By Thomas C. Zaugg

I have been awake to the state of our awful situation since 2005. Back then, being for free speech, against major pharmaceutical corporations, and having a general distrust of the government were all ‘left wing’ values. In those days, the ‘right wing’ disregarded these points of view as baseless conspiracy theories. It has been a fascinating experience watching these two poles slowly trade places over the last 15 years. It is enough to convince anyone that politics in Canada is about dividing Canadians into different camps that fight each other instead of fighting together for the type of future most Canadians want collectively.

To borrow a phrase from the Ex-Mormon community, the truth about 9/11 is what “broke my shelf.” If you can remember how you thought when you still trusted the government, picture a metaphysical shelf of sorts where you would put all the odds and ends of random information that just never made sense with your worldview — things that would be dismissed as conspiracy theories. In Mormonism, like in western society in general, foundational truths must be ignored in order to allow us to continue to participate within the society. In Mormonism, we ignore Joseph Smith’s criminal record of being a convicted con man and in the western world, we ignore water fluoridation and the fact that this practice originated in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. It is just one of many of those little things we put on the shelf to ignore and deal with later.

When our shelf breaks, we can no longer ignore all the odds and ends that we have shut out of our minds. We are left with a chaotic and jumbled mess that most of us can barely make sense of. It is an unsettling, traumatic and isolating experience, riddled with shame, guilt, grief, feelings of betrayal and anxiety and worst of all, isolation. It is as if you are the only individual who has come to this unpleasant realization, that everything you once believed was a lie. For me, as a young man who always wanted to join the military, I could not, in good conscience, go and participate in a war that I knew was founded on a lie. Planes did not cause the World Trade Centres to collapse, well-placed demolition charges did. My enemy wasn’t some goat farmer in Afghanistan, it was whoever placed the bombs in those buildings and the media establishment that sold the war to the public while demonizing anyone with legitimate physics-based questions that challenged the official narrative.

My war is with those who seek to control the minds of the masses and a key aspect of this continued battle is in expanding what is known as the ‘Overton Window’. The Overton Window is the arena of public discourse which can be discussed without people in the conversation being labeled as crazy. Ten years ago, the idea of bombs being used to blow up the World Trade Centre instead of the official narrative of hijackers with planes was well outside the window; today it is well within it. The more this window of acceptable public discourse shifts, the more things people are forced to put on their shelves to think about later. This, in turn, causes more shelves to break under the weight of things people would rather not think about — Chemtrails, Project Mockingbird, MK-Ultra, Operation Paperclip — all these things which were once well outside the Overton Window are now a part of the lexicon of pop culture.

At the same time, governments have invested considerably in the public’s access to mental health treatment. The psychiatric profession claims that we are experiencing a nationwide mental health crisis, while I see the powers that be aiming to capitalize on the feelings of isolation and anxiety bound to be experienced when our “shelf breaks.” In this new normal, distrust of the government and hesitancy to be injected with pharmaceutical products are signs of serious mental illness. If our thoughts are out of sync with the status quo, (and since only on paper do we have the freedom of conscience) we think criminals are labeled as suffering from dubious illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and even depression. It couldn’t be that the dumpster fire of a society we are living in is enough to cause us to be depressed, or that God forbid, we have become agitated with the piss poor state of culture in general! It is not even that we may speak out against it or that we might have knowledge of something that we are not cleared to know about. It is, in fact, that in Canada, mental illness is the mask used to enforce political policing of thought criminals. Sure, none of these things are technically against the law, but if we don’t think the way the government wants us to, we are apparently mentally unwell and in need of psychiatric treatment until we do.

In 2008, I was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic for not believing the official story of 9/11 and for knowing about something called ‘Project Echelon’ — the program Edward Snowden would later blow the whistle on. I have no shame about this diagnosis; I wear it as a badge of honour. It is proof positive that the government decided long ago that how I thought and what I spoke about was a threat to their power. I have been incarcerated and tortured on 16 different occasions. I have been denied the opportunity to face my accusers in open court and challenge the credibility of the accusations made against me at every turn. After all, speaking out against the status quo is protected speech in this country, but only if people are agreeing with you. If you are doing it alone based purely on principle, it is considered a symptom of mental illness. They want sheep, not shepherds.

In law, when you are charged with a crime, you are given the presumption of innocence. Everything surrounding the claims made against an individual is interpreted with a skeptical view. Claims are measured against a high standard of beyond reasonable doubt, and the charges are dismissed if there actually is reasonable doubt. In mental health, everything an individual is accused of is assumed to be true and any attempt to argue against that “truth” is a sign that someone is seriously mentally ill and in need of a drug cocktail to knock them out and leave them in a state of dazed confusion. I can only describe what takes place behind the closed doors of mental institutions in Canada as an ongoing crime against humanity.

The ‘doctors,’ nursing staff and even security guards know what they are doing is wrong, but they continue because of steady paychecks and the low probability of ever being brought to justice. They have been getting away with it for too long and they have been doing it to so many Canadians that it is now an accepted practice in society. Mental in-patients and out-patients under orders to take treatment are like second-class citizens — their rights are curtailed, and since noone cares what happens to them, the government is free to do with them whatever it pleases: experimentation, human research trials, psychological studies, electroshock ‘therapy’ and the final sickening phase of dehumanization — euthanasia for the mentally ill. The claim is, of course, that all euthanasia will be done with the person’s consent, even though legally, mentally ill patients cannot consent. Therefore, the ‘doctors’ decide which treatment is best, and by best, they mean whatever makes the incompetent staff’s lives easier. I can see a near future where people are detained in hospitals indefinitely until they agree to be euthanized.

In my own life, psychiatry has entirely delegitimized who I am as a person. It doesn’t matter how much success I achieve nor how rich the experiences of my struggle, the diagnosis will always be a storm cloud that hangs over my person and undermines any credibility I seek to garner. It doesn’t matter that I was the founding president of the first Peoples Party in Canada. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been on the ground for every legitimate protest in this country since 2010. It doesn’t matter that I was the first to act in a meaningful way against cancel culture. It doesn’t matter that I beat the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team in court as a self-represented litigant. It doesn’t matter that I have a vision for a better Canada. The only thing that matters about me is that the government has decided that I am mentally defective and therefore a danger to society.

Can someone explain how I am expected to believe this is a free country when this is my lived experience? The ugly truth about my story is that it is not unique. What has been done to me has been done to tens of thousands of Canadians, many of whom have been driven to absolute despair and suicide. What we have endured has shaped us and we cannot return to the worldview we once had before our torture began. We cannot move on with our lives until justice for what has been done to us is exacted. We cannot get justice until the people who have not lived our experiences are capable of hearing the stories of our battles and seeing the resulting scars. People will be unable to hear our stories until their ‘shelf breaks’ and they know for themselves that Canada isn’t free and probably never was. Only then, will people be willing to hear the dreadful story of how the psyche of the masses was captured and the horrors of what happened to all the people who resisted along the road to this dystopian present.