Deplorables And Dhimmis 2023

This week ought to have opened a lot of people's eyes about America

Audrey Hale, America’s most visible transgender this week

Y’all know that nothing much about wokeness and its pomps and works surprises me. But even a cynic like me wouldn’t have been able to predict that only days after a transgendered person murdered six Christians in a Christian school — including three children — the Machine would have turned it into an event about how trans people are the real victims!

PoliMath @politicalmath

The message our culture is currently sending is "If you target and kill Christians, we will completely ignore the people you murdered and lavish your preferred group with money, sympathy, and encouragement." I cannot stress enough how dangerous this is https://t.co/CPhOQqaiTR

The examples are, well, legion. We can’t accurately say that the assault was anti-Christian, because the police have not announced a motive, despite having Audrey Hale’s manifesto. Maybe we will learn that there was an unexpected motive for the shooting, but the most reasonable guess at this point is that she deliberately set out to kill Christians. There was a report earlier this week that her devout parents wouldn’t accept her transness. But we aren’t going to know for sure until the police speak. Why are they being silent? Do they think they are protecting trans people?

I am absolutely confident that this killing, and the public reaction, are a sign of the times. The ruling class, which runs the Machine, hates traditional Christians. This has been clear for some time, but the way the media, the entertainment industry, and Democratic Party leaders have reacted to the slaughtering of Christians in a Christian school tells you everything you need to know. Had this been done in a mosque or a synagogue, we wouldn’t have needed the police report to have had a rush of articles about hatred of Muslims or Jews, and an outpouring of support and solidarity for Jews and Muslims in this difficult time. But when the dead are Christians, and the killer is trans, well, it’s time to show sympathy to trans people, according to the Machine.

I do wonder what on earth it’s going to take for Christians to realize that the things I warn about in The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies are not just coming — they’re already here! We all have even less time to prepare for resistance and resilience than we once did. Are you ready to live in a society where murdered Christian children calls forth sympathy and solidarity with the group represented by the murderer? Because that’s what we have. And it’s only going to get worse. They honest to God hate us and wish us ill.

I was having lunch today with an American friend who lives here in Budapest. We are both Christians and conservatives. She said that she has confidence that normal people are finally getting sick and tired of this trans tyranny. I responded that I did not share her confidence. I suspect that many, even most, people are sick of it, but they are too afraid to say so. Or maybe they have been browbeat into complacency. Think about it (I said): there are states in which the government can seize your children and put them on cross-sex hormones if you don’t want to transition them. Why aren’t people in the streets protesting this attack on families? Where are the damn churches? Our country is full of cowards and conformists who won’t lift a finger to defend families and children from — I can’t believe I’m writing this — agents of the state who will remove children from families to change their sex.

If you had said twenty years ago that this is where the “love is love” movement was going to take us, you would have been accused of hate-filled alarmism. But here we are. It’s really happening, and most of the American church doesn’t care. It’s too busy apologizing for itself, and trying to figure out how to be good dhimmis in the new woke order.

If you search the website of NPR for reporting about the Nashville shooting that addresses the hostility to Christians angle, you’ll find nothing. But if you search for reporting that addresses the transgender angle, lo and behold, you’ll find a report showing NPR’s concern that trans people are the real victims.

Meanwhile, there is discord inside National Public Radio, which is cutting back on staff following a serious decline in revenues. Layoffs were recently announced, but the woke staff aren’t happy with how it’s being handled. There was an all-hands-on-deck Zoom meeting with executives, who were roasted by the woke:

Among the requests: employees wanted to see more specific breakdowns around the number or percentage of employees of different races and identities who were laid off, rather than those of the remaining employees. They also wanted to know more information about their audiences, what the plans would be for hiring a chief content officer and more clarity about how the layoffs were carried out.

But the already tense environment boiled over during an exchange between CEO Lansing and a laid-off Black employee. That employee voiced concern that some podcasts hadn’t received marketing support and wondered how a show could gain audience without it. This person also listed executives’ names and repeated statements they had made in the past, asking for more accountability.

The individual then asked how NPR would make diversity work essential. Lansing replied that all the organization’s programming should be relevant to all of America — a stated mission for NPR

Yeah, I have a lot of Schadenfreude about NPR being hoist on its own woke petard. The idea that NPR’s programming is “relevant to all of America” is a bad joke. Americans who are politically, culturally, or religiously conservative are invisible to NPR — except when they are the enemy. NPR drank the DEI Kool-Aid to the dregs. It deserves what it gets.

I know what you’re thinking: Dreher just won’t shut up, will he? We all know how bad wokeness is. He’s just bouncing the rubble now.

Maybe I am — but I’m telling you, the way the Machine has united behind the pro-trans narrative, even in reporting and commenting on Nashville, has caused more scales to fall from my eyes. Especially in light of this extremely important piece in Tablet magazine by Jacob Siegel, about the rise of tyranny built on fighting “disinformation”. Here’s the core thesis:

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

More:

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.

At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.

In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.

Note this:

It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

And:

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

One more:

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

I beg you, read the whole thing. There is no sign at all that Jacob Siegel has read Live Not By Lies, but this is exactly what I was writing in 2020, when it was published: that we are living through the technology-driven creation of a new kind of totalitarianism, within the hollowed-out husk of liberal democracy. The people who grew up under Communism recognized that something like it was coming back — but even they were mystified, because it didn’t look precisely like Communism. My judgment is that they couldn’t understand it clearly, that they were going on intuition, because Communism was forthright in its anti-liberal, totalitarian aims. This new thing is disguised — and it disguises itself as compassion, as empathy, as inclusion.

Do not be fooled! The Machine knows what it’s doing. The gaslighting we’re all being subjected to over the meaning of Nashville is the ordinary functioning of the Machine. We are nowhere near being able to defeat it.

I urge you to read this 2022 TAC piece from a while back by former high-level US official and CIA officer Nicholas Kass, writing about the lessons regarding the Deep State from Turkish history. It was the Turks who came up with the term and the concept of the “Deep State”. He recalls how, back in the late 1990s, the Kemalist (secular) Deep State deployed all its powers to stop an Islamist populist prime minister. Eventually one of the deputies of that defeated PM was elected, and has consolidated power. I’m talking about Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Kass wrote:

America is not Turkey. Nevertheless, the ease with which the Deep State narrative has planted itself in the American political consciousness owes a great deal to the increasingly evident factors America now indisputably shares with that particular Turkish experience. The consolidation of elite, oligarchic, managerial, bureaucratic, and ideological class interests at the apex of power, the casual equation of those “progressive” interests with the public good, the eagerness with which many ruling class representatives seek to manipulate and limit public discourse, and demonize non-progressive opponents as unenlightened, deplorable, traitorous, and unworthy of consideration—with scant regard to the consequences of such framing—suggest little willingness to accommodate. Indeed, among American elites, notions of prudence and tolerance have given way to a radical impulse to impose upon society—for the people, in spite of the people. 

So, the Trump indictment. The Left thinks they finally have Trump by the ya-yas, and that this is going to be the end of him. Again, I remind you that I want Trump to go away, and am supporting DeSantis for president. That said, the woke Manhattan DA going after Trump on such flimsy grounds is going to make Trump and the MAGA movement more powerful than it was before. Why? Because it’s so clear that this is the Machine, this is the Deep State, targeting him. I say this even if Trump is guilty of the specific charges; even some legal critics who hate Trump have said this is a shaky indictment. It’s going to cause a political explosion. Trump may end up returned to office as an American Erdogan. I think he’s dangerous, but not as dangerous as Joe Biden and the Machine — the Machine that reacts to the massacre of Christians, even Christian children, by a transgender by broadcasting the narrative that Trans People Are The True Victims.

We’ll end today with new data showing shocking American decline. The Financial Times writes about how the average American has the same life expectancy of someone born in the poorest city in England. Look at these data:

As the FT reporter points out, Americans are FAR wealthier on average than the English. And still, we’re dying younger. The great Chris Arnade, tweeting on the FT findings:

The US Ruling Class — especially the media — despises these Deplorables. We spend so much money and deploy so much hard power and soft power to remake the world in America’s image — but who wants to be like us? Miserable. Dying young. Alienated, No hope. Who wants to live in a country where the culture teaches your children that they might be of the opposite sex, and, depending on where you live, the state can kidnap your children and put them on cross-sex hormones? Who wants to live in a country where the DAs in your leading cities won’t prosecute street crimes? Where the Ruling Class is instituting racism under the Orwellian guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

Where little Christian children are shot dead by a transgender berserker, and the Ruling Class politicians and media sympathize with transgenders?

Who wants this? Nobody with any sense. And the American people might sooner or later rise out of their apathy and demoralization, and dismantle this soft totalitarian order. If they don’t? I can’t bear to think about it.

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