Bretigne Shaffer on official narratives

Some very powerful and very deep narratives have been crafted and fed to us over generations.  What are those narratives?  Primarily, that freedom is dangerous and that the state is a benign entity that acts for the good of “the people”, and that we, “the people,” control it. 

This narrative is deadly.

~ Bretigne Shaffer, "Letter to My Grandchildren from Inside a Cult," LewRockwell.com, November 18, 2020

Bretigne Shaffer on the cult of mainstream America

Somehow, the culture that I live in has come to be characterized by an outright disdain for independent thought.  Public debate has been largely reduced to the pitting of competing authority figures against each other, and the capacity of most people to engage in reasoned argument begins and ends with an appeal to those authorities.  Only a very few seem able to engage directly with information themselves, and those few are largely ignored. 

We have arrived at a point in history where the intellectual norm is now to abandon one’s own capacity for reason and to put in its place a collection of authority figures and institutions. Or rather, authority itself.

We have arrived at a point in history where mainstream America looks very much like a cult.

~ Bretigne Shaffer, "Letter to my Grandchildren from Inside a Cult," LewRockwell.com, November 18, 2020

Bretigne Shaffer on 2020: the year of dystopian fiction

I live in a world that only a year ago I would have thought was the stuff of poorly written dystopian fiction.  If anyone had told me in November of 2019 that just a year later, people would be ordered by the governor of the state I live in to close their businesses, to only leave their homes for “essential” activities, to stop attending church services, to stand six feet apart from other people, and eventually, to wear masks on their faces when out in public, and that most people would not only go along with this willingly but would cheer it on and even shame those who did not–I would have laughed in their face.

And yet here we are.

~ Bretigne Shaffer, "Letter to my Grandchilder from Inside a Cult," LewRockwell.com, November 18, 2020