Posted on March 31, 2023

The Mask Comes Off

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, March 31, 2023

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The media are the regime. In a democracy, media control is power. No politician can really be considered a “leader” without the press behind him. Even a landslide victory such as Richard Nixon’s in 1972 is hollow without media support.

The media have always been biased, but the United States was different from the rest of the Western world because of its guarantee of free speech. This changed after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Those in media and in the government concluded, perhaps rightly, that they must not let Americans discuss certain subjects for fear they would reach the “wrong” conclusions. Much of the press also abandoned the pretense of impartiality. Instead, many journalists took it upon themselves to police speech and to encourage deplatforming. 4chan is the latest target.

The best way to justify repression was to torture the language. “Hate speech” became dangerous violence; actual violence against “haters” became self-defense. (Even self-improvement is “radicalism.”) Repression requires high-profile cases that can be used to justify censorship.

The most important such case was the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. State and city police allowed the violence; an independent report found that the police chief instructed his men to let the opposing parties fight. Few journalists cared. Many white advocates, even those who had nothing to do with the event, were deplatformed. The justification was Heather Heyer’s death and the ideas that supposedly led to it.

Joe Biden claimed Charlottesville was the reason he ran for president, saying there was a battle for the “soul of this nation.” Despite the confused circumstances of James Fields’s actions, he was sentenced to life in prison. The Alt Right never recovered, with activists cut off from financial support and broader audiences. The Alt Right did not “die.” It was killed by state and corporate action. That may strengthen us in the long-run and may have been necessary, but it was shocking to those who believed freedom of speech meant something.

In 2022, when Payton Gendron killed ten people in a grocery store in Buffalo, he left behind a manifesto that blamed mass non-white immigration and the Great Replacement. Both the state and media decided “The Great Replacement” was a dangerous idea that fueled violence. Thus, the idea itself became quasi-criminal and journalists hunted “root causes.”

The government also edged closer to criminalizing speech. H.R. 61, introduced by Shelia Jackson Lee, was an act “to prevent and prosecute white supremacy hate crime and conspiracy to commit white supremacy inspired hate crime.” It defined “white supremacy inspired hate crime,” in part, as crimes in which someone published material that generated “antagonism based on ‘replacement theory’ or hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group.” This absurd law failed.

In June 2022, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning Great Replacement Theory. Rep. Jamaal Bowman called it a “toxic lie.” He argued it was a “dangerous intoxicant for extremists” that might lead people to go on “shooting sprees and massacres and members of targeted minority groups.” He said Critical Race Theory was not linked to any such crimes. That’s because no one is looking. There have been many black attacks on cops inspired by false claims of “racism,” including the BLM-inspired murder of five police officers in Dallas. The media and universities seem unworried about the possible consequences of the ideas they preach to a group with low impulse control.

The conservative movement, including President Trump, did little in the face of censorship. Conservatism Inc.’s inaction isn’t surprising. The key lesson in 2016 was not that the Republican Party lost control over its voters, but that the conservative movement lost control over its supporters. The Alt Right, which was most effective when it was an online subculture, began beating mainstream conservative outlets in audience share. If free speech had prevailed, it’s possible that the most “hardline” figures, such as Andrew Anglin, the hosts of TheRightStuff.biz, and podcast or YouTube hosts would enjoy larger audiences than “mainstream” hosts. Instead, they are cut off from access and from financial services. Self-declared anarchists and communists have no such problems. President Trump’s own complacency lasted until he himself was deplatformed. If he had managed to keep speech free, he might not have lost in 2020 or been indicted in 2023.

This is the way power works, and it’s useless to complain that it “isn’t fair.” It does mean that we can dismiss naïve claims about the “marketplace of ideas.” American society is governed from the top down by control of media, with the state and its security organs partially determining who speaks and who does not. It is not outright totalitarian, but neither is Russia. This doesn’t stop people from accurately calling Russia an illiberal, authoritarian regime. If America isn’t quite as authoritarian as Russia — and that’s debatable — it’s clearly moving in this direction, but in defense of values of which the media approve.

Nontheless, one might expect that “transgender” Audrey Hale’s murders at a Christian school in Nashville might cause some reaction. In a free society, speech and violence are not the same thing. A person should not be blamed if someone twists his words and murders innocent people. However, those with power have already decided that certain ideas are dangerous.

“Transgenderism” and its persecution complex could be one such idea. Though we live in a society that demands media be carefully controlled lest young people absorb dangerous ideas, it is impolitic to suggest young people are being brainwashed or pressured into going along with a psychological desires that every other generation would have called mental illness. Nor dare anyone suggest that the parents who run to journalists to claim their toddlers are “trans” are suffering from Munchausen by proxy or are attention addicts and status seekers. Our society celebrates grooming youth into a lifestyle where more than 40 percent of those involved try to kill themselves. According to recent surveys, the number of young people claiming to be “trans” has nearly doubled in recent years. Today, the intersectional and transgender flags have more moral significance than the American flag.

Though some conservative states are restricting medical treatments for minors, those in the heights of power clearly favor the “trans” trend. The White House and other leading Democrats support what is delicately called “gender affirming care.” Giving grotesqueries in women’s clothing an audience of children is the newest way Democrats such as New York Attorney General Letitia James taunt conservatives.

Media may insist that people “affirm” a “trans” person’s imagination and use the pronouns he or she demands, but most people will notice someone’s real sex. Someone using the wrong pronoun or saying “sir” or “ma’am” could spark a psychological crisis. The newly invented “trans” community is, not surprisingly, insecure, and claims that bans on “gender affirming care” are “genocide.”

A lot of talk of victimization is probably driven by social media or sexual fixations, and by the desperate desire of many young Americans to seek out victim status and thus win moral superiority. However, it also appears that the “trans” community is sensitive and quick to violence. It’s not surprising that the working-class Communist toughs of previous generations of antifa have been largely replaced by “trans” activists whose mug shot photos often belie their preferred pronouns.

Inventing a victim category that appeals to the mentally instable, pumping them up with claims that they face “genocide,” and then urging them to take up arms against persecution that no one is actually suggesting is incitement.

(Note: the flyer featured from 0:11–0:12 is a fake, but the rest appear legitimate.)

You’ll find plenty of memes, discussions, and outright calls to action by armed “trans” activists ready to blaze away at . . . someone they imagine threatens them. Few people really care, beyond not wanting children, especially their own, to be sucked into dangerous, irreversible treatments.

The killings in Nashville were thus predictable. However, the media have notably not blamed transgender ideology. Trans people are the real victims.

There are countless stories warning of the “backlash.”

Journalists have come close to blaming Tennessee itself, suggesting that the Volunteer State’s recent decision to ban sex changes for minors was responsible. “Some on the right blame gender identity and not guns for Nashville shooting,” said a scandalized NBC.

But anyone who refused to blame internet content for what Payton Gendron did in Buffalo would be shouted down.

MSNBC blamed conservatives: “Research shows mass shooters often experience trauma and deep levels of social rejection and bullying, conditions that far-right rhetoric reinforce.” Would MSNBC argue that Gendron could have felt bullied by anti-white propaganda?

Certainly, MSNBC pundits were not furrowing their brows discussing the grievances of James Fields after Charlottesville. His actions, however reprehensible, were far less extreme than setting out to murder children. And I don’t recall anyone worrying about a backlash against peaceful white nationalists, or even random white people.

While President Biden said Charlottesville was a battle for the “soul of the nation,” he now apparently believes that “trans” people “shape our nation’s soul.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered her support not to Christians, but to the trans people who are “under attack right now.” So did Amazon.

One can almost admire the “trans” community’s shamelessness, but courage is easy when the federal government and its media pets are backing you.

At least one leftist used a fake AI image to shame conservatives.

It’s tedious even to say it, but obviously there will be no sweeping purges of pages, products, or propaganda on trans issues, in contrast to even moderate pro-white speech. That said, Amazon has taken down the “Trans Rights… Or Else” shirt that featured the slogan along with pictures of various rifles. A “Trans Day of Vengeance” (for what?) rally was canceled, but not out of shame. Organizers claim there was a threat.

And the killer turns out to be a sympathetic figure. Imagine a media writeup of James Fields’s talents.

Or maybe the massacre was just a sad thing that happened, with no larger political significance.

Conservatives have been muted. To take just one example: In 2019, after a young white shot non-whites in El Paso, David French wanted “war” and to treat “online white-nationalist radicals exactly the way we treat online jihadist sympathizers.” After the Nashville shooting, he just wants to “pray” and vent his scorn on “gun fetishists.”

“Imagine if the situation was reversed” is tedious. Pointing out double standards, by itself, accomplishes nothing. In their minds, progressives do not have a double standard. Many believe speech they think is harmful and reinforces oppressive social structures should not be free. We can argue all we want about who is the real liberal, what free speech means, or what liberal icons of the past such as Noam Chomsky or Christopher Hitchens would say. Appeals to legal norms or tradition always lose to moral fanaticism. There may be a few old-fashioned leftists or true liberals, but they are likely to be as cowed as conservatives.

We must understand reality. American Exceptionalism was always a myth. America is a country like any other, with a ruling class that has an official ideology that justifies its power. These days, that ideology is egalitarianism, which has spawned a religion that worships blacks and other media-approved “victims,” and has far more energy than Christianity, even inside most Christian churches. Those who are obstacles to the impossible (and undesirable) goal of equality, especially whites, are an “enemy” group as surely as the kulaks were under the Bolsheviks. All history has been redefined as a story of oppressors versus oppressed, with whites, traditional Christians, and others who built Western Civilization cast as eternal villains. Even calling it egalitarianism may be too kind because it often becomes crude anti-white hatred. Modern America’s war against “hate” is one of the biggest cases of projection in history.

Our system needs a constant supply of new grievances and new victims. Broken, frustrated people are not a problem for the system but its inevitable product. The Left functions by inventing and then mobilizing resentment. Today, “trans youth” are the new frontier. Tomorrow, it will be something else. Egalitarians cannot be satisfied; it’s a fool’s errand to try.

This week showed that there is no act that can cause the proponents of this faith even to pause. The slaughter of blacks in liberal cities changed no one’s mind, so it’s not surprising that the murder of children won’t either. One of the victims of this shooting was black, but no one seems to care about that either. A person’s value comes from media attention and sympathy, and that value is a tool against political enemies.

The calls for “vengeance” against normal people will continue. No one will be punished for storming state capitals or assaulting police. If anyone is blamed, it will be the Christian victims and conservatives. It’s a remarkable case in which the shooter is being excused, if not quite defended.

It’s useless to plead for our rulers to be fair. We should instead ask why Republicans and others who claim to speak for overwhelmingly white, Christian voters, are silent. And when will they restore online free speech rights so normal people can fight back against the madness?

About Gregory Hood

View all posts by Gregory Hood
Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab.