A Primer on Manipulating Procedural Outcomes

The Neo-Ciceronian Times ^ | January 6, 2023 | Theophilus Chilton

[Yashcheritsiy]

Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play - and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.

Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.

Yet, purposeful it truly is. There is a concept about our institutions that I wish every conservative understood, which is that of “manipulating procedure outcomes.” Basically, what this refers to is the process by which bad actors will take an established procedure - a rule or statute, an institution inside or outside of government, a social or political norm - and subvert it to their own use while still “technically” adhering to procedure. However, the process of doing so completely warps the results from those which “should” happen had the procedure been played straight. This intentionality explains why our institutional failures always seem to tend in one direction - Cthulhu always seems to swim left, so to speak. The American Left are masters at manipulating procedural outcomes, while the American Right rigidly tries to adhere to “the way things oughta be” and end up getting outmanoeuvered every time.

Allow me to give some examples of this; seeing them will start to train the eye towards recognising other instances of this process.

Let’s take, for example, the recent revelations of government censorship of dissident ideas and individuals that we saw in the Twitter files. Now, we all know that the government can’t censor speech and ideas because of the First Amendment. So this means that they’d never do so…right? (LOL) Well, as the Twitter files revealed - and which absolutely assuredly applies to every other major tech company in the field - FedGov and the alphabet agencies simply use companies like Twitter as a way to work around the 1A. They can’t censor directly, but they can rely upon a combination of selective pressure on tech companies and ideologically friendly personnel within these companies to censor and gather information about right-leaning, and especially dissident Right, users all the same. And technically, none of this is illegal, because muh private company and all that. So a functional illegality nevertheless remains within the boundaries of “procedure.”

The same type of manipulation is underway with regards to the Second Amendment, too. Again, the plain wording of the 2A, as well as a long train of prior judicial interpretive precedence, militates against federal and state governments really being able to restrict the gun rights of Americans (not that they don’t try anywise). They can’t make it illegal to buy or own guns. Schemes like prohibitively taxing ammo won’t pass muster either. So if you’re a left-wing fruitcake who hates the Constitution and badly wants to disarm your fellow Americans for further nefarious purposes, what do you do?

Well, you make it too legally dangerous for gun owners to actually use their guns for anything beyond target shooting. You install a bunch of Soros-funded prosecutors in all the jurisdictions that you can so that you can go light on criminals but throw the book at gun owners who defend themselves from criminals. You creatively interpret laws to mean that harming someone while defending yourself is a crime or, barring that, open up self-defenders to civil attack from the criminal’s family. From a self-defence perspective you set up an anarchotyrannical regimen that can be used against ideological enemies. This is basically the same thing the Bolsheviks did when they were consolidating their power as “Russia” transitioned to “the Soviet Union,” as recorded by Solzhenitsin in The Gulag Archipelago. They used administrative courts and ideological judges to punish people who legitimately defended themselves against criminals. If you injured someone who was attacking or robbing you, you went to the gulag. Of course, as we’re also seeing today, these criminals were functionally agents of the Regime by that point.

The whole point is to punish and suppress right wing chuds (which at this point basically just means normal, everyday Americans) who are actually willing to use deadly force to defend themselves and their families. When self-defence is common and accepted, it lends legitimacy to pro-2A arguments. Yet, the Left wants the populace to be functionally disarmed because only then can their efforts at using America’s criminal element as an enforcement arm really bear fruit. After all, when the next riots break out and they try to send their goons into the suburbs and the countryside, they don’t want a repeat of what happened in South Africa a few years ago.

Keep in mind that all of this is, again, technically legal. No guns need to be banned. You just need to make people afraid to do anything with those guns.

The same type of deal exists with the way plandemic responses were used to enforce compliance, even when nothing directly could be done to you by the government. I mean, sure, maybe you can’t be forced to take the clot shot, but hey, that doesn’t mean you should be allowed to buy food or hold a job, eh? The vaxx is your choice, but you just won’t be able to live a normal life if you choose (or your own free volition!) not to get it. This was the reality for many people in left-leaning locales and would have been so nationwide had the “experts” gotten their way. Once again, much of this was due to private companies “doing their part to save lives" with no direct involvement from government entities. All perfectly procedural and above board.

Here’s another one - doxxing and canceling. Now, it would be illegal for the government to attempt to intimidate dissidents by shutting down their bank accounts, getting them fired from their jobs, and otherwise subjecting them to social harassment. So what do you do with people causing trouble for the Regime when you’re a government subject to that kind of formal procedural constraint? As with the First Amendment example above, you farm it out to private entities. You get banks and big employers to do the dirty work for you since, hey, they wouldn’t want any bad press from the media for tolerating “Nazis” would they? It’s not like they’re not being leaned on by regulatory agencies to meet CRT-related goals or anything, right?

The doxxing aspect of this equation is something that you can readily get large numbers of private citizens to go along with - direct coercion is not necessary most of the time when you can convince millions of a dissident’s fellow citizens to view him or her as beyond the pale. Indeed, even when the occasional tech company won’t play ball, you can still find plenty of losers who will. As Arnold Kling recently observed,

“The masses are not held back by force. Instead, their own lack of rationality allows them to be exploited by elites through misdirection and melodrama.”

Once more, the government is technically not involved in any of this and so is technically not violating any law or political norm. Yet the procedural outcome is still manipulated into existence.

My last example is one that ought to hit close to home for a lot of committed conservatives. It’s the way people like Dan Cringeshaw and other neocons are used to channel normie right-wingers into “safe” directions. See, normie conservatives know how the process is “supposed” to work. You vote for candidates who will represent you and then those representatives, if elected, proceed to actually represent their voters. Seems pretty simple, right? That’s the way democracy is supposed to work.

Yet, that ain’t how it works. People like Kevin McCarthy interfere in local primaries to suppress pro-American candidates. People like Lisa Murkowski get weird little election rules like ranked-choice voting implemented so they can use Democrats to screen off actual conservative GOP candidates. The Uniparty uses lobbyists and corporate money to subvert and buy off fresh-faced, newly-minted representatives to do their bidding, rather than the voters’. And then, when conservatives who do manage to surmount these hurdles try to act on their mandates, you have people like Cringeshaw and Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger there to rein in the dissent. There’s no better way to get normie conservatives to go along than to throw a few military veteran American heroes their way to reinforce the Regime’s agenda.

After all, people who prevent RINOs from being elected as Speaker of the House are “terrorists,” amirite? But the whole thing is still procedurally “sound.” I mean, they had an election, right? People voted, right? There’s no law that says you can’t buy politicians with lobby money, right? All of the right procedures were followed, yet conservatives somehow never seem to get what they want, even when they win elections.

There are any number of other issues that understanding the manipulation of procedural outcomes helps to clarify, from immigration policy to election integrity and beyond. Now, in some cases, understanding can yield insights into how to counteract manipulation efforts. However, on a more fundamental level, conservatives should internalise the conviction that just because a procedure or rule is technically followed, doesn’t necessarily mean the process is legitimate or deserves to be treated as such. If an election is stolen like the last two were, do the results really deserve to be respected? If voting is constantly subverted to yield the Regime’s desired results, does voting really have any legitimacy? If “conservative” leaders continually confound the will of their own voters and treat them like paypigs, shouldn’t those “leaders” be replaced? These are questions those on the broad Right will need to grapple with in the years to come.

[BEJ]

The Democrats are masters of manipulation and word deception. New weasel words are introduced that get the results they want so that one couldn’t say that the rules are broken or not followed. “We follow policy” they say, but then want they really do is enforce guidelines which are the real rules. The status of guidelines is never questioned.

But are Conservatives just stupid... or just don’t care as well? Well meaning ones get out or just get cynical.

[John Galt's cousin]

Great food for thought. Thanks.

[Jacquerie]

A thoughtful column.

Thank judges for making the manipulation inevitable.