I responded to a tweet from Mark Changizi recently (screenshot because I’m sure they’ll erase my account - and Mark’s too - soon):
As you can see, Ben replied, which set off a brief conversation.
I think the ‘I’ll never understand that’ comment may have been a challenge to my subconscious because I spent half the night awake, tossing and turning, with my brain refusing to shut down and I’ve come up with an explanation of sorts for what are the most puzzling and deeply disturbing series of events I have ever experienced in my entire life; namely the last two years of lockdowns and Covid hysteria. I’m sure it’s not original and that many people have come up with similar explanations, but it’s original to me and represents to me a simple theory based upon my own personal observations which adequately explains the facts as I experienced them.
So I’ll start with events as I experienced them. With the scare-stories coming out of China about a deadly new zoonotic plague, I believed, at first, that they were real and not exaggerated. I had a reasonable knowledge of previous zoonoses and it seemed quite plausible that a virus originating in bats had indeed jumped from bat to human via an intermediary host and was now spreading from person to person, causing serious disease in a significant number of people and death in an estimated 3.4% (34 times more lethal than ‘flu) of those infected. That was the official line we were fed and I ate it up.
The WHO and China cried wolf, so I reacted accordingly on the evidence I had. I purchased some FFP3 high filtration masks with the intention of minimising the risk of myself and my partner being infected with airborne respiratory virus particles whilst shopping in supermarkets. It seemed sensible to me and went against government and medical advice at the time. I got some odd looks from the normies and my partner was aggressively challenged on one occasion for choosing to wear a mask. The mask wearing didn’t last more than a few weeks, because I felt physically and psychologically uncomfortable with them. But the point is, I was fearful enough to wear one, against official advice, yet very few other people were, or maybe even then the vast majority relied exclusively on what they were told by the ‘experts’.
I looked at what was happening in Wuhan with the extreme lockdowns and people actually being welded inside their homes, dogs and cats being thrown out of high rise apartment windows because residents were terrified of catching some deadly disease from them and it made me extremely uneasy. Something was very badly wrong. Then lockdowns were implemented in Italy and Johnson issued some stern advice to the British populace on March 16th 2020, based on Professor ‘Pantsdown’ Ferguson’s projections of hundreds of thousands of fatalities in the absence of non-pharmaceutical mitigating measures to control the spread. I thought people would heed that advice. I was wrong. They carried on more or less as normal. I remember being quite irritated by that, thinking that this would result in compulsory restrictions and sure enough Pol Pot Belly went the full monty a week later and shut the entire country down, going beyond even the recommendations of the Ferguson Imperial paper. Why was that?
Around this time, it was becoming obvious that the lethality of the virus had been grossly overestimated by China and the WHO and that it was more comparable to ‘flu, albeit a lot more lethal to people in their 80s and 90s, but less lethal to younger age groups, especially children. There were also disturbing rumours that it was a ‘gain of function’ virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. The facts changed but the ‘science’ didn’t. It grew legs and started running, right across the globe. Hence ‘3 weeks to flatten the curve’ turned into months and months of ridiculous, society destroying, human rights busting and economy flattening restrictions. By April, I was a fully-fledged Covid sceptic and never looked back once as our world fell apart. But the majority sucked it up, much to my amazement and increasing horror and I never could figure why, until perhaps now.
So here’s the explanation I have come up with. Myself and a significant minority of others are Outsiders - people on the edge of the herd, who tag along with the herd, but are not really part of it. When China and the WHO and successive governments and health ‘experts’ cried wolf, we were the first to hear and respond. Some, better than me, realised this was a scam right from the word go and responded by rejecting the (mis)information they were receiving. I was caught up in that frenzy of misinformation and false alarm for a short while, then quickly came to my senses.
Meanwhile, the Herd did not register alarm. They were quite content to continue grazing, oblivious to the apparent danger, whilst they gazed with complacency at the jittery actions of the Outsiders, having either not heard the Shepherd Boy’s warning, or ignored it. This was where Britain was on March 16th. The roads were still full of traffic, people were going out and about, all living their lives more or less normally, without a sense of alarm or impending doom. The Old Normal was still very much alive, existing in a state of stubborn inertia. Then on March 23rd everything changed. Pol Pot Belly addressed the nation urgently and told the British people what to do. He told them to stay at home, not to gather together, avoid all unnecessary contact etc. and he told them that he was shutting the country down - shops, schools, cinemas, gyms, theatres, virtually every place of commerce, work or leisure that was not deemed ‘essential’ and he told them that this would be the law. Only then did the Herd register the cry of alarm from the Shepherd Boy. Inertial resistance disappeared and they acted as one to the perceived threat.
This is vitally important to understand. Myself and others on the fringes of the herd responded as individuals to the perceived threat. The vast majority, the Herd, acted as a single entity. All rational, independent thought was extinguished at that moment in preference for moving as one, with the Herd, away from danger. This happened because the Herd were told to move. It needed that definite, unequivocally stated order for them to act, which they did, in perfect synchrony. The shops emptied, the roads, the parks, town centres became like scenes from a post apocalyptic movie. The Age of Lockdown had begun. the problem is, the Herd never really stopped running, because once told, it was difficult to untell them. They could never stop running as a unit. All that could happen is that individual members of the Herd would gradually slow their flight as they came to realise that the threat was no longer imminent or in fact they were too weary to keep running. As Charles Mackay said, nearly two hundred years ago:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
This brings me back to Ben Irvine and his theory that it was the unions who pushed the government into lockdowns, not the other way round. I don’t know if that is the case. It was the Shepherd Boy who first cried wolf and I don’t know for sure the true motivations of the Shepherd Boy for doing so, or the true identity of the Shepherd Boy or whether somebody else was instructing him.
Modern human society is obviously a lot more complex than a herd of animals. It is structured into special interest groups. The academics, the unions, the medical profession, politicians, the main stream media, science ‘experts’ are all examples of those special interest groups. So it could be that, before the main Herd reacted to the Shepherd Boy’s definite cry of alarm, these groups reacted early, just like the Outsiders, but most importantly, not as individuals but as a group. They then attempted to communicate this alarm to the Herd, on behalf of the Shepherd Boy but also on behalf of themselves and their special interests in supposedly ‘staying safe’ or else adopting the saviour mentality that they were charged with the unique responsibility of keeping the Herd safe.
None of this contradicts my sincerely held view that the Shepherd Boy’s intentions in crying wolf were mailgn. I believe that is amply demonstrated by the abundant evidence of ill intent on the part of bad actors that we have now.
My fear is that, having been spectacularly successful with Covid, these bad actors are now trying exactly the same tactics with climate change alarm, to nudge us into yet another new normal, which will be even worse than lockdowns. So far, the Herd seems somewhat scattered and confused on this issue and not ready to act as one again, but the nudge merchants are not giving up, having tasted so much power and controlling influence with Covid. They are determined to change the world permanently - to their advantage - and they see climate action to supposedly ‘fight’ an alleged ‘climate crisis’ as their way of doing that. That along with phoney wars.
I think that, to a large extent, people really want to be part of a world-wide effort to save humanity. They don't want a world war but just some huge thing of which to be a part. They can then earn the "I saved humanity merit badge" and then tell their grandkids:
"You should have seen it! Bodies piled 10 feet high lining every street! Why I told your grandma, 'this is it! we gotta do our part!" and we put on masks, social distanced and took whatever medicine the government ordered! And that's why I'm here to tell you about that today Jonny and Suzie! Your great uncle Jeff... well... god rest his soul was a vax denier and he didn't make it. He'll have to make his piece with god for all the people he killed through his selfish actions and all the misinformation he spread!"
Wow, that was me. Masks, etc. in February and stocking up. April 1, this is baloney. Knew immediately after FAuci pushed trump aside to poo poo HCQ (I trust Raoult Didier more than any other doctor and he foudn the cure in late Feb in Marseilles.) So I am a bit an early re-actor, but a bit too not a good herd person for any length of time.