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 The example he gives is the belief, prevalent in the 1960s, that monogamy is outdated and marriage a source of patriarchal oppression.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.
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A parade of twats.
Talking about a parade of twats have you seen this ?
Have a bucket handy – you’ll be cringing all the way through this – especially during the last couple of minutes …
https://twitter.com/CharlieEmmaUK/status/1405418444753940484
The final part gets worse …
https://twitter.com/stocktonseadog/status/1405422330558484482
What a cunt.
What a clot
I really can’t like this link of yours…
But OMG! The video, it’s bad….
Some of the comments are priceless!
I have never looked forward to someone having an adverse reaction or indeed infertility. But I’m looking forward to it now.
Too much to hope they both actually got the vaccine and are therefore in God’s waiting room.
Here in my attached picture are the positive qualities of James Corden.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
‘The object of power is power’: Anarchism 101 – welcome to the Wild Side, Julian!
I thought it was well understood that politicians were a slimy lot who needed to be kept in check
I’ve actually been much less cynical than many friends in the past about politicians
Now most people seem to think they are incapable of telling huge porkies
This is what I find incredible! The brainwashing/propaganda is working so well because family and friends who called me naive years ago for believing the lovely government and politicians have our best interests at heart and are doing there best whilst telling us the truth and nothing but the truth now cant even critise the government or there mate BoJo…whilst i am telling them they are all lying through there teeth and this whole process has got nothing to do with a medical emergency.It beggars belief everyday, I feel like im living in the twilight zone whilst the western world slowly devours itself in complete insanity.
Mental self protection by those who have developed some doubts.
The zealots are beyond reason and reach anyway, and, like German Nazis post WW2, deep inside they won’t even change their mind after the catastrophe has happened.
What I find extraordinary is that intelligent family, friends and acquaintances have been so gullible. The lack of critical thinking astounds me. I’ve taken to replying to critics by passing a slip of paper with a link to brighteon’s excellent video by Vrouwen Voor Vriheid. Which every citizen on earth should watch. If you’ve not watched it do so and share. We are the 99%!
Here’s the link.
https://www.brighteon.com/b00ec5e4-f220-4a21-a31e-cb77048d5dc1
The object of depopulation is depopulation.
Precisely – if not always entirely, And money is both instrumental and an end in itself.
I’m sure there are some in this madness with sincerely held beliefs – at least they kid themselves successfully. But I think a lot of it can be explained by people on top wanting to stay there, and jumping on whatever bandwagon looks like it will do that for them
“Choosing between these two positions is far from simple”
I beg to differ. All it requires is some ability to investigate the numbers for yourself, and the capacity to put things into context and proportion.
That’s all, really.
Basic morality unpolluted by ideology helps, admittedly.
“it’s also because being in favour of non-pharmaceutical interventions is a high-status indicator“
This is certainly part of the problem. It ties in with the prevalence of a lot of positions based on virtue signalling – climate alarmism, antiracism, remain and globalism in general, woke posturing generally.
But that’s for the hangers on, the insecure and the wannabees. It can’t really explain why the real movers and shakers adopt these positions. For that you have to look at more concrete motivations: power, money. ideology, imo.
The object of the worthless non-pharmaceutical interventions is to push the public towards a pharmaceutical solution to the perceived threat of global overcrowding.
But “remain” was not a position of virtue signalling, well not for me anyway. I favoured it for purely economic reasons and, if you want to test if I was right, go and speak to any SME in the UK that exports into the EU and ask them whether Brexit has helped or harmed them. I think you’ll be pretty shocked.
Meanwhile you’ve grouped climate, antiracism and globalism into catch-all groups, but there is a wide spectrum of people who might support these causes to some degree, some of whom might have perfectly valid opinions that shouldn’t just be dismissed because of extremists like Thunberg, BLM (only a small percentage) and Schwab.
Any kind of sweeping generalisations such as those will always only be generally true. There will always be many individuals or sub-groups for whom the general does not apply.
Remain absolutely was the “high status indicator” side of the debate, much like Trump-hating in the US. I recall seeing research on the point years ago. Same for the other positions I mentioned.
Granted there will be people who adopted these positions for other reasons, and also some who convinced themselves they did – rationalisation.
Ask yourself which side the leaderships of the Labour and “Conservative” Parties would both refer to find themselves on, at their dinner parties. They all solemnly agree that racism is evil, that man-made climate change threatens the planet, that nationalism is evil. The only exception is occasional lying dogwhistling by Tories to pretend to “Conservative” Party supporters that they are on their side, and Leave on the EU due to a very recent opportunist rebellion in the Party. All the previous Tory hierarchy was pro-EU, as in his heart imo is Johnson.
Another clue is which side of the argument tends to get smeared as “populist”.
And indeed the fact that one side might be the virtue signallers’ opinion on an issue does not preclude it being the “correct” side (though obviously I take the other view on all these). and most certainly there are valid arguments for all of them, just imo arguments that are significantly outweighed by the arguments against them.
Climate alamism is another modelling-based panic rationalisation for emergency measures, much like the coronapanic, antiracism is a pretext for demonising and suppressing dissenting opinions on various related issues and for destroying established obstacles to radicalism, and globalism is just another harmful radical political ideology (internationalism). Remain, a subset of internationalism.
“I favoured it for purely economic reasons and, if you want to test if I was right, go and speak to any SME in the UK that exports into the EU and ask them whether Brexit has helped or harmed them. I think you’ll be pretty shocked.“
Def not shocked, as I’ve spoken to quite a few sme owners on the topic. Many who export elsewhere are intensely relaxed about the EU. The point is that the financial interests of a few exporters cannot outweigh the wider interests of the nation as a whole, and EU membership is slow national suicide. Bigger is not better when it comes to governance, quite the contrary.
Have always said to people “what makes you think Bill Gates gives a shit about whether you live or die. I wouldn’t care if he died so why would he care about me?”
These days I just wish he would drop dead lol.
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWBog7MRo8
Tory MP Marcus Fysh Admits The Government Are Lying To Dupe The People Into Longer Lockdowns
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
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.
Why is Ian Wright of Arsenal in the pic?
“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?
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.
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.
Agree with every word, Toby.
How I despise those who indulge in ‘luxury beliefs’.
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. So you can’t kill them all.
So you can’t kill them all.
True and they don’t want to. 95% will suit them just fine.
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
In order to hedge my bets I am currently self identifying as ‘elite’
You might well regret that.
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. 🤞
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.
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.
You lost me at “eminent public health scientists like … Neil Ferguson“.
This analysis is too simplistic as a total explanation. There’s a lot going on.
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?
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.
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 to misrepresent the relationship structures between all the main NGO parties to this as though they are somehow separate and independent, to ignore the fundamental issues of the subversion of national public institutions and not to be willing to connect the simple undeniable facts that all these are paid for and controlled by the same, small, cabal and for the purpose of enacting the agendas of those groups , and to deny the overarching hand of the Global Government objectives of the UN is frankly insulting to your audience and undermines your credibility.
Revisit your arguments in the article and try to assimilate the evidence of just a small selection of events from just one year , 2020
Event 201
Agenda 2020
Fatso’s speech to the UN in September 2020
We eagerly await your revised appraisal.
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 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.
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
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!
Why are they so keen? Er, power, money, control, depopulation? Do I need to go on?
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?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/feeling-downtrodden-you-aint-seen-nothing-yet/
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.