A Long Road to Reckoning
Why the Struggle to Have a Real Discussion about the Covid/Vax Disaster Will Be Long
I know, I know, I promised a full version of the “Covid/Vax Disaster Lexicon” I was talking about last time. One with actual definitions of the terms mentioned there. It’s coming soon, okay?
The thing is, as I began writing what I thought would be a merely introductory point to that, namely, that one reason we need to re-jigger our language on this is that the struggle to force a reckoning is going to be a long one, it became apparent that I have a lot more to say about that.
Reckoning, by the way, is a most handy word. It can signal three distinct meanings, or connotate all three bundled as a single one: 1) a counting-up of what happened, 2) a best-estimate figuring-out of what happened, and 3) a moral judgment—with consequences for the guilty—of what happened.
With that so-very-applicable-to-our-situation word in hand, I was intending, then, to introduce the lexicon with these three sentences:
The Reckoning we need to have about what happened circa 2020-2023—and make no mistake, we need one if we are to have a chance at Rescuing liberal democracy from its many now-revealed enemies in elite ranks—requires new and precise language.
For one of the main ways they fooled us was with language-tricks.
We need the discomfort that initially-strange-sounding and bordering-on-over-precise language brings (e.g., “Covid-19 vax harm claims”). For the struggle here is going to be long and tough.
But again, that very last idea got me thinking, thinking that I needed make the case for it clear.
So, some of what follows is repetition, that is, it consists of ideas I first laid out in my “Repentance or Repression” series; still, it feels like important repetition and underlining, and especially at the present moment.
Don’t Believe in a “Tipping Point” for This Issue
Some dissident figures like Ed Dowd are telling us that the tipping-point that brings us to public awareness and major media discussion of the Disaster is about to be reached.
Measuring things by the weight of accumulating factual evidence, or by the number of persons who have now been exposed to that evidence, Dowd and company ought to be right.
(And Father in Heaven, may they be proven right, and myself wrong! Let justice roll down like a mighty stream, and even before 2023 comes to a close!)
But things like massive bodies of evidence, the common good, and word-of-mouth might not count for much in the Upside-Down World we now live in. “Newsworthiness” for the Official and Respectable channels is now nearly entirely determined by ideological considerations. This is the raw truth about our media situation. It doesn’t matter if 70% of the population knows that one of the official Narratives is false—our elites will keep delivering it, and those who challenge it will be putting any higher-up career they currently enjoy or aspire to obtain into jeopardy. We live, informationally speaking, in a partially-totalitarian state. If about some events the media cannot lie all that much—e.g., with a big earthquake that happens—with respect to others, such as the Covid/Vax Disaster, we might as well be living in Stalin’s USSR, where a government-orchestrated Holdomor Famine in the Ukraine could be taking millions of lives, but without anyone “who counts” (in that shameful case, even in the West) talking or writing about it.
That is, it is necessary to face the fact that the Suppression Campaign deployed against discussion of the Covid-19 vax harm claims has succeeded.
And yes, it remains in full operation.
Despite how strange this operation has been compared to classic techniques of despotism—strange in the way it leaves largely untouched the discussions among dissidents on their little channels--, and despite the unprecedented magnitude of its audaciousness, we have to face that in our bizarre new world it is working. It has an iron hold in professional circles. Oh, they will let us talk our heads off, and build-up whole libraries of documentation, but we will remain essentially non-existent on all the channels they deem important, and in all the organizations which call the shots.
If you’re not appearing, then you’re disappearing. Kevin Morby, “Disappearing.” 1
[Notice that “if you’re not appearing” nearly sounds like “if you’re not up here.”]
What is more, we must admit that our implicated elites, and the implicated ones constitute nearly all of the elite class, appear to have staked everything on the Suppression’s continuance, and can also count on a substantial portion of the non-elite public to strongly prefer its continuance.
To a shamefully large degree, this is a cross-party phenomenon: as some of my writings have shown, even amid the decidedly non-RINO sections of the “professional conservative” career class, we notice a regular employment of the sorts of language and framing tricks necessary for pretending that the CV-19 vax-harms aren’t widespread, that the Suppression of the news about them isn’t happening, or at least, that the particular professional conservative figure is innocently unaware of all this.
Given all that, I’m not sure you should believe, as Dowd does, that the opinion-dynamic of a “tipping point” is going to apply in the unprecedented situation we are now in. As Bill Rice Jr. has pointed out,2 it is a situation in which so many parties are so invested—including with vast sums of money which might be propping up our entire economy—in a Tipping Point never being reached or acknowledged.
So I’d suggest that instead, every aspect and every stage of the Reckoning is going to be resisted tooth-and-nail, that every decisive change of opinion in the dissidents’ direction is going to be gas-lighting-ly reframed by our implicated elites as something they always knew about and stood for.
The Long Road to Come
That is, even if liberal democracy does get rescued, even if the populist coalitions get most of what they want, we are going to be having these arguments, both the factual ones, and the tiresome ones about “what you oh-official-oh-expert-oh-senior-manager actually said when it counted,” until the day these legions of heart-hardened Pharaoh-crats die. Guys like Fauci and gals like Walensky are going to go their graves spouting the latest set—say, version 2043--of Covid-19 talking points. And it seems that ugly pattern will likely be followed by most of the implicated executives and managers, down to the lowest levels.
Repentance is the only alternative for them—something quite impossible to predict.
So prepare yourself. It looks like this struggle is going to infect your professional life, personal relations, and life-decisions as no other “current event” ever has. You will experience divisive argument after divisive argument, and it will be your duty not to turn away from them. It does not at all matter how much or how little interest you’ve previously had in the relevant areas of medical science. What happened with the Covid/Vax Disaster is going to remain a front-line issue for our societies for decades upon decades, or even longer.
If you are to win enough of these arguments, or better than winning them in the debate-tournament sense, if you are to have a chance to do the honest and lasting peacemaking about these issues which Jesus always calls you to, you need to attend to your words. For these are the very building blocks of our thinking. Of our ability to think together. Or to put it slightly differently, with nods to R.E.M. and to Aristotle’s Politics (bk I, chap 2), of our ability to Reckon together.
Aiming to strengthen our ability to do that about this radically new set of issues, I’ll be presenting my little lexicon soon.
For more on the rock artistry of Morby, and its ambivalent relation to the events of the last few years, see my Carl’s Rock Songbook No. 129,
and also No. 130.
See also Rice’s “The bleak message from my 1st year on Substack,” and “Some Crimes Are Too Explosive to Be Exposed.”