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https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/13/hedges-society-of-spectacle/

Society of Spectacle

The televised spectacle of the January 6th hearings will not restore democracy or halt the rise of the far right. The hearings are a desperate ploy by a doomed political class. 

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, whose first of six televised hearings began last Thursday, is spectacle replacing politics. There is nothing substantially new in the accusations. The committee lacks prosecutorial power. No charges have been filed by Attorney General Merrick Garland against former President Donald Trump and none are expected. The choreographed hearings, like the two impeachment trials of Trump, will have no effect on Trump voters, other than to make them feel persecuted, especially with more than 860 people already charged (including 306 guilty pleas) for their role in storming the Capitol. The committee echoes back to Trump opponents what they already believe. It is designed to present inaction as action and substitute role-playing for politics. It perpetuates, as Guy Debord writes, our “empire of modern passivity.”

The committee, which most Republicans boycotted, hired James Goldston, a documentary producer and former president of ABC News, to turn the hearings into engaging television with slick packaging and an array of pithy sound bites. The result is, and was meant to be, politics as reality television, a media diversion that will change nothing in the dismal American landscape. What should have been a serious bipartisan inquiry into an array of constitutional violations by the Trump administration has been turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for a Democratic Party running on fumes. The epistemology of television is complete. So is its artifice.

The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lock step for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women who support Donald Trump and the far right. 

Committee members cloyingly seek to sanctify themselves and their hearings by holding up the Constitution, democracy, the Founding Fathers, due process, the consent of the governed and the electoral process.

Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, talked about “domestic enemies of the Constitution who stormed the Capitol and occupied the Capitol, who sought to thwart the will of the people, to stop the transfer of power.” Liz Cheney called the Capitol “a sacred space in our constitutional republic.”

There was no acknowledgement by committee members that the “will of the people” has been subverted by the three branches of government to serve the dictates of the billionaire class. No one brought up the armies of lobbyists who are daily permitted to storm the Capitol to fund the legalized bribery of our elections and write the pro-corporate legislation that it passes. No one spoke about the loss of constitutional rights, including the right to privacy, because of wholesale government surveillance. No one mentioned the disastrous trade deals that have deindustrialized the country and impoverished the working class. No one spoke of the military fiascos in the Middle East that cost taxpayers over $8 trillion, the for-profit health care system that gouges the public and prevents a rational response to the pandemic, already resulting in over a million deaths, or the privatization of institutions of government, including schools, prisons, water treatment, trash collection, parking meters, utilities and even intelligence gathering, to enrich the billionaire class at our expense.

The gaping hole between the reality of what we have become, and the fiction of who we are supposed to be, is why spectacle is all the ruling class has left.  Spectacle takes the place of politics. It is a tacit admission that all social programs, whether the Build Back Better Plan, a ban on assault weapons, raising the minimum wage, ameliorating the ravages of inflation or instituting environmental reforms to stave off the climate emergency, will never be implemented. Those who occupy the “sacred space” of “our constitutional republic” are capable only of pouring money into war, allocating $54 billion to Ukraine, and passing ever higher military budgets to enrich the arms industry.

The wider the gap becomes between the ideal and the real, the more the proto fascists, who look set to take back the Congress in the fall, will be empowered. If the rational, factual world does not work, why not try one of the many conspiracy theories? If this is what democracy means, why support democracy? 

The right-wing also communicates through spectacle. What were the four years of the Trump presidency but one vast spectacle? Spectacle versus spectacle. The aesthetic of spectacle, as in the dying days of the Roman Empire or Tsarist Russia, is all that is left. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business,” Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The current ruling class, blinded by their hubris and pomposity, however, is not very good at it.....

....In short, since the system has betrayed and fleeced you, why not take it down with the vulgarity and crudity it deserves? Why not be entertained by political arsonists? Why engage in the polite civility and political decorum demanded by those who destroyed our communities, wrecked the nation, looted the US Treasury, oversaw a series of costly military debacles and took away our ability to make an adequate living, as well as our childrens’ future? 

In 1924, the government of Weimar Germany decided to get rid of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, by trying Hitler for high treason in the People’s Court. Hitler was clearly guilty. He had tried to overthrow the elected government in the botched 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch,” which, like the January 6 riot, was as much farce as insurrection. It was an open and shut case. The trial, however, backfired, turning Hitler into a national martyr and boosting the political fortunes of the Nazis.

The reason should have been apparent. Germany, convulsed by widespread unemployment, food riots, street violence and hyperinflation, was a mess. The ruling elites, like our own, had no credibility. The appeal to the rule of law and democratic values was a joke.

There was a revealing moment in the hearings when Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a concussion during the storming of the Capitol, related an exchange she had with Joseph Biggs, a leader of The Proud Boys who was indicted, along with four other Proud Boy leaders, for seditious conspiracy in connection with the storming of the Capitol.

“The tables started turning, once the — what is now that — the Arizona group — that’s what you said — the crowd with orange hats, they came up chanting “F-U-C-K antifa!” Edwards told the committee. “And they joined that group. And once they joined that group, Joseph Biggs’ rhetoric turned to the Capitol Police. He started asking us questions like, “You’ve — you didn’t miss a paycheck during the pandemic,” mentioning stuff about — our pay scale was mentioned, and, you know, started turning the tables on us.”

The brief exchange highlighted the yawning gap between the haves and the have nots, which, if not addressed, will turn Trump, his supporters, Biggs, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers into martyrs.

Congress is a cesspool. Corrupt politicians whore for the rich and get rich in return. This reality, which the hearings ignore, is apparent to most of the nation, which is why the hearings will not bolster the flagging fortunes of the ruling political class, desperate to prevent displacement.

The old ruling class is slated for extinction, not that what follows will be better. It won’t. But the game of pillage and corruption in the name of sacred democratic values no longer works. A new game is taking its place, one where narcissistic buffoons, who stoke the fires of hate and only know how to destroy, entertain us to death.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/globalist-elites-beg-trust-despite-unending-stream-covid-lies-massive-censorship/5783200

Globalist Elites Beg for ‘Trust’ Despite an ‘Unending Stream’ of COVID Lies and ‘Massive’ Censorship

Despite enormous evidence to the contrary and in a bid for totalitarian power, globalist health leaders declare the COVID crisis ‘anything but over’ while ignoring sharp challenges from thousands of competent professionals.

In a May 17 press conference some have called Orwellian, representatives from globalist institutions insisted that the COVID crisis is “anything but over,” demanded higher levels of “risk management” compliance from every nation, a “seamless” implementation of globalist decisions in health systems, and even more censorship of “conspiracy theories” from Big Tech corporations. 

The occasion was a document release from the International Science Council (ISC) titled “Unprecedented and Unfinished: COVID–19 and Implications for National and Global Policy.” 

The organization’s president, Dr. Peter Gluckman, explained the purpose of the project was to contest the notion that experimental gene-based vaccines in some way would end the COVID crisis allowing nations to “return to some form of normality.” But this “clearly was not going to be the case,” he exclaimed. 

Gluckman, who formerly served as Chief Science Advisor to the prime minister of his home nation of New Zealand, lamented the lack of trust afforded to “elites” from citizens with regards to the imposition of COVID response measures over the last two years, including lockdowns, school closures, mask requirements and gene-based “vaccine” mandates as even a condition of employment. 

Without defining the term, or providing any examples, he expressed a special concern over the dissemination of “conspiracy theories” during the COVID phenomenon and how such matters were especially problematic in democratic nations.  

“I think one of the deep existential threats for all countries, but particularly for democratic countries, is how is trust sustained between citizens and the elite parts of society,” he said.  

“The first defense against conspiracy theories is undoubtedly trust in societies. And trust in societies is a hard thing to build. It requires trust to be built between those who govern and those who are governed,” said the trained pediatrician. 

And making a hard distinction between citizens and “elites,” he said, “and I think where we saw vaccine resistance is often related to the fact there was not trust in the elite, even political, scientific, or academic, but it was then reinforced or the excuse that was given was those of conspiracy.” 

One question advanced by a journalist was whether or not it would be helpful to have a global “register of conspiracies,” at which Gluckman balked.  

“And so, does a register of conspiracy theories help or not? I’m not sure,” he said. “But as the experts on conspiracy theories … would suggest, just trying to confront conspiracy theory with rationality does not work. And there’s strong evidence of a strong correlation between distrust in the elites of society and a willingness to believe conspiracy theories.” 

Trust undermined by an ‘unending stream’ of ‘official lies’ proceeding from govt, international agencies, medical organizations, and media

Whether Gluckman and his colleagues would consider Dr. Robert Malone a “conspiracy theorist” is unknown as there is no such registry which would naturally have to specifically identify such individuals and theories, and then attempt to exercise rationality in demonstrating why they are erroneous.  

But with regard to citizens trusting the “elites,” Malone suggests it would be helpful if there was not such a well-documented track record of those in power issuing so many “lies” over the last couple of years and he provided the following sample of such blatant falsehoods in a May 19 column:  

• SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than influenza virus by several orders of magnitude. 
• Everyone has a significant risk of death from COVID-19. 
• No one has immunity, because this virus is new (“novel”) and so expedited vaccine development and deployment is essential. 
• Everyone is dangerous and spreads the infection. 
• Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread of disease. 
• Locking down- closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel will stop/eliminate the virus. 
• Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread. 
• Immune protection can only be obtained with a vaccine.  
• Natural immunity conferred by infection and recovery is short lived and inferior to vaccine-induced immunity. 

The elites Malone identifies as being responsible for these lies include present and former U.S. federal COVID-19 Response officials Drs. Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, and Francis Collins. 

In a peer-reviewed Surgical Neurology International paper published April 22, neurosurgeon Dr. Russel Blaylock also compiles a generous selection of “official lies” regarding the COVID-19 eventwhich also had the effect of destroying public trust. These lies proceeded “in an unending stream led by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies” such as the ISC and WHO. 

In his section titled “Tools of the indoctrination trade” Blaylock provides a description of the “‘fact-check’ scam” listing a sample of 17 propositions which were identified by such outlets as “misinformation” or “conspiracy theories” but which were later proven to be true. Five examples of these include the following: 

• Early treatment could have saved the lives of most of the 700,000 who died [in the U.S.]. 
• The vaccines cannot protect adequately against new variants, such as Delta and Omicron. 
• The unvaccinated will be denied employment. 
• Hundreds of thousands have been killed by the vaccines and many times more have been permanently damaged. 
• The spike protein from the vaccine enters the nucleus of the cell, altering cell DNA repair function. 

“Today, extensive evidence has confirmed that each of these so-called ‘myths’ were in fact true,” Blaylock wrote. 

Indiana AG shows how govt disinformation was used to violate intrinsic human rights and also shattered trust 

To cite another example of lies from “elites” that destroyed public trust, in early May, Todd Rokita, Attorney General of the State of Indiana, replied to a public solicitation from Biden Administration Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy requesting “stories and research on #HealthMisinformation.” 

Global COVID Summit Declaration Representing 17,000 Physicians and Medical Scientists

With epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya, Ph.D., a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., senior research fellow at the Brownstone Institute and former professor at Harvard University School of Medicine, Rokita issued a formal response detailing examples of misinformation proceeding from the CDC itself and other official health organizations.  

The letter included the following nine areas of government disinformation, inaccuracy, and harmful policy which the authors assert “have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.” 

• Overcounting COVID-19 
• Questioning Natural Immunity 
• COVID-19 Vaccines Prevent Transmission
• School Closures Were Effective and Costless
• Everyone is equally at risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 infection
• There was no reasonable policy alternative to lockdowns
• Mask mandates are effective in reducing the spread of viral infectious diseases
• Mass testing of asymptomatic individuals and contact tracing of positive cases is effective in reducing disease spread
• The eradication of COVID-19 is a feasible goal 

Such government misinformation also provided a pretense for authorities to violate intrinsic human rights by mandating injections of experimental gene-based vaccines and the use of “vaccine passports,” not to mention the imposition of disastrous lockdowns, school closures, and other policies that “were themselves harmful,” the authors wrote. 

Rokita and his colleagues also accused the public health officials of ignoring obvious data and evidence regarding the transmissibility and lethality of COVID-19 in an effort to precisely impose these harmful public health policies. 

‘Elites’ hide behind implicit conspiracy theories to dismiss contrary judgement of thousands of medical experts 

Lacking any specifics to support his sweeping assertions, it remains unclear if Gluckman would consider these presentations as part of what he called “the misinformation world,” though they sharply challenge the messages proceeding from his agency, the WHO, and what he refers to as many other “elites.” 

It’s also unclear what his assessment would be of the Global Covid Summit (GCS), a coalition of over 17,000 doctors and scientists who in mid-May released a statement and hosted a press conference outlining ten foundational principles which generally affirm the critiques above including the following declarations:  

• The COVID-19 experimental genetic therapy injections must end.  
• Doctors should not be blocked from providing life-saving [early] medical treatment.  
• The state of national emergency, which facilitates corruption and extends the pandemic, should be immediately terminated.  
• Medical privacy should never again be violated, and all travel and social restrictions must cease.  
• Masks are not and have never been effective protection against an airborne respiratory virus in the community setting.  
• Funding and research must be established for vaccination damage, death and suffering.  
• No opportunity should be denied, including education, career, military service or medical treatment, over unwillingness to take an injection.  
• First amendment violations and medical censorship by government, technology and media companies should cease, and the Bill of Rights [in the U.S.] be upheld.  
• Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, Janssen, Astra Zeneca, and their enablers, withheld and willfully omitted safety and effectiveness information from patients and physicians, and should be immediately indicted for fraud.  
• Government and medical agencies must be held accountable.  

These thousands of medical and scientific professionals, who claim to represent many more, call the COVID enterprise an “orchestrated catastrophe” with officials “generating an illusion of scientific consensus by substituting truth with propaganda,” all of which, and more, “constitute nothing less than crimes against humanity.” 

Such a presentation, one may assume, Gluckman and his colleagues would include in their condemnation of “the misinformation world.” Yet it would seem for such a charge to be plausible one would have to accept the theory that these thousands of medical professionals are not sincere in their conclusions but are rather colluding (or “conspiring”) against actual scientific truth.  

In other words, instead of addressing such arguments directly, or better yet, accepting even a lucrative million-dollar payment from entrepreneur–turned–journalist Steve Kirsch to demonstrate how these researchers are part of the “misinformation world,” Gluckman and his colleagues themselves ironically and implicitly advance conspiracy theories. 

Globalist Orwellian doublespeak: ‘Dialogue’ and ‘social listening’ actually mean censorship  

But the Orwellian nature of the ISC presser came into even greater relief when WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan assessed the situation calling for a greater degree of “dialogue,” which, upon her description, really meant censorship. 

“I think as scientists we need to think about how we communicate. We have to adapt. We are used to speaking with each other. We don’t often have a conversation with the public at large,” reflected the pediatrician and native of India. “So, I think rather than speaking one way, it has to be a dialogue. 

“And one of the things we’ve started at the WHO is something that we call ‘social listening,’” she said. “So, we are monitoring all of these [social media] platforms to see what people are talking about. So that very early on you can pick up maybe the start of a new conspiracy or some misinformation that started circulating.” 

“And we are addressing it in two ways: One is working with all these big technology platforms … to make sure that they have in their algorithms a process whereby they direct people to credible sources of information rather than to conspiracy theory websites,” she said. 

“Secondly, we also flag them when we find misinformation so that they can take down those videos. And that’s happened over the last two years. And I think there’s been a very good response from the technology companies. So, I think that’s the first thing: to learn how to communicate and use modern technology to do that,” concluded Swaminathan. 

Many representatives of the GCS have been censored by big tech companies over the last two years. Early in the pandemic, the highly credentialed internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough had a video describing his peer-reviewed paper on treatments of COVID-19 pulled down from YouTube. Dr. Richard Urso with America’s Frontline Doctors also had their viral July 2020 press conference removed, and Dr. Robert Malone was banned from Twitter late last year. 

For these reasons, the thousands of physicians and medical scientists of GCS declared point eight above, that “first amendment violations and medical censorship by government, technology and media companies should cease, and the Bill of Rights be upheld.”

Speaking on their behalf, physician-scientist and neuroendocrinologist Dr. Fady Hannah-Shmouni, MD, FRCPC of Canada, condemned (44:33) the “medical censorship” which was inflicted upon medical professionals “that wanted to speak the truth about various medical information and research pertaining to the pandemic.” He called this a violation of medical “ethical standards” which remains a disservice to patients and communities as it undermines their ability to exercise genuine informed consent.  

Yet the ISC globalist panel appears committed to advocating for much more censorship. A seemingly exasperated Gluckman lamented the “huge challenge” of “the increasingly digitally embraced world where the ability to spread disinformation is so easy.” Confronting this challenge requires “massive work,” he said, between “scientists and the policy community.” 

WHO aims for ‘seamless’ authority over global health systems, civil society, nations 

In focusing on their work to expand globalist power, Swaminathan advocated for authorities to “reform the whole architecture, the global architecture” of “the multilateral system.” Looking ahead toward an upcoming session of the World Health Assembly (WHA) which happened on May 22-28, she said “it’s important that the multilateral system continues to be strong, that the WHO is further strengthened and given the power, as well as the accountability and the financing to do its job properly.” 

The WHA with its 194 member states is the governing body of the WHO. On their agenda last month were amendments offered by the Biden Administration which, in the words of journalist James Roguski, would “take away limitation on [the powers of the] WHO.” Such an arrangement would turn their Director-General into a “Dictator-General” with the legal power to declare a global state of emergency merely on his own authority, with regional directors being able to do the same in their seven respective regions around the world. 

Such designations could trigger impositions of any or all of the draconian measures imposed on societies over the last two years, including lockdowns, masking, testing the uninfected, social distancing, use of the inaccurate PCR test, contact tracing, etc., which have been shown to be of little or no use in preventing spread of the virus while causing immeasurable damage to populations worldwide.  

Along these lines, Swaminathan appeared to advocate for the WHO becoming the legal decision-maker with regard to pandemic response for health systems across the world as well. Utilizing delicate language, she said the health industry’s emergency response should be “seamlessly coordinated at the national level, but also at the regional and global level” while such “coordination” naturally renders national and regional levels subservient to the higher-order global organization when it comes to so-called mitigation efforts. 

Mami Mizutori, another panelist at the presser, from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, expanded this concept touting the necessity of global authority to direct this “comprehensive risk management where we break down silos of government sectors, and we all work together.” And not just national and local governments, “but also the civil society, the private sector, the media and ultimately each individual that we work together to tackle risk.” 

Vice president of the ISC, Salim Abdool Karim, echoed this sentiment as well declaring that every single nation, without exception, must “as a global society … stand together. There is no scenario in this world that sees a few countries or some countries mitigating and suppressing the virus while it is spreading rampantly in others. We have to be able to come together in … supporting each other in a common goal of suppressing, mitigating and ultimately controlling this virus.” 

‘Dynamic silence’ utilized to suppress massive evidence and experts, victory at the WHA

As Blaylock wrote, this messaging in favor of such global totalitarian impositions remains unchanged by these agencies regardless of any level of evidence exposing their futility against the virus and their catastrophic consequences on populations. The neurosurgeon wrote:  

 Some states ignored these draconian orders and had either the same or fewer cases, as well as deaths, as the states with the most strictly enforced measures. Again, no amount of evidence or obvious demonstration along these lines had any effect on ending these socially destructive measures. Even when entire countries, such as Sweden, which avoided all these measures, demonstrated equal rates of infections and hospitalization as nations with the strictest, very draconian measures, no policy change by the controlling institutions occurred. No amount of evidence changed anything. 

The strategy of these global and otherwise governmental health and media organizations is evidently one of “dynamic silence”: simply pretending massive evidence against their narrative doesn’t exist, nor do the voices of the tens of thousands of competent medical and scientific professionals who publicly repudiate their agenda as damaging, massively deadly, and as thus, “crimes against humanity.” 

The other aspect of this strategy is to suppress and censor these voices in public discourse, or within institutions, even through intimidation in the medical systems themselves and by threatening, firing, or suspending the medical licenses of doctors who present compelling evidence contradicting the authoritative narrative. 

Yet, former high-tech entrepreneur turned journalist Steve Kirsch has attempted to propose several solutions to the impasse between the globalist health authorities and the many groups of thousands of other physicians and scientists who have presented enormous amounts of evidence which sharply contradicts the position of the public health establishment.  

On numerous occasions Kirsch has even offered to pay qualified individuals of standing, including the likes of Gluckman, Swaminathan, Karim, Mizutori, Fauci, Birx and Collins millions of dollars to come and explain to a team of experts, including Malone, McCullough, and former Pfizer vice president, Dr. Michael Yeadon, why their understanding of the data on these several subjects is erroneous.  

Needless to say, thus far “they [have] all refused,” Kirsch wrote in January. “It’s so hard to give away a million dollars nowadays.”  

In correspondence with an ISC spokeswoman, LifeSiteNews (LSN) asked if Dr. Gluckman would be willing to put together a group of experts to correct and / or debate such a team, including GCS members, assembled by Kirsch. LSN also asked if the ISC would go on record alleging any of these individuals challenging their narrative, mentioned above, to be “conspiracy theorists” or spreaders of “misinformation.” 

Despite Gluckman’s stated insistence on prioritizing “plurality to input” when “discussing a crisis like this,” and his touting the “extraordinarily inclusive process” which brought about the newly released document of his organization, a response was not received from the ISC by the deadline for publication. 

If and when a response is received, we will provide an update here. 

In the meantime, due to the initial intervention of the landlocked nation of Botswana in Southern Africa, followed by several other nations, the Biden Administration’s proposed amendments offered at the WHA late last month were defeated by several countries, including Brazil, Brunei, Namibia, Bangladesh, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Iran, with Brazil stating they would exit the WHO altogether rather than allow its citizens to be subjected to the hostile new powers of such a “dictator-general.”