Before getting to the substance of today’s blog entry, which concerns the depoliticization of tyranny in America today, I want to take the occasion of the holiday in his name to acknowledge the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and reiterate my opposition to post-civil rights conception of social justice that denies Kings’ vision of a colorblind society. Far from putting racism behind us, the post-civil rights deviation has spawned a new era of racial antagonism. This extremism grows from New Left perversions that pushed civil rights—and politics generally—from its roots in American conceptions of freedom and democracy towards a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values.
More than Stokely Carmichael’s belittling characterization of King as a “reformer who was good for the image of America,” the New Left eschewed the Old Left’s commitment to orthodox Marxian concepts and socialist politics, and took up instead the anti-American standpoint of such prominent Third World revolutionaries as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. These developments mingled with the nihilistic turn in French postmodernist philosophy to produce the truly vile synthesis that elites across the West exploit to undermine democratic-republicanism and the modern nation state. It’s this synthesis that forms the basis of contemporary antiracism and critical race theory.
Those of us who believe in justice and democracy must redouble our efforts to explain to those around us that Black Lives Matter and similar phenomena collectively represent a disjunctive break from the civil rights of MLK, Jr. The New Left, however much its rhetoric apes critical dialectics, because of its obsession with race, is incapable of grasping the West as a contradiction in need of a full becoming—the establishment of democratic socialism in the context of the Enlightenment. Thus the so-called critical turn in leftwing politics not only threatened bourgeois interests; it threatens proletarian interests.
If it was not clear in the moment, history has exposed Black Power as a reactionary politics. These are not King’s politics. Let’s rededicate ourself to King’s dream of a world in which individuals are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. This is a demand not for equity, but for each and every person to enjoy equal treatment—treatment blind to race. Let’s us say once and for all that we are to get no more or no less on account of our race. That’s justice. (See Colorblindness versus Colorfulness; A Note on Desegregation and the Cold War.)
Today we celebrate the victory we achieved more than half a century ago in ending institutional racism and recognize the need take the nation off the path to retribalization that progressives and the corporate state have put us on. Let’s honor Dr. King’s legacy and get back to living the dream.
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Last week the Supreme Court blocked Joe Biden’s attempt to federally impose a mandatory vaccine and testing regime on the nation’s large employers. “Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers,” the majority observed in an unsigned opinion, “it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly.” The opinion continues: “Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category.”
This was the right decision. I was disappointed on the second decision regarding the mandate for health care workers. The paradox of medical personnel with natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 being fired for not submitting to a vaccine requirement while vaccinated personnel with a COVID-19 diagnosis are allowed to continue working in the heath care system is a contradiction that demands redressing. But as the arguments and questions unfolded, one could see the split decision emerging; blocking the employer mandate was the best one could hope for.
In rationalizing their dissent, the progressive minority, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor, those justices who had embarrassed themselves during arguments by disseminating misinformation, write, “When we are wise, we know not to displace the judgments of experts, acting within the sphere Congress marked out and under Presidential control, to deal with emergency conditions.” You knew that was coming based on their questions. What was perhaps unexpected is the degree to which they make explicit the technocratic attitude that works behind the decision-making process. Technocracy is the rule of unelected bureaucrats and selected experts managing the corporate state.
In a pending blog entry (not the next one, which will either be about mass formation psychosis or voting rights, but probably the one after those), I will delve deeply into the struggle to save the American republic from the totalizing tendency of corporate statism reflected in the minority’s opinion. It will suffice to say here that the Supreme Court’s decision on Biden’s attempt to weaponize OSHA against the proletariat is a ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak historical moment; it will take a lot more than this decision to turn things around.
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I highly recommend to readers Paul Diesing’s How Does Social Science Work? In the chapter “Science Politics,” Diesing, who is a political scientist, distinguishes democratic science from technocratic science. A recent hearing in the Senate provides instantiations of Diesing’s categories. In the exchange recorded above, Senator Rand Paul articulates the principles of democratic science. Dr. Anthony Fauci is the paradigm of technocratic science personified. If you watched the hearings you could see Democrats pushing technocracy. Make no mistake about which of the two parties is the authoritarian part of the moment.
I want to dig into this problem a bit more by bringing in some other voices. In her essay, “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity’,” published in a special edition of Social Research, philosopher Sandra Harding discusses the matter by distinguishing between two kinds of politics and their relationship to knowledge production.
The first kind “is the older notion of politics as the overt actions and policies intended to advance the interests and agendas of ‘special interest groups,’” she writes. “This kind of politics ‘intrudes’ into ‘pure science’ through consciously chosen and often clearly articulated actions and programs that shape what science gets done, how the results of research are interpreted, and, therefore, scientific and popular images of nature and social relations.” This kind of politics politicizes science, a practice seen as corrupting in light of the idea of objectivity as neutrality.
This charge is usually leveled against Republicans. One often hears in progressive circles and the establishment media the lament, “How did the COVID-19 pandemic become so political?” The Washington Post tells us, “The pandemic didn’t have to be politicized,” adding, “one party is to blame for it.” Guess who? The Republicans. An article in the journal Science Communications blames “the high degree of politicization in initial COVID-19 coverage” for polarizing US COVID-19 attitudes. The Brookings Institute complains, “Politics is wrecking America’s pandemic response.” While CBS News wonders “Why did COVID-19 become partisan?” Vox tells us why in “How political polarization broke America’s vaccine campaign.” As if one could approach public health from an apolitical standpoint. As if we it wasn’t obvious to everybody that the virus was weaponized to advance the slow-motion coup against the Donald Trump presidency.
The accusation of politicization is a trick that depends on the false notion of objectivity as neutrality—a fig leaf, Immanuel Wallerstein calls it in his American Journal of Sociology essay “Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society.” The pandemic response is political. That’s the truth that requires trickery. But the power elite is desperately seeking to dissimulate the politics driving policy while depicting resistance to those politics as the only politics in play. To see the trick, one needs to understand that there is an other type of politics, Harding writes, in which “power is exercised less visibly, less consciously, and not on but through the dominant institutional structures, priorities, practices, and languages of the sciences. Paradoxically, this kind of politics functions through the ‘depoliticization’ of science—through the creation of authoritarian science.”
Harding cites Robert Proctor, who, in his Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, reminds us of vital historical facts. “The Nazis depoliticized science by destroying the possibility of political debate and controversy,” writes Proctor. “Authoritarian science based on the ‘Führer principle’ replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences.” (In light of present circumstances, we can update the Führer principle to the Fauci principle.) “The Nazis ‘depoliticized’ problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms.”
Are things clearer now? This is an old trick. It’s the way the classical political economists, such as Adam Smith with his “invisible hand” metaphor, removed economics from the political realm by establishing the logic Darwin later adapted as his theory of natural selection, a theory that would then inform eugenics and racial science. It’s the way neoliberalism works today; by treating public utilities as private business entities, and I am speaking here of the social media platforms controlled by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, censorship is no longer a government move but a consequence of market forces. You should see that the pandemic is a strategy to launder the grand project of transnational corporate power by denying the political ambitions of the policy makers.
The question at hand is not whether science is political. It is. It always has been. Denying that is political is part of the corrupting force. Depoliticization works by denying politics—by dissimulating and obscuring power. For the reason, Harding contends, we have to abandon the neutrality that hides power in order to become more strongly objective in our scientific and other endeavors. I agree with her.
One must stand somewhere. Indeed, how could there be science ethics without recognizing politics and power in scientific endeavor? The question before us—and this question must always be before us—is how power and politics are being hidden from view by the depoliticizing language of neutrality. Otherwise, Nuremberg becomes nothing more than a romantic bother that gets in Prometheus’ way. Humanism requires a critical standpoint, and this standpoint simultaneously rejects technocratic science and a demands democratic science—that is, science for the people.
(See also Robert Proctor’s Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge and Joseph Rouse’s Knowledge and Power: Towards a Political Philosophy of Science.)
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I want to show you what legacy media looked like before it became entirely subservient to the corporate state. The legacy media wasn’t perfect. But it was a hell of a lot better than what we have now. There once was a thing called “investigative journalism.” The networks covered the Church Committee hearings. They covered the Pentagon Papers. You would never see those stories covered today in the organs of the establishment.
In the video below, you will watch CBS News exposing the dangers of vaccines. In 1976, pharmaceutical corporations and governments around the world, including the US government, manufactured a swine flu epidemic. The government rolled out a massive vaccination program accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign involving print and television media. Millions of Americans were injected with the experimental swine flu vaccine. Scores of people suffered a range of vaccine injures. The story focuses on a sometimes lethal and almost always devastating paralytic condition called Guillain–Barré syndrome, or GBS. The government, shamefaced, had to cancel the program.
That disaster and mounting death and injuries from other vaccines led to the creation of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, or NCVIA, which required health care providers to report adverse events to vaccines. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, established in 1990 and jointly managed by the CDC and the FDA, grew out of the NCVIA. In the meantime, the US government granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers. United States Code states in part: “No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine.” This law is associated with the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), popularly known as the “vaccine court,” administered by Health and Human Services (HHS), to compensate those injured by vaccines covered by VICP. VICP has to date paid out several billion dollars in compensation to those killed and injured by vaccines cover by the law.
Thus a regulatory apparatus was stood up to manage the fallout from mass vaccination programs—not to hold medical-industrial complex accountable but to act as a public relations operation to reassure the public that these products are beneficial, efficacious, necessary, and safe. In tandem with the establishment of this apparatus, the establishment media shifted its role from its traditional roles as the Fourth Estate criticizing government and corporate power to serving as the propaganda arm of the corporate state. Mainstream news organizations run interference for vaccine manufacturers by denying the link between the vaccines and GBS and a host of other deleterious side effects, while they demand that those who do criticize the industry are removed from social media platforms.
Over the years, I have posted this video twice on YouTube only to have it removed for violating “community standards.” Watch it while you can on YouTube if you are afraid to watch it on Rumble. If you do not fear Rumble (which you shouldn’t), you can can find my upload of a high definition video, “The Swine Flu Epidemic of 1976.” But the one currently on YouTube is a polished and contextualized presentation worth checking out.
This issue is personal. As many of you know, my son was injured by the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. (I discuss this in a recent blog: The World Has Been Played So Hard—But It’s Not Too Late to Resist.) I was injured by a flu vaccine in the late 1990s that produced an autoimmune disorder called Grave’s disease that nearly killed me. Fortunately, my Graves is in remission thanks to hormone treatment, an intervention that unfortunately resulted in obesity and metabolic disorder, which in turn caused my Barrett’s esophagus. All this is thanks to a flu vaccine. The mRNA vaccines are associated with Graves (and several other autoimmune disorders). Why didn’t I not subject myself to this shot? The answer to that should be obvious. (Over the last few years I have lost a lot of weight and my metabolic conditions is under control, but the quality of life lost, not to mention career advancement, is incalculable.)
The COVID-19 vaccine is associated with known dangers, which I have blogged about extensively. These vaccines (mRNA and viral vector technologies) may cause harms down the road. In the video below, Stephanie Seneff, a Senior Research Scientist at MIT with more than 170 peer-reviewed publications, whose research interests lie at the intersection of biology and computation, in which she studies Alzheimer, Parkinson, autism, and cardiovascular diseases, is warning of the potential for neurodegenerative diseases caused by the toxins the vaccine uses to produce an immune response to SARS-CoV-2 (or at least early variants of the virus).
Why is the establishment media not reporting on this story? Because the establishment does not want you to know about the dangers of vaccines. This is why there is so much censorship of information that challenges the official narrative by the social media platforms run by the Big Tech oligarchs. In place of democratic science, the model of science that dominates today is authoritarian science, what Diesing calls it technocratic science. I have called it scientism. Whatever we call it, it must be called out for what it is: corporate profiteering at the expense of human health and life. The Biden regime wanted to mandate this at the federal level. States are mandating the vaccine. Even for children.
I am often asked how it is possible that the United States government would allow dangerous and even lethal health care practices. Why would the medical-industrial complex list COVID-19 as the cause of death in cases where people died with not from COVID-19? That sounds like a conspiracy theory, I am told. Most people have no idea how deadly the policies and practices of medical-industrial complex can be, even when the evidence for this is publicly available. I want to close this essay with an example of publicly available evidence that ought to shock those who don’t already known about it and then make a point about our current relationship with the truth.
In 2016, in analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, researchers at Johns Hopkins calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year in the United States are homicide cases. The number of those killed by doctors and nurses and lab technicians surpasses the third leading cause of death in America (respiratory disease kills close to 150,000 people per year). How do the killers get away with this? John Hopkins documents that the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. Are you sure the CDC is correctly classifying COVID-19 deaths accurately?
The media is just now reporting that 40 percent of pediatric hospitalizations for COVID-19 are not COVID-19 cases. The kids were there for something else and incidentally tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. And they were asymptomatic. And that’s not the only recent admission that should cause us to reassess everything we have been told about the pandemic. The fact is that COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality statistics are vastly exaggerated (in morality statistics the error may exceed 90 percent), while statistics on cases remains underreported because most infected people aren’t tested. Also underreported are vaccine injuries and deaths (VAERS only captures some of the incidents).
Why would US doctors, medical corporations, and our government underreport vaccine injuries and deaths? For the same reason they underreport medical error. This is an industry and you’re an expendable. Corporate power means profits over people. You should be so naïve. Untie the ribbons and use them for something else.
freedom and reason 