UNHUMANS
FOREWORD BY [INMATE] STEPHEN K. BANNON
In Unhumans, the authors focus on the critical matter of what actually makes us human. They note that “humanity” only happens when you have an actual civilization—principles of civility, rules of law and order, respect for basic human rights. Great civilizations have always organized and risen from these characteristics, from the ancient world to the Roman Empire to the West today.
The authors argue that it is humanity itself currently under threat. They unwrap the history of Communism, a dehumanizing philosophy of oppression, of denial of human rights and nihilism. The reader is guided around the world, revealing the stories and histories the mainstream press won’t touch … from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan and the Soviets, to Apartheid in South Africa. They bring us right up to President Donald Trump and January 6th, a day they correctly call “America’s Inverse Bastille.”
…“Unhumans” simply refers to those Homo sapiens who seek nothing but destruction of human society, borne of grievance and misery and nihilism. Unquestionably, we are in a period of this unhuman ascension. Unhumans is a clarion call to every American citizen. Be aware. Too often, the most dire and significant moments in history are only realized afterward, when civilizations are already defeated or too broken to continue. If you love this country, read this book. Study this book. Share this book. And understand this: The very survival of the American Republic is now on the shoulders of every American.
INTRODUCTION
PETTY RESENTMENT AND CRUELTYCommunism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing. —@MysteryGroveThis is not a book about communist ideology. You’ve read those. This is a book about the communist reality—and how to tell when it’s coming to a society near you.
History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable.
It doesn’t matter what you call these the people of anti-civilization. They will change their name, shape, and form as needed and for their own purposes in their unique time and place. For the last couple centuries, we’ve known them as communists. Socialists, with extra steps. And of course, leftists. Radicals and revolutionaries as well. A hundred years ago, Marxist-Leninists, then more recently, Cultural Marxists. Even as, without irony and not as a joke, “progressives.” For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans. This is a book about unhumans, and this is what they do: With power, unhumans undo civilization itself. They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty, and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.
“Unhuman”—isn’t that harsh? Yes, and it also happens to be correct. By becoming consumed by nihilism, unhumans oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman. They specifically reject the human rights of others. So if and when they get their way, they will unhuman you, too. They convert, and that which they cannot convert, they destroy. And they will call this evil, good.
But that’s not how it starts. It all begins with a wedge between two identifiable groups in a given society—the haves, and the have-nots, which they prefer to call the oppressor and the oppressed, respectively. Now, many have-nots do aspire to more, and they earn every bit of it. But some of them stop dreaming. Some don’t in the first place. And the trouble is, these men and women find each other. They have shared grievances, real and imagined. And then … they unite. There are parades and protests. Then power. All of a sudden, it’s theirs, all theirs. Then they rob and they kill. Any ideology preached along the way is just window dressing.
They don’t believe what they say. They don’t care about winning debates. They don’t even want equality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you.
This is what they do.
And this book is how we stop them.
Posobiec, Jack; Lisec, Joshua (2024). Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Evidence of the devil’s success is all around us. That is the real story of the political, social and moral transformation of America. Satan has been influencing the minds of the elites in particular, increasingly steering policy and shaping public discourse. The mainstream media have been overcome by the devil. This has influenced millions of people. NEVER HAS ANYTHING LIKE THIS HAPPENED BEFORE. NEVER HAVE AMERICANS SEEN SUCH A SATANIC ABERRATION IN THEIR PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS.Lovely. The Flurry book is (unintentionally) Comedy Gold. UnHumans and America Under Attack both rise to the deliberative level of Marvel Comics. Posobiec and Lisec obviously think they are the sole brilliant purveyors of "the real truth about Communism." There's gotta be a DSM-V code for that poignant conceit. Guys, seriously? Or is it really just about marketing to the MAGA rubes? Confirmation Bias on Fentanyl.
2 Corinthians 11:14 reveals that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” He is skilled at deceit and intimidation, and he is using these powers to conquer this nation.
That is what the Michael Hastings example is all about. By Mr. Obama’s second term, Satan had all the mainstream media “swooning”! THE REPORTERS SWOONED AS THE DEVIL TOOK CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY.
This book tells the full story of how Satan has gotten a stranglehold on America. And as you will see, he has done so by using one man—a man with such arrogance that he opened himself up to terrible satanic influence.
This book also shows how God confronted the attack on America that took place during President Obama’s two terms. It reveals the crucial role Donald Trump fulfilled, a role also prophesied in the Bible. It provides spiritual perspective on the presidency of Joe Biden, who is effectively a front man for a third Obama term. And it gives you the stunning revelation—made plain in prophecy—of how this satanic attack will be STOPPED.
Prophecy shows that Mr. Trump’s role in U.S. politics is not over. But what happens when he returns to power will shock you.
It is critical to see the devil’s influence in what is happening. But you must also see God’s hand. This gives you wonderful perspective, even amid some of the darkest days our nation has ever faced. Knowing why God is allowing this, and how He plans to use these events to ultimately bless every American and every other human being, will give you unsurpassed vision and hope!
Flurry, Gerald; Church of God, Philadelphia. America Under Attack: Bible prophecy will help you understand the treason in our country. (pp. 12-13). Philadelphia Church of God. Kindle Edition.
Mr. No-Life here dug out Kevin Roberts' UTexas doctoral dissertation and am about 20% through it. Fairly well written. Focuses on the history of slavery in Louisiana during the 1791-1831 pre-statehood era. Interesting enough as a historical "study," I guess. Doesn't provide much insight regarding his eventual slippage off the tracks of rationality.The Heritage P25 Essence:
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“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless Cat Ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they have made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too, & it’s just a basic fact—you look, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
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My citations and excerpts custom and its rationale.to wit:
In addition to my numerous subscribed and episodically perused online periodicals, I read 2-3 books per week, and have done so for decades. On this blog (along with several others of mine), I often post "lengthy" excerpts (though far less in length than you'd see in the typical Amazon "Look Inside" preview). My readers deserve to hear directly from the authors in full salient topical contexts, with MY opinions significantly subordinated. Per "Fair Use" law—[1] I have never done ANY of this for money; nor do I solicit or receive freebie "reviewer copies," [2] I am consistently scrupulous to provide author / publisher / seller links, and I routinely apprise authors of my activities in support of their efforts.
All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.
This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.
Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them…
Applebaum, Anne. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (pp. 1-3). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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Conservative political activist Ivan Raiklin claims to have assembled a “Deep State target list” that includes high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, U.S. Capitol Police officers, officials at the FBI and other intelligence agencies, witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trials, and journalists at The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. Their supposed crime? Being Trump’s political enemies. And Raiklin views himself as justice incarnate.
During one podcast appearance earlier this year, Raiklin said his nickname was the “deep state marauder, a.k.a. the mauler.” Raiklin’s plan for what to do with his list isn’t nearly as gruesome, but it is still terrifying. He intends to enlist right-wing sheriffs to carry out mass arrests, and in May, he declared his intention to arrange “livestreamed swatting raids.”
Raiklin reportedly claims that if he went public with all of the so-called evidence he collected on Trump’s enemies in the deep state, it would be probable cause to arrest those high-ranking officials and journalists on his list.
Those arrests would be carried out by “constitutional sheriffs,” specifically a right-wing anti-government group called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Those sheriffs would then deputize the 75,000 veterans Raiklin claims were dismissed from the military for refusing to comply with Covid-19 vaccine mandates, forming a rogue army intent on revenge…
Former Sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs group, told Raw Story that he had severed ties with Raiklin in early June and did not approve of his rhetoric. “Quite frankly, he talks about that list of 350 people—I’m sure they can afford lawyers,” said Mack. “It reeks of lawsuits, and it doesn’t follow due process.”
Raiklin has also emailed sheriffs’ offices across the country hoping to enlist them to his cause. Not one has signed on, according to Raw Story.
If the image of AI as an imminent destroyer or supplanter of human dominance and supremacy were only a looking-glass fantasy—a flight of misplaced imagination, serving as a creative template adapted by generations of science fiction writers, then perhaps we could just enjoy it for its imagined possibilities. iRobot is a thrill! The Terminator is a lot of fun. The Matrix is a gas. Ex Machina is spellbinding. Westworld is mind-blowing (often literally—minds get blown open quite a lot)!
But in fact, the looking-glass illusion these entertaining fictions reflect is being leveraged today by billionaires, lobbyists, and powerful AI companies to directly influence and reshape public policy, scientific research priorities, venture capital investment, and philanthropic giving. It is being placed in service of movements to defer action on real and imminent existential threats—from climate change and ocean acidification to global pandemics and food insecurity—in favor of lavish funding for research on long-term AGI risk, which these powerful interests now claim outstrips all other dangers. The new tech-centered movement of longtermism, which grew out of an earlier movement called effective altruism, has put forth in many powerful academic, policy, and media circles the idea that AGI presents an incalculably greater threat than even climate change. Many longtermists now argue that the most prudent use of philanthropy and public resources for long-term human benefit is to invest more heavily in AGI risk and AI safety research. Yet it is not the safety of living humans today, or even the next generation, that drives longtermists.
Longtermist arguments often go as follows: because AGI in the far future could theoretically kill or immiserate even more living humans than are alive on the planet now, preventing future AGI from doing this is a more rational use of resources than funding clean energy tech, food security, or public health today. Related claims made by some longtermists include the idea that saving the future requires directing even more of today’s resources toward the wealthy in the Global North, rather than sending aid to the most impoverished countries in the Global South, since wealthy people in already disproportionately wealthy regions are better positioned to use their resources to fight these “existential” risks from AGI.
Longtermism is rooted in utilitarian ethics, a brand of moral theory that has long driven effective altruists to the contemporary work of philosopher Peter Singer. Utilitarianism, from its foundation in the nineteenth-century writings of philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to the AI-inflected writings of today’s longtermists, has always held that our first and highest moral duty is not to root out injustice, or cultivate virtue, or protect human rights and the planet, but rather to maximize the sum total of happiness that will be enjoyed in the future.
Peter Singer is widely admired for his vigorous defense of animal liberation on the grounds of their capacity to suffer, which subtracts from their happiness. He is less well known for his claims (still bitterly recalled by many disability activists) that it is ethical to kill so-called “defective infants” whose potential for future happiness he sees as severely compromised. What longtermists and effective altruists have in common with Singer is the utilitarian view that morality is a happiness optimization problem, a matter of running the numbers. Conveniently for AI enthusiasts, that makes morality just the sort of thing that computers and computer scientists are supposed to be good at!
For a virtue ethicist like me, there are profound dangers and moral errors in any view of morality that separates it from humane feeling, relational bonds, and social context, reducing it to a mere computation of net happiness units. As longtermist Eliezer Yudkowsky readily admits, this kind of fundamentalist utilitarianism licenses one to turn off moral feeling and just “shut up and multiply” happiness sums, even if the action dictated by the calculation feels deeply wrong or shocks the conscience. Some longtermists at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) have used such license to entertain hypotheticals in which the welfare of billions of today’s suffering humans is dispassionately sacrificed for the potential to create far larger numbers of happy “digital people” in virtual worlds of the distant future. Others work out longtermist defenses of a related utilitarian view known as the Repugnant Conclusion: the proposal that given the option, it would be better to choose a world packed with people who all suffer so greatly that their lives are “barely worth living” than to choose a far more modest population of ten billion people who can all flourish.
These types of scenarios are often seen as compelling rebuttals to utilitarian logic. When taken instead as plausible moral obligations for humans, such scenarios are, as the philosopher and fierce critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams famously said, the result of having “one thought too many.” Ideas like this did not dominate the early philanthropic thinking of effective altruists. From donating surplus personal wealth to the purchase of mosquito nets and other high-impact aid for the global poor, to investing in public health and climate resilience, much of what effective altruists initially tried to do is aligned with commonsense moral obligations to present and future generations. Even as the effective altruism movement merged with the more speculative AI fantasies of longtermism, many remained committed to fighting the existential threats already here: climate change, biohazards, and nuclear holocaust. As observed by a critic quoted in a 2022 profile on effective altruist and longtermist William MacAskill in The New Yorker, “If you read things that [effective altruists] are saying, they sound a lot crazier than what they’re actually doing.” If the more speculative AGI visions of longtermists were just intellectual side hustles for bored Oxford philosophers and Silicon Valley investors, we might think them harmless.
But today, longtermism is the language of moral thought spoken in a growing number of the wealthiest and most powerful political and industrial circles. Billionaires like Jaan Tallinn and Peter Thiel have been described as avid supporters, while Elon Musk, funder of the Future of Humanity Institute, has cited MacAskill as “a close match for my philosophy.” FHI Senior Research Fellow Toby Ord notes in his bio that he has advised “the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science.” Ord was quoted to the UN General Assembly in a 2021 speech on climate by former British PM Boris Johnson. Nor do longtermists only seek influence in conservative political circles. FTX crypto founder and longtermist Sam Bankman-Fried was celebrated as a “megadonor” in US Democratic circles before being jailed on fraud charges, while longtermists in the UK formed a group called Labour for the Long Term to influence the Labour Party. Political influence is a core part of longtermist strategy. A 2022 position paper by Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute outlined their political case for institutional longtermism, the view that far-future considerations should dominate public policy and even our choice of political institutions, in contrast with longtermism as a personal philosophy for setting one’s own philanthropic priorities….
Vallor, Shannon. The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (pp. 76-80). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
"Longtermist arguments often go as follows: because AGI in the far future could theoretically kill or immiserate even more living humans than are alive on the planet now, preventing future AGI from doing this is a more rational use of resources than funding clean energy tech, food security, or public health today. Related claims made by some longtermists include the idea that saving the future requires directing even more of today’s resources toward the wealthy in the Global North, rather than sending aid to the most impoverished countries in the Global South, since wealthy people in already disproportionately wealthy regions are better positioned to use their resources to fight these “existential” risks from AGI."
Moments Are Fleeting
Well, that didn’t last long.
After Saturday’s assassination attempt, Donald Trump signaled that he would focus on unifying the country at the Republican National Convention. He told a Washington Examiner reporter that he had scrapped a speech focused on attacking Biden’s policies in favor of taking the chance to “bring the country together.” “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” he wrote on Truth Social the morning after the shooting. And a person close to Trump told The Washington Post on Sunday that the RNC’s planners “want speakers to dial it down, not dial it up.” But that quickly proved impossible for a party that has spent years marinating in grievance.
The mood on day one of the convention was, as John Hendrickson put it in The Atlantic today, “oddly serene.” But there were still signs of latent anger: When Trump walked out yesterday, after the opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, the delegates began chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” echoing Trump’s words after the attempted assassination.
Ron Johnson’s apparent speech mishap was an apt metaphor for the GOP’s inability to set a new tone: Instead of appealing to national unity, the senator from Wisconsin accused Democratic policies of being a “clear and present danger” to the country. Afterward, he blamed the teleprompter operator for not loading the new, more pacific speech he said he had intended to give.
As the night wore on, it became obvious that the problem wasn’t just the teleprompter. Impassioned speeches against Democrats’ policies are par for the course at the RNC, and such discourse is essential to our democracy. But yesterday’s agenda revealed something darker and angrier than policy disagreement. One featured speaker was North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican nominee for governor, who declared just last week that “some folks need killing.” “It’s time for somebody to say it,” Robinson remarked in an appearance at a local church. “It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity.”…
And then there is Trump himself. Even as his team seemed to ask other Republicans to tone down their rhetoric, the former president continued to attack his critics in and out of the justice system on social media. The day after he was shot at, Trump was already relitigating his many grievances on Truth Social, and once again appeared to defame E. Jean Carroll, the woman he sexually assaulted.
As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts — The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.
For a moment on Saturday, it felt as though we might start to see a gentler, more unifying Republican Party. But in politics, moments are fleeting, and as we were quickly reminded, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—a man whose core message is incapable of bringing us all together again. [Charlie Sykes]
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2, A Good Word Spoiled
Not all grievances are created equal. I want to say that again. I want to be clear. And not all expressions of grievance raise identical concerns. Some don’t raise any at all. There are wildly disproportionate outbursts, mildly disproportionate outbursts, and ones scaled defensibly and even commendably to their trigger. There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.
What’s more, the fruits of the grievances on the left don’t match the fruits of the grievances on the right, and for all the talk about how illiberal both camps have become, it’s the right that currently poses the much greater threat to the country, both in terms of its disregard for democratic institutions—for democracy itself—and the behavior it provokes, sanctions, and sometimes even glorifies. The foiled plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate a prominent elected official, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, was hatched by right-wing terrorists. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enormously popular right-wing lawmaker, who’s infamous for statements such as one in a speech at a gala for the New York Young Republican Club in December 2022, when she made light of January 6 by saying, “I will tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
It’s Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who lashed out at the federal bureaucracy and indulged the darkest fantasies about the dimensions and depravity of the “deep state” by saying that if elected president, he’d “start slitting throats on Day One.” It’s Kari Lake, the failed Republican candidate for governor of Arizona in 2022, who seemed to be emulating Greene (what a thought) when she reacted to Trump’s federal indictment for treating classified documents like a personal stamp collection in June 2023 by saying: “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have to go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”
It’s Trump himself whose response to the far-ranging, grave legal predicament that he brought upon himself went beyond any sort of rebellion and resistance that a Democrat of comparable stature in modern times had called for. He waged an unfettered verbal assault on the American government and issued an unqualified vow to demolish certain American institutions. As the indictments rolled in, as the civil trials in which he was a defendant commenced, and as his fury pinballed from one courtroom and judge to another, his language grew ever darker, ever more dangerous. He labeled the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other byways of the federal bureaucracy in general and the Biden administration in particular “a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out immediately,” “fanatics,” “fascists,” and “sinister forces” who were engaged in “vicious persecution.” No, no, make that “demented persecution.” He called Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, a “monster” and, on the first day of his civil trial on the fraud charges that she’d brought against him, publicly stated that people “ought to go after this attorney general.” That chilling directive belonged to a lengthening sequence of violent musings, including his insinuation that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, should be executed for treason and his recommendation, during a speech to California Republicans, that shoplifters be shot as they left stores. His remarks increasingly amounted to sputtering thesauruses of thuggery with which he seemed to be pledging bloody payback. As Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote: “This is not the reaction of a normal person. It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain.”
And that was before Trump used the occasion of a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire in November 2023 to say that if he won the presidency anew in 2024, he would “root out” what he referred to as “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Challenged about the echoes of Nazism and fascism in that pledge, a Trump campaign spokesman defended it, exulting that the “sad, miserable existence” of its critics “will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” The tenor of that vow matched the totalitarian fantasies of Trump, his advisers, and his allies, who envisioned and made plans for a federal workforce meticulously stocked with Trump loyalists and an army of federal prosecutors intensely focused on Trump’s enemies.
What’s more, there’s no left-wing analogue to Fox News, no media enterprise of commensurate reach that consciously pursued a commercial strategy of lying to its viewers, as Fox did about one of the most consequential matters of all: who won a presidential election in the most powerful country on earth. That’s what led to the settlement with Dominion, a maker of voting machines and the butt of hour upon hour of Fox programming that aired baseless claims—claims that Fox’s hosts and executives knew to be laughable: that those machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
But it’s also true that on both sides of the political divide, there’s a quickness to grievance, a tendency among many people to identify themselves and interpret events in terms of past, current, and looming hurts. There’s a psychological and emotional impulse—a way of approaching and assessing the world—that transcends partisan affiliation. It’s not so much bipartisan as it is pan-partisan or supra-partisan, and it’s getting worse. It exiles nuance. It rejects the kind of triage that a checks-and-balances government, which can deal with only so much so quickly, must do, even as it lengthens the odds of that government being able to do anything at all. It places personal over public interest. It turbocharges conflict.
That was one of the saddest revelations of the coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat so universal and dire that it should have put the usual animosities on ice. At the start, I naively thought—or, more accurately, hoped—that it would. As we confronted a previously unthinkable shutdown of life as we knew it and fumbled our way through remote work, contactless grocery shopping, virtual family get-togethers, and the whole surreal rest of it, I wondered whether the suspension of normalcy would include an abnormal (but welcome!) discovery of the kind of solidarity that the country had experienced for a brief period after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush suddenly had an approval rating north of 85 percent. (The intensely pitched debates about national security versus civil liberties and about the wisdom of invading Iraq came later.)
But much had changed in the nearly two decades between the shattering of the World Trade Center and the shuttering of all of New York City, and by 2020, national solidarity was a political yeti. Battle lines were quickly drawn. Rival camps promptly emerged: people who wanted to err on the side of epidemiological caution and those who felt that individual preference took precedence over any government edict, no matter how well intentioned, especially given how fledgling and fluid our understanding of the pandemic was; people who gave experts the benefit of the doubt and those who rebelled against what they saw as facile groupthink; people who instinctively admired Dr. Anthony Fauci and people who reflexively abhorred him; masking evangelists, some of whom muttered the wish that the virus would winnow the ranks of the reckless, and masking apostates, for whom all the shutting down and covering up was rank liberal opportunism…
Bruni, Frank. The Age of Grievance (pp. 13-17). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
So, I was randomly working away online yesterday when an Amazon book recommendation pinged into my inbox. Being long familiar with and a NY Times reader fan of Frank Bruni, I clicked.
Peeps, didja all know that, if you are routinely successful at reining in your High Dudgeon Outrage Reflex, you are guilty of snooty Woke Liberal Grievance Able-ism.
2. The Profits of ParanoiaAmong other things, goes to the topic of this book (cited here):
For a nation that emerged from history’s most destructive war with an unconditional victory over fascism and a rapidly growing economy, the America of the early fifties was strangely demoralized and apprehensive. Having brushed aside fear itself to overcome the Depression and the Axis, Americans were unable to resist the panic over communism that enabled the rise of McCarthy and his cynical henchman Cohn. The McCarthyites hyped the Red Menace for their own political and personal advancement, encouraging a wave of hysteria that long outlasted the Wisconsin Republican’s meteoric career. Every day, Americans were warned that rising communism threatened their way of life, not only overseas but everywhere, from the schools and universities to the churches, the military, and even the movies.
Looking back, it’s not easy to determine how much of this political offensive was spurred by genuine concern over the Kremlin’s attempts to subvert democracies. Very often, it was advanced by far-right forces aiming to discredit liberals, labor unions, minority groups, intellectuals, and anyone identified with the Democratic Party—and never mind that those liberals were far more effective in opposing communism, both at home and abroad, than their right-wing critics. When McCarthy publicly slandered General George C. Marshall—whose aid and reconstruction program had played a critical role in brushing back Europe’s Stalinist parties—as an instrument of the “communist conspiracy,” the petty partisan motive was plain. McCarthy was trying to smear not just Marshall himself but his boss, President Harry S. Truman—a zealous anti-communist whose “loyalty” programs were an assault on First Amendment freedoms.
Many of the prominent Far Rightists who promoted mythical plots in the postwar years were the same figures whose isolationism and hatred of the New Deal had aligned them with pro-Axis seditionists before the war. McCarthyism’s authoritarian bullying damaged America’s reputation, while providing a convenient propaganda topic for the Kremlin. Such strategic considerations never troubled the Right when there was money to be made.
Confrontations between East and West played out on the global stage, but by the time McCarthy gave his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech warning of Red conspirators in government, the communist movement in the United States was moribund if not dead. By 1950, the tiny cadre of Russian spies in Washington were apprehended and facing prosecution. The Communist Party (CPUSA) had been decimated by federal prosecution of its leaders during the late forties, in a spasm of legal repression that sent dozens to prison and menaced hundreds more with potential prosecution under the Smith Act. And as the monumental crimes of Stalinism emerged, an intense disillusionment gripped party members and sympathizers. The remnant of a few thousand diehards posed no threat to anybody but themselves.
Yet once launched, conspiracy theories tend to fester and spread, without respect to reality, as we have seen in recent years—especially when their cultivation still sustains a profitable enterprise. Decades before social media turned conspiracy-mongering into an online industry, the impresarios of the Far Right found many ways to monetize the “communist conspiracy,” as they exaggerated its dimensions beyond absurdity.
These “professional anti-communists” pioneered the exploitation of “fake news” and disparaged traditional news sources, spreading stories that overstrained credulity. They found the niche audiences that not only believed their far-fetched warnings of imminent doom but would spend good money to hear the bad news. For well over a decade, nearly any speaker who inspired dread of the Red Dawn would draw a paying crowd, no matter how implausible the tale.
In 1962, for instance, rumors quickly spread that Operation Water Moccasin, a military training operation run by the US Army in rural Georgia, was secretly a rehearsal for a United Nations plot to seize power in the US, spearheaded by “barefoot” African guerrillas. (The appeals to racial anxiety were never subtle.) The same nefarious scheme was also said to involve a huge contingent of Chinese Communist troops over the border in Mexico, where they eagerly awaited the signal to invade. Incredibly, the hysteria over this entirely fabricated scenario reached a crescendo across the South that forced the Pentagon to cancel the exercise entirely. A CBS News special investigation later found that panic over a UN takeover had begun when a radio evangelist started the rumor, which gained velocity after a far-right congressman from California, the aptly named James B. Utt, picked it up. By then, of course, the phony story had achieved its principal purpose: to intensify fear and alienation among the targeted audiences.
As a vocation, anti-communism had provided a substantial living and a measure of fame (or infamy) to a host of government informants, industrial consultants, writers, and public lecturers for many years, dating back to the first Red Scare that followed the Russian Revolution. But as the CPUSA declined, so did the prosecutions, congressional hearings, and other platforms that had sustained “experts” on communism, principally former party members who snitched on their ex-comrades. Opportunities in that once-flourishing field were evaporating by the early fifties. But a cohort of bold grifters with a fresh angle—“anti-communist education,” pitched to the suburban masses—was about to show up…
Conason, Joe. The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (pp. 25-27). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
