What words are "violence" and who gets to decide? This claim that words are violence is the flip side of the widespread embrace of censorship by those on the political left. They don't foresee that someday the political winds will change and this exaggerated empathy for those "hurt" by words will be turned against them by a ruthless right-wing authoritarian.
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.
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.
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.
Americans are the most propagandized people in the entire world, and they don't have any idea that they are. You know, at least people in China know they're being propaganda. The people in the old Soviet Union knew it was propaganda. People in America turn on Anderson Cooper, turn on Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, they think they're getting the truth. They really do. Don't you think it's a little weird when Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are saying the exact same thing about Ukraine? Don't you think that's weird? ...They don't fire you for lying about wars. They don't, they fire you for telling the truth about the wars. And that's just same reason why Julian Assan was in prison. He wasn't in prison because he lied about the war machine. He was in prison because he told the truth. And that's what people need to realize. When I have these conversations with my own liberal friends from Hollywood, the ones who still talk to me, and I'll say, is there anything you hear on cable news that you don't believe is there anything? And you know what? They never say anything back. They never say, Well, I don't believe that. They never say anything. They just change the subject or move on to something else.
You really think they're just accepting the whole sandwich, yes, just swallowing without chewing.
The beginning of the end for me, was when I wouldn't go along with Hillary Clinton because I've always been a liberal progressive and I supported Bernie Sanders. I thought we were really close to doing something at that convention in 2016 and Philadelphia. I was there, and you walked into the convention hall, and half the people in there wanted to overthrow the Democratic establishment. Half the people there wanted to get corporate money out of politics. And there was lots of friction. ...It really felt like we were about to do something right. And then I went to the last convention, just this year in Chicago, and it was like a Stepford's Wives convention. It was brainwashed, brain dead, go alongs. Nobody had a thought in their head. There's cheering on billionaires and cheering on the war machine. And it was gross. CIA director, billionaires on stage. You had, you know, Pritzker, come on stage. "I'm a real billionaire." And people are cheering. Is this the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party?
It, honestly, it depressed me to the point of almost tears. And I would go up to people, I would go up to delegates, and I would say, Does it bother you that the party who is putting democracy on the ballot threw out 14 million ballots and installed Kamala Harris? And to a person, they would all say, there was a process. She followed the process. They didn't care. Nobody cared. They didn't care that she didn't get a vote. They don't care that they threw out the guy who did get a vote. They didn't care that they were lied to about his mental, his dementia for years. ..