patrick.net

@zzyzzx Can you find that on Rumble, Bitchute, or Odysee?

Ceffer says

Harvard was in on the intelligence operation scam from beginning to end.

I could believe it. Same reports from Columbia. He's repped as some big shot ace student, but almost nobody remembers him, and those that did thought him unremarkable.

The Ayers - because I believe the Father was in on it - were his lifetime handlers.

BTW, the above meme fits perfectly with most of the Ivy League people I've met.

I had a girlfriend who went to Harvard, and I remember being surprised that she absolutely hated the idea of direct democracy, because then the hoi polloi would get a direct vote over how they she was governed. Just reeked of disdain for common American people.

https://palexander.substack.com/p/agreed-i-we-have-nothing-zero-less?publication_id=579356&post_id=75803652&isFreemail=true

The stakes are apocalyptic but our political and military leadership and the blue-check geniuses on Twitter do not seem to care. Like blustering Western leaders of ages past, this group seems willing to risk it all for their “master of the universe” sense of superiority. As Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told MSNBC in a recent, essential piece on how we might have averted this crisis, “It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia.”

I think people don’t understand the whole game the elites play and that s probably by design … the Ivy League system is part of the rigged system by the elites to show how great their children are and assure the continuity of their dynasties … it s a way for them to be like kings and queens without the responsibilities since they don’t operate in the same way … deep down the elites have a complex of inferiority and they have to cover it by imposing on us their rules by force (look at Bill Gate when he was interviewed by the DOJ for Microsoft antitrust infringement and you ll understand what I mean) … read “The hero with a thousand faces” by Joseph Campbell and it will inspire you with a better meaning of what s going on with these fake heroes … it looks like nowadays everything around us is fake

The elites are an interesting bunch; they are actually intellectually lazy. They have made a mistake to believe because they have intelligence, they don't need to gather facts before having an opinion. They actually assume that the liberals at the NYTimes tell them what they need to know.

Remember that guy Andrew Lahde (not Dr. Burry) who made a fortune shorting the housing mortgage derivatives? He closed his hedge fund making fun of the Ivy League dimwits on Wall Street.

"The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."

He actually had visited California and saw who got mortgages; for example, an illegal allien who picked strawberries bought a $750,000 house.
"How will I pay it back?" Mortgage broker: "Don't worry about it."

I knew some illegal aliens in California who got mortgages; one told me she and her brother immediately defaulted when the value of the house dropped. Why not? They likely used fake names on the app, or names of dead people.

I digress. The true elites are the vast army of government employees who fear and hate guys like Trump who will scrutinize their pay, pensions, raises, budgets, and nonsense called "work".

Why is there a Federal Department of Education for example? These and others are afraid of Trump or someone like him focusing attention on them.

clambo says

Why is there a Federal Department of Education for example? These and others are afraid of Trump or someone like him focusing attention on them.

Exactly. It should not exist and knows it. Thus the apoplectic fits of hate for Trump.

My current working assumption is that no federal agencies should exist at all except for the military and whatever agency sets US trade policy. Defense and trade, that's all the Federal government should have.

Everything else should be left to the states, as the Constitution says.

The Federal Reserve in particular should not exist, as it isn't even part of the government, but somehow has a monopoly on the issuance of money.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/forget-being-the-science-apparently?publication_id=323914&post_id=76294669&isFreemail=true

Trump did make some mistakes, imho:

Choosing Pence.
Cozying up to the Saudis who murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11
Trying to take credit for the dangerous and ineffective toxxine.
Failing to dismantle any of the Deep State.
Failing to pardon Assange and Snowden.

But he remains the most effective president any of us have seen.

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/crowdsourcing-request-what-are-the/comments

Great post ! Without reading the 380 comments I'll just say that in my experience THEY WILL NOT ENGAGE. I stopped trying as I only receive blank stares and they walk away. If you send them links they do not respond with "Thanks for sharing I'll take a look." they say nothing. (Even though you are my sister, or best friend, who I was close to for 50 long years and you do have a master's in Critical & Creative Thinking...I'm not looking). What is mind blowing to me is that they have zero consideration of your research and how you came to your opinion. Rather they have outsourced their thinking to their traditionally trusted sources, NYT, NPR, etc. and those sources in my view are telling them that even considering an alternative version of the narrative puts them in the dreaded 'conspiracy nut' basket. Thinking themselves the academics (many I know are) they can't stomach the idea of the label. (Your average Joe doesn't have this fear and knows that they have been treated as 'less than' for their blue collar work, when they are the ones keeping the lights on, so they have always smelt shit from these main stream sources.) The best way in my view is not to try to have any conversation rather it is putting the truth out on T-shirts from sea to shining sea. This way everywhere they look they are seeing that their sources are not being trusted by millions. They will not lose face by having to back down in a conversation but the exposure of these alternate opinions will then will have them secretly questioning their stance. As much as they don't want to be labeled 'conspiracy theorist' they also don't want to be left behind as 'stupid' for being the last one to 'get it'.

Patrick says

The best way in my view is not to try to have any conversation rather it is putting the truth out on T-shirts from sea to shining sea.

I've been doing this for over a year now. I have several t-shirts now. The last one I bought says..."Noah was a conspiracy theorist and then it rained" on the front. I'm going to add "Are you jabbed?" on the back.

GNL says

."Noah was a conspiracy theorist and then it rained"

That slogan may actually be detrimental, as it can be dismissed as coming from someone with dogmatic beliefs. Better to point out current relevant facts, like "Biden, fully vaxed, fully boosted, and fully Covid positive."

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

What the elites are executing and succeeding at, is a slow but surely moving insurrection. And this is why it was worth it to go after Trump for the supposed insurrection, as a distraction. The printing of trillions and the Ukraine pony show is a part of this plan.

Patrick says

Elon will be shut down, they cant let him continue to do what he is doing today, they can't let Twitter be used by people to empower themselves.

Patrick says

I'll just say that in my experience THEY WILL NOT ENGAGE. I stopped trying as I only receive blank stares and they walk away. If you send them links they do not respond with "Thanks for sharing I'll take a look." they say nothing.

There is no reason for them to engage because engagement doesn't benefit them, power often works this way.

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

I have 2 family members in healthcare industry and they both believe in vaccines, I don't know, I am confused.

cisTits says

Need to line the elites up against a wall and, well...you guess the rest.

So let's be like China during the cultural Revolution?
Elites serve their purposes, but the rank and file need to elect people who keep them in check.

But what if we don't really have elections anymore?

gabbar says

I have 2 family members in healthcare industry and they both believe in vaccines, I don't know, I am confused.

@gabbar There is a big difference between previous vaccines and this mRNA crap:

- the toxxine is new tech, no long term safety data
- short term safety data is far worse than any other vaxx ever
- the mRNA can integrate itself into your genes, and possibly the genes of offspring
- rushed through development
- rushed through testing, and testing results were bad, especially for pregnant women
- forced on the public through threat of job loss, expulsion from school and military, exclusion from public life; this has never been done before

gabbar says

There is no reason for them to engage because engagement doesn't benefit them, power often works this way.

Might be better to send them a few choice memes, because they can often make the point before defense mechanisms kick in.

https://patrick.net/memes

Patrick says

gabbar says

There is no reason for them to engage because engagement doesn't benefit them, power often works this way.

Might be better to send them a few choice memes, because they can often make the point before defense mechanisms kick in.

https://patrick.net/memes

T-shirts

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/greg_price11/status/1599786392363892739#m

Greg Price
@greg_price11
Dec 5
Sen. Kennedy: "These woke, high IQ stupid people, they walk around with zip lock bags of kale that they eat to give them energy. If you want to eat kale, that's up to you. I don't eat kale. You know why? Because kale tastes to me like I'd rather be fat."
Townhall.com

GNL says

T-shirts

Yes, maybe T-shirts are better because a lot of people get to see them.

gabbar says

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

I have 2 family members in healthcare industry and they both believe in vaccines, I don't know, I am confused.

I believe in SOME vaccines, just not this one.

It obviously doesn't work. It doesn't prevent spread, it doesn't give immunity, and it's for a disease that is RARELY fatal. Why mandate people take it?

How can somebody in health care not understand this?

No vaccines work against airborne viruses. You need mucosal immunity. You need an INHALED vaccine to get that - not a shot.

We're being set up.

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

Almost. But the proper analogy is

Iraq WMD : War in Iraq :: Wuhan Virus : Mandatory Vaccination

So my line is: "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (so I didn’t support the war in Iraq), and I don't believe in a deadly supervirus from Wuhan (so I don’t support mandatory vaccination)”

Not very catchy I admit.

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/thinking-points-december-7-2022

Maginot Line

All of the academic scholarship of the last 100 years failed to protect society from the mind virus of fascism. It was another Maginot Line that provided a very expensive illusion of safety yet it was easily circumvented when the fascists launched their blitzkrieg. One by one the heroes of the anti-corporate left pledged their allegiance to the Fascist Pharma State and support for the iatrogenocide — Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, George Lakoff, Michael Moore, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Micah White, Slavoj Žižek.

If we survive, we have to completely dismantle and restructure all of the institutions that failed over the last three years, especially education. If the system fails the moment it is tested, then it was never a good system to begin with.

Undoctored says

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

Almost. But the proper analogy is

Iraq WMD : War in Iraq :: Wuhan Virus : Mandatory Vaccination

So my line is: "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (so I didn’t support the war in Iraq), and I don't believe in a deadly supervirus from Wuhan (so I don’t support mandatory vaccination)”

Not very catchy I admit.

No.

The point is the government tells huge lies and it's not just the Republicans that do, the democrats do too

It's stupid to trust this government. You have to be a fucking retard to trust it still.

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/former-top-cia-analyst-condemns-fbi/comment/11795879

Clever Pseudonym
6 hr ago
Not only is the Trump phenomenon the most important event of our time, but now (oddly enough) it looks like Trump and his 4 years in power are only a footnote in comparison to the reaction he engendered.

Trump in his way almost qualifies as a revolutionary moment, but which has been swamped almost entirely by the counter-revolution.

Every single power center in our society, from the FBI and State Dept to the legacy news corps down to your local branch library and county clerk, were jolted into some kind of allergic response where (mostly because all our modern modes of communications work best as conduits of mass hysteria) nothing mattered except ejecting the Orange Beast of the Apocalypse.

This has meant blasting through every possible guard rail and tradition, tearing up the Bill of Rights like Pelosi tore up his speech, and nothing has been off limits: 2 spurious impeachments, the prosecution of anyone who worked for him, the social blackballing of anyone who supported him, up to and including unleashing massive riots in the hope of dislodging him.

I am not as optimistic as Martin Gurri: our Corporate Social Justice ruling class is officially post-democratic, they simply do not recognize any legitimate political opposition, and they absolutely believe that the only reason anyone opposes them (on any point) is retrograde bigotry.

They would sooner turn our entire culture into one single endless Maoist struggle session than admit any possible mistake.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/indoctrination-reputation-and-evolution

it’s an old saw that “the smart, educated people become liberals because progressivism is somehow the “better” or “more intellectual” or “higher” position on the political spectrum.”

the leftward shift among the more and most educated and especially among the faculties at schools and universities is often trotted out as evidence to this end.

but what if the causality flows the other way?

what if this “blueshift” among the most credentialed who spend the most time in school is not illumination but indoctrination and capture?

what if they are just being inducted to this worldview from long years in institutions designed for just that purpose and then locked into durable allegiance by the elevation of “credentialed classes” into preferential guild-like structures around things like law, science, medicine, and academia where one must be granted and maintain some sort of accreditation to participate?

because there sure seems to be a lot of that going around. ...

the civil war, we were assured, was about nothing but slavery. issues like state’s rights, secession, free association, preferential internal mercantilism, and large scale tax and spend infrastructure projects were not mentioned. the same idea of “no taxation without representation” was not applied to tyranny of the majority and north vs south or industrialized vs agrarian. ...

i have spoken before about the importation of prussian notions that school was meant not to “educate” and generate free thinking but rather to mold model citizens loyal and subordinate to the state and its ends. ...

the minds of the young are not like the minds of the adult. they are missing parts and far more prone to intense irrational loyalty that lacks the basic self-awareness and self-governance that comes later. the human mind is not really fully finished until into one’s 20’s. before that they are more malleable, more easily programmed. how tantalizing then that this is just the age that “school” seems to have evolved to finally let them go. one might well wonder what it evolved to optimize…

but what happens when these systems of indoctrination become utterly corrupt?

and what happens when the fact of this really starts to leak out? ...

these wizards of woo woo ran into a buzz saw of people who had real domain expertise outside the walled gardens of academic endeavor and the pattycake peer review of friendly guild systems. they came from a world where one has to actually be right for a living, not just “socialized and credentialed.”

the “experts” ran headlong into the reputation economy and it turned them into mulch.

and it’s going to keep coming.

and it needs to keep coming. ...

universities and university systems hung together because this pvivileged class had FAR more invested in keeping this system intact and functioning than it did in knocking it down or pruning back its power or prestige over trifling matters like truth, honesty, or accuracy. ...

it’s tearing ivory towers down because this newly informed and enfranchised class does not care about “keeping the system as it is” and are happy to bulldoze the castles of the would be feudal lords of academia because they have come to realize that this group is not here to protect us from invasion.

it IS the invasion.

and this invasion is dishonest.

and it is weak.

it has succeeded because it retained sufficient reputation to gaslight society into being too frightened, too alienated, and too intimidated to challenge it. but it was all woo-woo, a kung fu theater of phony facility. it’s all flash, no substance; it’s all hat, no cowboy.

the true power of woo-woo lies in making you too afraid to challenge it.

and a lot more of the world works like this than you think. ...

the level of access and education available to any who seek it and engage with it is almost impossible to overstate and is certainly impossible to compete with. it just takes desire, diligence, and application. 3 years of arguing economics in earnest on twitter probably has more value than most econ degrees.

and the cream will find ways to rise.

i don’t know about cream. i see a lot of crooks, swindlers and professional liars rise. thats what our system rewards.

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

i don’t know about cream. i see a lot of crooks, swindlers and professional liars rise. thats what our system rewards.

Yes, but that is the best of the crooks, swindlers, and liars.

https://notthebee.com/article/this-lad-from-deep-appalachia-knows-more-about-history-than-most-harvard-grads

This lad from Deep Appalachia knows more about history than most Harvard grads

Coastal elites look down on "flyover country," especially the Southern boys in places like Appalachia, like the Capital looked down on District 12 in Hunger Games. They imagine backwards, ignorant hicks when many of them are actually smarter and wiser than they are.

I'll post the full video if you want to watch more interviews with some of the poorest but best people in America - a place wrecked by the ambitions and ideology of the elites.

If you want the history kid, his interview starts around the 50-minute mark and he knows a TON more than what you saw in that short clip (and can sing to boot). Truly an amazing young man...

Fear of being outsmarted by ordinary white men is why poor white men are the most aggressively discriminated against in Ivy League admissions.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally. ...

They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public. ... both China and the West, in their own ways and at their own pace, but for the same reasons, are converging from different directions on the same point – the same not-yet-fully-realized system of totalizing techno-administrative governance. Though they remain different, theirs is no longer a difference of kind, only of degree. China is just already a bit further down the path towards the same future. ...

This managerial takeover was accelerated by what I call the managerial doom loop: the larger and more complex an organization grows, the exponentially more managers are needed; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power for the managers; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion, including by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucracy to take over ever more functions of the broader economy and society; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be educated, which requires more managers…

Utopianism: The belief that a perfect society is possible – in this case through the perfect application of perfect scientific and technical knowledge. The machine can ultimately be tuned to run flawlessly. At that point all will be completely provided for and therefore completely equal, and man himself will be entirely rational, fully free, and perfectly productive. This state of perfection is the telos, or pre-destined end point, of human development (through science, physical and social). This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. Consequently history has a teleology: it bends towards utopia. This also means the future is necessarily always better than the past, as it is closer to utopia. History now takes on moral valence; to “go backwards” is immoral. Indeed even actively conserving the status quo is immoral...

Meanwhile the managerial corporation also has a great deal to gain from the project of mass homogenization, which allows for greater scale and efficiencies (a Walmart in every town, a Starbucks on every corner, Netflix and Amazon accessible on the iPhone in every pocket) by breaking down the differentiations of the old order. The state, which fears and despises above all else the local control justified by differentiation, is happy to assist. ...

When the Communist Party took control of China, the bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy were not gently coopted into joining the managerial elite. Instead, as with the Kulaks (middle-class peasants) of Lenin and Stalin’s USSR, they were virtually exterminated. An endless series of bloody “campaigns” launched in the name of liberation by Mao Zedong against “landlords,” “rich peasants,” “rightists,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “bourgeois elements” all had the same objective. Through relentless collective persecution, confiscation of property, and mass torture, rape, and murder, the bourgeois middle class that had begun to emerge during China’s Republican period was systematically destroyed.

This served a straightforward purpose. Political theorists since Aristotle have recognized that “a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor” is the natural bedrock of any stable republican system of government, resisting both domination by a plutocratic oligarchy and tyrannical revolutionary demands by the poorest. By eliminating this class, which had been the powerbase of his Nationalist rivals, Mao paved the way for his intelligentsia-led Marxist-Leninist revolution to dismantle every remaining vestige of republican government, replace the old elite with a new one, and take total control of Chinese society.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

Thousands of American intellectuals became “disinformation” experts overnight. In coordination with these academics and NGOs, mass media leapt to set up “fact checking” operations to arbitrarily declare what was and was not true, selling the public a tall-tale of foreign meddling and dark tides of online “hate” that conveniently justified having their burgeoning independent competition deplatformed from the internet.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was then seized upon as a reason to double-down on this attack on the public. As Jacob Siegel recently documented in a magisterial account of the origins of the “war on disinformation,” the managerial state quickly re-oriented all the tools, techniques, and swollen bureaucratic automatons it had developed to fight the “Global War on Terror” in order to begin waging a counterinsurgency campaign against its own citizens. ...

The most immediate explanation for why the managerial elite decided to hurry up and cast off any tattered remains of the old American values is simply that they panicked. They panicked because they experienced a moment in which they felt they nearly lost control. That moment was 2016, when the socialist Bernie Sanders had just nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary, the British people had decided they’d had enough of the EU, and then, most egregiously of all, the thoroughly déclassé Donald Trump won the US presidential election. None of this was supposed to happen; in each case the people were supposed to have voted the right way, the way the elite had planned on them voting, but they didn’t. Worse, they seemed to be voting wrong as part of a broader trend of populations specifically reacting against and challenging managerial elite control. ...

In the West, this underdog public rebellion is not only directed against the ruling managerial technocracy, but, critically, has been conducted by precisely the managerial elite’s historic class enemies: the remnants of the old bourgeois middle class.

For the managerial elite this was the apparition of a terrifying nightmare. They thought they’d broken and cast down the old order forever. Now it seemed to be trying to climb out of the grave of history, where it belonged, to take its revenge and drag them all back to the dark ages before enlightened managerial rule had brought the word of progress to the world. The prospect of real power returning to the hands of their traditional enemies appeared to be a mortal threat to the future of the managerial class. ...

This elite revolt against democracy cannot be fully understood as a reaction only to proximate events, however – no matter how outrageously orange and crude their apparition. Rather, the populist revolts that emerged in 2016 sparked such an intense, openly anti-democratic reaction because they played directly into a much deeper complex of managerial anxieties, dreams, and obsessions that has roots stretching back more than a century.

It was 1887 and Woodrow Wilson thought America had a problem: too much democracy. What it needed instead was the “science of administration.” ...

By this he meant that all the affairs of the modern state, all the “new things the state ought to do,” should be placed above any vulgar interference from the political – that is, above any democratic debate, choice, or accountability – and instead turned over to an elevated class of educated men whose full-time “profession” would be governing the rabble. ...

Over the course of his presidency (1913-1921), and seizing in particular on the opportunity provided by the crisis of WWI, Wilson would oversee the first great centralizing wave of America’s managerial revolution, establishing much of the initial basis for the country’s modern administrative bureaucracy, including imposing the first federal income tax and creating the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Labor.

He also ruled as perhaps the most authoritarian executive in American history, criminalizing speech through his Espionage and Sedition acts, implementing mass censorship through the Post Office, setting up a dedicated propaganda ministry (The Committee on Public Information), and using his Attorney General to widely prosecute and jail his political opponents. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in two years of war under Wilson than in Italy under Mussolini during the entirety of the 1920s. ...

The People’s Republic of China has already taken this logic to its fullest conclusion. Popular voting may have been done away with all-together in China, but it too is still a democracy (it says so right in its constitution!). Instead of elections, the Party (which exists solely to represent the people, forever), rigorously assesses the will and interests of the masses through a process of internal consultation and deliberation it calls “people’s whole-process democracy” – also known as “consultative democracy,” for short. ...

No risk of the populist rubes ever getting to fondle any delicate machinery here! It should be no wonder that Western managerial elites have been smitten by this vision and the many advantages its offers (to themselves), and have thus everywhere rushed with growing fervor to adapt and implement it at home as fast and to the greatest extent that they can get away with. Wilson would be proud. ...

Dewey the Great had already helped transform America. A leading light of the rising American progressive education movement, he had successfully led a mission to completely remake the American education system, remodeling the country’s historic liberal arts colleges into copies of Germany’s fashionable new centrally-managed “research universities,” as well as generally overhauling the purpose and pedagogy of public education. Whereas Western educational institutions had for centuries focused largely on cultural transmission and forming the character of the students in their charge through study of the humanities and the classical virtues, Dewey believed this approach was outdated and in fact immoral. ...

But of course Dewey and his likeminded colleagues did want to shape the character of America’s children, just in a different way from the old order. ...

Dewey believed public education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform” precisely because it was, he wrote, “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Social reconstruction meant reengineering society. Frank Lester Ward, Dewey’s teacher and mentor (and the first president of the American Sociological Association) was even less bashful: the purpose of formal education, he said, was now to be “a systemic process for the manufacture of correct opinions” in the public mind. (It should, he added, therefore be brought under the exclusive control of government, since “the result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.”) ...

Mao, meanwhile, would embrace the same project with particular gusto. ... Explicitly based on new theories of Pavlovian psychological conditioning imported from the USSR and much admired by Mao, it always followed the same distinct method: endless hours of “study” and “discussion” groups where silence was not an option; repeated “self-criticism” and writing of confessions, allegedly to “lay one’s heart on the table” in the name of benevolent collective self-improvement and education; encouragement of neighbors and colleagues to report each other’s alleged harmful faults, wrongdoings, and wrong ideas; separation of people into “good” and “bad” classes or groups; isolation of one target at a time and the “persuasion” of former friends and allies to join in a simultaneous attack; mass “struggle” meetings designed to overwhelm and humiliate the target, and to turn a purge into public spectacle and object lesson; forced groveling apologies, followed by “magnanimous” temporary mercy and redemption or rejection and destruction of the individual as a warning to others; cyclical repetition with persecution of new targets. ...

This conditioning method was combined with an effort to create a fully controlled and wholly fluid information environment, where no one could be quite sure what was true or “correct” at any given moment. Journalism and literature were strictly censored; satire was outlawed. (Patrick's emphasis here) ...

In time the whole country would be reduced to the same state of stifling conformity. ...

Still, it’s true that Mao’s brute force method was particularly crude. In the soft managerialism of the West the effort to build a politically safer, more right-thinking New Man would adopt far more subtle, sophisticated, and gentle methods for washing brains. ...

Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, but World War II didn’t end. Managerial liberalism had engaged in its first global ideological war, and once the shooting had stopped the ideological struggle was just getting started. Europe and even the American homeland itself still had yet to be truly liberated. The problem was: fascism continued to lurk in minds everywhere. Eradicating it would require nothing less than the psychological transformation of entire populations.

That at least was the conclusion of the politico-psychoanalytic movement led by German self-described Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich, who became convinced that working class Germans were susceptible to authoritarianism because of their unhealthily “repressed” sexuality and attachment to traditional gender roles. Only by liberating them from sexual restraint (Reich coined the phrase “sexual revolution”) and especially by destroying forever the rigid structure of the family and the authority of its patriarchal father figure – i.e. the Fuhrer – could they be reformed and their psyches made safe for liberal democracy. ...