Over the last several years, America has experienced a new phenomenon in which people critical of official dogma suddenly endorse the dogma. An alternative form of this is where people who have made a career debunking claims that appear in the media suddenly become the most faithful consumers of media propaganda. It is as if a new virus has entered the system that causes the victim to switch sides or reveal themselves to be a double-agent all along.
The Trump phenomenon was the first example. When Trump famously came down the escalator to declare his candidacy, many assumed it was just a publicity stunt from a guy known for showmanship. Some went a bit far in criticizing it but Trump is one of those guys who can rub some people the wrong way. Once it was clear that he was a serious threat to be nominated, it also became clear that those harsh critics had contracted this new mind virus.
Granted, we did not know it was a mind virus. When Bill Kristol started waving around Hillary Clinton signs, it was just assumed he was bitter. In fact, that was the assumption about all of the neocons who were ranting about Trump. He had torpedoed their guy Jeb Bush so their attacks were just sour grapes. Jonah Goldberg was sure his old lady was going to land a job in the next Republican administration so Trump was a huge blow to his plans.
We now think that Trump triggered the forgotten Trotsky gene. All of those old neoconservatives and their progeny who had been posing as conservatives for fifty years have the Trotsky gene. Trump triggered it and as a result they instinctively returned to their natural state as hyper-violent leftists. At least it was assumed that Trump triggered it. Further evidence suggests that a virus of some sort was in the air that was the real cause of the neocon reaction.
Ironically, it was the presence of another virus that revealed the presence of this prior virus in the population. The Covid panic, which was fostered by the managerial state, triggered a reaction in some of the harshest critics of it. Instantly, people who had made careers in media criticism, usually around the issues related to the humans sciences, became totally trusting of the media. Everything in the press regarding Covid was treated as holy writ.
Strangely, this uncritical acceptance of media messaging was particularly hard on the old HBD community. These are the people who spend their days thinking about the biological diversity of humanity. As a result, they spent decades picking apart the blank slate claims in the media. Their message for generations has been that you cannot trust the media to talk honestly about biology. Then all of a sudden, they accepted all media claims about Covid without question .
It was not just the HBD people who were gripped by this madness over Covid, but they were the hardest hit by it. This is when the possibility of the cause being a virus started to make some sense. People whose psychological immune systems have been tuned to defeat a specific sort of media agitation were probably most vulnerable to a different form of media agitation. It is why they have never recovered from the infection, despite the revelations.
The war in Ukraine has brought a new outbreak of the virus. Many who chanted “fake news” during the Trump years are now festooned with Ukraine symbols and carrying on like the remaining Biden supporters. In fact, the most fanatical supporters of the regime are people who used to be Trump partisans. Sean Hannity, for example, is demanding nuclear war over Ukraine. He repeats whatever is in the mainstream media regarding Ukraine as if it is gospel.
Granted, the talks show circuit types are mostly carny folk who go where they think they can get an audience, but there are more sober minded examples. Victor David Hanson has been uncritically repeating media claims about the war. He seems to be fond of the narrative that says the Russians planned to sack Kiev, but the Ukrainians heroically defended their capital. He is lending his credibility to nonsense made up by children at the New York Times.
The war in the Ukraine is another clue that we are dealing with a virus that causes the victim to trust the mass media. Many of the people who got Covid all wrong at the start are now on the wrong side of the war in Ukraine. They either have staked out the wrong position or they are accepting media narratives. This madness transcends ideological orientation. The victims, once infected, lose the ability to critically judge what is being presented to them.
Further evidence of a virus, and that it may be deliberate, is the sudden chanting of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” by the media. Maybe the virus has a different impact on sociopaths than it does on other people. Media people infected by the virus become paranoid, sure that a secret cabal is feeding them lies. Perhaps the virus causes a moment of clarity which then induces madness. This is a topic that needs further research.
The cause remains unknown, but the madness we have seen over the last half dozen years points to some common cause. Perhaps this is just a symptom of modernity or maybe this is what cultural collapse causes in people. A mind virus of some sort is always a possibility, given what we have witnessed. Regardless, a plague has spread across society causing the subversives to go public, the skeptics to become trusting and the media to go insane.
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Paul Gottfried and Greg Johnson are a couple of guys I like who have succumbed to the Ukraine hysteria. Joseph Cotto spends his podcast time with Gottfried pushing back on the idea that the poor Ukranians were just minding their own business until the mean Russians came in and started slaughtering innocent civilians. I’m not exaggerating; that’s what Gottfried says, though on their most recent show on Friday, he started to at least admit that Ukraine had some major problems pre-invasion.
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There is a strong alignment between DR types who fell into Covidianism who now support Muh Ukrainians.
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The idea that we are stuck in a simulation is one of those things I don’t believe, but I don’t disbelieve.
Watching people, people I’m close with, fall back to talking points and hold completely opposite views on an issue is disturbing. They can ruefully laugh about black crime one day and the repeat civic nationalist slogans the next. Its like certain slogans activate Manchurian candidate protocols.
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The lock downs should have resulted in an economic depression. That did not happen. That is why I move simulation theory from the implausible category to the plausible category. In fact, everything about modern economic flies in the face of everything we have been taught about economics. Either we were lied to or the people running the simulation changed the rules.
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They just delayed it. The depression has been baked into the cake since 2008. What those who rule us fear is deflation because their wealth and power is based on inflation. The easiest way to win a game is to lie to the other players about the rules while racking up all the assets for yourself!
Still subscribe to this thesis:
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
If you were crazy and a control freak, would you release a virus to remain in control of the power to issue money?
“he lock downs should have resulted in an economic depression. That did not happen”
I’m going with “yet.” Trillions were pumped into the economy to offset the lockdown consequences. That is no longer sustainable.
Everything we were told may have been a lie, and our rulers are liars, but this seems implausible. The Fed and Treasury are at odds, which indicates the former doesn’t think so and the latter wants to empower the looters a bit longer. Allowing the (more) blatantly Treasury Department to control the money supply indicates this.
The financial people I trust are confused, but pushed they think a depression is highly likely.
I’d second that. I don’t care how much money you print. It’s doesn’t create goods and services in a global lock down. Don’t know if I buy into the simulation theory, but the Covid lock downs should have caused a depression and broke the financial system.
But it didn’t. Not even close. Something doesn’t add up. My suspicion is that 1) many (maybe most) workers don’t add much to a company’s output and 2) most of what we consume – and thus GDP – is unnecessary and not missed when it’s gone.
Yes, it is still early days. i’ve seen many homesteads pop up around my house here in Appalachia. These people know something coming. I plan to conduct raids when times get bad. They growing those zucchini’s for me. They just don’t know it yet.
The contradictory beliefs held by seemingly right thinking people is somewhat astonishing. Always trying to balance facts, long hatreds and mob mentality. No one is immune I suppose.
The Gellman-Sailer effect.
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Talking cuck heads and their print counterparts always have shown this duality. They will point out deliberately false propaganda, and then cite the same sources when they bolster a point they want to make. It’s worse now but certainly not new.
The same duality could be seen in Trump. He would correctly condemn fake news, then such up to the same purveyors. Not quite the same but still cognitive dissonance.
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VD Hanson is simply reverting to form after falling out with the Jews who sponsored his pathetic career over Trump.
By pretending that Ukraine constitutes some sort of latter-day Thucydidean struggle he is signaling his willingness to continue servicing the tribe. But he’ll keep honking about immigration as a way to hedge his bets.
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At this point I think there’s 100,000 real people in the world and everyone else is just an automaton. Endlessly accepting and regurgitating the latest slop.
I see Ukraine flags on houses in my neighborhood, these are people who until February probably never even said the word Ukraine. I doubt any of them could even pick out the country on the map.
It’s depressing to be honest, people I respected have shown themselves over the past 2 years as people who barely exist, people with no independently generated thoughts, feelings, or desires.
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Sometimes you just have to laugh at the bozos because it really is very funny.
A few weeks ago, Bongino publicly lit his ass hair on fire trying to imitate Hannity’s roid rage over Ukraine. I guess he thought that that would be an entertaining demonstration of his fealty to the Borg in a virtue-signalling kind of way, but upon seeing this, I fell over laughing and couldn’t stop. I wanted to be offended by this grotesque act of self-immolation, but it hit my funny bone instead. I even thought of sending him a 5 pound bucket of Silvadene creme because he really did scorch his anus pretty badly.
When people behave in this way, can there be any doubt that we are way overdue for a Darwinian purge?
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in computing systems, there is the concept of an ‘undefined state’; once a system enters this, all bets are off. nothing can be trusted from the system, even if it somehow manages to get back into a defined state (no telling what kind of mischief it got upto while undefined, that is hanging around like a landmine). all you can do is reboot and retry.
i suspect that is the phenomena we are seeing now; many people have been mentally disoriented and have lost their bearings. so they beat back and forth, trying to regain equilibrium, trying to determine their actual heading. but their heads are full of garbage and their cognitive processes are fouled. this isn’t exactly mental illness, which i would classify as a kind of hardware fault. it’s akin to a new release that’s buggy, and blocking all attempts to clear it out.
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Nominally rational people try to filter and synthesize information on the internet to find some sort of middle ground on the issues of the day. But as the days of Usenet faded and the internet became dominated by “helpful” interfaces, we exchanged ease of use for overarching control by corporate, government, and media interests.
A reasonable person looking at Ukraine stories might question “Ghost of Kiev” nonsense, but accept the “fact” that Putin woke up, went mad, and invaded a pure as-the-driven-snow next door neighbor. Because that’s all most people see.
The dissident side isn’t any better. It’s impossible to vet alternative sources like “Russians with Attitude”, except to say that the fact that they’re being purged means they’re probably over the target. But then dissidents overweigh that info and get equally bizarre opinions.
The sanest thing to do is to disconnect entirely and limit exposure to “the virus”. The internet is so powerful I’m not sure the human mind is capable. Certainly none who post regularly here can.
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Sometimes people aren’t really acting irrationally or just snapped rather they just have had enough.
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I don’t think it’s as hard as you say. Discernment and humility with a bit of time and experience are all you need to land on the correct side of things. It’s no coincidence that my favorite commentators agree with me on The Ukraine, the coof, the stolen election, and the role of women.
Let’s call it “Dissident Fatigue”.
The soul-sucking amount of psychological bandwidth/energy consumed by holding dissident opinions claims a lot of fatigue victims. I think this phenomenon explains a lot of the inconsistent/weird behavior Zman cites. For anyone with a public profile, it’s really hard to be at constant odds with the consensus.
Of course, history shows that this is when the biggest mistakes are made. Say what you will about Ron Paul, but he’s one of the few who had the steel balls to resist the major errors of the GWOT and Patriot Act. Nearly everyone else finally succumbed under pressure. As George Carlin said: ” the work bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”
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Dr. Paul and Pat Buchanan revived my faith in America after the Neocon termites of the W. Administration shredded it. Shame that we as Americans are such creatures of habit that so few were willing to give him a chance.
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Then they are probably not truly “dissident” then
Being a dissident, when all is said and done, takes a man who has strong inner confidence and courage. It is never easy standing up to the crowd. And given that so many of the people we live among virtually and via the TV and computer screen are men in makeup and who play a role, their true aim is to be a crowd pleaser, or to go where they think the audience is as Z says. Even these seemingly “normal” people we see who seem to hold dissident views are really just performers on a large stage.
Put it this way, I think if any of us went onto Hannity’s show we would not see a normal guy with normal views but a guy who wears heavy makeup and gets his hair combed by an assistant and is really nothing more than an entertainer. Any normal guy would go home to his wife and when she asks him what he thought, he would reluctantly say “He’s kinda weird. He gives off a strange vibe.”
I noticed this with Rush back in the day when a lot of conservative politicians were actually more or less normal guys who had spent their lives in business or something and then thought they could make a difference in politics. I’m talking 1990s etc. when these guys were still in existence. But I always noticed how they tended to treat Rush as some kind of weirdo and may have gone on his show but sure were not eager to spend time with him in person or on the golf course. Their senses could tell them this was not the guy he was claiming to be but a guy with some kind of issues being masked by pretending to be someone he was not.
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As it pertains to “conservatives” like Hannity and VDH, I noticed that what they profess and say they believe is what they think their dads would have thought and said if they were still around. IOW they are trying to be good, dutiful, and loyal sons.
And notice how other conservatives like Cruz and Rubio base their entire worldview on what their dads experienced. Rush was much the same. They are talking and living through their fathers.
It seemingly is the polar opposite of liberals with “daddy issues”. But it is merely the flip side of the same coin. And I think this all is so ingrained in them that they cannot break its hold and think individually or critically. About anything really.
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Sean Hannity is the patron saint of the Nutclutcher Patriots. That tends to be a cohort of conservatives that are always happy to support a war, any war. At the drop of a hat, they’ll be charging off with their swords in one hand and their balls in the other, ready to Make the World Safe for Israel, or solve a Great Humanitarian Crises, or Destroy the WMDs. I’m astounded that sort of crap has any audience at all, but unfortunately it seems to be doing pretty well for itself.
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Yeah, it is all pretty bizarre but I think what it boils down to is that these are guys with daddy issues. With Hannity it even goes into more storage territory where he not only tries to find acceptance from his father but from truckers and cowboys or “real men.” But since he can’t find any truckers or cowboys to pal around with he ends up cavorting and taking the stage with country singers, as if they are a real alternative. I remember me and my plumber laughing for a good day when Hannity was on the radio saying how he doesn’t hang around with media types or the New York set and instead goes home and hangs out with electricians and blue collar guys at the pub. Yeah SURE YOU DO HANNITY. I guess you leave your mansion 20 miles from the nearest pub and hang around guys who make in a year what you make in an hour, and you all just get along swimmingly. No resentments. No awkwardness. Just regular guys having a beer.
Moral of the story: Hannity is a mess.
And now it is finally coming out.
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While the Covid response among those who should know better remains a mystery to me, the response to Trump and Ukraine doesn’t. Both threaten the system and give dirt people bad thoughts about fighting back, either politically or with actual violence.
Hanson, Hannity, Sailer, etc., all rely on the current system and don’t want it overturned. There’s no place for them in that new world. They’re not dirt people, after all. In a sense, they’re the court jester. Well, the court jester needs the court.
They all believe that the system can be reformed. They also feel that they have a place in the current system, and, in truth, they’re doing pretty well in the current system. Whether consciously or not, they are shareholders in the system, so anything that fundamentally challenges the system gets under their skin.
They want to mock or slightly alter the system, not overthrow it.
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I think Trump was the virus. Up until he came along, the left (and “right”) were secure in their bubble and secure in their power and control over virtually everything. When he actually got elected, the insanity erupted. Everything that has occurred since then is straight out of a lunatic asylum – Russian collusion, bogus impeachment, covid, fraudulent election, J6 hoax, Ukraine.
A lot of it was background noise during the Trump years, but has gotten increasingly strident. It’s like they have to amp up the volume to make sure the plebs get the message and stay on board with the narrative. Just like the 3 year old who pitches nastier temper tantrums to keep the parent’s attention.
I guess the next question is what’ll these whack jobs come up with next as we get closer to the midterms? I’m sure it’ll be a doozy – simple election fraud is so yesterday. And will the sheeple get sucked in yet again? It’s seemingly so obvious the media and government lie about everything, and yet continually get away with it. Somehow, some way they must be held to account and must be made to pay a price. Unfortunately, with our increasingly mongrelized population, the odds of anything substantive happening are diminishing.
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@Z-man – I agree with your observations, and indeed this is what I’ve been writing about on my blog for the past several years (but from a Christian perspective).
I call these ‘viral’ issues the Litmus Tests. To adopt the Establishment side on any one of them (others you don’t mention include climate change and the transagenda) , defines your existential position wrt life in this world.
Each test that comes along causes another cohort of people on the Good-side to switch sides and affiliate with the global totalitarian leftists – and once they’ve switched sides they always seem to solidify their position.
My understanding is that we now have an evil System (consisting of all the major institutional bureaucracies of – probably – all large nations that are linked at their uppermost levels); and the world population is sorting itself into being (overall) pro-System or anti-System (neutrality is impossible).
As The System continues to grow – it gets harder to detach spiritually, and to reject it as evil; and more tempting to choose to regard evil as Good. Hence we get the creeping value inversion which underpins the morality of this bizarro world.
This switching sides applies to (self-identified) Christians just as with secular people – although by now there are (by these strict Litmus Test standards) even fewer secular people on the right side/ the side of right, than there are Christians…
The reason that it is unusual for secular people (or fake Christians) to stay on the side of right is that all short-term personal and social expediency suggests that embracing The System is advantageous. Unless someone has a compelling ‘transcendental’ motivation for opposing evil, sooner or later he is likely to ‘lapse’.
You yourself are (at present!) apparently one of this tiny and shrinking group of (at present) secular people on the right side – which is why I continue reading here.
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