The Winter of Our Enlightenment

An immense burden has been lifted, one that many did not know they were carrying

Secret Sympathies, photogravure etching

An unmistakable spirit of exuberance marks the quadrennial election rituals in the United States this year (2024), as the nation enacts for itself and the world a version of its better self. The American people, after two attempts to assassinate then-former President Trump, somehow got through this year’s electoral rite of passage without repeating too many of the dreadful mistakes of 2020. They cast off the immense burden of pretense and hypocrisy they had lived with since 2020. The approaching winter is a time for sloughing off afflictions of the body politic, in preparation for the work of repairing the damage. The interesting views of two Substack characters evoke the curious contrasts of the present moment.

Elizabeth Nickson, in ‘It's A New Dawn, A New Day, A New Life’, writes ‘You have no idea how good it will get’:

I didn’t think it was possible in the earth realm for all my wishes to come true in one moment. My friends (the ones who still talk to me) and I feel as if a massive cloud has been lifted. A dark oppressive force that covered the sun, is all of a sudden gone as if it never existed.

Her assessment of the damage that has been done is comprehensive:

I look around myself and my admittedly broad acquaintance (courtesy of a ravening curiosity) and all I see is wasted potential. We have been halted, foreshortened, brutalized, silenced, suppressed, censored, oppressed and immiserated for decades, longer. Our very life’s energy has been stolen…

Historians may record these days as the first of a postwar era, marking the end of an epic conflict. For we have actually been through a war, different from all preceding wars. It is not a conflict of civilizations represented by nation-states, though such wars are not altogether outmoded. Citizens of the more advanced civilizations of America and Europe have actually been under attack by their own governments — that is what the populist majorities of Europe and America now realize. National governments and self-appointed world economic and health organizations launched a surprise attack on humankind, using lab-crafted viruses twinned with vaccines, ‘psy-ops’, massive psychological campaigns through mass media designed to induce a continuous state of fear and confusion, to foster passive compliance with their edicts. This was not only a medical experiment on billions of terrified people deprived of the means of informed consent; it was also an experiment in the mobilization of social, economic, and political pressure to compel compliance with commands to harm oneself. About two-thirds of the U.S. and global populations complied.

Driven by warped eugenics theories updated by ‘save-the-planet’ fanatics, and by the more conventional motives of self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, the hostile intentions behind these campaigns are finally recognized as such by their victims. The attempted assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024 at Butler Pennsylvania amid unexplained security ‘lapses’ and destruction of evidence, the bizarre media silence on the case almost immediately thereafter, a second assassination attempt in Florida by a professional mercenary, and a laser attack on rally attendees in Arizona, crystallized this understanding. The American people recognized these assassination attempts as attacks on themselves. What role Federal agents anxious to perpetuate their ascendancy may have had remains to be investigated.

But perhaps it’s too early to break out the champagne, perhaps the celebratory mood will turn out to be chimerical, a will-o’-the-wisp that floats away just when we reach out to grasp it. Skeptical observers like Curtis Yarvin, wise in the ways of Washington DC, warn that running U.S. foreign policy involves more than merely removing globalists from positions of power:

He [President-Elect Trump] doesn’t have to hire foreign-policy professionals! To run his foreign policy! He could hire just, like, cool dudes who have an idea of what to do. He could hire historians. He could hire amateur historians. He could hire Alaska crab captains. He could hire the CEO of Exxon. Lol. He could hire a rocketship pilot. If he had a rocketship. Does he have a rocketship? No. He has a helicopter. So he needs to hire a helicopter pilot. That’s how it is. He doesn’t make the rules. There are two kinds of helicopter pilots he could hire: red helicopter pilots, and blue helicopter pilots. He is red, so he needs red pilots. All the red pilots are neoconservatives, that is, Trotskyists. So more Ukraine war it is. Or, he could find some cool guy. Like me. And see if he can fly a helicopter on the first try. Which would you pick, dude? Have some sympathy for Trump. He’s got a hard gig.

You simply can’t be an isolationist NSC staffer. You could be a vegetarian steak chef. You could be a blind photographer. You could even be an Islamic porn star, but you can’t be an isolationist NSC staffer.

Yarvin channels the 19th-century essayist Thomas Carlyle, evoking the daemonic character of a self-propelled bureaucracy:

‘By our electioneerings and Hansard Debatings, and ever-enduring tempest of jargon that goes on everywhere, we manage to settle… that the Right Honorable Zero is to be the man. Zero, all shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and the horse gallops — whither it lists. That the Right Honorable Zero should attempt controlling the horse — Alas, alas, he, sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will only gallop any-whither, and not throw him.

Measure, polity, plan or scheme of public good or evil, is not in the head of Felicissimus; except, if he could but devise it, some measure that would please his horse for the moment, and encourage him to go with softer paces, godward or devilward as it might be, and save Felicissimus’s leather, which is fast wearing. This is what we call a Government in England, for nearly two centuries now.

So he gallops stormfully along, thinking it is forward and forward; and alas, it is only round and round, out of one old lane into the other; — nay (according to some) “he mistakes his own footprints, which of course grow ever more numerous, for the sign of a more and more frequented road”’.

According to Yarvin, ‘In some places Washington should be doing something, and it is doing nothing. In some places it should be doing nothing, and it is doing something’. In the second part of this trenchant summary is a clue to how President-Elect Trump and his associates could succeed. It’s easier to stop doing something that should never have been started in the first place, than to start something new from scratch. The basic solution is in a speech Trump gave in 2023:

First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats and I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus and there are plenty of them.

Trump and his associates Robert F Kennedy Jr and Elon Musk may have enough daemonic energy of their own to ride roughshod over bureaucratic resistance.

Take the war in Ukraine — a perfect example of a thing the U.S. Government is doing that should not be done. Congress has given $175,000,000,000 of taxpayer funds to Ukraine, even waving its flag as they and the soon-to-be-former President forked it over. Despite Yarvin’s caution about the pro-war preferences of experienced foreign-policy professionals, the fact is that these experts have lost every war they’ve been engaged in for the past 50 years. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, it’s been one unbroken record of humiliating failure, the Afghan helicopter exit recapitulating the hasty departure from Vietnam, complete with abandonment of allies on the ground. The geopolitical expertise and war-fighting capabilities of these experts then somehow convinced them they could effect regime change in Russia by throwing NATO-trained Ukrainians into battle with their far larger neighbor. Installation of a subservient Russian regime would (in their dreams) unlock its vast resources of oil, gas, and other resources for Western exploitation.

In the service of that delusory ambition, 500,000 or more lives have been lost, 6,500,000 refugees have fled their homes, $175,000,000,000 taken from Americans’ earnings have been delivered to the Ukraine Government (and more on the way, the current U.S. regime promises), and the German and European economies have been crippled by the U.S. sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline which had supplied inexpensive Russian oil and gas to Germany. War has its own momentum, forged by the enormous sacrifices entailed, inability to admit or even recognize error, and delusions impervious to realities on the ground. The war’s end could be negotiated based on historical balance-of-power relations in the region, de-militarization and de-nazification of Ukraine, and international recognition of its neutrality, similar to that of Austria after WWII.

Aside from war-making, the current U.S. foreign-policy establishment hangs its (rainbow) banner on ‘Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World’, according to a presidential memo with that title. As Christopher Rufo has documented,

Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender — for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries — and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs. If necessary, the memo maintained, agencies should use “the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools” to ensure foreign governments’ compliance with this agenda, including “financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”

A person of common-sense might ask who in the world is better off for these tax-funded sanctions-enforced agitprops. Every government sustained by popular consent must prioritize the needs of its own citizens, yet the U.S. Federal Government has shown itself to be both inept and politically biased at that. Other nations’ foreign-aid programs are tied to export promotion (Japan), geopolitical advantage (China), imperial legacy (Britain), or other aims that they can be judged against. No one else proselytizes. Globalist diplomats pushing gender studies into every remote corner of the planet could be replaced with those hired to orient U.S. foreign policy to American interests, with no loss of American influence in the world.

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Another part of the vast U.S. Federal bureaucracy handed out taxpayer money to mad scientists domestically and overseas crafting new and more virulent viruses, twinned with another bio-weapon fallaciously called a ‘vaccine’. In their bio-speak argot, these scientists were engaged in ‘gain-of-function’ research, using U.S. National Institutes of Health funds and specifications. The function they were gaining was, in plain English, to make them more lethal to humans. This research was done by means of successive improvements in the ability of the transplanted bat covid virus to cling to human epithelial cells, a type of cell lining the respiratory and circulatory systems. Following the Chinese Communist Party’s broadcast of covid around the world via infected international travelers, causing global chaos, illness, and death, the same parties that had patented the virus miraculously produced what purported to be a cure in 2020. Four years later, we know for a fact it was never a cure, as indeed Pfizer and Moderna knew from their own internal testing during that same year. It was instead, and still is, another method of killing and disabling millions of people around the world.

Here is yet another example of something the U.S. Government is doing that should not be done. The entire covid ‘vaccination’ program could be eliminated, as it is now definitely known to be neither a vaccine, nor safe, nor effective against its intended target. These shots cause cardio-vascular disease, neurological disease, reproductive damage, renal (kidney) impairment, immune system damage, cancer, and from these and other causes, death. Autopsies and excess death data provide both clinical and epidemiological evidence of the causal link with mRNA injection. All this to repel an infection with a 0.15% chance of causing death, and an even lower fatal probability in children. The mRNA injections don’t even prevent covid infection or transmission. They do, however, stimulate prodigious production of spike proteins with no off-switch. These circulate throughout the body (contrary to earlier false assurances), and enter every vital organ including the heart, kidneys, liver, brain, lungs, reproductive organs, and bloodstream, where they go on to inflict continuing damage. (Some lot numbers of the mRNA products are harmless, others have different degrees of lethality and cause different degrees of damage.) The total extent of this carnage has yet to be assessed, but as with the Ukraine war, it has become more than obvious that this program serves nobody’s interests except its lethal suppliers, in this case Pfizer, Moderna, and their bought-and-paid-for Government collaborators (NIH, CDC, FDA). These toxic products could be withdrawn from the market, as has been done with far less lethal drugs. Independent doctors and medical organizations urge this, together with revocation of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA), and cancellation of the secret contracts granting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the pharma suppliers.

This again requires no new Government programs. It only requires stopping an existing program, by firing those officials responsible for it and stopping the taxpayer subsidies. The public funds previously gifted to these organized-crime outfits could be clawed back and put into a fund to compensate the many covid-vax-disabled, and the families of the 600,000 who have died from mRNA injections so far. Why has this program of mass murder continued long past when the slightest doubt of its malevolence had been removed? My guess is that eugenics, a misbegotten effort to ‘save the planet’ by murdering about a third of its inhabitants, inspires the highest priests of this cult. Bill Gates preaches his techno-utopian version of salvation at a TED talk: ‘First we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people, that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10-15%. More examples of their thinking and its intellectual antecedents can be found in my Malice post. The lower-level operatives are out to make a buck or to boost their official powers. None of this improves public health — quite the opposite. It is not at all difficult to stop.

For the United States and every nation that has subjected itself to the covidian cult, it would be like a scaled-up version of an individual stopping hitting himself on the head with a hammer. It would feel a lot better afterward, and would immediately enable more productive pursuits. Imagine a population no longer subjected to commands to harm itself, no longer living in fear of saying what everyone knows, that this covid-vax mass-injection campaign is itself a bio-weapon similar to the virus it purports to treat. And imagine the burst of productive and creative energy that could be propelled by the discovery that none of this nonsense is necessary for one’s health — that everyone is free to do as he thinks best, based on his own common-sense observations. Freedom from the psy-ops — psychological operations — that have twisted the public mind into going passively along with this pathological narrative could likewise release and re-direct mental energy to practical, creative, and healthy ends. The benefits, both tangible and intangible, are protean.

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A third example of a completely unnecessary, and in fact harmful Government program is the vast array of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs and regulations currently strangling universities, corporations, and government agencies; inevitably accompanied by censorship obsessively blocking the slightest variation from these doctrines. In the Orwellian world of these bureaucracies, ‘diversity’ means rigid conformity, ‘equity’ means universal impoverishment, and ‘inclusion’ means exclusion of any hint of dissent. They are staffed by thought police enforcing a warped ideology through mandatory ‘training’ and direct censorship, armed with the power to blacken employment records, and thereby threaten careers, jobs, and livelihoods. So a professor or middle-manager who simply wants to stay out of trouble and hang on to his job is forced to genuflect to these latter-day Stalinists. If they are of the White persuasion, they may even find it expedient to hate themselves and express remorse for things they have never done. Today we are already looking back on this demented belief system in wonderment at how it could ever have taken possession of so many institutions.

DEI bureaucracies can be dismantled, as Christopher Rufo has shown decisively at the State level in Florida. What works in Florida can work in other States, and nationwide. These encrustations on the academy are outgrowths of ‘studies’ that are nothing but ideologies masquerading as honest inquiry. But as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it,

We have seen the growth of an extraordinary number of new subjects in which the pursuit of truth seems to be secondary to something else; the other thing being the pursuit of some kind of political conformity. Take Women's Studies, for example. It's very difficult to imagine anyone succeeding in that subject who is not a feminist. It's a subject constructed around an ideology. It might be grounded in truth, who knows, but questioning it has been made impossible, both by the curriculum, and by the way of teaching it. And I think you'll find there are quite a lot of subjects like that, growing in our universities, in which conformity to an orthodoxy takes precedence over an intellectual method. ...You can then call upon a mass of fake scholarship and fake philsophy to give you authority. ...The growth of the fake scholarship industry which enables people to claim authority for nonsense. The purpose of that nonsense being that it makes conformity to that orthodoxy the only thing that you have.

This academic cult is sustained by assertions of systemic racism, patriarchal domination, lack of biological difference between women and men. Through reification, they drive biological boys into girls’ sports and locker rooms, and in extreme cases to violence and genital mutilation surgery. Absurd as these ideas are, they have real and tragic consequences.

Corporations that have transplanted these beliefs and enforcement methods wholesale from the academy can likewise dismantle them whenever business practitioners choose to return their focus to producing and delivering goods and services that customers want. Buyers of beer want beer without the woke-foam, as Budweiser found out, and retail customers prefer to shop without grating virtue-displays, as Target found out. With aircraft manufacture, elevating woke-credit to the top of the goal hierarchy puts passenger safety at risk, as Boeing and its airline customers are still finding out. Competition can help business firms sort out what is essential to their existence, and what can be let go. Since the costs of wokery are typically lumped in with ‘General and Administrative’ in accounting statements, it’s hard to estimate the impact on profitability of such pruning, but chances are it’s substantial.

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As dispenser of both funds and regulations, the U.S. Federal Government brings unique powers to discussions of public policy issues. In its current incarnation, it has mobilized an ‘all-of-government’ array of agencies and departments to entrench DEI everywhere in the same manner as noted above in the State Department. Each agency follows these proscriptions not only in its own staffing, but among those who depend on the agency for money, regulatory relief, legislative assistance, or some other favor. Government being by nature coercive, inevitably recipients of largesse or favors are forced to conform to DEI regulations in their own organizations. Thus the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), nominally concerned only with financial regulation, discovers within its self-annointed writ the ability to enforce ESG (environmental, social, governance goals) on hapless corporations. This forces business firms to report what they are doing to minimize their carbon footprint, maximize their recruitment of women, minorities, and perverts, and whatever other measures of corporate virtue regulators might devise. Compliance is enforced by cutting off access to working capital. The Environmental Protection Agency, egged-on by the climate cult, finds within its writ the ability to shut down resource-extraction industries with a thicket of regulations. The intelligence and national security agencies, having violated the privacy of American citizens for decades, discovers suspicious behavior among political opponents (Tea Party members, Trump campaign staff). Political opposition itself then denotes suspicious behavior.

Government coercion manifested itself invasively and massively with the covid vaccination campaign of 2020 - 2021, as noted above, bringing together several instruments of government coercion: Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), closing off legal recourse for victims of covid-vax harm; lavish payments to mRNA-drug suppliers Pfizer and Moderna through secret contracts prohibiting disclosure of terms; firings of Government employees who refused the covid-vax, even for religious reasons; de-certification of professional licenses of doctors who treated covid patients — successfully — with non-covid-vax remedies; cancellation of payments owed to Federal contractors that failed to fire employees who refused the covid-vax; forced closures of businesses, schools, churches, and other gathering-places; mobilization of social pressure through public health authorities’ media messages exhorting covid-vaxing as a moral obligation to others, despite the known fact that it does not prevent infection or transmission; and, when adults stopped taking these toxic injections, extension of covid-vaxing to children, enforced by adding it to a list of requirements for school attendance.

Corrections of the U.S. Federal Government’s skewed version of covid origins appeared within weeks of the virus’s debut itself. As common-sense at the time, and laborious research later confirmed, the virus leaked out of the Wuhan Virology Lab. This understanding was denounced by U.S. health authorities as ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘anti-science’, backing up these assertions by sponsoring fraudulent scientific papers published in leading medical journals. It soon became clear why U.S. authorities were protecting the Wuhan Lab — the money for this lethal research came from U.S. taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health, laundered through a cutout called Eco-Health Alliance. As further questions about the safety and efficacy of mRNA injections were voiced, these too were met with screaming denunciations, name-calling (‘anti-vaxxer’), and exhortations to ‘follow the science’.

At the same time, a vast ‘all-of-government’ censorship apparatus was established with the cooperation of social media giants, prominently Facebook, Google, and then-Twitter. Their cooperation was enforced by Government threats to re-classify them from ‘neutral platforms’ to ‘publishers’ with liability for their content. Each company installed several gradations of censorship, ranging from down-ranking and fact-free fact-checking to shadow-banning to de-platforming for what they called ‘violations of community standards’. Translated, this meant ‘as specifically instructed by Federal officials’. At first, censorship focused on information that might cause people to refuse covid-vaxing, even if true. As we discovered from the Twitter Files released by Elon Musk after he purchased the company and renamed it ‘X’, explicit instructions by Federal officials (one of whom, Scott Gottleib, worked simultaneously for Pfizer) forced Twitter to ban science writer and covid-vax critic Alex Berenson. Soon, Federal officials extended their censorship to any post that incurred their dislike for any reason. Prominent officials openly advocated abolition of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, telegraphing their intention to do just that if they got the chance.

Americans voted in record numbers on November 5, 2024 to reject these calls to end free speech. President-Elect Trump noted the central importance of free speech in his November 10, 2024 speech on censorship: ‘If we don't have free speech, then we just don't have a free country. It's as simple as that.’ His plan to end the censorship regime encompasses law enforcement, staff changes, a ban on public-private collusion to deprive Americans of free speech, and changes in funding priorities:

'If this fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes, one by one, they'll go down. That's why today I'm announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime, and to reclaim the right to free speech to all Americans. In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media, have been collaborating and conspiring to silence the American people. They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed, and it must happen immediately. Here's my plan.

Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an Executive Order banning any Federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban Federal money from being used to label domestic speech as 'mis' of 'dis' information. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every Federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship, directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are. Second, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of Federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, Federal election law, securities law and antitrust laws, the Hatch Act, and a host of potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses. To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters — we have to do this right now — to the Biden Administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.

Fourth, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called myths and disinformation. The Federal Government should immediately stop funding all nonprofits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for Federal bureaucrats who partner with prvate entities to do an end run around the Constitution, and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights.

The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America, and for the survival of Western Civilization itself. When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won't be anything left. By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation. Thank you, and God bless America.

While one part of this plan involves new laws (criminal penalties for Federal officials who collude with private companies to bypass Constitutional free speech protection), the bulk of it can be accomplished by simply stopping what should never have started in the first place — dismantling the ‘all-of-government’ censorship regime, firing those responsible, removing its funding.

Restoring free speech to America will go a long way toward lifting that immense burden of fear induced by censorship, and by the social, economic, and political sanctions that inevitably accompany it. Of course some expressions of free speech will be silly, wrong, biased, insensitive, or worse; some will be boring, or over-the-top, or irrelevant; a few will be eloquent, wise, spiritually uplifting, practical, revelatory, and otherwise useful. This Substack platform is a marvelous compendium of many styles of writing, a real gift to the public commons. We all benefit even more from everyone else’s free speech than from our own. May this winter of our enlightenment prove to be the beginning of a true postwar era of recovery.