First, in honor of the few generous readers who don’t know me personally, a quick round of Two Truths and a Lie:
A. I didn’t vote for Trump.
B. I don’t ever plan to vote for Trump.
C. I think most people who voted for Trump are fascist, uneducated white supremacists, since there aren’t many other reasons for voting that way.
(C. is a lie - as of 2020. And I’m sorry for any ways in which my prior-to-2020 thoughts concerning Trump voters might have hurt anybody, although my sway over even an iota of public opinion is admittedly nonexistent, so I’m really just making a rhetorical point here.)
There are games and personal opinions, and then there are Not Games, and matters of public import.
An obvious reason that Hamilton 68’s newly-uncovered status as Completely Fraudulent and Lying “News” Advisory Organization is so disturbing is that hundreds if not thousands of front page mainstream news articles - especially leading up to the 2020 election - now turn out to be…well, totally fraudulent and untrue. Also, untold zillions of points of censorship throughout our digital commons were (and are still today) further justified by the federal government based upon lies concerning “Russian Influence” that Hamilton 68 kept generating for reporters who Never Once Fact Checked.
The facts are incredibly simple: there were not and never have been Russian Bots on Twitter trying inexplicably to meddle in US politics - while Hamilton 68 promoted itself nationally as an Uber Handy, one-stop-shopping source for journalists seeking details on Russian Disinformation. Instead of actually tracking influential Russian Bots on Twitter (since these don’t exist), Hamilton 68’s entrepreneurs hand-picked about 650 conservative (and some left-wing) individuals, plus a few people from Russia, and tracked their tweets. For years. Without telling the individuals being tracked. And reported this as “Russian Bot Activity” for front page news stories. Which the legacy news agencies published. Even Mother Jones based a dozen “investigative” articles on this bullshit!
When it’s not-a-game, all lies and no truths is so Uber Scientific.
Meanwhile, when faced with their fraud finally becoming public, the organization is now turning right around and absolving themselves of any wrongdoing by quietly updating their online dashboard of lies. Now Hamilton 68 only offers “suggestions” of Questions To Ask, rather than Absolute Authority on What’s New in Russian Disinformation Today. I wonder if Harvard and Princeton et al will invite them back to lecture on such “questions”? Hamilton 68’s lies shaped how the mainstream press told us to think for YEARS, along with which politicians we were told were manipulating us most. Not coincidentally, Hamilton 68 influenced who many of us voted for, in much more insidious and dangerous ways even than the theoretically influential Data Profiteering and attempts at voter manipulation outlined in “The Great Hack”.
The organizations lied. The politicians lied. The New York Times and the Washington Post and all the rest happily published the lies…and now that we know they were lying, they show no sign of apologizing.
It’s not a game, after all. It’s USA 2023, and this is business as usual.
——
Last week, I used the words “vaccine” and “mandates” together in a carefully-edited note that I posted to over a dozen Facebook groups. Facebook allowed all but one instance of these postings, all of which were relevant to each group’s mission, and nothing about my posted content looked different (apart from a pinned notice to Always Consult the CDC Exclusively For Anything Related To Covid) from any other post in each feed.
Later that day, multiple people contacted me by email: whenever they attempted to comment on my post, this was disallowed for “violating community standards.”
I heard a wise person say recently - regarding ongoing censorship of groups but mostly individuals like me, by agencies and individuals within our federal government in partnership with Big Tech, especially since 2016 but accelerating in 2020 - that it’s counterproductive to pursue these tactics, in addition to censorship being super unconstitutional. Specifically, it’s a bad idea to treat people like extremists when they disagree with you, and to censor these disagreements instead of acknowledging and/or addressing their concerns.
The reason is simple: when Big Government via Big Business constantly cancels, shadow bans, and otherwise censors people, these people. Will. Get. Annoyed. People will not shut up because of the censorship, and they WILL become more and more aggravated. And annoyed people eventually get angry. And angry people are very likely to become radicalized, not because they were radicals to begin with, but because they have been treated poorly for so long.
Because I’m angry, but determined not to become radicalized, and because I attempt to maintain a sense of humor, I’ll play a game called State Some Facts. You can play by deciding whether each statement is true by doing your own research:
1. Vaccine mandates are unconstitutional medical coercion.
2. Covid mRNA jabs are hurting enormous numbers of people, especially young people.
3. People who have gotten injected with these experimental drugs are more likely to suffer serious injuries and die, and get and transmit and die from covid, than people who didn’t get the shots.
4. The covid response debacle consists of crimes against humanity that are actively being perpetuated by our own government and companies that work with them.
I’m actually finally boring myself by stating this stuff over and over. I have no new ways to say it, and all the information is out there. I’ve just this moment decided that I’m going to take a sabbatical from writing about covid, for at least three weeks and/or until I have something new to say.
——
There is one thing that’s new: I’m tired of being censored and called a conspiracist. Stating theories that turn out to be true 98% of the time is not nearly as bad as saying things that were never true to begin with. In fact, it isn’t a crime at all! The new part is that today I own my feelings about it.
And yet I’m the one being censored for noting that covid vaccine mandates are divisive, along with millions of other Americans saying who knows what heretical other and similar things that don’t go along with the Government’s Message. It’s enough to make one vote for a rogue wildcard populist President just because he’s almost entirely incapable of not-saying what he thinks! ….oh wait, that already happened.
I’m so tired of being treated like a freak by most of my former progressive and liberal allies, that I’m planning an incredibly radical move during my upcoming sabbatical: I am going to learn how to make a pair of pants. Jeans, specifically. I have no good pants in my closet, and I can never find any at thrift stores. Also, I don’t want to buy pants made in Madagascar or Ecuador or Tahiti, and even if I could find some that fit well, new ones cost a ton. So, I have purchased a pdf pattern, some 100% cotton blueberry denim and assorted Complicated Fittings like zippers, plus poplin for the pockets. I haven’t sewed much in over 25 years, so this project will take a lot of my “free” time over the next many weeks, in addition to my day job of testing new sourdough recipes and occasionally checking in on my children’s education and whereabouts.
I will report back in a while, concerning this revolutionary pants project, which, if successful, will be 100% effective at covering my ass.