Kindness and Truth-Telling

A SITREP for an Old Friend

If there were no grace and no kindness, conversation would be useless, and nothing we do would matter.
-Rumi

---

A couple of days ago, Mrs Clarence reminded me of a saying, the original sayer of which I do not remember. Perhaps it was Mrs Clarence herself.

The saying goes like this: you can say almost anything to people, speak your truth to anyone, as long as you say it kindly.

Which feels like a rule worthy of being put to the test in these fractious, polarized, and estranged times.

Kindness, of course, like compassion, can easily devolve into niceness if one is not careful, if we define niceness as a practice of bypassing differences and avoiding anything risky or contentious in order to keep the peace. This is why, in Mrs Clarence’s saying, kindness gets directly paired with truth-telling. Because sometimes the kindest and most compassionate thing to do is to tell the truth, no matter how risky it feels, or how potentially contentious the subject matter, or how nice or not nice it might be judged by polite society.

And, as both Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson have said recently, telling the truth of your experience can give you access to incredible new levels of personal power.

All of which is on my radar today because I’ve been crafting a response to a letter received from an old friend from my Liberal-Progressive past,¹ who saw a video Mrs Clarence posted on her Facebook and followed the trail back to the contact page on our website.² We go back forty years or more, this friend and I, and have corresponded off and on for much of that time: about music, literature, philosophy, religion, culture, and the human experience, in both abstract and personal terms. But like so many have experienced, he and I have gone missing from each other these past five years or so.

And so, in my response, I’ve been working to step right into Mrs Clarence’s saying, and Peterson’s and Carlson’s exhortation, and simply tell the truth of my experience with all the kindness I can muster. I have no idea where making such a move will take us, but I’ll take Carlson and Peterson at their word, and gratefully accept any new empowerment the experience brings me.

Here, then, below, is the bulk of my response, with the bits and pieces of personal stuff redacted. There was no need to change the names to protect the innocent because, for some reason I no longer remember, my friend and I have called each other Ralph and Sam for all of this time, those names lifted from the series of famous Chuck Jones/Warner Bros. cartoons³ as described below.

It’s an attempt to say plainly how I’m now viewing our world. It’s the preliminary picture I puzzle together from the many data-points I’ve gathered in my life. It’s my own personal SITREP, written from a place of fondness and respect still felt across the seeming chasm of difference, and without blame or judgement.

---

Hey Ralph,

I’m finding the Sam and Ralph conceit particularly apt these days. 

While we’ve used it for decades, it seems to finally fit, because having now “switched teams” or “chosen a side,” I sense that we are seeing the world through very different lenses. Perhaps we’ve grown as different (and oppositional?) as Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf. The question of which one of us is trying to protect the sheep and which of us is trying to eat them we’ll leave for another day…  😎

Apt, also, insofar as these cartoons depicted these two characters as being, on the one hand, diametrically opposed in terms of their goals and aims and view of the world, and on the other hand able to interact as colleagues or teammates in a kind and civil manner, an ability resting on what looks to me like a deep bedrock of respect.

And so my question for you is this: what, exactly, are our differences now, and can our long friendship withstand such differences? 

Now, for the people of this culture, traumatized as we have all been, IMO, the inclination at this point might be to just say “of course we can” and to then studiously ignore these differences, and pretend that they are not there. That is certainly how my family-of-origin operated. I see that inclination in action all the time in this weary world. And I could easily go this route myself, simply by not sending this email.

But… I can’t do that any more. For reasons which should become clear if we take this conversation in the direction I think it might could go.

Apologies if I’m working from vague or untested assumptions, or being too circumspect. Either I have crawled way too far out to the lonely and risky edge of the normal distribution, or a sizable portion of human beings have crawled together in the opposite direction. I suppose there’s truth in both options. In either case, it has brought no small amount of trauma, to find myself even more different from so many than ever before, and to have lost so many folk along the way. There are reasons I’m no longer on FB…

So “circumspect" is the right word. I am wary, and finding it sometimes daunting, to take risks. It’s been a long ten years… 

But I’m also fed up with hiding, and want even more access to the power that comes from simply telling the truth of my experience, and suspect that we will get nowhere that I want to go unless I move out of circumspection and beyond vagueness. 

So here goes with that. It’ll give me an opportunity to concisely sum up my present world view… 

---

As far as I can see, by way of a preliminary assessment, based on my long years of research and observation, I would say that:

-We are living inside a great 5th-gen or psychological war, and have been our entire lives, though it’s only more recently that a defensive opposition has arisen into consciousness and gained strength. Whether the language of warfare is the most helpful metaphor to use or not, it is convenient and widely used amongst the people with whom I hang out, and so I shall use it here.

-War is being waged against us regular people, those I call the Goodfolk, by something - a network of groups, people, and entities - which deserves the label “evil” if anything does, and which goes by various names: the Deep State, the Cabal, the Secret Societies, the Elite, the Dark Ones, the Globalists, the Collectivists, the Cryptocracy, etc.  This force has been in existence for a very long time, and plays the long game to achieve its ends.

-This force works from what I call “the Satanic impulse," practices an elaborate and esoteric occult spiritual system, believes in eugenics and population control, considers enlightened despotism its natural right and role, and keeps its agents in line using a global system of blackmail. They prefer to confuse⁴ us into destroying ourselves when they can.

-The people/entities comprising this force hate us Goodfolk, especially our children, and operate a vast and hugely profitable system of child sex trafficking, child pornography, child abuse, child torture, and child murder. They also appear to hate individualists, nationalists, patriots, Christians, the family, the biological sexes, and anything else they perceive as coming from God.

-The primary weapons used against us regular people are psychological in nature: trauma-based mind control, ridicule, censorship, the master-slave dialectic, propaganda, mass formations, the Two-Minutes Hate, fear mongering and emotional alarmism, false flags, projection, predictive programming, spells and rituals, problem-reaction-solution, logical fallacies, the Big Lie, etc. Their aim is to always keep us Goodfolk fighting with each other, rather than against them.

-The enemy also employs such physical weapons as food, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, dopamine, addictive substances, industrial chemicals, agricultural chemicals, household chemicals, personal care products, EMFs, terrorism, and constant warfare to distract, confuse, sicken, sterilize, and kill us.

-This force has created, shaped, or twisted most of the major narratives our propagandized people think of as “reality.”

-This force has taken control of almost all of our human systems: the medical/healthcare system; the information systems; the education system; the government and its regulatory agencies; the food and agricultural system; the entertainment system; the financial and banking systems, etc. Many in the opposition speak of these various systems and agencies as being “captured.” At this point, much or most of our science has been captured: by money, by programming and mind control, and by threat.

-All of these systems and agencies have been weaponized against us regular folk to achieve the Cabal's ends, even as they mostly employ good-hearted regular people who have no real idea how they are being used and manipulated.

-This force, while having programmed and even captured people on both or all sides of the political spectrum (I think of the Democrats and most of the Republicans as the Uniparty), is right now primarily using the Left-Liberal-Progressive end of that spectrum to achieve their goals, I think because Blue people are more emotion-led in their approach to life than are Red people, and their emotionality is more easily manipulated.

-Thus I see how, in general terms, the enemy's COVID operation (lockdowns, masking mandates, testing, social distancing, vaccine mandates, MSM jingoism, censorship, etc) was pushed and enforced primarily through the Blue people (urbanites, Northerners, the bi-coastals, academics, the mainstream corporate media, Hollywood, the college educated, etc) and more resisted by the Red people (Christians, patriots, rural folk, Southerners, Westerners, MAGA, deplorables, fringe people, military and LEO, etc).

-I regard the alleged pandemic and novel coronavirus as fraudulent in almost every particular. I would expand that judgment out to the entire vaccine schedule, much of our healthcare system, and the scientific field of virology itself.

-And with Science itself as deeply captured as it seems to be, I regard the question of climate change as almost completely unanswered in any real scientific way, and would argue that those who doubt or oppose the climate alarmism narrative (the ones who get reviled, cancelled, or censored) have earned a right to a seat at the table whenever we decide, as a culture, to re-engage in actual scientific inquiry regarding this issue of anthropogenic climate change.

-In the meantime, it seems clear to me that the climate change narrative (and the larger environmental narrative) is being used to slowly achieve the enemy’s control and depopulation agendas.

-I think the Blue people are almost completely wrong about Donald Trump, who I think represents and stands at the center of the opposition forces now engaging the “evil” enemy. It is for this reason that I voted for him in the last election, an election I regard as having been stolen outright by the enemy.

-Likewise, I think the Blue people are almost completely wrong to consider the Red people as their enemy, save for that portion of the Red side which serves the Cabal. I feel some measure of guilt about having negatively judged these people for most of my life, especially since these are the people from whom I came. I have worked to make amends.

-Thus, I hold that, in general terms, it’s the Red people who are seeing reality more accurately these days, though we’ve all been deeply programmed, and there’s plenty of confusion to go around across the political spectrum. The Blue people used to be much better clued-in as to the nature of the underlying evil (especially as it manifests in government, corporations, etc) but, with Liberalism having been swallowed up by Leftism, they have largely forgotten, or been terrorized out of, this knowledge, and have now been manipulated into being the enemy’s “tip of the spear.”

-Which is to say, in summary, and only in general terms: while “both sides” are correct in sussing out that something is deeply wrong here on Planet Houston, the Blue people think it’s the Red people that are evil, and the Red people think it’s the hidden Cabal which is evil.

-As a response/reaction to what is widely regarded now as the obvious presence of “evil,” I observe that the US, and indeed this is happening in many places around the world, is experiencing a spiritual awakening the likes of which have not been seen in a long time.

-I would also aver that, as far as I can see, there is plenty of evidence to support the notion that the opposition forces are actually winning, and that the Dark Ones are slowly and effectively being exposed, revealed, and taken down.

-All of which leaves me feeling more hopeful for our human future than I have ever been in my life.

-30-

Well then…

Notice that I’ve tried to simply list my conclusions, but have spent little time trying to explain them. That conversation - why I think what I think and feel what I feel, how I got where I now am, what data-sets I’ve encountered, etc - is the conversation we might now have as we walk together through these times and into the future. But I don’t see how we could have that conversation without my first revealing myself, as I did above.

And perhaps, having revealed myself, you can see now why I felt moved to write this, in response to your comments about societal ills, and the right-wing, and climate change, and smirking, and the pandemic, and sickness, and vaccines, and losing friends these past couple of years.  It would have felt, and would, in fact be, dishonest of me, to simply skim past such comments without revealing how I seem to be seeing things very differently than you.

Perhaps you can also see why my and Sally’s attention is so focused on the matter of healing the societal polarization and estrangement so prevalent in this moment. We see the type of True Dialogue we practice and teach as one of the major healing modalities we Goodfolk might employ if we hope, as a people, to move beyond our current Cabal-provoked mutually assured acrimony. 

As I said, these statements above are my “preliminary assessment,” based on the best data and analysis I have been able to find, or conclude on my own. It’s my current take on what I’m seeing. But we only get to see a small fraction of “what’s really going on” in this surreal world, and while I’m sure I’d feel surprised were my basic assessment to prove untrue in the general sense, it won’t surprise me to learn that some of my particular conclusions are off. There’s simply too much I don’t know, to pretend I can have any real certainty about some of the items on my list. 

To conclude…

I’ve been reading a marvelous, if limited, book called We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring American’s Civic Tradition, by Michael Austin. In this book, Austin recounts how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had come together as friends and colleagues to help write the Declaration of Independence and help the United States win its liberty⁵ from England. They frequently corresponded, sharing philosophies and worldviews, as friends do. But as fighting for independence gave way to governance and politics, they found themselves on opposite sides of a growing chasm of political opinion and practice. After the rancorous and slander-filled election of 1800, they did not speak for eleven years.

But then, in 1812, a mutual friend intervened, and prevailed upon them both to renew their friendship. Adams sent Jefferson a brief note, creating an opening. Jefferson responded with a lengthy letter expressing his wish that they renew their friendship. For the next thirteen years, they corresponded frequently, discussing politics and philosophy, poetry and religion and education, and what it was like to grow old. And they argued with each other. They argued as friends.  As Adams wrote in 1813: “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”

And so they did. And it’s just this “arguing as friends” that Michael Austin thinks lies at the very heart of the American experiment, and is a necessary part of its success. Says Austin, “Between 1813 and 1826, Adams and Jefferson wrote more than 150 long and affectionate letters to each other. Their relationship then passed from history into poetry when they died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826 - fifty years to the day after the birth of the nation they founded together.”

So, I don’t know what’s possible for you and me in this time. We’ve corresponded off and on for, what, almost forty years now? About music and literature and culture and the human experience. You were even in my doomer documentary, from which I now mostly try to distance myself, because it was made before I came to deeply understand how thoroughly the people of our culture have been lied to and propagandized. I no longer trust the data and analyses upon which that documentary rests, and long for a future time when we might “do the science” without the interference of money, politics, propaganda, mind control, and threat. 

Perhaps it’s possible that we might explain ourselves to each other before we die. 

Here’s to that, my friend.

Sam

---

So there it is, folks. My earnest attempt at speaking the truth of my experience with kindness, to argue as friends. My heart is pounding as I hit send… and… there it goes!

Time will tell me whether Mrs Clarence’s saying proves itself true.

I’ll let you know.

Pax, ya’ll.
Clarence

@ClarenceThe17th on TruthSocial
https://t.me/qclarence on Telegram
http://rightrelationships.us

1.

2. http://rightrelationships.us

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Wolf_and_Sam_Sheepdog

4.

5. https://ammo.com/articles/freedom-liberty-difference-understanding-negative-vs-positive-rights