In response to this study, a spokesman for Eli Lilly told the Telegraph, “No regulatory authority has ever determined that Lilly withheld or improperly disclosed any data related to these medications.”3
Experts said the reviews findings were startling and deeply worrying, stating that people in the United Kingdom are consuming more than four times as many antidepressants that they did two decades ago.4
Now what about the United States? America is no stranger to the antidepressants, either, as our nation increased its use of them by 65 percent in fifteen years.5 I’m sure you know a number of people who run on antidepressants like M&Ms. But this is no laughing matter, rather an alarming moment indeed for our nation as a growing number of us are beset by depression.
If we examine the school shootings in America, in almost every case the deranged child was on antidepressant medications but inevitably it is swept away by the drug companies before we can recognize these perils.
My concerns were only solidified as the media once again pushed the use of antidepressants in reaction to these high-profile suicides. Instead of recognizing the risks associated with antidepressants, a Reuters article called for pharmaceutical companies to introduce new antidepressants to the market: “A spike in suicide rates in the United States has cast fresh light on the need for more effective treatments for major depression, with researchers saying it is a tricky development area that has largely been abandoned by big pharmaceutical companies.”6
With more research pointing to the dangers of these medications, we would expect news outlets to warn the masses about these worrisome outcomes, but unfortunately, they won’t. As I have maintained for years, we must consider the board of directors of major media companies and then check out the interlocking corporate directorships.
Ultimately, antidepressant medication is a bad immediate solution and not the long-term solution.
Hassan’s techniques of deception, mind control, infiltration, and false narrative have been and continue to be aggressively employed by those seeking profit and power against an entrenched individual or system—whether or not that person or institution is corrupt.
Not all mind-control techniques rely on drugs and the promise of unearthly delights. In some cases, moral corruption or a paycheck can be used to build a protest army. There is also a third path. Sometimes a strong sense of real injustice is enough to turn rational people into criminals. The decade leading up to the American Revolution saw several examples of ways to build and deploy a destructive mob.
PROTESTING AND PATRIOTISM
Whatever else the Stamp Act of 1765 was, it was legal. Britain ruled the colonies, the British Parliament passed the act, and it became the law of our land.
However, individuals may decide what is just and unjust and take appropriate steps—steps that, ideally, are legal, peaceful, and no threat to other people.
Colonists in New York and Boston in 1765 acknowledged none of these limitations. The Stamp Act, under which the British taxed almost all forms of paper, such as pamphlets, legal documents, government documents, newspapers, and even playing cards, was a profound insult to the colonists. Not only did it take money from their pockets, not only was this tax created without the colonists having representation in the British Parliament, but the proceeds were used to offset the expense of maintaining British troops on these shores.7
The act became law on March 22, 1765, and was supposed to go into effect on November 1, but within the colonies, those facing the additional taxes didn’t wait for it to be implemented. In the early morning of August 14, a newly formed group from Boston, calling itself the Sons of Liberty,8 hung an effigy of tax official Andrew Oliver from the Liberty Tree, an elm that stood in Hanover Square. They made clear to any loyalists or officials approaching the effigy with the intent of removing it that doing so would put their lives at risk. The effigy stayed—but only until that night. By then a form of mass hysteria had settled in, triggering long-held resentment of the Crown. Not long after dark, members of the merchant class who were sympathetic to the Sons of Liberty took the effigy down and carried it to an unfinished building owned by Oliver.
The rumor was that Oliver planned to use this building as an office to distribute tax stamps. Mob logic held that if there were no building, there might not be a tax, so the marchers quickly tore the building apart. Then they carried the lumber from the destroyed office, along with the effigy, to Oliver’s home, where they beheaded the effigy and threw rocks through Oliver’s windows. The official and his family wisely fled to the home of a friend. But the mob wasn’t finished. They toted the wood and the effigy up Fort Hill, where the timbers were used to fuel a massive bonfire. Oliver’s effigy was burned there as well. Once the fires burned down, participants danced in the ashes.
Yet even this was not enough for the mob, which stormed back to Oliver’s home, beat down the doors, and ransacked the place. The mob was gearing up to do a house-to-house search for Oliver—a search that would have almost certainly ended with Oliver receiving the same treatment as his effigy—when someone speculated that he was likely holed up in the well-fortified Castle William, within Boston Harbor. That took the wind from the rabble and Oliver was allowed to survive. No fool, he swiftly resigned his position as the Stamp Act’s overseer, despite the fact that the act hadn’t gone into effect and that he hadn’t taken a single official action under it.
There is significant difference between mass hysteria to achieve an outcome and mass hysteria to change an outcome. The witch burnings were the former. Fueled by fear and prejudice, the fervor of the populace was renewed every time a new victim was arrested and brought to trial. The Sons of Liberty and their supporters were different. They felt abused by a governing body across the ocean and wanted the misconduct stopped. Before you ask, “How is that different from AntiFA, Black Lives Matter, and other far left groups?” remember that the colonials acted at great personal risk for principles of liberty and property that today’s hooded clowns of the left haven’t the brains or will to understand, nor the sense of personal honor and responsibility to respect. In both the witch trials and in AntiFA, there was little chance of punishment for participating in hysteria: denouncing witches became status quo, and AntiFA anarchists are lionized by the liberal left. The colonists standing up against the Crown may have been prone to hysteria at times, but they all knew that if they had been captured and made to account for their actions, they would be hung.
Furthermore, as the American Revolution would demonstrate, the hysteria mostly passed after the outcome—independence—was achieved. Cooler heads, especially among some of the Founding Fathers, would eventually impose the rule of law and the protection of private property within the colony, although as we will see, British sympathizers weren’t exactly welcomed back into the fold.
The successful action against Oliver empowered the Sons of Liberty and those who supported them. On August 26, protesters ransacked the homes of two British officials: William Story, who was responsible for hearing trade law cases in court, and Benjamin Hallowell, Boston’s comptroller of customs. The mob then made its way to the residence of Governor Thomas Hutchinson, demanding that he disown the Stamp Act. When Hutchinson refused, the protesters burst into his home, stole what they could, and gutted the structure. Hutchinson and his family barely escaped with their lives.
These incidents showcased the extent to which the authorities had lost control of Boston. A call went out for members of the sheriff’s office to step in but, as with Hassan’s followers, authorities discovered that many within the office were already part of the mob. However, as frightening as it may be, even the reach of a hysterical mob can only go so far. As we saw with Cotton Mather’s printed accounts, real influence comes from the media. The Sons of Liberty had evolved from a smaller, earlier group called the Loyal Nine. It is no accident that the Loyal Nine regularly convened in the offices of the Boston Gazette, a news publication Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard once called “the most fra
ctious paper in America.” Benjamin Edes, the paper’s printer, was a member of the Loyal Nine,9 and both the symbolic and chilling significance of the group meeting at a media outlet, a place where opinions are shaped—and reputations could be destroyed through unfavorable press—cannot be overlooked.
Massachusetts wasn’t the only colony in which a newspaper played a prominent role in the Stamp Act revolt. In May 1765, twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses—a colonial legislative body—helped pass four “resolves”—statements of opposition to the Stamp Act. A fifth resolve boldly stated that the Virginia Assembly had “the only and exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the inhabitants of this Colony[.]” That one was struck down as being too radical.10
That fifth resolve, however, was not too radical to be published in the Newport Mercury newspaper, out of Newport, Rhode Island, which printed all five without noting that the last hadn’t been passed. The Mercury’s account also included a sixth resolve, the authorship of which has never been conclusively determined. That resolve stated that inhabitants of the Virginia Colony were not required to comply with any taxes not passed by the colony. Not to be outdone, the Maryland Gazette account of the resolves printed all six, plus another that stated that any individual outside the General Assembly who attempted to levy a tax on Virginians “shall be deemed, AN ENEMY TO THIS HIS MAJESTY’S COLONY.”
Most historians attribute the last two “fake news” resolves to Patrick Henry.
He was angry that the Virginia Gazette had refused to print any news of the resolves, including the four the House of Burgesses had actually passed, so Henry and his associates distributed the full list of seven to news outlets throughout the colonies, representing all of them as having passed.
One can understand newspapers’ willingness to help foment unrest against the Stamp Act. The paper tax alone would have been onerous, but there was also a clause in the act that demanded an additional two-shilling tax on every advertisement that appeared in its pages.
Without the help of the media, the August 26 events in Boston would have been isolated incidents of mob fury. But when word got out about the successful intimidation tactics the Bostonians had used, agitators in other cities were quick to pick up on their methods. The next day, in neighboring Rhode Island, a merchant mob erected a gallows in the town square and hung effigies of three stamp distributors. In New York, stamp distributor James McEvers resigned his position four days after the August 26 Boston riots. In his resignation letter, McEvers made specific reference to the damages realized by the Boston distributors, writing, “I have a large store of goods and seldom less than twenty-thousand pounds currency value in it with which the populace would make sad havoc.”11
At this point, any chance of the Stamp Act actually being enforced was effectively over. McEvers’s resignation was quickly followed by those from stamp distributors in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Patrick Henry’s Virginia. The distributor for Delaware and Pennsylvania announced he would not enforce the Stamp Act unless the other colonies did so.
Officially, the Stamp Act went into effect on November 1, 1765. But by then the only stamp distributor left in the colonies was Georgia’s George Angus, who did his job for a fortnight before fleeing.
Knowing when to stop. That’s the quality that made the Sons of Liberty unique, effective, and most of all credible. Knowing how to apply pressure in the media without actually corrupting the media, influencing others with your actions instead of brainwashing them, creating support without hysteria. They were picking appropriate targets, not lashing out with blind, brutal tactics the way ISIS or the anarchists on Soros’s payroll do. Those savages are only looking to destroy. You can’t build a nation on the aftermath of terror, you can only tear one down.
These are the qualities that distinguish the revolutionary era from the present. They are the qualities that marked George Washington for command of a seemingly impossible mission: to secure American independence.
Like many of the upper class of his time, George Washington was a farmer and a businessman. He was also a candidate for perpetual pain management: What few teeth he had were rotting away. As a farmer, Washington had several options for treating pain available to him, and one of them involved a plant we do not automatically think of in connection with an illustrious Founding Father.
Washington’s diaries are full of details on sowing and harvesting hemp—marijuana—and then separating the male and female specimens. As potheads know, the female buds are more potent for both pain relief and as intoxicants. In 1796, Washington discussed raising “India Hemp”—indica—in a letter to his foreman:
What was done with the Seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sown again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp. (emphasis added)12
Washington’s claim that indica was valuable is curious. At the time, wheat was a much better cash crop, and the fibers from indica are not as suitable for industrial use as the more common sativa variety of cannabis. Washington raised a number of strains at his farm and he would have been familiar with their wide-ranging uses.
If, as seems apparent, Washington was using medicinal cannabis—a possibility that may give pause to those who ridiculously want plaques commemorating our first POTUS removed because, like all southern farmers of his time, he was also a slaveholder—Washington knew how to balance his medicinal needs with his responsibilities. Washington was a general whose troops and equipment were of far poorer quality than those fielded by the British army. Yet by the time the war ended, the thinking of the commander in chief had evolved to encompass strategic retreats as well as cutting enemy supply lines, which had the added benefit of helping to replenish his own ill-equipped troops.
There’s a moral in this obscure bit of history. As with so many basically good concepts, the left has taken the idea of medical marijuana and, like intractable children, decided they want pot all the time, for any purpose. That’s like alcoholics demanding that we let them stay impaired while they work, drive a car, interact socially, and slavishly protest Donald Trump. Not only is pot itself becoming a major business, but a cottage industry of questionable medical practices has sprung up for the purpose of authorizing marijuana’s use by the general public. Again, a drugged public, an easily coerced electorate, is the left’s best friend. And normalization means we’re all going to be exposed to it. Anyone who has walked down the street and smelled cigarette smoke knows this—people will light up freely, and the rest of us, those of us who want our mental facilities to remain unimpaired, are going to be subject to contact highs, headaches, and all the other unwanted effects and side effects of pot use.
We’ve already seen how the Assassins used pot and hashish to entice or trick young men into doing things they normally wouldn’t do, things that were morally repugnant. Make pot freely accessible and what few restraints the left has will be gone. Remove inhibitions and violence will come easier, the threat of arrest being an abstraction. In our current day, if left-wing rioters lose the fear of arrest for beatings, violence, unlawful gatherings, they’ll be further emboldened to disrupt legal, peaceful expressions of thought they don’t like. Soon the only voices will be those of the progressive left puppet masters urging their doped lackeys on.
I’ll make one prediction. It’s not going to be the beautiful world that leftists imagine in their pot-fueled haze. As we’ve seen, when one voice, unchallenged, is allowed to create mass hysteria and group amnesia, the results are destructive for their frequently innocent targets.
And the worst was yet to come.
In a way, the colonial victory in the Revolution spurred the kind of outburst we see after a home team wins the big game and the celebration gets out of hand. Americans had every reason to be proud and euphoric. But mass hysteria settled into some
parts of the new United States and the victors became vengeful against those who had supported the Crown. Abraham Lincoln would learn the hard lessons of this hysteria. A few weeks before assured victory, in his Second Inaugural Address, he cautioned the North to treat the South “with malice toward none; with charity for all[.]”
But that speech was still the better part of a century away. And the better part of our natures had not yet emerged.
LIBERTY, LOYALISTS, AND LIBERAL LIES
During the Revolutionary War, the Patriots’ attitude toward the Loyalists, or Tories, was malicious. For the duration, mass hysteria and lawlessness toward Loyalists was rampant. In New York, for example, Patriots destroyed printing presses that had churned out pamphlets against the revolt and stole cattle and other personal property.13 There were also physical assaults. Patriots relied on tarring and feathering, a form of public humiliation that was both shame-inducing and painful. Sticky pine root tar and occasionally more adhesive and maiming coal tar heated to a point where it can be poured can cause painful blistering and burns. And removing the chicken feathers one by one took skin with it.
Tarring and feathering was initially a tool of the mobs, but in December 1776, less than five months after the Patriots had declared the colonies an independent country, the Provisional Congress of New York ordered the Committee of Safety—a shadow legislative body that governed when the Provisional Congress was not in session—to take possession of enough tar and pitch “necessary for the public use and safety.”14 They weren’t using it to patch holes in ships.
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