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By now everyone has probably heard about the unfathomable stupidity and ignorance of “journalist” Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s Face the Nation, who put forth a peculiar thesis about the Holocaust. In a February 16 interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, she expressed her horror that Vice-President JD Vance, in his visit to Germany, was meeting with representatives of “the far-right party known as the AfD.” To add to her dismay, Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Just when you thought these neo-Marxist apparatchiks could not possibly be more biased, ignorant, and corrupt, they come up with something like this. But it’s par for the course, and no one should be surprised. The Trump Administration has announced measures to combat the Fake News industry. These include ethics probes by the FCC, cancellation of subscriptions, and elimination of privileges given to certain outlets at the White House and the Pentagon. This in addition to the ongoing elimination of Federal slush funds for Leftist organizations (such as the BBC), money that had been laundered via US AID and other channels. These are excellent first steps, but much more is needed. If the goal is to stop and reverse this malignant disease, we first need a more accurate diagnosis. As happens so often, the road to recovery begins with the use of correct terminology. Calling them the Mainstream media or even the Legacy media gives them credibility as news media. When Americans, particularly the older cohort, think of the press, we naively imagine hard-nosed reporters fighting organized crime or city hall, and otherwise serving the public, like this. But anything remotely resembling this quaint image ceased to exist years ago. The likes of CNN, the New York Times, Yahoo, CBS, the Washington Post, Associated Press, etc. are not news media. They are propaganda organs of the Leftist establishment; its public relations arm, if you will. They serve the same function as Pravda in the Soviet Union. We must stop referring to them as “the media,” of any kind whatsoever. There is no reason to have Soviet-style propaganda organs present at any government event, especially press conferences—which should be reserved for the press. Why on earth should these degenerates-in-a-suit be there, badgering the President (or some other official) with lies, distortions, and “gotcha” questions? Any “journalists” engaging in this practise should be forthwith excluded from the privilege of attending a press conference. Everyone has their personal biases, but shifty and deceitful Leftist behavior should not be tolerated. Instead, reserve these slots for legitimate producers of news. The internet is bursting at the seams with organizations and individuals who fit the bill. They are the real media, serving the public by providing useful information in an intelligent manner. The Trump Administration is cleaning house, eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse throughout Washington, DC. They are vigorously purging entrenched woke ideologues from all government institutions. There should be no exemption for the Deep State’s propaganda mouthpieces. Cut off the money and cut off the access. They can exercise their First Amendment rights from their mother’s basement. We began this post with the Nazis; let us end there: Allowing these fraudsters to be the filter through which millions of people receive information about the government would be like the Allied armies, after crossing the Rhine into Germany in 1945, appointing Joseph Goebbels as their press secretary.
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In my post of 12/14/24 (“Annoyances”), I listed some of the more annoying aspects of current human behavior. One item was the following:
“Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls.” I had hoped that with the change in atmosphere following the advent of the Trump Administration, a more masculine manner of speech would be heard across the land. Sure, I expected to still be subjected to pathetic feminized uptalking from a twenty-something woke moron working at Whole Foods, but among our thought leaders, absolutely not. Unfortunately, it seems that everywhere I look, even among bright individuals with good ideas, the plague has not ceased; if anything, it has worsened. Another verbal tic that has spread far and wide is the constant use of the words “kind of” and “sort of.” Or, in more rapid speech, kinda and sorta. Yesterday I began watching a podcast featuring an expert in economic and financial affairs. This was an intelligent person, not a Leftist by any stretch of the imagination. Almost every definitive statement was preceded by kind of or sort of. I was not able to watch more than a couple of minutes. It was kind of, sort of, like, you know, well, very exhausting. These words do have a use case. There are times that one wishes to qualify an assertion, as in “her demeanor was sort of hostile, though I couldn’t point to anything explicit.” But when making a factual statement, the usage is inappropriate. There is no reason to say “the Fed kind of held interest rates where they are, with no change.” The Fed didn’t kind of hold them, they held them, period. The effect is the same as with uptalking: information ceases to be communicated as cold, hard facts. Everything is in question, and nobody wants to commit. Given the multiple crises and challenges we face today, there has never been a time that demands more forceful, unequivocal speech. What we do not need to convey is weakness, uncertainty, and self-doubt. In one of my posts on the scamdemic (12/3/2024), I referred to the Orwellian phenomenon, “we have always been at war with Eastasia.” In other words, the astonishing capacity of the Left to reverse ideological positions at breakneck speed, and then act as if it had always been that way. Down the memory hole goes the old way of thinking.
In addition to the switcheroo on Big Pharma, who were upgraded from villain to hero, a prime example of this behavior is the treatment of the working class. Once worshiped by the Left, they were downgraded from heroes to Deplorables, and from there to Garbage. Below is a post that I wrote on this subject, on the original AWOL Civilization blog, in 2007. * * * The Redneck Paradox It has become common practice, in polite circles, to mock and deride a certain sector of American society. I am speaking of the ordinary working class, particularly those living far in the hinterland, and those with a strong attachment to traditional values. It is now de rigueur to launch blustering condemnations of this vague yet threatening tribe. People who would never dare utter a word of criticism against a minority feel perfectly at ease disparaging, often viciously, the enemy they alternately refer to as rednecks, white trash, Christian fundamentalists, holy rollers, or crackers. All of these labels blur into an image of the blue-collar guy in the pickup truck. Of course, the more that “tolerance" is preached as a general ideological position, the more vehement the condemnation of the working class. The blinders of political correctness have shut down the possibility of complaining about, or in some cases even perceiving, the real dangers and the really dangerous people. A substitute was needed at which to redirect the emotional energy. Not that there aren’t other targets; the same crowd inveighs against oil companies, Republicans, law enforcement, etc. The difference is that this particular target is composed of people who used to be the darlings of the Left. We’re talking about the proletariat! Who would have thought that the Working Man was destined to become an enemy of the people? But isn’t the Working Man supposed to be oppressed? Robbed of his labor’s surplus-value by greedy capitalists? One of the reasons for this twist of fate is that the Working Man represents one of the last bastions of traditional American values: he works, goes to church, has a family, owns guns, and believes in liberty (the horror). Also, he is less “educated," and thus less exposed and susceptible to the neo-totalitarian brainwashing that has rotted away the minds of much of our population. This resistance is resented by the high priests of collectivism. I realize that economic Marxism has been replaced by cultural Marxism, and local oppressed masses by Third World oppressed masses. But still, is it not ironic that our latter-day Marxists detest the proletariat? It’s the Redneck Paradox. Pondering the disaster unfolding in Los Angeles, I am reminded of the 1966 movie Fahrenheit 451, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. The film is a masterpiece of the dystopian/futuristic genre. It portrays a society in which the job of the fire department is to light fires, specifically for the purpose of burning forbidden books.
And here we are. The job of the state and local government in California, apparently, is to ensure that fires break out, and when they do, that the people and equipment for extinguishing them have been degraded as much as possible. The accomplishments of the leadership thus far: malfunctioning reservoirs; precious water channeled into the ocean; empty hydrants; routine brush-clearing protocols ignored; criminals, drug addicts, and lunatics (“homeless”) running amok and starting fires; essential equipment sent to Ukraine; funding diverted to woke insanity; a mayor who has the intellectual prowess of a gerbil; and last but not least, fat lesbians making sure that ability is the least important qualification required for the post of “firefighter.” The dystopia has arrived. We are in it. As an author of dystopian fiction, I am concerned that my vocation will be mooted by reality. If things continue on their current trajectory, it will soon be impossible to write a novel like Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World. It is already problematic. How can one depict horrors that await us in a future society when those horrors are happening right now? The synopsis on Amazon for Huxley’s Brave New World declares that the book is “a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order.” Well, we’re about, what, eighty percent of the way there? We often hear that such-and-such government policy, or new piece of woke terminology, is “Orwellian.” What adjective do we use when everything is Orwellian? At that point, the term is useless; the outbreaks of depravity that plague us are no longer outbreaks, but rather the norm. Walking in the rain, you can say “I’m getting wet,” but if you jump in the pool, the phrase loses its meaning. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a mentally retarded black lesbian struggling to lift a fire hose—forever. In my recent post on Covid (12/3/24), I remarked that a calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. Revisiting this phenomenon, I was reminded of a story.
One day during the late 1980s, I was sitting in a café in Philadelphia, discussing current affairs with a wise old gentleman who had vast experience in the world of think tanks and public policy. We were lamenting the adoption by the city of some harebrained program championed by the usual nutjob Leftist coalition. We concluded that it was well-nigh impossible to challenge the move in a public forum because all of the keywords associated with the program were ingrained in the hivemind as positive: war on poverty, anti-discrimination, equal rights, empowerment, etc. My interlocutor, with a deep sigh, then proclaimed: “The Left owns the rhetoric.” Never were truer words spoken. We face the same problem today. The components of Leftist ideology are so infused in our language that we hardly notice it, to the degree that we often are unable to formulate an adequate response in our own minds. We become paralyzed, without knowing why. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the bathrooms at the Capitol in Washington, DC. A few members of Congress are bravely resisting the Alphabet freak show, and I applaud their efforts. But they are hamstrung by the lexicon itself because they engage in arguments about gender. Until recently, this word was almost exclusively a linguistic term, denoting an attribute of a noun: masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the subject was people (or animals), the operative word was sex. As in male or female. If you argue over “gender,” you have already conceded half the battle. Once this linguistic battle is lost, the door is open to a torrent of twisted Orwellian doublespeak. A good example is the mind-bending term gender-affirming care to describe the genital mutilation of children. A related sleight-of-hand is the use of the third-person plural, they, in place of the grammatically correct singular form, he or she. In addition to being a linguistic atrocity, this usage serves to blur the identification of people as male or female. The language now forces us all to speak of each other as androgynous beings. Chalk up another victory for the Left. Higher culture requires the ability to identify and analyze differences, great and subtle, between people, things, and concepts. This intellectual process used to be called discrimination. We all know what happened to the word. For decades already, noticing differences between people, once obligatory in educated circles, is taboo. A final example, and this one a bit more subtle: The use of the word planet instead of world. I am hearing this more and more. “Everyone on the planet knows that…” “They have the best sausage on the planet” “No one on the planet believes that…” etc. In all cases, up until very recently, the usage would have been “in the world” instead of “on the planet.” Planet denotes a hunk of rock, an inanimate object. It is a favorite word of the Climate-Industrial Complex. In contrast, world denotes people, nations, cultures, etc. A huge difference. When we use planet, we are already sucked halfway into the Green scam, without a single argument being made. One of the signs of a civilization gone AWOL (absent without leave) is the abuse of language. The meaning of numerous words and concepts has been inverted, a phenomenon duly noted by George Orwell, and discussed at length by subsequent commentators.
A parallel development is that many words and phrases have been misused and misapplied, often as the result of rampant laziness and ignorance. These misapplications are then propagated with lightning speed throughout the society, to include purportedly educated classes of people. A particularly annoying example is the use of the term "literally." How many times must we cringe from such statements as "the politician's insulting remarks were literally a bomb tossed at the opposition." Or how about "I was literally freaking out when I heard that nonsense." We cannot have intelligent discourse when people are literally shredding the language. Whenever I hear people literally using the word literally, my head literally explodes. |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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