Winston Smith Lives Again

Attempting to discuss concerns about Covid-19 vaccinations on Facebook and Reddit is a dangerous game. It immediately invites hysterical attacks, shattering of old bonds of friendship and family, and group outrage.

In the last three weeks Reddit has taken censorship of those who question Covid-19 vaccination to an unprecedented new level of Orwellianism. The sub r/unvaccinated , a "Safe community for unvaccinated redditors that refuse or are hesitant to take the new experimental covid vaccine. A place to support, share thoughts and discuss news topics." has had no new posts since November 9th - seventeen days ago.

Does it seem strange that in the current environment the Unvaccinated subreddit would become a ghost town? There's no need to wonder. I myself posted there twice in the last ten days, only for my posts to silently and completely disappear.

Go there yourself; post to your heart's content. Watch as your posts vanish, one by one. They never existed. No one will ever hear what you have to say. Nor will you ever be given a reason for that censorship.

I tried writing to the group moderators, of course. No answer ever came. I've been writing to the moderators individually, but so far have received no answer. The first ones I wrote to seem to have been inactive for months.

Mind you, this was a fairly active group! And questioning the safety of Covid-19 vaccines is not illegal. That speech on that subject can be simply blanked out of existence is an ominous sign of what's to come.

My Body, My Choice

I would like to take this opportunity to state unashamedly that I support the right to choose. Each person's body is their own, and the government has no right to interfere with our medical decisions. Government meddling with our medical decisions at the point of a gun, or under threat of financial ruin, is tyranny.

I'm talking about a woman's right to an abortion,  of course. But I'm also talking about everyone's right to decide for themselves whether to receive a Covid-19 vaccination. 

I'm not anti-vaccination. I'm vaccinated, and my son is vaccinated - with vaccines that have been thoroughly tested through standard procedures by the FDA before the regulatory capture of the FDA by the pharmaceutical industry - Big Pharma.

Testing a new medication for safety, including long-term safety, is a process that takes years. Covid-19 itself is barely two years old as far as medical awareness is concerned. It surely existed before that, but no one was trying to develop a vaccine for it before then. And that's why the vaccines currently available are being used on the basis of emergency waivers from the FDA. Even the Pfizer vaccine could not possibly have passed standard FDA safety checks in the time that was given, despite it's supposed "approved" status.

What's really stunning is the degree to which the government and media have conspired to terrorize the public against anyone who questions the safety of these new and untested vaccines. It's virtually a Two-Minutes Hate on TV and online. The sheer unthinking loathing expressed by the vast majority of the public is strongly reminiscent of the peak of McCarthyism. Appeals to Constitutional rights are met with contempt and seething hatred.

"My body, my choice" is an interesting answer to those attacks. It puts one unthinking, unquestionable article of faith - a woman's right to choose (which I personally support) against another: that anyone who questions a mandate that forces them to be vaccinated under threat of job loss and ensuing homelessness, potential seizure of their children by the government, and unemployability.

It exposes the basic hypocrisy of proudly standing by a woman's right to chose while condemning the right of everyone to chose not to be vaccinated. And since studies now show that the vaccinated are as likely to be carriers of Covid-19 as the unvaccinated (if not more so, because there are so many more of them), the poor excuse of public safety simply doesn't apply.

A powerful argument. It forces anyone who supports abortion rights to at least take a moment to reflect. It can also force those who oppose abortion rights to consider, as most of them oppose vaccine mandates. In short, both sides are equally hypocritical when it comes to mandates. They're just hypocrites in opposite directions, so to speak.

The New Untouchables

 So here's what happened.

Six days ago someone posted on r/skeptic:

 

The rest of the post consisted of nine reasons, point by point, why the poster didn't get the vaccine - including that she had lost a family member apparently due to the covid vaccine (very shortly after receiving it), and that her mother had had severe reactions to the same vaccine. Genetic tests indicated that the covid vaccines were extremely dangerous for her. She had also herself caught covid and recovered; tests afterwards showed that she had acquired a natural resistance to covid (at least for a while) that was higher than that bestowed by the vaccine. Her doctor had recommended that she not get the vaccine due to the risk of a negative reaction.

The poster did NOT say that no one should get the vaccine, only that she herself didn't want to get it for the reasons she'd given. She also noted that she follows appropriate masking and social distancing protocols. She needn't have bothered, though, because she was accused of both. Told that she was responsible for the deaths of millions because of her reckless refusal to get vaccinated. The free-thinking minds of r/skeptic - or at least most of them - absolutely savaged her, downvoting her comments like mad.

I stupidly jumped in.

I know that a few people in the sub upvoted my comments, because they bounced up and down a little for a while. But they were downvoted into invisibility pretty fast.

Now, don't get me wrong. So far this is just a typical day on Reddit, more or less. But here's where it got interesting. First, the original post was mostly deleted - that is, all the facts and details that had been posted which supported the poster's original statement were removed. A huge number of comments were removed, too. But more than that: within a day or two the original poster herself disappeared, her account suspended with no reason given. It made no sense. She'd been far more polite that I would have been under the same circumstances.

The hypocrisy of supposed "skeptics" joining in such a blatant display of groupthink, conformism, and obedience to the "official truth" was simply sickening. I left the sub for good.

But there's more to the story in the next post.

Entering full-blown fascism

I can only post this here because no one will ever read it. Even so, it may be disappeared.

We're entering untrammeled fascism, it seems. But not in a way I anticipated. Censorship has gotten aggressive; posts, comments, forums, and users are being shadowbanned and disappeared. But there's no acknowledgement that it's happening; they're simply made invisible. 

Unposts. Uncomments. Unpersons.

I've warned of this all my life, but deep down I guess I never really believed that they'd go all the way. Now they have.

The ruling class turned the internet into a trap. It became our primary form of communication, in many ways the only form of communication. And they control it. Facebook? Reddit? You say what you're allowed to say, and nothing more.

How can we fight back when we can't even speak to each other?