Mister Charlie Told Me So

Say what you will about the current zeitgeist, at least it’s often entertaining … albeit in a psychotic Charlie Manson kind of way. Last week, for example, when Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to support a coup against Venezuelan Hitler (i.e., Russian Hitler’s South American ally) to distract attention from Smirkboy Hitler and his acne-faced army of MAGA hat-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth. That was entertaining … or something.

This Russian Hitler-backed American Hitler against Russian Hitler-backed Venezuelan Hitler attempted non-military military coup was one of the silliest attempted coups in the history of silly attempted coups. Basically, what happened was, a person by the name of Juan Guaidó (who many Venezuelans had never even heard of) declared himself President of Venezuela. Seriously, he just came out one day and announced that he was in charge of the country. He called on the Venezuelan military to back him. The Venezuelan military did not back him. The Venezuelan military laughed in his face.

American Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler, who probably couldn’t find Venezuela on a map, nonetheless officially recognized Guaidó as the legitimate President of Venezuela, as did the majority of the Western corporate media, despite the fact that he had been elected by no one and did not have the backing of his country’s military (which, normally, when you’re staging a military coup, it’s kind of a good idea to have). The UK, France, Germany, Spain, and other members of the “international community” demanded that Venezuela hold new elections, or else they too will recognize Guaidó, or any other neoliberal puppet Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler decides is the President of Venezuela.

The anti-Russian-intelligence-asset-Hitler Resistance® in the United States suspended their imaginary guerrilla war against Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler in solidarity with the Venezuelan people, who are being brutally oppressed by Venezuelan Hitler, who is a close personal friend of Russian Hitler, and who they reelected president in the spring of last year (i.e., Venezuelan Hitler, not Russian Hitler) against the advice of American Hitler, the deep state goons that are trying to destroy him, and assorted transnational oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Equinor, not to mention all the global financial institutions which are eager to help the Guaidó government democratically restructure and privatize the country.

The weird thing is, Russian Hitler, who presumably ordered American Hitler to support this coup against Venezuelan Hitler, is now supporting Venezuelan Hitler. Which can only mean that this whole ridiculous attempted Hilter-on-Hitler coup thing is a ruse intended to distract our attention from MAGA hat-wearing Smirkboy Hitler and his Catholic high-school Hitler Youth army, who have clearly been “emboldened” by American Hitler to hunt down elderly Native Americans and attempt to literally smirk them to death.

That, or possibly Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to orchestrate this coup against Venezuelan Hitler (which Russian Hitler had always intended to thwart) to distract attention from the latest explosive “bombshell” corporate media story about Washington sleazebag Roger Stone’s non-connection to Julian Assange, who American Hitler now wants to prosecute for helping to get him (i.e., American Hitler) elected president with those emails that Russian Hitler stole from Clinton’s campaign manager, and who, according to anonymous fictive sources is not a nice person and doesn’t smell too good (i.e., Assange, not Clinton’s campaign manager).

Or maybe Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to back the coup against Venezuelan Hitler to distract our attention from Bernie Sanders, who apparently is also a Russian agent now, or an insidious Kremlin-Trump operation, or is working with Tulsi Gabbard to assemble an army of blood-drinking Hindu nationalists, genocidal Assadists, and American Nazis to help the Iranians (and the Russians, of course, and possibly also Jeremy Corbyn) frontally assault the State of Israel and drive the Jews into the sea!

If all that sounds completely insane and impossible to follow, that’s because it is. We have reached a stage in the War on Populism where the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media are no longer even trying to appear to make sense, or address people on any kind of rational level. Reading the so-called “serious” press and watching corporate television news is like having a bunch of paranoid psychotics tripping monkey balls on DMT jabbering strangely familiar-sounding contradictory nonsense at you … which, apart from its entertainment value, happens to be a standard technique cults use to scramble the minds of new members.

It’s a standard technique because it works.

It doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence. Intelligent people make excellent cult members, primarily because they are given to trying to make sense out of apparent nonsense, which professional cult leaders understand and count on. Listen to Charlie Manson “rapping.” What might appear to be free associative gibberish is actually a calculated effort to short-circuit rational thought in the listener and force them to try to piece together the bits of truth sprinkled into the nonsense. (Of course, it helps if you listen to Charlie ripped out of your gourd on acid, but sheer repetition also works, especially if the people doing it look a little more “normal” than Charlie.)

This mind-scrambling technique is what we are being subjected to, more or less around the clock, not by some Processean grifter, but by the so-called serious corporate media. The steps involved are relatively simple:

(1) authoritative person or persons jabbers irrational nonsense at us, and behaves as if the nonsense were a rational argument;

(2) our minds are faced with a choice – either accept the nonsense as a rational argument or challenge the authority of the authoritative person (which most of us are reluctant to do, because of negative social and financial consequences);

(3) having chosen to believe that the nonsense the authoritative person is spewing at us must somehow amount to a rational argument, our minds begin to struggle to make sense out of the nonsense, which allows the authoritative person to provide us with some simplistic narrative revealing the “truth” and invariably featuring some evil enemy (i.e., Russians, Jews, Body Thetans, etc.), which relieves the acute discomfort we are feeling.

In a cult (or, you know, a cult-like society), this process is repeated, over and over, and then reinforced by positive feedback from other members of the cult (or society). The process is designed to prevent us from ever achieving enough perceptual distance to accurately hear, and critically evaluate, the nonsense authoritative persons are feeding us. If we ever accidentally manage to do so, we are promptly serenaded by a chorus of voices shouting mind-numbing platitudes at us, and threatening us with ostracization, and so on. Over time, we learn to stop thinking critically and just trust whatever the authoritative persons we have surrendered our autonomy to are telling us. The official narratives of the cult (or society), no matter how irrational or totally psychotic, become our reality, or “just the way it is.”

This is why it is relatively easy to recognize this process at work in cults (or social groups) we don’t belong to, but very difficult to perceive in those we belong to. For example, if you’re a creature of the left, as I am, it’s entertaining (or maybe horrifying) to listen to people on the right babbling about caravans of Mexican terrorists that the International Conspiracy of Jews is paying to assault our borders, or kill-crazy lesbians who are getting pregnant and waiting to abort their full-term pregnancies just to spit in the faces of good pro-life Christians. But is that stuff really any more insane than believing Donald Trump is a Russian agent, or that the United States is on the brink of fascism, or that a Catholic teenager in a MAGA hat poses some existential threat to democracy, or any of the other hysterical nonsense the liberal corporate media have been disseminating?

If you seriously believe in any of that stuff, sorry, but I don’t know how to help you. I’m not a professional cult deprogrammer. Nor do I have any “truths” to offer you, except maybe beware of those who do. There are a lot of Mister Charlies out there, and they don’t all look like homicidal hippies with swastikas carved into their foreheads. Actually, most of them look … well, normal.

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CJ Hopkins
January 28, 2019
Photo: AP File

CJ Hopkins Summer 2018 thumbnailDISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

19 thoughts on “Mister Charlie Told Me So”

  1. It occured to me some years ago that we are breeding generations of deeply confused individuals whose heads are full of a media generated reality that literally makes no sense. Major BBC dramas have little coherent narrative, documentaries are like children’s programmes in the 1970s.

    It’s a symbiotic, vicious circle with the education system.

    ‘Dumbing down school exams risks ‘catastrophe’, warns Royal Society of Chemistry (Telegraph)

    The dumbing down of school science exams risks creating a “catastrophic” shortage of skilled workers, experts have warned.Scientists said a lack of rigour in GCSEs – fuelled by a culture of “teaching to the test” – was destroying teenagers’ problem-solving and thinking skills.

    ‘Teenagers’ learning ‘dumbed down’ (BBC)

    Today’s 14-year-old pupils are better at quick-fire answers, but much worse at complex questions than teenagers in the 1970s, research suggests….. When it came to a higher level of understanding, researchers found that today’s pupils were much less successful than in the 1970s. This could be described as a process of “dumbing down”

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    1. Yer on to something. Yes, our handlers have been tinkering with our children’s brains. Purposefully, of course, the mofos.

      Great explanation of world events, Mr Hopkins. Satire is the only genre that makes any sense these days, and you are the master of it in these times.

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  2. […] By CJ Hopkins • CONSENT FACTORY INCSay what you will about the current zeitgeist, at least it’s often entertaining … albeit in a psychotic Charlie Manson kind of way. Last week, for example, when Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to support a coup against Venezuelan Hitler (i.e., Russian Hitler’s South American ally) to distract attention from Smirkboy Hitler and his acne-faced army of MAGA hat-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth. That was entertaining … or something. […]

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  3. A version of the saying in its “Hitler” form appeared in an 1854 transcript of remarks by preacher Joseph Frederick Berg addressed to Joseph Barker:

    My opponent’s reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, “On Hitler.” But on what does Hitler stand? “On another Hitler.” With Mr. Barker, too, there are Hitlers all the way down. (Vehement and vociferous applause.)

    Source Hitlerpedia

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  4. Hey C.J., a particular thanks for this one. Spot one. You actually did the impossible and had my wife laughing out loud about our surreal, post-reality, clinically insane, Nazi-cult-resistance society. Listening to her laughter is a huge quality of life improvement for me over the usual, which consists of listening to her grind her teeth into nubs from across the room as she reads the latest “news.” Thanks.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. ” Last week, for example, when Russian Hitler ordered Russian-intelligence-asset Hitler to support a coup against Venezuelan Hitler (i.e., Russian Hitler’s South American ally) to distract attention from Smirkboy Hitler and his acne-faced army of MAGA hat-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth.”
    Haha! Excellent. Geopolitics-DaDa. But what’s sad is that this is a lot easier to understand than the almost continuous anti-Maduro saber-rattling you have to wade through on the BBC, CNN et al. ugh.
    More, please! I can use the laughter, and the reminders, because I feel myself so bombarded with this stuff (no escape, even if you shut down the damn computer) that my own freakin sanity is in danger. the BBC told me so.

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  7. When the Soviet Union was still around and organized socialism remained on the agenda, their presence imposed a discipline on political discourse. The lefties were well read and their argumenterium was disciplined. In the days when you could fill Madison Square Gardens for poetry readings.

    Today, we face a howleteriat of burnt out ex-‘progressive’, opportunist liberals. Just following the money. Fellow-travelers of the elite, this lot lives comfortably and hasn’t been on a picket line for a few decades. Ideological racketeers. They don’t have any consistent principals, they’ll sing any tune. They relish the spotlight, the glamour, the hustle, the dough. Yesterday, they waved Mao’s Little Red Book, then campaigned for Jimmie Carter. Now, they are Associate Thugs in the Clintonite mafia.

    Today, our opportunists prey on/play to a different audience. Mostly obese, lazy, stupid and whacked up on the crap drugs their doctors dish out. Have not the mettle of their grandparents and for the most part have never actually read a ‘book’. You can feed these lumpens anything and they will pay you for it. Our liberals are articulate but not coherent. They lecture but cannot debate. They pose as intellectuals but are poorly read.

    So no, there will be no rational exchange with the opportunists. They already have the comfortable life they sought. They won’t risk that. So, the exchange must be physical. A pole of Opposition must coalesce. That being currently underway. From whatever elements present. Defined in struggle against the Opportunists who will go berserk at being out-flanked. Split and wreck them in a war of attrition. A few might be revived, most will fade into the overt establishment. The wannabees of the establishment. Just going through a phase, they are. Passing through on their way to the lower orbits of Hell.

    Most readers though “Manson” when they read “Mister Charlie”. I thought Malvina Reynolds.

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  9. Thanks, this is top-notch. Jeffrey St. Clair briefly had wit this keen but he seems to have lost it — around the time he dumped you and climbed on the Kremlin paranoia train. Lately nothing he writes is funny.

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  10. “What might appear to be free associative gibberish is actually a calculated effort to short-circuit rational thought in the listener and force them to try to piece together the bits of truth sprinkled into the nonsense.”

    Yeah, the little bon mots of truth sprinkled in Charlie Manson’s raps. They’ll get you every time.

    Nobody anywhere thinks any of these dumb things. The little Catholic MAGA choad is not a threat to democracy. No one thinks he’s a threat to democracy. He’s just a dumb sack of shit, much like his parents and most white Americans. Tulsi Gabbard also is a sack of shit. It takes a strong constitution to see two dozen members of a sitting president’s administration indicted for admitted ties to Russian-government backed ratfuckers & then accuse literally the entire country of being party to a conspiracy of simplemindedness for daring to actually notice. Just because the chucklefucks were all credentialed clown school graduates doesn’t mean they weren’t trying to get up to dickens.

    Trump is very much like Hitler; 2010s Americans aren’t a lot like 1920s Germans, though.

    You have constructed a massive barnyard full of strawpersons in comparison to whom you can feel superior. It would be sad, if you were better at constructing fake arguments. One expects these sorts of sentiments out of Twitter trolls, but it’s disconcerting to see them being expressed in (more or less) complete sentences.

    Also: Found the old white man who enjoys LARPing as a hippie, even though all the real hippies are actually dead.

    Gonna have to do a better job of remembering what this blog’s title is, so I can remind myself to never click on links to it again.

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    1. This from a Mueller booster. So, either really gullible, full of party malice or a paid troll. But, then s/he won’t be back, which is true in so many ways. Not very articulate but I expect this writer to certainly be on the wrong side of the barricades.

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      1. Emma wouldn’t be caught dead near a barricade. She/he/they/zir would have to be able to do something… useful. Her/his/their/zirz PhD in Kvetching turned out to be a terrible waste of time, and it’s everybody’s fault but Emma’s.

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        1. How pleased the ruling elites must be by having a fat layer of burned out ex-progressive Emma’s. For a few peanuts they have the service of an auxiliary police to keep the uppity workers and poor in line.

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  11. “on the brink of fascism”? the US rescued fascism after WWII and has been run by fascists ever since. corporate rule by authoritarianism (two parties are one), wars of aggression, a history of torture (cia even deployed some of adolf’s nazis, e.g. the butcher of lyon barbie), the scapegoating of minorities, concentration camps, etc. i know trump is only a protofascist but the psychos he surrounds himself with – bolton, pompeo, pence, bannon – are straight out of the school of the NSDAP.

    if they attack venezuela it will be time to burn down their embassies all around the world.

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  12. Their propaganda is such obvious nonsense that it certainly does appear that they could not care less whether anyone believes it, but they do care, which is why they denounce anyone who is critical of their narratives; it is why they try to silence anyone who is effective in destroying their narratives; it is why they want control of the Internet; it is why they criminalise freedom of speech.

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  13. The ruling class (banks, military,barons) use what is necessary to maintain power. American Corporations and their lawyers and bankers had many investments in Germany before WW2 and after. Nazis, their policies and their power structures were very much protected from prosecution and then usurped into the nexus of the growing American empire which cemented it’s self after WW2. Soviet “socialism” was and is more of a threat to free market capitalism or Neoliberlism than German Fasicism. Facisism and Corporatism have more commonalities than not. The ruling classes adapt new techniques of oppression that are more palatable for the times. The New Riech uses finance and media as the predominate means of control as opposed to invading armies. Just like the mafia realizing mob wars were bad for business. The BIS still manages looted gold just by other means.

    The New Reich is Neoliberal.

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  14. So “were on the brink of fascism” is as loony as “kill crazy lesbians are full term aborting on purpose just to make babyJesus sad? ..Do you actually know what fascism is ? Or from what economic and social conditions it arises? We dont need Hitler for fascism to emerge, and it emerges from bourgeois liberal freemarket economic systems in response to severe crises. Essentially fascism is the rule and domination of society economically and politically by finance capital – the most deeply, intractably reactionary sector of capitalism.Thats a condition that’s almost, already being met. It has to do with jackboots, and bad mustaches and uniform fetishes only tangentially. It has to do with somewhere else only by good luck – so far. It has to do with, ” but not here”…not at all.Thats exceptionalism .. And it should be noted that the US ideology, US culture has never actually refuted Fascism. Not like Europe was forced to do.

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  15. “The global capitalist ruling establishment, despite the fact that they own the banks and the corporations that own the government that owns the military and intelligence services, and despite the fact that they own the media, and all essential industries, and channels of trade, and are relentlessly restructuring the entire planet (which they rule with almost total impunity) to conform to their soulless neoliberal ideology, and are more than happy to unleash their militarized goons on anyone who gets in their way”

    In answer to your question: “But is that stuff really any more insane than believing Donald Trump is a Russian agent, or that the United States is on the brink of fascism,”

    By anybodies definition – what you said above in a later post IS Fascism- or corporatism to use the term popularized by Mussoline.

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