Fear and Loathing in Oceana

America is Falling Apart

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” 
― George Orwell, 1984

Just before the election I had an ongoing email exchange with two friends of mine. What we had in common was a growing horror of the rise of “cancel culture” on the left. The big worry was how bad will it get before the bubble finally bursts, and sanity reigns. Both of them were very much anti-Trump, in that way where you can sense their souls shattering at the mere mention of Trump’s name. I probably have never seen, in my lifetime, any person who could cause that kind of reaction in people. My mother, for instance, would literally shake if I brought up his name. Another friend hung up on me when I started to talk about Trump. The reason being, there is only one way to talk about Trump: as the ultimate evil, worse than even Hitler and Charles Manson by now.

Trump is an ideological and existential threat to so many, even still, that they are willing to go along with anything in order to bring him down. It’s gotten so bad that now, millions of Americans have been silenced in an attempt to “deprogram” Trump supporters. People on the left see them as being in a cult because they’ve bought the version the media has been selling and why wouldn’t they. The only way they would see the actual reality of who Trump’s people actually are is to spend time in that world, and no one I know had any desire to walk through the door of the Devil’s paradise.

My two friends were saying that once Trump won everything would calm down, that the threat of hysteria and purging would disappear and sanity would once again reign. Ah, but no I said. Trump is probably the only person in power willing to stand up against it because nothing anyone says or does to him can bring him down (that is still true, by the way). If he wins maybe it will topple at last and sanity will reign. We argued back and forth about this until one of them finally said “you’re just a Trump supporter! Why not admit it!” But I could not and would not admit it because I wasn’t a Trump supporter. But I could see him as the only remedy to topple the insanity on the left by fighting it head on rather than bowing to it.

I was right. They were wrong. Sanity reigns.

Both of them, without knowing it, were trying to make me talk in the language of our shared tribe, our family of beliefs. If I did not agree with them I was out of the tribe. And honestly, so I remain, as we speak, without a tribe except the one where people like me kind of drift in and out of ideological bubbles. We’re not a large group but at least I do not feel so alone in wanting to return to the world of being able to have conversations again.

No, it’s just getting worse. Joe Biden is not tapped into what’s going on and has no clue. Kamala Harris fully on board with it. The Democratic Party is led by the loudest voices on Twitter and right now that is AOC, not Biden or Harris. AOC is, as we speak, calling for a commission to regulate the media so as not to allow disinformation, as if the left press hasn’t been engaging in that for months now.

“Give Biden time,” people say. “He isn’t even President yet.” But there have been many times Biden could have united this country the right way, but each time he just backed the party line that Trump and all of his supporters, all of the 74 million who voted for him, are either racists or too dumb to know they support one.

Being accused of racism is the worst thing you can be accused of in 2021 and it is the one word that controls the ruling class on the left. Since whites are still 60% of the American population, with Hispanic rising in numbers — believed to be the dominate group in 2040 - those who are black or African American are said to be around 13-16%. Social media has mostly made these two groups on an even playing field since Black Twitter has become such a powerful force in the past few years. But it’s the charge of racism that has sent Big Tech into a mass hysteria oppressive spiral. That’s all it takes for someone to lose their job and thus, being a Trump supporter at all means you are a threat and thus, expendable.

It’s the charge of racism that has Trump impeached for the second time and it’s the charge of racism that drives all of the extreme government actions that are about to take place now that the left has been emboldened and control all three branches of government.

No one on the left would dare speak out against it. It is like being called a witch in Salem in 1692. There is no way to prove otherwise because once accused, forever guilty. Since whether or not someone is a racist must exist in their minds and hearts, just like witchcraft, there is no real way to tell. But what we do know is that the modern left evolved, came of age and defined themselves as a force under President Obama. Since Trump’s rise was seen as a direct response to the first black president, the charge of racism stuck.

Calling the Capitol Riots “white supremacist” and Trump himself the “white supremacist in chief” is a powerful accusation. Cancel culture works only if the accusation is extreme enough to cause mass panic and fear. People can’t really use their rational brains and must rely on their fight or flight mechanism. CNN and MSNBC are happy to play along because just as an undesirable is canceled off of twitter when accused of racism or a sexual offense, so too is the charge of racism where Trump is concerned the golden ticket to power.

Trump is a racist, they will insist. And there is no defense of that. While it might be true with Trump - we don’t really have any real way of proving that in 2021 short of someone wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt or carrying a Confederate flag, as at least two were at Capitol Riots.

This conversation with Bret Weinstein from a photojournalist describes pretty well the protests, who was there and specifically that it was far from the norm of your average Trump supporter.

But racism on the left is often bounced off of things that could be interpreted as racist or not. For instance, Trump taking out a full page ad in the New York Times saying the “Central Park Five” (who were later found to be innocent of the charges) deserved the death penalty. Trump called protesters “thugs” and “animals.” Trump called migrants “rapists and murderers.” If those are the only sound bites you hear from Trump and Trump world you could not see him as anything but. This is not even a debate I ever want to have. The point is not whether or not Trump is a racist but often how people define racism, which is very different on the left than it is on the right.

Trump has so many black supporters, other non-white supporters that continually defend him as not being a racist but rather someone who doesn’t use the language of the left, “politically correct” or “woke.” No one inside the bubble of the left could ever know this unless they spent time in Trump world.

The Capitol Riots had at least two people from the left — the “antifa” group, or the anti-Trump self-appointed soldiers who like to mix it up with the Proud Boys. They no doubt infiltrate the Facebook groups and follow them around to their marches, pick fights then put those fights online to prove that the Trump supporters are the violent ones - and vice-versa. But it is getting increasingly difficult to tell who is who anymore and believe me, you can’t count on the press. They will tell it only one way.

Still, those two participants, one who stole a policeman’s vest and dressed up in fur at the Capitol riot, not to mention more than a few non-white participants is, at the very least, a sign that this was not a “white supremacist coup.” In fact, it’s worth noting that the Trump speech and his supporters not only didn’t know about the coming attack (the FBI apparently knew and did nothing, alerted no one) but their version was being debated in congress at the exact same time as the attack. It destroyed any chance Trump’s side had to have his arguments heard. And it handed unlimited power to the left and big tech, Reichstag fire-like.

Some of us just want truth in media back. We just want to be able to not listen to hysteria-driven madness choking out our culture. We can’t seem to get it anywhere. Thus we must rely on our own sanity to guide us through the headlines, dipping in and out of ideological bubbles to find any kind of truth, any kind of facts.

The Democrats do not really want unity. They say they want “accountability” but really, what they want is conformity. They want Oceana, as described in Orwell’s 1984. They have created, with the help of Big Tech and Wall Street and even a good many Republicans an Oceana of “elites” that control their own utopia with strident and strict rules of participation: talk like this, believe this, say only this or face the consequences of being shunned, bullied, deplatformed, fired. Then there is the lower level of the “proles.” In Orwell’s 1984 the proles are simply the unwashed masses that aren’t even worth the time of Big Brother to worry about. They DO NOT MATTER. They are to be ignored. That is what Big Tech did to the Trump supporters when they eliminated Parler from the internet, banned Trump from Twitter and began their mass firings.

Here is artist Ariel Pink who showed up in DC on January 6 to legally protest, protected under the Constitution, at Trump’s final rally. He was part of a group of hundreds of thousands who peacefully protested, as did almost all of Trump’s supporters did for months. He was dropped by his record label and is now financially destitute. GOOD, the members of Oceana would scream. GOOD!

And notice how only Tucker Carlson on Fox News, verboten and considered racist by everyone on the left, will report on it. And just by posting that I could be called a racist. Although I’ve been called it enough times that probably there is no value in continuing to call me one. I fully expect to be, at some point, fully cancelled - I just don’t matter enough for anyone to bother. I chase news and truth where I can find it, whether it’s on Fox or anywhere else. The last place I can find it is CNN or MSNBC. When they start offering more balanced coverage let me know and I will start paying attention to them again.

Orwell’s Oceana…hate drives unity, Love is obliterated. Art is obliterated. Language is obliterated. I don’t think it’s this extreme but I do think, at least right now, the fury and hysteria is around that which people can control - and that means anything on the left where the ruling class might be called racist. Art, language, books, music, science, education. If it’s on the right it is in Proles territory and doesn’t matter.

Why do I continue to speak out? Do I want to ruin my career, lose all of my friends and get kicked out of Oceana? Or do I want to stand up for the Proles because I have that thing in me that wants to stand up for those being picked on. The members of Oceana would tell you that I am ruined, that “something happened” to me where I stopped speaking Newspeak and decided to just tell the truth. I hope that I can still see both worlds and try to bring them together, futile though that may be.

Says Orwell of the Proles:

“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”’

I would be lying if I said I had any faith that Biden and Harris can unite this country and stop the sanity. As we saw with Evergreen, bowing to the angry mob usually just means the line gets drawn further back. Right now, the powerless have the power and they will not relinquish it. What they don’t realize is that it is temporary power. Just as with the head of Evergreen, the ruling class is protecting themselves from having their images destroyed. They are more than happy to go along with anything as long as they can still sell themselves as good people. I’m not sure that’s real power. Maybe it is. I guess we’ll see. But real or not, it will be controlling force for the next four years.

Glenn Greenwald was a guest on the Megyn Kelly podcast (highly recommend) said this:

“I have pretty much devoted my whole adult career first as a lawyer and now as a journalist, first and foremost defending civil liberties in general, and free speech in particular. I left law and started writing about politics, principally motivated by the concern about the erosion of due process rights and the political climate that arose after 9/11 in the years after the Iraq war and I would say that, without doubt, that this is the worst free speech crisis, the worst civil liberties crisis, that has arose in the entire time that I’ve been doing that work.

Because all of this, Megyn, as you know, is stemming from this very ingrained fury that they have that Trump won in 2016. That is what this is all about. This whole thing with impeachment and the 25th Amendment and wanting to kick his supporters off the internet all comes from this sense that this is their society and that these people came and took it from them unjustly and illegitimately and they’ve been wanting to punish them for so long and they’re now seizing on this as a pretext and that’s what concerns me the most. If it were just one event I would say, okay, I get that people in Congress that day are scared, I get that it’s traumatizing. I’m sure it was. I don’t make light of that.

But eventually, as you said, especially if it’s a one time event, and not like two huge towers falling on 3,000 people, but just like a three or four hour long breach of the Capitol, eventually it’s going to subside and people are going to come to their senses. But this is an ongoing, multi-year rage that is driving all of this and this latest incident is just the opportunity to finally justify what they wanted to do all along, which is humiliate these people and silence of them for good.

The Proles are going to need a voice. Trump will remain a powerful force as long as he is their only hope.