The 1920s, we say, were the Roaring Twenties. Flappers, fads, gin, gangsters, bull-market madness, Fitzgerald & Hemingway, and the first part of the Sexual Revolution.
And the 2020s?
Well, we ought to know that they will matter for posterity far more than the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s did—those decades will be likely be discussed by future historians primarily for the ways they led to the tectonic shocks of the last few years.
And of the next handful of years. For it may well be, as the Weyes Blood songwriter Natalie Mering senses, that the worst is yet to come. That’s definitely the case in terms of more people coming to see what has happened, and struggling to mentally cope with it.
The way I would put it, however, makes less room for the impersonal voice. After all, as Aaron Kheriaty’s powerful new book The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State indicates, that is the voice taught us by the anti-democracy and scientism-linked idea of “inevitablism.”
What I rather say is that the remainder of the 2020s involves a choice: it will either become known as the Repenting 20s, when the rebuilding of workable liberal democracy, and of the necessary public confidence in such, stumblingly began, or, the Repressing 20s, when that kind of society came to an ignominious end, followed by many decades, perhaps even centuries, of despotism.
Thus, in 2030, I will either be able to share my qualifications of the “repentance”-oriented predictions I make in this series of essays, or, I will be a largely silenced person, in some kind of institution or under some kind of tech-aided house-arrest.
Repentance or Repression. It’ll be one or the other.
Leftists/progressivists, “liberals”-so-called, “moderates”-so-called, and most especially, “elites”-so-called: you are going to have to decide.
You either will have to actually meet the likes of myself half-way in a new ideological zone and understanding, which quite a few in your group will moan is far more than half-way for your side, and will involve admitting a number of truths you don’t want to, or, you will be obliged to go full security-state with people like me.
Yes, things have gotten that stark.
The surface appearances and sayings are becoming that removed from the truth.
If you are ultimately going to refuse endorsement of and participation in the regime of despotism now plainly visible on our horizon, you have to start standing against it now in a clear manner, and you’d better realize that the new (for yourself) zone of understanding necessary for that stand will involve repentance for certain injustices against others—call them sins--you in fact are already guilty of some participation in.
While the recent Twittergate and Missouri v. Biden revelations of the Betrayal of the First Amendment by Biden and his officials are part of what I’m talking about, the thing most on my mind—surprise, surprise--is what I have called the Covid/Vax-Disaster. And of the seven big categories of sin involved in that, the one I am most appalled by is the one unfolding as we speak, everywhere around us: the attempt to deny that the mRNA-vax-caused a.) deaths and b.) serious injuries have happened on a significant scale.
That repression is external/political, involving censorship, e.g., open persecution of dissenting or hesitant doctors by hospitals, professional associations, and governments, but also internal/psychological, involving, to continue with this one key example, almost all of our doctors censoring themselves from saying what they suspect or know, or repressing natural thought-processes in their own minds that would otherwise lead them to suspect or know.
James Kunstler has a new piece talking about how the medical profession is going to have to engage in major Repentance if the coming collapse of our medical system is not be a total one.
For those catching up on the Disaster, a couple of his paragraphs are useful:
The hazard signal has been clear for the better part of a year. The mRNA products made by Pfizer and Moderna did not stop transmission of Covid-19 and were causing widespread harm, especially in the working-age population between 25 and 64 who were forced to take the shots to keep their jobs…
The trend appeared to start with the unnatural deaths of professional athletes dropping dead on their playing fields. Then, in early 2022, life insurance companies reported that the death rates of policy-holders employed by companies with insurance plans were up 40 percent. The unprecedented numbers were confirmed in mid-2022 by the Society of Actuaries... In fact the number of excess deaths in younger age groups had grown dramatically — Covid vaccination produced a 78-percent increase in excess deaths among the 25-34 age group, a 100-percent increase in excess deaths among the 35-44 age group, and a 80-percent increase in excess deaths among the 45-54 age group.
It is stunning that, when the likeliest tabulation of (U.S. only) numbers for the two categories I mentioned above, the “vax”-caused deaths and serious injuries, are a.) nearly a half-a-million, and b.) probably a million and a half, we have yet to have open discussion about this.1 To date, there has been no headline story by any MSM paper or channel, WSJ included, conservative-think-tank-affiliated publications included, and Fox included too, with Tucker as a partial exception.
It is stunning that, since about this time last year, multimillionaire vax-harm investigator Steve Kirsch has put big money on the table for any credentialed expert or media representative to debate him, much of it money not connected to any judgment of who won the debate, and has had no takers. (39:30-ish of this film.)
It is stunning that, week after week, that money sits there, the testimony of the several-score embalmers about the novel clot-structures sits there(48:30-55:00 of the last link), key pieces by Kirsch and ones by fifty or so other prominent vax-harm investigators sit there, the Thai myocarditis study comes out, and still, and still, and still, no leaders of major organizations say, “we need to devote serious resources to conducting open investigation of this.”
It is such a bizarre world we live in now! A discussion, the real one, about what is obviously the story of the century, and one that even if we can settle someday on the “largely unintended” judgment, damns much of the past three decades of organizational power in modern nations, and it is entirely happening…er, over here, on Substack channels, at the events or on the platforms of dissident organizations like Doctors4CovidEthics or The Brownstone Institute. None of it is permitted on MSM or on non-Musk social media, and with no justification provided for this raw act of indefinitely extended censorship beyond a few cliched assertions (i.e., “fact checks”).
So those who control the mainline channels and platforms increasingly look insane, like grown adults with their hands over their ears chanting LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU. Worse, in a few cases, a loved one of theirs dies, for no apparent reason by the standards of pre-2021 medical knowledge, and—my God!--they put their hands over their eyes and start up the LA LA LA CDC SAYS even for that.
Van Morrison titled his early-2022 album What’s It Gonna Take?
What’s it gonna take, for you wake-up?
What’s it gonna take, for you to break?
But if I were a poet or songster myself, my new album or collection would be titled: How Long Do You Think You Can Swing This?
Before I explain my title, I need to highlight one fact: some among our elites are sincerely ignorant. I had the displeasure this fall of having conservations with two top-notch, ethics-serious, and usually wise academics, wherein I learned that they knew nothing of what was being discussed on the dissident channels.
To know nothing of that, in late ‘22!
It involves obvious imprudence: it depends on a bizarre assumption that the talking heads of the health organizations have earned a substantial level of trust. I grant that for both of the persons I’m talking about, the work they are engaged in, requiring constant reading of and engagement with other thinkers, is their primary excuse: their attention is required for a host of issues unconnected to the Disaster I’ve become especially focused on this last year, which in my under-employment, I can devote more time to learning about it. Nonetheless, I am obliged to say that their ignorance cannot be understood as one mainly forced on them--it seems connected in some part to a pride or a professional mode that is far too ready to dismiss the non-insider.
In any case, my How Long Do You Think You Can Swing This? fantasy-album title is not aimed at such semi-innocently ignorant types, but rather, at the many leaders who must know that there is at least some truth in the dissidents’ findings, but who for political/institutional reasons want to continue this strange cover-up.
Some of this group of elites who know (or who partially know) maintain it for base, or outright villainous, CYA reasons, but some presumably entertain reasons which at their most responsible-sounding warn about “what the public can take.”
To this last set I would ask: so you’ve pulled this off, sort of, for a year or so now, but how much longer can this go?
Do you think you can still swing it if the (U.S.) vax-deaths remain in, say, the 200,000-700,000 neighborhood, and any number remains hard to solidly document?
Or, what number of deaths will break you? And do you have any solid reasons for assuming the deaths will remain below that?
Or, is the really key numerical question this: how more many visits to dissident channels can you allow?
This is smart again, strategic again, common-good protecting again, how?
Do you think this repress-the-reality mode of yours can maintain a middle-way between an open admission of the Disaster, and a totalitarian-level repression of those who like myself and Kheriaty will seek to force this admission?
That last rhetorical question especially, posed against all too much evidence that a majority of our elites remain all in on maintaining this Lie, indicates why the remaining 2020s will either be years of Repentance, or Repression.
My coming essays will detail what I mean by both terms. And they will further spell out why a middle-way, besides being most sinful, would be impossible.
Let’s wrap-up this introduction to the series with quick indications why some other terms, especially “Revolution,” “Reform,” and “Revival” are not part of my framing.
First, “Revolution.” Let’s toss “civil war” into the this basket also, because all talk of it without talk of revolution is pretty limited in its seriousness, as the most likely scenario for real civil war is one in which one side, the progressivist one, largely controls the government. For similar but more complicated reasons, talk of largely-peaceful separation via secession is unserious at bottom.
Yes, in some of our nations, actual revolutions, justified by the first part of the Declaration of Independence, may be needed to oppose attempted impositions of Repression, but the key fact is their success or failure will largely depend on whether or not enough of the citizenry is willing to Repent. But absent Repentance, that is, in a situation where near-majorities of our “fellow citizens” continue to Repress the natural operation of their own thinking and come to openly demand that government Repress the expression of ours, technological and media facts predict that revolutions will have a very hard time succeeding, even in gun-owning America.2
Repentance would similarly be necessary for any movement of “Reform” to become effective.
Those of us who are believers in the Bible know that we should pray that a fifth word, “Revival,” becomes the decisive one. Surely, the late Pope Benedict prayed regularly for this. And yes, without some measure of Revival, the minimally-necessary levels of civic Repentance will never occur. But beyond saying that, there not much a writer not blessed/burdened by God’s gift of prophecy can predict about Revival.
Final point: you can’t repent of a sin you don’t even know you’ve committed, and so the word that might matter most of all for understanding the pickle we’re in is Denial.
That is, Denial is one-half of the Repression I‘m speaking of.
I do not want to wade into debates among dissidents about the proper term for the mental phenomenon here. Is it Mass Formation Process? Mass Psychosis? Is the Repression I’m speaking of grounded in the conception which Freud and company made famous? Well, I haven’t done the homework to know. Yeah, I probably should. But for the present, I use “Repression” in the broad sense, and similarly deploy “Denial.” I do this as a way of keeping more to common language on this, and of not committing myself to one of the diagnostically-precise hypotheses.
I also do it to stress the link between political and psychological repression.
But what I can say is that Denial is no longer, as the joke has it, a “river in Egypt,” but the main feature and support of the new regime which America’s supporters of the Democratic Party, of the non-populist parts of the Republican Party, and of the existing elites generally, are in the process of gradually establishing.
I’ll save my reasons for that assertion for later on in this series, but this introduction has made the main features of my Repentance or Repression warning/hypothesis clear.
Someone has likely done a tighter summary of the evidence for why these estimates are the best at present—commenters are invited to link—, but here is a big Steve Kirsch piece in which you can find the main evidence, and much else. Addendum: There is a new Ed Dowd video (w/ Aubrey Marcus), starts slow, but becomes very insightful from 35:00 to 49:00, and at 39:30, Dowd indicates that his team have estimated there have been 1.2 million disabilities since February 2021 in the U.S., a number that is very likely lower than the actual count, for a number of reasons, but especially because the stats they’re using are only derived from those employed at the time of the claimed disability. I assume he means he has already deducted the average pre-’21 disability numbers from that total—buy his new book to learn more. And finally, note that not every “serious injury” can legally count as a “disability.”
And that predicts that few will be attempted. For indeed, even the Declaration can be read to contain a case, growing out of its use of the word “Prudence,” against the moral justification of attempting a revolution when the odds of success are most probably judged to be hopeless. Thomistic Natural Law reasoning indicates the same, and classic natural right could be thought to also, though there is that much-commented-on passage by Leo Strauss, in Natural Right and History, which extols the moral witness possible in the “last stand.” For more of my thoughts on these subjects, which show my agreement with Kheriaty in mainly recommending civil disobedience for our situation, go here, and here.
Take a look at this video where Bret Weinstein and Dr Ameet Malhotra discuss and dissect this complete failure we are all witnessing. For two very scientifically oriented dissidents they take a deep dive into the denial that seems to have afflicted so many of their peers. The term they use - willful blindness - covers a lot of ground explaining how so many experienced intelligent people prefer to cover their ears and go la la la. For some it’s motivated by fear of financial loss or societal acceptance and for others it’s the arrogance of refusing to accept they’ve been duped. After all nobody likes to be made a fool especially when people have looked up to them their entire life. So for as long as they possibly can, they play along and encourage the mass ignorance. “Yes the emperor has lovely clothing. Of course I can see it. Don’t you?” https://youtu.be/4MKQ0krjLpo
It'll be repression. We have it coming to us. Unless an epiphany happens and society takes a 180, and that seems very very doubtful. My latest article talks about the lack of epiphanies and how we all live with our heads buried in the sand.
Maybe 100 years from now repentance will happen. I look forward to your other installments of this series.