Posted on 02/07/2022 6:25:43 AM PST by Kaslin
Conservatives have sat in paralysis for a good part of the past 25 years now not knowing how to address the left’s radical transformation of society that is canceling conservatives and forcing the left’s rules on everyone. Amazon bans our books and only a few people who are ridiculed compare it to George Orwell’s 1984.
It’s because we think the takeover is being done by private corporations and actors in a free society, so we don’t know how to react. Most of us aren’t ready to call it communism or socialism; it doesn’t seem to violate the Constitution.
The reality is, while on the surface the new situation may appear to involve private actors, the truth is much more sinister. And it’s been done deliberately this way, in order to sneak it past the scrutiny of half of society that believes in a free society and the Constitution. We’re basically being ruled by a hybrid oligarchy of government and large corporations.
We need to stop defending Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other massive corporations as private actors allowed to do whatever they want. They are no longer operating as purely private actors. They get subsidies from the government, they are regulated by the government and they regularly succumb to pressure from activists who use the government to punish them if they don’t.
The right rarely threatens corporations over politics, it’s something that originated on the left. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was famous for starting it, making race-related demands that were followed up by boycotts and complaints to the government.
The Human Resources departments of corporations have long lists of rules and regulations they must comply with, that most people are unaware of because they operate behind the scenes. Many of these rules get promulgated by obscure left-wing bureaucrats working in federal agencies, or in the fine print of bills with hundreds of pages of text. They are rarely publicized so no one ever finds out about them unless they work in HR — and the left flocks to HR departments due to its tendencies for low-level bureaucratic control — think Karens — so they’re the least likely people to be whistleblowers.
We saw the early rise of this with Public-Private Partnerships. They fooled people into thinking it was the government hiring the private sector to perform government functions more efficiently than the government. But in reality they have operated like government-sanctioned monopolies, unthreatened by competition so free to charge enormous amounts of money and neglect innovation.
A strange bedfellow in this situation is the self-described “libertarian socialist” and intellectual Noam Chomsky. He has warned for years against eventual societal control by a handful of major corporations. He didn’t foresee the government involvement, and much of his perceptions are off, but he’s one of very few people who have predicted some semblance of this.
For those unfamiliar with Noam Chomsky, the short 2016 documentary “Requiem for the American Dream” discusses this concern. He explains how the biggest corporations now make money from merely moving money around, and how they benefit from American workers who are forced to compete with overworked starving workers overseas.
He points out that bank lobbyists write the laws regulating the bank industry. He rails against bailing out banks, admitting that’s not a true capitalist system. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed to protect freed slaves, ended up predominantly protecting corporations instead, treating them as “persons.”
He starts getting a little off on his analysis when he compares corporations controlling things to students who take out school loans who are then tethered to paying them off for years. He claims that James Madison believed power should be in the hands of wealthy men. This is inaccurate, Madison and the Founding Fathers feared power concentrated in the hands of a few elites — their mistake was not recognizing the equality of women and blacks at the time. Chomsky says he didn’t anticipate the strength of the backlash to the egalitarian efforts of the 1960s — but other than the Civil Rights movement and some aspects of the women’s movement, that era hurt free society by dramatically decreasing the attitude that society needs morality.
Other Chomsky beliefs can be dismissed as straight Keynesian economics. He says taxes on the wealthy have been reduced in recent years, but the data shows the opposite. He claims that there’s no evidence that lowering taxes on the wealthy creates jobs and improves the economy, but there’s plenty out there.
Chomsky cites the Powell Memorandum from 1971 as evidence of conservative support for big business, but it was merely one person’s confidential letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, future Supreme Court Justice Jerome Powell ranting about how certain government regulations negatively affect business.
Chomsky thinks one solution is unions, claiming they’re a democratizing force. He ignores the fact that unions are controlled by wealthy hypocrites who are often in bed with big business. Look how the demands of labor unions eventually materialize and coalesce with big business — a few years ago they were fighting for a minimum wage of $15/hour, now that’s passé.
Large corporations govern much of our lives now, and over half the workforce is employed by big business so they are even further constrained; those workers could be fired for engaging in what used to be considered free speech. That number continues to grow every year, thanks to sneaky maneuvers like allowing big businesses like Amazon and Walmart to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic while locking down small businesses. Studies everywhere report that a quarter to a third of small businesses shut down due to the restrictions. And even so, small businesses are increasingly subject to workplace regulations.
Much of this could be happening organically, it doesn’t matter if it’s organized or not. There are massive numbers of people on the left side of the spectrum who push and push from every angle to get their agenda implemented, and they have discovered this is the way they can fundamentally transform society right under our noses with the right divided over how they’re doing it. Even our Founding Fathers did not envision this coming.
I’ve been saying for many years, the 1984 model of symbolizing direct government totalitarianism is obsolete. They figured out years ago that controlling the private sector is better than doing your own dirty work when they took over the media. This is because people will automatically reject and rebel against government overreach and overbearing control.
It’s not overly complex. It’s like information laundering. Passing the information through 3rd parties so as to conceal the source.
Now they do it with the power to suppress information too. It’s not government censorship of the people if it’s the ‘private sector’ doing it, right?
1984 squared = 3,936,256. This is where we are.
I think 1984 is the end game. In the book, the System is all in place and well established. It may have gotten their with private-sector actors, but they have long since been eliminated.
It makes sense, to me, that naked totalitarianism would, in the end, be only the Government. They would eliminate all threats, even those who once helped them.
I think you are correct, though, that a direct path to the end is out of fashion.
Big Tech corporations who have chosen censorship are the enemies of liberty against every human being in the planet.
Their assets need to be seized and their executives thrown in jail.
Never again.
This must not ever happen again.
I remember when 1984 came around and the media anchors and pundits were querying whether we were like the Orwell novel.
Of course, they all dismissively laughed, scoffed and tut-tutted.
Even then Iknew we had too many commie libs who hate this country. The hippies who got so much attention were fully of age and had not paid for their crimes at all. In fact they were really starting to constantly self-congratulate themselves for how great they are, with their stupid TV shows (30Something), movies, etc. they really are full of themselves and got too big and so infiltrate everything.
I was just a young person then but just seeing all the whining Europeans over “nuclear disarmament” I knew we were in trouble.
That’s a really good point.
We still have too much freedom. So obviously blatant oppression would be rejected. But once they eliminate the ability for the people to check their power, such as those pesky elections (lol), you’re right. They will apply power and control directly.
1930s Germany just called, they want their fascism back ...
I just call it the “tech enabled tyranny”, enabled only by a connected world where everything is accessible by everyone in real-time globally. Add to that narcissistic virtue signaling keyboard warriors and many at the top of corporations that can’t take the heat as the narrative will just turn in their direction.
It was never possible before. The internet has turned the whole world into a massive neural net, one where individual people are the neurons, and the battle is to train your mind to only believe in the will of the collective - and then repeat it. This is literally the last war over evil vs. righteousness imho....you can see the concurrent battles going on now. Economic tyranny is one of them - “do as we say otherwise your economic potential will be destroyed”. Moral tyranny is another - “you must allow your children to question their gender, Christianity is the problem”. Medical tyranny too - “you can’t know what is in it, you can’t know what the trial data says, and nobody can be accountable even if they get rich - but you must take it”.
It’s all forms of extortion, especially when put together - “take the shot otherwise you’re selfish and can’t have a job here”. How is that not extortion? You’re demanding somebody do what you say, for their perceived benefit, at the threat of losing your job. It is a crime. The real selfishness is to casually give away the rights of others to make YOU feel safer, how repugnant considering how many have given their lives to fight for those very rights.
These are not normal times and everything is accelerating. The left have no grounding, they are accelerating into an abyss of social chaos - one that just rejects ANY form of normalcy in society. That what has evolved our societies - being Judeo-Christian morality, is deliberately being torn down. The right is grounded in these principles, it doesn’t really move - but the left has no grounding and continues to veer extreme leftward, while believing it is the right which is becoming more extreme because they’re farther and farther from them. They HATE Christianity, they can no longer hide it.
Ask a lefty “what is sexually immoral?” today. You *might* hear “pedophilia” - although some of them are now arguing it is just another sexual orientation and the stigma is wrong. You’d be pressed to hear any other admission, everything else goes.
I think the internet is an amazing invention. I’m software engineer - but it seems we have some growing pains to go through. Tyranny will always try to use new tools.
It’s called fascism.
i would be interested to see the response to a FOIA request that requires the tax dollars spent on facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. etc. be reported.
Simple fact is that NO tax dollars should be spent on these organizations, at all.
It is possible that in the 1984 novel, the unification preceded the Ingsoc takeover, especially if the Soviets drove the British and Americans off the European continent. In a modern context, it would be like the Davos group power brokers suppressed all real opposition in the U.S. and Western Europe, imposing a Social Credit system, mandatory vaccine passports, repressed conservative religions, etc. Then Antifa/BLM, who served as the Davos group's brown shirts,turned on their paymasters and seized power.
Yes, the spooks took over the mass media for domestic propaganda, and then they subverted big tech to do the domestic spying that they aren’t supposed to do. The only thing left is for them to outsource the concentration camps.
Interesting take.
Remember Mussolini’s quote :
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/221166.Benito_Mussolini
It seems we live in the modern Fascist state.
We are the fattest, most passively entertained and most comfortable people that have ever existed. We are also the least used to sustained physical labor of any people in history. Our poor are the most likely to be obese. Seems to me it’s closer to Brave New World than 1984. Our soma is our screen culture of the 24 news cycle, instant entertainment, social media and smart phones.
Freegards
When I first read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, long ago, I couldn't imagine how the American People would allow such decadence to occur in the USA.
Today I know all too well.
Today I watch in horror as beloved, priceless America, unique in history, the Shining City on the Hill on which God has shed His grace, descends deeper and deeper into the horrors and madness revealed in both masterpieces--as millions of Americans not only refuse to heed the warnings but openly celebrate the fulfillment of their most horrifying proclamations.
Never in my darkest moments did I ever imagine that the American People, heirs to the Torch or Liberty, to the Greatest Nation ever to grace the world, would allow themselves to descend into such madness.
Not only are millions of Americans afflicted, but the decadence, corruption, tyranny, and madness have afflicted all branches of the Federal Government, the news media, academic institutions, the military, America's most trusted and sacred institutions, and all levels of American culture.
They were amply warned.
The madness has blinded them.
It is no longer truly about left versus right, it is about the powerful doing EVERYTHING they can, to maintain, and increase their control over the 'proles'.
'Left' versus 'right' is mostly kabuki theater. One need only see what is happening in d'Ottawa! The d'Ottawa 'stasi' have taken all fuel from the truckers' camps and are arresting ALL who bring food and water to the camps, as 'aiding and abetting' them. What law is being broken? THEY DON'T NEED NO STEENKING LAW TO BE BROKEN!
Jan 6 prison = Room 101.
The left.have been socializing USA and canceling conservatives for 25 years?
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