Well said, Clifton. No one with the remotest sense of decency wants anyone to die. Nor do we want to murder anyone. But it’s time to stand up to these vile bullies. The Orcs from LOTR comes to mind when I think of some of them and their evil minds, but in my attempt at being decent I’m loath to name them that.
Very often these bullies are intellectually vapid, empty vessels, in other words Stupid. I use a capital for Stupid because they are a distinct category. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out before he was summarily executed by the Nazis:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7
I am non plussed by characters such as John McWhorter though. He’s not a Stupid man, so what in the world is his excuse for his inhumane attitudes, none that I can muster.
A term I heard the other day that I think fits is "Reputationally Paranoid."
I think partisanship and extreme reputational paranoia drives some people to public inhumanity; in other words, they want to continue teaching at Ivy League institutions and stay in the good graces of the New York cultural scene.
Hi Clifton, thank you for your response, I know you’re a busy man. That sounds very feasible to me. If you have not heard Melanie Phillips, a journalist from England explain with incredible insight why people tore down posters of kidnapped babies right after 10/7/23, it’s remarkably on point and I think in line with what you’re saying:
Clifton, I have tremendous respect for you and understand this is written from a place of trauma—and that is *exactly* where the intellimafia wants you to be so they can emotionally manipulate your pain and escalate the culture war that has been on a low simmer to a boiling, violent civil war.
Immediately after learning Charlie Kirk was announced dead, I posted this Note:
“This is absolutely horrific 💔 The intellimafia will stop at nothing to incite violence, division, hatred, and civil war. Don’t let them bait you and then use escalating violence as an excuse to ramp up tyranny. Always remember Problem-Reaction-Solution.” (https://substack.com/@margaretannaalice/note/c-154550037)
“You may love Charlie Kirk; you may loathe him. The fact that he is such a firebrand for the manufactured political divide makes him an ideal sacrificial lamb for maneuvering in the next phase of totalitarianism.
“The intellimafia wants you to think this is about left versus right, gender politics, immigration, race, Trump, and every other hot-button topic they’ve installed in people’s minds so they can mass-manipulate the populace at will.
“They want us to hate, feel outrage, blame the other, strike back, and dive head-last into uncivil war.
“They want us to kill each other for them. Democide, genocide, eldercide, hospicide, war—they’ve pulled out every stop for their mass-murdering, one-world tyranny agenda, and we’re still not dying fast enough.…
“They want to toss out the ragebait and hide behind the curtain while we dogfight.
“We defeat their attempts to divide, dissipate, and decimate us by refusing to let them play our emotions, cognitive biases, and trauma like a well-worn record.
“We cancel their programming by remembering one another’s humanity, engaging in respectful dialogue, cutting the puppeteers’ strings, and alchemizing pain into love.”
This event brought the past half-century of social engineering into clear focus for me as I suddenly realized this:
“The hypersonic rise of Wokeism, SJWs, ESG, and other identitarian initiatives funded by BlackRock, the Vanguard Group, and State Street; the inversion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; the gaslighting of the public by redefining ‘racism’ to exclude whites as victims; the vilification of and structural discrimination against white males under the guise of counterbalancing systemic racism; the gender wars; the supplying of charismatic leaders and movements to magnetize disenfranchised white males whose psyches have been rubbed raw after serving as the cultural whipping boy for decades … Suddenly, it all makes sense.”
I would be grateful if you would take the time to read it because I think it addresses many of the concerns you articulate in your essay while showing the long con behind the Wokeism strategy.
Most importantly, the video I share by Chase Hughes is a must-watch, and my hope is that if as many people as possible embrace the pledge he articulates, the manufactured chaos will end:
“One thing that I want to give to you here—and you can say this pledge out loud if you need to—‘I will not let anything electronic decide who my neighbor is. I will not let political violence become normal. I will no longer let propaganda tell me who to hate. I will never cheer for blood. I will choose sanity. I will choose unity. I will choose to see the humanity in people before I see their politics.’
“And if enough of us take that stand, the whole entire rotten, nasty structure starts to fall because the truth is very simple. There are more sane people than there are psychopaths. What we’re seeing online is fake. There are more of us than there are of them, and the second that we remember that, the second we refuse to be divided against each other, which is fake, the game is permanently over.”
The outrage bait we are seeing on the screens is manufactured. Those fringe crazy radicals—on both sides projected to outrage each side—are a minuscule percentage and not representative of the real human beings who vote blue or red.
What we need right now is depolarizing conversations across the nation and ultimately world, which is why I am so honored and grateful to have hosted two such healing dialogues as part of CJ Hopkins’s America Road Trip Project last week (https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/america-road-trip-project-week-three).
I am hoping this will spark continued community conversations as we combat the intellimafia’s attempts to divide, distract, and conquer us, and I believe you, Clifton, can be a pivotal force in that movement.
P.S. I want to applaud your call to meet violence with art and completely agree that we win by creativity and love. You clearly have not taken the intellimafia bait, for which I am grateful. The most difficult challenge for many of us who have been steeped in caricatures of Wokeist lefties is to realize those are mostly phantoms and not representative of the human beings they are being used to dehumanize. Once we transition from the left-right divide of us/them to We the People against the cruelites, we will have harnessed the power necessary to defeat their technotalitarian aims.
Thank you for saying what all "real" humans (the loving, thinking, praying kind) want to say. For a while "others" trying to circumscribe our world (though imperfect) to an unfamiliar and slimy way of living tried the angle that nothing was real - words didn't mean what we thought; history wasn't what we were taught; what we saw and heard and touched and smelt wasn't what was going on; and we said "I'm confused. Maybe you're right. Maybe we're in a paradigm shift like what happened before - in history, I hear - ."
We thought we'd have to wait for things to settle, for the atoms to realign. Some kind of a Shrodinger's cat thing, maybe.
But now we see it has all been a distraction, a stall, a tricky game, a Trojan Horse within which evil has been allowed through the gates. Reality and goodness and humanity hasn't changed. It has just been covered up.
What kind of people wish others (who have done no harm - and even if - ) to die?! Do the teachers and politicians and artists and neighbors who cheer at CK's assassination feel even the slightest remorse for harboring nefarious wants? Even the sociopathic Lady Macbeth felt angst and unease. "Out damn'd spot."
Is there even the tiniest desire to clean their hands, their hearts? Are they without conscience? Completely? You said it, so that I don't need to. I'll say it, so that others don't need to. What has been seen cannot be unseen. "What has been done cannot be undone." Much love !!
Pushing peaceful, fair-minded, ethical people into a corner, with savage intent, will likely not get the "turn the other cheek" these deranged nihilist expect. We just wanted to be left alone...you know the rest.
Well, you spurred me to upgrade to a paid subscription! None of this seems organic or grassroots, though. This is more like organized, funded violence & paid protests that are encouraged by politicians and the MSM. They repeat the same phrase, "Civil War", as if to make it true. It worked in Germany during WWII, so...
My tactic is to pay it forward with sunshine-y smiles, donations, and random acts of kindness. Does this guarantee any improvement? Who knows? It can't hurt.
Great post! Duncan's right: civil disagreement is dead. What we're watching is Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" applied to human discourse itself. Platforms don't just decay, they weaponise the worst human impulses for profit. First, they hook users, then they abuse them, and finally, they extract maximum value whilst torching everything. That's not just tech, that's our entire cultural operating system.
We've normalised intellectual lobotomy disguised as engagement. Parasocial relationships with symbol-people have replaced actual thought. The result? Tribes who've outsourced moral reasoning to whatever their chosen prophet tweets between wellness retreats. This isn't activism, it's kayfabe. Professional wrestling for people who think having opinions is a personality. Chris Hedges called it: when spectacle replaces substance, violence becomes entertainment. These aren't political movements, they're fandoms cosplaying as revolutionaries.
Social platforms reward extremism because rage equals money. Each scroll trains people to see disagreement as an existential threat. Death threats feel like discourse when your entire existence is screen-mediated. Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have been shouting about this for years: we're raising generations marinated in comparison culture and outrage mechanics, completely detached from consequences.
A hardcore minority is beyond reach. They've fully integrated the algorithm into their identity. Their dopamine circuits are completely rewired. Trying to save them is like trying to reason with someone mid-psychotic break. You can't logic someone out of a biochemical addiction.
But most people? They're not brain-dead, they're brain-hostage. There's a difference. There is hope.
Not only will they kill you and shit on your grave, but they will send your family a bill for the bullets they used.
Well said, Clifton. No one with the remotest sense of decency wants anyone to die. Nor do we want to murder anyone. But it’s time to stand up to these vile bullies. The Orcs from LOTR comes to mind when I think of some of them and their evil minds, but in my attempt at being decent I’m loath to name them that.
Very often these bullies are intellectually vapid, empty vessels, in other words Stupid. I use a capital for Stupid because they are a distinct category. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out before he was summarily executed by the Nazis:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7
I am non plussed by characters such as John McWhorter though. He’s not a Stupid man, so what in the world is his excuse for his inhumane attitudes, none that I can muster.
A term I heard the other day that I think fits is "Reputationally Paranoid."
I think partisanship and extreme reputational paranoia drives some people to public inhumanity; in other words, they want to continue teaching at Ivy League institutions and stay in the good graces of the New York cultural scene.
Hi Clifton, thank you for your response, I know you’re a busy man. That sounds very feasible to me. If you have not heard Melanie Phillips, a journalist from England explain with incredible insight why people tore down posters of kidnapped babies right after 10/7/23, it’s remarkably on point and I think in line with what you’re saying:
https://substack.com/@lawsuitalpha/note/c-143810381?r=kp9du&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Clifton, I have tremendous respect for you and understand this is written from a place of trauma—and that is *exactly* where the intellimafia wants you to be so they can emotionally manipulate your pain and escalate the culture war that has been on a low simmer to a boiling, violent civil war.
Immediately after learning Charlie Kirk was announced dead, I posted this Note:
“This is absolutely horrific 💔 The intellimafia will stop at nothing to incite violence, division, hatred, and civil war. Don’t let them bait you and then use escalating violence as an excuse to ramp up tyranny. Always remember Problem-Reaction-Solution.” (https://substack.com/@margaretannaalice/note/c-154550037)
The next day, 9/11, I published a short essay in my Memes by Themes on the intellimafia (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/memes-by-themes-20-the-intellimafia), including in part:
“You may love Charlie Kirk; you may loathe him. The fact that he is such a firebrand for the manufactured political divide makes him an ideal sacrificial lamb for maneuvering in the next phase of totalitarianism.
“The intellimafia wants you to think this is about left versus right, gender politics, immigration, race, Trump, and every other hot-button topic they’ve installed in people’s minds so they can mass-manipulate the populace at will.
“They want us to hate, feel outrage, blame the other, strike back, and dive head-last into uncivil war.
“They want us to kill each other for them. Democide, genocide, eldercide, hospicide, war—they’ve pulled out every stop for their mass-murdering, one-world tyranny agenda, and we’re still not dying fast enough.…
“They want to toss out the ragebait and hide behind the curtain while we dogfight.
“We defeat their attempts to divide, dissipate, and decimate us by refusing to let them play our emotions, cognitive biases, and trauma like a well-worn record.
“We cancel their programming by remembering one another’s humanity, engaging in respectful dialogue, cutting the puppeteers’ strings, and alchemizing pain into love.”
This event brought the past half-century of social engineering into clear focus for me as I suddenly realized this:
• “We Have Been Living Through a Global Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment”: https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/we-have-been-living-through-a-global
I begin that piece:
“The hypersonic rise of Wokeism, SJWs, ESG, and other identitarian initiatives funded by BlackRock, the Vanguard Group, and State Street; the inversion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; the gaslighting of the public by redefining ‘racism’ to exclude whites as victims; the vilification of and structural discrimination against white males under the guise of counterbalancing systemic racism; the gender wars; the supplying of charismatic leaders and movements to magnetize disenfranchised white males whose psyches have been rubbed raw after serving as the cultural whipping boy for decades … Suddenly, it all makes sense.”
I would be grateful if you would take the time to read it because I think it addresses many of the concerns you articulate in your essay while showing the long con behind the Wokeism strategy.
Most importantly, the video I share by Chase Hughes is a must-watch, and my hope is that if as many people as possible embrace the pledge he articulates, the manufactured chaos will end:
• https://youtu.be/azE7nqqQMmo
From Chase Hughes (https://x.com/NCIUniversity/status/1966924840855892184):
“One thing that I want to give to you here—and you can say this pledge out loud if you need to—‘I will not let anything electronic decide who my neighbor is. I will not let political violence become normal. I will no longer let propaganda tell me who to hate. I will never cheer for blood. I will choose sanity. I will choose unity. I will choose to see the humanity in people before I see their politics.’
“And if enough of us take that stand, the whole entire rotten, nasty structure starts to fall because the truth is very simple. There are more sane people than there are psychopaths. What we’re seeing online is fake. There are more of us than there are of them, and the second that we remember that, the second we refuse to be divided against each other, which is fake, the game is permanently over.”
The outrage bait we are seeing on the screens is manufactured. Those fringe crazy radicals—on both sides projected to outrage each side—are a minuscule percentage and not representative of the real human beings who vote blue or red.
What we need right now is depolarizing conversations across the nation and ultimately world, which is why I am so honored and grateful to have hosted two such healing dialogues as part of CJ Hopkins’s America Road Trip Project last week (https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/america-road-trip-project-week-three).
I am hoping this will spark continued community conversations as we combat the intellimafia’s attempts to divide, distract, and conquer us, and I believe you, Clifton, can be a pivotal force in that movement.
P.S. I want to applaud your call to meet violence with art and completely agree that we win by creativity and love. You clearly have not taken the intellimafia bait, for which I am grateful. The most difficult challenge for many of us who have been steeped in caricatures of Wokeist lefties is to realize those are mostly phantoms and not representative of the human beings they are being used to dehumanize. Once we transition from the left-right divide of us/them to We the People against the cruelites, we will have harnessed the power necessary to defeat their technotalitarian aims.
Thank you for your comments. I responded to you restack.
Thank you so much, Clifton, and I am grateful for your thoughtful and thought-provoking reply, which I agree with almost entirely.
Thank you for saying what all "real" humans (the loving, thinking, praying kind) want to say. For a while "others" trying to circumscribe our world (though imperfect) to an unfamiliar and slimy way of living tried the angle that nothing was real - words didn't mean what we thought; history wasn't what we were taught; what we saw and heard and touched and smelt wasn't what was going on; and we said "I'm confused. Maybe you're right. Maybe we're in a paradigm shift like what happened before - in history, I hear - ."
We thought we'd have to wait for things to settle, for the atoms to realign. Some kind of a Shrodinger's cat thing, maybe.
But now we see it has all been a distraction, a stall, a tricky game, a Trojan Horse within which evil has been allowed through the gates. Reality and goodness and humanity hasn't changed. It has just been covered up.
What kind of people wish others (who have done no harm - and even if - ) to die?! Do the teachers and politicians and artists and neighbors who cheer at CK's assassination feel even the slightest remorse for harboring nefarious wants? Even the sociopathic Lady Macbeth felt angst and unease. "Out damn'd spot."
Is there even the tiniest desire to clean their hands, their hearts? Are they without conscience? Completely? You said it, so that I don't need to. I'll say it, so that others don't need to. What has been seen cannot be unseen. "What has been done cannot be undone." Much love !!
The Lady Macbeth allusion is apt. She lusts for power, stopped at nothing to achieve it, and it destroys her in the end.
Would these ghouls would learn such a lesson.
Pushing peaceful, fair-minded, ethical people into a corner, with savage intent, will likely not get the "turn the other cheek" these deranged nihilist expect. We just wanted to be left alone...you know the rest.
I do.
“We are all souls with lanterns in search of
the light…” Noah BenShea
Thank you, Clifton, for holding the lantern high along the path…
Thank you sir!!
Thanks for your support as always, Charles.
Keep us your great work!!
Well, you spurred me to upgrade to a paid subscription! None of this seems organic or grassroots, though. This is more like organized, funded violence & paid protests that are encouraged by politicians and the MSM. They repeat the same phrase, "Civil War", as if to make it true. It worked in Germany during WWII, so...
My tactic is to pay it forward with sunshine-y smiles, donations, and random acts of kindness. Does this guarantee any improvement? Who knows? It can't hurt.
Great post! Duncan's right: civil disagreement is dead. What we're watching is Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" applied to human discourse itself. Platforms don't just decay, they weaponise the worst human impulses for profit. First, they hook users, then they abuse them, and finally, they extract maximum value whilst torching everything. That's not just tech, that's our entire cultural operating system.
We've normalised intellectual lobotomy disguised as engagement. Parasocial relationships with symbol-people have replaced actual thought. The result? Tribes who've outsourced moral reasoning to whatever their chosen prophet tweets between wellness retreats. This isn't activism, it's kayfabe. Professional wrestling for people who think having opinions is a personality. Chris Hedges called it: when spectacle replaces substance, violence becomes entertainment. These aren't political movements, they're fandoms cosplaying as revolutionaries.
Social platforms reward extremism because rage equals money. Each scroll trains people to see disagreement as an existential threat. Death threats feel like discourse when your entire existence is screen-mediated. Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have been shouting about this for years: we're raising generations marinated in comparison culture and outrage mechanics, completely detached from consequences.
A hardcore minority is beyond reach. They've fully integrated the algorithm into their identity. Their dopamine circuits are completely rewired. Trying to save them is like trying to reason with someone mid-psychotic break. You can't logic someone out of a biochemical addiction.
But most people? They're not brain-dead, they're brain-hostage. There's a difference. There is hope.
A-friggin-men!
Very well said, Mr. Duncan.