Desperate times
The elites and their minions are showing their insecurity at every turn.
Every Western nation is seeing a clamp down on freedom of speech. Nothing is excluded. Even memes are swept up in the digital net.
We are witnessing the end state of the civil rights mentality, where individual rights trump all other considerations. We are being told individuals now have a right not to be offended or even be exposed to hateful material, an obvious impossibility.
As a consequence many Western countries are losing their once admired reputations as bastions of freedom of thought and conscience. Even the United States with its famous First Amendment has not been spared.
The champions of civil rights believe they are winning. They have a point as they have won most of the recent skirmishes and ushered in an era of increasing surveillance and censorship.
They imagine they are preparing the ground for some kind of rights-based singularity. Alas all these successes really do is broadcast how weak, how poorly prepared and how anxious and pathetic our cultural enemies really. And some of us are paying attention.
Vote for Hillary via Twitter
A key example illustrates the trend visible in almost all Western countries. Douglass Mackey was recently convicted in the United States for posting memes during the 2016 election.
One meme in particular depicted an official looking election poster with a line suggesting anyone could now cast a vote for Hillary Clinton via Twitter.
It mimicked the style of 2016 election material and jokingly suggested people could now vote for candidates via social media platforms instead of attending a polling station.
It was one of many memes he and others posted on Twitter and other social media sites.
His Twitter account was ultimately cancelled as were many others in that era. But five years later, in 2021, shortly after Joe Biden ascended to the Oval Office, Mackey was arrested and tried for the memes he posted.
Here is the meme.
According to Mackey the FBI expended considerable resources to find anyone who was fooled and attempted to vote via Twitter. They failed to find a single example. There seems to be no injured party and nor is there a law against posting humorous images online.
There are, however, laws about preventing interference in elections. One such law is the one used to investigate Mackey, conspiracy to deprive citizens of their right to vote.
He was ultimately convicted and received a seven month custodial sentence which he is currently appealing.
Mackey did not create the meme, he found it on 4chan, a site that contains a very broad range of material, some of it disturbing and illegal.
Many others reposted the Vote Hillary meme on Twitter and elsewhere so he was not alone. No one else was charged with any crime, only Mackey.
To Mackey’s audience these kind of memes were commonplace during the election and obviously humorous fakes presented for laughs.
But at that time Mackey’s Twitter account had tens of thousands of followers. It later came to light the FBI viewed him as a major source of influence for the dissident right during the election campaign despite the fact he was a private citizen with limited means, holding down a job.
Mackey’s entire media empire amounted to shitpoasting funny pictures he found surfing the web, mainly at people just like him. Again, none of these were unique, and all were memes he found on other sites.
But to those following events in many Western countries that doesn’t matter. Censorship has become fashionable. And now it has fused with the bottomless pit of individual rights our elites and their minions are obsessed with, providing endless opportunities to present free speech as harming a group or an individual.
No one is censoring, you understand. They are protecting the rights of innocents. They are exercising people’s right to not be offended, hurt or ridiculed.
And this is the genuinely valuable part of these debacles. The insight it provides into just how pathetic and weak our cultural opposition has become as their inability to tolerate criticism or opinion that differs from their own is on full display every time they jail people for making strangers laugh.
Europe is beyond parody
America still retains a degree of testicular fortitude thanks to the First Amendment. European states by comparison have been socially castrated for years.
Britain, the home of Magna Carta, leads the charge. It has long been pushing to jail people for free speech and recently succeeded in passing the Online Harms Bill, which is every bit as Orwellian as you would assume.1
Recently a British citizen called Sam Melia was jailed for two years for erecting stickers in public in a town in the north of England.
He was investigated for inciting racial hatred. The three sticker designs said the following:
Reject white guilt
Britons to be a minority in Britain by 2066
Mass immigration is white genocide
Polls in England indicate these are the views held by an overwhelming majority of the population. The opinions and observations made by Melia are the norm and a source of concern for many natives of Britain.
However that is not the most concerning aspect. The judge presiding confirmed Melia’s actions were not illegal. What drove the conviction was the intent behind the material. This was assumed to be racial animosity despite one of the statements being based on publicly-available demographic data and another making no reference to other ethnicities.
This is not an isolated incident. Britain leads the world in convictions for online hate crimes. Thousands have been convicted for posting memes and comments on social media.
It has become a standing joke the police expend more energy cautioning Tweeters and social media posters than bank robbers or rapists. Needless to say the police view even this kind of commentary as hateful itself.
As an institution the British police have long since been hollowed out, with most senior officers all too willing to endorse increasingly insane fads and developments no less so than the equally lost judiciary. The jokes hit all the harder for being true.
The situation is even worse in Scotland. The Scottish Parliament have just passed a law that enables indivduals to be convicted for hateful things they say in their own homes.
This means if you say something at home and some passer by happens to take offence, like an Amazon delivery guy who overheard you speaking inside your own house, you can be changed with a hate crime.
There is zero self-awareness from the political class and the media on this matter. They are genuinely baffled at pushback or anger they see from the public.
The emphasis once again is on individual rights that trumps even common sense.
This is a consequence of obsession. Reading hurtful comments, even being robustly challenged with facts and data, trigger feelings and these feelings cannot be tolerated. So they must be banished, and if that is not possible people must be punished for the triggering.
Therefore protection from such horrors is emphasized. This is then held in the foreground at the expense of the broader issues, the overall context including tradition or common sense.
In this way the media and the political class lose sight of normality and find themselves arguing loudly for things that sound like fascism and tyranny to normal people despite being oblivious themselves. Indeed they often claim to be fighting authoritarian forces such as hate groups despite the lack of evidence for their existence.
When these absurdities are pointed out to them they seem lost. The cynical view this as a convenient act, but increasingly we are seeing sincere confusion from whole sections of society pioneering progressive policies no one likes and no one has ever voted for.
The constant drone of invented rights, perceived harm and the unexamined vulnerability of favoured victim groups insulates many of these self-appointed advocates from the legitimate concerns of normal people.
As they win plaudits in their bubble the normality of the outside world begins to seem unduly harsh and abrasive, something to be controlled and shaped by the enlightened.
Even the Germans, normally hypersensitive about avoiding any suggestion of fascism, have fallen off the wagon in the myopic search for extremist needles in the dying haystack that is their federal republic.
A recent story surfaced of the police visiting a schoolgirl at her school as she had given a presentation comparing her fellow Germans to Smurfs. Smurfs know who their fellow Smurfs are because all of them are blue.
Some were concerned she may be veering towards right-wing bias where Smurfdom was a veiled reference to nationalism or even the rising political party, Alternative für Deutschland.
The police went to some trouble to confirm the girl had broken no law. They were however concerned about the direction she was going in.
Like the British examples above the authorities involved are oblivious to how ridiculous they look. They seem more lost than many of us imagine them to be. These acts of insanity are normal to them. They in turn are baffled at our concerns.
Britain seems to have pioneered this nonsensical notion of non-criminal hate incidents. The Orwellian nature of this is missed by those who embrace it as a reasonable response to legal material being posted online.
It can be jarring watching a police spokesman use such terminology while being interviewed, the Soviet-sounding phrases all the more chilling when coming from a uniformed law enforcement officer completely immersed in a world of social engineering where he does not belong, telling us about his concerns that adults might be harmed by funny pictures on Twitter.
This is all the more galling in English-speaking countries where the prevailing system has always been everything is permissible unless explicitly forbidden. Our tradition is to leave people in peace.
The lack of awareness from those pursuing these various hate incidents is staggering, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide.
More to be pitied than scorned
All this is depressing but it tells us something important. They are not winning.
Even more important, they are losing in their own minds too. And they know they are losing.
These various activities demonstrate they are not confident as they cannot handle alternative views. There is no serious attempt to debate. They seem to fear people reading unapproved material. Even if we accepted their argument, that something is wrong or offensive, why the fear?
The only goal is zero dissension. A very obvious urge to shutdown all discussion. Fingers in their ears, like toddlers. It indicates they don’t wish exposed to reality, perhaps some latent awareness their ideas are not as sound as they pretend.
They are pursuing memelords like Douglass Mackey and others because they are threatened by them. And we know why. A good meme cuts through billion-dollar propaganda campaigns like a hot knife through butter. The best of them are instantly funny and relatable. All that money and effort destroyed in an instant by young men taking the piss.
That has to hurt.
But it especially hurts the fake concern they project about refugees or transgender people. When a meme or other insightful work lances their carefully constructed bubble they are forced to confront reality, a terrifying prospect to those who act their way through life. Today’s Cluster B world is full of them, and many are those shrieking loudly to condemn the racists and the sexists and the transphobes among us. They do that because it works. In another era they would be denouncing witches.
Hence the mania for these absurd laws and the convictions they trigger. People are not being jailed for posting funny images, they are being jailed for their unwelcome reminder that reality exists and does not conform to invented fantasy the civil rights movement now rests upon. Who really believes women in the West are oppressed or that minorities are targeted for abuse? And yet we have built whole systems on these very lies and more besides.
We are witnessing the end state of the civil rights mentality, the assertion one now has a right not to be offended or hurt or exposed to hateful material. That one somehow has the right to avoid real life itself. The politicians and the media and the boffins in academia have constructed elaborate theories built upon observable lies and deceit.
That is why we see constant mention of narcissism. The narcissist lives in a fantasy bubble they project, their entire lives a battle to keep reality from intruding into their fictional construction.
What are these initiatives if not the narcissist’s ultimate goal, to keep reality at bay, to protect their fragile sense of self from a reckoning most of us accept as normal?
But more of us notice. More of us are paying attention. These incidents are exposing increasing numbers of people to the mental disturbances driving this obsession with individual rights and the censorship it requires. The focus on rights is coming to an end if for no other reason the deranged have exploited it as a chance to bolster their own place in society, a fatally shortsighted move given how crazy things have become.
We are learning the hard way letting the mentally compromised drive public policy never ends well. But their end is preceded by increased exposure to their anxiety and their fears of being challenged.
We can only look forward to the epic memes that will ultimately commemorate this broken era.
Further reading
An interview with Douglass Mackey conducted by
.
The public consultation of the proposed Online Harms bill by the British Parliament had the temerity to boast about Britain’s long history of pioneering freedom and liberty. It quite literally quoted Magna Carta and mentioned the English Bill of Rights from 1689 while simultaneously proposing to demolish any notion of speaking freely.
There is no dissonance here in those who propose this kind of legislation. They cannot break out of their obsession with offending, being offended, our ability to be offensive towards protected groups etc. This is not the freedom they mean. All these discussions are embedded inside a subjective worldview unable to tolerate dissenting opinion but also recognizes they cannot be blatant about this. Hence the sophistry. Rights matter, but we are interested in the rights of the vulnerable not the dissidents who will harm them.
As they constantly bump up against real life there is no escape except to reexamine the obsession with vulnerability and artificially protecting whole groups. This doesn’t happen. Instead we get people telling us with a straight face that the new mega surveillance bill is really Magna Carta 2.0 because it ensures people remain free from harm. Wasn’t that what the Barons mean by Magna Carta 1.0?
Don't forget Ireland, where they have (of course) taken it a step further in the government's drive to be THE most progressive pseudostate within the EU. The cops (Gardai) can just walk into your home and confiscsate all electronic devices therein , if they "suspect" that you "might" have material which "might" cause offence or harm IF posted online. Three steps removed from anything resembling a fact. It happened to a local councillor the other week, as he had been seen just talking with protestors outside a hotel in his small town that had been earmarked for "International Protection Applicants" (more doublespeak). These IPAs almost always are not families, but young fighting-age men. In this instance, the cops also apparently confiscated the phones of his wife and children who were in the house at the time. Interesting that JK Rowling has said today that she will put this new law to a thorough test in defiance of the Scottish Government. She can probably employ a lot more lawyers than the government, so it will be entertaining, hopefully.
"The politicians and the media and the boffins in academia have constructed elaborate theories built upon observable lies and deceit. [ ] That is why we see constant mention of narcissism. The narcissist lives in a fantasy bubble they project, their entire lives a battle to keep reality from intruding into their fictional construction."
Bingo. Great write up. How does this end? I wonder. Last century showed us one way. Is there another?