Censorship as a response to Trump

With the removal of Jack Dorsey as CEO of Twitter, you can see latest evidence that the establishment are still acting in a way that is clearly a response to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016.  They got a result they did not like, and have ever since been trying to use censorship, be it to Trump himself or anyone who has an opinion counter to the standard narrative, to remove any resistance to the established line of thinking.  

At some point the establishment deemed itself as more important than the country, more important than the principles of American democracy and more important than the greater good.  And at some point, they were able to enshrine those beliefs into the culture and into the power of government, media, education and entertainment to enforce that hierarchy.  That's why you see them leveraging woke-ism, race, women's issues, COVID and anything else that they can in order to herd the majority of society into unilateral herd thinking, guided always, by them of course.

Russell Brand touches on how Trump managed to bypass the establishment:

The thing is, a lot of establishment efforts are looking backwards and that works to their disadvantage.  Censorship as a response to Trump's rise (and beyond) is solving yesterday's problem for them.  If you think about it, the establishment isn't forward looking. Oh, I'm sure they have goals, and objectives and milestones etc., but they are based on a growth formula of the existing paradigm. America has been the land of opportunity but only until it became a nation of institutional primacy.  Now, with technology becoming so complex, new innovations much rarely will come from a someone not working for a major conglomerate. But ideas can come from anywhere.  And that is what the establishment fears.  They want the existing paradigm to grow because it suits their objectives. Disruptions are not allowed, they will upset their apple cart. They must control your ideas so that they do not cause disruptions.  Censorship is the tool.

Much like communism in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, capitalism is on the road to an oligarchy, a ruling elite, out of touch with the reality on the ground, and likely not even caring that such is the case.  Meanwhile, people can see that there are problems, and that is okay for the establishment, as long as they can guide you to the 'proper' conclusion of what a solution should look like.

The initial full blown disruptor to that in America was Donald Trump, in the U.K. it was Brexit.   But for the establishment, all he did was expose a flaw in their firewall of control.  They are reacting to it still.  While that is dangerous for society, it is still backwards looking and as long as they look backwards, you still have the opportunity to look forwards and outsmart them in some way.  Maybe Parler, Getr and alternative sources of communication will help, but they are not the answers.  They are merely tools to share the potential answers.  The answers must come from you, they must be shared at a grassroots level, and then acted upon in unison.  For example standing up to school boards and demanding accountability at the lowest levels possible is a disruptor to the status quo of the unelected ruling elite.  Take that sort of approach forward in numbers too great to deny and the ruling elite cannot control you.  Think a step ahead of the establishment, meaning do something different, unexpected that has not been accounted for in their plans.

Donald Trump was  a master of this, tricking the media into coverage of his campaign although they detested him and served the establishment.  He further leveraged Twitter to amplify his message in a way that the establishment could not initially control or even filter and distort.  If he runs again in 2024, he will likely move on to another methodology that cannot be curtailed.  It's the only way he will succeed.

That approach is a model for absolutely everyone.

Control the assumptions, control the outcome

Whether it relates to weather prediction models, polling questions or  even (perhaps especially) "non-partisan" assessments of government budgets, if you control the assumptions, you control the outcome.  Liberals get it, we don't.

I work extensively with statistical models in my day job.  Models can have very strong predictive power if they are created with proper diligence. That means that you must control the assumptions that go into them to avoid creating your own confirmation bias.  If you skew the input variables you skew the outcome accordingly.  For example if you treat a missing value in a row of data as a zero as opposed to ignoring the missing value, you are lowering your overall average and therefore skewing your outcome towards a lower value for that particular income.

Democrats have understood this for decades - controlling "non-partisan" groups in order to control the message that comes out of them to condemn every Republican bill (e.g. the recent tax cuts) and heap praise on every Democrat bill (e.g. Obamacare's fictitious budgetary cost reductions).  They have granted money extensively to scientists to predict weather calamity as a result of global warming, thus incenting them to find problems in order to secure more funding.  Intentionally done or not (it really is intentional), the results are skewed towards the desired outcome.

Democrats have stacked everything in their favor over decades of working their way into positions to do so - not just entertainment, journalism, government bureaucracy but also polling firms, lobbyists and even statistical modelling and supposedly non-partisan  organizations.  The trick in the latter is to find a gullible but well-intentioned Republican to co-found an organization or co-sponsor a bill in congress so the claim of non-partisan can be applied. Afterwards they ensure that they stack the top positions and teams involved with those who will find, or skew their findings to their own liberal liking.

This is an important lesson for conservatives.  It will take decades but we should be working towards undoing those decades of entrenching bias and deliberately skewed findings just as we should be working towards re-balancing journalism and entertainment and all the way down to the assumptions that go into models and forecasts.  It's not just a matter of voting for the right people and hoping for the best, or leaving it to them to do all the work. Progressives understand this and are fighting this way on all fronts, if conservatives do not fight with the same level of intensity, we are destined to lose despite being on the right side of the truth.