All across the internet, increasingly radicalized “liberal” activists argue among themselves about what kind of treatment I deserve. Should I be allowed on social media? Should I be employable? Can they punch me if they don't like my ideas? Can they throw a milkshake at me? A brick? Should I even be breathing?
Who am I?
I make videos on the internet. I'm not a racist, or any other “ist” for that matter. I'm just a guy from the middle of America who voted for Donald Trump. Apparently that is enough to lump me in with every vile person on the planet, real or imagined.
Who I am or what I actually believe is irrelevant. Subscribe to their particular view of the world, or you are the enemy.
Keyboard warriors hailing from the left of Mao have abandoned any pretense of debating ideas with a person such as me. Who I am or what I believe is irrelevant. Subscribe to their particular view of the world, or you are the enemy. They are the foot soldiers for a control structure headed towards an abyss of radicalism that will surely lead to violence like we have not seen in the West since the 1970s.
To these techno-fascist automatons and the party/industry leaders that represent them, words are bullets, speech is violence, and some ideas are just too dangerous for the masses. The would-be tyrants have adopted buzzwords and phrases such as “quality of conversation” and “creating safe spaces for discussion” as their mantras, because the enemy of any oppressive regime is the freedom to form opposition to the status quo, both in the spoken word and in organized action.
Free thought is the precursor to verbalization, and speech precedes action. What keeps the “powers that be” awake at night is the thought that the very people that have bestowed the mantle of power upon them, might one day demand it be given back.
The path is clear: to suppress action, one must first control speech, and eventually thought.
George Orwell wrote in 1984:
'Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect... 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
Hate speech is free speech.
The policing of language and attempts to stifle expression are the first phase in a bid to subjugate us all. After decades of indoctrination, so called “hate speech” has wormed its way into the national consciousness. The idea that some speech rises to the level of a criminal act is the building block upon which phase two has been launched. And believe me, it has been launched.
Of course not everyone is willing to participate in this great subversion of free thought, and this is the worst crime of all.
In order to subvert the First Amendment it was necessary to create “hate speech” as an artificial barrier within the language. A dividing line that can be imperceptibly moved and expanded over the course of years. Each incremental repositioning reducing the bounds of acceptable discourse by conflating terms, redefining words, and blacklisting words that are “offensive” to an ever shrinking pool of “marginalized” victims.
Commandeering of the common vernacular is only an elaborate setup for what comes next. A cover for the real goal, placing the thought police inside every living brain to silence thoughts before they can be spoken. Self-discipline and reality-control: train the minds of the masses to self-report and pay their debt to society with self-imposed silence.
Of course not everyone is willing to participate in this great subversion of free thought, and this is the worst crime of all. Their punishment is banishment and exile, we are told ghost stories about these “dangerous” thinkers all the time as cautionary tales. They are held up to us as examples of why we must protect the general public from their potentially catastrophic influence. Conveniently they are not present to defend themselves or shed any light on what they actually believe, because that would be too dangerous.
“Trust us, they're bad, this is for your protection. You want to be safe, right?”
The thought police are real, and they have a terrifying amount of power. I often speak about big tech and social media censorship. In almost every case, the people that have deplatformed were removed not for what they said, but for what they might say, and who they might influence.
[caption id="attachment_177151" align="alignnone" width="5616"]
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, (CC) Brian Solis via Flickr[/caption]
Few details are revealed about why people have been banned from supposedly public platforms. The lack of specificity and detail is indicative of the goal: without clear lines, the censors can do whatever they want without consequence or accountability.
Social media purges should be recognized for what they are, a warning to all that remain: fall in line, we are here to protect you from yourself, even if it is against your will.
The fear of being cut off from a major public square at the whim of a malevolent force is very real, and it reinforces the urge to conform and adapt. It is a very human quality to want to belong, and this instinctual desire gave rise to Western civilization.
What has been our greatest strength is now being weaponized against us.
We have seen fear exploited this way many times throughout history, and each time it produces a moral panic followed by human tragedies that shock the world. It begins with the subversion of language and the policing of thought, and ends with terrified people stripping the humanity from those who might take action.
The fragile balance that we have fought to maintain between powerful entities and those that they would rule stands on a knife's edge.
It is crucial that those of us with a voice do not remain silent. In a world dominated by instant communication, the fragile balance that we have fought to maintain between powerful entities and those that they would rule stands on a knife's edge. The speed of communication has a direct correlation to the speed of change, and we are now in era where massive change can happen in months, not decades.
A year ago I watched in disbelief as supposedly “serious news people” debated on live television about whether it was ok to punch Nazis. Just a few years ago, the debate would not have lasted more than a few seconds. Of course you can't assault someone because you disagree with their ideas, no matter how repugnant. To my horror, the debate went on and on, with many landing on the side of political violence.
I said on that day as I do today, the answer to bad speech is more speech. Violence is the ultimate conversation ender. There is no such thing as a sucker punch debate, nor is a bike lock a suitable substitute for a well formulated argument. Violence signals a complete surrender to emotions, and the total abandonment of reason and logic.
Fear is by far the emotion that most easily translates into action. Instinctively, fear is the one emotion that cannot be displaced or ignored for long. Our very survival depends on quickly reacting to danger. A populous that is ruled by their emotions is destined to be ruled by fear, and history teaches us that fearful people will commit atrocities, just to feel safe again.
For now the “atrocities” have been quarantined to the digital world, and the “digital violence,” aimed at personalities such as Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Laura Loomer, and Paul Joseph Watson, has not translated into real world events.
That may soon change.
The crypto-fascists that advocate for the use of violence to vanquish their intellectual enemies are not simply nodes on a network. They exist in the real world as well, and the rules can change in an instant. The digital war can come to the real world with shocking ease and incredible speed.
The digital war can come to the real world with shocking ease and incredible speed.
Meanwhile the all-powerful but little understood algorithm feeds these automatons an ever increasing dosage of outrage, anger fuel, and fear stoking rhetoric. Silently lurking in the background, identifying new wrong-think and wrong-speak to restrict. Just this year: #LearnToCode, Two Genders, and certain parody accounts have joined the list of banned items. The outrage addicts cry out for ever more fodder to use to virtue signal to the rest of their clan, and the benevolent dictators oblige as the addicts become more radicalized.
The time to defend free speech is now, and the place is wherever you stand. We must be hyper-vigilant because the outrage addicts and crypto-fascists will never stop hunting thought criminals. We must defend speech we abhor just as vehemently as the speech we like. We must not let voices be silenced and their owners disappear into the black bag of deplatforming.
Most importantly, we must not let the language be cooped and twisted into an implement of control.
“The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect,” and the control structure behind the digital world maintains a very singular focus and a vocabulary of one. Consume. And never forget that in the digital world you are the product.
Carpe Donktum is best known as President Donald J. Trump’s favorite meme-maker.
