Self-Controlled Opposition

The Ailments of a US Free Speech NGO movement

Today, my friend C.J. Hopkins has finally spilled the beans on the ailments of the “global free speech movement” we have both joined this spring, by publishing an excellent polemic. My own Whistleblowing piece dates back to July. On the advice of a friend, I have refrained from publishing it at the time (the Saint-Simon at Louis XIV’s court story, remember?).

The following is a more recent piece, written just before the pot boiled over and I left the group on Monday.

I have spared you, my dear readers, the details from the developing stages of a Free Speech Declaration me and others, much more prominent than myself, have launched this spring. It is not a secret that the initiators were Michael Shellenberger and his NGO Public, as already indicated in a June post of this Substack. Michael has done substantial work on behalf of Free Speech, and his PR work especially – from going on Joe Rogan to being a witness in the US House Subcommittee hearing on the Weaponisation of the Federal Government – has proved invaluable for raising broad and popular awareness about the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Our meeting in London had a good outcome: we all agreed to work on a Free Speech Declaration. Its text was quickly drafted and became an excellent appeal to universal human rights, and its first and most important manifestation – freedom of speech. I happily signed it.

After London, the work group started convening on a Signal chat where each member was able to suggest celebrities as signees for the declaration, preferably people who have come to the fore as free speech enthusiasts in some way or other. It was made very clear from the beginning, however, that people “on the right”, like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and even J.K. Rowling would be “bad for the optics” and “deter other people from signing” [original quotes]. We were encouraged by the initiators who I understand now to be as apolitical as they come – and not in a good sense – to focus on “people from the Left”.[2] Instead, names like Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Margaret Atwood, or Yannis Varoufakis were welcomed and soon found their entry on the list of possible signatories.

Do you remember Noam Chomsky?

Chomsky (94) is a linguist by profession, a prominent US leftist, the co-author of Manufacturing Consent (1994), and a supporter of the total biosecurity state. The latter is famously stated here:

Now why would you have Chomsky and the Stalinist Zizek on board in a struggle for freedom of speech? Because, as Michael stated: “They are strong Leftists”. And, as another, equally famous NGO bureaucrat said, “the vast majority of people seeing [Chomsky’s] name on the list of signatories will associate him with being a principled defender of free speech, not an authoritarian Covidian.”

Of course, strictly speaking, Chomsky’s cheerleading for fascist policies during Covid did not touch on the free speech issue. He merely said that the “unvaccinated” should “isolate themselves from society”. And confronted with the question of how they will obtain food and water, merely shrugged his shoulders: “How they get food is their problem”. Not to split hairs, but Chomsky’s defendants are right: it’s not that the National Socialists had a problem with Jewish free speech. It’s just that they didn’t exactly support their survival.

Perhaps more sadly, Chomsky is not the carrier of the torch of truthfulness in another sense. In the video, Chomsky says that “in the Global South, there is overwhelming demand for vaccines. They are pleading for the West to stop hoarding the vaccines. They want to have them so that they can overcome the terrible effect of non-vaccination.” (repeat: the terrible effect of non-vaccination).

But Africa neither had any demand nor “pleaded for vaccines”, as was known relatively early in the pandemic and had been covered by the media. To the contrary. That Africa came through the Covid-19 pandemic better than the "West" because of its inhabitants' relative lack of interest in a flu virus cannot be forgiven by the covert racists of Chomsky’s ilk (“they are pleading!”, the little black slave people) or the WHO whose talking points Chomsky adopts, and whose pandemic treaty seeks to create “intensive cooperation”, better “preparedness” with the Southern Continent. Not only are vaccination patents to be abolished and supply chains to be organised more smoothly. Above all, Africa is to come under greater "monitoring" so that the technocratic redefinition of people as statistically measurable viral carriers, which has been completely successful in China and is well on its way in the West, also takes root here.

Noam Chomsky, in other words, has spread Covid disinformation in line with the agencies and institutions that want us silenced and better “monitored” for the purposes of censorship and control. A “strong Leftist” indeed.

The idea that Chomsky (or Zizek, or Varoufakis, for Heaven’s sake) will draw millions of upright Leftists who are as yet “undecided” about whether they should support people’s right to express their opinions is, um, perhaps a bit irrational. But this very argument was repeated ad nauseam. Now, where are all the millions of “undecided Leftists” when it comes to matters of human rights, and especially free speech? Have we not witnessed over and over again that they – from the queer students in the humanities course to your go-to climate friendly or civil rights NGO (think of the ADL) - know exactly what they are doing when they silence their “Trump- and Putin-loving”, “anti-vax conspiracy theorist”, and “anti-semitic” enemy? Even those that shy away from the official rhetoric are not happy with right-wingers getting away with their freedom of expression: “freedom of speech, not of reach” or “free speech has consequences” is what you hear most often. Who, then, are the initiators talking about when they say that “undecided people will come to our side”? As explained in my last post, they mean an ominous third party – the Superego – hovering like the shadow of an impersonal Big Brother over the room. But in reality, these “undecided leftists and liberals” people do not exist. Or rather, they exist by virtue of the false manifestation given to them by a strong and equally unfounded belief. “We need to sacrifice to the Golem!” Behind every recent ideology lurks a heathen belief.

For, let’s not kid ourselves, as I expressed my concern about Noam Chomsky receiving the honors of a Free Speech image, a response went like this:

“A small number of anti-vax conspiracy theorists will call us part of the ‘controlled’ counter-narrative or opposition. But they are the silliest and worst people. If Chomsky is standing up for free speech despite his views on mandates, we should be prepared to work with him. We will only prevail in the goal of free speech if we work with people we disagree with.”

When CJ and I pointed out that people were indeed hurt – professionally or personally - by vaccine mandates, the same person replied:

“I have met them. They think it’s a ‘plandemic’ cooked up by the WEF to depopulate the planet. I don’t blame them for jumping to these conspiratorial conclusions, but we do have to challenge them. The left abandoned them to join the establishment and in the vacuum irrational conspiracy theories have flourished. But I’m not going to set my political clock by their political immaturity no matter how hurt or upset they are.”[3]

In other words: you must understand that “them”, i.e., people losing their jobs to unconstitutional mandates, are immature. You must realise that we must educate “them”, and our “political clock” will not be set by people who fall prey to “conspiracy theories” – no matter how many of the theories have become a harsh reality. Hence, we stand with Chomsky, Zizek, Dawkins, and all the rest of left-wing authoritarians because they are Leftists.

Against the background of bending over backwards to incorporate Leftismo Celebrities who don’t exactly think of free speech as a value, C.J. Hopkins had a crazy idea: “How about we skip the “risk assessment” and the PR-strategizing and just uphold the principles we claim to be defending?”

That was the last straw for Michael Shellenberger who resorted to expelling C.J. from the group. Which, in turn, was my last straw. Though, not quite: it was reached when the mainstream media shitstorm against Russell Brand was mirrored 1:1 in the words, rhetoric, and intent in the free speech forum.

Maybe, though, CJ and I were wrong. My understanding has always been that people who say things like “fuck your freedom” are not the kind who truly believe that censorship is a problem. But according to the group’s logic, we “need to be prepared to work with” them. The logic is that we need to collaborate with people who directly contradict our goals. And why? Because the movement will miraculously benefit from this kind of cooperation. But if this is not the very definition of controlled opposition, I don’t know what is. Only that the opposition is not controlled from the outside. It is self-controlled opposition. Which is remarkably worse.

At the end of the day this means that you cannot escape the liberal-left consensus even among those who seemingly fight for human dignity and freedom. They will find ways to undermine their own call, because in the long run, they are not very serious about their own dissidence. Then why the effort? I do not know if they are waiting for an invitation to the New York Times op-ed. I do not know if they are looking to up their NGO career, or to be on the receiving end of state funding or other. Maybe you have some ideas, of which I’d like to hear in the comments.

But what I know for certain is that where a self-controlled opposition exists, you don’t need a controlled opposition.

cover: video still of Matt Bianco’s Whose Side Are You On (1984)

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[1]

https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/mr-mikes-mondo-imbroglio-or-how-not/comments

[2] I have had my moment in reaction to that “strategy”, and I’ve already written about it in more general terms last week here: https://elenalouisalange.substack.com/p/its-all-about-the-optics

[3] I will not reveal the person’s identity, but let me stress that it wasn’t Michael Shellenberger.