Conspiracies on Parade

This is a tough time to be a conspiracy theorist. And it's not because there aren't plenty of conspiracy theories to go around – on the contrary! They multiply and proliferate on a daily basis. They spill out, unimpeded, from the print media, TV, radio, the Internet, social media, and pretty much anyone you might encounter on the street (keeping a safe distance, of course). No, the problem is more about which theory to choose, or which cluster of theories to choose, and which ones to reject, and where to assign various theories according to perceived probability. Besides which, there don't seem to be any “leading” theories – ones that are getting the lion's share of the votes. While not all are perceived as equally probable, it seems like there is an unusually high number of valid contenders – kind of like the Democratic field when the 2020 race began. (We have yet to identify the Joe Biden of conspiracy theories, in other words.)

Of course, any situation that generates conspiracy theories also features the establishment narrative, also known as “the official finding”. This is, traditionally, something along the lines of “stuff happens”. In other words, there are accidents, coincidences, and random events that make up most of existence, and this is just another one of them. The most they will ever allow for is a single narrative, which is striking in its simplicity. For example, the “lone nut with a gun” narrative has been used so many times that it has become a meme, or a verbal tic. But curiously, the “lone nut with a gun” explanation is always accompanied by a frantic search for a “motive”. It never occurs to anyone that the premise (lone nut) renders any search for a motive futile. The very concept of a “lone nut” implies that there may not be a motive – at least not one that any sane person can understand. And I think on some level they (officialdom) know this, but they also know that people are looking for something they can understand and grasp on to, and which will provide that perennial will-o-the-wisp known as “closure”, which also ranks high on the list of verbal tics of our time. And “closure” is another word for “all is well”, and Big Brother is in control, and you can plug your thumb back in your mouth and space out. Brutal, but true. (Ever notice how network news programs always end with some feel-good, “human interest” story? That's the opiate that is intended to neutralize the crazy juice you've been force-fed for the preceding 55 minutes. Create fear, provide relief. Rinse and repeat. It's a time-honored method, and it works just as well now as it ever did. The fact that in the long run it creates chronic anxiety and paranoia in the public mind, and a longing for protection by Big Brother, is... well, how about totally intentional?)

And yet in this case, even the establishment narrative looks shaky. We all agree that it started in China, right? But did it start in a biological research laboratory or in a market that sells bat soup? Or pangolins? Or bat soup with a side order of pangolins? Or pangolin soup with a side order of bats? (And for that matter, was the laboratory studying viruses for public health reasons, or for biological warfare reasons? Or for both offensive and defensive purposes, not unlike comparable facilities elsewhere?) And then we have the interesting phenomenon of the media vs. the Trump administration when it comes to policies and actions vis-a-vis the corona virus. For the mainstream media, anything Trump is for they will be against, without exception. They will oppose his every action and every statement – his every thought, every gesture, every choice of necktie. So what happens when he assembles his corona virus team in front of the press every evening? When he and his superstars Fauci and Birx seem to be on the same page, Fauci and Birx are, according to the media, stooges, sell-outs, hacks, yes men (and women), sock puppets, etc. On alternate days, when there appears to be a rift between Trump and his brain trust, the media present them as saints! Victims! Whistle blowers! Martyrs! Scientists! And so on. So much for the unshakable reverence for “science” that the media always claim to have.

So what we have is an establishment narrative that looks anything but firm and well-grounded. It makes the narratives for the JFK assassination and 9-11 look downright Biblical – etched in granite! (And all the “conspiracy theories” in those cases are still scratching at the back door, begging to be let in.)

So... having set the stage, let's delve into some of the many conspiracy theories that festoon the airwaves and everyday conversation at this point (and these may not be mutually exclusive):

• Yes, it originated in China, but it was no accident. It was an intentional biological attack on the U.S. in retaliation for economic and trade sanctions, our position on Taiwan, our positions on currency manipulation, intellectual property, etc. As such, it was intended to be a “shot off our bow”, i.e. get out of our face or else (it could be worse).
• Variation 1: It was a probe – a test case – to see how effective biological warfare would be, what our response would be, etc. Corona was never intended to be the ultimate weapon, in other words; that's still under development.
• Variation 2: The intention was not only near-term but long-term. By bringing the U.S. to its knees economically, China would be assuring its ascent to the position of leading economic power on the planet – and, soon to follow, leading military power.
• Variation 3: The focus was on causing major damage to our military, which has turned out (no surprise, if you know anything about history) to be particularly vulnerable to viral infections and epidemics. If you can sap the strength of the U.S. military, and get it to stand down, it's much easier for China to continue its high jinks in the South China Sea unimpeded. (If the military was the prime target, then the civilian population counts only as “collateral damage” – something that aggressors are always willing to accept.)
• Footnote: China has decided that a direct military confrontation with the U.S. would be costly, and they might not even win. So they had to come up with something completely different (if not totally unexpected – after all, we've been studying the biological warfare issue since before World War II).
• It was a false flag operation on the part of the globalists and their collaborators in the U.S. (including no small portion of the Deep State). See that China gets the blame, while in fact they are creating a crisis in order to (1) cut the U.S. down to size, and (2) increase the power of central government exponentially, which will, in turn, (3) increase the power of the globalist elite once they consolidate their control over the U.S. government, which will, at that point, become a mere proxy or shadow government for the globalist empire, the way most Western European governments already are.
• It was cooked up by the vaccination industry and lobby in order to demonstrate, once and for all, that vaccination is the only way to survive, and that vaccinations for every conceivable ailment, up to and including toenail fungus, should be mandated by the government, and anyone who objects should be arrested and jailed because their reckless ideas threaten public health.
• It was a false flag operation on the part of our own Deep State, which seeks (1) a death blow to the Trump administration, because all other efforts have failed; and (2) an exponential increase in the power and reach of the Deep State, with the ultimate goal of complete control of the citizenry, including monitoring all movements, transactions, and social contacts. (The totalitarian dream, in other words.)
• It was a false flag operation on the part of our economic “planners”, political ideologues, “agents of change”, and the ruling elite. Getting rid of Trump is necessary, but it's only a first step. The main goal is to deliver the final death blow to the American middle class, and finally achieve what the elites have been dreaming of for generations – namely, a slave state made up of serfs and rulers, with the middle class eliminated as an economic and political factor. Note that:
  • The titans of big business have no problem at all with the shutdown – in fact, they're urging Trump to keep it going indefinitely. That should be a clue right there. And with their cash reserves, they can weather just about anything while they wait for their “stimulus” check from the Treasury Department.
  • The ruling elite and the working classes have recently discovered a common cause in demonizing the middle class and gradually eroding its resources and influence. This is exemplified in the makeup of the Democratic Party.
  • The economic shutdown is having a much more severe effect on the middle class – in terms of employment, income, and small business – than on big business (an example being the DJIA, which took a major hit but is still alive and well, because it represents big business, which has sufficient reserves to ride this out, whereas small businesses are dropping like flies and unlikely to recover). (It's also possible that the scheme included letting the Dow take a hit as a cover – “See, we're suffering too”, etc. But see what recovers first when this is over with.)
  • Footnote 1: Why is the middle class so despised and persecuted? (And why, for that matter, has this process been going on ever since the Progressive Era, although it has become much more blatant over the last 50 years?) For one thing, it tends to be, and vote, conservatively-- especially if you're talking about people in agriculture, small business, and the skilled trades. People who do meaningful work that has a well-defined product, and people with ties to the land, are naturally more conservative. It's the paper traders and parasites who tend toward the liberal side.
  • Footnote 2: What the people in charge of this project intend is for small business to vanish, and for all of those enterprises to be absorbed into vast industrial and commercial cartels which will eventually become synonymous with the State. Note that (1) this process is already underway, with predatory large businesses gobbling up small businesses at a rapid rate, and turning those business owners into franchisees at best, and wage slaves at worst; and (2) what we call “crony capitalism” will, in its ultimate state of evolution, become either business being a wholly-owned subsidiarity of the State, or vice versa. This will be a distinction without a difference. Whether those in charge are called CEOs or commissars will make no difference to the disenfranchised citizenry.
  • Footnote 3: But how does a “modern, industrialized society” function without a middle class? We've had that discussion before. The answer is that it doesn't – not in the way we're used to. But the Soviet Union managed to pull it off for many decades. (China, on the other hand, was stuck in the stone age until they decided to try a bit of free enterprise and property rights. And apparently it worked.)

And finally...

• It was a deal worked out between China – birth-control experts extraordinaire – and the ZPG cartel, to reduce populations worldwide because free and unrestricted abortion has failed to do the job (as has war).
• It was an act of sabotage by the “greens” and eco-fanatics, who are already celebrating the improvement in air quality as the result of restrictions on commerce and travel.

So... and this just scratches the surface (and I'm not going to assign a probability value to any of the above – consider that an exercise you can perform on your own). Stay tuned for many more, and many more outlandish (or maybe not) theories. (What's crazy one day is overtaken by reality the next. Then we have to redefine “crazy” – until the next day.)

So what we wind up with is a cafeteria of sorts (or a Chinese menu, appropriately enough) – pick two, pick three, and go to town. The thing is, these theories are all possible – quite possible, in fact, although I doubt if very many would succeed in isolation. In a state of symbiosis they could work quite well. They are not out of la-la land, they don't involve flying saucers or tinfoil hats or even 5G. They could happen because things like this have happened, more than once down through history (our own and that of the world in general).

It's also true that, regardless of how this all got started, there are plenty of people willing and able to take advantage – to the extent that it might be possible to add conspiracies, layer upon layer, as more people and entities pile on. So we might wind up with a single initial cause, but many conspirators after the fact. Is having dreamed something like this up worse than taking advantage of it once it's going full speed? To answer that you'd have to probe the minds of everyone involved, and who wants that job? Similar questions can be asked about any man-made catastrophe down through history. Are the people who lit the fuse worse than the exploiters? Well, if it hadn't been for the original mad geniuses, the exploiters would have had nothing to exploit, right? But being who they are, they would have found something else in due course. Plus, in some cases it might all have fizzled except for the people who came along and gave it more energy – a booster shot, if you will. This has been claimed for the Great Depression, for example, and it's almost certainly true of the Great Recession. Even in the present case, there is so much self-serving going on that it's hard not to find the people doing it guilty, regardless of what we believe about initial causes. There are slickee boys around every corner, and on every Internet page, looking to make a buck from other people's misery – 'twas ever thus.

But a word of caution is apropos here. It's one thing to theorize as to how something came to be, who cooked it up, etc. And it's one thing to theorize as to what they expected to gain from the event. (The eternal question, “Cui bono?” is always relevant, and no, it's not always about the money, but that's usually the first place one should look, to be closely followed by power.) But when one views any major event in retrospect, and sees who and what really benefited, it would be a mistake to assume that that was always the motivating force, and that those who benefited were in on it from the start. For example, plenty of people benefited from the events of 9-11. Does that mean they were all in on it? Maybe their benefits were accidental – something the people who really were in on it allowed to happen, partly as a cover and partly because it was too small a matter to be concerned with. If a hedge fund manager makes a killing in the stock market by devious means, and some day trader makes a killing because he happened to have a portfolio very similar to that of the manager, that doesn't mean the day trader was in on the scheme. Likewise, there will be many people who will benefit from the current crisis, and we shouldn't hold them accountable without further evidence. On the other hand, some of the conspirators may actually wind up losing, but that does nothing to lessen their guilt.

I should add that – in line with the fragmented establishment narrative – public confidence in the government's pronouncements seems to be at an all-time low. (Who knows, maybe conspiracy theorists will someday be in the majority!) This is attributable to the Trump Effect to some degree, i.e. to the idea that some people would trust the government if Trump weren't nominally in charge of it, and some people would trust Trump but not the government in general. But regardless of the reasons, this newfound skepticism can only be a good thing. The ruling elite has been blowing smoke up our butts for generations, with the full cooperation of the mainstream media, and if it's time for a reckoning, this would be a good place to start. Part of it, of course, involves skepticism regarding “experts”, and people who rely on “models”, and of course this can run into the opposite extreme, namely that of anti-science. So as with any other historical process that can be characterized by thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the present process may yield up a favorable and valid middle ground, where the “experts” are no longer worshiped without question, but the citizenry are not treated like a bunch of idiots and retards either.

At this point in history, as omnipresent and powerful as the ruling elite is, I don't believe that they have yet acquired total control, by which I mean total control. We have not yet become a people's republic (although a lot of people are starting to think they're inmates in some vast prison camp, and it's hard to blame them). I think the current crisis is a major step in that direction – perhaps the biggest single step since the Depression – but total control? It would be like having total control of the weather. There are just too many variables... the system is too complex, and there are too many random factors. And besides, you have human nature, which is notoriously fickle, cupidic, irrational, and subject to whims, crazes, fads, panics, and hysteria. (And American human nature is especially that way, as we see on a daily basis.) Every time a totalitarian regime has attempted to remake mankind, it has failed – we had the Master Race, the New Soviet Man, and all of the various lunatic schemes of Chairman Mao and his acolytes in places like Cambodia. All failures, and spectacular ones at that. Why should this be any different? We are feeling the cold, heartless hand of totalitarianism in our midst and in our daily lives at this point, but at the same time the Regime is getting a lot of push-back. People are cooperating up to a point, but then turning around and saying “Enough! We're not taking it any more!” They are spilling out onto the streets and highways in protest, and to hell with “sheltering in place”. This, to me, is an encouraging sign. Other peoples, at other times, have resorted to sabotage, insurrection, revolution, and so on; I don't think we're anywhere near that point as yet. But if the degree of oppression, and its degree of apparent arbitrariness, increases, we may see signs. Right now, the “vibe” I'm picking up is similar to the “feeling tone” of people who have to pay income and property taxes, or obey traffic laws. They gripe and mutter, but they do it – grudgingly and with occasional glimpses of dark humor. The elite have to think long and hard before they assume that if people are basically cooperative now they will remain so if the ante is raised. There is a point at which any people – any society – will rebel, and turn on its masters. And this varies from one society to another. In Cambodia half the population had to be exterminated by the other half before people decided they'd had enough. Things were slightly less severe in Mao's China and in the Soviet Union, but the dynamics were similar. Right now we seem to be at the tipping point – either we capitulate to increased control, or we fight back. And fighting back will not be without cost; it never is. “There will be blood”, as the saying goes. What comes out at the end is anybody's guess, but whatever it is will both confirm and debunk conspiracy theories. Many will fall by the wayside and others will rise to greater prominence (those Democratic primaries again!). Those that survive will serve as a conceptual template for the future, and those that don't will nonetheless be stored up in the event of future needs, like 3-piece suits. There is, after all, always a future – maybe not the one we would like, but a future nonetheless. And the chances are that it will continue to be inhabited by flesh-and-blood people, not just by bats and pangolins.

There will be many winners and losers who will come out of this episode – some according to plan and some according to accident, and some with what one might call karma (good or bad). It's going to be very interesting to see how it all falls out – even though the process may take years or even decades – and how it impacts the future of this nation and society.