The New Atheism: When Bertrand Russell Met Lenin Once Again

The "new" atheism - a misnomer, really - emerged into the mainstream in the early 2000s with the publication of such works as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.  It was not really new in the sense that they were not saying anything that Bertrand Russell hadn't said back in the 1920s, and other philosophers before even him.

What was new was how this early 21st century wave of atheism used the internet to take the American cultural scene by storm.  The net was dominated by a younger, more libertarian cohort, and they were getting ever angrier and more frustrated with the Christian conservative Bush white house.  It wasn't just Bush's policies that drove their bitterness, but rather his facade of down-home folksiness, exemplified by his intentional mispronunciations of words.  These new atheist authors found a receptive audience in these social media pioneers, for whom the problems America, and indeed the world, were facing were reducible to too much church attendance among red state Americans.

The Meme of Legends

These new atheists did indeed make a convincing deconstruction of evangelical Christian doctrines, and their propensity to mop the floor with Christians in online flame wars became the subject of memes.  The case they make against the inerrancy of scripture is convincing.  Personally, I was never really convinced by them, however.  Not fully.  While this argument drove online atheists crazy, I was among those who thought of them as their own sort of evangelists.  I didn't trust the degree of importance they attached to the nonbelief in God, as if that was what made or broke a person morally or intellectually.  Funny how alike their mirror image fundamentalist rivals they were in that respect.

I didn't trust how eager so many of them were to pronounce as fact something they could not prove - the nonexistence of God, despite their constant insistence on smoking gun evidence for God's existence from their religious opponents.  The implication that all the world's problems could be laid at the feet of belief in Christian dogmas struck me as absurdly reductionist. Bertrand Russell became aware of the fact that God-belief wasn't the real root of the problem after meeting Lenin in 1920, and becoming extremely put off by Lenin's fanatical devotion to a decidedly non religious ideology.  My direct experience with Bush era internet atheists was that they were staunchly unwilling to learn from Russell's experience.  Talk to them of the terrors of the Soviet anti-religious campaigns or the Red Chinese invasion of Tibet and cultural revolution, and I was universally admonished - especially by female liberal atheists - to stop sounding like such a McCarthyite Republican.

Their experience with religion seemed limited to the conservative, evangelical Bush presidency and was defined entirely by being opposed to abortion and gay marriage.  I was no friend to religious conservatism either, and had not been since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s wherein I was accused of devil worship on account of listening to heavy metal music and playing Dungeons and Dragons.  But after having read Bertrand Russell, Eric Hoffer and others who'd done deeper research into the nature of belief and fanaticism, it seemed to me as though the new atheists were hamstrung by a decidedly one dimensional take on spiritual concerns.  Although some of them had even read works by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, many atheists I knew online and in real life seemed to not grasp that side of human nature that was drawn towards the mythical, the poetic and the spiritual.

Increasingly, online atheism came to be about smugness, wittiness, signalling, sarcasm, posturing, decidedly anti-holy holier than thou-ness, and just how much smarter they all were than those stupid religious rubes, inbreeding in the Ozarks, or the like.  Being considered a good person was measurable by the correctness of one's beliefs and one's politics.  The smug scenester mindset that I'd seen among my counter-culture acquaintances in high school was there all over again, except it was religious incorrectness rather than listening to the wrong kind of music that would get you snubbed by the very same people who claimed to despise preppy snobbery.  There was no room at the table for people who believed in sky daddies, invisible pink unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.  He who fought with monsters was not taking care, and gazing altogether too long into the abyss.

I disliked religious intolerance, of course, but much more the intolerance than the religious.  Especially when said intolerance was becoming increasingly agenda-driven and ideologically ego-stroking and self serving.  Most anti-religious liberals were decidedly unwilling to take on Islam, for instance, long before Maajid Nawaz called out regressive leftism.  Associations of anti-Islamism with racism were not invented by Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It was old hat even then.  Censorship and sexual prudishness were only wrong when the Catholic Church and southern evangelicals were doing it.  When radical feminists and college campuses were doing it, you were obviously an anti-gay, anti-abortion Bush loving republican for even daring to say such a thing.  Clerical celibacy was just oh, so unnatural, but separatist radical feminism was heroic resistance against the patriarchy.

This was my experience from 2006 onwards.  What would come to be called the SJWs and the Regressive Left were, as popular concepts, years away still.  But the foundations had already long been laid and set.  The hypocrisy on the left that drove me to abandon progressivism in the late 1990s after reading Warren Farrell's Myth of Male Power only seemed to be intensifying.

Thus, when donglegate happened, and Elevatorgate happened, and Atheism+ happened, the new atheists were a lot more surprised than I was.  Descriptions of the debacle that was atheism+ in this 2013 article in Atheist Revolution now seem quaintly humorous in their familiarity.  Postmodern intersectional 3rd wave feminism: Like Seinfeld, classic Star Trek or the music of the Beatles, it's easy to forget that a much younger and less worldly you actually experienced it for the first time:

"On August 19, 2012, blogger Jen McCreight unleashed "Atheism+" upon unsuspecting atheists around the world, and some would say our community has been divided ever since."

"Still others were turned off by the manner in which Atheism+ quickly became an "us vs. them" endeavor that seemed to be more about branding, self-promotion, and purging the atheist community of those who were not liked by those who decided to promote Atheism+ than it did about social justice."

"I was wrong about most atheists valuing skepticism and critical thinking. I would soon realize that many atheists were not skeptics or critical thinkers, at least not when it came to some aspects of their ideology. Unfortunately, I discovered I was wrong by observing the behavior of many of the most vocal supporters of Atheism+. They demonstrated little willingness to think critically or skeptically about the particular form of feminism that seemed to be at the center of their worldview."

"Because Atheism+ was righteous, those who offered criticism were not just people who disagreed; they were bad people. In order to be a valued member of the community, one needed to be the right kind of feminist."

And this, the canary in the coal mine gone silent even in 2013:

"Social justice tends to emphasize human rights, making it more inclusive than the particular issues Jen listed after it. For example, social justice efforts have long focused on the plight of the poor. This was nowhere to be found on Jen's list."

You don't say!

The moment I had been hoping for since 1992, when I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - when a substantial portion of liberals would catch on to the fact that the postmodern progressivism of which the new atheism was a part, and Christian conservatism were much more alike than different beneath their cultural veneers - finally seemed to happen in the later part of 2014.  The tone of the discussion had finally shifted.  Bill Maher and Sam Harris were squaring off against Ben Affleck on Real Time, and a YouTuber calling himself the Amazing Atheist had finally found a punching bag he preferred to the Christian God in another YouTuber by the name of Anita Sarkeesian.

Once again, it seemed, Bertrand Russell had met Lenin, and was again unimpressed by what he saw.

About damn time.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

How we Know that the "Intersectional Social Justice" Movements of the 21st Century are a Very Different Thing than Previous Civil Rights and Social Justice Struggles 

Social justice causes such as anti racism and feminism have a natural appeal.  What arguments could reasonable and conscientious people make against equal access to educational and employment opportunities?  Who in their right mind would be supportive of barriers to success based on such arbitrary characteristics as race, gender or sexual orientation?  As a culture, we are very fond of stories from our past about how basic rights and civil liberties were won by hitherto discriminated against people.  Vietnam war era rallies, protests and riots in opposition to unjust and costly wars abroad and discrimination and bigotry at home have become cornerstones of the identifying mythology of the western world.  

The appeal that these movements have for people today, even half a century after their occurrence, should be obvious.  But are the movements against sexual and racial discrimination we see today, especially on college campuses and on social media, truly the successors of their summer of love era progenitors?  

There are some similarities and areas of overlap.  Just as earlier periods of civil rights struggles produced its share of unhinged extremists.  But the differences between the civil rights era and what have been called the regressive left and the social justice warriors of our time go much deeper than that.  It is not just that current year has just happened to produce more moonbats and nutjobs than times past, though many factors are conducive to that happening, or that you're just able to hear more about them due to social media.  Beneath the veneer of social justice, the so called progressivism of our era is fundamentally different, and in ways that are decidedly unprogressive, compared times past.

Oppression has been defined as the exercise of authority in a burdensome, cruel or unjust manner, unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power, a situation in which people are governed in an unfair or cruel way and prevented from having opportunities and freedom and as prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or exercise of authority.  Given these definitions, are many of the causes taken up by the regressive left social justice warriors of our time really anti-oppression struggles?

Some questions to ask ourselves, and things to think about:

Are people who are oppressed, as defined above, typically given legal recourse against those who they deem to have defamed the group to which they belong, as is the case of hate speech laws?  

Are the penalties for crimes against oppressed peoples greater if hatred of the group to which the victim of the crime belongs is deemed a motive for the crime in question, as is the case with hate speech laws?

Are members of oppressed groups able to seek and win elected office, sometimes the highest executive office in the land, as was the case in the United States of America in the 2008 - 2016 time frame?  Typically, oppressed peoples are barred from public office, as black people were in the days of apartheid and segregation.

While peoples suffering from genuine oppression can have enlightened benefactors among the more privileged elites otherwise profiting from their marginalization - and good for them when they do, would oppressed peoples enjoy the level of government funding and corporate sponsorship that their claimants enjoy today?  Would advertisers fear to be associated with a brand that did not sympathize with "marginalized" groups?  Would social justice provide not just meaning and purpose for its activist cadres, but lucrative careers in bureaucracies in the public sector, in education at all levels, in both entertainment and informative media and media watchdog groups, in non-profit advocacy, in law, with lobby groups, in politics and numerous other fields?  I would hardly expect advocacy on behalf of truly oppressed peoples to be institutionalized to even a fraction of the extent that it is in western cultures today.

Radical left protest, up to the point of rioting or even terrorism has historically targeted institutions of government and corporate power.  This was the case up to the time of Occupy Wall Street.  Today, anti-racist groups claiming to oppose police brutality protest in a manner that obstructs the lives of ordinary, workaday people surprisingly far removed from positions of power.  Wouldn't it make more sense to picket a police station than to block traffic or obstruct the progress of white students to their classrooms on college campuses? What does it tell us when movements like intersectional feminism and black lives matter spend much more time and effort attacking individuals who happen to be white and male than they do the actual "structures" and "systems" to which they attribute ultimate responsibility for oppression?

Speaking of college campuses, is there no difference between the campuses of fifty years ago, that required court orders to even admit black students at all in some cases, and campuses today, infamous for their immediate and thorough capitulation to endless rounds of demands for courses, entire dormitories and study halls, curriculum content and even convocation ceremonies exclusively for black and other minority students?  

Stories of speakers deemed offensive to minority sentiments being no-platformed, disinvited from college campuses or even provoking campus riots abound, and virtually always with little or no academic discipline or legal consequences following for the offenders, abound on social media.  More astonishing still is the fact that the scripts that these protesters are reading from were written in the very academic institutions they're protesting, and the protests themselves often enjoy at least the tacit, if not open support of college administration and faculty.  If this is oppression, it is certainly the strangest form of oppression I've ever heard of.  

I would expect "oppressed" to be a descriptor of people who are denied access even to basic education, let alone access to the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the world, even in preference to more qualified applicants who are not members of the supposedly oppressed group.  Oppressed groups would not be granted their own whole fields of study, such as black studies or women's studies, and the works of these fields would not be exempted, at least by taboo if not by institutional policy, from scrutiny or criticism from their peers.  Oppressed is most certainly not the descriptor I'd use to describe those whose mere disapproval or offense could ruin the career of otherwise distinguished professors and make entire college faculties quake with fear.

Oppressed groups and their representatives do not typically enjoy near universally favorable media bias, nor do they enjoy a near complete absence of scrutiny or criticism of claims they make in academic or media environments.  When's the last time you've seen or heard a credible journalist not associated with an explicitly conservative or libertarian news source openly challenge a core doctrine of feminism or a leading feminist theorist or critic?

Issues of concern in intersectional social justice circles have a remarkable way of arising quite suddenly and simultaneously in multiple media outlets, framed in the same way and couched in the same terms with the same talking points.  Observe, again and again, how quickly one manufactured issue after another appeared very suddenly and dramatically, supported almost universally across multiple media outlets or on multiple college campuses, while opposition and criticism to the "progressive" stance on this issue is developed and disseminated only slowly, and articulated primarily in the comments sections of mainstream corporate media outlets.  Would oppressed and marginalized groups have access to the money, resources and skills needed to conduct such apparently professional and well coordinated media campaigns?

Oppressed groups are not typically successful in their efforts to block the efforts of their supposedly more privileged counterparts to bring to light instances of when the "non-oppressed" group suffers domestic partner or sexual violence.  It would be logical not to expect oppressed groups to be capable of marshalling vast mobs on social media to harass, dox or even get fired from their jobs individuals who happen to criticize the orthodox political and social opinions favored by the oppressed group.  The logical thing to expect would be for victims of domestic and sexual violence to be silenced and swept under the carpet if they belonged to oppressed groups.  Could it be that this is, in fact, actually happening, just not in the way, and against the groups that conventional media narratives would have us believe it is?

Demands on behalf of an oppressed groups for the elimination of due process for members of the oppressor group where allegations of rape are concerned would most certainly not be taken seriously, at least in mainstream, agenda setting media, and would not animate policy on college campuses.  If a member of a privileged group were to compliment a member of an oppressed group, I highly doubt that offense or even allegations of harassment would ensue in response, if the recipient of such attention were indeed oppressed.  Extreme flattery would be a much more logical response. The privileged would be enjoined by stringent cultural norms and social mores from speaking well at all of the groups they oppress.

Would truly oppressed peoples really object to their oppressors adopting elements of the culture of the oppressed group, and would an oppressor group who had really adopted widespread attitudes of bigotry and disdain towards the people they're oppressing "appropriate" their culture?  Or would it be sternly frowned upon within the elite, domineering group to adopt any aspect of the oppressed group's culture?  When the dominant group begins assuming certain cultural forms of oppressed groups, is this a mark of oppression or, perhaps, a veiled expression of sympathy?

The real canary in the coal mine, however, is the disposition of protest politics and social justice movements towards the concept of free speech.  No group who ever sought a more inclusive, just and liberal society ever advocated censorship or the silencing of its opponents.  That the protest politics and social justice movements of today very explicitly advocate censorship and the judgement of people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character should tell us everything about their nature today as opposed to their nature - the odd fanatic notwithstanding - back in the glamorized 1960s.

None of which is to say that women, minorities and so on do not have legitimate grievances or that they are not still treated unfairly and discriminated against.  But the worm has turned in many key respects.  

Rather, this is about the appropriation of the historical struggles of marginalized peoples for political purposes much more related to the consolidation of power for a class of people whose resemblances to the truly marginalized and oppressed are literally only skin deep.  

They are, perhaps, better compared to the clergy of medieval Christendom, for whom the works of Christ and the Apostles were more to legitimize their own privileged position in the feudal hierarchy than they were examples to be followed.  Perhaps this is more about that summer of love mythology described above that so many people love so much, and are increasingly turning to now that the clergy of Christendom seem to be receding from their former prominence in largely similar roles.  The clergy of social justice - itself originally a Christian concept, interestingly.  Social justice, or state religion?

Whatever the politics of the regressive left are, they are not politics on behalf of oppressed peoples.

Cosmopolitan's Orgasm Failure

Usually, Cosmo is the magazine to turn to for people, women especially, who have difficulty orgasming during sex.  An issue has not been printed that has not touched on (no pun intended) this subject.  One can only guess at how many trees have given their lives to be converted to paper in service to this great and noble cause.

But on March 22 2017, we get a bit of a cold shower courtesy of this gem from the appropriately named author Hannah Smothers:

Why Guys Get Turned on When You Orgasm — and Why That's a Bad Thing 

Of course guys manage to make YOUR orgasm about themselves.

Uh oh.  This can't be good.  

It's not enough that men are already having more orgasms than women. To make matters worse, a new study published in the Journal of Sex Research found — aside from deriving pleasure from their own orgasms, obviously — men also derive a specific sort of masculine pleasure from making female partners orgasm. The researchers in the study, Sara Chadwick and Sari van Anders, refer to this incredibly predictable phenomenon as a "masculinity achievement." I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I imagine a "masculinity achievement" looks something like Super Mario punching a coin out of one of those floating boxes in the video game. 

Masculinity achievement?  This can only mean that oppressiveness and general shitlordery are just around the bend.  The abstract of the study in question states:

Orgasms have been promoted as symbols of sexual fulfillment for women, and have perhaps become the symbol of a woman’s healthy sex life. However, some research has suggested that this focus on women’s orgasms, though ostensibly for women, may actually serve men; but the mechanisms of this are unclear.

We should all know by now that gender relations are a zero sum game.  That anything that "serves men" is thereby harmful to women should go without saying, but I guess I just said it anyway, just in case you might have forgotten.

To be fair, Smothers writes in the Cosmo article that:

Let's be clear — there's nothing wrong with feeling good about making your partner feel good (in this case, orgasming). It's nice to bring pleasure to your partner! But the researchers point out a sexist flaw in the masculinity boost thing.

Nice to bring pleasure to your partner, unless that pleasure takes the form of the heterosexual male feeling competent as a lover and being a causal agent in his partner's pleasure.  The "sexist flaw" in question being stated a bit later in the study's abstract:

Despite increasing focus on women’s orgasms, research indicates that the increased attention to women’s orgasms may also serve men’s sexuality, complicating conceptualizations of women’s orgasms as women-centric.

Men may exercise sexual agency from pleasuring their female partners, and thereby feel more masculine and sexual themselves.  Oh noes!  The horrors!  Surely the only logical thing to come next is a repeal of the nineteenth amendment.  Or something.

For example, men have stated that a woman’s orgasm is one of their most sexually satisfying experiences, describing feelings of confidence and accomplishment in connection to female partner orgasm occurrence.  This could further demonstrate positive shifts in sexual discourse by evidencing men’s enthusiastic participation in women’s sexual pleasure, but research points to more self-interested motivations.

Better that this be so then that men be indifferent to the sexual pleasure of their partners, no?  Something tells me that we are not going to be seeing women's march protests on par with the anti-Trump marches against male enjoyment of woman's orgasm any time soon.  Well, not outside social media, anyway, where zero-sum feminist adversarialism vis-a-vis men in a sexual context is rule number one. What sort of "self interested motivations" do men go into sex with that we should be so concerned?  We are given an idea here:

For instance, heterosexual women have stated that, while they enjoy orgasms, their desire to experience orgasm mainly rests on a concern for their male partner’s feelings and perceptions as a good lover. Studies have also found that many women fake orgasms to please their male partners, highlighting that women sometimes prioritize their male partner’s ego over communicating their own sexual desires.

I am no sex therapist, but I would certainly not counsel any woman to not communicate her own sexual desires for fear of upsetting her partner, and would likewise suggest that men be made of stern enough stuff to be able to hear their female partners communications without getting too butthurt about it.  Nobody likes a fragile ego.  Sex is meant to be a mutual pleasure shared by both (or all, if that's what you're into) participants in the sexual act.  Being an active participant in sex implies that one be capable of inducing sexual pleasure in one's partner, and this being a source of one's own pleasure in the act.  In essence, that's what makes it worth participating in, what separates real sex from mere mutual masturbation.

And, not surprisingly, this is precisely what these obviously feminist articles and studies are framing as being "male-centric" and indicative of a masculine fragility that relies upon "giving" women orgasms in order to selfishly buttress their masculine identities - the dreaded "masculinity achievement."  Because, you know, sexual identity and confidence is a bad thing for heterosexual males.  Because rape culture, because male privilege, because patriarchy, because twitter, "Being Liberal" style Facebook and tumblr-esque feminist standoffishness.  Speaking of fragile egos.

Given that, we shouldn't be surprised to discover:

In addition, men have reported that they experience disappointment when their female partner does not orgasm, but state that they would be reluctant to induce a woman’s orgasm with a vibrator because of worries of their own personal inadequacy. 

Overall, it appears that men may be more concerned about their role in women’s pleasure than they are about women’s pleasure itself. Together, this seems to indicate that although sexuality discourse has shifted to promote women’s orgasms, it has not shifted from a male-centric perspective.

Confused?  Me too.

Any self respecting male's concern about his own role in women's pleasure is quite legitimate, if you ask me.  Otherwise, why even be there at all?  Women are quite capable of inducing their own orgasms with vibrators, just as men are quite capable of masturbating to orgasm by themselves and the vast majority of them do so frequently.

I would suggest that women ask themselves these questions: If your partner is not to have some degree of agency in your own sexual pleasure, why waste his time?  And if your partner does not himself derive some degree of satisfaction from said agency, how would you justify the use of another person as an instrument of your own sexual pleasure and nothing more?

The whole point of having sex, besides procreation, is mutual pleasure.  Both partners getting off on each other getting off, and becoming more aroused and thus more satisfied as a result.  Not in the sense of surrendering sexual agency and making another person responsible for your satisfaction and becoming dependent on them, but using sexual agency to share that enjoyment with another and achieve a kind or degree of satisfaction that neither one could achieve independently.  This is the essence of erotic intimacy.

Is this making the female orgasm about the male, at least in part?  You better believe it is, just as the male orgasm becomes, at least in part, about the female.  Sure, this has the potential to lead to problems, as with performance anxiety induced frigidity or impotency.  But these problems are not what is being objected to here.

This, folks, is what the feminists behind this study object to:

Empirically demonstrating a link between women’s orgasms and men’s masculinity also has important implications for conceptualizations of women’s sexual liberation, among others.

"Women's sexual liberation", as defined in this study and as conceived of in feminism in general, would appear to entail a nullification of male sexual agency.  This is a consistent theme in feminism, hence its disdain for male heterosexuality as is evidenced in popular feminist concepts such as the "male gaze" and sexual objectification.  Implicit even in the fat-positivity and body positivity movements are the notions that men are to have no minds of their own regarding what they find attractive.

Men are to be completely extraneous as far as female sexual pleasure and satisfaction are concerned, and if men are to be used in the sex lives of women, they are to derive minimal pleasure and enjoyment from either the act itself, or even of any competency in the giving of women pleasure through sex, lest it become a stigmatized "masculinity achievement" which is bad because reasons.

Is it any wonder that lack of libido is becoming a more prevalent problem?  Better some good anime and a jar of petroleum jelly than sex with "liberated women" if this is how we are to define liberated.

I have long suspected that women's liberation, in its present social media form, is more of a gender flipped version of male machismo; a fear of real intimacy hidden behind an exaggerated concern for gender identity.  This study and Ms. Smother's Cosmo article have confirmed this suspicion.

Reason, thy name is Caitlin Johnstone

I first came across Caitlin Johnstone's writing on "Newslogue", described on its home page as follows:

Welcome to Newslogue 

Newslogue is Australia’s first online publishing platform that matches audiences to writing they love. Our digital environment provides you with stories from your favourite writers direct to your front page, because a newspaper isn’t a platform, and social media isn’t news.

Ms. Johnstone is also on Twitter, and is definitely worth following.  She is one woke chick, let me tell you.  Here's a small sampling:

Democrats Have A Nasty Case Of American Privilege

Two words: American privilege. Democrats will gleefully accuse their political opposition of white privilege, male privilege, straight and cis privilege in their attempts to hand the government over to politicians who want to topple governments and drop cluster munitions on cities overseas, because the alternative might make things a little uncomfortable for them at home. How many of my readers were accused of “white privilege” for their decision to back Jill Stein over Hillary Clinton in the general election? Quite a few I’d imagine. They’d rather have elected a President with an extensive history of supporting disastrous military intervention after disastrous military intervention, who was promising to shoot down Russian military planes over Syria and provide “military responses” for Russian “cyber attacks”, than fight the political system that forces them into voting for World War 3 in a pants suit. All because the orange guy said he’d build a wall.

 The Establishment Is Incapable Of Winning The Media War

The message, of course, being that David Brock’s brand of ham-fisted astroturfing will poison anything it touches. Progressives want real human beings, not a corporatist agenda wearing a fake nose and glasses pretending to be a human being. 

No, David Brock is not a winner. But he’s also the best they’ve got. There’s a reason Brock was hired by the Clinton campaign despite having spent the first part of his career attacking the Clintons; he’s the very sharpest tool in the establishment’s tool shed. And even he is far too blunt for the job. He simply cannot compete with the energy, adaptability, speed and hunger of the anti-globalist grassroots movements on both the left and the right which oppose everything Brock stands for. 

What the corrupt systems which control our world are rapidly realizing is that you simply cannot artificially imitate a grassroots movement. When your candidates have their words being audited by entire teams of campaign strategists before making a single tweet, there’s no competing with thousands of minds all around the world pouring inspired creativity into a memetic war against the rigid, blocky ideas you’re trying to circulate.

 You Can’t Fight Trump Without Understanding TheAnti-Globalization Movement

Trump, like Sanders, and like all progressives who are worth a damn, is an anti-globalist. He opposes the way multinational corporations and banks have used legislation, war, and predatory trade deals to subvert the needs of the nation to powerful elites who are not limited by or loyal to it. You cannot understand the Trump movement without understanding globalism and the anti-globalization movement, and most Democrats don’t. Anti-globalization was the crux of Trump’s entire campaign, and most liberals are still squealing about racism and sexism as the thing that got him elected. This is wrong, and the rank-and-file left will be unable to mount any meaningful grassroots counteroffensive until this changes. 

I doubt any of the hyperventilating Democrats who are breathlessly gasping that Trump is the next Adolf Hitler have taken a moment to reflect on the fact that Hitler was not exactly the poster-boy for non-interventionism. Trump has been advocating non-interventionism so extensively that some critics have been accusing him of isolationism, which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is kind of the exact opposite of trying to conquer the world and make everyone look like Ryan Gosling. Non-interventionism happens to be an essential part of both the progressive and anti-globalist movements; if you support America’s policy of military interventionism and world-policing, you are not progressive, you are a war hawk like Clinton and Bush.

This one I find especially poignant.  I distinctly recall being one of about eight or so left wing people in the western hemisphere in the mid 1990s, and each month's issue of Dissent, Z Magazine and The Progressive were stuffed with articles warning of the dangers of NAFTA, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the International Monetary Fund and so on.  All of this columnated in the anti globalization protests in Seattle and elsewhere beginning in 1999.  Of course, the Clinton wing of the Democratic party and their copycats in the Canadian Liberal Party and the British Labour Party were all for globalism, but organized labor and anti poverty groups in general were against it and strove to warn all who would listen (not very many, I can assure you) that it would not be the grandeur that the media in the 1990s promised us it would be.

Perhaps organized labor should adopt a green frog as a mascot.  Perhaps people will listen to them this time.

And speaking of mass media blitzes to groom the populace into the acceptance of shitty policy:

Reminder: WikiLeaks Revealed The Deliberate Construction Of A Liberal ‘Echo Chamber’

So to recap, an elite insider of the Democratic party met with a group of powerful neoliberal oligarchs to discuss how they would use their footholds in the media, the internet, academia, faith-based groups and think tanks to create “a group situation where information, ideas, and beliefs are uncritically bounced from insider to insider and amplified, while dissenting views are censored and/or ignored,” exactly like the idiocy-generating manipulation machine that conservative think tanks were inflicting upon Americans of the political right. They planned this, and they succeeded, which is why Democrats have been acting like raving lunatics lately.

This one's a doozie.  Well worth reading, for it contains links to Podesta email 59125, which is essential reading for anyone really curious about where the current form of the regressive left came from.  There's two, actually, found under the attachments: NYC Meeting 2007 and 2008 Combined Fundraising ...  They are downloadable doc files.  Well worth the read, and I'll likely do more blog posts and YouTube videos about them in the future.  They lay out a solid blueprint for precisely how to build an astroturf political movement, and confirm all your worst suspicions about the state of progressive blogging and journalism during the late Bush and Obama years.  It is also continuing to pay dividends into the Trump presidency.

Yes, it did involve George Soros, in case you were wondering.

Consider This: Every Time You Focus On Trump, You Are Helping The Dem Establishment

The Democratic establishment has lulled us into believing the lie that as long as its politicians are paying lip service to Black Lives Matter and advocating gay marriage, that it’s acceptable for them to choke us all to death by helping big money institutionalize the Walmart economy, shrinking our wages and making it a struggle to acquire medicine or put food on the table while spending trillions of dollars slaughtering millions of people overseas in corporatist wars. “Vote for me! Sure I’ll sell America’s infrastructure to my plutocrat owners and fight to protect them from tax loopholes while you work two jobs just so your kids can eat, but I’ll never assume your gender!” 

That is the fake left. That is the entirety of the Democratic establishment right now, and it’s what we need to be fighting. We need to be shining a big, bright light on that neoliberal bullshit at every opportunity until the whole country gets sick of it and flushes it down the toilet where it belongs. Let’s stop collaborating with their ineffectual demonstrations and manufactured outrage and start attacking the real oppressors. Let’s become real rebels.

Shocker: Amidst some valid criticisms, a lot of anti Trump sentiment on social media is "look at how witty I am" vanity and signalling.   

Establishment Dems Hold Minorities Hostage And Demand Support For Corporatist Policies As Ransom: The hyperbole in this one gets a bit carried away, but its essential point still stands:

I’m talking about the way the Democratic establishment extorts voters into supporting them and their soul-crushing corporatist policies under the threat of losing their civil rights. Everyone watched during the 2016 election cycle as the Dems forced a warmongering corporate crony into the nominee slot and then bullied, shamed and gaslighted progressives into supporting her because if they didn’t, minorities, LGBT people and women will lose their rights. The decision to invest your vote in a progressive third party was propagandized as a “mark of privilege,” because if you didn’t support the woman who wants to start wars, continue the policies which increase income and wealth inequality, and enslave Americans to predatory trade agreements while staving off welfare and universal healthcare, disadvantaged groups will lose their rights. 

This was not an accident, of course. The Republican and Democratic parties have figured out a scheme for working together to leverage Americans into supporting corporatist oppression no matter which party they vote for. The Republicans have agreed to threaten reproductive rights, gay rights and immigrants while wooing rural Americans who want to protect their culture and their families, while their neoliberal brothers in the Democratic party threaten the exact same things if you refuse to vote for their brand of corporatist exploitation. It would only take one party to stop this psychopathic game and give people both social justice and economic justice, but the Democrats choose not to be that party, because it keeps corporate donations rolling in. They deliberately perpetuate this evil for power and money.

The G.O.P are far from innocent, of course, for they threaten their base with the spectre of a liberal boogeyman forever coming to take their guns and their bibles away.  The article overall is a little harshly worded, but more true than false, ultimately.  

BashingTrump Doesn’t Make You A Rebel, It Makes You An Establishment Tool

So you think you’re a badass, crowing about Michael Flynn’s resignation and making fun of Trump? You think you’re a rebel, spelling his name tRump like a naughty eight year old kid from the forties? It’s because “rump” means “butt”, right? Is that the gag? Be careful you don’t cut yourself on all that edge there, Lenny Bruce … 

This is not a defense of Trump; I see Trump as largely irrelevant and very low on the list of priorities America’s political left should be focusing on. This is simply a reminder to liberal Americans that you cannot attack Trump without propping up the Democratic establishment, and you cannot prop up the Democratic establishment without supporting the oligarchs who own it. When you celebrate the Deep State’s counteroffensives against the Trump administration, you are not cool, you are not anti-establishment, and you are not a rebel. You are a tool.

While most of Ms. Johnstone's articles attack the regressive left establishment, some of them also address looming economic problems.  And - surprise surprise - offer reasonably sound analysis.

The Right Has No Answer For Automation Job Loss, But The Left Does

Donald Trump is not going to solve America’s job creation problem. The manufacturing jobs are gone forever; they’re not coming back, and artificial intelligence advancements are only going to make things much, much worse very, very soon. Trump might be able to coerce companies into staying in America for a little while with protectionist policies, which might temporarily make it harder for CEOs to leverage unions into accepting dehumanizing wages for workers, but none of that will do anything about the imminent job apocalypse that’s just around the corner due to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics. There's no way "entrepreneurship" can compete with the rate at which artificial intelligence is going to accelerate in advancement. Conservatives have no answers for this problem, and neither do the fake-left neoliberals. 

But the true left does. AI and automation will make it much easier for a few lucky plutocrats to make a tremendous amount of money for themselves, which is just fine and dandy, because they’ll be able to afford a lot more taxes. With those taxes, we could easily help fund the basic living expenses of everyone in America. There will still be some jobs to be had, which will provide some people with some extra gravy for whatever cool skills and ideas they have that they want to put to use, but the soul-crushing demand that people find stupid, arbitrary tasks to do in order for their existence to feel justified will be eliminated.  

So all in all, what's not to like here?  We need all the good, honest columnists and pundits that we can get at this point, and Newslogue in general and Caitlin Johnstone specifically delivers it in spades.  Keep up the good work!