this seems to be the question everyone is asking. “just what are we supposed to do here?” “how do we fight this?” “how do we get our lives back?”

my take is this: we need to break the spell.

and this is a spell. it’s mass societal delusion and hallucination brought on by stress tactics and authoritarian big lie repetition. it’s disorientation and a lack of grounding in and reference to the touchstones of our lives.

those touchstones are still there. we just need to remember them.

we need to return to a world where people (much less mayors of major cities) saying things like this are shouted down as lunatics. because they are lunatics.

we need to get back to a world where people saying things like this are lauded because they are right and because this is how the social control psyop ends. masks dehumanize and frighten. they alienate and separate. associating them with public health safety is not normal, it’s pathological.

remember going to the beach as a kid? you’d swim and the tide would push you down the shoreline and you’d look up and suddenly realize how far down you had drifted. “wow, where did i leave my towel?”

this is that moment. look up. see the drift. a year ago, people dressing like this to sell coffee would have been called weirdos, because they ARE weirdos. i would NEVER have walked into a place with that barista in 2019. i would have taken one look and said “nope, weirdo. don’t even wanna know what that’s about. getting coffee somewhere else.”

probably, you would have too. try remembering that. this is not normal. you cannot even see normal from how far down the beach this is.

teachers dressing like this would have been calmly pulled aside like a horse from a burning barn and asked some pointed questions about their mental health.

they would certainly not be encouraged to interact with our children or listened to when they accused others of being conspiracy theorists. masks were for bank robbers, not virtue signalers. and guess what? they still are. (and always were)

remember who are many and who are few

the vast apparatus of state and cancel culture is too much for anyone to take on alone. its very vastness and aggressiveness is precisely what it relies upon to intimidate you. but it is not actually that strong. you are. we are. its strength derives from and only from our fear.

when you fear the thought police, you ARE the thought police.

you do their job for them. they have conscripted you to sacrifice your own liberties and agency to oppress yourself for them. they are few and you are many. they cannot possibly do this on their own.

only you can do this to you. and only you can make it stop.

so stop.

• stop being afraid. that’s what you can do.

• encourage others to stop being afraid.

• call things by their names. call a lunatic a lunatic, a charlatan a charlatan, and a jumped up tyrant a jumped up tyrant.

• gaslighting works because people are isolated so break the isolation.

• find community. establish the norms of being able to speak freely and honestly again. stop tiptoeing around the scaredy-karens and their hectoring abuse and tell them to sit down and shut up. their 15 minutes are over.

people speak of the overton window with regard to policy and politics, but it applies to speech and society as well. what can we say in public? what is acceptable discourse?

if you allow the thought police to establish these norms, you will live in a police state. it’s really that simple.

so don’t. reject their censorship of wrongthink and wrongspeak.

make up your own mind and speak it.

you don’t have to win the whole war, just carve out a little space. help others to do the same and stand by one another. make the world safe for sanity, and sanity will return.

you’ll be amazed how quickly normal comes flooding back once you shed the fear and shed the disorientation and derangement of a year as a lab rat in the kind of social experiment no post-milgram ethics board would ever have approved.

stand up, be brave, and spread courage. disobey. the rest takes care of itself.

and really, what’s the alternative? is this the life you want?