Gary Null PhD and Richard Gale
Progressive Radio Network, May 3, 2022
What does it mean when the government’s largest anti-terrorism enforcement agency for domestic and public security, the Department of Homeland Security, creates a governance board to rule over what information is true and permissible and what is false and to be censored? In case we have forgotten Orwell’s warnings about a Ministry of Truth, the horrors of 1984 are now upon us. You might say, “but that was fiction.” However, Hitler actually had a ministry of truth; the Third Reich’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was overseen by Joseph Goebbels. So did Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong have their propaganda arms to seek out and persecute truth seekers. So what does it mean when freedom of speech and thought that contradicts the official narratives of Washington, the billionaire elite, the medical industrial complex and the mainstream media are diabolized and banned? To understand what is currently, we must pause and probe more deeply into the larger changes occurring across American culture.
At no other time in our history have we witnessed a rapid restructuring of American culture within a very short period of time. The social Balkanization of the nation, the creation of sharp divisions within the American population into highly politicized units, often hostile towards each other, is a unique development during our lifetime. These divisions are motivated largely by the proselytization of ideological purity, both from the left and the right. On both sides of the political spectrum, the underlying beliefs and superstitions fomenting the religious moralism on the right and scientific materialism on the left are fundamentally delusional. And amidst the national vacuum of critical thinking and the purging of our greatest intellects, Americans’ levels of fear and anxiety, financial uncertainty and pessimism are at an all time high. These culture wars are now contributing to a complete breakdown of personal well-being and future security as chaos and dystopia become the norm. It is as if anything that were sensible and pragmatic could be undertaken to restore normalcy, we can anticipate its opposite will be implemented.
Ideological privilege is the antithesis of open, civil discourse and debate. For example, Senator Warren and Representative Adam Schiff are representative of a politically correct woke culture who are willing to invoke unlawful government censorship to advance social obedience to conformity. Warren, for example, requested Amazon to ban books, which in her opinion spread Covid-19 misinformation. Among them was The Truth About Covid-19 by Dr. Joseph Mercola and the Organic Consumers Association founder Ronnie Cummins. Warren was subsequently sued by the Vermont publisher Chelsea Green for violating the First Amendment under the precedent set by the 1963 Supreme Court case Bantam Books v Sullivan after state officials attempted to persuade booksellers to ban certain books. In 2019, Rep. Schiff sent letters to executives at Google and Facebook to curb the dissemination of information that challenges vaccine safety and efficacy. Last year, Schiff again reached out to the tech giants and Amazon accusing them of promoting “dangerous misinformation about vaccines.” Sadly, Warren’s and Schiff’s autocratic endeavors are simply examples of a broader movement by centrist liberals, educators and the mainstream media to censor free speech itself.
This regressive mindset is further contributing to groupthink tribalism that had entered hyper drive during the Trump years. It is intended to neuter the intellect by removing individual freedoms. It is the dark side of wokeness that is now weaponizing cultural and historical differences that in the past were the nation’s strengths in the preservation of racial, ethnic and religious diversity. Any claims of personal sanctity of one’s body and mind are demolished in a drab, gray landscape of acquiescence to a privileged class of government bureaucrats and their technocratic funders who are determined to reshape the country, and the world at large, into a perverted image of themselves as the superior elite who claim to possess all of the solutions and truths.
One of the elites’ defining strategies to maintain control over the prevailing narratives of national policies is to disengage from civil debate. This is best exemplified by the utter lack of discourse over the efficacy of federal health decrees to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. Shut out all noise so that only one voice is heard over the crowd. This has been the tactic of pro-vaccination advocates for the past two decades; the nation’s leading foot soldiers for mass vaccination mandates, such as Paul Offit, Peter Hotez and California state Senator Richard Pan, has been to marginalize direct confrontation at all costs and support the bully pulpit of government to pass laws that advance their medical apartheid agenda. The fruits of their efforts are now ripening as a new caste division between the vaccinated and unvaccinated unfolds. A one-size-fits-all agenda has no room for the empirical fact that the mRNA vaccines have not been proven sufficiently safe over a long-term review, nor have the vaccines’ safety profiles been shown to be adequately safe for pregnant mothers, small children, people with compromised autoimmune conditions, etc. It has become near impossible for individuals at high risk of injury or death due to vaccine ingredients or with prior cardiovascular conditions to get medically exempt. And of course, many medical experts have criticized the entire shibboleth of reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination as mere fantasy with no basis in scientific reality whatsoever.
Although terms like “identity politics” have become derogatory insults of closed minded ideological stubbornness, identity political correctness has further morphed into people’s personal self-centered identities that define who they are rather than reflecting the state of the world we live in. There can be little constructive progress through dialogue when political parties and persuasions, racial differences, religions and ideologies become entrenched in their insulated niches as combatants against each other. Of course, any specific identity political belief can only be defined in relationship to the other beliefs it is directly antagonist towards.
The corporate ruling elite and Silicon Valley have successfully commoditized the options of worldviews that we can either buy into or scorn. Consequently, the inability to reconcile their differences has reverberated into social fractionalization and tribalism. In either case, the corporations that rule over the public’s lives hold to a single monolithic narrative that keeps all other narratives under wraps. This is the Balkanization of America that especially accelerated during these past two years.
The situation has especially worsened in modern medicine. Evidence-based medicine, which at one time held great promise, has systematically backfired and become a weapon for the pharmaceutical industrial complex to dictate medical treatments to reap greater profits. Today, doctors are finding it exceedingly difficult to treat patients as they see best in the interest of their patients’ illnesses. Rather they must abide by a standardized protocol, as in the case of treating Covid-19 patients, as if medicine has turned into an assembly line and patients are of no more value than damaged robots. In education, parents have been removed from the equation. Parents are expected to turn their children over the state as the overseeing ward. And we are all expected to willingly turn our bodies over for vaccination, regardless of the dangers any given pathogen may pose to our personal health.
This narrative has been hand over to special interest groups, fact checkers and the big tech media industry, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, with the permission to create truth forums in order to pound the elites’ propaganda repeatedly into our psyches. Consequently, the world around us and our options of self-expression contract; individual freedoms and the façade of democracy shrinks to conform more or less to an orchestrated narrative. Yet to not embrace and conform one’s attitudes and behavior to the government’s demands, one thereby shows a refusal to display their citizenship and hence their solidarity with their masters’ demands. This explains, according to Belgian psychologist Prof. Mattias Desmet, why people are so willing to buy into the official pandemic narrative out of a manufactured fear of the virus. Desmet explains this as “mass formation,” a form of collective psychosis. Now those who dissent from the narrative are labeled as domestic terrorists. If Gandhi, Marin Luther King and WEB Du Bois were alive today, would they too be targeted as terrorists against the status quo’s social order? Each took risks that today would be criminal acts.
Likewise, the great philosophers of the Age of Reason, who advocated for the freedom of the human spirit from the tyranny of political repression by self-appointed rulers and elites would be appalled at the detour Eurocentric civilization has taken away from civil justice and the inherent dignity of the human being. John Locke’s “natural freedom” demanded that every person not be subjected to the will or authority of any other man.” Once a person’s liberty is stripped way, Locke warned, the powers that be would rip away everything else. The reduction of humans to pawns on a global chessboard for the benefit of technological progress and private interests would outrage their sensibilities. Even our educational institutions have been reduced to incubators for birthing guardians of wokeness, and critical race theory to advance the Balkanization of society. This trend was first observed by Bishop George Berkeley in the early 19th century. “The most ingenious men are now agreed,” Berkeley wrote, “that universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism and pedantry.” The introduction of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility is one clear indication of the turn towards adolescent reasoning universities have taken.
It is easy to fall into despair that we may be in a no win situation. Part of the elites’ success has been to disrupt human connectivity. Lockdowns, social distancing, quarantine and isolation, and facemask mandates have contributed to a breakdown in human relationships and a sense of community. The collateral damage of the Great Regression has led to the reduction of the American public as economic chattel. Therefore, a solution to counter social control rests in our innate capacity to rebuild community and human relationships based upon universal ethical values that transcend the delusional devilry of the elites’ self-centered ambitions.