Brownstone Institute
Who Ultimately Wins in a Society of Flash Mob Moralists?
From the Brownstone Institute
A big story in the hockey world in recent days centers on the Boston Bruins’ decision to offer, and then rescind, a contract to promising 20-year-old defenseman Matthew Miller.
Miller was drafted in the 4th round of the 2020 NHL draft by the Arizona Coyotes, who subsequently renounced their rights to the player when two journalists from the Arizona Republic reported the player had been convicted at age 14 in an Ohio juvenile court of serially abusing a developmentally disabled fellow student of color.
As a result of the same stories, apparently spurred by testimony given by the victim and his family, Miller was stripped of his hockey scholarship at the University of North Dakota.
Two years later, after talking with Miller and his agent the Bruins management decided that Miller was worthy of a second chance.
However, after a fierce media/social media storm ensued—in the midst of which NHL commissioner Gary Bettman announced that he would have the last word on deciding who would be eligible to play in the NHL—the Bruins rescinded the recently signed contract, saying they had discovered unspecified “new information” about Miller in recent days.
And thus ended yet another of our era’s online morality plays, dramas wherein the social capital of personal aggrievement, magnified by the vicarious expressions of outrage emanating from largely anonymous online mobs, invariably rules the day.
I’ve got nothing against morally-infused personal outrage. Indeed, I’ve got plenty of it. Moreover, I am well aware of the role it has played in regulating behavior in social collectives throughout history.
But I also know that one of the things that made the emergence of modern democracies possible was the subordination of mob-style moral outrage, and its twin brother personal vengeance, to the rule of law.
Is the application of the law often imperfect? Absolutely. Does the restitution it offers, when it indeed does offer restitution at all, almost always fall well short of what the victims of the injustice believe is owed to them? No doubt.
The founders of our institutions were not unaware of these limitations. But they believed that flawed justice such as this was infinitely superior to the alternative, which they correctly understood to be a society “regulated” by some mixture or another of personal vendettas and mob rule.
I have read the news reports about what Matthew Miller did to Isaiah Meyer-Crothers during the course of what is said to be several years of bullying, allegedly starting when both were 7 years old. The incident most commonly adduced by the press to exemplify this sad period of harassment—Miller’s getting Meyer-Crothers to lick a push-pop that had been dipped in urine—is repellent beyond belief. And I know that if I were Isaiah and/or his family I’d have a very hard time ever forgiving him for these aggressions and for the way it no doubt damaged the disabled youngster’s psychological well-being.
But does it mean that Miller, himself a probable victim of some sort of abuse or neglect to engage in such sadism at such a young age, has to be a social pariah for life, unable to exercise his skills in the workplace? This, when a veritable host of professional athletes who have done far worse things as adults (e.g. Ray Lewis, Craig MacTavish) have been breezily pardoned and welcomed back into the playing and/or management ranks. Apparently it’s much easier to go after a 20-year-old kid than an established star whose jersey you bought for yourself or your kids.
To pose the above question is not, as so many eager and zealous moralists in the comments section of the oh-so-liberal Boston Globe sports section and other places would have us believe, the same as “excusing what Miller did” or being in any way heedless of the serious damage that his childhood/adolescent actions had on Meyer-Crothers. Nor does it imply that Matthew Miller’s transgressions were just a case of “boys being boys” or that you believe he has been reborn as a moral angel.
As is usually the case, things are far more complex than that.
It is my understanding that Matthew Miller was remitted to the existing system of juvenile justice, did whatever putatively proportional penance was levied on him by the system, discharged, and allowed to get on with his life.
And in keeping with the fundamental precepts of juvenile justice, rooted in the belief that no one should be condemned in perpetuity for acts committed before the onset of full adult moral reasoning, the records were sealed. And as far as I’ve been able to tell, he has not been remitted to the justice system since that time.
When he was drafted in 2020, someone, however, violated the spirit of this principle and brought up Miller’s juvenile transgressions and contacted the victim who expressed his dismay at the possibility that Miller might be afforded the possibility of going on to a life of wealth and fame. “Everyone thinks he’s so cool that he gets to go to the NHL, but I don’t see how anyone can be cool when you pick on someone and bully someone your entire life.”
This is a perfectly understandable sentiment, one that is expressed a lot more tamely than what I might have said were I in his same position.
However, the bigger question is if, in a supposed society of laws, these more than legitimate feelings about seeing your one-time tormentor experience recognition and the possibility for success can and should be used as a means of imposing—through media-social media-business collusion—a de facto form of double jeopardy on someone who has theoretically paid his debt to society?
Do we really want to live in a society where, if you can recruit a posse of infuriated and media-savvy moralists you can supersede not only the intended effects of the law, but perhaps more importantly in the long run, the possibilities of healing in both the aggressor and his victim? Do we really want to effectively lock two young people into the tormentor-victim dynamic for the rest of their lives?
According to this logic, prison education programs like the one I taught in for many years, and where I experienced the most vibrant and meaningful classroom interactions of my teaching career, should not exist.
Rather as someone conscious of some of the heinous things that my would-be students had done, I should, according to the logic at play in the Miller case, have haughtily rebuffed my colleagues when they asked me to join the effort, telling them in no uncertain terms that “I don’t in any way wish to support or dignify ‘animals’ such as these.”
I would then proudly tell everyone that would listen about how I had strongly enunciated and defended my clear and unbending moral principles in the face of requests to glorify criminals and their crimes.
Again, is this really a model of moral comportment that we want to advance and normalize?
Sadly, the answer of many—apparently secure in the belief that their immaculate children could never, ever be agents of evil—to this question appears to be “yes.”
Indeed, wasn’t it a simple variation of this dynamic of stigmatize, dehumanize and shun—rooted in the idea that evil is always pure and located elsewhere—that psychologically underwrote the worst repressions of the High Covid era?
As bad as this practice of eschewing the prospect of healing in favor of preening self-regard and continued aggrieved tension is, it may not even be the worst part of the new trend toward widespread armchair moralizing.
Arguably more troubling is the damage such practices do to what might be called our society’s “economy of concern.” Like most everything about us, our ability to pay attention to the world outside our heads is limited. The kingpins of the new cyber economy know this, and are laser-focused on getting us to give as much of this scarce and extremely valuable resource to them during the course of our days.
They do so most obviously to sell us things we often don’t need or intrinsically want. But they also do so to keep us from thinking about how the social structures they have a huge say in shaping do or do not serve our long-term interests.
How?
By encouraging us to spend cognitive, emotional and moral energies on people and things that ultimately lie well beyond our own radius of personal control.
Like, for example, on young hockey players who made ugly mistakes as a child and early adolescent or, conversely, on the truly heart-wrenching stories of his victim.
Will fulminating online about the young hockey player’s past really solve any of our real problems?
Obviously not.
But it will take energy away from addressing big and structurally-imposed violations of basic rights happening today.
Every minute spent talking today about a single child-on-child abuse case legally resolved, however imperfectly, 6 years ago is a minute not spent addressing the cruelties and injustices of government-on-child abuse taking place today, much of it on the name of “fighting Covid.” outrages eloquently and passionately denounced here by Laura Rosen Cohen .
In effect, when we allow ourselves to be swept up into object-free campaigns of moral virtue-signaling about past personal cases, we are giving those in big entrenched centers of power much more space to enact and consolidate enveloping systems of citizen abuse and social control. And if you think these entrenched centers of power are beyond thinking of how to stimulate diversionary campaigns of small-bore outrage, then it’s time you wake up to the new realities of our world.
A half-century ago, certain activists declared that now “The personal is the political.” It was an alluring soundbite and like so many alluring soundbites overly simplistic. Should we strive to always inject the personal concerns of the citizenry into policy-making discussions? Of course.
That said, there is, and must always be, as Hannah Arendt reminded us, a barrier between our private and public selves as well as an acceptance, as excruciatingly difficult as it might be to do, of the unfortunate role of unrequited tragedy in the lives of us all.
Do I wish that the pain of Meyer-Crothers could have been eliminated by Ohio’s system of juvenile justice? I obviously do. But sadly, that’s not how it works. A public justice system is not designed to eliminate pain, but rather attenuate its onward march, and in this way, provide a possible opening for healing.
The internet has, for better or worse, created new forms of social organization and political mobilization. As we have seen in the Miller case, the Meyer-Crothers family, backed by journalists and online activists, has sought, in effect, to gain a measure of the moral payback the justice system was unable to provide them.
Is it understandable? Yes. Is it their right? Certainly.
Is using these new methods of mobilization to effectively override the legal system and create what are effectively vigilante forms of retribution good for the future of our society and culture?
Probably not.
While it may make a lot of people feel good about themselves at the moment, it will only further corrode trust in the rule of law— a shift that always favors the powerful—and take valuable energy away from the urgent task of fighting massive and systematic government and corporate assaults on our dignity and freedom.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For me, it’s not difficult to see what the world’s real rulers are trying to achieve. They’re trying to obtain more power and control for themselves. In fact, they’ve largely already achieved this goal. The terrifying thought is they are far from done.
We know they are not finished because their most conspicuous initiative at the moment is their quest to slay the petulances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The correct definition of misinformation/disinformation is any speech that challenges what authority figures say is the truth.
The world’s real rulers don’t want their pronouncements challenged, as this would pose a grave risk to their continued rule and their ability to implement myriad programs that will effectively defeat, once and for all, human freedom.
As long as persuasive dissent doesn’t go viral, the Powers that Be know they will achieve their objectives, which are authoritarian world government much closer to the communist utopia envisioned by thinkers and tyrants like Marx, Mao, and Lenin.
But real communism is not the real goal either, as communism was supposed to make every person equal. The modern form of communism, not unlike all previous forms of communism, ensures the world’s elite organizations will remain ultra-powerful while the proletariat will beg for crumbs.
Who are the World’s Elite Organizations?
They are every important organization – those with great influence (and police-state powers) – including all governmental agencies and departments as well as international government organizations like the UN, WHO, and European Union.
They are also all the major “crony” corporations that benefit from close ties to government and non-governmental organizations.
Plus, foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which have more money than many nations and certainly more ideological commitment to deploy their resources to implement their agendas.
A simple method to define the establishment organizations would be to simply identify the world’s key authorized narratives and then ask yourself what organizations zealously support these initiatives (aka “The Current Thing”).
In the last four years, any organization that vociferously supported all the Covid protocols would be examples of “captured” organizations that enthusiastically supported the Current Thing.
But these same organizations also support all the other ascendant political movements, such as the fight against (allegedly) man-made Climate Change, numerous wars or “interventions” to advance “democracy,” central bank digital currency, and ever more mRNA “vaccines.”
Furthermore, it’s obvious these same organizations support initiatives designed to discredit long-accepted cultural norms in favor of more “progressive” thinking that normalizes gender reversal, race grievances, LGBT+ initiatives, or any reform that advances “diversity, inclusion, or equity.”
The promotion of policies that make mass illegal immigration much easier to achieve has also become a crucial program of our planet’s establishment rulers.
I believe the above summary provides an accurate assessment of the state of the world today.
I also note that it’s an undeniable truth that every program of these establishment organizations has made the world a darker place, with future developments planned by our leaders guaranteed to decrease the qualify of life for children or young adults who may live another 50 to 80 years.
For example, at the moment, unelected delegates who serve on the World Health Organization continue to deliberate in secret as they finalize a new health treaty and make changes to “international regulations” that will affect virtually every citizen on the planet in decades to come.
The salient point about the WHO is that this agency was provably and disastrously wrong on every policy and piece of guidance it issued involving the response to Covid-19.
Another way to identify the members of the Establishment ruling class is to simply identify those who were spectacularly wrong on every key issue of our times. These are the people and organizations who are seeking even more power and control.
Who Will Prevail in the End?
The good news is our side – those who still believe in human liberty – vastly outnumbers the group that is clearly aligned against us.
Above I listed many of the world’s captured organizations. These organizations are staffed by probably a couple hundred thousand key leaders who are committed to supporting the nefarious and freedom -eradicating components of “The Current Thing.”
As I’ll show below, the numbers who identify with “our side” surely exceed tens of millions of citizens.
The bad news is the the enemies of freedom – the worshippers of Big Brother – control all of the institutions and organizations in the world that actually matter.
Whoever sought to capture all of these organizations – from the CDC, the military, the Federal Reserve, the WEF, and the mainstream press – didn’t embark on these projects just to entertain themselves. They did this for a reason. This reason? They wanted to use these organizations to advance/achieve their goals.
To be more specific, they must have known that if they captured all of these organizations it would be almost impossible for any private citizens to stop their plans.
Our Side Actually has a Major Numeric Advantage
Still, the committed generals and staff officers who are seeking even more global control of the masses are…greatly outnumbered by people who are repulsed by their programs.
I’m currently working on a business idea that might supplement the dissident class of independent writers or “citizen journalists” found in the alternative media and on Substack.
In working on this project, I’m very interested in gauging the size of the market for content that resonates with the world’s population that still values freedom. This would be the group of citizens who is skeptical of the authorized narratives and values (genuine) “watchdog” journalism.
My estimate is there must be tens of millions of people who think like I do, people who would like to stop all the goals of the WEF, Davos, and WHO crowd.
The Tucker Carlson Metric
Perhaps the simplest way to estimate the size of this market is to examine the audience of one of the world’s best-known “contrarian journalists,” Tucker Carlson.
Before Carlson was fired by Fox News, his nightly news show routinely drew four million viewers per night, which made it the top-rated news program in North America. Over the course of a month, the show might have attracted 10 million viewers.
As we all know, Carlson was fired for producing content that was extremely popular with millions of adults. But Carlson didn’t disappear or stop producing “taboo” commentary and news segments, he simply moved to Twitter (now X) and kept doing the exact same thing.
Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin garnered more than 150 million views and his various streaming podcasts routinely double or triple the number of people he was reaching on Fox News.
Since Tucker covers many of the same “taboo” subjects I do, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 million of Carlson’s regular viewers strongly oppose everything the world’s so-called leaders want to make a reality. And that’s just Carlson’s audience.
Substack has more than 35 million subscribers, probably 20 percent of whom are searching for content they know they won’t find in, say, the New York Times or CBS News. That would be a “market” of 7 million freedom-supporting citizens.
Tucker was recently the guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast show. Rogan probably has an audience just as large and loyal as Carlson. Indeed, in their wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rogan made the point that shows like his and Tucker’s should now be considered “mainstream”…because they reach far more viewers than, say, the newscasts of the big TV networks (which actually aren’t so big anymore).
As far as I can tell, all the “alternative media” outlets are growing rapidly while all the traditional news outlets are Dead Men Walking.
Again, this is an extremely encouraging sign for anyone who believes that skeptical and independent speech is important to help ensure a world where real freedom might continue to exist.
But I Haven’t Mentioned the Biggest Group of Citizens
While “our side” greatly outnumbers the figure of key employees occupying all the captured organizations, the real population group that matters is the immense group that is sitting out this existential battle for freedom.
The citizens who will probably determine the outcome of this battle are the people who have not discovered the Substack contrarians or who never watch Joe Rogan…or who think Tucker Carlson is a dangerous extremist who should have been fired by Fox (and should now be fired by Elon Musk and X). This group numbers in the billions.
(This would be the group that doesn’t want to think anymore about the Covid response or think about the possibility that scary-looking, worm-like clots might be in their veins and arteries right now.)
This group just wants to get through each day with adequate supplies of bread…and if they’re given a few mildly entertaining circuses to distract them from the challenges of their daily lives, that’s enough.
For this segment of the population, any big debate on “freedom” is either boring, not germane to their lives, or they love and appreciate Big Brother and are convinced he is protecting them.
What this means to you and me is that the denouement of this historic battle will be determined by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population.
On one side, we have the 200,000 or so leaders of thousands of important captured organizations. On the other side, we have 10 to 20 million citizens who’ve found each other in the alternative media. In the middle, we have a couple billion people who are oblivious to what’s really at stake.
Whatever way this massive middle group swings in the future, so goes the world.
One suspects the world’s real rulers know that their track record and planned agendas won’t stand up to close scrutiny. They know that their arguments are not as persuasive and could easily be debunked if our side’s arguments were to “go viral.”
To help keep this middle group indifferent or on their side, the Deep State concocted the concepts of disinformation and misinformation to smear or throttle the influence of those on our side.
The ever-growing Censorship Industrial Complex has performed its most important job with (disgusting) distinction. For now at least, the depressing truth is the masses don’t seem to care much about the issues that some of us think are tectonic.
This means recruiting the legions of people we need to recruit will be a strangely tough sale.
Our charge of persuading more of our neighbors to join our side has been made far more difficult by the false narrative that all of the important disinformation is coming from citizens like us, when, in fact, we don’t control any of the important information.
If and when the masses realize who’s been producing the real disinformation, freedom might pull an upset victory.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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