When Intellectuals Lie
They are not all deluded
A key divide between conspiracists and structuralists is the issue of how conscious the behavior is of intellectuals who publish clearly false information. Was it a simple mistake, was it the result of deeply rooted delusions, or was the intellectual being intentionally deceptive? Most of us are not mind readers, so it is not easy to know. And when there is no other seeming excuse for their behavior, were they doing it out of twisted ego and ideological needs, or were they just doing their jobs, in which lying was part of their job descriptions?
Sam Husseini has specialized in asking questions of officials so that they have to lie to wiggle off the hook. American society lies to its children about Santa Claus. Does that set them up for a lifetime of being lied to? In 1800, a popular book was written about George Washington that was a series of fabrications about his honesty and other illusory virtues. In reality, Washington was the architect of history’s greatest swindle, and the evidence is in his own hand, which Wikipedia still cannot bring itself to mention. Similarly, Zbigniew Brzezinski bragged about baiting the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, and “scholars” have leapt into the fray to deny that Brzezinski meant what he said. But Brzezinski later confirmed it to the CIA official who presided over the Afghanistan region at the time. Are scholars fundamentally dishonest? It can sure seem that way.
I watched officials repeatedly act criminally during my days as a free-energy revolutionary, and when a psychopathic sheriff’s deputy finally unmasked himself during my day on the witness stand, it was the turning point of my life. The media endlessly lied about us, which primed me for Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s work about the media. The media simply makes it up as it goes along. The point of the title of Manufacturing Consent is that prominent intellectuals argued in the early 20th century that the public needed to be lied to for its own good.
When I interacted with the “skeptics,” and was stalked by one for years, they lied all the time, and when I exposed my stalker’s lies, he would make up new lies. These are all merely examples of my journey’s primary lesson. But the “skeptics” are a good example of how their delusions can run so deeply that it can look like bold-faced lying, but it is likely just how blinded they are by their ideologies that they can’t see what is obvious to everybody else. Ed Herman made similar observations about establishment pundits, in that they are incapable of rational thought when encountering information that challenges their delusions. If that can absolve them of their responsibility, it brings up Brian O’Leary’s question of whether humanity is a sentient species. I have yet to see a valid critique of Ed’s work, his Propaganda Model has never been credibly challenged, and I saw the same kinds of invalid criticisms of Howard Zinn’s work, which were painstakingly dissected in Zinnophobia. It is hard to call some of those invalid critiques anything other than deliberate deceptions.
This is a preamble to recent lies that I have seen regarding vaccination. Since 2009, I have read vaccine critics state that vaccines are never safety tested with double-blind trials of vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations, in which the unvaccinated population is given a harmless placebo, as is standard for drug-safety testing.
When challenged on that, officials have made transparently irrational arguments to defend the situation, including Anthony Fauci. Can those officials really be that stupid, do they expect their audiences to be that stupid, or is something else happening? One of vaccination’s greatest cheerleaders, Paul Offit (AKA “Dr. Proffit,” who voted himself rich), recently defended the lack of placebo testing with an absolutely idiotic argument: if we gave a thousand times the recommended placebo dose, it would harm the patients. But Offit is not as stupid as he seems, as he soon deleted his Tweet. If Offit was not being deliberately deceptive, then he is as deluded as they come. I vote for deceptive.