False Equivalencies, Parts 6-10 of 10
How Media Gatekeepers Marginalize Alternative Voices
Part Six: Social Media
The far-left hates everyone, themselves included! But I’m no fan of the far-right either. Let’s have less hate and more love. – Elon Musk
Throughout social media, FEs commonly drape the mantel of “outside the pale” onto progressives by associating them with right-wingers.
Caitlin Johnstone argued in 2016 that when there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship:
…representatives of Facebook, Twitter and Google were instructed on the Senate floor that it was their responsibility to adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
Regardless of what opinions about the Ukraine war we are offered, most if it is squeezed through a very narrow mainstream social media lens that instructs us how to think about it. In 2017, Robert Parry wrote:
…I cannot think of a single prominent figure in the mainstream news media who questions any claim – no matter how unlikely or absurd – that vilifies Vladimir Putin…And, behind this disturbing anti-Russian uniformity are increasing assaults against independent and dissident journalists and news outlets outside the mainstream.
The Justice Department had demanded that the Russian news outlet, RT, register as a foreign agent:
This attack on RT was rationalized by the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” prepared by “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA...whenever RT covers a newsworthy event – even if others have too – that constitutes “propaganda,” which must be throttled to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it.…The government’s real beef with RT is that it allows on air some Americans who have been blacklisted from the mainstream media – including former U.S. intelligence analysts – because they have challenged various Official Narratives.
Once again, the reasoning seems to be that citizens can’t be trusted to ingest competing analyses and make intelligent decisions. This is authoritarianism at worst and patronizing at best. And it introduces a profoundly mythic issue. My book repeatedly asks, What are they so afraid of?
Fear of the outsider was nurtured through the deliberate creation of an image. For four decades J. Edgar Hoover described those who threatened the status quo as “outside agitators,” regardless of their nationality. This almost poetic image of the Dionysian menace implies three assumptions about the polis. The first is innocence: evil comes from abroad...Terrorism, quips Chomsky, is “what others do to us.”
A second assumption is weakness. Just as youths seemingly cannot resist drugs or sex, the polis can entertain only the mildest diversity of opinion. If allowed access, leftists would prevent discrimination of right from wrong and infect the children with their “agit-prop.”
A third assumption is fairness. The terrorist is urban, possibly Jewish. He infects us through trickery rather than through direct, “manly” confrontation. His refusal to play by the rules justifies our righteous and overpowering vengeance.
The actual purpose of social media censoring of “fake News” is to shut down real debate and purge writers critical of the American empire – all under the guise of “fairness”.
Some of these examples are clearly of FEs, while others exhibit the censorship that FEs produce. We need to understand how our primary electronic gatekeepers collaborate with government to narrow the window of acceptable debate.
Airbnb prevents Palestinian hosts from listing their homes in the occupied West Bank
Payment Providers
Equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, Paypal refused to provide services to Palestinians and shut down the accounts of solidarity groups that were blacklisted by Israel. Many were prevented from crowdfunding their work. Soon after the Ukraine war began, Paypal blocked the account of MintPress, which had published articles criticizing Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar. It froze $9,000 in Consortium News’s account, although popular protest convinced it to release the frozen money. On the other end of the FE spectrum, Paypal repeatedly promised to prevent white nationalists from fundraising online. But a year after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, several openly racist groups were still using mainstream payment providers to process credit card payments and crowdfund their efforts.
Music platforms
Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube (owned by Google, a military contractor) have censored pro-Palestinian posts. CEO Susan Wojcicki admits that while it still allows entertainment videos equal shots at going viral, in areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”. In addition to banning content deemed harmful, it has a category (“borderline content”) that algorithmically de-boosts many videos and has deleted over 9,000 channels relating to Ukraine. This list includes Chris Hedges and his entire, six-year archive of author interviews, not one of which was about Russia. He responded:
This censorship is about supporting what, as I.F Stone reminded us, governments always do – lie. Challenge the official lie, as I often did, and you will soon become a nonperson on digital media. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power. Look where they are now. This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin’s airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes the efforts to examine our reality...The goal is to foster historical amnesia.
Another of those voices is anti-war comedian Lee Camp, whose TV show had argued that the U.S. provoked Russia into the war. YouTube, which had already banned Trumpus, suddenly banned Camp’s channel. Here’s the FE logic:
Russia invades Ukraine; Putin bad.
Trumpus praises Putin; Trumpus bad.
Social media bans Trumpus.
Progressives present evidence of U.S. provocation.
Progressives = Russia; progressives bad.
Social media can now de-platform other progressives.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is actively censored, and users are blocked not only for spam.
Wikipedia’s Culture of Editorial Chaos and Malice
How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia
Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages
Former UN weapons inspector and Marine officer Scott Ritter has been banned for criticizing the establishment Ukraine narrative. Twitter actually admits an Algorithm Bias for Rightwing Politicians.
Twitter Suspends Accounts For Propaganda, Has Literal Propagandist As High-Level Executive
Top Assange Defense Account Deleted By Twitter
Under Israeli pressure, Facebook and Twitter delete large amounts of Palestinian content
The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed
Defending Freedom and Democracy Requires An Awful Lot Of Censorship
Twitter is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents
Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk
Google’s origin partly lies in CIA research grants for mass surveillance. It’s business is controlling what viewers see. Like Twitter, it “de-ranked” RT and many independent news sources. The algorithms moved their websites from previously prominent positions to positions up to 50 search result pages from the first page, essentially removing them.
This is classic false equivalency – using concerns over fake news as a cover to suppress antiwar websites. In 2017, World Socialist reported that traffic coming in from web search was down 70%. It claimed that In mid-April, a Google search for “socialism vs. capitalism” brought one of the site’s links on the first results page but, by August, that same search didn’t feature any of its links and that 145 of the top 150 search terms that had previously redirected people to the site were now devoid of its links. It obtained data estimating the decline of traffic generated by Google searches for 13 popular sites, several of which were not radical at all:
* wsws.org: down 67%
* alternet.org: down 63%
* globalresearch.ca: down 62%
* consortiumnews.com: down 47%
* socialistworker.org: down 47%
* mediamatters.org: down 42%
* commondreams.org: down 37%
* internationalviewpoint.org: down 36%
* democracynow.org: down 36%
* wikileaks.org: down 30%
* truth-out.org: down 25%
* counterpunch.org: down 21%
* theintercept.com: down 19%
In 2018, public pressure led Google to relent – at least for a while. C. J. Hopkins wrote:
What’s happening isn’t censorship, technically…The point of Google “unpersoning” CounterPunch…is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitimize them, decrease traffic to their websites and ultimately drive them out of business…a message to other writers: “This could happen to you.”
Facebook (Meta) has, quite deservedly, become the focal point for all that’s wrong with social media. It has regularly manipulated FEs to purge progressive voices, using Republican political operatives and Israeli censorship experts. It allows governments to decide what to censor, punishes Black people for talking about racism and targets Palestinian accounts.
In 2017, long before the current genocide, Glenn Greenwald described meetings between Facebook and Israeli officials:
…failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in laws requiring FB to do so…Ever since, FB has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists…Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient FB is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders…Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.
FB has been dishonest in its public statements about the FE of “anti-Zionist” = “anti-Semite”. But its mendacity (and collusion with the empire) has gone well beyond that issue. It banned Infowars for 30 days but permanently shut down countless progressive accounts (including mine!) because “…their activity was similar – and in some cases connected – to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.” Matt Taibbi writes:
Facebook was “helped” in its efforts to wipe out these dangerous memes by the Atlantic Council, on whose board you’ll find Henry Kissinger, former CIA chiefs Michael Hayden and Michael Morell and former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff.
In 2018 it removed police accountability pages, and in 2020 it purged several anarchist accounts, some of which were associated with the antifascist movement. These included It’s Going Down, a news and opinion platform on Pacifica radio.
While FB uses FEs to block legitimate progressive postings, it allows actual hate speech. A journalist who went undercover as a moderator in Ireland reported that it lets pages from far-right fringe groups exceed the deletion threshold.
Social media are now much more influential than newspapers, and the money involved (cui bono – follow the money) is correspondingly greater. So we shouldn’t be surprised when the NYT cheers on these efforts to censor alternative opinion through the use of FE algorithms.
Facebook ‘Bot’ Adviser Secretly in Pay of US Regime Change Agency
This FE business is about the erasure of memory and the cancelling of what we see with our own eyes, especially regarding Gaza. Taibbi describes:
…the doublethink phase predicted by Orwell, where most of the population is conscious of double standards but ignores them...made the spooks the good guys again…taken what was once the oppositional-skeptic portion of the American population and seen them rallied behind the people they once hated the most...when there’s fighting going on in a faraway land, the real target is always the domestic population, whose memories and doubts are the real threats...
How successful have these efforts been to make left and right equivalent in the liberal mind? Well before the Russian invasion, Americans were approving of steps to restrict false information online. And Democrats were approving of the CIA and the FBI more than Republicans were. Greenwald noted:
One of MSNBC’s most vocal DNC boosters, Chris Hayes, gushed that the war in Ukraine has revitalized faith and trust in the intelligence community more than any event in recent memory – and deservedly so, he said: “The last few weeks have been like the Iraq War in reverse for US intelligence.”…No matter one’s views on Russia, Ukraine and the U.S, it should be deeply alarming to watch such a concerted, united campaign on the part of the most powerful public and private entities to stomp out dissent, while so aggressively demonizing what little manages to slip by.
PART SEVEN – Who Checks the Fact Checkers?
I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are. – George H.W. Bush
You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. – George W. Bush
Nothing makes us feel more part of the chosen community than to believe in something in common with others. So who determines what is “disinformation”? Fact checkers to the rescue!
Conservatives accuse Snopes.com of being “loony liberal”, while Allsides’ “Fact Check Bias Chart” places CNN on the far left (!) of “liberal bias”. The actual agenda of many of these “objective” voices is to bestow quasi-academic reinforcement to the marginalization of progressive opinion through the same process of FEs. For years, as the oligarchs bought up media, journalists, writes Andrew Lowenthal, “began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting ‘disinformation.’” They like to compile lists:
An “International Fact-Checking Network” claiming to be the ultimate checker of all other fact-checkers is a project of the Poynter Institute (which owns Politifact). Bill Gates (who has given over $250 million toward journalism) and Charles Koch are major funders.
At best, fact checkers are preaching to their own choirs, reinforcing strongly held beliefs. At worst, their mission is service to the empire. Facebook uses US-funded organizations for its Ukraine facts, and it employs many “former” CIA agents. Another of its checkers is an affiliate of The Daily Caller, co-founded by Tucker Carlson. Derrick Broze writes:
...label someone fake news, lower their reach with algorithmic manipulation, force them to comply to arbitrary commands if they want the label removed, control the narrative… many choose to self-censor, hoping that things will get better in the long run…a losing strategy.
The worst of the lot is Newsguard, which promotes an “Internet Trust Tool” to libraries and markets its services to advertisers to protect their “brand safety.” However, many of its partners and investors are linked to military intelligence. Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff of Project Censored write:
NewsGuard and its ilk...promote narrow ideological perspectives and corporate economic interests that reflect the world views of powerful institutions such as Homeland Security, NATO, the CIA, AT&T and Microsoft.
Anybody with financial backing can proclaim themselves “a trusted arbiter of investigative news,” as does right-wing RealClearInvestigations, which proclaims, unsurprisingly, that “the media’s fact-checkers tend to lean left”.
No self-proclaimed fact checker is likely to transcend their prejudices, whether honest or corporately-imposed, to determine what’s objectively true – especially Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Board”. Introducing a Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know, Taibbi writes that this is “just the military-industrial complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
But social media has allowed some facts, such as mass genocide in Gaza, to exist right in front of us, and the only thing that keeps us from seeing them clearly are our own mythologies of privilege and innocence.
We note in passing that much legitimate writing about disinformation came from RFK Jr – before he sold his soul to Trumpus. As the poet William Stafford wrote, “I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact”.
We also note that, as Trumpus regained the White House, Mark Zuckerberg, like most oligarchs, was happy to do business with him. That meant ending the factchecking practice on Facebook and Instagram, “restoring free expression on our platforms” and abandoning its DEI team. In the age of AI, facts were becoming increasingly irrelevant and false equivalencies unnecessary.
It’s up to all of us to build and teach media literacy. Roth and Huff suggest
A robust independent press – grounded in core values of journalism, including independence, accountability and transparency – provides a first line of defense.
They quote four simple writing guidelines from the Society of Professional Journalists:
Seek Truth and Report It.
Minimize Harm.
Act Independently.
Be Accountable and Transparent.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting offers a Media Literacy Guide:
Who are the sources?
Who is telling the story?
Where does the funding come from?
What are the unchallenged assumptions and stereotypes?
Does it include loaded language?
Does it present a false balance between sides of an issue?
Are the visuals misleading?
Do headlines match reality – or the rest of the piece?
How prominently are stories placed?
Johnstone suggests that there are basically only four questions that really matter:
Where is the money is going?
Where are the resources are going?
Where are the weapons are going?
Where are the people going?
Everything else is narrative spin meant to justify, distort or distract, and often with FEs.
PART EIGHT: Progressive False Equivalencies
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide
Belief means not wanting to know what is true. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Centrists are not the only ones to de-legitimize ideas further out on the spectrum than they are comfortable with. Many progressives, for example, are disappointed with Noam Chomsky, both for ridiculing the 9/11 Truth movement as well as for accepting the conventional narrative of the Kennedy assassinations.
But we need to consider certain mythological implications, because our attitudes, prejudices, ignorance and naiveté are determined by the unconscious ways in which we attend to our American myths. So we need to look at how the left also engages in FEs.
The fear and hysteria that crop up in every generation usually mobilize the right wing, especially men who identify as white rather than as working class. But after World War Two, beginning with the fluoridation disputes, something new gained momentum with the political assassinations of the sixties. It blossomed after 9-11, when many good-hearted progressives demonized some of their brethren who dared to articulate the latest “conspiracy theory.”
The broader issue is not about right and wrong; it’s about innocence and experience. Ridicule is a tool of the gatekeepers, and its intention is to marginalize people rather than engage with them.
In a binary world of polar opposites, either you agree with us on every issue, or we can’t trust you about anything. Change the terminology just a bit, and we are back in the language of Puritan theology and the American frontier, where you are either among the elect inside the pale, or you represent the dark, inscrutable evil on the outside. As G.W. Bush wondered, we can’t understand why they hate us. In American myth, evil must be utterly and permanently obliterated and removed from memory. There is no middle ground.
This is the language of a demythologized world, in which subtle nuance is replaced by dualistic language. However, as I write in Chapter One of my book:
The Aramaic word spoken by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolos and into English as “evil” actually means “unripe.” What if we used “unripe” instead of “evil?”
During the Covid crisis, most progressives got on board the “ridicule the anti-vaxxers” train, lumping many legitimate anti-corporate, anti-military dissenters together with Tea Party and MAGA loonies simply because of their common views on vaccination.
Eventually, as many framed vaccination along the left-right continuum, they no longer needed to think about it. If they were experiencing anxiety over this issue (as we all do when our assumptions are questioned), their anxiety was reduced. But the myth of American innocence is inherently unstable. Like any other addiction (alcoholism, consumerism, fundamentalism, Marxism, libertarianism, workaholism and our greatest addiction of all, fear), it has very little nutritional capacity and must be constantly fed. But this issue is most certainly not about right and left.
We recall that the CIA coined the phrase, “conspiracy theorist” to marginalize those who were questioning the official the Kennedy assassination narrative.
Why do so many progressives dismiss alternate thinking on the vaccination issue? Perhaps because, as “secular humanists,” their religion is reason or rationality, and its dogma is science (or scientism). Their world is explained by science rather than by divine truth. However, as with all dying mythologies, once a single facet of the dogma is seen as imperfect, the entire theology is also called into question. The fear of such a chaotic universe is so strong that it overrides the evidence of both the massive corruption of science (see here) as well as the fact that many vaccine skeptics (all the ones I know) are not universally opposed to vaccines, only to the ones (or the combinations) they consider dangerous.
Indeed, many progressives refuse to let go of the belief in progress itself, which inevitably assumes perpetual economic growth – on a planet that is rapidly approaching terminal limits and a collapsing ecosystem. Belief in progress conflicts with our environmental concerns. Perhaps “progressives” should find a different term to describe ourselves.
So how do we explain that many who question the dominant narratives are right-wingers, or that countless New Agers support Trumpus, or that many progressives refuse to get vaccinated? I’m less interested in resolving these mysteries and more interested in pursuing the issue of belief itself, as I do here.
We have all internalized the heritage of monotheism. In Chapter One of my book I write:
Since monotheism rejects ambiguity and diversity, it requires belief, which implies not merely a single set of truths but also the obligation to convert – or eliminate – others. It invites misogyny, aggression, hatred of the body and a single creation myth.
Are you a believer – in religion or in scientism? Do you believe in things that you once knew to be untrue? Eisenstein writes:
To leap from one certainty to another skips the holy ground of uncertainty, of not knowing, of humility, into which genuinely new information can come. What unites the pundits of all persuasions is their certainty. Who is trustworthy? In the end, it is the person with the humility to recognize when he or she has been wrong.
Or, as Caroline Casey says, believe nothing; entertain possibilities.
PART NINE – The Corruption of Science
To reduce the length of this series, I’ve posted this chapter separately.
PART TEN: Conclusions
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. – Blaise Pascal
Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex. – Frank Zappa
If I’ve given some attention to vaccination, it’s because it’s so critical to understand how we can be diverted from more important issues. The “Russiagate” narrative does exactly that.
The liberal logic:
A – The “intelligence community” asserts that Russia hacked the 2016 election.
B – Liberals, needing to explain Clinton’s loss, trust the spooks.
B – Trumpus denies any collusion.
C – Trumpus is Putin’s dupe.
D – Leftists argue that he won because of voter suppression and Clinton’s unpopularity.
E – Leftists are Putin’s dupes – and should be de-platformed.
The conservative FE:
A – Communists bad.
B – Russia / USSR was communist once.
C – Russia became capitalist in the 1990s.
D – Putin bad.
E – Putin is Russian.
F – Putin is communist.
G –To believe F, one must ignore C (this, once again, is cognitive dissonance).
But my concerns go beyond this one issue. I’m talking about a post-9/11 era in which our freedoms, including those of privacy and of choice, have been disappearing gradually and imperceptibly. It is only our sense of innocence that keeps us from noticing that the pot is boiling, that we are all being cooked; it is only our constantly manipulated fear of the Other that can still distract us from the threat of climate change.
Republicans are clearly not alone in this, as the national security state’s determination to confront Russia (and eventually China) indicates, even under Democratic presidents. In 2022, 44% of Democrats thought Russia was still Communist.
Perhaps you agree with those who would mandate vaccinations for everyone. But please ask yourself if you are condoning yet another loss of freedom in yet another dispute where almost all the money is on one side of the issue. Cui bono?
This bears repeating: almost all the money has been on one side of the issue.
Consider the significant issues in our lifetimes. Without exception, the vast majority of money has been spent by the arms industry, the churches, the AMA, the NRA, Big Agriculture, Big Lumber, Big Mining, Big Chemical, Big Tobacco, Big Banks, Big Auto, Big Cancer Research, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Coal, Big Voter Suppression, Big Internet / High Tech, the Private Prison and anti-immigration industries and, of course the Israel lobby.
Or consider “family values” issues: the segregationists, MAGA, the anti-union, anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-cannabis, anti-trans and anti-gay marriage movements are always subsidized by the ultra-rich.
All except for the vaccination dispute, which is a consumer protection movement begun by aggrieved parents and some libertarians on one side (appropriated by self-serving politicians), and a trillion-dollar industry on the other hand, one that spends billions lobbying Congress and on advertising, one that generates so much profit that it can regularly absorb huge fines without alienating its stockholders.
And who supports the pro-vaxxers? “Quackwatch” gatekeepers, scientists – and a volunteer legion of liberals and comedians armed with FEs.
Please note: I am not advocating any position; all my grandchildren have been vaccinated.
I’m simply trying to put things in perspective. Though I welcome a good argument, I avoid ideological absolutes. That is a language to which I am trying to offer an alternative, the language of mythological thinking. Rather than suggesting compromise, I’m hoping to move from a binary world of “twos” (right or wrong) to a world of “threes” – holding the tension of those opposites, resisting the temptation to resolve it by believing only one side, until something greater – a third element – appears. This is the essence of the Creative Imagination.
But I can’t avoid this one: there is simply no political conflict in which progressives should find themselves aligned so indisputably, so arrogantly, so unconsciously with the interests of Big Business, and indeed the most corrupt of them all, Big Pharma.
Christian Parenti writes:
...the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship...For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute...
The fact checkers created lists such as the “Disinformation Dozen” to attack celebrities who questioned the pro-vax narrative. “Anti-Vax Watch” is “an alliance of concerned individuals seeking to educate the American public about the dangers of the anti-vax industry.”
Industry?
I don’t advocate warring on science. This is about scientism as a secular religion. It’s about becoming conscious of how late capitalism has vomited out a collection of oligarchs whose pathological drive for profits has so corrupted science that it would collude in poisoning three generations of children. At the deeper level, it’s about the myth of the killing of the children. It’s about no longer referring to scientists as arbiters until they clean up their act and regain our trust. I’m talking about scientists who can prove they aren’t owned by Big Business and science that can be replicated regularly.
This permission to demonize from the left may well be one of the greatest scams of all. Some of us have become FOX wannabes, more and more comfortable with its nasty, divisive language. When we use it we are no longer speaking from our creative imagination, but from our paranoid imagination. As John Michael Greer writes:
If you want people to get nothing done but conflict, convince them they are on one side of something. Only violence will result. What two needs is to become three. The unifying story is the crucial third factor which turns opposition into a spiral.
But moving from two to three requires being willing to live in uncertainty.
The present hysteria (whatever it is as you read this) will end soon. Behind it is our characteristic American predisposition to fall from fear into crusades, to retreat behind the pale and sacrifice not only the dreaded Other but our own children.
It’s not about the fear-du-jour; it’s about our willingness to go there. It’s about how our rationalism, our sense of fair play and our assumptions of innocence until proven guilty are the thinnest of veneers, below which lie the demons of paranoia that America has avoided looking at for 400 years.
Once legislation mandating universal vaccination and banning any criticism of Israel or the police becomes law, will you or I be able to save ourselves (as at Salem, as during McCarthyism and the “war on terror”) by naming names? You can count on this: the next hysteria is already planned, and those who will profit from it expect to count on us to accept false equivalencies that cancel out alternatives. When you hear the call to join the next witch-hunt, will your pitchfork and torch be ready?
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know. - Wendell Berry