The Big Hoax: Red-Pilling The Public Discourse

Yesterday I touched on the idea that's at the basis of The Big Short that a hoax can be perpetrated on the public -- and by this is meant the educated, informed, and prosperous classes -- via respected institutions and the media. But this isn't just paranoid thinking -- the mortgage-based securities hoax that led to the 2008 financial crisis was predictable and quantifiable, which is one of the chief themes of the film. Near the end, the contrarian Mark Baum makes the point that the fraud has been taking place "not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball". I noted yesterday that his omission of medicine must have been inadvertent.

What we're seeing in the era of Trump 47 is a systematic, at least notionally top-down effort to dismantle the comprehensive social hoax. For instance,

You could see just how much the Health and Human Services secretary is despised last week at a Senate committee hearing when Democrat after Democrat abused him with slurs like “charlatan” and demanded he resign. There is an orchestrated campaign to force him out that includes the overplayed political ploy of an “open letter from nine former CDC leaders” and another letter from 1,000 current and former HHS employees calling on him to step down.

But why would he resign? He’s only just getting started on Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which is popular with Americans of all stripes, especially Republicans, 73% of whom rated it favorably in the latest Insider Advantage poll.

It addresses public concern that transcends party lines about chronic disease, food safety and vaccine skepticism, the latter of which can be blamed on the lies we were told during the COVID-19 pandemic, not on RFK Jr.’s six months in office.

But it wasn't just Democrats:

Republican senators are sending clear signs of disapproval and unhappiness with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making it plain to President Trump that they want the administration to address the chaos Kennedy has caused by trying to rewrite the nation’s vaccine policies.

GOP senators have stopped short of calling on Kennedy to resign and haven’t yet said they regret voting for him in February, but they want him to back off efforts to change vaccine policy recommendations without sound scientific backing as the administration faces a growing public backlash.

However, as Miranda Devine says at the first link, the public doesn't like vaccines. I can say from my own experience that in my routine trips to the doctor at Kaiser, he and the nurses have definitely backed off any pressure for me to get yet more COVID boosters -- I stopped, I think, after the fourth shot, when my booster card ran out of space anyhow. I firmly refused any more, and they've been polite about it. Every indication has been that my decision was prudent. Miranda Devine continues at the first link,

Democrats hate RFK Jr. because he’s an apostate who helped propel Trump to victory last year and because he calls out donations from Big Pharma. Some establishment Republicans don’t care for him either and fear he is undermining faith in vaccines.

But that faith was undermined by the real charlatans during the COVID-19 pandemic who lied that the mRNA so-called vaccine would stop transmission, must be administered to healthy children and had no downside.

The problem is that the hoaxers have hijacked formerly respected institutions. In The Big Short, it was the ratings agencies and the Federal Reserve. Remember that abolishing the Federal Reserve during almost all the last century was seem as an agenda item for only the farthest-fringe right wing. Now, we're getting a closer look at who's actually on the board via the Lisa Cook kerfuffle, and the idea of getting rid of it doesn't seem so extreme.

They've certainly hijacked the Centers for Disease Control.

The percentage of US adults reporting high confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fell from 82% in February 2020 to 56% in June 2022, along with decreasing trust in other US health institutions, according to a study yesterday in PLOS Global Public Health.

. . . The authors noted that respondents reporting high confidence in the CDC dropping from 82% in February 2020 to 68% in May 2020 to a low of 56% in June 2022—26 percentage points from its high point. The rate of those expressing high confidence then rebounded only slightly, to 60%, in October 2024.

Reported high confidence in the NIH, HHS, state health departments, and medical organizations followed a similar pattern, dropping by 25, 13, 16, and 26 percentage points, respectively, from the first (February 2020) through third (June 2022) survey.

So Secretary Kennedy fired the newly-named CDC head. That ought to be a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

Kennedy told senators on the Finance Committee that the CDC official, Susan Monarez, had lied about the circumstances that led to her firing, and said the CDC’s failings during the pandemic, and in combating chronic disease, meant more people at the agency needed to go.

“We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at the CDC. They did not do their job,” Kennedy said. “I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Another issue is the August 22 murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown on a Charlotte, NC tram car. This wasn't covered until Elon Musk reposted about it on X yesterday:

Here’s a list of all the news networks who have NOT covered the Charlotte NC story:

- NYTimes
- CNN
- Washington Post
- MSNBC
- NPR
- USA Today
- Reuters
- Axios
- ABC News
- PBS

Every single one of them wrote stories on Daniel Penny...

…do you get it yet? pic.twitter.com/gr7MJx0NsX

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) September 7, 2025

A video showing the murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on public transport in Charlotte, North Carolina, has sent shockwaves round the world. It has also reignited debate over the widening ideological gulf in news reporting. The video shows Zarutska sitting alone, scrolling her phone, while behind her Decarlos Williams, a 35-year-old black man with a long history of arrest and diagnosed schizophrenia, rises to his feet and swings a knife toward her unsuspecting neck.

. . . In addition to alleging a racialised disparity in propensity to criminal violence, the Right also claims that the progressive press seeks methodically to report cases so as to invert this disparity. That such violence is preponderantly and unjustly perpetrated by white people, especially police officers, against black Americans, was the animating claim that drove the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent calls to “defund the police”. In a similar vein, there are dozens of New York Times articles on the Daniel Penny trial, while I could find none on the death of Austin Metcalf.

. . . Putting all this together, there is simply no obvious way to make her murder intelligible within American race politics in a way that does not serve Right-wing narratives. It thus appears that those outlets which most zealously oppose such narratives have either not registered it as having occurred, or opted not to report it.

In other words, we've been hoaxed, not just for a dozen years since the George Zimmerman and Michael Brown episodes, but since Rodney King and O J Simpson in the 1990s, that racial violence is overwhelmingly white-against-black. Trump has an instinct for these issues, and it's no coincidence that the top-down redpilling is taking place while he's been president.

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump is planning to look into the kiIIing of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte

"Horrible... I'll know all about it by tomorrow morning."

After the Charlotte Mayor refused to condemn the attacker, the city may need federal intervention. pic.twitter.com/3vefQcnpXK

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 7, 2025