Last Crusade 46: An Engine Called the Press
The Last Crusade begins this day. Our task is to retake possession of Western Civilization. We have identified their seven strongholds and three centers of power. The task now is to discuss strategy. Let us start with a discussion of the Press.
The battle is unequal. The forces of corruption need only to rot, to degenerate, and to destroy. Sea wave after sea wave can undermine the tallest cliff.
The enemy forces are greatly aided by the sins that beset any group of men, no matter how goodwilled and upright. Envy, for example, will always bestow the ideas of socialism an extra magnetism and allure those ideas do not by right possesses; likewise, lust grants undue glamor to the tawdry deceptions of sexual liberation.
The various sins need not dominate the majority for the corruption to take hold. They need only be present.
These sins need only befog the sight of the watchman, relax the nerve of discipline, make his swordblows soft and slow. An atmosphere of moral uncertainty, where every opinion is right, no one is wrong, and good and evil are a matter of personal taste, is all that is needed in order for the progress of the disintegration of society to advance another infinitesimal increment.
Nor is there any easy answer, any safe way to wage this war, nor any earthly hope of victory.
Every hand is against us, every word scorns and opposes us, including the whisper of our own sinful hearts.
Our hope is in heaven, or does not exist at all.
The Enemy is animated by one spirit. We need a spirit of equal strength on our side.
The uniformity across generations of the enemy corruption is difficult to explain to anyone who thinks of ideas as being the creation of humans, rather than, as the truth of the matter shows, humans are the creation of ideas.
Ideas possess us, as a ghost in a fairy tale can possess a living man, or, to use a more mundane example, wine obscure the wits, or beauty infatuate the senses.
Ideas have a logic of their own. An obvious historical example of this is the inability of the United States, after rebelling against the British Crown on the grounds that all men are created equal, could not maintain the institution of slavery unquestioned and unchallenged.
The logic of the idea that all men are created equal creates an incentive, a psychological pressure, a force like a living spirit, which will carry anyone possessed by that idea to the conclusion that slavery must be abolished, whether he will or no, except and unless a contrary rise up to oppose it.
In this case, it was the idea that the various tribes of Africa were one race, and the various nations of Europe whose sons were now living in America were another race, such that fate or heaven or nature had cursed the first to such inferiority to the second that slavery was justified, and hence the self-evident truth that all men are created equal no longer applied.
But that idea, in turn, creates incentives, psychological pressures, or a living spirit that also come to possess the soul of anyone who adopts the first idea. Logic cannot be the priority. A sense of pride, a touchiness concerning one’s honor and reputation, must become a priority. The pride of Southern gentlemen was a natural consequence, and made even discussions and debates about tariff policy or the admission of new territories to statehood a toxic mixture of self-interest and rage.
The lesser or derivative ideas are controlled by a master idea or a sovereign idea. Once a man, or a society, accepts the axioms of a sovereign idea, it is only by extraordinary effort that the ideas derived from it do not also come and take rightful possession of his mind, or theirs.
This is why, on matters are far removed from each other as climate science to race relations to pronoun grammar to fossil fuel industry policy to philosophical questions about the objectivity of reality, the Enemy goosesteps in eerie perfect unison.
All these varied conclusions fall out of one living spirit that possesses them. Once the worldview of the cult of the Enemy is accepted into one’s mind, all these other conclusions and opinions and matters of judgment naturally follow. The Enemy are all ruled by the same fell spirit.
Politics springs from culture, but culture springs from cult, that is, from those sovereign ideas held to be transcendent, foundational, and sacred in the society.
This is why the war is primarily spiritual, and the intellectual, cultural, and political battles are secondary.
Nothing can be accomplished without prayer and fasting. But let us explore what more can be done in addition to that. Of necessity, this will be a high-level, general overview suggesting strategies.
The tactics by which those strategic goals will be carried out will change as the facts on the ground change, from year to year and generation to generation, and as the Enemy changes his posture in response.
The war is spiritual rather than cultural or political. A victory on the spiritual level opens the way to victories in culture and politics; spiritual victory is necessary but not sufficient.
It is missionary work.
I do not propose to analyze which crusade must be launched in which order. The Enemy carried out their operations over generations, and assaulted the West in whatever institution proved weakest, nor did they ever surrender in the face of setbacks or obstacles.
In the same way that for the Christian, no soul is too humble for salvation, for the Enemy, no group of any kind, from bankers to birdwatchers, was beyond the reach of damnation. All were infiltrated.
The missionaries of the devil were tireless. The absence of any coordinated resistance was and remains a mystery to me, a shock and wonder, and a blot of shame on the escutcheon of conservatives, Christians, and all the decent men who slept.
Let us remember the situation on the battlefield.
The Enemy has seven proud towers or unconquerable strongholds into which they crept by slow stealth, masking their goal, until the point where they felt confident enough to throw disguise aside, and throw shut the gates outside of which the unwary and befuddled conservative finds himself:
In a recent column (Last Crusade: Seven Deadly Sins and Strongholds 2020 08 18) we identified the seven strongholds the Enemy holds captive in the modern generation, and the deadly sins to whom no man is immune, whose powers of temptation give the Enemy, as it were, an ally inside all of us, making resistance difficult.
The strongholds and their besetting sins were listed as Press, which is the stronghold of Wrath; the Cinema, of Lust; City Hall, of Envy; the Marketplace and Corporate Culture, which is the stronghold of Greed; the Academy, because it sold its soul for federal money, can be called the stronghold of gluttony; the Salon of intellectuals, which is the stronghold of Pride; and, finally, the stronghold of Sloth, which is the Church.
Please note that this expands on a previous column discussing the Enemy centers of power (Last Crusade 35 Three Centers of Power 2017 09 17). The new additions fall under subversive, coercive, and persuasive power.
- The Press and the Cinema are the subversive strongholds, the means to indoctrinate the multitude without openly admitting one’s goals.
- City Hall is coercive power, and is the be-all and end goal. It is intermingled with the Marketplace.
- Persuasive power uses open debate or obvious incentives to promote ideas, and includes the Academy, and the Salon, and, to a lesser degree, the Church.
Note that the Church is also a seat of spiritual power, which is above subversive, coercive or persuasive, and informs them all, and trumps them all.
The weakening of the spirit in the West in general and of America in particular, an embarrassment or uncertainty shed on public witness of Christ or on public display of the Ten Commandments in lawcourts, or on prayer in schools, as well as the defamatory portrayal of priests and preachers in films and shows, all of this was needed in order for the persuasive and subversive and coercive forces to corrupt the West.
A note on definitions: In this column, the various deceptive nonsense words the Enemy uses to disguise his nature, means and goals will not be emphasized. It is wearisome and deceptive to use a word like “liberal” or “progressive” or “leftist” to refer to totalitarian tribal primitivists, mired in economic theories exploded since the Victorian Era, whose movement is fundamentally religious rather than political.
The Enemy here means those who are secular in theology, totalitarian in politics, socialist in economics. In matters of art and literature, they glorify the aberrant, vulgar, and ugly. The Enemy views man as beast, his life as profane, not sacred. In matters of philosophy, they are taught that truth is subjective, reason is deceptive, and morality is brainwashing.
Subversive Power: Press and Cinema
They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.
To recover the press, it needs must be outflanked, discredited, and starved of revenue. It is most morally corrupt organization in the USA.
It is also the most visibly and obviously corrupt. The general public by and large is aware of the corruption.
Whenever an organization becomes corrupted by the Enemy, it ceases to have the ability to carry out its original function, and can only work to promote and spread the mental virus of corruption. The completeness of the corruption can be measured in terms of how far from its original mission or purpose the organization has wandered in pursuit of serving the Enemy.
In this case, the news has become a perfect and diametric opposite of what it is meant to be. Newsmen are meant to offer facts of public import to the public, and venture opinions on the opinion pages to help interpret those facts.
After corruption, the press operates as nothing more than the psychological warfare arm of the Enemy, as activists for Enemy political causes, and propagandists.
The media is primarily a means to conceal the truth, create smokescreens, destroy lives, undermine any attempts to publicize the truth. Matters of utmost public import are smothered, tossed into the memory hole. Trivial matters of either local significance or none at all gain nationwide public attention.
Let me digress to speak at length about one example of bringing an absurdly trivial local matter to national attention, because it is necessary to preface remarks on counter-strategy with a remark about the psychology of the Enemy assault.
The example is this: we have all seen the clip of young Mr. Sandman, the remarkably polite Catholic lad from Covington Catholic Highschool, wearing a ball cap, being rudely confronted by a withered and ancient freak banging a drum in his face while chanting some pagan mumbo jumbo.
Even supposing the story had been what the news took it to be, namely, a sign of disrespect from a youth to a toothless old coot — how is this newsworthy?
Even had the youth whipped out a switchblade and murdered the creepy old man, to answer his addlepated yodeling and banging, it would still be solely a local story, unworthy of introduction into the national debate.
It has value only according to magical thinking.
In magical thinking, a sign, or omen, or symbol of an object, such as a wax doll, or the image in a mirror, is confused with the real object, to that what harms one is thought to harm the other.
This is why a voodoo doctor thinks he can curse a man by sticking pins into a doll symbolizing the man, or why an Aztec ceremony of beating slave girls until they wept was thought to bless the coming rainfall, because the tears symbolized the rain.
In this particular case, the youth, because he wore a magical evil-juju hat, was thought to symbolize Trump and all Trump supporters, and the act of having a drum beating in his face was thought to symbolize the noise and commotion of the beating the racist Trump supporters, in the magical symbolism of the mystical world of play-pretend, clearly and openly delivered against the toothless old coot.
And so the press duly reported it: the story was not old coot bangs a drum in the face of polite Catholic lad. The story was white whitelads in whiteface Trump supporters hence racists seen beating or threatening to beat a charming but venerable innocent old man of minority color.
The toothless old coot then became a martyr, due to the unreal but completely symbolic act of micro-oppression, and the sacrifice of the martyrdom gave him MANA or spiritual power, with which he could then work witch doctor hocus pocus against Trump, who would then be cursed and carried away by winged monkeys. Or something like that.
The youth allegedly being rude to the crooked old yodelfreak was newsworthy because the entire nation, like an audience of children clapping their hands so that Tinkerbell would spring to life once more, had to join in the faith-act of cursing Trump to summon the winged monkeys.
The problem with magical thinking is that, first, there are no such thing as winged monkeys, and second, even if there were, it is not the job of the news to work the mighty magics that summon them. Their job is to report the news, not summon enchanted airborne simians to effect political change.
But no man can serve two masters. One cannot be a witchdoctor and a newspaperman at the same time.
Any organization willing and able to spend time and effort to cast spells on Trump by finding innocent youths to act the unwilling part of living versions of the voodoo doctor’s wax doll — that is, living people asking as symbols or strawmen to be used in a bogus strawman argument — cannot also tell the truth about anything, not even to identify what is or is not newsworthy.
In the witchdoctor’s world, things have no innate value because they have no innate reality. They have no fixed nature. They have only symbolic value as the tools of witchcraft, tools used to shape and create reality. To the witch doctor, reality is fluid, and changes as the symbols change.
This is the source of political correctness. Words have a mystic power.
Some take this literally, some not. The ones who take it literally are witches.
For them, using a euphemism or elliptical phrase to disguise the nature of a bad thing, or using a swear-word to obscure the nature of a good thing, changes its nature.
Those who do not take this literally are cynics.
The cynic believes words change psychology, not change reality. Political correctness severs men from the truth, hence severs them from their ability to resist. Pressuring men to call everything by names antithetical to their true names has a demoralizing effect on their spirit, halts rational discourse, and soaks the man who bows the knee to this pressure with humiliation and shame.
To bully the weak is a joy, but to bully the weak into publicly proclaiming that the bully never bullied him is the joy beyond all joy.
Political Correctness is sadism disguised as altruism.
For the same reason, any literary, scholarly, or scientific organization that embraces political correctness can no longer function in its primary function. Words no longer have meaning in the world of witchcraft, which means any organization whose work product is words, any intellectual or literary scientific effort, can no longer do its work.
Political Correctness is the belief that factual correctness, that is, truth, is insignificant, or does not exist at all. The truth, the world, the universe is only what the consensus of conformity, the hive mind, the Party says it is.
This is why the Enemy will react with insane fury to polite questions or requests for proof or reasoning to support their narrative.
The narrative is a spell, a spiderweb of words, spun out of nothing and based on nothing. It is being trapped on the holo-deck. It is the Matrix.
For a sane man, asking him a question or challenging his proof merely asks him to re-examine his opinions and conclusions, or to make explicit his reasons. Even if he finds new evidence, or changes his mind, no damage is done him.
But to question the lies of a witchdoctor threatens to destroy his spell, hence to destroy his world. Without his hate, his life means nothing, and so he must maintain his narrative tp justify that hate at all costs.
Likewise, to question the lies of the cynic shatters his whole approach and his only hope of victory. He cannot win using the truth. He shoots blanks because he has no ammo: it is either that, or give up the fight, which means, surrender power. But if his sad life had any other meaning or higher purpose than a grubby and sick search for power, he could not be a cynic, could he?
The news is publicity department for the Enemy, but also more than that.
It is an organ of information warfare, cooperating with elements in the CIA and FBI, to undermine a duly elected president, which, in effect, undermines the concept of democratic Constitutional government. This is illegal, and must be corrected with vigorous prosecution of the laws.
So, one strategic goal is to challenge the political power of the press.
The first strategy is to gain sufficient political power to drain the swamp of corruption which allows the newsmen to break the laws. The New York Times and others who cooperated with the Russian government to attempt a coup against the duly elected president of the United States must be fined, and the officers and owners responsible must be jailed, if not hanged as traitors.
This strategy includes, not merely enforcing existing laws, but changing the laws.
Whenever an organization operates with impunity, or has an unchallengeable monopoly, look first to see what regulations or laws favor that organization, or protect its position from challenge.
For example, the news media has become controlled by a handful of corporations thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Likewise, 47 U.S.C. § 230, a Provision of the Communication Decency Act, holds the partisan information warfare agents like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and search engines like Google immune from the lawsuits which otherwise would correct their high-tech censorship of conservative content.
Once the laws no longer favor the entrenched establishment loyal to the Enemy, sovereign power will return to the consumer, and voting by the pocketbook will be feasible. New platforms could then be developed and promoted, and boycotts will be a feasible means to punish partisanship in the media.
Court rulings have granted the press an absurd immunity to libel laws given no other group in our society. This must be curtailed. It should not have been a protracted legal struggle for the Covington Catholic lad to avenge his good name against the defamation by the national press. Having the courts have to power to punish those who abuse their power by publishing defamatory and hurtful material in reckless disregard for the truth should not be nigh impossible.
For what benefit was the press given the ability to destroy the good name of private citizens forever? Even public figures have nearly no recourse against libels spread by the press, particularly as they conspire to promote each others’ stories.
The news organizations cooperate. I speak here from personal experience. When I was being defamed in international media, the original newsmen, having made false and actionable statements, immediately retracted them, but a dozen others then felt free to repeat, as news, the fact that the first had made this claim, but not to repeat the retraction. Not a single paper, not one, called me for a comment, or even looked up my public record on the internet.
The First Amendment is in no danger from a law that punishes defamation. It will change the incentives under which the press currently operates.
Changing incentives is the second strategy.
We have heard that media giants are go broke when they get woke, but the sad reality is that this is not so. Losing a million customers means nothing if the richest man in the world or the largest nation-state floods money into the dying business. If Jeff Bezos or Red China is bankrolling you, it does not matter how many American consumer dollars you loose. Antitrust laws or proper foreign policy is needed to shut off this abuse of financial hegemony.
The third strategy is to challenge their persuasive power.
This must take place on the psychological level, and is to be propagated through the academy, through the arts, through the popular entertainment.
This is the strategy of replacing witchcraft with logic and reason.
The prestige and role of objectivity, logic, reason, and masculine thinking has been slowly, step by step, eroded by Marxism in the Victorian Age, then by Feminism and hippy sentimentality during 1960s, finally by Leftwing racism in the modern day.
The Enemy in the modern day uses racism to dismiss reason. Racism here refers to the pronouncements denigrating logic, reason, and masculine thinking, such as the one recently publicized by the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which dismissed self-reliance, the nuclear family with its traditional roles for man and wife, and objective, linear, rational thinking, all as Caucasian in nature, therefore despicable.
In sum, the three centers of power are political, persuasive, and subversive. Politics uses force, persuasion uses rhetoric, subversion uses corruption.
Our three strategies of response must use rule of law to overcome force, reason to overcome rhetoric, superversion to overcome subversion.
No one man can devote his life to each of these three crusades. Prayer will bring to each man his sign or inspiration telling him where his talents might best be used.
Missionary work can win cultures over, but the task is not small, not easy, and not without sacrifice.
In the current day, the news is perhaps the weakest of the strongholds of the Enemy, because it is the most obviously corrupt, and it is slowly but surely losing readership, credibility, prestige, and power.
Two simple words, like cannon shots, framed the opening salvo of this battle: FAKE NEWS.
Keep in mind that the news would not and could not be fake, and so obviously and openly fake, were it not that a semi-illiterate and wholly uninformed body of dupes and gulls had been prepared to demand such fakery.
These fakes are meant to protect and augment the power and prestige of the Democrat party, which is the political arm of the enemy, and to glamorize the Enemy actions in popular entertainment, law, academics, and all other areas where their banners are planted.
But the fake news also flatters this same uninformed majority. It soothes and lulls. Wrath particularly is flattered and stoked, but also pride and lust. Every victory for the sodomite lobby, for example, when publicly lauded with many an ovation, anesthetizes and silences the conscience of anyone whose sexual deviance is less, an adulterer or an addict of pornography. As a matter of logic, if sodomy is licit, then the sexual impulse is held to be paramount over the moral considerations of nature, biology, and logic. By definition, the sexual impulse so paramount must also excuse the violations of oath of adulterers, which only offend man, not nature, or the self abuse of the sexual organs of Onanists, or the abuse of the eyes with pornography. Such indulgence in sin are unlawful, but not unnatural.
The news cannot be correct unless the general society, and all its corruptions, is also corrected, at least in part. The fake news can only prevail if the multitudes are addicted to flattery and enamored of sentiment over logic and reason.
Moral leadership is needed from the Church. Instruction in simple rational thought is need from the schools. The endless flood of filth and emotional garbage from the popular entertainment needs to be cut off, or, better get, replaced with something clean, wholesome, and hale.
The problem that each problem in one section of civilization is encouraged and aided by the problems in other sectors means that the battlefront is wide and deep. Let not your hearts be troubled, however. We are not in a Catch Twenty-Two where the news cannot be reformed until the schools are reformed, and the schools cannot be reformed until the news is.
Instead, we are in a situation where crusade in any one sector, against any of the strongholds of the Enemy weakens the enemy elsewhere. Each man can use his talents to fight in the field where he is strong, on the battlefield of his choice. We are in a target rich environment.
Shall we reform the news industry? We must begin with ourselves, in prayer and fasting.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
