Volume 80, no. 3 March
The foundation of our rights is not “freedom and democracy”; this is the label used by the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) in U.S.-instigated “color revolutions” to topple unfriendly governments and influence elections worldwide (https://tinyurl.com/22h9jeya). “Protecting Our Democracy™” is now the mantra for protecting our ruling elite as by censoring “misinformation” or punishing protests against election fraud.
The Founding Fathers were fearful of democracy—mob rule—and devised Constitutional protections against it.
Voting rights do not guarantee our liberties. The franchise was restricted in our early days: it was (and is) plain that all are not equal in ability to make prudent, fair community rules. Yet government was much less tyrannical than today, when “voters” might even be fictitious. The Founders could not have imagined current methods for massive fraud that can negate millions of votes.
The only freedom mentioned in Biden’s 2024 State of the Union message was the freedom to have an abortion. This as a supreme right extinguishes the rights of everyone except pregnant women and abortionists—even the right of the voters to protect women against dangerous practices or practitioners, and the rights of persons attempting to persuade mothers to choose life.
The “unprecedented assaults on freedom” that Biden recognized were from Vladimir Putin and from the Jan 6 protest, which he called a “dagger aimed at the heart of democracy.”
The First Amendment is first because without freedom of speech, of religion, and of assembly, there is no freedom. But it is not the foundation, nor does it stand alone. Even in the 1980s before the cancel culture, Czech expatriate Petr Beckmann told me that “you have the right to say anything you want—as long as not very many people are listening.” He could publish politically incorrect books and the newsletter Access to Energy because of the print shop in his basement: the Golem (an offset press), a linotype machine, folding equipment, etc., that he operated by himself.
The great economist John Locke, whose writings and ideas had a major influence on our nation’s Founders, wrote that “life and liberty are secure only so long as the right of property is secure.” John Adams argued, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence” (https://tinyurl.com/482veshk).
Property rights have come under sustained attack, especially since the New Deal, and crushing regulation and taxation have driven essential American industry offshore. Biden falsely claimed to (somehow) be bringing it back, though his promise to increase corporate taxes to 21% is not likely to help. The Green New Deal is deliberately destroying industry and, worse, farming. The SOTU did not mention Amish farmer Amos Miller, whose organic farm was raided, and $100,000 worth of food placed “under detention” (https://tinyurl.com/2u8tka23).
People have served time in prison for violating regulations, as by filling in a mud puddle, and the lawfare against Donald Trump is showing how the “justice” system can ruin a business empire because of an allegedly inaccurate valuation that caused no harm.
The criminalization of speech is following. France quietly passed a bill (https://tinyurl.com/nhb5p46b) that could imprison a person for 3 years and fine him 45,000€ for advising against the use of therapeutic or prophylactic treatment (including experimental mRNA gene therapy). In the “free” U.S., the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was historically focused on anti-Semitism, is urging law enforcement to investigate Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo, claiming that their criticism of transgender ideology might cause “hate” and violence (tinyurl.com/69srfvnb).
Why Is This Happening to Us?
In May 2023, Stephen Meyer recalled the somber, prophetic 1983 acceptance speech that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave on accepting the Templeton Prize (tinyurl.com/yckhzupe). As disaster spread after the Bolshevik Revolution, the old people said, “These things are happening to us because we have forgotten God.”
Meyer lists some of the disasters in America: suicide, fentanyl overdoses, gender confusion, homelessness, crime waves. Does this devastation result, he asks, from “the entire 20th century being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction”?
Citing Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn said that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” The only hope is to reach for the hand of God. “There is nothing else to cling to, in the landslide: all the thinkers of the Enlightenment can give us nothing” (ibid.).
“The atheistic and nihilistic revolutionaries who populate Dostoevsky’s novel Demons…reject what is given and leave tragedy in their wake. They burn everything to the ground,” writes Aaron Alexander Zubia. “Dostoevsky said of them: ‘These people imagine that nature and human society are otherwise than God made them and than they actually are’” (tinyurl.com/58jxjb2e).
Self-creation is the ideal of contemporary liberal thought, which rejects a priori universal truth and requires annihilation of all limits, human and divine. As James Madison wrote, economic utility is not the standard of right and wrong. Washington’s inaugural address, ghost-written by Madison, said that national policy must be grounded on private morality, based on “the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained” (ibid.).
Without a foundation of truth, there is no freedom.
Which Foundation?
In a 1942 memo to Henry Luce, publisher of Time, former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers wrote:
Tentatively, I am calling what I have written: The irreconcilable issues—Belief in God or Belief in Man…. I wish to show that these issues are the real line of cleavage in the modern world between conservative and revolutionary, cutting across all lines of economic class and political party; binding together proletarian and capitalist in a common belief in the primacy of God, just as they inexorably throw together those who believe in the primacy of secular Man no matter what their superficial differences or pseudo-religious trappings.
In testimony to the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), Chambers, according to Arthur Koestler, “committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation.” He identified several Soviet spies, including Alger Hiss.
Chambers said: “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.” The driving force for his work at Time was to take every possible opportunity “to clarify, on the basis of the news, the religious and moral position that made Communism evil” (Terry Teachout, ed. Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959, Regnery Gateway, 1989).
Flashback: ‘The New Deal’s Dark Underbelly’
Though hailed as a champion of democracy, FDR violated civil rights time and time again, writes Marcus Witcher in a review of The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights by Paul Beito (https://tinyurl.com/fdpfat3m).
FDR empowered his allies in the Senate to harass, undermine, and delegitimize political enemies and critics through formal investigations. The [Hugo L.] Black Committee was used as an instrument of political surveillance. The IRS issued “a ‘general blanket order’ for access to the tax returns of potential witnesses.” Roosevelt’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also granted “authorization to require the telegraph companies [to] comply” with Black’s requests for complete access to witnesses’ telegrams.
In response to the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Governance (NCUCG), which played a key role in defeating his court-packing scheme and his proposed restructuring of the federal government, FDR empowered Sen. Sherman Minton (D-Ind.) to form a committee to try to force organizations to disclose their donors, in order to enable New Dealers “to embarrass, worry, terrorize and destroy.” This succeeded in freezing donations. FDR used the regulatory scheme to suppress negative radio coverage. He looked the other way when Black Americans’ voting rights were being suppressed. He issued the executive orders that interned more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry though most were loyal American citizens.
X X X
“The Communist answered: ‘Democracy is the most perfect form of government for capitalism because it offers the most perfect illusion of freedom…. But democracy is not something that cannot be overstepped. Democracy is a stage in the course of the development from capitalism to Communism.’” Whittaker Chambers, op. cit.
Anti-Human ‘Rights’
One result of burning down our traditional foundation might be democratically enacted (by referendum) in Ireland. This would establish iron-clad legal protections to all elements of Nature. “Every human being alive would be deputized to bring lawsuits to uphold the rights of every aspect of existence on the planet. In other words, the most radical, anti-human environmentalists would be empowered to harness courts to impede any use of the Earth’s bounty,” writes Wesley J. Smith.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature’s “Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth,” he states, “declares unscientifically that ‘Mother Earth is a living being,’ with ‘inalienable’ rights that ‘arise from the same source as existence’—a generating cause that it doesn’t identify—without ‘distinction of any kind, such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings [!], species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status’” (https://tinyurl.com/mrzwp3jh).
Smith calls it neopaganism, as in the worship of the goddess Pachamama—already shutting down development in Panama.
The Destruction of Liberal Individualism
The “New American Way” of nihilistic subjectivity and identity politics comes from the destruction of belief in the moral and civic preconditions of a constitutional republic, writes Richard M. Reinsch II in a review of The New Leviathans by John Gray (https://tinyurl.com/56unmrb6). Gray cites Dostoevsky’s 1871 novel of ideology, Demons, for the portrayal of how God-builders justified the destruction of human beings and Russian society. One character in the novel, Shigalyov, finally understands that his desire for absolute freedom has led him into absolute tyranny.
‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’
Edmund Burke, a champion for the American Revolution, was appalled by the doctrinaire spirit and ruthless methods of the French revolutionaries. Excerpts from his 1790 essay were quoted in a Wall Street Journal editorial, “You See Nothing but the Gallows,” on Jul 14, 1989:
“[Y]ou chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had to begin everything anew. You began badly by despising everything that belonged to you.”
“[S]ee what is achieved by those extravagant and presumptuous theories that have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors…. By following…false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime!” (https://tinyurl.com/2w4xp8zk).
AAPS Calendar
Sep 18-21, 2024. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX.
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Scholarships are available to help medical students and residents attend the AAPS 81st Annual Meeting, Sept 18-21, 2024, in San Antonio. Details at https://aapsonline.org/2024am.
Sentencing Guidelines in the USSR
‘The Liar’
A cell in prison. A new prisoner has just been brought in.
“How much did you get?” asked the other inmates.
“25 years.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing! Believe me, I am innocent!”
“Oh, come off it! You only get ten years for that!”
Petr Beckmann
Hammer and Tickle: Clandestine Laughter in the Soviet Empire
[“The penalty for telling one of these jokes was 10 years of forced labor, which meant death.”]
A $1 Million ‘Message’
After 12 years, Mark Steyn finally got his day in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., in Mann v. Simberg and Steyn. Michael E. Mann of the University of Pennsylvania had sued for defamation related to criticism of the “Mann-made Hockey Stick.” This graph is the foundation of climate alarm, as it purportedly shows a recent rapid acceleration of global temperature rise like the blade of a hockey stick. (It resembles the graph of the U.S. accumulation of debt, https://tinyurl.com/mw3a7n2k). Mann’s graph has been criticized by many, especially after exposure of the Climategate emails (tinyurl.com/5d37ubdh; also see AAPS News, January 2010, tinyurl.com/28rnwwf6).
Mann’s career, grant funding, and stick remain intact, and the jury awarded him only $1 in actual damages—plus $1 million in punitive damages. Mann’s counsel had told the jury that “these attacks on climate scientists have to stop,” and also drew a comparison between “climate deniers” and “election deniers” (Trump and the J6-ers). A press release quotes Mann as saying, “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech” (https://tinyurl.com/j729hcnp).
Steyn’s counsel is filing post-verdict motions stating that the verdict is unlawful (ibid.).
The Court of Appeals “has stated repeatedly that an attorney must not ask a jury to ‘send a message’ to anyone.” Bowman v. United States, 652 A.2d 64, 71 (D.C. 1994). This is the law for good reason: “Juries are not in the message-sending business. Their sole duty is to return a verdict based on the facts before them.”
A verdict like this is likely to have a profound chilling effect on disfavored speech on important political or social issues: COVID-19, transgender ideology, voting fraud, and others.
Steyn thinks the Constitutional issues are compelling, but that the way to bet is that it would cost another $5 million to prove it.
Tip of the Month: Hospitals report to the National Practitioner Data Bank “any professional review action that adversely affects the clinical privileges of a physician or dentist for a period of more than 30 days,” quoting the Data Bank Guidebook. We’re hearing about dirty tricks to ensure a longer-than-30-days restriction, triggering a Data Bank report. One such trick is a requirement of monitoring a certain number of procedures by the physician, while making it impossible for him to complete that monitoring within 30 days. That becomes a reportable event even though the monitoring finds no deficiencies.
After Trump, Who’s Next?
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared the state wouldn’t target businesses with political cases after winning a $454 million judgment against Donald Trump. But Attorney General Letitia James is charging the world’s largest beef producer, JBS USA, with misrepresenting its carbon emissions, using the same law she used to sue Donald Trump for allegedly defrauding banks by inflating his assets: Executive Law Section 63(12). Courts have interpreted the law to provide for disgorgement of “ill-gotten gains” even when there are no victims who lost money.
Although neither New York nor federal law says companies must disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions, James complains that JBS didn’t quantify its Scope 3 emissions. JBS says it plans to become “net zero” by 2040, but because existing technology can’t reduce methane from cow burps, James argues that JBS’s emissions will inevitably increase. She contends that the climate promises motivate customers to buy more meat and pay more.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate disclosure rule will force companies to report their emissions publicly, opening them to suits for alleged misrepresentations (Wall St J 3/5/24, https://tinyurl.com/mt7nr3p3).
The Inversion of Democracy
Tucker Carlson states that the defining fact of this country is freedom of speech, “the right from which all other rights flow.” This is threatened by a new type of censorship on the pretext of suppressing mis-, dis-, or malinformation—without reference to its truth. He explores the development of the control apparatus in an interview with former State Dept. official Mike Benz, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
Internet free speech functions were initially developed by the national security apparatus as a tool for overthrowing foreign governments unfriendly to the U.S. agenda. (Google was originally branch of DARPA.) The pretext of RussiaGate facilitated the morphing of the whole scheme into a domestic as well as a foreign operation, just in time for the 2020 election, Benz stated.
“What I’m describing is military rule,” Benz concluded. Democracy itself is a threat. It needs to be redefined as the sanctity of democratic institutions instead of the will of the voters. These include the military, NATO, the IMF and the World Bank, legacy media, and NGOs (largely state-department-funded)—the elite establishment (https://tinyurl.com/5fs6skyr).
Contentless Conservatism
American conservatism arose in the mid-20th century to defend “good liberalism” against advancing progressivism, writes Patrick Deneen. It fights for issues such as religious liberty, academic freedom, limited government, and free markets, all designed by modern liberals to be used as battering rams to overthrow a predominantly Aristotelian/Thomistic world view. They are contentless, and while conservatives deplore relativism, the challenge from the Left is not relativism: they know what they believe, and pursue that goal with fierce determination. It’s the defenders of Con. Inc. who are the relativists, promoting a world in which the individual is the measure of truth and increasingly radical positions must be affirmed (tinyurl.com/4kzh65wh).
Correspondence
We’ve Got Their Number. The February issue of AAPS News highlights deep state censorship, the tactic of government contracting out censorship of speech to social media and others.
In 1973, socialists in Congress recognized that government-run medicine (Medicare and Medicaid) and government-overregulated insurance were nonsustainable long term, and that rationing care would be necessary. Not wanting to be held accountable for denying care, Congress contracted out the job to HMOs, created by the HMO Act, of which Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) was the principal sponsor. After HMO abuses and wrongful denials became evident to all, Sen. Kennedy proposed the Patients’ Bill of Rights to curb HMO abuses that his own bill had invited. Delegating the violation of rights to “private” entities is a long-standing government method.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
CDC’s Misrepresentations. CDC knowingly misrepresented scientific facts in order to align messaging. Articles labeled as “misinformation” were accurate, according to internal emails and experts (https://tinyurl.com/yeywax2w). The supposed point of public-health “paternalism” is that the experts do know what they are doing, more than the general public. When the experts misrepresent facts, they completely lose credibility as experts, which at the very least compromises the ability of their public institution (CDC) to do its job. These identified people should be fired, and CDC must publicly state that their goal is to be accurate, not to be zealots for special-interests messaging.
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., Yale School of Public Health
Doublethink. Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm (1900-1980), who fled Nazi Germany to save his life, wrote an “Afterword” to George Orwell’s novel 1984. He explained that with “doublethink”—holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them—the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks; he thinks the opposite of what is true. With a successfully manipulated mind, he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. In the West, we present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism, and idealism when in reality we are a centralized managerial industrial society of an essentially bureaucratic nature, motivated by a materialism that is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns. For me, doublethink broke down when trying to practice medicine and psychotherapy controlled by the power of corporate bureaucrats.
Lee Beecher, M.D., Maple Grove, MN
Dezinformatsiya. In his book Disinformation, Ion Mihai Pacepa, who was head of the intelligence service of Romania and the highest ranked defector to the U.S., explained how the rulers in the Soviet Empire used “framing,” rewriting history, and manipulating records and documents to bring about a desired outcome. There were more agents working on dezinformatsiya in the Soviet Bloc than there were people in the armed forces and the defense industry. One of the main disinformation messages produced by media is that America is not vulnerable to the virus of Marxism, thus lulling Americans into a false sense of security. This powerful tool is everywhere today, and is being employed by rich globalists to transform nations into police states.
Ileana Johnson, Ed.D., https://tinyurl.com/4sedsxf4
Transmission Riddles. Some narratives about outbreaks of respiratory illnesses are wholly in keeping with germ theory and our contemporary understanding of immunity and transmission. But how do we explain the worldwide presence of genetically identical viruses and their near synchronous appearance thousands of miles across? Do respiratory viruses live with us and activate when the time comes? In 1919, general practitioner Andrew Garvie concluded about the spread of influenza in an industrial area in Halifax, England: “With the experience gained in over 100 cases and with many hours spent in analysing the observations made, I cannot help but express the view that if public health authorities canny [can’t] be a help to the general practitioner, they should at least refrain from being a hindrance.”
Transmission is a lot more complicated than it appears.
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, tinyurl.com/3asr5d4j
Cognitive Warfare. Many social media warriors and alternative media “journalists” are unaware of how effectively they are being manipulated. Documents from the Communist Party of China, the People’s Liberation Army, NATO, and the UK’s 77th Army Brigade summarize the state of the art. By learning how state, non-state, and corporate actors are influencing us, we can possibly develop immunity to this grave threat to freedom.
Robert W. Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/w6y4f4f
Convicted for a Joke. A New York court, after 3 days of jury deliberation, convicted Douglas Mackey, a.k.a. Ricky Vaughn, for posting a joke about Hillary Clinton in 2016 (tinyurl.com/mur983sm). According to U.S. attorney Peace, he was attempting “to deprive individuals of their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice.” He joked from Florida, but the internet cable passed through N.Y.
William Briggs, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/mu76hezr
