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.
And now you have brought meliorism to my awareness. It's a very power-move word, haha.
The post-Reagan iteration of economic "conservatism," as well as libertarianism, are both doomed for the same reason as centrist progressivism - I would say 10 minutes ago because they are based on utilitarian promises of endless progress, now I will just say because they are meliorist. Very useful word.
So the "right" is quite tired of the lie of progress and ready to drop it. With that, it can only see things in terms of who is in power, it's credential-havers, not them. Answer: populism. The credential-havers find this very upsetting, and Applebaum says "that's just blood-based party rule," ironically not realizing that the reigning status quo is the same thing dressed up as meritocracy.
The "left" is meanwhile in a schism between the credential-havers and those who supported them because of promises of an egalitarian utopia, "the arc of the moral universe" clearly isn't going to bend toward justice at this point unless society is totally dismantled. But, the supporters are already in a kind of hangover from having a taste of that in 2020. So I think they will all sort to either The Party or the populist opposition going forward. No one will believe in progress and maybe simple, naked patronage politics and economic stagnation will be the future, which is basically California now.
I think you nailed the left. But I do think there are many on the left that are similar to the independent-like on the right and are a bit baffled as to what's going on.
On the right, I think it may be very complex and tenuous at this point with, like you say, populism being the glue temporarily holding it together. You have, I'd guess, about 1/3 on the right that are pure populists, and most of those lean nationalist. Another roughly 1/3 maybe are really more independent in the old way with an almost country club Republican-like look and feel to them; even if they aren't wealthy. The final 1/3 (which may be as much as 2/3...just can't tell) I believe are Christian/Constitution-loving/Nation-loving/exceedingly-independent conservatives in the truer sense of the term (i.e. they are holding fast to the reigns of this horse which is galloping towards the edge of the cliff).
The conservative portion has only recently awoken in horror to the abuses (both present and now looking to the past) of the bureaucratic agencies (e.g. DOJ, FBI, CIA, CDC, FDA, NIH, DOD, etc.) and are therefore jarred enough to join with the populists (with the populists saying to them I told you so). The conservatives are driven by a deontological crusade to do the right thing and want that within the government as well. Whereas I tend to believe much of the pure populist movement is a bit pragmatic, thinking mostly of their proximal necessities. Finally, the old-style independent leaning right are also pragmatically driven, but less from their own needs and more from the values of collegiality, negotiation, and "let's all get along."
I could be completely off base here, but if I were to sum up my description of the right, it would be this...just for fun:
--Christian Conservatives watch Tucker, listen to people like AFR and Bongino, and read Epoch Times.
--Independent Republicans watch Golf, listen to Clay and Buck, and read the Wall Street Journal.
--Populist/Nationalist watch One America News, listen to Hannity, and read Info Wars.
Sounds right. The added wrinkle is that the media apparatus of the populist arm is composed of "Party"-aligned IRs who probably don't actually want the populists to win. But being in the Party hasn't stopped them from perceiving the pragmatic landscape that animates populism, and they know it's where the engagement is, so they change content accordingly. While the rest of "conservative media" as well as libertarian media can't stomach that reality, and so they remain Professional Free Market Progress Promisers who no one wants to listen to anymore (except for alignment in anti-woke-ness).
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?
Browsing Girard... I think that's a better way of putting it. With both "flatten the curve" and everything in the summer after "instagram black box day," it wasn't psychosis because there would have been high engagement of rational thought the entire time. But the rational thought was alien to any material input or output; like two people cranking the disengaged handles of a rail trolley that is actually being towed by a train. "I must do this, and there are so many important reasons why, like X1, X2," and then if the train does stop, which happens as soon as someone isn't reflecting the meme, there is violence.
Assumptions of epidemiological impact - here the "experts" in fact do get the blame. More than anyone the inception can be credited to Robert Webster, who co-advanced the understanding of flu immensely between 70s to 90s, essentially driving acceptance of the avian reservoir as where flu comes from.
And then he goes batty in the late 90s and by 2006 is warning that an avian flu is going to kill half the earth. This is when even Neil Ferguson is just saying 'up to 200 million.'
"Society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility," Webster said. "I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role." https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/AvianFlu/story?id=1724801
A lot of people listened to him and others like Ferguson, so the avian flu scare led to a government initiative to translate his crazy ideas into "pandemic preparedness." You can see Webster mentioned in the first "background" bullet of the 2006 HHS pandemic preparedness meeting that leads to the CDC guidelines the next year (pdf auto-download url https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=771457)
This is at the same time as frozen 1918 genes are sequenced and so there's a revival of interest in 1918, the cytokine storm myth is formed, so all these pieces get kind of stitched together into a narrative of what will happen next. It's basically this War on Terror era spiritual tumor, a prophesy of apocalypse, that kind of goes to sleep and then suddenly explodes in 2020. But there might have been some kind of deep state op behind some of the elements, like cytokine storm, a lot of the "literature" on that myth comes out of China or Wellcome/Oxford between 2006 and 2019.
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.
Yes, that could have been the way the "plan" was constructed and carried out. But if all the "plan" needs is to make us all scared then it's clear we are still the agent doing the dirty work of inflicting crazy behaviors on ourselves.
Lots of agents here, with different affordances. Power nexus networks, professional classes, "thought leaders" of various sorts, politicians and other officials... media mediating all the while. Quite a mix.
I waste a lot of keystrokes here in the peanut galleries of Substack trying to get people to understand that "conspiratorial" control can be exercised quite effectively in very subtle and nuanced ways, over long preparatory periods as well as speedy agile feedback, and that the people best positioned to do this have plenty of practice and put plenty of serious study into how to most efficiently accomplish it.
I refer you or anyone to Norbert Weiner's classic (circa 1950) work "On the Human Use of Human Beings", a founding classic of "cybernetics" (later known as "operations research", a highly influential cross-disciplinary project).
But yes, it all works best when we're unaware of it... which is why most of us are still fumbling with the basic concepts. This stuff doesn't get a lot of sincere and thoughtful exposition.
In a way this isn't a question that has an answer.
Let's say you are married to a spouse who is intensely gullible, so much so that she can come home any day convinced you are an insect in disguise that needs to be set on fire because some stranger merely asserted the same at the grocery store. Is your problem the spouse that keeps coming home and trying to set you on fire, or the fact that society tells your spouse things? You obviously can't do anything about the latter except move to a desert island, so you would answer that your problem is the spouse.
With the deep state, supposing it is manipulating humanity at large (it certainly seems to be deeply embedded in manipulating the opposition, i.e. Dr. 🐴 etc.), then the spouse is society, so it might be more the case that the only possible action is to somehow overthrow the deep state. I.e., pointing out that most of society is gullible and prone to trying to kill the non-gullible all the time isn't going to change anything. Fair enough. Still, it does lead to understanding better how the conspiracy works - by constructing beliefs, not feeding scripts.
The "deep state", properly understood, isn't really something that can be overthrown: its would-be overthrowers quickly become absorbed into it. New boss, same as de old boss. The old Hegelian dialectic doesn't so much control a genuine opposition as preempt and prompt and channel it. This is just power, whether exercised through the numerous (and highly malleable) official means of governance, or by (bespoke, expensive and risky) bribery and blackmail, carefully structured incentives (quite suitable for the middle layers, the professional classes), or the big driftnets of ideology (a long game, played both within the prestige nexus nurseries and against the masses at large).
What we can do is to recognize the principles of operation: game theory, behavioral economics, old-fashioned machiavellian machinations, mass psychology, and so forth. With these understood, we can construct our own maps of the ongoing manipulations. And ultimately, we can route around the worst of these, as we build and maintain and defend our own alternative social structures.
Spiritual warfare, if we want to call it that, is at least as much go as chess. Increasingly, I think of "human nature" in ecological terms. The fundamental predator-prey relationship isn't something we can change: but there are many metastable configurations, and many ways to alter the balance. I don't think "they" will succeed in turning the entire world into a feedlot factory farm, but I don't think we'll all be going back to the jungle either.
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.
It ranks third behind the great nations of Quail and Duck. Not being sarcastic, though maybe applying a low bar to humanity. She was able to explain why the Cochrane review doesn't make sense for evaluating masks when most people are just "study proves X!" like apes at the obelisk.
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?
Andreessen characterizes this effect as "availability cascades." It isn't really clear why "availability" rather than any other word, but it sort of works / makes sense https://pmarca.substack.com/p/availability-cascades-run-the-world - wait I just read it and I get why "availability" now, takes two readings
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.
I suppose I should one day look into the China videos, they didn't have any impression on me at the time but lots of people still mention them as meaningful in our reaction later.
I think it was part of a whole feed of news through non MSM channels. There was the official information, which was that there was some kind of more transmissible SARS, which put people in the hospital; along with the official stats from china which were clearly false because they didn't fit the shape of an outbreak. Not being able to trust the official reports, the unofficial reports had lots of distressing content like videos of people keeling over, overloaded hospitals, crazy decontamination methods, lockdowns of whole cities that nevertheless failed because everyone just left early for CNY, and claims about massive numbers of urns and huge clouds of sulfur dioxide allegedly due to cremation.
Looking back on it, it could all have been an op to plant false stories and data to cause the people who (think they) are trying to stay ahead of the curve to internalize a false sense that this was a truly dangerous situation, that was being missed by MSM or suppressed.
Once it reached our shores. nothing emerged that was remotely like what was supposedly happening in china. Was it different in china? or was it all a hoax? or was this an emergent phenomenon of alt media? I don't know.
I'm leaning toward this being a hoax which worked as designed: it spooked the decision-makers across the world to implement lockdowns, vaccines, and whatever comes next... and if the plebs didn't get it, scare the shit out of them until they do.
That is:
1. scare the technocrats
2. technocrats manipulate the media to make sure the commoners are scared, and will authorize any solutions technocrats come up with
3. technocrats gain power and implement lots of solutions, and never ever ever admit they were wrong.
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.
Thank you! Yes - When Sam Neil used the electrical and communication networks that some other workers still had to keep working in person to sustain in order to send a funny video... true heroism
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
Nothing in the federal response can describe "our" plan - federal gov can't issue any orders that fall in the lockdown umbrella. What's more interesting is preparation of proto-"lockdown team" capacity at sate and corporate level, which may have happened in the months before October in the form of Crimson Contagion. Ultimately lockdowns were still implemented by individual states as well as corporate partners nexus'ed in "fusion" centers. The corporate partners might have been the most important part - however, these are the organizations whose entire staffs were already on board with 'flatten the curve' as soon as the memes took off.
You are correct in that the Federal Govt can’t order the state to do anything. I believe 8 states did not go along. However, they do have influence via money. On March 6 Congress gave Trump 8 billion to play with. That was seed money. More would come at the end of the month after Lockdowns were recommended via the Cares Act.
In addition you had Bloomberg having weekly call in sessions with the Council of Mayors who had their own Lockdown authority, discussing ways to get Federal dollars.
For over 30 years the Federal Government had been using Block Grants to coerce cities ,communities and regions to go along with their programs weakening the power of the state to dole out this money.
Overall, the government spent over 4 trillion on Pandemic Response with much going to states, cities and hospitals and those who cooperated most by inflating death/case counts and going along with school closures, mask mandates, lockdowns, testing got rewarded
Crimson Contagion was a way to get the states involved in the exercise up to speed on taking orders from the Feds. Many of these states in the exercise played a leading role in the first wave of the Pandemic accounting for most cases/deaths
And the Feds had an awful lot of influence over large WEF corporations through their public private partnerships and PPP bribes. Larry Fink took charge of the 400 billion authorized under the CARE Act and rewarded corporations who went along buying their bonds and propping up the stock market
It was literally one of the greatest Rackets ever run. The Crime of the Century, actually the greatest caper in history
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.
In prison there are also strict regulations on behavior exerted by fellow inmates. When a social more is dominant then violating it can be just as existential as being targeted by state power. Overall though things just kind of stayed at "everyone is playing fort, yippee (except sorry poor people whose kids are missing school lunch today)" level for a few months and then all the steam blew off in a different direction after Floyd.
Where I live in Maryland the school lunches were handed out to overfed parents driving Lincoln SUVs. Long lines of vehicles at lunch hour waiting for the handouts. Maybe the kids got some of that. Maybe not.
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.
There is a value to having an allergic response to the mass psychosis theory as a general defense against being hoodwinked. This doesn't change whether the theory is valid. Where was anyone in the streets in early March, 2020? Where was a single government official or police officer forcing anyone to do anything? I know two examples -- Burbank and Long Island bars -- but these are noble exceptions that proved the rule. There was no government / elite "imposing" of lockdowns, we are all just victims of yet another shameful panic. That's human nature; it isn't pretty.
A panopticon may be a better explanation to your point about identifying the source. I can also think of this like an influencer (vector) passing a viral meme. JP at Hidden Complexity makes a good argument for hybrid warfare and memetics at play. I can tell you the public's response presents like my initial reaction to stalking groups using classical conditioning cues or fear anchors.. mass formation I can accept if it is related to an infection of consciousness by an egregore involving repetition, ritual and shared purpose altho this system still requires a "priestly" and managerial class with persuasive power over an in-group hungry for meaning. John Michael Greer at Ecosophia provides some insight on this.
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.
Sorry for delayed response - I think this ties into my reply to InfoHog. The deal was done once the news got everyone terrified. This is how I saw it not just at the time but in the lead-up - as soon as people started staying home, we were on track for a return to 9-11 style authoritarianism of some sort. And then it happened. It wasn't just elites where the "flatten the curve" idea arose - and especially, it wasn't in the elites that were supposed to by making any decisions or setting guidelines. It was in people with media and social media cachet.
Thinking about this reminded me of a video I saw of a presentation looking at pandemic planning scenarios going back 20 years and more. I didn't think I would be able to find it in my huge collection of bookmarks, but luckily I did and it hasn't even been purged from youtube!
If there is any penultimate origin of lockdowns, it is probably these pandemic planning scenarios since they specifically discuss suspension of civil liberties as a fundamental part of dealing with biowarfare threats. Plus Biden specifically referenced the most famous one as a sort of in your face flex.
If we were to accept that US government planners conceived of the lockdown idea without any reference to science as a wartime measure, then wouldn't we have to suspect that each and every time the concept arises from other seemingly independent sources that it might have been deliberately seeded?
"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.
I view politicians and government officials as essentially disempowered beings, who have to just do (legislatively) whatever the media succeeds in making the public angry at them for not doing, at all times. Hypocrisy in such a context doesn't strike me as having any kind of moral meaning. It's the fault of people for letting the media whip them around.
And, for this reason, I'm skeptical of how outcomes can be used to infer intent. Let's say for example that the deep state was ensuring a virus panic by staging media coverage (which in fact seems totally plausible), just as 9-11 ensured a terrorism panic. An authoritarian response is going to follow because an authoritarian response will be demanded by a public angry at the government not over-reacting. But the script for that response came from the people; at best the deep state could cast a wide net of narratives and see what takes off, just like pop music producers they can't predict what will be a hit most of the time. But here it seems more likely that the people really just crowd-sourced this idea from scraps of a messy CDC document, like the engineers pretending to fix Apollo 13's air filter in the movie.
That first paragraph - 💯. And since it worked reasonably well this time they will use it again. We're lab rats. They'll make adjustments for the next thing and gull the people who were skeptical from the beginning of the scamdemic. I've seen many people claim that they won't get fooled again...oh yes you will. It won't be a scamdemic - it will be something else. This whole thing could not have worked as well as it did without the media - all media - including what is called "alternative" media.
A more promising vow would be 'I will try to realize more quickly that I have been fooled next time' - 'won't get fooled again' and 'never again' are both just recipes not to realize when it happens
What I was trying to say mainly is - important chunks of what turned out to happen was forseeable consequences of the actions - and if it's forseeable, it was at least condoned, if not part of the actual goals, and I emphasize the latter for the gravity. Such as crushing the effect on smaller businesses.
It's not like this could happen as an accident of not thinking properly for a minute - there was a lot of time to reconsider, and given how uninhibitedly they made narrative flipflops, they could just have done another one, if they wanted, and sell themselevs as double heroes.
For the major aspects of the last 3 years we here tend to muse about, too many things just run too smoothely together and into each other, also in accordance with goals for 2030 etc, as to just be emergent and requiring "conspicary maximalism" to consider a great deal of coordination.
When someone suggests coordination, it also doesn't mean "dey all in on it", as used to be the presented rationale for why "conspiracies" were supposedly unlikely (until any sort of reasoning stopped being required at all, and the mere utterance of the word "conspiracy" had to suffice for Rational People (TM) to stop thinking...).
It's certainly not what I'm suggesting, like, ever. Hierarchical structures have this property that only key places need to be able to be influential to get the whole thing moving in the desired directions, without even nearly every part of the pyramid understanding what's going in or what their actual role is in the game.
Look at the meticulous documents they are putting out. And how the chain of things being implemented nicely fits all the totally coincidental crises.
There clearly has been a lot of engineering going on in the past decades.
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.
And now you have brought meliorism to my awareness. It's a very power-move word, haha.
The post-Reagan iteration of economic "conservatism," as well as libertarianism, are both doomed for the same reason as centrist progressivism - I would say 10 minutes ago because they are based on utilitarian promises of endless progress, now I will just say because they are meliorist. Very useful word.
So the "right" is quite tired of the lie of progress and ready to drop it. With that, it can only see things in terms of who is in power, it's credential-havers, not them. Answer: populism. The credential-havers find this very upsetting, and Applebaum says "that's just blood-based party rule," ironically not realizing that the reigning status quo is the same thing dressed up as meritocracy.
The "left" is meanwhile in a schism between the credential-havers and those who supported them because of promises of an egalitarian utopia, "the arc of the moral universe" clearly isn't going to bend toward justice at this point unless society is totally dismantled. But, the supporters are already in a kind of hangover from having a taste of that in 2020. So I think they will all sort to either The Party or the populist opposition going forward. No one will believe in progress and maybe simple, naked patronage politics and economic stagnation will be the future, which is basically California now.
I think you nailed the left. But I do think there are many on the left that are similar to the independent-like on the right and are a bit baffled as to what's going on.
On the right, I think it may be very complex and tenuous at this point with, like you say, populism being the glue temporarily holding it together. You have, I'd guess, about 1/3 on the right that are pure populists, and most of those lean nationalist. Another roughly 1/3 maybe are really more independent in the old way with an almost country club Republican-like look and feel to them; even if they aren't wealthy. The final 1/3 (which may be as much as 2/3...just can't tell) I believe are Christian/Constitution-loving/Nation-loving/exceedingly-independent conservatives in the truer sense of the term (i.e. they are holding fast to the reigns of this horse which is galloping towards the edge of the cliff).
The conservative portion has only recently awoken in horror to the abuses (both present and now looking to the past) of the bureaucratic agencies (e.g. DOJ, FBI, CIA, CDC, FDA, NIH, DOD, etc.) and are therefore jarred enough to join with the populists (with the populists saying to them I told you so). The conservatives are driven by a deontological crusade to do the right thing and want that within the government as well. Whereas I tend to believe much of the pure populist movement is a bit pragmatic, thinking mostly of their proximal necessities. Finally, the old-style independent leaning right are also pragmatically driven, but less from their own needs and more from the values of collegiality, negotiation, and "let's all get along."
I could be completely off base here, but if I were to sum up my description of the right, it would be this...just for fun:
--Christian Conservatives watch Tucker, listen to people like AFR and Bongino, and read Epoch Times.
--Independent Republicans watch Golf, listen to Clay and Buck, and read the Wall Street Journal.
--Populist/Nationalist watch One America News, listen to Hannity, and read Info Wars.
Sounds right. The added wrinkle is that the media apparatus of the populist arm is composed of "Party"-aligned IRs who probably don't actually want the populists to win. But being in the Party hasn't stopped them from perceiving the pragmatic landscape that animates populism, and they know it's where the engagement is, so they change content accordingly. While the rest of "conservative media" as well as libertarian media can't stomach that reality, and so they remain Professional Free Market Progress Promisers who no one wants to listen to anymore (except for alignment in anti-woke-ness).
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?
Browsing Girard... I think that's a better way of putting it. With both "flatten the curve" and everything in the summer after "instagram black box day," it wasn't psychosis because there would have been high engagement of rational thought the entire time. But the rational thought was alien to any material input or output; like two people cranking the disengaged handles of a rail trolley that is actually being towed by a train. "I must do this, and there are so many important reasons why, like X1, X2," and then if the train does stop, which happens as soon as someone isn't reflecting the meme, there is violence.
Assumptions of epidemiological impact - here the "experts" in fact do get the blame. More than anyone the inception can be credited to Robert Webster, who co-advanced the understanding of flu immensely between 70s to 90s, essentially driving acceptance of the avian reservoir as where flu comes from.
And then he goes batty in the late 90s and by 2006 is warning that an avian flu is going to kill half the earth. This is when even Neil Ferguson is just saying 'up to 200 million.'
"Society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility," Webster said. "I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role." https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/AvianFlu/story?id=1724801
A lot of people listened to him and others like Ferguson, so the avian flu scare led to a government initiative to translate his crazy ideas into "pandemic preparedness." You can see Webster mentioned in the first "background" bullet of the 2006 HHS pandemic preparedness meeting that leads to the CDC guidelines the next year (pdf auto-download url https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=771457)
This is at the same time as frozen 1918 genes are sequenced and so there's a revival of interest in 1918, the cytokine storm myth is formed, so all these pieces get kind of stitched together into a narrative of what will happen next. It's basically this War on Terror era spiritual tumor, a prophesy of apocalypse, that kind of goes to sleep and then suddenly explodes in 2020. But there might have been some kind of deep state op behind some of the elements, like cytokine storm, a lot of the "literature" on that myth comes out of China or Wellcome/Oxford between 2006 and 2019.
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.
Yes, that could have been the way the "plan" was constructed and carried out. But if all the "plan" needs is to make us all scared then it's clear we are still the agent doing the dirty work of inflicting crazy behaviors on ourselves.
Which "we" is that, exactly?
Lots of agents here, with different affordances. Power nexus networks, professional classes, "thought leaders" of various sorts, politicians and other officials... media mediating all the while. Quite a mix.
I waste a lot of keystrokes here in the peanut galleries of Substack trying to get people to understand that "conspiratorial" control can be exercised quite effectively in very subtle and nuanced ways, over long preparatory periods as well as speedy agile feedback, and that the people best positioned to do this have plenty of practice and put plenty of serious study into how to most efficiently accomplish it.
I refer you or anyone to Norbert Weiner's classic (circa 1950) work "On the Human Use of Human Beings", a founding classic of "cybernetics" (later known as "operations research", a highly influential cross-disciplinary project).
But yes, it all works best when we're unaware of it... which is why most of us are still fumbling with the basic concepts. This stuff doesn't get a lot of sincere and thoughtful exposition.
In a way this isn't a question that has an answer.
Let's say you are married to a spouse who is intensely gullible, so much so that she can come home any day convinced you are an insect in disguise that needs to be set on fire because some stranger merely asserted the same at the grocery store. Is your problem the spouse that keeps coming home and trying to set you on fire, or the fact that society tells your spouse things? You obviously can't do anything about the latter except move to a desert island, so you would answer that your problem is the spouse.
With the deep state, supposing it is manipulating humanity at large (it certainly seems to be deeply embedded in manipulating the opposition, i.e. Dr. 🐴 etc.), then the spouse is society, so it might be more the case that the only possible action is to somehow overthrow the deep state. I.e., pointing out that most of society is gullible and prone to trying to kill the non-gullible all the time isn't going to change anything. Fair enough. Still, it does lead to understanding better how the conspiracy works - by constructing beliefs, not feeding scripts.
The "deep state", properly understood, isn't really something that can be overthrown: its would-be overthrowers quickly become absorbed into it. New boss, same as de old boss. The old Hegelian dialectic doesn't so much control a genuine opposition as preempt and prompt and channel it. This is just power, whether exercised through the numerous (and highly malleable) official means of governance, or by (bespoke, expensive and risky) bribery and blackmail, carefully structured incentives (quite suitable for the middle layers, the professional classes), or the big driftnets of ideology (a long game, played both within the prestige nexus nurseries and against the masses at large).
What we can do is to recognize the principles of operation: game theory, behavioral economics, old-fashioned machiavellian machinations, mass psychology, and so forth. With these understood, we can construct our own maps of the ongoing manipulations. And ultimately, we can route around the worst of these, as we build and maintain and defend our own alternative social structures.
Spiritual warfare, if we want to call it that, is at least as much go as chess. Increasingly, I think of "human nature" in ecological terms. The fundamental predator-prey relationship isn't something we can change: but there are many metastable configurations, and many ways to alter the balance. I don't think "they" will succeed in turning the entire world into a feedlot factory farm, but I don't think we'll all be going back to the jungle either.
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.
It ranks third behind the great nations of Quail and Duck. Not being sarcastic, though maybe applying a low bar to humanity. She was able to explain why the Cochrane review doesn't make sense for evaluating masks when most people are just "study proves X!" like apes at the obelisk.
Maybe she reads your substack. The rest of her deep thoughts can be conjured while looking out windows.
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?
Andreessen characterizes this effect as "availability cascades." It isn't really clear why "availability" rather than any other word, but it sort of works / makes sense https://pmarca.substack.com/p/availability-cascades-run-the-world - wait I just read it and I get why "availability" now, takes two readings
Interesting! I didn't have a term for this phenomenon so it's good to know that there's some literature out there about this.
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.
I suppose I should one day look into the China videos, they didn't have any impression on me at the time but lots of people still mention them as meaningful in our reaction later.
I think it was part of a whole feed of news through non MSM channels. There was the official information, which was that there was some kind of more transmissible SARS, which put people in the hospital; along with the official stats from china which were clearly false because they didn't fit the shape of an outbreak. Not being able to trust the official reports, the unofficial reports had lots of distressing content like videos of people keeling over, overloaded hospitals, crazy decontamination methods, lockdowns of whole cities that nevertheless failed because everyone just left early for CNY, and claims about massive numbers of urns and huge clouds of sulfur dioxide allegedly due to cremation.
Looking back on it, it could all have been an op to plant false stories and data to cause the people who (think they) are trying to stay ahead of the curve to internalize a false sense that this was a truly dangerous situation, that was being missed by MSM or suppressed.
Once it reached our shores. nothing emerged that was remotely like what was supposedly happening in china. Was it different in china? or was it all a hoax? or was this an emergent phenomenon of alt media? I don't know.
I'm leaning toward this being a hoax which worked as designed: it spooked the decision-makers across the world to implement lockdowns, vaccines, and whatever comes next... and if the plebs didn't get it, scare the shit out of them until they do.
That is:
1. scare the technocrats
2. technocrats manipulate the media to make sure the commoners are scared, and will authorize any solutions technocrats come up with
3. technocrats gain power and implement lots of solutions, and never ever ever admit they were wrong.
I remember one photograph in particular from China, a door being boarded up, with people inside trying to get out. The people inside had covid.
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.
Thank you! Yes - When Sam Neil used the electrical and communication networks that some other workers still had to keep working in person to sustain in order to send a funny video... true heroism
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
Nothing in the federal response can describe "our" plan - federal gov can't issue any orders that fall in the lockdown umbrella. What's more interesting is preparation of proto-"lockdown team" capacity at sate and corporate level, which may have happened in the months before October in the form of Crimson Contagion. Ultimately lockdowns were still implemented by individual states as well as corporate partners nexus'ed in "fusion" centers. The corporate partners might have been the most important part - however, these are the organizations whose entire staffs were already on board with 'flatten the curve' as soon as the memes took off.
You are correct in that the Federal Govt can’t order the state to do anything. I believe 8 states did not go along. However, they do have influence via money. On March 6 Congress gave Trump 8 billion to play with. That was seed money. More would come at the end of the month after Lockdowns were recommended via the Cares Act.
In addition you had Bloomberg having weekly call in sessions with the Council of Mayors who had their own Lockdown authority, discussing ways to get Federal dollars.
For over 30 years the Federal Government had been using Block Grants to coerce cities ,communities and regions to go along with their programs weakening the power of the state to dole out this money.
Overall, the government spent over 4 trillion on Pandemic Response with much going to states, cities and hospitals and those who cooperated most by inflating death/case counts and going along with school closures, mask mandates, lockdowns, testing got rewarded
Crimson Contagion was a way to get the states involved in the exercise up to speed on taking orders from the Feds. Many of these states in the exercise played a leading role in the first wave of the Pandemic accounting for most cases/deaths
And the Feds had an awful lot of influence over large WEF corporations through their public private partnerships and PPP bribes. Larry Fink took charge of the 400 billion authorized under the CARE Act and rewarded corporations who went along buying their bonds and propping up the stock market
It was literally one of the greatest Rackets ever run. The Crime of the Century, actually the greatest caper in history
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.
In prison there are also strict regulations on behavior exerted by fellow inmates. When a social more is dominant then violating it can be just as existential as being targeted by state power. Overall though things just kind of stayed at "everyone is playing fort, yippee (except sorry poor people whose kids are missing school lunch today)" level for a few months and then all the steam blew off in a different direction after Floyd.
Where I live in Maryland the school lunches were handed out to overfed parents driving Lincoln SUVs. Long lines of vehicles at lunch hour waiting for the handouts. Maybe the kids got some of that. Maybe not.
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.
Wow and thanks
You both have been excellent teachers! Thanks for your service!
There is a value to having an allergic response to the mass psychosis theory as a general defense against being hoodwinked. This doesn't change whether the theory is valid. Where was anyone in the streets in early March, 2020? Where was a single government official or police officer forcing anyone to do anything? I know two examples -- Burbank and Long Island bars -- but these are noble exceptions that proved the rule. There was no government / elite "imposing" of lockdowns, we are all just victims of yet another shameful panic. That's human nature; it isn't pretty.
A panopticon may be a better explanation to your point about identifying the source. I can also think of this like an influencer (vector) passing a viral meme. JP at Hidden Complexity makes a good argument for hybrid warfare and memetics at play. I can tell you the public's response presents like my initial reaction to stalking groups using classical conditioning cues or fear anchors.. mass formation I can accept if it is related to an infection of consciousness by an egregore involving repetition, ritual and shared purpose altho this system still requires a "priestly" and managerial class with persuasive power over an in-group hungry for meaning. John Michael Greer at Ecosophia provides some insight on this.
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.
Sorry for delayed response - I think this ties into my reply to InfoHog. The deal was done once the news got everyone terrified. This is how I saw it not just at the time but in the lead-up - as soon as people started staying home, we were on track for a return to 9-11 style authoritarianism of some sort. And then it happened. It wasn't just elites where the "flatten the curve" idea arose - and especially, it wasn't in the elites that were supposed to by making any decisions or setting guidelines. It was in people with media and social media cachet.
Thinking about this reminded me of a video I saw of a presentation looking at pandemic planning scenarios going back 20 years and more. I didn't think I would be able to find it in my huge collection of bookmarks, but luckily I did and it hasn't even been purged from youtube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3WUv5SV5Hg
If there is any penultimate origin of lockdowns, it is probably these pandemic planning scenarios since they specifically discuss suspension of civil liberties as a fundamental part of dealing with biowarfare threats. Plus Biden specifically referenced the most famous one as a sort of in your face flex.
If we were to accept that US government planners conceived of the lockdown idea without any reference to science as a wartime measure, then wouldn't we have to suspect that each and every time the concept arises from other seemingly independent sources that it might have been deliberately seeded?
That is how I interpret Mr. Senger's research.
"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.
I view politicians and government officials as essentially disempowered beings, who have to just do (legislatively) whatever the media succeeds in making the public angry at them for not doing, at all times. Hypocrisy in such a context doesn't strike me as having any kind of moral meaning. It's the fault of people for letting the media whip them around.
And, for this reason, I'm skeptical of how outcomes can be used to infer intent. Let's say for example that the deep state was ensuring a virus panic by staging media coverage (which in fact seems totally plausible), just as 9-11 ensured a terrorism panic. An authoritarian response is going to follow because an authoritarian response will be demanded by a public angry at the government not over-reacting. But the script for that response came from the people; at best the deep state could cast a wide net of narratives and see what takes off, just like pop music producers they can't predict what will be a hit most of the time. But here it seems more likely that the people really just crowd-sourced this idea from scraps of a messy CDC document, like the engineers pretending to fix Apollo 13's air filter in the movie.
That first paragraph - 💯. And since it worked reasonably well this time they will use it again. We're lab rats. They'll make adjustments for the next thing and gull the people who were skeptical from the beginning of the scamdemic. I've seen many people claim that they won't get fooled again...oh yes you will. It won't be a scamdemic - it will be something else. This whole thing could not have worked as well as it did without the media - all media - including what is called "alternative" media.
A more promising vow would be 'I will try to realize more quickly that I have been fooled next time' - 'won't get fooled again' and 'never again' are both just recipes not to realize when it happens
'I will try to realize more quickly that I have been fooled next time'
Doesn't that mean that the "fooling" began but the person needs to realize, sooner, that he's been fooled?
What I was trying to say mainly is - important chunks of what turned out to happen was forseeable consequences of the actions - and if it's forseeable, it was at least condoned, if not part of the actual goals, and I emphasize the latter for the gravity. Such as crushing the effect on smaller businesses.
It's not like this could happen as an accident of not thinking properly for a minute - there was a lot of time to reconsider, and given how uninhibitedly they made narrative flipflops, they could just have done another one, if they wanted, and sell themselevs as double heroes.
For the major aspects of the last 3 years we here tend to muse about, too many things just run too smoothely together and into each other, also in accordance with goals for 2030 etc, as to just be emergent and requiring "conspicary maximalism" to consider a great deal of coordination.
When someone suggests coordination, it also doesn't mean "dey all in on it", as used to be the presented rationale for why "conspiracies" were supposedly unlikely (until any sort of reasoning stopped being required at all, and the mere utterance of the word "conspiracy" had to suffice for Rational People (TM) to stop thinking...).
It's certainly not what I'm suggesting, like, ever. Hierarchical structures have this property that only key places need to be able to be influential to get the whole thing moving in the desired directions, without even nearly every part of the pyramid understanding what's going in or what their actual role is in the game.
Look at the meticulous documents they are putting out. And how the chain of things being implemented nicely fits all the totally coincidental crises.
There clearly has been a lot of engineering going on in the past decades.
Kind of the grounds for coordination.
It's like Candy Crush but for ideas. Tap tap tap