It is tempting when critically commenting on the futile, brutal and destructive policies implemented during the Covid pandemic to frame the whole disaster as something inflicted by malevolent elites on virtuous but passive masses: ‘them’ versus ‘us’. And, indeed, once one starts to look, it is not hard to find elite networks that actively promoted those policies.
It does not follow from this, however, that those elites lie at the root of the problem. Without the assent of a substantial proportion of the general population, elites can do nothing and, except in cases of direct foreign colonialism, well-established ruling classes are always broadly representative of the political culture of the society they lead. To paraphrase a comment made to me once by a student from Iraq: “After Saddam Hussein was overthrown, Iraq was ruled by a million Saddams”, while Vladimir Putin’s style of governing is that of a historically typical Russian autocrat.
The fact that contemporary elites tend to have a globalist, supranational outlook does not change matters: globalist schemes can only be implemented insofar as the nations let them, and it is perfectly possible for a state to withdraw from, or drastically qualify the depth and nature of its involvement in such schemes. Anyone who has ever looked at the operation of the major UN human rights treaties, for example, will know that very many states-parties to those agreements have lodged far-reaching get-out clauses known as reservations (public documents that can be found on the relevant websites), while compliance monitoring structures operate – or even exist – only insofar as affected member states specifically permit them to.
Nor is it true that the ‘masses’ are so easily bewitched by media propaganda. People tune into media that is on their wavelength and out again when that contact is lost. Do you still watch BBC News? I don’t.
In the real course of events in the UK in spring 2020, the popular mood played a decisive role. As readers will recall, the initial inclination of both the political leadership and its key advisers was to follow the pre-existing Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, which explicitly or implicitly rejected all the draconian policies that were in fact implemented. The practical measures implemented after the sudden authoritarian shift in March 2020 certainly followed a script promoted by the media-expert mob (representing ‘The Science’), but that promotion would not have succeeded had it not chimed in with a rising tide of mass hysteria, in which the political leadership, apparently unable to distinguish between epidemiological facts and transient moods, then joined.
By the middle of March 2020, the vast majority in this country were on the same page, demanding that the virus be magicked away. The people-in-the-street wanted the politicians to do it, the politicians asserted that Science, if dutifully followed, could do it, and, then, when the virus remained stubbornly unimpressed by the whole circus, the media-expert mob blamed the politicians for not imposing sufficiently harsh controls, the politicians blamed the masses for their lack of discipline and the people-in-the-street blamed everyone but themselves for being too strict or not strict enough, often in the same breath.
The underlying impulse and unifying factor behind the grand collapse was an overwhelming longing for a ‘Science’ that would provide an escape from the anxiety of life, dramatically embodied in a fantastically inflated ‘viral threat’. Responding rationally to that anxiety requires constant individual effort in a situation of dynamic uncertainty, which is a drag.
But that’s life.
Of course it’s true that some found positive advantages in the lockdowns, while others complied mainly out of fear of social ostracism or punitive consequences. It’s also true that there were many expressions of doubt and acts of kindly disobedience that went unrecorded.
Even so, there were also plenty of acts of stupidity, meanness and cruelty, against a backdrop of astounding absurdity.
All of which points to some conclusions:
- If a society’s political immune system is no longer able to counter toxic threats, then that society is in big trouble;
- The choice between, on the one hand, the stance of rationality, which includes the genuine scientific attitude, and, on the other hand, the stance of magic thinking (‘Science’) is not just a matter for ‘scientists’, but for everyone;
- The decisive struggle is not between social groups, but within the hearts and minds of individuals;
- Such inner struggles are fluid, dynamic and unpredictable and their course will therefore always elude the grasp of statistics, however useful these may be in many respects;
Such matters are the proper province of stories, such as the one I have written. It’s titled Stay Safe: a lockdown fiction and is available on Amazon in paperback and e-book form. It’s a friendly sort of tale – despite some suspicious deaths! – and definitely not a polemic or philosophical tract, but it does say some nice things about Lockdown Sceptics (the predecessor of the Daily Sceptic), to which the author was an early subscriber.
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I disagree with everything in this article. Covid satisfied many objectives – not least the moving of wealth from the individual and those individuals’ businesses to the already wealthy.
It may not have been a conspiracy in the usual sense but it certainly appears that way from where I’m standing.
Yes, not a conspiracy by the normal definition, but it did present an opportunity to some political groups and their corporate friends, notably in the pharmaceutical trade. It also demonstrated a fair amount of unwanted traits in organisations that are supposed to provide worthwhile services to us.
I am in complete agreement.
And I am sure, as an early subscriber to Lockdown Sceptics Colin Meade will understand when I state that he is talking nonsense. Putting a new set of clothes on the old cock-up theory does not change the reality.
Isn’t it strange how pretty much all western governments fell for the same cock-ups? Weird isn’t it?
And I suppose the destruction of western societies is just more cock-up across all the major nations on the planet excepting some African countries and Russia and China.
Articles such as this increasingly come across as space fillers, a bit like the NR which seeks only to divert readers to the Torygraph and the Speccie. Yawn.
I think that they put articles like this on DS just to wind us up and get people commenting.
From another time but same story:
“These men are not incompetent or stupid. They are craft and brilliant. Consistency never has been a mark of stupidity if the diplomats who have mishandled our relations were merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor. The fact that not one single mistake has fallen in our favor I would suggest that’s not incompetence that’s people working to a script.”
James Forrestal
Thanks.
An extraordinarily complacent article in total denial of the obvious facts of the case.
Yawn.
They got away with the CoVid scam by promising most people 80% wages to stay home, have BBQs in the garden with food and drink ordered on-line and delivered, watch Netflix, play video games – in effect a long paid holiday.
Had the Internet gone down, maybe power cut, the lockdown wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple of days.
So when load-shedding starts because of all that free wind and solar, there will be no Internet. I doubt the population will just chill out.
Klaus Schwab published the WEF book ‘COVID-19: The Great Reset’ just 3 months after the pandemic was declared. In this book he sets out the new world will look including many dystopian ideas such as reduced human contact. The target date for this reset is 2030 and that date continues to crop up and be part of the corporate world such as Net-Zero.
Exactly.
I agree.
It is certainly true that “contemporary elites tend to have a globalist, supranational outlook” – the masses instinctively feel that whatever they want, whoever they elect, there are certain things that won’t change. Mass migration from third-world countries is a good example. We can all see that whatever the general population wants, the people just keep coming; any attempt to even limit the numbers will be met with insurmountable legal challenges.
But at the same time – let’s also keep in mind that governments can only do what they do because of the tacit approval of people. Most of Germany did not oppose Adolph. Russians supported Stalin. Most of Britain supported the lockdowns (some would still prefer to be locked down). The Labour government, however awful, came to power through elections, and still enjoy 22% or so public support. We get the leaders we deserve.
In this sense signing up to a conspiracy theory can be a cop-out. Ah, it’s not us doing it – it’s the global elite!
I’m sure that Cameron and his successors think that Conservative voters got the government they deserved, but I’m not sure that I agree.
Yes.
‘”Most of Britain supported the lockdowns …”
So many did so because they would have lost their job or position. Many that did lost friends (and were often better for it, but it’s still a loss).
Politicians have become puppets, mostly to experts because they lack understanding of the relevant STEM subjects involved, and the experts provided by the civil service have been ‘controlled’. And then the usual checks and balances, journalism, has become another ism. Yes, defeat often could have been avoided with better defenses, but sometimes analysis of the attackers guides us to how we can improve our response.
We wore masks in the local shops because the shopkeepers were at the end of their tether, yet we are jab-free. The three retired nurses we know were all for the jab: one even took her young grandchildren. Can’t miss out on obeying the medical profession, can we? Our butchers had several in hospital with COVID and just about survived: yes, we wore masks in there as well. But how would not wearing them have improved matters at all?
If only more people understood how Science works. If only there were well know platforms that topical knowledge could be explained for those with an A level in it. It might even encourage children to study STEM subjects, or even some of the Arts and Humanities. It appears that many graduates from the Arts and Humanities departments have missed the expected seeds of wisdom and had the weeds of Marxism and Fabianism planted, without being aware of it.
Some people lie, and others lie by omission.
“We” never wore a mask, never took a test, never took a jab. Maybe better to speak for yourself rather than involved others
My husband and I refused to comply because taking a stand gives courage to others. And, going along with what amounted to a mass human defacement was to encourage evil. Surgical splashguards were introduced in the summer to give the illusion of a continuing emergency when in reality, any virus would recede at that time. It was a cynical ploy, essentially untrue, and therefore taking a stand was important.
It’s not exactly a revelation to point out that some people like to be told what to do, but that doesn’t absolve cynical, manipulative and dishonest leaders from moral responsibility.
It’s very much a straw man argument to characterise our view of the masses as “virtuous” – we all remember how many of our fellow citizens behaved abominably during “Covid”. But there were conspiracies and lies and those responsible should be held to account.
There were lies, and lies by omission.
It’s entirely unknown what the public wanted or didn’t want because of COVID because nobody ever held a referendum about it. But one thing is certain: Without the hysterical propaganda – Because of exploding goats¹, the health system will collapse three weeks from now unless … !!! – the general public wouldn’t ever have notived COVID. People would just have complained about their flu symptoms. And ever people would have gently mocked them for this: “Thank God, I had that already!” Just as they’re again doing today.
¹ Insofar the level of understanding of the general population goes, there’s certainly no material difference between exponential growth and exploding goats.
Excellent post
Very click baity title.
I assume the author isn’t actually trying to demonstrate that conspiracy theories are never true. Or if he is, gulp, that was a pretty feeble effort.
His argument is tantamount to saying that nothing ever happens that the public is in disagreement with, because otherwise it wouldn’t happen.
Dumb as shit.
Sorry to be so blunt, but by the time I read the typical pseudo-intellectual, vacuous phrase “a society’s political immune system” which literally means…. nothing, I realised this is not going to be one of the DS’s finest pieces.
Nicely put.
I’m inclined to think that governments all over the western world were breifed that covid was an escaped bio-weapon and that the response was driven by the military
Yes. Five Eyes and NATO locked down in lockstep. Sweden, outside NATO, didn’t.
The author may no longer watch BBC News but millions still do, including my partner who continues to believe everything the BBC say, because “they wouldn’t be allowed to say it if it weren’t true.”
So, during Covid she was scared out of her wits by the likes of Hugh Pym (the Grym Reaper) with his regular mask-clad walks around hospitals which were simultaneously ghost-like, but under HUGE PRESSURE according to Pym. She has never fully overcome the fear that he and all the other BBC and ITV suspects promoted daily in 2020 and 2021.
She was one of millions who honestly believed that the Government and the BBC knew best and everything was done with good intentions.
On the other hand, there were many people like me who were immediately sceptical of the whole management of Covid and who naturally gravitated to this site as one of very few places where dissent to the orthodoxy could be discussed. And, it really didn’t take that long for us to be proved right in pretty much everything we thought back in March 2020.
Now you can call us Conspiracy Theorists if you like, but please don’t rubbish our views and opinions which time proved were correct all along.
The conspiracy is myriad domestic and international bureaucracies (eg UN, EU, World Bank), NGOs, activist -groups, charities, rich people, the media controllers, all with intersecting, interdependent objectives which, even if they differ, all want to be part of a World Government to serve their specific interests.
The result is a mutual support network, where they will stay silent or agree with others not their natural partners. The Greens “conspired” with Big Oil & Big Coal to stop nuclear power in the 1960s/70s.
Bootleggers and Baptists: “Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose. For much of the 20th century, Baptists and other evangelical Christians were prominent in political activism for Sunday closing laws restricting the sale of alcohol. Bootleggers sold alcohol illegally, and got more business if legal sales were restricted.”
Indeed.
“Conspiracy theorists eh?”
We have been proven to be Conspiracy Realists.
There is little that DS subscribers have mentioned on here since launch that has not been proven correct from useless masks, dangerous and useless injections to a genuine belief, barely covered now that the flood of immies is in fact an invading army.
I consider this article provocative at best. DS subscribers are not theorists, they are realists.
The telly watchers/consumers of MSM were “played” and enjoyed it for the most part as it was new and we were “all in it together” and not really fatal after all. (To me all that watching and waiting felt like a dress rehearsal.)
As the Climate narrative had been going for 20 years, since 2001, it was a second dress rehearsal.
“Without the assent of a substantial proportion of the general population, elites can do nothing”.
How can I take seriously anything said by a person who believes that Net Zero, Catastrophic Immigration, Lockdowns and forced administration of lethal medicines, Paying for the BBC, Paying for five-star hotels to house enemies of the British people had the “assent of a substantial….”?
Back to the “conspiracies”. Lots of generalisations like “elites” and “globalists” all making money, thus giving rise to more, often unpleasant, conspiracy theories.
All this would have been avoided if the author had mentioned names of people and countries who profited from the scam – Bill Gates and China are a good start.
I agree, the argument probably works for Covid measures but I can’t think of many other cases where it would – the nature of our representative democracy is entirely that the public don’t get a chance to decide the details, or in fact anything about the individual policies. Brexit is an example. Politicians really had little idea how unpopular the EU was because people had been voting for left wing pro-EU parties for years – because very little else was on offer. Also because politicians live in an elite bubble. It would be interesting to have referenda on other live issues such as immigration, I wonder how that would go?
The last thing we need are more referenda given how votes are being fixed. Even Farage has openly stated that the recent election in Scotland was decidedly manipulated something I have witnessed personally in every election in our constituency since 2019.
“… globalist schemes can only be implemented insofar as the nations let them, and it is perfectly possible for a state to withdraw from…”
Isn’t that overlooking that those ruling the nations are part of the globalist schemes.
We The People live in Countries of Uniparty politics, so voting is irrelevant, where should “populists” challenge the status-quo they are branded Far Right, the State uses its judicial process to exclude them, Le Penn, Trump (or shoot him), AfD, and police are sent to harass ordinary citizens who voice dissent, whilst legislation is passed to shut down free-speech on spurious grounds… protecting children on-line, stopping “hate speech”.
Of course conspiracies are real, the people that create them may well not be the only people that take advantage of them but the two groups are strongly related.
As adults we really need to have very healthy scepticism of everything and everybody, because very few people are altruistic enough to not require scrutiny.
Of course it’s a bloody conspiracy. The fact that the regulatory agencuies have been captured by the pharmaceutical companies is the simplest and most elegant proof of this. Such capture cannot be defended because it nullifies the whole purpose of regulation obviously. There is no serious person who doesn’t believe in conspiracy. Even Adam Smith said, people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but that the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Recently, there was a doctor, on TV, criticising the NHS’s COVID response, yet he was talking negatively about the capitalists, Big Pharma. He hadn’t realised that the NHS has removed the doctor’s authority and responsibility for patient health care, and given it to Matt Hancock. And Big Pharma was treating the NHS, not the patient.
The NHS, a centrally controlled, Marxist, organisation, that ensured that no-one feels responsible for anything beyond their own work, because criticising others would because sin of the worst kind. They are just a small cog, a very small cog, in a vast machine for doing good, that is out of control, apart from implementing NET Zero and DEI. And Big Pharma fixes the health of the NHS, not the patients. And the NHS and BBC respond to ministerial pronouncements, instantly.
“It does not follow from this, however, that those elites lie at the root of the problem. Without the assent of a substantial proportion of the general population, elites can do nothing…”
The assent of a substantial proportion of the population will be given by showing them alarming and frightening footage of people lying dead in the street (or so it appeared), people being forcibly removed from their houses, people being forcibly sealed into their houses, JCBs digging mass graves, hospitals that had supposedly been built in hours, people in full hazmet suits spraying clouds of something over everything, everyone wearing face masks and footage of mass testing, and road blocks. All this footage came out of China without any scrutiny, while the WHO was declaring that all that China was doing was successfully at controlling an unknown virus. It didn’t matter how consistent or true any of this footage because its affect was to scare the living daylights of “a substantial proportion of the general population,” and then these populations demanded their governments copy China.
Conspiracy, or a mass formation/delusion event? There is a lot of consistent intent with one goal.
👍👍
A Conspiracy of Silence by ambitious and immoral people who – despite knowing better – had self-serving motives for not creating a fuss, is still a conspiracy.
sheep fodder
I think there is ample evidence that the lurch towards authoritarianism that occurred in March 2020, happened when the security services took over the pandemic response from the public health bureaucrats. It appears they did this when they concluded the virus was a bioweapon, whether released accidentally or deliberately.
The whole thing was clearly a biowarfare response, complete with unremitting fear propaganda, the suspension of democracy and rule by ministerial decree.
Does anyone seriously think the government wrote the Coronavirus Act, well over 300 pages, in a couple of weeks when the pandemic hit? No, it was clearly waiting on the shelf for this eventuality.
The whole thing was clearly a biowarfare response, complete with unremitting fear propaganda, the suspension of democracy and rule by ministerial decree.
It clearly wasn’t because ABC countermeasures don’t look like people tying random stuff around their heads and sometimes keeping a distance of 2m from each other while prohibited from buying books or records in special-purpose shops for that. These weren’t even serious public health measures, cf the most-recent Ebola outbreak preceeding COVID. Just a bunch of We know everthing better! cranks being allowed to do their worst to keep a sense of pandemic alive until the products supposed to be sold to combat it were ready and everyone with a chip on his shoulder trying to somehow hitch is pet agenda to the mighty COVID bandwagon so that it could also gain some traction. Notably, the teetotallers (Drakeford, Sridhar), climate change advocates and the people who really wanted to get rid of The Donald™.
It it the Dailey Sceptic or is it me?
Odd that the writer, while trying to flog his book, doesn’t mention the latest conspiracy theory – the climate scam – to tell us why that’s not a real conspiracy. And hey, while people are writing here to try to flog a few copies of their latest literary masterpiece, why don’t you all rush onto Amazon and buy my book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS.
David, I bought your books a few years ago and is now out on loan to another curious neighbor. Thank you for your work. (When is your next book “There is STILL no climate crisis” out?)
“The practical measures implemented after the sudden authoritarian shift in March 2020 certainly followed a script promoted by the media-expert mob….”
No, it almost certainly followed an instruction by the American Military “Deep State” (which was responsible for funding the Gain of Function Research in Wuhan) and issued those Orders to the other Five Eyes countries and NATO.
It was obvious that these countries were all moving in lockstep. The only western nation which didn’t was Sweden. Interestingly and obviously very relevant, was that Sweden although in the EU was not then in NATO. So it either didn’t get, or it ignored, the Orders.
A gullible population is very easily manipulated by fear-based propaganda and the British Media did everything it possibly could to ramp up the fear and prepare the ground for the Tyranny which was launched against them.
It most certainly was a conspiracy: it represented an acceleration of the WEF’s plans for “The Great Reset” which had been damaged by the Brexit Referendum in the UK and President Trump’s first term of Office.
Bill Gates or Fauci could have written this article.
Let’s now leave out the bastardised word ‘conspiracy’. It has as much meaning in contemporary dialogue as ‘fascist’ ‘racist’ or ‘far-right’. It belongs only in the minds of the mentally timid and incurious who need to feed off the legacy media’s nipple for succour and security.
Yes, thank you. Nothing more to be said on the matter.
Well, the clever title got me reading to the end – it’s an advert for his book!
I thought so as well.
I agree with every word of it.
Contorted, too-clever-by-half sophistry. Those who insist on promoting cock-up over conspiracy theory must explain why the globalist WEF sleepers in Western governments all cocked up in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time, using exactly the same language and sound-bites, and using exactly the same lies in defiance of all the evidence.
“The practical measures implemented after the sudden authoritarian shift in March 2020 certainly followed a script promoted by the media-expert mob (representing ‘The Science’), but that promotion would not have succeeded had it not chimed in with a rising tide of mass hysteria,” It chimed with a fear deliberately, insistently and powerfully promoted by a globalist political and corporate elite using every propaganda and psychological manipulation tool available to them. There are feeble-minded individuals who are always ready to throw themselves at the feet of the politicians and establishment “experts” whose job it is to fabricate crises to which only they can provide the solutions, but to suggest that the general population – the victims of the lying, the fear mongering and the “nudging” – were somehow equally complicit with the criminals themselves in what happened is insulting.
Given the swathes of evidence now available, the author is naive at best. This article really is wishful thinking. The reality of what happened is so frightening some people will reconfigure events in their minds to seem less malevolent. Worse, he implies it was our fault. It wasn’t.
He needs to read the recently published The Deep State Goes Viral (Debbie Lerman) which manages to connect the dots to show that the operation was coordinated at the highest level. When the public is subject to military grade psychological operations and there is a high degree of control and censorship of the mass media, the narrative can be made to show that the public begged for lockdowns. You only have to recall the “take down” of the Great Barrington group to realise that any sane voices, however qualified, were actively and publicly demonised. The medical establishment threatened any medic that questioned the narrative, Steve James, Sam White, and in America, Simone Gold and many more. It wasn’t just us (Britain) that jettisoned long established medical and scientific protocols. The lockstep effect was a tangible reality across the western world. Sweden was the outlier by a fluke of their constitution (which I gather has now been altered in readiness for future “events”). This is not how “science” works, it should never be about consensus or conformity. But now it is. Disagreement and testing hypotheses are vital to locating truth. There is nothing good to say about lockdowns. They amounted to a crime against humanity.
Here’s my take for what it’s worth. https://open.substack.com/pub/thesidewaysthinker/p/the-zones-of-interest?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8t5f7
You lost me at “pandemic”.
Oh, well that’s all right then…..Does a seat in the Lords await the writer?
No doubt the author believes that Event 201 being held a few months before the outbreak in the West was simply coincidence. Ok.
I noticed he says he doesn’t watch BBC news anymore but wonder if he has yet realised all channels share the same news today. That we have to go to, for example, the Hindustan Times to find out what’s really going on in Europe shows how utterly shallow and useless our media/ journalism truly is.
How to cut the link between big Pharma and regulatory bodies, the RFK way. Just sack every member of the ACIP.
“A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy added. “ACIP’s new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine. The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas…” See:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2025/06/11/rfk-jr-took-a-huge-step-to-restore-public-trust-in-vaccines-n2658597
With respect I think some of the comments missed the point. I think the title of the article is very silly and misrepresents the point the writer was trying to make which I think is one worth debating – the extent to which the governed consent to being governed and to the way they are governed. I strongly disagree with some of the article, particularly the implication that propaganda doesn’t work, but it is true that there is an interplay between the elites and the masses.
As I said in my other post though, that doesn’t absolve the elites of the lion’s share of moral responsibility when they lie and manipulate.