You probably know who Alex Jones is. He is best known for slightly unhinged rants on Youtube about chemicals turning frogs gay and other stuff but he also shed light on topics that the powers that be prefer not be exposed to light. He was perhaps the highest profile person on the right to be deplatformed on social media. He was easy, a trial balloon to soften up resistance, because so many establishment “conservative” members of Conservatism Inc. wouldn’t speak up for fear of losing their precious “respectability”. If you are a respectable conservative you get to keep your social media access, you get invited onto TV shows and you get to keep selling your books. If you become slightly less than properly respectable, well you go away and get tossed from the gravy train. So establishment “conservatives” kept quiet or even praised his deplatforming. Alex is still ranting away at Bitchute however, which is a big reason why Bitchute is in the crosshairs of the Left.
You might not know who Gavin McInnes is. He is kind of a clownish provocateur and the founder of a group with the rather silly name “Proud Boys”. Earlier in the year he was booted from Twitter and then it all started to snowball. Some of the members of his group got into a fight with some anitfa and kicked the crap out of them. The antifa attack people for political reasons all the time and usually get away with it but when the Proud Boys slapped around some antifa, the wheels came off. The news media, which never misreports the news for partisan reasons, said that the FBI had classified the Proud Boys as a “white nationalist” group, although they were nothing of the sort. Gavin stepped down from the Proud Boys, allegedly to help some of the members of his group that had been arrested after the fight. As a side note, it was easy to identify the Proud Boys as they were not wearing masks but the police regularly allow antifa to show up and commit mayhem while wearing masks. Shortly after stepping down, it came out that the FBI had not after all labeled the entire Proud Boys organization as “white nationalists”. Oops! The original erroneous report got widespread, coordinated coverage, the retraction not so much. Shocker. Then Blaze, the media arm of lunatic controlled opposition figure Glenn Beck, “merged” with CRTV where Gavin had his show and within short order fired Gavin (other figures like Michelle Malkin wisely quit CRTV rather than fall under the control of Beck). Then Youtube banned Gavin from his channel which had over 200,000 subscribers and with that Gavin was deplatformed and memory holed. Gavin was a clown who did some kind of gross stunts and also went out of his way to distance himself from the alt-right but that doesn’t stop the Left from calling him names. A search of his name on DuckDuckGo brings up a number of results with blurbs referring to him as an “alt-right commentator”, several instances of “far right” and one predictably over the top description from the Huffington Post as “the founder of the violent neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys”. Gavin learned too late that once you get targeted, no amount of oblation will save you.
Then came this tweet from Prager U., the Youtube channel of Dennis Prager:
Prager has been in the crosshairs for some time for his naughty speak criticizing socialism and other protected political positions. This sort of warning shot from Google is the lead up to shutting this platform down. That will be quite an escalation when it happens as Prager has almost 2 million subscribers and has over half a billion views. I assume both those numbers have been tinkered with as well so the real numbers are probably much higher. I would expect to see Prager get the Alex Jones treatment as soon as Youtube thinks it can get away with it. The thing is, Prager is pretty mild stuff, very entry level from a conservative standpoint but that doesn’t matter. Heck even pewdiepie is being targeted and he has the most subscribers of any channel on Youtube.
All of that stuff is just the lead up to the 2020 election. The Left learned a harsh but valuable lesson: they cannot allow the free exchange of ideas if they want to game the election process. That is where the “Russian collusion” nonsense comes from and the “fake news” rhetoric which was quickly turned around and used against them, something that makes them even more furious because it mocks them and that is the worst thing you can do to a self-righteous (but I repeat myself) Leftist. It is also the source of the obvious coordination between the media groups to keep presenting the same narrative over and over, while at the same time the social media giants collude with the media to shut down opposing points of view. There were lots of election shenanigans going on that flipped Republican wins to Democrat wins, and that is also a precursor of what is going to happen in 2020. Silencing and shutting down anyone that might speak up about it is key to making sure that the Democrats retain the House and defeat Trump. Remember Stalin saying that who counts the votes being the only important one also requires that no one tattles on the vote counters. In a free and fair election, I think Trump wins. I expect 2020 to be anything but a free and fair election.
That brings us to James Fields. You can be forgiven for not knowing his name but I have been watching this fairly closely. James Fields is the young man who crashed his car at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last August. The crash resulted in the death of a young woman, Heather Heyer, and caused a cascade of events. James Fields is from Maumee, Ohio which is the town next to the one I grew up in. My first job was in Maumee and we used to go there all the time because it had the closest stores and restaurants. I have been keeping an eye on this case and it finally went to trial recently. Mr. Fields was found guilty on all charges including the big one, first-degree murder. I am not a lawyer and don’t pretend to be one but first-degree murder requires intent and premeditation. To prove this charge the prosecution had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, not that the car crash resulted in the death of Ms. Heyer which is not in dispute but that Mr. Fields intended to do so. Watching the case from afar it seemed like there were a lot of questions that could and should have been raised and hammered hard by the court appointed defender but were not. Again, I didn’t watch the trial in person but it certainly smacked of a pre-ordained outcome. Did he intend to drive his car into the crowd with the intent to commit murder? I don’t know but I have serious doubts.
James Fields is a pretty effective bad guy, an easy guy to dislike, almost a cartoonish figure out of central casting. He looks and acted like kind of a loner, the sort of lonely, angry and aimless young men that are frustrated but don’t know how to constructively deal with it. He has a dorky version of the “fashy haircut” favored by some alt-right figures. He seemed to have some sort of fascination with Hitler (although having a similar fascination with other mass murderers like Che, Mao or Stalin doesn’t carry the same baggage). He just looks like a prototypical basement dweller. He now faces life in prison although I assume there will be multiple appeals which, again not a lawyer, it would seem he has a decent chance of winning, at least on the first degree murder charge. But this is far from over and that is why I am linking him with Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes even though neither of them are “white supremacists” or “white nationalists”.
Vice ran a story just yesterday lamenting how difficult it would be to prove “hate crime” charges against James Fields, Why it will be hard to convict neo-Nazi James Alex Fields of hate crimes. Of course Vice is not a serious news or opinion journal (ironically Gavin was one of the founders of Vice although now the website just lists the other two co-founders, as if he never existed) but they are talking about the very issue I am driving at. According to the article, there is a meeting at the end of next month to discuss the charging of Fields with 29 Federal hate crimes, which apparently could carry the death penalty. There will be a lot of pressure to proceed with the hate crimes charges, even though he already faces a pretty certain sentence of life in prison. The reason is not to put him to death, it is to send a message:
Dual prosecutions are less unusual in cases of national significance though. For example, Dylann Roof — the self-avowed white supremacist who opened fire on a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and killed nine black parishioners — faced both state murder charges and federal hate crime charges.
But even the symbolic value of hate crimes charges can matter.
“I have argued in some of my writings that symbolism is very important. But it can’t just be symbolism because it has to be vigorously enforced,” Chavis said. “You want to deter someone from perpetrating crimes against people because of their membership in a protected class.”
Hate crimes laws are mostly about symbolism, as well as an opportunity to retry or try with more serious charges individuals when they draw sufficient attention. This goes back to the “civil rights” trial of the officers in the Rodney King incident, where police officers were acquitted by a jury of their peers so the Feds came in to charge them with civil rights violations for the same crime, which is a way to sidestep double-jeopardy and give the government another shot at convicting someone. This message from the first Fields trial and almost certain subsequent hate crimes trial will be to discourage people from showing up at any rally that can be labeled “far right”, which causes a chilling effect on political speech. Why would you go to a political rally when you know that violent leftists will certainly show up and the cops, as they did in Charlottesville, will stand aside and let them attack you and that if you fight back and hurt someone you could find yourself facing not just local charges but also Federal hate crimes charges? It just isn’t worth it, until things become so intolerable that it does and at that point all bets are off. There is a breaking point where the risk of being arrested won’t be enough to stop people and that will result in something bad.
Again, since I run the risk of being accused of being sympathetic to Fields and his beliefs: he was clearly a disturbed and angry young man and he should go to jail for running into a crowd of people, whether he intended to harm anyone or not. A car is a dangerous piece of equipment and you are responsible for using it responsibly. I don’t support his specific views, presuming he is an actual “Neo-Nazi” or “white supremacist”. But I also see the state jumping on him with both feet while antifa commit violent acts and largely get away with it. The message is clear. Stay away from public gathering because if you show up and something happens, you are going to get the full force of the government coming after you. The vast majority of people along the political Right spectrum have jobs and homes and families, and being too public about your politics runs some real risks so it is just easier to stay home and get angry in private. If you don’t think that is a very dangerous situation, you don’t understand human nature.
Many conservatives and sundry people on the Right try to steer clear of this controversy. The Left picked Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes for a reason, they are on the fringes and “respectable”, lovable losers, “muh principles!” conservatives are not going to defend them on free speech grounds for fear of getting lumped in with them. Even a whiff of controversy can jeopardize your social media accounts, book deals and talk show appearance gravy train and let’s be honest, for many of these “conservatives” that is what this whole thing is about. Nobody in their right mind other than a handful of people, mostly on the alt-right, are openly questioning whether the James Fields conviction was a just verdict or not.
This is the strategy I liken to conservatives angling to be on the last train to the gulag. But there is a fundamental flaw in that strategy:
A strategy of being on the last train to the gulag still ends up at the gulag.
There is no place anywhere on the Right where you can stand and be safe. Today it is Alex Jones and James Fields, conspiracy theories and Nazi fetishism turned violent. Tomorrow it will be something else. Your church teaches that homosexuality is sinful and worse you teach that to your children, contra the school system? Hate crime and possibly child abuse. You reject the “scientific consensus” on global warming climate change? Hate crime. You question the wisdom of flooding the country with tens of millions of low skill, low education migrants that don’t speak English, refuse to assimilate and send their earnings back home? Hate crime, bigotry and xenophobia. You hold to the quaint ThoughtCrime that children are born either male or female and the gender you are born with is the gender you will die with, mutilation notwithstanding? Hate crime.
Do you think I am exaggerating? A kid in a New York college hung up posters, on the same places countless other people hang up posters that no doubt praise Communism or promote really crappy bands. These posters feature a picture of Hitler and say “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi party!”, a direct reference to a line from The Producers sung by Mel Brooks (who happens to be Jewish). His stupid stunt drew the attention of the governor of New York, the reprehensible Andrew Cuomo, and now this kid is facing felony “hate crime” charges. Read that again. He put up posters, that is it, and he is being charged with a felony. Taken in isolation this is just prosecutorial overreach but looking at the bigger picture this is part of a pattern of speech suppression. Again, today it is a kid putting up posters of Hitler being charged with a hate crime but if that stands (and I don’t think it will at this stage), then it is only a short hop to you saying homosexuality is a sin also being a hate crime.
“But muh First Amendment will protect me!”
Think again. The First Amendment and the rest of the Constitution is only as good as the court hearing the case. The Left recognizes that the greatest impediment to implementing their plans fully is the legal structure of the United States and is already attacking the validity of the Constitution as outdated, written by old white men, not sufficient for a modern state, etc. Right now any Federal judge anywhere can undo a law for no reason other than not liking it. The puppet-masters of the Left aren’t as dumb as their followers and street thugs, they know the way to undermine the Constitution is not by outright amending it but just chipping away at it until it becomes a meaningless historical footnote. Heads up to those that think we will somehow get back to being a Constitutional Republic. It is never going to happen and that is due in large part to the betrayal of our elected “leaders”.
The next two years leading up to the 2020 elections are going to be a time of unprecedented political turmoil. The mainstream media, social media and tech giants and the “entertainment” world are going to be in open opposition to the President and even if he survives to the election, it will be unimaginably difficult for him to get a fair hearing in the public square. Expect to see more voices banned, more avenues of expression closed, more aspects of the financial system off-limits and even more open use of the power of the government to suppress speech via arrests of dissident voices. Trump became President thanks to winning very small margins in a few states and with four years of additional demographic change and open warfare from the media, it will be very difficult for him to be re-elected. If Trump loses re-election in 2020, expect to see an orgy of retaliation and vengeance from the Left.
We are entering the end stage of the American experiment and the state enforced suppression of dissent is a critical component of finishing the progressive jihad.
First they came for the gay frog conspiracy theorists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a gay frog conspiracy theorist.
Then they came for the neo-Nazis, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a neo-Nazi.
Then they came for the paleoconservatives, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a paleoconservative.
Then they came for the evangelical homseschoolers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an evangelical homeschooler.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.