The US government recently updated its advice to citizens in the event of a nuclear attack:
When you have reached a safe place, try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them.
If you are sick and need medical attention, contact your healthcare provider for instructions. If you are at a public shelter, immediately notify the staff at that facility so they can call a local hospital or clinic. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 9-1-1 and let the operator know if you have, or think you might have, COVID-19. If you can, put on a mask before help arrives.
The subtext: even in the event of a nuclear war, we MUST prioritize terror of COOTIES-19. Losers with radiation burns can wait in line for an operator.
You cared whose ass it was
Every once and while some media commentator drags out the 2006 black comedy Idiocracy to condemn a rising tide of political and mass stupidity. And while the film seemed prescient, a controlled or uncontrolled collapse of the social order isn’t a simple function of diminishing intelligence, as some commentators insist (though the end results, like the nuclear policy update above, are undeniably stupid).
Idiocracy was financed by 20th Century Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It’s portrayal of Fox News anchorunits as trash-talking dimwits may have sealed the film’s fate, promotionally-speaking. Originally destined for theatres, it went straight to DVD and became a cult classic.
To recap, Luke Wilson plays the thoroughly average Joe Bauers, an army librarian enlisted by the Pentagon for a year-long hibernation experiment. He is supplied with a companion for the freezing, a prostitute by the name of Rita, played by Maya Rudolph.
After the mission commander is arrested for his extracurricular business with Rita’s pimp, the authorities bury the operation - including the forgotten pair. Centuries later, the hibernation pods are disturbed by the “Great Garbage Avalanche,” which rains down a mountain of unattended trash onto a 26th century city. Joe and Rita, not the smartest folks in their world, crawl from the debris as certified geniuses in a massively dumbed-down future.
The population parrot simple slogans, such as “money is good,” and are tracked by RFID barcode-style tattoos. Everyone and everything is loud, stupid, and expendable. Idiocrats sit at home watching wall-size televisions, crammed with multiple ad-windows. The most popular TV series is “Ow! My Balls!” which features a character who suffers multiple blows to his testicles.
The voiceover informs us the number one movie in the year 2505 “was called ‘Ass.’ And that's all it was for 90 minutes. It won eight oscars that year, including best screenplay.”
Toward the end of the film Joe Bauers shares his nostalgia for the past in a speech to the citizens: “People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!”
(Joe’s speech anticipated the recent sentimental media reviews of the third film in the “Jackass” self-harm film franchise. The Detroit News rhapsodized, “it’s one of the reasons no one has truly followed in the wake of “Jackass”: anyone can hit someone in the junk, but it's something else to make people care.”)
It’s Got What Plants Crave
The world’s most powerful man in Idiocracy is Dwayne Alezando Camacho, “five-time Ultimate Smackdown champion, porn superstar, and President of the United States.” Camacho’s cabinet meetings are characterized by snorts, guffaws and brain-dead banter. Joe - recognized as a genius after some comic mishaps - is enlisted to advise Camacho.
A sports drink company has purchased the entire Food and Drug Administration after water is deemed a threat to the company’s profit margin. Instead of water, people quench their thirst with Brawndo, “The Thirst Mutilator.” But there’s a problem: even the nation’s crops are irrigated with the sports drink, which are dying as a result. When Joe argues against this agricultural policy with White House cabinet members, they sleepily respond with the company’s advertising slogan: “Brawndo’s got what plants crave.”
“Yeah, it’s got electrolytes,” says one cabinet member, repeating the franchise’s follow-up tag line.
“But what ARE electrolytes?” asks the exasperated Joe. “Do any of you even know?”
“They use it to make Brawndo,” replies another.
“Yeah, but WHY do they use it to make Brawndo?!”
“‘Cause Brawndo’s got electrolytes.”
“It‘s what plants crave.”
In real-world 2022, the Food and Drug Administration isn’t under the sway of Brawndo, but rather Big Pharma. Millions of people are either unaware or unswayed by evidence of a government agency under regulatory capture, with a well-lubricated revolving door (former head of the FDA Scott Gottlieb now serves on the board of Pfizer). Almost half of the agency’s budget - $2.8 billion - is covered by industry user fees. Meanwhile, 75 percent of the budget for the FDA’s drug approval testing program is paid for directly by pharmaceutical companies.
The same ignorance applies to the fact that in 2009 Pfizer was hit with largest health care fraud settlement in history ($2.3 billion), that the mRNA injections were designed to protect against symptoms but not against infection or transmission, and that to date there are over 26,000 vaccine deaths and over a million adverse events listed in the VAERS database, and more worldwide.
The same applies to the revelations of unblinded clinical trials for COVID vaccines, and the effort of the vaccine makers to withhold data from the public.
It doesn’t matter that that the CDC reported that less than 6 percent of COVID deaths had COVID-19 as “the only cause mentioned on the death certificate,” that the pandemic is shading into an endemic with seasonal variants bearing profiles comparable to the flu, that there is no credible scientific evidence for outdoor transmission of COVID, or that plexiglass offers no barrier to airborne viruses indoors, yadda yadda yadda.
These and other bits of contrary information have failed to penetrate the skulls of millions of multiply-vaccinated people still staggering the streets wearing face masks, with the Brawndo-worthy “safe and effective” slogan power-drilled into their brainpans by corporate media, along with the terribly ironic fall-back line, “trust the science.”
Yet it would be wrong to condemn news consumers glued to their phones for their misperceptions and exaggerated fear response. It takes a lot of brilliant people to make smart people think and behave this stupidly. These would be the authors of the most successful psy-op in history, using principles of behavioural psychology and perception management honed through decades of mass marketing, political campaigns, foreign destabilization operations and regime change.
In other words, the masters of propaganda and their stenographers in the so-called free press.
There is an upside. Just prior to and during the “Freedom Convoy” protests in Ottawa, polls indicated a majority of Canadians wanted an end to all COVID mandates. The scaremongering from the usual suspects is failing to stick - among most Canadians at least.
Curated for your horror
Here are a few real-world items below that would have been unimaginable at the time Idiocracy was released. But now? Insane claims, demonstrable nonsense, and frightening endorsements of mad schemes worthy of an Idiocracy sequel are all the rage in government and media. You can likely come up with plenty more of your own examples:
Reality and satire are now like a tag-team taking turns wrestling credibility to the mat. Consider the recursive strangeness below: a 2015 Ukrainian comedy series starring a comedian who plays a high school teacher who ends up becoming the nation’s president. It’s being replayed on Netflix now that the comedian actually is the president of the Ukraine.
It’s got what progressives crave
I recently ran into a tall, razor-thin fellow while waiting for an elevator at a grocery store. His large, elaborate N95 mask made him look a bit like a praying mantis. He seemed slightly uneasy getting into an enclosed, vertically mobile space with an unmasked and possibly unvaccinated vector of death like me.
“You wouldn’t be _______, would you”? I asked.
“I am!” he replied, a bit surprised anyone could recognize him wearing a baseball cap and a face mask.
I told him I thought his novels were brilliant, but his nonfiction even more. “Oh, I don’t hear that too often, thank you!” he said, clearly pleased with this exchange.
“And still relevant!” I said of his essays as the elevator door opened.
I had another question rolling around in my head for the literary celebrity, which I didn’t get to ask:
“You’re a talented and critically praised author, and obviously a very smart person. The masking restrictions have been lifted, and they’re not requested by the store, but you’re here wearing a N95 mask. How did someone like you buy so fully and fearfully into the narrative? How did you end up walking around wearing a medically pointless mark of ideological conformity, like a character in one your own sci-fi dystopias?”
In Idiocracy’s opening scenes, the narrator offers an explanation for the descent into mass stupidity: educated but cautious professional couples were outbred by yahoos with poor impulse control. Ah, if only today’s situation was reducible to a demographically-skewed confederacy of dunces. The literary celebrity in the elevator is no dummy, far from it - and he’s hardly alone. In the past two years, I know a fair number of intelligent, educated people who became absolutists on mandates and morally upright mouthpieces for a Big Pharma-funded tide of medical misinformation. This is how powerfully precise the programming has been, resulting in the ‘mass formation’ cited by Belgian professor Mathias Desmet.
In a superb essay for Tablet, Alex Gutentag deconstructs the transformation of the liberal left into cheerleaders for the kind of unthinking authoritarianism they condemned Trump followers for:
After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy—it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right.
…
This is not simply a matter of hypocrisy. It is only by painting themselves as victims fighting against their oppressors that college-educated professionals can rationalize their own authoritarianism. The cult of victimhood conjures the specter of fascism, misogyny, or white nationalism in order to justify blatantly repressive measures. This is why, for example, the professional class consistently portrayed unvaccinated people as Trump supporters even though in many major cities vaccine passports mostly excluded Democrat-voting Black residents from indoor establishments. Under the guise of combatting anti-vax extremism, woke liberal politicians embraced segregation and the exact kind of “systemic racism” they claimed to oppose. While considering themselves to be on the side of righteousness and rationality, commentators called for hospitals to reject unvaccinated patients, and some even celebrated their deaths. This is precisely the type of punitive, regressive tendency that progressives warned would be a consequence of Trump’s election.
We’re at a bizarre inflection point in history. Progressive liberals - the biggest supporters of COVID mandates and theoretically the greatest opponents of violence, ethnic conflicts and war - recently backed calls for a no-fly zone over the Ukraine along with western military support, even though such moves would almost certainly push the atomic clock to seconds before midnight. If and when it ever strikes midnight, it’s game over for everyone. There won’t be any 9-1-1 operators crawling from the wreckage to answer some survivor’s call about a disturbing persistent cough.
Such is the dumbing-down power of propaganda, the ultimate equalizer for the swift and slow, the sensitive and cynical, and the old and young. As a famous author once observed, “the deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent.”
The lack of self-awareness of the leftie elites regarding their fundamental hypocrisy about such things as propaganda will ultimately be their undoing, as extremist agendas rarely have a good outcome.
"Safe and Effective"..."Its got what plants crave"... Brilliant analysis once again!