The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Totalitarians Try to Suppress Dissent

Posted on | May 6, 2019 | 3 Comments

Morning shift at the National Affairs Desk.

LAKELAND, Florida
Just as I finished my breakfast here at Burger King and was checking around the ‘net, Professor Glenn Reynolds called attention to the latest outrage from the Thought Police at Google: The Claremont Institute has been banned for “wrongthink,” as Ryan Williams explains:

What Google is really doing (like Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms) is policing the terms of American political debate to advance acceptable establishment ideology. In First Amendment parlance, Google is in the viewpoint discrimination business, and its target is heresies like ours against the prevailing orthodoxies of our time.

Indeed. Google, like the mainstream media establishment, has decided that President Trump’s election proves that freedom of speech is dangerous, and so anything that might conceivably prevent the election of a Democrat in 2020 must be suppressed as some form of “hate speech.” Remember that Google “blacklisted” The American Spectator last month, and of course I got banned from Twitter in 2016, so this increasingly totalitarian regime of online Thought Police affects me directly. As I have explained (“How Disagreement Became ‘Hate’,” March 18), the tactic of labeling conservatives as proponents of “hate” is being used by the Left in an effort to shift the Overton Window leftward.

Why was it, after all, that the 21 Convention’s location in Orlando had to be treated as top secret? The blacklisters and boycotters and Antifa goon squads might unleash their usual harassment tactics while claiming this was necessary and justified to suppress “hate speech.” What was going on at this conference that might possibly be so dangerous?

After three nights and two days at the event, having talked casually with dozens of the speakers and attendees, I still can’t imagine what harm could result from guys sitting around talking about guy stuff, but of course, the Thought Police have other ideas. My report on the event:

President Donald Trump “represents the return of the patriarchy,” popular fitness entrepreneur Elliott Hulse declared at this weekend’s 21 Convention, a gathering of so-called “red pill” men dedicated to revitalizing masculine influence in society. A muscular New York native and father of four with nearly 800,000 YouTube subscribers, Hulse gave an impassioned presentation entitled “Defending Marriage in a Degenerate Culture.” Marriage and fatherhood were the focus of this, the 16th such conference organized by Anthony Johnson’s 21 Studios, billed as “The World’s Ultimate Event for Fathers.”
While most of these guys are Trump supporters, the “red pill” is not about politics in the usual sense. The phrase, borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, refers to seeing through socially accepted illusions to understand the brutal truths of human nature. A major popularizer of this concept as applied to male-female relationships is Rollo Tomassi, author of the 2013 book The Rational Male and its sequels. Tomassi was introduced at the 21 Convention as the “godfather” of the red-pill community. “A lot of men are finding the red pill because they’re looking for answers,” Tomassi said during an on-stage discussion with popular Tulsa radio talk-show host Pat Campbell. Often the experience of divorce or the break-up of a romantic relationship leads men to discovering the online community known as the “manosphere,” where Tomassi’s books about “intersexual dynamics” are widely read. Campbell says he’s heard from men who say their lives were quite literally saved by reading The Rational Male. “They were ready to end it all, zero out,” Campbell told me, describing men — typically in their 40s — who were devastated by divorce. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Breakfast is over, and I’m heading north on I-75.



 

Category: Media Bias, Shoe Leather Fund

Comments

3 Responses to “Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Totalitarians Try to Suppress Dissent”

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