Drinking Ice Water in Cyber Hell

America 2.0 online

I must sound monotonous stating the obvious; that we’re living in a barely recognizable society, run by corruption and incompetence. That there is no moral foundation left, no great ideals, no shared values. I feel increasingly like Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. America is on life support. Running on fumes.

Well, you’re probably saying at this point; okay, if you’re so tired of sounding black pilled, then why do you keep black pilling it, Mr. bigshot Community College Dropout? Good question. I often don’t know what else to write about, because the truth is cathartic, and unfortunately, the truth in our time is very, very bleak. I have a powerful need to write and talk about the madness which has enveloped our politics and our culture. Without the online outlets I have, I might very well seek a padded room somewhere, in one of our few remaining mental health facilities, where I could wile away the time pretending I was Thomas Jefferson or something. Mental health patients have always been more interesting to me than those haven’t been classified as mentally ill. You know, like the lunatics presently running this giant, crumbling asylum. As long as they’re not violent. Violent people are scary, not interesting.

I’m fooling myself, and we’re all fooling ourselves, if we believe that life here is ever going to get better, at least in the eyes of those of us who lived for any length of time in America 1.0. Sure, I guess you could say things were technically worse in 2020, when everyone was scurrying around in masks like frightened lab mice, keeping their distance, and not hugging their loved ones. Or 2021, when you could lose your job if you refused to take the dangerous warp speed jab. But the trend is pretty clear. Very little has “gotten better” economically for the eighty percent of people who “lose” to varying degrees under this rigged system, in my lifetime. The monkey pox or bird flu may be coming. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Call your doctor and get your latest booster.

But it’s not like I haven’t seen positive changes over the years. I experienced a vast improvement in the quality of my life with the invention of the VCR, for example. I bought the first one I could; large and overpriced. It was 1979. Disco was dead, and things were already looking up. Now I had a machine with which to record all my favorite shows and old movies. I can’t tell you how obsessive I was with videotaping things. The best episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Flintstones, Leave it to Beaver, and The Twilight Zone. All the classic Our Gang and Three Stooges shorts. Many old films. I had them all neatly labeled and organized, like any good anal retentive would. Taping each new SCTV Network 90 every Friday night became a real ritual. I try not to think of how all the cast members seem to be “Woke” now, and would probably applaud my banishment as a Thought Criminal.

After a few years, I got a top of the line four head Magnavox, which took my recording obsession to a new level. I held a Barney Fife Festival in my apartment, where we built a party around Andy Griffith reruns. I think my girlfriend was the only female there. When my kids were born, I had a series of camcorders, which recorded their every birthday, Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, sporting event, dance recital, etc. Now, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when watching them. Glorious memories of what once was, but a heartbreaking reminder of the realities of time. I accumulated hundreds of these home recorded tapes. I transferred the home VHS tapes to DVDs. Of course, I still have all the regular VHS tapes, because I don’t throw anything away. That comes in handy when it’s old baseball cards or comic books. With their dust and disregard, they seem anachronistic already, but I remember when they were my pride and joy.

Then, when the internet became available to all by the mid-1990s, I was in ecstasy. I began spending all my free time online, waiting for that trusty 56K modem to spring to life. The internet then was like the Wild West. Totally unregulated. You could smell the freedom wafting out of your wired mouse. The early JFK assassination forums were terrific. So was the old Liberty Forum, where everything could be discussed. No fact checkers. No censorship. I confidently told everyone that if they could stop the internet, they would have done so. If they made a move, some teenager in Japan would counteract it instantly. I circumvented the deadly Microsoft monopoly by using Word Perfect and Netscape Communicator. I advocated for freeware. I thought we may have finally found the way to get truth to the masses. But I didn’t count on social media.

My Space let you set up your own theme song. There wasn’t much you could do there, but I was thrilled to be connected to people like Hutton Gibson, Mel’s Holocaust doubting/Vatican II hating father. When everyone transitioned to Facebook, I thought it was great at first. I found people I hadn’t seen since elementary school. And an old girlfriend I apparently turned lesbian. In the early days, you could search for your high school graduating class, and every classmate that was on Facebook could be found in the same group. That was fantastic; a revolutionary way to interact with your classmates. But they soon changed that, without explanation. They didn’t used to censor what you said there, either. I left many radical rants on the record on Facebook, further cementing my status as a national “Do not Hire.” Then began my shadow ban, following the tyrannical banning of Alex Jones and other dissenting voices there, and on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Which few really protested.

I am still obviously smitten with the internet. With stars in my eyes, I continue to see her as she once was; lovely and willing to grant me access to anything my mind can fathom. Even with the onerous restrictions everywhere, I remember the endless possibilities that once existed for this marvelous technology. The potential for communication without an FCC to regulate it. And to some degree, that is still a reality. What I am typing here, in my comfortable home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., will be going out instantaneously to thousands of people all over the world, the second I click on “publish.” I could never have envisioned something like this in 1979, even as I was reveling in the birth of the personal VCR and celebrating the death of disco. As a writer, it meant the end of sending out bulky manuscripts with self-addressed stamped envelopes. No more writing on notepads, or typewriters.

Things definitely improved for writers, not only because it’s a lot easier to submit your work via email than snail mail, but because of the invention of world processing. No more white out. No more messy crossing out mistakes in hand written text. Spell correct. Word processing makes the entire writing experience so much more pleasant. So there I am, sounding stunningly optimistic. Call me Tony Robbins, Jr. Next I’ll be reading The Secret or something. Watching Bravo. I actually have a streak of hopeless idealist still in me. As I’ve said repeatedly, that comes from watching all those Frank Capra films. Expecting those unrealistic but uplifting fairy tale endings. Where The People prevail. My mother believed that I could do anything. My father didn’t think any regular person could do anything against those who ruled the world. It’s obvious to any of my readers that I spend more time in my father’s mindset.

On a personal level, I have been far more blessed than I deserve to be. I wanted to be a writer from the time I learned to read. How many people achieve their life’s dream? I can’t believe that American Memory Hole is my tenth published book. I live in my dream home, in a quiet and safe neighborhood. I am not in pain. So what am I always complaining about? I lacked ambition, and goofed off and partied too much. I lucked into what I have. I think where I differ from others is that while I appreciate my lot in life, I can’t stop thinking about all those out there who are suffering. The vast majority of them work jobs they hate, and very few achieve their life’s dream, as I did. Maybe I have an excessive amount of empathy. Or I’m really ungrateful. Maybe I just like to complain. My late, great colleague Tae Kim used to call me “Mr. Compainer.” But people far wealthier than me have brooded over the state of the world.

It just strikes me that perhaps this is as good as it’s going to get. In politics, the MAGA movement is not going to bring back some semblance of constitutional government, to the degree that we ever had any. The unknown millions of illegal immigrants already here aren’t being deported. And they’re having babies, while an increasing number of Whites aren’t. I read about a recent study that concluded by 2030, over 40 percent of women under age forty will be single and childless. You can be guaranteed that the percentage for White women under forty would be even much higher than that. So, the White race is dying. Long live the White race! It just seems so wrong, for something so unnatural and tragic to happen, all because of the intense cultural conditioning doled out by our corrupt schools and decadent media.

No one is putting the transgender genie back in the bottle. We’ve lost that one, too. And it’s basically the same Whites who aren’t having babies, who are supporting this diabolical lunacy. If you’ve tried to communicate with any of these people, you know how pointless that is. You would have to deprogram millions, much as they had to do with members of cults like the Moonies, in order to try to restore their reason. The Whites who have been unimpacted by this continuous propaganda must accept the fact that we are the real minority. There aren’t many of us left who won’t apologize on command. Who don’t feel irrational guilt for things they never did. And who don’t condemn all those who share their skin color as “White Supremacists.” Some of us are not going to go gently into that good night, as second class citizens.

The recent poll, showing that 53 percent of Americans think the First Amendment “goes too far,” should be a cold slap in the face to anyone who hasn’t lost their critical thinking ability. That’s not going to “get better.” The trends we see will only continue to grow in the direction we don’t want, towards more authoritarianism and less personal liberty. Look around the world; Trudeau’s authoritarian chic in Canada, England’s medieval crackdown on White protesters, and France, where Macron and his much older, seeming man/wife see to it that Le Pen and her followers remain out of power. Ironically, the only place that seems more free than it was fifty years ago would be Russia, under the leadership of the much demonized Putin. Russia is rebuilding churches. And banning GMO products. Putting out arrest warrants for Rothschilds. Paying people to have babies. He’s “a threat to democracy.”

So, we’ve made some trades. Mandatory child car seats instead of bouncing kids in the back of a pickup truck. Handwritten notebooks in exchange for Microsoft Word. VHS tapes for cell phone videos. Speaking of cell phones, how did we live without them even thirty years ago? Ah, the good old days when people would be walking on the sidewalk, looking straight ahead or all around them, not engrossed in their smartphone. In America 1.0, you had no way to contact your child, as he navigated by himself miles from home on summer days, avoiding the sex predators who somehow didn’t seem to exist then. Now, you can track them like they’re on radar. But their personal freedom is dissipated. And so is yours. That’s the issue in a nutshell; safety vs. liberty. Benjamin Franklin said something profound about that once.

We have bigger and better toys now. Sure, Aurora horror models and electric football games were cool, but they don’t compare to having a phone with you that can do just about everything. Take photos on the spot, unless you’re at a mass shooting event. Entertain you to such an extent that you literally step out into traffic without looking at all, let alone both ways. First and foremost there’s this beauty, who seduces me to such an extent that I spend the majority of every day with her. The internet has effectively become my world. It’s where I go to express myself. I can’t express myself like this outside, in my neighborhood, or in the stores. All my friends come from cyber world. I’ve seen some of your faces, heard some of your voices. But many of you are just names. Familiar names. Names that say such wonderfully complimentary things about me. No one says wonderfully complimentary things about me in the real world.

I was right, fifteen years or so ago, when I said that they can’t shut the internet down, or they would have. They haven’t shut it down, but using the social media platforms, and everyone’s dependency upon them, they found a way to control what’s being said. It’s their version of the FCC. No nudity on television, no “election denial” or “medical misinformation” on social media. Platforms like Substack, which allow hopeless Thought Criminals like me to post my musings, are the hope of the world. This is what they despised about the internet from the beginning. Common riffraff analyzing events, like they were some Ivy League graduate. Cashiers and mechanics expressing their opinion, sharing with others how some typically awful proposal would impact their lives. Doctors, lawyers, and physical laborers, all commenting as equals, on a level playing field. Sounds like digital democracy.

Blogs are a unique, essential glory of the internet. They are basically diaries or journals, which theoretically millions of people all over the world could read. But they’re also like old opinion columns in those newspapers of yore. The kind Robert Novak, or James J. Kilpatrick, or the great Pat Buchanan wrote, in my lifetime. Podcasts are in the same vein, only there the audience gets to know your face, should you decide to show it, along with your voice and your views. I am made for this world, because I’ve never been much of a private person. My life is pretty much an open book. Blogging is also therapeutic, where the hundreds of comments serve in effect as a collective therapist. But you’re not on a clock, as you are in a therapist’s office. You can write as often as you like, make it as long as you want, about whatever you want. That is power for The People. And those who misrule us hate that.

If they’d been this far along in their march towards totalitarianism forty years ago, we would have had no alternative news media to learn what was really happening. Back then, you had The Spotlight, and a few other regular periodicals. And plenty of books. But no publisher like Skyhorse, which has published four of my books, despite being a division of Simon & Schuster. I had my own Simon & Schuster’s author’s page, but they disappeared it. Apparently, Simon & Schuster took a look at my book titles, and was embarrassed to be so publicly associated with me. I doubt anyone would have published my books back then. Besides, I would have been too lazy to keep trudging to the post office with those bulky manuscripts. And would have probably lost more confidence with each new rejection slip.

Without the internet, I’d have no one to commiserate with over the decaying state of the union. Well, my next door neighbor and I do chat about it sometimes. And my son is in my corner, the only one in my family who is awake. But there wouldn’t be these kinds of platforms, to let those who still care at least grieve over the demise of freedom. Without this outlet, I’d probably be getting arrested regularly for sharing my unwanted thoughts with the sheeple. On Substack and internet forums, we interact with those who see the madness as we do, and also have no one to talk about it with in their personal lives. Those 70 to 80 million Americans that are awake to at least some extent aren’t going to vanish. The internet gives them a place to congregate, an unfettered “free speech zone.” While they exist, and the internet exists, there is hope.

So don’t fret over the world wide web disappearing. They can’t do it, and they know it. In my case, a few days without the internet would send me into figurative rehab. I’d be climbing the walls, searching for a keyboard somewhere. I’d be talking to myself even more than I usually do. Kicking the internet would like kicking heroin for me. Not that I’ve ever done heroin, but I’ve heard it’s very addictive. Well, I’m addicted to the internet. The places we can go to in the real world are rapidly disappearing. There are still nice places here on the internet. And nice people I can communicate with. My daily routine is built around the internet. I’m obsessive compulsive about it, as you might expect. But I can feel the heat in places, and sometimes see the flames. So please pass me something cold to drink.