Brainwashed: Cutting Through the COVID Confusion

By John Schroeter

We are living through an upheaval of such historic proportions that it's hard to know if we were giving birth to a new and wonderful world or actually destroying all that we have known as good, true, and beautiful. But what's behind it all? Is the catastrophic fallout of the global COVID-19 pandemic response simply the result of well-intentioned overcorrection to a mysterious and fearsome disease we believed would mercilessly claim the lives of millions? Or is there something sinister going on? And if the latter, how can we know? Brainwashed -- Cutting through the COVID Confusion, the much-anticipated follow up to John Schroeter's bestselling COVID-19: A Devil's Choice, provides the answers. From the democracy-eroding acids of propaganda to the forging of a new social contract for a New World Order, learn how -- and why -- a COVID-driven global agenda, with its attendant economy of radical degrowth, will lead to less of everything for everyone. In-depth interviews with Oxford's Dr. Kathleen Taylor on the power of propaganda and Dr. Meryl Nass on the disturbing issues surrounding the development of a COVID-19 vaccine lend remarkable new insights to our otherwise murky understandings. The book also examines the slippery slope of contact tracing technologies that are designed to give way to a permanent surveillance state; the counterintuitive truths of the lockdowns and their disastrous effects; what the science really tell us about herd immunity; the fraud-ridden COVID-19 testing industry driving a phony casedemic; the tragic suppression of myriad safe and effective treatments that has led to the needless deaths of tens of thousands (but lined the pockets of the Vaccinati and the COVID Industrial Complex); and more. Brainwashed also takes readers inside the intent of the World Economic Forum's Klaus Schwab, who offers compelling clues to the organization's aims with such declarations as, The possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination. The post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labor. Learn how Schwab and his globalist cohorts at the WHO, GAVI, and other organizations are exploiting the COVID crisis to trigger a massive retraction of both the economy and the world's population. That so many have accepted these assaults with so little resistance -- or questioning -- speaks to the mind-numbing power of the brainwashing techniques and campaigns of propaganda that are being deployed at massive, unprecedented scale. Brainwashed will forever alter your thinking about the most consequential crisis in modern history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John August Media, LLC
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780999736425

John Schroeter

John Schroeter is publisher of the iconic Popular Electronics, Mechanix Illustrated, and Popular Astronomy magazines at TechnicaCuriosa.com, as well as Executive Director at www.TheStartupStudy.com. His deep industry experience spans semiconductors to high-performance computing to advanced automotive technologies. His patented work in eliminating counterfeit drugs from the supply chain was recognized with Frost & Sullivan's Technology Innovation Award. He continues to write consult in the advanced semiconductor and high-performance computing fields, with an emphasis on machine learning applications in defense and healthcare. Schroeter is also the author of several books, including the Prentice Hall classic, Surviving the ASIC Experience, on the design of custom integrated circuits.

Book preview

Epilogue

Prologue

During my years as a music producer, I chatted with Don McLean about his song, American Pie . What, exactly, I asked him, does it all mean? It means, he answered, that I don’t have to work anymore!

That song—a faithful friend in the soundtrack of my life—resonates in very different tones today, as I watch powerful players on a global stage, my hands clenched no less in fists of rage.

There was a time, not long ago, that in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried and the poets dreamed. But now, though, muzzled, not a word is spoken; the church bells, too, are broken.

Strangely, yet also sadly in a way, the music hasn’t died. Not completely: a quartet still plays in a virtual park; others, plaintively, sing their dirges in the dark.

But something has died. And I find it in the penetrating sadness of another of McLean’s songs, Vincent. What was it the painter tried to say to us across his swirling clouds in violet haze—even as he suffered for his sanity?

I wonder, can anything be said or heard today? I don’t know. They would not listen then; they’re not listening still. But still, hope remains—this I do believe—if only as shadows on the hills.

This heartfelt volume is for those with faith enough to cling to those shadows, and who have an ear to hear, even as our world collaborates, colludes, and cooperates in its collective suicide. God bless you, whoever, wherever you are.

We are living in the greatest revolution in history—a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race; not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody.

—Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

. . . in the Big Lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the Big Lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

PART I

The End Game

The Playbook

(CNN Business) A video featuring a group of doctors making false and dubious claims related to the coronavirus was removed by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube after going viral online Monday. We’ve removed this video for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN, adding that the platform is showing messages in News Feed to people who have reacted to, commented on or shared harmful COVID-19-related misinformation that we have removed, connecting them to myths debunked by the WHO.

This opening paragraph of a recent CNN story captures the organizing principle that guides this book: the war of information, misinformation, and disinformation in the quest to drive the pandemic response, from policy to propaganda to paranoia.

What makes the task difficult are the very dynamics that Thomas Merton described in this book’s opening epigram—the presence of the good together with the evil, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalized by the purest and most innocent intentions."

How, then, can one navigate such insidiously convoluted terrain? How are we to sort it out? In short, the only way we can sort it out: by putting it all to the test; by tossing the entire mix into the air to see what blows away as the chaff of agenda-motivated falsehoods and what settles resolutely to the threshing floor as scientific truth. Only then can we divide fact from fiction, science from spin, probity from propaganda.

To these ends, the questions we ask matter, because, as Walter Lippmann explained, "For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a question, they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a fact." And facts have never been of greater consequence.

Notwithstanding, we are witnessing in our day the wholesale dismissal of facts. Never in our history have we seen such a sweeping displacement of truths in favor of a preferred and, I might add, grotesquely corrupted, narrative—a narrative shot through with impudent lies made credible by their inclusion of partial truths, which, it turns out, are more insidious than total falsehoods. Moreover, this creeping cancer sets out to divide the population between the propagandists and those who oppose their aims, aka the enemy.

Disturbingly, today’s COVID propaganda playbook is also shot through with pages torn directly from the book of the greatest propagandist of them all. Read this carefully: "The function of propaganda, Adolph Hitler wrote, is … not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly."

The task of this book, in part, is to show, equally unflinchingly, that this is precisely the game plan that is being played out on the global stage today. And disturbingly so with great effect in this country.

As Thomas Merton illuminates, this state of affairs goes far above and beyond and well beneath the physical and economic surface features of the current crisis. Indeed, it goes to the deep underlying spiritual crises that pit all that is good, true, and beautiful against perfidious dark forces in a struggle for hearts, minds—and souls—in the shaping of human destiny.

The weapons in this struggle are words. And their power should never be underestimated. Of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, wrote Paulo Coelho, the most terrible— and the most powerful—was the word.

Indeed, the world itself came into being by the power of the Word; the constructive, productive, and instructive expressions of true words yield life—and they yield it abundantly. Destructive words, however, are those uttered in the service of disinformation—the organized, systematic dissemination of deliberately misleading information, otherwise known as propaganda. And as we’ve seen, propaganda cannot abide truth, which is why it seeks to contain and control any information that might challenge or otherwise damage its interests.

Propaganda is, in fact, a critical component of psychological operations, methods of which include distortion, deceit, manipulation, and lies (the bigger, the better). And just as we’ve seen in the CNN article, propagandists seek to control the narrative by attacking the veracity of dissenting voices, undermining their credibility via character assassination and through the labeling of their positions as false, dubious, discredited, debunked, dangerous, unfounded, or without evidence.

The word disinformation is actually derived from the Russian dezinformatsia, as used by the KGB. Now, while one could certainly make the argument that the use of propaganda is not unknown in the US, never have we seen it so violently and dangerously applied in our own times and to our own citizens. This is new to us, and we’ve not digested it well: being on the receiving end of propaganda goes against the fabric of the American character, generating in the process a distorted and disorienting sense of reality. Consequently, many Americans do not recognize it for what it is—particularly when it issues from trusted government authorities and healthcare officials. (Tony Fauci, after all, is called America’s doctor.) Others, though, know it when they see it.

Inna Faliks, writing in the Los Angeles Times, explained, Having spent my childhood in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, I’ve inherited a knee-jerk reaction to slogans. Soviet buzzwords were the foundation of our reality, overseen by the holy trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. She writes of the empty Newspeak, buzzwords, and hashtags that have flourished here now, surprisingly, by our own doing as much as by any government indoctrination programs. In other words, propaganda is now propagated by the propagandized!

Indeed, propaganda works best when its targets believe they are acting of their own accord. But mostly, propaganda’s perceived legitimacy just reduces cognitive effort. It’s easy. Reflexive, uncritical responses that tap bias-primed emotions are nearly automatic, effortless. Critical thinking, on the other hand, requires work. Resisting popular opinion is painful, laborious, and potentially alienating. Who wants that? No one wants to be the outlier. No one wants to be ostracized. No one wants to stand apart from prevailing opinion and risk ridicule or scorn or be told they’re threatening the lives of others with their selfishness. In the end, propaganda works as well as it does simply because it has more wind in its sails. And this is yet another reason why disinformation spreads farther and faster than information.

Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, writing in their book, Propaganda and Persuasion, offer a particularly cogent definition of the word:

Propaganda may appear to be informative communication when ideas are shared, something is explained, or instruction takes place. Information communicated by the propagandist may appear to be indisputable and totally factual. The propagandist knows, however, that the purpose is not to promote mutual understanding but rather to promote his or her own objectives. Thus, the propagandist will attempt to control information flow and manage a certain public’s opinion by shaping perceptions through strategies of informative communication. The point is that the propagandist does not regard the well-being of the audience as a primary concern. The propagandist is likely to be detached from the recipients. Not only does the propagandist not care about the audience, but also may not believe in the message that is being sent. In fact, concealment of purpose may not be the only deviousness.

And now, in an age of social media, the dissemination of propaganda is easier than it has ever been, elevated and amplified in the aggregate to yield mass influence that steamrolls normal forms of communication, e.g., interpersonal one-to-one forms of persuasion—the respectful exchange of ideas that can actually serve to enlighten—and without needing to resort to coercion or deception.

To all these ends, Jowett and O’Donnell explain that the propagandist tries to control information flow in two primary ways: (1) controlling the media as a source of information distribution, and (2) presenting distorted information from what appears to be a credible source. Using journalists to infiltrate the media and spread disinformation is one way to present distorted information, they write. Minority opinion may be suppressed to maintain an appearance of a strong base of support. Colluding sources of information that support the propagandist’s intent will be disseminated, whereas opposing sources are likely to be suppressed.

And we’re falling for it.

Suppressed, Stifled, and Spun

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

—Romans 1:18

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), which operated from 1937 to 1942, was dedicated to promoting the techniques of propaganda analysis among critically-minded citizens in order that it may be detected and countered—while instilling awareness of its democracy-eroding acids. In their book, The Fine Art of Propaganda , the IPA explained, It is essential in a democratic society that young people and adults learn how to think, learn how to make up their minds. They must learn how to think independently, and they must learn how to think together. They must come to conclusions, but at the same time they must recognize the right of other men to come to opposite conclusions. So far as individuals are concerned, the art of democracy is the art of thinking and discussing independently together.

Alright, let’s see how these values square with current events. This is rhetorical, of course. They don’t square at all. Today we find that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the New York Times are the new arbiters of medical information. Consistent with propagandists’ need to contain and control any information that might challenge the preferred narrative, they suppress it, using the full force of complicit media. Consequently, what people know is severely limited—or at least requires effort to discover. Propagandists know that the vast majority are too busy, too lazy, or just not sufficiently motivated to do any due diligence. It’s easier to just trust the authorities and follow the crowd.

Sadly, we are seeing this trend of suppression spill over into professional associations and trade publications, as well. Suddenly what was once considered erudite research is no longer relevant in our current climate, as in the example in Figure 1.¹

This lends new meaning to the term climate science, which gets even stormier in the case of Google, whose policy is to ban advertising whose claims they deem to go against the authoritative scientific consensus. Dr. Knut Wittkowski points out the absurdity of the policy. Authoritative science he explains, is an oxymoron. Indeed, there’s been precious little scientific consensus regarding the pandemic response. Scientists, doctors, and officials alike express substantive differences. Hence, Wittkowski concludes, consensus can only mean agreement with Susan Wojcicki’s opinion. . . . This is nothing but fascism. Indeed, disagreement abounds on nearly every aspect of the pandemic! But the honest among us seek to resolve disagreements via dialog—dialog that comprehends reasoned counterargument, supporting evidence, the refuting of errors—skills that appear to be in short supply in many quarters today, and certainly in the media. But we can still insist upon it.

To this end, a 2008 blog post, How to Disagree, by Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup incubator Y-Combinator, inspired the popular infographic, below (Figure 2). It is instructive in that it shows the media to be bottom feeders, relying principally on the lowest rungs of the disagreement hierarchy: name-calling and ad hominem attacks. Interestingly, this is the territory preferred by propagandists. The name-calling technique—that’s actually what the propagandists call it—is intended to incite fear and/or prejudice, obviating, or obliterating by forceful language, any need for fact-based arguments. As such, seldom, if ever, do we find rational counterargument or refutation in articles seeking to discredit opposing viewpoints.

Even rarer are actual debates. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny has participated in many forums for debate, only to find that the opposing side never shows up! They won’t debate us, she explains with a laugh. If we engage in debate, it means that the subject is debatable. And they don’t want to acknowledge that.

Remember, the task of propaganda is . . . not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness.

So, where shall we begin?

When coming to terms with complex and confusing conditions, the application of Occam’s razor is

Reviews for Brainwashed

[marko · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Let’s all do an “Angela” review. I haven’t read the book, either. But I can give you my biased viewpoint, also.

Losing a loved one—in any way—is difficult. Losing someone to covid, or the vax, is even worse. Not for the reasons stated by those who know nothing, except what MSM tells them to believe. But, rather.... because this has all been about SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY, leading to a total surrender of your rights, liberties, your body.... yourself. Capitulating TO Evil, Rich, Egomaniacal, god-wannabe, Possessed Authoritarian Globalist Sadists.

THAT is what and who you should be pissed at. I am furious, and have been since this Plandemic started. Livid, because of what they are purposely doing to innocent people (if you do it to your children, that’s on You). Thankfully, none of my people have fallen into the trap of getting shot. We knew instinctively that it screamed DANGER! A little research confirmed the fact that it’s: an Unlicensed Unapproved Untested gene-editing never-before-used-in-humans toxic poisonous graphene sterilizing prion disease inducing cancerous nanogel 5G operating system binary bioweapon clotShot. Why anyone would willingly offer up their arm, is beyond me.

I am going to read this book. And I’ll leave a pointed review. But, to you lost souls who automatically write off books like this—because of your Lefty leanings.... I ask: whatever happened to Considering the Evidence, BEFORE you blindly accept what the Government (or anybody) is telling you? These authors are trying to HELP YOU. IT MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE.
But, go right ahead and —>Have It Your Way.
At least, get right with God.

[Angela Browne · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Sounds like the writer of this book is a bit brainwashed. He obviously did not have any of his loved ones die or become seriously ill from this condition. His next book should be based on interviews with those that did lose loved ones or have become severely disabled themselves from COVID-19. Amazing as well, those that talk about a new world order, do not also point out that anybody that speaks at an international forum knows they have no authority to impose their ideas on anybody or any country.