Tactics of the Propagandists: Part 6

In Part 6

‘Public Health’ Branding

Monopolizing Attention

Self-Abuse is Benevolent

The Pandemic Is Always On The Verge of Getting Much, Much Worse

Majority Knows Best

Social Interaction and SARS-CoV-2 are Deadly

Red Herrings

Firing Journalists for Reporting on Lockdown Harms

“We Had No Choice”

Making a Spectacle of Healthy, non-Seniors Dying of COVID

Pontificating Theories as Science that are not Disprovable

Speaking for ‘Science’

Choreographed Conversation

Celebrity Endorsements

Social distancing is extremely harmful to public health, even taking into consideration its role in decreasing the spread of coronavirus. The wellbeing-adjusted life years stolen by lockdowns is hundreds of times greater than a community with a 100% infection rate of COVID-19. Therefore, a pandemic response based in public health would actively encourage people to live normally and socialize freely, with optional distancing protocols in place for the elderly and infirm. 

On the contrary, the pandemic response has completely ignored the basic needs, wellbeing, and health of the population. Social distancing and face-covering edicts are political in origin. Obviously, government tries to portray the restrictions as evidence-based ‘public health’ policy. Officials also play on people’s trust of doctors, referring to the restrictions as “important medical directives” and the like. 

No government has produced a report demonstrating that pandemic restrictions will do more good than harm, or that they even decrease contagion of COVID-19. They violate every principle of public health including informed consent, do no harm to patients, the Nuremberg Code, basing practice on evidence, and free debate among scientists and advocates. All the world’s pandemic response plans, including WHO guidelines, before 2020 advised against the use of mass quarantines. The draconian life-destroying orders we have now are ‘public health measures’ in name only.

Whether or not it is by design of the lockdown architects, the attention of the public has become compulsively fixated on the mainstream media. People’s fears keep them glued to The New York Times website or BBC News channel around the clock — fears of the deadly plague growing deadlier, and of community life and the economy remaining crippled. The need to know the latest updates on the ever-changing restrictions also force people to check the news everyday. 

The lack of employment, social life, or even ability to leave home, removes almost all stimulation and time-users from our lives, leaving us with only the television and internet to keep us company. The media seldom discusses any issue besides coronavirus and pandemic restrictions. They only portray a fiercely pro-lockdown view, so people don’t even hear the arguments from the pro-rights side. As a result of these factors, our attention is monopolized on lockdown propaganda. Considering the degree of immersion, it is no wonder that most people have become hopelessly indoctrinated. 

There doesn’t seem to be any limit to the misuse of psychology. How sadistic does a person have to be to persuade others that suffering is good and should be embraced? That is what lockdown propagandists have succeeded in doing. They have marketed self-destructive behavior as patriotic and compassionate. Most people now regretfully believe that submitting to incarceration, mental deterioration, and poverty makes them heroes. The pandemic restrictions are, in truth, severely detrimental to health and wellbeing, so abiding by them makes people anything but honorable.

The main gimmick used to convince people that following horrific social distancing is noble is the claim that distancing saves lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds more years of life are lost from distancing than from COVID. Of course, lockdown apologists won’t even discuss the decrease in life expectancy caused by social distancing. 

To keep terror as high as possible, the media has always claimed that the coronavirus pandemic is about to get exponentially worse in the near future. Catastrophe is always right around the corner. The rocket has already taken off because we haven’t been isolating ourselves as much as they told us to. 

This scare tactic usually takes the form of dire predictions from ‘experts’ that a massive spike in COVID cases is about to occur unless we really dig in and avoid others completely. A year into the pandemic and the huge spike has never occured, yet the media still keeps claiming on a daily basis that it will come any day now — pure propaganda to keep the public terrified. 

Another COVID spectacle that we are told will happen anytime, or has already begun, is the development of much more lethal strains of SARS-CoV-2 that will wipe out a large part of the population if austere social neglect is not practiced. Since late 2020, the media really cranked up this angle. There are thousands of strains of coronavirus and, like all viruses, mutation is always occuring. However, there remains no evidence that any particular strain of SARS-CoV-2 is significantly more deadly than the other strains. Since people keep falling for this trick, you can bet the media will keep playing the “new strain will kill us all” game.

In many countries, such as Great Britain and the U.S., a substantial majority of people have unfortunately succumbed to the propaganda and support lockdowns. Who can blame them, considering the only press of the opposing side consists of defamation and misreporting? 

The press likes to report polls on the popularity of lockdowns. Majority support for a policy or viewpoint makes it seem legitimate, but it is only a cognitive bias. People inherently think that the higher the proportion of people who hold a view, the more legitimate must be the view. People often justify their view on an issue by saying that it is common: “Everybody drinks and drives.” “Everyone eats meat.”

The media are aware of majority bias and use it to influence public opinion. Mentioning surveys that demonstrate majority support for lockdowns is often used to influence readers of the merit of lockdowns. Government spokespersons often mention that the vast majority of people are “following the rules” to persuade dissenters to get on board with the majority and stay at home. It is also intended to intimidate. Showing citizens against lockdowns that they are in a small minority is threatening. Having few people on your side makes you feel like the cause is hopeless and instills fear over retribution or ostracism. 

The desire to go along with the majority in a new social development is often called the bandwagon effect. People are biased to believe that majority opinion must be correct, and also have the inherent psychological need to be ‘part of the group’ and get on board with the latest trend, even if that trend is destructive. It often doesn’t occur to people that many others only believe in something because they have been coerced themselves and are not thinking rationally.

In 2021, many people know that SARS-CoV-2 only kills elderly people with pre-existing health issues, and then only at a very low rate. Deaths in the rest of the population are rare. It is therefore not “deadly.” Calling it such is nothing more than fear-mongering. Everything kills some people. The cold and flu have similar risk profiles to coronavirus, including rare mortalities among the young and healthy, yet have never been considered deadly or used as an excuse to deny rights. 

Think of things that are not considered dangerous but can be for certain people or in rare situations. How about walking? Have you ever heard anyone say “Don’t walk. Walking is deadly!” No. But many people die from walking. Seniors often fall, break their hip, and die from the resultant pneumonia. Sometimes people get in fatal accidents while walking, such as being struck by a vehicle or hit by a fallen object. 

What about eating? It is an essential part of life, isn’t it? Like social interaction and employment, it is an essential need. Many people have died due to eating, but who refers to eating as deadly and advises people to avoid it? Food poisoning, food allergies, and choking are some of the ways in which eating can kill. If everyone had an intestinal feeding tube with a medical grade feeding solution, there would be no more eating deaths. But we would rather keep our steaks and restaurant dates and accept the miniscule risk of dying from food.

Social interaction is no deadlier now with endemic SARS-CoV-2 than it has ever been. Infectious diseases have always been around. Interacting with others sometimes results in  homicide or bullycide. Drug use is another activity that is often done with others and occasionally causes fatalities. Deadly accidents from recreational or workplace activities have always occurred. SARS-CoV-2 becoming endemic in the community does not even affect population life expectancy. The same can not be said for suicide, alcohol-related disease, and drug overdoses, at least not among men.

A red herring is a distraction used to take attention away from an important issue. The ruling class doesn’t want people to so much as think about the harms caused by social distancing and whether or not they negate the expected benefits. The main red herring used by lockdown propagandists to avoid the topic is to defame anyone who challenges them. If there is a protest against lockdowns, the media doesn’t even discuss the complaints of the protesters. Instead, they insult the protesters, call them idiots, lie about them not believing that SARS-CoV-2 exists, and accuse them of jeopardizing public safety by being in public. News reports of anti-lockdown protests don’t even touch upon the very reason for the protest.

Scientists speaking up on the harms caused by social distancing and other problems with the pandemic response, such as the extremely low reliability of COVID tests, have also been harshly slandered. The strategy is the same as with the protesters — keep the conversation on how the scientists are stupid to keep it way from the concerns they raise. Attacks against the scientists usually involve wildly distorting their positions or finding one controversial statement made and concluding that nothing that they say can therefore have any value. 

Very few reporters have allowed anti-lockdown perspectives to be heard. The little exposure given is usually a blatant attempt to discredit and embarrass. Sadly, many reporters have actually been fired just for allowing someone to criticize lockdowns in their report. What’s more, the lockdown critic is often a respected scientist or physician. 

It is not surprising to see reporters fired and blacklisted from the news industry for criticizing lockdowns or interviewing a lockdown critic. News agencies want the restrictions and hysteria to be as severe as possible for as long as possible. Fear = advertising revenue. That is their business model. If a coworker of yours did something to risk your employer’s profitability, how long do you think she would last at your company? 

Firing journalists who are not 100% compliant with the lockdown scam is not only bad for them, it is bad for society. The public doesn’t learn both sides of the story. Other reporters are intimidated into staying in line. Like all intimidation tactics, termination of unbiased reporters only works when there are very few people to terminate. If journalists started reporting fairly on the lockdown en masse, news agencies couldn’t continue using them as puppets. According to one journalist who was fired for playing a statement criticizing the pandemic response, many of her colleagues are opposed to the pandemic restrictions but they are too afraid of termination to speak up. 

Many politicians have responded with a dismissive “We had no choice” in responding to questions about why they imposed lockdowns. This empty argument has to get the prize for being the laziest tactic of the propagandists. Politicians who use this line don’t go on to explain that they had no choice because they determined that the benefits of lockdowns vastly outweighed their harms. In fact, they avoid any discussion of the harms of lockdowns. 

Politicians’ claim that there are no practical alternatives really means that there are no political alternatives. They saw how terrified the public was about coronavirus and noticed that it became the only issue on the public agenda. “We had no choice” is not an argument. It is a dismissal; a way to avoid scrutiny of public policy. It is related to framing that mitigating coronavirus is a war that must be won at any cost because the insinuation is that there was no choice but to lock down because the collateral damage is irrelevant.

The odds of a healthy person under 50 dying from COVID-19 are basically zero: only one out of tens of thousands of infected individuals. The odds of pandemic measures shortening life, however, are quite high, as demonstrated by the homepage graphs. Ever out to maximize hysteria, the media has hidden the statistics and flaunted the deaths of the few healthy young to middle-aged adults who have died from COVID. 

Along with showing off middle-aged adults who have died from coronavirus, there is often an explicit message that the virus can kill anyone at any age at any time. So be afraid — you may be next! The audience understandably gets the impression that SARS-CoV-2 is hundreds of times deadlier to people under 60 than it actually is. They may not even concern themselves with fatality rates. All the consumers of the media know is that coronavirus is super deadly and they should stay as far away from others as possible. 

This propaganda method is utterly detestable. It frightens people into appalling social isolation. It instills tremendous fear which is a serious harm in itself. Living with this constant, intense fear of the virus has destroyed quality of life. Surveys have discovered soaring rates of anxiety around the world. In the U.S., one in six people went into counseling for the first time in 2020. The media has been shameless in glorifying rare COVID deaths to make a profit.

Not all theories are scientific. There are criteria, or elements, of theory that distinguish scientific theories from other theories. One of the essential elements that any theory must have in order to be considered grounded in science is disprovability or falsifiability. No hypothesis can be definitively ‘proven.’ An experiment, for instance, can lend support that a hypothesis is true, but cannot prove for certain that it is true. 

On the other hand, a hypothesis can be proven to be false, and in fact can only be considered based in science if there is the potential to falsify or discredit it. For example, a horoscope prediction is not considered a scientific theory because it is too vague and general for a definitive statement that it has not occurred to be possible. 

Some of the basic theories underpinning pandemic restrictions cannot be considered scientific because it is not possible to disprove them. For instance, the most zealous lockdown proponents espouse a heartless theory that lockdowns have not stopped contagion because they have not been strict enough. They therefore propose hyper-austere police-enforced lockdowns in which almost no one is allowed to leave their homes for any reason. Of course, these villains place all the blame for the harms of lockdowns on the victims themselves: “We would all be living normally already if you didn’t have to go for that walk!”

This hypothesis can’t be disproven. How is it possible to prove that coronavirus would have been eradicated if people behaved differently in the past? It isn’t. It can’t be. If a governor inflicts increasingly severe lockdowns on residents, she can always claim that lockdowns didn’t work in the past because there were too many rule-breakers and the only solution to stop the spread is an EVEN MORE STRICT lockdown. This foolish yet popular argument is infinitely regressive and thus impossible to disprove. No matter how many lockdowns a state has of progressive strictness, the governor can always claim that the lockdowns haven’t worked because they are still not strict enough. Trash bin, please!

No individual can represent “science” or a field of science. Enforcers of social distancing boldly claim that “science” says that people should stay away from each other, often citing a public health representative of government who himself claims to speak on behalf of science. This begs the question, ‘What is science?’ Science is not the sole purvey of any one person or group. It is a process of continuous inquiry, of constantly challenging existing hypotheses. Science is debate, not doctrine. 

Lockdown propagandists constantly play the science card. Rather than using science to back up their claims, such as social distancing benefiting public health, they make decidedly unscientific and frankly, silly declarations like “The science says that we all need to stay home.” No government has produced a report explaining how staying home benefits public health. Rather, politicians heap scorn on any citizen or scientist who criticizes their obnoxious “Science says..” decrees.

Everyone is influenced by the views of the people around them whether they realize it or not. The influence is greater when it is from people with whom you identify, when it is regarding an issue that is new or unclear to you, and when the view is held by a majority of people in your circle of associates. News agencies understand that there is no substitute for peer influence so they create situations which mimic genuine peer interaction.

The discussions among hosts and reporters of radio and television news programs are designed to look spontaneous, but they are not. They are scripted, or at least planned ahead. Each host and reporter knows what the other ones will say and what they themselves are expected to say. The back and forth conversation is rehearsed before the show airs. Journalists are not allowed to express their real personal opinions, at least not on topics deemed critical by the company. They are forced to pass off their employer’s views as their own. That’s their job! 

No view has ever been as heavily promoted through fake conversation on news shows as has the view that social distancing is healthy and desirable. Almost every news program promotes social distancing with this propaganda technique, leaving viewers with the impression that it is a universally-held position. In reality, not only are many people against social distancing, but many of the “journalists” on TV are opposed to it as well. Journalists and television hosts have to lie about their views in order to keep their jobs.

Famous people are very influential. They have a unique ability to make something cool and popular. Corporations pay celebrities millions of dollars to advertise their products because they get a favorable return on investment. Charities effectively utilize celebrities to popularize their cause and raise donations. Famous people also have a great deal of political influence. A vocal A-lister expressing disapproval with an elected leader, for instance, can have a measurable impact on her approval ratings.

Public figures have a strong incentive to align with the majority. An actor who publicly expresses an unpopular opinion can see his box office — and therefore, personal — revenues diminish. In an effort to avoid controversy, fewer studio will hire him. They may even stop calling altogether. Criticizing social distancing is not only unpopular, it is a lightning rod for defamation and bullying. It is therefore expected that most celebrities not only keep the criticism to themselves, but actively endorse the cruel pandemic restrictions. 

Celebrities like to make videos from home showing off how strictly they have been imprisoning themselves — and enjoying it to boot! They know that that virtue signalling will pay off with increased record, book, or film sales. It is rather disturbing how few famous figures have spoken out against the restrictions, but they are merely acting in the best interest of their highly lucrative careers. The public doesn’t realize that celebrities are merely pandering to the majority and thus, the public is further inclined to support the isolation measures touted by their favorite actors and singers.