– by Robert F. Kennedy Jr –
Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth.
In her seminal book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein chronicles how authoritarian demagogues, large corporations and wealthy plutocrats use mass disruptions to shift wealth upwards, obliterate the middle classes, abolish civil rights, privatize the commons and expand authoritarian controls.
The methodology is, in fact, formulaic, as Hitler’s Luftwaffe commander, Hermann Göring, explained during the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg: “It is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country.”
Now the medical cartel and its billionaire Big Tech accomplices have invoked the most potent, frightening and enduring enemy of all — the microbe.
And who can blame them? Increasing the wealth and power of the oligarchy is seldom a potent vessel for populism. Citizens accustomed to voting for their governments are unlikely to support policies that make the rich richer, increase political and social control by corporations, diminish democracy and reduce their civil rights.
So demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience and to win public acquiescence for the demolition of civil and economic rights.
Of course, the first casualty must always be freedom of speech. After stoking sufficient panic against the hobgoblin du jour, robber barons need to silence protest against their wealth and power-grabs. In including free speech in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison argued that all our other liberties depend on this right. Any government that can hide its mischief has license to commit atrocities.
The free flow of information and self-expression are oxygen and sunlight for representative democracy, which functions best with policies annealed in the boiling cauldron of public debate. It is axiomatic that without free speech, democracy withers.
To consolidate and fortify their power, dictatorships aim to replace those vital ingredients of self-rule — debate, self-expression, dissent and skepticism — with rigid authoritarian orthodoxies that function as secular surrogates for religion. These orthodoxies perform to abolish critical thinking and regiment populations in blind, unquestioning obedience to undeserving authorities.
Instead of citing scientific studies to justify mandates for masks, lockdowns and vaccines, our medical rulers cite WHO, CDC, FDA and NIH — captive agencies that are groveling sock puppets to the industries they regulate. So it’s unsurprising that, instead of demanding blue-ribbon safety science and encouraging honest, open and responsible debate on the science, the badly compromised and newly empowered government health officials charged with managing the COVID-19 pandemic response collaborated with mainstream and social media to shut down discussion on key public health and civil rights questions.
The high priests of the modern Inquisition are Big Pharma’s network and cable news gasbags who preach rigid obedience to official diktats including lockdowns, social distancing and the moral rectitude of donning masks despite the absence of peer-reviewed science that convincingly shows that masks prevent COVID-19 transmission. The need for this sort of proof is gratuitous.
They counsel us to, instead, “trust the experts.” Such advice is both anti-democratic and anti-science. Science is dynamic. “Experts” frequently differ on scientific questions and their opinions can vary in accordance with the demands of politics, power and financial self-interest.
Predictably our other constitutional guarantees lined up behind free speech at the gibbet. The imposition censorship has masked this systematic demolition of our Constitution, including attacks on our freedoms of assembly (through social distancing and lockdown rules), on freedom of worship (including abolishing religious exemptions and closing churches, while liquor stores remain open as “essential service”), private property (the right to operate a business), due process (including the imposition of far-reaching restrictions against freedom of movement, education and association without rule making, public hearings, or economic and environmental impact statements), the 7th Amendment right to jury trials (in cases of vaccine injuries caused by corporate negligence), our rights to privacy and against illegal searches and seizures (warrantless tracking and tracing), and our right to have governments that don’t spy on us or retain our information for mischievous purposes.
It’s a bad omen for democracy when citizens can no longer conduct civil, informed debates about critical policies that impact the vitality of our economy, public health, personal freedoms and constitutional rights. Censorship is violence, and this systematic muzzling of debate — which proponents justify as a measure to curtail dangerous polarization — is actually fueling the polarization and extremism that the autocrats use to clamp down evermore draconian controls.
We might recall, at this strange time in our history, my father’s friend, Edward R. Murrow’s warning: “The right to dissent … is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail to totalitarianism.”
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Robert Kennedy Jr. is an American environmental attorney, author, and advocate for children’s health. He is the President of Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit environmental group that he helped found in 1999. Kennedy is also the Chairman of Children’s Health Defence. Kennedy is a son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy. To learn more visit childrenshealthdefense.org
The text of this article is from the foreword to the new book The Truth About COVID-19 — Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal by Dr. Joseph Mercola.
Thank you.