So it’s been ten years since I started writing these essays. I don’t know how many I’ve written at this point, probably over two hundred. I’m not going to count. I started out publishing them on my blog, Consent Factory, and submitting them to CounterPunch back in 2016. Since then, they’ve been published (with and without permission) by outlets all across the political spectrum. Four collections of them have been published as books. They’ve been censored, “visibility filtered,” banned, made the subject of a criminal prosecution, and have otherwise amused, confused, informed, and infuriated readers throughout the world.

I guess I’m going to have to continue writing them.

But, first, a situation report.

A lot has happened over the last ten years. Some things have changed, other things haven’t. The essential conflict of our times hasn’t changed. It’s still neoliberalism versus neo-nationalism. That conflict is the context of virtually every sociopolitical event of major importance that has taken place since 2016, and it is the context of most of what is happening currently.

The story of that conflict goes like this …

Once upon a time, circa 2016, the globally-hegemonic global-capitalist system that came into being after the end of the Cold War was going about its business-as-usual, i.e., destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the planet, when it suddenly realized that it had a nasty little populist rebellion on its hands. Actually, as it turned out, not so little. The United Kingdom left the European Union. Neo-nationalist parties were on the rise throughout the West. Americans elected Donald Trump president.

The globally-hegemonic global-capitalist system (hereinafter also “GloboCap”) got to work putting down this populist rebellion. It shut down the War on Terror that it had been pretending to wage for fifteen years, and launched the War on Populism.

For the following four years, the system, GloboCap, relentlessly demonized anyone and everyone associated with the populist rebellion or espousing populist (i.e., anti-GloboCap) views. Every element of the GloboCap system was engaged, government, media, global corporations, non-governmental governing organizations, Hollywood, academia, etcetera.

It didn’t work. The rebellion continued.

So GloboCap rolled out the Covid event, and reminded everyone how easily it could revoke our so-called inalienable democratic rights and lock us down, like they lock down rioting inmates in a penitentiary.

That took the wind out of the sails of the rebellion for a while.

But GloboCap’s administrators aren’t stupid. They knew that the populist rebellion wasn’t over. The discontent that had triggered it was still out there, festering, like a sebaceous cyst. That discontent needed to be dealt with, somehow.

There was no way to alleviate the discontent. The planet needed to be restructured, globalized, privatized, corporatized, and … well, basically, transformed into one big mono-multicultural marketplace in which everything and everyone is essentially a commodity, and the populists were never going to go along with that.

So the discontent needed to be captured and redirected. It needed to be redirected away from the hegemonic global-capitalist system that was causing it by dissolving national cultures, erasing national borders, superseding national sovereignty, and otherwise transforming the entire world into one big global-capitalist marketplace.

So the neo-nationalist discontent was redirected into ethno-nationalist resentment.

What had begun as a rebellion against globalization was transformed into a culture war. The global-capitalist system disappeared from the radar. The essential conflict, i.e., neo-nationalism versus neoliberalism, was erased, and replaced by a simulacrum of the conflict, ethno-nationalism versus multiculturalism, or “wokeism,” or “Cultural Marxism,” or any number of other nonsensical concepts designating the maleficent forces that are supposedly conspiring to “replace” the white race and turn everyone into transgender communists.

And that’s pretty much the situation at the moment. That’s as simple and clear as I can possibly describe it. The neo-nationalist rebellion against globalization is over. The ethno-nationalist-rebellion simulacrum continues. It will continue until it has made such mess of things, and has grown so ethno-nationally ugly, that the masses will demand a “return to normal.” Which the global-capitalist system will facilitate.

Which doesn’t make it particularly easy for a professional political satirist like me.

During the Russiagate/Hitlergate era (i.e., 2016-2020), the satire more or less wrote itself. For example, here’s the opening of my year-end wrap-up column in December 2017, The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken …

First came the overwhelming shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump, a repulsive, word salad-babbling buffoon with absolutely no political experience whom the media had been portraying to liberals as the Second Coming of Adolf Hitler. This was a candidate, let’s recall, who jabbered about building a “beautiful wall” to protect us from the hordes of “Mexican rapists” and other “bad hombres” who were invading America, and who had boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy” like a prepubescent 6th grade boy. While he had served as a perfect foil for Clinton, and had provided hours of entertainment in a comic book villain kind of way, the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was inconceivable in the minds of liberals. So, when it happened, it was like the Martians had invaded.

Mass hysteria gripped the nation. There was beaucoup wailing and gnashing of teeth. Liberals began exhibiting irrational and, in some cases, rather disturbing behaviors. Many degenerated into dissociative states and just sat there with their phones for hours obsessively reloading the popular vote count, which Clinton had won, on FiveThirtyEight. Others festooned themselves with safety pins and went out looking for defenseless minorities who they could “demonstrate solidarity” with. Owen Jones flew in from London to join his colleague Steven Thrasher, who was organizing a guerilla force to resist “the normalization of Trump” and the global race war he was about to launch, which “not all of us were going to get out of alive.”

In the weeks immediately following the election, the mainstream media inundated liberals with pronouncements of the advent of an “Age of Darkness” and the “Triumph of White Supremacy” over the beneficent values of Globalism. Yes, it was pretty much the end of everything. America was facing nothing less than a descent into “racial Orwellianism,” “Zionist anti-Semitism,” and “the bottomless pit of Fascism” itself. Liberals, who by then had dispensed with the safety pins, immediately set about terrorizing their children with visions of the impending holocaust, which would be carried out by the genocidal, racist monsters who had voted for Trump.

At that point, the media had been hammering hard on the Trump-is-Hitler narrative for months, so they had to stick with that for a while. It had only been a few weeks, after all, since The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and numerous other establishment publications, had explained how Trump was using special fascist code words like “global elites,” “international banks,” and “lobbyists” to signal his virulent hatred of the Jews to the millions of Americans who, according to the media, were secretly Hitler-loving fascists.

Those millions of neo-nationalist, Trump-supporting Americans are no more secret Hitler-loving fascists today than they were back in 2017, but the secret Hitler-loving demographic has certainly become a lot less secretive. Here’s an example of the kind of conversation you might encounter on the ethno-nationalist social-media platform formerly known as “Twitter” …

Now, I’m one of those free-speech absolutists, so I have no problem with neo-Nazis, crypto-fascists, and other anti-Semites openly discussing the “Jewish Question” and strategizing ways to further widen the Overton Window in order to foment paranoia and hatred of “organized Jewry,” or “world Jewry,” or “the Zionists,” or however they eventually decide to refer to Jewish people. I have always thought it best to have neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of bigotry out in the open, where we can see them, rather than lurking in the shadows.

For example, here’s a comment posted on my Substack in response to my recent piece about the ethno-nationalist-rebellion simulacrum …

Here’s another one, which is a bit more concise …

I’ve been getting more and more of that kind of stuff recently. Mr. Cooper may want to have a chat with “Renzo,” and introduce him to the art of subtlety.

Anyway, that’s not what’s making my job difficult. What’s making my job difficult is, actually, several things.

For one thing, satirizing hysterical liberals and the establishment media—which was my bread and butter—doesn’t work quite as well when people are being renditioned to Salvadoran gulags, arrested for political speech, stopped and forced to show their papers because they “look Latino,” and occasionally shot in the face by MAGA goon squads. It’s tough to get a laugh out of that.

Another thing that is making my job difficult is the extreme political polarization and mindless assigning of every utterance, and whoever uttered it, to one or the other side of the culture war simulacrum. (Okay, maybe that’s actually two things.) Make fun of a liberal, and you get labelled conservative. Make fun of a conservative, you get labelled a liberal. Criticize Israel, and you get labelled an anti-Semite. Criticize anti-Semitism, and you get labelled a genocidal Zionist. And so on. The subject doesn’t really matter. Whatever it is, you’re either for or against it. Vaccines are either good or they are evil. Everything is either right or wrong, truth or lie, real or fake. Everyone is either friend or foe, ally or enemy, and you never know which, because, at any moment, they might say the wrong thing, or appear to disagree with you about something, despite the fact that they agreed with you yesterday about some other thing, which led you to believe that they would agree with you about the new thing, which they don’t, which is bad, so now you have to denounce them, or what will all the other people who agree with you about the new thing think?

This is not an environment in which political satire thrives … or any kind of comedy, really. It’s like trying to do a stand-up set in a ward full of paranoid schizophrenics.

Meanwhile, the global-capitalist system continues on its neo-totalitarian trajectory. Mass surveillance of the public continues. The criminalization of dissent continues. According to a new report by Big Brother Watch, in the UK, over the last five years, more than 60,000 people have been arrested for “communications offenses.” Andrew Lowenthal’s outfit liber-net recently mapped out the German censorship network …

… and, of course, regular readers are familiar with my case(s).

This is also not a wellspring of comedy material. I guess I’ll have to try to squeeze some humor out of it, but, honestly, it’s becoming kind of a downer, the whole neo-totalitarianism thing, and most people’s seeming inability, or refusal, to recognize what it is … to recognize that it doesn’t matter which color hat the global-capitalist system is currently wearing, which country you happen to live in, or which flock of partisan sheep is bleating the loudest at the moment.

Or maybe I should get out of the satire business, and launch a marginally-popular weekly podcast in which I interview assorted “experts” on … you know, the Jewish conspiracy to miscegenate the white race with daughter-raping Mexican-terrorist immigrants, and the Epstein/alien-pedophile connection, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk by an Unmanned Jewish Aerial Vehicle …

… or, I don’t know, maybe not. It seems like that market is already quite saturated.

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CJ Hopkins
September 16, 2026

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DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or 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 Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, III, and IV of his Consent Factory Essays, 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 or threatening email, feel free to contact him directly.