Asking for Seconds
"Did you get your booster?"
Let’s talk about what it seems like some would rather forget: the 2020–’23 public health emergency of the coronavirus pandemic, and the global response to the same.
Since 12 December 2019—when treatment began on the first patients in Wuhan, China, for what was later identified as the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), following what the U.S. Senate concluded in 2023 was most likely an accidental leak, from a lab funded by American taxpayers conducting gain-of-function research that manufactured more infectious viruses than exist in nature, and which planned to engineer novel coronaviruses specifically—the world has grappled with unprecedented (self-imposed) challenges. The virus’ origins were deliberately obfuscated as its rapid transmission allowed it to spread quickly across international borders, while flawed modeling from the Imperial College of London prompted most nations to implement various authoritarian measures such as lockdowns, social distancing, and widespread testing to curb its spread.
(As noted in a slice last year, that all got started just a couple months after the World Economic Forum [WEF] and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-sponsored the Event 201 pandemic simulation exercise. Right on time!)
Governments and international organizations collaborated to develop and distribute vaccines at a pace unprecedented for the industry—hence the Trump Administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” public/private (i.e., fascist) initiative to develop emergency medical treatments with funding through the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the $2 trillion legislation which (as we covered last year) also granted $475 billion in tax relief to individuals with $200,000 or more in annual income. The emergence of multiple vaccines, including those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, led to mass vaccination campaigns worldwide with the advertised intent of achieving widespread immunity, in pursuit of which these products failed so phenomenally that, in September 2021, the U.S.’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) changed its definition of “vaccination” from a procedure performed “to produce immunity” to one performed instead “to produce protection”—just not the same kind of protection, I guess, as that mentioned in the definition of “immunity,” which is the kind that means someone “can be exposed […] without becoming infected.”
That pandemic response was the focus of Bret Weinstein’s interview with Tucker Carlson last month, during which time they discussed potential issues with mRNA technology, censorship and erosion of rights during public health emergencies, as well as speculation on actors and incentives behind global vaccination campaigns.
As Weinstein explains in the interview, Big Pharma profits from intellectual property and has incentive to portray products as safe and necessary, but mRNA technology has major safety flaws due to lack of lipid nanoparticle targeting, causing our immune systems to attack mRNA-transcribed cells, including in organs like the heart.
Weinstein hypothesizes that the pharmaceutical industry used the psychological trauma of the pandemic emergency and its influence in media, government, and NGOs to bypass obstacles and normalize lucrative but dangerous mRNA technology through government mandates before harms were detected. Safety testing was inadequate and truncated for the mass rollout of the Warp Speed jabs, which researcher Denis Rancourt estimate may have caused up to 17 million deaths globally. (Weinstein also references [at ~19:47] the reporting of Dr. John Campbell, whose work on excess mortality rates worldwide—resulting in enough deaths [not attributable to COVID-19 infection] in 2022–’23 to eclipse the U.K.’s civilian losses during World War II and the U.S.’s combat losses during the Vietnam War [the latter by a factor of ten]—deserves special mention.) Yet public health authorities continue recommending them without acknowledging potential harms.
Meanwhile, pandemic preparedness treaty changes at the World Health Organization (WHO) propose to give that international body the authority to censor what it deems “misinformation” or “malinformation,” in the terminology used to demonize dissenting voices and justify censorship, regardless of whether the claims are factual. Accordingly, WHO changes could further erode rights during future pandemics in their efforts to silence contrarian voices that previously disrupted dominant narratives. Therefore, Weinstein urges us to speak out to protect our civil rights and our scientific discourse.
The WHO presumably justifies these proposed treaty changes—themselves constantly changing, as Weinstein reports (at ~33:23–33:57)—to address supposed pandemic-response challenges like vaccine distribution inequities, vaccine hesitancy, and the emergence of new variants.
Of course, none of those amendments will change the fact that the fucking things don’t work. Pfizer might have known that, had they bothered to test whether their so-called “vaccines” prevented infection or transmission. But, according to Pfizer international markets president Janine Small’s October 2022 testimony to the European Parliament, they just didn’t have the time.
Certainly that raises the question, “What were they even trying to accomplish?!” I mean, Pfizer’s response to the resulting uproar was just (paraphrasing), “We never said it prevented transmission”: an amazing statement, from a company that brands itself as a vaccine manufacturer. I hear that next year automakers will put a new design into production before checking if the key turns.
Personally, I believe it should have been obvious by August 2021 that the injections didn’t confer immunity, but just because that’s when it became obvious to me. I can cite the exact article that made it obvious: “CDC study shows 74% of people infected in Massachusetts Covid outbreak were fully vaccinated”, published 30 July 2021—about two months before the CDC changed its definition for “vaccination.”
Nonetheless, legacy corporate media both promoted the mRNA injections as safe and effective, and vilified those hesitant to consent to (or who would exercise their personal autonomy in refusing) an experimental medical treatment. If you’d like a reminder—of that dehumanizing rhetoric and the false promises of the treatment’s efficacy from corpoate-media personalities and public-health officials—treat yourself to a classic mash-up from Matt Orfalea:
(Seriously, if you haven’t seen it before, check it out: it’s really well done. I’ve watched it many times now just for fun.)
In concert with that constant messaging from mainstream media, the U.S. government was moving to compel its citizens to comply: in September 2021, President Biden issued Executive Orders 14042 and 14043, mandating that all federal employees and onsite contractors be vaccinated and extending the vaccination requirement to all federal contractors, subcontractors, and their employees, expanding the scope of vaccination mandates across a broader spectrum of the workforce connected to federal projects.
Soon after, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) introduced an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) that mandates vaccination or regular testing for employees of private businesses with 100 or more workers, significantly impacting a large segment of the private sector. Moreover, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) at the Department of Health and Human Services issued “an interim final rule” requiring healthcare workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid to be fully vaccinated.
Of course, all that shows no regard for the fact that a lack of long-term safety data meant that no patient could grant informed consent to this experimental treatment—and, therefore, that to administer it according to mandate entailed violating the Nuremberg Code.
Fortunately, EO 14042 was stayed by court injunction in Dec 2021, with EO 14043 falling to a similar fate and OSHA’s ETS overturned outright the following month. The CMS rules endured until May 2023, a few weeks after President Biden signed EO 14099 to overturn those previously stayed by injunction. By the previous month, ~69% of the U.S. population had been “fully vaccinated” with the same injections implicated less than half a year later (as Weinstein mentioned above) in 17 million deaths worldwide, though still some three months after other researchers found patients faced a ~1.62% chance of suffering myocarditis following vaccination, with ~90% of those who suffered it having received an mRNA formula.
Given that, as I said above, mainstream headlines directly contradicted claims to these treatments’ efficacy hardly six months after their introduction to the general public, I felt surprised to see that those with whom I would have said I share ideological affinity didn’t change their own messaging. Instead, the discourse among those erstwhile comrades remained focused on vaccine distribution inequities as supposedly extending the pandemic’s duration (at ~3:41) and on demonizing those who opposed vaccine passports and mandates, presenting them as driven by a malignant individualism and a lack of neighborly compassion.
Of course, the unvaccinated were the ones lacking in compassion: so lacking in it that the famed progressive Noam Chomsky said in October 2021—despite three months’ worth of clear-to-me evidence that the vaccinations didn’t prevent transmission—“I think the right response for them is not to force them to but rather to insist that they be isolated” and replied, when asked how the unvaccinated would receive food, “That’s their problem.”
In the course of all this, observing supposed anti-establishment comrades repeat propaganda of the same stripe as that available in corporate media would inspire a shift in my ideological commitments. Dedicated Radio Free Pizza aficionados cursed with perfect memory may remember that last year I discussed (at ~5:31–6:07 in the linked clip) this shift in ideological commitments with reference to the 2020 George Floyd riots in Minneapolis:
Somehow I made it out alive, but I was not actually troubled by it, weirdly enough. A lot of that may have had to do actually with the fact that I would have been quite a bit more on the side of the globalists, I would say. I wouldn’t actually go that far, but what I want to say is that I would not have known in 2020 […] how this could fit into any kind of really just overall anti-human agenda.
(Meaning, in that context, a neofeudalist agenda for the country’s plutocrats to accumulate further real estate holdings and dispossess the local residents, which rioting anarchists would unwittingly serve.)
In the same conversation I offered more details about my political background, and the trajectory of my political opinions’ development over the course of my life, adding (at ~21:41–21:49) that I’d lost faith in the political process of capitalist republics more than a decade ago—instead, “I completely abandoned it and went anarchist […] in 2012” following the substantive failure of the Occupy Wall Street movement—before going on to explain that (at~22:15–22:25), “at some point in the past three years, I switched: I kind of abandoned anarchism. I call myself a communist now.”
Saying that out loud last year gave me reason to ponder the cause for such a shift. On this line of thought I tweeted my conclusion a week later:
Paradoxically, seeing people manipulated by media during the scamdemic into fearful obedience to the state (which used their obedience to enrich capitalists) made me more friendly to the idea of a state, so long as the means of production for human necessities are nationalized.
So, essentially, seeing some of my fellow anarchists vilify and dehumanize those who rejected the mandates of a fascist public health regime drove me toward what I described in that initial conversation (at ~23:27–24:04) as “MAGA Communism, if people want to call it that, patriotic socialism, if they want to call it that,” because, “although I default to calling myself a leftist, I am trying to break out of the left/right paradigm […] it plays too well into the duopoly agenda.”
Weird, right? But, looking back, I don’t know why I should have expected anything else: seriously, those whole three years were a real farce, or a true comedy of errors, or an absolute tragedy of absurd cruelty, depending on which aspect you’re considering. So, given the circumstances, obviously you’re going to encounter something unanticipated.
Still, with that mind, maybe you’ll be surprised to learn that lately I’ve been asking myself, “Why didn’t we see it all coming?”
No, not because of 2019’s WEF-sponsored Event 201: because of a phenomenon some researchers call “predictive programming.” Ohio State University blog The Psychology of Extraordinary Beliefs quotes Scottish-Canadian radio host Alan Watt in a post on the subject to define it as “a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders” so that the audience “will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.”
In his “Hollywood Occultism” (2015) presentation, Jay Dyer offers (at ~2:56) a similar definition as “a sort of a deep psy-op technique where we utilize the concept of ‘twilight language’”—a concept originating, as Dyer explains later (at ~4:39), in the Vedic texts as sandhyabhasa—“to prepare the way for, to use H.G. Wells’s terms, ‘the things to come’ [with] the effect of conditioning the mass mind through the manipulation of archetypes.”
“Prophetic entertainment,” we might call it. If it indeed involves the manipulation of archetypes, then it makes sense that television programming in the months and years ahead of the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks has provided some of the most provocative potential examples of predictive programming, with ‘towers’ representing a manipulated archetype—one appearing, presumably, as the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis, the Tower as a major arcana in Tarot cards, etc.—in narratives designed to prepare their audiences for the WTC’s imminent collapse.
(This, of course, would likely imply that the WTC attacks were a false-flag event, which they obviously were. Doesn’t take “predictive programming” to see that.)
Similar to the above discussion of recent shifts in my ideological commitments, hardcore Radio Free Pizza devotees with an almost discomfiting attention to detail will recall how I mentioned in another conversation last year likely the most famous example of predictive programming, the pilot episode—haha, “pilot episode,” can you believe I only just got that?—of The X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen that aired 4 March 2001, which depicted the conspiracy of a faction within the U.S. government to crash a passenger aircraft into the WTC. Those same maniacal devotees would also recall the mention (at ~37:05 in the linked clip) of a series called Utopia.
Debuting in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon’s Utopia (2020) revolves around a graphic novel predicting a scientist’s creation of a flu-like disease to combat Earth’s overpopulation, the outbreak of which propels a group of comic-geeks into a perilous quest to unveil its secrets while evading murderous adversaries. Of course, given the timing of its debut, the show’s uncanny coincidence with the pandemic lends itself to a conspiratorial aura, though the date of its premiere fell just a little too late for us to call it “predictive programming.”
Instead, we have to reserve that honor for writer Dennis Kelly’s Utopia (2013), the BBC series that Amazon adapted and which premiered seven years before the coronavirus pandemic, and for which reason I said above, “Why didn’t we see it all coming?”
An early review describes the BBC’s Utopia as a welcome thriller depicting two hitmen tracking a conspiracy theorist web hacker and a group of forum friends from a comic-book-fan community to retrieve a doom-prophesying graphic novel manuscript called “The Utopia Experiments Two” on behalf of a powerful cabal called “the Network.” These comic-geeks believe that the original “The Utopia Experiments” predicted various disastrous epidemics, while the unpublished sequel contains more information on future world events, for which reason they become the Network’s targets. Lives are dismantled as the Network searches for the manuscript and a fugitive named Jessica Hyde, eliminating anyone in their way. As the plot unfolds, various characters become entangled in the Network’s schemes, revealing a web of mysteries and conspiracies that become increasingly perilous. Amidst global rumors of a “Russian flu,” that review of the first season tells us, the protagonists strive to unravel the truth in the face of imminent danger. Later, a 2014 eulogy for the cancelled BBC series argues that the plot’s Janus vaccine—ostensibly engineered to combat the Russian flu but in truth designed by the Network to sterilize humanity—serves as a metaphor for the harm done in aiming to control the world’s population.
With the benefit of some eight years’ hindsight, a Sense Receptor News article from November 2022 explores the intriguing parallels between the BBC’s Utopia and the perspective of conspiracy theorists on the coronavirus pandemic. Delving into the uncanny alignment between the show’s plot and the theories circulated by figures like former Pfizer Vice President Michael Yeadon, immunologist Dr. Dolores Cahill, and others, the article draws parallels between Utopia’s narrative and real-world events, highlighting instances from the show that seemingly anticipated aspects of the COVID-19 crisis—including references to PCR testing, concerns about a mutated strain of the Russian flu, and the show’s portrayal of infertility-inducing “vaccines”—while also touching on the role of figures like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates (heads of Event 201-sponsoring organizations) as being aligned with the Network.
Sense Receptor News also points out details in Utopia’s script, such as references to a “cold storage chain” for delivering infertility-inducing vaccines, which resonate with the real-world cold-chain distribution requirements of certain COVID-19 vaccines. The article examines the potential connections between the show’s fictional narrative and the actual trajectory of the pandemic, raising questions about the origins of the show’s ideas and the creative process behind it.
Despite speculating on the alignment between Utopia’s storyline and COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the article notes that creator Dennis Kelly claims not to be a conspiracy theorist. But—as strange as this sounds to say—given everything we’ve learned so far about the coronavirus pandemic and about predictive programming, does it really matter what the writer thinks?
Certainly the tenets of the analytical framework for predictive programming emphasize the authorial intent. (In other proposed examples from Dyer’s 2015 presentation, these inferred intents seem to correspond to long-term agendas for eugenics-based social engineering in breakaway civilizations enabled through private spacefaring agencies over which the so-called elite will more openly reign.) But, as Dyer argues (at ~53:49) in his presentation’s conclusion, any fidelity between predictive programming and humanity’s future in fact depends on the audience:
It’s all about giving a synthetic overlay of reality, and humans, we don’t generally get our view of the world, our worldview, from bureaucrats spitting out facts. We get it from theater, we get it from movies, and from music, and from pop culture, and from novels. That’s where most people get their understanding of the world. Hollywood has become our new mythos […] and, when we allow that to program us and to give us our view of the world, we hand over our sovereignty: we allow oligarchs and corporatists to tell us truth and falsehood—to define the threshold between fiction and reality. And, I would say, [let’s] just simply stop doing that.
That perspective, of course, accords harmoniously with the concerns shown in our last slice of Radio Free Pizza for the importance of shared narratives and iconography to foster cohesion in a culturally heterogeneous society, and for the failure of the modern superhero mythos to address the challenges facing the masses.
With that harmony in mind, it’s interesting to note that the initial reception of Utopia’s 2020 adaptation displayed some hand-wringing over the show’s exploration of what some might view as dangerous ideas—or at least those that one ought not to stage in mass media during an officially declared pandemic, given these ideas’ potential virality. For example, David Jesudason’s September 2020 review of the Amazon adaptation notes in its introduction that “Utopia is a new TV series so prescient that it feels like the timing of its release could itself have been part of a conspiracy theory” and goes on to argue that the zeitgeist of pandemic-induced paranoia reflects a broader societal trend marked by a surge in conspiracy theories, which “have become a way to explain the biggest problems our planet faces.”
As Jesudason tells us, moments of societal tension have historically given rise to an array of conspiracy theories attributing calamities to shadowy forces or clandestine organizations. In his view, the expression of these narratives in cinema and television both reflect and catalyze our collective anxieties, amplified and disseminated through ubiquitous social media. Citing Dr. Michael Butter’s insights, Jesudason links these conspiracy theories’ popularity to the allure of intricate, interconnected narratives unfolding over an extended television series, allowing viewers to vicariously experience in a similar fashion the gradual revelation of information—or, in other words, to experience the real world like a TV show.
The Vigilant Citizen also covered the series on 30 October 2020, noting that it was filmed in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic. In contrast to Jesudason’s article for the BBC, The Vigilant Citizen gives more credit to the eerie accuracy with which the show predicted some of the pandemic’s aspects: i.e., the rush for to develop vaccine, and that Big Pharma CEOs operate as villains. (Even those mentioned above who felt concerned with vaccine equity would have to agree.) Of course, I should hasten to say, many members of the general public might say that reality and the TV show diverge with the mind-controlled slaves and the conspiracy to depopulate the Earth with a mass-distributed vaccine. Nonetheless, The Vigilant Citizen suggests that the series might serve as a warning or reflection of the insanity of the current era.
Reflecting on the tumultuous period of the coronavirus pandemic and the global response reveals a complex tapestry of events, narratives, and shifting perspectives. Those who regard the plot of Utopia as predictive programming and who believe that it functions as a veiled disclosure of a real-world conspiracy would surely find evidence of its predictive accuracy in the findings of Denis Rancourt and John Campbell, as described above.
Given those disastrous results of a global vaccination campaign that distributed harmful and ineffective injections worldwide, the BBC’s Jesudason would have to agree now that theories about such a conspiracy attempt to explain a real (and potentially growing) problem for people worldwide—and if that’s not enough, maybe they should take another look at Contagion (2011), in which a pandemic begins in a Chinese wet market.
I imagine that would appeal more to those concerned about vaccine equity—y’know, people who see the rollout as a happy ending, instead of a crime against humanity—but, still, the BBC’s Jesudason and others might better understand how the correspondences between reality and entertainment fuel the very conspiracy theories that legacy media outlets like theirs have seen fit to stigmatize. Of course, if the WHO gains the international authority to censor anything it deems as misinformation, they might never need to think about any of this. Still, considering the idea of predictive programming—and, particularly, how anyone who might have suspected in 2013 that Utopia could represent an example of it would then have interpreted the events of the pandemic much differently—suggests that perhaps it would be worth exploring how the influence of the mass media on collective understanding might account for apparent shifts in my political alignments.
But above all, the 2020–’23 public health emergency of the coronavirus pandemic has emphasized the need to critically evaluate information sources (whether mainstream news or cult sci-fi entertainment), to question prevailing narratives, and to challenge them where appropriate to defend our civil rights despite whatever international emergencies might arise. Surely what we’ve covered today and everything else we’ve learned and experienced during the pandemic can inform a more discerning approach to both the information we consume, and the entertainment too—while doing our best to preserve the individual sovereignty with which we shape our worldviews.