It was December 25, 1973. I was seven years old. Three years earlier, my grandparents, Olivette and James—he went by Jimmy—had adopted me. Growing up with economic hardship, I became especially fond of Santa Claus because, the way I saw it, Christmas was the one time of year when we didn’t have to worry about money. Santa brought toys for free, which meant presents wouldn’t burden my grandparents. I always asked for things that helped me make other things, and imagined I could one day sell my handiwork and “help out.”

I thought of Santa as a kind of planetary social program we were duty-bound to use. When the Sears catalog arrived after Thanksgiving, I studied it for weeks, marking toys I thought would pay dividends all year: looms, rock tumblers, clattering little “sewing machines” that glued fabric instead of stitching it.

This Christmas in 1973 would be the last time I believed in Santa’s social program.

My grandparents were ill-suited for parenting even when it came to their own children. I wasn’t their child, and Olivette never pretended I was. My place was as her comrade, sidekick, and partner in crime.

My grandfather had recently had open-heart surgery at Shands—I always thought they were saying “Sands”—after a major heart attack on his daily walk. He had just taken up walking “to get healthy,” and Olivette never missed the chance to say, “A lot of good that did you.” Her wit belonged in the mouth of a detective’s girl Friday. Despite barely finishing eighth grade, she’d worked as a legal secretary and gotten her real estate license as soon as women were allowed; her résumé flowed directly from her attitude. It didn’t hurt that she had also been a model.

Her sensibilities were tempered by the Great Depression, but her persona was forged when her parents abandoned her and her younger sisters after the Great Miami Hurricane in 1926. She was an orphan too—only worse off, in my view, because she remembered being left. I was abandoned at the hospital and had the dubious good fortune of never knowing my “real” family. I was more than her little partner; I was her reflection. From the time I was born, I rode shotgun on every caper, whether it was grocery shopping or something more elaborate.

This year was especially hard. After the heart attack, the surgery, and the loss of my grandfather’s income, we discovered that he didn’t qualify for Social Security. He fell into a “donut hole,” which meant his benefits would be postponed for years, even though he was well over 65 and effectively disabled.

Because of all that, the family dragged its feet on Christmas. By Christmas Eve, no one had put up our scraggly little artificial tree. I’d been sick with a fever all week, and when it finally broke that afternoon, I panicked. Without a Christmas tree, I was sure we were in real danger of Santa passing us over, and losing the one time of year we could get presents without adding to the bills. I pleaded with the adults to put up the tree. They sat in their living room chairs, unmoved by my impeccable 7-year old logic.

Realizing my adoptive parents weren’t going to do it, I decided I’d seen enough Christmases to handle it myself. The only problem was that everything was stored on a high shelf near the ceiling.

Now I had to find something to stand on. It turned out to be a dresser from the other side of the room. I knew I couldn’t lift it, but after pushing at it for a few minutes I discovered I could lean my weight into it and slide it. Bonus: it didn’t make much noise. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing until the tree was already underway.

The next hurdle was getting the boxes down. I didn’t know how heavy they were. I climbed onto the dresser and nudged them; they were light enough to shove off the edge and onto the bed. I hauled them open and took inventory. The lights were a hopeless tangle, as they were every year. At the bottom of a worn-out cardboard box were red and green shards from ornaments that had been packed away carelessly. There’s nothing quite as sad as broken Christmas ornaments at the bottom of a box.

I came up with a plan. I didn’t have much time, but I could make the tree beautiful if I kept the color scheme simple: only blue lights and white ornaments. My favorite lights were a set of blue bulbs wrapped in frosty five-pointed stars, and I always thought the multicolor strands distracted from their importance. By now I was practically vibrating. I was proud of muscling the boxes down, but even more thrilled with the design: an all blue tree that needed fewer ornaments, less work, and—if I moved quickly—no adult supervision. Everything was coming together so neatly that it seemed obvious I was saving Christmas.

No way Santa could pass by our house now.

When I marched the tree out to its place on top of the planter that separated the living room from the dining room, my grandparents kept their eyes fixed on the TV news. It was like someone had cut the power to them.

Just one more thing, though. I realized I should’ve put the angel on the top of the tree before I placed the tree on the planter and put the lights on. Now I had to find something to stand on, which turned out to be one of the swiveling dining room chairs. This was the trickiest part of the whole endeavor, because the chairs didn’t want to stay still, so instead of relying on the chair to hold me up the entire time, I used it to hop on top of the planter and put the angel on the tree’s apex without incident.

Still standing on the planter, I asked if I could have everyone’s attention, then took a deep bow and said “TA DAAAA” gesturing to the completed tree. I explained my design theory and how using just the blue lights were key to making the whole project come together. My grandmother said something to the effect of “very nice,” while my grandfather looked over the newspaper to mutter “yes indeed” in his odd English gentleman manner.

After all the scheming, designing and assembling, I was exhausted. Lying in my bed, I realized it was the first Christmas Eve I could remember that I was actually sleepy. It would also the first year I didn’t look out the window for the reindeer, or wake up every hour to check the clock, because I knew there was no way Santa could pass us up now.

When I woke up at first light, just a few minutes before 7am on December 25, 1973 and it was one of those heavy, socked-in Florida mornings that flops down like a damp towel on a tile floor. It got cold overnight but instead of a cold front that brings Technicolor blue skies, this one seeped into house like an unwelcome guest. I was freezing and didn’t know which pile of clothes my sweater was under. Digging around I found a pair of socks to put on and layered a long sleeve shirt over my pajamas.

The oppressive weather made the living room seem extra dingy. Olivette hated cleaning due to the fact that she was put to work cleaning houses as a child. If I had a quarter for every time she said “I’m not your servant,” I could’ve paid for college out of pocket. The only “heat” we had was a gas “fireplace” nestled between the dusty bookshelves. It was the kind of “faux” fireplace that was used for ambiance, its tiny flames licking the ecru-colored “breeze blocks” that echoed the material used in the planter. I really wanted to light it but I’d already tested everyone’s boundaries enough, and had no idea where I’d find matches.

Typically I wasn’t the first one awake. Olivette would usually have her second up of coffee made by now, but she was still in bed.

I was too scared to look under the tree on the planter for presents. It seemed like bad faith to peek first thing, so I decided to take note of the surroundings evidence of any traces Santa left behind. The hearth by the faux fireplace had a thick layer of undisturbed dust, so that could be ruled out. Besides, we didn’t have a chimney and it never made much sense that Santa would gain entry through there. Florida’s lack of fireplaces, chimneys, and snow seemed like a fairly big logistical issue for Santa. In years past I worried that he had no where to land a sleigh.

Then I realized the glass sliding door would be the most likely entry for clandestine entry to the house. I noticed one of the doors wasn’t completely closed and was elated. Santa uses the sliding doors in Florida! Of course he does! Everyone has sliding glass doors and they’re impossible to lock (as far I knew).

This gave me the courage to look at the planter for presents, but in the dark it looked just like it did the night before—grungy and sad. I plugged in the blue star lights but now the cool glow made everything seem extra gloomy.

I felt a lump in my throat as I realized that my bid to save Christmas had failed. My breath started to catch, but I didn’t want to cry because the entire reason for this was to spread joy. Taking deep breaths to gather myself I went to deliver the news to Olivette and see if she knew what happened or what I did wrong.

Tiptoeing silently into her room I saw that she was lying on her side. She didn’t seem awake, but she didn’t seem asleep either. When I got closer I could tell her eyelashes were clumped like they’d been wet and sensed that she already knew things had gone awry.

Climbing on the bed next to her I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to say. I wanted to comfort her but how do you do that while delivering bad news?

“I’m sorry…it didn’t work,” I started. “I thought Santa would know how difficult it’s been and much it would mean to us. With everything that’s happened I thought we’d be pretty far up on Santa’s list.” I’d assumed that Santa operated a needs-based organization.

“Does Santa even do Florida? How does he land the sleigh without snow?”

My line of reasoning opened up multiple avenues for her to gloss things over. I needed to have this conversation but I wasn’t exactly ready to get a 150-proof shot of rejection. Her eyes were fixed on something a mile away and it became obvious that I was in uncharted water. I was afraid of what she was going to say, and then it was so long before she said anything that I was thinking of reasons to excuse myself. But when she spoke I heard every word. I still hear those words.

In the smallest voice I’d ever heard her use, she said: “We tell horrible lies to children.” It was almost like she was picking up in mid-conversation with someone else I couldn’t see—someone in that far off place she had her eyes fixed on. “We’re all in on it,” she continued weakly. “We hide…that…the world doesn’t care about children. And that’s the truth.”

I needed a concrete answer. “Why didn’t Santa visit though?”

In her stronger, more familiar proclamation voice: “Christmas presents come from money and this year there is no money.”

There I had it. Santa wasn’t real, but that wasn’t the worst part. She was showing me that she was sad, and she was hiding why she was sad. Something big and bad happened, and she wasn’t going to tell me what it was. It felt like failure because it felt like a bigger version of what I was already feeling.

I became fixated on the Santa Claus subterfuge. It seemed impossible. “So…all the parades in all the places…and decorations downtown…the TV specials, Christmas cards…the commercials—none of it’s real?”

“That’s right and it’s cruel. We shouldn’t do it, we wouldn’t do it if we were better people.”

Suddenly a gear clicked in my brain. I felt my face flush and another lump growing in my throat and whispered, “and…Jesus?”

“That too—in fact that’s worse. It’s different but the same…and worse.”

She was spilling all the beans. This was stuff kids weren’t supposed to know, and yet she was holding something back. But it seemed okay. I’d had quite enough truth already and it was still early in the morning.

Seeing that Olivette was “in a state,” I suggested that she start her coffee and I could make cinnamon toast. It was best to leave the religion conversation until later. She was in one of those moods where everything is crap and I could’ve asked her how she felt about rainbows and she’d have said, “they never last.” This was also the reason I was never supposed to pick flowers.

Now that she was at least talking I wanted her to get up. She couldn’t mope around all day on Christmas—especially on this particular Christmas.

“It’s not a total loss,” I said. “We still have presents to open from Aunt Judy.” There were indeed three immaculately wrapped gifts from my aunt in Tennessee. I felt bad that they always sent presents to us and we never sent presents to them. Olivette said they knew we couldn’t afford presents. Then she’d say something like “Judy was the pretty one. She married a doctor.” Inevitably followed by, “your mother was the smart one.” Her world hung together through oppositions.

Knowing something that only adults know made me feel more grown up. None of my classmates knew that Santa wasn’t real, and I wasn’t gonna tell them either.

We sat on the low-slung celery-colored couch with our packages. Mine was thin like a book. Hers was a satisfying cube. They were both tied with curling ribbon and adorned with poof-balls handmade from the same curled ribbon. I thought about how “extra” Aunt Judy’s wrapping always seemed. Olivette taught me how department store clerks wrap gifts, so I had the basics down, but Aunt Judy took it to the next level. It seemed a shame to rip up all her handiwork.

I wondered what my three cousins’ Christmas was like. They lived in the mountains. I figured they had snow and would all go outside and sled or throw snowballs. I wanted to know what that was like.

Clearing the wrapping paper off revealed that Aunt Judy had sent a book of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis paper dolls.

With her usual sardonic grin and finally with a lilt in her voice my grandmother said, “that’s a terrible gift! Who plays with paper dolls at your age?”

I laughed and said, “It’s better than what YOU got me!” It felt harsh to say, but as repartee, I could own its sharp edge with a smirk.

She was feeling better but, I was still just a kid and her “gift” that morning felt less like truth and more like a small disaster: no Santa, no Jesus, no conspiracy of adults bending the world toward children’s happiness—just money and the lack of it, just bodies that give out, just women who drink too much coffee and get up earlier than they want to so other people can eat.

But sitting in that tiny living room bathed in blue light something in me shifted. I could feel the collapsing foundation under all the stories, and beneath it there was something harder and stranger than faith: resilience. Our own stories are far more powerful than those received through others. That year, Santa brought me something that no one could ever take away.

I didn’t have words for it yet, but that morning was the first time I understood that adults curate reality—that they choose which fictions to pass down and which to break. My grandmother, who’d been handed plenty of pretty lies and ugly truths herself, chose that day to hand me the uglier thing. It hurt. It still hurts. But it also gave me a place to stand.

Years later, when I was studying philosophy and art, publishing my own newspaper, then as a creative director for advertising agencies, I would recognize the shape of that morning everywhere: in the way images sell comfort, in the way slogans smuggle in belief, in the way a community agrees, silently, on which lies are acceptable. It was my first lesson in how power and narrative hold hands. But no, it wasn’t the best present a child could get.

It was a mean little miracle, wrapped badly and given too soon.

But it was mine, and I grew into it. The paper dolls ended up in a drawer; the truth stayed on the table.

THIS IS ALL GOING SOMEWHERE…BAD

Joe Biden’s abysmal polling and obvious cognitive issues present a serious problem for political consultants trying to get him reelected. They’ve abandoned the use of policy prescriptions to make life better for voters. Now the consultant class turns to The Darkest Political Arts to engineer outcomes. Since 2016 and Russiagate these tactics have included methods previously used only in CIA coups…only in foreign lands. That’s over. Since 2016 they’re accustomed to using that power domestically, and if there’s one thing we know about power, it’s that no one relinquishes it without a fight.

The switch from foreign to domestic use of “Arab Spring” tactics was originally meant to stop Bernie Sanders (and Jeremy Corbyn in UK). Everything thrown at Trump was created for intended for use on the “socialist.” Trump wasn’t seen as a threat in 2016—that’s how he won that election.

Russiagate broke the seal, setting the American intelligence community loose to influence US elections using their old playbook: NGOs, mass media, big tech and lawfare. These are the same resources that have empowered a new priesthood of government contractors and NGOs with tools to control public opinion, censor speech, and manage social media.

“White Rural Rage” is ‘the next current thing.’ The book details an insurgency of domestic terror that is predicted to materialize before November and judging by the way it was introduced into public opinion, I believe it’s an electoral strategy.

“White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy” by authors Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, has already made the rounds to all major media, which reports uncritically of a threat to Democracy from white rural people. The book makes the case that Trump voters will inevitably turn violent this election cycle because it’s in their nature to be:

1. racist

2. conspiracist

3. anti-democratic, and

4. prone to violence.

Here’s a snippet from a transcript of the authors’ guest appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Mika Brzezinski sets up the interview by asking:

“Why are white rural voters a threat to democracy at this point?”

Schaller takes it from there:

“We lay out a four-fold threat that white rural voters pose.”

“They’re the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geodemographic group in the country.”

“Second, they’re the most conspiracist group. QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism and scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism,” Schaller said.

“Third, anti-democratic sentiments. They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re most likely to say the president should be able to act unilaterally without any checks from Congress or the courts or the bureaucracy,” he said.

And lastly, this demographic is the most likely to “justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discussion,” Schaller, who’s apparently unaware of Portland, Oregon claimed.

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Saying white rural people are a threat to America is every bit as bigoted as saying the same about Pakistani-Americans of Muslim heritage, especially given that the books spends a lot of time pumping up the menace of the faith traditions of rural people. Furthermore, it signals a willingness to act upon the bigotry. Coastal elites in general, and Democratic Party Elites specifically are already quite bigoted against rural folks. For every $1 spent in rural America by the Democrats, the Republican Party spends $14—but apparently this can’t be why Democrats do so badly in rural America. Nor could be about a history of economic inequality resulting from a history of labor exploitation and refusal to invest in these communities—nah, it’s the voters—something is wrong with the voters.

Thus, the “strategic vision” for reelecting Joe Biden has shifted from ‘Trump is dangerous’ to ‘Trump voters are dangerous.’ Rural folks are so treacherous, we are told, that they’re the prime threat to American Democracy.

I believe that evidence of this threat will be “produced” whether it exists or not, and according to the scholars who collected and analyzed the data used in Schaller and Waldman’s book, it most certainly doesn’t exist.

Scholars of rural America, Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis have come forward to denounce “Schaller and Waldman in the strongest terms, calling “White Rural Rage” is “academic malpractice.”

According to Jacobs and Munis, “rural identity is not reducible to these beliefs,” such as racism, conspiricism, violence, and anti-democratic sentiment, and moreover these beliefs “are vastly more numerous outside rural communities than within them.” In other words, the data upon which the book is based, according to two of the researchers who actually gathered it, shows the exact opposite of what “White Rural Rage” claims. If you’re looking for racism, conspiracism, anti-democratic sentiment, or propensity to violence in American demographics—look to urban areas, not rural. Jacobs especially doesn’t mince words in his criticism of “White Rural Rage”: “The book reeks of tell-tale signs of being written first and finding facts second. Only after they settled on a salacious title, it seems, did they go out and try to find what they already agreed to see, with little to no attention paid to whether any of it was true.”

Jacobs observes that the book is based on the “ecological fallacy” of political geography, which is a mistaken conclusion drawn about individuals based on findings from groups to which they belong. This applies to all four of the book’s claims, which are each articulated as characteristics that apply to individuals, not social groups. You can’t infer from a group down to a person. This is the same fallacy conservatives often use to racialize crime. A study of crime rates may find that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of African-American residents had higher crime rates. When that same data is analyzed correctly, African-American individuals are no more likely to commit crimes than other races.

Jacobs shows exactly how the fallacy is applied to elections in a critique published in Reason: “Because authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries and because rural residents tend to support Trump, [Schaller and Waldman] say rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian.” The ecological fallacy is actually in the premise, which ought to be avoided by serious researchers, but Schaller and Waldman premise their whole book on this casuistry.

“White Rural Rage” itself is disinformation manufactured to influence our election—which is, according to its authors, the cardinal sin the book is supposed to address. Despite this mendacity, they’re given free reign in legacy media—from cable news to coastal elite print media including the New York Times—to ensure that Americans are suitably freaked out about country folk.

Another scholar of rural America, Kristin Lunz Trujillo, who teaches Political Science at University of South Carolina notes that Schaller and Waldman also cite her work and again, “get everything about rural America wrong.” She wants people to know that “researchers and academics do genuinely care about being meticulous and measured and about getting things right..many of us care about reducing the rifts in society rather than stoking them,” she writes in Newsweek.

Trujillo reflects my own sentiments when she says rural Americans deserve far better than being cast as villains and “dangerous boogeyman of modern America.” She agrees with Jacobs, that Schaller and Waldman are guilty of precisely that which they proclaim to fight against, saying they “seem to miss their own complicity (or worse, understand it but don't care) in further inflaming the societal discord that they so vehemently criticize in others.”

To everyone who is of the same mind, I just want to say, this has nothing to do with rural America. What’s happening here is that Democrats occupy an exceptionally weak position going into the election. If politics were poker, then the Dems are drawing for an inside straight while their opponent almost certainly has two pair. They’ve run out of options, and they think (or desperately hope) they can bluff their way out.

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING—WRAPPING UP THE SMEAR

Elites will turn up the volume on this impending threat with a big, new HBO documentary on the Oklahoma City bombing called “An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th.” This will further abet the disinformation project to attack rural white folks in the sphere of public opinion by “layering” and then “merchandizing” the threat. This is called a “Wrap-Up Smear,” according to Nancy Pelosi who describes the process in a viral video. First you manufacture propaganda and find “placement” in media for it. That smear is then “merchandized” through PR networks and picked up by other media, who then “layer” it with more smears (lies, half-truths) to further assail those who’ve offended their feudal lords. Once the smear is established, it becomes integrated in public opinion so that it’s taken for granted as “common knowledge” which is no longer questioned or examined.

In the case of HBO’s Oklahoma City Bombing documentary, I noticed that its description could’ve been cribbed from the “White Rural Rage” book (quoting from Rotten Tomatoes): “The film looks at the surge in political violence through the story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, showing the roots of anti-government sentiment and its reverberations today, along with the emotionally charged warnings of those who suffered tragic losses in the deadliest homegrown attack in U.S. history.”

Under the auspices of State Department, USAID, and intelligence cutouts, the US government is no stranger to foreign anti-democratic skullduggery, but the OKC bombing is considered by many to provide a view of those capabilities put to use on domestic terror. According to new OKC researchers, McVeigh’s first contact after embarking upon the national gun show circuit in early 1993 was a man with CIA connections who was an international arms dealer who was also involved in the covert wars in Central America, and even claimed to have trained Cuban counterrevolutionaries. Cuban terrorist groups Alpha 66, Brigade 2506, Omega 7 were all CIA-backed anti-Castro terrorist groups of this subgenus. Not saying he trained those group, but do have a look at them to understand what’s being considered.

You might say, “Sure, the US does this sort of thing in other countries, but they wouldn’t do that here, would they?” Well, that’s the point. It’s a question that must be answered because if this is true, it turns our entire “democracy” into a clown show.

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It wouldn’t be the only time this happened, either. Remember the Liberty City Seven (aka Miami Seven)? The much-hyped “terror cell” was supposed to prove that Al Qaida threatened us domestically. The group was described as a bizarre cult bent on killing Americans. They were “arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses in 2006” and the media hyped the threat despite the fact that none of the men were from the Middle East (two were Haitian; five African-American—none Muslim). Holes appeared in the tale after it was reported that their actual operational capability was extremely low.” It became obvious this was an FBI entrapment scheme when reports circulated that an FBI informant had been promised reduced jail time for domestic violence if he delivered some terrorists.

That’s some next-level domestic skullduggery by our intelligence community, and it barely scratches the surface of chicanery associated with the OKC bombing. With years of combing through archives of local news, a new generation of researchers have uncovered information that didn’t reach 90s-era mass media audiences. Many now argue that evidence suggests the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building was known beforehand, and possibly assisted by government assets. Once you examine those assets, the question becomes: Did they instigate it? This would be quite significant if true, and we deserve the truth no matter what.

If it has indeed been decided that “white rural rage” is necessary to keep Donald Trump out of office, then my fear is that someone will produce more evidence of a “white, rural threat to Democracy” than Schaller and Waldman’s fraudulent book.

“WHITE RURAL RAGE” IS HYBRID WARFARE

When militaries engage in political subterfuge with the intent of affecting power dynamics it’s called Hybrid Warfare. Arab Spring and Euromaidan both used hybrid warfare to service the interests seeking power. It works with and without live gunfire. We recently saw hybrid warfare in action when Israel claimed Hamas committed monstrous rapes, which wasn’t true, but the smear was “wrapped up” in media so that it became “common knowledge.” The truth is that Israel lied to provide political cover for US sending money and arms.

Hybrid warfare gimmicks were recently on display domestically when every media outlet, talking head, and Democratic Party operative ran with a story that was an obvious fabrication, but fit their new Trump-as-domestic-terrorist theme. I’ll quote directly from FactCheck.org: “While speaking about the potential loss of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, former President Donald Trump said if he isn’t elected, ‘it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.’ President Joe Biden’s campaign quickly accused Trump of fomenting “political violence.”

The “bloodbath” quote propagated across Twitter quicker than a rumor of infidelity at a Baptist Church. CBS News seemed to be ahead of the crowd, issuing one of the first tweets promoting a story devoted to it. Then the herd followed: Aaron Rupar, Thom Hartmann, HuffPo, Guardian, etc ad nauseum. The media hits on MSNBC and CNN were sickening with Democratic Party operatives insisting “even if he didn’t completely say it, he meant it.”

In the first few pages of “White Rural Rage,” Schaller and Waldman refer to January 6 rioters as “domestic terrorists.” You’d have to be blind not to see where this is going.

In this media environment it’d be fairly trivial to substantiate such a threat with a combination of surveillance, AI and the US intelligence community’s long history of research into behavior modification. Pinpoint a few vulnerable people—maybe an ex-military bullet-catcher facing jail time on domestic violence charges—and push them until the desired act manifests.

The possibility of this sort of skullduggery was explored in the 2014 movie, “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” The Macguffin used by the villains was a phone app that transmitted an ultrasonic frequency in order to agitate people to commit violence (like cable news, but you can’t hear it). In the movie, the behavior modification gizmo was tested during Sunday Service at a white rural church in Eastern Kentucky.

It exceeded expectations with 100 percent of people in the church responding to the frequency in a bloodbath that is arguably the most important action sequence of the 21st Century. The orgy of violence is set perfectly to the score of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.”

This clip demonstrates the essence of what “White Rural Rage” prescribes: an uprising of the well bred against the hordes of barbarians.

All the villains had to do was just turn the knob until the desired amount of violence became inevitable.

Our “hero” of the movie is “The King’s Man,” a posh operative with impeccable manners who wears “Oxfords, not Brogues” and massacres the packed church of white rural folks while barely creasing his tailored suit. After the carnage, we’re faced with the contradiction of identifying with “The King’s Man,” whose actions repudiate our trust in him and forces us to think about all the dead churchgoers. The Kingsman (movie) challenges us to question our appreciation for the urbane gentlemen who showed the hillbillies who’s boss. This is why the scene hits so hard, and why I believe it’s culturally important and relevant to this essay.

ANTIDEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES, and CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Of all the claims about the essential nature of white, rural Americans, the one about “antidemocratic sentiment” is the most egregious because it’s being posed by the most anti-democratic institutions on the planet: US mass media. In a “pot-calls-kettle-black” manner, Schaller and Waldman tautologically define voters’ “support for Trump” as anti-democratic. It can’t be proven wrong in their logic because one defines the other (it’s how tautologies work).

But here’s the thing: a voter can’t be “antidemocratic” because voters don’t have the power to act anti-democratically. It’s like saying that a user of Microsoft Word impacts the world when they change their default font to Helvetica. It just doesn’t work like that. You have power over ONLY your own Microsoft Word docs in the same way voters have power ONLY over our own votes. To act “antidemocratically” requires access to the system.

A voter is as likely to bring down democracy using their powers of “anti-democratic sentiment” as I am likely to produce the Hope Diamond out of a desire for a big, expensive rock.

Those who actually do have that power include mass media, the US intelligence apparatus, oligarchs and Silicon Valley. The real bad guys are those technocrats, toadies, and mercenaries using the dark political arts to destroy foreign and domestic democracies through coups and Color Revolutions.

If it weren’t so dangerous, it’s be hilarious that the authors of “White Rural Rage” basically published a 320-page conspiracy theory of the inevitability of scary hillbillies bringing down democracy with their pickup trucks and ham biscuits. We really do have to laugh, but then we need to get serious and know this: The real threat to democracy is posed by those who point to a specific racial demographic in America, hoping to scapegoat them for all that’s wrong in a country, because that usually precedes very bad things happening. And Schaller and Waldman have provided a textbook that may (or may not) be used to engineer an electoral win for a presidential candidate that everyone knows is suffering from mid-stage dementia.

I have much more to say on conspiracy theory and antidemocratic sentiment. It’s already written and will drop soon as Part Two. I’ll leave it here for Part One.

(editor’s note: in this essay I use the terms “Movement Left” and “Institutional Left” to distinguish regular lefties from the establishment end of the Democratic Party. For more detail on the interplay between the two groups see this previous essay.)

In literature, the sacrifice of one’s ‘spiritual values’ for material gain is called a Faustian Bargain. In politics that’s just another day at the office. Values are considered a weakness in the neoliberal wasteland we inhabit, and never has this been more nakedly evident than in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Molly Ball’s “Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” published in Time Magazine just 16 days after Biden’s inauguration, we learned that the Institutional Left conspired with Democratic Party elites along with corporations, big media and Silicon Valley to politicize the public health and COVID-19. Even though I’ve been marveling at this story since it came out, it wasn’t until recently, as I was reviewing the Institutional Left’s COVID-19 messaging guidelines that I realized how early the Movement Left was pulled into this confederacy, and worse, that the proof of concept for the anti-Trump project that Ball wrote about in Time Magazine was knocking Bernie out of the primaries.

The messaging guidelines (e.g. above) provided by US progressive organizations funded by family foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, et al) are pictured and discussed below. They are constructed from four basic premises aimed at the Institutional Left’s stated opposition: neoliberals, libertarians, and populist conservatives. The four premises are negations of their opposition’s messaging. Here’s that messaging. The premise is in bold and the matching Institutional Left COVID-19 messaging in italics:

1. individualism is how a neoliberal or conservative sees the world. To negate this, Institutional Left messaging is “to pull together.”

2. free market is a libertarian value. The negation: “take care of all of us—not just corporations.”

3. small government is advocated by neoliberals, libertarians and conservatives. To negate this, the COVID-19 messaging says “invest in local government,” to invest in “us.”

4. racist appeals to white supremacy typifies how opponents respond to the world. The negation is to “come together across the  differences used to divide us.”

A keen reader might notice that the underlying ideology is aimed at individuals rather than systems, which is obviously contradictory to “pulling together.” The talking points are crafted to heighten the differences that divide us because they’re tools of a political campaign not a public health initiative. They seem created with social media in mind, as they’re suggested to be used as responses to things other people say, such as “response to racism, othering, dog-whistles,” and “response to individualism.” As we’ll see later, the messaging was developed in conjunction with the “Protect The Vote” project that Ball writes about in Time Magazine. Incredibly, the dates on these messaging guidelines show that the types of talking points the Institutional Left rolled out to try to control discussion around the COVID pandemic were in place far ahead of the public discourse. Examples are found here and here.

‘DISASTER SOCIALISM’ WAS A RUSE

COVID-19 messaging guidelines released just a week later promise the opportunity to do what I’d characterize as “Disaster Socialism.” Activists were told that the coming pandemic would so cripple society that it would need to be rebuilt, which would afford the opportunity to “push towards decommodification and public control: from pro-equity restrictions on financial corporations,” to the incorporation of “formerly private hospitals into the public system.” This would be our opening to “nationalize significant aspects of the US economy, from fossil fuel corporations to the airline industry and beyond.”

Oddly these particular messaging guidelines also wag a finger at “far right…nationalists” who accuse Bill Gates and George Soros of “partnering” with China “to produce the coronavirus as a bio-weapon to attack the United States.” This stands out as a bizarre and confusing detail tacked on at the end of the document, almost as addenda—but it’s actually brilliant disinformation. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t show up on government contracts related to work in Wuhan. Instead, Gates Foundation funded Event 201 which was held in China a few weeks prior to the outbreak (more on this below). This misdirection seems designed to obfuscate important details of the virus origin: US researchers developed it in coordination with Chinese researchers in work funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, which obviously does weapons work—not healthcare). Research on this project was conducted in both the US and China, so it makes sense to 1) ask what its intended use was, and 2) understand how the partnership with China in gain-of-function research squares with US national security interests. These are straightforward questions—nothing convoluted, as the talking point would have you believe.

Obviously Disaster Socialism didn’t pan out. Instead, the Institutional Left enlisted Movement Lefties in the largest Disaster Capitalist project ever conceived. This scam wouldn’t have worked with the politicization of public health, which research suggests may have caused as many as 17 million deaths worldwide from unsafe and ineffective gene therapy products. This is in addition to ongoing “excess deaths,” and the largest transfer of wealth to the upper 1% ever in human history.

Progressives who rightly believe that public health is a top priority during a pandemic were made willing accomplices in a giant, murderous ripoff. And it was the Institutional Left that sat at our cultural crossroads, enticing Movement Lefties with the promise that they’ll outsmart the devil and achieve their wildest dreams if they’d just sign-on to the program. The deal put before them was to use the money and power of capitalist financiers to, essentially, overthrow capitalism.

The Movement Left lost its soul in this deal. Those like myself and many others who are injured and bereaved will never trust them again. I hope to place the blame where it belongs—at the feet of the Institutional Left.

COVID-19 CONSPIRACY AND TIMELINE

At 7000 words, Ball’s article takes about an hour to read and it’s so full of revelations that it’s easy to lose focus, but COVID-19 plays a central role in the conspiracy, as it was used to drive fear and increase urgency of political messaging. Midway through the article, in a section called “The Alliance,” Ball gives credit to the team that roped progressives into their “deal with the devil.” The center of the “secret alliance” that politicized COVID-19 was AFL-CIO political strategist Mike Podhorzer. Next we have Institutional Left data maven Laura Quinn known for Catalist data. Finally we’re introduced to political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio who’s attached to AFL-CIO, Open Society, and the Democracy Alliance donor network. She wrote the messaging guidelines shown above.

By the time COVID-19 emerged Podhorzer had been networking the left with CEOs for a couple of months; since late 2019. Per these messaging documents, the weaponization of the emerging public health crisis was presented to progressive organizations and the Movement Left at-large as their chance at Disaster Socialism. Those who played along would hit the jackpot if all went according to plan. This deal was taken up by many left YouTubers who, to this day, continue to fill their channels with low-value, anti-Trump glurge. They did their bit to promote Biden and haven’t been the same since.

The timeline necessary to deliver these campaigns by Super Tuesday (March 3, 2020), suggests that work was initiated by funders around late January, early February at the latest. This is the same time that FOIA’d emails show Anthony Fauci and others at CDC/NIAID cooked-up their conspiracy to hide gain-of-function work at Wuhan. Just seems an odd coincidence that the Institutional Left published their core COVID-19 campaign materials on the same day, March 15, that the infamous “Proximal Origin of COVID-19” paper was published in the journal Nature, which was part of the Fauci conspiracy to hide US bioweapons work at the China-based lab. Remarkably, these dates also coincide with the final Bernie-Biden debate when Bernie took his dive.

With the Podhorzer’s AFL-CIO driving the electoral project, it’s not unreasonable to assume that unions and progressive organizations were pressuring Bernie’s campaign with the pandemic narrative as soon as they possibly could—likely after the Iowa Caucuses, which you’ll remember he actually won, but the DNC stole from him through meddling with caucus software developed by people show up at the center of this and other Democratic Party Machine conspiracies.

Fascinating to me that Bernie was the first to sound the alarm about in-person voting potentially vectoring virus to poll workers, while Biden campaign spokesperson Symone Sanders went on MSNBC to declare that “voting rights”—not a public health—was what mattered to Joe. For an administration that became to devoted to fighting “dis-and-misinformation” they were sure keen to spread their own lies when it benefitted them.

As soon as Bernie “bent the knee” at the debate, our public discourse made a radical 180-degree turn with Democratic Party elites suddenly so concerned with public health that a national vote-by-mail program must be instituted immediately so as not to endanger our precious voters and election workers.

WAIT UNTIL YOU TURN BLUE AND THEN GO TO THE HOSPITAL

In contradiction to Osorio’s talking point that, “We stand united against a handful of politicians and corporate insurance and pharma industries that would use this crisis to generate profits,” the Institutionalists provided cover for these interests, especially regarding the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. I know because I argued frequently for cheap, repurposed therapeutics that any ‘frontline’ worker could easily afford thereby reducing impact on the healthcare system. Given most low-income workers in retail, service jobs, and gig work don’t have health insurance, it’s foolish to withhold information about protection such as vitamin D and antiseptic gargles are known provide. Actual public health information that could save lives was so bent around the political discourse that at one point Twitter announced that they would ban any account that spoke of gargling with antiseptic mouthwash to guard against respiratory virus—which is a time-tested, and clinically proven method of reducing respiratory virus.

And of course, the entire #resistance (plus their software that mimics personas) lined up against hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as if they were radioactive rightwing waste instead of safe and effective medicine that even a barista could afford. But felonious Democratic financier Sam Bankman-Fried funded fake clinical trials to impugn cheap repurposed drugs, and the Institutional Left in 2020 depended on dark money like his and that provided by pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Moderna.

It’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that those two cheap repurposed drugs do exactly what their champions said they would. They prophylaxis and early treatment of COVID-19, and far fewer people would’ve died if they’d had access to them. But, the popes of the Democratic Party declared this to be forbidden knowledge— despite the fact that FDA even issued an Emergency Use Authorization for hydroxychloroquine and hospitals stockpiled it because it is the gold standard for treating SARS infection. FDA rescinded the EUA only when CDC opted for a global experiment with mRNA gene products, which tells you everything you need to know about our captured health agencies.

RACE AS CORE COMPETENCY OF THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT

For me, the darkest propaganda in The Alliance messaging guidelines instructed the Movement Left to use complaints of racism to control public opinion on the origin of the emerging virus. Movement Left progressives provided cover for intelligence agencies engaged in gain-of-function research which continues to make us all less safe.

Every messaging document I’ve reviewed (e.g. here, here, here) warns progressives steeped in identity politics away from associating the virus with China because that’s antithetical to the “coming together” required to achieve Disaster Socialism. Says Osorio in her talking points, “the messages we must disrupt are rooted in xenophobia, racism, and individualism…people will be susceptible to fearing “the other,”…media and certain public figures will actively or inadvertently stoke that fear.” None of the virologists engaged in the origins debate were animated by racism—they were animated by the truth. Instead of “coming together,” the left attempted to cancel these researchers for exposing clandestine bioweapons work which actually does “endanger us all,” as suggested by Osorio et al in their messaging guidelines.

Virologists had already determined that COVID-19’s provenance was 99.9% artificial, because of the “novel furin cleavage site” which enables human infection. No previous virus in the clade has this feature, and we now have documentation that American contractors were performing this exact same gain of function research at Wuhan where biological weapons programs were carried out.

Sure, standing against racist attacks is a bedrock left value, but you need actual racist attacks in order for that to work—otherwise you’re just silencing legitimate science.

Accusations of racism were used against those trying to tell a critically important story: that the US has been collecting and performing gain-of-function research on esoteric viruses for decades under our bioweapons programs laundered through USAID, NIAID, and CDC. The Movement Left should’ve been demanding accountability from those agencies for their bioweapons programs instead of acting as the CIA’s attack dogs.

IF THE TRUTH IS DIVISIVE YOU’RE LIVING IN A PSYOP

Ball’s article also provides insight into the creation of the “Censorship Industrial Complex” by introducing normies to “Laura Quinn, the veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist.” Ball writes that Quinn also “piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.” The fight against “disinformation” was used throughout the pandemic to provide cover for powerful corporations and their capitalist financiers while vaccine injured patients such as myself couldn’t tell our own stories without being attacked by Movement Left activists who use “swarm and report” methods to deplatform voices they disagree with.

Quinn’s other role in the conspiracy was to recruit Silicon Valley to assist the Democrats by “pushing social media platforms to take a harder line,” against “dangerous disinformation,” which resulted in silencing victims, researchers, and clinicians who were trying to save lives. Ball’s article touts Quinn’s work dated as far back as November 2019, when she arranged a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, who would be “warned him about the danger of the alleged election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked.”

November 2019 is mentioned in the article as a turning point for Podhorzer. As relates to COVID-19 the November date is interesting because that’s only days after the “Event 201” pandemic simulation sponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The role-playing workshop focused heavily on controlling public opinion and involved representatives from media worldwide. A central participant was Biden Administration Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines who’s also a principal (along with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken) in the government affairs consultancy WestExec Partners, which peddles influence to clients such as Blackstone, Facebook, McKinsey & Co, Google, Shield AI, a drone surveillance company, pharmaceutical giant Gilead, data-mining company Palantir, and Windward, an Israeli artificial intelligence firm.

Given that corporate roster it’s no surprise that the Institutional Left echoed Event 201’s censorship calls to action: “governments and the private sector…to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response.”

The Institutional Left is a very small world, and their capitalist financiers are members of an even more exclusive club. It’s the financiers who were invited to experience Event 201. Then, whispers of a virus with a lab origin began circulating in early January. That information would be relayed in whole or in part to the group (or, cabal, if you will) at the center of this political campaign. Since countering misinformation was the point of Quinn’s “secret unnamed project,” you could say the public health crisis was exploited in exactly the manner laid out in Event 201, including through the use of technology predicated on newly acquired biopowers granted via the pandemic emergency.

INSTITUTIONAL LEFT PROPAGANDA

Previous generations understood that the Movement Left has no business running propaganda for corporate and state interests. But much of the left is populated with young activists who were born into identity politics, austerity and mass surveillance through social media. They’ve been trained to believe that “canceling” an individual is somehow equal to achieving a policy goal. As an older veteran of left movements, the last few years since the pandemic has felt like watching toddlers waddle into oncoming traffic. Our role has got to be to hold these interests to account. When we join forces with them—making deals with devils—we open ourselves and our movements to destruction.

My concerns align with those delivered by propaganda expert Piers Robinson at the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania where he said, “…blunt censorship has been used to attempt to prevent serious and informed debate about what was, by any measure, an unprecedentedly draconian response to a declared health emergency. The slippage into nefarious activities such as smear campaigns and the creation of a highly coercive environment, leading to job losses and legal action, is further evidence of quite how far we have fallen from our democratic ideals.” These negative outcomes could have been mitigated if the Movement Left refused to enter into a codependent relationship with plutocrat-funded institutions.

Instead of demanding truth and accountability, the left helped in the program of coercion, surveillance and smearing those who spoke out to protect others. When Institutional Left elites delivered the very somber news of an emerging pandemic, the Movement Left blazed into action to launch a corporate propaganda campaign rather than a public health effort.

To recap, the politicization of COVID-19 1) played a key role in the scheme to tank Bernie Sanders, while 2) appearing simultaneously with the bogus “Proximal Origins” paper that was, 3) the result of a conspiracy of our public health leaders to keep secret their biological weapons program in Wuhan, China. Through this we now have a propaganda apparatus that’s metastasized throughout our thoroughly captured media, and enforced by a Movement Left which seems enthusiastic to re-make social media into a corporate-friendly environment where speech is policed by political consultants and military contractors.

Pharmaceutical companies, DARPA, and the Department of Homeland Security must’ve been crapping their pants at the degree to which the left defiled themselves during COVID-19, and continue to do so with midwit proclamations such as, “Our own health depends on the health of the person next to us, and the person next to them,” which is another of Osorio’s talking points. This one is borrowed from the right wing who love to say that they pay for overweight smokers on their insurance. It’s also used to scrutinize the BMI of the working poor receiving government food assistance.

The end result of Institutional Left’s politicization of COVID-19 was best summed up by @0ddette on Twitter, who wrote, “One of the most incredible things to observe over the past few years was the simultaneous expression of the ideas that: every individual was not just responsible—but culpable, for the health of those around them, while a for-profit health industry had no institutional liabilities.”

CODA

The blame for wrongdoing here lies squarely with the Institutional Left’s political operatives, Podhorzer/Quinn/Osorio et al, who knowingly exploited the goodwill of Movement Left. But let’s be real—the left needs to upgrade their bullshit detection, and recommit to our principles. These institutions that pay salaries of ‘organizers’ are not in the business of socialist reform, and they never will be. They serve the interests of oligarchs.

Privacy and bodily autonomy must be considered sacrosanct. These are bedrock principles of abortion rights, so the left ought to be more familiar with ‘em. No one can tell you what to put in your body, or know your bodily status without your approval. The more shrill the entreaty, the more cautious you need to be as an individual making decisions that will affect your entire life going forward.

The Institutional Left NEVER talks about issues like war-and-peace, digital privacy, bodily autonomy, or shifting government spending away from defense. Have you not wondered why? The money in those family foundations that fund the Institutional Left was made from war and now they’re invested in data and pharmaceuticals. Hell will freeze over before the Institutional Left steps out into these subject areas. That’s their deal with devil. It doesn’t have to be yours.

I’d been sick in bed when I caught just a clip of the song going around Twitter on Friday afternoon, and watched the clip the same way you watch a cat video—not really that interested, but figured it might be amusing. Well, the clip blew me away and I wanted to hear the whole song which I initially found the RADIOWV YouTube channel and listened to the other artists featured there.

Soon I was weeping in bed with the dogs. Mountain folk music and bluegrass does this to me. My husband looked in to check on me and asks, “what’s wrong?” I say, “fuu-uucking blu-hooo-grass.”

I was overcome at that moment. It’s magical to me that people with nothing more than their voice and a stringed instrument make…that…connection. Who doesn’t love the feeling when a song catches you in the right place? It’s also thrilling to see a talented songwriter and performer get a break. His song is more than viral now, with millions of views.

Well, today I find that I’m a lone leftist who doesn’t think Oliver Anthony is cog in a conspiracy cooked up by a cabal of cigar-chomping rightwing media moguls. After checking out the nuttery on Twitter I’m feeling pretty good with that distinction.

But it’s also sad because “Rich Men North of Richmond” elicits feelings that ought to resonate with the left. It’s a lament about alienated labor which is straight-up Marx in case you didn’t know. You work all day, drive…drive…drive home, and drink until you pass out to do it the next day. That’s not living, and that was a primary issue Marx set his mind to.

• I've been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay so I can sit out here and waste my life away, drag back home, and drown my troubles away.

• It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to for people like me — for people like you. Wish I could just wake up and it not be true. But it is. Oh, it is.

• Living in the New World with an old soul. These rich men north of Richmond. Lord knows it all. Just want to have total control.

Anthony hits the nail on the head with these lines. It’s what caught my attention in the first place. These are the lines that are repeated, and that means they’re the ones you remember on the first few listens—it’s that way for me, at least.

Then, these are the lines that chapped everyone’s ass:

• I wish politicians would look out for miners and not just minors on an island somewhere. Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothing to eat, and the obese milking welfare.

• God, if you're five foot three, and you're 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds. Young men are putting themselves 6 feet in the ground because all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.

This doesn’t appeal to my sensibilities, but the fact that I see this differently doesn’t drive me to attack the songwriter. Rather, it suggests the left has an existential vacuum where our class politics used to be.

Because of these lines many left Twitter critics have inverted the song’s meaning as if Anthony intends to have “has his boot on the neck of the downtrodden.” I don’t think that’s the case. This is an unfortunate verse that I’d not write. But to my ear, as someone who grew up on welfare…back when it existed, I actually hear someone tuned to the malicious intent of those who prey on poor people. I also think it’s what a lot working Americans think, because they’re sick and tired of going to work everyday, not having healthcare, not having vacation, not being able to afford rent and food, and being told that somehow this is paradise.

Anthony’s entire catalog is about being downtrodden, addicted, and barely scraping by. Check out “Ain’t Got a Dollar,” and “Rich Man’s Gold,” and maybe especially “Hell On Earth.” This is not someone who’s interested in having his boot on anyone’s neck.

So let’s talk about these lines:

• “…we got folks in the street, ain't got nothing to eat, and the obese milking welfare…if you're five foot three, and you're 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds. Young men are putting themselves 6 feet in the ground because all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.”

These lyrics only get it partly wrong. Class and mental health are a driving forces in obesity, but the same powers north of Richmond that seek control of what we think/do, also have control of what we eat. SNAP benefits can be used for junk food because big processed food manufacturers have made damn sure that the government subsidizes the consumption of their products instead of healthy foods. It’s far more expensive to eat healthy than it is to eat junk and people are paid to keep it that way.

Honestly, I didn’t even hear the lines about the ‘obese’ until about the fourth time I listened to the song because I was too busy hearing the instrumentation and the artist’s vocals. I think that’s how a lot of people hear music. You can go forever without registering the actual words of a song. My ex, a working musician, thought that Sweet Home Alabama lyrics said “now, whether you’re gay doesn’t bother me,” instead of “now, Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?”

Many on the left only heard the stuff about welfare and obesity and skipped the larger message about alienated labor. I know a lot of Twitter peeps on the left who think the songwriter a fascist, white nationalist, racist—building from the conspiracy theory that the whole thing was engineered by rightwing media because a couple of rightwing social media accounts shared the song.

Sweet mother of god, it’s hard enough to break out in music without also having to police who shares your song. You want everyone to share your song and take meaning from it. If you’re writing for one tribe or another then you’re not really crafting songs—you’re making propaganda.

Anthony actually did a video explaining that he’s neither fish nor fowl when it comes to politics. He says that both Democrats and Republicans are corrupt, and no honest person would disagree with that. Unfortunately, that isn’t making a dent in the conspiracy discourse because apparently there’s a popular country artist (with full label and legal representation) whose current song says that BLM wouldn’t go over in a “small town.” Well, okay. That sucks. But if you’re whatabouting an unknown artist to one with the full force of the music industry behind him…well, maybe you’re blind to class.

If I learned anything this week, it’s that the left is keenly aware of country music and every posting of every rightwing influencer you’ve never heard of.

To provide another example of our collective lunacy, one popular author and critic of religion in the US said that the song is clearly racist because ‘Richmond’ is supposedly a dogwhistle for the Civil War. On this Occam’s Razor would like a word. The songwriter lives in Farmville Virginia, just west of Richmond. Might it be…just spitballing here…that the line refers to a place on a map? Perhaps a person from Farmville would consider Richmond the dividing line between us in the US and them in Northern Virginia and Washington DC?

For all I know he *could* be referencing the Civil War—the same way there *could* be Satanic backward masking encouraging me to write this essay.

What I see in this miasma of bad takes is contempt for the actual working class by people who share SEIU messaging all day and claim to have solidarity with workers. Maybe some of those who got rich off of podcasting have never met actual workers. Seems like most of them went straight from elite schools to selling the ‘dirtbag’ political aesthetic which has become indistinguishable from any pablum you’d find on Daily Kos circa 2017.

I’m reminded of how Lou Reed sang, “I wanna be black…I don't wanna be a fucked up, middle class, college student anymore.” If you’re a white kid living in Ohio or Texas and despair of being confused with “one of them,” (cultural conservatives) then your political aesthetics might be all you have.

The liberal left has a well known problem with poor white people—rural folks specifically—those who’re currently dying “deaths of despair.” They’re trivialized and vilified as “Trumpers.” If you’re of the tribe that thinks of Trump when you hear that song, maybe it’s a sign that the left has nothing to say to poor people in general and poor white people, specifically.

The rest of us recognize a dirge when we hear one. Sad songs make us feel less alone. Folk and bluegrass come from pain, not university degrees.

It’s sad that so many that can’t hear music without putting it through a political filter (that includes both sides). I love when an artist reflects my values or pulls a thread that’s important to me. But if every bit of culture had to align to my personal political blueprint then I’d be listening to the same 10 songs for the rest of my life—and I’m not even sure about them.

Think of all the misogynist lyrics in rap and hiphop. No one sees the objectification of women as a problem—so maybe just think of all the capitalist-consumerist messaging in pop music, instead. No one demands purity or political virtue from those artists. And that is precisely how music is naturally consumed. You hear a line that clashes with your values and you either skip the song or ignore the lyric. But hey, maybe it’s a conspiracy that these artists push capitalism, misogyny and grotesque consumerism to their audiences? Maybe all music is a conspiracy?

I can extend forbearance to Anthony on the couple of lines that offend my sensibilities. I’d do the same for any other song I like with a politically incorrect lyric or two.

So, “MILKING WELFARE”

We’ve come to the educational portion of our program, ahem: Welfare exists only for the rich in the US. There’s no safety net or social “welfare” in this country. There’s disability which is next to impossible to get, and I can’t imagine that anyone can pay rent on SSI (Supplemental Security Income) which tops out at $941 a month for an individual and $1371 for a couple (yeah, there’s a perverse incentive to divorce built into the system).

Compare that to the $7.2 BILLION that the government has given to Exxon-Mobil since 2010.

Bill Clinton gutted the welfare system when he threw it to the states, funded by block grants. Only about 1/4 of those block grants find their way to needy families, and TANF benefits (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) come with harsh work requirements and arbitrary time limits.

“Food Stamps” became SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program). Your food allotment is about $180/month and it’s limited to three months for most people. Young mothers can sometimes get WIC (Women Infants Children) benefits which provide only a few extremely basic goods.

Once and for all, WE DO NOT HAVE WELFARE IN THIS COUNTRY.

This goes to the heart of what his song is about. He clearly has ‘welfare’ wrong, but you know, it’s a song, not a campaign stump speech. Life is shit right now for everyone except billionaires. It’s shit for workers. It’s shit for students and new graduates. It’s shit for PMCs, but at least ya’ll are working from home. It’s shit for people who got sick and it’s shit for those like me who were injured by the vaccine that was supposed to save the world. It’s shit for kids who missed two years of school. It’s shit for small business owners who lost everything since 2020. It’s shit for everyone renting since Blackrock cornered the market on residential housing.

Life is shit because we live in a country that consumes us as fuel. We’re the commodity. We’re the livestock. We’re the resource that’s farmed, bought and sold. Our chronic disease makes people very rich and they have no incentive to “cure” anyone because the sicker we are, the more powerful they become. It’s zero-sum.

This is the nature of US greed that leads to the sort of misery that people are feeling right now, and what I see in a song such as this is recognition of that suffering.

• Because your dollar ain't shit, and it's taxed to no end because the rich men north of Richmond.

Working people complain about taxes in the same context as “welfare” because they don’t see that the system doesn’t work for them. The culprit isn’t the obese, addicts, and those dying deaths of despair, and I don’t think that’s where Anthony puts the blame. If we did actually get something from our taxes—other than war—we might actually have healthcare, mental health, better nutrition, better schools, and mass transit. We know it’s possible because we see other countries getting much more for their work and taxes. Europeans get free healthcare, a MONTH of vacation every year, generous family and maternity leave, amazing mass transit systems that encourage walking from your stop to your destination, thereby reducing obesity. European countries spend a tiny fraction of their taxes on warfare compared to the US. None of this is fair to us and we’re right to be furious about it. Why does everyone else have clean, beautiful urban landscapes with safe neighborhoods while we get drug cartels running open-air fentanyl markets that are killing everyone in our formerly “world class” cities?

I don’t know, maybe ask those rich men north of Richmond.

___________________

LYRICS

I've been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay so I can sit out here and waste my life away, drag back home, and drown my troubles away.

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to for people like me — for people like you. Wish I could just wake up and it not be true. But it is. Oh, it is.

Living in the New World with an old soul. These rich men north of Richmond. Lord knows it all. Just want to have total control.

Want to know what you think, want to know what you do. And they don't think you know. But I know that you do. Because your dollar ain't shit, and it's taxed to no end because the rich men north of Richmond.

I wish politicians would look out for miners and not just minors on an island somewhere. Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothing to eat, and the obese milking welfare.

God, if you're five foot three, and you're 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds. Young men are putting themselves 6 feet in the ground because all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.

Lord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to for people like me — people like you. Wish I could just wake up and it not be true. But it is. Oh, it is.

Living in the New World with an old soul. These rich men north of Richmond. Lord knows they all. Just want to have total control.

Want to know what you think, want to know what you do. And they don't think you know. But I know that you do because your dollar ain't shit, and it's taxed to no end because the rich men north of Richmond.

I've been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay...

___________________

As mainstream media barely touches on the massive Missouri v Biden case, it’s all the more important for us to discuss it amongst ourselves, because what the Department of Justice is arguing is that the government has the right to control public opinion. Full stop. Most would agree that a government which claims the right to control public opinion has become despotic, but if that wasn’t already obvious enough, the DOJ’s Motion To Stay the July 4 Injunction comes right out and argues that the government’s primary aim is to deceive the public, and that exposing those lies amounts to “irreparable harm.” The government must never be called to account or embarrassed by individuals exposing their corruption.

Here’s the language used to make the claim: “The Government faces irreparable harm … [because the injunction will] prevent the Government from … speaking on matters of public concern and [prevent them from] working with social media companies …These immediate and ongoing harms to the Government outweigh any risk of injury to Plaintiffs if a stay is granted, and for the same reason, a stay is in the public interest.”

Given the basic facts of the First Amendment case laid out in the initial complaint, they’re arguing that it’s in the public interest for the government to lie to us while coercing social media companies to censor protected speech. And they’re further claiming they’ll be irreparably harmed if public opinion isn’t under their full control. The motion further argues that upholding the First Amendment is an “improper intrusion by a federal court into the workings of … government.” Cry me a river, the court is impeding their ability to run a totalitarian state.

Their maximalist view of their “right” to narrative control indicates they’re operating at a level of exceptionalism that is simply unheard of in democratic systems. When everything is an existential threat, anything goes. We came to expect this from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who developed the concept of the “unitary executive” which basically adopts Richard Nixon’s famous view that “Well, when the President does it ... that means it’s not illegal.” As if all the rot from the Bush Jr has spread to every corner of government like a metastasized cancer, DOJ now claims that unitary executive applies to everything.

This shows that the US is operating under the doctrine of dual state in which liberal democracy has been overcome by an unaccountable “prerogative” government—an American Stasi.

In his denial of an earlier Motion To Dismiss, Judge Doughty cited the relentless pressure campaign of federal government officials to suppress social media shows that the Biden administration’s political agenda cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment. And that federal officials such as White House digital director Robert Flaherty “convert[ed] the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action.”

It’s understandable that lay people might not immediately appreciate how expressly unconstitutional this is. But lawyers, reporters, publishers, and editors have no such excuse. I asked three different attorneys, one who studied First Amendment law specifically, and they all said “Everyone knows it’s unconstitutional to coerce a private entity to violate the Bill of Rights on behalf of state actors—especially the White House.” They all said “it’s axiomatic.” When I asked if this principle had a name, I was told that it didn’t need a name because it’s so basic.

Later I found the name of that principle in Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s lawsuit filed earlier this year in Louisiana. The beautifully constructed Kennedy v Biden complaint begins by citing The Norwood Principle, which is the name I was looking for.

Here’s the language as it appears in the complaint:

1. A half century ago, in Norwood v. Harrison, the Supreme Court reaffirmed what the Justices called an “axiomatic” principle of constitutional law.

2. The Court set forth this principle categorically, without qualification or dissent.

3. The principle was this: government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

4. The Norwood principle is “axiomatic” because, without it, government actors could evade nearly every prohibition in the Bill of Rights through the simple expedient of inducing private parties to do what the Constitution bars the government from doing directly.

That’s unambiguous. In their Motion to Stay, the DOJ might as well have invoked the Divine Right of Kings—that’s how un-American and unconstitutional this is.

DOJ also argues that the injunction “lacks specificity” as if no one in the Biden Administration has ever heard of the First Amendment. In the 247 years since the founding of the United States, this is the first time the government has claimed that the First Amendment is too difficult to understand.

The problem is that the government has made an enormous power grab and they’re not giving it up willfully. Here’s a short list of disinformation shops that currently work with the government to censor protected speech and propagandize the public with disinformation. Many were originally created to fight terrorism, but Biden’s Administration has converted them to use against Americans.

Start here:

• Global Engagement Center (funded by the State Department)

• Cyber Security & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, housed at Dept of Homeland Security)

• Center for Internet Security (CIS, Dept of Homeland Security funded)

• Stanford Internet Observatory

• Virality Project (housed at Stanford)

• Election Integrity Partnership

• Newsguard

• Hamilton 68

• New Knowledge

• Graphika

• New America

• Clemson’s Media Forensics Lab

• Atlantic Council’s DFRLab

Disinformation organizations have no transparency or accountability. They operate for the state, but outside of the state, on the behest of the state. This entire project can be well understood under the doctrine of “dual state” wherein the visible side is liberal democracy, but there is also an “exceptional” side— sometimes called “prerogative” state which is composed of intelligence agencies, military, organized crime, and all other non-transparent actors that undermine the democratic institutions they’re supposed to work for. Some have described prerogative state as a fusion of authoritarianism and liberal democracy, but I see it more like aufheben wherein this fusion creates something new that is neither liberal democracy nor prerogative. Aufheben is like when you have a cucumber, but want a pickle, so you change the cucumber into a pickle. It’s no longer a cucumber. You could say we’re in a pickle when the prerogative state takes the wheel from liberal democratic institutions.

In the case of Missouri v Biden, the prerogative state is the part of government censoring information, pushing lies and propaganda, and curtailing free speech. Prerogative state in the US has taken full control of media, and is responsible for all the lies and upheaval we’ve experienced since 2016: Russiagate, COVID-19, January 6, Hunter Biden’s role in his family’s corruption per the evidence on his laptop that was hidden by intelligence agencies who ran an operation to discredit it during the Presidential election so that his father Joe Biden would be elected. These sorts of follies used to be rare. Now they consume our every waking moment.

And so it’s truly remarkable to see dual state dirty laundry aired out publicly. It’s almost never forced to argue for its “exceptionalism” out into the open. This is usually done in closed Congressional hearings, Presidential briefings, on private jets, and at Georgetown cocktail parties. In Missouri v Biden the prerogative state argues that it should be exempt from democracy. It’s as simple as that. This is why mainstream media reporting on it so obtuse.

A fuller understanding of the mechanics of this struggle would reveal America’s Dirtiest Secret: that a coup happened a long time ago and actual political power in the US isn’t democratic at all and most certainly doesn’t reflect the wishes of citizens. Power instead rests with corporations (like pharmaceutical companies) that are enhanced by emergency measures designed for THEIR benefit, not ours. The Censorship Industrial Complex (or American Stasi) exists to protect the prerogative state’s ability to change the rules of the game by declaring an emergency. In so doing they aim to define any discussion of the prerogative state as “conspiracy theory,” a term made up by our intelligence agencies to curtail discussion of the assassination of JFK by the cowardly prerogative state.

Their real existential fear is that Americans will eventually learn the dangerous truth that we’re no longer in a democracy, which is why we’re lied to constantly. A fitting example of this in action is Biden reneging on the release of JFK Assassination Records. This extraordinary move was announced after 5pm on Friday before the July 4 holiday weekend. As a Senator, Joe Biden had signed the JFK Assassination Records Act. Now he’s “ruled” that the documents can’t be released because the prerogative state that murdered JFK is still in operation, at the same time Biden’s DOJ is arguing “irreparable harm” to the government when it can no longer deceive the public.

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”—Harry Truman

This was a truly epic July 4 with the surprise victory for free speech (in the form of an injunction) and an unprecedented 155-page judge’s memorandum laying out all the ways the Biden Administration has likely violated the First Amendment rights of Americans by coercing social media companies to censor sharing of COVID-19 information.

I’ll have much more to say about this, but for now—quickly—I need to convey something that’s important about the ruling for the left.

In the memorandum the judge repeatedly referred to censored COVID-19 information as “conservative speech.” In the margin of my print-out I scribbled “not conservative—politicized.”

This bothered me throughout the entire pandemic. Many of COVID’s most ardent critics are dyed-in-the-wool liberals. Pierre Kory, Robert Malone, Bret Weinstein, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are all unquestionably lefties. Malone even maxed out donating to Biden in 2020—although I doubt he’ll make that mistake again. I also know from my own social media following that there is robust support on the left for rational COVID discourse and critique. Many more on the left have held their tongue, and shame on them, but I get it, I guess. It’d be nice to eventually see some courage from these folks. Olly olly oxen free.

The Democratic party politicized everything relating to COVID-19, thereby leaving us stranded and lowering society’s collective IQ by dozens of points, while creating an environment that facilitated too much avoidable sickness, injury and death. This entire circus would be total farce were it not for all the lives lost and diminished by state censorship. Imagine if we had been able to discuss cheap early treatments; or the real safety and efficacy issues with the injectable products.

I complained bitterly to my husband that the politicizing of COVID-19 continues in the pages of the Judge’s memorandum. He said 1) it’s mostly true, and 2) it’s smart legal strategy because in First Amendment law, political speech is the most protected form of speech.

This would explain why the three non-political and well known doctors (Bhattacharya, Kheriaty, Kulldorff) were joined in their complaint by the (politically conservative) Gateway Pundit. They’re making the case for COVID-19 discourse to be framed as political speech.

But there’s more to it than just political speech.

At the beginning of his legal analysis of First Amendment claims (page 88) Judge Doughty cites something called “viewpoint discrimination,” which I believe is the obvious reason for framing censored speech as “conservative.”

Here he says:

“Viewpoint discrimination is an especially egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

“What is really telling is that virtually all of the free speech suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech. Using the 2016 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government apparently engaged in a massive effort to suppress disfavored conservative speech. The targeting of conservative speech indicates that Defendants may have engaged in ‘viewpoint discrimination.’”

One of the reasons the memorandum is so damn long is because the judge explains everything as if speaking to a lay audience. From terms of art to legal principles, the judge speaks to a reader who is assumed not be a lawyer.

So while it is true that censored COVID-19 information wouldn’t be considered “conservative” had it not been for the machinations of the Democrats, we actually live in the world they created. Not every deplatformed social media account was conservative, but in the eyes of the court (and the DNC) any censored COVID-19 information was by definition conservative bullshit.

And now they’re reaping what they sowed.

Biden’s DOJ has already filed to appeal. It’s difficult to imagine any honest court that would rule differently. At best they’re stalling until after next year’s Presidential election—which they’d consider that a win, even if they ultimately lose that appeal—because that’s how far around the bend they’ve gone.

Take a walk down memory lane and enjoy this essay on abortion rights originally published April 19, 2015 by Brook Hines at The Florida Squeeze

A note on the image: If you’re offended by the symbol of back-alley abortions, then you don’t understand the history of women’s struggle for equality and bodily autonomy. The two cannot be separated.

I’ve been criticized by a gay man and former State Legislator for using this image on campaign materials. To him I say, use the time on your hands since losing re-election to educate yourself on OUR STRUGGLES AS WOMEN the same way we did the work to educate ourselves and advocate on behalf of LGBTQ+ rights.

Women have fought for WOMEN’S RIGHTS for generations and the tone police who seek to silence us can’t erase that history. We’re on our own and it’s taken entirely too long to recognize that fact. There’s no political party, NGO or corporate progressive organization that’s ever coming to OUR defense. We’ve trusted them for 50 years to codify Roe and look what that’s gotten us.

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This week I traveled to Tallahassee to “tell my abortion story” to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Along with two other women, we went to make women’s voices heard as the fate of the Mandatory Wait Bill (SB 724) was “considered.” I put “considered” in scare quotes because we all know that there’s no “consideration” in these matters.

And, the fact that I was the only one of the three of us who was able to tell my story proves they never intended to allow women to be heard. They hid behind a procedural rule to cut off testimony, because what could women possibly add to a debate that’s already been decided? The suppressed testimony of the two other women can be found here, and here. They had a lot to add, as you’ll learn when you watch these videos, and it’s outrageous that they weren’t permitted to be heard. My own testimony focused on the fact that while our stories are different, we share the opinion that we don’t need Tallahassee politicians inserting themselves into our lives to remind us of the seriousness of our decisions. Everyone knows that mandatory wait laws are impediments made in bad faith by snickering opponents of reproductive rights.

It’s clear to me that the only way to fight back is to step out of the shadows, and roar. So let the headlines read “Local Woman Has Abortion 25 Years ago: Still Doesn’t Regret It.”

In the 40-plus years since Roe v. Wade, we’ve lost so much ground that reproductive freedom barely exists anymore, and this threatens our basic human rights as women. I believe that if we don’t put a human face on it we’re ceding another victory to our opposition.

Refusing to fight for, and personalize reproductive rights was a mistake we made in the 90s. We thought that finally having a Democratic president after 12 years of Reagan/Bush meant we could rest easy on this issue of women’s rights. Far from codifying Roe, as was promised, the Clintons further horse-traded abortion rights away, while telling us to sit tight and not “attack” our own party. Remember! the rising tide would float all boats. They never meant it. The Clintons were NOT sympathetic to abortion rights and did damage to reproductive rights that Republican Administrations could only dream of.

This is precisely when things went haywire. Following the lead of the Clintons, political thinkers and Democrats in Congress began asking, “Where can women compromise?” One the answer was ‘late term abortion,’ which is a procedure that’s used only under the most extreme circumstances when the life of mother or child is at stake. People needing this procedure aren’t seeking birth control. They’re fighting for their lives. And yet this seemed a “reasonable” goddamn place to cede ground — it was the camel’s nose under the tent.

Once you abandon the foundational premise that we’re equal members of society with full agency over our healthcare decisions, the forces that desire to “keep us in our place” are empowered on all levels. Forget equal pay, or the right to seek healthcare without discrimination. We’re all “daddy’s little girls” now.

I remember having this discussion with my mentor, a professor of political theory at my university, while I was in grad school. This was the person who taught The Handmaid’s Tale in Intro To Political Science 101. His discussion of the book showed how reproductive rights encompassed more than the literal ability to terminate a pregnancy. They circumscribe our agency as human beings. Losing control of the size and nature of our families ensures institutional abuse of women and economic marginalization.

Soon, bipartisan negotiations began under the delusion that right wing ideologues would bargain in good faith. It’s just a mandatory counseling session here, and a 24-hour “cooling off” period there. What’s a transvaginal ultrasound between friends? Surely this won’t lead eliminating most of the women’s clinics in Texas, or contribute to a woman in Indiana being sent to to prison for a ‘suspicious miscarriage.’ To suggest this was a slippery slope down which the rest of rights would soon tumble was considered unreasonable.

And yet, the ground lost through mandatory wait laws, mandatory counseling, mandatory invasive imaging, admitting privilege rules, and insane over-regulation has added up to the effective virtual repeal of Roe in many states. Republicans in Mississippi cackled openly about how laws requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges in local hospitals were aimed at eliminating abortion in the state altogether.

It’s a feature, not a bug, when no facilities exist to access the procedure.

It’s a feature, not a bug, when a woman is priced out of the ability to access the procedure.

It’s a feature, not a bug, when a woman is time-limited out of the ability access the procedure.

It’s a feature, not a bug, when a woman is shamed out of the ability to access the procedure.

And what’s the effect of all this? Here’s Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2009 clearly articulating how chipping away at reproductive rights sends women into a “cycle of poverty and abuse.” When asked if the administration had any plans to further restrict abortions in the developing world she responded:

“I’ve been in hospitals in Brazil where half the women were enthusiastically and joyfully greeting new babies and the other half were fighting for their lives against botched abortions.”

“I’ve been in African countries where 12 and 13 year old girls are bearing children. I have been in Asian countries where the denial of family planning confines women to lives of oppression and hardship.”

It’s easy to articulate when we’re talking about other countries but we too often refuse to look into the mirror ourselves. It’s obvious that restrictions on access to women’s healthcare is creating a United States that accepts third world status for women. Tell me again where it is that we jail women for suspicious miscarriages. Saudi Arabia? Sierra Leone? Oh right … Indiana.

The story I’m about to tell begins with a bizarre Twitter DM from someone I’d not heard from since 2015, a podcaster named Nicole Sandler.

The DM was meant as a withering attack on my character. But instead, it serves as a roadmap to the ideological holy war currently waged by Democratic Party Machine apparatchiks on behalf of giant pharmaceutical corps, alphabet soup intelligence agencies, and White House staff who seek to censor every corner of digital communications.

Here’s the DM that set me to thinking about the holy war:

Just to set the table, I stand accused of the following:

1. being a [nasty] antivaxxer

2. being a [nasty] RFK supporter, and

3. being a [nasty] Taibbi-reader, possibly even Greenwald (clutches pearls, faints)

To interpret this message through the lens of narcissism would be a mistake. That’s maybe necessary but definitely not sufficient to explain this level of contempt. A psychological struggle might exist, but this communication is not of a personal nature. It’s political. It’s like a witch hunt, but the aim isn’t to burn witches [yet], it’s to silence rational thinking and replace it with pure ideology.

That’s all fairly high-level stuff and I’m sure Sandler hasn’t given any thought to this. She just knows that her tribe demands unquestioning loyalty to a set of ideas and she wants to be a good foot-soldier.

NICOLE … WHO?

Sandler is long-time radio broadcaster who cast her lot with the Democratic Party Machine, whose apparatchiks fill time on her show segments. Listeners of her show find a safe space for a “vote blue no matter who” orientation that adheres to a cult-like belief that the the walls are still closing in on Trump. I don’t understand how they still have the energy. There’s so much more to life (and our political moment) than re-litigating Hillary Clinton’s richly deserved 2016 loss in the presidential election…but there it is.

So, why lash out at me?

Well, in this holy war combatants apparently believe their ideology wins when they’re assholes to enough people on the internet. Seems an unlikely solution to anything, but I don’t make the rules—and they might not have thought this through. It’s every bit as stupid as it sounds.

THE ATTACK: vaccines

Trust me, this is just a prelude to much bigger issues so just skim this section if you know story.

I’ll take the “anti-vaxxer” accusation first [deep, prolonged exhausted sigh and eyeroll]:

1. I took the vaccine.

2. and had a severe adverse reaction.

3. I don’t tell people not to get the shot.

4. I tell my own story and share relevant information so others can make the informed decision that I wasn’t afforded.

5. I’m especially concerned with those who suffer from autoimmune or inflammatory chronic disease who seem to be especially vulnerable to injury.

I’ve spoken out about these things because I believe we have a responsibility to share information that can help others.

Additionally, we all know the ‘antivaxxer’ moniker is meant as a slur, which is a form of social coercion called ‘symbolic violence’ (described by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu). It’s intended to impose social norms through a display of power and tribal affiliation.

Here’s my good faith response to her volley.

It’s important to say right up front that I’m not tolerating attacks regarding my medical status—that’s ableism. I took the shot and had a stroke. It’s very straightforward. I didn’t even mention the $23,000 hospital bill.

Which she momentarily seemed to appreciate…

…but the veneer cracks and in mere moments she angrily accuses me of lying. She also accuses a mutual friend of lying. His brother died. None of this okay in the context of normal adult interaction.

I contend it only makes sense in the context of holy war. I’m reminded that it was radio hosts in Rwanda who kicked off the genocide, and it’s becoming easy to see how that came about.

“SOME OTHER FACTOR”

I half-agree when Sandler says that “some other factor” led to my stroke and our mutual friend’s brother’s death. This has been my key point throughout the entire debate: We need safety data of this pharmaceutical product AS IT PERTAINS to autoimmune (my disease family), precisely BECAUSE autoimmune makes us vulnerable to certain medicines that may cause hyper inflammatory states.

Medicine shouldn’t be politicized because we ALL come with “other factors”—be they sex, weight, genetic disposition, pregnancy status and chronic disease. No medication is ‘one size fits all.’

With safety data, informed consent and the right of bodily autonomy, I know I’d have avoided all of this misery, and chances are our mutual friend wouldn’t have lost his brother.

But I doubt this tribe would agree to that, because…

OUR LIVES DON’T MATTER

In the screenshot below she tells us we (injured, bereaved) mean nothing to her. If I had a nickel for every time a Democratic Party Machine apparatchik told me during COVID19 that my life meant nothing to them, I could afford healthcare.

Sandler claims both the injured and the bereaved are “insignificant” and “infinitesimal,” because she’s under the impression that my vaccine injury would curtail her access the mRNA product—and apparently she thinks COVID19 is transmitted through Twitter since we’ve never met in person (and I didn’t go anywhere for two years during COVID, anyway).

It gets weirder when she dismisses our real material conditions because hypothetically there are other material conditions in the world. This move is only taken when you’re telling people they’re literally the enemy. It’s not only that our lives don’t matter. It’s that our blood must be shed to purify their ideological needs.

It’s like saying to the families of the Parkland shooting that “Gun violence doesn’t matter because people die in car crashes.” Or, “Why worry about heart disease when people die from falling pianos?” It’s a non-sequitur that would likely get you punched in the throat if said it face-to-face to a bereaved family member.

The vaccine injured don’t matter to Sandler because she signed-up for ideological holy war, not humanitarian aid. The “liberal” position prescribed by Democratic Party Machine apparatchiks demands that the disabled just fuck off and die. There’s no place in their narrative for anyone’s pissy little neurological injury or dead loved ones.

You might ask, what kind of person harasses those bereaved by pharmaceutical corporations? Are pharmaceutical corporations somehow involved this ideology or holy war?

PR IN THE SERVICE OF HOLY WAR

It stinks of public relations that Sandler uses the exact same talking points that so many other faceless Twitter Dems touted: “People die from stuff all the time. What’s the big deal if YOU die?” I’ve seen this line repeated in almost every social media discussion of deaths and injuries from the mRNA product.

No normal human being would look into the eyes of someone suffering from iatrogenic injury, and poke them in the chest to punctuate the words “Your_life_doesn’t_matter.” That’s the job of $1000-an-hour bigdog litigators retained by pharmaceutical companies. What kind of moron does their dirty work for free?

That behavior requires someone who’s enlisted in an ideological holy war. We’ve come a long way since the days of Mad Men when simple psychological levers were pulled to sell hosiery. Now we have the largest public relations institutions in the world, employed by the largest corporate interests in the world, using the networks of Left Institutions adjacent to the Democratic Party to fight an ideological holy war that has nothing to do with public health, and everything to do with campaign strategy.

Dangerous times, indeed. And sad too, because the Democratic Party used to serve The People instead of serving the people up to corporate interests.

Which brings us to …

RFK Jr.—DEMOCRATS’ PROTOTYPICAL PRESIDENT

The Democratic Party is well aware of the allure of a real Kennedy because they’ve spent the last 50 years manufacturing cheap Kennedy counterfeits in the hope of capturing that old JFK/RFK magic without actually having the humanity that JFK or RFK were famous for. Every election cycle the party tosses out a few Kennedy-esque empty suits like Beto O’Rourke. They’re actually scared shitless that anyone with a Kennedy’s intelligence, humanity and work ethic might emerge and blow their whole shit show to pieces. Kennedy facsimiles are prized by the Democratic machine. Real Kennedys won’t be tolerated.

RFK’s son and JKF’s nephew will most certainly show up the current Doddering-Old-Man-in-Chief, and that has Democrats freaking out. This would be a disaster for the aging triangulators and horse-traders who currently run the joint up in DC. Imagine voting for a real Kennedy with a long career of consumer, environmental and human rights litigation under his belt. RFK Jr. is a threat because he’s the real McCoy.

We all have history that leads us in one political direction or another. I came to the Democratic Party through my family of Irish Catholics who saw the Kennedys as the prototypical Democrat. When they went to vote for Democrats, they always imagined they were voting for the party of the Kennedys. I think that’s fairly common.

But my family’s attachment to the Kennedys goes deeper.

My grandmother who raised me worked at the Kennedy Compound in Palm Beach. She was a ward of the state of Florida after her family abandoned her and her sisters in the aftermath of The Great Hurricane in 1928 (think, The Little Rascals, or Our Gang). Back then foster kids were rented out by the state to serve in the mansions of South Florida, and specifically for my grandmother, Palm Beach. She was 12 when she cleaned house at the Kennedy Compound.

She resented all of the wealthy on Palm Beach except the Kennedys for the simple reason that they treated her like a human when no one else did. She’d weep telling me how Rose Kennedy was the only mansion-dweller who bothered to learn the names of the orphans. “They’re good people,” she’d say. “True humanitarians.”

But none of this isn’t the reason RFK Jr., has my attention.

RFK Jr.’s father and uncle were [likely] murdered by the same intelligence agencies now operating the massive censorship regime and control operation that Matt Taibbi has been reporting on—this is why he’s relevant to our moment. He represents everything Democrats were before they tongue-kissed Sauron’s ring. Now they’re playing the role of little Gollums, fully encased in their ‘shadow self’; shunning those who remind of who they once were.

Corruption hates seeing itself in the mirror.

Contemporary Democrats want to take all the corporate money, screw over real people who’ve been hurt and bereaved, and still see themselves as stars of their own Hero’s Journey. They’re sick. I’d feel sorry for them but they’re so far into their addiction that there’s no core identity left to mourn.

The Kennedys believed in the promise of a united America and a world at peace because that’s how we secure a future for ourselves and others. Democratic voters have sought leaders with this worldview and been fooled for 50 years. Does RFK Jr. have flaws? Sure. But I don’t care. If the vote is between RFK Jr. and Handsy McBiguy, there’s no contest.

‘BEAT OFFICE, HOW MAY I DIRECT YOUR CALL?’

We see through them now. I know I do. Those who cast their ballot for Democrats are doing so with the knowledge, and maybe even the hope, that they’re electing the dirtiest bastards in Washington. This mindset is a relic of Bill Clinton’s administration when the party openly marketed themselves on the premise that they’d garner more corporate money than Republicans.

It’s taken 30 years but I see that Clintonian moment in perfect clarity now.

During the presidential election of 1992, I was publishing a left newsweekly in one of the most conservative parts of the country. I had to make dozens of snap decisions a day. I admit, I took shortcuts. In fact, I took the exact same shortcuts that every Brooklyn wannabe-journo does now in their practice of “advocacy journalism” instead of practicing actual reporting.

I started my publication while in graduate school studying Marx and postmodernism (and teaching classes, and waiting tables). It was called “The Beat.” We answered the phones, “Beat Office,” which was apropos because we were complete wankers.

Those in the thrall of “advocacy journalism” tell themselves that they have a principle more important than truth. That’s the essence of postmodernism which was my area of study in graduate school as well as the latter part of undergrad. I had once been enthusiastic by the promise of postmodernism, but no more. It’s taken me decades to undo the damage to my brain and my soul from that ideology—only to find my own party with a needle in its arm, OD-ing on pomo.

[NOTE: Postmodernism is different from ‘wokeism.’ Pomo is the ideology and epistemology that allows ‘woke’ identity politics to exist.]

My biggest regret of that time was not publishing, in its entirety, an insider’s account of Bill Clinton’s corruption in Arkansas. A lovely, LONG, story was provided by someone who had just come from Arkansas and had seen the corruption with his own eyes. But we were mere months away from the 1992 presidential election and I simply refused to show that story to our readers … because postmodernism demands a different set of ‘higher principles.’

TAIBBI, JOURNALISM … DEMOCRACY, FREE SPEECH

This brings us to Matt Taibbi and the Democratic Party’s lunacy toward the bedrock principle of democracy—free speech.

According to the online AI program ChatGPT, the Founders’ rationale for the First Amendment was:

Firstly, they were deeply committed to the principles of individual liberty and religious freedom, which they saw as essential to a free and democratic society. The First Amendment was seen as a way to protect these freedoms by prohibiting the government from establishing a state religion or interfering with individuals' right to worship as they choose.

Secondly, the Founders were aware of the history of government censorship and repression in Europe and wanted to ensure that such abuses did not occur in the United States. The First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were intended to ensure that citizens could freely express their opinions and ideas without fear of retribution from the government.

Finally, the Founders recognized the importance of a free and open marketplace of ideas, where citizens could engage in vigorous debate and discussion to arrive at the truth. They believed that the free exchange of ideas was essential to a healthy democracy and that the First Amendment's protections would help to ensure that this exchange could occur without interference from the government.

And here’s why it’s important to us in this moment:

1. The Founders knew from experience that a free and democratic society cannot exist without free speech, because

2. They had been victims of a corrupt government that silenced those who revealed the details of that corruption, and

3. It was recognized that TRUTH is not something a monarch proclaims, it’s rather

4. Arrived at through reason and vigorous discussion in a free marketplace of ideas, where

5. Free people speak freely without interference or retribution from THE GOVERNMENT, in order that

6. The TRUTH may simply EXIST, because

7. Without a free and open discussion there is no TRUTH, rather

8. You get the capricious proclamations of inbred imperialists.

Free speech is free for BOTH those who are right and those who are wrong, because we can’t know the difference without discourse. The greatest ‘tell’ in the history of civilization is that corrupt governments always seek to silence those who are right—not those who are wrong.

“Government censorship and repression” is currently on full display but Democratic Party Machine apparatchiks are distracting you with some misbegotten tribal hatred for a handful of journalists—specifically, those who’ve revealed the corruption.

HOW DOES ANYONE NOT SEE THIS?

Democratic leaders and Members of Congress have threatened to imprison a journalist, Matt Taibbi, for reporting on the massive Censorship Industrial Complex whose architects hail from the highest levels of the Biden White House. They’re currently claiming that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, together, represent “a direct threat to people who oppose them” — a rather strange turn of phrase, which is true if and only if staffers in the Biden White House actually did what they’re accused of doing, and if so, represents only the “threat” of accountability.

The surest sign of a corrupt government is when one moves to repress and imprison journalists who dare to reveal its perfidy.

Our current nightmare directly mirrors the worst impulses of the British Monarchy prior to the Declaration of Independence. For example, the pseudo Left that regards free speech as “fascist,” curiously remains in favor of “free speech” as it pertains to modern-day monarchs like Chrissy Teigen and other celebrity influencers. Meanwhile, Democrats seem to have directed the the IRS to intimidate Matt Taibbi and his family, while he was giving testimony in a Congressional hearing.

This is the exact opposite of how a ‘democracy’ works. Sorry to be yelling, but HOW DOES ANYONE NOT SEE THIS?

I’ll tell you why. Because everything we’ve experienced since 2016 has been a giant postmodern feint. Those who were supposed to be ‘the best among us,’ set out on a villain’s journey to dismantle democracy. They’re doing it by short-circuiting reason, and by claiming exceptional powers during crises that seem to be both (somewhat) natural (COVID19) and manufactured (January 6).

Taibbi speaks to this directly in his aptly titled essay, “The Democrats Have Lost the Plot.” What’s described is “a system that wants to bypass proof and proceed to punishment, a radical idea that this new breed of Democrat embraces.”

Perfectly exemplifying postmodernism, Taibbi says, “I think they justify this using the Sam Harris argument, that in pursuit of suppressing Trump, anything is justified.”

Taibbi then observes, “But by removing or disrespecting the rights to which Americans are accustomed, you make opposition movements like Trump’s, you don’t stop them.”

Personally, I don’t think they want to stop them because the more Trumps they have, the more power they can grab. I’m not sure Democrats know how to govern without an all-purpose excuse of ‘extraordinary circumstances.’ Never forget, Hillary Clinton lost the election to the walking orange turd she wanted to run against. That was her Pied Piper Strategy.

‘Extraordinary circumstances’ powered Russiagate, COVID19, and Jan 6 which all compelled new ‘emergency powers’ that serve the interests of this new monarchy.

As Taibbi says at the close of the essay, the Congressional Hearing forced him to see “the intellectual desert that’s … the party I once supported.” He laments, “there are no more … Wellstones and Kuciniches … that crucial little pocket of principle is gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.”

HOLY WAR IN THE FULLEST SENSE

Despite the forward-sounding name, postmodernism seeks to turn the clock back to when ‘rulers’ were feared because they governed through barbarism. I reject that, as should everyone.

Michael Shellenberger just published a whistleblower account titled, “It’s Even Worse Than You Think,” that features testimony from a “trust and security professional” (code for a professional censor) who works within the social media industry. In it Shellenberger asks if censorship is a function of simple “Wokeism,” or if it’s “driven by the [intelligence community] IC?”

The whistleblower replies, “‘Wokeism’ is a description of an ideology that…while popular, it is also quite convenient for the ruling class and the IC to the extent that the IC shares the ruling class’ priorities.”

The whistleblower continues: “The conflict is total; it’s being waged in every school, business, and platform. I don’t think it’s appropriate to view the present conflict as a battle between movements with leaders, but rather as a conflict between religions. If one leader falls on either side, two more will rise to take their place. This is a battle of world views, not of organizations.”

This perfectly describes our current postmodern holy war, where no one really knows what they’re fighting for, but they’re damn sure they’re right about it.

The whistleblower says that the holy war has already engulfed the popular view of free speech and the First Amendment: “The First Amendment is the expression of a dead worldview… It derives its legitimacy from the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment is dead.”

So here’s my biggest problem with all of this. The most basic organizing principle of postmodernism is the death of the Enlightenment. What postmodernism seeks to establish is a technocratic dark age that some have called Endarkenment.

The whistleblower continues: “Personally, I’d like to see a basic organizing principle that people can identify with, which has free speech as a logical consequence of holding that principle. Whether that worldview wins remains to be seen.”

We already have THAT organizing principle in The Constitution. What’s happening now is nothing less than the controlled demolition of the structures that have held us together for 246 years, complete with radio hosts pumping up holy war. What’s described by this whistleblower is an ideological coup and a declaration of civil war. It’s exactly the kind of thing our intelligence communities have done in other countries since the 1950s. They’re doing it to US now—and they’re cloaking it not in an American flag, but in a rainbow.

If it seems like celebrities overnight became vaccine POD PEOPLE, it’s because they did. In a Judicial Watch FOIA released in October, 2022 we learn that the US government basically “called the manager” on every professional performer to bring them to heel on COVID messaging, by enlisting talent agencies, management companies, media outlets and producers in a massive propaganda scheme.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was awarded at least $3 billion to coerce Americans to take the vaccine, prior to releasing any data on safety and efficacy. Pfizer’s own data obtained by FOIA shows just how unreliable and unsafe the shots actually are. This means our government enlisted the entire entertainment industry to lie to us about the COVID vaccines.

In a 249-page FOIA release on the ‘COVID-19 National Public Education Campaign’s for “Entertainment Industry engagement,”’ it’s revealed that HHS went hard on the performing arts, even coercing “artists who rely on live events for their livelihoods,” to “convey the message that the sooner everyone’s vaccinated, the sooner we can have concerts and shows again” (see image 4 below).

It almost sounds like a threat. “Nice career you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.” And conversely, “Sure would be nice to book some gigs. See what you can do with our ‘community outreach.’ We’ll talk later.”

Many felt uneasy with the concatenation of Hollywood celebrities, stand-up comics, social media influencers, musicians, and athletes who sprang forward to sing from the same hymnal on COVID-19 vaccination. It felt manufactured because it was.

HHS knew that in order for you to consume their messaging, it would need to be delivered by those “you trust most,” which are, of course celebrities.

And it turns out, celebrities are hella easy to manipulate.

In order to stay employed, most entertainers have an unimaginably complex web of relationships. Agents, managers, media, and producers all have an amount of power over any one celebrity’s career. Imagine you must toe all of their lines in order to pay your rent. They could get you to publicly agree on anything. “Of course monkeys belch ammonia—who doesn’t think that?”

Moreover, those invested in the messaging would need to “take down” those with a different perspective or else the people who look up to them would discover they’re all brazen sell-outs. It would take whole armies of Twitter bots attacking the free thinker at once for them to save face.

“She denies that monkeys belch ammonia!”

“Monkey Truther!”

“Belch Denier!”

“Putinista!”

When talent agencies, management companies, producers, and nearly 4000 media outlets all demand piety to a specific set of vaccine messages it’s only the rare, self-possessed, self-managed, self-produced performers who dare go against the grain.

Enter Jimmy Dore.

Dore has commented extensively on this, saying that comedians he knows “who have ‘Question Authority’ bumperstickers” express horror at others who’ve “done their own research,” and concluded that the shot might not be for them. What Jimmy didn’t know is that, starting in April of 2021, (as is reported in this FOIA release) the entertainment industry was on a short timeline to sell the vaccines to Americans—despite the fact that it would maim or kill many of those who took it (according to Pfizer’s own data which is also dated April 2021).

Those entertainers who take umbrage with Dore, and others who ‘do their own research,’ are throwing a tantrum on behalf of the entities getting paid to push this propaganda campaign. They’re stupid people yelling at smart people to shut up so no one sees how wrong they are.

Let’s be clear, comedians who agreed to push HHS propaganda agreed to do no research and ask no questions because the talking points were handed to them by government contractors. They made it their mission to excoriate anyone who actually did do their own research—dedicating years to understanding our own medical conditions and how medical products impact our health. They operated on FAITH that they were supplied with the correct information.

They weren’t.

Actor’s Equity and Stage Directors and Choreographers Society are just two entertainment industry organizations that signed-on to the propaganda campaign at the level of the entire organization. The FOIA release also provides insight into how the propaganda campaign targeted very specific entities within the performing arts: talent agencies, management companies, show producers and media companies were all targets after the initial, larger organizations joined up.

This program partnered with just about everyone a performing artist depends on for work, in order to apply pressure to performers to “be the influencers” that the government “can depend on” to sell all the vaccine doses they bought from Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen.

But the entertainment industry wasn’t the only one selling out their workers to big pharma. The Institutional Left was also in on this with big union players like SEIU, United Farm Workers, Teamsters, American Federation of Teachers, and National  Education Association. If you’re like me you probably followed a lot of union people. I knew they were associated with labor organizations. I didn’t know they’d lie to my face about something that could kill me.

LGBTQ+ organizations such as GLAAD and PFLAG were also recruited to tell their members that they knew the shots were right for them.

Other organizations recruited as vaccine influencers included progressive non-profits such as UltraViolet, Sierra Club, Indivisible, and Center For Popular Democracy, and Center For American Progress.

If anyone associated with the left was able to avoid messaging from all of these players, then there were messaging, data and marketing firms involved who could pitch the outreach program to their entire client base. Between the client list for Data For Progress and Democracy Partners there wouldn’t be a single Democratic voter not thoroughly propagandized by this $3 billion campaign.

All the organizations on the “community corps” ledger were asked to reach out to their members and were strongly encouraged to send messaging through their pipeline. This is a partial list. See the full list here.

LOSS OF TRUST IN PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZATIONS?

“Brand tarnish” is what happens when an otherwise trusted brand (product, service, business, non-profit, etc) becomes associated with something contrary to its core principles, or something just plain bad. So what happens when progressive organizations, often focused on criticism of the status quo, abruptly give themselves over to act as unthinking mouthpieces for state propaganda?

Imagine you listened to a union or an organization assuring you the vaccines were completely safe and “the right thing to do.” You rely on the same organizations for voting information. Why not a vaccine? You proudly arrange a vaccine for your child so that you’d be seen as a responsible, science-following citizen of the world. Then you lose your child to an apparent case of vaccine-related myocarditis. How can you ever again trust those groups who pushed for mandated shots and propagandized all within their reach—at the behest of this government program? How can you ever bear to even see their logo again?

Let’s say your wife is paralyzed from Guillain-Barré syndrome after her shot. She’ll never walk again. The next time you see Indivisible or Sierra Club pushing vaccine messaging you might feel a twinge of disgust…maybe even, hatred.

Brands are generally careful about what they’re associated with because the repercussions when something goes wrong can be dire when they’re blamed for the sins of those who borrowed their identity to ‘sell’ propaganda.

Do the groups listed above not bear some responsibility for the deaths of those killed by the shot? Most Democrats ran to take the shot because the people they trusted told them when they said that only the ‘bad Trumpers’ didn’t take the shot—or worse, anti-vaxxers.

• What MEDICAL expertise did Randi Weingarten of American Federation of Teachers bring to the table?

• Why is Actor’s Equity involved in your family’s medical decision making?

• Did United We Dream pick up the tab for anyone’s vaccine death funeral?

• Will lawyers in the National Bar Association have a conflict of interest representing those suing on behalf of their dead loved ones?

I’m just asking questions.

Going through this list of propaganda partners, it’s striking how involved left political organizations were in this vast government-sponsored propaganda campaign. Imagine a Republican administration populating a far-reaching governmental propaganda campaign with right-wing political interest groups. Wouldn’t that seem to politicize the pandemic? How is it different when “your” side does the brainwashing?

Think of the ‘left influencers’ you watch on YouTube. How many do you supposed are engaged in this propaganda experiment? I’d argue that the only YouTube broadcaster who isn’t in the mix is Jimmy Dore, and he’s attacked so much by the Institutional Left that his name trends almost every day on Twitter.

Go down your list of follows and followers on Twitter and remember the ones who were out in front of the messaging EARLY, and then look at the timeline again. How many of these were direct contacts? How many were pushed into their propaganda role from their marketing-communications vendors like Democracy Partners. How many on their client list were asked politely to “help out the vaccine effort.”

When one’s livelihood depends on your relationships with interconnected branches of the propaganda machine, it’s not necessary to PAY people to carry a message. They’ll do it to maintain the relationship, especially when some of those in the relationship let it be known that it’s verboten to disagree. That’s why it’s been so important for other left YouTube broadcasters to rage-tweet at him every day.

There’s many ways you’re told what’s verboten but the most obvious one in this conversation is the aggressive nastiness put out by all these organizations toward those injured from the shot. When you see one person vilified for it, you don’t have to be told directly.

What role did Data For Progress play in this propaganda scheme? Do you know how many state and local “progressive non-profits” operate under the banner of Center For Popular Democracy? Have a look and ask yourself and ask yourself how many people you know are connected to any of those orgs. What role did THEY play in propagandizing you or your friends?

These people all love to chirp about “disinformation” but Regular Joes weren’t part of this massive disinformation scheme—and make no mistake, THIS was the disinformation scheme.

• When they told you the shots were “safe and effective” they lied.

• When they told you the shots wouldn’t affect fertility they lied.

• When they told you the shots stopped transmission they lied.

• When they told you the shots were necessary for children they lied.

• When they told you that the only way out of the pandemic was through the shots, they lied.

Intellectual fraud has been the hallmark of Russiagate since Hillary Clinton first blamed Russia for her loss to Donald Trump. Wild claims are frequently (and quietly) walked back, while the next cycle of wild claims demands our attention.

What started out as a salacious tale of Russian spies stealing an election and then running the White House via a Manchurian Candidate, has been whittled down to “it appears as if some guy who is maybe Russian might have given Wikileaks some stuff, but we’re not sure if it was ever published.” Corporate news obviously has a vested interest in keeping the original fiction alive, but the truth has been managing a comeback.

Well, that was before July 9 when Michael Isikoff published his “EXCLUSIVE! The true origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. A Yahoo News investigation.” I’ll describe this below but I’m amused at the succinct summary provided by Amanda Marcotte whoo quickly jumped on the “blame Seth Rich” bandwagon with her discursive contribution: “How The Seth Rich Conspiracy Put Trump In The White House.” 

Michael Isikoff is the same Yahoo News reporter who first published the now-debunked claims in the Steele Dossier, and then modified his position saying many of his claims were “likely false” and media should have been more skeptical. Amanda Marcotte spends most of her time imagining that she’s the world’s foremost feminist and attacking Bernie Sanders and his supporters. She’s mostly forgettable, but this Isikoff ride-along article is so vile I’m mentioning it as a public service.  

These articles are remarkable for the sheer desperation implied by their furious spinning.

But they’re also notable for another reason: they’ve elevated one of the internet’s most disreputable hoaxers to the level of offical Russian state political operative. 

OOPS ISIKOFF DID IT AGAIN

Isikoff wastes no time stating exactly what his central claims will be in the first paragraph of his story: “In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House.” 

There are five primary claims laid out here:

1. Russian intelligence planted,  

2. a fake report,

3. which became a ‘notorious conspiracy theory,’

4. claiming that Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton.

5. This fake Russian conspiracy theory was promoted “from inside President Trump’s White House.” 

To support these claims Isikoff presents two pieces of information that drive the Yahoo News Exclusive Investigative Report. 

ITEM #1 — THE “RUSSIAN REPORT”

The first item is that a former assistant U.S. attorney (D.C homicide prosecutor), Deborah Sines, used her security clearance to “access copies of two SVR (Russian) intelligence reports about Seth Rich that were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials.”

This content of these reports appeared on the cataclysm/UFO hoax website whatdoesitmean.com, which seemingly first appeared in 2004 and is run by an entity known as Sorcha Faal who may or may not be a woman, a group of women, a man named David Booth selling books about Planet X and the return of the Anunnaki, or an escaped mental patient who learned HTML in the 90s.

Falling far short of presenting a threat to democracy, the whatdoesitmean.com website is an object of ridicule even on UFO websites such as Above Top Secret, and ZetaTalk—a site whose content is channeled from aliens originating from Zeta Reticuli. Links provided refer to pages specifically devoted to Sorcha Faal.

As an aside, while the name Sorcha Faal might sound menacingly Russian, it’s actually Gaelic.

When Sorcha Faal isn’t mesmerizing the former assistant U.S. attorney who was supposed to prosecute Seth Rich’s murderer, she’s posting articles like “Mysterious Planet Ejected From Black Hole At Center Of Galaxy Warned Could Soon Impact Earth,” and “Jade Helm war exercise linked to Nordic Alien UFOs invading Texas.” 

Isikoff alleges that Sorcha Faal provided “the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.” Philip Bump refutes this notion in the Washington Post. It definitely wasn’t the first instance of linkage to a political conspiracy. As Bump points out political murder conspiracies around the Clintons have a name: Clinton Body Count, and they go back as far as the 90s when Bill Clinton was president. 

The particular version of the Seth Rich conspiracy cited on the Sorcha Faal site is UNLIKE any speculation on the unsolved murder of Seth Rich.

The claim that it drove internet conspiracy theories is a straw man. Isikoff uses this straw man to claim that the speculation floated on the Sorcha Faal website is an “example of how fake news infects the internet.” But in order for Isikoff’s claim to be true he’d need to provide examples of this particular idea being repeated in serious or at least semi-serious media—and that simply doesn’t exist. Sure, there were plenty of people speculating on the unsolved murder of Seth Rich, but literally no one (except Sorcha Faal) thought he was on his way to the FBI to turn Hillary Clinton in for rigging the presidential primary. 

Isikoff warns in serious tones that the Sorcha Faal website “is a frequent vehicle for Russian intelligence.” But he doesn’t clarify which way the ‘phony’ Russian intelligence report went. Did U.S. intelligence intercept a Russian intelligence report, or what appeared on the Sorcha Faal website? Or did Russian intelligence find its way to Sorcha Faal’s website via U.S. intelligence? Heck, maybe it’s latter, and Russian intelligence that Seth Rich was on his way to the FBI was correct. Until evidence emerges no one can say for sure. 

What we can say with certainty is that the obvious flimflam artist, Sorcha Faal hardly deserves a moment of our attention, let alone that of Isikoff, Russian intelligence, and the prosecutor in the Seth Rich murder case. Faal is considered a credibility-killer among posters on UFO/alien abduction forums. The audience for this aggregator of utter nonsense is internet rubberneckers who ridicule the site for amusement. 

What IS clear is that Sorcha Faal wants you to believe she’s a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. Most articles on the website claim that the information came from “Russian intelligence,” and are “circulating through the highest levels of the Kremlin.” Anyone can make that claim. I could say that what I’m writing here was faxed to me by time-traveling Russian hackers—the same ones responsible for Joy Ann Reid’s written history of homophobia.

ITEM #2 — WHITE HOUSE INVOLVEMENT

The second item was presented by Isikoff thusly: “the Yahoo News investigation uncovered new evidence that the false claim that Rich was the victim of a political assassination was advanced by one of the White House’s most senior officials at the time.” Isikoff’s tone belies the mild point that former White House strategist Steve Bannon sent a text to a 60 Minutes producer that said: “Huge story…he was a Bernie guy…it was a contract kill, obviously.” The producer was working on a profile of Bannon that aired in September 2017, and presumably the subject of Seth Rich was brought up by either Bannon or the recipient of his text. The text is dated March 17, 2017, so it seems safe to assume that the text was in the context of Bannon chatting up the producer. 

Even if Bannon was pitching a story, this doesn’t support Isikoff’s claim that the version of the conspiracy theory peddled by Sorcha Faal (or Russians or space aliens) was promoted by the White House. There’s no mention that Seth Rich was “on his way to squeal to the FBI,” and there’s no mention of Hillary Clinton. Rather, Bannon is speculating on an unsolved murder in the same way millions of other Americans speculate on unsolved murders all the time. This unsolved murder just happen to serve Bannon’s political interest. 

I’d like to suggest that the solution to politically motivated speculation about unsolved murders is to solve the murders. Invoking a treacherous Russian plot as clickbait is precisely the kind of fact-free fear mongering Sorcha Faal peddles on whatdoesitmean.com. 

Isikoff doesn’t claim that 60 Minutes ran with the Seth Rich story, or even quoted Bannon on this. The “new evidence” uncovered by “the Yahoo News investigation” is simply that Bannon texted something stupid to a television producer. There was no demonstrable effect in the real world, and it’s certainly not breaking news that Steve Bannon is a dipshit. 

This claim that the White House promoted the Seth Rich conspiracy referenced in the intercepted Russian intelligence report simply isn’t supported by evidence. Other than this text message, Isikoff provides no other evidence of the Trump White House boosting the Seth Rich conspiracy. He’s merely insinuating that where there is smoke there is fire. Innuendo is a favorite mechanism for conspiracy theorists because the author doesn’t have to make their claims actually work—they just throw them at the wall and hope they stick. When the innuendo hits a critical mass of repetition, it’s considered “common knowledge.” Mission Accomplished, Russiagate. 

AMANDA MARCOTTE: BAD TAKE QUEEN

Using Isikoff’s flawed article, Amanda Marcotte claims that Russians AND conservatives AND The Left used Sorcha Faal’s narrative to divide America and convince Bernie Sanders supporters not to vote for Hillary Clinton. I can’t decide which writer trades in the most absurdity, Marcotte or Faal. Here’s her most recent excuse for Hillary Clinton’s historic loss to her own handpicked pied-piper candidate Donald Trump. She states that the source of the DNC emails (to Wikileaks) was so critical in popular opinion that the Seth Rich narrative threw the election to Trump:

That’s where the Seth Rich conspiracy theory came in. It wasn’t just that it helped create an atmosphere of suspicion around Clinton. It also helped to bolster and protect the conspiracy theory that the primary was “rigged,” by giving true believers someone other than the Russians to credit for the anti-DNC conspiracy theories.

Marcotte’s fiction is that published emails from the DNC led to an outrage about the DNC rigging the primary—instead of superdelegates undermining voters, and news of a money laundering scheme via the Hillary Victory Fund, which had been discussed in national media for months. I wrote about the Hillary Victory Fund here.

According to Marcotte, it took Russians promulgating a conspiracy theory around the murder of Seth Rich to trigger a panic around the Democratic Presidential primary being rigged:

Most the campaign (sic) to sway Sanders supporters was centered around the Russian hacking of emails from DNC officials and the Clinton campaign, and their strategic release through WikiLeaks. The idea was to stoke the impression that Sanders would or should have have (sic) won the Democratic nomination, if only the DNC hadn’t “rigged” the race or sabotaged his campaign.

To bring this back down to earth, concern about rigging of the primary never hinged on the DNC emails. Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn’t resign her position as the head of the DNC because of the Seth Rich narrative. She resigned because she helped rig the primary—a fact that Donna Brazile as interim DNC chair admitted repeatedly, such as in this Vanity Fair piece entitled “Donna Brazile says she has ‘proof’ Clinton rigged the primary against Sanders.” 

Democrats were rightly outraged that superdelegates decided the primary instead of voters. Party activists fought to reform the system because superdelegate rigging was so overt that it was a topic of outrage on mainstream media like The Morning Joe Show.

Marcotte warns “there’s every reason to believe that similar alliances between Russian propagandists and anti-democratic forces in the United States will try to pull similar stunts in 2020.” I think it’s far more likely that without taking responsibility for the failures of 2016, the Democratic Party and a lazy media establishment could lose again fair and square.

GETTING BACK IN SHAPE

But let’s be generous and say that both scenarios are equally possible. Doesn’t it seem more pragmatic to address the stuff you have power to fix? Why not reform the party, instead of wailing about loony conspiracy websites that claim to have Russian intelligence on speed dial? 

If the Democratic Party were truly committed to winning in 2020 they’d attack their to-do list by acheiving the easy tasks first and letting the fanciful, neurotic stuff simmer until they’re tired of obsessing over it. It’s like when you’re serious about losing weight, you change your diet and exercise routine. You don’t instead obsess about building an addition to your house that will become your personal world class gym where you’ll finally be able to workout. You put on your shoes and walk (or run) it off.  

One way gets you to your goal. The other becomes a perennial excuse.

Similarly, as long as we have the First Amendment, Americans will never have total control over what nefarious or ridiculous actors say. If it’s not Russian intelligence services “intruding” on our national discourse, it might be global terrorists. Maybe Sorcha Faal’s space faring Nordic aliens invading Texas seek to bend out national narrative. It doesn’t matter. We either clean up our own house or we don’t. 

Isikoff and Marcotte have yet to write that column, and as long as they have Russiagate to blame, they never will. 

It started out small because few of us were speaking up. But now you’ll get that abuse direct from Democratic Party operatives.

In the early days you’d be insulted personally, to your face, for mentioning your vaccine-induced disability: “Sad to say but i think being sick is something she has made a personality.”

The comment in the above screenshot was an attempt by a doctor to shame me into silence as a vaccine injured, chronically ill person on Twitter. Patients like myself regularly face this contempt in healthcare settings, so it’s not surprising that healthcare professionals would feel empowered to ‘let it all hang out’ social media.

Airing malice toward those with vaccine-induced disabilities is a form of clout-chasing that’s become outrageously popular recently. If you’d like to know what’s behind that, read on.

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VACCINE INJURED & VACCINE DISABLED

My backstory is that on August 15, 2021 I had a transient ischemic attack. This happened 19 days after taking Moderna shot #1. There would be no #2. It was terrifying for both me and my husband, and there’s no risk/benefit ratio that can rationalize stroke for “the greater good.”

Like any other principled person in this situation, I believe it’s my responsibility to warn others—especially those who share my chronic illness profile—that these mRNA products caused me to have a transient ischemic attack. It’s so common that even the CDC admits it now. The UK just stopped the vaccine for people under age 50.

The commenter above, DrAlana was incensed that a disabled person was allowed to speak openly of a serious adverse event caused by the vaccine. She launched her complaint in the form of personal insult with the intent of showing vaccine-disabled that their stories will not be tolerated on the left.

Apparently leftists—all of them?—are so utterly confounded and repulsed by disability that once they’re made aware of it they become blind to any other forms of personality.

Thankfully my injury was “just a stroke” rather than Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

Had that been the case I’d have been relegated to an even darker disability ghetto: “exclusively white women poorly pretending to have seizures on TikTok.” This is the origin of the “shaking meme” which started more than a year ago as the Rose Twitter slur of choice for vaccine-disabled, specifically Guillain-Barré, a disease that often results in PARALYSIS.

Let’s use the left’s own framework to break this down: If it happens to women, who cares (this is the very definition of misogynist). If it happens to white women, fuck’em twice (I suppose it’s not racist if it’s directed at white people). These ‘white women’ according to Jonah The Whale are ALL FAKING IT for TikTok clout (misogyny, ableism, and disability erasure all in one screenshot). I’m surprised Jonah didn’t also describe GBS sufferers as Trumpers…evangelicals…or…“trailer trash,” because that’s the conclusion they want you to arrive at.

This contempt for the vaccine injured and vaccine disabled has now gone mainstream with Democratic Party ghouls enjoying hearty laughs at the expense of women whose lives are forever ruined from the vaccine they took thinking they were “doing the right thing.” Behavior like this ensures we’ll never make this mistake again.

Here’s Bernie Sanders’s own MEDICAL SURROGATE, Dr. Victoria Dooley mocking those disabled by the mRNA shots with her very own “shaking” meme:

Victoria Dooley jumped in to harass vaccine injured patients in the same way DrAlana did above—with the intent of shaming people with disabilities from speaking up. And she did this with the full imprimatur of 1) a famous surrogate for Bernie Sanders, and 2) a licensed, practicing medical doctor.

[Again, notice how healthcare professionals take glee in this, because you’ll need that knowledge if you wind up with any chronic condition.]

When it was obvious she was being ratioed Dr. Victoria Dooley tried to mollify nasty antivaxxers vaccine-injured patients, by adding a tweet which claimed that she was actually “protecting” us poor vaccine injured patients by mocking us.

Then she locked responses to the thread.

Aaaaand then locked down her account.

This particular instance of the ‘shaking meme’ used to shame Guillain-Barré sufferers tells me that this meme is manufactured by the Democratic Party. Go down a list of Democratic Party B- and C- listers and you’ll find that many of them participated in this meme. That’s not organic.

IT’S ALL FAKE; EVERY BIT OF IT

I’ve been in many left-leaning groups that execute messaging campaigns. I’ve designed messaging campaigns. I’ve helped those whose messages I thought were worthy. What you see in the form of ridiculing Guillain-Barré patients is a POLITICAL MESSAGING CAMPAIGN.

The Democratic Power wields almost total power as long as COVID 19 (or any of its variants) is considered an “emergency.” The ruling class loves nothing more than a crisis, and currently Republicans (of all people) are challenging that totalizing power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has empaneled a grand jury to investigate vaccine manufacturers for consumer fraud and wrongdoing. Just yesterday Alabama AG Steve Marshall filled a letter on behalf of 16 state attorneys general that seeks to end the Biden Administration’s continued use of pandemic emergency powers. So, the heat is on.

For the ruling class’s power to appear legitimate, they must have the appearance of “grassroots” support. The non-stop propaganda campaign on cable news, and in mainstream publications is NOT enough. Having every celebrity mouth your talking points is not enough. The entire house of cards is built on the appearance of grassroots support—and they’ll do anything to keep up appearances.

Social media is engineered to create the appearance of anything you want. All you need are enough messaging troops to get a subject to trend.

These groups might originate with national party officials and staffers who reach down to request assistance of state party officials and staffers, who then reach down to their county party officials, who then have their precinct captains form messaging groups to boost a signal on social media. This trickle-down approach is how much of the anti-Trump ‘blue wave’ nonsense was started.

Messaging campaigns also initiate from cultural-political groups that organize online around such issues as Medicare For All, BLM/antifa, or gender issues. Others might organize around candidates for office. Other are aimed directly at specific legislation, such as generating the appearance of support for California’s Assembly Bill 2098 that seeks to make it criminal for doctors to have a professional opinion that contrasts with the policy aims of elected politicians.

Once you’ve set up your group, or attached yourself to another person’s group, you’re given messages and “assets” (like photos, memes, and video) to “share with your followers.” Then, most importantly—you wait until the prescribed time to release the message so that it triggers the trending algorithm.

Any time you see something trending, as a smart consumer of social media it’s your job to ask yourself WHY a certain thing is trending when it’s trending. Deconstruct the power relations. It’s fine if a trending issue is one that’s close to your heart. Jump right in, and use your following to boost it. But, understand, at least, how you’re being used by others whose interests are hidden from you.

INSTITUTIONAL LEFT’S NUMBERS GAME

As someone who has worn many hats within the Institutional Left, I know how the Institutional Left makes messaging promises in fundraising proposals. A “family foundation-funded progressive organization” vying for a large grant from Ford Foundation or Rockefeller Foundation will almost always have a line item for “engagement” where they promise to measure effectiveness of campaigns by meeting certain “engagement thresholds” via social- and earned media. Usually this just amounts to programmatic engagement (orgs boost other org’s messaging). But the pandemic was different. Everyone thought they were a warrior against the pathogen and enthusiastically boosted pharma astroturf.

Much of the money coming into Left Institution groups is “dark.” You don’t get to know who is paying for the appearance of grassroots support. You don’t get to know how much they send. You don’t get to know what that money is earmarked for. If you wanted to hide pharmaceutical companies astro-turfing support, the obvious place to go are “family foundation-funded progressive organizations” with 501c4 designations because no one can see who the funders are.

“Organizers” operating on social media are rewarded for showing benchmarks and big numbers to their organizations, and I’ve never known an organization to pay any attention to the actual quality of content that produces engagement.

They just want that engagement number to be as high as possible, and of course some political operatives are not beneath running crooked schemes such as sockpuppets (multiple identities for one person), and bots (cliché inorganic engagement from the hinterlands of Romania or India) to generate fake engagement numbers. Many well known fiascos have resulted from political operatives pushing their sock puppet accounts (see links above for the famous Sally Albright debacle).

No one in an organization’s hierarchy cares if their social media numbers reflect organic engagement, inorganic engagement, sockpuppets, bot farms or generated through artificial intelligence. The final product will look the same no matter how it’s generated.

And the bitter truth right now is that there’s no daylight between the Democratic Party machine and pharmaceutical companies, so no one who values their health should trust messaging coming from the party machine. If you’re disabled by the shot, the Democratic Party isn’t going to pay your medical bills, and the government will only compensate you if fraud is proven in court—and that’s a high bar to clear. It’s all fun and games until you’re the one who’s disabled.

WHY RIDICULE OF VACCINE INJURED HAPPENING NOW?

The numbers of vaccine injured have exploded, and families of the dead and disabled are starting to demand compensation. There’s one vaccine injury for every 800 mRNA products taken up by people who were “trying to do the right thing.” One in 800 people will suffer from myocarditis, stroke, blood clots, neurological damage, liver damage, and even blindness. These people can no longer work and they’re coming back to the governments that demanded they take the shot that left them disabled. Some will be coming to their employers who mandated their shots (they'll have a much easier time getting compensation).

And just as our demands are issued, the usual suspects pop up to belittle, defame, and vilify those who’ve already “done the right thing.”

Rolling Stone just published an article that casts the global vaccine injured demonstrations as “Antivaxxer Superspreader Events.” This piece has found a ready audience in all the Democratic Party operatives posting the shaking memes. You’ll find the same accounts boosting both signals.

So we’ve got growing protests for compensation of vaccine injured. Imagine how valuable it is to Pfizer for the appearance of grassroots vilification of vaccine injured: “they’re all faking.” This is where the rubber meets the road.

And that’s not all.

Two studies recently came out that show Americans are actually quite worried about vaccine injury.

On January 2, Rasmussen released a blockbuster study that shows “nearly half of Americans think COVID-19 vaccines may be to blame for many unexplained deaths, and more than a quarter say someone they know could be among the victims.”

In the poll taken over two weeks in December 2022, Rasmussen Report found that 49% of Americans believe that unexplained deaths are due to the mRNA vaccine injuries. “Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults say they personally know someone whose death they think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines,” and 48% of Americans “believe there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

These are big numbers, and they track with another study published in BMC Journal of Infectious Diseases. A total of 2840 participants surveyed in December 2021 found that those who knew someone who experienced a health problem following vaccination were less likely to be vaccinated, and that 22% knew at least one person who had experienced a severe health problem following COVID-19 vaccination. Extrapolating this data, BMC Infectious Diseases reports that the total number of fatalities due to COVID-19 inoculation may be as high as 278,000.

So it’s no wonder Pfizer pflaks are pfreaking out. And this is why I’m speaking out. This goes far beyond tribal affiliations. My shot did not protect you, nor did it protect me. It nearly killed me.

The left’s consent factory is running out of raw materials. Soon they’ll need to resort to the message: “my DEATH protects you; your DEATH protects me,” because that’s where all this is going.

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Read that quote from Time Magazine and memorize the words: “a well funded cabal of powerful people…to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” I can’t think of a better description of a political conspiracy, and no one is denying it. As a matter of fact, it’s a brag.

This plot was originally designed to unseat President Trump. The splintering of the Movement Left and the politicizing of COVID weren’t the aims of this conspiracy—they were products of it. Time Magazine laid it all out in February 2021, right after Biden’s inauguration. I’d rather Donald Trump not be president of the United States, but I’m not in favor of oligarchs, political machines, and intelligence services orchestrating the downfall of any president and you shouldn’t be either.

The gist of this conspiracy is that the political machine of the Institutional Left (I’ll break this down momentarily) partnered with CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce to unseat Trump in 2020. You might wonder how supposed left institutions got in bed with CEOs and the Chamber. And you might wonder what COVID has to do with this. Read on.

HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN

Time Magazine published this work of public relations penned by Molly Bell in the first week of February 2021: The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election. It tells the story of how the left’s institutions and their supposedly sworn enemies—CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce—conspired to use the left’s influence network to unseat Donald Trump.

According to the article it all started back in 2019. The Institutional Left, which consists of monied union leadership and family foundation-funded ‘progressive non-profits,’ conspired with CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce in a “good conspiracy” to keep Trump from winning in 2020. The unfolding pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to dial up the urgency of their messaging to “YOU MIGHT DIE” if you don’t vote correctly. This was ground zero for the politicizing of COVID.

Time Magazine describes a “radical partnership” of unions with the Chamber of Commerce. They claim it was appropriate because Trump was so threatening, that Democracy would crumble without their behind-the-scenes machinations. A state of exceptionalism was proclaimed by the players in this conspiracy which means the players were high enough up on the food chain to have the power to change the rules and not be questioned. They said this was about handwaving-hair-on-fire “saving democracy.” But really what we’re talking about is the establishment of a new politics-as-usual. This is a beachhead. They’re not giving up this territory. They’ll keep these alliances and power-through-public-health for as long as we let them.

Key concepts to understand this conspiracy:

• The Institutional Left is an ecosystem of labor unions, family foundation-funded ‘progressive’ operations, lobbying groups, and all branches of the Democratic National Committee. This is The Establishment end of the Democratic Party and it’s where the money is. Institutional Left is integrated down to Democratic Party grassroots through groups like Democratic Socialists of America and various state Democratic Party affiliated progressive clubs and caucuses that always participate in elections, but rarely (never, actually) offer ‘progressive critique’ of the party. This is the part of the left that is paid for their labor, and those writing the checks. It’s the business end of the stick.

• The Movement Left consists of all those unpaid lefties for whom the Institutional Left depends on for votes, donations, and volunteering. We don’t get a say in what the Institutional Left does and we’re expected to cheerlead for whatever bullshittery they put forth. The Movement Left doesn’t necessarily do that though, and that’s where you have the only real vibrancy of an American Left.

Please know that these distinctions do NOT reflect how far left on the spectrum anyone is. Instead the distinction is how close to power one is. It’s not the “far left,” that did this. It was the Donor Class of Democrats and their toadies who crave power. Some of them may be more left than others. Most aren’t. They’re only interested in their own power. This is the central difference between the reality of our politics and the fantasy that’s promulgated via media and social media. If there’s one thing I’d like everyone to know it’s that the money/power dynamic always trumps the political spectrum dynamic. Those who pushed all the propaganda were NOT the “far left.” I’m the far left. The people who pushed the propaganda were establishment Democrats (who aren’t ‘left’ at all) and their lackeys in the Institutional Left which is the business end of the Democratic Party. This is more than cultural differences. This is a gaping material difference between those with money and power and those without.

According to Time Magazine’s article, the conspiracy to ‘save democracy’ relied on structure within the Institutional Left to provide a network of influencers who could reach voters, and provide social media ‘shock troops’ who operated in a protected environment courtesy of Silicon Valley billionaires who also signed-on to the scheme. From The Twitter Files we now know what big tech offered: freedom of speech in an environment where they could assume their opposition’s speech would be censored.

The ‘left network’ consisted of all the myriad organizations that could either be ordered to carry the messaging; convinced to do it; or eager to do it. The ‘shock troops’ are the usual suspects who can found in chat groups formed for activists to share media to either promote or swarm. If you’re ‘on the left’ chances are you interact regularly with accounts that seem to be ‘regular joes,’ but are in fact employees of any number of these organizations, wannabe employees of these organizations, or cheerleaders who have no idea what they’re actually doing. The people at the top of the hierarchy can’t function without the rest of us holding them up.

COVID HERESY WAS KEY

I’ve worked on political campaigns for more than a decade, and the first thing you’re asked on any given tactic is “What’s the urgency?” There were hundreds of ways the Institutional Left could’ve run their political operation against Trump but they chose COVID because it offered the urgency. Trump was a threat to public health. “You’ll die if Trump is re-elected.” These are once-in-a-lifetime messages. So easy. Members of the Institutional Left like Kamala Harris, Laurence Tribe, Amy Siskind and Brooklyn Dad were sworn antivaxxers when Trump was in office, but if you had a vaccine injury in 2021 under Biden (when I did) you were treated as a covid heretic. If your health countered their asinine messaging then too bad for you.

In the course of executing this plan, COVID heretics who were identified on social media attracted the attention of their ‘network influencers’ and were swarmed by the Institutional Left’s chat-group soldiers who, in my circles, might be DSA members, or employees or activists with unions and progressive organizations. It was a tactical decision to make a big show of quashing any COVID Heresy in order to reduce the likelihood of anyone else speaking up. If the COVID heretic were of sufficient stature, none other than aides of the White House would step in to have their social media accounts suspended.

Another distinction worth understanding:

• TACTICS are the actual efforts put forth in support of an overarching action plan.

• STRATEGY is the action plan. It’s those in power hand down to their organization’s employees and activists in order to take the steps (tactics) to achieve an objective.

The social media tactics employed by the Institutional Left hit vaccine injured particularly hard because the mainstream media was all-in on the Institutional Left’s strategy and performed the tactic of publishing ONLY that material which supported their objectives. Social media outlets like TikTok, Twitter and Facebook were the only places you could find regular people discussing their experiences with the shots.

Those like myself who were hurt by the vaccine weren’t the only heretics hunted in this project. Their tactics also called for silencing independent media covering the untold side of the story, and crushing any medical professional not toeing the official party line. Medical professionals have built-in mechanisms to ensure message discipline. If you go off script you’ll find your license to practice dinged.

What had started as a program to unseat Trump thus became an all-out war to control COVID information. Democratic Party elite came up with the strategy and deployed their resources to carry out tactics to achieve the goal. The party’s shock troops, despite many proclaiming to be ‘socialists,’ defended the vaccine-only approach that made possible the windfall profits of pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna. Kind of ironic, doncha think. But young DSA members were led to believe that the vaccine-only approach to COVID represented the beginnings of a full-blown national healthcare system.

Americans would get all of the bad and none of the good of a “national health,” as party elites pushed all the worst aspects of the pandemic mitigation (mass surveillance, tracking and discrimination) as if they were a shiny new national healthcare system.

This wasn’t exclusive to the US. Similar forces in Canada and UK were discrediting the very idea of national healthcare, which I believe was a goal of their Institutional Left, Donor Class strategy.

WEAPONIZED IRRATIONALITY

None of this would’ve worked without first limbering up our brain muscles to accept irrationality as the new reasoned response. One of my favorite examples of this weaponized irrationality is the wild about-face made by servants of the Institutional Left. Prior to Biden winning the election these high-level political operatives were sworn antivaxxers. After the election they changed their tune despite the fact that there’s no difference between the mRNA vaccines developed under Trump’s administration and those bought and distributed under Biden’s administration. They’re the same damn shots.

Weaponized irrationality was the main tactic used to ensure compliance with lockdowns that killed small businesses and shut down schools, threatening the employment status of working parents across the country. This irrationality enforced masking despite the fact that public health leaders such as Anthony Fauci publicly spoke out against masking. It enforced vaccine mandates even though Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi spoke out against such measures. This irrationality made it impossible to have a civil discussion of disastrous COVID policy at all. It led to many dying on ventilators in hospitals, despite clear evidence that venting was killing people. It led to sick seniors being sent to assisted living facilities to infect the seniors there. This irrationality almost made universal vaccine passports a thing.

My favorite example of weaponized irrationality was the Institutional Left’s insistence that the truckers who SHUT DOWN ALL AUTOMOTIVE COMMERCE between the US and Canada were ‘petit bourgeois’ which allowed the goddamn Teamsters to dismiss their collective action.

The irrationality continues to this day.

Our response to COVID is now so unmoored from reality that California passed laws that criminalize medical doctors for disagreeing with politicians. This is going to be catastrophic for patients with ill-defined syndromes that have no ‘official CDC’ imprimatur. This includes all autoimmune, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia…and ironically, Long COVID in addition to vaccine injuries which are basically outlawed in California now.

Another example of an attempt to institutionalize this irrationality: Rhode Island considered a bill to disqualify individuals for employment, impose monthly fines and “double tax” any unvaccinated person over the age of 16.

And for all those who claimed the Democratic response to COVID was “nuanced” this legislation offered by Democrats in Rhode Island was designed to make medical exemption to the mRNA vaccine impossible. You may PETITION the legislature (lol) but only if you 1) have three licensed physicians (willing to risk losing their practice) to sign-on to your petition, 2) in the presence of a notary; and 3) the state would still reserve the right to refuse exemption, regardless.

None of this is rational. None of it “follows science.” This is plain old Mayberry Machiavellianism put forth by those who believe their political team can’t win without subterfuge and ratfuckery.

It’s also an enormous material issue that the vaccines never worked as promised. If after four doses of mRNA you’re still susceptible (and seemingly more so) to COVID and long COVID, then it’s irrational to mandate vaccines in order to keep your job or your place in school. And yet the Institutional Left has pushed the science-free vaccine-only policy because 1) they’re working with Chamber of Commerce to get people ‘back to work,’ 2) they’re using public health as a stand-in for actual provision of healthcare that would help people, and 3) they’d rather pick an imaginary fight with right-wingers than address real material issues facing voters.

And the most chilling part to me is that this irrationality isn’t going away. It’s gonna be used against us until we make it stop. We saw this immediately in the Ukraine conflict where we’re told repeatedly that nazis aren’t nazis when they’re our nazis. This is the kind of thing that happens right before something truly awful happens on a mass scale.

THEY ACTUALLY HATE DEMOCRACY

Back to the Time Magazine article, the cabal’s premise couldn’t be more condescending.

“Democracy is not self-executing” said one member of the group to Time Magazine. “We’re not rigging an election,” said another, “we’re fortifying” it. Apparently “democracy” is inconceivable without a “well funded cabal of powerful people…to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” which is the direct quote that I used to kick off this essay. The same people who said this to Time Magazine also want you to believe that once these billionaires get their way that things will somehow get better for us, however the offer does not apply to Elon Musk.

Opinion pieces that took as their premise that Democracy is a plaything for billionaires popped up like mushrooms with headlines like “Democracy works when there is less of it,” and “It’s time to give the elites a bigger say in choosing the president” (Financial Times and Washington Post, respectively). Bloomberg went a step further saying that what we really need right now are a few good dictators.

This self-described cabal, which included our beloved Institutional Left, saw COVID as an opportunity, not just for the 2020 campaign but for capitalism itself. For all the “behind the scenes” mucking around that the Institutional Left did to “save Democracy itself,” you’d think they might’ve at least been able to get us a full stimulus check.

Nope.

Instead we got a rebate on coffins and organized attacks on any actual action toward Medicare For All during a pandemic (such as Force the Vote). Instead of being a voice for workers and people who were dying without healthcare, this billionaire fan club sought to cancel the idea of Medicare For All, as well as anyone who advocated for it. By the way, this is when hate for Jimmy Dore first started in earnest. It was always about protected the protected class for capitalism. It was never about pushing a left agenda.

THE UNVACCINATED BECAME THE UNTOUCHABLES

After the election the cabal used all the tools at their disposal to promote their new, post-Trump existential threat: The Unvaccinated. Perception Management Teams called “nudge units” that worked through official social media backdoors, demanded deplatforming of anyone who got out of line. Only right-wing extremists question the untested mRNA technology. And they’re basically terrorists. If their vaccine-only policies caused you harm it was a sign of your actual right-wing orientation instead of anti-worker policy pushed through to satisfy billionaires who were frantically transferring wealth from workers to their own pockets.

After the election this conspiratorial cabal joined forces with corrupt federal agencies to push unquestioning compliance with disastrous US COVID policy. “Shut down the entire country (because we, the professional managerial class, can work from home)! Vaccine passports are freedom (for me and not for thee)! Fire anyone who doesn’t take the shot (off with their heads! Gosh this feels good!)” “Enjoy your winter of death and despair (which…never happened).”

BOLD STRATEGY—HOW’D IT WORK FOR THEM?

They unseated Trump, but have you heard of the DeSantis Democrat? Some of Florida’s most blue areas swung up to 30 points to vote to re-elect Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose most notable policies of the last year or so have been to reject this sprawling Covideology. Florida eschewed lockdowns and school closures, while the state’s Surgeon General took the media to discuss myocarditis risk for young people taking the vaccine. Many Democrats welcomed this in the Sunshine State. In another sign of how irrationality has taken hold, I’ve talked to quite a few political operatives since the election and not ONE recognizes that DeSantis’s COVID policy had anything to do with his surge among Democrats.

Virgina’s 2021 Governor race should’ve given Florida Dems a clue of what was about to happen (but Florida Dems aren’t known for responding to reality). The off-year governor’s race is always considered a bellwether for post-Presidential election sentiment. As such, Virginia Democrats were shocked by their 2021 gubernatorial defeat. However, what they lacked in election-winning they made up for in excuses (and dirty tricks). They blamed the loss on everything from critical race theory to transgender bathrooms. But the real story is one of material conditions instead of culture wars.

In the Virginal race, the Republican’s closing argument on the day of the election was simply ‘closing schools was bad.’ People simply couldn’t manage their lives with uncertainty in school closings. Polling data backs this up.

In this graph notice the steep drop in late October. This corresponded to a bizarre last minute announcement of school closings for “mental health,” and “teacher burnout” prior to election day. This was a real material issue for parents can’t work when schools are closed. It’s not just an inconvenience. Imagine being home with no pay deciding who to vote for, while worrying if you’ll have a job at the end of the month. You can see the result of that tactic in the tracking poll below.

Governor Northam announced these closings on October 20, right when the two lines drop precipitously. They didn’t even bother to cloak this political maneuver in public health messaging. It was for ‘mental health,’ and ‘teacher burnout.’ For those with eyes to see, this was a cynical appeal to teacher unions—Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, in particular. This stunt cost them the election because voters, unlike the Donor Class of the Institutional Left, can’t afford live-in nannies to pick up the slack. When their kids are home, working parents have to be home too.

COVIDEOLOGY AS FAILED POLITICAL WARFARE

In his excellent autopsy of the institutional left’s COVID policy, Christian Parenti describes how Dem party elite’s Covideology was confused with actual left strategy. In his essay published in The Grayzone he says, “The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital, has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers.”

Instead of punching-up at capital they’re punching-down at workers.

Their “embrace of COVID hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability” says Parenti. In other words, COVID revealed the Institutional Left to be vindictive technocrats rather than rational policy advocates.

It’s a shame because the Movement Left will be paying for this long after mavens of the Institutional Left have retired into their own private consultancies.

Parenti explains what’s really happened, saying, “the situation is worse than a mere political fumble. The left is now actively helping its own enemies…In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere.”

The left actually helped its enemies by frantically attacking those who were just trying to navigate the pandemic. Instead of working on our behalf their strategy was to actively organize tactics against us to please their CEO and Chamber buddies.

The Institutional Left, of which neither you nor I belong to, has gone so far that the basic ideas of bodily autonomy and freedom of speech are understood my many to be the telltale signs of rightwing extremism. They’re not. And if catching rightwing extremists actually mattered to the Institutional Left they could, you know, oppose rightwing extremism (say, in Ukraine), instead of attacking the vaccine injured and shitcoating workers who don’t like 1 in 800 odds of being severely injured by the shot (this number is from Pfizer’s own phase 3 trial data).

While the left continues to “actively help its own enemies” I’m starting to wonder if they can ever stop. None of these strategies worked and they’re plodding on as if they’ve had one success after another. They refuse to acknowledge that the shots are making people sick and killing others. The Institutional Left is out of control and we’d be fools to trust them again without a massive overhaul.

[CONTENT WARNING and editor’s note: Be aware that this essay discusses the death of a beloved pet and it’s not my intent to re-traumatize anyone who’s experienced this. I’ve never told this story fully in writing because it’s so difficult to write, but promised my friend Pam more than once that I’d share it, so here it is.]

INTRODUCTION
This is an attempt at explaining the inexplicable experience I had involving a dream about glowing green rods, an imposter, and a swirling vortex that left me convinced the dogs I'd left back at home needed my help. They did. 

What I'm writing here is true—painfully so. I wish it weren’t.

I'm a reasonably well-educated person with wide-ranging interests, including speculative ideas about the mysteries of the universe and so forth. I'm not committed to any particular set of wild ideas; but I’m not committed to any set of non-wild ideas either.

I’d been rather closed off from speculative stuff after grad school in philosophy. But I’d had enough of postmodernist academic struggles and by god if I wanted to read a book about alien abduction, I felt I’d earned the right to do so.

But also, I’d caught myself being rude to someone who told me about a dream she had in which an alien morphed into Jesus. I said, and I quote, “you don’t believe that shit do you.” I don’t think I could possibly apologize enough for this reaction. I knew I didn’t own it. Rather, it was a bad habit I picked up in college—to dismiss speculation with scorn. I knew I was wrong and now I had a karmic debt. So I took the big philosophical toolbox I’d acquired in college and set out to make my own determination about all things speculative that crossed my path.

It’s been 30 long years since I made that imperious remark to my colleague and I’m still doing penance. For all I know, dismissing her dream experience could’ve invited the weirdness with my dream experience. The universe is perverse like that.

HOLIDAY TRAVEL SET THE WHEELS IN MOTION

This story starts on a particular Thanksgiving weekend in the late 90s. We were driving four hours east to Johnson City, Tennessee from Nashville to spend the holiday with my ex’s parents. It was the second year we were making the trip as dog parents. The year before we took the dogs with us and it was an unmitigated disaster.

This year my ex insisted we get a petsitter. One of his colleagues just started up a pet sitting service after she was laid off in a cost-cutting measure. He wanted to give her some business, which I thought was cool; but I still didn’t feel good about leaving the dogs, and I ignored that feeling the same way we ignore bad feelings all the time. You can’t let your anxiety run your life.

Looking back, I realize how painfully new we were to dogs, generally. We had our first house and it had a real yard—a half acre with trees and lots of room to run. I bet first-time dog parents all think the same thing: “No ill-tempered or untrained dogs for us. Our dogs will never potty in the house,” yadda yadda.

Dogs have other ideas.

We have Italian Greyhounds, and they especially have other ideas. First off, they think they’re human. That’s what the thousands of years of breeding for “companionship” has provided. They’re not “sporting” or “working” dogs. This breed, which we chose for being hypoallergenic (it was non-negotiable), have evolved for literally thousands of years of being treated like one of the royal family.

But this applies to ALL dogs. They see you eating and they expect a cut of the deal. They see that you have your own room in the house where you can go to the bathroom and they feel like they should be able to claim a room too. You might have little dog beds dotting every room of the house, but if you’re sitting in a chair or lying in ‘the big bed,’ that where they’re going to be.

The bonds we create with dogs aren’t like human bonds; but they’re not like bonds with other animals either. You don’t “own” a dog. Instead, we have an ancient social contract where the dogs agreed to come in from the freedom of the wild in exchange for food, warmth, and shared companionship. So protecting them isn’t just something we do to be nice or even out of love. We owe them.

BACK TO THANKSGIVING

Like every new, nervous dog-mom leaving for the first time, I wrote out a fully detailed set of instructions for the sitter—the most important of which was “you MUST attach the bungie cord around the gate or else it can open on its own.” That gate, for whatever reason, would swing open in a strong wind. It was almost like shifting air pressure alone would push it open. It was infuriating, so the bungie cord was extra insurance. Ninety-nine percent of the time you wouldn’t need it. It was for that one little percent that almost never happened (because I was being a stickler like that).

We headed out for the five-hour drive to Johnson City early Wednesday in order to make it to our local bar/music venue for Open Mic on Wednesday night. We’d made this trip every Thanksgiving since leaving Johnson City. Wednesday night before Thanksgiving was kinda like All Hallows Eve for people who grew up in Johnson City because if you went out you might see the ghosts of people who’d left town but came back this one night. It was a nice ritual.

I love driving but I came to hate this particular drive. Tennessee is a long, skinny state and we had to go from the middle to the mountains in the far east. It takes four hours to drive from Nashville to Johnson City and you cross the time zone into Eastern from Central time. In ‘relative time’ you pick up an hour going east and you lose an hour going west. It always felt like a victory to “gain” that extra hour traveling east. When you’re coming back it always felt like defeat losing that damn hour.

We did Thanksgiving early the next day. The ex-mother-in-law threw a pan of Stouffer’s lasagna in the oven. I think it was a passive-aggressive move on her part. Maybe she wished other people would cook Thanksgiving (which I’d have gladly done); maybe she was harboring feelings of ill-will based for not yet having grandkids (that’d crop up in later Thanksgivings too); but regardless of the reason, this meal was one to forget—if only my gut would let me. That lasagna laid a hurt on the entire family and I can’t imagine this wasn’t the plan.

We escaped whatever drama was brewing at the house and headed out to see if any other ‘ghosts’ were haunting downtown Johnson City. We found one of the ex’s especially close friends—a guitar player whose father ran a disreputable travel agency. We drank beers at a pool joint and headed back to the in-laws’ house relatively early. We probably stumbled into bed around 1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time—my gut was still screaming in pain from that damn lasagna.

THE DREAM

At 5 a.m. I shot out of bed with my head full of information that I didn’t put there. I was on my feet grabbing my jeans in a state of panic; my heart was hammering in my chest. We had to get back to Nashville immediately. Something terrible had happened to the dogs.

I’d just had a dream. Sounds simple and reasonable, almost.

In the dream I was sitting in the kitchen of an old friend from middle school, Cindy. She’s the “best friend” and longest friend I've ever had. She’s a very significant person in my life. We lived across the street from each other growing up at the beach in Florida. Her mom’s house, especially this kitchen area, was my second home.

This dream felt like a memory had been hijacked. One moment it was just as it was when were kids, and the next minute my friend became . . . someone else, who turned to pull something out of the freezer. She was holding two green glowing rods. They were L-shaped, like dowsing rods, and maybe about a half-inch thick and 18” long. They seemed supernaturally cold, and heavy. I felt like she ought to be using oven mitts.

As she held them out to me one of the rods seemed to flicker and fade. The idea of a glowing rod felt really familiar to me. I’d once found a glowing piece of wood that did this. It was fluorescing (probably some kind of bioluminescent fungus) and then . . . it wasn’t. I figured it was probably because I moved it. It felt like I’d broken something special. It was my fault. That’s how the rod was behaving.

It stopped glowing in her hand and she said, “You’ve been a bad mother so I have to put one of these back.”

I didn’t have kids in real life, but my friend Cindy did. So in the dream I said, “You’re crazy, I can’t be a bad mother because I don’t have kids. You’re the one who had kids.” Suddenly I had the thought that this wasn’t “my” Cindy. This was likely what ‘woke me up’ into lucid dream. Simulacra Cindy puts the non-glowing rod back in the freezer as the kitchen faded away as the space around us morphed into a roiling, unfurling vortex. Where the counter had been, now there was a wormhole swirling in front of us. There were bright colors entwined around a center of bright white light. It seemed mathematical and coherent—as if the light had a structure and none of this was a big deal. It just the way things are.

I could see silhouettes of people and animals gathering at the mouth of the wormhole. A whole bunch of complex thoughts all crashed into my head at once. I felt like my parents were among figures, but I couldn’t tell which ones they were and there was a clear sense of “that’s not important right now.” I knew some but not all of the animals. It wasn’t just my family and pets—there were too many. A feeling of urgency kept building until I woke up. We had to get home immediately (which was impossible).

I woke up the ex a little before 5 a.m. Johnson City time. “Something bad has happened. We have to leave now. It’s the dogs.” Props to the ex, he said, “okay, I’m ready to leave anyway.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d had a hunch and needed to get moving.

THE OTHER TIME THIS HAPPENED

A couple of weeks prior to this trip I’d been awakened with the memory of a song that I hate so much I couldn’t sleep through it: Scandal, The Warrior. I hate that song. I hate the stupid video. I hate the ripoff of David Bowie’s Starman face. I hate the fashion it was selling. I hate that Patty Smyth’s name was endlessly confused with Patti Smith.

Everything I despised about that era is concentrated into this sticky hairball that the 80s cacked up. And here’s my own consciousness pushing this shit on me.

“Shootin' at the walls of heartache—bang, bang.” [does fingers like guns]

Dreaming those lyrics was so offensive I was instantly wide awake…and also I knew the dogs had escaped. I know! it doesn’t make any damn sense. There were no dogs in this dream.

It was midnight. I hadn’t been asleep for very long. I knew the dogs weren’t in the house, so I ran straight through the kitchen to the driveway just in time to see both of them turning the corner on to the busy street. In my pajamas, barefoot on the gravel driveway I remembered you can’t run after them because they think you’re playing and run farther away. They have to be trained with a “return word” that will 100 percent of the time turn them around to follow you. Our magic word was GREENIE!—and they came running. I had at least taught them one thing useful.

“I am the warrior.”

The next day we found a small hole dug under the fence, which inspired a weekend project to reinforce the area below the ground with stakes, railroad ties and anything that could stop or slow down a tunneling enterprise. It’s again, one of those things you generally wouldn’t think of prior to having a dog.

BACK TO THANKSGIVING AT THE IN-LAWS

This time I was four hours away and couldn’t just run down the driveway in my pajamas. It took time to pack the car, explain things to the in-laws, and leave. It was probably 6:30 a.m. by the time we were officially on the road. It was still very early in the morning—but we were able to get a friend on the phone who could run over there and scope out the situation. For a moment I felt some relief and hope. Maybe I’m just tripping and everything is fine. If so we’ll grab breakfast and try to enjoy the drive.

He called back about 40 minutes later. He discovered the gate was open and the dogs were missing. We weren’t even to Knoxville yet. He’d keep looking around and try to figure out what was up.

We still had three hours of driving ahead of us. The friend called back about the time we hit Oak Ridge and said he’d found one of the dogs in the garage. We had an open space that we called a “garage” but it was more like a barn. He found our girl dog Astra curled up in there, shivering. She had a few scrapes but no broken bones or serious injuries, but it had been way too cold for a little dog with almost no fur. She was ready to get back in the house and curl up on top of a heat vent.

Her brother, Mister Chompers, was missing and I felt very much like a “bad mother” as Simulacra Cindy had said.

The moment I got home I set about to do the things you do when you have a missing pet. First, I asked my listserv for advice and watched the email for responses while I made posters and faxed them to the pet ER and local vet offices. One listserv suggestion was to put his bedding out on the porch hoping he’d catch a whiff and find his way home. They said to also put a favorite blanket out of the fence so the wind would carry his scent around. I wasted no time, walking the neighborhood, putting up posters and calling for him. I was determined to make the dream not come true.

THE SEARCH

Here’s something that had not occurred to me as a new pet owner. Name your pets something you don’t mind yelling if they go missing. I could barely say “Mister Chompers” without laughing. I’d not considered how difficult it would be to sincerely call for him away from home where we all knew the genesis of the silly name.

The name ‘Mr. Chompers’ is a reference to Jerry Stahl’s autobiography of addiction called Permanent Midnight. Stahl’s memoir tells of writing for television while addicted to heroin in the 80s (this explains a LOT about 80s pop culture). He wrote for shows like thirtysomething, Moonlighting, and ALF. Stahl also wrote the 1989 cult classic Dr. Caligari which is an artifact of the glorious decadence of the late 80s; as opposed to the lazy decadence of that stupid Scandal song. In the movie version of Permanent Midnight, Stahl is struggling with heroin addiction (but has no trouble writing screenplays) and has an argument with a 6-foot tall hallucination of ALF (a kind of conscience motif). But because of licensing they can’t call him ALF in the movie so they call him “Mister Chompers.”

I named my dog Mister Chompers because holy crap that’s funny. It’s still funny.

Looking this up, just now, I realized I didn’t know that one of the producers on that movie was Jane Hamsher, who also co-produced Natural Born Killers and had the vitally important early aughties blog, FireDogLake (which since evolved into ShadowProof). Hamsher also coined the term “veal pen” to describe the hypocrisy of Obama-era progressive professionals who trade access for power. Sadly, the analysis has turned out to be timeless. It’s as true now as it was then.

At any rate, I walked the neighborhood calling out “Mister Chompers” all Friday night. Did the same most of the day Saturday and Sunday. Monday I went to work and took a call on my cell phone from someone who didn’t have my dog but asked if I wanted their dog. I told them that I still had hope for Mister Chompers, but ‘let’s keep in touch.’ I figured it’s best not to close a door when one opens, but also if Chompy turned up then I could help them get in touch with a rescue for the breed.

After work I headed out to walk and call “Mister Chompers.” My ex came with, as did his drummer. We’d walked up the road toward the Cumberland River where there is a big protestant church. It was a pretty day.

My phone rang and I didn’t recognize the number. My heart jumped. This could be someone with information.

Indeed it was.

The caller said he was a paramedic. He’d been working late Thanksgiving night when a cold front blew in, and was driving home when he saw Mister Chompers at the big church at the fork in the road—the exact place we were standing that moment. He was injured as if hit by a car. So the paramedic rushed him to the animal ER. This was about 1am Central time. The paramedic said he held Mister Chomper’s paw until he passed away at 4am Central time—I lost it. Handed the phone to my ex while I walked in circles, sobbing.

That was the same damn time woke from the dream.

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT

So what’s the explanation here? This wasn’t a case of seeing the future. And I don’t think I have a special, mystical relationship with canines (okay, maybe a little). I had a feeling and a cognition of something happening in the present. The word for this feeling is “clairsentience” and the word for this knowledge is “claircognizance.” That is literally, “clear feeling” and “clear thought.” When I woke up I had a clear feeling that something bad happened, and I had clear knowledge that something happened to the dogs.

I also don’t know if that wormhole exists, but it’s not the only time I saw it in a dream, so it must have some significance (if only as a metaphor). I don’t know what happens to us when we die, but I have a clear feeling we’re looking at it wrong. Here’s a possible re-framing: Maybe the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and maybe, when those moments have coherence they resonate enough to break through your consciousness. That would mean that eternity lives in the moments we’ve spent in the kitchen with our friends in Jr. High School; and the hours we’ve spent watching the clock at work; and the happiness of watching someone you love sleep.

Or maybe not.

These two incidents of dreaming that the dogs were in danger stand alone. Plenty of bad things have happened when I didn’t have a hunch or a dream. I can remember other times when a thing I dreamed corresponded to reality. But those things were always mundane. It’d be a haircut or the way furniture would be arranged in a room.

Long story short, little dogs sometimes get into trouble and human beings sometimes are amazing. We live in a succession of moments that comprise our life. It makes sense to make the most of each of moment just in case they turn out to be eternal.

Each moment we live might possibly be heaven enough.

I feel like this is edgy for a political consultant to talk about, but intuition itself isn’t controversial. I studied Special Education for a hot minute in college and our textbook treated intuition as a form of intelligence and suggested exercises for sharpening those skills. One of those exercises, called “Ladybug” became a game we’d sometimes play if we had enough people who were bored enough to follow along.

In Ladybug you have your subject make something out of clay. Then another student hides the object made by the first student. Then, the kid who made the clay figure was instructed to go through a series of binaries: is hot or cold. Is it high or low. Is it dark or light. You’d come away with a description that went something like, “it’s dark but it’s on top of something that’s shining brightly. It’s at eye-level. It feels warm, and I feel like the color orange is important.” This was a real response to a target that was placed in a floor lamp with orange shades. The lamp had three lights and the bulb was burned out in the top can where the object was hidden.

This is essentially teaching remote viewing to kids. The textbook was from the mid-80s. It was the main textbook used in gifted education and has undergone a lot of revision the last time I checked. I’d love to know if they still teach this.

For adults, I noticed that 1) some people are much better at Ladybug than others, and 2) I was lousy at predicting who would be good at the game. Even though I known my friends for years I didn’t have a bead on who had good intuition. Maybe it just never came up.

LOSING A PET

I don’t have words for the pain of losing a pet like this. A friend of mine in Nashville wrote a song that Emmylou Harris performed, and one of the lyrics went something like “you have to let love hurt.” You might as well, because it’s not going to stop. I don’t make the rules. I’ve cried a dozen times writing this. Suffice it to say that ‘bad mother’ doesn’t even come close to the guilt I felt (and still feel to some extent).

Also, the caller with the dog did stay in touch and I did adopt that dog. The dog’s name was Boots Dunn Trouble. We called him Trouble. He’d been the pet of an older gentleman who applied to rescue him from a semi-truck that overturned in Nashville. The trailer was full of dogs from puppy mills in Missouri. There were hundreds of dogs in that truck and many didn’t survive. After crashing the driver ran away, leaving the dogs to die enclosed in the heat of the trailer. The local news featured this story which created so much interest that they ran out of dogs to place in homes (after they’d all had veterinary care and had a couple of weeks of relative calm at the Davidson County Animal Shelter).

The older gentleman was moving into assisted living and had to re-home Trouble. His home health nurse was who called me because the dog on my poster looked just like the dog she was trying to re-home. She thought she’d take a shot in the dark, she said, because she thought I’d know how to care for him. It worked out that she brought him over exactly a week to the day from when we lost Mister Chompers. Astra had already settled into being the ‘top dog’ and was not happy with new arrangement.

From the moment Trouble walking through the door I knew there was no way I’d let him leave. He was incredibly good natured and everyone agreed that he seemed like if he could speak he’d have a posh British accent. I imagined he’d been an RAF officer in another life.

We’d share the ancient dog-human social contract until he passed away at 16 and boy did that hurt, but it’s okay. We went through a lot together. It wasn’t tragic by any stretch, and I think Mister Chompers probably would’ve approved of Astra having to share the den with another boy who was difficult to push around.

As far as intuition goes, I think we use it much more than we recognize. I was just making bread and thought about how it takes a bit of intuition to work with the dough. If you’ve ever invested money or taken out a loan you’ve likely felt a jerk of intuition (either egging you on, or warning you off). If you play music you’ve likely engaged intuition, like when improvising or writing a song. And we know that the military has been keenly interested in it; and intentionally let us know their interest in it—which opens up a whole other can of worms—for another day.

They got their answer in one of the most brutal ratios ever seen on Twitter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if #NoAmnesty trends on and off for awhile.

I have no doubt that editors at The Atlantic take calls from White House because lawsuits are now producing discovery and releasing documents that show Biden advisors personally targeted specific social media accounts of researchers and reporters and demanded they be deplatformed. Tech companies made special portals to give White House covid advisors their own administrative access. This is flagrant government censorship.

So it’s remarkable while this is happening that these same players are now expecting forgiveness, and so far have failed to even mention the material damages they’ve left in their wake. In the 892-words spilled by Emily Oster at The Atlantic there wasn’t one mention of myocarditis, Guillan-Barre, elders dying alone, and our latest horror: “excess deaths.” Oster fails to examine how things went wrong and petitions for forgiveness without any self-reflection. There’s no overture to earning our trust back. Instead she announced that she was forgiving herself and letting us know that she’d be moving on.

Here’s a few reasons why “forgiveness” is exactly the wrong approach

Oster petulantly asserts that those who got it right “got lucky.” “Who could’ve known the ‘right’ answers” she asks disingenuously. Certainly not anyone blindly following the narrative.

Here’s the secret sauce: Those who got it right were following the science and rejecting evil occurring all around them. It doesn’t take a PhD to see that hospitals were financially incentivized to put as many people as possible on ventilators and Remdesivir (which is known to cause kidney failure). You don’t need to be epidemiologist to recognize that those ventilators and Remdesivir actually killed people. You just needed to be paying attention.

We ought not forgive US government for paying hospitals to kill people.

Meanwhile, clinicians who weren’t so brainwashed simply treated carried on inflammation and blood clots; making sure their patients survived. That is, until the courts stepped in, and their hospitals fired them.

We ought not forgive our Judicial System for ruling that people must die so that Pfizer may sell more product.

Murdering people in the name of “science” was not just socially and financially rewarded, and it was enforced with judicial sanction for those who refused to kill their patients. Doctors who had been saving lives were ordered by courts to STOP and watch their patients die. This is a horror that’s nearly unimaginable, but here it is, as mundane as an office memo.

It would be impossible to believe if I had not seen it myself in real time. The best doctors who cared enough to save lives, lost their careers and livelihood and made to watch at their patients clotted-up and died.

To forgive and forget the atrocities of the official pandemic response would be utterly irresponsible because it would ensure that all this will happen again—probably sooner rather than later.

We ought not forgive the Biden Administration for instituting an official policy of censorship.

It goes all the way to the top. The White House itself instructed tech companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor specific doctors, researchers, and influencers. The goal was to rid social media of any information that ran counter to The Narrative. Let that sink in. The highest level of the Federal Government targeted specific people like Alex Berenson, Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Robert Malone. This created a chilling effect so that even the most critical reporters chose to ‘bend a knee.’ When reporters who market themselves as critical thinkers approached The Narrative they wrote in the ‘meta’ voice; choosing to make articles about writing articles instead of about people dying and what could be done about it.

Mainstream wannabes are still repeating Anthony Fauci’s lies; but I’m most disappointed in left-niche reporters who ostracized their colleagues who were actually getting it right. I could name names, but the list would be long and pointless. They’re all dead to me now.

We ought not forgive those scribes who chose piety over reason.

Reporters and commentators like Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore didn’t “get lucky.” Dore was actually injured (much in the same way I was; minus the mini-stroke). He did the work (like I did) to understand the science, because he HAD to. For this, he endured outright attacks from colleagues while many others sat silently on the sidelines. Those who were vocal supporters of Dore and Blumenthal—and science— deserve major props. Alex Rubenstein and Mila Ghorayeb were on this earlier than most, as were Cory Morningstar, CJ Hopkins and Charles Eisenstein, Denis Rancourt, Mark Crispin Miller, and others.

We especially ought not forgive left institutions that demanded piety to their crackpot pandemic messaging.

The left, for the most part, ran to the defense of all-powerful pharmaceutical companies because party elites told them to. Line items on HHS “Covid-19 Community Corps” presentations released by Freedom Of Information Act show explicit partnerships with every sort of organization from non-profits to talent agencies—but left institutions were especially active. The Democratic Party and their functionary organs like DSA; labor unions; family foundation-funded ‘progressive’ organizations; and nearly all alternative ‘left media,’ enthusiastically echoed the murderous propaganda.

It appears that small left media influencers followed suit, seeking to impress bigger influencers. Some created the hilariously cringe “AntivaxHunters” account for the purpose of swarming and deplatforming those like myself who sought answers for our own suffering (or that of family members). There was a real story just laid out in front of them and instead off reporting on it they chose to attack those who looked past The Narrative and followed the science—behaving as official Thought Police. It’s the exact opposite of what reporters are supposed to do.

I certainly wouldn’t have said this prior to 2020—when “Not Me, Us” Bernie 2.0 was in full swing—but the left is full of cowards who will stand by idly, and even join in when colleagues are attacked. That tells me that much of what you see online is authored by institutional leftists (as opposed to actual, individual leftists). Their eyes are fixed on what elites want and how they can amass clout. The question that’s not addressed is what’s good for The People.

And yet there seemed to be something “extra” at work here because this wasn’t just the result of pandering to power. There was glee. On the supposed “real lefty institutional left” there was a palpable delight in being as nasty as possible.

Let’s call this by its name: EVIL

As a modern, secular person, I’m queasy about using the word ‘evil.’ So I want to be perfectly clear: this evil isn’t mystical or transcendent. It’s an empirical phenomena that we’re able to describe and catalog.

The first evil is Instrumental (the lending of one’s intentions to a larger project). Those who demanded a segment of the population be denied healthcare and jobs according to whether they took an experimental gene therapy had given themselves over to Instrumental Evil.

I was the target of this and let me tell you, those doing it were high on their imagined righteousness and license to dehumanize whoever they saw fit. They had the power to get away with doing real harm to real people, and it was intoxicating.

German Nazis are the go-to example of Instrumental Evil—so much so that it’s cliché to even bring them up. But the similarities are undeniable.

I bet you heard the same excuses back then:

“Everyone thought it was the right thing to do.”

“We were just following directions.”

“No one knew what was really happening.”

“It was the fog of war.”

It’s precisely because of this sort instrumentalized evil that we have The Nuremberg Code which enumerates 10 principles of ethical medical experimentation so as not to commit these sorts of atrocities again; and guess what…we committed these sorts of atrocities again. Our pandemic response threw the Nuremberg Code out the window while saying “only right wing fascists care about Nuremberg,” which is an odd card to play, indeed.

Here’s the first few lines of the Nuremberg Code: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion…The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment.” This would include pharmacists, doctors, researchers and especially NIH Director Anthony Fauci. It also applies to political operatives who used the pandemic response to sort the “good people” from the “bad.” It extends especially to marketing drones who made TikTok videos to encourage children to get the vaccine without their parents’ knowledge.

Which brings me to the second sort of empirical evil we experienced during the pandemic: Systemic Evil, specifically the establishment of a medical fascist state that operates with a kind of “BioGladio” logic (h/t @faust_flag).

Gladio was a NATO stratagem in post-war Europe (especially Italy), where they armed ‘fusion cells’ of business leaders and other fascists to carry out a “strategy of tension” by terrorizing small towns in rural Italy; bombing grocery stores and blaming the left wing for the horror. NATO wanted to convince Italians that the Soviet Union was invading. The Strategy of Tension worked because it made the people believe that a threat lurked amongst them, which led to masses accepting measures they otherwise would reject.

BioGladio operates on the same logic, as our bioweapon industrial complex ensures there will always be another pandemic. We have enough smallpox, anthrax, tulameria, and bird flu to keep the world sick for the rest of time.

The BioGladio establishment has been running tabletop wargame scenarios on this for decades. It’s not a secret. You can easily find the videos and reports online. Judge for yourself, but I found that they always focus on taking authoritarian control and creating profit for corporations instead of providing a humane response to suffering.

The Italian Gladio operation created a crisis to blame on the left while supporting the global anti-communist project. BioGladio also identifies an outgroup while supporting a larger conflict that benefits the security state.

BioGladio makes use of Intrinsic Evil (that which doesn’t need to be explained)

If you were to ask a child, “do you think it’s okay make everyone sick and die,” they’d say “no, that’s evil.” It’s so obvious it’s unremarkable.

This entire pandemic enterprise, with the unimaginable death and equally unimaginable profits, the was the creation of US bioweapons programs and some are starting to ask if the release of this gain of function virus wasn’t an accident.

Making those biological weapons is an intrinsic evil. Using those biological weapons is…the apotheosis of evil.

The creation and release of biological weapons intended to kill and maim large numbers of people must not be allowed to happen ever again. We just lived through a sample run of their playbook. We’ve had treaties prohibiting these programs as recently as 2014. It’s not a new idea that we ought to keep this stuff under wraps.

So far I’ve listed empirical evils: Systemic, Instrumental and Intrinsic. But I think there’s still another evil that actually is transcendent and metaphysical…

We made an egregore

An egregore is a useful concept. It’s when the collective unconscious forms ‘a larger complex system that has its own emergent qualities and which intends to mobilize human energies to meet its own requirements.’ The pandemic response gave birth to a kind of sociological egregore that we’re barely able to name, let alone rid ourselves of because it lives in the hearts of each and every one of us.

The pious left-liberals who committed their energy to this particular demon, thinking it was the “only right thing to do,” are to blame for the lion’s share of suffering we’ve seen. It’s obnoxious that they should announce their self-forgiveness, as if we’re all just gonna move one. Sure, they were duped, but they aren’t innocent. They played the fool and gave themselves over to a monster that used them for its own ends. They enjoyed the feeling of power that came with being instruments of The System (that’s how systemic evil rolls).

The egregore is useful to us now because it gives shape to the murky collection of feelings we’ve all been having. Finally those feelings coalesced into something recognizable. And so it behooves us to withhold amnesty until we get this egregore off our back.

And wouldn’t you know it, there is no time to waste as the monster is already moving on to World War 3 in Ukraine.

This is why I say ‘no amnesty.’ What we need now is for people to take responsibility for their thoughts and actions; to be accountable in the future; and to commit to a humane ethic and a set of principles that ensures this never happens again.

That’s a lot of work to do but it’s not impossible. Naming the monster is always the first step. Then we put one thought in front of the next, followed by one foot in front of the other until a critical mass gets the message and disengages with the evils they’ve become comfortable with.

More NATO documents on cognitive warfare found here.

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Nathan J. Robinson's essay: "Don't Use The Right's Assumptions To Make The Left's Arguments."

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Plus! Facebook continues to be an evil and stupid thing. 

STILL MORE! Zeroing in on early covid treatment. 

CITATIONS

Trust in Media Hits NEW CRISIS LOW, Axios
ROLLING STONE BOGUS ARTICLE "Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals"
Ivermectin Overdose NOT An Issue At Oklahoma ER, KXMX radio fact checking (with hospital rebuttal of bogus article)
I-MASK+ prevention and early outpatient treatment protocol for Covid-19, FLCCC Alliance
Making Sense of Sensemaking: what it is and what it means for pandemic research, The Atlantic Council
Facebook Hires ex-NATO press officer as intel officer to censor speech, The Grayzone

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