The Naton State

It should be no surprise that the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell has lifted the Jeffrey Epstein saga off life support with a potent shot of adrenaline and steroids. Whilst it’s too early to know what she might or might not reveal in exchange for some sort of immunity or lesser sentence, the circumstances surrounding her capture are curious to say the least.

Bearing in mind that she’s facing some pretty serious criminal charges, we’re forced to wonder whether it’s really credible that the US authorities had no idea where she was hiding this whole time. The majority of people who live in the real world will raise an eyebrow when they learn that Ms Maxwell has been holed up in a million dollar mansion in New Hampshire the whole time, yet nobody was able to track her down until recently. If you or I wanted to go on the run we’d be forced to channel our inner Charles Bronson and vanish into blinking neon motel obscurity. Even then there would be no guarantee that the very capable and well-resourced FBI wouldn’t catch up with us eventually. After all, the Feds know that flophouse central is a likely place to look.

The idea that the US authorities were completely unaware that Ghislaine Maxwell was living a comfortable life right under their very noses is about as believable as the Pakistani government having absolutely no clue that Osama bin Laden was hiding just a stone’s throw from a military academy.

This does of course lead us to ask why the one person with the most direct knowledge of Epstein’s affairs made no serious attempt either to leave the country or disappear into some sort of serious hiding. The answer is obvious really; because although she needed to escape from the press and the public, Maxwell never seriously feared arrest or prosecution.

So what’s changed?

Media

Piers Morgan is a Paragon of Hypocrisy

16 June 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

Who could possibly have guessed it? The Guido Fawkes website has just unearthed a picture of Piers Morgan in a Nazi fancy dress costume. As of yet, Mr Morgan hasn’t commented directly, in fact the attention hungry journalist has suffered a sudden attack of shyness when people want to ask questions about it. Apparently he’s blocking anyone and everyone on Twitter who dares to mention the offending photo, so we’ll see if he’s forced to take the next step and delete his account entirely. If that happens, brace yourself for a self indulgent orgy of hand wringing and navel gazing surrounding our lawless and unaccountable cancel culture. Out in the real world, most of us won’t be paying too much attention to that as we quietly chuckle while we watch the outrage machine eat one of its own. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be Trump’s fault in the end.

Although SS costumes are in poor taste and never a good idea, I can’t say I’m especially offended or surprised by Piers’ tactless fancy dress choice.

In fact, blackface and Nazi getup seem to be de rigueur for our morally and intellectually advanced elites. You know, the people who are paid exorbitant sums to lecture the rest of us knuckle draggers about what we should think and how we should view the world.

Although it’s great fun to watch one of our self-appointed betters bake in the fires of PC outrage, such delicious schadenfreude can deflect from a more fundamentally important point. Piers Morgan is not an outlier or some shocking statistical anomaly; in fact, his current troubles are part of a discernable pattern we can see emerging among our self-righteous, hectoring and badgering elites.

Culture

SJWs Always Lie – a Review

14 June 202014 June 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

If you’re reading this blog post then there’s a fair chance you’re a pretty decent sort; an independent thinker with an enquiring mind. You probably ignore a lot of the craziness around you (especially on the internet) and conduct yourself with considered rationality and restrained civility if you enter into some kind of social or political discussion.

If I’ve just described you reasonably well then I’m afraid I have some bad news. You may not realise it, but your reputation and even your livelihood could be at risk and you’re exactly the kind of person who should read SJWs Always Lie by the indomitable Vox Day.

It’s a common misapprehension among ordinary, decent folk that if they just keep their heads down, mind what they say and don’t rock the boat, the social justice mob will pass them by.

Day explodes this dangerous myth by highlighting how social justice warriors are not concerned with any kind of justice. In fact they are shockingly vindictive and self righteous individuals who delight in using the decency of their victims as a weapon against them. Although they will occasionally fire off a salvo of misinformation about the likes of Vox Day and even yours truly, we are not their preferred targets. Instead of taking on people who know how to punch back, the online outrage mob will seek out softer targets to unjustly malign, isolate and destroy. Unfortunately there’s a fair chance that you might be that softer target if you’re not prepared. The fact that you’ve done nothing wrong and don’t seek out confrontation is irrelevant and actually makes you more vulnerable to wrongthink purges and possible de-employment.

Just like the school bully, SJWs tend to avoid targets who hit back in favour of those who don’t know how to defend themselves.

Politics

The New Cold War – Part 1

7 June 20207 June 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

Whether we’re prepared to admit it or not, there’s no escaping the fact that a new Cold War has been raging since at least 2001, although only one of the parties involved seems to have cared or even noticed…until now.

Western democracies have been burdened with a stupefying level of naivete for at least the last century, and its consequences have been far more destructive than anything the coronavirus could ever wreak upon our open and tolerant societies. One of the more insidious side effects of this liberal-democratic mindset is an unfortunate tendency to judge the motivations of others by our own standards. This very often leads Western policy makers to view others as sharing our motives if not our viewpoint, rather than identifying a rival and incompatible belief system for what it really is and effectively challenging it. This peculiar mental pathology remains as much a threat today as it did when Kim Philby was officially cleared of spying for the Soviet Union.

“To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Sun Tzu’s Art of War

Perhaps the most egregious example of this huge blind spot has been the sense of invincibility that settled over the West when the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989. We thought it was over and we thought we’d won, but that complacency has cost us dear.

Of course, we in the liberal democratic West were not the only ones taking notes as the Soviet experiment collapsed; communist China was also watching carefully, determined not to follow that same road to ruin.

Media

Did Twitter Just Re-elect Trump?

29 May 202031 May 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

It’s finally happened.

President Trump has finally issued the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship. This hasn’t come a moment too soon and by the looks of this very detailed document, Trump’s had it ready in his desk for some time. All he had to do was wait patiently for someone to cock up massively like Twitter just did.

At this early stage it’s not clear whether the social media giants will respond by feigning shock and ignorance, loudly protesting their innocence or just carrying on like nothing’s actually happened. None of those responses would surprise me but if I had to guess, I’d say they’ll just carry on, while maybe announcing some kind of internal review which is far too little and way too late. Nobody would believe the findings of such an enquiry anyway. Not now.

Whilst this isn’t an actual change in the law, the executive order does explicitly state what everyone in the world, and his dog, has known for many years; namely that the tech giants have been wantonly abusing Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act with impunity for decades. Worse than that, they’ve been using the legal protections of Section 230(c) to censor law abiding platform users for no good reason other than their will to dominate discourse and control information.

“Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike.”