The Prince of the Wokes Joins the American One-Party State

The Aspen Institute claims that its Commission on Information Disorder represents a "diversity of expertise, backgrounds, and lived experience". To boost that diversity which includes the spectrum of the lefty ruling class of 5 former government officials, 4 academics, 3 left-wing activists, a Googler, one billionaire's wife, and a former morning show host, it added a prince.

Or Aspen’s bio democratically describes him, "Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex".

The commission is funded by Craig Newmark, the billionaire who got rich destroying the media by creating Craigslist, and also funds the Election Integrity Partnership, which accuses conservatives of disinformation, and the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at Poynter’s fact-checking machine. It goes without saying that Newmark is a Biden donor.

“Disturbingly,” as Indira Lakshmanan, the Newmark chair in journalism ethics at Poynter who commissioned a study about media trust put it, some 44 percent of Americans “believe the press invents negative stories” about President Donald Trump.

Crazy, right? Almost as crazy as Craig Newmark Philanthropies funding a plot to embed 1,000 lefty activists into newsrooms through an organization called the GroundTruth Project.

Why would people not trust a media that functions suspiciously like a disinformation network for a ruling class, and declares that the existence of political dissent is a disinformation crisis that must be censored out of existence using social media monopolies and a royal prince?

There’s something almost too perfect in a billionaire who got rich from a company sued over sex trafficking recruiting a prince to tell the commoners to shut up and fall into line.

But that’s what the American One-Party State looks like.

Big Tech tyranny meets the British monarchy has a happy ending as Silicon Valley tyrants finally find their prince to act as a public face of their campaign to carry on King George III’s fight against the rule of the people, their right to bear arms, and to freely speak their minds.

The diversity of Harry's lived experience and expertise as part of the British monarchy will no doubt contribute to the Aspen commission's fight against "information disorder" and "disinformation" by shouting, “off with their heads” while sticking out his pinky finger.

Disinformation is a fancy way of saying that conservatives post things on the internet that the Aspen Institute and oligarch donors like Craig Newmark don't like and want to get rid of.

Or as the Commission states, the "lawful and ethical means by which the federal government can promote fact-based information to counter the most dangerous disinformation campaigns."

The Feds have plenty of means at their disposal for providing “fact-based information” or, more often, everything from strings of spin to uninhibited lies that would make Baron Munchausen blush like a schoolgirl. The government spends $1.5 billion a year on public relations. And that’s a fraction of the inconceivable total which no one is likely to even be able to calculate.

The Voice of America alone has a budget of over $200 million. Then there’s the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which is a taxpayer-funded effort to spread lefty propaganda. These are dubiously lawful or ethical projects, but they exist, and it’s not what Aspen means.

Or as Lord William Campbell wrote of the American Revolution, "I found the people of this province did not yield to any of their Northern Brethren in the violence of their measures and contempt of all Legal Authority". The embattled colonial ruler pleaded for military support in the "province of South Carolina" and "Authentick Information” from Britain.

The Aspen Institute is also interested in "Authentick Information” and is enlisting the scion of a monarchy against which Americans fought for their freedom of speech to get rid of it again.

Rashad Robinson, a fellow Aspen disinformation commish, heads Color of Change which has fought to censor conservatives, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, by convincing MasterCard and other payment processors to stop allowing donations to conservatives.

Color of Change not only listed the David Horowitz Freedom Center as a white supremacist organization, it also smeared a black church in Harlem as a white supremacist group.

It’s tough out there when you’re fighting disinformation by lying about your victims.

The Aspen Institute's disinformation commissioners want to know how to "engage disaffected populations who have lost faith in evidence-based reality". They might want to ask themselves.

Aspen, like much of the lefty media and the non-profit complex, keeps shouting there’s an information crisis. But the problem isn’t information, it’s trust. Lefties radicalized institutions and turned them into echo chambers with less interest in the facts, and “evidence-based reality” than Hunter S. Thompson on mescaline, typing frantically while trapped at a Bunuel film festival.

In a few months, Governor Cuomo went from a hero to a villain, not because anything he did changed, but because the political agendas of the media required a new narrative. The external reality of an objective world has very little to do with any of the lies and hate campaigns. A mass murderer can go from a hero to a monster and, in a few months can become a hero again.

Why would anyone in their right mind trust institutions that specialize in creating horrifyingly ugly hyphenated compound words like “evidence-based” to mean that their complete detachment from truth, facts, or reality in pursuit of a political agenda is somehow factual or scientific.

It’s bad enough that the ruling class lies and censors, but its crimes against language and meaning are especially offensive. Instead of coming out and saying that they would like to censor their political opponents, they create commissions to study “information disorders”. Instead of calling their opponents liars, they accuse them of “disinformation”. Instead of declaring that they’re right, they claim that their views are “evidence-based”.

This is the gibberish of an American radical ruling class that uses a specialized language as bad as anything out of Orwell’s Newspeak. A specialized language can be the mark of a professional class or a ruling class. A professional class, like doctors, lawyers, engineers, does something useful and needs a specialized language to describe the intricacies of its world. The American ruling class likes to pretend that it is a professional class. That’s why it loves donning the mantle of science and insisting that its beliefs are “evidence-based”.

But government is not a profession and the Aspen Institute is not a government of elected officials. Instead it’s a regime of former officials, of figures who belong to powerful Big Tech monopolies, like Google that can choke off free speech, and the Duke of Sussex.

The ruling class doesn’t adopt a specialized language because it’s trying to describe something very complex, like the inner depths of the human heart or the outer reaches of space. The language of the ruling class isn’t simplifying complex concepts, it’s complicating simple ones.

A specialized language that complicates simple ideas is the tool of either fraud or tyranny.

Is it easier to say “Disinformation” or “Lie”? Does calling a lie “disinformation” add anything except making it sound like an authoritative expert diagnosis, instead of an opinion?

The entire “disinformation” agenda is a lie about a lie, and is based around a specialized language that makes its crude ideas seem sophisticated and the work of experts. Calling “people we disagree with” a “disinformation network” makes speech sound threatening. And redefining “fundamental political differences” as an “information disorder” turns a societal conflict into a technological concept while accusing your political opponents of being a “disorder”.

And you know what happens to “disorders”.

Prince Harry made the right move by moving to California. The powers and privileges of the British Monarchy have been narrowly circumscribed, while the One-Party State, as it exists in California, has no known limitations on its power... except possibly the Supreme Court.

Harry is in demand to add that royal spice of noblesse oblige to the repression. America’s lefty oligarchs have borrowed the old motto of monarchy that controlling our politics is their public service. But the actual monarchy was much better at selling the myth of its moral grandeur by dressing it up in the trappings of a royal court. That’s why Craig needs Prince Harry.

Censorship sounds better with class, and tyranny with tea goes better than another commission.

The American One-Party State is an underwhelming collection of Big Tech billionaires, activists, and celebrities whom few Americans have any interest in worshiping or obeying. After the American Revolution had been fought and won, there was speculation that the new country would have to find a monarch from some royal dynasty to provide a government figurehead.

But Americans did not want a king. The wokies however have finally found their prince.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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