Trump, COVID and Your Mental Health

David Hockney Nichols Canyon 1980

There are two things happening simultaneously in the world today that affect the lives of many millions of people, but that we are told we cannot talk about: Hunter Biden and a second wave of lockdowns. As if the US presidential election and COVID19 are not in and of themselves stressful enough, now we also may not discuss them, other than to “parrot the party line”. This is having a severe impact on our mental health, though nobody apparently wants to talk about that either.

The whipped up fully one-sided frenzy for clickbait in the MSM on the topic of Donald Trump Orange Man Bad, aligned with RussiaRussia, Julian Assange and anything that can be mixed in in order to keep the narratives flowing, have split America, and much of the rest of the western world, in half, though probably not exactly down the middle, as we will find out after the election is done. And there, too, the MSM is sure to whip up more frenzy. Because it sells to pit people against each other.

So we find ourselves with Glenn Greenwald leaving his The Intercept because his own organization refuses to let him discuss Hunter Biden, though he is undoubtedly a newsworthy subject. Even if the entire MSM attempts with all its might to deny this, joined recently by Twitter and Facebook.

As I said a few days ago: “A strong sign of what US media has become, that Greenwald needs to go to Fox to be able to tell his story.” But that’s what this has turned into. Of course now you have people saying: “look who Greenwald’s hanging out with these days”. Well, he’s with the only people who won’t censor him. And say what you will, but Greenwald is as eloquent as ever. You may not like what he says, but that is still undeniable. Which, combined with his track record, means censoring him is nuts. As Matt Taibbi described:

Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept

Greenwald, after commenting pointedly about the reaction by press and Democratic Party officials to the New York Post story, reached out to Intercept editor Betsy Reed to float the idea of writing on the subject. The first hint of trouble came when Reed suggested that yes, it might be a story, if proven correct, but “even if it did represent something untoward about Biden,” that would “represent a tiny fraction of the sleaze and lies Trump and his cronies are oozing in every day.” When Greenwald retorted that deciding not to report on one politician’s scandals because those of another politician are deemed worse is a “corrupt calculus” for reporters, Reed expressed concern. Based on this, on his comments on Twitter, and other factors, she worried that “we are headed for a conflict over the editing of this piece.”

Greenwald insisted he wasn’t planning an overwhelming amount of coverage but wanted to do a single article, reviewing the available facts and perhaps asking the Biden campaign to comment on the veracity of the Post story. Reed agreed that he should write a draft, then they could “see where we are.” An aside: when reporters and editors interact, they speak between the lines. If an editor only ever suggests or assigns stories from a certain angle, you’re being told they don’t particularly want the other angle. If your editor has lots of hypothetical concerns at the start, he or she probably won’t be upset if you choose a different topic. Finally, when an editor lays out “suggestions” about things that might “help” a piece “be even stronger,” it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through.

Tucker Greenwald
https://twitter.com/i/status/1322003267182682113

In exactly that same vein, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, turned to the Daily Mail to express her views on lockdowns. Because nobody else wants to listen.

A Contagion Of Hatred And Hysteria

Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way. That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent. I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration. As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas. But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal.

The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me. I am not a politician. The hurly-burly of political life and being in the eye of the media do not appeal to me at all. I am first and foremost a scientist; one who is far more comfortable sitting in my office or laboratory than in front of a television camera. Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail. I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.

And Trump advisor Scott Atlas went to RT for the same reasons, only to be “forced” into a cowardly mea culpa for having talked to a “propaganda network”. Well, the real propaganda networks are the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN etc. We’ve seen that an awful lot these last few years, people accusing others of exactly what they themselves have done. Which is precisely what makes Hunter Biden a newsworthy story.

Trump COVID Adviser Atlas Forced To Apologize For RT Interview

Trump administration Covid-19 adviser Scott Atlas ripped public-health officials for “egregious” policy failures – only to be forced to apologize after mainstream media deflected his points by attacking him for appearing on RT. On Saturday, the Stanford University doctor, who has emerged as President Donald Trump’s top adviser on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,” while speaking with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground show. “The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Atlas told RT.

“The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept they were wrong – were wrong, refused to accept they were wrong, didn’t know the data, didn’t care. And it became a frenzy of stopping Covid-19 cases at all costs, and those costs are massive,” he said. “The argument is undeniable: The lockdowns are killing people.” Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. One study showed that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown”, he said.

Further on the lockdowns topic, Howard Beckett tweeted on Sunday about the UK: “Governments own stats have 4% of cases arising from hospitality, 20% from the workplace and a whopping 36% from education. So we shut bars & restaurants and keep schools & universities open.”

I’ve said earlier that a lockdown when days get shorter and nights get colder is a dangerous game. It’s a mental health issue, plain and simple, and one that very much MUST be discussed.

Last but very much not least, “At 10:04 PM on the night before an election, we discover that as part of his investigation into DNC hacking/election interference, Mueller declined to indict Assange and WikiLeaks due to a lack of evidence and First Amendment concerns.” But Buzzfeed, which reported the story, still keeps talking about hacked emails. There never were any. It’s the same thing Mueller himself did when he kept accusations against Assange and 12-13 Russians in his final report. The man should be investigated.

Mueller Declined To Indict Assange And Wikileaks Due To Lack Of Evidence

Prosecutors investigated Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone for the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers as well as for possible campaign finance violations, but ultimately chose not to charge them, newly released portions of the Mueller Report reveal. Although Wikileaks published emails stolen from the DNC in July and October 2016 and Stone — a close associate to Donald Trump — appeared to know in advance the materials were coming, investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing. In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump’s election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous.

The fresh details of special counsel Robert Mueller’s decision not to charge Assange, WikiLeaks, or Stone for their role in influencing the 2016 election come just a day before voters head to the polls for the 2020 presidential election. The material sheds new light on the seriousness with which the special counsel investigated the hacks of Democratic party computers. In July 2018, Mueller indicted 12 Russian officers belonging to the Kremlin’s intelligence directorate, the GRU, for the theft and distribution of those emails. The role that Stone and Assange may have played in the hacks or their distribution has been the subject of much speculation. Little, however, was known about how intently the special counsel focused on those individuals as possible targets for prosecution during the two-year investigation into Russian election interference.

In order to maintain or regain your mental health, you need today to either ignore all news all the time, or you have to make sure you are well-informed. You might even say you have a right to that. But it has become an awful lot harder the last 5 years. Because your formerly trusted media have been selling you out for profit. You have all become clickbait targets instead of respected readers and viewers.

If Trump might lose the election today -or next week, next year, who knows- this entire model will be dead in no time. The media may try to carry on on the back of supposed litigation against him, but that will only go so far. They have bet on one horse, and then tried as hard as they could to cripple it, and now find themselves with nowhere left to turn.

In a way, that’s a good thing. No matter who wins the election, we will end up with better media. If Biden wins, the entire circus will just fizzle out, and if Trump wins, they will be found out. It’s high time. Unfortunately, the brains and minds of countless people will be scarred by the double whammy of Trump Derangement Syndrome and ever more lockdowns for a very long time to come.

But, you guessed it, we cannot talk about that.

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