Senor Supersol2016 via Wikipedia Commons
Suppose for a moment you’re in control of the US government, either overtly or covertly. There’s a growing anti-government movement which is increasingly committing acts of domestic terrorism. This is a problem you need to nip in the bud, but you can’t do so in a brazenly violent way.
If you do, then you suffer immediate, severe loss of legitimacy with your allies. For example, look at the steep price China is paying internationally for their mistreatment of the Uighurs, as well as their long list of human rights violations from prior decades.
Look also at the steep price the US government pays in terms of public face for operating Gitmo and internment camps at the border. Look at the price they continue to pay for operating Japanese American internment camps during WW2. Overt, publicly visible acts of evil are “expensive” in many different ways, and thus poor statecraft.
Another reason you can’t solve this problem with violence is that most US soldiers aren’t going to fire on American citizens, especially ones who share their political and religious views. Then there’s the fact that this segment of the population is infamously well armed and not shy about making use of those arms in stand-offs with the feds.
You can still probably force it to happen, but not without enormous public outcry and international condemnation, sanctions and other lasting consequences. Your legitimacy will be destroyed, the remainder of the population is likely to rise up against you, and rightfully so as you just committed a massacre against your own citizens.
Can you perhaps kill them discreetly? Poisoning them for example, either through the public water supply, through contaminated vaccines, or by dusting whole towns and cities from the sky via chemtrail emitting airplanes. The problem with this is that all of these approaches distribute the evidence of your wrongdoing very widely, outside of your ability to contain/conceal it.
Anybody can use readily available chemical tests on soil samples in afflicted population centers to prove you’re raining down toxic particulates onto them. Anybody can do the same with tap water. Anybody can steal vaccines and perform an analysis on the contents. Then you face all the same consequences as if you’d simply rounded up your targets into death camps, or gunned them down in their homes.
Benoit Prieur via Wikipedia Commons
The problem with distributing poisons through vaccination, in particular, is that your target group isn’t going to get vaccinated. They don’t trust you. If you mandate vaccines, that’s the signal to would-be insurrectionists to avoid the jab at any cost, including their own lives and livelihoods. In this scenario the only people you successfully poison are your loyal supporters.
But what if you turn this scenario inside out, and come at it from the other direction? What if, instead of trying to trick your targets into accepting a poisoned vaccine during a fake pandemic, you instead use kindergarten level reverse psychology to spook them into refusing a legitimate vaccine during a real pandemic?
The poison in this case isn’t the vaccine, it’s the virus. The virus your targets don’t believe is real, or if they do, they don’t believe it’s a danger to them because they think the average survival rate applies to them no matter how many risk elevating attributes they have (obesity, old age), no matter how many risk elevating actions they undertake (partying without masks), and no matter how many sensible precautions they neglect (masks, vaccination, social distancing).
It is a boon to such a wicked government, that innumerate misunderstanding of statistical probability is so widespread among the ranks of their opposition. It’s like someone venturing naked into the wilderness slathered in barbecue sauce, reasoning they’re safe from bears because the average rate of maulings per year is vanishingly low.
Yathin S. Krishnappa via Wikipedia Commons
If this is how you go about killing off undesirables, you face no consequences. You’re blameless; you didn’t create the virus. You didn’t tell anybody not to take the vaccine. You in fact made the vaccine free to everybody and urged them to take it. You broadcasted PSAs explaining how the vaccines work, that they’re safe, and in every other way you did everything that could reasonably be asked of you, trying to keep the public safe from Covid.
Your enemies voluntarily suicided. You not only didn’t force this fate upon them, you struggled mightily to talk them out of it, knowing all the while they would reliably do the opposite of whatever you recommended. Problem is, the virus isn’t lethal enough.
It’s killing ‘em alright, especially the stalwart right wing elderly voting bloc. But even though variants have emerged which kill younger and younger patients, and even though pneumonia as a complication of Covid is what’s doing most of the actual killing rather than Covid itself, only a few hundred thousand have so far perished. At this rate they’ll get wise before variants can finish them off.
This might be a boon in that many of those who don’t suffer significant symptoms will, due to survivor’s bias and not losing anybody they personally know, go on thinking Covid was a nothingburger. So they will once again refuse vaccination if/when a significantly more lethal variant arises, wholly unprepared, dying to it as a result. But then again, the ones who suffer more severe symptoms but still survive often change their minds, urging others in their political circle to vaccinate, undermining your goal.
Alberto Giuliani via Wikipedia Commons
What you need is to prevent those who suffer serious symptoms from going to the hospital, which you accomplish via anti-vaxx memes claiming the ventilator is what kills you, even urging the infected to stay away from hospitals altogether. That’s one half of the strategy.
The other half is to prevent as many unvaccinated patients who do go to the hospital from recovering as possible. They’re filling up ICUs across the nation, incurring steep hospital bills, but often succeeding in cheating deaths thanks to the tireless efforts of medical professionals they spent the prior weeks or months demonizing on social media.
So, you introduce a vaccine mandate which punishes refusal with job loss. Besides selectively impoverishing undesirables, this also results in an abrupt reduction to the number of nurses available in already overwhelmed ICUs, which indirectly increases mortality by reducing the quality of care. Other strategies include posing as anti-vaxxers, promoting ineffectual alternative treatments which are dangerous in themselves, like Betadine, Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin (in the high doses some anti-vaxxers are taking).
Assisting you in this endeavor are complicit megacorps like Facebook which performatively censor anti-vaxx memes, so as to further convince anti-vaxxers that they possess a forbidden truth, while ultimately facilitating the spread of misinformation with an algorithm that favors controversial high-engagement posts.
Today Testing via Wikipedia Commons
This is how you covertly introduce talking points that get the undesirables to take the specific self-destructive actions you want them to. Talking points like “Stay out of hospitals”, “It’s the ventilator that’s killing people”, and “Stay away from the vaccinated, they shed spike proteins”. All exactly what you might wish them to believe in order to maximize fatalities only among the undesirable group.
The reason corporations might be complicit in such a scheme are numerous. First, automation is rendering an ever-increasing number of American laborers obsolete. Useless eaters who will eventually agitate for basic income, paid out of the pockets of the billionaires who own corporations like Facebook. The more proles you trick to death, the less lives you’ll eventually have to finance.
Another reason is climate change. Anti-vaxxers point to a long list of quotes by famous well loved public figures saying shocking things about the urgent ecological necessity of population reduction. For example this 1991 interview with Jacques Cousteau suggesting that we would soon need to “eliminate” as many as 350,000 lives per day in order to prevent ecological and Malthusian catastrophe. Or the Georgia Guide Stones which propose the population be reduced to 500,000 and maintained there in perpetuity.
The wealthy don’t want to reduce emissions, because that’s their golden goose. That kind of money buys a lot of cocaine orgies on mega yachts with instagram models. So as always, they pass the buck to the general public. Urging regular people whose carbon footprint is miniscule by comparison to accept eco-austerity, appealing to their environmental sentiments.
“You peasants must make due with less, so that our fabulous quality of life does not have to suffer” is the real message behind corporate sponsored PSAs to recycle, to eat insects, to live in micro urban housing, to walk or cycle, or to buy burdensomely expensive electric cars. They don’t want a ruined planet, but they’re not willing to swallow the bitter pill of eco-austerity. The way out of this dilemma is to instead force that pill down the throats of the masses….or steeply reduce their numbers.
Sufficed to say, especially from the perspective of billionaires, the ever-swelling ranks of the poor are at best an unwanted nuisance and at worst an ecologically devastating plague that threatens to eventually rise up against the wealthy in search of unconditional provisions, like a collective mugging.
The corporate/governmental compromise is selective depopulation, not targeting everybody, just well armed, aggressive, increasingly organized right wing revolutionaries who recently stormed the capitol. These are people you don’t mind losing. Left wing Americans also won’t mind losing neighbors who raised such a violent, ugly stink about public health measures. Who prevent climate action, who took away women’s access to abortion in Texas, who prevent single payer Healthcare (which they now desperately need) and so on. So, you can count on them not to speak up or otherwise interfere.
If indeed it was deliberately orchestrated, this would be an unparalleled psyop masterstroke. You’ve achieved a steep reduction in the number of insurrectionists without compromised optics. If anything your optics are better than ever as you distributed, for free, life-saving vaccines to the tremendous benefit of your loyal supporters.
Raimond Spekking via Wikipedia Commons
All enemy fatalities were self-inflicted. Every measure you took against them was ostensibly benevolent and necessitated by Covid. Everything you did genuinely did benefit the half of the public which supports you. Because you played it straight, no funny business, the one possibility your enemies couldn’t fathom. That the government would actually do something good, with no hidden catch.
It’s the simplest ploy of all, yet at the same time, four dimensional underwater chess, so to speak. Your enemies drop like flies, but you come out of it with no blood on your hands. Literally all you did was try to save your enemies from an authentic danger to their lives. Unable to accept an apparent reality so deeply contrary to their narrative, they self-destructed en masse, and of their own accord no less!
The funny thing is, this incredibly simple strategy will probably work a second time. Maybe even a third, or fourth. The sort of people who think watching Youtube videos shared on Facebook makes them more knowledgeable than doctors are psychologically unable to believe in the possibility that they’ve been tricked. Dunning-Krugerites absolutely, fundamentally cannot imagine anybody outwitting them even when it’s trivially easy to do so. These are the kind of people Mark Twain once said are easier by far to fool than it is to convince them that they were fooled.
If indeed this is what’s happening, each successive pandemic will reduce their numbers further and further. They have more children, but then they orphan those children by self-destructing, leaving them to the care of the state. How likely are those children to adopt their late parent’s attitudes about the government as they grow up? Or their religious views?
Allan Chatto via Wikipedia Commons
The rest of us can be counted on not to interfere because of what we get out of it. Basic income, rendered far more affordable by way of reduction to the number of recipients. Likewise with single payer healthcare. The climate benefits, women’s reproductive rights can be restored, LGBT rights secured, accurate evolution education and a long list of other perks resulting from the self-inflicted liquidation of aggressive, stubborn dummies currently obstructing all of these causes.
What inclines me against believing in this conspiracy is that it assumes a far more competent governmental apparatus than I’m able to be convinced of. This is the same government that wasted 2.9 trillion on a war in Afghanistan, only for the Taliban to retake it the microsecond we withdrew our troops.
This is the government which squandered hundreds of millions on spy blimps for border control which now will never be used, and an F35 program which has so far cost taxpayers more than 11 times the combined cost of the ISS and shuttle program, only recently producing fully operational aircraft.
It seems more likely by far that all of this is just a fortuitous coincidence. Various biological and sociological factors happening to converge in a way that aligns with the government’s interests. An act of God, perhaps? I’ve seen many evangelicals confidently proclaiming Covid is a judgement. On who? Supposedly on groups disproportionately unaffected by it, because they’re overwhelmingly vaccinated.
Unknown author via Wikipedia Commons
The one possibility which has somehow not yet occurred to any of these televangelists or other public faith leaders is that Covid could be a judgement on American Christians for being lousy exemplars of Christ’s teachings. But this idea, much like the self-inflicted death by reverse psychology theory I proposed above, is far too contrary to their narrative to be seriously considered.
Maybe that’s for the best. After all, these are a people who deeply, sincerely believe life is a test that everybody but them is failing. That the rest of us will (and ought to) suffer mightily for not believing in Biblical authority enough to accept the free gift of salvation. Even as nearly the same scenario plays out in reality with the Covid pandemic, evangelicals suffering mightily for not believing in scientific authority and refusing the free gift of vaccination. Do they appreciate the irony?
Is it not the book of Revelations which says “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still” urging us not to despair that the wicked and foolish persist in their ways, because that is exactly as it should be, so that such people will not escape judgement?
Michel Bakni via Wikipedia Commons
Do they also appreciate the irony of making GoFundMes cover their ruinously steep medical expenses when they themselves voted against the affordable care act on the grounds that it’s socialism? When their own choices in the voting booth are why we don’t yet have a fully featured single-payer universal healthcare solution like every other developed country? A system which would’ve come in extremely fucking handy for them right about now?
Perhaps they imagined they would never need it, because they’re protected by the blood of the lamb. Not allowing that during this particular passover, the vaccine is the blood over your door which tells the avenging spirit of Yahweh to move on. A symbol of your willingness to overcome your fears for the sake of protecting your neighbors, in particular the elderly and infirm.
Perhaps they didn’t want their money used to save the lives of people they politically disagree with. Is it not the most deliciously poetic justice in the world that they’re now on the receiving end of that judgement? That it’s we who are spared from having to subsidize their medical care? Even though we’d have been glad to, simply so everybody could be affordably covered?
Talk about being hoisted by your own petard. So hard, in some cases, that it kills you. Truly, sometimes all you need to defeat your enemy is to give him enough rope with which to hang himself. Any government, malicious or benign, would be blessed to have enemies like that.