Search: [Politics] - Links, ist nicht Recht

Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation

Prologue: The Information War

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.

At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.

In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.

At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up. Publicly, Twitter’s algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing “dashboard” into a major news story. Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to the journalist Matt Taibbi, that “instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The discovery prompted Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and “call this out on the bullshit it is.”

In the end, neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial-grade bullshit—the old-fashioned term for disinformation —continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream.

It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review ’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”

The foundations of the current information war were laid in response to a sequence of events that took place in 2014. First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia invaded Crimea; and several months after that the Islamic State captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and declared it the capital of a new caliphate. In three separate conflicts, an enemy or rival power of the United States was seen to have successfully used not just military might but also social media messaging campaigns designed to confuse and demoralize its enemies—a combination known as “hybrid warfare.” These conflicts convinced U.S. and NATO security officials that the power of social media to shape public perceptions had evolved to the point where it could decide the outcome of modern wars—outcomes that might be counter to those the United States wanted. They concluded that the state had to acquire the means to take control over digital communications so that they could present reality as they wanted it to be, and prevent reality from becoming anything else.

Technically, hybrid warfare refers to an approach that combines military and non-military means—overt and covert operations mixed with cyberwarfare and influence operations—to both confuse and weaken a target while avoiding direct, full-scale conventional war. In practice, it is notoriously vague. “The term now covers every type of discernible Russian activity, from propaganda to conventional warfare, and most that exists in between,” wrote Russia analyst Michael Kofman in March 2016.

Over the past decade, Russia has indeed repeatedly employed tactics associated with hybrid warfare, including a push to target Western audiences with messaging on channels like RT and Sputnik News and with cyber operations such as the use of “troll” accounts. But this was not new even in 2014, and it was something the United States, as well as every other major power, engaged in as well. As early as 2011, the United States was building its own “troll armies ” online by developing software to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

“If you torture hybrid warfare long enough, it will tell you anything,” Kofman had admonished, which is precisely what began happening a few months later when Trump critics popularized the idea that a hidden Russian hand was the puppeteer of political developments inside the United States.

The leading voice promoting that claim was a former FBI officer and counterterrorism analyst named Clint Watts. In an article from August 2016, “How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too),” Watts and his co-author, Andrew Weisburd, described how Russia had revived its Cold War-era “Active Measures” campaign, using propaganda and disinformation to influence foreign audiences. As a result, according to the article, Trump voters and Russian propagandists were promoting the same stories on social media that were intended to make America look weak and incompetent. The authors made the extraordinary claim that the “melding of Russian-friendly accounts and Trumpkins has been going on for some time.” If that was true, it meant that anyone expressing support for Donald Trump might be an agent of the Russian government, whether or not the person intended to play that role. It meant that the people they called “Trumpkins,” who made up half the country, were attacking America from within. It meant that politics was now war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.

Watts made his name as a counterterrorism analyst by studying the social media strategies used by ISIS, but with articles like this, he became the media’s go-to expert on Russian trolls and Kremlin disinformation campaigns. It seems he also had powerful backers.

In his book The Assault on Intelligence, retired CIA chief Michael Hayden called Watts “the one man, who more than any other was trying to ring the alarm more than two years before the 2016 elections.”

Hayden credited Watts in his book with teaching him the power of social media: “Watts pointed out to me that Twitter makes falsehoods seem more believable through sheer repetition and volume. He labeled it a kind of ‘computational propaganda.’ Twitter in turn drives mainstream media.”

A false story algorithmically amplified by Twitter and disseminated by the media—it’s no coincidence that this perfectly describes the “bullshit” spread on Twitter about Russian influence operations: In 2017, it was Watts who came up with the idea for the Hamilton 68 dashboard and helped spearhead the initiative.

II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”

No one thought Trump was a normal politician. Being an ogre, Trump horrified millions of Americans who felt a personal betrayal in the possibility that he would occupy the same office held by George Washington and Abe Lincoln. Trump also threatened the business interests of the most powerful sectors of society. It was the latter offense, rather than his putative racism or flagrant un-presidentialness, that sent the ruling class into a state of apoplexy.

Given his focus in office on lowering the corporate tax rate, it’s easy to forget that Republican officials and the party’s donor class saw Trump as a dangerous radical who threatened their business ties with China, their access to cheap imported labor, and the lucrative business of constant war. But, indeed, that is how they saw him, as reflected in the unprecedented response to Trump’s candidacy recorded by The Wall Street Journal in September 2016: “No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney.”

The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.

Two days after Trump took office, a smirking Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that it was “really dumb” of the new president to get on the bad side of the security agencies that were supposed to work for him: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”

Trump had used sites like Twitter to bypass his party’s elites and connect directly with his supporters. Therefore, to cripple the new president and ensure that no one like him could ever come to power again, the intel agencies had to break the independence of the social media platforms. Conveniently, it was the same lesson that many intelligence and defense officials had drawn from the ISIS and Russian campaigns of 2014—namely, that social media was too powerful to be left outside of state control—only applied to domestic politics, which meant the agencies would now have help from politicians who stood to benefit from the effort.

Immediately after the election, Hillary Clinton started blaming Facebook for her loss. Until this point, Facebook and Twitter had tried to remain above the political fray, fearful of jeopardizing potential profits by alienating either party. But now a profound change occurred, as the operation behind the Clinton campaign reoriented itself not simply to reform the social media platforms, but to conquer them. The lesson they took from Trump’s victory was that Facebook and Twitter—more than Michigan and Florida—were the critical battlegrounds where political contests were won or lost. “Many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is,” Clinton’s chief digital strategist Teddy Goff told Politico the week after the election, referring to Facebook’s alleged role in boosting Russian disinformation that helped Trump. “Both from the campaign and from the administration, and just sort of broader Obama orbit…this is one of the things we would like to take on post-election,” Goff said.

The press repeated that message so often that it gave the political strategy the appearance of objective validity:

“Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook”; New York Magazine , Nov. 9, 2016.

“Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence”; The New York Times , Nov. 12, 2016.

“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”; The Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2016.

“Disinformation, Not Fake News, Got Trump Elected, and It Is Not Stopping”; The Intercept , Dec. 6, 2016.

And on it went in countless articles that dominated the news cycle for the next two years.

At first, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the charge that fake news posted on his platform had influenced the outcome of the election as “pretty crazy .” But Zuckerberg faced an intense pressure campaign in which every sector of the American ruling class, including his own employees, blamed him for putting a Putin agent in the White House, effectively accusing him of high treason. The final straw came a few weeks after the election when Obama himself “publicly denounced the spread of fake news on Facebook.” Two days later , Zuckerberg folded: “Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments.”

The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification—just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War—to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the backend of the internet’s biggest platforms.

Though there was never a public order given, the U.S. government began enforcing martial law online.

Adam Maida

III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?

The American doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare famously calls for “winning hearts and minds.” The idea is that victory against insurgent groups depends on gaining the support of the local population, which cannot be accomplished by brute force alone. In places like Vietnam and Iraq, support was secured through a combination of nation-building and appealing to locals by providing them with goods they were presumed to value: money and jobs, for instance, or stability.

Because cultural values vary and what is prized by an Afghan villager may appear worthless to a Swedish accountant, successful counterinsurgents must learn what makes the native population tick. To win over a mind, first you have to get inside it to understand its wants and fears. When that fails, there is another approach in the modern military arsenal to take its place: counterterrorism. Where counterinsurgency tries to win local support, counterterrorism tries to hunt down and kill designated enemies.

Despite the apparent tension in their contrasting approaches, the two strategies have often been used in tandem. Both rely on extensive surveillance networks to gather intelligence on their targets, whether that is figuring out where to dig wells or locating terrorists in order to kill them. But the counterinsurgent in particular imagines that if he can learn enough about a population, it will be possible to reengineer its society. Obtaining answers is just a matter of using the right resources: a combination of surveillance tools and social scientific methods, the joint output of which feeds into all-powerful centralized databases that are believed to contain the totality of the war.

I have observed, reflecting on my experiences as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, how, “data analytics tools at the fingertips of anyone with access to an operations center or situation room seemed to promise the imminent convergence of map and territory,” but ended up becoming a trap as “U.S. forces could measure thousands of different things that we couldn’t understand.” We tried to cover for that deficit by acquiring even more data. If only we could gather enough information and harmonize it with the correct algorithms, we believed, the database would divine the future.

Not only is that framework foundational in modern American counterinsurgency doctrine, but also it was part of the original impetus for building the internet. The Pentagon built the proto-internet known as ARPANET in 1969 because it needed a decentralized communications infrastructure that could survive nuclear war—but that was not the only goal. The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.”

In the days of the internet “freedom agenda,” the popular mythology of Silicon Valley depicted it as a laboratory of freaks, self-starters, free thinkers, and libertarian tinkerers who just wanted to make cool things without the government slowing them down. The alternative history, outlined in Levine’s book, highlights that the internet “always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.” There is truth in both versions, but after 2001 the distinction disappeared.

As Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , at the start of the war on terror “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism.”

In Afghanistan, the military had to employ costly drones and “Human Terrain Teams” staffed with adventurous academics to survey the local population and extract their relevant sociological data. But with Americans spending hours a day voluntarily feeding their every thought directly into data monopolies connected to the defense sector, it must have seemed trivially easy for anyone with control of the databases to manipulate the sentiments of the population at home.

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon began funding the development of a host of tools for detecting and countering terrorist messaging on social media. Some were part of a broader “memetic warfare ” initiative inside the military that included proposals to weaponize memes to “defeat an enemy ideology and win over the masses of undecided noncombatants.” But most of the programs, launched in response to the rise of ISIS and the jihadist group’s adept use of social media, focused on scaling up automated means of detecting and censoring terrorist messaging online. Those efforts culminated in January 2016 with the State Department’s announcement that it would be opening the aforementioned Global Engagement Center, headed by Michael Lumpkin. Just a few months later, President Obama put the GEC in charge of the new war against disinformation. On the same day that the GEC was announced , Obama and “various high-ranking members of the national security establishment met with representatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Internet powerhouses to discuss how the United States can fight ISIS messaging via social media.”

In the wake of the populist upheavals of 2016, leading figures in America’s ruling party seized upon the feedback loop of surveillance and control refined through the war on terror as a method for maintaining power inside the United States. Weapons created to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda were turned against Americans who entertained incorrect thoughts about the president or vaccine boosters or gender pronouns or the war in Ukraine.

Former State Department official Mike Benz, who now runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online that bills itself as a digital free-speech watchdog, describes how a company called Graphika, which is “essentially a U.S. Department of Defense-funded censorship consortium” that was created to fight terrorists, was repurposed to censor political speech in America. The company, “initially funded to help do social media counterinsurgency work effectively in conflict zones for the U.S. military,” was then “redeployed domestically both on Covid censorship and political censorship,” Benz told an interviewer . “Graphika was deployed to monitor social media discourse about Covid and Covid origins, Covid conspiracies, or Covid sorts of issues.”

The fight against ISIS morphed into the fight against Trump and “Russian collusion,” which morphed into the fight against disinformation. But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society.

For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.

IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon

Once upon a time, the internet was going to save the world. The first dot-com boom in the 1990s popularized the idea of the internet as a technology for maximizing human potential and spreading democracy. The Clinton administration’s 1997 “A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” put forth the vision: “The Internet is a medium that has tremendous potential for promoting individual freedom and individual empowerment” and “[t]herefore, where possible, the individual should be left in control of the way in which he or she uses this medium.” The smart people in the West mocked the naive efforts in other parts of the world to control the flow of information. In 2000, President Clinton scoffed that China’s internet crackdown was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” The hype continued through the Bush administration, when internet companies were seen as crucial partners in the state’s mass surveillance program and its plan to bring democracy to the Middle East.

But the hype really went into overdrive when President Obama was elected through a “big data”-driven campaign that prioritized social media outreach. There appeared to be a genuine philosophical alignment between Obama’s political style as the “Hope” and ”Change” president whose guiding principle in foreign policy was “Don’t do dumb shit” and the internet search company whose original motto was “Do no evil.” There were also deep personal ties connecting the two powers, with 252 cases over the course of Obama’s presidency of people moving between jobs at the White House and Google. From 2009 to 2015, White House and Google employees were meeting, on average, more than once a week.

As Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led the government’s “Internet freedom” agenda, which aimed to “promote online communications as a tool for opening up closed societies.” In a speech from 2010, Clinton issued a warning about the spread of digital censorship in authoritarian regimes: “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said. “And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”

It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.

Or perhaps irony is not the right word to capture the difference between the freedom-loving Clinton of a decade ago and the pro-censorship activist of today, but it gets at what appears to be the about-face done by a class of people who were public standard-bearers for radically different ideas barely 10 years earlier. These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents. That’s how to bridge the gap between the Hillary Clinton of 2013 and the Clinton of 2023: Both see the internet as an immensely powerful tool for driving political processes and effecting regime change.

Which is why, in the Clinton and Obama worlds, the rise of Donald Trump looked like a profound betrayal—because, as they saw it, Silicon Valley could have stopped it but didn’t. As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.

In his book Who Owns the Future? , tech pioneer Jaron Lanier writes, “The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultra-secret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.” Because digital economies produce ever-greater concentrations of data and power, the inevitable happened: The tech companies got too powerful.

What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government’s regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies’ power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party—a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.

They chose option B.

Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump—a candidate every bit as loathsome to the highly educated elites in Silicon Valley as he was to the highly educated elites in New York and D.C.—provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.

V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!

If one imagines that the American ruling class faced a problem—Donald Trump appeared to threaten their institutional survival—then the Russia investigation didn’t just provide the means to unite the various branches of that class, in and out of government, against a common foe. It also gave them the ultimate form of leverage over the most powerful non-aligned sector of society: the tech industry. The coordination necessary to carry out the Russian collusion frame-up was the vehicle, fusing (1) the political goals of the Democratic Party, (2) the institutional agenda of the intelligence and security agencies, and (3) the narrative power and moral fervor of the media with (4) the tech companies’ surveillance architecture.

The secret FISA warrant that allowed U.S. security agencies to begin spying on the Trump campaign was based on the Steele dossier, a partisan hatchet job paid for by Hillary Clinton’s team that consisted of provably false reports alleging a working relationship between Donald Trump and the Russian government. While a powerful short-term weapon against Trump, the dossier was also obvious bullshit, which suggested it might eventually become a liability.

Disinformation solved that problem while placing a nuclear-grade weapon in the arsenal of the anti-Trump resistance. In the beginning, disinformation had been only one among a half-dozen talking points coming from the anti-Trump camp. It won out over the others because it was capable of explaining anything and everything yet simultaneously remained so ambiguous it could not be disproved. Defensively, it provided a means to attack and discredit anyone who questioned the dossier or the larger claim that Trump colluded with Russia.

All the old McCarthyite tricks were new again. The Washington Post aggressively trumpeted the claim that disinformation swung the 2016 election, a crusade that began within days of Trump’s victory, with the article “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” (The lead expert quoted in the article: Clint Watts.)

A steady flow of leaks from intelligence officials to national security reporters had already established the false narrative that there was credible evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. When Trump won in spite of those reports, the senior officials responsible for spreading them, most notably CIA chief John Brennan, doubled down on their claims. Two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration released a declassified version of an intelligence community assessment, known as an ICA, on “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections,” which asserted that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

The ICA was presented as the objective, nonpolitical consensus reached by multiple intelligence agencies. In the Columbia Journalism Review , Jeff Gerth writes that the assessment received “massive, and largely uncritical coverage” in the press. But, in fact, the ICA was just the opposite: a selectively curated political document that deliberately omitted contrary evidence to create the impression that the collusion narrative was not a widely disputed rumor, but an objective fact.

A classified report by the House Intelligence Committee on the creation of the ICA detailed just how unusual and nakedly political it was. “It wasn’t 17 agencies, and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” a senior intelligence official who read a draft version of the House report told the journalist Paul Sperry . “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan handpicked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.” An Obama appointee, Brennan had broken with precedent by weighing in on politics while serving as CIA director. That set the stage for his post-government career as an MSNBC analyst and “resistance” figure who made headlines by accusing Trump of treason.

Mike Pompeo, who succeeded Brennan at the CIA, said that as the agency’s director, he learned that “senior analysts who had been working on Russia for nearly their entire careers were made bystanders” when the ICA was being written. According to Sperry, Brennan “excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a ‘wild card.’” (Brennan was also the one who overrode the objections of other agencies to include the Steele dossier as part of the official assessment.)

Despite its irregularities, the ICA worked as intended: Trump began his presidency under a cloud of suspicion that he was never able to dispel. Just as Schumer promised, the intelligence officials wasted no time in taking their revenge.

And not only revenge, but also forward-planning action. The claim that Russia hacked the 2016 vote allowed federal agencies to implement the new public-private censorship machinery under the pretext of ensuring “election integrity.” People who expressed true and constitutionally protected opinions about the 2016 election (and later about issues like COVID-19 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) were labeled un-American, racists, conspiracists, and stooges of Vladimir Putin and systematically removed from the digital public square to prevent their ideas from spreading disinformation. By an extremely conservative estimate based on public reporting, there have been tens of millions of such cases of censorship since Trump’s election.

And here’s the climax of this particular entry: On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day that Brennan’s ICA report lent institutional backing to the false claim that Putin helped Trump—Jeh Johnson, the outgoing Obama-appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference, he had designated U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure.” The move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS. It was a coup that Johnson had been attempting to pull off since the summer of 2016, but that, as he explained in a later speech , was blocked by local stakeholders who told him “that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process.” So Johnson found a work-around by unilaterally rushing the measure through in his last days in office.

It’s clear now why Johnson was in such a rush: Within a few years, all of the claims used to justify the extraordinary federal seizure of the country’s electoral system would fall apart. In July 2019 the Mueller report concluded that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russian government—the same conclusion reached by the inspector general’s report into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, released later that year. Finally, on Jan. 9, 2023, The Washington Post quietly published an addendum in its cybersecurity newsletter about New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics study . Its conclusion: “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters.”

But by then it didn’t matter. In the final two weeks of the Obama administration, the new counter-disinformation apparatus scored one of its most significant victories: the power to directly oversee federal elections that would have profound consequences for the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden.

VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended

Clint Watts, who headed up the Hamilton 68 initiative, and Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, CIA chief, and NSA director who championed Watts, are both veterans of the U.S. counterterrorism establishment. Hayden ranks among the most senior intelligence officers the United States has ever produced and was a principal architect of the post-9/11 mass surveillance system. Indeed, an astounding percentage of the key figures in the counter-disinformation complex cut their teeth in the worlds of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare.

Michael Lumpkin, who headed the GEC, the State Department agency that served as the first command center in the war against disinformation, is a former Navy SEAL with a counterterrorism background. The GEC itself grew out of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications before being repurposed to fight disinformation.

Twitter had the chance to stop the Hamilton 68 hoax before it got out of hand, yet chose not to. Why? The answer can be seen in the emails sent by a Twitter executive named Emily Horne, who advised against calling out the scam. Twitter had a smoking gun showing that the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the neoliberal think tank behind the Hamilton 68 initiative, was guilty of exactly the charge it made against others: peddling disinformation that inflamed domestic political divisions and undermined the legitimacy of democratic institutions. But that had to be weighed against other factors, Horne suggested, such as the need to stay on the good side of a powerful organization. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote in February 2018.

The ASD was lucky to have someone like Horne on the inside of Twitter. Then again, maybe it wasn’t luck. Horne had previously worked at the State Department, handling the “digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn , she “worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering [ISIS] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-[ISIS] Coalition activities.” Put another way, she had a background in counterterrorism operations similar to Watts’ but with more of an emphasis on spinning the press and civil society groups. From there she became the director for strategic communications for Obama’s National Security Council, only leaving to join Twitter in June 2017. Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.

It is no coincidence that the war against disinformation began at the very moment the Global War on Terror (GWOT) finally appeared to be coming to an end. Over two decades, the GWOT fulfilled President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence.” It evolved into a self-interested, self-justifying industry that employed thousands of people in and out of government who operated without clear oversight or strategic utility. It might have been possible for the U.S. security establishment to declare victory and move from a permanent war footing to a peacetime posture, but as one former White House national security official explained to me, that was unlikely. “If you work in counterterrorism,” the former official said, “there’s no incentive to ever say that you’re winning, kicking their ass, and they’re a bunch of losers. It’s all about hyping a threat.” He described “huge incentives to inflate the threat” that have been internalized in the culture of the U.S. defense establishment and are “of a nature that they don’t require one to be particularly craven or intellectually dishonest.”

“This huge machinery was built around the war on terror,” the official said. “A massive infrastructure that includes the intelligence world, all the elements of DoD, including the combatant commands, CIA and FBI and all the other agencies. And then there are all the private contractors and the demand in think tanks. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake.”

The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level.

In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush promised to drain the swamps of radicalism in the Middle East. Only by making the region safe for democracy, Bush said, could he ensure that it would stop producing violent jihadists like Osama bin Laden.

Today, to keep America safe, it is no longer enough to invade the Middle East and bring its people democracy. According to the Biden White House and the army of disinformation experts, the threat is now coming from within. A network of right-wing domestic extremists, QAnon fanatics, and white nationalists is supported by a far larger population of some 70 million Trump voters whose political sympathies amount to a fifth column within the United States. But how did these people get radicalized into accepting the bitter and destructive white jihad of Trumpist ideology? Through the internet, of course, where the tech companies, by refusing to “do more” to combat the scourge of hate speech and fake news, allowed toxic disinformation to poison users’ minds.

After 9/11, the threat of terrorism was used to justify measures like the Patriot Act that suspended constitutional rights and placed millions of Americans under a shadow of mass surveillance. Those policies were once controversial but have come to be accepted as the natural prerogatives of state power. As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, George W. Bush’s “‘with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.”

The war on terror was a dismal failure that ended with the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. It also became deeply unpopular with the public. Why, then, would Americans choose to empower the leaders and sages of that war to be the stewards of an even more expansive war against disinformation? It is possible to venture a guess: Americans did not choose them. Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.

domestic_extremists VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”

A few weeks after Trump supporters rioted in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier wrote an article for The New York Times advocating for the United States to wage a “comprehensive counterinsurgency program” against its own citizens.

Counterinsurgency, as Grenier would know, is not a limited, surgical operation but a broad effort conducted across an entire society that inevitably involves collateral destruction. Targeting only the most violent extremists who attacked law enforcement officers at the Capitol would not be enough to defeat the insurgency. Victory would require winning the hearts and minds of the natives—in this case, the Christian dead-enders and rural populists radicalized by their grievances into embracing the Bin Laden-like cult of MAGA. Lucky for the government, there is a cadre of experts who are available to deal with this difficult problem: people like Grenier, who now works as a consultant in the private-sector counterterrorism industry, where he has been employed since leaving the CIA.

Of course there are violent extremists in America, as there have always been. However, if anything, the problem is less severe now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was more common. Exaggerated claims about a new breed of domestic extremism so dangerous it cannot be handled through existing laws, including domestic terrorism statutes, is itself a product of the U.S.-led information war, which has effaced the difference between speech and action.

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots. They start with words,” Clint Watts proclaimed in 2017 when he testified before Congress . “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations.” Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization. But this was a fearful response, informed by beliefs widely, and no doubt sincerely, shared in the Beltway that mistook an equally sincere populist backlash termed “the revolt of the public” by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri for an act of war. The standard Watts and others introduced, which quickly became the elite consensus, treats tweets and memes—the primary weapons of disinformation—as acts of war.

Using the hazy category of disinformation allowed security experts to conflate racist memes with mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and with violent protests like the one that took place at the Capitol. It was a rubric for catastrophizing speech and maintaining a permanent state of fear and emergency. And it received the full backing of the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and President Biden, all of whom, notes Glenn Greenwald, have declared that “the gravest menace to American national security” is not Russia, ISIS, China, Iran, or North Korea, but “‘domestic extremists’ in general—and far-right white supremacist groups in particular.”

The Biden administration has steadily expanded domestic terrorism and counter-extremism programs. In February 2021, DHS officials announced that they had received additional funding to boost department-wide efforts at “preventing domestic terrorism,” including an initiative to counter the spread of disinformation online, which uses an approach seemingly borrowed from the Soviet handbook, called “attitudinal inoculation.”

Adam Maida

VIII. The NGO Borg

In November 2018, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy published a study titled “The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis.” The scope of the paper is comprehensive, but its authors are especially focused on the centrality of philanthropically funded nonprofit organizations and their relationship to the media. The Shorenstein Center is a key node in the complex the paper describes, giving the authors’ observations an insider’s perspective.

“In this landscape analysis, it became apparent that a number of key advocates swooping in to save journalism are not corporations or platforms or the U.S. government, but rather foundations and philanthropists who fear the loss of a free press and the underpinning of a healthy society. ... With none of the authoritative players—the government and platforms who push the content—stepping up to solve the problem quickly enough, the onus has fallen on a collective effort by newsrooms, universities, and foundations to flag what is authentic and what is not.”

To save journalism, to save democracy itself, Americans should count on the foundations and philanthropists—people like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Open Society Foundations’ George Soros, and internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party fundraiser Reid Hoffman. In other words, Americans were being asked to rely on private billionaires who were pumping billions of dollars into civic organizations—through which they would influence the American political process.

There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff. Second, this mandate, and the enormous funding behind it, opened up thousands of new jobs for information regulators at a moment when traditional journalism was collapsing. Third, the first two points placed the immediate self-interest of the NGO staffers perfectly in line with the imperatives of the American ruling party and security state. In effect, a concept taken from the worlds of espionage and warfare—disinformation—was seeded into academic and nonprofit spaces, where it ballooned into a pseudoscience that was used as an instrument of partisan warfare.

Virtually overnight, the “whole of society” national mobilization to defeat disinformation that Obama initiated led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators.

The modern “fact-checking” industry , for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party. Its leading organization, the International Fact-Checking Network, was established in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a central hub in the counter-disinformation complex.

Everywhere one looks now, there is a disinformation expert. They are found at every major media publication, in every branch of government, and in academic departments, crowding each other out on cable news programs, and of course staffing the NGOs. There is enough money coming from the counter-disinformation mobilization to both fund new organizations and convince established ones like the Anti-Defamation League to parrot the new slogans and get in on the action.

How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge. For proof, look no further than the arc traced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who pivoted from being failed podcast hosts to joining the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Such initiatives flourished in the years after Trump and Brexit.

But it went beyond celebrities. According to former State Department official Mike Benz, “To create a ‘whole of society’ consensus on the censorship of political opinions online that were ‘casting doubt’ ahead of the 2020 election, DHS organized ‘disinformation’ conferences to bring together tech companies , civil society groups , and news media to all build consensus—with DHS prodding (which is meaningful: many partners receive government funds through grants or contracts, or fear government regulatory or retaliatory threats)—on expanding social media censorship policies.”

A DHS memo, first made public by journalist Lee Fang, describes a DHS official’s comment “during an internal strategy discussion, that the agency should use third-party nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

It is not unusual that a government agency would want to work with private corporations and civil society groups, but in this case the result was to break the independence of organizations that should have been critically investigating the government’s efforts. The institutions that claim to act as watchdogs on government power rented themselves out as vehicles for manufacturing consensus.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the fields that have been most aggressive in cheerleading the war against disinformation and calling for greater censorship—counterterrorism, journalism, epidemiology—share a public record of spectacular failure in recent years. The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA diehards that the 2020 election was legitimate, or prevent the public from inquiring into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they tried desperately to do.

But they succeeded in galvanizing a wildly lucrative whole-of-society effort, providing thousands of new careers and a renewed mandate of heaven to the institutionalists who saw populism as the end of civilization.

IX. COVID-19

By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. To take just one example, Google’s censorship , which applied to its subsidiary sites like YouTube, called for “removing information that is problematic” and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”—a category that at different points in the constantly evolving narrative would have included wearing masks, implementing travel bans, saying that the virus is highly contagious, and suggesting it might have come from a laboratory.

President Biden publicly accused social media companies of “killing people” by not censoring enough vaccine disinformation. Using its new powers and direct channels inside the tech companies, the White House began sending lists of people it wanted banned, such as journalist Alex Berenson. Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated , “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.”

Dystopian in principle, the response to the pandemic was also totalitarian in practice . In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.”

“Due to both the pandemic and the disinformation about the election, there are increasing numbers of what extremism experts call ‘vulnerable individuals’ who could be radicalized,” warned Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Reduction, on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riots.

Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum and capo di tutti capi of the global expert class, saw the pandemic as an opportunity to implement a “Great Reset” that could advance the cause of planetary information control: “The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise.”

X. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule

The laptops are real. The FBI has known this since 2019, when it first took possession of them. When the New York Post attempted to report on them, dozens of the most senior national security officials in the United States lied to the public, claiming the laptops were likely part of a Russian “disinformation” plot. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operating as fully integrated branches of the state security infrastructure, carried out the government’s censorship orders based on that lie. The press swallowed the lie and cheered on the censorship.

The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the yearslong effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory.

It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable. As recently as February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the scandal as the “half-fake laptop story” and as “an embarrassment,” months after even the Bidens had been forced to acknowledge that the story is authentic.

While the laptop is the best-known case of the ruling party’s intervention in the Trump-Biden race, its brazenness was an exception. The vast majority of the interference in the election was invisible to the public and took place through censorship mechanisms carried out under the auspices of “election integrity.” The legal framework for this had been put in place shortly after Trump took office, when the outgoing DHS chief Jeh Johnson passed an 11th-hour rule—over the vehement objections of local stakeholders—declaring election systems to be critical national infrastructure, thereby placing them under the supervision of the agency. Many observers had expected that the act would be repealed by Johnson’s successor, Trump-appointed John Kelly, but curiously it was left in place.

In 2018, Congress created a new agency inside of the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was tasked with defending America’s infrastructure—now including its election systems—from foreign attacks. In 2019, the DHS added another agency, the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, which was focused on countering foreign disinformation. As if by design, the two roles merged. Russian hacking and other malign foreign-information attacks were said to threaten U.S. elections. But, of course, none of the officials in charge of these departments could say with certainty whether a particular claim was foreign disinformation, simply wrong, or merely inconvenient. Nina Jankowicz, the pick to lead the DHS’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, lamented the problem in her book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict. “What makes this information war so difficult to win,” she wrote, “is not just the online tools that amplify and target its messages or the adversary that is sending them; it’s the fact that those messages are often unwittingly delivered not by trolls or bots, but by authentic local voices.”

The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.

In January 2021, CISA “transitioned its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM [ed. note: an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation ],” according to an August 2022 report from the DHS’s Office of Inspector General. After the pretense of fighting a foreign threat fell away, what was left was the core mission to enforce a narrative monopoly over truth.

The new domestic-focused task force was staffed by 15 employees dedicated to finding “all types of disinformation”—but specifically that which related to “elections and critical infrastructure”—and being “responsive to current events,” a euphemism for promoting the official line of divisive issues, as was the case with the “COVID-19 Disinformation Toolkit” released to “raise awareness related to the pandemic.”

Kept a secret from the public, the switch was “plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents,” according to Mike Benz. “DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.”

Just like that, without any public announcements or black helicopters flying in formation to herald the change, America had its own ministry of truth.

Together they operated an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies that flagged objectionable content they wanted scrubbed. That structure allowed the DHS to outsource its work to the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a consortium of four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror); Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public; and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Founded in 2020 in partnership with the DHS, the EIP served as the government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger,” according to congressional testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger, who notes that the EIP claims it classified more than 20 million unique “misinformation incidents” between Aug. 15 and Dec. 12, 2020. As EIP head Alex Stamos explained, this was a work-around for the problem that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.”

Looking at the censorship figures that the DHS’s own partners reported for the 2020 election cycle in their internal audits, the Foundation for Freedom Online summarized the scope of the censorship campaign in seven bullet points:

22 million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
859 million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation,” often in real-time;
<1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes, an effort DHS partners openly plotted and bragged that tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.
- *

XI. The New One-Party State

In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Biden’s victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that drew together “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election” in an “extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.

Not so long ago, talk of a “deep state” was enough to mark a person as a dangerous conspiracy theorist to be summarily flagged for monitoring and censorship. But language and attitudes evolve, and today the term has been cheekily reappropriated by supporters of the deep state. For instance, a new book, American Resistance , by neoliberal national security analyst David Rothkopf, is subtitled The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation .

The deep state refers to the power wielded by unelected government functionaries and their paragovernmental adjuncts who have administrative power to override the official, legal procedures of a government. But a ruling class describes a social group whose members are bound together by something deeper than institutional position: their shared values and instincts. While the term is often used loosely and sometimes as a pejorative rather than a descriptive label, in fact the American ruling class can be simply and straightforwardly defined.

Two criteria define membership in the ruling class. First, as Michael Lind has written , it is made up of people who belong to a “homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta.” America has always had regional elites; what is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class.

Second, to be a member of the ruling class is to believe that only other members of your class can be allowed to lead the country. That is to say, members of the ruling class refuse to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate.

Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the social class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama’s national mobilization. In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, “tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.”

Historian Angelo Codevilla , who popularized the concept of an American “ruling class” in a 2010 essay and then became its primary chronicler, saw the new, national aristocracy as an outgrowth of the opaque power acquired by the U.S. security agencies. “The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated,” he wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations .

What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue , “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth. While technically an opposition party is still permitted to exist in the United States, the last time it attempted to govern nationally, it was subjected to a yearslong coup. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling party, which represents the interests of the ruling class, is depicted as an existential threat to civilization.

An admirably direct articulation of this outlook was provided recently by famous atheist Sam Harris. Throughout the 2010s, Harris’ higher-level rationalism made him a star on YouTube, where thousands of videos showcased him “owning” and “pwning” religious opponents in debates. Then Trump arrived. Harris, like so many others who saw in the former president a threat to all that was good in the world, abandoned his principled commitment to the truth and became a defender of propaganda.

In a podcast appearance last year, Harris acknowledged the politically motivated censorship of reporting related to Hunter Biden’s laptops and admitted “a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.” But, echoing Ball, he declared this a good thing.

“I don’t care what’s in the Hunter Biden laptop. … Hunter Biden could have had corpses of children in his basement, and I would not have cared,” Harris told his interviewers. He could overlook the murdered children because an even greater danger lurked in the possibility of Trump’s reelection, which Harris compared to “an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.”

With an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, even the most principled rationalists might end up asking for safety over truth. But an asteroid has been falling toward Earth every week for years now. The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.

XII. The End of Censorship

The public’s glimpses into the early stages of the transformation of America from democracy to digital leviathan are the result of lawsuits and FOIAs—information that had to be pried from the security state—and one lucky fluke. If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter, many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.

But the system reflected in those disclosures may well be on its way out. It is already possible to see how the kind of mass censorship practiced by the EIP, which requires considerable human labor and leaves behind plenty of evidence, could be replaced by artificial intelligence programs that use the information about targets accumulated in behavioral surveillance dossiers to manage their perceptions. The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.

In fact, that sounds rather similar to what Google is already doing in Germany , where the company recently unveiled a new campaign to expand its “prebunking” initiative “that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation,” according to the Associated Press. The announcement closely followed Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ appearance on a German podcast, during which he called for using artificial intelligence to combat “conspiracy theories” and “political polarization.” Meta has its own prebunking program. In a statement to the website Just The News, Mike Benz called prebunking “a form of narrative censorship integrated into social media algorithms to stop citizens from forming specific social and political belief systems” and compared it to the “pre-crime” featured in dystopian science-fiction movie Minority Report .

Meanwhile, the military is developing weaponized AI technology to dominate the information space. According to USASpending.gov , an official government website, the two largest contracts related to disinformation came from the Department of Defense to fund technologies for automatically detecting and defending against large-scale disinformation attacks. The first, for $11.9 million, was awarded in June 2020 to PAR Government Systems Corporation, a defense contractor in upstate New York. The second, issued in July 2020 for $10.9 million, went to a company called SRI International.

SRI International was originally connected to Stanford University before splitting off in the 1970s, a relevant detail considering that the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institution still directly connected to the school, led 2020’s EIP, which might well have been the largest mass censorship event in world history—a capstone of sorts to the record of pre-AI censorship.

Then there is the work going on at the National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds research in universities and private institutions. The NSF has its own program called the Convergence Accelerator Track F, which is helping to incubate a dozen automated disinformation-detection technologies explicitly designed to monitor issues like “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.”

“One of the most disturbing aspects” of the program, according to Benz, “is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad.”

In March, the NSF’s chief information officer, Dorothy Aronson, announced that the agency was “building a set of use cases” to explore how it could employ ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of a reasonable simulation of human speech, to further automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda.

The first great battles of the information war are over. They were waged by a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority.

Future battles fought through AI technologies will be harder to see.

XIII. After Democracy

Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”

So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator , strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.

A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony , on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.

JacobSiegel · Propaganda · DeepState · Politics · Technocracy · Corporation

May 3, 2023 at 4:47:59 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

Amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations: An Annotated Guide

The Covid-skeptic world has been claiming the World Health Organization (WHO) plans to become some sort of global autocratic government, removing national sovereignty and replacing it with a totalitarian health state. The near-complete absence of interest by mainstream media would suggest, to the rational observer, that this is yet another ‘conspiracy theory’ from a disaffected fringe.

The imposition of authoritarian rules on a global scale would normally attract attention. The WHO is fairly transparent in its machinations. It should therefore be straightforward to determine whether this is all misplaced hysteria, or an attempt to implement an existential change in sovereign rights and international relations. We would just need to read the document. Firstly, it is useful to put the amendments in context.

The changing role of WHO

Who’s WHO?

The WHO was set up after the Second World War as the health arm of the United Nations, to support efforts to improve population health globally. Based on the concept that health went beyond the physical (encompassing “physical, mental and social well-being”), its constitution was premised on the concept that all people were equal and born with basic inviolable rights. The world in 1946 was emerging from the brutality of colonialism and international fascism; the results of overly centralized authority and of regarding people to be fundamentally unequal. The WHO constitution was intended to put populations in charge of health.

In recent decades the WHO has evolved as its support base of core funding allocated by countries, based on GDP, evolved to a model where most funding is directed to specified uses, and much is provided by private and corporate interests. The priorities of the WHO have evolved accordingly, moving away from community-centered care to a more vertical, commodity-based approach. This inevitably follows the interests and self-interests of these funders. More detail can be found on this evolution elsewhere; these changes are important to putting the proposed IHR amendments in context.

Of equal importance, the WHO is not alone in the international health sphere. While certain organizations such as UNICEF (originally intended to prioritize child health and welfare), private foundations and non-government organizations have long partnered with the WHO, the past two decades have seen a burgeoning of the global health industry, with multiple organizations, particularly ‘public-private partnerships’ (PPPs) growing in influence; in some respects rivals and in some respects partners of the WHO.

Notable among PPPs are the Gavi – the Vaccine Alliance (focused specifically on vaccines) and CEPI, an organization set up at the World Economic Forum meeting in 2017 specifically to manage pandemics, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and the Norwegian Government. Gavi and CEPI, along with others such as Unitaid and the Global Fund, include corporate and private interests directly on their boards. The World Bank and G20 have also increased involvement in global health, and especially pandemic preparedness. The WHO has stated that pandemics occurred just once per generation over the past century and killed a fraction of those who died from endemic infectious diseases, but they nonetheless attract much of this corporate and financial interest.

The WHO is primarily a bureaucracy, not a body of experts. Recruitment is based on various factors, including technical competency but also country and other equity-related quotas. These quotas serve a purpose of reducing the power of specific countries to dominate the organization with their own staff, but in doing so require the recruitment of staff who may have far lower experience or expertise. Recruitment is also heavily influenced by internal WHO personnel, and the usual personal influences that come with working and needing favors within countries.

Once recruited, the payment structure strongly favors those who stay for long periods, mitigating against rotation to new expertise as roles change. A WHO staffer must work 15 years to receive their full pension, with earlier resignation resulting in removal of all or part of the WHO’s contribution to their pension. Coupled with large rental subsidies, health insurance, generous education subsidies, cost-of-living adjustments and tax-free salaries, this creates a structure within which protecting the institution (and thus one’s benefits) can far outlive initial altruistic intent.

The DG and Regional Directors (RDs – of which there are six) are elected by member states in a process subject to heavy political and diplomatic maneuvering. The current DG is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian politician with a checkered past during the Ethiopian civil war. The amendments proposed would allow Tedros to independently make all the decisions required within the IHR, consulting a committee at will but not bound by it. Indeed, he can do this now, having declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) against his emergency committee’s advice, after just five deaths globally.

Like many WHO employees, I personally witnessed, and am aware of, examples of seeming corruption within the organization, from Regional Director elections to building renovations and importation of goods. Such practices can occur within any large human organization that has lived a generation or two beyond its founding. This is, of course, why the principle of the separation of powers commonly exists in national governance; those making rules must answer to an independent judiciary according to a system of laws to which all are subject. As this cannot apply to UN agencies, they should automatically be excluded from direct rulemaking over populations. The WHO, like other UN bodies, is essentially a law unto itself.

WHO’s new pandemic preparedness and health emergency instruments.

The WHO is currently working on two agreements that will expand its powers and role in declared health emergencies and pandemics. These also involve widening the definition of ‘health emergencies’ within which such powers may be used. The first agreement involves proposed amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR), an instrument with force under international law that has been in existence in some form for decades, significantly amended in 2005 after the 2003 SARS outbreak.

The second is a new ‘treaty’ that has similar intent to the IHR amendments. Both are following a path through WHO committees, public hearings and revision meetings, to be put to the World Health Assembly (WHA – the annual meeting of all country members [‘States parties’] of the WHO), probably in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

The discussion here concentrates on the IHR amendments as they are the most advanced. Being amendments of an existing treaty mechanism, they only require approval of 50 percent of countries to come into force (subject to ratification processes specific to each member State). The new ‘treaty’ will require a two-thirds vote of the WHA to be accepted. The WHA’s one country – one vote system gives countries like Niue, with less than two thousand residents, equal voice to countries with hundreds of millions (e.g. India, China, the US), though diplomatic pressure tends to corral countries around their beneficiaries.

The IHR amendments process within the WHO is relatively transparent. There is no conspiracy to be seen. The amendments are ostensibly proposed by national bureaucracies, collated on the WHO website. The WHO has gone to unusual lengths to open hearings to public submissions. The intent of the IHR amendments to change the nature of the relationship between countries and the WHO (i.e. a supra-national body ostensibly controlled by them), and fundamentally change the relationship between people and central supranational authority – is open for all to see.

Major amendments proposed for the IHR

The amendments to the IHR are intended to fundamentally change the relationship between individuals, their country’s governments, and the WHO. They place the WHO as having rights overriding that of individuals, erasing the basic principles developed after World War Two regarding human rights and the sovereignty of States. In doing so, they signal a return to a colonialist and feudalist approach fundamentally different to that to which people in relatively democratic countries have become accustomed. The lack of major pushback by politicians and the lack of concern in the media and consequent ignorance of the general public is therefore both strange and alarming.

Aspects of the amendments involving the largest changes to the workings of society and international relations are discussed below. Following this are annotated extracts from the WHO document (REF). Provided on the WHO website, it is currently under a process of revision to address obvious grammatical errors and improve clarity.

Resetting international human rights to a former, authoritarian model

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights, agreed by the UN in the aftermath of World War Two and in the context of much of the world emerging from a colonialist yoke, is predicated on the concept that all humans are born with equal and inalienable rights, gained by the simple fact that they are born. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was intended to codify these, to prevent a return to inequality and totalitarian rule. The equality of all individuals is expressed in Article 7:

“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.”

This understanding underpins the WHO constitution, and forms a basis for the modern international human rights movement and international human rights law.

The concept of States being representative of their people, and having sovereignty over territory and the laws by which their people were governed, was closely allied with this. As peoples emerged from colonialism, they would assert their authority as independent entities within boundaries that they would control. International agreements, including the existing IHR, reflected this. The WHO and other international agencies would play a supportive role and give advice, not instructions.

The proposed IHR amendments reverse these understandings. The WHO proposes that the term ‘with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons’ be deleted from the text, replacing them with ‘equity, coherence, inclusivity,’ vague terms the applications of which are then specifically differentiated in the text according to levels of social and economic development. The underlying equality of individuals is removed, and rights become subject to a status determined by others based on a set of criteria that they define. This entirely upends the prior understanding of the relationship of all individuals with authority, at least in non-totalitarian states.

It is a totalitarian approach to society, within which individuals may act only on the sufferance of others who wield power outside of legal sanction; specifically a feudal relationship, or one of monarch-subject without an intervening constitution. It is difficult to imagine a greater issue facing society, yet the media that is calling for reparations for past slavery is silent on a proposed international agreement consistent with its reimposition.

Giving WHO authority over member States.

This authority is seen as being above states (i.e. elected or other national governments), with the specific definition of ‘recommendations’ being changed from ‘non-binding’ (by deletion) to ‘binding’ by a specific statement that States will undertake to follow (rather than ‘consider’) recommendations of the WHO. States will accept the WHO as the ‘authority’ in international public health emergencies, elevating it above their own ministries of health. Much hinges on what a Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) is, and who defines it. As explained below, these amendments will widen the PHEIC definition to include any health event that a particular individual in Geneva (the Director General of the WHO) personally deems to be of actual or potential concern.

Powers to be ceded by national governments to the DG include quite specific examples that may require changes within national legal systems. These include detention of individuals, restriction of travel, the forcing of health interventions (testing, inoculation) and requirement to undergo medical examinations.

Unsurprising to observers of the COVID-19 response, these proposed restrictions on individual rights under the DG’s discretion include freedom of speech. The WHO will have power to designate opinions or information as ‘mis-information or disinformation, and require country governments to intervene and stop such expression and dissemination. This will likely run up against some national constitutions (e.g. the US) but will be a boon to many dictators and one-party regimes. It is, of course, incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but these seem no longer to be guiding principles for the WHO.

After self-declaring an emergency, the DG will have power to instruct governments to provide WHO and other countries with resources – funds and commodities. This will include direct intervention in manufacturing, increasing production of certain commodities manufactured within their borders.

Countries will cede power to the WHO over patent law and intellectual property (IP), including control of manufacturing know-how, of commodities deemed by the DG to be relevant to the potential or actual health problem that he /she has deemed of interest. This IP and manufacturing know-how may be then passed to commercial rivals at the DG’s discretion. These provisions seem to reflect a degree of stupidity, and unlike the basic removal of fundamental human rights, vested interests here may well insist on their removal from the IHR draft. Rights of people should of course be paramount, but with most media absent from the fray, it is difficult to see a level of advocacy being equal.

Providing the WHO DG with unfettered power, and ensuring it will be used.

The WHO has previously developed processes that ensure at least a semblance of consensus and an evidence-base in decision-making. Their process for developing guidelines requires, at least on paper, a range of expertise to be sought and documented, and a range of evidence weighed for reliability. The 2019 guidelines on management of pandemic influenza are an example, laying out recommendations for countries in the event of such a respiratory virus outbreak. Weighing this evidence resulted in the WHO strongly recommending against contact tracing, quarantine of healthy people and border closures, as the evidence had shown that these are expected to cause more overall harm to health in the long term than the benefit gained, if any, from slowing spread of a virus. These guidelines were ignored when an emergency was declared for COVID-19 and authority switched to an individual, the director general.

The IHR amendments further strengthen the ability of the DG to ignore any such evidence-based procedures. Working on several levels, they provide the DG, and those delegated by the DG, with exceptional and arbitrary power, and put in place measures that make the wielding of such power inevitable.

Firstly, the requirement for an actual health emergency, in which people are undergoing measurable harm or risk of harm, is removed. The wording of the amendments specifically removes the requirement of harm to trigger the DG assuming power over countries and people. The need for a demonstrable ‘public health risk’ is removed, and replaced with a ‘potential’ for public health risk.

Secondly, a surveillance mechanism set up in every country under these amendments, and discussed also in the pandemic preparedness documents of the G20 and World bank, will identify new variants of viruses which constantly arise in nature, all of which, in theory, could be presumed to pose a potential risk of outbreak until proven not to. The workforce running this surveillance network, which will be considerable and global, will have no reason for existence except to identify yet more viruses and variants. Much of their funding will originate from private and corporate interests that stand to gain financially from the vaccine-based responses they envision for infectious disease outbreaks.

Thirdly, the DG has sole authority to declare any event rated (or potentially related) to health an ‘emergency.’ (The six WHO Regional Directors (RDs) will also have this power at a Regional level). As seen with the monkeypox outbreak, the DG can already ignore the committee set up to advise on emergencies. The proposed amendments will remove the need for the DG to gain consent from the country in which a potential or perceived threat is identified. In a declared emergency, the DG can vary the FENSA rules on dealing with private (e.g. for-profit) entities, allowing him/her to share a State’s information not only with other States but with private companies.

The surveillance mechanisms being required of countries and expanded within the WHO will ensure that the DG and RDs will have a constant stream of potential public health risks crossing their desks. In each case, they will have power to declare such events a health emergency of international (or Regional) concern, issuing orders supposedly binding under international law to restrict movement, detain, inject on mass scales, yield intellectual property and know-how, and provide resources to the WHO and to other countries the DG deems to require them. Even a DG uninterested in wielding such power will face the reality that they put themselves at risk of being the one who did not ‘try to ‘stop’ the next pandemic, pressured by corporate interests with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, and huge media sway. This is why sane societies never create such situations.

What happens next?

If these amendments are accepted, the people taking control over the lives of others will have no real legal oversight. They have diplomatic immunity (from all national jurisdictions). The salaries of many will be dependent on sponsorship from private individuals and corporations with direct financial interest in the decision they will make. These decisions by unaccountable committees will create mass markets for commodities or provide know-how to commercial rivals. The COVID-19 response illustrated the corporate profits that such decisions will enable. This is a situation obviously unacceptable in any democratic society.

While the WHA has overall oversight on WHO policy with an executive board comprised of WHA members, these operate in an orchestrated way; many delegates having little depth in the proceedings whilst bureaucrats draft and negotiate. Countries not sharing the values enshrined in the constitutions of more democratic nations have equal vote on policy. Whilst it is right that sovereign States have equal rights, the human rights and freedom of one nation’s citizens cannot be ceded to the governments of others, nor to a non-State entity placing itself above them.

Many nations have developed checks and balances over centuries, based on an understanding of fundamental values, designed specifically to avoid the sort of situation we now see arising, where one group is law unto itself can arbitrarily remove and control the freedom of others. Free media developed as a further safeguard, based around principles of freedom of expression and an equal right to be heard. These values are necessary for democracy and equality to exist, just as it is necessary to remove them in order to introduce totalitarianism and a structure based on inequality. The proposed amendments to the IHR set out explicitly to do this.

The proposed new powers sought by the WHO, and the pandemic preparedness industry being built around it, are not hidden. The only subterfuge is the farcical approach of media and politicians in many nations who seem to pretend they are not proposed, or do not, if implemented, fundamentally change the nature of the relationship between people and centralized non-State powers. The people who will become subject to these powers, and the politicians who are on track to cede them, should start paying attention. We must all decide whether we wish to cede so easily what it has taken centuries to gain, to assuage the greed of others.

Annotated summary of significant clauses in the IHR amendments.

Notes. (Within qualities from the IHR draft, italics are added for emphasis here.

DG: Director General (Of the WHO)
FENSA: (WHO) Framework for Engagement of Non-State Actors
IHR: International Health Regulations
PHEIC: Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
WHA: World Health Assembly
WHO: World Health Organization
“States Parties’ in UN parlance (i.e. self-governing countries) is simplified below to ‘State(s)’ or ‘country’.

See full document at the WHO IHR portal.

Setting the scene: Establishing WHO authority over individuals and national governments in health-related decision-making.

Article 1: Definitions

‘Health technologies and knowhow’;: Includes ‘other health technologies’, [any of these that solve a health problem and improve ‘quality of life’ and includes technologies and knowhow involved in the] ‘development and manufacturing process’, and their ‘application and usage’.

Note relevance to requirement for countries to give these up to other entities on WHO demand. This must be unacceptable to most existing legal systems and corporations.

“standing recommendation’ means non-binding advice issued by WHO

“temporary recommendation” means non-binding advice issued by WHO

‘standing recommendations’ and ‘temporary recommendations:’ The removal of the ‘non-binding’ is consistent with the requirement later for States to consider the ‘recommendations’ of the DG as obligatory.

Article 2: Scope and purpose (of the IHR)

_“The purpose and scope of these Regulations are to prevent, protect against_, prepare**, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of diseases including through health systems readiness and resilience in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risk all risks with a potential to impact public health**, and which …”

Wording changed from “restricted to public health risk” to “restricted to all risks with a potential to impact public health.” Public health is an extremely broad term, and potential risks can be any virus, toxin, human behavioral change, article or other information source that could affect anything in this vast field. This is an open slather that would in operation provide the WHO with a jurisdiction over anything potentially vaguely pertaining to some change in health or well-being, as perceived by the DG or delegated staff. Such broad rights to interfere and take control would not normally be allowed to a government department. In this case, there is no direct oversight from a parliament representing people, and no specific legal jurisdiction to comply with. It allows the WHO director general to insert himself and give recommendations (no longer ‘non-binding’ to almost anything pertaining to societal life (health, in the WHO’s definition, is physical, mental and social well-being).

Article 3: Principles

“The implementation of these Regulations shall be with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities of the States Parties, taking into consideration their social and economic development”

This signals a fundamental change in the human rights approach of the UN, including the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) that all UN countries have signed up to. The concept of broad, fundamental rights (equal in all) is removed, and replaced with vacuous wording ‘equity, inclusivity, coherence.’ Human rights (of the individual) are seen as based on economic and ‘social’ development. This implies that the wealthy and poor have different rights, and there is a hierarchy of ‘development’ that defines one’s rights. This is a return to a feudalist or colonialist view of human rights (in many respects the excuses used to justify slavery), that the post-War WHO and UDHR had sought to move away from.

“shall be guided by the goal of their universal application for the protection of all people of the world from the international spread of disease. When implementing these Regulations, Parties and WHO should exercise precaution, in particular when dealing with unknown pathogens.“

Again, addition of a clause that enables the WHO to override human rights previously stated, including for speculative (unknown) threats.

Article 4: Responsible authorities

Each country is required to appoint an ‘authorized responsible authority’ for WHO to liaise with. Seemingly innocuous, but reflects the mindset change in status within these regulations, with the WHO becoming a body requiring compliance, no longer ‘suggesting’ or ‘supporting.’

Establishing the international pandemic preparedness bureaucracy with WHO at the center

Article 5: Surveillance.

These amendments establish /expand a periodic review mechanism, similar to the UN human rights office. This seems in itself innocuous, but is a very large resource drain, especially for smaller countries, and requires (as in the human rights compliance case) a dedicated large international (WHO) bureaucracy and consultant base. WHO will require regular detailed reports, send assessors, and require changes. This raises questions both on (1) sovereignty in health and (2) rational and appropriate use of resources. WHO is not assessing the country’s health needs here, it is assessing one small aspect and dictating the resources spent on it, irrespective of other health burdens. This is a fundamentally poor and dangerous way to manage public health and means resources are unlikely to be spent for maximum benefit overall.

Article 6: Notification.

Countries (States Parties) to make information available to WHO at WHO request, and WHO can make this available to other parties (see later clauses) in a manner yet to be determined by the WHA. This may seem innocuous but in reality, removes State sovereignty over data (which had been significant prior to 2005 IHA amendments). It is unlikely that powerful States will comply, but smaller ones will be left with little choice (China has significantly inhibited information and will likely do so. It can be argued this is appropriate – such information can have significant economic and social implications).

Article 10: Verification

“If the State Party does not accept the offer of collaboration within 48 hours , WHO may shall , when justified by the magnitude of the public health risk, immediately share with other States Parties the information available to it, whilst encouraging the State Party to accept the offer of collaboration by WHO, _taking into account the views of the State Party concerned_.”

The WHO gains power to share information from a State or pertaining to a State with other States, without consent. This is remarkable: It is important to understand who the WHO is (essentially unaccountable beyond the WHA).

Article 11: Exchange of Information (Formerly provision of information by WHO).

This article enables WHO to share information obtained as discussed above, to both UN and non-governmental bodies (allowed recipients changed from (formerly) relevant intergovernmental to (now) relevant international and regional organizations (i.e. now including organizations not related to national governments).

WHO can therefore share State information with ‘relevant international organizations’ – this presumably includes such as CEPI, Gavi, Unitaid – organizations that have private and corporate representation on their boards with direct financial conflicts of interest.

Further:

“Parties referred to in those provisions, shall not make this information generally available to other States Parties, until such time as when: (a) the event is determined to constitute a public health emergency of international concern, a public health emergency of regional concern, or warrants an intermediate public health alert, in accordance with Article 12; or …”

Widens the criteria determining when the WHO can disseminate information from sovereign States, from PHEIC to ‘health alert’ (which in practice the DG or subordinates could apply to almost anything). This could occur, as specified later in the Article, when WHO staff decide a sovereign State does not have ‘capacity’ to handle a problem, or when the WHO staff decide (with unspecified criteria) that it is necessary to share information with others to make ‘timely’ risk assessments. This allows unelected WHO staff, on salaries supported from external conflicted entities, to disseminate information from States directly relevant to those entities, based on their own assessment of risk and response, against undefined criteria.

Widening ‘public health emergency’ definition to include any health or pathogen-related event at DG’s discretion, and requiring States compliance.

Article 12: Determination of a public health emergency of international concern public health emergency of regional concern, or intermediate health alert

This Article both reduces the threshold for the DG to declare an emergency (it can just be a concern of a potential outbreak) and greatly increases the power of the WHO (removes requirement for State agreement) to then act.

“If the Director-General considers, based on an assessment under these Regulations, that a potential or actual public health emergency of international concern is occurring ….. determines that the event constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, and the State Party are in agreement regarding this determination, the Director-General shall notify all the States Parties, in accordance with the procedure set forth in Article 49, seek the views of the Committee established under Article 48 (but is not required to follow them)

Removes requirement for State to agree to release of information pertaining to that State. DG can declare a PHEIC against States wishes and instructions. The WHO becomes the dominant party, not the servant of the sovereign State.

Emergency committee review is optional for DG, who can act completely alone in determining PHEIC – a decision that can have vast health, social and economic implications and is allowed above to abrogate basic human rights norms.

_If, following the consultation in paragraph 2 above, the Director-General and the State Party in whose territory the event arises do not come to a consensus within 48 hours on whether the event constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, a determination shall be made in accordance with the procedure set forth in Article 49_.

Removes requirement of DG to seek agreement of State before acting.

“Regional Director may determine that an event constitutes a public health emergency of regional concern and provide related guidance to States Parties in the region either before or after notification of an event that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern is made to the Director-General, who shall inform all States Parties”

Regional directors appear to be granted similar powers, though full implications are unclear.

“In case of any engagement with non-State actors in WHO’s public health response to PHEIC situation, WHO shall follow the provisions of Framework for Engagement of Non-State Actors (FENSA). Any departure from FENSA provisions shall be consistent with paragraph 73 of FENSA.”

The WHO Framework for Engagement of Non-State Actors (FENSA) allows the DG to “exercise flexibility in the application of the procedures of FENSA” in the case of a health emergency (which here in the IHR is widened, as above, to any concern the FG has of potential harm, irrespective of State agreement.

“Developed State Parties and WHO shall offer assistance to developing State Parties depending on the availability of finance, technology and know how…”.

A line fascinating mainly for its anachronistic (but telling) use of the colonialist-like terms developing and developed in this formerly egalitarian WHO context.

“The State Party shall accept or reject such an offer of assistance within 48 hours and, in the case of rejection of such an offer, shall provide to WHO its rationale for the rejection, which WHO shall share with other States Parties. Regarding on-site assessments, in compliance with its national law, a State Party shall make reasonable efforts to facilitate short-term access to relevant sites; in the event of a denial, it shall provide its rationale for the denial of access”

WHO set as the dominant partner. The State must comply or provide excuses for not agreeing with WHO’s dictates.

“When requested by WHO, States Parties should shall provide, to the extent possible, support to WHO-coordinated response activities, including supply of health products and technologies, especially diagnostics and other devices, personal protective equipment, therapeutics, and vaccines, for effective response to PHEIC occurring in another State Party’s jurisdiction and/or territory, capacity building for the incident management systems as well as for rapid response teams”.

‘Should’ changed to ‘Shall,’ requiring States to provide resources at the WHO’s request for a PHEIC (e.g. monkeypox of an event the DG considers may pose a potential threat.) This begins a theme of the WHO acquiring the ability to order States to provide resources, and (later) know-how and intellectual property when ordered by the DG to do so.

NEW Article 13A WHO Led International Public Health Response

This new article explicitly lays out the new international public health order, with the WHO in charge at the center, rather than national sovereignty being paramount.

“States Parties recognize WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response.”

This requires States to follow WHO recommendations in a PHEIC – declared by an individual (DG) whose position is determined by non-democratic states and who is open to wide influence by private and corporate money. The criteria for PHEIC are deliberately vague, and at the DG’s discretion. This is an amazing reversal of roles of the WHO versus States, and clearly abrogates sovereignty.

The wild failure of Covid response, and the WHO’s abrogation of its own guidelines, should give pause for thought here. The WHO could mandate abrogation of bodily autonomy on states regarding medication or vaccination, or testing.

“Upon request of WHO, States Parties with the production capacities shall undertake measures to scale up production of health products, including through diversification of production, technology transfer and capacity building especially in the developing countries.”

The WHO can require (tell) countries to scale-up production of certain products – to interfere with markets and commerce, at the WHO’s (DG’s) discretion.

NEW Article 13A WHO Led International Public Health Response

“**States Parties recognize WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response**.”

This requires States to follow WHO recommendations in a PHEIC – declared by an individual (DG) whose position is determined by non-democratic states and who is open to wide influence by private and corporate money. The criteria for PHEIC are deliberately vague, and at the DG’s discretion. This is an amazing reversal of roles of WHO versus States, and clearly abrogates sovereignty. It is requiring sovereign states to submit themselves to an external authority, whenever that authority desires it (as the WHO DG can through previous amendments above, declare a PHEIC on the basis of just perceiving the potential form an infectious disease event).

The Covid response, including the WHO’s abrogation of its own guidelines and policies, should give pause for thought here. The WHO could mandate abrogation of bodily autonomy on states regarding medication or vaccination, or testing.

“**Upon request of WHO, States Parties with the production capacities shall undertake measures to scale up production of health products, including through diversification of production, technology transfer and capacity building especially in the developing countries.**”

The WHO can require (tell) countries to scale-up production of certain products – to interfere with markets and commerce, at WHO’s (DG’s) discretion.

“ [WHO] shall collaborate with other international organizations, and other stakeholders consistent with the provisions of FENSA, for responding to public health emergency of international concern.**”**

This enables the WHO to collaborate with non-State actors (private individuals, Foundations, private corporations (Pharma, its sponsors etc.). FENSA, which restricts such contacts, can be varied by the DG in a ‘health emergency’ that the DG declares.

WHO requiring countries to provide resources, intellectual property and knowhow at WHO’s discretion.

New Article 13A: Access to Health Products, Technologies and Know-How for Public Health Response

“States Parties shall co-operate with each other and WHO to comply with such recommendations pursuant to paragraph 1 and shall take measures to ensure timely availability and affordability of required health products such as diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines, and other medical devices required for the effective response to a public health emergency of international concern.”

The WHO determines response within States’ borders, and requires States to provide aid to other countries. At the WHO’s behest.

“**States Parties shall provide, in their intellectual property laws and related laws and regulations, exemptions and limitations to the exclusive rights of intellectual property holders to facilitate the manufacture, export and import of the required health products, including their materials and components**.”

States shall change their intellectual property (IP) laws, to allow sharing of IP on the DG’s determination of a PHEIC, at his/her discretion, to whom they determine. It is difficult to imagine a sane State would do this, but it is clearly required here.

“States Parties shall use or assign to potential manufacturers, especially from developing countries, on a non-exclusive basis, the rights over health product(s) or technology(ies)”

The WHO can require IP to be shared with other States (and thereby IP is passed to private corporations within those States.

“Upon request of a State Party, other States Parties or WHO shall rapidly cooperate and share relevant regulatory dossiers submitted by manufacturers concerning safety and efficacy, and manufacturing and quality control processes, within 30 days”

Requirement to release confidential regulatory dossiers to other States, including to WHO qualification programme, and to sovereign state regulatory agencies.

“[WHO shal]… establish a database of raw materials and their potential suppliers, e) establish a repository for cell-lines to accelerate the production and regulatory of similar biotherapeutics products and vaccines”,

WHO holding such materials is unprecedented. Under whose laws and regulatory requirements would this be done? Who is responsible for damage and harm?

“**States Parties shall take measures to ensure that the activities of non-state actors, especially the manufacturers and those claiming associated intellectual property rights, do not conflict with the right to the highest attainable standard of health and these Regulations and are in compliance with measures taken by the WHO and the States Parties under this provision, which includes:**

a) to comply with WHO recommended measures including allocation mechanism made pursuant to paragraph 1.

b) to donate a certain percentage of their production at the request of WHO.

c) to publish the pricing policy transparently.

d) to share the technologies, know-how for the diversification of production.

e) to deposit cell-lines or share other details required by WHO repositories or database established pursuant to paragraph 5.

f) to submit regulatory dossiers concerning safety and efficacy, and manufacturing and quality

control processes, when called for by the States Parties or WHO.”

The ‘highest attainable standard of health is beyond what any State has now. This effectively means, as worded, that the WHO can require any state to release almost any confidential product and intellectual property on any product related to the health sector.

This is an amazing list. The DG (WHO) on their own criteria can declare an event, then require a State to contribute resources and give up sole rights to intellectual property of its citizens, and share information to allow others to manufacture their citizen’s products in direct competition. The WHO also requires States to donate products to the WHO /other States on DG’s demand.

To understand the scope of the intellectual property rights to be forfeited to the DG, the definitions (Article 1) describe them as:

“health technologies and know-how” includes organized set or combination of knowledge, skills, health products, procedures, databases and systems developed to solve a health problem and improve quality of life, including those relating to development or manufacture of health products or their combination, its application or usage …”.

WHO claiming control of individuals and their rights within States

Article 18 Recommendations with respect to persons, baggage, cargo, containers, conveyances, goods and postal parcels.

“Recommendations issued by WHO to States Parties with respect to persons may include the following advice:…..

– review proof of medical examination and any laboratory analysis;

require medical examinations;
review proof of vaccination or other prophylaxis;
require vaccination or other prophylaxis;
place suspect persons under public health observation;
implement quarantine or other health measures for suspect persons;
implement isolation and treatment where necessary of affected persons;
implement tracing of contacts of suspect or affected persons;
refuse entry of suspect and affected persons;
refuse entry of unaffected persons to affected areas; and
implement exit screening and/or restrictions on persons from affected areas.”

This (article 18) was already in existence. New Article 13A, however, now requires States to follow WHO recommendations. The WHO will thus now be able to, based on the sole determination of an individual (DG) under influence of non-democratic states and private entities, order states to incarcerate their citizens, inject them, require identification of medical status, medically examine, isolate and restrict travel.

This is clearly insane.

“[Recommendations issued by WHO shall]…ensure mechanisms to develop and apply a traveller’s health declaration in international public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) to provide better information about travel itinerary, possible symptoms that could be manifested or any prevention measures that have been complied with such as facilitation of contact tracing, if necessary.”

The WHO can require the availability of private travel (itinerary) information, and require the provision of medical travel documents. This is requiring the disclosure of private medical information to the WHO.

Article 23 Health measures on arrival and departure

“Documents containing information concerning traveller’s destination (hereinafter Passenger Locator Forms, PLFs) should preferably be produced in digital form, with paper form as a residual option. Such information should not duplicate the information the traveller already submitted in relation to the same journey, provided the competence authority can have access to it for the purpose of contact tracing.”

Text (which clearly needs further work) aimed at future requirements for vaccine passports for travel.

WHO setting the scene for digital health passports

Article 35 General rule

“**Digital health documents must incorporate means to verify their authenticity via retrieval from an official web site, such as a QR code.**”

Further presaging digital IDs containing health information, that must be available to enable travel (i.e. not at individual’s discretion).

Article 36 Certificates of vaccination or other prophylaxis

“Such proofs may include test certificates and recovery certificates. These certificates may be designed and approved by the Health Assembly according to the provisions set out for digital vaccination or prophylaxis certificates, and should be deemed as substitutes for, or be complementary to, the digital or paper certificates of vaccination or prophylaxis.”

As above. Setting up the WHO/WHA to set international travel requirements (the UDHR says there is a basic right to travel). While not new here, this is expanded by the expansion of PHEIC provisions, and focused more on the DG’s determination. It is moving from national sovereignty to a transnational travel control beyond national sovereignty – not directly answerable to populations, but heavily funded and influenced by private interests.

“Health measures taken pursuant to these Regulations, including the recommendations made under Article 15 and 16, shall be initiated and completed without delay by all State Parties”

Requirement for all countries to comply with these recommendations (they only take 50 percent of the WHA to implement).

“State Parties shall also take measures to ensure Non-State Actors operating in their respective territories comply with such measures**.”**

Also requires private entities and citizens within the state to comply (which likely requires changes of many national laws, and the relationship between government and people).

This requires a totalitarian approach from the State, subject to a totalitarian approach from a supra-state (but clearly not meritocratic) entity. Following these IHR revisions, the DG of WHO, at his discretion, has the capacity to order private entities and citizens in any country to comply with his/her directives.

WHO being empowered to order changes within States, including restrictions on freedom of speech.

Article 43 Additional health measures

“[Measures implemented by States shall not be more restrictive than.]… would achieve attain the appropriate highest achievable level of health protection.”

These changes are very significant. Appropriate’ meant taking into account the costs and balancing these against potential gains. It is a sensible approach that takes the whole of society and population needs into account (good public health).

‘highest achievable level of protection’ means elevating this problem (an infectious disease or potential disease) above all other health and human/societal concerns. This is stupid, and probably reflects lack of thought and poor understanding of public health.

“WHO may request that shall make recommendations to the State Party concerned reconsider to modify or rescind the application of the additional health measures …”

On removing health interventions, the WHO DG now can require such actions (States have agreed to ‘recommendations’ being binding above). As elsewhere, the WHO is not the instructing party, not the suggesting party. The WHO takes sovereignty over formerly State matters. The following paragraph requires a response in 2 weeks rather than formerly 3 months.

Article 44 Collaboration and assistance

“States Parties shall undertake to collaborate with and assist each other, in particular developing countries States Parties, upon request, _to the extent possible_, in:…”

Changes move the relationship from the WHO suggesting/requesting, to the WHO requiring.

“in countering the dissemination of false and unreliable information about public health events, preventive and anti-epidemic measures and activities in the media, social networks and other ways of disseminating such information.”

States undertake to work with the WHO to control information and limit free speech.

“the formulation of proposed laws and other legal and administrative provisions for the implementation of these Regulations.”

States agree to pass laws to implement restrictions on free speech and sharing of information.

“countering the dissemination of false and unreliable information about public health events, preventive and anti-epidemic measures and activities in the media, social networks and other ways of disseminating such information;…”

The WHO shall work with countries to control free speech and flow of information (based on their own criteria of what is right and wrong).

Nuts and Bolts of the verification bureaucracy to ensure countries follow WHO requirements.

NEW Chapter IV (Article 53 bis-quater): The Compliance Committee

53 bis Terms of reference and composition

“The State Parties shall establish a Compliance Committee that shall be responsible for:

(a) Considering information submitted to it by WHO and States Parties relating to compliance with obligations under these Regulations;

(b) Monitoring, advising on, and/or facilitating assistance on matters relating to compliance with a view to assisting States Parties to comply with obligations under these Regulations;

(c) Promoting compliance by addressing concerns raised by States Parties regarding implementation of, and compliance with, obligations under these Regulations; and

(d) Submitting an annual report to each Health Assembly describing:

(i) The work of the Compliance Committee during the reporting period;

(ii) The concerns regarding non-compliance during the reporting period; and (iii) Any conclusions and recommendations of the Committee.

2. The Compliance Committee shall be authorized to:

(a) Request further information on matters under its consideration;

(b) Undertake, with the consent of any State Party concerned, information gathering in the territory of that State Party; (c) Consider any relevant information submitted to it; (d) Seek the services of experts and advisers, including representatives of NGOs or members of the public, as appropriate; and (e) Make recommendations to a State Party concerned and/or WHO regarding how the State Sarty may improve compliance and any recommended technical assistance and financial support.”

This sets up the permanent review mechanism to monitor the compliance of States with the WHO’s dictates on public health. This is a huge new bureaucracy, both centrally (WHO) and with a significant resource drain on each State. It reflects the review mechanism of the UN human rights office.

More on WHO requiring states to provide taxpayer money to WHO’s work, and restricting freedom of populations to question this work.

ANNEX 1

A. CORE CAPACITY REQUIREMENTS FOR DISEASE DETECTION, SURVEILLANCE

AND HEALTH EMERGENCY RESPONSE

“**Developed Countries States parties shall provide financial and technological assistance to the Developing Countries States Parties in order to ensure state-of-the-art facilities in developing countries States Parties, including through international financial mechanism…”**

States shall provide (i.e. divert from other priorities) aid funding to help other States develop capacity. This has a clear opportunity cost in other disease/societal programs where funding must accordingly be reduced. However, this will no longer be in the budgetary control of States, but required by an external entity (WHO).

“**At a global level, WHO shall… Counter misinformation and disinformation”.**

As above, the WHO takes the role of policing / countering free speech and exchange of information (funded by the taxes of those whose speech they are suppressing).

Useful links

The WHO documents regarding the IHR amendments
A summary of the amendments and their implications

WGIHR_Compilation-Annotated-1

Author

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

[](https://brownstone.org/author/david-bell/)

Health · Bureaucracy · UN · DavidBell · Politics

April 14, 2023 at 11:35:59 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://brownstone.org/articles/amendments-who-ihr-annotated-guide/

In the War Between Judaism and Democracy in Israel, Anything Is Possible

Bibi is by nature cautious – even timid. His radical ministers, however, are not, Alastair Crooke writes.

Michael Omer-Man writes: Almost exactly 10 years ago, a young star rising in the Likud party, spoke to an audience committed to the outright annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories, laying out his blueprint. A year later, this same speaker set out certain prerequisites to full annexation: Firstly, a shift in the way the Israeli public thinks about a ‘two-state solution’ for Palestine; and secondly, a radical recast of the legal system “that will allow us to take those steps on the ground … that advance sovereignty”.

What was reflected in this statement is the structural dichotomy inherent within the ‘idea’ of ‘Israel’: What then is ‘Israel’? One side holds that Israel was founded as a ‘balance’ between Jewishness and Democracy. The other says ‘nonsense’; it was always the establishment of Israel on the “Land of Israel”.

Ami Pedahzur, a political scientist studying the Israeli Right, explains that the religious Right “has always considered the Israeli Supreme Court to be an abomination”. He points out that the extremist Meir Kahane “once wrote extensively about the tension between Judaism and democracy and the need for a Sanhedrin [a biblical system of judges] instead of the extant Israeli judicial system”.

In Israel’s attempt to balance these opposing visions and interpretations of history, the Israeli Right sees the judiciary as deliberately having been tilted toward democracy (by one part of the Israeli élite). This simmering tension finally exploded with the 1995 Supreme Court claim that it possessed power of judicial review over Knesset (parliamentary) legislation deemed to be in conflict with Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. (An Israeli constitution has been considered since 1949, but never actuated.)

Well, that ‘young star’ of 10 years ago – who asserted so forcefully “We cannot accept … a judicial system that is controlled by a radical leftist, post-Zionist minority that elects itself behind closed doors – dictating to us its own values – today is Israel’s Justice Minister, Yariv Levin.

And with time, Netanyahu has indeed already brought about that first prerequisite (outlined by Levin almost a decade ago): The Israeli public perspective on the two-state Olso formula is radically changed. Political support for that project hovers close to zero in the political sphere.

More than that, today’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, explicitly shares the same ideology as Levin and his colleagues – namely that Jews have a right to settle in any, and all, parts of the ‘Land of Israel’; he also believes that the very survival of the Jewish people is dependent on the actuation of that divine obligation into practice.

Many on the Israeli Right, Omer-Man suggests, therefore see the Supreme Court as “the central impediment to their ability to fulfil their annexationist dreams, which for them are a combination of messianic and ideological commandments”.

They saw the 1995 Supreme Court ruling as ‘a coup’ that ushered in the judiciary’s supremacy over law and politics. This is a view that is hotly contested – to the point of near civil war – by those who advocate for democracy versus a strict Judaic vision of religious law.

From the perspective of the Right, Ariel Kahana notes that although

“they have continued to win time and again – but they have never held power in the true sense of the word. Through the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the defence establishment, academia, cultural elites, the media, and some of the economic wheelers and dealers, the Left’s doctrine continued to dominate Israel’s power foci. In fact, regardless of who the cabinet ministers were, the old guard has continued with its obstructionist insurgency”.

Today, however, the numbers are with the Right – and we are witnessing the Israeli Right’s counter-coup: a judicial ‘reform’ which would centralize power in the Knesset – precisely by dismantling the legal system’s current checks and balances.

Ostensibly this schism constitutes the crisis bringing hundreds of thousand Israelis on to the street. Prima Facie, in much of the media, at issue is who has the final word: the Knesset or the Supreme Court.

Or, is it? For, beneath the surface, unacknowledged and mostly unsaid, is something deeper: It is the conflict between Realpolitik versus Completion of the Zionist project. Put starkly, the Right says it’s clear: Without Judaism we have no identity; and no reason to be in this land.

The ‘less said’ fact is that much of the electorate actually agrees with the Right in principle, yet opposes the full annexation of the West Bank on pragmatic grounds: “They believe that the status quo of a “temporary” 55-plus-year military occupation is the more strategically prudent”.

“Formally [annexing West Bank] would make it too difficult to convince the world that Israel is not an apartheid regime in which half of the population — Palestinians — are denied basic democratic, civil, and human rights”.

That other unresolved contradiction (that of continuing occupation within ‘democracy’) is also submerged by the prevalent mantra of ‘Right wing Orbánism versus democracy’. Ahmad Tibi, an Palestinian member of the Knesset earlier has wryly noted: “Israel indeed is ‘Jewish and democratic’: It is democratic toward Jews – and Jewish toward Arabs”.

The mass of protestors gathered in Tel Aviv carefully choose to avoid this oxymoron (other than around the kitchen table) – as a Haaretz editorial a few days ago made clear: “Israel’s opposition is for Jews only”.

Thus, the crisis that some are warning could lead to civil war at its crux is that between one group – which is no longer content to wait for the right conditions to arrive to fulfil the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel – versus an outraged opposition that prefers sticking to the political tradition of buying time by “deciding not to decide”, Omer-Man underlines.

And although there are ‘moderates’ amongst the Likud lawmakers, their concerns are eclipsed by the exultant mood at their party’s base:

“Senior Likud officials, led by Netanyahu, have incited Likud voters against the legal system for years, and now the tiger is out of control. It has its trainer in its jaws and threatens to crush him if he makes concessions”.

The flames lick around Netanyahu’s feet. The U.S. wants quiet; It does not want a war with Iran. It does not want a new Palestinian Intifada – and will hold Netanyahu’s feet to the flames until he ‘controls’ his coalition allies and returns to an Hebraic ‘quietism’.

But he can’t. It’s not possible. Netanyahu is held limp in the tiger’s jaws. Events are out of his control.

A prominent member of Likud’s central committee told Haaretz this week:

“I don’t care if I have nothing to eat, if the army falls apart, if everything here is destroyed … The main thing is that they not humiliate us once again, and appoint Ashkenazi judges over us”.

The ‘second Israel’ genres have wailed against ‘the ten Ashkenazai judges’ who discredited their leader (Arye Dery), whilst breaking into a song of praise for the ‘only Sephardic judge’ who was sympathetic to Dery. Yes, the ethnic and tribal schisms form a further part of this crisis. (A bill that effectively would reverse the Supreme Court decision barring Dery from his ministerial position over previous corruption charges is currently making its way through the Knesset).

The appeal of Religious Zionism is often attributed to its growing strength amongst the young – particularly ultra-Orthodox men and traditional Mizrahi voters. What became abundantly clear and unexpected in recent weeks, however, is that the appeal of a racist such as Ben-Gvir, is spreading to the young secular left in Israel. Among young Israelis (ages 18 – 24), more than 70% identify today as Right.

Just to be clear: The Mizrahi ‘underclass’, together with the Settler Right, have ousted the ‘old’ Ashkenazi élite from their hold on power. They have waited many years for this moment; their numbers are there. Power has been rotated. The fuse to today’s particular crisis was lit long ago, not by Netanyahu, but by Ariel Sharon in 2001, with his entry to the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif).

Sharon had earlier perceived that a moment would arrive – with a weakened U.S. – when it might prove propitious for Israel to complete the Zionist project and seize all the ‘Land of Israel’. The plans for this venture have been incubating over two decades. Sharon lit the fuse – and Netanyahu duly took on the task of curating a constituency towards despising Oslo and the judicial system.

The project’s content is explicitly acknowledged: To annex the West Bank and to transfer any political rights of Palestinians remaining there to a new national state to the east of the River Jordan, on the site of what now is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In the confusion and violence which would accompany such a move, Palestinians would be ‘persuaded’ to migrate to the ‘other bank’. As Hussein Ibish warned two weeks ago:

“We’re getting awfully close to the point where the Israeli government, and even Israeli society, could countenance a big annexation – and even expulsion [of Palestinians] – done in the middle of an outbreak of violence, and it would be framed as a painful necessity,” Ibish said. Such a move, he added, would be justified “as the government saying ‘We’ve got to protect Israeli settlers – they are citizens too – and we can’t let this go on anymore. Therefore we have to annex and even expel Palestinians.’”

To be fair, the unspoken fear of many secular protesters in Israel today, is not just that of being politically deposed, and their secular lifestyle circumscribed by religious zealots (though that is a major driver to sentiment), but rather, by the unspoken fear that to implement such a radical project against the Palestinians would lead to Regional war.

And ‘that’ is far from an unreasonable fear.

So there are two existential fears: One, that survival of the Jewish people is contingent on fulfilling the obligation to establish ‘Israel’ as ordained; and two, that to implement the consequent exodus of the Palestinians would likely result in the demise of the Israeli State (through war).

Suddenly and unexpectedly, into this fraught situation – with Netanyahu buffeted by a whirlwind of external and internal pressures – arrived a bombshell: Netanyahu was stripped of his ace card – Iran. In Beijing, China had secretly orchestrated not just the resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but laid down the framework for a regional security architecture.

This represents a nightmare for Washington and Netanyahu – particularly for the latter, however.

Since the early 1990s, Iran has served both these parties as the ‘bogey man’, by which to divert attention from Israel and the situation of the Palestinians. It has worked well, with the Europeans acting as enthusiastic collaborators in facilitating (or ‘mitigating’ – as they would see it), Israel’s ‘temporary’, 55-year occupation of the West Bank. The EU even financed it.

But now, that is blown away. Netanyahu may ‘huff and puff’ about Iran, but absent a Saudi and Gulf willingness to lend Arab legitimacy to any military action against Iran (with all the risks that entails), Netanyahu’ s ability to distract from the domestic crisis is severely limited. Any call to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities is an obvious non-starter in the light of the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement.

Netanyahu may not want a show-down with Team Biden, but that’s what is coming. Bibi is by nature cautious – even timid. His radical Ministers, however, are not.

They need a crisis (but only when the ‘prerequisites’ are all lined up). It is clear that the wholesale stripping of Palestinian rights, in tandem with the emasculation of the Supreme Court, is not a project that can be expected to quietly proceed in normal circumstances – especially in the present emotive state across the global sphere.

No doubt, the Israeli Right has been watching how the Lockdown ‘Emergency-crisis fear’ in Europe was used to mobilise a people to accept a compulsion and restrictions to life that in any other circumstance they would never rationally accept.

It won’t be a new pandemic emergency, of course, in the Israeli case. But the new Palestinian Authority-led ‘SWAT-squads’ arresting Palestinian resistance fighters in broad daylight is bringing the West Bank ‘pressure-cooker’ close to blow-out.

Ben Gvir may simply decide to follow in Sharon’s footsteps – to allow and participate in the Passover ceremony of sacrificing a lamb on Al-Aqsa (the Temple Mount) – as a symbol of the commitment to rebuild the ‘Third Temple’, permission for which, hitherto has always been denied.

So what happens next? It is impossible to predict. Will the Israeli military intervene? Will the U.S. intervene? Will one side back-down (unlikely says ex-Head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland)? Yet even if the ‘Judicial reform’ is somehow halted, as one exasperated Israeli forecast, “Even if this time the attempt does not succeed, it’s likely that they [the Right] will try again in another two years, another five years, another 10 years. The struggle will be long and difficult, and no one can guarantee what the result will be.”

Israel · Ideology · AlastairCrooke · Politics · Violence · Law

April 1, 2023 at 8:41:00 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/03/19/in-the-war-between-judaism-and-democracy-in-israel-anything-is-possible/

Why was the Soviet Union created?

When Putin in his ideological salvo that preceded the actual war in Ukraine placed the blame for the existence of the Ukraine within its current borders on Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, he not only opened up the Pandora’s box of borders, but led to the renewed discussion of the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. (Putin’s blaming of the three Soviet leaders was as follows: Lenin for ignoring the Russian majority population in the Donbass and thus “giving” the Donbass to Ukraine; Stalin for “giving” the eastern part of Poland after World War II to Ukraine, and Khrushchev who “for whatever reasons” decided in 1954 to transfer the Crimea to the Ukraine.)

There is often very little understanding among many, especially young, people about the ideology behind the creation of the Soviet Union. In an otherwise good article recently published in the “National Interest”, Mark Katz rejects Putin’s critique of Lenin by arguing that “instead of blaming Lenin, Putin should draw lessons from Lenin’s realization that a more accommodative approach toward Ukrainian nationalism would better serve Russia’s long-term interests”.

This point however shows marked lack of understanding by Katz of the forces that led to the creation of the Soviet Union, in addition to imputing Lenin to have been concerned with “Russia’s [sic!] long-term interest” - a statement that only people unfamiliar with Lenin’s ideology and writings could make. But let us go back to the creation of the Soviet Union. The most important person behind the creation of the Union was Stalin, not Lenin. Stalin, as is well known was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and was, within the Bolshevik leadership the person in charge of nationality questions, including obviously the creation of a new Union composed of ethnically-based republics. (At the creation there were six republics: RSFSR, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Transcaucasian Federation composed of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.) Here is what Stalin said about the creation of the Union:

Finally, there is a third group of facts, which also call for union and which are associated with the structure of the Soviet regime, with the class nature of the Soviet regime. The Soviet regime is so constructed that, being international in its intrinsic nature, it in every way fosters the idea of union among the masses and itself impels them to take the path of union. Whereas capital, private property and exploitation disunite people, split them into mutually hostile camps, examples of which are provided by Great Britain, France and even small multi-national states like Poland and Yugoslavia with their irreconcilable internal national contradictions which corrode the very foundations of these states** whereas, I say, over there, in the West, where capitalist democracy reigns and where the states are based on private property, the very basis of the state fosters national bickering, conflicts and struggle, here, in the world of Soviets, where the regime is based not on capital but on labour, where the regime is based not on private property, but on collective property, where the regime is based not on the exploitation of man by man, but on the struggle against such exploitation, here, on the contrary, the very nature of the regime fosters among the laboring masses a natural striving towards union in a single socialist family. (my emphasis)

Very similar statements are repeated in several publications, speeches and interviews that Stalin gave at that time. The links are here and I would suggest that people read at least some of them. For my purpose here, the key thing to understand is that the ideology behind the creation of the Union was not whether that Union, with the Ukraine defined one way or another, would be more or less stable at Katz implies, but that the Union is simply the reflection of the end of national and class contradictions that come with the socialist revolution. It is thus a “natural” striving of peoples liberated from under the rule of capital, and the most important point it is therefore open for all other parts of the world that, sooner or later, may also become free. The USSR was envisaged not as a finished state, but as an open-ended state that would grow as socialism spreads to the extent of including within it all European, and perhaps even all countries in the world.

To make this union more attractive, the open-endedness was not only in accepting the new countries, but in allowing those that are included to leave. Thus “the character of the union should be voluntary, exclusively voluntary, and every national republic should retain the right to secede from the Union. Thus, the voluntary principle must be made the basis of the Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Here the point is made by Stalin, but Lenin, as is well-known, insisted on that double open-endedness even more.

Consequently, it is not the political stability of what then constituted the USSR that was of paramount importance to its Bolshevik founding fathers but its openness. This is a point on which Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the entire leadership were in full agreement. The new federated Soviet Union was not the end- formation, but the beginning-formation. The Bolsheviks expected the success of the revolution in Germany, Austria and Hungary any time. Thus they expected that these new Soviet republics (as they indeed called themselves) would ultimately join them in a federated state even if they were defeated for now. It is notable that the USSR has no geographical denomination in its name. When the United States of America were created (in a somewhat similar fashion like the USSR) the founding fathers did include a geographical limit in its name. Not so the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It is then fully understandable that Mao Zedong proposed in 1949 to Stalin that China join the USSR (Stalin, after some reflection, rejected the idea). It was a “normal” view entertained by many communists world-wide. When the communist revolution won in Yugoslavia, many people there thought that the next step would be the accession to the Soviet Union. I recall my father’s friends in 1960s in their conversations talking of believing in the 1940s that Yugoslavia would immediately apply to become another republic of the USSR.

Perhaps for today’s generations that know very little about the communist ideology and the forces that led to the creation of the USSR, this may be difficult to grasp, but it would help to think by analogy: if instead of the USSR they think of the European Union. The EU is a similar supra-national and ideological creation, and it is at present thought “natural” in many parts of Europe to believe that countries will ultimately “accede” to that Union. It was likewise thought “natural” among the communists that, as individual countries became free, they would “accede” to the Soviet Union.

One can think of at least two other historical precedents when ideological homogeneity was thought sufficient to trump over all other allegiances including national. The first precedent is the Christian empire that was thought indissoluble and one. The emperor in Constantinople was thus shocked when the Pope decided to bestow the crown on Charlemagne and create yet the second Christian emperor. It was thought inconceivable that Christians would have two different empires since they were all just that: Christians. Another example is Islam where too, at the origin, it was believed that all Muslims, anywhere in the world, would be united into a single political union, the khalifate. That too rather quickly evaporated. But as in the case of communism and the Soviet Union, it is important to understand the ideological motives of the founders and not to ascribe to them the goals that seem reasonable to us now, but that they simply did not have at the time.

Russia · SovietUnion · History · BrankoMilanovic · Ideology · Politics

October 17, 2022 at 4:40:04 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/why-was-the-soviet-union-created

The Italian Election: the Right Wins, but don't Expect big Changes

The data are now almost definitive and, as you probably already know, it was a historical triumph for the right-wing parties, and in particular for the "Fratelli d'Italia" coalition led by Giorgia Meloni.

The triumph of the right may make people outside Italy worried, but there is no reason. Elections in the West are now mainly for show. The Italian government has almost zero power, it is all in the hands of the European Commission, in turn controlled by the global powers. To say nothing about the pervasive corruption that affects the West as a whole. No decision can be taken without satisfying the various lobbies and mafias engaged in the feeding frenzy on what is left of the Italian economy.

In any case, the left-wing parties in power up to now have made such strongly right-wing choices that I doubt that the "real" right can be more rightish than them!

So, don't worry too much about who is the theoretical leader of the Italian government. Ms. Meloni is, in my opinion, not a bad person, but she can't do much more than rubber-stamp decisions taken elsewhere. Changes are going to come, but not as a result of elections. Right now, it is difficult to divine what's going to happen in the difficult winter that's coming, but something is going to happen. Something big.

Incidentally, the left played the game hard by using the "Putin card," that is, telling Italians not to vote for Putin's friends. Instead, Italians flocked to vote exactly for them. I leave to you the task of interpreting this interesting fact.

"Do not vote for Putin's friends." La Repubblica, Sep 23, 2022

UgoBardi · Politics · Italy · Ideology · EU · Propaganda

September 26, 2022 at 9:08:18 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/09/the-italian-election-right-wins-but.html

The Royal Accession

On Monday, Charles III entered Buckingham Palace for the first time as king. It was the British people’s first real chance to greet their new sovereign. Huge crowds thronged outside the gates, letting out deafening cheers every time he raised his hand to wave. His Majesty seemed genuinely touched—and a little surprised.

For decades, Charles has been mildly unpopular with the British public. For half a century, he has been the British media’s favorite punching-bag. Films and television shows about the Royal Family always cast him in a negative light. On a good day, his approval rating hovers around 50 percent.

Yet this anti-Charles sentiment has always seemed a little forced. Britain’s new king is one of the most fascinating men in public life.

The 70 years he spent waiting to inherit the throne certainly were not wasted. Charles used his family’s wealth and influence exactly as one ought to do. Above all, he has devoted himself to good works. He is not only Britain’s foremost philanthropist, but also her greatest patron of the arts. And he has used his spare time to broaden his own horizons. He has traveled almost constantly, studying with the greatest philosophers, painters, and poets (and polo players) in the world. Once upon a time, we would have called him a renaissance man.

Charles is the first “high church” monarch since James II. The British aristocracy have always been decidedly “low church.” They prefer simpler forms of worship, more in keeping with the Protestant tradition. Meanwhile, Charles—now Supreme Governor of the Church of England—has one foot in the Orthodox Church. As Prince of Wales, he was known to sneak away from Clarence House to go on retreat at Mount Athos and created a Byzantine-style prayer corner in his private residence.

Still, Charles is firmly devoted to the Anglican Church. He has long served as a patron of the Prayer Book Society, an organization for liturgical conservatives.

Charles is a theological conservative as well. During a trip to Pennsylvania, he opted to worship at a Presbyterian church rather than the local Episcopal cathedral. (The Episcopal Church is a member of the Anglican Communion, whose “Mother Church” is the C of E. It is also the Communion’s most liberal province.) When a layman asked him why, he reportedly said, “You know very, very well why I cannot worship in an Episcopal Church.”

The King is also a follower of the Traditionalist School, a group of scholars and philosophers who are committed to the idea of “resacralization.” As Charles himself explained,

The teachings of the Traditionalists should not, in any sense, be taken to mean that they seek, as it were, to repeat the past—or, indeed, simply to draw a distinction between the present and the past. Theirs is not a nostalgia for the past, but a yearning for the sacred and, if they defend the past, it is because in the pre-modern world all civilizations were marked by the presence of the sacred.

Charles’s affinity for the Traditionalist School explains his novel translation of the title Fidei Defensor. First bestowed on Henry VIII by Leo X (before all the unpleasantness), it is usually translated as “Defender of the Faith”—that is, the Christian faith. Yet Charles floated the idea of calling himself “Defender of Faith”—that is, a belief in the presence of the sacred.

The idea went over badly, even with Rowan Williams, then archbishop of Canterbury. Usually seen as a moderate, Williams insisted that the monarch “has a relationship with the Christian Church of a kind he does not have with other faith communities.” Happily, Charles dropped the whole business.

This Traditionalism may also explain his (in)famous love for Islam. This affinity hasn’t made him many friends on the British right. Yet Charles isn’t naïve. He has studied extensively with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Sufi philosopher who was exiled from Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini. The King understands Islam at its best and at its worst. So, he feels a duty to help “build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.” On the other hand, he has raised millions of dollars to help Christians who are being persecuted by Islamists in the Middle East.

Charles III is a traditionalist (with a little “t”) as well. To quote His Majesty,

These traditions, which form the basis of mankind’s most civilized values and have been handed down to us over many centuries, are not just part of our inner religious life. They have an intensely practical relevance to the creation of real beauty in the arts, to an architecture which brings harmony and inspiration to people’s lives and to the development within the individual of a sense of balance which is, to my mind, the hallmark of a civilized person.

Charles has spent most of his adult life in his efforts to recreate that balance. In 2005 he founded the Prince’s School of Traditional arts, which seeks to “to continue the living traditions of the world's sacred and traditional art forms.” He also serves as patron of the Temenos Academy, whose fellows include localist Hossein Nasr, Rowan Williams, and the American localist Wendell Berry.

I think the affinity between Charles and Berry is instructive. Both are traditionalists, though not exactly conservatives. They’re more what my friend Bill Kauffman would call “reactionary radicals.” Both are critics of industrialism, consumer capitalism, and scientism. Both champion agrarianism. They believe that small-scale agriculture (that is, family farms) are the only basis for a stable and happy society. As a matter of fact, Charles has written a couple of books on organic gardening.

Both are also what we might call Christian ecologists. They’re environmentalists driven less by fear of climate change than by love for God’s creation. As the new king wrote in his book Harmony, “We are not the masters of creation. No matter how sophisticated our technology has become, the simple fact is that we are not separate from Nature. Just like everything else, we are nature.”

The King is no primitivist, however. Charles is also a pioneer of the New Urbanism. Since the 1980s, the King has been the most outspoken critic of modernist architecture in the English-speaking world. And, here, he pulls no punches. “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe,” he said: “when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”

In 1993, he decided to put his theories to the test. Charles hired the architect Léon Krier to build a brand-new community on four hundred acres of grassland outside of Dorchester. The result is the town of Poundbury.

In Poundbury, all the buildings are designed in the local styles of South West England. Of course, there are no skyscrapers; a “tall” building might be four or five stories tall. Shops and residences are mixed; there’s no hideous business district surrounded by soulless housing units. This also minimizes the need for cars, saving residents time and money while reducing the need for emissions.

Even the King’s worst critics have been forced to admit that his “feudal Disneyland” has been a triumph. Poundbury is beautiful. It is prosperous. And it proves that life can still be lived on a human scale.

Of course, the King is far from perfect. Britain’s media will be sure to point that out whenever they get the chance—and whenever they don’t. Yet every now and then the press will also shed light on Charles’s virtues. They don’t mean to, of course. Usually, they’re taking a shot at him and the bullet ricochets. Still, these moments have allowed the British people to catch a real glimpse of their new king.

Take the “black spider memos.” For decades, it had been rumored that Prince Charles wrote to senior politicians with the hope of effecting policy changes. The media had long dubbed him the “meddling prince.” Then, in 2015, the Guardian (a far-left British newspaper) convinced a government tribunal to publish the letters in full.

The monarchy’s opponents were thrilled. After all, the British Crown has survived in the 21st century by being purely apolitical. Elizabeth II was content to play a purely symbolic role in government. But not Charles. As king, it was suggested, he would insist upon his right to rule as well as reign. The British people (they said) must choose: monarchy or democracy? Of course, the choice was clear. It seemed to spell death for England’s thousand-year-old crown.

Once the public actually got to read the memos, however, all of that changed. They saw him pleading with Tony Blair not to cut subsidies to beef farmers, and instead to help them develop better treatments for bovine tuberculosis. He urged the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to develop better public housing for low-income families. He shared with the Minister for the Environment his concerns about the destruction of rainforests and the overfishing of sea bass.The media had always sought to paint Charles as a goof and a snob. Yet his letters showed him to be witty, self-effacing, intelligent, and compassionate. The British people were amazed and delighted. For a moment, they loved the prince nearly as much as he loved them. That is who Charles is. He is a good man. And he’ll be a good king, if we let him.

UK · Monarchy · Politics · Psychology · Ethics

September 20, 2022 at 10:05:18 AM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-royal-ascension/

The Great Clutching at Pearls

I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adulthood at the end of the one, forty year long, period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.

In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector, significant public housing.

We thought it would last forever.

In 1973 I joined the Liberal Party. Much of the 1974 Liberal Party manifesto I could still believe in now. The above things like public ownership of utilities and major industries and free education were not in the manifesto, because they did not have to be – they already existed and were the basic structure. The manifesto added things like a basic guaranteed income for everybody in society, compulsory worker shareholdings in those industries not nationalised, workers’ councils, and a rent freeze in both public and private sectors.

I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in, like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption are not sustainable or desirable.

Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!

Here are a couple of extracts from the 1974 Liberal manifesto which may surprise you. This kind of language you will not hear from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – indeed it would probably get you thrown out:

That Liberal Party is of course gone, along with the radical, anti-war, anti-unionist traditions of British liberalism. They were diluted by the merger with the SDP and finally killed off by Nick Clegg and the “Orange Bookers” who turned the hybrid party fully neoliberal, a doctrine with almost no resemblance to the liberalism it claims to reassert.

Those hardy souls who follow and support this blog are witnessing the last knockings of the legacy of political thought that was bestowed by John Stuart Mill, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, John A Hobson, Charles Kingsley, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge and many others, seasoned by Piotr Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don’t imagine any further generation attempting to be active in politics will develop their worldview with those thinkers as their primary motivators.

But the point of this self-absorbed drivel is that I am not a Marxist and do not come from an organised labour or socialist background or mindset.

The key thought towards which I am plodding through this morass of explanation is this: I grew up in the one era when capitalism was sufficiently moderated by palliative measures that it seemed a reasonable way to conduct society. That ended around 1980 when the doctrine of neoliberalism took hold of the Western world. In the UK, that doctrine now firmly controls the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour and SNP parties and is promoted relentlessly by both state and corporate media.

The result of this neoliberal domination has been a massive and accelerating expansion in the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills required simply to live. The situation has become unsustainable.

In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neoliberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.

That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut.

This obscenity cannot continue forever.

Wars are not incidental to neoliberalism. They are an essential part of the programme, because untrammelled consumerism requires massive acquisition of natural resources. Constant war has the helpful side-benefit for the global elite of enormous profit to the military industrial complex. The cost in human misery and death is kept at a discreet distance from the Western world save for refugee flows, which meet with a response increasingly founded in the denial of humanity.

The promotion of continual war has led to the acceleration of crisis. Much of the current cost of living explosion can be directly attributed to the provoked, prolonged and pointless war in Ukraine, while neoliberal doctrine forbids control of the horrendous associated profiteering of the energy companies.

There is going to be public anger, come spring, of a strength and reach not seen in my lifetime. The ultra wealthy and their political servants know this, and therefore strong action is being taken to forestall public protest. The new Policing Act is only one of a raft of measures being brought in to clamp down on avenues for free expression of public discontent. Demonstrations can simply be banned if they are “noisy” or an “inconvenience”. The 2 million person march against the Iraq War in London, for example, could have been banned on both grounds.

I met and talked last weekend at the Beautiful Days festival with the admirable Steve Bray; we don’t agree on everything but his public concern is genuine. He is getting used to being removed by police from Parliament Square after being specifically targeted in legislation. I reminded him – and I remind you – that the Blair government had also banned protest near the Westminster parliament, and the Scottish parliament has recently taken powers to do the same. Intolerance of dissent is a feature of modern neoliberalism, as people in Canada and New Zealand are also witnessing – or as Julian Assange might tell you.

But in addition to legislative and state attack on protest, the neoliberal state is also ramping up its more subtle elements of control. The security services are continually being expanded. The media is not only increasingly concentrated, it is increasingly under direct security service influence – the Integrity Initiative, the Paul Mason revelations, and the barely disguised spookery of Luke Harding and Mark Urban all being small elements of a massive web designed to control the popular imagination.

The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi millionaire, corrupt, neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.

A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me).

Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.

The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour.

It astonishes me that anybody does not see through it.

Rather quaintly, they use different methods on women. Brigadier Janis Karpinski was the chosen patsy to take the blame for the USA’s Abu Ghraib atrocities (entirely unfairly – she had no role or authority in the CIA controlled portion of the jail where the atrocities took place). Dismissed from her post, she was prepared to testify to a memo personally signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorising torture.

How did the US security services fit up a woman, not a man, who threatened the powers that be? Shoplifting. The day after her enforced resignation, Karpinski was “caught shoplifting”. Because of course, when at the eye of an international storm and under CIA surveillance, you immediately go out and steal some clothes.

The cynical weaponisation of the trans debate has taken the art of using identity politics to split the left to a whole new level, and in particular to alienate the younger generation from traditional left feminists. It has also been used successfully – and remarkably – to neuter the most potent current threat to the UK state, by driving both the non neoliberals and the more ardent Independence supporters out of the SNP.

Similar to the use of gender politics to undermine class solidarity is the weaponisation of accusations of anti-semitism. Just as accusations of misogyny, however false, succeed in alienating left unity, so do allegations of racism.

Here it is not so much that accusations were believed – the conflation of criticism of the crimes of Israel with criticism of Jews per se being all too obvious – as that the attack was so blistering, with the full weight of the establishment political and media class behind it, that people cowered rather than face up to it. The worst example of cowering being Jeremy Corbyn.

One lesson from both the “leaked report” and the Forde report is that Corbyn and his office believed that if they threw enough sacrifices to the wolves, betraying decent people like Tony Greenstein (son of a Rabbi), Mark Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, then the wolves would be appeased.

Israel is the last large scale project of colonisation by physical occupation of a conquered land by European people. Ukraine and Israel are the two current neo-liberal violence projects, which it is not permitted to criticise. The banning of any nuance of opinion on Ukraine should frighten everybody who is thinking rationally. If you are thinking rationally, try this small antidote to the unremitting propaganda:

The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.

This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.

Yet, despite this interwoven system of dampening all dissent from the neoliberal agenda, the Establishment remains terrified of the public reaction to the crisis that is about to hit. The controlled opposition is therefore used to attack actual opposition. Keir Starmer’s banning of Labour MPs from union picket lines is a clear example of this.

We are seeing for the first time in many years an assertion of the rights of organised labour in the face of the massive attack on workers’ real incomes. This is the first time many adults under thirty will ever have encountered the notion that ordinary people are able to defend themselves against exploitation – that is one reason the impressive Mick Lynch has been such a revelation, and is viewed by the “elite” as such a threat.

The Starmer line is that strikes inconvenience the public, which you will recall is the government excuse for banning protest also. Well, of course they do. So does the spiral of real terms wage cuts. The fractured workers of the gig economy are now showing interest in unionising and organising; this is too little and too late to avert the crisis that is about to hit us, but a useful indication of the will to resist.

Popular resistance terrifies the elite and thus must be demonised. The political class is to be protected from insult or contradiction. You may recall in February it was headline news that Keir Starmer was “mobbed” in Whitehall as he walked down the street, by protestors shouting at him over lockdown and over his role in the non-prosecution of Jimmy Savile (and, less reported, in the extradition of Julian Assange).

In fact, nothing happened. Aerial photographs showed that the protestors numbered about a dozen, that they were heavily outnumbered by Starmer’s handlers and the police. The only, mild, violence was initiated by the police. There was no threat to Starmer other than the threat of being verbally opposed by members of the public on subjects he did not wish to be discussed.

This protection of highly paid politicians from the public, this claim that it is extremely bad behaviour for ordinary people to confront elite politicians with an opposing view, is an extraordinary assertion that the people must not challenge their betters.

We are going to see a great deal more of this in the coming crisis. There is currently the most extraordinary manifestation of it in Scotland where the Chief Constable has announced an investigation into people daring to protest against the Tory leadership hustings in Perth.

Impressions of Donald Trump

Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.

Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”

Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.

Celebrity Culture

For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.

America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.

Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.

How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.

Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler

Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:

Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.

Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.

Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.

Political Theater and Propaganda

This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.

Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.

There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)

Monet Paints Trump

These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.

Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.

Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”

Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.

Celebrity Culture

For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.

America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.

Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.

How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.

Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler

Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:

Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.

Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.

Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.

Political Theater and Propaganda

This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.

Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.

There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)

Monet Paints Trump

These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.

Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.

Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.

Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.

Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:

We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director

It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.

It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.

Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.

Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.

Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:

We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director

It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.

It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.

Psychology · Politics · Propaganda · EdwardCurtin

August 27, 2022 at 11:36:02 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

http://edwardcurtin.com/impressions-of-donald-trump/

What's Really Important to Canadian Politicians - Vagina and Vulva Celebration Day!

This is what passes for an important issue to the Trudeau government in Canada which has been one of the leading nations in persecuting its unvaccinated citizens:

I did like how all of the trained (and masked/virtue signalling) Liberal monkeys around her applauded her announcement after she finished speaking, even going so far as to shake her potentially SARS-CoV-2 hand! On the upside, it's nice to know that Canada and Canadians have nothing to worry about; under the Trudeau regime, all of the nation's problems, with the notable exception of its treatment of vaginas and vulvas, have been solved.

Since Canada's Liberal Party bases its philosophy on total inclusion (except for unvaccinated Canadians who are deemed unworthy of using the nation's airlines and rail infrastructure as passengers because they are either misogynistic or racist according to Justin Trudeau) I very quickly noted that MP Pam Damoff made three key omissions. While she celebrates vaginas and vulvas, she seems to have completely forgotten about clitori, uteri and ovaries who are now feeling inferior because they don't have their own special day.

As an aside, here is further information on Ms. Damoff and her role in leading Canada:

...and, as an MP, here is what she is costing Canadian taxpayers:

Member of the House of Commons - $189,500

Parliamentary Secretary - $18,400

...as well as this:

Certainly, Canadian taxpayers are getting their money's worth from Ms. Damoff and her vagina/vulva.

In closing and just in case those Canadians who have an X and Y chromosome can assure themselves of one thing; from the tone of Ms. Damoff's speech, a special celebration day for vas deferens and scrotums is pretty much a non-starter. Sorry about that.

For some reason, this word comes to mind and I can't really explain why:

ViableOpposition · Canada · Politics · Ideology · Video

June 6, 2022 at 12:07:48 AM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2022/06/whats-really-important-to-canadian.html

COVID UPDATE: What is the truth? - PMC

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is SNI-13-167-inline001.jpg

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.[3,6,57] We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence.

For the first time in American history a president, governors, mayors, hospital administrators and federal bureaucrats are determining medical treatments based not on accurate scientifically based or even experience based information, but rather to force the acceptance of special forms of care and “prevention”—including remdesivir, use of respirators and ultimately a series of essentially untested messenger RNA vaccines. For the first time in history medical treatment, protocols are not being formulated based on the experience of the physicians treating the largest number of patients successfully, but rather individuals and bureaucracies that have never treated a single patient—including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, EcoHealth Alliance, the CDC, WHO, state public health officers and hospital administrators.[23,38]

The media (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc), medical societies, state medical boards and the owners of social media have appointed themselves to be the sole source of information concerning this so-called “pandemic”. Websites have been removed, highly credentialed and experienced clinical doctors and scientific experts in the field of infectious diseases have been demonized, careers have been destroyed and all dissenting information has been labeled “misinformation” and “dangerous lies”, even when sourced from top experts in the fields of virology, infectious diseases, pulmonary critical care, and epidemiology. These blackouts of truth occur even when this information is backed by extensive scientific citations from some of the most qualified medical specialists in the world.[23] Incredibly, even individuals, such as Dr. Michael Yeadon, a retired ex-Chief Scientist, and vice-president for the science division of Pfizer Pharmaceutical company in the UK, who charged the company with making an extremely dangerous vaccine, is ignored and demonized. Further, he, along with other highly qualified scientists have stated that no one should take this vaccine.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most cited experts in his field, who has successfully treated over 2000 COVID patients by using a protocol of early treatment (which the so-called experts completely ignored), has been the victim of a particularly vicious assault by those benefiting financially from the vaccines. He has published his results in peer reviewed journals, reporting an 80% reduction in hospitalizations and a 75% reduction in deaths by using early treatment.[44] Despite this, he is under an unrelenting series of attacks by the information controllers, none of which have treated a single patient.

Neither Anthony Fauci, the CDC, WHO nor any medical governmental establishment has ever offered any early treatment other than Tylenol, hydration and call an ambulance once you have difficulty breathing. This is unprecedented in the entire history of medical care as early treatment of infections is critical to saving lives and preventing severe complications. Not only have these medical organizations and federal lapdogs not even suggested early treatment, they attacked anyone who attempted to initiate such treatment with all the weapons at their disposal—loss of license, removal of hospital privileges, shaming, destruction of reputations and even arrest.[2]

A good example of this outrage against freedom of speech and providing informed consent information is the recent suspension by the medical board in Maine of Dr. Meryl Nass’ medical license and the ordering of her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for prescribing Ivermectin and sharing her expertise in this field.[9,65] I know Dr, Nass personally and can vouch for her integrity, brilliance and dedication to truth. Her scientific credentials are impeccable. This behavior by a medical licensing board is reminiscent of the methodology of the Soviet KGB during the period when dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric gulags to silence their dissent.

OTHER UNPRECEDENTED ATTACKS

Another unprecedented tactic is to remove dissenting doctors from their positions as journal editors, reviewers and retracting of their scientific papers from journals, even after these papers have been in print. Until this pandemic event, I have never seen so many journal papers being retracted— the vast majority promoting alternatives to official dogma, especially if the papers question vaccine safety. Normally a submitted paper or study is reviewed by experts in the field, called peer review. These reviews can be quite intense and nit picking in detail, insisting that all errors within the paper be corrected before publication. So, unless fraud or some other major hidden problem is discovered after the paper is in print, the paper remains in the scientific literature.

We are now witnessing a growing number of excellent scientific papers, written by top experts in the field, being retracted from major medical and scientific journals weeks, months and even years after publication. A careful review indicates that in far too many instances the authors dared question accepted dogma by the controllers of scientific publications—especially concerning the safety, alternative treatments or efficacy of vaccines.[12,63] These journals rely on extensive adverting by pharmaceutical companies for their revenue. Several instances have occurred where powerful pharmaceutical companies exerted their influence on owners of these journals to remove articles that in any way question these companies’ products.[13,34,35]

Worse still is the actual designing of medical articles for promoting drugs and pharmaceutical products that involve fake studies, so-called ghostwritten articles.[49,64] Richard Horton is quoted by the Guardian as saying “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”[13,63] Proven fraudulent “ghostwritten” articles sponsored by pharmaceutical giants have appeared regularly in top clinical journals, such as JAMA, and New England Journal of Medicine—never to be removed despite proven scientific abuse and manipulation of data.[49,63]

Ghostwritten articles involve using planning companies whose job it is to design articles containing manipulated data to support a pharmaceutical product and then have these articles accepted by high-impact clinical journals, that is, the journals most likely to affect clinical decision making of doctors. Further, they supply doctors in clinical practice with free reprints of these manipulated articles. The Guardian found 250 companies engaged in this ghostwriting business. The final step in designing these articles for publication in the most prestigious journals is to recruit well recognized medical experts from prestigious institutions, to add their name to these articles. These recruited medical authors are either paid upon agreeing to add their name to these pre- written articles or they do so for the prestige of having their name on an article in a prestigious medical journal.[11]

Of vital importance is the observation by experts in the field of medical publishing that nothing has been done to stop this abuse. Medical ethicists have lamented that because of this widespread practice “you can’t trust anything.” While some journals insist on disclosure information, most doctors reading these articles ignore this information or excuse it and several journals make disclosure more difficult by requiring the reader to find the disclosure statements at another location. Many journals do not police such statements and omissions by authors are common and without punishment.

As concerns the information made available to the public, virtually all the media is under the control of these pharmaceutical giants or others who are benefitting from this “pandemic”. Their stories are all the same, both in content and even wording. Orchestrated coverups occur daily and massive data exposing the lies being generated by these information controllers are hidden from the public. All data coming over the national media (TV, newspaper and magazines), as well as the local news you watch every day, comes only from “official” sources—most of which are lies, distortions or completely manufactured out of whole cloth—all aimed to deceive the public.

Television media receives the majority of its advertising budget from the international pharmaceutical companies—this creates an irresistible influence to report all concocted studies supporting their vaccines and other so-called treatments.[14] In 2020 alone the pharmaceutical industries spent 6.56 billion dollars on such advertising.[13,14] Pharma TV advertising amounted to 4.58 billion, an incredible 75% of their budget. That buys a lot of influence and control over the media. World famous experts within all fields of infectious diseases are excluded from media exposure and from social media should they in any way deviate against the concocted lies and distortions by the makers of these vaccines. In addition, these pharmaceutical companies spend tens of millions on social media advertising, with Pfizer leading the pack with $55 million in 2020.[14]

While these attacks on free speech are terrifying enough, even worse is the virtually universal control hospital administrators have exercised over the details of medical care in hospitals. These hirelings are now instructing doctors which treatment protocols they will adhere to and which treatments they will not use, no matter how harmful the “approved” treatments are or how beneficial the “unapproved” treatments are.[33,57]

Never in the history of American medicine have hospital administrators dictated to its physicians how they will practice medicine and what medications they can use. The CDC has no authority to dictate to hospitals or doctors concerning medical treatments. Yet, most physicians complied without the slightest resistance.

The federal Care Act encouraged this human disaster by offering all US hospitals up to 39,000 dollars for each ICU patient they put on respirators, despite the fact that early on it was obvious that the respirators were a major cause of death among these unsuspecting, trusting patients. In addition, the hospitals received 12,000 dollars for each patient that was admitted to the ICU—explaining, in my opinion and others, why all federal medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA, NIAID, NIH, etc) did all in their power to prevent life- saving early treatments.[46] Letting patients deteriorate to the point they needed hospitalization, meant big money for all hospitals. A growing number of hospitals are in danger of bankruptcy, and many have closed their doors, even before this “pandemic”.[50] Most of these hospitals are now owned by national or international corporations, including teaching hospitals.[10]

It is also interesting to note that with the arrival of this “pandemic” we have witnessed a surge in hospital corporate chains buying up a number of these financially at-risk hospitals.[1,54] It has been noted that billions in Federal Covid aid is being used by these hospital giants to acquire these financially endangered hospitals, further increasing the power of corporate medicine over physician independence. Physicians expelled from their hospitals are finding it difficult to find other hospitals staffs to join since they too may be owned by the same corporate giant. As a result, vaccine mandate policies include far larger numbers of hospital employees. For example, Mayo Clinic fired 700 employees for exercising their right to refuse a dangerous, essentially untested experimental vaccine.[51,57] Mayo Clinic did this despite the fact that many of these employees worked during the worst of the epidemic and are being fired when the Omicron variant is the dominant strain of the virus, has the pathogenicity of a common cold for most and the vaccines are ineffective in preventing the infection.

In addition, it has been proven that the vaccinated asymptomatic person has a nasopharyngeal titer of the virus as high as an infected unvaccinated person. If the purpose of the vaccine mandate is to prevent viral spread among the hospital staff and patients, then it is the vaccinated who present the greatest risk of transmission, not the unvaccinated. The difference is that a sick unvaccinated person would not go to work, the asymptomatic vaccinated spreader will.

What we do know is that major medical centers, such as Mayo Clinic, receive tens of millions of dollars in NIH grants each year as well as monies from the pharmaceutical makers of these experimental “vaccines”. In my view, that is the real consideration driving these policies. If this could be proven in a court of law the administrators making these mandates should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sued by all injured parties.

The hospital bankruptcy problem has grown increasingly acute due to hospitals vaccine mandates and resulting large number of hospitals staff, especially nurses, refusing to be forcibly vaccinated.[17,51] This is all unprecedented in the history of medical care. Doctors within hospitals are responsible for the treatment of their individual patients and work directly with these patients and their families to initiate these treatments. Outside organizations, such as the CDC, have no authority to intervene in these treatments and to do so exposes the patients to grave errors by an organization that has never treated a single COVID-19 patient.

When this pandemic started, hospitals were ordered by the CDC to follow a treatment protocol that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of patients, most of whom would have recovered had proper treatments been allowed.[43,44] The majority of these deaths could have been prevented had doctors been allowed to use early treatment with such products as Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine and a number of other safe drugs and natural compounds. It has been estimated, based on results by physicians treating the most covid patients successfully, that of the 800,000 people that we are told died from Covid, 640,000 could have not only been saved, but could have, in many cases, returned to their pre-infection health status had mandated early treatment with these proven methods been used. This neglect of early treatment constitutes mass murder. That means 160,000 would have actually died, far less than the number dying at the hands of bureaucracies, medical associations and medical boards that refused to stand up for their patients. According to studies of early treatment of thousands of patients by brave, caring doctors, seventy-five to eighty percent of the deaths could have been prevented.[43,44]

Incredibly, these knowledgeable doctors were prevented from saving these Covid-19 infected people. It should be an embarrassment to the medical profession that so many doctors mindlessly followed the deadly protocols established by the controllers of medicine.

One must also keep in mind that this event never satisfied the criteria for a pandemic. The World Health Organization changed the criteria to make this a pandemic. To qualify for a pandemic status the virus must have a high mortality rate for the vast majority of people, which it didn’t (with a 99.98% survival rate), and it must have no known existing treatments—which this virus had—in fact, a growing number of very successful treatments.

The draconian measures established to contain this contrived “pandemic” have never been shown to be successful, such as masking the public, lockdowns, and social distancing. A number of carefully done studies during previous flu seasons demonstrated that masks, of any kind, had never prevented the spread of the virus among the public.[60]

In fact, some very good studies suggested that the masks actually spread the virus by giving people a false sense of security and other factors, such as the observation that people were constantly breaking sterile technique by touching their mask, improper removal and by leakage of infectious aerosols around the edges of the mask. In addition masks were being disposed of in parking lots, walking trails, laid on tabletops in restaurants and placed in pockets and purses.

Within a few minutes of putting on the mask, a number of pathogenic bacteria can be cultured from the masks, putting the immune suppressed person at a high risk of bacterial pneumonia and children at a higher risk of meningitis.[16] A study by researchers at the University of Florida cultured over 11 pathogenic bacteria from the inside of the mask worn by children in schools.[40]

It was also known that children were at essentially no risk of either getting sick from the virus or transmitting it.

In addition, it was also known that wearing a mask for over 4 hours (as occurs in all schools) results in significant hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels) and hypercapnia (high CO2 levels), which have a number of deleterious effects on health, including impairing the development of the child’s brain.[4,72,52]

We have known that brain development continues long after the grade school years. A recent study found that children born during the “pandemic” have significantly lower IQs—yet school boards, school principals and other educational bureaucrats are obviously unconcerned.[18]

TOOLS OF THE INDOCTRINATION TRADE

The designers of this pandemic anticipated a pushback by the public and that major embarrassing questions would be asked. To prevent this, the controllers fed the media a number of tactics, one of the most commonly used was and is the “fact check” scam. With each confrontation with carefully documented evidence, the media “fact checkers” countered with the charge of “misinformation”, and an unfounded “conspiracy theory” charge that was, in their lexicon, “debunked”. Never were we told who the fact checkers were or the source of their “debunking” information—we were just to believe the “fact checkers”. A recent court case established under oath that facebook “fact checkers” used their own staff opinion and not real experts to check “facts”.[59] When sources are in fact revealed they are invariably the corrupt CDC, WHO or Anthony Fauci or just their opinion. Here is a list of things that were labeled as “myths” and “misinformation” that were later proven to be true.

The asymptomatic vaccinated are spreading the virus equally as with unvaccinated symptomatic infected.
The vaccines cannot protect adequately against new variants, such as Delta and Omicron.
Natural immunity is far superior to vaccine immunity and is most likely lifelong.
Vaccine immunity not only wanes after several months, but all immune cells are impaired for prolonged periods, putting the vaccinated at a high risk of all infections and cancer.
COVID vaccines can cause a significant incidence of blood clots and other serious side effects
The vaccine proponents will demand numerous boosters as each variant appears on the scene.
Fauci will insist on the covid vaccine for small children and even babies.
Vaccine passports will be required to enter a business, fly in a plane, and use public transportation
There will be internment camps for the unvaccinated (as in Australia, Austria and Canada)
The unvaccinated will be denied employment.
There are secret agreements between the government, elitist institutions, and vaccine makers
Many hospitals were either empty or had low occupancy during the pandemic.
The spike protein from the vaccine enters the nucleus of the cell, altering cell DNA repair function.
Hundreds of thousands have been killed by the vaccines and many times more have been permanently damaged.
Early treatment could have saved the lives of most of the 700,000 who died.
Vaccine-induced myocarditis (which was denied initially) is a significant problem and clears over a short period.
Special deadly lots (batches) of these vaccines are mixed with the mass of other Covid-19 vaccines

Several of these claims by those opposing these vaccines now appear on the CDC website—most still identified as “myths”. Today, extensive evidence has confirmed that each of these so-called “myths” were in fact true. Many are even admitted by the “saint of vaccines”, Anthony Fauci. For example, we were told, even by our cognitively impaired President, that once the vaccine was released all the vaccinated people could take off their masks. Oops! We were told shortly afterward— the vaccinated have high concentrations (titers) of the virus in their noses and mouths (nasopharynx) and can transmit the virus to others in which they come into contact—especially their own family members. On go the masks once again— in fact double masking is recommended. The vaccinated are now known to be the main superspreaders of the virus and hospitals are filled with the sick vaccinated and people suffering from serious vaccine complications.[27,42,45]

Another tactic by the vaccine proponents is to demonize those who reject being vaccinated for a variety of reasons. The media refers to these critically thinking individuals as “anti-vaxxers”, “vaccine deniers”, “Vaccine resisters”, “murders”, “enemies of the greater good” and as being the ones prolonging the pandemic. I have been appalled by the vicious, often heartless attacks by some of the people on social media when a parent or loved one relates a story of the terrible suffering and eventual death, they or their loved one suffered as a result of the vaccines. Some psychopaths tweet that they are glad that the loved one died or that the dead vaccinated person was an enemy of good for telling of the event and should be banned. This is hard to conceptualize. This level of cruelty is terrifying, and signifies the collapse of a moral, decent, and compassionate society.

It is bad enough for the public to sink this low, but the media, political leaders, hospital administrators, medical associations and medical licensing boards are acting in a similar morally dysfunctional and cruel way.

LOGIC, REASONING, AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE HAS DISAPPEARED IN THIS EVENT

Has scientific evidence, carefully done studies, clinical experience and medical logic had any effect on stopping these ineffective and dangerous vaccines? Absolutely not! The draconian efforts to vaccinate everyone on the planet continues (except the elite, postal workers, members of Congress and other insiders).[31,62]

In the case of all other drugs and previous conventional vaccines under review by the FDA, the otherwise unexplained deaths of 50 or less individuals would result in a halt in further distribution of the product, as happened on 1976 with the swine flu vaccine. With over 18,000 deaths being reported by the VAERS system for the period December 14, 2020 and December 31st, 2021 as well as 139,126 serious injuries (including deaths) for the same period there is still no interest in stopping this deadly vaccine program.[61] Worse, there is no serious investigation by any government agency to determine why these people are dying and being seriously and permanently injured by these vaccines.[15,67] What we do see is a continuous series of coverups and evasions by the vaccine makers and their promoters.

The war against effective cheap and very safe repurposed drugs and natural compounds, that have proven beyond all doubt to have saved millions of lives all over the world, has not only continued but has stepped up in intensity.[32,34,43]

Doctors are told they cannot provide these life-saving compounds for their patients and if they do, they will be removed from the hospital, have their medical license removed or be punished in many other ways. A great many pharmacies have refused to fill prescriptions for lvermectin or hydroxy- chloroquine, despite the fact that millions of people have taken these drugs safely for over 60 years in the case of hydroxy chloroquine and decades for Ivermectin.[33,36] This refusal to fill prescriptions is unprecedented and has been engineered by those wanting to prevent alternative methods of treatment, all based on protecting vaccine expansion to all. Several companies that make hydroxy chloroquine agreed to empty their stocks of the drug by donating them to the Strategic National Stockpile, making this drug far more difficult to get.[33] Why would the government do that when over 30 well-done studies have shown that this drug reduced deaths anywhere from 66% to 92% in other countries, such as India, Egypt, Argentina, France, Nigeria, Spain, Peru, Mexico, and others?[23]

The critics of these two life-saving drugs are most often funded by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, both of which are making millions from these vaccines.[48,15]

To further stop the use of these drugs, the pharmaceutical industry and Bill Gates/Anthony Fauci funded fake research to make the case that hydroxy chloroquine was a dangerous drug and could damage the heart.[34] To make this fraudulent case the researchers administered the sickest of covid patients a near lethal dose of the drug, in a dose far higher than used on any covid patient by Dr. Kory, McCullough and other “real”, and compassionate doctors, physicians who were actually treating covid patients.[23]

The controlled, lap-dog media, of course, hammered the public with stories of the deadly effect of hydroxy- chloroquine, all with a terrified look of fake panic. All these stories of ivermectin dangers were shown to be untrue and some of the stories were incredibly preposterous.[37,43]

The attack on Ivermectin was even more vicious than against hydroxy-chloroquine. All of this, and a great deal more is meticulously chronicled in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s excellent new book—The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.[32] If you are truly concerned with the truth and with all that has occurred since this atrocity started, you must not only read, but study this book carefully. It is fully referenced and covers all topics in great detail. This is a designed human tragedy of Biblical proportions by some of the most vile, heartless, psychopaths in history.

Millions have been deliberately killed and crippled, not only by this engineered virus, but by the vaccine itself and by the draconian measures used by these governments to “control the pandemic spread”. We must not ignore the “deaths by despair” caused by these draconian measures, which can exceed hundreds of thousands. Millions have starved in third world countries as a result. In the United States alone, of the 800,000 who died, claimed by the medical bureaucracies, well over 600,000 of these deaths were the result of the purposeful neglect of early treatment, blocking the use of highly effective and safe repurposed drugs, such as hydroxy-chloroquine and Ivermectin, and the forced use of deadly treatments such as remdesivir and use of ventilators. This does not count the deaths of despair and neglected medical care caused by the lockdown and hospital measures forced on healthcare systems.

To compound all this, because of vaccine mandates among all hospital personnel, thousands of nurses and other hospital workers have resigned or been fired.[17,30,51] This has resulted in critical shortages of these vital healthcare workers and dangerous reductions of ICU beds in many hospitals. In addition, as occurred in the Lewis County Healthcare System, a specialty-hospital system in Lowville, N.Y., closed its maternity unit following the resignation of 30 hospital staff over the state’s disastrous vaccine mandate orders. The irony in all these cases of resignations is that the administrators unhesitatingly accepted these mass staffing losses despite rantings about suffering from short staffing during a “crisis”. This is especially puzzling when we learned that the vaccines did not prevent viral transmission and the present predominant variant is of extremely low pathogenicity.

DANGERS OF THE VACCINES ARE INCREASINGLY REVEALED BY SCIENCE

While most researchers, virologists, infectious disease researchers and epidemiologists have been intimidated into silence, a growing number of high integrity individuals with tremendous expertise have come forward to tell the truth—that is, that these vaccines are deadly.

Most new vaccines must go through extensive safety testing for years before they are approved. New technologies, such as the mRNA and DNA vaccines, require a minimum of 10 years of careful testing and extensive follow-up. These new so-called vaccines were “tested” for only 2 months and then the results of these safety test were and continue to be kept secret. Testimony before Senator Ron Johnson by several who participated in the 2 months study indicates that virtually no follow-up of the participants of the pre-release study was ever done.[67] Complains of complications were ignored and despite promises by Pfizer that all medical expenses caused by the “vaccines” would be paid by Pfizer, these individuals stated that none were paid.[66] Some medical expenses exceed 100,000 dollars.

As an example of the deception by Pfizer, and the other makers of mRNA vaccines, is the case of 12-year-old Maddie de Garay, who participated in the Pfizer vaccine pre-release safety study. At Sen. Johnson’s presentation with the families of the vaccine injured, her mother told of her child’s recurrent seizures, that she is now confined to a wheelchair, must be tube fed and suffers permanent brain damage. On the Pfizer safety evaluation submitted to the FDA her only side effect is listed as having a “stomachache”. Each person submitted similar horrifying stories.

The Japanese resorted to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) lawsuit to force Pfizer to release its secret biodistribution study. The reason Pfizer wanted it kept secret is that it demonstrated that Pfizer lied to the public and the regulatory agencies about the fate of the injected vaccine contents (the mRNA enclosed nano-lipid carrier). They claimed that it remained at the site of the injection (the shoulder), when in fact their own study found that it rapidly spread throughout the entire body by the bloodstream within 48 hours.

The study also found that these deadly nano-lipid carriers collected in very high concentrations in several organs, including the reproductive organs of males and females, the heart, the liver, the bone marrow, and the spleen (a major immune organ). The highest concentration was in the ovaries and the bone marrow. These nano-lipid carriers also were deposited in the brain.

Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist from Idaho reported a dramatic spike in highly aggressive cancers among vaccinated individuals, (not reported in the Media). He found a frighteningly high incidence of highly aggressive cancers in vaccinated individuals, especially highly invasive melanomas in young people and uterine cancers in women.[26] Other reports of activation of previously controlled cancers are also appearing among vaccinated cancer patients.[47] Thus far, no studies have been done to confirm these reports, but it is unlikely such studies will be done, at least studies funded by grants from the NIH.

The high concentration of spike proteins found in the ovaries in the biodistribution study could very well impair fertility in young women, alter menstruation, and could put them at an increased risk of ovarian cancer. The high concentration in the bone marrow, could also put the vaccinated at a high risk of leukemia and lymphoma. The leukemia risk is very worrisome now that they have started vaccinating children as young as 5 years of age. No long-term studies have been conducted by any of these makers of Covid-19 vaccines, especially as regards the risk of cancer induction. Chronic inflammation is intimately linked to cancer induction, growth and invasion and vaccines stimulate inflammation.

Cancer patients are being told they should get vaccinated with these deadly vaccines. This, in my opinion, is insane. Newer studies have shown that this type of vaccine inserts the spike protein within the nucleus of the immune cells (and most likely many cell types) and once there, inhibits two very important DNA repair enzymes, BRCA1 and 53BP1, whose duty it is to repair damage to the cell’s DNA.[29] Unrepaired DNA damage plays a major role in cancer.

There is a hereditary disease called xeroderma pigmentosum in which the DNA repair enzymes are defective. These ill-fated individuals develop multiple skin cancers and a very high incidence of organ cancer as a result. Here we have a vaccine that does the same thing, but to a less extensive degree.

One of the defective repair enzymes caused by these vaccines is called BRCA1, which is associated with a significantly higher incidence of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.

It should be noted that no studies were ever done on several critical aspects of this type of vaccine.

They have never been tested for long term effects
They have never been tested for induction of autoimmunity
They have never been properly tested for safety during any stage of pregnancy
No follow-up studies have been done on the babies of vaccinated women
There are no long-term studies on the children of vaccinated pregnant women after their birth (Especially as neurodevelopmental milestone occur).
It has never been tested for effects on a long list of medical conditions:
- Diabetes
- Heart disease
- Atherosclerosis
- Neurodegenerative diseases
- Neuropsychiatric effects
- Induction of autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia
- Long term immune function
- Vertical transmission of defects and disorders
- Cancer
- Autoimmune disorders

Previous experience with the flu vaccines clearly demonstrates that the safety studies done by researchers and clinical doctors with ties to pharmaceutical companies were essentially all either poorly done or purposefully designed to falsely show safety and coverup side effects and complications. This was dramatically demonstrated with the previously mentioned phony studies designed to indicate that hydroxy Chloroquine and Ivermectin were ineffective and too dangerous to use.[34,36,37] These fake studies resulted in millions of deaths and severe health disasters worldwide. As stated, 80% of all deaths were unnecessary and could have been prevented with inexpensive, safe repurposed medications with a very long safety history among millions who have taken them for decades or even a lifetime.[43,44]

It is beyond ironic that those claiming that they are responsible for protecting our health approved a poorly tested set of vaccines that has resulted in more deaths in less than a year of use than all the other vaccines combined given over the past 30 years. Their excuse when confronted was—“we had to overlook some safety measures because this was a deadly pandemic”.[28,46]

In 1986 President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which gave blanket protection to pharmaceutical makers of vaccines against injury litigation by families of vaccine injured individuals. The Supreme Court, in a 57-page opinion, ruled in favor of the vaccine companies, effectively allowing vaccine makers to manufacture and distribute dangerous, often ineffective vaccines to the population without fear of legal consequences. The court did insist on a vaccine injury compensation system which has paid out only a very small number of rewards to a large number of severely injured individuals. It is known that it is very difficult to receive these awards. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, since 1988 the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has agreed to pay 3,597 awards among 19,098 vaccine injured individuals applying amounting to a total sum of $3.8 billion. This was prior to the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccines, in which the deaths alone exceed all deaths related to all the vaccines combined over a thirty-year period.

In 2018 President Trump signed into law the “right-to-try” law which allowed the use of experimental drugs and all unconventional treatments to be used in cases of extreme medical conditions. As we have seen with the refusal of many hospitals and even blanket refusal by states to allow Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine or any other unapproved “official” methods to treat even terminal Covid-19 cases, these nefarious individuals have ignored this law.

Strangely, they did not use this same logic or the law when it came to Ivermectin and Hydroxy Chloroquine, both of which had undergone extensive safety testing by over 30 clinical studies of a high quality and given glowing reports on both efficacy and safety in numerous countries. In addition, we had a record of use for up to 60 years by millions of people, using these drugs worldwide, with an excellent safety record. It was obvious that a group of very powerful people in conjunction with pharmaceutical conglomerates didn’t want the pandemic to end and wanted vaccines as the only treatment option. Kennedy’s book makes this case using extensive evidence and citations.[14,32]

Dr. James Thorpe, an expert in maternal-fetal medicine, demonstrates that these covoid-19 vaccines given during pregnancy have resulted in a 50-fold higher incidence of miscarriage than reported with all other vaccines combined.[28] When we examine his graph on fetal malformations there was a 144-fold higher incidence of fetal malformation with the Covid-19 vaccines given during pregnancy as compared to all other vaccines combined. Yet, the American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology endorse the safety of these vaccines for all stages of pregnancy and among women breast feeding their babies.

It is noteworthy that these medical specialty groups have received significant funding from Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, just in the 4th quarter of 2010, received a total of $11,000 from Pfizer Pharmaceutical company alone.[70] Funding from NIH grants are much higher.[20] The best way to lose these grants is to criticize the source of the funds, their products or pet programs. Peter Duesberg, because of his daring to question Fauci’s pet theory of AIDS caused by HIV virus, was no longer awarded any of the 30 grant applications he submitted after going public. Prior to this episode, as the leading authority on retroviruses in the world, he had never been turned down for an NIH grant.[39] This is how the “corrupted” system works, even though much of the grant money comes from our taxes.

HOT LOTS—DEADLY BATCHES OF THE VACCINES

A new study has now surfaced, the results of which are terrifying.[25] A researcher at Kingston University in London, has completed an extensive analysis of the VAERs data (a subdepartment of the CDC which collects voluntary vaccine complication data), in which he grouped reported deaths following the vaccines according to the manufacturer’s lot numbers of the vaccines. Vaccines are manufactured in large batches called lots. What he discovered was that the vaccines are divided into over 20,000 lots and that one out of every 200 of these batches (lots) is demonstrably deadly to anyone who receives a vaccine from that lot, which includes thousands of vaccine doses.

He examined all manufactured vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson (Janssen), etc. He found that among every 200 batches of the vaccine from Pfizer and other makers, one batch of the 200 was found to be over 50x more deadly than vaccines batches from other lots. The other vaccine lots (batches) were also causing deaths and disabilities, but nowhere near to this extent. These deadly batches should have appeared randomly among all “vaccines” if it was an unintentional event. However, he found that 5% of the vaccines were responsible for 90% of the serious adverse events, including deaths. The incidence of deaths and serious complications among these “hot lots” varied from over 1000% to several thousand percent higher than comparable safer lots. If you think this was by accident—think again. This is not the first time “hot lots” were, in my opinion, purposefully manufactured and sent across the nation—usually vaccines designed for children. In one such scandal, “hot lots” of a vaccine ended up all in one state and the damage immediately became evident. What was the manufacture’s response? It wasn’t to remove the deadly batches of the vaccine. He ordered his company to scatter the hot lots across the nation so that authorities would not see the obvious deadly effect.

All lots of a vaccine are numbered—for example Modera labels them with such codes as 013M20A. It was noted that the batch numbers ended in either 20A or 21A. Batches ending in 20A were much more toxic than the ones ending in 21A. The batches ending in 20A had about 1700 adverse events, versus a few hundred to twenty or thirty events for the 21A batches. This example explains why some people had few or no adverse events after taking the vaccine while others are either killed or severely and permanently harmed. To see the researcher’s explanation, go to https://www.bitchute.com/video/6xIYPZBkydsu/ In my opinion these examples strongly suggest an intentional alteration of the production of the “vaccine” to include deadly batches.

I have met and worked with a number of people concerned with vaccine safety and I can tell you they are not the evil anti-vaxxers you are told they are. They are highly principled, moral, compassionate people, many of which are top researchers and people who have studied the issue extensively. Robert Kennedy, Jr, Barbara Lou Fisher, Dr. Meryl Nass, Professor Christopher Shaw, Megan Redshaw, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Neil Z. Miller, Dr. Lucija Tomjinovic, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Steve Kirsch and Dr. Peter McCullough just to name a few. These people have nothing to gain and a lot to lose. They are attacked viciously by the media, government agencies, and elite billionaires who think they should control the world and everyone in it.

WHY DID FAUCI WANT NO AUTOPSIES OF THOSE WHO DIED AFTER VACCINATION?

There are many things about this “pandemic” that are unprecedented in medical history. One of the most startling is that at the height of the pandemic so few autopsies, especially total autopsies, were being done. A mysterious virus was rapidly spreading around the world, a selected group of people with weakened immune systems were getting seriously ill and many were dying and the one way we could rapidly gain the most knowledge about this virus—an autopsy, was being discouraged.

Guerriero noted that by the end of April, 2020 approximately 150,000 people had died, yet there were only 16 autopsies performed and reported in the medical literature.[24] Among these, only seven were complete autopsies, the remaining 9 being partial or by needle biopsy or incisional biopsy. Only after 170,000 deaths by Covid-19 and four months into the pandemic were the first series of autopsies actually done, that is, more than ten. And only after 280,000 deaths and another month, were the first large series of autopsies performed, some 80 in number.[22] Sperhake, in a call for autopsies to be done without question, noted that the first full autopsy reported in the literature along with photomicrographs appeared in a medico-legal journal from China in February 2020.[41,68] Sperhake expressed confusion as to why there was a reluctance to perform autopsies during the crisis, but he knew it was not coming from the pathologists. The medical literature was littered with appeals by pathologist for more autopsies to be performed.[58] Sperhake further noted that the Robert Koch Institute (The German health monitoring system) at least initially advised against doing autopsies. He also knew that at the time 200 participating autopsy institutions in the United States had done at least 225 autopsies among 14 states.

Some have claimed that this dearth of autopsies was based on the government’s fear of infection among the pathologists, but a study of 225 autopsies on Covid-19 cases demonstrated only one case of infection among the pathologist and this was concluded to have been an infection contracted elsewhere.[19] Guerriero ends his article calling for more autopsies with this observation: “Shoulder to shoulder, clinical and forensic pathologists overcame the obstructions of autopsy studies in Covid-19 victims and hereby generated valuable knowledge on the pathophysiology of the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 and the human body, thus contributing to our understanding of the disease.”[24]

Suspicion concerning the worldwide reluctance of nations to allow full post mortem studies of Covid-19 victims may be based on the idea that it was more than by chance. There are at least two possibilities that stand out. First, those leading the progression of this “non-pandemic” event into a perceived worldwide “deadly pandemic”, were hiding an important secret that autopsies could document. Namely, just how many of the deaths were actually caused by the virus? To implement draconian measures, such as mandated mask wearing, lockdowns, destruction of businesses, and eventually mandated forced vaccination, they needed very large numbers of covid-19 infected dead. Fear would be the driving force for all these destructive pandemic control programs.

Elder et al in his study classified the autopsy findings into four groups.[22]

Certain Covid-19 death
Probably Covid-19 death
Possible Covid-19 death
Not associated with Covid-19, despite the positive test.

What possibly concerned or even terrified the engineers of this pandemic was that autopsies just might, and did, show that a number of these so-called Covid-19 deaths in truth died of their comorbid diseases. In the vast majority of autopsy studies reported, pathologists noted multiple comorbid conditions, most of which at the extremes of life could alone be fatal. Previously it was known that common cold viruses had an 8% mortality in nursing homes.

In addition, valuable evidence could be obtained from the autopsies that would improve clinical treatments and could possibly demonstrate the deadly effect of the CDC mandated protocols all hospitals were required to follow, such as the use of respirators and the deadly, kidney-destroying drug remdesivir. The autopsies also demonstrated accumulating medical errors and poor-quality care, as the shielding of doctors in intensive care units from the eyes of family members inevitably leads to poorer quality care as reported by several nurses working in these areas.[53-55]

As bad as all this was, the very same thing is being done in the case of Covid vaccine deaths—very few complete autopsies have been done to understand why these people died, that is, until recently. Two highly qualified researchers, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi a microbiologist and highly qualified expert in infectious disease and Dr. Arne Burkhardt, a pathologist who is a widely published authority having been a professor of pathology at several prestigious institutions, recently performed autopsies on 15 people having died after vaccination. What they found explains why so many are dying and experiencing organ damage and deadly blood clots.[5]

They determined that 14 of the fifteen people died as a result of the vaccines and not of other causes. Dr. Burkhardt, the pathologist, observed widespread evidence of an immune attack on the autopsied individuals’ organs and tissues— especially their heart. This evidence included extensive invasion of small blood vessels with massive numbers of lymphocytes, which cause extensive cell destruction when unleashed. Other organs, such as the lungs and liver, were observed to have extensive damage as well. These findings indicate the vaccines were causing the body to attack itself with deadly consequences. One can easily see why Anthony Fauci, as well as public health officers and all who are heavily promoting these vaccines, publicly discouraged autopsies on the vaccinated who subsequently died. One can also see that in the case of vaccines, that were essentially untested prior to being approved for the general public, at least the regulatory agencies should have been required to carefully monitor and analyze all serious complications, and certainly deaths, linked to these vaccines. The best way to do that is with complete autopsies.

While we learned important information from these autopsies what is really needed are special studies of the tissues of those who have died after vaccination for the presence of spike protein infiltration throughout the organs and tissues. This would be critical information, as such infiltration would result in severe damage to all tissues and organs involved—especially the heart, the brain, and the immune system. Animal studies have demonstrated this. In these vaccinated individuals the source of these spike proteins would be the injected nanolipid carriers of the spike protein producing mRNA. It is obvious that the government health authorities and pharmaceutical manufacturers of these “vaccines” do not want these critical studies done as the public would be outraged and demand an end to the vaccination program and prosecution of the involved individuals who covered this up.

CONCLUSIONS

We are all living through one of the most drastic changes in our culture, economic system, as well as political system in our nation’s history as well as the rest of the world. We have been told that we will never return to “normal” and that a great reset has been designed to create a “new world order”. This has all been outlined by Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, in his book on the “Great Reset”.[66] This book gives a great deal of insight as to the thinking of the utopians who are proud to claim this pandemic “crisis” as their way to usher in a new world. This new world order has been on the drawing boards of the elite manipulators for over a century.[73,74] In this paper I have concentrated on the devastating effects this has had on the medical care system in the United States, but also includes much of the Western world. In past papers I have discussed the slow erosion of traditional medical care in the United States and how this system has become increasingly bureaucratized and regimented.[7,8] This process was rapidly accelerating, but the appearance of this, in my opinion, manufactured “pandemic” has transformed our health care system over night.

As you have seen, an unprecedented series of events have taken place within this system. Hospital administrators, for example, assumed the position of medical dictators, ordering doctors to follow protocols derived not from those having extensive experience in treating this virus, but rather from a medical bureaucracy that has never treated a single COVID-19 patient. The mandated use of respirators on ICU Covid-19 patients, for example, was imposed in all medical systems and dissenting physicians were rapidly removed from their positions as caregivers, despite their demonstration of markedly improved treatment methods. Further, doctors were told to use the drug remdesivir despite its proven toxicity, lack of effectiveness and high complication rate. They were told to use drugs that impaired respiration and mask every patient, despite the patient’s impaired breathing. In each case, those who refused to abuse their patients were removed from the hospital and even faced a loss of license—or worse.

For the first time in modern medical history, early medical treatment of these infected patients was ignored nationwide. Studies have shown that early medical treatment was saving 80% of higher number of these infected people when initiated by independent doctors.[43,44] Early treatment could have saved over 640,000 lives over the course of this “pandemic”. Despite the demonstration of the power of these early treatments, the forces controlling medical care continued this destructive policy.

Families were not allowed to see their loved ones, forcing these very sick individuals in the hospitals to face their deaths alone. To add insult to injury, funerals were limited to a few grieving family members, who were not allowed to even sit together. All the while large stores, such as Walmart and Cosco were allowed to operate with minimal restrictions. Nursing home patients were also not allowed to have family visitations, again being forced to die a lonely death. All the while, in a number of states, the most transparent being in New York state, infected elderly were purposefully transferred from hospitals into nursing homes, resulting in a very high death rates of these nursing home residents. At the beginning of this “pandemic” over 50% of all death were occurring in nursing homes.

Throughout this “pandemic” we have been fed an unending series of lies, distortions and disinformation by the media, the public health officials, medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA and WHO) and medical associations. Physicians, scientists, and experts in infectious treatments who formed associations designed to develop more effective and safer treatments, were regularly demonized, harassed, shamed, humiliated, and experience a loss of licensure, loss of hospital privileges and, in at least one case, ordered to have a psychiatric examination.[2,65,71]

Anthony Fauci was given essentially absolute control of all forms of medical care during this event, including insisting that drugs he profited from be used by all treating physicians. He ordered the use of masks, despite at first laughing at the use of masks to filter a virus. Governors, mayors, and many businesses followed his orders without question.

The draconian measures being used, masking, lockdowns, testing of the uninfected, use of the inaccurate PCR test, social distancing, and contact tracing had been shown previously to be of little or no use during previous pandemics, yet all attempts to reject these methods were to no avail. Some states ignored these draconian orders and had either the same or fewer cases, as well as deaths, as the states with the most strictly enforced measures. Again, no amount of evidence or obvious demonstration along these lines had any effect on ending these socially destructive measures. Even when entire countries, such as Sweden, which avoided all these measures, demonstrated equal rates of infections and hospitalization as nations with the strictest, very draconian measures, no policy change by the controlling institutions occurred. No amount of evidence changed anything.

Experts in the psychology of destructive events, such as economic collapses, major disasters and previous pandemics demonstrated that draconian measures come with an enormous cost in the form of “deaths of despair” and in a dramatic increase in serious psychological disorders. The effects of these pandemic measures on children’s neurodevelopment is catastrophic and to a large extent irreversible.

Over time tens of thousands could die as a result of this damage. Even when these predictions began to appear, the controllers of this “pandemic” continued full steam ahead. Drastic increases in suicides, a rise in obesity, a rise in drug and alcohol use, a worsening of many health measures and a terrifying rise in psychiatric disorders, especially depression and anxiety, were ignored by the officials controlling this event.

We eventually learned that many of the deaths were a result of medical neglect. Individuals with chronic medical conditions, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurological diseases were no longer being followed properly in their clinics and doctor’s offices. Non-emergency surgeries were put on hold. Many of these patients chose to die at home rather than risk going to the hospitals and many considered hospitals “death houses”.

Records of deaths have shown that there was a rise in deaths among those aged 75 and older, mostly explained by Covid-19 infections, but for those between the ages of 65 to 74, deaths had been increasing well before the pandemic onset.[69] Between ages of 18 and aged 65 years, records demonstrate a shocking hike in non-Covid-19 deaths. Some of these deaths were explained by a dramatic increase in drug-related deaths, some 20,000 more than 2019. Alcohol related deaths also increased substantially, and homicides increased almost 30% in the 18 to 65-year group.

The head of the insurance company OneAmerica stated that their data indicated that the death rate for individuals aged 18 to 64 had increased 40% over the pre-pandemic period.[21] Scott Davidson, the company’s CEO, stated that this represented the highest death rate in the history of insurance records, which does extensive data collections on death rates each year. Davidson also noted that this high of a death rate increase has never been seen in the history of death data collection. Previous catastrophes of monumental extent increased death rates no more than 10 percent, 40% is unprecedented.

Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Indiana’s chief medical officer, stated that hospitalizations in Indiana are higher than at any point in the past five years. This is of critical importance since the vaccines were supposed to significantly reduce deaths, but the opposite has happened. Hospitals are being flooded with vaccine complications and people in critical condition from medical neglect caused by the lockdowns and other pandemic measures.[46,56]

A dramatic number of these people are now dying, with the spike occurring after the vaccines were introduced. The lies flowing from those who have appointed themselves as medical dictators are endless. First, we were told that the lockdown would last only two weeks, they lasted over a year. Then we were told that masks were ineffective and did not need to be worn. Quickly that was reversed. Then we were told the cloth mask was very effective, now it’s not and everyone should be wearing an N95 mask and before that that they should double mask. We were told there was a severe shortage of respirators, then we discover they are sitting unused in warehouses and in city dumps, still in their packing crates. We were informed that the hospitals were filled mostly with the unvaccinated and later found the exact opposite was true the world over. We were told that the vaccine was 95% effective, only to learn that in fact the vaccines cause a progressive erosion of innate immunity.

Upon release of the vaccines, women were told the vaccines were safe during all states of pregnancy, only to find out no studies had been done on safety during pregnancy during the “safety tests” prior to release of the vaccine. We were told that careful testing on volunteers before the EUA approval for public use demonstrated extreme safety of the vaccines, only to learn that these unfortunate subjects were not followed, medical complications caused by the vaccines were not paid for and the media covered this all up.[67] We also learned that the pharmaceutical makers of the vaccines were told by the FDA that further animal testing was unnecessary (the general public would be the Guinea pigs.) Incredibly, we were told that the Pfizer’s new mRNA vaccines had been approved by the FDA, which was a cleaver deception, in that another vaccine had approval (comirnaty) and not the one being used, the BioNTech vaccine. The approved comirnaty vaccine was not available in the United States. The national media told the public that the Pfizer vaccine had been approved and was no longer classed as experimental, a blatant lie. These deadly lies continue. It is time to stop this insanity and bring these people to justice.

Footnotes

How to cite this article: Blaylock RL. COVID UPDATE: What is the truth? Surg Neurol Int 2022;13:167.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Journal or its management.

REFERENCES

1. Abelson R. Buoyed by federal Covid aid, big hospital chains buy up competitors. The New York Times Mat 21, 2021 (updated Oct 22, 2022) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/health/covid-bailout-hospital-merger.html .

2. Albright L. Medical nonconformity and its persecution. Brownstone Institute. https://brownstone.org/articles/medical-nonconformaity-and-its-persecution [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

3. Ausman JI, Blaylock RL. What is the truth? United States: James I. and Carolyn R. Ausman Education Foundation (AEF); 2021. The China Virus. [Google Scholar]

4. Beder A, Buyukkocak U, Sabuncuoglu H, Keskil ZA, Keskil S. Preliminary report on surgical mask induced deoxygenation during major surgery. Neurocirugia. 2008;19 [Google Scholar]

5. Bhakdi S. Presentation of autopsy findings. https://www.brighteon.com/4b6cc929-f559-4577-b4f8-3b40f0cd2f77 Pathology presentation on findings https://pathologie-konferenz.de/en [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

6. Blaylock RL. Covid-19 pandemic: What is the truth? Surg Neurol Inter. 2021;12(151) [Google Scholar]

7. Blaylock RL. National Health Insurance (Part 1): the socialist nightmare. Aug 19, 2009 https://haciendapublishing.com/national-health-insurance-part-i-the-socialist-nightmare-by-russell-l-blaylock-md [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

8. Blaylock RL. Regimentation in medicine and its human price (part 1 & 2) Hacienda publishing. March 20, 2015 https://haciendapublishing.com/regimentation-in-medicine-and-its-human-price-part-2-by-russell-l-blaylock-md [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06] [Google Scholar]

9. Blaylock RL. Haciendia Publishing; When rejecting orthodoxy becomes a mental illness. Aug 15, 2013 https://haciendapublishing.com/when-rejecting-orthodoxy-becomes-a-mental-illness-by-russell-l-blaylock-m-d [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06] [Google Scholar]

10. Bloche MG. Corporate takeover of Teaching Hospitals. Georgetown Univ Law Center. 1992. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1731&context=facpub [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

11. Bosh X, Ross JS. Ghostwriting: Research misconduct, plagiarism, or Fool’s gold. Amer J Med. 2012;125(4):324–6. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

12. Breggin PR, Breggin GR. Breggin PR, Breggin GR. Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey. Ithaca, NY: Lake Edge Press; 2021. Top Medical Journals Sell their Souls; pp. 285–292. [Google Scholar]

13. Breggin, p133 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

14. Bulik BS. The top 10 ad spenders in Big Pharma for 2020. Fierce Pharma Apr 19, 2021 https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/top-10-ad-spenders-big-pharma-for-2020 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

15. Children’s Health Defense Team Harvard experts critique cozy FDA-Pharma relationship. The Defender. Jan 28, 29020.

16. Chughtai AA, Stelzer-Braid S, Rawlinson W, Pontivivi G, Wang Q, Pan Y, et al. Contamination by respiratory viruses on outer surface of medical mask used by hospital healthcare workers. BMC Infect Dis. 2019. Article number 491.

17. Coleman-Lochner L. U.S. Hospitals pushed to financial ruin as nurses quit during pandemic. Bloomberg. Dec 21, 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-21/u-s-hospitals-pushed-to-financial-ruin-as-nurses-quit-en-masse [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

18. D’Souza K. Pandemic effects may have lowered baby’s IQs, study says EdSource. https://edsource.org/2021/pandemic-may-have-lowered-baby-iq-study-says/661285. [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

19. Davis GG, Williamson AK. Risk of covid-19 transmission during autopsy. Arch Path Lab Med. 2020;144(12):1445a–1445. [Google Scholar]

20. Department of Health and Human Services: Part 1. Overview Information. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HD-20-013.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

21. Durden T. Life Insurance CEO says deaths up 40% among those aged 18 to 64. Tyler Durden Report. 2022. Jan 3,

22. Elder C, Schroder AS, Aepfelbacher M, Fitzek A, Heinemann A, Heinrich F, et al. Dying with SARS-CoV-2 infection an autopsy study of the first consecutive 80 cases in Hamberg, Germany. Inter J Legal Med. 2020;134:1275–84. [Google Scholar]

23. Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance. https://covid19criticalcare.com [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

24. Gueriero M. Restriction of autopsies during the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy. Prudence or fear? Pathologica. 2020;112:172–3. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

25. Hope JR. Sudden death by “hot lot”—Dr. Michael Yeadon sounds the alarm. The Desert review. 2022. Jan 24,

26. Huff E. Idaho doctor reports “20 times increase” in cancer among those “vaccinated” for covid. Natural News. 2021. Sept 14, https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-09-14-idaho-doctor-20times-increase-cancer-vaccinated-covid.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

27. Ioannou P, Karakonstantis S, Astrinaki E, Saplamidou S, Vitsaxaki E, Hamilos G, et al. Transmission of SARS-C0V-2 variant B1.1.7 among vaccinated health care workers. Infect Dis. 2021:1–4. [Google Scholar]

28. James Thorpe interview by Dr. Steve Kirsch. Rumble https://rumble.com/vru732-dr.-james-thorp-on-medical-censorship.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

29. Jiang H, Mei Y-F. SARS-CoV-2 spike protein impairs DNA damage repair and inhibits V(D)J recombination in vitro. Viruses. 2021;13:2056. doi: 10.3390/10.3390/v13102056. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar] Retracted

30. Jimenez J, Vigdor N. Covid-19 news: Over 150 Texas hospital workers are fired or resign over vaccine mandates. The New York Times. 2021. Jun 22, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/22/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

31. Katz E. Postal service seeks temporary exemption from Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate. Government Executive. 2022. Jan 22, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/01/postal-service-seeks-temporary-exemption-bidens-vaccine-or-test-mandate/360376 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

32. Kennedy R., Jr . Skyhorse Publishing; 2021. The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health; pp. 24–29. [Google Scholar]

33. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 24–25.

34. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 26–30.

35. Kennedy RF., Jr p. 32.

36. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 35–56.

37. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 47–56.

38. Kennedy RF., Jr p. 135.

39. Kennedy RF., Jr p. 217.

40. Lee M. University of Florida finds dangerous pathogens on children’s face mask. NTD https://www.ntd.com/university-of-florida-lab-finds-dangerous-pathogens-on-childrens-face-masks_630275.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

41. Liu Q, Wang RS, Qu GQ, Wang YY, Liu P, Zhu YZ, et al. Gross examination report of a Covid-19 death autopsy. Fa Yi Xue Za Zhi. 2020;36:21–23. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

42. Loffredo J. Fully vaccinated are Covid ‘Superspreaders’ Says inventor of mRNA technology. https://childrenshealthdefernce.org/defender/justin-Williams-Robert-Malone-fully-vaccinated-covid-super-spreaders [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

43. Marik PE, Kory P, Varon J, Iglesias J, Meduri GU. MATH+ protocol for the treatment oof SARS-CoV-2 infection: the scientific rationale. Exp rev Ant-infective Ther. 2020 doi: 10.1080/14787210.2020.1808462. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

44. McCullough P, Kelly R, Ruocco G, Lerma E, Tumlin J, Wheeland KR, et al. Pathophysiological basis and rationale for early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection. Amer J Med. 2021;134:16–22. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

45. McCullough P. Study: Fully vaccinated healthcare workers carry 251 times viral load, pose threat to unvaccinated patients, Co-workers. The Defender 08/23/21. [Google Scholar]

46. McCullough P. “We’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe”: Covid expert Dr. Peter McCullough. 2021. Oct 6, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/were-in-the-middle-of-a-major-biological-catastrophe-top-covid-doc-mccullough/?_kx=9EtupqemhhFXJ1kgCo9W3xUNfwrkqB5nT7V2H15fUnA%3D.WXNMR7 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

47. McGovern C. Thousands report developing abnormal tumors following Covid shots. LifeSite News. Nov 1, 2021 https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/thousands-report-developing-abnormal-tumors-following-covid-shots [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

48. Mercola J. Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci: a ‘formidable, nefarious’ partnership. Mercola.com. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rfk-jr-the-real-anthony-fauci-bill-gates [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

49. Moffatt B, Elliott C. Ghost Marketing: Pharmaceutical companies and ghostwritten journal articles. Persp Biol Med. 2007;50(1):18–31. [Google Scholar]

50. Mulvany C. Covid-19 exacerbates bankruptcy for at-risk hospitals. Health Care Financial Management Association. 2020. Nov 9,

51. Muoio D. How many employees have hospitals lost to vaccine mandates? Here are the numbers so far. Fierce Healthcare. 2022. Jan 13, https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/how-many-employees-have-hospitals-lost-to-vaccine-mandates-numbers-so-far [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

52. Nalivaeva NN, Turner AJ, Zhuravin IA. Role of prenatal hypoxia in brain development, cognitive functions, and neurodegeneration. Front Neurosci. 2018 doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00825. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

53. Nicole Sirotek shares what she saw on the front lines in NYC. # Murder. https://rumble.com/vt7tnf-registered-nurse-nicole-sirotek-shares-what-she-saw-on-the-front-lines-in-n.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

54. Noether M, Mat S. Hospital merger benefits: Views from hospital leaders and econometric analysis. Amer Hospital Assoc. Charles Rivers Associates. Jan, 2017 https://www.aha.org/guidesreports/2017-01-24-hospital-merger-benefits-views-hospital-leaders-and-econometric-analysis [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

55. Nurse Colette Martin testimony to Louisiana House of Representatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBwnIRUav5I [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

56. Nurse Dani: It’s the Covid-19 hospital protocols are killing people. https://rumble.com/vqs1v6-nurse-dani-its-the-covid-19-hospital-protocols-are-killing-people.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

57. Parpia R. Mayo Clinic fires 700 employees for refusing to get Covid-19 vaccinations. The Vaccine Reaction. https://thevaccinereaction.org/2022/01/mayo-clinic-fires-700-employees-for-refusing-to-get-covid-19-vaccinations [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

58. Pomara C, Li Volti G, Cappello F. Covid-19 deaths: are we sure it is pneumonia? Please, autopsy, autopsy, autopsy! J Clin Med. 2020 doi: 10.3390/jcm9051259. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

59. New York Post. Post Editorial Board Facebook admits the truth: “Fact checks” are just (lefty) opinion. Dec 14,2021. https://nypost.com/2021/12/14/facebook-admits-the-truth-fact-checks-are-really-just-lefty-opinion [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06] [Google Scholar]

60. Rancourt DG. Mask don’t work. A review of science relevant to the covid-19 social policy. https://archive.org/details/covid-censorship-at-research-gate-2 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

61. Redshaw M. As reports of injuries after Covid vaccines near 1 million mark. CDC, FDA clear Pfizer, Moderna boosters for all adults. The Defender 11/19/21.

62. Roche D. Boston Herald. 2021. Sept 14, Members of Congress and their staff are exempt from Biden’s vaccine mandate, Newsweek 9/10/21 Boston Herald Editorial Staff. Editorial: Political elites exempt from vax mandates. [Google Scholar]

63. Ross E. How drug companies’ PR tactics skew the presentation of medical research. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/20/drug-companies-ghost-writing-journalism [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

64. Saul S. Ghostwriters used in Vioxx studies, article says. New York Times. April 15, 2008 https://www.fpparchive.org/media/documents/public_policy/Ghostwriters%20Used%20in%20Vioxx%20studies_Stephanie%20Saul_Apr%2015,%202008_The%20New%20Times.pdf [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

65. Saxena V. Doctors loses medical license. Ordered to have Psych Eval for Ivermectin Scrits, Sharing Covid “misinformation” BRP News. Available from: https://bizpacreview.com/2022/01/16/doctor-loses-license-orderedto-have-psych-eval-for-prescribing-ivermectin-sharining-covid-falsehoods-1189313. [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

66. Schwab K, Malleret T. Cologny/Geneva: The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Great Reset. Forum Publishing 2020 World Economic Forum. [Google Scholar]

67. Sen. Ron Johnson on Covid-19 vaccine injuries to test subjects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxqC9SiRh8 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

68. Sperhake J-P. Autopsies of Covid-19 deceased? Absolutely! Legal Med. 2020 doi: 10.1016/j.legalmed.2020.101769. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

69. Svab P. Non-Covid death spike in Americans aged 18-49. The Epoch Times. Jan 26-Feb 1 2022.

70. US Medical, Scientific, Patient and Civic Organization Funding Report: Pfizer: Fourth Quarter 2010. https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/responsibility/grants_contributions/pfizer_us_grants_cc_q4_2010.pdf [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]

71. Vivek Saxena. Doctors loses license, ordered to have psych eval for Ivermectin scrits, sharing Covid ‘misinformation’ BPR News. https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/01/16/doctor-loses-license-ordered-to-have-psych-eval-for-prescribing-ivermectin-sharing-covid-falsehoods-1189313 .

72. Westendorf AM, et al. Hypoxia enhances immunosuppression by inhibiting CD4+ effector T cell function and promoting Treg activity. Cell Physiol Biochem. 2017;41:1271–84. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

73. Wood PM. Coherent Publishing; 2018. Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order. [Google Scholar]

74. Wood PM. Coherent Publishing; 2015. Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation. [Google Scholar]

Articles from Surgical Neurology International are provided here courtesy of Scientific Scholar

Covid-19 · Vaccine · Propaganda · Corruption · Pharmaceutical · Medicine · Politics

June 5, 2022 at 11:44:44 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9062939/

It is not enough, to explain crazy state policies by invoking an abstract will to "power" or "control."

In commenting on the many absurdities of the Corona regime, and asking what their purpose could possibly be, I’m often told that “it’s about power” or “it’s about control.”

I confess that I don’t find these explanations convincing. I think they’re grounded in a mistaken view of how western states exercise power and the constraints they face in this. The idea seems to be, that states accumulate the potential to act, which potential is however constrained by the law or popular opinion; and that they are forever striving to escape these artificial constraints through subterfuge and deception, in order to transmute more of their accumulated potential into real-world prerogatives.

I see it otherwise. As far as I can tell, neither laws nor popular opinion limit the action of modern states in any serious way. There are constraints, but these lie elsewhere, mostly in the area of coordination. As I’ve written several times now, our governments have become profoundly demobilised. Political power has accumulated at ever lower levels, with the press, academia and in the bureaucratic institutions. This process represents a kind of political decay, and yet it has distinct advantages for the senescent elite: It ensures broad consensus across all major corporate, government and media factions, shielding them precisely from things like popular opinion and judicial review.

The monstrous institutional apparatus can only act effectively if enough of its widely distributed nodes are activated and aligned behind the same agenda. This requires some kind of (in most cases external) stimulus. Corona has revealed how powerful modern states can be, if only they can get enough of their decentralised distributed substance to back a given programme. Laws become totally meaningless in the face of such coordination; the ensuing propaganda campaign overcomes popular resistance easily.

(The problem of coordination is also why I think the lockdowners and the vaccinators had a much harder time in the United States than in Europe. American [unlike German] federalism is a real force, which fragments the various parties to power still further. Coordination for the American government is thus much harder than it is in Europe, or New Zealand.)

Even in a condition of high coordination, though, the exercise of power or control by the state represents exertion. It’s like running, or lifting a weight. Modern states, with their multitude of international adventures and national initiatives, are fully committed here. The more the various arms of the state have been stirred to action, the more power it has to act in the moment; for a time, the stimulation of SARS-2 provided enough surplus energy to bring vaccine mandates within the realm of possibility. With Omicron, though, the enthusiasm and with it the coordination faded, and the exertion was no longer worth it. They could have still done it, but it would have meant redirecting resources from someplace else and not doing some other thing.

Anyway, that’s my basic model of how state power functions. It’s like the Eye of Sauron: It can’t look everywhere at once, it can’t do everything. And when it’s looking at you, the purpose isn’t just to control your life for the thrill of it. If that’s all the state wanted, it could look anywhere.

States act with purpose, towards specific goals. Their constituent pieces function like a distributed intelligence, which is always striving for something, and – especially when policies become bizarre, clearly unattainable, or circular – it’s worth trying to figure out what that something might be. It might not always be obvious; we shouldn’t assume that states will have goals or aims that make all that much sense to humans.

In fact, while they’re made up of people, western states often behave towards bizarre and alien ends, like an extraterrestrial or a sentient machine: They insist on human uniformity, they’re indifferent to children, they’re hostile to traditional cultures, they hate pathogens, they’re wary of real-life social interaction, they’re mildly wary of the natural world, they like buildings made of glass, steel and concrete, they abhor death, they like to count things, they dislike the rural environment, they prefer the highest possible degree of networking and interconnection.

eugyppius · Covid-19 · Bureaucracy · Politics

June 5, 2022 at 11:22:56 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/it-is-not-enough-to-explain-crazy?s=r

Visions of A New World: My Interview With Eugyppius

Eugyppius is the pseudonymous author of Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle, the foremost publication on all things Covid and beyond where he masterfully details what not one single well-funded, well-staffed, well-networked mainstream outlet was able to get right about the last 2 years of unprecedented change. This has probably been my favorite interview so far and it’s made me much more interested in interviewing other pseudonymous writers in the future, and as you read along you’ll see why. There’s maybe something about pseudonymity that frees individuals from the everyday incentives we face to conform and seek status, things you’re bound to do or at least consider when you’re visible since, if you do conform publicly, you’ll get good-boy points from the internet in the form of likes and retweets and followers, and, if you don’t conform, you’ll present a legible attack surface for other status-hungry conformists—nothing signals obedience and ostensible decency like bashing deviations from popular opinion! At any rate, pseudonymity allows the open-airing of truth and that’s exactly what we get here, and if you’re truly concerned with the truth and it’s expression as much as I am, Over the last 6 years or so I’ve seen a kind of (as of yet) unidentified sclerosis creep into widely used online infrastructure; the internet as I knew it became less responsive to my questions and interests, more prone to elevating mainstream sources to satisfy query inputs, less likely to guide me to the individuals actually concerned with whatever problems I was facing. The usual channels for learning more about niche experiences like Google and YouTube became virtually useless, and I began to spend more of my time looking to people on Twitter or rustic web forums for answers, most of whom were anonymous like yourself. But this phenomenon seemed intuitively backward—random internet denizens were somehow producing more insightful commentary on pretty much every matter than highly credentialed experts and capital-heavy institutions. My question to you is: how is this possible? You’ve basically been more right about covid than any mainstream news source I’ve seen, and there is a significant trend online of part-time sleuths predicting world events or describing complex subjects with higher-fidelity than “persons of authority.” But what makes anons and everyday people so much better here than our ostensible betters?

Thanks for your kind words about my work. It's an interesting question, and one I've written about now and then. One of the main things, is that these curated, establishment discourses promoted by the algorithms and sustained by mainstream media organs, are always trying to do something in addition to being right. They're trying to sell advertisements at the very least, but most of them are also running interference for progressive political programs, and striving to manage public opinion. This is also broadly true of academics and most of the experts who are brought to your attention on news programs.

Twitter anons aren't trying to do any of that, so we can speak a lot more freely and grasp problems much more directly than they can. This isn't to say that we're not political, but for me (and I suspect for most others in this sphere), the political commitments are secondary to the empirical project, and arise from it. To that comes the fact that the barriers to entry are a lot lower for us, and competition is much more ruthless. So we cast a wider net for ideas and promote the good ones much more relentlessly.

In addition to just being right, I'm often impressed with how much more agile and sophisticated all of the anons I interact with are, than the participants in expert, establishment discourses. The Twitter blue checks come across as very slack-jawed and narrow-minded by comparison. All the signs of a confident, dynamic discourse are with us – the sly, ironic humour; the openness to critique; resilience in the face of censorship and algorithmic deboosting; the inordinate interest we attract from adversaries.

I want to focus for a second on the progressive political program you’ve mentioned: there’s a trend of revolutionary posturing sweeping through authority and status-minting institutions in the West that’s come with a deeply polarizing affect; shifting, ultimatum-laden demands for (leftwing) ideological commitment have torn apart families, friendships, workplaces, universities, and entire cities in the US have even suffered millions in damage from those demands being taken to their extreme. Social trust has eroded and centers of power have become addled. A number of theories have been advanced to explain what we’re seeing, a few being that unprecedented consensus-generation (virality) from the rise of social media has an over-socializing quality that inspires shock, incredulity, and disgust at dissent; that the rise of secularism has left a God-sized hole that needed filling; that the decline of hobbies has seen the means for deriving positive approval change from doing something and signaling what we’ve done to believing something and signaling our beliefs; and that progressivism is a form of memetic warfare seeded by non-western state actors, which I’m more inclined to believe these days considering that Covid hysteria seems like part of the same thing, with China producing videos of collapsing bystanders at the start of the pandemic to seemingly bait western powers into overreaction. What do you attribute to the rise of the ideology we’re seeing?

All these are very good explanations for the rise of wokery, and they clearly all play a part. Not just social media, but the expansion of the technological apparatus in general, has had a destabilising effect on western culture. We are all of us increasingly withdrawn from natural conditions, we spend most of our time in artificial environments. Our experience of the world is mediated by technology, and so we see corresponding cultural and social tendencies to deny our biological essence. This is important, because most of leftist wokery is about overcoming our animal and physical natures – whether it is denying sex differences, the influence of genes on behaviour, unequally distributed cognitive capacity, and so on.

Beyond that, I think there's another component of social media that we understand only imperfectly, and that is the degree to which it is used deliberately to influence our ideas and behaviour. Social media platforms want universal participation and an advertiser-friendly experience, and they have coincided with the rise of a woke ideology that is pathologically inclusive and that seeks to suppress certain human emotions (hate, anger) which are not conducive to consumption. You propose that "progressivism" might be "a form of memetic warfare seeded by non-western state actors," and I think theories in this direction should be taken very seriously, especially if we expand the idea a little, to include also western actors in the major technological enterprises like Google. These people are notoriously pozzed, they have amassed a wealth of data on all of our habits and how we respond to content on their platforms. The result is a massive and increasingly sophisticated effort to manipulate the opinions and beliefs of billions of people across the globe. There is a good chance that the trangender craze arises from algorithmic manipulation, and I really, really want someone to explore the extent to which big tech was involved in pushing lockdowns and containment policies. A lot of these ideas seem to have first emerged in Bay Area tech circles.

It looks pretty bleak, but one reason for hope is that progressive wokery is at root a disease of affluence. It is not a normal, self-sustaining cultural tradition, and sooner or later it will end, whenever the money runs out, if not before.

Has wokery affected your personal life living in Germany? Various political polls here in the US have seen self-censorship and cancellation become the new norm where unorthodox thinking was once the rule and where personal views simply didn’t matter, and just anecdotally a startling number of people I know have experienced both a compulsion to lie publicly about personal views to maintain social-standing and livelihoods, and the loss of relationships and opportunities when non-mainstream views have been discovered or aired. What has your experience been so far here and what differences do you see between European and US manifestations of wokeness?

This is an interesting question, because the answer is that wokery has affected my life here in Germany far, far less than it did when I was living in the United States. This is not to say that there is no wokery in Germany, but it's far more limited, particularly in the south. One theory would be that we're just behind America, perhaps by 20 years or so, and in some ways this seems plausible. For example, the primary woke-adjacent political concerns are classic feminist issues of the kind that would strike an American as quaint, such as equal career opportunities for women, and (huge in Germany right now) gender-neutral language. But it's more than that too, I think. There is the fact that Germany has its own quite separate original historical sin, namely the Holocaust, and so aggressive woke doctrines about white oppressor classes are superfluous here. To some unknown degree, and in a way I can't even articulate all that well, I would also posit that wokery and the English language are closely related, and that as a political religion, wokery has trouble operating outside the Anglophone world. Thus wokery is more current in Scandinavia than Germany, and actually quite crazy in Scandinavian schools (where the language of instruction is generally English); it's worse in the north than in the south, it's worse in cities than in the countryside, it's promoted primarily by our very Anglo-centric mass media. Finally, Germany (and Europe in general) is much more racially homogeneous than the United States, so wokery beyond feminist topics lacks an organic constituency; and I don't teach students anymore, and students and the student-focussed administration were, in my prior life as a professor in the US, the main way that wokery made itself felt in my everyday routine.

When it comes to feminism and equality among the sexes, I don't really obfuscate my views. This irritates some people, but surprisingly fewer than you'd think. There just isn't any of the toxic hysteria here, that there is in America, the UK and Canada. On some topics (including Corona) I do obfuscate my views, because I'm not in a position to change anything.

Can you go a bit further into the English language being conducive to wokeism? This is probably one of the most interesting perspectives where meme-development and propagation is concerned but I’ve only had cursory exposure to ideas related, like for example I’ve heard that German with all its precision and granularity is the language most hospitable to philosophy, so I’m wondering if there’s more there: Do certain languages act as hedges against certain ideas or as fecund ground for their development and spread?

Well, these are just half-formed intuitions, but I’m happy to expand. Just observationally, wokery in German is almost always accompanied by a deluge of English vocabulary, and again is associated with those regions and social sectors closest to the Anglophone world. Why might that be?

There is in the strictest sense what you’re alluding to, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - the idea that languages or linguistic categories determine or guide thought. While I’m sceptical of the work I’ve read in this area, a few small points do come to mind. One is that the gender deconstructionists will probably have a harder time in languages with grammatical gender. When everything, from inanimate objects to animals to abstract ideas, has gendered articles and pronouns, special pronoun tricks become more challenging and less plausible. And staying with pronouns for a moment, I think the deeper goal of leftist word games like this is to introduce grammatical awkwardness, and to make plain speech difficult. Different languages offer different paths to achieving this. Thus, parallel to pronoun insanity in English, German leftists have engaged in a long-running (and equally absurd) attempt to introduce gender-neutral speaking habits, which is substantially more difficult and awkward in German than English. Wokery isn’t all about word games, of course, so this can’t be a full explanation, but it’s maybe a start, and perhaps there are deeper and less obvious ways in which language works here too.

But I also think wokery is native to and embedded in a tradition of critical theory, which has its deepest roots in postmodern critical theory. The earliest layers here (Frankfurt School) were obviously German, but the more direct foundations are French writers like Foucault and Baudrillard, and then English-language theorists like Judith Butler and the lamentable Kimberlé Crenshaw and so on. It’s hard to disentangle all the cause and effect going on here. On the one hand, these are arguments embedded in what you might call a broader intellectual operating system that, despite pervasive translation, exists only incompletely and without much cultural resonance outside the English language. On the other hand, these woke theorists are appealing to the interests of certain constituencies or political factions that, for historical and demographic reasons, don’t really exist outside of America and perhaps the UK. Intersectionality, for example, has something to do with the fact that affirmative action in the United States brought a lot of black women into white-collar jobs and universities, but very few black men. Black women thus needed a theoretical construct to maintain their position atop the victim hierarchy. These are social constellations that don’t exist outside the post-colonial Anglophone world. Which raises another point, the fact that wokery has a clear post-colonial political role, which will resonate far less in countries outside the Anglosphere that don’t have a very significant colonising past.

A final point would probably be that the Anglosphere has this tradition of often private residential universities, which I think are crucial for fostering a certain kind of leftist activism. Here my thoughts are even less well-formed than about English as the native language of wokeness, but in continental Europe, the university system is overwhelmingly public, with comparatively much smaller administrations, less well-defined campuses, relatively few student services, and so on. It’s much harder for schools to incubate these extremist left-wing cultures of permanent racial offence and protest. This isn’t to say there’s no leftist activism at European Unis - there is no end of it - but it’s generally much more integrated with the world beyond the university and the broader political environment, which mitigates certain kinds of extremism (but not others).

This is all reminding me of something I’ve wondered in the past 24 hours: One facet of the language angle of wokeism is that it maybe signals the acme of what Fukuyama considered a core feature of liberal democracies: the sort of simulation of war, the impulse for conquest acted out as upward advancement in academic, governmental, or private sector bureaucracies, now expressed as conquest over the language governing the procedures of our bureaucracies. Now new procedures with a new language are used by individuals unwilling or unable to play competence games to seize new territory in the academic landscape, by governments to seize new powers over the will of their people, by corporations to seize new standards for themselves beyond those of safety and quality or, for platforms, new standards beyond adherence to laws that may have constrained them to protection of privacy and the guarantee of freedom of expression. A new form of soft-power has been realized in the West which can bludgeon seemingly anyone into submission or achieve previously inaccessible goals. Countries like the United States and Canada seem smug in its deployment, confident that nothing can overcome its ability to guilt, shame, dehumanize, or transform the order of the world. But the incident happening now between Russia and Ukraine has maybe shown another way, an old way which may have defied Pax Americana, a way that shouts loudly that strength and ambition don’t need to be bound by procedural norms or obfuscated by compassionate misdirection! For the first time perhaps since the end of the Cold War the genteel cornerstone of liberalism—the idea that governance by procedure (and now by changes to procedural language) can exist without challenge—has proven itself assailable. How do you view US hegemony in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what are your predictions for the state of the world order if liberal democracy loses face?

(Eugyppius here takes a brief break before answering. I harassed him a lot, the interview was too 🔥🔥🔥 to stop now)

In a way, I‘m almost grateful my answer comes at such delay, after the West imposed its unprecedented sanctions regime on Russia. This extends even to the withdrawal of American television news operations; the western propaganda of CNN will no longer be broadcast to Russians, and this is supposed to punish them somehow. If this continues for very long, it will lead to the development of a Russo-Chinese financial, industrial, perhaps even metacultural sphere, a multipolar world and an alternative to the West. On the one hand, I think this is the result of a lot of undirected, systemic processes premised on corporate virtue signalling and pandering to blue check outrage mob on Twitter. It helps to remember that a lot of the people making these decisions are incredibly parochial; they live in bubbles where everybody has the same views, and this leads to strange extremism, like these Munich doctors refusing to treat Russian patients. On the other hand, though, in a broader metaphorical or even spiritual sense, perhaps it means the abandonment of western universalist claims. A world in which the West has to develop a particularist conception of itself as something other than these abstract platitudes about democracy and freedom and so on, could only be an improvement on what we have right now.

In the near term, of course, I think the humiliation of the West is very dangerous. Not only the political leadership, but also many of the urban upper middle-class sub-elites, live in a state of profound isolation from reality, including geopolitical reality. While I think the nature of the post-political West is to prefer cultural and economic assimilation to military solutions, they also have a lot of munitions and they command substantial armies, and it‘s conceivable they misjudge the situation and do something really stupid, like escalate to direct military confrontation with Russia.

Despite all that we’re seeing happen in the world now, are we gonna make it?

Yes, I think we will make it. I’m not sure any of us will live long enough to see the end of this period of decline, and I’m even more pessimistic that anything can be done to reverse it. But beyond that, there are are reasons for optimism: Firstly, as things unravel, and the globalist vampire squid loses its monolithic hold, there will be more opportunities for some of us, here and there, to create alternative communities or even small-scale political orders that provide some relief from the decline and allow us to realise some of our vision. Secondly, it is the broader globalist machine that is artificial and requires enormous effort and resources to stay running. We represent nothing but older, more traditional, much more stable ways of living and conceiving of the world, which are rooted in our nature and biology and can‘t really be abolished. We can‘t ever be defeated, just sidelined for a time, and the corollary to this is that our enemies can never win, they can just dominate for a time.

To find more from Eugyppius follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack today!

Philosophy · Ideology · Politics · eugyppius

March 13, 2022 at 12:35:23 AM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://sotonye.substack.com/p/visions-of-a-new-world-my-interview?s=r

Rex Murphy: A Canadian insurrection? It is to laugh

Protesters gather around Parliament Hill in Ottawa for the Freedom Convoy protest on Jan. 30.

No vulgar harassment of police — no “All cops are bastards” signs.

No rocks for every Starbucks window and those of small businesses. No blizzard of break-ins, no store owners standing guard on their shops. No arson or looting.

Jan. 6 insurrection Canadian edition? Ha! It is to laugh. I’ve seen more threatening picnics thrown by a few nuns.

Yet if you listened to much of the established press predictions, Ottawa over the weekend was supposed to be like Rome waiting for the Visigoths. Ooooh — the end of cottage government as we’ve come to know it. A full-scale assault on our Zoom Parliament.

Plain, straight reportage uninflected by the personal dispositions or ideological pre-sets of the reporters or the corporations they work for was hard to come by. Our stern reporters, always ready to squeak agreement to power, worked to set a context. I’ve seen more threatening picnics thrown by a few nuns

They perspired with eagerness that an almost completely incident-free protest might turn into a gathering of “yahoos.” That an angry diesel mob fired up by Boston creams and cold coffee would storm the House of Cottage and end democracy in Canada, such as we know it. They leaped at trivial individual mischiefs and tried to brand the entire protest as negative and even hateful.

The bottom line — they did not cover this protest in the gentle, generally approving manner they have covered so many others, from the Summit of the Americas demonstrations in Quebec City in 2001 to Black Lives Matter in 2020. I believe that Justin Trudeau joined that one.

The contributions over the course of this protest from the prime minister and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh were viciously demeaning.

Trudeau was extremely derogatory, to the point of calculated insult, concerning all who were not in line with his view of things. And he acted as a woke Pope in assuming the right to make the judgment on which views of Canadians were “unacceptable.” And to declare the protesters a band of racists and misogynists.

Does he not know the meaning of the words he recklessly threw out to brand Canadian citizens? “Racist” is the dynamite word of our time. Throwing the word “racists” at a collection of Canadians is mean, nasty, and false.

It must be remarked that a quadruple black-face prime minister is not the best centurion to stand guard against racism, or to accuse others, who incidentally are not so addicted to facial cosmetics as he plainly is.

You know what the saddest part in all of this is? A walk down to the protest, an easy talk with random truckers, with Trudeau saying his piece, and the drivers theirs — that would have been a Canadian moment. The civilized, respectful thing to do.

It was never to be however. Hard politics is better than harmony. Sunny Days has morphed into Mr. Thunder-cloud.

Then there was the other party leader, Jagmeet Singh, the scaffold and support of Trudeau’s stay as prime minister. Of Mr. Singh let us say it must be very hard to have the instincts of a demagogue without the talent to carry it off. But to give him credit, he does try.

First, just to set the stage, is it really that hard to believe that after two years of a pandemic regime some Canadians are not “on-board” with current policies? Hard to believe that people living and working (or trying these days to get work) far from Ottawa and power, feel left out and frustrated?

Sunny Days has morphed into Mr. Thunder-cloud

More to the point, is it also that hard for a Canadian political leader to believe that some Canadians act on principle, and out of concern for their personal autonomy?

Was not the NDP once, of all parties, populist in a positive sense, more tuned to the “working man and woman” than any other? Those days are obviously long gone and the dimmest memory. Instead what we got from the current and most-urban NDP leader was a smearing of the protest, citing a comment from one individual who claimed “the superiority of the white bloodline” as an index of the thinking of the other leaders, and by insinuation, the whole convoy. A crumb is not the whole cake. Let me put it to the reader: Is this tweet a fair description of the convoy:

Mr. Singh: “Conservative MPs have endorsed a convoy led by those that claim the superiority of the white bloodline and equate Islam to a disease .” (Italics mine.)

The convoy of Canadian truckers, of multiple ethnicities, may be many things. But it is not composed of men and women who subscribe to, use, or think in such crapulous terms. In my judgment Singh’s comments were the lowest of the whole weekend — and he had some stiff competition in that department.

Singh is either desperate to out-Trudeau Trudeau in demonizing the truckers, or there is a serious wobble in the runners on his cushioned rocking chair.

Singh's comments were the lowest of the whole weekend

Final point: Is it really that hard for Trudeau and Singh not to acknowledge that the full majority of people who went all the way to Ottawa are just decent people? Not racists. Not women haters? Not orcs. That these protesters may be as at least as fair-minded and decent as the politicians who govern them.

A talk with a dozen or more of these folk may not have changed minds, on either side, but would have had a touch of Canadian respect and politeness, and taken the charge of sheer politics out of this whole episode.

Far too much to ask I suppose when politics is a cynical game, the press are an essential part of the same game, and some guys in a truck, on the edge of making a living, travel across the country to say a few things to their government. After all … who are they?

PS. As I was writing this, the Conservatives, with their superb sense of political timing, were behind closed doors busily disembowelling themselves. More on that in the next column.

Canada · Protest · Vaccine · RexMurphy · Politics

February 4, 2022 at 6:43:13 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-a-canadian-insurrection-it-is-to-laugh

A night with the untouchables

I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest. They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters. I have a perfect view down Kent Street – the absolute ground zero of the convoy. In the morning, I see some protesters emerge from their trucks to stretch their legs, but mostly throughout the day they remain in their cabs honking their horns. At night I see small groups huddled in quiet conversations in their new found companionship. There is no honking at night. What I haven’t noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada’s news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are. So last night, I decided to do just that – I introduced myself to my new neighbours.

The Convoy on Kent Street. February 2, 2022.

At 10pm I started my walk along – and in – Kent Street. I felt nervous. Would these people shout at me? My clothes, my demeanour, even the way I walk screamed that I’m an outsider. All the trucks were aglow in the late evening mist, idling to maintain warmth, but all with ominously dark interiors. Standing in the middle of the convoy, I felt completely alone as though these giant monsters weren’t piloted by people but were instead autonomous transformer robots from some science fiction universe that had gone into recharging mode for the night. As I moved along I started to notice smatterings of people grouped together between the cabs sharing cigarettes or enjoying light laughs. I kept quiet and moved on. Nearby, I spotted a heavy duty pickup truck, and seeing the silhouette of a person in the driver’s seat, I waved. A young man, probably in his mid 20s, rolled down the window, said hello and I introduced myself. His girlfriend was reclined against the passenger side door with a pillow to proper her up as she watched a movie on her phone. I could easily tell it’s been an uncomfortable few nights. I asked how they felt and I told them I lived across the street. Immediate surprise washed over the young man’s face. He said, “You must hate us. But no one honks past 6pm!” That’s true. As someone who lives right on top of the convoy, there is no noise at night. I said, “No, I don’t hate anyone, but I wanted to find out about you.” The two were from Sudbury Ontario, having arrived on Friday with the bulk of the truckers. I ask what they hoped to achieve, and what they wanted. The young woman in the passenger seat moved forward, excited to share. They said that they didn’t want a country that forced people to get medical treatments such as vaccines. There was no hint of conspiracy theories in their conversation with me, not a hint of racist overtones or hateful demagoguery. I didn’t ask them if they had taken the vaccine, but they were adamant that they were not anti-vaxers.

The next man I ran into was standing in front of the big trucks at the head of the intersection. Past middle age and slightly rotund, he had a face that suggests a lifetime of working outdoors. I introduced myself and he told me we was from Cochrane, Ontario. He also proudly pointed out that he was the block captain who helped maintain order. I thought, oh no, he might be the one person keeping a lid on things; is it all that precarious? I delicately asked how hard his job was to keep the peace but I quickly learned that’s not really what he did. He organized the garbage collection among the cabs, put together snow removal crews to shovel the sidewalks and clear the snow that accumulates on the road. He even has a salting crew for the sidewalks. He proudly bellowed in an irrepressible laugh “We’re taking care of the roads and sidewalks better than the city.” I waved goodbye and continued to the next block.

My next encounter was with a man dressed in dark blue shop-floor coveralls. A wiry man of upper middle age, he seemed taciturn and stood a bit separated from the small crowd that formed behind his cab for a late night smoke. He hailed from the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. He owned his own rig, but he only drove truck occasionally, his main job being a self-employed heavy duty mechanic. He closed his shop to drive to Ottawa, because he said, “I don’t want my new granddaughter to live in a country that would strip the livelihood from someone for not getting vaccinated.” He introduced me to the group beside us. A younger crowd, I can remember their bearded faces, from Athabasca, Alberta, and Swift Current Saskatchewan. The weather had warmed, and it began to rain slightly, but they too were excited to tell me why they came to Ottawa. They felt that they needed to stand up to a government that doesn’t understand what their lives are like. To be honest, I don’t know what their lives are like either – a group of young men who work outside all day with tools that they don’t even own. Vaccine mandates are a bridge too far for them. But again, not a hint of anti-vax conspiracy theories or deranged ideology.

I made my way back through the trucks, my next stop leading me to a man of East Indian descent in conversation with a young man from Sylvan Lake, Alberta. They told me how they were following the news of O’Toole’s departure from the Conservative leadership and that they didn’t like how in government so much power has pooled into so few hands.

The rain began to get harder; I moved quickly through the intersection to the next block. This time I waved at a driver in one of the big rigs. Through the rain it was hard to see him, but he introduced himself, an older man, he had driven up from New Brunswick to lend his support. Just behind him some young men from Gaspésie, Quebec introduced themselves to me in their best English. At that time people started to notice me – this man from Ottawa who lives across the street – just having honest conversations with the convoy. Many felt a deep sense of abuse by a powerful government and that no one thinks they matter.

Behind the crowd from Gaspésie sat a stretch van, the kind you often see associated with industrial cleaners. I could see the shadow of a man leaning out from the back as he placed a small charcoal BBQ on the sidewalk next to his vehicle. He introduced himself and told me he was from one of the reservations on Manitoulin Island. Here I was in conversation with an Indigenous man who was fiercely proud to be part of the convoy. He showed me his medicine wheel and he pointed to its colours, red, black, white, and yellow. He said there is a message of healing in there for all the human races, that we can come together because we are all human. He said, “If you ever find yourself on Manitoulin Island, come to my reserve, I would love to show you my community.” I realized that I was witnessing something profound; I don’t know how to fully express it.

As the night wore on and the rain turned to snow, those conversations repeated themselves. The man from Newfoundland with his bullmastiff, a young couple from British Columbia, the group from Winnipeg that together form what they call “Manitoba Corner ” all of them with similar stories. At Manitoba Corner a boisterous heavily tattooed man spoke to me from the cab of his dually pickup truck – a man who had a look that would have fit right in on the set of some motorcycle movie – pointed out that there are no symbols of hate in the convoy. He said, “Yes there was some clown with a Nazi flag on the weekend, and we don’t know where he’s from, but I’ll tell you what, if we see anyone with a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag, we’ll kick his fucking teeth in. No one’s a Nazi here.” Manitoba Corner all gave a shout out to that.

As I finally made my way back home, after talking to dozens of truckers into the night, I realized I met someone from every province except PEI. They all have a deep love for this country. They believe in it. They believe in Canadians. These are the people that Canada relies on to build its infrastructure, deliver its goods, and fill the ranks of its military in times of war. The overwhelming concern they have is that the vaccine mandates are creating an untouchable class of Canadians. They didn’t make high-falutin arguments from Plato’s Republic, Locke’s treatises, or Bagehot’s interpretation of Westminster parliamentary systems. Instead, they see their government willing to push a class of people outside the boundaries of society, deny them a livelihood, and deny them full membership in the most welcoming country in the world; and they said enough. Last night I learned my new neighbours are not a monstrous faceless occupying mob. They are our moral conscience reminding us – with every blow of their horns – what we should have never forgotten: We are not a country that makes an untouchable class out of our citizens.

DavidMaybury · Technocracy · Justice · Love · Vaccine · Politics · Propaganda · Canada · Protest

February 4, 2022 at 3:54:54 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://maybury.ca/the-reformed-physicist/2022/02/03/a-night-with-the-untouchables/

Taking Advantage of the Crises: Comments on Bökenkamp

It is probably prudent to start with a clear affirmation that the pandemic is real, that COVID-19 has taken many lives, and that public health measures have been necessary to try to limit the devastation of the disease. No denying here.

But it is also evident that the messaging by health authorities has often been confusing, and that has undermined their own credibility: for example, in the shift from initial advice against wearing masks to the current (if inconsistent) mandate to do so. If the science on a particular question is not fully settled, it might be better for the authorities to be honest about that indeterminacy rather than to lay claim to an infallibility they cannot maintain. That clarity, however, would mean a willingness to trust the public to think on its own and to act in the spirit of individual responsibility, instead of issuing orders and vilifying critics.

Communication concerning COVID-19 was exacerbated in the United States by the context, as the pandemic erupted onto a highly polarized political landscape just prior to a national election. As a result, every coronavirus policy immediately turned into a target of partisan crossfire, whether at the federal, the state, or the local levels. When governors and mayors were caught disobeying their own ordinances, public doubt could only grow. Similarly, the remarks by then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris that she would not take a vaccine developed under the Trump administration has likely contributed to anti-vax sentiment in minority communities. And the ups and downs of fatality rates under Democratic and Republican governors are given more or less prominence in the press, depending on the partisan orientation of the respective newspaper. No wonder the expectations about objective journalism are so low.

Yet the coronavirus debate is not only an American phenomenon. Overseas, notably in France, the Netherlands, and especially Germany, there have been robust and often polemical debates—although never as clearly party-political as in the United States—concerning the character of the restrictions imposed on society in the name of slowing the spread of the disease or “flattening the curve.” There have been plenty of different strategies, and, in the future, there will be ample room for political scientists, civil rights advocates, and epidemiologists to review data in order to ask which country got it right: too much or too little lockdown of the economy, too severe or insufficient the suspension of education, religious services, or other public gatherings, and so forth. In earlier texts published here, we have seen German philosopher Otfried Höffe prioritize liberty over excessive restrictions, while novelist Thomas Brussig controversially proposed “more dictatorship.” Clearly the pandemic required some policy response, but we are still a long way away from a nonpartisan evaluation of the different sorts of strategies and their effectiveness. That necessary discussion is still pending. We are likely to be able to determine, sometime in the future, that some leaders got it all terribly wrong.

German historian and author Gérard Bökenkamp, in an essay translated here, approaches the problem from a different angle. He sheds important light on what we have been living through, including the heated polemics around coronavirus policies—but he links it all to the phenomena of climate politics as well. Yet instead of asking which policies were effective and which failed, he reflects on a widespread (but surely not uniform) willingness of the public to embrace them. Why has so much of the public willingly submitted to restrictions on their freedoms, and why have they responded with such animated hostility toward the minority of opponents to the coronavirus prevention regime or to climate policies? In other words, his argument is not an attack on the scientific legitimacy of the public health measures adopted, about which he maintains a distanced agnosticism here. Nor does he cast doubt on the claims about climate change. He does not even present an argument about the dramatic power grab by political authorities, their utilization of the crises to introduce new strategies of societal control. Instead Bökenkamp proposes a hypothesis concerning the motivation underlying the willing and often eager public acceptance of restrictive orders: not why this or that policy was right or wrong but why the German public largely acquiesced. What makes obedience so attractive?

Drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas and the scholar of religions Walter Burkert, Bökenkamp argues that the public’s proactive embrace of the various strictures associated with policies linked to the pandemic (e.g., mandatory social distancing) and climate change (reduced energy consumption) repeats some recognizable patterns that he associates with certain religious phenomena. These include expectations of sacrifice, in the form of self-denial or self-punishment; the prioritizing of moralistic arguments (pandemic or floods as punishments for wrongful behavior); rhetorics of denunciation targeting heretics (anti-vaxxers and climate deniers); and the emergence of prominent figures who, in Bökenkamp’s view, play the roles of saints or priests. The participation in coronavirus and climate policies, he argues, involves the repetition of atavistic behavior patterns otherwise familiar from traditional religions but now, in a largely secular society, played out under the aegis of scientific authority. Hence his suggestion that science has been operating as a substitute religion.

Bökenkamp provides a convincing description of the phenomena, the rapid willingness of much of the public to accept limitations on their exercise of freedoms previously assumed to be unquestionable. Presumably some of this participation might, of course, be reasonably attributed to the assumed credibility of science: rightly or wrongly, the public “believes” in science. Some of it might also be explained in terms of an inclination to obedience, in the sense of a noncontroversial willingness to respect the law, whatever it is. With those alternative explanations in mind, one can ask whether Bökenkamp’s insistence on an analogy between aspects of public behavior and anthropological aspects of religion is credible and whether it suffices to prove that a religious substance is at play.

There are no doubt some apparent similarities between, on the one hand, public behavior facing the crises, COVID and climate, and, on the other, aspects of traditional religion—sacrifice, guilt, and the denunciation of heretics are Bökenkamp’s main points. Yet other parts of religion, perhaps the most vital parts, seem to be absent: the centrality of numinous or holy experiences, the role of miracles (which would of course be at odds with the priority of science), and the absence of any possibility of transcendence. The simulacrum of religion at stake in the embrace of crisis politics is at best an impoverished religion or the eviscerated substitute for religion in a largely secular culture. With that limitation, Bökenkamp is surely on to something important.

In any case, Bökenkamp does describe convincingly the emergence of a repressive conformism, legitimated in the name of public health crises—whether or not one can describe this adequately as a form of religion is almost secondary. While his examples draw on the specific German example, the account rings true for the United States as well, where, however, the twin crises of COVID and climate have been compounded by the cultural moment around BLM and the emergence of cancel culture censorship. Actually Bökenkamp’s religion thesis might find supporting evidence in parts of the American experience, especially the pseudo-religious liturgical moments: the taking the knee ritual at athletic events and the insistence on reciting the names of the dead. Germany and other European countries also have had their versions of American neo-anti-racism, but it was rarely as overwrought as in the United States, from which ultimately it was imported. (Indeed the dissemination of this American discourse can be viewed as a new form of American soft power in the present, even as it purports to be critical of the U.S. past.) Whatever the particular religious dimension of this current development—and this depends a lot on how one evaluates religion as such—Bökenkamp is certainly right to point out this new wave of repressive conformism as a culturally distinct event, with transatlantic common denominators despite some specific national distinctions.

The net effect of these three arenas—public health responses to the pandemic, new regulations associated with global warming, and the various formulations of cancel culture—has been an acceleration of the management of public opinion: from above, through media and employer mandates, and from below, through social pressure, including threats of violence. How so? In the end, we are facing greater monitoring of mobility in the interest of contact tracing, heightened security at various buildings (greater frequency of the need to swipe into buildings that were previously open to the public), a generalized kind of biopolitical surveillance through extensive testing, social ostracism directed at dissenters, and especially the pervasive prospect of censorship on social media. Merely by calling out censorship or doubting the infallibility of government scientists, this text may by endangered. Read it while you can.

How to explain this transformation? The space of unmonitored freedom has been reduced considerably. Yet the public responds with a gleeful renunciation of its previous lifestyle, a willingness to accept policing (even as police forces are to be defunded!), and a particular fanaticism in the denunciation of heterodox viewpoints. We have long ago lost the expectation of a space of public debate in which one could claim to disagree with an opponent on the basis of reason and evidence: at stake now is the vilification of antagonists in order to silence them. Voltaire’s promise to defend the right of one’s opponent to speak has been abandoned.

The steps taken to respond to real crises, like the pandemic, are increasingly a matter of prohibitions and mandates, with little value placed on individual responsibility. That distinction however may help understand what is going on. Modern societies are undergoing a quantum leap increase in social control. Bökenkamp’s concluding explanation—leaving the religion question aside—is alarmingly credible. We have been living in societies with deficient social cohesion. The social-political disciplining that ensued from the Cold War ended decades ago. Traditional cultural ties that can bind and that may have existed in the past are gone, and this structural disruption has surely been amplified by the experiences of globalization, as well as the protest against it, populism. The new forms of social control, legitimated by pandemic and climate change, should be understood as a response to that instability: manage opinion and monitor behavior in order to limit dissent. Meanwhile the new technologies and their transformation of the public sphere provide the infrastructure for surveillance and censorship. The social system has been able to take advantage of the genuine challenges to public health, whether from the virus or from climate change, in order to impose a new regime of control. The crises have been turned into opportunities that are not going to be wasted. Welcome to the new panopticon.

Technocracy · GérardBökenkamp · RusselBerman · Philosophy · Politics · Covid-19 · Psychology · Culture

October 28, 2021 at 12:58:41 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

http://www.telospress.com/taking-advantage-of-the-crises-comments-on-bokenkamp/

From 9/11 to Covid : the refusal of the debate

The three monkeys at the Toshogu Shinto temple. They illustrate the precept of a Chinese sage: "Say nothing wrong, see nothing wrong, hear nothing wrong. They could also illustrate Western cowardice: "Say nothing of the Truth, see nothing of the Truth, hear nothing of the Truth.”

The celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 give rise to two absolutely contradictory narratives, depending on whether one refers to the written and audio-visual press or to the digital press. For some, Al Qaeda declared war on the West by plotting a high-profile crime, while for others the same crime masked a domestic coup d’état in the US.

Any debate is impossible between the supporters of these two versions. Not because both sides refuse it, but because the supporters of the official version -and only they- refuse it. They consider their opponents as "conspiracy theorists", that is to say, in their mind, at best fools, at worst evil people, accomplices -willing or not- of terrorists.

From now on, this disagreement applies to any major political event. And the worldview of the two camps keeps distancing itself from each other.

How could such a fracture between fellow citizens occur in societies that aspire to democracy? Especially since, not this fracture, but the reaction to this fracture makes any democracy impossible.

The continuous news channels privilege the speed of the retransmission of an event. They do not have the time to contextualize it and even less to analyze it; functions which are the proper of journalism. The viewer becomes a voyeur of things he does not understand.

A certain conception of journalism

We are assured today that the role of journalists is to report faithfully what they have seen. Yet when we are interviewed by a local media outlet about a story we know about and see how they have handled it, we are often disappointed. We feel that we have not been understood. Some of us lament that we have come across the wrong journalist and retain our trust in the mainstream media. Others feel that while a little distortion is possible on small issues, a lot more must be done on more complex ones.

In 1989, a crowd attending one of his speeches heard the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, accuse the fascists of having invented the Timișoara massacre attributed to his regime’s torturers. Revulsed by this denial, the crowd revolted, chanting "Ti-mi-șoa-ra! Ti-mi-șoa-ra!" and overthrew him. The local television station in Atlanta (USA), CNN, broadcast live the few days of this revolution. It thus became the first live news channel and turned into an international channel. However, we know today that this massacre never existed. It was only a staged event using corpses taken from a morgue. It was later learned that a propaganda unit of the US Army had an office adjacent to the CNN newsroom.

The Timișoara manipulation only worked because it was live. Viewers had no time to check or even think. Professionally, no journalist ever drew any conclusions from the event. On the contrary, CNN became the model for the live news channels that have sprung up everywhere.

During the Kosovo war, in 1999, I was producing a daily bulletin summarizing the information from NATO and the regional news agencies (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Albania, etc.) to which I had subscribed [1]. From the beginning, what Nato was telling us in Brussels was not confirmed by the regional agencies. On the contrary, they described a completely different conflict. It was strange to see that the regional journalists, from all countries except Albania, formed a block, writing texts that were compatible with each other, but not with those of NATO. Week after week, the two versions were moving away from each other.

I n response to this situation, NATO put Jamie Shea in charge of its communications. He told a new story every day from the battlefield. The international press soon had eyes only for him. His story became the media story and the regional news agencies were no longer covered except by me. In my mind, both sides were lying and the truth had to be somewhere in between.

When the war was over, humanitarians, diplomats and UN soldiers rushed to Kosovo. To their surprise - and mine - they found that the local journalists had accurately reported the truth. Jamie Shea’s words had been nothing but war propaganda. They had been the only "reliable" source for the international media for three months.

Western journalists who went to Kosovo also found that they had trusted people who had lied to them with aplomb. Yet few of them changed their tune. And even fewer managed to convince their editors that NATO had deceived them. The narrative imposed by the Atlantic Alliance had become the Truth that the history books would repeat despite the facts.

We accept to be deceived when we think the Truth is too hard to admit.

Ancient Greece and the Modern West

In ancient Greece, plays caused strong emotions in the audience. Some feared that the gods would drag them into dark destinies. So gradually the chorus, which narrated the story, also began to explain that one must not be fooled by what one saw, but to understand that it was only a staged show.

This distancing from appearances, which is paralyzed by the myth of live information, is called in psychology the "symbolic function". Small children are incapable of this, they take everything seriously. However, at the "age of reason", at 7 years old, we can all make the difference between what is true and what is only a representation.

Reason here is opposed to rationality. To be rational is to believe only in things that are proven. To be reasonable is not to believe in impossible things. This is a very big difference. Because we don’t find the Truth with beliefs, but with facts.

When we see airplanes hitting the World Trade Center in New York and people jumping out of windows to escape the fire, we are all very moved. When the Towers collapse, we are ready to weep. But that should not stop us from thinking [[2](#nb2 "On the political significance of the September 11 attacks, read: "20th (...)")].

We can always be told that 19 hijackers hijacked four airplanes, but since these people were not on the airline’s lists of passengers on board, they could not hijack these planes.

One can always tell us that the fuel from the two burning planes slipped onto the pillars of the buildings and melted them, which would explain why the Twin Towers collapsed, but not on themselves, and not the collapse of the third tower. For a building to collapse, not on one side, but on itself, you have to blow up its foundations, then blow it up from top to bottom to destroy the floors on themselves.

One can always tell us that panic-stricken passengers phoned their relatives before dying, but since the telephone companies have no record of these calls, they did not exist.

One can always tell us that a Boeing destroyed the Pentagon, but it could not have entered through a porte cochere without damaging the doorframe.

The testimonies contradict each other. But only some are contradicted by the facts.

We accept to be deceived when we think the Truth is too hard to admit.

Why we accept to be deceived

There remains a big problem: why do we accept to be deceived? Usually because the Truth is harder for us to accept than the lie.

For example, when for years the son of the president of the National Political Science Foundation denounced the rapes he was subjected to by the president, everyone pitied the poor delusional boy and praised his father for enduring his madness without saying a word. When the victim’s sister published a book of testimonies, everyone realized who was telling the truth. The president was forced to resign. The rapist owes his escape from justice only to his status: former European deputy, president of the emblematic institution of the entire French political-media class and president of the Siècle, the most exclusive private club in France.

Why do we believe that Al Qaeda is responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Because the Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, came before the United Nations Security Council and swore it. It doesn’t matter that he lied years earlier when he validated the story of the incubators stolen from Kuwait by the Iraqis and the babies left to die. Or that he lied later about President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is a Secretary of State and we must believe him.

On the contrary, if we question his word, we should not only ask why we invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, and so on. But also and above all why he lied.

The irremovable Anthony Fauci has managed every major epidemic in the US. He does not work as a doctor, but as a senior civil servant. He does not care about the Hippocratic oath. He has not hesitated to embezzle public money to sponsor illegal and dangerous research in a distant country. Or to promote the compulsory confinement of healthy people.

The reaction to Covid-19: another 9/11

The enigma of 9/11 is not a question of the past. Our understanding of the last twenty years depends on how it is answered. As long as we do not have contradictory debates between the two versions, we will reproduce this fracture on all global issues.

We are currently experiencing another catastrophe, the Covid-19 pandemic. We have all seen a large laboratory, Gilead Science, bribe the editors of the medical journal The Lancet to denigrate a drug, hydroxychloroquine. Gilead Science is the company formerly headed by the 9/11 Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. It is also the company that produces a drug against Covid-19, Remdesivir. In any case, no one dared to look for drugs to treat Covid anymore. Everyone turned to the hope of vaccines.

Donald Rumsfeld had instructed his staff to develop protocols in case of a bioterrorist attack on US military bases abroad. Then he asked one of them, Dr. Richard Hachett, who was a member of the US National Security Council, to extend this protocol to an attack on the US civilian population. It was this man who proposed the compulsory confinement of healthy populations, provoking an outcry from American doctors, led by Professor Donald Henderson of John Hopkins University [3]. For them, Rumsfeld, Hatchett and their advisor, the senior civil servant Anthony Fauci, were enemies of the Hippocratic oath and of humanity.

When the Covid-19 epidemic occurred, Dr. Richard Hatchett had become the director of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations); an association created at the Davos Forum and funded by Bill Gates. It was Hatchett who first used the expression "We are at war", which was taken up by his friend President Emmanuel Macron. It was he who advised confining healthy populations as he had imagined 15 years earlier in the "war on terror." Anthony Fauci, on the other hand, was still at his post. He had embezzled federal money to finance illegal research in the United States. The research was conducted for him at the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.

Normally, the medical professions would have risen up again against the compulsory confinement of healthy people. This did not happen. They overwhelmingly considered that the situation required violating the Hippocratic oath.

Today, the Western countries that followed Dr. Hatchett’s advice and believed Gilead Science’s lies have a terrifying record of this pandemic. The United States has 26 times more deaths per million people than China. And its economy is devastated.

This would deserve some debate and explanation, but no. We prefer to see our societies fractured again between supporters of Anthony Fauci or Professor Didier Raoult.

Conclusion

Instead of talking to each other, of confronting our arguments, we organize false debates between the supporters of the dominant doxa and those of the most grotesque opinions possible.

It is useless to aspire to live in a democracy, if we refuse to really discuss the most important subjects.

Politics · ThierryMeyssan · Psychology · Ethics · Propaganda

September 18, 2021 at 3:25:48 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.voltairenet.org/article214009.html

A Letter to the Vaccinated

(Traduction en français disponible ici)

Following their “Open Letter to the Unvaccinated”, an expanding group of Canadian scholars has now written a letter addressing “the vaccinated”. The writers expose the divisiveness of vaccination status and denounce the resulting rift in society.

Giving up civil liberties in exchange for a false sense of safety is futile. We must not accept a descent into medical apartheid in Canada and around the world.

The letter appeals both to those who chose to take the vaccine and those who were coerced. It reflects on the broader implications of our actions in an effort to collaborate on a constructive path forward.

Open Letter to the Vaccinated

Prime Minister Trudeau recently warned that “there will be consequences” if federal employees do not comply with vaccine mandates. This is a voice of tyranny that has reverberated fear and heightened agitation across our country. It has launched our nation into deep division around mass vaccination and brought our collective recovery from this pandemic to a critical head. In fact, it forces us, as a country, to finally ask: indeed, what are those consequences?

What are the societal consequences of being divided along the lines of vaccination status? What are the consequences of mandating such an insufficiently tested medical intervention? How is this all supposed to end well?

The consequences will be dire, to be certain. And the consequences will affect all of us, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated alike.

Over the last six months, many of us made our decision to accept the vaccine in good faith – doing the right thing in order to work, travel and visit the people we love. Sadly, some of us have been pressured or coerced. And now, mounting evidence worldwide shows that these vaccines cannot stop the transmission of the virus and variants, yet vaccination mandates continue.

Meanwhile, the pharma corporations are earning billions of dollars of public money, and pushing to fast-track the vaccines towards full approval, without due process or public discussion. It is abundantly clear that when money and politics intertwine, science and ethics take a back seat.

Maybe you once resented those who hesitated to get the vaccine, as people who were not doing their part; but maybe it is time to consider that we have all become passengers on the same runaway train. The meaning of “fully vaccinated” is rapidly changing as leaders demand the next booster upgrade and threaten ousting us from public spaces if we don’t comply. So, if you are among the “fully vaccinated” today, by tomorrow you may become one of the “insufficiently vaccinated” and be coerced into taking another shot.

If history is any indication, this will not stop with barring admission to concerts or bars. When you can no longer buy food, access banking, vote in person or cross a provincial border, it will be crystal clear that the same discriminatory practices that you hope to abolish will be ever more firmly established. The real consequences await all of us.

Perhaps you’ve had your full round of doses and are now having doubts about whether to continue based on the alarming number of infections among the vaccinated. Or maybe you know someone who has been vaccine-injured or are concerned about the mounting death reports in conjunction with vaccinations.

We keep asking ourselves, “Why is the data not allowed to be scrutinized and why are independent experts being censored if they attempt to do just that?” It is incomprehensible, and decidedly un-Canadian, to see the silencing of highly regarded doctors and health scientists in our country and around the globe.

History has taught us that one-sided arguments and outlawed dissent are signs of totalitarianism lurking at the doorstep. Soon, asking questions will make you an enemy of the State. Mandating vaccines is a breaking point. “My body, my choice” has been one of the hallmarks of a free and democratic society, but this is changing. Canadians are being robbed of personal decision making.

With lockdowns already scheduled for the fall, and boosters at the ready, we are entering a watershed moment. Are we all willing to continue being injected indefinitely? In Canadian provinces and around the world vaccine passports are demonstrating our new, long-term relationship with medical coercion in exchange for basic freedoms. Thus far, each treatment has been promised to be the last, but it couldn’t be clearer that there is no end in sight.

And now they’re coming for our children.

With extremely low risk of becoming ill and practically no risk of dying from COVID-19, the mass vaccination of children and adolescents remains unwarranted. Lining up our healthy children for medical treatment was never part of the deal. Most disturbingly of all, we are being primed for mass vaccination campaigns in our schools that do not require parental consent. Does the government decide what is best for our children? Without question, the family ties that bind us are being undone. Justifiably, parents are appalled by this unprecedented overreach and are debating pulling their children out of schools.

Despite our best intentions, families are scarred, friends are divided, and partners are at odds with each other. We have been weakened by our division and manipulated through fear.

Just how far will we allow this to go? “All the way!” some of us declare. But “all the way” is a place we will never reach. We need to stop this medical catastrophe and face the truth: this isn’t about our health; it is about politics and it is about control.

The consequences of following Prime Minister Trudeau’s current orders are greater than his threatened consequences. We entered into this for one another, not for our politicians. We have done what we felt we had to do, and now we must say, ‘This is far enough, no more!’

Angela Durante, PhD
Denis Rancourt, PhD
Jan Vrbik, PhD
Laurent Leduc, PhD
Valentina Capurri, PhD
Amanda Euringer, Journalist
Claus Rinner, PhD
Maximilian C. Forte, PhD
Julie Ponesse, PhD
Michael Owen, PhD
Donald G. Welsh, PhD

Covid-19 · Politics · OntarioCivilLibertiesAssociation · Ethics

September 2, 2021 at 9:12:50 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://ocla.ca/a-letter-to-the-vaccinated/

Political Life in the Lottery of Babylon

A great confusion has settled over America’s political scene. The country, for most, seems harder and harder to recognize. Our capacity for ceaseless revision has given way to longer trends that have locked us onto tracks whose fixity we never thought to anticipate. The confusion has been made more intractable by the self-delegitimation of the academy and the press, which are selectively allergic to context and historically shallow, respectively.

As Theta Skocpol noticed, over the course of the 20th century America went from membership civics to managerial civics. Membership civics involved civil society groups with thick social ties—the Knights of Columbus, the Elk’s Lodge, and so on. Even presidential candidates had to win them over. But as America became more disaffiliated, membership groups gave way to managerial civics. Rather than relying on the power of regularly meeting groups, we got a world of PACs and lobbyists and inboxes buckshot with panicky fundraising emails warning of imminent partisan collapse without another $5 donation to someone you’ve never heard of.

While this happened, Karl Rove’s Red Map strategy went into effect. Republicans came to dominate the local level from schoolboards to judiciaries to statehouses. Democrats, meanwhile, shifted from a pseudo-labor party to the party of the urban professional. While Rove’s plan worked to cinch victory at the lower levels, Democrats took to the federal level. Couple this with a trend Christopher Lasch noticed in the ’90s, and which lockdowns and the 2020 riots helped deepen: the death of “third places,” local organizations and establishments that allowed the co-mingling of classes and provided venues for civic practice.

Set atop this yet another trend: the downfall of local news media to social media. The internet, and social media in particular, has devastated local press, blinding the public to local issues and turning their gaze toward larger national issues over which they exert less and less control. Thus all news is national news and most national news is helmed by an establishment of so-called centrists and progressives. What we see here is the death of a federalist civic culture, a huge shift in American political subjectivity.

Ellen Meiksins Wood marked this shift from a different angle nearly 25 years ago as she surveyed political life in America since the fall of the Soviet Union. The left began to quit socialism for a postmodern “new pluralism” anchored in identitarian issues. Wood worried that the left’s abandonment of class politics for “new pluralism” would mean surrendering to a politics that reached “beyond the traditional liberal recognition of diverse interests and the toleration (in principle) of diverse opinions” in three important ways: first, “its conception of diversity probes beneath the externalities of ‘interest’ to the psychic depths” of identity while expanding the political into lifestyles; second, it no longer assumes that universalist principles can “accommodate all diverse identities and lifestyles”—in other words, a politics of exception and entitlement; and, third, its belief that no larger structure overhangs human life so that society is little more than a sum of different fragments that need to be brought together by evermore elaborate theorizing. Wood thought that identity politics would launder elite interest while the left cheered it on. Imagine.

On the right, a different mistake was being made: that business was the “innocent opposite” of government, as Christopher Caldwell puts it. Now that Lockheed Martin is putting on white guilt human resources seminars, the CIA is posting woke advertisements to YouTube, and efforts like Prop 22 are incentivizing further destruction of unions as Uber puts up billboards shaming “racists,” it’s clear that business has no cultural counter-state allegiance to the little guy. Of course, it never had much material allegiance either. Deploying wokeness as a script to co-opt the left is a remix of big business’s relationship to the traditional values of the right: pledge concern for said values while steamrolling whatever stands in the way of making a buck.

But Wood’s and Skocpol’s angles need updates. Since the Non-Profit Industrial Complex has come of age, the managerial civics Skocpol described have evolved into something far stranger. And Wood wasn’t cynical enough.

Anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed how the wealthy have bankrolled foundations and NGOs that now dictate much of our political life. In some cases, it helps entrench certain discourses at the national level. Take Jack Dorsey of Twitter bankrolling Ibram X. Kendi, for example. Or the hundreds of millions major foundations poured into #BlackLivesMatter which has done bupkis for everyday black Americans, their alleged cause. In other cases, it has led to a new version of the company town. Take Kingston, New York, for example, which Peter Buffet—Warren’s son—has terraformed with various other woke overlords. They have inundated the town with so much money residents would sooner choke on a wad of Benjamins than criticize the Buffets. Those who do face ostracism and are severed from the money pipeline. Yet while Buffet and his buddies decolonize hot chocolate by calling it cacao and astroturf local politics, a fentanyl epidemic ravages Kingston’s working class.

This is a politics as divorced from democracy as is possible without altering the Constitution. The civil society formation brought on by the non-profit regime works as an end run around the public will as different elite-funded groups vie to Gene Sharpe their way into dominance. Not only that, this formation has restructured political life at the local level—how could what’s left of traditional membership organizations compete with NGOs with well-stocked war chests? No surprise the word “neofeudalism” has been popping up on both sides of the partisan spectrum.

Because civil society has ballooned to capture government and political proceedings at every level it feels increasingly hard to tell what’s real and what pro wrestling calls “kayfabe.” The net effect of unreality and elite meddling casts a fog over the national self-understanding. Who’s in charge? What are they doing? And why are they doing it? Unsurprisingly, a bounty of conspiracy theories—left and right, hub and heartland—has flowered over the last few years. The role of the citizen is less in doubt than increasingly irrelevant. So why do we feel so involved?

* * *

Whoever manages to capture the hearts of the people can do so at the expense of reality and to their own advantage. Fear of this has been around as long as democracy. Where people need persuasion—as all democracies do—political rhetoric enters the fray. The potential disjuncture between rhetoric and truth and the consequences incurred by that disjuncture can be found in writers like Thucydides and Plato. Political emotions have proved a boon and a burden to human society for a long time. What I want to highlight is not so much new in itself as it is a new version of an old problem.

The novel permutation goes by what I call the “culture of emotionalism,” though it has gone by many names and been puzzled over by all thinkers of all political persuasions. It came to the fore in the post-war era when mass media, particularly television, came to present new political problems and opportunities. The problems involved information control, deception, and seduction. The potential could best be summarized by a member of the Chicago Six, Abbie Hoffman, who thought that whereas previous revolutionaries headed to the job site, “a modern revolutionary group should head to the television station.”

The most optimistic engagement with mass media came from those who conveniently ignored that hedges and warnings within the work of Marshal McCluhan. A gentler, softer, more connected world was possible, they said. This was a world of uplift and feelings over facts. It rejected the regimentations of Fordism and embraced the coming horizontalism that the Telstar-1 satellite, which first connected the world via simultaneous television broadcast, prophesied. We would become a “global village.” Nation-states would fall into obsolescence and so too would other divisions that arbitrarily bar our hearts from touching.

In other words, the Cold War battle plan for a society that could remain connected after nuclear winter and the vision a society so interlinked as to provide us with new intimacies anticipated the same technology: the internet. A strange fusion of ’60s pathetic appeal and hawkish cynicism intertwined as the internet grew and brought each of us into its network. No surprise then that the author of the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” published in 1996, was John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Like Newt Gingrich, Barlow found himself favorably depicted in the early issues of Wired magazine.

While this material, technological, and media shift took place, culture became more therapeutic in tone. We used to worry about “self-esteem” and now we fret over “mental health.” Everyday life has become yet more pathologized, more in need of experts to adjust, interpret and rework it for us. It’s as if we can make no commonsensical assumptions about how to behave, how to raise children, how to date, marry, or even weep.

As our society has become more invested in our emotions, it has become more manipulative. Slavoj Zizek likes to joke about the difference this way: while the older, authoritarian father would tell you that you’re going to grandma’s whether you like it or not, the new, postmodern father would say, “You know how much your grandma likes it when you come with us to visit her.” Rather than commanding you, our society prefers to emotionally massage you into obedience. This, of course, means access to your interiority. And access to your interiority is what the internet, as it currently exists, is designed to secure, catalog, and adjust. At least, that’s their hope.

To put it succinctly, the emergent telos of the culture of emotionalism from the ’60s wedded well to the expansion of control society as incarnated in the internet. Their mutual development has given us what we’re now living in: an emotionalist managerial regime concerned with moral coercion on behalf of elite interest.

* * *

The online version of the bureaucrat is the moderator, who has deep roots in the culture of the internet. You could argue that today the figure of the moderator has replaced that of the bureaucrat. Policing the norms of discourse is the moderator’s job. Its function, originally, was small “p” political back when forums, messageboards, and other internet venues were the norm. As the major platforms grew, moderators grew with them.

Not all moderation is bad of course. There are plenty of underpaid workers in places like Florida whose lives are slowly ground down by monitoring Facebook for videos and images of child molestation, animal cruelty, murder, etc. But that’s a category apart from the regime-legitimizing moderator function we’re watching now. As the Biden administration has rolled out its “domestic terror” initiative, obviously meant to punish those outside the monoparty orthodoxy, and as Twitter and Facebook have severally purged accounts with dissenting views, it’s obvious that moderation exists in a loose agreement between private tech companies and the federal government. What’s more, those in the media and many in the academy, members of the professional-managerial class all, serve as enforcers of the regime in the open.

The managerial class is obsessively meritocratic, but of course meritocracy can’t concern itself with instrumental knowledge alone. It eventually adopts moral worth as criteria and thus turns moral worth into a category of knowledge about which people need to be taught. The managerial class moderators’ role is to “educate” people on the latest moral formulations. This makes for much of this class’s political commitments. As Catherine Liu writes in Virtue Hoarders, “If [the professional managerial class’s] politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance.”

I say “latest moral formulations” because, as we’ve noticed, a large portion of this moderating class is interested in enforcing “wokeness,” an ideology born on the internet with antecedents in the “new pluralism” of the new, new left that Wood criticized. Wokeness seems endlessly revisable with new acronyms and obscure social rules issued by the month and sometimes week. With each new iteration, people must be shown how they ought to relate so that they can merit moral worth. Their inner lives must be plumbed for old badness so that the knowledge of the new goodness can take its place.

Philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls this dynamic the “schoolteacher’s paradox.” The logic of the relationship between the schoolteacher and the ignoramus constitutes itself around abolishing “the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus. His lessons and the exercises he sets aim gradually to reduce the gulf separating them.” The catch is that the schoolteacher can only achieve this goal by constantly recreating the gulf between himself and the ignoramus. “To replace ignorance by knowledge,” Ranciere writes, “he must always be one step ahead, install a new form of ignorance between the pupil and himself.”

Thus our unending tutelage under the managers. Those who cannot or will not get with the program are delegitimized and even drummed out of the discourse to make more room for the semi-official line. As the “epistemic gulf” between the woke schoolteachers and the ignoramuses of the world bloats and shrinks, a sister dynamic plays out at the same time.

As Geoff Shullenberger noticed during the flare-up over the Harper’s Letter (remember that?), “Regardless of which side wins any particular battle in the recurring speech wars, both parties to the conflict end up reinforcing the power of the overall system in which the drama is enacted.” What appears as ideological conflict is in actuality a process that social media platforms are built to foster. Shullenberger continues,

It is an arena for perpetual conflict driven by an accumulation of grievances collected in a mass program of decentralized surveillance. We are incentivized, by the coded logic of the social media platforms where public engagement now takes place, to find reasons to hate each other. The algorithms that encourage and reward particular behaviors on Twitter and Facebook play on our deepest human instincts and desires to create spectacles of symbolic violence and sacrifice.

And so the miasma shrouding American political life, more and more divorced from its most basic political traditions, thickens around us. What appears to be a “breaking point” at any given time is more likely confirmation that the platforms work as planned to the benefit of those already in power. In this way, resistance gets absorbed into the legitimating machinery itself. Wokeness is only one version of content that will generate the correct squabbles to perpetuate the platforms. The status quo remains remarkably plastic.

* * *

“Like all men of Babylon,” the narrator begins in Borges’ In the Lottery of Babylon, “I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.” As the story unfolds, we learn a lottery has taken hold of Babylon. At first an innocent game, like any lottery, it eventually came to incorporate more people by replacing financial remuneration with non-monetary chances. Sometimes you could win the role of proconsul, sometimes that of a slave. Some began to say a shadowy cabal runs it. Others that there no longer is a lottery. But it is impossible to tell because it has so colonized everyday life that no one can determine what activity does or does not fall under its control.

It feels today as if America is a lottery owned by elites but run by those below them, so that unifying against them and their interests appears so obscure and difficult that we hardly know where to begin. But what we seem to be losing in the confusion is a basic civic sense of equality. While it may appear unclear who will find themselves proconsul or slave, so to speak, the durability of those roles becomes more and more ingrained in the national culture. No republican democracy can survive without a basic commitment to common standards that apply to all. To the extent difference and exception become the name of the game is the extent to which we abandon basic democratic values.

And this is the darkest success of the regime thus far: that fewer and fewer Americans believe they are or can be a nation of co-equals committed to the shared project of society.

Emmet Penney is a writer and the co-host of the ex.haust podcast.

Politics · Ideology

August 20, 2021 at 11:31:20 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/political-life-in-the-lottery-of-babylon/

Fascism and the Antifestival

(Part 2 of the Girard series. Part 1 here)

Today, the Western world and particularly the United States appears to be in the midst of a classic Girardian sacrificial crisis. Once-reliable social institutions crumble. The public loses trust in its authorities: political, financial, legal, and medical. The new generation is poorer and sicker than the last. Few of any political persuasion believe that society is working or that we are on the right track. Reason, markets, and technology have failed to redeem their utopian promise. The gods have failed us, and we glimpse monsters emerging from their shadows: ecological collapse, nuclear armageddon, the poisoning of our bodies, minds, and world. Simmering differences and rivalries, once subsumed under a general civic consensus, take on a new intensity as each side grows more militant. As confidence wanes in the state’s capacity to hold evil at bay, latent ritualistic instincts come back to life.

Philosopher Rene Girard argued that these ritualistic instincts derive from social upheavals in which runaway cycles of vengeance – the original social disease – were converted into unifying violence against scapegoated victims. Rituals, religions, festivals, and political institutions evolved to prevent similar outbreaks from recurring.

One such ritual pattern that Girard identifies is the “antifestival,” in which “The rites of sacrificial expulsion are not preceded by a period of frenzied anarchy, but by an extreme austerity and an increased rigor in the observance of all interdicts.” In modern times this takes an extended institutional form in totalitarianism. Both Soviet communism and Nazi fascism had a strong puritanical streak, as both were hostile to anything outside their own order. Fascism is essentially an extended antifestival, and it arises, as does the antifestival, in response to looming social breakdown, real or imagined. In many societies, the priestly caste takes every opportunity to impose these rigorous interdicts, taboos, and rituals, which after all increase their own power. The best opportunity is a crisis that can be attributed to people’s sinful ways. A crisis like an earthquake, a flood, or… a plague.

We seem today to be partially emerging from an extended series of antifestivals, otherwise known as “lockdowns.” They have accompanied totalitarian tendencies and a quasi-fascistic hostility to true festivals or indeed to anything resembling public fun. Moreover, many of our public health measures bear a distinct ritualistic cast, and share with both fascism and with numerous archaic antifestivals an obsession with “pollution.” Consider the following passage from the early 20th-century anthropologist James Frazer, entitled “The Collapse of the Nredom Tribe: A Case of Religious Hysteria.”

Jenkins’ chronicle begins at a moment when the Nredom “tribe” (actually a numerous and highly organized society) was already showing signs of social, political, and ecological decline. For years its priests had been warning of evil spirits on the verge of attacking the people. Finally on the third year of Jenkins’ ethnographic residency, some members of the tribe began to take ill. An evil spirit was afoot! As the priests explained it, the spirit could possess anyone who did not abide by various new taboos and perform necessary rituals. Once possessed by the spirit, a person became unclean, at risk of transmitting it to anyone they associated with. No one could see the spirit without special ceremonial instruments such as the priests possessed, but they made drawings of it to show the populace.

A ritual was devised to determine whether any given person was possessed by the spirit. A specially consecrated wand was moistened with the bodily fluids of the person suspected of possession, and then sent to a special hut where priests would subject the stick to further divinatory rituals designed to force the evil spirit to reveal itself. Thereupon, agents of the priests would notify the unfortunate tribesperson of his or her possession. Anyone so adjudged of possession had to remain in strict separation from the rest of the tribe for a fortnight.

Some of the taboos and rituals that the unfortunate superstitious natives adopted were quite bizarre. For example, the priests had marks placed a fathom-length apart in all public places, stating that if everyone stood no closer to each other than the marks indicated, that they would enjoy magical protection. They also demanded that everyone who might come into proximity to the unclean perform frequent ritual ablutions and other forms of bodily purification, and wear various forms of ceremonial headgear to frighten off the spirit. All public gatherings were prohibited, and even normal functions of life severely curtailed. No activity was permitted except with the priests’ explicit sanction.

As you can imagine, this regime generated intense social stress, hardship, and some degree of opposition. Soon the priests were busy stamping out various heresies. Some heretics claimed that the rituals to stop transmission of the evil spirit wouldn’t work, or that the spirit was not so dangerous. Some heretics doubted in the very existence of the evil spirit, saying the heightened levels of sickness were due to some other cause. Others loudly proclaimed that the evil spirit had been loosed upon the populace by the priests themselves. Social tensions mounted as the priests tried to silence the heretics and arouse the populace against them.

Most people in the tribe trusted the priests, but many apparently harbored doubts too, because adherence to the rituals was inconsistent. Knowing that public rejection of the strict regime of taboos and rituals was inevitable, the priests announced they were developing a new sacrament, a magic potion that would protect the recipient forever from possession. Administered by a deputized priest via a slightly painful ritual of skin piercing, the potion sanctified all those who received it. These sanctified brethren could engage in normal life again, although they still had to abide by certain of the new rituals and taboos. Those refusing the potion remained unclean and were subject to all kinds of penalties, shaming, and ostracism.

Unfortunately, the new potion proved less effective than the priests originally promised. According to the priests, other ghosts and spirits were laying in wait, against whom new rituals and taboos must be applied and new potions administered. The power given unto the priests in this time of crisis would need to be permanent. And, they hinted darkly, this plague of evil was a kind of punishment for the tribe’s sinful ways, particularly the sins of the heretics. Heresy must be stamped out! The unclean must be sanctified! Soon religious pogroms swept the land, followed by counter-pogroms against the priests themselves. And Nredom society collapsed.

Okay, I confess. I made up this passage. The priests are the scientists. The wand is the PCR test swab. The unclean are those who test positive. The potion is the vaccine. My point is not that Covid is nothing but a religious hysteria. My point is that, whatever else Covid is, it is also a religious hysteria; that this lens greatly illuminates our current condition and quite probably upcoming events. Our social responses to Covid bear so striking a resemblance to ritual practices and ideas (masks, potions, tabooed persons, sanctification, etc.) that we have to ask how much of our public health policy is really scientific, and how much is religion in disguise. It might even lead to a deeper question: how and whether science differs from (other) religions. (Before you start protesting, “Ridiculous. What about objectivity? The Scientific Method? Peer review?” please read this explanation. The idea cannot be dismissed on trivial grounds.)

I hesitate to call anything “just a ritual,” a dismissal that ignores the mysterious relationship between ritual and reality; however, the dubious efficacy of many of our public health practices invites the judgment that they are, indeed, “just rituals.” I will not attempt here to make a case that masks, lockdowns, distancing, and so forth are dubious. Ultimately the argument comes down to whether our systems of knowledge production (science and journalism) are sound, and whether our medical and political authorities are trustworthy. To doubt public health orthodoxy is to answer no, they are not sound, they are not trustworthy. However, anyone who tries to make this case must, by necessity, source evidence from outside official institutions – evidence which, for the true believers, is illegitimate by definition.

One is unlikely to prove the priests wrong using information sanctioned by the priests. If you try, you are exposed as a heretic.

One contemporary term for a heretic is a “conspiracy theorist.” The term belongs in quotes because it is one thing to claim our institutions are unsound, and quite another to claim that a conscious conspiracy makes them so. “Conspiracy theorist” has become one of the ways to dismiss and dehumanize dissidents to public health orthodoxy.

The swiftness with which deviants from Covid orthodoxy are consigned to subhuman categories is alarming. It is just what is needed to prepare them for their role as Girardian scapegoats. A perennial human reflex, in times of trouble, is to find or create heretics and outcasts. Today they are called “anti-maskers,” “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “Q-adjacent,” “conspiracy theorists,” “covidiots,” and “domestic extremists,” subjects of a kind of virtual pogrom that humiliates, blames, and often digitally extinguishes its targets. And sometimes the consequences are more than digital.

Like modern fascists with their ideas of ethnic cleansing, and modern communists with their party purges, ancient societies according to Girard were often obsessed with pollution. The original pollutant was violence, which once instigated could quickly spread out of control, much like an infection. To quote Girard, “If the sacrificial catharsis actually succeeds in preventing the unlimited propagation of violence, a sort of infection is in fact being checked…. The tendency of violence to hurl itself on a surrogate if deprived of its original object can surely be described as a contaminating process.” Thus it was that sacrificial victims were often quarantined from normal society, and that the violence of the sacrifice was strictly contained within ritual structures.

What totalitarian societies, traditional antifestivals, and Covid lockdowns have in common is a reflex of control. This reflex meets any failure of control with more of it. When herbicide-resistant weeds appear, the solution is a new herbicide. When immigrants cross the border, we build a wall. When a school shooter gets into a locked school building, we fortify it further. When germs develop resistance to antibiotics, we develop new and stronger ones. When masks fail to stop the spread of covid, we wear two. When our taboos fail to keep evil at bay, we redouble them. The controlling mind foresees a paradise in which every action and every object is monitored, labeled, and controlled. There will be no room for any bad thing to exist. Nothing and no one will be out of place. Every action will be authorized. Everyone will be safe.

Those who attribute the controlling programs of Bill Gates and the technocratic elite to malice do not see the idealism behind the Technological Program. To the elites, their critics seem incomprehensible: deluded, ignorant enemies of progress itself, enemies of the betterment of humanity.

Unfortunately for them and for us, the paradise of total control is a mirage, receding all the more quickly the faster we approach it. The more tightly we impose order, the more chaos squeezes out through the cracks. Girard: “Violence too long held in check will overflow its bounds—and woe to those who happen to be nearby.” The same for other aspects of the Wild: desire, anger, fear, eros. Extreme order creates its opposite.

A subtle parallel connects the dynamics of the sacrificial victim with other programs of control. Ultimately, both depend on a false reduction whose temporary appearance of success allows deeper problems to persist. The cause of immigration is not just immigrants; the cause of school shootings is not just shooters; the cause of disease is not just pathogens; the cause of climate change Is not just greenhouse gases. These are but the terminal agents of a long process; they are the most conspicuous among a complex of causes; they are, like a scapegoat, convenient targets for the exercise of power. Having exercised it, we rest satisfied that something has been done.

CharlesEisenstein · Psychology · Politics · Covid-19

August 12, 2021 at 11:49:45 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-2-fascism-and-the-antifestival/

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

(A standalone Part 3 of a series. Part 1, Part 2)

Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.
– Joseph Goebbels

We would like to think that modern societies like ours have outgrown barbaric customs like human sacrifice. Sure, we still engage in scapegoating and figuratively sacrifice people on the altar of public opinion, but we don’t actually kill people in hopes of placating the gods and restoring order. Or do we?

Some scholars believe we do. Following the thought of the late philosopher Rene Girard, they argue that human sacrifice is still with us today in the form of capital punishment (and incarceration – a removal from society). Girard believed that human sacrifice arose in response to what he called a “sacrificial crisis.” The original sacrificial crisis – the greatest threat to early societies – was escalating cycles of violence and retribution. The solution was to redirect the vengeance away from each other and, in violent unanimity, toward a scapegoat or class of scapegoats. Once established, this pattern was memorialized in myth and ritual, applied preemptively as human sacrifice, and carried out in response to any other crisis that threatened society.

In this view, capital punishment originated in human sacrifice and it is human sacrifice. It performs the same function: to forestall reciprocal violence through unanimous violence. It does so by monopolizing vengeance, truncating the cycle of retaliatory violence at the first iteration. This works whether the subject of execution or incarceration is guilty of a crime or not. Justice is a cover story for something more primal. Theologian Brian K. Smith writes,

The subject of a modern execution might also be carrying multivalent significations. Among other things (i.e., racial and economic metonymic potentialities), such a figure might serve as the representative of all crime, of "disorder" and social "chaos," of the "breakdown of values," etc. Apart from any utilitarian deterrent effect capital punishment might have, it is one, rather drastic, response to a social problem – illegal and illicit violence.

In other words, what we rationalize in the language of justice and deterrence is actually a blood ritual, in which a person, whether guilty or not, becomes a symbol. Ritual springs up irrepressibly around executions: the last meal, the “dead man walking” to the special execution chamber, the witnesses, the medical procedures, the presiding physician, the signed papers, the last rites, the covering of the head, the precise timetable, the final words, and the exacting attention to detail all mark off the execution as separate, special… sacred.

Something Must be Done

In a lucidly argued paper, legal scholar Roberta Harding offers several examples from the deep South during Jim Crow where judge, jury, and prosecutor well knew that the accused black man was innocent of the charge of raping a white woman. However, because the white supremacist social order was threatened by consensual interracial intercourse, they executed the accused anyway; if they failed to do so promptly he was lynched. Partly this was to set an example and terrify the black population, but partly it was because something had to be done.

By the same token, it mattered little that Afghan villagers or Iraqi politicians had no culpability for 9/11; nor did it matter that bombing them would have no practical effect on future terrorism (except to further inflame it). Obviously, the United States was using 9/11 as a pretext to accomplish larger geopolitical aims. Yet it worked as a pretext only because of broad public agreement that “something must be done.” And, enacting the age-old pattern, we knew what to do: find some target of unifying violence that cannot effectively retaliate. I was dismayed in 2001 when, at Quaker Meeting of all places, one of the Quakers said, “Of course, a forceful response of some kind is necessary.” What, I wondered, does “forceful” mean? It means bombing someone. In other words, we must find someone upon whom to visit violence. He may also have mentioned addressing the imperialist causes of terrorism, but those were not the subject of “of course.” Nearly everyone instinctively took for granted the necessity of finding sacrificial victims. We were definitely going to bomb someone – the only question was whom.

The 9/11 attack exemplifies what Harding calls a triggering incident, which “resuscitates dissensions, rivalries, jealousies and quarrels within the community,” leading to a sacrificial crisis. A recent such incident was the murder of George Floyd. The latent conflicts it exposed have been festering for so long that it takes little provocation for them to erupt into an active crisis. The response to Floyd’s murder is a classic illustration of the calming power of violent unanimity, as Derrick Chauvin’s conviction and sentencing temporarily quelled the racialized civil unrest that the killing sparked. Something was done – but only to quell the unrest, not to solve the complex, heavily ramified problem of police killings. It no more addressed the source of America’s race problems than killing Osama Bin Laden made America safe from terrorism.

Not just any victim will do as an object of human sacrifice. Victims must be, as Harding puts it, “in, but not of, the society.” That is why, during the Black Death, mobs roamed about murdering Jews for “poisoning the wells.” The entire Jewish population of Basel was burned alive, a scene repeated throughout Western Europe. Yet this was not mainly the result of preexisting virulent hatred of Jews waiting for an excuse to erupt; it was that victims were needed to release social tension, and hatred, an instrument of that release, coalesced opportunistically on the Jews. They qualified as victims because of their in-but-not-of status.

“Combatting hatred” is combatting a symptom.

Scapegoats needn’t be guilty, but they must be marginal, outcasts, heretics, taboo-breakers, or infidels of one kind or another. If they are too alien, they will unsuitable as transfer objects of in-group aggression. Neither can they be full members of society, lest cycles of vengeance ensue. If they are not already marginal, they must be made so. It was ritually important that Derrick Chauvin be cast as a racist and white supremacist; then his removal from society could serve symbolically as the removal of racism itself.

Just to be clear here, I am not saying Derrick Chauvin’s conviction for George Floyd’s murder was unjust. I am saying that justice was not the only thing carried out.

Representatives of Pollution

Aside from criminals, who today serves as the representative of Smith’s “disorder,” “social chaos,” and “breakdown of values” that seem to be overtaking the world? For most of my life external enemies and a story-of-the-nation served to unify society: communism and the Soviet Union, Islamic terrorism, the mission to the moon, and the mythology of progress. Today the Soviet Union is long dead, terrorism has ceased to terrify, the moon is boring, and the mythology of progress is in terminal decline. Civil strife burns ever hotter, without the broad consensus necessary to transform it into unifying violence. For the right, it is Antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, critical race theory academics, and undocumented immigrants that represent social chaos and the breakdown of values. For the left it is the Proud Boys, right wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and the burgeoning new category of “domestic extremists.” And finally, defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers. As a readily identifiable subpopulation, they are ideal candidates for scapegoating.

It matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society. As with the subjects of criminal justice, their guilt is irrelevant to the project of restoring order through blood sacrifice (or expulsion from the community by incarceration or, in more tepid but possibly prefigurative form, through “canceling”). All that is necessary is that the dehumanized class arouse the blind indignation and rage necessary to incite a paroxysm of unifying violence. More relevant to current times, this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends. Totalitarians right and left invoke it directly when they speak of purges, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst.

Sacrificial subjects carry an association of pollution or contagion; their removal thus cleanses society. I know people in the alternative health field who are considered so unclean that if I so much as mention their names in a Tweet or Facebook post, the post may be deleted. Deletion is a certainty if I link to an article or interview with them. The public’s ready acceptance of such blatant censorship cannot be explained solely in terms of its believing the pretext of “controlling misinformation.” Unconsciously, the public recognizes and conforms to the age-old program of investing a pariah subclass with the symbology of pollution.

This program is well underway toward the Covid-unvaxxed, who are being portrayed as walking cesspools of germs who might contaminate the Sanctified Brethren (the vaccinated). My wife perused an acupuncture Facebook page today (which one would expect to be skeptical of mainstream medicine) where someone asked, “What is the word that comes to mind to describe unvaccinated people?” The responses were things like “filth,” “assholes,” and “death-eaters.” This is precisely the dehumanization necessary to prepare a class of people for cleansing.

The science behind this portrayal is dubious. Contrary to the association of the unvaccinated with public danger, some experts contend that it is the vaccinated that are more likely to drive mutant variants through selection pressure. Just as antibiotics result in higher mutation rates and adaptive evolution in bacteria, leading to antibiotic resistance, so may vaccines push viruses to mutate. (Hence the prospect of endless “boosters” against endless new variants.) This phenomenon has been studied for decades, as this article in my favorite math & science website, Quanta, describes. The mutated variants evade the vaccine-induced antibodies, in contrast to the robust immunity that, according to some scientists, those who have already been sick with Covid have to all variants (See this and this, more analysis here, compare to Dr. Fauci’s viewpoint.)

It is not my purpose here, however, to present a scientific case. My point is that those in the scientific and medical community who dissent from the demonization of the unvaxxed contend not only with opposing scientific views, but with ancient, powerful psycho-social forces. They can debate the science all they want, but they are up against something much bigger. Rwandan scientists could just as well debated the precepts of Hutu Power for all the good that would have done. Perhaps the Nazi example is more apposite here, since the Nazis did invoke science in their extermination campaigns. Then as now, science was a cloak for something more primal. The hurricane of sacrificial violence easily swept aside the minority of German scientists who contested the science of eugenics, and it wasn’t because the dissidents were wrong.

We face a similar situation today. If the mainstream view on Covid vaccines is wrong, it will not be overthrown by science alone. The pro-vaccine camp has a powerful nonscientific ally in the collective id, expressed through various mechanisms of ostracism, shaming, and other social and economic pressure. It takes courage to defy a mob. Doctors and scientists who express anti-vaccine views risk losing funding, jobs, and licenses, just as ordinary citizens face censorship on social media. Even a non-polemic essay like this one will likely be censored, especially if I stain it with the pollution of the heretics by linking blacklisted websites or articles by the disinformation dozen anti-vaxxers. Here, let’s try it for fun. Greenmedinfo! Chldren’s Health Defense! Mercola.com! Ah. That felt a little like shouting swear words in public. You’d better not follow these links, lest you be tainted by their pollution (and your browsing history mark you as an infidel).

To prepare someone for removal as the repository of all that is evil, it helps to heap upon them every imaginable calumny. Thus we hear in mainstream publications that anti-vaxxers not only are killing people, but are raging narcissists, white supremacists, vile, spreaders of Russian disinformation, and tantamount to domestic terrorists. These accusations are amplified by cherry-picking a few examples, choosing hysterical-looking photos of anti-vaxxers, and showcasing their most dubious arguments. If the authorities follow the playbook developed to counter other domestic “threats,” we can also expect agents-provocateurs, entrapment schemes, government agents voicing violent positions to discredit the movement, and so forth – techniques developed in the infiltration of the civil rights, environmental, and anti-globalism movements.

Concerned friends have advised me to “distance myself” from members of the Disinformation Dozen whom I know, as if they carry some kind of contagion. Well, in a sense they do – the contagion of disrepute. It reminds me of Soviet times when mere association with a dissident could land one in the Gulag with them. It also reminds me of my school days, when it was social suicide to be friendly with the weird kid, whose weirdness would rub off one oneself. In grade school, this contagion was known as “cooties.” (In my early teens I was the weird kid, and only very brave teenagers would be friendly to me while anyone was watching.) Clearly, the basic social dynamic pervades society at many levels. A deeply ingrained gut instinct recognizes the danger of membership in a pariah subclass. To defend the pariahs or to fail to show sufficient enthusiasm in attacking them marks one with suspicion; the result is self-censorship and discretion, contributing all the more to the illusion of unanimity.

Hijacking Morality

The same kind of positive reinforcement cycle is what generates a mob. All it takes is a few loud people to incite it by declaring someone or something a target. A portion of the crowd goes along enthusiastically. The rest keep silent and conform in outward behavior even as they are troubled within; to each, it looks like he or she is the only one who disagrees. Writ large to the totalitarian state, the support of a majority of the population is unnecessary. The appearance of support will suffice.

The mechanisms that generate the illusion of unanimity operate within science, medicine, and journalism as well as among the general public. Some conform enthusiastically to the orthodoxy; others complain in whispers to sympathetic colleagues. Those who voice dissent publicly become radioactive. The consequences of their apostasy (excommunication from funding, ridicule in the media, shunning by colleagues who must “distance themselves,” etc.) serve to silence other potential dissidents, who prudently keep their views to themselves.

Notice that here I have not yet said what I personally think about vaccine safety, efficacy, or necessity (be patient); nonetheless, what I have said is enough for anyone to distance themselves from me to keep safe. If I’m not an anti-vaxxer myself, I certainly have their cooties.

Someone on an online forum that I co-host related an incident. His children had a play date scheduled at their friend’s house. A parent called him to ask if his family had been vaccinated. Politely, he said no, and his children were immediately disinvited.

a.image2.image-link.image2-194-534 { padding-bottom: 36.15384615384616%; padding-bottom: min(36.15384615384616%, 193.06153846153848px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-194-534 img { max-width: 534px; max-height: 193.06153846153848px; }

While this parent doubtless believed he was being scientific in canceling the invitation, I doubt science was really the reason. Even the most Covid-orthodox person understands that the non-symptomatic children of non-symptomatic parents pose negligible risk of infection; furthermore, since vaccine believers presumably trust that the vaccine provides protection, rationally speaking they have little to fear from the unvaccinated. The risk is vanishingly small, but the moral indignation is huge.

Many if not most people get the vaccine in an altruistic civic spirit, not because they personally fear getting Covid, but because they believe they are contributing to herd immunity and protecting others. By extension, those who refuse the vaccine are shirking their civic duty; hence the epithets “filth” and “assholes.” They become the identifiable representatives of social decay, ready for surgical removal from the body politic like cancer cells all conveniently located in the same tumor.

Social stability depends on people rewarding altruism and deterring antisocial behavior. These rewards and deterrents are encoded into morals and then into norms and taboos. Performing the rituals and avoiding the taboos of the tribe, and shaming and punishing those who do not, one rests serenely in the knowledge of being a good person. As an added benefit, one distinguishes oneself as part of the moral majority, a full member of society, and not part of the sacrificial minority. Our fear of nonconformity is born of ancient experience so deeply ingrained it has become an instinct. It is hard to distinguish it from morality.

The fear operating in the ostracism of the unvaxxed is mostly not fear of disease, though disease may be its proxy. The main fear, old as humanity, is of a social contagion. It is fear of association with the outcasts, coded as moral indignation.

In any society some people are especially zealous in enforcing group norms, values, rituals, and taboos. They may be controlling types, or they may simply care about the common good. They serve an important function when the norms and rituals are aligned with social and ecological health. But when corrupt forces hijack the norms through propaganda and the control of information, these good folks can become instruments of totalitarian control.

a.image2.image-link.image2-274-412 { padding-bottom: 66.38036809815951%; padding-bottom: min(66.38036809815951%, 273.4871165644172px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-274-412 img { max-width: 412px; max-height: 273.4871165644172px; }

Those doing the scapegoating may honestly, even fervently, believe the narrative of “the unvaccinated endanger others.” Again, while I find the evidence to the contrary persuasive, I won’t try to build a case for it beyond the hints I’ve offered already. As the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into to begin with. Furthermore, most of the citations I would use would come from blacklisted sources, which, owing to their heresy, are unacceptable to those who trust official sources of information. If you trust the official sources, why, then you trust their exclusion of the heretical information. When official sources exclude all dissent, then all dissent becomes a priori invalid to those who trust them.

Consequently, much of the dissent migrates to dodgy right-wing websites without the resources to check facts and scrutinize sources. One would think, for example, that a highly credentialed scientist like Dr. Peter McCullough, a professor of medicine, author of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, and president of the Cardio-Renal Society of America, would be able to find a hearing outside the right-wing media ecosystem. But no. He’s been sidelined to places like the right wing Catholic John-Henry Westen show. I wish I could fine a link to this persuasive interview somewhere else, especially because there is actually nothing right-wing about McCullough’s views.

Tragically, the sites that host people like McCullough are quite often home to anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ articles that use the same tactics leveled at anti-vaxxers, tap into the same template of dehumanization and scapegoating, and lend themselves to the same fascistic ends.

Moving the Masses

For these reasons, I won’t try too hard to substantiate my belief that – and I may as well say it explicitly as a gesture of goodwill to the censors, who will thus have an easier time deciding what to do with this article – the Covid vaccines are much more dangerous, less effective, and less necessary than we are told. They also seem not as dangerous, at least in the short term, as some fear. People are not dropping dead in the streets or turning into zombies; most of my vaccinated friends seem to be just fine. So it is hard to know. The science on the issue is so clouded by financial incentives and systemic bias that it is impossible to rely on it to light a way through the murk. The system of research and public health suppresses generic medicines and nutritional therapies that have been demonstrated to greatly reduce Covid symptoms and mortality, leaving vaccines as the only choice. It also fails to adequately investigate numerous plausible mechanisms for serious long-term harm. Of course, plausible does not mean certain: at this point no one knows, or indeed can know, what the long-term effects will be. My point, however, is not that the anti-vaxxers are right and being unjustly persecuted. It is that their persecution enacts a pattern that has little to do with whether they are right or wrong, innocent or guilty. The unreliability of the science underscores that point, and suggests that we take a hard look at the deadly social impulses that the science cloaks.

To say that official sources exclude all dissent overstates the case. In fact, peer-reviewed publications and highly credentialed medical doctors and scientists concur with much of what I’ve said. Admittedly, they are in the minority. But if they were right, we would not easily know it. The mechanisms for controlling _mis_information work equally well to control true information that contradicts official sources.

The foregoing analysis is not meant to invalidate other explanations for Covid conformity: the influence of Big Pharma on research, the media, and government; reigning medical paradigms that see health as a matter of winning a war on germs; a general social climate of fear, obsession with safety, the phobia and denial of death; and, perhaps most importantly, the long disempowerment of individuals to manage their own health.

Nor is the foregoing analysis incompatible with the theory that Covid and the vaccination agenda is a totalitarian conspiracy to surveil, track, inject, and control every human being on earth. There can be little doubt that some kind of totalitarian program is well underway, but I have long believed it an emergent phenomenon agglomerating synchronicities to fulfill the hidden myth and ideology of Separation, and not a premeditated plot among human conspirators. Now I believe both are true; the latter subsidiary to the former, its avatar, its symptom, its expression. While not the deepest explanation for humanity’s current travail, conspiracies and the secret machinations of power do operate, and I’ve come to accept that some things about our current historical moment are best explained in those terms.

Whether the totalitarian program is premeditated or opportunistic, deliberate or emergent, the question remains: How does a small elite move the great mass of humanity? They do it by aggravating and exploiting deep psycho-social patterns such as the Girardian. Fascists have always done that. We normally attribute pogroms and genocide to racist ideology, the classic example being antisemitic fascism. From the Girardian perspective it is more the other way around. The ideology is secondary: a creation and a tool of impending violent unanimity. It creates its necessary conditions. The same might be said of slavery. It was not that Europeans thought Africans were inferior and so thus enslaved them. It was that thinking them inferior was required in order to enslave them.

On an individual level too, who among us has not operated from unconscious shadow motivations, creating elaborate enabling justifications and post facto rationalizations of actions that harm others?

Why is fascism so commonly associated with genocide, when as a political philosophy it is about unity, nationalism, and the merger of corporate and state power? It is because it needs a unifying force powerful enough to sweep aside all resistance. The us of fascism requires a them. The civic-minded moral majority participates willingly, assured that it is for the greater good. Something must be done. The doubters go along too, for their own safety. No wonder today’s authoritarian institutions know, as if instinctively, to whip up hysteria toward the newly minted class of deplorables, the anti-vaxxers and unvaccinated.

Fascism taps into, exploits, and institutionalizes a deeper instinct. The practice of creating dehumanized classes of people and then murdering them is older than history. It emerges again and again under all political systems. Our own is not exempt. The campaign against the unvaccinated, garbed in the white lab coat of Science, munitioned with biased data, and waving the pennant of altruism, channels a brutal, ancient impulse.

Does that mean that the unvaccinated will be rounded up in concentration camps and their leaders ritually murdered? No. they will be segregated from society in other ways. More importantly, the energies invoked by the scapegoating, dehumanizing, pollution-associating campaign can be applied to gain public acceptance of coercive policies, particularly policies that fit the narrative of removing pollution. Currently, a vaccine passport is required to visit certain countries. Imagine needing one to go shopping, drive a car, or exit your home. It would be easily enforceable anywhere that has implemented the “internet of things,” in which everything from automobiles to door locks is under central control. The flimsiest pretext will suffice once the ancient template of sacrificial victim, the repository of pollution, has been established.

Rene Girard was, from what I’ve read of his work, something of a fundamentalist. I do not agree with him that all desire beyond mere appetite is mimetic or that all ritual originates in sacrificial violence, powerful though these lenses are. By the same token, I don’t want to reduce our current acceleration toward techno-totalitarianism and a biosecurity state by just one psycho-social explanation, however deep. Yet it is important to recognize the Girardian pattern, so we know what we are dealing with, so that we can creatively expand our resistance beyond futile debate over the issues – and most importantly, so we can identify its operation within ourselves. Any movement that leverages contempt in its rhetoric fits the Girardian impulse. Elements of scapegoating such as dehumanization, rumor-mongering, stereotyping, punishment-as-justice, and mob mentality are alive within dissident communities as they are in the mainstream. Any who ride those powers to victory will create a new tyranny no better than the previous.

There is another way and a better future. I will describe it in Part 4 of this essay although the reader already knows what it is, by feel if not in words. This future reaches into the present and the past to show itself any time that vengeance gives way to forgiveness, enmity to reconciliation, blame to compassion, judgment to understanding, punishment to justice, rivalry to synergy, and suspicion to laughter. Transcendence is in the human being.

CharlesEisenstein · Psychology · Myth · Vaccine · Politics · Variant · AntibodyDependantEnhancement

August 12, 2021 at 11:37:27 PM GMT-7 * · permalink

·

https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/mob-morality-and-the-unvaxxed

Prologue: The Information War

CONTENTS

I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”

II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”

III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?

IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon

V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!

VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended

domestic_extremists VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”

VIII. The NGO Borg

IX. COVID-19

X. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule

XI. The New One-Party State

XII. The End of Censorship

XIII. After Democracy

Who’s WHO?

WHO’s new pandemic preparedness and health emergency instruments.

Major amendments proposed for the IHR

Resetting international human rights to a former, authoritarian model

Giving WHO authority over member States.

Providing the WHO DG with unfettered power, and ensuring it will be used.

What happens next?

Annotated summary of significant clauses in the IHR amendments.

Useful links

Author

OTHER UNPRECEDENTED ATTACKS

TOOLS OF THE INDOCTRINATION TRADE

LOGIC, REASONING, AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE HAS DISAPPEARED IN THIS EVENT

DANGERS OF THE VACCINES ARE INCREASINGLY REVEALED BY SCIENCE

HOT LOTS—DEADLY BATCHES OF THE VACCINES

WHY DID FAUCI WANT NO AUTOPSIES OF THOSE WHO DIED AFTER VACCINATION?

CONCLUSIONS

Footnotes

Disclaimer

REFERENCES

A certain conception of journalism

Ancient Greece and the Modern West

Why we accept to be deceived

The reaction to Covid-19: another 9/11

Conclusion

(A standalone Part 3 of a series. Part 1, Part 2)