Our Private Selves and our Public Selves

I've repeatedly seen that many people lack the courage to publicly say what they believe. They either stay silent on critically important issues or they pretend to align themselves with a prominent tribe in public discourse. Those who who speak their minds even occasionally pay the price in the West, where cancel culture has been honed to a high art form. This immense problem has been described and diagnosed by The Canceling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.

Here's the data:

I am horrified by these statistics because of the deep and somewhat subconscious interplay that exists between our public side and our private thoughts. When we get into the habit of publicly pretending we are someone else, we corrupt our capacity to learn and grow organically and authentically. We become our public silence and lies.

Hannah Arendt was concerned about the long term effect of a dishonest society:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
What is the solution? Speaking up even though you know that you'll be snarled at. Most of us will live to see another day. Most of us won't lose our jobs or lives, even though we will lose some of the people we considered our friends. We will gain new, more honest and forthright, friends. And you are probably not alone with regard to your position on most issues. Consider these additional statistics:

People privately agree on most issues.

For two-thirds of the sensitive issues studied (43 of 64), ranging from abortion rights and school choice to legal immigration and voter ID requirements, 90% of demographic groups are privately on the same side of the issues.

Men and women have similar views.

A majority of men and women are on the same side of 57 of the 64 sensitive issues in this study.

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Bret Weinstein: Every Institution Dedicated to Public Truthseeking is Under Attack.

Bret Weinstein's presentation to Senator Ron Johnson's ROUNDTABLE-American Health and Nutrition - Expert Panel:

I believe we must zoom out if we are to understand the pattern that we are gathered here to explore, because the pattern is larger than federal health agencies and the COVID cartel. If we do zoom out and ask, what are they hiding?

The answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing. They are hiding everything. It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case, I have tested the idea, and I am as certain of it as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded. It is the only explanation I have encountered that will not only describe the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy.

The pattern is a simple one. You can see it clearly and test it yourself. Every single institution dedicated to public truthseeking is under simultaneous attack. They are all in a state of collapse. Every body of experts fails utterly. Individual experts who resist or worse, in an attempt to return their institutions to sanity, they find themselves coerced into submission.

If they won't buckle, they are marginalized or forced out. Those outside of the institutions who either seek truth alone or who build new institutions with a truth-seeking mission face merciless attacks on both their integrity and expertise, often by the very institutions whose mission they refuse to abandon.

There is a saying in military circles, once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. I have no doubt that given an hour, the people on this panel could point to a hundred examples of the pattern I have just described, while finding even a handful of exceptions would pose a significant challenge.

We are left in a fool's paradise. Our research universities spend huge sums of public money to reach preordained conclusions. Professors teach only lessons that are consistent with wisdom students have picked up on TikTok, even when those lessons contradict the foundational principles of their disciplines.

Once proud newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post only report important stories after they have become common knowledge. Morticians must now raise the alarm over patterns missed by medical examiners. The CDC has become an excellent guide to protecting your health, but only for people who realize you should do the opposite of whatever it advises.

The courts, the last holdout in this ongoing inversion of reality, are now regularly used as a coercive weapon of elites against those who threaten them. We have literally witnessed the Department of Homeland Security attempt to set up a truth ministry and declare accurate critique of government as a kind of terrorism.

To my fellow patriots in the West, the pattern is unmistakable. I cannot tell you with any certainty who they are or what they hope to accomplish, but I can tell you that we are being systematically denied the tools of enlightenment and the rights guaranteed in our Constitution.

We, those who remain dedicated to the values of the West, must fight this battle courageously and we must win. For if we do not stem the tide, the result will be a dark age that differs from prior dark ages only in the power and sophistication of the coercive instruments wielded by those who will rule us.

The entire four hours of testimony here. Description of the proceedings:

Senator Ron Johnson and a panel of experts provide a foundational and historical understanding of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare industries which impact the current state of national health.

List of Speakers:

Continue ReadingBret Weinstein: Every Institution Dedicated to Public Truthseeking is Under Attack.

Walter Kirn Ponders this Moment

Walter is an excellent writer and my respect for him has soared based on his weekly conversations with Matt Taibbi. His recent Tweet:

I've done all I could this year, and perhaps more than I should have, to clarify the issues before us and characterize the nature of our moment. I didn't do it for the money, and there hasn't been any. In fact, I lost some. Happily. My personal American dream involved becoming a writer and an artist, see, and expressing myself as well as I knew how and as freely as I dared. This year, for the first time in my life, I saw that the opportunity to chase this dream was gravely, gravely threatened, not just for me but for the kids and young people who are much like I was once, an odd little kid who was trying to find his voice. To keep this great road of possibility open seemed to me the highest mission I could assign myself. I did. It's been an adventure. And such a pleasure.

But now it's time for words to turn to action. It's time for us to protect what we hold dear. For me it is our right to speak, think, and create freely, without fear, or at least without fear from the authorities and the moneyed interests and powers that lie behind them.

I hope I've made a difference in this cause. I hope I've convinced some others to join me in it. And to act accordingly, democratically, as is our right and duty.

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Why Martin Gurri is Voting for Trump

Martin Gurri's thoughtful analysis of the considerable flaws of both candidates. The Founders of this Country must be weeping in their graves.

"Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5."

Here is Gurri's overview of the Democrats:

There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.

The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.

Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.

The Democratic Party is the party of control.

Excerpt re Harris:

So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.

If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.

Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust...

China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.

There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.

This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.

Harris is not helped by her recent interviews. Brett Baier tells her the numbers: 79% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and you and Joe Biden have been in charge for the past 3 1/2 years. Harris: It's Trump's Fault.

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Huxley’s Prediction

Huxley clearly saw it coming:

"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature . . . the quaint old forms... elections, parliaments, supreme courts and all the rest... will remain.

The underlying substance will be a new kind of Totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly like they were in the good old days. Democracy & freedom will be the theme of every broadcast & editorial, Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite will quietly run the show as they see fit."

—Aldous Huxley, 1962

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