Apr 1, 2023·edited Apr 1, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Great post. It helps us further noodle down the rabbit hole of human nature during the last few years. I do wonder, however, if your "Are these concerns not seminal to the “right” — to traditionalists, Christians, and nationalists" was meant to be tongue in cheek. I believe we are in the midst of a political shift, as large as the great migration of the conservative democrats over to the right in the 1970's and 80's, where now the "old right" (the blue-bloods, chamber of commerce, economic-only conservatives, etc.) are being slowly pushed out of this new conservative/freedom-loving/populist/decidedly-non-elite right we are seeing gel organically before our eyes...perhaps in response to an ever spiraling/calcifying/authoritarian/utopian hard left====I love your coin of phrase "Credential-haver." In my day, we called them experts. When I was in grad school for political science (temporary miscalculation on my part) the professors openly bragged about their expertise and how they could "solve" problems if given the opportunity. So disgustingly melioristic. Ironically, it was an old style liberal professor that brought meliorism to my attention...a concept he also abhorred.
1. Your scenario is scarier to me than the Evil Masterplan scenario. Your scenario means that we are in a society so broken that it just shoves itself straight into mass hysteria with no significant driver at all, which means that we should expect to be in similar dire straits shortly and there is probably no fix for it. I have been thinking a lot about Rene Girard's theories on mimetic contagion lately and this seems like a more helpful way to look at 2020-21 than the mass psychosis formation especially given that Girard's theories predict the need for scapegoating which is the biggest feature of the whole pandemic in some ways.
2. All of the key events happened before your summary began.(don't mean that in a critical way it's a very good summary of how the flatten the curve and lockdowns entered our consciousness) Where did the assumption that covid would require ventilators and icu care come from? Where did assumptions on how contagious it would be come from? I think that the 'officials' and 'experts' were like the cartoon dad being slung around by the waterhose(I forget who it was) but who loaded the thing up with so much pressure. They clamped down trying to keep their control on all that pressure, using a toolkit that they had already been prepped on certainly. But where did the assumptions that formed all of that pressure come from?
Let's say that "a globalist deep state is the most likely culprit behind development of the virus and the vaccines for the same", as you say. It certainly seems plausible. But what would be the purpose? Wouldn't it be possible that the people developing the virus and the vaccine wanted to instigate a mass panic, which they hoped and expected would lead to lockdowns and/or mandates of various kinds?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's possible that the "globalist deep state" you speak of could have desired lockdowns and mandates, and found a way to get them to happen, while being able to hide their intent behind media-driven mass panic.
It's likely I'm missing something here, but I'm having trouble coming up with other ideas to explain the motivation behind the virus + vaccine plan.
Eugyppius has explained the disaster as a sudden shift by governments from mitigation to mass containment, with no one including the governments knowing exactly why.
This telling of it adds a missing piece for me, how, when, and why so many panicked people chose containment for themselves. Even as the infographics called for hand washing, people were eager to swallow the stronger stuff - staying at home and having everything delivered.
In an era where we are describing social contagions it's strange that we can't argue that many of these policies were themselves social contagions, moving far faster than the actual virus at the time that remarks were being published online and through the media.
We even see a lot of these things happening within our own "community" with the Pfizer/PV video, IgG4, Died Suddenly, Snake venom, the list can really go on. In many cases someone may report on something and it leads others to cover the same topic as well.
Maybe a lot of this has been organized, but we also can't deny that information gains traction just by having it go through the proper channels and having that right tinge of fear porn. I even remember former coworkers making comments about the bat soup. How many people fell for the bat soup idea are now arguing that public perception didn't play a role in how many of these slogans became adopted?
You're right it was a popular movement first. I remember explicitly "limiting my risk" based on the bs scare videos from China and all the rest of what appeared to be grassroots reporting, and the fact that China was obviously lying about the numbers.. I stopped using public transport and started working from home more. Now I wonder if that was actually all just an op. However, when facts on the ground in the US failed to match the supposed scenario in China.. when basically nothing happened, I figured it out: I didn't know why, or how, but this wasn't the sort of problem it was being billed as.
Unfortunately almost nobody else figured this out, and here we are.
Outstanding piece fab references too.. big time kudos & thanks for this landmark for the madness.
"Lockdowns occurred because they gave scared, (literally) non-essential Western professionals “something to do.”"
Let's not discount the virtue bestowed on already isolated lap top class w more big box delivered & all rebranded as heroic curve flattening.. humans are such a pecularly flawed species.
Masks and Lockdowns were policies pushed by a joint Military-Intelligence -Health Complex. Otherwise known as the NSC which is under the authority of the President
The Principals Committee is convened and chaired by the Presidents National Security Advisor. The Deputy National Security Advisor may also attend. Matt Pottinger was Deputy National Security Adviser and rabid promoter of Lockdowns and Masking before there was major spread of Covid and fear in the US
Our Covid Policy was an NSC Policy adopted on March 13 (Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted -PanCAP-A) and based on a 2018 PanCAP draft version created when Bolton was NSA. It was then implemented by FEMA (not HHS as originally planned).
As for masks, remember CDC Director Robert Redfield telling everyone masks were the best vaccine.
Back in the 1980’s Redfield was a proponent of universal HIV Testing and isolation of HIV positive testing. He also was responsible for the military HIV vaccine trials and was accused of fraudulently manipulating the data to get Congressional Funding
Lockdowns were an adoption of a 2013 Shelter in Place trial following the Marathon Bombing. At the time of the bombing they were undergoing training for an exercise planned for June simulating just such an event named Urban Shield.
The two accused “bomber” brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had an uncle born in Chechnya named Ruslan Tsarnaev. Ruslan was married in the 1990s until their divorce in 1999 to Samantha A. Fuller, the daughter of Graham E. Fuller.
Graham Fuller was formerly vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, and he also served as Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA with a network of CIA-backed Caucasus Jihadists .
Fuller admitted that “Uncle Ruslan” had lived in Fuller’s home in the suburban Washington area and that Fuller went several times to the Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia just as the CIA was heating up the Chechen Islamic terror against Moscow, allegedly to “visit” his daughter and son-in-law.
Ruslan Tsarnaev, who changed his name to Ruslan Tsarni, had worked in the past for companies tied to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, as well as working as a “consultant” in Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea in the 1990s with the State Department’s USAID, which has been widely identified as a CIA front.
COVID policies were homegrown and part of a larger conspiracy than panicked politicians and health officials, or WEF and Chinese manipulations. The fear that was created was by design as part of Psychological and Cognitive Warfare.
Obviously, neither of us can prove our theories. Mine might be too much for some people to accept because it is rather terrifying. I hope I am wrong. I fear I am not
I have been perplexed by the use of "lockdown" to describe staying at home, since the beginning of all the covid stupidity in 2020. It was always a prison term, as when inmates were ordered to stay in their cells and were not free to wander their cell blocks, usually during times of misbehavior or feared revolts.
I know this because I used to do prison ministry and only heard the term "lockdown" used on the "inside". Then 2020 and all of a sudden a free people are accepting and yammering endlessly about "lockdowns" with no clue what a tyrannical, vicious mechanism it always was. It seems to tie in with what you're describing here.
Mar 30, 2023·edited Mar 30, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
A very interesting post. Masks are not my thing. I do not feel strongly about them. If I thought that a mask could prevent Covid, I would possibly wear one in crowded settings. Since I do not believe that, I do not wear them.
(I am unvaxed and had Covid once over 2 years ago)
It is good that we are discussing history.
Thinking about writing a followup in this discussion.
I have referred your blog to posters on a skeptic's forum who I trust on matters of energy, renewables, economics and complexity.. a few come across as trolls.. willfully ignorant despite plentiful evidence of scripted drills with same partners coordinating live pandemic response, social media narrative control and suppression of vaccine harms. I recommend Due Diligence and Art for patents, legislation and contracts regarding the Covid operation. I figured your approach might open a door for them if they are sincere. Igor's explanation with sources is more compelling for me given my experience as an activist fighting municipal corruption followed by years of targeting/gaslighting and unsupportive therapists and family members.. standard victim blaming mentality, dismissive, impervious to contrary data. Claims of spontaneous group response reminds me of Matt Desmet's "Mass Formation" psychosis giving an easy out to Elites signaling and coordinating in plain sight.
Rather than trying to find the most influential manifestation, I think Mr. Senger has been trying to trace back the early emergence of these ideas in order to find Chinese influence. In some cases he seems to have been rather successful. I thought his research about Pottinger (who appoints Birx whose influence A Midwestern Doctor recently wrote about) and his 'sources in China' was very interesting for instance.
And what of the large numbers of tweets in English using the term lockdown that Mr. Senger wrote about related to Sierra Leone in 2014-2015? If lockdowns were just elites reacting to what the masses seemed to want, who was seeding the concept of lockdowns for diseases on twitter with legions of bots years earlier? There are all sorts of shady and suspicious individuals tied to ebola outbreaks, like Hunter tied Metabiota.
Just as you say: that there was a foolish adoption of a bad idea by elites in response to the need to 'do something' doesn't mean that the idea just spontaneously arose from the ether.
"My perception of these charades at the time and afterward is that they were, in fact, media-sparked mass panics merely codified “after the fact.”
Everyone in the West suddenly became afraid to go outside at the same time; for weeks at a time"
Yeeeah well, almost everybody, except some major politicians caught partying without masks and stuff, in several countries?
Given how big these things are, and that people (superficially seeming to be) at the helm probably making, at least by gut, cost-benefit calculations for their actions - I mean _for their own hides_ , not The People, mind you, ... I doubt that things were being done lightly and willy nilly.
My default assumption is, for any big thing happening one can observe, the outcome, if half way forseeable, is probably not an accident, but intended, welcomed or at least condoned.
This includes the prime effects of lockdowns, for one thing (at least according to some epidemiologists, most prominently, Knut Wittkowski) "flattening the curve" by stretching it out in time (at least long enough for certain experimental products to become available),
and, of course, a lot of middle size companies going belly up, while large corporations rubbing their hands, making more dough AND picking up scraps for cheap, leadig ever closer to visions of The Future (TM).
At least the latter of the two aspects wasn't rocket science, and if, as you say, the thing was a sharade, I doubt it was headless chickens doing it, or, not ones without strings pulling the wildly flappy wings anyway.
The publicly visible stuff we're allowed to have a glimpse into, like you've referenced, might just as well be some theater that doesn't have that much impact on the big picture?
The _origin_ of "lockdowns", literally, is American prison, where, when the inmates got too unruly, they would be kept in their cells, isn't it? Interesting etymology, and mindset of those choosing the terminology.
On 12 March 2020 Boris Johnson said ‘squash the sombrero’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r97T-Fpyxlc
Great post. It helps us further noodle down the rabbit hole of human nature during the last few years. I do wonder, however, if your "Are these concerns not seminal to the “right” — to traditionalists, Christians, and nationalists" was meant to be tongue in cheek. I believe we are in the midst of a political shift, as large as the great migration of the conservative democrats over to the right in the 1970's and 80's, where now the "old right" (the blue-bloods, chamber of commerce, economic-only conservatives, etc.) are being slowly pushed out of this new conservative/freedom-loving/populist/decidedly-non-elite right we are seeing gel organically before our eyes...perhaps in response to an ever spiraling/calcifying/authoritarian/utopian hard left====I love your coin of phrase "Credential-haver." In my day, we called them experts. When I was in grad school for political science (temporary miscalculation on my part) the professors openly bragged about their expertise and how they could "solve" problems if given the opportunity. So disgustingly melioristic. Ironically, it was an old style liberal professor that brought meliorism to my attention...a concept he also abhorred.
Very thoughtful review Brian. Two thoughts.
1. Your scenario is scarier to me than the Evil Masterplan scenario. Your scenario means that we are in a society so broken that it just shoves itself straight into mass hysteria with no significant driver at all, which means that we should expect to be in similar dire straits shortly and there is probably no fix for it. I have been thinking a lot about Rene Girard's theories on mimetic contagion lately and this seems like a more helpful way to look at 2020-21 than the mass psychosis formation especially given that Girard's theories predict the need for scapegoating which is the biggest feature of the whole pandemic in some ways.
2. All of the key events happened before your summary began.(don't mean that in a critical way it's a very good summary of how the flatten the curve and lockdowns entered our consciousness) Where did the assumption that covid would require ventilators and icu care come from? Where did assumptions on how contagious it would be come from? I think that the 'officials' and 'experts' were like the cartoon dad being slung around by the waterhose(I forget who it was) but who loaded the thing up with so much pressure. They clamped down trying to keep their control on all that pressure, using a toolkit that they had already been prepped on certainly. But where did the assumptions that formed all of that pressure come from?
Let's say that "a globalist deep state is the most likely culprit behind development of the virus and the vaccines for the same", as you say. It certainly seems plausible. But what would be the purpose? Wouldn't it be possible that the people developing the virus and the vaccine wanted to instigate a mass panic, which they hoped and expected would lead to lockdowns and/or mandates of various kinds?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's possible that the "globalist deep state" you speak of could have desired lockdowns and mandates, and found a way to get them to happen, while being able to hide their intent behind media-driven mass panic.
It's likely I'm missing something here, but I'm having trouble coming up with other ideas to explain the motivation behind the virus + vaccine plan.
Eugyppius has explained the disaster as a sudden shift by governments from mitigation to mass containment, with no one including the governments knowing exactly why.
This telling of it adds a missing piece for me, how, when, and why so many panicked people chose containment for themselves. Even as the infographics called for hand washing, people were eager to swallow the stronger stuff - staying at home and having everything delivered.
"Zeynep is a brilliant intellect who...". Are you being sarcastic here?
And, Zeynep: Turkey is not a third world country.
Brilliant post. We are soul mates (except you are vastly smarter than me - otherwise we're the same). 🤣
In an era where we are describing social contagions it's strange that we can't argue that many of these policies were themselves social contagions, moving far faster than the actual virus at the time that remarks were being published online and through the media.
We even see a lot of these things happening within our own "community" with the Pfizer/PV video, IgG4, Died Suddenly, Snake venom, the list can really go on. In many cases someone may report on something and it leads others to cover the same topic as well.
Maybe a lot of this has been organized, but we also can't deny that information gains traction just by having it go through the proper channels and having that right tinge of fear porn. I even remember former coworkers making comments about the bat soup. How many people fell for the bat soup idea are now arguing that public perception didn't play a role in how many of these slogans became adopted?
You're right it was a popular movement first. I remember explicitly "limiting my risk" based on the bs scare videos from China and all the rest of what appeared to be grassroots reporting, and the fact that China was obviously lying about the numbers.. I stopped using public transport and started working from home more. Now I wonder if that was actually all just an op. However, when facts on the ground in the US failed to match the supposed scenario in China.. when basically nothing happened, I figured it out: I didn't know why, or how, but this wasn't the sort of problem it was being billed as.
Unfortunately almost nobody else figured this out, and here we are.
Outstanding piece fab references too.. big time kudos & thanks for this landmark for the madness.
"Lockdowns occurred because they gave scared, (literally) non-essential Western professionals “something to do.”"
Let's not discount the virtue bestowed on already isolated lap top class w more big box delivered & all rebranded as heroic curve flattening.. humans are such a pecularly flawed species.
Masks and Lockdowns were policies pushed by a joint Military-Intelligence -Health Complex. Otherwise known as the NSC which is under the authority of the President
The Principals Committee is convened and chaired by the Presidents National Security Advisor. The Deputy National Security Advisor may also attend. Matt Pottinger was Deputy National Security Adviser and rabid promoter of Lockdowns and Masking before there was major spread of Covid and fear in the US
Our Covid Policy was an NSC Policy adopted on March 13 (Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted -PanCAP-A) and based on a 2018 PanCAP draft version created when Bolton was NSA. It was then implemented by FEMA (not HHS as originally planned).
As for masks, remember CDC Director Robert Redfield telling everyone masks were the best vaccine.
Back in the 1980’s Redfield was a proponent of universal HIV Testing and isolation of HIV positive testing. He also was responsible for the military HIV vaccine trials and was accused of fraudulently manipulating the data to get Congressional Funding
Lockdowns were an adoption of a 2013 Shelter in Place trial following the Marathon Bombing. At the time of the bombing they were undergoing training for an exercise planned for June simulating just such an event named Urban Shield.
The two accused “bomber” brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had an uncle born in Chechnya named Ruslan Tsarnaev. Ruslan was married in the 1990s until their divorce in 1999 to Samantha A. Fuller, the daughter of Graham E. Fuller.
Graham Fuller was formerly vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, and he also served as Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA with a network of CIA-backed Caucasus Jihadists .
Fuller admitted that “Uncle Ruslan” had lived in Fuller’s home in the suburban Washington area and that Fuller went several times to the Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia just as the CIA was heating up the Chechen Islamic terror against Moscow, allegedly to “visit” his daughter and son-in-law.
Ruslan Tsarnaev, who changed his name to Ruslan Tsarni, had worked in the past for companies tied to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, as well as working as a “consultant” in Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea in the 1990s with the State Department’s USAID, which has been widely identified as a CIA front.
COVID policies were homegrown and part of a larger conspiracy than panicked politicians and health officials, or WEF and Chinese manipulations. The fear that was created was by design as part of Psychological and Cognitive Warfare.
Obviously, neither of us can prove our theories. Mine might be too much for some people to accept because it is rather terrifying. I hope I am wrong. I fear I am not
I have been perplexed by the use of "lockdown" to describe staying at home, since the beginning of all the covid stupidity in 2020. It was always a prison term, as when inmates were ordered to stay in their cells and were not free to wander their cell blocks, usually during times of misbehavior or feared revolts.
I know this because I used to do prison ministry and only heard the term "lockdown" used on the "inside". Then 2020 and all of a sudden a free people are accepting and yammering endlessly about "lockdowns" with no clue what a tyrannical, vicious mechanism it always was. It seems to tie in with what you're describing here.
A very interesting post. Masks are not my thing. I do not feel strongly about them. If I thought that a mask could prevent Covid, I would possibly wear one in crowded settings. Since I do not believe that, I do not wear them.
(I am unvaxed and had Covid once over 2 years ago)
It is good that we are discussing history.
Thinking about writing a followup in this discussion.
I have referred your blog to posters on a skeptic's forum who I trust on matters of energy, renewables, economics and complexity.. a few come across as trolls.. willfully ignorant despite plentiful evidence of scripted drills with same partners coordinating live pandemic response, social media narrative control and suppression of vaccine harms. I recommend Due Diligence and Art for patents, legislation and contracts regarding the Covid operation. I figured your approach might open a door for them if they are sincere. Igor's explanation with sources is more compelling for me given my experience as an activist fighting municipal corruption followed by years of targeting/gaslighting and unsupportive therapists and family members.. standard victim blaming mentality, dismissive, impervious to contrary data. Claims of spontaneous group response reminds me of Matt Desmet's "Mass Formation" psychosis giving an easy out to Elites signaling and coordinating in plain sight.
Rather than trying to find the most influential manifestation, I think Mr. Senger has been trying to trace back the early emergence of these ideas in order to find Chinese influence. In some cases he seems to have been rather successful. I thought his research about Pottinger (who appoints Birx whose influence A Midwestern Doctor recently wrote about) and his 'sources in China' was very interesting for instance.
And what of the large numbers of tweets in English using the term lockdown that Mr. Senger wrote about related to Sierra Leone in 2014-2015? If lockdowns were just elites reacting to what the masses seemed to want, who was seeding the concept of lockdowns for diseases on twitter with legions of bots years earlier? There are all sorts of shady and suspicious individuals tied to ebola outbreaks, like Hunter tied Metabiota.
Just as you say: that there was a foolish adoption of a bad idea by elites in response to the need to 'do something' doesn't mean that the idea just spontaneously arose from the ether.
"My perception of these charades at the time and afterward is that they were, in fact, media-sparked mass panics merely codified “after the fact.”
Everyone in the West suddenly became afraid to go outside at the same time; for weeks at a time"
Yeeeah well, almost everybody, except some major politicians caught partying without masks and stuff, in several countries?
Given how big these things are, and that people (superficially seeming to be) at the helm probably making, at least by gut, cost-benefit calculations for their actions - I mean _for their own hides_ , not The People, mind you, ... I doubt that things were being done lightly and willy nilly.
My default assumption is, for any big thing happening one can observe, the outcome, if half way forseeable, is probably not an accident, but intended, welcomed or at least condoned.
This includes the prime effects of lockdowns, for one thing (at least according to some epidemiologists, most prominently, Knut Wittkowski) "flattening the curve" by stretching it out in time (at least long enough for certain experimental products to become available),
and, of course, a lot of middle size companies going belly up, while large corporations rubbing their hands, making more dough AND picking up scraps for cheap, leadig ever closer to visions of The Future (TM).
At least the latter of the two aspects wasn't rocket science, and if, as you say, the thing was a sharade, I doubt it was headless chickens doing it, or, not ones without strings pulling the wildly flappy wings anyway.
The publicly visible stuff we're allowed to have a glimpse into, like you've referenced, might just as well be some theater that doesn't have that much impact on the big picture?
The _origin_ of "lockdowns", literally, is American prison, where, when the inmates got too unruly, they would be kept in their cells, isn't it? Interesting etymology, and mindset of those choosing the terminology.