Where I’ve been this week (and where we all are now)

I’ve been silent all this week because I spent the last few days at NYU Langone, the hospital affiliated with the university. On Sunday, my most acute Lyme symptoms had so worsened that my doctors sent me to the ER, where I was told that it seemed possible that I’m now suffering from some neurological disease as well as Lyme, so that I ought to be admitted for a range of tests, and further observation.

So I checked in that night, and got home yesterday. The good news is that I evidently have no such condition, so that I may proceed to deal with those more acute Lyme symptoms as an out-patient. (I also now have vertigo, which may be a Lyme symptom, too.) 

The whole experience was, of course, exhausting—and surreal, what with the entire staff masked, making it impossible to have a human conversation, even with the most attentive and compassionate personnel. (They were mostly excellent.) Since I could not be treated
otherwise, I was tested for COVID-19, and it was negative, so I wasn’t in a COVID ward; but the pandemic atmosphere was heavy on my floor, as all throughout the hospital, all hospitals in New York City (and elsewhere). 

Out in the world, meanwhile, the Democratic (!) crackdown on free speech has intensified this week, with Biden reportedly warning that “conspiracy theories” concerning the election (and, presumably, much else) will not be “tolerated,” while the “insurrection” on 1/6 has been ever more hysterically and luridly played up as grounds for Trump’s impeachment, in order to ensure that he can never again run for office: an obvious attempt—whatever one may think of him—to thwart the will of an electorate that might (however deludedly, perhaps) want him instead of Biden to be president four years from now. This propaganda drive has necessarily entailed attacks on every voice and forum that somehow contradicts the terroristic narrative, so that it’s getting ever harder to hear, read and/or see anything that’s not in perfect harmony with all the state and corporate organs thundering that narrative non-stop. 

Those dissident voices seem to include mine, as, since the weekend, my usual daily flood of emails has dwindled to a trickle (as happened only for one day a few weeks back), and the donations to my GoFundMe pages just stopped as of two days ago. One email that I did receive informed me that several attempts to donate, via different servers and computers, had failed; so it now seems that GoFundMe, as PayPal has done to other dissidents (not me, not yet), is part of the state/corporate merger against wrongthink. As well, the daily number of new signatories to my petition has now markedly declined, despite the ongoing circulation of the several podcasts I have done, and an item on my situation published by the Free Speech Union in the UK. 

So I send this out today in hopes that it will get to you, half-expecting it too to be blocked, as we unhappy few (though I suspect there really aren’t so few of us) who contradict or question the Big Lie are obviously under an attack whose scale  and comprehensiveness are quite unprecedented in world history.