by Dr. Joseph Mercola, public domain
(Mar. 4, 2022) — In the video above, podcaster Joe Rogan interviews Maajid Nawaz, author of “Radical,” a former Islamist revolutionary who eventually became an anti-extremism activist. This is another three-hour-long interview. If you want, you can skip the first hour as it gets more applicable to current day issues after the first hour.
Nawaz’s past experience with recruiting extremists to infiltrate and overthrow Western governments helped him to more clearly recognize the psychological mind games waged against the civilian public during the COVID pandemic. He’s basically spent much of his later life opposing “the manufacturing of consent around something that isn’t true.”
According to Nawaz, we’re in a “hybrid war.” It’s basically an information war, because the primary weapon is information, and whoever gets to define reality with their narrative wins.
He explains how, when recruiting extremists for your cause, you first have to dismantle and destroy their current view of the world. After that, you can then indoctrinate them with your view of the world.
Big Tech obviously plays a crucial role in this war, as they have the technology and the algorithms to influence, manipulate and mold people’s minds by deciding what narratives they’re allowed to see. Social media platforms can easily make it appear as though a minority, fringe position is actually backed by a majority.
Ironically, as Rogan points out, the people who are being brainwashed are in many cases fiercely defending the right of these companies to mold and manipulate them. They support the censorship, they support cancel culture, seemingly not understanding the impact it’s having on their view and understanding of reality and the world at large.
Power Grabs Through ‘Emergency Powers’
One answer to how we got to where we are today is that governments have invoked emergency powers, and those emergency powers often end up becoming permanent. That’s why they were invoked in the first place.
As explained by Nawaz, “emergencies are always used by the state for power grabs.” Once they’ve been able to expand a power under the banner of a national emergency, they keep it. They don’t roll it back. So, when, in 2020, the COVID pandemic was used to suspend human rights, Nawaz knew we were on a slippery slope.
And, as he feared, we’re now experiencing a very radical shift in our social contract with the state. Before the pandemic, the social contract, the generally accepted modus operandi, was that everyone has the right to bodily autonomy. While it’s good to donate blood, for example, you are not required to do so — even if someone’s life hangs in the balance.
No one can demand that you donate a kidney because you have two functioning kidneys and someone else needs one. You have the right to keep both of your kidneys, even if it means the other person dies for lack of organ donation.
Also, if someone is vulnerable to illness due to preexisting conditions, that person has always been expected to take their own precautions. If you have a peanut allergy, you make sure you don’t eat anything with peanuts, for example, and others are encouraged, but not mandated or required, to make accommodations for and be considerate of those who are vulnerable.
What we have never done, Nawaz notes, is make other people responsible for our comorbidities and preexisting conditions and force them to submit to a medical intervention that could harm or kill them in order to improve our chances of survival.
A Radical Shift in Our Social Contract
If the state is going to tell us that we must get vaccinated because it is our duty to protect other people, then that is a very deep and radical shift of our social contract.
So much so, Nawaz argues, that it should require serious public dialogue followed by a democratic mandate. But that’s not happening. We’re now told that we must surrender our bodily autonomy for the common good. If you disagree, you’re simply canceled and eliminated from the public forum.
While not specifically discussed in this interview, this new social contract, sprung on us during the COVID crisis, is actually part and parcel of The Great Reset.1 The surrendering of individual rights — some for now, but eventually all of them — is the “new social contract” that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has envisioned and is pushing out to the world through his installed leaders.
As noted by Nawaz, at the end of the day, it comes down to what kind of society, what kind of world, we want to live in, and “We can’t go from democracy to a ‘papers please’ society … without having any consultation with the public on this,” he says. We need to have a “proper conversation about how this will permanently change the structure of our society.”
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