SubscribeStar Saturday: The Stakes of the Culture War

A special note:  today’s SubscribeStar Saturday is probably the most important essay I’ve written this year.  I encourage to read it with your subscription of $1/mo. or more.  If you’re unable to pitch in, send me a message and I’ll e-mail you a PDF.

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Over the past couple of weeks, the stakes of the culture war have really hit home for me.  As I wrote last weekend, the “misinformation gap” between regular voters and reality seems overwhelming.

I’ve long held that building individual relationships can change lives, and can undo a great deal of brainwashing, and I have anecdotal proof:  through patient dialogue and loving guidance (and prayer), I helped guide a former student away from progressive extremism and bisexuality (it was a male student, so it’s impossible for him to be truly bisexual, anyway).  He’s now a girl-loving populist and, while he’s not totally on the Trump Train, he’s longer a Bernie Bro.

But that kind of patient, incremental relationship-building, while critical, is too slow for our present crisis.  It’s also incredibly wearying because it’s so labor-intensive, and because of the immensity of the project:  there’s a lot of brainwashing to undo, and most of what needs to be unwashed is quite subtle.

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Monday Morning Appeal

This post is a shameless but sincere appeal for support.  If you would like to support my work, consider subscribing to my SubscribeStar page.  Your subscription of $1/month or more gains you access to exclusive content every Saturday, including annual #MAGAWeek posts.  If you’ve received any value from my scribblings, I would very much appreciate your support.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog lately, you know that I’ve been despairing about the state of the world.  I suppose I occasionally go through these phases, and it seems incongruous even to me, as I’ve been trying to lighten up the blog a bit.

Regardless, I’ve been reminded lately how big the gap is between the red-pilled conservatives—the folks that see the world for how it truly is—and the blue-pilled normies, still shuffling about in their state of waking sleep.

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Tommy Robinson is Free!

It might be Friday the 13th, but it’s Tommy Robinson’s lucky day:  he’s free!

For those unfamiliar with Tommy Robinson, he is a journalist-activist.  Robinson was jailed once before, ostensibly for contempt of court.  In fact, his “crime” was calling the defendants in an then-active child grooming trial “Muslim child rapists.”  For having the pique to critique Islam, Robinson was jailed.

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TBT: Self-Righteous Virtue-Signalling Lives On

The capacity of human beings to be busybodies never ceases to amaze me.  Aristotle wrote that “man is by nature a social animal,” and he is a political animal as well.  As such, virtue-signalling and puritanical social policing are probably here to stay, whether we like it or not.

Still, I’m always struck by how willing people are to butt into others lives—not just the curiosity of gossip, but the desire to control other people’s behavior, and even thoughts.  I’m all about enforcing social norms through the soft power of culture, and even I don’t want to hassle people.  I think hard drugs and prostitution should be illegal, sure, but only because those do demonstrable harm, physically, mentally, and spiritually, beyond the individual partaking in them.  Otherwise, I’m more than willing to let people make their own mistakes, and to believe whatever kooky nonsense they’d like, so long as I’m afforded the same courtesy.

Maybe I’m not the best spokesman for a laissez-faire social life, but a broadly Jeffersonian-Jacksonian, rural outlander mentality should apply to our daily lives:  you chase your squirrels, and I’ll chase mine.  Often the very last thing I want to do is to give someone else a hard time about their lifestyle, beliefs, or the like, so long as they’re not forcing their insanity on me.

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May We Never Forget

Today’s Number of the Day from pollster Scott Rasmussen is a poignant 9/11 memorial:  204 New York City firefighters have died due to illnesses from that fateful day.  That’s in addition to the 343 NYFD firefighters who gave their lives on September 11, 2001 (the NYFD maintains a list of “line of duty deaths” dating back to 1865; deaths 809 through 1151 were the result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks).  Rasmussen also notes that 2977 people died in the attacks.

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Lazy Sunday XXV: Techno-Weirdos

Big Tech companies routinely run roughshod over free speech, working hand-in-glove with the Deep State of our government to curtail our rights.  This kind of public-private tyranny is designed to allow the government to control speech when it legally and constitutionally cannot, by allowing large tech companies to write vague, ever-changing “terms of service” agreements that are weaponized to silence or smother conservative voices.

With the potential to control what citizens see or don’t see, Big Tech firms like Facebook and Google have the power—given their incredible market share—to suppress news favorable to the president (for example), burying news that doesn’t fit their hip, Leftist viewpoints.  Even when third party websites can exist, they face demonetization:  get dropped by PayPal, and your ability to take donations or collect subscription fees withers.

All that power means Big Tech companies will likely play a huge role in the outcome of the 2020 election.  President Trump and conservative Republicans will be fighting an uphill battle against a blackout of the techno-elites’ making.

As such, this week’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to four pieces about the techno-weirdos that lord over our society like the robber barons of the Gilded Age:

  • Banned! Techno-Elite Deplatform Alex Jones” – this piece chronicled the surreptitious, cross-platform, nearly simultaneous deplatforming of InfoWars, Alex Jones’s alternative news and commentary site.  The coordinated nature of Jones’s deplatforming was such a stark example of collusion across multiple companies in the same industry, it practically begged for a Department of Justice investigation.  As far as I know, the government never looked into it.  Naturally, I immediately purchased a bunch of InfoWars stickers, because now we pretty much have to support Alex Jones, even if he is a bit wacky.
  • First They Came for Crowder” – earlier this summer, lisping, totalitarian gay apparatchik Carlos Maza convinced YouTube to demonetize conservative comedian Steven Crowder with a single limp flick of his wrist.  The fallout was that a number of content creators—even non-conservatives—began to see their videos demonetized, as clueless YouTube execs tried to figure out what to do.
  • Creepy Techno-Elites Spy on Users” – as if all this malfeasance weren’t enough, Facebook—owned and operated by an autistic intellectual property thief—was paying scribblers to transcribe the contents of voice calls made over its Messenger app.  Even the NSA never (allegedly) listened to calls without a warrant, but Facebook “is a private company, so it can do whatever it wants,” scream the libertarians.  Even more shocking, Google is rewriting its algorithms to suppress search results related to conservative content.  Break ’em up, DoJ!
  • Friday Reading – Dystopian Short Story” – this recent post is a review and summary of the story “Das Woke Capital,” a chilling vision of what is to come if we don’t disrupt the nexus of progressive governance and progressive corporations.  Just a day after writing that post, Terror House Magazine published a similar story, “Chip,” about a near-future in which users willingly get a cybernetic chip implant that allows them to share content mind-to-mind—only, the designers have taken control of users’ minds to put them to work on massive undertakings like uncovering light-speed hyper-drives.  Sound ludicrous?  Don’t be so hasty.

We’re living in strange times, when technology has the potential to destroy our fraying social fabric—and to suppress the views of anyone who disagrees with the mercurial beta soyboys that run these companies.  I am loathe to recommend government intervention, but these companies represent an existential threat.  Break them up!

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mother Hive”

To start yesterday’s History of Conservative Thought class, I had students skim through Rudyard Kipling’s 1908 short story “The Mother Hive.”  I stumbled upon the reading in our class text, Russell Kirk’s The Portable Conservative Reader.

It is a grim little fable that warns about the perils of progressivism infiltrating a proud but weakened nation.  In the story, a deadly wax-moth sneaks into a large but bedraggled beehive during a moment of confusion.  She quickly steals away to the cell of the youngest bees, who have yet to take their first flight.  There, she fills their impressionable heads with gentle words and promises of a glorious future, all while covertly laying her eggs.

One young bee, Melissa, who has just returned from her first flight, is suspicious of the beautiful stranger’s soothing words, but the wax-moth plays the victim and insists that she’s only spreading her “principles,” not the eggs of her hungry future children.

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#MAGAWeek2019: President Trump’s Independence Day Speech

It’s #MAGAWeek2019 here at The Portly Politico.  Each day’s post will be a SubscribeStar exclusive.  For a subscription of $1/month, you gain exclusive to each day’s posts, as well as exclusive content every Saturday throughout the rest of the year.  Visit my SubscribeStar page for more details.

I was not planning on writing about President Trump’s incredible Independence Day speech as part of , mainly because I try to keep these posts historical.  The speech was so powerful, though, and so educational in a historical sense, it and President Trump have earned a spot (alongside the president’s favorite food) as part of my annual celebration of American greatness.

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