Wokescold 658037, Report!
subject citizen engaged in incorrect humor
The anarchist philosopher Crispin Sartwell describes our political culture as one of “squishy totalitarianism,” a term I like quite a bit. (See the third page of this document.) You can disagree and refuse to comply, and the secret police won’t show up at your door (with maybe a growing list of exceptions). We don’t have a gulag. We don’t have the “culture of the disappeared.” You just…maybe find yourself with fewer friends, and some family that stops talking to you, and maybe your employer lets you know that hey, you know what, this doesn’t seem to be working out.
It’s not the Great Terror, it’s just a kind of low-grade grind of social decredentialing that lets you know you’re not making the right choices. We need to rethink Thanksgiving this year, because we’re very disappointed in you. (Don’t you want to be safe?) The way Google searches are working these days is a pretty good example of squishy totalitarianism: Oh, I’m sorry, we have no results for that widely known piece of wrongthink, but here are some results that debunk the conspiracy theory you’re searching for. Wouldn’t you prefer to read a correct search result?
So. Woody Harrelson joking about drug cartels, and getting a tepid response from a vax-mandate-compliant audience: squishy totalitarianism.
The news media responds in lockstep: Citizen Harrelson has engaged in improper speech!
We’re all very disappointed in our friend Woody. He needs to be spoken to so he can understand not to do that.
But the entire news media can’t really be marching in lockstep, right? Let’s check in with a counterculture magazine, founded in the late 1960s to Question Authority™:
Ah.
We can debate the origins and the motive force behind the constant parade of error that has plagued us over the last three years: useless mask mandates, aggressively harmful school closures, insanely damaging vaccine mandates, ludicrous closures of beaches and parks, the pearl clutching over all those conspiracy theories about a lab leak.
You know the terms of the debate: Is the world led by idiots who are screwing it all up, or is this a plan that they’re executing on purpose?
But whichever answer turns out to be correct, one thing that seems extremely clear to me is that this perpetual reign of error couldn’t possibly go on without the unthinking enforcement activity of a distributed commissariat, the slogan-repeating upper-middle-class-aligned cultural apparatus that endlessly lawn signs their compliance. No one has to tell journalists to scold Woody Harrelson: they already know. The moment the Woodster engaged in crimethink, the Rolling Stone writer Marlow Stern started salivating like a trained dog hearing a bell. Vast armies of professors and HR specialists and marketing executives and bureaucrats and Hollywood functionaries and school board wokescolds and on and on and on already know their roles without being assigned to them. It is not correct for you to fail to comply with Current Thing; you are spewing conspiracy theories.
Doctor, the symptoms began shortly after I received the second dose of the Covid vaccine.
No, that is not possible, vaccines do not cause injuries. Let us not discuss this conspiracy theory any further. Here are some pills.
We have an enforcement apparatus made up of people who volunteered for the job. In terms of social class, we have the lower class, the lower-middle-class, the middle class, the Stasi, and the upper class.
Complying and signaling to convey status, the enforcers are always wrong, and they never stop. Did you hear about this monster, this NBC reporter who shamefully claimed that the brilliant Senate candidate John Fetterman has difficulty understanding spoken language? What an idiot! She must be a secret MAGA type! All cadre, CLOSE RANKS!
And so now John Fetterman is in the Senate, and just like every respectable person said, he’s doing just fine — okay, well, he’s not, but shut up.
This compliance-centered, slogan-repeating cultural stratum is the engine of our ruin. They’re the muscle and bone of the WEF class, and they perform their role with such a flawless automaticity that they never fail to chant the daily absurdity on cue. There’s no path to a healthy culture that doesn’t break them. Start by seeing them clearly.
I think Havel called it post-totalitarianism. Moscow doesn't need to send tanks down your street, because your neighbor and your boss are enforcing Moscow's diktats. His "Workers of the World, Unite" banner, displayed by the go-along-to-get-along merchant on Main Street, is today's "Hate Has No Home Here" or "In This House, We Believe in Science," or whatever the hell is popular up North this week. We don't have that garbage in Daytona, and it's a blessing not to have to keep up. It's kind of neat how (just like in Shakespeare!) the jesters are the only ones publicly speaking the truth, and allowed to get away with it. Jon Stewart with the pangolin jokes last year, and now Woody (who has been publicly anti-corporate "food," etc., for quite some time). Guys like Kory and McCullough have to be hounded out of their jobs, but our artists and comedians are allowed to be honest. For now. When the PTB start shutting down the comedians, then we'll be in 1977 in Prague. Of course, Havel said we'd end up here; he told us over and over again that having lots of choices at the mall doesn't mean you're free, but that your ruling class is made up of corporations, rather than Communist apparatchiks.
Last night my wife and I went out for a stroll. A few houses in our neighborhood have retarded Leftist yard signs. “ In this house we believe: love is love, science is real, blah blah blah. “ Very enlightening stuff. The yard signs, in fact all of the virtue signaling dialogue in every medium, besides asserting social dominance and stifling dissent, is designed to conceal and obfuscate urgent, dangerous problems in our society. I mean, wtf does “science is real” mean? Did anybody, anywhere claim that science doesn’t exist? Did somebody claim that black lives don’t matter, other than the hair shirt sporting phonies who ignore the massacres going on every hour in black neighborhoods throughout the USA while wallowing in fake guilt about the legacy of slavery? I actually appreciate these signs. They tell me who to avoid.
What was more real to me during my walk was the police helicopter making a tight circle over a near neighbor’s house and the 7 police cruisers surrounding it while I tried to preemptively work out the calories from some tomahawk ribeyes yet to be seared. Having some situational awareness, but not carrying at the time, I tried to get my blissfully oblivious better half to slow down so I could make sure we weren’t about to wander into an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire type of newspaper appearance. The police on the chopper megaphone demanding somebody come out because “ your house is surrounded...” were more real to me than the yuppie poseur signs pledging alliegance to the DNC sanctioned drivel these tautological imbeciles are broadcasting from their gravel. We don’t get much crime in my neighborhood, although we are not far from some less affluent zones. But violent crime is on the uptick in the city and and it’s ugly stuff. Fentanyl deaths, homeless panhandlers, drug cartel shootouts, people losing their minds and doing bad things - it’s nearly every day now. And it’s all over the country. Not to mention the economic debacle just getting started, the criminal migration invasion, the general distrust we now have for each other.
But nobody in the ruling junta or their accomplices wants to acknowledge any of the actual critical problems we have. They want to conjure obedience with imaginary bogeymen. Putin’s gonna get you. The “white supremacist transphobic “ mom who wants her 7 year old to grow up a little longer without a pornography indoctrination at school. She’s gonna get you. Math is racist. Excellence is racist. An excellent mathematician is gonna get you. No doubt.
These are silly fuckers. And they will fail. One way or the other. But they are dangerous in their games and they are dragging a lot of us down. They are just clever enough to use us to break their fall. And they will dust themselves off and walk away while the rest of the country lies fractured and bleeding on the pavement. There is no soft totalitarianism beneath the surface. They killed millions with COVID and they are killing more with the vaccines. There were no accidents. It’s not bombs and firing squads yet. They fear armed resistance. So they’re using hybrid warfare to subdue us.
Keep speaking up.