Victoria Ferro

There needs to be a reckoning of this crazy idea that, prima facie, doesn't even make sense until you realize that it is borne out of actual Western ethnocentrism and wishful thinking: that as a nation achieves economic growth and modernization (through industrialization, urbanization, education, and wealth accumulation), they naturally progress toward democratic governance. The scandal isn't that it was wrong. The scandal is how the hell it became so embedded in Western intellectual and institutional frameworks that it became taken as true and remained completely unquestioned for 70 years. I knew better, but it wasn't because I was smarter. The reason I was early in NOTICING and sounding the alarm on the true face of the CCP since 2018 was because I grew up in Singapore where I saw GDP per capita skyrocket in my lifetime, with no resulting changes in political freedoms. I also knew that the Eastern cultural mindset was distinct as it prioritizes different values and desires than the West does. In other words, this orthodoxy, which undergirded Western foreign policy for GENERATIONS, was a result of the West projecting its own cultural norms, values and experiences as if it were universal. It presumed, erroneously, that people everywhere fundamentally value individualism, democratic governance, and market-driven progress above all else. In reality, other societies prioritized different things like stability, order, collectivism, religious authority, tribal loyalties, or historical grievances. America's foreign policy establishment proceeded to pursued actions that were based on the false premise that promoting economic liberalization was an effective tool to fostering democracy. Economists, political scientists, policymakers, business leaders and journalists were all steeped in the same myopia. This mind virus was super-spreaded globally via organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and OECD. These bodies conditioned loans and aid on market-oriented reforms (e.g., privatization, deregulation), assuming political liberalization would follow as a byproduct. Universities lionized them, think tanks kept inviting them to speak, and to date, the same institutions that imposed shock therapy on Russia, structural adjustment on Africa, and “China will become like us” fantasies continue to face no reckoning when their predictions spectacularly failed and led us to this mess. Will the architects of this strategic disaster pay at all? Probably not. For the sake of all of us though, we need to understand who they were, and how this blindspot became so tacitly accepted as the truth without any proof whatsoever. More disturbingly: how we were able to hinge such consequential decisions on nothing more than a hypothesis about how the world works? This is by far, the most profound miscalculation of the 20th century. And we're now in the 21st living with the consequences of it. It turns out that liberal democracy's survival depended more on wealth than its emergence from growth alone, and that authoritarian regimes adapted to use markets for control rather than yielding to liberalization. It was easy for communism to collapse when it had to deal with its own internal contradictions. Now, we have rich commies, and their youth reject what the West is selling. The West only has itself to blame.

Look closely at this graph — the results are jaw-dropping. Vaccinated kids: 57% chance of developing a chronic disease in the first 10 years of life. Unvaccinated kids: Only 17%. “That should shock everyone.” This figure is nearly identical to national data, which says that 54% of American children now have at least one chronic condition. The graph comes from a vax vs. unvax study that’s been buried for five years. Dr. Marcus Zervos led the research but chose not to publish it, admitting, “Publishing something like that, I might as well retire. I’d be finished.”