Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich

Autorentext

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist. His plays have been produced and toured at theaters and festivals including Riverside Studios (London), 59E59 Theaters (New York), Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh), Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney), the Du Maurier World Stage Festival (Toronto), Needtheater (Los Angeles), 7 Stages (Atlanta), the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Brighton Festival, and the Noorderzon Festival (the Netherlands), among others. His writing awards include the 2002 First of the Scotsman Fringe Firsts, Scotsman Fringe Firsts for new writing in 2002 and 2005, and the 2004 Best Play of the Adelaide Fringe. His political satire and commentary is published by Consent Factory, OffGuardian, ZeroHedge, Dissident Voice, and many other publications. His debut novel, Zone 23, was published in 2017.

Klappentext

A hilarious and horrifying journey into the dark heart of the ‟New Normal Reich.” C. J. Hopkins’s latest volume of Consent Factory Essays chronicles his Kafkaesque prosecution in Germany, the broader crackdown on dissent throughout the West, and other unsettling features of the ‟New Normal”—the new pathologized form of totalitarianism that was rolled out during ‟the Covid Pandemic,” which is radically transforming societies around the world.

Charged by the German authorities with ‟disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda” for tweeting the cover art of his bestselling book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020–2021), Hopkins’s absurdist adventures in the German legal system—where he was pronounced guilty without a trial, then acquitted, and then ‟unacquitted”—make for harrowing and uproariously humorous reading. Prosecuted in criminal court, his book banned by Amazon, his tweets censored by Twitter, reported to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, its domestic intelligence agency, his battle to defend his right to freedom of speech and artistic expression has become an international cause célèbre, receiving major media coverage in the USA, UK, Australia, and Switzerland, as well as Germany.

Spanning the years 2022–2024, the essays in this volume also cover the crackdown on so-called ‟disinformation,” ‟hate-speech,” and other forms of wrongthink, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, the culture wars, the rise of the ‟Musk Cult,” the return of Trump, and the rest of the aftermath of the ‟Covid Pandemic.”