The Struggle over Whether to Even Talk about It
A great Disaster has occurred, and is still unfolding. Because it is man-made, and half of its unfolding has been concealable, there is a pitched-yet-hidden struggle at present, as to whether it is to ever to receive the open media treatment and discussion long presumed necessary for major issues in liberal-democratic societies.
The concealable half is the mounting toll of deaths, injuries, and diminishments-of-fertility caused by the CV-19 vaccines. Evidence collected by dissident experts strongly suggest the number of deaths has been at least 200,000 in the U.S. alone, and thus several million world-wide.1 All-cause mortality rates have been dramatically higher in every nation that widely vaxxed, for three years now, but without any discussion from these nations’ health organizations, political classes, or major media. Systematic squelching of dissident efforts to force debate about the CV-19 vax-harm claims has been seen everywhere, raising questions about whether the liberal-democratic principles of free-press and publicity have been officially—albeit silently--ditched by the ruling classes.
It can appear this silencing is more welcomed than not by large portions of the populations of these nations. They seem content-enough to accept and play their bit parts in the pantomimed “return to normality.”
Because the pandemic was immediately politicized, in part to cover-over the sins of experts like Anthony Fauci and Ralph Baric, in part to get the public to go along with the unprecedented mass experiments (lockdowns, mRNA meds, etc.), and likely in part to harm Trump’s prospects, virtually every citizen in the modern nations was pushed to take a stand on its “big issues,” including, obviously, the issue of whether it was good to get vaxxed or not.
The lion’s share of them got all or most of those issues wrong. We now know the efficacy of the vaxxes was highly limited and temporary, and that lockdowns, mask-rules, school-closures, and vax-mandates did little or nothing to mitigate spread. It is also clear that the emergency-powers used to require lockdowns and mask-rules, and especially the censorship and vax-mandate measures, violated fundamental principles of liberal democracy, and have brought us to a place of diminished political freedom. But it is hard to admit one was wrong, and particularly if one shouted-down the few who dissented, perhaps even one’s own relatives and friends.
Horribly, this means that many persons don’t want to investigate the most shocking aspect of the Disaster. Even if it directly touches their own lives! We often see that persons who have every reason to suspect a loved-one of theirs who unexpectedly died or suffered serious injury over the last three years did so due to the CV-19 injections will turn away from any consideration of the possibility.
But what matters more than the majority’s strong, if-at-times-wavering, desire to not revisit their fundamental mistakes, is the set determination of our elite classes, “elite” meaning those in middle-management on up (in virtually every organization), to avoid any such reckoning.
For they know that the majority of ordinary folk who got the major issues wrong did so mainly because they trusted their word. They know that if a real public reckoning on this occurs, it could end up in a wave of outrage as intense as any in history, sweeping them out of their positions, down into courts and prisons.
Our elites surely assume some blaming of picked scapegoats will be needed, as well as partial admissions of error on things like lockdowns, but they also know that of all the aspects of the Disaster, the one they must never permit public discussion of is that about the vax-harms.
Thus, the present half-hidden struggle is mostly against these elites, although it admittedly depends on convincing enough members of the public that the silence is no longer acceptable.
As a conservative, I would like to tell you that this struggle is primarily being waged against progressivist and leftist elites; but the truth is, most conservative leaders, including at least 90% of national Republican politicians, are on the elite side here.
By their silences you will know them.
I would like to also tell you that this struggle is confined to issues medical, that what is primarily at stake are the deaths, injuries, and fertility-numbers, as well as the policies of our medical establishments. That is, I’d like to adopt the language of what-we-must-do-so-that-this-never-happens-again, as if this were just one big scandal among others over the course of our history. But I cannot. Whatever your own—and likely complicit—medical doctor tells you about the claims of widespread vax-harms, my doctorate is in political science, and I increasingly believe that if the elite side is to win this struggle, they will need a further diminishment of democracy and liberal rights. I think the next step downward they may push our governments to take, in order to secure the continued suppression of discussion, will likely be irreversible, and one which will bring us under a new kind of tyranny.
The Importance of Language
Various theories exist about what the driving factors of the Disaster have been: ideologies, power-interests, money-interests, group-think, and Big Conspiracies, are the factors most mentioned.
But what I want to encourage here is reflection on what weapons are being used in the struggle, regardless of what is driving it.
Words, ones sophistically deployed by the elites, have been among the important weapons.
The dissident side has been largely losing this war of words, but I hold there are ways of talking about the “it,” that is, the Disaster, and its main aspects, which can begin to shift the discourse.
I of course do not believe, as that man of no firm beliefs Barack Obama once enthusiastically said, that the terms of political rhetoric are “just words!,” which, while they are surprisingly capable of moving the public, are highly supple, so much so that they can perhaps serve any narrative the skilled orator wants.
Rather, with the Plato of the last part of the Phaedrus, and the Aristotle of treatise after treatise, I understand that when rightly used, there is a significant degree of correspondence between logos and phusis, i.e., between a rightly-chosen word and some aspect of the nature of our world, including aspects of human nature.
Among other things, this means that the best rhetor can be the philosophic man participating in politics, that is, the person who has used dialectic to know the most-necessary distinctions between words, and the various senses one might derive from a single one. And it thus is also the philosophic person, like Socrates, who can most effectively puncture and expose word-tricks.
How should the Socrates-es and Pericles-es of the 2020s use language so as to have a chance of winning the Disaster-Reckoning struggle currently being fought against our elites?
Here, I will simply list the terms and phrases I believe could be the most helpful, and highlight a few of the ones which have done the most harm to our 2020s “discourse.”
In a follow-up post, I will offer short definitions and explanations.
I hope to show how the distinctions signaled by the good terms can help us get a grasp on what we’ve been plunged into.
We were, after all, thrust into an unprecedented situation, and thus, a big part of our disadvantage, especially among conservatives, was a delay in our having the words and phrases necessary to understand it. Without them, our minds couldn’t see clearly, nor see that some previous lines and habits of political language had been rendered unhelpful, or at least secondary.
Precise language about the Disaster can thus keep us from political flailing. It can help us avoid falling into the traps, certain mental ruts, set by the propogandists. It can keep our minds open to the various possible explanations of what has happened. It can help us steer clear of the Scylla of precipitous alliance with certain over-certain cranks among the dissidents, and the Charybdis of supposedly-respectable reticence among the conservatives and academics, which so easily becomes de facto alliance with the suppressors. It can give us a clear view of who is with us in the struggle, and who is not.
Without further ado, then, here are the bare words and terms of my lexicon:
Beneficial Terms and Phrases
Suppressor
Adjunct Suppressor
Sup-servative
Disaster-Aware Conservative
Half-Innocent Ignorance
Pravda-ization
Regime-Adjacent Media (I forget who gave us this—was it Elon Musk?)
Political Apostasy
Philanthropath (coined by Margaret Anna Alice)
Possible Regime-Naming Terms
Biosecurity State (coined by Aaron Kheriaty)
The Biopharmaceutical Complex (coined by Peter McCullough)
The Successor Regime (used by Bari Weiss—not sure who coined it)
Potemkin Democracy
Deliberately Precise Phrases
Covid-19 Vax-Harm Claims
a With-Covid Death
a Protocol-Suspected Covid Death
The Best Term for “It”
The Covid/Vax Disaster
Deceptive Terms for “It”
Covid
The Pandemic
Other Deceptive or Unhelpful Terms and Phrases
Misinformation, Malinformation, & Disinformation
Anti-vaxxer, Anti-vax
Normie
Pure-Blood
Covidians
“Strong-against-the-Covidians”
See several of the footnotes of my “Adjunct Suppressors.”
Other terms come to mind, such as Dr. David Martin's recent speech where he calls out the global Biopharmaceutical regime in plain terms: "Make no mistake, this is a criminal conspiracy." Another term that we should resurrect from history to describe Covid criminals is "mafia." Investigative journalist Whitney Webb has made it clear the mafia was never disbanded by law enforcement but in fact merged with them. Vaccine mandates are simply a 21st century version of, "Pay for our protection racket or we'll break your legs." Other writers have wisely suggested we stop using "global elites" (their preferred designation) and instead call them what they are: global parasites. Even in economic terms this was established in Thomas Piketty's bestselling Capital in the 21st Century (2014), though he used the more polite term of "rentier class" to describe them.
The larger problem you address is much tougher to answer with a solution—the complete collapse of civil society and the total corruption of ALL our major (and minor) institutions. Here in Canada we've just wrapped up the National Citizens Inquiry into the authoritarian administration of the pandemic by our federal government. The problem? It's not a judicial body, and all attempts to invite government officials to testify were met with silence. Thus, their conclusions from hundreds of hours of testimony will simply be ignored, just as happened with Reiner Fuellmich's independent quasi-legal inquiry. The official judicial inquiry into the Truckers Convoy and Trudeau's repressive invocation of the federal Emergency Act ended with the surreal conclusion by Judge Rouleau—against all evidence presented—that the government was justified in its violent, draconian response to peaceful protesters. Now we await the outcome of the trial of the leaders of the Convoy movement, but you can fully expect the government to make an example of them to send a chill into the dissident movement.
Am I saying all is hopeless, just throw up our hands? Not quite. But increasingly, society is being split into rival factions, with an official and an underground culture hopelessly at odds with each other. Read your history: Is it likely corrupt officials will suddenly have an epiphany and succumb to reforms, overwhelming evidence or restorative justice? This is why history is replete with examples of governments being violently overthrown. When the Roman legions or the hordes of Genghis Khan were sweeping over the ridge of your valley, unless you were a soldier your only option was to get the hell out of the way, try to keep growing food for your family, and wait for the storm to pass. Let the empire burn itself out on its own amorality and corruption and work on the periphery for the new society to rise from the ashes. Change and innovation almost always arises from the edges, the outliers, not the centre.
Thank you for understanding and articulating the importance of language and framing, Carl, as well as for including “philanthropath” in this handy lexicon!
I would also like to add “fact-choker” and “fact-choking,” terms I coined a couple of years ago or so in response to an el gato malo challenge and have been using ever since.
I also think Matt Taibbi’s and Michael Shellenberger’s introduction of the “Censorship Industrial Complex” is an important addition that has already entered popular consciousness.