Day: 6 October 2020

Manfred Horst In March 2020, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) was involved in the preparation of a 17-page strategy paper entitled How We Can Get COVID-19 Under Control. The paper can still be retrieved from the ministry’s official website. One essential focus of this paper is the communication strategy to be followed by the government, aimed at encouraging the population to trust and accept the measures which were going to be imposed. This strategy explicitly involved the creation of an emotional “shock effect” and the singling out of children as culpable transmitters of disease. The scenario paper How We Can Get COVID-19 Under Control was prepared by external scientists in March 2020 with the participation of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI). It was completed on Sunday, 22nd March 2020 – the day on which the German state premiers and the Chancellor decided on the initial lockdown measures. How We Can Get COVID-19 Under Control recommends methods of propaganda and mass influence which, up to this day, remain precisely the elements of Government strategy that are unmistakable components of reporting in the round-the-clock news on all official channels and in most of the media, not just in Germany, but almost everywhere in the world. Methods which are terribly reminiscent of the ones used by the most ...

He Is Risen When I first heard the news that Trump had caught Covid, I was worried. What if he died? Not only would we have to endure the triumphalist crowing of the lockdown zealots, but his death would become the central plank in the case for maintaining all the current restrictions or making them even more severe. Donald Trump didn't take the virus seriously and look what happened to him! We'd all be wearing masks in public for the next 10 years. As if to confirm these fears, the zealots already started making this argument in anticipation of Trump's demise. Heather Mac Donald makes this point in City Journal. The media and Democratic establishments are in a frenzy of Schadenfreude over President Trump’s Covid diagnosis. Trump’s contracting the disease, they argue, discredits any coronavirus policy short of lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, outdoors as well as in. Trump is now “exhibit No. 1 for the failure of his leadership on coronavirus,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told the New York Times. ...New York Times columnist Frank Bruni claims that Trump’s infection proves that the country has been lax in its coronavirus response. “It is time, at long last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others as well as to ourselves,” he wrote on Saturday. ...