Exploring the Badlands of Rogue Conversations
From bioweapons to flat-Earth, the threat to our future is the security blanket called civil society that we’re trying so hard to grip onto for fear of monsters real or imaginary.
The Badlands of rogue conversations — the space where the most untouchable conversations live — aren’t the threat. The void of the rabbit hole isn’t the threat. The threat to our future is the security blanket called civil society that we’re trying so hard to grip onto for fear of monsters real or imaginary.
This morning, I was sitting with my son while he watched a trekking film of a Himalayan landscape where Tibet and Nepal meet. A rural village surrounded by temples nestled across wild mountain ranges, exploring stunning scenes where two points meet and where the wilderness of the soul is invited to explore. My mind, however, was exploring other ranges: the accusation of what Democratic presidential candidate RFK Jr. said recently in a private conversation.
Recorded without permission or context during a recent private dinner in New York, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) said, “there was an argument that Covid-19 was ethnically targeted” — a target he went on to suggest may have favored the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. As you can imagine, plenty of people and news sources alike jumped on this accusing RFK Jr. of antisemitism. It certainly smells like antisemitism, but was it?
“We need to talk about bioweapons. …. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19, there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are—because of the genetic structure, the genetic differentials among different races, of the receptors, of the ACE-2 receptors—COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons, and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. That’s what all of those labs in the Ukraine are about. They are collecting Russian DNA so that we can target people by race.” — RFK Jr.
In a series of tweets responding to the accusation of anti-Semitism launched by the New York Post, RFK Jr. made it clear that he was “quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons”…
My mind was sorting through these events while still sitting with my son, watching soft snowfall across a remote village — the scene gently shifting to the prayer wheels spinning in rows. Prayer wheels in rotation reminded me of the rotations in the air that my mother always makes with her index finger after her prayers — as if she’s taking the invisible thread of her closing conversation with God and winding them around her finger before clapping three times and scattering the prayer into to wind with her breath.
And I wondered, how did those conversations with the sacred symbolized by the wheel across cultures and religions become what I saw in a channeled state two years ago, where I went into a trance and saw what I call the Distortion…
In 2021, a trance state pulled the veil of mystery and showed humanity’s enslavement by something so beyond human life, so beyond even the idea of evil, that it was unknown and carried no name. “It” was so skilled in its deception that evil and the devil were warm bedtime stories. Its web of control over human consciousness was so masterful that every new human life since the moment humankind believed the trick was enslaved in its wheels of control by the very people who bore life into form. Parents enslaving their own children, communities enslaving families, cultures enslaving communities, and on and on into a forever nesting doll of control. Wheels within wheels forever spinning into nothingness across time, all unknowingly feeding The Distortion.
Across the last two to three years of my own spiritual awakening, I’ve been slowly forming a new lexicon of the language of light versus the language of distortion. The discernment of what is the thing that spins as a wheel toward what purpose is part of that lexicon. In my trance state, I learned how everything that was good and beautiful given to us by God and under the stewardship of our own free will, was in all the ways we can imagine and know, be deformed by the Distortion through our own tools and by our own hands — language, culture, values…
Sometimes the only respite from the maddening world is to go deeper, deeper into mystery and toward grace, deeper into exploration, deeper into the rabbit hole. I thought back to the vision I had, the endless wheels of distortion. The microcosm of the symbolic wheel is a true portrait for what we’re seeing today in the national landscape: a hamster wheel of hate. The sacred perverted into oppression through the spinning of chaos and confusion.
The wheel of life, of prayer, the symbolic representation of the Great Eye of God, over time, was used as a symbol of torture while in other parts of the world was still used in ceremony and celebration through rituals of healing.
— The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, TASCHEN
Seeing gentle prayer wheels spin across Buddhist temples in faraway lands, singing of prayers, I’m brought back to the question…
Did RFK Jr. make an anti-Semitic comment about coronovirus? Probably not.
If the last few years have taught us anything — I mean, consider we’re now having open conversations about UAPs (UFOs) — it’s that anything is possible and we deserve deeper dialogues. The more we push conversations into the fringes, beyond the pale of society, into the Badlands, the more power the most distorted aspects of that conversation gain traction. As issues surface, we cannot keep spinning a wheel of distortion locked into the assurance of our opinion. We have to be willing to sit by the rabbit hole, we have to be willing to look in and dig if needed. We have to be patient to see what surfaces. And if we’re brave enough, we take a leap of faith and jump in.
This space, this rabbit hole, is a metaphorical birth canal, a black hole at the other end of which is a sea of dark waters upon which we are invited to commandeer the vessel of our being as pirates, as outsiders, as expressions of a sovereign life. We have the responsibility to raise our black flag.
In a follow-up tweet to the manufactured moral pandemic of anti-Semitism, RFK Jr. cited the study published in the National Library of Medicine / The National Center for Biotechnology Information, which concluded that there was "likely a genetic susceptibility of Covid-19, which calls for human genetics initiative for fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.” The study was trusted medical review that spoke to coronavirus having a greater effect on those with certain genetic/ethnic backgrounds. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. Yet, nothing in there screamed Jew-hatred or conspiracy. I also found this:
Following the New York Post’s lead, The Atlantic launched an attack piece as well, despite bioweapons being an issue they have covered before.
In his Substack, Courageous Discourse, Dr. Peter McCullough listed several more studies on the emergence of bioweapons:
The Coming Threat of a Genetically Engineered ‘Ethnic Bioweapon, The National Review, April 10, 2023.
Pentagon Making Race-Specific Bioweapons to Target Citizens, China Says, Newsweek, May 11, 2023.
Could you make a genetically targeted weapon? The Guardian, 28 October 2004.
The sound of the Buddhist prayer wheel, a wheel that spins with each cycle completing a prayer, has so many varied songs. It can sound like the playing card older generations used to wedge in a bicycle wheel, the way that card would rattle like the quickening drum of a shaman as a child would ride into the wilderness of play. Buddhist prayer wheels during their Sufi-like dance lost in their own rotations, can sound like a slow heavy grazing, a shuffle of a wheel accented by the bell chimes as each full rotation marks the completion of the prayer with a wooden dowel striking a bell. There are so many voices through which the song of the sacred sings, spinning and weaving in the intimate choreography of the cosmic dance.
The hamster wheel of hate spooling reactions that crash and tangle into each other, also has a song: the song of a cash register ringing.
There are leagues of people, groups, and industries profiting from rapid-fire of careless, thoughtless opinions. It doesn’t matter what you say anymore, it’s how quickly can you pull the trigger of your tongue and how far can that bullet travel. This goes for media, politicians, think tanks, NGOs parading as social causes, and of course pundits and influencers.
The panic attack to RFK Jr. citing a medical study that highlighted different impact range of Covid-19 based on one factor such as race or ethnicity, was spun by reporters into “coronavirus was a bioweapon made to kill white and black but spare Jews.”
Much of the culture of today’s influencer-pundits, many of whom don’t even have an education (or any commitment to curiosity), saw the 2017 bandwagon coming and jumped on it. The biggest scream reaped the largest rewards (one of the downsides to the Trump-effect though there are also positives).
The hamster wheel of chaos and confusion spins what the sacred into a distortion, a disease. And that disease (that pattern of malformation) uses the most profitable ideological trade routes. Whether gently or loudly, everyone is screaming into the their wheel to make it spin. The opposite of a song is a scream, vast endless scream.
"You want to know what caused January 6? Is pervasive censorship in this country in the lead-up to January 6. You tell people in this country they cannot speak, that is when they scream. You tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.”
— Vivek Ramaswamy, Family Leadership Summit July 14, 2023.
For years I covered extremism within the Islamist context, with campaigns and coalitions against anti-semitic hate imams in California. I covered extremism through preventing violent extremism programs. I covered it with the rise of old Nazi rhetoric across today’s social justice activists. I traced the thread of anti-Semitism over the last 200 years.
Was referencing a medical study that talks about ethnicgroups antisemitic? I don’t see the evidence. What I do see evidence for is a statistic I give in my counter-extremism talks where I help communities understand the complexity of our times. In that talk, I always refer to a statistic that speaks to the growing complexity of ideological extremism over the last 40 years, and forecast where we’re headed.
We’re headed toward more entanglement, more cross associations between groups and ideas. The mistake we cannot make in that entanglement is believing association implies guilt.
The Atlantic attack piece, showed a photo of rapper Ice Cube with RFK Jr. — as if a photo is a short thread of evidence. While the rapper has been accused of making anti-Semitic statements (I cannot verify either way, as I honestly haven’t looked into that), I do know that you cannot reasonably link the statements one person has made to another person through nothing but association, as if the association was a contagion. If the media was at all true to that pattern, we would be questioning every single person that was photographed or had any known travel or business association with actually notorious personalities at one helm of an insidious child rape and trafficking operation, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But that doesn’t happen as a practice. It only happens when there is a coordinated effort to discredit a person.
Think of cross currents in shallow waters. Think of how they come together, merge, cross over, recede. That is a much more accurate metaphor for the complexity we’re seeing where people are crossing into association with another, agreeing in some areas more than others while not at all in some. A picture of Ice Cube and some history of comments about the music industry is not guilt by association of antisemitism. It’s more likely, based on Ice Cube’s recent video announcing his tour, that what RJF Jr. and Ice Cube have in common is an interest in removing systems of gridlocks, systems that entrap people into patterns.
We’re seeing waves of movements like that right now. We saw it just this last month with a new soft alliance between conservative / traditionalist Muslims and Republicans. Even though the two groups will disagree on plenty else, they’re merging when it comes to the range of territory where childhood and the rights of the family are being perverted. Where that issue surfaces, those two points meet, and rather than trek through that territory with curiosity, some leaders across political and culture circuits choose to blame the “right wing” and thereby infantilize the ability for Muslims to make decisions for ourselves based on our inherited values.
When I started challenging Islamism, Jew-hatred, and extremism in the mid 2000’s, I dealt with years of hate from Muslims because I aligned with Republicans. I aligned with them not because I agreed on all the issues, but because on some issues we shared common ground. Fast forward 20 years, the landscape has changed suddenly in just one month — a blink of time if you consider what 20 years looks like — because a new issue posed a greater threat than the threat of perceived differences. Landscapes change. Conversations change. This is normal. We should as a people have the capacity to hold comparative ideas and dialogues without needing to identify enemy combatants. We should be able to spool with reverence the acts of listening and conversing as cycles of holiness.
Almost everyday now there is an incident rooted in misrepresentation and questionably intentional misunderstanding that fuels the rift between people. There are no shortages of examples beyond the example of RFK Jr. — an example I’m taking the time to discuss because it’s vital as a republic that each party has a healthy challenger. It’s vital that the exclusion of Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries of 2016 not be repeated again with RFK Jr., though it likely will be.
The reaction we’re seeing to RFK Jr. is not unique. It happened in the last month to actress/comedian Roseanne Barr where her video clip was taken out of context and circulated as anti-Semitic despite the fact that she’s also Jewish. Attacks to generate clickbait or defend an identity often refuse to discern between actual anti-Semitism. This waters down public interest and sensitivity to when we really do need to take it seriously over an issue the actually exists. We all know what happened in The Boy Who Cried Wolf…
At the end of the day, it’s not about anti-Semitism so much as it’s about using anything tainted as conspiracy to segregate human dialogue out of fear of association. At this very moment, the cultural conversation around child sex traffickers is stained as a Q-Anon conspiracy because there’s an interest among some groups to downplay the war on childhood and the largest illegal trade in the world that out-grosses arms trafficking and drug trafficking: human trafficking.
As I was writing this, there was another spin of the wheel like a rigged game of roulette. This time, a California-based Islamic scholar was attacked for using the theory/conspiracy of flat earth to talk about the denaturalization of the spirit (which in theory as far as science sanitizes the natural world, is correct. I can delve into that another day). Instead of understanding the context or offering nuance, another attack gets launched. The point of the attack is little more than content for a group that survives off content, along further demonstrations to show Muslims as ignorant, and perhaps as a bonus to spin a new entanglement between Islam and Q-Anon.
It just doesn’t end, and it’s not going to. The systems in place benefit from the entanglement too much to cut the chord. Beyond bad faith actors there is a serious reading comprehension problem. Most people aren’t listening or reading what is actually said; they’re projecting what they feel. You cannot have a dialogue within this framework. The Badlands of rogue dialogues — the space where the most untouchable conversations live — aren’t the threat. The void of the rabbit hole isn’t the threat. The threat to our future is the security blanket called civil society that we’re trying so hard to grip onto for fear of monsters real or imaginary.
That fear is what fuels extremism, as we saw with how the fear of a virus distorted a constitutional republic [watch my interview] overnight during the pandemic.
If everything is a threat, nothing is a threat.
If everything is anti-Semitic, nothing is anti-Semitic.
I’ve drummed the same beat for years, warning people not to assume for example that everything was jihad (as respected think tanks began willfully distorting jihad for more clicks and donor support).
“If everything is jihad, nothing is jihad” — I would advise leadership with most advice falling on deaf ears because the hamster wheel is far more rewarding than doing the right thing.
Since 2016, the wheel of distortion begun spinning more wildly — the silver lining being that eventually it will tip off its axis and fall apart. For now the dull chant of the homogenous thought-blob continues:
Everyone I don’t like is a Nazi.
Everyone I don’t like is a jihadist.
Everyone I don’t like is an anti-Semite.
Everyone I don’t like is Q-Anon.
The reptile mind — that part of our human makeup that still responds to a stimulus like it could be a threat to survival — that part of the mind can only see the world through the polarity of win/lose, good/evil). That part of the mind scrambles to protect the scaffolding of our identity.
Identity, especially today, is a commodity. If you can stake your identity into the ground like an ideological flag defacing the sanctity of boundary-less land, you can make a coin or two, have a few nice things, become an influencer, feel important. You can anchor the ebb and flow of human experience into a monolith, and you can commodify that monolithic identity marker. In that, the boundary of an identity is contrasted when something outside of that identity is charted. In the search for developing our identity, the patterns of distortions have us believing that identifying a border between self and other — in order words, the creation of an enemy real or perceived — reinforces the self. In other words, ‘if I can identify the enemy over there, I am safe over here and have a better sense of who I am separate from this otherness.’
The search does not require an enemy.
— Mitch Horowitz
The more you decry everything you don’t like as an enemy combatant, the more you help pour gasoline on actual problem where it exists. The more you create a landscape in which things can camouflage and hide. You’re feeding the proverbial monster a cookie; you’re proving their theories correct with rampant censorship that validates the victim narrative that the world is against them.
This cycle shapes culture into empire, and the empire always loses. The question you have to ask yourself is, what is it losing to?
The Badlands.
We’re in the badlands, whether we’re of an extremist belief set or not, we’re increasing in this space of no space, beyond the margin of society as we knew it and into a wild territory.
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About Shireen Qudosi
Storytelling on seismic cultural issues through the lens of the sacred, Shireen Qudosi looks at the space between things or within the Dark to map a new understanding of the human experience. Through that journey, she found a lost Islam. Shireen Qudosi is the author of The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam, which speaks to the theologically-sound parallel reality of the world’s third-largest religion.
“The world we live in is growing more complex with newer challenges. These times are an invitation for us to step into our gifts. To do that, we need to remember the song of our hearts and the stories that are our own.
My gift is in alchemizing chaos and confusion into song. I inspire others to believe it is possible to go within and below the surface layer of their identity to find the mystery, a wonderful complex constellation that is beautiful and uniquely their own.”
— Shireen Qudosi
Shireen is devoted to mapping figurative landscapes and inviting others to go into unknown places not as a tourist, but as a child exploring the world for the first time filled with wonder and curiosity. As a daughter of refugees across three continents, as a mother to a son with Autism, and as an explorer in the wilderness of the heart, she believes that the mystery of being is often nested within the composite of our entire life experience, that we can find the sacred in the mundane nestled like a jewel in the rock.
Read The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam.