COVID CENSORS MENDING FENCES, POORLY

On a Saturday morning, August 1, 2021, my boss uncharacteristically showed up at my workplace, two acres of community gardens. Getting right to the point, she asked if I knew someone named John Schroeder. I dealt with hundreds of people at the gardens and knew countless more from other settings. I couldn’t recall anyone with that name.

I asked why she wanted to know. She said someone who had so identified himself had emailed her that I was spreading Covid and “vaccine” misinformation on the Internet.

I told her, “with all due respect,” that I knew far more about The Virus, the shots and the law than she did and would discuss these with her for as long as she was willing. I added that, though Rutgers University, our employer, was about to require all staff to inject, I would never comply, they’d have to fire me and I’d sue them if they did.

To her credit, my boss, a late-thirties Public Health PhD candidate who bought the “Pandemic” hype, understood what Schroeder and many others didn’t: the First Amendment protects free speech. Besides, everything I had written about the shots was true. My semi-government-funded employer couldn’t restrict what I wrote and said, especially on my own time.

Not gonna lie, though: I often mocked the lockdowns and masks in the presence of those I encountered at the gardens. Aren’t college campuses supposed to be bastions of discourse? Isn’t this the ostensible reason for academic tenure?

I requested my boss to send me my accuser’s email. She did but deleted the sender’s address so as to prevent direct contact.

FW: Mark Oshinskie — Director of New Brunswick Community Farm

From: John Schroeder
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2021 3:28 PM
To: info@nbcfarmersmarket.com
Subject: Mark Oshinskie — Director of New Brunswick Community Farm

The director of the J&J funded community farm in New Brunswick is a rabid anti-vaxxer who is posting vaccine and covid disinformation on his Medium page.

Please see here:

https://forecheck32.medium.com/vaxx-time-for-bonzo-251501c8b742

And generally here:

https://forecheck32.medium.com/

You are each now on notice of this and I should think something should be done about his continued interest in posting dangerous misinformation.

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

John

—

I’m still not sure John Schroeder wasn’t a pseudonym used by someone I knew. Because I often criticized the Covid Scam and have publicly taken other non-PC stances, numerous individuals in my NPR-loving town hate me. A difference between them and me is that when I disagree with someone, I let that person know directly. I don’t contact their boss and “tell on” them.

If the Schroeders of the world strongly believed in lockdowns, closures, masks, tests and shots, why were they so afraid to defend their views in the marketplace of ideas?

—

Regardless, I didn’t see how pointing out that the lockdowns and shots would cause more harm than good made me “rabid.” Although the lockdowns caused extensive, permanent damage and the shots failed to stop infection or spread and millions of vaxxers have died or been injured, Schroeder and his ilk still falsely tell themselves that the lockdowns and shots saved millions of lives. It’s easy to think you’re right if you rely on bogus statistics, only hear one side of a story and never consider opposing arguments.

Since March 2020, Schroeder and many other lockdown, mask and jab supporters have believed that calling opponents names like “grandma killer,” “Trumper” and “anti-vaxxer” marginalized their targets and simultaneously placed the name-callers on some self-imagined higher moral and intellectual ground. Instead, name-calling should discredit name-callers. I didn’t need to call those who supported the vaxxes, names. I methodically enumerated and explained the lockdowns, school closures, masks and shots’ shortcomings and their financial, social and human costs.

And though “anti-vaxxer” was intended as a disqualifying insult, being called one didn’t bother me. I believe all of the ostensible vaccines are overrated, have seriously injured many children and that parents should be allowed to refuse to have their kids injected. I’m willing to discuss this topic with those who disagree, as long as they remain calm. I’ll first ask which pro-vaxx studies they’ve read and what they know about these studies’ designs. Then I’ll point out the sharp drop in incidence of diseases decades before vaccinations began.

I wondered what Schroeder thought “should be done” to me. I suspect he copied the garden’s vaxx-making funder, Johnson & Johnson, hoping they’d fire me. This outcome was unlikely. I knew a bunch of J & J employees who volunteered at the gardens. We had gotten along well as we worked alongside each other. I think they would have said I was the opposite of rabid.

And those J & J shots didn’t work so well. Unsurprisingly, none of the shots did.

—

Brainwashed by panic-mongering media, those who supported lockdowns, school closures, masks, asymptomatic testing and vaccines have been wrong throughout. Living among so many fearful, illogical, low-information and ultimately, destructive individuals bothered me. It’s hard to forget the extent of the groupthink, how imperious people and governments became, and how, collectively, millions of people were either threatened with firings or actually lost jobs because they didn’t inject.

Although I didn’t hide from others or wear a mask and I got a religious exemption from the shots, I couldn’t avoid being censored. Medium removed not only my lockdown and shot criticisms, it also removed dozens of my other, unrelated posts. They digitally “disappeared” me, presumably, given the timing, because Schroeder reported me to them. That’s when I found Substack.

—

The Scamdemic was built on a relentless barrage of propaganda. In order to deceive the public with its biologically, logically and logistically untenable virus-crushing strategies, the propagandists tried to comprehensively block or erase messages criticizing lockdowns, school closures, masks, asymptomatic tests and vaxxes. The propagandists hated dissent. Allowing the public to consider such messaging would have caused a critical mass of the public to question the “mitigation” measures and jabs and ended the Scamdemic.

From the beginning, it was obvious that various entities, later labeled the Censorship Industrial Complex, had conspired to present a one-sided viral narrative. These entities included federal, state and local governments, the media and a group of government-sponsored, university-employed, euphemistically named entities, purportedly tasked to thwart “Misinformation” but really designed to prevent the public from learning the truth about the Covid Scam. Mum was the word.

Clandestine censorship subsequently became a matter of record. Emails showed that Biden’s henchmen and bureaucrats pressured the media and websites to deplatform, suspend or shadowban those who criticized the lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and shots. This censorship went far beyond “influencers” with sizable followings. It also encompassed legions of social media users who were suspended by Facebook, LinkedIn, et al. for questioning the Covid “mitigation” or later, the shots.

—

It’s been painfully clear that many with whom I’ve discussed the Covid mitigation and shots had never heard basic facts that revealed the Scam. As four of many examples, most lockdown and shot backers have never heard that: 1) many said to have died ‘“from Covid” really died of other causes, especially old age, 2) many ostensible Covid victims were medicated or ventilated to death, 3) the PCR tests used to detect “Covid” were never supposed to be used for diagnosis because these tests were wildly overinclusive and 4) vaxx efficacy and risk stats were badly distorted via statistical, definitional chicanery I’ve detailed in prior posts.

In a sixth-grade unit regarding newspapers, our teacher, Mrs. Kasper, told the class that newspapers were valuable because they presented both sides of a story, using more facts than TV or radio reports used. In pre-Scamdemic decades, many newspapers, including the major ones, published my commentaries on various topics, even though I had expressed minority views. I remember, in the mid-1970s, seeing a local nun deliver a forceful anti-abortion, Voice of the People, message after CBS’s New York City affiliate’s Six O’clock News. That equal time ethic is long gone.

In March, 2020, newspapers wouldn’t publish my, or anyone else’s, lockdown, school closure, mask and Covid potlatch criticisms. At that time, we Covid dissidents comprised a tiny slice of the population, probably less than 10%. Some of these conscientious objectors were MDs, Public Health PhDs or, as I was, attorneys.

While we objectors wanted to engage in dialogue, public debate didn’t occur. Unheard by most, I shouted along with other dissidents into gale force winds of government and media demagoguery. Richard Nixon spoke of The Silent Majority. Lockdown and vaxx opponents were The Silenced Minority.

Without seeing lockdown skepticism in print or on electronic media, many succumbed to peer pressure and accepted or acquiesced to the prevailing Viral Terror narrative. If instead of such mob mentality, some dissenting voices were allowed to be heard, as in the movie, Twelve Angry Men, many people would have, for the first time, considered the Covid response’s flaws. Such adversarial exchanges used to be common on TV news shows as 60 Minutes or the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour.

While many people are willing to dance, most are too shy to get on the floor until others do. Similarly, as news purveyors blocked Covid skepticism, news sources prevented others who might have added their anti-lockdown and anti-jab voices from seeing that Covid skeptics like me were out on the floor, assailing these interventions.

Beyond reluctance to stand alone, supporting the Covid overreaction was cast as a moral imperative. The ads told us to “Stay Home, Save Lives” and “Your mask protects me.” In order to be seen, or see oneself, as “good” or “kind,” one was told that they had to buy into all of the mitigation measures and shots.

But if the masses had seen and heard that others sensibly opposed this unprecedented overreaction, some of the reluctant Covid rule followers who considered themselves “the good people” would have concluded that not only was it OK, but far better for humanity, to reject the Covid theater and later, to oppose injecting billions of people with an unnecessary, experimental substance than it was to support any of the overreaction. The lockdown supporters, mask wearers and vaxx takers signaled virtue. In contrast, those who opposed these measures advanced public welfare.

If, in particular, more celebrities or clergy had publicly observed all of the Covid theater’s damage, the dysfunctional wall of obedience and censorship would have been breached and then, collapsed and been overrun. The few in either occupation who spoke against lockdowns, closures, masks or shots didn’t receive column space or airtime.

—

This week, I repeatedly heard a fifteen-second radio ad for NBC News. The message was, as in many contemporary Med/Pharma ads, delivered over a melancholy violin and slow piano arrangement. Without such manipulative musical accompaniment, the words spoken would lack the substance needed to persuade listeners.

Using this soundtrack, the ad plays snippets of various disillusioned adult script- reading actors spouting such fashionable cliches as, “I feel like we can’t trust the news” and “I think the media is just trying to divide us.”

Most Americans like to think of themselves not only as virtuous but also as disillusioned and disaffected. This self-image makes them feel independent and smarter and more virtuous than average. Beginning an ad by implicitly telling the listener s/he’s one of the good, smart people is a cheesy attempt to win them over. It’s like a man saying to a woman in a bar, “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?”

In each instance, the patronizing speaker implicitly tells the listener, “You’re exceptional. And because I feel your pain, I’m also exceptional. Though others lied to you, I won’t. Let’s make common cause.”

During the ad’s second half, a condescendingly calm voice—ostensibly the voice of reason—says NBC News is turning the temperature down, just “focuses on facts,” reports “clearly” and looks “deeper and wider” into stories.

The ad uses the present tense, so as to suggest that NBC has always been a straight dealer, not a contrite entity changing their lying ways. The implicit, false premise is that you could always trust them.

The narrator ends by saying, “Let’s move forward.”

To those who saw the media’s censorship alongside the Covid FraudFest, the ad, generally, and the notion of simply “moving forward,” forgetting the past five-plus years, are repugnant.

I seldom watched the news during the Scamdemic. But when I visited my parents, who often had their TV on, NBC zealously sold Coronamania. Over its ominous violin, drum and trumpet theme song, it bombarded the public with terroristic, badly exaggerated death and case statistics and inflammatory images of morgue trucks and people hooked to ventilators. There was no journalistic trace of an alternative perspective. The TV and radio news seemed never to question the very dubious narrative or broadcast the comments of those who did.

The subtext of the current NBC ad is “Yeah, we lied to you non-stop for the past five years. Get over it. Tune in to hear our new lies.”

Over the past year or two, other news outlets have been running ingratiating, image-rehabilitating ads resembling NBC’s. These ad campaigns reveal that the media’s focus groups have found that many people have belatedly figured out that news sources repeatedly lied to them during Coronamania.

Even though those who sold the Covid lies speak glib platitudes atop contemplative music, these lies were so obvious and damaging that they shouldn’t be forgotten. I don’t understand how NBC expected to lie to people for five-plus years and think they wouldn’t notice. Though I guess they were right about this much: most people didn’t stop to think that none of the interventions made sense.

I strongly suspect that if one were to watch NBC News this week, s/he’d still see superficial, inflammatory, partisan coverage regarding various crises du jour.

—

Ultimately, the media heads seem to have concluded that most Americans are addicted to the news and won’t ever abandon it. Though the mainstream news sources have lost most of their audiences to Internet sites, many of which also blatantly misrepresented all matters Covid, the media managers might be right about news addiction. Many people constantly check their newsfeeds.

NBC and other news purveyors desperately hope that, three years removed from peak Coronamania, the public has forgotten the Chicken Little and Boy Who Cried Wolf stories they heard in kindergarten and will continue to buy scams. Existentially and financially, they have no choice but to believe this. If too many stop watching the news, newspeople will have to find another line of work. News watchers and the larger society would be better off as a consequence.

—

People say they watch the news because they “want to know what’s going on in the world.” To the extent this goal is worthy of one’s time, s/he could more constructively consult internet sources not beholden to advertisers or governments and, at least outside the Covid context, not subject to censorship; at least these days and in most instances.

Better still, people can directly observe daily life. The truth presents itself as you move through, and think about, the 3D world. In addition to remembering that phenomena or trends you’ve seen before tend to repeat themselves, asking and getting answers to a few basic questions about stuff that seems unusual or new tells you nearly everything you need to know. Though you might miss out on some celebrity scandals.

Ultimately news, like gossip, is expendable. Consuming either of these can make you believe in much that isn’t true. And the time spent on each is precious and can be used far better. We can, instead, interact face-to-face with others and do a variety of activities we like for as long as we are able.