Do Your Own Research

A war is being waged against the minds of the many.

“I assure you from a God's Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.”

— Frank Herbert, “God Emperor of Dune”

Chapter 1

Tracing back into the mists of memory, further than I can follow, there has been a concerted effort by rapacious rulers to deprive the masses of their powers of discernment. Sometimes this can be overt: books burned, dissidents disappeared, rights revoked. Sometimes, however, this can be covert: appeals to emotion, promises of safety, promulgation of propaganda.

It is the second, covert category that can prove most pernicious. Confronted with the full, antagonistic force of transparent tyranny, there is a will in men that instinctively rises to defend its most primal humanity and oppose such clear and present oppression. As such, many regimes and rulers have adapted to eschew such vulgar displays of power where possible and instead opt for less perceptible and perturbatious forms of control.

We witnessed such a campaign over the last few years.

As the COVID-19 military-grade psychological operation unfolded, the neo-fascist amalgam of corporate and statist interests injected a viral narrative into the public consciousness via intellectual stents masquerading as mainstream media and euphemistic “trusted sources.”

That viral narrative held that people should not do their own research.

A key subtext derived from this proposition was that intelligence was no longer to be regarded as a measure of one’s ability to do their own research and then utilize their mental faculties to sift through and critically analyze said research, extract useful information, and use it in the construction of a coherent view relevant to the topic at hand. Even beginning that process was now not only verboten, but synonymous with stupidity. Intelligence was now to be defined solely as one’s ability to access, conform to, and regurgitate the prescribed messaging. The degree of intelligence—the modern IQ test—would then be gauged by the celerity with which one performed the first two steps (access, conform), and the vehemence with which one performed the third step (regurgitate). That is to say, the new “intelligence” would be a measure of one’s conformity to, and defense of, the Party’s orthodoxies, a near-perfect inversion of the word’s actual meaning.

This kind of redefinition, in turn, can also be relatively overt or covert. Examples of the more overt, surgical reconstructions of language include the rash of redefinitions of words in dictionaries and official documentation.¹ These words include:

• sexual preference

• racist

• rape

• vaccine and fully vaccinated

• anti-vaxxer

• black

• fascism

• woman
  

This is a stunning development. Here are over half-a-dozen words, many of which are not only relatively common in the lexicon, but extremely—and increasingly—important to the political and ideological agenda being pushed by the Party. And now, in the span of a few short years, we have seen all of them altered to facilitate that agenda. This is not some organic, gradual shift in usage that is occurring. This is a violent and forcible violation of the meanings of these words for political convenience and manipulation of the discourse at the behest of—and to the benefit of—the Party.

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”

— Aldous Huxley, “A Brave New World”

Chapter 2

Stunning though those overt linguistic powerplays may be, let us now take a closer look at the more covert and pernicious forms of linguistic manipulation. These also allow the Party to influence how we communicate, but without any formal—or conspicuous—update of a dictionary. I refer to one such technique as “repackaging.”

The concept of repackaging is derived from three extant ideas in the field of communication: 1) Wittgenstein’s “Beetle in a Box” thought experiment, 2) Semiotic “hijacking,” and 3) Bernaysian propaganda. All of these are worthy of extensive discourses of their own, but for the sake of this article, I will provide a brief synopsis of them below:

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein was a 20th-century Austrian philosopher who did a great deal of work with language. In his book Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein likens language to all of us having a box with a “beetle” in it, but no one can see inside anyone else’s box. In this schema we all have a kind of “private language,” only knowing a “beetle” to be whatever is in our own box.

2. Semiotics is an extremely broad field consisting of various subfields, but for the purpose of this explanation, suffice it to say that it has been effectively implemented to study language as a system of signs and symbols, the signifiers and the signified. “Hijacking” refers intentionally disrupting the associations inherent within those systems to achieve a desired response.

3. Bernaysian propaganda is named for Edward Bernays, the 20th-century propagandist credited as “the father of public relations,” which says a great deal about the reality of “public relations” and “marketing.” The nephew of seminal psychologist Sigmund Freud, Bernays weaponized his uncle’s groundbreaking work concerning the human psyche to craft campaigns that bypassed logic (and truth and ethics) to directly manipulate people’s emotions. He was able to orchestrate sweeping societal shifts, topple governments, and generate enormous profits in the process.
   

These three concepts serve as a foundation for repackaging. Building on their tenets, we find that words can be thought of as boxes. The sensory “exterior” of the word consists of two components: aural (pronunciation) and visual (written form). These components form a unique box. Contained therein, the informational “interior” of the box consists of its meaning. In acquiring language, humans learn to associate “interior” meaning with “exterior” presentation, so that seeing the word “beetle” will conjure up the concept of a beetle within the mind of the reader, for example. This conjuring, in turn, then generates an emotional response based on the reader’s view of beetles. To express this in more Saussurean terms:²

Phase 1: external sensory package (signifier) → Phase 2: internal informational content (signified) → Phase 3: subjective emotional association (resonance, a term I am adding here).

In totality, this constitutes a single “sign.” Note that this is a linear, temporal, causal sequence, with each phase triggering the subsequent phase. Also, my inclusion of the Phase 3 “resonance” response is largely a nod to the devastatingly effective of work of Bernays.

This formulation can be likened to putting a black beetle in a red box. Once a person has been shown the black beetle in the open red box several times and conditioned to associate the contents of the red box with the black beetle, the holder of the box can close the lid. People will now see the red box and assume that there is a black beetle inside, as that is what they have experienced and what they have been conditioned to believe. The subject of this conditioning will treat that red box as though there was a black beetle inside: they would tell someone that it contains a black beetle. They would pay a sum of money for it based on how much they value a beetle. They would feel concern, elation, or indifference to the box being tossed in a fire based on how they feel about black beetles, not red boxes. All based solely on seeing the exterior of the red box and assuming no one had changed the contents.

Let us, then, also assume for a moment that our subject does not like beetles. In that case, the modified construction would look like this:

red box (signifier) → beetle (signified) → disgust (resonance)

The sleight of hand begins when the owner of the red box surreptitiously changes the contents and “hijacks the sign.”

To continue the metaphor, if the controller of language furtively replaces the beetle with something else and then presents the same closed, red box (signifier) to the same subject, that subject will still conceptualize a beetle (signified) and feel disgust (resonance) as though a beetle were present inside the box. Whether the box now contains the subject’s beloved pet cat, Schrödinger, (Don’t worry, there are air holes in the box.) or a live grenade is completely irrelevant to the subject. They see a red box, they think of a beetle, they feel disgust. If the subject knew their cat was in the box, they would feel happy to open the box and see their cat. If the subject knew there was a grenade in the box, they would frantically throw it as far as they could. But, they do not know. They only see the box, and the rest unfolds automatically.

When people see the box, this not only generates an intellectual process whereby the associated concept is recalled, but also the associated feeling. That final response is the most important in our modern Bernaysian propaganda society. It allows the Party to subvert this fundamental, three-step process in order to directly manipulate the emotional centers of their targets, and thus, their behavior.

Current, real-life examples of repackaging abound:

Ex. 1) Conventional association: science (signifier) → “any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation” (signified) → trust (resonance)

Party repackaging: science (signifier) → any arbitrary Party diktat (hijacked signified, bypassed) → trust (resonance)

Ex. 2) Conventional association: disinformation (signifier) → “false information spread in order to deceive people” (signified) → distrust (resonance)

Party repackaging: disinformation (signifier) → true information inconvenient to Party orthodoxy (hijacked signified, bypassed) → distrust (resonance)

The power of this form of linguistic control can scarcely be overstated. When referenced elsewhere, these same words—their very utterances—retain their meanings and conventional emotional resonance with unindoctrinated individuals, so said individuals may be oblivious to the fact that a term’s substance has been altered at all, that it has been repackaged. This can often allow for tactical deployment through controlled media to win disingenuous and deceptive facsimiles of debates, but even in lieu of this, the confusion created is sufficient to stymie any meaningful discourse. The further damage this does to the public consciousness is often as valuable, or more, than even outright winning an argument. Once meaning has been unmoored from linguistic signifiers, over time, signified meanings become modular and can be swapped in and out at will by the Party. The short-term results are described above, but it must be stressed that the long-term result of this willful corruption and control of language is far more catastrophic. It is nothing short of the complete intellectual collapse of the Indoctrinated to the point where they are incapable of understanding or discussing even the most basic concepts independently, degenerating to a state of utter reliance on the Party to provide, literally, meaning to their lives.

“The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought,
as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

— George Orwell, “1984”

Chapter 3

To promote this Orwellian control, the authoritarians invoked previously established trigger words: terms that had already been successfully weaponized for years in order to generate repugnance and shut down discourse, such as “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “(fill-in-the-blank)-denier” (itself a callback to the powerful emotional payload of the “Holocaust-denier”). These were deployed in order to generate the desired associated Bernaysian responses—in this case, “The Three Ds”: dismiss, disdain, and deride³—against this widening demographic of individuals carrying out the reasonable, rational process of research.

Furthermore, other, more recent emotional trigger words designed to demonize and “other” opposition were brought into play. Now, pejoratives like “anti-vaxxer” and “science-denier” were combined with invectives such as “Right-Wing extremist,” “Ultra MAGA,” and even “white supremacist,” then merged with this latest expansion of the Boogeyman group: people who do their own research. The conditioning complete, in the minds of the Indoctrinated notions of any individual, regardless of their background or reasoning, who dared to do their own research were immediately lumped in to the “evil, stupid, dangerous, deplorable other” category, and no further consideration for their rationale or results was required. In fact, to do so would be a transgression of the highest order, punishable with expulsion into that very group of deplorable pariahs.

The mind virus having now taken hold, this renders the Indoctrinated wholly unable of breaking free, as they are conditioned to reflexively reject the very notion of recognizing data, anecdotes, or opinions outside of the narrow, sacrosanct orthodoxy.

A brief interjection, please note I described the “enemy group” here as generally to be regarded as “evil, stupid, dangerous, deplorable, and other.” This is true. I will mention, though, that an extremely potent ingredient that COVID-19 allowed to be added to this already heady cocktail is “diseased.” The idea of portraying your opposition as “diseased” or as “vermin” is, of course, extremely powerful and prevalent throughout history. Sadly, it is still alive and well today.

Through these methods, research—fundamental to the cultivation and exhibition of intelligence—was now rebranded as its opposite. Again, the only actions permitted the victims of this brainwashing are to access, conform to, and regurgitate the Party doctrine, and external reinforcement decreases in importance as the victim is trained to feel euphoria in their conformity concurrent with their dread and disgust at the prospect of nonconformity.

One deflection employed in defense of this campaign is the claim that people are simply too stupid to do their own research. The Party is looking out for them, like a kindly Big Brother or some benevolent Nanny. A slightly more conciliatory move is to proclaim that people are simply too busy to be bothered with all of that thought-thinking. While there may be kernels of truth in these assertions, there is also a profound confounding of cause and effect that creates a behavioral maelstrom, dragging the culture spiraling into the atramentous abyss below. It brings to mind an observation made by the late, great Michael Crichton back in 2002 while explicating his theory of Gell-Mann Amnesia, wherein he described reading a news article that, as he pithily put it, was “so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.”

He was completely right. Now, just over 20 years later, those stories have spilled out of the newspapers onto the streets, into millions of monitors and myriad minds. They have become foundational.

Tying that back to the notion of the Party saving us from the consternating complexities of research, the inversion lies in the fact that if (and this is a very big “if”) the populace is indeed not smart enough to do its own research, then the solution is to encourage and empower them to investigate challenging topics, and in doing so to stimulate and reinvigorate their languishing mental faculties—not to compound their ineptitude by pouring pabulum into their addled heads, like some hideous mother bird regurgitating into the squawking maws of its blind, helpless young.

The intellect can be likened to a muscle. And like a muscle, it can either be strengthened through use or atrophied through disuse. If the masses’ minds have indeed atrophied due to inaction, then we must incentivize and cultivate action. We must discourage this pathetic, self-defeating, self-fulfilling passive decline into utter incapacitation, a point of no return, where no amount of rehabilitation will be effective because movement itself has become impossible with such feeble faculties.

We cannot constantly cater to the lowest common denominator. To do so, is to ensure that loftier elements will inevitably collapse to the floor in time, smashing through to reveal even lower depths… ever lower depths.

“And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
O, then, at last relent: Is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?

— John Milton, “Paradise Lost”

Chapter 4

This vicious cycle should be avoided at all costs, but instead it is actively being advanced by the Party as it seeks to create a permanent underclass while the Indoctrinated tumble from Gamma to Delta down to Epsilon levels of imbecility in this Brave New World.

In fact, we see similar justifications trotted out in defense of idiotic naming conventions that eschew references to locations, ethnicities, or even animals. For example, we were told that we cannot refer to COVID-19 as the “China Flu,” despite a long history of toponymous diseases referenced without issue.

The most common excuse was issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015, when they decreed their “best practices for naming new human infectious diseases.”

According to Dr. Robert B. Taylor (emphasis mine):

Citing “unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” the WHO decried names such as swine flu, Rift Valley fever, and Middle East respiratory syndrome. They also condemn the use of people’s names, such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and Chagas disease. The directive goes on to point out that the guidelines apply only to newly recognized diseases and syndromes, and not to disease names already described.

First, this is obviously internally inconsistent on the part of the WHO, as on one hand they are suggesting that these nebulous “unintended negative impacts” are grievous enough to mandate immediate revocation of a long-established medical practice when politically convenient, yet also somehow innocuous enough to allow the continuation of every other toponymous practice prior to this enlightened hour. Are the feelings of certain groups today more fragile? Are they more important?

Even granting their paradoxical premise, which is clearly ideologically and politically motivated, and assuming that these naming practices will lead to “unintended negative impacts,” the solution would still not be to change the naming practices.

To do so, just like in the case of outsourcing our research to government agencies to spare the citizenry from thinking, inverts cause and effect. Just because a few people may make rash, overbroad, illogical associations when hearing an otherwise perfectly innocuous, descriptive term, does not mean that we must rearrange society to accommodate them. This would again mean to continually recalibrate civilization around a perpetually plummeting lowest common denominator. It is also to tacitly accept the premise that it is somehow logical, fair, and inevitable that people will connect fundamentally unrelated toponymous nomenclature with the character of an entire region or race of people, when to do so is clearly neither logical, fair, nor inevitable. It is not sensible to assume that if there is something called a Spanish Flu, for example, then all Spanish people are evil and should be treated as such, necessitating bureaucratic intervention and social engineering to prevent mob eradication of Spaniards. The correct response to such an absurd assumption—should it manifest at all—is to educate people as to its prima facie absurdity, not to change names.

Further examination of the WHO’s specific language in the quotation above reveals another insidious phrase: “unintended negative impacts.”

“Unintended.” Regulating around "unintended” consequences in this arena strips agency from the active party (the one seeking to convey information), rendering their intent wholly irrelevant when assessing the degree of transgression or harm. One might conjecture that it would, thusly, confer that agency to the recipient (the one receiving the conveyed information), and that does seem to be true at first glance.

For example, imagine an otherwise anodyne situation wherein a sane store clerk refers to a male customer as “sir” instead of “ma’am.” Under this new paradigm, if the male customer correctly being referred to as “sir” suffers under the illusion of actually being a woman and asserts that the speaker—regardless of intent—harmed him by not saying “ma’am,” then the clerk is wholly at the mercy of the caprices of this mentally ill man, subjecting him to a range of possible social, professional, and even legal punishments.

Agency conferred to the recipient… or so it seems. Panning out a bit further, we will discover that once again the actual agency, as always, lies with the Party.

For example, imagine a different scenario where a man joins a team of exclusively young, female, college athletes against their wishes, traditions, regulations, and common sense. The man claims he is a woman. He parades around naked with the young ladies in their locker room. He beats them in their competitions. He robs them of their records and their opportunities. Based on the previous example, one might assume the recipients of these actions, i.e., the women having their lives violated continually by this demented man, would be the arbiters of the matter, regardless of what the man intended.

However, this was not the case. In the second example, the young women were essentially threatened by their institution and leadership if they even expressed their concerns; they were cowed into an agonizing silence, even amongst themselves, all but ordered to endure seemingly endless humiliation with a smile, lest they face possible social, professional, or even legal punishments. All the while, their victimizer was awarded seemingly endless encomium.

In one case, perfectly rational behavior is ruled verboten due to a single individual alleging unintended harm. As a result, the full weight of the Party mobilizes in the rabid defense of the self-appointed victim and in the destruction of the unjustly branded transgressor. The “aggrieved” party is deified.

In the second case, blatantly aberrant behavior is defended despite the protestations of genuinely aggrieved individuals, and the full weight of the Party mobilizes in rabid defense of the person causing intentional harm and in the destruction of the justly outraged victims. The aggrieved party is demonized.

It is clear that despite the best marketing efforts of the Party, agency is not conferred to the recipient under this paradigm on principle, but on the whim of the Party. This is one more example to show that the Party is not defending the downtrodden. The same people confidently basking in the harsh fluorescent glow of Party protection today will someday find themselves abandoned in the outer darkness to wail and gnash their teeth in vain. The Party remains the ultimate arbiter of what is true and what is false, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. It grants certain groups power as it sees fit in order to advance its own agendas; it can and will rescind or reassign that power as it sees fit. Much like the God it seeks to replace, to paraphrase the Book of Job: “The Party giveth and the Party taketh away.”

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

— Edward Bernays, “Propaganda”

Chapter 5

Anyone who has dared commit the mortal sin of research over the past few years, or even the venial sin of inquiry, has undoubtedly slammed into the sneering wall of derision erected by the phalanx of Indoctrinated pawns deployed in defense of their Party abusers.

”Do you have a degree? In this specific subject? From what university?”

”You haven’t gotten accreditation from a Party-approved source?”

”Are you employed in that field? Are you an expert?”

”Why won’t you just listen to the experts?”

The sneering wall of derision cries out in a million voices, legion, a tower of babbling incredulity and condescension, but for those who can hear the past the empty roar, a single, droning, insect cry emerges from behind the cacophony:

”Shut. Up.”

Over and over and over again.

”Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up.”

The message has no end, and no beginning, and vibrates into a mindless mantra, an insatiable gestalt plague of semantic satiation. It is as monotonous in its form as it is in its function: to assimilate.

Despite this, some people will often defend a reliance on credentialed individuals and institutions, conceptually, by asserting: “We need some type of oversight or regulation! We can’t just have the Wild West out there. People don’t have the intelligence or time to make informed decisions, and the companies will exploit us unless held accountable by governmental (or quasi-governmental) agencies.”

On its surface, this argument is not without merit. Oversight can provide valuable checks and balances for powerful organizations. But, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Today, most faux “oversight” is worse than nothing at all because it provides the soporific illusion of oversight—lulling the citizenry into a false sense of security, disarming their critical thinking—while in reality avaricious industry leaders and their supposed regulators are one and the same.

Credentialing can also be valuable. We all have limited time and varied aptitudes; having objective experts who have devoted their time to achieving excellence in their preferred fields can be an extraordinary boon for humanity. It has been in the past. One hopes that it will be again. However, despite Party assurances to the contrary, this is distinctly not the case now. There are two chief reasons why we cannot and must not “shut up and trust the experts”:

1. The Party-approved experts are compromised, both financially and ideologically, as intrepid thinkers and defenders of true science like Michael Crichton had eloquently warned us for years.⁴ These experts prioritize money, message, status, and conformity over objective investigation. They fear “peer review” of their politics more than their papers. At best, they are demonstrably unreliable, and, at worst, actively malevolent, causing incalculable harm to a credulous populace in the elites’ zealous quest to advance the Narrative, along with their own station within the Party hierarchy. They hide behind the cover of “science” and “expertise,” which provides a veneer of respectability and, thus, a degree of unassailability, in our modern, materialist society. What we are seeing is another linguistic inversion trap here though, as they are not practicing science, but instead proselytizing their religion. They are not engaging in objective, open-minded scientific endeavor, humbly allowing for new evidence or contrary hypotheses to be entertained in their hallowed halls. They are instead blindly assuming the a priori verity of their world view (or that of their leaders and funders) and then fanatically hammering any incongruity until its mangled remains somewhat fit within their expectations. The same cultists who regularly deride religion and worship science (as it is deceptively presented to them by the Party) are actually deeply religious and unscientific. This is the result of successful repackaging.
   
   The observation above is not intended to litigate the relative merits of a religious or a scientific worldview, nor to explore the possible overlaps and historical relationships between them. It is simply to point out the linguistic inversion of the two being committed by the Party and the complete, internal incoherence that results. This, in turn, inverts the credibility hierarchy, as the individual or organization being labeled “an expert” by the Party, now means the exact opposite in reality, i.e., the presence of that “credential” certifies that the holder has subjugated any and all expertise in the service of the Party and its narrative, otherwise they would not have been awarded their credential. The chillingly dystopian “trusted source” designation is a similarly clever semantic trick, as the Party is indeed telling you to “trust” the source, but they are neither inviting you to investigate that source for yourself, nor establishing why they should be trusted save once again pointing at their Party-approved credential. This circular logic creates an unfalsifiable feedback loop in the mind of the Indoctrinated.

2. The Party and the Indoctrinated don’t actually believe in “trusting the experts” or objective oversight anyway. These are just more feints in their inexorable, ravenous quest to acquire power and avoid responsibility. In reality, they constantly ignore experts and meaningful regulation, even as they excoriate and accuse others of doing the same.

“As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

— Richard Feynman, “What is Science?”

Chapter 6

The Party has convinced the Indoctrinated to only trust official sources, namely those that push the desired narrative, and to instinctively and uncritically reject everything and everyone else. It has conditioned its victims to view that as intelligence, conditioned them to regard actually intelligent people doing research as stupid. Once more, this is an extraordinary form of inversion and repackaging, where the natural and correct definition of the word is captured and contorted to mean the precise opposite. Because the victim still retains the emotional attachment (resonance) to the word—and his or her fellow brainwashed victims also continue using the word as though no change has occurred (because none has with regard to the signifier)—this is tantamount to a Bernaysian “mental stent,” as was discussed in a previous article, allowing the Party to bypass “normal intellectual immune responses of doubt and analysis, while also shutting down the emotional immuno-responses of compassion and empathy.”

Warning against independent inquiry is a truly astonishing admonition, especially from the Fourth Estate, and the fact that it was not met immediately with righteous indignation is both tragic and telling. Tragic in that it betrays everything journalism, academia, and a free press should fundamentally stand for. Telling in that it reveals how thoroughly this cancerous dogma has metastasized in those institutions.

If the last few years should have taught us anything, it is that you should do your own research. The appointed and anointed experts have gotten nearly everything wrong, at best, and at worst have deliberately and maliciously deceived us for profit and power.

Those who succumbed to the siren song of experts wore useless masks, got dangerous injections, retarded their children’s development, destroyed the economy, and did countless other forms of incalculable emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, and economic damage to themselves and the world at large.

Meanwhile, we demonized plebeians who dared do our own research have gotten nearly everything right, despite being hectored, censored, and virtually drowned in corporate and government propaganda. The powers-that-be lied constantly and labeled any truth that snuck through “misinformation” and “disinformation.” (With the current regime’s obsession with delusional “Gender Theory,” I’m surprised they didn’t just label it all dangerous “cisinformation” and be done with it.)

We pesky thought-thinkers who resisted the indoctrination and coercion of this military-grade psychological operation have emerged stronger, smarter, and healthier. And most vexing for the authoritarian technoligarchs, we are an ever-increasing group of diverse individuals ever-awakening to the machinations and manipulations of their megalomaniacal machine.

Now, more than ever, people should be doing their own research.

That said, one piece of evidence for some success in their campaign is the “Source!? Movement” in the cultists. This is where the cultist, having been presented with anything—however rudimentary—that triggers them, will immediately begin shrieking “Source!? Source!?” and if there is no source they will completely dismiss it. If the source isn’t approved by the Party, they will completely dismiss it. If an approved source is presented, they will either move the goalpost, switch to ad hominem attacks, or vanish from the conversation entirely in a haze of cognitive dissonance.

Of course, the source of information is an important variable to consider when assessing it, and people are wise to request it, but it is not the only variable. And, as we have discussed, the Indoctrinated’s singular obsession with sources and credentials is not an attempt at genuine investigation, merely an appeal to approved authorities and an excuse to shut down discussion.

“ARE YOU A SCIENTIST!?!”

The Indoctrinated do not actually care about expertise or credentials at all, only Party allegiance. To bolster the cognitive dissonance and doublethink required here, they often evoke “The No True Scotsman” fallacy or, more precisely, “The No True Scientist” fallacy. This is easily demonstrable by looking at the experts we are not supposed to trust.

• How about Kary Mullis, the scientist who won a Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR test, the same sacrosanct one widely used to test for COVID-19? He said that the PCR test is inappropriate for viral detection and that Anthony Fauci is a liar. Should we believe this expert?
  
  ”No!” says the man in Washington. “He didn’t say what you heard him say. Anyway, he is a madman, a scoundrel, and a liar!”

• How about Dr. Robert Malone, the physician and biochemist who helped to develop mRNA platform technology, the same sacrosanct one widely employed in COVID-19 “vaccines?” He said that the rash dissemination of those mRNA injections was “a health public policy nightmare” and that Anthony Fauci is a liar. Should we believe this expert?
  
  ”No!” says the man in Washington. “He didn’t say what you heard him say. Anyway, he is a madman, a scoundrel, and a liar!”

• How about Dr. Peter McCullough, a renowned cardiologist with prestigious appointments, thousands of publications, and hundreds of citations in the medical field who successfully treated COVID-19 patients? He said that the COVID-19 mRNA injections are highly dangerous, causing a range of health issues including fatal heart issues. Should we believe this expert?
  
  ”No!” says the man in Washington. “He didn’t say what you heard him say. Anyway, he is a madman, a scoundrel, and a liar!”

• How about Dr. Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who discovered the Omicron variant of COVID-19. She said that Omicron symptoms are “extremely mild” and there is no need for panic. Should we believe this expert?
  
  ”No!” says the man in Washington. “Panic, prole, Omicron will kill you all!”

• How about the diverse group of doctors, epidemiologists, public health scientists, and other medical professionals across the globe who drafted and signed the Great Barrington Declaration? They argued against counterproductive, Draconian lockdowns and paranoid, performative mandates (e.g., masking and social distancing) as measures to combat COVID-19 in favor of the completely vindicated policy of “Focused Protection.” Should we believe these experts?

• ”No!” says the man in Washington. “Their ideas are problematic! Ridiculous! Anyway, they are madmen, scoundrels, and liars!”

I refer to this as “The No True Scientist Fallacy.” The list goes on and on. We see this arbitrary allocation of validity in other ways as well. For example, the VAERS website for reporting adverse effects from vaccines (and its international equivalents) was regarded as fine for decades, and is still the main source of such data among professionals. Yet, the second it started to document the enormous (but still vastly underreported) amounts of adverse reactions caused by the radical gene therapy, the Mockingbird Media swooped into inform us that VAERS has always been unreliable, dutifully dredging up a few aberrant entries to discredit the deluge of real-not-rare victims of the jab.

Though the COVID-19 psychological operation illustrates this phenomenon disturbingly well, the Party uses this arbitrary allocation and revocation of credential validity in order to regulate all of its narratives and deter people from conducting independent research. From “Climate Change” to “Gender Theory,” experts in any field who contradict the dogma are immediately excommunicated for their heresy and removed from the Party-approved reading list. Undercover reporting has already caught CNN technical director Charlie Chester admitting:

[COVID-19] will taper off to a point that it’s not a problem anymore. Climate change can take years, so [CNN] will probably be able to milk that quite a bit. Climate change is going to be the next COVID thing for CNN. Fear sells.

The Party will continue to simply move on to their next useful narrative and employ all of these same techniques of control.

Such propaganda in the end miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses.

Joseph Goebbels, Nuremberg Rally (1934)

Chapter 7

Language not only represents reality, in a Sapir-Whorfian sense, it creates reality.

The suppression or deletion of a word can remove the very concept from the mind of the victim (or at the very least make it so difficult for them to hold that concept in their mind, let alone express it, that it renders the concept virtually annihilated). Conversely, the promotion of a word can manifest into existence egregorian entities (or enemies) that the Indoctrinated will interact with in predictably prescribed ways.

The Party’s linguistic alchemists can morph months of destructive, deadly riots into “mostly peaceful protests” and transform a fed-fueled false flag with many peaceful protestors into a “deadly insurrection.” They can rebrand barbaric baby murder as merely anodyne “healthcare” and transmogrify concerned parents into “domestic terrorists.” They can transubstantiate racism into “anti-racism.” They can transmute a dangerous and ineffective gene therapy into a “safe and effective vaccine.” They can turn a man into a woman.

They can use increasingly vague, unfalsifiable doublespeak to blame you for an ever-looming, ever-evanescing, past apocalypse of global cooling, global warming, Climate Change©. Remember, citizen: it’s already too late, and time is running out, so you must comply immediately or you will doom the already doomed world!

They can redefine and repackage words to suit their whims, crippling comprehension and communication without the Indoctrinated even noticing, while driving the heretical sane further toward the margins.

They can tell you that an imbecile is an expert, and an expert is an imbecile. That intelligence is conformity. That inquiry is idiocy. That curiosity will kill more than just the cat.

They can wage a war on our minds without firing a shot. Without most people ever even noticing.

And, thus—above all else—they will warn that you must not do your own research. That it is dangerous to do so. That it is the domain of maniacs and monsters, extremists and conspiracy theorists! A task best left to Big Brother, to the Nanny State, to the state-sanctioned “experts” and their “trusted sources.”

Unfortunately for them, my research has shown otherwise. What will yours show?

“Nothing is casual. Everything requires work, research, and thought. Agonize. Take it seriously. Don’t leave it up to someone else, and don’t phone it in.”

― Howard Stern, Howard Stern Comes Again

Case Studies in Anti-Research Propaganda

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Case Study #1
The New York Times
Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole
By Charlie Warzel
February 18, 2021

Example passage:

In 2016, Mr. Caulfield met Mr. Wineburg, who suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact checkers assess information. Mr. Caulfield refined the practice into four simple principles:

1. Stop.

2. Investigate the source.

3. Find better coverage.

4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

Otherwise known as SIFT.

Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer. “If this is not a claim where I have a depth of understanding, then I want to stop for a second and, before going further, just investigate the source,” Mr. Caulfield said. He copied Mr. Kennedy’s name in the Instagram post and popped it into Google. “Look how fast this is,” he told me as he counted the seconds out loud. In 15 seconds, he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist.

“Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best, unbiased source on information about a vaccine? I’d argue no. And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on,” he said.

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Case Study #2
The New York Times
Skeptics Say, ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple.
By Nathan Ballantyne and David Dunning
January 3, 2022

Example passage:

Isn’t it always a good idea to gather more information before making up your mind about a complex topic?

In theory, perhaps. But in practice the idea that people should investigate topics on their own, instinctively skeptical of expert opinion, is often misguided.

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Case Study #3
CNN Business
These Four Words are Helping Spread Vaccine Misinformation
By Ramishah Maruf
September 19, 2021

Example passage:

The problem is that most people simply don’t know how to do their own research, especially when it comes to understanding the complexities of medical science.

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Case Study #4
Thinking is Power⁵
The Problem with “Doing Your Own Research” (Part 1) (Part 2)
By Melanie Trecek-King
Sometime in 2021 (Exact date uncertain)

Example passage:

The danger is that uninformed or dishonest people can cherry pick individual studies, or even an expert, to support a particular conclusion or to make it look like the science is more uncertain than it is… especially if they don’t want to accept it.

In any area in which we aren’t an expert, the expert consensus is the best source of knowledge.

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Case Study #5
The Conversation
Vaccine Hesitancy: Why ‘doing your own research’ doesn’t work, but reason alone won’t change minds
By Vinod Goel
February 17, 2022

Example Passage:

The first mistake is obvious and can be quickly set aside. Most of us are not capable of “doing our own research” on COVID-19 vaccines. We do not have the training plus years of postdoctoral experience specializing in viruses and vaccines to seriously evaluate the primary literature, much less generate our own research. Even my family doctor, neurologist and cardiologist depend on the research produced by immunologists and vaccinologists.

The only thing most of us can do is follow the advice of specialists. “Doing our own research” simply amounts to making a decision on whom to believe. Do we believe the celebrities offering shocking and entertaining — but uncorroborated — opinions, the next-door neighbour, or the specialists at the Centers for Disease Control who have spent their lives studying viruses and vaccines?

Get the vaccine hesitant to expand their in-group to incorporate vaccine scientists. However, this is difficult because human in-group formation can be arbitrary and disjointed. For example, if the scientists are lumped with government, Big Pharma or other out-groups, assimilation into the in-group will be difficult for many.

1. Enable the vaccine hesitant to feel the severity of COVID-19 on a more visceral level, similar to the way anti-smoking campaigns from the ‘70s and ‘80s used graphic pictures of diseased lungs and emotional videos of dying cancer patients. These campaigns were more effective at changing behaviour than the earlier approach of printing the surgeon general’s health warning on cigarettes packs (appealing to reason alone).

2. Offer sufficient reward or penalty to tip the balance away from the pleasure associated with in-group membership.

Notice that none of these strategies targets reason. Reason is not the stumbling block.

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Case Study #6
The Washington Post
Doing your own research is a good way to end up being wrong
By Philip Bump
January 17, 2024

Example passage:

While confidence in American institutions has been in decline for some time, it’s not hard to imagine how the economic incentives of the internet contribute. There is an outsize [sic] appetite for derogatory, counterintuitive or anti-institutional assessments of the world around us. This is in part because alleged scandals are interesting and in part because Americans like to view themselves as independent analysts of the world around us.

The result is that there is both a supply and a demand for nonsense or appealingly framed errors. Americans who have little trust in the system can easily find something to reinforce their skepticism. They often do.

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Bonus Quotes

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

— Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity”

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

— William J. Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, Department Meeting (1981)
(Note: Whether or not Casey really said the chilling quotation above is disputed, so—as much as it may fit thematically—I didn’t include it in the body of the article. However, there is some compelling corroboration floating around out there to support its authenticity. If you wish to do your own research, related information can be found here and here.)

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1. At least one word—anti-vaxxer—has undergone multiple, relatively rapid revisions. According to The Wayback Machine internet archival site, it appears that on October 4, 2021 the alteration from “laws” to “regulations” took place, along with the addition of the phrase “specifically: a parent who opposes having his or her child vaccinated.” By the time we get to September 1, 2022, the definition has been further broadened from “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination” to “a person who opposes the use of some or all vaccines, regulations mandating vaccination, or usually both,” and the word ”often” has been added to lead off the section about parents. This serves as a reminder that we should be vigilant in both checking for clandestine changes and in archiving everything possible to prevent Minitrue from memory-holing it.

2. 20th-century Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure was a key figure in the field of semiotics—or semiology, as he called it.

3. I refer to this as “3D Coding.” When present, this code immediately initializes the “Dismiss, Disdain, Deride” program in the Indoctrinated, bypassing any higher-level thought engagement or more robust emotional processing.

4. I am happy to have the opportunity to reference Crichton twice in this article, as I believe that despite his great fame and success in popular media, he still remains severely underrated with regard to his perspicacity and prescience in realms such as academia, sociology, science, and politics. Astute readers will also likely have noticed that I “borrowed” this essay's formatting—introducing chapters with a quotation and iterations of a transformative image—from Crichton’s Jurassic Park. However, the images I used are not technically fractals, as they were in Crichton’s novel; they are fragments of M.C. Escher’s Liberation.

5. Oh, the delicious irony of this publication’s name!