If you have not yet listened to or read a transcript of J. D. Vance’s scolding of the European pseudo-nobility for giving up on free speech, I urge you to skip away from here and devour it, word for word. There is something quite remarkable about a senior member of the US establishment travelling to Europe to confront the upper echelons of European political hierarchy with their own manifest insanity. Even allowing for the questions about the current US administration’s commitment to free speech that have since rumbled forth, this speech remains a milestone contribution to political discourse.
This event is rendered even more amazing when we recall that for years now, we’ve been resolutely informed by nearly every media organ in the English-language world that Donald Trump is “literally Hitler”. Indeed so widely travelled is this phrase that when a fake article employing it and purported to be from The Atlantic circulated on social media, many (including Elon Musk) failed to notice it was a prank. I presume this is that typical confusion between figurative and literal that Weird Al Yankovic has scolded folks for failing to appreciate, and not a claim that, in the manner of Scooby Doo, we could tear off an orange-tinted face mask and discover a 135-year-old Adolf Hitler hidden beneath the 47th President of the United States. Without wanting to dismiss the harm that the current Trump administration will inevitably cause (every US administration in my lifetime has done terrible things), I hope it’s clear that the National Socialist party was not known for its defence of free speech, nor for having senior politicians like Vance who are practicing Catholics married to Hindus.
I hope it’s clear that the National Socialist party was not known for its defence of free speech, nor for having senior politicians like Vance who are practicing Catholics married to Hindus.
Or maybe I’ve spoken too soon. For incredibly, the response to Vance’s speech in the legacy media included remarks from CBS journalist-impersonator Margaret Brennan that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide”, which is an extraordinary version of the history of Nazi Germany. Likewise, the BBC, which began suffering the vapours around the time the citizens of the UK voted to leave the European Union and has not recovered since, claimed that Vance “shocked delegates on Friday by roundly attacking Washington’s allies, including Britain, in a blistering attack decrying misinformation, disinformation, and the rights of free speech”. Even if the ill-advised sentence I’ve quoted was only accidentally implying Vance was “decrying” free speech, the BBC’s reluctance to even come close to engaging with the substance of the US Vice President’s criticism helps clarify just how much this speech ruffled the delicate sensibilities of Vance’s censorship-happy audience.
Readers of Café Américain, simply by virtue of not being offended by its mission to stand against the New Normal, are likely to be sympathetic to the dropping of my aghast jaw. This attempt to vilify Vance for his staunchly expressed support of freedom of speech appears quite literally insane. But then again, perhaps there are readers of this publication who are now so inured to the folie du jour that nothing can surprise them. Goodness knows we have had to swallow some whoppingly bizarre porkies in the last decade, including (as Vance himself mentioned) the claim that it is “misinformation” to suggest that a certain virus escaped from a laboratory in China where, as it happens, they were doing research with something very much like that very same virus. This, you may recall, was condemned as “racist”, another term, like “free speech” and “democracy”, that seems to undergo a radical transmogrification in the mouths of legacy media outlets.
However, there is a problem facing those of us who can see the darkly hilarious side of all this. We may be able to marvel at the sheer sincerity with which utter nonsense can now be spouted by those whose job is purportedly something adjacent to journalism, but can we explain it? Can we actually provide some kind of explanatory framework that will make this commitment to absurd hogwash make sense? Here, we all somewhat stumble. We can certainly invoke comparisons that express how we feel about it—George Orwell is getting a lot of exercise today, for instance—but can we provide a model for what we are witnessing that is robust against any cogent objections that might be raised?
Can we provide a model for what we are witnessing that is robust against any cogent objections that might be raised?
It seems to me that we not only lack the required scaffolding to do so, but that all we have is a collection of beams that don’t entirely fit together, as if an Ikea factory had somehow jumbled together several boxes of flat-pack furniture that we are now vainly trying to assemble into a sofa bed, without realizing that what we have is actually a “chest of tables” or a “bookchair”. Somehow, we have to disentangle these pieces and perform a kind of contemporary palaeontology: like those putting together a model of iguanodon for the Great Exhibition, we can see we’re facing some kind of fearsome monster but we still aren’t entirely sure how its legs should go.
The least clear aspect of our “Ikeadon” monster is the involvement of various intelligence services. We might all feel confident that the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance between the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has something to do with the situation, but the fact that Germany is also one of the nations with the most problematic departures from the old ideals of national sovereignty and civil rights must surely give us some pause here. But if we add NATO into the picture, Germany’s situation becomes less ambiguous, and it is therefore plausible that at least some of these pieces belong in something NATO might build.
In a recent episode of their news round up conversation America This Week, essayist Walter Kirn and journalist Matt Taibbi touched upon this issue. In this instance, the epithet “journalist” is thankfully richly warranted: Taibbi has been relentlessly on the ball about censorship issues, and having previously reported from Russia has given him more of a warning sense about what’s at risk here than many in and around this once-noble profession. Attempting to trace the shape of the missing bogeyman, Taibbi suggests there is an effective “meta-state” comprised of internationalist groups pushing political agendas trans-nationally, consisting at the very least of NATO, WTO, WEF, and WHO—the latter two of which came under intense sceptical scrutiny during the recent nonsensical response to an aforementioned virus.
Kirn asked of his colleague “And who would you imagine might be the ruling board of this meta state?”, to which Taibbi suggested that NATO and the Pentagon would be the likely suspects. Kirn then speculated that this is what figures like John Kerry mean when they invoke “our democracy”—and that there was an attempt at “building a scaffolding above our heads for this meta-state”. He then pondered a possible “far more colourful and vivid name for it”, before eventually settling upon “the Luftreich”—the “Kingdom of the Air” or “Empire of the Sky”, which Taibbi suggested brings up amusing connections to Mount Olympus.
The Luftreich might give us one of the two boxes of components comprising our rampaging Ikeadon—but it still doesn’t manage to resolve all the ambiguities. We can readily understand why, for instance, the Sky Empire might crackdown on dissent in the context of the intentionally wrought panic over a respiratory infection, but what plausible reason could this meta-state have for insisting that penises and vaginas aren’t constitutive of the terms “man” and “woman”, to give the culture war example most obviously disjunct from NATO concerns?
We can readily understand why the Sky Empire might crackdown on dissent over a respiratory infection, but what plausible reason could this meta-state have for insisting that penises and vaginas aren’t constitutive of the terms “man” and “woman”?
Here, we find an entirely different history, one that might be traced back to philosopher Judith Butler’s project to “queer gender”. Butler, an adherent of Michel Foucault’s philosophy (which she understands better than most), first started on this path in 1990’s Gender Trouble, and then accelerated her project with 2004’s Undoing Gender. The broad context, which flows on from conventional feminist politics, presumes that gender is a locus of oppression, and that therefore a campaign of liberation has sound reasons to destabilize the binary concept of gender. There’s much that might be said about this (I have written elsewhere about the colossal mess we’ve made of gender), but the key point is that academic enthusiasm for this project soon spilled out into the ever-online youth.
In as much as I can postulate a means for an Ikeadon to be comprised of “NATO spycraft” on the one side and “gender metaphysics” on the other, the blender creating this unholy smoothie appears to be social media. I’ve discussed at Café Américain previously the strange epistemology of “misinformation” and the fact that information is not, and never can be, truth. What seems to have happened is that the Five Eyes apparatus latched onto “misinformation” and its kissing cousins “disinformation” and “malinformation” as a means of massaging public discourse down paths it would prefer were taken, leading rapidly during the era of nonsense “public health” to a massive rise in online censorship. The youth that were recruited into this operation were simultaneously experimenting with Butler’s queering gender, creating a bizarre confluence between intentional attempts to deceive on the one hand and unintentional self-deception on the other.
There are, no doubt, other explanations for the strange set of beliefs that the Luftreich has adopted, but what is evident is that those serfs of the Sky Empire who adhere to its propaganda tenets maintain an ideological purity that Lenin and Goebbels failed to achieve through the more severe method of murdering dissenters. Under these conditions, beliefs that serve the overlords of the Sky Empire quite naturally collide with the political praxis of its vassals. Thus, alas, the horrible and tragic disaster that is the annihilation of Ukraine. Those who flew the gender separatist flag (that version of the Rainbow flag that chose to side with trans activists against classical lesbians in the Rainbow Civil War) swiftly adopted the Ukrainian flag instead (or as well) and unknowingly championed the destruction of a nation in order to “save” it, in what was (from outside the horrors of the battlefield, at least) a military-themed revisit of the ideological crusades of the SARS-CoV-2 debacle.
After the spread of a bizarre hodgepodge of beliefs maintained primarily through online censorship, the work of spies and propagandists has been rendered so much easier. For example, consider the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines that used to supply Russian natural gas to Germany. The media organs of the Luftreich first tried to offer the implausible claim that the Russian themselves had blown up this infrastructure they had been using to sell gas to Germany. It then followed up with the even more implausible suggestion that Ukraine had blown up these pipes using a small ship and some scuba gear. These pipes lie at depths between 70 and 90 metres, while scuba gear has an operational depth of about 30 to 40 metres. I miss the days when the lies we were being told were at least believable.
After the spread of a bizarre hodgepodge of beliefs maintained primarily through online censorship, the work of spies and propagandists has been rendered so much easier.
Unfortunately, even if this sketch of the Luftreich has some validity, it doesn’t really help us get out of this mess. The new administration in Washington D.C. is evidently no fan of the Empire of the Sky—not least because it seems suspiciously as if forces loyal to it tried several times to assassinate their most dedicated political opponent. But since this is a kingdom of the skies and not of land, it’s not at all clear it can be reined in via the ballot box. “Our democracy”—which can mean nothing other than voting to endorse those political positions the Luftreich has already chosen—recognizes no national sovereignty and it will be rather difficult to dismantle what amounts to the widespread corruption of hearts and minds.
All we can do, perhaps, is resolve to refuse to be serfs of the Luftreich, and commit to honouring free speech and the freedom of thought that underlies it as best as we can. In this regard, despite Vance’s honourable scalding of the European wing of the Thought Empire, we cannot presume that the current US administration is our reliable ally so much as “the enemy of my enemy”. Even this gives us a further problem, for the uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the serfs of the Luftreich (who make up the vast majority of its people) are not our enemies but rather our neighbours. I cannot help but fear that this breakdown of civil life may become still worse before we have any plausible opportunity to smash the idols of these self-appointed sky gods.
