So, the quadrennial simulation of democracy in the USA is getting underway, and personally, I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a challenging few years for unincorporated political satirists like myself. The roll-out of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism hasn’t been particularly funny. In fact, it has been extremely not funny. Squeezing a little humor out of it has been like trying to suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

Not that the New Normal Reich is history … on the contrary, it is just getting started. Yes, the shock-and-awe campaign is over. It’s been over for the better part of a year. We are deep into the mistakes-were-made/limited-hangout phase of the changeover. Nothing can stop or reverse it now. The implementation of the new official (i.e., Orwellian) reality is a fait accompli. What actually happened has been memory-holed, forever, supplanted by stories of censorious “bad apples,” “overreactions,” lab leaks, and so on. Those who are old enough will recall this phase from the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. It’s going pretty much by the numbers.

Which … fine. That “reality” stuff was ruining my shtick. No one wants to be told that they’re the victim of an elaborate PSYOP, which is what I’ve been doing for the past three years, with one demographic after another. First, I alienated most of my friends and colleagues, and even family members, by challenging “The Science” (which has now been debunked) and opposing the transformation of the planet into a pathologized-totalitarian police state. Then, when I warned people about Elon Musk and the whitewashing of Twitter, or X, or whatever we are calling his Chinese-style “everything app,” which, if Elon has his way, we’re all going to “live on” in the visibility-filtered, advert-saturated, dystopian, global-capitalist future … well, that pretty much did it for the rest of my audience.

Not you, of course … the other rest of my audience. See, part of the genius of the New Normal Reich is how it has completely polarized society. It has systematically divided the masses into two irreconcilable warring camps, both of which demand absolute conformity to their dogma from their respective members. That isn’t to imply that there’s parity between them. The one camp, “the New Normals,” is backed by state and corporate power. The other camp, “the anti-New Normals,” is not. It’s no secret where my sympathies lie.

The problem, for me, is, I don’t do well in camps. Any kind of camps. I’m not a camp person. I have an aversion to self-appointed leaders, or an oppositional-defiant disorder, or something. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many movements congeal into irrelevant countercultural ghettos where people blow off steam in a virtual vacuum and get preyed on by hucksters and ten-cent gurus … or 240-billion-dollar gurus.

So, screw it, I’m going back to comedy, or at least I’m going to give it a try, and the upcoming US election season should provide me with the perfect material!

For example, this piece in The New Republic about the horror a new Trump term would bring. It’s basically a “Return of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of the Son of Hitler”-type piece … you know, like one of those 1970s Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee.

That’s right, he’s back … Trumpenstein, the monster! It’s the Second Coming of Literal Hitler! Vladimir Putin’s personal cock holster! The pussy-grabbing Destroyer of Worlds! According to Brynn Tannehill and The New Republic, it is “goodbye NATO … goodbye democracy!” Hello to the new-and-improved Trumpian Reich!

To folks who know their 20th-Century history, the story-line will be eerily familiar. Like Hitler returning from Landsberg prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf after the “Beer Hall Putsch” …

“[Trump] is coming back with the entire conservative apparatus at his back, having spent four years in the wilderness methodically planning how to permanently alter the political and legal landscape of the country to favor an anti-democratic minority.”

Apparently, Trump’s evil master plan this time revolves around reinstituting “Schedule F” for federal employees, which would allow him to fire anyone with “policy-making authority” and replace them with hate-crazed Nazi fanatics. Brynn explains the utter horror this will lead to.

“… a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.”

Shortly thereafter, the genocide will begin.

“The right intends to use every power of the government to eradicate anything it considers woke, particularly transgender people.”

According to Brynn, once Trump has mass-murdered all the transgender people, and the gay people, and women, and presumably the Jews, and African-Americans, and whoever else he’s planning to mass-murder, he will fire and replace all the generals and admirals, arrest all his political and personal enemies, and declare himself American Führer for life!

The next Trump administration would be worse, because this time they’d be coming in with a plan. https://t.co/AqeyXE8ByN

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) July 31, 2023

And so on. I think you get the idea. The most powerful propaganda machine in the history of propaganda is revving up again. It’s going to be a year-long Two Minutes Hate, with Donald Trump playing the part of Goldstein. The message is, Trump, and his master, Putin, and THE FORCES OF UNSPEAKABLE HITLERIAN EVIL, and Covid, and global boiling, and whatever, are slouching toward Washington to DESTROY DEMOCRACY, and, this time, they’re not screwing around! The only way to prevent the Trumpocalypse will be to visibility-filter the hell out of everything (except, of course, for free-speech Twitter), lock down everyone when things get unruly, and just basically go full-blown totalitarian again. It won’t be very difficult to set in motion. All they will need to do is get Rachel Maddow to shriek “IMMINENT COVID GLOBAL-WARMING INSURRECTION!” and the New Normal masses will strap on their masks and start clicking heels and following orders.

Seriously, they’re already breaking out the Trump-is-Literally-Hitler routine, and the official election season hasn’t even started!

Selfishly speaking, I can’t wait for it to begin. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not going to let him win again, but they’re clearly preparing to whip the masses into a full-blown frenzy of ass-puckering PARANOIA and MINDLESS HATRED of anyone even marginally deviating from official ideology, and I plan to milk that show for as many laughs as possible. I may not be able to stop what’s coming, but, in the immortal words of a very drunk Jim Morrison, I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Of course, I’ll probably be doing that in my new accommodations in German prison, where I’ll be serving time for comparing the roll-out of the New Normal to the rise of Nazi Germany. For those of you who think I’m joking, I am not. I am under criminal investigation in Berlin for comparing New Normal totalitarianism to Nazism, which, comparing anything to the Nazis is strictly prohibited in Germany … unless, of course, you’re comparing Trump to the Nazis, in which case, that’s fine …

… or, as the Germans like to say, in Ordnung!

Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

32. In one remarkable email, the Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”

None of the leaders of this effort to police Covid speech had health expertise. pic.twitter.com/UUd50ZaghG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

… because that’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

I am also sure I was hallucinating yesterday, because, right in the middle of my hallucination, right around the time that Stacey Plaskett started squawking like a demon pterodactyl, I had another hallucination, like my hallucinating self was hallucinating, which was like being in a Christopher Nolan film. In this one, Matt asked me to talk about how I was being censored by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., and their governmental and NGO partners in 2021, and I started babbling all this “conspiracy theory” stuff about the very “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” that Matt and Shellenberger were testifying about in the hallucination I appeared to be hallucinating the other hallucination in.

And then my hallucination got weird.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve indulged in any seriously mind-bending drugs, but this reminded me of a bad LSD trip, like when Satan starts talking to you through the TV. There I was, happily hallucinating these two distinguished independent journalists who had done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance and had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all went dark and twisted.

Stacey Plaskett, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Matt and Shellenberger like Joe McCarthy in drag. Trembling with hatred, she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and “threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan, the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening remarks.

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some hate-drunk witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to resign as the DNC Chair for rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on. Sylvia Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in an ass-kicking contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents who conspired against him (i.e., Allred) personally, and then lectured Matt about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy theorist.” Stephen Lynch went full-McCarthy, demanding that the witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016 election.”

And so on. I told you things got twisted. Thank God it was just an hallucination and not a live, televised demonstration of precisely what I have been trying to describe the emergence of for the last six years, which is a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our “democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation, and even “malinformation,” and corporate-owned political puppets feel no compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on television because they know they have the fearsome power of the global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or absurd, and will spew their mindless hatred at whomever they are ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

Anyway, thank God that was just a bad flashback, or a minor cerebral infarction, or whatever, because, if it wasn’t … what a total bummer!

OK, seriously now, I assume that some of my regular readers might be confused by this essay. After all, I have been rather critical of Elon Musk and his handling of the “Twitter Files.” And now, here I am, celebrating Matt and Shellenberger’s testimony yesterday. Did I not call the Twitter Files a limited hangout? Yes, I did. And I will do it again. But not today. Today I will celebrate. I will raise a glass to Matt and Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and the other Twitter Files journalists. I will even raise a glass to Elon Musk (who continues to maliciously defame and censor me and others like me with fake “content warnings” and other such slimy censorship tactics) for making the Twitter Files available to them.

If that baffles you … well, let me tell you a secret.

The way this little ecosystem works is, writers like me don’t get to testify on television before subcommittees. Actual journalists get to do that. Actual journalists who are “normal” enough. Actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, et al. You know who I’m talking about. Actual journalists who know where the lines are, who aren’t going to start babbling about “Pathologized Totalitarianism” and “The New Normal Reich” on national television. What writers like me do get to do (and what it is our job to do) is subtly influence, gently pressure, and pester the living hell out of actual journalists who still have a shred of integrity left by saying the things they cannot say, or saying them in a way that they cannot say them, until the time comes when they can almost say them, because we have said them over and over again, and more or less everyone can see them, so it is finally safe to say them, almost.

OK, sure, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’s fun, and I tend to sleep fairly well.

So, don’t worry, I’ll get back to doing that shortly. The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” is a much bigger story than just the US division. I’ll be prodding Matt and the other Twitter Files journalists to prod Elon Musk to bring in international journalists to cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Feel free to join in the fun. Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how this photo simultaneously appeared in every paper of record on the planet in January of 2020 … that is, if we’re not all locked away in “conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

In the meantime, kudos to the Twitter Files Team!

Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog.

Understanding what we’re facing is necessary if we’re going to face it properly. It’s counterproductive to sugarcoat it with platitudes like, “We can win if we all work together, y’all!” The reality is this: We may fight and still lose. The enemy is willing to risk our lives to achieve their goals as they’ve proven time and again for the last five or six years. This is why C.J.’s article is so important. We cannot treat the globalist threat of totalitarianism the same way we’d protest a tax increase. This really is an existential threat we face and we must treat it as the highest possible level of severity. With that said, here’s C.J.’s article with inconsequential edits for clarity…

It feels like it’s finally over, doesn’t it, the whole “apocalyptic pandemic” thing? I mean, really, really over this time. Not like all those other times when you thought it was over, but it wasn’t over, and was like the end of those Alien movies, where it seems like Ripley has finally escaped, but the alien is hiding out in the shuttle, or the escape pod, or Ripley’s intestinal tract.

But this time doesn’t feel like that. This time it feels like it’s really, really over. Go out and take a look around. Hardly anyone is wearing masks anymore (except where masks are mandatory) or being coerced into submitting to “vaccinations” (except where “vaccination” is mandatory), and the hordes of hate-drunk New Normal fanatics who demanded that “the Unvaccinated” be segregated, censored, fired from their jobs, and otherwise demonized and persecuted, have all fallen silent (except for those who haven’t).

Everything is back to normal, right?

Wrong. Everything is not back to normal. Everything is absolutely New Normal. What is over is the “shock-and-awe” phase, which was never meant to go on forever. It was always only meant to get us here.

Where, you’re probably asking, is “here”? “Here” is a place where the new official ideology has been firmly established as our new “reality,” woven into the fabric of normal everyday life. No, not everywhere, just everywhere that matters. (Do you really think the global-capitalist ruling classes care what people in Lakeland, Florida, Elk River, Idaho, or some village in Sicily believe about “reality”?) Yes, most government restrictions have been lifted, mainly because they are no longer necessary, but in centers of power throughout the West, in political, corporate, and cultural spheres, in academia, the mainstream media, and so on, the New Normal has become “reality,” or, in other words, “just the way it is,” which is the ultimate goal of every ideology.

For example, I just happened upon this “important COVID-19 information,” which you need to be aware of (and strictly adhere to) if you want to attend a performance at this Off-Broadway theater in New York City, where “everything is back to normal.”

I could pull up countless further examples, but I don’t want to waste your time. At this point, it isn’t the mask and “vaccination” mandates themselves that are important. They are simply the symbols and rituals of the new official ideology, an ideology that has divided societies into two irreconcilable categories of people: (1) those who are prepared to conform their beliefs to the official narrative of the day, no matter how blatantly ridiculous it is, and otherwise click heels and follow the orders of the global-capitalist ruling establishment, no matter how destructive and fascistic they may be; and (2) those who are not prepared to do that.

Let’s go ahead and call them “Normals” and “Deviants.” I think you know which one you are.

This division of society into two opposing and irreconcilable classes of people cuts across and supersedes old political lines. There are Normals and Deviants on both the Left and the Right. The global-capitalist ruling establishment couldn’t care less whether you are a “progressive,” or a “conservative,” or a “libertarian,” or an “anarchist,” or whatever you call yourself. What they care about is whether you’re a Normal or a Deviant. What they care about is whether you will follow orders. What they care about is whether you are conforming your perceptions and behavior and thinking to their new “reality” … the hegemonic global-capitalist “reality” that has been gradually evolving for the last 30 years and is now entering its totalitarian stage.

I’ve been writing about the evolution of global capitalism in my essays since 2016 — and since the early 1990s in my stage plays — so I’m not going to reiterate the whole story here. Readers who have just tuned into my political satire and commentary during the last two years can go back and read the essays in Trumpocalypse (2016-2017) and The War on Populism (2018-2019).

The short version is, back in 2016, GloboCap was rolling along, destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the planet that it came into sole unchallenged possession of when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, and everything was hunky-dory, and then along came Brexit, Donald Trump, and the whole “populist” and neo-nationalist rebellion against globalism throughout the West. So, GloboCap needed to deal with that, which is what is has been doing for last six years … yes, the last six — not just two and a half — years.

The War on Dissent didn’t start with Covid and it isn’t going to end with Covid. GloboCap (or “the Corporatocracy” if you prefer) has been delegitimizing, demonizing, and disappearing dissent and increasingly imposing ideological uniformity on Western society since 2016. The New Normal is just the latest stage of it. Once it gets done quashing this “populist” rebellion and imposing ideological uniformity on urban society throughout the West, it will go back to destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the rest of the world, which is what it was doing with the “War on Terror” (and other “democracy”-promoting projects) from 2001 to 2016.

The goal of this global Gleichschaltung campaign is the goal of every totalitarian system, i.e., to render any and all deviance from its official ideology pathological. The nature of the deviance does not matter. The official ideology does not matter. (GloboCap has no fixed ideology. It can abruptly change its official “reality” from day to day, as we have experienced recently). What matters is one’s willingness or unwillingness to conform to whatever the official “reality” is, regardless of how ridiculous it is, and how many times it has been disproved, and sometimes even acknowledged as fiction by the very authorities who nonetheless continue to assert its “reality.”

I’ll give you one more concrete example.

After I happened upon the “Covid restrictions” (i.e., the social-segregation system) still being enforced by that Off-Broadway theater, I stumbled upon this article in Current Affairs about the oracle Yuval Noah Harari, the writer of which article mentions in passing that somewhere between 6 million and 12 million people have “died of Covid,” as if this were a fact, a fact that no one in their right mind would question. Which it is, officially, in our new “reality,” despite the fact (i.e., the actual fact) that — as even the “health authorities” have admitted — anyone who died of anything in a hospital after testing positive was recorded as a “Covid-19 death.”

This is how “reality” (i.e., official “reality,” consensus “reality”) is manufactured and policed. It is manufactured and policed, not only by the media, corporations, governments, and non-governmental governing entities, but also (and, ultimately, more effectively) by the constant repetition of official narratives as unquestionable axiomatic facts.

In our brave new totalitarian global-capitalist “reality,” anyone who questions or challenges such “facts” immediately renders oneself a “Deviant” and is excommunicated from “Normal” society. Seriously, just for fun, try to get a job at a corporation, or a university, or a part in a movie or a Broadway play, or a book deal, or a research grant, etc., while being honest about your beliefs about Covid. Or, if you’re a “respectable” journalist, you know, with literary and public-speaking agents, and book deals, and personal managers, and so on, go ahead, report the facts (i.e., the actual facts, which you know are there, but which you have been avoiding like the plague for the last two years), and watch your career get violently sucked down the drain like a turd in an airplane toilet.

That last bit was meant for “urban professionals,” who still have careers, or are aspiring to careers, or are otherwise still invested in remaining members in good standing of “Normal” society, i.e., not you folks in Florida and Idaho, or my fellow literary and artistic “Deviants.”

We have pretty much burned our bridges at this point. Unless you’re prepared to mindf— yourself, and gaslight yourself, and confess, and convert, there’s no going back to “normal” society (which we couldn’t go back to anyway, on account of how it doesn’t exist anymore).

I realize that a lot of folks have probably been looking forward to that … to the day when the Normals finally “wake up” and face the facts, and truth prevails, and we return to something resembling normality. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going back. The Normals are never going to “wake up.” Because they’re not asleep. They’re not hypnotized. They’re not going to “come to their senses” one day and take responsibility for the damage they have done. Sure, they will apologize for their “mistakes,” and admit that possibly they “overreacted,” but the official narrative of the Covid pandemic and the new “reality” it has ushered into being will remain in force, and they will defend both with their lives.

Or, rather, they will defend both with our lives.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, well, consider the epithets GloboCap has conditioned the Normals to use to demonize us … “conspiracy theorist,” “science denier,” “insurrectionist,” “extremist,” “violent domestic terrorist.” None of which signify a political ideology or any political or critical position whatsoever. They signify deviation from the norm. Any type of deviation from the norm. They are tactical terms, devoid of meaning, designed to erase the political character of the diverse opposition to global-capitalism (or “globalism,” if you are touchy about the word “capitalism”), to lump us all into one big bucket of “deviance.”

It is usually not a very good omen when nations — or totally unaccountable, supranational global-power systems — suddenly break out the “deviance bucket.” It is usually a sign that things are going to get ugly, ugly in a totalitarian fashion, which is precisely what has been happening for the past six years.

Back in July of 2021, at the height of the fascistic New Normal hate frenzy, with the military enforcing “Covid restrictions,” a global segregation system being implemented, and people threatening to decapitate me for refusing to get “vaccinated,” I published a piece called The Road to Totalitarianism. We are still on that road. Both the Normals and we Deviants. We’ve been on that road for quite some time, longer than most of us probably realize. The weather has improved, slightly. The scenery out the window has changed. The destination has not. I haven’t seen any exits. Let me know if you do, will you?

Article cross-posted from C.J.’s blog.

In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.

I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.

Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.

One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:

“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.” American Psychological Association

“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.” Psychology Today

“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.” Newport Institute

The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.

Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.

Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.

Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.

The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).

The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t f-ing matter. Of course Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and of course they lied about the “vaccines.”

The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.

Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.

These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.

You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”

You can show the New Normals the video, and they will watch it, and then look you right in the eye and deny it. https://t.co/iLWsS7jl0f https://t.co/JJTuhGViya

— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) October 13, 2022

But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.

In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.

The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).

Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.

I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”

We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.

I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”

We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills are doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.

Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.

CJ Hopkins
October 16, 2022
Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog

I happen to live in New Normal Germany, the current tip of the New Normal spear, or one of the tips of one of its spears (or mRNA-laced hypodermic needles), the others being countries and states like Canada, China, Australia, New York, California, and assorted other hotbeds of New Normalism. If you live in one of these New Normal strongholds, as I do, you are acutely aware of how it is not over.

Yes, the Covidian Cult is kaput. The spell has been broken. Only the most insanely fanatical New Normal cultists continue to walk around in public in their plague masks and homemade hazmat suits. But the New Normal Reich is not kaput. The New Normal Reich is being … well, normalized. The masses are being systematically conditioned to accept the biosecurity police state that the global-capitalist ruling classes have been implementing for the last three years.

Despite the now irrefutable evidence that the “vaccines” do not prevent transmission of the virus, “the Unvaccinated” are still being segregated, banned from working, attending school, competing in major sporting events, and so on. People are still being forced to wear masks — the symbol of the New Normal Reich — on planes, trains, public transport, in doctors offices, hospitals, et cetera. Here, there, and everywhere, New Normal symbols and social rituals are being permanently integrated into everyday life.

These symbols and rituals are more than just the window dressing of the New Normal Reich. They are how our new “reality” is being created and maintained. The masses are like actors being forced to emotionally invest in the “reality” of an absurdist stage play. The more they repeat the performance, the more convincing the fictional “reality” becomes, regardless of how patently absurd it is … and it is becoming more and more absurd.

For example, at the airports in New Normal Canada, citizens attempting to enter their own country without the so-called “ArriveCAN” app on their smartphones to provide proof of their “vaccination status” (including octogenarians who do not own smartphones) are subjected to extended absurdist harassment by imbecilic New Normal clowns in red vests. Here in New Normal Germany, the government is preparing to force everyone to wear medical-looking masks in public every Autumn and Winter, not just on account of the “Apocalyptic Plague” but also on account of the normal Winter flu. The pretext doesn’t really matter anymore. The point is the display of ideological uniformity.

Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health was forced to publish a limited hangout regarding “vaccination” injuries and deaths. They did it classic Goebbelsian fashion.

The Ministry of Health of New Normal Germany didn't like the official data on "vaccine" adverse effects, so they lied about them. According to the @PEI_Germany report, severe side effects occur in 0.02% of DOSES, not in 0.02% of all vaccinated people. Do the math. https://t.co/UoDwHC4L7i

— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) July 20, 2022

Apparently, they didn’t like the actual data on the number of serious adverse effects, so they decided to just lie about them on Twitter. (Serious adverse effects were reported in roughly 1 in 5,000 doses, not 1 in 5,000 “vaccinated” people. Approximately 184,000,000 doses have been administered to people in Germany and … well, you can do the math.) Naturally, the Twitter Corporation has been slapping its fake “misleading” warning on retweets pointing out the Ministry of Health’s lie, because the truth is whatever the Corporatocracy says it is, and everything else is “disinformation.”

If you think I’m being harsh or hyperbolic in characterizing the Ministry’s lie as a lie, keep in mind that the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, has been lying, repeatedly, to the German public for over two years now. Here he is lying about the “side-effects-free vaccines” in August 2021, right around the time he ordered the segregation of “the Unvaccinated” and fomented hatred of anyone who refused to conform to New Normal ideology …

And now, tens of thousands of people in Germany — at minimum, as vaccine adverse-effects have always been significantly under-reported — have been seriously injured or … you know, killed, because Karl and his fascistic New Normal cronies lied to everyone, over and over, and the German media repeated those lies, and the New Normal masses repeated those lies, and the government and global corporations censored, deplatformed, and demonized those of us who challenged those lies as “far-right extremists,” “science deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and so on.

And these are just a few recent examples. I don’t think I need to provide an exhaustive list. At this point, you are either well aware and capable of facing what’s happening, or you’re not, in which case you are telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself in order to pretend that what is happening isn’t happening.

If that is what you’re doing, I cannot help you. Nothing I write or say will get through to you. Facts will not make any difference to you. Government and health officials and media talking heads will lie to your face, over and over, and get caught lying, and you will go on adamantly repeating their lies, not because you do not understand that they are lies, but because you do not care that they are lies.

You do not care that you are killing and injuring countless people with your officially-approved lies, with your cowardice, with your mindless obedience. Your goal is to remain within the bounds of “normality,” and not get called a lot of names and get ostracized from your social circle, and if a lot of people have to die and you have to abandon any semblance of integrity and intellectual honesty to achieve that, so be it.

As for the rest of us, those who are aware of what’s happening and are doing our best to face what’s happening, even if we don’t understand what’s happening, or disagree about why it’s happening, I wish I had something clever to offer in terms of how to make it stop happening.

I don’t, other than what I’ve been advocating, i.e., organized, non-violent civil disobedience, like what the Canadian truckers did in Ottawa, like what the Dutch farmers are doing in The Netherlands. Columns like this, social media memes, sporadic Sunday mass demonstrations, and individual acts of non-compliance are not going to stop the New Normal juggernaut.

The normalization of the New Normal will continue, the pathologization of society will continue, the destabilization and restructuring of the global economy will continue, unless something truly historic happens and the workers of the world unite (or if the sovereign individuals of the world unite if “workers” sounds too Commie to you) and jam a monkey wrench into the New Normal machinery.

The chances of that happening are slim. In my 60 years of corporeal existence, I have never experienced a time when people were this alienated, hopeless, and at each other’s throats. I can’t recall a time when people were this humorless, sanctimonious, and vicious … and I am talking about the people who could make a difference, not the order-following New Normal masses.

If there was ever a time when the working classes needed to set aside their political differences and flex their collective muscles, this is it, but most of us are too busy pissing on each other to score cheap points on Twitter, or Gettr, or Telegram, or, you know, wherever.

I’m sorry to end on such a pessimistic note … I’m recovering from the Apocalyptic Plague, so perhaps I’m just feeling overly gloomy. Probably everything will be just fine, and people will eventually come to their senses, and the global-capitalist ruling classes will cancel the whole New Normal thing, and no one needs to organize any kind of international non-violent civil-disobedience campaign, and, one day, we’ll wake up and check our phones and discover that there was no New Normal Reich, and that no one ever died because of a vaccine, and we will check our social credit status, and tell our smart-kitchens to start cooking our crickets, and pull up the War-of-the-Day on our ViewScreens so we can root for whoever we were told to root for … and everything will finally be “normal” again.

CJ Hopkins
July 22, 2022
Photos: NTV, Twitter

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

Cross-posted from CJ’s blog.