Matt Taibbi on the State of the Campaigns

Matt Taibbi has eyes and ears that work, unlike the so-called journalists of corporate media organizations. An excerpt:

[T]he campaign is pure chaos, Pompeii after the blast. In the annals of presidential races we haven’t experienced many days like yesterday, July 31, which ended with the futures of all major candidates appearing hopelessly clouded. Forget the national debt; there are now not-improbable scenarios in which the main issues in next year’s debates, which could easily involve both nominees in ankle monitors, are nuclear fallout and alien visitation. Our leaders, who once had the election process reduced to scripts more predictable than Everybody Loves Raymond, now seem to have no clue what will happen beyond the next few minutes.

If not for the fact that the disintegration of American society might be imminent as a result, I’d be laughing harder. It might be funny anyway. Consider: the establishment plan for the Republican Party this cycle was clearly Ron DeSantis, but a New York Times/Siena poll published yesterday shows he’s plunging like a stone, falling to 17%, a.k.a. 37 points behind Donald Trump...

Incumbent Joe Biden not only has the lowest approval rating in history — he “shouldn’t” be this unpopular “but he is,” mused a mortified Washington Post — but as of Monday, when his son’s former partner Devon Archer testified in Congress, he appeared to be careening toward withdrawal due to impairment, scandal, or both. [P]apers like the New York Times and Washington Post . . . are suddenly filled with baleful criticisms of Biden, appearing to notice flaws for the first time. Pamela Paul in the Times compared her dread feelings about a Biden-Trump rematch to Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, whose premise is an inexorable collision of a rogue planet with Earth.

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Why Our Government and our “News” Outlets Get the Facts So Very Wrong? It’s not an Accident.

Michael Shellenberger sets forth the official narrative in his June 29, 2023 presentation, which you can view at Public. This is a detailed litany, a tour de force of the items of faith that our sense-making institutions (including the federal government, federal law enforcement, universities and "news" outlets) have been telling us that we must believe. If you fail to proclaim that you believe these things, you will pay a steep price. You will be ostracized by many of your friends, you will be less unemployable and you will be made invisible. You will be condemned to secular hell. If you give in and agree to proclaim the truth of these many false things, doors to public spaces will remain open to you and you can continue basking in the shallow warmth of social rectitude.

As various social media memes have recently pointed out, George Orwell's book, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a recipe for revamping society. Despite that, we are now living in an age that is truly Orwellian, an era where our most fundamental civic principle, free speech, is being attacked by your Keepers so that they can maintain control over your thoughts and your vote. George Carlin saw this coming many years ago when he described "The American Dream," and it has arrived.

If you often find yourself sitting on your hands in silence, forcing yourself to swallow your doubts as our public institutions declare blatant falsehoods, please invest an hour in Michael Shellenberger's video. You will see well-documented disturbing facts on the ground. You are not alone. You are not crazy. It's time for you to begin speaking up when something does not make sense to you. Say what is on your mind even though an insecure person, an acolyte, will call you a mean name.

The Title to Shellenberger's presentation is "Escape The Woke Matrix: A pathological religion is destroying our civilization."

I had the pleasure on Monday of giving a keynote address to the students and faculty of the University of Austin titled “Escape The Woke Matrix.” In it, I argue that Western civilization is being rapidly taken over by a psychopathological religion, and that we must resist it by exposing it for what it is, and re-grounding our institutions in love of humanity, civilization, and freedom...

Behind the war on free speech is the same totalitarianism we have been watching sweep over the Western world for several years. It is relentless and uncompromising. It is driven by bullying people full of dogma and hatred of dissident views.

The totalitarians are well-resourced and powerful, while we have few resources and are just starting to find each other. But we believe our love of humanity, civilization, and freedom will conquer their hatred, as it has so many other times in the past.

It’s not enough to condemn, we must also seek to understand, and explain. We are going toe-to-toe with an opponent that would put us in prison for wrongthink. We must stand up to their bullying, and break their hyponotic trance over the population. That is how we will escape from the woke matrix.

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Whence “Liberals”?

I abhor Donald Trump. I canvassed for Bernie Sanders. I considered myself to be "liberal" until what seems to be the majority of liberals who I know turned pro-censorship, war-friendly, trusting of the FBI & CIA, abandoning the working class in most things except rhetoric, willing to applaud authoritarian measures during COVID & clueless that they were being played by the corporate media on numerous major issues including Russiagate. The majority of these people wouldn't recognize themselves if they time-traveled to meet themselves from ten years ago. For several years I have considered myself to be politically homeless.

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Increasing Numbers of Left Wing Voters Side with the U.S. Government on Censorship and Spying

Modern day Democrats have become much more pro-censorship and much more in favor of U.S. government spying on its own citizens. You won't hear the full import of these stories from the NYT/WP/MSNBC/CNN or NPR. They treat you like infants, protecting you from "harmful" ideas. God forbid that they might fall off-narrative, thus incurring the wrath of the DNC. Glenn Greenwald operates differently. He treats his followers like adults. He recently did a two-hour deep dive on both stories on his show, System Update, which you can see on Rumble. Not Youtube, which now has a long proud history of censoring information it doesn't like.

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Matt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."

[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

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