Mr Young has provided a slightly longer version of the same argument in The Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hancocks-lockdown-files-show-there-was-no-covid-plandemic/. Unfortunately it isn't really an argument, but still merely an assertion. Mr Hancock does not appear to have been taking orders, merely to have been acting presumptuously, erratically, and injuriously. This assessment, however, even if sound, supplies nothing very germane to the question. It is perfectly possible to suppose that, in the UK, as in many other places, there was no set script for covid 'measures' operating at the Hancock level—that the local pandemonium was in some sense a local product, albeit not entirely a local product—without reaching the conclusion that there was no coordinated effort to provide the occasion for such pandemonium or to take advantage of it by lending it, as far as possible, a certain tendency and even certain specifics. With all due respect, Mr Young will have to make a better case for his 'just clowns' thesis if he wants to convince those of us who don't suppose the whole issue hangs on Mr Hancock.
I'm sure Mr. Young considers himself a well-intentioned, accomplished and professional journalist, but the naivete of concluding that this is merely and only a "Clown Show", replete with its bearded ladies, mutilated dwarfs and elephantine giants who fumbled their dance steps and bungled their scripts is to miss the mark completely, in my humble commoner opinion.
In fact, let me take this opportunity to convey my own bewilderment on a grave matter: how is it that mere "horsepower intelligence" had nothing whatsoever to do with an awareness of the larger narrative in motion? Why were the professional, expertise and so-called "thinking classes" so oblivious toward the ongoing and orchestrated global calamity? How were they so easily duped, yoked and harnessed like dumb oxen in to the service of eugenicist evil? How could so many be conscripted as "useful idiots"?
Because...Cyunce?
How is it that commoners like truckers, farmers, pipe-fitters, street sweepers, garbage collectors, trench-diggers, front line workers and the like were more apt to see through the contradictions and chicanery?
Well, we know, as you've previously suggested Douglas, the that the "zone" was indeed flooded like never before in human history. Paradoxically, those whose fragile identities were most grafted to the status quo and the consensus trance and the establishment centers of power and manufactured order were the first to fall like dominoes. In turn, all the institutions populated by such credulous people fell in turn.
If this historical event was indeed a mere Clown Show, the accumulated errors would have been recognized and rectified by now. Rather, we have crossed so many Rubicons that I think we can safely(?) say that the behaviour of the perpetrators and the dumb, mute momentum of the shocked-and-awed masses seem to be pointing to its relentless continuance.
I cannot even remember or enumerate the number of "Bombshell" headlines I've come across over the last three years that in the "Old Normal" would have stopped this train in its tracks. Ditto for all the "Smoking Guns", "Explosive Revelations" and so forth. But nothing of the sort happened. "Speed of Cyunce"??? What???
Perhaps Mr. Young would do well to isolate himself in a room, tied to a kitchen chair, and fast for a few days while his mind comes to clarity and unhindered vision. While he is at it, he could listen to some of the nuggets of wisdom that Leonard Cohen left behind in his illustrious canon of work. Perhaps then he might come to a more finely honed capacity for acknowledging structured and organized evil. The process could be considered a useful form of professional re-education, such as was recently suggested for the inconvenient Jordan Peterson!
And the dealer wants you thinking
That it's either black or white
Thank God it's not that simple
In My Secret Life
[...]
They're lining up the prisoners, the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons, they were middle-class and tame
I Didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim
Foremost, thank you for not liking my disjointed and half-crazy comment. This cybernetic age seems to have reduced human communication to a series of instrumental fragments - click, like, share, swipe, like, follow, subscribe etc. I suppose it drives the algorithms and it does save time after all. It's little wonder there are no pitchforks and torches in the street. There isn't the social cohesion and common perception of reality to allow for it. The masses - bearing in mind everyone is somebody else's "masses" - have been rendered insensate, mute, dumb, estranged and neutralized. The "move fast and break things" crowd and their associated ilk have reduced us to quantifiable merchandise, atomized, itemized and parameterized, through their "covetousness and feigned words". Worst of all - we bought the grand seduction. We are on one enormous and never-ending soma holiday.
Forget about Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever". The "vision of the future" seems to come these days packaged with a smile and smart suit, glib and dissociative, sinister and vicious. And remember: thoughts are "nothing but data". Klaus, (yes - that Klaus) in his recent speech at the World Government Summit, (yes - that World Government Summit) prattled on like some latter-day Goebbels, waxing as poetic as he could muster on the "Five dimensions of leadership". One of these "dimensions", believe it or not, was "soul". The functional purpose of "soul", apparently, is "purpose and ambition". Your misery will at least be shiny, bright and forever upgraded until you are literally brain in a jar, nourished by powdered cricket carapace.
WEF Declares That Human Beings Are No Longer Sovereign (10 min)
Incompetence, arrogance, and stupidity played a role because that's what government needed to implement the plan has in overabundance. But these people are merely the actors. It's the people who've written this drama, not acted in it, who are worrisome. My hunch is that we've just concluded Act I; there's a lot more to go.
Mr. Farrow said your point in the article, "There has already been a great deal of intelligence at work, intelligence that counts on the clowns, and laughs at them too." Albeit he did not necessarily mean that the government were the "intelligent ones," nor if Act I has concluded.
But, alas, I suspect there is a certain "will" that is behind these "actors" and "clowns," that is, also, stated implicitly in both yours and Mr. Farrow's hypotheses. This "will" I am referring to, for brevity's sake, can be perspicuously explained by the first scene of "Faust" by Goethe, when Faust asks a question to the demon Mephistopheles,
"'...who are you, then?'
'I am the part of that power which eternally
wills evil and eternally works good.'"
This quote is also the epigraph for Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master & Margarita," which is apt if you read the story.
I concur with your writing. Something very evil is prowling this world. Naomi Wolf, a leftwing, secular Jew until a few years ago, has written poignantly about this as well. Here are a couple of essays she's written that you might find very interesting:
Apparently it's also time for journalists to talk: "So much of what we were told during the pandemic was wrong – and nobody has been held accountable," says Allister Heath in the Telegraph. "The lesson is clear. Even in a crisis, free speech and open inquiry must be nurtured: elite groupthink is too often wrong, and must at all times be scrutinised. Long live the free press."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/01/untruth-untruth-peddled-justify-great-lockdown-disaster/. What a remarkable Johnny-come-lately statement! Who, we may ask, will resurrect this free press that for several years has been moribund? Who will liberate it from its shameless service to its Lockstep masters? Who will hold it accountable? But thanks for the Wolf links. The article on the demonic is well worth reading, though I don't suppose Toby Young has the stomach for it.
It was too coordinated. The messaging was all the same.
It's not entirely a coincidence the WHO is revising its pandemic treaty. One in which that seeks to remove human agency and rights from the medical process. In other words, medical autonomy and ethics are in the way of their paternalistic and authoritarian medical-scientific-technocracy.
Academic institutions are on the take. McGill and U of T have taken millions from Bill Gates. And now we learned U de M took money from Chinese donors. Do they not have dignity? Close those legs already.
So it's not surprising they will serve as mouthpieces for their paymasters. The frightening thing is they still insist on peddling failed 'solutions'. It's like they don't know the jig is up.
Krusty is the perfect metaphor for these clowns who are acting out the Peter Principle in live time for all to see. They're too dimwitted to notice we see the string pulling them.
Mr Young has provided a slightly longer version of the same argument in The Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hancocks-lockdown-files-show-there-was-no-covid-plandemic/. Unfortunately it isn't really an argument, but still merely an assertion. Mr Hancock does not appear to have been taking orders, merely to have been acting presumptuously, erratically, and injuriously. This assessment, however, even if sound, supplies nothing very germane to the question. It is perfectly possible to suppose that, in the UK, as in many other places, there was no set script for covid 'measures' operating at the Hancock level—that the local pandemonium was in some sense a local product, albeit not entirely a local product—without reaching the conclusion that there was no coordinated effort to provide the occasion for such pandemonium or to take advantage of it by lending it, as far as possible, a certain tendency and even certain specifics. With all due respect, Mr Young will have to make a better case for his 'just clowns' thesis if he wants to convince those of us who don't suppose the whole issue hangs on Mr Hancock.
I'm sure Mr. Young considers himself a well-intentioned, accomplished and professional journalist, but the naivete of concluding that this is merely and only a "Clown Show", replete with its bearded ladies, mutilated dwarfs and elephantine giants who fumbled their dance steps and bungled their scripts is to miss the mark completely, in my humble commoner opinion.
In fact, let me take this opportunity to convey my own bewilderment on a grave matter: how is it that mere "horsepower intelligence" had nothing whatsoever to do with an awareness of the larger narrative in motion? Why were the professional, expertise and so-called "thinking classes" so oblivious toward the ongoing and orchestrated global calamity? How were they so easily duped, yoked and harnessed like dumb oxen in to the service of eugenicist evil? How could so many be conscripted as "useful idiots"?
Because...Cyunce?
How is it that commoners like truckers, farmers, pipe-fitters, street sweepers, garbage collectors, trench-diggers, front line workers and the like were more apt to see through the contradictions and chicanery?
Well, we know, as you've previously suggested Douglas, the that the "zone" was indeed flooded like never before in human history. Paradoxically, those whose fragile identities were most grafted to the status quo and the consensus trance and the establishment centers of power and manufactured order were the first to fall like dominoes. In turn, all the institutions populated by such credulous people fell in turn.
If this historical event was indeed a mere Clown Show, the accumulated errors would have been recognized and rectified by now. Rather, we have crossed so many Rubicons that I think we can safely(?) say that the behaviour of the perpetrators and the dumb, mute momentum of the shocked-and-awed masses seem to be pointing to its relentless continuance.
I cannot even remember or enumerate the number of "Bombshell" headlines I've come across over the last three years that in the "Old Normal" would have stopped this train in its tracks. Ditto for all the "Smoking Guns", "Explosive Revelations" and so forth. But nothing of the sort happened. "Speed of Cyunce"??? What???
Perhaps Mr. Young would do well to isolate himself in a room, tied to a kitchen chair, and fast for a few days while his mind comes to clarity and unhindered vision. While he is at it, he could listen to some of the nuggets of wisdom that Leonard Cohen left behind in his illustrious canon of work. Perhaps then he might come to a more finely honed capacity for acknowledging structured and organized evil. The process could be considered a useful form of professional re-education, such as was recently suggested for the inconvenient Jordan Peterson!
And the dealer wants you thinking
That it's either black or white
Thank God it's not that simple
In My Secret Life
[...]
They're lining up the prisoners, the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons, they were middle-class and tame
I Didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker
[...]
I heard the snake was baffled by his sin
He shed his scales to find the snake within
But born again is born without a skin
The poison enters into everything
[...]
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine
Of survival
[...]
Wild as any freedom loving racist
I applaud the actions of the chief
Tell me now oh beautiful and spacious
Am I in trouble with the Jazz police?
Or to sum up Naomi Wolf (see elsewhere in these comments) in Cohen's words, also from "The Future":
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder. [...]
When they said, REPENT, REPENT,
I wonder what they meant.
Foremost, thank you for not liking my disjointed and half-crazy comment. This cybernetic age seems to have reduced human communication to a series of instrumental fragments - click, like, share, swipe, like, follow, subscribe etc. I suppose it drives the algorithms and it does save time after all. It's little wonder there are no pitchforks and torches in the street. There isn't the social cohesion and common perception of reality to allow for it. The masses - bearing in mind everyone is somebody else's "masses" - have been rendered insensate, mute, dumb, estranged and neutralized. The "move fast and break things" crowd and their associated ilk have reduced us to quantifiable merchandise, atomized, itemized and parameterized, through their "covetousness and feigned words". Worst of all - we bought the grand seduction. We are on one enormous and never-ending soma holiday.
Forget about Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever". The "vision of the future" seems to come these days packaged with a smile and smart suit, glib and dissociative, sinister and vicious. And remember: thoughts are "nothing but data". Klaus, (yes - that Klaus) in his recent speech at the World Government Summit, (yes - that World Government Summit) prattled on like some latter-day Goebbels, waxing as poetic as he could muster on the "Five dimensions of leadership". One of these "dimensions", believe it or not, was "soul". The functional purpose of "soul", apparently, is "purpose and ambition". Your misery will at least be shiny, bright and forever upgraded until you are literally brain in a jar, nourished by powdered cricket carapace.
WEF Declares That Human Beings Are No Longer Sovereign (10 min)
https://sp.rmbl.ws/fw/s8/2/y/l/5/e/yl5ei.caa.mp4?u=3&b=0
Leonard might have been crazy (by our standards), but he was effing clairvoyant!
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
Incompetence, arrogance, and stupidity played a role because that's what government needed to implement the plan has in overabundance. But these people are merely the actors. It's the people who've written this drama, not acted in it, who are worrisome. My hunch is that we've just concluded Act I; there's a lot more to go.
Mr. Farrow said your point in the article, "There has already been a great deal of intelligence at work, intelligence that counts on the clowns, and laughs at them too." Albeit he did not necessarily mean that the government were the "intelligent ones," nor if Act I has concluded.
But, alas, I suspect there is a certain "will" that is behind these "actors" and "clowns," that is, also, stated implicitly in both yours and Mr. Farrow's hypotheses. This "will" I am referring to, for brevity's sake, can be perspicuously explained by the first scene of "Faust" by Goethe, when Faust asks a question to the demon Mephistopheles,
"'...who are you, then?'
'I am the part of that power which eternally
wills evil and eternally works good.'"
This quote is also the epigraph for Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master & Margarita," which is apt if you read the story.
I concur with your writing. Something very evil is prowling this world. Naomi Wolf, a leftwing, secular Jew until a few years ago, has written poignantly about this as well. Here are a couple of essays she's written that you might find very interesting:
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/is-it-time-for-intellectuals-to-talk (can be accessed by activating the free 7 day trial)
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/have-the-ancient-gods-returned (from last week)
Apparently it's also time for journalists to talk: "So much of what we were told during the pandemic was wrong – and nobody has been held accountable," says Allister Heath in the Telegraph. "The lesson is clear. Even in a crisis, free speech and open inquiry must be nurtured: elite groupthink is too often wrong, and must at all times be scrutinised. Long live the free press."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/01/untruth-untruth-peddled-justify-great-lockdown-disaster/. What a remarkable Johnny-come-lately statement! Who, we may ask, will resurrect this free press that for several years has been moribund? Who will liberate it from its shameless service to its Lockstep masters? Who will hold it accountable? But thanks for the Wolf links. The article on the demonic is well worth reading, though I don't suppose Toby Young has the stomach for it.
This goes past clown show.
It was too coordinated. The messaging was all the same.
It's not entirely a coincidence the WHO is revising its pandemic treaty. One in which that seeks to remove human agency and rights from the medical process. In other words, medical autonomy and ethics are in the way of their paternalistic and authoritarian medical-scientific-technocracy.
Academic institutions are on the take. McGill and U of T have taken millions from Bill Gates. And now we learned U de M took money from Chinese donors. Do they not have dignity? Close those legs already.
So it's not surprising they will serve as mouthpieces for their paymasters. The frightening thing is they still insist on peddling failed 'solutions'. It's like they don't know the jig is up.
Krusty is the perfect metaphor for these clowns who are acting out the Peter Principle in live time for all to see. They're too dimwitted to notice we see the string pulling them.