In 1971, NASA Astronaut Edgar Mitchell climbed into his Kittyhawk command module and was blasted on a journey into outer space. He was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, NASA’s third manned lunar landing. For Mitchell, however, the most extraordinary part of the journey was not kicking up moon dust. It was the cosmic awareness that he began to feel on his way back home. He felt he had tapped into something profoundly intelligent and universal that could lead to understanding how the human inhabitants of the earth could save their home planet and guide the process of their own evolution toward uplifted awareness and meaningful lives.

Mitchell also realized that his exceptional ability to “tune in” was greatly enhanced by being many thousands of miles away from his home planet. The term he used to describe his profound change of perspective when he viewed the blue jewel-like earth suspended in inky black space was epiphany. Epiphany is the name for achieving intuitive insight wherein creative experience accumulates to a critical point and suddenly, knowing jumps to a higher level. He said he experienced a grand epiphany and was thereafter more able to explore and learn the truth of things by rising above distracting bits and pieces for a panoramic view of scattered facts. He realized that with an open mind in an unfettered environment, exciting new life Insights and plans can be imagined and then validated by employing what is said to be the greatest single invention of mankind: the concept of reserved judgement (scientific method).

At this time, we are at a juncture in our political awareness far below the perspective that we need to see and understand the swirling dynamics of what is happening and what we can do about it. Under the prevailing circumstances, we are failing to recognize the real sources of stealthy assaults on the concept of democratic government around the world and we are unwittingly playing into the hands of the perpetrators. Almost any of the fractional truths now available in our society about the secret efforts to kill our democracy should be enough to set off alarms and frequent massive protests in capitols and statehouses and other ongoing political action. With these fractional truths purposely suppressed in the recorded history of our human relations, a comprehensive state of public knowing has not yet been reached. To use a time-worn but pertinent aphorism that captures the meaning of this dilemma, we are missing the woods for looking at the trees.

Here are some of the “trees” or information fractions that are suppressed and keeping us held below the comprehensive awareness that could cause us to mobilize and resist the slave-like stasis intended for most of us by a dedicated group of libertarian extremists:

A bold new documentary film series, entitled Exterminate All the Brutes, provides an agonizing journey through time with visual images of the darkest hours of human relations around the world. The four episodes chronicle and explain the deadly white supremacy doctrine with its conquest, genocide, and the myths used to justify torture and killing certain people in its name. These films are now available on HBO Max and streaming plans of HULU. They provide a timely education for all of us in America about the genocide and racial injustice purposely suppressed in the history of our human relations.

Fox News is not a reputable news organization. It is a propaganda machine under the direction of owner Rupert Murdoch who has a troublesome history of abusing the media to suppress and negate democracy. The former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, writes that Murdoch has used his vast ownership of the media voices to sway federal elections and maximize his political power. Rudd has launched a campaign calling on the Australian federal government to establish a Royal Commission to look into the abuse of media monopoly in Australia, and in particular by the Murdoch media. Murdoch moved from Australia to Great Britain in 1968, bought up several media outlets, and continued his biased political manipulation and distortion of the news to ensure that his political allies won elections. When British Lawmakers passed laws in 1995 limiting how much of the media one company can control, he angrily moved the center of his business operations to America and set up the television network he slyly called Fox News.

The empires of Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch (with his brother David before his death in 2019) have teamed up to control most of the news media in America. In December of 2017, The Huffington Post published an article about this unholy alliance entitled, What Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers Have in Common. This article was first published in July of 2011, to announce the coming release of a bold new film, Koch Brothers Exposed, a very revealing documentary of the corruption and pooling of power by the Murdoch and Koch empires for eliminating democracies and replacing them with plutocracies managed by self-selected elites. This film is available on You Tube.

Charles Koch, whose mega-wealth is based on fossil-fuel industries, has parlayed his role in the anti-democratic movement to become its supreme leader. He has established a new international headquarters of this movement in the State of Virginia, USA! Here is a revelation: Contrary to Donald Trump’s media hyped power-role in the anti-democracy movement, he never has been its real boss. He has play-acted the title role in the take-over scheme, but his actual position on the organization chart is more like the loyal plantation overseer who sternly gives orders to the field workers that the real boss, Koch, sends out to him from the office in the main house.

Through persistent and highly qualified research, documentation of these discoveries and much more is now available in a new and startling article by Duke University Professor of history and public policy Nancy MacLean entitled, Enchaining democracy: The now-transnational project of the US corporate libertarian right.

Now is time to for us to bring these hot fragments of information together and realize the comprehensive truth so well documented and described by Professor MacLean: that a majority of us (99%) are under fire by a rich but fearful minority who are hell-bent to achieve absolute monopoly control. They intend to do this by any means necessary, following a plan devised by American Economists James Buchannan and Milton Friedman and applied in societies around the world with disastrous results for all but the wealthy in-group (1%). The basic premise of their plan is that people who have experienced democratic freedoms will not willingly give them up for the virtual slavery that Buchannan proposed is the rightful place in life for most of us. Friedman turned that assertion into a plan for mandatory compliance: (1) gain monopoly control by secret manipulations of the body politic, (2) invite the captured people to yield to rule by the elites voluntarily, (3) re-educate disinclined stragglers, and (4) eliminate (disappear) any hard-core resisters. None of this plan includes bi-partisan thinking. It is only a plan for completely eliminating democracies and establishing monopoly control without reference to any moral imperatives. The following quotation from Professor MacLean’s article initiates access to facts that, if widely shared, can stem the tide of organized democracy assaults.

“My subject is the ideas that are guiding the billionaire-funded libertarian right made notorious by Charles Koch, one of the world’s richest men. He and his brother David, now deceased, have assembled over 600 like-minded wealthy donors into the largest private political network the world has ever seen, one that outstrips in size and sophistication the Republican Party which it has turned into a delivery vehicle for the donor’s unpopular agenda. Other researchers have captured well the scale and audacity of the Koch network’s bid for power. What they have not identified are the ideas this network has weaponized to climb from utter marginality to breathtaking power. I believe knowing about these ideas – and how the Koch’s networks operations have used them to gain a sway this arch-right billionaire project otherwise could not – is important not just in its own right, to see more clearly what is happening and why and how, but also because having that knowledge may equip concerned citizens to stop this speeding train before it is too late.”

Exploitative dictatorships are not sustainable. They all yield eventually to more democratic participation in governance as people become more educated and aware. Massive revolutions have brought powerful dictatorships to violent ends in such familiar places as Rome, Russia, The Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, France, Uganda, Egypt, and Libya. There are many other plutocratic governments of powerful stature that have gone down in flames or their hold on exploitative power is currently being firmly resisted. Each round of revolutionary correction has wasted enormous amounts of life and property. Some contemporary researchers and thinkers about human relationships believe that through cultivating uplifted awareness it is now possible to move toward improved democracy by exercising the ballot box instead of violent revolution.

It is past the prudent time to rise above the darkening circumstances here on the earth and find the divine sunshine above the clouds. We need to send our minds out in space, like Astronaut Edgar Mitchell did, and pull together the fractional discoveries of qualified researchers to form a comprehensive picture of the realities in our world. With uplifted awareness we can create our own alternate plan to join with other people who are ready and able to explore and learn. This awareness can first help us put the brakes on the leaders of the transnational corporate libertarian movement who are steadily forging the chains for our enslavement. We can then use the best of religious thought and modern science working together to find morally justified ways to save democracy and improve life on the earth for all of its inhabitants. It starts by our personal commitment to share this information as widely and as soon as possible.