The Day the Delusions Died = Why the tide is shifting From Woke

Disillusioned 

The Day the Delusions Died

A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives. What changed?

By Konstantin Kisin

October 22, 2023

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When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

Whose on a Bigger Bender

 America is living in an era of fragmentation, and something has gone terribly wrong in our society on our way to that era. We celebrate vulgarity, lies, and anger, and more often than not prop up the people who perpetuate it.

How did this happen? Why are more and more of our elected officials behaving as though they just emerged from a fight scene between Kim and Kourtney Kardashian? In truth, a lot of us aren’t OK with it.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt said it all started in 2012 when Mark Zuckerberg was preparing for Facebook to go public. He wrote to his investors that that moment marked a tipping point in society that he hoped would “rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

Haidt wrote in an essay that “Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.”

We used to cling to positive forces that bind us together, such as fraternal organizations that build social capital and strong and trustworthy institutions that used to be run from our hometowns, not from thousands of miles away by elites who know little about the communities they were supposed to serve. 
Click for the full story: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/who-is-on-bigger-bender-in-country-voters-or-elected-officials 

DARK MONEY, DARK GOALS

 DARK MONEY, DARK GOALS:

 New Group Attacking iPhone Encryption Backed by U.S. Political Dark-Money Network.

The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else.

When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: “Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud” — Apple’s cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who’s behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse — and political will — of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

Ironic? No. Expected.

Democrats have been opposed to digital privacy at least since Bill Clinton was pushing the Clipper Chip 30 years ago.

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Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator

 MATT TAIBBI:

 Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator: He institutionalized the purposeful lie, suppressed critics, mastered emergency politics, even sold himself as a sex symbol. Anthony Fauci gave the next monster a playbook.

Actually, our press had the playbook, he just gave them an excuse to run with it. And though Taibbi may not be ready to admit it, they ran that playbook with Obama, too.

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