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Part 1 of 2
Ideological enforcement has become a thriving industry, representing nearly every cause-du-jour in the cultural Marxist constellation, from the old to the new and the great to the small, from feminism down to sulfate-free hair products in prison. This includes a wide range of rackets: certain government officials (like HUD munchkins who bust up white neighborhoods), big-name professional motormouths, corporate ESG/DEI bureaucrats, diversity mystagogues who deliver “sensitivity training” and workplace struggle sessions, und so weiter, all the way down to wannabe professional activists with an opinion and a Patreon account.
One thing these make-work programs for leftists all have in common is that they’re unproductive. These are ways to get a paycheck, but aren’t useful toward running a country, helping a corporation produce more widgets, getting buildings built, or making society better. They’d likely say that their purpose is to solve social problems or relieve tensions, but really they’re doing nothing of the sort. Instead, they’re a net detriment, stirring up more trouble and friction. It’s doubtful that these ideological enforcers realize the irony. Even if they somehow could fix social problems, that wouldn’t be in their best interests; then they’d have to find real jobs.
Of these ideological enforcers, the most damaging categories are those who directly manipulate public opinion through harmful propaganda and censorship. Together they comprise The System’s version of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth. Here we’ll have a close look at some of these presstitutes, narrative goalies, censor bots, and so forth.
Activists pretending to be journalists
A typical dictatorship has to set up its own propaganda institutions, which takes resources and manpower. The way it rolls in Our Democracy™️ private industry does most of the heavy lifting. If anything, it’s more pernicious that way. A dictatorship’s propaganda is usually pretty heavy-handed, and everyone knows that it’s by and for the régime. On the other hand, the sort of propaganda cranked out by the MSM can be as slick as snot.
Moreover, the illusion of a free and independent press is maintained. Technically speaking, it is – it just happens to be run by half a dozen corporate monopolies, each with Deep State ties and heavily Zionist management. Five are in ideological lockstep with The System. The remaining one effectively serves as a controlled opposition, never crossing the line into forbidden territory. Wow, what a big variety of alternatives! Together, these are The System’s propaganda arm, which own 90% of America’s media outlets: newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, TV networks, radio stations, and even comic books. (Some of these monopolies are gobbling up Internet service providers, and it’s easy to see how that isn’t going to be much of a benefit for freedom of speech online.) All told, the illusion of choice persists despite the tight centralization and ideological sameness.
Even so, there’s plenty of mythology showing a very different picture. As we all know, this free and independent press is a central pillar of Our Democracy™️. Journalists are bold seekers of the truth who objectively tell both sides of the story, balanced and free of bias – “Just the facts, Ma’am!” Naturally, pressmen are stalwart champions of freedom of speech – it’s their very livelihood! Yes, this is what I was told when I was a teenager – back when dinosaurs walked the Earth – and I knew it was baloney even then.
Still, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a cultural legacy about the reporter who pounds the pavement to battle corruption, merely armed with a pen, a steno pad, and a few pointed questions. Then in the newsroom, he clacks out the story on his trusty Underwood typewriter. When the morning edition shows up in the newsstands, the crooks will be exposed in their iniquity at last – another job well done! Maybe there was something to all that melodrama in the 1920s, when pressmen locked horns with robber barons and their pet politicians. Still, when’s the last time anyone really believed this hoopla about bold journalists speaking truth to power? The Watergate caper did shore up the MSM’s faltering reputation for a hot minute, back when Nixon went down in history as the guy who got caught, but that was half a century ago.
These days, the shine has worn off from the mythology, now that the Lügenpresse is working for the robber barons and their pet politicians. Moreover, there’s not so much pavement-pounding lately. There’s still live reportage on the televitz, but their comrades in the print media are no longer so eager to don their trenchcoats and fedoras to brave a rainy night in pursuit of a story. Instead, presstitutes are more interested in mining social media, copying each other, and giving their hot takes on what everyone else is saying. (Hell, I can do the same thing and make them look stupid too!) The decline is hardly anything new – Yuri Bezmenov had plenty to say about the USSR’s Novosti Press Agency and our own comsymp journalists jerking each other off across the Arctic Ocean, or a lot closer during booze-soaked Potemkin village tours.
Other than that, when presstitutes are tired of cranking out articles for the MSM, they might surf social media and tattle on thought criminals. Sometimes this is via special channels arranged between “journalists” and the Tech Tyrants. Oh, how liberal! Apparently, their management isn’t too bothered by them cyber-loafing when they’re supposed to be doing their jobs. These days, journalism is the pits. In fact, presstitutes are Public Enemy Number One. They’re one of the least trusted professions, and the Lügenpresse earned every bit of their lousy reputation.
With corporate margins stretched ever thinner, it’s entirely possible that most of the existing journalism jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence that spins stories through a Narrative Filter. (Interestingly, Orwell predicted machine-generated literature in 1984.) Well, why not? If news will be manufactured by algorithms programmed with politically correct restraining bolts, then that’s hardly different from today’s indoctrinated NPCs. If this does happen – which I figure is a fair bet – first it will be rumored but denied. Then long after everyone figures it out, it finally will be admitted and explained away as an improvement.
Activists pretending to be “Fact Checkers”
Lately, there’s a new department in the Ministry of Truth. These are supposed experts who get to tell us once and for all whether some particular matter is true, or to “debunk” it. They (and apparently they alone!) can determine if something is the real deal, or if it’s a conspiracy theory. The latter phrase of course means, “There’s nothing to see here; move along!” Since these oracles are called “fact checkers,” then they’ve got to be right – right?
The very idea that a silly talisman confers some special authority is cornier than a basket of tortilla chips. [1] In this case, we’re expected to believe that the self-applied label “fact checkers” grants them something like Papal infallibility, therefore whatever they say supposedly is decisive, end of discussion. Yeah, sure they have the final word on the truth! The very idea is so hokey that the term “fact checkers” just doesn’t look right without scare quotes. They may call themselves that, but they’re really just a new variety of narrative-pushers.
What else is the matter with them? For one thing, the very idea that they’re neutral, dispassionate, objective truth-seekers is basically the same pretension afforded to journalists. In fact, many of these guys are journalists – and you know what that means. These “fact checkers” are certainly not above biases and casuistry. I’d trust them to dish out common celebrity gossip – even the National Enquirer is capable of doing that much – or tell me the real deal about alligators in the sewers. On the other hand, for anything that has any ideological implication, forget it.
Their role is to back up whatever the establishment narrative is about something, or shoot down alternative explanations. It’s quite rare that they’ll endorse a contrarian take, even if they have to play word games to hand-wave it. Then there are other “fact checkers” who have proclaimed that certain products are safe, but it turns out that they’d been paid by the manufacturers – how embarrassing!
Activists pretending to be filmmakers
Hollywood has a long history of dishing out leftist content. It used to be a lot better when it wasn’t so overwhelming that it made the show suck. Once upon a time, it also wasn’t in every damn movie they made. The strange thing is that some of the outright pinko stuff, from the days before Joseph McCarthy took them out to the woodshed, is a breath of fresh air compared to the crap Hollyweird is putting out now.
I’m old enough to remember when movies used to be enjoyable. Mostly it was about art for art’s sake, or at least entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Then things started changing about two decades ago. Lately, it’s a rarity when something watchable comes along. Now that the film industry’s creativity has run out of steam, many of the big blockbusters are either comic book adaptations, or unnecessary reboots and remakes which usually don’t hold up to the original.
All too often, the show will be ruined with diversity casting or moldy politics otherwise injected into the story. When this happens, the producers, directors, screenwriters, and so forth are assuming the role of activists pretending to be filmmakers. When a movie isn’t for art or for entertainment, but rather to indulge the Left Coast values of the Hollywood types, then there’s not much to love about it. The film industry is still raking in obscene piles of cash, but I don’t know for what. Who’s watching this crap, anyway? Now that Hollyweird’s quality is about the same as a chicken salad sandwich that’s been left on a picnic table for a couple of weeks, it’s time for the audience to start tuning them out.
Activists pretending to be teachers
In times past, at least with K-12 schools, the teachers weren’t supposed to push their ideology on the kiddos. This was basically an unwritten standard, though not always observed. My first experience of that was in second grade. Somehow I’ve always had a keen ability to detect propaganda – maybe it’s just part of my lifelong authority problem – even though I didn’t fully understand the significance given my young age.
I remember the teacher well. She had a cowbell on the desk, which she’d ring to get our attention. Even then, I thought it would’ve been more fitting if she’d worn it. One day, she taught us two unusual new words for a spelling assignment: segregation and integration. While she explained what they meant, take a wild guess which word got the deep frowns and which got the simpering grins. My third grade teacher was a lefty too, but at least she didn’t rub it in like that. For other reasons as well, she was an angel compared to my second grade teacher, who can go put the lotion in the basket.
Time marches on, of course. Today’s woke teachers act as if God put them on this planet to indoctrinate the kiddos. (I’d show some telling clips from someone who documented oodles of this, but some purple-haired castrato from YouTube’s censorship department deleted the account.) They also have a bad habit of oversharing about their sex lives. Back in the day, that stuff was a no-no for teachers; moral turpitude was supposed to remain in the bedroom. It seems that teaching academic subjects is less of a priority lately than pushing moldy politics. I guess this is yet another reason why Johnny still can’t read. Lately, activists pretending to be teachers have been instrumental in pushing gender confusion on vulnerable youths. Back when I was in school, that wasn’t even a thing. By now, through the use of disingenuous rhetoric and positive reinforcement, hordes of impressionable kids are being persuaded to make life-altering decisions before they’re old enough to sign a contract.
In college, the ideological deep fry really begins. I’ve written extensively about this problem elsewhere, so I’ll keep it brief here. Every fall, a new batch of freshmen enrolls with the expectation that a degree will be their guaranteed ticket to the middle class. Four years later, many will wind up deeply in debt and with their brains pickled in propaganda. Some degree programs are still worth it, and some campuses haven’t become indoctrination mills, but all too often our youth is getting ripped off and brainwashed.
The guilty parties are too numerous to name, but I’ll give a special shout-out to the ethnomasochistic professor James W. Loewen, who used tricky rhetoric to pathologize white communities. As for my own experience ages ago, I was immersed in a campus culture somewhere to the left of the Soviet Politburo. Half of the English faculty members were pinkos, and it was a lot worse with economics professors. The stories I could tell about our journalism department – the MSM’s maggots in training – would make for an entire tirade of its own. Two decades after graduation, I saw a daily edition of the student newspaper once more, and not a damn thing had changed.
I also got an education about Jews. By then, I knew that Zionism had done tremendous harm to America and the world abroad. Even so, I was faced with a paradox. Before that, none of the Jews I’d known personally ever behaved that way. They were pretty irreproachable, or at least had no more than a normal amount of foibles. (I have no problem with those ones – why can’t they all be that way?) At college, where they comprised about 10% of the student body, some were just ordinary people like the Jews I knew before, with nothing worse than some forgivable liberal tendencies. Unfortunately there also were some hardcore radicals, as nasty and fanatical as they come. I’d prefer to keep company with the mega-motormouth Al Sharpton than one of those (((campus pinklets))). They were remarkably lousy ambassadors for their people. If Jews want better public relations, they should stop doing that.
Another fun facet of our ideological breeding ground was that our women’s studies department was turning charming girls into man-hating harpies. This wasn’t just the “we only want equality” surface layer of feminism; this was the real thing. After their brainwashing, it seemed as if they’d crack their faces if they tried to smile. Not all the coeds were like that, of course, but the snotty attitudes certainly got around in the leftist campus echo chamber. For those who haven’t experienced a university like that, it’s hard to describe. When I first enrolled, I wasn’t expecting an Animal House social scene, but neither did I expect to find that hardcore radical feminism had poisoned the well.
Activists pretending to be encyclopedists
Wikipedia almost always comes up high on search engine results for any major topic, often to the very top. (Maybe the programmers like it.) Lately, Wikimedia gets over 20 billion hits a month, about half of which is for the English-language Wikipedia. Therefore, whatever everyone’s favorite overgrown online do-it-yourself encyclopedia has to say obviously will have a significant impact on public perception. Besides that, it’s a wonderful tool to deliver boilerplate to diversity hires with a plagiarism habit.
For subjects like exotic caterpillar species, skateboards, plate tectonics, spectrometry, ancient Chinese history, and far-off galaxies, Wikipedia is actually pretty good. On the other hand, for just about anything that has to do with contemporary ideological controversies, or touches on any politically correct bugaboos – whoa, Nellie! Really, it’s nothing new. Encyclopedias have been a front in the culture war since powdered wigs were in fashion. The problem is that much of the public believes that Wikipedia really is the sum of human knowledge.
How bad is the bias? For just one illustration of how twisted up it can get, consider the article about Stefan Molyneux. It looks like a hit piece written by his critics, because that’s what it is. Their defamatory “biography” of him consists largely of calling him devil words and accusing him of believing naughty things. What a stunning refutation, huh? From reading that character assassination, one might suppose he’s a skinhead who gnaws raw meat for breakfast. The truth is that Stefan Molyneux is an anarcho-capitalist (more or less an enthusiastic libertarian) who cares deeply about peace, human rights, and freedom. He even opposes disciplinary spanking. If Amnesty International’s Board of Directors met him in a dark alley, Stefan would offer to buy them a round of drinks in the pub next door.
To add some balance to an article, of course you can edit it to add the other side of the story. The problem is that one or more leftist narrative goalies is almost certainly patrolling the page, and will be notified immediately through their watch lists. Then with a few mouse clicks, your careful effort goes right down the memory hole. There could be an easy solution, namely separate “pro” and “con” sections for each contentious subject, with a gentleman’s agreement to let the other side have their say. Sometimes it does work that way, but usually that’s not good enough for leftists – they want it all, “my way or the highway.”
Thanks to the usual Long March Through The Institutions (or a fairly short stroll, in this case), some of the tone policemen became barnacles deeply embedded in the Wiki-bureaucracy. Therefore, good luck if you try to resolve an edit war by pushing the dispute up the food chain. It’s little wonder why Wikipedia is biased as hell. By now, it would take an epic frontal assault by bureaucratic press-of-pike to recover some semblance of the neutrality that Wikipedia says it treasures so much.
Aside from garden-variety narrative goalies, there are the paid editors. Besides that are Israel’s professional editing teams; both their Zionists and our Zionists admit to it:
The Yesha Council also announced a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor” — the person who over the next four years incorporates the most “Zionist” changes in the encyclopedia. That lucky encyclopedist will receive a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.
Sweet! I wonder, which (((lucky winner))) got the aerial grand tour? Anyway, at least the Israelis have transparency about what they’re doing. Surely there exist several other tricky editing clubs and Narrative goalies with all kinds of national, ideological, religious, and commercial agendas.
Other than that, behind the scenes there’s quite a cast of spergs, OCD sufferers, monomaniacs, and Weicheier in Wiki-land. These are the kind of people who will argue about whether the movie Wall-E has a dash in the title, or if it’s an “interpunct” – one of those words so prissy that it’s seldom seen outside of Wikipedia. (As the quaintly Freudian joke goes, does “anal retentive” have a hyphen?) Sometimes fanboys are the perfect types to compile minutiae, but there are right and wrong ways to be obsessed, dig? Most editors are just normal volunteers – ordinary people who work for a living and have social lives. Still, a comparatively few well-networked cyber-zealots, with lots of free time on their hands, can do a lot of filibustering.
It’s actually entertaining to read the talk pages and see them rules-lawyering their justifications for information-blockading. They’ll never admit they’re using procedural arguments to keep articles ideologically slanted, but they’re not fooling anyone. The word games will go on even if the facts aren’t in dispute. For example, I recall extensive efforts to protect a notoriously cranky skintellectual from the indignity of a balanced perspective, like quoting her actual words. My favorite riff was when someone invoked the “Biography of Living Persons” rule – she’d assumed room temperature less than two years ago, so she wasn’t dead enough! Monty Python hardly could outdo that.
Rules there are aplenty. Some are well-intentioned but have lots of wiggle room for selective enforcement. Their treasured “Neutral Point Of View” has a pretty big gap between theory and practice, most unfortunately. Also, the “Reliable Sources” policy can become an exercise in the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. For example, a lying worm can be a “reliable source” simply for being published by the MSM – as if presstitutes have some kind of special relationship to the truth. On the other hand, Lothrop Stoddard is not a “reliable source,” simply because his views are out of fashion with good liberal opinion. This is despite him having plenty of journalistic and scholarly street cred, back in ancient times when these things actually meant something.
Their infamous “No Nazis” policy is a rule geared specifically to enforce leftist ideology. Among other things, this allows the Wiki-bureaucrats to ban editors for certain pro-white arguments. Of course, there’s no restraint on moderate advocacy for any other races or ethnicities in the same ways. (I wonder which goat-faced Space Lizard made up that policy?) Apparently Wikipedia is suffering from Nazi inflation. In times past, joining the NSDAP counted. If not that, then a Nazi was at least someone in general agreement with its 25 point program of 1928, or Gottfried Feder’s 1932 update. Lately, one no longer needs to be a 90 year old unreconstructed German to qualify, or even have any special appreciation for Austrian painters of the belle-époque. Simply wanting white countries to remain white makes one a Nazi by Wikipedia’s special definition. That means, of course, that even the Allied countries of the 1940s were Nazis too, except for the Soviet Union which nominally professed squishy internationalism. For that matter, none other than the British Prime Minister – The Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, CP (RU), CP (Can), DL, Hon. RA – was a full-fledged Brownshirt by this standard, because he wanted Britain to remain white. [2]
There are lots of alternative online encyclopedias, general purpose as well as with a topical focus. Some strive for balance, and also to improve on other structural problems such as article bloat. (Wikipedia does have a “notability” rule, but still, lots of trivia and fan wank gets in anyway, which wouldn’t fly in a real encyclopedia.) There are others with a rightist angle, often a good place to find details that get memory-holed elsewhere. The problem is that, for the most part, the public is only dimly aware of these alternatives. It would take a tremendous amount of resources and manpower to establish an effective competitor, but without an army of volunteers to generate and maintain the content, obscure encyclopedias will remain obscure.
Finally, when you see Wikipedia begging for donations, don’t even think about sending them your hard-earned shekels. They already have a king’s ransom in the coffers. Also, comparing Wikimedia’s budget between 2012-2013 and 2020-2021 is a real trip. Awards and grants shot up, some going to tricky leftist rackets. Salaries and wages more than quadrupled during this eight year stretch – someone’s making serious bank at this volunteer encyclopedia! Total expenses more than tripled, although hosting expenses diminished slightly. In their operating budget of over $100 million, some new categories appeared out of the blue, including six million (ahem) dollars for “donation processing expenses.” Sweet! Tell you what – being the generous soul that I am, I can set up a bank account in the Cayman Islands to receive all their donations, and I totally pinky-swear that I won’t bill them a dime!