Guest Post by Margaret Anna Alice
“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of freedom of speech.”
—Noam Chomsky, interview included in Manufacturing Consent
I know what you’re thinking.
Noam Chomsky seems an unlikely companion for a disquisition in defense of civil liberties.
I’m not talking about the authoritarian, enemy-defining, menticided Chomsky who in 2021 advocated for the isolation, stigmatization, and deprivation of those who exercise their right to refuse an experimental injection.
I’m talking about Vintage Chomsky.
The Chomsky who wrote Manufacturing Consent.
The Chomsky who uncloaked the mud-throwing tactic of kafkatrapping:
“I don’t mind the denunciations, frankly. I mind the lies. I mean intellectuals are very good at lying. They’re professionals at it, in a wonderful technique. There’s no way of responding to it. If somebody calls you, you know, an anti-semite, what can you say? ‘I’m not an anti-semite.’ Somebody says you’re a racist, you’re a Nazi, you always lose. The person that throws the mud always wins. Because there’s no way of responding to such charges.”
The Chomsky who defended a Holocaust denier’s right to express his views:
“A professor of French literature was … brought to trial for ‘falsification of History,’ and later condemned for this crime, the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it. Later he was beaten practically to death by Jewish terrorists. As of now, the European and other intellectuals have not expressed any opposition to these scandals; rather, they have sought to disguise their profound commitment to Stalinist-Nazi doctrine by following the same models, trying to divert attention with a flood of outrageous lies.”
The Chomsky who recognized the don’t-think-of-a-white-bear Streisand effect created by laws that criminalize unpleasant speech and thought:
“I don’t think the way to deal with neo-fascist groups is to try to shut them up forcefully. You should try to win the argument. It’s quite remarkable to see how it works. So take say, Holocaust denial. In a lot of Europe, Holocaust denial is a crime.…
“In the United States, it’s not a crime. The consequence is that in the United States, Holocaust denial is unknown. There’s plenty of it.… Nobody pays any attention to it.…
“In France and a lot of Europe, it’s all over the front pages, ton of publicity. Some guy somewhere does some marginal thing, everybody knows about it. It’s a way of giving publicity to Holocaust denial. If you treat it the sensible way, it’s about like somebody claiming the earth is flat—okay, forget it, it has no impact.
“I just don’t think it’s even tactically the right way to deal with say, neo-fascist groups, and it does give them an argument. As you said, they can claim freedom of speech, which is a value we all uphold.”
The Chomsky who identified the “Stalinist-style technique to silence critics of the holy state” and “the endless lies of the Anti-Defamation League.”
The Chomsky who warned us about the five filters of the mass media machine.
The Chomsky who pointed out “the difference between defending a person’s right to express his views and defending the views expressed.”
The Chomsky who condemned the hegemonic State:
“There’s no concern for justice and there never was. States don’t have a concern for justice. States don’t act on moral grounds.…
“They are instruments of power and violence, that’s true of all states; they act in the interests of the groups that dominate them, they spout the nice rhetorical line, but these are just givens of the international system.”
The Chomsky who exposed the hypocrisy of practicing censorship in the name of “protecting” Jews:
“It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”
That Chomsky.
But can we learn anything from present-day Chomsky?
We can learn that no matter how awake we think we are, how aware we are of the tricks used to propagandize us, how skeptical we remain of media and the State, or how knowledgeable we are about history, there but for the grace of God go we.
We can learn that we must ceaselessly guard our hearts from the emotional manipulators, our minds from the behavioral psychologists, our souls from the totalitarian morality inverters.
And we can learn that perhaps even those prodigal thinkers who have strayed from the truth-seeking path can sometimes find their way back, step by step, like Chomsky appears to be doing in this July 2022 interview, where he states:
“Without freedom of speech, we have no hope of dealing with any of the problems that concern us. We can see this very clearly today, very dramatically. Take the United States today. It is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev.…
“The United States has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing and which in fact go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia.…
“Anyone who dares to break the party line on the dominant issue of today—Ukraine—is simply demonized, vilified. Can’t be sent to the gulag; it’s a free country still, but you can barely talk. And that has very dangerous implications for the current situation and beyond. All of this is very serious.”
Now substitute “COVID” for “Ukraine,” Noam. And every other dominant narrative pumped out by Pravda. And you might just learn something from—and about—yourself, too.
My Conversation with Mickey Z. on the Post-Woke Podcast
The magnificently magnanimous Mickey Z. and I discussed Chomsky as an object lesson in humility and a reminder of the need to perpetually practice “intellectual self-defense” in a recent Post-Woke Podcast. Take a listen and sign up for Mickey Z.’s Substack to catch more stimulating conversations and posts. (Tidied AI transcript below thanks to the generous efforts of a friend who wishes to remain anonymous; I’ve done some cosmetic cleanup for clarity and flow and inserted links to referenced materials.)
Post-Woke
I also encourage you to support his Helping Homeless Women NYC project. For nearly seven years, Mickey has been buying food, supplies, and gift cards to hand out to homeless women, practicing on-the-ground love instead of virtue-signaling “activism.”
MZ: Hello, free thinkers. I’m Mickey Z, and I welcome you to Post-Woke, the New York City–based podcast where we practice intellectual self-defense.…
As I’ve documented on this podcast and as a guest elsewhere, I was once a prominent “left” activist before eventually moving on by mutual decree. I’ve since been embraced by what might be called the right, only to find that in many ways, it was a mirror image of the radical left I knew. For example, preaching to the converted, infighting high school–like tactics, virtue-signaling, groupthink, confirmation bias, the silencing of questioners, thought policing, and paranoia.
What I’ve seen is that people all across the ideological spectrum believe they are the truth-teller who is so effective that the cabal must specifically bring them down. And we’ve reached the point now in this so-called medical freedom truth movement that we have dissident medical professionals clogging up Zoom with nonstop conferences, some of which have already reached the third annual stage. So, across the spectrum, the true believers are left wondering when and if the sheeple or the Good Germans or whatever they call them will ever wake up. So, with all that as preface, I want to bring in my guest, Margaret Anna Alice. Welcome to Post Woke.
MAA: Thank you, Mickey. It’s an honor to be here.
MZ: Thank you for being here. So, having said all I said, I want to clarify to you and the listeners, it’s not about confrontation, because I’m not sure where you stand, anyway. I am genuinely interested if and how our activist experiences might differ. So, I’m guessing that a big chunk of my listeners are familiar with you. But I want to start with this as a question, What were you doing leading up to March 2020, and what led you to your Substack page and its large and sustained readership?
MAA: I never really considered myself an activist, especially before March 2020. I have always thought of myself as a writer, and I’ve always been interested in a broad spectrum of disciplines—politics, psychology, literature, lots of dystopian fiction, things like that, and neurology, neuropsychology.
Pretty much all of the topics I naturally gravitated toward throughout my life as a reader and a writer converged in March 2020. And because I’ve always been interested in propaganda and mass control and psychological manipulation, it was quite evident to me from the outset that this was a manufactured crisis. I was initially just attempting to reach out to people I knew. I was using Nextdoor.com and connecting with people in my community and trying to expose what to me were very obvious lies and attempts at coercion. And I pretty quickly began seeing it was almost impossible to communicate because almost anytime I would share a link to a scientist or a physician or some documentation that countered the mainstream narrative that was all in lockstep, my comments would get deleted.
It was in April of 2021 that I was writing a comment in response to a Nextdoor post, and [the post] basically said, “These masks are not about health; they’re all about control.” By the time I finished writing my comment, the post had been disappeared.
That is what prompted me to start my Substack. I wanted a place to share my writing where I wouldn’t have to worry about being censored. And I didn’t really expect that much to come out of it, but my husband encouraged me to submit my article to OffGuardian.
My first article was called A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind Killer, and my audience grew from there. I was really surprised at the overwhelming enthusiasm with which it was greeted. I was just trying to formulate all of the things that were swirling around in my head … the divisive rhetoric, the fearfulness that was being sown, and the counterintuitive “health” recommendations that contradicted everything we previously understood regarding herd immunity and the inefficacy of masks for respiratory illnesses, things like that. So it blossomed from there.
A Primer for the Propagandized
“Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.” —George Orwell The noose is dangling gently around our necks. Every day, they cinch it tighter. By the time we realize it’s strangling us, it will be too late. Those who gradually and gleefully sacrifice their freedoms, their autonomy, their individuality, their livelihoods, and their relati…
MZ: Okay, and I could totally relate to that. Thank heaven for Substack in general, but certainly during this situation, and there is a lot of solace to be found in even just being heard. And I can relate to you we’re being shut down prior to being on Substack, and I was using Facebook, believe it or not.
MAA: Wow.
MZ: And it was sort of self-sabotage to stay on there at this point. So, the OffGuardian article helped to bring people over, and then it blossomed. I mean, I would assume—you’re a good writer. You offer copious amounts of evidence. I’ve never seen anyone embed more links.
I’m sure you’ve heard that a thousand times, but I’m a fan of that because going back to a different time period, two of my much earlier books were alternative histories related to war propaganda. And they were very, very diligently annotated because for all the reasons that everyone listening would know is that if you come on a podcast and say, all right, guys, you got to wear two masks, no one’s going to ask you for evidence. But if you say anything to the contrary, they’re going to squeeze you and not give you enough time and make you look like you’re a lunatic. And it’s very brilliant at creating this.
So, once you’re on Substack and begin to build an audience, did you feel—as I did after some point—that it was useful, but at some point you felt like maybe you were singing to the choir, and then probably the people who disagreed with you were on some other site, maybe Facebook or Twitter at that point, and they were singing to their choir or being sung to by an eloquent voice like yours? And that creates even deeper schisms between the two sides. Did you notice that? And if so, how did you manage that?
MAA: Good question. I actually did gradually come to realize it was going to be almost impossible to get anyone who was on the other side of the debate to actually read my articles. I started my Letters series with a piece called Letter to a Covidian. And I know that term can come across as maybe dismissive of the people I was trying to address, but I of course borrowed it from CJ Hopkins, and for me, it wasn’t necessarily about denigrating the people I was trying to reach but rather about showing them their own values had become inverted and their compassion weaponized against them as part of this inculcation into this ideological compliance that was causing them to turn against their neighbors.
And instead of coming together, like typically occurs in a genuine crisis, the propagandists were turning them against each other. I was trying to reach into that part of them that I told them in the letter … go back to two years ago and ask what yourself from two years ago would think about the way you’re behaving and you’re thinking now.
Letter to a Covidian: A Time-Travel Experiment
Hello there. I understand you’re a believer. You have zealous, unwavering faith in the System. You Trust The Science™. You deem anything that falls beyond the margins of the approved narrative “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” and “fake news.”
To answer your question, even though I can’t necessarily directly reach the people I’m trying to talk to and wake up, I feel like my work serves as essentially a tool. I have a Wake-up Toolkit that organizes all of my articles by topics and really, it’s something that I’m creating for my readers who are already awake, but they can then use that to help wake up people they know. It isn’t necessarily that I’m reaching them directly, but my readers can use it for their own purposes. They can pull out the evidence.
Wake-up Toolkit
Below you will find my articles organized by topic so you can readily reference and share them as the need arises. You can also visit my archive to view all of my content in reverse chronological order.
Like you said, I do extensively hyperlink practically every word of my articles. And that’s because I’m not going to sit down and say, “Here’s what I believe, and this is what you should believe, too.” I am simply presenting the evidence I have compiled, and I link to it so people can then go and assess it and make their own decisions. I’m trying to empower people to be independent critical thinkers and not to just repeat or regurgitate a mantra like “Trust The Science” that the propagandists have pounded into their heads.
Going back to preaching to the choir. I wrote a piece maybe around a year ago called Letter to My Karass.… I have a number of pieces that are dialogues with people I’m debating on different platforms—Twitter, Facebook, whatever, who are very entrenched in their views. And it became clear that presenting evidence and trying to argue rationally and show my perspective versus theirs was causing the backfire effect, which caused them to dig their heels in deeper in terms of their point of view. And so I was realizing my role isn’t necessarily to try and wake up people who don’t want to be woken up, because that’s not going to work. What I am here partly for is to inspire and galvanize the Resistance and provide tools for my readers to do their good work in whatever form it takes.
Letter to My Karass
I am posting this in celebration of reaching 12,000 treasured individuals on my mailing list. I originally intended it for the big 10K, but that milestone occurred amidst the whirlwind following my Corona Investigative Committee presentation and by the time I caught my breath, I’d reached 12,000 (12,038, to be precise). Thank you for choosing to be a pa…
MZ: Thank you for that. Yeah, it’s the Wake-up Toolkit, right, that you have there. I’m saying—talking to the listeners now—if there is an area related to the past three-plus years, it’s covered in there. And if you have people in your life demanding evidence, like I’m talking about tons of evidence, it is an incredible resource.
And I do want to come back to at some point in this conversation, I want to come back to your saying how someone in your position or mine can’t directly reach a lot of the people we want to reach. I want to use that as a segue later, and I definitely want to come back in a minute to that you’re not telling people what to think, but I really like the phrase that compassion is being weaponized—because you’re then talking about asking people to put themselves in their mindset pre-Plandemic.
It reminds me of what people do to talk to folks who have been drawn into a cult, where people say something like, How could you be so stupid to be in a cult? But quite often it’s a very intelligent, compassionate person who, as you phrased it, had their compassion weaponized. It’s like they suddenly find this tunnel vision avenue where they can actually make a difference in the world—only, they’re being exploited.
And I don’t think it’s inaccurate to talk about what the mainstream narrative has done as being very cultic, so I’m glad you highlight that because … it’s recognizing the folks we’re disagreeing with in many cases have good intentions and are motivated by emotions like compassion. It’s just that the more they’re being pushed, suddenly you can’t find any of that compassion in there.
But I do want to share something. When you talked about how important it is to not tell people what to think, it reminds me of a TED Talk by an author named Julia Galef.… She juxtaposes the soldier mentality, which is protecting your viewpoint at all costs, with the inquisitive outlook of a scout, which is motivated by exploration. And she asks, What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs, or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?
MAA: I like that.
MZ: How does that resonate with you? Go in any direction you want from there.
MAA: Well, obviously I resonate with trying to have clarity in terms of reality and the propaganda we’ve been bombarded with that is designed to invert our reality. It’s very Orwellian. It’s employing gaslighting techniques and wielding our cognitive biases against us.
And for me, partly this whole exercise of doing my Substack and doing writing has been an exploratory process, and I’m constantly absorbing new information. I’m always trying to get a broad spectrum of sources. I view everything with a critical lens and don’t necessarily accept something just because it comes from someone on “my side.”
One of the liberating experiences I’ve had—and I wrote about this in my two-year Stackiversary piece, was recognizing my own cognitive biases and how my in-group and out-group biases were affecting my interpretation of events. And so, by simply being able to see those lenses—even though I can’t always control them—being aware of them helps me see past that. And that’s what I try to help other people do as well. Basically, I realized I’m liberated from those labels.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
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Chomsky is one of a million examples of why no man is fit to rule another. He’s brilliant and right – except when he’s not.
Abolish the state. If you need a ruler . . . look skyward.
.
MORE:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/?s=romans+13
Romans 13 – more of the self proclaimed ‘Apostle’ Paul’s heresy.
“Render unto Caesar” was one of Jesus’ most brilliant and powerful teachings. And as always Paul ignores its remarkable nuance and instead subverts Jesus’ teaching with the pagan “divine right of kings”. I despair that people who call themselves Christians accept such obvious manipulation
I always go with Acts 5:29 .
” Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.”
If this article had ended right before
it would have been an excellent article. Why do writers seem to think that more is better? An article, like a comment, loses my interest as it meanders on and on and away from the central theme.
I don’t care what Chomsky has to say or think.
Like most men, who he was isn’t who he is now.
I’ll take Goebbels over Chomsky any day.
Correct. Goebbels was a far greater man than Chomsky.
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb64.htm
Give it up. Chomsky is and always has been a member of the controlled opposition. All his ideas on consent and propaganda had been around for decades. The Nobel Prize he was given for nothing is all the proof you need he’s not on our team. He was publicised and promoted during the Vietnam era as a way to divert public anger into a dead-end. His home base at MIT was instrumental in faking the moon landings in the 60’s. Nothing he has said or done has ever been a positive for the people of the USA. His disgraceful statements during the covid era prove he is no lover of freedom and is nothing but a tool of the state.
I’d agreee with that assessment. I went back and looked at a lot of Chomsky’s early debates from the 60’s when he first emerged as one of the leading intellectuals and you could see how stage managed his pserona appears. There doesn’t seem to be a core philosophy, but rather an appearance of deep thinking that can be used for any occasion even if it requires taking positions that are illogical, like his flu tirades.
It appears as if everything truly is fake and gay.
Eye of Thundera! Give me sight beyond sight!
lol. Can the end be far off?
Chomsky was never a ‘truthseeker’.
Chomsky, no matter what he really is/was, was among those who made me realize it is all a charade. The propaganda, manipulation, coercion..all part of a plan to keep Man down.
Then Plandemic WAS The Road To Damascus……………
Always try and learn something from everyone, friend or foe.
I consider a portion of NC’s works, as he wrote them, as under the Craft of Censorship The Campaign Death Algos began before common day practice of censorship.