I noticed more statues came down this week in Portland, sadly including a very beautiful bronze of Lincoln that I visited a couple of times when I was reading about the Civil War. The piece, by George Fite Waters, was good to meditate on as I pondered the complexities of the struggle and what it meant and still means for our nation. Lincoln was looking down and in a walking motion with one hand moving forward almost as if to receive someone's hand, but not quite; embodying the ambiguity of Lincoln. There was a hesitating quality to it, a tiredness, but also a sense of great determination. It called forth the mystery of the man and the time, and the mystery of the American experiment in general. It is fitting that Americans should still be debating the war so many years later. For such an epic bloodletting the conclusion was anti-climactic. The nation decided to move on, mouthing the same old platitudes about State's Rights they always had. Why argue about it when the point is moot? The war was fought, the blood was shed, precisely to avoid having more debates. The South was defeated, but actually gained congressional representation while managing to repress the vote of the Blacks. Grant was unable to establish a homeland for the freed slaves due to the greed of the Southern landowners and the anti-Catholic bigotry of the North who balked at admitting a new State of papists to the Union.
To this day, the more one learns, the more questions come to mind. Even the central figure himself is hard to pin down. What would he have done about the freed slaves had he survived? Would Reconstruction have succeeded if a Democrat VP had never gotten his hands on office of the Presidency? What motivated those poor men to face the dangers of the carnage at the front line? All these thoughts and more would fill me as I sat under the great, gaunt monolith.
It is fitting that Lincoln was destroyed by mobs in 2020. The destruction and recreation of history in a manner amenable to Political Correct Orthodoxy is a constant theme of this contentious election year. The fraudulent 1619 Project (which the NYT eventually updated, clarifying that America was not actually created as a labor camp for African slaves) is perhaps the most prominent example of the push to fabricate historical context. Looking closer to the present we see the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary redefining the term "sexual preference" in response to its use in the Senate confirmation hearings just hours prior. Thus one can reasonably assume that Orwell's "1984" is in the last stages of manifestation in reality: the past is controlled to give power over the present and the future.
The main difference between the fictional work and reality is the private sector taking charge of censorship rather than "The Party". Maybe this is less concerning to some, but the effect and goals are the same. As of this week the political nature of the repression has become overt with Twitter locking the Trump campaign out of their official account. Whatever your opinions about the New York Post reporting on Joe Biden's corruption, it is a continuing escalation from banning mainly coronavirus discussion and topics deemed offensive. It does not surprise me, though. From the beginning of the censorship effort I've expected it to metastasize, if they are allowed to get away with it. After all, what monopoly has not abused it's power?
No reasonable person can now deny the danger we are facing as a democracy. The disregard for freedom of speech has already tainted the election badly and the Minnesota-style fraud hasn't even begun yet. We have the intelligence agencies chiming-in (as usual) with their baseless claims that Hunter Biden's e-mails are another Russian plot. If this absurdity was the case, why hasn't Biden denied meeting with Burisma execs? Of course, he can't deny that he used his authority to interfere with the prosecution of Burisma because he bragged about it on camera. But the veracity of the e-mails will have to be proven, hopefully in a court of law trying the case. Any other outcome is a travesty and proof that we live in a true banana republic.
So what do patriotic citizens do when the intelligence community is determined to rig elections, the media is silent or complicit, and the Democrats have an army of lawyers already prepped to ram through as many harvested ballots as needed in the weeks following the election? Clearly the first step is to develop back-up lines of communication. Twitter is down right now, in damage control mode I presume. Facebook is tightening their restrictions and expanding their criteria for bans every day. During and after the election there will certainly be an attempt to control access to information, possibly including a shutdown of Twitter and Facebook and the usual shadow-banning by Google. Patriots need to have e-mail lists and outposts on other platforms. Once communications are established we can turn our attention to the task of discovering what has gone so wrong that citizens of the "land of the free" are cashing it in.
These networks may actually be the silver-lining behind the clouds. As the legitimacy of the two-party system fragments there is a new opportunity for new political associations to form. The Democrats have been hopelessly penetrated by foreign money and influence, corresponding to the internationalization of their financial backers. The Republicans have similar problems, and even when they remain loyal they are unable to learn how to fight back against the weapons of Critical Theory when it is weaponized against them. They should have learned by now that it is impossible to fight political correctness while being politically correct: you have already conceded the important mental territory at that point. This is one why the first places to fall to Big Tech Censorship were meme-generating sites and forums that everyone could agree were quite distasteful; not only are they hard for public figures to defend without themselves being smeared, but they are also engaging in cultural warfare through humor and mockery of political orthodoxy. Even Infowars was, at it's core, a silly place. The Trump subreddit r/theDonald was also also full of ridiculousness and probably started as a joke to troll the Bernie Bros, but it became to dangerous to tolerate because of precisely those reasons. Gab remains as a haven for meme generation (banned from Mastercard and on their own private servers), though most people will probably prefer Parler if they branch out from Twitter. As far as I know only one joke website (the Daily Stormer) has actually been banned from the internet so that it can only be accessed through the Dark Web, but I expect to see plenty more go.
For the more intellectually inclined I would refer you to a site I just found, Unrestrained Analytics, and particularly the linked article on the "soft coup" we are undergoing. It can be difficult to digest the tactics that are being used in this particular information war (the tendency is to get bogged down in the post-modern haze), but the article does a fairly good job:
This is not politics as usual but rather political warfare at an unprecedented level that is openly engaged in the direct targeting of a seated president through manipulation of the news cycle. It must be recognized on its own terms so that immediate action can be taken.
At its core, these campaigns run on multiple lines of effort, serve as the non-violent line of effort of a wider movement, and execute political warfare agendas that reflect cultural Marxist outcomes. The campaigns operate through narratives
It's crucial to understand the "non-violent" aspects of the culture war, because most of the violence is really intended as propaganda to aid the narrative formation. The media does not faithfully cover the violence of the Leftist revolutionaries, but they are all over any reaction from the citizenry. It doesn't matter who won the brawl, the narrative of the US as a hateful, violent, racist, place is further established. This narrative is designed to be destructive to any form of identity that does not fall into a victim category, and any identity that is a "victim" of American society is invested in the narrative that seeks to destroy America. This total atomization of the individual based on their grievance group then inevitably reforms as a monolithic entity in opposition to the social order that must be destroyed to make way for the "new normal," or the "great reset," or whatever branding they like to put on the new corporate totalitarianism. Any social cohesion that does not seek to destroy the nation is dangerous to Grandma or racist, or both.
The only way these ideas can thrive is in a totally a-historical context. Studying history shows us that there are positives and negatives to every action. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Ambiguity and uncertainty are natural to all humans and lurk behind the decisions of even the boldest leaders. But they managed to push forward, as should we. By failing to heed their example and relying on victim status we are encouraged to give up control of our destiny and put it into the hands of "experts" and "authorities." The first thing to go will be our right to speech and after that it should be smooth sailing for the internationalist oligarchy.
Who knows how far this will go? In European countries they are now just outright arresting elected representatives in the Nationalist parties (to stop fascism, one presumes). The situation in the US is only different because we have a strong attachment to the Bill of Rights. If we lose our reverence for that document, if we lose our connection to our history, we lose our chance to continue this Great Experiment. It's hard
to be a Guinea Pig, but the eyes of the world are upon us, as usual, and they watch to see if liberty can make one more final stand on this fallen Earth.
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