TWICE HAVE the censors at Twitter kicked me off their anything-but-neutral platform.

When these arbiters of right and wrong periodically block my Twitter account, visitors to the site will be greeted with a stark warning:

“Caution. This account is temporary restricted.” The snowflakes will be forewarned of “some unusual activity on the account. Do you still want to view it?” Naturally, the worded choice offered—to view or not to view—ultimately doesn’t exist. I am told that when you click to avail yourself of the “choice,” my account is nowhere to be seen. Once blocked, you’re invisible.

The visual that assaults the eye is this one:

The screen shot was taken by a friend. For, when sent to the Twitter doghouse, one is typically barred from accessing Twitter at all, except for fleetingly seeing the notice, “Your account has been locked.”

Thereafter, the only thing visible to this untouchable will be a shakedown notice from Twitter’s shameless shysters.

It’ll be written in millennial syntax, and will read as follows: “Enter a phone number that you would like to associate with your Twitter account.”

The ransom demand looks like this:

When they block you, our Twitter overlords seize the opportunity to extract your most personal information.

Picture Mr. Burns of “The Simpsons” fame, when a plot or a scheme comes together.  Mr. Burns minus the charm.

“Excellent.”

“We will make the political pariah cough up her most private information, or else she’ll remain in exile.”

Only, in the case of Twitter, the enforces are singularly charmless young millennials. The uniformity of the opinion they enforce is scarier than its uninformed nature. Misguided, mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds are monopolizing one of the Internet’s most powerful, intellectual means of production: Twitter.

Twitter technocrats reckon you’re desperate to partake in their consensus-driven enterprise and will thus eagerly part with your most private information. “Confirm your phone number,” comes the next instruction.

The dissident right has its speech rights curtailed on what are ostensibly neutral, government-protected, social-media platforms. Luckily, the free-market still provides us with … burn phones.

It all sounds so cloak-and-dagger, but nobody in their right mind would part with sensitive information on Twitter or on Facebook. Having always been literally off-the-grid when it comes to my mobile phone (a thing I only acquired in 2017); a burn phone provided me “with partial privacy. Even the NSA can’t track them with accuracy. The secret lies within how prepaid carriers, also known as MVNOs, identify their users – they don’t.”

Other than “sensitive content-blocked,” I am also “shadow-banned and follower-throttled.” The first means that my #hashtags go nowhere on Twitter other than to my immediate, Twitter followers, mostly.

As to followers, as someone who’s been “sensitive content-blocked,” my Twitter followers never increase, but only dwindle by the day. As another victim observed—she tracks the refugee scam and dissects the miseries of diversity—“Twitter has been taking away followers again for weeks now. I will get a spurt of hundreds of new followers and then they take them away. They don’t have to shadow-ban you; they can just make sure that your follower number stays stagnant until you ask yourself, ‘Why do I bother?’”

Ditto. The dynamics on my account are identical.

Gab serves as a convenient control group. On Gab, where there is no blocking, shadow-banning and follower-throttling—my number of followers only ever increases. Isn’t that curious? Admittedly, Gab comprises a less conventional cohort than the Twitter ditto-heads.

“Wear their contempt as a badge of honor,” exhorted a loyal reader. “At least you know you’re doing something right.” I’ve never doubted it. Still, while not hugely dispiriting, being powerless and right is not much of a consolation.

Establishment conservatives will get together on Fox News to grate on about how “libtards” are making them sad by calling them Nazis. Conservatism Inc., however, is seldom blocked or deplatformed. And they certainly don’t stand up for those on the dissident right who are.

As for President Donald J. Trump: Anchor Tucker Carlson suggested that POTUS has done precious little to stop the intimidation, firing, hounding, de-platforming, doxing, and marginalizing of those who do not revel in the warm smell of the herd.

Tucker did, nevertheless, try to steer Trump, urging that he “would be remembered as a ‘genuinely great’ president if he fought for free speech.”

Fat chance.

In taming and claiming the political landscape, social-media tyrants fancy themselves exemplars of enlightenment. But those who hoist their pixelated pitchforks to purge ideological disagreement, Soviet-style; they are the enemies of civilization.

In case I am ever permanently removed from the grubby cyber-reality that is Twitter, you can find me on Gab.

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©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review
June 27

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If you want to picture the relationship between the 60 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and the Deep State seeking to unseat him; don’t picture a Venn diagram. There is no overlap between the two solitudes.

Rather, picture a giant amorphous amoeba, geared toward survival. This single-celled organism will galvanize all systems within to preserve its threatened integrity.

Much like our parasitical one-celled protozoa, the Deep State has an overriding purpose and a fixed repertoire of reflexes. “Some amoebas protect their bodies by covering themselves with sand grains.” The Deep State organism protects itself by throwing dust in our eyes.

Hence the Russia probe. The production that is the Russia probe is courtesy of agents of the Deep State—the “managerial society” and its ruling elite, as political philosopher James Burnham (1905-1987) called it.

Like nothing else, the Trump populist revolution has exposed the sub rosa presence in American lives of a “transpartisan elite with its own interests.” “Such an analysis of the political and economic elite—its composition, its genesis, its beliefs, its myths, and its failures—is the common strand running through the [prescient] writings of James Burnham,” observes Julius Krein of American Affairs.

“Increasingly power is shifted away from individuals elected to represent the political community toward unelected officials qualified to hold the positions responsible for administering the government … Like all managers, they derive their power from the administrative expertise and credentials that qualify them for office rather than from democratic legitimacy. They are accountable, that is, not to the political community but to the other managers that define their qualifications.”

“Deep State” is no conspiracy theory. There’s nothing mythical about the Republican and Democratic career government workers, embedded like parasites in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the military, and a like-minded media, who’ve risen on their hind legs to protect their turf and protest an agenda that leaves them out in the cold.

The anatomy and workings of the Deep State are, in my opinion, reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Simple psychology—human nature at its worst—sees government jobs and programs, war and welfare alike, protected in perpetuity and at all costs by the administrators of government jobs and programs.

Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus.

But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire.

The “technocratic elite” has a corporate extension. Engorged government bureaucracies are complemented by colossal corporate entities, whose virtue-signaling managers have occupied “the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and culture.” As Burnham warned they would.

The corporate element of this government-within-government superstructure (yes, the conservative Burnham had a Trotskyite beginning) has special access by virtue of its obscene wealth. Think the liver-spotted George Soros, who moves to overthrow governments in “lesser” countries. Think Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Brad Smith, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, or Google’s Sundar Pichai. They all sprang into action against Trump’s secession from the Paris Climate Accord.

Candidate Trump got considerable support for his promise to secede from or renegotiate this or the other agreement between the U.S. government and various supranational systems. Successive U.S. governments have ceded the rights and sovereignty of Americans to these supra-state systems.

Deplorables voted for more, not less, sovereignty. But bien-pensant Elon Musk of the Tesla and SpaceX fame is having none of this sovereignty stuff.

Musk, worth $15.2 billion, is muscling the Trump administration to further tax Americans so as to fund the Europeans and their polluting cosignatories to the climate accord.

Mr. Musk trashes the environment with his “Commie Cars,” electrical cars which discharge into the environment lead, cadmium and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—and whose impact on the environment has been shown to be worse than that of the gasoline-powered car.

Trashing the popular will is all in a day’s work for the corporate arm of the Deep State.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
The American Thinker, The Libertarian Alliance, The Liberty Conservative, Constitution.com, Ricochet.com.
June 3

* Musk via Mises.

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