"Do you think there was a kind of desire, to believe in a conspiracy of the liberal elite, all misbehaving in gross ways that ordinary folks could never think about?"
"Certainly, rationality is beleaguered these days. This is one of the last major newspapers in the country not to publish a horoscope,...non-science, nonsense, the elevation of emotion over fact, is on the rise, whether it's the extraordinary faith in homeopathy or the voodoo economics of the neoliberal right or the healing power of crystals. To read here of Tony and Cherie Blair's rebirthing experience in a Mexican mud bath in 2001 is to be torn between contempt and hilarity.
That our leaders for the past 25 years or so have been as cretinous as anyone else who believes there are fairies at the bottom of their garden is not exactly consoling. The powerful are protected from the consequences of their credulity; we are not."
It's bizarre, how lawyers and so forth are blogging online, without mentioning Judge Joe Brown.
"The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labour & double its Produce. All Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a Way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity,..."
“The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore. Some are manifestly sinister, others seem merely comical---harmless fun, as Nancy Reagan said of her husband’s reliance on astrology. Cumulatively, however, the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilization,..."
"What characterizes our era? Cults, quacks, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, that's what. In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Francis Wheen brilliantly laments the extraordinary rise of superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria. From Middle Eastern fundamentalism to the rise of lotteries, astrology to mysticism, poststructuralism to the Third Way, Wheen shows that there has been a pervasive erosion of Enlightenment values, which have been displaced by nonsense. And no country has a more vivid parade of the bogus and bizarre than the one founded to embody Enlightenment values: the USA. In turn comic, indignant, outraged, and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is a masterful depiction of the absurdity of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less." (2004)
"[The Clintons have] an eerie, unattractive ability to get liberals to keep their mouths shut"
"That's why I got out of the Democratic Party, for sure, because that is one giant cult"
"They think it's a messaging issue, but messaging is not the problem: reality is the problem"
The Democrat Party's open embrace of the NewAge movement vs. reality. It's a nightmare. And a long-running one: if America is so sufficiently educated that our government warned quackery was an $84 billion scandal by 1984, how were the people so brain dead that Oprah - by the early 2000s - could establish Dr. Oz as "America's Doctor"? Why wasn't there an immediate government intervention, plus a groundswell of public indignation, at Winfrey and television executives, after her (remember: educated) audience immediately recognized she was promoting a fraud over U.S. airwaves?
Because nobody saw a goddamn thing, that's why.
Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
By the year 2000, Bill Clinton (who had been playing around in the NewAge movement for decades) was already on a tear to legitimize the concept of evidence being malleable (and, apparently, he's still a huge fan). But his job was to protect America from fraud like that. And now, we're over two decades into this thing, and everything's falling apart, because so little can be nailed down. Hardly anything can reach resolution. And anyone, paying attention, should be able to recognize, part of the reason for that is, the Democrat Party's relationship to evidence has A) gotten very slippery, and B) expanded beyond the parameters of alternative medicine.
Two recent examples being the successful, 5 year-long, Hillary Clinton-inspired Russia hoax - featuring no evidence whatsoever - that was fully supported as fact by Democrats across the nation. And now, the massive amount of evidence against the Biden family that, somehow, the Democrat Party, just as miraculously, cannot see. For them, evidence - as a concept - has become twisted and strange.
You may not think NewAge spirituality and American politics are logically connected at first, but, like Oprah looking good while totally fucking you over, they are. (As logical as the notion that, if everything NewAge is "harmless," then the website dedicated to its many mistakes will be called "What's the harm?") Oprah is now a Washington lobbyist, with at least three of her accolades and "spiritual advisers" now vying for political power in their own right. And, when the Vice President of the United States is someone gullible, or cynical enough to have dated Montel talking-to-the-dead Williams, then it's undeniable.
Clearly, the NewAge movement now has the power to turn fellow Democrats into unquestioning idiots - even those who'd never go near Oprah - babbling any conspiracy theory they're told to run with. But what's important is, once again, our educated public doesn't catch it. Time to say it again:
"Propaganda only works when you do not have a well-informed population"
One of the few things I am 100% sure of is that we have a population that's "well-informed" enough to keep psychics in business. They all know their star signs and any details about them. They keep psychics, chiropractors, and homeopaths doing a brisk business. They're collectively going vegan. They are also collectively practicing yoga (though Indians, mostly, do not). Most Democrat voters can imagine no higher calling than attempting to be blissfully "happy" at all times, even if it's totally manufactured, and especially if they can do it in a group. In other words, the next generations of Americans are being groomed as a NewAge cult. A nation of Burning Men.
Political partisanship appears to cause almost every major writer, who sees the world as I do, to forget or ignore (or maybe they were already oblivious to) Andrew Breitbart's admonition that politics lives downstream from culture. So - by putting the emphasis on the wrong people: politicians - they've pointed their readers in the wrong direction, in almost the exact same wrong way, to end up telling the exact same wrong story, over and over again:
Francis Wheen discovered - almost immediately - he blew his NewAge thesis by attaching Margaret Thatcher to it.
Christopher Locke revealed the weakness in his argument, through the Republican-to-hate of the moment, George W. Bush.
And Kurt Andersen of The New York Times (of course) spirals down the drain by being unable to resist the zeitgeist, and attaching Donald Trump to his, otherwise sound, theories.
They're all wrong, with TMR's point being - even if they weren't - we wouldn't have any of them without a NewAge MOVEMENT, and that puts the ball back in the court of an Oprah or Deepak or Shirley MacLaine or Arianna Huffington or Gary Lachman or any of the other frauds and cult leaders assisting The Democrat Party in distorting reality, and thus, the American way of life.
Two mature takes, on President Obama's 2009 Nobel Peace Prize nomination, we did NOT hear regularly in the news: 1) it was like giving an Academy Award to a Director in the hopes he'll make a great film one day (which he never did) and 2) Obama became Jimmy Carter faster than Jimmy Carter became Jimmy Carter.
The newspapers said just the opposite.
Here's Hitchens in 2009, noticing Obama and Hillary Clinton's "unbelievably patronizing attitude toward the Heartland" - one of the very things that led to President Donald Trump's win in 2016 - which is a long time for Obama to have been an asshole,...without him, his supporters, or the media, noticing.
They didn't notice Hillary's first, real political act was to actively humiliate a black guy. So, they also did NOT notice, it wouldn't be the last time the Clintons decided ambushing a black person could earn them a ticket on the road to riches.
American newspapers don't print anything, the way it is, anymore.
Before it was fashionable to call people "cult members", Hitch was already saying the Clintons knew how to create them, but the media, generally, hasn't ever been reporting that.
Especially not this cult member.
I pity poor Francis Wheen, who wrote his great books on it, nobody (else) read.
