The Rationales of the Knowing Suppressors, Pt. I
Or, Is a Conservative Case for the Suppression of the Covid-Vax-Harm Story Possible?
They gave applause to Hector’s ruinous tactics,
None to Polydamas, who gave them sound advice.
Homer, Il., XVIII, 312-13; Fagles trans.
Suppression: Definition and Key Instance
Suppression is the refusal by a journalist, pundit, or politician, to publish or discuss content relating to a story of major public import, in violation of their duty to serve the citizenry.
It is distinct from censorship, which is government-orchestrated action that bans or punishes the publications of others. Unlike censorship, suppression is legal in America, because the free choice of a private person or organization to talk or not talk about an issue is protected by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment.
There are any number of current events, or aspects of them, which get suppressed. For example, this summer, upon President Biden’s difficulties in the debate with Trump, the Democrat part of the nation was forced to realize that their media outlets have been suppressing numerous reports, anecdotes, and clips which have long pointed to his mental incompetence.
Conservatives were not surprised, however, and they’ve long known that “mainstream” media outlets tend to suppress, or to downplay and reframe to the point of suppression, all stories inconvenient to the main progressivist and elite-managerial narratives. The leftward media bias complained about in the 1990s had by the Obama era become so shameless that it was plausible to speak of most of the media as “Democrat operatives,” and to quip as David Burge (“Iowahawk”) did in 2013, in one of the era’s most widely-shared tweets, that:
“Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
Suppression by a lone outlet would hardly be a matter for concern. Numerous outlets have to work in concert to keep an important story from “moving.” And by 2013, with the broadcast and print media having become even more corporate and centralized than previously, and the background and ideology of most journalists more uniform, the suffocation Burge was pointing to had become easier to pull off. This was despite the competition from internet-only outlets, for establishment organs by then had learned how to coordinate official slanders and social-media blockades of contrary content from internet-only outlets, thus consigning stories they disliked to an “information ghetto.” Things only got worse from there, as seen in the Pravda-like functioning of most media during the Covid-19 crisis.
But things can get more pathological yet, and that brings us to my present concern:
There is an unprecedentedly audacious and extensive suppression campaign against a story being conducted by nearly all media outlets of significant reach, and in this case, without much difference between progressivist or conservative ones.
The story being suppressed is the widespread covid-vax harms story.
The suppression is unprecedentedly brazen and extensive because the story is itself bigger than big: the claim is that the Covid-19 experimental medications are quite dangerous, having killed half-a-million to 17-million worldwide so far, with comparable numbers of disabling injuries, off-the-charts numbers of lesser injuries, strong reasons to expect them to cause millions of premature deaths from cancer and other conditions in the decades to come, and yet-to-be-ruled-out concerns that they may alter the human genome; a closely related claim is that nearly all the medical and pharmaceutical watchdog agencies of the world’s governments, in addition to the corporations who produced these toxic products, are engaged in a criminal cover-up of these harms.
My saying that this is a bundle of “claims” is at this point mainly a formality of discussion, a way to provide the hypothetical premise necessary for evaluating whether an abdication of journalistic and political duty has been taking place. For those of us who attend to the relevant substacks, websites, books, and videos, call us the “dissidents,” we know that at least three-fourths of the main claims just mentioned will be confirmed. That is how serious the evidence is, and how voluminous. And part of what I mean by “serious” is that nearly none of the claims from the most respected of the dissident experts have been proven false, or likely false. To mention just a few examples, there have been no thorough and pause-causing refutation attempts of what more than 200 embalmers are reporting about the novel “Hirschman” clots, no thorough and pause-causing refutation attempts of the Ed Dowd (and company) all-cause mortality and disability reports, no thorough and pause-causing refutation attempts of the studies (42:30-47:30) Peter McCullough cites in the cardiac-damage area, and no thorough and pause-causing refutation attempts of the Arne Burckhardt autopsies. Notice also that in the latter two instances especially, direct “do the results replicate?” refutation attempts could have been undertaken. Either such attempts were quietly tried without success, or they simply never have been.
Oh, and the very fact that some of you reading this have never heard of Dr. Burckhardt, Dr. McCullough, the statistical analyst Dowd, or the “Hirschman clots,” itself indicates that this story is being suppressed.
Imagine the general public personified as a single judge. One day she discovers there is a grand jury under her nominal authority that for three years has been receiving evidence of a man’s crime, evidence that now fills a wall-length set of its filing cabinets, but that it had yet to indict him, or to inform her.
That is what your media, and your political class, have been doing with regards to the widespread covid-vax-harms story. They have long been capable of knowing that the sheer amount of the evidence, and the sheer seriousness of the claims, demanded the journalistic equivalent of a trial, namely, that this be treated as a blockbuster story, with front-page debate and investigation. Their refusal to hold that “trial,” to even admit to the public that this issue is an issue, is nothing less than a betrayal of journalistic and public-service duty. A betrayal which both in its depth of sinfulness, and in its width of participation, is breathtaking.
Now if you really are reading about the claims of widespread covid-vax-harms for the first time, the way I conceptualize suppression has it that your chosen inattention, that is, your chosen neglect of dissident voices and platforms in an era of increased censorship and suppression, is not part of the sin here. It helps it along, and is its own kind of lesser sin, but is something distinct.
To offer one example, I was astounded this spring to encounter a very sensible clergyman who knew nothing of the vax-harm claims I have just related. Zip. Despite his general brilliance and Christ-likeness, and his attending to a number of conservative-leaning experts in his field who do engage in some reflection on current affairs, the suppression campaign had worked in his case. While strictly speaking he chose his ignorance, the suppressors made it the most likely of his choices to fall into.
This three-part essay is not, however, about the phenomenon of chosen ignorance, either as it occurs among those regular citizens duped by the suppression, or among those journalists and politicians simultaneously duped by it and engaged in it themselves. Rather, it is primarily focused on, and addressed to, those leaders in journalism and politics who by now know, or strongly suspect, that there is something to the claims of widespread covid-vax-harms, and thus, that their chosen inactions have added up to a suppression of a key story.
And their number has been growing. True, most of our suppressors, and particularly the ones in professional conservative circles, fell into a pattern of avoiding the covid-vax-harm story without really understanding what they were doing. In many cases they assumed it “wasn’t their beat,” and that they were obliged to accept the statements from the official science agencies. They were duped, which explains much of their behavior in 2021, 2022, and possibly, in 2023 also. But 2024 is a different time. Most of the suppressors know enough by now to draw the necessary conclusion, which is this: the sum of their choices to avoid the topic can only be regarded as a choice in favor of continuing the suppression.
(For further detail on a.) my usage of “suppression,” b.) how conservatives are engaged in it, and c.) how the widespread covid-vax harms story is itself but a part, though most important one, of a larger Covid/Vax Disaster story, see previous essays of mine linked to in this footnote.)1
2044
Imagine a scene two decades from now. An editor or executive of one of today’s conservative punditry/news outlets is queried by his adult son, age 30: “I’ve been reading up on the Covid/Vax Disaster, and particularly the Silent Massacre part of it, and some are saying that you must have played a role in the Suppression of that story. Is that true?” And since this son is sharp and well-informed, and so much evidence has stacked-up over the years, all the father’s deflections and excuses, which for so long seemed automatically effective, now fall flat.
Thus, at some point in this painful conversation, our now-elderly editor or executive, for whom the word “conservative” once meant so much, connected as it was to other words and phrases of sacred import, must admit the truth, or at least the bulk of it. He was caught up in a niche-elite-omerta about the unfolding calamity. He helped his “conservative” elites help the progressivist ones, especially the key players in the medical, military, and intelligence agencies of the administrative state. He became a denier-via-silence of a set of their crimes which nearly everyone now regards as abominations, and ones which should have been the subject of every third headline. They were crimes which in certain ways had a close moral resemblance to the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and other totalitarian atrocities of the 20th-century, even if, yes, they were distinct by a number of fundamental legal definitions which classify degrees of intention, and also by being significantly less destructive in terms of cumulative body-count.2
The son knows that the father’s articles or speeches in the times before the Disaster, or even during it, featured all those fine phrases about Rejecting ‘The Lie,’ about Core Principles, and so on; but alas, they condemn him now.
And the scene may be adjusted to become even more painful, as the above one assumes what we should not: the continuance of our liberal democracies. Picture, then, the son-confronts-father scene in a 2044 where outright despotism or collapse has come. The son’s shaming of the Suppressor becomes aggressive: “Had you not gotten conservatives used to lying and staying silent for the sake of supposed ‘tactical advantage,’ then that, and then …[here follows a chain of causes]… and finally this, would never have happened!!!” It may in significant part be unfair, but, it has an undeniable core of truth.
Aims of This Essay
The above sketch is not the key argument against conservative participation in the suppression. For one thing, while it turns on consequences for personal happiness, those guided in moral decisions by a Kant-like mindset, by a Glauconian or Adeimantian spirit(Pl., Rep., II), or most importantly, by the Bible’s truth that God has His “Eyes on You,” believe that far more decisive arguments against that participation exist.
I sketch it because this essay is an attempt to step into the shoes of those I call the “supservatives,” i.e., the conservatives who suppress the story of the vax-harms. I will do so by exploring the best arguments they might make for what they are doing, and, by speculating about what they believe the consequences of this course will be for their own lives, and for the health of constitutional democracy.
My main aim is to make those hesitating between the supservatives’ camp, and that of the Reckoning-demanding dissidents, realize that the first is destined, either sooner or later, to become the ground of spiritual and practical ruin. I want them to see that that camp’s best possible arguments--which by the very nature of the suppression cannot be openly voiced while it remains in operation—do not work, and cannot constitute some higher prudence.
So on one hand, my aim is to make plain the choice, to bring the sword of division.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, regarding his long struggles with the Nazi-accommodating church leaders, “the sooner the conflict is revealed in the clear light of day, the better.” (Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, 183) Bonhoeffers’ opponents in church leadership accused him of being a conflict-savorer, but he knew his stand reflected a fundamental choice, one between “Christianity or Germanism.”(183) I take a similar stand, involving lesser but still quite serious stakes: I say we must now choose between authentic Conservativism and a Narrativism of the Right.
While Conservativism recognizes the perennial necessity in politics to utilize rhetoric, and in rare cases—mostly ones of wartime or emergency executive action--, tactics of outright deception, it remains a political creed dedicated to integrity, and to the open and truth-seeking public discussion essential to constitutional democracy. It expects a government class and a journalistic class committed at bottom to what certain classic liberal thinkers of the French tradition called publicité, i.e., a basic transparency about major issues. In contrast, the Narrativism of the Right is a new political path which aims to compete against the nearly all-lies-all-the-time Narrativism of the Democrat Elites with one of its own that will only lie, propagandize, and suppress a fifth or so of the time, and only about certain issues, such as the covid-vax-harms one.
But a secondary aim is to explore whether there could be grounds for a dialogue of reconciliation between the dissidents who stay true to real conservativism, and a certain set of the supservatives. The certain set I have in mind are those who are for the suppression continuing for the sake of getting Trump in office, but ending it at some point once he has been elected, and has come through an initial period long enough to posit basic safety from deep-state coup, say, 100 or 200 days in. At that point, these would begin to publish the covid-vax-harms story.
Premises and Initial Conclusions
Premise 1: The Claims of Widespread Harms from the Covid-Vaxxes Are Numerous Enough, and Convincing Enough, That They Would Be Highly Persuasive to Citizens Were They to Learn of Them from More Regular Media Channels.
--Clarification 1.1: “Widespread” = 500,000 to 17,000,000 deaths so far across the world, with more expected; injuries 2x to 20x this amount, depending on how one defines injury.
Again, note that the four key claims I listed and linked to above, which have in no way been refuted, nor even challenged in a pause-causing way. And for my own (limited) reporting on more recently-made claims, see:
“Dr. Peter McCullough on the State of the Information,” “Recent Must-See Vids on the Covid/Vax Disaster, Part III,” “3 Quick Vids and a Graph,” and “Recent Must-See Vids on the Covid/Vax Disaster, Part II."
Premise 2: Liberal Democracy Must Encourage Open Discussion of Issues, Especially Ones Which Widely Impact the Citizenry; Its Journalists Should Serve This Commitment.
Up until the early aughts, most Americans took this premise for granted. As a supplementary prelude to this essay, I wrote “The Purpose of Open Journalism and Free Speech: Francis Canavan, the US Supreme Court, and the Present Crises of Censorship and Suppression,” which in large part consisted of quotations from court cases which spell out the arguments for this premise, though it ends with agreeing quotations from French liberal thinkers on the concept of publicité. The piece could have added in similar quotations from America’s Founders as well.
Initial Conclusion A: Putting Premises 1 and 2 Together, It Is the Duty of Most Every Journalistic Outfit in Our Democracies to Provide Regular Coverage of the Covid-Vax-Harm Issue.
Clarification A1: the time when this conclusion became undeniable, and thus, the time when this duty became binding, was no later than the end of 2022.
Clarification A2: “regular coverage” means something in the neighborhood of 2-10% of all stories and pieces by an outlet.
Clarification A3: “coverage” means specific discussion of the estimated numerical scope of the covid-vax deaths and injuries, and it means interviews w/ key dissident experts on the specific topic of covid-vax harms. For an explanation of how The Federalist cleverly violated the first requirement, and another of how Fox News cleverly violated the second, see the links in Footnote 1.
Clarification A4: In addition to the duty of journalists and pundits, all national-level and state-level politicians from that point forward had a similar duty, albeit less pressing and subject to more qualification, to mention it to the public, to put bills requiring investigations and data releases forward, and to themselves pressure journalists to cover this story. Remember: every national representative has a website which they can use to push stories, regular opportunities to speak to the public, and aides who can put releases together for them.
Premise 3: Because The Democratic Party Is All-In on General Censorship and Reality-Denial, and on Specific Protection of Elites Guilty of Covid/Vax Disaster Crimes, It Would Be Pointless to Concentrate Criticism of the Suppression on the the “MSM.”
Democrat-controlled institutions and agencies will never repent of the original Covid/Vax Disaster crimes, nor of the connected suppression and censorship sins; for these are a subset of the overall sins of The Administrative State, an entity the Democrats worship and serve; additionally, all these sins and crimes illustrate the Party’s total acceptance of Narrativism. Thus, only a radical re-founding of the Democratic Party could make such repentance possible.
Premise 4: Many if Not Most Conservatives, However, May Still Be Brought to Repent of Their Participation in the Suppression.
Clarification 4.1: the same may also apply to other political groups not utterly corrupt in the manner of the regular Democrats, such as the libertarians, the old-school liberals (a la Barri Weiss), and perhaps, new groups of “democracy-first democratic socialists” which, as far as I know, have yet to be formed.
Initial Conclusion B: Putting Premises 3 and 4 Together, the Key Ideological Ground We Must Fight Suppression-Acceptance off from Is That of Conservatism.
This explains my focus. And it explains, if you notice me screaming about the Suppressionist sins, of say, Laura Ingraham, it doesn’t mean that I don’t notice the even worse ones of the Dem-apparachtiks in the “MSM.”
The ground is key because, as I said recently said here:
…conservatives’ souls, our ability to maintain friendships, and in the future to build institutions, are now all on the line with this issue. If conservatives, no matter how otherwise based, religious, risk-taking, and loyal to the deepest principles, keep admitting the disease of this silence into themselves, it will rot from the inside any impressive thing they might achieve during what we all hope will be Trump’s second term and a longer rebound of Americans into political sanity.
And if you dislike the moralism in that, try this:
Those conservatives who do not wield against their enemies this greatest free gift of rhetorical advantage that ever fell before anyone’s feet, this massive club spiked with ten-thousand shocking facts, among them thousands of videos of victims weeping over their disabilities or lost loved-one, facts which prove that the right’s long-voiced worries about the growth of the administrative state were entirely correct, indeed underestimated, and which utterly discredit scientism to boot, are political strategy dunces. Here’s the leader of the hour, himself not an intellectual, calling upon us to “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” and all these word-smiths, all these thinkers, many of whom congratulate themselves for their Bravery in identifying as “anti-Woke,” “post-Enlightenment,” “post-feminist,” or what-have-you, will not pick up that club!!!
It’s as if they heard him say, “Do Not Disturb! Do Not Disturb! Do Not Disturb!”
The Two Basic Categories of Conservative Suppressors
The Unknowing Suppressors
They still don’t see the evidence for premise 1. Again, their ignorance and confusion are their own fault, though to some degree those are the products of the Suppression working on them.
It could be the case that this group still constitutes the majority of conservative suppressors—that is, I concede I could be wrong in positing that most of them know that the harms are widespread by now. But that doesn’t mean my concentrating our attention in this essay upon the knowing types, particularly in parts two and three, isn’t a better path to clarifying things.
The Knowing Suppressors
All of these accept premise 1, but will not admit this in public. Further, all of these either reject premise 2, or believe an exception to it must be made in this case.
To reject premise 2 is to reject and oppose liberal democracy, that is, it logically must become an attempt to change it into something else. Therefore, those persons cannot be conservatives by any coherent definition, because conservatism correctly understood is a specific political creed dedicated to defending liberal democracy. It may be open to the application of pre-liberal and monarchist understandings to the defense and shaping of modern democracy, but it does not, outside of emergency situations deemed to be temporary ones, advocate returning to an essentially non-democratic or non-liberal regime.
Thus, using new words to describe those “conservatives” who reject premise 2, such as the terms I have coined, “supservatives” and “Right Narrativists,” is fully justified.
The Two Types of the Knowing Suppressors
These are the Indefinite Suppressors, and the Temporary Tactical Suppressors. The first want the Suppression to continue indefinitely, the latter want it to end fairly soon, early in what they hope will be Trump’s second term.
And yet, by the very nature of the activity, no Knowing Suppressor will admit in public that he is. And we can expect that if a public Reckoning does come, many a Knowing Suppressor will pretend to have been an Unknowing one all the way through.
In any case, in parts Two and Three of this essay, I will seek to articulate the main justifications which I assume these two types of knowing suppressors of the right would offer for their behavior, were they assured of the conversation remaining private. That is, I will provide two imagined dialogues, between myself and each of these two kinds of knowing suppressors.
Stay tuned…
On a.) and c.), see “My Covid/Vax Disaster Lexicon,” on b.), see recent articles on why Fox News and The Federalist are guilty of suppression, and why Eric Metaxas is not; for my earliest protest against the pattern, see here, and for my most developed example see here.
We have every reason to expect that the total body count will wind up being quite a bit less than the 120 or so million corpses piled-up by the Nazi and Communist actions against non-combatants over the course of the 20th-century. At present it looks like the estimates by 2044 could not get beyond the 40 million mark, and if the injections yield less long-term damage than is feared, final numbers as “low” as 6-20 million deaths strongly-suspected-to-have-been-primarily-caused-by-the-CV-19-vaxxes could be possible. But given what little we know about the mechanisms of the various adverse events, and particularly with respect to immunity and cancer, much higher counts cannot yet be rationally ruled out.
This is also a good place to underline my disagreement with those dissidents who by insisting that “mistakes were not made,” and by not providing tighter definitions of their own terms, seem to imply that the millions of deaths, whatever the final count winds up at, were intended, and intended by most of those involved in the various conspiracies to cover-up the harms. Make no mistake: health agency, corporate, and hospital/pharmacy actions to cover-up unintended harms are definitely crimes, but even if one of the wilder posited scenarios of “conspiracy to cull” or “conspiracy to experiment with new weapons” proved to be true, only the actions of the select group of masterminds would constitute intended killings (i.e., instances of first- or second- degree murder).
This is brilliant and very important. The DUTY to tell citizens important truths has been abdicated and never even considered by political leaders and the 100-percent captured MSM. I look forward to the follow-up articles and will do what I can to increase the reach of this article.
Those who think like we do have somehow got to get around the "gatekeepers of the news" (who create and then suppress the truth about our myriad false and harmful "narratives.") Significant real journalism needs to reach far more people. And we need far more brave and enlightened true "leaders."
You can lead a horse to water, but if he dies of thirst he was really stupid.