Civil War for Truth: Conclusion

The Black Pill or the White Pill?

We discovered that all Gated Institutions are captured and corrupted. As a result, we can’t trust any politician, corporation, media company, journalist, academia, or science member without validating their claims. The corruption has very far proceeded and there is no quick way to resolve it. Equipped with that knowledge, what can we do?

In the introduction, I explained the concept of the blue and the red pill. James Lindsay mentions two more pills in his podcast, the black pill and the white pill. The analogy stands for how we deal with the information we gain by swallowing the red pill and accepting the state of the world as it is.

Taking the black pill means adopting the belief that everything is hopeless. The bad people won, and the society will turn to Authoritarianism or Totalitarianism, all that is left is a steady decline and downfall of society, or even revolt, war, and mass murder. Swallowing the black pill is fatalism, defeatism, and determinism. You give up. We will live soon in Neofeudalism. The rich people will rule the world, we will be their slaves. We will be restricted in movement and travel, a social credit system will punish any dissent. Critics will be fined, incarcerated, re-educated, tortured, or exterminated.

But there is the concept of the white pill. It stands for hope, resistance, for the belief that those people can’t win with their ridiculous plans to control the world. All bad ideologies or central planning will fail eventually and expose them for what they are. And even though at times it looks very bleak and the push for central control, censorship, removal of encryption, the introduction of surveillance, and eroding civil rights is worrying, swallowing the white pill, resisting, and fighting bad ideas is the only option with a future worth living.

But how can we fight back as individuals?

Select Your Sources Carefully

What do you do if the Gated Institutions are no longer trustworthy? The first thing you need to do is equip yourself with knowledge and learn the opinions, arguments, and truths about the different discussed political or social topics. That is work-intensive and not everybody is willing to do so. But even if you’re unwilling to invest the time and effort into digging into the truth of a topic, there are ways to at least be better informed than the regular person.

The quality of your thinking is directly proportional to what information you consume. It is similar to a diet. You can eat healthy foods and unhealthy foods. In the same way, the quality of content differs massively.

Books, audiobooks, and scientific papers are the best sources of input, but even inside the categories exist differences. If you read garbage, like Bill Gates’s newest book, reading will not help a lot. Reading books by activists is less valuable than by economists, philosophers, or scientists. If the theory has proven its value in the real world, the better.

Podcasts I categorize as the next best option to learn things, especially long-form interviews with a variety of different thinkers on various heterodox topics. Long-form podcasts make it easier to spot bullshit. You might be able to not contradict yourself in a 30-minute interview, but after 3 hours of intensive discussion, you’ll get a feeling about the person, their position, and the coherence of their arguments. In a podcast, is little room for manipulation. And they are nearly impossible to censor and cheaply to host. You don’t need the approval of big platforms to subscribe to any podcasts, a simple RSS feed is enough. You can consume podcasts while doing your dishes, walking, doing laundry, carrying your baby, or sitting on the toilet. You can play them faster (or slower) in many podcast apps.

As with books, not every podcast is of quality. If you listen to a state-sponsored podcast, you will not gain a new perspective, but hear the same talking points pushed by mainstream media again and again. Propaganda is propaganda, regardless of what the medium is.

Articles are the next best thing to consume, preferably by independently supported journalists instead of large media companies.

The worst information you’ll get is by reading the only headlines of news articles, consuming social media posts on Facebook, or watching the news on television. Staged talk shows and pretend discussions on television are in many cases garbage.

The big censoring on social media platforms gave birth to a massive, growing alternative media ecosystem.

Recommendations

Books

The more interesting people you listen to on podcasts, the more book recommendations you’ll get. Services like Readwise allow one to collect and learn highlights from those books (or articles). You can follow people on Goodreads or Literal to find new reading recommendations. Jordan Peterson keeps a list of Great Books, Ryan Holiday has a Reading List, Tim Ferriss has many articles with book recommendations, and the platform Most Recommended Books lists book recommendations of more than 500 experts.

Podcasts

The list of interesting podcasts is huge, you’ll need to pick your topics. I prefer long-form interviews with various people on topics like science, economics, health, or politics. I can recommend Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman, Michael Malice, Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, Eric Weinstein, James Lindsay, Matt Walker, or Andrew Huberman. You can see a full list of the podcasts I listen to here.

To extract information from podcasts, you can use an app like Snipd or Airr. They allow the request of full transcripts for each podcast and then clip specific parts of the conversation as text.

Articles

Substack has become the number one place for writers, journalists, doctors, and scientists to publish their articles and essays without fear of being censored or taken down. You’ll find journalists and writers like Alex Berenson, Bari Weis, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, or Abigail Shrier, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, health experts and medical journalists like Robert Malone, Pierre Kory and Steve Kirsch or scientists like Heather Heying or Colin Wright. Many publications are free, and others have sometimes paid articles to support the authors.

New Discourses is one of the best websites to get educated on ideologies. James Lindsay explains complicated philosophical texts to a broad audience. Sovereign Nations is a website dedicated to the ideas and ideals of a Constitutional Republic.

RSS is the best way to consume content in your time and your speed without algorithms that manipulate what you see and what they think is important. A lot of RSS readers are either free or low-cost. I use Feedbin as a content aggregator, it supports reading Newsletters, 𝕏, YouTube, Reddit, and any RSS, Atom, or JSON feed. I use the Reeder app on iOS and Mac to read my subscriptions.

Projects like Ground News are a fantastic way to see your biases and blind spots. The website shows how different news outlets cover a news story and exposes blind spots. They provide a browser extension that will show on many websites the political bias of that source.

Videos

Instead of YouTube you can watch videos on Odysse, Rumble, BitChute, and on many more platforms. The more decentralized a platform is, the better. Prominent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on Edward Snowden, moved exclusively to Rumble.

YouTube has a massive variety of critical content creators, even though censorship and deplatforming risk make it harder for content creators to discuss controversial topics. Paul Joseph Watson (Anything Goes) is one of my favorite political commentators. His comment is always on point, it hurts, and he doesn’t give a shit if somebody might be offended by the truth. Foundation for Economic Education creates fantastic videos explaining the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society with examples from current movies and TV Shows. ReasonTV is an interesting Libertarian channel with independent opinions, documentaries, interviews, and political discussions. Tim Pool, Don’t Walk, Run! Productions, and Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar create good political content. Comedians like Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, or Leo Kearse create much better journalistic work than “mainstream” journalists. James O’Keefe’s organization Project Veritas provides good undercover journalism, with regular leaks and whistle blows.

Social Media

Instead Facebook, you can read news on Minds, Gettr or Parler. Another uncensorable platform to build communities is Locals. Many political or cultural thinkers build communities on this platform. The platform allows supporting the creators financially. But Social Media is the worst possible way to consume news because it is manipulated by algorithms that are programmed by extremely progressive-left biased companies. 𝕏 got really useful for getting news, since Elon Musk bought it. You could first read about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on 𝕏 and Joe Biden announced there to not run for president anymore.

Alternative Media in German

If you want to consume German-speaking alternative media, you are lucky because many heterodox content creators gathered on a new independent website: theplattform. The publicly funded broadcasting companies in Germany don’t fulfilled their contract for balanced political reporting since at least 2010, but still, every German person is forced to pay €17 per month for state propaganda. Germans have to pay even if they don’t watch (or own) any television or radio. They even put people refusing to pay the fee into prison for up to 6 months.¹ And while other countries like the UK or France plan to stop publicly funded broadcasting, Germany instead increased the price during a recession.

Why You Need to Do Your Research

One thing you don’t learn in school is how to do your research. If you lack those skills, it will be helpful to develop them. But why should you do the work?

If you don’t check a discussed topic for yourself, you might go along with a lie and you or your family might get harmed. Every lie, false belief, or ideology will eventually fail but creates tremendous harm until this happens. Depending on the extent of a lie, everything is possible, from destroyed economies to people freezing, starving, and dying, or even the end of whole civilizations. If you believe a lie, you live in a pseudo-reality and are caught in a delusion.

That’s why it is important to listen to the “other side” of any argument. It’s up to you (after listening to their arguments) to come to your conclusions. Here is a list of examples of inconvenient facts, I learned by reading books, reading scientific papers, listening to podcasts, or watching video essays:

• People overestimate the chance of dying by an accident 300 times over, dying of Diabetes.²
• The people in the Mid-Victorian times (the 1850s) were healthier than we are today and lived a similarly long life (after the age of 5). They had 10% fewer degenerative sicknesses.³
• The best way to stave off cognitive decline is not a cognitive activity, but exercise, especially weight lifting and cardiovascular exercises.⁴
• 80% of all immigrants to Germany in 2015 were young, male Muslims with a below-average educational level for European standards. They dominate now the majority of violent crimes, in particular against women, homosexuals, and Jews.⁵
• Berlin has 9% Muslims, but 70% of inmates in youth arrest are Muslims.⁵
• 308 of the arson attacks of 2019 in Germany had an extremist Left motivation, 20 had an extremist Islamic motivation, and 17 had an extremist Right motivation.⁶
• The poverty rate among black married couples in the USA has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.⁷
• Young, black males, whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards have similar academic outcomes to their white counterparts, going back to 1969.⁷
• Police shootings that are reported in a media storm in the news (e.g., George Floyd), lead to a significant reduction in police work and a catastrophic increase in crimes as a result. For every dead black person reported on the news, an additional 900 people die because the police retreat after bad publicity.²
• Black men in the USA are twice as likely to be killed by police than white. The black population is 14% in the USA, but make 34% of deaths by police. White Americans are killed twice as likely by the police than Asian Americans. White Americans commit twice as many crimes as Asian Americans.⁸ The differences are not a result of racism but can be explained by the crimes committed by individual racial groups.²
• 35% of all police murders in the USA are committed by black perpetrators.²
• Black Americans commit 7 times more murder than White Americans.²
• Unarmed black people are shot 23.5 percent less likely by the police than unarmed white people.⁹
• Donald Trump never called Neo-Nazis fine people. He was talking about peaceful protesters. Media companies intentionally cut the quote. In the same interview, he explicitly condemned racism, Neo-Nazis, and the KKK.¹⁰¹¹
• Donald Trump didn’t build detention centers for illegal immigrants at the Mexican border (aka kids in cages), Barack Obama did.¹² They need to hold the children until their parents are found because traffickers send children regularly without their parents.
• Donald Trump never mocked a disabled person. He used the same motion he always used to show that a person doesn’t know what they’re doing. Trump has a history of supporting disabled people throughout his career.¹³
• Barack Obama brought the USA from 2 wars to 7 wars.¹²
• Barack Obama dropped more bombs than George W. Bush. His drone program killed 90% of innocent people.¹²
• Barack Obama deported more Hispanics than Donald Trump could ever dream of.¹²
• Joe Biden signed 19 Executive Orders in the first 3 days, Barack Obama 5, Donald Trump 1, Bill Clinton 1, and George W. Bush 0.
• Joe Biden called Obama the first mainstream, African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking. He told a mostly black audience that booed him at a speech to [put them] back in chains. He mocked Indians and Mexicans, called black kids roaches, and gave a eulogy for a former KKK recruiter.¹⁴
• The COVID-19 vaccine by Pfizer was promised to be nearly 100% safe and effective but proved to be neither safe nor effective. Pfizer never claimed their vaccine would prevent hospitalization or death because their study didn’t prove this. The absolute efficiency of the vaccine was reported as 95%, but the relative efficiency was only 0.8%. Of the 40,137 study participants, only 165 in the placebo group and 8 in the vaccinated group got COVID-19. 15 people died in the unvaccinated group, and 16 died in the vaccinated group. There were over 1,500 adverse reactions that Pfizer tried to hide. A 12-year-old Girl, Maddie de Gray, who is wheelchair-bound since her inoculation, was reported as having “bowel problems.”¹⁵
• Pfizer was court-ordered to release the documents the FDA used to give emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine. They show that Pfizer falsified data in their study by ignoring PCR positive results, even in symptomatic people. They claimed only 8 COVID-19 positive cases in the vaccinated group, but 75 showed a positive PCR test. This would have reduced the risk of infection for the vaccine by about half of the 95% they claimed.¹⁶
• Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline are the two companies that had to pay the biggest penalties of all time for criminal acts.¹⁷
• The COVID-19 vaccines created in one year more adverse reactions than all vaccines of the last 30 years combined.¹⁸
• The continuously repeated sure, vaccines may cause an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, but it’s lower than the increased risk of the same from having gotten COVID-19 was proven to be false by a large scientific study from Israel.¹⁹
• Masks do not only not work against viral load, the infection rate is lower for unmasked individuals as shown in a large, well-controlled study.²⁰
• Virus aerosol sub-microns are so small they pass any mask, and even in a droplet they stick to the mask and the mask acts as a nebulizer. The aerosol virion (0.1-03 microns) hangs in still air for 1-2 weeks. A 1% edge gap in your mask is a 50% leakage, and a 2% gap is 75%.²¹
• Even conservative estimates of severe adverse reactions of the COVID-19 vaccines by Prof. Dr. Harald of the Charite Berlin and a study from Sweden are now 0.8%.²²
• The German health insurance BKK ProVita can access the data of 11 million insured people, who did an extrapolation from their data and estimated 2.5 to 3 million German people with severe adverse reactions from the vaccines. The CEO of health insurance was fired one day after he made the data public.²³ After 3 months of waiting the health insurance finally had to release a report that shows that 2.5 million of the 61 million (172 million vaccinations) vaccinated in 2021 had so severe adverse reactions that they needed medical attention. This is a severe adverse reaction rate of 1.5%, for every 70th person.²⁴
• The EU database for adverse drug reactions, EudraVigilance, lists 1,928,328 adverse reactions (July 2022) for the EU, and around 50% are severe. The underreporting rate is estimated to be between 1-10%.
• FIFA reported a 5-fold increase in sudden cardiac and unexplained deaths in 2021.²⁵
• The rate of people that will die in 12-24 months after their COVID-19 vaccination from an autoimmune disease (ADE, antibody-dependent enhancement) is estimated between 0.01% and 2%.²⁶
• The nano-lipid carriers of the mRNA “vaccines” don’t stay in the muscle as proclaimed, but circulate in the whole body and can be found in high concentrations in the ovaries and the bone marrow.¹⁸
• The mRNA shots reduce the fertility of men by 22% for five months (abstract) and levels continue to decline after that (hidden in the data).²⁷²⁸
• The mRNA vaccines introduce a spike protein to the body that is neurotoxic and impairs DNA repair mechanisms. The suppression of type I interferon responses result in impaired innate immunity, and the vaccines increase potentially the risk for infectious diseases and cancer.²⁹
• The scientific article that was published in The Lancet in February 2020 and in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that denied the Wuhan Lab as the origin of the virus was written by Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance. He is the same person whose organization was responsible for the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Lab. He didn’t declare any conflicts of interest in his paper.³⁰
• Drinking water from bottles (0.3-liter oil) produces 1000 times more CO₂ than drinking tab water (0.3-milliliter oil).³¹
• We don’t have a climate catastrophe or climate crisis. There is a warming of the earth, but nothing humanity cannot handle.³²
• The claim 97% of all scientists are sure that humans are the reason for climate change, is a misrepresentation of the study. The scientist and activist John Cock evaluated 12,000 scientific studies (abstracts only) from scientific publications between 1980 and 2013 to check if humans were mentioned as the reason for climate change. Less than 1% of the studies explicitly contradict the claim. 32.6% claimed humans as the source of climate change, and 66.4% of the studies didn’t make any claim about who was to blame. Cook eliminated those studies and suddenly 97% agreed.⁵ 32.6% of scientists are sure humans are the reason for climate change doesn’t sound too impressive, right?
• It will cost Germany €1,500 billion to reduce their CO₂ from 2% of the world’s output to 1%. This will cost each household an additional €320 net every month for the next 30 years. Following Greta’s demands of 100% renewable energy in 15 years would cost each household €620 net every month. This will bring a massive portion of the German population below the poverty line (€1,890 net) and destroy the industry in Germany.⁵
• China is pumping out the same amount of CO₂ additionally every year that Germany would reduce in 30 years.⁵
• If the sectors of traffic and warmth would need to switch to 100% renewable energy, Germany would need an additional 1,150 Terawatt hours. This would need a 200-meter-high wind turbine every 1.5 kilometers across the whole country.⁵
• Australia has a critical energy crisis in 2022. The winter is too cold and there is a threat of blackouts, a fate that Germany will share in a few months. The move to renewable energy in Australia was too successful, which made coal energy unprofitable. Energy providers shut down the power plants. 30% of power plants don’t deliver energy because they are being repaired or maintained. Most power plants are from the 1970s or 1980s. 25% of the possible coal production stands still.³³ If you destroy the incentive for industry, it will die. You can’t just turn it on again later. It takes 30 years to destroy an industry and 30 years to build up an industry.
• During the Roman Empire it was possible to grow wine in Great Britain and the Vikings harvested crops on Greenland.³⁴
• The Earth is much greener today than 35 years ago. A team of 32 scientists used satellite images by NASA and found a massive greening of the Earth over the last 35 years as a result of higher CO₂.³⁵ I learned in school in 1995 that the Sahel Zone would soon turn into a desert, because of global warming. Today it is a lush green forest.

This was a small sample of controversial topics. You might have had a bad feeling reading the one or other fact. This is your cognitive dissonance. Your brain was fed media propaganda and tries now to protect that sacred knowledge to prevent you from feeling pain.

Don’t outsource the fact-checking to biased companies, funded and sponsored by the same people that write the articles. Basic research is not as hard as it sounds.

All you need is a good search engine and a few minutes. If somebody shares a news article, try finding its sources. If they don’t provide any, that’s a warning sign. You can search for names of products, people, and companies and get basic facts about them on Wikipedia or their websites. You can often see who funds the organization or with whom a person is affiliated.

The Google Knowledge Graph is a good way to find out relationships between people and their occupations. Companies are often legally obligated to publish their donations. For example, you can search on the website of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for donations.

All these searches are quick and easy, and you can at least confirm who the person in the stories is and might see potential conflicts of interest.

Keep in mind that many search engines, especially Google, are heavily biased and have blacklists to bury stories that contradict their political bias. Use Brave Search or MetaGer instead.

If you don’t find what you’re searching for, try other search engines like Yandex, Qwant, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Swisscows and many more. Brave Search rolled out a new feature called Goggles, which allows for the intentional use of a specific content filter. I created already two Brave Goggles and will likely create more.

Keep in mind that some search engines use the Google index. Brave Search builds its index and even shows you how independent your search results are.

If you want to search for facts, you can use Wolfram Alpha. Does your vegetarian co-workers’ virtue signal again how much CO₂ they save by not eating meat? Show them how little the impact is if you live in the developed world. Our World in Data has interactive charts on a huge number of topics like this. Wikipedia is reliable in many scientific areas, but useless for political topics. Activists have taken over the website and used it as a political weapon to smear people. Use with caution.

You should learn to use the WaybackMachine to find out if the content was deleted or changed later. They provide a browser extension to quickly save a website to the archive. The extension can auto-save a website and show contextual information. The Internet Archive is an incredible source of information, it has millions of historical documents, audio, video, books, software, and images to search. Do you want to listen to Martin Luther’s The American Dream or But If Not? The Archive will provide.

Another good service is archive.today which provides an extension to quickly save a website to a permanent archive.

Feedbin has a great feature that shows changes made to any subscribed article. This allows keeping track of changes made later to articles.

Raindrop.io is my favorite bookmark manager. It saves articles offline in case somebody deletes an article and informs about article deletions by checking for broken links. You wouldn’t believe how many COVID-19 articles got deleted later by news companies when it was proven they lied.

Note-Taking

If you want to increase your knowledge on a topic, you’ll need to write your research notes and connect ideas and insights. There are many ways to do this, I use the Zettelkasten method.

The number of tools is massive. A massive community of people is now interested in note-taking, which created many wonderful tools. There is Obsidian (which I use), Logseq, Roam Research or Notion, to name a few. The idea is to create small notes and connect them and over time build your knowledge system.

Privacy and Security

If you can’t trust the companies and institutions, you should keep them from listening to your conversations and getting your data or benefitting from it.

You can use an encrypted messenger like Signal, Telegram, Element/Matrix, Session, or Status instead of using chat tools of social media companies. Signal is good for private conversations, Telegram has a fantastic group chat feature. Matrix is a decentralized messenger that can provide uncensorable communication. Session is completely anonymous and uses an Onion router for messages. Status and Session use peer-to-peer technology. There is a reason authoritarian politicians hate encryption, they dislike that people can communicate without them listening. That obviously doesn’t apply to them, as the SMS communication between Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla showed.

Start using secure browsers like Brave, Firefox or Tor. Brave has a built-in Tor browser, which is sufficient for being anonymous in most cases. If your life depends on it, better use the Tor browser. Brave has the Wayback Machine built-in, in case a site is missing.

I recommend the encrypted mail service ProtonMail, but there are many other options. The website Privacy Tools provides an up-to-date list of the best software, services, and tools in each category to maintain your privacy and security.

I hope that over time more and more people start using decentralized services which are harder (if at all) to censor, don’t allow central control by one company, and free the people. I wrote a three-part series on that topic: The Decentralized Web.

Whom To Trust?

One of the reasons why many people are reluctant to stop consuming mainstream media is because it is convenient and nice to be told what the truth is. You outsource your thinking to somebody you hope is smarter than you. Does the USA invade Iraq for oil? Good! Does Russia invade Ukraine for Gas? Bad! The media serves simple narratives without any nuance or context. They decide what you should think about any given topic and serve the necessary propaganda to ensure you follow along. This is how The Current Thing Meme was born, to mock how media pushes always one topic on all channels until another topic comes around to replace it.

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly.

If you’re on your own, it might be intimidating at first to do your research. But studies show over and over that fake news and disinformation are easier to spot by average people than politicians try to make us believe. And you can train to learn to trust your gut feeling.

Ask yourself a few simple questions: Cui bono? (Latin, to whom is it a benefit?) Who has financial interests? Who has conflicts of interest? Who risks their reputation? Who is more often right with their predictions than others? How often is a person wrong with their predictions and claims? Do they own their mistakes and explain where they went wrong? Are their arguments simple and easy, or nuanced and complex?

People who try to convince you a topic is simple, are usually not right. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, be it global warming, energy, racism, salary differences, immigration, or health. Avoiding the people on both isles of the political spectrum that provide easy answers is a safe way to not follow wrong ideas.

Stay away from the extremes, it doesn’t matter whether it’s QAnon or Blue Anon. If you think rationally about a topic, you’ll move along the center on many topics. Learn your biases. You can take personality tests like the Big 5, The Political Compass, Meyer-Biggs, 8values or PersonalityDNA. Big 5 is the only test that is backed by years of scientific study, but the others are fun and will reveal interesting things to you.

Learn how to spot bullshit. There is an excellent, free university lecture on the topic on YouTube: Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.

Avoid people that use terms like Trust the Science™ or Trust the Experts, they have no clue how science works and don’t deserve your trust. Arguments from authority are one of the most common cognitive fallacies. Authority can never replace critical thinking, and you’ll have a better life by adopting Anarchist ideas:

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, and their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God.³⁶

Bakunin continues that all subordination under authority needs to be voluntarily and temporary:

Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

But it is not only Anarchists that know this to be important, it’s the basis of science.

One of the great commandments of science is, Mistrust arguments from authority. (…) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

Speak Up (Or at Least Don’t Lie)

If nothing helps and the majority of society walks down a dark path into Authoritarianism or even Totalitarianism, there are still ways to try to prevent this.

The most important thing is to try to be a person of virtue. Stoic virtues such as Wisdom, Temperance, Courage, and Justice are important personal qualities. If you can follow an inner compass or moral, you’re less likely to go along with the mob and take part in unjust actions.

A common cognitive bias is the false consensus effect. This is how dictatorships and other repressive movements keep their power. If everybody is too afraid to speak up, everybody believes that everybody else supports the prevailing unjust cause. This is the reason you should never bow down to authority or injustice, especially if the worst-case harm is to annoy a few people, be hated by a few, or maybe have fewer career options.

Each of you, for himself or herself, by himself or herself, and on his or her own responsibility, must speak. It is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government or politician. Each must decide for himself or herself alone what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man, to decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor. It is traitorous both against yourself and your country.

Let men label you as they may, if you alone of all the nation decide one way, and that way be the right way by your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country, hold up your head for you have nothing to be ashamed of.

J. Michael Straczynski took Twain’s quote as inspiration and formulated this catchy quote:

It doesn’t matter what the press says. It doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. It doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. Republics are founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe in, no matter the odds or consequences.

When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move. Your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth and tell the whole world:

No, you move.

In the early stages of a society that descents to Totalitarianism, you have the option to reject bad ideas. Use your right to vote, to remove unfit candidates from power. Use your voice to reject unjust policies. And if you can’t because the price you might have to pay is too high, you should follow the advice of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

Expose and Mock Ridiculous Ideas

Mocking bad ideas is an important weapon against creeping Authoritarianism. Share and create jokes, memes, and collages that expose hypocrisy and idiocy. Tyranny and incompetency crumble when exposed to light.

Absurdity must be exposed, and no acid is more corrosive to the absurdity of tyranny than laughter pointed in its general direction.³⁷

A massive community of artists and writers is dedicated to mocking political ideology. There are funny Standup comedians like JP Sears (AwakenWithJP), Brent Pella, and Ryan Long.

Zeducation is a funny satire channel with nearly 1 million subscribers that shows Memes and exposes hypocrites and liars in media, Hollywood, and entertainment. The Right To Bear Memes is a fantastic Meme channel on 𝕏.

Argo Nerd is a German commentator who creates commentary by putting two contradicting news articles next to each other.

Plenty of fantastic cartoonists mock political and ideological ideas. My favorites are George Alexopoulos, Bob Moran, Tatsuya Ishida and Stonetoss, but it’s worth following FreedomToons, Grrr Graphics and Comically Incorrect.

The Babylon Bee is the funniest satirical website on the internet. They recently started hiring the creator of Libs of TikTok, a hilarious channel exposing crazy leftist ideas. The Babylon Bee has a sister news site, Not the Bee, that collects stories that sound like satire but are unfortunately true.

Music is another way to mock ridiculous ideas. Country musician Buddy Brown releases regularly based political commentary and fun guitar songs in “Truck Sessions” on his YouTube channel. The rapper Tom MacDonald is a phenomenon. He regularly takes over the billboard charts, but the media tries to block and remove him from any public discussion. He is a unique rapper who voices social and political problem in a sometimes funny way, for example People So Stupid, Clown World, Im Corny, Dummies, and Buttholes. His library of songs is immense, and each song is impressive and touches on topics people would never talk about: Fake Woke, Snowflakes, Brainwashed, New World Order, The System, and Everybody Hates Me.

Parallel Societies

When a descent into Totalitarianism is no longer preventable, few options remain. You can either leave the country (if possible), fight tyranny, or live under totalitarian rule. If you decide to resit, there are many interesting books on Guerrilla warfare. Ironically, Socialist tyrants like Ernesto Che Guevara or Mao Zedong wrote useful books. To summarize in one sentence: Attack the train support lines and shoe factories. Total Resistance by Swiss military theorist Hans von Dach is worth a read.

If you decide to live inside a totalitarian system, there are various options to reject the ruling power. If a totalitarian regime can’t be overthrown with force, a viable option is the creation of parallel societies. Parallel societies begin in spontaneous acts of mutual self-defense in different parts of society.³⁸

Parallel structures do not grow (…) out of a theoretical vision of systemic change (…) but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people,

writes Václav Havel in his book The Power of the Powerless³⁹

People that don’t support the current regime and its cause start to build alternative structures of trade and support, and over time a new society blooms inside the repressive system. Those parallel societies get stronger with more people joining, and it is even possible that a parallel society replaces the tyrannical regime at some point.

Self-Reliance

Self-reliance is a natural antidote against tyranny. If you’re dependent on the state for money or support, you’ll be the slave of the state. Don’t expect a politician or the state to solve your problems.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.

Learn to get independent of others. This can be as simple as learning how to sew and knit, how to repair things, or how to grow your food. You can support each other in small communities of family, friends, or neighbors. During the COVID-19 crisis, more people reached out to me from all around the world than ever before in my life. If you shine a light in the darkness, people will find you.

Prepare for the worst case, expect that incompetent and corrupt politicians will create bad policies which will result in suffering. If bad things happen, they will not be held accountable, don’t expect them to care about their actions. If you’re mentally and physically strong and prepared, you’ll suffer less in case things go sideways.

It’s up to us, to decide if we take part in unjust systems, bad ideologies, discrimination, and anti-humane ideas.

You’re a human being and you can choose whether or not to participate in that system and other systems as well. We can decide if we want to stop complying, to become disobedient on mass, to not participate in systems that we disagree with. Reality isn’t a foregone conclusion, we participate in its construction through our consent, through our discourse with it and through our willingness to submit to it.⁴⁰

The more people decide not to take part or to actively resist unjust policies, the more people exercise civil disobedience, and the more power we remove from authoritarian politicians, greedy and woke corporations, and captured Gated Institutions back to where it belongs, to the people.

Footnotes

1. Redaktion (2021): Nach 181 Tagen im Gefängnis – Georg Thiel ist wieder frei, https://www.welt.de/fernsehen/article233329219/Rundfunkbeitrag-verweigert-Georg-Thiel-ist-nach-181-Tagen-Gefaengnis-wieder-frei.html. ↩

2. Matthew Blackwell (2020): Black Lives Matter and the Mechanics of Conformity, https://quillette.com/2020/09/17/black-lives-matter-and-the-mechanics-of-conformity/. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham (2009): How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died, https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/3/1235/htm. ↩

4. Jordan B. Peterson and Jocko Willink (2021): 13. Jocko Willink, https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000515852353. ↩

5. Raymond Unger (2021): Vom Verlust der Freiheit: Klimakrise, Migrationskrise, Coronakrise, Europa Verlag. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Gunter Frank (2021): Der Staatsvirus: Ein Arzt erklärt, wie die Vernunft im Lockdown starb, Achgut Edition. ↩

7. Thomas Sowell (2018): Discrimination and Disparities, Basic Books. ↩ ↩²

8. Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito (2019): Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793. ↩

9. Roland G. Fryer (2016): An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force. ↩

10. Steve Cortes (2019): Trump Didn’t Call Neo-Nazis ‘Fine People.’ Here’s Proof., https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/21/trump_didnt_call_neo-nazis_fine_people_heres_proof_139815.html. ↩

11. (2017): Read the complete transcript of President Trump’s remarks at Trump Tower on Charlottesville, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-charlottesville-transcript-20170815-story.html. ↩

12. Jimmy Dore (2022): It’s Official! Elon Musk Buys Twitter! NBC News Just Learned That Politicians Lie! W/ Kurt Metzger, https://youtu.be/too_zD0gPkI. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

13. K-von (2020): Trump vs Biden: Handicap Face-Off, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIfRUIm3Kuc. ↩

14. K-von (2020): Trump vs Biden: Which Candidate is RACIST?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZfzJATDmXs. ↩

15. Canadian Covid Care Alliance (2021): The Pfizer Inoculations For COVID-19 – More Harm Than Good – VIDEO, https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/media-resources/the-pfizer-inoculations-for-covid-19-more-harm-than-good-2/. ↩

16. Health Advisory & Recovery Team (2022): First finding from Pfizer trials, https://www.hartgroup.org/first-finding-from-pfizer-trials/. ↩

17. Joe Rogan and Maajid Nawaz (2022): The Joe Rogan Experience 1780 - Maajid Nawaz, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ugbn7cuab3mNgKbo81ajM. ↩

18. Russel L. Blaylock (2022): COVID UPDATE: What is the truth?, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9062939/. ↩ ↩²

19. Ortal Tuvali, Sagi Tshori, Estela Derazne, Rebecca Regina Hannuna, Arnon Afek, Dan Haberman, Gal Sella, and Jacob George (2022): The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients—A Large Population-Based Study, https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219. ↩

20. Th. Göran Tunevall (1991): Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: A controlled study, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01658736. ↩

21. Frank Drewnick, Julia Pikmann, Friederike Fachinger, Lasse Moormann, Fiona Sprang, and Stephan Borrmann (2020): Aerosol filtration efficiency of household materials for homemade face masks: Influence of material properties, particle size, particle electrical charge, face velocity, and leaks, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02786826.2020.1817846. ↩

22. Kai Rebmann (2022): Schwere Nebenwirkungen: Was verschweigt das Paul-Ehrlich-Institut?, https://reitschuster.de/post/schwere-nebenwirkungen-was-verschweigt-das-paul-ehrlich-institut/. ↩

23. Paul Schreyer (2022): Krankenkassenchef warnt: Zehn mal mehr Impfnebenwirkungen als offiziell erklärt, https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/mehr-impfnebenwirkungen. ↩

24. Gunter Frank (2022): Bericht zur Coronalage – Paul-Ehrlich-Chef feuern, Lauterbach entlassen – sofort, https://www.achgut.com/artikel/bericht_zur_coronalage_24.06.2022_paul-ehrlich-chef_feuern_lauterbach_entlassen_sofort. ↩

25. Mordechai Sones (2021): 5-fold increase in sudden cardiac and unexplained deaths among FIFA athletes in 2021, https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/2/frontlinenews/500-increase-in-sudden-cardiac-and-unexplained-deaths-among-fifa-athletes-in-2021/. ↩

26. Jochen Ziegler (2021): Schlechtere Krankheitsverläufe nach Covid-Impfung?, https://www.achgut.com/artikel/schlechtere_krankheitsverlauefe_nach_covid_impfung. ↩

27. Alex Berenson (2022): URGENT: The Covid vaccine paper on declining sperm counts is even worse than it seems at first, https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-the-covid-vaccine-paper-on/. ↩

28. Itai Gat, Alon Kedem, Michal Dviri, Ana Umanski, Matan Levi, Ariel Hourvitz, and Micha Baum (2022): Covid-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.13209. ↩

29. Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos, and Peter A. McCullough (2022): Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X. ↩

30. Matthew B. Crawford (2021): Science has become a cartel, https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-scientists-sacrificed-scepticism/. ↩

31. Uschi Jonas (2020): Gesundheit, Umwelt, Kosten: Welches Wasser Sie trinken, hat große Auswirkungen, https://www.focus.de/perspektiven/nachhaltigkeit/kolumne-in-kleinen-schritten-die-welt-retten-gesundheit-umwelt-kosten-welches-wasser-sie-trinken-hat-einen-grossen-effekt_id_10958059.html. ↩

32. Mark J. Perry (2019): There Is No Climate Emergency, Say 500 Experts in Letter to the United Nations, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/there-is-no-climate-emergency-say-500-experts-in-letter-to-the-united-nations/. ↩

33. Stefan Frank (2022): Australien: Stromkrise im Energieparadies, https://www.achgut.com/artikel/australien_stromklrise_im_energieparadies. ↩

34. Burkhard Müller-Ullrich and Sebastian Lüning (2021): Indubio Folge 162 – Tausend Jahre Klimawandel, https://www.achgut.com/artikel/indubio_folge_162_tausend_jahre_klimawandel. ↩

35. NASA (2016): Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth. ↩

36. Michael Malice, Murray Rothbard, Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, David Friedman, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Lysander Spooner, Emma Goldman, and Louis Lingg (2021): The Anarchist Handbook, Independently published. ↩

37. James Lindsay (2021): A Manifesto for the Based, https://newdiscourses.com/2021/05/manifesto-for-the-based/. ↩

38. Academy of Ideas (2022): The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World, https://academyofideas.com/2022/02/parallel-society-vs-totalitarianism-how-to-create-a-free-world/. ↩

39. Academy of Ideas (2021): How to Escape from a Sick Society, https://academyofideas.com/2021/09/how-to-escape-from-a-sick-society/. ↩

40. Russel Brand (2022): Something Big Is Coming, https://youtu.be/Ks_qkWXW-ho. ↩