We Rise as One to Passionately Denounce [TBD]
tomorrow, insert name here is bad cadre!
Well-written histories of the Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution — or of the final years of the Roman republic, say for example — have the strange effect of becoming incredibly boring. The 94th bonfire of humanity, appearing on page 678, resembles the previous 93 bonfires. The grim machine of political purges makes brutal depravity tedious. Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z run the Committee to Kill Wrongthinkers; then, and you always see this coming, Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z are declared to be wrongthinkers, and are tossed on their own bonfire. The managerial tier is always consumed by its own instrument. Purge culture is the center of a politics of repression, the inevitable dynamic of a system that has degenerated to the stage of an unprincipled grasping for status and position. Someone was denounced yesterday; someone is being denounced today; someone will be denounced tomorrow.
In two instances, now — the frenzied shark attack on Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, and the obviously insane response to RFK Jr. this week — prominent House Democrats have mimicked a cultural style that should be extremely familiar to anyone who has read some history. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is so fascinatingly horrible a figure that she echoes, a bug-eyed ranting halfwitted sociopath with a hollow core like a long historical line of hollow bug-eyed sociopaths. These are the people who are drawn to destructive political stages. Repellent and ascendant, they call to others of the type. Destroyers flock.
I assume you’ve seen some footage from yesterday's hearing, which was widely covered and widely discussed, so I’m not going to rehash that nasty piece of Theatre of Cruelty. If you missed it, just know that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is OBSOLETE OBSOLETE OBSOLETE.
But I want to point at the water underneath the waves we can see in national media, because the presumptions of the Central Commissariat go all the way down.
The week that led to the ritual denunciation of RFK Jr. started with a fascinatingly naked declaration in a Pasadena courthouse. Two California physicians, Mark McDonald and Jeff Barke, are suing the California Medical Board to block enforcement of AB 2098, the new law that threatens the medical license of any doctor in the state who expresses consensus-deviating crimethink about the darkly sacred Covid-19, a High Enemy of the Glorious Motherland. McDonald and Barke are relying on the First Amendment and its protection of the so-called “free speech” trope, a well-known tool of dangerous far-right extremists.
Courts have split on AB 2098, and so far some have declined the premise that this regulation of physicians’ speech is unconstitutional, so the case is now before the 9th Circuit on appeal. A three-judge panel heard oral argument in the case this week, in an architecturally pleasant forum that used to be a luxury hotel. And this is where Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska said this to the court: “In order to effectively regulate the practice of medicine, the state needs to be able to reach the aspects of speech that are used to care for patients.”
If you take a professional license from the state, the regulatory power of the state reaches your speech acts; you can lose your license not only for harming patients or providing poor quality care, but for saying things that the state disagrees with. Your conversations belong to the government.
You can watch the entire oral argument in McDonald v. Lawson (Kristina Lawson is the head of the medical board) here, and whoever runs the 9th Circuit’s excellent public information operation is my personal hero:
In the same week, the Los Angeles-area lawyer Julie Hamill released the 200-page transcript of her July 7 deposition with Brett Morrow, the director of communications for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. (See more information about Hamill’s lawsuit here.) That department has spent the last several years telling social media companies to take down user posts that criticize or disagree with county health officials — and the same department also prevents all users from posting comments in response to its own social media content, because the public speaks in “inappropriate ways”:
A few months ago, Hamill deposed public health director Barbara Ferrer. That exchange was extremely informative, and I wrote about it here:
Disinformation, Explained
Disinformation is a garbage standard applied by an absurd process, and I’m going to show you that in less than five minutes. I wrote last week that the Southern California lawyer Julie Hamill was about to depose Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, a local official who has had a remarkably high national profile during the pandemic. T…
The deposition of Ferrer’s chief propagandist is similarly revealing, and Hamill has been working through the highlights on Twitter. Misinformation, it again turns out, is a statement that deviates from the statements made by government officials. If a county health official says X, then saying Not-X is spreading disinformation. That’s it: that’s the standard. If you disagree with government, you’re wrong, and government can tell social media platforms to deplatform you. Truth is what the government says, full stop. “We determine what’s credible.”
A favorite detail from the transcript of the Morrow deposition that Hamill was too polite to mention, from pp. 29-20:
So Barbara Ferrer, who has a PhD in social welfare studies, sits down with her communication director, who has a BA in political science, and together they decide if scientific claims from people like Dr. Ryan Cole and Dr. Peter McCullough are sufficiently credible to be allowed to remain on the Internet. This is where we are. This guy decides what the truth is about viruses and vaccines and scientific questions like the public health utility of non-pharmaceutical interventions. He’s a government official, so disagreeing with him is disinformation.
There are more examples to be had — more examples from this week, in fact — but I’ll avoid beating the point into the ground. Anywhere you look, now, a generation of government officials believe that they embody the truth, and disagreeing with them in any way, on any basis, at any time, is inappropriate and a dangerous act of disinformation. On any question, there is a proper declarative line, provided by authority; to disagree with it, to question it, or to criticize it is to deviate into the realm of the conspiracy theorist and the disinformation artist, which unpersons the speaker and leads to denunciation.
The assumption is ubiquitous and unexamined, organizing government action at the local, state, and federal level, and it’s increasingly dangerous. It gains momentum precisely as it becomes much more reflexive and indefensible.
This paper out of MIT in January, 2021 describes exactly the same thinking. A pronouncement that the writers/researchers possess the one unquestionable, perfected truth, an assertion without any evidence other than the pronouncement itself. And that all other understandings and analysis, no matter the qualifications of the presenter or evidence presented are false, ignorant, wrong, "unorthodox.' The use of religious terms not a coincident. A self-own that their "truth" is really their faith, their religious devotion to the religion of Scientism. And to question them, their tenets is heresy. Not Wrong, Not untrue. But evidence of an unbeliever in their God:
Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox
Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online
MIT, January 20, 2021
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993.pdf
(Contains a lot of important background to begin the paper, with the most revealing insights in pages 13-15)
When you read it you'll notice a few names you may recognize from the censorship industry, including Kate Starbird, oft-cited and serving on many of the official government and quasi-government information control programs. Over 100 footnotes to the work of many in the censorship industry regime, if one wishes to go down those rabbit holes.
It's not just that they make bold and unmerited assertions that they possess the singular truth and all others are false. All religions do the same. It's their self-righteousness that escalates into the rhetoric that rationalizes and justifies a religious crusade against non-believers. It's not enough to cast out the heretic, the heretics must be hunted down, forced into submission, converted to their religion or suffer the sword. The paper calls for persecution and eradication of all non-believers from public life, polite society, placed into ghettos, both thought and actual impoverishment. Perhaps death comes later when they believe they have the power to get away with it?
These are evil people. When researchers dove into the records of the Nazi's following Germany's defeat after WWII they discovered damning information, detailed records of their atrocities that were presented as evidence at Nuremberg. Many wondered why they were so brazen as to document their crimes against humanity? It was because they didn't view themselves or their work as evil. They believed they were doing good an righteous work, proudly detailing what they thought were accomplishments, not crimes. Hitler even wrote Mein Kampf years before he gained power, his plans for evil were out there for the world to see. Many in power, including in the US agreed with his writings and goals. Not believing them evil, crimes. Others who were taken back by the words chose to dismiss them, "he doesn't really mean that, he could never get away with that, authorities would never allow that to actually happen, that's the crazy talk of a lunatic." The evil in our time tells us what they are doing. Proudly. We just choose to dismiss them, as those who came before us dismissed Mein Kampf and the words and deeds of the perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity did.
And if anyone was ever curious about what they would've done living in Germany in the 1930's they only need to look into the mirror and reflect on their thoughts and actions since 2020. Sames. The Nazi Party never had majority support in Germany. Getting 43% in the last free election held there, even with opposition parties effectively silenced and on the heals of a crisis they staged, the Reichstag fire (their January 6). Proving it doesn't take a majority of a nation to lead it to hell. Just the will to power. This evil has the will to power. As Nietzsche wrote and Hitler learned from. Sames. A religious zealotry, righteousness, not in God, but in Science, pseudosciences, given divinity.
This write up by Townhall's Scott Moorefield about the paper above gives some good snippets for those who don't care to dive into the research paper above:
https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2021/03/29/mit-researchers-grudgingly-admit-covid-team-reality-is-effectively-winning-minds-with-real-data-n2587020
The fact that deviation from an authorized set of beliefs now jeopardizes a practitioner’s medical license in California, and they must therefore remain in the consensus lane as determined by some unnamed arbiter, which is likely to be the same public health establishment responsible for our disastrous pandemic response, is Orwellian in the extreme—and idiotic. I wrote about AB2098 here:
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/ab2098
Suffice it to say that this new statute will not only harm patients by depriving them of information, but it will further erode trust in public health when the institution can least afford it. This isn’t really about a dangerous spread of dis/misinformation, but is instead an example of the dangerous weaponization of the concept of dis/misinformation in order to silence medical practitioners who don’t trumpet The Narrative™.