Archives For COVID-19

“Follow the Science?” Obedience to Authority Vs. Personal Conscience

March 6, 2021 — Leave a comment

Quoting from the results of a study carried out in 1963 by Stanley Milgram, Chuck Colson predicted the kind of C0V1D-19 lockdown authoritarianism that was birthed by Communist Chinese authorities, and copycatted all around the world.

The Milgram ‘shock experiment’ was a study into ‘the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.’

Milgram’s aim was to see how ‘easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.’

He designed the study to answer questions raised by the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, and the defence’s justification that those on trial “were only following orders.” [i]

In 1974, Milgram himself wrote,

‘I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.

Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.’

Colson explained that up to 80% of those who participated in Milgram’s experiment were willing to ‘inflict painful electric shocks on another person if an authority figure told them to do so.’ [ii]

In 2007, Santa Clara University’s, Jerry Burger ‘replicated the experiment, and Burger’s results were nearly identical with Milgram.’

This prompted New York Times’ Adam Cohen to conclude, ‘that ordinary Americans are about as willing to blindly follow orders to inflict pain on an innocent stranger as they were four decades ago.’

Colson, not surprised by the results said, ‘the two experiments are a huge cautionary tale of how people respond to authority.’

The studies, he said, show that ‘nothing changes about human nature; we really do blindly follow authority, and very few people challenge it.’

Colson wrote, ‘when there’s social chaos, people will choose order over liberty. It’s the reason why, if you give a prison guard or a government clerk a little power, they become abusive.’

The ‘only real barrier preventing people from inflicting pain is conscience,’ which Colson explains is our God-given ‘internal moral bearings’ (see Romans 2:15) that have to be nurtured into maturity.

The problem and its cause are, as the Milgram/Burger studies infer, a lack of Godly nurturing, which is the consequence of ‘the breakdown of the family and moral decay in American life.’

The abdication from nurturing our God-given internal moral bearings blinds us to tyranny, and binds us to sinful participation in it.

People will obey a lawful authority without question, because there’s no acknowledgement of God; no other authority or power higher than Government fiats and stuffy, bloated Bureaucratic rules.

This is God vs. Government-become-god territory.

Where unjust laws are obeyed because, as Colson argued, ‘people have lost the concept of a law beyond the law.’

Which, says Colson, leads to a rejection of civil liberties, because ‘given a choice between order and chaos, Americans will always choose order – even if it shuts down some of our freedoms.’

The act of civil disobedience, he said, also becomes a farce, because ‘in a morally relativistic era, there’s nothing that kicks in and tells us that something is wrong.’

A docile, conditioned polis simply can’t know what they’re protesting, or find reasons to justify why.

It was a dismal prediction. Now a C0V1D-19 reality.

Atheist, secular humanist Governments following their Communist Chinese counterparts turned neighbour against neighbour. The police were weaponised against the people they’re paid to protect, and fighting the virus became about denouncing people perceived to be lockdown “lawbreakers”.

The highest civic duty was the surrender of civil liberties, wearing a mask, not questioning the mandated medical advice from bureaucrats, applauding their disaster porn, and staying glued to the media’s daily “briefings”.

As Milgram, commenting on the outcome of his experiment noted,

 ‘The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.’

To paraphrase Colson, the only sure-fire way to protect civil liberties, and live out just civil disobedience, is by ‘courageously asserting the law beyond the law’; disobeying unjust laws that are contrary to our internal moral bearings, informed as they are, by the self-revealing God of Grace, and His objective moral law.

Though it may seem like we are being ‘plunged into the abyss of hell’, Charles Spurgeon once said, ‘God does not leave us there alone.’

The ‘star of hope is still in the sky when the night is blackest. Surely out of death, darkness, and despair, we shall yet arise to Life, light and liberty’.

References:

[i] McLeod, S. 2017. The Milgram Shock Experiment, Simply Psychology

[ii] Colson, C. 2015. My Final Word, Zondervan  (pp.58-59)

[iii] Spurgeon, C. Not Left to Perish, Faith’s Checkbook March 3rd

First published on Caldron Pool, 4th March, 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

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Rapper, PitBull: If C0VID Authoritarianism Smells like Communism…

February 22, 2021 — Leave a comment
*Explicit language warning

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Facebook suspends Conservative Politician For Advocating Informed Consent

February 22, 2021 — Leave a comment
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is kelly-gvl-caldron-pool-2021.png

Australian politician, Craig Kelly’s Facebook page has been suspended over at least four quotes he’d posted in February. Each post gave expert opposing viewpoints to the accepted expert narrative over treatments for C0VID-I9.

The Liberal Party member for Hughes told The Australian’s Richard Ferguson that ‘Facebook went through thousands of my posts and only found five that led to the ban.’

Kelly, who isn’t an “anti-vaxxer”, said he “supported the Morrison government’s message on vaccinations,” and that all he is only “advocating for treatments in concert with the vaccine.”

According to The Australian, Facebook declined to comment, but said ‘that social media giant would crack down on any COV1D misinformation on its site;’ [quote] “We don’t allow anyone to share misinformation about C0VID-I9 that could lead to imminent physical harm.” [unquote]

Kelly has been a strong advocate for civil liberties throughout the COV1D-I9 crisis.

He is one of the few politicians with the moxie to tell it like it is. Up until his public confrontation with Labor’s Tanya Plibersek, and a subsequent ‘dressing-down’ by the Prime Minister, Kelly took a strong stand for Australians to have the right to “weigh the evidence” before taking the vaccine.

In a blunt explanation for Kelly’s ban, Rebel News explained that he was “booted” for one week for ‘touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine.

The Guardian, outlining reasons for the social credit score reduction to Kelly’s page stated that

‘The three posts related to: unproven claims about hydroxychloroquine by professor Dolores Cahill; a profile of professor Thomas Borody in the Spectator which includes advocacy of ivermectin to treat coronavirus; and claims by pathologist Roger Hodkinson that masks are “useless” for children and “paper and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling”.’

In response, Kelly told the Guardian that,

“The points are a legitimate point of view. I’m not posting my opinions; I’m posting the opinions of medical experts. “whether [the views are] right or wrong is a matter of debate, but their views should be debated”.

When asked for comment, Craig Kelly told Caldron Pool that “it was a sad day for free speech and public debate.”

He explained that,

“the four they’ve identified are actually not my opinions but opinions of highly ranked medical professionals, which I’ve put direct links to. In fact, one of them was nothing more than a cut and paste job from a story published in the Spectator magazine, on Australia’s professor Thomas Borody, and how he was suggesting Ivermectin could be an effective treatment against C0VID.”

The minister commented on the leap-before-looking, heavy-handed nature of the ban, stating

“The real danger of this is, Facebook argue, ‘It’s against our Community Standards – it’s dangerous stuff. With the studies that are coming through, it’s very likely in the next couple of weeks that the World Health Organisation will actually recommend Ivermectin, which Borody tried to do six months ago; now that debate has been shut down and over a million and a half people have died.”

Speaking directly about the mounting number of reckless bans, and blocking of reasoned content providing an opposing viewpoint, Kelly added,

“The effect of censoring [of] debate on these early treatments could have possibly been responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

So, where we should have been having more open debate and more free debate, shutting down debate is likely to have killed people. Not just one or two people, but probably hundreds of thousands. This is why throughout the last 250 years people have said free speech is so important. This is why people have said, ‘I may not agree with what you say but I’ll fight to my death your right to say it.’”

Cancel Culture’s COV1D-I9 fanatics may have scored a temporary win over Kelly, but in doing so they’ve added to further erosion of civil liberties.

Noting the word, “crackdown” used by Facebook, a better headline here would be:

Fascistbook suspends truth-teller for advocating the right of informed consent.

 

First published on Caldron Pool, 17th February, 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021

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Review: Fundamental Rights in the Age of COVID-19

February 1, 2021 — Leave a comment

Connor Court Publishing’s Fundamental Rights in the Age of Covid-19, edited by Augusto Zimmermann and Joshua Forrester, is a formal Classical Liberal rebuke of totalitarian anti-COVID-19 prohibitions.

Its chief criticism is against the blatant absence of any steadfast verbal or visual confirmation (from most of our elected representatives) affirming a desire for the dogged preservation of civil liberties. Reassurances which should have gone hand-in-hand with most daily briefings about Government initiatives aimed at protecting citizens from the COVID-19 Wuhan Virus, but didn’t.

This lack of passion for the conservation of civil liberties (even from so-called Conservatives or Christians in government) justifies the kind of necessary criticisms found in Fundamental Rights in the Age of COVID-19. One such being the danger of despotic Government’s undermining constitutional law, and placing citizens at risk of Governmental abuses of power by politicians arbitrarily granting themselves the right to act outside the Constitution.

The protection of civil liberties is a debate worth having.

Zimmermann & Forrester’s readable compendium achieves this and more.

Beginning with Rex Adhar’s cost to benefit analysis of lockdowns balancing the economic argument with the medical. His charge that elected representatives have ‘abdicated political decision-making to scientists’ is evidenced by ‘rushed COVID-19 laws’ was pointed. The bottom line is that the disproportionate responses to COVID-19 are likely to create greater casualties than the virus itself.

James Allan rightly states that many of the people advocating for lockdowns weren’t affected by them; and that ‘one of the effects’ of following the Communist Chinese Party’s lockdown fanaticism, was the ‘turning of law enforcement in an arm of the nanny state’ (p.43).

Noting in contrast to many Western nations adopting the CCP’s dehumanising Communist meat-grinder, that Taiwan (p.43) and Sweden’s response worked, and they ‘didn’t drive a truck through civil liberties’ (p.46 & 47) in order to do so. All for a virus ‘nowhere near The Spanish Flu’ in terms of ‘lethality and seriousness.’ (p.44).

As Morgan Begg argues, the virus has been exploited by bureaucrats, with ‘many of the isolation and social distancing rules going beyond what should be required under the guidelines’ (p.69). The ‘disproportionate response’ exposes citizens to ‘structural flaws in [COVID] legislation’ (p. 74) that allows governments (particularly Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews) to rule via emergency powers without accountability.

David Flint’s essay in chapter 5 is on par with Adhar’s ‘abdication’ argument. Governments let [helpful, but also unreliable] computer modelling rule the day (p.83). [i]

Another highlight is Anthony Gray’s distinction between whether a law is ‘prohibitive’ of foundational rights (Constitution) or ‘protecting’ those foundational rights, applied when testing laws against the constitution. For Gray Western Australia’s border closure offends Section 92 of the Australian Constitution.

Expanding a little bit in this direction, Polish contributors, Kudla and Blicharz see the marginalisation of Christians, and Churches as “non-essential” being the result of bureaucrats exploiting COVID-19, as well as ‘the collision of two fundamental rights: the right to practice one’s religion and the right to protect one’s life’ (p.144).

While condemning the marginalising of Christians under COVID-19 “protections” the authors contrasted Poland’s Church and State cooperative approach with the dehumanising, “non-essential” quota applied to the Church by most Western nations (p.159).

In other words, while Pastors and Christians were told that 2,000 years of care and charitable service was “not essential”, Polish (and even Italian) authorities recognised that Pastoral Care is an essential service.

While there are some overlaps, Zimmermann and Forrester’s careful ordering of well referenced essays creates an interwoven text. It all flows in an engaging, consistent and logical direction.

Rocco Loiacono’s criticisms of mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, and Government overreach, pivot on the principle of the ‘informed consent’ of the governed. For him 2020 saw the rise of ‘elected dictatorships…aided and abetted by a now all-powerful health bureaucracy’ that tends to ignore ‘frontline medical advice, preferring instead to hide behind [a] cadre of unelected bureaucrats, and state of emergency’ powers (pp.165 & 171).

The chapter is punchy, includes Big Tech’s ban on Doctors like Simone Gold, advocates for HCQ, and concludes with an appeal against rapid rollouts, when herd immunity still can’t be ruled out, with reference to the ‘horrible effects of thalidomide, a sedative given to pregnant women in the 1950’s and 1960’ precedent: ‘just because we are assured something is safe, or legal, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is’ (p.180).

Closing out the book, Gabriel Moens, with whom Jacques Ellul would agree (see Technological Society & Propaganda), talks about Government’s manipulative use of behavioural science (Obama in particular p.192), remarking that Government ‘intervention should be a last resort, not a reflex instinct’ (p.193). [ii]

The well-read, and prolific, Bill Muehlenberg presents a theological ‘petition, flight, and as a last resort, fight’ push back against the surrender of religious freedoms to what is essentially leftist Gnosticism (and exceptionalism).

Understood as such through Thomas Sowell’s description of ‘the exaltation of the anointed above others’ (p.220) – and I’d add Eric Voegelin’s ‘Science, Politics and Gnosticism’. The (conservative) sinner saved by grace ridiculed by the Übermensch “victim” class: sinless (leftists) saved by special knowledge.        

As was witnessed in Michigan (Gov. Gretchen Esther Whitmer, U.S) and Victoria (Premier Daniel Andrews, Aust.) when these Leftist bureaucrats approved fiats granting Leftists the right of protest, while denying other community groups that same right; often through police intimidation, encouraging neighbour to denounce neighbour, arbitrary arrest, and cost prohibitive fines.

Recall how Black Lives Matter, and anti-Australia “Invasion Day” protests went unopposed, but anti-lockdown protesters and unity preaching patriots were dehumanised as “Grandmother killers”, banned, blocked or defamed by celebrities and the legacy media as selfish deplorables.

While good, Monika Nagel’s defence of civil liberties (Chpt.11) through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the good and bad of Globalisation, and the purpose of fundamental rights, was unanchored; too existential. It lacked transcendent; concrete, objective ground.

The only protection of fundamental rights comes from the commanded order as revealed by God through His self-revealing in time and space, through Covenant and Christ: God gives us those rights, good government recognises, and protects those rights. It doesn’t make themselves the source of them or the determiners of good and evil.

As has been said, man over-Lord is man overboard. Anything else displaces the Logos from His rightful place, positioning man-made power structures to rule, tyrannically, instead.

Further along, Johnny Sakr’s use of Luis de Molina’s theological argument in respect to the relationship between Divine Sovereignty and creaturely freedom, seems overly verbose.

Though, Sakr’s end point linking up Molina’s theory with a “where is God in all this” question is well worth the effort. From God’s freedom, comes our freedom, and all the responsibility it infers.

Navigating both fatalism and open theism, Molina’s description of God’s Providential activity in the life of humanity as ‘strong actualisation and weak actualisation’ can also be read as Calvin’s distinction between ‘God doing and God allowing”, Karl Barth’s ‘God’s free, Divine Lordship and the invitation for participation given to His Creature as Covenant partners.’

As I have come to express it:

Not all suffering comes from God, but God works through all suffering. Those in Christ are not free from suffering, but are free in their suffering.

Steven Samson’s appeal to history, predominately the act of ‘interposition’ as just protections applied by just protectors against despotism, whether it be a Monarchy, Democracy or Republic, joins up with Muehlenberg’s argument.

Samson’s chapter is a fine read. In it pushes towards the conclusion that COVID-19 counter-measures were blurring, if not being used to abolish a separation of powers by merging the judicial, executive and legislative tiers into one politically aligned body.

William Wagner later calls this: ‘Governance by Decree.’

For Wagner COVID-19 reveals an erosion of fundamental rights as granted by foundational laws. ‘Decades of judicial activism diabolically evolve constitutional law, enabling State Governments to justify their infringements, emboldening them to govern despotically.’ Consequently, we see ‘an activist judiciary enabling Executive tyranny’ (p.351)

Wagner amplifies Samson’s,

 ‘which will prevail: politics – the art of persuasion and consensus-building – or despotism – the coercion of surrender and acquiescence? ‘days of reckoning are upon us.’ (p.338)

In sum, Fundamental Rights in the Age of COVID-19 asks and seeks to answer two main questions from a Classical Liberal perspective:

  1. Where are the sunset clauses for Totalitarian anti-Covid-19 measures?
  2. Why are our politicians not standing up for the protection of civil liberties, with as much gusto as they are protecting people from a pandemic?

There are syntax errors and some spelling issues, making the exceptional body of work look rushed.

I also think the limited number of references engaging with leftist academics might work against the book; opening it up to asinine accusations of confirmation bias. The Spectator and The Australian are linked to frequently.

Overall, Zimmermann and Forrester’s book is a readable compendium, full of uncomfortable truths that we need to adjust our ears to hear.

The slack approach from politicians in protecting civil liberties; the ease at which people have been willing to hand over total control to Government, not just without question, but with thunderous applause, lets an unelected bureaucratic caste lead our us, and our elected representatives around by the nose. We shouldn’t be letting such apathy and compromise slide.

COVID-19 prohibitions on fundamental rights are an atrocious betrayal of constitutional protections.

This isn’t justice and liberty. It’s fascism proper – make-up on a muddy pig.

In the words of Anglican theologian John Stott,

‘…the one thing a totalitarian regime cannot endure is to be refused the total allegiance which it coverts.’ [iii]

*Fundamental Rights in the Age of COVID-19 is currently available via Connor Court Publishing or Amazon/AU.

References:

[i] This ‘abdication’ is also evidenced by how the ‘Australian government ignore[d] world’s best practice, that of Taiwan, which was available at the time when relevant decisions were being taken’ (p.79). Reasons for this might include the fact that the CCP has ‘long made it clear that Taiwan is to be treated like a pariah’ (p.80).

[ii] In sum, “never waste a crisis” can be translated: disaster porn is a drug and they know how to use it.

[iii] Stott, J. 1992, Contemporary Christian, Christ & His Cross (p.67)

First published on Caldron Pool, 31st January, 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

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Actorvist, Alyssa Milano Claims Masks Offer Greater Protection Than Guns

January 4, 2021 — Leave a comment

“Defund the Police” Alyssa Milano has offered unsolicited advice to anti-maskers in a swipe at gun owners.

The Daily Wire unpacked the nonsensical anti-gun Twitter tirade where the Milano, keyboard warrior and actorvist, asserted that

 “Anti-maskers are the same people who think they need an AR-15 for ‘protection.”

This was followed by her “shouting to the bleachers” in an apparent attempt to make herself better heard, writing,

“LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK: A MASK WILL PROTECT YOU *MORE* THAN AN AR-15 WILL.”

Conflating questionable protections against COVID-19 with the effectiveness of guns as a deterrent against an aggressive assailant, is false equivalence.

The logical fallacy may have garnered Milano attention, but her use of it isn’t impressive.

For me, Milano’s appeal to faulty logic joins the “either/or” Joebama train of fear, election campaign which preached the falsehood of “vote for me or face certain death at the hands of COVID, climate change, racists and Nazis, man!”

This also furthers serious concerns about how COVID-19 is being used by the Leftist “elite” to expand their influence, control and financial power base.

Further to this, surely her anti-gun rant inadvertently equates gun-toting criminals with a virus, and therefore comes under the Leftist banner of “hate speech”, intolerance, bigotry and fascism?

Noting Milano’s hypocrisy in high definition, The Daily Wire referenced a Fox News piece from September reporting Milano’s reliance on local police.

According to Fox, Police were called by Milano’s neighbour because said neighbour was concerned about a “a man dressed in all black, walking in the woods between our properties with a gun.”

Milano’s husband then rang the police in order to ‘find out when they were arriving.’

The gun toting man turned out to be a ‘hunter stalking squirrels with an air rifle.’

Entering 2021, be sure not to overlook the hypocrisy.

The lived-out message from our would-be overlords hasn’t changed:

There’s one rule for those who wish to rule us, another for those they wish to rule.

Come the zombie apocalypse or anything close in equivalence, be assured of this fact: following any celebrity’s advice outside exceptions like Denzel Washington in ‘The Book of Eli’, will prove to be as stupid a move, as Hollywood’s spate of unoriginal, “avant-garde” films, that drip with all the trimmings of California’s Radical Leftist social engineering industrial complex.

First posted on Caldron Pool, 30th December 2020.

©Rod Lampard, 2020.

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Federal M.P. George Christensen’s “No” to Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccinations is a win for Civil Liberties

December 14, 2020 — Leave a comment

In a letter to the Prime Minister, George Christensen (LNP – Dawson) has requested Scott Morrison ‘consider legislation or regulation to ban coercive measures by private companies or state governments that seek to restrict service to those who choose not to receive the [COVID-19] vaccine.’

Christensen’s bold public stand is a reply to QANTAS executive, Alan Joyce’s November fiat, requiring customers, regardless of age and susceptibility to the virus, be denied service if they didn’t cough up proof of having received a vaccination against COVID-19.

While not breaking ranks with Scott Morrison’s leadership in response to the Wuhan Coronavirus crisis, Christensen, joins Craig Kelly in breaking free from under the shadow of fear cast by bureaucrats, and corporations manipulating the deadly coronavirus for the cameras.

Exceptions to Christensen’s proposal for legislation would include ‘high-risk cohorts of the community, such as aged care homes’ where ‘vaccinations may be required prior to entry just as it is with the influenza vaccine.’

As Caldron Pool has consistently warned, the denial of freedom to trade, think, assemble, speak, and worship, for not meeting arbitrary laws that infringe on Classical Liberal freedoms in the name of civil rights, turns a war against the virus into a war against the people.

The denial of livelihoods will, has and is already affecting lives.

The implementation of authoritarian rule starts with laws demanding proof of an oath, party membership, “approved” melanin, or “approved” ethnicity. In the case of a mandatory COVID-10 vaccine, ‘it begins with travelling on an aircraft. It [will] end with trying to buy bread.’

Regardless of whether you read Revelation literally or metaphorically, the “get vaccinated against COVID-19 or else”, is mark of the beast territory.

Especially when hypocritical would-be anti-Christs in business suits, or fanatic activists with a power fist are selling it.

Christensen’s careful “no” to mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations is a potential win for civil liberties.

(Full transcript and copy of the letter is available via Caldron Pool).

First published on Caldron Pool, 12th December 2020.

©Rod Lampard, 2020.

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The U.S. Election Debacle Is the Result of Democrat Disaster Porn

November 7, 2020 — Leave a comment

The COVID Reflex & the Mechanization of the Masses

Under the shadow of Democrat encouraged civil unrest, and Covid-19, the 2020 election was always going to be a close call.

Temporarily set aside valid concerns about voter fraud. Then consider the climate of fear that has been battering voters non-stop since January.

Leftist politicians and activists went from attacking pro-active, anti-COVID conservative governments with “that’s racist”, to “they knew and didn’t do anything to save lives.”

Go back to the debates. The Biden/Harris campaign maximized COVID-19 for political gain. Biden was propped up as the adult, taking Covid-19 seriously, while Trump was portrayed by the feckless legacy media as irresponsible, and reckless.

Aided by Big Tech, Doctors were silenced, while keyboard warriors asserted themselves as life-saving experts.

Anyone who presented a well-reasoned argument that countered the approved narrative, was censored.

When this was questioned, with the help of leftist funded “fact-checkers” hiding behind the word “Independent” (not to be confused with impartial), Big Tech told us that this censorship was “for the greater good” because it was about “saving lives.”

As has been suggested by others on various platforms, the consequence of this is that people have voted against Trump as though he was a) responsible for COVID-19 and b) was the virus itself.

Since 2016 the Democrats have been playing a zero-sum game. (Found in the murderous ambition of Antifa and BLM.) It wasn’t beyond them to pave Biden’s road to the White House with fear and the bodies of COVID victims.

Covid-19 may not have been designed to remove Donald Trump from the White House, but the Left was quick to weaponize COVID-19 as a means to do so.

As Amanda Prestigiacomo put it,

‘This election is not like anything we’ve seen before, with well over 65 million mail-in ballots cast, relaxed rules. (COVID panic porn vital here.) The chaos is a feature, not a bug. Trump needs to challenge everything. I think he will. His supporters can’t be disenfranchised.’

COVID-19 propaganda porn created a COVID reflex. Disaster porn has been the bedrock of the Democrat platform since Hillary Clinton failed to move into the White House after Barrack Obama, the leftist lord-of-lords and king-of-kings, ended his tenure.

The “vote for us, or face certain death at the hands of COVID and racists” equation appears to have been a winning formula.

This says nothing positive about American voters who appear to have voted in fear, because of falsehoods and fake news, over against facts, faith, and freedom. Victims of a successful, corrupt Democrat scare campaign.

The COVID reflex is the result of propaganda; vicious political maneuvering. It’s what Jacques Ellul called psychological warfare.

To illustrate this, Ellul pointed to the different levels of aid provided by the United States, and the Soviet Union to under-developed countries in the 1960s.

 ‘The United States gave three times as much assistance as did the Soviet Union; but thanks to propaganda, it is the Soviet Union who is regarded as the great helper and benefactor in whom one can put one’s trust.’ (Propaganda, 1965:134)

Ellul warned that the dangers in doubting the power of propaganda led to propagandists manipulating and implanting within the public a conditioned reflex. 

He deduced that ‘the propagandist seeks automatic responses; to induce action without consideration; mass movement without thought.’ (ibid, 300 & 302)

Enemies of this mechanization of the masses were ‘organic groups.’

This is why genuine dictatorships, and totalitarians undermine families, authentic churches, and traditional community assemblies.

The only way for the masses to be manipulated is to replace these groups with ‘new primary groups’; political action groups, parties, unions, where ‘the individual can be trapped and made ready for propaganda.’

This meant automated mechanization (ibid, p. 98). Examples include the Nazis’ strategy in banning Homeschooling, and undermining Sunday School with laws instructing parents to enlist their children in the Hitler Youth. Moa and Lenin’s political re-education mantra ‘each must be a propagandist for all.’ (ibid, p.82)

The point of this, Ellul states, is ‘to make the masses demand of the government what the government has already decided to do.’ (ibid, p.132)

Come back to the U.S. election, and four years of Democrat scare campaigning. The climate of fear successfully established conditions and controls. Covid-19 just gave the political establishment the impetus it needed to deploy hysteria and its subsequent, “vote for us, or face certain death” brain washing, to move the people against its political enemies.

As economics Professor Gary Galles concluded in his article for the Mises Institute,

‘The 2020 election results will be a test of earlier liberal/progressive “investments” in modifying how Americans think about things. But at this point, perhaps more important will be whether, after the fact, people recognize how much they have been manipulated, which is the first step to thinking more accurately, which must precede learning to effectively resist that manipulation.’

This COVID reflex may have given Joe Biden and the Democrats the edge over Trump. Fear is a powerful motivator. Much more so than freedom.

The globalist elite, and their bureaucratic caste friends in Washington D.C know this, and they strip-mined it for every ounce of political gain they could squeeze out of it.

The COVID reflex is a direct product of Leftist propaganda. More concerning than a Biden/Harris Presidency is this mechanization of the masses, and I’m almost convinced that the U.S. election results are proof of it.

First published on Caldron Pool, 7th November, 2020.

©Rod Lampard, 2020.

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