Noisemakers
are overwriting the societal hard drive
The disk is overwritten. There is no information.
There’s a group called Moms for Liberty. Who are they, and what do they believe? Let’s ask a professional journalist:
There’s the answer, see? They are for Hitler. Let’s ask Google:
They are extremist. They are far-right. They are anti-government. See, just like Adolf Hitler, they don’t even believe in having any government! We all know how Hitler made the German government completely powerless with his relentless anti-government rhetoric. It’s good that we sought information from reliable sources. Now we can understand.
All heterodox figures emerging into prominence get this treatment, immediately and with a sustained fury. As David Burge has said, the job of a journalist is to cover important new developments — with a pillow, until they stop moving. The role of the duckspeaking news anchor or the disinformation expert is to make an occluding spectacle, producing an anti-discourse discourse that keeps you from hearing a discussion. “Well, Mike, thank you for asking. I disagree with the consensus because my view of the evidence is thHITLER HITLER HITLER HITLER HITLER HITLER HITLER HITLER HITLER SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER BAD BAD BAD. We have a discussion that exists to fill the space where discussion goes, so we can’t have a discussion.
Who is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Let’s ask a law professor at a top-tier law school:
What does he believe? Well, he argues thaDANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER BAD BAD BAD BAD BEWARE
“Squirrel!”
— Mainstream institutional culture
If, as a test, you could get a few national profiles for a tangerine that makes skeptical noises about Ukraine or mRNA injections or transgendered children, the SPLC would produce a major report on the HITLER TANGERINE before the end of the week. It’s the noise they make. There’s a button, and media stimuli trigger it, and some noise comes out.
Set the noise aside, and you discover that you can start to think. Moms for Liberty has a website, and their website has a pledge for parents that expresses the core of their project:
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DEFENDED TRANSPARENCY AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AGAINST GOVERNMENT OVERREACH THAT’S RIGHT ADOLF HITLER THINK ABOUT IT
At the risk of terrifying you with how much this is just like invading Poland, Moms for Liberty has a page of third-party resources for parents. You can see the profound danger of the extremism they’re espousing, here:
Information about voting? A guide to understanding school curricula? A resource to protect privacy rights? CAN YOU HEAR THE GOOSESTEPPING!?!?!?
The endless flood of gibbering dumbfuckery that fills all media exists to prevent understanding. It’s a rice bowl protection racket.
And so, yes, the preliminary injunction issued on July 4 in Missouri v. Biden is great news. But it’s only half. The anti-discourse discourse has worked by pruning information, removing content and blocking unpersoned crimethinkers.
But the other half is the noisemaking, the cultural overwriting by the production of empty noise. It’s much harder to overcome, and you have to do it yourself with a disciplined application of skeptical awareness, all day and every day. The Keith Olbermanns, the bone-dumb propagandists, make it easy.
But they are not all Keith Olbermann.
The networks and the mainstream press, once in the First Amendment business, also once had a near-monopoly on information distribution. Now they pine openly for censorship and parrot government press releases. I'd say it's bizarre but, really, it isn't. It's self-interested. And it's disgraceful.
P.S. RAAAAAAAAAGGEE!
It's all so tiresome, but like all noise that carries no information, it ends up being self limiting. It fades into the background. The signal is harder to discern, which of course is the point, but gradually we adjust, and tune it out.