When the “cult” is the majority

We will need a plan for helping the NYTimes readers face shocking realities

When Bobby Kennedy was running for President, his promise was to “heal the divide”. But Donald Trump has made no such promise, and even if he had the will and the means, there would be a lot of history to overcome.

If Kennedy has any sway at all in the new administration, the divide is about to get a lot deeper. I’m speaking of the biggest political divide in America, the split between people who get their news from any mainstream source and others who distrust all these sources and “do their own research”.

In my opinion, Kennedy’s day-one priority should be to put an end to bioweapons research, rebranded as “gain-of-function” or “dual use”. Half the country will breathe a sigh of relief — it was weaponization of a coronavirus that led to a nightmare pandemic. The other half will cry out in alarm, “what are you doing? We need this research to give us the vaccines we will need in the next pandemic!” They will cite the NYTimes and 75 Nobel laureates who say that RFK is a danger to public health.

All of us who read this column have been stigmatized and ostracized during the COVID era. As the tables turn, it is our place to be more mature, to be sensitive and supportive to our friends and loved ones who find themselves drowning in messages that contradict everything they once thought was true. The fabric of their narrative is fragile as gossamer — it is about to tear wide open; but the social network that supports that false narrative is robust and durable.

The same people who isolated themselves in 2020 “to protect grandma” will now gather in groups formal and informal to support one another in resisting new information.

What can we do to help them through a difficult transition? These are the same people who have disdained and excluded us. How can we offer kindness, free of gloating and recrimination?

And, of course, no less important than offering comfort is facilitating acceptance of the reality that a great deception has taken place. We will need their help and democratic advocacy if “separation of pharma and state” is to have a chance.

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There is nothing new about the American government deceiving American citizens. “Remember the Maine”, the Kennedy assassinations, the Gulf of Tonkin, “weapons of mass destruction”…

9/11 was the great in-your-face deception of this century. By 2010, polls were telling us that fully half of Americans did not trust the government’s account of the 9/11 terror attacks. But that figure was deceptive, because the number of us who realized the implications and adjusted our foundational reality accordingly was much smaller.

What are the implications of the 9/11 deception?

• That a network of murderous autocrats is deeply embedded in the US government.

• That they are able to hide their crimes because, in crucial ways, they control the print and broadcast media.

• That the “war on terror” was designed not to keep us safe from terrorists but to scare us into accepting abridgements of our Constitutional freedoms.

• That once again in American history, the people have been led into war based on lies.

The COVID deception was a sequel to the 9/11 deception, carrying the Deep State’s repressive agenda past airport security lines, into a regime that intrudes on our everyday lives.

But the majority of Americans obeyed government directives around COVID and they now have a stake in believing that they were not taken for fools. These people have been pre-bunked to think that everything that Trump says is a lie, and that RFK is a kook. They are heavily armored against cognitive dissonance.

So we who fancy ourselves torch-bearers for the cause of Truth have a dilemma before us. We are in need of psychological de-programing technologies that are sufficiently robust to diffuse the formidable propaganda technologies, developed from Bernays through Mockingbird, that have conquered so many American minds over the the last century.

The lesson that the propagandists learned was that beliefs are not established through evidence and logic but through peer groups. It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain beliefs that are fundamentally at odds with one’s family and community.

I am not immune to this dynamic. I remember well the day that I first faced the fact that 9/11 was an inside job, and I was fortunate to be in touch with people I respect who were on the same path, and who offered me support. I am certain that I could not maintain the belief system that I have today without the support of various communities that share my various heresies. [read this inset if you’re interested]

This is my personal story, how I was red-pilled with respect to the MSM. If you aren’t interested in the details, the moral is this: Even though I had every advantage — my background, my training, my skeptical attitude developed in youth, and personal experience with evidence right in front of my face — even with all these advantages, it was a wrenchingly difficult transition for me, and I could not have done it without the support of trusted friends.

The story begins when I was a precocious math student in junior high school. I was reading calculus books and asking questions that my teacher and my father couldn’t answer, then figuring out the answers myself. It was disorienting to find how limited were the grown-ups’ understanding, but this experience gave me the advantage of learning to trust my own thinking.

In the 1990s, I discovered that the whole community of gerontologists had taken a wrong turn, led by the nose by Darwinian fundamentalists who had a narrow and dogmatic notion of evolutionary mechanisms. I began to rewrite our understanding of aging, working as a renegade scientist, determined to correct a wrong turn which the science community had taken. I imagined at the time that it must be very rare for the science community to be misled en masse.

Then, in 2004, the US Presidential election was stolen on behalf of Doubleyou Bush. In the days following the election, I was part of a small group of activists around the country who came together, exchanging emails. The exit polls were our evidence, and the statistics carried a clear signature indicating that the official vote count had been altered electronically. We wrote up our findings succinctly and sent them to the News Desk at the NYTimes, signed by a handful of professors, engineers, and lawyers.

We thought this would be a major scoop, a scandal that the Times would be eager to report, because they were Democratic partisans, and the story was about Republican malfeasance.

But we were wrong. The Times didn’t follow up to ask about our evidence. They didn’t conduct an investigation of their own. What they did was to publish a hit piece a week after the election. They claimed that unnamed anomalies had all been resolved by “experts”.

“while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift
propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known,
spread the rumors so fast that experts [sic] were soon able to debunk them”

This is typical of the Times’s modus operandi. They avoid blatant lies, and instead use their voice of authority to assure their well-educated readers in a well-educated tone concerning the Right Way to Think about a situation. In this case, they neglected to mention the professors and PhDs who had contacted them directly, but to represent our movement they chose a junior high school math teacher from Utah, and painted her as a well-intentioned but ignorant ski bum.

I watched this happening in real time. I had run the numbers myself, and I knew the truth; I knew that the Times’s distortion was deliberate. I was puzzled that a Democratic rag would cover for the Republican crimes. But at this time, 2004, it was an anomaly that I did not relate to anything else in my experience.

The following year, an on-line documentary appeared called Loose Change (now scrubbed from Youtube, but available on Rumble). The claim was that the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by 15 Islamists; 9/11 was an inside job. From curiosity, I tried to watch this video several times, and got only a few minutes in before being distracted. After the third or fourth attempt, I began to suspect there was something uncomfortable for me here, something I was avoiding. So one afternoon (March, 2006), I set up the laptop computer in front of my elliptical trainer, and I watched and listened while I worked out.

The information washed over me. I pumped the machine harder and faster. My thoughts were racing. It was when they described the physics of building collapse that I felt I had no escape. It occurred to me that my two choices were (1) that my understanding of high school physics was wrong, or (2) the New York Times and The Nation — my two most trusted news sources throughout my entire life — were both deliberately misleading me.

I fell off the elliptical trainer and rolled on the floor. I was in a puddle of tears for many minutes. I think I realized even then what I was losing. How was I ever going to know what was true if the New York Times is capable of such prominent, blatant, and seminal deceptions?

Fortunately, I was scheduled to participate in an election integrity conference in Cleveland the following weekend, a place where I could connect with other skeptical souls. I took Mark Crispin Miller aside and whispered my suspicions. Could it be that 9/11 isn’t what we’ve been told? I was extremely fortunate that Mark was at a similar place in beginning to confront evidence about 9/11, and he responded, thoughtfully, that it was a possibility we would have to consider.

The experience was deeply disorienting. I felt unmoored, drifting. The foundation of my belief system had been pulled out from under me. It would be a long time re-scaffolding, and I would never again have the comfortable certainties that I enjoyed before March, 2006.

My descent from the Liberal Establishment to the Cosmic Rabbit Hole was marked by my own peculiarities — my rebellious nature, my experience as target of the NYTimes hit piece 16 months earlier, but most of all my unshakable conviction that I understand elementary physics. Other people have found their way to deep skepticism of the MSM by very different paths.

Most important: Despite my rebelliousness and my scientific background and my previous personal experience with deception from the very same NYTimes, I could not have made this transition without support of others who shared my new beliefs. I credit Mark with giving me the courage to begin exploring the space of 9/11 Truth.

The making and unmaking of cults

This we know: Cult groups are able to make and keep converts because they take people in and insulate them from outside influence. This is something that Sunny Moonies, Hassidic Jews, Branch Davidians, and Osho’s harem all have in common. There are well-developed, tested and effective methodologies for de-programming cult members. The first step is to separate the subject from the cult community. For an extended weekend, the subject is surrounded by people who know and love him, who are united in a different belief system. Immersed in a different social environment, most victims are able to revert from cult belief systems to consensus reality. But what do we do when consensus reality is itself the cult?

This de-programming technology is an important beginning, but it is unlikely to work when the “cult” is a majority, and it has the support of the most powerful institutions in the world. We will need something else. Truth is good — certainly to the extent that we don’t have objective truth at our back, we will not succeed. But truth is not enough, logic is not enough, internal consistency is not enough, evidence in plain sight is not enough. Whatever university degrees and honors we have received, whatever prestigious positions we have held will be compared to the larger numbers of people with similar feathers in their caps who remain loyal to the mainstream narrative. And, of course, the ways in which the academic establishment and the mainstream journalists were pressured to conform with censorship, de-platforming, even the loss of medical licenses — this will be unknown and unimaginable to the people who trusted the mainstream narrative.

Clinging to illusions

When Prophecy Fails is a pop-psych book from 1956, based on an academic case study. Dorothy Martin (in Chicago) was in touch with aliens from the planet Clarion, who warned her that there was going to be a worldwide flood to rival Noah’s on December 21, 1954. There were a few dozen Seekers who took her prophecy very seriously, and prepared for the end, some of them leaving jobs and relationships or making other irreversible changes in the course of their lives. Early on the morning of Doomsday, Dorothy received a message that the Clarionians had heard the Seekers’ prayers, and the world had been spared. The point of the book was that this new development did nothing to shake the faith of the Seekers; instead they adapted the old story to new circumstances, and re-affirmed their faith.

There will be a tipping point. Once communities start to succumb to our narrative, the effect will snowball and people will switch sides quickly, and in great numbers. But to reach that tipping point, we have a formidable social challenge before us. Yes, it is a social challenge, not an epistemological challenge. We will not profit from winning debates; when we win debates, we are likely only to increase people’s discomfort, and reinforce their commitment to their group’s narrative and to avoiding those who don’t share it.

One of the best things we can do is to be an open community, welcoming new recruits with heartfelt appreciation for how difficult a transition they have managed.

Part of our opponents’ tactics has been to use censorship and character assassination. Remarkably, they have — beginning in 2016 — legitimized the idea that there is some “misinformation” that is just too seductive for the First Amendment, and it is “extremely dangerous to our democracy” to allow those ideas into print. Which ideas these are has not been defined; instead our most effective truth-tellers have been branded with such monikers as “Disinformation Dozen” and “anti-vaxxer” and “Putin apologist”; thus they avoid taking issue with particular narratives and explaining why We the People must be protected from their corrupting influence. All that is necessary is to spread the news that certain influencers have cooties, and that anyone who listens to them will be shunned and ridiculed. It’s a tactic right out your junior high school playground, but it works.

There’s a science of propaganda that began with Freud’s double nephew, Edward Bernays in the 1920s. Bernays’s first success was at the Easter Parade in Manhattan, 1929, when he promoted cigarettes to the Suffragettes, campaigning for the right to vote. “Coffin nails” were rebranded as “freedom torches”. Before that time, smoking was a men’s vice. Afterward, women joined men in addiction and lung cancer. Tobacco sales doubled.

Hint: When I worked in the 1990s with groups trying to help teens to quit smoking while they still could, the most effective tactic we had was to show them that they were being deliberately targeted and deceived for the sake of Big Tobacco’s products. Health data fell on deaf ears, but these kids got angry when they learned they were being duped.

Big Tobacco was only the beginning. Every consumer company that stuck to old-fashioned marketing based on honest communication of information about a product was pushed out of the market by companies that applied the science of psychological manipulation and mob behavior.

The Nazis advanced the science, and after the War, Russians and Americans competed to recruit the Nazi mind-control scientists for cold war applications. MK-Ultra became infamous for using drugs, sensory deprivation, and extreme forms of psychological manipulation to completely take over a person’s individual will. But ultimately more important was Operation Mockingbird, in which CIA agents were embedded in every major newspaper and broadcast news service, in America and around the world. Not only did they have legitimate jobs at the most respected newspapers, they became the best-known reporters and columnists, loved and trusted by millions of Americans who had no idea that they were also on the payroll of the CIA.

Remember the image of the Marlboro man — strong, self-reliant, independent. “The thinking man’s filter. The smoking man’s taste.” People like their freedom, and want to think that they are making decisions with their own minds. No problem — we can make them think they made the decision all by themselves, and it just happened to be Marlboro. Remember the “think different” campaign by Apple. Did tens of millions of Americans all suddenly start thinking different? Or were they responding to a sophisticated marketing appeal.

During COVID, the appeal was not to people’s rugged individualism but rather to their altruism and community spirit. “We’re all in this together.” and “Your mask protects me. My mask protects you.” Children stayed home from school to protect their grandparents. Not only did the best citizens, the most civic-minded individuals embrace the deception; they pressured their neighbors and friends, they shunned and excluded and browbeat their own family members for failures to isolate and failures to vaccinate.

Most of my readers know that the masks don’t stop viruses from passing through, that the vaccinations don’t stop transmission, and that isolation protocols could slow the spread of the virus by a few weeks or months, but eventually everyone in the world has been exposed to COVID many times over. While we sheltered in place, there has been a multi-trillion-dollar wealth transfer to those who need it least.

Where are we and where do we need to go

There is now a segment of the population that has absorbed the civic-minded message. They own it. They feel self-righteous about it. They identify with the friends and colleagues and family members who carry the same message. They tend to be good people, responsible people, well-educated and motivated, with the best of intentions. They have no idea that they have been cynically manipulated for the purposes of billionaires and globalists who aspire to totalitarian control. If you try to tell them this is the case, they may get angry at you, but more likely they will walk away and return to the community of good, caring people who share and support their illusion.

We’re not going to change minds by showing these people data. Personal experience is a little more promising; but they’ve already seen friends and family members getting strokes or cancer or neurological disorders or just dropping dead on the kitchen floor. They want to believe this is just bad luck, and has nothing to do with the vaccine. (For any individual case, this may well be true.)

If this were a minority cult, it is clear that the most effective de-programming strategy would be to separate individual cult members, surround them with loving family members who don’t share the cult beliefs, and draw them back into consensus reality. But when consensus reality has been perverted, we have a more difficult problem.

The problem is urgent. It is a schism dividing this country, and it will only get worse. If Bobby is confirmed by the Senate and tries to ban bioweapon research or to enforce honest safety testing at the FDA, this bloc of civic-minded, well-educated people will fight him tooth and nail. And there will be plenty of media pundits cheering them on with spin, deception, and selective reporting.

I don’t have a solution to propose. I’m writing this column to seed a conversation, to ask for help. But I want to end on a hopeful note.

In 1600, all of Europe was under the thrall of the Catholic church, and the idea that Earth was not the center of the cosmos was sufficient cause to be burned at the stake. To establish the contrary required pages and pages of hand calculations by someone with the devotion of a Kepler or a Tycho. And yet, despite the censorship and 17th-century cancel culture, a revolution took place in people’s thinking. (The very word, “revolution” acquired its present meaning from this seminal event in cultural history.) What can we learn from the 17th century experience?

Last week, I was invited to a healing circle for inner wellness. I was the only male. The way that women share their feelings and intuitions, the way they support each other in diverse endeavors contrasted with my familiar world, where information is exchanged. The most promising medium I can imagine for helping people across the bridge away from mass deception is small groups, dominated by women, in which participants share their experience, their emotions, their intuitions, their doubts and their insights.

We can do this. Truth will prevail, as it always does, eventually. We are called upon to play a role both firm and compassionate, above all listening and supporting our dear ones as they are dragged through a painful un-deceiving.

How will we reach people whose resistance to new information is a strong collective? Please share your ideas below.