Opting Out of the Manufactured MAHA Consensus

It feels eerily like the manufactured Covid consensus, which is why I want no part of it.

Illustration by Anthony Freda

In March 2020 my world turned upside down and inside out, and then exploded into a million pieces. I’m still trying to put it back together.

As a very typical, self-righteous “progressive liberal” who always voted Democrat and listened to NPR while reading my daily-delivered print version of The New York Times, the events surrounding Covid were life altering. In a very short period of time, I came to realize that almost nothing I believed about how government and society operated was true. And I discovered that enormously powerful covert forces were pursuing agendas that directly harmed my well being and the well being of my loved ones – not to mention the lives, livelihoods and freedoms of people the world over.

I’ve had to construct a whole new framework for understanding and being in the world: new sources of news and information, new friends and colleagues, new affiliations with people and groups who I believe share my fundamental values. Very roughly speaking, my new social and professional groups encompass people from every point on the political spectrum who, at least until recently, agreed with me that traditional left/right politics were largely irrelevant, and that what we are facing, which became terrifyingly apparent during Covid, is a global technocratic totalitarian takeover.

To all the people and groups with whom I have been working on medical freedom and general freedom issues since Covid I am eternally grateful: You have saved my sanity, given me hope, and restored some of my faith in humanity. Most importantly, you have reassured me that there are many out there who will hold truth to power and adhere to the common principles that bind us together: always be open to questions, and never stop seeking the truth.

Yet now, reading the Substacks and publications that were sanity-preserving for me during Covid, is starting to feel like reading The New York Times felt back then. I understand the jubilation, the release of pent up angst that has been accumulating for years. I identify with the need for hope, for a positive outlook. The need to feel like we belong to the winning team. I know we are all tired of fighting, tired of scrutinizing every news item and government document for hidden malfeasance, tired of not being able to trust anyone, tired of pessimism and a feeling of pervasive dread.

I understand all of this, and I share the desire to stop feeling that perpetual underlying unease that started for me during Covid. But I also think succumbing to this desire, however tempting, is very dangerous. The wool is actively being pulled over our eyes as we speak, taking advantage of our basic human desire for hope. The same malevolent forces are still at work, and if we willfully close or avert our eyes, we risk losing sight of the truth.

That’s why I am experiencing now the same feeling of disorientation I felt in 2020: I know bad things are happening, but many of the information sources I have come to trust are either unaware or unwilling to expose what’s actually happening.

Specifically, in the realm of medical freedom, where I find myself these days, working with people who have been fighting against the pharma/vaccine public-private racket for decades, and others like me who started fighting against it during Covid, there’s a self-imposed consensus that I find deeply disturbing: Before the election we were supposed to cheer for Trump because he joined forces with RFK Jr., who used to be one of our public leaders. After the election, we are supposed to shut up and not criticize Trump, RFK Jr., or anyone in the MAHA organization, because we’re all supposed to be very excited about RFK Jr. becoming HHS Secretary.

That self-imposed, or manufactured, consensus goes against everything we’ve been talking about and fighting for. We certainly don’t have to agree about everything - it’s the debates and disagreements that keep us on our toes. However, when we self-censor to create a false impression of cohesion, we play right into the hands of those who seek to silence and destroy us.

I recognize that my views often err on the side of extreme cynicism and I work hard, with varying degrees of success, to be open to the possibilities of positive change. Pushback and challenges to my views are welcome and necessary. The problem is that we have shifted from pushback and challenges into censorship and silencing.

We used to be a morally grounded, across-party-lines, righteously enraged movement that was generating interest and support from every corner of the political landscape. We posed a threat to the nonpartisan power centers that try to keep us at each other’s throats in order to distract us from their ongoing efforts to amass an ever greater share of the world’s wealth and resources.

Sadly, I believe they have succeeded in neutralizing the threat we represented: We have been rebranded and coopted, our message has been muddled and diluted, and our moral compass has been scrambled to the point that we don’t even know where it’s pointing anymore.

And, I would argue, this has all been done very deliberately and accomplished by the exact same forces and agendas that hoodwinked the “other side” during Covid.

Here’s a brief summary of the psy-op being waged against us in real time:

When RFK Jr ended his independent run for President (why that happened requires extensive investigation) and threw his support behind Donald Trump (ditto), the medical freedom/anti-vax/anti-lockdown/civil rights movement underwent a corporate rebranding and re-emerged as “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again). We were no longer allowed to talk about vaccines in general or mRNA products in particular. It was suddenly all about toxic chemicals in our food and environment and a “chronic disease epidemic” that has been going on for decades and that has nothing to do with any Covid-related atrocities. In fact, Covid became a side issue, if mentioned at all.

Before MAHA, we were a hodgepodge group from every political background – open to debate while acknowledging that traditional left/right politics were largely meaningless, and focused on the struggle against the biodefense public-private partnership that ran Covid specifically, and global technocratic tyranny, more generally.

Yet with the catchy MAHA moniker, we were suddenly one letter away from Donald Trump’s political organization, MAGA, and we were supposed to be excited about banding together not just with that organization, but with another newly named monstrosity called DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency): a public-private partnership whereby the richest person in the world with the biggest government/defense contracts would be in charge of telling the officials elected by the public how to spend public money.

The powerful grassroots movement that propelled RFK Jr. into unprecedented success as a third-party candidate literally disappeared, becoming part of a corporate-political organization led by globalist entrepreneurs with shady deep state affiliations, like Casey and Calley Means. The message became: We can save the world by eating healthy, monitoring our blood glucose continually, and doing studies on every toxic chemical and chronic disease known to man – and we can get rich in the process!

So, for me, it’s back to searching for anyone whose fight against the Covid atrocities has not been squashed by the MAHA psyop.