Latest Door to Freedom newsletter muses on the psychology of the crowd; and our plan to roll out a campaign focused on the farming–>food crisis

Dear Friends,

I have not written for awhile. Apologies. I have been travelling and working on so many different projects. It seems that nearly every day I am asked to help out with something or the other. Being a nitpicker, I usually spend time I don’t have trying to perfect documents or looking up things.

I have been working feverishly with farmers, lawyers and activists on trying to understand and tell the story of the crisis for farmers, developing a slide deck, choosing the punchiest ways to convey information. I’m continuing to analyze the crisis. Identifying fixes. Things are dire for many farmers and ranchers, who seem to be attacked in about a dozen different ways. While I have mentioned many of these attacks during the COVID era, I am digging more deeply into the history, the legalities and trying to plan a winning strategy for the people who provide our food.

It’s complicated. Most of the best fixes require Congressional approval, which is the hardest to accomplish–but possible. Like the WHO work, I need a simple story for the public (hard to boil this down) but a more complete, yet short version for officials. Soon there will be more on this.

The story needs to be so compelling that all our MAHA and health freedom groups will take it and run with it and ask their constituents to get active with appropriate “asks” for their elected representatives.

It took me a long time (months) to boil down the story of what the WHO was doing so it was understandable, believable and compelling. I am hoping that experience will help me get this right a lot quicker. But this story is more complicated because there are so many parts to it.

But in a way, much of it is the same story. It amounts to the fact that consumers, farmers and ranchers have been sold a false bill of goods. Many false bills of goods. And we have been presented with, as RFK Jr. says, one perverse incentive after another. Bad policies had justifications created for them that probably bore little relationship to what their creators knew would ensue from those policies.

Working on this is hard going emotionally. It is like live-blogging an ACIP meeting. There is so much deliberate evil, and yet the people perpetrating it appear to be sleepwalking. The ACIP members, the USDA employees, the FDA staff– go along with what is obviously unethical, and often go against their own regulations. The important thing, as best I can tell, is sticking with the crowd. This is where it is safe.

They ALL go along. It is not an aberration.

That is the part that hurts so badly. It is not an aberration. In their shoes, most of us would probably do exactly the same thing. Is the problem in our brain, our culture, or can we find something blameworthy, like our vaccines and processed foods? Where did basic common sense go? When did the ethical compass disappear? Are we just not trained to have a strict moral code? Does that need to be trained or is it innate, and conditioned out? Does living in society beat it out of us? Are we psychically numbed?

Because it sure seems that the bad guys have more emergencies planned with which to terrorize us. And I worry that they will pull it off again. They were so good at making people hate and fear each other. They have that one figured out. Do we have the will and the wits to withstand it next time?

Matt Stoller wrote yesterday about attending his 25th Harvard graduation recently, and his impressions of his classmates, who after 25 years still have that elite, effete edge to them. Their self-regard may be blinding them to the realities of the world. A good read. As is his list of legal news items that follows.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-best-and-the

Maryanne Demasi wrote about a well-known Australian economist who was asked to give TED talk.

https://substack.brownstone.org/p/when-ideas-become-too-dangerous-to

“Economist Professor Gigi Foster delivered a TEDx talk titled The Manipulators’ Playbook at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in October 2024.

It was a bold examination of how, in times of crisis, fear and conformity can be deliberately harnessed by those in power to manipulate public behavior and silence dissent.

Her message was a call to defend the freedom to question, to challenge authority, and to think independently.

The local TEDx UNSW team, who had worked closely with Foster to ensure her talk met TEDx standards, described it as “insightful and important.”

But when the video was submitted to TED’s US headquarters for publication on the organization’s official YouTube channel, it was rejected.

The reason? The talk “did not adhere to the TEDx content guidelines….”’

I am fearful that for whatever reasons (probably many, in addition to the ability to flood us with propaganda designed especially for our personal psychological needs) society is now poised for another Salem witch trial. Playwright Arthur Miller (also known as briefly a husband of Marilyn Monroe) had this to say about his play The Crucible, a chronicle of the Salem witch trials of 1692:

While acknowledging that the rise of McCarthyism was one of his motives for writing The Crucible, Miller said there was something more: “It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which no one would have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten….”

And critic Michael Billington notes,

But what was extraordinary… was Miller’s awareness of society’s tendency to demonize what it fears or fails to understand.

Will people of today sleepwalk into destroying each other over trifles, like expressing unwanted opinions?

My good friend John Klar quoted Aldous Huxley yesterday along the same lines. Huxley observed:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

I wonder if someone can develop a curriculum on this subject that we can provide to schools to help turn our children into better citizens than we have been?

Closing on a better note, I have been pleased that my advice on multiple issues is being heard within the administration. Some things HAVE gotten better: many fewer birds are being culled. Contracts for bird flu vaccines have been cancelled. Measles cases (and the accompanying fear-mongering) are down, and there have been no more deaths since the initial 3–none of which have been clearly caused by measles, and two of which appear to have been medically mismanaged. The third person died at home.

Culture is changing to the extent that people everywhere are recognizing the profound influence the food they eat, water they drink and the drugs they take have on their health. Changing cultural awareness is the first step to making positive changes.

Next, we need to change our culture’s awareness of the food and farm crisis that Door to Freedom began to outline in our 2023 and 2024 symposia. Expect a lot more on that in the very near future.

Appreciate your patience with me. There really has been a lot going on. I truly feel blessed to have this bully pulpit. And to have your assistance when we need it.

Be grateful too. It really does change everything.

Meryl and the Door to Freedom team