Clickbait Conspiracy: Or, the Death of Discernment Among the Right

Dangling this” drip torture, or the “poor man's clickbait” |  Multidisciplinary Reflectives

By Colby Malsbury

Things have been understandably quite tense around Pastor James Coates’s GraceLife Church, as reported here recently.

So it was with a mixture of horror and elation that conservatives read about a typical example of state overreach in which two hundred Royal Canadian Mounted Thugs attempted to strong-arm the church service being held outside the fenced-off church grounds on Sunday, April 11, moving in en masse to break up the gathering with brute force. Enraged congregants, pushed to the very limit by nwo diktats, stormed the fence and began breaking it up, just like East Berliners venting their frustrations on their anything-but-beloved Wall in 1989. Details remained sketchy, but no doubt massive arrests were made and onerous prison sentences were meted out to the participants.

Dramatic, yes? Gets the rage broiling red-hot, no?

It certainly does….and all to no effect whatsoever. For this version of the story was a grossly exaggerated fabrication.

Yes, there were two hundred cops on site drawing up inflated overtime pay ‘monitoring the situation’. And yes, they did do a rather gay little parade in front of the cameras to show how menacing they were – that always plays good on the tee vee. Thing is, though: there was no church service being held there. GraceLife was congregating at an undisclosed location that Sabbath, as they themselves disclosed in an official statement released by their legal team. Those on site were protesters from across Alberta come to the church in a show of Christian solidarity. As for those fences being torn down in righteous zeal? Witnesses to the scene avow that that was the work of outside agitators trying to create trouble…and that the legitimate protesters at the scene helped the RCMP set up the fences again after the demonstration was over:

So where did this initial hysteria originate from? None other than Canada’s highest profile source of alt-news, Rebel Media, and picked up and spread like wildfire online by secondary sites in both Canada and the US. RM’s founder and driving force is one Ezra (((Levant))), who has a rather opportunisitic reputation within resistance circles in Alberta and has a decided tendency towards the hyperbolic and the sensationalist – likely because he is one of the many, many Canucks in journalism pining for bigger and better things south of the 49th one day, as his many appearances on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze over the years has demonstrated. Thus, he is hardly a source untainted by self-interest, and that might be something for the Right to keep in mind before giving themselves a bigger ulcer than absolutely necessary over these horrific times.

But don’t worry – there’s also some wonderful news to report!!! We’re all against coerced vaccinations, right? Well, not to worry!!! One courageous constitutional lawyer in Canada has succeeded in ending this diabolical practice for one and all times!!! Don’t believe me, scoffers??? Check out the totally irrefutable proof:

Except…..this is misleading right out of the gate. There has not been any legislation passed mandating vaccination at the federal level. That is entirely a provincial realm, and even the provinces seem to be loath to go that route. Rocco Galati is a Canadian constitutional lawyer who is fighting the Scarybug tyranny full force, but nowhere on his website or Twitter feed will you find reference to such a sweeping triumph. And show me a lawyer of any stripe who doesn’t promote his practice on the slightest provocation? These troubling details did nothing to prevent irate Canucks from sharing this screenshot around Twitter as though it was Gospel. They’re a zealous, determined lot! They’re also tooth-grindingly stupid.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar? Such as: your direct experience within the panorama of social media over the past ten, twelve years?

The internet hasn’t been referred to as the ‘information superhighway’ for many a decade now for good reason. Past a few specialized niche corners of the web, there isn’t a whole lot of information, revisionist or otherwise, to be found on there. Rather, as it approaches early middle age, the telos of the internet seems more and more to be to provide its users with an intense visceral experience…and, ultimately, existence. It is primarily an emotion-driven medium. And becoming more so as western society increasingly fossilizes itself into a matriarchy, and the Gen-X and early Millennial third-wave feminists of the 1990s and 2000s now constitute the heaviest users of handheld smart devices. And just as methamphetamine will keep you up every night for a straight week, so too will an online format designed to keep your adrenaline pumping at maximum capacity keep you glued to that glass screen, and food, sleep, and bathroom functions be damned! It is in Big Tech’s best interests to cultivate this unhappy state of affairs with exquisite care, that the gelt may flow into their numbered bank accounts and they can continue to finance international subversion.

We have all seen how well this plays out among the Karens of the woke left.

But is it not safe to assume the same is also playing out among the righteously rebellious right?

Particularly when a sizable percentage of that ‘right’ is composed of those same third-wave feminists, inspired by Anne Coulter to think of themselves as edgy political pundits? A matriarchy doesn’t discriminate against which ends of the political spectrum it usurps.

In the wake of the debacle that was November 2020, in an election that Trump wasn’t exactly going all-out to win with flying colors, so that the forces of globalism could be rolled back apace, the alt-rite, in one of its trademarked ‘hindsight is 20/20 moments’, suddenly came across the existence of the ‘Operation Trust’ black op in Soviet Russia, designed to convince distraught Whites that a coterie of Tsarist patriots was working behind the scenes to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and to generate a false hope that would eventually break down their last remaining resistance. The parallels between that false flag and the now-discredited cooings of Qanon and similar sacristans intoning ‘Trust the Plan’ are quite stark. There is no reason to think that just such a mass disheartening campaign is underway online, and hasn’t been for quite some time. If the Left can’t meme, they certainly are adept at overwhelming.

And it’s so easily accomplished. In this era of Snopes and fact-checking and jumping on the condemning fake news bandwagon, all it takes is one or two deliberately planted errors within a story for the Woke to yell ‘Checkmate!’ once the Right begins parroting back what it has read on a site that must be trustworthy because it’s hosted under a domain no one outside of the dark web has ever heard of. If retaining our credibility is still paramount with us – and it ought to be – we really need to make the extra effort to confirm our sources. There are enough alt-sites out there that have proven their bona fides over time that we don’t need to be rushing into the loving embrace of some sketchy new thing. This is a lesson that at one time the Right seemed to have learned. In the Obama years, after we all got burned posting, for example, predictive programming prognostications that didn’t come true, we learned to avoid posting links that began URGENT ALL PATRIOTS PLEASE SHARE – with the remainder of the headline also being in all-caps. The Trump years tossed all such caution to the wind, though. After all, why take pains to eschew spam when you’ve so obviously and totally ‘won’, right? How shortsighted that mindset proved to be, and we’re reaping the whirlwind from our pride today.

Let us not overlook the siren song of the almighty Shekel, either.

It is the height of irony that as they decry the cyber-prison that will constitute the sole economic activity of the Great Reset, many on the Right are relying for their entire livelihoods on the revenue generated by the hits visited upon their very own tabloid sites – not to mention the advertising space they can sell to ‘survivalist’ companies run by shadowy figures who likely operate midnight auto supply chains as a sideline. Nothing generates hits on these sites like purely (and poorly) speculative panic-mongering, and such is ladled upon the credulous with a trowel. One can obtain to levels of burnout never dreamed possible by following the unsubstantiated online rumor mill unabated and be exposed to such scintillating bits of breaking intelligence as ‘Secret Executive Order 294.1A (B/87)’ or ‘Operation Horus Eye War Games’ or ‘The Most Powerful Person in the World Is a Retired Secretary in Oil City, LA’ or the like. This is edifying how? Nay, it tends to only breed further despair exponentially, like patches of toadflax in a previously pristine meadow. And don’t we have enough despair thanks to the actual, documented atrocities in our midst as is? Whatever happened to ‘sufficient for the day is the evil thereof’?

Conservatives have had a serious credibility gap after smoking the Trump ‘hopium’ and learned the hard way that there was no 4-D chess being played, nor was there any master plan to be trusted. Let us not compound that grievous error by mistaking chatter for revelation. Otherwise, we will be no more fit to lead than those acolytes in a Florentine bazaar spending an obscene amount of coin on a spongy piece of rotted cypress, merely because the jolly (((merchant))) manning the stall has assured them it is indeed a fragment of the true Cross.

7 thoughts on “Clickbait Conspiracy: Or, the Death of Discernment Among the Right

  1. Joe Putnam

    This piece struck a chord with me. I have an older relative who breathlessly watches Bannon’s “War Room Pandemic”, and was very wowed by (((Cahn’s))) recent book *The Harbinger II*. She has no real historical knowledge, no interest in fact checking, and has been deeply indoctrinated in “Christian” Zionism. The CCP is infiltrating America, and der Juden are just so special! It is generally pointless trying to reason with her. I think that the Boomer age post-Trump right have subconsciously adopted the mindset that “it’s not a lie if you believe it”.

    1. Colby Malsbury

      I could have written a book on this topic, but space and time requirements forced me to scale things back.

  2. Eddie Price

    “If retaining our credibility is still paramount with us – and it ought to be – we really need to make the extra effort to confirm our sources.”

    AMEN! I am always reticent to share ‘news’ gleaned from social media and other popular sources. It is imperative that we ALWAYS vett ANY information we are inclined to share with others. As Christians in particular, our credibility should be paramount. Too often, those on the ‘right’ fall for the age-old lie that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” They believe that if the left hates and discredits a story, it must be true, especially if the headline is captivating enough and filled with all the right emotion-stirring buzzwords. We should take to heart the Biblical standard for establishing a matter, and insist on at least two or three independent sources (witnesses) to verify a matter before we dare endeavor to risk our reputations by sharing it as gospel truth.

    As for “The Most Powerful Person in the World Is a Retired Secretary in Oil City, LA,” I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Sadly, Sylvia Pinkard, who ruled the global conspiracy from her nondescript Oil City Elementary/Middle School Secretary’s office, passed away in 2001in Oil City, LA, and was laid to rest in Vivian, LA. Her title of ‘Most Powerful’ has now been passed on to her successor, the Produce Manager of the Interlock Co-op Gas Bar and Convenience store in Arborg, MB.

    An outstanding post, and as always, a pleasure to read.

  3. Randall Gerard

    How sad is it when most on the right would consider our views ‘extreme’, and yet they eagerly parrot the wild fiction that passes muster as ‘news’ in some quarters? Great article, Colby. Very timely.

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