by William Skink
James Damore, the Google employee martyred by upper management for sharing his opinion internally with peers, is just the latest example of a liberal ideology grown increasingly brittle to criticism. Here is more Damore from an op-ed he was invited to write for the Wall Street Journal:
We all have moral preferences and beliefs about how the world is and should be. Having these views challenged can be painful, so we tend to avoid people with differing values and to associate with those who share our values. This self-segregation has become much more potent in recent decades. We are more mobile and can sort ourselves into different communities; we wait longer to find and choose just the right mate; and we spend much of our time in a digital world personalized to fit our views.
Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”
Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
But echo chambers also have to guard against dissent and opposition. Whether it’s in our homes, online or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.
As someone who has challenged the echo chamber of Montana Democrats from the heart of their liberal stronghold in Missoula, I can identify with what Damore is experiencing right now. But if I thought pushing back against the rationale to destroy Libya was tough, challenging the accepted narrative that Russia hacked the US presidential election appears even more difficult.
For those of us who didn’t self-segragate into the resistance echo chamber after Trump was elected, The Democrat/MSM/Intelligence campaign to scapegoat Russia for HRC’s shocking electoral defeat was obvious. Every new headline was anonymously sourced and inflated claims, like all 16 alphabet soup agencies agreed that Russia hacked the election, quickly deflated when scrutinized.
Unfortunately for all humans living on this planet, the resistance has been impervious to mounting evidence that the case against Russia has slowly collapsed.
A few days ago The Nation picked up on a report that should be the stake through the heart of this brazen propaganda campaign to de-legitimize Trump. Here are legitimate professionals in the field of intelligence providing forensic evidence that the emails from the DNC were leaked, not hacked:
Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment. Few have noticed since these evasive terms first appeared that an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge. This is how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept—as the record shows many of them have done.
We come now to a moment of great gravity.
There has been a long effort to counter the official narrative we now call “Russiagate.” This effort has so far focused on the key events noted above, leaving numerous others still to be addressed. Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:
There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.
Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.
Once again, those of us outside the echo chamber expressing skepticism were absolutely right to be skeptical. But how will the resistance respond?
I know how partisan bloggers like Don Pogreba have responded to me in the past, and that’s to use mockery and terms like “conspiracy theory” to discredit my opinions and sources. Apparently establishment Democrats have no better response than something I would expect to read from Intelligent Discontent The Montana Post. Here is the DNC response to The Nation’s piece:
Editor’s note: After publication, the Democratic National Committee contacted The Nation with a response, writing, “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It’s unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.”
This is the response of a desperate political party still totally invested in the now discredited narrative that Russia hacked the election.
It doesn’t seem to matter how many investigations have so far produced no substantial evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia to hack the election.
It doesn’t seem to matter how much money and time is being wasted focusing on this cooked-up scandal when so many other dire issues are literally begging our lawmakers for attention.
It doesn’t even matter that tensions with Russia have surged to levels unseen since the height of the Cold War.
Nope, the party of safe spaces and identity politics is too invested in this propaganda campaign to admit defeat now.
As the Democratic Party and its Deep State colluders continue pushing the world closer to another world war, the rest of the world continues seeing America as the biggest threat to world peace, just like they did back in 2013, when Obama was president.
It’s amazing the different perspectives that exist outside the echo chamber of the resistance. If that echo chamber isn’t dismantled and its prisoners liberated, I’m afraid those perspectives will be destroyed along with our ability to live on this planet.
If the resistance can’t admit the narrative they so desperately hoped would be their ticket to depose Trump is nothing more than a contrived intelligence op, then we are in real trouble. Anyone who has perpetuated this false narrative has a responsibility to bring attention to this new evidence.
If they don’t, and knowingly continue pushing this false narrative, then I hope they are seen as the dangerous ideologues they are–hopefully before a nuclear war with Russia or a civil war in the States breaks out.