Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
“Hacks” costar Hannah Einbinder said “Free Palestine” during her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress at the Emmys on Sunday. Questioned by the press afterward, Einbinder said she has friends in Gaza, adding, “I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel, because our religion and our culture is such an important and longstanding institution that is really separate to this sort of ethnonationalist state.”
I’ve followed Einbinder on Instagram for a long time because she’s been one of the few people in Hollywood consistently using their influential voice to oppose this genocide, and it is very good that she said these things. Hopefully we see much more of this.
But right now I can’t help thinking about how unforgivable it is that all the other Hollywood celebrities haven’t been using their platforms at these events to call for an end to the Gaza holocaust this entire time. For two years this nightmare has been normalized in the eyes of the public with the assistance of the vast conspiracy of silence between all the people with the largest and most influential voices in our society.
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I’ve been seeing a lot of people talking about how hypocritical it is of Trumpers to be going around trying to get people ostracized or fired for speaking ill of Charlie Kirk after his assassination.
One of the most boring political observations you can make about Republicans or Democrats is that they are “hypocrites” who say one thing and do another. That stops being interesting when you realize their words are never actually saying anything about their real principles and values; they’re always just making empty noises to advance whatever agendas they’re trying to push in a given instance.
Of course Republicans pretend to care about free speech and then support the suppression of the speech of their political enemies; their lip service to “free speech” was just something they said to attack the Democrats. Of course Democrats pretended to care about racism and injustice and then threw their support behind a live-streamed genocide; their lip service to justice and equality was only ever empty noise they were making to attack Republicans.
The interesting thing about these contradictions isn’t that they show “hypocrisy”, it’s that these people don’t actually stand for anything. It’s that they’re just a bunch of babbling human livestock mindlessly regurgitating whatever noises they’re conditioned to regurgitate in order for their team to win.
This unthinking lateral feuding benefits nobody but the powerful. The empire managers are always happy to see a white hot culture war sucking all the oxygen away from the kind of dissident thinking that could give rise to a revolutionary class war. The more Americans are fixated on empty partisan feuding with no real content, the less inclined they will be to do anything real. The more their gaze is fixed horizontally, the less likely they are to look up at those who are pulling their strings.
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When rightists talk about people who “celebrated” Charlie Kirk’s death they’re talking about literally anyone who didn’t give him the respect and reverence they feel he was due. For days they’ve been falsely claiming I celebrated and cheered his assassination because I didn’t act like Jesus Himself had been shot.
Go ahead and search through my articles. Search my tweets. You’ll find me saying he was a genocide apologist, you’ll see me saying his life wasn’t worth more than the lives of the people being murdered in Gaza as we speak, you’ll see me calling him a GOP swamp creature, you’ll see me calling rightists a bunch of mindless NPCs for uncritically swallowing every narrative they’ve been fed about this thing, but you won’t find me celebrating, expressing joy at his death, mocking or making jokes about his death, justifying his death, or saying he deserved to die.
They’re just lying and claiming people celebrated his death whose only real offense was declining to participate in the efforts to posthumously beatify this asshole and pretend he was a wonderful, saintly person.
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“Don’t criticize the behavior of a dead political operative” is not a legitimate position to have. Grow the fuck up.
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Feature image is a screen grab from Television Academy (Fair Use).
The Kirk devotees who urge civility in the face of their hero's demise were the same people who openly guffawed when Anas-al-Sharif was killed. They started calling him a "Hamas terrorist" no sooner had the news of his killing come out. And they guffawed at the death of every single Palestinian, including the 380,000 children below 5 years of age. If it is right when you do it, it is right when they do it. And if it is wrong when they do it, it is wrong when you do it. Simple as that.
I feel empathy, not for him but for his kids. Unlike him, of course, who didn’t possess a shred of empathy for the hundreds of thousands of orphaned kids, or hundreds of thousands of murdered and wounded kids, in Gaza. Or the thousands of kids who have had their parents abducted by masked men and bundled into unmarked ICE vehicles with no idea if or when they’ll ever be reunited. Or the thousands of kids who have had their families broken up by Joe Biden’s racist Crime Bill, which the right has been more than happy to implement. Or the underage girls who will/would be forced to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth even when raped, under new Republican State laws. All of the above saw Kirk cheering them on. Which brings me back to his kids - he even said he’d force (his words) his own ten year old daughter to have the baby even if she was raped. They’re better off without him. Having to grow up with such a hateful, cruel, father would undoubtedly make them into psychologically damaged individuals as adults.