Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

Renee DiResta writes in her new book:

* when attorney – turned – speechwriter Michael Benz set his sights on convincing American conservatives that a vast collusion operation had deprived Donald Trump of his rightful victory in 2020…

Despite his social media boasting, Benz hadn’t actually “run cyber” at State. He’d been the deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs for approximately three months, 2 following a year as a speechwriter for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. But no matter — after leaving government, Benz simply created an email address, reserved a domain name, and embarked upon a new career as a former cybersecurity expert.

The man whose prior attributable online presence had been scrubbed down to little more than a Pepe – the – frog – throw – pillow Pinterest pinboard was now the head of what he called the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) — and also, seemingly, its sole employee. He reinvented himself as “mikebenzcyber” on social media and set about proclaiming that he was going to expose the crime of the century.

The goal of the FFO, Benz wrote in a convoluted blog post, was to expose a vast collusion operation that he claimed had transpired between the government, academia, media, and tech companies. There had been a plot, he alleged, to create a “social media censorship bureau” that “targeted” the speech of millions of Americans — particularly those on the populist right.

At the center of this plot — the keeper of an “AI censorship death star superweapon” — was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). And the Darth Vader figure in his Death Star analogy? That was me.

In Benz’s bespoke reality, the EIP, in cahoots with the Department of Homeland Security, his old employer the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Big Tech, had colluded to censor tens of millions of tweets — twenty – two million to be precise — during our 2020 election work. In his more bombastic media appearances, the number ballooned to hundreds of millions, or even billions , of posts that we’d supposedly gotten nuked from the internet via some sort of shadowy special access to “internal systems” of government and tech. Government actors had supposedly told us, via these secret systems, what needed be suppressed, and we had supposedly passed their demands on to Big Tech companies. This effort, Benz claimed, had prevented people from seeing entire narratives during the 2020 election. We had “pre – censored discussion that predicted the possibility of election fraud.”

If this sounds like word salad served up by someone in a tinfoil hat, that’s because it is. Benz’s theories were remarkable primarily for how utterly wrong they were. When we saw his early posts targeting EIP’s work in August 2022, we laughed. His “source” for this list of crazy allegations was something we’d written ourselves: a 292 – page final report describing our work, released publicly in March 2021, widely covered by the media and posted publicly to our website for a year and a half before he “discovered” it. 4
But accuracy wasn’t Benz’s objective; storytelling was. He was picking out random phrases and numbers from within our report’s pages and reassembling them into a sordid spy thriller. Driving this drama was a compelling trope: the Man (or Woman) Behind the Curtain, secretly steering world events unbeknownst to the powerless targets. Benz’s long “exposés” were the alternate history of a fantasy world. They included a specific set of villains: real people, reduced to avatars whose lives could be mined for further plot points to generate maximum outrage, engagement, and revenue. His followers and subscribers could enjoy the equivalent of a multiseason drama. But unlike with Star Wars or Game of Thrones , the audience could actually inhabit the universe, helping harass the villain online and off.

Benz confidently presented his fantasy as fact and himself as the hero, drawing heavily on the Whistleblower trope to sell it. In some right – wing media interviews, Benz postured as an ex – government insider who’d seen terrible abuses in his (very short) tenure at State; in others, he was a concerned citizen who had been “investigating” the rise of a vast censorship apparatus for nearly a decade ; in still others he was a diplomat offended on behalf of supposedly silenced global populist leaders (like India’s president Modi) 5 or a chess champion who had seen the board several positions out and deduced that an “AI censorship death star superweapon” was about to destroy the First Amendment in America.

Those of us who had worked on EIP noticed his sustained effort to get attention, but the attempt to retcon our very public work into some secret conspiracy screamed “crank,” and we thought that no reasonable person would take it seriously.

We were wrong.

One challenge of refuting conspiracy theory propaganda is that its authors often present their claims in what’s known as a Gish gallop : a litany of allegations so numerous that the target is temporarily paralyzed, unable to decide what to respond to first. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to address them point by point, since some are based on twisted or decontextualized grains of truth. And so it was with Benz.

The Election Integrity Partnership work that Benz refashioned into a plot had taken place in 2020, when the government bureaucracies were run by Trump appointees. In Benz’s alternate universe, the government had been in the tank for Joe Biden. There was no “secret access” to “internal systems” or data portals. The 2020 EIP effort and 2021 Virality Project had no government funding, although Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington did subsequently receive a National Science Foundation grant to study rapid responses to rumors in late 2021 — a grain of truth that Benz twisted to label us “government – funded censors” and imply that we had been rewarded for helping Biden win. 7 The soon – to – be – infamous “22 million tweets” statistic he bandied about had nothing to do with anything getting “censored” — it was a figure from a table in our report, calculated well after Election Day, that tallied the number of tweets discussing the prominent election rumors we’d studied. This simple act of addition was refashioned into evidence of a plot in his alternate reality.

Online cranks are a dime a dozen. But it quickly became clear that the Foundation for Freedom Online was linked to a broader network of right – wing advocacy organizations with ties to a small group of congressional partisans. The FFO’s website footer, later removed, described it as “a project of Empower Oversight,” 8 an effort started by a longtime Republican combatant who’d previously wondered if Senator Joe McCarthy — he of the 1950s Red Scare hysteria — had gotten a bad rap. 9 Empower Oversight primarily worked to procure “whistle – blowers” for congressional hearings, 10 and FFO came to serve as the primary source for the now growing chorus of right – wing media and legislative rumblings about censorship. Benz had a limited understanding of the “cyber” topics he presented himself as an expert in, but with the backing of a partisan machine, he was able to step into the role of spokesperson for the grievance and was rewarded with glowing profiles that bolstered his credibility.

And so, an absurd alternate history, overwhelmingly sourced to one man, proliferated. Far Right outlets, influencers, and media – of – one figures were thrilled to give Benz’s claims airtime: Some people on the internet are saying that Stanford censored tens of millions of YOUR tweets! Some people are saying Stanford rebooted a CIA mind control project! 12 Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and John Solomon eagerly had Benz on as a guest. Narrative laundering began — a very old propaganda strategy in which claims attributed to a seemingly authoritative source appear in one small outlet, then propagate across a daisy chain of ideologically aligned outlets, each citing the last. It goes something like this: Outlet B repeats a baseless claim, but attributes it to A — “Outlet A is reporting that the Election Integrity Partnership…” Outlet B is just reporting on the reporting, after all. Outlet C can then cite Outlet B, and so on. Very few readers will take the time to look at the original source material if they trust the outlet restating the claim. The repetition, meanwhile, gives the impression that the story is important and ensures it remains on the audience’s mind.

But today narrative laundering across propaganda rags is only half the ballgame. There’s also the social media rumor mill. Indeed, several of the “repeat spreader” influencers described in EIP’s report — the pivotal figures who’d repeatedly helped election rumors go wildly viral — shared the coverage of Benz’s claims. They reframed our work summarizing their demonstrated massive reach as preemptively targeting them, suppressing them , and alleged that we were motivated by anticonservative bias. These allegations, of course, went viral.

As the lies spread, they ignited harassment from the influencers’ fans. People who were turned into villains in this alternate history were battered with outrage, abuse, and sometimes threats. Meanwhile, growing interest from partisan politicians was setting the stage for harassment from another entity: the political machine. This was not accidental; Benz’s avowed goal, very plainly stated on his blog, was to have a congressional committee “armed with subpoena power” investigate the villains he described in his reports.

There’s a term for the kind of material the FFO produced and the network boosted: bullshit.

* Benz’s cosplay as a cybersecurity whistle – blower would have real – world consequences for me and my colleagues. That’s because even the people in the world best – equipped to understand the mechanics of these Kafkaesque claims have a difficult time refuting them. It takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk bullshit than it does to produce it. 16

* After right – wing media had picked up Benz’s bullshit for several weeks in a row, we put up a detailed post on the Election Integrity Partnership’s blog, on October 5, 2022, patiently explaining what he’d gotten wrong. 17 But the outlets that covered the crank theory were undeterred.

* It did not matter to Jack Posobiec (or to Mike Benz) what the cost of their lies was for the people they targeted and smeared. What mattered was keeping fans engaged, aggrieved, and subscribed.

* Benz, who’d been trying to make Taibbi notice him for weeks, seized the opportunity, effusively praising Taibbi’s work for a long, embarrassing moment before letting the audience know that it was actually he, Benz, who had “all of the missing pieces of the puzzle” detailing the evil cabal purportedly censoring right – wing speech.
“I can tell you literally everything,” Benz told Taibbi, promising him that he would have “superpowers” at the end of the conversation. In a rambling monologue, Benz breathlessly recounted the alternate history he’d so painstakingly crafted. He fixated on me: I was the puppet master of this vast cabal, with “special privileged access” to “DHS’ 24/7 cyber mission control” and “DHS FBI powers.” My supposed powers came with a secret deputization authorizing me to censor “22 million tweets,” he burbled, dropping the twisted statistic he’d harped on for months on his blog. Then he ran through the laundry list of conspiracy theories he’d been feeding right – wing media. Basking in the audience attention, he enthusiastically upped the number of posts we’d somehow censored to hundreds of millions. “Wow,” Taibbi solemnly replied, as if he were Bob Woodward speaking to Deep Throat in an underground DC parking lot.
“This is a scale of censorship the world has never experienced before!” Benz exclaimed.
A few days later, on March 9, 2023, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified in a public hearing before Jim Jordan and his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Under oath, and in chaotic written testimony, the two witnesses regurgitated Benz’s claims — the nonsense about “millions of tweets” and targeting of conservatives, my supposed “undisclosed CIA ties,” and all the rest of the bullshit, now entered into the congressional record as if they’d uncovered it while sleuthing through Twitter’s files.
The appearance made Benz’s dream of congressional hearings before a committee with subpoena power — the stated goal in his first blog post — come true.

* Four months after that panel in England, Benz was the subject of a damning exposé by NBC News. He had, as I mentioned earlier, erased nearly all of his social media profiles before starting his “foundation” — a move that suggested he perhaps had something to hide. Indeed, an October 2023 news story revealed that Benz had “a secret history as an alt – right persona” known as “Frame Game.” 92 Frame Game had run an anonymous YouTube channel called “Frame Game Radio” where he ranted about “white genocide” in the United States, a purported Jewish cabal, his desire to set up a “White Mother Fertility Fund,” and the IQs of racial minorities. He posted similar content to Twitter and Gab. When caught by NBC, he declared that his secret past persona had been an effort to deradicalize anti – Semites (an excuse that his past social media contacts, including prominent neo – Nazi Richard Spencer, publicly mocked). 93 However, Frame Game/Mike Benz’s past posts still lingered in some corners of the web, where his own words spoke for him: “If I, a Jew, a member of the Tribe, Hebrew Schooled, can read Mein Kampf & think ‘holy shit, Hitler actually had some decent points.’ Then NO ONE is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the White genocide happening all over the world.”

Posted in Censorship, Internet, Journalism | Comments Off on Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

Decoding Trump Shooting Conspiracy Theories 4 (7-25-24)

09:00 Trump Shooting Conspiracies, Multiple Shooters DEBUNKED, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLRKpMxtW6A
17:00 Single bullet theory for JFK assassination, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-bullet_theory
25:00 Michael Kochin on Gaza War 12 October 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03JTNM3IgjY
36:00 Beyoncé, Jennifer Aniston, and Kamala Harris triple team JD Vance | Mark Halperin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV8wJOZHkE8
42:00 N.S. Lyons | The Parallel Path to Political Power, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZJFp1Yv2Oo
45:20 Mike Benz on NATO & censorship, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28qKrWGTWXU
54:00 Conservatives more likely to believe that past bad behavior is likely to predict future bad behavior, https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/evolutionary-theories-of-female-gossip
56:30 Theodor Adorno would have called the police, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKFL6dEQlP4
1:14:30 Robert Barnes (Deep State Tried To Kill Trump: Conspiracy Theory Or Fact?), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4KvbRlD0Q
1:17:20 Each and Every Security Failure Leading to Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump, with Mike Baker, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gALfKuzR0Ew
1:20:00 Abigail Shrier on the Dark Side of “America First” Republicans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ98cANs7Ks
1:22:20 Donald Trump Shooting: Bodycam Confirms Snipers Spotted Gunman Before Assassination Attempt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzwAD5-XWOw
1:26:20 Investigating Donald Trump’s Would-Be Assassin’s Motive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UezJXmWJYqc
1:27:30 Kip joins
1:29:00 Kip regrets the 50-pounds of marijuana he smoked
1:36:00 Seventh-Day Adventism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church
1:38:00 Ellen G. White, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_G._White
1:44:00 La Cienega Heights Was Known As Corning-Cadillac When It Was Dominated By The Playboy Gangster Crips, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=145230
1:46:00 Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries in La Cienega Heights, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=145237

It’s amusing to see all the media and Democratic party rhetoric about how Donald Trump presents this epic threat to democracy. This will be the last time ever have a chance to vote in the United States! This indicates how out of touch the MSM and elites are because nobody in the real world in America believes that democracy is on the ballot. People will vote based on their habits and inclinations, community, race, sex, vibes, profession, and economy.

The idea that democracy is on the ballot doesn’t resonate with anyone in the real world. You have to live in an incredibly abstract world to believe that democracy is on the ballot, that you can change your sex, that there aren’t significant group differences, that IQ doesn’t matter, that you don’t need to punish criminals.

The smarter a person, the more likely they are to earn, innovate, create, contribute to the tax base, and have below average tendencies to commit crime. This doesn’t stop at any level of IQ. The smarter the person, the more likely they are to enjoy living in an abstract world. This comes with many benefits to society, but also some dangers. Only a person living in an abstract world believes in communism.

I live in a largely abstract world. I am not married. I don’t have kids. I spend my time exploring ideas, reading books, writing essays, creating livestreams and sometimes I get out of touch with the reality of having a family.

So I get to spend a great deal of my time as I wish, and I wish to spend it in an abstract world. I read a lot of books, reading a lot of essays.

Think about the concerns that you have. I would assume that you’re most concerned about your family, your friends, your career, your education, your hobbies, and your interests, your religion, your volunteer opportunities, your safety in your community.

Men living in an abstract world create symphonies, art, science fiction, video games. There’s nothing wrong with living in an abstract world, but it does predispose you to getting out of touch with reality, and one example of this is believing that democracy is on the ballot in 2024.

The Democratic party is increasingly the party of the managerial elite who go to the right schools and practice careful critical discourse. Carefully choosing your words is often good, but it also comes with downsides. For example, for the past six years, Joe Biden at times has shown senility. There’s no nice word for senility so the elite doesn’t use it. As soon as you say “senile,” you show that you are uneducated and bigoted. Words that you can’t say you increasingly don’t think.

“Retard” is not a nice word but there’s no nice alternative. Retarded is the best metaphor for parts of life. If you excise the word from your vocabulary, you lose touch with reality.

The more prestigious your position in life, the more you are expected to practice careful critical discourse. So as a price for this exacting discipline, our elites get out of touched with retardation and senility, which is all around us. “Cognitive decline” is not a normal way of speaking. It’s stilted. Hygienic.

People on the right have their own blind spots. For example, they think Kamala Harris is ridiculous. Well, she has at least a 40% chance of becoming the next president of the United States. With their kneejerk distrust of expertise, many conservatives are blinded to the reality that sometimes expertise matters, and the experts have superior insights to those of ordinary people.

Adrian Vermeule writes on Substack July 24, 2024:

A brief conjecture to explain a phenomenon much on display in American politics in recent days: why do liberals in groups display a greater susceptibility to conformism, hive-mind politics, and rapid but near-unanimous changes of position than non-liberals do? I won’t pause to establish the fact of this phenomenon — it seems to me undeniable — but merely take it as true for the sake of argument (and I refer the reader to Ryszard Legutko’s excellent discussion of the phenomenon in “The Demon in Democracy.”)

My conjecture about the basic cause of the phenomenon is that the liberal, as such, has no transcendent criterion for establishing political truth, but relies on social proof as the fundamental criterion of truth. What everyone (at least everyone in the liberal’s space of reference) believes to be true, is true. The notorious liberal appeal to being on “the right side of History” is just social proof set in a time frame: it amounts to an appeal to and prediction about what almost everyone will believe tomorrow. Hence the liberal is peculiarly susceptible to intellectual conformism, sudden belief cascades, and other herd-like phenomena, all the while imagining himself as especially evidence-based, open-minded and enlightened. Hence we see liberals, and their dependent minor intellectuals and journalists, suddenly and vehemently deny today what they affirmed yesterday, or the reverse, without any apparent sense of contradiction.

Politically, this is both a source of tremendous power and tremendous weakness. There is power in the sudden stampede of the herd all in one direction, creating an irresistible mass. But where there is some reality constraint on belief — if for example the herd is heading towards a cliff — then the results can be disastrous. Only the end result can tell us which case currently obtains.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Decoding Trump Shooting Conspiracy Theories 4 (7-25-24)

Decoding Trump Shooting Conspiracy Theories 3 (7-24-24)

01:00 NYT: A Volatile Election Is Intensifying Conspiracy Theories Online, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/business/election-conspiracy-social-media.html
06:00 Conspiracies & Hero Systems, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156613
16:00 Analysis of Joe Biden’s speech explaining why he wasn’t running for reelection
20:00 Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156125
41:00 WP: Trump allies crush misinformation research despite Supreme Court loss, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/14/trump-allies-disarm-misinformation-researchers-ahead-election/
46:45 VDARE destroyed
50:00 Michael Kochin: Israel’s Year of Dangerous Living, Part 3: On Ballots and Bullets, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNZLx9mK2r8
57:33: Trump Assassination Attempt Aftermath with Bill O’Reilly & Jon Stewart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZjyRKy6QSM
58:30 JD Vance Is An Opportunist & That’s A Good Thing! (7-19-24), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28NmcMm6bhw
1:02:50 Subordinate individual autonomy to state purposes
1:05:00 The ballot or the bullet
1:09:00 Violence is a male thing
1:10:00 The word “hysterical” comes from “uterus”
1:10:45 People who talked about killing Trump were not sufficiently afraid of what Trump’s supporters would do in response
1:12:00 The lesson of October 7 is that you have to be ready to defend your own
1:13:20 Kim Cheatle steps down as Secret Service head, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfGMxsa6R8
1:14:30 Elliott Blatt joins – he doesn’t think Kamala Harris will be elected as president
1:25:00 Elliott goes to the beach and notices that hot chicks with no tats stick to their own kind while fat tatted up chicks stuck together
1:28:30 Biden Stays on the Job, and Harris’ Accountability, https://www.youtube.com/live/MjiGQblbuz0
1:30:30 Kip joins
1:31:00 Luke Ford | 12-Step Programs for Sex Addiction, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW2-BWD-YtE
1:33:00 As a realist, I don’t believe in progress

Posted in America | Comments Off on Decoding Trump Shooting Conspiracy Theories 3 (7-24-24)

Conspiracies & Hero Systems

When your hero system is far removed from those who hold power, you’re going to look like you believe in crazy conspiracies.

Rony Guldmann writes in his work-in-progress Conservative Claims Of Cultural Oppression:

* The conservative magazine Chronicles explains:

Once upon a time in America, you could say you loved your country, believed in God, and held your marriage sacred…and not be snickered at as a simple-minded simpleton. You could believe in honesty, hard work, and self-reliance; you could speak of human responsibilities in the same breath as human rights…and not be derided an as an insensitive fool.

You could speak out against profane books, depraved movies, and decadent art; you could express your disapproval of drug-sodden entertainers, America-hating educators, and appeasement-obsessed legislators…and not be branded as an ignorant reactionary. And yes, once upon a time in America, you could actually believe in morality, both public and private, and not be proclaimed a hopeless naïf—more to be pitied than taken seriously. But that was before the “censorship of fashion” took control of contemporary American culture. This insidious form of censorship is not written into our laws or statutes—but it is woven into the very fabric of our culture. It reigns supreme in literature and the arts, on television, and in film, in music and on radio, in our churches, our public schools, and our universities. And above all else, it is dedicated to the propagation of one agenda—the liberal activist agenda for America. The “censorship of fashion” is not only sinister and subtle, it’s also ruthlessly effective. It employs the powerful weapons of ridicule and condescension to stifle the voices of millions of Americans, like you, who still cherish our traditional values.

* I argue that the relationship between religious conservatives and secular liberals is most profoundly conceived as a contemporary recapitulation of the relationship between conquered pagans and conquering Christians endeavoring to uproot these pagans’ idolatry. What liberals call religious neutrality is an intellectualized, sublimated, and secularized iteration of this ancient ambition, which now operates within unacknowledged layers of social meaning rather than through formal creeds. This plausible deniability is why conservative anxieties about the encroachments of an aggressive, evangelizing secular humanism sound paranoid and conspiratorial. But like all conservative claims of cultural oppression, these apprehensions become intelligible once placed in their broader historical and philosophical context, which always reveals the larger truth of what strikes liberals as conservative obtuseness.

* Chronicles treats the “censorship of fashion” as anew phenomenon. But Kirk lamented that late nineteenth-century conservatives became unsettled in their first principles by the march of science and “shrank before the Positivists, the Darwinians, and the astronomers.” The intimidation of conservatives by liberals has a distinguished pedigree, it seems, and is not limited to those now fancying themselves “ordinary Americans.” Nor is the idea that an intellectual elite conspires behind the scenes to maintain a stranglehold on the means of cultural reproduction. Unable to realize their ends by “any direct or immediate act,” the atheists of Burke’s day conspired to pursue them “by a longer process through the medium of opinion,” to which end the “first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it.” O’Reilly alleges that late-night television comedy paints liberals as smart and conservatives as dense. And in the same spirit, Burke charged that atheists connived “to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers,” and sought with “an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction.” Conservatives have long held that intellectuals are driven by their own self-contained interests, and long warned that centralized planning, unqualified equality, and other utopian dreams are recipes for a leveling and homogenizing tyranny. The language may have changed, but conservative claims of cultural oppression are built atop of these long-held conservative suspicions about liberalism and the Left.

* The claimants understand themselves as speaking truth to a power that conceals itself at every turn, to forces that will never officially announce their goals, their motivations, or even their existence. This does not typically devolve into the crude conspiracism that we usually associate with the extreme right. There is the visceral sense that things are not as they seem, to be sure. But whereas this once meant things like the John Birch Society alleging that President Eisenhower was a knowing agent of communism, the conservative claimant of cultural oppression judges the problem to be largely structural and unconscious or semiconscious, and not the calculated product of human agency. There is indeed a liberal conspiracy, but it consists in hidden layers of meaning rather than secret plots. It transpires, not in smoke-filled backrooms, but in the fabric of our culture, as Chronicles says.

* What strikes liberals as conservatives’ eschewal of rationality is, in its deeper hermeneutic structure, an eschewal of the rationalism that underpins liberals’ claims to moral superiority, and hence the liberal identity.

* Conservatives charge that the “new class” of liberal elites harbors an ingrained hostility to the traditional family. But the indisputable truth is that many of these elites form part of such families themselves. And so the conservative accusation seems rather conspiratorial. The list of counter-arguments available to liberals is quite long. The comic aspect of Bobos in Paradise immunizes it from any direct intellectual confrontation. But is it not in this regard a microcosm for conservative claims of cultural oppression and their penchant for strategically deployed innuendo whose real upshot can never be quite pinned down? Conservatives would characterize liberalism as a surreptitiously parochial creed, the lifestyle preference of a privileged minority.

* Liberals do not construe the conspiracy-mongering of some black nationalists—like Louis Farrakhan for example—as conclusive proof that racism is dead. And this is because the underlying reality of racism can be distinguished from what may be implausible characterizations of its nature—for example, as involving genocidal conspiracies to infest inner city communities with AIDS or cocaine…

And likewise, perhaps conservative claimants of cultural oppression are, just like these black poll respondents, anthropomorphizing what are very real social forces, which are ill-understood by virtue of the distorting yet understandable resentment that is usually the lot of the oppressed. Most of McWhorter’s poll respondents simply lacked the theoretical detachment and sophistication that allows critical race theorists to frame their grievances in more intellectually nuanced terms. And likewise, conservatives may simply lack access to a theoretical framework through which to plausibly articulate their irrepressible intuition that they are culturally oppressed and that the ideals of liberalism can be appropriated to their own cause.

* Conservatives’ often conspiratorial-sounding allegations about the cunning machinations of an all-powerful liberal elite working “behind the scenes” to strip them of their very agency are the anthropomorphization of what is really a metaphysical and existential problem. The ideal of the modern free subject is covertly embedded in a hero-system that liberalism will not acknowledge. And this means that to embrace liberalism is to embrace more than a set of policies. If some African-Americans anthropomorphized structural racism as a government conspiracy to infest inner city neighborhoods with narcotics, so conservative claims of cultural oppression anthropomorphize the spiritual dimension of the modern self as the sundry depredations of the liberal elites.

* Conservatives’ “convoluted stories” may seem unhinged. But this impression is the predictable outcome of the conservatives’ historical predicament, which allows them to sense deceptive and self-deceptive histrionic mimicry without illuminating its essential nature. Like Kafka’s K. in The Trial, they can only access an assortment of partial “leaks” concerning the true nature of their oppression—like the Smithsonian memorandum—without ever receiving a more general accounting. It is this dilemma, itself a feature of their cultural oppression, that yields the conspiratorial flights of fancy. And this is why even these flights of fancy have a social meaning and philosophical significance. Though generally inaccurate as accounts of the actual present-day intentions of identifiable liberals, conservative claims of cultural oppression are meaningful as symbolic references to the “old loves” that liberals will not acknowledge, to the structural forces that may portend as yet greater cultural oppression in the future. These endlessly convoluted stories are at their core distorted articulations of these old loves, and so distortions with a heretofore undiscovered logic.

* Lee Harris concedes that the “populist conservatives” of the Tea Party movement have been susceptible to paranoid conspiracy-mongering, as in their concerns about Obamacare “death panels.” Their appeal to the yeoman virtues of a rugged, republican individualism is moreover an exercise in political nostalgia, as they aren’t truly interested in returning to the harsh conditions of frontier life.75Thisnostalgia is also at odds with their insistence that America keep its place the planet’s sole superpower, which presupposes a far larger government than was ever countenanced in the national past they idealize.76And in bewailing the depredations of overbearing liberal elites, populist conservatives betray their blindness to the workings of “impersonal forces far beyond the control of even the most cunning and ingenious cabal of villains.” Their affinity for doctrinaire libertarianism furthermore blinds them to corrupt corporate executives and amoral financial consortiums, responsibility for which cannot fairly be laid at the feet of big government. It also lands them in the contradiction of taking for granted some government programs, like Medicare, while being reflexively hostile to others. On these and similar points, Harris is in full agreement with liberals. But unlike them, he believes that it “does not matter greatly whether the resentment and resistance makes sense logically or is backed by solid evidence.” The grievances of the populist conservative are rooted, not in any kind of social or economic theory that could be rationally evaluated, but in “a specific character type,” the “natural libertarian” who becomes “ornery” whenever “he feels that his self-image as a free and independent individual is under assault.” “Ornery Americans” are the heirs of the Jacksonian spirit, the egalitarian ethos of independence and self-sufficiency that once defined America. And their populist conservatism is their attempt to keep this ethos alive against the efforts of the liberal elites to uproot it. In resisting the forces that seek to tame and subdue them, populist conservatives try to “hold back, at least for another day, the dusk of decadence that comes whenever the forces of order have triumphed too completely over the anarchic will of free men.”

* Feminists who protest patriarchy are not necessarily alleging any calculated backroom conspiracies to keep women down. They are describing, not a plot but what they understand to be a “complex ecology of domination and subjugation,” as Sommers puts it, which cannot be reduced to some discrete set of enumerable transgressions. Naomi Wolfe writes that“[t]he beauty backlash against feminism is no conspiracy, but a million separate individual reflexes…that coalesce into a national mood weighing women down; the backlash is the more oppressive because the source of the suffocation is so diffuse as to be almost invisible.” Andin a similar vein, conservatives feel weighed down by a national mood of conservaphobia, suffocated by liberalism through the cumulative effect of “a million separate reflex actions” all serving to reinforce the buffered identity, activating certain neural make-ups while devitalizing others.

* Just as critical race theorists warn that we may fail to recognize our own racism, so conservative claims of cultural oppression warn that we may fail to recognize our own secular humanism and anti-religious hostility, which is too pervasive or deep-seated to be recognized as such.

* Religious conservatives’ apprehensions about the connivance of a small coterie of secular humanists whose insidious tentacles now reach into every sphere of life sounds outlandish and conspiratorial. But the conspiracy theories are just distorted anthropomorphizations of these conservatives’ visceral aversion to an alien cosmological orientation. They are culturally oppressed, not by the secular, but by the modern understanding of the relationship between the religious and the secular. Ravi Zacharias observes:

“The California Supreme Court proved it has little problem with the state endorsing a religion, even forcing religious beliefs down its citizen’s throats, provided the religion is secular humanism. On March 1, 2004, the Court ruled that Catholic Charities of Sacramento must comply with the statute requiring California employers to include contraception coverage in their employee healthcare plans. Under the Women’s Contraceptive Equity Act of 2000, only religious employers are excluded. The Court had no problem rationalizing its decision, saying that since the Catholic Charities provides services that are secular in nature, such as counseling, immigration services, and low-income housing, for people of all faiths, it is not a religious employer. One would think that the politically correct California court would applaud the pluralistic attitude of the charity in making its services available to non-Catholics. Instead it used the charity’s tolerance to punish it.”

* …the rhetorical supremacy of the buffered identity, which forces conservatives to articulate cosmological grievances in epistemological terms, at which point they are easily discredited as outlandish, conspiratorial, or authoritarian.

* Conservatives’ visceral conviction that liberalism is an omnipresent force that slyly insinuates itself into all the minutiae of our lives is indeed paranoid and conspiratorial once liberalism is intellectualized as a moral philosophy or personalized as a political movement, reduced to the opinions of a Walter Mondale. However, I have sought to de-intellectualize liberalism by tracing its roots to the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, of which the opinions of a Walter Mondale are merely manifestations and symbols. The “liberalism” that besieges conservatives isn’t the conspiratorial machinations of nefarious East Coast elites, but these disciplines and repressions. The elites have simply internalized these to a greater degree than the “ordinary American,” who retains a residue of the pre-modern impulses which modern disciplinary societies seek to extirpate.

* Conservatives may be unscientific in their tacit devotion to some “order of things.” But liberals are unscientific in their eagerness to detach culture from physiology, not explicitly in their official theoretical positions, but implicitly and unofficially in their easy dismissals of conservatives’ “symbolic” grievances. And this dismissiveness simply betrays liberals’ inability to take its naturalism to its logical conclusion, where conservatives’ ostensible paranoia and conspiracism begin to make sense.

Posted in Conservatives, Conspiracy | Comments Off on Conspiracies & Hero Systems

Decoding Trump Shooting Conspiracy Theories 2 (7-23-24)

01:00 WP: Secret Service encourages Trump campaign to stop outdoor rallies, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/23/trump-rallies-secret-service-change/
15:00 Female vs male gossip: Evolutionary theories of female gossip, https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/evolutionary-theories-of-female-gossip
35:30 WP: Harris’s campaign will have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/23/trump-rallies-secret-service-change/
41:20 Truth About Willie Brown and Kamala Harris, and How She Got Her Political Start, w/ Charlie Spiering, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfR7Lzs_ja8
42:30 Kamala Harris launched political career with $120K ‘patronage’ job from boyfriend Willie Brown, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/1014836/kamala-harris-launched-political-career-with-120k-patronage-job-from-boyfriend-willie-brown/
1:05:00 Investigating Donald Trump’s Would-Be Assassin’s Motive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UezJXmWJYqc
1:15:20 Elliott Blatt joins to discuss incompetence vs maliciousness
1:24:00 How do you pronounce Kamala?
1:26:00 Elliott Blatt analyzes Mark Halperin, DEI
1:37:00 Elliott Blatt joins Curious Gazelle’s live space, https://x.com/CuriousGazelle
1:40:30 The Harris-Biden Dance | Mark Halperin, https://www.youtube.com/live/NTAtaIoVngw
WSJ: How the Bet on an 81-Year-Old Joe Biden Turned Into an Epic Miscalculation, https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/joe-biden-age-condition-before-election-drop-out-c9fc46ef
What Should You Expect From The News?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146911
WP: Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny after Biden’s exit, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/22/trump-age-health/
LARRY JOHNSON and SCOTT RITTER; IS DHS RESPONSIBLE FOR ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON TRUMP?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayh3RyYUWw
WP: Secret Service said to have denied requests for more security at Trump events, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/07/20/trump-secret-service-security-attempted-assassination/
I Didn’t See One Good Faith MSM Article Describing Failures By Trump’s Female Agents Last Saturday, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156555
Is Honor A Virtue In Liberalism?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156547
Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156522

Posted in America | Comments Off on Decoding Trump Shooting Conspiracy Theories 2 (7-23-24)