"A Tale of Two PSYOPS" by CJ Hopkins

 

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Source: CJ Hopkins

	A Tale of Two PSYOPS CJ Hopkins Nov 15   READ IN APP   Once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, there was born a global-capitalist empire. It was the first global empire in the history of empires. It dominated the entire planet. No one knew what to call the empire, because there had never been anything like it in history. It had no external adversaries, so it had nothing left to do but “clear and hold,” i.e., neutralize internal resistance and consolidate its domination of the planet. So that is what it set about doing. It did this first in the territories of its final ideological adversary, an empire called the Soviet Union, the ideology of which was known as “Communism.” This was known as the “Post-Cold-War Era.” It did this next in the Greater Middle East, where people were still trying to live their lives according to a religion known as “Islam.” This was known as the “Global War on Terror.” The Global War on Terror was originally intended to go on forever, and it would have, and it will, but it had to be temporarily suspended, and rebranded, because something unexpected happened. One day, in the Summer of 2016 — theretofore officially “The Summer of Fear” — the global-capitalist empire noticed that a new form of resistance to its domination of the entire planet had risen up, not in the former Soviet Union, or the Greater Middle East, but throughout the West, right in the very heart of the empire. And so the War on Terror was suspended, and the War on Populism began. The War on Populism raged for four years, and culminated in the rollout of the New Normal, officially known as “the Covid pandemic.” For over two years, i.e., from March 2020 to approximately December 2022, the global-capitalist empire morphed into a new form of totalitarianism, a global-capitalist form of totalitarianism, which was not like any other previous form of totalitarianism. This period was the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal Reich. The transition to the New Normal Reich was broadcast throughout the global empire. The message was unmistakeably clear. From now on, there would be a “New Normal.” It would be like a permanent state of war, a permanent state of civil war. And so, from now on everyone would need to pledge their allegiance to the New Normal Reich, and follow orders, or be labelled an “extremist,” a “science denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” or some other type of seditious deviant. The vast majority of the citizens of the West understood the message, followed orders, and pledged allegiance to the New Normal Reich. But a sizeable minority did not. The global-capitalist empire needed to neutralize this sizeable minority. The majority of this sizeable minority was comprised of conservative, libertarian, and other basically right-leaning people. It contained a few old-school left-leaning people, but they were a minority within a minority, and so they weren’t really a factor when it came to neutralizing the larger minority, which the empire promptly set about doing. The Free-Speech Twitter PSYOP In October 2022, Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire military contractor, electric car salesman, and transhumanism enthusiast, and a coterie of serious global-capitalist entities and individuals purchased the social media platform known as Twitter, Inc. for 44 billion US dollars. Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters grinning like a chimpanzee and carrying a bathroom sink, and the Free-Speech Twitter PSYOP began. During the War on Populism and the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal Reich, Twitter, Inc., and every other social-media platform and mass-media outlet in the Western world, had been functioning as the empire’s Ministry of Truth, disseminating official New Normal propaganda, censoring dissent, and unpersoning anyone challenging the empire’s official narratives. And thus, it provided the perfect stage for the PSYOP the empire was about to conduct. Musk reinstated a number of prominent, primarily conservative Twitter accounts that had been deplatformed for “posting misinformation” about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the “Covid vaccines,” and for posting “incitement” and “glorification of violence,” and bigotry and other such offensive content, among them, the account of Donald Trump, and tens of thousands of Trump supporters. As Elon had promised, “the bird was freed”! Elon acolytes and grateful garden-variety Trumpians and other right-leaning persons poured onto Twitter to thank their savior for reversing the company’s target demographic, thus saving America from “Cultural Marxism,” and “Communism,” and the “Woke Mind Virus.” The PSYOP continued with a textbook limited hangout known as the “Twitter Files.” Musk let a few carefully selected journalists run a few searches at Twitter HQ, which exposed how the former staff of Twitter had been collaborating with elements of the Biden administration (i.e., not the global-capitalist empire) to censor and deplatform people — mostly those in the new “red” target demographic — and was part of some strictly-USA-operated “Censorship Industrial Complex,” which was absolutely not a global operation, and had nothing to do with any global-capitalist empire, or a “New Normal Reich,” because all the censorship and “shadowbanning” — which was all in the past now that Elon was in charge — was the work of a cabal of deep-state libtard bureaucrats, who were all a bunch of “Commies.” These revelations in the “Twitter Files” prompted Republicans in the US Congress to hold a series of subcommittee hearings into the possibly unconstitutional behavior of the Biden administration and its libtard proxies (i.e., not the global-capitalist empire), which had forced Twitter, Inc., and the other totally helpless Internet corporations to “shadowban” and censor Americans (i.e., not everyone else all throughout the empire that these corporations were also censoring in a clearly coordinated fashion). And then, right on cue, once the story had been framed within a US-centric “red/blue” narrative, Musk shut the “Twitter Files” limited hangout down, i.e., before it could do any damage to the global-capitalist empire itself. For the next two years, Elon and his cronies inundated their new target-demographic with “Free-Speech-Twitter” propaganda, sentimental Elon Musk-hagiography, and a never-ending series of PR-stunts. Twitter was officially rebranded as “X.” Musk went to war with Brazil’s Darth Vader, and Thierry Breton, and assorted other “Commies.” Twitter users were besieged with memes of Elon dressed up as Captain Free-Speech America. Et cetera. And so the Musk Cult was born. Meanwhile, X is continuing to censor and “visibility-filter” content at the behest of governments throughout the empire, as well as in furtherance of its own objectives. If you think that fact has had a negative impact on the Free-Speech Twitter PSYOP, on the contrary, the Musk Cult has only grown broader and stronger. Like any other cult, it is impervious to facts. All that matters is loyalty to the cult, and the leader of the cult, and the cult’s official narrative. You can direct Musk cultists to the Twitter Safety pages where “visibility filtering” is explained, and cite countless examples of Musk’s hypocrisy, and it will have absolutely no effect whatsoever. Like every other successful cult leader, Elon is beyond reproach, incapable of sin, a god made flesh. But deifying Elon was not the primary objective of the Free-Speech Twitter PSYOP. The primary objective of the Free-Speech Twitter PSYOP was to harness, corral, and establish control over the majority of the sizeable minority of people who refused to follow orders and pledge allegiance to the New Normal Reich when it was rolled out during the “Covid pandemic.” These people needed to be herded into a manipulable mass and redirected away from the global-capitalist empire and into a harmless cul-de-sac where they could scream and shout at the empire’s designated scapegoats to their heart’s content. The Musk Cult was just a means of herding and leading them into this cul-de-sac. “Free-Speech Twitter” is this cul-de-sac, and is a microcosm of a larger cul-de-sac. Which brings us to the second PSYOP. The America Made Great Again PSYOP One of the most effective ways to neutralize an opponent is to let them win. This is especially true when you’re dealing with an opponent you can never entirely defeat. What you do is, you lure your opponent into a battle you can afford to lose, because you need to actually lose the battle, and let your opponent actually win, i.e., not just trick them into thinking they have won, because … well, your opponent isn’t stupid. This battle that you lure your opponent into and let them win will be a battle over a territory within a territory, but which your opponent believes is “the territory.” You can afford to lose control of this territory within a territory because you control the territory it exists within, and because your opponent doesn’t know that. The trick is getting your opponent to believe that, by winning this battle, they have won “the war,” and that they now control “the territory,” and have destroyed you, or have otherwise removed you from power, when, actually, all that your opponent has destroyed or removed from power is a corporeal decoy, a material incarnation of an invisible, immaterial adversary, an adversary they do not know exists, or which they refuse to acknowledge the existence of … assuming, of course, that is what you are. At which point, you have neutralized your opponent. For example, say you’re a global empire, a supranational global-capitalist empire, and say your opponent is a populist insurgency, a potentially revolutionary mass, that you need to distract from contemplating your supranational, invisible, immaterial nature, and from the fact that the governments of nation-states are essentially administrative components of this invisible immaterial empire that you are, and thus it doesn’t really matter to you which political party administers these nation-states or who the leaders of these parties are, because they can’t really do much damage to you, because all they control are the material territories within the immaterial territory you control, which predetermines the context and the scope of their actions, and the parameters of their imaginations, and … OK, you probably see where this is going. Or, I don’t know, maybe you don’t. So let me try to simplify it. There is no “America” to make great again. “America” is a simulation. It is a map of a territory that does not exist. It is a dream within a dream in a film that no one can see because everyone is watching. It is a brand name for an imaginary product. OK, that didn’t make it any simpler, did it? Let me try this one more time. We are living in a global-capitalist empire. One big global-capitalist empire. We have been for the last thirty-something years. All of us. Americans. Canadians. The British. The French. Australians. Germans. Russians. Israelis. Palestinians. Iranians. All of us. The global-capitalist empire is not a cabal of powerful individuals. It is a system. And that system is evolving. Metamorphosing. Transmogrifying. Evolving into a new form of totalitarianism. A global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. It is the system, and not its servants, that is driving … driving this systemic evolution. It makes no difference whether Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Macron, or Starmer, or Netanyahu, or Gates, or Bezos, or Soros, or any other political “leader” or powerful figure knows what they are doing. They serve the system, as the system requires, each according to their specific role and scope of action within the system. Elon Musk did not “save free speech” or “rescue Twitter” from a “Woke Mind Virus.” He purchased a corporation and rebranded its product for new market demographic. In so doing, he corralled and neutralized most of the conservative populist resistance to the evolution of the global-capitalist system … which is what the system needed to happen. It makes no difference whether Elon Musk understood his role. He played it perfectly. He is continuing to play it perfectly. The Musk Cult is growing. Its apostles are preaching the Gospel of Elon throughout the empire, paving the road to The Privatization of Everything! Verily, it is the dawn of a golden age of “Freedom” ruled by global corporations and beneficent oligarchs! However, before that golden age can begin, America must be made great again! And so the Free-Speech Twitter PSYOP has to be repeated on the macro-level. The same conservative populist resistance to the evolution of the global-capitalist system that Musk corralled and neutralized needs to be corralled and neutralized everywhere … not just in America, everywhere, all throughout the West and the rest of the empire. Once it is corralled, and neutralized, and whipped up into a frenzy over “Wokeness,” “Cultural Marxism,” and “Communism,” it can be unleashed on the remnants of the dying age of nation-states, national sovereignty, constitutions, and so on, which will prompt the Global Powers That Be to take extreme measures to “defend democracy,” which will prompt the Other Global Powers That Be to take more extreme measures to “Rescue the Republic,” which will prompt the Global Powers That Be to take even more extreme extreme measures to “defend democracy from fascism” and … OK, this time, I do think you see where this is going. Or, I don’t know, maybe you don’t. But I don’t think I can make it any simpler. And I don’t see any way to stop it or fix it. It isn’t an error to be corrected. It is the organic evolution of a system … a supranational system evolving into a new totalitarian form. So, there you have it, a tale of two PSYOPS. I’m sorry that it isn’t as comforting as a story about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their global-capitalist investors, and their subsidiaries, agents, and assigns, are going to “make America great again.” If it’s any consolation, one thing is certain … whatever happens, it won’t be boring.

"Capitalist radicals will shatter the world" by Quinn Slobodian

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Capitalist radicals will shatter the world

Fragmentation is the new frontier of liberty

BY QUINN SLOBODIAN

“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are living through.” The surprise ending to the Cold War was followed by a period that many remember as one of global consciousness: a time of capitalist triumphalism, human rights talk, and corporate extension across borders, oceans, and continents. President George H. W. Bush gave the complex a name in 1990 when he praised the “New World Order”. The decade is marked in historical memory by a trend towards the scaling up of institutions: the World Trade Organisation, the European Union, NAFTA — new encasements for planetary supply chains.

But there were signs of an alternative timeline if you looked closely, one marked by fragmentation as much as unity. Cultural events rippled in the consciousness; there were traces of the possibility that the apparent age of integration might actually be one of fracture.

The two Germanys unified in 1991 but the Soviet Union dissolved the same year. Mikhail Gorbachev was dubbed a “hero of deconstruction”. Yugoslavia began its disintegration shortly afterwards. In late 1991, the Somali state descended into a civil war and would have no central state for over a decade. The Swiss People’s Party racked up supporters as it drafted people against membership in the UN. The Freedom Party in Austria sought to revive nationalism along with the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, and the National Front in France. In Italy, the Northern League called for the secession of Lombardy. Many of the mainstream press’s post-2016 “populist” villains appeared on the stage in the early Nineties.

Pundits were hard on the trail of this alternative plot. In The Atlantic in 1994, Robert D. Kaplan warned of “the coming anarchy”. “Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change,” he wrote, “but it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning.” Kaplan foresaw “an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged glass pattern of city-states, shanty states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms”.

How to envision this world? Francis Fukuyama had borrowed “the Last Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche. Kaplan proposed a “Last Map”, three-dimensional and holographic:

“In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional colour markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving ‘centres’ of power, as in the Middle Ages.”

“This future map,” he concluded, “will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.” Of course, the goal of Kaplan’s map, appearing in the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, was to contain and control the chaos. It recalled the oversized maps of Cold War thrillers from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to WarGames (1983). Bruce Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net (1988) also featured a global simulation called Worldrun, used “as a forecasting tool for development agencies” and also as a game. In the interface, “long strips of the Earth’s surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption.”

The Last Map’s vision of anarchy was dystopian — a future to be avoided at any cost. This is the dominant perspective one gets from the airport bookshelves and magazine racks: the anxieties of those who perceive themselves to have access to the levers of power, the mapmakers, those who need to figure out how the dials can be tweaked to return order from disorder. Implicitly and often explicitly, this is a story about the reassertion of American overseas power. In a phrase he would repeat variations of for decades, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1988 that “the only alternative to America is anarchy”.

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Should America be more like Ukraine?

BY MARK LILLA

But there were others who saw the crack-up coming and cheered it on. After the Cold War’s end, they surveyed the globe and thought: now that capitalism had won, why not go all the way? Fragmentation, they believed, was the new frontier of liberty. Paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and conservatives like Charles Murray and Paul Craig Roberts opposed the moves to greater integration that marked the Nineties, cheered the hardening of borders and called for the revision of immigration laws to discriminate against people from blacker and browner countries, revived race science to support their claims. Some dug deep into medieval history to claim that segregation was good and small collectives should protect their own. They promoted, in other words, many of the principles associated now with the far-Right.

Yet they all had something in common: they were market liberals and libertarians. How did people from the supposed camp of open borders become champions of higher and thicker walls? How did adherents of an ideology supposedly built around the universal figure of homo economicus embrace hoary theories of genetically determined intelligence and ignorance? When did zealous advocates of global markets turn against what one called “the beast” of the “New World Order”?

When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined after the First World War. National economies were layered over with private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

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The American experiment has just begun

BY ANTON JÄGER

The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity — as “neoliberal”.

To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats — often from democracy itself.

The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events. Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon Smith.

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America is showing its age

BY ADAM SMITH

What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won. At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.

Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.

Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:

“Look at the reaction in the US to the collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”

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Larkin's lesson for Northern Ireland

BY TOM MCTAGUE

At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.

In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration. Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.

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Are you an extremist?

BY TERRY EAGLETON

This post-Cold War period was a historically sublime moment: capitalism had won but what capitalism meant was still undecided. Libertarians were among the most active in this process of re-imagination, with solutions from designing boutique polities and bespoke states to rehabbing existing zones, colonies, and city-states. For these thinkers states should dissolve into platform polities and “start-up societies” offering customised services to customers instead of securing rights for citizens.

For decades, these capitalist radicals surveyed the world for experiments in anarchocapitalism comparable to existing favourites, such as the Wild West or medieval Iceland. They started their own experiments in “micro-ordering” and sparked wide-ranging discussions about the basic requirements for building collective life and the foundational facts of human nature. When Silicon Valley prophets such as Peter Thiel said in 2009 that “if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries”, he was speaking out of this alternative zeitgeist. Anyone who thinks globalism is the only way that capitalist radicalism manifests itself should acquaint themselves with those less interested in scaling up than scaling down and opting out.

Quinn Slobodian is a historian of modern Europe and the world. He is the author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, out on 4 April 2023.

@zeithistoriker