Terrible Racists

Plus, Orwellian history scrubbing, media hoaxes and tales from Pigeon Forge...

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”

~ Eric Hoffer

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Pigeon Forge, Tennessee...

Lies, damned lies and the mainstream media... 

We’ll “Psaki back” to the plenty-disgraced Fourth Estate shortly. But first, a quick update from the road...

We’re here in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for something of a family reunion. Relatives traveled in from all over the country... uncles and aunties from Texas and New York, grandparents and cousins from Florida and Oregon, a new guard of toddlers and ‘tweens from near and far, and one peripatetic trio who journeyed all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina (via Hanoi)...

This here is small town America. Home to just over 6,000 people, the population swells considerably during the summer months, when out-of-towners come to enjoy the cool Smoky Mountains air, to hike, fish, golf and generally get amongst the great outdoors. 

Our own setup looks like something out of a John Candy film from the ‘80s. We’re in an old log cabin, up in the hills. It’s warm during the day, but a fresh breeze blows in during the evening, when the forest comes alive with insects and wildlife. 

Hoping to catch a glimpse of “the scene,” we left Dear Daughter with her cousins last night and headed into the town. There, it pains us to report, we were confronted with some truly awful racists... 

Skin Deep

First, there was the fellow wearing the “Let’s Go Brandon!” T-shirt, waiting beside us for a table at the bar and grill. Clearly a conservative, the man was standing patiently with his pretty wife and their young child... only, the wife appeared to be of Indian (or perhaps Pakistani?) descent. What kind of faux racist was this, we wondered? As best as we could tell, the man adored his brown-skinned wife and child, holding the former’s hand and petting the latter’s dark and shiny hair. Here was a white supremacist who obviously did not understand the assignment. 

Then there was the lovey-dovey couple seated next to us at a kitschy themed bar afterwards, where the waiters are supposed to be rude to their customers (a real achievement, given the obsessively polite locals). The pair, close to our age, we guessed, were plainly African American... but when the Vice President appeared on the television behind the bar, well... the words that came rushing out of our new friend’s mouths cannot be repeated in these family-friendly pages. 

We recalled Joe Biden’s famous remark – “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” – and wondered whether we shouldn’t remind them of their patriotic duty to vote along racial lines. But there they were, stubbornly judging a candidate based on the content of her character (or, to hear their opinion, crippling lack thereof) and not her skin color. Pssh! Some racists!

Finally, and here we wish we’d taken a group photo for readers who may doubt our Tales from the Forge, we encountered a young Cherokee family at the go-kart track. The flattering things they had to say about “Our President, Mr. Trump...” lead us to the only conclusion imaginable: that we’d just had our first ever encounter with self-hating native Americans. And colorblind, to boot! 

And so, in the space of a few short hours, we witnessed not one, not two, but three glaring examples of people being absolutely terrible at racism. Now, we are not so naive as to imagine the scourge of hatred and bigotry has been eradicated from the hearts of man. And yet, to believe the popular narrative, there has never been a more racially-divided America than five minutes ago. Hmm...

Of course, one can’t believe everything one reads in the press or sees on the television. If we did, we’d be obliged to think that Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race to “save democracy”... that Kamala Harris was never the “point person” on immigration along the southern border... and that she was not, in fact, a DEI hire. 

And that’s just a handful of mistruths from the past week. (Another involved JD Vance performing acts he oughtn’t to have performed with a couch cushion. The claim was found by AP’s fact checkers to be false – as it indeed is – but the post was removed from their site because, claimed the newswire, it “didn’t go through our standing editing process.”)

That’s the trouble with the anti-facters manning, womaning and theying so-called “fact-checking” sites. They only check the facts they want, and then only how they want. Take the aforementioned “border czar” hoax. 

The very same people who brought you the Biden is “sharp as a tack” balderdash... who told you videos of him on aimless walkabout were “cheap fakes”... that his son’s laptop was “classic Russian disinformation”... etc., etc., etc... spent the best part of last week assuring America that Kamala Harris had absolutely nothing to do with the mess at the country’s southern border, that she was, in fact, never “border czar” at all. 

And yet... reality. 

It was March 24, 2021, when President Biden made the following announcement in the Briefing Room at the White House.

I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.

[...]

And so, this increase has been consequential, but the Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.

[...]

So it’s not her full responsibility and job, but she’s leading the effort because I think the best thing to do is to put someone who, when he or she speaks, they don’t have to wonder about is that where the President is.  When she speaks, she speaks for me.  Doesn’t have to check with me.  She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along. 

But — so, Madam Vice President, thank you.  I gave you a tough job, and you’re smiling, but there’s no one better capable of trying to organize this for us.

Orwell Meets Heller

You can still read the entire, rambling transcript, with your own lyin’ eyes, right there on the White House’s website, helpfully filed under Remarks by President Biden and Vice President Harris in a Meeting on Immigration (see here). At least, that was the case when we went to press... who knows for how long that page will remain in the inconvenient light of day? 

Now, if Orwellian-style “history scrubbing” sounds a tad conspiratorial, maybe that’s because that’s what we’ve been led to think. Besides, as Joseph Heller’s warned in his novel, Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”

Earlier this week, a so-called “government transparency” website, GovTrack, memory-holed a 2019 page citing Kamala Harris as that year’s “most liberal” senator.

The now-deleted page (which you can’t find, right here) compiled data from Harris’s time in the Senate and assigned a ranking relative to other senators. GovTrack found Harris was the least likely to cosign on bipartisan legislation, held the fewest committee positions and was the third most absent senator, missing 61.9% of votes.

Now, some gentle readers may have trouble believing such bald-faced lies could be perpetrated by upstanding members of the press, much less by elected members of the United States Government. 

But then, what if the lie itself is not the point. What if the aim is not to make us believe in an untruth... but to so distort reality that we no longer know how to discern what is real from what is unreal, what is war and what is peace, what is good and what is pure evil. 

It was the German historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who once wrote:

“The constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

---

And now for the Notes From the Past Week…

---

And that’ll do us for another week, dear readers. We’re off to enjoy a pirate voyage dinner show, whatever that is, in town with our extended family.

No matter what you’re up to this weekend, we hope it involves good food, great company and being terrible at racism.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World…

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Might unpopular ideas – free markets, civil liberties, common sense – be enjoying a resurgence… even in the woke West?

Might thoughtful individuals be ready to ditch the ‘statist quo’ in favor of a more peaceful, voluntary existence?

Might citizens be ready to shrug off the illusion of choice proffered by their would-be political leaders and their puerile porters in the mainstream press?

Such a reality might be closer than you think. Already, millions of people in hundreds of countries have tuned out of state propaganda, meant only to divide, conquer and impoverish people.

How do we know?

Well, we don’t… but we have reason to be cautiously optimistic. Even these humble Notes now reach dear readers in all 50 states across the US… and in 130 countries around the world. Not bad, given that we only just kicked off this year.

Of course, the ideas of freedom, liberty and independence are not going to spread themselves. And that’s where our dear members come in. Thanks to their support, we are able to remain fully independent… which means no advertisements, no bosses and no bias.

Just free markets, free minds and free people… all the time.

If you’d like to support our work and join the growing community of folks interested in these lately resurgent ideas, please consider becoming a Notes member today. Cheers!