Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
There are these strange moments in American political history when the whole of the establishment decides to test its power over the public mind.
I’ve lived through five of these times. Each makes a fascinating study in what is called “the manufacture of consent.” It happens when some big push is essential to powerful interests but this very thing is opposed or only mildly favored by the people.
The point is mass manipulation. You can feel it when it happens.
If you have lived through such times, you know that it has a different feel than the normal stream of news. You cannot turn on the TV without hearing about it. The radio and podcasts too. All top venues agree with right, left, or in between. Every expert agrees. The media blitz has a daily signal: anyone who disagrees with this is uniformed, deluded, crazy, dangerous, and certainly does not deserve a hearing.
This happened last week with regard to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
He went before a Senate committee to testify about goings-on. He could hardly get a word in. The Democrats called him a liar, a charlatan, a quack, a danger to the lives of children. Republicans weren’t much better.
He handled himself well given the situation. When he said that we have no idea how many people died of COVID, he was telling the truth. The death-certificate misclassification was rampant, and the PCR tests were wildly inaccurate, failing to distinguish between exposure and sickness. It was treated as a gotcha moment as if he did not know his stuff.
It was the same with the vaccine. Kennedy took the COVID shot off the recommended schedule for children because it was determined to be ineffective, unnecessary, and has a poor safety profile. The Democrats said he was putting the nation’s children at risk. Then the media got involved. It was all the usual suspects with commentaries nearly identical: dogmatic, extreme, vociferous, and wicked.
Here’s what’s remarkable. Kennedy is in fact a hugely popular figure, even more so than Trump himself.
The reason traces to the COVID response. The CDC, NIH, FDA, and so on, were the handmaidens of social and cultural destruction, all in an effort to prepare the public for a shot that was not necessary for healthy people and which generated an unprecedented flood of adverse events reporting.
We have here a huge gap between the views of the people and the views of the elites. It becomes this strange challenge to close the gap through intimidation and flooding the zone.
Will it work? Probably not this time.
Technology is too sophisticated. We have options now. The media has lost credibility and so has government. The game has changed.
Still, watching this unfold brought back memories.
It was just after the Cold War ending and the new thing being debated was the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA. I downloaded the documents. It was unbearably obvious that this was no free trade. It was a corporatist melange of bureaucratic management, one designed to pave the way for outsourcing jobs and cartelizing the market.
It seemed obvious to me that any honest person would have to oppose this. But no, it was the opposite. Every mainline venue was behind it. Every “responsible” outlet pushed it very hard and would listen to no objections, no matter how well-documented.
We lost that debate not on the merits of the case but because of the narrative that was being pushed. NAFTA passed and all the predictions of the opponents came true.
Soon after, the machine was fired up again to get through the World Trade Organization that was supposed to bring free trade to the whole planet. Again, I looked through the documents and saw a larger version of the same. It was another corporatist ploy. I did what I could to oppose it but was shouted down left, right, and center. By now, I had the game figured out.
There is something different about these moments. Normal political debate has many sides and many different perspectives, each vying over facts and details and each citing their own experts. In times when the machine goes into overdrive, it is something else entirely. All dominant voices agree. Partisanship all but disappears. You get the impression that no responsible, educated, and aspirational person with the proper information could ever take another position.
There really is what is called an establishment. It can seem to disappear for a time. But in pivotal moments of grave importance, it pops up like never before and overwhelms the public square with one view only.
This also happened during the outset of the Iraq War. It was a few years after the WTO debate, following the attacks on 9-11. George W. Bush and his administration were keen to scapegoat its old ally in Saddam Hussein. They said that he was building Weapons of Mass Destruction and that there was a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. As it turns out, none of that was true.
I listened to a speech by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This speech was simply incredible and yet received no national attention.
She documented how the same people who got us into the Iraq War were part of the smears against the first Trump administration that it was somehow in power only due to Russian interference:
“We have these conspirators, these traitors to the Constitution, who are working within our government, who dangerously believe that they are not only above the law, but that they are above the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. People who believe that they have the right to undermine the duly elected president of the United States because they disagree with his positions or his policies, and that they know better.”
There we go: the Director of National Intelligence just repudiated both the Iraq War and Russiagate. And it received almost no public attention at all.
So it was with the COVID response.
The push from the national media to lock down and get vaccinated was overwhelming. As it turns out, the response was universally terrible and unwarranted, resulting in loss of learning and waves of ill health. And yet there has been no reckoning. The establishment treats today’s dissidents like Kennedy as crazy people who are a threat to public order.
I’ve seen this too many times. There is such a thing as an establishment. Its interests are different from the people. From time to time, it acts in unison when the policy priority is high enough. When the stakes become essential to its survival, it goes into overdrive, manufacturing consent.
Are we onto this game yet? I hope so. As time goes on, their victories over the public will, their wild media push to intimidate the dissidents into silence, should decline. We are living through such a moment right now. They want Kennedy out before he can dismantle their racket. This truth is no longer lost on us. We know what’s up.
We aren’t buying it anymore.
