OK, I know I always say it, and almost never achieve it, but I really am going to keep this newsletter concise this time. I kind of have to, because after four days of dealing with extremely agitated Mattias Desmet fans in the replies to my latest column here on Substack, I’m worn out. So I’m going to get straight to the news (i.e., the stuff you might actually care about and want to read and view) and then just paste some of my exchanges with the Desmet fans below, for educational and entertainment purposes.
The news you might actually care about is this segment I did with Catherine Austin Fitts for the Stiftung Corona Ausschuss (the “Corona Investigative Committee”). We had a lively discussion/debate about Mr. Global (a/k/a GloboCap), the New Normal, how official propaganda works, the Financial Coup, mind control, faith, resistance strategies, and all kinds of other stuff you may actually be interested in. The Solari Report (i.e., Catherine’s outfit) has put our segment up on their site. Here it is …
Just to be clear, this is not part of the WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT MR. GLOBAL series. Part Two of that will be released by OVALmedia … well, relatively soon. It is still in post-production, and I don’t have any control over that. I’ll let you know, of course, when it gets released. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this segment as much as I did. (Click on the photo and it will take you to the video.)
That’s it. That’s all the news for now, or at least all the news I’m allowed to tell you about, currently. Amazon hasn’t banned my latest book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), in any new countries yet — it’s still just banned in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands — but they’ve slapped a big “Covid Vaccine Advisory” on it in the USA, UK, Canada, France, and presumably everywhere else.
So definitely do not attempt to purchase and actually read my book — or any other extensively footnoted historical documentation of the rollout of the New Normal in 2020 and 2021 — without first visiting the CDC, or whatever public health authority acts as the CDC where you are, for the latest information on Covid-19 and vaccines!
All right, that’s really it for the news this time. Here’s that copy-and-paste selection of some of my exchanges with a few of Professor Mattias Desmet’s fans in the replies to my latest column, Mass Formation Hypnosis Disorder. I am publishing these (a) because I engaged with some of the commenters more than I typically do — which I thought I needed to given the nature of the column — and articulated some of my thoughts in a way that I wanted to preserve somewhere other than in the messy context of the over 800 comments that have poured in over the last four days, and (b) just to pad out this newsletter with a big wad of content that I’m fairly sure very few people will actually read but which will meet my personal standards regarding the gratuitously excessive length of these newsletters.
Anyway, here they are …
Commenter: Please ~ if not for the sake of remaining in the truth, then for the sake of your own reputation ~ do not publish another word about M. Desmet before listening attentively to the entirety of this recent interview: https://thehighwire.com/videos/inside-the-mind-of-the-masses/. Do we not have *enough* misrepresentation to contend with, without adding to it ourselves? PLEASE ... we need you too much to be able to afford having you detour into bullshit like this.
Commenter: In short: an idiot ( c.j. hopkins) ranting about something that he does not understand. for fucks sake you man cannot even get the name right... so why don't you just shut up and educate yourself before you start off on a mission to prove to the world what a moron you are.
Commenter: I've watched so many of Mattias' interviews - the Del Bigtree was awesome as was the Tucker Carlson one. Then I heard about his Alex Jones one - it made me worried! I hadn't watched Alex Jones in YEARS because, well....Alex Jones!? Right? Ugh. He's too much. So I thought I need to see what this interview was like and it was seriously AWFUL. Awful. Have you seen it? I couldn't get through it - it was like being in a War Room - so bombastic, all the violent colours, all the shock and awe....Alex' voice. In the other interviews Mattias had faced his interviewers and had talked to THEM...it was very human and natural...in this one Alex faces his camera with all of the bling and shock behind him and talks to the camera and has Mattias do the same...so Mattias isn't talking TO Alex he's talking to some camera. He's Mattias so he's being calm and measured and saying what he's been saying...and every now and then Alex BARKS at him - and english is MY first language but I can barely understand his barks...it was VERY unsettling and made me super anxious, the whole thing! I can only imagine how Mattias felt! No wonder he said what he said - the whole set was like an attack. Awful. I wish he never did that interview (because look, even CJ is using the visual of it to disparage him :( ) - but I liked what he said about why he did that interview...I appreciate he has his principles and was just going to do interviews with anyone and everyone and not judge them. But, I don't think he should have done that interview! Del is interviewing Alex on Thursday...THAT should be interesting. I wonder if I'll be able to stand it. Hmmm...
Commenter: A naive blowhard that’s too close minded to admit he’s wrong, so he cites himself to bolster up in the corner that he’s blogged himself into. This is fortunate, because he’ll need that corner for support of his spineless pride. “Certain monitors can emit electromagnetic field pulses that excite a sensory resonance in a nearby subject, through image pulses that are so weak as to be subliminal. This is unfortunate since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby people are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someone else's purposes. Such application would be unethical and is of course not advocated. It is mentioned here in order to alert the public to the possibility of covert abuse that may occur while being online, or while watching TV, a video, or a DVD.“ That’s verbatim from the .gov patent website/database for US PATENT 6,506,148 - January 14, 2003.
(And so on.)
Commenter (some time later): Some fair arguments have been made and concerns expressed etc. At this point, a sincere intellectual genuinely trying to be objective would engage with a thoughtful response. Someone compromised by their own biases would ignore what’s been conveyed and simply move on. At the moment, CJ you yourself are looking a bit like controlled opposition given all the seemingly wilful misrepresentation, all the emotive focus you are putting on this simple matter and all distraction and division it is leading to. As many have already said ad nauseum, the Mass Formation and Mattias Desmet are not one and the same. How is that so hard to understand? There seems to be an agenda of some kind not to acknowledge any of the merits of this simple point. Accordingly, one has to ask point blank: Do personal matters related to Desmet disallow Mass Formation, a concept which predates him by decades, if not centuries, from being sincerely contemplated? Do problems with Desmet preclude us from thinking for ourselves and reaching our own conclusions free from being denigrated and dismissed as ‘devoted fans’ of Desmet on your page? It seems so, and it’s surprising, to say the least.
CJH: Get with the program ... everyone knows I'm "controlled opposition," not to mention a "Suppressive Person."
Commenter (i.e., the same commenter): That's your considered response? Wow.
CJH: Actually, my considered response is something along the lines of ... go fuck yourself with your paranoid, agitated-cultist accusations and amateurish passive-aggressive trolling tactics. It's just that this is a public platform, so I try to keep my replies to people like you at least somewhat entertaining.
CJH: I realize and appreciate that many people are avid fans of Prof. Desmet and have become adherents of "Mass Formation" theory. But try to exert a little intellectual discipline. When Desmet and Malone talk about the masses being hypnotized (which Desmet does repeatedly), they mean what they say. The most common definition of hypnosis is "a mental state like sleep, in which a person's thoughts can be easily influenced by someone else." (Look the word up. It means what it means.) Of course mass hysteria, mob behavior, and other such phenomenon are real. But that is not hypnosis. I will provide one more example of what is not hypnosis. Here in Berlin, hardly anyone is wearing masks currently. In the Autumn, when the new "restrictions" go into effect, the majority of people will put their masks back on and resume harassing people not wearing masks ... not because they will have been re-hypnotized, but rather, because they will be following orders. They will conform to official "reality" again, despite that fact that they just spent the Summer living in a different, contradictory "reality." They will repeat the official propaganda that "makes sense" of why they have to wear the masks again. They will do this in order to not be punished, fired from the jobs, ostracized by their friends, and called horrible names by the government and the media. This is not the behavior of hypnotized people. It is, however, the behavior of people in cults and totalitarian societies. Their behavior is motivated by fear, and they are absolutely right to be afraid. If they disobey, they'll be punished, and they know it. They are not in a trance or a sleep-like state. They are perceiving the dynamics of their society accurately. They will conform to the changing, contradictory "realities" because they understand the penalties for refusing to do so. There is nothing wrong with these people's minds. At the moment, they are not wearing their masks because they have not been ordered to wear their masks. When they are ordered to wear their masks again, they will do so, because they have been ordered to do so. Just like we let ourselves and our families be x-rayed, fondled, and humiliated by the "security personnel" at the airport, not because we have all been hypnotized into believing that these procedures keep us safe, but because we want to get on the fucking plane.
CJH: I've added an addendum to this essay (see above) as it appears Professor Desmet has been telling the “doctors performing open-heart surgery on hypnotized patients with no anesthetic” lie for some time, or at least trying to. I'm sorry, it is clear from the comments that many of my readers are devoted fans of Professor Desmet, but when a person lies like this, gets caught lying, weasels out of it, then tells the same lie two years later on the Alex Jones Show (and who knows where else), gets caught lying again, confesses, tries to weasel out of it again, and posts a bunch of misleading links in a desperate attempt to convince people he wasn't lying in the first place (whenever that was, exactly) ... well, I think there is probably a professional-psychology-type term for such a person.
Commenter: Mattias Desmet the man doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. We evaluate ideas separately from the character flaws of their originators all the time, and Desmet didn’t even originate most of the “mass formation” theory. I hope this isn’t an excuse to casually dismiss Desmet’s ideas because he may not be a good person, just like many people refuse to acknowledge any good policy Trump might have had because he was a bombastic assclown.
Commenter (replying to the above commenter): Nailed it. The attempts to ignore the obvious points you make here are palpable and even seem wilful. We are called 'Desmet fans' as a kind of slander for even uttering such things. This is the kind of thing I think we've all become accustomed to experiencing from those powerful elites whom we are all united in opposing. It's strange to see it here too. This is exactly what Power wants.... to distract and divide opposition.
CJH: If you don't want me to refer to you as "fans," stop acting like fans. You people are exhibiting exactly the same behavior as the people I have referred to as "Covidian Cultists," twisting yourselves into pretzels with one desperate rationalization after another in an attempt to defend the narrative you have invested in from "attack." I'm honestly sorry that you bought a truckload of pseudo-philosophical snake oil from a charlatan who doesn't even have the good sense not to tell the same lies over and over again (to a non-captive audience), but perhaps this will become a learning experience for you.
Commenter: Perhaps I haven’t followed this debate in sufficient detail, CJ, but aren’t your Covidian cultists pretty much the same as the folk in the grips of what Mattias Desmet—whom I agree is an intellectual fraud—calls mass formation? If not, perhaps you can spell out the differences? The reason I agree with you and not Desmet is that such irrational behavior and beliefs (and that seems much the correct order, guided or directed behavior preceding beliefs) seems to me pretty much the norm for most of mankind, only now whipped into a crowd-like frenzy with the organized political venom that such groups generate and embody. But isn’t your cult pretty much his mass formation? Isn’t the major difference between you, personal honesty and integrity aside, that he sees it as a remarkable phenomenon requiring his genius to explain whereas you (and I) see it pretty much as the norm for mankind and generated by and controlled by a well-organized tyrannical state?
CJH: No, and please forgive me if am curt, but I am getting tired of being asked to explain what I have worked fairly hard for over two years to explain, and have arguably done a fair job of explaining, and which, i.e., my explanation, is available to read online, published in a book, and contained in the various interviews I have given. But here's the short version ...
Totalitarianism operates like a cult ... a cult writ large, on a societal scale. People in cults are not hypnotized. They have simply adapted their behavior and beliefs to the social "reality" and rules of the cult. People in totalitarian systems behave exactly the same way.
Totalitarianism is a political phenomenon, i.e., a social/political structure, imposed on society by force, when whoever is in control of the key elements of power (i.e., military, police, media, etc.) deem it in their interest to adopt this structure. It does not magically arise out of some general state of "loneliness, isolation, and pent-up frustration" among the masses, or any other type of preexisting pathological social conditions, as Desmet's theory would have it. The New Normals, the Covidian Cultists, are not hypnotized. They are not deluded. They have adapted to the new official "reality" of their societies, exactly as cult members adapt to the "reality" of their cults, in order not to be shunned, punished, ostracized, etc. It only looks crazy to us because we are not adapting to it, but most of us will, to some degree, in time.
Do we rebel at the airport when we are forced to perform Anti-Terrorism Security Theater in order to travel? We do not, though we know it is just theater. But these theatrical rituals, i.e., airport security, masks, vaccination passes, tests, weddings, graduation ceremonies, (LSD orgies if you were in the Manson Family) etc., are what generate and reinforce our collective "reality." We perform these official-"reality"-reifying rituals, even the ones we know deep down are nonsense, not because we are hypnotized, but because we want to remain members of the society, or club, or cult, or religion, or corporation, and not be singled out and shunned, demonized, and punished for non-conformity.
Well, that wasn't as short or curt as I thought it was going to be. But thank you, because now I can use it as boilerplate for my future replies to people asking me to explain what I have already explained in my published essays and interviews for over two years now ... again, apologies, I'm getting cranky.
Commenter (a different commenter, replying to my reply): Isn’t adhering to cultish behaviour emblematic of ‘mass formation’? I bought the mass formation shtick bcuz well, how else do I explain the sheer madness around me? I also thought that most fear to stand out & just want to be polite & go along to get along. I suppose that those who do so in the extreme are truly cultists.
The red flag for me on Desmet was when he attacked ‘conspiracy theorists’. This, after conspiracy theorists had been batting nearly .1000. He also said there was no signs of plotting or planning etc. How he could say this in light of overwhelming information to the contrary is concerning & shows him to be an intellectually dishonest contributor.
CJH: See, e.g., the reply you are replying to (above).
Commenter: Dear CJ, Desmet really touched a very sensitive nerve in you. I still am not sure what nerve it is. Desmet never said "mass formation PSYCHOSIS". His interest in mass formation/groupthink started with his doctorate. He does see the evil, he does recognize the things you see as well. He does go a step further to turn the mirror on us. Maybe we should take a deep breath and find what is really disturbing us. PLEASE, PLEASE listen to this excellent interview with Del Bigtree. We must not now crawl into our foxholes and just fire. Maybe we can tolerate our differences and keep the real enemy in our sights? I find Desmets discussion with Del Bigtree very explanatory of what Desmet tries to tell us. He holds a mirror before us that is not easy to look in all the time. https://thehighwire.com/videos/inside-the-mind-of-the-masses/
CJH: Yes, it's that "I don't like lying charlatans" nerve. Oh, and, fuck you for the creepy, manipulative attempted mindfuck. Do you find you have much success with that kind of creepy behavior in your personal relationships, or do you just break that out on the Internet? In any event, thanks ... I am beginning to understand where people's fanatical devotion to Desmet comes from.
Back in 2001, I was in a social work masters program at NYU, assigned to an adolescent ward at a mental hospital for my field training.
My placement did not go well, because after a few weeks of listening to the teenage girl to whom I was assigned - diagnosed as oppositional-defiant and other things — and also listening to my social worker supervisor, I though the girl’s aggressive responses to the threatening world in which she actually lived when outside the hospital (and possibly when inside it) made a lot more sense than the social worker’s efforts to get her to stop fighting.
I thought it would be useful to provide kids with more effective tools to fight back against their abusers and escape, and harmful to teach them to suppress their self-protective responses altogether.
Only lasted that one semester in the program, but learned a lot about social control mechanisms.
I was thrilled to see the Corona Investigative Committee *finally* interviewed you as I recommended you to them when they invited me several months ago. I love that you and Catherine did this together and am looking forward to listening to what is sure to be an engaging discussion.