One of our most cherished freedoms is the freedom of opinion—and the right to express it. It is our great equalizer. Lately, however, that freedom has been challenged by a small number of people who have decided that their opinion is more equal than others. And they’ve managed to indoctrinate—or at least intimidate—a sufficient number of people that they’ve tacitly accepted it.

If you can resist the indoctrination of the established order, then you’ll be sufficiently independent of it that you can smash it. And smash it we must. Especially as it threatens our essential rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the sheep-like majority notwithstanding. As Mark Twain warned, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

“Many people,” Martin Luther King wrote, “fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody … The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a non-conforming minority … [We are reminded] of the danger of overstressing the well-adjusted life. Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted. We must, of course, be well-adjusted if we are to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities, but there are some things in our world to which men of goodwill must be maladjusted … Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”

The word “maladjustment” is defined as a failure to cope with the demands of a “normal social environment.” Let’s pause and reflect on this. If there is a constant motif in the media today, it is that we’re entering into a “new normal.” A new normal that tells you when you can and can’t go outside, visit friends, attend church, hug your grandkids. A new normal that surveils your every move, capturing your data exhaust for real time analysis of your compliance. A new normal that dictates how many of us can gather at any one place at any one time. A new normal that decides what you are allowed to read, view, hear, or say. A new normal that traces your every contact. A new normal that will require—under penalty—that you wear a mask in public.^* And this is just the warm up act.

How can normal be normal when it is inherently abnormal?

Give California governor Gavin Newsome points for honesty: “We talk about what the new normal looks like,” he said. “Normal it will not be.”

If ever there was a time for creative maladjustment, it is now.

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* The requirement for mask wearing is ingeniously insidious on multiple fronts. Every scientific study on both surgical and cloth masks has proven them to be ineffective for containing viral spread. Masks not only provide a false sense of security, they can actually make the wearer sick. The health officials know this. But that’s not the point. Masks reinforce the twin objectives of fear and ignorance, which in turn enables the manipulation of populations, providing leverage for a raft of additional compliance measures. See COVID-19: The 95 Theses to learn more.