Are there signs that the world is turning on Covid and related tyranny? How would we measure progress on this?
The wise and prolific Jeffrey Tucker reckons – perhaps, merely hopes – that we have reached a point of global inflection.
My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.
I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.
The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.
There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.
Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.
https://brownstone.org/articles/did-lockdowns-set-a-global-revolt-in-motion/
Bret Weinstein, quoted by Elizabeth Nickson, believes:
The lessons of covid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed. People now know the shots were very dangerous, and there were contributing factors like Vitamin D that people, apparently obsessed by their safety, never bothered to tell them about. How did people get wise to the fact given that this “thing” owns every major broadcast network, every newspaper? As powerful as this force was, it wasn’t especially smart, it didn’t understand us.
Nickson believes in the pivot-point theory.
The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable. If I were in strategy in left-wing politics, I would be panicking. James Carville, that wizened dwarfish hate-filled creep, is panicking and I for one, cannot stop watching him.
What she goes on to say about the Bidens and other players in the global game are colourful, to say the least. She says:
Disgust is the prevailing emotion.
She is right about what I feel. And possibly about what many readers here feel, too.
Tucker also quotes a piece called Vibe Shift (lovely title) by Santiago Pliego:
The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
To which one would (of course) respond – bring it on!
But political pivot points require evidence of fear among the political class, fear that leads to policy retreat, across the board and embedded, not merely strategic. Action that changes outcomes for the people. They also require evidence of strategic, turbo-charged voter intent to bring down, or at least fundamentally to disrupt, the Uniparty system and the puppet-masters whose interests it serves.
I am not sure we are there yet. What might the indicators of a meaningful shift look like? Here are a few:
· Specific recognition of Covid errors;
· Abject apologies for the Covid evil the political class inflicted;
· Seeking justice for Covid policy victims;
· Recognition of the truth of the Barrington Declaration and the work of other Covid dissidents;
· A Covid Nuremberg;
· Utter rejection of World Health Organisation treaties and future “pandemic” oversight;
· Defunding of WHO;
· Resinstatement of ALL sacked workers for refusing the jab;
· Compensation for same;
· Evidence that the courts are resisting state power;
· Sending to jail those who lied about Covid vaccines, stopped effective treatments, covered up corruption with Big Pharma deals and caused deaths on an industrial scale.
Blind Freddie can see that we ain’t there yet. Crankiness among we-the-people is encouraging but not much more. The people have been cranky for a long time, and yet nothing has changed. The top-down tyranny has only grown. The Covid-enabled power structures are still in place. Governments are rolling out even more horrendous freedom-crushing legislation, suggesting anything but Covid remorse and a governmental re-dedication to individual freedom.
Indeed, there has been double-down. Vigorous silence. Look-over-there bread and circuses. Continued “normal science” in the Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) sense of the term. Covid memory-holing.
Only this week, as noted by the marvellous Australians v the Agenda, the geeky teenaged South Australian Health Minister suggested:
Vaccines are safe and effective, but unfortunately there is an incredible amount of misinformation online. We are going to do everything we can to ensure this doesn’t happen.
God help us all. This doesn’t suggest “victory” for we-the-people to me. It suggests continued, blissful technocracy-driven arrogance among the mediocre puppets who govern us. And a quietly vicious determination to continue to crush the outsiders.
Jeffrey Tucker is a realist, but he detects an approaching pissed-offedness among the victims of the relentless progressive-green-woke-Covid State. A mood that, with careful, strategic nurturing, could be transformed into a political counter-force.
Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to the powerful.
The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct. This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone who makes a basic demand for normal freedom – to speak or choose one’s own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask – can reliably anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely no sense.
The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.
All true, of course. But … all the institutions of influence are still very firmly in the hands of those who have sought (successfully) to control us and to drive agendas of tyranny. Our resistance to the narratives of the powerful is still, very much, at the passive grumpiness phase. Grumpiness can be countered by distractions and rewards by those determined to do so.
Using social media grumpiness and push-back as a measure of counter-revolution has its limitations. How many of the punters, especially the young, are clued into reality and to nodes of dissident thought on social media that will shift opinion and motivate political action? I am guessing, not that many. The numbers are revealed in the polled support for freedom micro-parties. Certainly, in Australia. I am guessing that Stuart Lindsay’s dictum that all most Australians care about is “Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate” still holds true.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/free-speech/2021/09/nothing-to-lose-but-chains-and-shame/
Yes, a lot of us are rejecting Government intentions in relation to digital ID and “online safety”. Filling in our online protest forms. But is there any evidence that such push-back is influencing executive actions? Nope. It is the old story of the quadrant of conformity. The aggressive non-conformists are the only agents of change here. How these people might be powered up to achieve opinion-shift among the passive non-conformists and, therefore, political heft is, as it always has been, the real question.
As I say, Tucker is a realist:
As for politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a possible unfriendly president in the form of Trump or RFK, Jr.
So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.
What does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly likely pathway for long-term social change? These are legitimate questions.
Yes, there is an abundance of global anger. We know this. To date, it has not shaken the elites one jot. There is much work to be done.
Tucker knows his Thomas Kuhn.
But how long does such a paradigm shift take? Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a bracing account of how one orthodoxy migrates to another not by the ebb and flow of proof and evidence but through dramatic paradigm shifts. An abundance of anomalies can wholly discredit a current praxis but that doesn’t make it go away. Ego and institutional inertia perpetuate the problem until its most prominent exponents retire and die and a new elite replaces them with different ideas.
In this model, we can expect that a failed innovation in science, politics, or technology could last as long as 70 years before finally being displaced, which is roughly how long the Soviet experiment lasted. That’s a depressing thought. If this is true, we still have another 60 plus years of rule by the management professionals who enacted lockdowns, closures, shot mandates, population propaganda, and censorship.
And yet, people say that history is moving faster now than in the past. If a future of freedom is ours just lying in wait, we need that future here sooner rather than later, before it is too late to do anything about it.
The slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There is no other path. The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.
Yes, there is much work to be done. On Team Recovery, there is room for political theorists, scientists, marketing people, networking specialists, community organisers, polemicists, strategists and many more. Tucker suggests that the cause isn’t hopeless. That is great, and I mean that. We need counter-revolutionaries as well as optimists, however.
Resist and rebuild, or doom. Indeed.
Paul Collits
12 April 2024
I wish it was so. The parts of the world it seems to be happening are where the screws have been turned the hardest. People only come alive when their livelihoods dry up. In Aussie the government is doing everything it can to catch up with the more regressive countries but I fear, with an election coming, they are cooking as many books as they can so nobody can really know how bad things are. Inflation is sticky, power is only going up, taxes are only going up. They have lost the agriculture vote and most of the religious vote and anyone trying to buy or rent knows there is a real problem. Businesses are going bust at an alarming rate but youth unemployment is still low. Makes no sense to me. I think we must descend further into the abyss. Bring on the ute tax and the manufacturing grift but we still have the problems of the uniparty, offering no real change, and the suicidal media determined to self immolate. Anyway thanks for the rays of hope, Bobs your uncle and the sun shines in The Lucky Country.
They are not nice people these elites and they will fight tooth and nail to keep us down.