Publisher’s Note: Chelsea Green, Vermont’s most courageous independent publisher, will be releasing this April Dr. Joseph Mercola’s new book The Truth About COVID-19.. We’ll be reviewing Mercola’s book and interviewing him comes spring. Meanwhile, here’s a preview – Mercola’s new essay making the rounds on the ‘Net. Read the whole essay below., beginning with RFK, Jr.’s Foreword. Unmask, Vermont – let’s restore sanity to our 2nd Vermont Republic!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is the foreword, by Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to “The Truth About COVID-19 — Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal.” The soon-to-be-released book, by Dr. Joseph Mercola, physician and founder of Mercola.com and Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association, can be pre-ordered here. The official release of the book is April 29.

Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks.

Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth. In her seminal book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein chronicles how authoritarian demagogues, large corporations and wealthy plutocrats use mass disruptions to shift wealth upwards, obliterate the middle classes, abolish civil rights, privatize the commons and expand authoritarian controls.

A consummate insider, the former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel is known for his admonition that vested power structures should “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” But this treadworn strategy — to use crisis to inflame the public terror that paves the road to dictatorial power — has served as the central strategy of totalitarian systems for millennia.

The methodology is, in fact, formulaic, as Hitler’s Luftwaffe commander, Hermann Göring, explained during the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg:

“It is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country.”

The Nazis pointed to the threats from Jews and Gypsies to justify the homicidal authoritarianism in the Third Reich. The dictatorial demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee warned against communist infiltration of the U.S. State Department and film industry to rationalize loyalty oaths and the Blacklist.Ask Congress to Investigate COVID Origins – Take Action

Dick Cheney used the 911 attack to launch his “long war” against amorphous terrorism and the Patriot Act abridgments that laid the groundwork for the modern surveillance state.

Now the medical cartel and its billionaire Big Tech accomplices have invoked the most potent, frightening and enduring enemy of all — the microbe.

And who can blame them? Increasing the wealth and power of the oligarchy is seldom a potent vessel for populism. Citizens accustomed to voting for their governments are unlikely to support policies that make the rich richer, increase political and social control by corporations, diminish democracy and reduce their civil rights.

So demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience and to win public acquiescence for the demolition of civil and economic rights.

Of course, the first casualty must always be freedom of speech. After stoking sufficient panic against the hobgoblin du jour, robber barons need to silence protest against their wealth and power-grabs.

In including free speech in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison argued that all our other liberties depend on this right. Any government that can hide its mischief has license to commit atrocities.

As soon as they get hold of the levers of authority, tyrants impose Orwellian censorship and begin gaslighting dissenters. But ultimately they seek to abolish all forms of creative thinking and self-expression. They burn books, destroy art, kill writers, poets and intellectuals, outlaw gatherings, and at their worst, force oppressed minorities to wear masks that atomize any sense of community or solidarity and prevent the subtle, eloquent nonverbal communication for which God and evolution have equipped humans with 42 facial muscles. The most savage Middle Eastern theocracies mandate masks for women, whose legal status — not coincidentally — is as chattels.

The free flow of information and self-expression are oxygen and sunlight for representative democracy, which functions best with policies annealed in the boiling cauldron of public debate. It is axiomatic that without free speech, democracy withers.

The most iconic and revered monuments of democracy therefore include the Athenian Agora and Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park. We can’t help feeling exhilaration about our noble experiment in self-government when we witness the boisterous, irreverent debates in the House of Commons, or watch Jimmy Stewart’s filibuster scene in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” — an enduring homage to the inseparable bond between debate and democracy.

To consolidate and fortify their power, dictatorships aim to replace those vital ingredients of self-rule — debate, self-expression, dissent and skepticism — with rigid authoritarian orthodoxies that function as secular surrogates for religion. These orthodoxies perform to abolish critical thinking and regiment populations in blind, unquestioning obedience to undeserving authorities.

Instead of citing scientific studies to justify mandates for masks, lockdowns and vaccines, our medical rulers cite WHO, CDC, FDA and NIH — captive agencies that are groveling sock puppets to the industries they regulate. Multiple federal and international investigations have documented the financial entanglementswith pharmaceutical companies that have made these regulators cesspools of corruption.

Iatrarchy — meaning government by physicians — is a little-known term, perhaps because historical experiments with it have been catastrophic. The medical profession has not proven itself an energetic defender of democratic institutions or civil rights. Virtually every doctor in Germany took lead roles in the Third Reich’s project to eliminate mental defectives, homosexuals, handicapped citizens and Jews.

So many hundreds of German physicians participated in Hitler’s worst atrocities — including managing mass murder and unspeakable experiments at the death camps — that the allies had to stage separate “Medical Trials” at Nuremberg. Not a single prominent German doctor or medical association raised their voice in opposition to these projects.

So it’s unsurprising that, instead of demanding blue-ribbon safety science and encouraging honest, open and responsible debate on the science, the badly compromised and newly empowered government health officials charged with managing the COVID-19 pandemic response collaborated with mainstream and social media to shut down discussion on key public health and civil rights questions.

They silenced and excommunicated heretics like Dr. Mercola who refused to genuflect to Pharma and treat unquestioning faith in zero liability, shoddily tested experimental vaccines as religious duty.

Our current iatrarchy’s rubric of “scientific consensus” is the contemporary iteration of the Spanish Inquisition. It is a fabricated dogma constructed by this corrupt cast of physician technocrats and their media collaborators to legitimize their claims to dangerous new powers.

The high priests of the modern Inquisition are Big Pharma’s network and cable news gasbags who preach rigid obedience to official diktats including lockdowns, social distancing and the moral rectitude of donning masks despite the absence of peer-reviewed science that convincingly shows that masks prevent COVID-19 transmission. The need for this sort of proof is gratuitous.

They counsel us to, instead, “trust the experts.” Such advice is both anti-democratic and anti-science. Science is dynamic. “Experts” frequently differ on scientific questions and their opinions can vary in accordance with the demands of politics, power and financial self-interest. Nearly every lawsuit I have ever brought pitted highly credentialed experts from opposite sides against each other, with all of them swearing under oath to diametrically antithetical positions based on the same set of facts. Science is disagreement; the notion of scientific consensus is oxymoronic.

The modern intention of the totalitarian state is corporate kleptocracy — a construct that replaces democratic process with the arbitrary edicts of unelected technocrats. Invariably, their fiats invest multinational corporations with extraordinary power to monetize and control the most intimate parts of our lives, enrich billionaires, impoverish the masses and manage dissent with relentless surveillance and obedience training.

In 2020, led by Bill Gates, Silicon Valley applauded from the sidelines as powerful medical charlatans — applying the most pessimistic projections from discredited modeling and easily manipulated PCR testing, and a menu of new protocols for coroners that appeared intended to inflate reporting of COVID-19 deaths — fanned pandemic panic and confined the world’s population under house arrest.

The suspension of due process, and notice, and comment rulemaking meant that none of the government prelates who ordained the quarantine had to first publicly calculate whether destroying the global economy, disrupting food and medical supplies, and throwing a billion humans into dire poverty and food insecurity would kill more people than it would save.

In America, their quarantine predictably shattered the nation’s once-booming economic engine, putting 58 million Americans out of work, and permanently bankrupting more than 100,000 small businesses, including 41,000 Black-owned businesses, some of which took three generations of investment to build.

These policies have also set into motion the inevitable dismantling of the social safety net that nurtured America’s envied middle class. Government officials have already begun liquidating the 100-year legacies of the New Deal, New Frontier, the Great Society and Obamacare to pay the accumulated quarantine debts. Say goodbye to school lunches, healthcare, WICS, Medicaid, Medicare, University scholarships, etc., etc., etc.

While obliterating the American middle class and dropping an additional 8% of Americans below the poverty line, the 2020 “COVID coup” transferred a trillion dollars of wealth to Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch) and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Jack Dorsey. It seems beyond coincidence that these men, who are cashing in on the poverty and misery caused by global lockdowns, are the same men whose companies actively censor critics of those policies.

The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications have created a world where it has become impermissible to speak ill of official pronouncements, and practically a crime to criticize pharmaceutical products. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, now gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, are rapidly transforming America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state over which they profit at every turn.

For example, this cabal used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition and “track-and-trace” infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, will use to mine and monetize our data for free, compel obedience to arbitrary dictates and suppress dissent.

Their government/industry collaboration will use this system to manage the rage when Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country and way of life — while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like illness.

Predictably our other constitutional guarantees lined up behind free speech at the gibbet. The imposition censorship has masked this systematic demolition of our Constitution, including attacks on our freedoms of assembly (through social distancing and lockdown rules), on freedom of worship (including abolishing religious exemptions and closing churches, while liquor stores remain open as “essential service”), private property (the right to operate a business), due process (including the imposition of far-reaching restrictions against freedom of movement, education and association without rule making, public hearings, or economic and environmental impact statements), the 7th Amendment right to jury trials (in cases of vaccine injuries caused by corporate negligence), our rights to privacy and against illegal searches and seizures (warrantless tracking and tracing), and our right to have governments that don’t spy on us or retain our information for mischievous purposes.

Silencing Dr. Mercola’s voice, of course, was the Medical Cabal’s early priority. For decades, Dr. Mercola has been among the most effective and influential advocates against the pharmaceutical paradigm. He was an eloquent, charismatic and knowledgeable critic of a corrupt system that has made Americans the world’s top consumer of pharmaceutical drugs. Americans pay the highest prices for drugs, and have the worst health outcomes among the top 75 nations.

Putting opiates — which kill 50,000 Americans annually — aside, pharmaceuticals are now the third biggest killer of Americans, after heart attacks and cancer. Like a prophet in the wilderness, Dr. Mercola has argued for years that good health does not come in a syringe or a pill, but from building strong immune systems. He preaches that nutrition and exercise are the most effective medicines, and that public health officials ought to be pushing policies that discourage reliance on pharmaceutical products and that safeguard our food supplies from Big Food, Big Chemical and Big Ag. These predatory industries naturally consider Dr. Mercola to be Public Enemy #1.

Big Pharma’s $9.6 billion annual advertising budget gives these unscrupulous companies control over our news and television outlets. Strong economic drivers (pharmaceutical companies are the biggest network advertisers) have long discouraged mainstream media outlets from criticizing vaccine manufacturers. In 2014, a network president, Roger Ailes, told me he would fire any of his news show hosts who allowed me to talk about vaccine safety on air. “Our news division,” he explained, “gets up to 70% of ad revenues from pharma in non-election years.”

Thus, pharmaceutical products were both the predicate and the punchline of the Cancel Culture. The Pharmedia long ago banned Dr. Mercola from the airwaves and newsprint while turning Wikipedia — which functions as Pharma’s newsletter and propaganda vehicle — into a mill for defamations against him and every other integrative and functional health physician.

At COVID’s outset, the social media robber barons — all with their own financial entanglements with Pharma — joined the campaign to silence Mercola by ejecting him from their platforms.

It’s a bad omen for democracy when citizens can no longer conduct civil, informed debates about critical policies that impact the vitality of our economy, public health, personal freedoms and constitutional rights. Censorship is violence, and this systematic muzzling of debate — which proponents justify as a measure to curtail dangerous polarization — is actually fueling the polarization and extremism that the autocrats use to clamp down evermore draconian controls.

We might recall, at this strange time in our history, my father’s friend, Edward R. Murrow’s warning: “The right to dissent … is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail to totalitarianism.”

SNIP–>

A number of mental health experts have expressed concern over the blatant fear and panic mongering during the COVID-19 pandemic, warning about potential — and let’s face it, likely — psychiatric effects. In a December 22, 2020, article¹ in Evie Magazine, S.G. Cheah discusses what may in fact be the real problem at hand: mass insanity caused by “delusional fear of COVID-19.”

Cheah refers to lectures and articles by psychiatrist and medical legal expert Dr. Mark McDonald,² who believes “the true public health crisis lies in the widespread fear which morphed and evolved into a form of mass delusional psychosis.”

“Even when the statistics point to the extremely low fatality rate among children and young adults (measuring 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at 25), the young and the healthy are still terrorized by the chokehold of irrational fear when faced with the coronavirus,” Cheah writes.

Infectious Hysteria

)Cheah goes on to review a number of irrational behaviors that have become all too commonplace, such as parents being kicked off planes because their young children refuse to wear a mask during the flight, or people having hysterical meltdowns when they see a person not wearing a mask.

The science³ is quite clear about the risk posed by asymptomatic individuals, meaning anyone who feels perfectly healthy yet may have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 with a PCR test set to an excessively high cycle threshold. They pose an exceptionally low risk to others, if any risk at all. Science is even clearer on healthy individuals who test negative for SARS-CoV-2. You simply cannot spread a virus you do not have.

The bulk of published science^{4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11} also shows that masks do not prevent the spread of viral infections, and this is particularly true if you’re wearing cloth masks,¹² surgical masks or masks with vents.

Despite all of that, many still enter a state of hysteria when they see an unmasked person, even if they look perfectly healthy and clearly are not suffering from any kind of respiratory issue. This is a highly irrational state that has no basis in reality.

Indeed, according to McDonald, these people are suffering from delusional psychosis,¹³ and there are a lot of them. He goes so far as to refer to the outside of his home or office as the “outdoor insane asylum,” where he must assume “that any person that I run into is insane” unless they prove otherwise.¹⁴ As explained by Cheah:¹⁵

“Instead of facing reality, the delusional person would rather live in their world of make-believe. But in order to keep faking reality, they’ll have to make sure that everyone else around them also pretends to live in their imaginary world.

In simpler words, the delusional person rejects reality. And in this rejection of reality, others have to play along with how they view the world, otherwise, their world will not make sense to them. It’s why the delusional person will get angry when they face someone who doesn’t conform to their world view …

It’s one of the reasons why you’re seeing so many people who’d happily approve the silencing of any medical experts whose views contradict the WHO or CDC guidelines. ‘Obey the rules!’ becomes more important than questioning if the rules were legitimate to begin with.”

“There was never a medical crisis. There were always enough resources to deal with the people with people who were sick … Many resources were in fact turned away … The question then, for me, became, ‘What’s the real crisis? What are people really suffering from?

It became clear to me, very quickly, within the first two or three weeks in March [2020], that it was fear. Since then … the fear … has morphed and evolved, not just into a ‘I’m worried, I’m scared so I need to stay home,’ but an actual belief that is against reality — because the definition of delusion is something you believe that doesn’t conform with reality.

They believe that they are going to die — no matter what age, no matter what state of health they’re in — if they don’t leave their house with a mask and gloves on every day and run from [other] human beings. That’s delusional psychosis. It’s false, it’s wrong, it’s not backed up by evidence. And many, many Americans are living that and believing that.”

While there’s no data to back this up, McDonald says it appears women tend to be more prone to delusional psychosis than men. Part of it, he suggests, may be because when women get scared, they tend to become more hyperprotective than men do under the same circumstances, likely because women — speaking in pure generalizing terms, of course — tend to be more emotionally driven.

Mass Delusional Psychosis Traumatizes Children

McDonald is particularly concerned with the lasting effects this widespread insanity will have on children as they grow up. As a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of children and adolescents, he should know. Since the lockdowns began in the first quarter of 2020, he’s seen a massive increase in patients, and their mental states are far worse than what he’s used to seeing in these age groups.

One of the worst traumas children suffer as a result of all this fearmongering is the idea that they may kill their parents or grandparents simply by being around them. As noted by Cheah, they’re also being taught to feel guilty about behaviors that would normally be completely, well, normal.

As just one example, hysterical adults calling a toddler who refuses to wear a mask a “brat,” when in fact resisting having a restrictive mask put across your face is perfectly normal at that age.

“It’s not normal for children to grow up thinking that everyone is a danger to everyone else,” Cheah says, and rightly so. It’s not normal at all, and hysterical adults are mindlessly inflicting severe emotional trauma on an entire generation.

As noted by McDonald in his interview with Peterson above, a primary cause of depression, especially among youngsters, is disconnection from others. We need face-to-face contact, we need physical contact as well as emotional intimacy. We need these things to feel safe around others and within our own selves. Digital interactions simply cannot replace these most basic human needs, and are inherently separating rather than connective.

McDonald cites recent CDC statistics showing there’s been a 400% increase in adolescent depression compared to one year ago, and in 25% of cases, they’ve contemplated suicide. These are unheard of statistics, he says. Never before have so many teenagers considered committing suicide.

“This is a mass-casualty event,” McDonald says, and parents — adults — are to blame, because they are the ones scaring them to the point they don’t feel life is worth living anymore.

This is also why just treating the children is not going to be effective enough. We have to address the psychosis of the adult population. “It’s up to us adults to fix this,” McDonald says, “because children are not going to be able to fix this themselves.”

Delusional People Ultimately Require Controlled Environments

We must also address the mass delusion for another reason, and that is because it’s driving us all, sane and insane alike, toward a society devoid of all previous freedoms and civil liberties, and the corrupt individuals in charge will not voluntarily relinquish power once we’ve given it to them.

A totalitarian society, McDonald believes, is the ultimate end of this societal psychosis unless we do something about it and realize that “we’re fine, we’re perfectly safe.” Indeed, we’re in no more danger now than we were pre-COVID. We must not allow our freedoms to be taken from us due to delusional fears. As noted by Cheah in her article:¹⁶

“It’s not unthinkable that the final outcome would be total societal control on every aspect of your life. Consider this — the endpoint of a mentally ill person is for them to be put under a controlled environment (institutionalized like an asylum) where all freedoms are restricted. And it’s looking more and more like that’s the endpoint of where this mass psychosis is heading.”

A December 18, 2020, Tweet by political commentator Candace Owens also sums up how irrational fear and panic have figuratively lobotomized a significant portion of the public:

McDonald points out that many of our leaders obviously do not suffer these same delusional fears. They issue stay-at-home orders from their vacation homes in the Caribbean and repeatedly break their own mask and lockdown mandates. They ride their bikes, stroll through the park, have family gatherings and dine out without a care. They know COVID-19 isn’t the deadly plague it’s been made out to be, but they’re playing the game because it benefits them.

Fear Is Never Virtuous

The video above features a short lecture McDonald gave during America’s Frontline Doctors’ White Coat Summit 2¹⁷ in mid-October 2020, titled “The Way Forward: Overcoming Fear.”

In it, he points out that not only has fear morphed into a delusional belief that masks, gloves and physical separation is required to stay alive, but fear has also been turned into a virtue, which is doubly tragic and wrong.

Wearing a mask has become a way to demonstrate that you’re a “good person,” someone who obviously cares about others, whereas not wearing a mask brands you as an inconsiderate lout, if not a prospective mass murderer, simply by breathing.
Healthy people should never wear masks, social distance or self-isolate. Not only are these strategies unhealthy from a physical standpoint, they also perpetuate the delusional psychosis gripping the nation and therefore must end.

By encouraging us to remain in fear, to burrow and settle into it and allow it to control and constrain our lives, the fear has become so entrenched that anyone who says we need to be fearless and fight for our freedoms is attacked for being not only stupid but also dangerous. “I would argue that it’s the opposite,” McDonald says.

The problem we now face is that the delusion has taken such hold that even if the mask mandates ended nationwide today, many would refuse to give up their masks, and they would not stop chastising those who don’t wear them, either. What’s more, we now have private companies pushing these freedom-robbing edicts, refusing services to those who don’t wear masks.

Soon, you won’t be allowed into certain venues if you don’t have the COVID-19 vaccine as well, and private corporations are the ones instigating those unconstitutional rules. If you understand the technocratic agenda, then you know why that is. It’s because many private companies are part of the global technocratic alliance that is trying to eliminate our freedoms in order to enrich themselves.

We started out with fear and hysteria. We moved to delusional psychosis, and now we have group control,” McDonald says. “Now we don’t have police officers and government coming after us. What we have more of is our fellow citizens now castigating us, legally limiting us from getting into vehicles [such as Uber or plane], going into businesses [and] getting jobs.”

Restoring Sanity as We Move Forward

Essentially, citizens are now acting as a de facto “police force” to suppress other people’s freedom, and this has a terribly harmful effect on society. So, how do we get out of the proverbial insane asylum? How do we restore sanity to our society while still helping those who are at greatest risk for complications and death from COVID-19? McDonald offers the following suggestions in his lecture and the featured interview:

•We must firmly reject masks as a virtue signal; the idea that action taken out of fear — such as donning a mask — is virtuous. Fear is not helpful and never virtuous.

•We should protect those at greatest risk — meaning elderly, frail individuals with comorbidities and those who are in poor health — using simple, inexpensive and readily available prophylactics, including vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin and zinc.

•Healthy people should never wear masks, social distance or self-isolate. Not only are these strategies unhealthy from a physical standpoint, they also perpetuate the delusional psychosis gripping the nation and therefore must end.

•We must embrace courage, truth, honesty and freedom, not just in our thoughts and words but also in our actions.

As noted by McDonald in the featured interview, people cannot think logically when in a state of delusional psychosis, hence sharing information, facts, data and evidence tends to be ineffective except in cases where the person was acting out of peer pressure rather than a delusional belief.

Typically, the best you can do is stand firm and act in alignment with truth and objective reality, much like you would if you were a first responder faced with an accident victim who is responding hysterically to what you know is only a minor injury.

Sources and References

^{1, 2, 15, 16} Evie Magazine December 22, 2020 (Archived)
³ Nature Communications November 20, 2020; 11 Article number 5917
⁴ Annals of Internal Medicine November 18, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-6817
⁵ Spectator November 19, 2020
⁶ JAMA 2009;302(17):1865-1871
⁷ ONA.org September 7, 2018
⁸ Emerging Infectious Diseases May 2020; 26(5)
⁹ WHO.int
¹⁰ WHO.int Advice on the Use of Masks in the Context of COVID-19
¹¹ medRxiv April 7, 2020 DOI: 10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217
¹² BMJ Open 2015;5:e006577
¹³ Lifesite News November 28, 2020
¹⁴ Target Liberty November 30, 2020
¹⁷ AFLDS Summit 2 Sessions