The Chris Moeller Archives

Our privacy as private citizens and residents has never been more at peril from the threat of our own government, even as that government takes action that is without historical precedent in order to keep itself operating in shrouded secrecy. Compliant news media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and NBC have hired “media reporters” to secretly infiltrate private chat rooms online and to “out” those that might be anywhere saying or thinking a bad thing-- expressing private opinions of nuance perhaps, and certainly opinions that would land safely outside the permissible orthodoxy of the day. They publicly shame the offenders and refer to the results of their reporting as “news,” even while they walk in unquestioning lockstep with those that just happen to be the current power players in each of the government’s co-equal branches. 

The public cover-- as well as the sometimes legal cover-- for doing something so thoroughly un-American is that they are saving us from Donald Trump or someone like him ever being elected again. This is the pure definition of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is very real and which is more fascist at its core than anything they’ve been describing to us of late as fascist. You must understand that, to this privileged class, unmonitored spaces anywhere in the U.S. now are akin to social laboratories capable of creating attacks on democracy, that foment what they have deemed “misinformation.” These spaces must be exposed. And it’s okay if they expose it because these are not actually “public” spaces, they argue. The First Amendment, they’re quick to inform, does not extend to “freedom from consequences.” And just try to forget for a minute that we’ve succeeded in privatizing the freedom of expression. 

They’re going after podcasts and platforms such as the Parler app, Clubhouse, Telegram, and Substack. For those that work in the corporate media, it’s a long-awaited moment to richly savor-- the opportunity to take aim at the independence of those news competitors with too much editorial independence, those alternative journalists that have stubbornly refused to make the same career compromises they’ve chosen to make. 

And transparency is a great thing. Who could disagree with the premise? I’m always arguing for more transparency here. But how do we line up corporate media’s promotion of their idea of transparency with their simultaneous detestation of Edward Snowden, of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, of government and corporate whistleblowers of all stripes? Of their unbending support for official government secrecy that extends inexplicably to millions upon millions of “classified” documents? Dr. King famously said the United States offers socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. True it still is, and we also have the First Amendment for the privileged class and paternalism and censorship for the unwashed. The nation’s billionaires will judge which is which. 

The root of the danger to civil liberties can be dug up again at the New Left’s hatred for populism. They believe the uneducated and the poor are racist, sexist, and willfully ignorant of all things. It can’t possibly be the case that the government has betrayed any expectation of the people’s trust. How dare you say this presidential election was rigged after we spent the last four years telling you the last one was rigged by Vladimir Putin. Left wing intellectuals look down their noses at these people’s unskilled and low-paying jobs, and at the depressed communities in which they choose to live. It used to be that these were the ugly traits of the nation’s conservatives. No longer. Neo-liberals and corporate Democrats have abandoned any hope of ever again getting the votes of the rural poor because in order to do so, they would have to do something to earn them, and they’ve chosen to be beholden instead to the banking, tech, and military-industrial giants. The Democrats are fighting a battle against “misinformation” this very moment in the well of the United States Senate, but I’ve already got the new Democratic president down for misinforming us about his son’s business dealings, his history as a sexual predator, several lies and plagiarisms regarding his resume, and my promised $2000 stimulus check. Misinformation is how our government has long functioned. 

It’s one of the few plays they have. There was no other way to discredit a Bernie Sanders or a Tulsi Gabbard, no other way to defend indefensible trade deals, immoral wars, and the get-out-of-jail-free cards given to the arsonists of our national economy. Now we can see precisely what that play is. #Resistance politics is denouncing your opponents as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes to distract from bloody foreign policy and secret government. What other way are you going to sell-- to a populace that ostensibly believes in democracy-- a totalitarian surveillance and empire-building state, especially after you’ve been forced to replace a great salesman in Obama with a borderline-senile one in Biden. The approved national storyline is that we’re surrounded on all sides by white male fury-- well, except, that is, inside the CIA, NSA, FBI, and in the banking sector. 

There was initially some widespread liberal support for Julian Assange, and then for Edward Snowden, when those individuals exposed some of our nation’s most heinous and secret crimes. Not by institutional government officials, mind you, but at least by self-described liberals in the civilian ranks. That little support seems to have evaporated under the relentless, now decade-long assault on these men and their cohorts by the neo-liberals. Now the newly-defined liberals have partnered with the establishment right under the belief that the hackers and the whistleblowers are the villains. Julian Assange is Roger Stone. Edward Snowden is Julius Rosenberg gone off to literally live in Russia. and it’s our nation’s law enforcement agencies that will be our hero protectors. Lest we forget that there were actually loud calls less than ten years ago to “defund” the NSA. Now a simple call to “defund the police” is thought to be like holding up a placard that reads “Kushner for POTUS 47.” Even media exposures such as the one involving Hunter Biden’s corruption are labeled “misinformation” when they are factually plausible and not at all disproven or even denied, but simply have the wrong political impact. That’s fascism.

Politicos on the inside seem to be telling us now that free speech is a fallacy. Speech has been “weaponized,” says one pundit, because-- hmm, as I read it-- it takes place between two or more individuals without first having passed through an attempt by the corporate media to contextualize it. Michael Moore told us back in the mid-90s this would ultimately happen, and I’ll bet he doesn’t even remember saying it, but I remember. He said, paraphrasing now: use the internet, organize, before they take it away from us. And now the taking is happening. 

The fear of our own shadow that I mentioned before is no longer collective, it’s turned person to person. Your neighbor is a threat. Maybe even your family member. Turn him in. We got you. We’re your new family. You and I both know that the Trumpies are a cult, but, unlike them, you’re an independent thinker. I could tell that about you right away. Oh, and thanks for looking past the Tara Reade assault allegations, and Hunter’s completely-logical, coked-up foray into Ukrainian national industry, and those exciting campaign promises that fizzled to nothing within the first 24 hours that immediately followed the Georgia runoff. No cult behavior to see over here.