hallucinating hegemony

waking up is hard to do

greenwald gets this one exactly right, but perhaps does not take it far enough. it's not just media.

whole subcultures of america are inhabiting hallucinations and their social and social media interactions are all centered around enabling it and shouting down any dissent while congratulating one another on being so progressive and tolerant.

i spent 16 years living in san francisco studying this movement in its adolescent stages like some sort of feline jane goddall. it was deeply educational. it also showed me just how easily a group can mistake close minded tyranny of the other side for inclusive social justice and pluralism and become everything they purport to hate. it showed me just how utterly a group can lose self-awareness.

when your social graph looks like an ouroboros swallowing its own tail and all you hear is echo chamber, it's easy to presume yourself not just right but righteous. it’s easy to presume that you must be the majority.

when you become sufficiently adept at shouting down dissent, people stop bothering to voice any where you can hear it. but they do not change their minds. they become ever more sure of what a jerk you are.

this is just what happened to the "moral majority" on the american right in the 80's. it had been ascendant too long and lost touch with reality and the with the zeitgeist of america. and now it is the left's turn, as they too have been culturally dominant for much too long and they too have become riddled with rot and intellectually vacuous.

they stare in disbelief as those speaking against their narratives thrive despite the relentless attacks they launch against them. they gawp, incredulous, as their once august mastheads and and media franchises circle the bowl into disrepute and penury.

they blame sabotage. they blame stupid, gullible, deplorable readers. they blame the referees for not calling fouls despite the longest, most absurd run of hometown reffing in media history. they blame everyone but themselves. and that is why they're going to fail.

there is nothing left but empty credentialism and weaponized social dogma rooted in the dishonest application of post-modernism hollowed out to carry hypocritical payloads of un-interrogatable salients about how everything is race or gender or cultural oppression. it's just the childish game of "punch no punchbacks" wrapped up in impenetrable semiotics and jihadi rhetoric.

it’s an empty movement that serves nothing and nourishes nothing but division and divisiveness. astoundingly, the secular priesthood pushing it is so out of touch that they see this as “healing” and “coming together.” i do not use the term hallucination lightly, but this is definitely that. it’s smug, sanctimonious, and oppressive. it’s ubiquitous, unrelenting, and flat out amoral. it inverts everything it touches and calls up down and sideways stationary. it has about as much to do with reality as a hogwarts class on hippogriffs.

and people have had just about enough. the dam is breaking, it’s becoming OK to call this out as the dishonest hogwash it is and the outlets where one can do so freed of the editorial slant of the dominating left and where the winged monkeys of cancel culture cannot intrude are forming and coming to prominence. a child born today may well never even know what a “new york times” or an “msnbc” is. and that’s going to be to their benefit.

maybe this is easier to see if you are neither leftist nor conservative but rather a libertarian that does not really buy into either. i have experienced the oppressive ascendance of each and found neither to my liking.

the death throes of the ruling ideology as it crashes in upon itself are not pretty. the idea that they are not the center, not the pole star, not the axis mundi is one that their very consciousnesses will scream to deny. no one likes having to come to terms with being wrong about their core assumptions about their place in the world, but it’s coming.

it’s hard to keep denying gravity with the ground rushing up so visibly. the cognitive dissonance-driven phantasmagoria will keep getting more and more intense right up until it cannot hold any more. then it will break and the wake up call will come. waking up is not easy. if it were, we’d have far fewer sleepers…