Of all the elements of today’s “New Normal,” the most ominous is the “reform” that effectively changed the meanings of previously accepted words or terms. The following glossary illustrates how changes to our vocabulary played a central role in making the world a more dangerous and frightening place.
New Normal – “Normal” is something that has long been the norm and is accepted as the norm. The key point is that the “old” normal no longer applies. This change in thinking provided authority figures the license to enact reforms that would not have been widely accepted in the past.
In the old normal, a citizen might not have complied with authoritarian mandates, but in the New Normal, most will… that is, if one accepts the premise that we now have a New Normal, a premise most people now accept.
Vaccine — Previously a vaccine was an injection that provided “immunity” or prevented diseases, as well as the spread of diseases. Today, at least as it involves the COVID “vaccines,” vaccines simply (and allegedly) reduce the probability someone will develop a severe case of this disease or die from this disease.
Safe — An activity that is not dangerous or does not cause harm.
According to public health officials and almost all doctors, COVID vaccines are “safe and effective.” According to VAERS, approximately one million Americans believe they have suffered adverse medical reactions to COVID vaccines, with approximately 20,000 deaths possibly caused by the vaccines. Several studies have concluded that VAERS captures only a small fraction of such adverse events.
Effective — Certainly today “effective” does not mean COVID vaccines prevent infection or virus spread. In many heavily vaccinated countries, the vaccinated comprise a greater percentage of new COVID cases than the unvaccinated.
Harm — Something that injures, perhaps even kills, or causes someone pain or discomfort. The key change here is that “harm” can now be caused by speech. The nexus that would definitively trace any alleged harm to any piece of speech is nebulous and impossible to prove.
Still, a person who composes words determined to include “misinformation” or “disinformation” is held guilty of causing potential harm to people who might read these words. Such a person can be censored, maligned, lose their jobs, or even be prosecuted. In our Old Normal, this rarely happened. In our New Normal, it happens daily.
Misinformation or Disinformation — In its simplest terms, this would be information that is provably false.
In our “New Normal,” misinformation or disinformation is simply any information that challenges the veracity of pronouncements made by authorized experts or authorities. That is, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading public health authority, cannot be charged with producing “disinformation,” but skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can and should be.
Also, in today’s New Normal, many people censor their own thoughts as they know “free speech” can result in personal or professional harm. By now, the censors don’t even have to censor everyone. People do it themselves.
Science and “The science” — A theory largely accepted by the scientific community and public.
“Science” used to be the process of testing a hypothesis and was almost never “settled.” In the past, a skeptic who examined or challenged the conclusions of peers was himself engaging in science. Today, “The Science” is what the authorized scientists and officials at public health bureaucracies say it is, and cannot or should not be challenged by other “scientists…” who perhaps should not even be called scientists and should now be labeled as “science deniers.” Or as…
Anti-vaxxer — Technically, this would be a person who opposes all vaccines. In Newspeak, it means anyone who is against mandatory COVID vaccines. In practice, this term is used as a slur to denigrate anyone who questions the pronouncements of authorities. If you oppose mandatory COVID vaccines for whatever reason, you are a “science denier” or “anti-science…” and, as such can and should be punished or censored because you could be causing “harm” to the public.
Free or freedom — In “the land of the free” the definition of freedom has also been radically changed.
Today, some Americans are “free” to keep their jobs or go to a restaurant or see a play if they can prove they have received at least two injections of an experimental vaccine (a vaccine where the vaccinated waive their right to sue if they later suffer harm). Americans may be allowed to engage in “free speech” on social media… if they say the right things.
It’s not just “COVID” topics that are now being regulated by speech monitors. If you publish “extremist” speech or politically incorrect speech that can be labeled as “harmful” or “dangerous,” you also can lose your job or speech privileges.
With the precedent established that speech can cause “harm” and that the primary role of government is to protect people from harm, the harm of being “offended” by speech is now a sanctionable offense.
Patriotism or patriot — In the past, a “patriot” was one who stood up to tyrannical governments and/or displayed a great love for their country. Today, for many Americans, a patriot is one who complies with the edicts of their government and helps attack or embarrasses those who challenge governmental authority.
Just this week, President Biden proclaimed that Americans who get vaccinated are doing their patriotic duty. This statement builds on the “us-against-them” theme, the good American vs. bad American narrative.
Public health — This term once meant the state of overall health in hundreds of millions of people who comprise “the public.” In the last two years, it’s come to mean the “health” of people who may or may not have COVID-19.
Today, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental health, obesity – all the conditions that kill and harm people — are afterthoughts when compared to “COVID health.”
All of the above was made possible by changes in accepted language. George Orwell was right. If you want to control people, first control the language.
COVID, a virus that poses no significant health risk to 98 percent of the population, has given us a “New Normal” where “vaccines” are not vaccines, where “freedom” is now a privilege granted to those who obey, and where unelected public health officials have made billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies.
Tennis star Novak Djokovic is being deported from Australia, after losing his final appeal the WTA’s top-ranked player will not be allowed to defend his Australian Open title.
It was reported this morning that an Australian court had refused Djokovic’s appeal against the cancellation of his visa, and as such he’s being put on a plane and flown out of the country.
To be clear: This is all because he’s not “vaccinated” against Covid19, and vocally speaks out against the practice. The government have clearly and publicly admitted as much…but we’ll get to that.
The rejection of Djokovic’s medical exemption and subsequent deportation has been accompanied by a wave of vitriol in the press the likes of which we have rarely seen.
One Australian sports presenter was “accidentally” recorded calling him a “lying, sneaky arsehole” in a video that was later “leaked” to the press.
The Spectator has one piece which is nothing more than a slew of ad hominem and mockery, against not just Djokovic but all “anti-vaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, calling the Serbian a “conspiracy super-spreader”. They have another blaming his “arrogance for his downfall”.
The Guardian‘s Australian Political Correspondent Sarah Martin defends the decision and jokingly refers to it as a “no dickheads” immigration policy, attacking Djokovic’s “anti-science god complex” and calling him an “all-round jerk”.
The childish name-calling just doesn’t end. Even his fellow players are sticking the boot in.
Stefanos Tsitsipas attacked Djokovic for attempting to “play by his own rules”, adding “A very small minority chose to follow their own way. It makes the majority look like they are all fools”, which is at least true, but not in the way he means it.
Spanish star Rafael Nadal said Djokovic should just follow the rules like everyone else, perhaps flashing the kind of attitude which allowed a fascist dictator to stay in power in his country for 40 years.
Some players, at least, have come to Djokovic’s defense, including Australia’s own Nick Kyrgios, who has said he is “ashamed” of the way Australia has handled the situation and chastised other players for not showing solidarity with Djokovic.
But why is this happening? Why are they trying to punish such a public figure, and why now?
Well, firstly, I’m not sure it is about punishing Djokovic, and not just because getting to leave Australia is an odd thing to be considered any kind of punishment these days.
Rather, it’s about the performance of punishing him. It’s about making an example of him. Not so much preventing him from playing, as much as denying him a platform.
The Australian government basically admits that in their legal justification for cancelling the visa.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Djokovic had been barred from entry for “breaching the rules…it’s as simple as that.” But he is either mistaken or lying, as he directly contradicts the case presented to the appeal court by the government.
Yes, the visa was first cancelled on a technicality about incorrect information but, a judge overruled that decision, allowing Djokovic to enter the country.
Under this (worryingly vague) legislation, the Immigration Minister is granted the power to cancel any visa at all, if:
the Minister is satisfied that it would be in the public interest to cancel the visa.
This was the argument put to the appeals court, that the minister can expel anyone, for anything, if he believes it to be in the best interests of the public.
That’s public interest, NOT public health.
Hawke admits in his written statement that Djokovic presents a “negligible risk of Covid19 infection” to those around him. So it’s nothing to do with protecting people from infection or stopping the spread of the virus.
Public statements from officials suggest that they consider any “anti-vaxxer” to be a threat to the public interest by undermining the vaccination programme. Thus they can justify barring entry to Djokovic (or, it should be said, any other “anti-vaxxer”) under the guise of “public interest”.
It’s about control, it almost always is.
In short, the government are scared that Djokovic’s very presence in the country is a threat to their neo-fascist lockdown.
If you look closely at the media messaging, there’s more than a little fear behind the wall of abuse and mockery.
Article after article is at pains to point out that “the majority of normal Australians want the Joker gone”, or some variation on that sentiment. Somewhat desperately selling the line that nobody agrees with, or supports, Djokovic’s position.
A statement which is given the lie by the regular huge protests taking place all across Australia’s major cities (like this one, just this weekend, in Sydney).
The Australian government are worried they’ve turned their country into a powder keg of public resentment, and that the slightest social spark could set it off. Increasing the size of the (already huge) protests against the lockdowns and vaccine mandates, maybe even tipping the country into full-blown chaos.
One of the Spectator articles mentions that Australians have been living in a “police state” for two years, and then vaguely references the subsequent public anger, even whilst attempting to downplay it, misrepresent its cause, and turn it against the unvaccinated.
Australia has fallen. Peace, prosperity and freedom have been sacrificed on the altar of “safety”, and Covid “vaccination” has become a quasi-religious rite in their country, even more so than the rest of the world.
As such, the unvaccinated are slandered, punished, threatened and othered at every turn. Locked down, locked up and locked out.
Can you only imagine what could happen if people found out it was all for nothing? Or that the heaven-sent vaccines aren’t the magical solution to all that ails us?
In this kind of political climate they simply can’t afford to have an “anti-vaxxer” on national television, healthy and athletic and winning championships against a field of vaccinated rivals.
Before anyone accuses me of a surfeit of cynicism, let’s review the actual words of Alex Hawke from the appeal procedure [our emphasis]:
I consider that Mr Djokovic’s ongoing presence in Australia may lead to an increase in anti-vaccination sentiment generated in the Australian community, potentially leading to an increase in civil unrest of the kind previously experienced in Australia
Elsewhere Djokovic is described as a “talisman of a community of anti-vaccine sentiment”.
This kind of brutal treatment of publicly unvaccinated famous faces will likely only intensify. It’s already spreading from country to country, with France announcing Djokovic will not be allowed to defend his French Open title unless he gets vaccinated.
It seems pretty clear that the public shaming of Djokovic is a power-play to secure what they perceive as their own tenuous grip on the narrative, one that could have far-reaching consequences moving forward.
Consider, Djokovic is not barred from entry just for being unvaccinated, but also because he has publicly spoken out against vaccination.
Australia is now not only requiring you be “fully vaccinated” to enter the country, but has barred someone for even expressing anti-vaccine sentiment.
It’s no longer enough to conform by action, you must now conform by speech.
Next is thought, but even they would never try to legislate against that…right?
It’s been a year since I’ve written anything for this blog. The reason, frankly, is that I have been at a loss for words. What has happened to human society in the last two years has been, for anyone with an understanding of history, beyond belief.
Of course, it should not be beyond belief because we know history repeats itself. And in the last two years it has been repeating with a vengeance.
I spent 18 years working to understand, and help others understand, the crimes of September 11, 2001. Those crimes were never honestly investigated apart from the work of independent researchers. The official accounts are widely known to be false and those who have taken the time to look deeper have found that there are good reasons to believe that people within government and major corporations were involved in planning and executing the attacks.
September 11th was a deception used by rich and powerful people to steal resources, consolidate power, and control the masses. It was just one example of such a mass deception. Others include the following.
The CIA’s assassination of JFK
The false Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the CIA’s war in Vietnam
The deceptions used to justify the 1991 Gulf War
The government-sponsored 2001 anthrax attacks
Claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the second invasion of Iraq
Previously hyped pandemics, including the 2005 “Bird Flu” and 2009 “Swine Flu” that were grossly exaggerated by the World Health Organization for the benefit of big pharma companies
Along with these conveniently over-looked crimes, the last 18 months have shown that the 9/11 lie was not taken seriously. Anyone who still believes that governments and media care about our health has forgotten that deep state actors murdered thousands of citizens on 9/11. The corporate media and corporate-owned governments then covered it up so that a million more could be murdered to steal resources and control people.
Historical illiteracy is largely to blame for the Covid scare although much of that illiteracy is by choice, through willful ignorance of events that cause cognitive dissonance. The examples cited above are but a few in the long history of deceptions used by governments to drive the agendas of the powerful few. People who ignore these historical facts not only turn a bind eye to history, they ignore painfully obvious features of current affairs including that “terrorism” has mysteriously disappeared.
People don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we do not live in democratic societies any longer. Yet today the world is fully run by an oligarchy and that oligarchy wants us to be diverted and outraged about superficial things while staying ignorant or silent on issues important to us like the following.
Indefinite detention without charges at Guantanamo Bay
Unwarranted mass surveillance
Voting machine hacking and election theft
Failure to prosecute the crimes of previous administrations (e.g. drone killings targeting weddings and funerals, torture at CIA black sites)
The increasing totalitarian censorship of dissenting views
Some people have accepted or ignored the poverty and famine being driven by the reckless response to Covid. And they have also ignored that the people driving the Covid scare have a history of crimes against humanity. Not the least of these are Bill Gates, who has monopolized healthcare and has tried to buy off the media, and Anthony Fauci, who is known for having killed nearly 200,000 HIV patients with the toxic drug AZT.
How has the public’s willful ignorance been established so easily? The Covid crimes were carefully practiced beforehand through a series of exercises conducted by governments and corporations since 9/11. And the operation builds upon elements utilized in all the previous government crimes against humanity. Here are three primary components.
As has been demonstrated through all of history, the most effective way to dumb down a population is through fear. Communism, terrorism, WMDs, virus… it all works the same way. This basic feature of the Covid scare is one of many features and outcomes that it shares with previous psychological operations.
Censorship is another hallmark of authoritarian tyranny and we are seeing it raised to a new level in the media today. Any doctor or scientist who has spoken out about the obvious lack of scientific scrutiny applied to the Covid scare has been blocked on social media and ignored or smeared on television, radio, and in print.
In America the most useful tool driving willful ignorance has been the narrative behind the phony 2-party system in politics. The Covid scare works in part because many Americans are easily controlled through the farcical theater of “right-left” identity politics. Today if you want “the left” to take a position, all that is needed is to frame it as opposition to Trump. Control of “the right” is just as easy. This works despite the fact that we are ruled by an oligarchy that does the same things no matter who is in office.
Added to this formula of fear, censorship, and cartoonish politics has been the complete abandonment of science. Scientific illiteracy is known to be quite high in America, but that has become the case for many nations and today anyone with a lab coat and a pointer promoted by the media is accepted as a scientific authority. What people often forget is that it was doctors, not soldiers, who committed the worst crimes in Nazi Germany. These days it is just as easy to buy a doctor or a scientist as it is to buy a politician.
Scientific literacy in America took a giant leap downward after 9/11. The absurd anti-scientific approach taken by the government for the destruction of the Word Trade Center buildings was either accepted or left unquestioned by many Americans. No doubt the death of science with respect to 9/11 was a key step in enabling the Covid scam.
Here are a few examples of how people around the world abandoned science when it came to Covid.
The PCR test for Covid infection in the U.S., which was used in many other countries as well, did not identify a unique coronavirus. In other words, the test had a high rate of false positives. Still, people accepted the narrative of “cases” that drove the fear.
The policy endorsed by the WHO and the CDC that attributed Covid as a cause of death for anyone who tested positive using the false PCR test, no matter what their actual cause of death was, dramatically inflated the number of deaths attributed to Covid.
Both the word vaccine and the word pandemic were redefined by agencies like the WHO to enable the Covid scare.
The “vaccines” are experimental gene therapies that are making people sick and killing them. Those bought into the vaccine narrative responded to this fact with the diversionary claim that the Covid drugs do not change your DNA. But most gene therapies do not change your DNA. Instead, they provide a functioning gene in addition to your DNA. More importantly, all the Covid “vaccines” provide genetic material that drives the production of toxic spike proteins that cause blood clotting, endothelial tissue damage, antibody dependent enhancement, and death.
The Emergency Use Authorizations under which these Covid drugs were granted temporary approvals were based on fraudulent attacks against long-established, effective treatments like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. The suppression of these effective drugs is responsible for the deaths of the patients who did die from Covid (instead of just with Covid).
How do we go forward realizing that many of our friends, family, and coworkers have decided to remain willfully ignorant of history and science and the facts about the Covid psychological operation?
It is a difficult question but one that has a few clear answers. First, we must stop parroting the absurd official narrative regarding Covid. It is an illness that has a 99.7% survival rate for the elderly and higher for everyone else. And it is very obviously a tool of propaganda in a psychological operation that exhibits all the features and outcomes of previous psychological operations. So, the first step is to not accept or repeat the nonsense narrative.
Secondly, since social media and other corporate media are completely compromised and engage in censorship of any facts related to Covid, we must reach people directly. This means speaking out locally, and contacting your city, county, and state government representatives to oppose the Covid agenda.
There are creative ways to resist as well. For example, if you are forced to wear a mask in public areas in order to conduct your life, put a message on the mask that lets like minded people see you. Something like “Mind Control” or “You stay safe, I’ll stay free” would work.
Finally, realizing that this will all get much worse before it gets better, plan to reduce your dependence on goods and services controlled by the oligarchy. If you can, get off the grid. In other words, find alternative sources of power, food, water, and the other necessities of life before the ultimate tool of control—the vaccine passport—limits your access.
The psychological operations of the media and political establishment are ramping up. They’re targeting every weakness of the gullible public, from its scientific and historical illiteracy to its most banal prejudices, in order to inflame superficial separations from the farcical left/right division to racial tensions. They know us better than we know ourselves.
Let’s resist these provocations and see if we can establish control groups within this corrupt system that can survive and educate future generations.
Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement. You can read more his work at his blog. You can also watch his testimony to the Toronto Hearings on 9/11 here, his video on the parallels between 9/11 and Covid here and his interview as part of our Covid19/11 series here.
When “taking the vax” became a means to signal ones virtue as part of the moral high ground, the right side of history, etc. many people were indulging themselves by taking the vaxx. It became not just an act of personal health or even collective health but a signal, a ritual of their faith in something much bigger and much more sinister.
The origin of that faith and purpose of that ritual should not be ignored. Especially given how by nature of the vaxx being a moral position many of those people entered into that contract full knowing that those of us who refused would be indicted by that same moral position.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
― Voltaire
Where there is no vision, the people perish…
– Proverbs 29:18
I read an opinion column early in the new year written by a local woman scolding The Unvaccinated in my area. Ironically, she addressed her article to the “my body, my choice” crowd and argued those who don’t get vaccinated should have their health insurance capped. She claimed taxpayers should not be burdened by those too selfish to care about overwhelmed health care systems or for those who are oppressing future generations.
Where does one even start?
The Irish author and satirist, Jonathan Swift, once wrote: “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired”. Obviously, that particular maxim applies to the fairer sex as well.
People act upon what they believe and this is, in fact, the very definition of “faith”. For even the Bible says faith (i.e. belief) without works (i.e. action) is dead. It means the woman’s article was written and published as the result of her faith in the Covid narrative; and reason be damned.
Certainly, the Covid Deceived have been made to fear. And they were tricked by the most powerful people and organizations on the planet. But their faith is more akin to superstition – cult-like and hypnotic; the end result of media-induced propagandaprogramming psychosis.
It’s been said that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics live in them. Except a majority today reside in mental castles that were, in fact, constructed by psychotics. Yet the masses have entered those castles on their own volition and it means Voltaire was right: Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Hasn’t this been the story of mankind since time immemorial?
In the middle of December 2021, blogger Jim Quinn (TheBurningPlatform.com) posted an article entitled “They Needed the Omicron Variant” and included a total of 37 bullet-points…“mile-markers”, if you will, on the road to The Great Reset – and concluded with these words:
As Euripides warned centuries ago, when the mob is persuaded by the honeyed words of evil men, great woes befall the state. Gates, Soros, Schwab, Fauci and Biden are evil men attempting to remake the world in a way that benefits them and their Davos co-conspirators. We will not comply. We will not obey. We will not give up our freedoms and liberties without a fight to the finish.
Irrespective of the financial elite’s motivations, the simple truth is this: They have successfully pulled it off. As of this writing, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet not decided on the Biden/OSHA-mandated Covid vaccinations but these will either be upheld or not.
If the mandates were upheld prior to this article’s post, then it would have been titled: “Let Our Vision Overcome False Narratives & Unjust Laws”.
But, even if the OSHA mandates are struck down by the Supreme Court, or get overridden by state lawmakers with common sense, be assured those administering The Great Reset have more tricks up their sleeves. Just this week, Dr. Robert Malone, an early pioneer of mRNA technology, has warned of an “Ebola-Like Hemorrhagic Fever Virus Now Spreading In China”.
So, bearing all that in mind, I believe it would be dangerous to underestimate those administering the New World Order… or to overestimate the wisdom and intestinal fortitude of a majority of Americans; and, by extension, the entire global citizenry.
To the financial elite, the masses are viewed as a means to an end. Their end, that is. Or, stated another way, the plebeians are viewed as base material – simple resources to get the “elite” where they are going.
On the popular entertainment streaming service, Netflix, the elitist worldview is revealed in the “Squid Game” series. The show is rife with symbols and messages that are, perhaps, most aptly deciphered at The Vigilant Citizen.com:
The outline of this game is also the main logo of the series. The reason: It perfectly illustrates the core philosophy of Squid Game and, by extension, the elite. The rectangle represents the masses. The circle at the bottom of it represents those who are poor and heavily in debt. The triangle above the rectangle represents the elite ruling over the masses. The upper circle represents the all-powerful occult elite that controls the world.
Appropriately enough, the narrator explains that the children who play Squid Game must make their way to the upper circle to win.
Win or lose. Zero sum gain. Rich versus poor. Us against them. Polemics. Dialectics: A life and death game where the winners win the world.
In the end, though, the game is about survival. Both the financial elite and the masses have near-reptilian instincts to survive. The innate survival mechanisms range from cold calculation to obvious ignorance dependent upon one’s position in the pyramid; as the masses are kept constantly confused, in the dark, and at each other’s throats. Until, that is, mission accomplished. Game over.
Belief materializes through perspective and perspective derives from context and context is defined by narrative. Surely, it all distills down to the stories in people’s heads. In fact, that is exactly how shit happens.
On January 6, 2022 one of my liberal acquaintances, an enthusiastic reader of the New York Times, expressed to me his gratitude that our “democracy survived”.
I calmly showed him how our democracy has NOT actually survived and he hasn’t broached the topic with me since. In any event, the keys of truth were given and he will either escape the imaginary castle in his head, or simply build a bigger moat.
What this guy will likely never understand, however, is that his insanities and absurdities were generated on purpose – the result of carefully crafted, and, quite often, chaotically circulated, narratives. Irrationality has become the essence of madness as logic, truth, and reality have been upended into Clown World.
So how do we fight back? And how do we win?
In the thread of a previous blog post, a commenter by the name of “Stucky” had this to say:
Hope works remarkably well when it is part of one’s Belief System.
….But, hope sucks when it’s a strategy
I agree. Hope alone cannot restore the Old Normal. In fact, nothing will at this point. But be assured of this: If we don’t resist, we are guaranteed to lose our liberties initially, and, later, our very lives.
One simple offensive strategy might be to generate different stories, fresh metaphors, and new allegories, to replace the elite-constructed narratives that have become the castles, fortresses, and high towers, in people’s heads. An example could be to challenge Big Pharma’s financial mining of the human immune system through endless Covid booster “subscriptions” with a metaphor describing mandatory organ donation by the state and in the service of The Collective.
Another method could involve sharing these websites (below) that give voice to the Covid vaccine-injured:
In my own locality, I have been hammering away at the foundational premises and assumptions underlying the Covid Agenda as follows:
– If the vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission, then what/who is behind the apparent agenda for vaccine passports?
– And, if the shots work, then why are boosters needed?
By so doing, I would like to express my gratitude to those who have become the tip of the spear, so to speak, in the War Against Covid Propaganda: Brave souls like Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Peter McCullough, Professor John Ioannidis, Dr. Christina Parks, Dr. Judy Mikovits, Catherine Austin Fitts, Joseph Mercola, and the entire “Disinformation Dozen”, as well as ALL of the writers, bloggers, and commenters posting here on the alternative internet.
Robert F. Kennedy’s book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health”, could be an effective weapon in converting progressives in the propaganda war because Kennedy is RFK’s son and JFK’S nephew. He has, additionally, been a champion of liberal causes including environmentalism.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so it was gratifying to see Kennedy’s take-down of the global medical cabal become a well-reviewed best seller this past Christmas season.
A global network of stakeholder capitalist partners are collaborating to usher in what they claim to be a new model of enhanced democratic accountability that includes “civil society”. However, beneath their deceptive use of the term civil society lies an ideology which offers this network an unprecedented degree of political control that threatens to extinguish representative democracy entirely.
Representative democracy is quietly being phased out to be replaced with a “new normal.” This “new normal” is a nascent form of governance being referred to as “civil society.” It is founded upon the principles of communitarianism and it is being offered to us as an illusory replacement for representative democracy.
The Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P), who set the worldwide policy agenda, have long-seen the manipulation of the concept of civil society as a means to achieve their ambitions. This is at odds with how many emergent “civil society” groups understand their allocated roll.
Set against the background of a corporate, global state, in this article, we will explore the exploitation of communitarian civil society and consider the evidence that, despite possibly good intentions, civil society is very far from the system of increased democratic accountability that communitarians had hoped for. In the hands of the G3P, what they refer to as “civil society” is a tyranny.
Shaping the Global Public-Private Partnership
Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual Davos meeting in 1998, then United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan, described the transformation of the United Nations. He signalled the transition to the G3P model of global governance:
“The United Nations has been transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a ‘quiet revolution’ […] A fundamental shift has occurred. The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community and civil society […] The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”
The WEF describes itself as the “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.” It represents the interests of more than 1000 global corporations and, in June 2019, it signed a Strategic Partnership Framework agreement with the United Nations. The WEF and the UN agreed to work together to “accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
Agenda 2030 establishes the initial waypoints along the path to completion of the plan for the 21st century, also known as Agenda 21. The policies required to achieve these goals will be developed by the multi-stakeholder partnership. The UN explain how this is envisaged to operate:
“Cross sectorial and innovative multi-stakeholder partnerships will play a crucial role for getting us to where we need by the year 2030. Partnerships for sustainable development are multi-stakeholder initiatives voluntarily undertaken by Governments, intergovernmental organizations, major groups and others stakeholders, which efforts are contributing to the implementation of inter-governmentally agreed development goals and commitments, as included in Agenda 21.”
For its part, the UN describes itself as the “place where the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems and find shared solutions.” Currently 193 sovereign states are signed up to the UN Charter.
National governments commit to abide by the principles of the Charter and the ruling arbitration of the International Court of Justice. While UN General Assembly recommendations are non-binding on member states, the UN provides a mechanism by which governments can take collective action.
With the Strategic Partnership in place, the WEF and the corporations they represent are now engaged in “effective collaboration” with the 193 national governments represented at the UN. They are directly partnering with government in the development of global policy agendas.
The partnership will guide the formation of policies and regulations related to international finance and the global financial system; the transition to a new, low carbon global economy; international public health policy, disaster preparedness and global health security; the technological development deemed necessary to bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution; policies on diversity, inclusion and equality; oversight of the global education systems and more.
In an attempt to add a veneer of democratic accountability to this Strategic Partnership Framework, as the world uniformly moves towards Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN strongly advocates collaboration with “civil society.” Indeed, SDG 17 specifically refers to this arrangement: “Goal 17 further seek to encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships”
Civil society will be engaged by utilising the WEF concept of the “multistakeholder platform.” This is a core element of the WEF’s definition of stakeholder capitalism.
The communitarian model of civil society is based upon a triumvirate power sharing structure between state (public sector), market (private sector) and community (social or third sector.) However, the WEF’s interpretation of stakeholder capitalism assumes that the public-private partnership stakeholders (state-market) select the civil society communities (social or third sector) they wish to engage with.
Selection bias is a concern, as it obviously excludes the communities the public-private partnership does not wish to engage with. In part, this contradicts the communitarian view of civil society.
The WEF’s multistakeholder platform appears to exploit, rather than embrace, communitarian civil society. Understandably, the WEF’s partnership with the UN drew strong criticism from many civil society groups. The Transnational Institute (TNI) encapsulated their concerns as follows:
“This public-private partnership will permanently associate the UN with transnational corporations […] This is a form of corporate capture […] The provisions of the strategic partnership effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions […] The UN’s acceptance of this partnership agreement moves the world toward WEF’s aspirations for multistakeholderism becoming the effective replacement of multilateralism […] The goal was to weaken the role of states in global decision-making and to elevate the role of a new set of ‘stakeholders’, turning our multilateral system into a multistakeholder system, in which companies are part of the governing mechanisms. This would bring transnational corporations, selected civil society representatives, states and other non-state actors together to make global decisions, discarding or ignoring critical concerns around conflicts of interest, accountability and democracy.”
Less than six months after the Strategic Partnership Framework was signed the pseudopandemic allegedly began in Wuhan, China. Resulting world events have somewhat obscured the corporate capture of global governance from public attention, but it remains in place.
The Civil Society Tradition
Representative democracies have a long tradition of civil society. Between 1835 and 1840 the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote and published two volumes of “Democracy in America.” He noted that, for the representative democracy of the “new world,” the voluntary institutions of civil society promoted active engagement in decision making and acted as a bulwark against the excesses of centralised, governmental authority:
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds -religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books […] and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools […] they form a society.”
While he found that American civil society empowered the citizenry, de Tocqueville also identified some of the apparent risks:
“When several members of an aristocracy agree to combine, they easily succeed in doing so; as each of them brings great strength to the partnership, the number of its members may be very limited; and when the members of an association are limited in number, they may easily become mutually acquainted, understand each other, and establish fixed regulations. The same opportunities do not occur amongst democratic nations, where the associated members must always be very numerous for their association to have any power.”
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with concept of civil society, but even in the 19th century the potential for it to be exploited by powerful interest groups was apparent.
Today, civil society is sold to us as a way to fix what many people see as the “democratic deficit”. First coined in the late 70’s by the Congress of Young European Federalists (JEF), the “deficit” was conceived to explain the observed failings in representative democracy.
The JEF held that the ponderous, centralised bureaucracy of national government was unable to adapt to rapidly changing economic and social conditions. Further, that the interdependent, international nature of modern, technologically advanced industrial societies created conditions that no single nation could address in isolation.
This left the electorate unable to affect the policy changes they needed, as government became unresponsive to social and economic realities. Civil society was suggested as a way to bridge the gap between governance, government and community. Unfortunately, the inherent credulity of the communitarian theory driving it rendered civil society vulnerable to manipulation by more Machiavellian global forces.
Communitarian Civil Society Model
In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the first edition of the Communist Manifesto. In it they criticised their intellectual forebears, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and others, for their utopian naivety. In particular they decried the “utopian socialist” rejection of the class struggle, pointing out that, in their opinion, the proletariat needed an independent political movement in order to overturn the rule of the bourgeoisie.
In 1841, John Goodwyn Barmby coined the term “communitarian.” He was among those who Marx would subsequently label as utopian socialists. Communitarianism elucidated their theory that individual identity was a product of familial, social and community interactions. Communitarianism wasn’t widely referenced until, in 1996, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor highlighted that a new form of political communitarianism was building in the US:
“The term has been taken up by a group under the leadership of Amitai Etzioni in the US. This group has a political agenda. One might say that they are concerned social democrats who are worried about the way that various forms of individualism are undermining the welfare state. They see the need for solidarity, and hence for ‘community’ on a number of levels, from the family to the state.”
Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American dual citizen, is the director of the Center for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. A former advisor to the Carter administration, he formed an association of like minded sociologists and other scholars called the Communitarian Network.
In 1991, the Network produced its manifesto in the form of the Responsive Communitarian Platform. Etzioni et al. defined civil society as the moral and political space between community and state. They suggested that global problems could only be tackled with the participation of civil society:
“A communitarian perspective must be brought to bear on the great moral, legal and social issues of our time […] Moral voices achieve their effect mainly through education and persuasion, rather than through coercion […] they exhort, admonish, and appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature […] this important moral realm, which is neither one of random individual choice nor of government control, has been much neglected […] we see an urgent need for a communitarian social movement to accord these voices their essential place […] civil society is a constant, ongoing enterprise.”
Communitarianism is opposed to authoritarian control. It specifies “community” as representative of the people. Accordingly, in order for government to be genuinely responsive to the changing needs of the electorate, it must engage with communities:
“We seek to find ways to accord citizens more information, and more say, more often. We seek to curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government. Similarly, we ask how ‘private governments,’ whether corporations, labor unions, or voluntary associations, can become more responsive to their members and to the needs of the community.”
Etzioni and other communitarians, like the utopian socialists before them, believe that the community represents the individual. Therefore, the community can speak for the individual. Further, they believe that governments and “private governments” can engage with the people via consultation with the communities. In combination, these communities form civil society.
Communitarian Assumptions
In his 2000 commissioned treatise for the UK-based, privately funded think tank DEMOS, titled The Third Way To A Good Society, Etzioni argued that civil society could remedy public disillusionment in democratic institutions. He noted the dwindling public trust in government and increasing sense of disenfranchisement. The remedy he proposed for this democratic deficit has since proven disastrous:
“We aspire to a society that is not merely civil but is good […] When we bond with family, friends or community members we live up to the basic principle of the good society […] The good society is one that balances three often partially incompatible elements: the state, the market and the community. […] Communities, in my understanding, are based on two foundations […] First, communities provide bonds of affection that turn groups of people into social entities resembling extended families. Second, they transmit a shared moral culture (a set of shared social meanings and values that characterise what the community considers virtuous verses unacceptable behaviour) […] These traits differentiate communities from other social groups […] Contemporary communities evolve among members of one profession working for the same institution […] members of an ethnic or racial group even if dispersed among others; people who share a sexual orientation; or intellectuals of the same political or cultural feather […]Groups that merely share specific interests – to prevent the Internet from being taxed or to reduce the costs of postage – are solely an interest group or lobby. They lack the affective bonds and shared culture that make communities.”
For communitarians shared morality defines the “good society” which manifests in the exercise of power sharing between “the state, the market and the community.” Communities, as defined, stand apart from mere “interest groups” because they have “affective bonds” whereas interest groups don’t, in the communitarian’s view.
Community is, according to the communitarians, held together because people have affection for each other. They suggest that interest groups lack cohesion by comparison.
Community is “good” and therefore the power-sharing triangle is “good” for society. Certainly the vast majority of us want to live in a peaceful society, where families of every shape and size can thrive, where children have the opportunity to reach their full potential and conflict is resolved without resorting to violence. Nonetheless, communitarianism poses some questions.
Absent a shared “specific interest,” it is not easy to define community. Which “communities” will be chosen to form civil society, how is this decision made and who makes it? Who represents the local community? Is it the church, if so which church? Is it a local charity or an environmentalist group? Does the local cyclist community represent the interests of the local road hauliers community? What “good” values do these selected communities promote, who among us agree with them and how many of us share their aims and objectives?
Who is selected from each alleged community to represent the opinions of all of its constituent members? Do the community members share the views of their representatives? Are they happy for these community leaders to speak for them?
In the multistakeholder platform-based model of civil society it appears that these judgments fall to the public-private partnership. How confident can the rest of us be in their rationale? Even the notion of the local community is a nebulous concept. Where are the boundaries of local? Is it our street, our town, city or nation state? Does everyone who lives in whatever is prescribed as the local community agree? Do we all share the same opinions, do we even want to be part of a community?
Communitarians offer few, if any, answers to these questions. It is an implicit assumption of communitarianism that this thing they call community is capable of acting as a voice for the individual. This is not evident.
Communitarian “New Normal” Intolerance
An oft quoted sound-bite during the 2020 iteration of the pseudopandemic was the phrase the “new normal.” Many of us probably believed that the prospect of a new normal referred to little more than the introduction of stringent public health measures following an unprecedented global pandemic. However, this is not what “new normal” means.
While he was far from the first to use it, the “new normal” was a phrase offered by Amitai Etzioni in his 2011 book of the same name. He accompanied his book with an essay, titled The New Normal, also written in 2011. In both the book and the essay, Etzioni explored the communitarian view on the new, post global economic collapse world. The “new normal” was the name Etzioni gave to a society of “diminished economic condition.”
He suggested that people must accept that continual growth was unlikely and should, in any case, eschew consumerism as a measure of success. He welcomed this envisaged change to a society that valued relationships as well as emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth beyond material acquisition. He claimed that a reduction in consumption was required to save the planet. We all needed to reduce our carbon footprints, he asserted.
As people have come to question the often dispiriting pursuit of modern materialism, Etzioni’s perspective was welcome perhaps. However, it is in Etzioni’s exploration of the balance between individual rights and the “common good” where doubts arise. Etzioni, alongside most communitarians, considers that balance to be fluid. Neither individual rights nor the common good take precedent in a sociological concept Etzioni called “libertarian communitarianism.”
As new situations arise and technologies emerge, what is good for the community today may not be good for the community tomorrow. Therefore, the point at which the common good does override individual rights—as it must—is constantly shifting, according to libertarian communitarianism.
However, one value which communitarianism does not espouse is diversity of opinion. In the communitarian model, the power to define the common good is absolute. The traditional democratic values of freedom of speech and expression are distinctly unwelcome in communitarian philosophy. This is not admitted, but it is implicit to their theory. For communitarians, dissent from the community or disagreement with the stated “common good” is not tolerated.
“We should not hesitate to speak up and express our moral concerns to others when it comes to issues we care about deeply […] Those who neglect these duties, should be explicitly considered poor members of the community […] A good citizen is involved in a community or communities. We know that enduring responsive communities cannot be created through fiat or coercion, but only through genuine public conviction […] Although it may seem utopian, we believe that in the multiplication of strongly democratic communities around the world lies our best hope for the emergence of a global community that can deal concertedly with matters of general concern to our species as a whole.”
Communitarians are ambitious. They see their civil society as a global project where everyone involved has a “genuine public conviction” to communitarian principles. This ambition is shared by the G3P, but for very different reasons.
What if we are not convinced? What if we believe individual sovereignty is sacrosanct and that freedom of speech and expression, of organic public protest and freedom of choice are more important than a commitment to any prescribed community or the community’s authorised version of the common good?
According to communitarians, like Etzioni, this makes us poor members of the community. We are not “good citizens” and they suggest how we should be dealt with:
“Responsibilities are anchored in community […] communities define what is expected of people; they educate their members to accept these values; and they praise them when they do and frown upon them when they do not […] Whenever individuals or members of a group are harassed, many non-legal measures are appropriate to express disapproval of hateful expressions and to promote tolerance among the members of the polity.”
This is community as a control mechanism, not as an extension of any egalitarian meritocracy where individuals can flourish. The community will define our responsibilities and spell out what is expected of us. The community will instill its values and we must agree with them. If we don’t, we will be “educated” to accept them.
If we strongly express disagreement with community values this could constitute “hate” and “harassment” of community members. Those of us outside of the community, for any reason, will be receive its disapproval and efforts will be made to make us more tolerant of the community’s beliefs. Whatever they may be.
Therefore, uniformity of opinion within these communities is enforced. Debate will be welcome as long as it doesn’t challenge the community’s precepts. These are off limits. Members will probably have to leave independent thought at the door before entering the community and certainly before being accepted by it.
There is a significant risk that groupthink will develop. The roots of communitarianism are in the utopian socialist view that identity is formed by the community. In turn, this also suggests that community identity becomes individual identity.
An individual suffering from groupthink possesses unquestioned certainty, intolerance for any opposing views and an inability to engage in logical discourse. Their critical thinking skills are impaired, because to question the community is to question their own identity.
Those who do not share the ordained group ethos, or those who question the evidence base underpinning the group’s certainty, are not part of the community. They are “other.”
Etzioni describes anyone who doesn’t embrace vaccine passports as Individual Rights Luddites. Having thought about vaccine passports, he concluded:
“These passports could enable scores of millions of people to leave their depressing quarantines, to go to work, to attend school, and to be socially active again, all of which would help revive the economy and reduce social tensions.”
He accepts that lockdowns and the closure of the global economy was an unavoidable response to a global pandemic and not a policy choice. He believes that school closures make sense and that the economy will be revived once the vaccine passport system is established. He believes that the mRNA and viral vector injections are vaccines and that they work as described by the manufacturers.
In other words Etzioni accepts a whole raft of assumptions. Based upon them, he insists that denying access to society to those who don’t want to be injected is not “discrimination” but rather “differentiation.” Applying his communitarian principles he wrote:
“Differentiation will exert some pressure on those who refuse to be vaccinated, as they will be unable to reap the benefits of the passports unless they reconsider their position.”
Etzioni has defined the common good. Or rather, he accepts the common good as defined for him. Freedom of choice or principles such as bodily autonomy are overridden by the “common good.”
Etzioni disagrees with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben who pointed out the horrific ramifications of a biosecurity state. This is fine, disagreement and debate are welcome in any free society.
Unfortunately, unlike Agamben, Etzioni doesn’t advocate a free society. He suggests a communitarian civil society based upon the consensus view of what does or does not constitute the common good. As did Hitler’s National Socialists in 1930s Germany, a society from which Etzioni fled as a child to what is now the state of Israel.
Communitarians oppose the abuse of power and it is unfair to describe them as fascists. Nonetheless, it is entirely reasonable to point out the parallels. Both political ideologies accept authoritarian diktat. That is what enforcement of the “common good” is.
However, this is not the most worrying aspect of the communitarianism. It is communitarians’ naive grasp of the global realpolitik, which renders communitarian civil society the perfect policy vehicle for the G3P. This is what should concern us most. Unlike communitarians, the G3P definitely wants to enforce dictatorial control.
The Political Class Embraces Communitarian Civil Society
In one sense, the global political class’ apparent enthusiasm for communitarian civil society seems surprising. It is unusual for them to seek ways to increase public scrutiny of state and corporate power or public involvement in their policy development.
While public consultation is nothing new, policy is typically designed via internal party political processes, set at party conferences and so-forth. The parties then produce manifestos that the people are invited to select in elections, once every 4 or 5 years.
Civil society, as envisioned by communitarians, suggests a permanent power sharing structure that affords individual voters “more say, more often” in an effort to “curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government.” It is rare that governments, and the political parties that form them, willingly diminish their own power and authority.
That this seeming diminution of party political power should be embraced both simultaneously and globally is unprecedented. Yet, that is what we have seen, as Western representative democracies have advocated, what appears to be, increasing political power for civil society groups.
The recent COP26 summit, which established the basis for action for the new global economy, invited representatives from “governments, businesses, NGOs, and civil society groups.” The US State Department brought together “leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector” for their Summit For Democracy to deliberate on US foreign policy.
The German government has appointed a National Civil Society Body to monitor the site selection for potential nuclear waste storage facilities. The UK government has created the Office for Civil Society within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. On the surface, it seems democracy is exploding everywhere.
Communitarian Civil Society Is A G3P Project
The Communitarian Network’s ideas certainly enthralled the western political class. During the 1990s, US president Clinton and then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder leading the mainland European charge, embraced what they called “the Third Way.”
“Elements of both stakeholding and communitarianism can be found in the Third Way […] communitarian ideas have undoubtedly influenced New Labour [..] Outputs and not ideology are driving the new agenda of governance under New Labour. This is seen to have its roots in the new ways of working the party has embraced in local governance, where public–private partnerships have become the norm and a new ethos of public service has emerged.”
This transformation in governance was not solely a political shift of the “progressive left.” Following the demise of the UK Labour government, the Conservative-led coalition, under David Cameron, advocated the “Big Society.” Today, under another Conservative government, virtually no UK policy initiative or announcement is complete unless it speaks of engagement with “civil society.”
“Public-private partnerships” became prevalent in UK local government decision-making during the 1980s & 90s. This was an aspect of the forerunner of the Third Way, named by the UK Labour party as the “stakeholder society.”
The idea of the stakeholder society owed much to the reforms introduced by former UK Conservative Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher. Under her leadership in the 1980s the pursuit of “Reagonomics” led the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) for all local authority contracts.
Hitherto, standard local government practice had been to allocate infrastructure projects to private contractors while the regional government provided many local services. With CCT, all contracts were opened up to the private sector. This meant that multinational corporations had access to new taxpayer-funded markets.
“The key idea behind one nation socialism is the stakeholder society, a society in which all individuals and interests have a stake through democratic representation, and through the adoption by political parties like the Labour Party of a conception of the public interest.”
However, the stakeholder society redefined who would determine the public interest? Traditionally, this had primarily been an undertaking for elected governments. They could be kicked out of office if the public disagreed with their policies. However, the stakeholder society gave a formal policymaking role to both the third (social) and the private sector. No one voted for them, nor could they be removed through any electoral process.
Nor was the Third Way simply a European project. In the US, the Third Way policy think tank was formed in Washington in 2005. Supposedly a think tank of the “progressive left”, the Third Way was heavily backed by global corporations and lobbied Congress intensively to adopt multinational trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Initially, it seems difficult to understand why global corporations and governments would be eager to promote an idea like the Third Way or civil society. For global corporations, the ability to focus their lobbying efforts on a handful of elected officials would appear preferable, and easier, than trying to influence the communities forming civil society. Centralised authority benefits them, so why would they seek to to dilute it?
The “key idea” of the stakeholder society did not originate in centre-left think tanks like the Resolution Foundation or the Third Way. It sprang from the heart of the global capitalist network forming the Global Public Private Partnership (G3P).
Stakeholder capitalism is supposedly a new model of so-called responsible capitalism which the founder and current executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, pioneered in the 1970s. The G3P he represents claims the right to act as trustees of society. In December 2019, Schwab wrote “What Kind of Capitalism Do We Want”, where he outlined the stakeholder capitalism concept:
“Stakeholder capitalism, a model I first proposed a half-century ago, positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges.”
“The person appointed, or required by law, to execute a trust; one in whom an estate, interest, or power is vested, under an express or implied agreement to administer or exercise it for the benefit or to the use of another.”
The referenced “other” is us, the population. We all apparently agree that private corporations should be invested with the power to administer the global estate. Or at least that is the assumption at the heart of stakeholder capitalism.
Communitarianism and stakeholder capitalism merge to form what is now being referred to as “civil society.” This then is the proposed model of representative democracy that will ostensibly enable us to have a say in the policy formation process. If we examine this claim, however, it is resoundingly hollow.
In the hands of the global stakeholder capitalists, with the connivance of a power hungry “progressive” left, Etzioni’s dream of a communitarian civil society has metastasised into a global control mechanism for the G3P. Civil society, as the term is now being used, is a threat to every democratic principle we value.
The Tyranny of the New Normal Communitarian Civil Society
Etzioni, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and other proponents of communitarianism, who advocate local and national governance via civil society, offer a model ripe for exploitation. Governments across the world have enthusiastically seized the opportunity presented by this rendering of civil society, typically in the form of people’s or citizen’s assemblies.
Many assemblies have formed their consultative community through the drawing of lots. So-called sortition is a governance model that invites members of the local community to deliberate on important policy issues. For example, the UK Government commissioned the Climate Assembly to look at policy enabling the UK to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.
Selected delegates were able to debate what the net zero policy priorities should be. They considered how fast net zero policies should be implemented and looked at how net zero policies could impact their communities, considering what mitigation measures may be required. What they could not do is question net zero policy nor the underlying assumptions it is based upon.
“Civil society actors from a wide range of fields come together to collaborate with government and business leaders on finding and advocating solutions to global challenges. They also focus on how to best leverage the transformation brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and partner with industry, philanthropy, government and academia to take action and engage in the development, deployment, use and governance of technology. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), labour and religious leaders, faith-based organizations and other civil society stakeholders are key members of the World Economic Forum’s multistakeholder platform.”
There is no questioning of either government or business. No opportunity is provided for the people, the subjects of the policy agenda under debate, to explore alternatives.
The necessity for the WEF model of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is assumed, as is the partnership with industry to achieve it. The problems are predetermined and the “solutions” have already been decided before civil society has the opportunity to “collaborate with government and business.”
The civil society stakeholders are chosen. Representatives from NGOs, religious communities, unions and philanthropic foundations are the selected stakeholders whose only role is to agree with the policies placed on the table by the public-private partnership. Their consent is deemed to be public consent.
As previously stated, the communitarian civil society creates a power sharing structure between state (public sector), market (private sector) and community (social or third sector.) It assumes that all three sectors are independent of each other and therefore governance, the setting of policy agendas, is achieved through equal compromise of all three parties.
This fatal naivety effectively extinguishes, rather than enhances, democratic accountability. In truth, the public and private sector are not independent of each other. They are working as equals in partnership.
Between them, they have all the money, all the legal authority, all the resources. Via the public sector (government), they also possess a monopoly on the use of force to compel communities to comply.
On the other side of the civil society equation sits some abstract form of “community” that is invited by the public-private partnership to collaborate. The public-private partnership selects the community or communities they want to rubber stamp their policies. The community has neither power, nor access to resources. Unlike their civil society “partners”, the community can’t force anyone to do anything.
The parameters of the alleged debate are set before the community joins and it will only be allowed to select from whatever “solutions” are put in front of it. All of this fulfills the immediate objectives of the G3P.
At the same time, this allows the G3P to address an issue that has plagued it for years: the democratic deficit or the public’s loss of trust in the institutions of government.
Within the G3P, governments don’t necessarily devise policy. Instead, their primary role is to market the policy and then enforce it.
Governments also provide the enabling environment for G3P policy agendas. They provide this environment both in terms of investment, via the taxpayer, and perhaps more importantly because the population is more likely to accept the rule of an allegedly democratic government rather than a dictatorship composed of a network of global corporations, NGOs and philanthropic foundations.
Consequently, a democratic deficit that erodes that trust is a problem. If you want to convert your policy agenda into legislation and regulation that impacts people’s lives, then you need to make them believe they still have some way of holding decision makers to account. Otherwise, they might resist your undemocratic rule.
The communitarian model of civil society is a gift for the G3P. Not only can they use it to continue maintaining the illusion of democracy, they can exploit claimed engagement with the community and build trust. Building trust is a current, major goal fo the G3P. For example, a “Crucial Year to Rebuild Trust” was the central theme of the 2021 Davos summit, hosted largely virtually by the WEF, and their planned theme for 2022 is “Working Together, Restoring Trust.”
Our continued “trust” in their institutions is vital for the G3P and the stability of their rule. The constant reference to civil society is intended to convince us that we too are stakeholders in the G3P’s multistakeholder platform. In reality, we aren’t. This is a deceit.
Instead, we are the subjects of the predetermined policy agendas that civil society will be invited to approve on our behalf. If we question the selected representative civil society groups, their communitarian beliefs or their assumed right to speak for us, we will be castigated as “bad citizens.”
Being in a community of like-minded souls, with whom we feel a bond, is nice but such a community has no chance against against a committed “interest group.” Such groups have a shared goal and often the will and the resources to attain it. Throughout history, communities have been ruthlessly oppressed by such “interest groups.”
Interest groups’ big advantage is that their members don’t have to feel any affection for each other or even agree on anything other than their objective. Its constituent members simply need to settle their purpose and they do so because each recognises how it benefits them. They are committed to the cause, not to each other.
In the case of the G3P, their cause is the creation and control of new markets and, in doing so, the establishment of a new global economic model. Civil society has helped to set this process in motion.
One of the G3P objectives is the global roll-out of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This offers the G3P the ability to individually monitor and control every financial transaction on Earth. We have every reason to fiercely oppose its introduction. It represents nothing less than absolute economic enslavement.
Yet, the civil society deception is being used to convince us that we are somehow stakeholders in its development. This will undoubtedly be exploited to persuade us to accept its imminent introduction.
The Bank of England (BoE), who claim they have yet to make a decisions on CBDC, has committed its CBDC Taskforce to “engage widely with stakeholders on the benefits, risks and practicalities.”
To this end, they have set up the CBDC Engagement Forum (EF). The BoE states that the EF will:
“Provide a forum to engage senior stakeholders and gather strategic input on all non-technology aspects of CBDC from a diverse cross-section of expertise and perspectives […] The EF will inform the Bank’s further exploration of the challenges and opportunities of potentially implementing CBDC […] Participation in the EF is at the invitation of the Bank and HMT (Her Majesty’s Treasury.) Members will be drawn from the relevant range of CBDC stakeholders: from financial institutions, to civil society groups, to merchants, business users and consumers.”
Given that the introduction of CBDC will radically transform all our lives, it would be good to know who the civil society groups are that will supposedly be representing the public interest. The BoE explains that representatives will be invited to join, following their application, from any of the following organisations:
“Organisation active in retail or the digital economy, a university, a trade or consumer representative body, a think-tank, a registered charity or non-government organisation.”
It is not clear how any of these hand-picked delegates will actually advocate in the public’s interest. However, the BoE assures us that they will:
“On an individual level, the EF will be representative of the gender and ethnic diversity of the UK population, and seek to incorporate members of different backgrounds to support diversity of thought.”
This is what the BoE call engaging widely with stakeholders. In many respects, it is the epitome of communitarian ideology.
The community (in this case, the British public) will be represented because the EF will reflect the right gender and ethnic balance. This is appropriate, but it is missing one vital aspect of diversity: Class.
Just like the utopian socialists who inspired Etzioni and other communitarian thinkers, the BoE does not think that economic power matters when it comes to defining civil society. As long as they tick the right diversity boxes, class is not an issue. However, when they decide to introduce CBDC, it is the working and middle class who will suffer most as a result.
This may not be the model of civil society that the communitarians intended, but it is the model that the rest of us are going to get. A powerful interest group, the G3P, has seized upon the opportunity of communitarianism to construct a form of fake democratic accountability that consolidates their power and authority.
In one sense, it does fix the democratic deficit. By cutting out the electorate, the “new normal” communitarian civil society effectively ends representative democracy.
There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another form of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.
It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.
For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.
I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”
Not once.
This is NOT analysis, this is controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into a thought experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.
Educational programming like this is now a mainstay while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of actual scientific method or science in general. Ask them what the equations for Density or Acceleration are, and they’ll have no clue what your are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change”, and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.
In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe, and look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions and agree with the teacher.
Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to covid as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:
Why don’t people trust the science and scientists anymore?
This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory, this is provable fact.
That’s not to say that all science is to be mistrusted. The point is, no science should be blindly accepted without independent examination of ALL the available facts. This is the whole point of science, after all. Yes, there are idiotic conspiracy theories out there when it comes to scientific analysis, but there are a number of scams in the world of science as well.
The usual false claim is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that THEIR scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science”, it our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.
Most people have the capacity to sift through scientific data as long as it’s transparent. When the facts are obscured or spun or omitted this causes confusion, and of course only the establishment scientists can untangle the mess because they are the ones that created it. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health…
GMO Crops And The Corporate Money Train
The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there a hundreds if not thousands of studies which readily confirm this conclusion. So, case closed, right?
Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the indoctrinated – Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data on GMOs?
Well, in the vast majority of cases GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or, government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMO’s.
Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists that are involved in experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.
There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama Administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.
Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is proven to cause long term health damage the government cannot be sued for approving them unless there are special circumstances.
If they could be held liable, you would be damn sure the FDA would be running every conceivable test imaginable to make sure GMOs are definitively safe without any bias attached, but this is not the case. Instead, the government actively propagandizes for GMO companies and uses hired hatchet men to derail any public criticism.
I, for one, would certainly like to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which specific GMO foods were removed from the market because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins which act as a pesticides).
There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. All the money is in dismissing the risks of GMOs; there’s almost no money in studying them honestly.
The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.
Covid Vaccines And The Death Of Science
I bring up the example of GMO’s because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analysis. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the majority of data is dictated by the people that profit from them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowing is upheld as proof of safety – But this is not scientific. Science and medicine would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.
The same dynamic exists in the world of covid vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring NO negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains approved for emergency use by the FDA. It may be important to note that the FDA has said it will take at least 55 YEARS to release all the data it has on the Pfizer covid vaccines, which suggests again that there is a beneficial collusion between the government and corporate behemoths.
In the meantime, anyone that questions the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma. These attacks are not limited to the alternative media; the establishment has also gone after any scientist or doctor with questions about vaccine safety.
There are clear and openly admitted ideological agendas surrounding covid science which have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the covid pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the covid science is also being rigged to support special interests.
Luckily, the covid issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to control every study. Instead, the establishment ignores the studies and data they don’t like.
The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100% vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is only 0.27%. This means that on average 99.7% of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is confirmed by dozens of independent medical studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government scientists like Anthony Fauci?
I’ve never heard them talk about it. But how is it scientific to ignore data just because it doesn’t fit your political aims? Again, deliberate omission of data is a form of lying.
What about the multiple studies indicating that natural immunity is far superior in protection to the mRNA vaccines? What about the fact that the countries with the highest vaccination rates also have the highest rates of infections and their hospitalizations have actually increased? What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? What about the fact that the average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before being approved for human use, while the covid mRNA vaccines were put into production within months? That is to say, there is NO long term data to prove the safety of the covid vax.
These are easily observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from corporate scientists or government scientists like Fauci? Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him, and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes HE IS the science.
And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium. Real scientists like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, call Fauci a fraud, but they are ignored while Fauci is worshiped. I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I would have to write an entire separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming academics (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, yet, institutions like the NOAA continue to claim the end of the world is nigh because of global warming).
The stringent bottleneck on science today reminds me of the Catholic church under Pope Innocent III when church authorities forbade common people from owning or reading a bible. These laws remained in effect well into the 13th century. Instead, the peasants were to go to church and have the texts read to them by specific clergy. Often the bible readings were done in Latin which most people did not speak, and interpreted however the church wished.
It was only the invention of the printing press in the 1400s that changed the power dynamic and allowed bibles to be widely distributed and information to spread without church oversight. Much like the creation of the internet allows the public to access mountains of scientific data and methodologies at their fingertips. The free flow of information is an anathema according to the establishment; they argue that only they have the right to process information for public consumption.
Cultism requires excessive control of data and the complete restriction of outside interpretations. As information becomes openly available the public is then able to learn the whole truth, not just approved establishment narratives.
Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science” or even censored as “dangerous.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust the science? Any reasonable person would have questions and suspicions. Those who do not have been indoctrinated into a cult they don’t even know they are a part of.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But, of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too. This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent.
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.
“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
Despotism has become our new normal.
Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.
These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.
This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.
The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.
Censorship. The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. Thus, while on paper, we are technically free to speak, in reality, we are only as free to speak as the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow. Yet it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Unfortunately, censorship is just the beginning. Once you allow the government and its corporate partners to determine who is worthy enough to participate in society, anything goes.
The Emergency State. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. Therein lies the danger of the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. This is the power grab hiding in plain sight.
Pre-crime. The government is about to rapidly expand its policing efforts to focus on pre-crime and thought crimes. Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism, a broad label that can be applied to anything or anyone the government perceives to be a threat to its power.
The Surveillance State. This all-seeing fourth branch of government, comprised of a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors, watches everything we do, reads everything we write, listens to everything we say, and monitors everywhere we go. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.
Genetic privacy. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government—helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.
Bodily integrity. It doesn’t matter what your trigger issue is—whether it’s vaccines, abortion, crime, religion, immigration, terrorism or some other overtly politicized touchstone used by politicians as a rallying cry for votes—we should all be concerned when governments and businesses (i.e., the Corporate State) join forces to compel individuals to sacrifice their right to bodily integrity on the altar of so-called safety and national security. This debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccines to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
Gun control. After declaring more than a decade ago that citizens have a Second Amendment right to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense, the Supreme Court has now been tasked with deciding whether the Constitution also protects the right to carry a gun outside the home. Unfortunately, when it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.
Show Your Papers Society. With every passing day, more and more private businesses and government agencies on both the state and federal level are requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination in order for individuals to work, travel, shop, attend school, and generally participate in the life of the country. By allowing government agents to establish a litmus test for individuals to be able to engage in commerce, movement and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the groundwork for a “show me your papers” society in which you are required to identify yourself at any time to any government worker who demands it for any reason. Such tactics can quickly escalate into a power-grab that empowers government agents to force anyone and everyone to prove they are in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books.
Singularity. Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Elon Musk has announced his intentions of implanting brain chips in humans sometime in 2022. The digital universe—the metaverse—is expected to be the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one. Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
Despotism. Even in the face of militarism, fascism, technotyranny, surveillance, etc., the gravest threat facing us as a nation may well be despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money. The American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.
If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.
“We the people” are the hope for a better year.
Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.
After the Crash 