Is Vax-Disaster Dissidence a Function of a Tendency toward Naiveté?
Reflections Prompted by My Last Post
Steve Kirsch is perhaps the most important of the dissidents spreading the news about the dangers of the Covid-19 vaxxes. He fights tirelessly, repeatedly getting in health-agency officials’ faces (mostly on email) with awkward questions, repeatedly putting out his own money as a bait for the sake of debates about his own claims—so far with almost no straight-up takers—, and constantly producing content for his essential stack and his organization VSRF, the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. I have long been exasperated by how few conservative journalists, pundits, and politicians seek him out for interviews, and so I was a little grateful to see Tucker Carlson belatedly follow-up on his first summer-of-’22 interview with Kirsch, in a recent full segment for his new channel. A free snippet of it is available on that vital substack for videos, Vigilant Fox,
However, I didn’t realize that Steve, for all his tireless work, was so incredibly naive.
I mean, I knew he was a registered Democrat up until 2021 or so, which says a lot in my book, and I saw that at times in his writing he geekily let his enthusiasm for his own expertise in statistical analysis leave 3/4 of his readers in the dust. But I didn’t know the half of it!
Somewhere in the full interview with Carlson, and I’m not sure the free X version is available anymore, he’s recounting how he initially became a dissident on the Covid-19 vaxxes, despite having taken them himself. Due a number of anecdotes in his own circle about post-vax adverse reactions and even deaths, he began, around April of ‘21, to look into all the evidence, beginning with VAERS, but going much further. Soon convinced, even given the sparse amounts of information available at the time, that this was a very dangerous vaccine, he began to release his findings to the public. Now, some of you have already heard this story, which traces Kirsch’s path from highly successful tech-entrepreneur to the man our governments would label a top “spreader of misinformation,” but there’s one part I’m sure you haven’t heard, at least until this Carlson interview.
In the first few days in April ‘21 after he began to share his findings on social media and such, when the inevitable heated push-back from colleagues, friends, and experts began to roll in, his wife expressed some concern about what this would do to his reputation. And Steve’s response? “Oh, this will all be settled in a couple of weeks!”
I.e., at that time, Steve honestly thought that once the experts at the CDC and such really attend to what I’m laying out, the evidence will compel them to do the right thing, and call for full investigations, issue warnings to the public, etc.
Wow. Such faith in democratic debate. In scientific organizations and scientists. Even in the media! So little of the chastened attitude and fear, that reasoned public debate was no longer something one could hope for, which most contemporary conservative thinkers had arrived at somewhere amid the illiberal tide of 2014-2019, and which most dissidents against the lockdowns—whether conservative or not—had arrived at also by 2021.
Kirsch is surely a wiser man now, but in 2021 he thought: just get the evidence out there and the statistical analysis right, and they will come.
And yet, quite a few of the Covid/Vax Disaster dissidents, myself included, have often behaved in basically parallel, if less obviously naive, ways.
Now, I tried not to be too optimistic: upon seeing in January of ‘22 that Kirsch and others were right about the vaxxes’ deadliness, I immediately adopted the Eugyppius slogan, “We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science—The world will never be the same,” a slogan that not only stressed what had been revealed about the vaxxes, but also what had been revealed about society. That insight, which stressed the ideology-addiction and institutional-corruption bases of the Disaster, meant that one had to expect massive resistance to the public’s learning any of the key scientific truths.
Nonetheless, I sure didn’t think we would still be having to debate the safety of these injections two full years later, and that they would still be promoted by our medical establishment. I sure didn’t think I would have to write, in late 2023, a piece titled “A Long Road to Reckoning.” And while I expected my more political-philosophical and political-history informed manner of approach would necessarily be more cynical, compared to that of a data-lover like Kirsch, I was apparently, back in 2022, not cynical enough. I too, in my own way, was too boy-scout about my society (and about my own set of expert-colleagues) even though I had warned my readers from the very beginning to prepare to rethink everything—in only my fourth or so piece on the vax-harms, the one where I introduced the Hirschman clot story then breaking, I quoted this from the novelist Irène Némirovksy, a passage describing an upper-class family trying to flee Paris in June of 1940:
…It was impossible to make the servants listen… Even though they wanted to leave too, their need to follow a routine was stronger than their terror; and they insisted on doing everything exactly as they always done when getting ready to go to the countryside for the summer holidays. The trunks had to be packed in the usual way... They hadn’t understood the reality of the situation. They were living two different moments, you might say, half in the present and half deep in the past, as if what was happening could only seep into a small part of their consciousnesses, the most superficial part, leaving all the deeper regions peacefully asleep.
Myself also, though I’ve sought to live with the present reality in view, in much larger part have lived by the patterns of the past. I can pride myself in not being as self-blinded as those who cling to the Potemkin Normality of things like the Superbowl, nor as trusting-in-scientific-debate as someone like Kirsch (circa 2021), but I have had quite a few blind-spots also.
I’m thinking about all this, because in writing my last post on the latest data about the “Hirschman horror,” I looked back at several posts I’d written on the topic previously, mostly back in 2022.
I was surprised to find that I had written, as early as June ‘22, before I had yet posted a single one of my pieces formally decrying the silence of “respectable conservatives,” lines like this:
…the refusal of most media, including most conservative media outlets (including several supposedly “hard-hitting” or “scientism-questioning” ones) to cover key vax-harm stories…
Or these:
I warn you, conservatives with resources, platforms, and power, that the type of coordinated negligence towards this story that is going on here, and which you are participating in if you read this and do nothing, could wind up consigning your reputation to the dung-heap.
Or this, as dark a thing as I’ve ever written:
…the diseasing of bodily tissues here parallels a spiritual diseasing... I say that more horrifying than the structures growing within and blocking veins and arteries, perhaps of millions of victims-to-be, are the silences of the respectable, growing all around us, like an invisible cancer. Such silences and such “respectability” will wind up killing much more than mere bodies. They threaten to smother all remaining faith in civilization.
The weird thing in reading these now, is that I recall at the time thinking it could be a mere matter of months before the story really broke open, leaving allies of mine scrambling to patch-up their reputations. I wrote earnest letters to several conservative editors at that time in that spirit.
And alas, to no avail.
What scares me, and angers me, is the thought that not a few of these academic conservatives who refused to heed my warnings at some point concluded that I am probably right about the CV-19 vax-harm evidence, but that, hard as it is, over-earnest persons like myself had to be ignored and shunned for the strategic benefit of the conservative cause, and given an across-the-board silent treatment.
Because it is too early.
Because Trump remains in denial, and so much depends on getting him elected and his retaining trust in the wisest conservatives.
Because the public could never take the enormity of the revelation, that nearly all their public servants had betrayed them, and that life-shortening poisons might be at work in their bodies. Ditto for investors—even if the public didn’t go vengeance-insane or descend into some other kind of madness upon finally facing the truth, stock markets would crash across the globe.
Because openness on this is a sure way to be kicked-out of academia, or out of any position of societal power, which is never a strategically acceptable thing.
Or, you tell me.
Use an anonymous tag, and spell it out in the comments: just what is the prudential conservative rationale for continuing to aid and to abide by the regime’s suppression of the CV-19 vax-harm story?
Ah, but the world of conservative academics is a small one, and here I am riding my hobby-horse about their shortcomings vis-a-vis the Disaster yet again, as if any of that matters to those who seem the real players, namely, the tech-masters, the Dem-leaders, the donors and the donor-cultivators, the media heads, the bank owners, and the Deep Staters. Heck, even if Trump gets into office again, everything will be decided by the set of persons perceived-by-him-to-be-loyal, and will more than a few of those folks give vax-disaster dissidents the time of day?
I have more reflections on this, and there’s even a passage1 I could comment upon from my essay about the fictional character, Georg Dreyman, in the film The Lives of Others, who like Steve and myself is an earnest man (albeit one compromised in ways that we are not) up against political dynamics perhaps even darker than the ones in operation today, but I’ll leave it be for now.
Instead, tell me what you think.
Is it sound strategy for conservatives to stay silent about the Disaster, or at least, for most of their leaders to stay on the sidelines of this fight?
Is the dogged insistence on discussing the issue, by persons like myself, and in different manner, by full-time dissidents like Kirsch, in large part a function of arrogant naiveté, even granting that we are likely right about the main facts?
Or is it a moral failing of mine to even ask such questions, or to write pieces like “A Long Road to Reckoning,” in which I get myself and my readers used to the idea of this evil suppression just continuing on and on? Wouldn’t it be better to remain as outraged, and as expectant of some soon-to-come decisive breakthrough into the public’s consciousness, as I was back in 2022?
“The bottom line, which Donnersmarck may or may not accept, is that the Czechoslovakian reformers and Gorbachev were both wrong to think that a communist system could be reformed and yet remain communist by means of offering some political freedoms. Had the Prague Spring reforms gone forward, all indications suggest the communist party would have been ousted from power, and the example of the resultant regime would have gravely threatened the authority of all communist states, just as occurred when Gorbachev allowed Poland and Hungary to liberalize in 1989. The truth about the European communist regimes is that they would fall were they not shored up by the party’s political monopoly, by the prohibition of market activity, by the closing of borders, by the wide censorship, by the constant activity of security organs like the Stasi, and by the fear of Soviet military intervention. Dreyman, as it was with many noble dissidents, does not understand this. Wiesler does: the instant the Wall falls, he knows he no longer need obey his Stasi masters. Erich Honecker understood it, going so far as to ban circulation of Soviet pro-glasnost publications. Gorbachev, thank God, did not.” [emph. added]
“At the shot of Gorbachev in the newspaper, Donnersmarck remarks that “people can change.” I submit that Dreyman hoped his humanistic message of change might influence up-and-coming party figures potentially like Gorbachev; and for Donnersmarck, he was right to never abandon this hope. That particular political hope, of course connected to a broader set of ambitions for art, was not impossible. But reform communism itself was impossible; it was a recipe for communism’s self-destruction. Thus, the reformist artist might do his part to pull a ruler or an up-and-comer into greater openness toward art and reform, but perhaps, he would be able to do so only by himself errantly believing in the viability of reform communism.” [emph. added]
“What Malia describes as the Prague Spring reformers’ “tragic dilemma” to some extent applies to all Dreyman-like dissidents: ‘Had they been more lucid, either they would have been unable to act at all, in which case they would have given up in despair, or they would have had to attempt a revolution, in which case they would have gone down to defeat. Therefore, they had to take it on faith that the third way did exist, half-fooling themselves into believing they were not destroying the system and hoping they could fool Moscow into believing the same thing.’(Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 392-393)”
I think a big wakeup call is "Defeat The Mandate" rallies but a lot of them, locally. They should be on a Friday so people can take a day off off or the afternoon off and rally at the County Building.
There should be a collection taken for books to give to County leaders - the booth need not have the books - just Amazon gift them to them. People say "But Wayne, they don't care if people get hurt."
But they do care if people know that they know, even if they don't show it. A regular twice-a-week or monthly rally would be good, as well. Form a citizen's investigative committee like Canada did and video the results. There are many things we can all do but we need to unite locally on a county level.
The reason is, there is a Uniparty, and its been in charge for a looong time, we are all just now realizing it as our liberties erode for the "general welfare" and RINO's need to stay in the mix to give the illusion of choice that everyone cherishes so much.