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MindMatters: Is Liberalism the New Totalitarianism? A Conversation with Ryszard Legutko

Harrison Koehli and Corey Schink
Sott.net
Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:00 UTC
legutko
During the Cold War, the world's liberal democracies, like the USA, were widely perceived as the bastion of freedom, especially to those behind the Iron Curtain. But the past three decades have caused many to revise their views. With the rise of totalitarian thinking and practice in the West in those years, the question must be asked: what happened?

Professor of Philosophy and conservative politician Ryszard Legutko pondered these questions in the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in his 2012 book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (published in English in 2016), and his latest book, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols (2021). Legutko argues that at its root, liberalism as ideology shares many of the same features as communism. Despite their differences, both share essentially the same views of history, the future, politics, ideology, and religion. These tendencies cause ideology to seep into every aspect of daily life ("the personal is political") - in liberalism, to a degree even the communists weren't able to achieve, despite their best efforts. These trends have only gotten worse in the years since the book's release.

Today on MindMatters we talk to Professor Legutko about his books, life under communism, editing samizdat, the recent controversy with his university's "office of safety and equality," and the time he got sued for calling some students "spoiled brats."


Running Time: 01:46:55

Download: MP3 — 97.9 MB


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Brick Wall

'Lockdowns are over, in the name of Jesus': Australian police fine church & ban services for openly defying Covid restrictions


RT
Wed, 25 Aug 2021 10:34 UTC
sydney police lockdown
© Saeed Khan/AFP
Police officers patrol the streets of Sydney, August 3, 2021.
Police have imposed a week-long operations ban on a church outside Sydney, Australia after its pastor held a sermon in violation of health orders and urged followers to defy the city's strict lockdown rules.

The seven-day operations ban was handed to the Christ Embassy church in Blacktown, a suburb of Sydney, the New South Wales (NSW) police said on Wednesday.

The officers were alerted on Sunday night that the church was open in violation of public health orders. They said around 60 adults and children participated in the sermon, despite NSW lockdown rules ordering places of worship closed to the public but allowing services to be livestreamed.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

Washington public school requires student athletes to wear tracking monitors to trace COVID

Emma Colton
Fox News
Wed, 25 Aug 2021 17:26 UTC
covid ankle monitors, ankle monitors, covid, student athletes
A public high school in Washington state is requiring some student-athletes and coaches to wear tracking devices on their wrists to trace COVID-19 during practices.

"It's just one more thing they're doing to the kids through this whole covid thing," father of two students at Eatonville High School, Jason Ostendorf, told The News Tribune. "The vaccine, now be tracked when you're at practice. Where does this end? I feel like this is an experiment on our kids to see how much we can put them through before they start breaking."


Comment: This father isn't far off the mark.


The high school said that both vaccinated and unvaccinated athletes who play on teams with high contact and moderate indoor contact, such as volleyball, basketball and wrestling, are required to wear the devices. The tracking devices, which were paid for by federal funds, are worn during practice to trace the proximity of one player to others in the event of a positive coronavirus case.
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House

Feds report most rental assistance has still not gone out

Michael Casey
AP
Wed, 25 Aug 2021 17:04 UTC
stop evictions, evictions protest
© AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File
FILE - In this Jan. 13, 2021, file photo, tenants' rights advocates demonstrate in front of the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in Boston. A federal judge is refusing landlords' request to put the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium on hold, though she made clear she thinks it's illegal. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich on Friday, Aug. 13, said her “hands are tied” by an appellate ruling the last time courts considered the evictions moratorium in the spring.
States and localities have only distributed 11% of the tens of billions of dollars in federal rental assistance, the Treasury Department said Wednesday, the latest sign the program is struggling to reach the millions of tenants at risk of eviction.

The latest data shows that the pace of distribution increased in July over June and that nearly a million households have been helped.

But with the Supreme Court considering a challenge to the federal eviction moratorium, the concern is that a wave of evictions will happen before much of the assistance has been distributed. Some 3.5 million people in the U.S. as of Aug. 16 said they face eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey.

Lawmakers approved $46.5 billion in rental assistance earlier this year and most states are distributing the first tranche of $25 billion. According to the Treasury Department, $5.1 billion in Emergency Rental Assistance has been distributed by states and localities through July, up from $3 billion at the end of June and only $1.5 billion by May 31.

Several states, including Virginia and Texas, have been praised for moving quickly to get the federal money out. But many others have still only distributed a small percentage of the rental help.
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X

Bodybuilding sponsor drops ex-Gov. Schwarzenegger following 'anti-America' freedom comments

Sophie Mann
Just the News
Wed, 25 Aug 2021 16:40 UTC
Arnold Schwarzenegger
© Instagram
Arnold Schwarzenegger piles on the covid guilt
Former California GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been dropped by a bodybuilding sponsor following a recent rant directed at anti-maskers.

Sports supplement company REDCON1 called Schwarzenegger's comments "anti-America." In addition to pulling it sponsorship, the company is also disaffiliating itself from a Schwarzenegger bodybuilding event next month.

"To be clear we did not pull out of the event because of a mask issue. We understand the importance of public safety as well as the responsibilities of all event organizers. These are unprecedented times and we're aligned with public safety for all," a spokesperson for the company told The Hill. "We elected to discontinue support due to Arnold's comment, 'Screw Your Freedoms.' With the global influence Arnold beholds we find that ideology dangerous and anti-America and community."

Comment: Schwarzenegger lays into anti-maskers: 'Screw your freedom'

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Black Magic

'Pure fear porn': Media 'expert' ripped for predicting the coming of COVID-22, a much-more deadly, vax-resistant 'super variant'


RT
Tue, 24 Aug 2021 06:59 UTC
Corona Cartoon
© REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen
An immunologist alarmed by coronavirus strains, and the media that cited him, are accused of fear-mongering the masses into thinking a "super variant" called Covid-22 is on the way - a warning so far based on pure conjecture.

Zurich-based immunologist Dr. Sai Reddy claimed this week that the combination of existing strains of coronavirus could create a "super variant" Covid-22 in 2022. He added that we will no longer be able to rely on the currently available vaccines for protection.
"It is very likely that a new variant will emerge and that we will no longer be able to rely on vaccinations alone," Reddy told German newspaper Blick.
According to Reddy, if Covid variants such as Beta or Gamma become more contagious or Delta - which the doctor refers to as Covid-21 even though it was first discovered in 2020 - mutates, this could create a "new phase" of the pandemic which will be "worse than what we are experiencing now."

Comment: The new Covid variants and new spike of infections are probably the result of the mass vaccination with virus-vectored and experimental genetically engineered vaccines.

Last year, UK Medical Freedom Alliance send an open letter to The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization... for COVID-19 in the UK."
This is an excerpt from that letter:
"It is worrying that recent Parliamentary discussions seem to not attach proper weight to any concern about vaccine risks and the right to informed consent, while focusing solely on strategies to increase the uptake of vaccines in the general population.

Inadequate Assessment of the Public Health Risk from a Covid Vaccine

In a recent letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), physician Arvind Joshi warned against the disaster that could result from this misguided policy and outlined the serious risks involved to the public and other serious issues that are being taken if a Covid Vaccine is rushed out without thorough and adequate safety and efficacy testing:

"Adverse effects like Subacute Sclerosing Pan Encephalitis, Ascending Polyneuritis, Myopathies, Autoimmune Diseases, and rarer chance of triggering development of malignancies are most dreaded possibilities."..." The rush for the Vaccines should not lead to disaster." (Note: There is a more comprehensive list of potential 'bad outcomes' in the link to the article.)

Virus-vectored and genetically engineered vaccines could undergo recombination or hybridization with unpredictable outcomes.... Previous attempts to develop coronavirus and other vaccines e.g., RSV and dengue, have been hampered by the problem of 'antibody dependent enhanced immunity'(ADEI), which has led to severe illness and deaths in the animals and human subjects involved in the trials 28. This phenomenon only becomes apparent after vaccination, when the subject is exposed to wild virus at some point in the future. Worryingly, the Covid Vaccine trials have not been conducted in a way to exclude the possibility of this serious sequalae occurring months or years after vaccination...

Late onset adverse vaccine effects such as Subacute Sclerosing Pan Encephalitis (SSPE),Ascending Polyneuritis, Myopathies, Autoimmune Diseases, Infertility and Cancers cannot be ruled out with short duration trials." ("Open Letter From: UK Medical Freedom Alliance To: The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization... for COVID-19 in the UK.")
Despite all the knowledge that exists about the dangers and ineffectiveness of the vaccines against Covid, the propaganda machine will continue to persuade and force people to accept vaccines as the only solution to their health and well-being.

It is not a fact-based science. It is a quasi-science promoted by psychopaths in white coats so they can gain more money, power, and control over our bodies, minds, and souls.

See also:

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People 2

Man on a Mission: Meet 'Billboard Chris', Canadian Warning About the Dangers of Medical Gender Transition

Rosemary Frei
rosemaryfrei.ca
Wed, 25 Aug 2021 09:22 UTC
billboard chris
BillboardChris is spreading the word about the danger of gender ideology from coast to coast and also endorsing the People's Party of Canada in the upcoming election.

Chris Elston - AKA Billboard Chris - is on a mission.

The southern-B.C. resident recently toured Eastern Canada. Wherever he landed, he brandished his billboard that has messages about the dangers of medical transition. That led to dozens of conversations a day between Elston and passers-by about the gender-ideology indoctrination that's manipulating millions of kids in Canada alone into believing medicalizing puberty is praiseworthy.

Elston is driven by the conviction that it's his duty as a man and as the father of two daughters to be on the front line defending girls from harm.

And indeed it's a gladitorial arena: his left arm was broken in Montreal in March when social-justice warriors swarmed him and one pummeled him with a large traffic cone. (Elston needed surgery to mend the break; the scar is still prominent on his arm.)

"The truth is, a broken bone is nothing compared to what our kids are going through," he told one of the many reporters who interviewed him after that assault.

What Elston is referring to is the unprecedented jump in number of young people, disproportionately females, who are being diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is defined as a mismatch between one's psychological sense of one's gender on the one hand and one's biological sex on the other.
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Oscar

The woke are cancelled by the woker: Disgraced ex-governor Cuomo loses laughable Emmy

TK Sanders
OutKick
Tue, 24 Aug 2021 09:31 UTC
Andrew Cuomo
© Timothy A. Clary/AP
Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Cuomo is accused of sexually harassing women on his staff. That's not similar in any respect to what happened with Brett Kavanaugh. Why is the same standard not applying? The answer is one person is a Republican and the other person is a Democrat.

The International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has taken back its absurd, meaningless, hyperbolic Emmy that it awarded then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo for "leadership" during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Attention

Washington public school forces student athletes to wear ankle monitors: parents

Ari Hoffman
The Post Millennial
Tue, 24 Aug 2021 19:58 UTC
ankle tracking bracelet
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly forced to wear an ankle tracking monitor for volleyball practice at Eatonville High School in Washington state as a condition of participating in team sports. This was required of both vaccinated and unvaccinated students.

According to her mother who spoke anonymously to The Post Millennial, her daughter was at a practice for the public school's volleyball team and texted her that she was being asked to put on an ankle monitor.

The teen did not answer the mother's follow up texts or calls. The mother assumed she was playing during practice and attempted to contact the school via phone. No one at the school was able to answer her questions about the monitor, so she drove to the building.

The mother spoke to an employee in the school office, as well as a coach and was informed there was a meeting last week discussing the ankle monitoring program for unvaccinated teens. The program was allegedly designed for contact tracing in the event of a positive COVID test of a student.

Comment: Sounds a lot like Israel's 'freedom bracelet'... but only if you are vaccinated!

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NPC

Oregon implementing mask mandates outdoors regardless of vaccination status

Lexi Lonas
The Hill
Tue, 24 Aug 2021 05:21 UTC
masks outdoors
© REUTERS/Emily Elconin - RC29PM9DS0U1
Oregon announced Tuesday it is reimplementing an outdoor mask mandate regardless of vaccination status, a measure that is slated to take effect Friday.

"Effective Friday, August 27, masks will be required in most public outdoor settings, including large outdoor events, where physical distancing is not possible, and regardless of vaccination status," a press release from the governor's office stated.

Gov. Kate Brown (D) said in a video this action is to "protect Oregonians and save lives."

Comment: In response to the announcement, many people on Twitter argued that it STILL wasn't enough:

Some were more critical:


See also:

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