Just the medicine I needed today...a rollicking, and rocking, and wise and wondrous conversation between two of my most favorite human beings!! THANK YOU Margaret and CJ!!🙏💖🤗 If it weren't for beautiful and precious souls like you two I'd feel a lot less grounded, and sane, and well, grateful. It means so much to me to know there are kindred spirits like you both milling about the theater of life ...truth-telling, laughing, crying, living, and loving! I extend my heartfelt gratitude to you as always Margaret, you are a twinkling diamond in the rough seas of the moment, and you help me to stay the course by watching your sparkle ebb and flow amongst the rolling waves. Keep on ROCKING my friend!!✌️
Aww, thank *you*, Stone for bringing the whole of your passionate, tender, and fiery being to this experience and joining us in this beautiful conversation! 🙏💓🔥🤗
Aug 9, 2022·edited Aug 9, 2022Liked by Margaret Anna Alice
That was just….superb. So rich. So thought provoking. I even role played what I’d do if responsible for little ones in some possible End Times. I’m not saying how it came out, but I can sleep. By one of the many simple twists of fate, between about 11 & 16, I read the entire canon of US post war “SciFi”. I find nothing anywhere close to where their great imaginations might have taken us. What is happening is pretty tame. Nasty, unacceptable & potentially irresistible, sure, but not that “far out”. Not shocking, rather dull. As if a software salesman & not Vonnegut wrote the script.
Accompanying me as I read & paced about, occasionally remonstrating with myself or with an imaginary guard who might, in the future, have the misfortune to deal with me, were the Kossoy Sisters “Bowling Green”.
I am always grateful for your attentive readership, Mike. You absorb every detail with the entirety of your being and then deepen the work with your own meaningful contributions.
I do think that tour of duty through the sci-fi lexicon has prepared you well, and it is something of a relief to hear what we are experiencing is dull by comparison (imagine what creative villains could achieve versus egotistical bureaucratic dunderheads steeped in groupthink).
“As if a software salesman & not Vonnegut wrote the script.”
🤣 Kilgore Trout would certainly scoff at the philanthropaths’ limited imaginations ;-)
Thank you for sharing that song, Mike—the Kossoy Sisters’ rendition of “I’ll Fly Away” is a slice of heaven, and now I’m listening to “The Banks of the Ohio” and see how it would melt you to tears. The beauty is so intense, it’s almost painful.
If you aren’t familiar with the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, I think you would relish it:
Dr. Mike, I've watched Doc Malone for over a year reckon with the Science and Vax Technology world that he excelled in. It is poignant. I watched his eyes flash with anger when he discussed Dr. Sanjay Gupta pitch the drugs to Sesame Street and try to guilt trip the children to get the jabs to "save Grandma".
I watched Geert Vanden Boscche reckon with it with Del Bigtree (in a few different interviews) and talk about how he tried to create a more ethical environment within the structures which he worked.
With Ebola and Gavi, I think, and other areas.
And finally, I watched you discuss on CHF that when you found about Pfizer getting fined for fraud, that "none of us quit, we all still took out paychecks". (paraphrase).
Dr. Mike, all three of you were out of the biz when Covid hit.
Three of the biggest whistleblowers. All three of have suffered greatly for this bravery.
Would it have been different if you had still been employed with Pfizer? How much more difficult would it have been to blow the whistle from within the belly of the beast?
I'm not going to write this up. This is my personal White Whale of curiosity.
Every day I look at people who still can't get over the hump with this (Dr. Jay B, for one)
You jumped on this early. You made a stand. And I personally appreciate that and admire you.
1. I confess it never occurred to me or any of us in R&D in UK to resign jobs we liked & were paid well to do, just because some crooks in sales & marketing out of NY HQ more than broke the law in claiming activities of marketed drugs for which there wasn’t the evidence or because the drug safety monitoring board covered up emerging serious adverse effects. I don’t know whether I should have? I still don’t think so. The principle is clear to me, though I now recognise I misread the situation. The principle is that if there are crooked individuals, they & their employer takes the consequences. Some separating & the largest criminal find in the sectors history. The misreading is that presumably the board was In in it. I don’t believe that possibility crossed any of our minds.
2. If I was still at Pfizer, I’m clear: I would still have spoken out, though obviously that would have meant internally at first. I know this, because I did do it on other, far less important events. Upon receiving the news in 2010 that they intended to shutter my therapy area in 2011, I disagreed & sought the find out why. I booked a trip to NYC & arranged meetings with the seniormost commercial lead & remarkably, with Ian Read, the then CEO. They had made a mistake & none of the reasons advanced made any sense. I said as much. At that moment, the look in Read’s eyes told me I was gone. Well, I was anyway! Might as well give it a go. I recall my boss telling me never to do it again. I’d embarrassed them. Diddums.
If I hadn’t been under threat, and the covid19 “vaccines” had hoved into view, I’d have started with my R&D peer & the line head in Drug Safety. If I wasn’t satisfied, I’d climb upwards until I got good answers. I can imagine being told to desist or risk termination & with that, I’m quite sure I’d have told them if they didn’t address the single thing I was most sure of, I’d resign in protest. I know I would because as a young scientist aged 31, I encountered my only experience of severe, senior management led fraud, and I did resign rather than to look the other way.
Resigning at 60-61, after a decent career, seems a pretty easy choice. Sadly, I see so little evidence of others of similar vintage doing the same. I really have no idea why not.
I find you exceptional, Dr. Mike. I find Dr. Kory and Dr. Mary and Brook Jackson exceptional. And Dr. Peter.
In a similar way that I find Edward Snowden unique. Or Julian Assange.
I wonder why some emerge from darkness and others burrow deeper. The outliers. The geniuses. And you are, and no, that is not empty praise, but just sober tracking of variables. They get absorbed into the mix of commerce, or ideology.
Nobody, certainly not me, gets off this rock pure.
I knew from the first time that I saw you that this man is not lying. He may not be exactly accurate. But he is most definitely not lying. And I clocked the same thing with Geert.
Our host here who is probably sick of my shit as all who enter my life become is also preoccupied with this dilemma, of that I am certain.
I'm trying to track back The Science. Like a moth, I return to this same flame.
Trying to understand things about this human animal.
I'm more like a Kirsch Red Pill, minus the jabs and injuries of family and friends. (And the millions.) But in the sense that realizing something is amiss and becoming consumed with exposing it.
I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose. I have nothing.
Whoa! Be still my theatre nerd heart! Been following CJ for awhile and of course, I aped into your writing only a few months ago, but what delightful treat it was to take a deep dive here. Funny how CJ mentions that he was searching for what can be said post Beckett and settled on - when there’s nothing left to say, you must do.
Lately, this sentiment has been reverberating through the Stackosphere with valid questions of what to do. We’ve all been shouting about totalitarianism taking over but what do we do? And an old Charles Eisenstein podcast echoes in the back of my head “we do what is ours to do”. Garden, take care of a dying parent, stand in front of Amazon bulldozers, write a play, or a song, giggle with a toddler, nurse a wounded animal back to health... there are so many things to do and we can’t do them all, but if each one of us simply does what is ours to do, our micro input will amplify on a macro level and we’ll pull humanity through the next level of evolution.
Thanks for this interview, Margaret. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
😆 I should have known you’d enjoy the theatrical talk!
Thank you for sharing that inspiring statement and poetic reflection, VA—“we do what is ours to do.” Precisely. I have been telling people that every tiny action has a ripple effect, so they don’t need to feel like they have to do something epic. Merely not complying, one instance at a time, speaks volumes and jars people out of their complacency. If enough of us do this (or *not* do ;-), gradually, the dissonance becomes too powerful to ignore, and it will help shatter the spell.
I think we’ve passed the inflection point now and the ripples are a strong wake (pun intended). I see people’s thresholds being passed exponentially faster and in bigger volumes. Let’s hope this transition isn’t violent. 😳
Agreed. I think the Canadian truckers (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/profiles-in-courage-the-canadian) demonstrated that peaceful mass compliance can be accomplished with waves of love, hope, and solidarity—the fact that they achieved that over such a sustained period without violence shows it can be done 🌊
Everything changed. The dissidents no longer felt like lonely, isolated voices in a sea of compliant Covidians—they joined together in a mighty chorus that buoyed one another up; inspired freedom and resistance movements around the world; exposed the tyranny of Trudeau and his WEF-infested cabinet; and moved the needle of public opinion against mandates. It would take a book to capture the importance of that movement, but this is as close as I could get given my time constraints:
INTERESTING HOW GOD and PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS ARE IN THE SAME parenthesis ---- CJH is many years younger than I am!
CJH: I get in trouble when I talk about “reality.” I spent too much time in the theater, took too much LSD, and probably read too much Nietzschean post-structuralism in my youth. Thus, what is “real” in one society may be “unreal” in another society (e.g., the existence of God, or ancestral spirits, or certain diseases and psychiatric disorders). Or that is how it has been for most of history.
-------------This Is the Number of Innocent People Murdered by Governments. Let’s start with a number: 262 million. That’s the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed “democide” during the 20th century. “This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century,” he wrote. When Georgetown University bioethicist Lawrence O. Gostin cheers on former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nanny-state meddling and writes, “the public health approach rejects the idea that there is such a thing as unfettered free will,” he forgets (or doesn’t care) that using the law to clamp fetters on us unhealthy saps creates more rules and regulations that we could ever possibly obey.
Governments have proven a far greater threat to existence than individuals living in community with one another. If everyone were armed and could defend against the rogue elements, we’d be a lot “safer” *and* freer.
Aug 9, 2022·edited Aug 9, 2022Liked by Margaret Anna Alice
left vs. right are a charade as in Kabuki theater aka Kayfabe.. too easy to play the sheep, at least at the present time... since EVERYTHING is global - does the US exist any longer!
politicians,/media are controlled by global organizations ?
btw... most of that 262 murders were at the hands of communist/nazi governments... and no, nazis are NOT constitutionalists/christians!!
That’s a very useful statistic. People mostly don’t believe “it” could happen here, now. Of course, that’s probably what 262,000,000 citizens elsewhere thought, before their own government arranged things so that they died.
I just finished reading your amazing discussion with C.J Hopkins. It was fascinating and a lot to take in. I will have to reread it again to fully understand it all. Thank you.
Thank you Margaret for some glorious thoughts and a remarkable profile of a remarkable man. You captured my own feelings when you say: "Tears are welling up in my eyes, CJ, and I feel like I’ve just read the ending of a new beloved book and want to wrap around to the beginning as I’m not yet ready to leave this experience." Sadly I have just finished 'States of Emergency'.
I have quoted and linked in my Letter on August 20. As humanity's spiritual battle against evil proceeds we will need more champions such as the two of you leading the charge.
Thank you for your moving words, Peter, and I am so glad you felt that way, too.
I’m not seeing a Letter on August 20 (which hasn’t happened yet), nor do I see one for July 20. Perhaps you can share the link so I know which article you’re referencing.
It hasn't happened yet Margaret, it is scheduled for Saturday after next - I collect gems as I go along. You will see it in 'Thought for the Week' at the head on my regular 'Letter from Great Britain'.
There is so much going on at present - multiple crises - I am full for this Saturday trying to stick to around 2,500 words. I really need 10,000 each week. Unlike your wonderful essays, I guess that my readers might not have the staying power!
My focus is to document the decline and fall of the great British Empire which funny enough is hiding in various tax havens, via the City of London and I suspect is the hidden hand behind the Empire of Lies (they learned well). Interest fact:
Thank you so much for the recommendation and link to C.J Hopkins. I must confess I was unaware of this individual and have signed up after a sneak preview of his essays.
I am thrilled to hear that, Helen. I just assumed everyone who follows my work already knew about CJ, so I am delighted to learn I am introducing him to new readers and vice versa!
I just realized that I have read some of the writings by C.J. Hopkins! It was on Off Guardian which I have been reading for quite sometime. I guess I didnt pay attention to the author's name at the time.
Stunning, and intimidating. Will be working for quite a while to process this. It's a remarkable achievement that you've sustained and developed this conversation.
Thank you so much, Chris—that means a lot coming from you. CJ and I enjoyed the process immensely, and I am deeply grateful to him for giving so much of his time, thought, and heart.
Both of you are among by favourite writers. I bought his latest book the other week and keen to buy yours when you publish a hard copy. I think it's important to have a paper record of this period.
Margaret Anna, I too loved CJH’s conclusion to do things once all that can be said (Beckett) have been said. Each our own way is doing that. Your contribution is huge. On the podium of best writers in this storm, for sure.
You really *are* going to make me cry, Mike. To hear those words from you—whose integrity is unassailable, contributions incalculable, and taste in writing impeccable—means more than I can express. Thank you for your precious friendship and for modeling a rigorous commitment to truth, liberty, and love 🤗
Looking forward to finish this long read! However, I'm at #7 and I have a question:
CJH says: "Totalitarianism causes mass psychosis... It is an essential part of the structure of totalitarianism. The people who conform to the dominant system of power will conform to ANY dominant system of power."
But the most conformist people I know currently, i.e. people who find my questions or POV alarming/endangering, and who are all-in on masks, lockdowns, mandates, and boosters, for example, are all people who ostensibly (or philosophically) opposed the capitalist system for the last 30 years. What am I missing here? I was more openly capitalist (I'd be a hypocrite otherwise), my friends were much more overtly socialist, and have been much more 'in line' with government diktats. Would CJH say we're all in the same system so it's irrelevant? It feels awfully relevant.
That’s an astute observation, Paz. I would be curious to see what CJ says if he has time to weigh in on this, but my guess is he would say they were still conforming to the dominant system of power albeit within the illusion of an anti-capitalist framework. They were still following the lead of the MSM, which fostered the semblance of a counterculture while still placing it firmly within the control of GloboCap.
My sense is that CJ has a master schema of an economic system (capitalism) which he claims operates without ideology. And that master schema is the one that he uses to order the world. It must be maintained.
It reminds me of religious people who order the world through the lens of, "they need God in their lives".
Or, as he purports with Desmet, as using a master psychological lens to order the world.
I don't see "controversy" here. I just see bright people who have a different paradigm which they make things fit into.
As I read quotes like this:
"It invades territories coded with despotic values (i.e., values established and enforced by the will of kings, despots, religious institutions, political parties … any type of ideological power system that dictates the values of a society), and it decodes those despotic values and substitutes its only value—exchange value—rendering everything and everyone a de facto commodity. A commodity has no inherent value."
I wonder: Does he not see that the commodity is now humans? Human beings, their DNA, their "data"? Does he not see that this is the language of a capitalistic despotism?
His entire framework seems to involve the seminal time in his formative life.
And it doesn't strike me as that much different than guys like Michael Moore or Marianne Williamson who cling to the "liberal" world they once understood, while others like MCM move on.
And much the way he critiques Desmet for having a psychological basis and bias in describing the elephant, I feel like CJ struggles to make extremely multi-factorial phenomena fit into his non-ideological economic system master world view.
Now is what is happening in our world right now, "capitalism"? Or stakeholder Marxism?
Does it matter? Power in a few hands corrupts.
But even if you take his capitalism is non-ideological view, it seems to me that Globo-Cap forces have in fact created isolation and made people willing to bargain for anything to get out.
I am far less bullish on CJ Hopkins after reading this.
I agree with you, Paz, there's something much more insidious going on. In several of my episodes I ask the question, "How did the left become so obedient?" Before, it was like trying to herd cats, there were as many agendas as there were people in the room. The right was well-organized and known for respecting authority. And then the left became the biggest conformists.
My speculation is that the left is manipulated through guilt, which is more potent than fear. Between BLM, climate change, overpopulation, overconsumption, and income inequality, they feel that anything they have they don't deserve and are more willing to sacrifice. And once they have sacrificed, they're motivated to blame anyone they don't perceive as doing the same.
I also feel that Trump was the set-up to the Great Reset. I think he was carefully chosen, if not groomed, to be outrageously everything that liberals would hate. So everything he was for (hydroxychloroquine, Assange, journalist freedom, ending NAFTA, pulling out of Afghanistan) they became against, and everything he was against, like Fauci and the vaccine, they became militantly for. The oligarchs are playing both sides of the chessboard, and we're all their pawns.
“An unwitting Goldstein, Trump played right into BigPharma’s strategy to discredit hydroxychloroquine by praising it—giving Trump Derangement Syndrome (a psychological disorder manufactured by and spread to tremendous monetary benefit and turnkey mass control by the media) sufferers the best and only reason they needed to dismiss it. They have been trained to plug their ears, cover their eyes, scream at the top of their lungs, and stamp their feet the instant any one of the Deplorables opens his mouth. One of the most effective instruments in the plutocracy’s toolkit, TDS has been brandished to misdirect the public for years, and it continues to work its magic despite Trump’s declining relevance, the embers of which the media will continue to fan as long as it pays dividends—just as Goldstein’s detested image is deployed in culturally unifying activities such as Two Minutes Hate.”
CJ’s first collection of essays, “Trumpocalypse: Consent Factory Essays” explores this phenomenon in detail.
GloboCap has no problem with "people who ostensibly (or philosophically) oppose the capitalist system," no more than it has a problem with people who call themselves "Christians," as long as these people conform to global-capitalist ideology in their actions. If that's not clear enough, try imagining someone actually trying to LIVE as a disciple of Jesus in the USA, i.e., giving everything to the poor, loving one's enemies, etc., not just going to church on Sunday and participating in the market the rest of the time, or reflect on what your capitalist-opposed friends have actually been doing (not saying) on a daily basis for the last 30 years. Which is to say, it is by our actions that we conform to whatever we conform to, not our words.
CJ, I got people right now telling me on my board that the problem is "Commies". The CCP.
Commies want global domination.
Naomi Wolf is leaning hard into CCP is taking over good ole USA USA USA.
Doc Malone framed it as "Stakeholder Capitalists" or "Marxists".
"The ESG system developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and now implemented by all of the large institutional investment transnational corporations (such as Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) has incorporated elements of the Chinese Social Credit system."
So this Globo Cap vs. Commies angle seems to be people carrying 1960's Cold wars into 2022 and framing it through one lens or another.
I lean to your framing of Globo Cap, FWIW. But really.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with "markets" or Adam Smith.
It's just rich people consolidating power and trampling over their fellow critters.
"GloboCap has no problem with "people who ostensibly (or philosophically) oppose the capitalist system," no more than it has a problem with people who call themselves "Christians," as long as these people conform to global-capitalist ideology in their actions."
--------
Did you not make the express case that global capitalism exists outside an ideology?
“What we are experiencing is a further evolution of the post-ideological model of power that came into being when global capitalism became a global-hegemonic system after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such a global-hegemonic system, ideology is rendered obsolete. The system has no external enemies, and thus no ideological adversaries. The enemies of a global-hegemonic system by definition can only be internal.
"Again, most people will conform to whatever type of societal structure is imposed on them by force as long as their basic needs are being met. Totalitarianism doesn’t transform people into monsters. It transforms the structure of the society such that they must behave as monsters in order to remain “normal,” i.e., in good standing with the totalitarian regime, and avoid being punished for nonconformity."
-------------
This is a tautology.
This shattered some illusions that I may have had about CJH. What a confounding and circular logic.
"A doesn't cause B. A simply sets in motion the conditions which cause B."
See? Totally different!
This is just bad logic from a brilliant person. This is a person that getting in their own way with their own intelligence.
Of course, we are all monsters. We are prone to behave very badly. We are animals by nature. The most predatory animal on the planet, and it ain't close.
The social ordering is how "Monsterism" is either co-opted and sublimated, or encouraged and condoned.
To try to split "Totalitarianism" off as a non-factor and create some kind of middle step eliding the Incentive Structures set upon the masses, and say, "See?"
First, I arrive at this discussion from what seems to be a different set of ideological givens, and I think of capitalism as a useful and productive force. But "the global-hegemonic system (i.e., global capitalism)" is clearly malign, and clearly intolerant of local capitalism, and of everything else local. The state-aligned corporations, like the ones selling pharmaceutical products by getting governments to coerce people into taking them -- after making those products with government funding and then selling them directly to governments -- no longer seem to me to be participating in markets in any real sense. Gleichschaltung isn't about the free market. So I wonder where this very astute critic of global capitalism sees corporate capitalism and its alternatives going, though I see the dismissive line about how we'll "sell each other individually hand-crafted artisanal doodads on Etsy." My impression, apparently shared here, is that giant corporations hate markets and want to abolish them, and sell through the security of mandates and regulatory monopolies, so I don't think a critique of "capitalism" gets at the heart of the game. It feels like there will be space for voluntary exchange, for people who are awake to the fact that that's a thing. Maybe not!
Second, about the decoding machine and the way it's "rendering everything and everyone an essentially valueless, interchangeable commodity," I immediately thought of the very strange war on childhood:
I can give fifty other examples of this, but **wow** the experience of watching grown-ups teach eight year-olds to shake their sexy little asses for dollar bills. And I think the decoding machine makes some sense of this, as it breaks down distinctions to make everyone merely an undifferentiated consumer.
Will be thinking about all of this for a long time. A really productive series of discussions.
Although I can’t speak for CJ, I think it would be safe to say he would be in agreement on several of your points.
My take on the Etsy line is not that he was dismissive of the act of people selling doodads in itself but rather that is an example of the simulation of freedom we would be permitted within a global-capitalist system in which humans are reduced to consumption/production machines.
And that clip 😳 “Look at all that money you just made!”
With regards to the twelve German soldiers who opted out of shooting Polish Jews…..this exact same choice is now in front of everyone who recognizes the current “thing” for what it is. As humans recognize physicality for the illusion it is, fewer and fewer will consent to participate in nonsense, no matter the consequences for them within physicality.
Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Margaret Anna Alice
Margaret Anna Alice, your output of high quality work simply astounds me. Yes, I am familiar with C.J. Hopkins and your piece here with him is first-rate. I agree with him that the current paradigm works to dismantle everything in order to commoditize the human. In some ways that is essentially another way of saying "turning them into compliant sheep", or perhaps compliant cogs in the machine. What we're seeing is people going along with the nonsense, some wanting to be the farmers, some the shepherds, but most content to simply be sheep. Those of us who would never consider ourselves sheep are problems. The sheep bleat at us to shut up and get in line. We must be the wolves, eh?
Just the medicine I needed today...a rollicking, and rocking, and wise and wondrous conversation between two of my most favorite human beings!! THANK YOU Margaret and CJ!!🙏💖🤗 If it weren't for beautiful and precious souls like you two I'd feel a lot less grounded, and sane, and well, grateful. It means so much to me to know there are kindred spirits like you both milling about the theater of life ...truth-telling, laughing, crying, living, and loving! I extend my heartfelt gratitude to you as always Margaret, you are a twinkling diamond in the rough seas of the moment, and you help me to stay the course by watching your sparkle ebb and flow amongst the rolling waves. Keep on ROCKING my friend!!✌️
Aww, thank *you*, Stone for bringing the whole of your passionate, tender, and fiery being to this experience and joining us in this beautiful conversation! 🙏💓🔥🤗
That was just….superb. So rich. So thought provoking. I even role played what I’d do if responsible for little ones in some possible End Times. I’m not saying how it came out, but I can sleep. By one of the many simple twists of fate, between about 11 & 16, I read the entire canon of US post war “SciFi”. I find nothing anywhere close to where their great imaginations might have taken us. What is happening is pretty tame. Nasty, unacceptable & potentially irresistible, sure, but not that “far out”. Not shocking, rather dull. As if a software salesman & not Vonnegut wrote the script.
Accompanying me as I read & paced about, occasionally remonstrating with myself or with an imaginary guard who might, in the future, have the misfortune to deal with me, were the Kossoy Sisters “Bowling Green”.
https://youtu.be/4MNM0OO_iVI
So many brilliant songs, but I’ll Fly Away is a personal favourite, yet the one which reduces me to tears is The Banks of the Ohio.
I am always grateful for your attentive readership, Mike. You absorb every detail with the entirety of your being and then deepen the work with your own meaningful contributions.
I do think that tour of duty through the sci-fi lexicon has prepared you well, and it is something of a relief to hear what we are experiencing is dull by comparison (imagine what creative villains could achieve versus egotistical bureaucratic dunderheads steeped in groupthink).
“As if a software salesman & not Vonnegut wrote the script.”
🤣 Kilgore Trout would certainly scoff at the philanthropaths’ limited imaginations ;-)
Thank you for sharing that song, Mike—the Kossoy Sisters’ rendition of “I’ll Fly Away” is a slice of heaven, and now I’m listening to “The Banks of the Ohio” and see how it would melt you to tears. The beauty is so intense, it’s almost painful.
If you aren’t familiar with the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, I think you would relish it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2weIVqWXOw&list=PLMsFR-IuG_7F0EspAuL9NvBtsruK14F4s
Thank you, yes, I was aware but haven’t yet heard that assembly of songs.
Do you rate the movie?
The music is unforgettable; the movie, forgettable :-) Something of a disappointment compared to “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski.”
Thank you. I’ll stick with the wonderful recordings!
Dr. Mike, I've watched Doc Malone for over a year reckon with the Science and Vax Technology world that he excelled in. It is poignant. I watched his eyes flash with anger when he discussed Dr. Sanjay Gupta pitch the drugs to Sesame Street and try to guilt trip the children to get the jabs to "save Grandma".
I watched Geert Vanden Boscche reckon with it with Del Bigtree (in a few different interviews) and talk about how he tried to create a more ethical environment within the structures which he worked.
With Ebola and Gavi, I think, and other areas.
And finally, I watched you discuss on CHF that when you found about Pfizer getting fined for fraud, that "none of us quit, we all still took out paychecks". (paraphrase).
Dr. Mike, all three of you were out of the biz when Covid hit.
Three of the biggest whistleblowers. All three of have suffered greatly for this bravery.
Would it have been different if you had still been employed with Pfizer? How much more difficult would it have been to blow the whistle from within the belly of the beast?
I'm not going to write this up. This is my personal White Whale of curiosity.
Every day I look at people who still can't get over the hump with this (Dr. Jay B, for one)
You jumped on this early. You made a stand. And I personally appreciate that and admire you.
Thank you.
1. I confess it never occurred to me or any of us in R&D in UK to resign jobs we liked & were paid well to do, just because some crooks in sales & marketing out of NY HQ more than broke the law in claiming activities of marketed drugs for which there wasn’t the evidence or because the drug safety monitoring board covered up emerging serious adverse effects. I don’t know whether I should have? I still don’t think so. The principle is clear to me, though I now recognise I misread the situation. The principle is that if there are crooked individuals, they & their employer takes the consequences. Some separating & the largest criminal find in the sectors history. The misreading is that presumably the board was In in it. I don’t believe that possibility crossed any of our minds.
2. If I was still at Pfizer, I’m clear: I would still have spoken out, though obviously that would have meant internally at first. I know this, because I did do it on other, far less important events. Upon receiving the news in 2010 that they intended to shutter my therapy area in 2011, I disagreed & sought the find out why. I booked a trip to NYC & arranged meetings with the seniormost commercial lead & remarkably, with Ian Read, the then CEO. They had made a mistake & none of the reasons advanced made any sense. I said as much. At that moment, the look in Read’s eyes told me I was gone. Well, I was anyway! Might as well give it a go. I recall my boss telling me never to do it again. I’d embarrassed them. Diddums.
If I hadn’t been under threat, and the covid19 “vaccines” had hoved into view, I’d have started with my R&D peer & the line head in Drug Safety. If I wasn’t satisfied, I’d climb upwards until I got good answers. I can imagine being told to desist or risk termination & with that, I’m quite sure I’d have told them if they didn’t address the single thing I was most sure of, I’d resign in protest. I know I would because as a young scientist aged 31, I encountered my only experience of severe, senior management led fraud, and I did resign rather than to look the other way.
Resigning at 60-61, after a decent career, seems a pretty easy choice. Sadly, I see so little evidence of others of similar vintage doing the same. I really have no idea why not.
I find you exceptional, Dr. Mike. I find Dr. Kory and Dr. Mary and Brook Jackson exceptional. And Dr. Peter.
In a similar way that I find Edward Snowden unique. Or Julian Assange.
I wonder why some emerge from darkness and others burrow deeper. The outliers. The geniuses. And you are, and no, that is not empty praise, but just sober tracking of variables. They get absorbed into the mix of commerce, or ideology.
Nobody, certainly not me, gets off this rock pure.
I knew from the first time that I saw you that this man is not lying. He may not be exactly accurate. But he is most definitely not lying. And I clocked the same thing with Geert.
Our host here who is probably sick of my shit as all who enter my life become is also preoccupied with this dilemma, of that I am certain.
I'm trying to track back The Science. Like a moth, I return to this same flame.
Trying to understand things about this human animal.
God Bless you, Dr. Mike.
https://sagehana.substack.com/p/is-biological-science-inherently-ba1
Sage Hana,
Thank you, I appreciate that very much.
Best wishes,
Mike
"You jumped on this early. You made a stand. And I personally appreciate that and admire you."
Same. Mike was quick to self-red-pill and courageous in sounding alarm.
Really appreciate your work and efforts too, Sage.
Thanks. I'm a different kind of Red Pill.
I'm more like a Kirsch Red Pill, minus the jabs and injuries of family and friends. (And the millions.) But in the sense that realizing something is amiss and becoming consumed with exposing it.
I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose. I have nothing.
But my ability to think, and see.
Which turns out to be more than enough.
Yup.
Whoa! Be still my theatre nerd heart! Been following CJ for awhile and of course, I aped into your writing only a few months ago, but what delightful treat it was to take a deep dive here. Funny how CJ mentions that he was searching for what can be said post Beckett and settled on - when there’s nothing left to say, you must do.
Lately, this sentiment has been reverberating through the Stackosphere with valid questions of what to do. We’ve all been shouting about totalitarianism taking over but what do we do? And an old Charles Eisenstein podcast echoes in the back of my head “we do what is ours to do”. Garden, take care of a dying parent, stand in front of Amazon bulldozers, write a play, or a song, giggle with a toddler, nurse a wounded animal back to health... there are so many things to do and we can’t do them all, but if each one of us simply does what is ours to do, our micro input will amplify on a macro level and we’ll pull humanity through the next level of evolution.
Thanks for this interview, Margaret. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
😆 I should have known you’d enjoy the theatrical talk!
Thank you for sharing that inspiring statement and poetic reflection, VA—“we do what is ours to do.” Precisely. I have been telling people that every tiny action has a ripple effect, so they don’t need to feel like they have to do something epic. Merely not complying, one instance at a time, speaks volumes and jars people out of their complacency. If enough of us do this (or *not* do ;-), gradually, the dissonance becomes too powerful to ignore, and it will help shatter the spell.
I think we’ve passed the inflection point now and the ripples are a strong wake (pun intended). I see people’s thresholds being passed exponentially faster and in bigger volumes. Let’s hope this transition isn’t violent. 😳
Agreed. I think the Canadian truckers (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/profiles-in-courage-the-canadian) demonstrated that peaceful mass compliance can be accomplished with waves of love, hope, and solidarity—the fact that they achieved that over such a sustained period without violence shows it can be done 🌊
What changed in Canada because of the peaceful mass compliance? The truckers already had love, hope and solidarity when they started the protest.
Everything changed. The dissidents no longer felt like lonely, isolated voices in a sea of compliant Covidians—they joined together in a mighty chorus that buoyed one another up; inspired freedom and resistance movements around the world; exposed the tyranny of Trudeau and his WEF-infested cabinet; and moved the needle of public opinion against mandates. It would take a book to capture the importance of that movement, but this is as close as I could get given my time constraints:
• “Profiles in Courage: The Canadian Truckers” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/profiles-in-courage-the-canadian)
"we do what is ours to do" that's it in a nutshell. For me, it's such a hopeful realization. Just be you, everyone else is taken.
Thanks for you being you and putting it that out there.
Thank YOU for being a unique, resonating, and much needed voice out here!
😊🙏
INTERESTING HOW GOD and PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS ARE IN THE SAME parenthesis ---- CJH is many years younger than I am!
CJH: I get in trouble when I talk about “reality.” I spent too much time in the theater, took too much LSD, and probably read too much Nietzschean post-structuralism in my youth. Thus, what is “real” in one society may be “unreal” in another society (e.g., the existence of God, or ancestral spirits, or certain diseases and psychiatric disorders). Or that is how it has been for most of history.
-------------This Is the Number of Innocent People Murdered by Governments. Let’s start with a number: 262 million. That’s the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed “democide” during the 20th century. “This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century,” he wrote. When Georgetown University bioethicist Lawrence O. Gostin cheers on former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nanny-state meddling and writes, “the public health approach rejects the idea that there is such a thing as unfettered free will,” he forgets (or doesn’t care) that using the law to clamp fetters on us unhealthy saps creates more rules and regulations that we could ever possibly obey.
Monica Hughes also shared some powerful statistics about the number of deaths caused by governments in this post:
• https://themariachiyears.substack.com/p/the-ship-is-not-sinking
Governments have proven a far greater threat to existence than individuals living in community with one another. If everyone were armed and could defend against the rogue elements, we’d be a lot “safer” *and* freer.
left vs. right are a charade as in Kabuki theater aka Kayfabe.. too easy to play the sheep, at least at the present time... since EVERYTHING is global - does the US exist any longer!
politicians,/media are controlled by global organizations ?
btw... most of that 262 murders were at the hands of communist/nazi governments... and no, nazis are NOT constitutionalists/christians!!
edit not functioning
That’s a very useful statistic. People mostly don’t believe “it” could happen here, now. Of course, that’s probably what 262,000,000 citizens elsewhere thought, before their own government arranged things so that they died.
the well known Doc answers... and is appreciated..
my question to Mr. Hopkins would be what is your personal belief system? not out of bounds!
btw.. here is the article
https://reason.com/2014/05/15/be-antigovernment-and-proud/
I just finished reading your amazing discussion with C.J Hopkins. It was fascinating and a lot to take in. I will have to reread it again to fully understand it all. Thank you.
Thank you Margaret for some glorious thoughts and a remarkable profile of a remarkable man. You captured my own feelings when you say: "Tears are welling up in my eyes, CJ, and I feel like I’ve just read the ending of a new beloved book and want to wrap around to the beginning as I’m not yet ready to leave this experience." Sadly I have just finished 'States of Emergency'.
I have quoted and linked in my Letter on August 20. As humanity's spiritual battle against evil proceeds we will need more champions such as the two of you leading the charge.
Thank you for your moving words, Peter, and I am so glad you felt that way, too.
I’m not seeing a Letter on August 20 (which hasn’t happened yet), nor do I see one for July 20. Perhaps you can share the link so I know which article you’re referencing.
It hasn't happened yet Margaret, it is scheduled for Saturday after next - I collect gems as I go along. You will see it in 'Thought for the Week' at the head on my regular 'Letter from Great Britain'.
There is so much going on at present - multiple crises - I am full for this Saturday trying to stick to around 2,500 words. I really need 10,000 each week. Unlike your wonderful essays, I guess that my readers might not have the staying power!
My focus is to document the decline and fall of the great British Empire which funny enough is hiding in various tax havens, via the City of London and I suspect is the hidden hand behind the Empire of Lies (they learned well). Interest fact:
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/is-queen-elizabeth-ii-worlds-biggest-landowner.html/
A Canadian colleague was unaware of the status of his land!
Thank you so much for the recommendation and link to C.J Hopkins. I must confess I was unaware of this individual and have signed up after a sneak preview of his essays.
I am thrilled to hear that, Helen. I just assumed everyone who follows my work already knew about CJ, so I am delighted to learn I am introducing him to new readers and vice versa!
I just realized that I have read some of the writings by C.J. Hopkins! It was on Off Guardian which I have been reading for quite sometime. I guess I didnt pay attention to the author's name at the time.
Stunning, and intimidating. Will be working for quite a while to process this. It's a remarkable achievement that you've sustained and developed this conversation.
Thank you so much, Chris—that means a lot coming from you. CJ and I enjoyed the process immensely, and I am deeply grateful to him for giving so much of his time, thought, and heart.
Thanks again for the invigorating dialogue, Margaret!
My pleasure, CJ, and thank you for making fire out of my kindling! 🔥
Thanks Margaret, that was a fantastic read.
Thank you, Andrew! Happy to hear it.
Simply stellar. Thanks so much for this deep and intimate dive into these matters most pressing on us all, rarely so poignantly spoken of.
Beautifully stated, Nowick, and thank you for contributing your verse to the conversation.
Both of you are among by favourite writers. I bought his latest book the other week and keen to buy yours when you publish a hard copy. I think it's important to have a paper record of this period.
I am honored by your words, anacara, and thank you for your enthusiastic support of our work!
I will be turning these essays into several books, mostly likely :-) In the meantime, you can check out my fairy tale if you haven’t already:
• “The Vapor, the Hot Hat, & the Witches’ Potion” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/the-vapor-the-hot-hat-and-the-witches • https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/get-the-book-the-vapor-the-hot-hat)
Margaret Anna, I too loved CJH’s conclusion to do things once all that can be said (Beckett) have been said. Each our own way is doing that. Your contribution is huge. On the podium of best writers in this storm, for sure.
You really *are* going to make me cry, Mike. To hear those words from you—whose integrity is unassailable, contributions incalculable, and taste in writing impeccable—means more than I can express. Thank you for your precious friendship and for modeling a rigorous commitment to truth, liberty, and love 🤗
Looking forward to finish this long read! However, I'm at #7 and I have a question:
CJH says: "Totalitarianism causes mass psychosis... It is an essential part of the structure of totalitarianism. The people who conform to the dominant system of power will conform to ANY dominant system of power."
But the most conformist people I know currently, i.e. people who find my questions or POV alarming/endangering, and who are all-in on masks, lockdowns, mandates, and boosters, for example, are all people who ostensibly (or philosophically) opposed the capitalist system for the last 30 years. What am I missing here? I was more openly capitalist (I'd be a hypocrite otherwise), my friends were much more overtly socialist, and have been much more 'in line' with government diktats. Would CJH say we're all in the same system so it's irrelevant? It feels awfully relevant.
That’s an astute observation, Paz. I would be curious to see what CJ says if he has time to weigh in on this, but my guess is he would say they were still conforming to the dominant system of power albeit within the illusion of an anti-capitalist framework. They were still following the lead of the MSM, which fostered the semblance of a counterculture while still placing it firmly within the control of GloboCap.
My sense is that CJ has a master schema of an economic system (capitalism) which he claims operates without ideology. And that master schema is the one that he uses to order the world. It must be maintained.
It reminds me of religious people who order the world through the lens of, "they need God in their lives".
Or, as he purports with Desmet, as using a master psychological lens to order the world.
I don't see "controversy" here. I just see bright people who have a different paradigm which they make things fit into.
As I read quotes like this:
"It invades territories coded with despotic values (i.e., values established and enforced by the will of kings, despots, religious institutions, political parties … any type of ideological power system that dictates the values of a society), and it decodes those despotic values and substitutes its only value—exchange value—rendering everything and everyone a de facto commodity. A commodity has no inherent value."
I wonder: Does he not see that the commodity is now humans? Human beings, their DNA, their "data"? Does he not see that this is the language of a capitalistic despotism?
His entire framework seems to involve the seminal time in his formative life.
And it doesn't strike me as that much different than guys like Michael Moore or Marianne Williamson who cling to the "liberal" world they once understood, while others like MCM move on.
And much the way he critiques Desmet for having a psychological basis and bias in describing the elephant, I feel like CJ struggles to make extremely multi-factorial phenomena fit into his non-ideological economic system master world view.
Now is what is happening in our world right now, "capitalism"? Or stakeholder Marxism?
Does it matter? Power in a few hands corrupts.
But even if you take his capitalism is non-ideological view, it seems to me that Globo-Cap forces have in fact created isolation and made people willing to bargain for anything to get out.
I am far less bullish on CJ Hopkins after reading this.
I agree with you, Paz, there's something much more insidious going on. In several of my episodes I ask the question, "How did the left become so obedient?" Before, it was like trying to herd cats, there were as many agendas as there were people in the room. The right was well-organized and known for respecting authority. And then the left became the biggest conformists.
My speculation is that the left is manipulated through guilt, which is more potent than fear. Between BLM, climate change, overpopulation, overconsumption, and income inequality, they feel that anything they have they don't deserve and are more willing to sacrifice. And once they have sacrificed, they're motivated to blame anyone they don't perceive as doing the same.
I also feel that Trump was the set-up to the Great Reset. I think he was carefully chosen, if not groomed, to be outrageously everything that liberals would hate. So everything he was for (hydroxychloroquine, Assange, journalist freedom, ending NAFTA, pulling out of Afghanistan) they became against, and everything he was against, like Fauci and the vaccine, they became militantly for. The oligarchs are playing both sides of the chessboard, and we're all their pawns.
Great points, Tereza. I do believe TDS has been key to orchestrating compliance among the formerly anti-authoritarian left, as I discuss in “Letter to a Scientifically-Minded Friend” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-scientifically-minded):
“An unwitting Goldstein, Trump played right into BigPharma’s strategy to discredit hydroxychloroquine by praising it—giving Trump Derangement Syndrome (a psychological disorder manufactured by and spread to tremendous monetary benefit and turnkey mass control by the media) sufferers the best and only reason they needed to dismiss it. They have been trained to plug their ears, cover their eyes, scream at the top of their lungs, and stamp their feet the instant any one of the Deplorables opens his mouth. One of the most effective instruments in the plutocracy’s toolkit, TDS has been brandished to misdirect the public for years, and it continues to work its magic despite Trump’s declining relevance, the embers of which the media will continue to fan as long as it pays dividends—just as Goldstein’s detested image is deployed in culturally unifying activities such as Two Minutes Hate.”
CJ’s first collection of essays, “Trumpocalypse: Consent Factory Essays” explores this phenomenon in detail.
GloboCap has no problem with "people who ostensibly (or philosophically) oppose the capitalist system," no more than it has a problem with people who call themselves "Christians," as long as these people conform to global-capitalist ideology in their actions. If that's not clear enough, try imagining someone actually trying to LIVE as a disciple of Jesus in the USA, i.e., giving everything to the poor, loving one's enemies, etc., not just going to church on Sunday and participating in the market the rest of the time, or reflect on what your capitalist-opposed friends have actually been doing (not saying) on a daily basis for the last 30 years. Which is to say, it is by our actions that we conform to whatever we conform to, not our words.
CJ, I got people right now telling me on my board that the problem is "Commies". The CCP.
Commies want global domination.
Naomi Wolf is leaning hard into CCP is taking over good ole USA USA USA.
Doc Malone framed it as "Stakeholder Capitalists" or "Marxists".
"The ESG system developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and now implemented by all of the large institutional investment transnational corporations (such as Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) has incorporated elements of the Chinese Social Credit system."
So this Globo Cap vs. Commies angle seems to be people carrying 1960's Cold wars into 2022 and framing it through one lens or another.
I lean to your framing of Globo Cap, FWIW. But really.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with "markets" or Adam Smith.
It's just rich people consolidating power and trampling over their fellow critters.
I'm a fan, btw. Really.
Thank you for the reply - I'll set aside more time to read the rest, because now I just have more questions!
"GloboCap has no problem with "people who ostensibly (or philosophically) oppose the capitalist system," no more than it has a problem with people who call themselves "Christians," as long as these people conform to global-capitalist ideology in their actions."
--------
Did you not make the express case that global capitalism exists outside an ideology?
No, I didn't. You might want to read a little more closely and comprehensively before attempting to summarize people's views of complex subjects.
"It doesn't have any values other than exchange values."
https://sagehana.substack.com/p/cj-hopkins-todays-totalitarianism
Also this:
“What we are experiencing is a further evolution of the post-ideological model of power that came into being when global capitalism became a global-hegemonic system after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such a global-hegemonic system, ideology is rendered obsolete. The system has no external enemies, and thus no ideological adversaries. The enemies of a global-hegemonic system by definition can only be internal.
--------
So there is an ideology, just an obsolete one?
I don’t think they’re conforming to capitalism. It’s other, non-economic, non-ideological social forces to which they’ve acquiesced.
I'll go one further.
CJ Hopkins says,
"Again, most people will conform to whatever type of societal structure is imposed on them by force as long as their basic needs are being met. Totalitarianism doesn’t transform people into monsters. It transforms the structure of the society such that they must behave as monsters in order to remain “normal,” i.e., in good standing with the totalitarian regime, and avoid being punished for nonconformity."
-------------
This is a tautology.
This shattered some illusions that I may have had about CJH. What a confounding and circular logic.
"A doesn't cause B. A simply sets in motion the conditions which cause B."
See? Totally different!
This is just bad logic from a brilliant person. This is a person that getting in their own way with their own intelligence.
Of course, we are all monsters. We are prone to behave very badly. We are animals by nature. The most predatory animal on the planet, and it ain't close.
The social ordering is how "Monsterism" is either co-opted and sublimated, or encouraged and condoned.
To try to split "Totalitarianism" off as a non-factor and create some kind of middle step eliding the Incentive Structures set upon the masses, and say, "See?"
Meh...
So many thoughts about this.
First, I arrive at this discussion from what seems to be a different set of ideological givens, and I think of capitalism as a useful and productive force. But "the global-hegemonic system (i.e., global capitalism)" is clearly malign, and clearly intolerant of local capitalism, and of everything else local. The state-aligned corporations, like the ones selling pharmaceutical products by getting governments to coerce people into taking them -- after making those products with government funding and then selling them directly to governments -- no longer seem to me to be participating in markets in any real sense. Gleichschaltung isn't about the free market. So I wonder where this very astute critic of global capitalism sees corporate capitalism and its alternatives going, though I see the dismissive line about how we'll "sell each other individually hand-crafted artisanal doodads on Etsy." My impression, apparently shared here, is that giant corporations hate markets and want to abolish them, and sell through the security of mandates and regulatory monopolies, so I don't think a critique of "capitalism" gets at the heart of the game. It feels like there will be space for voluntary exchange, for people who are awake to the fact that that's a thing. Maybe not!
Second, about the decoding machine and the way it's "rendering everything and everyone an essentially valueless, interchangeable commodity," I immediately thought of the very strange war on childhood:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1554539187088396289
I can give fifty other examples of this, but **wow** the experience of watching grown-ups teach eight year-olds to shake their sexy little asses for dollar bills. And I think the decoding machine makes some sense of this, as it breaks down distinctions to make everyone merely an undifferentiated consumer.
Will be thinking about all of this for a long time. A really productive series of discussions.
Thank you for so thoughtfully and thoroughly digesting this conversation, Chris!
If you haven’t yet seen it, I recommend watching the interview in footnote #1 (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/dissident-dialogues-cj-hopkins#footnote-1) as CJ explains his more complex views of capitalism in that exchange.
Although I can’t speak for CJ, I think it would be safe to say he would be in agreement on several of your points.
My take on the Etsy line is not that he was dismissive of the act of people selling doodads in itself but rather that is an example of the simulation of freedom we would be permitted within a global-capitalist system in which humans are reduced to consumption/production machines.
And that clip 😳 “Look at all that money you just made!”
I weep for the future:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-hkw1HUCbM
Most appreciated -- thanks for that video in the footnote.
With regards to the twelve German soldiers who opted out of shooting Polish Jews…..this exact same choice is now in front of everyone who recognizes the current “thing” for what it is. As humans recognize physicality for the illusion it is, fewer and fewer will consent to participate in nonsense, no matter the consequences for them within physicality.
Margaret Anna Alice, your output of high quality work simply astounds me. Yes, I am familiar with C.J. Hopkins and your piece here with him is first-rate. I agree with him that the current paradigm works to dismantle everything in order to commoditize the human. In some ways that is essentially another way of saying "turning them into compliant sheep", or perhaps compliant cogs in the machine. What we're seeing is people going along with the nonsense, some wanting to be the farmers, some the shepherds, but most content to simply be sheep. Those of us who would never consider ourselves sheep are problems. The sheep bleat at us to shut up and get in line. We must be the wolves, eh?
Thank you for your thoughtful words, William, and haha, that’s how the sheep see us because the real wolves told them to. Maybe we’re goats :-)