Excerpt from Don Surber’s substack. Link to full essay at the end.
Common sense thought control
…McQuade said, “I hope that by dissecting it, explaining it, and educating the public, we can all see disinformation for what it is so that we can begin to push back against it.”
Maddow said, gee willikers, certainly Americans are not dumb enough to fall for disinformation.
McQuade said, “Actually, Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to it than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel. So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, and nobody wants to get rid of it, but it makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship.”
I agree that many Americans foolishly and readily accept propaganda. A majority of Americans still believe that carbon dioxide kills life on the planet even though the reality is that carbon dioxide and water make life possible.
Many Americans also fell for believing Putin rigged the 2016 election, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plant and that a protest inside the Capitol was an insurrection.
What these outrageous lies share in common is that they all are promoted by the central government in efforts to expand its power (climate change), cover its crimes of spying (Russian Hoax), fix the 2020 election (not investigating the laptop), and imprison a president to keep him from getting a second term (insurrection).
McQuade is not interested in stopping those lies by the government. No, no, no. She is interested in silencing those of us who tell such truths as Obama had the FBI spy on Donald Trump and covered it up with a whacky tale of Putin being in cahoots with The Donald.
But for that darned Constitution, it would be easy for fascists like her to shut us up. She is unhappy with that situation.
She said, “Of course, the Supreme Court has held that all fundamental rights, even the right to free speech, can be limited as long as there is a compelling governmental interest and the restriction is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. But I think any time someone tries to do anything that might limit free speech, people claim censorship.”
How dare they claim censorship is censorship.
Her best line was “We need to have a conversation and common-sense solutions to these things. Instead, we throw out terms like censorship, call each other names, use labels and retreat to our opposite sides. We need to be pragmatic and come up with real solutions.”
Liberals have no problem with liberals calling Trump and any other Republican candidate Hitler, but calling a tranny “he” is a hate crime worthy of a lengthy prison sentence.
Too bad, birdbrain. Dylan Mulvaney is a man, baby…
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/common-sense-thought-control
Very serious things are occurring, and all because we fundamentally misunderstand what we are up against…
“One reason conservatism failed in America is that conservatives could never accept that people lie in politics. In fact, lying is an essential part of politics. The reason is you must paint your opponents as the bad guys and your side as the good guys, which means gross exaggeration. Conservatives never accepted this. Instead, they demanded as much factual accuracy from their side as possible. When people on their side would exaggerate, conservatives were there to set the record straight.
This was not the result of stupidity. American conservatism evolved into the 1980’s as the antidote to politics. They used to make this point in the Reagan years. Conservatism was the lack of politics. Instead, it was just problem solving. That was very appealing to people who did not like rolling around on the mud with left-wing kooks, but it was a terrible way to engage in politics. It is part of what made conservatism the beautiful losers described by Sam Francis.
Related to this was the fact that American conservatism embraced the libertarian idea that people are motivated by rational self-interest. For conservatives in the 20th century, people were not spiritual beings, so much as moist robots who naturally responded to incentives, particularly economic incentives. This is why conservatism was the accounting department for the welfare state. The only way they could relate to their audience was through the jargon of popular economics.
Another result of this was the habit of conservatives to rely on charts and graphs in response to moral claims. The Left would demand we do something about some victim group and conservatives would respond with a table of figures showing that the victims were not really victims. It was not that it made conservatism heartless, but that it made them seem brainless. They kept falling for the same traps, eventually succumbing to the moral claims of the Left.
That is the probably the main failing of American conservatism. To this day they insist that politics is about solving problems. This is false. Politics is always about friends and enemies and those are defined on moral terms. No one wants to fight someone for making a math error. Politics is so nasty and feral because the opponents see one another in moral terms. The other guy is the bad guy because he does not love what you love and hate what you hate.”
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29972
Examples:
“Yesterday, we detailed the leak of a wiretapped telephone conversation in which senior German officers discuss the use of German Taurus missiles, training, the capabilities of this system and the possibility of destroying the Crimean bridge.
They revealed many interesting facts. Embarrassing for the Germans, who have now launched an investigation…
Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting with Pope Francis in Rome, Scholz described the incident as a “very serious affair”.
“It will be investigated very carefully, intensively and quickly,” he said.
“It is also necessary to do so.”
Politicians from parties in Scholz’s coalition expressed concern that Russia may have eavesdropped on other sensitive conversations, and that government communications may no longer be adequately protected.
The German defence ministry said:
“According to our assessment, a Luftwaffe conversation was tapped. We cannot say for sure whether changes were made to the recorded or transcribed version that is circulating on social media.”
Konstantin von Notz, a senior Green MP, said it must be swiftly established if the “eavesdropping scandal is a one-time event or a structural problem”.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/complete-disaster-german-govt-scholz-promises-probe-very-serious-leaked-recording-plan
Jan. 6 Committee Deleted Over 100 Encrypted Files Days Before GOP Took Majority
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jan-6-committee-destroyed-more-100-encrypted-files-days-gop-took-majority
Taliban’s Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/talibans-massively-successful-opium-eradication-raises-questions-about-what-us-was
Wait, the Krauts are more concerned about Russkies dropping some waves than they are about plans to bomb Crimea? Means they have other nefarious plans as well…
Of course! After all, the Russians can now use this (the Truth) as ‘propaganda’ against them! Democracy is under threat! The public must be kept safe and unaware!
The story gets better (worse), we can confirm that US and UK boots are on the ground dressed up as Ukies!
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/generals-discussed-secrets-ukraine-war-using-shelf-video-phone-tech-one-dialed-hotel
Meanwhile in Britannia…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/british-man-jailed-2-years-over-stickers-pm-whines-about-democracy
I think the main problem is that political partisans do not realize the Hegelian dialectic is being used. For example, if some politicians claim to want to stop minors from seeing porn, they will push something like requiring websites to verify a person’s identity so that other politicians in the future can remove anonymity from the internet and implement social credits. Or if they claim they want to stop illegal immigrants they could require everyone to carry an identity at all times so everyone will need a digital identity to participate in society. If totally unforeseen cyberattacks take place as simulated politicians can push biometrics to access the internet. It’s just problem-reaction-solution. And both sides only seem opposed.
Susceptibility is not limited to America, this below continues to be a recurring problem worldwide.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/socialists-it-doesnt-matter-if-socialism-works-what-matters-power
Democracy, capitalism, the American Dream, CANNOT stop this. Only Catholicism can! It requires a moral religious solution. Fatima! Fatima! Fatima!
Some insight into the current German mindset and the level of it’s public susceptibility.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/03/04/the-brainwashing-of-germany-in-preparation-for-war/
They’re Germans, bro. They’ve always been down for power, war, generally screwing things up (Luther, Marx, Hitler, Benedict XVI). Even Nigel Farage’s quest to get out of the EU was due to Germany dominating the institution that was meant to limit its power .
Those Errors of Russia? Communism? Born in Germany. Along with weaponizing the atom.
Who is Barbara Maquade? Who are these no name people trotted out daily and by our side too in reaction to them with a hostile message positioned as legitimate?
Take a picture of me then and put subtitle under it – “efforts to undermine our constitution are treasonous and will result in military trial says political science major”….
Sr. Lucia continues to be right, speaking from nearly 100 years ago. America will be Communist. The “Consecration-was-done” crowd are wrong.
“Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.
This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.
All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.
The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…
Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears on offer in the People’s Republic of China.
There are limits to this similarity, of course: the Chinese Communist Party is a brutal regime that has in the past killed tens of millions of its own people and still rules over them with an iron fist. To say that the United States or any other Western country is identical in nature to China would be ridiculous.
And yet, I’m going to argue that commonalities are indeed growing, and that this is no illusion, coincidence, or conspiracy, but the product of the same deep systemic forces and underlying ideological roots. To claim that we’re the same as China, or even just that we’re turning into China (as I’ve admittedly implied with the title) would really just be political clickbait. The reality is more complicated, but no less unsettling: both China and the West, in their own ways and at their own pace, but for the same reasons, are converging from different directions on the same point – the same not-yet-fully-realized system of totalizing techno-administrative governance. Though they remain different, theirs is no longer a difference of kind, only of degree. China is just already a bit further down the path towards the same future.
But how should we describe this form of government that has already begun to wrap its tentacles around the world today, including here in the United States? Many of us recognize by now that whatever it is we now live under, it sure isn’t “liberal democracy.” ”
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
This is my problem with the Sedes. The consecration was never done. Not under Vatican 2, not pre Vatican 2. The Church always fails to do the right thing.