The Anxiety-Complacency Connection

Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.

-Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (Torsten Engelbrecht, Virus Mania, 2021)

I've been struggling to understand why it is that "The Blob" (or, as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have termed it, the "censorship-industrial complex") tolerates and even seems to embrace so many flavors of woke dogma. Many of these woke position are outright oxymorons. Here are a few examples:

Men = Woman

Carefully- gathered statistics (e.g., regarding police/race) are racist. And see here for many statistics that are inconvenient to the "abolish the police" insanity.

The Rule of Law is unfair, even racist/colonial/white supremacist etc.

Enlightenment Principles, including free speech, have become barriers to progress. See here for my articles on free speech.

Intelligence Tests (modern versions, which are highly predictive, as much as any other aspect of psychology, as well as very carefully designed to be race-neutral) are "racist."

Allowing high schoolers to take advanced math courses is racist. To preserve "equity" we must not allow such classes in high school.

I have written about all of these pronouncements at DI. I have also written repeatedly about immense pressures to conform to particular unwarranted, nonsensical and incurious narratives (see more than 250 of my articles that I have tagged as "narratives in media"), especially by corporate media outlets (which I am increasingly thinking of as government propaganda (often CIA) outlets--See Dick Russel's "Belly of the Beast" two-part article here and here. It is guaranteed to ruin your week--it can be painful when scales fall from your eyes).

My understanding from the sordid marriage between multinational corporations, U.S. foreign policy, government censorship and CIA dirty tricks is those with great economic and political power want more and more. They are never satisfied. But why allow woke ideology or even push it on us?  What does that have to do with money or power? For that, consider the quote at the beginning of this article. When those around us utter palpable bullshit, it makes us anxious, even when we know that it is bullshit (see here). It makes us stay indoors. It causes us to avoid going to school board meetings. It keeps us from speaking up at the workplace or even at family dinners. We know woke ideology makes no sense, but most of us are willing to do a LOT of work to keep others from disliking us, even if they are saying things that we know, for sure, make no sense. Even if we know that they are saying and believing these things due to a vast censorship effort funded and operated by our own government. Even if we are certain that the corporate media consensus is a false consensus enabled by a highly sophisticated government apparatus.

Hearing nonsensical things being uttered around us by family, friends and co-workers who rely on corporate media makes us anxious. In the long run, this anxiety makes us more obedient.

This leaves us with two paths in life.

#1: Run out to get yet another COVID booster, then go home to watch Disney and eat ice cream;

#2: Keep speaking up. When you hear nonsense, call it nonsense. You might be worried that if you say what you believe out loud, people will yell at you and call you names. That will, indeed, happen. But remember, for every ignorant loud mouth in the room, you have become a hero to 9 anxious and silent people who are sitting on their hands. Your job is to inspire those people to be heroes next time.

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Corporate Media Lies About NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s Ideology

It was totally predictable that the corporate media (mainstream media or MSM) is trying to pretend that there is nothing to see about recent revelations about Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR. They are pretending her illiberal woke-drenched ideology has no relevance to the illiberal woke-drenched ideology of the modern version of NPR. Andrew Sullivan also noticed this cover-up in his recent link-rich article*:

I used to be quite fond of NPR. Each time I’d tune in, I’d be treated to calm, reassuring voices, occasional folk music and high-minded liberalism. Yes, it was biased — but in a tolerable, occasionally hilarious way, still relaying facts about the world, occasionally even letting an always-qualified “conservative” voice on its airwaves. Yes, we used to refer to “All Things Considered” as “All Things Distorted,” but it was a tease, not an indictment.

And so when I read the NYT story about the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, being criticized for past tweets that were “embracing liberal causes,” it felt like a blast of ‘90s nostalgia. Who running the MSM doesn’t “embrace liberal causes”? Ditto the WSJ’s description: that the tweets “indicate liberal leanings.” Or the Washington Post, which wrote that Maher’s tweets included calling Tump a “deranged racist” and a photo of her “wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris.”

Nothing to see here. Nothing new. Just a liberal CEO getting blasted by a far-right activist (in this case, Chris Rufo), after an NPR stalwart, Uri Berliner, wrote a public critique of NPR. A tale as old as the MSM.

But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”

Sullivan also noticed that substantial drop-off in NPR audience since 2017, from 11M to about 8M. I'm not in a mood to hear about correlation and causation on these numbers . . .

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The Inversion of the Central Missions of our Sense-Making Institutions

The CEO of NPR was previously the executive director of (the now severely compromised, though still somewhat useful) Wikipedia. Katherine Maher's admission is an important data point--we don't usually get it so clearly from the top in their own words. One after another, our most important sense-making institutions in the United States have abandoned their primary missions, incentivized by tax-funded government cut-outs. Their leadership has become power-mad, narcissistic and arrogant. They see you as a child and they are your self-appointed nanny. It is totalitarianism wrapped in well-coifed elitism. Their vision clashes with the vision of the Founders of this country.

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Chris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets

What can we tell about NPR CEO Katherine Maher based on a review of her tweets?  Chris Rufo notes that she has tweeted more than 29,000 times. He has found a few themes:

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

This is the person in charge of NPR. As you can see from Rufo's article, she has also taken a hard stand in favor of censorship.

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.”

Rufo's article is titled, "Quotations from Chairman MaherNPR’s new CEO exemplifies the ideological capture of America’s institutions."

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Majority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Glenn Loury's introduction to his podcast interview of Dan Shellenberger:

Maybe my least surprising political position is advocacy for free and open discourse. Without free speech as a bedrock principle, democracy would mean little. If we can’t, as private citizens, receive, judge, and debate ideas and information, the decisions we make on the basis of that information cannot themselves be considered “free” in any meaningful sense. If some central authority prevents me from discussing information—or even the possibility of the existence of information—that could change people’s minds about that authority’s course of action, all of our rights have been damaged.

But over the last five years, a whole raft of ideas potentially threatening to dominant media and government narratives have found themselves shut out of “legitimate” discourse. Having concerns about the side effects of COVID vaccines, advocacy for the chosen presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and opposition to funding Ukraine would seem, in another time, like normal positions any person in the US could hold. And yet many legacy media outlets treat those positions as anywhere from delusional to treasonous. Such positions are often labeled as sources of “misinformation,” dangerous ideas to which, we’re told, ordinary First Amendment protections may not apply.

In an age when almost all of us rely, to some degree, on web-based platforms for our information, the line between government censorship and platform terms of service can seem vanishingly thin. In fact, in this week’s episode, the journalist Michael Shellenberger suggests the line may not exist at all. In this clip, he draws my attention to a startling poll that finds a huge increase in the number of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters who want to see the government censor “misinformation” online. But who decides what counts as misinformation? When platforms seek government guidance on that definition, we have good reason to ask whether the apparent freedom they offer is government censorship by another name.

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