By Roger Guttridge

The brand-new People’s Health Alliance this week launched a unique initiative aimed at helping the estimated 1.2 million people suffering from long-Covid or vaccine injury.

The campaign, called We Hear You, includes a new Telegram group enabling victims to meet up virtually, receive emotional support and practical advice and guidance, and to find practitioners who may be able to help.

The PHA, which launched on April 23 to present a new and unique approach to healthcare in a primary care setting, has developed a Health Optimisation Programme which it describes as a “distinctive protocol to assist in strengthening the immune system, whilst taking the ‘whole healing’ approach to assist the mind, body and soul”.

A PHA spokesperson said: “We are seeing a huge influx of people suffering with adverse reactions to the jab or from the effects of long-Covid.

“The majority of reports we receive claim people are either struggling to get an appointment with their GP or that NHS teams have no idea how to recognise or treat these injuries.

“It appears that these very poorly people are completely pushed aside, which we feel is disgusting.

“They’re often told it’s in their minds or are made to feel like they are either going mad or not worth the hassle.

“PHA is taking a stance today. We will not neglect our fellow man, we will not ignore these immense issues and we will not turn people away.

“Now is the time for unity and support. We want to offer a safe and welcoming place where people can receive emotional support as well as potentially reap the benefits of our Health Optimisation Programme.”

The spokesperson added: “PHA intends to be loud and proud in our support and to help bring conversation to the fore.

“We won’t shy away from raising awareness with the NHS and government.

“The time for ignorance is over, the time to be vocal has arrived.”

To find out more, keep an eye on all PHA social media or check out the health group’s website: www.the-pha.org

By HTL

A doctor taking legal action against the Government over alleged crimes – in relation to lockdowns and Covid injection harm – has taken his battle to the police complaints authority.

Dr Sam White and his PJH Law legal team have made the move after the Metropolitan Police informed him there was no evidence of a crime taking place, despite the submission to the police of 1,100 pages of evidence which included expert witness testimony.

If unsuccessful at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, Dr White plans to take his case to the High Court so the evidence he has gathered can be heard.

In a shocking interview with Holding the Line, Dr White is calling on doctors still administering the experimental Covid injections to stop what they are doing and to speak out about the dangers involved.

Watch the full interview on HTL’s Odysee platform

Dr White said: “You will find that as soon as you speak out you are incredibly well supported. On the flip side of that, if you’re still injecting people, if you are still part of this, history will not judge you well because you only need to take a cursory look at the Yellow Card system to understand the harm and death.”

Speaking to HTL, Dr White revealed:

• He had been hounded by medicine regulators since speaking out about the dangers of the Covid injections and was branded by colleagues as being mentally ill

• The Covid injections are the deadliest pharmaceutical product ever marketed. In the UK alone, more than 2,000 Covid injection associated deaths have been recorded in the Government’s own Yellow Card reporting scheme – with the real figure likely to be in excess of 20,000 owing to the scheme’s acknowledged underreporting factor

• The Office of National Statistics stopped reporting on stillbirths in early 2021 despite known fears for pregnant women in relation to the injections

• The NHS still officially has no official treatment for Covid and doctors were barred from recommending or prescribing Vitamin D as a preventive nutrient that he claimed could massively reduce Covid mortality rates

• Treatments like ivermectin that he said would have saved tens of thousands of lives in the UK alone were blocked to ensure the emergency authorisation of the Covid injections would be granted

• A study into the contents of the vaccines revealed the presence of highly toxic substances including graphene oxide

• Spike proteins generated by the injections were leading to catastrophic neurological illnesses and heart disease for young women and men, as well sudden death from strokes and heart attacks

• The Covid injections have “negative efficacy” meaning those receiving the treatment were more likely to become ill with the disease

Addressing doctors who might be thinking about expressing concerns about government policy, Dr White said: “When the government acted unlawfully it was duty bound on the doctors to do something about it, not to be the pawns in their game to subvert the rights and liberty of every man, woman and child in this country. Come forward, stop what you are doing and speak out. You will be more than amply supported.”

Watch the full interview on HTL’s Odysee platform

Dr White was expressing his own opinions in this interview that are not necessarily shared by Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship as a collective.

Holding the Line exclusive

By Roger Guttridge

Watch the interview at HTL’s Odysee channel

Helping people with vaccine injuries will be an early focus of the People’s Health Alliance (PHA), which launches on April 23 in response to the crisis in the NHS.

Katherine Macbean, who is spearheading the nationwide PHA initiative, said they were aware of an urgent need to support and treat people adversely affected by the Covid-19 jabs.

‘It wasn’t in our original plan but we have so many reports of people going to their GP with a vaccine injury and being fobbed off or the GP doesn’t really know what to do with them or doesn’t have anywhere they can reach out to in order to get support for these victims,’ Ms Macbean told Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship.

‘We were very blessed to be able to connect with doctors and scientists in labs across the UK who were looking at various protocols as to how they could help these vaccine-injured.

‘Someone joined our team who was heavily involved with that and that’s allowed us to connect with healing practitioners – and I don’t just mean conventional here.

‘We are reaching out to holistic practitioners who are having some successes in treating vaccine injuries.

‘We are pulling together all this knowledge, this expertise, to create a protocol which won’t just be a protocol of tablets or supplements.

‘We are looking at a whole healing approach and we expect that protocol to be ready by April 23 when we launch – and we’re quite excited about it.

‘We understand it’s not a cure. With those with very low-level injuries, we might be able to eradicate the issues they are having.

‘The more severe ones, possibly not. But we are looking at sustaining life long enough for cures to be found.

‘It is a major problem. We do need to accept that there are vaccine-injured out there whether we want to see it or not.’

Vaccine-injured doctors

Ms Macbean said the vaccine-injured included a growing number of GPs themselves who ‘don’t know what to do about it’.

‘At PHA we are looking to connect practitioners having some success with vaccine injuries with the patients,’ she said.

‘If we can support these people who are going through a horrific time, we are doing our job.

‘It’s not just the physical healing that needs to take place – there’s the emotional and mental healing as well.

‘We won’t turn anyone away because of their vaccine status. We are looking to heal people whether they are vaccinated or not.’

Children and teenagers affected by lockdowns, mask-wearing and jabs will be another early PHA target for help.

‘The problem is massive,’ said mum-of-three Ms Macbean. ‘We’re becoming aware of major anxiety issues, problems due to lack of physical exercise during lockdowns, and parents struggling with how to address emotional issues.

‘We are fortunate to have some paediatric and teenage healthcare specialists in the team and we are building support mechanisms for parents and carers who are struggling to know how to deal with these issues.

‘We are also looking at the physical side and nutrition.

‘With every approach the PHA makes, we are looking at a whole healing system.

‘We don’t believe that just sticking a plaster on something or sticking a pill in someone is the answer.

‘We want to inform teenagers as well that they can take more responsibility for their own health in a way that works for them.

‘One of our first major fund-raising projects will be to support, facilitate and subsidise mental health support and care for young people because we can see there’s a pandemic of mental health issues out there.

‘We are very fortunate to be working with a number of partners and affiliates who are experts in this field.

‘We are pulling together to work alongside each other and be more productive in swiftly bringing forward these solutions.’

Meeting needs the NHS cannot fulfil

In the interview, Ms Macbean also outlines plans to:

• adopt an ‘integrative’ approach by using both allopathic and holistic medicine and giving patients a choice

• publish a blueprint for the creation of community health hubs across the country

• help adults with mental health problems

• launch a ‘social care pot’ to ensure health care is available to all

• mentor medical professionals to help them make the transition from the NHS

• organise an online dispensary as a ‘one-stop shop’ for prescribed or recommended treatments with any profits going to the social care pot.

A website, due to go live on April 23, will include a database that will enable patients to search for practitioners in their area and practitioners to connect with each other, the vaccine injury protocol, a database of volunteers, information about different types of treatments and guidance on fundraising and donations.

Ms Macbean told Holding the Line: ‘The PHA was born because of what we have seen over the last couple of years and the realisation that the NHS primary care system isn’t in a position to support patients.

‘People aren’t able to get an appointment with their GP, very important diagnoses were missed from the start of the covid shutdown and there’s a huge rise in diseases as a result.

‘We are paying for a service and we can’t access it.

‘We are hearing of NHS staff becoming disgruntled with what they are seeing and looking for other options.

‘We’re not going to be a complete picture for some time yet but we’re putting these foundations in place now to start alleviating some of the pressure from the primary care system.’

Ms Macbean added that the PHA could never be competition for the NHS and that was not the intention.

‘We are not in a position to take on secondary or acute care,’ she said.

‘I’ve had great passion for the NHS – they’ve saved my life a couple of times and my mother was an NHS nurse for 35 years.

‘We would love to see a better service from the NHS and if we can support that, we will.

‘We are looking to create something new and I have faith we will pull it off because we have to.’

Watch the interview at HTL’s Odysee channel

Contact the People’s Health Alliance at peopleshealthalliance@protonmail.com

From https://www.thelookingglass.co.nz/

Two years after Covid hysteria hit we must come to terms with the sleight of hand used to buy our compliance, and face up to the devastating harm the injection has caused.

As commentator and scientist Guy Hatchard has often said, the fact that the manufacturers got away with calling the Pfizer and Moderna injections ‘vaccines’, is a coup that has made them very rich, and provided them with legal cover that means there will be little-to-no blowback on any of the, by now, blatant problems with the products.

“It was a very deliberate masterstroke to call this vaccination and it goes right back to 2017 when Tal Zaks the chief executive of Moderna gave a Ted Talk in which he said mRNA vaccination was going to cure virtually all diseases. When what it really was, was repurposed gene therapy,” Hatchard told me in February.

However, it’s been known since 2003 that RNA is active genetic material that can be integrated into a person’s genome, Hatchard explains.

“That immediately raises the possibility of mutagenesis, which means cancer. [Along with vaccine injury] that is another thing that we are not looking for, and can develop quickly. I have two friends who developed leukemia quite quickly after having taken the vaccination. That is a known side effect of gene therapy, yet there is no suggestion from their doctors that that is due to vaccination.”

The experiment in question was done in France and found that two out of nine subjects – a very high number – developed leukemia and was halted immediately.

“So, it is a real sleight of hand that companies have taken these techniques out of largely discredited gene therapy and then said they are perfectly safe. And we are not monitoring what is happening and they are not monitoring. And these are known as secondary effects.”

And then earlier this year a study showed that genetic sequences from mRNA vaccines can integrate into human liver cells in-vitro. What has been the response from the public health officials, ethicists and academics? Crickets.

_{Professor Norman Fenton has been analysing Covid data since March 2020}

How data manipulation has driven the Covid fear narrative

Queen Mary University of London Professor of Risk Management, Norman Fenton has been analysing this issue since March 2020. A mathematician whose work focuses on critical decision making and quantifying uncertainty using Bayesian networks, Fenton analyses Covid data and exposes problems with the way they are presented to the general public.

In January, he put together a presentation for PANDA (Pandemics, Data and Analytics) in which he goes into the flawed data in detail.

“I have been motivated by a concern about the way that statistics were being used to drive the Covid narrative and about the lack of evidence to justify lockdowns and vaccine mandates,” he says.

Fenton describes going from being respected in his field, to being censored, to getting cancelled, as a result of his work, a now very familiar story.

And yet he says it doesn’t take much to show that Covid was not as lethal as claimed or the jab as safe and effective as claimed. The fundamental problems with Covid data in the United Kingdom start with definitions. He provides some hypothetical case studies to illustrate this:

1. Fred, who has no Covid symptoms, tests positive in a PCR test for work. He doesn’t go on to develop any symptoms, but 13 days later is critically injured in a car crash and dies two weeks after being taken to hospital. Fred is classified as a Covid case, a Covid hospital admission and a Covid death.
2. Jane gets a Covid vaccine and 13 days later tests PCR positive with symptomatic Covid. Jane is classified as an unvaccinated Covid case, because she is within the 14 days post-jab.
3. Peter gets a Covid vaccine and dies the next day from an adverse reaction to it. Peter is classified as an unvaccinated Covid death.

All of the key metrics are driven by the definition of a Covid case – the number of Covid cases, the number of hospitalisations, the number of deaths.

Fenton then points out that even if the definition of a ‘case’ was something that everybody agreed on, the fact that we are not told these additional definitions means that the core data are fundamentally misleading.

New Zealand Ministry of Health Definitions. In the Covid era, these have often moved away from common understandings to something counterintuitive.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests

But we can’t ignore the flawed PCR test, because it is essentially how a Covid case is defined. Not by clinical analysis based on symptoms, but by a test. Fenton says because of that, and because of the high levels of false positives thrown up by PCR testing, ‘cases’ include all of these different classes of people.

1. Has the virus with symptoms (true positive)
2. Has the virus but is pre-symptomatic and develops symptoms some days later (true positive)
3. Has virus but never develops symptoms (many doubt these people should even be included)
4. No virus but has symptoms (false positive)
5. No virus and no symptoms (false positive)

The vast majority of asymptomatic cases are false positives, he says.

It’s not surprising then that many people call the Covid situation a ‘case-demic’ or a ‘pandemic of testing’. The more you test, the more cases you will find. Dr Sam Bailey does a great job at explaining this here.

It’s also no wonder we are seeing a huge increase in the number of ‘cases’ recorded in New Zealand, as Sam Bailey’s husband Mark Bailey points out in this article, given that Rapid Antigen Tests are now widely available.

“On 1 February, the government announced that ‘along with the 5.1 million tests already in the country, New Zealanders will have access to over 55 million rapid antigen tests in the coming two months.’  Two weeks later, ‘cases’ of the meaningless entity covid-19 went parabolic. In early March, RAT was said to be detecting 97 percent of these cases. By that stage, Rapid Antigen Tests were being provided for ‘free’ for all and sundry, with many feeling the need to test themselves or their children several times a day.”

NB: The Baileys are prominent critics of virology, and challenge the claim that viruses have been proven to exist. Dr Sam Bailey is a co-author of the book Virusmania: How the medical industry continually invents epidemics, making billion dollar profits at our expense.

New Zealand’s misrepresentation of Covid data

Hatchard has concluded that the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) statistics are also being used to try and show that unvaccinated people are more likely to be hospitalised than the boosted and more likely to die. Covid deaths are deliberately overcounted, he says.

MOH death figures covering the two years of the pandemic from Hatchard’s 29th March article. For up to date figures go here.

“When addressing the public, both the Ministry and the media repeatedly use the largely irrelevant figure of all 223 deaths temporally related to Covid, and almost never use the more accurate subset number of deaths caused by Covid.” (emphasis mine).

Rather than clear categories identifying how many shots a recipient has had, if any, MOH data puts the unvaccinated and the single dose people into the same group in the death charts, which means we don’t have the data to show how many deaths have occurred in the unvaccinated, he says.

New Zealand doesn’t count a recipient as vaccinated until a week after their jab, but Hatchard says there is evidence suggesting that people may be at greater risk of contracting Covid in that first week. While if someone catches Covid in the first week after having their booster they are counted as a two dose Covid case, or death if they die.

“This will lead to the booster having fewer cases/deaths, and the two doses having more [in the charts], thus creating an impression of greater booster efficacy.”

A video just released by Grant Dixon using MOH data published at the end of March demonstrates hospitalisations in vaccinated and boosted groups exceeded those from unvaccinated groups.

Dying ‘with’ and ‘of’ Covid

The news reading public may have noticed a change in the way the New Zealand media reports Covid deaths lately. I don’t know when the change began exactly, but you will see headlines now such as “X number of people died with Covid-19 yesterday”.

The key being the word ‘with’, meaning that is not the primary cause of death, which if it were, would be recorded as dying ‘of’ Covid. This was not a differentiation made for a very long time and I’m guessing enough people got wise to it they had to begin differentiating. I’m not sure they have explained this particular piece of context to the public, however.

So, without further information on each individual death cited as ‘dying with Covid’, we can assume they were in hospital for something else but tested positive for Covid while there, miraculously becoming a ‘Covid death’.

CDC recently updated its website to notify the removal of 72,000 deaths previously reported as Covid deaths, but which were misclassified.

US Covid statistics were overcounted all along

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with individual US states are backtracking on Covid death statistics. On 14 March, 72,277 Covid deaths were removed from the official tally, including 24% of deaths attributed to children under 18. This was noted quietly in its Footnotes and Additional Information section, rather than by press release.

A faulty algorithm that counted deaths from drowning and drug overdoses as Covid was blamed. Remember the New Zealand case of a man shot in the head last year being classified as a Covid death? This has happened all over the world. The UK has been through its own reckoning of data.

Columbia University researcher Spiro Pantazatos says there is a correlation between vaccination and all-cause mortality.

New data on the Vaccine Fatality Rate from Columbia University

Columbia University researcher Spiro Pantazatos was interviewed for the excellent video series Perspectives on the Pandemic, by Journeyman Pictures last week.

In the shocking interview, Pantazatos reveals that in a six-month period last year, Covid injections killed between 150,000 and 180,000 Americans, which is consistent with data released by the insurance industry reporting a 40% rise in mortality among people aged 18-to-64, relative to the pre-Covid era in the US.

The paper is called Covid vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk.

“There does appear to be a positive correlation between vaccine doses and all-cause mortality. The more doses you have the more likely it appears that you are going to have an adverse effect.

“And so, this was seen with the first two doses. Most people had their severest reaction on the second dose and it appears that it’s not going to be any different with the third dose.”

Unsurprisingly, Pantazatos has come in for criticism for undertaking the analysis from his peers, and scientific journals appear uninterested in publishing his research.

“I’ve been submitting it to a lot of journals and it has been desk-rejected by most all of the medical journals that I have submitted it to. Desk-rejected meaning they don’t send it out for peer review … Typically, the reasons they give are not that substantive.”

Pantazatos explains that the job of an editor alongside validating work, is to take into consideration its importance for the public interest. He believes many editors are failing in this duty. He points out well documented corruption in medical journals, essentially acting as advertisers for pharmaceutical companies.

MedRxiv (pronounced MedArchive) says work that challenges public health measures around vaccination will not be published.

He also notes that publishing policies are also problematic. At MedRxiv, it’s explicitly stated that work that challenges or could compromise accepted public health measures on infectious health measures, immunisations and therapies would be screened out.

“In my view the editors are not doing what they are supposed to be doing,“ he says.

Pantazatos says the politicisation of science publishing in this respect is a strategy to stigmatise inconvenient science.

The position that anything that undermines confidence in vaccination, or causes ‘vaccine hesitancy’ can’t be given a public airing – either in journals, or in the media, is now widespread. Most legacy media outlets for example, will not open comments on stories about vaccination as it invites unpopular views to be expressed, which could be considered giving oxygen to ‘dangerous ideas’.

Hatchard himself has recounted how a prominent radio personality in New Zealand told him this exact thing – any views or information that could lead to vaccine hesitancy was absolutely off-limits.

Australian health practitioners are warned not post or author papers that go against public health messaging, even when evidence-based.

In Australia health practitioners have been explicitly warned that views expressed on social media, or even when authoring papers, must be consistent with public health messaging.

“Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.” (emphasis mine).

In New Zealand the Medical Council similarly gagged doctors and censured and de-registered those who dissented.

The problem with this is that it is essentially anti-journalistic and anti-scientific and anti-democratic. So that even in the face of overwhelming evidence of harm from vaccination – see the most recent VAERS data – whether it be the Covid injection or any other, the public will not be informed about it, lest it cause people to not trust vaccines.

Bureaucratic propaganda now holds more weight than the opinion of practicing clinicians and researchers. They can put public relations material on the homepage of their websites while practitioners are gagged. This ideological stance belongs in the Soviet era and is far more ‘dangerous’ than allowing science to be publicly debated. People are being harmed and dying and nothing is being done about it because it has been made taboo.

Perhaps in a sign the cultural mood might be shifting, last week Judge Stephen Harrop ruled the Medical Council wrongly suspended Dr Matt Shelton and Dr Peter Canaday for expressing concern about the safety of the Pfizer injections. The suspension must be reversed.

This article was first published at The Looking Glass https://www.thelookingglass.co.nz/

By Rusere Shoniwa

To try to understand the economics underpinning the never-ending stream of crises, Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship spokesperson Rusere Shoniwa caught up with Professor Fabio Vighi who teaches critical theory and film at Cardiff University. His current research focuses on ’emergency capitalism’ and his recent books include Unworkable: Delusions of an Imploding Civilization (State University of New York Press, 2022); and Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2015; co-authored with Heiko Feldner). You can watch the interview with Professor Vighi here on Odysee. This article extracts the pith of it and includes some perspectives that weren’t discussed.

You can read more of Rusere’s work at https://plagueonbothhouses.com/

As we glide smoothly from two years of authoritarian Covid containment diktat into the theatre of war, the image to hold in mind, by courtesy of Professor Fabio Vighi, is of continuity editing in a movie: as one crisis begins to lose its momentum, a new one is seamlessly edited into the movie to keep you in a febrile state, free from the tedious constraints of critical analysis.

Be afraid, be very afraid: of virus apocalypse, nuclear apocalypse, economic apocalypse, cyber apocalypse. Be enraged: first at the unvaccinated, then at the evil Dr Strange-Putin. Clap and cheer: for the NHS, for plucky little Ukraine. Pick a side, goddammit! Root for the actual Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion as it repels the make-believe ‘Putin-Nazi’ invaders from Russia. (Disclaimer: previous sentence not to be construed as an endorsement of Putin, who is just as dangerous to humanity as nearly all Western political leaders have proven themselves to be over the past two years.)

For those in need of guidance on who and how to hate, Facebook has relaxed its rules on hate speech, generously giving you a free pass to call for violence against Russians so long as you make clear in your post that you are referring to the invasion of Ukraine. Always check the small print! Tip – begin every hate-filled post directed at Russians with, “In reference to the invasion of Ukraine …” and then proceed carefully, perhaps along the lines of: “It’s remotely possible that the Russians might love their children too, but that Putin chap is asking for a bullet in his head and if I were a crack marksman … I’m not saying I am … but if I were, I might be minded to go to Davos next January to see what could be done.”

Whatever you do, just don’t think too hard about it because thinking will inevitably spoil the drama of endless crises in the movie called Emergency Capitalism.

Covid lockdowns … it’s the economy, stupid

When the Covid crisis hit in Spring 2020, a badly wounded global monetary system had been limping for 10 years through an unresolved debt crisis. In September 2019, the credit markets began seizing up again with junk debt and, having kicked the can down the road for as long as possible, there is compelling evidence that, by the end of 2019, the spectre of a far more dire replay of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was stalking the markets.

The immediate and desperate response of the Federal Reserve in the US was to create liquidity with a repeat of the money-printing of 2008. Between September 2019 and March 2020, the Fed injected more than $9 trillion into the banking system, equivalent to more than 40% of US GDP. Essentially this was another bailout, only much bigger than the first one but silent and virtually unreported. That extraordinary move triggered threats and opportunities that required extraordinary management.

While throwing that amount of money at the financial markets was necessary to prevent a repeat of the 2008 panic and contagion, that mass of money could not be allowed to reach the real economy (‘Main Street’) through retail lending, because it would trigger overheating and hyperinflation.

Professor Vighi posits that the global lockdowns of Spring 2020 provided an economic shutdown which played the vital role of an ‘induced economic coma’, allowing the US Fed, under a programme of government bond purchases managed by BlackRock, to temporarily plug holes in the interbank lending market and avert hyperinflation. This was known to be a case of more kicking of cans down the road, but global financiers don’t have anything else in their playbook on debt and liquidity management.

This theory completely reverses the role of the economy in the Covid drama and demands a paradigm shift from one where we tend to view the economy as simply another victim of pandemic measures to one in which the severely ailing economy and monetary system are in fact the driving force for pandemic measures.

The opium of debt

Critiques of global capitalism almost always refer to a ‘financialised economy’. This is a simplistic term to describe the departure from capitalism’s traditional MO which centres on creating profit or ‘surplus value’ by leveraging labour, goods, and services in the productive process to using the inflation of debt as a means to make fictitious profits. Exciting while it lasts but painful when the Ponzi scheme collapses, as it did in 2008.

The creation of surplus value in the ‘old fashioned’ way hit a ceiling in the late 1970s and early 1980s when real wages in the West peaked and it became harder for corporations to extract profits through wage exploitation. So global capitalism, an extremist ideology par excellence, did what it does best through the extreme exploitation of the economic concept of competitive price advantage: it ‘offshored’ huge swathes of Western manufacturing to economies with cheaper labour in the developing world.

What happened to blue collar workers in the West? They were effectively handed a copy of global capital’s staff handbook – Adapt or Die. Transplanting real jobs and factories and transitioning to ‘service’ economies (which, let’s face it, is a euphemism for bureaucracy on steroids) was sold as something that ‘mature’ economies did. Immature Germany didn’t get the memo and remained a net exporter of manufactured goods, which may have something to do with why it is Europe’s powerhouse economy.

This tectonic shift in global finance created a flow of cheap goods from Chinese and other sweatshops into the West but the demand for those goods, previously fuelled by a real productive economy, would now be fuelled by debt. Credit and money markets were revamped to feed the new addiction to debt.

Traditionally, banking used to be an appendage, albeit a vital one, to the real economy. It provided a key ingredient in the profit leverage process – capital, either to get a leg up at the start of a venture or to expand existing operations. Leon Wansleben of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies explains that, under the old model, banks used to issue loans to businesses in order to hold those loans on their books. Now, they turn these loans into ‘securitised assets’ that can be transacted with other banks and non-bank firms. This is a form of credit expansion on which financialisaton rests as a driving force.

Professor Vighi explains that “the more the financial market grows, paradoxically … the more the real economy free falls. The two things are not connected anymore as they were before.” Using the Apple corporation as an example, he points out that “there’s no correlation with the value that is produced by Apple as an industry and the market capitalisation of Apple”, which is “astronomical in relation to the real value of Apple”. Inflating debt in order to make money from money is a compensating mechanism for the shrinking real economy.

Having arrived at a position in March 2020 where it was clear to monetary authorities and governments that the debt crisis of 2008 was very much unresolved – the pumping of $9 trillion by the US Federal Reserve into the banking system in the lead-up to lockdown is very clear proof of that – why would all Western governments be content to make a bad public debt situation far worse by drastically inflating the public debt through the Covid support programmes and bank lending schemes that were supposedly intended to keep individuals and businesses afloat?

I accept that it is by now tedious for most readers to see writers pre-emptively batting away the naïve answer which claims that governments didn’t know how bad Covid was going to be and therefore had to prioritise saving lives above all else, but it must be done to avoid accusations of preaching to the converted.

Firstly, no government in the West bothered to do a cost/benefit analysis vis-à-vis saving lives. There is no escaping such analyses because throttling economies and cutting off access to health care can kill as effectively as a virus. Governments knew that even the most rudimentary cost/benefit analysis would have shown that their lockdown pill was worse than the ill. So, they didn’t dare do one. The UK Government itself implicitly acknowledged before the first lockdown that Covid could be dealt with in a conventional way because it downgraded the seriousness of Covid on the eve of lockdowns, taking it off the list of High Consequence Infectious Diseases, citing low mortality rates among other things as the key factor.

So, the refusal to do a cost/benefit study combined with the knowledge acquired before lockdown that Covid was not the Black Death are clear signposts that lockdowns, along with the huge increase in public debt that they would entail, were a foAlregone conclusion with not the slightest regard shown for social or economic cost.

With that out of the way, we can return to Professor Vighi’s answer to the question of why governments across the West decided to double down on the public debt Ponzi scheme:

“Because they don’t have any other strategy … They have no plan B … There’s no other way of dealing with the problem except kicking the can down the road a bit further and pretending that the problem is not there [by] inflating the financial sectors. And at the same time, yes, creating a public debt situation which is very problematic, which is even as [Jerome] Powell, the chairman of the Fed, said that the US public national debt is unsustainable … I don’t think they are endowed with an intelligence large enough to consider a plan B to this situation. They continue with plan A because they are part of a mechanism which is blind … The mechanism is about profit making.”

In the UK, debt as a percentage of GDP has nearly quadrupled from 27% in the early 90s to 104% post Covid in 2021. In the US, over the same period, it has jumped from 54% of GDP to 124% of GDP ($3.2 trillion to $29.6 trillion). The pre- to post-Covid rise in the UK is 83% to 104% (£1.87 trillion to £2.2 trillion). In the US it’s 107% to 124% ($ 22.7 trillion to $29.6 trillion). That’s a hell of a price to pay for something the authorities knew would be on a par with a bad flu season.

Ukraine – an entirely avoidable war is by definition a war of choice

To appreciate that the engine of global capital, of which the war machine is an integral and vital part, is fuelled by crises, we must appreciate that the Ukrainian conflict is as much a choice as it is a tragedy. We can then question who is choosing it and what they have to gain from it. And crucially, who will lose?

How avoidable was this state of emergency emanating in Ukraine? The short answer is entirely avoidable. NATO and the US (really one and the same thing) have spent a great deal of time, energy and money inviting war … and then denouncing it. If you’re looking for a lucid explanation by one of the most accomplished and distinguished political scientists in the world as to why the situation in the Ukraine is almost entirely the fault of the West, a really good starting point would be two lectures by Professor John Mearsheimer. The first pre-dates the invasion by about seven years and can be viewed as an accurate prediction of what would eventually happen if NATO continued to push unreasonably for Ukraine to become a NATO bulwark on Russia’s borders. The second is confirmation of Professor Mearsheimer’s theory in a talk he gave to Cambridge University two weeks before the invasion in February 2022.

The inescapable conclusion is that Ukraine is being used as a pawn or proxy in a NATO/Russia superpower play in which only ordinary Ukrainian citizens and the economically weakest global citizens will be the losers.

These lectures don’t delve too deeply into the interesting side story of Ukraine’s love affair with neo-Nazis and the role they’ve played in Ukrainian politics since the Maidan coup in 2014. The Nation reported in 2019 that “post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces.” Is Ukraine’s flirtation with the far-right just a storm in a little Nazi teacup? Probably not. The corridors of power in Ukraine might just be so littered with copies of Mein Kampf that there is speculation that Mr Zelensky’s hands may be tied in peace negotiations by the country’s Neo-Nazi militia.

This is not some minor detail in the backdrop to the Ukraine conflict. It’s part of the important story of how the US has backed two coups in Ukraine to help install NATO/US friendly regimes, how those coups have strengthened the hand of neo-Nazi and far-right forces in the country and why its president may be powerless to intervene against those forces who have alienated Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine to further their own divisive nationalist and NATO agenda. Something is seriously wrong with the official BBC narrative if your so-called pro-democracy and anti-racist governments in the West are backing neo-Nazi forces in a conflict that could spark a nuclear exchange between Russia and NATO.

Here’s the key takeaway from the linked analysis:

“Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people. The fact that most Ukrainians wanted peace with Russia was reflected by the fact that they voted for the peace candidate Zelensky in such overwhelming numbers, 73%. And the fact that Zelensky did a total 180° [turn] on that promise shows how little political power he actually has.”

So, if this conflict was entirely avoidable and if Ukraine “has emerged as a new hub for the far right across the world”, as this Al Jazeera report claims, shouldn’t NATO actually be joining forces with Russia to stamp out the threat of Nazism?

Facebook doesn’t think so. It has come down on the side of Neo-Nazis by making “a narrow exception for the praise of the [Neo-Nazi led] Azov regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine”. That’s alright then. The Azov soldiers may be SOBs but they’re Facebook’s SOBs. The System is constantly telling you what its true values are. Facebook, owned and operated by global capital, a major cog in the Big Tech machine with its monopoly on the online public square, is a proxy for global capital’s values – it censors doctors (and anyone else) who express concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and it backs neo-Nazis.

How Cold War II will pan out for global capital’s serfs – the 99%

In recent piece Professor Vighi wrote for Philosophical Salon titled “From Covid-19 to Putin-22: Who needs friends with enemies like these?”, he described Putin’s war as “the ideal continuation of the war on Covid.” It’s a continuation of emergency capitalism with all the same monetary policies employed to keep the house of cards afloat. For example, Germany will be giving the equivalent of €300 per taxpayer to soften the blow of surging energy costs.

Meanwhile, citizens across the West are now being told that inflation, food shortages, and supply chain disruptions are unavoidable and arch villain Putin is the scapegoat. Italy has just transmuted its virus state of emergency to a war state of emergency … for a war in Ukraine. ‘State of emergency’ is a euphemism for dictatorship and, for one of the EU’s largest member states, the exacting threshold for a ‘state of emergency’ is some kind of problem, anywhere on the planet.

The fact that this conflict was entirely avoidable implies that it was a choice. Therefore, by extension, everything that flows from it is a choice: sanctions on Russian energy supplies making energy prices unaffordable for the most economically vulnerable; supply chain disruptions creating food shortages; declaring economic warfare on Russia, which will only immiserate working class Russians. All squeezing the mass of humanity in an ever-tightening vice and enriching elites who run the machine. More disaster capitalism.

If sanctions are intended to bring Russia to heel by halting its military venture and/or toppling its government, will they work? As Professor Vighi points out, sanctions are in many ways a fig leaf from a global corporate perspective because Russia is part of an inextricably connected international finance system and trying to hurt it could backfire in a number of ways. Firstly, there is significant exposure to Russian debt among US and EU banks so hurting Russia too much comes with serious financial risks.

JP Morgan has recommended that clients take buy positions on Russian corporate debt, which implies a bet on a quick Russian recovery. Cutting raw material supplies from Russia will worsen inflation. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT banking system will likely push it to trade in other markets and currencies, which damages the USD. Russia has announced that payments for its energy exports must now be made in rubles, which has just boosted the exchange rate for the ruble and has given further impetus to something the US fears – de-dollarisation of the energy market.

That is not to say that Russia will not be hurt by sanctions. However, the primary outcome will be economic shocks to the weakest which, in turn, will be used to justify greater control to purportedly administer and ‘ameliorate’ these shocks. If food shortages result in rationing, then digital IDs combined with programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) could be pushed as the most efficient way to administer control over and spending on rationed goods. But don’t take my word for it. BlackRock’s CEO says the invasion of Ukraine could be used to accelerate the use of CBDCs.

Meanwhile, the UK government is powering ahead with its nationwide digital ID plans, despite half of the responses to its public consultation on digital identity opposing the idea.

Professor Vighi summed up the link between the freefalling real economy and measures like Central Bank Digital Currencies:

“The only way in which this crazy situation can be sustained is by making sure that, whilst the real economy free falls, there are ways of controlling that free fall … it’s a kind of controlled demolition of the real economy. That’s the way I define it. So, some kind of state control … to make sure that either people don’t realise it or, when they realise it, their reaction is somewhat contained by some form of authoritarianism. We should be quite honest here. We are moving towards a kind of authoritarian type of capitalism, more and more explicit, which I think whose purpose is precisely to try and make sure that the controlled demolition of the real economy takes place in the way they want it to take place. I think central bank digital currencies, insofar as they would enable some kind of monetary slavery, are precisely a step in that direction, although we don’t know yet when or even if it will actually happen. But certainly, they are thinking about eliminating physical cash and replacing it with digital currencies which would allow them to control the monetary flow from top to bottom.”

Geopolitics and the economy

If the unipolar US-led world that was ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is now fracturing, which dynamic will drive societal and economic developments – the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset or the Cold War II Great Fracture? And does a Cold War II play into the hands of global capital’s elites? Professor Vighi believes that:

“the geopolitical chess board is related to the economic cause of everything. So, Cold War II could play into the hands of global capitalist interests, because once again, you have an ongoing emergency, maybe with some hot wars as well here and there to keep the tension high and to keep all the emergency precautions in place, to justify, again, more restrictive measures on societies and populations around the world. And, of course, the monetary system going the same way. So, I see this playing into the hands of the big financial elites and what the central banks are trying to do. It kind of makes sense, irrespective of the real geopolitical frictions that, of course, are there. There are also real geopolitical problems and antagonisms, but I think they are, in a sense, part of the bigger game that is being played here, the theatre of war remains a theatre. It’s a tragic theatre, no doubt, because people are dying … but it’s still a theatre that is part of a wider agenda, which fundamentally has to do with keeping this kind of economic system, which is hyper indebted and hyper financialised, going. Making sure that those wheels don’t come off the global capitalist bus, which is the main concern. And that’s why I see politicians … don’t really have a role to play. They play the roles that they are told to play. Those really in control of big government are elsewhere. Big government is where you don’t see it. It doesn’t have the face of the politicians that we know. It has faces that we don’t probably know either. And those are running the show from above, from up there, we don’t see them. They give orders, politicians execute the orders, and things happen.”

From the perspective of geopolitical rivalry, isolating Russia certainly increases the likelihood of strengthening ties between Russia and China, creating a formidable China/Russia bloc against the West. However, Professor Vighi emphasised that:

“a Cold War could be beneficial to everyone because that would justify certain measures … like the nuclear threat would come back … and that would create, again, justification for more and more authoritarian measures … It’s all baked into the same cake, and the cake is the economy, I’m afraid … The US probably has some interest in trying to divide Europe from Russia, for example, to create a division and to prevent the EU from being part of that bloc, which would be a threat to the US as such. So definitely, this is something that might have justified what we’re seeing now. But I think overall, the concern is the logic I’ve been talking about earlier. The concern is to keep that system going in the way in which it is reproducing itself now in these extreme circumstances.”

The system cannot afford not to have an emergency

Rounding off the discussion, Professor Vighi emphasised the continuity editing image with these powerful words:

“We know that as soon as this emergency loses some of its appeal, as it were, we will see immediately another one coming in. I don’t know from where yet, but there will be another one taking over again. Remember that idea of continuity editing. Something will be edited into the film and pretty quickly. We won’t even realise it. We won’t have time to because the system cannot afford not to have an emergency.”

You can watch the interview with Professor Vighi here on Odysee

You can read more of Rusere’s work at https://plagueonbothhouses.com/

In an interview with HTL’s Roger Guttridge, Sir Christopher Chope MP accuses the Government of running a ‘disinformation campaign’ to encourage Covid-19 injection take-up while being in denial about the treatment’s safety.

Sir Christopher claims the media saw itself as being the spokesperson for that campaign, with editorial decisions being made to keep adverse reactions ‘under wraps’ at major TV stations and national broadsheet newspapers.

He alleges that some people seeking help from the NHS for Covid injection harm were ‘ridiculed as having mental health problems’

And he says he is speaking out for the ‘forgotten heroes’ of the pandemic who were harmed by the injections after being told they were safe.

Watch the interview on HTL’s Odysee channel

The Conservative MP for Christchurch, Dorset, told Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship he had been contacted by hundreds of people across the UK about serious harm, including death, caused by the injections.

Sir Christopher said: “There was a propaganda war to say the injections are safe and nothing to worry about. There has been pressure on staff to take them and for going to venues and going abroad.

“In this propaganda war, truth was the victim and people were discouraged from using their own judgement.”

He said the Government’s Yellow Card vaccine injury reporting scheme had up to 500,000 Covid injection injuries flagged including reports of 2,000 deaths and a five-figure number of people who suffered very serious consequences.

Sir Christopher said there were cases where people reporting vaccine injuries to the NHS were “ridiculed as having mental health issues”.

He said some NHS staff he had spoken to in his constituency were relieved they no longer had to have a Covid injection as a condition of their employment as they had seen with their own eyes some of the adverse consequences.

Sir Christopher, an MP since 1997, said: “Some people are feeling the need to club together to fight back against the disinformation campaign from the Government.

“The media have seen themselves as the spokespersons for the Government propaganda machine and continue to do so.”

Asked why he was sticking his head above the parapet on the issue while so many of his colleagues appeared reluctant to do so, he said: “The reason I’m making a stand is because I know there are a group of people who are the forgotten heroes of the pandemic.

“They are the people who followed the Government advice that they should get vaccinated in order to promote good public health and in following that advice they have suffered dire consequences, in some cases fatalities and in other cases life-changing injuries.

“So many in middle age and younger age groups with no underlying health issues have had their lives completely wrecked.”

Sir Christopher said YouTube had censored a speech he gave in Parliament in early March of this year about Covid injection harm that had been uploaded on the Google-owned platform.

He said YouTube claimed the video contained content which was “medical disinformation” – which he denied.

He said the censorship of injection harm information also reached across to the mainstream media where journalists at the main television stations and broadsheet newspapers had told him there was “nervousness about opening up” on these issues.

Sir Christopher said: “There are some brave journalists who buck the trend but on the editorial level there is very much a ‘let’s keep this under wraps’ attitude.

“I have accused the Government of being in denial about the fact that the vaccines are not safe for everybody.”

But he added the Government now acknowledged that some had died or were seriously injured as a result of the injections, when its initial view had been the treatment was absolutely safe.

Since raising the safety issues with the Government, Sir Christopher said he had been told the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme had been transferred to a dedicated team at the NHS Business Authority.

Yet no one had yet received any compensation for injection harm through the scheme and claims were only just starting to be processed, with a lot of obstacles appearing to be put in the way of those who were claiming.

Sir Christopher said organisations claiming to be fact-checkers were trying to ridicule and discredit factual information about injection harm, and he was concerned that the Online Safety Bill going through parliament could challenge the right to speak out.

When asked who might be responsible for the lack of debate, he said: “There is always a group of people who are rather statist [advocates of a political system in which the state has substantial centralised control over social and economic affairs] whose life would be much easier if people could not express individual opinions.”

Watch the interview on HTL’s Odysee channel

By Rusere Shoniwa

This article was first published at https://plagueonbothhouses.com/

In this three-part essay I discuss the Government’s deployment of psychological warfare techniques to induce compliance with Covid containment policies. Robert Lifton’s 1961 study of ‘brainwashing’ in China elucidates eight psychological themes that characterised 1950s Chinese Communist ideologues’ indoctrination techniques. Using both Sue Parker Hall’s and Lifton’s work as a platform to provide my own perspective, I explore the extent to which UK Government psyops mirrored methods employed by 1950s Chinese Communist ideologues. Part I discusses the first four themes. Part II discusses themes five to eight. Part III is an exploration of the root cause of Covid ideological totalism.

“This is not a data war. We won that a long time ago. It’s a psychological war, and it really needs to be thought of that way.” – Dr Mark McDonald, psychiatrist and author of “United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to Mass Delusional Psychosis.”

In its own benign phrasing, the remit of the Government’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) is to provide “behavioural science advice aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts.” 

What it actually ended up doing was made much clearer in a confession by a SPI-B scientist who spoke to Laura Dodsworth, author of A State of Fear. They had “discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian. The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable.”

It’s more than just “ethically questionable”. The Government’s widespread use of fear and other emotional levers to manipulate behaviour fits the definition of classical military psyops or psychological warfare.

The weaponisation of behavioural psychology did not happen overnight. At the very least, it can be traced back to the formation in 2010 of the Government’s Behavioural Insight Team, whose aim is “finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves”. You do have to wonder about the Orwellian mindset that is unable to see the contradiction between people “mak[ing] better choices for themselves” and a Big Brother government unit being set up to “encourage” and “support” them in this supposedly autonomous decision-making process.

The integration of ideas about mind control into popular culture finds expression in the term ‘brainwashing’ which encapsulates a degree of mind control in the service of a political or other ideological goal. Today, Her Majesty’s brainwashers euphemistically call it ‘nudging’, as if they’re merely setting an alarm for you to make sure you don’t forget to do something you had always intended to do, like wear a mask in public for two years. 

The choice of language for today’s government sponsored brainwashing is in itself an attempt to brainwash. After all, psyops wouldn’t work if your daily ‘nudge’ flashed up in a neon light ticker tape over Piccadilly Circus reading: “Today’s brainwashing message is brought to you by the manipulative controllers at SPI-B. Don’t forget to wear your mask! Mask-wearing makes it easy for you to instantly distinguish the rule breakers from the rule followers, thereby enhancing compliance with idiotic rules by leveraging group normative pressure. Have a nice day!”

Perhaps it’s naïve to think that psychologists would be any less prone to using their powers for evil than other professions, but there is something exceedingly sinister about using an academically acquired understanding of the human psyche to subvert human happiness. Which is why it is heartening to see the emergence of a group of mental health professionals in the UK, Therapists for Medical Freedom (T4MF), which has aligned itself with sound ethics by taking aim at the Government’s use of covert psychological manipulation.

Totalitarianism, like the Government’s weaponisation of psychology, is not something we have accidentally stumbled into. Total control, precisely because of its manipulative intent, is a deliberate, stepwise, and stealthy process. We must get wise to what unscrupulous psychologists in the Government’s service are doing and tell the brainwashers in no uncertain terms that we like our brains dirty, thanks very much!

In early 2021, T4MF wrote to the British Psychological Society (BPS) asking them to explain their position on the Government’s unethical practice of increasing emotional discomfort to influence behaviour and compliance. Shockingly, the BPS saw nothing problematic with the psychologists’ role in the pandemic response, which they felt demonstrated “social responsibility and the competent and responsible employment of psychological expertise”. Should we be surprised by such blatant dereliction in light of T4MF’s pertinent observation that the “BPS is impeded by a major conflict of interest on this issue in that several members of the SPI-B are also influential figures within the BPS”?

The rhyme of Maoist thought reform with Covid brainwashing

Robert Jay Lifton’s book Thought Reform (1989) is an academic study of the psychological techniques used by Chinese Communists in the 1950s to politically indoctrinate opponents. ‘Thought reform’ is the term Lifton gave to the Communists’ extremely organised, comprehensive and deliberate methodology of remoulding their opponents’ worldview. It was this apparent dedication to a highly disciplined and carefully thought-out approach that set the Chinese Communists’ approach apart from previous historical attempts at ideological indoctrination.

The wellspring of thought reform is ideological totalism, which Lifton defined as the integration of an “immoderate ideology with equally immoderate individual character traits – an extremist meeting-ground between people and ideas”.(1) Ideological totalism is manifested by an extremist all-or-nothing emotional alignment to a particular ideology. In that sense the term is interchangeable with totalitarianism.

In attempting to provide a vantage point for identifying ideological totalism wherever it might rear its ugly head, Lifton outlined eight psychological themes that dominate an atmosphere of manipulative thought reform. Initially these themes were rapidly picked up by cult researchers because of their relevance to cult psychological indoctrination techniques.

Sue Parker Hall, a member of T4MF’s Steering Group, has published an article which explores how these themes have been mirrored in what has effectively been a government and media psyops campaign. I have taken her up on her invitation “to reflect on how the psychological influence of government and media may have affected [us]”. 

Reading her article together with Lifton’s original elucidation of the themes, I have added my own perspectives and interpretations of how the Government and its media allies may have applied a 21^st century thought reform programme since March 2020. A discussion of Lifton’s eight themes, contextualised for Covid containment policies, is laid out in parts I and II of this essay.

When considering these themes in the context of government Covid containment policies, I have found it helpful to view them in two ways: (a) as tactics or methods employed to alter individuals’ perceptions of a problem or situation with a view to directing behaviour towards a desired outcome, and; (b) collectively as a barometer of totalitarianism or a set of criteria for judging an environment that we suspect of ideological totalism. 

In part III of this essay, I will discuss why 21^st century Covid totalism was so successfully implemented at such short notice and how Covid totalism is rooted in global capitalism, itself an extremist ideology which, at its current apogee, is entirely compatible with totalitarianism. 

Any celebration of the apparent retreat of Covid totalism, in the UK or anywhere else, should be tempered by the realisation that ideological extremism and its imperative for total control are baked into the system we live under. In England at least, it may feel as though a battle has been won, but the war is by no means over. 

But first a discussion of the themes and how they transfer to Covid containment policies and propaganda.

1) Milieu control

This refers to the control of human communication and is the most basic feature of thought reform upon which all the other elements depend. At the outset, the hands of all mass media communications were tied by Ofcom’s suffocating guidance to broadcasters to avoid “question[ing] or undermin[ing] the advice of public health bodies on the Coronavirus, or otherwise undermine people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources of information about the disease”. 

The control of external communications as governments around the world sought to be the “single source of truth” has seriously hampered individuals’ ability to gain a balanced perspective on risk factors. The alignment of the interests of Big Tech with Government has seen industrial-scale censorship on social media platforms, with the government now seeking to formalise this censorship by introducing legislation to police these platforms, our public squares for debate, by removing lawful free speech content.

Renowned and eminently qualified experts who dissent from the official narrative on lockdowns, masks, testing and especially vaccines, have had their YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts deleted and their reputations besmirched by Big Media ‘fact-checkers’. The mushrooming of an Orwellian ‘fact-checking’ industry is in fact nothing more than repressive narrative management dressed up as a noble pursuit of truth.

Any reality checking that is typically done through person-to-person social contact was again severely curtailed by the alienation of people from their normal social contacts through the ‘social distancing’ and lockdown measures put in place.

In a more normal world, one in which information is not so tightly managed, competing sources of information compel the individual to inwardly reflect and perform reality checks. This helps to maintain a measure of identity separate from the environment that is under constant assessment. When this lively interaction with the world is severed, the individual is freed from the “incessant struggle with the elusive subtleties of truth”.(2) There is a regression to a childlike state in which ‘reality’ (the Government’s and media’s version of it) is packaged and handed to the individual on a plate. All the risk that goes with judging whether a situation is ‘real’ or not is removed.

The power of milieu control is such that even when information that contradicts the official narrative seeps through the Government’s filter, there is powerful resistance to “realities outside the closed ideological system… until the milieu control is sufficiently diminished for [the individual] to share these realities with others”.(3)^]

As more and more dissenters continue to speak their truth, alternative realities will make it through this filter, creating disequilibrium in those who have been infantilised into accepting “one truth”. This is no bad thing since, as Lifton points out, the alternative is to be “profoundly hampered in the perpetual human quest for what is true, good, and relevant in the world around [us] and within [us].”(4)

2) Mystical manipulation

Complete capture and carpet bombing of the information airwaves is essential to the manipulation of the individual’s emotion and behaviour. This manipulation acquires a mystical quality as events directed by the omniscient authority to control the individual appear to arise spontaneously. 

Under Covid containment policies this was achieved by scientism – the debasement of science by giving bad science the imprimatur of scientific authority. Sue Parker Hall defines scientism as:

“The framing of a problematic phenomenon and subsequent interventions, in genuine scientific language, but based on the models and opinions of a few influential individuals, not on a meta-analysis of all the relevant empirical data in the pertinent fields. Further, this closed ideological frame, from where the apparently scientific models, opinions and interventions originate, is created purposefully, in a form of backwards engineering, to justify the particular interventions.”

This is a good start but, for me, scientism is more than just bad science. It is the deployment of science, good or bad, as the sole arbiter of public policy and personal actions. Science is a tool for making sense of the material world. It should never override the imperative of placing an ethical, moral and values-centred framework at the heart of decision-making. Science as a tool may complement it, but we risk dehumanisation when it supersedes ethics and values. Seeing a medical doctor argue with the Secretary for Health against mandated vaccination on the basis of medical expediencies such as vaccine efficacy and immunity from prior exposure rather than on the basis of voluntary informed consent (with the emphasis on voluntary) is a victory for scientism and a defeat of our humanity.

That said, we have witnessed established scientific principles and evidence thrown under the bus on an unimaginable scale: bogus models uncritically used to justify the destruction of livelihoods; enforcing lockdowns with no evidentiary basis; u-turns on masking with no basis in scientific evidence; an overnight change in the definition of the foundational principles of herd immunity; the abandonment of the core medical principle espousing early treatment to save lives in favour of late treatment with instructions from medical authorities not to seek medical treatment until symptoms are unbearable; the abandonment of voluntary informed consent and mandating mass human experimentation on a global scale with novel gene-based therapies labelled as vaccines. And so on. This is a short list of the perversions wrought by apparently spontaneously evolving but, in reality, pre-planned Covid policies. 

Far from sowing doubt, this element of ‘planned spontaneity’ fuels a bizarre mystique and evinces a childlike acceptance of and trust in the manipulations. This is essential to engendering a sense of higher purpose reinforced by the apparent supernatural knowledge of the controlling authorities. This higher purpose yields a sense of virtuous superiority – of being ‘in the vanguard of an advance movement’ – impelling the individual to pursue the imperatives of ‘staying safe’ and stopping the spread of the virus at all costs, zealously jettisoning considerations of decency or immediate human welfare in the process. 

Anyone not aligned with the imperatives of the higher purpose is considered to be in the throes of lower order impulses such as selfishness, backwardness and stupidity, and accordingly denigrated as ‘Covid-denier’, ‘science-denier’, ‘tin foil hatter’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘disease or misinformation super-spreaders’.

3) The demand for purity

Ideological totalism by its very nature creates a sharp polarisation, both within the individual and society, between the pure and impure, both of which are speciously defined to advance the needs of the ideology. The pure is everything that is in harmony with the ideology while the impure is everything that threatens it.

Failure to achieve purity must necessarily lead to guilt and shame, which are weaponised in the war on impurity. Apostates of the ideology can expect ruthless ostracisation and humiliation.

Purity messaging with its guilt and shame corollary have been hallmarks of Covid policy messaging. The Government’s Behavioural Insights Team advised on the role of psychological persuasion in creating guilt and shame to influence people to behave in ways that achieve the desired outcomes as defined by those in authority. If you weren’t committed to saving Granny, you were relegated to the status of a quasi-murderer. 

One of the most perverse outcomes of weaponising guilt was seeing our most emotionally vulnerable group, children, effectively encouraged to believe that getting a vaccine for a disease that posed virtually no risk to them would be a way in which they could protect adults whose job it is to protect children.

Statements antithetical to public health and common decency emanating from the highest offices bear witness to the scale of the moral perversity produced by this demand for purity. The Archbishop of Canterbury debased his office and the entire Christian faith by engaging in vaccine evangelism which moralised a medical choice. New Zealand’s premier expressed a joyous acceptance of a two-tier medical apartheid as the consequence of her vaccine passport policy. And France’s President crudely told the country that it was his aim to ‘piss off’ the unvaccinated. 

A paradox of ideological extremism is that the ideological extremists inevitably end up manifesting the darkest aspects of the impurity they claim to be fighting.

4) The cult of confession

The demand for purity and the accompanying guilt and shame place demands on the individual to make public declarations of the private sphere to either seek absolution for transgression or to confirm continued allegiance to the ideology. 

Totalitarianism (or ideological totalism) seeks to gain private ownership of the mind by stigmatising privacy and, in more extreme cases, making it illegal. Thus, whereas a sincere and heartfelt confession in more normal circumstances might offer the prospect of genuine catharsis, totalism corrupts the confession by rendering it into a ‘command performance’ whose true aim is to reassure fellow believers of continued allegiance to the ideology. The aim of confession under totalism is, paradoxically, not to reveal innermost secrets but to conceal them. 

The most sacred public Covid confessional relates to the injection and provides one example among many of how Covid seeks to normalise the abnormal. Whereas previously, vaccination status was rightly regarded as private medical information, people now declare their jabs on social media as the ultimate symbol of purity, and colleagues think nothing of enquiring about it in the workplace and in social settings. 

Not only does this confessional serve the purpose of maintaining the fervour of official narrative acolytes but I have also witnessed its power to convert doubters. Someone I know who had decided not to get jabbed was asked by workplace managers if he had been jabbed. He had not, but he replied in the affirmative as he felt in that moment unable to cope with the anticipated unfavourable reception to a negative response. Having then lied about receiving the jab to avoid censure, he later explained to me that he would in all probability go on to get jabbed as he foresaw too many negative consequences for his survival at work if he didn’t. 

And so a public demand to ‘confess’ secret truths elicited the exact opposite – a lie – which the confessor then felt compelled to convert to truth in order to resolve the inner conflict that a ‘confessional’ lie had created. This is the power of the cult of confession – not only curbing apostasy but converting doubters.

Part II will complete the discussion of the psychological themes that signpost totalitarianism or totalist ideology. Part  III explores the ultimate cause of Covid ideological totalism.

You can read more of Rusere’s work at https://plagueonbothhouses.com/

(1) Robert J Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Ch 22, pg 419

(2) Robert J Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Ch 22, pg 421.

(3) Robert J Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Ch 22, pg 421-422.

(4) Robert J Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Ch 22, pg 422.

HTL’s Sonia Elijah analyses the first-release Pfizer papers. This is a must-read article and it’s available at TrialSiteNews, an essential resource to which HTL readers are urged to subscribe.

‘This is phenomenal investigative reporting. Either the Pfizer vaccines are over, or the entire social order of democracy and liberalism is over.’ Nick Hudson, Pandemics Data & Analytics

First Look at Newly Released Pfizer Docs Part 1: Case Report Errors and Anomalies

In a wide-ranging interview with Holding the Line’s Rusere Shoniwa, James Corbett (the Corbett Report) discusses the ‘emergencies’ around public health, the economy, climate change and war and claims that behind these four themes is a wider agenda of global control.

Corbett also examines the role of the World Economic Forum and the legacy media in the roll-out of the ’new normal‘ across the majority of the world’s countries.

While many of these themes are familiar to journalists within the independent news arena, they are not widely discussed by those within the legacy media, not least because the journalists within the legacy media ‘bubble’ are not aware of them.

Perhaps it is the duty of journalists to engage in a broader debate that allows for the question  ‘who benefits?’ and to follow the money during journalistic investigation.

Watch the interview on HTL’s Odysee channel

In a hard-hitting interview with Holding the Line, a United Kingdom Member of Parliament is calling out tech giants and mainstream news for failing to provide balanced debate on Covid and lockdowns.

Watch the interview

Conservative MP Chris Green, speaking to HTL spokesperson Roger Guttridge, says: “When we think of a media challenging the establishment, they have failed.”

During the wide-ranging interview he also raises concerns about restrictions on free speech that could be brought in via the proposed Online Safety Bill.

The Bolton West and Atherton MP also discusses the social and economic costs of lockdowns and why he resigned as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in October 2020 because of the coronavirus restrictions, which he believes caused more harm than good.

Fear-based policies around Covid-19, Mr Green claims, resulted in people being too frightened to visit their doctors and hospitals for serious conditions including heart disease and cancer.

The MP says that in the Bolton borough alone there were 20,000 fewer referrals from doctors to hospitals over the period of just a few months.

He also discusses vaccine mandates for health staff, and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Sajid Javid’s U-turn on those mandates for NHS staff.

Mr Green was speaking to HTL spokesperson Roger Guttridge on February 22, 2022.

Watch the interview on the HTL Odysee channel.