Letter to US Legislators: #DefundTheThoughtPolice
Reject S.3737 (Promoting Public Health Information Act) and All Other Legislation, Tools, & Infrastructure Targeting Free Speech
“In 1946 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution reading in part, ‘freedom of information is a fundamental human right, and the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated.’ This is our touchstone as well. This is the code of the Voice of America. We welcome the view of others. We seek a free flow of information across national boundaries and oceans, across iron curtains and stone walls. We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
—President John F. Kennedy, Address on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America, February 26, 1962
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
—CIA Director William Casey, February 1981
Below is one of the dubious duties delineated in S.3737:
(C) strategies to improve communication and dissemination of scientific and evidence-based public health information to the public, and, as appropriate, to address misinformation during public health emergencies, including strategies to—
(i) identify the most effective methods for the dissemination of information during a public health emergency;
(ii) determine best practices and communicate information to populations that may be impacted by such misinformation; and
(iii) adapt approaches for the dissemination of information, as appropriate, to address emerging trends related to misinformation.
Doctors
Dr. Oliver Sacks
Substacker Mickey Z. recently attempted
“the Tuskegee Study, mercury fillings, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), veal crates, electroshock therapy, napalm, mustard gas, automatic weapons, sonic weaponry, directed energy weapons, weapons in general, surgical experiments (without anesthesia) on slaves, deforestation, Vioxx, DDT, eugenics, GMOs, fossil fuels, the Milgram experiments, factory farming, the medicalization of the birthing process, vivisection, mountaintop mining, MK ULTRA, conversion therapy, forced sterilizations, pre-frontal lobotomies, waterboarding, deep-sea bottom trawling, Accutane, land mines, and the electric chair …”
“[P]ropagandists are implying that we must always view ‘mainstream science’ as trustworthy and never question it—despite thousands of reasons why good journalists should be far more circumspect. After all, mainstream science once gave its stamp of approval for pregnant women to use thalidomide, later blamed for birth defects in forty-six countries. Mainstream doctors once said smoking was good for us. Mainstream scientists gave approval to the RotaShield vaccine to prevent diarrhea in newborns, but the medicine was found to cause a fatal disorder in some babies. You can probably think of more examples. The point is that although mainstream medicine has done incredible things to save and improve lives, it is hardly infallible or without conflicts of interest. What is seen as mainstream science today is often not mainstream science tomorrow. Yet many in the media today suggest that acknowledging this fact is heretical. Journalists used to believe part of their job was to question in a rational way. Now many see their job as convincing the public not to question certain narratives and bullying those who do.”
She describes how the narrative-shapers justify their manipulation of facts:
“[T]he people behind a narrative do not always have cynical or evil motives. They may even be acting according to what they believe to be a higher purpose. In such cases, these people share an important belief: that they are smarter than you are. They do not trust you to process information and draw your own conclusions because you might draw the wrong ones. You must not be left to your own devices. So, much like Big Brother, they dictate which views are to be considered legitimate and which are off-limits. They tell you what to think. They become the ultimate arbiters of truth even when it’s a matter of debate or opinion. It’s all for your own good.
“Settled science. Not open to debate. Everyone agrees.”
“Though banned for decades in America, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012legalized the dissemination of information in the US whether the information is true, partly true, or completely false.”
“We know you are lying, you know you are lying, you know we know you are lying, we know you know we know you are lying, but you are still lying.”
“But the science has changed. And we can’t really lie to everybody. We can’t have a quarantine policy that doesn’t reflect some natural immunity. We can’t have a quarantine policy that doesn’t reflect that vaccinated people, particularly when they make up the majority of the population, are very likely to get infected.…
“The places we fail are the places we’ve failed historically, and the work to repair this is gonna take some time.… People don’t trust us.…
“We’re disadvantaged because the data’s complicated. The story we’re trying to tell is complicated. If I stand up and I acknowledge that ‘Vaccines don’t work so great at preventing infections’ while I’m trying to get more people to get vaccinated, you could see why people are saying, ‘Well, don’t share that information, don’t tell people.’…
“Everybody knows the vaccines aren’t working so great. So if they don’t hear it from us … that doesn’t really help.”
In other words, the inconvenient data reflecting the reality that the injected get infected is making it “complicated” to maintain the false narrative that these snake-oil products are “effective.”
“This is another of those rapidly multiplying legislative enactments which make it dangerous ... to think or say anything except what a transient majority happens to approve at the moment. Basically these laws rest on the belief that Government should supervise and limit the flow of ideas into the minds of men. The tendency of such governmental policy is to mould people into a common intellectual pattern. Quite a different governmental policy rests on the belief that Government should leave the mind and spirit of man absolutely free. Such a governmental policy encourages varied intellectual outlooks in the belief that the best views will prevail. This policy of freedom is in my judgment embodied in the First Amendment and made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth.”
“In our fear of being polluted, we create norms and schemes against which we measure the acceptability of unorthodox ideas, and we forget that the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking in us.…
“Because of this policy [of freedom], public officials cannot be constitutionally vested with powers to select the ideas people can think about, censor the public views they can express, or choose the persons or groups people can associate with. Public officials with such powers are not public servants; they are public masters.” [emphasis mine]
Not only does the Supreme Court’s overturning of Feinberg Law make S.3737 and every other attempt to establish a Thought Police illegal, but it serves as a necessary reminder that you are public servants—not public masters, and you have neither a legal nor a constitutional nor a moral right to dictate which information citizens can consume, contemplate, or share.
“[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
Václav Havel
“If the main pillar of the [totalitarian] system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why [the truth] must be suppressed more severely than anything else.”
“… by letting your fine newspaper be destroyed rather than allowing it to serve falsehood and despotism, you were one of those uncompromising witnesses who, in all circumstances, deserve respect.
“… when you were the respected President of Colombia—you not only did not use your power to censor your adversaries but you kept the newspaper of your political enemies from being suppressed.
“That deed alone is enough for us to recognize in you a real free man. Liberty has sons who are not all legitimate or to be admired. Those who applaud it only when it justifies their privileges and shout nothing but censorship when it threatens them are not on our side. But those who, according to Benjamin Constant’s remark, are willing neither to suffer nor to possess the means of oppression, who want freedom both for themselves and for others—they, in an age that poverty or terror condemns to the excesses of oppression, are the seeds beneath the snow of which one of the greatest among us spoke.”
— Resistance, Rebellion, & Death( Kindle, paperback, hardcover)
These lines from Camus’s speech could have been written directly to you at this historic moment in the battle to recover our First Amendment rights:
“whoever does violence to truth or to its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it.”
An elaborate guiding ideology
A single political party, typically led by a dictator
Use of instruments of terror such as violence and secret police to control the population
A government monopoly on weapons
A government monopoly on means of communication (such as state-controlled media and heavy censorship)
A state-controlled economy
Thanks to autocratic COVID policies, the majority of countries around the world have nearly achieved all six characteristics of totalitarianism.
You can either escalate or roll back that tyranny, and voters will remember your actions accordingly.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies. We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence.
“For the first time in American history a president, governors, mayors, hospital administrators and federal bureaucrats are determining medical treatments based not on accurate scientifically based or even experience based information, but rather to force the acceptance of special forms of care and ‘prevention’—including remdesivir, use of respirators and ultimately a series of essentially untested messenger RNA vaccines. For the first time in history medical treatment, protocols are not being formulated based on the experience of the physicians treating the largest number of patients successfully, but rather individuals and bureaucracies that have never treated a single patient—including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, EcoHealth Alliance, the CDC, WHO, state public health officers and hospital administrators.
“The media (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc), medical societies, state medical boards and the owners of social media have appointed themselves to be the sole source of information concerning this so-called ‘pandemic’. Websites have been removed, highly credentialed and experienced clinical doctors and scientific experts in the field of infectious diseases have been demonized, careers have been destroyed and all dissenting information has been labeled ‘misinformation’ and ‘dangerous lies’, even when sourced from top experts in the fields of virology, infectious diseases, pulmonary critical care, and epidemiology.These blackouts of truth occur even when this information is backed by extensive scientific citations from some of the most qualified medical specialists in the world.” [emphasis mine]
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
We are now approaching the third stage, and it is time for you to make amends to the people of conscience bills like S.3737 would penalize for “spreading misinformation.”
“As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
It is long past time to restore freedom of speech, communication, and thought in this once-great nation.
You can express your patriotism, attempt to salvage your personal credibility, and demonstrate your respect for the people of this republic by heeding Kennedy’s summons to let the “people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market.”
You can close the chapter on one of America’s most shameful periods in history and prevent this country from sliding into a totalitarian technocratic dystopia by refusing to sanction S.3737 and every other permutation that violates our First Amendment rights under the pretense of suppressing “mis/dis/mal-information.”
Draw fortitude from Camus’s words in knowing that:
“[you are] not alone and [your] action is not futile, that there always comes a day when the palaces of oppression crumble, when exile comes to an end, when liberty catches fire.”
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