(LifeSiteNews) – If Democrats have their way, parents who oppose transgender ideology or irreversible drugs and surgeries for kids may lose custody of their children in the near future.
That may sound too radical to be real, but it’s happening.
In late September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill, SB 107, that allows California courts to take “emergency jurisdiction” of children who come to the state for “gender transitions.”
In other words, starting in January, California will be able to strip parents in any state of their custody rights if their children seek chemical or surgical mutilation within California’s borders, or even through telemedicine with a California-based doctor.
Moreover, the law, authored by a homosexual lawmaker from San Francisco and co-sponsored by Planned Parenthood, could promote abduction of minors to California – and leave parents powerless to stop it.
SB 107 includes a broad carve-out that protects the “taking of a child” to pursue transgender drugs or surgeries, as conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom has pointed out.
“This gives a relative who secretly takes a child to California and arranges for gender identity procedures on the child a pathway to also strip the parents of their rights and obtain sole custody of the child,” the group explained. “Parents whose child visits a relative in California could lose custody of their child forever if the relative persuades the child to identify as a different gender during the visit.”
California’s ultra-radical attack on parents would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But in 2022, it’s part of a growing trend among far-left Democrats.
Days after Newsom signed SB 107, a Democratic lawmaker in Virginia, Rep. Elizabeth Guzman, announced she would introduce legislation to criminalize parents who don’t “affirm” their child’s “gender identity” and strip their custody rights. The bill would force schools to report such parents to Virginia’s Child Protective Services (CPS).
Asked what penalties parents could face under the measure, Guzman responded, “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”
Guzman designed her bill with an activist linked to the Pride Liberation Project, an LGBT group recently caught trying to help homosexual and gender-confused youth run away from home to live with a “queer friendly adult.”
This even isn’t the first time that Virginia Democrats have worked with groomers to take away people’s kids: In 2020, Guzman and four Democratic colleagues introduced a similar bill soon after Democrats retook control of the state legislature. As the Daily Wire noted, the only sponsor of that bill in the Virginia Senate had previously been indicted for child pornography and underage sex crimes.
Democrats’ push to gut parental rights as part of their totalitarian LGBT agenda has already had devastating effects on families. In recent years, a growing number of parents around the country have been tragically separated from their children because of opposition to LGBT ideology.
Even before Newsom signed SB 107, multiple parents in California lost their custody rights for not being “affirming” enough, like Abigail Martinez, whose gender-confused daughter ultimately killed herself after being remanded to state custody. The Epoch Times reported about Martinez, who unsuccessfully fought the Los Angeles school system and child services department:
Abigail told us that she was visited regularly by members of the trans-advocacy group RISE and recounted one of them encouraging her to “have a funeral for your daughter and adopt your son.” She was told not to talk about God. “They told me if you do that, you’ll never see your daughter,” she said.
Parents have faced similar ordeals in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Dallas.
No doubt we’ll see more cases like this as Democrat-run states, many of which already indoctrinate children into LGBT confusion with mandatory gender ideology, rush to join California as transgender “sanctuary states.” Michigan may be next, with a constitutional amendment on the ballot next week that would create a “fundamental right” to sterilization, including for children.
And if Democrats keep their majority in the House and net just two more Senate seats in the midterms, they’ll pass their radical, pro-LGBT Equality Act, which the Heritage Foundation has warned “could lead to more prosecutions against parents who refuse to aid in the sterilization of their children.”
Opposition to “gender transitioning” isn’t the only type of ideological dissent threatening conservatives’ custody rights. According to a January poll, around one-third of Democratic voters agree with removing children from unvaccinated parents, and Democratic judges have done just that. Liberals openly describe raising kids according to Christian beliefs as a form child abuse. How much longer before they come for religious households?
In this new era of woke, extremist Democrats, one of our most fundamental and sacred rights is now on the ballot: the right to keep and raise our own children.
In just the last few weeks, Liz Truss, Britain’s new prime minister, has been denounced by critics as a “fascist.” So has Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s newly elected prime minister. Along with all Republicans in Congress, Texas and Florida GOP Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and, of course, former President Donald Trump. Every one of the tens of thousands of “MAGA Republicans” who attend Trump rallies, too.
Dangerous fascists, for that matter, all of whom critics say need to be shut up.
Truss is a fascist because she wants to cut taxes. Meloni is a fascist, and getting banned from several social media platforms, because she gave a rousing speech endorsing God, family and country. What a dangerous tyrant. Republicans in Congress are fascists because they support work for welfare and are trying to block the Green New Deal.
“What is so infuriating about these slurs is that the Left doesn’t even understand what a fascist is.” Hillary Clinton said after a recent Trump rally in Ohio, “I remember as a young student … I’d watch newsreels and I’d see this guy standing up there ranting and raving, and people shouting and raising their arms.” Trump’s defeated 2016 Democratic presidential rival was referring to Hitler.
“You saw the rally in Ohio the other night,” added Clinton, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state. “Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour, and you have these rows of young men with their arms raised.” She didn’t quite say it, but the implied message was clear: These crazy Trump supporters wanted to say, “Heil Hitler.”
At least President Joe Biden doesn’t call his political adversaries fascists. They are only “semifascists.” What a relief.
Aren’t these the same people who have urged raising the level of civil discourse? Wasn’t Biden supposed to “unify” the country with Trump out of the picture?
What is so infuriating about these slurs is that the Left doesn’t even understand what a fascist is. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fascism is “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government.” The Britannica Dictionary defines fascism as “a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.”
Let all that sink in for a minute. Who are the fascists here? A government that “controls the lives of the people.” Let’s see — we have a group of politicians who shut down schools, businesses, restaurants and churches during COVID-19. A government that is now telling us what kind of light bulbs we can put in our homes, what temperature we can set our thermostat in our living rooms, what kind of car we can buy and what kind of drugs we need to be inserted into our arms.
Who is the leader who is vastly supersizing our centralized government? Biden and congressional Democrats have already spent $4 trillion expanding nearly all the power structures of government in Washington. If this isn’t fascistic, what is?
But here’s the rub. The definition of “fascism” has gradually been evolving over time. Nowadays, according to the Collins Dictionary, fascism “is a set of right-wing political beliefs that includes strong controls of society and the economy by the state” (emphasis added).
By this definition, leftists can’t be accused of being fascists because they want to use government for virtuous ends, while the Right wants to use government to further enrich the rich, spread racism and deny science.
What we have here is a clinical case of “projecting.” Democrats and other leftist parties around the world accuse the Right of wanting to expand government powers when that is precisely the overriding objective of the modern-day American Left.
It is prototypically fascistic. Elevate race and skin color into the public debate. Trample civil liberties. Squash those who disagree with the reigning government. Partner up Big Government with Big Business and micromanage the economy through dictates from the central planners. Put your political enemies in handcuffs and jail without a trial. Trample over the traditional guardrails that were installed to protect liberty — by changing voting rules, ending the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate and discrediting and trying to pack the Supreme Court. Declare everything, including COVID-19 and climate change, an existential threat to justify more power to the politicians.
So what is a fascist really? The Left says it is anyone who opposes what they want to do to expand government.
But the real definition of a fascist is a leader who wants to exploit governmental power to suppress the basic liberties of individuals. It is the partnership of government and private industry for political power and monetary gain. To find it in modern-day America, the folks at the (Biden) White House may want to look in the mirror.
The reaction of the persecuted church in Iran to Biden’s anti-conservative speech on the 1st September is cause for alarm. Persecuted Christians easily recognise the precursor to tyrannical oppression against godly, law abiding citizens. The US Democrats are doubling down against their opponents in an act of desperation, as a result of disastrous policy failure and a growing awareness by US citizens that all is not well, not realising that demonising the opposition leads to an increased risk of hypocrisy, injustice and inhumanity. Ideology, whether it is Islamic or atheistic, can be fundamentally dangerous to the lives of faithful Christians.
John 15:19–20 If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they keep my word, they will also keep yours.
By Josh Boak, Zeke Miller, posted September 2, 2022 in National News.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — President Joe Biden charged in a prime-time address that the “extreme ideology” of Donald Trump and his adherents “threatens the very foundation of our republic,” as he summoned Americans of all stripes to help counter what he sketched as dark forces within the Republican Party trying to subvert democracy.
In his speech Thursday night (Sept. 1) at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Biden unleashed the trappings of the presidency in an indictment of Trump and what he said has become the dominant strain of the opposition party. His broadside came barely two months before Americans head to the polls in bitterly contested midterm elections that Biden calls a crossroads for the nation.
“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal,” he said before an audience of hundreds, raising his voice over pro-Trump protesters outside the building where the nation’s founding was debated. He said he wasn’t condemning the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 but added, “There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” using the acronym for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.
The explicit effort by Biden to marginalize Trump and his followers marks a sharp recent turn for the president, who preached his desire to bring about national unity in his inaugural address.
“President Biden’s speech to the nation last night was more inflammatory than healing,” said Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in an email to Baptist Press. “For a President who campaigned on unity and healing the country, he continues to govern in a way that is deeply polarizing. It was a campaign speech disguised as an official word from the commander-in-chief.”
Delivering a preemptive rebuttal from Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Biden was born, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said it is the Democratic president, not Republicans, trying to divide Americans.
“In the past two years, Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America, on its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values,” McCarthy said. “He has launched an assault on our democracy. His policies have severely wounded America’s soul, diminished America’s spirit and betrayed America’s trust.”
Asked on Friday if he considered all Trump supporters a threat to the country, Biden said, “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”
He added: “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge when an election has been won, insists on changing the way in which the rules to count votes, that is a threat to democracy.”
He said that when people voted for Trump, “they weren’t voting for attacking the Capitol. They weren’t voting for overruling the election. They were voting for a philosophy he put forward.” Last week, he compared the “MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.”
“Equality and democracy are under assault” in the U.S., Biden charged in the speech, casting Trump and his backers in the GOP as a menace to the nation’s system of government, its standing abroad and its citizens’ way of life.
Trump and his supporters “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence,” he said. They “are determined to take this country backwards.”
“Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” he said.
Red lights illuminated the brick of Independence Hall, as the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief” and a pair of Marine sentries stood at parade rest in the backdrop. Still, the major broadcast television networks did not carry the address live.
“His use of the symbols of the American military, his attempt to portray half the country as irredeemable fascists, and the bizarre red backdrop did not convey a leader wishing to heal but divide,” Darling said. “It was especially appalling to see the pro-life movement–of which the President used to be a member–portrayed as enemies of democracy.
“What America needs in this moment is a president willing to help heal our deep divides, to resist the election-year urge to consider his ideological adversaries as enemies of the state, and to ratchet down the rhetoric coming from the White House. We are at a dangerous moment, where the incentives on all sides are toward demonization, where partisans seem increasingly eager to engage in political violence. Preserving democracy requires cool heads and warm hearts, not cheap campaign rhetoric.
“For Christians, this is a moment of opportunity, to both display courage in advocating for transcendent truths and civility in seeing even those who disagree with us as image-bearers of the Almighty. And should pray for leaders willing to do the same.”
Iowa GOP chair Jeff Kaufman said in a statement that Biden was using the tactics of an authoritarian regime, “trying to turn his political opponents into an enemy of the state.”
Last week, Financial Times Associate Editor Edward Luce tweeted that Republicans are the most “dangerous” political force in the world, bar none. “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world,” he said, and “I have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.” Former CIA Director Michael Hayden chimed in immediately and said, “I agree.”
This past Tuesday, Democrat adviser Kurt Bardella called all Republicans a “domestic terrorist cell.” MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross agreed and said there should be no distinction between Republicans and “right-wing extremists.” At the same time, Peter Wehner, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, likened the Republican Party to a “dagger pointed at the throat of American democracy.” All this while the FBI Director Christopher Wray added that any American flying the Gadsden — “Don’t Tread On Me” — flag is suspect of violent extremism.
Does anyone except me hear the ghost of George Orwell laughing right now?
Does it concern you that a group of Democrats holding power is now defining all Republicans as being “right-wing extremists” and a “threat to American democracy?”
And by the way, what is a right-wing extremist? Is it someone who advocates for pro-life legislation? Is it someone who believes in traditional standards of sexual morality? Are you a right-winger if you believe in lower taxes? Are you an extremist if you dare to call for open debate on environmental policy? Are you a threat to American democracy if you think enforcing America’s borders will actually be good for America? Are you one of those “nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible” people “holding a dagger to America’s throat” if you believe in school choice and the self-evident reality of parental rights?
Isn’t it a bit convenient that Big Brother has decided that all Americans with a “Republican” bumper sticker on their car versus those who obediently parrot the beltway propaganda of George Soros are a security risk?
And what about these smart folks on the left? Is their thoughtless embrace of critical race theory a security risk? How about their endless printing of monopoly money and the consequent degrading of U.S. currency? Does this enhance or impede American democracy? Does their embrace of the neo-Marxism of Black Lives Matter endanger our freedom? Does their infatuation with sexual nihilism make America’s women and children feel more or less secure? And how about “climate change” and “green” economics? Does their religious zeal for the disproven pantheism of former Vice President Al Gore enhance our national security or hurt it? Finally, let’s consider their post-modern aversion to any robust debate concerning everything above; is their intellectual foreclosure not nihilistic and extreme?
Oh, a final question: How about their ad hominem attacks of calling 50% of the American people derogatory names? Isn’t such ignorance of the elementary principles of Socratic logic a bit dangerous? Do you feel more secure knowing that some bureaucrat or politician at the highest levels of political power can unabashedly pigeonhole any person holding a conservative worldview as a compromise to national security? Do you feel safe knowing that this tactical use of rhetorical sleight of hand is actually accompanied by a straight face — or perhaps a sly grin?
This betrayal of classical liberalism is simply incredible. And I mean this in the technical sense of the word. These worn-out political attacks lack any credibility. Our nation’s political class and their obedient media lapdogs make no sense. They disregard any elementary understanding of freshman-level logic. Their rhetoric is foolish. And when caught on the horns of their duplicitous dilemma, their only reaction is to shoot the messenger and ignore the message. “All Republicans are right-wingers,” they shout. “Anyone who disagrees with us is a security risk, a deplorable, and thoughtless rube!” This narcissistic nonsense lacks any credibility. It is simply in-credible!
A free society that remains silent while George Orwell‘s “1984” unfolds before its very eyes will not remain free. Our nation’s elites are hell-bent on completely restructuring the socio-political context of our country, and in their zeal, they are labeling anyone who challenges them a “dangerous, contemptible, terrorist.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned that “silence in the face of evil is evil is evil itself.” Half of the American people have just been told we are a “domestic terrorist cell.” Silence in the face of this oligarchical power grab is complicity in our demise as well as our country’s. “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.”
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper) is a columnist for The Washington Times, former university president and radio host.
The Democrat Party of the USA is underpinned by the Common Features of Fascism, expounded upon by Umberto Eco (The 14 Principles of Fascism).
1. The cult of tradition. Leaders in the Democrat make the claim for authentication from recent historic civil rights laws and leaders. For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Wade vs Roe abortion laws.
2. The rejection of modernism. Science is easily ignored and irrationalism is embraced. This is evident when physical reality and biological science is overturned in favour of personal, emotional truths. For example, claiming that there are more than 52 genders instead of only two – male and female.
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. Reaction and perpetual revolution is the sign of a neo-Marxist solution. Thinking is seen as a form of emasculation and when confronted by their their thoughtless deeds, Democrats are unable to refute their critics.
4. Disagreement is treason. As is evident with the banality of cancel culture and the demonization of conservatives.
5. Fear of difference. Any political, religious or ideological difference will not be tolerated.
6. Appeal to social frustration. According to intersectional theory, the greater the perception of oppression of a group, the greater their inherent power for social change.
7. The obsession with a plot. Such obsession includes Trump’s Russian collusion (proven to be a hoax) and the January 6 insurrection plot (with no evidence).
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. Ultra MAGA and conservatives are seen as an existential threat to the nation and yet often down graded as feeble minded and a minority.
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. Any person who denies the neo-Marxist woke agenda is open game for attack. Recently a 61 year old grandmother was arrested for attending the rally on January 6. Bakers have been persistently persecuted for refusing to a make a cake for a gay wedding on religious grounds.
10. Contempt for the weak. The elite use the popularity of the poor and yet despise the poor at the same time. They find it hard to accept that most people do not have the wealth to embrace climate ideology and purchase expensive electric cars or install solar panels.
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. One is now a brave hero by standing up for gender, race and woke ideologies. Nothing needs to be accomplished, one just needs to show one’s support.
12. Selective populism. Social media influencers and celebrities represent a select minority and yet are envisioned to be the voice of the people.
13. Newspeak. Vocabulary is impoverished and limited in “order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” The sterilisation of language to make it politically correct and the use of woke pronouns is a sign of newspeak.
All thirteen signs are evident within the Democrat party, implying that they are fascists as well as socialists. One principle that is not shown is machismo – that is because they adore everything sexually perverse and abhor traditional gender roles. They display an inherent hatred of women, though, whenever they place women’s rights as less important than that of an intersectionally oppressed group.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
We are living in a world where the degree of disinformation and outright lying has reached such a state of affairs that, possibly for the first time ever, we see the majority of the western world starting to question their own and surrounding level of sanity. The increasing frenzied distrust in everything “authoritative” mixed with the desperate incredulity that “everybody couldn’t possibly be in on it!” is slowly rocking many back and forth into a tighter and tighter straight jacket. “Question everything” has become the new motto, but are we capable of answering those questions?
Presently the answer is a resounding no.
The social behaviourist sick joke of having made everyone obsessed with toilet paper of all things during the start of what was believed to be a time of crisis, is an example of how much control they have over that red button labelled “commence initiation of level 4 mass panic”.
And can the people be blamed? After all, if we are being lied to, how can we possibly rally together and point the finger at the root of this tyranny, aren’t we at the point where it is everywhere?
As Goebbels infamously stated,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State [under fascism].”
And here we find ourselves today, at the brink of fascism. However, we have to first agree to forfeit our civil rights as a collective before fascism can completely dominate. That is, the big lie can only succeed if the majority fails to call it out, for if the majority were to recognise it for what it is, it would truly hold no power.
The Battle for Your Mind “Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognise that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.
If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organise the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”.
However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?
The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum[1]. We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”.
We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognised by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, the majority choose not to…
It is recognised, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.
What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? [And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…]”
Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted.
In fact, many are probably not fully aware that presently there is a battle waging for who will “control the past” in a manner that is closely resembling a form of “memory wipe”.
***
William Sargant was a British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West, with connections to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra. Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s LSD “blank slate” work at McGill University, funded by the CIA.
Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that were sent back from the battlefield during WWII with various forms of “psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD.
The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become “experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter of self-defence of course.
The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”, “passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behaviour”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.
It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!
However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not exactly how mind control worked.
For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.
No matter the length or degree of electro-shock, insulin “therapy”, tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation etc induced, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather, the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning” was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and long term conversions (months to years) were rare.
However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects.
Sargant wrote in his “Battle of the Mind”: “Pavlov’s clinical descriptions of the ‘experimental neuroses’ which he could induce in dogs proved, in fact, to have a close correspondence with those war-neuroses which we were investigating at the time.”
In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as effectively.
Sargant goes on to state in his book:
“It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal…A person is considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ by the community simply because he accepts most of its social standards and behavioural patterns; which means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary occasions.”
Sargant then goes over the phenomenon of the London Blitz, which was an eight month period of heavy bombing of London during WWII. During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbours could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it.
Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an ever changing environment.
It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense.
Sargant quotes Hecker’s work, who was studying the dancing mania phenomenon that occurred during the Black Death, where Hecker observed that heightened suggestibility had the capability to cause a person to “embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.”
And that such a state of mind was likened to the first efforts of the infant mind “this instinct of imitation when it exists in its highest degree, is also united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinated by the look of a serpent.”
I wonder if Sargant imagined himself the serpent…
Sargant does finally admit:
“This does not mean that all persons can be genuinely indoctrinated by such means. Some will give only temporary submission to the demands made on them, and fight again when strength of body and mind returns. Others are saved by the supervention of madness. Or the will to resist may give way, but not the intellect itself.”
But he comforts himself as a response to this stubborn resistance that “As mentioned in a previous context, the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures.”
How to Resist the Deconstruction of Your Mind “He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all drive mad.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Masque of Pandora”
For those who have not seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight” directed by George Cukor, I would highly recommend you do so since there is an invaluable lesson contained within, that is especially applicable to what I suspect many of us are experiencing nowadays.
The story starts with a 14 year old Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) who is being taken to Italy after her Aunt Alice Alquist, a famous opera singer and caretaker of Paula, is found murdered in her home in London. Paula is the one who found the body, and horror stricken is never her old self again. Her Aunt was the only family Paula had left in her life. The decision is made to send her away from London to Italy to continue her studies to become a world-renowned opera singer like her Aunt Alice.
Years go by, Paula lives a very sheltered life and a heavy somberness is always present within her, she can never seem to feel any kind of happiness. During her singing studies she meets a mysterious man (her piano accompanist during her lessons) and falls deeply in love with him. However, she knows hardly anything about the man named Gregory.
Paula agrees to marry Gregory after a two week romance and is quickly convinced to move back into her Aunt’s house in London that was left abandoned all these years. As soon as she enters the house, the haunting of the night of the murder revisits her and she is consumed with panic and fear. Gregory tries to calm her and talks about the house needing just a little bit of air and sun, and then Paula comes across a letter written to her Aunt from a Sergis Bauer which confirms that he was in contact with Alice just a few days before her murder. At this finding, Gregory becomes bizarrely agitated and grabs the letter from Paula. He quickly tries to justify his anger blaming the letter for upsetting her. Gregory then decides to lock all of her Aunt’s belongings in the attic, to apparently spare Paula any further anguish.
It is at this point that Gregory starts to change his behaviour dramatically. Always under the pretext for “Paula’s sake”, everything that is considered “upsetting” to Paula must be removed from her presence. And thus quickly the house is turned into a form of prison. Paula is told it is for her best not to leave the house unaccompanied, not to have visitors and that self-isolation is the best remedy for her “anxieties” which are getting worst. Paula is never strictly forbidden at the beginning but rather is told that she should obey these restrictions for her own good.
Before a walk, he gives as a gift a beautiful heirloom brooch that belonged to his mother. Because the pin needs replacing, he instructs Paula to keep it in her handbag, and then says rather out of context, “Don’t forget where you put it now Paula, I don’t want you losing it.” Paula remarks thinking the warning absurd, “Of course I won’t forget!” When they return from their walk, Gregory asks for the brooch, Paula searches in her handbag but it is not there.
It continues on like this, with Gregory giving warnings and reminders, seemingly to help Paula with her “forgetfulness” and “anxieties”. Paula starts to question her own judgement and sanity as these events become more and more frequent. She has no one else to talk to but Gregory, who is the only witness to these apparent mishaps. It gets to a point where completely nonsensical behaviour is being attributed to Paula by Gregory. A painting is found missing on the wall one night. Gregory talks to Paula like she is a 5 year child and asks her to put it back. Paula insists she does not know who took it down. After her persistent passionate insistence that it was not her, she walks up the stairs almost like she were in a dream state and pulls the painting from behind a statue. Gregory asks why she lied, but Paula insists that she only thought to look there because that is where it was found the last two times this occurred.
For weeks now, Paula thinks she has been seeing things, the gas lights of the house dimming for no reason, she also hears footsteps above her bedroom. No one else seems to take notice. Paula is also told by Gregory that he found out that her mother, who passed away when she was very young, had actually gone insane and died in an asylum.
Despite Paula being reduced to a condition of an ongoing stupor, she decides one night to make a stand and regain control over her life. Paula is invited, by one of her Aunt Alice’s close friends Lady Dalroy, to attend a high society evening with musical performances. Recall that Paula’s life gravitated around music before her encounter with Gregory. Music was her life. Paula gets magnificently dressed up for the evening and on her way out tells Gregory that she is going to this event. Gregory tries to convince her that she is not well enough to attend such a social gathering, when Paula calmly insists that she is going and that this woman was a dear friend of her Aunt, Gregory answers that he refuses to accompany her (in those days that was a big deal). Paula accepts this and walks with a solid dignity, undeterred towards the horse carriage. In a very telling scene, Gregory is left momentarily by himself and panic stricken, his eyes bulging he snaps his cigar case shut and runs after Paula. He laughingly calls to her, “Paula, you did not think I was serious? I had no idea that this party meant so much to you. Wait, I will get ready.” As he is getting ready in front of the mirror, a devilish smirk appears.
Paula and Gregory show up to Lady Dalroy’s house late, the pianist is in the middle of the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #8 in C minor. They quickly are escorted to two empty seats. Paula is immediately immersed in the piece, and Gregory can see his control is slipping. After only a few minutes, he goes to look at his pocket watch but it is not in his pocket. He whispers into Paula’s ear, “My watch is missing”. Immediately, Paula looks like she is going to be sick. Gregory takes her handbag and Paula looks in horror as he pulls out his pocket watch, insinuating that Paula had put it there. She immediately starts losing control and has a very public emotional breakdown. Gregory takes her away, as he remarks to Lady Dalroy that this is why he didn’t want Paula coming in the first place.
When they arrive home, Paula has by now completely succumbed to the thought that she is indeed completely insane. Gregory says that it would be best if they go away somewhere for an indefinite period of time. We later find out that Gregory is intending on committing her to an asylum. Paula agrees to leave London with Gregory and leaves her fate entirely in his hands.
In the case of Paula it is clear. She has been suspecting that Gregory has something to do with her “situation” but he has very artfully created an environment where Paula herself doubts whether this is a matter of unfathomable villainy or whether she is indeed going mad.
It is rather because she is not mad that she doubts herself, because there is seemingly no reason for why Gregory would put so much time and energy into making it look like she were mad, or at least so it first appears. But what if the purpose to her believing in her madness was simply a matter of who is in control?
Paula almost succeeds in gaining the upper-hand in this power-struggle, the evening she decided to go out on her own no matter what Gregory insisted was in her best interest. If she would have held her ground at Lady Dalroy’s house and simply replied, “I have no idea why your stupid watch ended up in my handbag and I could care less. Now stop interrupting this performance, you are making a scene!” Gregory’s spell would have been broken as simple as that. If he were to complain to others about the situation, they would also respond, “Who cares man, why are you so obsessed about your damn watch?”
We find ourselves today in a very similar situation to Paula. And the voice of Gregory is represented by the narrative of false news and the apocalyptic social behaviourist programming in our forms of entertainment. The things most people voluntarily subject themselves to on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Socially conditioning them, like a pack of salivating Pavlovian dogs, to think it is just a matter of time before the world ends and with a ring of their master’s bell…be at each other’s throats.
Paula ends up being saved in the end by a man named Joseph Cotten (a detective), who took notice and quickly discerned that something was amiss. In the end Gregory is arrested. It is revealed that Gregory is in fact Sergis Bauer. That he killed Alice Alquist and that he has returned to the scene of the crime after all these years in search for the famous jewels of the opera singer. The jewels were in fact rather worthless from the standpoint that they were too famous to be sold, however, Gregory never intended on selling these jewels but rather had become obsessed with the desire to merely possess them.
That is, it is Gregory who has been entirely mad all this time.
A Gregory is absolutely dangerous. He would have been the end of Paula if nothing had intervened. However, the power that Gregory held was conditional to the degree that Paula allowed it to control her. Paula’s extreme deconstruction was thus entirely dependent on her choice to let the voice of Gregory in. That is, a Gregory is only dangerous if we allow ourselves to sleep walk into the nightmare he has constructed for us.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
– Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and a writer at Strategic Culture Foundation, consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page. This article was originally published on The Saker.
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone announced on Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is forbidden to receive Holy Communion because of her increasingly “extreme” pro-abortion views.
Cordileone wrote:
After numerous attempts to speak with her to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that the point has come in which I must make a public declaration that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiate her support for abortion “rights” and confess and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance. I have accordingly sent her a Notification to this effect, which I have now made public.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly bans both obtaining an abortion and assisting with one, saying “since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion….”
In his letter, Cordileone said he wrote to Pelosi on April 7, telling her that she must publicly disavow her pro-abortion stance “or else refrain from referring to your Catholic faith in public and receiving Holy Communion, I would have no choice but to make a declaration, in keeping with canon 915, that you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Cordileone said since sending that letter that Pelosi has not abided by his request. He wrote:
Therefore, in light of my responsibility as the Archbishop of San Francisco to be ‘concerned for all the Christian faithful entrusted to [my] care” (Code of Canon Law, can. 383, §1), by means of this communication I am hereby notifying you that you are not to present yourself for Holy Communion and, should you do so, you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin in the sacrament of Penance.
He also said a Catholic legislator who supports abortion after knowing the teaching of the Church, “commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others. Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons ‘are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly bans both obtaining an abortion and assisting with one, saying “since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion….”
“This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law,” the catechism says.
Cordileone wrote in his announcement that he has received many letters over the years “expressing distress over the scandal” of Catholics in public life — like Pelosi and President Joe Biden — promoting “such grievously evil practices as abortion.” He said in part:
I have responded that conversion is always better than exclusion, and before any such action can be taken it must be preceded by sincere and diligent efforts at dialogue and persuasion. With regard to Speaker Pelosi, I have striven to follow this wise route, as delineated by then-Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) in a letter to U.S. bishops regarding Holy Communion and Catholic politicians who cooperate in the grave evils of abortion and euthanasia.
The announcement continues:
Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi’s position on abortion has become only more extreme over the years, especially in the last few months. Just earlier this month she once again, as she has many times before, explicitly cited her Catholic faith while justifying abortion as a “choice,” this time setting herself in direct opposition to Pope Francis: “The very idea that they would be telling women the size, timing or whatever of their family, the personal nature of this is so appalling, and I say that as a devout Catholic”; “They say to me, ‘Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope.’ Yes I do. Are you stupid?
Cordileone said he took “no pleasure whatsoever” in fulfilling his pastoral duty and said his action is “not political.”
Online Church for Christ 