X's freewheeling Grok AI is responsible for letting users create countless Commie Kamala memes, and they're proving effective enough that MSNBC and Democrats (but I repeat myself) are having hissy fits trying to force Grok to stop them and Harris to fight them.
Is the urge to shut down and shut up all opposition just a sort of gag issue for the Left, or are they particularly hysterical this time around because the Commie Kamala memes are proving effective at defining the candidate who refuses to define herself?
Yes.
Let's talk about the censorship reflex before we get to the part about why Commie Kamala has Democrats so worried.
On MSNBC's Sept. 29 "The Sunday Show," NPR talking head Maria Hinojosa "had a minor meltdown," as my Twitchy colleague Brett T put it, over some funny memes that would never in a billion years pass as real. It's really something to see, so here's the clip if you haven't seen it.
Watch @MSNBC meltdown over Kamala/Mao memes
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) September 29, 2024
"FRIGHTENING!" pic.twitter.com/mA0ifp0xTF
Host Jonathan Capeheart agreed and called the images "frightening."
But MSNBC and NPR weasels were hardly the first to let their Grok Freak Flag fly.
Late in August, seven House Dems — Shontel Brown (Ohio), Seth Magaziner (R.I.), Nikema Williams (Ga.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (non-voting, D.C.), Dan Goldman (N.Y.), Summer L. Lee (Pa.), and Greg Landsman (Ohio) — wrote to the FCC, complaining that Grok was being used to generate "fraudulent" deep fake images of political candidates. They went on to complain that "there are no policies that would allow the platform to restrict images of public figures that could be potentially misleading."
Because it's the FCC's job to determine what people are allowed to do online, I suppose. The FEC's Sean Cooksey cracked down hard on that idea, reminding the House Censorship Caucus (I made that up) that "the First Amendment is not optional."
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Brett T has the details on the hissy fits, both legal and pseudo-journalistic.
But c'mon, anyone stupid enough to believe AI images like the one below are real is already voting for Harris-Walz.
Kamala's views on "Equity" is 100% Communist Dogma! She is the first Communist Presidential Candidate in US history! pic.twitter.com/W4KYezrb74
— 🇺🇲 FJHalle 🇺🇲 (@FJHalle) September 30, 2024
Deep fake? No. Representative of a deeper truth? Oh, hell yes.
That, my friends, is the real reason the Left wants Grok shut down and you shut up — Kamala Harris is a 21st-century Marxian (I'll explain that word in a moment), through and through.
Old-school Marxists-Leninists are harder to find these days than a practicing Mormon in a liquor store. There are some out there, sure, but they're mostly keeping their heads down. Nobody is into seizing the means of production or the dictatorship of the proletariat any longer because there's no money in it. Better, as Barack Obama showed us, to use the power of the State — in his case, the FCC and "net neutrality" — to generate enormous profits for a benefactor (Netflix) and then, once out of office, get a multimillion-dollar Netflix deal to produce almost nothing.
And Another Thing: The great irony of the Soviet collapse is that when the State finally "whithered away" as Marx theorized, it wasn't because Full Communism had finally been achieved — it was because the people wanted to be free enough to indulge in a little capitalism. Sadly, the Russian Federation never did develop the civic structures, formal and informal, that make a free-market-based republic sustainable. So the Russian people again ended up with Vladimir Putin and a government that, if not actually totalitarian, is depressingly authoritarian.
The trick is how you gain political power in the first place, and that's where Marx and Engels come in. While their economic theories, dangerous nonsense through and through, have long been discredited, their political theories on how to gain and wield power are notoriously effective.
Perhaps none so effective as Marx and Engels's theory of "false consciousness." More fully developed (and given its name) in the 1920s by Marxist theorist György Lukács, false consciousness insists that members of certain "oppressed" groups — workers, peasants, blacks, women, gays, etc. — must think in certain ways. If they aren't agitated enough to see their class or race or sex as reason enough to overthrow the system and install communism, then they're guilty of false consciousness.
A steelworker or a single woman or a gay man can't believe in individual liberty because Marx and Engels and Lukács said so.
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You can draw a straight line from 19th-century Marxist thought to this Kamala Harris statement from 2022:
This is a frightening philosophy. According to Harris, disaster aid should be based on race and gender, not how much water flooded your home. That’s insane. pic.twitter.com/Nf99blUFzP
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) September 30, 2024
"This is a frightening philosophy," Rep. Dan Crenshaw posted to X — but it's nothing new. "According to Harris, disaster aid should be based on race and gender, not how much water flooded your home. That’s insane."
It isn't insane. It's how a Marxian sows grievance and discontent against "the Other" to divide the people against one another and conquer a nation. Taken to its extreme — and you see this every day — those guilty of wrongthink are treated as traitors to their class/race/sex/whatever.
And you know what happens to traitors.
At best, they're canceled. At worst, you can also draw a straight line from false consciousness to Hitler's gas chambers.
It doesn't really matter who "the Other" is — Jews, kulaks, cishet white men — so long as you can "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it," as Saul Alinsky wrote in "12 Rules for Radicals."
Cambodia's Pol Pot was such an enthusiastic Marxist that he whipped up his minions to murder anyone wearing glasses. They didn't fit in with Pot's worker's paradise because they appeared too intellectual. Before he was finally deposed after just three years of Communist rule, Pol Pot murdered one in four Cambodians.
While no mass killer, Obama is perhaps the greatest recent master of this dark art, undoing decades of progress on race relations cloaked under pleasing phrases about "unity" and "just one America."
Ayn Rand villain Ellsworth Toohey made all of this clear 80 years ago in "The Fountainhead."
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"Divide and conquer – first," Toohey explained to his friend Peter Keating. "But then, unite and rule."
Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We found the magic word. Collectivism.
There has perhaps never been a greater tool for dividing and conquering than false consciousness. The "unite and rule" comes through the media, particularly social media.
But when we benighted proles are allowed to create our own counterpropaganda, cracks show in the facade of unity.
When I realized all this several years ago, I started using the word "Marxian" to describe our postmodern Marxists like Obama, almost the entire mainstream media, and Kamala Harris.
Whether or not any particular right-leaning American is intellectually aware of the theories that underpin Harris's political philosophy, we can sure feel it in our guts — we've seen her talk put into action before in places like Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and too many others.
The Commie Kamala memes are effective but not because the great unwashed masses will get tricked into thinking that Harris was a Nazi concentration camp guard. They're effective because they serve as a humorous rallying cry for the Right. Alinksy would also remind you of the power of ridicule, and St. Thomas More would reply that “The devil… that proud spirit… cannot endure to be mocked.”
The Left, which so often beats us at creating politically effective imagery, understands all too well the power of those Commie Kamala memes. Those seven House Dems, the screeching NPR lady, the buttisnky who got you suspended from Facebook for sharing wrongthink images — they aren't worried about deep fakes. They're scared that Grok has given the Right a tool to produce effective political imagery.
For once, the Left is right — they're right to be scared.
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