Excerpts from the article:
In addition to the dissonance of seeing people who had been perfectly okay with discriminating against the very people who had fought to return to them the liberties they now enjoyed, I suffered a sense of disorientation at realizing that there was a giant cognitive hole in the middle of contemporary culture.
The staffers at the Brooklyn branch of Jackson McNally Bookstore, an independent bookstore which had for years been a stalwart outpost of free-thinking publishing, were still masked, against all reason. I walked in with some trepidation.
Peacefully, faces covered, three years on, they stacked books on the shelves.
I was astonished, as I wandered the well-stocked aisles. Independent bookstores usually reflect the burning issues in a culture at that given time.
But — now — nothing.
[…]
The bizarre thing about this moment in culture, is that the really important journalism, and the really important nonfiction books about the history, the racial and gender injustice, the economics, the public policy, of the “pandemic” years — are being written by — non-writers; by people who are trained as doctors, medical researchers, lawyers, politicians, and activists.
And their books are not displayed or even stocked in bookstores such as Jackson McNally.
So there is a massive hole in the central thought process of our culture.
The courageous non-writers have stepped in to tell the truth, because the famous writers, for the most part, can’t.
Or won’t. Or, for whatever reason, didn’t.
This is because the public intellectuals are by necessity, for the most part, AWOL to the truth-telling demands of this time.
You cannot be a public intellectual whose work is alive, if you have participated in manufacturing, or even accepting quietly, state-run lies.
[…]
“People just want to move on,” I keep hearing, in my former haunts in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Don’t talk about it.
So this all leads to a weird situation, culturally, now, indeed.
In the world of alt-media independent exiled dissidents, where I live most of the time, we are having the most riveting, important conversations of our lives. This is because we all know civilization itself, and liberty itself, and maybe even the fate of the human race itself, are at stake every day.
In the polite elite-media circles of Brooklyn and New York, to which I returned briefly to dip a toe in the water, people are — not talking about any of it.
They are not talking about the enslavement of humanity. They are not talking about young adults dropping dead.
[…]
We don’t fight for freedom so that we can get credit.
We don’t fight for truth because we want a byline.
We do both just because we can’t help it.
We do both because our Founders fought to the death so that we ourselves would be free one day.
And we fight so that little children whom we will never live to see, will grow up free.
But it is painful to witness the beating heart of what had been a great culture, stunned and muted in denial, and unable to function intellectually.
I guess we just need to leave the sadly rotting carcass of the establishment culture of lies and denial behind.
I say that with sorrow. I will miss the bookstores, universities, newspapers that I once revered.
I guess we have to follow the voices of the truth-tellers of the moment, to other, surprising, beleaguered campfires.
I guess we need to pitch our tents in new fields, outside the walls of the crumbling, breached, and decadent city.
I guess we need to learn new songs and tell new stories, as we find ourselves alongside other — surprising — fierce, and unbowed, and determined, new comrades in arms.