A lengthy Twitter post by comedian and political commentor Konstantin Kisin and cited by J.D. Rucker in The Liberty Daily details in 2,300 words the outright lies, intentional disinformation, and flagrant slanders that have become the stock-in-trade of government, scientism, and media over the last few years. It explains why vaccine hesitancy may be understandable and even commendable. As Rucker comments, “the content found in it is a masterclass on explaining the lack of trust tens of millions of people in the U.S. and U.K. currently have towards the Covid-19 injections both governments are pushing so hard.”
But such sensible reluctance is the province of a minority. The majority have embraced the pious bromides and strident assurances of a corrupt media consortium, a profoundly compromised scientific community, and a coercive government apparatus intent on the radical usurpation of power, of whom the French president and the New York mayor are representative instances. And a concurring public has bought the official narrative at the cost of intellectual integrity, moral conscience, responsible inquiry, and finally of political liberty, as if following the proscription of the author of a notorious, pro-Fauci Forbes article. We must, as this “expert” insists, not do our own research. We must submit to the consensus of the (apparently) unbiased authorities. For, as we are condescendingly informed, we cannot be trusted to escape our natural prejudices and untutored convictions. The ultimate goal, as Mark Levin writes in American Marxism, is “to consume the identity and uniqueness” of the self-reliant individual.
Related: Dr. Fauci Embarrasses Himself While Trying to Mock Fox News
Regrettably, the duplicity practiced by our dominant elites and their enablers is matched only by the credulousness with which it is received by the mainstream public. The Twitter thread lists multiple occasions of ritual deceit, influence peddling, and interested persuasion. For example: The polls that assured us Brexit was dead in the water or that Trump had only a one percent chance of winning the election; that only Russian collusion could explain his victory; that Jussie Smollett was noosed by MAGA thugs or that the Coventry students insultingly confronted a native elder; that masculinity is “pathological and harmful,” as the American Psychological Association confidently asserted; that the COVID virus emanated from a Wuhan wet market when a biological lab experimenting in “gain of function” technology was just up the street; that lockdowns were mandatory to prevent the spread of the disease while massive BLM protests were officially permitted on the grounds that they were actually “a profound public health intervention”; that looting, burning and ransacking communities in the name of fighting racism were “mostly peaceful”; and that America is a racist nation through and through (although millions of immigrants, legal or illegal, are intent on coming to the country); and so on and on. The thread concludes: “These same people are now telling you the vaccine is safe.”
Such corporatist behavior flagged in the Twitter thread constitutes a species of collective fraud whose scope and intensity appears to be growing with every passing day. The hypocrisy of the tribal elect is no less glaring, whether it is Gavin Newsom flouting his own decrees and dining maskless at a posh restaurant or Obama dancing maskless at a mammoth birthday celebration eliminating all vestiges of social distancing and protocol adherence. As Rep. Elise Stefanik remarks of the Obama fiasco, “Democrats are imposing forced vaccine mandates, unscientific masks mandates, and are openly discussing lockdowns, while President Obama gathers with hundreds of maskless liberal elites who flew in on private jets with no vaccine requirement to attend.” The litany of such evident misconduct can be readily expanded.
The issue is essentially fraud in word and action. Fraud, as Horace Freeland Judson writes of the heavily subsidized and professionally dubious portion of the contemporary science community in The Great Betrayal, is “built into the ways institutions…work.” Deception seems to be a feature and indeed a prerogative of institutional life, especially on the Left and in the bowels of academia. Profit, power, and ideological complicity are the watchwords that currently govern the plurality of our political and institutional leaders, self-declared mentors, medical bureaucrats, university professors, Agency functionaries, journalists, editors and social justice moguls, and, in general, an entrenched patrician class that affects cultural and cognitive supremacy over a plebeian class of malleable citizens. The peerage manipulates the deplorables with consummate hauteur, convinced of the latter’s susceptibility to obeisance.
The trouble is that the comportment of far too many of our countrymen tends to confirm their assumptions. As a general social paradigm—the vaccine controversy is merely the latest case in point—individual initiative, self-directed research, and healthy skepticism appear to be at a discount. As Stacey Lennox writes in PJ Media, referring to a Joe Rogan podcast discussing leaky vaccines that permit the evolution of more virulent virus strains, “Now the vaccinate-at-all-costs crowd has the knives out for Joe Rogan, saying he is using his platform irresponsibly for reading a peer-reviewed study on air.” But it is not only a question of crowd hysterics and sanctimonious mobs agitating for the cancellation of people like Rogan and others; there is also the general accord of a larger and quieter social collective who have thoughtlessly swallowed the official and media line on COVID and the vaccines in toto.
A good friend, the editor of an important intellectual journal, writes in a personal communication: “40 years ago, if someone had said there would be liberal/socialist governments that would try to take away our freedoms, I would have replied, ‘Of course there will be.’ Had he said there’d be citizens publicly demonstrating to demand their freedoms be taken away, I would have given him directions to the nearest mental hospital.” Directions are no longer necessary.
We are now witness to two related phenomena. On the one hand, as GOP operative Ryan James Girdusky observes, “The ruling class tells Americans they can’t see their grandparents while they release COVID positive migrants at the border, you need to conserve carbon while they fly private jets, defund the police while they hire private security, and you have to wear a mask indoors with your own children while they throw soirées with 600 millionaires.” The arrogance and self-insulation of the anointed beggars belief.
On the other hand, in the memorable words of Samuel Adams from a speech at the Philadelphia State House on August 1, 1776, we have the “tranquillity of servitude,” a compliant and righteous population happy to surrender their political autonomy and sovereignty of mind in exchange for the luxury of unexamined lassitude and emotional security. The majority enthusiasm for the experimental vaccines, for the effectiveness and safety of which there is no long-term data, is a vivid illustration of the public deference to authority and the willingness to abandon the democratic virtue of independent judgment. Hypothetical safety eclipses genuine liberty. The fact that the vaccines are in constant need of boosters, that cases continue to mount among the vaccinated, and that Public Health England (PHE) now suggests vaccinated people may be as infectious as the unvaccinated does not impinge on the pervasive belief in the competence, ethics, and trustworthiness of the administrative establishment.
As Adams said, “Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity’s liberty…the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance.”
This is one of those times.
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