this is an interesting question you pose. the reflexive answer is that censorship "allowed" the mandates to happen but that's a bit too simplistic. i was able to find alternative information; it's out there even if it takes a bit of digging.
i'm reminded of something my friend said recently. she and her husband were subjects in the moderna trials but she called me for help getting her mother IVM when she had covid. she was telling me that she intended to get the bivalent booster as soon as it was approved and my dismay was obvious. "you read different things than i read," she answered.
i wanted to say "but you don't read at all." of course i see all the stuff about how great the vaccines are; you'd have to be blind and deaf to miss it. but i also see what's going on around me even if i didn't have access to malone, berenson (they disagree), mcCollough, RFK jr and Del Bigtree. in fact i never listened to or even heard of most of those people UNTIL i became suspicious of the vaccine. then i sought them out.
sure you give a child a cartoon bandage when they're afraid of needles, but donuts and lottery tickets for adults? and when the carrots failed to work- the sticks. i lost my job, my passion of 40 years over my refusal to take a shot. but in the previous 39 years, no one had ever checked my medical records. they might have guessed what i would do based on my prior insistence that the tetanus shot requirement boilerplate language be stricken from my contract.
my Moderna friend had a bad bout of Delta followed by a bout of Omicron and she called me to ask for advice and, like i said before, for help getting IVM to her unvaccinated best friend and later her mother. surely she saw how the wonders attributed to the vaccines kept being downgraded. the back pedaling, the shifting goal posts.
for her to say that i read different stuff (i.e., fringe, alternate, conspiracy theory) while she reads mainstream based on "Science" and "Truth" is kind of a lazy man's excuse.
but the reality is this: EVEN IF COVID HAD BEEN AS DEADLY AS THEY SAID IT WAS AND THE VACCINES AS EFFECTIVE AND SAFE AS ADVERTISED, the mandates still would not have been justified. they are unconstitutional, they violate bodily autonomy. what rights do we have if we can't decide what to do with our own bodies?
then to see the My Body My Choice crowd advocate forced vaccination, the people you might expect to be most sympathetic to a refuseniks cause!!! "you have no right to spread your germs to me!" i might answer "Well, you have no right to deprive me of the future worker, cannon fodder and tax payer who is going to support me in my old age."
formerly intelligent people lost the ability to think, to reason, to see what was obvious to anyone with eyes and a few brain cells.
so i guess, yes. censorship violates the first amendment but the mandates violated something even more sacred
I’m so sorry you lost your job. And I couldn’t agree more — the my body my choice people were practically proud of their hypocrisy! Thank you so much for reading and commenting 🤍
Great points you make. You wrote: “the reflexive answer is that censorship "allowed" the mandates to happen but that's a bit too simplistic.” That statement by itself is correct, but I f throw on top of that the disgusting propaganda on top of censorship that allowed the mandates to happen. Listening to, not by choice, Rachel Maddow pontificate how safe and effective they were, and that you were a selfish person for not getting, or Don Lemon stating the people who aren’t will to get jabbed should lose their rights as citizens, is as dangerous as the censorship. My parents are in there 90’s, and I have a very large family that are all within the area. All are extremely influenced by what comes out of the Oracle(TV). I have said early that the only way to snap these people out of trance that they are in is to have the major talking heads to come out and say, “we were wrong, they aren’t as safe and effective as we once thought they were.”
well, i'm waiting for Rachel Madcow to publicly apologize and i do believe that her absurd video ("the virus STOPS with every vaccinated person") should be broadcast daily on all news outlets until she does!
yes the censorship was one thing; the propaganda/brainwashing was another. at one point i posted a quote from an actual holocaust survivor who compared what was happening now to the beginnings of what happened then. a colleague, someone who had worked at the Spoleto Festival for close to 30 years and who's ass i had pulled out of the fire on more than one occasion, wrote "you've gone too far this time. no one is pushing unvaccined people into ovens. the unvaccinated people are choosing to die!" (i guess by refusing the safe and effective shots).
this guy lives for most of the year in Germany where graffiti on store fronts read "Gas the unvaccinated" which is not a particularly good look, all things considered.
i was not choosing to die but rather choosing to own my body. in 1976 i watched my cousin's wife spend a year in a wheelchair with GBS after taking the swine flu vaccine; no amount of Oracle propaganda can make me unsee that and it has affected my medical decision making since Joe Rogan was a young boy. so i hotly dispute any attempts to blame my refusal to take this vaccine on him.
there were many- Don Lemon, the Emanuel brothers, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert (who i worked with at the Festival in 1982 and 1984 when he was a super in 2 productions and i lived with his in-laws for about 10 seasons), Howard Stern, Noam Chomsky, Leana Wen- and it seems to me that they cannot be forgiven. what they wished on people for the mere crime of not going along was heinous and not excusable by any extenuating circumstances.
my father died in Dec of 2019 shortly before this all started. he was 6 weeks shy of his 96th birthday and as a young man had run up a beach in Normandy. whenever i took him to the VA, he was treated like a hero. word would get out that there was an actual WW2 veteran in the building and extra doctors would come in to salute, nurses to flirt. whatever they offered him- new hearing aids, an enlarger to help him read- he would ask "how much does it cost?" and the doctor would reply, almost embarrassed, "Sir, you have paid for this and more with your service to our country and this is but a small installment of a debt that a grateful nation can never repay." i'm not much for the military but i would sob like a baby to see my dear father treated with such respect.
a little more than a year after his death and people were talking about denying benefits to veterans based on vaccination status. it nearly broke my heart. the deal my father made with the country was that his future medical care was pay back for services rendered, not for compliance to some standards TBD. i saw veterans there who were overweight, who smoked, who drank, who took drugs. some of them probably cheated on their wives and voted for the "wrong" guy and were less then perfect but no one evaluated their behavior in the decades since their service and denied them benefits because of it.
suddenly, an open ended contingency, a new deal: your benefits are no longer based on past service but rather on future obedience. your rights did not come from some higher power as enumerated in the constitution but from an intrusive government that monitors your behavior and decides minute by minute what you may or may not do depending on how completely you went along with a never ending series of demands!
when i worked in NYC, my shop was asked to make costumes for Aladdin. the Disney contract specified that they could use my likeness and the likenesses of my employees for any purpose in "any technologies that exist now or may exist in the future throughout the known and unknown universe."
i e-mailed them back. "what is this, cyber slavery? here's the deal: i make costumes, you pay me. that's the sum total of our relationship. i'm not helping you advertise on Mars or anything. isn't it presumptuous to talk about known and unknown universes stretching out into an endless future when thanks to the greed of corporations like Disney, mankind may not make it another 50 years?"
they sent my e-mail to their legal department and another contract was drafted for my shop and we made the costumes.
you cannot let these people get an inch. one shot becomes two, becomes 5, becomes annual, becomes necessary for you to have medical care or a job or a credit card. i hardly recognize my country these days. it seems my father braved that beach for no reason at all.
You go girl. If you’re not writing articles/post on Substack you should be. Sounds like you’ve got something to say. I use to take my father to the VA and loved to see how they treated him. He was in the Korean War. He transitioned 2 years ago, he was 92. He didn’t die of Covid, he died because of Covid. He was in a recovery facility and the Covid Plandemic was around 9-10 months old. They we’re putting the pressure on that no one could come into the facility to see him except my mother. He died of loneliness. We could wave at him from a window, but he was a hugger. It was the most ridiculous scene, the day he transitioned he had 7 grand children 4 sons and a daughter, with all there spouse looking in a window as my mother’s in hazmat suit not even being able to kiss him goodbye.
You should get together with my sister and write a screenplay about your life. She’s been in that business for 25+ years.
thank you for your encouragement. i'm now weeping about your father. mine passed in his own bed. we lived together and did everything together. i had given him a shower and helped him into bed. i tucked him in and suddenly i had a sense that something was wrong. he passed right there in his bed with me in the room. everyone said it was the best possible way one could go and i know that to be true but still, i miss him terribly. although he would be miserable to see what the world has become.
i'm so very sorry that your father was denied a gracious exit. i know many who passed in similarly horrible ways. i wonder that their survivors can ever get beyond that.
Lockdowns and mandates were assaults on the body. Censorship is an assault on both the truth and your mind. I think maybe there isn’t a “correct” answer. Each individual has to decide for themselves which was worse.
I don't use Twitter but Alex also posted to his substack and this is what I said in response to a post that listed failure to attempt early intervention and treatment: "I actually think this is a close second to the mandates. As sadistic as denying treatment was/is it primarily affected the elderly, and I do believe that was barbaric, but in many ways the mandates have focused on the young. They targeted school children, college students, athletes, military, and first responders. Even pregnant women were coerced into compliance. Healthy humans at no significant risk, with very little to gain but much to lose. "
I would never deny how evil censorship is but it was fear that stopped people from talking about their vaccine hesitancy. Even in the darkest days of mandate coercion there was a handful of people I looked forward to crossing paths with because I knew we would talk about how crazy this shit is. Even if you were not inclined to seek out reliable sources or to investigate for yourself, the lies were glaringly obvious. From the beginning the vaccinators weren't trying to be convincing so much as intimidating.
Yes, withholding the lifesaving treatment & then putting people on ventilators not because they needed it but because of the CARES Act kickback! Insanity. And murder. Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Somewhat related to censorship, but also worth considering, is the propaganda assault. You could see the vax/mandate train a comin' from a mile away, but we still couldn't stop it.
Oh yeah — I linked in the piece to a writer who outlined the most outrageous examples of propaganda. It was surreal! Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Excellent post. I was a bit annoyed by the Berenson poll (and didn't respond), since all three sins were egregious. What's the point of trying to rank them? Seemed to me like a useless and largely irrelevant question. And BTW, as a case in point about your active vs. just-have-one comment regarding Twitter accounts, I never, ever use mine -- and only set it up (years ago) to research Twitter as part of an article on social media I was writing.
Interesting — yeah, twitter attracts a certain (not run of the mill) personality type but even then, it’s such a time suck that it ends up being a waste of time if no one interacts with you! Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Thanks for another very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay. I had trouble deciding between mandates and censorship when I voted, but finally decided on censorship. You have helped me to think more deeply about this, and I'm still torn between the two.
One thing I would say in support of choosing censorship on the poll is that in my opinion, censorship --and certainly as it has been practiced during this psyop--encompasses more than just suppressing voices on social media platforms such as twitter. It has involved all manner of communication and all venues. Teachers on all levels of education, and certainly in universities and colleges, have been muzzled and forced to indoctrinate their students with the "correct" covid narrative (Mark Crispin Miller's experience is just one example). Almost all forms media have focused on amplifying the frightening narrative 24/7, saturating consciousness and dulling the consciences with messages encouraging division and hatred (as you point out), while drowning out and demonizing the voices of those with alternative opinions and information. The propaganda was everywhere, posters in the subways and on buses, signs in stores, masks on faces.
You discussed these things in the essay, but treated them as separate from censorship, but I believe they are integral to it. The overwhelming and never-ending force of these messages, as well as the suppression and demonization of alternative sources of information, is the major reason why most of us have found it almost impossible to get information through to friends and family members who to this day will not consider looking at the information we offer them and continue to put their lives in danger playing spikeshot roulette.
Yes, it is very much a character issue as well, and I am hard put to have patience with those who refuse to see the obvious, who maintain a willful blindness I find incomprehensible, but then I remind myself of the myriad ways they have been denied (or tricked into denying themselves) access to the truth.
this is an interesting question you pose. the reflexive answer is that censorship "allowed" the mandates to happen but that's a bit too simplistic. i was able to find alternative information; it's out there even if it takes a bit of digging.
i'm reminded of something my friend said recently. she and her husband were subjects in the moderna trials but she called me for help getting her mother IVM when she had covid. she was telling me that she intended to get the bivalent booster as soon as it was approved and my dismay was obvious. "you read different things than i read," she answered.
i wanted to say "but you don't read at all." of course i see all the stuff about how great the vaccines are; you'd have to be blind and deaf to miss it. but i also see what's going on around me even if i didn't have access to malone, berenson (they disagree), mcCollough, RFK jr and Del Bigtree. in fact i never listened to or even heard of most of those people UNTIL i became suspicious of the vaccine. then i sought them out.
sure you give a child a cartoon bandage when they're afraid of needles, but donuts and lottery tickets for adults? and when the carrots failed to work- the sticks. i lost my job, my passion of 40 years over my refusal to take a shot. but in the previous 39 years, no one had ever checked my medical records. they might have guessed what i would do based on my prior insistence that the tetanus shot requirement boilerplate language be stricken from my contract.
my Moderna friend had a bad bout of Delta followed by a bout of Omicron and she called me to ask for advice and, like i said before, for help getting IVM to her unvaccinated best friend and later her mother. surely she saw how the wonders attributed to the vaccines kept being downgraded. the back pedaling, the shifting goal posts.
for her to say that i read different stuff (i.e., fringe, alternate, conspiracy theory) while she reads mainstream based on "Science" and "Truth" is kind of a lazy man's excuse.
but the reality is this: EVEN IF COVID HAD BEEN AS DEADLY AS THEY SAID IT WAS AND THE VACCINES AS EFFECTIVE AND SAFE AS ADVERTISED, the mandates still would not have been justified. they are unconstitutional, they violate bodily autonomy. what rights do we have if we can't decide what to do with our own bodies?
then to see the My Body My Choice crowd advocate forced vaccination, the people you might expect to be most sympathetic to a refuseniks cause!!! "you have no right to spread your germs to me!" i might answer "Well, you have no right to deprive me of the future worker, cannon fodder and tax payer who is going to support me in my old age."
formerly intelligent people lost the ability to think, to reason, to see what was obvious to anyone with eyes and a few brain cells.
so i guess, yes. censorship violates the first amendment but the mandates violated something even more sacred
I’m so sorry you lost your job. And I couldn’t agree more — the my body my choice people were practically proud of their hypocrisy! Thank you so much for reading and commenting 🤍
Great points you make. You wrote: “the reflexive answer is that censorship "allowed" the mandates to happen but that's a bit too simplistic.” That statement by itself is correct, but I f throw on top of that the disgusting propaganda on top of censorship that allowed the mandates to happen. Listening to, not by choice, Rachel Maddow pontificate how safe and effective they were, and that you were a selfish person for not getting, or Don Lemon stating the people who aren’t will to get jabbed should lose their rights as citizens, is as dangerous as the censorship. My parents are in there 90’s, and I have a very large family that are all within the area. All are extremely influenced by what comes out of the Oracle(TV). I have said early that the only way to snap these people out of trance that they are in is to have the major talking heads to come out and say, “we were wrong, they aren’t as safe and effective as we once thought they were.”
well, i'm waiting for Rachel Madcow to publicly apologize and i do believe that her absurd video ("the virus STOPS with every vaccinated person") should be broadcast daily on all news outlets until she does!
yes the censorship was one thing; the propaganda/brainwashing was another. at one point i posted a quote from an actual holocaust survivor who compared what was happening now to the beginnings of what happened then. a colleague, someone who had worked at the Spoleto Festival for close to 30 years and who's ass i had pulled out of the fire on more than one occasion, wrote "you've gone too far this time. no one is pushing unvaccined people into ovens. the unvaccinated people are choosing to die!" (i guess by refusing the safe and effective shots).
this guy lives for most of the year in Germany where graffiti on store fronts read "Gas the unvaccinated" which is not a particularly good look, all things considered.
i was not choosing to die but rather choosing to own my body. in 1976 i watched my cousin's wife spend a year in a wheelchair with GBS after taking the swine flu vaccine; no amount of Oracle propaganda can make me unsee that and it has affected my medical decision making since Joe Rogan was a young boy. so i hotly dispute any attempts to blame my refusal to take this vaccine on him.
there were many- Don Lemon, the Emanuel brothers, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert (who i worked with at the Festival in 1982 and 1984 when he was a super in 2 productions and i lived with his in-laws for about 10 seasons), Howard Stern, Noam Chomsky, Leana Wen- and it seems to me that they cannot be forgiven. what they wished on people for the mere crime of not going along was heinous and not excusable by any extenuating circumstances.
my father died in Dec of 2019 shortly before this all started. he was 6 weeks shy of his 96th birthday and as a young man had run up a beach in Normandy. whenever i took him to the VA, he was treated like a hero. word would get out that there was an actual WW2 veteran in the building and extra doctors would come in to salute, nurses to flirt. whatever they offered him- new hearing aids, an enlarger to help him read- he would ask "how much does it cost?" and the doctor would reply, almost embarrassed, "Sir, you have paid for this and more with your service to our country and this is but a small installment of a debt that a grateful nation can never repay." i'm not much for the military but i would sob like a baby to see my dear father treated with such respect.
a little more than a year after his death and people were talking about denying benefits to veterans based on vaccination status. it nearly broke my heart. the deal my father made with the country was that his future medical care was pay back for services rendered, not for compliance to some standards TBD. i saw veterans there who were overweight, who smoked, who drank, who took drugs. some of them probably cheated on their wives and voted for the "wrong" guy and were less then perfect but no one evaluated their behavior in the decades since their service and denied them benefits because of it.
suddenly, an open ended contingency, a new deal: your benefits are no longer based on past service but rather on future obedience. your rights did not come from some higher power as enumerated in the constitution but from an intrusive government that monitors your behavior and decides minute by minute what you may or may not do depending on how completely you went along with a never ending series of demands!
when i worked in NYC, my shop was asked to make costumes for Aladdin. the Disney contract specified that they could use my likeness and the likenesses of my employees for any purpose in "any technologies that exist now or may exist in the future throughout the known and unknown universe."
i e-mailed them back. "what is this, cyber slavery? here's the deal: i make costumes, you pay me. that's the sum total of our relationship. i'm not helping you advertise on Mars or anything. isn't it presumptuous to talk about known and unknown universes stretching out into an endless future when thanks to the greed of corporations like Disney, mankind may not make it another 50 years?"
they sent my e-mail to their legal department and another contract was drafted for my shop and we made the costumes.
you cannot let these people get an inch. one shot becomes two, becomes 5, becomes annual, becomes necessary for you to have medical care or a job or a credit card. i hardly recognize my country these days. it seems my father braved that beach for no reason at all.
You go girl. If you’re not writing articles/post on Substack you should be. Sounds like you’ve got something to say. I use to take my father to the VA and loved to see how they treated him. He was in the Korean War. He transitioned 2 years ago, he was 92. He didn’t die of Covid, he died because of Covid. He was in a recovery facility and the Covid Plandemic was around 9-10 months old. They we’re putting the pressure on that no one could come into the facility to see him except my mother. He died of loneliness. We could wave at him from a window, but he was a hugger. It was the most ridiculous scene, the day he transitioned he had 7 grand children 4 sons and a daughter, with all there spouse looking in a window as my mother’s in hazmat suit not even being able to kiss him goodbye.
You should get together with my sister and write a screenplay about your life. She’s been in that business for 25+ years.
Thanks for your comment.
thank you for your encouragement. i'm now weeping about your father. mine passed in his own bed. we lived together and did everything together. i had given him a shower and helped him into bed. i tucked him in and suddenly i had a sense that something was wrong. he passed right there in his bed with me in the room. everyone said it was the best possible way one could go and i know that to be true but still, i miss him terribly. although he would be miserable to see what the world has become.
i'm so very sorry that your father was denied a gracious exit. i know many who passed in similarly horrible ways. i wonder that their survivors can ever get beyond that.
tell me about your sister.
Lockdowns and mandates were assaults on the body. Censorship is an assault on both the truth and your mind. I think maybe there isn’t a “correct” answer. Each individual has to decide for themselves which was worse.
Great point — love that, “censorship is an assault on both the truth & your mind.” Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
I don't use Twitter but Alex also posted to his substack and this is what I said in response to a post that listed failure to attempt early intervention and treatment: "I actually think this is a close second to the mandates. As sadistic as denying treatment was/is it primarily affected the elderly, and I do believe that was barbaric, but in many ways the mandates have focused on the young. They targeted school children, college students, athletes, military, and first responders. Even pregnant women were coerced into compliance. Healthy humans at no significant risk, with very little to gain but much to lose. "
I would never deny how evil censorship is but it was fear that stopped people from talking about their vaccine hesitancy. Even in the darkest days of mandate coercion there was a handful of people I looked forward to crossing paths with because I knew we would talk about how crazy this shit is. Even if you were not inclined to seek out reliable sources or to investigate for yourself, the lies were glaringly obvious. From the beginning the vaccinators weren't trying to be convincing so much as intimidating.
Yes, withholding the lifesaving treatment & then putting people on ventilators not because they needed it but because of the CARES Act kickback! Insanity. And murder. Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Somewhat related to censorship, but also worth considering, is the propaganda assault. You could see the vax/mandate train a comin' from a mile away, but we still couldn't stop it.
Oh yeah — I linked in the piece to a writer who outlined the most outrageous examples of propaganda. It was surreal! Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Thank you for your interesting takes on the world.
Excellent post. I was a bit annoyed by the Berenson poll (and didn't respond), since all three sins were egregious. What's the point of trying to rank them? Seemed to me like a useless and largely irrelevant question. And BTW, as a case in point about your active vs. just-have-one comment regarding Twitter accounts, I never, ever use mine -- and only set it up (years ago) to research Twitter as part of an article on social media I was writing.
Interesting — yeah, twitter attracts a certain (not run of the mill) personality type but even then, it’s such a time suck that it ends up being a waste of time if no one interacts with you! Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Mandates for sure!! They made our lives contingent on injecting poison into us. Nothing could be worse
I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Bodily autonomy was violated against the Nuremberg code.
Our legal system is designed to benefit the establishment and only started to act much later only because of a change in popular opinion!
Even Ted Kaczinkski wrote that the final battle is over ones own body.
Thankfully, people are learning to draw boundaries, with the boosters and child jabs having dismal uptake, lol!
Stopping censorship won't change the fact that people like Berenson get sway by their reputation (his New York times past etc).
People like Berenson would still muddy the waters with their own soft propaganda, their own confidence in being right.
He still demonizes ivermectin and cannabis and people believe him.
Based on what? He's smart or something.
I pick something, but many think he's smart just because he was against the jabs.
Another big fool in that space is Dr Malone, who is great at making truth sandwiches with a tiny bit of directed lying in the special sauce.
Censorship sucks but my body, my choice is the ultimate right.
Wholeheartedly agree mandates were the worst. Especially with the added hypocrisy of mandates coming from the “my body, my choice” libs.
Thanks for another very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay. I had trouble deciding between mandates and censorship when I voted, but finally decided on censorship. You have helped me to think more deeply about this, and I'm still torn between the two.
One thing I would say in support of choosing censorship on the poll is that in my opinion, censorship --and certainly as it has been practiced during this psyop--encompasses more than just suppressing voices on social media platforms such as twitter. It has involved all manner of communication and all venues. Teachers on all levels of education, and certainly in universities and colleges, have been muzzled and forced to indoctrinate their students with the "correct" covid narrative (Mark Crispin Miller's experience is just one example). Almost all forms media have focused on amplifying the frightening narrative 24/7, saturating consciousness and dulling the consciences with messages encouraging division and hatred (as you point out), while drowning out and demonizing the voices of those with alternative opinions and information. The propaganda was everywhere, posters in the subways and on buses, signs in stores, masks on faces.
You discussed these things in the essay, but treated them as separate from censorship, but I believe they are integral to it. The overwhelming and never-ending force of these messages, as well as the suppression and demonization of alternative sources of information, is the major reason why most of us have found it almost impossible to get information through to friends and family members who to this day will not consider looking at the information we offer them and continue to put their lives in danger playing spikeshot roulette.
Yes, it is very much a character issue as well, and I am hard put to have patience with those who refuse to see the obvious, who maintain a willful blindness I find incomprehensible, but then I remind myself of the myriad ways they have been denied (or tricked into denying themselves) access to the truth.