Out of the mouths of babes and propagandists…
One hour ago as I write this, The New York Times published a big front-page story that begins:
The United States secretly manufactured biological weapons in Ukraine. It trained birds to carry pathogens into Russia. It created Covid-19.
My first reaction: Yowza! Man bites dog! NYT tells truth! MSM is stealing our stuff! I’d better invite this NYT journalist, Steven Lee Myers, as a guest commentator on False Flag Weekly News!
Then I read the second paragraph:
Of the many falsehoods that the Kremlin has spread since the war in Ukraine began more than six months ago, some of the most outlandish and yet enduring have been those accusing the United States of operating clandestine biological research programs to wreak havoc around the globe.
So the first paragraph had been an innoculation, and the second paragraph the desired immune response.
Regime propagandists have been using this “immunization” technique intensively for at least a decade. After 9/11 and the widespread loss of faith in the official story, a cottage industry sprung up in academia, heavily funded by grant money, looking at ways to “cure conspiracy theories.” (The seminal contribution to the emerging field was Cass Sunstein’s “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.”)
A consenus emerged that since conspiracy theories were a viral disease, the authorities should “innoculate” those who had not yet been exposed, while “locking down” the “carriers” (conspiracy theorists) off in the far corners of the internet where they wouldn’t “infect” the normies.
So how do you “innoculate” someone against conspiracy theories? Simple: You state the conspiracy theory (i.e. you inject the subject with a small dose of the toxic, contagious idea) and then “debunk” it (building an “immune response” in the subject).
That’s what the above-cited New York Times story tries to accomplish in its first two paragraphs.
Note that the Times’ debunking atttempt doesn’t actually engage in factual debate. It doesn’t have to. Most people are dominated by emotional, impressionistic thinking. So smearing the theory that COVID came from a US bioweapons lab as an “outrageous falsehood” and “Kremlin propaganda” suffices to innoculate the average NYT reader.
One thing the NYT innoculation attempt, I mean, news story, fails to mention, is the fact that the Chair of The Lancet’s COVID Origins Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, has made it clear that he thinks COVID did originate in a US bioweapons lab.
As Ron Unz has noted, that’s a bit like Philip Zelikow, Chair of the 9/11 Commission, saying 9/11 was an inside job. If such a thing happened The New York Times probably wouldn’t mention that, either.
Jeffrey Sachs is a consumate insider. He’s the last person on earth anyone would call a Russian stooge. Sachs was actually a prime villain in the 1990s looting of Russia, as explained in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.
Maybe he’s telling the truth now because he wants to be remembered for doing something admirable rather than reprehensible.
Why did The New York Times, the leading propaganda organ of the Deep State, find it necessary to run a big front-page innoculation against COVID origin “conspiracy theories”? I would like to think it’s because I just published “What America Needs Right Now Is a COVID Origins Truth Movement”—and then highlighted it during this week’s False Flag Weekly News broadcast.
Or because my video with Ron Unz COVID-19 Bio-Attack Smoking Gun! just broke 400,000 views on Rumble (the equivalent of millions of YouTube views).
But it probably wasn’t me, or even Ron Unz’s book and articles, that forced the issue. It probably was the Russians. The peg the NYT uses to hang its innoculation attempt on, the actual news, arrives in the fourth paragraph:
In Geneva this week, Russia has commanded an international forum to air its unsupported assertions again. The Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty that since 1975 has barred the development and use of weapons made of biological toxins or pathogens, gives member nations the authority to request a formal hearing of violations, and Russia has invoked the first one in a quarter-century.
Naturally the NYT piece assures us in advance—more innoculation!—that the Russian accusations will be unsupported by facts:
Virtually no Western officials or experts expect Russia to produce, during the weeklong gathering, facts that corroborate the accusations. If the past is any guide, that will not stop Russia from making them.
If the Russians want to provide facts to support allegations that COVID emerged from a deliberate US (neocon) bio-attack on China and Iran, they won’t have to work very hard digging them up. A strong prima facie case has been freely available on the internet since spring 2020.
China is on Russia’s side:
The state media in China routinely amplifies Russian claims about the war with Ukraine and about secret biological weapons research, as part of its own information battle with the United States that began with the debate over the spread of Covid-19.
China is in an “information battle” involving “the debate over the spread of Covid-19” presumably because the Chinese leadership knows that its Wuhan Lab was set up as a patsy to take the blame for the October, 2019 US bioattack. But don’t expect The New York Times to say that, or anything like it, any time soon.
COVID/Vaccines = Bioweapon/Antidote?
Many people have a hard time accepting that US leaders would be so stupid as to attack China and Iran with a highly contagious (even if only .5% lethal) bioweapon. Wouldn’t they be deterred by the possibility of blowback?
Certainly the blowback was intense. The US took a much bigger hit than China did. If someone with the mentality of Mike Pompeo or Robert Kadlec wanted to slow China’s economic growth using deniable bio-attacks, and decided to go with COVID, they would seem to have screwed the proverbial pooch.
If we consider the long-term strategic perspective, however, the picture becomes more murky. The key to the outcome of the US-China battle for global #1 power status is China’s economic growth rate, especially in key technological sectors.
If you’re a China hawk neocon dedicated to perpetuating US unipolar hegemony, you know that the prime US geostrategic imperative is to reduce China’s economic-technological growth by any means necessary, even if it means sacrificing US and global well-being.
Though COVID hit the US worse than China, it may still have served US/neocon objectives. It battered international trade and initiated a process of decoupling the US (and US imperial sphere) from China. (The US cannot credibly threaten pre-emptive war on China without decoupling first.)
And though COVID has harmed more Americans than Chinese, the very success of the Chinese “hard lockdowns” has prevented China from gaining herd immunity, necessitating continuing rounds of lockdowns that inflict economic damage.
So COVID may continue to slow the Chinese economy for years—or even decades if new variants and viruses keep emerging.
And then there is the most powerful and underestimated factor in history: demographics.
By disproportionately killing old and infirm Westerners, especially Americans, COVID offered at least a partial solution to the West’s single biggest economic problem: the massive bulge of baby boomers hitting retirement age and consuming heavily while producing nothing.
As US life expectancy crashes from 79 to 76 years, largely though not entirely due to COVID deaths among older people, the disappearance of people Yuval Harari considers “useless eaters” will actually serve to enhance US economic growth vis-a-vis China.
But what about the antidote? You don’t unleash a bioweapon unless you have an antidote, right? And if the antidote to COVID was MRNA vaccines developed alongside the bioweapon, what kind of lousy, dangerous, only-temporarily-effective antidote was that?
As the Unz Review commenter allergic2catz puts it: “How can ineffective/actively harmful (containment) measures (like MRNA vaccines) be ‘necessitated’”?
My response:
Remember the extremely harmful vaccine cocktails inflicted on US troops during Gulf War 1? The long-term vaccines-plus-toxins casualties were orders of magnitude greater than the war casualties: 60k deaths according to Doug Rokke, 250k disabled by Gulf War Syndrome according to Wikipedia.
The vaccines were deemed necessary to defend against Saddam’s potential germ warfare attacks. The anthrax vaccine was probably the worst culprit.
The military approach to biowar mitigation involves willingness to sacrifice a lot of pawns on the chessboard, especially in the long term, in order to preserve enough forces in the short term to win the game. The vaccine cocktails (like DU and lots of other toxins) were seen as a military necessity.
The US military presumably developed COVID and the vaccines (or their precursors that were later farmed off to the military-linked corporations) side-by-side, using a military rather than civilian approach to threat mitigation—in other words, they weren’t that concerned about negative side effects.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that the RAND and DARPA biowar strategists saw the COVID response as a dry run for defense against a future virus that could be much more lethal.
To which another commentator, Iris, added:
Especially that they believe the mRNA “vaccines” are their joker cards out of any such biowarfare trouble.There is something very unique about the mRNA “vaccine” technology: unlike traditional virus vector vaccines, an mRNA product can be adjusted to a new virus/new variant and be developed in relatively very short time. No long experimentation is required. This is why all booster doses, adjusted to fast-evolving virus variants, are mRNA, even in countries which used AZ or J&J among initial main vaccines.This is why the US warmongers are now so fond of using viral biowarfare: they think that they are the only ones able to quickly produce the antidote.What a depressing thought; we can expect more of the same, for sure.
By Kevin Barrett
Published by Kevin’s Newsletter
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com