Roger Waters, the British rock legend and co-founder of Pink Floyd, is in the midst of his “This Is Not A Drill” tour. He joins Chris Hedges to discuss his music, life, and how his politics have guided him through it all.
I know we on the right probably use the word satanic too often but this peformance from Sam Smith is literally a tribute to Satan. pic.twitter.com/1GrNgjssZN
There are 55 documented cases of performers collapsing, dying, or falling ill in late 2022 through 2023 in this video.
And in almost all of these cases, the media will say: “We don’t know what caused this, but it was definitely not the COVID vaccine.”
Really? And we saw this happening prior to the roll-outs of the COVID “vaccines”? Did we see this in 2020 during the height of the COVID “virus pandemic” when they said we would see people dropping dead on the streets because the COVID “virus” was so bad?
No, we did not see this. This began later in 2021, and continued throughout 2022 after the shots had been injected into the majority of the population.
It’s amazing that for the last couple of decades many Hollywood celebrities have become self-described experts and spokespeople for US wars, Big Pharma, climate change and other globalist agendas.
The so-called “Hollywood activists” such as George Clooney, U2 lead singer Bono, and the rest of them are phony as they can be.
Alistair Cooke, a British-born writer who became a BBC film critic early in his career who worked mainly in the United States as a journalist, television personality, radio broadcaster had expressed his honest point of view on Hollywood’s film industry when he said that
“I believe that Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.”
Since World War II, Hollywood has been one of the main instruments of propaganda for globalist agendas. It began with US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt who established the US Office of War Information (OWI) from June 1942 until September 1945 whose job was to regulate newspapers, radio broadcasts, Hollywood films and all other forms of media in order to propagandize the public in an effort to gain support for America’s involvement in the war.
The OWI launched a global propaganda campaign that oversaw revisions in collaboration with Hollywood producers, and at times, even rejected film scripts that portrayed the US as a negative force on the world stage. The OWI’s main job was to reject any film that had anti-war material.
There was also the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) which was a division under the OWI that worked with Hollywood executives to decide which movies could benefit the war effort, for example, it authorized several films that had anti-Japanese propaganda, sort of like today’s anti-Russia propaganda you find in many Hollywood films. However, over the last 20 years or so, Hollywood propaganda has even become even worse with the help of its Hollywood celebrities who have become mouthpieces for globalist agendas, so let’s call them for what they really are, ‘Useful Idiots.’
It’s amazing that for the last couple of decades many Hollywood celebrities have become self-described experts and spokespeople for US wars, Big Pharma, climate change and other globalist agendas.
Hollywood celebrities act and sing for a living, wear expensive name-brand clothing, and in some cases exploit their children to be part of the new woke culture.
The so-called “Hollywood activists” such as George Clooney, U2 lead singer Bono, and the rest of them are phony as they can be.
However, in all fairness, there are a handful of celebrities who do not, in any way fall into that category including Mel Gibson who is an outspoken critic in Hollywood, comedian and actor George Carlin (R.I.P.), Marlon Brando, John Lennon (R.I.P.) and a handful of others.
When it comes to Israeli occupation and genocide against the Palestinians, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, singer-songwriter and composer Roger Waters, Natalie Portman, and actress Vanessa Redgrave come to mind. In 1978, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for best-supporting actress in the film ‘Julia’ gave an acceptance speech at the 50th Academy Awards in which she denounced Israel’s war against the Palestinians. Redgrave said that “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world.” The British actress had claimed in the past that the far-right Jewish Defense League targeted her for producing the 1977 documentary ‘The Palestinian’.
Most Hollywood celebrities who toe the line will do and say anything to remain relevant in the film and television industries, so they also follow the mainstream media narratives or listen to their Hollywood bosses, or maybe they are just dumbed-down individuals, just ask outspoken actor and comedian Ricky Gervais who had an iconic opening monologue in the Golden Globe awards ceremony in 2020 that will be remembered for the ages:
So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f**k off, OK? It’s already three hours long. Right, let’s do the first award
Although talented, two of the most “idiotic” actors in Hollywood when it comes to the war in Ukraine are Sean Penn and Ben Stiller. Last month, Sean Penn recently visited and lent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky his Oscar while Zelensky awarded Penn the Order of Merit honor because he is “doing everything to help us gather international support” according to Reuters.
The article ‘Sean Penn visits Ukraine’s Zelensky, loans him an Oscar’ stated that “Hollywood actor and director Sean Penn, sanctioned by Russia for criticizing its war in Ukraine, loaned his Oscar statuette to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday.”
“The comedy star praised the Ukrainian president — himself a former comedian and actor — as a hero during the meeting, telling him: “You’re amazing” and that “It’s a great honor for me,” Stiller, who was appointed a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in July 2018, said in video capturing the meeting. “It’s really wonderful, you’re my hero. You’re amazing.” So Stiller jumps on the Zelensky bandwagon just like most of his Hollywood friends to help the Western narrative that the war in Ukraine is about “freedom and democracy.”
But I want to go back to Sean Penn and his incredible hypocrisy when it comes to US wars and regime change. In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave US forces and NATO the greenlight to remove Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi from power which destroyed Libya in the process. Here is the interview with Sean Penn on CNN on his claim that it was all Gaddafi’s fault:
Obviously, the war on Libya was run by the Democratic Party so for Penn it was justified. Now here is Sean Penn questioning the Bush Administration on WMDs in Iraq on December 15th, 2002. The war on Iraq was basically a Republican Party affair under the Bush neocons (click image below to watch the video):
Sean Penn’s hypocrisy is clearly staggering. He is a total propagandist for the US war machine. Although Sean Penn has supported Venezuela’s revolution and other causes such as the Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 where he founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization which operated a 55,000 person tent camp for victims of the earthquake, he is still a mouthpiece for the Democratic party and any regime change operation they deem necessary, so it is fair to say that both, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are useful idiots.
Celebrities who Proudly Received their Covid-19 Vaccines
I am not going to get into the global lockdown and the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine and the ridiculous enforcement of wearing facemasks or social distancing rules, so here are what several celebrities have posted on Instagram and twitter after they received their shots :
Lady Gaga:
“Double vaxed + boosted…don’t 4get to still wear a mask this sh*ts contagious ,
America Ferrara:
“Boosted for the holidays! Thankful for the miracle of science and medicine allowing me to be with my loved ones safely this year
Amber Heard:
“Did someone say ‘vaccine queen’?! ”
Sean Penn (No Surprise here!):
“I’m a lucky man. Lucky to work alongside the @LAFD & our great frontline @CoreResponse staff, our partners at Carbon Health, USC, & Curative Lab,” he tweeted. “We test & vaccinate thousands per day. We need your support to get more people lucky. Text CORE to 707070 to donate.”
*Note: Sean Penn was interviewed by Yahoo Entertainmentand said that “My deep belief personally, is that these [vaccines are] no different than having everybody being able to drive 100 miles an hour in a car” he continued “This is one of those things that should be mandatory. That we all get with the exception — the very few exceptions — for those people who, for whatever medical condition, might offset it, but I do think that vaccines need to be mandatory, and I do think that business — all businesses, the movie business, all businesses — need to take the lead and to be not so timid in dealing with their collective bargaining agreement partners.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger:
“All right, I just got my vaccine, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, come with me if you want to live.”
Despite all the evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and that wearing a facemask or social distancing does not work which brings me to the conclusion that these Hollywood celebrities are either brainwashed by the mainstream media, or they are just following the lies of Anthony Fauci who was elevated to celebrity status during the Covid-19 “pandemic”.
These people are not role models, they are just following what the medical establishment has prescribed to the public. They are propagandizing the public to take Covid-19 killer shots which demonstrates that no one should listen to these people. Once you inject the MRNA technology into your body, its forever, its permanent and you cannot detox to get rid of it. So in other words, don’t listen to these fools.
The Truth about Hollywood
There is no doubt that Hollywood has produced good films in the past but the Hollywood of today should focus on producing better movies and TV shows because most of their films are made only for propaganda purposes. In fact, many films today have no originality, better yet, there should be an alternative Hollywood that produces films without any form of propaganda that are worth watching.
They can produce films that tell us real stories from around the world, like stories that come out of the Palestinian struggle or what is happening in certain parts of Africa as in the Hollywood movie ‘Blood Diamond’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou that tells the story about the Diamond industry and its effects on the African people. Instead, they produce propaganda films based on the US Military fighting for democracy or numerous films based on the Jewish Holocaust. When was the last time you saw a film based on the genocide of a Native American tribe on the North American continent?
However, Hollywood is pretty good at producing movies that offend different nationalities and cultures. As we all know who really runs Hollywood, one documentary that shows some of the most offensive films based on the Muslim world is called
Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are propagandists who support the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 vaccines and other globalist agendas including the concept of eating bugs as recommended by the World Economic Forum. The bottom line is that Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are a bunch of clowns that should not be taken seriously, so why do people around the world idolize these people in the first place is beyond me.
*
Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
All images in this article are from SCN
The original source of this article is Global Research
US government data shows it is 99.6% likely that Celine Dion got her Stiff Person Syndrome from the COVID vaccine. She can’t sue because of the liability protection.
You will never, not in a million years, guess what is a known listed side effect of the Pfizer COVID vaccine?
Give up?
Answer below:
We have proof that Pfizer knew about SPS in Feb 2021
Pfizer knew about this potential side effect likely before Celine Dion was vaccinated, but they have no duty to disclose that because hey, it’s a safe and effective vaccine with only mild side effects. The FDA simply looks the other way for safety issues. That’s the way science is done.
Pfizer knew about SPS in February 2021 and the FDA knew about it on April 2021. But the FDA isn’t going to warn anyone about all these side effects because that would create vaccine hesitancy.
Thanks to Amy Kelly of dailyclout.io, we know that SPS was reported in Pfizer’s postmarketing documents on page 37, which is also page 8 of Appendix 1. Being in this document indicates that Pfizer was aware of it no later than 2/28/21, and the FDA knew about it no later than April 2021.
So the FDA and Pfizer clearly know and told the public nothing. They aren’t liable for any damages even if they didn’t give anyone informed consent by revealing all the side effects.
I don’t know if Celine got the Pfizer vaccine or not, but the side effect profile of the other vaccines is even worse, so my arguments apply no matter what vaccine Celine got.
VAERS data shows any post-vaccine diagnosis of SPS is 283X more likely caused by the vaccine than by “bad luck”
Now lets’ look at VAERS. Guess what? If you get SPS post-vax, there is a 99.6% chance it was from the vaccine.
The numbers for SPS over 30 years only implicate the COVID and HPV vaccines.
Note: You should read the Turtles All the Way Down book about the HPV vaccine (starting on page 112) and how they covered up the safety signal there; they used the exact same gaslighting techniques they perfected with the HPV vaccine on the COVID vaccines).
So for a “safe” vaccine like the flu vaccine (which I’m not conceding is safe, but just for the sake of argument), we’d get 1 report in 30 years (.03/yr). For COVID, we get 17 reports in 2 years (8.5/yr). So the relative rate increase is 8.5/.03 = 283.
In other words, math says that the chance that Celine Dion got SPS from the vaccine is 99.6%.
In short, it is almost certain that Celine Dion is vaccine injured.
But wait, there’s more! SPS can happen the SAME day as the COVID vaccine!!!!
If you think that’s not causality, then explain the VAERS report below. It shows SPS can start IMMEDIATELY after vaccination. This is likely because it is causal because the chance this would happen by “bad luck” is very small. Remember, there was just 1 report for the flu vaccine in 32 years. What do you think the chance is of a spontaneous SPS happening on the same day as a vaccination with the COVID vaccine? Very close to zero.
How do you explain this? It happened right after the shot, on the same day. Of course, this person could have been “unlucky” but when you look at the other reports, they occur in close proximity to the vaccine.
Reuters “fact check”
Here is the Reuters “fact check” for you to compare how THEY interpreted the VAERS data.
Well…. they didn’t. Can you believe that? VAERS is the official US government adverse event reporting system that they spend $100M or more a year to maintain and the experts don’t even look at it?!?!
According to the experts contacted by Reuters, there is absolutely no evidence that the COVID vaccines cause SPS:
Newsome, also Associate Professor of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, echoed this: “The short answer is, there is no data or evidence to suggest that the COVID-19 vaccine causes Stiff Person Syndrome. This is also the case for other vaccines.”
Wow. Contradicted by the evidence in plain sight. These experts cannot explain the data above. They don’t even mention it. If they had mentioned it and gave a reason to dismiss it, I’d listen to their reason. But to gaslight Reuters with false statements about data “not existing” when it is in plain sight, that’s downright unethical. Newsome should avoid commenting in areas where he lacks competency.
Reuters never contacted me on their fact check because THEY NEVER CONTACT ANYONE on our side to dispute their experts.
So these “fact checks” are ALWAYS one-sided (at least all the ones I’ve ever read). Have you noticed that? They are propaganda pieces. They should be researching the evidence on both sides and then presenting a conclusion. Instead, they only call experts who agree with the government narrative. That’s NOT fact-checking.
One other thing. The fact check said that SPS was an auto-immune disease:
The exact cause of this rare condition, which affects “only about one or two in a million people” according to John Hopkins Medicine (here), remains unknown, but it has been commonly associated with an autoimmune reaction…
Hello…..!!!! There is GOBS of evidence COVID vaccines cause auto-immune diseases. How do you think the people died in the Schwab study for example? It’s crystal clear. Those patients died because the immune system attacked their heart. That’s called auto-immunity. I can’t believe the “experts” Reuters contacts are so brain-dead that they don’t even understand the basics about the COVID vaccine. Willful blindness as Dr. Aseem Malhotra would say.
Celine Dion developed SPS after the COVID vaccination.
The chance she got it from the vaccine is 99.6%.
Will she go to a doctor who specializes in treating the vaccine injured? Nope. It’s highly likely she was told it wasn’t the vaccine by her doctor. This means unfortunately, she will likely never recover since in general, the sooner you are treated properly, the greater the chance of making a recovery. To get proper treatment, you need to see a doctor who understands the cause.
Will Celine’s doctors ever tell her about this article? Nope. What a shame.
Celine Dion could be a powerful voice to warn people not to take the vaccine if she has the courage to speak the truth.
The former Pink Floyd frontman also described information in the western media about the alleged crimes by the Russian military in Ukraine as “lies” and “propaganda”.
The singer chastised US President Joe Biden as a “war criminal” in August, arguing that he is “fueling the fire” in Ukraine as Russia continues its special operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify the country. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has told the US monthly Rolling Stone that he believes America to be the greatest evil in the world.
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has told the US monthly Rolling Stone that he believes America to be the greatest evil in the world.
The author of Money, Hey You and Shine on You Crazy Diamond pointed to “that compliant media”, which, he said, “feeds” US citizens with “the idea that Russia and China are evil”, and the US by contrast is good.
“Of course, we — when I say we, I’m now speaking as a taxpayer in the United States — are not. We are the most evil of all by a factor of at least ten times. We kill more people. We interfere in more people’s elections. We, the American empire, is doing all this sh*t,” Waters added.
The former Pink Floyd frontman also described information in the western media about the alleged crimes by the Russian military in Ukraine as “lies” and “propaganda”.
“You’ve seen it on what I’ve just described to you as western propaganda. It’s exactly the obverse of saying Russian propaganda; Russians interfered with our election; Russians did that. It’s all lies, lies, lies, lies,” he said.
The interview came after Waters urged Ukraine’s first lady to help stop the nation’s ongoing conflict with Moscow, dismissing the notion that western arms supplies to Kiev could pave the way to ending hostilities. In an open letter to Elena Zelenskaya, the rock legend commented on her interview with the BBC, in which she argued that if support for Kiev is strong, the Ukraine crisis would be resolved.
He noted that if Zelenskaya was referring to western arms supplies, she “may be tragically mistaken”. “Throwing fuel, in the form of armaments, into a firefight, has never worked to shorten a war in the past, and it won’t work now,” the musician wrote, adding that most of the fuel is being thrown by the US, which he asserted wants the Ukraine conflict to go on “for as long as possible.”
On February 24, Russia launched a special operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, with the US and its allies responding by imposing packages of “severe” sanctions against Russia and ramping up their military support for Ukraine.
Moscow has repeatedly slammed the West for its weapon supplies to Kiev, with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warning that “any weapon, any arms shipment on the Ukrainian territory” would be considered “a legitimate target” by the Russian military.
For her part, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has stressed that “Washington has once again demonstrated how much it has lost touch with reality, having actually become a party” to the Ukraine conflict. According to her, “further evidence of this is the US Congress recently agreeing on the allocation of a new assistance package to the Kiev regime worth almost $12 billion”.
Might it not be better to demand the implementation of your husband’s election promises and put an end to this deadly war?
“Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”
An Open letter to Mrs. Olena Zelenska from Roger Waters
Sunday 4th September 2022
Dear Mrs. Zelenska,
My heart bleeds for you and all the Ukrainian and Russian families, devastated by the terrible war in Ukraine. I’m in Kansas City, USA. I have just read a piece on BBC.com apparently taken from an interview you have already recorded for a program called ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ which is to be broadcast on the BBC today, September 4th. BBC.com quotes you as saying that “If support for Ukraine is strong, the crisis will be shorter.” Hmmm? I guess that might depend on what you mean by “support for Ukraine”? If by “support for Ukraine” you mean the West continuing to supply arms to the Kiev government’s armies, I fear you may be tragically mistaken. Throwing fuel, in the form of armaments, into a firefight, has never worked to shorten a war in the past, and it won’t work now, particularly because, in this case, most of the fuel is (a) being thrown into the fire from Washington DC, which is at a relatively safe distance from the conflagration, and (b) because the ‘fuel throwers’ have already declared an interest in the war going on for as long as possible. I fear that we, and by we I mean people like you and me who actually want peace in Ukraine, who don’t want the outcome to be that you have to fight to the last Ukrainian life, and possibly even, if the worst comes to the worst, to the last human life. If we, instead, wish to achieve a different outcome we may have to seek a different route and that route may lie in your husband’s previously stated good intentions.
Yes, I mean the platform upon which he so laudably ran for the office of President of Ukraine, the platform upon which he won his historic landslide victory in the democratic election in 2019. He stood on the election platform of the following promises.
1. To end the civil war in the East and bring peace to the Donbas and partial autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk.
2. And to ratify and implement the rest of the body of the Minsk 2 agreements.
One can only assume that your husband’s electoral policies didn’t sit well with certain political factions in Kiev and that those factions persuaded your husband to diametrically change course ignoring the people’s mandate. Sadly, your old man agreed to those totalitarian, anti-democratic dismissals of the will of the Ukrainian people, and the forces of extreme nationalism that had lurked, malevolent, in the shadows, have, since then, ruled Ukraine. They have, also since then, crossed any number of red lines that had been set out quite clearly over a number of years by your neighbors the Russian Federation and in consequence they, the extreme nationalists, have set your country on the path to this disastrous war.
I won’t go on.
If I’m wrong, please help me to understand how?
If I’m not wrong, please help me in my honest endeavors to persuade our leaders to stop the slaughter, the slaughter which serves only the interests of the ruling classes and extreme nationalists both here in the West, and in your beautiful country, at the expense of the rest of us ordinary people both here in the West, and in Ukraine, and in fact ordinary people everywhere all over the world.
Might it not be better to demand the implementation of your husband’s election promises and put an end to this deadly war?
Have you ever wondered why a famous person whose work you’ve enjoyed has such a myopic perspective on world events? How someone can stir you at your most intimate depths with their words or their music and yet have a blinkered mainstream political worldview that is manufactured by think tanks and spinmeisters?
Celebrities have been particularly odious empire sycophants these last few days, and it’s probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what’s going on when that happens.
Bette Midler has been drawing headlines for her recent let-them-eat-cake remark about baby formula shortages, taking to Twitter to tell Americans, “TRY BREASTFEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”
There are of course many reasons why parents might be unable to consistently provide breast milk to their baby, including but not limited to the very health problems and long working hours that the US status quo often creates. More than this, telling individuals what to do in response to a systemic problem created by the wealthy and the powerful serves to divert attention away from criticisms of those people and those systems.
Midler often uses her Twitter account to broadcast her indifference to the struggles of the less fortunate, like in March when she tweeted “I’d happily pay more for gas for her” with a picture of a child holding a Ukrainian flag. Midler has an estimated net worth of a quarter billion dollars.
While we’re on the subject of Ukraine, U2’s Bono and the Edge recently played a concert in Kyiv in support of the world-threatening US proxy war against Russia, because of course they fucking did. Bono, who says he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush and praised capitalism at the World Economic Forum and teamed up with warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire narratives about Syria in 2016, would of course be seen singing “Stand by Ukraine” in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv subway in 2022.
The immensely popular Indian spiritual leader known as Sadhguru Jagadish Vasudev recently tweeted “May Israel inspire the world” in praise of the apartheid ethnostate’s farming practices even as its tyranny and bloodshed draws international headlines. Few of the enlightenment merchants on the spiritual marketplace have anything worthwhile to say about individual awakening, and virtually all of them are fast asleep when it comes to consciousness about the external world.
Horror author Stephen King made the bizarre decision to tweet “I stand with Nina Jankowicz” the other day in support of the freaky shitlib who will be leading the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth. Nothing really to say about that beyond what it is.
This kind of thing happens so often because within an empire that is held together by propaganda, capitalism and mass military violence, those who are elevated to prominence within that empire have a symbiotic relationship with those things.
Someone who is worth a quarter billion dollars is unlikely to support the end of capitalism and the elimination of vast wealth inequality. Someone whose wealth and status come from Hollywood is unlikely to oppose the imperial propaganda machine of which Hollywood is a crucial part. Someone who benefits from status quo politics is unlikely to promote meaningful opposition to them.
And it goes both ways. The imperial machine is not going to elevate people who seek its death. Anti-imperialist journalist Aaron Maté will never win a Pulitzer. Antiwar comic Dave Smith will never star in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Chart-topping songs will tend to glorify money and affluence and will never amplify any opposition to the mechanisms which make them possible.
You don’t generally become rich and famous without the cooperation of people who have the power to facilitate your doing so. Those people will always be invested in the continuation of status quo systems, because they are intimately intertwined with those systems. If you seek the end of capitalism or empire or Israeli apartheid or US sanctions or cold war brinkmanship, you are unlikely to be helped toward the top by any of those people.
And then once you are granted your golden ticket to fame and fortune, you immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are deeply invested in the status quo systems which just elevated you. You go to their parties. You make friends with them because it’s difficult to form normal friendships with ordinary people when you’re very famous. Before you know it you’re in a tighty cloistered echo chamber of the status quo worldview.
So fame is a self-reinforcing feedback loop of support for establishment power in numerous ways, and it’s a major problem. It’s a major problem because it means that the people with the most influential voices in our society will always necessarily be people who have benefited tremendously from status quo systems. Their voices eclipse those countless millions who are suffering under those same systems, not because they are more valid or more truthful but solely because they are more amplified.
When you’ve got all the loudest voices talking about the world and their nation in a way that suggests that the system is working fine while all the far more numerous voices saying the opposite are going virtually unheard, what happens? It creates the illusion that the system is working fine. That status quo politics is getting the job done, and no massive, sweeping changes are needed.
In this way the contentment of celebrities with the current establishment order becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, because it keeps enough of the population thinking that the status quo must be working. That any difficulties they are having making ends meet and keeping their head above water is a failure not of the system, but of themselves. That the answer is not revolution and change but self-defeating self-blame and learned helplessness.
To be a celebrity within the oligarchic empire is, with very few notable exceptions, to be an agent of that empire. The weird plastic-faced freaks who fill our screens and shape our worldviews are as much a part of the oppression machine as the Pentagon and the police force.
Just a useful thing to be aware of while navigating this mess.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Michael McCaffrey lives in Los Angeles where he works as an acting coach, screenwriter and consultant. He is also a freelance film and cultural critic whose work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog.
A bevy of housebound celebrities have turned a global calamity into a stage-5 narcissism outbreak, in which they compulsively spew their mindless thoughts and feelings upon the rest of us.
Coronavirus is a terrible malady that is killing people and the global economy, but it isn’t the most pernicious pandemic afflicting the globe right now. No, the most diabolical disease currently in circulation is the dreaded Celebrivirus.
The onset of the Celebrivirus starts with a steady stream of verbal diarrhea gushing forth from empty-headed, self-absorbed, attention-starved celebrities, which is quickly followed by convulsive puking and rage headaches from the rest of us.
The most recent outbreak of Celebrivirus began with a plethora of Covid-19-related videos from a cavalcade of self-aggrandizing stars.
For instance, Matthew McConaughey thought that now was a good time to espouse his incoherent optimism regarding coronavirus.
The Typhoid Mary of Celebrivirus, Madonna, rose from the grave that is her moribund career so that she could, in the nude of course, benevolently inform us that Covid-19 has, in fact, made us all equal.
publicly lamented that she was “stressed” over the coronavirus. Not having to worry about losing her job, or being evicted, she’s struggling with her stress while safely tucked away in her mansion with her husband, daughter and her gobs of money.
Serena explained, “I don’t hang out with anyone, and when I say anyone I mean my daughter. She coughed, I got angry and gave her a side-eye. I gave her that ‘angry Serena’ and then I got sad.”
Shock of shocks that Serena’s number one priority is the well-being of Serena, and not the health of her toddler daughter. Serena has a boatload of tennis championships, but it seems like the title that will forever elude her is Mother of the Year.
The Celebrivirus that forced McConaughey, Madonna and Serena to compulsively share their idiocy, has also mutated into song version.
Self-adoring U2 frontman Bono caught the Celebrivirus bug and decided to share with humanity an original song he conjured related to Covid-19. Yikes… this song is pretentious, even for Bono, the Crown Prince of Pretension. Note to aging restless rockstars recording shelter-in-place mediocrity: At least make it remotely decent before you drown us in pompous indulgence.
The most egregious of all the Celebrivirus videos came from Gal Gadot of Wonder Woman fame, who recruited a bunch of her patronizing and condescending celebrity friends like Kristen Wiig, Jamie Dornan, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Adams, Sarah Silverman, James Marsden, Natalie Portman, Sia, Labrinth, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Kravitz and Will Ferrell, who looked like he had just ingested his body weight in cocaine, to sing a truly nauseating version of John Lennon’s iconic kumbaya knock-off ‘Imagine.’
On the best of days, ‘Imagine’ is a cringe-worthy number, but in the hands of these smug and self-satisfied jackasses it rockets into the stratosphere of saccharine dreadfulness.
If John Lennon were alive to see this cloying, celebrity-fueled monstrosity he would beat Mark David Chapman to the punch and shoot himself in front of the Dakota Building just to end his own mortification and misery.
The fact that these filthy-rich stars, not a single one of which is not a multi-millionaire, chose to un-ironically sing the lyric, “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man,” when there are millions of people potentially facing evictions from their apartments, foreclosures on their homes, losing their jobs and life savings, not to mention the fear of getting sick and dying, is a staggering testament to their delusional fanaticism and fatuousness.
Yes, Wonder Woman and friends, people can imagine life with no possessions because most of them live a life with few or no possessions…especially now, since the ranks of the unemployed are swelling from the coronavirus depression.
It is easy to sing about a world of no greed or hunger when you are rich and nourished. I wonder if they hum “Imagine” to themselves as they drive past the filthy hordes living in cardboard boxes on the street?
It would have been less offensive if Gal and her cornucopia of celebrity clowns started a band named The Marie Antoinettes, then wrote and performed their new song, titled “Let Them Eat Cake.”
They are so in the thrall of the Celebrivirus they actually thought their syrupy crooning from the security of their golden-gated castles would ingratiate them to the masses rather than inflame hatred.
When I watched these various vacuous and vapid Celebrivirus videos, I didn’t have the insipid ‘Imagine’ playing in my mind. No, my soundtrack was Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ with its wishful lyric, “when I am king, you will be first against the wall, with your opinion which is of no consequence at all”.
On the bright side, at least the Celebrivirus is bringing ordinary people together out of common animosity toward these narcissists. I know hate is supposed to be bad, but I think in this case it is healthy and helps to keep our collective immune system robust.
As for a cure for the dreaded Celebrivirus, scientists have found only one…and that is for celebrities to simply keep their moronic mouths shut. In other words…there is no cure.
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has condemned Swedish prosecutors who yesterday dropped a rape investigation into WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, saying the whole thing was “a complete bogus set-up” from the beginning.
Waters told RT that the statement from Swedish prosecutors claiming that the evidence against Assange had “weakened” since 2010 was a “mealy-mouthed bunch of bullsh*t” and that there was “no evidence to support the idea that [Assange] injured anybody.”
It’s partly because of this whole “set-up” that Assange is still suffering in London’s Belmarsh Prison with no real process of law being followed, Waters said. “Assange is being slowly murdered by the state because he told uncomfortable truths about US war crimes,” he added.
The law is being thrown out the window at the behest of the growing mono-empire that is the USA — and it is so wrong.
The British rock ‘n’ roll legend said that Assange’s continued detainment behind bars was “purely political” and that there is no question that he is a political prisoner who is being used as a “warning” to others who might be inclined to do real journalism.
In any sane universe, Julian Assange would be lauded as a hero of the people.
Waters also took aim at mainstream media, where he said it is now nearly impossible to find a truthful narrative of events. “To find the truth these days is extremely difficult,” he said.
Assange is currently languishing in Belmarsh awaiting a hearing on extradition to the US, where he could face 175 years in prison for publishing leaked military documents and exposing war crimes. A London court ruled against the whistleblower in October after his lawyers sought to have the extradition hearing delayed.
“Presently, the fabric that holds a society together has shredded in the wind. Everyone has their own facts, their own private Idaho stored in their expensive cellular phones. The earbuds are in, the feedback loops are locked, and the Frappuccino’s are flowing freely. Social media provides the highway straight back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The restless natives react to digital shadows on the wall, reduced to fear, hate, and superstition…”
Following the band’s Rock Hall nomination, founder Gerald Casale reflects on its dystopian legacy in the age of Trump.
In 2018, 15 years after becoming eligible, Devo was nominated for the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame. The honorees will be announced a week from today. I was immediately struck by the timing of our sudden recognition: When Devo formed more than 40 years ago, we never dreamed that two decades into the 21st century, everything we had theorized would not only be proven, but also become worse than we had imagined. For me, Devo has been a long journey littered with broken dreams, but the nomination compelled me to put things in perspective. I know that many are called but few are chosen.
Forty-eight years ago, on May 4, 1970, as a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), I was front and center being fired on by my fellow Americans in the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, as we peacefully protested President Nixon’s expansion of the cancerously unpopular Vietnam War into Cambodia without an act of Congress. I was lucky and dodged the bullet, both literally and figuratively, but four students were killed, and nine more were seriously wounded by the armed, mostly teenaged, National Guard troops. Two of the four students killed, Alison Krause and Jeffery Miller, were close acquaintances of mine. Less than a year earlier, as an Admissions/Curriculum counselor to incoming students, I had admitted them to the Honors College program.
May 4 changed my life, and I truly believe Devo would not exist without that horror. It made me realize that all the Quasar color TVs, Swanson TV dinners, Corvettes, and sofa beds in the world didn’t mean we were actually making progress. It meant the future could be not only as barbaric as the past, but that it most likely would be. The dystopian novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World suddenly seemed less like cautionary tales about the encroaching fusion of technological advances with the centralized, authoritarian power of the state, and more like subversive road maps to condition the intelligentsia for what was to come.
As I started working with my Kent State poet friend, Bob Lewis, a philosophy emerged, fueled by the revelations that linear progress in a consumer society was a lie. Things were not getting better. There were no flying cars and domed cities, as promised in Popular Science; rather, there was a dumbing down of the population engineered by right-wing politicians, televangelists, and Madison Avenue. I called what we saw “De-evolution,” based upon the tendency toward entropy across all human endeavors. Borrowing the tactics of the Mad Men-era of our childhood, we shortened the name of the idea to the marketing-friendly “Devo.” We were not left-wing politicos. We were more informed by Jungian principles of duality in human nature, and we realized human flaws spread out across the political spectrum. Hence: “We’re All Devo,” an idea from which we did not exempt ourselves.
Then, and in the decades to follow, we witnessed an America where the capacity for critical thought and reasoning were eroding fast. People mindlessly repeating slogans from political propaganda and ad campaigns: “America, Love It or leave It”; “Don’t Ask Why, Drink Bud Dry”; “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”; even risk-free, feel-good slogans like “Give Peace a Chance.” Here was an emerging Corporate Feudal State. You were either inside the draw bridge at night, or outside with the gnashing of teeth.
Rebellion appeared hopelessly obsolete. If the message wasn’t sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, there could be hell to pay. More and more, it seemed like the only real threat to consumer society at our disposal was meaning: turning sloganeering on its head for sarcastic or subversive means, and making people notice that they were being moved and manipulated by marketing, not by well-meaning friends disguised as mom-and-pop. And so creative subversion seemed the only viable course of action. We mixed our outrage with equal parts satire and dark humor. What else could a poor boy do?
Prior to the resignation of the nefarious Richard M. Nixon, I partnered with a new collaborator, Mark Mothersbaugh, and with his musical prowess we found the sonic alchemy for the Devo aesthetic. We formed a band of brothers around the philosophy of Devolution, only to be proven all too right.
Presently, the fabric that holds a society together has shredded in the wind. Everyone has their own facts, their own private Idaho stored in their expensive cellular phones. The earbuds are in, the feedback loops are locked, and the Frappuccino’s are flowing freely. Social media provides the highway straight back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The restless natives react to digital shadows on the wall, reduced to fear, hate, and superstition. There are climate change deniers, and there are even more who think that the climate is being maliciously manipulated by corporate conglomerates owned by the Central Bank to achieve global control of resources and wealth. If only that James Bond-style fantasy were true, I would be much more excited about the future, which I fear is more of a slow-death conspiracy of dunces like in Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy, the movie Devo should have made.
We are drowning in a devolved, WWF Smackdown-style world, with warring, huckster TV pundits from “The Left” and “The Right” distracting the clueless TV viewership while our vile, venal Mobster-in-Chief (who makes Idiocracy’s Macho Camacho look fit for office) and his corrupt minions rob the nation’s coffers in a shamelessly cruel, Grab-‘Em-By-The-Pussy Kleptocracy. They reflect the prevailing mentality of the electorate. It’s as if Christopher Nolan wrote the script for America, where Trump is the Joker handing out Cabinet positions to The Suicide Squad: Hey, Betsy! You hate public education? How’d you like to run the Department of Education? Scott, you don’t give a shit about poisoning the environment for your kids and grandkids, right? Here’s your new office, Pal. Don’t forget that soundproof phone booth!
The rise of authoritarian leadership around the globe, fed by ill-informed populism, is well-documented at this point. And with it, we see the ugly specter of increased racism and anti-Semitism. It’s open season on those who gladly vote against their own self-interests. The exponential increase in suffering for more and more of the population is heartbreaking to see. “Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want,” those Devo clowns said in 1980.
So, let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late. Perhaps the reason Devo was even nominated after 15 years of eligibility is because Western society seems locked in a death wish. Devo doesn’t skew so outside the box anymore. Maybe people are a bit nostalgic for our DIY originality and substance. We were the canaries in the coalmine warning our fans and foes of things to come in the guise of the Court Jester, examples of conformity in extremis in order to warn against conformity. We were certainly not the one-hit wonders the dismissive rock press likes to say we were. We have always been the Rodney Dangerfields of Rock ‘N’ Roll. We were polarizing because we did not “play ball” with the sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll messaging dictum.
But today Devo is merely the house band on the Titanic. With three generations of fans, 10 studio albums, five live albums, scores of singles, scores of music videos (a format which we pioneered), and eight world tours committed to history since our 1978 debut record, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo, we’ve all too chillingly stood the test of time. 2020 will be the 40th anniversary of our Freedom of Choice record. Don’t be surprised to see us on tour then in our iconic, red Energy Domes, careening toward the latest Presidential election/selection. Speaking truth to power is a never-ending battle. In the best-case scenario, we avoid sinking into the abyss and, as a society, scratch ourselves back to square one.
Is there any question that De-evolution is real?
Devo founder Gerald Casale is a director, and songwriter based in Los Angeles. Vote for Devo in the Rock Hall’s Fan Vote here.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 