The Year of the Mindfuck

C J Hopkins

Well, that’s pretty much it for 2023 … which I’m officially dubbing The Year of The Mindfuck.

I am doing that against the advice of my attorney, who is (a) trying to keep me out of German prison for as long as possible, and (b) trying to stop me from gratuitously alienating whatever remains of my former readership and going totally broke.

I’m not making that particularly easy for him.

The thing is, no one wants to hear that they have been mindfucked. People want to hear that other people have been mindfucked. Which … they have. Other people have been thoroughly mindfucked. But that doesn’t mean that other people — i.e., the people who want to hear that other people have been mindfucked, but not that they, themselves, have been mindfucked — haven’t also been mindfucked, which is what I’ve been mostly writing about in 2023, which, as Matt Taibbi put it in a blurb for one of my books, “probably this is not a profitable life choice.”

So it goes in the political satire racket. Sometimes you are hailed as a “prophet,” other times you’re scorned as a “dissension-sowing asshole,” censored into Internet oblivion by beloved billionaire free-speech defenders, and prosecuted for trumped-up “hate crimes.” It depends which way the wind is blowing.

It hasn’t been blowing my way this year.

On top of which, I’ve been pissing into it, the wind, at more or less every opportunity. I know it’s dumb, but I can’t seem to stop. Something about watching people being mindfucked over and over again “triggers” me, or punches my buttons, or something.

But enough about me … let’s get to the mindfucking. Due to the voluminosity of it, I won’t be able to review it all in detail but I’ll try to cover most of the mindfucking highlights.

Ready? OK, here we go.

The mindfucking started in January with the birth of the Musk Cult and the whitewashing of Twitter, and the trickle of “revelations” about “mistakes that were made” during the “Covid pandemic.” The Powers That Be needed to memory-hole the story of what actually happened (and didn’t actually happen) in 2020-2022 and enshrine the official Covid narrative in history. To achieve this they needed to mindfuck some people, not the Covidian cultists who they had already mindfucked, the other people, who they hadn’t been able to mindfuck. It was obvious that we were about to be subjected to The Mother of All Limited Hangouts.

If your memory of what actually happened (and didn’t actually happen) in 2020 is little hazy, here’s an excerpt from that column, which I published in January.

“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.”

Now, over three years later, the facts are indisputably clear to everyone but the hopelessly brainwashed. There was no global epidemiological emergency … no legitimate justification whatsoever for that initial “shock-and-awe” campaign, or the totalitarian “New Normal” it ushered into being.

However, by January of 2023, that wasn’t a problem for The Powers That Be, as most of the masses had been hopelessly brainwashed, and they would break down and start spastically gibbering at you like frightened hyenas if you confronted them with facts.

No, the problem for The Powers That Be was us, i.e., those of us who had never bought the PSYOP. By the end of 2022, we comprised what you call a sizable minority … a problematic, pissed-off, sizable minority. So we needed to be promptly and extensively mindfucked. We needed to be managed, decoyed, distracted, buried in minutiae, partial revelations, limited hangouts, official inquiries, and so on. Above all, we needed to be made to feel like we were getting revenge on The Powers That Be. And we needed to be made to feel this way without actually endangering The Powers That Be, or inconveniencing them in any significant way.

Enter Elon Musk & Co.

Yes, that’s right, Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire military contractor! At last, a savior had arrived to deliver us from the Cabal of Wokeness, and Cultural Marxism, and Globalistism! Vanquished were evil Wokian censors and shadowbanners of the “old bad” Twitter! It was Morning in America Again!

An Elon’s-ass-kissing contest ensued. Internet hucksters, social media influencers, and all manner of money-worshiping toadies competed against each other to get their lips on the Muskian anal orifice! This salacious spectacle went on for months …

Meanwhile, the sleight-of-hand artists got to work, distracting folks with groundbreaking stories like how the Pfizer Corporation had engineered THE MUTANT COMMUNIST VIRUS BIOWEAPON that had caused the pandemic that never happened and triggered THE MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS that prompted The Powers That Be to go bonkers and launch the PSYOP that the sleight-of-hand artists were memory-holing right before our eyes …

… or something more or less along those lines.

And then, right on cue, came the Twitter Files story! Do you recall, way back in 2008, when Obama took office, admitted that we had “tortured some folks” in Iraq, and so on, and then decided against prosecuting Bush and his crew for launching a textbook war of aggression, murdering hundreds of thousands of people, and destabilizing and restructuring the Middle East, based on a lie about WMDs? Do you recall all the limited hangouts back then? The Abu Ghraib scandal? The mea culpas? Is your memory of all that a little “hazy”? Imagine what people’s memories of “Russiagate” and “Covid” will be like in twenty years.

People’s memories don’t get hazy just by accident. If they did, The Powers That Be wouldn’t need to distract us, redirect our attention, and otherwise relentlessly mindfuck us. Which is how Class-A limited hangouts work. You feed people a juicy part of the story, so they forget about the rest of the story. You redirect their attention away from the globally-coordinated simulation of “a worldwide epidemiological emergency” and the roll-out of new totalitarian “health measures” — “health measures” that become permanent features of society, like the post-9/11 “security measures” did — with a story about US “Red/Blue” politics, government overreach, “woke” bad apples, and the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

I don’t mean to denigrate the Twitter Files story. I really don’t, and I have made that clear to Matt and other Twitter Files journalists. Had I been in their positions, I would have done the same thing. I would have gladly taken whatever Musk gave me and reported on it, exactly as they did. And, no, the Twitter Files story is not at all a “nothingburger.” It is one of the most important stories about censorship in the 21st Century so far, despite the fact that it is also a limited hangout … like Abu Ghraib and most of those other “Iraq-post-mortem” stories were.

In real life — as opposed to the Hollywood version, or the social-media version, where people are conditioned to see everything in black-and-white terms and judge everyone as “good” or “bad,” as “truth-telling heroes” or “controlled opposition” — historical events have different aspects, and sometimes even contradictory aspects. One aspect doesn’t cancel out the others.

Some people absolutely hate it when I say this, but the kind of mindfucking I’ve been writing about is not intentionally perpetrated by “bad guys.” In fact, most of it is perpetrated by “the good guys.” In other words, yes, of course the Twitter Files are a limited hangout, and part of the mindfuck, but the Twitter Files journalists are not the mindfuckers. And Elon Musk is not Mindfucker-in-Chief. The kind of mindfucking I’m talking about is not a conspiracy; it’s built into the system. It’s how the system protects itself.

Ideological systems are not just sets of interconnected components and procedures. They are organic entities, self-sustaining organisms, with survival programming, just like you and me. They react when threatened, like any other organism, like our bodies react to mutating cells, invasive pathogens, and other internal threats. They perceive (or register) these threats, and take defensive action against them. The more totalitarian the ideological system is, the more aggressive its reaction to internal threats will be.

In our global-capitalist ideological system, mindfucking is one of the primary means of dealing with internal threats. Global capitalism cannot afford to do the Orwellian boot-stomping-your-face thing, not for extended periods, anyway. It needs to maintain a simulation of “freedom,” and some semblance of “the rule of law,” so consumers will continue shopping, and not … you know, launch an armed rebellion.

Anyway, that’s the kind of mindfucking I’m talking about. It’s how the system knows exactly when to release a certain limited hangout, or when to launch an anti-Semitism panic, or an attempted Wokester coup at Free-Speech-Twitter HQ, or a Literal Russian-Agent-Hitler sequel, or when to shut down the aforementioned limited hangout for no actual reason whatsoever, or manipulate a belligerent political satirist into obsessively writing about exactly what it wants him to be writing about.

Yes, you read that last part right. If you thought I think I am immune to the mindfuckery … I don’t. I’m not. I get mindfucked too. For example, I got mindfucked into travelling to London and taking part in The Michael Shellenberger Show in June, and wasting months afterward helping to draft and gather VIP-signatories for the “Westminster Declaration,” which turned out to be the weakest popcorn fart in the history of popcorn farts.

My foray into pretentious NGO-activism did not end well …

And then I spent most of the remainder of the year obsessing over my prosecution for “Nazi hate Tweets” here in Germany and raising money for my “legal defense fund,” and so on, which, OK, there’s another example of something that is both an important matter and, at the same time, a colossal mindfuck (i.e., for me, personally, but also for people who will be bullied into censoring themselves by the example the authorities are making of me).

But that wasn’t it for the mindfucking. Oh, no, the mindfucking coup de grâce was still to come!

If The Powers That Be had consciously set out to come up with something that would hammer the final nail into the coffin of the “anti-New Normal resistance,” they couldn’t have done any better than October 7, also known as “Israel’s 9/11.” Two and a half months of 24/7 balls-out mindfuckery have broken the brains of everyone whose brains hadn’t already been broken. It started with “the 40 beheaded babies” story and “the super-suicide Hamas rocket” story, and rapidly devolved into this …

I tried to comment on the story dispassionately, and was instantly set upon by both shrieking pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian fanatics. It seems I’m both a genocidal, atrocity-denying Israel apologist and a genocidal, atrocity-denying, anti-Semitic Hamas apologist!

The neo-Roman orgy of hatred and projectile spewing of propagandistic vomitus is ongoing, as I’m sure you are aware, so I’ll spare you the gory details on that one.

My point is, the October 7 attack and Israel’s ongoing liquidation of Gaza have obliterated any remaining shred of clarity about what’s actually happening, globally, and has re-polarized the “populist” resistance to it.

The Red Team has become the new “cancel culture” mob …

And the Blue Team is “shocked and horrified” that the new totalitarianism they helped usher into being during 2020-2022 is suddenly being turned against them …

So it goes in the bug-eyed, stark raving Schizotocracy that is The New Normal Reich. One by one, opposing demographics are being mindfucked into aligning with The Powers That Be and going full-fascist, almost as if the whole global-ideological system were going totalitarian, and what it needed to do was whip the masses into a mindless, hate-drunk, frenzy of zealotry, and pit us all against each other, and then switch the sides and do it again, over and over, until we don’t trust anyone or anything, and we literally can’t even think.

But I wouldn’t worry too much about that … I’m pretty sure The Powers That Be will be happy to do our thinking for us. They are getting rather good at that, and we are getting rather good at letting them.

OK, that’s it for me for 2023 … merry mindfucked Christmas and happy mindfucked New Year!

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.