In my column in this week’s Spectator I have tried to answer the question of why the global elite became such enthusiastic supporters of the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis — stay-at home orders, business closures, face masks — and passionate opponents of less draconian alternatives, such as those set out by the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. First, I summarise the explanation that my friend James Delingpole favours:
It’s because these 21st-century robber barons are making money out of the pandemic. According to Robert Watts, who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List, more people have become billionaires in the past year than at any other time in Britain’s history. The combined fortune of these Masters of the Universe has grown by more than a fifth, and the rest of the 1 per cent haven’t done too badly either, thanks to massive government expenditure. Across the developed world, central banks have pumped money into the economy, boosting asset prices and further enriching the plutocratic elite. What’s not to like?
But while I think that’s a factor, I don’t think it’s the whole of the story. I think it’s also because being in favour of non-pharmaceutical interventions is a high-status indicator, a way of advertising that you’re in the same club as tech titans like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and eminent public health scientists like Anthony Fauci and Neil Ferguson.
That’s a term coined by a doctoral student at Cambridge called Robert Henderson. In an article for the New York Post, he defines ‘luxury beliefs’ as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class”. The example he gives is the belief, prevalent in the 1960s, that monogamy is outdated and marriage a source of patriarchal oppression. That doesn’t cost the rich anything because most of them are brought up in bourgeois two-parent households and enter into stable, monogamous marriages. But as the credo of sexual liberation trickled down to the working class it has wreaked havoc, leading to illegitimacy, crime and poverty.
This is where Delingpole goes wrong, I think. The reason Davos Man has outsourced his opinions on the pandemic to the World Health Organisation is not because the policies recommended by Tedros Adhanom enrich him. Rather, it’s because they cost him nothing. He can just as easily work in the shepherd’s hut at the bottom of his garden as he can from his corner office. His children are provided with a full timetable of lessons via Zoom, courtesy of their private school, and if he feels like a holiday abroad he can charter a private jet. Becoming a cheerleader for lockdowns is a way of signalling that he is among the tiny elite of successful people for whom there is zero cost associated with them.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
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To summarise:
Toby states that Mr Delingpole believes we are victims of an elitist wealth grab.
Toby states we are victims of “luxury beliefs.”
Both of you fail to understand the depth of depravity confronting humanity.
Even if one of these interpretations was correct what is the outcome?
Our position is not about money, which is largely a fictional conceit based on trust and it is not about “luxury beliefs,” which in any case would rely on fulfilment of the former to be successful.
Whichever way our position is considered it is about control.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/feeling-downtrodden-you-aint-seen-nothing-yet/
Just returned from the USA. Wisconsin, Chicago, Las Vegas. The place is open for business, maskless, no social distancing and most states only 50% take up of experimental biologicals. Today the EU announced air corridors open between USA and E U. Meanwhile little Britain insists on an endless lockdown, and continues to move every single goalpost. Do people not realise the rest of the world is getting on with their lives?
Why are they so keen? Er, power, money, control, depopulation? Do I need to go on?
Totally misses out the totalitarian control aspect of all of this… it’s not just virtue signalling and it’s not just money. It’s about accruing more POWER to globalist supranational organizations and the people within them, including the plutocrats who help to form the agenda. Again Toby is weak: trying to appease, desperate not to rock the boat too much. Grow a backbone, man!
Ferguson an “eminent public health scientist”? You’re having a laugh. I’ll give you ‘public’ but on the other three he scores null points
I think you misrepresent James Delingpole’s views. I haven’t heard him use the economic argument as the reason for Davos man being in favour of lockdowns. No doubt he will put you right on the London Calling podcast.
Oh dear, oh dear.
Here we are again, round and around we go on the merry-go-round of subterfuge and misinformation.
Toby , you present a question as though it is of itself central to the unfolding events and then conjure up two , only two, simple opposing theories from which we the simple bewildered masses must choose. One so obviously ridiculous and the other so measured, sensible , yes that’s it , it’s really just a misunderstanding by a group of remote but basically well meaning leaders of commerce, of course , it’s all just a few crossed wires between that nice man Tedros and say, the irish pop singer , of course. No need to worry then .
How about another solution to the question. How about the only answer to the question. The answer so gigantically, glaringly obvious to all except those who’s job it is not to see it, the unavoidable elephant of reality that sits hugely occupying the entire screen and yet is somehow invisible ?
The relationships between the main players in this tragic farce have been so comprehensively established over the past 18 months that no amount of wilful blindness can avoid.
To continue… Read more »
I think Toby is at the stage of admitting there are some dots but hasn’t yet joined them up.
I do hope you are right.
on another issue :-
One concern that never gets an airing is how the psychology works in reverse. ie, the way a conflict has been arranged between the government and the governed allows the “decision makers” a way of dehumanising the rest of us and so will happily and determinedly press on just to show the indolent scum where real power lies.
The likes of Hancock would find this mental step all too attractive and hence we see the relentless determination to vax vax and vax again with the smack of firm government, and those who cannot see this is for their own benefit had better realise which side the bread is buttered and fast !
This is highly dangerous and leading to very bad outcomes. The likes of Hancock, Gove and Arbuckle are mediocrities and not worthy of polishing the boots of the average man/woman in the street.
That should read
ID2020 not Agenda 2020
there’s also Hancock’s and Fatso’s simpering speeches at GAVI, WHO, WEF etc etc .
I can’t fault that analysis.
However, I thank Toby heartily for this site and his FSU.
Maybe TY doesn’t read BTL.
I think you will find that the global elite is largely composed of self-righteous narcissists (just look at that photograph at the top of the article). These people have enormous wealth and enjoy lavish lifestyles but can still appear compassionate by preaching welfarism. It is all reminiscent of New Labour, who looked after the interests of the elite and those at the very bottom but screwed the hard-working people in the middle. The sad part of it is that many people are suckers for these narcissists.
“ It is all reminiscent of New Labour” I despise New Labour but isn’t it all reminiscent of the global elite everywhere since time immemorial? Isn’t that what elites tend to do unless prevented from doing so by checks and balances?
The welfare state takes from the working middle classes and it goes to the wealthy after resting very briefly with a combination of poor and feckless.
It’s concerned with establishment welfare.
Gates, Clinton, Blair and Bono.
It’s like a “most punchable face” competition.
I wonder if they just all got off Epsteins jet?
Oh yes!! Where do I buy a ticket to take part please?
This analysis is too simplistic as a total explanation. There’s a lot going on.
You lost me at “eminent public health scientists like … Neil Ferguson“.
If you are very rich – or even just plain rich – there is one anxiety that never quite leaves you: ” I could lose all of this wealth if money loses its value and/or anarchy erupts”.
If the rich could not pay their bodyguards because money had lost its value they would not survive 5 minutes. The boot would be well and truly on the bodyguards foot.
Keeping the masses firmly under control by making them wear masks, forbidding them to mix freely, periodically issuing ‘ stay at home’ orders and generally sapping them of the life force required to engage fully with human existence reassures the wealthy. Temporarily at least they feel safe. They can relax and enjoy their wealth feeling as secure as they ever will with the public forced into extreme subjugation by the state.
So that is my conspiracy theory. The restrictions serve the interests of the very wealthy by reducing their anxiety level. Hence they are cheer leaders for their continuation however implausible the justifications for maintaining them are.
That doesn’t cost the rich anything because most of them are brought up in bourgeois two-parent households and enter into stable, monogamous marriages.
Not much evidence of that I think. The men shag their secretaries and marry them as second wives and the women shag their personal trainers before moving on to another rich man.
And the reason it costs them nothing but also makes their portfolio rocket is the make-believe economics we put up with.
And along with make believe economics is the make believe social control.
So far so good on both counts. 🤞
In order to hedge my bets I am currently self identifying as ‘elite’
You might well regret that.
From the full Speccie article:
You may not be a virologist or an epidemiologist, but you’ve picked up enough of the lingo — herd immunity, R number, vaccine escape — to give a plausible impersonation of an expert at dinner parties.
Sounds VERY much like the shocking Devi Sridhar. Her worryingly authoritarian leanings and contemptibly blinkered, scornful attitude are utterly shameful.
She’s the embodiment of the Covid-19 ‘I’m all right, Jack’ crowd, a political activist masquerading as a ‘scientist’ and a sickening sycophant towards the appalling Nicoliar Ceausescu to boot.
Yes, she’s an anthropologist who first made her name by declaring herself an expert on world hunger at age 24, and writing a book on the subject. She then declared herself a world expert on viruses and pandemics.
It’s all too easy to be an ‘expert’ in front of thicko politicians when you have no skin in the game
Well, here in The Shires, not getting vaccinated and carrying on as if it doesn’t affect you is a sign of being in the elite. So Toby’s analysis has merit.
Sadly everyone here in my poor but aspirational working class and lower middle class neighbourhood are good citizens, and are all vaccinated as far as I can make out. One dead, 1 dying, and 2 with obvious ADRs. But like at the beginning of the lockdown, we’ll all carry on as if nothing is wrong. The ambulances and body wagons trundle quietly back from the old people’s homes.
The kids’ educations have all been affected, but they’ll be ok. Everyone is struggling with the incipient feeling that life feels grindingly bad, like war time without the bombs. And the mornings echo with the clinking of wine bottles hitting wheely bins.
No the elite don’t care, but their willingness to kill their social inferiors doesn’t make them elite. It makes them pure old-fashioned evil. But it’ll also be the same petard that hoists them. Despair kills more than they can, and as slave owners through time have learnt, you still need the people at the bottom to survive.… Read more »
So you can’t kill them all.
True and they don’t want to. 95% will suit them just fine.
Agree with every word, Toby.
How I despise those who indulge in ‘luxury beliefs’.
I would love to punch Bono (anagram Nobo) in the face.
I would love to watch you do that.
You’ll have to join a very long queue.
It costs him nothing, but that’s not sufficient.
Davos man has an agenda, defined by the World Economin Forum.
Covid gave the opportunity. A rigged test, designed to exaggerate the problem, was engineered to provide inadequate politicians (and Great Reset fans) like Johnson and Hancock the answer to their wildest dreams.
Everything stems from the tests. Expose this and the whole edifice crumbles.
“it’s also because being in favour of non-pharmaceutical interventions is a high-status indicator“ but aren’t they all in favour of double vaccines and boosters?
Why is Ian Wright of Arsenal in the pic?
Toby, of course there have been opportunists making the most of this engineered situation, and of course there are swathes of society maximising the opportunity to ‘virtue signal’. And yes there are people who really don’t like the smelly underclasses ( ie anyone not in ‘their set’). But really have they grown in such numbers or power to set in motion the events of the last 18 months?
I think the Drosten dates are indicative of pre-planning. Too many things were ready for the whistle to be blown across the globe in mid-March 2020 for it to be coincidence.
I don’t disagree with either your view or that of Delingpole, there is room for both to exist as part of the story, they are not mutually inconsistent.
But either or both are not enough.
What they do is help explain why the timing of the decision was made, plus of course the effect of the ‘orange man’ in the WH. The timing was decided by the cumulative threat of Brexit, Trump and the rise of nationalists. But the motive was deep seated and in motion for decades.
The ‘demo’ in democracies had to be put down, trodden into the earth.
Tedros has his job and lifestyle precisely because he does what he is told by Gates funded functionaries. It costs him EVERYTHING not to.
Tedros is Gates’s man at the WHO and one false move (as If he would) and Gates’s will have him vaccinated.
Is that the same as “terminated with extreme prejudice?”
To be fair it’s extreme experimental prejudice.
Here’s hoping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWBog7MRo8
Tory MP Marcus Fysh Admits The Government Are Lying To Dupe The People Into Longer Lockdowns
Being in favour of The Great Barrington Declaration isn’t a low status thing though given how eminent and Oxfordy its proponents are. In fact it’s even more elite in a way to be part of the minority sceptic group. So it’s ideology that swings it more than status for Davos Man though yes there is big status element for the outer circle Davos types. Also the concerted slurring of the GBD early on acted as a deterrent which OK yes was designed to make WEFers fear loss of status.
It’s because they saw it coming and positioned themselves to benefit. If you had a heads up in September 2019 that the Davos Fascists were planning a coup, you may have bought stock in pharmaceutical companies and PPE manufacturers or you may have shorted stock in airlines or the price of oil. That’s how they think.
But for everyone else at the top they have used their powers to further their own agendas; never let a good crisis go to waste. Whether that’s our overwhelmingly left wing political and medical establishment or the greedy fund managers or the lunatics at the BoE (and other central banks across the world) obsessed with their next scheme for more control with less accountability. The nihilism of our political elites is the essence behind the lockdowns.
Money, status, advancing the depopulation agenda (200x as many QALYs destroyed in each country than saved, 120 million killed eventually in the 3rd world, Britain’s share of that is 5 million) and power, of course.
The necessary groundwork has been laid through QE/zero rates/MMT over the last decade already, through bloating the civil service and making ever more people dependent on government spending, incl. in business, and through an even longer brainwashing and dumbing down of the population in conjunction with promoting a major change of the moral compass, away from unalienable individual rights to utilitarianism.
See The 4th Turning and this piece.
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/03/preparing-ground-for-mass-hysteria-what.html
120 million? We are looking at a cull of over 90% of the human population. The UK’s share of the dead will be more than 60 million.
That’s fear-mongering of Covid 19 proportions. Have you been using Neil Ferguson’s computer modelling program?
Keen, they planned and implemented the whole thing! Did you miss the part where Cummings said Bill Gates came in and told us what to do…?
The aim is the lockdowns which are the new normal and with a few goals in mind namely destroying businesses and country economies to usher in “The Great Reset”.
They are telling us what they are doing as well, the rest of it is pure theatre.