writing history to avoid repeating it

because the people who lied knew that they were lying and if we let them lie about having lied about lying, this is never going to end

i’m going to run back through some familiar themes here because i think it has quite a lot of current relevance and an important current implication.

history is written by the winners and given where we are right now, what happens next seems to be of unusual import because these last 5 years have been some strange days indeed.

the simple fact is that 2020-1 was a golden age of state sponsored propaganda (and trust me, we are not out of the woods on this yet). the west has seen nothing like it since the 1930’s, perhaps ever. as we get some distance and some perspective, the chicken little brigades that fell for and cheer led this departure from civility and from reason seem to be adopting a stance of “well, it’s over now,” “it was a long time ago,” and “let’s just forgive and move on” because “the experts meant well and were doing the best they could with uncertain information in a scary rapidly evolving situation.”

flatly, this is unmitigated tripe and apologia for deliberate misbehavior, manipulation, and profiteering.

and that is a critical distinction to internalize.

this was not an accident. this was not uncertainty or “honest errors.” it was deliberate, deliberately dishonest, and done in the most manipulative of fashions with malice aforethought by agencies and agents who specialize in doing exactly that.

we need to look at this not so much as “fog of war” as as a crime scene.

one might go so far as to ask about whether and to what extent the covid capers quite literally amounted to a de facto putsch against a sitting president to destroy his tenure and to set up vote that would take place in unprecedented fashion by unaccountable mail in ballots resulting in an election riddled with irregularities and implausibilites.

i’m not sure we really have an answer to this at this point, but the remarkable lack of curiosity about the question and lockstep denials as “misinformation” lobbed at any such inquiry by the same people whose behavior we’re about to dig into remains striking. at the very least, it’s an issue to explore and as i hope to show, there are some big questions here that remain unanswered (and even unasked).

tanks for nothing, debbie

continuing “never trust a public health official week” here on bad cattitude, i’d like to present an excerpt from the propaganda praxis of 2020. in keeping with my preference for “hearing people present their own positions in their own words” in order to avoid straw men and groupthink, here is debbie birx, who headed up the trump team covid response, and whose arrival at the white house had such a profound effect on policy quite literally inverting it from “it’s fine, go on a cruise if you want to, healthy people should just go live their lives and masks are covidian cosplay and don’t work to stop spread and neither do lockdowns” to “lock down, mask up, and wait for the jab” in a matter of days.

both tony fauci and trump were aligned with a policy more akin to sweden, a policy in keeping with 100 years of standing evidence based pandemic guidelines. given what ultimately happened, it’s difficult to remember this, but it seemed, for a moment, that the US might stand as a bastion of calm and sanity. then it all flipped when debbie rode into town. she did not come from public health agencies, she came in through the office of the national security advisor.

odd place to pick a pandemic provost. great place to pick a propaganda pusher though. the US intelligence community specializes in this stuff and in election interference and post 9/11 and patriot act have been a lot more active and muscular at home.

quite the curious confluence there for what turned out to be perhaps the most massive psyop ever perpetrated upon the american people.

here’s the debster laying it out:

note the strikingly dishonest claims and sloganeering right from the beginning. they literally thought through and war gamed all the objections and then found ways to frame the messaging to pre-bunk and disarm them.

and they knew they were lying. they lied because “if we told you what we really planned, you’d say no.”

not a terribly reassuring stance for government officials with such broad purview over lives and livelihoods, is it?

“two weeks to flatten the curve” was brilliant. it sounded reasonable (unless you know anything about disease spread, which most people don’t). it had snazzy graphics and an easy, direct ask. it had an embedded end point and sounded like “hell, it might be a bit of fun to work from home in PJ’s and have a little staycation for a fortnight.” for those unconvinced by this proposition, it added a moral dimension of “this is how we protect the vulnerable” to make it your obligation and not your choice to comply. or did you want grandma to die you horrible, selfish person you!?!

“we’re asking communities to come together and stand up against this virus.” common enemy, call to duty, ostracization of the non-compliant. it’s psyop 101.

watch the video.

psyop 102 is getting you trapped in a sunk cost fallacy of “we’ve already come so far and given up so much, just a little bit more to make it all worth it!”

just 2 more weeks. then 2 more. then, wait for it… 2 more. remember how it was always “just a bit longer”? yeah.

these people really are very good at what they do.

“your mask protects me, my mask protects you” was absolute pseudoscience and twaddle, but as a soundbite, it was epic. if they had clio awards for propaganda, this one would have won the whole night. it’s perfect.

“i am doing my part to protect you, do yours to protect me!” last time we saw this is was price fixing under FDR’s blue eagle.

at a stroke it’s the removal of free choice about you and the imposition of imperative to serve others. failure to adopt this highly visible, public marker that dehumanizes and disconnects you drives instant opprobrium casts you as not just as other but as antagonist. and this maxim clearly drove 20-30% of the population mad. i was screamed at by strangers on streets and (quite literally) braced by police over it. they were frothing in anger that i would make this choice and endanger them. they had no interest in facts or realty, just in fear and response and the chance to strut as moral avatars and attack any who failed to submit. giving fragile people the right to be beastly to others and congratulating them when they do so is how you stir up an ethnic cleansing conflict. the meow-meows are unclean. we must remove them from society!

masks were perfect as a high visibility public marker of tribal loyalty and perhaps even more potent as an endless, ubiquitous intensifier of perceived crisis. nothing looked normal. there were no faces, no feedback. all day every day at work and at school and at the store you could see that everything was not normal and just the act of wearing a mask convinces the wearer that they need to be masking because “i would not be doing this thing i dislike if it were not so dangerous out there.” it’s perceptive manipulation by performative cognitive dissonance, a very powerful embedding technique especially if you add both dehumanizing aspects and a context of social opprobrium and duty.

this spilled hard into vaccines where “your vaxx protects me” turned rapidly into “should the unvaccinated be tolerated/allowed out in public/given access to medical care.” a not insignificant percentage were so captivated by this divisive and predatory rhetoric that they were positively frothing for a game of “rawanda” with the unvaxxed playing the tutsi.

the “experts and officials” lied about all of this too to invert the ethics.

then they lied about the lies they told and spun it into “it was never supposed to stop the spread.”

but that’s outrageously, provably false.

there was never any evidence to support a claim that the vaxx would be sterilizing and prevent covid carriage and contagion, but this did not stop the entire edifice of public health from making this baseless attestation over and over again.

we have about 12 million receipts including reams of video.

the vaxx trials were shams, the products shipped were not the ones tested, the covid drugs were garbage and the functional ones were banished from the market and derided as “horse paste” despite having been used in a billion humans.

the campaigns on everything were always breathless and uncritical lionization of falsehoods and absurdities and the endless false vilification of any opposing idea using words like “denier” and “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-masker.” they were the “side of science” despite having just abandoned it and “do your own work” was an extremist dictum. mass rallies and the burning of cities was fine, but going to school or the gym was not.

this was propaganda praxis of insane intensity, duration, and ubiquity.

and it was done with full deliberation and consummate skill.

it penetrated everything and never, ever let up and every message was from the same core: it’s your duty to obey and anyone who disagrees is evil and unclean.

and there is simply no way that came from health agencies. they don’t know how and lack the capability to pull this off even if they wanted to and could conceive of it. this is not how they work. i’ve never seen them use this sort of “othering” and vilification before. they don’t do that.

this was somehting else.

you guys know me well enough to realize that my base prior is generally not “conspiracy” but rather “stupidity, cupidity, incentive, and emergent behavior.”

but i think we’re long past the point where one can make that claim about what’s going on with government and its messaging of late.

we’re being attacked.

there is, in fact, quite a lot of information on this and quite a lot that leaked from the UK where “People who stated this at the time (stated that covid was being overstated as danger) were monitored and censored by the Counter Disinformation Unit, Rapid Response Unit, 77th Brigade, MI5 and MI6. Simultaneously, public opinion was steered by the Nudge Unit.”

they shared info and techniques with the US. (and it was not the health agencies they talk to, lemme tell you)

the US did a better job with cut outs and cover ups and quasi academic groups at stanford, but it was the same dirty game from the same dirty players.

these soundbites and precision positionings were, most emphatically, NOT an accident. they were the output of a very sophisticated milspec/intelligence community persuasion and propaganda factory and of all the things i missed most egregiously in predicting covid was the fact that people were going to fall for it. in my mind, this was transparent twaddle and despite having literally studied the propaganda modes of the 1930’s, i presumed them to be outdated and somehow quaint. no way that sort of ham handed blatancy or repetition and fear mongering would work on rational, modern people with access to information and internet.

wrongo.

nice try kitty, here have a full lifetime supply of “shattered illusions.”

obviously, this stuff worked like a charm and especially early on those of us crying “foul” and “nonsense” were drowned out, overrun, vilified, turned upon, and impugned in motive and credential. it was a world class bum rush and there was just no shoveling back the tide and when we did manage to get some traction, the powers that be kicked us off social media as part of massive state sponsored censorship campaigns.

lest you think i exaggerate, let’s once more return to the book of debbie, “letters to kneecap the economists”:

they deliberately manipulated the reports in the white house and drove trump (who understood little of this and had a major failure of nerve and courage) into making truly terrible decisions and effectively destroying his own heretofore near certain re-election prospects.

but señor cat, we already know most if this, it’s old news, old hat. why are you bringing this up again now?

because now is when it matters.

we’re having an election and who wins will, to great effect, determine whether any of what just happened EVER sees the light of day. you cannot fix what you cannot see or what you cannot speak about and whatever one believes about donald or kammy and their various plans, only the orange light has any chance of shining though this murk and revealing all the cockroaches in the kitchen.

kammy whammy will sweep it out of sight never again to be seen and we’re never going to have the hearings and reckonings we need to get past this. and we need to because until this domestic informational warfare machine is dismantled and discredited, it will lie in wait, waiting to roar into life once more crushing liberties and society beneath its remorseless treads and miring america in misinformation.

“4 years to bury the truth” will be bad enough, but “4 years to make up a new one” will be even worse and the scope and reach of the tentacles here passes WAY beyond public health and into all manner of history and the right of dissent.

it comes for speech, guns, borders, elections, schools, culture, and even the idea of facts. if you doubt such claims, consider this:

huge swathes of america still believe that jan 6th was an insurrection, the gravest threat to US government since the civil war with trump playing at dictator and attempting a coup.

it’s complete nonsense. he urged troops to be there and urged the attendees at his rally to stay calm and peaceful. it was pelosi and the capitol staff and the pentagon saying no.

"iT wUz AN INsuRreCT!on!" really falls apart once you realize it was the "bad guy" trying to prevent it and that is was the "victims" seeking to enable attempted reichstag arson.

and seriously, a mob of the most heavily armed country on earth showed up to overthrow that state and not a single one had a firearm? pull my other paw, it plays "la marseillaise”… (a fine, bloodthirsty national anthem, btw)

it really does all wind up being a bit much…

the things done to americans these last 5 years were a concatenation of crimes and the cover up is under way but far from complete.

there is still a chance to dig back in and perhaps to even dig deeply enough to start asking the meaningful questions about just what role the intelligence and justice communities played here.

history is written by the winners and those who won dirty rarely tell true tales.

but the worst part of all this is the acclimatization. we’re getting used to this, coming to expect it. outrage after outrage in never ending stream and ever accelerating audacity and blatancy. this is not an accident, it’s the point. it’s how you demoralize a population to the point where they can no longer even muster outrage, much less resistance.

consider:

in the 1980’s or 90’s, this would have elicited a fire and brimstone level response:

today, it’s “meh, yeah, we know, but what are you going to do?” nothing. people will do nothing.

people who burned cities got paid because police were mean to them. and people who politely left the capitol after doing no damage and threatening no one got real, hard prison time.

“for my friends, infinite license, for my enemies, gulag for jaywalking.”

the only thing stopping us from being a banana republic is that we’re no longer credibly a republic.

we need a break.

this endless barrage of info and emotive war needs to stop.

and her imperious world salad queen would not be a president to rein this in, she’d be the one where it REALLY got control because she’s even weaker, dumber, and more puppetable than biden.

y’all know i have no great affinity or even respect for trump, but at least with him we could get a chance to dig out and find some accountability and RFK might be some real help there.

last time, donnie got his jersey pulled up over his head, got jacked into the boards, and beaten senseless. i suspect he’d like some payback and that that payback could be useful.

we’re at a sort of infection point in history where what we normalize and institutionalize and cast as our collective history over the next 4 years is going to matter a lot.

who has the power to expand or curtail agencies, to hold them to account and open them up to daylight or to sweep their misdeeds under the rug is going to matter a lot.

worth considering as one evaluates the election.

and if one were seeking a simple heuristic for good decision making, you could do a lot worse than “do the exact opposite of whatever these people tell you to.”