en 
While perhaps the US is a Constitutional republic in form and theory, in terms of function it has devolved into something far less suited to human flourishing. America has elevated, enabled, and become largely captured by a bureaucratic security apparatus whose raison d’être was purported to be fighting wartime threats. But the war machine does not exist to produce victory.
Collective consciousness, especially when it spans multiple centuries, carries immense power; but many of us have lost our communal ties and our sense of history. We may have forgotten who our ancestors were and where they came from; we may know little about what they ate, what they believed in, and the rituals they practiced.
A Myth-Making Toolkit from the Volcano’s Shadow Read Journal Article
Where does this leave us? We only have the intelligent bourgeoisie – products of the middle class that is currently under assault – that is well-read, clear thinking, attached to alternative sources of news, and only now in our post-lockdown world has become aware of the existential nature of the struggle we face. And their rallying cry is the same which has inspired the freedom movements of the past: the rights of individuals and families over the hegemon.
Downton Abbey, the Corruption of the Great Families, and the Future of Freedom Read Journal Article
The open society is also dependent on a positive narrative of freedom and self-determination. As an open society, however, it must be open in terms of how – and thus by which values – this narrative is justified. That is to say, it has to accommodate a pluralism of narratives which agree in the conclusion of implementing in society the moral obligation for every person to respect the right to self-determination of every other person.
Maybe this book by the Covid Crisis Group hopes to be the last word. This will never happen. We are only at the beginning of this. As the economic, social, cultural, and political problems mount, it will become impossible to ignore the incredibly obvious. The masters of lockdowns are influential and well-connected but not even they can invent their own reality.
When the federal government sent $9,000 to Patty Myers to pay for her husband’s funeral, she got angry. “I didn’t want to take a penny. It felt like hush money, like they were paying me to keep quiet about how my husband died in the hospital.”
The Hospital Protocol Killed Their Loved Ones and They Want Justice Read Journal Article
In a very real sense, Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War. This explains the ambivalence of most non-Western countries. They are no less offended by Russia’s war of aggression. But they also have considerable sympathy for the argument that NATO was insensitively provocative in expanding to Russia’s very borders.
Ukraine as a Proxy War: Conflicts, Issues, Parties, and Outcomes Read Journal Article
Will we renew our trust in the dignity, moral autonomy and inherent miraculousness of each individual human being? Or will we, in our absent-minded drift away from the only true sources of life and spiritual renewal—things like love, friendship, wonder and beauty—resign ourselves to the idea of living a new version of medieval serfdom, wherein our bodies and our minds are seen as, and used by, our self-appointed masters as a renewable resource for the execution of their megalomaniacal dreams?
How and Why the Intellectuals Betrayed Us Read Journal Article
Clearly the Covid panic is only the latest chapter in a continuing chronicle of corruption, exaggeration, and hysteria. For those who were observant and thinking for themselves, it was not a big leap to conclude that something very fishy has been happening in recent years too.
Toward the book’s end, Tolstoy wrote that “To imagine a man without freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of life.” So true. Imagine if Tolstoy had lived to see what his beloved country had been reduced to. The free thinking libertarian would have been horrified, all the while well aware of why what became the Soviet Union imploded. Do-gooder types and self-regarding politicians (a redundancy, obviously) break things with poverty and blood-soaked battlefields the result. War and Peace makes this all very clear.
Time to Read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Read Journal Article
The cultural crisis and the pandemic of loneliness, not to mention the mass wave of substance abuse and depression, reflects the country-wide shock that all our fundamental ideals could so easily have been swept aside for a cockamamie central plan that trampled on everything we believe in and have always practiced however imperfectly. It felt like an invasion of the body snatchers, nowhere better symbolized than with vaccine mandates that most intelligent people knew we didn’t need even if they were safe and effective, which they were not.
These days and for many months and years following, all the people involved in the pandemic response – not only government officials but media mouthpieces and Big Tech accomplices – will be rewriting history and hoping that everyone will forget the real history. They are trying to avoid accountability and save whatever vestiges of despotism that they can, while hoping to institutionalize the powers that made all of this possible. They cannot be allowed to win this struggle for essential rights, liberties, and truth.
German
French
Italian
Spanish
Portuguese
Dutch
Danish
Swedish
Polish
Czech
Armenian
Russian
Romanian
Turkish
Japanese
Korean
Chinese (Simplified)
Hindi
Swahili
Amharic
Yoruba
