The Rationales of the Knowing Suppressors, Pt. III
Dialogue with a Temporary Tactical Suppressor
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
Walter Scott, Marmion
You do need to first read part one of this, and part two. The last installment was a dialogue with an Indefinite Suppressor, the first of two types of the knowing suppressors. This one features a dialogue with the second type, and a couple of final conclusions.
Type-Two: Temporary Tactical Suppressors
Thankfully, this type of knowing suppressor is not cavalier about the prospect of betraying the commitment we should all have to Open Journalism. That is, he understands that one must affirm Premise 2 (see part one), but holds that a special and temporary exception to it is needed now.
Again, my desire to consider this suppressor’s possible arguments is twofold: I want to show him they do not withstand scrutiny, but also, to keep the ground open for reconciliation. I accuse him of a kind of betrayal of core principles, but not in a way that necessarily puts him on the path of permanent betrayal. For the Temporary Tactical Suppressor, call him “TTS,” agrees with me that Suppression is a serious moral danger. That is, something of an Apology for what TTS has been up to is contained in his very stance, and he joins me in being unable to stomach the idea of this Suppression remaining in force in say, 2026, 2036, etc. And here he is, in his own voice:
TTS: Hello Carl. Your guessing of what I believe is on the mark, but let me immediately highlight the basic difference between us, which is that you are insanely irresponsible about Election 2024. We have to get Trump well over the line. We cannot risk provoking those you admit are still in a sort of pathological Denial. We desperately need the demoralized-Democrat type to stay home, and we cannot hand the “recovering-RINO type” any excuse to not vote Trump. Things are shockingly close, especially if we assume that serious Democrat cheating operations are going to be deployed. And where will democracy the world over be, not mention efforts to force a reckoning on the Covid/Vax Disaster, in the wake of a Kamala victory? Even if we were to win Congress?
ME: God help us, it’s almost too stunning to contemplate—I’m extremely worried about what will happen if she “wins,” and there is even a third as much cheating-suggestive evidence as there was in 2020. If that happens, I predict mass civil disobedience of an extended kind, some of it violent, internet shut-downs, confusion everywhere, and enough turmoil and uncertainty to push Harris into trying something akin to martial-law.
TTS: And the Suppression of the covid-vax-harms story would again become outright Censorship--even without your martial-law scenario, we can predict Harris would push as far she could towards this. Rob Flaherty, who in the discovery part of the Missouri v. Murthy case emerged as a top villain of the Biden admin’s successful efforts to pressure the social media companies into doing censorship for it, is Harris’s Deputy Campaign Manager, you know. Also, the heads of the relevant medical agencies and organizations, knowing they will not be touched for another four years, would organize a final purge of all remaining dissident doctors and personnel. And do you really think Substack or X would survive a Harris administration intact? Finally, with the new waves of illegal immigrants she’d bring in, the GOP could never win the presidency again. Our problems would become so severe, with all of them touching the possibility of civil war, that the covid-vax-harms thing would not even seem all that big of an issue.
ME: So the moral imperative to win this is extremely high.
TTS: Extremely.
ME: So you say that justifies the rancid thing of conservatives turning our backs, for a season, on the tradition of Open Journalism. Rejecting Premise 2 and Initial Conclusion A, temporarily. In full knowledge that in doing so, they are delaying needed research which will thus result in many more persons than otherwise, likely tens of thousands, dying from the experimental meds.
TTS: You’re guessing with that number, but yes, all your metaphorical “rancidness,” the ditching of “Open Journalism” principles on this, would be justified. Consider what we just agreed would be the likely outcomes for dissidents under a Harris administration. And it is fair to remind you that at this point, TTS’s like myself are only asking for another six months or so of the Suppression. You’ve denounced conservative participation in it since August of 2022, so your putting up with it for just another half-year is not much to ask.
ME: Now don’t say six months unless you mean it! I assume I’m correct to guess that your real position is 100 or 200 days after Trump’s nomination, the better to be sure that his power over the government has become solidified?
TTS: I’ll only speak for myself, but yes.
ME: So that could be July of 2025, right? And this is your position even if Trump still wants the Suppression to continue? You’re going to push your outlet to start reporting the covid-vax-harms story in full, regardless of what the Trump administration is saying? Regardless also, of what the polls are doing?
TTS: Yes to all of that, especially my pledge.
ME: Which is what?
TTS: Oh come on. To stand with you against the continuance of what you call the Suppression past that date. To comply with your little “Clarifications” A-2 and A-3 about what real coverage of the story must consist of. And sure, to demand that GOP politicians abide by your A-4 demand that they also begin talking about it. Satisfied?
ME: I love it all. But no pledge, and especially one regarding political matters, can be made by anyone unwilling to attach their own name to it. And as a present suppressor, you cannot. I am reduced to imagining that a.) you exist, and b.) you would utter this promise to me if we were in a place free from recording.
TTS: Cute. Now what about you? You told INDEF that some of his arguments were strong ones. Is not my basic argument, about the importance of getting Trump in and secure, a strong one?
ME: I confess that it is very strong. I’ll return to the pledge problem momentarily, but I’d first like to hear your response to my recently expressed hopes, based on the RFK Jr. speech, that Trump would make it easy for you to keep to your pledge, by himself abandoning the suppression soon after his election. As well as your response to the persons who have been saying, and long before this event, that Trump would only stand to gain votes if he went some of the way towards an apology for his part in the “warp speed” development of the jabs, and towards a demand that the media cover the harm-story.
TTS: Aren’t your hopes all the more reason to take my position? You said the speech indicates that conservatives had better prepare themselves for the end of the suppression, and sure, I’m all for preparation. But for the sake of victory, we must not end the suppression prior to the vote. Nothing about Kennedy’s speech changes that.
And ultimately, when thinking about our own decision on suppression we have to assume that Trump will stick to his present line. I sure don’t see Trump bleeding support because he remains mum; but these next two months he could bleed support if moderates think that his conservative allies now look likely to act on “vax-harm-misinformation” if he wins. They could think that if an outlet such as Fox were to end its suppression. It’d be worse if Trump himself were to say something, though…look, it’s best for him and us to remain ambiguous about what he’ll do. And as you noted, RFK did not specifically mention the covid-vax-harm issue in his speech, but framed his health-policy points under the rubric of a “chronic disease” issue. His speech thus violated your “clarification” A-3! Kennedy himself is a Temporary Tactical Suppressor, wouldn’t you have to admit?
ME: Er…
TTS: Aha! But I’ll admit to you that I wish Kennedy had said and hinted less than he did—I dislike the idea of his getting Trump to implicitly agree with broad policy goals which could scare away certain voters.
Now as for those who were arguing that the key act here should have been Trump’s, that he should have sought to gain Kennedy’s supporters by himself admitting a change of mind, say, back in 2023 or this spring, there’s lots of problems with that idea. And I don’t think there was—or could have been--any polling about that hypothetical scenario.
ME: My main response is that you don’t factor in what support Trump might have gained if the conservatives of media had “picked up the rhetorical club” of the covid-vax-harms a half-year ago or earlier. If the public’s own perception of this issue had shifted because of what coverage had begun to reveal, who knows how much stronger Trump’s support might now be? I refer you back to my comments to INDEF about our side needing the public to come to a radical realization of the depth of our nation’s corruption—I say our deferring of that realization significantly hurts us.
TTS: Well, what’s before us is what’s before us. If your argument is that a strategic window was missed six months ago, you could be right about that even though the correct thing to do now is nonetheless to keep conservatives mum, and hold onto Trump’s slight edge in the swing-state polls.
ME: My gut tells me you are over-calculating the advantages he gains, and the dangers he dodges, from this Suppression continuing. So many of his supporters are reduced to half-believing in him. This trust issue is real. He has ever been only heterodoxically conservative, and he remains black-box on a number of issues, especially this one. Are we not concentrating so much on getting him in, that we are doing nothing to maintain conservative leverage over him if he does? Or consider it only in terms of this issue. You agree with me that the prospect of indefinite suppression is hateful, and so, do we not want some leverage, some “temporary-tactical-suppressor” leverage, in play against what could prove to be Trump’s “indefinite-ism?” Kennedy maybe gives us some, but Trump could turn against him on a dime.
TTS: This is getting a bit baroque, and I…
ME: But wait, it’s ultimately a simple issue. You’re fine with it being unknown what Trump will do, what the conservative establishment and GOP will do, and ultimately, pretty uncertain about what you yourself will do. People like me are just supposed to sit back, and basically, to wait upon your decisions. That’s unacceptable. Historians will judge this issue as having significant commonalities with things like the rise of Hitlerism in Germany, and the way many persons refused to believe what reports began to indicate in late 1941 about the systematic slaughtering of the Jews. I and my fellow dissidents believe the covid-vax-harms constitute the greatest in-a-democracy sin of scientism, of toxic media patterns, and of administrative state dynamics, ever. The calamities of the 20th are distinct from this failure because they were all driven by totalitarian ideologies. They occurred in non-democracies. But this disaster is happening without such ideology, and within democracies! It’s good news that those ideologies no longer have the power they once did, sure, but it’s very bad news that crimes against humanity can nonetheless happen without all that ideology and racism, or all that WWII turmoil, that they can unfold behind our façades of freedom and normality. So speaking for today’s dissidents, I say our names are damn well going to be on whatever documents survive this foul era which scream out NO!!!! Documents which shout it out to even to Donald J. Trump, and the masters of GOP…
TTS: Rave on brother, rave on, but can I get a word in?
ME: Sure. I do get carried away.
TTS: You agree with me that losing this election would decisively set back the very cause you’re espousing, right? We all see this ethical-shortcomings and black-box problem with Trump, right? You’ve nonetheless stated on numerous occasions that it is the duty of everyone to vote for him in 2024. You’ve urged your fellow covid-vax dissidents to not vote Kennedy. So you’re in the realm of political compromise also! You’re not out there demanding that Trump be clear about everything, and you’re thus accepting whatever advantage our side gains from his caginess.
And to repeat: you only have to wait a half-year, and folks like myself will be standing with you! Applying that leverage! Indicating how an imperative to investigate “chronic disease” necessarily leads to investigation of the new vaxxes! Why anyways do you want to put all the strategic burden of truth-telling, in an era of patent aversion to truth, upon our side? You don’t much call upon the MSM to cease their Suppression. I know, you explained why you don’t in part one, but it is maddening. The MSM are the primary reason this whole suppression exists, but you want our guys and gals to duke it out with them on this, and when the public is still quite uncertain and jumpy about it. And when the stakes could be Trump’s losing!
ME: First, permit me to underline that “could be” and point to my much greater uncertainty than yours about what a return to conservative honesty in reporting on this would do to his prospects. That uncertainly only increases now that Kennedy is on his side. Second, no, I cannot count on you standing with me sometime in 2025. Again, there is no name beside your pledge. You are but a fiction, perhaps a function of my not wanting to believe that I could wind up the outright opponent, not just of a Trump who decided never to back away from warp speed, but of 95% + of conservatives in leadership!
Now at bottom, yes, I do think you exist. What I fear, however, is that all the gravitational dynamics of this situation favor the indefinite suppressors.
For one, does your “pledge” hold if Trump loses? For if he lost, wouldn’t it be harder to get a hearing? And that’s not just because a Harris administration would be harassing your platform, but because your audience would look upon your new coverage as a move of desperation, asking “If they are serious about this, why weren’t they talking about it earlier?”
For two, what if he wins, but nonetheless, the timing of your pledge doesn’t look so good in July of 2025? What if your colleagues and allies, which would likely include folks inside or close to the Trump administration, refuse to join you? What if they want to keep on feigning ignorance? Do you understand that to keep your pledge you will come into conflict with them? Do you have what it takes to do that? To come over to my side, one of zero prestige? To risk your present friendships in the movement? And regardless of whether it would get that personal for you, if player conservatives retaliated against you in a way that threatened your career, would you stick by your pledge? After all, in this scenario, your covering the story could not avoid drawing attention to the fact that others are refusing to.
More broadly, having violated one time the principle of Open Journalism for strategic needs in a critical situation, why not continue to? Isn’t the logic of the Indefinite Suppressor, who says conservatives should only cease suppression when a moment for maximum strategic benefit from doing so has come into clear view, going to wind up tempting you and every one of your colleagues?
And if the larger suppression were to fall apart due to not enough conservatives participating in it, what would be so morally clear about the TTS stance once the public gets caught up in the passions released by a final admission of the magnitude of the disaster? Don’t your colleagues fear exposing their careers to such passions? And don’t you? The weeping mother stands up at the campaign stop, or at some “meet the pundits” event, and wails “Here’s a photo of my daughter who died in 2025, killed by side-effects which your foot-dragging kept the key organizations from researching!!!
TTS: I don’t see how we are going to reconcile, when you talk this way.
ME: But I won’t be seeking to unleash enraged victims against you. I do promise you that, right now, and in my own name. Rather, I would offer whatever sympathetic explanation of your view regarding the timing which I could, even though I had rejected it. It’s just that I couldn’t control the larger dynamics.
And the worst thing here is that you must fear you will wind up sliding into the indefinite suppressor camp. Think of it this way. Am I right that you chose the stance of the knowing temporary tactical suppressor, because initially you were an unknowing suppressor? In 2021, like almost everyone, myself included, the bastards had you duped; then in late 2021, people like me went “down the rabbit holes” of evidence regarding the covid-vax-harms, and continued to all through 2022, but you resisted seeing the evidence, despite your journalistic and political responsibilities; and then, sometime in 2023 or 2024, you must have realized, “Oh shit! It looks like the dissidents were right about at least some of this!” Is that fair?
TTS: It’s close to my states of awareness at the posited times, but it doesn’t do justice to my basic point about the critical character of this election.
ME: Fine. But the point is this. The top initiators of the suppression, the ones operating out of the agencies and Pharma corporations themselves, duped you, and because you had duties and yet reacted in the expected dismissive ways to the emergence of claims that their experts stoutly denied, they implicated you in the suppression. At that point you knew not what you were doing, so they hadn’t implicated you to all that much. That awaited your decision once you realized that the evidence for the harm claims was voluminous and credible. Then, your decision to continue to suppress could only be defended on this ground of Temporary Tactics. For to say, “Someone threatened me,” or, “My colleagues would have resisted,” or, “I remained too uncertain about it,” or, “I just stuck to our standard editorial patterns in a strange new situation,” is no moral argument whatsoever. So you really needed—and still need—this “Temporary Tactics argument” to be sound. You should be more introspective about this, wondering if a frame of mind which began for you with errors of chosen ignorance and prejudice is a healthy one, even if its latest arguments seem strong.
Look, I’d guess that so far, our contest here between my arguments against the temporary tactical suppression position, and yours for it, will be judged as something of a draw by many readers.
TTS: You’re admitting I’ve won the debate! But here come your “buts.”
ME: No I’m not. I’m admitting that you have some good arguments, and that I see why decent people might be convinced by them. And I’m stressing that due to the consequences of few of your own past failings, you so much wanted your argument here to be sound. Stay with me on this. For if that desire is at work in you, and in 2025 you fall into delaying, into putting-off the fulfillment of your pledge, you could start deploying similar but newer arguments of tactical necessity, eventually winding up with the indefinite suppressors.
“Conservatives” like INDEF are going ask you how it would be possible, if the full story came out, for the citizenry to take the shock of all their leaders’ lies for all these years, and he will insist that you’d get lumped in with the rest of them. Thus, it’s safer by far to stay mum and pretend to be ignorant. That’s what he’ll say to you so long as the suppression is still chugging along, and his key point will be that you’d have little to gain from trying to help it to collapse, and yet, everything to lose if it did. And he will give you the supposed reasons of public interest he gave me—such as the “mass mental melt-down argument”—to help you justify a duty-betraying prioritization of your private interest. He will count on your wavering between your promised-yourself future adherence to your scruples against suppression, and this new justification he offers you. He knows you’ve wavered before, because again, if we’re honest, that’s how you got to this position. You kicked the can of owning up to your chosen ignorance down the road.
My apologies if I am seeming to assume the worst. While I have argued that because you cannot speak in your own name, you cannot make a real oath, I do wonder… For if you are willing to risk the possibility of a real Repentance before your peers and the public, and the tough lumps which could come from it, much might be possible. And while a case for tying a pledge of yours to one particular date over another would necessarily be strained, setting such a date, any date, could free you from this morass. By all means, tie it to some Trump-related date, such as his inauguration or his 100-day mark, if it helps you swallow the medicine.
So I think I’ll wrap this up with a prayer:
Our Father in Heaven, who Sees beyond All Days and All Masks, please lead any Temporary Tactical Suppressor reading this to set that date right now, sharing it with at least one person, maybe a confessor, and please give them the strength to abide by it! Free them from this bondage to falsehood in this way, or in some other! And reconcile us, bringing them and I back into the comradeship of a decent political creed which we once enjoyed. Please God, Rescue America if you intend to Bless It. Sustain my spirit in the confusion of these battles, keep me from despair or hatred, and drive us one and all to Repentance!
TTS: Oh Carl, I’m still here! Should I say “Amen?” For I pray for God’s guidance and blessing to you also. I just think you’ve been asking us to risk too much, and I think this critical election, which you surely are praying for here when you plead for America’s “rescue,” is the instance that most reveals that. Let’s talk after Election Day if Trump has won, and see what we can agree upon. Though it is sad to see how little conservative comradery you encourage even though you pray for it, and especially, to see how little you trust my word on this.
ME: But how could I? And given all these months and months, and now of months become years, of playing your part in this unprecedented suppression campaign, how can you even trust yourself to keep it? I’d like to return to regarding you as my political brother, but I have no sense that you understand the costs you are going to have to incur for us come to a place of potential reconciliation, and most especially, the costs in dividing from those conservatives likely to remain committed to the suppression. Don’t I have strong reasons to expect you to recalculate, given all the power they’ll hold, especially if Trump remains unyielding, and to side with them, those I call the Narrativists of the Right, accepting their demand that all good Republicans sunder ties with the likes of myself, the losers of this little episode of sectarian-like division, as they will try to classify it?
TTS: The election is the key, and provides the framework for my holding myself to my promise. Things really will become different once Trump is in, you’ll see. Good-bye for now.
Conclusion I: Is A Conservative Case for the Suppression Possible?
Overall, no. For every suppression of a truly major story contains within it a threat to alter liberal democracy into another kind of regime, and in part, because once one has joined in the commission of a suppression, extricating oneself from it is difficult.
But I have learned that the temporary tactical suppressor can field better arguments than I expected, particularly about this just-before-the-election window. Yes, I still believe his overall stance is fatally flawed, and resulted in poor choices all along; I also still hold that conservatism has been sullied by them, and that there will be consequences for that. And of course, my critique of the TTS will become rather harsh in those cases where he does not follow through on his promise, changing into the Indefinite Suppressor; alas, for the reasons I have given, that could be most of the cases. Still, I hope for the day, fairly soon to come if it ever does, and perhaps presaged by RFK Jr.’s speech, when I will learn that there are more follow-through Temporary Tactical Suppressors than I had expected, and when a reconciliation between ex-suppressor and dissident conservatives, one in which my long and lonely campaign of critique would receive something of a vindication, would occur. And I see that it could come.
So to re-adjust the terms, I believe the TTS who sticks to his pledge could make a sincere, consistent, and truly conservative defense of his actions, a defense of his having temporarily abandoning a principle he gives immediate evidence of henceforth always upholding. I still wouldn’t agree with such a defense, but I wouldn’t judge it as one that placed him outside the camp of genuine conservatism. Yet we couldn’t exactly call it a “case” for suppression, because it would be an after-the-fact, and apologetic-in-part, explanation and defense of what was already done.
By definition, suppression cannot make any public and present-tense case for what it is doing.
Conclusion II: The Choice
But let’s underline the most obvious lesson from all three parts of this essay. The Indefinite Suppressor’s position is a decisive departure from conservatism and from liberal democracy. It accepts the new regime coming into being, one in substantial part built upon falsehood, and upon a code of special informational imperatives for leaders. We become obliged to suspect that INDEF merely wants to himself be among those who get to be in charge of it. Or if we assume better motives on his part, we should nonetheless ask this: while the progressivist knower of the covid-vax-facts who wants indefinite suppression is the new kind of totalitarian, just as he is also pushing for enforced-adherence to ideological lies on a number of other key issues, such as on immigration, trans, elections, etc., would our most selfless conservative-minded INDEF really gain for our societies, even if he wins all the little victories he promises, all that much distance from this new totalitarianism?
No. Because he strengthens powers and dynamics which those tempted by tyranny will take advantage of. Because he turns against truth-telling and nearly any trust in the people’s judgment. Because he demands that we fight “The Lie” in four or so areas by way of surrendering to it in one! What makes him so dangerous is that present circumstances permit him to draw the Unknowing Suppressors and perhaps most of the Temporary Tactical Suppressors well down his path, one progressively harder to turn back from the longer it is taken.
Nor is it likely that any key conservative player could finesse some partial ending of the Suppression. By that I mean a maneuver which would purportedly allow the hesitating TTS to wind-down his part in the suppression without many persons noticing the change, and best of all, without his making any admission of past missteps or controversial tactics. A pretense that a good journalist or pundit could only have begun perceiving the credibility of the dissident claims after some date in the future, say, December of 2025, would presumably be part of this ploy, and if Trump wins, dramatic federal data releases could be deployed to make it plausible. But it wouldn’t work. For one thing, the progressivists of media, as well as the criminals still in charge of many of the key covid-vax promoting institutions, would fight it hard. Even before voices like mine had chimed in, they would have exposed the hypocrisy of these trimmers de facto pronouncing not-X all through 2022-2025, but then “kind-of” shifting to X. Similarly, any conservative who tried to pretend to be cultivating a mid-way point-of-view, say, by holding that the “in-bounds” debate was whether tens-of-thousands have been killed world-wide, as opposed to the focus of most dissidents on the possibility that millions have been, would quickly find themselves the subject of ridicule. For once one departs from the safe zone of the official line, or the even safer one of just saying nothing, one enters a wide ocean of scary possibilities.
No. And please, much less of this elite faith in finesse. The leaders of conservative journalism, punditry, and politics must admit to themselves that they are choosing, and between starkly opposed options. And despite the present natural focus on the election, the peril lurking in this other choice throws every conservative hope for the future into fundamental doubt.
With respect to the widespread covid-vax-harms story, the choice is between Reckoning, or Indefinite Suppression.
Simultaneously, with respect to politics in general, the choice is between republics rescued by a Repentance of enough leaders, and especially by enough of the conservative ones, or Repression.