Way back in the old days, the Left used to accuse conservatives of being against free speech and open debate. They would say the Right was in favor of burning books and heresy laws. When conservatives rose to power in the 1980’s, it was time for them to “own the libs” by pointing out that the Soviets banned books, threw dissidents into gulags and banned speech critical of the state. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became a celebrity among conservatives, as an example of how the communists suppressed speech.
Regardless of which side was making the case, the basic assumption was that authoritarian government suppressed speech, banned books and threw political dissidents into prison. Democratic governments, on the other hand, permitted a marketplace of ideas, encouraged debate and protected political dissidents. A popular thing to say on the Left was “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll give my life to defend your right to say it.” Even right-wingers would say it on occasion.
That was a long time ago. Today, no one in the political class talks about free speech or the market place of ideas. Instead they rant and rave about hate speech. The “artsy” types are considered rebels because they repeat verbatim from the official catechism and demand greater restrictions on speech. It’s truly bizarre, when you step back and look at what is happening in the context of the last few decades. The man from 1985, transported to this age, would assume some lunacy has suddenly gripped everyone.
Of course, that same time traveler would be puzzled as to how it was possible for a handful of companies to have seized control of the public space. That’s the part no one could imagine thirty years ago. In 1985, a bookstore refusing to sell a book was no big deal, because there were plenty of bookstores that would sell it. The FCC regulated television and radio, but only for smut. The notion of corporations controlling the public space and un-personing dissidents was beyond fantasy in 1985.
Just think about that for a second. The people in charge will go to the mat to defend pornography freely available on-line, but scream bloody murder if Facebook lets someone talk about biology on their platform. Scientist are losing their careers, while pornographers are celebrated. It’s close to a 180 degree change from thirty years ago. In 1985, retailers were still keeping smut in the back room, away from the general public. Video rental places had a secret room for porn. Today, porn is so ubiquitous no one notices.
That’s the truly bizarre thing about this time, relative to not so long ago. The man in 1985 worried about the IRS and maybe the FBI abusing their power. The only worry about corporations abusing their power was the environmental stuff or maybe screwing their employees in some way. Today, you have much more to fear from the banks and tech giants than the government. If the state becomes aware of you, so what? If Google suddenly takes an interest in you, it might be time to go into hiding.
What makes this age even stranger is that it just sort of happened. In fact, it happened so quickly, most people have yet to upgrade their thinking. Conservatives think they are fighting for liberty and opportunity by defending global corporations. Libertarians are literally writing love letters to global business. Progressives continue to think of themselves as the defenders of the middle-class, despite making war on it. Antifa, an anarchist operation, is entirely funded by billionaires and corporate donors.
Again, that time traveler would be completely baffled by the uniformity of opinion among these corporate HR departments that now control society. In his time, there was variety of opinion on the Left. In fact, the main Left used to complain about its fringe screwing things up for them by making crazy demands. The Right was also quarrelsome, with paleos, neos and various libertarians fighting with one another. Today, conservative means lectures on racism and Israel and liberal means more lectures on racism and trannies.
What would really baffle our time traveler is the fact that we ban books now. In America, that has always been the hallmark of authoritarianism and intolerance. It was always the thing that no free person could tolerate. It’s not so much the books themselves, but the motivation behind it. The person who wanted to ban books wanted to control the most private of private spaces, the mind. Today, the idea of having any privacy, even private thoughts, is considered immoral by the people in American HR.
The scary part of this age is that the book burning is the least odious thing being normalized by American HR. Banks are now cancelling accounts, because they have deemed the client to be in violation of their HR polices. Visa and MasterCard are making private war on the gun industry. How long before someone like Jared Taylor finds he cannot get a credit card or bank account? How long before his bank calls his mortgage or his insurance company cancels his policy, because he is a blasphemer?
That was always the scary part of the Soviet Union. The book banning and speech laws were easy to mock. You could not mock the idea of men being sent to camps or facing internal exile. Imagine being in a state where your friends and family fear being associated with you, because the state has declared you an enemy. Now, imagine losing your phone service because someone working in the Bangalore office of Apple does not like your browsing habits. Imagine American HR becoming aware of you.
Probably the strangest thing for our time traveler would be the reality that people and ideas he considered on his side would now suddenly be enemies. To be a defender of a free society means sounding like a Bolshevik, with regards to big business. To oppose tyranny now means demanding the government crack down on the excesses of the corporate HR department. In order to defend your life and your posterity means secretly hoping for an American Pinochet to use the state to crush the enemies of the West.
Is it bad that I’m beginning to hope that North Korea nukes us?
Yes. They might hit Graceland.
Having been to Graceland, nothing inside of a twenty mile radius would be missed.
Yes, but it is a matter principle that it be defended! Felix is correct.
I read a recent scare article in the MSM about the Evil Russian Conspiracy, about how Russia is targeting more nukes at cities like New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, and it reminded me of this old Onion bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WlnSaIwfEg
That was funny
Well, it won’t do any good. The North Koreans are not our enemy. It’s us. Another excuse for an economy breaking foreign excursion ala 9/11 will gain us little.
After this weekend, I realize it’s not just the left who want to stifle free speech. CPAC banned several conservatives, such as Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey. Faith Goldy and Peter Brimelow of VDare were denied press passes. Laura Loomer was kicked out because she was badgering a CNN guy, Oliver Darcy, who was responsible for getting Alex Jones kicked off some platform or another (can’t remember the details). Meanwhile, Van Jones was actually a CPAC speaker, and Jared Holt, from Right Wing Watch, who doxxes dissident right people, was invited. Out of numerous panels, only one was about immigration,… Read more »
CPAC has always been like that. The controversy I remember was anti-war conservatives being banned during the Bush years.
The things to keep in mind about CPAC are that it is run by the ACU (they have their own agenda) and that the primary audience consists of college kids. It is what it is. Way too much fainting from everyone over what goes on there.
You would think that would’ve changed after the 2016 election season when Trump pushed the immigration issue front and center and it has become the number one issue for conservative voters.
For all their travails, they are still subject to SNL defamation that would not be allowed if any other group was being attacked.
In contrast to previous years, it appears as if there was no direct sponsoring by the Silicon Dons.
http://cpac.conservative.org/cpac-2019-sponsors/?utm_source=cpac_nav&utm_medium=web_referral&utm_campaign=CPAC2019
The following is inside baseball, but note that CPAC was sponsored by ECR (British Conservative Party) but not ENF (French National Front).
In previous years that support was all about the promotion and inclusion of gays. Mission complete.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/no-place-for-soy-boys-at-cpac-timed-tribute-to-men
TBH, I don’t even consider the Republicans or “respectable” conservatives to be the right. Just the right of the left. That’s why there are certain things they need to censor and block just as fanatically as the left. Because they’re the gatekeepers.
Another part of the problem is that the media has totally abandoned its traditional role of holding companies accountable. A good media, or at least a media performing its traditional functions, would be raising a fuss about all these things. In fact the media now has actively taken the side of the deplatformers, and become maniacal Thought Police, hungry to silence voices. A number of institutions that should be holding each other mutually accountable (companies, government, media, intelligence services, NGOs) have merged together into one giant totalitarian, white-hating blob. They’re all on the same team now. I believe some people… Read more »
And yet non of these recently banned books will be featured during “banned books” week/month held in schools and libraries everywhere (probably because they fall short of some degeneracy bar which mandates inclusion).
Great article: In the Booby’s lifetime he’s seen the world overrun with PC hysteria. Of course, we have only ourselves to blame. We allowed the radicalized left to completely take over our universities. Now they are our school teachers, lawyers, judges, journalists, bureaucrats… and yes, human resources officers. There really isn’t much point in even voting anymore. The state is now an organ of the academic left, and no one dares challenge it. The 60s were the revolution. By the 80s the revolutionaries had seized most of government. By the 90s the political correctness reign of terror had begun. Nothing… Read more »
I’m right there with you in that last sentence.
If I were a young man, I’d learn Hungarian or Polish.
Yeah, I’ve thought of places for me or my kids to escape if needed. Unfortunately, the places with similar language and customs – Australia and NZ – are both hard to get into for whites and plagued by the same disease. I feel like you’re only buying yourself a generation before they have similar problems. The countries that appear to have woken up – Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic – are linguistically difficult and culturally very different – which, of course, is probably why they’re not falling for the silliness. Anyway, these are much more difficult place to emigrate. Then there’s… Read more »
It seems even more than that conservatives haven’t upgraded their thinking. I can’t believe anyone on the conservative side with a brain can’t see what’s going on. I see libertarian guys like Justin Amash and Rand Paul crowing about how they’re going to vote against Trump on the declaration of emergency and my mind just boggles. I become embarrassed that I was once libertarian, because these guys act like a bunch of people who’ve just been herded on a train to the camps and won’t contemplate taking over the train, because taking over trains is against the law!
It’s happening, just slow. They are called conservative for a reason. I have enjoyed powerline’s kosher comments section. The tension between the scattering of dissident-right-inclined and neocon types is palpable. Hayward, a prototypical Baby boomer remains oblivious and is still crowing the DR3 poz. BTW I think t i detect a real shift among the catholic laity, the’re pissed. I’m buying my kids copies of Culture of critique as a spring break gift. Take courage, we are entering a age of heroes. It’s getting interesting, notwithstanding the chinese curse along those lines.
Of the authors on Powerline, Hinderaker seems the most aware. Interesting in that he’s the retired one. Mirengoff just makes me want to punch things.
“The man from 1985, transported to this age, would assume some lunacy has suddenly gripped everyone.”
This isn’t actually very far from the truth.
The hypocrisy of the left manifests itself in any number of different ways. Their desire to ban speech or label common sense logic and reason “Hate Speech” is especially twisted. They do these things because they operate under a false ideology and do not have the ability to win the argument. Truth is anathema to their delicate sensibilities. Problem is they refuse to leave me alone. I just want to punch their faces in.
Soviet Union 2.0 is far more efficient that 1.0. We have 24-7 propaganda that people voluntarily watch for hours a day, making the absurd (black software engineers, butt-kicking chicks, family-oriented gays, etc.) seem normal. In addition, no need for an expensive and unflattering system of gulags. Just cut a man off from his job, career, friends and neighbors, banking and sources of financing, and you’ve pretty well destroyed him. Hell, he’ll probably kill himself, saving you the trouble. You also don’t need a network of government spies and enforcers. The voluntary auxiliary of cat ladies will happily keep on an… Read more »
I’ve been downvoted in the past for writing this, but I will write it again: The day is soon coming in which your browsing habits will be compiled and broken down into a series of social capital rankings rather like that used in China. A “Risk Potential Profile” will become a standard background check for employment, enforced by the hens in HR. A history of visiting websites like this one will flag you as a potential risk for violent behavior, and will render you unemployable. All the information technology pieces are in place to do this. It’s only a matter… Read more »
Yeah it probably smart to use a IP proxy. But i’m too lazy and they can fuck off anyways- far as i’m concerned. By the time they work up to firing me, they will have trouble maintaining infrastructure.
I can’t imagine why you would be downvoted. It’s already happening. Social media platforms have already admitted to judging users based on their activities even off-platform. HR departments already scan your internet activitiy and social media accounts — people have already been refused jobs or fire for wrong opinions. Banks are already denying accounts or payment services to wrongthinkers. Schools discipline kids for things they do on social media, on what authority, I have no idea. I think that’s a big part of Zman’s point — the government is perfectly happy to let big tech and financial companies do the… Read more »
This country is done. It’s over. The mob has gotten exactly what it voted for. We have become our enemy.
Certainly the country that once was is over. But the country that we’ve because can’t hold together indefinitely because it’s built on factual falsehoods. I mean, you can only hold a chair over your head for so long.
That said, there’s a lot of built-up capital in this country. It’ll take awhile to burn through it. But it will get used up. Like the Hemingway quote about how a friend went broke: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
We’re in the gradual stage right now, but these things tend to accelerate, much like stock market crashes.
The part that seems ethically wrong and possibly illegal to me is that amazon achieved its monopolistic position by exploiting special shipping rates from postal services and special privileged tax status, thus acting as a quasi governmental entity. Having utilized those advantages, it ought to be constrained by the bill of rights, ie first amendment. However, the advantage of amazon and free distribution of materials was a new platform that we of the dissident right enjoyed for about twenty years. We had nothing comparable before that. It has been sort of an interglacial period. It seems to me that although… Read more »
Conservative competition never seems to materialize.
Just wait until Ben and the others start losing access. What will they think of private monopolies, I mean private businesses then?
White men bad, Orange men REALLY REALLY bad, Green energy good. Open borders good. That seems to be all they’ve got. How long can a theocracy hold on when the core beliefs are so ludicrous? Great column, by the way. HR departments really are a BIG problem for the West. Used to think I had the world all figured out as a libertarian, but what good is advocating a minimalist state when you are fighting against a religion that controls all institutions, not just the formal levers of state power? The internet is a double-edge sword for our rulers. It… Read more »
Fuggem. I can live without twitter and bookface, and I will throw out the internet if I have to too.