☕️ PERMISSIVENESS ☙ Saturday, October 12, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Americans getting things done; revealing Times article showcases media manipulation; Moderna stock still sliding; DOJ sues Virginia over illegal voters; more record aurorae; election news; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the Weekend Edition. Your roundup includes: real Americans don’t wait for FEMA even though it triggers liberals; New York Times puff piece accidentally rips the mask off the mechanics of media manipulation; Moderna’s long slide into financial irrelevance continues; DOJ sues State of Virginia for removing non-citizens from voting rolls; more worldwide aurora set more records and baffle disinterested climate scientists; and election news suggests the momentum is moving the right direction.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🌪️🌪️ Independent reports were making the social media rounds this week about industrious men in the Western Carolinas and Tennessee clearing roads and fixing bridges.

CLIP: Toxic masculinity and bridge repair (0:49).

Lacking permits, environmental impact studies, diversity compliance, or OSHA supervisors, local farmers and tradesmen have somehow begun using available materials, like downed power poles and toppled trees, to quickly repair or replace smaller washed-out bridges without waiting for the government to get around to it.

Hopefully, they aren’t mansplaining or man-spreading while sitting on their backhoe. Still, the fact groups of all white men are taking effective action without FEMA’s help is a kind of microaggression. As evidenced by FEMA’s website, the disaster relief agency’s top priority is —I am not making this up— not saving lives or protecting property, but equity:

The website explained that “FEMA will continue its efforts to integrate equity … through transformational change within our workforce.” From what I can tell, it seems like FEMA’s plan is working.

Meanwhile, everyday folks in sticky situations are getting things done without waiting for somebody else to do it or even for permission. Pheonix-like, something essentially American is resurrecting in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s tragedy, and it’s terrific.

(PS—I would be remiss if I failed to mention there are also plenty of reports of state DOT folks doing great work.)

🔥🔥 I’ve long argued corporate media’s job is not to inform, but to enforce political orthodoxy and police the allowable boundaries of approved thought. So I was intrigued by yesterday’s otherwise useless New York Times article headlined, “‘Pod Save America’ Won’t Quit.” The article was just free advertising for a far-left podcast, but it included an astonishing admission.

This particular podcast launched in 2016 right after Trump’s election as a part of the ‘#Resist’ movement. Seeded with Soros funding, this far-left show with its three white male hosts is now arguably partisan Democrats’ most popular podcast. “They were the Obama government in exile for eight years,” explained Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of far-left news site Semafor.

Pod Save America is everything you would expect.

Now set the PodSavers aside for a moment. I have long argued that corporate media’s main job is no longer reporting news or investigating stories. Apart from misleading people and distracting everyone from important developments, corporate media’s primary function in 2024 is to promote globalism and depopulationism by messaging Democrats about what they are allowed to think and say.

Democrats accept playing a Game of Life where the rules provide they’ll be socially ostracized and professionally canceled for holding heterodox thoughts and words, but socially and professionally rewarded for their conformity. The carrot and the stick.

It’s a self-fulfilling prediction; liberals energetically police themselves and each other with gusto.  They only need to know what’s permissible and what is verboten. Approved liberal orthodoxy is as flexible as a 12-year-old Romanian gymnast. It can turn on a dime, fly through the air with the greatest of ease, and change by the day.

Now, masks must be for everyone. (A few months later.) Now, masks are optional for anyone who thinks a seasonal cold is more dangerous than inhaling microplastics.

The media as Overton Window-setter is actually and literally mind control.  That its subjects are willing participants makes them no less manipulated.

Back to Pod Save America. According to the Times’ article, the PodSavers were the first machine-Democrats to publicly question Joe Biden’s fitness after his disastrous debate with Trump. That first post-debate podcast, argued the Times, started the political wrecking ball swinging and ended with Kamala Harris’s selection for the ticket.

Now look how the Times described the PodSavers’ Biden-questioning podcast:

There it was! They know about it, too. For discussion topics to “once be unsayable” necessarily requires the existence both of rules of discourse and enforcers of those rules.

And, of course, they minted a multisyllabic term for this kind of mind control: “permission structures.” It’s something quite difficult for we conservatives to imagine since, while we have our own problems, we face nothing like punishing, self-reinforcing group orthodoxy.

Permission structures weren’t always the Democrat default; it’s probably a neo-Marxist feature. After all, they used to call the Democrat Party the “big tent party,” meaning it covered a diverse group of related political viewpoints. But now, the Democrats’ big tent has been shrunk to something like a clown car, and you must wear the outfit if you want to cram yourself in.

This kind of agenda-setting was well described in George Orwell’s 1984, where the Party didn’t just control behavior, but it also regulated what people thought through a combination of fear and linguistic manipulation. It could also be compared to the Soviet Union’s “approved narratives.” Or to its precursor, the 1960’s fascinating ‘agenda-setting theory.’

In its most technical definition, “permission structures” are conceptually larger than just media manipulation defining the boundaries of acceptable groupthink. As used by Obama officials, the term referred more broadly to a psychological process of lobotomizing someone’s deeply held beliefs and getting them to accept things they used to find inconceivably repulsive.

Exhibit A might be transgender surgeries. Don’t make me show you the pictures again.

Merely recognizing the fact of media’s cognitive manipulation through ceaseless creation and enforcement of ‘permission structures,’ its Marxist agenda-setting, and its Stalinist-approved narratives helps immunize us against its insidious effects. The tactics are wielded against all of us, even if the most successful example is “creating necessary spaces for Democrats to talk publicly about what had once been unsayable.”

Resist corporate media’s permission structures.

😷😷 On Thursday, the San Fransisco Chronicle ran a story headlined, “Mask mandates are coming back to the Bay Area. Here’s where.” The good news was it’s only a limited mandate, for indoor masking in healthcare settings, in some California counties. The bad news is it’s certifiably insane.

Follow the science! It’s time to remind our fellow citizens again. The WHO found masks don’t stop respiratory viruses in 2019.  The CDC found the same in 2020. And the ‘gold-standard’ Cochrane Review found the same in 2022 — after the pandemic.

Beyond the science, pro-maskers must be made to grapple with emerging headlines like this one from the UK Guardian, in August:

Or this headline, from Boing Boing in June:

Or this Guardian headline, from around the same time:

Masks were banned in New York for 175 years, from 1845 to 2020, when the ban was repealed for covid. There must be some reason that, for most of the state’s history, wearing masks in public was a crime. What could it be?

There can be only one logical conclusion: masks are antisemitic. So.

💉💉 Moderna’s financial woes continued this week as the stock kept sagging. Simply Wall Street ran a story yesterday headlined, “The Market Doesn't Like What It Sees From Moderna, Inc.'s Revenues Yet As Shares Tumble 28%.” Uh oh.

Last week, Moderna depressed investors after appearing in the UK Daily Telegraph under the headline, “Moderna under fire after children offered cash to test Covid vaccine.” The sub-headline added, “Company targeted 12 to 18 year-olds through WhatsApp with payments of £1,500.” That’s about $2,000.

They used to convince people to take the jabs for a free donut. Now they’re having to offer thousands of dollars. It’s not a good sign for demand, which at this point could be reasonably compared to the demand for spicy cayenne pepper enemas or radical bee sting therapy. Ouch!

The larger significance is what this says about the market’s response to mRNA therapies in general. Remember, Moderna’s unexciting drug pipeline is all mRNA. Until very recently, mRNA was the hottest thing going. They were going to cure cancer with individualized mRNA shots.

But now, nobody wants their stupid shots, not even people fighting cancer.  Instead, all the cancer treatment excitement revolves around taking ivermectin, even though —or maybe because— the FDA panned the safe and effective drug as a horse dewormer.

Progress.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, Democracy Docket ran a breathless story headlined, “Justice Department Sues Virginia Officials Over State’s Noncitizen Voter Roll Purge.” Of course it did. But why? Is Virginia in play?

On August 7th, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the state elections commissioner to update the state’s voter lists to remove folks “identified as non-citizens” who don’t respond to a request to verify their citizenship within 14 days.

It was triggering. Yesterday, Biden’s DOJ filed suit arguing that removing non-citizens not allowed to vote this close to an election is illegal. Maybe if they’d removed the illegal voters sooner? What difference does it make when an illegal voter gets removed?

Youngkin’s spokesman insisted Virginia has complied with all applicable state and federal law. "Every step in the established list maintenance process is mandated by Virginia law and begins after an individual indicates they are not a citizen," he said. "Anyone spreading misinformation about it is either ignoring Virginia law or is trying to undermine it because they want noncitizens to vote.”

I’ll let you know what the court does. In distantly related news, I won my local election-related case this week, and yesterday the court of appeals denied the local government’s emergency request to expedite the appeal before election day. So.

Local, local, local!

🔥🔥 Finally, this week saw even more signs in the Heavens. NPR ran a colorful story yesterday headlined, “The northern lights dazzle night skies across U.S. and Europe.” Not once did uncurious NPR marvel over the historic nature of these worldwide aurorae. Maybe they’re uninterested because there’s no possible way this extreme weather event was caused by cow flatulence.

According to NPR, for the second time this year, the Northern Lights were visible as far south as Texas, DC, New York City, Arizona, and Australia. It also happened in May, when aurora appeared over South Pacific Islands for the first time since the Great Carrington Event of 1859.

The Northern Lights, aka Aurora Borealis, are a breathtaking natural phenomenon caused by energized solar wind particles interacting with Earth's magnetic field. They are usually only seen in frosty areas like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada, and Alaska.

Yesterday’s record-setting lights in the sky resulted from a moderate solar storm (4 out of 5 on the scale), not any kind of historic-level solar activity, which strongly suggests something about the Earth has changed. Experts are baffled, but independent observers fault Earth’s weakening magnetic field.

Whatever it is, it seems to be picking up pace. If anything, this week’s aurorae were more robust and more colorful than those from May, which were caused by a much stronger solar event. For just one of many examples, here are some pictures taken this week by a photographer in Greece, New York:

In a world where science had not been strangled by The Science™, we would have a fulsome conversation about this stunning solar development and what it implies for Earth’s weather and the climate.  It’s getting harder to deny. Today’s climate change proponent must stubbornly insist that the strongest energy source by far, the Sun, has no effect on Earth’s weather.

What will they say when the night skies bloom all the time?

📈📈 In election news, the New York Times ran an encouraging story this morning headlined, “Black Voters Drift From Democrats, Imperiling Harris’s Bid, Poll Shows.” More black Americans support Trump than ever (especially men), and “the drop-off for Ms. Harris, if it holds, is large enough to imperil her chances of winning key battleground states.”

Democrats’ normal race-hustling isn’t working this time. “Regardless of how people call him racist and stuff, he is for the country of America,” said LaPage Drake, a 63-year-old black Texan.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday headlined, “Battle for Swing States Is Tied, Trump Has Edge on Top Issues, WSJ Poll Shows.”  Voters in the seven tossup states see Trump “as better equipped than Kamala Harris to handle the issues they care about most—the economy and border security.”

We’re down to three weeks left. I’m not brave enough to try predicting what will happen. But this week left us with a strong sense of momentum moving in the right direction. Stay frosty.

Have a wonderful weekend! Then check back in again on Monday morning, to start the week off right with a fresh, pumpkin-spiced cup of Coffee & Covid.

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