When protests in the United States happen that help the establishment in some way, whether by stoking divide or pushing an establishment agenda, corporate media is all over them, bombarding us with news of packed streets. However, when massive crowds take to the streets to have their anti-establishment voices heard, it’s crickets on FOXSNBCNN.
Large protesters once again in Paris, France against the domestic vaccine passes.
Protests in France have been going on for thirteen consecutive weeks against the governments vaccine pass. pic.twitter.com/3Xznc9m5b5
Such is the case recently as millions of people across the world have taken to the streets to protest the draconian laws which segregate society and deprive people of their freedoms over their choice in taking a vaccine they may not even need.
Such is the case recently as millions of people across the world have taken to the streets to protest the draconian laws which segregate society and deprive people of their freedoms over their choice in taking a vaccine they may not even need.
One place, in particular, that is currently seeing massive protests is Italy whose government just passed the strictest vaccine mandate in Europe. Starting on October 15, Italy begins enforcing the new workplace green pass requirement. If employees cannot show proof of vaccination, they will not be allowed to go to work nor will they be able to enter any public places like restaurants, theaters, gyms, etc.
If an Italian citizen misses five days of work by failing to comply with the new mandate, the government forces their employer to stop paying them. If employees are caught working without a green pass, the state will extort them to the tune of $2,100 per instance.
Naturally, moves like this have pissed a lot of people off. It is well known now that the antibodies from the covid vaccines fade over time, which is why Israel is now requiring boosters for all of their citizens. It is also well known that immunity from natural infection is far superior to the vaccine.
A person who had the jab back in January and likely has very few antibodies left is considered “green.” However, at the same time, a person who may have caught covid last month and recovered, thereby drastically reducing their ability to catch and spread the disease, is considered a threat and cannot go to work or public places. There is zero logic in these mandates, which prove one thing — they are about control — not your safety.
This is why people are in the streets across the country and all over Europe and Australia. Civil disobedience is their only option left as they are forced out of their jobs, denied entry into public places, and forbidden from travelling.
Protesters are beginning to gather in New York City to protest against the vaccine mandate. pic.twitter.com/flFtoSiWvj
As the mainstream media refuses to question the idea behind mandating vaccinations, they have made their role clear in this tyranny as enablers. This should come as no surprise either given the money that pours into their coffers from the ones who stand to gain the most from vaccine mandates — big pharma.
As we are currently witnessing with their silence in regard to vaccine mandate protests, it is no secret that the pharmaceutical industry wields immense control over the government, big tech, and the media. It is their control which keeps this and any other negative press about their products from seeing the light of day. However, most people likely do not know the scope of this control.
As Mike Papantonio, attorney and host of the international television show America’s Lawyer, explains, with the exception of CBS, every major media outlet in the United States shares at least one board member with at least one pharmaceutical company. To put that into perspective: These board members wake up, go to a meeting at Merck or Pfizer, then they have their driver take them over to a meeting with NBC to decide what kind of programming that network is going to air.
We have even reported incidents in which reporters have been cut off by the network for mentioning the connection on air. In a clear example of how beholden mainstream media is to the pharmaceutical industries who manufacture and market these drugs, FOX News’ Sean Hannity was recorded in 2018, blatantly cutting off a reporter who dared mention Nikolas Cruz’s reported association with antidepressants.
In the report below, Papantonio explains how the billions of dollars big pharma gives to mainstream media outlets every year is used to keep them subservient and complicit in covering up the slew of deadly side effects from their products.
As we can see with the current censorship and narrative control in regard to those questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, big pharma wields massive control over the information you are allowed to talk about and consume. Once we zoom out and see the entire situation, it becomes exceedingly evident as to why Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of Big Tech, have made it their mission to wipe out any and all content that questions the “official narrative.”
Defenders of vaccination insist that indisputable, objective medical facts have determined the approach to the pandemic. Their dogmatic arguments are based on the false assumption that COVID is an enemy to be eradicated, and the vaccine is the singular weapon of choice.
Curing illness and preventing death have been the focus of most medical systems throughout recorded history. Symptoms, and their underlying causes, have dominated debates and research about disease.
For hundreds of years in western medical science, the central paradigm for developing therapies has rested on the supposition that each malady is the result of a single dangerous invasive element. Fundamental treatment usually involves dispelling a contaminant from the patient.
Poor health is presumed to have a foundational cause — the body is violated by something with destructive intent and force.
There are many advances in technological medicine that have saved lives. Medical science has made incredible progress in the repair and replacement of organs and limbs.
The evolution of micro-surgery represents the cutting edge of engineering. New therapies have made previously deadly cancers treatable.
Yet despite insightful developments in biology and genetics, the incredibly complex natural processes of the human body remain far from fully understood.
A static view is usually applied to disease — it is deemed something that must be eradicated. The remedies of choice are poisonous concoctions used to suppress symptoms or overwhelm pathogens.
Although new treatments and drugs have been developed, essentially the approach to health has not changed. That’s because the basic underlying philosophy and perspective of medical research and practice have not evolved along with technology.
New techniques, old habits
Without deeper knowledge of what sustains good health, evaluations of maladies are dominated by tests and statistics, and extremis of illness is assessed by need for hospitalization or risk of death.
In place of a sophisticated, philosophical approach, current medical practice maintains a false veil of modernity.
Failures in treatment reveal how most diseases continue to be framed as a corporal encroachment.
Bloodletting was a common practice for millennia through the late 19th century, applied for many maladies. The belief that the human body required purging from detrimental substances was the central guiding principle.
The need to expel deleterious parts or pathogens from the body continues to drive most therapies today.
Medical science hasn’t begun to understand the power of natural disease immunity. The ability of the endocrine and nervous systems to seamlessly integrate in maximizing vitality, even in the face of increasing challenges, is phenomenal.
The precarious belief that we have reached an apex of understanding the human body has engendered other false assumptions, including that medicine can improve biology with powerful disruptive drugs, including vaccines.
Epidemics arise where the benefits of a vaccine might outweigh its risks. Until more enlightened solutions are developed, their application should be openly debated, and then used with great caution.
Until generational studies can be done, including the effects on fertility, no one can make any claim about long-term safety.
The supposedly cutting-edge mRNA vaccine, developed from a growing understanding of the human genome, is designed and described as something that teaches cells how to fight off the virus.
The application conforms with the archaic arsenal of medical science — it is a weapon used against an opponent that must be conquered.
Vaccination therapy assumes the human body needs training to best defend itself. Following the logic of this highly questionable notion, in this current conflict the enemy appears to have found ways to camouflage and evolve.
If the pandemic is seen as a war, the use of vaccines could lead to many casualties and disastrous collateral damage.
The battle with disease
Within decades, experts will likely view the use of vaccines — promoted to defy viral infection — as misguided, similar to how we now regard bloodletting.
When general health is maximized, no vaccine comes close to offering the protection provided by the sophisticated and complex human immune system. With balanced vitality, our bodies instinctively eliminate microorganisms that don’t belong.
Pathogens are rarely the primary cause of ailments. As within the rest of nature, microorganisms most often thrive when the process of deterioration has already begun.
Most that live on or in humans are beneficial. Some bacteria are key components of digestion — we would die without them.
In the 20th century, the development of penicillin brought a profound impact to life-threatening infections and traumatic injuries with sepsis.
However, there are growing concerns that overuse of antibiotics, both in humans and animals, has engendered more powerful and more dangerous bacteria.
Medical science relentlessly continues to attack disease and pathogens without recognizing that suppression is a tactic with great risks.
There is growing awareness that this approach frequently engenders more virulent mutations and manifestations of underlying causes.
The ongoing notion that we must battle illness at all costs is an insidious problem. Attempting to destroy pathogens, or relying solely on a vaccine to defend against a toxic force, exacerbates the faulty logic that has driven treatment of disease since the Middle Ages.
Our well-being is founded on establishing harmony with our environment, and is exemplified by our innate immunity to microbes that might harm us.
The statistics about increased life expectancy for industrialized countries are less telling when compared to regions of the world where stress is minimal, air, water and soil are clean, and a nutritious diet is the cultural norm.
In some of those places, people have lived for more than 100 years without medical intervention.
The central thrust of modern medicine is based on a fearful, feudal model that eclipses the importance of life-style. Although they are key factors in avoiding illness, diet and environment are rarely mentioned by the medical establishment.
The irrational dread of a viral pandemic exemplifies how the medical world has projected its obsolete mania on to humanity.
People want to avoid pain and sickness, but they know that their quality of life is more precious than anything else.
Good health, even in the midst of a pandemic, can’t be measured by defiance of death or how well a medical system dispenses products.
Fear and loathing in the plague
As the philosophy of medical science staunchly remains in the Dark Ages, those who seek an alternative approach to maintaining health are marginalized.
In recent decades, there has been movement towards an enlightened approach in response to this ongoing challenge.
Compounding the current situation, the militant response to the pandemic has stalled necessary changes and further entrenched the vested medical mindset. The crisis has revealed, and furthered, detrimental attitudes towards illness and disease.
We are repeatedly told malicious forces are assaulting us in the form of a microorganism, and that this loathsome virus is intent on destabilizing humanity and every tier of society.
The vehemence of the counter-attack against the virus is telling — the pathogen and its mutations are enemies that we will need to fight perpetually. Those who defy the prescribed approach in any way are deemed heretics.
Similar views dominated during previous pandemics.
Although the greatest plague in modern history caused much more misery and mortality, the response to the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century has disturbing parallels to our current experience.
The bubonic plague engendered horrific suffering and often caused death within days of infection. Those who survived were deeply shocked and scarred, finding themselves in an unrecognizable world.
The pandemic is estimated to have killed half the population of Europe. Many factors contributed to its transmission. Treatments were mostly limited to exorcisms, bloodletting and poisonous concoctions that often killed the patient before the disease.
Widespread terror heightened divisiveness. Overt blame was laid at the feet of those who deviated from the dominant culture of the era. As the horizon darkened, hostility increased, with innocent people jailed, tortured or killed as punishment for their alleged responsibility for bringing the pestilence.
Infidels were burned at the stake because they held minority beliefs. They were identified as the source of the evil scourge that had spread through most villages, cities and provinces.
Although the Black Death pushed ignorance and hostility to new heights, the Renaissance emerged out of the darkness. An enlightened era fueled creativity in the general sciences, arts and philosophy, eventually leading to the rise of more democratic societies.
Yet medical science remained obsessed with morbidity and mortality.
The science of death
Physicians from Europe arrived for the first time in China in the late 16th century. The traditional doctors who met them found their approach to the human body peculiar. They seemed to know very little about the source of wellness or methods to prevent illness.
They were told about the reliance on dissecting cadavers to understand the human body. These doctors, whose training was in ancient and sophisticated folk medicine, concluded that the observation of the static anatomy of the dead overshadowed the physiology of the living.
The Chinese philosopher-physicians regarded western medicine as the science of death.
Over the following centuries, an ever-narrowing focus was applied to understanding disease, ultimately symbolized by a microscope in search of deadly pathogens.
Virtually ignoring a wider view and analysis of creative process, medicine became focused on finding nearly invisible beasts which were still believed to be the core source of affliction.
A long time coming
Many people believe the recent vaccine rollout is enlightened by achievements of the highest order, including how quickly a specific remedy for COVID-19 was released.
Those who are not convinced that a wonder drug has been developed are intimidated by the hostility of a vociferous majority.
The defenders of vaccination insist that indisputable, objective medical facts have determined the approach to the pandemic. Their dogmatic arguments all are based on the false assumption that the virus is an enemy to be eradicated, and the vaccine is the singular weapon of choice.
Alternative views are rejected with absolutism. By dismissing debate and mirroring the intolerance of the Dark Ages, harsh critics of the unvaccinated confirm their reactionary and hypocritical position.
Those who deny that the philosophical approach to disease is mired in the past, angrily assert that the advances of modern medicine are unassailable. Challenging the medical establishment’s majority position is now forbidden.
At the heart of the polarized debate is the definition of disease — everyone has a right to participate in implementing a model for good health.
Insistence on one point of view and supporting mandates to enforce it, reflects how an antiquated system has infected the populace and politics with medieval perspective and policies.
A mortal threat can cause an atheist to speak with god, convert a pacifist into a warrior, or transform a humanitarian into a fascist. Fear of the unknown, particularly when potential illness and death are looming, evokes the worst of human instincts.
Even the president of the United States feels he is empowered to further intensify the divide, blaming the unvaccinated for failures in the war on the virus.
Figuratively, dissenters are now burned at the stake, and from a psychological perspective, this condemnation is no different from 14th century nobles and priests denouncing innocent people for causing the plague.
This insanity prevails because the proponents of inoculation have been assured by the infallible gods of medicine and their devoted ministry that the unvaccinated are responsible for the continuing pandemic.
They have no doubt that those who question this edict exhibit the height of irresponsibility in the war against a destructive virus. Everyone must give unwavering support to the government’s plan to defeat the dark elements causing the plague.
Leaders and supporters have transformed into a hostile mob, grandly claiming that any scientist, doctor or journalist who questions the strategy of the battle is a dangerous liar and apostate. They insist the existential public health threat to every nation must be faced with a unified front.
This irate and intractable position is a thinly veiled charade.
Unrelenting vehemence and angry tirades are directly proportional to fears and doubts. A dogmatic stance is never an enlightened position — it reflects a need to suppress any dissent that reveals insecurity.
When anger fails, enforced dictates follow. However, the implementation of medical mandates with draconian tactics are ultimately detrimental to public health.
Echoing the irrational fears of medical science, and absurdly invoking the power of a threatening microbe, most governments will soon lose credibility in the handling of the pandemic.
The enemy is not the virus nor the unvaccinated. The only true threats are fear and intolerance.
To face this disease, we need an enlightened approach, particularly in developing innovative prevention for those at greatest risk and effective treatments for those who are ill.
A cabal with questionable morals and motives should not determine our future. Modern medicine will remain capricious and deeply flawed until a new open-minded, creative philosophy is applied to limiting disease.
The appropriate response to any genuine public health crisis needs to be debated, discussed and implemented with calm demeanor by the broadest range of informed individuals.
Establishing wellness begins with rational and ethical discussion about what is truly effective, including a renewed emphasis on the importance of good nutrition.
There is room for optimism. If we recognize that supporting natural immunity engenders the greatest vitality, a renaissance in healthcare can emerge from this current plague of ignorance.
Do you know what “leaky vaccines” are? There’s a good chance you don’t because discussion about them has been mostly shunted to the fringes of the web, with videos on the subject even excised from Youtube. The subject is treated as though it is something only tinfoil hat-wearing loons would take seriously.
But leaky vaccines have been an established concern in the medical community for years. A paper discussing the potential problems with them was published in a reputable medical journal by experts well before anyone had heard of Covid.
In brief, leaky vaccines don’t offer full protection against the virus they are designed to deal with. Such vaccines don’t stop you from catching the virus. They work in the sense that they are likely to reduce your symptoms and lessen the chance of transmission to others.
That’s a good thing, but researchers have worried that leaky vaccines can have potential drawbacks, possibly very serious ones. If a vaccine erects an imperfect barrier against a virus, one the virus can sometimes breach even if weakly, the virus persists and has every incentive and opportunity to adapt. That is, it is encouraged to grow stronger.
Over time, variants of the virus are likely to find a way past the immune system’s defences mounted by the vaccine. Because the new variant has an evolutionary advantage over the original strain of virus, it comes to dominate – until a new variant supplants it in turn.
Endless arms race
In short, a leaky vaccine is at risk of becoming less effective over time. New vaccines may be needed in an endless arms race against the virus that encourages it to keep adapting and evolving to become ever more potent.
Most of us should be able to understand this problem because we have heard about it in a closely related medical context: so-called “superbugs“.
Antibiotics were invented nearly a century ago to put an end to deadly bacterial infections. They proved highly effective and saved many lives. They were so effective that doctors were encouraged by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies – as well as the public’s desire for a pain-free life – to prescribe antibiotics for every tickly throat.
Making things worse, farmers looking to maximise profits had every incentive to routinely use antibiotics on livestock – to prevent illness and deaths among animals they packed into warehouses in unnatural and unsanitary conditions.
This abuse of antibiotics led to the current situation where some strains of bacteria have adapted so effectively they can resist every antibiotic on the market. These superbugs put hundreds of thousands of Americans in hospital every year and are reported to kill 35,000 of them annually.
‘Waning immunity’
So what does this have to do with Covid?
As you may have already guessed, the Covid vaccines are all leaky vaccines. In fact, it appears they were known to be leaky before the first person was vaccinated with them. It’s just no one thought to highlight it to us – not our politicians, the vaccine-makers or the corporate media.
We can see quite how leaky they are in the current obsession with “booster” shots to deal with what are being called “breakthrough” cases – only months after most people received what they assumed would be their one and only round of vaccination.
The justification for these boosters is framed as dealing with “waning immunity” and the fact that the delta variant is more “transmissable”. But this medical jargon, though reassuring, may in fact be concealing something significant about the direction the virus is heading in – something that was evident in earlier vaccine research.
‘Nastier’ viral strains
Until Covid, the only way to research how leaky vaccines worked in the midst of a major epidemic was by studying their use in animals. These studies were carried out in part because of concerns about what the effects of leaky vaccines might be if used during a human pandemic.
We now have that pandemic.
In 2015, four years before anyone had ever heard of Covid, the scientific journal PLOS Biology published a paper titled “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens”. It examined what happened in the treatment of chickens for a virus called Marek’s disease, caused by a strain of herpes more virulent – if you’re a chicken – than Ebola.
As one of the researchers concluded: “Our research demonstrates that the use of leaky vaccines can promote the evolution of nastier ‘hot’ viral strains that put unvaccinated individuals at greater risk.”
Uncharted territory
In other words, once you start routinely using a leaky vaccine, the very leakiness of the virus in the vaccinated population risks putting the unvaccinated in greater danger by exposing them to turbo-charged variants of the virus their immune systems struggle to overcome.
Because the vaccinated are less aware of being ill – they don’t take to their beds – they can become the equivalent of super-spreaders.
So the solution is simple, no? Just ensure everyone gets vaccinated. (We’ll draw a veil over the issue of what to do with those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons.)
But there is a potential problem here too. Because if the leaky vaccines simply allow the virus to adapt and evolve, never putting out the fire, the virus keeps spreading and could get more deadly over time. As with those superbugs, we could reach a point where much nastier strains of the virus become resistant to all the vaccines we have. Delta may be an early indication of how this might happen.
That’s the theory anyway. No one can be sure whether that is what will happen with the Covid pandemic for two reasons.
First, because – from what I can tell – a leaky vaccine has never before been used in the midst of a global pandemic. This is uncharted territory.
And second, because in the case of those chickens, the spread of the disease could be halted, in addition to vaccination, through the culling of infected animals. That – I should hope – is not a solution anyone is contemplating for dealing with Covid.
No debate
Now for the disclaimer. I am not a doctor. I don’t know what the most likely outcome of using leaky vaccines against Covid is, and I don’t claim to. In any case, I doubt most readers care what I think on the subject.
What I am concerned about – and I would hope most other people are too – is that experts in this field be allowed to have a medical debate about these issues in public.
Which is exactly what isn’t happening at the moment. Corporate media companies, from the New York Times and BBC to Facebook and Youtube – many of them invested in pharmaceuticals themselves – are deciding that you shouldn’t even know that the Covid vaccines are leaky, let alone the potential pitfalls.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so serious if we could trust the medical establishment and regulatory authorities to be doing that job for us. But it seems clear we can’t.
The truth is that most doctors, even eminent ones, are little better placed than you or me to judge the dangers of leaky vaccines. This is a very specialist field of research. Those qualified to have an expert opinion on the matter are mostly those doing advanced and very costly research for vaccine companies, especially those working on mRNA technology which has been so central to the Covid vaccination programme.
Difficult to whistleblow
But if there were really a problem with the leaky Covid vaccines, why isn’t this small group of experts not speaking up to warn us? Isn’t their silence proof that this is pure hyperbole?
Here we get to the rub.
Let’s take a comparable case. The first scientists to predict the current trajectory of climate change – to an extremely high degree of accuracy – did so back in the 1970s and 1980s and they worked for the oil companies. They kept their findings secret, as we now know many decades later.
This @exxonmobile chart from 1982 predicted that in 2019 our atmospheric CO2 level would reach about 415 parts per million, raising the global temperature roughly 0.9 degrees C.
Update: The world crossed the 415 ppm threshold this week and broke 0.9 degrees C in 2017 1/ pic.twitter.com/sLpOVkwzTF
Exxon, BP, Shell and the others invested huge sums in modelling climate change so they would be the first to understand the risks to their industry. They needed to know how long they could get away with destroying the planet before the damage became so apparent they would be required to reinvent themselves as pioneers of green technologies.
The crunch moment those scientists predicted was reached a few years back – about the time the oil companies indeed did start reinventing themselves as pioneers of green technologies.
Similarly, the scientists who best understand the risks of leaky vaccines are those employed by the vaccine companies.
There is no more reason to believe that they will whistleblow on the pharmaceuticals industry than the scientists who worked for the fossil fuel industry, or the tobacco industry, or the car industry.
Any scientist who does have concerns about leaky Covid vaccines knows that by speaking out they will make themselves unemployable, they will be labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist by the media, and in any case they will be unable to reach large audiences because social media companies will censor them either directly or through changes to the search engine algorithms.
Captured by the elite
So what is needed if we are to learn about scientific concerns relating to leaky vaccines in general and leaky Covid vaccines specifically, and not simply the talking points of Big Pharma, is for the odd expert to step forward as an industry whistleblower. Any who do are almost certain to be mavericks – those who have little to lose, those who have retired, those who already hold grievances with the way public health policy is made.
And these are precisely the people who have been raising their voices.
A few disgruntled, former insiders are speaking up – while most of their colleagues keep their heads down. Is that because their colleagues think that they are wrong? Or is it because their colleagues have more to lose – like all those scientists who worked for Exxon and BP and never got round to telling us about the evidence for climate change they had unearthed.
The problem is we just don’t know. And we don’t know because our system of information dissemination is entirely captured by corporate interests. The wealth-elite that profits from rapacious, conscience-less, profit-driven, consumption-led capitalism is also the elite that buys our political class, owns our media, funds our regulatory authorities.
Playing with fire
One expert whistleblower is Dr Robert Malone, who was given a platform this week by Jimmy Dore to express his fears that what happened to the chicken virus may also happen to Covid.
His view is that we are playing with fire by trying to enforce a mass vaccination programme through a mix of mandates, incentives and social pressure . He believes only the most vulnerable to Covid should be vaccinated. Meanwhile, doctors should be working on developing an armoury of repurposed drugs for the small numbers of younger and healthier people who suffer serious ill-effects from Covid.
This, in his view, would have been the wisest and safest strategy.
I don’t know whether he’s right, but I sure would like to hear his and other experts’ concerns being addressed in public – and ideally refuted – instead of what is happening: their concerns are being brushed under the carpet.
I don’t know whether these concerns have been ignored because they are fanciful nonsense, or because the medical establishment has no good arguments to counter them and doesn’t want to frighten us, the children.
Gutter journalism
My worries have only been heightened – and yours should be too – by the fact that no one appears willing to engage in any kind of debate about the potential problems with leaky Covid vaccines.
There should be no doubt that Dr Malone qualifies as an expert. He describes himself as the inventor of the very mRNA technology that is the basis of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
But in practice, that authority to speak on the subject is being used against him. Which should set off alarm bells.
Here is one execrable attempt to discredit Dr Malone rather than address his concerns – this one from the supposedly prestigious Atlantic magazine. The article’s headline, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation”, is designed to make us assume – as the author and editors doubtless hope we will assume without reading on – that the piece proves Dr Malone is peddling conspiracy theories.
That headline suggests that the doubts Dr Malone has raised about the safety of leaky Covid vaccines will be discredited in the article with countervailing scientific evidence, presumably from other experts.
The article, however, does nothing of the sort.
It is dedicated instead to painting Dr Malone as an embittered fantasist. It does so not with evidence but by quibbling over whether he can in fact be credited with inventing mRNA technology, as he says, or whether he was simply one of its leading pioneers.
Is Dr Malone the most knowledgeable person on mRNA technology or just one of a handful of them? Unless the first is true, the Atlantic implies, everything he has to say about the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines based on mRNA technology is worthless and can be safely discounted.
The Atlantic’s article is what we journalists call a hatchet job. It’s what journalists do when they have no evidence to make a stronger case. You play the man, not the ball. It is the very worst kind of gutter journalism.
Treated like child
I don’t know about you but that simply isn’t good enough for me. I want to hear what Dr Malone is saying and I want to hear experts who are as eminently qualified as him address his concerns. I’m not interested in having corporate journalists and editors no more qualified than me declare me a gullible fool for listening to him or for wanting to hear a scientific rejoinder to his arguments.
I also don’t want politicians and social media corporations deciding whether Dr Malone gets to speak, or the medical establishment pretending that he and the research literature he draws on don’t exist.
And I don’t want Pfizer and Moderna deciding for themselves – and without a proper discussion – whether I and my children should be made to take vaccines for the rest of our lives and whether that is a safe or wise strategy.
I can’t understand why anyone would not feel the same, unless they would prefer to be treated like a child, cocooned from taking any responsibility for their own and their family’s health, safe in the illusion that the establishment has never made a mistake or ever told a self-interested lie.
I want to be treated like a grown-up. I want Dr Malone treated like the expert he undoubtedly is. I want a conversation – before it’s too late to have a conversation.
UPDATE:
The Twitter warriors have been out in force again, insisting to me that there has been no silencing of a debate by experts on the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines, while paradoxically also telling me to pipe down as I ask for the chance to be exposed to that debate. Disappointingly, none of these enforcers of discourse conformity seems to be an expert on vaccines.
Strangely, we have gone from being subjected to the Atlantic magazine’s discourse policing on the issue of leaky vaccines to the Twitter mob’s discourse policing. That wasn’t quite the progress I was hoping for.
I wrote this post for two reasons.
First, when concerns about matters relating to Covid start to go viral (sic) – whether prompted by experts, as in this case, or not – it is incumbent upon our political and media class to engage with those concerns, not pretend they don’t exist or imperiously berate those who repeat the concerns.
Rightly, levels of trust in politicians and media have been falling ever lower. Treating sections of the public who entertain doubts as gullible fools who can be safely ignored will prove entirely counter-productive and simply fuel more cynicism towards our already largely unaccountable, corrupt systems of power.
And second, when potentially unjustified certainty on medical matters – especially by non-experts – translates into an attitude of rigid moral rectitude, as we are increasingly witnessing in Covid vaccine debates, we are in very dangerous, divisive territory.
When the majority is focused on finger-pointing, demanding that vaccine mandates and passports be required before fellow citizens are allowed to work or enter the public square, we ought to be pretty damn sure we know that the vaccines are absolutely essential for everyone and that they are the only safe medical option before us.
This is precisely not the time for lazy assumptions, group-think, censorship or standing back as the corporate media decides which experts should be allowed to be part of the public conversation.
One prominent web journalist led the charge against this piece, accusing me of being “disingenuous” in wanting an open debate among experts so we can all be clearer whether there are any potential dangers with leaky Covid vaccines.
But I think there are very good reasons to demand that debate.
If there is, in fact, genuine scientific uncertainty about where the enforcement of mass vaccination at the height of a pandemic might lead, then we ought to be a little more cautious and tolerant before directing our fire at those hesitant to vaccinate themselves or their children.
It might also be wise to demand a little more vociferously that other methods of treating Covid be developed, in addition to vaccines, and that public health care be properly funded rather than put all our eggs in the vaccine basket.
Whereas if there is certainty, then we can all rally enthusiastically behind these vaccines, our doubts assuaged.
My experience is, I suspect, common. I have been exposed on the web for many months to what may indeed be a “conspiracy theory” by dissident experts about leaky vaccines, and yet I haven’t been exposed to the pushback against this theory from similar experts in the “mainstream” corporate media. That shouldn’t be treated as my fault. It is a problem with the current, dominant, corporate media conversation.
If lots of experts know Dr Malone and others are talking nonsense, why did the Atlantic, for example, engage in a hatchet job on Dr Malone rather than quote some of those experts pointing out the glaring fallacies in his thinking?
I am a journalist, and so is my colleague-critic. We know that you play your strongest cards when you write a polemical piece. So why was the only card the Atlantic played the character assassination of Dr Malone? Any journalist happy with that approach is forgetting what journalism is there to do: inform public debate, not fuel hate mobs and prop up group-think.
When asked for links to the vigorous public debate on leaky vaccines that is supposedly taking place, my colleague declined to provide any. Instead he switched tactics and suggested that this be left to peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.
But the concerns raised by experts that he seems so sure – as a complete non-expert – can be dismissed as quackery are out there on the web right now. They relate to public policy decisions that are being formulated right now. If they are indeed simply conspiracy theories, we don’t need to wait months or years for researchers to share their findings. We need these conspiracy theories engaged with and exposed right now.
You don’t put out a fire by turning your back on it. Those who prefer to silence debate, supposedly in the interests of science, only increase the division, they fuel the blame campaigns, they rationalise the demands for more censorship. And they drive those who refuse to accept the silence deeper into the opposing camp.
Interestingly, in response to my article someone did finally post a piece by an expert relevant to this debate – written, in fact, by one of the researchers behind the chicken study I cited above. It was published in a relatively obscure online publication, fittingly named The Conversation.
I will leave you to assess it as a response to Dr Malone’s concerns. Contrary to the certainty of the Twitter warriors, Prof Andrew Read appears to accept that the virus could adapt under pressure from the leaky Covid vaccines into nastier variants, though he also seems to think that this is not very likely and that there are ways to nullify that threat – mostly by intensifying the use of boosters and further refining the vaccines.
He concludes:
There are probably ways the available COVID-19 vaccines could be improved in the future to better reduce transmission. Booster shots, larger doses or different intervals between doses might help; so too, combinations of existing vaccines. Researchers are working hard on these questions. Next-generation vaccines might be even better at blocking transmission.
The fact that hardly anyone engaged in the social media “row” provoked by my post appeared to know of Prof Read’s rejoinder to the viral videos of Dr Malone underscores exactly the point I was making. It is the responsibility of corporate media like the BBC and New York Times to air these scientific debates through experts, not draw a veil over them.
We need less polarisation and more engagement with prevalent concerns or confusion about Covid and its treatment. And that surely won’t happen as long as the corporate media and Twitter warriors insist on policing the discourse.
There’s a quote from an ancient Buddhist text called the Dhammapada that’s often translated as, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”
In other words our mental habits shape our personality and determine how that personality will behave, and that behavior contributes to the shaping of the world.
We see a similar line in the Upanishads of Hinduism: “As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”
These are two different ways of expressing the same timeless observation we see pop up in various forms throughout philosophical traditions around the world: that our actions arise from our thoughts and our thoughts arise from our conditioned mental habits, so we need to be very careful about what those mental habits are since it will ultimately determine our destiny.
But the people who pour the most energy and attention into this timeless observation as a group are not the Buddhists, nor the Hindus, nor any religious or philosophical tradition at all. Those who are the most interested in studying and acting upon this insight are the powerful people who rule this world.
The powerful understand that because people’s actions follow from their thoughts and the destiny of the world follows from people’s actions, if you can control the thoughts people think at mass scale you can control the destiny of the world.
Control the way people collectively think about things and you can control the way they act, you can control the way they organize, and you can control the way they vote. This is important because people have become more literate and better at sharing information over the years, and therefore more aware of the value of freedom and equality, so it’s gotten harder and harder to deny them freedom and equality without sparking violent revolutions and winding up with your head in a basket.
Power structures of more “enlightened” societies have addressed this dilemma by giving people the illusion of freedom snd equality while still keeping them enslaved to the agendas of their rulers via mass-scale psychological manipulation. Media institutions, online platforms and think tanks are dominated by plutocrats in coordination with secretive government agencies to ensure that the information the majority of people consume serves the social, political, military and geostrategic interests of the ruling power structure.
This is why when you watch the news on TV it always kind of feels like they are deceiving you; that’s exactly what’s happening. Information that is inconvenient for the powerful is omitted, while information that serves the powerful is amplified and twisted in the most convenient light possible.
This happens not because the media-controlling class is personally leaning over the shoulder of every news reporter and instructing them to lie, but because if you control who runs a media outlet then you control who they will hire and who they will elevate, naturally giving rise to a system wherein reporters understand that the only way for them to advance their careers is to promote narratives which serve the ruling power establishment and marginalize narratives which don’t.
Many journalists – either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement – are completely misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up: pic.twitter.com/AgznEp3LB1
The best way to manipulate people without their knowing it is to appeal to their strongest and most unconscious impulses. In practice this means tugging at the psychological hooks of the ego, which at their base level are fear and identity. If you’ve made a strong identity out of something like belonging to a certain political party or a certain ideological or ethnic group, then it will carry a lot of egoic weight for you. If you’re in a fear state then there will be a lot of egoic contraction and you’ll consequentially take your thoughts very seriously.
If you can appeal to people’s base impulses of fear and identification it becomes very easy to insert ideas into their minds and give them new mental habits, and that’s exactly what propagandists do. You need to fear the terrorists, the Russians and the Chinese, because they’re going to harm you. You need to support the Democratic Party and everything its pundits tell you, because that’s your tribe. Those anti-vaxxers over there are your real enemy, not the nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure that is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways. And on and on and on.
They give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn’t matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us.
If we want to free our minds from the chains of power, it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts about what’s really going on in our nation and our world. The most important step to freeing our minds from their shackles is to remove from ourselves the psychological hooks of fear and identity to which those shackles are attached. This means freeing ourselves from the delusions of egoic consciousness, which, funny enough, brings us right back around to the central tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism again.
As long as humanity is enslaved to the ego it will remain enslaved to abusive power structures, because manipulators will always be able to use our egoic hooks to propagandize us into supporting their interests at mass scale. Until then it won’t ultimately matter how many civil liberties we gain or lose, because we’ll still be unable to move beyond the bonds of our psychological chains.
Not until humanity collectively breaks free from the gravitational pull of egoic consciousness will we truly blast off into the real potentiality of our species.
In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.
According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
In the repurchase agreement (repo) market, interest rates soared on 16 September. The Federal Reserve stepped in by intervening to the tune of $75 billion per day over four days, a sum not seen since the 2008 crisis.
At that time, according to Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory at Cardiff University, the Fed began an emergency monetary programme that saw hundreds of billions of dollars per week pumped into Wall Street.
Over the last 18 months or so, under the guise of a ‘pandemic’, we have seen economies closed down, small businesses being crushed, workers being made unemployed and people’s rights being destroyed. Lockdowns and restrictions have facilitated this process. The purpose of these so-called ‘public health measures’ has little to do with public health and much to do with managing a crisis of capitalism and ultimately the restructuring of the economy.
Neoliberalism has squeezed workers income and benefits, offshored key sectors of economies and has used every tool at its disposal to maintain demand and create financial Ponzi schemes in which the rich can still invest in and profit from. The bailouts to the banking sector following the 2008 crash provided only temporary respite. The crash returned with a much bigger bang pre-Covid along with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.
The dystopian ‘great reset’ that we are currently witnessing is a response to this crisis. This reset envisages a transformation of capitalism.
Fabio Vighi sheds light on the role of the ‘pandemic’ in all of this:
“… some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s).”
Vighi describes how, in pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown and chronicles how the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers and others worked to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.
The world economy was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were rising everywhere.
Lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation.
Vighi says:
“… the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off.”
It all amounted to a multi-trillion bailout for Wall Street under the guise of COVID ‘relief’ followed by an ongoing plan to fundamentally restructure capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for these predatory corporations, and the eradication of millions of jobs resulting from lockdowns and accelerated automation.
“It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.”
The World Economic Forum says that by 2030 the public will ‘rent’ everything they require. This means undermining the right of ownership (or possibly seizing personal assets) and restricting consumer choice underpinned by the rhetoric of reducing public debt or ‘sustainable consumption’, which will be used to legitimise impending austerity as a result of the economic meltdown. Ordinary people will foot the bill for the ‘COVID relief’ packages.
If the financial bailouts do not go according to plan, we could see further lockdowns imposed, perhaps justified under the pretext of ‘the virus’ but also ‘climate emergency’.
It is not only Big Finance that has been saved. A previously ailing pharmaceuticals industry has also received a massive bailout (public funds to develop and purchase the vaccines) and lifeline thanks to the money-making COVID jabs.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants as well and have cemented their dominance. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID government measures.
Capitalism and labour
Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms. A significant part of the working class has long been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. Since then, this section of the population has had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services or, if ‘lucky’, insecure low-paid service sector jobs.
What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. After a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK – a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs – a leading UN poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.
In another 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.
Over the past 10 years in the UK, according to the Trussell Group, there has been rising food poverty and increasing reliance on food banks.
And in a damning report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million cannot afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million are too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults are not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).
Moreover, a 2015 report by the New Policy Institute noted that the total number of people in poverty in the UK had increased by 800,000, from 13.2 to 14.0 million in just two to three years.
Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity’ years were anything but austere for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).
Just some of the cruelties of the ‘free market’ for those who live and work in the real world. And all of this hardship prior to lockdowns that have subsequently devastated lives, livelihoods and health, with cancer diagnoses and treatments and other conditions having been neglected due to the shutdown of health services.
During the current economic crisis, what we are seeing is many millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision on the immediate horizon, a mass labour force will no longer be required.
It raises fundamental questions about the need for and the future of mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.
As the economic is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. If work is a condition of the existence of the labouring classes, then, in the eyes of capitalists, why maintain a pool of (surplus) labour that is no longer needed?
A concentration of wealth power and ownership is taking place as a result of COVID-related policies: according to research by Oxfam, the world’s billionaires gained $3.9 trillion while working people lost $3.7 trillion in 2020. At the same time, as large sections of the population head into a state of permanent unemployment, the rulers are weary of mass dissent and resistance. We are witnessing an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
In 2020, World Bank Group President David Malpass stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns but such ‘help’ would be on condition that neoliberal reforms become further embedded. In other words, the de facto privatisation of states (affecting all nations, rich and poor alike), the (complete) erosion of national sovereignty and dollar-denominated debt leading to a further strengthening of US leverage and power.
In a system of top-down surveillance capitalism with an increasing section of the population deemed ‘unproductive’ and ‘useless eaters’, notions of individualism, liberal democracy and the ideology of free choice and consumerism are regarded by the elite as ‘unnecessary luxuries’ along with political and civil rights and freedoms.
We need only look at the ongoing tyranny in Australia to see where other countries could be heading. How quickly Australia was transformed from a ‘liberal democracy’ to a brutal totalitarian police state of endless lockdowns where gathering and protests are not to be tolerated.
Being beaten and thrown to the ground and fired at with rubber bullets in the name of protecting health makes as much sense as devastating entire societies through socially and economically destructive lockdowns to ‘save lives’.
It makes as much sense as mask-wearing and social-distancing mandates unsupported by science, misused and flawed PCR tests, perfectly healthy people being labelled as ‘cases’, deliberately inflated COVID death figures, pushing dangerous experimental vaccines in the name of health, ramping up fear, relying on Neil Ferguson’s bogus modelling, censoring debate about any of this and the WHO declaring a worldwide ‘pandemic’ based on a very low number of global ‘cases’ back in early 2020 (44,279 ‘cases’ and 1,440 supposed COVID deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion).
There is little if any logic to this. But of course, If we view what is happening in terms of a crisis of capitalism, it might begin to make a lot more sense.
The austerity measures that followed the 2008 crash were bad enough for ordinary people who were still reeling from the impacts when the first lockdown was imposed.
The authorities are aware that deeper, harsher impacts as well as much more wide-ranging changes will be experienced this time around and seem adamant that the masses must become more tightly controlled and conditioned to their coming servitude.
Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.
With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.
In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many.
In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media”
I’d say the UK media campaigns certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed ‘independence’.
Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.
But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.
A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted, “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”
Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:
“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.”
Given all of this, I’ve come to believe that with regard to media reporting on Covid-19, my cynicism is well-deserved.
Covid-19 reporting has increasingly been utterly absurd, with stories of people dropping dead in the streets, ice rink morgues to cope with the mountains of bodies, footage of an overcrowded New York hospital (that just happened to be of an Italian hospital), claims of animals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, and more recently reports of people dying post-jab but we are told‘it could have been worse!’
This campaign of fear caused the public to massively overestimate the lethality of Covid-19, which as un-alarmist voices note has a survival rate of over 99%.
When months into the outbreak it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was far less lethal than first predicted, the media and talking heads moved from talking about ‘Covid deaths’ to ‘positive cases’.
Although relatively early on a goat and pawpaw tested positive for Covid-19, instead of then scrutinizing the accuracy of the PCR test as a means of ‘detecting Covid-19’, the media continued to hype the rise in Covid ‘cases’.
In lockstep, ‘Covid testing’ was increased dramatically using the PCR test (recently revoked by the CDC). This inevitably pumped up the number of ‘cases’, which mass media have in turn promoted non-stop, this in turn gave ammunition to those enforcing lockdowns and vaccines.
By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media.
Alongside this, there have been relentless ad hominem attacks on journalists who pose legitimate questions and uncomfortable truths about the official narratives around Covid-19.
For offering perspectives which contradict the standard narratives around Covid-19, journalists have been deemed conspiracy theorists, pandemic-deniers, right-wingers, selfish… I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few slurs.
When it comes to matters Covid-19, it is suddenly unacceptable to question ‘The Science’, question the authorities, or question the same media that sold us WMDs in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria.
Media are the drivers of Covid hysteria, and it is the daily bombardment of fear porn that confuses average people and enables tyrannical powers to be brought in, largely unchallenged.
As it is the responsibility of journalists to expose lies around wars of aggression, it is also the duty of journalists to do so around Covid-19. For some journalists who have stubbornly refused to hold power to account, instead toeing the line on all things Covid, it appears their fear is of losing an audience and not of a virus.
Whether or not you agree with dissenting voices’ questions and criticisms, we have the right to ask and make them. We do so, knowing that remaining silent in the face of the brutal Covid measures is a guaranteed path to tyranny.
Prior to this pandemic, if you wanted to weed out all of the “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” from our society, how would you have done it?
I suppose that sending everyone a questionnaire asking them what they believe would be one way to do it, but of course a lot of people would give false answers and many others would simply ignore the questionnaire. Social media profiles contain a wealth of information, but many “non-conformists” are not even on social media and digging through all of that data would take an extraordinary amount of time, money and energy. Up until just recently, there just hasn’t been an easy and efficient way to identify those that are not eager servants of the system.
But now the COVID vaccines have changed everything. These injections are the perfect litmus test, because “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” are pretty much the only ones that are refusing the shots at this point. This makes it exceptionally easy to divide American citizens into two categories, and it also gives authorities a perfect excuse to push all of those “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” to the fringes of society.
As I discussed yesterday, I was literally sick to my stomach as I pondered the implications of Biden’s tyrannical new decrees. Originally, Biden and other Democratic leaders were against any sort of vaccine mandates, but now I think that they have realized that mandates are a tool that they can use to fundamentally reshape our society.
If you don’t understand where I am going with this, just keep reading, because it will become extremely clear by the end of this article.
Biden’s new decrees cover almost every major institution in our society. Just think about it. Any “major institution” is almost certainly going to be employing more than 100 people, and all such organizations are covered by Biden’s mandates.
In addition to businesses of various sizes, we are also talking about colleges, schools, churches, non-profits, political entities, sports teams and charitable organizations.
Millions of Americans that are employed by such institutions could be forced to leave their positions if they refuse to comply with what Biden is demanding.
And the rules that the Biden administration is coming up with will require the institutions to be the enforcers of these draconian new measures.
Your bosses will be forced to make sure that you are submitting to the new rules, because if not they could be hit with massive fines.
In my last article I used the word “sickening” to describe what Biden is trying to do to all of us, but the truth is that word is not nearly strong enough.
What we are facing is a complete and total national nightmare, and it isn’t going to end any time soon.
Biden’s new mandates are even stricter for employees of the federal government. Previously, employees of the federal government were at least given the option to undergo regular testing if they didn’t want to be vaccinated, but now that option is being taken away.
So now millions of federal employees will have to choose between their principles and their careers.
And considering the fact that so many of these people are barely providing for their families right now, a lot of really heartbreaking choices are going to have to be made.
Earlier today, I posted a video from a woman that works for the U.S. Treasury Department. After all these years, she publicly announced on social media that she is going to leave her job because of Biden’s new mandates.
And countless others will follow her out the door.
Biden’s new decrees will also force nearly everyone in the entire healthcare industry to either get vaccinated or give up their careers.
What a horribly cruel thing to do.
Biden is essentially putting a gun to the heads of these people. So many of them spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money to get their educations, and now Biden is telling them that they have to sacrifice everything that they have worked for if they will not comply with his demands.
As I pointed out yesterday, healthcare workers won’t just be forced out of their current jobs. Because virtually every health care provider in the entire country accepts Medicaid and Medicare, those that refuse to comply will essentially be banned from the entire industry.
At a time when a shortage of qualified workers is causing chaos throughout our economy, Biden’s tyrannical orders could force millions of Americans to suddenly lose their jobs. This is an incredibly foolish thing to do, and it could have very serious ramifications in the years ahead.
Sadly, it won’t just be a few people quitting their jobs. A poll that was just conducted discovered that 72 percent of unvaccinated Americans said that they would quit their current jobs rather than be vaccinated…
Many making this argument have cited a Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend. It showed that just 18 percent unvaccinated people whose employers don’t currently have mandates said they would likely get vaccinated if their employer required it. About 7 in 10 (72 percent) said that, if they couldn’t get a medical or religious exemption, they would probably quit rather than submit to the requirement.
I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, but it is my opinion that Kamala Harris has had a lot of influence in the recent decisions that Biden has been making.
She has always had authoritarian tendencies, and if she ever becomes president that will truly be a catastrophic scenario.
Needless to say, Biden’s new mandates are going to cause great anxiety for millions upon millions of people, and a recent CNN poll found that the mood of the country was already heading in a very negative direction…
The new poll finds 69% of Americans say things in the country today are going badly, below the pandemic-era high of 77% reached in January just before President Joe Biden took office but well above the 60% who felt that way in a March CNN poll.
And 62% say that economic conditions in the US are poor, up from 45% in April and nearly as high as the pandemic-era peak of 65% reached in May 2020.
My hope is that Republican governors will fight Biden’s new decrees with everything that they have got.
Because the truth is that this is one of the most critical moments in U.S. history.
Our most basic liberties and freedoms are under full assault, and we really are descending into full-blown tyranny.
If Biden’s new mandates are not overturned by the courts, millions of Americans that love liberty and freedom could be forced from their jobs.
It would truly be a witch hunt of unprecedented size and scope, and it would represent the greatest purge of “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” that any of us have ever witnessed.
The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.
Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they don’t want censored.
A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring “libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence.” This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that “leads” to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian “Peace Keepers” to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada — plus, if he or she were in the mood, I’ve probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if it’s just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the “defense” of Canada. (And it shouldn’t matter that I’m not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)
Well, what’s the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him “fake” — which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises can’t have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We can’t do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.
This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as “obscenity” is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and you’re mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.
The tech-giant censors’ concern is — in part — also with stupidity, but it’s not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power — their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned — whether they know it or not — with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.
Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out they’re mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else they’re right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.
The “promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence” bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the “action-filled” (violence-filled) children’s entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?
The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news — poof! — there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.
Censoring news, and labeling news as “factual,” seems to me a cheap fix that doesn’t fix. It’s a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that you’ll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. It’s a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the “fact-checker” sections of corporate media outlets. They’re as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; they’re just labeled differently.
The solutions that will work are not easy, and I’m no expert on them, but they’re not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.
We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they won’t be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; I’d be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if they’re going to bomb children in the name of “democracy,” well, then, that’s my vote for the use of my dollars).
At the same time, we need — through schools and outside of them — radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think it’s entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms — part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.
After the Crash 