A Very Sanitary Future

 

The future.  It is often portrayed as so very perfect.  So clean.   Yet also so sterile and sanitized.

The sanitation has begun as cancel culture tells us what to think and how to behave.  Eventually we can become like the automatons that we see in futuristic portrayals.  All on the same bland even keel.  No ups, no downs, no extremes of emotion. People are calm.  They say only the right things.  They have only the correct behavior.  And they have no joy.  No humanity.

Today there are things you can’t say.  There is history that must not be taught.  There are books that cannot be read.  Our world, and especially the world of our minds, is being sanitized.  Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird are stories that if anything create an awareness and perhaps empathy for the Black experience in America.  Yet those books are cancelled because they use language of the times and are true to the times.  Dr. Seuss has now been cancelled.  I find it hard to believe that every child who was given a Dr. Seuss book to enjoy, to giggle at, and in the process to learn something of phonetics, I refuse to believe that those children because of that experience were turned into racists.

Soon our stories will be fully sanitized and will all read something like this: “They met.  They fell in love.  They died.”  No detail allowed - it might offend someone.  No joy, no sorrow, nothing to learn from.  Just a few words on a page, sanitized and approved.  (Those who are familiar with Russian history will of course think of the Soviet establishment of socialist realism as the only acceptable aesthetic for authors who were given basic mandatory plots to follow.  Any deviation was banned, sometimes along with the authors themselves.)

We learn from that which has not been sanitized.  Great literature teaches us about our humanity, about the human condition.  History teaches us about where we went right and where we went wrong, thus allowing us to not repeat the same mistakes.  Information, even information that might offend one or many, can spark thoughts, innovations, excitement in the human brain and the human soul. 

It is information and the spark of inspiration that it provides that allows humanity to progress.  Information feeds our natural curiosity.  It is as essential for our being as is food.

Human emotion is a part of us, both its positive and negative passions.  It cannot be banned; allowing us to be conscious of it means that we can learn about and from it and perhaps even control our own individual demons.

Once upon a time I wrote a poem about an Eagle and a Pigeon.  I don’t think I understood the significance of it then but let me use its spirit here.  The mighty Eagle soars and dives.  I don’t know how an eagle feels when it dives, but I do know that when it reaches the bottom it often gathers sustenance that allows it to soar again.  Our minds, indeed our whole being, when allowed to be open, are like the Eagle, soaring to great heights of joy, diving into sadness and depression, learning from both and indeed living as we humans are meant to live, full of spirit, emotion, reason, and passion. 

Yet with the onslaught of cancel culture we are becoming more like carrier homing pigeons.  Kept in cages, their route is always direct and level and predetermined by someone else.  Even the message they carry is not theirs but is instead written for them.  The pigeon does its job, but with how much joy or personality?

People are not perfect. Nor are they level and unthinking or unfeeling.  Their ugly parts cannot be banished and indeed it is the contrast with the ugly that allows us to experience our greatest joys.  Much as we might try, while we might be able to sanitize a city for a day, we simply cannot fully sanitize the imperfect being called human.  We can force the humanity onto the level and predetermined course of the pigeon, but sooner or later the individual human spirt needs to soar.

The sanitized future may look lovely.  A “perfect world.”  But it seems more and more like that perfect world, cold and devoid of emotion, requires us to sanitize our very selves so that we no longer exist.  We still have the ability to soar and to dive like the eagle, but every time a thought or a word or an action is banned from our access, we move a little closer to the pigeon.

 

It’s So Much More Than Just the Biden Coverup

By now you are (or should be) aware of the fact that the press conveniently ignored and suppressed the Hunter Biden investigation until after the election.  Now, when the result is fairly certain, they begin to report it, though generally with the best spin possible. 

We should all be appalled about their coverup, but the concern goes or should go far beyond that.  Anyone who does not believe their vote this election was at least in part manipulated by the media is dreaming.  But, beyond vote manipulation, we should all be concerned about the way that more generally our thinking is being manipulated.    

        The Hunter Biden Affair
First, a quick recap of the Hunter Biden affair. If you are not inclined to research the actual documents, two current opinion pieces present the key facts fairly objectively and I will quote from them in this summary. They are from the Wall Street Journal LINK-HERE  and The Hill LINK-HERE 

If you only read the mainstream Left media or get your news from social media, you probably don’t remember when the Biden story broke last October.  The New York Post published an exclusive story about Hunter Biden being under investigation.  There was a laptop and incriminating email from and to Hunter including about arranging a meeting between his father Joe and executives of the Ukrainian oil company with which his father may have used his influence when he was Vice President.  There are texts and witness statements from people close to Biden. 

The story’s sources were verified.  Here is what happened to that story:  It and any reference to it was banned from Twitter and accounts were locked down; other media outlets and all Democrats simply and immediately dismissed it as either Russian disinformation or a smear campaign by Trump and the Republicans. 

Here is what some of the more popular “news” outlets said:

Politico: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”;
CNN: “The anatomy of the New York Post's dubious Hunter Biden story.”;
Washington Post: “The truth behind the Hunter Biden non-scandal”;
New York Times: “Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It: Inside the White House’s secret, last-ditch effort to change the narrative, and the election — and the return of the media gatekeepers.”;
Taxpayer-funded NPR: "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories. And we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."

Leslie Stahl interviewed President Trump for 60 minutes and here is a portion of that interview relating to the Biden story:

Stahl (response when Trump brought up the topic): “This is the most important issue in the country right now?” 
Trump: “It’s a very important issue to find out whether a man’s corrupt who’s running for president, who’s accepted money from China, and Ukraine, and from Russia. . . .Take a look at what’s going on, Leslie, and you say that shouldn’t be discussed? I think it’s one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever seen, and you don’t cover it.”
Stahl: “Well, because it can’t be verified.  I’m telling you —”
Trump: “Of course it can be verified.  Excuse me, Leslie, they found a laptop…”
Stahl: “It can’t be verified.”

As the Hill article notes, “Well, it's difficult to verify anything when you don't bother to check under the hood in the first place, right? Because that's exactly what happened here, except that the cake was baked with a condemnation of the few who decided to pursue the story.”

None of these responses should surprise us.  Before the NY Post Story, there were earlier reports that Hunter’s position on the board of Ukrainian energy company Bursima was tied to improper influence by his then Vice President father Joe.  The media chose to ignore this along with Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, the chairmen of investigating Senate committees who in September released a joint report detailing some of Hunter’s million-dollar dealings with politically connected foreigners. The report said they raised “serious counterintelligence and extortion concerns relating to Hunter Biden and his family.” And as the WSJ states, the press merely “yawned.”

But now, the election is over, Hunter admitted that he is under investigation, and the story can no longer be ignored (although, the press is putting the best spin possible on it to make it as innocuous as possible for presumptive president-elect Biden).

            Omission Bias
There was widespread omission bias by the media and big tech.  Omission bias is “when an outlet or publication purposely suppresses or outright ignores a newsworthy story that is carried by others.”  In this case the story carrier was the NY Post and the suppressing (actually outright banning) outlets were the rest of the media.      

The Hill piece notes “There are two kinds of bias in the media. First there is the kind we regularly see from many – not all – outlets in broad daylight, which includes openly rooting for one political party while echoing rapid-response opposition research against another. And then there is the more invisible, insidious variety — the bias of omission.”

Clearly, the Hunter problem is a clear example of this insidious bias.  But it is not in any way the only example.  For four years we have had the worst spin possible put on anything that President Trump did while any achievements were either downplayed or ignored.  Ask those who get their news from the mainstream or social media or late-night TV.  They never heard about Trump’s criminal justice reform, about his peace accords in the Middle East, about his work to improve the economic status of minorities or to preserve funding for Black colleges.  They don’t know the positive effects that his re-negotiated trade agreements had for American businesses.  And the positives that they have heard about are couched in such things as:  the previous administration set up the ability for him to do this or that; despite a litany of negatives, he did one small thing; etc.  They still believe that the Obama border cages did not exist before Trump took office. 

The political bias is clear and it is indeed a bias of omission rather than just spin.  That is dangerous because without facts, with a preconceived narrative presented to us, we are bound within the facts of the particular narrative being presented.  Our views are being bent to fit within someone else’s narrative.

That should anger us.  And not just because the press is not doing its job of presenting us with fair and unbiased facts.  It should anger us because it means that they are trying to change, create, and determine the way that we think about issues or people.

That the press creates a narrative for us means that they are attempting to manipulate and mold our thinking, and that should be of deep concern to every American.

               The Manipulation goes beyond Political Viewpoint
Not just the news, but everywhere around us our freedom of thought is being interfered with if not obstructed. The Academy Awards now require certain identity qualifications for actors and staff.  Try to get a grant in any of the arts without having a “social justice” aspect to your work.  LeBron James was awarded Time’s athlete of the year because of his activism (I don’t deny that he is a great athlete, but that goes unmentioned in this “athletic” award). 

The political correctness and thought control goes beyond popular entertainments.  People are fired for speaking their mind if it is not in agreement with the appropriate political correctness.  A doctor had his license revoked after giving a view of COVID precautions that was not that of the mainstream.  A medical professor at Harvard expressed the more widespread danger of this sort of action to science generally:  science requires that people question; when questioning is silenced, when people become afraid to speak out, then science cannot progress.  Nor can anything else.

In Russia following the revolution the Communists created a series of 5-year plans to lead the country more and more toward socialism.  Contrary to popular belief, these plans were not just industrial or manufacturing goals.  They also governed things like the arts, media, and most every aspect of life.  The goal was to create a new type of human being, to turn the individual into a communist, a communal being that was little more than an automaton for the State.  The individual voice was no longer welcome and everything the people did, read, watched, or interacted with was designed to display the (often false) positivity and beauty of communism and the proper behavior of the communist.

So, when the media commits acts of omission and when it presents clear positive bias for its narrative and negative bias against those who disagree, when the arts present only one view of life as that which should be lived and strived for, when athletics become about how good an activist (for the right cause) rather than athlete you are, when you cease questioning either because you are afraid to or simply not allowed to, when these things happen, remember this:  media can change your thinking, remold who you are.  The Soviets tried it, and it worked for 75 years. But those 75 years were far from the utopia that the people were told it was.

We live in dangerous times.  This is a post-truth America.  I’d like to think that those whose votes were manipulated this election cycle will wake up when they see the bait and switch that occurred.  I doubt they will because the media will continue to hide what is inconvenient to its narrative.  More dangerous is the media, film, music, entertainment generally that is with us 24/7.  That and the social shunning of those who question or disagree. 

We are definitely being manipulated and the danger is that we end up losing ourselves.  Stay alert.  Keep questioning.  And most importantly, think for yourself.