X’s freewheeling Grok AI is responsible for letting users create countless 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.
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.”
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.
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.”