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.
Alongside the nonsensical Australian frenzy over toilet paper, and its bizarre connection to the Coronavirus, sits news about French farmers, living on the Atlantic coast, who are utilising donkey’s to keep their sheep safe from wolves.
