New Frontiers in Professional Conservative Absurdity
Ongoing Pretend-Talk from VDH, and a Note on Esotericism
Imagine a man being tortured to death by hot irons crying out:
“It’s as if they’re torturing me to death with hot irons!”
But no, that’s not even absurd enough, not if we’re going to approach the weirdness of the latest Victor Davis Hanson editorial, titled:
The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats
I agree with every single point VDH makes in the piece, so how could I think that, but still think it is all wrong?
I tried to explain in a comment I left:
Professional conservative VDH protests against a vile set of Dem policies/moves by analogizing them to mad scientists conducting an experiment on us as if we were lab rats. But he makes no mention of the very-evidence-based conviction (read Steve Kirsch) which a majority of non-professional conservatives now hold, that, er, whatever Dem politicians have been doing, actual mad scientists allied with them actually have been conducting an experiment on us [i.e., nearly the whole population] as if we were lab rats!
The problem here is the ongoing silence from professional conservative figures about the possibility that the vax-harms are quite widespread and serious. I protested at greater length about this here, and VDH was one of my targets there also.
Since I have been following the evidence where it leads, I know this is not merely a possibility or conviction.
It is deadly real.
I only use the words “possibility” and “conviction” to highlight the anti-democratic character of the refusal of most anyone in a position of prestige, including most professional conservatives like VDH, to engage in public debate on this issue.
Tens of millions of their fellow citizens hold this conviction, and they refuse to treat it with the most elementary gestures of respect.
As for my speculation that at least some persons in key positions knew these medicines were extremely dangerous and could alter DNA, i.e., my speculation that the disaster of producing botched vaxxes for the world wasn’t entirely a criminal-negligence motivated-by-profit-‘n’-political-gain mistake, but that some key moves of the mistake were driven by behind-the-scenes actors who intended to see how the bodies of others would respond, well, we’ll see.1
But we know the harms are real and widespread.
And we know that men like Fauci, Baric, and Bourla, and all the scientists at Boston U. who approved or participated in the recently-revealed gain-of-function experiements there, fit the idea of mad scientist to a tee.
To get to the extreme of analogical absurdity which VDH’s determination to stay silent about the vax harms has led him into, we’d have to posit that our imaginary wretch being tortured had also been stripped of his clothes and robbed of his money, and at the moment of his being tortured, was protesting against the exposure of his body and his impoverishment, and was saying that those harms were metaphorically like “being tortured to death by hot irons” while ignoring the fact that he really was being so.
That is what VDH asks us to do. To be outraged about the way things like the shenangins of the J6 committee, or the near-passage of HR.1, or the abandonment of the border are like the U.S. citizenry being experimented upon like lab-rats. But also, to remain silent about the life-and-death fact that you and your fellow citizens were and are treated as expendable lab-rats with these novel mRNA medicines.
He wants you to pretend that his chosen silence about that is normal and respectable.
He apparently cannot see that the analogy about being treated like lab rats which would have worked pre-2020s is now a most awkward one to use. And especially awkward for folks who refuse to mention the vax-harm debate.2
The deeper point here is that conservatives are not going to be able to talk coherently about any other issues—say, free-speech, institutional corruption, wokeness, Trump, military unpreparedness--however huge they are, without also addressing this story of the century, and thus putting other huge but lesser ones in their proper context. If conservatives like VDH want to contest the numbers of the posited vax-harm injuries or death, or some of the key arguments, that is, if they want to contest the very idea that it is the story of the century, that is fine. Challenging questions in open debate are most welcome. I don’t think such questions will succeed, but in any case:
Our professional conservatives have to at least talk about this issue.
No more censorship via an elite-class self-silencing that de facto silences others!
And however tough that shamefully belated talk is going to be for our professional conservatives, no, it won’t be as painful as being tortured by hot irons, or going through the realization that your body,3 and many of the bodies of your loved ones and of your fellow humans across the planet, are non-metaphorically being experimented upon by Pfizer, NIH, Moderna, DARPA, etc.
To put this in terms of Sage-Hana-speak (explore her substack), I do not at present accept any of the Big Conspiracy theories of the Covid/Vax Disaster, and instead, contrary to Hana herself, endorse the “Dolts-Botching-Shit” thesis she derides with that label, albeit with the qualifications that a.) various smaller conspiracies were at work to drive the main acts of Botching, the biggest being the formulation and approval of bad vaxxes, and b.) that many of our institutions are infected with a Culture of Botching followed by Ass-Covering/Narrative-Imposing that often makes them behave like nefarious supervillains. [Endemically infected. This is before we even get to the Regulatory Capture phenomenon. That’s why many of these institutions, without question the CDC, NIH, and FDA, need to be rebuilt from scratch.] My first qualificaton remains compatible with the hypothesis that there is a “they” who has experimented on us—it’s just that the “they” is much smaller, and has less inside power, than Big Conspiracy theory would hold. It is also compatible with the idea that tyrannical mad scientist types like Gates, Fauci, and Harari want to cull for population-reduction purposes—it just stays undecided about how close they got to translating such evil “philanthropath” desires into the actual injections produced and policies adopted, and leaves plenty of room for the botching of their own intentions, regardless of whether these were twisted, extra-twisted, or supervillain-twisted.
There is another possibility besides self-deluded blindness here, one that might be entertained those who understand Leo Strauss’s teaching about the esoteric writing move of calling-attention-to-something-by-making-its-absence-conspicuous: for some reason of institutional pressure, perhaps coming from the increasingly-despotic Stanford University where he is a Hoover Institution fellow, VDH feels he cannot safely express the position he has in fact come around to, that the vax-harms are real, and so he deployed an analogy to denounce other things which he knew would bring the vax-harms to mind. (American Greatness is fine with publishing vax-harm pieces, BTW, so any pressure he might be facing would not be from it.) By this “conspicuous absence” editorial, he is signalling that he will come out openly with demands to investigate the vax-harms, just that he cannot at present. I will apologize if he eventually makes it plain that that is what he is attempting here, and I do not know the details of the situation he is in, but in judging what I can see, I say that if he is making an esoteric wink, it is an imprudent one that serves to shore up the de facto censorship. Esoteric writing in an situation of established censorious oppression is one thing; esotericism in a situation where a censorious oppression is seeking to establish itself but has not yet succeeded, and your words seem to aide its march, is quite another.
Since shedding is real, it may turn out that even the bodies of those of us who never vaxxed, are being experimented on also. And then there’s the very-long-term effects on passed-down human DNA to consider.
ProCons may some day get to the point of discussing the Plandemic and vaccine stuff but it’s probably a few years off yet. Though I see John Hinderaker of Powerline hinting at it sometimes. For now, many of them still need their paymasters to believe they are still vax-brainwashed to continue to collect their checks. The vax harms will become more obvious over this winter as many of their friends and family get weird cancers and die young of heart attacks, like Megan Kelly’s sister a few days ago. Though she did recently interview RFK Jr., so there is a chance some may start coming around to these facts sooner. Since “biology” is not their area of expertise, I also suppose they don’t want to be accused of getting outside their lane. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be asking the questions. I’m guessing this column is VDH’s subliminal way of saying he’s begun to wade into these deep waters. I’ve noticed these people will often say much more about what they really think in podcasts than they do in print.
In re shedding, an anecdote: my 26yo unvaxxed sponsored climber friend became very ill and ended up in the hospital unable to walk and diagnosed with Guillain-barre last summer. He is back to about 90% now. Being a climber, he spends ALOT of time around vaxxed people….