Speechless
Postmodernism makes things disappear on a society-wide scale. If there is no objective truth that can be known, voilà, no structural problems to be solved other than our own psyches that can be treated with drugs or psychotherapy. This strange ideology is incredibly valuable to capital. The ruling class wants to do horrible things to our bodies. And postmodernism has become a Magic Eraser of these crimes.
—Toby Rogers
…can we learn anything from present-day Chomsky?
We can learn that no matter how awake we think we are, how aware we are of the tricks used to propagandize us, how skeptical we remain of media and the State, or how knowledgeable we are about history, there but for the grace of God go we.
We can learn that we must ceaselessly guard our hearts from the emotional manipulators, our minds from the behavioral psychologists, our souls from the totalitarian morality inverters.
—Margaret Alice Anna
Every since the beginning of the lockdowns, and until the beginning of this year, I have ungracefully protested and expounded and shrieked and cried - to anyone and everyone in my life and beyond - concerning the terrifying and repulsive increase in totalitarian policies, and the devastating effects on our collective health, economy, ecology, and society that covid policies have wrought from the very moment they rolled out. I felt a tiny version of how some of my recent ancestors must have felt, when they wrote to loved ones or even went to Germany before WW2 began: “Get out!!” they must have said, urgently and over and over, in every way they knew how. “It’s time! I don’t know how we missed the signs before, and I don’t know what’s coming or what it will look like, but NOW it is time to save yourselves and your families and your friends by getting out before it’s too late!”
Ungraceful and somewhat inaccurate as my ancestors’ pleas to emigrate must have been, we all know now that any Jew (or Catholic, or homosexual, or other targeted person) would have been wise to heed their nagging relatives.
“Between 1933 and 1941, many Jews decided to emigrate from the Third Reich in response to the increasing Nazi persecution. By September 1939, approximately 282,000 Jews had emigrated from Germany and approximately 117,000 had emigrated from Austria…”
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/resistance-responses-collaboration/responses/emigration/
Four hundred thousand emigrated…but six million did not.
Many similarities between other totalitarian regimes and Our Current Situation can be noted over the past three years and going forward, because the rising authoritarianism that birthed the covid response and which moves swiftly onward as capital is quietly funneled up up and away was a wake up call for many of us, even while the collective social silence remains staggering, the terrible casualties continue to mount, accountability for past and current criminal behavior of those in power remains years away (if it even comes at all), and censorship remains a dominant response at all levels of government. But nobody knows how it will end, just like nobody in preWW2 Germany or anywhere else could know what would happen until it did, and nobody under any currently genocidal or totalitarian system can know how it will implode until it does.
So when I selfishly examine my tiny sphere of influence, I have to admit that I don’t know a single person who suddenly changed his or her mind about totalitarianism and covid due to my shrill warnings over the past few years (though many have told me that my writing helped them feel less alone, and my kids now understand the definitions of Ad Hominem, Appeal to Authority, and Argumentum Ad Populum fallacies, which they tell me are generally conversation cues for them to quietly Leave The Room). While I appreciate the power of the pen, I’ll further admit that I understand next to nothing about how to convince anyone else to do anything without coercion or censorship, even when everything we care about may be on the line.
Which is why I haven’t written anything this year, and am not sure what I will write about, going forward. This is not at ALL because I feel less strongly about the dangers of totalitarian mob-style groupthink, corrupt “public health” policy and “public health” agencies, nor the devastating power currently wielded by the richest 1% of the world’s population, and especially those at the helm of pharmaceutical companies and most big businesses and governments. I am more convinced than ever we must “get out” before it’s too late, but others who are way more articulate than I are digging into the How and Why of what’s happening.
Here is an incomplete list of thinkers, reporters, commentators, and analysts whom I have found worthwhile over the past three years. Nobody has the whole picture, but together we can try to see the elephant more clearly:
Racket News with Matt Taibbi (and often, guest Walter Kirn) https://www.racket.news/
Taibbi takes his commitment to old-fashioned journalism (I.e. prioritizing Truth over “The Message”) beyond the political binary, and has a unique ability to place individual events into the wider context of Other Related Stuff Going On.
The Abbey of Misrule with Paul Kingsnorth https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/
Paul Kingsnorth has been writing about environmental issues for years, and now investigates what he calls “the machine” from a uniquely ecologically-minded Christian perspective.
Lean Out with Tara Henley https://tarahenley.substack.com/
Like Taibbi, Henley transcends the political divide in search of journalistic truth, and while I personally can relate to her as a fellow forty-something lifelong-until-recently feminist and progressive lefty, she is incredible at asking relevant questions without taking disagreements personally. She is a fabulous interviewer and her concise and fascinating podcast interviews with many interesting people are virtually the only podcasts I listen to that leave me wanting more. Henley trusts her story and then gets out of its way.
Children’s Health Defense https://childrenshealthdefense.org/
CHD focuses on legal strategy and outreach concerning health issues specifically relevant to children, including environmental pollution, developmental and behavioral health disorders, corruption within our pharmaceutical, hospital, medical, and public health systems, and issues of vaccine safety.
Brownstone Institute https://brownstone.org/
Brownstone publishes the work of an increasing number of academics, doctor, philosophers, lawyers, and thinkers from across the political spectrum, and manages to unite so many different perspectives under one umbrella goal: figuring out What Actually Happened during the spectacular humanitarian, economic, and environmental debacle that was the covid response.
Unacceptable Jessica with Jessica Rose https://jessicar.substack.com/
This substack dives deeply into covid data from every available source, from pubmed studies to VAERS to the CDC’s own reporting.
Nobel Truths with Rev Arora https://ravarora.substack.com/
This young journalist appears to take accuracy quite seriously, and while I’ve only just recently started reading his substack, I hope his youthful energy will propel him for many years to come!
Toby Rogers https://tobyrogers.substack.com/
Rogers often speaks on behalf of the vaccine injured, who are a specifically censored and ignored population with enormous medical needs, and melds concise commentary on economics, health, and sociology.
Michael Lesher http://www.michaellesher.com/publications.htm
Lesher writes about the covid response and a huge number of other issues, from the unique perspective of a Jewish attorney with extensive experience defending victims of sexual abuse within the orthodox community.
But with all the analysis of the past and present, and all the head scratching ways that we can individually and collectively wonder “why did it take me so long to see what is going on?!”, the major questions that no one can truly answer at the moment are: how do we “get out” of a machine that is global in nature, and where can people go to or create those parallel structures that might allow us to weather the coming decades or (god forbid) centuries of Storm? How do we prepare the next generation, who will inherit an even messier mess than we got, to do a better job than we have of of cleaning things up for THEIR children??
I find that it is not easy to let go of bitterness. And I mostly have so many questions. I guess I’ll write again when there seems to be something useful to say. And meanwhile, thanks for being out there. It makes me feel a lot less alone.