Why Midwits Rule Society Now. By Eugyppius.

A long time ago, Dean Keith Simonton published an important paper on Intelligence and Personal Influence in Groups, which shows why it is that all of society seems to be dominated by the discourse of somewhat intelligent but never all-that-brilliant people.

His central insight is that there exists a “range of comprehension” for a given level of intelligence. This is the range of less intelligent people who can still understand the reasoning of someone at the top of that range, and who are therefore susceptible to being persuaded by it.

A near-genius with IQ 160 will be able to argue persuasively to his quite intelligent colleagues of IQ 140, but for the 50% of everyone with IQ 100, what he says will seem baffling. Because very few people are in the IQ 140–160 range, having IQ 160 is not very socially advantageous. If your goal is to make friends and influence people, it’s better to be substantially stupider.

This and other theoretical considerations lead Simonton to propose this chart of social influence (“potential adherents”) as a function of IQ:

 

Those who are of merely average intelligence don’t have much social influence at all. They find their intellectual superiors far more persuasive than their peers, at least to a point. Those who are very intelligent suffer from much the same disadvantage, because they are comprehensible only to a fairly small pool of slightly less intelligent people at the extreme right end of the curve.

Ours is therefore an IQ 120 midwit society; it could not be any other way. Those with the most influence have an upper comprehensive range extending to about IQ 140. They are still capable of internalising and mostly comprehending the criticism of the smartest professors.

In the other direction, they look on the vast population of the unintelligent with a muted frustration, because their powers to persuade those with an IQ much below 100 are as weak as the power of their IQ 145 superiors is to persuade them.

Since our midwit rulers are cognitively better endowed than probably 90% of the whole population, it’s easy for them to overlook the rare 10% of people who are smarter than they are. Accordingly, they throw all of their opponents into the same basket of intellectual deplorables, and commit themselves to unceasing wars against “disinformation,” to devising various social manipulation schemes and to banning the political opposition.

It follows that the ideas which dominate our world are not necessarily the best or the most rational approaches to things. They are rather those ideas which appeal to people whose intelligence is above average if less-than-phenomenal, and whose other personality traits optimise their institutional influence. They have the brains of upper middle-class professionals, and they’re also much more extroverted, conscientious and conformist than the broader population.

In academia, where they dominate like nowhere else, we see a range of learned pathologies — not only a deep faith in irrational hygiene procedures like perpetual vaccination and masking, but a whole world of bizarre ideologies pertaining to human gender and biology, the environment and society.

Something has obviously gone very wrong with these kinds of people, but — and this is the crucial point — those things which have gone wrong with them are calibrated precisely to that midwit peak. However irrational the ideas current in this sphere, their appeal will increase with intelligence up to a point that is very nearly out of sight from us, because people of outlier high intelligence are extremely rare and their influence is negligible.

This is the result of a well-known phenomenon that people find those with IQs more than about 20 points higher hard to understand.

So if in the TV age the people elect a leader with an IQ of 125 (say, George Bush), with whom they are comfortable, then that leader will not hire staffers or advisors with IQs over about 145 because they will make him or her uncomfortable. Since the 1960s, the bright fringe have become frozen out of more and more areas. Yes, our leadership really is becoming more incompetent.

Now social media has accelerated the trend, as more policy is open to more discussion by a wider range of people. To say nothing of the numbers. Consider an IQ curve. In the right hand side, each drop of 10 points means the less smart greatly outnumber the smarter.

On top of that, the genetic component of average IQs has been dropping at about 1 to 1.5 IQ points per decade since 1880, and even the Flynn effect (which was about the non-genetic components of intelligence, such as learning to take IQ tests better) has now reversed.

On current trends, we are entering a technologically stagnant age of authoritarianism, run by a moderately dopey ruling class.

hat-tip David Archibald

Scientists ‘shocked’ and ‘alarmed’ at what’s in the mRNA shots. By Rebekah Barnett.

Early in 2023, genomics scientist Kevin McKernan made an accidental discovery. While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls. He was ‘shocked’ to find that they were allegedly contaminated with tiny fragments of plasma DNA.

McKernan, who has 25 years’ experience in his field, ran the experiment again, confirming that the vials contained up to, in his opinion, 18-70 times more DNA contamination than the legal limits allowed by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In particular, McKernan was alarmed to find the presence of an SV40 promoter in the Pfizer vaccine vials. This is a sequence that is, ‘…used to drive DNA into the nucleus, especially in gene therapies,’ McKernan explains. This is something that regulatory agencies around the world have specifically said is not possible with the mRNA vaccines. …

Other scientists soon confirmed McKernan’s findings, though the amount of DNA contamination was variable, suggesting inconsistency of vial contents depending on batch lots. One of these scientists was cancer genomics expert Dr Phillip Buckhaults, who is a proponent of the mRNA platform and has received the Pfizer Covid vaccine himself.

In September of this year, Dr Buckhaults shared his findings in South Carolina Senate hearing. ‘I’m kind of alarmed about this DNA being in the vaccine — it’s different from RNA, because it can be permanent,’ he told those present.

‘There is a very real hazard,’ he said, that the contaminant DNA fragments will integrate with a person’s genome and become a ‘permanent fixture of the cell’ leading to autoimmune problems and cancers in some people who have had the vaccinations. He also noted that these genome changes can ‘last for generations’.

Dr Buckhaults alleges that the presence of high levels of contaminant DNA in the mRNA vaccines ‘may be causing some of the rare but serious side effects, like death from cardiac arrest’. …

Safe and effective, they said:

In Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) maintains that Covid vaccines cannot alter a person’s DNA. …

There is already at least one peer-reviewed scientific paper demonstrating that the Pfizer Covid vaccine mRNA can enter the human liver cell line and reverse transcribe into DNA in vitro (meaning in a lab dish).

Other studies cited in the case materials show the presence of spike protein mRNA in the nucleus of human cells, and evidence that acquired immune traits pass down to the offspring of mice pre-exposed to the Covid vaccine mRNA-LNP platform. This is suggestive that, once in the nucleus, the vaccine mRNA can be transferred and integrated with chromosomal DNA.

Taking both the LNP-mod-RNA complexes and the recently discovered DNA contamination present in the mRNA Covid vaccines, acting solicitor Katie Ashby Koppens says, ‘Every single person who has been injected with these products has received a GMO that has not been through the expert regulatory process in this country.’ She adds, ‘The human genome could be changed permanently, and no one was informed.’

The Australian PM will be announcing these findings on Friday, and apologize on behalf of the Australian Government for encouraging vaccination. (Just kidding.)

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things (Like Getting mRNA Injections). By John Carter.

During the lockdowns I was absolutely gobsmacked by how thoroughly so many of my friends fell for the psyop and succumbed to the mass psychosis.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, most of them are quite convinced that carbon dioxide is a pressing threat to the survival of the human species, one which photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries will save us from; that race is a social construct; that the pay gap between men and women is real; and that a woman is whoever uses she/her pronouns.

Still, in this case, it all just seemed too obvious to me that the entire thing was a put-up job, a hysterical collective nervous breakdown cultivated by an unholy alliance of politicians greedy for power and pharmaceutical behemoths greedy for cash. I mean, we had the Diamond Princess results in March of 2020.

These aren’t stupid people, by any means. I’m talking PhD scientists, computer programmers, engineers. In terms of raw cognitive grunt this is a group with serious horsepower. So despite the fact that they’d largely swallowed every other mandatory absurdity in the prevailing culture, I retained a naive expectation that they’d eventually come to their senses and realize that COVID’s dangers were exaggerated.

No such luck. Most of them still haven’t come to their senses. Even several months ago masks remained a common sight in professional settings, and of course, the majority dutifully, even enthusiastically, lined up for their untested gene therapy injections. Which, as so many predicted before the rollout, have done absolutely nothing to protect anyone from the Coof of Doom, and have generally proved to be far more trouble than they’re worth what with all the myocarditis. Many of them got sick from the shots. That didn’t stop them from getting more.

A few days ago Cremieux had a thread on Twixxor examining a recent study which found a strong positive correlation between cognitive ability and likelihood to have gotten jabbed. Here’s the money plot:

 

 

Given my personal experiences, I can easily believe the study’s results: in my immediate circle, amongst those I know professionally, I know precisely one other person who rejected the shot.

Cremiuex’s take-away from the study: smart people get vaxxed, so getting vaxxed is the smart thing to do. …

Just because smart people do something, does not make that the smart thing to do.

It’s certainly a popular heuristic though, including amongst intelligent people. “Smart people do this thing, so if you want to be smart you should do it too!” is in practice a highly effective argument for manipulating the behaviour of people who identify as smart.

As a simple historical example, take God.

Within Western civilization, until recently essentially everyone was a Christian. The intelligentsia, however, tended to be the most devout Christians: for a long time, if you had any intellectual acumen whatsoever, you were very likely to find your career inside the Church.

For about the last century or so, this has been reversed: smart people are in general more likely to be atheists.

If you’d been born five hundred years ago, the argument would be: smart people believe in God so believing in God is the smart thing to do. Now, the argument is: smart people do not believe in God, so not believing in God is the smart thing to do. …

Obviously, one of these groups of smart people is wrong. God either exists or he doesn’t. …

To inhabitants of a rationalist civilization that prizes logical reasoning as the best path to truth, this may seem strange. Intelligent people are better at reasoning, the truth is most effectively apprehended via reason, so intelligent people are more likely to achieve truth. Right?

Well.

Not really.

Intelligence really just boils down to the ability to extract meaningful patterns from information. The more rapidly this can be done, the more complex the patterns that can be discerned, the higher the intelligence. As a rule this means that intelligent people are capable of learning more rapidly, since learning is itself essentially a pattern recognition process in which the meaningful is abstracted from the meaningless and therefore more easily stored away for future reference. Hence ‘crystallized intelligence’, the sum total of the information that someone has acquired over their life, is usually a reasonable guide to how intelligent someone is. Early IQ tests relied to a large degree on tests of knowledge for this reason, until researchers realized that this measure was useless for cross-cultural comparisons, including comparisons of subcultures that had differential access to educational materials, at which point they ultimately settled on pattern recognition tests as an objective measure.

Basically, smart people are better at absorbing information.

Misinforming smart people is the fastest way to manipulate a society:

What happens when the information environment is saturated with nonsense?

GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. Most people will happily absorb the nonsense just as readily as they will the accurate information, and the smart ones will do so more efficiently than the less intelligent.

Now, there are caveats here. If the nonsense is really obviously nonsense, in stark contradiction to the evidence of the senses, people are less likely to absorb it.

However, if there’s no real empirical test — much of metaphysics, for example –then this won’t apply, and the only remaining tests are ‘is this logically coherent’ and ‘will people shun me if I think/don’t think this’. It is quite possible to build great towering edifices of elaborate logically coherent absurdity on foundations of difficult to detect bullshit, meaning that the latter, social test is often, in practice, the one that gets applied.

Vaccines:

The propaganda in favour of vaccination has been absolutely relentless for a couple of decades, now. The party line has been that any skepticism at all towards not just vaccination as a concept, but even the product safety of any specific vaccine, is a marker for anti-science obscurantism. …

“Vaccine hesistancy” will get you branded a kook, in other words, and laughed at for being stupid. Smart people don’t like getting laughed at for being stupid. It is extremely important to them that they be thought of as smart people by other smart people, because being smart is central to their identities. …

Smart people, by and large, tend to work within the professional-managerial classes. They are well-paid for their intellectual labour on behalf of the institutions, and by refusing to get the shot they risked losing their comfortable jobs. Even if their employer did not have a vaccine mandate, they would (potentially) be subject to travel restrictions which — given the nature of many of their positions — could be a significant professional impediment.

Institutional dependence is a significant factor. The lifestyle enabled by their well-remunerated services is for many a gilded cage. A six-figure income sounds like a lot, but when you’ve taken on a mortgage for a million dollar house in a suburb with good private schools for your 1.5 children, you’re on the hook for loans for your hundred thousand dollar post-graduate training and a pair of hundred thousand dollar Teslas, and you’ve grown accustomed to free range organic artisanal farm-to-table everything, there isn’t a lot of wiggle in the household budget, particularly if you want to spend that week in Italy next summer. Lose your position, and you risk losing everything and getting busted down to the trailer park, where you’ll be even worse off than the trailer trash because their meth habits are probably less expensive than your undischargeable student loan. Getting a new position isn’t at all guaranteed, particularly if you lost your old one because you did something gauche like refuse a grandma-saving medical treatment due to those anti-science right wing conspiracy theories you gave credence to. Professional fields tend to be small, word gets around, and the HR ladies talk. A career is not the same thing as a job: it is much harder to get, and much harder to replace.

So, regardless of whatever they privately thought about the mRNA treatments, many of the cognitively gifted would look at the social, professional, and economic ramifications of refusal, and calculate that the best option was simply to sit down and roll up their sleeves. While most of the professionals I know personally were quite enthusiastic about the jabs, I also know several who received them despite private misgivings, precisely because of such considerations. …

On the upper end of the cognitive scale, where the pressures were far more intense, refusal to get the jab had nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with character. It meant that one had to be comfortable adopting an oppositional stance towards both the overwhelming majority of one’s peers and one’s employer, risking not just one’s job, but one’s career. It meant that one had to weigh in the balance everything one had worked for, against one’s gut feeling that something smelled off about the not-vaccine, and be willing not just to trust one’s gut but to trust it so far that one was willing to throw away a lifetime of training, education, and professional success. Now, sure, it wasn’t wholly an intuitive call: there was, and is, an entire ecosystem of open source analysts and independent media who were performing critical examinations of the safety profile and medical efficacy of the mRNA shots … but many of these are anons, and that community was vastly outnumbered by the overwhelming consensus of the medical profession that the shots were a good idea, backed up by the overwhelming consensus of society that the medical establishment was essentially trustworthy.

Who you gonna believe, John Hopkins and the CDC or some schizo writing Tweet threads? …

When the majority of the world’s intelligent people are acculturated into a system that prioritizes obedience over veracity, looking at what the smart fraction do might not be a great guide to actually smart behaviour. In fact, it may be the precise opposite.

Indeed.

Whites Made Up Only 6% of New US Workers Added After BLM Protests. By Bruce Gil.

In 2021, 94% of new jobs at 88 S&P 100 companies were filled by people of color, according to an analysis from Bloomberg.

Following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, many large corporations made pledges to address racial imbalances among their workforce.

Microsoft promised to double its number of Black managers and senior leaders in the U.S. by 2025. Meta, then known as Facebook, pledged to increase its representation of people of color in leadership positions in the U.S. by 30% by 2025. Amazon set a goal to double its representation of Black directors and vice presidents. …

In 2021, 88 companies in the S&P 100 increased their headcount collectively by 323,094 people, and 94% of those people were from underrepresented groups, the analysis found. …

Seventy-four percent of executive positions were held by white people in 2021.

Protest works. Identity group politics worked, and meritocracy was weakened.

Corporate Australia has a problem: the demise of the anti-communist unions. By Ken Phillips.

From WWII until recently:

We can start with Australia’s immediate post-second world war political–corporate relationship, which was dominated by one big issue: the fear of communism. To some today this might sound simplistic, but this was the reality for several decades. …

After the war, a major Australian political obsession was the containment of domestic communism. …

The Menzies government attempted to outlaw communism but failed in the referendum of 1951. Brewing largely outside the public eye, however, was a massive power struggle within the Australian union movement and the Australian Labor Party between communist and anti-communist forces. …

What happened as a consequence was the corporate funding of the anti-communist forces. This occurred overtly with corporations directly funding the conservative/liberal political parties and movements.

What occurred covertly was corporate funding of the anti-communist unions. … The corporate funding took place through corporations ‘encouraging’ staff to be members of anti-communist unions. This was particularly the case in the retail sector. Few union members knew or understood the politics at play. But this union membership — which was endorsed and often paid for by the corporates — meant that the anti-communist unions were very well-funded and politically powerful.

This anti-communist effort established a bonded, symbiotic working relationship between corporations and anti-communist unions. These unions delivered workable industrial relations arrangements for the corporates which enabled their businesses to function, and even thrive. …

In effect, there was a subterranean political coalition of anti-communist Liberal, National and Labor parliamentary representatives who, through coordinated action, sought to deny power to the communist forces within the Labor Party and the unions. …

But now, the communist left is overtaking industrial relations in Australia:

Union private-sector membership continued to ‘fall off a cliff’, landing at just 8 per cent today.

This ‘failure’ of the Rudd/Gillard law induced panic in the union movement. For the hard Left in the Labor Party and the unions the Rudd/Gillard laws have ‘proven’ that if unions seek to work with corporations, the corporations will simply screw over the unions.

This has resulted in a massive shift in the balance of power between hard Left and ‘middle Right’ unions. It’s fair to say that the Right within Labor is a shadow of its former self. The old, staunchly anti-communist forces within the ALP have pretty much dissolved. The Left’s unions and ideologues are in a position of dominant power never before seen in Australia. The consequence is a crashing of the union-corporate ‘working relationships’. …

The ‘out-of-the-public-eye’ corporate-union deal-making that had been the primary hidden feature of Australia’s industrial relations system had washed out. But the extent to which this had happened did not become apparent until the Albanese Labor government introduced its first phase of industrial relations laws in late 2022.

Covid aside:

Further, however, Covid interfered. What Covid did was demonstrate that, in Australia, when push comes to shove, the old colonial-style powers of the ruling institutions politically reasserted themselves over the people and the plain wording of the Constitution.

This was demonstrated most starkly in the defeated Palmer application to the High Court where Clive Palmer had sought to prove that it was unconstitutional to close the borders between the states. The High Court was asked to rule that because section 92 of the constitution required that ‘trade, commerce and intercourse’ between the states shall be ‘absolutely free’ that the Covid border closures were unconstitutional. The High Court ruled against the Palmer application, effectively saying that the words ‘absolutely free’ do not mean ‘absolutely free’. …

If there was a message for Australia’s corporates from Covid and the High Court it is this. The law does not really matter. Politics is everything!

Now mere support for woke won’t save the corporates:

This accumulation of historical events has now brought corporate Australia to the point where the old (secret) industrial relations deal-making that has served them well has collapsed….

It certainly looks as though corporations have, in desperation, jumped on to overtly political bandwagons where those bandwagons seem to be in the ascendancy. They are searching for the new deal-making rules. It’s not just industrial relations that is causing a problem for corporations. The Green Agenda and others have corporates in a spin. But industrial relations is and arguably remains the biggest elephant stomping around the room.

It’s only an observation, but probably a reasonable observation, that the corporate hope was that, in courting political favour on non-industrial relations issues, industrial relations deals as part of broader deal-making could still be secured. This hope, however, has been thoroughly blown apart.

Corporate Australia has surely misread the power shift in the Australian union movement, the Labor Party and the Labor movement. The anti-communist forces are defeated. The Left is strongly in the ascendant. And corporate Australia has been caught flat-footed! The proof is in the new industrial relations legislation.

The Albanese government’s first wave of industrial relations changes in December 2022 shocked corporate Australia. That first wave entirely reflects the ascendancy of the Left inside Labor. It reflects an Australian home-grown Marxist agenda. There’s no deal-making with corporations. It’s now a ‘do as we command’ legislative, structural and political environment.

There’s now a second wave of industrial relations changes mooted by the Albanese government. The Bill presented to parliament on 4 September is a corporation’s nightmare. … The legislation is a Leftist’s dream.

We should remember that old-style Marxism called for the dismantling of the private sector and that the means of production should be owned by the state. Australian, home-grown, ‘modern’ Marxism (or whatever Left ‘ism’ applies) is smarter. It’s not necessary for the institution of the state to own the means of production. What they can do instead is micro-manage the corporate managers. That’s what the Albanese government’s first and now second wave of industrial relations changes seeks to do and will do. It’s the effective neutering of the capacity of managers to manage.

With the collapse of some six decades-plus of comfortable corporate–union deal-making, Australian corporations have turned in desperation to supporting social and related political issues to secure deals. Qantas, of course, is the most visible example of this. That has blown up in spectacular fashion. What do Australian corporations do now? They must be worried!

Australia will now begin sliding down the international rankings, as productivity dives. Eventually all Australians will be poorer.

A Miracle in Argentina? By Phiipp Bagus.

The left-wing zeitgeist is rolling over the freedoms of citizens almost unhindered; most shockingly during the Covid crisis. The left tries to paint anyone who stands in the zeitgeist´s way as an extremist or even a Nazi.

Against this background, what can a successful strategy look like? …

His policies would destroy the upper/bureaucratic class:

Javier Milei is making a splash on all sides, because on August 13, 2023, he won the primaries for the presidency in Argentina. In the German media, he is described as ultra-right and ultra-libertarian. Recently, the Financial Times … insinuated that the libertarian Milei would follow the strategy of right-wing populism designed by Murray Rothbard in 1992 …:

1. Radical tax cuts
2. Radical reduction of the welfare state
3. Abolition of privileges for “protected” minorities
4. Crushing criminals
5. Getting rid of bums
6. Abolition of the Federal Reserve
7. A program of America First (anti-globalist and isolationist)
8. Defending traditional family values …

Milei wants to radically reduce taxes. He never tires of calling taxes what they are, theft. He also wants to radically grind down the welfare state and likes to illustrate the reduction in government spending and his proposal of reducing Argentinian ministries from 18 to 8 with a chainsaw. His “Chainsaw Plan” is intended to radically trim the state.

Milei repeatedly speaks of equality before the law as a fundamental liberal principle and wants to abolish privileges for minorities. As a result, he repeatedly clashes with radical feminists who defend legal privileges for women.

The imprisonment of criminals is also on Milei’s agenda. Gun freedom is in his program so that victims can defend themselves against criminals. Those who refuse to work are no longer supported by the state in his Argentina.

Milei also has the 6th of Rothbard’s points in his agenda: Milei wants to abolish the central bank of Argentina. Using right-wing populist rhetoric he aims to physically blow up the central bank. In doing so, he would wipe out the power of one of the most inflationary central banks, which willingly financed all Peronist and Kirchnerist spending programs. He wants to dollarize the country and open it up to currency competition. …

Milei likes to point out that Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world at the beginning of the 20th century thanks to classical liberal policies and was destroyed by socialism in the 20th century. In 35 years, Milei promises, Argentina can be a superpower again. The prerequisite for this to happen is a return to libertarianism. …

His tactics are bold:

Milei has been very present in the public debate in Argentina for years. He gained fame as a polarizing and fiercely arguing talk show guest. Later, he decided to create his own party to lead the culture war against socialism and statism more effectively and to bring the right ideas to more people.

 

 

His rhetorical strategy in debates is vociferous, belligerent, and is sometimes perceived as offensive (if the truth can be offensive at all). He does not allow himself to be intimidated or belittled by left-wing opinion-makers. In a debate, he simply shouts louder than the leftists, whom he calls “Zurdos”, and interrupts them to tell them to their faces that they are saying an absolute stupidity and have no idea what they are talking about. You should read Hayek, Mises and Rothbard first, Milei recommends to them. He also calls leftists and politicians parasites and thieves, in a debate. For taxes are theft.

In keeping with Rothbard’s strategy of right-wing populism, he clearly names the profiteers of the state apparatus. He rails again and again against the caste of politicians and bureaucrats. He calls them parasites that live at the expense of the hard-working and decent citizens. … So-called social justice is a monstrous injustice because it means unequal treatment of people before the law. It is a fig leaf for envy and resentment.

Milei’s emotional and polemical nature resonates with many, especially among young people. After winning the primaries in mid-August, he has legitimate hopes for the Argentine presidency.

How bad does it have to get before someone like Milei is embraced? 116% inflation and a century of relative under-performance, apparently.

Orwell would loathe today’s left. By Lisa MacKenzie.

I recently re-read George Orwell’s 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, and I was taken by his description of the bourgeois, left-leaning intelligentsia of his time. They live in the shallowness of ideas, he writes, severed from the common culture and life experiences of the working class. They spend most of their time bickering with their chief enemy, the equally bourgeois ‘Blimps’ — archetypal red-faced imperialists. Though they despise each other, both the bourgeois intelligentsia and the Blimps are united in their mutual disdain for the working class.

 

 

Orwell, perhaps England’s greatest-ever political writer, notes how the bourgeois-left intelligentsia use a lot of words to intellectualise issues without understanding them. He saw that they frequently Blimp-baited without engaging with the real challenges people face. And he saw that they were only prepared to discuss issues raised in a few select publications — mainly the New Statesman and News Chronicle back then — which they also happened to edit, read and write for.

I was struck by how well this description of the bourgeois-left intelligentsia fits today’s middle-class lefties.

 

The British government writing to tech firms demanding they financially punish and cancel Russell Brand before he’s been through due legal process over the allegations against him is a very disturbing Orwellian development. pic.twitter.com/6hWPDOF8V3

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 21, 2023

Corrupt Media Suddenly Care About Russell Brand’s Behavior. By John Nolte.

The Brett Kavanaugh/Russia Collusion Media say five women have accused Russell Brand of rape and sexual assault between 2006 and 2013. Four of those women have chosen to remain anonymous. One woman claims she was 16 during their relationship, although 16 is the age of consent in England. …

Where do I stand on this?

Hell, I don’t know.

I have no idea.

The only people who know are the alleged victims and Brand. What I do know is that my opinion on this stuff has been and will always be the same: innocent until proven guilty. Our current climate, with its openly fascistic “Believe All Women” mantra, appalls and sickens me. …

Why should we believe the corporate media this time?

Why should we believe these people this time…?

• Russia Collusion Hoax
• Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax
• Jussie Smollett Hoax
• Covington KKKids Hoax
• Very Fine People Hoax
• Seven-Hour Gap Hoax
• Russian Bounties Hoax
• Trump Trashes Troops Hoax
• Policemen Killed at Mostly Peaceful January 6 Protest Hoax
• Rittenhouse Hoax
• Eating While Black Hoax
• Border Agents Whipping Illegals Hoax
• NASCAR Noose Hoax
• The Georgia Jim Crow 2.0 Hoax
• Trump Assaulted Secret Service Agents and Grabbed Steering Wheel of Beast Hoax
• MAGA Assaulted Paul Pelosi Hoax
• COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax
• Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Russian Disinformation Hoax
• Joe Biden Will Never Ban Gas Stoves Hoax
• COVID Deaths are Over-Counted Is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax …

I have no emotional investment in Russell Brand. I don’t know the guy personally. I know that he was a loathsome lout for most of his public life. I also know that in recent years, he’s sought to repent for his past. He appears to have wised up and matured. He says he’s now a dedicated husband and father.

Politically, while he’s no Donald Trump, he does see the Matrix. Using his wildly popular YouTube channel, he questions narratives cherished by the corporate media. He lashes out at the establishment’s obscene lies and desire to divide us and subjugate normal people as racist Nazis.

I also know that the moment any former member of the left takes even one step off the Leftist Plantation, the corporate media targets them for destruction.

So, yeah, I have questions…

The first question is, why now…? These allegations of wrongdoing are said to have occurred between 2006 and 2013. Why now? …

And let’s not forget this…

We all saw just how far the corporate media were willing to go to destroy Brett Kavananaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Christine Blasey Ford, an obvious liar who couldn’t even remember where and when her alleged assault happened, was treated like Rosa Parks. The media then pummeled us with one phony Kavanaugh claim after another, including rape gangs!

I simply cannot trust that this same media would not do whatever it takes to destroy an apostate like Russell Brand, a guy with 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. …

I don’t know if Brand is guilty or not…

What I do know is that over and over and over again, the corporate media have been caught red-handed manufacturing evidence to further the left-wing political agenda.

What I do know is that over and over and over again, women have been caught red-handed manufacturing allegations that proved to be lies. Still, if their lies are aimed at a media-approved target, that woman becomes Rosa Parks. Ahh, but if the media do not approve of the target, they are Tara Reade and Juanita Broaddrick.

They locked up Julian Assange on dubious sex charges too.

John Hinderaker on how Brand’s cancellation is really all about politics:

The British press has stirred up a wave of hate against him, and YouTube, where he had a vast number of followers, has demonetized him. So Brand has moved to Rumble. The London Times takes this as more evidence of Brand’s guilt: not of being a rapist, which may be secondary at this point, but of not being fully on board with woke ideology …:

A major shareholder in one of the world’s biggest “alt-right” video sites has embraced Russell Brand after the BBC, Channel 4 and YouTube distanced themselves from him.”

So Rumble is “alt-right.” No one knows what that recently-invented word means, but it is surely bad. The “major shareholder” is Dan Bongino.

Dan Bongino, a former Fox News presenter, is among the largest financial backers of Rumble, a Florida-based video-sharing platform that has styled itself as being “immune from cancel culture”.

A former Fox News presenter! A Florida-based platform! “Immune from cancel culture!” These are all cues to the Times’s liberal audience. …

The London Times obviously disapproves of the content of Brand’s videos, now that he has become a sort-of conservative:

After he passed one million subscribers in March, Brand hinted at its value and the way in which Rumble provided him with a platform to share his conspiracy theory-laced rants about Covid lockdowns, vaccines, central bank’s digital currencies and the West’s role in the Ukraine war.

Conspiracy theory-laced “rants” about Covid lockdowns and vaccines! Note, first, that liberals never “rant,” and second, that “conspiracy theories” about covid responses and vaccines have often proved to be true. (I have no idea what Brand’s specific take might be.) Nor do I know what Brand has to say about central banks’ digital currencies or the Ukraine war, but apparently these are verboten topics. …

I am not impressed by stories told by anonymous women about something that supposedly happened ten or fifteen years ago. Brand may or may not have anything useful to say, but in any event, he has the right to say it.

The media and political establishment had no problem with Brand’s well-known bad behavior when he was a left winger. But now he must be silenced from speaking his mind on politics.