Notes from the edge of civilization: Mar. 31, 2024 (Easter edition)
Scotland goes Stasi. The NYT says the Deep State is awesome. Our podcast guest says the Deep State is decidedly not awesome.
A new law takes effect in Scotland tomorrow, making it a crime to use “threatening or abusive” behavior with the intent of stirring up hatred on the basis of religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, and transgender identity. This expands an already existing law against racial hatred.
With this ‘enhanced’ law, people can be prosecuted even for things they say in the privacy of their own home. As The Economist reports, critics are concerned.
“Discussion or criticism” of protected characteristics is acceptable, and a carve-out has been made that allows Scots to voice “antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult” for religion. But the carve-out does not apply to the other characteristics named under the law. And some characteristics are not covered by it at all, most obviously sex and non-religious beliefs. That explains why some of the law’s most vocal critics are women who argue that biological sex should take precedence over proclaimed gender identity in areas from sports competitions to changing rooms to prisons.
In other words, it’s illegal to stir up hatred on the basis of gender identity, but not on the basis of biological sex. The Telegraph reports that women’s rights campaigners fear “the new law will be used by trans radicals to settle scores and silence anyone who dares to challenge their world view.”
Susan Smith, a director of the feminist campaign group For Women Scotland, paints a bleak picture of the country Scotland is about to become.
She says: “We are looking at an army of local spies potentially taking anonymous reports from other local spies and passing them on to the police. Some people are very gleeful about this and they’re going to report everyone they don’t like. It’s very Stasi and it’s absolute insanity.”
Take that, Canada! Scotland’s winning the race to the bottom…
Seems like we’re on a bit of an insanity kick this week.
Haven't we suffered enough?
In Susan Powter’s early ‘90s late night infomercials on fat loss, she would exclaim a signature phrase at the top of her voice: STOP THE INSANITY! It’s a useful exclamation to invoke now, and when delivered at volume it’s certainly worthy of attention. But Powter’s fat-loss system obviously didn’t work. We’re a country of extreme excess…
Meandering further down this river of insanity… A few years ago, when Donald Trump was president, The New York Times denied the existence of “the Deep State.”
Now that Trump is running again and renewing his promise to re-enact Schedule F, which would turn certain career bureaucrats into political appointees and remove their job protection, the media industrial complex’s flagship propaganda outlet has decided to take a different route.
New York Times video producers Adam Westbrook and Lindsay Crouse made a cloyingly cute six-minute video about “hard-working American public servants” who “wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us.”
Now The Times says: ‘sure there’s a Deep State, but they are nice people like Scott, and Radhika, and Nancy, who watch Star Trek and like Taylor Swift — and their jobs, quite frankly, save your life.’
What the Times doesn’t say, but wants you to think, is that Trump sees all government workers as enemies and would use Schedule F to get rid of them. For the record, Schedule F is targeted at making it easier to fire people like Anthony Fauci not Radhika from the EPA.
Journalist
, who writes Armageddon Prose on Substack, correctly diagnoses what’s going on with this New York Times flip-flop. In a post on Friday, he explains a four-step process that involves the corporate state media first ignoring inconvenient narratives, then censoring them, then targeting and smearing anyone who shares the forbidden narratives, then finally giving in and reframing the narratives “in the service of damage control.”Ignore, silence, deny and smear, then reframe, minimize, and off-load guilt.
All that to say: I suspect we’ve arrived at the last step in the Deep State narrative: it is becoming increasingly manifest that an entrenched, permanent bureaucracy — with the intent and capability to subvert the popular will — actually runs the state, irrespective of whoever occupies the White House at any given time; electoral politics is mostly a game of Kabuki Theatre to keep the Democracy™ façade viable.
A 2014 study from professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at over 20 years of data to determine who had the most influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; or organized interest groups.
Would it surprise you to learn that they found “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”?
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.
Our podcast guest this week, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, cites this study as evidence that who you vote for really makes no difference. He then goes on to share a 2018 study from Southern Methodist University that looked at psychopathy by U.S. state and ranked Washington D.C. in the top spot.
“So what we have found ourselves in is basically a country run by maniacs,” he says.
It’s a data-packed, alarming, but ultimately inspiring hour-long conversation and we hope you’ll take the time to watch it… And then we’ll see you on the barricades!
Lastly, it’s Easter Sunday and many of you may be attending a church service today to celebrate. That’s especially true if you live in Texas, where more people go to religious services than in any other state, according to a new survey.
To those of you who celebrate, we wish you a most blessed Easter. 🐰
Great post.
The comments about ignoring, then minimizing the opposition narrative, are spot on. No matter which side is in charge, that might be the best we can hope for. The current trend of taking political prisoners is the practical result (among many others) of the deep state run amok.