Brownstone Institute
Rebellion, Not Retreat
From the Brownstone Institute
Fran Maier is right that we are now at a hinge in history—the end of an age and the beginning of something new. Anyone who thinks he or she knows exactly what will emerge next is probably wrong. Whatever is coming next, it will be a very different world from the one we’ve inhabited since World War II. I am quite certain that many things will get worse before they get better. Our societal institutions—governmental, educational, communications, media, medical, public health, etc.—have failed us. The degree of rot in these institutions makes reform or repair, in the short term at least, impractical.
I believe our task is analogous to that undertaken by the Czech dissidents of the Soviet era. Many of us are familiar with Vaclav Havel, who became the first president of the Czech Republic after the fall of Communism and wrote the now classic essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” Maier mentions another Vaclav: a close friend and collaborator of Havel, Vaclav Benda is less well-known but no less important. In contrast to Havel, Benda was a faithful Catholic and remained grounded in his Christian convictions as he faced the challenges of his time and place.
Some readers will doubtless wonder whether the historical analogy to a communist totalitarian regime might not be a bit overblown. Things may be bad, but they surely cannot be that bad. But consider, as Eric Voegelin taught us, that the common feature of all totalitarian systems is neither concentration camps, nor secret police, nor mass surveillance—as horrifying as all these are. The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions: every totalitarian regime first monopolizes what counts as rationality and determines what questions you are allowed to ask.
At the risk of offending my audience I will suggest: if you don’t see that precisely this is happening on an unprecedented scale globally, you have not been paying close attention. If you still remain skeptical, consider Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s brilliant formulation to describe the totalitarian method of imposing unity on an entire population: perfect integration through perfect fragmentation. Mull over this phrase while you watch TV or scroll social media: perfect integration through perfect fragmentation.
In the Czech context of the 1970s and 1980s, as Professor F. Flagg Taylor writes, “[Vaclav] Benda saw that the Communist regime either sought to infiltrate and co-opt independent social structures for its own purposes, or to de-legitimate and destroy them. It sought to maintain a populace of isolated individuals without any habits or desires for association.” In other words, as he put it, the Iron Curtain had not just descended between East and West, but between one individual and another, or even between an individual’s own body and his soul.
Benda recognized that any hopes for the regime’s fundamental reform or even moderation were futile. It was time to ignore the regime’s official structures and build new ones where human community could be rediscovered and human life could be lived decently.
Benda proposed building new small-scale institutions of civil society—in education and family, in productivity and market exchange, in media and communications, literature and the arts, entertainment and culture, and so on—what Benda called “The Parallel Polis” (1978).
He described this idea as follows: “I suggest that we join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures that are capable, to a limited degree at least, of supplementing the generally beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in the existing structures, and where possible, to use those existing structures, to humanize them.” And he clarified that this strategy “need not lead to a direct conflict with the regime, yet it harbors no illusions that ‘cosmetic changes’ can make any difference.” Benda explained:
In concrete terms this means taking over for the use of the parallel polis every space that the state has temporarily abandoned or which it has never occurred to it to occupy in the first place. It means winning over for the support of common aims…everything alive in society and its culture in the broadest sense of the word. It means winning over anything that has managed somehow to survive the disfavor of the times (e.g., the Church) or that was able, despite unfavorable times, to come into being.
The parallel polis is not, Benda emphasized, a ghetto or an underground; it is not a black-market system hiding in the shadows. As the word polis suggests, the purpose of these institutions was to eventually renew the wider society, not to retreat from it entirely. “The strategic aim of the parallel polis,” Benda wrote, “should be the growth, or the renewal, of civic and political culture—and along with it, an identical structuring of society, creating bonds of responsibility and fellow-feeling.”
Benda acknowledged that every institution of the parallel polis was a David facing the Goliath of a massively powerful totalitarian state. Any one or another of these institutions could be crushed by the state machinery if the state specifically targeted it for liquidation.
The task, therefore, was to create so many of these parallel structures and institutions that the corrupt state would finally be limited in its reach: while it could crush any one institution at any time, there would eventually be too many such institutions for the state to target them all simultaneously. Elements of the parallel polis would always survive: as the state crushed one institution, two others would arise elsewhere.
Plan of Action
The parallel polis requires a deliberate strategy: it does not develop automatically. As Benda proposed in his own day, I am convinced it is time to build these new parallel institutions of civil society. We need to be thinking in 50-year increments. This means planting mustard seeds that may not fully germinate in our lifetimes. I suggest that today’s Parallel Polis should be grounded in three principles: Sovereignty, Solidarity, Subsidiarity. I will conclude with five brief points to illustrate the application of these principles in our current moment. (I am simply going to state these points, since time does not allow me to argue for or explain each one.)
First: governments during COVID demanded we become disempowered and isolated. People globally ceded their sovereignty and abandoned social solidarity. By contrast, the new parallel institutions of civil society must return sovereignty to individuals, families, and communities and strengthen social solidarity.
Second: markets, communications, and governing structures have become increasingly centralized at a national and global level, robbing individuals, families, and local communities of legitimate authority, privacy, and freedom. Thus, the new institutions must be grounded in technologies and models of decentralized communications, information sharing, authority, and markets of productivity and exchange.
Third: individuals, families, and local communities especially have been robbed of their legitimate authority and targeted. To rectify this, the new institutions must support the principle of subsidiarity and empower practical efforts at the local level.
Fourth: fear has been weaponized to coerce individuals, families, and communities to cede their sovereignty and even make them forget they once had it. To help individuals, families, and small communities reclaim their sovereignty—their ability to self-govern—we must help people overcome their fear and find their courage.
Fifth, with the rollout of new mechanisms of social surveillance and control—the biosecurity model of governance, biometric digital IDs, Central Bank Digital Currencies, surveillance capitalism, and so on—the temporal window to reclaim solidarity and regain sovereignty is closing fast. Therefore, the time to begin is now.
Reprinted from The American Mind
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
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