Wednesday Morning Rant

Last week, Ace posted a column about a Congressional sideshow wherein Governor Hochul (D[emon], NY) claimed not to remember any of the particulars about an incident in New York City where an illegal alien decided to turn a citizen into a human torch on a subway train. (reminder: don't comment on old threads). While I don't believe for a minute that Hochul wasn't well aware of the details and used the typical "I don't recall" dodge, the wider point is important.

Mark Halperin has been talking about this for a while. Democrats don't know what the public knows, or what the public is thinking, because the left-wing media "wraps them in blue bubble-wrap" to protect Democrats from being confronted with the horrors caused by their policies. Democrat politicians never realize the public is getting sick of being set on fire by lunatic illegal aliens, or having their daughters kidnapped and raped by illegal aliens fleeing their home countries because of outstanding rape charges, because the Blue Bubble-Wrap Media refuses to report on these stories.

All lefties wrap themselves snugly in this Blue Bubble-Wrap and go for years without ever realizing that their policies are causing rapes and murders.

This observation about "blue bubble wrap" is certainly true, and it underscores a serious risk. The apparent ignorance about the current state of affairs that many officials and Party loyalists exhibit (and for many of them, it is true ignorance) is evidence of the real underlying problem of censorship: an intelligence vacuum.

When there is no outlet for information because it is either crushed by the state (as it was throughout the West until Musk bought Twitter, and as it remains in many places and on most other platforms) or self-imposed by the loyalists and officials, it creates the appearance of total control. When you censor any negative information and suppress your opponents through official acts or informal policy, it makes it much harder for your opponents to learn anything. It makes it much harder for them to communicate. It makes it hard for them to figure out if their experiences are unique or widespread. It makes it hard for them to coordinate opposition. It helps to alienate them and atomize them because they think they are alone. These are all reasons for large-scale censorship, and the Party loves it for those reasons.

But the flip side of it is that it also denies the censors themselves of any information of what's actually going on. It's all smooth sailing with clear horizons all the time. They have total control and there are no major threats or opposition. That vacuum grows and gets harder and more untenable the longer it goes on. The final result is a sudden implosion that always seems to come out of nowhere. There is a reason small events appear to precipitate major, disruptive changes including the fall of governments. There is no feedback loop and no ability for the system to adapt. It denies itself vital information in the name of maintaining control, and then some small event is finally the "straw that broke the camel's back." They end up in shocked disbelief when some tiny thing causes the whole thing to collapse. Just whip out your ouija board and ask Ceausescu about that.

Setting aside the moral depravity of it, a major danger of censorship is the information vacuum it creates. At small scale in a personal echo chamber, it leads to shock and horror when the person is exposed to a contrary opinion he never knew existed in reality. At the largest scale in the center of a totalitarian regime, it leads to the utter inability to know when something is wrong and eventually a small incident easily leads to collapse.

This "blue bubble wrap" Ace talked about is the intelligence vacuum that leads to an inability to fathom the possibility that something is wrong. It isn't new, but our flavor of it is a bit different. The ability to pierce the vacuum without an implosion - to deflate that "bubble wrap" - is a valuable thing. Our system has various means of doing that, including communication and elections. It's why those are always battlegrounds - not the contests or messages themselves, but the venues as such.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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