The Twitter Files

With the release of the Twitter Files recently, it’s now official that the US Government colluded with major social media to manipulate public perception. We now know that the US Government, through the FBI, was able to request Twitter to take down posts they didn’t like. This is not only a violation of the American First Amendment, but contravenes the very spirit of free speech laws.

That the governments of the world collaborate with the mainstream media is not a new idea. Operation Mockingbird demonstrated almost 50 years ago that the US Government planted intelligence officers in mainstream media entities, for the specific purpose of pushing pro-Establishment propaganda. The Twitter Files are just another example of this long-established pattern.

Domestic propaganda was openly used by George W Bush to manipulate public perception in favour of his adminstration’s policies. Doing so was illegal, but that didn’t concern Bush any more than the legality of invading Iraq did. Then the open use of domestic propaganda was given a massive boost when Barack Obama made it legal.

Ten years ago, in the middle of the Obama reign, the alternative media dominated what were then the alternative media platforms. The mainstream media was still clinging to print, television and radio. But the mainstream media came to realise that the Internet was the future. They began to take social media seriously.

However, an obstacle remained. People preferred alternative media. They enjoyed the more casual interactions with smaller media entities. This led to high levels of trust, something the mainstream media no longer enjoyed since acting as cheerleaders for the Iraq War. It meant that all the intelligence operatives embedded in mainstream media could no longer control the narrative.

The solution? Ban the alternative media.

Once the Establishment realised that the horse of narrative control had bolted, they retreated to their fallback position of banning all alternative narratives. Mass censorship was the strategy used by authoritarians in the past, whether Nazi or Communist, so it’s no surprise that neoliberal authoritarians would do the same.

The image above shows what happened to the Google traffic of VJM Publishing on the 5th December 2020, after the Establishment decided they’d had enough of us. Our organic traffic was restricted from 200 or so hits per day to less than 50. It was as if someone reached into the Google algorithm and pressed a button that said “Throttle traffic to VJM Publishing.”

Joe Biden’s America considers dissenters to be domestic terrorists. Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand is no different. Agree with the authorities and fall in line, or you’re a terrorist. Given this attitude, it’s not surprising that Western governments are doing everything they can to destroy those who will not submit.

The Twitter Files are proof that little has changed since Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s. Western governments still use embedded intelligence agents to control the narrative, only they now do this with social media as well as legacy media.

Indeed, little has changed since 1928, when Edward Bernays wrote that “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country”.

That invisible government, now global, still intends to manipulate the opinions of the masses. So now that the opinion-forming mechanisms have transitioned from radio, television and newspaper to social media and search engines, the invisible government has taken over the Internet.

The ongoing Twitter Files saga is utterly undeniable proof that all of the major social media portals are heavily infiltrated by Establishment operatives. It turns out that, as Joy Pullmann put it, “Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.” Whereas the US Government used to plant intelligence officers in CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, they now plant them in Twitter, FaceBook, Google and Reddit.

Predictably, the Establishment will scream about how all this is conspiracy theory, and how none of the mainstream social media platforms or search engines have intelligence officers on the staff, and how even if they did they’re not censoring anything. But people who have followed the history of governmental interference in mainstream media will understand that the Twitter Files haven’t shown proof of anything unexpected.

What the Twitter Files have shown proof of is government officials working to destroy free speech rights, which are protected under human rights legislation in Western countries. This is therefore proof of a human rights abuse – but don’t hold your breath waiting for prosecution.

Thanks to widespread censorship pushed by Western governments, it’s now impossible to trust the narrative coming from mainstream Internet sources any more than the narrative coming from legacy media. Smart people will follow alternative media outlets, such as CounterSpin Media and VJM Publishing, to get facts and evidence instead of a globalist, corporatist, Establishment agenda.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon as a Kindle ebook or paperback. Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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VJMP Predicts 2023

As another year in Clown World ends, many are casting their mind forwards to the future. VJM Publishing has taken it upon ourselves to bring the light of edification to the Anglosphere masses, in opposition to the great stupifying force that is the mainstream media. To that end, we offer some ideas on what might happen in 2023.

The general prediction is that basically everything will get worse, save for a few things. And those few things will be subtle and not appreciated by all.

The area that we can be most confident will decline is the economy. Everyone is predicting a recession for 2023. Recession appears inevitable to most people, given that interest rates have risen sharply across the world in 2022, and that most countries and individuals were heavily burdened with debt before the rise. Maximum debt plus maximum interest rates equals maximum bankruptcies and maximum pain.

On top of the macroeconomic trends, we can also expect high consumer inflation next year. Electricity and food prices have risen sharply in Europe in 2022, and we can expect this to continue into 2023 now that Emmanuel Macron has signalled “The end of the age of abundance.” We won’t see Weimar conditions next year, but we will edge towards them.

Most ominous are the signs of the world continuing to split into the three territories predicted by Orwell in 1984. The Ukraine war has already divided the world into a Oceania (Western) bloc versus a Eurasian bloc. All that remains is for China to fall out with Russia, and to carve a sphere of influence for themselves, and to call it Eastasia.

The mainstream media of 2023 will continue to create the impression that megadeath in nuclear hellfire is imminent. In reality, the true threats to our well-being will be increasingly precarious housing, medical care (especially mental health care) and employment. In other words, the adverse microeconomic trends of recent decades will continue.

Life quality will also decline when it comes to surveillance technology, in particular facial recognition technology. Predictably, this tech will be marketed to us as necessary to keep us safe, but in reality will be used to monitor and harass dissidents. Artificial intelligence will also play an increasing role in identifying wrongthinkers.

The economic maladies will contribute to an ongoing collapse in social cohesion. In urban areas all over the Anglosphere, the atmosphere will become more desperate and nasty. Main street shoppers will find themselves subject to more aggressive panhandling, and public drug use and sexual displays will become more common.

2023 will bring us more and more videos of people beating the shit out of each other in public. The collective IQ will continue to decline from the degeneration of social media, combined with decades of dysgenic breeding. Pointing out that society resembles Idiocracy will become a cliche. Reading books will become a core part of the counterculture.

Television, in contrast to books, will become extremely unfashionable, the preserve of Boomers on their way out. Boomers themselves will become openly hated. Whether justified or not (and it mostly is), Boomers will start taking the blame for every aspect of Clown World.

Trust will reach all-time lows. Already, at the end of 2022, there is almost zero trust for politicians and journalists. This will spread to other professions traditionally considered trustworthy, such as professors and doctors. The ability of mainstream media to manufacture trust in authority figures will decline. This will lead to rapidly increasing support for the alternative media.

Social isolation will become more common, especially among young men. Escapism in the form of screen time will increase (where it’s still possible). Social media will continue to replace other forms of socialisation, and it will become increasingly toxic. Smart people will deliberately remove themselves from FaceBook, Twitter and Reddit.

Despite all this doom and gloom, there are a few good reasons to be optimistic. The Fifth Hermetic Principle, a.k.a. The Law of Rhythm, tells us that even as most things get bad, pressure rises on certain other things to become good. Although we can expect things to get worse in physical and emotional realms, the forecast is that improvements will come in spiritual areas.

Increasing acceptance of traditional spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and psilocybin suggests that a new spiritual age is dawning. We predict a revival of the prisca theologia, the perennial philosophy of which there is a multitude of religious expressions. Small groups of dedicated spiritual seekers will form, away from the oversight of the nihilistic masses.

These small groups will explore incredible, far-reaching new realities. Eventually they will start to join together in order to influence the human race as a whole, away from the darkness of ignorance and towards the light of theognosis. The observed effect of this action, however, will remain subtle throughout 2023.

In summary, most things will get worse for most people, but there is still plenty of good energy coming our way.

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Mythologising Retirement

Such a great portion of our human lives involves paid work. There is an important sense in which we have been convinced that the ultimate goal of work is to pay off our debts, only to then retire. There is value in challenging the assumptions beneath this kind of myth, because so much of our lives are invested in what is at stake. Unless we come to a very clear understanding of what it is that we feel and what the outcomes are of our participation in this life, we will never arrive at any kind of satisfactory point, nor will we have divined any beneficial understanding of our place in the world.

Firstly, we have inherited a cultural premise that tells us that ultimate well-being can be postponed to the future. This is a very large assumption with far-reaching implications.

Your learned capacity to be happy in the future is a clear reflection of how you have learned to be happy now. Obviously, when the future seems to have arrived, that will also be ‘now’, so your appreciation of your present environment must be managed skilfully.

Have you ever come across people who are retired who cannot stop for one moment? The garden, the housework, the motorhome. These people are continuing the education of a lifetime of work, which is an ethic of keeping busy. People will object: ‘What is wrong if this is what they want?’, but do we really know what we want? Do we know what is best for us, and where we may have misunderstood?

For example, there is hidden assumption that many people have accepted which is that a lifetime of work is also a lifetime involved with suffering, therefore retirement from working life will also equate to retirement from a lifetime of suffering. Just how true is this assumption? It is true that much work, being the expenditure of effort under often physically or mentally stressful conditions, can promote much in the way of personal suffering.

What a lot of people fail to see is that leaving daily work behind is allowing the departure of only one source of suffering, it is not a salvation from suffering as a whole. In fact, the point at which we are accepted to have earned the right to withdraw from a lifetime of work is also the same point at which our mind as well as our physical body is beginning to deteriorate, marking the onset of all kinds of potential physical and medical challenges.

Suffering still follows at our heels from other sources, most notably the illness and death of friends, peers and loved ones who are also subject to the ravages of time. In this respect, retirement enjoys the benefit of a kind of afterlife mythology, in which all of our pain and effort on a daily basis will one day be ultimately vindicated and returned in full measure.

This raises an alarming question: just how much daily tolerance of misery does this mythology support? How many of us are laboring under the illusion that all of our effort is guiding us toward somewhere ultimate where we will have eternal peace and we can finally kick up our heels?

I share a couple of examples of this from my own life which I believe touch upon something relevant here.

I have a friend whose father is in his seventies, and despite remaining reasonably physically fit, he still works himself to the bone every day of his life. He is still in full time employment, despite that fact that he has been given the nod of approval that he could leave his work if he wanted to. Now, you might say ‘If he is doing what he wants to, why not?’ And I would naturally agree, except that all he ever seems to talk about is how much of a welcome change it is going to be when he finally retires.

This poses an odd kind of paradox in which he is on the cusp of retirement, and really past his culturally accepted retirement age, but the actual notion of stopping work seems to terrify him. His insistence on the myth of retirement has been well noted – he has waxed eloquent about the benefits of not having to get up in the morning, to not have to do anything, to have the freedom to kick back with a beer in his hand and watch TV (incidentally, this mythology is also recounted in minor form in the notion of the weekend, almost like a mythic foretaste of Valhalla).

The sad irony is, these are things he has not given himself the permission to enjoy. He may literally never arrive at the point at which he is comfortable with letting go of the ethic of early rising and hard work before he dies. To have lived this way for over seventy years, with no substantial appreciation for being able to allow himself to get a real break, is quite a confounding and yet exceptionally ubiquitous social phenomenon.

We could surmise it comes down to a person’s character and their ethos of being a hard worker, which unsurprisingly is a highly respected social value in any country. It could also be that like the rest of us, he has been successfully indoctrinated into a program of lifelong drudgery, being strung along by an imaginary dangling carrot.

Another example I will give was when I was working out of town one day, an older man came up to me struggling to walk with a stick and specifically wanted to tell me his story. We were the only two people around for at least a kilometer, and he specifically made the effort to approach me from a distance of about three hundred meters.

He told me that he was a keen hunter and fisherman, and that shortly after retiring, he had experienced a stroke which meant that there was no aspect of his retirement he felt he could enjoy. He told me that he worked his whole life, expecting to be able to retire and do what he wanted, except now he felt he had been cheated out of it.

While I don’t believe there is nothing he could have left of value in his life, the fact remains that we do place an inordinate amount of good faith in the application of effort over decades of our lives hoping to have something tangible to show at the end of the process. How does this contribute to us putting off our lives now, and how are we foregoing our responsibility to live wisely and skilfully today?

Are we collectively so enamoured by the prospect of the future holding some form of salvation, either material or spiritual, that we can justify subjecting ourselves to misery today? What would we do differently today, what changes would we be willing to allow in our lives if we discovered the possibility that our imagined future with its ease, relaxation and distance from suffering would never eventuate?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

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Three Political Axes More Useful Than Left Vs. Right

Mainstream political discourse is hopelessly divided into the two poorly-defined camps of left and right. Leftists believe they’re the good and nice people against the evil and nasty rightists, and rightists believe they’re the good and tough people against the evil and weak leftists. The truth is that both sides are fuckwits.

The left vs. right axis is bullshit anyway – it’s completely arbitrary. Leftists claim to be for the working class, then dump hordes of violent refugees into working-class neighbourhoods. Rightists claim to be conservatives, but have conserved nothing, being more than happy to sell their descendants’ inheritance at discount price.

The truth is that there is a multitude of different axes upon which we can divide people’s political attitudes. The left vs. right axis has been subject to so many lies over the decades that talking about it no longer conveys any useful information. But there are at least three political axes that are still useful.

First: Authoritarian vs. Libertarian.

Mainstream academia likes to pretend that there’s no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. As anyone who has read The Gulag Archipelago knows, this is bullshit. Left-wingers are more than happy to dictate how others are allowed to live, as evidenced by the creeping spread of cancel culture.

Right-wing authoritarians exist, of course, in the form of theocrats, and centrist ones exist in the form of Nazis. But fighting against one or two of the three kinds, while ignoring the malice of the others, is foolish. All that can be achieved by such an approach is to let authoritarianism in through the backdoor.

George Orwell summarised this insight best when he wrote that “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” As a simple comparison of the American Revolution versus the French and Russian ones makes clear, libertarian revolutions tend to go much better than authoritarian ones.

Second: Globalist vs. Nationalist.

The received wisdom for most of the last 100 years has been that globalisation is inevitable. The reality is that increasing globalisation is dependent on increasing energy use, and we’re running out of the fossil fuels that have provided us with so much cheap energy. As this cheap energy declines, so too will the impetus for globalism, and nationalism will ebb back into fashion.

As with the previous axis, there can be left-wing globalists and right-wing ones, and the same is true of nationalism. A person’s position on the globalist vs. nationalist axis will tell you more about their position on issues such as immigration, free trade and military interventionism than their position on the left vs. right axis.

Globalist interests overlap heavily with authoritarian ones in the age of the World Economic Forum. In any case, there are plenty of left-wing reasons to be a nationalist, and plenty of right-wing reasons to be a globalist. So it’s more indicative just to say if you are a nationalist or a globalist. The truth is that many people use the labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’ to hide the fact that they are globalists.

Third: Materialist vs. Idealist.

People act as if someone’s position on materialism vs. idealism is just a philosophical whimsy, a private matter of faith with no import. The reality is that people who don’t believe in an afterlife behave predictably differently to those who do.

As Erwin Schroedinger realised, people who don’t believe in an afterlife have little moral incentive to act altruistically. If the brain generates consciousness, and if the death of the physical body means the extinction of consciousness, then all possible karmic debt for bad actions is annulled upon the death of the physical body. If no afterlife exists, then death wipes the slate clean.

Because many people who claim to believe in God actually don’t, and are just superstitious, it’s impossible to tell from a person’s assertions if they are an idealist or not. It’s possible to tell from their actions, though – if they act as if it’s possible to truly get away with fucking another person over, chances are they’re a materialist.

In summary, dividing people into left and right is low-IQ, and rarely helps a person make accurate predictions about people’s future behaviour. The left-right spectrum considers globalist neoliberals to be centre-right, and nationalist socialists to be far-right. It considers ultra-conservative theocrats similar to low-tax anarcho-capitalists. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

The next time someone claims to be proudly or staunchly left-wing or right-wing, ignore it, and ask yourself where they stand on the questions of authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, globalism vs. nationalism and materialism vs. idealism. That will tell you much more about them than their position on left vs. right.

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