SMEARED into Bad Products
Chapter Nineteen
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.
+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.
+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.
+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.
+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence.
+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare.
+ Bad Companies manufacture doubt and controversy to keep us from the Truth.
+ The Captured allow evil to succeed.
+ The Captured allow disease and death to escalate.
+ The Captured allow the degradation of our land, water, and food.
+ Smear Campaigns prevent us from actively opposing Bad Wars.
The majority has shown it now has eyes to see the lunacy in the claims and arguments regarding U.S. + Israel’s latest war in Iran, thanks in part to an increased clarity the people now possess from the last (and also current) war in Gaza. Some of that may be due to just how clunky and flagrant and undeniably unsound the moves have been.
The important confirmation we need next is that the people will also be able to recognize the Pattern & Playbook in all current commercial campaigns, so to shield themselves effectively against those highly engineered operations as well.
When it comes to war, the smear campaign will target the entire body of resistance. In the fight against corporate malfeasance, the opposition attacked is usually a much smaller group, often a single individual activist or whistleblower.
Recall from our study of Bad Arguments, the Ad Hominem fallacy—attacking a person’s character or background instead of addressing their argument. The deceiver is hoping the surface attack on the messenger will be enough to deter us from ever considering the actual content of the message. The tactic is so common and overused, you’d think it would be an obvious and easily surmountable red flag, but in fact it is still one of the most efficient tricks, every time.
This approach focuses on “character assassination,” aiming to isolate the individual and destroy their personal reputation, to render the individual untrustworthy, incompetent, or immoral, thereby removing their influence. The personal life, morality, or private information of the target will be attacked rather than professional work; rumors will be spread about scandals, financial misconduct, or personal indiscretions.
Slander on character is actually the tamer side of the intimidation. Campaign “attack dogs” are released against opponents, which with the upgrading from AI have now grown to entire “bot armies” sent out over the internet to spread lies. Threats and execution of lawsuits present the real and present danger of financial ruin. And beyond reputational and economic injury, many whistleblowers and truth-tellers have been suicided and killed for their speaking out against powerful corporations.
In the 1960s, consumer protection activist Ralph Nader wrote a book exposing General Motors car safety issues. Concerned that the book might jeopardize sales, GM hired private investigators to harass him. The company’s detectives tapped his phone to listen to his private conversations, made harassing phone calls, questioned his friends about his private life, and hired women to attempt to seduce him. (Nader sued the company for this, where GM settled and publicly apologized).
In the 1990s, tobacco scientist Jeffrey Wigand turned whistleblower against his company Brown & Williamson, exposing the manipulation of the level of nicotine in their products to create and sustain addiction, which they had falsely denied. The company hired Investigative Group International, who produced a 500-page dossier entitled “The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record”1, which included the most minor of drivers license application errors to outright lies about him, and was distributed to all media. His harassment eventually escalated to termination of his severance and health insurance, lawsuits which also threatened his livelihood, and anonymous death threats against him and his young daughters.
Robert Bilott, the environmental attorney famous for exposing PFAS contamination by DuPont, faced significant intimidation in the form of a long-term corporate campaign to discredit him and his legal work against them. The company, which heavily influenced the local community who were mostly all employed by DuPont, created an extremely hostile environment for the truth, with local newspapers and community groups working as company proxies to question the motives of the lawsuit and breed mistrust of Bilott. Industry front groups with DuPont executives in its leadership team created websites and propaganda to paint the environmental activism as efforts to “deceive the public, threaten our jobs, and destroy our way of life”. All this succeeded to pit neighbor against neighbor, those who were desperate to protect their livelihood against those fearful of or already sickened by the toxic chemicals. (In the middle of his fight against Dupont, Bilott developed a mysterious, unexplained palsy-like neurological condition which doctors were never able to diagnose.)
As discussed in previous chapters, the sustained harassment from the Monsanto corporation’s (now Bayer) smear campaigns are exemplary for their ferocity. The company operated a “fusion center” as part of a sophisticated, multi-year campaign to monitor, surveil, and discredit journalists, activists, and any critics of the company.
Under oath in one of the Monsanto glyphosate trials, the firm’s executives revealed a confidential 2017 program aimed at countering all their opponents called “Let Nothing Go”. The strategy organized responses to any and all media coverage and social media posts involving the company or its products, leaving nothing, not even Facebook comments, unanswered or unsmeared.2
Once the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared the glyphosate in Monsanto’s RoundUp product a probable carcinogen, the company plan detailed how they would “orchestrate outcry and outrage” from the “public” against those UN scientists.
Through industry front groups they published dozens of articles critical of the cancer agency, many of them containing personal attacks on the scientists involved in the glyphosate review. The publications accused the scientists of everything from “corruption, distortion and fraud,” to “conspiracy, lying and secrecy”, even “personal profit and ideological vanity”, despite the fact that the cancer group were volunteers.
Scientists or science work groups are not inherently built to withstand this level of abuse—the denigration and harassment of its employees and weakening of its finances—and very ill-prepared to deal with the infiltration. The persecution the scientific community has faced creates a deep reluctance to make themselves a target by presenting truths that displease a Bad Company.
Unlike with a war campaign that the population is watching closely, these corporate smear campaigns are rarely noticed by the average citizen. But the effects most definitely trickle down to the consumer, in these cases of our consuming toxins without proper warning.
When it comes to Big Pharma’s use of these tactics, it would likely take me the rest of my life to research every specific hit piece published against whomever was trying to get in the way of their profits. There are right now watchdogs in every corner of the world entering the ring with this most mighty Goliath and since most of them lose you will never likely hear the tales.
Here is one story of what you get in West Virginia, or any state, if you support the 30 year-old 340B program aimed to keep rural hospitals afloat and help low and middle-income Americans access expensive prescriptions. After a bill to protect the program promoted by state Senate President Craig Blair was passed, a dark money group dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars into his next primary election spreading falsehoods about him.
Blair claims there is zero truth behind the smear campaign against him but enough West Virginians believed the slurs and he lost his seat.
The exact same mud was slung in Oklahoma when legislators attempted to pass their own bill on 340B aimed to protect essential medical services, including cancer treatments and obstetrical care, across their state. Big Pharma’s lobbying and smear campaign loomed again and succeeded to organize a veto of the bill.3
“Today, rural Oklahoma lost to Big Pharma,” read the statement from the lawmakers. “Out-of-state and foreign drug companies and the dark money interests working for them successfully derailed the most important legislation introduced this year to help the health care providers who serve our most vulnerable communities…These groups spread blatant lies and misinformation to attack us and our fellow conservatives in the Legislature. They claimed we support illegal immigration and gender transition surgeries for minors, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
By conflating those who back a bill which passed the House with overwhelming support with those who back these other unpopular procedures—even though this supermajority GOP Legislature banned these procedures two years earlier—Big Pharma’s feeble cut & paste false claims were enough for industry to win and the people who need health care to lose.
Some of the smears we still contend with are decades, even a century old, yet can still persist to dictate what is undesirable for us, without any reevaluation of the reasoning since the initial false claim.
As we discussed in the Blind Guides of the Body chapter, homeopathy was an established medical system widely used since the 1790s. But, as part of the initial takeover by the pharmaceutical industry, after they shut down all the homeopathic hospitals, pharmacies, and medical schools, the subsequent smear campaign was launched. The propaganda, spread far and wide, claimed anyone who practices, uses, or believes in these formerly-accepted methods would now, suddenly, be considered a “quack”.
One hundred years ago, the most respected members of society utilized and benefitted from homeopathy—influential writers such as William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa M. Alcott, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Yeats, Dostoevsky, Goethe, also figures like Mahatma Gandhi and former American Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley. Yet, once the smears were invented and disseminated, the powerful pharmaceutical giants were able to thoroughly topple an entire field of industry viewed as competition to theirs.
This “quackery” smear would need to brand all those pillars of the community—the big influencers and all believers and beneficiaries of the discipline—as not only wrong, but crazy. And this manufactured claim has held strong in America for over a hundred years. (In France, however, 95% of doctors currently use homeopathy.)4
The Playbook tactics run their course, behind the scenes of public focus, to accomplish the Bad Company objectives:
Claim only their products are legitimate and good; all competing options are dangerous and bad.
Capture a scientific group to publish a seemingly-legitimate report condemning the competition’s arguments as junk science.
Remove the competing options from the market to cut off society from access, and from the information and wisdom of the past.
Smear anyone using or discussing the competing options.
In the case of Big Pharma versus their competitors who also attempt to serve public health, the early smear campaign pejoratives still prevail today: quack, crank, New Age, or pseudoscience. A read through wikipedia’s page on Alternative Medicine illuminates how much of any natural or holistic practice—complementary medicine, functional medicine, integrated medicine, acupuncture, etc—can still be labeled “quackademia”, even as they also acknowledge that the top academic medical centers like the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University, UCLA, and UC San Francisco all have integrative or functional medicine departments.
The industry also attempts to eliminate the desired products from the marketplace all together, on the basis of the false claim that the Bad Company’s product is the better or only solution for what the world wants and needs, on the basis of the smear that the competing products are unscientific and dangerous. Natural remedies, supplements, and alternative therapies are restricted, removed, or made impossible to access or afford by the same monopolistic methods that impede farmers from acquiring organic seed in a domain where the top 10 Big Ag producers control over two-thirds of the seed market and none of them offer anything organic.
If the Bad Companies are unable to rig it so we can’t get the competition’s products, the smear campaign attempts to make it so we won’t want them. This is really the ultimate “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” Jedi mind trick. Convincing us we don’t really want these natural or holistic therapies, we only want the pharmaceuticals. We don’t really want to bother with organic diets, we only want genetically modified food. We shouldn’t trust the quacks, we should only trust the convicted felons! And amazingly, convincing us that our politics should take precedence over our physical health.
None of us wants to be thought of as a quack, or as someone who got fooled by one. Most of us might be very hesitant to risk trusting our bodies to anyone who has one of the pejorative labels somewhere in their wikipedia, (even if we might not follow how or who gave them this label). However, it is critical we realize that any adept PR campaign, if they had enough money and influence, could replace the negative descriptor word with a positive one in the circulating mantras and wikis, and then there would likely be an instant stampede to acquire these non-Pharma therapies and products, once the public felt like they were allowed to listen to alternative perspectives without stigma. These labels become extremely impenetrable gates which block us from a whole host of potential remedies and advances, and keep us corraled into the limited space of believing only their claims and using only their products.
From our earliest interactions in the community, we have learned as social animals that it is troublesome and disadvantageous to be ostracized from the group. These behaviors emerge as early as the grade school playground. The declaration that “Sally has cooties!”, proclaimed out of nowhere and shouted with glee by all, compels everyone to run away from Sally, shunning her for what could be an agonizing amount of formative time. The mob rule mentality quickly and instinctively distances itself from the accused; it does not linger to question the accusation. We all innately understand the accompanying dynamic—if you were to step forward to say, “But, I like Sally, I don’t think she has cooties”—we know what will likely happen next. You will now have the cooties, the mob turns on you, you will be shunned from your peers.
As adults, we could surely withstand the slur of cooties, because no one is going to take that seriously. Yet our current societal climate has never been more saturated and burdened by pejorative-heavy discourse, not too-far evolved from playground taunts. What is officially referred to as the “outrage economy”—social media that relies on rage-baiting to drive engagement and revenue—has produced a bounty of derisive ammo now used in common vernacular far beyond just the Twittersphere. “Trumper” or “insurrectionist” or “racist” to smear conservative political views; “Libtard” or “snowflake” or “cuck” to humiliate liberal leanings, and the accusations of “fascist” and “extremist” hurled from both sides.
Where in Trump’s first presidency, certain extreme theories from the Right which rallied support for his campaign were painted as “QAnon”, in his second presidency, certain extreme theories from the Left which allegedly fueled multiple attempts against Trump’s life are now painted as “BlueAnon”. These labels serve to throw out a lot of necessary skepticism and analytical hypothesis with all the craziness bathwater, and disincentivizes critical discussion all together. There are a lot of extreme and wild theories within each camp, however it is the discussion and analysis which would allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is precisely why these efforts would have to be characterized and exemplified as an undesirable or wasted effort—getting into the ring with the whack jobs—so instead we don’t bother considering or investigating any of it.
Not long ago, it was considered crazy QAnon conspiracy theory to claim Jeffrey Epstein was a central figure in a global “Deep State” pedophile cabal that controls world events, as was their accompanying theory that "Epstein Didn't Kill Himself".
Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 and his death was officially called a suicide. Today, 63% of Americans believe Epstein was murdered, while only 14% believe he killed himself5. By using the former socio-political metrics, this large majority would have to been labeled crazy QAnon conspiracy theorists for believing this.
Same judgment would have to be put on anyone who read the files released this year, which detail a systemic sex-trafficking operation, including accounts of rape and sexual abuse, often involving underage girls "lent out" to prominent elites, or anyone who saw the bizarre and debauched “birthday card” from his rich and powerful billionaire besties. Those who concluded that this sure looks like a deep state pedophile cabal would technically fall under the crazy/conspiracy label.
To quote Breaking Points (the most popular independent populist news program online), “The culture war is used to distract people from the real problems in society around the globe—which is the power of these very billionaires—so it’s not crazy to imagine that they found all these “kooky” conspiracy theories useful.”
Crazy conspiracy theories morph into things that now everyone believes, once the actual truth comes out. After the transition, do the writers of history and wikipedias go back to change the labels for anyone who believed these theories previously from kook to—what? Early adopter?
The smears against the act of theorizing on your own (critical thinking) delay the acceptance of the reality until the truth becomes so obvious that the majority is forced to prioritize the undeniable evidence over its disdain for the smeared group it’s been persuaded to believe are crazy for believing the reality before they did.
This stock go-to smear that anyone mistrusting the system or its “official narratives” is a conspiracy theorist—used effectively since the CIA invented the term to make a pejorative out of any investigation beyond the official narrative about JFK’s assassination—may finally be losing its influence in the same way the antisemitism smear is no longer working to silence criticism against the U.S./Israeli War Machine.
The problem, for us, as always, is that the truth comes out long after the damage is done during the time when the smears were working to keep us from seeking the truth. We often won’t accept the reality until after the bodycounts have become impossible to spin as conspiracy. The tactics used against the truth-tellers not only extend this delay in acceptance but makes it very difficult for society to admit to it even after the truth is irrefutable.
Remember from The Dark Fog of Cognitive Dissonance chapter, the “effort justification” (also referred to as the Sunk Cost Fallacy), when someone has invested heavily in a belief, action, or group, admitting they are wrong feels like a painful admission that they wasted time and energy.
Once a good share of the population has to some degree believed in the PR pejorative slogan (or not thought critically on it or pushed back against it), and even likely then used the pejorative slogan themselves, out loud or in social media somewhere, it then marries this share of the people to the campaign and corners them into positions very difficult to maneuver out of, even if allegiance to the campaign does not benefit them, even if the effects of the campaign are actually harmful to them or others.
We can get trapped on the side of the Bad Company’s false reality and hyped into the social polarities the smear tactics also aim to provoke—the war between who believes what—which sabotages our chances for much-needed discussion and debate on the issues affecting us all. It’s difficult to find common ground with a group of people you’ve already vehemently opposed or openly distanced yourself from. It’s not a coincidental byproduct of their strategy that it feels socially impossible to change our mind and reevaluate in the midst of a smear campaign. This is the intended goal and why the accusations they supply to the public discourse are so ugly and toxic.
We should never lose sight of or underestimate the fact that society in the last decade has lived through an extremely intense and precarious cancel culture movement. Polling at the movement’s height in 2021 found that 64 percent view ‘cancel culture’ as a threat to their freedom and that most people in the U.S. were afraid they would be fired if they expressed their real views on social media. From the #MeToo Movement’s beginnings in 2017 to the mass cancellations in the Antiracism movement of the 2020s to the attempted takedowns of the top “anti-Semitic influencers of 2025” (like Ms Rachel, Tucker Carlson and Greta Thunberg), we’ve all had a front row seat to the sport of cancellation, whipped into a frenzy out of nowhere at any moment. Your closest friends and family, and surely your employer, could turn on you and throw you to the lions without pause. In this environment where no one feels safe, most will self-censor for greater protection. History has shown that the accusations don’t have to be true, or even widely believed, to do the trick of persuading everyone in your playground to distance themselves from you and keep their own mouth shut.
Veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson wraps it up best in her book (I recommend): “The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote“:
Behind most major political stories in the modern era, there is an agenda; an effort by opposition researchers, spin doctors, and outside interests to destroy an idea or a person. The tactic they use is the Smear. Every day, Americans are influenced by the Smear without knowing it. Paid forces cleverly shape virtually every image you cross.
A very few players run the campaigns, determine the targets, create the pejoratives, the spins, the falsehoods. The rest of us only contribute to the campaign by believing those, by neglecting to identify the source of the accusation and any ulterior motivations, by neglecting to think through their arguments using logic and wisdom from past campaigns. If all a Bad Company has to do to remove opposition is to attach an unseemly name to that faction, then we as a society still remain at the elementary school level of reasoning.
The campaigners work tirelessly to provide us an endless supply of mud to sling, which will always eventually solidify around our stance, ensuring we can no longer move to any other position. As long as we’re all cemented into the standpoints they’ve constructed—battling each other instead of the actual sources of harm, and in a state of cognitive dissonance because we were backed into views which often conflict with our actual values and needs—we remain stuck and defenseless against their agendas.
There is some encouraging news to report on the Watchdog scene, which illuminates another instance of the people prevailing over a current smear campaign which had been working successfully to undermine support for one of our most serious public health issues. A few weeks ago, the U.S. House voted 280-142 to approve an amendment which strips liability protections for pesticide manufacturers from the 2026 Farm Bill. Led by a Republican, the amendment blocked the immunity that was about to be awarded to Bayer/Monsanto and the agrochemical criminals to clear from their path the endless lawsuits they faced for the endless harm caused by their product. (Approximately 200,000 Roundup lawsuits have been filed at this point accusing RoundUp of giving the victims cancer, just to remind.). All accounts credited this win to a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) uprising.
Three days before this monumental victory over the current state of captured politicians and regulatory agencies who were set to give Big Ag exactly what they demanded, “The People vs Poison” rally was held on the steps of the Supreme Court in D.C. (as justices weighed in on yet another Bayer lawsuit). The event was a coalition of concerned parents, farming reps, environmental activists, and politicians, who all gave rousing speeches to the crowd about the fight against corporations poisoning Americans. Since the invention of the term in 2024, all these voices now fall under the label of MAHA.
If we were navigating purely by common sense, common values, common desires, (the people want to eat healthy food and drink clean water free of poisons and toxins which cause disease and death), we would not expect a heated battle—between the people—on this subject. But the PR campaign gets in the way of the common sense and the obvious consensus, and does its job to somehow shrink the numbers and hinder the momentum against the Bad Companies who want to sell the poisons, and now want the government to shield them from what they call “crippling liability” when people get cancer from their products.
As we’ve been discussing, the Bad Company, in this case Bayer-Monsanto, knows full well who their target opposition is—it’s these pesky moms and environmentalists!
The smear against MAHA is two-fold and both strategies have been highly successful. One is that tired 100 year-old strategy, the aforementioned “crazy/quack” label Big Industry uses to discredit all those who prefer healthier natural ingredients to synthetic toxic ones (they even call it chemophobia, as if the preference is actually an irrational fear).
This NYTimes op-ed The Kind of Moms Who Fall for ‘Make America Healthy Again’ —sets up the negative connotation in the headline with the verb “fall for” (defined as tricked, deceived, or fooled), and then goes on with a pejorative-filled dissection of the kind of group dumb or crazy enough—“crunchy moms” and “hippie-leaning momfluencers”—to “often fall for bad science”. (Even though the author, a mom herself, admits she also does not want Red Dye #6 in her kids’ food.)
As we’ve shown, industry third parties love the newspaper op-ed sections where they are allowed to malign via an “individual opinion”. Remember the Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really headline from last September, followed by the actual journalism a few months later which conceded A Study Is Retracted, Renewing Concerns About the Weedkiller Roundup , and finally reported on the fact that the 25-year-old landmark paper on the safety of glyphosate was ghost-written by Monsanto. The real facts come out, but that does not often reverse the smear or stop it from circulating.
The other smear against MAHA is obvious and predictable. Even though there has been a decade-old non-partisan grassroots movement focused on nutrition, health freedom, and chronic illness, some very simple well-understood math explains the stigma that has been attached to it once given its new name: Trump = MAGA = MAHA. So, if we are against Trump, as many are, we are therefore against MAGA, and therefore against MAHA. We are then compelled to align with the fear or disdain of this movement who Trump technically resides over, and perhaps even smear them ourselves. Only problem is, darnit, now we’re stuck on the side against fighting to get poison out of our food and water. This is the pickle the Democrats have been in since Trump won the 2024 election with the help of MAHA, even though their party has a longer record of supporting food safety, environmental regulation, and organic agriculture.
A 2026 survey indicates that over 83% of Americans are concerned about too many chemicals in our food and everyday products, with a similar majority wanting the government to take more action on regulation to do something about it. That’s the reality. That large percentage means this is a collective will which transcends political affiliation. But, even though the majority feels this way, the campaigns run by the political and media spin doctors can still make it undesirable or risky for any of us to visibly or audibly support this group.
The signal of change that appeared last week is that at the People vs Poison rally classified as MAHA, there were a handful of prominent Democrat lawmakers who participated, exemplified by this speech from Cory Booker.
What this illustrates is that these (first few) Democrats have overcome the fear of the smear that this cause enjoins you to Trump and Trumpers. The politicians understand that their constituents want and need them to venture out of their safe silos in order to protect the health of the community, although of course we still recognize that they are mostly fueled by a motive to win back voters who once aligned with Democrat environmental values, considering they’ve been silent on these issues up until now. Yet we will not complain, as the bi-partisan presence in this movement also scores a second win in the People vs Smear battle. Since there were representatives from both sides of the aisle actively promoting the same message, the captured media could not easily smear the participants at this rally as “Trump supporters” as they did all last year, or more commonly, ignore the event all together.
I’m one of those who believe the intrinsic state of man is “love thy neighbor”. The development of intensely-collaborative, shared cooperative structures—”the village”—is widely recognized by anthropologists and evolutionary biologists as the foundational cornerstone of Homo sapiens sociology. This set up has enabled humans to overcome immense environmental pressures and flourish in complex social systems. It takes deliberate interference—an alternative version of “the story” of reality zealously repeated to the humans—to disrupt this default position and persuade groups to silo off from each other. So, whenever we are experiencing negative feelings contrary to love for our neighbors, it is crucial to scan the scene to identify if a smear campaign is in effect.
Is there a person or a group of people we have been made to hate or made fearful of? If so, are there concrete (not hypothetical or potential) harmful outcomes which have come from this group, like disease and death? What Bad Company stands to gain power and profit if we hate and fear this group and handicap their efforts to stop the harm coming from the Bad Company? Could this Bad Company be employing a smear campaign as part of the Playbook they use to ensure they can continue profiting and continue to harm people and the planet without adequate resistance?
Like those rural citizens who were made so afraid of “Far Left Swamp” ideas that they voted against saving their own county’s essential medical services, or the moms who want to protect their children from unsafe ingredients but don’t want to be called MAHA during a Trump administration, we can be swayed to act (or abstain from acting) against our own beliefs, against the most up-to-date logic, against our best strategies for survival. We will often cut off our own foot before putting it down where the PR campaign has deemed is the wrong side of the gate that they control.
Hard numbers and hard logic should be able to beat a Bad Company’s lies and manipulations. Seeking and understanding the truth about the environment we exist in should be the ultimate goal, even over wins in the culture war or any particular election. Because the truth-tellers, if they were successful, were allowed to be, would save lives. The smear campaigns don’t just sully the reputations of protesters and watchdogs, they actually thwart their efforts to stop mass killings of humans.
But—things are breaking apart in the monolithic political polarity game. The Right is being splintered as opposition to war is being prioritized over opposition to the other political party. The Left is splintering as opposition to getting sick and dying by the hands of Bad Companies is being prioritized over opposition to the other political party. Once unstuck from our rigid positions on opposite poles, we can enter the large space in between, where nuanced perspectives allow for more complex comprehension of the dangers in our country we most need to defend ourselves against. If allowed into this space, liberated from the manufactured opinions created by a smear campaign, we quickly see that ALL of us want to be at peace, safe and healthy at home, and we’re willing to collaborate to attain these inherent, inalienable, fundamental human rights.