Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain

Posted on November 7, 2022 by Reid Mukai

Shuck-and-jive from America’s broken thinking class, the people who pretend to know better than everybody else.

By James Howard Kunstler

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

These dissenters turned out to be “right for the wrong reasons,” she declared, the main reason being that they were not aligned in good-think with the Woke-Jacobinism of her fellow “progressives” at Brown U, and academics all across the land, who were righteously busy destroying the intellectual life of the nation, making it impossible for the thinking class to think.

Let’s face it: every society actually needs a thinking class, a cohort able to frame important issues-of-the-moment that require argument in the public arena to align our collective thoughts and deeds with reality. America used to have a pretty good thinking class, with a pretty good free press and many other platforms for opinion — all animated by respect for the first amendment to the Constitution.

The thinking class destroyed that by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. Hence, America’s thinking class became the torchbearers of unreality, in step with the Party of Chaos which held the levers of power. This included the powers of life and death in the matter of Covid-19.

These were the people who militated against effective early treatment protocols (to cynically preserve the drug companies’ emergency use authorization (EUA) and thus their liability shields); the people who enforced the deadly remdesivir-and-ventilator combo in hospital treatment; the people who rolled out the harmful and ineffective “vaccines”; who fired and vilified doctors who disagreed with all that; and who engineered a long list of abusive policies that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, households, reputations, and futures.

How did it happen that the thinking class destroyed thinking and betrayed itself? Because the status competition for moral righteousness in the sick milieu of the campus became more important to them than the truth. In places like Brown U, what you saw was an escalating contest for status brownie-points, which is what virtue-signaling is all about. And the highest virtue was going along with whatever experts and people-in-authority said — the pathetic virtue of submission. Anything that got in the way of going along — such as differences of opinion — had to be crushed, stamped out, and with a vicious edge to teach the dissenters a lesson: dissent will not be tolerated!

Some thinking class. The case of Emily Oster should be particularly and painfully disturbing, since she affects to specialize, as an economist, on “pregnancy and parenting” (her own website declares), while the Covid regime of public health officialdom she supported instigated a horrendous pediatric health crisis that is ongoing — it was only days ago that the CDC added the harmful mRNA “vaccines” to its childhood immunization schedule for the purpose of conferring permanent legal immunity for the drug companies after the EUA ends, a dastardly act. Where’s Ms. Oster’s plea to the CDC to cease and desist trying to vaccinate kids with mRNA products?

The CDC is still running TV commercials (during World Series ballgames!) touting its “booster” shots when only weeks ago a top Pfizer executive, Janine Small (“Regional President for Vaccines of International Developed Markets”), revealed in testimony to the European Union Parliament that her company never tested its “vaccine” for preventing transmission of SARS CoV-2. The CDC under Director Rochelle Walensky is still extra-super-busy concealing or fudging its statistical data to obfuscate the emerging picture that MRNA “vaccines” are responsible for the shocking rise of “all-causes deaths” in the most heavily-vaxxed nations. In short, the authorities are to this minute still running their whole malign operation.

Notably, Ms. Oster’s plea for amnesty and forgiveness, showcased in The Atlantic, omits any discussion of accountability for what amounts to serious crimes against the public. A whole lot of people deserve to be indicted for killing and injuring millions of people. At the heart of her plea is the excuse that “we didn’t know” official Covid policy was so misguided. That’s just not true, of course, and is simply evidence of the thinking class’s recently-acquired allergy to truth. The part she left out of her petition for pandemic amnesty is: we were only following orders.

What Is To Be Done?

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Edwards

Source: Information Clearing House

Not an original title for a piece that will assert we are in a unique moment in world history? No, Lenin used it to expose the cruelty and villainy of the empire that ruled Russians like a slave master. Claiming we are in a “unique moment” is not original, either. We Americans, with our caudal appendage, Europe, have been told time and again we are in “unique moments”, unmatched in its peril, so that it’s now routine to say it of every asinine Presidential election.

I have spent a lifetime reading and listening to the best minds in journalism and reportage bemoan, attack, mourn, and decry the encyclopedia of lunacies and disasters our system has inflicted on our country, the world, and ourselves, its naive, ignorant people.

Since the Gulf War, and the rolling chain of shameful absurdities that followed—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et.al.—in the idiotic dirty joke of the bumbling “War on Terror”, I have seen the mainstream press devoured by the Capitalist Monster to the point where all voices of integrity have been marginalized and expelled, then denounced and vilified by the diseased whores who slunk into their places.

Now, with America’s ridiculous, transparent, and contemptible falsity so obvious in every aspect of governance at home and abroad, I have seen the entire press converted into an organ of crude and dishonest propaganda for the Capitalist War Machine that is coldly, inhumanly dictating our demise. The viciously dishonest and relentlessly stupid storm of juvenile horseshit disseminated by all mainstream outlets— print, tv, and internet—is an ethical crime of diabolical dimensions. Our government, with its cadre of vacuous, degraded simpletons, men and women of no intellectual size, depth, or scope, profoundly ignorant yet arrogant in their smarmy inadequacy, is restricting and distorting knowingly all truth that conflicts with the malign intentions of the War Lobby to pursue nuclear war with Russia until they get it. And, of course, they need a second enemy and so must tell China what it can and can’t do. Where do these moronic fuckers get the brass to try that shameless madness with Xi and his power?

And this is done while the few strong voices of courage and integrity that, against all the power of money and corruption of The Empire, continue to try to provide an educating effect through reason and evidence, are exiled and suppressed from platforms of influence.

I have long wondered at their dedication and staying power in the face of the cynical, unwarranted abuse they get, including, of course, from their supposed colleagues who, collectively, aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell, as my Dakota Grandpa used to say. I can only assume they are held together, in place, by the unbreakable fiber of integrity in them that they have no choice but to honor.

And yet, though those few and proud speak out against false America and denounce it where denunciation is richly warranted, I feel, even in their most blistering analyses that there is a conviction, a certainty, an honest, incontestable statement of truth, that is missing. I had hoped to hear it expressed by those who have great credibility, and great reputations, profiles and followings, but I have been disappointed.

My list of heroes is not long. I acknowledge them as the heirs to the great ones before: Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Sy Hersh, David Halberstam. I include among the present greats Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Aaron Mate, Michael Brenner, Max Blumenthal, Patrick Lawrence, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

All of them have done honest, deeply informed work to counter the rampant imbecility and cruelty of the American government and its stenographers, the press. The one conclusion none has plainly stated, that all have suggested, is neither obscure nor complicated.

It is this: America can not be reformed or improved under Capitalism. Its corrupt, rotten burlesque democracy must and will be destroyed. Not by any action of the torpid, gelded, stupid people. It will come, and soon, by financial chaos and meltdown, or by nuclear war.

We are told that unless bold action is taken, unless we find the moral courage to act, unless we come together, get money out of politics, vote for better candidates, unless we do this, that, or the other thing, disaster will follow. Sadly, that is all nonsense. In fact, it makes no difference what we do: America, as a viable state, is finished.

This is intolerably painful to admit. Every instinct of self-preservation, every human yearning for safety and justice rejects it. All our training, our education, our immersion in bullshit propaganda screams against it but, admitted or not, it is fact, it is truth, and collapse of America’s baselessly arrogant, obscene, punishing oppression of the compliant world, already tenuous and strained, is coming. And soon…

It is said to be easier for people to imagine the end of the world, than the end of Capitalism. This will end soon when it will no longer be necessary to imagine either, because both will have happened. In the same way that socio-political truth has been screened out by official deceit, environmental truth has been obscured and denied by our own and the world’s rulers. What Capitalism has done to humans is trivial beside what it’s done to the earth and all living things. In this, too, we are told that if we can just do this or that the world will recover and all will be well. It won’t. No matter what we do. And that will almost certainly be what we have done up to now: nothing.

Humans, mostly, are large, dull children. They have a great need to feel loved, protected, pardoned, saved. That’s why they were given religions by elites that have always owned them. All dogmatic religions are bullshit by definition, their fatuous fraud shown up by every advance of knowledge from Galileo to the Webb Telescope.

I, like all my kind, wish for mercy and grace, but I don’t look for it in a ludicrous infantile fantasy, or in deluded hope where there is clearly none. Both religion and science, in the hands of priests and hustlers, have set us up for unavoidable misery and suffering, and arranged for the suicide of our species and the murder of the living world. There is nothing you can do about this. We have the ability to love those we hold dear, and the world we have known. Let that be enough, for it is all you will ever have.

Peering Into the Crystal Ball, We See… Instability Leading to Collapse

Posted on October 25, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

We can only choose one: open, dynamic stability (evolution) or autocracy (instability and collapse).

When the fundamentals of life change, every organism must evolve or die. This is equally true of human organizations, societies and economies.

Evolution requires conserving what still works and experimenting until something comes along that works better. We call the fundamentals changing selective pressure and the process of experimenting with mutations / variations natural selection.

In genetic and epigenetics, this process is automatic. In human organizations, those in power influence the choice of what is conserved or replaced and what it’s replaced with. Those who benefit from the current arrangement will fight to conserve it as is, while those being weakened by selective pressure and those hoping to gain advantages with a new arrangement will fight for replacing the old with the new.

Longtime correspondent Ron G. recently shared an insightful economic characterization of this dynamic: wealth defense vs wealth creation. Those holding the system’s wealth have few incentives to risk changing the system, as those changes could undermine or erode their wealth. They have incentives to limit evolutionary forces that threaten their wealth as a means of defending their wealth.

Those who have lost wealth and those with little wealth have incentives to change the system to favor wealth creation.

We can describe the first as orthodoxy–evolution threatens the stability of the status quo, so limit evolution to the margins–and heretics being the second option that tosses out the status quo in favor of a more advantageous variation.

This isn’t either / or, of course. As Ron points out, corporations have incentives to both conserve stability and embrace variations that increase revenues and profits by expanding the markets for the company’s products. In Ron’s words: “The function of orthodoxy or corporate policy / rigor is to mitigate variations that would decrease stability.”

In other words, there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Dynamic equilibrium is based on a constant flux of variations and experiments–that is, low-level instability–continually modifying the system to maintain core stability.

Without this constant flux of low-level instability, sources of instability pile up, unnoticed and uncorrected, until they become consequential enough to destabilize the entire system. The system implodes, crashes, unravels, etc.

We can understand this flux of variations and experiments as evolutionary churn, and this churn requires two things: a steady flow of mutations / variations to feed the process of experimentation, and transparency so advantageous variations aren’t suppressed. In a transparent evolutionary system, data and information about each variation and experiment flows freely between all nodes in the system.

You see the problem. Those benefiting from the status quo are threatened by variations that could replace whatever is defending their wealth. Those in power benefit from the status quo, so their Job One is to suppress evolution by limiting transparency and variations, which include dissent.

Theoretically, those in power favor evolutionary advances that enhance their power and wealth, but anything that powerful is generally a two-edged sword: modified slightly, it could disrupt the entire status quo and fatally undermine their power.

So the safe bet is to suppress all evolutionary churn except those improvements which can be used to further cement their power. These are by definition autocratic.

You see the delicious irony: autocrats suppress evolutionary churn and transparency as threats, but evolutionary churn and transparency are the essential forces maintaining the system’s dynamic equilibrium. Once the system’s dynamic equilibrium decays, systemic instability builds up and eventually brings the entire system crashing down.

Because this process is obscured by authoritarian suppression of transparency, “nobody saw it coming.”

As those in power adopt ever stronger authoritarian measures to limit the potential threats of evolutionary churn and transparency, they accelerate the fatal instabilities building up within their self-serving, kleptocratic social, political and economic systems.

By suppressing the evolutionary churn and transparency that maintain the system’s dynamic equilibrium, they doom their regime to collapse.

The crystal ball isn’t cloudy, it’s crystal-clear: rising instability leading to collapse. “Nobody saw it coming” except those who understand evolution requires evolutionary churn and transparency.

Collapse is a perfectly good evolutionary solution. Stability is either dynamic or it’s not actually stable; it’s merely a simulacrum of stability sliding toward instability and ruin.

The better option is to embrace evolutionary churn and transparency and accept the trade-off: we can only choose one: open, dynamic stability (evolution) or autocracy (instability and collapse). Choose wisely, for once systems collapse there’s no turning back the clock.

It’s A Fact That Needs Repeating: The Federal Reserve Is A Suicide Bomber

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

For many years now I have been examining the policies and behaviors of the Federal Reserve because they are in fact the most powerful institution in the US, with far more influence over the fate of America than any single president or branch of government. They have the power to end the economic life of our country in a matter of moments. They hold their finger on the button of multiple financial nuclear bombs, and to this day there are people that still pretend as if they are a mere moderating presence subservient to the White House or Congress.

This is a fallacy proven by history and the admissions from central bankers own mouths. The Fed answers to no one in our government. They answer to a different set of masters, and the blame for the consequences of their policies falls to them and their cohorts.

Last year I published an article titled ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error.’ In that article I predicted that the Fed would embark on a hiking spree on interest rates in response to inflationary/stagflationary events. I noted that:

“We are now at that stage again where price inflation tied to money printing is clashing with the stock market’s complete reliance on stimulus to stay afloat. There are some that continue to claim the Fed will never sacrifice the markets by tapering. I say the Fed does not actually care, it is only waiting for the right time to pull the plug on the US economy.”

At the time I received a lot of resistance to the idea. The usual argument was: “The fed will never raise rates and put stock markets at risk. Why would they destroy the golden goose?”

This position showcases a common misconception about the central bank and its purpose. You see, a lot of people think the Fed exists to keep the US economy afloat, and specifically to keep stock markets afloat. This is incorrect. Every single policy of the Fed since its inception has been a long train of abuses designed to slowly and scientifically whittle down the US economy and bring it to the point of extinction.

The next most common argument is: “Wouldn’t the fed sabotaging the economy eventually destroy them as well?”

The answer is YES, and they don’t care. If you have read my previous work on this issue then you know that the Fed is inexorably tied to the Bank for International Settlements (the “central bank of central banks”) and that they call the shots in terms of coordinated global banking initiatives. The BIS is a globalist institution, not an American one, and its agenda is ideologically globalist in nature. The Fed is a servant of globalism; and if the US economy or our currency need to be brought down through a controlled demolition in order to make the globalist dream of a one world socialist “Utopia” come true, that is exactly what the Fed will do.

I was able to predict that the Fed would continue onward with its interest rate hikes and hawkish position only because I acknowledge what the Fed really is: A suicide bomber. And, they have decided the time is ripe to hike interest rates into economic weakness, just like they did at the onset of the Great Depression.

At the beginning of the Depression the Fed increased interest rates after years of artificially stimulating markets with low cost debt. This prolonged the deflationary crash for many years after. It was not until decades later when former Fed chair Ben Bernanke gave a speech celebrating economist Milton Friedman’s 90^th birthday that a central bank official finally admitted that the organization was culpable for the Depression debacle.

“In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn.

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” – Ben Bernanke, 2002

What Ben Bernanke did not admit to was that the engineered deflationary crisis greatly benefited the allies of the Fed – The international corporate bankers. Companies like JP Morgan and Chase National were suddenly in a prime position to seize unlimited power in the US.

So, they’ve done it before, why wouldn’t they do it again?

The next argument that I hear constantly is that the Fed is “ignorant” and they don’t know what they are doing. This is nonsense. Jerome Powell knows EXACTLY what he is doing, and here is the proof – In October of 2012 the Fed held a meeting in which Powell warned that markets and corporations had become addicted to the Fed’s easy money policies. If they decided to taper their stimulus measures and raise rates, there would be potentially disastrous blowback. Powell argued that:

“…I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.” – Jerome Powell

As he admitted, it is indeed their strategy. Powell was not the Fed chairman at the time, so he may not have been aware of the full agenda, but he is certainly aware now. Why would Powell undertake the exact policy action he once warned would result in a full spectrum implosion of the credit bubble? Probably because he was told to.

Powell knows the history of the Great Depression and he knows what will happen when the Fed raises rates into economic weakness and he is doing it anyway. He already tried a test run of rate hikes back in 2018 and the results were not hard to figure out; markets began to tank. We should never forget that the central banks are fully cognizant of the effects of their endeavors. As I stated back in February:

“The rate hikes of 2018 were a test run for a more aggressive and deliberately engineered crisis down the road. The Fed has its own agenda, it does not care about protecting U.S. markets, nor does it even care about protecting the U.S. economy in general.

I hold that the Fed is a weapon for social and political change within America and part of its job is to greatly reduce the standard of living of the population while making it appear as if this decline is a “natural” consequence of the U.S. System.”

This leads us to the final question – What happens next?

That’s easy to answer: The fed continues to hike rates well into next year and will not reverse course or capitulate and return to stimulus. The dovish predictions were wrong. The people that said the Fed would not raise rates were wrong. The people that said the Fed would never remove support from stock markets were wrong. This process is ongoing and the effects will grow as the months pass, but those that were hoping for a manic return to the days of bailouts and QE are going to be deeply disappointed.

This is a stagflationary crash, and as such we are going to experience the worst of both deflationary and inflationary worlds. Prices will remain high while GDP goes negative. Sales will decline and jobs will decline as we enter into the end of this year. There is no way around this. The Fed will have all kinds of theories and misdirections on why these things are happening, and they will try to distract the public as much as possible in the meantime.

What the Fed will never do is admit that a crash is happening until it is too late for people to act. They will never warn the populace of the dangers and they will never tell people to prepare. Watch as they tap dance and tell the public that all the pain is “transitory.” Then, watch as the dust settles and they tell people that “no one could have seen this coming.” It’s all very predictable, because it’s all been done before.

The Gaslighting of the Masses

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Off-Guardian

For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.

In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.

I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.

Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.

One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:

“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.”American Psychological Association

“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.”Psychology Today

“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.”Newport Institute

The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.

Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.

Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.

Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset.

They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.

The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).

The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and of course they lied about the “vaccines.”

The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.

Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.

These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.

You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”

You can show the New Normals the video, and they will watch it, and then look you right in the eye and deny it. https://t.co/iLWsS7jl0f https://t.co/JJTuhGViya
— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) October 13, 2022

But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.

In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.

The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).

Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.

I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”

We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.

I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”

We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills and doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.

Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.

The Fourth Turn, Turn, Turn

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The cycles of The Fourth Turning, Fischer and Turchin are all in alignment at this point in history..

The 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy proposed a cyclical pattern of four 20-year generations which culminate in a national crisis every 80 years. The book identifies these dates as Fourth Turnings: 1781 (Revolutionary War), 1861 (Civil War) and 1941 (global war). add 80 years and voila, 2021.

I use the term Fourth Turning generically to describe an existential crisis that decisively changes the course of national identity and history.

In other words, we don’t have to accept the book’s theory of generational dynamics to accept an 80-year cycle. There are other causal dynamics in play that also tend to cycle: the credit (Kondratieff) cycle, for example.

While each of the previous existential crises were resolved positively, positive outcomes are not guaranteed: dissolution and collapse are also potential outcomes.

David Hackett Fischer’s book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History proposes another cycle: humans expand their numbers and consumption until they’ve exploited and depleted all available resources.

As resources become scarce, societies and economies unravel as humans do not respond well to rising prices generated by scarcities.

The unraveling continues until consumption is realigned with the resources available. In the past this meant either a mass die-off that drastically reduced human numbers and consumption (for example, The Black Plague), a decline in fertility that slowly reduced population to fit resources, mass migration to locales with more resources or the discovery and exploitation of a new scalable energy source that enabled a new cycle of rising consumption.

The 14th century Black Death reduce Europe’s population by roughly 40%, enabling depleted forests to regrow and depleted agricultural land to restore fertility.

Once the human population regained its numbers and consumption in the 17th century, wood was once again under pressure as the key source of energy, shipbuilding, housing, etc.

The development of steam power and the technologies of mining enabled the exploitation of coal, which soon replaced wood as the primary energy source.

Oil and natural gas added to the energy humans could tap, followed (at a much more modest level) by nuclear power. Despite gargantuan investments, the recent push to develop solar and wind energy has yielded very modest results, as globally these sources provide about 5% of total energy consumption. (See chart below)

It’s self-evident that despite breezy claims of endless expansion of consumption, the global human population has now exceeded the resources available for practical extraction. Energy, fresh water, wild fisheries and fertile soils have all been exploited and the easy/cheap-to-extract resources have been depleted.

(The chart below of global CO2 emissions is a proxy for energy / resource consumption.)

So once again it’s crunch-time: either we proactively reduce consumption to align with available resources, or Nature will do it for us via scarcities.

Peter Turchin proposed another socio-economic cycle of 50 years in his book Ages of Discord: in the integrative stage, people find reasons to cooperate. In the disintegrative stage at the end of the cycle, people no longer find much common ground or reasons to cooperate. Political, social and financial extremes proliferate, culminating in a rolling crisis.

In Turchin’s analysis, the previous 50-year age of discord began around 1970, and the current era of discord began in 2020. Those who lived through the domestic terrorism, urban decay, stagflation and political/social/legal crises of the 1970s recall how inter-related crises dominated the decade.

In my analysis, the last period of discord in the 1970s was “saved” by the supergiant oil fields discovered in the 60s coming online in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That oil enabled a 40-year boom which is now ending, with no new scalable source of energy available to replace oil, much less enable an expansion of consumption.

In other words, the cycles of The Fourth Turning, Fischer and Turchin are all in alignment at this point in history. We have proliferating political, social and financial extremes and a forced transition to lower consumption to align with declining energy.

Turn, turn, turn. Right when we need to cooperate on transforming a high-consumption, bubble-dependent “waste is growth” Landfill Economy to declining consumption / Degrowth, we’re beset by discord and demographic pressures, as the promises made to the elderly back when it was expected that there would always be 5 workers per retiree cannot possibly be kept now that the worker-retiree ratio is 2-to-1 and there are no limits on healthcare spending for the elderly.

Humans are happy to expand their numbers and consumption and much less happy to consume less. They tend to start revolutions and wars in vain attempts to secure enough resources to maintain their profligate consumption and expansion.

Today’s extremes of wealth and income inequality are optimized to spark political discord and revolts. The wealthiest 20% will be able to pay higher prices, but the bottom 40% will not. The middle 40% will find their disposable income, i.e. their income left over after paying for essentials, will drop to near-zero.

When 80% of the populace are crunched financially, revolutions and the overthrow of governments follow.

As I’ve outlined in previous posts, global inequalities are widening as the Core exploits its built-in advantages at the expense of the vulnerable Periphery.

Core nations will be much better able to maintain their consumption at the expense of the Periphery nations, which will experience sharp declines in purchasing power and consumption.

Previous Fourth Turnings have been resolved one way or another within 5 to 7 years. If this Turning began in 2020, we can expect resolution by 2025 – 2027.

As I explained in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal, those nations that embrace Degrowth will manage the transition, while those that cling to the endless-expansion, bubble-dependent Waste Is Growth model will fail.

This is why I keep talking about making Plans A, B and C to preserve optionality and reduce financial commitments and consumption now rather than passively await crises over which we will have little direct control.

As I’ve endeavored to explain, those anticipating decades of time to adjust are overlooking the systemic fragilities of the current global financial/supply systems. Tightly bound systems of interconnected dependency chains have been optimized to work perfectly in an era of expansion. They’re not optimized to gradually adjust to contraction; they’re optimized to break and trigger domino-like breakdowns in interconnected chains.

We don’t control these macro-trends, we only control our response.

Deafening Silences: propaganda through censorship, smearing and coercion

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Dr Piers Robinson

Source: Off-Guardian

There is a case to be made that the most important part of any propaganda campaign is the drive to ensure that certain voices, claims and arguments either never see the light of day or otherwise remain contained within “fringe” or “alternative” circles.

Since the start of the COVID event, authorities around the world have sought to implement quite extraordinary policies including the so-called “locking down” of entire populations, compulsory masking and coercion through, for example, the mandating of multiple ‘vaccine’ injections. Many of these policies fly in the face of long-established and well-evidenced public health approaches to dealing with respiratory viruses whilst the scientific cogency of these measures – including lockdowns, community masking and “vaccine” injections – is coming under increased scrutiny.

At the same time, the catastrophic consequences, the so-called “collateral damage” (a military euphemism for wartime civilian casualties), of these extreme policies for populations around the world is becoming well-established. Randomised controlled trials of the injections to date have not shown net overall benefit, while accumulating evidence from passive reporting suggests they may be a cause of significant levels of harm. A central part of selling these extreme, and ultimately highly destructive, policies has involved the use of propaganda.

One of the problems with researching and writing about propaganda is that many people believe it to be alien to democratic states. However, as Edward Bernays, considered by many to be a key figure in the development of 20th century propaganda techniques, explained and promoted…

the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

At least to an extent, this belief in propaganda rests upon an assumption or belief that people are ultimately selfish, egotistical, power-hungry and hedonistic beings who require guidance and incentive; it therefore follows that propaganda is required by powerful actors in order to provide a degree of structure, order and purpose to a given society. In contrast, if one assumes that humans are ultimately good and well-inclined towards each other and to the natural world, and that they are capable of great things if conditions permit, propaganda emerging from self-interested and powerful actors equates to a parasite within the human mind that seeks to lead humans away from their better instincts [1].

To this one might add the propensity of those with power to define themselves as the arbiters of truth and morality:

The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterised by universal self-deception and hypocrisy. The unconscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values […]. […] the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.[2]

Whatever one’s position on the justifiability of propaganda, and although we usually call these techniques by different names today, employing euphemisms such as “public relations” or “strategic communication”, it is a fact that techniques of manipulation are part and parcel of contemporary liberal democracies.

PROMOTING THE NARRATIVE

In the case of the COVID-19 event, propaganda has been deployed across democracies on an unprecedented scale. In order to gain compliance with the unorthodox and intrusive measures adopted during the COVID-19 event many forms of “non-consensual persuasion” have been employed, ranging from manipulated messaging designed to increase “fear levels” through to coercion.

Indeed, very early on it came to light that behavioural scientists were providing advice to the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). UKColumn reported that this group, named the “Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour (SPI-B)”, was (re)convened on 13 February 2020. One document produced by this group identified “options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures” which include persuasion, incentivization and coercion.

In the section on “persuasion” it states that the…

perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging

The document also referred to using…

media to increase sense of personal threat.

Many of these “behavioural science” approaches to manipulation used in the UK context have been documented in Laura Dodsworth’s influential work State of Fear whilst Dr Gary Sidley has written about the remarkable reluctance of anyone in authority to accept responsibility for the deliberate manipulation of the public. Dr Colin Alexander has, for some time, been tracking the propaganda output across the UK public sphere.

More widely, and as described by Iain Davis, these approaches have been paralleled at the global level. In February 2020, according to Davis, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had established the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG);

The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant*.

Since then, Susan Michie has taken over as chair.

CREATING DEAFENING SILENCES

One aspect of the COVID-19 event propaganda has been the aggressive promotion of official narratives; but just as important has been the suppression and censorship of those questioning authorities. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the most important part of any propaganda campaign is the drive to ensure that certain voices, claims and arguments either never see the light of day or otherwise remain contained within “fringe” or “alternative” circles.

Part of this process of suppressing arguments and opinion involves superficially well-meaning attempts to manage what has been increasingly labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Elizabeth Woodworth documents the emergence of the so-called Trusted News Initiative (TNI) prior to the 2020 COVID-19 event and which involved a coalition of mainstream/legacy media establishing a network that would serve to combat “misinformation” and “bias”. She quotes the then BBC Director-General Tony Hall:

“Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation and bias … I’m determined that we use [the BBC’s] unique reach and trusted voice to lead the way – to create a global alliance for integrity in news. We’re ready to do even more to help promote freedom and democracy worldwide”

By 2020, according to Woodworth, the TNI had incorporated “Twitter, Microsoft, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism” and, predictably, adopted the role of tackling “harmful coronavirus disinformation”.

In the UK at least, there has also been military involvement with the 77th Brigade operating as part of the COVID-19 communication strategy. 77th Brigade activities include information warfare and “supporting counter-adversarial information activity” which includes…

creating and disseminating digital and wider media content in support of designated tasks.

Tobias Ellwood, who is both a Member of Parliament and Chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, is, remarkably, a reservist with 77th Brigade. In an answer to a written question in parliament it was confirmed that “members of the Army’s 77th Brigade” are…

currently supporting the UK government’s Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office and are working to counter dis-information about COVID-19.

The Rapid Response Unit itself was established in 2018 in order to, according to its head Fiona Bartosch, counter “misinformation” and “disinformation”, and “reclaim a fact-based public debate”.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also followed a similar tack cautioning the public about “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In a release titled “Let’s flatten the infodemic curve”, they advise people to refer to “factcheckers” and legacy media:

When in doubt, consult trusted fact-checking organizations, such as the International Fact-Checking Network and global news outlets focused on debunking misinformation, including the Associated Press and Reuters

The WHO describes in detail its involvement with social media and “big tech”:

“WHO has been working closely with more than 50 digital companies and social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google, Viber, WhatsApp and YouTube, to ensure that science-based health messages from the organization or other official sources appear first when people search for information related to COVID-19. WHO has also partnered with the Government of the United Kingdom on a digital campaign to raise awareness of misinformation around COVID-19 and encourage individuals to report false or misleading content online. In addition, WHO is creating tools to amplify public health messages – including its WHO Health Alert chatbot, available on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber – to provide the latest news and information on how individuals can protect themselves and others from COVID-19.”

AN INSTITUTIONALISED CULTURE OF CENSORSHIP AND SUPPRESSION OF “WRONG THINK”

These developments, along with others to be documented in due course via work at PANDA, would appear to have had major consequences in terms of suppression of debate. A preliminary examination of events over the last 2.5 years indicates this suppression has operated in at least three different ways:

direct censorship through removal of content and deplatforming;
sponsoring of hostile coverage designed to smear and intimidate anyone raising critical questions regarding the COVID-19 narrative;
coercive approaches involving threats to livelihood and employment.

I shall deal with each in turn.

• Censorship and deplatforming

Formal approaches to censorship via state-backed action were seen early on in the UK context with the regulatory body OFCOM issuing guidelines to broadcasters.

Dodsworth (p.31) reports that broadcasters were instructed to be alert to:

health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful: accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it”(Dodsworth p. 31).

One possible manifestation of this policy was the remarkable instruction issued to Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta. On October 14, 2020, she appeared on BBC News to talk about the lockdowns imposed in the north of England. It is claimed that just before she went on air, one of the producers told her not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed by eminent scientists setting out an alternative policy that would avoid lockdowns and other unorthodox measures.

Across social media, from almost day one of the COVID-19 event, tech giants (“big tech”) were willingly signing up to a strategy of censorship.

In April 2020 it was reported that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had declared that it would act to remove anything going “against World Health Organization” recommendations. Notable removals from YouTube included interviews with Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University and British physician Professor Karol Sikora whilst US Senator Rand Paul’s speech questioning the efficacy of facemasks in August 2021 was removed by YouTube. Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the MRnA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, and who has become a notable critic of official policies and narratives, was also removed from Twitter.

A large part of the policing of debate across social media platforms has involved issuance of warnings that a given post violates “community standards” in some way and some, such as LinkedIn, state that content at variance with authorities can lead to censoring. As Dr David Thunder has documented, the exact wording of Linkedin’s policy on “misinformation” states: “Do not share content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.“

Thunder notes:

What does this actually mean, in practice? It means that some select persons, just because they got nominated to a “public health authority” or a “leading global health organization,” are protected by Linkedin from any robust criticism from the public or from other scientists.

Furthermore, censorship and suppression of academic debate has been reported with respect to academic journals whereby articles and research running against the so-called scientific consensus appear to have been unfairly removed or blocked. For example Dr Peter McCullough reports unjustified censorship of a peer reviewed and published article relating to COVID-19 whilst, more broadly, undue suppression of legitimate research findings was reported by Dr Tess Lawrie with respect to Ivermectin trials. All of these are worrying indications that academic processes themselves have become subject to nefarious censorship and control.

The censorship continues unabated and it might even be intensifying. Whilst detailed and systematic research should be conducted in order to identify the scale and range of the censorship that has been occurring, it is reasonably clear now that, relative to pre-2020, the levels are unprecedented and represent a normalization, or routinization, of censorship.

• Character Assassination through Smearing

Suppression of debate is achieved not only through formal censorship, but also through indirect tactics whereby attempts are made to destroy the reputation of those challenging power. Although perhaps not widely appreciated, the tactic of character assassination appears to have become more prevalent in recent years and it appears to be an important feature of contemporary propaganda and our ‘democratic’ landscape.

Broadly speaking, smear campaigns are designed to avoid substantive rational debate and instead denigrate the person making the argument – ‘playing the man rather than the ball’ or ‘shooting the messenger’. A feature of smear campaigns is the use of identity politics sensibilities such as concern (legitimate) over racism and the deployment of pejorative and tendentious labels. For example, those questioning COVID-19 policies have sometimes been described as far right or fascist whilst pejorative use of the term “conspiracy theorist” is frequently employed to describe those questioning official narratives.

Smear campaigns can be justifiably seen as underhand and disreputable approaches to challenging dissenting voices and they frequently pass off without observers or even the victims being fully aware that they are being targeted: those ordering or enabling the smears have good reason to avoid being uncovered whilst those executing the smears, i.e. the journalists, will defend their hit pieces as legitimate critique.

In the case of the COVID-19 event, however, at least one high level smear campaign has been identified.

At the time of the release of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) during autumn 2020, the authors were only aware of a barrage of hostile media attention such as the above noted instruction by the BBC to Professor Sunetra Gupta to not mention the Declaration during an interview. But at least some of the hostile coverage was not simply a spontaneous reaction by journalists but had been initiated by high-level officials. When the GBD was published, leaked emails showed Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussing the need to swiftly shut it down. Collins wrote in an email that this…

proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.

Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed.

Other prominent instances, unproven but which bear the hallmarks of a directed smear campaign, include repeated attacks on the popular US podcaster Joe Rogan. In the European sphere, Professor Bhakdi, an early and prominent critic of COVID-19 policies has been repeatedly accused of anti-semitism and is now being prosecuted by the German authorities for inciting hatred (*see Endnotes for alt. link -Ed.). None of the accusations made in these attacks appear to be reasonable. Rogan, for example, was chastised for promoting the use of Ivermectin with many journalists referring to it, misleadingly, as “horse dewormer”. The vast bulk of Bhakdi’s work and output concerns the COVID-19 policies and, relatively speaking, his references to any issue related to Judaism is at most vanishingly small.

A subtle and arguably more widespread form of smearing involves the routine labelling of information by social media companies as harmful; for example the independent UK-based outlet OffGuardian has its tweets subject to a blanket warning suggesting their output might be ‘unsafe’ and contain…

violent or misleading content that could lead to real-world harm.

Such labelling is, arguably, defamatory.

• Coercion

Suppression of inconvenient opinions works through both the realm of information – censoring a person’s voice or ad hominem attacks – but also through action in the real, “material”, world via coercion. This could be the creation of conditions that deter people from speaking their mind by offering material incentives or, alternatively, threatening to deplete someone’s material circumstances. Put simply, the threat of loss of earnings.

In the case of the COVID-19 event the role of coercion can be seen through the threats to employment experienced by those challenging the narrative.

For example, Professor Julie Ponesse was forced from her position at Western University in Canada because of her refusal to receive the COVID-19 injection following the issuing of “vaccine” mandate there whilst a similar fate was suffered by Dr Aaron Kheriarty (Professor at University of California Irvine, School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program). Other academics have cited lack of institutional support with respect to their academic freedom, such as Professor Martin Kuldorff.

The coercive nature of mandates is particularly pernicious in that their implementation in universities forces ‘dissident’ academics to either go against their beliefs and opinions and comply or otherwise leave their posts. The disciplining effect is, of course, much more widely felt across the academy: the few who lose their posts serve as a warning to everyone else to reconsider their beliefs and actions. In particular, younger academics and those completing their PhDs will come to understand that compliance with the dominant narrative is the only realistic option if they are to realise their goal of an academic career.

The tactics of censorship, smearing and coercion are synergistic and help construct an environment in which self censorship becomes ubiquitous: Deplatforming of dissident scientists sends a clear warning as to the subject matter and issues that are off limits whilst examples of smearing highlight the potential unpleasant consequences of discussing such issues.

Coercion acts as a final hardstop for anyone entertaining the possibility of risking talking about censored issues and riding out the smears that will result: loss of job and income is simply too much to bear. Overall, the role of authorities in enabling censorship and coercion results in, broadly speaking, an institutionalised culture in which suppression of opinions and debate becomes the norm.

THE DANGERS TO DEMOCRACY AND RATIONAL DEBATE: ONLINE HARM LEGISLATION AND DIS/MISINFORMATION ‘FACT CHECKERS’

Clearly this situation has deleterious consequences for rational debate and democracy. John Stuart Mill explained that silencing the expression of an opinion robs us all of the opportunity to either hear an argument that might turn out to be true, or refine or reject an opinion that is faulty. There are very good reasons for this, as Mill notes:

First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. … All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

And:

if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Scientific and scholarly research demands such openness to questioning and critique and, behind concepts such as tenure, is the core grounding for the academy that scholars need to be allowed to present what might appear to be controversial and even offensive (to some) opinions.

Of course, there are well argued and established limits to freedom of expression – incitement to violence for example – but we are not talking about the usual areas of debate and controversy that lie at the limits of permissible speech. Rather, we are talking about the right of people to raise questions and concerns about policies that directly affect them, such as lockdown, masking and ‘vaccinations’, and, moreover, the right of credentialed experts to raise such questions in the public sphere. That the censorship, smearing and coercion of such people has come to be tolerated is a clear indicator of how far our democracies have slipped into an authoritarian abyss.

And things are, potentially, about to become even worse with the pushing through of so-called ‘online harm bills’ including in the UK, Europe and Canada. In the UK, the proposed bill creates a category of legal but ‘harmful’ speech: as described by the pressure group Big Brother Watch:

Under the threat of penalties, the legislation will compel online intermediaries to censor swathes of online discussion including in matters of general discourse and public policy. Harmful content is defined entirely by the Secretary of State who is also granted a host of executive powers throughout the legislation.

Liberty has explained further the potential dangers of such developments:

We are concerned that the ‘legal but harmful’ category set out in the OSB is inadequately prescribed by law and risks disproportionately infringing on individuals’ right to freedom of expression and privacy. In particular, we are concerned about the wide definition of online harm as meaning “physical or psychological harm” (clause 187). This is an extremely low threshold, and encompasses innumerable kinds of harm, the extent of which in our view far exceeds the qualifications on Article 10 provided by the ECHR and HRA.

And, as Lord Sumption points out regarding the proposed UK online harm bill:

The real vice of the bill is that its provisions are not limited to material capable of being defined and identified. It creates a new category of speech which is legal but ‘harmful’. The range of material covered is almost infinite, the only limitation being that it must be liable to cause ‘harm’ to some people. Unfortunately, that is not much of a limitation. Harm is defined in the bill in circular language of stratospheric vagueness. It means any ‘physical or psychological harm’. As if that were not general enough, ‘harm’ also extends to anything that may increase the likelihood of someone acting in a way that is harmful to themselves, either because they have encountered it on the internet or because someone has told them about it.”

It is likely that such legislative developments will operate in tandem with so-called “fact checking” entities and algorithms that work to define and then exclude what is defined as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and now “malinformation”.

The latter two are being defined now as, respectively, false information spread in order to mislead or cause harm and accurate information which is used out of context in order to harm or mislead. These terms are so nebulous that they will enable authorities to proscribe virtually any serious debate or criticism in the public sphere.

Here we see the continuing development and entrenchment of the mis/disinformation fact checking industry noted earlier. During the COVID-19 event the United Nations itself started working with the public relations entity Purpose to “combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation” which is described as a “virus spread by people”.

Purpose states:

[t]hrough Verified, we are leveraging the UN brand, as well as popular brands that connect audiences online and offline: from Cartoon Network in Brazil to Flipkart in India.

UNESCO, similarly, is promoting education about so-called “conspiracy theories”. Remarkably, and in apparent contradiction to rhetoric regarding inclusiveness and community-driven decisionmaking, the WHO actually asks people to report on people spreading “misinformation”: As such, an un-elected international organization is actively advocating for the suppression of free speech in democratic societies.

Entities tasked with deciding what is true and what is false, as opposed to allowing ideas and arguments to be openly debated as Mill would suggest, are already creating the link between dis/misinformation and harm. For example, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a state-sponsored think tank, attacked the disparate groups questioning the COVID-19 response with a publication titled “Between Conspiracy and Extremism: A Long COVID Threat?” The institute tweeted:

Today we launch a new series of reports on the global anti-lockdown movement, beginning with this paper examining how COVID restrictions have brought together a broad church of activists in a conspiracy-extremist movement we call a ‘hybrid threat’

On the issue of coercive measures, the recent passing of a bill in California, that will enable doctors who spread ‘false information’ to be charged with ‘unprofessional conduct’ and have their licenses revoked, is a worrying sign of just how aggressive authorities are becoming.

The trajectory here is clear to discern and it entails the move to a world where the truth is defined by factcheckers and authorities, and legislation provides the underlying coercive framework to ensure any deviance is punished. This is entirely at odds with basic principles of open debate, objective scholarship and freedom of expression and is not compatible with democracy.

THE END OF DEMOCRACY?

There is nothing new about censorship, smearing and coercion in western democracies. For some time now, those questioning, for example, western foreign policy have been subjectedto such tactics whilst the broader 9/11 global war on terror spawned wide ranging examples of censorship, smearing and coercion in order to shore up official narratives and the belligerent wars that have been fought under its banner.

Indeed, in the realm of foreign policy and war, the prevalence of propaganda and associated drives to marginalise dissent are well known to researchers in these fields. And, today, in 2022, we are witnessing a preeminent example of coercion as we see the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, facing the prospect of deportation to the US and the rest of his life in prison. His crime was to reveal accurate information about the 9/11 wars, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little reason to doubt that authorities in the West are seeking to make a powerful example of Assange; a warning to the rest of us as to the price of questioning our governments when they commit illegal wars of aggression.

What is new with the COVID-19 event is a combination of the spread of these strategies of suppression and a sharp uptick in awareness amongst increasingly large swathes of the population as to the existence of propaganda in democracies. The spread can be seen in how it is now a large number of medical scientists who have been at the receiving end of drives to suppress debate, whereas before it was often just a handful of relatively unknown dissident social scientists researching foreign policy issues.

Regarding public awareness, attempting to censor high profile researchers from the medical sciences alerts more of the public as to what is going on.

And, of course, as we rapidly see the dissident scientists now being vindicated by the facts – lockdowns don’t work, the “vaccinations” can harm etc – more people become aware of the basic truth that the official COVID-19 response has been underpinned by ferocious propaganda campaigns designed to silence any experts speaking truth to power.

It is also apparently the case that trust in mainstream, or legacy, media continues a sharp decline whilst, presumably, increasing numbers of people seek out the new independent media platforms and go to organisations such as PANDA and HART for reliable information on COVID-19 related issues and more widely. [3]

And yet the broader trajectory for our public spheres looks ominous.

Further legislative measures to redefine free speech, networks of sponsored factcheckers defining what is and what is not, resources poured into censoring, smearing and coercing dissident voices all parallel what some analysts argue is a wider drive to restructure Western societies.

Ending any semblance of democracy may indeed be the goal, starting with the ending of freedom of expression. There are likely to be dark days ahead and it has never been so important for there to be a robust and uncompromising defence of freedom of expression.

Endnotes:

Thanks to Colin Alexander for comments on the justifiability of propaganda and to David Bell, Maryam Ebadi, Gary Sidley and David Thunder for other comments and feedback.
Niebuhr, R., (1932), Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons.
The array of new and independent media and organisations is vast; some of those, with which the author is most familiar, include media such as OffGuardian, Multipolar, the Grayzone, Unlimited Hangout, UKColumn; and Organisations such as Brownstone Institute, Would Council for Health, Children’s Health Defence, Global Collateral.

Masters of Deceit: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear, Mind Control & Brain Warfare

Posted on October 13, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.

It’s all documented, too.

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.

Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda.

In the 1950s, MK-ULTRA, the mind control program developed under CIA director Allen Dulles as part of his brain warfare Cold War campaigns, subjected hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel to doses of LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. For Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA hired prostitutes to lure men into a bugged room, where they would be dosed with LSD and observed having sex

As Brianna Nofil explains, “MK-Ultra’s ‘mind control’ experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.”

The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

As one study reported, detainees held in CIA safe-houses abroad “were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis and torture, to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”

Similarly, the top-secret Montauk Project, the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, allegedly was working to develop mind-control techniques that would then be tested out on locals in a nearby village, triggering crime waves or causing teenagers to congregate.

As journalist Lorraine Boissoneault concludes, “Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.”

Fast forward to the present day, and it’s clear that the government—aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation—has updated its psy ops warfare for a new era. For instance, the government has been empowered to use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Back in 2014, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain).

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic could easily be considered psychological warfare disguised as a pandemic threat. As science writer David Robson explains: “Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic… Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations… Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease… the evocative images of a pandemic led [participants in an experiment] to value conformity and obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.”

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm.

This is not a new experiment in mind control.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is yet another key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, to this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

For years now, the powers-that-be—those politicians and bureaucrats who think like tyrants and act like petty dictators regardless of what party they belong to—have attempted to brainwash us into believing that we have no rights: to think for ourselves, make decisions about our health, protect our homes and families and businesses, act in our best interests, demand accountability and transparency from government, or generally operate as if we are in control of our own lives.

Well, the government is wrong.

We have every right, and you know why? Because, as the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights—to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness—that no government can take away from us.

It’s time we started reminding the government that “we the people” are the ones in charge.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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