The Return of the Hall Monitors

2,244 words

Hall monitors are students, usually found in American schools, who eagerly volunteer to patrol the corridors of their campus or building and ensure that their fellow students aren’t breaking any rules. Essentially, they do the petty work so that the real authority figures at school can focus on other things.

Is there a better metaphor to describe today’s mainstream media class?

The idea that journalists and reporters used to be stoically objective, with no political biases or ideological trappings, is a bit of a delusion. In the United States, for example, the majority of journalists have long identified as Democrats and support the Democrat Party. They have always been happy to attack whomever they considered to be an opponent. Muckraking, inventing scandals where there were none, launching smear campaigns, and downplaying or ignoring real outrages in order to protect a favored politician are nothing new. What characterizes the media class of today is that they’ve dropped all pretenses of fairness and objectivity. While many of the people working in the news media might fancy themselves as the reincarnation of journalism’s patron saint, Edward R. Murrow, nowadays it’s quite obvious that most mainstream American journalists are liberal progressives, donate almost exclusively to the Democrat Party, and likely have no love whatsoever for Mr. Murrow on account of the fact that he was pale, stale, and male.

Image credit: The American Journalist in the Digital Age

The situation is essentially the same across the rest of the West. The media class is not interested in challenging those in power unless they are ideological and political opponents. When those in power are allies, not to mention friends and spouses, the media class is interested only in flattering, protecting, and brown-nosing.

But their obsequiousness goes even further. Today’s journalists are adamant that no one who might dare to speak out against the status quo, of which the journalists themselves form a part, should be allowed a voice.

The Dark and Drublie Days are Coming Back

Has online censorship in the West peaked? It’s an intriguing possibility. There are those who believe that it has, and they’re certainly well within their rights to do so. Especially after Elon Musk bought Twitter and completed the arduous process of clearing out what I called a “Praetorian guard” still devoted to fulfilling the censorious edicts of the old emperors, it does seem as if things have improved compared to the times when everyone, from renowned virologists to anonymous memesters, were chased off the platform by zealous “moderators.”

When it comes to other sites, it may indeed be correct to say that censorship has peaked, because how could it increase? YouTube has censored its users into sterility. It’s not so much that one can’t say anything controversial or make a video about certain topics, although those restrictions do exist. It’s more that YouTube demonetizes any video or entire channels for committing the merest of infractions. For people who have made “YouTuber” their vocation, having a video demonetized is worse than the gallows. Sites such as Facebook have fallen out of favor with the kids, who seem to prefer platforms such as Twitch and TikTok — but even those have terms and conditions which conveniently always allow for banning dissenting opinions on the grounds of “hate speech.”

The year 2023 saw important steps taken in the direction of sanity. The freedom to criticize the liberal world order and its inane ideas spread throughout the digital sphere thanks to Elon Musk commandeering Twitter. This has caused many to feel that 2024 is going to be immense. There is a sense that the tide is turning, and that the forces of 2016 have risen again, bigger and better. 2024 will be fraught with challenges, traps, and more unexpected upheaval — but whatever happens, the momentum favors us.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

I’m not so sure.

The regime is very resilient. It can withstand punches which would knock out lesser regimes. It absorbs attacks against its legitimacy and turns them into opportunities to strengthen its legitimacy. The 2020 United States presidential election and its aftermath are a great example of this. Of course, this isn’t exactly a stunning feat when the regime controls and can count on the vastest and most sophisticated propaganda machine ever to exist, and when it employs an army of hall monitors who keep the rest of the population from stepping out of line.

One such hall monitor is Casey Newton. He is the writer and editor of something rather ironically called Platformer, who lately has been keen on deplatforming other writers who post on the website, Substack. What has got Casey Newton itching to catch errant Substackers who are wandering the passageways of free expression when they should be dutifully sitting in their diversity training classes? Nazis. What else?

Newton has joined a coterie of other hall monitors who have placed Substack in their sights. Over at The Atlantic, Jonathan Katz kvetches that Substack “has a Nazi problem.” Three of the so-called Nazi Substack writers and publications they cite: Richard Spencer, Patrick Casey, and White-Papers. This only goes to show how pathetic and desperate the hall monitors are. Richard Spencer is not a Nazi. It’s comical that he remains to this day a bogeyman in the eyes of the liberal establishment. What Spencer truly believes in is hard to say. Sincerity is not his forte. In recent years Spencer has disavowed MAGA nationalism, endorsed Joe Biden, and appeared on CNN to belittle the American “Right.” His Substack, call sign Alexandria, is almost entirely dedicated to publishing material on Apolloism, to which Spencer’s “conversion” is arguably the only interesting thing about him these days. Nevertheless, for the hall monitors Richard Spencer is and forever will be the evil mastermind behind the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia which ended up descending into chaos. Casey Newton and Jonathan Katz don’t want Richard Spencer on Substack not because of what he is uploading there, but because of who he is.

As for Patrick Casey, I don’t know very much about him. I suspect that he is not a Nazi either, basing my hunch on the fact that the NSDAP doesn’t actually exist anymore. Patrick Casey’s Substack is called Restoring Order. From the look of it, it doesn’t seem to be very different from any other commentary typically found within nationalist and alternative media spheres. For example, there are articles about the Israel-Palestine War, a podcast with Jewish writer and friend of historical revisionists Ron Unz, and some pieces on the slow decay of the United States. Hardly “Nazi” stuff, but then again the hall monitors do not require real Nazism in order to cry about it. If there are no misbehaving students whom the hall monitors can tattle on, they will simply invent them.

Which brings us to White-Papers. Casey Newton, Jonathan Katz, and The Guardian writer John Naughton all accuse White-Papers of peddling the “racist lie” that is the Great Replacement “theory.” What, precisely, is “Nazi” about White-Papers is unclear. From the hall monitors’ perspective, publishing data which shows the massive, rapid, and unprecedented demographic changes occurring in the West suffices to brand the team behind White-Papers as “Nazis,” especially because White-Papers is critical of these changes. As I wrote in my two-part series of essays regarding the liberal narrative created in the aftermath of the Second World War, any form of advocacy or defense of native or diaspora Europeans is immediately set upon by the liberal establishment and labelled “far Right,” “extremist,” and “Nazi.” The treatment of White-Papers is no different. Along with lumping White-Papers in with Nazi Substackers, the hall monitors also complain that White-Papers’ commentary on immigration is ‘misinformation’. They want White-Papers kicked off Substack not only for being 21st century NSDAP members, but for spreading falsehoods.

This is very curious. I wonder what Casey Newton, Jonathan Katz, and John Naughton suggest we do about the European Union and the fact that it funded a research project entitled Becoming a Minority, which studies life in cities across Europe where the native European population has done exactly what the project’s name states. Is the “BAM Project,” as its creators call it, spreading “far Right” and “racist” “misinformation”? What about the Atlas of Demography, an “interactive tool” created by the European Commission that is designed to help users understand the “demographic change . . . shaping the future of Europe”?

Should we look forward to Katz and Co.’s denouncement of the European Union? Probably not. The “Great Replacement,” Renaud Camus’ term to describe this mass demographic shift, is nothing but a racist conspiracy theory and “misinformation” if you oppose it. The hall monitors don’t have a problem with the massive demographic changes happening in the West. They don’t have a problem acknowledging that these changes are in fact happening. They have a problem with people who notice the changes and disapprove of them. I said this to Casey Newton himself. He has not responded.

Misinformation Wars

Just as hall monitors “work” for the teachers and principals, today’s mainstream journalists work for the ruling class. Their redoubled efforts to censor wrongthink online and ban certain “extremists” from using crypto currency exchanges come at the behest of Davos Man. At the time of this writing, the World Economic Forum is holding its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. There, the “leaders of the world” laid out their main concerns for 2024 and the coming years. Chief amongst them: misinformation. “For the global business community,” said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, “the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate. It is disinformation and misinformation.”

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel The New Austerities here.

Allow me to interrupt Ursula for just a moment. There is no such thing as “disinformation.” There cannot be such a thing as “disinformation.” The prefix “dis” almost always implies the opposite of the word to which it is attached. For example, “disappear” is the opposite of “appear,” “disagree” is the opposite of “agree,” and so on. It is simply impossible to “disinform.” You would have to remove information from someone’s mind, like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and as yet such a feat is not possible. In fact, no one ever uses the verb “disinform.” Only the noun “disinformation” is used. That is because if anyone actually ever said or wrote “disinform,” they would probably realize that such an action is impossible.  “You disinformed me!” What?

The verb “misinform” works because the prefix “mis” implies something done in error: “mishear,” “misunderstand,” etc. A person can “misinform” or be “misinformed,” just as a person can “misstep.” “Misinformation” works because it implies information which is slightly or entirely erroneous. Some people have exposed their stupidity by stating that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are two separate things. “Misinformation” is accidental. “Disinformation,” supposedly, is deliberate “misinformation.” Excuse me, but we already have a word for false information told deliberately: lies. “Disinformation” is not some distinct word with a separate meaning. It is just another product of an increasingly dumb society which doesn’t know how to use the English language properly. There is absolutely no need for the word “disinformation.” Stop using it. Put it to death. Discourage its use whenever possible.

Now, back to Ursula von der Leyen. According to her, the risks posed by misinformation “limit our ability to tackle the big, global challenges we are facing.” One such challenge she then went on to cite was “shifts in our demography.” Once again, demographic change is real and happening, but only when a nice liberal globalist such as Ursula von der Leyen says it is.

In fact, the WEFsters are so worried about misinformation that they placed it at the very top of the Top 10 Global Risks of the next two years, even above some newspeak abomination called “interstate armed conflict,” which I think is what we used to call “war.” This indicates a few things: one, the importance of the “mediatic” – a word which, unlike “disinformation,” does not enjoy widespread use, but people would do well to start employing with more frequency.

Marshall McLuhan was right. We are in a “guerrilla information war,” a mediatic war. The “elites” sipping champagne and watching bizarre modern art performances at Davos know this. This indicates something else: that they are not about to roll over and let us have our victory. 2024 promises to be an eventful, and yes, maybe even positive year, but we should not be complacent. Indeed, it is rather disappointing that there has been little pushback against the hall monitors and their new attempts to censor and ban people. Apart from an open letter signed by an array of individuals including Richard Dawkins demanding that Substack maintain its free speech-friendly, open-platform policy, there has been too much silence. When it comes to nationalists, the very people in the hall monitors’ crosshairs, our response must be united and unshakeable. If online censorship has truly peaked and it is about to start its descent, we must push it along. The hall monitors must be confronted, mocked, and challenged. As Imperium Press said in response to a hit piece The Guardian published against them:

The MSM would like to paint [us] as extreme. We are anything but.

All the greatest geniuses who have ever lived agree with us and disagree with the media, the academic world, and big tech in the current year. If these people want to oppose themselves to that, let them.

We are the default position.

So, onward into 2024 we go. Prepare for battle.