Love it! The absolute best thing to come out of the covid years is this massive political re-alignment centered around first principles. I would love for Democrats to re-assert their desire to protect free speech - and not just when they're out of the White House. I certainly don't like my free speech rights hinging on the intestinal fortitude of Republicans.
My moment came when I learned that my 14 year old daughter was using a boy’s name and pronouns at school. I had always vaguely believed that there was some really tiny percentage of people who believed from birth that they were the opposite sex and whose psychological characteristics were more like that sex, so there must be something biological about it. But my daughter was a doll-loving, dress-wearing typical girl for 14 years, so this did not compute. All mainstream information was incredibly intellectually dishonest and didn’t explain anything at all, just tried to drown me in rainbows and unicorns. It disgusted me how obvious the lies were.
So I went looking for information that could explain it, and found alternative spaces like Substack where people were telling the truth. Not all of them, of course, you still have to use your brain to figure out what makes sense and is backed by evidence. But it reminded me of reading a newspaper 30 years ago.
Once you start to realize how badly you’ve been lied to, you start to wonder what else you’ve believed that isn’t true. How many of my previous opinions about Trump were simply manipulated? (And I wasn’t even a democrat, just a moderate who’d left the Republican Party to become independent over Trump!) The whole house of cards tumbled down as the propaganda became obvious.
Thanks for writing this! It really resonated with me. As the propaganda machine overreaches more and more, more people are affected personally and start to question the narrative, breaking the spell. I think everyone is only one event away from realizing they’ve been lied to. It seems we’ve reached critical mass now. The Constitution worked, because they were unable to completely shut down the opposing viewpoints that broke the spell for so many of us. Without the Constitution they would have completely seized power over all information before they started affecting a significant number of people. Then it would have been too late.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an essay, Bread and the Newspaper, in 1861, about how the Civil War had very quickly completely taken over peoples' thoughts. "THIS is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace" is how he begins the essay. It's easily findable online. Not about censorship, but Holmes is very on-target for our times, describing how a single motivator can overwhelm you, and prompt you to believe that censorship of your opponents is necessary and virtuous.
A couple excerpts:
"How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive."
"Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?"
Nice to hear from you again, Arne! Thank you for these excellent suggestions. I think part of it too, is moralizing, rather than trying to solve a problem (even if you have the moral high ground). Because an easy way to get “your way” is to make it the only way, by turning it into a morality play. But that necessarily radicalizes your opponent, just prolonging the impasse (even while it may look like it has passed).
And moralizing could prompt you to believe the problem is urgent and unresolved, because as long as the problem remains, you can keep feeling good about how you're fighting for justice, love, peace, kindness. "The moral equivalent of war," right?
Wow. This is everything, right here - thank you(!!!!) This speech by Trump is a takedown of the whole censorship industrial complex. I thought RFK was exaggerating when he wrote it should earn Trump a spot on Mt Rushmore, but, actually, really - speech is the foundation of everything ...
I hope Trump and Vance are not in the same location til after the inauguration ... that lying narrative that killed and maimed so many is done ... : ) !!!!!
That speech is incredible. I didn’t realize it had been on his site since 2022. It is so thorough in how it will handle the problems, that it really makes me hopeful. I considered adding it as the post script for the post, but then decided to do another with it :) thanks for adding!
Oh wow. I hope she is all right now. That is so maddening. It does seem like it has to be one person at a time, unfortunately. But that is how most things work, I suppose.
(Also, I really want the rainbow back for kids, not polluted with sexuality).
I work in cybersecurity. One of the things that seriously irritates me about EIP stuff is how they hijacked what should have been a good an uncontroversial idea for taking down criminal activity (romance scams, phishing etc.) and co-opted it so that it was used to censor political stuff and then later Wuflu related medical stuff.
Having a central place where you can report and take down the criminal scammers and phishers was a really good idea that people I know worked on, starting in about 2012. It took them a good five years to get through all the federal government bureaucracy and empire building and set up, essentially, the jira system EIP used. It could have been done in a week if there hadn't been empire building bureaucrats putting up pointless roadblocks in terms of process.
Anyway they get the thing set up and Alex Stamos, who had been CISO at Facebook when the concept got started, waltzed in and hjijacked it to use it for censorship. Not that many people knew that at the time (I didn't) so we blithely recommended and used the CISA data without knowing that it had been compromised.
I figured something was iffy during the Wuflu because the list of "fake COVID" sites was laughably wrong but my assumption was that this was just a one off. I was wrong and I'm still very angry about that
Absolutely. I noticed as I went through the Jira tickets from EIP that many were reasonable. Interesting how over time it just gets more and more abused. The VP stuff is mostly wrong, and then it just seems to get worse and more egregious from there.
Bureaucrats are often a part of the problem if not the problem. Their like demi Gods who try to act like Gods b/c the Fed Gov has little to no checks & balances. With teh advent of the Tesla Optimus 3 robot I'm all for replacing every GD one of these bureaucrats with a robot.
Right there with you. First time I voted a straight ticket in my life. Usually I vote libertarian for president and swing back and forth on Congress depending on who's more aligned with me in the moment. Not this time.
1) if there are both Republican and Democrat running for the position, vote Republican.
2) If there is no Republican running, vote for almost anyone over the Democrat (even the Green and Communist party are at least more honest, if just as horrible)
3) If there is no Democrat running, vote for any of the vaguely "non horrible" third parties (Libertarians, for instance... who could be great, if they could just lose the "only in it for the drugs" contingent, and perhaps put "open borders" AFTER "getting other countries to not suck" instead of before).
It's a really easy rubric to follow. It would be really nice if the Republicans followed their stated political ideology more often, as then I would feel better about voting for them... Alas, politicians, BLARG.
I'm not trying to be a jerk about this but America is not a liberal Democracy; it's not even just a Democracy. It never has been and never was meant to be. We have democratic like processes but we are not a Democracy and every time someone says we are, even if they mean well, they are helping perpetuate a lie. When a lie like that is allowed to go on long enough the lie becomes accepted truth over time as has happened with this lie that we are a Democracy.
I recently read a really great book that came out this year called Framed, about women (it has happened to men) who are coercively controlled by abusers (it might not be physical abuse) and lose custody of their kids. I personally know one of the mothers features in this book, and while ALL woman (and parents) shouldn't be believed ALL of the time ALL family court complaints should be taken seriously because MANY victims tell the truth. The book Framed explains that coercive controllers use a process called DARVO to gaslight their victims. I'll just quote here from a top google explanation: "Deny
The abuser denies any wrongdoing or accountability for their actions. For example, they might say "Are you kidding? That's not what happened".
Attack
The abuser attacks the victim's character, intelligence, motivation, mental health, or emotional stability. For example, they might say "You're overreacting".
Reverse Victim and Offender
The abuser shifts the roles of victim and offender, making the victim feel like the abuser. For example, they might say "You know how hard it is for me to trust someone and then you do this to me".
I am bringing all this up to say, in reading many Democrat responses to the election results, some are good and really looking for answers--and some are DARVO. Accusing the Republicans of censorship, totalitarianism, taking away freedoms and bodily autonomy...I'm seeing lots of D responses that read as denial, attacking Rs, pretending to being the real victims and accusing the Rs of everything they have done. Many of the top Ds are acting like coercive controllers, and many of the Ds believing what they are being sold are, though they don't know it, reminding me of coercive control victims.
It's interesting to learn how so many of us former NPR types had specific moments when we finally saw the snow for what it was. It's also interesting to see that others also gravitated toward primary sources and works on the rise of authoritarianism.
They were able to come very close to successfully executing their fake pandemic b/c at that point they had not yet risked that level of exposure. The media was already self-exposing itself trying to get Trump out of office and keep him out but the Feds had not yet tried something risky enough that if it failed they'd have lost their chance to do something like it again for at least a generation or 2. This is why their attempts with the monkeypox non-sense and their push to try and revive the covid hysteria are failing. The percentage of the public that would go along with a repeat of covid even if by another name is too low to have a chance at success unless the virus was something truly nasty a real killer and not something they have to spend billions on in marketing to convince people to be afraid of it.
They failed with covid not b/c the public got wise but because they bet on the wrong horse. A lot of people claim covid was intentionally released but I believe it was either an accidental leak or China released it for whatever reason but I don't believe the US government or any of it's allies intentionally did this. You can tell by how they initially reacted. At first they treated covid like it was a nothing burger and within a month they did a 180. Why? Someone saw covid as an opportunity not to be wasted. Problem is it wasn't lethal enough so they had to spend billons on marketing fear to the public which worked initially but could not be maintained over time b/c the virus kept mutating and getting LESS lethal.
There were 3 primary goals for the covid pandemic.
1) Install a physical monitoring & checkpoint system. The vaccine passport.
2) Obtain the precedence that during an emergency the government can force drug the population and outright violate Constitutional rights. All because they declared an emergency.
3) Eliminate as many non-corporates owned/controlled business as possible. This was mainly to get buy-in from the fortune 500 entities but also to continue their own going efforts of wealth re-distribution.
Of these only #3 was what you'd call successful. They got #1 in a few major cities but nothing close to what is necessary to force it everywhere else and in an authoritarian state like China you have a physical checkpoint/monitoring system in place to control the masses. Now their trying to do this with CBDC; controlling the movement of money instead of people. They initially got away with #2 but once cases worked their way thru the courts that changed.
Let this sink in; %81 of Americans got at least 1 covid jab. That's 4 out of every 5 people. That's alarming. I don't think people realize just how dangerously close we came to being permanently converted into a police state like nation. The pandemic was a power grab, plain & simple. Yes some industries greatly profited but that was a side benefit and a means to get buy in from a number of large entities in the private sector. Many want o believe it was just about money and I can see why they'd believe that since a number of people did get rich off of this. Had that been all this was about you would not have seen the level of ongoing coordination between all levels of government over the long haul.
Had covid been truly lethal, as bad as they tried to claim, we'd have not had the level of resistance needed to stop them and they would have gotten all 3 goals.
Thanks, yeah, I didn’t realize that I started a book :)
Love it! The absolute best thing to come out of the covid years is this massive political re-alignment centered around first principles. I would love for Democrats to re-assert their desire to protect free speech - and not just when they're out of the White House. I certainly don't like my free speech rights hinging on the intestinal fortitude of Republicans.
Amazing article!
My moment came when I learned that my 14 year old daughter was using a boy’s name and pronouns at school. I had always vaguely believed that there was some really tiny percentage of people who believed from birth that they were the opposite sex and whose psychological characteristics were more like that sex, so there must be something biological about it. But my daughter was a doll-loving, dress-wearing typical girl for 14 years, so this did not compute. All mainstream information was incredibly intellectually dishonest and didn’t explain anything at all, just tried to drown me in rainbows and unicorns. It disgusted me how obvious the lies were.
So I went looking for information that could explain it, and found alternative spaces like Substack where people were telling the truth. Not all of them, of course, you still have to use your brain to figure out what makes sense and is backed by evidence. But it reminded me of reading a newspaper 30 years ago.
Once you start to realize how badly you’ve been lied to, you start to wonder what else you’ve believed that isn’t true. How many of my previous opinions about Trump were simply manipulated? (And I wasn’t even a democrat, just a moderate who’d left the Republican Party to become independent over Trump!) The whole house of cards tumbled down as the propaganda became obvious.
Thanks for writing this! It really resonated with me. As the propaganda machine overreaches more and more, more people are affected personally and start to question the narrative, breaking the spell. I think everyone is only one event away from realizing they’ve been lied to. It seems we’ve reached critical mass now. The Constitution worked, because they were unable to completely shut down the opposing viewpoints that broke the spell for so many of us. Without the Constitution they would have completely seized power over all information before they started affecting a significant number of people. Then it would have been too late.
Thank you for this feature article. There's A LOT of work here
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an essay, Bread and the Newspaper, in 1861, about how the Civil War had very quickly completely taken over peoples' thoughts. "THIS is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace" is how he begins the essay. It's easily findable online. Not about censorship, but Holmes is very on-target for our times, describing how a single motivator can overwhelm you, and prompt you to believe that censorship of your opponents is necessary and virtuous.
A couple excerpts:
"How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive."
"Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?"
Nice to hear from you again, Arne! Thank you for these excellent suggestions. I think part of it too, is moralizing, rather than trying to solve a problem (even if you have the moral high ground). Because an easy way to get “your way” is to make it the only way, by turning it into a morality play. But that necessarily radicalizes your opponent, just prolonging the impasse (even while it may look like it has passed).
And moralizing could prompt you to believe the problem is urgent and unresolved, because as long as the problem remains, you can keep feeling good about how you're fighting for justice, love, peace, kindness. "The moral equivalent of war," right?
This is awesome. Thank you!
For me the lying goes back to the '60s. Now we know they lied about US losing the Tet Offensive in 'Nam, when we actually won it.
Much evidence/discussion now about Nixon being set-up and Watergate a fraud on America.
I tend to agree. Guessing probably right after WWII, based on Ike’s farewell.
Yep, Gulf of Tonkin incident as a justification for the Vietnam war as well.
“…anti-mascot…”
A more nuanced word for “scapegoat.” I like it!
Wow. This is everything, right here - thank you(!!!!) This speech by Trump is a takedown of the whole censorship industrial complex. I thought RFK was exaggerating when he wrote it should earn Trump a spot on Mt Rushmore, but, actually, really - speech is the foundation of everything ...
https://rumble.com/v5nxnj2-president-trump-makes-history-defending-free-speech.html
(Although the one thing of concern at the end is different categories for over/ under 18, which surely makes sense, except could be a trojan horse for digital ID ... https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/age-assurance-as-the-trojan-horse?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
I hope Trump and Vance are not in the same location til after the inauguration ... that lying narrative that killed and maimed so many is done ... : ) !!!!!
That speech is incredible. I didn’t realize it had been on his site since 2022. It is so thorough in how it will handle the problems, that it really makes me hopeful. I considered adding it as the post script for the post, but then decided to do another with it :) thanks for adding!
Oh wow. I hope she is all right now. That is so maddening. It does seem like it has to be one person at a time, unfortunately. But that is how most things work, I suppose.
(Also, I really want the rainbow back for kids, not polluted with sexuality).
I work in cybersecurity. One of the things that seriously irritates me about EIP stuff is how they hijacked what should have been a good an uncontroversial idea for taking down criminal activity (romance scams, phishing etc.) and co-opted it so that it was used to censor political stuff and then later Wuflu related medical stuff.
Having a central place where you can report and take down the criminal scammers and phishers was a really good idea that people I know worked on, starting in about 2012. It took them a good five years to get through all the federal government bureaucracy and empire building and set up, essentially, the jira system EIP used. It could have been done in a week if there hadn't been empire building bureaucrats putting up pointless roadblocks in terms of process.
Anyway they get the thing set up and Alex Stamos, who had been CISO at Facebook when the concept got started, waltzed in and hjijacked it to use it for censorship. Not that many people knew that at the time (I didn't) so we blithely recommended and used the CISA data without knowing that it had been compromised.
I figured something was iffy during the Wuflu because the list of "fake COVID" sites was laughably wrong but my assumption was that this was just a one off. I was wrong and I'm still very angry about that
Absolutely. I noticed as I went through the Jira tickets from EIP that many were reasonable. Interesting how over time it just gets more and more abused. The VP stuff is mostly wrong, and then it just seems to get worse and more egregious from there.
Bureaucrats are often a part of the problem if not the problem. Their like demi Gods who try to act like Gods b/c the Fed Gov has little to no checks & balances. With teh advent of the Tesla Optimus 3 robot I'm all for replacing every GD one of these bureaucrats with a robot.
A project for DOGE....
I voted straight Republican ticket because of the Democrats willingness to censor and their anti Second Amendment positions.
Right there with you. First time I voted a straight ticket in my life. Usually I vote libertarian for president and swing back and forth on Congress depending on who's more aligned with me in the moment. Not this time.
Same here
I have a very easy system for voting:
1) if there are both Republican and Democrat running for the position, vote Republican.
2) If there is no Republican running, vote for almost anyone over the Democrat (even the Green and Communist party are at least more honest, if just as horrible)
3) If there is no Democrat running, vote for any of the vaguely "non horrible" third parties (Libertarians, for instance... who could be great, if they could just lose the "only in it for the drugs" contingent, and perhaps put "open borders" AFTER "getting other countries to not suck" instead of before).
It's a really easy rubric to follow. It would be really nice if the Republicans followed their stated political ideology more often, as then I would feel better about voting for them... Alas, politicians, BLARG.
I'm not trying to be a jerk about this but America is not a liberal Democracy; it's not even just a Democracy. It never has been and never was meant to be. We have democratic like processes but we are not a Democracy and every time someone says we are, even if they mean well, they are helping perpetuate a lie. When a lie like that is allowed to go on long enough the lie becomes accepted truth over time as has happened with this lie that we are a Democracy.
Words matter.
I recently read a really great book that came out this year called Framed, about women (it has happened to men) who are coercively controlled by abusers (it might not be physical abuse) and lose custody of their kids. I personally know one of the mothers features in this book, and while ALL woman (and parents) shouldn't be believed ALL of the time ALL family court complaints should be taken seriously because MANY victims tell the truth. The book Framed explains that coercive controllers use a process called DARVO to gaslight their victims. I'll just quote here from a top google explanation: "Deny
The abuser denies any wrongdoing or accountability for their actions. For example, they might say "Are you kidding? That's not what happened".
Attack
The abuser attacks the victim's character, intelligence, motivation, mental health, or emotional stability. For example, they might say "You're overreacting".
Reverse Victim and Offender
The abuser shifts the roles of victim and offender, making the victim feel like the abuser. For example, they might say "You know how hard it is for me to trust someone and then you do this to me".
I am bringing all this up to say, in reading many Democrat responses to the election results, some are good and really looking for answers--and some are DARVO. Accusing the Republicans of censorship, totalitarianism, taking away freedoms and bodily autonomy...I'm seeing lots of D responses that read as denial, attacking Rs, pretending to being the real victims and accusing the Rs of everything they have done. Many of the top Ds are acting like coercive controllers, and many of the Ds believing what they are being sold are, though they don't know it, reminding me of coercive control victims.
It is a very, very apt metaphor. Thanks for the recommendation!
It's interesting to learn how so many of us former NPR types had specific moments when we finally saw the snow for what it was. It's also interesting to see that others also gravitated toward primary sources and works on the rise of authoritarianism.
They were able to come very close to successfully executing their fake pandemic b/c at that point they had not yet risked that level of exposure. The media was already self-exposing itself trying to get Trump out of office and keep him out but the Feds had not yet tried something risky enough that if it failed they'd have lost their chance to do something like it again for at least a generation or 2. This is why their attempts with the monkeypox non-sense and their push to try and revive the covid hysteria are failing. The percentage of the public that would go along with a repeat of covid even if by another name is too low to have a chance at success unless the virus was something truly nasty a real killer and not something they have to spend billions on in marketing to convince people to be afraid of it.
They failed with covid not b/c the public got wise but because they bet on the wrong horse. A lot of people claim covid was intentionally released but I believe it was either an accidental leak or China released it for whatever reason but I don't believe the US government or any of it's allies intentionally did this. You can tell by how they initially reacted. At first they treated covid like it was a nothing burger and within a month they did a 180. Why? Someone saw covid as an opportunity not to be wasted. Problem is it wasn't lethal enough so they had to spend billons on marketing fear to the public which worked initially but could not be maintained over time b/c the virus kept mutating and getting LESS lethal.
There were 3 primary goals for the covid pandemic.
1) Install a physical monitoring & checkpoint system. The vaccine passport.
2) Obtain the precedence that during an emergency the government can force drug the population and outright violate Constitutional rights. All because they declared an emergency.
3) Eliminate as many non-corporates owned/controlled business as possible. This was mainly to get buy-in from the fortune 500 entities but also to continue their own going efforts of wealth re-distribution.
Of these only #3 was what you'd call successful. They got #1 in a few major cities but nothing close to what is necessary to force it everywhere else and in an authoritarian state like China you have a physical checkpoint/monitoring system in place to control the masses. Now their trying to do this with CBDC; controlling the movement of money instead of people. They initially got away with #2 but once cases worked their way thru the courts that changed.
Let this sink in; %81 of Americans got at least 1 covid jab. That's 4 out of every 5 people. That's alarming. I don't think people realize just how dangerously close we came to being permanently converted into a police state like nation. The pandemic was a power grab, plain & simple. Yes some industries greatly profited but that was a side benefit and a means to get buy in from a number of large entities in the private sector. Many want o believe it was just about money and I can see why they'd believe that since a number of people did get rich off of this. Had that been all this was about you would not have seen the level of ongoing coordination between all levels of government over the long haul.
Had covid been truly lethal, as bad as they tried to claim, we'd have not had the level of resistance needed to stop them and they would have gotten all 3 goals.