In a world where a majority of people under thirty can't even see (let alone explain) the difference between liberty and democracy, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out how the populism of fake democracy can be used to dilute liberty - 'for the good of the majority' - and restrictions on liberty can be introduced....to stop cyber attacks threatening our voting democracy. The Slog examines half a century of growing State expertise in the art of manipulation alongside the decline in voter discernment. The conclusion is not a happy one.

Sometimes when online - sifting through emails, blogposts, social media and random tweets - I am struck by the feeling abroad that the ability of an infinitessimal number of twisted minds to variously fool, manipulate, regiment, mislead and perhaps even kill vast swathes of humanity is somehow incomprehensible.

The truth is - and I do not proffer this outlook as 100% paranoid plot loopy-loo Zionist Elders claptrap - a multivariate range of selling, media, welfare State, brainlessly perverted liberalism, neoliberal economic nonsense and socio-ideological Groupthink has been grooming all of us for (at the very least) half a century. When analysed from that perspective, the triumph of globally inflicted surreal anti-science is not so much a mystery as an inevitability.

Take a look at the fifty years since Tom Wolfe interrogated 'radical chic', and you should perceive three persistent trends in the West during the time since: first, what one might call the regimentation of consumption; second, the growing preference for ideological rigidity over empirical analysis; and third, the tendency by 'top-down government' élites to keep on running Psy-Ops to see how far the emergence of group-dependant obsession and obstinately accepted belief systems might be exploited.

These factors are not, or course, mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, I want today to look into all three in turn...while allowing readers to see for themselves where the joins are.

One size fits All

Take a look at cars, houses, furniture, fashion, music, hairstyles, online slang, sexuality and a hundred other things we all adopt by paying for stuff....or paying lip service to "values".

Can you tell a mid-range Renault, Peugeot, VW, Citroen, Skoda or Audi apart from its competitors? Damned if I can: even the colour choices are the same.

Can you think of a single housing developer brand offering anything other than a proto-prison cell box made for the 2+2 family....or a 2-room apartment for the Great Divorced?

Can you name a single qualitative leap in musical genre over the last 50 years? And please don't say "rap", because by even the most electic definition, rap is tediously repetitive misogynist doggerel, not music.

Ever go to watch football? When's the last time you saw a team building up an attack other than by passing the ball square in midfield? You could grow old before they get to the opposition penalty area.

But we don't just consume entertainment, sports, products and services....we also imbibe laws, orders and procedures. Airports have arrows on all the floors, perhaps to stop us from walking up the walls by mistake. You have to get half undressed just to go airside. You can't take a toenail clipper on board in case you use it to hijack the plane. You can't take liquid on board, so don't think about trying to spit the crew to death.....it ain't gonna happen.

Think about the regimentation we live with, and the cattle-prod mentality that lies behind it: we never object, and they never see us as anything but compliant chimps who are sort of vaguely in the way of getting stuff done. We are, in their heads, an inconvenience. The arts we produce show no sign of originality, we watch uniformly coached soccer, absorb braindead game and talent shows on TV, panic when a few shelves are empty in the supermarket, and can't wait to go and see Auschwitz: the Musical on Ice at the theatre.

Viewed from that parallax position, one begins to see how vast hordes of robotic wide-eyed conformists sucked up all the negative spin about Brexit, became terrified of a virus unable to kill more than 42 wrinklies among a human crowd of 100,000 and then rushed to buy masks that don't work, take PCR tests that don't work, and accept a vaccine that doesn't innoculate....but is chock full of weird nano-debris as yet unexplained by politicians, bureaucrats and the pharmafia.

Groups that don't Think

Alongside a regimented society full of orders and unsmiling officialdom we have seen the rise and rise of post-empirical analysis. No theory is worth anything these days unless it is consumately contradicted by an avalanche of fieldwork facts, social anthropology and mathematical measurement. Intolerant and rigid belief systems are, in my view, the enduring cancers of our age. They have given us 'trickle-down wealth' in economics, monetarism in all things fiscal and financial, political correctness in education, stone-age violence and mysoginy in Islam, the purging of all things 'off message' in politics, and the continuing appeal of totalitarian socialism to those who knowledge of its serial abject failures is not exactly informed by a grasp of history that goes back - at the very earliest - to 1979, 'fatcha' and 've cuts'.

Hardly surprising, then, that the World Health Organisation, Davos, the CDC, oddly transhuman UK Health bureaucrats and over 95% of the mainstream media have managed - in just under two years - to spew forth nonsensical anti-science and 'doctor' (fine choice of word, that one) every premise of virology and immunology that went before....with 7/8ths of the populace nodding unwisely.

A great friend of mine in Athens listened quietly one evening as I entertained a group of locals with my amusement at the standard answer to every question put to a Greek being "Of course".

"Can you build me a space rocket to the Moon?"

"Of course".

"Can you water-ski backwards across the Atlantic balancing a ferret on your nose?"

"Of course".

And so forth. Then my chum explained the cultural history behind a Greek always saying "Yes" when asked a question about policy possibilities. For hundreds of years, the Greeks were ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and vicious Turkish officials who made unreasonable demands of Greek citizens.

"You must make this happen," the Turk would assert.

If the Greek said such was impossible, the Turk took a scimitar to his head/body joining equipment, then demanded the same from the next Greek in the queue.

"Of course," came the answer.

By such means is the obedience habit formed. Think King Canute in reverse, and you're about there.

The bottom line to this section is as follows: if you have a media set willing to repeat and confirm insane medical correlations - and you invest heavily in scaring the Bejesus out of the readers with tall tales of imminent death unless we all don masks, stand two metres away from everyone else and take regular infection tests - then the outcome will be total terrified belief by right-brain hemispheres no longer ruled by left-brain logic.

Take that last example - the PCR test. The PCR test has now been thoroughly debunked and rejected - even by Fauci the Mendacious Medicine Man. But when it came out, it was "a gold-standard test" - remember that? In fact, 60+% of all positive PCR results are false. So the MSM line taken was, "Ah well, you see - this means there are millions of sneaky asymptomatic super-spreaders among us....so all the more reason to be terrified of everyone".

Now just think for a second there: the media suggested that so deadly was this virus, many people could have it without symptoms (so they were immune in other words) and spread it. You can't spread a virus if you're immune to that variant of it....the respected Establishment site MITMedical based in Cambridge Mass states: "The short answer is that people who have recovered from COVID-19 cannot spread that version of the virus to others".

Not only did the MSM ignore that basic Truth, they then went on to applaud the development of mRNA formulations that provide immunity to only 2 in 3 of those jabbed, and don't stop the jabbed from spreading.

So to sum up, rather than say PCR is crap and the mRNA jabs are both crap immunisers and full of dangerous debris, they put out an anti-science version that was the diametric opposite of scientific reality.

That 84% of Western electorates accepted that shows you how far blind belief has avanced in this century.

The 0.001% chose to try and prove this to their satisfaction. They must be very pleased with the way it's going.

Getting away with Murder

Pretty much since globalist capitalism began being imperceptibly transformed into financialised monopolism after 1979, the alternative Secret, Banking and Climate/Ecology unelected States have been transferring influence in the West from ground-up to top-down government.

Those developments were audited more fully in these columns on September 8th, August 25th, and April 8th 2021.

But when it comes to stretching credulity, there was a tipping point in 2012, when the disgraceful relationships between Newscorp and the Met police on the one hand, and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and the Murdoch régime on the other, finally came under the public glare. In Hunt's case, it was blindingly obvious he had used his ministerial position to overcome stiff resistance to Murdoch's Newscorp bid to buy out BSB sattelite television. Hunt was caught red handed hiding damaging email material, and a special Commons debate was called....an event Labour confidently expected to result in the end of the Minister's political career.

In fact, Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt offered but one phrase, uttered over and over: "I have done nothing wrong". He not only survived on that "toasted snowflake" of a defence, he went on to be promoted in the ensuing Cabinet reshuffle to Health Secretary. The Newscorp group as a whole - despite being involved in constitutionally illegal phone-hacking on an industrial scale - survived without major damage....by using their Met Police links to the full - that, and the influence of the Met's boss, London mayor Boris Johnson.

Along the way, the British State has variously conducted a completely illegal war alongside the US in Iraq, swindled its own pensioners out of a retirement lifestyle they had been led to confidently expect, consistently excused bankers and media moguls, perverted the course of justice in relation to the sale of arms to foul Middle Eastern régimes, allowed the CIA to torture prisoners on British territory, cooperated in the downfall of otherwise innocent truth-sayers through false accusation, conspired with a serving US President to mislead British voters, and used the unelected bureaucracy to undermine the biggest plebiscite in recorded UK history.

Observing little or no pushback on any of these issues, our ruling Establishment chose to join in wholeheartedly with a coordinated attempt to boil every human lobster at the lobster's expense.

So where are we now? Well, this is the current Home Page header of what was once the most respected financial newspaper in the world, the Financial Times:

It isnt an ad, it's a corporate falling-into-line with creeping totalitarianism. I haven't trusted a word written by the FT since Brexit; but even I was shocked by its appearance. For many years now, the Pink 'un has been running a Weekend feature How to Spend It. Now it wants to tell us the Past didn't work. It's breathtaking.

OK, for most people the last thirty years have seen gushing-up gigawealth for the few. The imputation in the headline, however, is that we were complicit in that. Staggering cheek coming from a title representing all the worst excesses and hypocracies of monetarist neoliberalism. But in reality, little more than an extension of the insane notion that the authors of this past have a new novel full of goodies and happiness for those of us left out last time.

I suspect this is the novel they have in mind:

Even the darkest predictions of Huxley's novel are a flickering candle in comparison to the pitch blackness of the world that the Intelligence > Banking > Green > Red > Media alliance has in store for its victims. Remember: Huxley wrote the book before the Holocaust, atomic weapons, Gulags, the PRC, Dallas murder, oil geopolitics, the CIA, MI6, Brussels unelected fascism, the internet, satelite surveillance and biowarfare were even imagined.

In Brave New World, the jobless masses are kept quietly obedient with Soma pills. The information manipulators of today have done it by using the lessons of psychology and neuroscience to obtain insouciant obedience based on naked fear and GroupThink. These factors (via which they achieved their goals) have been in turn made easier by political correctness in general, and the cultural Marxism of education alongside the shallow virtue signalling of the media and political classes.

Here's my conclusion: it may seem somewhat random, but on further thought that's the last thing it is: in the Citizen/State contract of the Old Normal, we were all innocent until proven guilty. The current Establishment assumption is the other way round.

The New Normal post-Reset world will be dominated by the demonisation of the innocent based on an assumption of anti-social guilt.

Trump voters, Brexiteers, the unvaxxed, anti-vax demonstrators, Russian plots, fictitious weapons, mask refuseniks, medical truthsayers, Wall Street whistleblowers, State lie wiki-dumps, cancel culture....it's already deeply ingrained in the "liberal" mindset.

We're all guilty of giving these loons the benefit of the doubt. Two months ago I was at the departmental préfecture to get my post-Brexit residency completed. At the end of the process, the functionary took my fingerprints.

"Why do you need to do this?" I asked her.

"It's just routine," she answered, "nothing to worry about".

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you cannot have the residency".

No prints, no security of tenure. No vax, no job. On and on it goes. No biometrics, no passport.

No compulsion, mind: it's your choice.

It's eight years since the great black American guitarist Ritchie Havens left us. Few understood the fragility of freedom like that man...and nobody wrote more moving lyrics on the subject:

My dreams have all been raided

By every kind of greed

And liberty invaded

'til there's nothing left you'd need.

Enjoy what's left of your weekend.