"Confusion is the Message"

The defenselessness of the disoriented

By JOHN LEAKE

Last night, at the film premiere of Nefarious (an extraordinary movie I will review in a separate post), I bumped into the comedian, Alex Stein, and we spoke for a while about the madness of contemporary culture. To those who have never met Alex, it may come as a surprise to hear that when he isn’t acting, he is model of meticulous investigation and analysis. He believes the only way to resist the destructive designs of ideologically possessed lunatics is through satire. Trying to reason with them is futile. Through humor and caricature, their absurdity is laid bare so that even the most confused member of our society can see it.

In a Substack column last fall, I wrote about the KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov’s 1984 interview with American author G. Edward Griffin in which he described how a Constitutional Republic such as the United States may be destroyed from within through a process called Ideological Subversion. He described the objective of this process as follows:

To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their communities, and their country.

I thought of Bezmenov this morning when I stumbled across a fascinating essay by Seth Barron at the Claremont Institute titled “The Mad Emperor of Ice Cream.” The title—an allusion to Wallace Stevens’s strange and poignant 1923 poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream"—immediately grabbed my attention.

As Barron writes, the point of so much of what we now hear in the public forum is NOT to delineate or clarify anything, but to confuse everything. As he puts it, “confusion is the message.”

Disoriented people cannot defend themselves from malevolent tyrants who, through the constant broadcasting of AgitProp (Agitation Propaganda), recruit the alienated, resentful, directionless, and mentally disturbed to destabilize society.

President Biden—the senile lover of ice cream—will apparently sign any document or deliver (by teleprompter) any speech put in front of him, no matter how inimical it is to a civilization based on reason, law, prudence, and rearing children to be responsible adults. Destabilization was the true objective of his “Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility” while the nation was still reeling from the mass murder of children by a disturbed transgender gunman. As anyone who has received any social training knows, timing always plays a huge role in how messages are received by grieving people.

Elevating gender dysphoria—a disorder that affects a tiny percentage of adults—to a national issue of the significance of African-American slavery (note the subtle but unmistakable allusion to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) was NOT to help those suffering from gender dysphoria, but to confuse the overwhelming majority of Americans. Millions of Americans are now making a valiant effort to raise adolescent children who are constantly bombarded with this same confusing and disorienting messaging.

When a people can no longer tell the difference between male and female, they are as dizzy as a prize fighter who has just taken a hook to the chin. Head spinning, knees buckling, vision blurred, the next punch he takes is sure to send him to the canvas.

I highly recommend reading Seth Barron’s essay.