Dissent is never popular. Knowing this doesn’t make being a voice of dissent any less burdensome. This is especially true if those who share an unpopular opinion find themselves having to make a difficult argument, or in an area of real nuance.
Tom Woods has shared numerous times on his podcast the contrast between the abolitionists versus the claim today that we are inherently racist. He reiterates all the time about how stating your support for slavery or racism today will get you ostracized from society. So clearly there isn’t some inherent racism that we all share being kept behind closed doors. The very idea that the vast majority of white people are just waiting for an opportunity to treat a minority with disrespect or hatred is ridiculous. Especially since the vast majority of people responsible for firing or refusing to hire people with those abhorrent views are also allegedly the inherently racist white people.
People claiming that everyone is racist or there is some hidden agenda is absurd. The people making that claim are able to do so specifically because they share the majority consensus of the general population. To state overt support for racial segregation or slavery today is unacceptable. So saying you don’t support slavery today is easy.
Rarely do the people going out of their way to display their support of this consensus message ever actually take a single position that would be considered inappropriate. In the very rare occasion that one of them happens to step outside the approved opinions, or utters a thought outside what is acceptable, they are quickly corrected, apologize, and then make repeated overtures of penance.
There isn’t an ounce of courage among them.
Going along those routes, it is easy to identify streams of thought in our society today that seem to enjoy the general approval of those in power, and experience no real discrimination. Any apparent discrimination towards those certain groups is aggressively, sometimes violently, addressed by the powers that be. They are protected classes.
Still, we find as protected classes of people, they feign victimhood and claim discrimination around every corner. The idea that it is “institutional” allows them to obfuscate the fact that they often can’t show evidence of any discrimination at all, but get to point to some vague, nefarious force that has targeted them. Results that are not equitable are proof to those who approach the world this way, even if there is a much less nefarious, and completely more reasonable explanation for the outcomes they take issue with.
Supporters of this idea of institutional discrimination share in the protected status of these protected classes. By supporting the idea that these classes deserve some special exemption from societal norms, they signal their virtue to others and align themselves, at least in theory, with those victims. It is absurd, but it is the essence of what they are doing.
Abolitionists in the early 1800’s required great courage. Supporting their cause often came at great personal cost. Their livelihoods, status in society, wealth, property and sometimes even their lives were given in support of freeing the slaves. They happened to be morally correct, but their argument was difficult to make at a time when slavery was a global phenomenon. Apologists for continuing the practice of the day were applauded and promoted. Despite the abusiveness and moral depravity of the situation, speaking against what was common practice made the voices of dissent targets of the population at large.
We honor those men and women today specifically because of the courage it took to do what was right.
In medicine, I have found my hopes of helping people being crushed between the rock of established bureaucracy and the hard place of policy and influential powers. When I was brought into a screening facility as part of a COVID response, I found myself among many who thought like me. It was reasonable with a new disease that we didn’t have a lot of information about to take it seriously. Screen, isolate the sick, and protect the population. Even at that time, it didn’t make sense to forcibly do any of that, but appealing to others to do it was certainly reasonable. By May of 2020, though, it was obvious that this was a very disproportionate disease in that it targeted the old and the sick. All measures forcing the young and healthy to ruin their lives or development were absurd at that point and needed to end.
Still, the medical “consensus” was in and we watched physicians and other providers, or researchers, who spoke against the propagandized narratives adopted by authority figures as they were ostracized and cancelled. Many lost their jobs. Whether the issue was masks, lockdowns, vaccines or any other policy, dissent was not to be tolerated. Natural immunity, fear of forced vaccination, or simply bodily autonomy were ignored in order to viciously smear and denounce anyone who questioned the approved narrative.
I felt those acutely in the medical field. I’ve heard physicians in positions of influence denounce poor policies or actions because it might cause others outside of medicine to question their professionalism, who turned right around just a few minutes later and started supporting forced vaccination among the young and the healthy.
People like this are incapable of introspection or critical thought.
The mindset is everywhere in our current political environment, though. Trans rights, Black Lives Matter, monkey pox, access to abortion, Ukraine or overall US foreign policy, and a whole host of other issues have approved narratives. There are usually two which coexist and are different in degree only. The prevailing narrative, though, is that if you are a voice of dissent, you deserve to have your life ruined.
These people won’t come out and actually say that, of course. Instead they move to get you fired, make it nigh on impossible to get hired anywhere where pay is competitive, and publish your personal information and address so you’ll be harassed to the point you may even move away entirely. Again, most of those who just go along will say they don’t think it should go that far, but they are afraid of actually voicing any dissent themselves.
It is very Orwellian in the truest sense of the term. These people believe that if they just keep their head down and don’t push back against the absurdity, that they will be spared.
They are wrong.
The prevailing narrative always needs another victim. It will continue to ostracize anyone who is farthest away from the exact new opinion that they just fabricated yesterday, and if they have completely eliminated one group of dissent, the next farthest from them will be the target. This cycle continues until the entire ideology fractures, which it inevitably will. The scary part is that some of them can persist long enough to ruin the lives of, sometimes actually murdering, millions.
History has a way of allowing objectivity to prevail, given enough time and the right set of eyes. Abolitionists are celebrated today, as they should be. Those who embrace whatever new narrative is propagated to the public are the least likely to have had the courage to be abolitionists, though. They will equate those who actually are voices of dissent to the most abhorrent characters in history without the least bit of self-reflection or understanding of their hypocrisy.
So who are you? If you do not have a single opinion that you are reluctant to share in public, you are probably on the wrong side of history. If you do, and you are still unwilling to share it, you are a coward.
Those willing to say very unpopular things and stand firm on them consistently may suffer tremendously. In the end, they are most likely to be viewed favorably by history, and according to my faith, by God. Even if they are wrong, it still takes courage to stand up to the prevailing narrative and voice concern. Those who ostracize, cancel, or otherwise seek to silence or harm those voices are the greatest cowards among us. They are intellectually bereft, crowd pleasing, consensus cowards.
Assuming you have made it this far, you likely know what I’m talking about as you are the dissident voice. If that is not you, continue carefully and understand this is targeted at those dissenting.
The mobs hate you, not because of any tangible or discernable defect that they have witnessed, but because you, as a voice of real dissent, embody what they can only imagine themselves to be. They are incapable of the good they wish they could produce, and are the source of all the evil they accuse you of. They project all of their own personal defects on you and accuse you of their greatest evils. Racism is evident in their policies. They institutionalize it by propagating it. They call you selfish for driving a gas burning vehicle while they make accessing food and other goods impossible or very costly, ruining the lives of hundreds of millions around the world for their own agenda.
Ignore them. Find friends who think like you and surround yourself with them. Network.
Render their efforts obsolete. This will lead to the biggest fractures in their own attempts and expedite the fall of their false narrative and imaginary empire.
The mobs will turn on them when they realize the masses don’t actually support their garbage policies and tired agenda.
You have to stop being silent, though. So will you? Or are you just another consensus coward?
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