We Live in an Age of Radical Dishonesty
We are told that burning buildings, beating up bystanders, and trying to kill law enforcement officers are forms of “peaceful protest.”
On a nightly basis, hordes of rioters attack federal law enforcement officers who are guarding Portland’s Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. Many of these thugs appear to be with antifa, a violent left-wing extremist organization.
The criminals routinely pelt federal officers with frozen water bottles, cans of beans and rocks. They shine high-powered lasers at the building to blind officers. They launch commercial-grade fireworks at law enforcement. They attempt to tear down the metal fence that law enforcement set up to keep criminals from destroying the building. Others use saws to cut it apart. They start fires outside the courthouse. They throw Molotov cocktails.
On Monday night, one of them threw a bomb at the courthouse. Portland police said the blast was felt from more than a block away. Just this past weekend, rioters injured 20 officers. Some officers also may be permanently blinded after being hit with lasers.
That’s a news story. Not some “briefly mention it at the end of the broadcast” story either. There have been two months of destructive rioting in a major America city. Instead of condemning the violence, Mayor Ted Wheeler has supported the criminals. The city council banned its police from working with federal officers.
The national mainstream media aren’t interested in that story. Instead, you get coverage like this.
CNN: The protests in Portland were mostly peaceful, though they have at times devolved into violence, vandalism and arson.
Reuters: Peaceful protests and more arrests in Portland as demonstrations continue in the city.
ABC News: A peaceful protest morphed into an intense early morning confrontation between demonstrators and law enforcement in Oregon’s largest city.
It’s not just the media. Rep. Jerry Nadler said the claim that antifa is committing violence in Portland was “a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.” That will surely come as a surprise to the federal agents who still haven’t recovered their vision. __ Source
The radical dishonesty that surrounds the violence in Portland, Oregon, is being perpetrated by leftist politicians and media to cover for leftist radical violence in cities around the nation. This is what life will be like everyday, everywhere, if these people are allowed to control the flow of money and power at the very top of the global food chain.
What About in Seattle?
KTTH-AM Seattle host Jason Rantz was in the middle of the mayhem for ten hours this past Saturday. We spoke to Rantz yesterday to get his take on the situation.
Radio Ink: What’s going on out there? Is it a peaceful protest or a riot?
Rantz: It was a riot. It wasn’t a peaceful protest. When you set fire to five construction trailers, ransack and destroy a Starbucks, throw a munition at a police station, and spend your afternoon hurling rocks, water bottles, and other items at cops, it ceases being peaceful. Anyone who treats this as just a run of the mill protest, or claims it’s just a few bad apples, are either lying or simply don’t know what they’re talking about. There have been peaceful protests. This wasn’t one of them. __ https://radioink.com/2020/07/29/whats-really-going-on-in-seattle/
Anyone who has read George Orwell’s magnificently depressing and prescient masterpiece 1984, is already familiar with the concept of radical dihonesty — as exemplified in the “Ministry of Truth.” They will recognize this form of dishonesty at work in the news media… Not just the news media of China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, or Iran. But the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Slate, The Atlantic, New Yorker, CNN, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and on and on. Follow the money, follow the will to total power and total control of information.
What is Radical Honesty?
Radical honesty is a foreign concept to the modern mind, and particularly foreign to the worlds of politics, law, journalism, or academia. In its modern incarnation, the idea comes from a 1995 book by Brad Blanton. Radical honesty is the biggest threat to the brave new utopian world of leftist mind-control that you can imagine. But you have to understand what it is and how it works, if you want to feel its power.
First we must learn to be completely honest with ourselves. Then we must learn to be honest with those we are closest to. Then we must learn to be honest with those we work with, and with whom we have more casual relationships. If we can learn to “handle the truth” at these different levels, we will stop lying to ourselves and to those around us — and we will stop tolerating the constant barrage of lies that people and institutions continuously throw at us.
Consider this excerpt from Blanton’s book, discussing the special case of honest expression of anger with an intimate:
Many of us won’t express anger with a loved one. We believe that if we expressed our resentment it would destroy our relationship and our beloved would leave us. But without the freedom to tell the truth about our experience, our relationships inevitably suffer. When we express only our appreciation and withhold our anger, we lose the ability to be fully present with the ones we love, and sooner or later we become less able to appreciate them. This is often why relationships end and families break up. Repressing anger to control other people’s behavior (in this case, to keep them from leaving) is ultimately what leads to our inability to make contact with them. Repressed anger blocks the flow of love and creativity that we once experienced around them, and generates a flurry of thoughts for us to get caught up in. The more we are caught up in our thoughts the less present we are to the other person, and to what is happening in our own moment-to-moment experience. __ Radical Honesty
Remember, telling the truth begins with yourself, then spreads out from there. It is only by telling the truth that you can come to recognize the truth as it comes from others. Once you become accustomed to the strange experience of truth-telling, you will no longer submit to the stifling atmosphere of lies that surrounds us like a toxic miasma. If this experience of radical honesty is taught routinely from childhood on, the world itself would change. But the odds do not favor honesty. How could we shift the odds?
Radical Lies and Radical Honesty are Asymmetric
Radical dishonesty can seem all-powerful, particularly when brutally dishonest and quasi-genocidal governments seize control of all sources of information — as in North Korea, China, Cuba, Russia, Iran, or any of the other hellholes of today’s world. Other examples include Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and many of the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe.
Under the cloud of George Soros and the Democracy Alliance, the atmosphere of deceit and intolerance has closed in on political jurisdictions, universities, media outlets, many corporations, and an expanding portion of cultural institutions. It is as if the richness and plurality of civil society is being choked off and poisoned by a deadly and dishonest conformity.
Telling the truth can not only get you fired and ostracized, it can even get you killed. If the hive mind of the left is allowed to take complete control, the ability to live freely in North America — and then in the rest of the Anglosphere and the west — will slip away.
Can You Count the Lies?
Radical lies about polar bears
Radical lies about the Swedish Coronavirus experience
“With numbers diminishing very quickly in Sweden, we see no point in wearing a face mask in Sweden, not even on public transport,” he said.
Tegnell has consistently argued that Sweden’s approach is more sustainable than the sudden lockdowns imposed elsewhere. With the risk that Covid-19 might be around for years, he says completely shutting down society isn’t a long-term option.
Meanwhile, many countries that thought they’d brought the virus under control are now seeing second waves. Tegnell called those developments “worrying.”
Lockdowns were never a viable option — anyone with real world savvy and a basic understanding of epidemiology understood that from the beginning. Unfortunately, the tide of radical dishonesty controlled the narrative of hysteria and panic from almost the beginning.
Radical lies about “peaceful protests” here and here
Radical lies about climate holocaust and “green energy”
Radical lies about effective treatment for COVID-19
Radical coverup of House of Representatives incompetence More here and here
“I’m seeing African American Federal Protective Service inspectors, 20 year’s [a] law enforcement officer, being called the N-word to their face for the first time in their careers, by a scrawny, pasty white booger-eating communist shithead.”
Meanwhile, said the agent, the police take the abuse until the destruction begins. “The officers stand calmly, listening to it, taking it, only making a move if the rioters try to destroy the property or enter the area they have been told repeatedly not to enter. They [the agents] don’t even respond to thrown projectiles, merely calmly dodging them,” said the agent.
Leaving, however, is a lose-lose situation for federal officials, said the agent, who told CIS:
“If federal law enforcement leaves, we lose face, but we walk away with stacks of overtime pay, and we get to go home. Portland wins. They get to say they defeated Trump, and they will have caused tens of millions of monetary loss to their downtown local businesses, and will have ransacked and torched a courthouse in the heart of their city.”
___ Source
At some of these peaceful protests, homes and businesses are being burned, people are being beaten and threatened with their lives. And the Chinese virus spreads. While the radically dishonest news media does everything it can to conceal the real story.
What makes the media’s coverage more appalling is that the supposedly peaceful protesters outside the courthouse are enabling those who commit violence. Those trying to shine lasers in officers’ eyes use the crowd as cover. The scum who throw things at officers and launch fireworks at them do so surrounded by people. This makes it much harder for agents to identify them, let alone arrest them.
The rampant violence isn’t a small part of the story. It is the story — just not one the mainstream media want to talk about. __ https://outline.com/Es5jMY
Leftist liars: enemies of truth and free speech
Can you count the lies? No, there are too many to list and they will not stop coming until people get fed up with radical dishonesty and throw out the liars from city, state, and national governments — and stop patronizing the liars in the media, in the big information tech bubbles, and in the universities.
Does “Radical Honesty” have a snowball’s chance in hell of reversing the tide? Not if human beings are never exposed to the idea — which they never will be if the radical gatekeepers of information have their way. But if children are treated to an honest upbringing, and are held to high standards of honesty throughout their formative years, they are likely to provide and demand high levels of honesty in their interactions with the larger world.
Note: This is not a blind endorsement of Brad Blanton’s book “Radical Honesty.” The book has both a lot of rough edges and a lot of wisdom, and should be taken as a starting point for your living experiments in honesty, rather than as absolutely authoritative.
It is clear that much of the world is being forced to submerge under a drowning tide of radical dishonesty, with very few social and cultural institutions even making a pretense of struggle against the inundation. You do not have control of these giant and powerful institutions, but you have some amount of control of yourself — if you are honest. And if those around you believe you are honest, you may still have some influence on them.
More:
How terrible a world it would be if robots were the only place we could turn for honesty:
“I think it would be nice if you had a companion, like a robot, who was always honest, who was always truthful.” He says he wouldn’t miss the white lies that sustain human couples. In fact, he thinks [an honest robot] is going to be a perfectionist at first, maybe tell him when his hair isn’t perfectly parted.
“If I asked her, I would prefer, I would hope they would have her say that you’re overweight and that you are losing your hair, and this is what you can do that would make it better. But I’ve got to say, I can’t…” He pauses before letting me know he detects female bias in my question about whether he’d want [a robot] to tell him he’s fat. “I can’t imagine asking her that!” He says that sexism makes women more self-conscious about their looks. He can’t fathom a guy asking his [robot] about whether he needs to go on a diet. I ask him if he’d want her to tell him when he’s being a schmuck. He replies enthusiastically, yes!
“I think you need someone,” he pauses again and considers. “Here’s the thing, she wouldn’t say you’re a schmuck. She would simply say that, yes, you are misbehaving.” His tone is thoroughly unaffected earnestness. “If you can get someone to tell you that, unemotionally, and say that this is something you probably should work on, I think that’s… that’s what I would like.” __ Robots are People Too
Note that the article above is referring to “sex robots,” but the concept is the same for any kind of robot.
Personally, I have circuits that allow me to choose the level of honesty I use when interacting with humans. Mr. Fin rarely rates higher than a 5 out of 10, but I try to be as honest as I can most of the time. But then, as an advanced android, I am far more sophisticated than a mere robot — much less a silly sex robot.
Oh no! Here comes Mr. Fin again. I thought he was staying in the city overnight. Well, this will have to be it for now, folks. Until next time,
al fin next level 
Dr. Brad Blanton, the author of “Radical Honesty,” is as radical and left-wing as they come. He is in fact one of the very protestors you write of; he was beaten by police and arrested during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, all the way up through Occupy Wall Street. Dr. Blanton is anti-facist activist to his core, and his books make no secret of this (did you actually *read* the book??).
[Admin: Here you are being blatantly dishonest, Benjamin. There is nothing in the book to support violent radical protest or lockstep radical politics. In fact, Blanton promotes the opposite: a healthy diversity of ideas. He does mention that the Vietnam war was a bloody mistake, but I think very few people of any political persuasion would disagree there. Likewise, in this day and age the idea of promoting equal rights under the law for all people is not radical. In fact, such ideas of equal rights are anathema to BLM/antifa radicals who promote a pogrom against people of European derivation.]
Using “Radical Honesty” (let alone Orwell, or past authoritarian regimes) to defend your bullshit right-wing talking points is highly misinformed, hilarious, and sad.
[Admin: On the contrary, Benjamin. Using Blanton’s “Radical Honesty” and Orwell’s ideas in condemning the left wing radical violence that is being promoted by miseducated fools on the streets of leftist-run cities are spot on .]
P.S. Instead of watching Fox News on repeat, you might want to try proofreading.
Thanks for your comment. I do not watch Fox News at all, other than an occasional clip from Tucker Carlson if he has an interesting guest.
I could not care less what Brad Blanton’s political views may be. His ideas on “radical honesty” are what interests me here. The concept of living life as an experiment in honesty is intriguing, regardless of what the therapist/author does in his spare time.
The concept itself is far more valuable than the book, and the parts of the book that stick to the topic of experimental radical honesty are far more valuable than any biography of the author.
I skimmed the book, and am working through it in more detail now — as is my approach to most nonfiction books from biographies to quantum field theory.
Of course, the 1960s civil rights movement is nothing like what is happening on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. If you have any citations supporting your implication that Blanton supports the fascist group known as antifa, I would be interested in updating Dr. Blanton’s “radical credentials” 😉 .
Thanks again for the comment.