The past few days, even weeks, have seen a definite alteration in the media’s attitude to the Covid “pandemic”.
There have been numerous examples of what, if the media were not so tightly controlled, might be referred to as “dissent”. But, since the media is tightly controlled, we must call it an apparent change in the message.
Famously, Dr Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist, confronted UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid over the weakness of the science supporting vaccine mandates. Note this was actually aired on Sky News:
"The science isn't strong enough".
Watch the moment an unvaccinated hospital consultant challenges Health Secretary Sajid Javid over the government's policy of compulsory COVID jabs for NHS staff.https://t.co/IvbdwQbF0N
A few days ago Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, went on Good Morning America to discuss the “Omicron” wave, and ended up pointing out that most “omicron deaths” have multiple co-morbidities.
In another interview, with Fox News, Dr Walenksy said the CDC was going to publish data on how many people had died of Covid, and how many died with it.
This begs a series of important questions.
Why is the director of the CDC (seemingly) engaging with these Covid skeptic arguments after two years of pretending they don’t exist?
Why would Sky News air, and then tweet out, the video clip of a doctor challenging the health secretary?
Why Endemic Covid-19 Will Be Cause For Celebration
An article which argued, among other things, that “Endemic Covid-19 will be no worse than seasonal flu”. This sentiment has been repeated ad nauseum across multiple outlets.
The messaging isn’t just media-based, either. Reports are coming out that “living with Covid” is going to be the UK government’s strategy moving into 2022, with an official publication on this topic expected “within weeks”.
So, “living with the virus” is going to be added to the Covid phrasebook alongside “flatten the curve” and “the new normal”. But what does it actually entail?
When they say “living with Covid”, what do they really mean?
Well, firstly, let’s not make the mistake of trusting any government, media, or “expert”, just because they start telling 20% of the truth.
They are liars, they have an agenda, this is always true, you should always be aware of it, even when – or especially when – they are suddenly telling you what you want to hear.
They have not seen the light, they are not correcting their mistakes, they not finally seeing sense, and they are not switching sides.
There have been no Damascene conversions. There is no wave of guilty consciences sweeping through the elite.
They have an agenda. They always have an agenda.
You should also dispel all notions of “getting back to normal” from your mind. That isn’t happening.
How do we know? Because they said so.
Half the articles talking about “living with Covid” go into detail about how things won’t really change. Take this one, from the Guardian yesterday:
‘Living with Covid’ does not have to mean ditching all protective measures
It outlines that Covid could become endemic soon, that the mass testing of asymptomatic people may be counter-productive and possibly should stop, but it doesn’t reverse course on masks or vaccines and leaves the door wide open for a new “variant” to jump-start more lockdowns in the future:
“Living with Covid” does not have to mean reversing every protective measure. If better ventilation and face masks reduce the impact of winter respiratory illnesses, that is a positive, even if the NHS is no longer under imminent threat of being overwhelmed. We will also need to remain vigilant about the threat from new variants, which could still cause big setbacks. There is no guarantee that another variant, more infectious and more virulent than Omicron, could emerge in the future. Scientists say that supporting global vaccination efforts will be crucial to securing the path to normality.
Masks, working from home, and social distancing in crowded settings could all be “sticking around”, according to one of the above CNBC articles. And “Covid Boosters could become like annual flu shots”.
Meanwhile, “experts” are warning that even once Covid is endemic we should prepare for “surges” every three or four months.
It seems “living with the virus” means maintaining the status quo, loosening a few restrictions, but leaving the path clear for new waves of fear porn should the need arise.
But why? Why are they doing this now?
It could be that there are splits and factions, fractures along the floors of the corridors of power. Perhaps some members of the great big club want to halt the Pandemic where it is, afraid that any more progress along the “Great Reset” path may imperil their own position or their own wealth.
Maybe.
What I see as more likely is that they sense they have over-extended themselves already, and that stretching further could break their entire story to pieces.
To use an apt metaphor, imagine the “Great Reset” agenda as an invading army, marching through town after town, winning battle after battle and burning as they go.
There comes a point where you have to stop. Your supply lines are pulled taut, your men are tired and numbers dwindling, and the occupied citizens are putting up more and more resistance. Push on now, and your entire campaign could crumble.
What you do in that situation is withdraw to a defensible position and fortify it. You don’t give back the land you’ve taken, or not much of it at least, but you stop pushing forward.
The people whose land you have invaded will be so glad the war is over, so tired of fighting, they’ll be so relieved by the respite before realising how much of their land you’ve taken away. They may even say “let them keep it, as long as they stop attacking us”.
That’s how conquest works, from the days of ancient Rome and beyond. A cycle of aggression followed by fortification.
When we switch from “pandemic” to “endemic”, we won’t be getting our rights back, the vaccine passes and surveillance and the culture of paranoia and fear will remain, but people will be so relieved at the pause in the campaign of fear and propaganda they will stop resisting.
They won’t push back, and the “New Normal” will literally become just that, normal.
Hell, they’ll probably greenlight funding for anything Bill Gates wants to do make sure “Covid is the last pandemic”.
And then, one day when people are nice and docile again, a new variant will come back, or we’ll need a “climate lockdown”, and the push for control of every aspect of our lives will start up again in earnest.
The best thing we can do is not fall into the trap.
The press politicians and Big Pharma didn’t all just realise the truth, they’re just using some small parts of truth they’ve been ignoring for two years to fortify their position.
But that doesn’t make it a bad thing.
The very fact they feel the need to do so shows that the resistance is building, and that they’re are trying to lull us into relaxing.
People crowd along a street of Barcelona to buy books and roses at makeshift stands as Catalans celebrate the day of their patron saint, Sant Jordi. Emilio Morenatti | AP
The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.
When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.
A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate.You are being manipulated – propagandized – even before you engage with a topic if you look only at the substance of a debate and not at other issues: such as its timing, why the debate is taking place or why it has been allowed, what is not being mentioned or has been obscured, what is being emphasized, and what is being treated as dangerous or abhorrent.
If you want to be treated like a grown-up, an active and informed participant in your society rather than a blank sheet on which powerful interests are writing their own self-serving narratives, you need to be doing as much critical thinking as possible – and especially on the most important topics of the day.
Learning curve
The opportunity to become more informed and insightful about how debates are being framed, rather than what they are ostensibly about, has never been greater. Over the past decade, social media, even if the window it offered is rapidly shrinking, has allowed large numbers of us to discover for the first time those writers who, through their deeper familiarity with a specific topic and their consequent greater resistance to propaganda, can help us think more critically about all kinds of issues – Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Israel-Palestine, the list is endless.
This has been a steep learning curve for most of us. It has been especially useful in helping us to challenge narratives that vilify “official enemies” of the west or that veil corporate power – which has effectively usurped what was once the more visible and, therefore, accountable political power of western states. In the new, more critical climate, the role of the war industries – bequeathed to us by western colonialism – has become especially visible.
But what has been most disheartening about the past two years of Covid is the rapid reversal of the gains made in critical thinking. Perhaps this should not entirely surprise us. When people are anxious for themselves or their loved ones, when they feel isolated and hopeless, when “normal” has broken down, they are likely to be less ready to think critically.
The battering we have all felt during Covid mirrors the emotional, and psychological assault critical thinking can engender. Thinking critically increases anxiety by uncomfortably exposing us to the often artificial character of official reality. It can leave us feeling isolated and less hopeful, especially when friends and family expect us to be as deeply invested in the substance – the shadow play – of official, tribal debates as they are. And it undermines our sense of what “normal” is by revealing that it is often what is useful to power elites rather than what is beneficial to the public good.
Emotional resilience
There are reasons why people are drawn to critical thinking. Often because they have been exposed in detail to one particular issue that has opened their eyes to wider narrative manipulations on other issues. Because they have the tools and incentives – the education and access to information – to explore some issues more fully. And, perhaps most importantly, because they have the emotional and psychological resilience to cope with stripping away the veneer of official narratives to see the bleaker reality beneath and to grasp the fearsome obstacles to liberating ourselves from the corrupt elites that rule over us and are pushing us towards ecocidal oblivion.
The anxieties produced by critical thinking, the sense of isolation, and the collapse of “normal” is in one sense chosen. They are self-inflicted. We choose to do critical thinking because we feel capable of coping with what it brings to light. But Covid is different. Our exposure to Covid, unlike critical thinking, has been entirely outside our control. And worse, it has deepened our emotional and psychological insecurities. To do critical thinking in a time of Covid – and most especially about Covid – is to add a big extra layer of anxiety, isolation, and hopelessness.
Covid has highlighted the difficulties of being insecure and vulnerable, thereby underscoring why critical thinking, even in good times, is so difficult. When we are anxious and isolated, we want quick, reassuring solutions, and we want someone to blame. We want authority figures to trust and act in our name.
Complex thinking
It is not hard to understand why the magic bullet of vaccines – to the exclusion of all else – has been so fervently grasped during the pandemic. Exclusive reliance on vaccines has been a great way for our corrupt, incompetent governments to show they know what they are doing. The vaccines have been an ideal way for corrupt medical-industrial corporations – including the biggest offender, Pfizer – to launder their images and make us all feel indebted to them after so many earlier scandals like Oxycontin. And, of course, the vaccines have been a comfort blanket to us, the public, promising to bring ZeroCovid (false), to provide long-term immunity (false), and to end transmission (false).
And as an added bonus, vaccines have allowed both our corrupt leaders to shift the blame away from themselves for their other failed public health policies and our corrupt “health” corporations to shift attention away from their profiteering by encouraging the vaccinated majority to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority. Divide and rule par excellence.
To state all this is not to be against the vaccines or believe the virus should rip through the population, killing the vulnerable, any more than criticizing the US war crime of bombing Syria signifies enthusiastic support for Assad. It is only to recognize that political realities are complex, and our thinking needs to be complex too.
To be clear, I haven't 'changed my view'. I've kept an open mind throughout. I scorn the media's silencing of dissenting scientists, the general celebration of vaccine profiteering, the unscientific discounting of natural immunity, and the divisive use of mandates to scapegoat https://t.co/83L1UXR4ga
These ruminations were prompted by a post on social media I made the other day referring to the decision of the Guardian – nearly two years into the pandemic – to publish criticisms by an “eminent” epidemiologist, Prof Mark Woolhouse, of the British government’s early lockdown policies. Until now, any questioning of the lockdowns has been one of the great unmentionables of the pandemic outside of right-wing circles.
Let us note another prominent example: the use of the term “herd immunity,” which was until very recently exactly what public health officials aimed for as a means to end contagion. It signified the moment when enough people had acquired immunity, either through being infected or vaccinated, for community transmission to stop occurring. But because the goal during Covid is not communal immunity but universal vaccination, the term “herd immunity” has now been attributed to a sinister political agenda. It is presented as some kind of right-wing plot to let vulnerable people die.
I've had run-ins with Off-Guardian of late, but they're right to highlight the WHO mucking about with the established definition of 'herd immunity'. This kind of thing does nothing but undermine trust in science and scientists https://t.co/SgEMqnptZu
This is not accidental. It is an entirely manufactured, if widely accepted, narrative. Recovery from infection – something now true for many people – is no longer treated by political or medical authorities as conferring immunity. For example, in the UK, those who have recovered from Covid, even recently, are not exempted, as the vaccinated are, from self-isolation if they have been in close contact with someone infected with Covid. Also, of course, those recovered from Covid do not qualify for a vaccine passport. After all, it is not named an immunity passport. It is a vaccine passport.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has at least been open about the “reasoning” behind this kind of discrimination. “In a democracy,” he says, apparently unironically, “the worst enemies are lies and stupidity. We are putting pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting, as much as possible, their access to activities in social life. … For the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.”
Notice that the lies and stupidity here emanate from Macron: he is not only irresponsibly stoking dangerous divisions within French society, he has also failed to understand that the key distinctions from a public health perspective are between those with immunity to Covid and those without it and those who are vulnerable to hospitalization and those who are not. These are the most meaningful markers of how to treat the pandemic. The obsession with vaccination only serves a divide and rule agenda and bolsters pandemic profiteering.
Crushing hesitancy
The paradox is that these narratives dominate even as the evidence mounts that the vaccines offer very short-term immunity and that, ultimately, as Omicron appears to be underscoring, many people are likely to gain longer-term immunity through Covid infection, even those who have been vaccinated. But the goal of public “debate” on this topic has not been transparency, logic, or informed consent. Instead, it has been the crushing of any possible “vaccine hesitancy.”
Dr John Campbell is always worth listening to. The bottom lines of the latest omicron research are positive: a) It's likely to be more like a cold b) It'll spread so quickly there's a good chance we'll have herd immunity within months, at minimal suffering https://t.co/GIpGYbXZOX
I have repeatedly tried to highlight the lack of critical thinking around the exclusive focus on vaccines rather than immune health, the decision to vaccinate children in the face of strong, if largely downplayed, opposition from experts, and the divisive issue of vaccine mandates. But I have had little to say directly about lockdowns, which have tended to look to me chiefly like desperate stop-gap measures to cover up the failings of our underfunded, cannibalized, and increasingly privatized health services (a more pressing concern). I am also inclined to believe that the balance of benefits from lockdowns, or whether they work, is difficult to weigh without some level of expertise. That is one reason why I have been arguing throughout the pandemic that experts need to be allowed more open, robust, and honest public debate.
It is also why I offered a short comment on Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms, published in the Guardian this week, of national lockdown policies. This evoked a predictably harsh backlash from many followers. They saw it as further proof that the “Covid denialists have captured me,” and I am now little better than a pandemic conspiracy theorist.
Framing the debate
That is strange in itself. Prof Woolhouse is a mainstream, reportedly “eminent” epidemiologist. His eminence is such that it also apparently qualifies him to be quoted extensively and uncritically in the Guardian. The followers I antagonize every time I write about the pandemic appear to treat the Guardian as their Covid Bible, as do most liberals. And they regularly castigate me for referring to the kind of experts the Guardian refuses to cite. So how does my retweeting of a Guardian story that uncritically reports on anti-lockdown comments from a respectable, mainstream epidemiologist incur so much wrath – and seemingly directed only against me?
The answer presumably lies in the short appended comment in my retweet, which requires that one disengage from the seemingly substantive debate – lockdowns, good or bad? That conversation is certainly interesting to me, especially if it is an honest one. But the contextual issues around that debate, the ones that require critical thinking, are even more important because they are the best way to evaluate whether an honest debate is actually being fostered.
Either Prof Mark Woolhouse has arrived at this view very late in the day, or corporate media like the Guardian have until now effectively gagged eminently qualified scientists critical of lockdown policy. Either way, it looks like we've been screwed over pic.twitter.com/Gmj1RjXrBe
My comment, intentionally ambiguous, implicitly requires readers to examine wider issues about the Guardian article: the timing of its publication, why a debate about lockdowns has not previously been encouraged in the Guardian but apparently is now possible, how the debate is being framed by Woolhouse and the Guardian, and how we, the readers, may be being manipulated by that framing.
Real, live conspiracy
Interestingly, I was not alone in being struck by how strange the preferred framing was. A second epidemiologist, Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician at Harvard who serves on a scientific committee to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saw problems with the article too. Unfortunately, however, Prof Kulldorff appears not to qualify as “eminent” enough for the Guardian to quote him uncritically. That is because he was one of three highly respected academics who brought ignominy down on their heads in October 2020 by authoring the Great Barrington Declaration.
Like Woolhouse, the Declaration offered an alternative to blanket national lockdowns – the official response to rising hospitalizations – but did so when those lockdowns were being aggressively pursued, and no other options were being considered. The Guardian was among those that pilloried the Declaration and its authors, presenting it as an irresponsible right-wing policy and a recipe for Covid to tear through the population, laying waste to significant sections of the population.
My purpose here is not to defend the Great Barrington Declaration. I don’t feel qualified enough to express a concrete, public view one way or another on its merits. And part of the reason for that hesitancy is that any meaningful conversation at the time among experts was ruthlessly suppressed. The costs of lockdowns were largely unmentionable in official circles and the “liberal” media. It was instantly stigmatized as the policy preference of the “deplorable” right.
This was not accidental. We now know it was a real, live conspiracy. Leaked emails show that Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president, and his minions used their reliable contacts in prominent liberal media to smear the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” a senior official wrote to Fauci. The plan was character assassination, pure and simple—nothing to do with science. And “liberal” media happily and quickly took up that task.
The Guardian, of course, went right along with those smears. This is why Prof Kulldorff has every right to treat with disdain both the Guardian’s decision to now publish Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms – so very belatedly – of lockdown policy and Prof Woolhouse’s public distancing of himself from the now-radioactive Great Barrington Declaration even though his published comments closely echo the policies proposed in the Declaration. As Prof Kulldorff observes:
Hilarious logical somersault. In the Guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that [the] UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by the Guardian.”
Hilarious logical somersault. In @guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by @guardian. https://t.co/lJfKVbzgaC
If we put on our critical thinking hats for a moment, we can deduce a plausible reason for that mischaracterization.
Like the rest of the “liberal” media, the Guardian has been fervently pro-lockdown and an avowed opponent of any meaningful discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration since its publication more than a year ago. Moreover, it has characterized any criticism of lockdowns as an extreme right-wing position. But the paper now wishes to open up a space for a more critical discussion of the merits of lockdown at a time when rampant but milder Omicron threatens to shut down not only the economy but distribution chains and health services.
Demands for lockdowns are returning – premised on the earlier arguments for them – but the formerly obscured costs are much more difficult to ignore now. Even lockdown cheerleaders like the Guardian finally understand some of what was clear 15 months ago to experts like Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors.
What the Guardian appears to be doing is smuggling the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments back into the mainstream but trying to do it in a way that won’t damage its credibility and look like an about-face. It is being entirely deceitful. And the vehicle for achieving this end is a fellow critic of lockdowns, Prof Woolhouse, who is not tainted goods like Prof Kulldorff, even though their views appear to overlap considerably. Criticism of lockdowns is being rehabilitated via Prof Woolhouse, even as Prof Kulldorff remains an outcast, a deplorable.
In other words, this is not about any evolution in scientific thinking. It is about the Guardian avoiding reputational damage – and doing so at the cost of continuing to damage Prof Kulldorff’s reputation. Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors were scapegoated when their expert advice was considered politically inconvenient, while Prof Woolhouse is being celebrated because similar expert advice is now convenient.
This is how much of our public discourse operates. The good guys control the narrative so that they can ensure they continue to look good, while the bad guys are tarred and feathered, even if they are proven right. The only way to really make sense of what is going on is to disengage from this kind of political tribalism, examine contexts, avoid being so invested in outcomes, and work hard to gain more perspective on the anxiety and fear each of us feels.
The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.
That’s the buzz phrase that has rocked the internet the past two days. This comes about after the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, Dr. Robert Malone, used the phrase to describe the current state of society on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Immediately, search engines began to alter their algorithms so that only those narratives which fit the great MSM, Silicon Valley, globalist/communist narrative were shown.
But let’s take a step back from the scientific jargon for a moment, if you will. Because the fact of the matter is that you’ve already a fundamental and inherent understanding of what mass formation psychosis is.
Daisy wrote about this when she described the “othering” taking place within society.
Americans can feel it. There’s no denying that there has been active discrimination, violence, in many cases “lawful” against the Americans who are pro-freedom/pro-Constitution/pro-human dignity. But perhaps I’m being redundant here, for a true American is all of those things.
And it’s getting worse.
You can feel it. Think about this. Have you ended up in an altercation with somebody over masks throughout the past two years? Or, have you been denied entry to a building because of your jab status or refusal to mask? Did cops use “trespassing” as the limp excuse for discriminating against you when you weren’t willing to wear the yellow star?
That’s what mass formation psychosis is. It’s a society-wide brainwashing.
Dr. Robert Malone actually says that this is what has been used against the global population throughout the past two years.
How do you end up with a “civilized” nation such as Germany turning into a state-run murder machine? Furthermore, how does a nation filled with the likes of Goethe, Mozart, and Bach turn into a world where those with wheelchairs are pushed out of third-story windows, where babies are swung by the feet to crack against the trees? How do the people who are renown for precision machinery turn to using that ability to hunt down women and pump Zyklon B into their lungs?
At what point do the doctors decide that sewing twins together is ok?
You use mass formation psychosis.
According to Dr. Malone, this is exactly what happened in Germany. And if we look at other genocides throughout history, we’ll likely see the same.
Just what is necessary for mass formation psychosis to take place though? Four separate variables which combine to create a monster. They are:
The lack of a social bond.
Free-floating anxiety
A feeling of not having any purpose
People who are confused and can’t make sense of anything around them [source]
To be clear, the theory of mass formation psychosis was developed by Dr. Matias Desmet, a professor, psychologist, and statistician, at the University of Ghent in Belgium. [source]
Dr. Desmet has been shouting for the past two years that this is what he’s currently seeing (particularly on Daily Expose, which you should be reading), but it appears as if this recent podcast is what has served as the springboard for his theory becoming a part of the common vernacular.
But what do the four aspects of mass formation psychosis mean?
Returning to the four aspects though, each of them requires a sizeable segment of society. If only a small percentage of a population experiences these factors, mass formation cannot take place by definition. From Desmet’s research, it appears as if 30% is the magic number.
Once 30% of a nation’s population has fallen into the four factors of mass formation psychosis, very troubling times are on the horizon.
The lack of a social bond is one of the first factors which must be met. Individuals need to be severely isolated from one another, creating a feeling of loneliness. It appears that solitary confinement isn’t as healthy for people as one may initially think, huh?
Perhaps by robbing people of their faces, this isolation can even be forced upon one when they’re out in public. Why have so many ancient warriors utilized covering the face when they went into combat? Because it takes away the human aspect of the person right in front of one. Instead of a man – who could be killed – now standing in front of you with katana raised high, it was a bizarre looking monster.
Dehumanization bred fear. It was a form of psychological warfare.
The free-floating anxiety revolves around generating massive amounts of panic and fear over something that people really have a hard time of putting their finger on. Sure, people may be afraid of the typhus which are alleged to carry (as propaganda stated throughout 1930s Germany), but there’s something even deeper than that as well.
It’s the constant state of being unsure. Of not knowing when one is going to be potentially harmed. In the Cold War this would have been the daily pressure of a nuclear attack. Children are taught to shelter under their desk, bomb shelters are being built in the city hall, and the news is telling about some type of missile crisis out in Cuba.
In modern day, it’s the fear that walking down the grocery store is what’s going to be the death of you. You just touched a door. Was it clean? Have you touched your face lately? Did you hear about Sally? She tested positive. So-and-so is in the hospital.
All of this has created two solid years of mass panic as people have become afraid of the world around them.
The third variable is the need for 30% of the population to feel as if what they’re doing has no purpose or meaning. People are upset that what they’re doing doesn’t even seem to matter. There’s got to be more out there – a bigger purpose -but nobody can really figure out just what.
And this brings us to the fourth point. People aren’t able to make sense of anything in the world around them. Perhaps their government leaders have consistently flip-flopped on telling them what they are or are not to do. One day it’s perfectly safe to stand beside your neighbor. Now, you must stand six feet away. Tomorrow, you better avoid them completely because they haven’t taken their morning anal swab yet.
For starters, those affected by the variables start to join together. They begin to feel as if they need to strive together to reach this common goal, of defeating that which is filling them with angst, and many times this pushes them against another sizeable segment of the population.
During the Holocaust, it was the need to create the “superman”, to rid the world of genetic disease, to get rid of the infirm and crippled which led to the extermination of millions at the likes of Dauchau, Auschwitz, and more.
Media can then be used to push this agenda even further
It can continue to fan the flames of fear while telling the affected what it is they need to do – who they need to push back against. The leaders of this movement “become revered – unable to do wrong.”
As Malone states, “one of the aspects of that phenomenon [mass formation psychosis] is that the people that they identify as their leaders, the ones typically that come in and say you have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone….Then they will follow that person. It doesn’t matter whether they lied to them or whatever. The data is irrelevant.”
Anybody that speaks against Dear Leader is fought back against in unison by the affected. They are silenced, stripped of their jobs, or even acted against with violence.
This all takes place as those affected become almost hypnotized, in a sense. People will outright refuse any logic presented them. It doesn’t matter if the facts just don’t line up. Anything which counters the narrative which they’ve been hypnotized by is automatically rejected.
And when this happens, the seeds of totalitarianism, are sown. A despot can now spring forth, giving the brainwashed all the “righteous indignation” they need to commit atrocities they wouldn’t have even dreamed of participating in just years prior.
(To learn how to become better prepared for this type of society, check out our free QUICKSTART Guide.)
But it’s not hopeless.
The interesting thing about this research is that Dr. Malone points out mass formation psychosis follows a general distribution. This means that 30% of a nation will be brainwashed. Approximately, 40% will be those who ride the fence – unable to really make up their minds as to what they want to do, or those who are too afraid to voice their opinions.
And then there are those who refuse to bow to evil. That is the remaining 30%.
As Dr. Mattias Desmet points out, this sane 30% is that which can turn the tide for good. By speaking out, they can embolden more of the 40% of the fence riders to find the courage to speak out against evil.
But this only happens when one uses their voice.
“Continue to speak out. If other voices are available in the public space, then the mass hypnosis will be disturbed.” – Professor Doctor Mattias Desmet. [source]
Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.
In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.
I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.
Having unelected tech oligarchs ban duly elected members of Congress – or even the sitting President – from using their massive platforms is dystopian. Remember how many world leaders warned that FB & Twitter's banning of Trump was a threat to democracy.https://t.co/zIT7l04hMWhttps://t.co/2BPFrgeZXv
We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.
“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”
Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.
The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.
Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures Which Affect Everyone
"Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse."https://t.co/WlDypacgmM
It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.
When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.
I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.
This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.
MIDWAY THROUGH 1999’S THE MATRIX, Keanu Reeves’s hacker-cum-cyberpunk-messiah Neo sees a black cat shivering in a doorway. Then, he sees it again. “Woah,” he utters, in that trademark, flat Keanu Reeves way. “Déjà vu . . . ” The phenomenon, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) tells him, means big trouble. In the titular world-scale digital simulation in which the bulk of the film unfolds, déjà vu signals a computer glitch: a case of the simulation tweaking its code in real time.
One can’t help but be reminded of this idea watching The Matrix Resurrections, a long-gap sequel to the original sci-fi trilogy, which ended with Reeves’s Neo striking a détente between the machine overlords that enslaved mankind within a counterfeit reality and the fleshy human resistors who opposed them. The new film opens as the original does, following a heavily-armed SWAT team as they swarm a seedy motel room where a leather-clad hacker is plonking away at a computer terminal. The scene expands to introduce a new character, Bugs (Jessica Henwick), who notes to her compatriot that this familiar scene is a training module, designed to hone the skills of the digital heavies who patrol the parameters of the matrix. Or rather, a version of it that exists within the original matrix. It’s sixty years after the events of the last film, and nearly twenty years after its release. Things have gotten deeper—if only slightly.
The simulation now includes a popular video game trilogy—called, of course, The Matrix—that re-stages the events of the original films. Neo, too, is back, in his guise as Thomas Anderson. This time he’s not a computer programmer but a video game designer, whose “great ambition was to make a game indistinguishable from reality.” He’s the chief architect of the Matrix game trilogy, which has just seen a sequel green-lit within the fiction of both the matrix and The Matrix. (Matrix Resurrections was itself promoted with a tie-in video game demo, The Matrix Awakens.) Like William James’s image of our world resting on an infinite regress of rocks, it seems like it’s matrixes all the way down.
The planned game sequel prompts much hand-wringing. Characters bat ideas back and forth in an open-concept office, trying to get to the heart of what made the original Matrix work. Resurrections abounds with this sort of dorky meta-humor. There are jokes about the game design firm’s parent company being Warner Bros. (the actual film’s producer) and jokes about déjà vu. A fourth-wave coffee shop is called “Simulatte.” That kind of thing. It’s the sort of stuff that elicits barking, staccato guffaws from in-the-know audience members that quickly fade into barely bemused titters. It’s meant to be cute, but it’s mostly annoying.
Still, the film is not without its charms. Some of the early action scenes crack along reliably, playing with inversions of gravity and time, like a fleeter Christopher Nolan flick. And the notion of revisiting the world of the matrix is not without appeal. After all, the original film forecasted a world of digital disenfranchisement that is now, under the auspices of our current Silicon Valley overlords, regarded as aspirational. (In a telling touch, Resurrections moves the action from an implied Chicago to the Bay Area, explicitly marked by familiar landmarks and San Francisco PD cruisers.) And with its image of two pills representing diverging ideological bents, The Matrix provided a ready-made vocabulary that has been embraced in our real world, where everyone is redpilled, blackpilled, Danpilled, or Tedpilled. But Resurrections never manages to meaningfully intervene in the very conditions it seems to be diagnosing—and which the series had already diagnosed, decades ago. Like postmodernity itself, the state of digital dependency dramatized by The Matrix cannot be alleviated. It can only be mediated, with increasing levels of irony and winking self-awareness.
To wit: Resurrections is not about digitization, or the metaphysics of reality, or the broken promise of the cyberpunk genre. It is about movie reboots. Here, Neo must be liberated again, literally remaking his quest from the original film, with the obstacles re-skinned and old foes appearing in new guises (Jonathan Groff, playing the meddling computer program Smith, is a hunkier, paler imitation of the menacing Hugo Weaving). Characters snipe about how humanity is merely reframing the same handful of archetypal themes and ideas. “We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told,” says one game designer, sounding like he’s been watching too many Jordan Peterson YouTubes. “Just with different names, different faces.” This may well be true. But it also feels like a cop-out. Especially because the original Matrix, as imagined by sororal duo Lilly and Lana Wachowski, felt genuinely inventive. It blended Terminator-styled dystopian sci-fi with Hong Kong wire-fu action and state-of-the-art special effects, all draped in the industrial liveries of a turn-of-the-millennium goth club. It may not have been wholly new. But it was thrilling remix. It spoke to the ennui of America at the “end of history.” It captured the soul-deadening, Dilbert-esque daily doldrums explored in films like Fight Club and Office Space. It also played straight to the anxiety around “Y2K” and the mounting cultural panic that home computers and toaster ovens might break down or turn against their owners. The Matrix felt like it was speaking to its time. Now, movies seem to chatter only among themselves.
There’s plenty of precedent here, of course: Ready Player One; the recent Space Jam sequel; and the new Spider-Man movie, which draws together two decades worth of sticky narrative threads spun across three distinct franchises. Corporate wheeling-and-dealing is increasingly allegorized onscreen, to the point that many blockbusters are now about their own production. Within ten years, we’ll see Aaron Sorkin hoisting an Oscar overhead, rewarded by his peers for helming a chatty drama about the backroom legal finagling that saw a Star Wars-branded lightsaber licensed to the movie Free Guy. Hollywood is already lodged in the post-postmodern rabbit hole, with little to show for it. The culture is glitching, looping, stuck in some long, static interregnum, like a radio drifting between channels. If a new Matrix movie felt grimly inevitable in such a climate, it also had great potential.
And I suppose it’s nice that director Lana Wachowski (going solo this time) returned to wield some control over a story that would otherwise be expropriated however-which-way by the studio. But she has only a passing interest in the new convolutions of the simulation itself. Wachowski is more invested in revisiting Neo and Trinity’s wrenching, realities-spanning romance. Rather than the heady ideas at play in the premise—which have been by-and-large replaced by geeky in-jokes—she wants to explore (again) the profound power of love as some supernatural force. At its worst, the Wachowski worldview recalls that classic Simpsons joke: the secret ingredient is always capital-l Love.
This strain of touchy-feely sci-fi certainly has its admirers, and I sometimes count myself among them. But I find the Wachowskis’ sappiness (however earnest) more tolerable when enlivened by their stylistic and technical inventiveness. The rote, underdog rhythms of Speed Racer (2008) only work because they unfold within an aesthetic landscape that splits the difference between La Chinoise and Paper Mario. The Matrix’s heavy hooey about fate and choice and freeing one’s mind is leavened because, well, the movie is entertaining as hell. But now, the ideas are stale (2003’s The Matrix Reloaded already introduced the concept of its story being a remake), and the action settles into tedium: graceful bullet-time ballets are replaced by crunchy, John Wick-style fights and repetitive CGI set pieces that see Neo stopping hails of bullets with his hands, over and over and over again.
Perhaps there’s something modestly clever in the major meta-gesture of this newest Matrix—in its idea of the matrix reproducing its own destruction in the form of an interactive video game. After all, the notion that the very systems that delude us offer self-contained safe spaces for relieving those delusions is apt. Like capital, the matrix survives by evolving quicker than the forces that oppose it. If we take this message seriously, then the goodly thing to do is to ignore The Matrix Resurrections and all corporatized entertainments. To put down Twitter and TikTok and smooch our spouses; build a snowman with the kiddies; clink some beers with a gaggle of good buddies.
That we should all invest not in our virtual existences, but the fleshy, loving, contingent relationships of real life, is a perfectly decent message. That the Wachowskis have been repeating this tired line for two decades speaks despairingly to the conditions of our own, present-day dystopia. Resurrections is suspended between cyberpunk trappings that were already shopworn circa 1999 and the intellectual prison of high-concept meta-mongering. It is a movie of the interregnum, one that could have been auto-generated by it. In this way, The Matrix does manage to speak to the times. Again.
And so, as 2021 goose-steps toward its fanatical finish, it is time for my traditional year-end wrap-up. It’s “The Year of the Ox” in the Chinese zodiac, but I’m christening it “The Year of the New Normal Fascist.”
But this isn’t just a story about New Normal Germany, or New Normal Europe, or New Normal Australia. And it isn’t just a story about mass hysteria, or an “overreaction” to a corona virus. The “New Normal” is a global GloboCap co-production, a multi-trillion-dollar co-production, which has been in development for quite some time, and this year has gone exactly to script.
Given all the drama over the past 12 months, it’s easy to forget that the year began with the occupation of Washington DC by thousands of US (i.e., GloboCap) forces in the wake of the “Terrorist Assault on the Capitol” (a/k/a the “January 6 Insurrection,” or the “Attempted Coup,” or some such nonsense) carried out by a few hundred totally unarmed Donald Trump supporters, who were allegedly intent on “overthrowing the government” and “destroying Democracy” with … well, their bare hands.
This was the long-awaited “Return to Normal” spectacle that had been in the pipeline for the previous four years, the public humiliation of the Unauthorized President (and the “populists” who put him in office) and the GloboCap show of force that followed. Here’s how I described it back in January:
“In other words, GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except for a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a ‘field of flags,’ symbolizing ‘unity.’ They even did the Nazi Lichtdom thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a ‘Mockingjay’ brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.”
As I assume is obvious to everyone by now, the “Return to Normal” was a “Return to the New Normal,” which the global-capitalist ruling establishment was already imposing on the entire world. The message couldn’t possibly be clearer. As Arnold Schwarzenegger succinctly put it, the message is, “screw your freedom.” The message is, shut up and toe the fucking line. The message is, show me your fucking papers. Use the fucking pronouns. Eat the fucking bugs. Get the fucking “vaccinations.” Do not fucking ask us “how many.” The answer is, “as many as we fucking tell you.”
The message is, there will be no more unauthorized presidents, no more leaving the European Union, no more “populist” rebellions against the global hegemony of global-capitalism and its soul-crushing, valueless “woke” ideology. GloboCap is done playing grab-ass. They announced that back in March of 2020. They informed us in unmistakable terms that our lives were about to change, forever. They branded and advertised this change as “the New Normal,” in case we were … you know, cognitively challenged. They did not hide it. They wanted us to understand exactly what was coming, a global-capitalist version of totalitarianism, in which we will all be happy little fascist “consumers” showing each other our “compliance certificates” in order to be allowed to live our lives.
I’d like to end on an optimistic note, because, Jesus, this fascism business is depressing. So I’ll just mention that, as you have probably noticed, more and more people are now “waking up,” or relocating their intestinal fortitude, and finally speaking out against “vaccine” mandates, and “vaccination passes,” and social segregation, and all the rest of the fascist New Normal program. I intend to encourage this “awakening” vociferously. I hope that those — and you know who you are — who have been reporting the facts and opposing the New Normal, and have been ridiculed, demonized, gaslighted, censored, slandered, threatened, and otherwise abused, on a daily basis for 21 months, as our more “prominent” colleagues — and you know who you are — sat by in silence, or took part in the Hate Fest, will join me in applauding and welcoming these “prominent” colleagues to the fight … finally.
Oh, and, if you’re one of those “prominent” colleagues and you start beating your chest and sounding off like you’ve just rediscovered investigative journalism and are now leading the charge against the New Normal for your YouTube viewers or your Substack readers, please understand if we get a little cranky. Speaking for myself, yes, it’s been a bit stressful, doing your job and taking the shit for you out here in the trenches for the past 21 months. Not to mention how it has virtually killed my comedy … and I’m supposed to be a political satirist.
But there I go, getting all “angry” again … whatever. As the doctor said, “buy the ticket, take the ride.” And it’s the season of joy, love, and forgiveness, and publicly crucifying dissidents, and paranoia, and mass hysteria, and persecuting “Unvaccinated” relatives, and, OK, I might have had one too many. Happy holidays to one and all, except, of course, to the New Normal fascists, especially the ones that are torturing the children. God, forgive me, but I hope they fucking choke.
Julian Assange is one of the political prisoners that the US claims not to have. The UK is again the good vassal, keeping him locked up until the Biden administration finds an opportune time to ship him off to a kangaroo court. Everyone who believes in press freedom and who opposes imperialism must be a staunch Assange defender.
December 10 is International Human Rights Day. It is always a sham holiday for the United States, which locks up its own people at rates exceeding those of every other country, and routinely makes war against the rest of the world. In 2021 the date was treated as even more of a mockery than in the past. Joe Biden convened a bizarre democracy summit, wherein he declared other nations good or bad based on whether they go along with the dictates of the U.S. empire. Although it was in London where the U.S. behaved in a particularly shameful manner, working with the United Kingdom to secure the right to extradite Julian Assange.
In 2018 Assange was indicted in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, a hanging court where acquittals are rare. His offense is one that the system will not tolerate. Over a period of years his organization, Wikileaks, revealed U.S. crimes committed around the world.
Assange ran afoul of four different U.S. presidents, republicans and democrats alike. Wikileaks revealed war crimes committed during the George W. Bush administration in their Iraq War Logs and Afghanistan War Logs. Private Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video, which shows the deaths of civilians, including two Reuters reporters, as they were gunned down by a U.S. army helicopter crew in 2007.
Collateral Murder was released in 2010 when Barack Obama was president. All of the purported differences between democrats and republicans disappear when U.S. hegemony is in need of protection. Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, confirmed that Assange was under investigation. While the Justice Department ultimately chose not to indict, they laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to make Assange a political prisoner. Obama’s unprecedented use of the Espionage Act sent other whistleblowers to jail and gave Trump license to get his hands on Assange. As always, Joe Biden follows Trump policy and he continues the Assange persecution.
The Trump administration built on the work of the Obama DOJ and secured a 17-count indictment in 2018, with charges that could result in a 175-year sentence. Of course they didn’t stop with criminal charges, which were useless as long as the Ecuadorian government gave Assange sanctuary in its London embassy. The Trump administration secured a $4 billion IMF loan for Ecuador, just one month before Assange’s protections were lifted. The timing of the transaction and the arrest were clearly not coincidental.
It isn’t surprising that presidents wage war against the truth tellers of the world. What is especially disheartening is the way that journalists have abandoned Assange and turned into U.S. government spokespeople if they discuss his case at all.
Media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Guardian worked with Assange for years, printing Wikileaks revelations on a regular basis. Yet they have said little in his defense ever since he was arrested on April 11, 2019. Neither have the liberal elites, who parrot the falsehood that Assange is responsible for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. According to democratic propagandists, Russian operatives hacked the Democratic National Committee computers and gave a trove of embarrassing emails to Wikileaks. Hillary Clinton even refers to the organization as “Russian Wikileaks” just in case anyone forgot to blame others for her political debacle.
Of course, Wikileaks received the DNC documents the same way they received all others. A whistleblower leaked the material and the rest is history. Except history didn’t turn out as most people predicted. Hillary Clinton lost, in large part because of the corrupt behaviors that Assange revealed.
The DNC revelations were as big a threat as the war logs. Assange exposed how the Clinton campaign amplified Trump, in a mistaken belief that he would be the easiest republican to defeat. They also proved that the primary process was rigged against Bernie Sanders, who would have been the better candidate. The revelations had to be squelched and the need to turn Assange into a scapegoat only intensified over time. Russiagate was the means of vilification and made him persona non grata with people who might have been his defenders.
The Collateral Murder video shows the killing of two Iraqis who were employed by Reuters in Baghdad. One would think that some professional courtesy would be extended to their memories, if only for appearance sake. But that isn’t how corporate media operate. They work on behalf of the state and they conveniently forget their past relationship with Wikileaks and the killings of their colleagues so that they might stay in the good graces of the people prosecuting Assange.
Ultimately the U.S. and U.K. couldn’t be bad actors at all if powerful media organizations behaved like independent entities and not as an arm of the state. Assange has no influential friends and sits in Belmarsh prison, having suffered a stroke on October 27, 2021. His physical and mental health deteriorate while unscrupulous people in London and Washington decide his fate.
The corrupt process must be exposed and all Assange supporters must speak up. The United States should not be allowed to use the Espionage Act or any other mechanism to snatch up anyone, anywhere and charge with a crime of dubious legality. If they are allowed to do so in this case they will certainly do it again. Anyone who wants to expose high crimes will find themselves in Assange’s position. People who oppose the empire and its machinations are all at risk if Assange is extradited and stands trial in the Eastern District court. He is a political prisoner and others will be too if the prosecution proceeds. It is no exaggeration to say that we are all Julian Assange.
The ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign was launched earlier this year. It is designed to enable people to participate in a grassroots nonviolent campaign to strategically resist the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ and related initiatives of the Global Elite including the transhumanist, eugenics and Cyber Polygon agendas.
Since being launched, people have been joining from all over the world.
A key initiative of the campaign was to prepare and design a one-page flyer so that people could be given, by various means, a short list of nonviolent actions that offered a series of simple but powerfully effective ways in which anyone could participate in the strategy to defeat the elite agenda.
With the invaluable assistance of members of the campaign from around the world, translations of this one-page flyer are now available in English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish with other languages imminent or in the pipeline.
Anita McKone is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and has been a nonviolent activist since 1993. She has been arrested and imprisoned on a number of occasions for her activism. Anita has written many articles on different aspects of nonviolent activism, psychology and philosophy including Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice. She has also written and recorded eight ‘Songs of Nonviolence’.
After the Crash 