State power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. The state can train subjects, but it can never develop free people who take their affairs into their own hands, for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.
--Rudolf Rocker
Hi
Graham. I guess the question is why LSHTM did not (like JP Morgan)
include a scenario of lower virulence – given that this is a
very-plausible option that changes outlook massively. See below… pic.twitter.com/MtoDlPVTdM
The
exchange, reproduced in full below, is illuminating because Graham says
they do not include more benign scenarios because “it doesn’t add any
further information” and “decision-makers are generally on [sic] only
interested in situations where decisions have to be made”.
“Decision-makers don’t have to decide if nothing happens,” he argues.
This is wrong, of course: not imposing restrictions because the threat
doesn’t warrant it is itself a decision, a very important one.
Fraser asks: “So you exclusively model bad outcomes that require
restrictions and omit just-as-likely outcomes that would not require
restrictions?”
Graham replies that “we generally model what we are asked to model”.
Fraser asks: “Okay, so you were asked to model bad Omicron outcomes and make no comment as to the probability?”
The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating. – Mohandas K. Gandhi
I
once read an account of bullying in rural America in the early 20th
century. The narrator said, “If a victim did not stand up to them, there
was no limit to how far the bullies would go.” He described them tying
another child to the train tracks as a train approached (on the parallel
track). There was no appeasing the bullies. Each capitulation only
whetted their appetite for new and crueler humiliations.
The
psychology of bullies is well understood: compensation for a loss of
power, reenactment of trauma with roles reversed, and so forth. Beyond
all that, though, the Bully archetype draws from another source. On some
unconscious level, what the bully wants is for the victim to cease
being a victim and to stand up to him. That is why submission does not
appease a bully, but only invites further torment.
There is an
initiatory possibility in the abuser-victim relationship. In that
relationship and perhaps beyond it, the victim seeks to control the
world through submissiveness. If I am submissive enough, pitiable
enough, the abuser may finally relent. Other people might step in (the
Rescuer archetype). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with submission
or what improvisational theater pioneer Keith Johnstone called a
low-status play. There are indeed some situations when doing that is
necessary to survive. However, when the submissive posture becomes a
habit and the victim loses touch with her capability and strength, the
initiatory potential of the situation emerges. The bully or abuser
intensifies the abuse until the victim reaches a point where the
situation is so intolerable that she throws habit and caution to the
wind. She discovers a capacity within her that she did not know she had.
She becomes someone new and greater than she had been. That is a pretty
good definition of an initiation.
When that happens, when the
victim stands his ground and fights back, quite often the bully leaves
him alone. On the soul level, his work is done. The initiation is
complete. Of course, one might also say that the bully is a coward who
wants only submissive victims. Or one might say that resistance spoils
the sought-after psychodrama of dominance and submission. There is no
guarantee that the resistance will be successful, but even if it is not,
the dynamics of the relationship change when the victim decides she is
through being a victim. She may discover that a lot of the power the
bully had was in her fear and not in his actual physical control.
Until
that shift happens, even if a rescuer intervenes, the situation is
unlikely to change. Either the intervention will fail, or the rescuer
will become a new abuser. The world will ask again and again whether the
victim is ready to take a stand.
Please do not interpret this as a
cavalier suggestion to someone in an abusive relationship to simply
“take a stand.” That is easier said than done, and especially easy to
say in ignorance of just what sort of courage would be required. In some
situations, especially when children are involved, there is no way to
resist without horrible risk to oneself or innocent others. Yet even in
the most hopeless situations, the victim often learns a certain strength
that she didn’t know she had. Because submission often leads to
further, intensifying violation, eventually she will reach her breaking
point where courage is born. In that moment, freedom from the abuser is
more important than life itself.
The
relationship between our governing authorities and the public today
bears many similarities to the abuser-victim dynamic. Facing a bully, it
is futile to hope that the bully will relent if you don’t resist.
Acquiescence invites further humiliation. Similarly, it is wishful
thinking to hope that the authorities will simply hand back the powers
they have seized over the course of the pandemic. Indeed, if our rights
and freedoms exist only by the whim of those authorities, conditional on
their decision to grant them, then they are not rights and freedoms at
all, but only privileges. By its nature, freedom is not something one
can beg for; the posture of begging already grants the power relations
of subjugation. The victim can beg the bully to relent, and maybe he
will—temporarily—satisfied that the relation of dominance has been
affirmed. The victim is still not free of the bully.
That is why I
feel impatient when someone speaks of “When the pandemic is over” or
“When we are able to travel again” or “When we are able to have
festivals again.” None of these things will happen by themselves.
Compared to past pandemics, Covid is more a social-political phenomenon
than it is an actual deadly disease. Yes, people are dying, but even
assuming that everyone in the official numbers died “of” and not “with”
Covid, casualties number one-third to one-ninth those of the 1918 flu;
per-capita it is one-twelfth to one-thirty-sixth.1
As a sociopolitical phenomenon, there is no guaranteed end to it.
Nature will not end it, at any rate; it will end only through the
agreement of human beings that it has ended.2
This has become abundantly clear with the Omicron Variant. Political
leaders, public health officials, and the media are whipping up fear and
reinstituting policies that would have been unthinkable a few years ago
for a disease that, at the present writing, has killed one person
globally. So, we cannot speak of the pandemic ever being over unless we
the people declare it to be over.
Of course, I could be wrong here. Perhaps Omicron is, as World Medical Association chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery has warned,
as dangerous as Ebola. Regardless, the question remains: will we allow
ourselves to be held forever hostage to the possibility of an epidemic
disease? That possibility will never disappear.
Another thing I’ve
been hearing a lot of recently is that “Covid tyranny is bound to end
soon, because people just aren’t going to stand for it much longer.” It
would be more accurate to say, “Covid tyranny will continue until people
no longer stand for it.” That brings up the question, “Am I standing
for it?” Or am I waiting for other people to end it for me, so that I
don’t have to? In other words, am I waiting for the rescuer, so that I
needn’t take the risk of standing up to the bully?
If you do put
up with it, waiting for others to resist instead, then you affirm a
general principle of “waiting for others to do it.” Having affirmed that
principle, the forlorn hope that others will resist rings hollow. Why
should I believe others will do what I’m unwilling to do? That is why
pronouncements about the inevitability of a return to normalcy, though
they seem hopeful, carry an aura of delusion and despair.
In fact,
there is no obvious limit to what people will put up with, just as
there is no limit to what an abusive power will do to them.
If the
end of Covid bullying is not an inevitability, then what is it? It is a
choice. It is precisely the initiatory moment in which the victim—that
is, the public—discovers its power. At the very beginning of the
pandemic I called it a coronation: an initiation into sovereignty. Covid
has shown us a future toward which we have long been hurtling, a future
of technologically mediated relationships, ubiquitous surveillance, big
tech information control, obsession with safety, shrinking civil
liberties, widening wealth inequality, and the medicalization of life.
All these trends predate Covid. Now we see in sharp relief where we have
been headed. Is this what we want? An automatic inertial trend has
become conscious, available for choice. But to choose something else, we
must wrest control away from the institutions administering the current
system. That requires a restoration of real democracy; i.e., popular
sovereignty, in which we no longer passively accept as inevitable the
agendas of established authority, and in which we no longer beg for
privileges disguised as freedoms.
Despite
appearances, Covid has not been the end of democracy. It has merely
revealed that we were already not in a democracy. It showed where the
power really is and how easily the facade of freedom could be stripped
from us. It showed that we were “free” only at the pleasure of elite
institutions. By our ready acquiescence, it showed us something about
ourselves.
We were already unfree. We were already conditioned to submission.
In
Orwell’s 1984, Winston’s interrogator O’Brien states: “The more the
Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the
opposition, the tighter the despotism.” The Covid era has seen endless
indignities, humiliations, and abuse heaped upon the public, each more
outrageous than the last. It is as if someone is performing a
psychological experiment to see how much people are willing to take.
Let’s tell them that masks don’t work, and then reverse it and require
them to mask up. Let’s tell them they can’t shake hands. Let’s tell them
they can’t go near each other. Let’s shut down their churches, choirs,
businesses, and festivals. Let’s stop them from gathering for the
holidays. Let’s make them inject poison into their bodies. Let’s make
them do it again. Let’s make them do it to their children. Let’s censor
their first-hand stories as “false information.” Let’s feed them obvious
absurdities to see what they’ll swallow. Let’s make promises and break
them. Let’s make the same promises again and break them again. Let’s
require authorization for their every movement. Wow, they’re still going
along with it? Let’s see how much more they will take.
I
have written the above as if the bullying powers were a bunch of
cackling sadists delighting in the humiliation of their victims. That is
not accurate. Most people staffing our governing institution are
normal, decent human beings. While it is also true that these
institutions are hospitable environments for martinets, control freaks,
and sadists, more often they turn people into martinets,
control freaks, and sadists. These individuals are more symptom than
cause of the generalized abuse of the public today. They are
functionaries, playing the roles that a systemically abusive drama
requires. Causing suffering is not their root motivation, it is to
establish control. The quest for power doubtless finds justification in
the idea that it is all for the greater good. Yes, they think, it would
be bad if evil people were in charge of the surveillance, censorship,
and coercive apparatus, but fortunately it is we, the rational,
intelligent, far-seeing, science-based good guys who are at the helm.
Through
the absolute conviction by those who hold power that they are the good
guys, power transforms from a means to an end. As maybe it was to begin
with—Orwell dispels the false justifications of power when he has
O’Brien say:
The Party seeks power entirely for its
own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested
solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only
power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.
We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know
what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves,
were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists
came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage
to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even
believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time,
and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings
would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever
seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a
means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish
the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object
of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to
understand me?'
The theme resumes on the next page:
He
paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster
questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over
another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly.
By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering,
how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power
is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds
to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own
choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
Thus
it is that the privation, humiliation, and suffering of those they
dominate is pleasing to the controllers. It isn’t suffering per se that pleases them. They may even consider it a regrettable necessity. It pleases them as a hallmark of submission.
Covid-era
policies cannot be understood merely through the lens of public health.
In an earlier series of essays I explored them from the perspective of
sacrificial violence, mob morality, dehumanization, and the exploitation
of these by fascistic forces. Equally important is the perspective of
power. Seeing Covid through the lens of rational public health, of
course we should expect the “end of the pandemic” quite soon. Seeing
through the lens of power, we cannot be so sanguine, any more than the
bullied child can hope the bully will stop because, after all, I’ve done
everything he told me to.
The bully doesn’t want the victim to do
X, Y, and Z for their own sake. He wants to establish the principle
that the victim will do X, Y, Z, or A, B, or C, on demand. That’s why
arbitrary, unreasonable, ever-shifting demands are characteristic of an
abusive relationship. The more irrational the demand, the better. The
controllers find it satisfying to see everyone dutifully wearing their
masks. As with O’Brien, it is power, not actual public safety, that
inspires them. That is why they roundly ignore science casting doubt on
masks, lockdowns, and social distancing. Effectiveness was never the
root motivation for those policies to begin with.
I learned about
this too in school. In the senseless, degrading busy work and the
arbitrary rules, I detected a hidden curriculum: a curriculum of
submission.3
The principal issued a series of trivial rules under the pretext of
“maintaining a positive learning environment.” Neither the students nor
the administration actually believed that wearing hats or chewing gum
impeded learning, but that didn’t matter. Punishments were not actually
for the infraction itself; the real infraction was disobedience. That is
the chief crime in a dominance/submission relationship. Thus, when
German police patrol the square with meter sticks to enforce
social distancing, no one need believe that the enforcement will
actually stop anyone from getting sick. The offense they are patrolling
against is disobedience. Disobedience is indeed offensive to the abusive
party, and to anyone who fully accepts a submissive role in relation to
it. When “Karens” report on their neighbors for having more than the
permitted number of guests, is it a civic-minded desire to slow the
spread that motivates them? Or are they offended that someone is
breaking the rules?
It is uncomfortable for those who have
knuckled under to a bully to see someone else stand up to him. It
disrupts the idea of powerlessness and the role, which may have become
perversely comfortable, of the victim. It invokes the initiatory moment
by making an unconscious choice conscious: “I could do that too.” To
resist the abuser asks others if they will resist too. It is far from
inevitable that they will accept the invitation, yet the example of
courage is more powerful than any exhortation.
Today a wave of
resistance to Covid policies is surging across the globe. You’ll see
little mention of it in mainstream media, but thousands and tens of
thousands are protesting all across Europe, Thailand, Japan, Australia,
North America… pretty much anywhere that lockdowns and vaccine mandates
have been applied. People are risking arrest to defy lockdowns and
curfews. They are walking out of jobs, losing licenses, enduring forced
closures of their businesses, sometimes even losing custody of their
children because they refuse to comply with vaccine mandates. They are
getting kicked off social media for speaking out. They are sacrificing
concerts, sports, skiing, travel, college, careers, and livelihoods.
Under compulsory vaccination laws In Austria, they will soon risk
prison.
Some
people have much more to lose than others by speaking out, refusing
vaccination, or engaging in civil disobedience. As someone who has
relatively little to lose, it is not my job to demand other people be
brave. It isn’t anyone’s job. We can, though, describe the reality of
the situation. That fosters bravery, because it isn’t only external
fear, force, and threat that breeds submission. In an abusive
relationship the victim often adopts some of the abuser’s narrative: I
am weak. I am contemptible. I am powerless. You are right. I am wrong. I
need you. I deserve this. I am crazy. This is normal. This is OK.
When
the victim internalizes the abuser, I say that the bandits have
breached the castle walls. I know well what it is like to be a fugitive
in my own castle, dodging the patrolling invaders to protect my secret
sanity.
My understanding of the bullying victim comes from direct
experience. I was among the youngest in my grade and reached puberty
quite late. At age 12 I was a scrawny 4’10”, 90-pound weakling among the
hulking adolescents of my former friend group. Their cruel jokes and
torments were mostly not intended to cause physical pain, but rather to
assert dominance and humiliate. Fighting back was not much of an
option—the ringleader was literally twice my weight. When I tried to
fight back, the gang looked at each other with amusement. “Uh oh,” they
said, “Chucky’s getting mad! Did your daddy tell you to stand up to us,
Chucky?” The next thing I knew, I was on the floor in a submission hold,
surrounded by a chorus of mocking laughter. That was what happened when
I resisted. Yet submission didn’t work either; it appeased them for a
day or perhaps a few minutes or not at all. It was an invitation to
further violence. In this difficult situation, I internalized the
abusers by taking on their opinion of myself as pathetic and
contemptible.4
In
this case, literally fighting back was futile. My initiatory journey
took the form of stepping into the unknown of finding new friends—a
frightening prospect in the cacophony and chaos of the junior high
cafeteria. Exiting the role of victim doesn’t usually mean physical
combat or legal combat, though it might. Invariably, it means refusing
to comply with violation or humiliation. In real life it could be
blocking a caller, getting a restraining order, or simply running away.
It cannot be a mere gesture. It must be determined and sustained until
the old role no longer beckons.
It is worth noting that none of my
abusers were particularly bad people. Nor were those who joined in the
laughter, nor those who stood by in disapproving silence. They went on
to become solid contributing members of society, good fathers and
husbands. There was something in the confluence of our biographies that
called them to the role of abuser, enabler, or bystander at that moment.
The abuser-victim drama issues a powerful casting call. An abusive
spouse may no longer occupy that role in a subsequent marriage. The
roles allow each actor to discover—and possibly integrate and
transcend—something in themselves. So it is society-wide as well. What
will the functionaries of our abusive, degrading, oppressive system
become when the drama ends? Already a lot of them are getting sick of
their roles. The victim does the abuser no favor by prolonging the
drama.
Earlier I wrote that often, the point of courage comes when
the pain of submission grows intolerable. The erstwhile victim reaches a
breaking point and throws caution to the wind. The abuser may still
wield the outward apparatus of power, but no longer does that power have
an ally within the victim, who becomes ungovernable. A lot of people
are reaching that breaking point now. Powering the aforementioned wave
of resistance is a hurricane of fury brewing just offshore of official
reality. If you want to get a sense of it, subscribe to the Telegram
channel “They Say Its Rare.” It displays without comment Tweets from
vaccine-harmed individuals and their friends and families. Thousands
upon thousands of Tweets, raw, outraged, and indignant. Most of these
people will never comply with vaccination again no matter what the
pressure, nor will many of their friends. Perhaps this partly explains
low public uptake of boosters. (That and the fact that the first two
shots did not deliver the promised rewards of immunity or freedom.)
The
drama continues. The bully does not relent at the first sign of
resistance. On the soul level, the bully serves his purpose only when he
provokes real, sustained courage. As resistance grows, so grows the
coercion. We are very nearly at a tipping point. The scale is evenly
balanced—so finely, perhaps, that the weight of one person may tip it.
Could that person be you? Whatever reasons you have to comply, to stay
silent, to keep your head down—and they may be very good reasons
indeed—please do not accept the insidious false hope that someone else
will take the risk if you do not.
What can one person do? Will it
matter if I resist, if too many others do not? Five percent of the
population can be locked up, locked in, or locked out of society. Forty
percent cannot. Will you resist and risk being one of the five percent?
Safer to wait and see, isn’t it. Safer to wait until after critical mass
has been reached, and join the winning side.
Of all the lies of a
controlling power, the key lie is the powerlessness of its victim. That
lie is a form of sorcery, coming true to the extent it is believed. All
modern people live within a pervasive metaphysical version of that lie.
In a Newtonian universe of deterministic forces, indeed it matters
little what one person does. It is wholly irrational for the discrete
and separate self to be brave, to defy the mob, or to stand up to power.
Sure, if lots of people do it, things will change, but you aren’t lots
of people, you are just one person. So why not let other people do it?
Your choice won’t much affect theirs.
To refute that logic with
logic would require a metaphysical treatise that reclaims self and
causality from their Cartesian prison. So I won’t use logic. Instead
I’ll appeal to Logos—the fiery logic of the heart. Something in you
knows that your private struggles and the choices of just-one-person are
significant. Furthermore, something in you knows when the time has come
to make the choice, to be brave. You can feel the approach of the
breaking point. It may feel like, “I’ve had enough. Enough!” It may be a
calm clarity. It may be a leap in the dark. Probably you recognize the
moment I’m describing; most of us have gone through some life initiation
of this kind, bursting out of a cocoon of fear. In that moment you know
something significant has happened. The world looks different. That is
because it is different.
An abuser, whether a person or a system, offers an opportunity to graduate to a new degree of sovereignty. We claim by example what a human being is.
When made at risk, such a claim issues forth as a prayer. An
intelligence beyond rational understanding responds to that prayer, and
reorganizes the world around it. We may experience this as
synchronicity, which seems to happen with uncanny frequency just at
those moments where one takes a leap in the dark. She leaves the abusive
spouse in the dead of night with nowhere to go. Yet she is not
reckless, because she knows It is time. She steps out into
nothingness and Lo! Something meets her foot. A path invisible from the
starting point opens with each step along it.
So it shall be. The
world will rearrange itself around the brave choices millions of people
are making as they trust the knowledge, It is time. If you join
us, you will be witness to a most marvelous paradox. The transition to a
more beautiful world is a mass awakening into sovereignty, far beyond
the doing of any hero, any leader, any individual. Yet you will know
that it was you—your choice!—that was the fulcrum of the turning of the
age.
This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Estimates
of Spanish flu deaths range from 17 million to 50 million. The global
population was somewhat under 2 billion. In terms of life-years lost the
contrast is even more stark. In the US in 1918-1919, 99% of casualties
were among people under 65 years of age, and half were in people age
20-40. The median age of death with Covid is around 80.
The
resemblance of school to lockdown society is uncanny. In school, one’s
movements are subject at all times to authorization. A hall pass is
given for essential functions. And the top authority, superseding even
the principal, is the doctor’s note.
Some
readers may suspect that I am my defiance of Covid orthodoxy comes from
unprocessed trauma from my youth. Maybe I’ve been playing out my own
psychodrama on the projection screen of current affairs, projecting
abuse onto a benign public health system and its dedicated doctors and
scientists. If you are tempted to discount my analysis on these grounds,
please consider that I am not unaware of this possibility.
Thanks to sabelmouse for contributing this article.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
COVID and the Law of Karma
It’s a spiritual battle. Most spiritual leaders have failed us.
Guy Crittenden
Let’s face it: many spiritual practitioners don’t
have much of a ground game, at least when it comes to fighting
totalitarian takeovers.
I’ve seen this writ small and large since the COVID operation started
in early 2020. Many spiritual friends have been missing in action,
unable to handle “the energy” of protest rallies. I appreciate that
raising their frequency in private could shift things, but a lot of
people (including children) may perish before the good vibes make a
difference.
On the writ large level, I won’t soon forget seeing photos of
Sadhguru hanging out with World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab.
The situation wasn’t innocent before.
The human family was not in right relationship with nature, God,
source, our higher selves — whatever you want to call it. A karmic debt
built up over decades of US imperialism (and other insults to human
decency), which sprouted dreadful vines from the bloody soil of
centuries of unimaginable exploitation and genocide.
We lazily pretend the colonial era somehow ended with the British Empire.
The central-bank-perpetual-war-story arc (that Catherine Austin Fitts
talks about) connects the founding of the British and Dutch East India
companies four centuries ago with the moment the first crisis actor
keeled over for the cameras in Wuhan, China.
In the 20th century we endured the dual scourges of communism and
fascism, and Apartheid regimes in South Africa and Palestine, over 70
CIA coup d’états, and sickening unfairness and injustice everywhere.
Almost every armed conflict has been a bankers’ war based on a false
flag attack, and most civil wars have been stoked by foreign mercenaries.
Case in point: Libya. Or Syria.
I wonder if the Rwanda conflict wasn’t a test for some Voice of God
technology (that we know exists) in preparation for the worldwide zombie
apocalypse that the CDC pretends to make light of.
If we peek behind the curtain of peoples declared religious
affiliations, we’re likely to find their true allegiance is to the cult
of scientism for which the true cathedral is the corporate head office.
People might pray, but the shopping mall receives their most convincing
genuflections, whether we’re in Dallas, Rome or Dubai.
And now the vast karmic debt must be paid. And it is being paid,
quite literally, with our coagulated blood and, most recently, the blood
of our children. Lord Baphomet must be pleased by the installation of defibrillators in elementary schools and the release of new blood thinners for children.
Many will soon learn the full meaning of the Indian term “Kali Yuga” and Goddess Kali’s necklace of skulls, her goblet of blood, and her shimmering sword.
Make no mistake: the New World Order (NWO) is being imposed in about
200 countries right now by a corporate oligarchy whose accomplishments
include that they convinced most people the NWO was only a conspiracy
theory. (Like anti-vaxxer, these are spell words.)
“Two weeks to flatten the curve” has yielded to a full press
assault on the laws and constitutions of every country, and especially
the Commonwealth nations whose property rights and common law traditions
are intolerable to both the communitarian values and the eugenicist (transhuman) goals of the predator class.
Commentators have (correctly) described what’s happening as a contest
between good and evil, and even as the Apocalypse. Adherents of the
Abrahamic religions see this as a fight between God (or Christ) and
Satan and they’re finding evidence in the many satanic symbols (such as
666) in the logos and publications of various globalist institutions,
from Google to CERN to Microsoft’s patent to mine crypto from human
energy.
The Pope himself convened a conference of transhumanists at the
Vatican. (He promotes the injections despite their containing aborted
fetus cells.) The leaders of most Western faiths have kissed the ring of
globalist institutions, ergo we see uninjected parishioners excluded
from attending service.
There are exceptions, of course, which in my experience was marching
through the streets of Toronto with Bible Christians (like Mennonites)
with whom I felt sudden affinity.
Shifting east, karma is a big topic.
Its lean Zen Buddhist conception will serve us here, as opposed to
the complicated ideas of, say, Tibetan Buddhism, which focuses on cycles
of death and rebirth, and incorporates deities from earlier shamanic
practices.
For Zen practitioners, karma is a forthright law that corresponds
with the notion in physics that every action has an equal and opposite
reaction. Even if I escape punishment in human institutions for some
misdeed, any harm I do to another being puts me out of harmony with the
way of things; I disrupt a cosmic homeostasis.
If, for instance, I steal without getting caught, I’m punished
nonetheless living in a world where stealing happens — a world in which “I have stolen.” And this is more corrosive than judicial punishments, from a spiritual perspective.
With sufficient conscious evolution, we humans wouldn’t need laws to
govern behaviour, much less police to enforce them. (This is what
serious anarchists think.) Instead, our spiritual poverty, our conscious
stuntedness, has led to a Pied Piper hell realm where kids contract
myocarditis and Australia’s First People are trucked to internal
displacement camps.
Unless people rise up (and soon!), we will all live in an
AI-controlled dystopia, surveilled by millions of facial recognition
cameras networked with satellites and social credit score algorithms. To
date our concerns have fallen on the dead ears of human leaders; there
will be no appealing to the better nature of robot dogs or swarms of
flying drones.
Let’s be clear: There will be no human beings in the ultimate New
World Order. We’re slated for elimination either from the jabs,
starvation, or radical augmentation.
I was reminded recently of the “weighing of the heart” scene in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead. The king cannot access the celestial realms
unless his heart is lighter than a feather. The past 20 months have
revealed much about the “heart weight” of many spiritual teachers. Most
have been revealed as frauds, as quick to engage in bypassing as any
proponent of mRNA technology.
This first came to my attention when I stumbled upon social media
posts from a yoga teacher with whom I’d taken a workshop, who exposed
himself as a mask-wearing Karen of the highest order, and an ersatz
American liberal to boot, trapped in the dead-end false dichotomy of
left versus right politics. (A Biden fan, unsurprisingly.) He
excommunicated me on Facebook after I disavowed the orthodoxy.
My greatest disappointment has been with a Sanskrit scholar who has
translated some important sutras and published what I consider the
definitive book on Tantra traditions. This author is an accomplished
practitioner as well as a translator, and his teaching included
interesting mudras.
I still haven’t finished his landmark Tantra book, since every time I
read a few pages I spend the next day contemplating their profound
implications, which align squarely with insights gleaned from my own
journey in Zen Buddhism and other modalities, and especially with my
work with shamanic visionary plants, about which I wrote a book that won
an award in 2018.
This serious scholar-practitioner has heavily promoted the official
COVID and “vaccination” narrative on social media, and has encouraged
his students to get the jab. He even recorded a video to warn people
away from dangerous anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, in which he extolled
his followers to trust The Science.
Witnessing this was simply unbearable for me. How, I wondered, could
someone who so clearly “gets it” in regard to the nondual perspective of
eastern mysticism fall so hard for a cliché of scientism that is
harming and killing millions, while a digital prison is erected around
the human family?
To my mind, the universe is nudging us to turn away from shallow
teachers, false gurus and plastic shamans, and to turn instead inward
for guidance. When we “build back better” let’s not construct the
metaverse or anti-health paradigm promoted by deep state apparatchiks
like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. It’s time also to break
with spiritual bypassers who can recite the Diamond Sutra while ignoring
the jewel inside their own heart.
Let’s build something new and different, based on the principle of
compassion and mutual assistance. Perhaps it’s nothing new, but instead
deeply ancient. Terence McKenna called it the Archaic Revival and I consider this an intriguing latter-day prophecy.
A radical shift in this direction could interrupt the globalist plan
and reduce our karmic burden such that we could assuage our shortcomings
by, perhaps. lighting some incense, and not (for example) tossing our
children on a pyre.
Love and truth will win in the end. Our willingness to rise in
defense of what is right and true will determine the length of our
journey, which could end tomorrow if enough of us stopped complying.
A Culture War in Four Acts: Loudoun County, Virginia. Part Two: “The Incident.”
An
Underground Railroad simulation at an elementary school brings a
long-simmering political dispute out into the open, triggering a bizarre
series of unfortunate events
February
5th, 2019. An educational consultant named Dr. Linda Deans walked to
the lectern at a meeting of the Loudoun County School Board. Addressing
issues like black student underrepresentation in the gifted programs and
overrepresentation in disciplinary cases, she asked the board to remedy
matters through more funding of diversity and inclusion positions.
Loudoun had a diversity officer, but Deans stumped for a department.
“To
be real about equity and inclusion, contracting out the work might be a
good idea because insiders may be — hmm — influenced by politics,” she
said, pausing to apply a dollop of contemptuous stank on the hmm.
She went on: “I highly recommend that LCPS offer this serious work to a
reputable organization, such as the Loudoun Freedom Center.”
The
Center, where Deans worked, is a nonprofit founded by charismatic local
pastor and new NAACP chapter president Michelle Thomas. The meaning was
clear: Loudoun had race problems, and if the board wanted to be credited
with taking those seriously, it had to make a financial commitment, and
to the right destination.
Deans was followed by the Education
Chair for the local NAACP chapter, Robin Burke. Burke and husband Steven
had recently met with Loudoun’s Director of Teaching and Learning, and
weren’t happy.
“On Wednesday, January 16th, 2019,” she says, “my
husband and I attended a meeting facilitated by Mr. James Dallas to
discuss our concerns regarding our son… being denied admission to the
Academies of Loudoun.” She paused. “We are convinced that the admission
process is disjointed, unfair and represents a clear example of historical institutional racism.
Therefore, we expect now more than ever that our straight A-student
[son] be unconditionally admitted to the Academies of Loudoun.”
The
Board was silent for a moment, some members confused. They only set
policy and had no power to intervene in an individual gifted admissions
question. Also, the admissions process was blind: reviewers had no
access to names or racial identities, seeing only test scores, grades,
courses taken, etc. To some members, this was an obvious reply to any
charge of “historical institutional racism.” To Burke, the blind nature
of the testing was the racism.
The fact that Loudoun had
race-neutral admissions was “true, therefore problematic,” she told me
by email. “By removing personal identifiable information,” she added,
“it is impossible to assess an applicant’s unique experiences alongside
traditional measures of academic achievement such as grades and test
scores.”
Burke had reached out to several officials about her son.
After correspondence didn’t result in changes, she went public with
complaints. Asked about this, she replied, “As the Chair of Education
for the NAACP, I represent all students of color,” adding that, “These
claims were brought to the attention of the School Board and the
Superintendent,” whose “inaction led to the NAACP contacting the AGs
office.”
Loudoun has a gruesome history on race and schools. In
1956, the county infamously voted to defund schools rather than follow
the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education desegregation
order. Not until 1962 did the first black student attend a “white”
school. Segregation was essentially pried from the cold dead fingers of
this county’s grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and suspicions in the
black community naturally linger. However, the current controversies
aren’t a clear continuation of civil rights-era battles. Some aspects
may be similar, but the legal context at least is reversed: in place of a
decades-long effort on the part of groups like the NAACP to expunge
racial considerations from the law, the new thinking is that progress is
impossible without them. Whether or not that’s a warranted belief is a
separate issue, but it’s how the new debate is framed.
Heading
into the winter of 2018-2019, a dispute between county officials and the
NAACP had been escalating. This disagreement would eventually be
memorialized in the aforementioned formal complaint to the Virginia
Attorney General’s Office, called NAACP Loudoun Branch vs. Loudoun County Public Schools.
Loudoun’s
NAACP leadership increasingly felt statistical inequities in areas like
gifted admissions or discipline were explained by racism, and policy
proposals often mere cover for perpetuation of an inherently
discriminatory system. For a long time, they clashed in this with an old
guard of county officials trying to cling to do-gooder liberalism’s
once-standard position that a variety of addressable factors, including
racism but also economics and other issues, were the cause of
discrepancies.
The latter group’s idea for addressing gifted
admissions once involved things like Loudoun’s adoption of EDGE
(“Experiences Designed for Growth and Excellence”). The plan was to
provide “intensive, engaging support” early in elementary school to
talented-but-disadvantaged students to help them compete in the
difficult admissions processes ahead. The school system had long been
pushing back against more drastic action, like eliminating standardized
testing, that might heighten complaints about a lack of rigor in
Loudoun’s once-celebrated school system. The county had already
eliminated final and midterm requirements in 2015, leading some parents
to complain of their kids being left unprepared for college.
NAACP
officials were more and more uninterested in those concerns, demanding
direct intervention to square ugly numbers. In 2017, after data was
released showing 88% of Loudoun teachers were white compared with only
48% of students, then-NAACP chapter head Philip Thompson threatened to
file a federal civil rights complaint. “We believe we will only see an
increase in the number of minority teachers when LCPS puts requirements
on the people hiring the teachers,” Thompson said.
Rhetorically, this was walking a fine line, since Supreme Court cases like the 1977 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke had deemed explicit racial quotas in public education illegal. According to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, Thompson
hastened to add he wasn’t “suggesting the school division adopt racial
hiring quotas,” merely applying pressure to meet “targets.” However,
putting “requirements on the people hiring” seemed to have a clear
meaning.
By 2019, the NAACP seemed out of patience, moving toward
the Ibram Kendi conception of equity, which holds that “there is no
such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” As Kendi puts it,
“racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question
is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity.” Loudoun
in this view fell under the latter category, even if the admissions
inequity, for instance, overwhelmingly redounded to the county’s Asian
minority. (Ironically, Asians were also massively underrepresented in
school hiring in 2017, making up 3% of teachers despite being 20% of the
student body, though this fact didn’t make it into the NAACP
complaint).
When asked about the legality of quotas, which she
would later publicly support, Burke’s response was that the legal system
itself was part of the problem and therefore not relevant. “As you are
aware, the legal system has protected and in some cases
perpetuated systemic racism. It was LEGAL to own people,” she said. She
added:
“LCPS needs to make of amends for the wrong they have done,
by helping those who have been wronged, African American students and
families. Reperations [sic].”
Late in the fall of 2018, a
group of fourth-grade teachers at Madison’s Trust elementary school in
Brambleton, Virginia got together to plan the curriculum for Black
History Month in February 2019. At the time, principal David Stewart was
following in the footsteps of Superintendent Eric Williams, described
on school websites as a devotee of an educational theorist named Philip
Schlechty, by pushing a program called Project-Based Learning. Schlechty
scoffed at the idea that a teacher was a mere “facilitator” of
“personal development,” seeing the educator as a more muscular figure
who helped ensure the “functioning of a democratic society” by
“transmitting the collective wisdom of the group” through “authentically
engaging activities.”
Loudoun’s schools touted “Project Based Learning” as such an “engaging” approach that fused the “3 Rs” (a Relevant, Rigorous, and Responsive curriculum) and the “4 Cs” (utilizing Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity).
What did those seven letters mean, at a school like Madison’s Trust? In
practice, that classroom instruction might be bolstered by
cross-pollinating lessons with a gym class.
The 4th grade team
that fall was working on a “PBL” on “Notable African Americans.” One of
the school’s three PE teachers volunteered that he’d been to a
conference years before, where he’d heard about a plan that sounded to
him like a potential complement to any lesson about Harriet Tubman.
Ian Prior of the Loudoun parent group Fight for Schools later brought details forward in a story for The Federalist, and noted in a longer private report
that this teacher had attended the 2011 meeting of the Virginia
Association For Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance
(VAPHERD) at the Hyatt Regency in Reston. There, a program was presented
called “Underground Railroad”:
In
“Underground Railroad,” kids in a PE class are led through an obstacle
course simulating the path of slaves to safety along Tubman’s famous
road to freedom. Along the way, they stop at various stations, where
they might be introduced to a “drinking gourd” to learn that slaves used
the Big Dipper constellation to help find the north star, or help each
other move through hula hoops, or watch a video about Tubman, etc.
Such
simulations have been going on for at least thirty years, if not
longer. One educator I spoke with who’d used a version of the program,
Geoffrey Bishop of “Nature’s Classroom” in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, said he
thought he first came across the idea at a conference in New Hampshire
35 years ago.
The most famous “UGRR” simulation is the Kambui
Education Initiative, a re-enactment founded by Kamau Kambui, a former
devotee to a Malcolm X-inspired secessionist group called the Republic
of New Afrika. The Initiative takes place in a thousand-acre slice of
Minnesota’s Wilder Forest, dates back to the late eighties at least, and
is part living museum, part outdoors adventure. Anthony Galloway, a
pastor and equity coach who does use the term “critical race theory” in
describing what his “Dare 2 Be Real” program teaches, cites experience with the Kambau Initiative
as part of his credentials. However, both he and the current head of
the Initiative, Chris Crutchfield, vehemently deny that he or Galloway
had anything to do with any public school programs. “It’s abhorrent to
me that people might think that,” Crutchfield says. “If it’s not done in
the right way, it can be problematic.”
In the end, the origin story doesn’t really matter. As the New Yorker wrote
last year, “UGRR” simulations became a craze beginning in the nineties,
long ago reaching into public school classes from coast to coast.
Writer Julian Lucas described it as part of a movement to replace the
old Schoolhouse Rock heroes with progressive updates:
The
runaway has emerged as the emblematic figure of a renovated national
mythology, hero of a land that increasingly sees its Founding Fathers as
settler-colonist génocidaires. In their stead rises a patriotism
centered on slavery and abolition, and a campaign to set the country’s
age-old freedom cult on a newly progressive footing.
No
matter who came up with the Madison’s Trust lesson plan, the idea
clearly grew out of this same nest of ideas, with the aim of valorizing
Harriet Tubman, Henry “Box” Brown, and other Railroad figures. Until
there were complaints, there were plenty of progressive educators in
Virginia who seemed to think these simulations were a good idea. A story
in the Virginia Pilotfrom 2006 showed teachers boasting of how lifelike they’d made theirs.
In
that case, a pair of PE teachers in Chesapeake “transformed their gym
into an eerie obstacle course” and “allowed the school’s 800 students to
experience a little of what the slaves encountered during their
nighttime runs.” Parents volunteered to play roles as slave-catchers and
“patrolled the gym to the recorded sounds of barking dogs and galloping
horses,” and teachers added heavy doses of verisimilitude:
Students
who made unnecessary noise or skipped obstacles found themselves caught
and wearing gray construction paper manacles. There were no second
chances. The slaves never got any, the teachers explained.
“Some first- and second-graders cried,” the Pilot noted, in a deeply buried lede.
A
version of this was even officially approved for use in Loudoun County
at one point, only to be discontinued years before the 2019 incident.
Though the Loudoun County Schools declined to speak on the record for
this story, it’s safe to say there’s disagreement about who signed off
on what at Madison’s Trust, whose much watered-down version incidentally
didn’t involve dogs or manacles. The Physical Education teachers are
adamant that principal Stewart, as well as the Dean, Robert Rauch,
visited the simulation in its first days — all of this took place
between a Monday and a Wednesday on February 4th, 5th, and 6th, of 2019 —
and gave it a thumbs-up. Other teachers and even Stewart tweeted about it in approval, claiming the students were “100% engaged.” Those messages have since been deleted.
An
amazing part of this story is how close it came to never happening. “We
would have been fine not going cross-curricular,” one of the three
Physical Education teachers told me. “We’d have been just fine doing our
normal stuff.”
Much later, what happened in the district would be
portrayed as a white backlash against teaching the “truth” about
America’s past. Buzzfeed for instance would eventually describe
the Loudoun controversy as an effort by “right-wing activists” to “ban
lessons and conversations around race, racism, and slavery.” A WashingtonPost article described local citizens as being against “efforts to promote racial justice,” and blamed Donald Trump and his followers for seeing “hateful lies” in “teaching about slavery and racism.”
Yet
the triggering incident in Loudoun clearly involved an overenthusiastic
attempt to teach students about the Underground Railroad. Any
progressive’s knee-jerk response to this story would involve aching to
go back in time, Terminator-style, to quash thoughts of
sticking “conversations about slavery” in a period normally reserved for
volleyball and sack races. The issue wasn’t teachers trying to sabotage
an antiracist lesson plan, but rather trying too hard to teach one.
Even if you saw it as problematic, it was surely the opposite of not
wanting to “teach about slavery and racism.”
What happened next
followed the pattern after simulations in Carrolton, Ohio, in 1997
(“Living-History Lessons Resurrect Old Wounds”), or Atlanta in 2013
(“Parent Says Slavery Experiment at Camp Went Too Far”) or Chicago in
2018 (“Illinois School Made Black Students Pretend to Be Slaves”) or
countless other places: things went wrong. The typical complaint
involved a black student coming home with a tale about having been asked
to role-play a slave in school, followed by said child’s parent going
somewhat understandably ballistic (“That’s when the blood vessel kind of
broke,” is how one Atlanta parent described hearing his daughter’s
story).
The parents of one black child complained about the
Brambleton simulation, and what followed was a perfect metaphor for so
much of what’s wrong with modern American politics.
Taking the
dimmest possible view of the Madison’s Trust simulation, it was a
misguided attempt by white teachers to get in the spirit of both Black
History month and the Schlechty-ian concept of “authentically engaging
activities.” One can imagine a rational response involving an
air-clearing conversation between offended parents and school officials,
followed by an apology, a possible re-think of certain academic fads,
and maybe, depending on how conversations went, something like a course
of sensitivity training for everyone involved, senior officials
included.
It almost happened that way. The parents reportedly did
have a meeting with Madison’s Trust officials, and there was an effort
at an apology and an explanation. However, a national crisis ensued
instead. Pastor Thomas went to multiple local media outlets in early
February 2019 to decry
the “sickening and racist” use of a “runaway slave game” that, she
said, highlighted the need to commit to investments in race and bias
training. “The incident” now became fodder for advancing the Attorney
General complaint.
“Literally the top of the iceberg,” she said. “We have a longstanding list of incidents of racial discrimination.”
If
there is a tide in the affairs of men, a flood now carried the NAACP
forward. On February 6, 2019, when both the Madison’s Trust incident and
Robin Burke’s speech to the Board were taking place, news came out that
the state’s Attorney General, Democrat Mark Herring, had as a
19-year-old college undergrad done himself up in blackface. In the kind
of perfectly preposterous detail that would mark many later events in
this story, college-Herring was trying to look like the rapper Kurtis Blow of Basketball and If I Ruled The World fame.
“Shocking,”
said Blow, when apprised of the news. “Totally offensive and
disrespectful, degrading. It’s ugly. You know, I’m praying for my man
Mr. Herring right now.”
Given that Herring’s boss, Governor Ralph
Northam, had already been nabbed in his own blackface controversy, this
was a Krakatoa-sized PR disaster for a high-ranking Democratic Party pol
who reportedly still hoped to squeak through with his career intact,
and run for re-election in 2021. Worse, Herring graduated from Loudoun
schools, a fact Thomas seized upon.
“[Herring] graduated from
Loudoun Valley, so of course he wouldn’t know what he was doing, going
up, dressing as blackface, because blackface is never discussed in the
curriculum,” she thundered. “The insensitivity is astronomical. We are in a racism crisis in Virginia.” Herring issued a statement
apologizing for the “pain” he’d caused, underlining his commitment to
“work affirmatively to address the racial inequities… that we know
exist.”
By May 22nd, 2019, Thomas and the NAACP would file a
formal complaint against Loudoun County with Herring’s office,
eventually listing “Terms of Conciliation.” They demanded the
elimination of standardized testing for advanced programs like the
Academies of Loudoun in favor of a new, “holistic” process featuring
minimum criteria like “final grade of C or above,” and appended as
evidence the report of the outside consultants about to be invited in to
give the schools a racial colonoscopy in the wake of the “runaway
slave” incident. Herring would go on to adopt the consultants’
recommendations, and within a year, he would announce he was running for
re-election, buoyed by the endorsement of — you guessed it — Loudoun
NAACP chief Michelle Thomas.
All that still was to come, however.
On February 26, 2019, before another gathering of the School Board,
Thomas was still trying to pressure local officials into allowing the
outside inspection. She called for the resignation of Superintendent
Williams, among other things, and addressed the Board in fiery language.
“‘Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.’ Dr. Martin Luther King,” she
began, gravely. “Since day one of the integration of Loudoun County
public schools some sixty years ago, African-Americans have been under
constant and utter threat. And 2019 is not so different from 1960, in
that African Americans still have challenges with curriculum content —
racist curriculum content. That is how we get to play a runaway slave
game.”
Apparently in agreement that the Underground Railroad
simulation showed thingsin 2021 America were not so different from 1960,
one speaker after another, many of them white, got up to blast the
racism of the Madison’s Trust PE teachers. The latter incidentally were
placed on leave, while school leadership went unscathed (Stewart lost a
shot at Principal of the Year, a fact that didn’t impress the teachers).
All this happened just as a soon-to-be-white-hot controversy about a
measure to expand protections for LGBTQ students was coming before the
Board.
The Madison’s Trust incident would be rolled into that
issue as well, brought up by speakers as part of a broad argument that
Loudoun’s school system was inherently bigoted and in need of a
house-cleaning. As the press presence became more conspicuous, speakers
at public meetings increasingly wore their affiliations in a literal
sense. Christian parents donned prominently displayed cross necklaces,
while progressives wore rainbow badges and Black Lives Matter pins.
After progressives spoke, audience members silently waved rainbow flags
in a Town Hall version of the “jazz hands” phenomenon that, with minor
alterations, would have perfectly fit the hand-raising portion of any
Pentecostal ceremony.
“I’m here today to express my strong support
for the formation of an ad-hoc committee on equity,” said Natalia
Beardslee, an elementary school teacher in the district. “This committee
is needed because students are being asked to play underground railroad
games.”
“A true equitable culture will address the slave game,” said Zerell Welch.
“Get with it and end your Dixie Mentality!” said Pamela Lewis.
Burke
also spoke. “We are requesting that Loudoun County admit 20% of African
American applicants to the Academies of Learning for the 2019-2020
academic school year,” she said. “We are requesting that you appoint an
independent team of outside professionals.”
The school
administration would soon do just that. It’s hard to look at the
document record and conclude anything but that under a blizzard of
negative headlines, with leaders like Thomas calling for the heads of
people like Superintendent Williams, the school system buckled, tossed a
few gym teachers under the bus, and green-lit a full-tilt outside
diversity audit as a way to ease political pressures. Some local
political figures who initially welcomed what they thought would be a
healthy course of “unconscious bias training” to address issues like
hiring inequity soon found themselves in shock. Within a few months, the
Loudoun schools were transformed into a Boschian hellscape of
penthouse-priced equity consultants, who “saw race everywhere” to
degrees so far beyond even the most demented Fox News fantasies that the corpse of Roger Ailes almost sat up in surprise.
A teacher I spoke with for this story, not based in Virginia, put it like this:
“Education
is dominated by consultants,” she said. “They were former teachers, but
they decide they actually want to make money, so they leave and then
they start these companies.”
Just like soldiers-turned-defense
contractors, or SEC investigators turned corporate defense lawyers,
education consultants often end up selling their services at high-dollar
rates to the same types of public entities where they once toiled,
thanklessly and in the public interest, for small change. Enter the
Equity Collaborative, headed by a lingo-spinning Stanford-trained
ex-teacher called Jamie Almanzan, who by the summer of 2019 would become
one of the most controversial names in northern Virginia.
Although
the county insists the Collaborative’s “Equity Assessment” was in the
works before the Madison’s Trust incident, and the firm did submit a
small invoice for $6000 from August 2018 pointing to a pre-existing
relationship, documents we obtained via a Freedom of Information request
indicate that the first major scope-of-work agreement — which
ultimately paid Almanzan’s firm roughly $500,000 for the assessment and
other work at a rate of $5000 per person, per day — was not struck until
April 4, 2019. Moreover, the expenditures were not approved by the
School Board, which usually had a say in much smaller budget matters.
(See the separate file containing the documents, with the curious chronology).
Almanzan
and his company preach a diversity training gospel that’s increasingly
popular with organizations ranging from Amazon to Goldman, Sachs to the
Pentagon. They describe a pervasive, psychologized conception of racism
that is so deeply entrenched at both an individual and a societal level
that it can never be eradicated, only treated — constantly and by
credentialed experts, of course. Firms like the Equity Collaborative are
professional sin-hunters and good at what they do, smart enough to make
sure clients don’t stray from the point by focusing on fixable
problems. “Economic diversity across the county/division complicates the
discussions about race, leading many people to steer the conversation
away from race to focus on poverty,” would be among their main initial
observations about Loudoun.
For most of the first year after
their arrival, few people outside school officials, a handful of local
politicians, and a smattering of activists knew much about the work the
Equity Collaborative was doing in Loudoun. By the fall of 2020, some
conservative activists like Prior were beginning to raise alarms in
publications like the Washington Free Beacon that had used FOIA
requests to get hold of the Collaborative’s reports. These news stories
contained excerpts that made the Collaborative’s “Assessment” sound
like the lost papers of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, but not everyone was
convinced they could really be that bad. People like Emily
Curtis, a former Clinton Administration official who had never voted for
a Republican, were skeptical. “I hadn’t fully lost my trust in
mainstream media yet,” Curtis recalls. “So I said, ‘Point me at all this
stuff.’”
Curtis read the raw documents. A lot of the ideas struck
first-time readers like her as beyond bizarre, from “affinity groups”
that regularly segregated kids according to race through an “Equity
Ambassador” program that, as originally conceived, would have recruited a
secret network of “Student Leaders of Color” to inform to school
leaders. The Collaborative suggested these “ambassadors” collect
“anonymous student stories/experiences regarding issues of racism,
injustice and inequity” using an electronic form “to ascertain whether
or not the student would like… the issue investigated.”* The Stasi,
but for kids — awesome! Curtis, especially troubled by the affinity
groups, tells a story of approaching various local Democratic officials
with warnings like, “These issues you’re dismissing are going to hurt
you in the next election.”
One prominent local Democrat scoffed in
reply, to the effect that complaints were coming from Fox-watching
racists only. When she approached another currently serving official to
express concerns about the affinity groups, the official replied, “Have
you read White Fragility? You need to do the work.” Curtis was aghast.
“I’m
from the South. I felt like I’d walked into an old-fashioned tent
revival,” she says. “This wasn’t politics. They were trying to save
souls.”
The religious fervor was only just getting started. It
would soon extend to national reporters, national politicians, and other
click-hungry holy rollers, who were about to descend upon the county in
droves. The Great Loudoun Equity Crusade was on.
Figure 1: Hey people telling me what to do! Superhero this.
A brand new medRxiv pre-print study entitled: “The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses”
has graced our world. This paper is so important and it provides
evidence to support what many prominent immunologists and vaccinologists
have been saying for a long time, including myself. These COVID-19 mRNA
injectable products are causing, yes, causing, immune system dysregulation - and not just in the context of the adaptive system, but in the context of the innate system.
Not only that, but these findings provide very good reasons as to why
we are seeing resurgences of latent viral infections and other adverse
events reported in VAERS (and other adverse event reporting systems) and
perhaps more importantly, why we should under no circumstances
inject this crap into our children. Children are fine in the context of
COVID-19 (for the 80 millionth time - this well documented) and this is
due to their extraordinary innate immune response systems.
Let’s rip into some background in immunology, shall we?
Figure
2 shows many of the different cell types involved in the adaptive and
the innate immune system branches. Most of you probably know about T
cells and B cells. I would bet that many more of you have not heard of
my personal favorite killer, the Natural Killer (NK) cell. They kill
infected cells and are of utmost importance to a healthy and functioning
immune system. The cell types involved in the innate immune response
system emit special molecules in response to invaders. These special
molecules primarily comprise defensins, collectins, c-reactive proteins,
lipopolysaccharide (endotoxin) binding proteins and complement factors.
These responses are non-specific and target invading pathogens and even
cancer cells.
Figure 2: The big picture of adaptive versus innate immune cells.
In
a nutshell, in this article, what they found was that the BNT162b2
(Pfizer/BioNTech) injectable products are modulating the production of
inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells upon stimulation with both
specific (SARS-CoV-2) and non-specific (viral, fungal and bacterial)
stimuli whereby the response of innate immune cells to TLR4 and TLR7/8
ligands was weaker after BNT162b2 injection, while fungi-induced
cytokine responses were stronger.
In conclusion, the
mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine induces complex functional reprogramming of innate
immune responses, which should be considered in the development and use
of this new class of vaccines.
Yes. It should be. And it should have been.
So
what is inside the nutshell? Let’s back it up a bit, shall we? What are
acquired/adaptive immune responses and more importantly, what are
innate immune responses? I did say we were going to rip into immunology.
Our immune system’s first line of defense is called the innate immune system.
It comprises the skin (chock full of epidermal dendritic cells or
Langerhans cells), mucous and mucosal epithelium, immune cells such as
natural killer cells, basophils, dendritic cells, mast cells and
macrophages and many molecular mediators such as cytokines,
interleukins, c-reactive proteins and complement factors. The complement
system (Figure 2) is an immutable system vital to proper functioning of
antibodies and phagocytic cells (cells that eat stuff), clearance of
invaders and damaged cells, inflammatory response promotion and membrane
attack complex (MAC) formation (Figure 2). Membrane attack complex.
Cool name for a band.
Figure 2: The complement cascade
The
mucus layer covering the mucosal epithelium acts as a first physical
and biochemical barrier. An additional layer of physical protection
against microorganisms is provided by a tightly interlaced cell-to-cell
network of epithelial cells and intraepithelial lymphocytes. Various
antimicrobial peptides produced by the epithelium and secreted into the
mucosal lumen can directly kill the invading pathogenic bacteria.1
Every
single ‘invader’ such as bacteria or viruses have molecules on their
surfaces known as Pathogen-Associated Molecular Patterns (PAMPs)
that are detectable by cognate molecules on immune cell surfaces call
Pattern Recognition Receptors (PPRs). One type of PRR are Toll-like
Receptors (TLRs). These TLRs come in many types and bind to specific
types of molecules. TLR-7, for example, binds single-stranded RNA
(ssRNA). Hmm. Where have I seen that before? Oh right! SARS-nCoV-2 is an
ssRNA virus. Interesting. There are also cell receptors called
RIG-I-like receptors (RLRs) that sense viral RNA.2
If
a PAMP is detected by a PRR, an intracellular signalling cascade
commences which results in the production of such inflammatory mediators
as Nitric Oxide, histamine, TNF-alpha, IL-1 (protoypic inflammatory
cytokine) and others as part of a pro-inflammatory reaction to quell
invaders. Perhaps of primary note is that via TLR signalling - a
prolific PRR type - Nuclear Factor kappa B (NF-kB) activation ensues.
What is NF-kB?
NF-kB3 plays a key role in regulating the immune response to infection. Incorrect regulation of NF-kB has been linked to cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, septic shock, viral infection, and improper immune development.
In
the presence of danger, the immune system responds via these fantastic
on/off switches and mechanisms, to eliminate said dangers. This is the
natural way of things and it is a constant ebb and flow of immune system
regulatory magic.
Let’s assume the role of the coronavirus and
see what our life would be like in the case of say, a child. You should
know, once again, that children have very strong innateimmune systems.
The links attached refer to excellent works by Dr. Robert Malone and
Dr. Francis Christian on this subject. So I’m a coronavirus and some
arshole just sneezed me all over the face of a child standing next to
me. The person who sneezed is one of those people who wears a mask
incessantly on their chin and then sneezes all over everyone whilst
symptomatic. So the child has me (Dr. Coronavirus or Dr. CV, for short)
all over it’s face. And just so you know, there are many of me. So I
find my way in a misty droplet into the sweet nasal cavity of this child
where I encounter lots of mucousy membranes and sheets of epithelial
cells. Lots of mucous. Mucosaliscious. I imagine it would be like
running through a tunnel full of spider webs like Frodo Baggins did when
he was trying to escape ‘she who needs to feed’ in order to get to the
Mordor volcano to destroy the ring of power. So it’s kind of hard to get
through. The nose. Sort of.
Ok, so most of me gets stuck in the
booger path in the child’s nose. But nasal epithelial cells are chock
full of ACE-2 receptors. I can bind them and thus can easily get inside
the nice and warm cozy cells. There are also CD147 receptors here! So, a
few of me manage to get ‘past’ this mucousy hurdle and bind to yummy
epithelial cells via ACE-2 and CD147 receptors, which to me, are like
red and yellow-colored lollipops of delight leading me into the place
where I can call home and settle down and reproduce. But wait, before we
get into that, since I am lurking around looking for receptors to bind,
I am also encountering a lot of cells. These cells start telling me
that they need to see my green pass if I want to keep lurking. No wait,
no not my green pass, my PAMPs, so that they can find out how dangerous I
am. I am new to this neck of the woods so they’re more than a little
curious about my lurking. So they probe me with their PRR/TLR tools. Oh
man! This is not pleasant at all! Being frisked by dendritic cells is
like being manhandled by an octopus on a mission. So even though I have
no idea, the by-product of their frisk is the inevitable launch of an
army of things hell-bent on removing me from this kid. All of a sudden
I’m surrounded by tenticular cells and they’re throwing TNF-alpha and
IL-1 molotov cocktails at me! And it’s starting to get really hot in
here and I’m like, man, this is not a hospitable environment. What did I
do to deserve this? I’m just an innocent virus ultimately looking for a
place to… breed.
Luckily, I have made a home in some cells. I am
bound to others about to gain entry. But, the immune defenses don’t
stop on the outside of cells; they continue on the inside. I thought I
had found a nice warm and cuddly cell to settle down in and reproduce
in. I have to think again! All of a sudden the PH is like, way too high!
This feels awful! They’re trying to kill me, man! And eventually, they
destroy me before I can get out. One of them sicked this crazy MAC on me
and it poked holes in my home cell that I had managed to get into. They
also used all sorts of internal and external armaments to make sure
they cleared me out. And they did!
How do I know that? Because I am speaking from virus heaven.
So
that’s the imaginary journey of the SARS-nCoV-2 virus and the potent
response of a child’s innate immune system to my presence. Not enough
cells get infected fast enough for an infection to ensue. The kid never
gets to disease state and in most cases, symptoms are excessively mild
or non-existent.
Alas, not enough of me were able to ‘infect’
enough cells to result in enough of me being produced to result in a
‘symptomatic infection’ party party. Innate immune system: 1.
Coronavirus me: 0.
But what if I am reincarnated as mRNAs’ssss.
And let’s go really sci-fi and imagine I am reincarnated as mRNAssss’s
wrapped in a Lipid Nano Particle (LNP) bubble. And what if, I happened
to be injected into someone’s arm muscle. What lives I am having! So
what would be my fate? Well, surely, since I am injected intramuscularly
with a pretty heavy guage needle (22–25-gauge 5/8 inch (16 mm)), I get
inserted pretty deep and in copious amounts into muscle tissue. I
witnessed many a muscle cell screaming in pain! I can’t really see
anything yet because of this fat bubble I am in. But all of a sudden I
feel us moving! So fast! The injector didn’t aspirate to check if I was
being injected into the muscle as planned! It’s like riding the rapids
of the cardiovascular system! Or something. Then suddenly we stop.
There’s some kind of blurry kidney-shaped thing outside. It seems like
the LNP has slimed its way into a cell. And I think we were just dumped
out of the LNP into this cell. Well, ok. This is great news! Since we
have been reincarnated into mRNAs, we can simply find ribosomes and
start translating ourselves into the butterfly proteins we’ve always
wanted to be! And there will be so much of us! Butterlies a swarmin’ in
the body of a person! We have to act fast though, lest we be… degraded,
however. I guess this is why we were wrapped in a LNP.
Later on that day…
So
we are a spike proteins now! Hallelujah. We can do so many things! But
we have to be careful: there are cells everywhere looking to eat us and
turn us into alphabet soup. These so-called antigen-presenting cells
just love to gobble up foreign proteins like us and regurgitate our
entrails and mount them on Major Histocompatability Complex (MHC) I and
II molecules. If they do that, then those T cells and B cells can detect
our ground up guts mounted on these complexes and then build an army of
cells that can recognize us and kill us! We do not want that. We want
to exist. We seem to be doing alright in that desire. We also have to
make sure that we don’t end up killing this person we got injected into!
That wouldn’t help anyone, now would it. We can embed ourselves into
monocytes4 and other cells like epithelial cells5 due to their proclivity to express ACE-26.
But there’s a problem here. Through no fault of our own, we are causing
some serious micro-clotting issues all over this person’s body by
binding all these ACE-2 and CD147 receptors. The inflammatory mediators
produced in response to our presence are in overdrive and the entire
system is on fire! Hyperinflammation abound! The normal systems that
regulate the anti-inflammatory response seem to be on vacation and it
just won’t seem to stop. And it’s all because of little old me! Since I
was designed to be pretty durable with my extra prolines and my
pseudouridines, I am not easily get-riddable. [Word on the street says
that my prolines aren’t preventing me from binding ACE-2 at all.] That
would explain why so many of me are stuck in monocytes. Teehee. By the
way, I forgot to mention, while I was inside the cell as mRNA, there
were these TLR-7 molecules that seemed to find me very attractive. They
detected some of me and in some cells, caused a chain reaction that
obliterated us and the cell.7 TLR-7 is actually really important in the context of COVID-19 clearance.8
Perhaps
the most successful part of our journeys, however, has been the
avoidance of those pesky innate immune mediators in that kid’s nose.
Phew, what a bullet we dodged there, right? So we got catapulted all
over the body, triggered the T and B cells to respond accordingly with
their specificness all along the way, but we avoided all of that other
stuff. That’s some weird under-the-radar stuff right there.
Until
this body flushes me out (which could take 15 months (see reference #4)
unless they inject me again!) I am probably going to cause some systemic
problems while I am here. Of these problems includes the dysregulation
of the innate immune system, the (subsequent) induction of a
hyper-inflamed environment and so many thrombotic events.
I think
we can get into the paper now. This article was meant to be about the
paper, not an immunology lesson. But it seems these things are simply
not mutually exclusive.
So dysregulated inflammation plays an important role in the pathogenesis and severity of COVID-19.9
There are studies that show that long-term innate immune responses can
be either increased (trained immunity) or down-regulated (innate immune
tolerance) after certain vaccines (such as Bacillus Calmette-Guérin
(BCG) and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines) or infections,
so this is not a new thing.10
The way that the authors determined that the innate responses were
being modulated in the context of the COVID-19 (the BNT162b2 one)
injectables, was by checking out if the levels of certain measurable
immune mediators produced in response to TLR stimulation using other
virus, bacteria and fungi antigens, were ‘off’. Trained immunity (the
one with decreases) is often measured by looking at the
rustled-elevated-inflammatory cytokine (like monocyte-derived cytokines
TNF-alpha, IL-1beta and IL-1Ra) leaves. When the TLR-3 and TLR-7
receptors were tickled, the amount of TNF-alpha production was way lower
(significantly so for TLR-7) following dose 2 of the Pfizer stuff.
TNF-alpha
production following stimulation with the TLR7/8 agonist R848 of
peripheral blood mononuclear cells from volunteers was significantly
decreased after the second [injection].
They also
tickled the system with yeast (fungus) and found that the responses
(specifically for IL-1beta - a fever-inducing interleukin) were higher
following dose 1. The production of the anti-inflammatory cytokine
IL-1Ralpha11
(the yin to the IL-1 yang) was reduced in response to a bacterial
antigen (lipopolysaccharide (LPS)) and to yeast after the second
injection - more evidence that there’s a shift to a stronger
inflammatory response to fungal stimuli after injection. They also found
that Interleukin-6 (IL-6) responses were similarly decreased, which is
interesting, because IL-6 induces the liver to produce c-reactive
protein which activates the complement system which helps antibodies out
and promotes inflammation which means that doesn’t this mean that we
should see less inflammation? So many questions. So very few answers.
Dysregulated continual synthesis of IL-6 plays a pathological effect on chronic inflammation and autoimmunity.12
You don’t say.
So
that’s what they found in the paper, in a very small nutshell. Figure 3
shows the design and some of the results of their assays. It basically
shows fold-changes in Interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) (these guys activate
macrophages and induce MHC-II molecule expression) and TNF-alpha in
response to stimulation of blood cells from injected people using TLR
stimulation with various pathogens.
Figure
3: Figure 1. TNF-α and IFN-α production in response to heterologous
stimuli in PBMCs isolated from vaccinated subjects. (A) Description of
the study: vaccination and blood collection days. (B-G)
The
bottom line here is this. We know that innate responses are vital to a
healthy and optimally-functioning immune system. They are vitally
integrated with and into the adaptive responses as these two branches
work in impeccable, complex harmony. We also know that there are cases
where vaccines have caused dysregulation of innate responses in humans.
We also know that something is very, very wrong with these COVID-19
injectable products with regards to persistent hyperinflammation and a
plethora of systemic and physiologically-comprehensive adverse events
including death from micro-emboli formation and clotting. We also know
that these authors have now provided evidence to support that these
COVID-19 injectable products are modulating innate responses and that
this isn’t limited to problems with COVID-19. Problems with fungi, other
viruses and bacteria can be anticipated. VAERS has hundreds of
thousands of reports of adverse events related to fungal infections,
plagues of herpes zoster occurrences (shingles) indicating weakened
immunity, cancers coming out of remission, and the list goes on. And
most of these reports are made for adults.
Here’s the thing…
Since
children have extraordinary capabilities with regards to dealing with
COVID-19 via their innate immune system responses, what will happen to
them if these are not only by-passed by these injections, but knocked
down by them?
Figure 4: The kids are alright. Leave them alone.
Please
listen to mighty baby. The kids are alright. Leave them alone. You
might not get how this circles back the kids, but it does. Thanks for
reading this to the end. And don’t inject kids with this stuff. You
might mess them up and they don’t need it.
Bruce
K. Patterson, Edgar B. Francisco, Ram Yogendra, Emily Long, Amruta
Pise, Hallison Rodrigues, Eric Hall, Monica Herrara, Purvi Parikh, Jose
Guevara-Coto, Xaiolan Chang, Jonah B Sacha, Rodrigo A Mora-Rodríguez,
Javier Mora. Persistence of SARS CoV-2 S1 Protein in CD16+ Monocytes in
Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) Up to 15 Months Post-Infection.
bioRxiv 2021.06.25.449905; doi:
https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.25.449905.
Xu H, Zhong L, Deng J, et al. High expression of ACE2 receptor of 2019-nCoV on the epithelial cells of oral mucosa. Int J Oral Sci. 2020;12(1):8. Published 2020 Feb 24. doi:10.1038/s41368-020-0074-x.
Fu
J, Zhou B, Zhang L, Balaji KS, Wei C, Liu X, Chen H, Peng J, Fu J.
Expressions and significances of the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2
gene, the receptor of SARS-CoV-2 for COVID-19. Mol Biol Rep. 2020
Jun;47(6):4383-4392. doi: 10.1007/s11033-020-05478-4. Epub 2020 May 14.
PMID: 32410141; PMCID: PMC7224351.
National
Center for Biotechnology Information (2021). PubChem Pathway Summary
for Pathway WP4868, Source: WikiPathways. Retrieved December 16, 2021
from https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pathway/WikiPathways:WP4868.
Li
SW, Wang CY, Jou YJ, et al. SARS Coronavirus Papain-Like Protease
Inhibits the TLR7 Signaling Pathway through Removing Lys63-Linked
Polyubiquitination of TRAF3 and TRAF6. Int J Mol Sci. 2016;17(5):678. Published 2016 May 5. doi:10.3390/ijms17050678.
Tahaghoghi-Hajghorbani
S, Zafari P, Masoumi E, Rajabinejad M, Jafari-Shakib R, Hasani B,
Rafiei A. The role of dysregulated immune responses in COVID-19
pathogenesis. Virus Res. 2020 Dec;290:198197. doi:
10.1016/j.virusres.2020.198197. Epub 2020 Oct 16. PMID: 33069815; PMCID:
PMC7561578.
Tanaka T, Narazaki M, Kishimoto T. IL-6 in inflammation, immunity, and disease. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2014;6(10):a016295. Published 2014 Sep 4. doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a016295.
