When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things and a group of people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?”
Objective reality – the existence of things as they are – is obvious to everyone. And so are the values, accumulated over several millennia, of what is true and of what works and what hasn’t. But not everyone accepts the obvious and the values based on time proven objective reality. Some see themselves as Progressive in rejecting both.
Today’s academic, artistic, media, and political elites, a vanguard of Progressive Groupthink, reject the existence of things as they are and do so within the safe space of their ranks thereby creating an illusion of invulnerability and inherent morality. Members of this vanguard suppress dissenting opinions and avoid critically evaluated alternatives so as to maintain the group’s shared illusion of unanimity.
The vanguard’s conformity is maintained with mind guards – the media reports “right thinking” about a matter – and with self-censorship of deviations from shared beliefs and with shared views of the enemy – those who present a reality contrary to the groups’ notion of reality.
When we hear the vanguard’s irrational take on what is going on in the world, its roiling Doublethink, its name calling and shunning of voices outside its collective choir, and its dysfunctional decision-making which objective reality tells us will result in disastrous, dehumanizing, and even deadly outcomes, we ask “Where is this coming from and where is this going?
Those of us who keep an ear to the ground in order to hear what is approaching will answer “History is repeating itself.”
The objective reality of the murderous totalitarian regimes of the last century, which Progressives willfully ignore to promote their glorious future of equality via the same means, will help us understand the denial-of-reality collaboration of today’s intelligentsia – those who hold to one way of thinking – and their quest for total domination of the body, mind, and soul with Progressive Groupthink.
Specifically, Russian Soviet history will help us understand the conformity dynamic behind today’s intelligentsia. For this understanding I turn to one of the most informed scholars of the Russian history of ideas as communicated in its literature: Northwestern Professor Gary Saul Morson.
He describes Soviet thinking that rejected the realism and the real people depicted in nineteenth-century Russian fiction and required that reality be written to include “not only of the observable present but also the inevitable future in the making” and with Socialist Realist heroes – utopianism made flesh.
Writers of Russian realism – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and others – wrote about what they saw and experienced. They are the “wonder” in the title. They represented the world as it was in their writings about the Gulag, mass starvation, torture, unspeakable violence, about how people thought about and dealt with what was going on, and about how many succumbed to the imposed Soviet mindset.
Russian realist authors confronted those of the “certainty,” those who wrote redefined reality in terms of the “observable present and the inevitable future in the making” and in terms of “positive heroes.”
The “positive hero” was to set an example for the reader’s behavior. A Soviet cosmonaut, for one example, became a “positive hero.” A cosmonaut’s space trip was seen as science, materialism, and atheism triumphing over the transcendent values held in the U.S., the enemy of the Soviet Union.
The “certainty” writers followed the lead of the embodiment of “certainty” – Vladimir Lenin. Lenin mocked his opponents’ self-characterization as ‘seekers’ of truth. He held that dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it. And so, the party-minded “positive hero” refused dialogue, refused to see any alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist-materialist-atheistic “truth” espoused by the party, the representatives of Karl Marx’s class-struggling proletariat.
From Wonder Confronts Certainty:
“The Soviets would label fidelity to present facts “bourgeois objectivism.” It was the best that could be expected from the age of realism, but must give way to socialist realism, which shows the ideal world inevitably coming. The socialist realist author was expected to focus on the people of the future, “positive heroes” exhibiting complete “Party-mindedness.” True positive heroes do not have bring their thinking into accord with the party, a process requiring effort; they exhibit Party-mindedness so thorough that no effort is required”
“Party-mindedness”, we learn from the writings of Russian realist authors, was propagated through the means of propaganda, show trials, random arrests, and the constant terror that there might be any hint, any innuendo, any false statement that would convict one of not being party-minded.
The “party-mindedness” of the 20th century Russian intelligentsia, its conformity to only one way of thinking, is replicated today.
“I happened to witness two professors waiting for an elevator. To make conversation, one voiced an opinion on some political question to see if the other agreed. When she did, they chattered away on a dozen other topics with perfect assurance that they agreed on those, too. Evidently, their beliefs came as a package. Subsequently I noticed this way of thinking many times, as I imagine many of my readers have.
The process works something like this: a person first chooses the group with whom he wishes to identify and then adopts its opinions. He believes as strongly in gun control, let us say, as he does in supporting Planned Parenthood, defunding the police, and banning fossil fuels. It is evident that no arguments or evidence can shake his opinions on any of these topics because arguments or evidence had nothing to do with why they were adopted.
To be sure, a person who thinks this way can cite facts and reasons to justify his opinion, but they have been acquired in the same way as the opinion itself. They are the same reasons others in the group have learned to give. I used to find it eerie to hear repeatedly the same arguments expressed in the same phrases, as if I were listening to a recording rather than to highly educated people who imagined that, unlike their intellectual inferiors, they had arrived at opinions rationally and would change them as evidence warranted. I thought of Jonathan Swift’s observation that no one was ever talked out of an opinion he was not first talked into.”
***
Reading Morson’s article, I was reminded of the easy-going liberal mindset of the Stiva Oblonsky character in Tolstoy’s Russian realism novel Anna Karenina.
Behind Stiva’s smile, his self-possessed mannerisms and hedonism is what Tolstoy described as “the liberalism of the blood.”
From the novel:
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took and read a liberal newspaper, not a radical one, but one advocating the viewpoint maintained by the majority. And even though neither science, nor art or politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his paper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they imperceptibly changed within him . . .
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
Stiva, we learn in in the novel, does not recognize his conscious when it speaks to him. And that is aided by his living-in-the-moment forgetting. He did not want to remember any unpleasant thing.
Self-deception and romantic ideology play key roles in Anna’s life.
***
Czeslaw Milosz, Polish American poet, novelist, translator, critic, and diplomat, is best known for The Captive Mind (1953). His essay collection focuses on intellectuals, specifically poets and other writers.
As Charles Haywood writes in his 2019 article The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz), [Milosz’s] “book shows how mental gymnastics, rather than coercion, caused writers under Communism to adhere to Communism. Thereby, indirectly, it congratulates writers who believe their minds free from such, or other, contortions.
“The West incorrectly sees “might and coercion” as the reasons those in Eastern Europe submit to Communism. But, rather, unwilling to face either physical or spiritual death, many choose instead to be “reborn” through taking these metaphorical pills, because “[t]here is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.” Intellectuals, and artists especially,do not want to be “internal exiles, irreconcilable, non-participating, eroded by hatred.” So they swallow the pills and adopt the “New Faith” (a term Milosz uses throughout the book) which offers the intellectual the certainty he is both correct and virtuous, and therefore gives him a sense of belonging, gives him a feeling of being “warm-hearted and good . . . a friend of mankind—not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”” (Emphasis mine.)
Returning to Morson’s article about package thinking, Morson relates
“What really matters, [Czeslaw} Milosz explains, is “the intellectual’s feeling of belonging.” His defining “characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.” For this reason, as well as to prosper, he must root out all the old ways of thinking. Milosz describes a phenomenon with which university people are all too familiar, the always incomplete process of teaching oneself to say the right things (in the right words), and avoid saying the wrong ones, so that one never makes a slip entailing ostracism or worse. Of course, the best way to do this is to get oneself actually to share the prescribed views. Milosz describes how
after long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify self with the role one is obliged to play . . . permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper time become truly automatic.”
***
One obvious feature of our culture’s downward trend toward mindless conformity is critical thinking’s easy alternative: clicking on a machine to receive packaged thoughts.
Why think when packaged thoughts are there for the clicking? And why expand one’s personal bandwidth when you can reaffirm your tribal identity with a click?
Why research and consider a range of ideas and thoughts when clicking on machine AI is ready to do away with mystery and your curiosity, wonder, and impatience? And why think outside package thinking when life is short – shortened by every minute clicking on a machine.
Why read classic literature to gain wisdom, insight, and understanding from other people in other places and in other times, when you can click on a remote for package thinking entertainment.
Have you bought into the globalist, academic, secular and progressive (GASP) package (a feature of Wikipedia) that censors alternative views as “extremist” or “fringe theories” or “conspiracy theories” or “racist?”
Did you buy into the globalist open borders “welcoming the stranger” package where millions of unvetted illegal invaders entered the country as simple or criminal or terrorism opportunists? Did you accept the package thinking that allows third world invaders into our country to replace American workers and American values and do all manner of harm to its citizens as empathy, as what Jesus would do? Take a look at the strangers welcomed: Arrested: Worst of the Worst | Homeland Security And, there’s this: They Called It ‘Compassion’ — But it was Child Trafficking – American Thinker
Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package where everyone, except certain individuals who hold more power and privilege, must be made equal no matter the human cost? Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package and willfully forgetting the objective reality of the horrors of socialism/communism? Are you willfully handing over your life, your thoughts, to “Party-mindedness”?
Did you accept the “don’t question the science” COVID package thinking of mandates, masking, social distancing, vaccine passports, isolation camps, vaccine efficacy, and of COVID’s origin lies? America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies
Likewise, did you not question the package thinking of “climate experts” who announced their verdict that the world would end if we didn’t act now. Not long ago, woven into almost every weather report on local and mainstream media when major weather events (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires) occurred was the narrative that climate change was behind them – without ever mentioning large-scale natural phenomena such as solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanoes that have been affecting weather for many millennia.
Do you go along with the package thinking of the [John] Rawlsian theory of ad hoc justice that, for example, releases someone arrested 40 times, is not considered a “criminal” because of their minority status, and is released by a judge back onto the street where he sets a woman on fire?
Do you buy philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – the package thinking that says that people are entirely products of their environment, of their society, of their age, and that’s why they do what they do. Therefore, they are not responsible for what they do because of external influence. That’s the package thinking behind the Rawlsian theory of justice and behind the executions and horrors of the French revolution working to change social environment.
Have you agreed with the insurrection thought package being espoused by The Seditious Six imploring military service members to “refuse illegal orders” thereby implying that orders coming out of the Trump administration are considered illegal by them and therefore military service members should disobey their commanding officer and join the club of the “Party-minded.” Remember, package thinking has only one train of thought – gaining and maintaining power over reality.
Have you agreed with the insurrection package thinking espoused previously by NYT’s op-ed columnist David Brooks? Do the values of your party-minded package thinking allow you to hamstring a DEMOCRACY! elected president with the rulings of party-minded federal court judges that will be overturned. Do the values of your party-minded package thinking justify the deep state, in the labyrinth of government, to sabotage the efforts of a Democratically elected President?
Do the values of your package thinking allow you to call for uprisings by any means necessary, to burn down buildings, to destroy property, to destroy businesses, to steal, do violence on others, to defund the police, to create pipe bombs, to assassinate? To ignore your conscience?
Did you accept the “Danger to our Democracy” thought package the media delivered during the last presidential election cycle? It should be obvious from the likes of David Brooks, that the “guardians of democracy” are the ones who want to tear it down.
Have bought into the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) playbook that conforms and coerces everyone to identify with Soviet style party-mindedness package thinking?
Have bought into viewing everything including humans through the lens of materialism?
Have you bought into package thinking so as to not be considered an outsider? Have you bought into conformity for conformity’s sake?
Is censorship the worst thing that can happen to a people? Or, is it “Party-mindedness?”
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things with the smug air of certainty and people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?” and “Where is this coming from and where is it going?”
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia. And a mind is still a terrible thing to hand over.
You can put your ear to the road and hear what is quickly approaching. Download and listen to the following podcasts:
London is falling – or has it fallen already?
Liz Truss, the 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom, in her very first episode of The Liz Truss Show discusses how bad things are in Britain with a mass migration and economic doom loop – and how to defeat the deep state who have let this happen
Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Professor Gary Saul Morson shares his thought-provoking definition of an intellectual—someone who seeks truth independently, values ideas for their own sake, and stands apart from identity-driven thinking. Whether discussing classic Russian Literature or analyzing modern society, Professor Morson is one of the most insightful and consequential scholars of our time. Discover how this interview, and its exploration of timeless topics, can inspire bold, principled leadership and innovation within today’s business environment.
Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Vladimir Lenin’s ideas are alive and well today: Party-ness, politics as win-lose, zero-sum game, Who-Whom, rejection of truth, ideology, violence, philosophical materialism, adherence to lying.
Is Hope Naïve in a World Like Ours? | Esau McCaulley & Gary Saul Morson at Northwestern
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Quotes:
In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea … gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. … No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous. Galileo Galilei
If the Brave New World cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine “roundness” until a perfect fit results.
-Jerome Meckier, from Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure
…a sense of unity is opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone “belongs”, uses the same cliches, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, realizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide… Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life.
-Northrop Frye, from The Bush Garden
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something. -Plato
“The past is our always-available counterculture, and it’s a rich one. Every minute you spend attending to something not-immediately-present, you are helping to build a counterculture.” ― Alan Jacobs
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Links:
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Gary Saul Morson offers three explanations from the treasury of Russian literature.
Anti-Communism Week has been marked for November 2025. Writer-producer Julie Behling’s documentary “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” warns of communism’s devastation: “Globally, communism claimed the lives of approximately 150 million people in the 20th century.”
Totalitarian governments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous persons. This poses a threat to their quest to consolidate power. Individual liberty threatens the theoretical, utopian foundations of promising the re-distribution of goods, and equality; communism ultimately fails to re-distribute the essence of human nature.
We are entering a season of celebrating Good News – the birth of a good King, the King’s establishment of a good kingdom and the King’s means for new creation. But hold on. Have we been invaded by body snatchers?
They look like us. Exactly like your loved ones or even possibly yourself. Replacement people. Exact copies yet devoid of empathy and humanity.
The 1978 film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes place in San Francisco. The plot involves Matthew Bennel and Elizabeth Driscoll. Both work for the Health Department. Elizabeth is the first to suspect that something strange is going on. She awakes one morning to find her boyfriend Geoffrey being cold and distant and doing odd things. And it’s not just him. Everyone now seems strange to her.
Elizabeth Driscoll: I keep seeing these people, all recognizing each other. Something is passing between them all, some secret. It’s a conspiracy, I know it.
Matthew Bennel: There can’t be a conspiracy!
Elizabeth Driscoll: Matthew, I’m telling you something is going on here.
Matthew suggests they speak to his friend, pop-psychiatrist David Kibner. They drive over to the bookstore where Kibner is promoting his new book. On the way they encounter “They’re coming!”
Dr. David Kibner:
Elizabeth, could you please tell me, in your opinion, what is going on?
Elizabeth Driscoll:
People are being duplicated. And once it happens to you, you’re part of this… thing. It almost happened to me!”
Kibner confirms that several of his patients are claiming that their spouses are not who they seem to be. But he puts it down to mass hysteria until Jack and Nancy Bellicec, Matthew’s friends, discover a mysterious embryonic adult-body resembling Jack in the mud spa they run.
Elizabeth Driscoll:
I have seen these flowers all over. They are growing like parasites on other plants. All of a sudden. Where are they coming from?
Nancy Bellicec:
Outer space?
Jack Bellicec:
What are you talking about? A space flower?
Nancy Bellicec:
Well why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?
Jack Bellicec:
I’ve NEVER expected metal ships.
Together they figure out that humans are being replaced with flawless biological copies who are emotionless. The cold unthinking replicant has one quest – its survival. It must bring others into the fold . . . of the alien plant pods.
How does replacement happen? Organically over time. Strange spores drifted to earth from space. Mysterious pods began to grow. The pods begin replacing the dominant species by spawning emotionless replicas. The original bodies disintegrate into dust after the duplication process. The pod people outwardly resemble the people they have replaced, but are completely empty and soulless.
This happens to San Francisco’s residents one body at a time – when the citizen falls asleep near the pod. The ‘Podified’ then distribute the pods for more replication.
Spores en route to your home.
A ‘Podified’ Professor David Kibner explains the why of Pod Life:
“We came here from a dying world. We drift through the universe, from planet to planet, pushed on by the solar winds. We adapt and we survive. The function of life is survival.”
And so it is that when the credits roll, apparently there are no more humans left in San Francisco. Alien pods have consumed human’s emotional individuality for their survival. Only hollow replacement clones and a screech remain:
Pod people, alike as “two peas in a pod”, have a collective mindset and are extremely persistent. They want to replace humanity with a replicant humanity for their own survival. So America be warned. Pod people – They’re coming! Welcome to 2024 and communism.
Body Snatchers have invaded Progressive San Francisco. We see empty and soulless people acting in weird parasitic ways for the survival of the Left’s Pod People collective.
These had been lulled into replacing their humanity with an invitation for mindless wellbeing. We watch a ‘Podified” Elizabeth Driscoll try to pacify Matthew into acceptance:
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. They were right. It’s painless. It’s good. Come. Sleep. Matthew.”
People who fall asleep with media ‘pods’ wake up different people. These are the people Leftists want.
Leftist’s want Pod people who are devoid of individuality and filled with a collective consciousness. Free will and human agency are to be subsumed to create a monolithic culture. Take away one’s voice (except for the screech) and one’s power, and one’s free will and you have compliant Pod people.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers? There are several indicators:
Queer theory and critical race theory seek to Pod people with an alternate universe.
And there is Google which plants pod seeds. People who search with Google wake up as different people. For Google’s strange seeds drifted into cyberspace from the deep state. Mysterious pods begin to grow and take over minds. See The Big Brother of Silicon Valley video below.
(One disturbing aspect of the movie I noticed is that the men, including the male lead, disbelieve and gaslight the females. I don’t know if this was intentional or just indicative of society.)
Moderna ADMITS That DNA Contamination Can Lead to Cancer
• Moderna has a patent that acknowledges RNA is preferable to DNA in vaccines due to risks of insertional mutagenesis, which might activate oncogenes or inhibit tumor suppressor genes, Dr. @RWMaloneMD explained.
A whistleblower from New Zealand has gone public with vaccine data from the New Zealand Ministry of Health.
New Zealand: a COVID vaccine administrator has gone rogue and turned into a full-blown whistleblower, revealing, for the first time, the actual number of deaths related to a “bad batch” of the Pfizer vaccine.
Professor Dr. Didier Raoult and colleagues pioneered the use of hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin for treatment of COVID-19 disease.
Conclusion (Fauci lied people died)
Although this is a retrospective analysis, results suggest that early diagnosis, early isolation and early treatment of COVID-19 patients, with at least 3 days of HCQ-AZ lead to a significantly better clinical outcome and a faster viral load reduction than other treatments.
Not your usual Thanksgiving fare . . . If you live in Disneyworld, then don’t bother reading further.
May 19, 1925. Saloth Sar, as the eighth of nine children, is born into a well-off and well-connected farming family, landowners in Kompong Thong province in central Cambodia. He arrives in a time when the kingdom of Cambodia is a French protectorate within French Indochina.
Sar’s childhood is strict and sheltered in the capital city of Phnom Penh. He spends a year at a Buddhist monastery prep-school before attending a French Catholic primary school. He involves himself with the violin, drama, soccer and carpentry. His Cambodian education continues until 1949.
Having won a scholarship to study abroad with a group of some 200 students, Sar journeys to Paris to study radio technology. During the one-month boat trip in 1949, Sar meets Mey Mann. Mann would later describe Sar at that time as being a pleasant man who showed little interest in politics. But in Paris during the early 1950s, Sar becomes a different man. He turns his conscious into consciousness.
What Happened? Marx and Mao happened.
“Though a Roman Catholic and a devout Jeffersonian [preferring agrarian life over city life] coming out of high school, Sar attended university in Paris, 1949-1953, where he came under the influence of several Marxists, especially the radical former nazi-collaborator Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).”
In Paris, Sar is in the company of fellow travelers – radicalized Cambodians. He joins their reading group and immerses himself in the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. Sar connects with the ruthless ways of Lenin and Mao. He joins France’s Stalinist Communist Party.
As a result of neglecting his studies, Sar loses his scholarship. He then returns to Cambodia in 1953 to bring revolution to Cambodia. Mey Mann, who also went off to Paris as a young college student, also came back a leftist revolutionary.
Back in Cambodia, Saloth Sar joins Vietnamese communists who were intent on ridding South East Asia of western influence. When he becomes the leader of the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) he takes on the nom de guerre Pol Pot, which means “the original Cambodian.” His family’s ancestry traced back to Cambodian royalty.
William Branigin, who spent 19 years overseas, reporting in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Europe, provides background to Pol Pot’s growing revolutionary activism and his Maoist leanings in his article ARCHITECT OF GENOCIDE WAS UNREPENTANT TO THE END – The Washington Post:
After years of secret communist activity in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot rose to the leadership of the underground movement in 1962. The following year he fled to the countryside to escape a crackdown by the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who dubbed the revolutionaries “Khmers Rouges,” or Red Khmers. . ..
Ensconced in the Cambodian northeast in an isolated jungle base protected by Vietnamese communist guerrillas who were then his allies, Pol Pot and his followers concocted a strange ideological brew of Marxism and what one scholar described as “badly digested Maoism.” During this period Pol Pot was apparently influenced by a five-month trip he made to China at the beginning of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and his economic “Great Leap Forward.” It was marked by the partial evacuation of Chinese cities and purges of “class enemies.”
. . .
Pol Pot then launched his own version of the “Great Leap Forward,” but with an apparent determination to jump even farther. The Khmer Rouge promptly emptied the cities, viewed as breeding grounds of capitalism, and began slaughtering old-regime soldiers and officials. The aim was to establish an agrarian Utopia in a single giant bound over the various stages of Marxist development. It was “Year Zero,” and people were entirely expendable. . ..
Pol Pot combined Stalinist and Maoist models with a focus on an agrarian society. With support from rural Cambodians, North Vietnamese, and the Chinese, Pol Pot was able to take control of the country in 1975. The Khmer Rouge began inverting the entire structure of Cambodian society.
Children, indoctrinated into the new ideology, were given power. Taught to “harden their hearts” toward their countrymen and their own families, they decided who was ideologically pure and who must be purged. But that was not enough for Pol Pot. He remained obsessively paranoid, as Branigin writes:
But soon the revolution began devouring its own children, as Pol Pot launched repeated purges of those he believed were plotting against him or working for his Vietnamese or American enemies. Thousands were tortured into making “confessions” at Tuol Sleng, a Phnom Penh school-turned-jail whose director reported to Pol Pot.
In pursuit of their dreams of a communist Utopia, the Khmer Rouge abolished money, commerce, religion and traditional education. They suppressed family relationships, individualism, intellectuals and ethnic groups, slaughtered anyone who showed recalcitrance and enforced unquestioning obedience to “Angka,” the organization.
Thousands were beaten to death, then dumped in mass graves in the regime’s “killing fields.” Many more succumbed to starvation, disease and overwork. Out of a population of about 8 million, demographers and researchers estimate, at least 1 million, and possibly as many as 1.7 million, died.
But as the killing intensified, the revolution increasingly turned on itself, targeting “enemies” whom Pol Pot perceived to be multiplying like germs, creating what he called a “sickness in the party.”
There is much to the Pol Pot murderous legacy that is not written here. This brief intro describing Saloth Sar’s fundamental transformation into genocidal dictator Pol Pot is meant to open eyes to the fundamental transformation -subtle and not so subtle – that is taking place in our country right now.
I want my readers to recognize the signs of the coming onslaught on humanity. The Biden regime, the Merrick Garland DOJ, Leftist judges and the media, are showing signs of demanding ideological conformity to their form of totalitarian “Democracy!” The Left’s constant lawfare against Trump is just one indicator of this.
And though implemented in more efficient ways today, e.g., digital technology, the same Lennin Think and Maoism is being used by the intelligentsia to control every aspect of our lives – from thought to word to deed, from sunup to sundown and throughout the night.
To understand Pol Pot’s way of thinking and that of today’s intelligentsia, listen to the podcast below – Thinking Like Lenin with Gary Saul Morson.
The three videos below reveal the man Pol Pot and the political horrors of his regime. Learn about the brutalities of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and the genocide, one of the worst in recorded history, of about half the Cambodian nation. Learn from the firsthand accounts of Dith Pran and Haing S. Ngor.
Dith Pran, a Cambodia-born journalist, helped bring to light the brutalities of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. His three brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Haing S. Ngor, Cambodian physician and actor, is best known for his Dith Pran role in the movie The Killing Fields (1984), which depicted the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that Ngor himself had also lived through.
Watch Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields to see what is coming our way under the growing despotism.
Also, you may want to watch the third in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Tribology, The Dark Knight Rises, to get a sense of the anarchy and destruction just beginning to be released upon the world to bring about change. Gotham’s (Western Civilization’s) infrastructure is set apart for destruction by Bane and his “social justice” henchmen.
And learn about dehumanizing Marxism:
“Marx’s mechanical theory of society reduces real individuals, with their hopes and fears, beliefs and desires, to mere abstract “classes”. He subordinates reality—messy, limited, and all too human—to a perfect model in which utopia is the only possible outcome. As [Theodore] Dalrymple puts it: “Marx’s eschatology, lacking all common sense, all knowledge of human nature, rested on abstractions that were to him more real than the actual people around him.””
You say you want a revolution . . . so, with bloodlust, you can rid the world of monarchy and colonialism, of Christians and Jews, of the West, and of “oppressors” and replace it with an oppressive murderous regime and a descent into hell; to create a colony of insect peasants, war slaves, and execution squads, of senseless brutality, mind-numbing torture and purges; to create a society where indoctrinated children decide ideological purity among its members and where families cease to exist . . . well, you can count me out.
Mey Mann on the origin of Pol Pot’s murderous ways:
“On many occasions, Mey Mann said he tried to understand why the Khmer Rouge had turned to the killing fields. He asked Ieng Sary and Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea many times when Pol Pot had changed, when Saloth Sar turned into the leader of a murderous regime, but he never got a clear answer.
““Nobody knows. I don’t know why it happened like that, why they tried the extreme way,” Mey Mann said. “When we were students, we thought in a good way and did everything step by step. I don’t know which year Pol Pot changed his attitude.
““Maybe Pol Pot wanted to follow China and be strict like that. He was too biased to China and needed support from them because he hated Vietnam,” he said. “But Pol Pot forgot that Cambodia has only 10 million people. If China goes the tough way and kills 100 people, they have many more people so it doesn’t have a big effect. But here, that’s a big killing.””
“What influenced me most was the actual situation in Cambodia,” Pol Pot told American journalist Nate Thayer. When he came home from Paris, he found that his family had fallen on hard times. A once prosperous uncle had become a rickshaw puller, and other relatives had lost their land and livestock.
”I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people,” the infirm, 72-year-old Pol Pot argued to Thayer. ”Even now, and you can look at me: Am I a savage person?” he asked, adding: “My conscience is clear.”
“In order to survive you have to pretend to be stupid.” -Dith Pran, about life in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge
“I see … a pile of skulls and bones. For the first time since my arrival, what I see before me is too painful, and I break down completely. These are my relatives, friends and neighbors, I keep thinking … It is a long time before I am calm again. And then I am able, with my bare hands, to rearrange the skulls and bones so that they are not scattered about.”
— Dith Pran, writing about his return to Cambodia for The New York Times in 1989.
“This is sad for the Cambodian people because he was never held accountable for the deaths of 2 million of his fellow countryman. The Jewish people’s search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people’s search for justice doesn’t end with Pol Pot.”
— Dith Pran, upon the death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1998, quoted in The Times.
You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He’s a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he’s built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.
Why were you and I born in these times? Was it so we could surrender our wills, our human agency, our property and our lives to the lies of the totalitarian state? To the lie of a “Climate crisis” sequel to “climate change” sequel to Henny Penny? To the lie of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” sequel to racist Affirmative Action? To the lie of “Stakeholder Capitalism” and “ESG” sequels to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its endless mistrust of capitalism in the hands of simple (non-elite) humans? To the lie of the Davos vision of “The Great Narrative” sequel to “The Great Reset” sequel to atheistic and murderous regimes such as the world’s first Marxist state the U.S.S. R., Marxist–Leninist and Khmer ethnonationalist Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China?
Were you and I born in these times to subject ourselves to constant revolution, upheaval, paranoia, mass hysteria, chaos, show trials, and purges – to allow the State to have its way with us with its lies?
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Lies have become the pillars of our current State. The State’s lies require corrupt power structures to keep them in place. The State’s lies require double standards of justice. The State’s lies require manipulation of data. The State’s lies require violence. The State’s lies require more and more sleight of hand. The State’s lies require daily self-deception.
We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Truth requires nothing of this world to support it. Truth stands alone. Truth is not a thing of this world. Truth is power from a different world. Jesus made this clear to Pontious Pilate, the power of this world, before being sentenced to crucifixion, the State’s method to keep lies and systems of power alive.
Romney Wordsworth did the same. He spoke truth to power in The Obsolete Man. He was content to die holding on to the truth he gave witness to during his life.
I will do the same as a follower of the Way, the Truth and the Life.
You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
~~~~~
2+2=5 Radiohead
Are you such a dreamer To put the world to rights? I’ll stay home forever Where two and two always makes a five
I’ll lay down the tracks Sandbag and hide January has April showers And two and two always makes a five
It’s the devil’s way now There is no way out You can scream and you can shout It is too late now Because
[Chorus] You have not been Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention You have not been Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention You have not been Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention You have not been Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention Paying attention
Blackrock – a totalitarian assetDr. Francis Boyle talks about bioweapons, population control.
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, talks about bioweapons, population reduction of “useless eaters”, the racist use of bioweapons, transhumanism.
“Information warfare conducted by the US government includes covert propaganda, controlled opposition, chaos agents, divide & conquer operations, false flags, disinformation campaigns, bad jacketing, advertising and more. These are being combined with neural-linguistic programming, subliminal messaging, nudge technology, hypnosis and propaganda.”
“Commenting on climate alarmism, [Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John] Clauser has said that “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.””
“Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab’s right-hand man has called for so-called “conspiracy theorists” to be banned from the Internet because of their “dangerous” belief that a global clique of elites controls the world . . .”
“Ungodliness with discontentment is great gain” -a statement that seems to define the attitude and religious practice of the Left. Both mindset and praxis find their motivation in the communist confession of faith.
Ungodliness? “. . . communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.” We’ve seen the Left solemnize sex and sodomize the sacred.
Discontentment? “. . . we also see that the development of the proletariat in almost all countries of the world is forcibly repressed by the possessing classes and that thus a revolution is being forcibly worked for by the opponents of communism. If, in the end, the oppressed proletariat is thus driven into a revolution, then we will defend the cause of the proletariat just as well by our deeds as now by our words.” One can find the revolting “oppressed proletariat” on social media. There, you’ll find them whining, complaining, pillarizing, and plundering all day long.
By fomenting a what’s-yours-is-mine discontent with the possessing classes and picking winners and losers, communists “… work to replace the existing social order by community of Property”.
The most recent example involves divvying up the spoils of taxation: Biden Announces Student Loan Relief for Borrowers Who Need It Most. The communist regime signaled to 43 million borrowers that they should be discontented with their chosen plight – student loan debt. Therefore, taxpayer money (Community of property) is to be doled out to the “winners”, communist converts and votes being secured in the process.
The forced redistribution of private property is essential to the revolution of communism. Taxation makes it readily possible. As taxpayers, we are now being forced to pay for a bill we didn’t owe. And that makes Americans losers now and in the future.
Consider that the Biden regime is sending more taxpayer money to the corrupt nation of Ukraine- $3 Billion This while many veterans live on the streets. Biden is on par with Putin with his blatant disregard for the overall welfare of citizens of his own country.
Picking winners and losers. During the COVID plandemic as it worked to replace the existing social order through social engineering, the media made it a point to show that winners wear masks, socially distance, get the jab and basically do what they are told. Losers were the unwashed unvaxxed masses who did not follow “the science”. The media presented Joe Biden saying “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Don’t forget. It was the communist Biden regime that directed OSHA to force the vaccine mandate on the public, as if we were community of Property under state control.
Picking winners and losers. During the 2020 presidential election, the state media and those who stole the election (“defenders of democracy”) decided that communism was to be favored over forms of Christian nationalism.
What is the aim of the Communists?
Answer: To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.
How do you wish to achieve this aim?
Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property.
Dividing people into winners and losers – the oppressed groups and the “privileged” oppressor groups – for the purpose of abolishing differences between estates and classes through the abolition of private property is the stated mission of the church of Marx. Community of Property will somehow set all of us free to be all that we can be – under the state’s control of course.
Preaching discontent of one’s situation and with others is essential to the ministry of the church of Marx (CRT is just one example.). Without discontent there is no communist religion. And without murdering millions of people in the name of that religion there is no great gain – for the ungodly Marxists.
*****
“We are in a religious war.” Author, mathematician, and political commentator, Dr. James Lindsay speaks to the Young America’s foundation at the National Conservative Student Conference. You will want to take in this video. Lindsay provides insight into communism, Marxism, CRT and queer theory. (See my previous post for more Lindsay insight.)
The Q & A session starts at 28 min. with a female student of engineering at the Univ. of Michigan.
it’s fascinating to observe the CDC’s half-baked attempt to deploy expired shots into the arms of the general public, acting as the de facto public marketing arm for a Big Pharma mRNA liquidation sales drive.
Florida father Wendell Perez tells the state surgeon general that Clay County District Schools secretly "transitioned" his 12-year-old daughter without his knowledge and "affirmed" a male name and pronouns, which contributed to her attempted suicide in a school bathroom. pic.twitter.com/VY8Le9KqCi
Now people are fully embracing racial segregation. UC Berkeley has a “Person of Color Theme House” that is “NO WHITE PEOPLE ALLOWED.” Is this what MLK marched and DIED for?
No actual Climate Emergency, only media-generated existential fear porn:
“There is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.
My company’s Women’s Professional Network recently held an electric grid management panel session. The guest panelist: Mark Nelson, the managing director of the Radiant Energy Fund, which advises governments, nonprofits, and industry about nuclear energy.
You will want to hear Mark’s insight regarding nuclear energy.
Mark works tirelessly to prevent early closures of nuclear plants around the world and has attended the UN climate conference in Glasgow as a delegate from the American Nuclear Society. His efforts span the globe, working to save nuclear plants from Germany to California.
Mark holds an MPhil in Nuclear Engineering from Cambridge University and degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Russian Language and Literature from Oklahoma State University.
In this episode, Mark and Aaron discuss the differences between France & Germany, the complexity of the US electric grid, and reasons for hope.
Mark Nelson’s Challenge; Find out where you get your power from, what nuclear plants are nearby, and communicate to politicians that you don’t want them shut down.
“The grid does not currently have the capability to add millions of battery electric or even fuel-cell electric vehicles today,” Jack Brouwer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCI.
A dictionary defines “workaround” as a strategy or technique used to circumvent a defect or other problem in a program or system. Applied to politics, workaround describes a solution to a problem that bypasses the normal or established process which is considered to be obstacle to a desired outcome.
Progressives, with their aversion to the normative and Western tradition, see the Constitution, Christianity and common sense as problems that require workaround solutions. So, a strategy of the-ends-justify-the-means is employed by Progressives to produce a desired outcome – “Change we can believe in”.
These outcomes are often generalized and peddled with high-sounding platitudes: to save the planet, to ensure public health and public safety, to bring about social justice with diversity, equality, and inclusion.
The Left’s workaround solutions invariably involve forcing functions – a process or constraint that coerces a certain outcome. The Left’s outcome skews normal off course never to return.
The Obamacare individual mandate was justified using the Constitution’s commerce clause as workaround. The court decided that any decision to not to act related to commerce is an act and a person can be therefore required to do what the government says you must do. Wow.
The Left’s most in-your-face work around and forcing function: the stolen presidential election.
Joe Biden, once his junta took over the office of president, shut down oil and gas lease sales from the nation’s vast public lands and waters. The decision, based on computer models of climate cost estimates and not on reality and certainly not on the needs of Americans, ended America’s energy independence. And this after the economy was shut down with despotic COVID mandates.
Americans – everyday folk driving to work to feed their family, low-income families struggling to make ends meet, supply-line truckers requiring diesel fuel to deliver goods – are now forced to pay for oil, gasoline and diesel fuel at record high prices. (Heh, heh. That will teach Americans to stop using fossil fuels!)
By comparison, Americans were energy independent, working and flourishing under the previous “Orange man bad” administration. Now, Americans of all color, gender and creed are suffering high inflation, food shortages, diesel shortages, price hikes, baby food shortages, the ignominy of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, a southern border overrun by who knows what, and the stiff-armed indifference of a globalist agenda under an illegitimate president. Forced upon Americans is the inept Joe Biden intent on surrendering America to globalism by whatever means necessary including the Great Reset.
Work arounds have been used by the Progressives all along to produce the outcomes they so desire – sweeping, overly broad power for the actualization of their elitist utopian dreams.
A crisis provides the opportunity for workarounds. A crisis of late has Progressives plotting a way to keep their beloved workaround– the killing off of offspring at will – in place.
Fearing SCOTUS overturning a ruling of the unconstitutional declaration of Roe v Wade – that a woman has a Constitutional right to abortion – Democratsrecently talked of packing the court. Not so recently, President Roosevelt, frustrated with the Supreme Court, talked about the same work around.
When Roosevelt-directed laws of the New Deal program had been struck down by unanimous and near-unanimous SCOTUS votes, he talked about adding justices to the court. That did not happen thankfully.
But Roosevelt did expand the size and scope of the U.S. government and its role in the economy. The expansion has continued and its Leviathan tentacles workaround to reach into our daily lives and even into our bodies.
In September 2021, the Biden regime directed the regulatory authority of the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to write a rule requiring employers with at least 100 workers to force employees to get vaccinated or produce weekly test results showing they are virus free.
OSHA fast-tracked and bypassed their rule making process using a type of peremptory decree called “emergency temporary standard”. The ETS is supposed to protect workers from a “grave danger” i.e., excuse of emergency to regulate first and explain later.
OSHA had never used this authority to mandate a vaccine of any kind. (And why did they not mandate highly effective protocols like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin?)
January 2022, the Supreme Court blocked the enforcement of the sweeping Covid-vaccine mandate that would have impacted 84 million Americans. The majority concluded that Congress had not given OSHA such broad authority to enact a de facto vaccine mandate. While OSHA has the authority to regulate workplace safety, justices reasoned, in this case, it was attempting to use that authority to issue a sweeping rule to address a public-health issue in which the threat is not limited to the workplace.
In a previous Supreme court case, “a group of Alabama real estate agents asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to block a federal moratorium on evictions that was imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic . . .
The Alabama Association of Realtors urged the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis and lift that stay order, telling the justices that “Congress never gave the CDC the staggering amount of power it now claims.”
The staying opinion stated “We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.”
Congress, our supposed representatives in our constitutional republic, are handing over to agencies – the “administrative state” – overly broad powers. (This is likely done by our reps so as to distance themselves from their henchman.) If our courts were to adopt a posture of utter deference to claims of emergency, they’d leave OSHA and the “administrative state” in a position to order around the nation by diktat. (See 2021-2022)
The latest work around is a threat to the sovereignty and sanctity of your body!
Congress, our court system, our nation’s sovereignty and our own health choices will be circumvented by the Globalist World Health Organization (WHO). Globalists – driven by the will to power to control everything and everyone like the machinations of an evil villain in a James Bond movie – want world domination. They will start with control of your body.
You see, the Globalist One World Order considers you to be their property to do with as it will to save the planet, to bring about world peace, and blah, blah, blah.
The Biden Regime is handing over our nation’s sovereignty as you read this post. Like all evil, it is happening in the shadows. You won’t hear about this in the subservient media.
On January 18 2022, the United States Department of Health and Human Services proposed amendments to the IHR. These amendments give control over the declaration of a public health emergency in any member state to the WHO Director-General – even over the objection of the member state. The Director-General communicated the text of the proposed amendments on 20 January 2022, via a circular letter to State Parties.
The proposed IHR amendments also cede control to WHO “regional directors,” who are given the authority to declare a Public Health Emergency of Regional Concern (PHERC). Moreover, the proposed amendments allow the Director-General to ring an international alarm bell, by unilaterally issuing an “Intermediate Public Health Alert (IPHA).”
Properly understood, the proposed IHR amendments are directed towards establishing a globalist architecture of worldwide health surveillance, reporting, and management. Consistent with a top-down view of governance, the public will not have opportunities to provide input or criticism concerning the amendments. This, of course, is a direct violation of the basic tenets of democracy and can be compared to the separate new pandemic treaty. (Emphasis mine.)
****
The Globalist/Collectivist Cabal want to control your health, your agency, freedom and your property! And the Biden regime is all in!
Please take seriously the severity of this existential threat to everything free people hold dear. Do everything in your power to pass this report on to others and to find ways to communicate with and to influence people to stop empowering WHO to take over our national sovereignty and freedom. -Dr. Breggin
>>>>Go to Breggin.com | Blog, read the entire article. Sign the petition! Tell your reps today that you oppose this!
Here is Dr. Breggin explaining what is going on right now:
Do you understand? A public health emergency may be a virus or climate or gun ownership or your opinion. . . anything that Globalists conjure up. You thought the last 2+ years were bad under the “public health emergency” workaround diktats? Just imagine if the World Health Organization (which serves the interests of Globalists and the CCP) is given the authority to run our lives! Do you have any idea how people are treated in China? Communism is a workaround forcing function of humanity done not for the sake of the common man but for the sake of adherence to the few.
ACT NOW! Download and read the PDF.
#StopTheAmendments, #StopTheTreaty, and #StopTheWHO
“When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life — particularly human life — such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head.
Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a “biophilic” person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a “necrophilic character type,” whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.
Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.” ― M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.
The first clue I had that something wicked this way was coming: the media’s “We’re all in this together.” I understood that slogan not as a tug on my heart to join others in the ‘fight’ against COVID, but as an appeal to Groupthink, self-deception, and manufactured conformity and consent to COVID Communism.
I recognized the hammer-and-sickle symbolism behind the slogan and its meaning – proletarian solidarity with the state and its “public health” directives. I knew then that “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood” would come from the State’s Soviet-style propaganda machine – the mainstream media.
As we have learned, there is to be NO debate and NO questioning of “public health” guidelines and the all-inclusive mandates they foster. Remember comrades: “We’re all in this together” -the young, the healthy, the immune, the obese, the very old and the respiratory compromised.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Discussion and debate are not to be given social media ventilators. They are to be left to die. The free air that once filled our lungs and gave us consciousness – the State is taking the oxygen out of our lives, masking us and forcing us into a locked “Controlled Opposition” garage filled with exhaust fumes coming out of the State engine.
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” — Hannah Arendt
The carbon monoxide (CO or COVID Orthodoxy) induces headache, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion. Yet, anyone who opens the garage door to recycle the atmosphere will hear from a loudspeaker “You are letting in misinformation! Shut the door!” Any efforts to breathe free air will be dealt with severely.”
If discernment of the false and true– “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world” – is being deadened by the State and its media collaborators, then we may not see that . . .
There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
– Hannah Arendt
*****
Framed and Reframed
Once more Jesus went to the synagogue. There was a man there with a withered hand. People were watching to see if Jesus would heal him on the sabbath, so they could frame a charge against him.
“Stand up,” said Jesus to the man with the withered hand, “and come out here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath, or to do evil? To save life or to kill?” They stayed quiet.
He was deeply upset at their hard-heartedness, and looked around at them angrily. Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out – and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out right away and began to plot with the Herodians against Jesus, trying to find a way to destroy him.
-The Gospel According to Mark, 3:1-6
Those who read this account might say “What’s the problem with healing the man with the withered hand? Why would a rule or some mandate get in the way?
In this gospel account, people are “watching to see” if Jesus breaks the letter-of-interpreted-Law mandate – no work on the sabbath. They have watched the Pharisees day after day sabbath after sabbath, so they know what they are NOT supposed to do. And, according to convention, this Jesus must behave the same way. If he lifts a finger to lift the fingers of a withered hand, they will hand him over to the authorities.
Right before this (Mk. 2: 23-28), during a sabbath corn-plucking incident, Jesus had reframed the sabbath for the “Look here!” Pharisees: “The sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the sabbath.
Now he reframes the next sabbath situation with a legal question about good and evil that went well beyond their incremental mandates.
(According to Sabbath traditions, if you cut your finger, you could stop the bleeding – but you could not put ointment on the cut. You could stop it from getting worse, but you weren’t allowed to make it better.)
Who has discernment in this account? Jesus or the interpreted-Law mandates hovering over the group?
Are the sabbath traditions (mandates, essentially) made for man or man for the sabbath traditions/mandates?
Who is the person using their authority for good and who is using their authority to maintain their position of authority?
Now, I’ll reframe a similar scenario:
Once more a doctor went to his office. There was a man there in his waiting room with symptoms of COVID. People were watching to see if the doctor would heal the man with Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin and break with the CDC vaccine protocol, so they could frame a charge against him.’’ (That scenario seems eerily close to reality.)
Tell me. Is it right and good and discerning to give the man proven repurposed protocols (Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Vitamin D, Zinc, etc.) that will work to keep him out of the hospital and help him recover with immunity within days OR to force the man to go along with a highly touted CDC vaccine protocol that has many reported ill-effects and doesn’t’ protect the man from COVID (See Israel, the most vaxxed nation in the world)? Are the CDC mandates made for humans or humans for the CDC mandates?
Tell me. Do we sit in silence in a waiting room of appearances watching this because “We are all in this together”? Do we frame the doctor for not following the law laid down by authoritarians in power? Do we continue thoughtlessly day to day like, say, Adolph Eichmann or Joe Biden and let evil do its thing?
Or, do we regain discernment, speak the truth and do what is good no matter the framing and people waiting to destroy us?
Executive Order 2021-20 (COVID-19 EO Number 87), issued by Governor Pritzker on Thursday, August 26, implements the indoor mask mandate and vaccination requirements. Once again, the Governor has acted unilaterally to exercise his emergency management powers, without the advice and consent of the Illinois General Assembly.
. . . only the plasma from the UNVACCINATED meets their requirements:
“One of the Red Cross requirements for plasma from routine blood and platelet donations that test positive for high-levels of antibodies to be used as convalescent plasma is that it must be from a donor that has not received a COVID-19 vaccine. This is to ensure that antibodies collected from donors have sufficient antibodies directly related to their immune response to a COVID-19 infection and not just the vaccine, as antibodies from an infection and antibodies from a vaccine are not the same.”
Conclusions: This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
We must remember that this was all a choice. No, not the arrival of a deadly disease from China, but the concerted effort to radically alter daily life in response. It’s a choice driven by fear, by a failure to come to terms with our own mortality. And all the while, the goal posts shift, from “15 days to stop the spread,” to “flatten the curve,” to vaccines, COVID-zero, and on and on and on.
BREAKING: Healthy Joe Rogan tested positive for Covid & is about to make authoritarians big mad with his quick recovery regimen pic.twitter.com/2hzLxIBRjy
Dr. James Neuenschwander testifies about level three and four side effects and thousands of deaths at Michigan House hearing on Covid Vaccine Mandates.
“The “greater good” argument cannot be used to mandate vaccines . . .”
You and I encounter false narratives throughout our lives. Such narratives may be innocuous, as in “The tooth fairy will give you a quarter for the tooth under your pillow.” Or, they may be conniving, as in Obama’s “You can keep your doctor”. We also encounter behavior-shaping constraints based on narratives.
Forcing functions based on safety are common place. For example, one cannot operate a microwave or a washing machine without closing the door. Another example would be the reverse lockout on the transmission of a moving auto. We take these forcing functions in stride without a concern about our freedom. They make sense. But what happens when behavior-shaping constraints based on a quasi-safety-quasi-science narrative are employed to compel one to act against one’s own freedom?
Common sense safety practices have been abrogated and with them our freedom. Like good little sheep we are now to obey barking mad “Public Health” forcing functions: “wear a mask” (or “two”), “stay home”, “restrict your business”, “limit your church gathering”, “don’t go near your grandparents”, “social distance”, “get the jab”, “get the vaccine passport” “Do what we say or we will deal with you”, “We will tell you when it is safe to come out.”
Tragically, we are being forced to do senseless anti-human anti-social anti-flourishing anti-science things in the name of “Public Health”. And if we don’t do them AND don’t empathize with the forcing functions employed, we will be shamed or fined or our lives unplugged in the name of “Public Health”.
Over the past year our rights have been tethered to the “Public Health Crisis” narrative. Those behind the narrative – Globalists – took advantage of the manufactured COVID crisis. They played on emotions – empathy and fear – to get people to submit to the narrative.
The American people had been prepped to submit to top-down control by the “we need nationalized healthcare” narrative. That socialist gambit has been pushed for several years now. So, when the “Public Health Crisis” came along many were ready to have government bureaucrats tell them what to do.
We could call the seizure of our livelihoods a “Marxist takeover”. But what has happened is more insidious than playing at Marxism. We are being forcing-function-ed into taking the deadly jab of fascism. Our lives, with our rights and property under the control of the Globalist Gatekeepers, will only continue with the proper papers – a vaccine passport for starters. Data collection of your life (social credit system) will determine if your “papers are in order”.
We are being driven into normalizing COVID mandates. We are being driven into normalizing fear. We are being driven into normalizing our submission to others whose narrative – The Revolution aka The Great RESET – we DO NOT share.
Do Not NORMALIZE and give credence to this insanity. You will go crazy. Do not become obsessed with germs. You will go crazy. Businesses and churches DO NOT normalize and give credence to masks, social distancing, and vaccine passports. DO NOT normalize dysfunction!
DO NOT kowtow to anything the “Public Health Crisis” narrative posits. Not even if you are told (lied to, actually) that things can return to normal once . . . maybe . . . well, . . .
Faustian Fauci, “the science” behind the Wuhan virus, when asked about the point of return to normalcy, answers with ambiguity. He remains in the media spotlight for just that reason – as a forcing function mechanism of dependence on “the science.” Put another way, Fauci “poka-yoke” appearances are a way of ensuring allegiance to “the science” without actually using science.
Things will not return to normal. This I know. For the “Public Health Crisis” narrative tells me so.
Over the past year we have been living under restrictions based on the false pandemic narrative. There is no pandemic. There is no “Public Health Crisis”. We have been lied to about case numbers. We have been lied to about the number of COVID deaths. (See my previous posts for details).
We are being told via every media source to “follow the science” and get the jab so we can return to normal. Don’t believe it. The father of lies is busy today.
Over and over again, Jesus countered false narratives with truth. He exposed the narrators and sent them reeling:
“You are the from your father the devil! And you’re eager to get on with what he wants. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he’s never remained in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells lies, he speaks what comes naturally to him, because he is a liar – in fact, he’s the father of lies!
Another false narrative promoted today: “America is systemically racist, ergo, racism is a Public Health Crisis”. Tomorrow, the false narrative will be “Climate change is a Public Health Crisis.” Next week, the false narrative will be “Guns are a Public Health Crisis.” The week after that, the false narrative will be “Christians are a Public Health Crisis.” With each false narrative will come the forcing functions to produce the outcome desired.
You and I, humans, are of no consequence to the Globalists. You and I are annoyance to be dealt with on their way to The Great Reset. You and I are seen by them as ants in their ant farm.
“Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
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You and I both know that most commercials and PSAs are created to condition the viewer to respond positively to whatever is being offered . . .
Media is a forcing function used to “steer people down one pathway”. The following video shows Neil Cavuto positing the Fox News corporate COVID narrative. Dr. Ben Carson deflects the narrative that Neil Cavuto is trying to steer him into. The reason Dr. Carson can deflect the narrative is simple: he looked outside the narrative and sourced the truth.
Note: YouTube has now removed the video. Not submitting to the false narrative is unacceptable for YouTube.
What will the future of America look like? Hopefully, it will never get as horrific as it did under past failing liberal states. But this regime is already one that will denounce a police officer for saving someone’s life. This is a regime that tries to imprison a teenager for life for defending himself while trying to protect his community from a rioting mob. This is a regime that foments war in Ukraine to avoid admitting it lost an election. This is a regime that takes children from their parents so they can be put on hormone pills and have their genitals mutilated.
“29. It’s against the Nuremberg code to force vaccinations on a person, and informed consent overrides public policy. Federal law prohibits employers and others from using vaccines under EUA as a condition of employment. A Nevada attorney is ready to do battle. “
“I find it peculiar that all the people who told me they knew for certain that hydroxychloroquine was both dangerous and ineffective are now equally certain this vaccine is harmless and effective. Since I know they were lying before, their current proclamations don’t inspire confidence.”
“It is unclear how the FTC would know whether the products Neptune promotes is more or less effective at treating or preventing Covid-19 than vaccines. There are ongoing studies looking at the potential benefits of vitamins and various therapeutics when it comes to Covid-19.”
The brainwashing techniques of the tortuous past year – the state’s coercion to make us obey irrational and inhuman restrictions, the sensory-depriving mask mandates, the social isolation, the state-instigated shaming and punishment of those not conforming, the 24/7 fear-peddling of the media, the forced subjugation to pseudo-science, the unrelenting “get-the” vaccine goading – reminded me of the O’Brien-Winston Smith struggle session in George Orwell’s 1984:
I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
O’Brien later questions Winston as to Winston’s understanding of why people are brought to Room 101. Winston replies “To make them confess”. O’Brien replies “No, that is not the reason. Try again”. Winston answers “To punish them.” “No!” exclaimed O’Brien.
“Shall I tell you why we brought you here? “To make you sane! . . . The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
What has taken place the past year is also eerily similar to the mind-control techniques used on Korean War prisoners detained by communists in North Korea and China. The Biderman Report of 1956, details techniques used on prisoners (see chart below).
What has taken place the past year -the quashing of dissent – is also eerily similar to the destabilization techniques (“decomposition”) that was used in Stasi psychological and political warfare.
…the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it’s described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally “biodegradation.” But actually, it’s a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn’t try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.
—Hubertus Knabe, German historian
“The aim of decomposition is the fragmentation, paralysis, disorganization and isolation of hostile-negative forces, thereby providing a differentiated political-ideological recovery.”
You can read about the methods of The Stasi Decomposition here.
The 20th century handed us blood-stained receipts for the purchase of ideological conformity. These should have served as warning signs. But these signs are being taken down. History, with its own voice of dissent, is being “decomposed” by those who are taking control of the past (e.g., the 1619 Project). For . . .
Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future. ― George Orwell, 1984
2021 and the “PARTY” continues. Over my 68 years I’ve witnessed the American psyche transformed from an attitude akin to that of fiercely independent frontier folk to that of the emasculated, passive and childlike Eloi. In the process Americans have become fodder for the ruthless dark army of the “PARTY”, aka Globalists.
It is the Progressives – “PARTY” useful idiots – who use coercion and control, as documented above, to demoralize, degrade, and dispatch Americans. It was the much-ballyhooed Progressive FDR who ordered Japanese-Americans into internment camps. FDR created a milieu of fear to perpetrate this crime against a portion of humanity.
Have you noticed? For Progressives, being a U.S. citizen means doing nothing more or less than what they say. And, Progressives do not stop with removing freedom and rights of Americans. They desire the exorcism of the human spirit so that you and I may only be possessed by their collectivist ideology.
Human agency is a problem for Progressives. Your claim to be made in the image of God is a major problem for them. Your heart, mind and soul must be purged of anything that is God-resident. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
Over the past year we’ve witnessed how they “change them”. We’ve seen people forced to submit to the indoctrination of Critical Race Theory. We learned of the dark army’s passage of the For the People Act of 2021 (H.R. 1) – the act works to keep the dark army in control Of We the People.
We’ve learned of Megan Markle’s childish “me-me-me” worldview that was meant to be replicated worldwide. And, we’ve seen the entire population locked down when only those at risk – a small segment of the population – should have been quarantined.
We’ve seen the normalcy “goal post” moved over and over the past year (a destabilization technique). We’ve been forced to follow the (pseudo-)science of COVID pronouncements.
In truth, leftists and Democrats have become the purveyors of superstition. Their creation of a fantasy world is not because they do not believe in science per se, but because they believe more in the primacy of ideology that should shape and warp science in the proper fashion for the greater good. What prompted Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, or Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hysterically and wrongly to forecast widespread demographic or climatological catastrophe in just a few years was not ignorance of science per se, but a desire to massage science for our own good.
. . . Fauci has rejected science, as he knew it, to mislead the public. . . he adopted the Platonic “noble lie” on occasion. – Victor Davis Hanson, Follow The ‘Science’ They Said
In this post I presented some analogies from history of what the intelligentsia – those who think they know better than you; today these are the Globalists of Davos – will do to make sure you are controlled to the nth degree so as to produce the outcomes they desire.
Now come the questions: Since we have the blood-soaked receipts of the evil that occurred in the 20th century are people now allowing it to happen again?
Where are people’s heads at right now? Are people running around in a make-believe Where the Wild Things Are world created for them by the thought-control Globalists? Is political correctness and the “cancel culture” about people preferring a make-believe world as found in children’s books? Do people relate to Megan-Markle spewing her WOKE pablum?
(What should be deeply concerning: history and now literature, which also takes us beyond our finite self-world, are now being discarded as not being relevant to one’s own “me-me-me” experience.)
Do people like being treated like children? Are there people who are perfectly content being juvenile in their thinking and playing the Eloi? A plain reading of the times would indicate this to be so.
“Take your medicine and we’ll give you a cookie (or a Krispy Kreme Donut).”
****
Below are some links, videos, and podcasts – basically, a plain reading of the times:
“…reports of injuries and deaths following the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines.”
Episode 818 – Industrialized Crime … The Globalists’ Border Crisis and Endless WarfareEpisode 825 – Trust the Science, Follow the Money … American Elites’ ConnectionEpisode 831 – Black Box Voting … Ending Voter Fraud in Machines and By Mail
Added 3-31-2021: Here’s an interesting talk by an interesting character. Brand gives us a plain reading of the times. He comments on the Davos’ elitist view of things (us) and their takeover of the world via technology. He talks about the COVID Pandemic Shock Doctrine, The Great Reset, and the disturbing trends of technology.
😂😂😂The Parrots:🦜🦜🦜🦜 "Number are going up, numbers are going up" "Wear a mask, wear a mask." pic.twitter.com/lCyHEicGfV
1/ Okay, a bunch of countries have decided @AstraZeneca’s #Covid vaccine is double-plus ungood because of a tiny ittybitty lil risk it will cause horrible deaths in healthy young adults.
“I was a stranger and you . . . you treated me like chattel.”
Legal immigrants come to the U.S. to better their circumstances. Many immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are doing so for the same reason.
And, there are those illegal immigrants seeking new circumstances for their nefarious deeds. Pedophiles, rapists, drug dealers, MS-13 gang members, and terrorists also want in.
The CDC specifically cites the possibility of the cross-border movement of HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, tuberculosis, shigellosis and syphilis. Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent in South Texas, warned: “What’s coming over into the U.S. could harm everyone. We are starting to see scabies, chickenpox, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections and different viruses.” Some of the youngsters illegally entering our country are known to be carrying lice and suffering from various illnesses. Because there have been no medical examinations of undocumented immigrants, we have no idea how many are carrying infectious diseases that might endanger American children when these immigrants enter schools across our nation.
Talking about the realities of illegal immigration is not fear-mongering or xenophobia. Who and what is crossing the border affects everyone (except for a small minority who live in gated communities, e.g., Fort Pelosi, Washington D.C.) The effect of open borders will be coming to a town near you. In fact, the venal thinking behind open borders has already migrated into our lives.
The Democrats passage of H.R. 1 is an assault on humanity. From voting to gender to increased taxes, H.R. 1 imposes a Progressive ideology on America. HR 1 reveals the Hideous Strength underlying “the most progressive bill in U.S. history”.
Along with H.R.1, an open borders policy will bring about a dilution of Judeo-Christian values in America. Values will be then be reconstituted to that which Big Brother Tech ordains and enforces through dependency.
Humanity is threatened by the evil attached to policies. As always, there are government policies which slow the spread of evil and there are policies that rapidly deploy evil. The stolen 2020 election fostered the latter.
With the construction of the wall and a wait-in-Mexico policy among others, the previous administration throttled the flow of illegal immigration. The many deleterious effects of unbridled illegal immigration (e.g., human trafficking) that we are seeing today were held in check.
The current “border crisis”, acknowledged by those involved except for the Biden administration, is growing exponentially. The reason?
The Biden administration, via EOs, canceled the previous administration’s policies. Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki spins the canceling EOs to the world as moral high ground.
What you won’t hear from Press Secretary Jen Psaki is that the massive inflow of illegal immigrants is the low-cost labor force that Globalist’s require. To compete in the world market of consumerism, a cheaper labor force is required to sustain profits and their vision of a techno-utopia.
Allowing an incursion of illegal immigrants is hawked by a mawkish Christianity as compassionate. But what is happening is not humane. It is not Christian. To wit: the hardest hit by lower wages and a massive labor pool are the minorities – Blacks and Hispanics. But that is of no concern to Globalists and the virtue signalers they encourage.
Rather, the open border policy is diabolical, evil. Illegal immigrants are being used by Globalists including the Catholic church Globalists to shore up their Globalist agenda. That agenda first and foremost is the Great Reset – a dehumanized mankind made to service and accommodate centralized power. The Communist Chinese party is a prime example of this agenda in action.
The Globalist Elite need minions – blissfully ignorant and pliable “proles” – to grow the P in their P&L and to sustain a techno-utopia. That is why you will hear Progressives, secular and religious, pushing for open borders and illegal immigration. The Biden regime is now Executive-ordering the takeover and repurposing of humanity.
Biden, called the “Migrant President” by the very concerned president of Mexico, is actually the Human Trafficking President.
The cartels will literally tell these people, ‘If you have a minor with you we’ll give you a lower price of $3,200,’” he told War Room, Friday. “’We’ll give you safe passage.’”
On top of child smuggling, “we have all these pedophiles, rapists, and kidnappers being released into the United States,” Hernadez said. “This is not a Republican issue, not a Democrat issue.
If they don’t pay their debt then the cartel has the information about where they’re going, but more importantly, they have the information on their families in home countries,” Jones said. “From there, they can start the threats and hold them accountable through debt bondage, a form of human trafficking. Either pay or we’re going to come after your family.
The Mexican government is concerned that President Biden’s asylum policies are encouraging illegal immigration and providing revenue to drug cartels through human trafficking across the US border.
Should the administration fail to address the weaknesses in U.S. law that serve as a magnet drawing foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally, I will be writing a lot more about recoveries of human remains, rather than rescues of migrants in distress. I don’t want to.
An unnamed Mexican official recently quoted in Reuters stated: “Migrants have become a commodity” for smuggling gangs. “But if a packet of drugs is lost in the sea, it’s gone. If migrants are lost, it’s human beings we’re talking about.” That is eminently self-evident.
Simply telling migrants “[t]hey need — they need to wait”, as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did on March 1, is not a deterrent, or a life-saving strategy. In fact it’s not a strategy at all.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
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“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
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“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
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“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
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To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
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“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
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Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
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If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
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“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
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“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
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Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
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“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
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“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
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God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
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From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
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“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
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One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
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“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
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God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
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“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
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“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
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“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
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“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
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A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Hand Over
December 8, 2025 Leave a comment
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things and a group of people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?”
Objective reality – the existence of things as they are – is obvious to everyone. And so are the values, accumulated over several millennia, of what is true and of what works and what hasn’t. But not everyone accepts the obvious and the values based on time proven objective reality. Some see themselves as Progressive in rejecting both.
Today’s academic, artistic, media, and political elites, a vanguard of Progressive Groupthink, reject the existence of things as they are and do so within the safe space of their ranks thereby creating an illusion of invulnerability and inherent morality. Members of this vanguard suppress dissenting opinions and avoid critically evaluated alternatives so as to maintain the group’s shared illusion of unanimity.
The vanguard’s conformity is maintained with mind guards – the media reports “right thinking” about a matter – and with self-censorship of deviations from shared beliefs and with shared views of the enemy – those who present a reality contrary to the groups’ notion of reality.
When we hear the vanguard’s irrational take on what is going on in the world, its roiling Doublethink, its name calling and shunning of voices outside its collective choir, and its dysfunctional decision-making which objective reality tells us will result in disastrous, dehumanizing, and even deadly outcomes, we ask “Where is this coming from and where is this going?
Those of us who keep an ear to the ground in order to hear what is approaching will answer “History is repeating itself.”
The objective reality of the murderous totalitarian regimes of the last century, which Progressives willfully ignore to promote their glorious future of equality via the same means, will help us understand the denial-of-reality collaboration of today’s intelligentsia – those who hold to one way of thinking – and their quest for total domination of the body, mind, and soul with Progressive Groupthink.
Specifically, Russian Soviet history will help us understand the conformity dynamic behind today’s intelligentsia. For this understanding I turn to one of the most informed scholars of the Russian history of ideas as communicated in its literature: Northwestern Professor Gary Saul Morson.
***
In Morson’s magnum opus Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter Morson details how politics and literature, in the writings of realists, idealists, and revolutionaries, played against each other during the Soviet period.
He describes Soviet thinking that rejected the realism and the real people depicted in nineteenth-century Russian fiction and required that reality be written to include “not only of the observable present but also the inevitable future in the making” and with Socialist Realist heroes – utopianism made flesh.
Writers of Russian realism – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and others – wrote about what they saw and experienced. They are the “wonder” in the title. They represented the world as it was in their writings about the Gulag, mass starvation, torture, unspeakable violence, about how people thought about and dealt with what was going on, and about how many succumbed to the imposed Soviet mindset.
Russian realist authors confronted those of the “certainty,” those who wrote redefined reality in terms of the “observable present and the inevitable future in the making” and in terms of “positive heroes.”
The “positive hero” was to set an example for the reader’s behavior. A Soviet cosmonaut, for one example, became a “positive hero.” A cosmonaut’s space trip was seen as science, materialism, and atheism triumphing over the transcendent values held in the U.S., the enemy of the Soviet Union.
The “certainty” writers followed the lead of the embodiment of “certainty” – Vladimir Lenin. Lenin mocked his opponents’ self-characterization as ‘seekers’ of truth. He held that dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it. And so, the party-minded “positive hero” refused dialogue, refused to see any alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist-materialist-atheistic “truth” espoused by the party, the representatives of Karl Marx’s class-struggling proletariat.
From Wonder Confronts Certainty:
“The Soviets would label fidelity to present facts “bourgeois objectivism.” It was the best that could be expected from the age of realism, but must give way to socialist realism, which shows the ideal world inevitably coming. The socialist realist author was expected to focus on the people of the future, “positive heroes” exhibiting complete “Party-mindedness.” True positive heroes do not have bring their thinking into accord with the party, a process requiring effort; they exhibit Party-mindedness so thorough that no effort is required”
“Party-mindedness”, we learn from the writings of Russian realist authors, was propagated through the means of propaganda, show trials, random arrests, and the constant terror that there might be any hint, any innuendo, any false statement that would convict one of not being party-minded.
The “party-mindedness” of the 20th century Russian intelligentsia, its conformity to only one way of thinking, is replicated today.
***
Here’s Morson in his Touchtone article Beyond Belief: Literary Reflections on Thoughtless Conformity:
“I happened to witness two professors waiting for an elevator. To make conversation, one voiced an opinion on some political question to see if the other agreed. When she did, they chattered away on a dozen other topics with perfect assurance that they agreed on those, too. Evidently, their beliefs came as a package. Subsequently I noticed this way of thinking many times, as I imagine many of my readers have.
The process works something like this: a person first chooses the group with whom he wishes to identify and then adopts its opinions. He believes as strongly in gun control, let us say, as he does in supporting Planned Parenthood, defunding the police, and banning fossil fuels. It is evident that no arguments or evidence can shake his opinions on any of these topics because arguments or evidence had nothing to do with why they were adopted.
To be sure, a person who thinks this way can cite facts and reasons to justify his opinion, but they have been acquired in the same way as the opinion itself. They are the same reasons others in the group have learned to give. I used to find it eerie to hear repeatedly the same arguments expressed in the same phrases, as if I were listening to a recording rather than to highly educated people who imagined that, unlike their intellectual inferiors, they had arrived at opinions rationally and would change them as evidence warranted. I thought of Jonathan Swift’s observation that no one was ever talked out of an opinion he was not first talked into.”
***
Reading Morson’s article, I was reminded of the easy-going liberal mindset of the Stiva Oblonsky character in Tolstoy’s Russian realism novel Anna Karenina.
Behind Stiva’s smile, his self-possessed mannerisms and hedonism is what Tolstoy described as “the liberalism of the blood.”
From the novel:
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took and read a liberal newspaper, not a radical one, but one advocating the viewpoint maintained by the majority. And even though neither science, nor art or politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his paper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they imperceptibly changed within him . . .
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
Stiva, we learn in in the novel, does not recognize his conscious when it speaks to him. And that is aided by his living-in-the-moment forgetting. He did not want to remember any unpleasant thing.
Self-deception and romantic ideology play key roles in Anna’s life.
***
Czeslaw Milosz, Polish American poet, novelist, translator, critic, and diplomat, is best known for The Captive Mind (1953). His essay collection focuses on intellectuals, specifically poets and other writers.
As Charles Haywood writes in his 2019 article The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz), [Milosz’s] “book shows how mental gymnastics, rather than coercion, caused writers under Communism to adhere to Communism. Thereby, indirectly, it congratulates writers who believe their minds free from such, or other, contortions.
“The West incorrectly sees “might and coercion” as the reasons those in Eastern Europe submit to Communism. But, rather, unwilling to face either physical or spiritual death, many choose instead to be “reborn” through taking these metaphorical pills, because “[t]here is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.” Intellectuals, and artists especially, do not want to be “internal exiles, irreconcilable, non-participating, eroded by hatred.” So they swallow the pills and adopt the “New Faith” (a term Milosz uses throughout the book) which offers the intellectual the certainty he is both correct and virtuous, and therefore gives him a sense of belonging, gives him a feeling of being “warm-hearted and good . . . a friend of mankind—not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”” (Emphasis mine.)
Returning to Morson’s article about package thinking, Morson relates
“What really matters, [Czeslaw} Milosz explains, is “the intellectual’s feeling of belonging.” His defining “characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.” For this reason, as well as to prosper, he must root out all the old ways of thinking. Milosz describes a phenomenon with which university people are all too familiar, the always incomplete process of teaching oneself to say the right things (in the right words), and avoid saying the wrong ones, so that one never makes a slip entailing ostracism or worse. Of course, the best way to do this is to get oneself actually to share the prescribed views. Milosz describes how
after long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify self with the role one is obliged to play . . . permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper time become truly automatic.”
***
One obvious feature of our culture’s downward trend toward mindless conformity is critical thinking’s easy alternative: clicking on a machine to receive packaged thoughts.
Why think when packaged thoughts are there for the clicking? And why expand one’s personal bandwidth when you can reaffirm your tribal identity with a click?
Why research and consider a range of ideas and thoughts when clicking on machine AI is ready to do away with mystery and your curiosity, wonder, and impatience? And why think outside package thinking when life is short – shortened by every minute clicking on a machine.
Why read classic literature to gain wisdom, insight, and understanding from other people in other places and in other times, when you can click on a remote for package thinking entertainment.
Have you bought into the globalist, academic, secular and progressive (GASP) package (a feature of Wikipedia) that censors alternative views as “extremist” or “fringe theories” or “conspiracy theories” or “racist?”
Did you buy into the globalist open borders “welcoming the stranger” package where millions of unvetted illegal invaders entered the country as simple or criminal or terrorism opportunists? Did you accept the package thinking that allows third world invaders into our country to replace American workers and American values and do all manner of harm to its citizens as empathy, as what Jesus would do? Take a look at the strangers welcomed: Arrested: Worst of the Worst | Homeland Security And, there’s this: They Called It ‘Compassion’ — But it was Child Trafficking – American Thinker
Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package where everyone, except certain individuals who hold more power and privilege, must be made equal no matter the human cost? Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package and willfully forgetting the objective reality of the horrors of socialism/communism? Are you willfully handing over your life, your thoughts, to “Party-mindedness”?
Did you accept the “don’t question the science” COVID package thinking of mandates, masking, social distancing, vaccine passports, isolation camps, vaccine efficacy, and of COVID’s origin lies? America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies
Likewise, did you not question the package thinking of “climate experts” who announced their verdict that the world would end if we didn’t act now. Not long ago, woven into almost every weather report on local and mainstream media when major weather events (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires) occurred was the narrative that climate change was behind them – without ever mentioning large-scale natural phenomena such as solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanoes that have been affecting weather for many millennia.
The Green New scam was behind Biden’s $93 Billion Crony Climate Heist. Will declassifying carbon dioxide (necessary for all of life) as a pollutant and the end of carbon dioxide regulation mean the end of the Green New scam? Are we now seeing The End of the Green New Scam? | The Rude Awakening? Matt Ridely thinks so: The end of the climate cult – The Spectator World
(A climate expert I trust: https://judithcurry.com/about/)
Do you go along with the package thinking of the [John] Rawlsian theory of ad hoc justice that, for example, releases someone arrested 40 times, is not considered a “criminal” because of their minority status, and is released by a judge back onto the street where he sets a woman on fire?
Do you buy philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – the package thinking that says that people are entirely products of their environment, of their society, of their age, and that’s why they do what they do. Therefore, they are not responsible for what they do because of external influence. That’s the package thinking behind the Rawlsian theory of justice and behind the executions and horrors of the French revolution working to change social environment.
Have you agreed with the insurrection thought package being espoused by The Seditious Six imploring military service members to “refuse illegal orders” thereby implying that orders coming out of the Trump administration are considered illegal by them and therefore military service members should disobey their commanding officer and join the club of the “Party-minded.” Remember, package thinking has only one train of thought – gaining and maintaining power over reality.
Have you agreed with the insurrection package thinking espoused previously by NYT’s op-ed columnist David Brooks? Do the values of your party-minded package thinking allow you to hamstring a DEMOCRACY! elected president with the rulings of party-minded federal court judges that will be overturned. Do the values of your party-minded package thinking justify the deep state, in the labyrinth of government, to sabotage the efforts of a Democratically elected President?
Do the values of your package thinking allow you to call for uprisings by any means necessary, to burn down buildings, to destroy property, to destroy businesses, to steal, do violence on others, to defund the police, to create pipe bombs, to assassinate? To ignore your conscience?
Did you accept the “Danger to our Democracy” thought package the media delivered during the last presidential election cycle? It should be obvious from the likes of David Brooks, that the “guardians of democracy” are the ones who want to tear it down.
Have bought into the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) playbook that conforms and coerces everyone to identify with Soviet style party-mindedness package thinking?
Have bought into viewing everything including humans through the lens of materialism?
Have you bought into package thinking so as to not be considered an outsider? Have you bought into conformity for conformity’s sake?
Is censorship the worst thing that can happen to a people? Or, is it “Party-mindedness?”
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things with the smug air of certainty and people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?” and “Where is this coming from and where is it going?”
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia. And a mind is still a terrible thing to hand over.
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia . . . Britain Is Lost | ZeroHedge
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You can put your ear to the road and hear what is quickly approaching. Download and listen to the following podcasts:
London is falling – or has it fallen already?
Liz Truss, the 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom, in her very first episode of The Liz Truss Show discusses how bad things are in Britain with a mass migration and economic doom loop – and how to defeat the deep state who have let this happen
https://justthenews.com/podcasts/liz-truss-show/london-falling-or-has-it-fallen-already
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Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Professor Gary Saul Morson shares his thought-provoking definition of an intellectual—someone who seeks truth independently, values ideas for their own sake, and stands apart from identity-driven thinking. Whether discussing classic Russian Literature or analyzing modern society, Professor Morson is one of the most insightful and consequential scholars of our time. Discover how this interview, and its exploration of timeless topics, can inspire bold, principled leadership and innovation within today’s business environment.
Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, and The Importance of Critical Thinking – The Profitable Table Fed by Woolco Foods | Acast
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The Moral Imagination – Michael Matheson Miller
Gary Saul Morson Ph.D.: Thinking Like Lenin
Vladimir Lenin’s ideas are alive and well today: Party-ness, politics as win-lose, zero-sum game, Who-Whom, rejection of truth, ideology, violence, philosophical materialism, adherence to lying.
Ep. 15: Thinking Like Lenin, with Gary Saul Morson
Is Hope Naïve in a World Like Ours? | Esau McCaulley & Gary Saul Morson at Northwestern
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Quotes:
In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea … gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. … No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous. Galileo Galilei
If the Brave New World cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine “roundness” until a perfect fit results.
-Jerome Meckier, from Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure
…a sense of unity is opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone “belongs”, uses the same cliches, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, realizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide… Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life.
-Northrop Frye, from The Bush Garden
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something. -Plato
“The past is our always-available counterculture, and it’s a rich one. Every minute you spend attending to something not-immediately-present, you are helping to build a counterculture.” ― Alan Jacobs
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Links:
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Gary Saul Morson offers three explanations from the treasury of Russian literature.
https://tomklingenstein.com/mind-forgd-manacles-why-intellectuals-conform/
The greatest depiction of woke totalitarianism was written 150 years ago in Russia
Anti-Communism Week has been marked for November 2025. Writer-producer Julie Behling’s documentary “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” warns of communism’s devastation: “Globally, communism claimed the lives of approximately 150 million people in the 20th century.”
‘Beneath Sheep’s Clothing’: Communism’s Capture Of America | ZeroHedge
Totalitarian governments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous persons. This poses a threat to their quest to consolidate power. Individual liberty threatens the theoretical, utopian foundations of promising the re-distribution of goods, and equality; communism ultimately fails to re-distribute the essence of human nature.
10 Habits of Mind to Avoid Ideological Thinking
Everyday Habits That Reveal a Low IQ (Backed by Psychology)
Everyday Habits That Reveal a Low IQ (Backed by Psychology) – YouTube
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Added 12-15-2025:
Sam Faddis (formerly with the CIA) sits down to talk about the reality of the ongoing Marxist revolution in America.
The Revolution Right Here At Home – by Sam Faddis
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Filed under 2025 Current Events, Communism, cultural Marxism, Culture, Democracy, History, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, totalitarianism Tagged with Communism, Democracy, groupthink, history, Marxism, mind control, package thinking, party-mindedness, politics, progressivism, russia, Soviet Union, totalitarianism, Valdimir Lenin