Reading the news about the chemical poisoning of the people of Palestine, Ohio, and then another earthquake in Turkey, I was overcome, as I think many people must be, by the escalating suffering of millions of ordinary citizens around the world. We sit in our homes and stare at our screens, appalled. We cannot do anything to help all these people. They are far away. All we can do is be thankful it isn’t us—selfish, but understandable. And then, the uncomfortable question, for how long? At any moment, such a disaster could strike our families, too.
Many will say, just turn off the news. But is that the answer? To stick our heads in the sand until the devil is on our doorstep.
I sometimes wonder if I should I stop writing all this disturbing stuff. There certainly is no end to the material I could write about, and there are plenty of other excellent writers doing it. Yet, somehow, each day, I sit down at my computer, a sense of urgency compelling me forward.
I continually feel behind the times. Putin gave his speech today. Biden made his “surprise” visit to Kyiv yesterday.
This morning, I saw that James O’Keefe’s speech to his staff had been, unsurprisingly, released to the public. I listened to the entire speech, a chilling experience since it sounded eerily familiar to what happened to me. I need to write about that, too. “The Dark Underbelly of the Nonprofit World”. I wasn’t as savvy as O’Keefe; nor did I have such a big audience assured of supporting me going forward. Those were the days before social media meant we could reach hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions with our words and images. My voice was much smaller, but the devastation it caused to my life was no less consequential.
When I finally found a place (Substack) where, for the first time, I was able to say what I really wanted to say without being silenced, the feeling of freedom was beyond what I can ever describe. I’ve been through too much, stayed strong to my convictions for too long, to give up now.
And so, here I am, still trying to finish this disaster piece, after having helped with my grandson this morning and knowing I have about two hours to finish it (that two hours has turned into four).
Here we go….
Does anyone still consider it a conspiracy theory that there are “evil elites” who have more power now than they have ever had before. Or that they have been greatly aided in attaining this power because of their control over what we now the “Mainstream Media” and new technology that allows state propagandists to project words and images to every single corner of the planet.
The news has become one, all-powerful voice. Left or right, it doesn’t matter. With each new disaster, they work in conjunction, bombarding us on all fronts with the same phrases and images, implanting fear and confusion into our minds. Before Covid, there were plenty of disasters happening all around the world, every single day. Covid locked us away, made us into a captive audience, with no relief from these disasters playing out on our screens and being embedded into our minds.
What was the first fear after the term “COVID-19” entered our consciousness? I talk about it in Once Upon a Fomite. It was the FEAR OF TOUCHING ANYTHING.
And then we were told even our own children could kill us. Just like a zombie that hadn’t turned yet (how many zombie movies had we been exposed to by this point?) they might not look or act sick, but they, too, could infect us. They could kill their own grandparents. We could all kill each other if we didn’t follow the rules.
The only way to communicate became through a screen. This was the only safe way to connect with loved ones, with friends and colleagues. The only way to know what was happening. We were told if we saw someone in the market that we knew, to not greet them, to just walk on by and get back home as soon as possible. Cover your mouth and nose, don’t make eye contact, become a ghost in the terrifying real world while becoming more attached to what was happening in the fake world.
Covid was a huge success. The minute Fauci et al convinced the entire world to follow obsessive rituals of cleanliness, they knew they could take the next step and then the next. COVID was a BIG step towards total compliance, but it was by no means the first one.
Since Covid, we have become conditioned to watch disaster after disaster and make them fit into the explanations that we have already been conditioned to accept as fact.
Words have been implanted in our minds that we can use to express these theories on one side and accusations on the other side. Misinformation. Disinformation. Controlled opposition. Distraction.
And one of my new favorites. Deep Fake, which is a video of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information.
And another one that we hear a lot about lately: False Flag.
After which there always comes the Fact Check.
Like this one about the earthquakes in Turkey:
A Feb. 7 Facebook post said this:
“What really happened in turkey? Message to End Illuminati on Telegram that is clearly a telephone wire bursting not a timed explosion charge! But this is still a scripted event they used Geo engineering weather modification HAARP! See there’s a lot of fake channels out they’re putting out this information just for views, First we had the event with the cloud in turkey and then the earthquake a haarp generated earthquake. And something bigger is coming..”
To which fact checkers responded:
More than 36,000 people are dead after earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6, USA TODAY reported. Experts said the disaster was natural and not the result of any human system.
Or this one about the chemical disaster in Ohio:
This fact check followed after someone made this post on Facebook:
“THIS WAS PLANNED / BY DESIGN / FALSE FLAG. New reports indicate deadly vinyl chloride has contaminated the Ohio River as far as West Virginia, a water source for over 5 million.”
Now, I admit, this chemical disaster has me speculating.
Ben Ratner, an extra in the film, also happens to live in Palestine. “Talk about art imitating life,” he told People. “This is such a scary situation. And you can just about drive yourself crazy thinking about how uncanny the similarities are between what’s happening now and in that movie.”
Yes, you can just about drive yourself crazy thinking about it.
Looking back to those long-gone days of three years ago, before COVID took over almost every waking moment of our consciousness, were any of us thinking like this? Okay, maybe we had some thoughts about conspiracy theories and most people didn’t really trust the government. But mostly, conspiracy theories, like those about aliens, were kind of fun. Most people didn’t take them too seriously.
Back then, millions of people hadn’t banded together into hive minds traveling hysterically from one disaster to the next, regurgitating each other’s thoughts.
Inside Job? CDC Changed Toxicity Info For Vinyl Chloride 11 Days Before Derailment
After 17 years of inactivity, and just a couple weeks before the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the CDC decides to update its toxicological profile on Vinyl Chloride. The update changes the lethal exposure from 100PPM to 100,000PPM. What are the odds? pic.twitter.com/IwOH2suHJo
— Cognitive Dissident (@STP48315) February 16, 2023
But that’s on a website called “welovetrump.com”. You won’t find anything about these claims on NPR or the New York Times. I’m waiting for the fact checkers to debunk it.
So, what really happened? Was it terrorists? But terrorists love to take credit for their bombings. Was it special forces from our own government? Remember, it’s pretty obvious the US is the one who blew up the Nordstream pipelines. I wrote about this in Biden to the Rescue all the way back on October 7, 2022.
Our government has done so many terrible things to its own citizens. In 1979, back when the Washington Post still did real journalism, it was reported that:
In an experiment designed to determine both attack and defense capabilities with biological weapons, a Navy ship blanketed San Francisco and its neighboring communities with a bacteria-laden smog for six days in 1950, according to U.S. military records.
The records concluded that nearly every one of San Francisco’s 800,000 residents was exposed to the cloud released by a Navy ship steaming up and down just outside the Golden Gate Bridge.
The aerosol released by the ship contained a bacteria known as serratia, which was thought harmless by the military at the time but which has been found since to cause a type of pneumonia that can be fatal.
However, it did take them 30 years after thepresst to finally report what had happened. With so many other examples we can draw on over the years, it doesn’t take more than a modicum of deductive powers to figure out that we cannot trust what our government tells us.
There is something called predictive programming, which is described as “a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders”.
According to Watt, Hollywood was given the job to brainwash the masses—in the most entertaining fashion. I think this theory makes sense to most people. It’s not some crazy conspiracy theory.
It’s not even a new technique. It’s been going on since Plato, who said that elites used predictive programming (although not using that term, of course) as part of their messaging control from the theater stage. For Plato “the only viable alternative to mob rule was the rule of a caste of guardians: philosopher kings trained from infancy to control their emotions and put wisdom before instinct”. (The Economist)
The problem, of course, is that the elites are anything but wise philosopher kings. They are a clique of narcissistic maniacs who have grown drunk on their own power. The more they seek to control the mob, the more out of control they become. The only difference—and it’s a very important one—between now and Plato’s time of 428 BCE is that the entire global population can now be controlled by this small group of crazies, thanks to modern technology in the form of “entertainment”. Only since COVID can we now add the news as a form of entertainment, albeit a macabre one. What used to be mainly fiction embedding this propaganda in our minds, has spilled over into “facts” and the confusion between fact and fiction is now rampant.
If you doubt how such large numbers of people can be coordinated to carry out the bidding of a small group of elites, G. Edward Griffin has termed this The Quigley Formula, wherein:
If there is any comfort to be gained from this nightmare the elite are trying to force on us, it is that we still have the ability to discern for ourselves between right and wrong, good and evil, even if we have an increasingly difficult time discerning between fact and fiction.
The more time we spend trying to figure out if something we see or hear is true or false, the more confused we will become. People have given up on this. Most people now belong in one camp or the other, having given up free thought all together (although they think they haven’t). We have our go-to experts and influencers, who we trust to break down the news for us into palatable bits and pieces for our overwrought brains to consume.
We are so busy staring into our screens, sucked in by the algorithms feedings us what they know we want to hear, that we forget to look at the real world and recenter ourselves.
We have beautiful stories that sustain us during hard times. We have stories that teach us lessons about right and wrong, about telling the truth, about courage and self-sacrifice. My mother told us stories of our Mennonite ancestors who were tortured for their faith. These are true stories. Am I now supposed to believe that those people were ignorant fools and that they died for nothing?
Oh, people are always nostalgic for the past, but it’s just a dream. I hear this all the time. But our elders serve a vital purpose when they say this to the youth.
“It was better back then”.
Maybe it actually was better. Not in every way, of course. But in some important ways, even just in the necessity that we do not forget our heritage. That we maintain pride in who we are. Because there are so many heroic stories that give us a firm foundation in all that is good and right and true. In an ideal. There is nothing wrong with holding a higher ideal above you, to remind you of what you should achieve, even if it eludes you.
But this is dangerous for the elite. They want us to lower our standards. To wipe away the wonderful stories of the past. Wipe the slate clean. Like they are doing with children’s books.
For example, Oompa Loompas, from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, were called “small men,” but are now “small people.”
Glutton Augustus Gloop is no longer called “fat” but rather “enormous.”
In “The Witches,” a section saying witches are bald beneath their wigs has a new disclaimer: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the latest changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson said is “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature,” according to the Daily Mail.
“Words matter,” begins the notice at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books.
Yes, they do. And these “experts” know exactly what they are doing when they strip us of our authentic stories and replace them with fakery.
Roald Dahl was a real writer who lived in a real time in real history. That time influenced what he wrote, and such a fact cannot be denied. Real children read his very real books—and loved them because they were authentic and true.
As a children’s book author, I was often told by publishers that I needed to “dumb” my books down. Children’s books were in a certain category, it had been proved by experts that kids liked certain things and that if you used certain words, it was too difficult for them. But all the books I read as a child hadn’t been categorized. They were just books that I loved. I think of Wind in the Willows that I read at around the age of ten. Or the Arabian Nights, or any of Andersen’s fairy tales. What publisher would ever publish such stories now. Who would they market them to? They wouldn’t fit into any category.
I remember many stories from my past. Here are some things I remember about disasters.
One time, I was waiting in a train for it to depart when a man sat down, put a knapsack on the ground, got up and left. For about 30 seconds everyone just sat there. You could feel the tension in the air. Then, as if we all reached the same silent agreement, everyone got up and moved away. Someone informed a guard. I don’t know what happened with the knapsack.
But that was how we lived in those days. Constantly vigilant.
One morning I went to my local newsstand—a tiny shop on Bayswater—to find it a charred, empty shell. I heard later, although I cannot confirm it, that it had been blown up by the IRA.
My husband and I, along with our 2-year-old daughter, traveled to Belfast for a wedding. Belfast was a city under siege, surrounded by walls, gates, checkpoints. I was told how there were walls between Catholic and Protestant areas. Children played on either side of the walls. They heard each other’s laughter, but they would never meet. They would never laugh together. They would be raised, if not to hate one another, to at least be extremely suspicious.
Many years later, as a Fellow at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, I spent a wonderful couple of weeks writing there.
During that time, I met an artist from Belfast and later, we did a project together. Connecting teenage boys at a foster home in Los Angeles with youth living in the Shankill Road district of Belfast.
We called the project From LA to Belfast. The youth couldn’t show their faces, so they made faces out of cardboard boxes. No avatars in those days. They made real drawings and objects using their hands and real paints and pencils and paper.
They drew portraits of each other.
If you want to learn more about Shankill, watch the video below.
Shankill Road is infamous for some of the worst violence on record during the Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict.
The youth in Los Angeles had all been victims of violence. And they had learned to inflict violence on one another. They were in foster care because of gang warfare, drug addiction, homelessness. As with so many other similar projects I have done over the years, these youth who would otherwise have never encountered one another, were able to share their stories. And as with every other similar project, the youth started by thinking they had nothing in common and ended by realizing that they had everything in common of what is most important. Everyone wants to love and be loved, everyone wants a home, a family, security, a chance to be successful in life, to not be manipulated and downtrodden. These kids knew all about the horrors of the world and very little of the good.
Projects like this are dangerous for the elite. Imagine if Russian and Ukrainian youth got together and communicated like this, for example. They might actually start understanding instead of hating one another.
Next week, I go to a local elementary school to give a talk called “I am a Storyteller, tell me your story”.
I want to encourage parents and grandparents to tell their stories. Perhaps one day all the books will be burned or changed, and nothing will remain to remind our children of their heritage. But we will still have our stories to pass down from generation to generation. We can create our own stories, real stories about real people and their courage, or made-up stories about heroes and legends—not just cookie-cutter superheroes.
At night, when you put your children to bed, tell them a story. Listen to the grandparents, don’t just push them aside, (oh, who cares about what happened during the war). This is how it used to be; sitting around the fire, the elders telling the legends of old, reciting poetry, yes, even scaring the youngsters with tales of goblins who will get you if you misbehave!
It’s important to know what is happening in the world. I won’t stop writing. Because what is written here, all the parts where I include my own history, and histories that I was told by my parents of others, become the stories of the past, building a foundation upon which we know who we are today. To be told and retold, to be read and reread.
Yes, this is another long essay, but who knows, maybe one day after I am long-gone and robots run amuck, some dogeared printed copy will be found somewhere in an attic or a basement and it will be read and then retold. That is the power of words. That is what these maniacal elite can never take away from us. Our imaginations, our ability to create our own stories and pass them down from generation to generation.
That is why I keep writing.