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“As long as not everybody is vaccinated, nobody will be safe.” —Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum

I don’t like to use the word evil because of its theological implications, but I think in the case of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) it applies and must be admitted. Moreover, as you will see, the religious analog is unavoidable. Who is Klaus Schwab? Schwab is the leader of the hive-mind behind the so-called Party of Davos (the WEF holds an annual summit at Davos in Switzerland), the brain trust of the nascent New World Order (NWO). The WEF was established in 1971 and has become the hub of world planning by the transnational elite and its functionaries.

You may have wondered what’s with the slogans “Build Back Better” and the “Great Reset” and obsession with the date 2030? US president Joe Biden utters the slogans. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau utters them. UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Etcetera. Rightwing podcaster Steve Bannon is fond of saying that there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences. Well, there are conspiracies. But the Great Reset is not one of them. Conspiracies are secret by definition—at least until they are exposed, and then they were secret. The agenda of the WEF, the origin of these slogans, has never operated in secret. Biden, Trudeau, and Johnson repeat the buzz words and push the designs in public. The leaders of the English-speaking world leaders repeat the slogans because they constitute the established political arm of the transnational project to reorder the world.

Schwab coauthored a book in the summer of 2020 carrying the title COVID-19: The Great Reset. The thesis of the book is that the virus, likely an escaped pathogen, the product of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, provides an opportunity to reorder the world along the lines Schwab and crowd desire. That same summer Schwab published an essay on the WEF website titled “Now is the Time for a ‘Great Reset’” wherein he argued that the world must “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies.” This he calls the “Great Reset’ of capitalism.” 

Why is the COVID-19 pandemic the opportunity to carry out the radical transformation of everything? Schwab writes in that essay that “one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.” As if we were not forced to abandon these practices but rather saw the pandemic as an opportunity to do what we had long longed for: locking ourselves in our homes and cutting ourselves off from our friends and livelihoods and subjecting our children to forced isolation at a critical period in their development as humans.

When elites like Schwab use the word “we,” they do not mean us, you and me. In a now deleted web page, fortunately preserved in the form of a sponsored article in Forbes, authored by Ida Auken, member of the Danish Folketing, the WEF voiced the supposed desire of working people across the planet with an announcement from an ordinary appearing citizen: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” In 2030, everything will be a service and every ordinary person will be a subscriber, their use of services subject to their terms. “In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.” So business will continue even if you no longer have the privacy of your own living room. With this article, those who put those words in that ordinary person’s mouth are announcing their desire to own everything and enjoy exclusive privacy from the hungry eyes of the masses whose lives will be lived openly and never more unfree. 

One may be inclined to believe that this is just the same old machinations of the capitalist class. But what is described in “Welcome to 2030” does not resemble capitalism. It doesn’t sound like socialism, either. Schwab tells us it’s neither (sometimes dropping the construct “stakeholder capitalism”). He writes, “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.” Based on the ideas expressed, those new foundations appear more as reclamation of the structures of Europe before capitalism, but on a different technological foundation, some sort of global neofeudalism. This is what is meant by the “new normal.” We are not going to get our old lives back (I don’t mean the lives of the ancient feudal past, but the lives we lived only a few years ago). The reason why is the COVID-19 pandemic, which can only mean that COVID-19 is a pretext for transforming the world to align with Schwab’s vision.

Now, I am not saying that COVID-19 was created in a lab and unleashed on the world with this purpose in mind (although that possibility cannot be ruled out). What I am saying is, just as the Islamist attack on New York City and Washington DC was used as a pretext for a vast expansion of the National Security State, which became normalized within a few short years, SARS-CoV-2 is being exploited to radically transform global culture, economics, and politics. In both cases, the plans and the technology were largely already developed and awaiting justification for their implementation.

As I have established on Freedom and Reason in numerous blogs, as the science makes clear, mass vaccination does not have a public health function. If you contract SARS-CoV-2, you are as infectious if you are double jabbed as you are if you are zero jabbed. Vaccinated people can contract and spread the virus and they are. This means that vaccine mandates and passports are arbitrary from a public health standpoint. Indeed, because vaccines (like masks) lend a false sense of security to the public, mandates and passports are counterproductive, which is why we see a positive correlation between mass vaccination and mask mandates and COVID-19 cases. There is no rational medical science reason for vaccines that not only do not work, but which exacerbate the problem. The same goes for masks. The fact that these were so eagerly taken up by the majority indicates how far down the road we are to unfreedom.

Therefore, in addition to generating mega-profits, COVID-19 is cover for the implementation of an extensive and global administrative state apparatus (I guess we could suppose that all the agencies and organizations pushing the vaccine mandate are stupid, but frankly that strikes me as an absurd conclusion). The WEF plays a central role in pushing the imposition of the apparatus. The endpoint is global neofeudalism, wherein you will, according to the WEF’s own propaganda, own nothing and be happy. The transnational elite will own everything. You will be subservient to them because you will owe everything to them. They will take liberties with your dwelling and your person since it is not your dwelling and you don’t even own yourself. Democratic-republican forms of government will be replaced by technocracy (they largely already are). If you want a preview of coming attractions, take a look at the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Mass vaccination works in two interlocking ways: (1) the program permits the authorities to track the movements and activities of the vaccinated and those who are officially exempted by way of passports; (2) it relegates those who are not vaccinated to official second-class status, where they are made pariah by being cast as disease vectors and scapegoated for the persistence of a virus that has already persisted since at least the 1930s when it was discovered (there variants were officially named in the 1960s and the modern variants announced in the 1990s). Vaccine passports thus form a system of segregation that functions to apply pressure on individuals to rise in status by submitting to corporate state dictates by depriving them of liberties and rights that are naturally theirs by virtue of being a human being. The system, which is self-evidently intrinsically coercive, is pitched as voluntary via the language of incentive. 

What everybody will have on the other side of freedom is what the NWO provides to them. This is what lies behind the universal basic income (UBI) scheme. If everybody is provided with an income from the government, then everybody is obligated to obey the government’s edicts, and, since the government is fully captured by transnational corporate power, everybody receiving the UBI becomes a serf on a high-tech global corporate plantation. Everybody will receive the UBI by law. This will be followed by a cashless economy, with debit cards (digital along with the passports) restricting desired purchases unauthorized by government. There will be limits on everything “for the good of the planet.” Vaccine mandates and passports, UBI, debit cards, and all the rest of it are parts of the machinery, past, present, and future, paving the road to serfdom.

The scheme works in much the same way a proselytizing religion functions when it has achieved theocracy, wherein those with different religious beliefs or no religious beliefs are coerced into converting to the dominant religion to elevate their status. Otherwise, they will remain a second-class citizen (this is the way it is in Islamic theocracies, which is why I suspect Islam is so admired by the progressive left). Of course, neither faithful nor infidel are free in a theocracy. This is an authoritarian ordering of society and it is evil. This situation can also be achieved through totalitarian government and reeducation of the population, for example the PRC. For those who can’t see how all this is possible, they are blind to the fact that it already is.

Schwab’s vision is a world that runs on “intelligent robots,” “neuro-technological brain enhancements,” and “genetic editing.” This is the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the title of another of Schwab’s books. There, he extols the wonders of the “new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds.” In this new world order, the global population is fully integrated with digital networks encompassing all aspects of life. Schwab looks forwards to these new technologies “challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” This is the transhumanists wet dream. This sounds like science fiction, but it will soon be our lives. If we allow this, we are over.

As I see it, there are basically two ways a person may conduct himself in a modern political society. He may be loyal to a party, or he may be loyal to principle. This does not preclude a principled person associating with a party, either as a member or a fellow traveler. So, to clarify, I mean this in relative terms.

The relative degrees of loyalty to party and principle predict how the person will behave when confronted by change. With strong party loyalty, a person risks pinning his fundamental moral and political beliefs to the evolution of the party. A strongly principled person, in contrast, resists changes that affect his fundamental moral and political beliefs and, if unsuccessful in steering the party back to foundational principle (if he even bothers to try), will sever his ties to the party and end his identification with its platform.

Suppose a party that has stood firmly on the grounds of civil liberties and rights. The party has championed free speech and assembly, bodily autonomy, and so forth. The party has moreover been critical of concentrated wealth and power, instead emphasizing the interests of working-class citizens in formulating its policies and fashioning a politics. The party promoted the equality of individuals before the law and in opportunity.

Now suppose this party moves in an authoritarian direction, the commitment to individual liberty and personal rights replaced by a commitment to corporate power and an appeal to the special rights of selected minorities. Workers, once valued as autonomous and rational persons, become the targets of state surveillance and control, social coercion differentiated by identity. The change is sweeping, however gradual in development. Any objective observer can step back, look at the party’s trajectory, and admit to its changed character.

I need to clarify something before continuing with this example. Often, I hear about how liberals have changed. I am an admirer of Glenn Greenwald, but on a Rumble livestream last Friday he did just this (while at the same time professing liberal values). The proper way to put this is not that liberals believe something different now, but that, because they believe something different, they are no longer liberals. Liberalism is a rather fixed set of beliefs, even with contradictions and inconsistencies. Either one subscribes to the set and can properly call himself a liberal, or he abandons the set and becomes a former liberal. In other words, he becomes something else. He may become a fascist. Liberalism doesn’t become fascism. When a liberal becomes a fascist he ceases to be a liberal. There are those with latent or accumulating fascistic tendencies who identify as liberal and associate with liberals. So there are those who abandon liberalism and those who wear liberalism as a cloak.

The difference between the loyal party man and the man loyal to principle will over time become obvious. There may be a moment when the person’s true character is revealed (I discuss this in the second part of this blog). Many of those strongly identifying with party, desiring to remain loyal to their party identity, adjust their morals and politics to accommodate shifts in party platform. Many do not find the authoritarian drift alarming and, perhaps subconsciously seeking to remain emotionally and psychologically comfortable, rationalize criticism of the party and its platform. For those who, in contrast, base their choices firmly on principle, while admittedly less likely to be loyal to party in the first place, even the gradual trend towards authoritarianism is alarming and will cause them to leave or, if they are fellow travelers, distance themselves from the party and its platform, an action that will likely be portrayed in an unflattering light.

Let me use my own trajectory to demonstrate. My beliefs have always been strongly liberal. Liberalism promotes free speech and expression (cognitive liberty), which includes the right to remain silent, freedom from compelled speech, and the right of individuals to have access to ideas; the right to privacy; bodily autonomy; religious liberty or freedom of conscience, i.e., secularism or separation of church and state; freedom of assembly and petitioning government for redress of grievances. These are democratic-republican values. I am not completely in sync with liberalism as classically formulated in that, while I believe in the labor theory of value, indeed because I believe in this theory, I do not believe in exclusive control over the means of production. In dialectical fashion, a higher unity demands removing from the classical liberal standpoint the notion of capital as exclusive property since it constrains the ability of individuals to produce for themselves and thus be maximally free.

In light of the constraints of the US (effectively) two-party system, Democrats tended to be better in upholding civil rights than the Republican. That was my perception, anyway. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, the aggressive turn to globalization and neoliberalism (mirrored in the United Kingdom by the Third Way of Tony Blair and New Labour), was a clear signal that the Democratic Party was changing. As I grew more sophisticated in my knowledge of history and politics, I came to see that the Democratic Party and the progressive ideology it had embraced and institutionalized over the first half of the twentieth century explained that change. The point I want to make here is that, despite playing the chief role in globalizing late capitalism, including integration of the Chinese economy, the Democrats were better on liberal values than Republicans, the latter having sold their soul to the devil to fashion a coalition out of disaffected southern Democrats and evangelical Christians (mostly the same thing).

But this all changed over the course of the last two decades. The position of the Democratic Party today on the matter of civil liberties and human rights now reflects its subservience to transnational corporate power. The technocracy stood up by progressivism has become a coercive administrative arm of the oligopoly. With assistance from establishment Republicans, the Democratic Party has emerged as the house party of the oligarchy. To keep the corporate state apparatus in command, the liberal freedoms I extol, even when rehearsed in rhetoric, are sharply curtailed. The Democratic Party is the party of authoritarianism.

That the party loyalist does not find the drift towards authoritarianism alarming is explained by weak loyalty to principle. Rationalizing deviation from principle is easier for weakly principled persons. The party loyalist is differently motivated compared to the strongly principled person. The political party constitutes a society that makes the loyalist feel good about himself, providing him with a sense of belonging. Parties have banners, buttons, designs—they are brands. Politics become a personal style. It moreover feels good for weak egos to be around people who agree with them, especially when they wear the same slogans and express the same sentiments. A person feels empowered agreeing with the people he is around because it seems to him that the crowd is agreeing with him. The party loyalist’s desire to be part of the crowd is thus in part motivated by ego.

It is also motivated by laziness. The party provides ways of talking about and doing things (many of which are largely symbolic and ritualistic) that do not involve independent thought. Independent thought requires work. With a political party or movement, the individual is handed a script, repeats its points and slogans, and receives in return amens and strokes. Being one with a crowd means one does not have to act courageously while pretending to be courageous. The party loyalist can depend on the congregation to stand behind him when he confronts members of the other party or those who identify with none. It’s a church, where confronting apostates and infidels is easy with many at your back, while confronting the clerics over their hypocrisy means disloyalty and group shaming, even banishment.

Humans are prepared for congregating and herding because they are social animals. This natural history produces good and bad consequences. When it causes people to act as sheep to slaughter, following the crowd is contrary to self-interest—at least for the sheep. Absorption into the party does not bury ego. It puts ego in its service, making members feel as if their obedience to party dictates is virtuous—even while it robs them of the liberties and rights the party used to defend (at least better than the other party). Humans are naturally prepared on a psychological level to rationalize anxiety-provoking stimuli. We will die someday, so we imagine another world where we will live forever, a good place if we are good, even when some part of us recognizes that another world defies everything we know about reality (the curse of our big brains).

There are many such examples. Psychologists have identified the phenomenon that enables them as “cognitive dissonance.” If a person has a bit of principle in him, and the party loyalist is not always entirely bereft of principle, having to question the party’s evolution is anxiety-provoking. He will have to find that other form of courage, the one where a man has to speak against his comrades. There, he may have nobody standing with him. It is the rare man who does this. For most, that something that has to give is principle. Suppressing principle makes rationalizing change much easier. It is, in this way, that party loyalty is hazardous to the principled life.

In the context of party politics, cognitive dissonance is likely when a member or supporter of a party who is strongly oriented towards party loyalty and weakly oriented towards loyalty to principle is confronted by a policy or position that the party and its member have in the past opposed. The party loyalist doesn’t demand the party change back, or maybe he feebly tries with no success (and only ever so often does he find numbers sufficient to effectively raise internal opposition), but rather changes himself to accommodate his party. He may even convince himself that the party really hasn’t changed at all, that what the critic is characterizing as authoritarianism is nothing new or anything remarkable. The world has always been that way, he will tell others (and himself, since that is who he is really trying to convince). This way, despite his personal transformation, he can claim to be the same person he was along. He will be a puppet who does not think of himself as such.

If, on the other hand, he operates strongly on principle, finding the answer to his question unsatisfactory, and unable to pull the party and its members from the brink, he will quit the party and find a different party to travel with or even join. Or maybe he will abandon party politics altogether. His adherence to principle will almost invariably be portrayed as personal transformation. He was “radicalized” or some other such horrible thing. Those whose subjectivity moves with the herd do not see the herd’s changing direction because they move along with it. This is the optical illusion of positional relativity. Unlike quantum mechanics, however, space-time is not actually affected. The party left the principled man; he did not change.

Some people can easily transform themselves in tandem with the party’s evolution and these those who are weakly attached to principle. But there are those who are weakly attached to principle who also leave parties whether they are static or evolving. I have written about them on Freedom and Reason. Something should be briefly said about them here. These are the people who are drawn to parties for emotional and psychological needs. Eric Hoffer calls them “true believers.” (A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer.) True believers are attracted to the energy of actions, movements, and slogans. Consider how easily a person who finds satisfaction in physically confronting people in street-level action floats between activist groups depending on the opportunities they provide for neural stimulation. Street-level neofascists and antifascists are indistinguishable in their organization and tactics, their ideology merely a technique of rationalization. Even their dress, if but for different colored braces, buttons, and shoelaces; they are as differentiated in costume as two NFL football teams. It’s why they keep their actions confined to an arena (a park or street corner) and never actually challenge power. They are an annoyance. The party loyalist is something much worse. He becomes a threat to the democratic-republican order when his party becomes authoritarian and illiberal in character.

* * *

The New Fascism is a Lot Like Being Dead: You Don’t Know You Are

For this section, I am going to use Michel Foucault’s notion of fascism. Despite my criticisms of Foucault’s work and politics, there are real insights in much of it, and his treatment of fascism in at least one instance is useful for understanding the subjective side of the phenomenon, the task with which we are here faced.

Foucault, in a noted analysis of Gilles Deluze and Felix Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, abstracted fascism from its historical concrete forms to encompass “the fascism in us all, in our heads and everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominate and exploits us.” This should remind those who are familiar with his work of Erich Fromm. This is the character of Fromm’s authoritarian personality thesis (Escape from Freedom). Like Fromm, Foucault’s solution to the problem of endemic fascism is political and social practice that emancipates the individual from “unitary and totalizing paranoia.” (See Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me.)

I was horrified yesterday to discover how easily people I have known for years have slipped into the authoritarian mindset. This example will serve to illustrate some of the points I made in the first section of the blog. The opportunity to reveal the fascist living in their heads came when I shared a cartoon of people worshipping a syringe (see above) with the comment: “Because it’s not the science that justifies mandates and passports.” Passports are documents citizens are required to carry (now conveniently stored on your phone, soon maybe a chip in your hand) and present to a gatekeeper (soon to be completely automated for your convenience) if they want to enter spaces open to the public. These have always been part of our world, my Facebook friends said.

No, they have not always been part of our world. This is rhetoric designed to normalize the pathological. This is not normal. Never before in the history of America have citizens been forced as a general rule to present proof of vaccination to enter spaces open to the public. I have never had anybody ever ask me for my vaccination record to enter my child’s school, to dine in a restaurant, to attend a concert—to go anywhere. Even when I have been obviously sick, coughing and blowing my nose, nobody has ever questioned me about it or restricted my movements on account of it. Not a single time. I am fifty-nine years old. I won’t let people normalize fascism by acting as if what’s happening is not an extraordinary development in the history of our country.

(I am sure somebody reading this will identify my white privilege here. Maybe white people never had to present proof of a legitimate reason for being out and about, I hear a woke voice say, but this was a common experience of black people for centuries. Yes it was. And it was wrong. It is wrong to treat people this way. You’re making my argument for me.)

What makes mandates and passports so extraordinary is that the United States is based on the premise that a free and open society where the civil rights of the individual are paramount is essential for a good life. Mandates and passports are elements in totalitarian societies, not free and open ones. The power elite are using COVID-19 pandemic as cover to establish a totalitarian administrative state apparatus. What we are witnessing in real time is nothing less than a paradigm shift in the character of the United States.

The fascists-in-training shrug their shoulders as if it’s no big deal. Their acquiescence to authoritarian control exposes the fascist that lives in their heads. And they are utterly unprepared and ego-bound to confront their emerging authoritarian personalities. The brute force of clear and present reason has no effect on them. Not mature enough to deal with confronting error, they have an ego to defend. The greatest disaster for a weak ego is the collapse of worldview. I think it is too late for them.

There was some confusing on the particular thread I am referencing and the matter of international travel was raised. There we find passports. Yes, we do, and so we should. But let’s take a look at that, because it makes my point all the more. I have been to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Jordan—multiple times. I have been through France and the Netherlands. I never needed to be vaccinated to travel to any of these places. Nobody ever asked me about my medical history. Yet even here we’re seeing an extraordinary development. While the rank-and-file authoritarians live in a dreamworld constructed for them by the culture industry, the trans-Atlantic community is being transformed into a grand totalitarian administrative apparatus. 

These two Facebook friends are hardly alone. Hundreds of millions across the trans-Atlantic community are walking zombies for corporate state totalitarianism. The success of the power elite in incorporating young Americans into the social logic of corporate capitalism is spectacular. There’s no reaching them. They’re foot soldiers for the technocratic order, prepared to take up any cause deftly wrapped in the rhetoric of social justice.

As I have documented on Freedom and Reason, the power elite are using the rhetoric of public health and the religion of scientism to effectuate a new fascist order (Biden’s Biofascist Regime; see also A Dark and Authoritarian Path is Paved by Pathologizing Humanity). It’s obvious from the standpoint of any theory of power. But it is just as obvious from the standpoint of common sense. By definition, rule by the departments of public health constitutes technocratic government. Technocracy is diametrically opposed to democratic-republican values and libertarian norms. Mandates and passports are clear markers of the fascistic reorganization of western society. And all that flies by the rank and file authoritarians, because they have allowed a fascist to live in their heads—and cognitive dissonance has produced in them a false belief that all this is normal and necessary. But it is on the contrary objectively abnormal and scientifically unnecessary and we must resist it.

Fascism works by creating a subjectivity that seduces those weakly devoted to reason and principle into taking up authoritarianism.

* * *

Spreading the Mind Virus that Causes the Fascist Disease

Things were going fairly well until the Irish population reached a high level of vaccination. But once most people were vaccinated, COVID-19 cases started rising. Well over 90 percent of the Irish population is now vaccinated. See the below graph. Look familiar?

Why do we see an association between case frequency and high rates of vaccination? Because these vaccines do not confer immunity and by reducing symptoms allows the infected to spread the virus more successfully. Instead of being at home in bed with cold and flu-like symptoms, they are out interacting with other people. Moreover, passports allow infected people who have been vaccinated greater access to spaces exclusive of those not vaccinated.

If you fear COVID-19, you should be told that being around vaccinated people represents a significant risk to being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and that, even if you are vaccinated, you may contract and develop the disease. Not only are you not being told this, but you are being led to believe the opposite. None other than the president of the United States told an audience recently, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” This is false. When the authorities admit this, they tell you that the vaccine prevents severe illness. But once infected, you can still get sick, you can still wind up in the hospital, and you can even die. But mostly, you will just spread it to others.

I explained this weeks ago on Freedom and Reason. But I am painfully aware that facts don’t matter to people who peddle the vaccine. They are motivated not by science but by a desire for force people to submit to technocratic rule (and profits, of course). Authoritarianism is, after all, the desire to control other people, and it often comes with sadism. Support for mass vaccination has become the chief indicator of the extent of fascist subjectivity among the general population in western societies. And fuck is it extensive.

We might think of fascist desire as a mind virus, one that is much more dangerous than SARS-CoV-2. The mind virus causes people to do things that are especially damaging to children. Masking children is early training in obedience to arbitrary rules, the intervention occurring during the crucial years of personality development. And now they are going to jab them for a virus that will give them a cold, if they have any symptoms at all. And still make them wear a mask. And still quarantine them.

It’s as obvious as anything can be that the virus that causes COVID-19 is being used to spread the virus that causes the disease of fascism and the population has been so deranged that they’re welcoming totalitarian rule with open arms. This is because people are weakly principled.

Remember in the documentary The Corporation when MIT linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky said people can be anything depending on the circumstance—even a gas chamber attendant? Here’s what he said: “It’s a fair assumption that every human being, real human beings, flesh and blood ones, not corporations, but every flesh and blood human being is a moral person. You know, we’ve got the same genes, we’re more or less the same, but our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behaviour. I mean, every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint.”

The quote implies that exterminating humans is a moral endeavor. In other words, morality has no universal form and content. It is whatever the circumstances define as moral. It is then our nature to follow the norm. I try to remember in every class where I show that documentary to make sure students know that Chomsky’s claim pulls too many people into the orbit of banal evil. It is not the species that can be made into vaccine mandate/passport loving authoritarians given circumstance. It’s some people can be turned into vaccine mandate/passport loving authoritarians given circumstance. What circumstance reveals is not the infinite moral plasticity of man but who those men really were all along: authoritarians waiting for the right circumstance.

In other words, we now know Chomsky was describing himself.

Last night I took some time listen to Max Blumenthal’s analysis of Noam Chomsky’s politics presented on The Jimmy Dore Show. Spot on.

I was aware of Chomsky’s past involvement with the military-industrial complex, but I had long believed the horrors of the Vietnam War changed him. He was usually good, if sometimes prone to hyperbole, on the question of American imperialism. I have quoted the man’s insights on Freedom and Reason (We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears; The Self-Pacifying Political Stratum of the Modern Corporate State). I show substantial portions of the film Manufacturing Consent to my students in Freedom and Social Control. They learn about his “propaganda model.” I present the comparative/content analysis section on Cambodia and East Timor as paradigmatic of this type of work in Research Methods. I still intend to do so. This is important stuff. My Chomsky library takes up an entire shelf of my vast library.

But Chomsky has changed. Or did he really ever change? Blumenthal talks about how Chomsky’s technocratic training never really left his soul. His entire career was at MIT, a linguistic informing the development of weapons systems directly or indirectly. Chomsky finds himself at home in the technocracy, Blumenthal suggests. A company man, Chomsky now delivers the talking points of the authoritarian progressive establishment. (How much do you wager that his position on the question of Black Lives Matters is the standard progressive social justice formula?)

Blumenthal notes importantly that during the Manufacturing Consent period of Chomsky’s career, in his “Political Economy of Human Rights” phase (where one of his books was so controversial the publisher folded the company to prevent the book’s release after he couldn’t back out of the contract), the man did not work alone. His collaborator was Edward Herman. It seems more obvious that before that Herman shaped Chomsky’s thinking during that period. Sadly, Herman is no longer with us (Herman died in 2017).

Blumenthal appeals to the work of Michael Parenti as the superior go at media criticism. Those who know me well, know I think very highly of that man. Parenti is a Yale educated political scientist. I teach his material in a class I sometimes offer for the present moment called Power and Change in America. Parenti’s early 1990s books Inventing Reality and Make-Believe Media are important if a bit dated. The man’s catalog is much larger than that, though. His textbook Democracy for the Few, in its several editions, is a must read. He is prolific. And great with words.

Moreover, Parenti is a terrific speaker. Dore and Blumenthal talk about Parenti’s lecture “Conspiracy and Class Power.” It’s the speech that made me stop worrying about people calling me a “conspiracy theorist.” Parenti explains that things don’t happen by accident. People in positions of power make things happen. The rich have always wanted one thing, he says: everything. He then asks the audience to consider whether those with that mentality will do anything to keep privilege and power. Of course, is the answer. Even if it means killing people. They do it all the time. (Want evidence? Read William Blum’s Killing Hope. But you can also take a look at the record of the medical-industrial complex. The reality of medical science is horrific. I fear it is about to get even more so.)

A bit more stridently Marxist than Mills, Parenti works in the tradition of C. Wright Mills and the “Power Elite” model of explaining history, developed over a series of books by Mills in the 1950s. Mills was influenced not only by the work of Karl Marx, but also that of Max Weber. In the early 1950s Mills wrote a book with Hans Gerth called Character and Social Structure. Let that title sink in a bit. (We won’t go down that rabbit hole here, but you might anticipate a forthcoming blog on the matter. In the meantime, here is a short piece I wrote on Mills: C. Wright Mills and the New Fascism.)

Blumenthal does us a real service in helping those of us who remember Chomsky in the 80s-90s, the man we admired, work through the distress of seeing him in this state. Our trauma isn’t new. Chomsky shocked me when he showed up a few years ago up comparing Trump to Hitler, a comparison so ridiculous that it makes Chomsky’s past insights feel accidental. His aggressive “lesser of two evils” campaigns every four years long ago indicated that he was losing critical power power and sliding back into his past technocratic socialization. Blumenthal helps bring it all together for me.

I am worried about sounding too harsh. The fact that Chomsky is 92 years old isn’t lost on me. Blumenthal may have repurposed the term when he refers to the current intellectual landscape as a “gerontocracy.” Dore believes Chomsky is in mental decline. It’s obvious from the clips that Chomsky’s reasoning is unusually faulty and his mood is petulant.

However, the most disturbing piece of it is his authoritarianism and this doesn’t seem to be the work of senility. Chomsky’s opinions are marked by a profound loathing of the working class that betrays his elitism. He has always gotten to his head. Dore notes the air of fear that surrounds Chomsky’s manner and tone. You don’t need to note it for the audience. He is scared. He doesn’t want to die. His pathological fear makes him pathologically hateful. He sees the unvaccinated as killers because they spread the virus. Of course, the vaccinated spread the virus, as we all now know (even if many are too ashamed to admit it), and so Chomsky’s arguments make no sense. But I have written extensively on the reality of this virus on Freedom and Reason, so I will refer you to my past blogs.

It is not accidental that a man who compares Trump to Hitler will see those who are not vaccinated as killers. Chomsky believes, as do his irrational progressive peers, that those who do not get the vaccine are Trump supporters (he appears to be unaware that vaccine hesitancy is highest among black Americans). If Trump is Hitler, then what does that makes Trump’s supporters? It makes them Nazis. That’s right: the people Hillary Clinton labeled the “deplorables” are Nazis. And Nazis are killers.

This way of thinking is delusional and paranoid. More than this, it demonstrates a profoundly superficial understanding of politics and power. I cannot exaggerate how shallow this understanding is. It’s third grade. Trump is a liberal, a nationalist, and a populist, hardly remarkably things to a clear head. Yes, he’s a flamboyant New York City real estate tycoon prone to braggadocio. Yes, he tweets mean things. He also loves his country and was part of the 1990s populist movement that harassed the New Democrats and warned us about NAFTA and mass immigration and globalism.

No, today’s fascism comes in the form of corporate statism, the functionaries of which are drawn from the legacy media, the university, the culture industry, and the administrative state bearing the political face of the Democratic Party, especially its progressive wing, with establishment Republicans collaborating. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; Fascism Becoming Under Cover of COVID-19 Hysteria; Biden’s Biofascist Regime.)

Chomsky, a man who described himself for decades as a “libertarian socialist” and an “anarchist” is actually on the authoritarian capitalist side of politics. And not in a subtle way. Chomsky is deranged. It’s sad. But it’s also dangerous. A lot of people hang on his every word with eyes wide shut.

It use to be that you had to beg to take experimental medicine. Now you’re begging not to be forced to.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 26, 2021

Remember when I told you that young males are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems after being jabbed than be hospitalized from coronavirus? That’s still true. Over 90 percent of those males whose hearts are injured by the vaccine are hospitalized.

Knowing this, why would the US government, which is supposed to protect people, seek to inject young males with this vaccine? Why would any parent inject their teenage boys with this vaccine?

Pfizer and Moderna are making tens of billions from vaccine sales.

Myocarditis isn’t the only injury young people are suffering from this vaccine. Guillain-Barré syndrome, Grave’s disease, and Bell’s palsy are three other injuries caused by this vaccine. These are often devastating conditions that can last a lifetime. The numbers of those injured in the United States are much greater than those reported as the reporting system VAERS vastly undercounts cases.

The health systems in Scandinavia, which do a much better job at this, are so concerned about vaccine injuries that they have stopped the vaccines for those under 30 years of age. So Scandinavia is protecting children while the Biden regime and the technocracy are gearing up to vaccinate tens of millions of children with a vaccine we know will injure them for a virus that may produce in some of them common cold symptoms and for most of the rest of them no symptoms at all.

This is not collective insanity. This is sinister.

Here’s something else that’s true I bet most of you don’t know (and many of you won’t care) about: half of all those who are listed as hospitalized with COVID-19 are actually admitted for reasons other than COVID-19 and only test positive for SARS-CoV-2 once in the hospital.

According to the CDC, more than 90 percent of those who are listed as having died from COVID-19 died from other causes—half of them from influenza and pneumonia.

That last fact is especially odd since we’re told by the CDC that flu activity is the lowest on record. It must be one hell of a flu if at almost undetectable levels it kills nearly half of all those whose death certificates also list COVID-19.

Why is there so little flu activity? They aren’t testing for it. Just like they were testing for coronavirus two years ago.

* * *

As more and more people are vaccinated, the probability that an unvaccinated persons will be the source of your SARS-CoV-2 infection approaches zero. Put another way, in a society where 100 percent of the population is vaccinated, 100 percent of COVID-19 cases will be among vaccinated people.

If the number of COVID-19 cases were reduced by say 99 percent upon mass vaccination, and vaccination could be shown to be the reason for that, that would recommend the vaccine (not compel it). If, on the other hand, controlling for various factors, the number of COVID-19 cases is not reduced or case numbers go up with vaccination, then the mass vaccination program has failed.

Of course, it depends on what end the program is seeking. If the end is public health centered, then, clearly, the program is a failure. But if the end is to impose upon the general population totalitarian corporate-state arrangements, then the program is well down the road of success.

Mandates and passports flip the essential burden of a free society from the state to the individual. The state no longer has to prove I am guilty of something or that I represent a danger to restrict my movements in free spaces or fire me from my job. The state presumes I am guilty and dangerous until I present official documents showing otherwise. The original formula, with the state shouldering the burden, is liberty. The new formulation is tyranny.

* * *

James Heathers, writing for The Atlantic, in the story The Real Scandal About Ivermectin, tells us what the real problem is: “not all science is worth following.” Here comes the pivot. When the establishment can no longer deny the science on Ivermectin, they tell us that not all science should be followed. Which science should we follow, James? The science the establishment tells you to follow.

* * *

Finally, in other science news, Sabrina Imbler, writing for The New York Times, Can Skeletons Have a Racial Identity? reports that “[a] growing number of forensic researchers are questioning how the field interprets the geographic ancestry of human remains.” To summarize the article, forensic anthropologists are questioning the use of ancestry in making determinations of race. Why? Because race is not really a thing. Readers of Freedom and Reason will already know this.

But there’s a problem in changing the way experts think about this, Imbler laments. “Today in the US, the field of forensic anthropology is 87 percent white.” How can this be a problem if race is not really a thing?

Racism is not something a human being is born with. To be sure, a young child will see human difference. But how that young child responds to human difference is learned. Depending on what the child is taught, he may consider a difference or set of differences as incidental or significant. Racial thinking is the result of teaching children that human difference in terms of skin color and other phenotypic features, the result of ancestry, determines a person’s fate in the world. Racial thinking very easily crosses over into racism.

I will define racism later on. But before I get to that, I want to say more about the raising of children. How we raise children determines whether they operate on the basis of cognitive styles regarding and shaping interaction with individuals with or without respect to race. If you teach a child that those who share phenotypic characteristics because of ancestry are collectively bad or good and so forth, then the child will likely to grow up believing that. If you teach a child that the color of a person’s skin does not matter, then they will grow up believing that.

For example, if you teach a child that those with light skin and European facial features are “white,” and that people who are white enjoy a race privilege, this in a country where race privilege was abolished more than half a century ago and discrimination based on race in institutional life made illegal, then you will plant in that child’s mind a fiction that will shape future behavior. Some false beliefs fade over time. Few children grow up to be adults believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. At the time time, most children grow up to be adults who believe in other imaginary things, such things as angels and demons. Not all childhood beliefs fade easily away.

This is why it became widely recognized during the civil rights movement that parents, for example members of the Ku Klux Klan, who taught their children to think in terms of white supremacy, were practicing bad parenting. To counter the bad parenting that was widespread during America’s periods of institutional racism, those who opposed race prejudice taught their children, and encouraged other parents to teach their children, and sought to have teachers teach children, that thinking of others in essentialist racial terms is wrong. This principle was embodied in the preachments of Martin Luther King, Jr., who told the nation of his dream of an America where children are taught to judge each other not by the color of their skin, but on the content of their character.

A black child who is taught to believe that the world is made up of different races and that membership in these groups determines one’s life chances may believe that, no matter what he does, he will never be able to get ahead because he does not possess the race privilege he imagines the white person enjoys. This may cause the child to grow up falsely believing that he is disadvantaged because of his race. This belief may cause him to feel resentful and make him conflict-seeking. It may cause him to be fearful and limit his freedom of movement. The belief may cause him to interact with others in a way that sabotages his chances to make something of himself in a nation founded on individual liberty—the very value that caused men to abolish all forms of institutional racism over the course of its short and spectacular history.

The person who thinks this way may become bitter, not in the face of reality, but because of the fruit of his own self-defeating behavior—a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by the planting of false notions in his head during childhood.

Another person, on account of merely having white skin and European features, may on the basis of such teachings feel guilty for something he did not do or for something other people did. He may falsely believe the situation of those he believes aren’t like him are not because of a self-defeating cognitive style but because he enjoys a privilege he most likely does not enjoy because he is a working man. The false belief will cause him to be ignorant of the fact, for example, that most people who are disadvantaged in America share his skin color and European facial features. For this reason, it will be difficult for him to see that his disadvantage is the result of an economic system inadequate to his needs independent of his racial classification. This false consciousness will likely, like with his black brother, motivate self-defeating conduct.

No good comes from teaching children that ancestry shapes destiny. We have now an extensive decades-long history of collectively participating in a comprehensive, intergenerational real-world experiment. The first phase of the experiment involved teaching children to think and act in racial terms. The second phase taught children that thinking and acting in racial terms was wrong. In this phase, children were instructed to think of themselves as individuals first, for this was the creed of their nation, the ethic of a free and democratic republic. The third phase involves a return to instruction in racial thinking and practice. We are in the throes of the experiment’s third phase. It’s time to call off the experiment. The results are unambiguous. We continue to the detriment of the experimental subject: ourselves.

A society based on reason and evidence does not ignore the findings of such a definitive conclusion. Such a society, if it is true to its rational character, will abandon the antiracist teachings of critical race thinking and demand a return to traditional civil rights thinking and practice—and parents across the nation are indeed making this demand. Rational people recognize that critical race theory is a return to a cognitive style and practice deleterious to the optimal growth and development of human beings. CRT is a form of neoracism, one that teaches people that ancestry defined in racial terms shapes their life-chances. It teaches white children that they are members of an oppressor race, while teaching black children that they are the oppressed race. In its intention or its effect, this teaching obscures the common experience of all children in a class-based social system wherein a few enjoy lives of actual privilege, while the many are exposed to preachments dividing children in essentialist terms in order to raise falsely conscious adults.

Now I come to the definition of racism, although it hardly feels necessary anymore. Racism is not merely the belief that there is human variation and that group differences are the result of ancestry. As I said at the outset, physical differences are real. That offspring in time come to resemble their parents is true throughout the natural world. It is a biological truth (which it seems progressives would have us deny). The differences across a species can be made important or unimportant depending on how they are conceptualized and on the emphasis placed on things. But the individuals of a species are more alike than they are different. This is what we mean when we say race is “socially constructed.” The ideology of racism thus requires more than merely observing human variation; it holds that our species can be subdivided into essential race types and that these types tell us about what goes on inside a person’s head, how he acts in life, and what he deserves.

But our thoughts and our conduct are products of socialization and enculturation that ultimately have nothing to do with our physical appearance. This is why we can say that some forms of socialization and some cultural formations are inadequate for the proper raising of children and the treatment of individuals. This is why cultures that teach and practice racism, sexism, etc., are not up to the task of producing individuals who can develop to their full potential—they do not provide the tools necessary for self-actualization.

In the presence of an institutional system that mandates the differential treatment of individuals on the basis of skin color and other phenotypic features, it is wrong to teach children that such a system is good and appropriate. Because of our creed, Americans understood that and rebelled against this system and, in the end, abolished it. It is just as wrong to teach children that such a system still exists but as an abstraction accessible only through a specialized language. It’s wrong for a different reason, of course. It’s wrong because it is immoral to deceive children in this way to establish of a new system of racial division and conflict.

We see in the lie—an ideology dressed in social studies clothing telling children and young Americans untruths about America’s past and present—the desire to re-segregate social spaces on the basis of race. It is dishonest to resurrect and refashion the old antagonisms that favored the power elite using the rhetoric of justice. To be sure, the scheme of favored and disfavored races is flipped, but the inversion hardly disguises the racism inherent in such style and practice. The doctrine of critical race theory, that racism is about the direction of power, itself exposes the scheme as racist. This is why CRT pushers don’t want parents to know what they’re teaching their children. It’s even why the deny they’re even teaching it.

It is time we speak frankly about the state of affairs. The doctrine teaching untruths to our children is critical race theory. The CRT pushers tell us it’s not being taught to children. In the same breath, they tell us that those who seek to remove it from public school curricula are racist. Their doublespeak is noise designed to obscure the signal. Our purpose here, as in most times and places, is to improve the signal:noise ratio in order to live in light and truth. Removing neoracism from our schools is not about free speech and academic freedom. The appeal to free speech and academic freedom is noise because it is a false appeal. Our republican institutions have been captured and corrupted by a technocratic elite who serve corporate power. When the illiberal appeal to liberal freedoms, the cynicism is palpable. There is no freedom to indoctrinate children in ideology. It’s why the Founding Fathers separated Church and State.

Our struggle is nothing less than saving the American republic. We must return to our children a curriculum based on civil rights and the ethic of individualism—which are the same things. This will require legislative and popular action.

One last thing. There are voices who will tell you that it’s more complicated than this, that I am oversimplifying things. They will try to pull you back into orbit around a world they have constructed with jargon and slogans. I’m a professional sociologist who has studied racism and social history for more than a quarter century. I’m well-acquainted with the formulas of critical theory. I have also studied religion. Like any system of religious scripture, critical race theory is designed to obscure truth and it meant only for the clerics to translate. Our role is to join the congregation, receive the wisdom of the priest, take up the rituals, affirm the commandments, and sit and stand on direction. Yes, there are details here and there, but at its core it’s really not more complicated than that. Nor is it mysterious and novel. You’re already familiar with the way this sort of thing works. It’s an old story. We have already written a new one.

A hallmark of fascism is pathological fear of disease.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 23, 2021

The state has become parens patriae. That’s Latin for “father of the people.” Of course, the state must look out for children, the disabled, and the elderly if others cannot. But under the cover of COVID-19 hysteria, the principle is being extended to cover everybody but those in the Inner Party and selected functionaries. You will lose “privileges” (a euphemism for liberties and rights) if you do not do as you are told. Your “privileges” are contingent upon obeying the father. You may have received this form of punishment as a child. It’s the way convicts are treated. We call it “reform” or “rehabilitation” in the criminal justice system. When it’s applied to the general population it bears another name: fascism.

Fascism comes with numerous markers. But you have to know what to look for. “It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated!” goes out the slogan. But the hospitals are filling with fully vaccinated people with COVID-19, you point out (because you care to be informed and not appear gullible). So the powers-that-be change the definition of fully vaccinated. You need three shots to be fully vaccinated. Next you will need four shots. And then five shots. And so on. In other words, there are no fully vaccinated people really. There never really were. There are only people who keep getting in line for shots and those who resent being scammed, many of latter whom feel they have no other choice but to go alone. That’s not really a choice, of course. Mandates force people to do what the father tells them.

First, the Ministry of Truth changes the definitions of “immunity” and “vaccine.” Now Minitrue is changing the definition of “fully vaccinated.” Tomorrow Minitrue will tell us the term has always been defined this way. Most of the proles of Airstrip One will take it in stride thanks to doublethink. Empty shelves at the supermarket? The national economy is healthy. And so on. It’s doubleplusgood! “We’re doing our part.” How did Bill Maher put it? “I’m taking one for the team.” (You’re still on the wrong team, Bill.)

Control over information is vital in the establishment of the Ministry of Truth. In a free society, when somebody is saying something that others think is wrong, somebody will usually object and a discussion will ensue and people will learn things. With fact-checking, when somebody is saying something that the powers-that-be think is wrong, somebody in authority will label the post “false” or “partially-false” and there will be no discussion. Those who were likely to discuss matters will instead stand on either side of a claim and watch the powers-that-be determine the fate of whatever the claim may be. Fact-checking dumbs down and limits interaction. It treats social media users like elementary school students who need to be corrected by the teacher. And the teacher only has a bachelors degree and a lesson plan with no depth or detail. And an agenda she learned in professional development camp.

Massive, powerful display of protest against vaccine passports in Bern, Switzerland. The protesters wear yokes to symbolize the desire of the ruling class to treat workers like livestock that they can drug at will.pic.twitter.com/qq9z5gVxef

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) October 23, 2021

Because the establishment media won’t show you the protests occurring throughout the world in resistance to the fascist vaccine mandates, I will (see above). Letting people know they are not alone is about manifesting what we call in science “mutual knowledge.” Mutual knowledge is essential for building power among those upon whom illegitimate power is being imposed. When people don’t know that others think like they do, when they believe they are all alone in the world, they start to feel as if they are in the wrong. They can even start feeling like they are losing their sanity. That’s the point of marginalization and ridicule when it’s aimed downwards (power is by definition unequal, so you have no ethical responsibility to resist marginalizing and ridiculing the powerful).

https://t.co/9SMk9lIJa9

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 24, 2021

For those of you who recognize what’s happening for what it is—it is fascism—know that you are not losing your mind. The power elite, their attack dogs working the institutions and the irregulars working the popular front, are trying to gaslight you by keeping you in the dark and making you feel alone and wrong. This is a standard strategy of power, characteristic of totalitarian governments who control what you see and hear because they know they increase the likelihood of either controlling what you think or cowing you with this method. Unfortunately, the method is very powerful and it has gotten to quite a lot of our comrades.

You hear and see the gaslighting in memes about “conspiracy theory.” I’m sure you have seen the images of people wearing tinfoil hats and so forth. People who share these memes, while they may seem quite intelligent and compassionate otherwise, are shallow sadists who push corporate state propaganda. You can know them by their works. Consider this article from NBC News by Brandy Zadrozny: “‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users.” It sports an image of a rabbit in a hole surrounded by a steel trap and emoticons strewn about.

The story is damned condescending. Here’s the premise: you’re a bunch of proles who can’t think for yourselves—for sure you can’t be trusted to think the right thoughts. I’ve had this trick tried on me—I’ve been “radicalized” because people are just now discovering that I don’t operate according to checked boxes and approved slogans. What are the right thoughts? You can know by what they think the “radicalized” thoughts are. You’ll find there (and them) what Antonio Gramsci conceptualized as “hegemony.” Hegemony comes with both a velvet glove and an iron fist. Just ask yourself, “Who do they platform, promote, stroke, and privilege?” Alternatively, you can ask yourself, “Who do they marginalize, censor, discipline, and punish?”

NBC News is handing readers a template for action. A big part of the reason people will run with this, will become part of the fascist order of things, is because they possess an authoritarian personality. They enjoy lording power over others, and since they have no real power themselves, they stand with the manifestation of power they believe is most efficacious, which in the current period is corporate state power. They are just like those who, in early periods and in other cultures, theocratic ones, stand with the religious clerics in persecuting the disbelievers. They enjoy burning witches. Those who are smeared as “conspiracy theorists” are the disbelievers, the freethinkers. They do not accept the line of the power elite. As it should be in a free world. Be a freethinker. You are not alone.

Freedom is what we are told to run from. “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID,” former vice-president Joe Biden mockingly told a CNN town hall filled with plants. “Experts say vaccines mandates for COVID-19 infringe on individual freedoms, but may be necessary to protect public health,” writes Zaheena Rasheed for Aljazeera, in an article pushed out by the establishment news aggregators. Zaheena reflects the establishment admission that the mandates indeed infringe on individual liberty, which is where freedom lives. But mandates can’t possibly be necessary if (1) the coronavirus does not present a threat to the general population (it does not); (2) the vaccine does not confer significant immunity (it does not); (3) the risk : benefit ratio is to the detriment of children and young adults (it is). The facts make this obvious: there is no public health reason warranting mandates. COVID-19 mandates and passports are profoundly unethical and their advocacy from a public health standpoint is irrational. There has to be an ulterior motive. And it can only be sinister.

We got a dose of the sinister this morning when The New York Post reported that the former vice-president signed a memo blaming COVID-19 for postponement of the scheduled release of the assassination records of President John Fr. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, Texas in 1963, likely the result of a conspiracy according to conclusions reached by the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1979. In 1992, Congress ruled that “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy . . . should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.” Does it need to be pointed out that 1992 was a long time ago? Friday’s White House memo tells us that “continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

COVID-19 hysteria has become a master justification for a vast range of corporate state actions that work at cross-purposes with the fundamental tenets of a democratic society. We are seeing the socialization of totalitarian methods of mass social control. Fear and sadism are essential for its successful implementation.

* * *

The CDC is telling you that a COVID-19 vaccine is a magic talisman that protects you from everything. I refuse to live in the land of the absurd. I’m not kidding. Maggie Fox of CNN reports, People vaccinated against Covid-19 less likely to die from any cause, study finds.

Do you know why the vaccinated have better outcomes? They are healthier than those who do not get vaccinated to begin with.

We are seeing truth slowly appearing by percentage point decline (see link below). How low can it go? I’m talking about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy. After only a few months, most of the protection goes away. And it wasn’t very good to begin with. Just as Dr. Robert Malone (the inventor of the mRNA platform) told us, this is a leaky vaccine with poor durability. The general population was exploited as a leg in the experimental trial for these vaccines and the trial hasn’t gone well at all. Indeed, it has exposed corporate science as more of religion than science. Tragically—shamefully, really—a multitude still have faith.

https://canberranationalreview.com/health/blistering-video-documents-in-meticulous-detail-how-official-media-and-public-health-statements-gradually-walked-back-c0v-vaxxine-efficacy-from-100-to-under-33/

Authoritarianism is a giant snowball rolling downhill. Or a mudslide. Pick your metphor. The point is that, once it gets going, it picks up momentum and grows ever larger, increasing its capacity to flatten whatever stands in its path. That’s why you have to stop it early—or make sure it never gets rolling. There are those who will call you Chicken Little (and other names). But the “slippery slope fallacy” is not a fallacy. If a camel is in your tent, you can be fairly certain it started with his nose.

That the threat to democracy, freedom, and rights is the work of progressives in all of this must not escape your attention. It’s not a camel. It’s a donkey. This puts the lie to the claim that authoritarianism is a rightwing, populist, or nationalist phenomenon. Authoritarianism today is for the most part a leftwing, progressive, and globalist juggernaut. It’s one thing when you ask others to take a medicine you have faith in. It’s another thing altogether when governments and organizations mandate those under their control take the medicine. And when those claiming virtue side with oppressive power.

But we mustn’t blame only technocracy. One common feature of authoritarianism irrespective of its ideological stripe is acquiescence of the rank-and-file citizens that enables governments and organizations to implement policies that violate democratic freedoms and human rights. Authoritarianism is not just a character flaw of the elites who would oppress a population, but those who seek such oppression and moreover desire that this oppression to be visited upon others. My comrades, lovers of liberty and rights, don’t seek or side with oppressive power. I know it’s scary, but the enemy is all around us. Don’t let it conscript you into its ranks.

Authoritarianism is a feature of both the sadist and the masochist. I carry empathy for those who suffer under the thumb of power. But I cannot respect those who wish for themselves and others to suffer so. This is not a subjective matter. Oppression is an objective condition and it’s happening all around us. Right now. And all around us are those who welcome it. Support for the COVID-19 vaccine mandates is as clear a signal that can be sent about where people stand. It’s time to start putting people on notice.

* * *

So there’s a new variant in England and the “experts” are calling on the government to lock everything down again. The interesting thing about this is that England is one of the most vaccinated nations in the world, with more than 68 percent of the population fully vaccinated. England has suffered a persistent wave of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. And now there is a more infectious mutation. It’s almost as if (as we see with Vermont) that the greater proportion of the population is vaccinated the more COVID-19 cases there are. It’s almost as if there is a problem with the vaccine (ADE) or something, or at least the vaccine isn’t working (see Mass Vaccination Doesn’t Work).

Have you heard of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). I have been sounding the alarm about this phenomenon for months now (The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). I am noting it again to keep it fresh in your consciousness, so when you hear about it at some point in the media you will be, “Oh, wait, I’ve heard something about that before.” I hope it doesn’t happen, but if we see another surge on the back of the boosters, which will soon be art of these mandates and passports, the phenomenon will be difficult to ignore. (Take a look at that blog of mine, now three months old, and see how predictive it was.)

Of course, part of this could be marketing to push boosters. I imagine an internal company memo that looks something like this: “After extensive focus group testing, the COVID-19 marketing department has determined that the planned novel Greek name for the latest antibody-dependent enhancement did not generate levels of fear response sufficient to move product, so we are relying on the proven fear contagion ‘Delta’ with the modifier ‘even more infectious.’ Notify your subordinates of the change and follow up.” I shared this bit of satire on social media. It may be the best explanation for what we are about to see.

https://t.co/WNVfIJFVAF

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 22, 2021

Some politicians are honest. Maybe not all the time. But here is one of those times. This admission completely obviates the argument for mandates. The only rational argument for universal vaccination could be (and there are still hurdles) that it prevents infection and transmission of a virus representing a serious threat to the general population (something like smallpox, which kills a third of those whom it infects). If one argues that you must take a vaccine to protect your person from severe disease and death, then that opens the door to the state controlling what you eat and how much exercise you get and all the rest of it. And that makes you none other than pathetic Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (“6079 Smith W.”) standing in front of a telescreen doing your morning calisthenics to a virtual instructor remotely barking commands. And that’s what we call totalitarianism.

* * *

If you’re unvaccinated and haven’t gotten sick from SARS-CoV-2, that doesn’t mean you have avoided infection. It’s unlikely that you haven’t been repeatedly exposed to the virus. You have likely contracted the virus, were asymptomatic, or had mild symptoms, and have acquired natural immunity. That means that many of those vaccinated are already immune. Thus is surely a confounding factor in the statistics on vaccine efficacy. In other words, a significant proportion of those who are vaccinated are not getting sick, even with more infectious variants, because they have natural immunity. There is that other confound, the problem of ADE. The point is, at this point, a rational person can’t have any confidence is what the technocracy is telling you. The public health apparatus has been completely captured by corporate state scientism.

* * *

Finally, I have had enough with these memes about smallpox (for the history there, see The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes). Measles, polio, and smallpox vaccines are irrelevant to the question of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Those other vaccines are not analogous on grounds of public health and you either don’t know why (which I don’t know how you couldn’t) or you’re arguing in bad faith.

The COVID-19 vaccine mandate is analogous to the government mandating influenza vaccines for adults, which we don’t generally do (although there are some alarming tendencies in this direction), and which makes little sense from a public health standpoint. Flu vaccines are leaky and lack durability. They are unnecessary for most people, and widespread usage impedes natural immunity, which is more robust with greater durability.

For children, the COVID-19 vaccine would be analogous to an adenovirus or a rhinovirus vaccine mandate—if those vaccines existed (and one suspects they’re on their way). Mandating a rhinovirus vaccine would be as absurd as the coronavirus vaccine mandate. Rhinovirus (and its ninety-nine serotypes), like coronavirus and other cold viruses, is common and relatively harmless in children. Infection moreover primes and develops the immune system. Influenza is more dangerous for children than any of those viruses including coronavirus.

I don’t get many colds these days, but when I do, I know cross-immunity (or cross-reactivity), where the degree of similarity among families of respiratory viruses is such that prior exposure to one confers at least partial immunity to others, protects me to against other variants and reduces my chances of developing severe disease.

All those adenoviruses, coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses, and even influenza viruses, that I contracted over the years, especially as a kid, means my immune system is strong and ready to withstand most of the bugs it confronts as I head into old age (I will be sixty in a few months). I don’t get many colds and flus these days because of all the colds and flus I got as a kid. I hated them, but that’s the way the immune system works—it must be primed and developed and the unpleasantness of it all is the sign of good work being accomplished.

If vaccines are developed for all the unpleasant bugs we get but survive, and they are widely taken up or mandated, the practice will collectively impoverish the human immune system. The only reason to do such a thing would be to make investors in Big Pharma rich. And that is why they’re doing it for COVID-19 and will for future vaccines if we don’t stop them. Vaccine mandates will be counterproductive to the health of the species.

Public health is not really public health anymore, but a scheme to funnel money to Big Pharma. But there is something much more terrible in all of this. Religion developed in large measure as magical armor to protect against the arsenal of nature where practical science could not. People, scared and superstitious, believed survival required ritual action. Fear of disease comes from the same place, only science—Prometheus unbound—has largely replaced religion as the magical armor. As destructive as it can be, religion never built a hydrogen bomb or hijacked the transcription machinery of the human cell to produce endogenously lethal toxins with injected strands of human-sequenced nucleotides.

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Follow me on Twitter @andrewwaustin.

In the face of Antifa/BLM protests, Seattle councilmembers pledged to slash the police budget by half but backtracked after police resisted. There was a budget reduction of about eighteen percent, but it minimized the effects by pursuing strategies such as moving parking enforcement out of the budget (Trumm 2020). Not exactly what the activists were seeking with budget reductions. 

But that did enough it seems. Perhaps not incidentally, the state of Washington set a record for homicides in 2020, with Seattle’s homicide rate increasing almost 70 percent over 2019 (Westneat 2021). This year looks to be just as bad—if not worse. By the end of August, there were more homicides in Seattle than in all of 2019 (King 2021). Heather Mac Donald warned in The War on Cops (2016) that this is the predictable consequence of depolicing and the “Ferguson effect.”

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Data on lethal police-civilian encounters show that a majority of those killed by the police are white, not nonwhite. Twice as many white men are killed by the police every year than are black men. The Washington Post database, which reports that half of those shot by police are white (the majority of those killed by the police are therefore not persons of color), gets to that statistic by separating out Hispanics from whites. Two-thirds of Hispanics identify as white.  (White and black are racial categories, whereas Hispanic is an ethnic category. Most Hispanics are white, while a minority identify as black, American Indian, and Asian.) So, while it is a common belief in American society that the police kill more minorities than whites, it is not true. 

Moreover, while it is true that black Americans are shot by police at a disproportionate rate (take care not to confuse statistical abstractions with frequencies), statistical evidence of racial disparities by itself is insufficient to infer causation, in this case racism. It is a common error to conflate racial disparity (in education, housing, income, etc.) with racial bias. When the relevant evidence is considered, researchers do not generally find systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters. I have covered the topic extensively one Freedom and Reason. I provide a few of those sources here for your convenience: Roland Fryer (2019) finds no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are considered when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force, i.e., officer-involved shootings. Joseph Cesario and colleagues (2018) find, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. The authors conclude that, when analyzing all shootings, that exposure to police, given crime rate differences, accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks. Brandon Tregle and colleagues (2018) finds that, when focusing on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, blacks appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers.

Nor is the claim that US criminal justice overall is systemically racist supported by the facts. We have known this for more than thirty years. In 1987, William Wilbanks published a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers. Among the specific areas considered in his analysis are provisions of counsel, police deployment, use of deadly force, bail decisions, plea bargaining, sentencing patterns, and inmate classification and discipline. Wilbanks finds that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system, there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of systematic racism against blacks in the criminal justice system. Wilbanks summarizes: “At every point, from arrest to parole, there is little or no evidence of an overall racial effect” (2) The date of publication is significant, as claims that the Reagan presidency had ramped up and generalized racism again were at a fever pitch. A decade later, Sampson and Lauritsen find “little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias” (1997, 331). Keep in mind that, at that time, Robert Sampson was the researcher most critical of “broken windows” and stop-and-frisk (see, e.g., Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). Mac Donald’s The War on Cops, published almost two decades later, confirms these findings.

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Another common belief in circulation is that slave patrols were the forerunner of the modern police. There were slave states that had police agencies at the same time there were slave patrols and the agencies and patrols had different origins and separate functions. The Richmond police department, for example, was one or the first formally organized law enforcement agencies in the nation and was separate from the slave patrols in Virginia. Same with the city of Baltimore in Maryland. Both Virginia and Maryland are southern states. After defeating the CSA in the Civil War, during Reconstruction, the USA abolished slave patrols. The modern police have their origin in industrialization and urbanization and were designed to control the proletariat of all races (see Sheldon and Vasiliev 2018). Modern policing in the United States followed the logic of policing in the Great Britain, which did not practice slavery in the homeland.

Modern police agencies from their inception were bureaucratic in form, made up of full-time employees (not community or militia members), had a chain of command with written rules, procedures, and regulations, and were accountable to a central governmental authority. These agencies do not resemble in form or substance the organization and activities of slave patrols. In contrast, slave patrols were armed white citizens who stopped and questioned slaves about their permits to travel. They were organized and disciplined not in the bureaucratic logic of state governments but were civic organizations apart from the administrative state. 

Were both forms of formal social control? Yes. But formal social control systems with policing functions date back thousands of years. We are concerned with the police forces of modernity. Samuel Walker, who you are also reading this semester, locates the origin of modern policing in the London Metropolitan Police in 1929 and the origins of policing in the United States in the 1830s. To be sure, he recognizes that during the time of chattel slavery until Reconstruction, and even during Jim Crow segregation, the police in the southeastern United States were devoted to upholding the racial status quo. For this reason, Walker argues, “[d]iscussions of American police history should generally distinguish between the southeastern state and the rest of the country” (2016, 642).  

The narrative about the police originating in slave patrols is a paradigm of how ideology can corrupt historiography. The project, whether by intent or effect, is to make America generally appear as having the same culture and sensibilities as the southeastern United States during the period of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. It’s a political narrative. This is not to say that issues are not political. But in social science we proceed on the basis of objectivity. 

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Finally, a point about what we see because of technology and the role of the crowd. It is true that we are taking note of these things because technology—cameras in our phones, cellular communications, social media platforms—allow us to record and share the sights and sounds of civilian-police encounters. However, the risk this poses is that it can make something appear to be a growing problem when in fact they are not. This false perception risks self-fulfilling prophecies. As Mark Fishman (1978) and others since (Barlow, Barlow, and Chiricos 1995; Chiricos 1998; Chiricos, Padgett, and Gertz 2000) have pointed out, in exhaustive research going back years on the phenomenon known as “crime wave as ideology,” mass media feeds moral panic and mass hysteria. 

For a recent look at this, see James Walsh (2020). He writes, “Contra claims of their empowering and deflationary consequences, [investigation into this matter] finds that, on balance, recent technological transformations unleash and intensify collective alarm. Whether generating fear about social change, sharpening social distance, or offering new opportunities for vilifying outsiders, distorting communications, manipulating public opinion, and mobilizing embittered individuals, digital platforms and communications constitute significant targets, facilitators, and instruments of panic production” (from the abstract, which is found here. See also conclusion).” 

Mass media coverage is not only more abundant, but highly selective. A good example of this is the myth that mass shootings are mostly the work of white men. This myth developed rather rapidly, and knowledge of its appearance expressed even by mainstream media outlets. Before Black Lives Matter, prominent publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian discussed the problem of excluding black victims of mass shootings by not counting mass shootings by black perpetrators in the context of inner-city violence (see, e.g., Beckett 2016). 

Indeed, to make it appear as if white men represent most perpetrators of mass shootings, most mass shooting must be excluded from the statistics. What is the definition of a mass shooting? It varies, but it is generally defined as a single incident in which four or more people are shot or killed. In 2020, according to this definition, mass shootings disproportionately occurred in majority-black neighborhoods perpetrated by members of those communities. It is crucial to note that most murder victims are black. Using data tabulated by Statista, of the 17,754 homicides 2020, 9,913 were black. In other words, most (56 percent) of homicides in America were black.

These numbers are startling when considering that most black homicide victims are male and black males comprise only around six percent of the US population. When I tell people these statistics, they admit that they never heard them. This is partly because media coverage does not accurately represent the demographic patterns of homicide in America. A study published in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity about 2016 shooting victims in Chicago found that black people killed in predominantly black neighborhoods received roughly half as much news coverage as white people killed in majority-white neighborhoods (White, Stuart, and Morrissey 2020).

The consequences of selective coverage of crime and control in America leads to distortions of popular consciousness. George Floyd’s death by suffocation at the hands of Minneapolis police officers is known worldwide. The nation watched the trial or awaited the verdict. A white police officer was convicted of murder in that case. However, Tony Timpa’s suffocation death at the hands of Dallas police officers is known to a much smaller number of people. Timpa was a white man. Similarities in the two cases are striking. Selective coverage manufactures the appearance that more unarmed black men are killed by the police than unarmed white men. In fact, it is the other way around. Both Floyd and Timpa were unarmed when police officers killed them. No officers were charged in Timpa’s death. The city of Dalla paid no settlement to Timpa’s family. A judge tossed an excessive force lawsuit against the officers. On what grounds? Qualified immunity. Tony Timpa’s death is largely forgotten. And he is hardly the only one. (See McWhorter, 2020.)

The appearance does something else. Presenting excessive policing as a problem primarily for black America mentally circumscribes the perceived scope of excessive use of force by the police to racist acts against black Americans, and thus keeps whites from knowing the full extent of the police violence affecting the white community (while painting for blacks a bleak and fear-provoking picture that circumscribes their movements in society). To the extent that whites are racist, and let’s assume at least some are, they care less about the risk of excessive force by the police visited upon nonwhites. If they believe excessive force will not be visited upon themselves or upon their friends and relatives, they may have less empathy for those they believe do suffer such excesses. This works against what those of who are concerned about reforming policing in American are trying to accomplish.

Words Cited

Barlow, Melissa, David E. Barlow, and Ted G. Chiricos. 1995. Economic Conditions and Ideologies of Crime in the Media: A Content Analysis of Crime News. Crime and Delinquency 41(1):3-19.

Beckett, Lois. 2016. Most Victims of US mass shootings are black, data analysis finds. The Guardian. May 23. 

Cesario, Joseph, David J. Johnson, and William Terrill. 2018. Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016. Social Psychological and Personality Science 10(5). 

Chiricos, Ted G., Kathy Padgett, and Marc Gertz. 2000. Fear, TV News, and the Reality of Crime. Criminology 38(3):755-786.

Chiricos, Ted G. 1998. Media, Moral Panics and the Politics of Crime Control. Pp 58-75 in Criminal Justice System: Politics and Policies, Seventh Edition, George F. Cole and Marc G. Gertz, eds. Wadsworth.

Goode, Erich. 1994. Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction. Annual Review of Sociology 20:149-171.

Fishman, Mark. 1978. Crime Waves as Ideology. Social Problems 25(5): 531-543

Fryer, Roland G. 2019. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy 127(3).

King, Angela. 2021. Seattle gun violence surges in 2021, as police force dwindles. National Public Radio. August 31.

Mac Donald, Heather. 2016. The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Encounter Books.

McWhorter, John. 2020. Racist Police Violence Reconsidered. Quillette. June.

Sampson, Robert J. and Janet L. Lauritsen. 1997. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States. Crime and Justice 21: 311-374.

Sampson, Robert J. an Stephen Raudenbush. 1999. Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology 105 (3): 603–51.

Sheldon, Randall G. and Pavel V. Vasiliev 2018. Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A History of Criminal Justice in America, Third Edition. Waveland.

Tregle, Brandon, Justin Nix, and Geoffrey Albert. 2018. Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks. Journal of Crime and Justice. 42(6). 

Trumm, Doug. 2020. Seattle City Council Passes 2021 Budget with 18% Cut to Police Department. The Urbanist, November 24.

Walker, Samuel and Carol Archbold. 2019. The New World of Police Accountability, Third Edition. Sage.

Walker, Samuel. Governing the American Police: Wrestling with the Problems of Democracy. 2016. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 2016(1): 615-660.  

Walsh, James P. 2020. Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction. International Journal of Cultural Studies. March. 

Westneat, Danny. 2021. “Don’t have a clue: It turns out Washington state set a murder record in 2020, but no one knows why. The Seattle Times, July 10. 

White, Kailey, Forrest Stuart, and Shannon L. Morrissey. 2020. Whose Lives Matter? Race, Space, and the Devaluation of Homicide Victims in Minority Communities. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. September. 

Wilbanks, William. 1987. The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System. Brooks/Cole.

“Since this body belongs to me for however long I have it….” —Cher

Colin Powell was crucial to creating the mass perception of credibility that allowed Bush and Cheney to sell the lie of WMD in Iraq used to justify the invasion (War Hawks and the Ugly American). So perhaps it is with some irony that his death from COVID-19, despite being fully vaccinated, represents another blow to the credibility of those who claim that, even while admitting the vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus (the main reason for a vaccine), it will still protect you from severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Not if you have the comorbidities associated with hospitalization and death in those who have not been vaccinated.

The establishment press warns that the political right is misusing Powell’s death to spread misinformation about the vaccine. They would like for you to deal in the removed world of statistical inference, in the abstraction calculations of risk. To be sure, risk assessment has its usefulness. Indeed, if you step back and look at the actual risks of this disease, you may start to consider why your freedoms are being systematically taken from you. But, in the end, each person is a concrete reality. Each vaccinated person who is injured by the vaccine or who gets sick, hospitalized, or dies despite having sought out or submitted to the jab is a concrete reality. Each concrete person should be in charge of their own health care decisions.

The news of Powell’s demise comes on the heels of the recent admission that, despite having known about this since August of this year, the efficacy of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine in preventing viral transmission is the neighborhood of 30 percent. The good news is that the immunity is more durable than the mRNA vaccines (and a bit higher, as new evidence on Pfizer reveals). In other words, these mRNA vaccines are really crappy if Johnson & Johnsons is more durable. These statistics are worse than for the flu vaccine, itself a crappy corporate product the crappiness of which many of you have experienced first hand.

Mandating vaccines with poor efficacy and poor outcomes makes no sense. Not from the standpoint of the concrete person. These vaccines will not end the pandemic. The only thing that will end the pandemic short of the virus mutating into a harmless bug (which it already is for the vast majority of the people it infects) is natural-acquired herd immunity, which provides north of twenty-five times the immunity that the vaccines provide. Natural immunity is more durable. Moreover, it is an immunity trained on the entire viral signature, not just a protein strand of one component (spike). A significant proportion of healthy people are just going to have to get this thing—and the younger the better.

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https://twitter.com/Hxnxnah/status/1448440656431656968?s=20

I was trying to help people understand this on another thread but they kept doing what Gupta does in this video. When I watch this I don’t understand how Gupta, who should understand this, and if I am charitable, cannot wrap his head around something so simple. If hardly any young men go to the hospital for COVID-19 complications of every sort, but 85-90 percent of those young men who suffer heart-related complications from the vaccine wind up in the hospital, then it is obvious that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease for this age cohort. Remember, the younger ages were only relatively recently permitted to get the vaccine. The casualties of COVID-19 have been mounting from the beginning—which the media won’t let you forget. If folks can’t see that the argument is over at this point, then continuing the argument is pointless.

Rogan is right. I am right. You don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to understand simple things like this. Others can see this, too—but they will have to quit rationalizing. And stop shilling for Big Pharma. This vaccine is injuring people who don’t need to take the risk. We have to say this. It’s a moral obligation.

Gupta is perfect for CNN, the greatest source of trusted misinformation in operation today. Have you seen the video compilation of the lies they told about Rogan and ivermectin? I share it below CNN is a 24-7 misinformation machine. Why is it on just about everywhere you go? It’s like Big Brother. There are households with CNN on constantly in the background. Turn it off. It’s making you stupid.

* * *

I understand that Merck is set to receive 712 dollars per treatment course for its COVID-19 antiviral pill from the US government—which means from the US taxpayer (past, present, and future). I also understand that the pill costs a fraction of that amount to produce and is reportedly on track for a price of $12 in India. You could, of course, take ivermectin or HCQ, but you will need to move to Nebraska where they allow doctors to treat patients.

What you need to understand is this: US citizens, by paying so much more than cost for heath care in the United States, subsidize cheap health care around the world. “Why can’t we have socialized medicine in the United States?” Because you have to pay for socialized medicine for Europeans. And you have to carry wealthy elites on your back. And you have to open your borders and take in the Third World with all its health care needs, which immigrants receive for free.

Healthcare in the United States is for-profit. And there is no market, so prices are set for reasons other than competition. You live neither under social democracy nor free-market capitalism. You live in a corporate state arrangement, a liminal state between proletarian and serf. This is late capitalism. It’s not sustainable. And we’re on the road to serfdom.

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Professor of education and human development at George Washington University, explains how she needed “somatic embodied training” to “learn that she was white”.

These people are responsible for training new teachers. pic.twitter.com/yXBv2KV7VW

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) October 18, 2021

This is in the style of testimonials religious converts and addicts in recovery share. Please know that I am not knocking religious conversion or addiction work. I am making a social psychological observation. Being white is not a problem as long as society is going to treat people in terms of their racial categories. The problem is treating people in terms of racial categories.

Another problem is the explanation of critical race theory I share below. As I have shown readers of Freedom and Reason, critical race theory is not Neo-Marxist (see Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening). It’s Neo-Hegelian. It’s not aimed at cultural revolution to advance the socialist agenda. Quite the contrary. CRT is a rearticulation of that old tactic of manufacturing racial divisions for the sake of perpetuating capitalist power.

Critical race theory is not Neo-Marxist. It’s Neo-Hegelian. It’s not aimed at cultural revolution to advance the socialist agenda. Quite the contrary. CRT is a rearticulation of that old tactic of manufacturing racial divisions for the sake of perpetuating capitalist power. https://t.co/MWtzPSXBZV

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 18, 2021

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FAIR has become fringe (for a while now). See this article, for example. The organization have lost touch with the ordinary working class American. The framing of this story is highly revealing. The way progressivism, a projection of corporate governance, is portrayed as somehow on the side of workers, that organized labor represents the interests of the working class as a whole rather than serving an extension of the establishment to manufacture consensus among the middle-class professional fraction of the proletariat (represented by the Democratic Party in the US and Labour in the UK)—this is a project to deepen corporate hegemony.

All the assumptions underpinning the frame are no longer valid in a world where transnational capital controls what appears as mass leftwing politics. This piece is an instantiation of my point about the importance of understanding the real bifurcation in western politics as between populism (democratic, liberal, republican) and progressivism (technocratic, authoritarian, globalist). This piece is establishment propaganda. Perhaps unconsciously. But nonetheless in practice.

Related. Must see TV:

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Samuel Huntington, famous (or notorious) for his “clash of civilization” thesis, in his 1968 Political Order in Changing Societies determined that the United States and the Soviet Union represented successful models of imposing order on their populations, in contrast to underdeveloped countries, where the lack of stable authority explained their relative lack of economic and technological progress. Indeed, there was much to admire in the Soviet model, according to Huntington. In contrast, the United States, as evidenced by the chaos of the 1960s (anti-war protests, race riots, second-wave feminism, student radicals), was a nation in decline, and liberty and democracy without authority and obedience was the reason.

Based on these insights, Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Trilateral Commission tapped Huntington to pen a chapter on the “excess of democracy” for The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. Huntington stated directly what conservatives mean in their appeal to military prowess, law and order criminal justice, and the unitary executive: the problem is not “the authority of central government institutions” per se, or its analogs in the corporate world, but the character of the authority that’s emplaced.

The actual concern of the rightwing of the establishment then was not that the cultural left would unleash human nature, which their Hobbesian formulations seemed to suggest, the existence and character of which they accuse the left of denying (not without reason), but that it will substitute one overarching authority with another. Now that the establishment has incorporated the cultural left into the transnational project, the overarching authority comes wrapped in what the cultural conservative feared. And so populism has become a space for refugees—and an opportunity for what remains of the authentic left to expand its working class ranks. (I thought I might end on a hopeful note.)

I received a question from a student several days ago concerning a lecture I gave on Karl Marx and the materialist conception of history. Contextualizing Marx in my approach involves a discussion of those figures who inspired Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, namely Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, as well as the impact of Darwin on sociological thought, especially in the work of Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.” Darwin and Spencer were contemporaries of Marx. They even lived in the same country (England) and were witnessing and experiencing the same conditions. Although Marx agreed with Darwin on natural history, he rejected the evolutionary approach as useful for understanding human history. Therefore, his theory of historical change and development was much at odds with Spencer’s.

I think readers of Freedom and Reason will benefit from my answer, which follows the question reproduced below (the student’s name withheld) and is only slightly modified for the reader here. The student’s question has in back of it class discussion about social Darwinism as summarized above. Here’s the question (slightly edited to fix punctuation): “I just had a quick question about Thomas Malthus’ argument on systems of inequality. Would being born into a rich family be an example of this, or a continuation of this idea? People born into families with wealth are inherently not equal to those born in impoverished families. Going off that note, do you think he would include racial inequalities into that? Due to the redlining and block busting, African American’s did not have much equity leaving them disproportionately poor, and the effects are still seen today. So, if someone is born into an African American family, they are then at a disadvantage due to the systematic racism that caused inequality in commodities between Whites and African Americans.”

The logic of Darwinism is that variation in any population is subject to selective pressures in the environment (which includes sexual selection). For natural history (or biological evolution), the variation is gene-based and inherited via the reproductive process shaped by fitness. For social history, the variation is based on social factors. The selective pressure becomes much more complex, however. It is multifactorial. Moreover, applying the logic of natural selection to social history is problematical.

It is true that those born to poor families are more likely to be poor over the life course and in this sense poverty is inherited—not biologically but socially. Intergenerational poverty may therefore be explicable in terms of what we call cumulative disadvantage. This is a matter of social class and property relations. If offspring are allowed to inherit their parent’s wealth, then class inequality will persist. I support inheritance to a degree, since enhancing the life chances of children motivates parents to invest in their own success (this is true whatever the mode of production). At the same time, I believe in taxation and government policy that expands opportunities for all families to succeed. The question is what the appropriate public policy is to make this happen. We are not doing a very good job with this now. 

The picture becomes complicated with race. There are wealthy and high-income black families. Tens of millions of blacks enjoy high status position in American society. There are black academics, capitalists, high-wage workers, managers, professionals, etc. At the same time, there are tens of millions of poor whites. In fact, there are many more times the number of poor whites in the United States than poor blacks. Statistically speaking, i.e., in the abstract, blacks are disproportionately poor compared to whites (there are more whites overall than blacks). But we must avoid perpetuating the myth that whites are rich while blacks are poor.

In my review of explanations for racial disparities, cumulative disadvantage plays some role. Since blacks were at a disadvantaged in the past, the dynamic of inheritance explains some of the grouped differences. But it does not explain all of it. Probably not most of it.

For one thing, the abstract approach risks the ecological fallacy. For example, incomes differences between white and black makes are partly explained by other aggregate trends. For example, the average respective ages of white males and black males is 50-plus versus under-30, with earnings tied to age. Moreover, we are more than five decades removed from systemic privilege based on race. These were abolished in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Other causes of group disparities are 

• Family breakdown. Not having a father in the home disadvantages children in a myriad of ways. This is true for families of every racial category. However, more than three-quarters of black children grow up without a father in the home, a markedly different pattern than for other racial groups. This problem emerges after the abolition of segregation.
• Neighborhood disorganization and crime. Disorder is disruptive to economic development. Blacks are drastically overrepresented in serious criminal offending. These problems are exacerbated by family breakdown—and in turn contribute to family breakdown. Family and neighborhood are deeply interconnected.
• Globalization (offshoring) and mass immigration. Cheap foreign labor drives down wages for all workers, as well as displaces native workers. Because of the split-labor market in low-wage sectors, globalization has disproportionately affected native black and brown labor.
• The maintenance of a custodial society that pays people not to work and save. Public assistance, while at times necessary, becomes a system of social control in high-poverty areas. Without jobs and income, there is nothing to pass on to children. By idling a segment of the working class, public policy disadvantages future generations in a myriad of ways. Humans learn by example. Idleness and dependency are bad examples.

To address demographic differences, we must therefore look at cultural tradition and public policy in addition to the class and economics question. Unfortunately, political ideology precludes frank discussion of the causes of racial disparities in wealth and income. Progressives lay the blame on racism (indeed, often fallaciously redefining racial disparities as racism itself) and conservatives lay the blame on cultural factors (because they are loathe to blame capitalism). An objective examination of the problem requires a multifactorial approach.

Moreover, a comprehensive account of inequality in the United States requires an explanation that includes the circumstances of whites. I doubt very many people are aware that most poor people in America are white. The media portrays poverty as a black problem, thus distorting the problem of poverty in America. Joe Biden’s famous gaff about poor kids being just as smart as white kids, made in a discussion about black-white differences in poverty, has in back of it the assumption that blacks are poor and whites are not.

Among the solutions to the problem of economic inequality are these: reshoring industries, investment in (real) infrastructure, which includes jobs programs, a radical reorganization of the educational system, which includes training for the reshored industries, and a comprehensive approach to crime reduction.