https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-brief-history-of-epic-mass-madness/
A Brief History of Epic Mass Madness
The thesis called mass formation psychosis put forward lately by the Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet — a good digest here in text, not video — goes a long way to explaining the disgraceful mindfuckery that Western Civ has fallen for in our time, promulgated by a thinking class that descended into abject madness. It’s well worth reviewing.
The descent was provoked by the existential anxiety over the collapse of techno-industrial economies and the end of progress as-we’ve-known-it. (Have you noticed: it was the self-styled “progressives” who went the craziest?) As Dr. Desmet lays it out, the disconnectedness of contemporary life, its lack of meaning or purpose for many, leads to unendurable anxiety. All that inchoate fear seeks desperately to attach itself to some real object, some thing or some force that can be comprehended, fought, and triumphantly overcome. Finding such a target produces an intoxicating sense of communal connection, purpose, and meaning, driving actions that are often crazy and also absolutely impervious to rational debate.
The angst in America was well established by 2016. A beaten-down middle-class suspected that left-of-center politicians did not have their interests at heart after years of off-shoring their jobs, and they managed to elect their avatar, Donald Trump, over the obviously unsympathetic globalist, Hillary Clinton — who snootily tagged her opposition “the deplorables.” Even so, the polls had her ahead by a mile. Then, by some weird twist of fate, she lost a few crucial counties in midwestern states she hadn’t bothered to visit, and was reportedly too plastered after midnight on election night to come down and console the troops at campaign headquarters. The shocking election outcome instantly deranged the nation’s entire managerial class and its thinking-out-loud interlocutors in the news media and on campus.
The Golden Golem of Greatness, as I liked to call Mr. Trump, was the perfect target for their animus. Threatening to “drain the swamp,” he would shatter their hard-won power privileges and deprive them of their well-worn grifts — such as the various revolving doors between big money and its regulators. Plus, his rough personality offended their own pretense of decorum (in pursuit of that power and grift). They decided that he had to go, and fast, and the whole managerial class and their allies closed ranks to get it done, not least the vicious agents of the Intel “Community,” which force-fed all the federal legal machinery — the official instruments of punishment.
If they could only knock Mr. Trump off the game-board, America’s troubles would be over. We could get back on track to becoming a utopia of inclusion, diversity, equity, and self-driving electric cars. For four years the FBI, the DOJ, and other distributed players (such as the CIA mole Eric Ciaramella and his NSA co-seditionist Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and such ignoble rogues in Congress as Rep. Adam Schiff and Senator Mark Warner) beat President Trump like a piñata, casually breaking the very law that they supposedly represented in the process. This punishment was accompanied by a growing repertoire of cult-like rituals — especially around race-and-gender hustles — with rich opportunities for the new behavior called virtue signaling, which was essentially a game of collecting brownie points for status-seeking purposes in the new moral hierarchy of the “Woke.” The social networks, Facebook and Twitter, amplified every insane strand in the Woke messaging. As Dr. Desmet says, “The more absurd the rituals, the more they buy into it.”
This demonic opposition to Mr. Trump, and all the games issuing from it, produced the characteristic intoxication of mass formation psychosis. That is, the Left became a big cozy community of people initiated into a catechism of sacred truths. The important part is that they felt united in their struggle. Folks in the grip of this belonged to something at last, a solidarity of certitude, a social organism one could lose one’s anxious, fretful self in. No more loneliness and ennui. They were imbued with a sense of purpose: the ritual killing of the monster called Trump — millions of heroic Captain Willards stealing up-river to behead the renegade Colonel Kurtz. The news media’s role was to reinforce all that, with as much bad faith and dishonesty as they could get away with, in the service of fashioning a consensus that was eventually named “the narrative” — a self-reinforcing catalog of approved thought. The anti-Trump news posse garnered brownie points galore, including Pulitzer Prizes for their completely mendacious reporting.
The trouble was, for all their epic exertions, they weren’t exactly winning. The whole RussiaGate extravaganza fizzled — and may even eventuate in some criminal convictions if independent counsel John Durham turns out to be for-real. The Mueller Report came up plumb empty, to thundering disappointment, embodied in Rachel Maddow’s frantically bobulating Adam’s apple. The UkraineGate impeachment flopped. It was nice to have a sense of purpose and feel like a member of an exclusive club, but the Wokesters were unable to “nail that ol’ coonskin to wall” (as Lyndon B. Johnson once put it about winning the Vietnam War, which we lost). By January of 2020, it looked like Mr. Trump might even win re-election — the horror indeed! — considering the Democratic Party primary candidates were the most forlorn pack of has-beens, nobodies, kooks, and damaged goods ever assembled for such a contest. But whaddaya know? Along came Covid-19.
What a lifesaver the ‘Rona was for wobbling Wokedom, a cornucopia of boons, the gift that kept on giving! It provided an opportunity for perhaps the most craven public-private cartel in all the land, the CDC / FDA / NIH / NIAID / Big Pharma gang, to work some amazing hoodoo on the Golden Golem of Greatness and eventually all the nations of Western Civ. It put the perfidious, money-grubbing, and medically incompetent Dr. Anthony Fauci at the elbow of Mr. Trump as, in effect, the National Covid-19 Coordinator. He played the President like a Flugelhorn through most of 2020 — and, as the year ground on, Mr. Trump looked like he painfully suspected as much in all those ghastly televised daily briefings.
We will not go into the appalling mRNA vaccine boondoggle in detail here, except to say it reaped zillions for those with a stake in the patents, including Dr. Fauci. But Covid-19 also provided an excuse to relax the election regulations and pave the way to colossal ballot fraud in November, with Marc Elias of the Lawfare gang (and also a partner in the DNC’s pet law firm, Perkins Coie) scurrying from state to state tuning the electoral machinery in key swing precincts for a “Joe Biden” victory — and with hundreds of millions of dollars in help from Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg. Till then, nothing in all the weaponized legal machinery across the land had succeeded in expelling the hated object of the managerial class’s loathing, but the election would git’er done.
Remember: the Progressive-Woke-Marxist-Jacobins liked nothing better than inflicting punishment. In fact, when you swept away all their ideological bullshit and the associated hustles, the movement was strictly about coercion, about pushing other people around, making them do as the Woke commissars willed. And there was a clearly sado-masochistic edge to all that. They relished cancelling people, wrecking careers, destroying reputations, livelihoods, marriages, families. Their political leaders had no qualms about exterminating hundreds of thousands of small businesses in Covid-19 lockdowns orchestrated by Woke heroes like Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Jay Inslee of Washington State. And, of course, their darlings of the streets, BLM and Antifa, bashed-in shopfronts, looted all the merch, and burned down the buildings with mad glee.
But, most importantly, Covid-19 gave the political Left something else to focus its angst on once Mr. Trump was finally swept off the scene in the janky election. And until just the last few weeks of 2021, the virus has furnished endless opportunity for ever greater enactments of coercion and tyranny. Except now, suddenly, it’s all falling apart. In America, the claque behind the phantom president “Joe Biden” pulled the trigger on mandating vaccinations — complete with harsh punishments for the vaxx-averse — but then two things happened: 1) Federal Judge Terry Douglas in Louisiana issued an injunction against the mandate that applies in all fifty states; and 2) the news finally started leaking out — despite every effort of the US public health officialdom to hide it — that the vaccines carried an unprecedented risk of harm for medicines enlisted so casually into emergency use among so many millions of people, in addition to their negligible efficacy in preventing illness and contagion.
The Europeans, on the other hand, slid ever-deeper into despotic measures not seen since the Gestapo terrorized the continent. The Europeans face the same primal source of anxiety that the Americans do: the running down of their techno-industrial economies, except their predicament is arguably a little bit keener than ours is, since they have hardly any oil and natural gas of their own to run things on, and suffer terrible uncertainty about who will furnish it for them. If they had not gone out of their minds over what has turned out to be a pretty punk-ass virus — when treated early with a menu of cheaply available drugs — and hadn’t deified the false savior vaccines, they might be a whole lot more concerned about how they are going to heat their homes, fertilize their crops, and produce things of value — in short, remain civilized.
The catch is, they’ve given themselves until February to enforce their foolish vaccine mandates. The Omicron variant may help, too, since it is proving so far to be a grossly over-hyped development, discrediting the paranoia ginned up in the media. Can their courts act as ours have and put a stop to the madness? Between now and then we’re likely to see the defeat of the mass formation psychosis in America, at least, as the country is forced to face the truth of what it has done to itself.
Or, at least it will be the end of this chapter of that story. Perhaps the Europeans will snap out of it, too, as they see the narrative collapse in America. Or are they just too far gone? Standing by on developments.
....
http://edwardcurtin.com/robert-francis-kennedy-jr-s-heroic-resistance-to-the-cias-continuing-covid-coup-detat/
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.’s Heroic Resistance to the CIA’s Continuing Covid Coup D’état
A Meditation
With his extraordinary new book, The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK, Jr. has made it very clear that he will not allow Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian boot to stamp on his face. His is a very rare moral courage, and he is asking us to join him, before it is too late and we enter into a new dark age, in recognizing and resisting the evil forces intent on stamping out democracy around the world. He is not pulling his punches with language as he accuses the political-intelligence-media-money-medical-corporate-pharmaceutical conspirators of executing “the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.” For a brilliant and highly accomplished lawyer and excellent writer and speaker, the choice of those words “controlled demolition” is clearly intentional.
For anyone who doubts that the Covid-19 crisis is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci, billionaires such as Bill Gates, the military, media, Big Pharma, the World Economic Forum, etc., a close reading of this book – with its 2,194 references – will disabuse one of that illusion.
The CIA has long been deeply involved with vaccines, viruses, drugs, weaponizing cancer, biological weapons, and of course massive mind-control operations – deadly propaganda in plain English – for use in controlling U.S. Americans and foreigners alike. As Kennedy writes in an ironically understated way, “The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.” Yes, a long pause. He continues:
There is nothing in the CIA’s history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA’s historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coup d’état between 1947 and 1989, involving about a third of the world’s governments. Many of these were functioningd democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d’état. [my emphasis]
Just as it does Kennedy assassinations.
Character assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is what the CIA and its media mouthpieces have been doing for years. This has become more and more necessary as they have realized the great growing danger he poses to their agenda. Calling him an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and names far worse, is part of a concerted smear campaign to turn the public away from his message, which is multi-faceted and supported by deep research and impeccable logic. Like his father and uncle, he has become an irrepressibly eloquent opponent of the demonic forces intent on destroying the democratic dream.
With The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he has pinned his indictment of those forces to the world’s wall for all to read.
Just as this new book will not be reviewed by the corporate mainstream media, not even negatively for fear of promoting it by doing so, so too the last book he wrote, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, was completely ignored by such media.
As I wrote three years ago in the only review of that book:
When a book as fascinating, truthful, beautifully written, and politically significant as American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, written by a very well-known author by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and published by a prominent publisher (HarperCollins), is boycotted by mainstream book reviewers, you know it is an important book and has touched a nerve that the corporate mainstream media wish to anesthetize by eschewal.
American Values is part memoir, part family history, part astute political analysis, and part-confessional, and is in turns delightful, sad, funny, fierce, and frightening in its implications.
What implications? It is the heart of that book that had the obedient reviewers avoiding it like the plague, a plague introduced by a little mockingbird, as in Operation Mockingbird. No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK had dared to say what RFK, Jr. did in that book. He indicted the CIA in a carefully crafted and fully factual way for a vast array of crimes. He spelled out the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle President John Kennedy. He threw a gauntlet down in the midst of telling an entertaining and touching family saga, which included a critique of his own youthful transgressions.
But the nation’s spooks smelled danger in the tale and they are now more acutely aware that they must censor him because his message is finding an expanding audience of people sick of government lies and very hungry for the truth. More and more people are willing to follow this brave man into the darkness of our history and the ongoing coups d’état underway at home and abroad. They smell a demonic author behind the Covid-19 propaganda.
While Dr. Anthony Fauci understandably stands at the center of this new book, and deservedly so for his evil machinations over so many decades, it is important to recognize that he is an obedient, albeit very powerful, underling in a systemic structure of evil, who has greatly materially profited from the sale of his soul. Yet while this is true, to read Kennedy’s chapters on Fauci’s commanding role in the HIV/Aids fraud, the AZT shakedown, illegal experiments on children that killed at least 85, etc., is enough to make your blood boil and to realize that such actions must spring from a source far deeper than the thirst for lucre. Something fiendish and sinister is at work with all this with the suffering and death it has caused, and in the ways it has foreshadowed the COVID-19 propaganda and the complicity of the mass media in fronting for Fauci and his allies, then and now.
Kennedy exhaustively details Fauci’s work as a drug dealer for Big Pharma, even while his job at NIAID is to protect and improve the people’s health, which has deteriorated dramatically over his tenure. (It is important to mention parenthetically but not at all incidentally that the CIA “manages” the so-called war on drugs in a similar manner.) Thus we have a war of drugs and a “war on drugs” working in tandem in a perfect scheme to drug as many people as possible. Here are a few details:
- Fauci has an annual $6 billion budget, most of which goes toward the research and development of new drugs.
- He is the highest paid federal employee, more than the President, with an annual salary of $417, 608.
- He controls 57 percent of global biomedical medical funding directly and indirectly via the NIH, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and therefore controls the scientists looking for research money.
- He has for decades overseen the regulatory capture of government health agencies by Big Pharma.
- The CDC, a paramilitary organization, spends $4.9 billion of its $12 billion budget buying and distributing vaccines, the vaccines that Fauci has been pushing. It also owns 57 vaccine patents.
- Fauci and other officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help to develop and push through the approval process.
- He has for many years promoted false pandemics to promote novel vaccines, drugs, and pharmaceutical company profits.
- Forty-five percent of the FDA’s budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”
- Fauci has a “strange fascination with,” and has invested in “gain of function” experiments to engineer superbugs, which is part of a long CIA history of weaponizing viruses, etc.
RFK, Jr.’s detailed exposure of Fauci’s role reminds me of reading Moby Dick and meditating on Melville’s description of Ahab – one has to enter a different mental space to begin to comprehend such evil, and even then one is struck dumb by its extent and the media’s complicity in covering it up for so long.
When I use the word evil, I am not using that word loosely, but very precisely, for the actions of Fauci and his ilk are evil, although the human being Anthony Fauci is still capable of contrition and redemption. Anything is possible if not probable, but I am not holding my breath. Just as the actual people who shot JFK, RFK, MLK,Jr., et al. were obedient servants of the system that produced them – listen to Bob Dylan’s Only A Pawn in Their Game – Fauci is a product of a structural system of evil. This is not to excuse him but to place his actions in an historical and structural context.
Obviously he is not a poor southern unschooled white man used by the KKK as in Dylan’s song, but a sophisticated and Jesuit-educated New Yorker brought to political consciousness within a system that amply rewards obedience to the authorities. He is a graduate of the same Jesuit high school I attended, the elite Regis High School in NYC (and then the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross), and is considered by many of my classmates to be a national hero bordering on a saint. Such schooling made me well aware of how the system gobbles up its youth with promises of wealth and prestige if they yoke their intellectual acumen to allegiance to the rules of the game and become what Hannah Arendt termed “schreibtischtäter” – desk killers, or what the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth called hyenas with polished faces in the offices of billion dollar corporations devoted to “service.”
That such socialization is presented as being “a man for others” within the Jesuit tradition of mind-control, doubles its effectiveness as a confidence game. That is why so many decent young people succumb to this siren call. It then, however, demands the quelling of an uneasy conscience.
Jean Paul Sartre called this bad faith (mauvaise foi), a form of mental trickery in which one tries to “lie” to oneself – an impossibility since the liar and the one lied to are the same person – which means the deceiver must really know the truth that he is trying to conceal from the deceived. This form of split consciousness allows those who serve a rapacious system to attempt to deceive themselves and others that they are serving a just cause. Such attempts demand an actor’s skill and the quelling of one’s inner voice. But there are very many actors among us, as Nietzsche said, not genuine ones, but bad actors. Fauci, Gates, et al. are bad actors in a propaganda film, at least for those who know how propaganda is produced and bad acting exposed. Robert Kennedy is such an astute critic.
My purpose here is not to go into detail about Fauci and Gates’s connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense industries, for this is a meditation, not a review. But those connections are massive. Read the concluding chapter 12 in The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Check his sources, 298 for this chapter alone. This is not speculation or theory, but fact. Do your homework. Study. Kennedy says:
After twenty years [since the insider anthrax attacks following September 11, 2001: see Graeme MacQueen’s, The 2001 Anthrax Deception (isbn.nu)] of modeling exercises, the CIA – working with medical technologists like Anthony Fauci and billionaire internet tycoons – had pulled off the ultimate coup d’état: some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarians rule, the American experiment with self-government was over. The oligarchy was restored, and these gentlemen and their spymasters had equipped the rising technocracy with new tools of control unimaginable to King George or any other tyrant.
Yet the fight is far from over, and those with the tools and the mechanistic, material mindsets must contend with a rising tide of opposition to their plans for a “Great Reset” and a transhuman world. We may be in the final battle of this war, but the human spirit is stronger than those who wish to stamp out human freedom. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leading the fight for the soul of the world, and it is both a political and spiritual one.
It does not take great intelligence to realize that when countries throughout the world act in a synchronized way in locking down their populations and repeat the same message on cue that such events are centrally coordinated. The entire COVID-19 propaganda campaign, culminating with its push to enforce multiple vaccines that are not vaccines and are based on fraudulent PCR tests, has been long in preparation and the intelligence agencies’ fingerprints are all over its planning. War game scenarios, weaponized vaccines, the CIA, the NIH, Gates, Fauci, the NIAID, DARPA, Wired magazine, the financial elites and their power centers such as the World Economic Forum, etc. – they are all involved in a conspiracy to impose a rigid global tyranny over regular people for the benefit of the world’s super-rich. Since Fauci’s coordinated lockdowns early in 2020, there has been a 3.8 trillion dollar shift in wealth upwards to the super-rich, creating 500 new billionaires, while pulverizing the middle class, destroying small businesses, enriching Fauci and his Pharmaceutical and robber baron corporate partners, and causing vast suffering and death all around the world. None of this is accidental. Kennedy documents it all. He writes:
Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the “New Normal.” The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulator designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance.
Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination. The repetition of these exercises suggests that they serve as a kind of rehearsal or training drill for an underlying agenda to coordinate the global dismantlement of democratic governance….Virtually all of the scenario planning for pandemics employ technical assumptions and strategies familiar to anyone who has read the CIA’s notorious psychological warfare manuals for shattering indigenous societies, obliterating traditional economics and social bonds, for using imposed isolation and the demolition of traditional economies to crush resistance, to foster chaos, demoralization, dependence and fear, and for imposing centralized and autocratic governance.
U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have dominated the COVID-19 military project from the start. The CIA and Fauci are central to the official “conspiracy theory” – accurately called fact – including “Operation Warp Speed” under Trump. Trump simply carried on the work of his predecessors, including Obama, but acted as if he was opposed to it. It has always been a bi-partisan program because the CIA runs both parties.
When he was in prison in Germany after returning in 1939 from Union Theological Seminary in NYC to oppose Hitler, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his prison cell before he was executed:
Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
By stupid he did not mean that such people lacked intellectual ability, for they were often very smart, but that they had fallen under the spell of public power and lost all independence of mind. Thus he adds, “He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is still trying to reach these people. His is an heroic task. No wonder Kennedy is named for St. Francis to whom he is devoted; St. Francis taught him and us that courage and sacrifice are what God asks of us all.
One of his father’s favorite quotes defines the son as well; it is from Edith Hamilton, the author of The Greek Way, who wrote:
Men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…. To the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge.
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. has stepped up to the challenge. He is brave and brilliant. We are blessed to have his witness.
Comment to article:
" Thanks for an excellent review Ed. I finished Kennedy’s book a week ago, and will reread it once my wife has finished it.
I really wasn’t prepared for the level of “evil” that I encountered so clearly outlined in its pages. I found myself having to stop over and over in order to digest the significance of what I was reading. Government bureaucrats putting corporate profit and their own power above the very lives of the literally hundreds of thousands of people who needlessly died because of their decisions to implement unscientific policies, censoring of debate and their repression of effective and readily available treatment options. Arendt’s “banality of evil” observations were never far from mind as I read Kennedy’s book.
It would appear that the completely amoral murderous nature of all those good little Nazis’ that Dulles and company brought back to America post-WWII to incorporate into the CIA and our scientific community have proven quite useful to oligarchy. The CIA has become unchallenged master of “the big lie.” Those same Nazis “values,” so dear to oligarchy, clearly have come home to roost in our current version of the State’s “big lie” about covid. Fauci is yet one more “little Eichmann” in service to yet another grandiose and murderous scheme of oligarchy and State.
As memories of the proposed “Thousand Year Reich” fade into the rearview mirror of history, we now have “The Great Reset” to justify current global carnage of the plebs through lockdowns and dangerous mandatory “vaccines.” Yet more mayhem in service to those never ending oligarchic dreams of total control of all life on the planet, with a little dose of new high tech “elite immortality” fantasies thrown in for good measure. And who needs “death camps” when the death camp’s means of execution can be simply injected into the arm of the unsuspecting “inmate” conveniently at his/her local pharmacy or doctor’s office?
I will forever feel indebted to and deeply respectful of R.F.K. Jr. for writing this very brave and incredibly important book. Thank you again for your excellent review Ed. "