Daniel Greenfield
January 19, 2021
When the Black Lives Matter riots raged in cities around the country a
spectrum of the leftist oligarchy, from the New York Times to the ACLU
to the leadership of Washington State University justified them with
Martin Luther King’s quote, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
It
was a strange claim to make about a movement that had the backing of
the Democrat Party, the entire media, Coca Cola, IBM, and American
Express. There was hardly a Fortune 500 company, university, or major
organization of some sort that didn’t issue a statement of support for
the race rioters rioting, looting, and killing their way across America.
Come read about our oppression in these press releases from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Plazas
were renamed after the black supremacist movement and streets were
painted with its racist slogan. Drivers who drove over those slogans
became the subject of police investigations.
BLM was very definitely ‘heard’.
Rioting
mobs can be subjective in a system where law and morality have become
relative. A mob of rioters can be seen as a threatening mass of the
‘other’ or a heroic group of crusaders. The mobs of rioters that the
establishment unleashes and identifies with are heard and cheered.
And then there are the bad kind of mobs. The mobs of the unheard.
In
the weeks leading up to the Capitol Hill protest, claims of election
fraud weren’t just ‘unheard’, they were actively suppressed with the
media refusing to even air remarks by President Trump and administration
officials on the subject. Tech companies censored any questions about
the election. Elected officials took to describing such conversations as
‘sedition’ and the media deemed them ‘disinformation’ and called for
even heavier censorship of the internet.
The oligarchy had spent
the years since President Trump was elected laboring to silence the
political opposition even while its own cultural messaging machine
dispensed with everything from journalism to comedy to academic freedom
in favor of political haranguing. A monolithic cultural environment in
which there was no journalism, entertainment, or education, whose
political messages were broadcast by Fortune 500 companies, did not
create a new utopia.
Internet culture instead went down a digital
rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, racism, identity politics, social
media mobs, and trolling. The official culture was met with a
counterculture of a thousand subcultures whose sole unifying element was
contempt for whatever the culture was. That counter-culture was a
visionary, brilliant, insane, horrifying and evil fragmented vision of
America reflected through the shards of a culture that had lost its
mind, its hope, and its faith.
Caught in between them were the actual ‘unheard’.
The
‘unheard’ aren’t a race. They’re not necessarily even a class. They are
the culturally unheard. It might be their politics, their geography,
their religion, their jobs, or some combination of the above. They’re
easy enough to spot because you don’t see them represented in our
culture anymore except as villains or buffoons. Once upon a time we
called them Americans.
The unheard don’t live in the right
places, wear the right clothes, have the right beliefs, and don’t occupy
the right place in the culture. They have no role in the oligarchy’s
future except as cautionary examples of what happens to those who don’t
adapt to the establishment order.
They’re not Republicans. Most
have a profound suspicion of the system. But many end up voting for the
GOP because it’s become the party of the people who were left behind
once the Democrats shifted from ‘workers and peasants’ class warfare to
an identity politics technocracy.
Justifying violence as the
“language of the unheard” is a bad cliche that’s been used to cover for
everything from Islamic terrorism to shooting up schools to looting
local pharmacies. Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, and over a century
of terrorism carried out by the scions and allies of wealthy elites
show that violence is more likely to come from the ‘heard’ than the
‘unheard’.
The powerless are less likely to resort to violence
than the powerful. The essence of power is if not always a monopoly on
violence, a corner office on the ground floor of violence. That’s why
the same political machine that did little to restrain the worst
brutality of Black Lives Matter keeps warning about the threat coming
from the unheard who don’t share its political views.
The people most likely to resort to political violence have the most political cover for violence.
But
the unheard do exist and they aren’t simply unheard because they’re not
listened to. The unheard are the victims of a sustained effort to
suppress their existence. A generation ago they were virtually erased
from the cultural institutions that had been open to them. Now they’re
being eradicated from corporate spaces, as consumers, and from the
platforms of the internet.
A multipronged campaign was launched
against Facebook by everyone from Michelle Obama to Borat demanding that
it deplatform dissenting political views after the former Ivy League
social network was overrun with older deplorables who had been using it
to keep in touch with family. Like other corporations, Facebook is being
forced to choose between its class and its business model, and is
choosing its class because the oligarchy matters more than the user
base.
But the oligarchy’s user base aren’t its customers.
Facebook’s customers are multinational advertisers like Unilever,
Diageo, and Honda who
pressured it over conservative content, and Chinese sellers and organizations who run
$5 billion in ads
on the social media giant. When the Left captured the culture, it got
advertising along with it, and that put it in charge of a new economy in
which companies gave away free services to lure in users and resell
their data to advertisers. The only customers that multinationals and
their advertisers want are lefties.
The fundamental power shift
between the oligarchy and customers, and between those at the axis of
the culture and those at the outer rim of it, has overshadowed the
political system.
The unheard vote, but they feel that their
votes don’t count. And they often don’t, less because of fraud than
because their votes have little impact on the centers of power that run
the country. Republican voters have seen elections come and go without
anything really changing. They’ve sent generations of representatives to
D.C. only to have them adopt D.C’s mores and agendas.
To
understand the fundamental alienation that drove huge crowds to D.C.,
the vast majority of whom did not try to break into Congress, or the
spread of conspiracy theories like QAnon about the elemental evil of the
powerful people who seem to run everything, that’s the place to start.
Conspiracy
theories are an expression of powerlessness and deep distrust. And the
response to them over the last four years has been a public-private
campaign of suppression carried on by elected officials, the media, the
non-profit errand boys of billionaires, and dot com monopolies that
validate their distrust and increase their powerlessness until something
explodes.
This isn’t a formula for unity, healing, or reclaiming who we are. We’ve seen exactly what it is.
Banishing
political dissent to marginal spaces doesn’t build trust in the system.
It destroys all trust and makes even the most implausible conspiracy
theories seem like credible alternatives. If you have to choose between a
partisan media that acts as a propaganda firehose while calling for
further crackdowns on ‘disinformation’: anything else suddenly sounds
plausible.
Truth, facts, and trust depend on an open marketplace
of ideas. When that market is forcibly shut down, it doesn’t matter how
much the new owners shout that they represent truth, facts, and science,
and that their only opponents are extremist purveyors of
disinformation. Replacing truth with lies and debate with propaganda
makes that into the new normal across the board.
People in a
totalitarian society are prone to believing the wildest fantasies and
the most insane conspiracy theories because the system has destroyed any
concept of truth. Americans used to wonder how Muslims could
simultaneously believe that the 9/11 hijackers were CIA agents and
heroes, that the Jews run the world from a tiny country that is about to
be destroyed, that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam, or that Tom and
Jerry were a masonic plot against Islam.
A generation later we live in a country in which people routinely embrace equally insane ideas.
The
radicals poisoned the well by hijacking trusted institutions and not
just biasing them, but ‘pravdaizing’ them until they became widely
distrusted. They used those institutions to polarize society, spreading a
culture of lies across the centers of power, and then enlisting
governments and corporations in the suppression of their political
opposition for being too dangerous.
A riot is not the language of
the unheard. Most often it’s the language of extremists, radicals, and
agent provocateurs. The real language of the unheard is frustration,
mistrust, and despair. The job of the former is to covertly ally with a
totalitarian regime to radicalize the unheard, polarizing society, and
leading to a murderous confrontation that will affirm the establishment.
The
establishment has spent generations claiming that it represents the
forces of liberation because of its advocacy of class warfare and then
identity politics. But all that class warfare has left the heartlands of
its former political influence in the South and the Rust Belt in utter
misery. And its identity politics has made the urban ghetto into an even
worse place than ever. The same is not true for the bedroom communities
of D.C., the mansions of Marin County, or the multi-million condos of
the Upper East Side. The latest Black Lives Matter revolution is, as
usual, brought to you by Coca Cola, Harvard, Goldman Sachs, and the
Washington Post.
The Trump administration was a threat because it
gave voice to the unheard and the inherent scam of a political system
that claims to be representative, but only represents itself. Treating
its overthrow as a liberation movement funded by some of the biggest and
most powerful figures, organizations, and interests in the country,
gets at the heart of the leftist political hoax.
It was far from perfect, but it frightened enough of the right people that it had to be destroyed.
The
unheard now have less of a voice than ever. And many of them have
learned the lesson that this brute use of establishment force was meant
to teach them: that voting is futile. It’s not true, but it is what the
system and its agent provocateurs want them to take away from 2020.
The establishment is not afraid of riots. It thrives on them.
There
are two classes of riots. Those riots funded, encouraged, and deployed
by the operatives of the establishment to demand “change” are protected
and legitimized. Opposition riots are allowed to go far enough to cause a
crisis and justify a ruthless crackdown, not on the agent provocateurs
behind them, but on the non-violent political opposition to the
establishment.
That’s why dot com platforms terminated President
Trump’s social media accounts while the anti-Trump alt-righters who
helped drive the violence still retain their blue checkmarks.
The
more violence the establishment encourages from the ranks of the
unheard, or most often, the provocateurs pretending to represent them,
the more it can suppress the opposition. Its depiction of the unheard as
violent and dangerous, irrational and a threat to society, allows it to
wield unchecked power and further marginalize the unheard while feeding
the cycle of violence.
The establishment offers healing and
unity to conservative members of its own class, and more jobs shipped to
China, illegal migration, and political censorship for the rest of the
unheard.
The last generation has seen two political revolutions
by the unheard, the Tea Party, and the Trump campaign, that were brought
down from without and within. The establishment understands the threat
of the revolutions that it dismissively labels as ‘populism’ because
despite its constant posturing about values and the oppressed, it is
wholly illegitimate.
America was never meant to be ruled by a
single cultural class operating out of D.C., New York, San Francisco,
and a handful of other cities and suburbs for its own benefit. No amount
of black nationalist cosplay or advocacy for infinite genders can hide
the illegitimacy of this system from anyone except the junior members of
the establishment blinded by university indoctrination.
The
establishment would like to talk about anything and everything except
its own power.
Everything in our politics is a basic distraction from
that question. A populist conservative movement that can convincingly
stay on that question and hammer it home will win.
And then the unheard might finally have a voice.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Tags:
Big Tech,
recent,
riots
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
