Enemies of the People

It is alarming. That we’ve lived here this long, without understanding who are neighbours are, that they turn everything upside down, call the truth a lie and vice versa — and the scariest thing? Is that these people genuinely believe themselves to be free-thinkers.

— Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (1882)

Earl Fowler

So, just to be clear.

If you believe:

• That a United Nations force will arrive in black helicopters any day now to occupy the United States.

• That contrails of water condensation from aircraft (you call them chemtrails) consist of chemical or biological agents the government uses to poison our bodies or control our thoughts.

• That the Nazi-infiltrated Ukrainian Air Force shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in 2014 to frame Russia while also being part of a sinister plot by the elite Illuminati who run the world (more on this later) to conceal the truth about HIV by killing seven disease specialists on board, along with 291 other sacrificial victims.

• That the Coca-Cola Company deliberately brought out an inferior product with the ill-fated New Coke, knowing this would drive up demand for the original product (while diabolically providing a cover for the reintroduction of the old Coke with cheaper ingredients).

• That the Roman emperor Nero is the slaughtered head returned to life mentioned in The Book of Revelation and that he’s planning to retake his throne (I am not making this up).

• That any of the more than 900 books published on the assassination of JFK claiming that there was a conspiracy by the U.S. government to conceal the truth (with the usual suspects being the CIA, the FBI, the Deep State, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the KGB, Lyndon Johnson or some combination thereof) actually get to the truth.

• That Paul is dead.

• That Elvis lives.

• That Hitler faked his death and enjoyed a sunny retirement on a South American mini-putt course.

• That a group of international elites controls governments, industry and the media with an eye to maintaining its global hegemony.

• That this group of international elites (let’s call them the New World Order) consists of (take your pick of any or all of the below) members of secretive cells such as the Illuminati or gentlemen’s clubs like the Bohemian Grove or anticommunist foreign policy forums like Le Cercle or the World Bank or those fiendish NGOs (particularly the World Economic Forum) or Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci or Beyoncé … or, hell, who am I kidding? We all know it’s the Jews.

• That George Soros (speak of the devil) secretly funds all kinds of societies and guilds and syndicates and cabals for nefarious purposes, including that far-left, anti-fascist, anti-racist movement antifa (if you allege this, by the way, you’re in the illustrious company of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Rudy Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones and other deep thinkers).

• That there are any number of cures for cancer that Big Pharma and the medicial establishment have suppressed to maintain their lucrative business at the expense of millions of patients left to suffer and die (Invermectin and bleach have their uses, but turkey tall mushrooms are the real deal, I assure you).

• That 9/11 was an inside job and COVID-19 was either a Chinese hoax or linked to 5G cell towers or developed as a bioweapon in a lab to infect everyone who isn’t either Chinese or, come to think of it, Jewish.

• That ISIS and Boko Haram were created by a) Mossad, b) Hillary Clinton, c) Did I mention the Jews?

• That Sandy Hook and other mass school shootings were staged to promote communistic gun control measures and take away the shotguns farmers need to control vermin (ex-Klan leader David Duke has sussed out Zionist deception).

• That the catastrophic 2018 California wildfires were ignited by space lasers controlled by the Rothschild banking firm (the Jews again — Marjorie Taylor Greene was all-in on this one).

• That the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a false flag operation (just like the Oklahoma City bombing and a million other bombings).

• That Bill and Hill (aka the Clinton Crime Syndicate) have assassinated 50 or more of their associates and enemies.

• That FEMA is building concentration camps in the U.S. to prepare for imposing martial law and genocide.

• That Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim and Michelle was born a boy.

• That water fluoridation is a way to dispose of industrial waste.

• That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a lick of sense on the lethal danger posed by vaccines (pathogenic concoctions which, it goes without saying, cause autism, are part of a worldwide vendetta against Christianity and include radio frequency identification chips to enable Big Brother to track us, unlike, say, the cellphones in our pockets).

• That a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters operates a global child sex-trafficking / pizza-delivery ring that Trump has been sent by the good Lord to root out.

• That the science behind climate change (a Chinese hoax to begin with) has been distorted for ideological reasons as a way to raise taxes and impose a more authoritarian government (heck, we’ve always had hot, smoky summers, melting glaciers, rising seas and dry riverbeds).

• That Biden stole the 2020 election in states run by Republicans and that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were patriots (or CIA and antifa false flaggers just trying to make Trump look bad).

• That the Apollo moon landings were faked and that GPS devices are rigged to make pilots wrongly believe the Earth isn’t flat.

• That Freemasons and/or Catholics were behind the sinking of the Titanic and the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Not to mention the Jews.

• That the Holocaust is a hoax designed to milk sympathy for the “Jewish race”, which, as is well established, originated from genetic engineering carried out by malevolent extraterrestrials engaged in interstellar conflict with the deities of the ancient Sumerians.

• That “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is a historical document laying out the whole dastardly blueprint.

• That Israelis have bought vast tracts of land in Ukraine against the time (soon apparently) when life in the Middle East becomes untenable and its inhabitants move (back) to Eastern Europe. (Moreover, it was this intelligence that really precipitated Russia’s invasion. Not sure how this squares with Vlad’s noble denazification project but ... eureka! I get it! The Jews are the Nazis!)

• That truck convoy participants entertaining baseless claims about government conspiracies can acquire powers of arrest by swearing themselves in.

• That the clowns charged with conspiring to kill Mounties at the Coutts blockade, which paralyzed traffic for two weeks in 2022 at the Alberta-U.S. border to protest COVID rules and vaccine mandates, were freedom fighters defending anything other than their bloated sense of self-importance when they stored a cache of guns, ammunition and body armour in their trailers. (Ditto for the jerks who gummed up Ottawa.)

• That Canadian laws are non-binding because a self-styled legal expert has found loopholes in Confederation.

• That reporters who expose the increasingly deranged lies of the consummate con artist, convicted felon and traitorous autarch seeking to regain the U.S. presidency are enemies of the people … and so on and so forth and did I mention the Jews?

If you believe any of this patent hornswoggle or any of the other more-often-than-not antisemitic bilge, balderdash and baloney that has turned social media into a virulent cancer used by rogue states and bad actors to return the post-Enlightenment world to the Dark Ages, that doesn’t make you a free-thinker.

Rather, it makes you an easily manipulated, useful dupe desperately in need of a course in critical thinking.

It makes you a sheep, just as it did in 1882 when playwright Henrik Ibsen (not to be confused with Henry Gibson) was speaking the unvarnished truth quoted above to the Norwegian society of his day. (That’s Ibsen seriously rocking the sideburns in the accompanying photo, by the way.)

“There is,” as science writer Isaac Asimov admirably diagnosed the malaise well before social media platforms made it possible for all the village idiots to share and reinforce their misinterpretations and pathologies, “a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ”

That is not democracy. It is decay, imbecility, tastelessness. It is suicidal senselessness, astounding asininity.

And while the constant thread might have been nurtured in the United States through the Klan and the McCarthy eras and the John Birch Society and the takeover of the Republican Party by the Moral Majority and the gormless MAGA cult it spawned, susceptibility to wildly irrational conspiracy theories has metastasized through porous international borders to pose a malign threat to the brains of billions around the world.

The enemy of the people is that paranoid husband/sister/wife/uncle/friend/co-worker we all know who succumbs to the delusion that “the elite” are out to get them and embraces the rantings of brash, amoral leaders who know how to exploit this.

Hence Trump’s simpering, self-pitying, sempiternal message about finally facing consequences for his arrant criminality: “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone.”

Yeah, they could. If you’d committed crimes like he has. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

The enemy of the people has emboldened callous, self-serving leaders like Putin and Netanyahu, both doing whatever they can to ensure Trump’s return to power while steering their own countries into very dark holes.

The enemy of the people has opened the door to the return of diseases like polio, the mumps and measles as vaccination rates go down.

The enemy of the people is making it possible for the evangelical right to impose its loathsome contortion of Christianity on all of us while rolling back decades of painstaking, hard-won progress on civil and women’s rights.

George Carlin saw it coming: “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

Just to be clear.