Rallying to the Cause
I just read this headline, a perfect sign of the times on every level: “Hundreds in Atlanta rally against hate after spa shootings.”
First of all, if thousands rally against abortion, the event would be lucky to get mentioned on page two of the local newspaper. But when “hundreds” rally for a politically useful progressive cause of the moment, it is the lead article on MSN’s international homepage, suddenly world news. Similarly, just yesterday I saw another featured article on this cause du jour that was accompanied by a photo of, as I recall, four people holding signs denouncing anti-Asian “hatred.” Were they four people of any note, intelligence, relevance to anything? Who knows? And of course you are not supposed to care, for those four people were merely props for a propagandizing “news outlet.”
As I have argued for years, basically to the crickets, there is no such thing as news, as we routinely use that word. News does not exist. There is no objective reality corresponding to the term, and there never was. “News” means, and has only ever meant, and could only ever mean, the events or issues that some particular people with a public platform choose to highlight and frame today, in whatever way they prefer, for whatever reasons they like. Today, as the mass media is completely dominated and directed by socialist authoritarian apparatchiks and their fellow-traveling careerists, “news,” by and large, means whatever is happening, however objectively insignificant, in any dark corner of the world, that might, if framed and exaggerated in a glossy way, serve the agenda of Marxist totalitarianism.
Hence this week, the convenient agenda item at hand is a local crime in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, which the media and their puppet-masters in the progressive intellectual and political vanguard have decided must be exploited as evidence of a supposedly rampant “anti-Asian” sentiment sweeping the United States. This, of course, is the rhetorical precursor to, and justification for, the eventual institution of new laws regulating private speech, attitudes, and behavior, with a view to creating yet another level of police state controls on community life and child-rearing, by way of censorship, government-funded propaganda campaigns, and compulsory mass indoctrination in the schools. In addition, of course, it is intended to rope in yet another “minority group” as permanent and monolithic supporters of the Democratic Party, which is portraying itself as that group’s only and essential protectors against racism, which is the progressive left’s perennial conceptual stand-in for “capitalism,” which in turn is the left’s conveniently pejorative label for individual liberty, free speech, and self-determination, i.e., limited government.
Thus, we are told that hundreds of people in Atlanta rallied against hate. Against hate. Rallying against hate is equivalent to rallying against rudeness or against bad weather or against stupidity. Perhaps we may set it down as a rule of thumb for determining when a public sentiment is being manufactured and manipulated for purely authoritarian purposes that if you are told that people are “rallying” against something that every semi-rational human would be against in principle, and the government of the day is fully in support of, and actively promoting, this “rally,” then you may assume you are being had. Furthermore, when a particular private criminal — a murderer of all things — is suddenly being cited, in isolation, as supposed evidence of a general social evil, you may know that you are being manipulated, and that the reason the “rally” in question attracted only “hundreds” is because most people have not yet been convinced that the alleged social evil is really as prevalent or serious as the propagandists are proclaiming it to be. (That is no reason for hope, however; people are universally ignorant and malleable today. They will be turned, gradually, by the optics of those “hundreds.” They will be persuaded that they are missing out on something, that their lack of enthusiasm is a symptom of antiquated views or “false consciousness,” and they will finally cave in morally. They will “rally to the cause,” without ever being able to articulate what that cause is.)
A real political protest is a rally on behalf of private citizens, and against abusive State powers. A media-manufactured progressive protest, conversely, is a rally against private citizens, and in sympathy with increasing State power. Authoritarians dread the former, and take steps to crush or downplay it; they love the latter, and are usually its main instigators or backers.
