As the reader may know from my last guest appearance, I am entirely on the side of the COVID skeptics. I have never believed any aspect of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic — whether social distancing, face masks, lockdowns, or mass vaccination campaigns — has been anything other than destructive folly or intentional malice. So I, of course, applaud the many scientists, doctors, journalists, attorneys and authors who have become leaders in the struggle against the looming COVID medical security state.
These include, in no particular order, figures like Alex Berenson, Del Bigtree, Zev Zelenko, Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Brett Weinstein, Vernon Coleman, Joseph Mercola, Sucharit Bhakdi, Gert Vanden Bosch, J.J. Couey, Aaron Siri, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and many others, including of course, our generous host, William Briggs.
Dr. Robert Malone is, given his background as the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, a leading figure in the COVID resistance movement. And his three-hour appearance with Steve Kirsch on Brett Weinstein’s podcast was an important moment in the coalescence of the resistance [Rogan podcast too]. That podcast went viral because the participants calmly and rationally made a detailed case that the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in American, and indeed the entire world, was indefensible.
Now the question of why the narrative about COVID-19 is a universally the same across the world (with a handful of exceptions like Sweden) begs a response. The proponents of the current COVID measures typically will respond that this is a function of “the science” being settled and uniformly directing the actions of government and private parties. These measures are so obviously destructive and nonsensical begs the question why they are doing these things. One can’t help but conclude that it can only be intentional.
Anyone who speaks to friends and family members still in the grip of the official COVID a narrative will typically hear a response like the following: “You’re telling me that there is a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands of people that manages to keep itself completely secret? All it would take would be one person going to the press to blow the whole thing!” This is a common “normie” response to “conspiracy theories” of all types.
Likely with the foregoing in mind, at the time the Darkhorse podcast first aired in June 2021, Dr. Malone was quite hesitant to characterize the motivations of the public health officials, political leaders and pharmaceutical executives as anything other than the result of incompetence. As the months have passed, Malone has become less reticent, and in recent alternative media appearances, he lays out a description of how our public health response has been corrupted, explaining its apparently indefensible blunders as the outcome of subverting forces.
The first key element of the theory is the idea of “regulatory capture.” This is an entirely mainstream idea employed by political scientists, legal scholars, and prominent economists, such as George Stigler. In its classic form, it posits the idea that a government regulatory organization can be “captured” by the economic and business interests of the industry that it purports to regulate. This is usually a function of the “revolving door,” the phenomenon that lawyers and other experts working within the bureaucracy know that their tenure will be short, so while they are inside government, they are thinking about positioning themselves for a post-government job. The are “soft” on the industry to the detriment of the public good.
In the context of the COVID crisis, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among others, has noted that the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while legally responsible for regulating the pharmaceutical industry, are in fact its leading cheerleaders. Indeed, the fact that the FDA receives a substantial share of its budget from “user fees” paid by pharmaceutical supplicants creates a conflict of interest and incentivizes promotion of the commercial success of these companies at the expense of the public interest. In short, they are the foxes guarding the hen house.
The second key element has, as far as I know, only come to prominence recently, and has exploded in popularity both in the dissident Right and within the COVID resistance. It starts with the observation that a handful of financial service firms, primarily BlackRock and Vanguard, and to a lesser extent State Street and Fidelity, have become incomprehensibly more massive than anyone thought possible and control a meaningful fraction of all of the stocks and bonds issued by global public companies.
What are these firms? Unlike Goldman Sachs, the “vampire squid of Wall Street,” which makes money by creating financial products and making markets in them, these firms are on the “buyside.” Their job is to say “yay” or “nay” to the securities and other financial instruments that Wall Street is trying to sell to Main Street, acting as investment fiduciaries on behalf of ordinary investors.
Each started out managing some version of a “mutual fund,” the pooled investment vehicle in the portfolios of millions of middle-class Americans. In particular, these firms have focused heavily on the “index fund,” which seeks to replicate broad securities market performance by buying every security in widely-published indexes, like the Standard & Poor’s 500. The securities regulators always assumed these firms were the “good guys,” providing clear information and monitoring benefits in exchange for relatively low and transparent fees and presenting little risk of manipulation or other misconduct.
So it’s very interesting that these firms have become the focus of discussions identifying the villains of “late capitalism.” This seems to be a function of their enormous size. At $9.5 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock’s largely passive, index hugging money is incomprehensibly larger than anything Congress had in mind when it passed the Investment Company Act in 1940.
I have no brief for BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and much of what he and his minions moot publicly these days is symptomatic of the rot endemic to America’s oligarch class and their professional-managerial hangers on. For the last several years, the current fad in investing has been “ESG” (Environment, Social and Governance), which is the application of “woke” criteria to investing in stocks and bonds. For example, ESG constrained investment programs will steer their investments away from oil and gas and mining and toward unproven “green technologies” heavily dependent on government handouts. They also embed “diversity and inclusion” goals that require companies to have larger and larger “Human Resources” departments of bureaucrats keeping detailed statistics of what racial and gender minority groups have been advanced within the company.
These activities are on their face a dead weight cost, producing no benefit in productivity. Why “ESG” is happening now is an interesting question about which much ink could be spilled. I am inclined to think that it is another form of intra-elite competition in response to elite overproduction, but a closer look would take us far afield.
The typical version of the BlackRock/Vanguard theory presented in the alternative media focuses on monopoly control. Specifically the idea that these index fund giants own such large fractions of every public company that, by virtue of their shareholding, they can direct these companies and make them coordinate their individual actions in ways that would otherwise be impossible. This is combined with the observation that almost every critical industry in the developed world is oligopolistic, dominated by a handful of extremely large companies.
This theory posits that, because the pharmaceutical companies and the media companies are owned by the same people, a directive has come down from BlackRock/Vanguard to the media companies to not criticize the pharmaceutical companies, because doing so would be harmful to the owners’ interests in drug and vaccine profits. Since it is in the pharmaceutical companies’ interest to continue the COVID emergency indefinitely, so as to be able to sell new patented therapeutics and liability free vaccines, the media companies have been coerced to advance this agenda upon direct orders from their index fund pay masters.
Anyone who knows anything about index funds, pharmaceutical companies and media conglomerates is going to find this story to be quite unconvincing, because it is inconsistent with how these organizations operate in practice. Index funds do not give orders to the companies they invest in, because their agnostic strategy means they also own all of a company’s public competitors as well, and really only care that the entire market rise on the back of “fiscal and monetary policy” (i.e., printing money). The proponents of this theory never even mention the role of specialty media firms (like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s) who publish the indexes, and who set the rules that determine what securities are in each index.
Media companies do not take orders from their investors about what matters are or are not of journalistic interest. Situations where the business people attempt to influence “editorial independence” invariably blow up as minor scandals and causes cèlébre. For example, journalists working at Murdoch owned outlets, from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal, routinely take umbrage at allegations that they do the boss’s bidding, as does the Washington Post vis-à-vis Jeff Bezos. And they are not afraid to go public.
Finally, nobody outside of the pharmaceutical industry cares whether the pharmaceutical industry is profitable or not. Let us consider a useful hypothetical. Let’s say that you are the CEO of a big oil company, let’s call it NoxonMobility. You do care intensely about how your oil and gas competitors are doing, because if the performance of your company’s stock price is materially less than other players, your stock options will be reduced and you will lose your job. But you want to keep your job, because it gives you a great deal of money, power and prestige.
What you do not care about is whether pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, like Pfizer and Moderna, are making money selling therapeutics or vaccines. These are not your competitors. While you may need to “greenwash” your company with meaningless “renewable energy” projects, everything about your company’s success comes from selling oil. The COVID lockdowns were bad for the oil business. In April 2020, the price of oil fell below $20, after holding steady above $100 only a few years earlier. While the price largely recovered by the end of 2020, this volatility hurt “frackers,” whose cost structure requires higher oil prices.
You would think our hypothetical oil company executive would be dead set against COVID policies that reduce the demand for oil, depressing the value of his company’s reserves. The “New Normal” is bad for business, so, if it were me, I would prefer the “Old Normal.” But if our CEO bucks the narrative, whether on COVID, climate change, diversity and inclusion, and a host of other beliefs that are part of the elite consensus, he will be removed by his board for damaging his company’s “brand confidence” long before anyone at BlackRock/Vanguard makes a call. So economic profit is looking quite weak as a motive for corporate/managerial behavior. The meme “Get woke, go broke” is merely wishful thinking.
* * *
The BlackRock/Vanguard theory oversimplifies and attempts to make exoteric what is actually a much more complicated and esoteric power process. Instead, one of Mencius Moldbug’s key ideas, “the Cathedral,” is, I believe, an obviously more useful tool to try to describe what has been happening in the public/private response to COVID in the last two years.
Unlike my last guest appearance, I am here to praise Mencius Moldbug, not to bury Curtis Yarvin. As readers may recall, Curtis Yarvin is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had become a leader in the pre-Trump dissident Right, writing under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” His main vehicle until his 2013 retirement was a blog called “Unqualified Reservations” (UR), an idiosyncratic effort to make sense of American political decline. More recently, Curtis Yarvin has returned to public life in his own name, writing on Substack. Yarvin wrote a piece there recently called “A brief explanation of the cathedral,” which summarizes the relevant concepts in a single place without breaking much new ground.
The word “Cathedral” is an obvious metaphor adapted from the power of the Pope in Roman Catholicism to speak “ex cathedra” (from the episcopal chair) to define matters of faith and morals. The relationship between a civilization’s “truth finding function” and political power is fraught with peril. In a word, seeking political power corrupts the search for truth.
Moldbug’s “Cathedral” can been defined as a distributed or emergent conspiracy among media, academia, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government bureaucracies to seize and hold informal power in the Western democracies. Indeed, the Cathedral appears to have critical nodes within all of the West’s converged institutions (even, unfortunately, the Catholic Church itself). This definition includes two key elements that embody its explanatory power.
First is that the conspiracy is “emergent” or “distributed.” There is no CEO of the Cathedral, no Politburo. There is no top-down hierarchy and nobody is giving orders. The coordination between each node of the Cathedral, whether a government bureaucrat or a journalist, is achieved intellectually and culturally, by each member believing and saying the same things, attending the same schools, and reading the same newspapers and websites. Therefore, no orders are given, nor are they needed.
Second is that the power sought is “informal.” This is distinct from formal power, which is power that proceeds for well understood constitutional, legal and electoral processes. For example, under the U.S. Constitution, there is no formal role given to Harvard University. Unlike the “press,” universities as such are not mentioned anywhere at all in that document. But it would be difficult to refute the argument that what the leadership of Harvard University thinks is infinitely more important to the course of recent American history than the opinions of Republican members of Congress and the voters who put them there.
The worldview of the Cathedral is synoptic. It is the same everywhere. If there is a competitive “marketplace of ideas,” one would expect, on most issues, Harvard and Stanford would disagree, simply to create a market niche for each institution. From biochemistry to urban planning, Harvard would have the “East Coast” view while Stanford had the “West Coast” view. But we don’t see that. On every controversial issue, they both say the same thing. This seems a curious phenomenon.
Moldbug/Yarvin explains our observations with a Darwinian analogy, so the subtitle of his recent piece is “An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power.” Under the Darwinian metaphor, the Cathedral, like the COVID virus, is subject to selection pressures. In the marketplace of ideas, what ideas are being selected for? The answer is ideas that validate the use of power. So the nodes of the Cathedral gravitate to ideas that give the members of the intellectual class who embody the Cathedral an impetus to take action, to advocate, to have an impact.
One of the main historical scenarios Moldbug uses to develop the Cathedral thesis in UR is the “Climategate” e-mail scandal. Analogous scandals during the COVID pandemic are a ghostly echo of this largely forgotten episode. In 2009, thousands of e-mails and computer files were “hacked” or “leaked” from the University of East Anglia in the UK. The most damning e-mails were exchanges between Phil Jones, the head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and the hyper-litigious Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, father of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. The various e-mails exhibited the participants appearing to collude on manipulated data, to withhold facts unfavorable to their thesis, and to undermine the publication in peer reviewed journals of papers from climate change skeptics. In the most salacious exchange, Phil Jones suggests revising the presentation of a chart intended for publication to “hide the decline” (i.e., hide data showing temperatures had in fact been declining, not rising).
The problem of the Cathedral was not that Jones and Mann were working for BlackRock/Vanguard, the Trilateral Commission, the Rosicrucians, or any other shadowy actors. The problem was that they were not working for anyone. No one had practical oversight over what they were doing. Which put them in a position where they could craft their message into propaganda disseminated to millions in a tone of breathless hysteria. They saw their main task not as proving the truth of anthropogenic global warming as a scientific matter, but instead delivering a message to the public in a way that it would be believed and acted upon.
Since they defined what was and was not “climate science,” since they were a law unto themselves, there was no process to correct their errors or expose their frauds. We can easily imagine one of the participants uttering the phrase “I am Science…” The Climategate e-mails sank into oblivion without a trace, and nothing about university climate science changed an iota as a result. As our host would say, it never hurts to be wrong in the right direction.
The public relations campaign surrounding “global warming” was a preview of the COVID pandemic. Public affirmation of global warming reinforces the important of climate science and climate scientists. Denying it denigrates their importance. Affirming global warming means action, lots of action, in every area of human life that depends upon energy. Denying global warming means inaction. There is no power and influence in inaction. Of course, obtaining government research funding is an important part of this plan of action.
The Climategate e-mails have been mirrored by e-mails between Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Anthony Fauci, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The main irritant here was the “Great Barrington Declaration” (GBD), a call for an alternate COVID strategy that was prepared by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, and signed by thousands of scientists and physicians [Briggs: including myself]. (Do not be fooled by their affiliations; their institutions do not approve of their actions.)
In response, Francis Collins wrote to Fauci and others colleagues to call for “a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.” This was apparently necessary because the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were “fringe epidemiologists.” The tone is almost identical to the Climategate e-mails in its arrogance, indifference to scientific debate, and myopic fixture on manipulating public opinion.
So what was Fauci’s reply? “Don’t worry, I got this.” In short order, Fauci sent Collins weblinks to newly published articles debunking the GBD’s “focused protection solution.” These include an opinion piece in “Wired” (a technology/culture magazine) and an article titled “Focused Protection, Herd Immunity and Other Deadly Delusions” published in “The Nation,” the venerable Progressive weekly. Collins’ response? “Excellent.”
Obviously, Collins and Fauci didn’t work for and we’re not accountable to either Donald Trump or Rand Paul. Like Jones and Mann, it appears they were accountable to no one and worked for nobody but themselves.
The “groupthink” at the heart of the pandemic response was not a new phenomenon. In the two decades preceding the COVID outbreak, roughly dozen “pandemic planning scenarios” were staged, commencing with 2001’s “Dark Winter” smallpox bioterrorism simulation. We should not be surprised that the COVID pandemic and the increasingly totalitarian responses to it were the sole recommendations of the experts and institutions who organized and participated in these events.
In each case, the scenario would include one or more of the medical security state innovations we saw in the real COVID pandemic: travel restrictions, lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, mask mandates, “track and trace” via Orwellian smart phone apps, forced vaccinations and martial law. Most telling, the 2017 SPARS scenario hosted by Johns Hopkins focused on “manufacturing consensus” about hastily developed experimental vaccines by disseminating propaganda, marginalizing dissenting voices, and censoring social media. The only recommendation missing from these scenarios was branding the dissidents as “terrorists” and disrupting them via the state security services.
This is the Cathedral at work: the ideas that win are those that demand decisive action. Even if the best response would be to do nothing, if only to avoid the missteps that make the pandemic longer and more destructive. “Zero COVID” policies are the perfect example of a goal that is unattainable, permitting one to expend indefinite resources attempting to attain it.
Returning to the BlackRock/Vanguard thesis, I would note that much of it depends on an erroneous conception of the relationship between “capitalism” and the “free market” to the West’s ersatz liberal democratic regimes. “Capitalism” and the “free market” have the same relationship to the Cathedral-controlled modern state as the “Five Year Plan” had to Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union. These are not ends unto themselves; they are means to an end. This is simply how the system operates, but it is not why it operates. The Bolsheviks created the Five Year Plan as a way for them to implement their rule over Russia. The Bolshevik Party was not created so that there would be some political party committed to implementing Five Year Plans.
The various centers of power in the Western democracies, be they business, political, bureaucratic, media, or academic, seek to secure and increase their power. Those who we can call the “oligarchs” are motivated by this, and not by monopoly rents from pharmaceutical profits. It’s not the money; it’s the power.
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This is TOP SHELF material! It is the quintessential and up-to-date explanation of the Nasty New World Odor. https://frederickrsmith.substack.com/p/nasty-new-world-order-20-09-28
Good discussion.
The point can be expanded. For example, “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “celebration of differences” mean that the social effectq of family, religion, and inherited cultural community must be extirpated. Otherwise, sex, religion, and ethnicity will affect life outcomes, and that’s contrary to “equity.” But then formal commercial and bureaucratic arrangements become the only institutions allowed to have any effect. In other words, billionaires and bureaucrats run everything.
A side point on regulatory capture: one problem is that private industry can hire intelligent, knowledgeable, and hard-working experts to prepare studies and regulatory proposals that most often make some sense but are prepared with the industry’s interests in mind. It’s normal for the agency’s low-paid career employees to rely heavily on what the industry experts do for them. It saves them a lot of work and gives them something that isn’t likely to bollix things up horribly even though it won’t protect the public as well as it might.
Not criticising the general approach/direction of the article but downplaying the possible role of Blackrock and Vanguard is not something I agree upon. Their major shareholding of every large (Dow Index) corporate entity in America will mean cross-board coordination, the ability to choose winners and losers and the capacity to destroy.
All they have to do is ensure that their trillions are invested round and round in these hand-picked entities and they are in a sure win situation to the detriment of the rest of the economy. Combine this with the woke ideology that is on display by those in charge of these entities and you have a recipe for the destruction of society. The condition of society matters not to them as they have completely decoupled society and main street from their round-robin investment strategy.
In my view, the creeping and insidious role of the financialisation of every part of our lives is at the centre of the American malaise. Now the complacent guardians who should have been watching over this have placed the nation on the horns of a dilemma; either the country rights itself by destroying this financial vampire, which will lead to economic devastation, or we allow things to continue which will lead to economic devastation. I don’t see any other choices. In either case it is going to be nearly impossible to hold society together.
Both Regulatory Capture and the titanic interlocking influences of mega-financial-houses like BlackRock (et. al.) across the entire corporate space offer potential explanations to the apparent oligarchic phalanx driving current policy making and media messaging. [Phalanx: (1.) A compact or close-knit body of people: “formed a solid phalanx in defense of the Constitution and Protestant religion” (G.M. Trevelyan).] However, my conspiratorial predilection rejects these forces as the central factors. I sense instead that a form of Uber Wartime Propaganda is the inner operating machinery ~ and this is being guided from a Central Planning facility hub which is mission focused, hierarchically structured and strategically opaque by design. The intricate working model for such a comprehensive governmentally directed (propaganda) orchestration of society entire – in all its roots, veins, branches and foliage was first devised under the Woodrow Wilson administration as the Committee on Public Information. See: [The Conversation – How Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda machine changed American journalism – https://theconversation.com/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-76270%5D (see also): Sobel, Robert (1976). The Manipulators: America in the Media Age. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press. ISBN 0-385-08526-5.) Copy @ (https://archive.org/details/manipulatorsamer0000sobe). My essential thesis is that certain concrete objectives have been identified by oligarchic power players (the powers that should not be) ~ and “they” intend to achieve these objectives through schemes for guiding certain historical imperatives – thereby guaranteeing “to themselves” a permanent power dynasty. We are not watching some organic social transformation wrought by awkward responses to a Zoonotic pathogen contagion ~ but a deep and broadly conceived political coup whose purpose and intent is fully usurping representative government under a Technocracy built Society. [A Science/Technology/Society] or [The New Normal].
https://theconversation.com/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-76270
~ this link should work
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The intervention by Black Rock, et al, is completely unnecessary. The boards of the major corporations are comprised of the same 100 or so people, almost all of whom went to the same schools. These board members are also the major donors to both parties, but are more represented on the Left than the Right. These men (and women) also chair the major institutions, as well as the major charities. That which they don’t directly control, they heavily influence through both social pressure (everybody near the top aspires to join the club) and funding.
Yes, there is no such thing to them as “too much” money. But the key to understanding is that they already have amassed their fortunes. Now they’re playing status games with their peers. And, of course, nobody wants to be the first to stop applauding Stalin.
“You’re telling me that there is a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands of people that manages to keep itself completely secret? All it would take would be one person going to the press to blow the whole thing!”
Whenever some dope dares to raise this, I simply ask them if they believe in the existence of organized crime. How are all these illegal drugs getting everywhere, how are all these people being trafficed etc. How many people do they imagune are involved, and with all the fancy technology and power in the hands if the state, how do they keep operating and getting away with it?
The dopes of course have no reply and then begin to wave their arms attempting to explain why “that’s different!”
Of course, not everyone is “in on it”, and even the victims themselves are playing along, and many have nothing to gain except that their normal life can be maintained by doing so. There is also pressure to conform. So we all betray each other by not speaking out mind because of what the other guys might feel. We just want to be blissful and happy. We’ll smoke cigarettes and overconsume sugar for the same reasons we’ll passively participate in open conspiracies.
We’ll even divide into teams and some will champion it to the end. It’s all a game and you play to “win.” Democracy has conditioned us to behave so.
As we have discussed before “the need to do something” is what drives the experts and politicians. It’s why they only enter data into models guaranteed to necessitate a response. Otherwise science and politics is utterly utterly boring and they have a pressing need to justify their existence and look important. It why all movies and stories need conflict to work. We have to fight against something. When you are rich and powerful, life is dull as all your basic needs are met. Instead of struggling against personal sin, you seek something else to solve. Or you simply turn into an evil bastard because, wealth and power corrupts and your inclination to sin has more leeway. The rest is the thrill of getting away with it and enjoying watching no shortage of fools rushing to defend you!
So much smoke I can’t get close enough to the fire to feel any heat. This is such a
ham fisted attempt at counter narrative I hardly know where to begin. It’s so bad I’m
not even sure it’s worth the effort. This is one of those tell them them truth what’s really
happening and then with little verbal flourishes and dead end conclusions dazzle them
with uncertainty. Lead up and debunk technique which doesn’t leave me wanting more.
I don’t think anyone thinks BlackRock/Vanguard is ‘the Cathedral” or sole Nexis of what’s
unfolding. That’s a strawman argument. They’re just the bagmen passing out all that funny
money the Fed. is printing. The basic thrust of the article is that it’s all random events with
individuals scraping for power. No conspiracy just organic and natural events in a money
mad world. Basically the preferred narrative of the City of London, I think he threw in the
Cathedral for the Catholic audience..
Good topic and interesting article on the “Big Picture” — we perceive an agenda, a plan, a Party line, that seemingly directs concerted action across various fronts and over multiple generations — but who’s controlling it? What Power? — Masons? Rosicrucians? Esquimeaux? Pre-programmed-bouncing-billiard-balls of mindless evolution? Satan? Clearly, it is a dangerous enemy waging war against us, and as Sun Tzu noted if you don’t know your enemy you’re toast. It’s absurd that purely materialist Darwinian processes would produce such a uniformly perverse, destructive, and suicidal organism. Even ticks and mosquitos know their place and don’t try to take over the world. Same applies to the Masons, Rosicrucians, and Esquimeaux, who, while they might entertain plots of world power, could be expected to appeal to virtue, as well as vice, as a path to power. But that’s not what we see.
That leaves Satan. A spiritual force for evil acting in the world has far more explanatory power. As does the story of the Fall, where Eve, deceived by this evil power, believes she can become god-like by disobeying God, and so sin and death enter the world. Here is the germ of the lies, destruction, revolution, and lust for worldly power that characterize what we see, not only today, but in the past: sinful man, his mind and heart clouded by vanity, deceit, lust, anger, and spite, embarking on destructive follies at the behest of a malicious spirit who promises them a paradise of worldly power where they shall be as gods, by disobeying God. Disaster ensues, naturally.
Doesn’t mean there aren’t conspiracies, but important to see that behind the conspiring parties — and in a sense, we are all conspiring parties — there is a spiritual menace, those “Powers and Principalities”, and that the conspiracy for worldly power cannot be defeated by simply removing this or that set of conspirators. Rather, the solution to the problem was given by the Master, Jesus, who showed the way to God by the “narrow path”, and by following Him. (Much could be elaborated here, but it’s a combox.)
Somewhat related, I have almost finished a most interesting book on this “Big Picture” topic; Douglas Reed’s, “The Controversy of Zion”. Fascinating history, well written. Highly recommend. A man might be forgiven for thinking a cabal of Esquimeaux are behind it all, given their obvious talent for revolution. But it’s equally obvious their plots would come to naught without the eager participation of the goyim, who indeed hatch their own competing idiot plots. If we weren’t all slaves to sin we wouldn’t be in this pickle. The Good News is there is a way out, a way to defeat the enemy.
Agree with Fishbone. The source is deeper than the “financial sector”. Blackrock et al succeed if capitalism succeeds. They aren’t so stupid as to deliberately destroy the economy. They are themselves victims.
The wokies are the unnatural offspring of the abortionists, who are the vanguard of the De-Population Movement, which goes back to the Mathusian Victorians who gave us atheism, racial genocide, total war, and Marxofascism.
The Hate the Human Race folks are Satan spawn and always have been. Nukes and bio warfare are tools, like pitchforks, to eradicate humanity. That conspiracy is so evil and so blatant that it’s difficult to look at without burning your eyeballs. Most folks are forced to look away and distract with mundane concerns. But it’s real, and horrific, and powerful beyond belief.
The Truth is not a shield, though it is a salvation, perhaps not in this world but in the next.
One other thing to realize.
We have their planning scenarios and exercises for medical martial law documented. Up to and including accounting for mass vexxine injuries. They know the vexxine rollouts, even if the product itself were ‘safe enough’, would statistically kill many. The outcome was deemed acceptable.
Also there is another aspect to consider in the utility provided by the lock-step LGBTP- pushing, and here is the point:
“What the heck happened to Germany in the 20s and 30s? Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen?” asked Malone.
“The answer is mass formation psychosis.”
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” he added.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/governments-admit-using-mass-formation-psychosis-tool-population-control
In other words, the instability that LGBT-ism provides is one convenient faucet of an entire campaign.
Get rid of religion and dogma, bring about a society where everything is in flux, technology is constantly evolving, nothing is assurred and stable. Mess the people up so much that they will look for some rock of stability in a stormy sea of uncertainty, and that’s when you and your media apparatus are ready to strike and provide them with a cause to focus on – no matter how crazy – saving the Earth – zero carbon – zero covid – zero racism – zero inequality etc. In fact even the hersteria of covid rules and shifting lockdown drills can introduce more instability to ready the public for the next focus. Same principle as torture. Eventually ypu’ll break down and give in to anything, so long as it promises stabilty and peace.
It is a warping of what the Gospel provides. A warping of what God promised at Fatima – a period of peace – provided He was obeyed.
Instead we have the commie playbook. Gov takes your peace and prosperity away and promises to restore what it took if you bow down to their demands. Then it credits itself for restoring the peace and lifting you out of the poverty it put you into in the first place.
They learnt well from the Copernican affair – what had our science done when it killed god and unchained the Earth from its Sun and sent it spinning into nowhere in no discernable direction – tearing mankind’s blessed and eternal and fixed position from its center to shreds?
The instability is desired – it serves to spurn government and the experts into action so that their solutions will be accepted with little opposition. Those who do not believe will be excommunicado.
I believe it was Jordan Peterson who said “I am more afraid of those dealing with Climate Change than of Climate Change itself”. To paraphrase that – I am more afraid of those dealing with Covid 19 that I am of Covid 19.
interesting and thought provoking. however, it seems to me that all the original author did was to name a state of affairs rather than explore in depth what might be the cause. my good lady (a medieval historian) named the most likely cause: the Evil One. Now is the solution, the remedy to get back to “normal,” prayer? Or would mass, remote exorcism be possible?
BlackRock is all in on the scam, their function is to debase the currency which
will lead to the total collapse of Main Street with money the Fed. is giving them.
They’re not worried because they’ll have enough in assets to survive hyperinflation
and when Treasury reissues a new digital currency they’ll be the first in line. They
are not the shot callers, they’re the errand boys snapping up assets through foreclosures,
bankruptcies, depressed stocks & bonds, and hoarding gold and precious metals.
Things will get so bad they think they can create a new economic paradigm
by owning every hard asset and renting it back to the peasants. The same thing
happened in 2008, wash-rinse-repeat. They’re now buying up property lost to the
lockdowns often paying over market prices because they’re going to finish off the
dollar and your savings. The Fed., and European Central Banks are responsible,
and it will be like after a war people will be so shell-shocked they’ll accept anything.
The ultimate goal is to control all production and supply and dole it out as they see fit.
What we need to do is dissolve the Fed. and reissue the currency. (bring back the greenback).
Replace dollar for dollar outstanding currency with a full accounting of it’s provenance ie.
how it was earned, where it has been, and all taxes paid on it. The rats will boil in their holes
when they can’t meet the criteria and their dollars are declined.. This will wipe out the fake
national debt and put fiscal policy back where it belongs in the U.S. Treasury. It won’t be easy
as we enter the great market crash of 2022.
“In the most salacious exchange, Phil Jones suggests revising the presentation of a chart intended for publication to “hide the decline” (i.e., hide data showing temperatures had in fact been declining, not rising).”
No, this is incorrect. The proxy data was cut off because it was indicating falling temperatures when the instrumental temperature record was rising. Thus calling into question the trustworthiness of the proxy reconstructions, and hence the shaft of the hockey stick. (Also, the adjective “salacious” is not the mot juste. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.)
https://climateaudit.org/2021/11/02/the-decline-and-the-stick/
Mann’s hokey statistical adjustments were another problem for the Team. (Plus, they really didn’t like him.) He really was not qualified to be in the position he occupied. So, how did he get such a plum position? Read the Climategate emails again.
The fact is that the IPCC was such a put-up job, many of the most qualified scientists resigned in disgust rather than be associated with it.
And who was behind the put-up job? Oddly enough, somehow Pew (Sun Oil), Al Gore (son of the Senator from Occidental Oil), David Rockefeller, Rockefeller Trusts (Standard/Exxon Oil), not to mention the Club of Rome and Maurice Strong.
“Media companies do not take orders from their investors about what matters are or are not of journalistic interest.” They do, however, need ad revenues from pharmaceutical companies to keep afloat, and if you don’t think they’ll lie themselves blind to keep those… African Killer Bees! Remember the Maine!
if you don’t think Covid or Climate Change is a racket, it’s always worth reviewing Smedley Butler on the oldest racket of all:
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
War is a racket.
Many “ …attorneys and authors …have become leaders in the struggle against the looming COVID medical security state.
These include, in no particular order, figures like Alex Berenson, Del Bigtree, Zev Zelenko, Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Brett Weinstein, Vernon Coleman, Joseph Mercola, Sucharit Bhakdi, Gert Vanden Bosch, J.J. Couey,……”
Speaking of Dr (PhD-Biology) Couey, here’s his latest contribution to the cause of opposition to the COVID death-vax, as Dr (MD) Zelenko likes to call it.
https://m.twitch.tv/videos/1254229673
P.S.- Who knows what happens to your body when you get the shot?
Sucharit Bhakdi and Arne Burkhardt know.
https://www.informedchoiceaustralia.com//post/bhakdi-burkhardt-pathology-results-93-of-people-who-died-after-being-vaccinated-were-killed-by-jab
And it ain’t pretty.
People rebelling against God has brought this about. Our country allowing legal mass murder of the unborn and the newly born, by their mothers, has brought this about. Rejection of God’s Son, has brought this about.
Only genuine repentance can bring an end to all of this. But it will not happen for a very, very long time. Keep close with Jesus Christ doing God’s will and the Holy Spirit will lead and guide you daily.
I used to wonder how it came about that Adam and Eve wanted to be their own god, when God had given them all, plus knowing Him. Today it dawned in my mind that they did not love Him and that was why they were able to so easily disobey Him. But I have not seen that written anywhere.
God bless, C-Marie
It’s not the money; it’s the power?
You say tomahto, I say tomato. Call it what you will.
But it’s the use of the word ‘conspiracy’ which tends to rankle. What John Q. & Yarvin & Malone, et al describe is completely accurate but it is complicated unnecessarily by the cinematic notion of ‘conspiracy’….Dark Web Whispers evoking Maltese falcons, letters of transit, Pablo Escobar, the Matarese Circle, and locked silver suitcases full of cash.
None of that is necessary.
It’s entertaining, certainly, but — per Occam and his Razor — unrequired.
Would we equally describe the operation of economic markets as ‘conspiracy’? Would we point to all these millions of buyers and sellers, distributors, makers, and marketers – moving in lockstep coordination across the globe — as some Illuminati-thing that delivers Honey Nut Cheerios regularly to my breakfast table? Of course not (at least not in the sense used here)
So let us stop short of The DaVinci Code Explication and simply agree with Yarvin’s glamorous restatement of Econ 101: “An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power”. Or, said differently, we are profit & pleasure driven creatures, whose desire is to do what helps and to avoid what hurts.
How do we do that?
We acquire wealth, and/or fame, and/or talent, and/or position. “The object of power is power,” as Orwell noted. And Power (in whatever form) both profits and pleasures us.
That’s why we see in every society a natural agglomeration of institutional interests which work to ‘enrich’ (however we define riches) those who are most successful at creating, anticipating, and leveraging emerging opportunities while simultaneously avoiding significant risk exposures. William Whyte, in his seminal 1956 work, The Organization Man, made the same exact observation about his particular, buttoned-downed generation. Man, he told us, prefers the safety & shelter the Collective provides. “In further institutionalizing the great power of the majority, we are making the individual come to distrust himself. We are giving him a rationalization for the unconscious urging to find an AUTHORITY (emphasis added) that would resolve the burdens of free choice. We are tempting him to reinterpret the group pressures as a release, authority as freedom, and that this quest assumes a moral guise makes it only the more poignant.” “.As Briggs himself would note: thus the Expertocracy…. as Yarvin might then say, thus ‘the Cathedral’.
Whyte goes on: ““Most are interested in the philosophical only to the extent of finding out what the accepted view is in order that they may accept it and get on to the practical matters… The spectacle of people following current custom for lack of will or imagination to do anything else is hardly a new failing.” Rather it is what it means to be human.
Electrons fall to the lowest, the easiest energy level possible. Are we so different?
Far easier to echo the popular, the common, the accepted Narrative – the one we hear every night on the news, in our classrooms…the one we read in our news feeds — and swallow it whole. Much easier to do that than to oppose, resist, object, and swim unpopularly and increasingly dangerously against the onrushing current.
And so we do. Who doesn’t like to sit at the Cool Kids Table?
In the end, it is not surprising that there is a Cathedral (vastly more surprising if there weren’t). Nor is such a natural aggregation of human appetites and attitudes necessarily a bad thing.
Capitalism is just such a Cathedral, formerly preached by Economist, Politician, Parent, and Teacher as a normal part of “the land of opportunity”. (Not so fashionable now) Our nation is built upon a Cathedral of Beliefs, shared by our Founders (also significantly unfashionable) The problem is not the Cathedral, per se, but rather the god the Cathedral worships.
Most immediately, the problem is the Inquisition formed by today’s Progressive Priests (in every conceivable ‘parish’) to mandate ORTHODOXY and RIGHT THOUGHT. This problem occurs, not when interests aggregate but when the Cathedral so formed moves to consume & tyrannically control EVERYTHING which violates church gospel (check with Harvard, Lester Holt, and AOC if you have questions).
The problem is the state-sponsored use of the auto-da-fe as the path to Total Purity. The problem is the destruction of Freedom required by brain-dead worship.
@Johnno
Some more info
RE: Oh, the plans they’ve made.
https://ugetube.com/watch/extensive-patent-trail-of-the-corona-virus-by-dr-reiner-fuellmich_mbHzmDEJE6UHndl.html
RE: “mass formation …”
https://jeffreydachmd.com/2021/11/mass-psychosis-formation/
It’s not a conspiracy when people randomly pursue their individual self-interest, and some collective end result “appears” purposeful.
People in government want power. People in media want viewers/eyeballs. People in, say pharma cos, want product revenues and profits. The ‘establishment’ (and the behind-the-scene oligarchs) want to retain (or increase) its influence. No one need tell them this, or coordinate this.
In complex systems (and, if nothing else, the global economy is a complex system) these are known as emergent properties. Emergent behavior arises where interacting individual behavior create complex, unpredictable, and irreducible behavior. Individuals satisfying their self-interest for power, viewers, profits, and influence combine–cascade–into the results and outcomes we see in front of us. This is no different than a flock of birds or a school of fish, or a written/spoken language. No different than a clock being a sum total far greater than its individual parts.
But is a clock a conspiracy?? At best, Blackrock/Vanguard is a metaphor for the emergent properties of the global economy. At worst, it’s a crackpot explanation for a non-conspiratorial conspiracy theory. It’ll have to suffice as a wake-up call for federalism and the checks and balances of our republican form of government.
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At first I fell into Yarvin’s spell and swallowed the Red Tory pill by reading the gentle introduction but quickly upchucked it when I started reading some of the supporting documents in the second chapter about our Founding Fathers. I find I can’t trust this take-down of our founding which is so popular these days. While our fathers were not perfect by any means, and some may have been evil clowns, I find the British Royals to be more evil than friendly to the mass of humanity. I had a great laugh yesterday when I read the Queen had cut off Prince Andrew by refusing to pay his legal fees and that he had to sell a Swiss Chalet in a fire sale. I’m not sure that Yarvin is really what he says he is.
Another prominent theory to account for the madness is the push to an all digital currency via a vax passport. Including the fact that Social Security is due to go bankrupt. David Martin, Catherine Ann Fitts, etc. Wondering if Mr Public might address these.