The Mother of All Limited Hangouts

CJ Hopkins

The Mother of All Limited Hangouts has begun. Yes, I’m talking about the “Covid Twitter Files,” which are finally being released to the public, in almost textbook limited-hangout fashion.

I’ll get into that in just a minute, but first, let’s review what a “limited hangout” is, for those who are not familiar with the term.

The way a limited hangout works is, if you’re an intelligence agency, or a global corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those things are starting to come to light such that you can’t just deny that you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you’re doing) to distract people’s attention from the rest of the story.

The part you release is the “limited hangout.” It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole story. You “hang it out” so that it will become the whole story, and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.

Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA who went on to become a critic of the Intelligence Community, described the tactic this way in 1978…

“… a favorite and frequently used gimmick of clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

All right, so, you’re probably asking, if the “Covid Twitter Files” are a limited hangout, what’s the whole story that they’re distracting us from?

Let me try to refresh your memory.

In March and April of 2020, in the course of roughly five to six weeks, the majority of societies throughout the world were transformed into pathologized-totalitarian police states. A global “shock-and-awe” campaign was conducted. Constitutional rights were suspended. The masses were locked down inside their homes, where they were subjected to the most massive official propaganda blitzkrieg in human history. Goon squads roamed the streets of Europe, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, beating and arresting people for being outdoors without permission and not wearing medical-looking masks. Corporate media around the world informed us that life as we knew it was over … a “new normal” was coming, and we needed to get used to it.

The entire official pandemic narrative was rolled out during those first few weeks. Everything. Masks. Mandatory “vaccines.” “Vaccination” passports. The segregation of “the Unvaccinated.” The censorship and demonization of dissent.

Everything. The whole “New Normal” package. It was rolled out all at once, globally.

If your memory of what happened is a little hazy … well, have a look at this 257-tweet Twitter thread of corporate-media articles compiled in March and April of 2020, documenting the initial “shock-and-awe” campaign [also compiled into articles here and here – ed.]

That is the story. How that happened. Why that happened. And who or what made it happen. It isn’t a story about a virus, or our governments’ reactions to a virus. It is the story of the radical restructuring of society based on lies and official propaganda, executed, globally, through sheer brute force and systematic psychological conditioning.

It is the story of the implementation of our new totalitarian global-capitalist “reality” … the “New Normal” that was announced in the Spring of 2020. It is not a story the global-capitalist ruling classes can permit to be told, except by “crazy conspiracy theorists,” “science deniers,” and other “crackpots” and “extremists.”

All right, so … the “Covid Twitter Files,” or the “Fauci Files,” or whatever we’re calling them. If you wanted to bury the actual story (i.e., the story I just outlined above) with a limited hangout and discredit those of us who have been trying to report it for nearly three years, you couldn’t do any better than Elon Musk is doing.

Instead of a story about how the entire global-capitalist power apparatus coordinated with global IT corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., to conduct a global Gleichschaltung op the scale of which Goebbels could have never dreamed of, censoring and visibility-filtering dissent and enforcing the official pandemic narrative, not just in the USA, but in countries all throughout the world…instead of that monumental story, we are getting The Alex Berenson Show!, starring Alex Berenson as Alex Berenson, with a special guest appearance by Alex Berenson, written and directed by Alex Berenson, and so on.

Seriously, though, who better to handle the “Covid Twitter Files” than Alex Berenson, in whose opinion the events of the last three years were simply due to mass hysteria (or Pandemia, $14.99 on Amazon), and certainly not to any kind of coordinated radical restructuring of society by the global-capitalist power apparatus, or any other wild conspiracy theories.

Forget about that 257-tweet thread I compiled in March and April of 2020. What actually happened, according to Alex Berenson, was that people just went kind of crazy, and overreacted, and “mistakes were made.”

Mistakes like Twitter suspending Alex Berenson, and other very important people! Or, wait, no, it wasn’t just mass hysteria … it was also Pfizer and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and the White House, and someone named Andrew Slavitt, all of whom conspired with “Old Evil Twitter” to suspend Alex Berenson from the platform, all of whom Alex will be suing forthwith!

The Alex Berenson Show is just getting started, so definitely stay tuned to “Free-Speech Twitter” to follow all of Alex Berenson’s exploits as he leads “Team Reality” to its ultimate victory over “Team Apocalypse” and exposes the crimes of the usual assortment of official “bad apples,” or whatever cartoonish fairy tales Alex Berenson and Elon Musk have in store for us! It promises to be quite the spectacle!

I’ll be covering the show in my columns, of course — I still have a few subscribers and readers who I haven’t totally alienated yet — and discussing “The Art of the Limited Hangout” for the benefit of anyone still paying attention in the weeks and months and possibly years ahead. If you are one of the many people who now appear to seriously believe that military-contractor oligarchs like Elon Musk and narcissistic ass clowns like Alex Berenson are going to deliver us from the New Normal Reich, and “prosecute Fauci,” and end corporate censorship, or in any way meaningfully bite the hand of the global-capitalist system that feeds them, you may want to give those columns a miss.

For the rest of you, I will do my best to point out how this phase of the PSYOP works, because it’s going to last for quite a while. The “Covid Twitter Files” are not The Mother of All Limited Hangouts; they’re just one part of it. There are many more limited hangouts to come. The New Normal having been successfully implemented, the history of its implementation is now being written (or, rather, rewritten) to conform to the official Covid narrative, a process which will likely continue for years.

Those of you who are old enough might recall this phase from “The War on Terror.” It started around April 2004, when the Abu Ghraib torture photos were released, and continued until the Summer of 2016, when The War on Terror was abruptly cancelled and replaced by The War on Populism, which prepared us for the implementation of the New Normal in the Spring of 2020.

All of which is part of an even larger story, i.e., the story of the evolution of the first globally-hegemonic power system in history, which, lacking any external adversary, has nothing to do but go totalitarian, eliminating all internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity throughout the territory it occupies, which, in this case, means the entire planet.

Sorry … I know, history is boring, and complicated, and not nearly as fun (and cathartic) as the shit-slinging circus that Musk is making of the Twitter Files.

Personally, I can’t wait to find out which official “bad apple” they’re going to offer us in today’s edition of the Two Minutes Hate, and who’s going to be released from “Old Twitter Prison,” and, whatever, anyway, don’t worry about all that evolution-of-global-capitalism stuff. It’s probably just a bunch of fancy-sounding nonsense I made up to try to sell you my books, or to make myself sound smart, or something.

Forget that I even mentioned that stuff. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.