Max Vax Madness

a retrospective

That was quick! Here’s YT’s message. Better watch on Rumble:

Content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the World Health Organization isn't allowed on YouTube.

Now that we are four years into the CovidCon, I’m ready to risk PTSD by looking back at the madness and trying to come to terms, for myself, with how I want to go forward. I’ll talk about the situation that brought this up for me, how I responded and their answer. I’ll mention a couple of great reminders of how stupid, mean and ugly it all got. And I’ll end by quoting from a Health Ranger interview of Peter McLaughlin, hypnotherapist, author and most importantly, husband of my good friend Mary McLaughlin, who writes The Art of Freedom.

On a group phone call I told Mary I had a confession to make: I was in love with her husband. My only problem was that they were so well-matched and I was more than a little in love with her too! So I’ve linked Mary’s post with Peter’s interview at the end with the interview. See if you can listen and not fall in love with this sensible and kind man who’s explaining mind control and how we can use their own techniques to unravel the spells that they’ve put people under.

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turning the tables

For some years, I was a host for musicians at a local festival. I have a prime location within walking distance of the Civic Hall where they practice and perform. My garaj mahal is a separate unit in a town with the highest rental costs per income in the country. I don’t rent it. They rely on volunteers to house the musicians and composers, and in return, give them two tickets to the concert of their choice.

In 2022 they contacted me to host for their first live concert post-Covid. I asked about their vaccination policy and they said no one would be admitted without proof. This included hosts. I asked why I would host only to be barred from admission, and they said, “Maybe another time.” I asked them to take me off the list.

This year a composer who’d stayed here before with her husband was hoping to stay again. I sent the following reply to the Housing Coordinator:

Now that the dust has settled, I know many people who lost their jobs, had to leave school without their diplomas, some left the country, marriages ended, parents (including mine) died alone. I know of one suicide and several small businesses that went into debt and still ended up closing down.

I got off easy. I didn’t lose a job or housing. I just got excluded from places and events.

But going back to those places and events rankles—that effort at coercion of the few who weren’t forced by their circumstances. I don’t know if you remember some of the very ugly op-eds like Stephen Kessler’s Eulogy for the Unvaxxed. I have a YT video on it if you’d like to remember how mean things got.

And now, it seems like everyone just wants to forget. There was no explanation given that the festival was forced to make that choice. And maybe, even after everything, the festival would make it again.

My daughter is a bereavement counselor at a medical center, so she’s had to be fully vaxxed. When I saw her yesterday, she said that it was impossible to deny what she’s seeing—young people dying of cancers in numbers that had never happened before. She sees it with a co-worker’s wife who just passed, her own husband’s mother who died two weeks after their wedding, and her ridiculously healthy uncle, whose memorial is next month.

Some have paid a very heavy price for their positions, on one side or the other. It doesn’t feel right to just sweep under the rug the position the festival has taken and make nice.

The Director sent me a response:

After 2 virtual seasons and with covid still very much getting people sick and hospitalized, we followed suit with many other performing arts organizations and decided to require vaccination and masking that year (2022) that we returned to live. We also tested the orchestra players every day this year because many of them are not able to play their instruments while wearing masks. They were all very vulnerable. We are so glad that we did take these precautions because we did have a covid spread within our orchestra and were able to make a quick decision to reprogram with musicians that could mask. So, we released all winds and brass players. This helped keep unaffected players from getting sick and allowed us to proceed with the season without totally cancelling (which would have been a devastating loss to us as an organization, our ticket buyers and artists). We had proactively found safe covid houses where some players could go until they were well enough to travel home. Many of our players got very very sick. It did weigh heavy on our conscious and was beyond stressful. 

As masking and keeping up with all the boosters became more problematic and begrudging for our global community, we revisited our protocols for the following season (2023). We decided that our core staff would still be required to mask at all times and come vaccinated. We required that all of our artists and hosts would still need to be vaccinated but, no longer need to mask at all times in the hall. We removed masking and vaccination requirements for our audiences. After having to release half of the orchestra the previous year, we crossed fingers that lightening our covid protocols would not have a negative effect on our season, artists, hosts or community. We did have 2 players that arrived positive with covid and were able to catch it right away, keep them safe at a covid house and prevent another spread. It was still extremely stressful as a presenter but, thankfully no one else tested positive last year. 

Now here we are on the 3rd year of returning to live. It's not that we forget that covid was prevalent. Far from it! We are trying to navigate the demands of our community and world and things feel everchanging. People are fatigued with mask wearing and acknowledging covid I agree with you for sure! And, as your daughter can attest, it has very much wrecked havoc on our world (and still is in many cases). That is undeniable and I personally still stress about if we're making the right decisions as an organization every year. …We feel proud of those decisions to safe guard our patrons, artists, hosts and staff and we still continue to monitor covid trends to help us keep protocols in place that continue to keep people safe. Nothing is perfect that's for sure. But, we have done our best to navigate an ever-changing landscape. 

She ended by pointing out that the composer who wanted to stay here was vaccinated. I replied:

I really appreciate your thoughtful, heartfelt and detailed response to my email. I can feel the stress of these difficult decisions through your narrative and how much deliberation went into weighing the costs and benefits of each. It’s an excruciating weight of responsibility you’ve been under. There is a great deal of misunderstanding, I think, on both sides and not giving enough benefit of the doubt that we’re all doing the best we can. I think your story illustrates the efforts and good will in trying to bring something of benefit to the public while protecting the health of everyone involved.

There is, I’m sure, a desire to see all this as behind us with no need to figure out who was wrong or right, or what lessons we should learn from it, since we’ll never be in that situation again. From your perspective, this was a health emergency to which our governments and their agencies responded for the common good. Perhaps there will be other emergencies, which it seems they’re already predicting, but our agencies will respond just as competently with our best interests in mind.

I continued:

From my perspective and others, this was a planned agenda in which the ‘vaccines' were the goal, not merely for pharmaceutical profits but for more malevolent purposes. Other aspects of this agenda include Ukraine, Gaza, the ‘pack ’n stack’ housing taking over SC, the fires like Maui and CZU Lightning, the dropping of insurances, and the torrential rains washing away roads. Not to instill fear, but to give credibility in the future, some things to look out for are food shortages and banking crises. I could continue but my only point is that it’s ongoing.

The critical question for you is whether you were told the truth. That’s what everything you’ve done relies on. To remember exactly what you were told and how emphatically, I’m including this 11-min compilation by a guy named Matt Orfalea. He’s really funny and packs a lot in. At 5 min are the clips of everyone from Biden to Rachel Maddow saying that the vaccine stops the spread of Covid cold, and how that turned out: 

As you mentioned, in 2022 you required all musicians and staff be fully vaccinated and masked, and required daily PCR tests. Yet there was a covid spread, you had to release half the orchestra, and many of your players got very, very sick. How did the vaccine protect them? It stopped neither infection nor transmission. You already knew it wouldn’t, or you wouldn’t have needed the daily PCR tests. It doesn’t seem to have reduced the severity, as the media claimed even after everyone knew it hadn’t stopped infection or transmission. Many of your vaccinated players got very, very sick. You may say that otherwise they could have died but all you know for certain is the vaccine did not do what they told you it would.

What did the vaccine do? Increased the death rate soon after. This was something I discovered when I looked at the SC County pandemic reports and noticed that everyone was counted as unvaccinated for 60 days after vaccination. So everyone who died within 60 days became an unvaccinated death. This accounting trick, which a UCSC freshman stats student couldn’t get away with, has since been confirmed by many researchers. All county data was sent to the CDC for analysis but I would love to get the raw data.

The recent rise in cancer deaths among young people, that my bereavement daughter said is irrefutable, isn’t because of Covid. But it certainly coincides with the vaccine. Among researchers, the term for these are Turbo Cancers. I’m sure you know I could go on with other impacts like ’Sudden Death Syndrome’ and heart issues, especially in young men.

I can’t imagine how you could have taken the risk of going against all this no matter what your personal feelings or reservations. I think you’ve done the best you could with the information you’ve been given. These are things I’m saying to you as another person, not in your festival role. I never took being excluded personally. 

And I was never isolated. Both in SC and online I have very kind communities who’ve come together. My Worldanz teacher lived in the garaj mahal during the pandemic and I’ve never been fitter before or since ;-) Between YT and Substack, more people listen to my ideas on economics and spirituality than ever before in my life. I’d have to say I thrived during that time, despite or because of the restrictions.

It took the Director a week to get back to me, since she was down with a strep throat. Her reply said they would understand whatever I decided and hoped I was enjoying the nice weather. With the lack of any acknowledgment of my points, I think there should be consequences when the tables are turned. As a meme says:

… or your garaj mahal.

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mask psychosis

Two years ago, the Unherd author Matthew Crawford (no, not our Mathew C) wrote an article called Covid was Liberalism’s End Game and subtitled “Liberal individualism has an innate tendency towards authoritarianism.” He wrote:

I live in the Bay Area, in a county where the vaccination rate is in the mid-80s. In late July, I was dropping my younger daughter off for a soccer day camp each morning. It was 10 kids running around an open field. They wore masks for six hours each day, and it was about 85° that week. Telling my fully vaccinated daughter to put that thing on, I felt compromised for participating in the charade. The old Scots Irish belligerence started welling up. …

After a year and a half of this, going along with it starts to become habitual. If you defy the mask order, and are challenged by somebody doing their job as instructed, chances are you’re going to back down and comply, which is worse than if you had complied to begin with. Even if you strongly suspect fear of the virus has been stoked out of proportion to serve bureaucratic and political interests, or as an artefact of the scaremongering business model of media, you may subtly adjust your view of the reality of Covid to bring it more into line with your actual behaviour. You can reduce the dissonance­ that way. The alternative is to be confronted every day with fresh examples of your own slavishness. …

It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it.

Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths.

Two years later, I wonder how Crawford is feeling about that fully vaccinated daughter. To vaguely blame liberalism, authoritarianism or any other -ism is to let the plotters off the hook. Liberals were a tool, just like conservatives. And by now, it’s clear that Covid was the opening salvo, not the end game. But in terms of the ‘small moments of humiliation’ he’s spot on. An excellent quote, for which I’ve lost the source, says:

It is by the nakedness of our faces we encounter one another as individuals, and in doing so we experience fleeting moments of grace and trust. To hide our faces behind masks is to withdraw this invitation. This has to be politically significant.

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days of our lives

Mark Alexander of The Ministry of Truthiness gifted me a Scamdemic Nostalgia Calendar, images throughout. Here are some others:

Mark is now moving back to California, to a small town that overwhelmingly voted against Newsom, after Vermont and his beloved piano camp were even more intolerant of the unvaxxed. Inspired by my letter, he wrote this to the piano camp:

I haven't attended piano camp since 2010, and after I left my abusive marriage in 2020 I had high hopes of attending again.  But your Covid policies excluded me and my hopes were dashed. I was dumbfounded that you, of all people, who knew that the government push for fluoridation was harming people, would not see that the propaganda around Covid was the same thing on a much larger scale.  Pretty much everything we were told about Covid, masking, testing, social distancing, and the mRNA gene therapies was a lie.  Yet Sonata and many other music venues believed the lies and rolled out their exclusionary apartheid policies without a second thought. …

To be fair, Sonata wasn't the only music venue that implemented medical apartheid.  The music organizers in my little town of Rochester VT also excluded me from concerts for a couple of years, even after I played in one of those concerts during a brief respite from the apartheid in the summer of 2021.  The most egregious of these polices was at the library where I volunteer.  I had lent the library my Yamaha N1X digital piano for use at music events, and in 2022 I was not allowed to attend events at the library that used my own piano!

As Mark’s letter illustrates, even seeing through one psyops was no guarantee the person would see though the next or even empathize with those they excluded.

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the critical middle

The Critical Middle is a woman who left California in 2021. The first link below is her moving account of being betrayed by an employer she had admired for his fairness. The second is the fecklessness of her women’s group, of which she’d been a part for 13 years. She writes poignantly about the struggle between anger and forgiveness in ‘the smoldering rage of the unvaccinated’, parts 1 and 2. In the third, she writes about the kids. Here’s one quote:

There is a dark, heavy burden that comes with being on the outside of what everyone else believes, in an environment where difference is more than discouraged, it is actively demonized.  To disagree was to be at risk: of being called out, ignored, unfriended, shamed or bullied.  So no one dared speak out.

the smoldering rage of the unvaccinated - part 1

the smoldering rage of the unvaccinated - part 2

Tiptoeing slowly away from hell

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compassion and consequences

My youngest daughter says you can only change what you love. My definition of love in To Love Me is to Know Me is trying to see from that person’s perspective. If we are looking down on that person, rather than standing beside and looking out, our desire to change them comes from our ego.

Yet all of us have stories about the people and places that shunned us and worse. What do we do about that now? Peter McLaughlin talks about how to change minds:

Mind Control

The real game is the subconscious mind. That's where your emotions are; that's where your beliefs are. And a belief is simply an emotional idea. If you have an emotion and you have an idea, and they get married, now you have a belief. And a belief doesn't have to be true. It doesn't have to be false.

You know you've tripped over someone else's belief when they start arguing with you vehemently. It doesn't necessarily make sense to start screaming about a political issue, for example. Tripping over beliefs, frankly, is what motivates political talk radio to a degree: polarized, opposing positions.

There are five things I’d like to mention; the first one is repetition. If you want to learn something, you just repeat it over and over and over again, to move from a conscious awareness into an unconscious competence. Our entire educational system is based upon this one principle.

The second thing would be emotion. When a person is in a state of heightened emotion, their subconscious mind becomes open. There's this mechanism, a gatekeeper called a “critical factor” or a “critical faculty.” It prevents information from the outside getting into the subconscious … unless certain conditions are met. So repetition is one of the ways of battering down that door; another one is if you're in a state of high emotion, that door is wide open.

The next one would be authority. If a friend of yours tells you you have a tail, you're probably not going to look around to check and see if he's right. But if a doctor tells you, “Look, Todd, you've got a tail dragging around behind you,” you might actually look behind you because he's a doctor. He's an authority.

The next one would be the effects of your peer group. This is how advertising works: “Four out of five doctors choose this; more Americans choose this than any other kind.” And part of the reason for this is because we are herd animals. We're more like dogs than we are like cats. So we're heavily influenced by the effect of our peer group.

Then the last one of these first five — I know there are other ones — is hypnosis. And if you look at major incidents like COVID-19, or 9/11, all five of these were present immediately, and remained. People actually entered a hypnotic state, based on the shock.

Peter then outlines different hypnosis techniques that were used to put the critical brain to sleep and induce compliance. Yet hypnosis or neural linguistic programming, NLP, are just techniques, neither good nor bad. It depends what they’re used for. He says to the interviewers, “every decision the three of us have ever made in our lives, whether it's big or small, was an emotional decision that we later went to the conscious mind to justify.”

I don’t have an answer, I’m still processing the trauma done to me and with more dire consequences to others. But as the Dixie Chicks sang, I’m not ready to make nice. What about you?

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These are some of my early videos on YT before I was on Substack:

Examines a local op-ed called Eulogy for the Unvaccinated Republican as both spiteful and misinformed wishful thinking. Cites Matt Taibbi's review of Ben Shreckinger's book, The Bidens, and Glenn Greenwald's article on the 1/6 Committee as a way to bring the War on Terror home. Quotes from Julius Ruechel's "The Snake Oil Salesmen and Covid Zero" on immunity as a subscription service, and The European Journal of Epidemiology for why the author's grave-dancing may be premature. Particularly makes the point that local media is encouraging hate speech with publication while censoring peer-reviewed analysis from the government's own data.

Responding to Russell Brand's interview of Brad Evans, I examine obedience to the "technotheocracy" by looking at guilt as a more potent form of fear. I look at the 1987 defunding of Peter Duesberg as the replacement of science and empirical data with the religion of profit-friendly woke-speak. I define conspiracy theory as what investigative journalism used to be before it was replaced with infotainment. I propose propaganda as the interweaving of truth and lies, and Trump as a double-agent who turned truth into heresy by association and made villains into heroes by opposition. I cite Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi on the victim as sacred object, as Brad puts it. I applaud the diabolical cleverness of the strategy to term all power as privilege and make us give it up willingly.

On Unherd, Freddie Sayers interviewed philosopher and writer Paul Kingsnorth on "Why I Changed My Mind in the Vaccine Wars." I use his thesis, antithesis, synthesis model but show why it's backwards and it's the orthodox view that rejects science. I quote Robert F. Kennedy's chapter, HIV Heretics, on how science is not a consensus and tell about my realization, after 50 years of futile arguments, that my mother didn't believe in the existence of facts. I cite Dr. Amishi Jha's definition of science as "a pursuit through a process of understanding what is," and how that relates to peer-reviewed studies. I look at the deeper questions of "are we being manipulated?" and "how can this end well?" I conclude that Paul's example of a person changing their mind is one of the most powerful forces on earth, and hope that #IWasWrong goes viral.

In this video I look at who benefited from the pandemic, other than just pharmaceutical companies, and how the left became so obedient. I examine presentations linking 9-11 and C-19, and compare biodefense labs to breeding sabertooth tigers, just in case they came back in the wild. I ask whether we've been masterfully played by both sides to make the left into non-questioners of authority—Big Government, Big Tech & Big Pharma. I examine the savings to Medicaid from nursing home mortality, and the bankruptcies of small businesses, eliminating the competition for Amazon and Big Box Behemoths.

As Homeland Security targets Domestic Threat Agents undermining trust in US institutions, I suggest we become Domestic Truth Agents. The emerging issue of masking vs. vaccines for students is looked at as a false dichotomy intended to intensify peer pressure. Before we extend the experiment to the next generation, I suggest we analyze the data on adults from 2021.

In response to viewer comments, I examine Norman Doidge's 4-part article, Needle Points, on how the Behavioral Immune System, as he terms it, creates hesitancy. He reframes the question as psycho-social rather than data-driven, which seems odd for a scientist. I look at recent data analyzed by he-who-must-not-be-mentioned (one of many). In conclusion, I ask how the tyranny-hesitant have been turned into early adopters.