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Sunday, January 31, 2021

We All Live in the Internet's Flatlands Now

By On January 31, 2021

In Flatland, a mathematical satire, a being who exists in two dimensions experiences the arrival of a three-dimensional being as the extrusion of a flat surface into his world.

These days we all live in Flatland.

The internet connects and accommodates us at the expense of flattening our reality. Networks are based on common standards. To connect different things together is to reduce them to the lowest common denominator. The internet hasn't made our culture richer and deeper: it has simplified us. 

The flattening effect of the internet equates and simplifies everything. Its standards lower the barriers and in the process eliminate the complexities. This isn't a simple dumbing down. To dumb something down is to lower access, but to also offer the possibility of following that to a more sophisticated understanding.

What is pervasive about flattening is that it eliminates the third and fourth dimensions entirely.

In the physical realm, the third dimension provides depth. In the realm of culture and ideas, the third dimension is composed of the principles that allow us to measure the depth and truth of an idea by comparing and contrasting it with other ideas using a set of consistent principles.

Think of the façade of an old western movie. Striding down the street, past a saloon, a general store, and a stable, it looks real enough. But when you enter the third dimension and go inside, there's nothing there but wooden fronts. That's the flatlands that the internet has enabled us to build our culture around.

Without the third dimension, all ideas appear to be equally intellectually valid. And then we pick and choose whichever ones appeal most to us on the emotional and instinctual levels of narrative and identity. 

Narrative and identity are compelling and vital. They form the two-dimensional matrix that defines who we are. But when we access the third dimension, we enrich the bright line of our identity and the second dimension of narrative height that connects our identity to a larger story, by measuring it against reality.

A two-dimensional reality reflects our inner self. Without that, we don't exist. But without the third dimension, we lose the ability to make a meaningful impact on the external reality of the world.

The internet and the culture it spawned are entirely concerned with identity and narrative.

The 'flatness' of the internet is the key to its most magical ability which is the transmutation of identity and narrative that appears to allow people to transform who they are and reshape reality with words. 

But this magic only works in the unreal world of the internet. The more of our society is routed through the internet, the more obsessed it becomes with harnessing the power of identity and narrative, transmuting it and policing its boundaries, allowing people to believe that the borders of sex, of religion, and of all of reality can be reshaped through determined intentionality. This is classic magical thinking.

But the internet is built for magical thinking because it is a virtual realm, not a true physical reality.

Within virtual spaces, consensual realities can govern. That is why utopian ideas sprang from the virtual spaces of academia, of bohemian circles, and from the sheltered members of upper class households who were convinced that reality had become fluid, when really they were just detached from reality.

The internet is the ultimate virtual space. Its flatness allows everyone to build a consensual reality. And since we are thinking beings who inhabit reality through the language of our minds, that consensual reality appears encompassing and transformative even when it isn't really changing anything except us.

What's missing is context.

The computer pioneers envisioned an artificial world governed by the rules of its code. Its flatness is an extension of the flatness of machine logic and of the flatness of intellect detached from experience. 

Human beings, unlike computers, are not detached intellects. Any project that would preserve the intellect while detaching the body would result in something alien, inhuman, and dangerous.

The 'Singularity' of Ray Kurzweil in which man merges with intelligent machines will never happen. But we have merged with machines by trying to inhabit a space meant for machines and run by the logic of programming, rather than experience and intuition. The cultural singularity is all around us.

That we can't see the singularity is its biggest symptom.

We react to shocking events, like the election, as if they were unexpected, when in reality they were all around us, but we could not see them because like the square encountering a sphere, we have become limited to a two-dimensional world and we encounter events as if they suddenly appear from some unseen third dimension into the flatness of our world. And we try to understand where they came from.

The world has not become more irrational. We have just lost two out of four of its dimensions.

When we weigh and measure ideas based on consistent rules, rather than wishful thinking, we access the third dimension of depth. And when we test these third dimensional hypothesis against their results over the course of time, we holistically integrate them into the fourth dimension and arrive at some measure of truth. But when we remain in a two-dimensional world, then we just know what we know.

An example of this reality decay is the transforming of the term 'fact-checking', once used by the press to describe its own rigorous process of checking its own facts, to mean narrative attacks on Republicans. When the media checked its facts, it provided its own narratives with greater reality and depth. And when it redefined fact checking to mean attacking the opposition, it traded access to a third dimensional reality for intensified narrative force in its own two-dimensional world.

This is a problem that's not unique to the process, but bedevils science, politics, and every field that once set out to reach good decisions by measuring them against reality, but that now just bloviates. 

Without the third dimension of reality and the fourth dimension of time, there is goodness, but not truth. There are moral ideas, but none that we can measure and test. Everything becomes political, we say, but that really means that everything is run through an ideological filter that takes politics on faith.

Life becomes guided by political ideas the way it was by religious ideas in a less secular time.

The unexpected events coming in from the third dimension are reduced to mysteries and then conspiracy theories. Instead of dealing with reality, we explain contradictions with more mysteries. When faced with a crisis, we rarely take the real 'red pill' and question our premises, instead we take the 'blue pill' and question our principles, convincing ourselves to let the discredited premise ride.

A flat world has little room for principles, but plenty of room for premises. When we question our principles, it does not disrupt the flatlands of the internet where all ideas are equivalent. In Flatland, a white woman can turn black, a man can become a woman, a Jewish teen can become a white supremacist, a suburban Asian-American teenager can join Hamas, and we can all be anything we want.

When narrative and identity are just coats we wear in a medium where they are meant to be fluid and interchangeable, adopting new ones is an otherwise painless process in self-dramatization. 

The millennial insecurities of a generation that grew up on the internet are expressed through transforming identities to cash in on narratives. The square shifts into new lines all the time. 

The Flatland of the internet is an unstable two-dimensional world that destabilizes identity for the sake of narrative. And the premise of all those narratives is that we must not reconsider that process. 

The richest gift of the third dimension is that it can allow us to weigh and measure our choices, and to reconsider our premises and our decisions. In a two-dimensional world, there is no escape. The Flatlands of the internet appear to allow us to escape, to transform and become someone else, but that, like everything else that takes place in a virtual space, is just another mental illusion.

People don't escape by becoming someone else. Only con artists do. The internet has enabled a growth industry in con artists and in catfishing, in people pretending to be another sex, another race, another age, to be doctors, lawyers, and generals, but human beings can't change who they are, by changing who they say they are. This is another area where we differ from the flat code-based conception of reality.

To change, we must rethink the choices we made that brought us here. We must question our premises.

Without that third dimension, we can't change. And, worse still, we have no idea how to change. The 'flatness' of the internet has led to a culture that easily sheds its principles, but never questions its premises. It seeks dimension by following a shifting line on the ground, instead of looking up at the sky.

The 'flatness' of the internet polarizes, it rewards hot takes, extremism, and anything that stands out. 

'Flatness' selects for ideas without dimension or depth, that have surface appeal because they reassure us that our two-dimensional world is already full of color, life, and meaning, and we don't need anything else. 

The internet is a powerful and compelling tool. But when we cease to use it and instead inhabit it, then the tool becomes the master, and the master becomes the tool. We don't have to live in Flatland. And when we weigh and measure ideas, when we examine them and turn them over, then we gain dimension. The more we do that, the less surprised we are when unexpected events seem to happen.

To inhabit the internet is to exist in a world of shifting narratives that make it difficult to contemplate reality on its own terms, rather than on those of the stories that people tell us and that we tell ourselves. 

We are not bodiless minds. Our lives are grounded not only in the matter of the "leettle gray cells", but of our bodies, of our lives and our families. The way we make decisions when shopping for groceries or a home, when fixing a car that doesn't start, or an injury that doesn't heal, is the basic skill set of encountering the third dimension, weighing options, measuring them against the risks and rewards, and making a decision based on those rules and on experience, rather than on the narratives of Flatland.

We can be as real and as true as we choose to be. And when we seek the truth, our narratives grow stronger. When we test what we believe against reality, we emerge with stronger arguments, better plans, and a way of thinking and living that is not subservient to the virtual spaces of an unreal world.

The internet is Flatland. It controls much of our world. But it doesn't have to rule our minds.

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Biden Appoints Anti-Israel BDS Activist to Head NSC Intel

By On January 27, 2021
"Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?" an op-ed in the Washington Post had asked.

The group was the Palestine Solidarity Movement, a BDS anti-Israel hate group whose conferences had a history of antisemitism, supporting Hamas and the murder of Jews.

Maher Bitar, one of the executive board members of Students for Justice in Palestine, was one of the principal organizers of the 2006 conference which was being hosted by Georgetown University's SJP hate group. A photo appears to show him dancing in a keffiyah in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid”.

Despite protests from Jewish groups, the Georgetown BDS conference went ahead

Now, Biden has picked Maher Bitar as the Senior Director for Intelligence on the NSC.

In 2006, the American Jewish Committee was pleading with Georgetown to distance itself from the anti-Israel hate of PSM and SJP. Now the anti-Israel hate occupies the top of the foreign policy establishment and is set to define the foreign policy of the Biden administration.

In his new position, the former anti-Israel activist will coordinate intelligence between the White House and the intelligence community, receiving material from intelligence agencies, informing the intelligence community of White House policy, and deciding who gets access to secret information. The office also contains some of the most classified information around.

The job of Senior Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council is supposed to go to an intelligence professional. How did an anti-Israel activist go from helping host a conference for an organization whose speakers have supported Islamic terrorism to a top intelligence job?

At the PSM conference in Georgetown, Bitar had run a session describing how to best demonize Israel. Next year, he facilitated a Palestinian Student Society summit addressed by Joseph Massad who had called Israel a "Jewish supremacist state" and praised terrorism.

Massad had also argued that the idea that "any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism."

A few years later, Bitar could be found presenting at a Sabeel conference featuring some of the worst bigots like Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP ,who had invited a terrorist to address the BDS hate group, and Richard Falk, who had endorsed a book which wondered whether “Hitler might have been right after all”.

Maher Bitar went to work for UNRWA, interned at the misnamed and militantly anti-Israel

Foundation for Middle East Peace, and and studied at Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre, writing papers on the so-called 'Nakba' and on 'Palestinian' activism. He appeared to describe Israel’s security barrier as a “segregation wall”

Israel's "political existence as a state is the cause for Palestinian dispossession and statelessness," Bitar wrote in one paper. “Israel’s rejection of their right to return remains the main obstacle to finding a durable solution.”

The so-called ‘right to return’ would mean the destruction of Israel.

He helped assemble a BADIL publication: a BDS hate group which seeks to eliminate Israel through the ‘right of return’ and which has opposed bans on working with terrorists.

The issue in question denounced “Jewish colonization”

And yet before long, Bitar could be found working for the Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. From there he went on to serve as the NSC’s Director for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs and as Samantha Power’s Deputy at the UN. In under a decade, Bitar had gone from anti-Israel activism through the private network of BDS organizations to key positions shaping American intelligence and foreign policy at the National Security Council and the UN.

Even while Bitar was engaged in anti-Israel activism, he was also volunteering for the Obama campaign, and working for the UN. He started working for the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace as an extern while studying for his JD at Georgetown.

In 2016, Bitar came back to Georgetown to tell students that "those of you who might feel conflicted about or even disagree with American policy and want to change it" could do it.

When President Trump was elected, Bitar became the general counsel to House Intelligence Committee Democrats, serving as the top legal adviser to Rep. Adam Schiff and playing a key role in the first Democrat attempt to impeach President Trump. Now he’s back at the NSC.

Bitar’s rise through the ranks speaks to the abandonment of Israel by the Democrats and the ineptitude of pro-Israel advocates at fighting the personnel battles that define the government.

During the Obama administration, organizations that claimed to be advocating for Israel would come out to D.C. and take pride in receiving a personal briefing from Bitar about Israel’s security without having a clue about who Bitar was or how hard he must have been laughing at them.

Policy battles aren’t won at the executive level, but at the personnel level. The Left keeps winning policy battles even when moderates and conservatives win elections because it understands that having its people in a position to make policy matters more than elections.

Obama had put the author of "Ethnic Cleansing and the Falling Apart of Palestinian Society" in charge of the NSC desk on Israel. Biden put him in charge of NSC intelligence.

Israel will accordingly return to its old Obama understanding that it can no longer share the truly sensitive intelligence with its American counterparts because the NSC is once again tainted.

But the tainting of the NSC has larger implications that go far beyond Israel.

The Obama administration initially began spying on members of Congress who were speaking to Prime Minister Netanyahu after monitoring any effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program.

Pro-Israel legislators should once again expect to be spied on by the Biden administration.

The NSC was a key gateway for Obama’s surveillance of opposition politicians. Putting the right people in place at the NSC will be crucial to protecting the next wave of illegal surveillance.

And any effort by Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear program with its new Arab allies will be closely monitored and sabotaged by the Obama veterans who are back in charge of the NSC.

At the 2006 Georgetown anti-Israel conference, Bitar was advising attendees on how to infiltrate and blend in. Now that he has reached a career pinnacle at the NSC, he had the honor of being profiled by Politico as a “Palestinian”. But earlier versions of Bitar's story had him being "of Palestinian and Egyptian descent" and claiming "family roots [that] trace back to Palestine".

Bitar claimed that his family were “refugees”.

At the PSS summit, he described the group as those "who actively identify as Palestinian because of a shared national, historical, and cultural experience".

The dirty little secret of the ‘Palestinian’ myth is that its identity is imaginary.

The radicalism of the Democrats and their abandonment of the Jewish State however are all too real. That’s how Maher Bitar went from anti-Israel activism, from calling for the destruction of Israel, to the Israel desk at the NSC, and then the top policy intelligence position at the NSC.

"Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?” a Washington Post op-ed had asked in 2006. The question now is why are Joe Biden and the Democrats?

And what do pro-Israel groups intend to do about it?





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Impeach Obama for Inciting Black Lives Matter Riots

By On January 26, 2021
On May 31st, a violent Black Lives Matter mob burned American flags, threw bottles at police officers, and started a fire in the historic ‘Church of Presidents’ which had been visited by almost every president. Another building was set on fire, and windows across the area were smashed by the rampaging BLM mob wielding baseball bats, bricks, and even more lethal weapons.

Helicopter footage showed the Washington Monument wreathed in smoke from the fires set by the massive BLM assault on the center of our government. But while the BLMers assaulted numerous buildings, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, and had vandalized historical landmarks, including the Lincoln Memorial, the real target of the radicals was the White House.

60 members of the Secret Service and 150 law enforcement officers in total were eventually injured. As the BLM mob assailed the White House, the Secret Service took President Trump and his family to a bunker: an eventuality meant to deal with terrorist or nuclear attacks.

Black Lives Matter mobs didn’t break through to the White House, but they managed to set the White House guardhouse on fire. Instead of condemning this extremist assault on our nation, Democrats supported the rioters and falsely claimed that law enforcement had assaulted “peaceful protesters” for a “photo op”, and demanded the removal of the National Guard.

Democrats and their media allies sneered at President Trump for retreating to a bunker.

Barack Obama, as the first black man to sit in the White House, a D.C. resident, and the politician who had done the most to bolster the racist and radical BLM movement burning American cities, had the opportunity to put out the fires. Instead he poured on more gasoline.

After the White House attack, Obama delivered a speech at his own foundation’s event which made no mention of the assault on the house he had formerly occupied or the threat of violence to his successor. Obama then spoke to Brittany Packnett Cunningham, described as, “one of the most prominent activists behind the Black Lives Matter movement” whom he had appointed to serve on his Task Force on 21st Century Policing after the Ferguson riots.

Obama began his speech by once again accusing America of racism, which he described as an "original sin", and praised the mobs terrorizing the country. Instead of condemning the violent attack on the White House, he falsely claimed that the violence was the work of a "tiny minority".

Then, putting the lie to his false claim, he chatted with Brittany Packnett Cunningham who had previously urged attendees to repeat a chant by domestic terrorist Assata Shakur still wanted by the FBI for her role in the murder of a police officer. Shakur is the icon of BLM and while Democrats accuse Republicans of being domestic terrorists, the movement they embraced is built around one of the FBI’s top ten most wanted terrorists from a violent racist hate group.

The month before, she had tweeted Martin Luther King's quote about a riot being the "language of the unheard" while appending her own text, "Property damage at protests, 101".

Not only wasn’t the violence coming from a tiny minority, but Obama’s own event was complicit.

Obama’s speech described the turmoil as “profound as anything that I’ve seen in my lifetime”, and urged that, "at some point, protests start to dwindle in size. And it's very important for us to take the momentum that has been created… and say, let's use this to finally have an impact.”

Every American man and woman who had been assaulted, robbed, and threatened by Obama’s mobs felt the impact. The police officers in the hospital, the shopkeepers sifting through the rubble, and the dead in the BLM riots felt the impact. Obama could have stopped the violence, instead his political support for the violent racist BLM terrorists helped keep the riots going.

While in the White House, Obama had helped incite the racist BLM movement.

When the Ferguson riots broke out after Michael Brown robbed a convenience store and assaulted a police officer, Obama and his administration incited violence by spreading false claims without evidence that Brown had been an innocent victim of police racism.

The DOJ attempted to suppress the surveillance video showing Brown’s attack on a minority store clerk, and Democrats refused to stop spreading false claims that he had been murdered.

Recently, Senator Kamala Harris doubled down on the lie, inciting violence by falsely claiming that “Michael Brown’s murder forever changed Ferguson and America.”

Obama claimed that “the anger and the emotion that followed his death awakened our nation”.

The BLM racial terrorist movement, backed monetarily by left-wing foundations and corporations, timed its riots to coincidence with election years. These were not mere race riots: they were and are election riots that exploit the shooting of a criminal to help the Democrats.

The biggest years of BLM and proto-BLM riots in 2014, 2016, and 2020 were election years.

When Obama and the Democrats fed the racial supremacist agenda of BLM, they were engaging in a campaign of political terror to turn out votes and tilt elections in their favor.

In 2016, the BLM riots surged again.

On July 7, 2016, Obama delivered a speech from the Marriott in Warsaw falsely accusing the police of racism against black people. That same day, Micah X. Johnson, who had attended BLM rallies, set out to murder as many white Dallas police officers as he could. He killed 5.

Obama spoke at the funeral of the police officers in defense of the racist hate group that killed them, and continued to incite violence by falsely accusing police officers of “the killing of Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge and Philando Castile of Minnesota” at a funeral for police officers.

Sterling had raped a 14-year-old girl and was shot by police officers after reaching for a gun.

“Even those who dislike the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter,’ surely we should be able to hear the pain of Alton Sterling’s family,” Obama had urged.

Earlier that year, Obama had invited BLM organizers, including Brittany Packnett Cunningham and DeRay Mckesson, as well as Al Sharpton, to the White House. Mckesson had been sued that year by a Baton Rouge police officer who suffered brain trauma and lost teeth after being assaulted by a McKesson organized mob at a BLM protest for child rapist Alton Sterling.

Obama had invited a man accused of having “incited the violence” that crippled a police officer.

The Supreme Court case of Mckesson v. Doe, in which the racist movement was represented by Covington & Burling attorneys, was tossed by the Supreme Court with Justice Thomas, the court's only black justice dissenting, but it's already playing a role in the attempt to impeach President Trump over false allegations that he had somehow incited the Capitol riot.

The Democrats would like to continue impeaching President Trump even after he leaves office.

But if a president can be impeached even after he leaves office for supporting protests that turn violent, then Obama’s impeachment should be next. Obama’s long history of supporting Black Lives Matter is a matter of public record. Obama’s defenders will argue that he urged peaceful protests. So did President Trump. It hasn’t stopped Obama’s cronies from impeaching Trump.

The Democrat case against President Trump hinges on using the word, “fight” in his speech.

At Obama's BLM event at the White House, Brittany Packnett Cunningham had urged, "we have to take the fight everywhere.”

On the campaign trail for Biden in Philadelphia Obama had ranted, "We can't abandon those protesters who inspired us. We've got to channel their activism into action, we can't just imagine a better future. We've got to fight for it."

A week later, massive riots broke out in Philly that brought out the Pennsylvania National Guard. A curfew was imposed across multiple districts as mobs of thousands rampaged through the streets. Thirty police officers were injured: including a female officer who was hit by a car.

That’s how the “protesters” were fighting for that better future.

The case for impeaching Barack Obama is simple enough. He backed a violent racist hate group. He delivered multiple speeches in support of its extremist cause while falsely claiming that America was racist and that the racist protests were justified. After he used the word “fight” in a speech, devastating riots followed that brought a great American city to its knees.

That’s the same case that the Democrats have made for impeaching President Trump.

If it’s good enough to impeach President Trump, it’s good enough to impeach Obama.

Obama abused his office to support a racist hate group. He invited members of the racist hate group to the White House. Including those accused of inciting violence. He used his office to undermine law enforcement efforts to stop the extremist violence. And the end result has been thousands of injuries, numerous deaths, and billions of dollars in damages across America.

Impeaching Obama won’t fix all of that. But it will offer justice to some of BLM’s victims.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Sunday, January 24, 2021

The D.C. Occupation Will Continue Until Democracy is Saved

By On January 24, 2021
On a cold, windy day with a small group of spectators watching from behind barbed wire, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. swore another in a long series of false oaths before his motorcade passed between a long row of soldiers with their backs to him looking outward for threats.

No inauguration has been this empty in a century of American history. And at no inauguration have the spectators been outnumbered by a raw display of armed force. American presidents have been inaugurated in wartime and during actual national emergencies with a better turnout.

Through world wars and wars on terror, Washington D.C. has remained a national capital where the hundreds of millions of taxpayers who labor to pay for its grand edifices, free museums, and lavish lifestyles could briefly come to enjoy a little of the life lived by the ruling class in the Imperial City. Now the ruling class has made it clear that it doesn’t want peasants entering D.C.

Even as Biden’s team prepped the executive orders that would end the national emergency at the border and shut down construction of the wall, new walls topped by razor wire were rising across the imperial city. The new Fortress of Government sealed off two miles of the National Mall and parts of downtown D.C. and filled it with more soldiers than are deployed in Iraq.

The Secret Service designated green and red zones. Some 25,000 National Guard members were dispatched from Vermont, Maine, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Colorado to prepare for a fake invasion that never came. But the armored vehicles and heavy weaponry did come. President Trump had wanted a military parade that would show America’s strength to the world. Biden held his own military parade to intimidate his fellow Americans.

Democrats had deployed more soldiers in D.C. than they had in Iraq and Afghanistan while authorizing them to use lethal force and investigating their politics before the deployment. The radical leftists who had resisted using the military to fight terrorism or secure the border from invasion were eager to deploy the military against the people of the United States of America.

The handfuls of ordinary people who arrived, as Americans always do, to attend the inauguration of a new president were confronted with heavy weapons and barbed wire.

D.C. had become a Baghdad and Berlin of checkpoints, choking off access to much of the city, closing roads, bridges, and metro stations. Soldiers could be seen on every corner, and the 25,000 troops were bolstered by 4,000 Marshalls, and a motley crew of local forces, including 200 members of the NYPD, 40 members of the Chicago police, New Jersey and Maryland state troopers, Miami-Dade cops, and other law enforcement officers who were needed back home.

24 people were shot in Chicago this weekend and murders are already up 125% this year in New York City. Those officers could have done more good at home, but Democrats don’t care about murder victims in urban areas, instead redeploying officers to D.C. in a show of force.

Biden took office in a city under military occupation whose businesses were closed and boarded up. The D.C. government had tried to force hotels to shut down. The hotels didn’t close, but there were hardly any people. Instead the hotels were filled with soldiers tramping through their lobbies. Any tourists that did come found nothing to see except barricades and barbed wire.

Sometimes what you don’t see is more important than what you do see.

Filling D.C. with soldiers meant that no one was going to measure Biden’s crowds. The only crowds were heavily armed and had been ordered to come. The complete lack of enthusiasm for the new one-party state that was getting its Mussolini on was the dog that didn’t bark.

Questioning Biden’s election has been deemed to be incitement. It’s enough to get you censored, deplatformed, and fired by the companies standing behind him. The election challenges have been used as the pretext for a military occupation of Washington D.C. But the cloud of a disputed election, like the winter clouds overhead, still hung over the inauguration.

There were no crowds, just soldiers. After the military and police contingent, the second largest group there for the inauguration weren’t Biden’s civilian supporters, but his propagandists. With few people, the media had to work twice as hard to manufacture the illusion that this was a popular leader taking office instead of a usurper imposed by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the rest of the political, cultural, and economic oligarchy which owns the media on America.

CNN, a subsidiary of AT&T, had already gushed about, "Joe Biden's arms embracing America". MSNBC, a subsidiary of Comcast, compared Biden to God. "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." The only wounds being bound up were those of the ruling class which had temporarily lost electoral power to an army of flyover country workers and peasants, only to reclaim it with sedition, wiretapping, abuse of power, billions of dollars, and soldiers in the street.

Popular leaders, elected or unelected, might have troops in their cities, but they also have adoring crowds to cheer them on. Biden’s only cheers were coming from employees of huge corporations whose jobs depend on praising him as the greatest thing since SuperPACs.

Biden couldn’t manage the cheering crowds that greeted even the most mediocre presidents on their arrival. The band might as well have struck up a rousing chorus of, “Hail to the Thief.”

Jokes like that are all but illegal these days even though they were ubiquitous during the Bush and Trump administrations. But jokes only need to be banned when they’re too close to the truth. The hysterical fascist theater with troops in the streets and fawning praise on the lips of the press are all efforts to overcompensate for the hollow man taking a false oath on a bible.

This isn’t the pageantry of Stalin or Hitler. It’s the weary theater of Brezhnev, a senescent leader of a decaying regime being propped up by desperate threats of force by the nomenklatura. Even though the media has told us more about Biden’s dogs than it has about any of the Americans killed by Islamic terrorists enabled by the open borders that Biden just reinstated, no one cares.

Biden isn’t a charismatic leader. He isn’t moving the cause forward. He’s a placeholder for a ruling class that wants homes in Dupont Circle that it buys by selling out America to China, by ruining our economy with environmental consulting gigs and racial contract quotas, and for all the manifold ways which the swamp is coming back as Biden’s wetlands restoration project.

“Hail to the Thief” is as much their anthem as it is Biden’s. They fought to keep hold of D.C., the center of their power base not because they care about its history or that of this country, but because it’s where they network, collaborate, and do their dirty little deals at our expense.

The troops in the street are their warning to the rest of the country about who is really in charge.

And it isn’t Joe Jr, who, along with his criminal family, will be allowed to dip their beaks in cash and cocaine until they’re sopping wet, along with every aide, staffer, and associate. Biden will be fawned over, his idiot wife will be dubbed a doctor, and the investigations involving his son and brother will be swiftly dropped. And when the time is right, Kamala Harris will step into his place.

When the Soviet Union was entering its last days, one leader quickly made way for another. The parade of old Communist hacks in their dotage became a procession of political funerals. Generations after the revolution and the purges, the only thing anyone in Moscow believed in was the power and decadence of the ruling class. That and the threat America posed to them.

These are still the only three things that Washington D.C.’s ruling class believes in anymore.

Democrats and their media claim that this charade is a “victory for democracy”.

"We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated," Amanda Gorman, the Harvard youth poetess, sonorously recited her tin-eared Maoist verses at the inauguration.

But where is this democracy? Where are the adoring crowds, the joyous mobs celebrating and the people cheering the tremendous victory of the democracy of Google, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast and their D.C. lobbyists and associates over the Rust Belt and the flyovers?

Biden and the Democrats celebrated their democratic victory with barbed wire, troops in the streets, political terror, and the threat of even more political repression to come.

"There is a broader societal issue that is going to take years to detox the disinformation," Ben Rhodes, the Obama adviser who had boasted of creating a media echo chamber, ranted on Comcast's MSNBC. On that same state TV news network, John Brennan warned that "because of this growth of polarization in the United States" members of the Biden team would be "moving in laser-like fashion" to "root out an insidious threat to our democracy".

Democracy is in a state of permanent emergency that requires locking down D.C., filling it with soldiers, walls, and barbed wire, and investigating political crimes. And D.C. will do everything it can to end the threat that Americans pose to democracy even if its ruling class has to live in its green zone surrounded by troops and barbed wire until democracy is saved from Americans.

Biden, we are told by the political interests and corporations advocating this, is incredibly popular. But the crowds of his devotees can’t be allowed to come to Washington D.C. Anyone who doubts that Biden is incredibly popular is inciting violence and will have to be rooted out as an insidious threat to our democracy. The more people doubt Biden’s popularity, the longer D.C. will have to be under military occupation until finally no one doubts his legitimacy in office.






Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Democrats Outsource Political Repression to Corporate Monopolies

By On January 21, 2021
The repression will be televised. It will go better with Coke, it will promise to clear up your bad breath and make your toilet shine. It will be in the cloud, it will be digitized and monetized.

It will have a trademark, a brand, and it will be outsourced to the private sector.

Democrats love public-private partnerships and they outsourced political repression to the private sector. The Constitution has inconvenient things to say about freedom of speech and so the Democrat government of elected and unelected officials outsourced the problem of censoring and suppressing speech to the handful of Big Tech monopolies of the internet.

That same old document written by old white dead men, not to mention centuries of jurisprudence and tradition, prevents the government from kicking down your door in the middle of the night for wrongthink. But nothing keeps corporations from firing you for wrongthink, for being related to someone who committed wrongthink, or for insufficient political correctness.

The public-private partnership between big government and big monopolies is based on Democrats and corporations doing the dirty work of repressing each other’s opponents.

Corporations can’t write regulations that suppress competition from upstart rivals, and so the government steps in and keeps the marketplace under the control of a few cartels. And the government can’t censor, deplatform, fire, bankrupt, and bar its political opponents from speaking, flying, and doing business. But the monopolies it’s been partnering with can and do.

This political Strangers on a Train arrangement goes much more swimmingly because both the government Guy and the corporate Bruno are eager to take care of each other’s dirty business.

Democrats knock off Amazon’s rivals and Amazon knocks off Republicans. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Bezos, goes after President Trump. Amazon’s AWS takes out Parler and makes it more likely to get back its $10 billion military cloud contract from Biden.

You know, that contract which Amazon thought it had before President Trump took it away.

Big Tech monopolies like Amazon are also government contractors. Microsoft has 6,860 federal subcontracts, Amazon has 477, Google has 384, Facebook has 172, and that's just in military and law enforcement. And Big Tech employees pour millions into Democrat campaigns.

Google employees gave the Democrats $21 million, Microsoft gave $12 million, Amazon $9 million, and Apple and Facebook $6 million. But that’s just the official cash coming from employees. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent $400 million to buy the 2020 election.

Not to mention the priceless in-kind contribution of Facebook censoring stories about Hunter Biden’s ties to China and the FBI money laundering investigation right before the election.

The monopolies give Democrats cash and get government contracts worth a thousand times more. The corps suppress Republicans and Democrats suppress their corporate competition.

Everyone makes more money and gets more power.

The public-private totalitarian partnership between a one-party state and oligarchs who carry on its propaganda, enrich its officials, and suppress its enemies is a familiar one in China, Russia, Turkey and other hellholes that the Democrats seem bent on using as models for their utopia.

But it’s not just a simple economic ecosystem. Like the Communists and Nazis of Weimar Germany, socialists and monopolies claim to hate each other while secretly allied together.

Democrats let monopolies take over the internet and by extension much of the economy because they can then run against the abuses of “capitalism” and push socialism. And the monopolies can retort that it’s a choice between them and AOC’s version of socialism.

Pick your poison.

Like the Communists and Nazis of Weimar Germany whose political polarization convinced the public it had to choose between them even while Hitler and Stalin were privately allied against the liberals and moderates behind the scenes, economic polarization brings together socialists and monopolies to ally against the free market and offer a choice of two unpalatable dystopias.

But you don’t actually have to choose because we get both for the inflated price of one.

Google and AOC join together in jumping up and down on the bleeding corpse of the free market while the dumber sort of Republican pretends that they’re two different sides. (Google employees were AOC’s second-biggest donors. Amazon and Apple were the fourth and fifth.)

Americans get an inept kleptocratic government that’s socialist in all but name and a dystopia of cartels. The hybrid system is destroying jobs and the middle class at a record pace. The socialists tax and regulate to keep the competition down and the monopolies offshore jobs.

Those rights that the government can’t take from you, yet, Google, Amazon, and Facebook will.

The public-private totalitarian nightmare is mediated by the media and non-profits which act as the interface between the government and the cartels. The media and the activists tell tech firms, banks, and superstore whom to ban, which rights to eliminate, and how to virtue signal. The industries fund and own the media outlets and organizations that coordinate their activities.

In the wake of the Capitol riot, these middlemen have come up with wonderful ideas like banning conservatives, cutting off corporate political contributions to conservatives, and firing anyone who questions a massively rigged election, which the corps are implementing.

All of this really got underway once it was clear that Democrats would control the Senate.

Big Business was not about to turn up the machine of political repression to eleven on behalf of the Democrats until it was really sure that they would have sole control of the government.

The public-private partnership for tyranny is a balance of power and of terror.

Democrats keep threatening to break up the monopolies because that gives them direct leverage. They don’t really mean it, but as they radicalize into socialism, they will. And then they’ll nationalize the monopolies, toss the Bill of Rights in the trash, and then they won’t need to outsource repressing political dissidents to corporate middlemen for plausible deniability.

The monopolies need some Republicans around to protect them from the socialists. Just not the kind of Republicans who would be bad for business by breaking up monopolies, bringing jobs back from China, restricting immigration, and rebuilding the economy for the middle class.

And the Democrats need to protect themselves from monopolies so powerful that they can erase their opponents, like President Trump, from the marketplace of ideas, a power so dreadful that it has longtime international foes of Trump in the European Union fearful of this Death Star.

The public-private totalitarian partnership is also a rivalry.

America is being consolidated into a handful of monopolies, not only in the tech industry, but in retail, entertainment, medicine, publishing, household brands, and anything you can think of.

These rising monopolies dominate the economy and are the country’s next biggest power bloc.

The biggest power bloc is government. Not so much the government of the people you vote for, but the massive administrative state which writes its own regulations, has its own politics, and runs most of the country without input from elected officials, let alone little people like you.

Some call it the deep state or the administrative state. A better name is just socialism.

The full scope of the beast encompasses not just the official employees, elected and unelected, but the lobbyists, contractors, public universities, government grant recipients, and operatives who have made D.C.’s bedroom counties into some of the wealthiest places in America.

These two blocs are entwined by class, geography, and economic relationships. And by power.

Their partnership allows them to overcome the legal limits of the current system, one in which Comcast or Google can’t directly legislate, and in which the Democrats can’t directly destroy your life by using each other as middlemen to expand the limits of their power over America.

Only America could recreate Soviet political repression and Maoist culture wars using Target, Disney, and Coca Cola. Your commissar is a diversity consultant at Goodyear, you will be doxxed on Twitter, your life will be destroyed by a paper owned by Amazon’s CEO, and your neighbor will turn you in on an app built into a $1,000 Apple smartphone. Only in America.com.




Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

The Language of the Unheard

By On January 19, 2021
When the Black Lives Matter riots raged in cities around the country a spectrum of the leftist oligarchy, from the New York Times to the ACLU to the leadership of Washington State University justified them with Martin Luther King’s quote, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

It was a strange claim to make about a movement that had the backing of the Democrat Party, the entire media, Coca Cola, IBM, and American Express. There was hardly a Fortune 500 company, university, or major organization of some sort that didn’t issue a statement of support for the race rioters rioting, looting, and killing their way across America.

Come read about our oppression in these press releases from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Plazas were renamed after the black supremacist movement and streets were painted with its racist slogan. Drivers who drove over those slogans became the subject of police investigations.

BLM was very definitely ‘heard’.

Rioting mobs can be subjective in a system where law and morality have become relative. A mob of rioters can be seen as a threatening mass of the ‘other’ or a heroic group of crusaders. The mobs of rioters that the establishment unleashes and identifies with are heard and cheered.

And then there are the bad kind of mobs. The mobs of the unheard.

In the weeks leading up to the Capitol Hill protest, claims of election fraud weren’t just ‘unheard’, they were actively suppressed with the media refusing to even air remarks by President Trump and administration officials on the subject. Tech companies censored any questions about the election. Elected officials took to describing such conversations as ‘sedition’ and the media deemed them ‘disinformation’ and called for even heavier censorship of the internet.

The oligarchy had spent the years since President Trump was elected laboring to silence the political opposition even while its own cultural messaging machine dispensed with everything from journalism to comedy to academic freedom in favor of political haranguing. A monolithic cultural environment in which there was no journalism, entertainment, or education, whose political messages were broadcast by Fortune 500 companies, did not create a new utopia.

Internet culture instead went down a digital rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, racism, identity politics, social media mobs, and trolling. The official culture was met with a counterculture of a thousand subcultures whose sole unifying element was contempt for whatever the culture was. That counter-culture was a visionary, brilliant, insane, horrifying and evil fragmented vision of America reflected through the shards of a culture that had lost its mind, its hope, and its faith.

Caught in between them were the actual ‘unheard’.

The ‘unheard’ aren’t a race. They’re not necessarily even a class. They are the culturally unheard. It might be their politics, their geography, their religion, their jobs, or some combination of the above. They’re easy enough to spot because you don’t see them represented in our culture anymore except as villains or buffoons. Once upon a time we called them Americans.

The unheard don’t live in the right places, wear the right clothes, have the right beliefs, and don’t occupy the right place in the culture. They have no role in the oligarchy’s future except as cautionary examples of what happens to those who don’t adapt to the establishment order.

They’re not Republicans. Most have a profound suspicion of the system. But many end up voting for the GOP because it’s become the party of the people who were left behind once the Democrats shifted from ‘workers and peasants’ class warfare to an identity politics technocracy.

Justifying violence as the “language of the unheard” is a bad cliche that’s been used to cover for everything from Islamic terrorism to shooting up schools to looting local pharmacies. Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, and over a century of terrorism carried out by the scions and allies of wealthy elites show that violence is more likely to come from the ‘heard’ than the ‘unheard’.

The powerless are less likely to resort to violence than the powerful. The essence of power is if not always a monopoly on violence, a corner office on the ground floor of violence. That’s why the same political machine that did little to restrain the worst brutality of Black Lives Matter keeps warning about the threat coming from the unheard who don’t share its political views.

The people most likely to resort to political violence have the most political cover for violence.

But the unheard do exist and they aren’t simply unheard because they’re not listened to. The unheard are the victims of a sustained effort to suppress their existence. A generation ago they were virtually erased from the cultural institutions that had been open to them. Now they’re being eradicated from corporate spaces, as consumers, and from the platforms of the internet.

A multipronged campaign was launched against Facebook by everyone from Michelle Obama to Borat demanding that it deplatform dissenting political views after the former Ivy League social network was overrun with older deplorables who had been using it to keep in touch with family. Like other corporations, Facebook is being forced to choose between its class and its business model, and is choosing its class because the oligarchy matters more than the user base.

But the oligarchy’s user base aren’t its customers. Facebook’s customers are multinational advertisers like Unilever, Diageo, and Honda who pressured it over conservative content, and Chinese sellers and organizations who run $5 billion in ads on the social media giant. When the Left captured the culture, it got advertising along with it, and that put it in charge of a new economy in which companies gave away free services to lure in users and resell their data to advertisers. The only customers that multinationals and their advertisers want are lefties.

The fundamental power shift between the oligarchy and customers, and between those at the axis of the culture and those at the outer rim of it, has overshadowed the political system.

The unheard vote, but they feel that their votes don’t count. And they often don’t, less because of fraud than because their votes have little impact on the centers of power that run the country. Republican voters have seen elections come and go without anything really changing. They’ve sent generations of representatives to D.C. only to have them adopt D.C’s mores and agendas.

To understand the fundamental alienation that drove huge crowds to D.C., the vast majority of whom did not try to break into Congress, or the spread of conspiracy theories like QAnon about the elemental evil of the powerful people who seem to run everything, that’s the place to start.

Conspiracy theories are an expression of powerlessness and deep distrust. And the response to them over the last four years has been a public-private campaign of suppression carried on by elected officials, the media, the non-profit errand boys of billionaires, and dot com monopolies that validate their distrust and increase their powerlessness until something explodes.

This isn’t a formula for unity, healing, or reclaiming who we are. We’ve seen exactly what it is.

Banishing political dissent to marginal spaces doesn’t build trust in the system. It destroys all trust and makes even the most implausible conspiracy theories seem like credible alternatives. If you have to choose between a partisan media that acts as a propaganda firehose while calling for further crackdowns on ‘disinformation’: anything else suddenly sounds plausible.

Truth, facts, and trust depend on an open marketplace of ideas. When that market is forcibly shut down, it doesn’t matter how much the new owners shout that they represent truth, facts, and science, and that their only opponents are extremist purveyors of disinformation. Replacing truth with lies and debate with propaganda makes that into the new normal across the board.

People in a totalitarian society are prone to believing the wildest fantasies and the most insane conspiracy theories because the system has destroyed any concept of truth. Americans used to wonder how Muslims could simultaneously believe that the 9/11 hijackers were CIA agents and heroes, that the Jews run the world from a tiny country that is about to be destroyed, that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam, or that Tom and Jerry were a masonic plot against Islam.

A generation later we live in a country in which people routinely embrace equally insane ideas.

The radicals poisoned the well by hijacking trusted institutions and not just biasing them, but ‘pravdaizing’ them until they became widely distrusted. They used those institutions to polarize society, spreading a culture of lies across the centers of power, and then enlisting governments and corporations in the suppression of their political opposition for being too dangerous.

A riot is not the language of the unheard. Most often it’s the language of extremists, radicals, and agent provocateurs. The real language of the unheard is frustration, mistrust, and despair. The job of the former is to covertly ally with a totalitarian regime to radicalize the unheard, polarizing society, and leading to a murderous confrontation that will affirm the establishment.

The establishment has spent generations claiming that it represents the forces of liberation because of its advocacy of class warfare and then identity politics. But all that class warfare has left the heartlands of its former political influence in the South and the Rust Belt in utter misery. And its identity politics has made the urban ghetto into an even worse place than ever. The same is not true for the bedroom communities of D.C., the mansions of Marin County, or the multi-million condos of the Upper East Side. The latest Black Lives Matter revolution is, as usual, brought to you by Coca Cola, Harvard, Goldman Sachs, and the Washington Post.

The Trump administration was a threat because it gave voice to the unheard and the inherent scam of a political system that claims to be representative, but only represents itself. Treating its overthrow as a liberation movement funded by some of the biggest and most powerful figures, organizations, and interests in the country, gets at the heart of the leftist political hoax.

It was far from perfect, but it frightened enough of the right people that it had to be destroyed.

The unheard now have less of a voice than ever. And many of them have learned the lesson that this brute use of establishment force was meant to teach them: that voting is futile. It’s not true, but it is what the system and its agent provocateurs want them to take away from 2020.

The establishment is not afraid of riots. It thrives on them.

There are two classes of riots. Those riots funded, encouraged, and deployed by the operatives of the establishment to demand “change” are protected and legitimized. Opposition riots are allowed to go far enough to cause a crisis and justify a ruthless crackdown, not on the agent provocateurs behind them, but on the non-violent political opposition to the establishment.

That’s why dot com platforms terminated President Trump’s social media accounts while the anti-Trump alt-righters who helped drive the violence still retain their blue checkmarks.

The more violence the establishment encourages from the ranks of the unheard, or most often, the provocateurs pretending to represent them, the more it can suppress the opposition. Its depiction of the unheard as violent and dangerous, irrational and a threat to society, allows it to wield unchecked power and further marginalize the unheard while feeding the cycle of violence.

The establishment offers healing and unity to conservative members of its own class, and more jobs shipped to China, illegal migration, and political censorship for the rest of the unheard.

The last generation has seen two political revolutions by the unheard, the Tea Party, and the Trump campaign, that were brought down from without and within. The establishment understands the threat of the revolutions that it dismissively labels as ‘populism’ because despite its constant posturing about values and the oppressed, it is wholly illegitimate.

America was never meant to be ruled by a single cultural class operating out of D.C., New York, San Francisco, and a handful of other cities and suburbs for its own benefit. No amount of black nationalist cosplay or advocacy for infinite genders can hide the illegitimacy of this system from anyone except the junior members of the establishment blinded by university indoctrination.

The establishment would like to talk about anything and everything except its own power. Everything in our politics is a basic distraction from that question. A populist conservative movement that can convincingly stay on that question and hammer it home will win.

And then the unheard might finally have a voice.







Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Sunday, January 17, 2021

This Is How Conservatives Get Erased From the Internet

By On January 17, 2021
Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services.

AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place.

Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe through their browsers.

Google’s Chrome commands 45% of the browser market in America while Apple’s Safari has a little under 40%. While browser flags can be currently bypassed, it would add a further structural disadvantage that would make people less likely to use the service, and there’s nothing stopping Apple and Google from permanently blocking access to any conservative site.

There are other browsers, but Google and Apple could kick any browser off their app stores that doesn’t comply with a blocklist of ‘unsafe’ sites, further narrowing the potential browser options.

With desktops and laptops, Microsoft and Apple can block access to sites at the operating system level by using their built-in antivirus software. That can also be turned off. For now.

Google controls over 80% of search traffic. Facebook controls some 80% of social media. Being delisted and deplatformed by them can be all but fatal to any site trying to attract new users.

Some conservatives take refuge in the illusion of alternatives from smaller companies, but in the oligarchy, smaller companies usually directly or indirectly rely on services from Big Tech.

DuckDuckGo, for example, serves up searches from Microsoft’s Bing. Many smaller alternative companies are likewise dependent on Big Tech players. The small companies conservatives take refuge in are still reliant on the infrastructure of the big players and can be easily pressured into joining their boycotts or have their own services cut off by the Big Tech oligarchy.

There are workarounds for all of these, but when visiting a conservative site turns into the equivalent of going to a speakeasy, that eliminates much of the potential user base.

Sites can also be crushed at the domain level, banishing them to the dark web.

If conservatives distributing information becomes as onerous as Chinese political dissidents bypassing the Great Firewall, what will be left of the conservative movement online?

It will take more manufactured emergencies to unlock some of these options, but there should be little doubt that they will be. The Democrats and their media allies invented the threat of “disinformation” out of thin air and still can’t properly explain what it means. But they successfully used it to engage in a massive online purge of their political opponents.

A violent clash or a random shooting by an unstable man will unlock another censorship tier. But it could just as easily be another conservative politician winning when he’s supposed to lose.

Direct deplatforming is only the crudest tool. Pressure campaigns have targeted advertising and payment options for conservative sites. Google, again, controls 37% of the digital ad market. Payment options at the top are controlled by the same old team of players. That’s what happened when the David Horowitz Freedom Center was cut off by Visa and Mastercard.

The ‘killer app’ though won’t be direct internet censorship, but corporate cancel culture.

Instead of Facebook deleting your post, you will be fired from your job for posting it. If you own a small business, larger suppliers and companies will no longer work with you. If you belong to a trade association, you’ll be ousted. If your business requires a license, you will lose it.

This isn’t a paranoid fantasy. It’s happening right now.

In November, I wrote about how the National Association of Realtors had modified its regulations to allow members to be forced out of the business over their social media posts.

"Doesn’t this mean that if I post my opinion online and someone doesn’t agree with it, that I can lose my membership and be forced out of the business?" the NAR FAQ asks.

That’s not an isolated policy. Similar moves are underway in various trade associations which would treat politically incorrect views as a violation of professional obligations. Cancel culture isn’t a new phenomenon, but this is the industrialization of cancel culture which takes it from an isolated phenomenon to a collective system of enforcement like China’s social credit score.

This includes monitoring social media profiles and flagging employees, renters, or businesses with conservative views as a potential risk.

Yelp has already implemented a similar program for some eateries. It’s not alone.

Big Tech censorship is a symptom of a much bigger problem which is the criminalization of conservative views within the corporate world. The FAANG bloc has led the way, but big business has been slowly tilting leftward. The giant multinationals are the worst offenders, at least when it comes to public virtue signaling, and they control a great deal of the economy.

Conservatives never asked companies to adopt their political views. Leftists made it mandatory and organized pressure campaigns from the outside and the inside to make it happen.

That’s why they won. It’s why conservatives are losing.

Leftists took over academia and cultural industries by organizing networks inside and then imposing their own leadership and institutional ideologies that made their views mandatory and left no room for dissent, while conservatives failed to organize a common front against them..

Naming major conservative musicians and movie stars was easy. Now name one. Under 40.

The same takeover is happening at a slower pace inside the corporate world, backed by diversity quotas and social responsibility statements. I wrote about this at length in my Freedom Center pamphlet, Thought Control, Inc, and internet censorship is a symptom of that threat.

The whole threat will erase conservatives from the internet and from public life.

Can conservatives influence, campaign, and win elections under these conditions? The endgame here is eliminating conservatives as a meaningful political force in America.

That’s the scale of the threat. Conservatives have spent too long ignoring it. And even now they underestimate the sheer scale of the strategy to erase them from the marketplace of ideas.

But Big Tech isn’t as powerful as it seems. It’s vulnerable and it’s worried.

That’s why Big Tech waited until it was confident that the Senate would be in the hands of the Democrats before it made its big move against Trump. That’s weakness, not strength.

Forcing out President Trump was a priority for Big Tech, not only for political, but economic reasons. The Trump administration was the first to aggressively go after Google and Facebook on antitrust grounds. It’s no coincidence that Google is a Biden Inaugural Committee donor.

President Trump was the first GOP president to stop being a cheap corporate date. Republicans, even some in the MAGA class, are happy to trade favorable legislation for contributions with economic interests, from Big Tech to the media, that hate conservatives.

Democrats trade legislation for contributions, but they also demand political allegiance.

When corporations hire Democrat operatives, they get lobbyists for their business interests who still push leftist political agendas, but when corporations hire Republicans, all they get is lobbyists who ignore the fact that the interests they represent are bad for conservatives.

The Left understood that corporate policy is national policy. Its members adopted conservative boycotts of companies behaving immorally just when conservatives decided to abandon them. Leftists chose brands based on their politics, while conservatives had no idea what the politics of their cable company or breakfast cereal were. That’s why corporate politics turned leftist.

Democrat elected officials help companies who share their views and hurt those who don’t. Republicans help companies who give them money even while they’re crushing conservatives.

And if that doesn’t change, there will be fewer Republicans and a lot fewer conservatives.

The only way it’s going to change is if conservatives stop paying attention to what their elected officials are saying and start paying attention to what they’re doing on behalf of lobbyists.

The battle for the corporation, unlike academia and the media, isn’t a lost cause. But it actually needs to be fought. And one of the best tools for that fight is duplicating the Left’s infrastructure for monitoring the interactions between politicians and corporate interests, and demanding that the politicians represent conservatives, not just their campaign war chests, with corporations.

Conservatives view the corporate landscape as an amorphous free market while leftists see friendly and unfriendly companies. After generations of this, the market has become a lot more leftist and a lot less free. Conservatives need a better response to this crisis than to roll out the old claims about their commitment to a free system which failed in academia and the media.

Instead, conservatives may need to start viewing corporations in the same way, using political power to pressure companies into adopting conservative positions, funding conservative priorities, and protecting the civil rights of conservatives, while crippling the business interests of companies that serve as the major funders of leftist agendas and deny conservative civil rights.

Imagine if Republican legislators actually used government contracts, copyright law, and regulatory oversight to extract meaningful cultural concessions, instead of just campaign contributions, from AT&T, Disney, and Facebook: just to name a few examples.

If you want to imagine a country where conservatives aren’t just fighting a rear-guard action against an ascendant radical movement that is taking over everything, that’s the place to start.

This may strike some free market fundamentalists as anathema, but a better word is survival.

There is nothing free about a market controlled by a Big Tech oligarchy, a handful of multinationals and giant chains, and corporate fronts for Chinese business interests.

The only way to ‘free’ the market is to make it more open by demolishing the oligarchy.

Facebook and Twitter censorship may be what conservatives see immediately, but the big picture is the erasure of conservatism as a movement from America.

It didn’t have to happen. It still doesn’t.

Conservatives have lost their grip on many key institutions, but they still have a foothold on political power. The question is whether they’re willing to use it before they lose that too.








Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Thursday, January 14, 2021

China’s Virus Supremacy

By On January 14, 2021
Biowarfare is as the ancients dumping corpses in each other’s wells, and by the Cold War, both sides had developed storehouses of biological weapons alongside their nuclear weapons.

Mutually Assured Destruction kept the world from dying from radiation poisoning or plague.

The deadly weapons of the Cold War stalemated each other so that neither side could use its weapons without unleashing massive destruction. Both the US and the USSR wargamed the use of ‘low-yield’ battlefield nuclear weapons that would allow for strategic victories without triggering a full-scale nuclear war that would kill billions of people and wreck both sides.

The consensus was that any use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield would be apocalyptic.

The People’s Republic of China may have disproven that theory using not nuclear, but biological weapons, to secure a strategic victory while avoiding any retaliation for its biowarfare attack.

Instead of escalating military tensions, the PRC made itself economically indispensable to America’s elites allowing it to carry out an attack under the cover of plausible deniability. The purpose of the first biowarfare strike wasn’t mass death. The dead were collateral damage.

Communist China’s goal is economic supremacy. Its biological attack wasn’t aimed exclusively at America, but at the high-functioning economies in open societies who are its customers and enemies. And the attack succeeded in crippling the world’s top two economies while making them more dependent on China’s economic machine.

China’s image has taken a beating around the world for unleashing the virus, lying about it, and then cashing in on the disaster, but it has come out of it with more money and power than ever. Its moves against India and in the South China Sea show it would rather be feared than loved.

Most importantly, China has learned that it can unleash chaos while profiting from the disaster.

If the current coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab, the odds are that the next one will be. The past year provided the Communist regime with a blueprint for getting rich by weakening its enemies.

Now that China knows that it can unleash a virus, lie about it, and come out stronger than ever, why wouldn’t it do it again?

China has come out of the plague year stronger than ever by spreading the virus and then selling America and Europe, battered by the pandemic, lockdowns, and turmoil, the masks and base compounds to protect itself. The biological attack allowed China to not only test us, but to test its own society, using the pandemic to centralize and solidify control over its population.

The real weapon wasn’t the virus. It was chaos.

Chaos is the weapon of the insurgency, political, international, and ideological, against an open society. It’s a familiar weapon that China is currently better built to endure than we are.

When the Soviet Union kickstarted the new age of Islamic terrorism, it was betting that the chaos of bombings and airline hijackings would take a more serious toll on open societies that care about civil rights and the judicial system. Communist regimes were much better suited to suppressing terrorism and to expecting their citizens to shrug off acts of random terror.

The Russians took quite a beating in Afghanistan and Chechnya from the virus they originally unleashed, and there have been devastating acts of terrorism, most notably in Beslan, but domestic terrorism was never much of an issue until the fall of the USSR. And despite the growing Muslim population in the territories under its control, terrorism hasn’t crippled Russia to the extent that it has Europe. Nor did it make Russia spin out of control the way it did America.

The pandemic, like terrorism and online hacking, is the latest in a series of chaos weapons directed at our society. And it may be the most effective of the chaos weapons to date.

Like terrorism, the virus shuts down travel, collapses economies, and creates uncertainty and doubt. These are conditions that weaken open societies, but strengthen closed ones. Even a sizable death toll doesn’t worry a country that has spent generations struggling to roll back an excess population. The people most likely to die in a pandemic, older men or lower class male workers, are considered a burden or surplus to the new Chinese economy anyway.

The virus, from the PRC’s perspective, helps shed the dead weight of useless people.

The Chinese perspective is horrifying but not that foreign. Did the Democrat administrations, hospital systems and health care experts that forced nursing homes in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California, among others, to accept infected patients not know what would happen? Or did they think that “the old man’s friend” would rid them of useless people?

While the pandemic and their policies have been devastating for America, they’ve been mostly helpful to Democrats from a demographic and political perspective. The people most likely to die of the virus are older, and therefore statistically more conservative. The lockdowns broke down small businesses, another conservative demographic, and shattered health care systems, accelerating the collapse of the healthcare industry, and its takeover by the government.

Before the pandemic, Democrats were going up against a 2020 incumbent with a booming economy. By Election Day, the country had turned into a very different place than it had been.

The world’s third largest economy and the second largest party of the world’s largest economy had common interests that the pandemic fulfilled. Pandemic America is more like China, more centralized, more dependent on the Big Tech oligarchy, and more willing to set aside its basic freedoms to cope with a crisis. Everything that the Left claimed was true of 9/11, but wasn’t, has proven all too true of the COVID-19 crisis which replaced civil liberties with emergency rule.

And normalized collectivism under the rule of unelected officials bolstered by mass propaganda.

All China has to do if it wants to keep turning America into an inept socialist kleptocracy with no economy to speak of, a vast underclass, and a small corrupt overclass, is keep feeding the chaos. What the Russians tried to do in their usual clunky and showy way by utilizing the inherent chaos of the internet, the Chinese did much more smoothly and cleanly with a virus.

China wants America broken, but not destroyed. We are their best customers.

From China’s perspective, the pandemic showcased the superiority of their society, their system and their culture, while highlighting the inferiority of our own. The cheering crowds in Wuhan were meant to show the superiority of the Communist regime to that of the United States.

And to remind Chinese citizens not to long for the political and cultural freedoms of Americans.

Mutually Assured Destruction was based on the idea that neither side would be willing to flirt with destruction. But China’s biowarfare attack ‘nuked’ itself, before going on to cause destruction among the economies targeted by the Communist regime. The Communist grip on power had been based on this fundamental willingness to sacrifice millions for its goals. And while the Communist regime maintained its popularity by offering social mobility and consumer gadgets, its elite remain committed to that same genocidal maoist willingness to kill millions.

China’s biowarfare lab in Wuhan infected its own city before going on to release deadlier strains of the virus in Europe. The Wuhan release tested China’s own society and demonstrated the regime’s willingness to kill its own people in unknown numbers for the sake of the greater good.

All of this makes Communist China a deadlier enemy than the Soviet Union ever was.

The challenge of this century is how America can meet an enemy that is both seductive and ruthless, capturing our economy at the source and then killing us by the hundreds of thousands.

America has faltered in the face of the chaos weapons of terrorism and internet attacks. The biowarfare attack of 2020 proved to be even more effective at bringing down our society.

The American experiment departed from previous governing philosophies by not using government to manage chaos, but trusting to the people to do their own managing. Leftist movements met such open societies by exploiting their openness to spread chaos. The Soviet and then the Chinese Communist strategy was to boost the chaos with state sponsorship.

The stakes of the virus cold war are much the same as those of previous chaos campaigns. The fundamental question is whether we can defeat chaos assaults without turning into our enemies.

The Democrats met the pandemic, as they have met other crises in the last generation, by wishing that we were more like China. But a Democrat America would be a very poor man’s China, a nationwide California run by men and women lacking China’s nationalism, solidarity, and efficiency, while adopting its totalitarian technocracy with brutal incompetence.

America can’t beat China by becoming China. No more than it could beat Russia by becoming Russia. The only meaningful American victory is one that makes us a stronger America.

Europe and America have tried responding to the pandemic with government control. And we failed. Government is not our strength. The rule of experts is not what makes us great. The power of our people has been in individual initiative, in volunteerism, innovation, and the wisdom of crowds. That is what the Communists of every generation have feared about us.

Every time we respond to chaos with government, we become more vulnerable to chaos.

American resilience lies in our individuality. The Chinese endure collectively. We innovate individually. When the government takes away our individuality, we become third-rate Communists, outsourcing our products to China and demanding government handouts, while our government leaders party in pricey restaurants. We must become Americans again.

The only way America will survive this new coronavirus cold war is to reclaim its heritage.

We can survive and thrive on chaos, not because we are obedient collectivists like the citizens of the PRC, but because we are individuals who crowdsource solutions on our initiative.

This was a nation built on chaos. Americans not only built the first true free society, but they did it out of the refugees, exiles, and leavings of Europe. This was a nation built by individualists and nonconformists who tamed the wilderness and conquered the frontier. Government did not build this nation, as Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama falsely claimed, pioneers built it.

Government can only destroy it.

Americans can’t be better collectivists than Chinese Communists. The new Cold War can only be fought and won by a free people. Any other kind will lose.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

You Can Quit Because You Took Jeffrey Epstein's Dirty Cash And Still Be The Hero of a Spielberg Movie

By On January 13, 2021
In November 2020, filming began on Oslo: an adaptation of the revisionist history Broadway play about the fake peace process between Israel and the PLO terrorist organization.

That same month, the man at the center of both the play and the movie, Terje Rød Larsen announced that he was stepping down as president and CEO of the International Peace Institute after it was revealed that he had taken a $130,000 personal loan from Jeffrey Epstein.

The International Peace Institute is closely linked to the United Nations and its honorary chair is usually the UN Secretary General. The notorious pedophile didn’t just give Larsen money, he also pumped $650,000 into the UN-linked group through his “foundations'' and the Norwegian paper that broke the story published emails showing that Larsen’s people were trying to move money from IPI back to Jeffrey Epstein. "For forms sake we should send it to Jeff, however I am sure we will get it back many fold!" Larsen appears to have written in one email.

It was 2016. The date on the original loan was in 2013. All of this took place years after the original Epstein case and his conviction. The ex-UN diplomat knew whom he was dealing with.

But the Epstein scandal didn’t stop Oslo from being produced by Steven Spielberg anyway. Or HBO from moving forward with plans to air a story about a disgraced Jeffrey Epstein associate.

Neither HBO nor Spielberg are strangers to revisionist history or anti-Israel propaganda.

Spielberg’s most infamous movie, Munich, equated the terrorists murdering Israeli civilians with the Israeli operatives trying to stop them, and was the work of screenwriter Tony Kushner who had declared that he wished Israel had never existed. HBO has been responsible for a litany of anti-Israel flicks, most recently, Our Boys, which was protested by the families of terror victims.

But Oslo is awkward because a man linked to the world’s most notorious pedophile is its hero.

Oslo, the original play, was born when Terje Rød Larsen modestly proposed it to director Bartlett Sher who is also directing the HBO movie. The director and the diplomat are good friends.

“We were part of a historic event which we have waited twenty years to see written about,” is how Larsen pitched his story.

The “historic event” has been written to death. The so-called peace agreement has killed more people than many actual wars. The real problem was that the story was fading away. And, most particularly, Larsen’s starring role in the story which is key to his fame and his career.

The premise of Oslo is that Larsen and his wife, Mona Juul, who still serves as the Deputy Permanent Representative of the Norway Mission to the United Nations, got the “warring sides” to make peace by seeing each other as human beings for the first time. And it’s nonsense.

The true story of Oslo is how Israeli lefty radicals double-crossed their own country and government, violated laws against doing exactly what they were doing, made repeated concessions to the terrorists, and then presented a hoax of a peace agreement.

Arafat, the PLO, and the entire terrorist movement built around a fake ‘Palestinian’ nationality, never made peace, never recognized Israel, and were not going to stop killing Jews.

What was the whole thing really about? Long before Epstein, Larsen had been accused of trading cash for a Nobel Peace Prize. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the Nobel Committee, alleged that Larsen got $100,000 from the Peres Center, a project of Israel’s notoriously corrupt left-wing foreign minister, to ensure that Shimon Peres would receive a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian government had been pumping millions of kroner into the Peres Peace Center which was writing a very large check to Larsen. Meanwhile Larsen was also sitting on the board of governors of the Peres Peace Center which was giving him an award and a big check.

The diplomat claimed that he had informed the Norwegian government to which it responded, "no one in the Foreign Ministry has known about these sums of money." There were also suggestions that it would investigate the role that Mona Juul, Larsen’s wife, who was also getting the prize money, had played in getting those millions of kroner to the Peace Center.

In 2002, a conservative Israeli government bounced Larsen, who was being billed as ‘Mr. Peace’, after he falsely accused Israel of having “lost all moral authority” while it was fighting the Islamic terrorists behind the Passover Massacre of thirty people: most of them senior citizens.

Larsen’s false claims of an Israeli massacre in Jenin that was “horrifying beyond belief”, “a shameful chapter in Israel’s history”, and rife with “the stench of death” were disproven. Even the UN’s own report found that 52 died, most of them terrorists, along with 23 Israeli soldiers.

Two years later, the PLO declared ‘Mr. Peace’ persona non-grata making Larsen’s unwantedness in the region about the only thing that the Israelis and the terrorists agreed on.

A few years later, it was discovered that all of the ‘Oslo Files’, the papers related to the so-called negotiations, had vanished from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The twists and turns in the search for those documents, and why they went missing would make for a much more interesting story than the tedious nonsense of Sher directing another glamorization of Larsen.

There are plenty of interesting angles to Larsen’s story that Spielberg and Sher won’t touch, but the real truth about Larsen is that his story matters much less than the devastation of Oslo. The backchannel wasn’t a triumph of peace, but a dirty leftist political trick that wrecked Israel’s security, touched off decades of intense violence in the region, and cost thousands of lives.

Oslo is another one of the same stories that the elite tell each other. Larsen and Sher got to know each other because their daughters attended the same Manhattan private school. Larsen and J.T. Rogers, the playwright, then met up at an “Upper West Side haunt” for drinks. Oslo did well on Broadway by way of being touted by the New York Times, and will be an HBO movie.

There is one giant hole in Oslo’s story about the power of Norwegian diplomats who send their kids to Manhattan private schools to make peace. There wasn’t and isn’t any actual peace.

The only meaningful peace accords in the region that led to normalization weren’t made by Larsen, Clinton, Peres, and Rabin, but by Trump, Netanyahu, and conservative leaders. Oslo is nostalgic peace porn from the elites who failed miserably, though not at getting rich or getting a lot of people killed, calculated to obscure the real world triumphs of Trump and Netanyahu.

Jeffrey Epstein thrived in these same elitist circles and was plugged into the same networks. When Larsen, previously earning around half a million a year as head of the IPI, needed $130,000, he was there to lend it to him. And provide cash and connections for countless members of the elite, trading favors, offering introductions, and palling around with everyone.

Oslo isn’t about Israel or Islamic terrorism. Like everything the decadent cultural industry of our country makes, it’s about that incestuous world whose key players all send their kids to the same private schools, hang out at the same bars, and agree on the same basic things. They’re also very good at not seeing things like abused teenage girls or thousands of dead people.

If Bartlett Sher wanted to make a truly relevant and groundbreaking play, he would tell the story of Jeffrey Epstein’s network and of the girls he abused, some of them the same age as his daughter. But that play, unlike his theatrical smears of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and the Middle East, would never be put on, and would be quickly sunk by the New York Times.

And Spielberg, and the rest of the gang, along with HBO, wouldn’t turn it into a movie.

The real life players and their fictional counterparts in this world give each other awards and good reviews. They write about the world, but the only world they know is their own, and despite the dictum of writing what you know, they have little interest in writing about the horrors in their own world, when they can write about how their friends brought peace to the Middle East.

Oslo unintentionally explains why the professional peacemakers failed so miserably. It wasn’t only Jeffrey Epstein’s abused girls they couldn’t see, but the limits of their own corrupt hubris. They promise to solve the problems of the people who aren’t as famous and connected as they are, but fail horribly every single time, only to spin those failures as historic successes.

And if the New York Times says so, it must be true.

The true story of Oslo is a tale of corruption, death, and bloodshed. It’s about the price that ordinary people paid when the elites got their way. It’s about Jewish senior citizens murdered while celebrating Passover, schoolgirls blown up on buses, and children shot in the head. It’s a million miles away from the world of Off-Broadway plays and Manhattan private schools, skyscraper boardrooms and Brentwood mansions that spawned Oslo’s revisionist history.

The violence unleashed by Oslo’s empowered terrorists in Israel fell heaviest on working class people riding the bus to their jobs or commuting to cheaper homes in Judea and Samaria.

While Oslo films in Prague, the terrorism continues in Israel. And Jeffrey Epstein’s old associates look forward to being able to watch Oslo’s message that the elites know best while paying no attention to the terrorism, to Larsen’s scandals, or to their own corruption.





Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

This article first appeared exclusively at Front Page Magazine.

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