https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/23/us-officials-really-really-want-you-to-know-the-us-is-the-worlds-leader/
US Officials Really, REALLY Want You To Know The US Is The World’s “Leader”
In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the “leader” of the world.
Here are excerpts from his comments:
- “The two countries have grown closer. But they are both countries that chafe and bristle at U.S. leadership around the world.”
- “And in China’s case in particular, they certainly would like to challenge U.S. leadership around the world.“
- “But these are not two countries that have, you know, decades-long experience working together and full trust and confidence. It’s a burgeoning of late based on America’s increasing leadership around the world and trying to check that.”
- “Peter, these are two countries that have long chafed, as I said to Jeff — long chafed at U.S. leadership around the world and the network of alliances and partnerships that we have.”
- “And we work on those relationships one at a time, because every country on the continent is different, has different needs and different expectations of American leadership.”
- “That’s the power of American convening leadership. And you don’t see that power out of either Russia or China.”
- “But one of the reasons why you’re seeing that tightening relationship is because they recognize that they don’t have that strong foundation of international support for what they’re trying to do, which is basically challenge American leadership around the world.”
The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.
We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.
US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.
The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”
Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.
I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.
The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.
It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no valid reason why the US needs to remain in charge of the world and can’t just let different people in different regions sort out their own affairs like they always did before. There’s no valid reason why governments need to be brandishing armageddon weapons at each other instead of collaborating peacefully in the interest of all humankind. We’re being pushed toward disaster to preserve “American leadership around the world,” and I for one do not consent to this.
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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/circus_politics_are_intended_to_distract_us_dont_be_distracted
Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us. Don’t Be Distracted
“There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.”—Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor
It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted.
Don’t be fooled, not even a little.
We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.
We are being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.
The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
No matter who has occupied the White House in recent years, the Deep State has succeeded in keeping the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats.
After all, as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.
Unfortunately, what we are facing is tyranny in every form.
The facts speak for themselves.
We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking Americans’ personal property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity and keeping it for their own profit and gain. In one case, police seized more than $17,000 in cash from two sisters who were trying to start a dog breeding business. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police held onto the money for months. Homeowners are losing their homes over unpaid property taxes (as little as $2300 owed) that amount to a fraction of what they have invested in their homes. And then there’s the Drug Enforcement Agency, which has been searching train and airline passengers and pocketing their cash, without ever charging them with a crime.
We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. Journalist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps the plight of the American citizen. More often than not, the legislation lands the citizenry in worse straits.
We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”
We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, along with its corporate partners, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”
We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong—more than 80,000 annually—that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches—in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially lethal—and unwarranted—use of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on children for “mouthing off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”
We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs and now domestic extremism, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have not ended terrorism but merely sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have caught few terrorists while subjecting all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have done little to decrease crime while turning communities into warzones. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists and politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.
We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army. As if it weren’t enough that the American military empire stretches around the globe (and continues to leech much-needed resources from the American economy), the U.S. government is creating its own standing army of militarized police and teams of weaponized, federal bureaucrats. These civilian employees are being armed to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; authorized to make arrests; and trained in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly no friend to freedom.
To our detriment, the criminal class that Mark Twain mockingly referred to as Congress has since expanded to include every government agency that feeds off the carcass of our once-constitutional republic.
The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to hold the government accountable or express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.
Consider it: the penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, you will go to jail. In some circumstances, if you even attempt to approach your elected representative to voice your discontent, you can be arrested and jailed.
You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
We no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Rather, what we have is a government of wolves.
For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now unjust.
We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.
How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.
For the moment, the American people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that passes for politics today. It’s the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
As French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie observed half a millennium ago:
“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”
The bait towards slavery. The price of liberty. The instruments of tyranny.
Yes, that sounds about right.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “We the people” have learned only too well how to be slaves.
....
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/dissent-into-madness-crazy-conspiracy
Dissent Into Madness: Crazy Conspiracy Theorists
In "Dissent Into Madness: The Weaponization of Psychiatry," I told the long and sordid history of how the study of the mind has been used to suppress political opposition and subdue unruly segments of the population—not just in the "enemy states" of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or communist Cuba, but in England and the US and the rest of the "free and democratic West" as well. I also looked at specific examples of how this was accomplished and named names of some of the figures who had a hand in forging this psychiatric weapon.
With that history in mind, this week I will explore how the public has been trained to accept the pathologization of those peskiest of dissenters, the conspiracy realists. I will also explain how the trigger has already been pulled on this psychiatric weapon and how it is impacting those who dare question the motives of our would-be rulers.
Are you ready? Let's begin . . .
Pathologizing Conspiracy
One of the most popular articles to be written in recent decades is titled "Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?"
It starts by noting the worrying rise in the number of people who believe in wild, outlandish theories about how people in positions of power conspire to maintain their influence and expand their wealth.
The article's author then cites a psychologist, who explains that well-meaning but emotionally unstable people typically latch on to these fantastical conspiracy theories because they help these poor, deluded souls make sense of the world and offer them a feeling of control over an uncontrollable world.
Next, the report offers advice to those who are seeking to disabuse anyone who has fallen for this conspiracy claptrap of their delusional notions. That advice, it turns out, is the same admonition given to someone coming upon a wild animal in the jungle: don't confront the target directly or make them angry; speak to them in soothing tones and pretend to listen to what they're saying; and disengage if it seems they're preparing to attack.
But this article usually ends on a positive note: if this wild conspiracy theorist you're talking to hasn't yet lost touch with reality, then it may be possible to talk them down from the ledge. You can gently create some cognitive dissonance in their mind by pointing out that every conspiracy that has ever occurred in history has been exposed by whistleblowers and reported on by journalists, and therefore there is no such thing as a secret conspiracy. If they are of sound mind, this will be enough. Your confused friend will see the light and learn to trust government and authority once again.
Do you want to read this article? Would you like a link? Well, I don't have one link for you; I have dozens.
You see, the curious thing about this "Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?" article is that it hasn't been written just once or twice. It's been written hundreds of times by hundreds of different journalists, and it's been published by the BBC and FiveThirtyEight and Vox and the American Psychological Association and The New York Times and PsychCentral and Addiction Center and LSU and Technology Review and National Geographic and verywellmind and Business Insider and Psychology Today and Harvard and LiveScience and Scientific [sic] American and NBC News and The Conversation and Intelligencer and Time and The Guardian and Popular Mechanics and even that most prestigious of journalistic institutions, goop. (Yes, goop!)
And it's not only in written form. It's also a video report that's been filed by the CBC and Channel 4 and CNBC and Channel 4 (again) and DNews and StarTalk and 60 Minutes and Time and DNews (again) and Big Think and Al Jazeera and the Weekly and Tech Insider and Inverse and Dr. Todd Grande and euronews and CBS News and The University of Chicago.
Oh, and did I mention it's also a podcast? Well, it is, and it's been produced by Ava Lassiter and NPR and Radio Times and NPR (again) and LSE and Bill Gates and NPR (again again) and The Anthill and Speaking of Psychology and NPR (again again again) and Big Brains and NPR (again again again again).
So, are you starting to formulate a hypothesis that there may be some grand scheme afoot here? Do you find yourself speculating that perhaps (just perhaps) there might be a coordinated effort to pathologize conspiracy theorists in order to justify locking them away in padded cells?
Do you find it interesting that the terms "conspiracy theory" and "mental disorder" were forever linked in the public imagination when Richard Hofstadter penned his infamous 1964 essay in Harper's Magazine, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"? Or that the best-remembered passage from that essay is the one in which he describes the "style of mind" behind the conspiracy-prone, populist political movement of his era as "the paranoid style" because "no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind"? Or that his caveats to that "diagnosis"—namely, that "I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes" and that "I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics"—are largely forgotten?
Then the dinosaur media pundits and their psychiatric "experts" have a message for you: "Shut Up, Conspiracy Theorist!, or we're going to put you in a straitjacket!"
Don't believe me? Well . . .
First They Came for the Truthers . . .
The idea that those who believe in conspiracy theories are mentally unsound is, of course, not a new one.
Witness how the subject was treated on Barney Miller, a popular American television sitcom from the late 1970s that centered on the exploits of a cast of detectives in a New York City Police Department station house. In one episode from 1981, a man is arrested for breaking into the offices of the Trilateral Commission because, as he explains in an impassioned speech that is bizarrely punctuated by canned laughter, "what they are really up to is a scheme to plant their own loyal members in positions of power in this country; to work to erase national boundaries and create an international community; and, in time, bring about a one world government, with David Rockefeller calling the shots!"
The man then presents his evidence of this conspiracy in the form of articles in periodicals like Conspiracy Review and Suppressed Truth Round-up. Barney Miller's sneering reaction (along with the ever-present laugh track) is enough for the viewer to understand that this burglar—and, by implication, anyone who harbours similar views about the Trilateral Commission or other globalist institutions—is a delusional criminal who deserves to be locked up for those beliefs.
Or take the "tin foil hat" conceit. As the crack journalists over at Vice helpfully explain, the concept of wearing a tin foil hat to protect one's brain from government mind control was introduced into popular culture via Julian Huxley's 1927 story, "The Tissue-Culture King." In Huxley's tale, "caps of metal foil" are used to mitigate the effects of a mad scientist's telepathic hypnosis experiment. Since then, the "tin foil hat-wearing madman" has gone on to become a ubiquitous pop culture trope, employed by lazy TV writers as an easy way to signal to the audience that someone is suffering from paranoid delusions about vast government conspiracies.
Or take President Lyndon Johnson's advisor, John P. Roche, who wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement that was picked up and reported on by Time in January of 1968. In the letter, Roche dismisses conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination as the gospel of "a priesthood of marginal paranoids" and declares such theories "an assault on the sanity of American society, and I believe in its fundamental sanity."
Or take the various examples of the pathologization of conspiracy theorizing pointed out by Lance deHaven-Smith in his modern-day classic, Conspiracy Theory in America:
Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy-theory label is employed routinely to dismiss a wide range of antigovernment suspicions as symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness. For example, in a massive book published in 2007 on the assassination of President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who doubt the Warren Commission report are “as kooky as a three dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia.” Similarly, in his recently published book Among the Truthers (Harper’s, 2011), Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a similar point, if more colorfully, in his popular book Wingnuts, journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as "moonbats," "Hatriots," "wingnuts," and the "Fright Wing."
Certainly, there is no shortage of commentators perpetuating the idea that conspiracy theorizing is a form of mental illness. But it wasn't until the post-9/11 era of terrornoia panic accompanying the rise of the Homeland Security state that the trigger was pulled on the loaded gun that is the psychiatric weapon.
Of course, the post-9/11 decade was filled with academics, journalists and talking heads of various stripes conflating conspiracy theorizing with mental illness, exactly as the pre-9/11 era had been. Heeding Bush the Younger's injunction to "never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th," political commentators of all stripes began a campaign of vitriol directed against 9/11 truthers that began to ratchet the conspiracy/insanity rhetoric to new heights.
Bill Maher's "joke" that truthers should "stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you" helped to ferilize the soil for the likes of Winnipeg Sun columnist Stephen Ripley, who then "diagnosed" 9/11 truthers as suffering from "paranoid delusions." These pronouncements prepared the public for the fulminations of TV talking heads on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum that "necrotizing conspiracy theory radicalism" is a danger to society and that the crazy truthers perpetuating these delusions need to be treated as potential terrorists.
But the campaign to demonize 9/11 truthers as psychologically disturbed and potentially violent criminals who need to be taken off the streets has not stopped at harsh words and strong rhetoric. Institutions and authorities have now begun trying to literally declare truthers and other "conspiracy theorists" as insane as a way of silencing political dissent.
Corona Insanity
There's just one problem for those hoping for a conspiracy theorist round-up: many countries have adopted standards that—at least on paper—make it impossible to commit someone to psychiatric incarceration without their consent unless they pose a demonstrable and immediate risk of harm to themselves or to others. These countries aren't Soviet Russia, after all.
However, as readers of these pages will know only too well, these types of rules and safeguards are only as reliable as the integrity of those who are supposed to uphold and enforce them. And, unfortunately for us, those same officials instead often skirt them at the behest of the politically powerful.
Many examples of conspiracy theorists being held for psychiatric evaluation against their will could be cited here, but one case from The Corbett Report archives will serve to make the point. It's the case of Claire Swinney, a New Zealand journalist who in 2006 was—in her own words—"Held In A Psychiatric Ward & Called 'Delusional' For Saying 9/11 Was An Inside Job."
Swinney's story—which she recounted in an interview on The Corbett Report in 2009—is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is her harrowing account of how quickly a series of seemingly disconnected problems and concerns—a series of threats that she had received for her fearless reporting on big pharma and her 9/11 truth advocacy in the New Zealand press, a bout of insomnia, an off-hand comment that was misinterpreted as a suicidal statement—escalated into full-on forced detention in a psychiatric ward.
Secondly, there is her revelation that those who were supposed to be acting in her interest—a police officer, various social workers, the chief psychiatrist in the psychiatric ward—would not even listen to her when she tried to present evidence for her belief that 9/11 was an inside job.
But for those who believe in the legal safeguards that exist to prevent the abuse of the psychiatric weapon, the most concerning fact of all is that Swinney's remarkable 11-day ordeal in forcible psychiatric confinement—a confinement that included forced medication—was that it occurred in direct contravention of the New Zealand government's own laws. In fact, not only does the country's Mental Health Act clearly state that forcible psychiatric detention is not permitted if it is based solely on a person's political beliefs, but, as Swinney notes, the medical personnel who authorized her confinement weren't even familiar with this provision.
The compulsory psychiatric confinement of someone with no history of mental illness solely for expressing a belief in 9/11 truth is shocking enough. That this detention took place not in the United States and not in the immediate aftermath of the events, but in New Zealand some five years later, defies justification.
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. As we enter the biosecurity era, authorities around the world are working to set the precedent that people who resist the medical authorities' diktats can be diagnosed as mentally ill, stripped of their professional credentials and even arrested.
An example of this phenomenon that should be familiar to those in The Corbett Report audience is that of Dr. Meryl Nass. Dr. Nass is an internal medicine specialist with 42 years of medical experience who had her medical license suspended by the Board of Licensure in Medicine, Maine's state medical regulator, for refusing to toe the government-approved line on COVID-19 treatments. Incredibly, in addition to suspending her medical license, state regulators also ordered her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for the thoughtcrime of disbelieving the government's COVID narrative.
One of the most startling stories of psychiatric intimidation of a COVID skeptic, however, is that of Dr. Thomas Binder. Dr. Binder is a cardiologist who has had a private medical practice in Switzerland for 24 years. As Taylor Hudak reported for The Last American Vagabond late last year, Dr. Binder's life was turned upside down in 2020 when he found he could not sit idly by while the entire medical profession lost its collective mind.
In February 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Binder advocated for the return of ethics and science in the field of medicine. He spoke out against unscientific restrictions, mandates, the flawed PCR testing, etc., on his personal website and social media. Dr. Binder says it was his duty as a doctor to inform the public of the truth about COVID-19.
On Thursday April 9, 2020, Dr. Binder posted a blog to his website, which provided a thorough analysis of COVID-19 and the various unscientific measures implemented at that time. The blog post went viral, receiving 20,000 views, and Dr. Binder was hopeful his post may calm the public and initiate the end to the restrictions and mandates.
However, the post caught the attention of two colleagues, who alerted the Chief of State Police, claiming that Dr. Binder was a supposed threat to himself and the government. Two days later, on April 11, 2020, the day before Easter Sunday, Dr. Binder was brutally confronted by a total of 60 armed police officers including 20 officers with the Kantonspolizei Aargau’s anti-terrorism unit, ARGUS.
To those who remain ignorant of the history of psychiatry's use as a weapon of political oppression, this is incomprehensible enough. But what happened next almost defies belief, even among those of us already in the know.
After studying Binder's blog posts and emails, the police determined that there were no grounds for issuing an arrest warrant. Nonetheless, they did send Dr. Binder for a mental health evaluation. Incredibly, the doctor in charge of Binder's psychiatric evaluation invented a diagnosis of "corona insanity" and ordered him to be placed in a psychiatric unit. After a period of evaluation, Binder was offered an ultimatum: remain in the psychiatric hospital for six weeks or return home on condition that he take a neuroleptic medication.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
The incredible and flagrantly illegal actions taken in the forcible psychiatric detention of "conspiracy theorists" and political dissenters like Swinney and Binder serve more than one purpose. Beyond temporarily sidelining the person in question (both Swinney and Binder returned to their work critiquing government narratives after their release) and beyond throwing their public reputation into doubt by forever associating their names with a false psychiatric diagnosis, the wielders of the psychiatric weapon achieve something of even greater value when they engage in such tactics. That is, the stories of these psychiatric detentions serve as warnings to the general public: when you dissent on sensitive political issues, you risk being institutionalized for your beliefs.
Rationally speaking, it is utterly implausible to lock in a padded cell everyone who subscribes to a conspiracy theory. Even establishment sources readily admit that 50% of the public believe in some conspiracy or other, including the 49% of New Yorkers who, in 2004, claimed that the US government "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act," and including the whopping 81% of Americans who declared in 2001 that they believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
But unfortunately for us, those who are brandishing this psychiatric weapon are not rational at all. In fact, as we shall see next week, those in political power who seek to diagnose their critics with mental illness are themselves suffering from one of the greatest psychopathologies of them all. . . .
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