This is a tremendous analytical piece I read while in the hospital detailing how the mainstream media inundated the public with a solitary viewpoint while blocking any alternative perspectives. The one-sided crusade continued uninterrupted, and we more or less were bamboozled and caved. IF the censors did win, many of us might be to blame.

Did the Censors Succeed?

Jeffrey Tucker
September 19, 2022

These days, I rarely encounter people who disagree that the COVID-19 pandemic policy was a disaster.

You can usually get a laugh at a cocktail party when making fun of sanitizer madness, 15 days to flatten the curve, ubiquitous plexiglass, or six feet of distance. The school closures are in disrepute, as is the restriction on hospital visits or the banning of funerals and weddings. Even masking seems ridiculous in retrospect.

And remember when you couldn’t get a haircut for three months? How many lives did that save?

One even encounters widespread derision at the notion that the vaccines were effective at disease blocking. People whisper in private about vaccine injury, which seems incredibly common.

To be sure, there’s still a hard-core of true believers out there, easily recognizable by their beaks worn in public spaces and the funny two-step they do in stores to keep from getting near others. They wish we had stayed locked down longer or imposed even more violence against the unvaccinated.

Let’s say that group constitutes 10 percent but surely no more than 20 percent of the population. As for the rest, the days of delusion are long gone. The entire public health establishment faces tremendous public incredulity. Traditionally, medical science has been among the most trusted of all sectors of life. But the Pew Research Center documents that it has taken a huge hit this year. It’s not as bad as elected leaders in whom three-quarters of Americans say they have little or no trust, but it’s still bad.

And yet, however many people think these things in private, these opinions were nowhere in the mainstream media for the better part of two years. The near-universal opinion was that Dr. Anthony Fauci was a genius with the best interest of the country at heart. Dissidents were silenced and punished with throttles and bans. The government collaborated with Big Tech to mark all opposition to the extremist lockdowns and mandates as misinformation.

What effect does that have? It causes the opposition sectors to migrate into a Samizdat category, a banned point of view that’s nonetheless widely held. Think of opposition to Communist Party rule in the Soviet Union in the old days. Trust in the party was nearly zero, but that was hardly ever expressed in public culture. As a result, people felt a sense of shame for holding perfectly reasonable views.

In fact, most people who today disagree profoundly with regime priorities during the pandemic don’t know that some of the world’s leading experts on the topic shared their views completely. There were some who spoke out—not nearly enough—but there was a conspiracy from the top to crush and discredit them. We know this. We have the receipts.

The government worked closely with social media companies to shut down scientifically informed voices, which isn’t only an outrage against truth and justice; it’s also a flagrant violation of First Amendment rights.

Still, the censors succeeded in keeping these reasonable views out of the mainstream of the public mind, which is to say that their censorship worked. You and I might be pleased to have read the right Substack or encountered a contrarian book or paper. But remember that for every one piece of exposure of a dissenting perspective, tens of millions of others receive the mainstream line.

I was speaking to a group of highly informed finance professionals and making all of the above points. They seemed to be in full agreement. But then I became curious and asked how many in the audience had heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. Only six hands went up from the whole crowd.

Six people out of 600! This was a great reality check for me since this topic had reached more mainstream readers and listeners than any other during the pandemic. But in this crowd of highly educated professionals, only 1 percent had even heard of it.

This statement of public health principles has nearly 1 million signatures after a year of being online, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the daily reach of Fauci’s pronouncements. Even if people don’t really believe what they read and hear from the mainstream, a reputable alternative has never really had widespread reach.

The sad reality today is that people who have a seriously informed understanding of the issues underlying the great public health and economic calamity of our lifetimes—and perhaps in all of modern history—constitute a very tiny group. This is the triumph of the censors.

This leaves us today in a very strange position. An economic crisis is brewing, and inflation has already wrecked the value of wages and savings. This is a direct consequence of the pandemic lockdowns and wild congressional spending packages that were funded entirely by funny money created by the Fed. When Americans want to know why all of this is happening, they need only reflect on the policies over the past two years.

And yet, when you scour the mainstream media for this point of view, it’s extremely difficult to find. Even now, there has been no large effort to rethink what happened. Instead, we get the Orwellian memory hole. The entire lockdown experience is being dropped from memory simply because it was such an unworkable disaster but nonetheless one backed by the whole of the public and private establishment as if it were a normal and scientific application of public health mitigation strategy.

These days, the whole subject is treated like something weird that goes on in China and nothing more. The New York Times and CNN write about China’s continuing lockdowns as if nothing like that ever happened here, even though that did happen here. We just pretend otherwise.

Another strange effect of censorship is to train the public mind in a kind of protocol of compliance. We all know what we can and can’t say. We can believe what we want to believe of course, but constant compliance has spillover psychological effects. Force a person to behave as if he believes something long enough and it might eventually become an authentic belief. Even worse, a person comes to believe that authenticity and truth don’t really matter anymore.

I’m graced often these days with the opportunity to speak out about lockdowns and mandates and the remarkable disaster of the past 2 1/2 years. I often hear from listeners that it isn’t only educational; it’s also therapeutic. People truly need to talk, share, learn, decompress, and come to terms with the trauma that all of this has been for the world.

My message states to many people that they aren’t insane, evil, victims of misinformation, or dangerous non-compliers. Instead, they’re reasonable and responsible citizens who are looking at facts and reality for what they are. And the reality is that the ruling class that imposed this new order of things on the world is the real danger.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served such a crucial role in the latter years of communism and after simply because he told the truth that everyone knew in their hearts but couldn’t formulate fully or state without penalty or personal trauma. He said openly and with moral passion what multitudes knew but couldn’t say.

There’s a crying need today for a coming together of reality and public culture instead of the preposterous game of pretend that Big Tech and Big Media play every day. They know they were and are wrong, but they have to keep up the masquerade as champions of science and slayers of misinformation. They wasted vast amounts of their own credibility in the effort and seem determined to keep it up until their reputations are in complete ruins.

—Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.”

Jennifer Fischer here, blogging for Kevin. He thought you’d be interested in watching the Trick or Treat mess be addressed by the council. Kevin says there are three critical letters to keep in mind during this entire debacle:

C – Y – A.

In the broadcast industry where I spent a great of time that’s called a tease, a promo. A clever way to entice listeners and viewers to stick around or tune in later.

A radio tease goes like this. The newscaster says:

Coming up, Donald Trump goes off on Hillary. WTMJ Newstime, 7:35

Then comes the commercial break.

And in television…

You get the idea.

DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL.

“My wife and the older man” is a textbook tease. I’m guessing more than most want to read on. Possibly because you have some sense of what the story might be. But I’m sorry. You’d be wrong. Still good stuff, though.

This popular TV series debuted in January of 1979 and ran for seven seasons.

My wife Jennifer was in the first grade when the blonde star on The Dukes of Hazard” John Schneider got his big acting break…at the age of 18.

Jennifer has told me, many, many, many times how she watched the program religiously and had a massive crush on Schneider. My wife was wise to focus her affection on Schneider. He’s managed to accomplish quite a feat: become a conservative Christian filmmaker.

That means the major news networks and newspapers would shy away from any kind of update on his career. But The Epoch Times has done a wonderful piece on his accomplishments.

Making Movies Outside of Hollywood: Actor–Filmmaker John Schneider Blazes His Own Trail

BY DAVE PAONE, SEPTEMBER 6, 2022 

Hollywood loves a “fish out of water.” Put a poor family from the Deep South into a posh, Los Angeles suburb and you have “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Put a New York City lawyer and his Park Avenue-loving wife on a rural farm and you have “Green Acres.” Put a hardboiled, Philadelphia detective into an Amish community and you have “Witness.”

One might say actor-producer John Schneider is a real-life fish out of water.

Schneider, both a conservative and a Christian, found that jobs become less frequent after his political and religious values were known in the industry.

“What they do is they just don’t hire you,” he told The Epoch Times.

There was a time when Schneider was the go-to presenter or host on award shows.

“A lot of that dried up. A lot of that went away, because again, the people who have control of the microphone don’t want anyone else’s narrative to come through the airwaves,” he said.

Schneider has found a way around that predicament. But let’s start at the beginning.

‘The Dukes of Hazzard’

At the young age of 18, in 1978, Schneider landed the acting job that launched his career. He played Bo Duke, one of a pair of brothers in fictional Hazzard County, Georgia, in the television series, “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

For seven seasons, the “good old Duke boys” and their cousin, Daisy Duke, went wild—much to the chagrin of the corrupt county commissioner, Boss Hogg.

Although technically a one-hour drama, there was a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor from cartoonish characters, with “yee-ha!” shouted from the mouths of Bo and his brother, Luke, quite often. The series ran from January 1979 through February 1985.

All during that time, the Duke boys drove a tricked-out 1969 Dodge Charger, dubbed “The General Lee.” As did the real General Lee, their set of wheels had a Confederate flag. It was painted on the roof, often prominent in shots in the never-ending car chases in the series.

In the 1980s, no one cared.

An Early Example of Cancel Culture

By 2015, the world was a different place; or, at least the United States was. After a mass shooting of black congregants at a South Carolina church, it was learned that the white gunman had previously posted images of the Confederate flag. At the time, “The Dukes of Hazzard” was in syndication on the cable station TV Land.

Executives at TV Land concluded since the shooter was racist, and had posted pictures of the flag, and the Duke boys had said flag on their car, then they must be racist as well. They pulled the series from the lineup.

“It’s absurd, but that’s true,” Schneider said.

“‘Dukes of Hazzard’ was not a racist show in any way,” he said. “When they said that the General Lee and therefore everyone who drove it or had anything to do with ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ was in fact a racist, it was absurd.”

“I have not one time had a black man, woman, or child come up to me and express any concern or problem with ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ or the General Lee, ever,” Schneider said.

He actually sees the cancellation as a blessing.

“But in many regards, it made the show more cultish, more popular,” he said. “Nothing will make people want to do something more than The Man telling them they can’t.”

A Long, Successful Career

As an actor, Schneider has had a long, successful career, mostly in episodic television. He had a supporting role on “The Haves and the Have Nots” with Tyler Perry for eight seasons, and played Clark Kent’s father for 10 seasons of “Smallville,” to name a few shows. One of his most recent appearances was the “Love is On the Air,” which premiered in 2021.

Schneider is also an accomplished musician, and his latest album, “Southern Ways,” was released in March. Among its 11 new tracks is the touching song, “Younger Man.”

For the general public, this looks very easy and glamorous, but the entertainment industry is both cutthroat and fickle. Getting a job can be downright impossible and the public’s tastes change, which can sink the careers of even the most successful actors.

For Schneider, being a conservative Christian in Hollywood makes getting and keeping work that much more difficult.

John Schneider Studios

There are five steps to making movies and television series: development, preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution.

For many aspiring filmmakers, getting past step one is nearly impossible. Development is where actors are attached and, more importantly, money is raised. For the most part, finding money is dependent on the major studios. Getting blessed by the studio gods is something every filmmaker wants but few get.

Once a filmmaker accomplishes step one, steps two through four (actually making the movie) are the easy parts, comparatively speaking. But step five, getting the movie in theaters and on streaming services, can be just as impossible as step one. A filmmaker may scrape up the money to make his movie, yet can’t get a company to distribute it.

For the filmmakers who rely on studio money for production and distribution, their lament is being at the mercy of meddling executives who want endless changes but don’t really know much about making movies.

Schneider has found a way around all of this: He opened John Schneider Studios in Louisiana, which is both a film studio for rent and a production company for his own movies.

Schneider finances his own movies and has his own streaming service, Cineflix Digital on Demand, to distribute them—all without having to beg the studio gods for support.

Essentially, Schneider has told the powers-that-be in Hollywood he can make his movies without them. Since he’s paying for everything, there are no meddling studio executives.

On the website for the studio rental, there’s a long list under “amenities” that every production company needs, such as sound stages and production offices, located on John Schneider Studio’s 58 acres. But since it’s in Louisiana, it also has a swamp.

“We have swamp,” said Schneider. “If you’re looking to do a movie called ‘Swamp Thing,’ you don’t want pond; you want swamp.”

A Double Partnership

Not only is Alicia Allain Schneider’s wife, she’s also his business partner. Schneider writes and directs in addition to acting, but leaves the business half of show business to her. He knows that she can’t do what he does—but more importantly, he knows that he can’t do what she does.

Several years ago, Allain was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, which had spread to her bones. With a combination of medical treatment and diet change, she’s currently cancer-free.

Schneider credits the power of prayer for giving them the strength to fight through.

“When we prayed for that, we prayed for the strength to do it,” he said.

Their prayer wasn’t “God, cure this cancer,” but “Put us down the right road so that we can take care of this and, basically, not bother you with it,” he said.

Bo Duke at Heart

Though Schneider was born and raised just north of New York City, he describes it as “a rural place,” and that, most of the time since then, he’s lived on a dirt road.

“Every couple of decades, Hollywood will turn their backs on all things rural,” he said. “So when Hollywood turned their back on dirt roads and fast cars and community depending upon beer-drinking, barbecuing people,” Schneider said goodbye.

And that’s when he bought a swamp in Louisiana.

Small Business

The movies that Schneider makes aren’t big-budget blockbusters. They’re low-budget, and since their distribution is mostly digital with limited theatrical releases, John Schneider Studios is essentially a small business—and he knows that small businesses are the backbone of America.

“Go to that kiosk in Poughkeepsie and buy local coffee. Drink local beer,” he said. “Because this country is only as strong as its individual communities, and those individual communities are only as strong as, basically, the chamber of commerce—and you are at the head of that.”

Schneider encourages everyone to dump the chain restaurants and box stores. “Stop supporting that which you disagree with because it’s convenient.”

A sentiment that Bo Duke would agree with for sure.