A man is habitually battened upon his head with "elite" opinion.
He takes daily instruction in what he must think and how he must think.
If he fails to come aboard he is... varying by context... undemocratic, fascistic, racist, sexist, gay-phobic, transsexual-phobic, immigrant-phobic... and an altogether nasty fellow.
He may even cast a vote for Mr. Trump.
We are against these elites, so-called.
We are not against them because we are undemocratic, fascistic, racist, sexist, gay-phobic, transsexual-phobic, immigrant-phobic and an altogether nasty fellow though we may well be an altogether nasty fellow.
We are not against elites because we would cast a vote for Mr. Trump.
We never have. And we never will.
We are simply against them because they are not authentic elites.
We refer you simply to the enhanced influenza of 2020 and the elite botchwork surrounding it.
Were they correct in any particular? To our knowledge they were not.
Yet there they were... microphone in one hand... billy club in the other... policing the minds of the American public.
In reality they are not qualified to instruct anyone in how or what he must think.
And we would knock them from their unearned, unmerited and undeserved perch... if afforded the opportunity.
For they represent a fantastic menace. A fantastic menace amplified and magnified by government muscle, government goons.
Mr. Michael Benz once toiled for the State Department of the United States in the field of cybertechnology.
He presently directs an outfit named the Foundation for Freedom Online.
He recently related how the intelligence agencies of the United States once restricted to overseas spookwork have trained their sensitive sensory apparatus inward... upon the American people.
Mr. Benz:
Because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft almost from the outset of the privatization of the internet in 1991, we quickly discovered through the efforts of the Defense Department, the State Department and our intelligence services that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums.
And free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department and our sort of CIA cutout NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments... Internet free speech allowed... regime change operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishment’s State Department agenda.
The high-water mark of the sort of internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012, when... all of the adversary governments of the Obama administration, Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the State Department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online.
In 2014 free speech executed a 180-degree boomeranging. Free speech became not a saber in State Department hands but a dagger to its jugular:
In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected countercoup where Crimea and the Donbass broke away. And they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014.
And when the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet. In the eyes of NATO... the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment.
NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov Doctrine, which is named after this Russian military general who claimed that the fundamental nature of war has changed. You don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over Central and Eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem, because that’s what controls elections.
An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outfit... to create psychological buffer zones. Basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies, to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.
When Brexit happened in 2016, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn’t have to worry just about Central and Eastern Europe anymore. It was coming westward.
The threat subsequently swam the Atlantic and stormed American shores.
Thus American domestic opposition to elite priorities became in essence foreign enemies.
For instance, Donald Trump and his democracy-despising voters:
From their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse.
It became full throttle when Trump was elected... Where they took all of this censorship architecture spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DoD, the DOJ and then the thousands of government-funded NGO and private-sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate, by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself.
And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy-promotion regime-change tool kit just in time for the 2020 election...
It gave rise to this multibillion-dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact-checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet...
Their whole-of-society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole-of-society effort to stop misinformation online.
The ersatz plague truly set this bunch loose:
They did this, for example, with COVID. They created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high-profile individuals like Tony Fauci or Peter Daszak or any of these other protected VIP individuals whose reputations had to be protected online. They broke things down into narratives...
Then they plugged these into these essentially machine-learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about COVID. And whenever something started to trend what was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. It was the same.
Thus elites must wreck democracy in order to preserve democracy. And in their telling, they are democracy itself:
All of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves...
What they essentially said is we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. And who are the democratic institutions? Oh, it’s us. It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media, it is the NGOs.
Mr. Benz continues and continues.
His central thesis in brief is that the entire governmental apparatus perpetrates a ruthless and ceaseless information warfare upon the American people.
What separates information from misinformation? From disinformation?
Their exclusive judgment.
They alone determine which pharmacological agents are "safe and effective."
They alone determine Earth's proper temperature settings.
They alone determine that elections are "safe and secure."
They alone determine that which is democratic and undemocratic.
They alone determine which words are impermissible and the just punishment for speaking them.
And they do this all under the sanctioning color of law.
We are not against elites. Society as Mr. Jefferson argued long ago requires elites.
Yet he was for a "natural" elite class. That is, an elite class selected by natural talents and merits.
So are we.
Alas, that is not the elite class presently in operation.
Presently in operation is an unnatural elite class that holds us in siege.
We are against these particular elites.
They are elite not by adjective only by noun.
Down with the wrong elites!
And up with the right elites.
The Daily Reckoning