A parting shot re Conspiracies

And why they make us so deeply uncomfortable

Ask anybody about the upcoming US election and you’ll find that we are in rare agreement: it will unleash some kind of storm, some new, never seen before chaos resulting in collapse of Democracy or a new Civil War, take your pick. Aside from wondering whether this is a self fulfilling prophecy or ‘pre bunking’, I am with the doomsayers: it’s not going to be pretty though I have no ‘theory’ as to how it plays out and I do believe that it’s going to happen during the aftermath of the election.

Aside from that, I’m wrestling with why the last two long and brilliant CT posts with fellow sub stacker Geoff Olson received such a muted response. I have come up with two conclusions:

1. As a species, our advantage is that we can cooperate and plan, build Civilization and Culture, big C. It’s what makes us human. The problem is the shadow side, when it gets perverted towards sinister ends as it does with Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories. And we would prefer not to look at that.

2. The line between seeing legitimate patterns and plausible conspiracies is very thin. At what point does a ‘plan’ hatched in secret, something governments and corporations routinely do, morph into a ‘conspiracy’? This is so hard to pin down that anyone who tries is prone to falling into, you guessed it, a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ in turn.

A case in point is a recent book about this phenomenon, The Coming Storm, A Journey Into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine, by Gabriel Gatehouse. Gatehouse claims that it is the Republicans who are using Conspiracy Theories to undermine and confuse public opinion, while observing that he is not above falling into that trap himself. Brilliantly reviewed by James Ball in The Spectator, the book does demonstrate that nobody is immune to falling into CTs, especially not writers whose raison d’etre lies precisely in ‘connecting the dots’. Call it a professional hazard. Ball deftly illustrates this by refuting one of Gatehouse’s assertions, namely that it was the printing press that upended the feudal order and also ushered in the insanity of the witch hunts. They were, if nothing else, Conspiracy Theories of the most dreadful kind. Ball says that any scholar of the Middle Ages would refute Ball’s claim of a single cause, citing The Black Death, the peasants’ revolts and changes in the technologies of war. Says Ball:

‘Most of these happened decades before the printing press was developed and with literary rates hardly hitting the roof, it was not books that motivated workers’ uprisings. the story might be compelling, but the history is far messier than its narrative.’

Ball also observes that predicting storms is very difficult and full of pitfalls and delusions.

‘We can barely predict them, and we can do nothing to control them. that’s what makes them so compelling to watch. It’s also what makes it so tempting to see patterns in the chaos, to see reason where there is none.’

Timing and sequence of events is crucial to understanding any storm, and I will make my final point in that context. I can’t very well leave this discussion without trying to get a grip on the Conspiracy that continues to haunt us, the most gigantic Elephant in the Room of Humanity: Covid-19. I will recount here how I became convinced that it was indeed a Conspiracy. You may draw your own conclusions; this is an ongoing deep disagreement without any consensus.

Cast your mind back to 2021, if you will, when the first new ‘vaccines’ were rolled out. That was a storm of anxiety and confusion about what was happening to us and why. Suddenly, the old certainties about the right to choose what we put into your body, what we did, whom we associated with and above all, what we thought, were gone. We were subjected to a violent global assault of propaganda designed to make us obey, period. The excuse was a new virus that had a death rate that fluctuated with whoever was doing the research and changed from .004 percent to 10 percent. For some reason, nobody in government wanted to admit that it was essentially harmless to most healthy people under the age of 50 and only killed off those very ill already or very old and ill. But this is not what was reported; there was a narrative that this was a deadly virus and we should and must do everything to stop its spread by masking, social distancing and generally staying home and being nice and quiet while cheering on the heroic health care workers. Any and divergence from this official narrative was met with shaming, firings, and ostracism.

The question that is largely not asked by those who were in charge and continue to be in charge of us is WHY? why would an entire society go mental because of a health threat that wasn’t nearly as dangerous as other, previous ones like the bad flu of 1957, that were handled without fanfare and confusing propaganda?

One of the first books published that asked those questions in the context of where the virus originated was the Canadian investigative journalist Elaine Dewar. Her book, On the Origin of the deadliest pandemic of the last 100 years, published in August of ‘21, was a whodunit the likes of which I had never read before. While holed up in her apartment in Toronto, she scoured the Internet for every scrap of information on the Covid-19 virus and discovered two things: there was an international community of virologists. Most of them knew each other and collaborated. Some of them were doing gain of function research into bat viruses at a place called the Wuhan Institute of Virology which, strangely enough, was partially funded by American tax dollars via someone called Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak of the Eco Health Alliance. They were basically engaging in ‘research’ that manipulated the harmless bat virus to become, well, less harmless. They manipulated this virus so it was able to jump the species barrier which prevented it from infecting humans —in the name of ‘Science’. I remember how confused and alarmed I was. I had never heard of gain of function before and didn’t know who Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak was, either. The book is also highly technical, explaining in some detail how this ‘science’ is carried out and by whom. I came away from it feeling utterly discombobulated.

Fast forward to 2024 and we’re literally living in a different world, one where everyone knows who Anthony Fauci is even though they might not be entirely clear on what his role in the Covid-19 story is. This hair raising tale lies buried in the book of yet another woman; the better known and much lauded five time Emmy recipient and American journalist/ TV Anchor, Sharyl Attkisson. With Follow The Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails, Attkisson goes where none of us want to go: to a Covid-19 Conspiracy Theory so shocking it makes your heart race and your mind reel in disbelief. I can’t review the entire book here but I can give you some highlights:

For example, even well informed people do not know that Fauci was heading an organization that is part of the Department of Defence and focused on biodefense research. It was hatched under the Bush administration by Cheney himself and was part of the response to the 9/11 attacks. It is hiding its true focus behind its name: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Very clever. I wish I had written down who said on a YouTube clip I saw some months ago: Fauci is a weapons guy.

If Fauci was running a hidden-in-plain sight DOD department it suggests that the military precision with which the billion dollar propaganda machine flattened the discourse about the origin of the virus was no accident. They simply had to divert attention from their collusion with the Chinese Level Four Lab where the virus was being created. Here is where timing comes in: this wasn’t a recent collaboration. It began back in 2015 and was mostly funded by the rather mysterious Eco Health Alliance under Daszak and also received hundreds of thousands in funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Dr Fauci.

Why was there this push to create a new SARS virus? Because if you have one, you can then also create the cash cow of a vaccine, that’s why. I didn’t want to believe this for a very long time. This is how Attkisson tells it:

By insisting Covid came naturally from bats, they were attempting to save their own skin. And to make the scandal even more explosive, the risky research they were doing with China was in pursuit of a hugely profitable vaccine. Let me try to make the convoluted a little clearer. The record shows that in the years before Covid-19, US and Chinese scientist partnered up to invent a vaccine for a dangerous virus that didn’t yet exist. They then created such a virus in the lab to experiment on, in order to invent the vaccine. It’s important to understand the that particular vaccine would only be useful if that particular virus somehow got loose. It somehow got loose.

Her version of events is similar to that of Dewar, also a podcast by Unherd and an early scathing paper by Anonymous that said flatly: the same people that made the vaccine made the virus. There are numerous others who have come to the same shocking conclusion.

I came away from this information feeling sick. I still find it hard to think and write about because it shows a level of corruption that even my suspicious mind had not imagined. But I am convinced that no matter how distasteful, the Truth cannot be avoided or shoved under some collective rug.

By now, even people who actually trust the network ‘news’ are getting the uneasy feeling that they’re being duped, told half truths and led down the garden path. They may not know that there is a small but determined group of people who publish in places like The Brownstone Institute, Unherd, Substack and even the Spectator as well as a number of YouTube channels like Triggernomotry with Konstatin Kisin. But eventually they too will end up where I and all the other Conspiracy Theorists have ended. And they too will feel soiled and at a loss. How does a society that has been betrayed by the people it most trusted—the scientists—recover?

Eventually, we may get some sort of consensus about the great Covid-19 Conspiracy. In the meantime, all we can do is keep open minds and not get swept away in the coming storm. Because we have already been weathering it for too long.

Everybody knows that the plague is coming

Everybody knows that it's moving fast

Everybody knows that the naked man and woman

Are just a shining artifact of the past

Everybody knows the scene is dead

But there's gonna be a meter on your bed

That will disclose

What everybody knows

Leonard Cohen