Tonight, May 11, at 6 pm PST, we will be launching our first monthly Karass Konnections for paid subscribers!

Even more exciting, two incredibly special guests will be participating!

Plaintiff Rebecca Charles Jackson and attorney Graham Brownstein of the Free Now Foundation representing her landmark lawsuit seeking justice for Rebecca’s hospicided daughter, Danielle, will be available to answer your questions during our private chat.

rebecca’s Substack

“A mother’s fight for truth and justice, exposing corruption, honoring her daughter Danielle Cathleen Alvarez, and refusing to be silenced.”

By Rebecca Charles Jackson

sincerely, babagbb

Graham's actual own stack - letters to nobody and everybody in particular about what the heck we're all doing here

By Graham (baba gbb)

rebecca’s Substack

Navigating Mother's Day as a Childless Mother 2024

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2 years ago · 87 likes · 40 comments · Rebecca Charles Jackson

Bretigne recently described this lawsuit—which has the rare potential to pierce the PREP Act—in a cross-post as “quite possibly the most important case that will go before the courts in our lifetimes. ...and in 2026, that’s saying quite a lot. The outcome of this will impact every single one of us.”

rebecca’s Substack

Title: Why This Fight Matters – Saving Lives from Harmful Hospital Protocols

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7 days ago · 20 likes · 4 comments · Rebecca Charles Jackson

For more details, see Rebecca’s Substack, this post by Charles Wright, and my Karass Konnections announcement.

C’s Newsletter

Danielle Alvarez was one of many Homicide Victims in the Hospital Kill-for-Profit Nightmare led by Andrew Cuomo and Michael Dowling

The lawsuit of Rebecca Charles against Northwell Health and their employees is the most important lawsuit moving forward in the United States today, in my opinion…

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11 days ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · Charles Wright

This will be a live, unrecorded private video call only available to my paid subscribers. Sign up now if you would like to participate:

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Below is the Zoom meeting link and instructions for joining us. I look forward to seeing you at 6 pm PST this evening!

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If you are on my mailing list, you have self-selected into an exceptional karass of brave, brilliant, wise, kind, funny, and resilient individuals spanning the globe.

Even more rarefied are those of you comprising the 0.98 percent of my readers who are keeping me alive and making it possible for me to dedicate my life to helping people BECOME UNHERDABLE.

That’s why I want to give you a truly special thank-you gift: an opportunity to participate in a monthly online video call with other members of our karass and me.

Ever since I hosted the CJ Hopkins and Hugo Fernandez America Road Trip events in fall 2025 for their forthcoming book Strangers in a Strange Homeland, I have been cultivating face-to-face community connections as part of my goals to resurrect civil discourse and foster depolarizing conversations.

CJ Hopkins

The Map is Not the Territory

OK, here’s the first chapter of Strangers in a Strange Homeland, the USA road-trip book, which will be published by Arcade Publishing later this year, hopefully. I don’t usually publish drafts of work in progress, but, as my regular readers know, I’ve been more or less totally out of commission for the last four months due to a serious medical issue, and I feel like I n…

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17 days ago · 172 likes · 58 comments · CJ Hopkins

From reading at poetry events to speaking at school board meetings to breaking (low-carb!) bread with different small groups of kindred Badasses at regular intervals (weekly, bimonthly, and monthly), I have been joining forces with people of character who feel equally passionate about bettering our community and the larger world.

This has transformed my life in radically meaningful ways I look forward to sharing in future posts, but right now, I want to give my paid subscribers the chance to build similar life-, mind-, and heart-lifting Karass Konnections.

Subscribe now

While it may not be the same as hugging in the flesh, this is the next best way for you to meet others who share our mission to empower people to BECOME UNHERDABLE.

📆 Karass Konnections: Mark Your Calendars

On the second Monday of each month (barring conflicts or other surprises that necessitate rescheduling) at 6 pm PST, let’s do a video chat.

Second Mondays: 2026

• May 11

• June 8

• July 13

• August 10

• September 14

• October 12

• November 9

• December 14

To register for our first chat on Monday, May 11, please message me privately on Substack.

🤗 Want to Meet in Person?

🌎 Come to the World Council for Health’s Better Way Conference!

📆 Save the Dates: May 29–31, 2026

Rhode Island • Speakers

Gala Dinner: Friday, May 29, 2026 (evening)
Conference Dates: May 30–31, 2026
Cancer Workshop: May 31 (during lunch break)

💸 Get 10-percent off with basket code LAWRIE10

For the first time since I was thirteen, I will be boarding a plane (provided my passport arrives in time as I refuse to get REAL ID). Someone I trust with my life has offered to lovingly care for our thirteen kitties so I can accept World Council for Health’s gracious invitation to attend their Better Way Conference in New England.

World Council for Health

How Can Broken Health Systems Be Restored? Is It Even Possible? Come to the Better Way Conference to Discover More.

For the first time, many of the most prominent figures in the global health freedom movement will be together at a single event…

Read more

2 months ago · 48 likes · World Council for Health

If you’d like to connect while I’m there, message me privately on Substack.

See the press release for details and visit the Better Way Conference website to learn more about the conference and purchase tickets.

🗽 Anyone for a New York Meet-up?

After the Better Way Conference, I plan to spend the following week in New York visiting with dear friends like Vera Sharav. DM me on Substack if you’d like to try to connect while I’m there. I may organize a group meet-up with readers if enough of you are interested.

I will also be attending the cocktail hour for a special fundraising event on behalf of Rebecca Charles Jackson, whose luminous special daughter Danielle was hospicided on October 6, 2021. The Free Now Foundation has bravely taken on Rebecca’s case, and they need your support to fight this noble battle.

Danielle’s Justice Fundraiser Dinner with Vera Sharav

June 6, 2026 • 7:30–10:30 pm • West Village, Manhattan • Tickets

rebecca’s Substack

BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO VERA SHARAV: Our Guest of Honor for Danielle’s Justice Fundraiser Dinner in NYC

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a month ago · 20 likes · 9 comments · Rebecca Charles Jackson

rebecca’s Substack

A Heartfelt Thank You – And a Wake-Up Call for Medical Freedom

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16 days ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Rebecca Charles Jackson

Alix Mayer Medical Freedom Newsletter

It Took 41 Days to Kill My Daughter Rebecca Charles Jackson | Ep 9

Read more

16 days ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Alix Mayer

I plan to meet with Rebecca while I’m in New York and will be sharing more details about Danielle and this landmark case in a future post.

Graham Brownstein, one of the fearless attorneys representing Rebecca, has been a dear personal friend for years. I am grateful to him for inviting me to attend the cocktail hour for this meaningful cause.

I’ve been a fan of civil rights attorney Tricia Lindsay ever since I shared her fiery People’s Convoy USA speech in my March 2022 Profile in Courage on the Canadian Truckers.

Individuals of supreme integrity and conscience, the Free Now Foundation attorneys have been working diligently to build a robust case. They are the types of lawyers who work quietly behind the scenes, taking on lesser-known and frequently profitless dissident cases, often pro bono. They are true seekers of justice, and Rebecca is grateful for their willingness to fight on behalf of her beloved Danielle.

I realize few people can afford the prices for this unique fundraiser dinner. You can still help by donating whatever you can via this form.

I Never Imagined

I never imagined I would step foot on a plane again let alone have an opportunity to hug in person precious friends who have played such pivotal roles in my life—from Dr. Tess Lawrie inspiring my Profiles in Courage series and being the first person to voice Mistakes Were NOT Made, causing it to go viral, to my soul-sister Vera Sharav, who also delivered a riveting reading of Mistakes Were NOT Made as part of her We Can’t Forget speech, to Dr. Pierre Kory, who generously helped diagnose and miraculously save my mom’s life after her harrowing (mis)diagnosis just before Christmas 2024, to so many other freedom fighters I’ve interacted with personally, including Dr. Mark Trozzi, Anne Gibbons, Bretigne Shaffer, Christof Plothe, and Dr. Paul Marik, among many others.

My world has become smaller and larger at the same time, beautifully so.

Perhaps that world will encircle you, too, should we have an opportunity to meet in person. If not now, maybe someday.

In the meantime, we can talk heart-to-heart through Karass Konnections.

Subscribe now

I will close with a poem I dedicated to you in November 2024.

Thank you for making my past five years the most meaningful of my life. Here’s to many more years of Apocaloptimistically resisting tyranny, exposing democide, and helping people BECOME UNHERDABLE together 🙌

What I Like About You

by Margaret Anna Alice

You are humble, courageous, and kind.
You are witty, wonderstruck, and wise.
You are logical, intuitive, and sharp.
You are emotionally intelligent and intellectually curious.
You are observant, insightful, and analytical.
You are funny, joyful, and compassionate.
You are creative, resourceful, and resilient.
You are independent critical thinkers.
You are relentless readers and researchers.
You are Badass Apocaloptimists.
You challenge authority.
You resist propaganda and psychological manipulation.
You care about truth, freedom, living beings, and justice.
You discuss differences with maturity and civility.
You oppose war, fraud, corruption, tyranny, and democide.
You have integrity.
You think deeply and feel deeply.
You take responsibility for your actions and words.
You invest time and attention in what matters.
You model meaningful lives.
You embody gratitude.
You possess purpose and passion.
You light up the world.
Your tender hearts are as open as your minds.
You live love.

© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC

Share

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💓 You Are Wonderful 🙌

Thank you for enabling me to do my life’s work.

Your subscriptions and donations sustain me and will help fund my upcoming trip to New England.

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Get 30% off a group subscription

The only reason I can spend every possible second writing, researching, producing videos, collaborating, nurturing our karass, living my cheng, and battling tyranny is because of the 0.98 percent of you who are kind enough to support me. Thank you with all of my being for that tangible expression of your appreciation for my work.

When you subscribe, you get to participate in monthly Karass Konnections video calls. You also gain access to premium content like Memes by Themes, Elucidating Excerpts, Consequential Quotes, Case in Point, Afterthoughts, Behind the Scenes, podcasts, personal writings, and bonus articles.

Thank you, dear readers, for helping our thirteen kitties and me survive 😸

🎁 Personal Gift

If you would like to snail-mail me a tax-free personal gift, please DM me on Substack or reply to any of my newsletters for details.

😇 Become a Founding Member

If you take the extraordinary step of becoming a Founding Member, you will enjoy benefits such as:

• Mistakes Were NOT Made T-shirt

• signed & personalized copy of my dystopian fairy tale book

• signed & personalized copy of Canary in a Covid World—your choice of Volume 1 or Volume 2

• Audible audiobook of the first Canary volume ($21 value) while supplies last

• special gifts

• select typeset PDFs

• Zoom or phone call, depending on your preference

• Karass Korner (coming soon)

I especially want to thank those of you who have taken the time to write a private message to me when you subscribe. I read and cherish each note.

Thank you for being part of our karass of brave, brilliant, kind, and witty thinkers.

🛒 Spread the Words

If you would like to help propagate the message that Mistakes Were NOT Made, you will find a wide selection of products in this collection.

📖 SAVE on Signed Copies of My Fairy Tale Book!

I am currently running a sale on signed, personalized copies of my fairy tale, so now is the time to buy copies for yourself and as gifts. Message me on Substack or reply to any of my newsletters to place an order.

📚 Anthologies

• Canary in a (Post) COVID World: Money, Fear, & Power (Hardback, Paperback, Kindle)

• Canary in a Covid World: How Propaganda & Censorship Changed Our (My) World (Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook)

• A Doctor’s Despair (Paperback, Kindle)

• Yankee Doodle Soup for the Fringy, Tin Foil Hat–Wearing Conspiracy Theorist’s Soul (If you enter the code ALICE at checkout, Jenna will give me a royalty 🙏)

Buy YDS

🐇 Follow Me on Social Media

⏰ Wake-up Toolkit

My Wake-up Toolkit is a great way to get acquainted with my content. I’ve organized my articles by topic for easy reference and use in your red-pilling efforts as needed. Note that I have not been able to update this since June 2024 due to a technical issue, so check my archive for more recent additions.

🌟 WARM GRATITUDE FOR THE RECS!

The single-most important driver for new readers joining my mailing list is Substack Recommendations. I want to thank every one of you who feels enthusiastic enough about my Substack to recommend it, and I especially appreciate those of you who go the extra mile to write a blurb!

Remember, a subscription to Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass makes for an intellectually adventurous gift down the rabbit-hole!

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Note: Purchasing any items using Amazon affiliate links included in my content will further support my efforts to unmask tyranny.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
—Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

When I spontaneously started my Substack on April 25, 2021, I dashed off my mission as being to unmask totalitarianism and awaken the sleeping before tyranny triumphs.

That remains true, but over time, I’ve realized it goes deeper.

Why do I want to unmask totalitarianism and awaken the sleeping?

Because I want to stop tyranny and mass murder.

How do I stop tyranny and mass murder?

By empowering people to BECOME UNHERDABLE.

It isn’t critical thinking that’s our core defense but rather distrust of authority.

Critical thinking can and should come later, but we must first develop a reflex for authoritarianism.

I want to arm people with the weapons to defend their minds, hearts, bodies, and souls from infiltration.

I want to compile a living dossier of evidence showing Mistakes Were NOT Made—not only during COVID but throughout history.

I want to continually refine the contours of my mental map of reality and distill that evolving understanding into concentrated forms that accelerate people’s acquisition of liberating knowledge.

I want to use language to counter the propagandists’ framing by coining terms and phrases that torque consciousness toward truth.

I want to bear witness to human suffering, crimes against humanity, and targets of malfeasance.

I want to dismantle technocracy, the biosurveillance information state, the global financial prison, and one-world governmental powers.

I want bring democidal, narcissistic, and sadistic cruelites, philanthropaths, tyrants, kapos, and warmonsters to justice.

I want to teach people to identify the higher-level patterns, mass control playbooks, and methods of manipulation used to achieve PROFIT, POWER, and DEMOCIDE so they recognize them when they’re deployed.

Smartsheepe

It’s here! 🥳 Masters of Illusion is finally available!

The day is finally here! Master of Illusion: The Rise of Corporate Social Control is now live. Get your copy at Amazon. Or head over to my site and get a signed copy while taking advantage of the special deals. Books will ship from my site in early May. I’d be honored if you checked it out…

Read more

a month ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Michelle Stiles

I want to hand out X-ray glasses so people can see through propaganda, social engineering, false flags, psyops, deceptive narratives, and manufactured Problem-Reaction-Solution emergencies.

I want to equip people with the tools to explore, grow, and help others awaken when they are ready.

I want to embolden people to question, embrace a scout mindset, and live meaningful lives.

I want to buoy the Badass Germans who dare declare they see differently.

I want to rehumanize the enemy du jour.

I want to write what I most want to read.

I want to live in alignment with my values guided by integrity, rational compassion, valor, and wisdom.

I want to integrate my trauma and use it to help others.

I want to strengthen people’s resilience.

I want to help them think, feel, heal, connect, resist, and love.

I want to encourage independence, personal sovereignty, and moral courage.

I want to build community and nurture our karass.

I want to cultivate heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind, and soul-to-soul conversations.

I want to cocreate parallel societies that deflect corruption, fraud, and harm.

I want to spark Apocaloptimistic action.

I want to galvanize people to say NO.

0ne Little Alien

Welcome to the wonderful world of Micropixie and all her creations...

By Micropixie

In short, I want to make people UNHERDABLE.

Doc Malik Honest Health

I Don't Fucking Consent - Don't listen Or Read If You Are Easily offended

THIS PODCAST IS HIGHLY ADDICTIVE AND SERIOUSLY GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH…

Listen now

a year ago · 221 likes · 28 comments · Doc Malik

How to Bullshitproof Yourself

We can’t stop the cruelites’ attempts at indoctrication, mind-manipulation, and coercion, but we can bullshitproof ourselves from them. Below are a few ways to do that.

MIND

• practice critical thinking, pattern recognition, intellectual humility, and open-mindedness

• recognize propaganda, social engineering, behavioral psychology, nudging, emotional manipulation, and mass control

• zoom out to see the bigger picture—then zoom out some more, ad infinitum

• understand how your neuropsychology affects your perception of the world and shift from left-hemispheric thinking to right-hemispheric thinking

• develop immunity to lies, manipulation, social conditioning, and coercion

HEART

• trust your intuition

• distrust authority

• live your purpose

• connect with your karass

• heal your trauma

• develop resilience

BODY

• embrace natural, alternative solutions

• keep chlorine dioxide, DMSO, and other life-saving ingredients on hand to defend against illness and injury

• eat real, whole, locally grown organic foods

• avoid murderous and injurious pharmaceutical products; pesticides; EMF; processed foods; and other poisons, toxins, carcinogens, and frequencies

SOUL

• seek wisdom

• make peace with the knowledge that your body has an expiration date

• treasure your relationships

• practice Stoicism

• evade narcissists and dark triad personalities

• learn from your mistakes, Stoic challenges, and adversity and pass those lessons onto others

• be relentlessly creative

• elevate your soul by savoring words, images, videos, or other cultural works of edifying beauty and truth

This is a war on the mind. The cruelites are held aloft by nothing other than our belief.

Reality trumps their illusions.

As Étienne de La Boétie teaches, when we cancel our trust and faith in the charlatans, they all come Humpty-Dumptying down.

“You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

As each of us says NO, their power over us evaporates, one by one. Eventually, there will be no more herds to govern.

“When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly.”
—Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution (paperback, Kindle, audiobook)

Once we’ve read the spellbook, we can ricochet their sorcery back at them.

There is only one spell we need to know to break all of theirs:

NO!

And the more of us chant it, the faster their collective delusions vanish.

Be like a cat. BECOME UNHERDABLE.

I Need You

One of the most meaningful things a friend has ever said about me is, “You elevate everyone around you.”

This Substack is not about me. It’s about YOU.

I am only one person. Without you, I can’t reach anyone outside our karass.

I am a pebble in the ocean. You are the ripples.

For you alone, you are the everything.

🌎 World Council for Health’s Better Way Conference Comes to the US!

📆 Save the Dates: May 29–31, 2026

Rhode Island • Speakers

Gala Dinner: Friday, May 29, 2026 (evening)
Conference Dates: May 30–31, 2026
Cancer Workshop: May 31 (during lunch break)

I can’t think of a better organization to exemplify the concept of BECOME UNHERDABLE than World Council for Health (WCH). Dedicated to building a Better Way, WCH gives you the tools and knowledge you need to resist tyranny and protect your health.

For the first time, their Better Way Conference will be held in the United States. This is an amazing opportunity to experience illuminating presentations by a stellar lineup of speakers:

The event brings together voices from medicine, science, law, policy, and media. The conference aims to spark discussion of emerging perspectives on systemic healthcare problems and to explore possible solutions to known problems with scientific research, informed consent, prevention, treatment, governance, and health insurance models. This event showcases some of the most well-known voices in the health freedom movement.

See their press release for details and visit the Better Way Conference website to learn more and purchase tickets.

World Council for Health

How Can Broken Health Systems Be Restored? Is It Even Possible? Come to the Better Way Conference to Discover More.

For the first time, many of the most prominent figures in the global health freedom movement will be together at a single event…

Read more

2 months ago · 48 likes · World Council for Health

💸 Get 10-percent off with basket code LAWRIE10

World Council for Health

Dr. Tess Lawrie Explains: Why Attend the Better Way Conference?

Welcome to the third WCH Better Way Conference…

Read more

a month ago · 18 likes · World Council for Health

If you are interested in exhibiting or sponsoring, please click here. For media inquiries, email Nic Robinson.

© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC

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🙌 You Are My Lifeblood 💓

Thank you for making this work possible.

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Get 30% off a group subscription

The only reason I can spend every possible second writing, researching, producing videos, collaborating, nurturing our karass, living my cheng, and battling tyranny is because of the 1 percent of you who are kind enough to support me. Thank you with all of my being for that tangible expression of your appreciation for my work.

When you subscribe, you gain access to premium content like Memes by Themes, Elucidating Excerpts, Consequential Quotes, Case in Point, Afterthoughts, Behind the Scenes, podcasts, personal writings, and bonus articles.

Thank you, dear readers, for helping our thirteen kitties and me survive 😸

🎁 Personal Gift

If you would like to snail-mail me a tax-free personal gift, please DM me on Substack or reply to any of my newsletters for details.

😇 Become a Founding Member

If you take the extraordinary step of becoming a Founding Member, you will enjoy benefits such as:

• Mistakes Were NOT Made T-shirt

• signed & personalized copy of my dystopian fairy tale book

• signed & personalized copy of Canary in a Covid World—your choice of Volume 1 or Volume 2

• Audible audiobook of the first Canary volume ($21 value) while supplies last

• special gifts

• select typeset PDFs

• Zoom or phone call, depending on your preference

I especially want to thank those of you who have taken the time to write a private message to me when you subscribe. I read and cherish each note.

Thank you for being part of our karass of brave, brilliant, kind, and witty thinkers.

💝 Did You Miss This?

I messed up and didn’t send my last Memes by Themes to my full mailing list! As usual, I’ve included a generous sampling of memes for free subscribers if you’d like to check it out:

Subscribe now if you want to see the full collection as well as all my other Memes by Themes:

Subscribe now

🙏 Shoutouts Gratitude

NEVERMORE MEDIA

Against Defeatism: The Apocaloptimist Manifesto

The following essay, written by the inimitable Margaret Anna Alice, is the penultimate instalment in Nevermore’s Against the Rising Tide of Nihilism series. In it, Margaret Anna Alice offers a different perspective on how to approach the crisis of nihilism that has infected the world at large. Her solution doesn’t highlight what has already been done, but rather what…

Read more

a month ago · 15 likes · 4 comments · Margaret Anna Alice

L5 News

Better choices make

“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in piec…

Read more

a month ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Jim Davidson

🛒 Spread the Words

If you would like to help propagate the message that Mistakes Were NOT Made, you will find a wide selection of products in this collection.

📖 SAVE on Signed Copies of My Fairy Tale Book!

I am currently running a sale on signed, personalized copies of my fairy tale, so now is the time to buy copies for yourself and as gifts. Message me on Substack or reply to any of my newsletters to place an order.

📚 Anthologies

• Canary in a (Post) COVID World: Money, Fear, & Power (Hardback, Paperback, Kindle)

• Canary in a Covid World: How Propaganda & Censorship Changed Our (My) World (Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook)

• A Doctor’s Despair (Paperback, Kindle)

• Yankee Doodle Soup for the Fringy, Tin Foil Hat–Wearing Conspiracy Theorist’s Soul (If you enter the code ALICE at checkout, Jenna will give me a royalty 🙏)

Buy YDS

🐇 Follow Me on Social Media

⏰ Wake-up Toolkit

My Wake-up Toolkit is a great way to get acquainted with my content. I’ve organized my articles by topic for easy reference and use in your red-pilling efforts as needed. Note that I have not been able to update this since June 2024 due to a technical issue, so check my archive for more recent additions.

🌟 WARM GRATITUDE FOR THE RECS!

The single-most important driver for new readers joining my mailing list is Substack Recommendations. I want to thank every one of you who feels enthusiastic enough about my Substack to recommend it, and I especially appreciate those of you who go the extra mile to write a blurb!

Remember, a subscription to Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass makes for an intellectually adventurous gift down the rabbit-hole!

Give a gift subscription

Donate Subscriptions

Subscribe now

Note: Purchasing any items using Amazon affiliate links included in my content will further support my efforts to unmask tyranny.

“A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude. One of the first signs of the breaking down of free government is a disregard by the taxing power of the right of the people to their own property. It makes little difference whether such a condition is brought about through the will of a dictator, through the power of a military force, or through the pressure of an organized minority. The result is the same.”
—Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Seventh Regular Meeting of the Business Organization of the Government, June 30, 1924

If you’re a US citizen, you know April 15 is the day the illiberal protection racket that usurped our constitutional republic in 1913 commands that you proffer your annual sacrifice to retain the illusion of your freedom.

In typical rules-for-thee fashion, the demand for financial transparency stops at the threshold of power, so the agencies and politicians issuing the threats can cloak the ways in which they (ab)use the filched funds.

When double-digit trillions vanish, it’s a giant oopsie no one bothers to investigate much less prosecute—nor can you legally do so now thanks to the FASAB Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56. But don’t talk about it or you’ll be stamped a far-right–wing extremist Nazi fascist conspiracy freak.

On a lighter note, every tax season, Michael and I used to have a tradition of playing the first episode of Black Books, our favorite Britcom until 15 Storeys High edged it out.

In one of the several trillion ways Michael made me laugh hysterically over our nearly thirty-two years of marriage, he surprised me on March 25, 2015, by transcribing a portion of it and emailing it to me [I left it run together and with typos to keep it faithful to the original]:

What!? What does that mean? Now What!? If you live in a council flat beside a river but are not … blind. What!? What is your mother’s maiden name. What’d her first name? I just knew her as Ma. Ma! That’ll have to do. Ma. Possibly deceased. Did your non-returnable outgoings for the first half of the year exceed your deductions for quarterly VAT return … Right. That’s all my socks paired. Back to the accounts. Okay. Did your non-returnable outgoings for the first half of the year exceed your deductions for quarterly VAT return. [dials phone] Hello, Ma? It’s Bernard. No, nothing’s wrong. Come on. I don’t need an excuse to call my mother, do I? [11 seconds later] I know-I am. Yeah-I know. Yes-yes. Yes, I will. I know. Yes. Yes! I know. Yeah … Oka … Yea … Goodbye! I’ve got to do my taxes! Did your non-returnable outgoings for the first half of the year [knock knock knock knock] Oh thank Christ. [answers door] Yes? Hello. We were wondering if we could talk to you about Je-sus? Great! Come in. Wha-what? I’d love to hear about Jesus. What’s he up to now? Come on in. Come on. Ah-I mean. Are you sure? Yes! In-in come in. It’s a trick! It’s just, generally, people don’t say yes. Well I’m not people. Come one in! Let’s talk beliefs.

I encourage you to watch the episode in honor of Michael, perhaps making it an annual tradition to leaven future tax seasons. May the following memes help, too.

Read more

When you awoke this morning, did you remember you will one day breathe your last breath, or did you stuff that haunting awareness back down into the bosom of your busyness?

If the latter, take a moment to savor your breath.

Meditating on your eventual demise sparks you to live every remaining moment with deeper gratitude, purpose, and passion.

What are you going to do differently today because you contemplated your death? How are you going to make the rest of your life what you most want to do instead of what you’re pressured, forced, cajoled, or coerced into doing? Which regrets are you going to preempt? Who are you going to sing your love out for and to?

When My Body Stops

by Margaret Anna Alice

When my body stops
When my breath stills
When my heart grows quiet
and my blood chills

When my brain halts
and my cells cease
When my memories vanish
and I am released

My skin will be a burst balloon
My eyes will be a placid mirror
My hands will be a caress unfelt

And my thoughts will be elsewhere
Yes, my thoughts, my felts, my amwasis
will be elsewhere

Today’s tomorrow
And tomorrow’s yesterday
Will meet at the corner of
Forever

As you sing me into sleep
As you read me into dreams
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Losing My Religion

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Losing My Religion

These ideas come very slowly into being, and they are also very slow to disappear. Long after their erroneous nature has become clear to cultivated minds, they remain indisputable truths for the masses, and continue to exert their influence on the rank and file of a nation. It is difficult to obtain recognition for a new idea, but it is no less difficult to discredit an idea that has long been generally accepted. Humanity has always been exceedingly loth to abandon its decayed ideas and its moribund gods.

* * *

When an idea, after a longer or shorter period of tentative existence, modifications, deformations, discussion and propaganda, has acquired its definite form and penetrated the soul of the masses, it constitutes a dogma, that is one of those absolute truths which are no longer discussed. It then forms part of those general beliefs on which the existence of peoples is based.

—Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples (p. xiii and p. 178)

How It Started

It was 2017. My late beloved husband, Michael, started asking uncomfortable questions.

It began with playing raw footage of Evergreen Spring captured by Benjamin Boyce that May. Protests by shrieking, baseball bat–wielding social justice warriors had erupted at Evergreen College after biology professor Bret Weinstein had dared critique the Day of Absence during which whites were pressured to vanish from campus. In the email that sparked the conflagration, Weinstein stated, “On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

This was Michael’s and my first real-world glimpse of Wokeism, and we were appalled by the extent to which students had been ideologically inculcated into a victim mindset that rendered them irrational, emotionally volatile, envious, and enraged—a combustible combination.

Soon Michael began reexamining one long-held progressive belief after another. I thought he was succumbing to right-wing propaganda. I started researching how to deprogram him—not yet realizing I was the one who needed deprogramming and that “right-wing” really meant “liberal,” while those on the radical left were now illiberal.

We argued repeatedly. Michael presented logical reasons for his changing positions. I continued to resist.

Subconsciously, however, I was feeling uneasy about my mounting cognitive dissonance regarding issues I had not properly researched and had automatically taken my tribe’s word for.

Michael could not stomach much of the fictional media we previously consumed as he found the social engineering excruciatingly blatant. Having spent much of our marriage as film aficionados, we could no longer watch movies.

I told him, “I feel like I’ve lost my best friend.”

He persevered, playing videos in the background as we worked—political commentaries, lectures, interviews, presentations. Many were exposing the hypocrisies of the Democrat Party, which we had reluctantly switched back to from the Green Party after Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election.

To my surprise, many of the views presented in the videos Michael played made sense.

I gradually loosened my grip on my emotionally implanted beliefs. I shifted from a state of fearful defensiveness to open-minded curiosity—or from a soldier mindset to a scout mindset, to use Julia Galef’s illuminating terminology.

As my cherished soul-sister Meredith Miller writes in Becoming Whole: How to Prevent Stockholm Syndrome and Transcend Darkness in Your Life and Relationships:

Belief isn’t just thought; it’s architecture. Most of what we believe, we didn’t choose. We inherited it—from culture, family, religion, and trauma. These beliefs form the invisible scaffolding of how we see the world, like an unseen frame holding up what we call “reality.” It feels heavy because we are carrying the weight of the distortions we inherited. And at some level we sense the tension between what we’ve been taught to believe and what actually resonates.

I felt an exhilarating lightness, clarity, and freedom as I embarked on a journey of intellectual discovery.

I started writing a book titled No Longer a Lefty that began:

I used to call myself a progressive because I was anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-corporation, countercultural, tolerant of diverse viewpoints, pro-truth, pro–freedom of speech, pro–freedom of choice, pro-justice, and pro-equality for all.

I stopped calling myself a progressive because I am anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-corporation, countercultural, tolerant of diverse viewpoints, pro-truth, pro–freedom of speech, pro–freedom of choice, pro-justice, and pro-equality for all.

My core values remained the same. I just figured out political parties and politicians were lying about representing them.

Once I recovered from menticide and began shedding my illusions, I started realizing all the different ways in which I’d been deceived throughout my life. All the false narratives, all the manufactured crises, all the emotional and psychological manipulations of my cognitive biases came into sharp relief against the backdrop of immersive propaganda.

My One Inviolable Belief

There was one belief that remained untouchable, however: Climate change is an urgent, existential threat to all life on earth, and we must rapidly reduce our CO₂ emissions to save the planet.

To question this belief was to jeopardize all life. Only ignorant, dangerous, science-denying Deplorables would be stupid enough to do so.

Gustave Le Bon writes in The Psychology of Peoples:

Each citizen had a number of absolutely inviolable beliefs; none would have thought of discussing received ideas, which were accepted without demur.

Climate change was my inviolable belief.

As a Gen Xer, I had been indoctricated1 into the global warming narrative beginning in high school. Years later, I imbibed Al Gore’s 2006 An Inconvenient Truth. I believed him when he said, “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

I was scared, anxious, angry, and galvanized into action. All other issues paled in importance by comparison. My empathy was locked and loaded.

I cared about the environment. I cared about the oceans. I cared about wildlife and humanity. I didn’t want the polar bears to drown and the planet to become uninhabitable within my lifetime.

I would later realize the environmental movement—which exposed genuine toxic harms to water, soil, sky, wildlife, and people by psychopathic corporations—I had been born into in the seventies had been hijacked by the climate change agenda in the late eighties.

The emphasis was no longer on polluting corporations but individuals, who were now freighted with guilt and compelled to save the planet by recycling and minimizing their carbon footprint.

In this religion, gods such as the United Nations carve out the Ten Commandments in the form of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, VISION 2040, and the SDG7 Global Roadmap for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

Traumatized by sermons citing “sacred texts” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports) about a fire-and-brimstone future, parishioners can pay tithes on energy bills to offset their carbon footprint—like medieval Christians paying indulgences to the church to absolve their sins.

High-priest philanthropath Bill Gates can try to dim the sun, swap real meat for lab-grown Frankenfoods, and replace mother’s milk with artificial breast milk. In the words of Dr. Vandana Shiva:

He controls the seeds of the world. He finances the Svalbard seed bank, then he creates patent systems, and he destroys the international system that controls the country’s rights to their seeds … so that all the seeds of the world are his seeds, and he can be the new Monsanto on a global scale.… This is the net zero they’re trying to push in the climate discussions. It’s a land grab.

National churches called governments can slash food production, incarcerate citizens in fifteen-minute cities, restrict travel, and ban gas stoves all in the name of holy climate change.

Skeptics are burned at the reputational stake as heretics while fundaclimatists earn rewards in the forms of grant funding, career advancement, and Nobel Prizes for their righteous, planet-saving work.

As University of Melbourne Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences Ian Plimer observed in a March 8, 2026, Triggernometry interview:

This was a religion. It had all the hallmarks of a religion with sin and with redemption, with paying penance, and basically, you have to give up something in your life. “We won’t, as the leaders of the religion, but you have to.”… I could see very quickly this wasn’t science; this was absolute nonsense.… It is the new religion. It’s been embraced with fervor, and it’s going to cost us very, very dearly.

Climategate: Lifting the Veil on $cientific Fraud

In 2017, while I was still clinging to my faith, I started conducting research to corroborate my belief in the climate change narrative. I consulted “authoritative” sources like NASA and perused their evidence, which is buttressed by IPCC reports.

Even though I had several years prior discovered the extensive corruption of nutritional “science” by Food, Inc. after reading books like The Big Fat Surprise and Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, I still inexplicably Trusted The $cience™ when it came to climate change.

That was before I learned NASA’s James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt had colluded with climatologist Michael Mann to commit the scientific fraud that would produce the notorious hockey stick graph published in Nature on April 1, 1998 (no joke).

First exposed as fraudulent by Climate Audit Founder and Editor Stephen McIntyre and Canadian Professor of Economics Ross McKitrick, this graph was to become what Walter Lippmann calls in his 1922 book Public Opinion a symbol to steer the masses and drive public policy. Lippmann articulates the formula:

[H]e who captures the symbols by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy.

As Climategate’s leaked IPCC emails would uncover in 2009, the hockey stick symbol that ignited our present era of climate alarmism was produced by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period; using the short-centering technique to dramatically enhance the twentieth-century warming signal; and creating “about 0.6C warming from 1850 to 1976 – which they did by altering their own data,” according to Real Climate Science Founder and climate realist Tony Heller.

“Plucked out of Thin Air” & Other Trickery

In a September 6, 2007, email, Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Phil Jones postulated the 2° C ceiling on temperature increase was “plucked out of thin air,” writing:

The 2 deg C limit is talked about by a lot within Europe. It is never defined though what it means. Is it 2 deg C for the globe or for Europe? Also when is/was the base against which the 2 deg C is calculated from? I know you don’t know the answer, but I don’t either! I think it is plucked out of thin air. I think it is too high as well.

This is the same Phil Jones who boasted in a November 16, 1999, email:

I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.

The IPCC is fond of tricks. Its coordinating lead author on the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) Jonathan Overpeck wrote:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out [of IPCC reports].

In a September 19, 1996, email, Halliburton Scientific Advisor Gary Funkhouser noted:

I really wish I could be more positive about the … material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that.… I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have—they just are what they are … I think I’ll have to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.

Anyone intellectually honest who spends even a few hours scanning the Climategate emails will quickly realize the entire terrorizing narrative is based on junk data sets contorted to promote a political agenda.

IPCC contributor Mike Hulme confessed:

The debate around climate change is fundamentally about power and politics rather than the environment.… There are not that many ‘facts’ about (the meaning of) climate change which science can unequivocally reveal.

The trickery extends to field measurements as well. In the mid-2000s, Founder and Editor of WattsUpWithThat.com Anthony Watts discovered the temperatures were being cooked to create artificially elevated readings:

Actual thermometers—those stubbornly analog devices—were being placed next to heat sources, asphalt, and buildings.

Follow the Funding

With such rampant corruption of the data, why is it that so many scientists jumped on the climate change bandwagon?

In a 2014 CNN interview, Weather Channel Founder John Coleman answered that question:

The government puts out about two-and-a-half billion dollars directly for climate research every year. It only gives that money to scientists who will produce scientific results that support the global warming hypothesis.

There it is—the old familiar pattern of the government financially incentivizing desired outcomes for political ends.

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry said in an August 20, 2025, interview conducted by Hannes Sarv:

If your research funding is tied to agreeing with the consensus, if your salary increase, if your tenure case… It’s really about careerism and resources. That’s what it’s all about. The incentives are all pointing in one direction.

Former climate activist Lucy Biggers has gone from hobnobbing with Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to blowing the whistle on the climate deceptions. In a February 17, 2026, Free Press interview, Lucy said:

I have a responsibility to set the record straight and to counter this fear because I played a part in pushing it. And we’re seeing the impacts now with also just these really poorly thought-out green policies.… There are so many people who make money off this. How do you turn that ship? It’s really, really hard.

Don’t look at the climate models that say, “In ten years, the planet’s going to be this; in thirty years, it’s going to be that.” Those are models that are just computer models. You can put any bit of data in there to get any outcome that you want to prove there’s an Apocalypse, and the scientists who do those models are incentivized to find that outcome, and so they’re not solid science.

Exposing the Lie of “Consensus”

Even with such corrupting incentives, a shocking number of courageous scientists of integrity have been diligently exposing the climate lies, including Nobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser; Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer; and Steven Koonin, former undersecretary for science in the US Department of Energy under the Obama administration. These and many other highly credible climate skeptics are featured in the compelling 2024 documentary Climate: The Movie.

Michael Crichton presciently warned about the “consensus” cudgel in a January 17, 2003, speech at California Institute of Technology:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

More scientists are joining the mass exodus from the concocted consensus. In a January 12, 2026, X post, former British MP Andrew Bridgen shared “the words of the first 16 scientists of 46 that have left the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due to the corruption of science within the organisation.” Below is a sampling of the statements included:

Dr John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”

Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”

Dr Willem de Lange: “In 1996 the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3000 ‘scientists’ who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”

Dr Vincent Gray: “The [IPCC] climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”

The Greenshed

At the same time data is being manipulated to create the perception of a climate crisis, the green energy industry is literally harming the planet.

As Ian Plimer observed in the aforementioned Triggernometry interview:

To solve the world’s climate crisis, whatever that is, we are knocking down forests to put in wind turbines. These wind turbine blades have poisonous chemicals in them. They’ve got asbestos in them. And we are cutting swathes of forest, killing off wildlife, doing the same with offshore wind turbines—to save the planet! … We are killing off very large areas of prime agricultural land putting in solar panels, and these are contaminating the ground, these are destroying good farmland.… I think the world’s going through one of its periods of going mad.

It is estimated that wind turbines kill 700,000 to one million birds annually in the United States alone. So many endangered whales have been killed since the introduction of offshore wind vessels, it’s prompted a new Save the Whales movement.

It’s a Shell Game

As if the greenshed and the associated environmental devastation weren’t bad enough, it turns out the entire “green” energy industry is a shell game masking the reality that it ultimately relies on oil, natural gas, and coal. In a January 2026 interview, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright explained:

When it comes to climate change, we just check rationality at the door. Forget it. That doesn’t apply over here. It’s only about decarbonizing and claiming we’re in the middle of an energy transition.

I think we are in the midst of the greatest malinvestment in human history. Ten trillion dollars on a global base has been invested nominally in “fighting” climate change.

What do you get for ten trillion dollars? … We got solar up to 1.2 percent of global energy and wind at 1.4 percent. Collectively, 2.6 percent of global energy comes from these sources that ten trillion dollars of investment’s gone into. And everywhere the penetration level’s high, prices have gone up … and you just move industry. That doesn’t reduce emissions.

If you make it so that a factory closes in the Midlands of England, and it moves to Asia, and it runs on coal now instead of natural gas, and you load the goods on diesel ships, that’s not fighting climate change. That’s deindustrializing your nation and having a government pounding the drum on decarbonization but never doing the math on, “Is it working?”…

Let’s just engage with reality. Oil, gas, and coal are what run the world. Full stop. We can’t make a wind turbine or a solar panel or a nuclear power plant without massive amounts of oil, gas, and coal. That’s how the world works.

A Shocking Twist

In another surprise twist, the uncorrupted scientific data indicates CO₂ is not only not an Apocalyptic threat but rather is necessary for life on earth.

At the Tyler Energy Summit in Texas on March 25, 2025, CO₂ Coalition Executive Director Gregory Wrightstone discussed the findings presented in his latest book, A Very Convenient Warming:

Not only is there not a climate crisis, by almost every metric we look at … earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering, and humanity is benefiting from the combination of modest warming and more CO₂.

Wrightstone agrees with the mainstream climate scientists that humans are contributing to atmospheric CO₂, but his research shows this is incredibly beneficial for all life forms. He says, “Every ecological niche is benefiting from this increase in CO₂.”

The Greening of the Earth

Known as the “greening of the earth,” this phenomenon shows greater CO₂ emissions are actually saving the planet by pulling us out of perilously low levels. Plants requires CO₂ for their survival, and the rest of the species in our interwoven ecosystem depend on plants for their survival in turn.

According to remote sensing data published in Uncovering True Significant Trends in Global Greening in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment (January 2025), beginning in 1982, the planet began experiencing “a striking global greening trend, with a significant portion of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface showing increases in vegetation cover over the past four decades.”

Authors Oliver Gutiérrez-Hernández and Luis V. García note:

Among these significant trends identified using the TST workflow, 76.07% indicated greening, while 23.93% indicated browning. Notably, considering areas (pixels) with NDVI values above 0.15, greening accounted for 85.43% of the significant trends, with browning making up the remaining 14.57%. These findings strongly validate the ongoing global greening of vegetation.

Referencing a chart in his slideshow, Wrightstone explains:

This is probably the most scary chart you’ll see today. This is 140 million years of carbon dioxide data showing the steep and almost linear decline of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And that red line at the bottom is what I call the Line of Death. And what that is, it’s the minimum threshold for plant life to exist. We nearly got there. That’s 150 parts per million. We got to 180 at the end of the most recent ice advance.

Wrightstone elaborates in A Very Convenient Warming:

Rather than being at unprecedented high levels, CO₂ is at one of its lowest concentrations in the long history of the Earth. Recent increases of this miracle molecule are greening the Earth with an astonishing boost in the productivity of plants worldwide—an increase so dramatic that it can been seen by satellites from space. As usual, this good news is just the opposite of what we are being told by those who call themselves “green.”

To demonize CO₂ as dangerously high is an attempt to instill fear so that people will docilely accept drastic and economically destructive policies. Governments now have in place regressive regimes of taxation and regulation to curtail the use of fossil fuels. The policies are scientifically baseless and economically senseless. Their cost in lives and treasure is heavy.

He goes on to quote MIT Emeritus Professor of Meteorology Dr. Richard Lindzen:

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that carbon dioxide from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin.

It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world—that carbon dioxide, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

Climate $cientists Are Baffled

Like baffled doctor$ who can’t understand why incidences of heart attacks, cancer, and strokes suddenly started spiking in 2021, climate $cientists are stumped by new evidence from ancient Antarctica ice cores showing CO₂ releases follow temperature increases rather than the other way around published in two Nature articles on March 18, 2026:

• Broadly Stable Atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ Levels over the Past 3 Million Years

• Global Ocean Heat Content over the Past 3 Million Years

This Upton Sinclair quote never loses relevancy:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

How to Create a Collective Delusion

When I first embarked on my journey of awakening to the pseudoscientific collective climate delusion I had been inducted into through 360-degree propagandizing and social conditioning, I encountered no search results for credible voices questioning the narrative.

I didn’t realize that was because the Censorship Industrial Complex had blacked out and fact-choked any competing sources to achieve the simulacrum of consensus.

Fortunately, one of the YouTube channels Michael played in the background while we worked belonged to Tony Heller, whose calm, sensible, and scientifically robust dismantling of the climate catechisms caught my attention.

When the COVID psyop hit, I recognized the same telltale pattern of Orwellian thought control; silencing and smearing of once-respected scientists, doctors, and other counternarrative experts; scientific fraud; gaslighting; and astronomical wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to the philanthropaths and their fellow cruelites.

Now that I understood the Disinformation Playbook, I could view the unfolding tyranny with a lucidity that enabled me to see through the walls of Plato’s Propaganda Cave and sense when the mind-manipulators were attempting to pull my cognitive and emotional levers.

Another Global Scam by the Cruelites

I could smell the stench of a scam, and the deeper I looked, the clearer the picture became. Con artists use fear, urgency, coercion, and “the greater good” to get people to act against their own interests and relinquish their freedoms and civil rights.

It wasn’t until I encountered the Hudson’s Razor formulated by Nick Hudson that I realized I had intuited this survival knowledge as I became increasingly aware of efforts to corral the public toward one-world totalitarianism:

Hudson’s Razor, stating that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admitting only global solutions (3) amid suppression of dissent, is definitively a scam.

Hudson outlines the unmistakable signs of a con as follows:

The general rule of thumb that I believe everybody should adopt is that if any problem is being presented as a global crisis, then it is a scam. And the pattern that we are confronted with is really the fabrication of global crises. The presentation either of nonexistent problems or small local problems as being general global crises. That fabrication followed by the assertion that the only solutions that are permissible are global ones that require a global authority, global control.…

The climate change crisis is another example where we are told that the biggest threat to the world is this molecule, CO₂, and that an increase in the level of this molecule will cause an increase in temperature and that temperature increase will be bad for us and that the only thing we can do is consume fewer fossil fuels and less energy. That’s fitting the pattern exactly.

The other things you can observe is instead of presenting science as an ongoing, evolving activity, it is presented in terms of static knowledge, consensus. And you see the cancellation and censorship of dissident voices rather than engagement with them. These patterns are proof of a scam. That is what people need to understand.

Whenever something is presented as “The Science,” as a consensus, it is a scam. You do not have to go and get engaged in all of the minutiae of all the scientific principles and the models and the measurements at all. You can know with absolute certainty that you are dealing with a scam when dissent is suppressed.

Ian Plimer observes the same pattern in the climateers’ use of Scientism to blind the public with “science”:

I realized there is actually a very large body of people out there who are using science to promote scams.… I saw exactly the same thing arise in the late nineties with climate change. I could see exactly the same hallmarks.

In his article Opinion: Geopolitical Context of the Embattled Climate Racket, Dr. Denis Rancourt likens the climate con to a global protection racket, writing:

These delivered generic ideologies became tied to and protected by strong career and institutional interests, but also spun towards absurd and damaging lucrative endpoints.… The thus introduced and evolving ideology of climate change is an ideology centered on a fictitious kind of climate change that is mitigated by good behaviour, large investments using public funds, and industrial restructuring. It is a protection racket with no valid scientific justification.

Why the Big Climate Lie?

The average citizen might wonder why a group of philanthropaths, connivers, and colluders would propagate such a Big Lie as the climate crisis.

They’ve been telling us why for years.

The World Economic Forum’s infamous infomercial visualizing “8 predictions for the world in 2030” explicitly states, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

WEF Founder Klaus Schwab’s mentor Maurice Strong once fantasized:

What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is “no.” The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?

In the Rockefeller-funded Club of Rome’s 1991 report The First Global Revolution, Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider write:

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together.… All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

David Rockefeller proudly admits in his Memoirs:

Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

During his January 2026 inaugural speech as the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

A March 24, 2026, Brownstone Institute article titled Another Lockdown Coming (or Already Here)? warns the fuel crisis is now being used to justify authoritarian restrictions akin to COVID lockdowns:

[T]he International Energy Agency has released a full plan for global rationing. It involves stay-at-home orders, edicts against driving alone or on days in which you are not permitted, and only essential commercial road traffic. The report also criticizes cooking with natural gas.

Although fact-chokers like Wikipedia claim “climate lockdown is a conspiracy theory,”2 radical climatists are enthusiastically promoting the idea.

Green Matters, a website that says it is “for people looking to live more sustainably, fight the climate crisis, and learn about environmental justice,” writes in the 2023 article Will Climate Lockdowns Be Necessary to Fight the Climate Crisis?:

According to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a climate lockdown would entail the government taking other actions aside from asking people to stay at home. Limiting private vehicle use, banning the consumption of red meat, imposing intense energy-saving actions, and putting an end to fossil fuel drilling, are all examples of potential measures to be taken during a climate lockdown.

The main goal of these actions would be to lower global emissions. As we get closer and closer to reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius — a milestone that would cause the effects of climate change to further worsen — scientists are emphasizing the importance and necessity of staying below this threshold.…

And as we have seen with the pandemic, getting people to work together towards a collective goal isn’t always easy.…

If a climate lockdown becomes necessary, there’s a chance that we could run into a similar problem.

Taking a cue from Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays on crystallizing public opinion to get people to accept an unpopular, tyrannical policy, Matt Gallagher writes in a Green Packs article:

Climate lockdowns are a relatively new concept gaining traction in discussions about environmental sustainability and the urgent need to address climate change. They refer to measures that can be implemented by governments to restrict certain activities in order to mitigate environmental damage.…

A climate lockdown would involve strict regulations and restrictions, including measures such as limiting travel, mandating reduced hours of operation for businesses, and encouraging a shift towards greener practices.…

Implementing such drastic measures, however, raises a broad range of questions regarding feasibility and public acceptance. It challenges the very essence of modern society—our freedom to travel, work, and interact as we choose. So how do you convince a populace used to freedom that they need to accept temporary restrictions for the greater good? The answer may lie in transparent communication of the benefits, underscoring how collective cooperation can lead to significant environmental benefits and a healthier planet in the years to come.…

A climate lockdown represents a courageous and necessary step towards confronting environmental challenges head-on.… A climate lockdown aims to instill a cultural shift toward sustainability, compelling societies to reconsider not just our day-to-day habits but also the very structures that drive our economies and lifestyles. [emphases mine]

Climate hysteria is a coup de mâitre for the cruelites. They can use it to justify restrictions on farming that will result in widespread starvation, making people desperate enough to clamor for socialist solutions; curtail our access to energy; and lock us in twenty-minute concentration camps (a.k.a. “Climate-Friendly Areas (CFAs),” “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities,” “C40 cities,” and “smart cities”) touted as convenient and planet-saving.

The Jig Is Up

There comes a point in every con when the jig is up. That’s when it’s time to cool the mark out. Sociologist Erving Goffman writes about the nature of the con in his 1952 Psychiatry article On Cooling the Mark Out:

Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators’ point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business.… In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out. After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team‑mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.

We’re approaching that shift with the climate swindle as awareness of the fraudulent $cience™ spreads. This is the moment at which we must be especially alert to the propagandists’ attempts to cool us out as they prepare us for the next ruse in the cruelites’ long-term march toward the Fabianization of the world. As Nick Hudson warned in a March 2026 speech:

A jarring fact, one that people don’t like at all, is that socialism was founded and promoted by the bankers of the Anglo-American establishment, not for benevolent or philanthropic purposes, but to further their own interests.

This seems entirely implausible to someone. Why would these arch capitalists bay for socialism?

But elite control of governments has been a permanent feature of life everywhere throughout human history, whether one lives under a democracy or a monarchy or tyranny. Through lobbying, media control, infiltration, and bribery, elites have long been able to capture and control governments. And as governments increase in size, the rewards for capturing those governments increase, too. Because banking has long been a transnational enterprise, the notion of the sovereign state is, like the notion of socialism being for workers, largely illusory.

If you are an elite seeking control, it’s far easier to get government to confiscate private assets, bringing them under your control for free, than it is to generate sufficient wealth that would be required to buy them on the open market. So socialism offers financial elites an enormous bounty.

The actions taken by transnational bankers to bring about this situation over a century and a half are not a matter of speculation but are instead documented in excruciating detail, in some cases, even by the very institutions they formed.

Our only hope of escaping the Matrixian future the cruelites have plotted out for us is for people to become climate apostates and exercise the almighty power of NO.

In the words of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe:

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losin’ my religion …

Consider this
Consider this, the hint of the century
Consider this, the slip
That brought me to my knees, failed
What if all these fantasies come
Flailing around?
Now, I’ve said too much

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

It is time to awaken from that dream and shake off the mental fetters of climate fantasies that could lead to our physical fettering—unless we lose our religion.

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📣 #LosingMyReligion

A dear friend with expertise in climate science who reviewed a draft of this article said he thinks this is best article he has read on the topic and that it has the greatest chance of reaching those who are still believers in the climate delusion, particularly those on the left.

Please help me get the word out to those individuals by sharing this post now as well as whenever the topic of the climate con comes up in future. You can use the hashtag #LosingMyReligion and the short url LosingMyReligion.org to aid with your viralization efforts. Below is my X post if you’d like to repost it directly.

Thank you for helping me help others lose their religion.

Canary in a Climate World

Below is a sampling of the illustrious contributors I am honored to join:

• Dr. Angus Dalgleish – Oncologist & professor, University of London

• Dr. John F. Clauser – Nobel Laureate in Physics (2022)

• Professor Nir Shaviv – Astrophysicist, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Professor Henrik Svensmark – Physicist & climate researcher

• Professor Ramesh Thakur – Former UN Assistant Secretary-General

• Professor Richard S. Lindzen – Atmospheric physicist, MIT

• Professor Ian Plimer – Geologist & professor emeritus

• Professor Ian Clark – Hydrogeologist, University of Ottawa

• Dr. Will Happer – Physicist, Princeton University

• Dr. Willie Soon – Astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

• Dr. John Christy – Atmospheric scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville

• Professor Christopher Essex – Applied mathematician & physicist

• Professor Geoffrey Duffy – Chemical engineer & researcher

• William Kininmonth – Meteorologist, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre

• Gregory R. Wrightstone – Geologist & Executive Director, CO₂ Coalition

• Professor Howard C. Hayden – Physicist, University of Connecticut

• Dr. John Cherry – Hydrogeologist, University of Waterloo

• Anthony Watts – Meteorologist & climate data analyst

• Professor Gernot Rabeder – Paleontologist, University of Vienna

• Robert Lyman – Energy policy expert & former government advisor

• Kenneth P. Green – Environmental policy analyst

• Tom Harris – Executive Director, International Climate Science Coalition

• Andrew Roman – Environmental lawyer & legal commentator

• Michael Sangster – Author & technology executive

• Meredith Miller – Health advocate & speaker

• Dr. Michael Rectenwald – Professor & author, former NYU

• Seamus Bruner – Investigative journalist

• Dr. Sam Dubé – Physician & broadcaster

• Vijay Jayaraj – Environmental researcher & policy commentator

• Professor James Allan – Law professor, University of Queensland

• Sir Christopher Chope – 13-term UK Member of Parliament

• Shawn Buckley – Constitutional lawyer

• Rodney Palmer – Former CBC & CTV journalist

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These passages are intended to expand your knowledge, deepen your understanding, and whet your appetite for the full texts. If you are a bibliophile and avid quote collector like me, you will especially appreciate this series.

I can’t think of a more perfect book than Walter Lippmann’s foundational Public Opinion to launch a series aimed at exposing the trickery used to manipulate the public into accepting absurdities and committing atrocities.

Public Opinion (1922)

by Walter Lippmann

Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, & Audiobook

It is invisible, intangible, and inaudible, but it has the power to fell millions.

It makes people consume harmful products, ingest toxins, hate outgroups, resist reason, murder strangers, and impale themselves on an idea.

Without it, nations could not war, tyrants could not genocide, cruelites could not enslave, bankers could not lucratize blood, and philanthropaths could not lure believers into committing seppuku.

It is how supranational entities, governments, propagandists, and their kapos and colluders condition people to violate their self-preservation instincts.

In his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell describes it as follows:

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.

Sometimes called “consensus,” the dark scientific art of manufactured consent is historically known as public opinion, the forefathers of which are Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays.

Both men served in The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, whose origins trace back to London’s Wellington House in 1913. For over a century, this group has been quietly deploying persuasion techniques to social-engineer the majority into accepting everything from wars to economic destruction of the middle class.

In his book Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism, Christopher Daly says Lippmann “may have been the most influential American of the twentieth century never to have held elected office.”

In what became known as the Lippmann–Dewey Debate, John Dewey—himself primarily responsible for the contemporary indoctrication system in which students “fail to acquire basic academic skills and knowledge”—felt1 Lippmann’s views led him to “retreat from democratic ideals and to justify the manufacturing of consent by managing public opinion by a technocratic elite.”

Lippmann’s contemptuous attitude toward ordinary people is evident in this passage from Public Opinion:

The mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals, is very considerable, much more considerable there is reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians, people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion.

In 1908, Lippmann’s mentor and Fabian Society leader Graham Wallas2 wrote in Human Nature in Politics:

Popular elections, it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalize a trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it. If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund or discovered some other new source of political strength, would have any chance of permanent success.

It seems the Fabian cruelites and their protégés have nearly succeeded in achieving their agenda as Nick Hudson observes in this penetrating speech:

Through constant and massive funding and multigenerational consistency of objectives, Fabianization of the Western world is all but complete.

Although Lippmann, Bernays, Wallas, and other formative mind-manipulators lacked a clear picture of the cognitive landscape that would arrive with advances in neuroscience before the turn of the millennium, the mass control strategies they outline in their seminal texts remain shockingly effective today. People may not be as neurologically susceptible to their methods as once imagined, but the combination of the cognitively vulnerable and the cowardly conformists creates enough societal momentum to propel detrimental policies forward despite the cries of the courageous.

Like magic tricks, the power of these tools to deceive dissolves with awareness. If everyone memorized Hudson’s Razor, for example, the longconners wouldn’t be able to continue corralling us toward one-world tyranny through global terror campaigns:

Hudson’s Razor, stating that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admitting only global solutions (3) amid suppression of dissent, is definitively a scam.

The following excerpts from Public Opinion will further equip you to quickly recognize the cruelites and their PR firms’ tactics whenever they are deployed.

Elucidating Excerpts

Note: Page numbers below are from the Standard Publications Inc. 2007 edition. Emphases are mine for easier skimming.

Read more

Visceral Adventure

Alchemizing current events, culture, and conversation through media and immersive experiences in an effort to expand human aliveness and usher in the next conscious evolution.

Today—Friday the 13th, appropriately—I am releasing one of the alternative versions the brilliantly versatile Tonika produced. She describes it as a “retro-futurist duotone.” I felt it had a 2001 vibe, so she indulged my request to create title credits in that style. I shared a HAL 9000 screensaver Michael had installed, provided some reference material, did some detective work to identity the font, and created a mockup, writing her:

For the 2001 version, I was envisioning something like this—a solid background color with the text flickering in like it does where this video is queued up (starts on the teal screen):

I eyedropped these colors from your video but was also going for something slightly muted to echo the 2001 palette.

Tonika soared to the challenge with her characteristic exuberant creativity. Like the Blade Runner version, this video is scored with the instrumental of “Quite Hinky,” one of several hundred pieces Michael composed in the mid-2000s set to vocals written and performed by our dear friend Greg.

Whenever I publish dystopian content, some people express concerns about depicting a dark vision of the future instead of a hopeful one.

As an Apocaloptimist, I understand their perspective, but I think they are missing the power of dystopian stories to “unmask totalitarianism and awaken the sleeping before tyranny triumphs,” the mission I articulated when I launched my Substack nearly five years ago.

Most people are too preoccupied with their daily lives, exhausted, uncurious, and oblivious to project their imagination into the future and recognize the ultimate destination of the present trajectory.

Dystopian art helps us visualize that potential future—and activates us to stop it.

As I wrote in the four-year anniversary post for my dystopian fairy tale:

When we are fed a cookie-cutter happy ending to a serious threat, our brains interpret this fictional scenario as a satisfying resolution to the tension preceding it. That means people go away feeling placated without any sense of urgency to play a role in stopping such a vision from coming to fruition.

I don’t want people to be left with a lazy feeling of complacency because some supplied hero has done all the hard work for them.

I want to spark Apocaloptimistic action, courageous resistance, and Badass disobedience in reality.

I want the sleeping to reclaim their minds, rediscover their critical thinking, recognize propaganda, defend our freedom, awaken to tyranny, and become ungovernable.

I want people to escape their socially engineered granfalloons, find their karass, and live their cheng.

It’s not too late.

The story isn’t over.

We can write a new ending together.

Here is the formula I defined for Apocaloptimism:

Dystopian tales are the equivalent of Confront the Brutal Facts.

Like it or not, the cruelites, philanthropaths, tyrants, and colluders are rocketing the world into this future at lightspeed. Humans are being replaced with AI overlords programmed to constrain us. No grace, no empathy, no nuance, no exceptions.

In 2021, I wrote in Letter to a Colluder:

Eventually, you will be replaced by robots. Then you will become one of the plebeians you presently persecute—and the few of us who survive the democide will be equally disempowered, dependent, divested of possessions, and enslaved to a totalitarian technocracy. Mass surveillance will monitor our every twitch, tallying credits and demerits to our social credit score in accordance with the autocratic algorithms.

There will be no humans left to administer mercy. There will be no halfway decent enforcer to let this one slide. There will be no compassionate official to consider mitigating circumstances.

All grays will be washed into an unending, unflinching, unsparing blackness from which the dawn never emerges.

The totality of this New World Tyranny is unprecedented in human history. Indeed, it may signal the end of all human history, now and forevermore.

Unless you stop colluding. Unless you stop enforcing. Unless you stop enabling.

We are living in the twilight of Concentration Camp 2.0.

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
—Justice William O. Douglas

As usual, the plans for twenty-minute concentration camps are cloaked in euphemistic Aesopian language such as “Climate-Friendly Areas (CFAs),” “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities,” “C40 cities,” “VISION 2040,” and “smart cities.”

All over the world, land use planning laws are being rewritten to quietly alter the landscape; prohibit self-sustaining activities such as growing and rearing your own food; and force dependence on the State.

The blueprints for one-world subjugation are being disseminated worldwide through local entities.

I recently attended a private presentation by author Diana Anderson, who has been tracing the implementation of twenty-minute concentration camps in Oregon. Below is the flyer she distributed at the event. I will be attending a lecture by her this evening to gather more details and action steps, which I hope to share in a future article.

This is no longer a dystopian fiction—it is reality.

But it’s not too late to rewrite the ending—if we act now.

This is where the Stockdale Paradox portion of Apocaloptimism comes into play.

As a chaser to the bleak future depicted in In Five Years, I will close below with the 2026 version of New Year’s rEvolution, a collaborative poem I wrote with Shabnam Palesa Mohamed in 2025.

People Power with Shabnam Palesa Mohamed

This is my alternative Substack. My main Substack, which I can't access right now, is called Take Back Power with Shabnam Palesa Mohamed.

It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty from the philanthropaths, globalist scammers, and their muses. Let’s work toward achieving liberation, independence, and community resilience … in five years.

In Five Years (a Short Story)

In five years, no one will remember natural immunity existed. They will call you an anti-vaxxer for whispering such a term while they stand in line for their 187th booster.

In five years, no one will remember where one person’s body ends and the body politic begins. They will call you selfish for thinking you have a right to decide how your body is handled and what transgresses the perimeters of your flesh.

In five years, no one will remember there was such a thing as privacy. They will call you a criminal for suggesting people should be permitted a quiet space away from the eyes of Big Mother, Big Tech, and your surveilling cohabitants.

In five years, no one will remember the concept of independence. They will call you antisocial for wishing to carve out your own destiny rather than relying on the beneficence of OneState.

In five years, no one will remember they have the right to say, “No.” They will call you an insurrectionist for questioning the commands spilling out of the telescreen.

In five years, no one will remember natural birth ever occurred. They will call you primitive for thinking embryos were once fertilized and grown inside the body rather than in a laboratory.

In five years, no one will remember parents once cared for their own children. They will call you anti-child if you wish to live with your progeny instead of surrendering your newborns to the State so you can resume your lives of lazy, submissive convenience.

In five years, no one will remember heart attacks, strokes, and blot clots were previously uncommon among children, teens, and young adults. They will call you anti-medicine for saying the young were predominantly healthy with rare exceptions.

In five years, no one will remember diversity of opinion once existed. They will call you a heretic for choosing to think your own thoughts instead of zealously professing the beliefs issued by OneState.

In five years, no one will remember what responsibility was. They will call you ungrateful if you want to unplug from the Metaverse and seize control of your own life and will.

In five years, no one will remember what freedom means. They will call you a conspiracy theorist for claiming people once had the ability to do what they liked, go where they liked, and think what they liked.

In five years, no one will remember what love was. They will call you intolerant for wishing to bond with a single beloved instead of offering your body to whosoever demands it.

In five years, no one will remember death once happened naturally. They will call you a science-denier if you express a longing to remain alive beyond the term allotted by OneState.

What do you think no one will remember in five years?

New Year’s rEvolution

by Shabnam Palesa Mohamed & Margaret Anna Alice

It’s 2026, and the cruelites are jetting through
their todo list faster than a chemtrail across the sky.
But every time they tick off a box, we uncheck it.

There are ninety-nine of us per one of them,
and each newly awakened being multiplies
our strength by the power of positive infinity.

So we resolve to till truth,
scattering olive seeds over soil, sand, and rock
as the wind carries them to fertile minds and embattled lands.

We resolve to sow rEvolutionary love,
dissolving deviously devised divisions
with Apocaloptimistic visions.

We resolve to dance the rain out,
sprinkling discernment over seedlings
as we teach them how to grow.

We resolve to shine kindness,
photosynthesizing friendship
with the light of our compassion.

We resolve to cross-pollinate creativity,
shuttling inspiration on our wings
as we flit from petal to petal.

We resolve to harvest peace,
drumming out the philanthropaths’ war-whipping mantras
with the amandla of harmonized song.

We resolve to nourish souls,
ferrying beauty over oceans as wide as our courage,
as deep as our convictions.

We resolve to unite
as One Human Family
against one-world tyranny.

Through solidarity we are invincible.
Nobody is collateral damage.

In Ubuntu, we stand noble and righteous,
like the warriors of Standing Rock.

I am because you are.
You are because I am.
We are because of each other.

WE are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

We resolve to wait no more.

It’s 2026. Four years left on Countdown Humanity.

In 2025, we harnessed the Snake’s intuitive wisdom,
coiling ’round the warmonsters’ ankles
to trip them before their imaginary finish line
as we shed our chains like a worn-out skin.

In 2026, we ride the fierce and fearless Fire Horse,
trampling the tyrants while galloping toward the reckoning line,
the Billionairians’ Big, Beautiful Club of nefarious Nians
trembling as our fireworks illuminate their devilry.

The power of the people IS greater than the people in power.
An injustice anywhere IS a threat to justice everywhere.

There will be no Great Reset.
They know that. We know that.

Now to awaken the sleepers—
a sacred duty, a calling, a mission we dare not ignore—
for our ancestors, for our children’s children,
for all the children yet to come.

We resolve to make this world a freer place than when we arrived,
demonstrating freedom isn’t just a word. It is life.

It’s 2026 …
We are sovereign.
We are united.
We are free.

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I recently had the joy of sitting down for coffee with the fourteen-year-old daughter of a dear longtime friend. I’d heard about her badass bravery from her dad and step-mom a while back and had proposed we do a Dissident Dialogue (past exchanges include luminaries CJ Hopkins, Meredith Miller, and Naomi Wolf).

I knew she was an independent-minded critical thinker, but I didn’t know until we met what an astonishingly brilliant, resilient, and wise Apocaloptimist she is. I was so impressed, I offered to mentor her, and I look forward to nurturing her creativity, cognitive skills, and enormous potential.

At the beginning of our meeting, I gave her a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which she’d never heard of—although I soon discovered she is a natural Stoic. I later sent a copy to her dad and step-mom in the hopes that they will discuss it around the dinner table.

Originally, our meeting was intended to be a casual conversation so we could get to know each other before doing a written exchange for her Dissident Dialogue. A few minutes into our conversation, however, my jaw fell to the floor as she reeled off one profound insight after another. I suggested we record our conversation and use the transcript for her Dissident Dialogue instead of doing a written exchange. More articulate than most adults I know, she rose to the challenge magnificently.

After our meeting, I sent her The Complete Wreck (the full set of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events), writing in the gift note:

I would have LOVED this series if it had been available when I was your age and think you will appreciate it as a fellow bibliophile with an interest in problem-solving and mysteries.

Given her age, she and her parents chose to keep her identity obscured. She said I could pick her pseudonym. The first one that came to mind is Violet Baudelaire, the plucky elder heroine in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Synchronistically, I later discovered Violet is exactly fourteen years old at the outset of the series.

She had also asked me to recommend a book to expand her vocabulary. Later, I just happened to be looking up two of my old favorite grammar books (The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, & the Doomed and The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, & the Doomed – An Essential and Friendly Guide to Grammar) by Karen Elizabeth Gordon and came across The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon, which I immediately ordered for both of us.

After our conversation, her dad texted me:

I feel so fortunate to have a friend like you spending time with [Violet]. It seems you guys had a great time.

I replied:

Oh my goodness, it was my honor. When I got home, I texted [a friend], “OMG, I absolutely love her. She is a badass dissident Apocaloptimistic Stoic—unbelievably insightful, well-read, brilliant, and articulate. I felt like I was talking to my younger self, only she’s even more awake than I was at that age, partly because the COVID tyranny prompted her to dig deeper at an early age as she was in third grade when it started.”

I hope you will find our conversation as inspiring and uplifting as I did and that it will give you hope for younger generations at a time when the future is looking so bleak.

MAA:

I want to capture what you already said before we talk a little bit more because I felt like you had such great insights.

Why don’t you start by telling me about your experience in 2020, when the COVID rules started happening, and how you responded to that?

VB:

At first, I was just angry because of the more constricting rules that society was putting onto everybody. With the masks especially, it felt like I couldn’t breathe.

If there was a word to describe how I felt during that entire time, it was suffocated, especially with the isolation. I was alone in my room most of the time, and we had online school, but that wasn’t really being social with anybody. That wasn’t interaction. That was just looking to a screen for your comfort. And so I stopped doing it.

I didn’t tell my parents that I stopped doing online school. At my grandma’s house, I saw this trailer for Spider-Man, so I tried to find it on my Chromebook, and I did. So I would just watch it while I was supposed to be doing online school in my room. I was just enjoying myself instead of sitting there doing nothing because I wasn’t able to focus on what the people were saying [during online school]. I wasn’t maintaining anything in my head of the lessons at all. Eventually, my parents figured it out, and they hired a tutor so I could actually learn things. I feel like that’s one of the reasons why I am actually more, I forget the word … smart. (both laugh)

MAA:

You’re not as delayed as some of the other—

VB:

Not as delayed. And with the masks, it felt restricting, so I wouldn’t wear them. Because I thought, “Why would you breathe in your own germs to prevent somebody from breathing in yours?” It doesn’t make sense. You breathe in your own germs, and I feel like you would still get a little bit of other germs, and you would have to reuse the masks or toss them away, and it just created a lot of waste.

The time period was very wasteful, and we wasted a lot of time and resources, especially with the whole shopping thing where everybody took the toilet paper. I found that really absurd because shouldn’t we have enough of that? We don’t need to hoard it. It’s not like we’re going to die. And it just felt like we couldn’t get out anywhere, and we couldn’t interact with people.

So it wasn’t a nice time. It was just isolation, and that was it. And nobody was speaking out against it. They were being cowards. They weren’t saying anything. And even the people who did, the people would just shut them down because they wanted to conform so they wouldn’t get in trouble.

And then they were talking about all this medicine that was helpful. Like the vaccine, I kind of thought that was a hoax. I felt like it was bad for people, and I heard of people who were dying from it, so I didn’t want it.

And oh, the COVID tests. I wouldn’t want to stick something up my nose. If I’m sick, I’m sick. I can stay inside the house, but I don’t need to take a COVID test and shove a Q-Tip up my ear, I mean up my nose (both laugh).… It just felt like it was reaching into your brain. I never took a COVID test, and I never took a vaccine, and I never wore my mask. And if I did wear my mask, it would be right under my nose.

MAA:

You little dissident. I love that.

VB:

But most people, they were just conforming, and they were being cowards, and I thought that just wasn’t right. And there was two ways to go. You could be a coward and you could follow the rules of society and what it gave you, even if it wasn’t right or if it felt like it wasn’t good—or you could speak out against it and actually try to do something. I felt like many people, they couldn’t decide and they didn’t want to have to decide, so they just went with it, and it made them society’s little puppets. Because now they don’t have their own opinions anymore. They have other people’s opinions.

MAA:

Oh my gosh. You’re so brilliant.

I asked this earlier, but since we’re recording now, I want to ask again, What do you think it is that made you able to see through the nonsense in a way that so many other people couldn’t—both see through it and have the courage to stand up to it?

VB:

I feel like I’ve always been sort of disobedient. I can’t really find the word …

MAA:

Anti-authoritarian.

VB:

Yes.

MAA:

Me, too!

VB:

I have never liked the feeling of somebody being able to tell me what to do—because they’re not me, and they can’t control me if they aren’t me. And, of course, I will listen to people’s opinions and I will take them in, but if it doesn’t feel right with my moral compass, I’m not going to go with it. Because if it’s wrong, then I’m not going to do something that’s not right.

When I realized it was just all the people being alone and isolated, I was alone, and my parents had to work, and they were really busy, so I had to entertain myself. And I was like, “Well, this is stupid. I shouldn’t have to entertain myself. I should be able to go out and hang out with my friends. I should be able to hang out with people. I should be able to go run in a park and have fun with my friends. I should be able to just do all this stuff.” But I wasn’t able to do that, so I was angry at the people who were making these rules.

MAA:

And really, your childhood was being stripped away from you, and that causes psychological trauma. You mentioned your interest in psychology. Did that partly stem from this experience?

VB:

I suppose it did. I always liked watching shows about psychology like detective ones where they go deep into the serial killer’s mind. I guess that just sort of helped me. I also like mystery books. My mom got me into this series The Cat Who, and it’s about this detective. It’s not about the cat, but the cat does help a little bit. And I really liked the series. I can’t really remember them because I read them during that time period, but they were really fun. And then my neighbor, she recommended the Flavia de Luce series, which is about this young girl who really likes chemistry, but she solves this murder. It’s more Britishy, and at first, I couldn’t really understand much of it, but then my lexile grew higher, so I really started enjoying it.

MAA:

Have you read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events?

VB:

I don’t think I have, but is there a movie based off of it?

MAA:

There is. I haven’t seen the movie. Read the books, though.

VB:

I will. I prefer the books over movies most of the time, but I always like to see the movies. I have seen the movie of it, though.

MAA:

The series is wonderful, especially for someone who loves reading and mystery-solving and cats—actually, I don’t know if there are cats in there. Cooking, lots of different things in there that I think you’d love.

So when you were in school noticing these rules, how did your peers respond themselves, and how did they respond to you being a dissident?

VB:

Before the whole thing or after?

MAA:

During—when they started making people wear masks and things like that.

VB:

I wasn’t really around many people because I was always in the house, which was unfortunate. I did hear my parents talking about it, and they said it was stupid. They didn’t agree with it at all. Neither did my tutor. I sort of just developed that mindset because I was like, “Oh, this opinion is interesting.” So I figured out more about it, and I was like, “Oh, this is kind of—no!” … When I did go to school after quarantine, most of my peers, they didn’t like the masks, but some of them were just like—

MAA:

Just going along with it.

VB:

Yeah. And there was this one girl who kept wearing a mask even after they were removed. (I didn’t go to school until they took off the mask rule. I wouldn’t go to school with the mask on. I probably would’ve gotten so many referrals for not wearing them.) Even after quarantine, she wore the masks throughout the years, and I only saw her face once, which was sad. I think she was pretty insecure about herself.

MAA:

That goes back to the psychological trauma, and who knows if she and others are going to have long-term effects from that?

VB:

And I bet it made a lot of people germaphobic and scared, too.

MAA:

Yes, exactly, like OCD—

VB:

They’re being like, “Oh my goodness!”

And I have OCD, but not germ OCD. It’s just like, “Oh, this is here. I need to adjust it.”

MAA:

You’re a perfectionist. I definitely relate to that.

That goes back to what we were saying earlier about all these policies being about disconnecting people, isolating them, making them fear other people. You were talking a little bit about the effects of that and how it makes you maybe doubt yourself or your thoughts. Can you say a little bit about what you said earlier about that?

VB:

I feel like when you’re isolated and people are, they’re making me afraid of something. They’re like, “This is bad. This is gonna to kill you.” You’re like, “Oh, if I do something wrong, I might mess it up, I might die, I might be afraid.” So you will try to conform so you don’t get in trouble, so you don’t do something wrong, and that forms a sense of doubt, “Am I doing this right? Am I following correctly?” But the doubt you’re feeling, it’s just a reflection of other people’s doubt, and it’s not really your own.

MAA:

Yeah, exactly. You have a very clear sense of yourself, I think, that a lot of people at your age don’t, and I wonder why you are different.

VB:

Me, too! (both laugh)

I’ve always been introverted, and I’ve always been observant—not bragging or anything, it’s just how I’ve been. I always take in both sides. I don’t want to take something at face value because if you’re looking at something just as you see it and you don’t dive into why it is, then it’s not going to give you the full truth, and you’re not going to really understand it. So when you try to understand things more and you act on those impulses—I guess I’ve always been impulsive. If I want to do something, I’m going to—I can’t not.

MAA:

You follow your own inner truth. What’s especially impressive is you talked about evaluating both sides and not just taking something at somebody’s word, even if you trust them or you respect them, but you go in and you do the research and the work yourself to determine what conclusion you arrive at.

VB:

Yeah, I feel like especially these days with politics, a lot of people are spreading misinformation or they’re just spreading something. So if you just listen to somebody, you can hear a story. And if you base it off of who you like more. If you’re like, “Oh, I like you, I’m going to think your opinion is correct.” If my dad tells me something, I’m like, “I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you. No offense to you, of course, but I’m going to look it up for myself.” And I do base things mostly off of logic because if you base it off of emotion, it’s not right. But I do take emotion in sometimes. Like if people are dying and there’s somebody responsible for it, I’m like, “Okay, is this person innocent? Did they do something wrong? Is this person threatened by them because they were doing something weird?” So I take in those sides, and I’m like, “Okay, this is wrong. This person was killed for this reason, or this person committed this crime for this reason.”

It’s like what’s-his-name. What was that one story about the guy who stole from the rich? I forget.

MAA:

Oh, Robinhood?

VB:

It’s like Robinhood. People thought he was bad because he was doing all the—I never really read the story, but I got the gist of it. That’s sort of how I think. If there’s a reason, then it could be wrong, or it could be right, or it could be sort of in the middle.

MAA:

There’s the law, and then there’s the moral code. And sometimes the law contravenes your moral code, and you have to—

VB:

Sometimes you have to go against—even if there are consequences, because you need to help people or you need to help yourself.

MAA:

Yes, exactly. Kind of interesting what you were saying about emotion because one of the things I noticed in particular with COVID, but also with the larger political climate, is a lot of people’s empathy is being weaponized to guilt-trip them into doing things for “the public health” or because of some presented victim, and it’s emotionally manipulating people to do things against their conscience. Have you thought about that at all in terms of if you noticed that in other people?

VB:

Yeah, I have noticed that. Most people who are really caring and compassionate towards people. People will be like, “Oh, this whole group is being murdered, or this whole group is being stolen from by this section of these politicians or this government, so we need to stand up against that government.” But in reality, sometimes that’s not really how it is. Or it’s like, “The government is giving to these evil people,” but you need to see the story. I like to read informational articles and also noninformational ones, but there’s a bunch—I go more to the logos side instead of pathos. We’re learning about that in pre-AP English now. For me, I choose logos. I don’t like pathos or ethos because I don’t take somebody’s authority as them being right. If they’re a professional dentist and they recommend this, okay, sure. But if it’s a politician, why am I supposed to believe you if you’re just this high person? And then emotional, “Oh, these poor kids are dying.” Why are they dying? What’s contributing to that? Who’s contributing to that? And how can we stop it? It’s not about making us feel bad for them. What can we do to help them?

MAA:

Yes, yes. Oh, I love that.

(The coffeeshop where we were talking closed, so we walked to a nearby cemetery and resumed our conversation at a picnic table there.)

We were talking about weaponization of empathy and logic versus emotion. Have you ever done a Myers-Briggs or Enneagram test?

VB:

Yeah, I’m an INTP.

MAA:

I knew it. (both laugh)

VB:

What are you?

MAA:

INTJ. But my thinking and feeling are very closely balanced with just a little tip more toward thinking.

VB:

I haven’t really done too much research on the other ones because I was mainly focused on mine because I’m like, “Oh, this is my favorite one now.” But I definitely have favorites.

MAA:

Have you always been a reader?

VB:

Yes. When I was little, I would read until midnight. I would pick up a book, and I’d start reading. I’d be like, “One more chapter.” And then I’d read five chapters more.

MAA:

I bet that is another thing that contributed to your more analytical mind and your ability to have balance and see through the narratives.

VB:

Yeah. I was reading big chapter books when I was in third, fourth grade, because it was one of my favorite things. I loved reading, and I always loved the stories. I did more fantasy and mystery.

MAA:

Have you thought about writing?

VB:

Yeah. When I was little, I did start writing, and then I quit it because it didn’t make sense at all. The story was just little weird ramblings. And then I started writing again because I was in a Creative Writing class last semester. And we had to do many stories.… We had to do a character sketch where we made a character with their emotions.

I’m a big procrastinator, but it’s a weird procrastination because I don’t do it because I don’t want to do it. I do it because I want it to be perfect, and I can’t write until it’s perfect.

MAA:

I have that same problem. The perfectionism and procrastination definitely go together.

VB:

They go together. So I will think about it, and I’ll brainstorm for like forever, and then I’ll write it in a day. And that’s what I do.

MAA:

Oh my gosh. We are so alike.

VB:

Yeah. And sometimes I just write when I’m angry at something. One time I got food poisoning because of the school. So I was like, “I’m going to write an essay about this.” So I wrote about Sodexo and their horrible food because they have stuff with E. coli, salmonella, and norovirus. And their workers are underpaid and overworked, and they’re just everywhere and it’s horrible. And they’re giving kids poison basically. I still eat it, but what can I do?

MAA:

What did you do with that letter?

VB:

I revised it and then I believe I have it up—it’s on my dad’s tablet. If you want to read it, he can probably send it to you.

MAA:

I would love to.

VB:

It took me a day to write, and then a week later, I went through and edited it.

MAA:

I was doing a letter series, particularly during COVID, but just whenever something political or whatever made me angry, that’s where a lot of my inspiration comes from.

VB:

When something inspires me or makes me angry or just invokes some sort of strong emotion, that’s when I want to write about it or learn more about it.

MAA:

You would be a great Substack blogger if you thought about doing something like that because that’s the sort of thing people would love to read.

VB:

I don’t really do social media, but—

MAA:

That’s good.

VB:

I have Pinterest.

MAA:

This is something that’s come out in terms of the research, younger brains as they’re developing, the whole social media vortex and the dopamine hits can damage the attention span and have all kinds of emotional and psychological impacts. So it’s good that you’re not spending a lot of time on social media.

But Substack I feel like is different because it’s really more—at least it started out this way, it’s kind of becoming a little more social media–like now—but really it was a place designed for writers to share good writing and connect with kindred spirits around the world. I started mine in April 2021, and it’s been such a wonderful experience. And I’ve met people, courageous, brilliant, wise people around the world that I never would have connected with otherwise. So I think it could be, under the right circumstances, a good opportunity for you to share your writing and start your path toward that if you want to do that.

VB:

Have you always been a writer?

MAA:

Yeah, I guess I could say that because I remember my mom told me I would write poetry as soon as I started being able to write. I just always loved reading and writing and didn’t necessarily think of myself as a writer until maybe like, I don’t know, maybe around eighth—probably around your age—I started thinking of myself as that and really focused on my writing.

VB:

In Creative Writing, we had to do another assignment where—I think it was a character sketch. It was a three-page story. I got very engrossed in it because I spent a while, and I was thinking of characters. For me, before I make a character, usually, I just play a song in my head, or I just go through my day, and then their vibe will pop up in my mind, which is weird, but that’s sort of how it is. Then I’ll form how they look before I form how they act.

MAA:

Interesting.

VB:

I’ll do that, and then I’ll like base it off of them, but it turned into a detective sort of story, and I’m still thinking of finishing it because I had to cut it off.…

MAA:

Wow, interesting. In terms of going back to the COVID stuff, as things progressed and started becoming a little less totalitarian, did you see, as you were interacting with your peers, did you see more people starting to realize that what had happened before was a lie, or were most people still just going along and not really reflecting on what happened?

VB:

I feel like they just sort of tossed it aside like, “Oh, it happened.” And they didn’t really reflect mostly on it. There were some people, they didn’t really reflect on it, but I could tell how it affected them. I have friends who don’t have their own personalities. They just base it off of other people. They’ll hang out with them, and you’ll see them and you’ll ask them a question and they’ll be like, “Well, you decide.” You give them a choice, and they can’t choose because they don’t know how.

MAA:

Why do you think that is?

VB:

I feel like it’s because that’s how their childhood was. They didn’t get to choose for themselves because they were forced to do all these things, and now they are a slave to society.

MAA:

Wow. So in a way—and are you referring to COVID measures specifically or just in general, the types of things—

VB:

Just in general, but mostly COVID because that was a major event. It was like one—three years, two to three years. I can’t really remember the specific time.

MAA:

Well, 2020 to—depends on what timeframe you’re using—but 2023, 2024, they started acting like it was, “Oh, it’s over now. Forget about all those things we did to you and just go back to normal.”

VB:

Yeah. They just tossed it aside like it didn’t happen, which is what a lot of people do instead of actually trying to make sure that society is okay.

MAA:

Yes, and that it doesn’t happen again. And that’s my fear is that when people don’t reflect on it and realize what occurred, they’re just going to fall for the next narrative, whatever manipulation happens.

VB:

That’s why history is good, like learning about the Holocaust and stuff. But I feel like the world, since we disregarded this event, they’re disregarding other events that happen, too. And I feel like that’s very dangerous because that’s putting this country and the whole world, to be frank, in this state where, “Oh, the past doesn’t matter, and we don’t need to take into account, we’re doing it differently this time,” but they’re not really.... And kids nowadays, they’re not really learning as much in school because they didn’t know how to learn because they were online.

And they’re not knowing how to learn and they’re not learning how to learn, so they’re not able to learn anything. If they’re not able to learn anything, then they’re not going to be able to reflect on the past to be better with the future.

I like reflecting on the past, but I think you just need to understand one main thing, like, “You can’t do genocide, you can’t do this.”

MAA:

Exactly!

VB:

But you don’t have to go into all these stories unless you’re really interested in it. I feel like you just need to learn the basics of it, and you make sure you remember it, and then you move on from that story. Because I’ve learned about the Holocaust three times in different grades. I don’t think in third grade. I think we heard about it in third grade, but we definitely learned about it in fifth grade, and then we definitely learned about it in eighth grade, and now I’m learning about it again in ninth grade, and, to me, it’s getting a little bit tiring.

I want to learn about other genocides, other bad problems that happened and see how they’re similar because we recently did—we have to compare another genocide to the Holocaust. Normally, I just choose the name that looks most interesting to me, so I chose the Yazidi genocide. I didn’t learn too much about it, but we had to draw and then we had to write the similarities and differences. They were more out there about it—instead of like being like, “This is okay. These people are bad,” they were more outward like, “We’re just going to kill these people.”

MAA:

Wow. I can’t believe I don’t know about that! I want to learn about this from you!

VB:

I like to choose ones that are more not known. Because if you learn about things that are known, you’re going to cast aside the things that are smaller and less significant, but they are still significant because they happened. If something happened and it killed people, it’s significant—or it did wrong to people. Killing people isn’t always the worst crime you can do.

MAA:

Wow, that’s so profound. Do you know my poem Mistakes Were NOT Made: An Anthem for Justice?

I start out by talking about how the Armenian genocide was not a mistake, Holodomor was not a mistake. I go through these different genocides and then say, neither was the Great Democide of the 2020s. That was not a mistake.

VB:

It was a choice.

MAA:

Yeah, exactly. These are based on intentional collusion on the part of all these different parties. And I go through that specifically in reference to COVID. What do you think about that concept of—because some people want to say mistakes were made?

VB:

That’s not true. You can’t just excuse yourself for killing people or doing wrong to people or forcing them to be in isolation. That wasn’t a mistake. You chose to do that. You didn’t take into account what the people wanted. You chose that.

It’s like when you’re animating something, you have to make the choices in animation. Or when you’re filming something, you have to choose the set. Everything is chosen, and you don’t just like accidentally toss your hat into the scene and be like, “Oh, the hat’s on the table now.” It’s a direct choice. The posters on the wall, the characters—it’s a direct choice, and it was written, and it was chosen. You can’t just say, “Oh, that was a mistake. We didn’t mean to put that there. That wasn’t part of the story. It didn’t happen.” If you put something there, if you do something, it’s not a mistake. It’s a choice.

MAA:

(applauding)

VB:

Loud applause! (both laugh)

MAA:

That actually made me think of—I don’t know if you know Mike Yeadon, but he is a former chief scientist at Pfizer. He left in 2012, so he didn’t have anything to do with the later stuff, but he understands how pharmaceutical products are formulated. Specifically in reference to the COVID vaccines, he was saying these ingredients, these things that are in there, every single molecule, they are aware of what goes in there, and they are aware of the consequences and the potential dangers. So he says the COVID vaccines were lethal by design. They had to put things in there that they knew would be causing deaths and injuries. So that ties in with exactly what we were just saying.

VB:

It’s unfortunate how people are just okay with killing people.

MAA:

Yeah, exactly!

VB:

Like, “Are you serious?!” (both laugh)

MAA:

Why do you think that is? Is it denial?

VB:

They want to be elevated, and they want others to go to them for their problems. They’re like, “I made this medicine. Take it because I have done good for you, and this will do good for you and this will save you.”

They do it off of lies. That’s another thing now. People lie to you—everywhere. Where you go in school, anywhere, on the Internet, politicians—they all lie to you, and they don’t tell you the full truth. For me, not telling the full truth is also a lie.

MAA:

Yes!

VB:

If you’re not going to tell me everything you’re going to do—like if the country is going to do a big thing, like start a war with another country, and you’re like, “Oh, we’re just talking to them. We’re formulating this. We’re seeing if we’re going to do a war,” but they’ve already decided it, then that’s not okay. That’s a lie. You just lied to your country, and now we have no trust. And now how are we supposed to trust our government and the people running this country when they’re lying to us?

MAA:

Yeah, exactly.

VB:

They think because they’re in a position of power that they get to decide everything for us.

MAA:

Good for you for seeing through that. I think that’s one of the most important lessons that I wish more people could learn is not to trust the government, not to trust corporations, not to trust the media, and to do your own diligent research and make a determination for yourself.

When you do research, what’s the process you go through in terms of vetting information?

VB:

Wow, it’s really random. I look through trusted news sources, the big ones, and then I look through more local ones. You have to do a mix, and then you see which one is more there, and you see which one considers more options. If there’s one that considers both sides of the story, most likely that one will be more accurate than one that just says, “Oh, this is bad. This is bad. This sucks. This sucks.” If they don’t give a counterargument, then they’re probably just trying to force their opinion onto you.

MAA:

You seem to be distinguishing between propaganda, which is emotionally manipulative and opinion-based, versus the more unbiased sources that are giving supporting evidence for their particular conclusions.

VB:

When I look for evidence, I look for the logos. I think that’s the right way to say it, but that’s what I look for. I don’t look for the other two. You have to look for the ones that are real, like logic. Numbers aren’t my favorite thing. It’s hard to keep up with, but I like when the numbers are there. Like, “Show me how many people have done this. Show me how many of these have been sold. Show me what’s going on where exactly.” If you show me the hard evidence, then I will be more likely to take it into account. And then especially if you look at two sources and the numbers align, then it’s going to be more—

MAA:

Yeah. It sounds like you’re doing exactly what people with media literacy do. Especially younger generations, we’re not only having mathematical illiteracy and real illiteracy in terms of people don’t read anymore, but they also aren’t able to discern between sources that should be—I don’t want to say trusted, because really—

VB:

Nothing is trusted.

MAA:

Exactly. You need to be able to vet information.

VB:

What I mean by trusted, I forget what they’re called, but they’re not the news sources. You look for not .com but .org or dot-something. You have to look for the specific ones because—or .edu because that’s research going on actively, and most of those are more logic-based.

MAA:

Right. And you are digging in. You’re not saying, “Oh, just because this person is an authority, I’m going to trust them.” Unfortunately, a lot of people are just intellectually lazy, and they don’t make that extra effort.

VB:

I feel like that’s just because their childhood or a portion of their life, it doesn’t necessarily have be their childhood, it’s just rooted in laziness. Like, “Oh, I’ll do the dishes tomorrow.” They procrastinate. And procrastination is all right to a certain extent, but if it’s affecting your daily life and how you do things, then of course you’re going to be intellectually—

MAA:

Lazy, exactly. And it is important to develop that kind of internal discipline early on. I don’t know if you know the Marshmallow Test, but it was I think done in the seventies, and they took four-year-olds, and they put them in a room with a marshmallow in front of them, and they said, “You can either eat this now, or you can wait ten minutes and not eat it and come back and you’ll get a second one.” Well, they followed up on the kids in this experiment a decade or more later, and they found that the kids who didn’t have impulse control and ate the marshmallow right away were the ones who got into trouble in terms of crime, dropping out of school, not really being successful in life, whereas the kids who had the discipline to be able to wait and think into the future and forecast what the result would be and they got their two marshmallows, those were the ones who were able to have the life skills to succeed later on.

VB:

For me, if I was in that experiment, I would probably wait because I can wait for ten minutes. Did they have anything in the room, or did they just have to sit there?

MAA:

They just had to sit there, so they filmed the kids fidgeting and trying to restrain themselves.

VB:

If I were in the room, I would probably put the marshmallow somewhere else.

MAA:

That’s brilliant.

VB:

I would put it in a place where I couldn’t reach, like if there was a ceiling light. Or I’d play with the marshmallow or something. But sometimes people think into the future, and they’re like, “I want the marshmallow now, and I want to leave.” But for me, I wouldn’t just take the marshmallow because I wanted it, I would consider, but then I would take the marshmallow or not. It just depends on how I was feeling.

MAA:

But you would do it for a rational reason.

VB:

Yeah.

MAA:

That’s so interesting. What do you think we can do to help other kids your age be as an astute and observant as you are?

VB:

That’s a difficult one. Well, I don’t want to say take their screens away because I have a screen, and I’m still astute, and obviously, if I’m able to function with a screen, then that’s not the problem. I feel like it’s what they’re doing on the screens is a problem. I don’t have social media, but at the same time, if I had social media, I wouldn’t use it for social media. If I had TikTok, I would just use it to scroll. I would never post. And when I scroll, I don’t scroll for hours and hours and hours. I just am like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s interesting.” It’s like, if I’ve had a hard day and I want some time to relax, I would scroll. But I feel like the kids who post stuff online that isn’t educational and it’s just about their day or with their friends and they’re taking selfies with each other, that’s a problem. But at the same time, they don’t need their screens to have fun, but also, it’s their freedom, and I don’t want to take that away from them. Because I know that I would be pretty angry. Because I have problems with authority, and if somebody tried to take my phone, I’d be like, “Excuse you, I can handle myself.” And it’s not because I want to be difficult, it’s just—you should trust me.

MAA:

I would have such a difficult dilemma if I were a parent because I would absolutely want to empower my child to be free and independent, have self-discipline, and I would trust them. But there are so many kids who don’t have those innate principles and that moral discipline that you have. And part of the challenge is there’s research coming out showing how scrolling on TikTok—

VB:

With the dopamine.

MAA:

Yeah, exactly. And it’s shortening people’s attention spans to six seconds. And so it’s like neurologically, when children are developing, their brains are being morphed by this. But I would not—I say this not having kids myself, but I wouldn’t be comfortable saying, “No, no,” but I would want to work with my child to say—

VB:

I want to develop trust.

MAA:

Yeah, exactly. “You understand why this is a concern?” I would tell them the reasons and then empower them to do the right thing themselves.

VB:

I hate the “Because I say so.”

MAA:

Exactly.

VB:

If you’re just like, “Here, give this to me because you should trust me. I’m your authority figure.”

I hate when they’re like, “Oh, this isn’t your choice. You don’t get to make choices.” When people say that to me, it makes me think they don’t care about me, they don’t trust me, so I can’t trust them.

If they’re going to tell me, “Oh, you’re not old enough to decide that yet,” or “Me and your mom, we have this decision made for you, and you’re going to stick to that,” and they don’t even let the kid—

MAA:

Yeah, you need to be consulted.

VB:

You have to give them room to express themselves. Because if nobody can express themselves at a young age such as that, they’re not going to be able to do that in the real world. And that’s also going to take away from their opinions, and they’re going to—we’re not supposed to be teaching them that. We teach them boundaries, respect, and trust. We don’t teach them, “Listen to me because I say so.”

MAA:

Exactly.

VB:

I feel like they could be like—okay, they won’t take their phone because they can lock their phones now. So I’d be like, “Lock your phone until you read a book.” Just be like, “Read a book.” And then when they finish the book and they tell them about the book, then you unlock it. But at the same, just not lock the whole thing, but lock the social media. Be like, “You can have your social media if you read or if you go outside,” but that’s for the young kids. When you reach teenage years, then they can control themselves. They can control that.

I don’t think snooping through your phone is good, either. That’s not trust, and you have to build trust with them. And there’s many different ways to do that, and it’s difficult to explain in such a short period of time, but kids need to learn they can trust people and they can share things with others.… And hobbies.

MAA:

I don’t know if you know George Lakoff.

VB:

I don’t know many people. (both laugh)

MAA:

He’s kind of dubious in terms of—

VB:

I like that word.

MAA:

—his political machinations. But he has developed a model where he compared different parenting styles. The two main parenting styles he discussed were Nurturant Parent and Strict Father. The Nurturant Parent—and this is how my mom was—basically, you communicate with your child, you give them the rationale, you share why you would want them to do a certain thing, and then you encourage them to make their own decisions. You don’t say, “Just because I said so.”

Whereas the Strict Father is focused on discipline, even physical discipline, and basically says, “Do this because I said so. Don’t ask questions.” And I think a lot of our societal problems are because so much of authority is about that Strict Father model and the education system, and all of our social structures are about enforcing that obedient mindset and conformist mindset. That’s why it’s so rare to have someone like you who can actually see through that manipulation and think for yourself. I wish I could figure out how to make more, not just young people, but adults, be able to do that.

VB:

I wish I could figure out the specific root of why. Because I go back to my childhood, and I think. I remember a time when I was pretty insecure of myself, but that was when I was really young. I felt like the second I had my time to be alone and actually reflect on myself that I actually gained confidence. And that was self-confidence. It wasn’t confidence to put myself into the world. It was confidence to make my own decisions. It wasn’t like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to be so extroverted.” It was like, “I’m going to make my decisions for myself and for my own opinions, no matter what they say.” I encourage other people to do that, too.

MAA:

You tapped into something I think is important in that you had that time alone to reflect. And that’s different from the isolation like we were talking about earlier. This is voluntary. So many people are just always surrounded by—

VB:

Others, and their opinions.

MAA:

—other people, and they’re not even taking that time to have quiet reflection. And that’s when you form these deeper insights and opinions and your own core sense of values and yourself.

VB:

And for me, I also watched a lot of—I didn’t watch a lot of media actually when I was young. We watched media, and then we had this period where we didn’t have a TV, but it wasn’t because it was taken away. It’s just like it broke or something. But before that, when I had these—I have a thing with characters, I will go deep into the character—and so I learned their values, and I’m like, “They have cool values. I’m going to adopt that one.” So I would base myself off of characters. And then when I was alone, then I didn’t really have that. So I was like, “I’m going to be my own character.”

MAA:

Good job. I think that’s part of the problem is people don’t have that internal fortitude and that kind of wisdom to be able to separate themselves from the crowd. And a lot of that is cultivated by social media and media in general, as you were saying. People are just following whatever mold they are getting poured into without just saying, “Okay, I don’t want to be poured into a mold at all.”

Do you have any thoughts on education in terms of what would be good for schools to do to help make more independent thinkers?

VB:

More writing. When I write, I always write my rough draft on paper. I can’t stand writing out on the Chromebook. I like writing on—like if I’m going to make a book or something, I have to write on the thing, but if I’m trying to get my ideas out, I need to have it on paper.

So I think more paper things instead of online books. You need to give them books to read, things to write down. And give them hobbies, like art classes. I am a solitary creature, and I have been for most of my life because my parents were always working, and that was to pay the bills. So I would play by myself, and then I would ask them to play, and they’d be like, “Maybe later.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” So I would go play by myself. And then when quarantine happened, I wasn’t so bad off. Because I was by myself, and then I had school, and then I was by myself, like summer periods and stuff. So I was sort of used to it, and it wasn’t a necessarily bad thing for me. I was kind of lonely a little bit. But now I really like being solitary. I will go up, and I’ll have fun with my family, and then, I’ll be like, “Goodbye.” It’ll be a split second, I’ll be like, “I need to go downstairs and read or draw.” I like drawing a lot. I’ll go downstairs, and I’ll draw.

Make them draw, make them write. If they’re bad at drawing, make them draw. Do things you’re bad at. If you’re bad at reading, make them read. Give them a children’s book, or give them a book they will not understand, and make them read all those complex words, and then set them back a little bit. Make them read complex words, and then make them not, and then go back and forth. And then their brain will be like, “Oh, more words!”

You have to expose them to more words and more things. It may be bad to overdo it, but at the same time, you have to. You have to say, “Okay, I’m going to get you all this hobby stuff. Be creative.” And you be creative with them, especially at a young age, when curious, make them ask questions. Don’t let them be solitary. Make them ask questions. If they’re not able to ask questions, and they’re not able to do things that are hard, they’re not going to be able to do things at all.

MAA:

Questions are absolutely I think one of the most crucial things people need to learn to defend themselves against tyranny.

VB:

And especially young kids when they’re like, “Why?” And then you explain it, and they’re like, “Why, why, why?” Get them out of the why loop and say, ask me a better question instead. Sometimes they’re actually curious, but sometimes, they just want attention.

MAA:

That’s a good point.

VB:

So to distinguish it, say, “Why?” And they’d be like, “I don’t know.” And then you have to—

MAA:

Get them to go deeper.

VB:

Yeah! If you make them take things on surface level and not dive down deeper, it’ll be bad. If you just introduce them to looking around, it’s not going to make sense for them if they can’t see everything. And introduce them to shows, too. I feel like media is a good thing. Like TV shows, not the YouTube videos. Or you could do, there are informational ones about animals, stuff like that.

MAA:

Ones without an agenda.

VB:

Yeah, I think that’s a good thing for them. Give them a plot line and ask them questions about it: “Who’s your favorite character? Why are they your favorite character?” You have to ask them why so they’ll start asking you why. You just have to engage them more because if they’re not engaged, they’re not going to be able to do anything.

And take them places! I feel like that’s a good thing. Schools need to do more field trips, more active things. And instead of just letting them run around on the field trips, take them to ScienceWorks, local field trips. Do a field trip every month, take a class to a field trip every month, and don’t do it based on who has the highest grade. Do it on who has the lowest grade. Take them to this place, and be like, “Since you’re not learning sitting at a desk for five hours, let’s have you learn walking around for two hours.” Get them to walk around and learn. Take them on a hike. I feel like that’s a good thing. Put them in nature.

At school, there’s the no-phone rule, which I feel like in school is fine. I feel like they should allow it at lunch, personally, because lunch, it’s their free time. Let them do what they want. They should be walking around, but if they want to do it, then it’s fine. But take them on walks, field trips. I feel like that should be what schools are doing now because kids are sitting in desks, and that’s negatively affecting their attention span, and it’s putting weight on my kidneys. What are we talking about? We don’t need that. It’s making them lazy. And then they’re just going to sit there, and then they’re going to go home and sit down on their couch. So you have to get them walking around, make the passing periods longer so they can walk, give them a break period, do the morning periods, lunch, a class, and then a walk one. Make them walk around.

I feel like movement is something we don’t have anymore. Because it was restricted. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t walk to a park. We couldn’t go to the gym. We couldn’t take a hike. So give them movement now while they can still have it. Otherwise, they’ll be put in an office all day.

MAA:

And that sets them up for a sedentary lifestyle, which leads to health problems and basically funds the medical-pharmaceutical complex.

VB:

Yeah. And I feel like classes should also have snacks or water. Instead of being like, “Can I go get water?” Just have one. I don’t like plastic water bottles, but just have some water bottles for them to have. Like, “I’m thirsty. I need some water.” And do class activities where you’re standing and doing things. Or singing! Because you learn more from a song than you do from a packet. I hate when they give you ten-page packets in math. I don’t retain any of it.

I like when the teacher gets up and teaches us. Like in my French class, we’ll get up, and we’ll be in a circle, and we’ll pass this stuffed cat around, and we’ll be like, “Je m’appelle,” and we’ll say what we’re wearing, and we’ll learn new words. And we do movements.… I love that because we get to move, and we get to learn. Like avec, “together.”

Get them to work in a group. More groups. If you’re like, “I don’t want to be in a group,” that’s bad. “Too bad. So sad.” I don’t want to be in a group either, but I need to.

MAA:

Right, teaches you those social skills.

I know it’s getting dark and cold, so I think I’ll just ask one more question, and that would be, What do you think people need to understand who are basically cowards, who are conforming, how do they transition from that mindset to one of moral courage like you display?

VB:

I’m going to use a quote from Nike. “Just do it.” Sorry.

I have that problem, too. I lay in my bed waking up, and I’m like, “I’m just going to sleep another five minutes. Just get up, get a cup of coffee. Do what you need to do. Eat your breakfast, make your breakfast.” I feel like it’s hard to say “just do it,” but you can’t really start doing something until you start doing it. And I know that’s the most basic advice you can do, but the most successful people and the most professional people that I’ve heard from—like have you heard of Brendan Burchard? He’s this amazing life coach. I recommend. He’s awesome. But he has lots of life advice. But his thing was, “You have to just do it.” Because if you sit around waiting for something good to happen, it’s not going to happen. You’re never going to be lucky. Luck isn’t a thing. It is a thing, but it’s not a thing.

MAA:

Don’t count on it.

VB:

Don’t count on your luck. You may be a lucky person, and you may get lucky strikes, but it’s not going to be forever. And if you go through life and you take problems and you don’t let those problems—you don’t fight the problem. People will choose fight or flight. If you choose flight, you’re running away from the problem. Not many people choose fight. You have to fight the problem, and you have to solve it! Life will always throw hard things at you, and you can’t trust your luck, and you can’t trust the world to give you good things. You have to keep going, and it’s not going to just be, “Oh, overcome this, a bunch of problems, and then I’ll reach my thirties and I’ll be fine.” You are going to keep doing problems because you have to, and you can’t stop doing that. You have to keep going, and that’s the only advice you can do. You just have to switch your mindset. And stop consuming, start acting. Because you can consume all the stuff you want about doing things. You can read all the self-help books, you can watch all the podcasts, look at all these successful people, and you can pray all you want, but until you start acting and start doing things, you’re never going to get anywhere with your life. “To all the young people out there!” (both laughing)

MAA:

Oh, that’s brilliant. You are going to love Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Stoic philosophy because everything you just said is in complete alignment with Stoic philosophy. You’re a natural Stoic, which is what I am, too. And Apocaloptimist. That’s a term I got from a meme, so I can’t take credit for coining it, but I feel like you are someone who Confronts the Brutal Facts, which is a term from Jim Collins’s book Good to Great, and then he has something called the Stockdale Paradox, which is, basically, even if you’re struggling or you’re suffering or you’re in some terrible, dire circumstances, you always maintain faith that in the end you will triumph. And you have to have that balance of—you have to assess reality, be aware of the challenges, but have that fortitude and strength and foresight to be able to be optimistic about and work toward that positive conclusion.

VB:

Yeah, because it’s not going to be bad forever, but if you’re sitting there hoping that it’s going to stop being bad, you’ll have a moment or two. You might get lucky, but that’s not going to be a good life plan. You can’t just go based off your little bursts of motivation. You have to be consistent. It’s all about consistency and seeing into the future. Nobody can see into the future, but you can see into the future.

MAA:

You can imagine.

VB:

You can imagine it. It’s about “Imagination!” That was SpongeBob.

MAA:

And that goes back to the Marshmallow Test. Is there anything else you want to say before we end?

VB:

There’s nothing I can really think of that much. You’ve helped me learn a lot of new words today, I hope you know.

MAA:

Oh, good!

VB:

Even if I haven’t learned the actual word, I get the gist of it.

MAA:

That goes back to what you were saying earlier about you want to challenge people. You want to stretch people because that’s where growth comes from. And it’s so important that, especially younger people, learn to overcome their obstacles instead of fleeing from them like you were saying.

I use the analogy of a fledgling with clipped wings. If you don’t let that fledgling ever flap their wings, they are going to be unable to fly for the rest of their lives. So you have to let them spread their wings and strengthen those muscles, and then they’ll be able to take flight.

VB:

Yeah, I would rather take the risk of falling than never being able to fly.

MAA:

Yes!

VB:

Yes, exactly. That’s a quote. Quote me on that.

MAA:

I love it! Okay, that’s a great way to end.

Note: I did some cleanup of the transcript for clarity and flow along with inserting relevant links.

© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC

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Today, February 13, is the one-year anniversary of Cody’s reading of Lament. I am publishing this clip from Billy’s call for accountability at parliament along with a letter by Billy below to commemorate the occasion.

Cody has developed new life-threatening conditions since I published his video last year. As if fighting for Cody’s life wasn’t enough of a daily challenge, the Hudsons are currently trying to save their property, belongings, and lungs from a long-smoldering wildfire near their home. They have already lost nearly everything and will need to replace most of their belongings due to damage from the smoke. Please visit their Give Send Go page and do whatever you can to help this courageous, battle-weary family of resilient survivors.

Help the Hudsons

Message from Billy Queen

Founder of the Association for Vaccine Injury in Scotland

Looking back to early 2020, I began to wake up to what was happening to us all in Scotland. Fear and terror were being weaponised against the population on a daily basis. The lockdowns were causing death and destruction, and nobody was allowed to question the narrative.

I had a small business that would eventually become another victim of these draconian measures. So I began the futile fight against those measures by trying to engage with my political representatives—only to hit a brick wall that left my head sore from banging against it so many times.

Eventually, the miracle “remedy” of the vaccines began to roll out, and I made the early decision to give them a wide berth. This so-called remedy was being offered as our way out of lockdowns and restrictions, but my instincts screamed clearly to avoid it at all costs.

Unfortunately, my wife, who worked in a Glasgow school, decided to take the shot. Even as I write this, my heart sinks at what was to come after her second Pfizer dose. At first, she couldn’t articulate what had happened to her, but she kept repeating the words “I’ve been poisoned” over and over again.

Now we were in a new fight—this time with our healthcare system, where the standard reply to our cries for help was, “Can you prove it?”

It was during this time in 2021 that I first met Mr John Watt and Mr Alex Mitchell, both of whom had been injured and were desperately trying to get help while raising awareness. I had managed to secure a meeting with my local MSP, who promised she would listen to my concerns. I invited John and Alex to join me, and we laid everything out to her.

Needless to say, promises were made and promises were broken, and we began to realise exactly what we were up against. But bonds had been forged and friendships formed that still stand strong to this day.

It was through these relationships that we found a private doctor who would finally diagnose and treat my wife. I will never forget the day she came out of her first consultation. She had been in with the doctor for over an hour, and she emerged in tears. On the one hand, she was overwhelmingly grateful that someone had finally listened; on the other, she was terrified for the future.

This was the beginning of our journey to forming a charity. Like so many others around the world, it started in confusion, feeling lost and alone. In Scotland, a Facebook group called SVIG (Scottish Vaccine Injury Group) had sprung up to offer support and guidance to people all over the country who were trying to figure out what had happened to them. I will always be grateful for the work they did then—and continue to do—for the injured in Scotland, including my wife.

Out of that group, a small number of us decided to form a proper charity that could raise funds and speak up for the injured because nobody in our Parliament was willing to take this on. As individuals, many of us had contacted our representatives without any success, leaving us with the clear impression that nobody would ever take up our cause. The silence from those in Parliament was deafening—and deliberate.

So what should we do? Just lie down and stay silent? Or stand up and declare the truth? We had no choice but to stand up for ourselves and take the fight directly to their door.

Our charity board is made up entirely of people who have been injured or who have family members who have been injured. We are everyday, ordinary citizens trying to cope with what has happened to us. The fact that we have managed to form this charity at all is nothing short of a minor miracle.

In support of our new charity for the vaccine-injured, I decided to undertake a walk from my home town in Scotland to our national Parliament in Edinburgh—approximately fifty miles. As chair of the charity, I felt I had to lead by example, to raise awareness and some desperately needed funds to help the injured in Scotland.

This journey was inspired by Margaret’s powerful words: “DON’T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT.”

Along the way, I visited different NHS and public health organisations. It was time to make the comfortable feel uncomfortable. We had had enough of being ignored and gaslit. What else were we supposed to do—just lie down and die? No thanks.

Over the last few years, I have had far too many conversations with people all over Scotland who know they are injured or who have family members who have been injured. They all tell the same stories of coercion, fear, and family feuds.

Our citizens have been abused, and the abusers are still walking around making grand declarations about how “safe and effective” the vaccines are.

Finding others on this journey has been one of the saving graces of the last few years, and discovering Margaret’s work is no exception.

Cody’s reading of her work spoke so loudly to all of us that we decided to adopt it as our anthem. Listening to that courageous young man has been a source of inspiration to us all; he speaks Margaret’s words with such truth and pain.

The injured are joining hands across the world, and I will hold on to any hope I can find.

So thank you Margaret, Cody, John, Alex, and all the others across the world.

Together, we won’t let them get away with it.

—Billy Queen, Association for Vaccine Injury in Scotland (AVIS) (X • YouTube )

Lament of the Vaxx-Injured

by Margaret Anna Alice

They told us it was safe.
They told us it was effective.
They told us everyone was doing it.
They told us not getting it was selfish.
They told us it was the only way
we could study, work, shop, live.

We listened to them.
Why would they lie to us?
We trusted them.
Why would they hurt us?

So we got it.

And every day since
that irrevocable,
life-shattering decision
has been unrelenting
agony and exhaustion,
apprehension and regret,
uncertainty and dread.

Our lives are now a continuum
of questioning,
of searching,
of testing,
of fretting.

They tell us we’re faking it.
They tell us we’re lying.
They tell us we’re imagining it.
They tell us we’re anxious.
They tell us we’re exaggerating.
They tell us we’re grifting.

And once it’s undeniable—
when the diagnostics show
heart damage,
blood clots,
myocarditis,
pericarditis,
cardiac arrest,
hematologic abnormalities,
impaired immune functionality,
shingles,
Bell’s palsy,
Guillain–Barré syndrome,
autoimmune disease,
multiple sclerosis,
transverse myelitis,
neuropathy,
paralysis,
multi-organ inflammation,
leprosy,
strokes,
dementia,
prion disease,
cerebrovascular disease,
brain damage,
tinnitus,
turbo cancer,
DNA integration,
deep vein thrombosis,
post-vaccination syndrome,
multisystem failure—
then they tell us
they’re baffled.
Then they tell us they don’t
know how to fix it.

Every day, we research
as if our lives depend on it,
because they do.
Because only we
and our loved ones
care enough to save us.

For some, we’re a statistic,
a number on a spreadsheet.

For others, we don’t exist.
They don’t want us to exist.

They refuse to see us.
They refuse to hear us.
They refuse to feel us.
They refuse to help us.

Every minute, we scrape together the strength
to endure the anguish,
to resist the gaslighting,
to seek out supplements,
procedures, practices—
anything that will offer relief,
anything that will soften the suffering,
anything that will delay our terminal diagnosis.

They tell us to shut up.
They tell us not to scare others.
They tell us it is rare.
They tell us it was worth it.

And no one takes responsibility—
not the NGOs that hocus-pocused us,
not the corporations that poisoned us,
not the governments that coerced us,
not the agencies that betrayed us,
not the institutions that mandated us,
not the philanthropaths who targeted us,
not the ideologues who ridiculed us,
not the tyrants who scapegoated us,
not the politicians who maneuvered us,
not the enforcers who penned us,
not the psychologists who manipulated us,
not the propagandists who petrified us,
not the experts who hoodwinked us,
not the scientists who head-faked us,
not the censors who erased us,
not the doctors who pushed us,
not the nurses who needled us,
not the pharmacists who stabbed us.

They call us anti-vaxxers.
But we got jabbed?
They call us conspiracy theorists.
But we believed them?
They call us science-deniers.
But we trusted it?

And now we’re on our own—
without support,
without compensation,
without legal recourse.

Some of us have lost
our jobs,
our insurance,
our babies,
our lives.

They don’t need us anymore.
They don’t want us anymore.

They got what they ordered
… and moved on.

Each twinge of pain
is silver in their pockets.
Each desperate scream
is Muzak in their waiting room.
Each vaxxicide
is another piece of evidence
buried.

So that’s why we have to live.
That’s why we have to survive.
That’s why we have to fight.
That’s why we have to wage justice.

We are living proof
of their fraud,
of their cruelty,
of their tyranny.

Chisel our truth into your hearts.
Tattoo our stories onto your arms.
Photograph our faces with your minds.

Testify to our torment.
Testify to their lies.
Testify to their crimes.

See us.
Hear us.
Feel us.
Help us.

Cody’s Lament

A Description of Cody’s Diagnoses by His Mom, Heather Hudson of A Mother’s Anthem

Cody had his second and final Pfizer shot in the last week of July 2021. Within a week, a significant sign of reaction started with severe skin rashes. Within a month, he had a suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in his right leg. A few weeks later, he was hospitalized with a large pulmonary embolism, leaky heart valves, left ventricular hypertrophy, and marked right-side weakness we were later told was a stroke.

Cody returned to the hospital with a new lung infarction and a partially collapsed lung within two days of his release. He returned over and over with new blood clotting and pulmonary embolism events in 2022, until he began treatment for the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) he was left with after his shots.

Then his system became resistant to treatment, and Cody went on to suffer several life-threatening brain injuries; four infarct or ischemic strokes; a transverse sinus vein blood clot of the brain and severe stenosis of the veins of the left side of the brain over three regions; left parietal encephalomalacia; and blood clotting in all four limbs that are diagnosed and documented as resulting from the new onset APS post-shots.

Formerly physically in excellent health and running twenty-five miles a week at the gym, Cody was twenty-one when he went into the hospital, where he turned twenty-two. Cody has since been unable to walk without assistance.

© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC

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In this entry of my Case in Point series exploring real-world examples of logical fallacies and cognitive biases (past topics include hindsight bias, ad hominem, false premise, and anti-semitism), I examine the baby bathwater logical fallacy I encountered during a comment exchange on Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Bondi at Racket News.

I’m not actually sure if the baby bathwater fallacy is a formally recognized one as I haven’t managed to find it in official lists of logical fallacies, although search engine AI synopses from Presearch and Duck Duck Go act like it exists.

Duck Duck go points to a Wikipedia article on the idiom and a Law & Literacy article, but neither refers to it as a logical fallacy.

Adding quotes to the search term (“baby bathwater fallacy”) to obtain exact matches returns zero results at Duck Duck Go:

A Redditer from eight years ago asks what the logical fallacy for the idiom is, saying the closest he could find is fallacy of composition. Respondents could only come up with Nirvana fallacy, false dilemma, perfect is the enemy of good, faulty generalization, slothful induction, and jumping to conclusions—none of which captures the simple notion that a person discards everything someone has said because they dislike something else that person said or the person himself.

This is a frustration I have encountered so often, I have long wanted to write an article about it, but this Case in Point is probably the closest I’ll ever come besides this comment on What Noam Chomsky Can Teach Us About Freedom of Speech:

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read the article and listen to or read the interview before knee-jerk–reacting to the mere mention of Chomsky. I realize he is an incendiary figure, particularly for those of us whose isolation and coercion through societal deprivations he advocated for.

As I write in You Can’t Cancel Me:

“I may quote or reference someone you disagree with;
“I may quote or reference someone I disagree with.”

The point of this essay and conversation is not to idealize Chomsky but rather to glean wisdom from his past words, which serve as a “Remember thou art mortal” whisper in our ears and a lesson to forever guard against the cognitive biases and menticidal manipulations Chomsky himself has succumbed to.

If you are tempted to outright reject everything Chomsky (or anyone, even those you generally disagree with) has said simply because he has made other statements you find heinous, ask yourself if you are practicing a form of ideological Cancel Culture that prevents you from being able to find truth wherever it happens to exist.

If you find yourself reaching for ad hominems, consider taking a step back and examining the content of his words quoted in this piece. Do you agree or disagree with what he said about free speech—why or why not?

Those of us who are truth-seekers aim to rise above partisan divides and instead engage on the level of ideas, respectfully refuting them with logic, reason, and evidence if we disagree.

When we find ourselves falling into the trap of attacking those we disagree with, we risk becoming like those who name-call us because they have been propagandized to fear views that counter their brainwashing.

I encourage everyone to listen to the TED talk Mickey cited and ask whether you are living as a soldier or a scout. Do you seek to defend your beliefs at all costs, or do you seek clarity about reality?

Chomsky serves as a cautionary lesson that it is easy to slip into the role of soldier, even if you once sought to live as a scout.

I strive to practice the latter, and my sense is that if you are here reading this, you do, too.

I won’t be able to respond to every comment individually due to time-sensitive deadlines but wanted to post this comment to encourage respectful discussion of the ideas captured in Chomsky’s quotes and my conversation with Mickey rather than being triggered by the lightning-rod figure of Chomsky himself.

Again, thank you all for being here and for caring about truth, freedom of speech, and humanity 🙌🤗

I have taken to adding footnotes like this when I quote someone objectionable:

Quoting individuals here and elsewhere throughout my work does not constitute endorsement of the individual, their actions, or their beliefs. I separate the quotations/art/creation from the speaker/artist/creator and appreciate wisdom where I can find it, even if the source is suspect. If their words are instructive and help us understand a concept more deeply, I am not going to throw them on the rubbish heap of Cancel Culture.

As I write in my poem, You Can’t Cancel Me:

I may quote or reference someone you disagree with;
I may quote or reference someone I disagree with.

I have frequently needed to remind people of the baby bathwater fallacy in Notes like this:

My favorite test of someone’s ability to distinguish the value of content from its source is this inspirational quote … by Hitler 😆:

“If you want to shine like sun first you have to burn like it.”

Okay, so Hitler said it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t generally hold true that passion drives success, and this is a succinct motivational reminder of that principle.

Here’s a technique you can use to help you be more objective in your evaluation of the content of a quote:

The phrase “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” originates from the German proverb “Das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten,” which appears in Thomas Murner’s 1512 work Narrenbeschwörung (Appeal to Fools).

If it isn’t technically a logical fallacy, it should be, so I hereby deem it official and call upon the Logical Fallacy gods to make it so.

You will likely find many occasions to deploy the baby bathwater fallacy. The following exchange (including with two participants who evidently don’t believe the accusations against Epstein and his associates) shows my own usage.

Read more

"I Protest" by Donald Jeffries

An independent look at the systemic corruption engulfing the world.

I first encountered Donald Jeffries’s Substack four years ago as I was composing my Letter to Governor Ron DeSantis. Donald had written a gut-wrenching account of his brother Ricky’s medical murder, which I shared as one of far-too-many examples of hospicide in my plea for DeSantis to “Veto HB 7021 to Protect Floridians from Incentivized Medical Malpractice & Hospicide” (he didn’t).

"I Protest" by Donald Jeffries

Losing my Brother to the Medical Industrial Complex

On January 6, the last time I wrote here on Substack, my older brother Ricky called me in the early afternoon from the hospital. He said he had fallen out of bed, but couldn’t explain how. He called 9/11 and of course the first thing they did when he entered the hospital is give him a COVID test. Just as predictably, it came back positive…

Read more

4 years ago · 117 likes · 211 comments · Donald Jeffries

In a tragic bookend to his article about his brother, Donald just lost his beloved sister Janet and exceptionally special niece, Denise, within the space of four days. He wrote a heart-shattering tribute to them that left me sobbing, not only because it reignited my own grief but also because I feel honored to have witnessed these two bright, unique souls through such tenderly loving eyes after their candles flickered into darkness.

"I Protest" by Donald Jeffries

Goodbye to my Sister and her Magical Daughter

My sister Janet died on January 27, my daughter’s birthday. Four days later, at 4:03 am, the world lost one of its incomparable souls, my special niece Denise. Neither was unexpected, as they’d been going back and forth to rehabs and hospitals for over six months. But the unreal timing turned the grief for Janet into grief for both of them…

Read more

3 months ago · 342 likes · 396 comments · Donald Jeffries

I hope revisiting our Apocaloptimistic conversation brings Donald some healing amidst his grief and equips you with empowering concepts, information, and resources for your tyranny-resisting toolkit. Please cherish your beloveds, dear readers, and tell them you love them while you still can.

“I Protest” with Donald Jeffries

February 9, 2024

Intro

Hidden History, Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics: 1776–1963, and Survival of the Richest. Donald Jeffries separates the real from the unreal, fact from fiction, reverse-engineering our manufactured reality. And now from just outside the swamp-infested Washington, DC, this is “I Protest” with Donald Jeffries.

DJ:

Welcome to “I Protest.” This is Donald Jeffries here with you, just as the man says, from right outside the swamp-infested Washington, DC. We come to you every Friday at this time, 5 pm Eastern.

I have a really cool guest today, somebody I’ve been wanting to have on the show. And this really triggers my literary side. People have heard me say I’m primarily a novelist. That’s what I consider myself, but I’ve only had one novel published. I have nine nonfiction books now, so it’s proven to be much easier for that. But in my heart, I still have lots of short stories and stuff, poetry and all that. So I’m very much a literary creature.

Our guest today, Margaret Anna Alice, I discovered her through Substack. She held my hand somewhat through the process and helped me navigate the waters there. And she’s very successful there. You can see she looks the part of a writer—you can tell she’s a writer. I don’t know what the look of a writer is, but you’ve got it. And so I’m very pleased to have her here. We’re going to just talk about everything possible. She’s done lots of great stuff on free speech and COVID. Margaret, welcome to the show.

MAA:

Thank you, Don. It’s really lovely to be here.

DJ:

It’s great to have you. So I ask everybody this. My background—people listen to me and I’m an open book, so they know too much about me probably. But I’ve been awake since when nobody was awake. I was a teenager, I was awake, and I was working for Mark Lane as a volunteer for Citizens Committee of Inquiry with the JFK assassination. So I was awake then and telling everybody how corrupt everything was and the government’s covering up this and that. So all these decades later now, lots of people are awake.

How did you go to the process to where—because I could read your stuff and you definitely have some radical opinions as opposed to the mainstream—so were you a good girl at one point and then you went down the wayward path, or what happened?

MAA:

I’ve actually always been an anti-authoritarian. I think I was born that way. My father can attest to this. I actually only lived with him for a few years of my life, maybe between age six and nine, something like that. But I was incredibly resistant to his attempts to control me. I had a very good relationship with my mom because it was one of mutual respect, whereas he was trying to apply the Strict Father as opposed to the Nurturant Parent model that my mother used.

I did not—and do not—respond to people saying, “You need to do this just because I tell you to.” I have to understand the reason. I have to come to the conclusion on my own. It has to make sense to me. I don’t obey just because I’m told to obey. That’s pretty much how I’ve been all of my life.

I will say I did go through some ideological transformations where I was more—I considered myself a “progressive” at a certain point. I have a piece, it was for my two-year Stackiversary, where I talk about my core values, and those have always remained the same.

I’ve always been very strongly pro-freedom, anti-tyranny, pro-peace, anti-war, that sort of thing. And so what I discovered, though, was that the illusion that the Democrats and the progressives represented those values just fell away. And I realized it was all propaganda. This happened after the 2016 election. I actually did vote for Bernie Sanders. I’m very much a populist type of person because I love ordinary people and I’m anti-elite. That’s another reason I resonated so deeply with the Canadian trucker protest. I love seeing human beings coming together and resisting power.

I think it was 2017 when the Evergreen Spring happened with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying at Evergreen College. It was this quintessential example of how off the rails academia had gone, the social justice warrior Wokeism. A YouTuber named Benjamin Boyce was documenting the protests that were happening in Evergreen College by these SJWs. They were basically taking over the college. And it was really what started Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s career because they were both professors there and they were standing up to the “Day of Exclusion” [Absence] where whites were supposed to stay home as a way of honoring the minorities. Bret was exposing the racism of that, and he was under attack. Just watching that whole process unfold in real time and seeing the degree to which these people, the younger generations, have been ideologically indoctrinated, the scales fell away. Because I left the left, it didn’t mean I went to the right. I just abandoned partisanship altogether.

DJ:

We have a lot in common. I mean, you’re the girl of my dreams here. I was a card-carrying member of the ACLU back then and anti-war, prison reform, for instance. There’s things that the left used to stand for. Now, of course they stand for nothing, none of that. And isn’t it ironic that the left—I gravitated to their whole idea … back then, now the left hates the First Amendment. They had a so-called commie front back in the day called the First Amendment Committee. They were obsessed with the First Amendment, and yet they were claiming that was communist, the right was. Now they hate the First Amendment, and I don’t understand it. The ACLU says nothing about the January 6 prisoners. They’re not even concerned with that. And things have changed so much.

We were on the same trajectory, obviously. And the left, you’re right—I don’t think I’ve changed. I’m a populist, too. You’ve got to read my book Survival of the Richest. That’s where I think I singlehandedly restored the reputation of Huey Long, who is my all-time hero. I love Huey Long. People that listen to the show—so many people say, “I can’t believe you turned me on to Huey Long.” He was the real deal. He’s my all-time hero. I devoted a whole section of the book there to him. And that’s the kind of person I am. I’m a populist, and I can’t let go of the unfairness of wealth, the distribution of wealth. So that’s the left part of me. But on a lot of issues, I’m right-wing now just because I’ve been driven there.

You’re nowhere near old enough to have been a hippie, but you’re kind like a disillusioned hippie is what you seem like to me. You decided to do Substack, obviously, and it’s a great thing for all of us where we can vent and maybe make a little money and get an audience out there and everything. So tell us about that. What do you do at Substack? I noticed you had a three-part series, I think, where you’re talking about the bullies—and I have another book called Bullyocracy, too, where I wrote about bullying and the social hierarchy in schools.

I’m in accord with everything you say.… You said you’ve chafed at your father. I didn’t go that far, I don’t think. But doing that, you must be really out of your element now because we are living in such an authoritarian age, and they just want you to shut up, take your vaccines, “I don’t care if they don’t [work]. I’m taking my fifth booster, and I’ve had COVID eight times, but I don’t care. You have to do it.” So how do you get along now? Have you become, what’s your family situation like? Have you become the black sheep? I’m ostracized.

MAA:

My mother is very supportive, thank goodness. She’s one of my best friends in a way, so I’m very grateful for her support. My uncle. Going back to my father, I had a conversation with him two Thanksgivings ago, 2021, and I actually wrote about it in a piece called Letter to an Agree-to-Disagree Relative.

He was completely indoctrinated into the narrative and not just about COVID and the vaccines, but just “Trust the government, believe everything they say.” So anybody who questions them must be a flat-earth Holocaust denier. He half-jokingly called me, he said, “You’re the enemy.”

I was trying to have a reasonable discussion with him about risk-benefit ratio, clinical trials, things like that—just kind of out the window because I am a conspiracy theorist and everything I say is unsubstantiated crazytalk.

DJ:

Or conspiracy analyst. Gore Vidal said, “I’m a conspiracy analyst.” And there’s lots of conspiracies to analyze. We have a new thing almost every day.

What did you think of Tucker Carlson’s conversation with Vladimir? I got to tell you, if they’re translating Vladimir Putin correctly, he sounds better than most of our politicians.

MAA:

I haven’t actually had a chance to watch it or read any of the transcripts yet. I’ve just heard about it in the ether so far. But I had an interview with Croatian Weekly, and we got a little bit into Putin in that piece.

One of the things I found when I read his speeches is he is very cognizant of Wokeism and the infestation of ideology into America and how it is being used to manipulate the populace. Even though I can’t of course condone his dictatorial type of behavior, I do appreciate that he is much more aware of what’s going on and seems to be in a way more of a free speech advocate certainly.

DJ:

He supposedly banned all GMO products from there. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I think he’s gone on record saying, “Your government killed Kennedy.” I don’t know. So what would you say? Just looking at, it seemed to me like there were two themes. I’m all over the place. If you read my Substack, sometimes I’ll talk about personal stuff and I try to address the news if I can, but it comes and goes, the news—we’re always on the brink of World War III. At first, it was the Ukraine, then it was Israel, and now it might be Iran. We’re always almost on the brink of World War III. I don’t know if this is just a show or what to keep us in fear porn without COVID, but looks like COVID. So I get the idea that that probably radicalized you more. I mean, I call COVID the greatest psyop in the history of the world. What are your thoughts on that?

MAA:

Yeah, absolutely. I think because I had already begun awakening to the propaganda and the media manipulation—I had Trump Derangement Syndrome, I admit it, in 2016. Once I realized how many lies have been told and how I had been deceived—and I’m certainly by no means pro-Trump, and I’m very critical of him for his role in Operation Warp Speed—but I realized Trump Derangement Syndrome was being used to control people like me and people on the left. Initially, when Trump was in charge of “developing” the vaccine, the people on the left were saying, “Oh, I’m not going to take that. It hasn’t been sufficiently tested. Trump’s involved.” Soon as it switches over to Biden, “Everything’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s the salvation.” It was just so clearly an ideological switch and very religious, very cultlike.

From the beginning of the COVID psyop, it was very clear to me that this was a propaganda fear campaign. People who you could normally engage with and discuss differing viewpoints with just went absolutely batshit crazy when you tried to express or share opposing evidence and show this information you’re being fed is basically a lie or a deception. Death tallies are being drastically inflated, and the PCR tests are giving us a ridiculously disproportionate count of cases, and they’re just pumping that out on a second-by-second basis on the news and every conceivable media outlet in order to immerse you in this state of fear so you will bow down to whatever protocols they demand you accept and whatever rights you allow them to take from you.

DJ:

Absolutely. My book Masking the Truth: How Covid-19 Destroyed Civil Liberties and Shut Down the World, that’s the most shadow-banned book in the world. Barnes & Noble just recently removed it from their website, and they won’t even respond to why. Amazon has blocked—so many people told me they reviewed it, and they won’t put it up there. The libraries, they blocked it from libraries for a long time, you couldn’t find it, even the Library of Congress. A few—thanks to supporters who have been bombarding the libraries. We’re going to have to take this show down right afterwards because I can talk about the most controversial stuff you want, but that’s one topic YouTube won’t allow. As soon as they hear it, boom, I’ve got a strike against me. Most of the people end up watching this live on YouTube, so we have a better chat there.…

Obviously, you didn’t get vaccinated or anything, but did this cause—because this was an emotional issue, all the other issues, in my case, JFK, 9/11, all the other elections, whatever, but this was really emotional, and that’s why I call it the greatest psyop. This broke—my kids and I were the only ones in the family that didn’t get vaccinated, so we were banned from my niece’s wedding. I might never see them again. We weren’t going to get vaccinated to go there. We wanted to go, but sorry, I’m not going to do that. That kind of stuff where it ostracizes and it fractures families. Did you experience any of that? If people said, well, she’s been out there, but this is beyond the pale, we can’t talk anymore. Have you had that kind of stuff? You sound like your father did, but anybody else?

MAA:

Yeah, to a certain extent. And I should say my father has come around a little bit more in that last fall when I talked to him, I asked if he was going to get the booster, and he said, “I don’t know, probably not.” So I think he’s starting to see through the ruse, even though he still trusts the government and the media for the most part. But my experience has been, when I have spoken with—it’s kind of been a split. Some friends, when I told them, when I confessed that I’m a dissident writer, it was just so exhilarating because they were on the exact same page and they saw through the propaganda, but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking out about it, and seeing what I was doing was just, they were very inspired by it. That’s always just so exhilarating when you find someone who sees through the propaganda with you. It’s like the Asch Conformity Test. Somebody sees the real length of the line instead of seeing the long line as short because they’re being told to and everybody else sees it that way, supposedly.

DJ:

You have a nice following on Substack. I hope to be able to get into your stratosphere there. I’m growing, but you’ve got a real good thing going there. I hear from people all the time, so I know you must, I find, like for instance, Masking the Truth. There’s not one person I know in real life that they wouldn’t even acknowledge that book, let alone read it. And that pretty much goes from most of my books. They don’t acknowledge that it’s even happening. But I hear from strangers all the time or people I meet online. I consider these people my friends. I imagine that’s the way you—and this is kind of a cyberworld where our supporters are people we don’t know all over the world.

MAA:

Exactly. And honestly, one of the hardest, or the thing that hurts the most is to share something that I’ve done or that’s really meaningful to me with someone I consider one of my best friends or some really close friends, and they are so trapped in the narrative that they can’t even see beyond it. The cognitive dissonance is really painful for them.

For example, I had a friend visit, actually during that same Thanksgiving in 2021, and I shared—I’ve written a fairy tale, a dystopian fairy tale, about what’s going on—I shared it with her, and she read it while I was making tea.

And she was, her affect was just stunned, really. To her credit, she talked to me, she let me talk mostly for about forty-five minutes, and then at a certain point, she just said, “This is making me uncomfortable. Can we change the subject?” I was basically just asking her question after question, “Why this? Why that? Why are they doing it this way?” None of it was logical. None of it was following conventional health guidelines. Just pointing out the propaganda, pointing out the puppet strings. And it was just too painful for her because she had just gotten her five-year-old injected the week before, and she was lined up for her booster. Everyone she knows and loves has gotten injected, and she’s completely immersed in everyone completely believing the narrative. So for her to see someone she knows and loves and trusts have a completely different perspective, it really was too much for her to bear. I tried to share some resources with her afterwards, and she never really responded. She was quiet for a while, and I said, “Are you still talking to me?” I texted her, and she said, “Yes, we’re forever friends. I just haven’t had a chance to review the materials.” But that was two-and-a-half years ago, and she’s still, as far as I know, not there.

Meredith Miller, I’ve been doing a Dissident Dialogue with her—you should have her on your show. She’s incredibly brilliant. She’s a holistic coach, but she really understands the psychology of Stockholm syndrome and what she calls a psychoneurospiritual state of captivity.

I’ve learned from her that really there’s nothing we can do to force someone to wake up. We can plant the seeds, we can make the information available, but it’s something they have to come to internally to be willing to open their eyes. Otherwise, if we try to force them, they’re just going to resist more.

DJ:

Yeah, there’s normalcy bias. I know in my family, they were used to hearing me rant and rave at parties and stuff for a long time. That’s all I did. It’s just I’m doing it now, people are actually listening, and I am writing, and people are actually reading. Maybe they can’t handle that or something because they’ve heard all this before. Anybody that knows me, it would’ve been predictable to know how I would react to—I mean, I think they would’ve been shocked if I had gotten vaccinated if I believed, because from the very instant, and that’s my book, Masking the Truth. And I noticed you interviewed my friend Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolf wrote the foreword to my book, Survival of the Richest.

She’s really blown up in this world, ironically, because when we first talked, I was this conspiracy theorist, and she’s—I still don’t know why she was canceled by the left. I don’t really understand it, but I wrote a piece called In Defense of Naomi Wolf years ago when she was sandbagged by that BBC reporter when she wrote a really Woke book. It was about defending the homosexuals that were in prison in the 1800s. I don’t know how that got her in trouble with left, but somehow it did. And they took—one of the things, she misunderstood a term that I would’ve misunderstood the same way, and her editors didn’t catch it, and her editors at Random House or wherever it was, they threw her right under the bus—didn’t stand for it. So it was terrible. And so I wrote the piece. I thought it was unfair, and it was on Lew Rockwell. I see you on Lew Rockwell, too.

MAA:

I love Lew.

DJ:

So because of that, we talk, but still, I think she realized this guy’s completely different—the JFK guy, 9/11. She was a pretty mainstream liberal. She was reviewed in the New York Times and all that stuff that I would never be, but now she’s kind of in our world, which is amazing. So it’s nice that you talk to her. I should have her back on the show. I haven’t talked to her for a while.

MAA:

Yeah, I’m sure she’d love to discuss her new book.

DJ:

Yeah. But the difference with her book—I went to her book launch party here at the Willard Hotel in DC. She invited me to that, I guess last year, a year or two ago. But that’s why I met Peter McCullough because he was there, and Peter Navarro was there, and I had them on my show later, too. So it was really cool to be invited to that.…

When I wrote Masking the Truth, though, her book and Peter McCullough’s book, RFK Jr’s book on Fauci, what’s the guy, Alex Berenson, you know who, Tucker Carlson? But all those people, I think they start pretty much at Point C or something. They start with the vaccine, and they assume there was something there. My book is the only one I know of where I start at Point A, and I talk about what was in China. I don’t believe in the lab leak theory. What was in China, what was going on? Why was a woman walking around spitting on doorknobs supposedly? People weren’t dropping dead in the streets. All the fear porn we heard out there. And then Italy, the same kind of thing. You had the fake photo, the coffins coming out, that was from another part of the world.

Then I talk about the empty hospitals, I talk about the dancing nurses, who are back, by the way, the dancing nurses are back and shockingly enough, they’re not dancing for 9/11 truth or free speech or to stop war. They’re dancing for climate change. How about that? Isn’t that so? I dunno, but so that’s the difference from mine. I don’t know if you doubt COVID itself, too, as I do, or not. I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

MAA:

From the beginning, I have actually focused on the propaganda aspect of this because to me, this is completely artificial from top to bottom. Whether or not there is a specific SARS-CoV-2 virus or if it’s just a variation on flu or whatever, that almost is irrelevant to me because with a 99.7-percent survival rate for the majority of the population, it effectively is just another flu, common cold with some extra symptoms thrown in. And so I’ve never really wasted time on the lab origin theory or arguing about that because my overriding focus is to stop totalitarianism and democide. And those academic arguments do nothing to prevent totalitarianism from advancing. Other people, I don’t really care what their opinion is on it or not, as long as they’re pro-freedom, anti-tyranny and want to join me in stopping the lethal injections, I’ll join hands with them. I’m very much in alignment on many issues with Mike Yeadon and Denis Rancourt, and they do not believe there was an actual specific SARS-CoV-2 virus. Denis’s research—I don’t know if you have looked into his excess mortality data.

DJ:

No, but I’m very familiar with Mike Yeadon, and I don’t know how to contact him. I’d love to have him on the show. I mentioned him many times in my book.

MAA:

Yeah, Mike is wonderful. He’s been very limited in the number of his podcasts that he’s been doing. He may be open to it; I can see for you. But anyway, Denis Rancourt has done this groundbreaking, all-cause mortality and excess mortality research. This is really something he is deeply familiar with as a researcher and has been doing this for years. You can use the mortality data, which is completely objective. All countries have to report this. It doesn’t say, “This was a COVID death,” or anything like that. It’s completely disassociated from the causes of death, which we know were massively manipulated in terms of the death reporting. So going with the excess mortality data is the most objective way to analyze how many people have actually just simply died and then how many above and beyond the expected level there were. Specifically, he and his team have looked at how many people have died in direct relation to the rollout of the vaccine, the booster. And it’s just absolutely amazing that you see this spike in deaths in all these different countries right after the rollout. And so he is able to very convincingly tie approximately 17 million deaths to the injection.

DJ:

Earlier, somebody in the chat room called you a cutie, by the way. I dunno if you missed that. I put it up on the screen.

MAA:

I’m not seeing any of the chats.

DJ:

So you got that going for you. But Hughston asked you, “Curious about her thoughts on directed energy.” I have a lot of people that talk about directed energy.

MAA:

Yeah, that’s not something I have specifically researched. It absolutely would not surprise me if governments are using that to manipulate weather to cause “natural disasters.”

DJ:

Hawaii.

MAA:

Yeah, there’s so much suspicious around Maui. Very likely that was involved, but not having researched or written about it—I don’t tend to speak about things with confidence unless I have really, I dive very deeply into pretty much everything I write about. Anyone who has read my essays at Substack will see almost every word is hyperlinked to supporting evidence. Because I’m not just writing off the top of my head and saying, “Take my word for it. This is my opinion, and this is what you should believe.” I’m saying, “These are the conclusions I’ve done. I’m showing my homework, and you can take a look at some of the resources I’ve used to help inform that decision and decide for yourself.”

DJ:

You do a great job. I’ve put a few pictures up, and I need to put more graphics and stuff. You do a good job of that, and it makes it look better.

I’ve gotta ask you, because your logo or whatever is Alice, Alice in Wonderland, and I looked at your favorite authors. We have a lot of them in common, and I love Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodson, and I am fascinated by his life. I think that’s just an incredible work. It was written in 1850s or whatever, and it’s still very applicable today. It’s not aged at all because he was in an imaginary world. But do you think things are getting curiouser and curiouser? Because we’re at the stage now—I compare it all the time with the trials of Trump, and people mistake me all the time. I call him Trumpenstein, and you need to read my Trumpenstein Project. I think he’s a creation to divide the country. And that’s why I think everybody hates him. I’m a Trump agnostic. We’re the smallest minority group in the world.

MAA:

Yeah, I think we’re on the same page. I called him an unwitting Goldstein in Letter to a Scientifically-Minded Friend.

DJ:

Yes! I’ve called him that, too. He’s Emmanuel Goldstein. That’s what he is. Except for the Two Minutes Hate, we have the 24/7 hate, but the prosecutions that they’re subjecting this guy to—and again, I don’t think anything’s going to happen to him. I think he’s an actor, but symbolically, what it represents to us—but we’re at the stage where, was it the Red Queen or whoever it was in the courtroom in Alice in Wonderland where they said, “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.” Are we at that stage?

MAA:

Oh, yeah!

DJ:

We’re there. I think.

MAA:

Yeah. Considering how many of the courts are bought and the judges are owned and they’re just voting or arbitrating based on ideological lines. Soros has really dedicated himself to reforming the justice system by getting so many prosecutors on his payroll and funding their campaigns. We have so much corruption in the justice system, and we certainly have gone beyond Wonderland in terms of Clown World and things being completely upside-down and people’s perceptions not matching reality.

DJ:

Have you written books, or do you write fiction? Do you write, I just look at what your reading list was, and I imagine you must’ve at least tried fiction. Have you been published other than Substack?

MAA:

Yeah, I mentioned earlier my dystopian fairytale. That’s The Vapor, the Hot Hat, and the Witches’ Potion. That was just something that poured out, and I published it at my Substack, and it got a very strong response. I think it’s because I was framing what was happening and what is going to happen if we don’t stop it in a fictional setting. And so it was much easier for people to see the emperor has no clothes, going back to fairy tales throughout history. They are used to reveal the truth in very accessible ways. I had people tell me they were able to share that with people in their family who would not read a nonfiction article about COVID, but they were open to reading and listening to that. And so I just self-published a book of that using illustrations from the—I have these stock illustrators I typically use, and I just found when I was working on the story, when I went to look for the illustrations, it was like they were made for the story. It all came together very quickly. I haven’t done very much in terms of marketing it. I haven’t looked into distribution. I just put it up on Amazon. A number of people have bought it and appreciated it. Some people buy it directly, and I can do signed copies if people are interested in that.

My essays have appeared in several collections, my essays and poetry. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Canary in a Covid World, but that’s a collection of thirty-four essays by what they call “thought leaders.”

DJ:

A nice title.

MAA:

The first essay I wrote, which is A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-Killer, appears in that collection.

It’s a really wonderful group of dissident writers, scientists, doctors, journalists, so I feel proud to be associated with them and with that book.

I don’t know if you know Dr. David Cartland, but he put a poetry collection together called A Doctor’s Despair, and he has several of my poems in there, including what I’m most known for, which is Mistakes Were NOT Made.

A Doctor’s Despair (Paperback)

In the introduction, he said that poem actually helped inspire him to put this collection together, so that was really nice to see. And these are just doctors; some are professional writers and poets, and others are just regular people expressing their observations about COVID and the emotional pain they’ve gone through and the censorship—all the things dissidents have suffered during these past four years, and they’re putting that in poetry. I have three poems in that piece.

I do plan to put my essays together in one or more books and have been in communication with pretty much the only publisher I would consider working with there, too. I really like the senior editor, the one I’ve been in communication with for a long time, and she’s been just incredibly patient with me. I’m always so busy writing new content that it’s hard for me to go back and put together my old content in an organized way. It really shouldn’t take that much time. One of my goals for this year, my New Year’s goal, my only one, is to get my book together and hopefully work with this publisher because I do really like them, and they’re ethical and they publish books that I respect.

DJ:

Obviously, you have a literary bent. Do you mind me asking what the publisher is that you trust?

MAA:

Chelsea Green.

DJ:

That’s Naomi’s new publisher. Naomi had to go there. So she likes her, I guess. But yeah, that’s cool. I haven’t tried them. I have these two novels that I think are the best thing I’ve written, and they’re just sitting there, and I can’t get anybody to read them. I have an agent that’s a friend of mine and calls me fascinating all the time but apparently not fascinating enough for her to read my work. And so I said, “I can’t be that fascinating if you won’t read my work.” So yeah, I’m looking for something like that. I’ll have to talk to you about that later.

When you became—obviously with COVID, you became even more radicalized like I did, as if that’s such a thing is even possible. I dunno how that’s possible, but like I said, if they do institute the Chinese social credit score, I’d like to see anybody that’s going to have a lower score than me, but maybe there will, I don’t know. But I think it’s going to be hard to beat. But were you able to exist in the working world? Are you still existing in the working world, or are you kind of just you’re doing your own thing?

MAA:

Yeah, I’m very fortunate in that my husband and I have our own freelance business in that we do website development, writing, editing, graphic design, things like that. We were independent of the system, so we didn’t have a lot of the same pressures that people who are employed have. I was really grateful that I had escaped that about a decade before. Now, I pretty much do this, my Substack work, 99 percent of the time, so I don’t really do very much client work anymore at all. When I’ve found my purpose and I want to spend every single waking second writing and working to defeat tyranny and stop democide, it’s really hard work on things that seem more trivial by comparison, even though financially, we’ve definitely taken a hit from doing this transition from client work to my Substack work, but it’s absolutely worth it.

DJ:

Hey, you have to, because if you put yourself out there like we do where thousands of people read it, I’ve made myself unemployable. And you have, too, I’m sure. And that’s the point is that everybody’s going to look. It’s not just one post or something. This is everything you’ve written for—in my case, I have books, too. So I have all this stuff and podcasts for years, and so it would be impossible for me to do anything else. So that’s why I’m hoping, and I tell you guys out there, and certainly I’m going to want you to give your Substack address out, too, but please, if you want to support me, it’s the only place I’m not shadow-banned: donaldjeffries.substack.com. “I Protest,” just like the show. And what’s your Substack?

MAA:

MargaretAnnaAlice.com will take you there.

DJ:

We have to support dissident voices, and you have to support each other. A lot of times that doesn’t happen. There’s a lot of competition. I dunno how deep you are in the conspiracy—the JFK, 911, Oklahoma City, I mean, all these things I’m familiar with, the UFOs, all that stuff. I don’t know if you’ve experienced any of that or if you’re just in your own former-progressive-turned-civil–libertarian.

MAA:

In a way, I’ve actually always been skeptical of official narratives. I was just thinking back recently, it was funny because I’d forgotten about this, but I think it was in tenth grade, I did a book report on The Unseen Hand. I don’t know if you know that book, but it’s going into conspiracy theories that I don’t even remember, like things about Teapot Dome scandal, which I don’t remember what that is anymore.

DJ:

Nobody talks about that. It’s with the Harding administration. It did knock Harding off, though. That probably is why somebody did.

MAA:

I did this incredibly thorough report on it and got an A+ on it. But I, just thinking back, I thought if anybody had done that these days, a student writing about these conspiracy theories, they would’ve been vilified, ostracized. I found it interesting, I wrote about it, and moved on. I’ve always been—anybody who’s paid any attention to the JFK assassination, you’ve gotta be kidding if you believe the official narrative. Bill Hicks, I’m a big fan of Bill Hicks. He, of course, was very passionate about the JFK assassination.

DJ:

So do you think he became Alex Jones? That’s the conspiracy theory.

MAA:

I don’t believe that one! No.

DJ:

Of course, I don’t. You get lots of great things. You have, what’s the one, Barbara Bush, her real father was Aleister Crowley. That’s another good one. And if you look at these, it’s like, okay, I don’t know, maybe. And of course, there’s a whole substrata that I run into all the time now where these people—my son’s the only one in my family that is in my world. He’s the only one … who listens to my show all the time. But he’s really into this thing that so many people are about the conspiracy where Hollywood is fooling us, where all the celebrated women are really men, and lots of the celebrated men are really women. And this was before the whole transgender thing, so I don’t even understand it. I say, come on. I mean, I’ve had people say, Marilyn Monroe was a male.

MAA:

Oh my God.

DJ:

I say, well, they did a great job if that’s the case. But you can do that. So that’s the problem is you do run into that. And then in the JFK thing, there are people that support me a lot on Substack who I’m grateful for and I don’t want to argue with them, but there’s more and more people that think Jackie pulled the trigger and shot JFK.

MAA:

What?! I’ve never heard that one before.

DJ:

Yes, it’s the newest thing. It wasn’t enough that the driver did it, Bill Greer. The driver was part of the conspiracy. He stopped and let it happen, but he didn’t follow protocol.… And then I’ve had a guest on my show that thought George H.W. Bush was a gunman in the Dallas records. I said, “You really think they would’ve wouldn’t have hired somebody?” He was the son of a senator at that time. It’s not like he was a mafia hitman or something. So that’s the problem, but I entertain everything.…

You’re going to get the questions here, but these might not be in your area. John Basiglone said, “Ask her about Building 7 if she even knows about it. What about Building 7?”

MAA:

I actually haven’t gotten that deeply into 9/11, but of course, what I have been exposed to—in fact, the very morning it happened, my husband and I just immediately knew it was a false flag. We were actually listening to NPR on the way to work, and when they said the first plane flew into the building, he said, “What did they do?” And all of the evidence that has come out since then and Architects [& Engineers] for 9/11 [Truth], all of that. It’s so in a way, so incredibly clear that it was a false flag intended to usher in the War on Terrorism. They had all of the documents already prepared to immediately sign and disseminate and impose this new era that really, in a way, was the beginning of what they accelerated during COVID. The terrorism was wearing off, so then we had to have this new public health scare that no one can control. You can’t pinpoint it to a certain person. So it’s always in the ether, and you have the fear and you’re able to get people to relinquish their freedoms and rights for this completely phantom frightening bogeyman.

DJ:

For people like me, and you sound like you’re on board, too, but if you’ve been studying these things for years, and that’s why we come to where we are now, there’s no reason for anybody to trust the authorities. That’s why I have more and more people—I have so many anarchists that were fans of mine early on, and I was never an anarchist, but I have no argument for them anymore. Because what authority is there that’s worth respecting? I don’t know. I don’t know of any—I mean the police? Your local school board? Who would it be, I dunno, maybe your librarian? I don’t know, but that’s not really an authority.

MAA:

Yeah, but librarians are the ones censoring now as you pointed out earlier.

DJ:

Well, yes, they’re certainly censoring my book, Masking the Truth, that’s for sure. They’re censoring, but they want gender queer and things like that in there. When I see the left, they say, “We’re against book banning.” I say, “Wait a minute, you’re against certain political books, but you want books that have graphic depictions of—” and it’s always grown men with young boys, and young boys will be reading that. I mean, I don’t understand that. And that’s why anybody that doesn’t believe in conspiracy, you got to explain that kind of stuff because would a normal educator think that? Why would a normal educator, I was reading today where a kindergarten teacher, and he was a male kindergarten teacher, which not too many of those, but he was, regardless. And he said he objected to what he called the Woke—they had a course called Woke Kindergarten or something like that.

The titles were like, Whatchyou Doin’? Or something completely grammatically incorrect. And I’m thinking, what are educators doing? Are they trying to start kids in kindergarten with not being able to speak the language correctly? I’m a community college background, a dropout. I dunno what your educational background is, but the educational world is—how can anybody really trust that at this point?

MAA:

I was an English major, and I have a BA. I feel grateful that I was in college in the nineties, late nineties is when I graduated. I feel like I escaped the heavy-duty indoctrination that really started happening in the 2000s. And 2010 is I think when the Wokeism kicked off really intensely. When I went to college, the emphasis was still on the books, the literature. There was the scent of postmodernism in the air, but I actively veered away from that and was focusing on reading itself and not theory about reading and all the silliness that obfuscates the actual literature itself.

It is so clear that the education system from preschool, really, through PhD programs, is completely an indoctrination system. I don’t know if you’ve read Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, but I highly, highly recommend everyone read it. I’m listening to the audiobook right now, and I want to mark every single sentence practically. One of the things he talks about—and this was published in 1962—is how governments realized they need to start indoctrinating people as soon as they practically come out of the womb. So they’re immersed in this ideology, and he gave the example of when a government wants to start a war, you have to convince people to sacrifice their lives for these lies. It’s a lot harder to convince adults who are critical thinkers to go along with the propaganda, the war propaganda. But if you start indoctrinating them from youth and jingoism and patriotism and why you must give your life for your country and that sort of thing, it’s much easier to manipulate them when they come of age and it comes time to throw them into the war juggernaut.

DJ:

And that’s what they want, good citizens. In the past, the schools wanted good citizens in a different way where they taught civics. They haven’t done that for decades now. They want citizens of the state. They want obedience. And they’re introducing so many—I don’t care what any adult does, but it’s ridiculous when you introduce these poisonous concepts, this transgender confusion, when they’re so little, they don’t even know what a gender is. And by the way, am I the only one that says, how can a child consent to changing their sex when they can’t legally have sex? And you could still be arrested? I mean, if you can’t consent to sex, how do you—it’s mind-boggling what we’re allowing to happen. And that’s the left today. That’s not our left.

MAA:

It’s psychological and emotional abuse of children and using them as political tools.

DJ:

Again, the left that I remember back in the dinosaur era when I was a teenager and coming of age—you had a lot of libertarianism because we had a thing called victimless crimes. You remember victimless crimes? I don’t even think anybody knows what that is anymore, but that’s people like me. We wanted to legalize pot, decriminalize all drugs. Nobody should be punished for any sexual stuff. Who cares? It’s victimless crimes, that kind of thing. But we didn’t envision this. We didn’t envision that you’re going to ask a kindergartner, “Do you really want to be a boy or a girl?”

MAA:

There is a victim there, though. That’s not a victimless crime.

DJ:

Right, exactly. But I mean, back then, when we’re thinking of it, these are consenting people. They can’t consent. And we were concerned about, again, with the ACLU back then, you remember when they had the Skokie, Illinois? That was a Jewish lawyer, and I’ve tried to get him on my show, it’s Gold—, I forget his name, but he won’t do interviews anymore. He’s still around. But I mean, to me, that guy’s a courageous guy because these weren’t people—nowadays, the left calls people they disagree with Nazis, well, the right does, too, who aren’t saying they’re Nazis. But these people were saying, “Yes, we’re Nazis.” So they’re saying, “We are Nazis. Yes, we’re Heil Hitler.” And they wanted to march through an openly Jewish area. They were trying to provoke things, of course. But the ACLU recognized, “Okay, we object to this, but we have to support it.” So that’s what it’s supposed to mean. Even if you object to it. If they had a group of lone nutters that were trying to say Oswald did it, I’d have to defend them. Even though I know, of course, it’s a big lie. Absolutely.

MAA:

It’s their right to say that.

DJ:

Whatever happened to that? I don’t understand why people, I know you must run it. Do you get people objecting to you being a free speech purist?

MAA

Oh, yeah. I have a piece that I published recently called On Fearing Freedom, and I talk about how the propagandists have gradually acclimated the public to the idea that freedom is dangerous.

Again, referencing Jacques Ellul, he talks about pre-propaganda or sociological conditioning, which is nudging the public toward this new recalibrated morality or value system in which principles that were once held sacred are eventually shown to be vilified. Something like free speech, you can’t have free speech in a country or a world where the Ministry of Truth presents a narrative. Free speech is too much of a danger to their narrative. And that’s one of the reasons the Internet is such a danger to them and why Big Tech has had to come in and kind of clamp down on all that “dangerous” freedom. We’ve been gradually conditioned, especially with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and everybody saying, “Oh, well, we can’t have Trump or anyone from the right spreading these scary ideas. And so of course, yeah, some censorship makes sense.” So gradually people relinquish their freedoms because they think it’s the right thing to do. They’ve been psychologically manipulated into it.

DJ:

Yes! I’ve told this story before, you may not know it because I learned it when I was writing my book Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics: 1776–1963, which Ron Paul wrote the foreword to, so very gratified with that. But I learned something when I was writing—probably one-millionth of 1 percent of Americans know this, but we all hear it—when they first put the asterisk on free speech was the old, “Well, you can have free speech, but you can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” That came from World War I when Eugene Debs and socialists and other people were protesting World War I, Wilson threw them in prison. They appealed it to the Supreme Court. Oliver Wendell Holmes, great liberal, Supreme Court justice, he’s the one who came up with that. He said, “You can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” And I pointed out many times, protesting the war is not yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. What are you talking about? And people, it rolls off their tongue. And I said, “Do you know where that came from?” And they give you a blank look, but now we have this hate speech thing, and oh boy, hate speech is thoughtcrime. Call it what it is.

What is hate speech? Hate’s an emotion. Who determines that? Margaret, they’re trying to indoctrinate people in this, and they’re trying to solidify having hate speech crimes and laws. And everybody on the left, the old left that I used to be a part of. The ACLU, even, the ACLU probably believes in hate speech now. I don’t understand it! The left is now concerned, it used to be back in the day that, maybe to a fault, they were trying to, they’re still finding victims, but they’re not really trying to get rights for them. They’re just trying to punish others for supposedly saying bad things about them or something. But back then it was, you remember the seven things you couldn’t say on radio and television, George Carlin and things like that we’re talking about, you’re trying to open things up. Now the left is exactly the opposite. “What did you say? You can’t say that!” Absolutely. So what does it even mean to be liberal at this point?

MAA:

I think it’s partly that they now are the ones in power. Before, when they were fighting for free speech and our freedoms, it’s because they were resisting, say the neoconservative government, the Bush administration, things like that. So they could see how important it was to be able to have freedom to protest for dissent and to be able to speak freely about opposing opinions. But once they became the ones in power, they wanted to lock that down and prevent others from expressing their opposing opinions and critiquing their side. So it really wasn’t about the principles themselves, but it was about attaining power. And once that power was attained, they cemented it.

DJ:

Yeah, they absolutely did. It’s just ironic that there’s nobody ever since—Cynthia McKinney has become a friend of mine, the former member of Congress, and she was wonderful. And then Naomi Wolf, Cindy Sheehan, a friend of mine, the anti-war woman, and Kucinich is still kind of good, but that’s the left today. Jimmy Dore is good.

MAA:

Yeah, I love Jimmy Dore.

DJ:

But yeah, that’s it. I mean, where is the left? And other than that, so we look to Tucker Carlson and people on the right because those are the only people that are questioning this at all. Who on the left is questioning—you mentioned Bernie Sanders. And Bernie Sanders lost a lot of people when he didn’t even protest himself being, the election being, I mean, he had the emails documenting what they were going to do, and he accepted the Russian nonsense.

MAA:

I know. I was so disappointed. It’s good to be disillusioned in a way because you see the reality that you really shouldn’t put your faith in politicians. You shouldn’t put your faith in any leaders. And that’s why I go back to the people. That’s why it’s so important that people have free access to information, that there’s no censorship, that they’re not indoctrinated into a narrative so they can make educated decisions and use their own critical reasoning faculties to assess the information and make decisions for themselves. And that’s why we’re in such a dangerous situation right now. People have these blinders on, and they don’t even know there’s an entire world of information outside the walls that they are corralled into.

DJ:

You’re exactly right. We have to keep in touch because I’d love to see some of your fiction.… I always said, I became a published author probably fifty years too late. Because fifty years ago, there were a lot more readers. The books, people, especially young people, they just don’t buy. That’s why Substack is great because you probably have a better chance of—and you get instant, like I said, and I don’t have that many paid subscribers, but it’s growing, and I’m already making more money probably than I’m going to make for my books, and I’ve got nine of them. But the people just don’t do that. They just don’t buy anymore. It’s a frustrating time unless you’re one of a handful of authors. It’s like everything else in this country where everything is—just a few people benefit from it. So you have a handful of authors. Stephen King can put his disinfo about the JFK assassination out. There is a guy, boy, he’s become, and the TDS stuff you mentioned, it’s great, you’ve kind overcome your TDS in a way in terms you recognize what it was, but it really has infected so many good people. I know I’ve had people that interviewed me, reviewed my books, used to like me, but the ones I didn’t lose with Trump initially ’cuz I supported Trump in 2016 initially. And then with COVID, questioning that, I lost the rest of them there. But I said, “You don’t understand. Whatever you think about Trump, he could be as evil as you think he is. But that doesn’t make the CIA good. That doesn’t make Joe Biden good.” I mean, isn’t that what we’re looking at here?

MAA:

Yeah, I have a piece called Letter to the Menticided, a 12-Step Recovery Program, walking through people through the ways in which they have been programmed, brainwashed.

I reference the work of Joost Meerloo. I highly recommend everyone read his Rape of the Mind. That’s another highly illuminating piece. He also wrote Delusion and Mass Delusion. Both of those are excellent for understanding how propaganda and coercion are used to menticide people, which is essentially kill their critical reasoning faculties. And, of course, television plays a pivotal role. I think my number-two step after they acknowledge that they have a problem, which is number one, is to turn off the television and disengage from all mainstream media. Even if a grain of truth seeps through every so often, it’s only because that grain of truth serves the narrative.

They’re essentially coordinating to construct a manufactured reality that is then used to guide you toward preconceived objectives. Just like Edward Bernays outlined very clearly in Propaganda, which I think it was published what, 1928? And also he wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion. These are not secrets. They wrote about exactly how mass persuasion is achieved. The problem is that very few people know that these mechanisms even exist and that public relations firms essentially identify—they say, “Okay, we want the public to start believing this because we want them to be able to accept that we do this totalitarian measure. So what actions do we need to take to cause the public to change its opinion on this matter?” And so really it’s about mass control, mass persuasion. My twelve-step recovery program is helping people see those puppet strings and then sever them.

DJ:

Well, I don’t know what you’ve recovered from because you seem like you’ve always been kind of—like I have, I gues—you’ve never been really … Some of the people that I’ve talked to, they were leading successful lives, and they weren’t radical at all. And then something, 9/11 maybe, or even years later, like I said, I would count Naomi Wolf along that. I still really don’t know what radicalized her. I don’t know why they attacked her so much. I still can’t figure that out. I never had a chance to ask her. And she probably doesn’t want to really dwell on it.

MAA:

My sense is she wrote the book, I think it’s The End of [America], and was it 2010? So she recognized the telltale signs of a closed system, when a totalitarian system is advancing, all the stages they go through. At the time, that was being practiced by the Bush II administration, so the left could very easily identify with and accept those principles. But she saw the exact same signs in COVID. And when she pointed that out, for them, they can’t accept that their side is capable of doing what they consider the far-right extreme is doing. And that gets back to the horseshoe theory of totalitarianism where fascism and communism and all of those extremes meet in the middle and they have the exact same characteristics when it gets distilled.

DJ:

So many people, they don’t know what to call this. So many people on the right, they’ll call communists and Bolsheviks, even. A lot of people call it fascism, Nazis. I don’t know what it is. We’re under tyranny. The names don’t really matter. Oligarchy. These people don’t believe in freedom. They’re swearing to uphold a document they don’t believe in because they don’t believe in the First Amendment, that’s for sure.

MAA:

They’re actively trying to destroy the Constitution. I feel very fortunate that we live in America and we had Founding Fathers who had prescience to create a document that was a bulwark against tyranny. And I think the First Amendment and the Second Amendment are what protects us in a way that other countries don’t have the luxury of having. But of course, that doesn’t stop politicians from trying to chip away at it and trick people into thinking those are bad things.

DJ:

No, and you can’t put—I’ve talked about the trials of Alex Jones. Whatever people want to think of him, and lots—especially in the alternative media, most people don’t like him. But again, I questioned Sandy Hook. I’ve written stuff about that. I don’t accuse anybody of anything. But you can’t just prosecute somebody—I said, “You’re cheering this on because, okay, you’re emotionally, there’s children involved.” They’ve demonized that. They demonized Pizzagate. Let’s say a JFK assassination guy. What if the Kennedy family wanted to start suing all of us because we’ve harassed them? And especially the 9/11 victims’ families, because most of them, not all of them, but most of them seem to, because they got nice funds, maybe that helped or whatever, but they accept the narrative. But what if they wanted to say, “You guys, hey, you’re bringing up this is hurting me. You’re harassing me.” So it’s a very slippery slope. And people cheered that on. You can’t do that. And same thing with Trump. This woman, E. Jean Carroll, I mean, she couldn’t remember the year she was raped.

They could find a woman thirty years ago for any of us that said, “Hey, well, we don’t remember the year it happened or anything, and there’s no evidence, but.” So I think these fines, you have to take the personality out of it and people realize that, “Hey, this could come on for you.” I’m no a fan of Rudy Giuliani, but he doesn’t have the money, but 140-some million dollars to two poll workers because he questioned the process? This is weird. I say that present-day America, Margaret, I don’t know what the Soviets are like or the Nazis are like, or Maoist China. I don’t know all that. We just heard what it was like, but we know what this is. How much worse could they have been than this?

MAA:

I’ve always thought places like the UK, that’s really kind of a frightening place to be writing and working because it’s so easy for them to slap a libel suit or slander suit on you. And then look at places like Germany and what CJ Hopkins is going through. I don’t know if you’ve—

DJ:

I didn’t know about that. I read your thing about it there. Talk about that a little bit. Exactly what did he say that he got in trouble for?

MAA:

It really is preposterous. For those people who don’t know, CJ Hopkins is an absolutely brilliant satirist, and everyone should be following his Substack, hilarious work. He did a book, his collection of essays, his latest one is called The Rise of the New Normal Reich. And the book cover, the artwork was designed by a wonderful artist named Anthony Freda. It has a white surgical mask with a very faint swastika on it. And the point is to underscore CJ’s work that demonstrates how much in parallel the rise of the New Normal Reich is to the Third Reich. He’s been documenting this from early 2020, and you can very clearly see the parallels in terms of the discrimination against the unvaccinated. And, of course, everybody has the vapors when you draw these comparisons with the Third Reich, or especially the Holocaust, which CJ, I will clarify, never does. He doesn’t say what’s happening now is the Holocaust. He says it’s like 1930s Germany and the rise of the Reich.

I actually do make the comparison with the Holocaust because we are witnessing likely the deaths of 17 million people from this soft democide that’s invisible because it’s done through self-injection.

Going back to CJ, he did two tweets showing that mask artwork with the faint swastika. And the Berlin state prosecutor charged him with relativization of the Holocaust without any sense of humor or acknowledgment that he is critical of the Holocaust and the Nazis. They implied because he had this symbol in this artwork from his book that he is advocating Nazi ideology.

DJ:

Yeah, that’s like banning Huckleberry Finn because of the language from Mark Twain, who was obviously using it in a critical way. And that’s where we’re at, isn’t it? You can’t even, no matter what the position is on it, the word, “You can’t do that!”

MAA:

He did this absolutely brilliant speech that he gave at his trial. His article’s called The Verdict, and I think I reprinted it in a recent piece, A Good Day for Freedom, Truth and Justice.

CJ Hopkins

The Verdict

So, my show trial for thoughtcrimes in criminal court in New Normal Germany went pretty well. I was acquitted. Technically, it isn’t all over, because the prosecutor has a week to appeal the decision, but, given the circumstances, I doubt he will. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audienc…

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2 years ago · 2036 likes · 407 comments · CJ Hopkins

He really exposed the hystericalness of this true living satire of a satirist being put on trial for being critical of Nazilike ideology and practices and demonstrated the totalitarianism that the state The [Rise of the] New Normal Reich describes is exhibiting by persecuting him for thoughtcrimes. And he won. But the Berlin state prosecutor has already appealed the decision. So he’s stuck in this Kafkaesque trial they could just keep repeating over and over again. It’s just ludicrous.

DJ: