What are they thinking? Are they thinking?

16 April 2024, reposted 8 January 2026

I keep asking myself this question, day after day, especially on days when I walk around the House of Representatives, like today. I am genuinely baffled, and genuinely curious to understand it. This is a long post, a cry from the heart.

The question that occupies me - indeed, which simply will not let me go - is this: what on earth is going on in the minds of all those journalists, academics, researchers, museum curators, civil servants, cartel politicians, mayors, teachers, writers and so on, that they systematically and categorically, like a herd, hermetically exclude from their consciousness any sound which contradicts the government narrative, or even calls it into question, on any subject whatsoever?

Whether it concerns nitrogen, Ukraine, Covid, vaccines, climate… you name it, it’s always the same.

The hundreds, the thousands of (inter)national names, experts, critics and so on. who put forward dissenting ideas and facts are all, without exception, excluded - across the board.

Their books are not reviewed in the “quality newspapers”. They are not invited onto the major NPO programmes. No radio or TV programme will mention them. No university organises a guest lecture. No debate centre allows such a person to take part.

Do you think differently about the war in Ukraine? Blocked! Even if you have 30 years of experience in the army, speak fluent Russian and Ukrainian, know the region inside out and all your previous predictions turned out to be correct?

Doesn’t matter. Shut up!

You don’t see nitrogen as a problem? Blocked! Questions about the vaccines? Blocked! A world-famous infectious disease expert with a different view on corona? Blocked!

And so on, and so on.

We experience this weekly in Parliament. Round-table discussions (where “experts” are supposed to inform MPs) may, according to the cartel, include only people who already endorse the policy. Critical voices are not welcome. They do not want to hear them at all. One example: an “expert afternoon” on Ukraine with nothing but (often American arms-lobby-funded) pro-NATO types. Only those; not a single exception.

And no one, absolutely no one, not a stray columnist, not a late-night radio show, not a debate centre, not an independent-minded scientist, not a civil servant with a troubled conscience, not a maverick museum director… absolutely NO ONE who says: how strange, we’d also like to hear the other side of the story.

And this concerns human lives. It concerns our economy, world peace, the next generation.

Nope. Nothing.

Even when the dominant narrative later turns out to be completely wrong, afterwards there is also ZERO interest in the true course of events or in why things went wrong. As with Covid or with the “weapons of mass destruction”. 

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

Only obsessive attention to trivial scandals, playground squabbles around coalition talks, Little Pete being angry with Little John, “Russian money” (which everyone knows is nonsense), the so-called “serious threat” against Jesse Klaver, and so on. All blah blah blah. All nonsense.

Completely unserious, completely ridiculous, in fact.

The total brain-death of public debate and public decision-making.

It continues to amaze me. I truly do not understand it. It is not necessarily IQ; it’s not that all those people are necessarily very “stupid”. In most cases they have perfectly respectable IQs, so they are smart and stupid at the same time. How is that possible?

I keep thinking about it. I really don’t understand it.