Notes from a cluttered mind
Episode 13: The Empire Strikes Back
With Trump’s re-election, I can’t help but to reflect back on his 2020 loss — which at least in part was the result of his Administration’s COVID-19 policy and its impact on both the physical and economic health of American citizens. Trump was too trusting of entrenched bureaucrats within the medical industrial complex who, together with Big Pharma, were able to shape and control both the scientific and media establishments, be it through advertising leverage or a similar financially-directed control over medical schools and important scientific and medical journals.
Years later, in a media environment less able to throttle preeminent doctors and scientists who during the pandemic worked largely outside of the corporate healthcare structures that were applying pressure on doctors and clinicians to reject established epidemiological norms, we’re finding out just how pervasive and criminal was the alliance between pharma, the bureaucratic state, legacy journalism, and social media platforms. Millions died, many needlessly. And to date, no one has been held to account.
Unless and until they are, we’re open to another such emergency that can serve as a pretext for the attempt to “reset” our global governing paradigm, eschewing classical liberal Enlightenment ideas in favor of a “safety and sustainability” paradigm that looks a lot like neo-feudalism, with a narrowly-trained managerial class serving under the Elect to control and direct the billions of “useless eaters” sucking up all the resources with their filthy mouthholes and grubby carbon footprints.
There are people like me who were chased off of social media platforms during the pandemic who spent that time learning how to treat COVID-19 using off-platform drugs to manage the symptoms. We informed friends and family and directed them toward early treatment strategies — including how to find and import WHO essential drugs from places like India when our own government healthcare apparatus blocked us from procuring them in the US. Not only did the government turn customs enforcement on us to prevent us from bringing in medicine, but the bureaucratic behemoth often de-licensed or even criminally prosecuted doctors who, as the art of medicine requires, were prescribing anti-viral, anti-inflamatory medicines used in other parts of the world, to their patients.
People like Alex Berenson jumpstarted a middling career “questioning” the COVID-19 vaccine protocols. And yet, to this day, he has pretended that drugs like Ivermectin didn’t help in the treatment of the virus.
He was wrong. And as it turns out, people like Berenson — who were comfortable questioning vaccine protocols — couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the machinations and subterfuge around emergency use authorization that made those protocols possible.
For an excellent post-mortem, consider listening to Dr Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein discuss Kory’s book, War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic. As an appetizer, here’s a short documentary highlighting Kory’s premise from filmmaker Mikki Willis (click on photo):
Joe Scarborough and Axios CEO Jim Vandehei want you to know that the legacy media matters — that it, more than anything or anyone else, has the absolute and unfettered right to shape, disseminate, and police cultural narratives and contour public policy. The legacy media is charged with pronouncing what is true and what is not; it is the one institution acting as a bulwark between fascism — which relies on misinformation and propaganda and Elon Musk — and our democratic way of life, which is protected bravely and unselfishly by modern-day warrior poets like Jen Rubin, Molly Jong-Fast, Jeffrey Goldberg, Don Lemon, Joy Reid, Brian Stelter, and the Disney Corporation. Journalists hold the powerful to account! And this is something the filthies — who thought they could “do their own research” on, eg., COVID-19 vaccine protocols — are just not built to do, lacking the wit, intelligence, resourcefulness, and tenacity of legacy media journalists, who, save undocumented illegals, really do represent the best of us.
— at least, that’s how they tell it. Me personally, I don’t much trust captured media who let Pfizer and Fauci convince them that the entire history of natural and acquired immunity ceased to be, as an epidemiological truism, because shut up, rubes! Or tried to sell me on the proposition that a notorious germophobe was videotaped being pissed on by Russian hookers. So when that same august institution, deploying its many information tendrils, told me inflation was transitory, the border was closed, crime was down, and Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian intel op — I declined to take their word for it.
Legacy media can threaten, protest, hyperventilate, and bargain all they wish. But they’re over in their recent iteration. They just don’t know it yet. And they did it to themselves, the pompous fucks.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is under fire after being accused of holding therapy 'cry sessions' for department staffers upset over Donald Trump's election victory.
[…]
California Congressman and Trump ally Darrell Issa wrote an open letter to Blinken smashing the State Department for the rumored counseling sessions over Trump's win, calling them 'disturbing.'
Reports of the meetings first came out November 11, when a memo to department employees titled 'managing stress during change' was sent out less than a week after Trump's victory.
Sources told the Washington Free Beacon the meetings amounted to a 'cry session' for bereft liberal staffers.
Issa wrote to Blinken this week: 'I am concerned that the Department is catering to federal employees who are personally devastated by the normal functioning of American democracy through the provision of government-funded mental health counseling because Kamala Harris was not elected President of the United States.'
The email promoted staffers as being able to take advantage of a stressful environment of change which Issa termed as having a 'personal meltdown over the result of a free and fair election.’
'Change is a constant in our lives, but it can often bring about stress and uncertainty,' the email said.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the adults were never back in charge over the past 4 years.
"An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics."
I wrote this back in 2005, and it is only now coming into relief for certain Democrats rethinking the foundational ideas of their Party — most specifically, the Party’s reliance on the far left / progressives, who have sown extraordinary division among Americans and are bent on resegregating the US as part of a moral imperative. From affinity spaces to separate graduation ceremonies based on race to the repulsive idea of “cultural appropriation” — which in practice represents a dissolution of the very idea of culture, born as it is of the melding of beliefs and practices — the left thrives on dividing, on radicalizing who Marcuse called the “ghetto” groups as a way toward achieving Marxism culturally and then politically.
The inroads Trump’s campaign made with Black men, Latinos, Muslims, Asians, and Jews, suggests that not everyone is onboard with the racialism and identity politics programming being pushed by the left through DEI and other communist initiatives. The media — of course — doesn’t want to hear this, and many committed leftists are pushing back on the idea that they’re incredibly out of favor. And yet.
And yet.
Maybe there’s still hope for this grand experiment in Constitutional pluralism after all.
For those of you who haven’t heard, Ellen DeGeneres and her partner, Portia de Rossi, have left the US to resettle in the English countryside, where they’ll employ people to buttle and domesticize for them in their autumn years. This emigration is the result of a promise Ellen — long considered one of the kindest people America has ever produced! — made should Trump retake the presidency. Forbes would like you to know that this is a measure of brave accountability, not the petulant tantrum of over-idolized toddlers whose waning influence and cultural relevance are both moribund vestiges of an era of slavish deferrence to celebrities that I hope is killed dead, a stake in its heart, and then burned with fire.
“Around the Horn,” an ESPN talk staple for more than two decades, is being canceled, having predictably succumbed to ESPN’s relentless habit of turning once-profitable and popular programming into bitesize, advertising-interrupted struggle sessions — mini American shaming lectures from some of the most unimpressive people from one of the most anti-intellectual industries in the country.
The idea that modern-day sports reporters have either the gravitas or the moral autority to lecture sports viewers on politics, race, social justice, and the history of “resistance,” was never a good or smart one — so at long last, ESPN is pulling the plug on the attenuated corpse of a once vigorous and vital TV show. Back in the early 2000s, “ATH” was enjoyable TV; today, it’s morose, preachy, sanctimonious, and little viewed.
Everything the left touches turns to shit.
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