Free Bird

Everything about Elon Musk insults the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

“The Bird is Freed!”

That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for more money than you or I can really contemplate ($44 billion) lit the punditocracy ablaze. On the Left there was, as St. Matthew (13:42) put it in another context, abundant “fletus et stridor dentium,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” On the Right, there were cheers and not a little “Schadenfreude,” which is German for “serves you right, knucklehead.” The Right also went in for some creative trolling.

The dominant narrative, on the Left anyway, is that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter represents a conservative takeover of the social media giant. Twitter had been a brash and scrappy upstart, you see, and now it has been “colonized” by the rich and powerful. . . .

That’s the idea, anyway. You can practically hear the Nabobs of the Narrative holding their breath while they wait to see if the public buys it. 

Their  public will, of course. But how about the rest of us? 

The New York Times gave fastidious expression to this canard in a story headlined “Twitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One.” A “threat to titans,” eh? What do you suppose that means? The Times explains in its subhead. “A decade ago, the social media platform was a tool for rebels and those challenging authority. But over time, the powerful learned how to use it for their own goals.”

In order to appreciate how funny this is, you can start with CNN’s story about the pile of money paid to the executives that Musk, in his first order of business, fired on Thursday. It is a large pile. According to CNN, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s former CEO, Ned Segal (former CFO), and Vijaya Gadde (former Chief Legal Officer) will walk away with nearly $200 million. (I pause so that you, along with many others, can savor the word “former.”)

Gadde, by the way, was not only paid many millions of dollars a year but was also instrumental in engineering the expulsion of Donald Trump, then the president of the United States, from the platform. 

The idea that Twitter was a challenge to the establishment before the advent of Musk is almost as wrong as the idea that Musk is conservative and that he aims to transform Twitter into a a bastion of Trumpesque MAGA (or, to quote Joe Biden’s focus group, “ultra-MAGA”) sentiment. 

As Musk has repeatedly stressed, his aim is to open Twitter to a wide range of political viewpoints, Left as well Right, “progressive” as well as conservative. By removing the top executives, Musk merely removed a hose spewing intolerance camouflaged as inarguable virtue. Marinated in that sentiment, many of Twitter’s 7,500 employees doubtless have absorbed the mantra that “free speech” means “speech I agree with.” In the run up to Musk’s takeover of Twitter, rumors were rife that he planned to fire “75 percent” of the workforce. Musk later denied that, but everyone expects him to put the company on a serious diet.

Everyone also expects him to make big changes in the way the company oversees “content” on Twitter. Musk is the very incarnation of a man in a hurry. His firing of Agrawal, Sega, and Gadde happened before his name could be painted on the door to his office. So did his immediate deployment of software engineers from Tesla to review Twitter source code. 

But on issues of general policy he seems to be moving more deliberately. Twitter distinguished itself by its intolerance of views that challenged the dominant progressive narrative on everything from the presidency of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden’s laptop (really, a subset of Twitter’s Trump allergy), “climate change,” BLM, and various approved forms of “progressive” sexual pathology. Trespassing upon any of those orthodoxies could get you suspended, “shadow banned,” or banned outright. 

That will change, but not all at once. Soon after taking over, Musk announced(on Twitter, bien sur) that the company would be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”

There are, I think, two major things to bear in mind about Musk’s takeover of Twitter. One is that, although he is not himself a conservative, the fact that he supports a robust view of free speech in which a wide variety of opinions are not only tolerated but encouraged means that he will be regarded as an existential threat by the progressive establishment. 

That establishment is right to regard him as a threat. For its guardians require strict conformity in dispensing their twisted gospel of “diversity” if they are to maintain their power and perquisites. Open the door just a little, let just a little sunlight in, and pow! The magic spell that made it seem OK to say that men are women, that “climate change” is a threat to humanity, that COVID is a peril on the same plane as the Black Death, or that BLM and Antifa were justified in burning down our cities—suddenly that spell is broken, and so is the hold over the narrative that these new guardians of conformity had enforced.

The second thing to bear in mind is that the establishment will not sit idly by as Elon Musk challenges their narrative. Everything about Musk is an insult to the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that even as Musk pushes ahead with his reformation of Twitter, the coercive busybodies of the state have begun making minatory noises about “investigating” Musk. Thus we read that Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims. 

Expect more of that. Beatings will continue until morale improves. As Glenn Reynolds put it at Instapundit, “The Bureaucracy Mobilizes Against A Threat.” Were the midterms not just around the corner, I might be worried about this coalescing threat against Elon Musk. But come November 9, the clock will be ticking against that sclerotic, freedom-hating consensus. The bird is freed, and we will be too. Fiat Musk!

X22, On the Fringe, and more- Oct 30

 

The finish line is in reach. 1 more full week to go. Let's keep the faith and stay strong!

Here's tonight's news:

The Modern Right’s Founding Mothers

Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, and Isabel Paterson fought valiantly against the New Deal’s redefinition of the American dream as equal access to state management.

by Stephen Cox for American Greatness

People on the American Right can be forgiven if they don’t know their own history. After all, American political history is almost exclusively written by people on the Left. Timothy Sandefur’s new book does something to solve this problem.

Before there was Rush Limbaugh, before there was William F. Buckley, before even Russell Kirk, there was a small band of intellectuals opposing the great wave of statism that washed ashore with the New Deal. Everyone in that band was an interesting person—you had to be interesting to oppose such an overwhelming trend. Three of the most interesting are the subjects of Sandefur’s book:

Ayn Rand (1905-1982), who by her authorship of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged became one of the world’s most popular novelists.

Isabel Paterson (1886-1961), a novelist, literary critic, Rand’s political mentor, and one of the wittiest people of her time.

Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), journalist and story writer, who collaborated with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, to produce the Little House on the Prairie books.

These women led adventurous lives. Rand, the child of a Russian Jewish family, escaped from the Soviet Union to America when she was 21, and supported herself, often with great difficulty, until the unlikely success of her defiantly anti-collectivist books.

Lane was born on the Dakota frontier, and as a good daughter of the frontier, was determined to do as she pleased. She became an itinerant newspaperwoman and author of fiction. In the 1920s she took up residence in Albania, of all places, having driven there from Paris in a Model T named Zenobia. During World War II, she was investigated by the FBI because she wrote a note criticizing Social Security and delivered what was considered an “extremely seditious” speech to, of all things, the local Lions Club.

Paterson, one of nine children of an impoverished Canadian-American family, was another frontier woman who supported herself by writing. In the 1920s she won fame as the author of a Sunday column in New York Herald Tribune Books, a nationally popular journal. Her weekly visitations combined erudite literary analysis with slashing satires of the so-called liberals and pretended conservatives who, she believed, were destroying both the American constitutional system and the American economy. “Destitution,” she said, “is easily distributed. It’s the one thing political power can insure you.” 

Paterson was the intellectual senior of the three; she attained her libertarian-conservative views by the early 1920s. She influenced Lane and crucially influenced Rand—without, to her regret, changing Rand’s views about religion. Rand was the village atheist; Paterson held that the existence of God was axiomatic for any charter of human freedom: people were, indeed, “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Lane had her own reasons for agreeing and ultimately disagreeing with the others.

But the similarities were more impressive than the differences. These three women had known hard times—in fact, terrible times—but they were convinced that the American creative spirit could triumph over anything, as long as it was left free to operate. They understood that in opposing the statism of their own time they were defending liberty at all times and places. As intellectuals they weren’t defined by their opposition to the New Deal; they spoke to universal principles of freedom and common sense. And they understood how to do one of the toughest jobs in the world. They understood how to write.

Here’s Lane, in her essay “Credo,” on the significance of automobiles in capitalist America: 

California is overwhelmed by scores of thousands of penniless families arriving in them, and hunger marchers do not march but travel in trucks. And these people should have automobiles; that is my point. They should have them, and individualism has somehow, without plan or any such definite purpose, seen to it that they do have them.

Here’s Paterson, in the Herald Tribune, on the moral character of modern liberal politicians: 

A government official is a man who would cheat even at solitaire. . . . The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people—and you can guess for yourself which is likely to be done.

And here’s Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, prophetically describing the current occupant of the White House: 

The Head of the State was a man who possessed the quality of never being noticed. In any group of three, his person became indistinguishable, and when seen alone it seemed to evoke a group of its own, composed of the countless persons he resembled.

I wonder if you have the same experience I do: I read a lot of political writing, and even when I agree with it, I usually can’t remember who produced it five minutes later. It’s all “issues” and no personality. 

You never feel that way about Rand or Lane or Paterson. Few political writers are as vivid and entertaining. You’re not just interested in their ideas; you’re interested in the special things they do with them. And guess what? A lot of the ideas that we think are so new and important today were discovered by Rand or Lane or Paterson a mere 80 or 90 years ago. They’re still challenging. When you realize that, you get a new perspective on the Right—on its continuity, its inspiration, and its fun.

Lane, Rand, and Paterson had a large—in Rand’s case, an immense—popular readership. Their influence on intellectuals was significant, though varied. When in 1955 William F. Buckley founded National Review, the shaping force of a new conservatism, he eagerly wooed Paterson to write for it—and stoutly resisted the ideas of Rand. But all three women stood as far from the intellectual establishment as it was possible to get. “Mostly what ails the alleged intellectuals,” wrote Paterson, “is that they aren’t.” Long before the internet, the three real, though uncredentialed, intellectuals had identified the most important audience of political discourse—individual, often lonely, Americans who thought without being paid to think—and who had started reaching out to them. These were the people who counted; these were the Americans who made, and keep making, the conservative revolution. As Paterson wrote in her book of political theory, The God of the Machine, “everything can be done for a living future.”

Sandefur tells the story of the founding generation of the freedom movement, and because he knows how to write, he tells it in a clear and compelling way. He has not relied simply on published sources—such as (ahem!) my own biography of Paterson, The Woman and the Dynamo. He has also done what is known in the trade as “archival research.” It’s important, and it shows. He shows exemplary fairness toward women who were—with good reason—thorny personalities. He demonstrates how smart and compelling they were.

He does something else as well: He provides a vivid picture of their immediate adversary, the conglomeration of statisms known as the New Deal. If there was ever a regime that didn’t conform to its beneficent popular image, the New Deal was it. Consider the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, founded on the idea that to cure a depression you need to keep prices up; you need to inflate them artificially and make everyone pay them. To raise the price of agricultural products, farmers were given money not to produce, crops were plowed under, livestock was killed by the millions, and the cost of food was increased for an already suffering population. Also “adjusted” were the lives of small farmers and sharecroppers, often black, who were prohibited from producing marketable goods but who didn’t benefit from the subsidies shelled out to landlords. “The AAA,” as Sandefur explains, “effectively paid their employers to fire and evict them.”

Or consider the centerpiece of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration, colorfully though unlovingly detailed by Sandefur. The NRA was empowered to force participants in every type of business to adopt a “code of fair competition” stipulating what could be sold, when it could be sold, and what price it could be sold for. Don’t try to compete by lowering your prices—your “unfairness” could send you to jail. The NRA was so absurd that, as Sandefur observes, when the act that justified it went before the Supreme Court and “federal lawyers tried to explain [its] requirements to the justices, they had difficulty because members of the audience kept interrupting them with laughter.”

The NRA got knocked down by the Court. Other New Deal creations remained, as foundations of today’s state socialism, of all those acronymic agencies dedicated to adjusting our lives in every conceivable way. It was during the New Deal that politicians and “thinkers” started redefining the American dream as equal access to state management. But that was also the period when Lane, Rand, and Paterson, and other people who could think and write, began a radical clarification of ideas. The eventual result was the modern Right.

Sandefur’s book is about that movement of ideas, which began in a time eerily similar to our own. It’s a book for people who feel as Paterson did. “Right now,” she wrote, “it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don’t know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.”

Men Need Restoration, Not Leftist Ridicule, To Fix Our Modern Masculinity Crisis

America’s masculinity crisis presents tangible problems that require complex solutions, but all the left can do is make fun of suffering men.

by Casey Chalk for The Federalist

The “former conservative” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin declared in an October column that the “masculinity crisis” regularly bemoaned by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is “actually inside the GOP.” Rubin said, “Far from displaying the masculine virtues they imagine are endangered, Republicans have become the party of fearful men afraid to stand on principle.” She went on to cite David French, the senior editor of The Dispatch, and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney as exemplars of real conservative courage for their willingness to stand up to toxic masculinity within the GOP. 

Putting aside the risible claim that people like French and Cheney represent the faithful remnant of true conservatism, Rubin’s op-ed, like so many commentaries offered by leftists, fails on multiple fronts. It fails because it does not understand the severity of the crisis facing males in 2022. It fails because what it offers as solutions to the very real masculinity crisis represents what only insulated bureaucratic elites are capable of conjuring up to address the problems of everyday people. And ultimately, it fails on anthropological grounds because it does not understand men’s biological, psychological, sociological, and teleological character.

Our Masculinity Crisis

Although liberals seem to view masculine suffering as more of a joke, if not justified, retribution for having to live under “the patriarchy,” America is witnessing unprecedented problems for its men. As Hawley said in a speech last year, “American men are working less, they are getting married in fewer numbers, they’re fathering fewer children, they’re suffering more anxiety and depression, they’re engaging in more substance abuse.” The percentage of men pursuing degrees in higher education is precipitously declining. According to a study released by the Brookings Institution earlier this year, only 41 percent of students currently enrolled in college are men. That decrease, which has been going on for years, seems likely to continue. The percentage of men graduating from college is also declining.

This problem goes far beyond education. Lifetime earnings for men are also declining, a trend that has been going on for more than a decade. As of last year, men’s life expectancy had dropped by two years. Their testosterone levels have been faltering for decades. Almost a third of men are overweight, which puts them at risk for several health complications.

Male suffering unsurprisingly contributes to the overall suffering of America writ large. Significant percentages of the American population grow up in fatherless homes, putting children at increased risk of poverty, behavioral problems, health issues, and truancy. Children who grow up without a father are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect, commit crimes, wind up in prison, or become pregnant as a teenager. In other words, America’s male crisis is a societal crisis.

Elites’ Indifference

These problems are not unknown to liberal elites. Yet their solutions, rather than reflecting an appreciation for the threat the masculinity crisis presents, or even demonstrating empathy, more often prioritize partisan point-scoring while invoking condescension and indifference. That is undoubtedly Jennifer Rubin’s perspective: Rather than addressing Hawley’s concerns, she devotes the entirety of her op-ed to simply bashing Republicans. Nor is she alone — The New York Times, CNN, and Rolling Stone, among others, have all labeled the conservative alarm over the masculinity crisis as “hilariously empty” and “pathetic.”

The language of the left is dripping with radical feminist ideology, as scholar Scott Yenor’s work has so extensively documented. Our entertainment, fashion, and media industries are all investing their capital in dismantling the alleged threat of “the patriarchy.” Pundits, health professionals, and even commercials denounce “toxic masculinity.” Heck, those who helm our education, entertainment, and media institutions even encourage young men to abandon masculinity in favor of femininity, which boys are doing in unprecedentedly large numbers.

The left’s response to the masculinity crisis is one of contempt and derision. If men are suffering, it’s their own fault. “Aren’t men still disproportionately represented in C-Suites?” they rhetorically ask, forgetting that the vast majority of American men are not executives at million-dollar firms. Because our technocratic elites are insulated by their own wealthy, credentialed circles, they are ignorant and callous towards the dilemmas of millions of men, as evidenced by their sneering attacks on male defenders like Jordan Peterson.

A Failure to Know Men

The Washington Post’s print edition recently featured an extended story about a single mother raising her son in Wyoming’s “cowboy country” that had been featured on their website last month. It is, admittedly, a very sad tale of betrayal, domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, and social exclusion. “Men just take and take and take and take. That’s what they are taught,” the jaded woman tells the WaPo reporter.

This is where the left feels most comfortable: identifying and foregrounding stories that blame men for what ails society. There is, of course, truth here: There are plenty of losers and dirtbags out there who mistreat and exploit women. Feminist-influenced liberal elites have decided that men mistreat women because of their biology and traditional societal norms embolden this behavior. Men don’t need to reclaim chivalry and honor; they simply need to be more like women (though, ironically, these ideologues also claim women need to be more like men).

What is lacking in all of this are the ancient verities about men. That men biologically — influenced tendency toward violence and aggression — need proper, male-only outlets, like manual labor or sports. They require places to develop deep social bonds with other men to form and inculcate empathy toward others — “iron sharpens iron,” as Proverbs 27:17 declares. Men require opportunities to develop the cardinal virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice, and ultimately, men require their thoughts and affections to be directed toward the transcendent, giving their lives internal coherence, reasons to curb their vices, and an eternal outlook that gives meaning to the many thankless tasks they will perform.

Man’s very sexual and physiological makeup is obviously oriented toward the creation and protection of new life — any fool who has completed an introductory biology course can tell you that. The left’s linkered, narcissistic, and cynically punitive outlook on life has clouded their ability to know that ancient truth. What American men require is not ridicule but restoration.

Neil Oliver, “Don’t Pee Down My Back and Tell Me It’s Raining”

Against the backdrop of Rishi Sunak being installed as the U.K. Prime Minister, during his weekly monologue today, a fired-up friend of the Treehouse, Neil Oliver, asks two questions: #1) Why should WE put up with the pain predicted in our future by the same people who made it inevitable?… And #2) How quickly do they think we forget what only just happened?  WATCH:

[Transcript] –  I have two questions this week:

Question one: Why should WE put up with the pain predicted in our future by the same people who made it inevitable?

And question two: How quickly do they think we forget what only just happened? First the pain.

Rishi Sunak conjured up and blew away a mountain of money – hundreds of billions of pounds worth of the funny, all-but-fraudulent money that is the gift only of the private bankers who have him and every other western leader in their pocket.

Now he’s got an even bigger job than before and gets to tell us we’ll have to endure tough times ahead, real pain. That’s real pain for us proles of course – and champagne for him and his pals. All of this mess is of his creation – him and his pinstriped cronies – and yet we, who did nothing wrong, are the patsies handed the bill.

I’ve quoted The Outlaw Josey Wales before on here, but time and again I find the same words going round and round in my head.

“Don’t pee down my back and tell me it’s raining.”

The same characters – those that clapped and cheered as the disastrous lockdown measures were put in place – are still clumped around him, with shiny new jobs or at least their old jobs and every bit as pointless as they were before. None of them has added so much as a jot to their store of wisdom.

They have learned nothing – except of course the priceless knowledge relevant only to senior MPs … that if you just brass it out in the face of the most monumental cock-up of your career it turns out you can pretty much get away with murder.

We can see this – in fact our noses are rubbed in the reality of it daily, every time we have to look at the same old faces … unrepentant, blind and deaf to any notion that there might be confessions required, responsibility taken for the most inexcusable mistakes, grovelling apologies offered for unimaginable damage done, hurts inflicted that cannot and will not heal.

They should be in exile on Elba, the sorry lot of them, and yet there they are – business as usual and telling us the bill is past due.

Of course the bill is past due, the gormless fools – it was them that ran it up in the first place while some of us, some of us, looked on in horror at the truck crash happening in slow motion.

But remember at all times that it’s not Covid’s fault we’re flat broke, or Putin’s fault or the climate’s fault. You cannot blame the rain if you get soaked. The rain is inevitable. You get soaked because you gave away your coat and you didn’t buy an umbrella.

We’re getting soaked, drowning, because of two years in which the establishment shut down the country and the economy. We are out in the cold because of a decade and more of destructive energy policies that mean we have none of our own and have to go cap in hand to others to keep the lights on.

The fault is theirs, our political class and their masters … those that designed, choreographed and executed the plan. The fact we are in the deepest financial hole ever dug is down to those that shut us in our homes – or at least tried to – and then conjured up unimaginable sums of money that didn’t exist and sprayed it all over the floor, up the walls and down the drains.

Sunak and his ilk paid people – not all people, of course, but millions of people – to stay at home when they could and should have been out earning and keeping the economy going. Those deemed unworthy of help watched the businesses they couldn’t attend to going bust and lost everything.

Those usual suspects threw billions into the pointless, ineffectual money pit of track and trace. They blew billions more on useless and unused PPE and on gazillions of masks that made no difference other than to stoke the fear of millions of men, women and children and litter the countryside and choke the oceans.

They coerced millions into taking medical products that – as time has told – did not work as advertised. Nonetheless they nudged and pushed and finally bullied and threatened the majority of people into putting themselves under the needle – not once but several times. Now their propagandists are out and about again – pushing the same old drugs, with an influenza chaser just for good measure.

If it wasn’t so coldly calculated, you’d have to say it was insane.

As far as I’m concerned, it should be described as criminally insane.

Hundreds of billions of pounds wasted. All part of the greatest transfer of wealth to the already rich in the history of the world.

To my mind it’s not and never was any sort of accident that dumped us here, soaked to the skin and freezing. Too many of the same mistakes were made by too many of the same people, to the same effect. Too many people all reading from the same script.

To take but a couple of examples at random, EU overlord Ursula Von Der Leyen blew 71 billion euros buying the so-called vaccines – enough of the dope to give every man, woman and child in the EU 10 doses. TEN.

More pain for more people.

And across The Pond, addled President Biden, yet to take back so much as a syllable of his nonsense about safe and effective, has more recently overseen the destruction of America’s once limitless domestic energy supply to such an extent that his nation has just 20-odd days of diesel left.

That means in less than a month trains, buses and private cars – not to mention the trucks that move all the food and other necessities around the entire country – could grind to a halt and, with them, the entire US economy. Why is America committing suicide, ceasing to be what most of us even recognise as America? That’s a question for another day.

And now, to add insult to all the injury – and let’s not forget the millions of adverse effects suffered around the world, the deaths attributed to the jabs – we have to listen to the architects of our imminent financial misery and demise telling us we just have to endure the pain … the pain they knowingly caused, are continuing to cause and that they are manoeuvring to make even worse.

In Egypt at COP27 – the UN’s annual conference for climate change bedwetters – the agenda is stuffed with plans to eviscerate farming around the world. Against a backdrop of manufactured fear about how cows are destroying the planet by burping and how the fertilisers that have enabled us to feed the billions now promise only doom on a global scale, they talk about cutting farming here, there and everywhere by as much as half. Let’s all pay attention – we are talking here about the very stuff of life upon which every soul depends.

From the same deranged ideologues who have ensured energy insecurity, comes global food insecurity. All across the developed world, farmers and their supporters – which in truth should be everyone who has even vague plans to still be eating actual real fresh food in the years to come – are protesting in ever growing numbers.

Do we see this defiance reported on the news? Do we hear those farmers given airtime to explain the folly of what the bureaucrats have planned? No, we do not, and decisions affecting all our lives in every conceivable way – about food, and money, and round the clock surveillance – continue to be discussed and made by unelected, unaccountable advocates of One World Government.

Over and over we’re told he world is coming to an end on account of climate change that’s all humankind’s fault. And yet the measures being contemplated at COP27 will surely mean the end anyway for hundreds of millions … billions of people driven into the cold and bony arms of starvation, disease, war and death by suicidal policies born of vanity, hubris and the pursuit of yet more wealth by the few … for the few.

All of which brings me back to my second question, about the apparently misfiring memories of those desperate, utterly desperate, to pretend the last two years never happened – or if they did happen, that they happened altogether differently than I remember.

George Orwell wrote about memory holing in his novel 1984 – the process by which information that no longer helps the official narrative is made to disappear as if it had never existed.

Just as a for instance they are trying to tell us now that no one ever said the so-called vaccines would prevent the spread of Covid from person to person. They damn well did say that – over and over again. That was the entire basis for the Granny Killer selfish Covidiot abuse directed at those of us who never did and never will submit to those jabs.

To claim now that such claims were never made is the most blatant and shameless of lies – damned lies – and yet it is pushed now by politicians, medical professionals and mainstream media alike.

It can only be a matter of time – presumably when the numbers of vaccine dead and injured simply get too terrifyingly big to ignore – before the same characters are saying the jabs were voluntary anyway and that it was always and only a matter of personal choice whether you took them or not. Don’t come crying to me … they’ll say in unison.

In Orwell’s novel of a dystopian future, the totalitarian government of Oceania was constantly at war with one of the other two totalitarian superpowers that dominated the world: Eurasia and Eastasia. It wasn’t about ever winning or ending the war but rather maintaining a constant state of war in order to keep the citizens under control. Every citizen had to memory hole what each knew to be true and just accept the latest version of reality.

Orwell called this doublethink:

“To know and not to know,” he wrote. “To be conscious of complete truthfulness, while telling carefully constructed lies … to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment it was needed.”

This is where we are now: listening to those who know the truth telling carefully constructed lies. Worse still, we are supposed to lie to each other and to ourselves about what just happened.

We are expected to forget that those promising to fix the disaster are the same people that caused the disaster. We are supposed to forget that the MPs, medics and media told us we had to surrender our rights, our livelihoods, let loved ones die alone on account of a disease only a minuscule percentage of the population was ever at serious risk from – and they knew it.

And yet we are expected to believe instead that they never said any such thing.

Soon enough we might be expected to forget that we ever used to pay in cash and that our transactions were once our own private business … and accept instead Digital IDs, and CBDCs and social credit scores. In a year or two it might be as though there never was cash, or privacy, or dissent, or protest. We will be expected to forget.

If we are already expected to forget how all this mess happened … then in a year or two we might be expected to forget we were ever sovereign individuals with private lives and private thoughts.

But here’s the thing: I for one won’t be forgetting any of it. I remember everything. What’s been done, stays done. What’s been said, stays said. It’s up to us to remember – to remember everything that happened – and to keep reminding everyone else as well. (link)