It was only a matter of time before the waning US Empire and its loyal allies had to withdraw from Afghanistan. The US outlay over the last 20 years has been around $2 trillion. This astronomical sum may have empowered the likes of Halliburton, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin but it has brought Afghanis and military personnel alike nothing but death, destruction and more virulent strains of Islamic fundamentalism. Predictably much of the Western Media has blamed the current incumbent masquerading as the USA’s Commander-in-Chief for abandoning his troops and allies. The stage is set for Joe Biden’s exit for health reasons. The new Global Empire no longer needs American and European troops trapped in Central Asia. They can let China, Iran and India fill the vacuum. Besides, those troops may soon be needed much closer to home.
Have you noticed that some of the same high-profile opinion leaders who once evangelised humanitarian wars are now among the strongest advocates of our emerging bio-security state? They promoted the first kind of intervention to spread liberal democracy and overthrow tyrants and the latest kind to rid the world of a nasty disease. I’m thinking naturally of the likes of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the British context, but Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern are very much in the same mould. Younger leaders may have distanced themselves from past escapades that have since proven electorally unpopular. However, they are ideologically committed to the concept of interventionism to guide us towards their vision of a progressive utopia or rather to put the little people in their place.
Interventionism is the idea that large organisations should take over the management of individuals, families and communities. It may take many forms. Outwardly it may mean military actions against naughty local leaders who fail to cooperate fully with multinational entities. However, it may also involve government agencies taking coercive actions to regulate the behaviour of people who fail to comply with expected psychological, medical or environmental norms. While many wishful thinking lefties may have opposed recent military interventions in the Middle East, they often championed coercive social interventions against people in their own country as necessary means to a progressive end. Such interventions may include early years mental health screening, gender theory lessons in primary schools, taking children into care if their parents fail to comply with expected behavioural norms, monitoring politically incorrect speech on social media or in people’s private spaces and censoring media outlets that permit dissent from the dominant progressive narrative. More disturbingly, we have now learned such progressive interventions may also entail stay-at-home orders, mandatory medical procedures, digital health passports and total surveillance, allegedly to protect the public against ever-mutating nanoscopic genetic sequences.
What else do these policies all have in common? They all have powerful lobbies deeply embedded in the world’s media giants and administrations and require multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns to win public support, usually by spreading fear that a failure to take immediate action will result in greater human misery. By this logic, a failure to bomb Afghanistan could have, purportedly, condemned Afghani women to permanent enslavement under Taliban rule. A failure to invade Iraq could have let Saddam Hussein deploy weapons of mass destruction and continue torturing his own people. A failure to impose strict coronavirus containment measures could lead to a proliferation of vulnerable people dying from respiratory infections. And last but not least, a failure to track the movement of every human being on the planet through mandatory microchip implants could lead to more tragic child abductions, such as the much-publicised Madeleine McCann story. In all cases, technocratic lobbyists want us to trade personal responsibility and traditional cohesive communities for the engineered safety of their corporate partners.
The alternative to interventionism is not necessarily complete anarchy but rather decentralised management of our affairs or self-determination at a personal and communal level. In the normal course of events, the cultural and ethical choices of other individuals, families, communities and small nation-states should be none of our business. The last century of growing interconnectedness has shown us that more humane societies are also more successful in the long run. Societies with greater personal freedom attract the best and brightest minds and let their people unleash their creativity. Given a choice, nobody wants to live in tyranny, but some may wish to suppress the freedoms granted to the great unwashed to secure greater freedom in their own neighbourhood. Totalitarian regimes could only survive by granting cooperative key workers special privileges. Under international law, self-defence remains the only justification for military action. That’s why George W Bush and Tony Blair had to use weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. The trouble with humanitarian wars is that all sides in a conflict can play the same game. As countries like Australia ban protests and keep their citizenry under house arrest, other regional powers may take the moral high ground. China may never need to occupy Australia militarily, but corporations with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party will find it much easier to acquire the country’s assets with a dumbed-down populace.
Just as the eye-watering sums squandered on the occupation of Afghanistan did not defeat terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism, the trillions of dollars spent worldwide on covid containment measures will not eradicate deadly viruses. Likewise, the colossal expenditures on psychiatric screening and surveillance of private lives will not free us of emotional distress or child abuse. They will serve instead to identify troublemakers and remove children from their parental homes. Strict censorship and tight controls on the free movement of ordinary citizens can suppress all evidence of sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by the privileged classes. Nearly all top-down interventions, however well-intentioned they may seem, serve to consolidate elite power. The phoney humanitarian wars of the early 21st century empowered the military-industrial complex. Now, the battle against elusive coronaviruses has facilitated the greatest transfer of wealth and power away from the affluent upper-middle classes to the biotech-industrial complex.
We’re witnessing a coordinated attack on critical thinkers who defend the now outdated concepts of bodily autonomy and free association. Your inclusion in polite society is now contingent on your stance on the safety of new mRNA injections marketed as vaccines. Until the day before yesterday, your medical history was in most public venues a private matter. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have basic dress and hygiene codes but seldom had to resort to heavy-handed enforcement. Social opprobrium alone would usually send a clear message to slovenly transgressors to clean up their act. Every living organism on the planet is a potential bio-hazard, but our immune systems evolved over millions of years to cope with everyday social gatherings. The narrative is simple. The so-called anti-maskers and antivaxxers endanger others by failing to follow official medical advice. These are just cheap smears for people who wish to carry on their lives as they did in 2019. Very few would be against practical infection control procedures in clinical settings and very few would oppose all vaccines. However, most object to top-down coercion and mindless groupthink.
Administrations around the world have applied mass hypnosis (cf. Prof. Mattias Desmet) both to guide persuasion campaigns and to identify subgroups who do not comply with the new social norms. In the UK the Behavioural Insights Team is at the helm of such public policy initiatives. It started as part of David Cameron’s much-heralded Big Society, which gave an official stamp of approval to the surreptitious activities of hundreds of charities and NGOs who have exploited the plight of selected victim groups to change people’s attitudes on a whole host of lifestyle issues. The mental health industry, an outgrowth of psychiatry, has long played a key role in creating new identity groups that fail to fit in with an increasingly atomised society. Almost anyone who has experienced mild levels of alienation, depression or anxiety can now qualify for a mental health label. Redefining life’s challenges in terms of presumed neurological deficits can only engender a sense of helplessness, which in turn boosts demand for mental health services and/or psychoactive medication. Today’s psychiatric labels are so vague as to cover almost any kind of non-conformity or imperfect socialisation. Many psychopathologists view political incorrectness as a mental illness. It is now common for political analysts to attribute undesirable opinions, especially those that favour traditional families, close-knit communities, greater self-reliance, ethnocentrism and faith in outmoded institutions, either to a lack of education or a personality disorder. As Jason Brennan advocated in his 2016 book Against Democracy, public consultation does not help administrators bring their policies more into line with people’s needs or desires. Its main purpose is to gauge how successfully they have persuaded people to accept the next step in their long-term plans for wide-ranging societal transformation. If consultants detect widespread resistance to their favoured policies, they will not necessarily abandon the policy but change strategy. In many cases, unpopular policies are mere steppingstones to a much more radical goal. They are not the desired endgame but serve to prepare people for more far-reaching changes in their daily lives.
Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the governments of the world’s most prosperous countries have only managed to keep their people happy by artificially reinflating the consumer economy through unsustainable borrowing. Just as Chancellor Alastair Darling conjured up £600 billion overnight to bail out the banks thirteen years ago, in 2020 Chancellor Rishi Sunak found £400 billion under the sofa to enforce covid containment policies and keep millions of non-essential workers at home on furlough. While the likes of Google and PayPal may still pay lip service to the entrepreneurial aspirations of small business owners, they may now only operate within an ecosystem owned and controlled by a handful of tech giants. Sure, you can set up your handcrafted greetings card store on Amazon, accept payments via PayPal and source all raw materials online via similar channels. You’re selling a little piece of your human creativity. However, unless you can invest in specialised equipment with a dedicated workshop or become a megastar on Youtube, you will be lucky to earn more than some extra virtual pocket money to supplement your UBI. Your whole life will still be trapped in the matrix.
What is Technocracy?
Arguably, ever since the industrial revolution, our livelihoods have relied more and more on complex systems beyond our immediate control. Without clean water, electricity and integrated supply chains, our modern lives would soon grind to a halt. However, until recently, we needed millions of workers to maintain such systems. Large chunks of the workforce were thus directly involved in overseeing the smooth operation of machinery on behalf of their families, friends and neighbours. If the ruling classes failed to respect their key workers, they could hold their fragile economy to ransom. Outsourcing, smart automation and extreme labour mobility may have changed much of that, but even today some organised labour groups can challenge the powers that be. As the Australian governing classes deploy troops to enforce harsh lockdowns and their media outlets seek to shame those who do not comply with medical martial law, their truck drivers may offer the last hope in popular resistance. It may be easy for the military to neutralise and isolate a few thousand protesters in city centres, but a few thousand truckers can blockade cities and obstruct military movements giving a critical mass of suburban residents a window of opportunity to defy orders. Sadly, it is only a matter of time before driverless vehicles and deceptively green legislation disempower the last bastions of organised labour.
We should not confuse technology with technocracy. Where technological control is widely distributed, it can empower commoners. By contrast, centralised command structures with atomised and highly specialised workforces can abuse their effective monopoly on power to control every aspect of our private lives, including our most intimate moments and ultimately procreation itself. In a few short years, we have witnessed the close collaboration and commercial convergence of companies we once believed were fierce competitors. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook work in tandem to censor scientific dissent and spy on their customers. Artificial intelligence has already enabled tech giants not just to suggest new products and services based on your surfing history, but to analyse political leanings and diagnose critical thinking. Natural language processing may be in its infancy, but the leading social media platforms already have the means to intercept private messages that challenge their preferred narrative on strategic issues. They often justify such censorship as a necessary tool in their campaign against hate speech and in favour of vulnerable victim groups. This doesn’t just preclude open debate on sensitive subjects such as immigration or genetic determinism, it stifles any challenges to the new orthodoxy enforced ruthlessly by the biotech industrial complex.
The New Hate Speech
The faux-liberal elites have long co-opted the struggles against racial and sexual discrimination. Yet the same conceited ruling classes who once supported Western imperialism to tame the uncivilised peoples of the developing world have a new enemy in sight, the free-thinking socially conservative working classes and small business owners. The common thread that unites late 19th-century eugenicists such as Francis Galton with 21st-century transhumanists is their belief in the intellectual superiority of a master race. A century ago, race and biological sex were still key factors in determining one’s worthiness, but our rulers never intended to extend the same privileges they enjoyed to everyone who happens to share the same complexion or genitalia. Whether you were a Welsh coal miner, a Mississippi cotton picker, an Indian peasant or an African subsistence farmer, your imperial masters considered your lives expendable, unless they had trouble finding someone else to do a mission-critical job. Their main concern was to avoid open revolt and expand their commercial and cultural influence through a network of local leaders. Our technocratic overlords are now dividing us into rival castes of scientific gurus, middle managers, key workers, useless eaters, surviving on UBI and social credits, and the lowest of the low, outlaws or refuseniks.
Synthetic woke tolerance for people with different complexions, genders, sexual orientations and religions has now morphed into intolerance of anyone who fails to abide by arbitrary biomedical norms, which we once considered private medical matters. In two short years, we have regressed from accommodating people’s imperfections to treating nonconformists as lepers.
Opinion leaders and politicians, ranging from lowly BBC presenters such as Stephen Nolan in Northern Ireland to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, have started to blame the so-called unvaccinated or antivaxxers for a surge in people falling ill after testing positive with covid variants. Queensland health minister, Yvette Dath, went one step further to suggest citizens who refuse to get jabbed will have to stay under permanent house arrest. Western Europe’s hopes may now hinge on the French people’s reaction to Macron’s introduction of the controversial pass sanitaire. Every weekend hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens have taken to the streets in towns and cities across France, with some estimates suggesting participation rates of over 2 million nationwide. Yet these protests are barely reported in the mainstream media except as small gatherings of marginalised antivaxxers living in a parallel universe. The key issues at stake are not vaccination per se or even the development of new gene therapies to combat diseases, but coercion, bodily autonomy and complete submission to remote technocrats who may not have your best interests at heart.
Our technocratic overlords hope to harness their full spectrum dominance of the means of mass communication to atomise the general populace and isolate troublemakers. Their strategy is clearly to sow the seeds of deep societal division by blaming jab refuseniks for rising death tolls, including those caused by genetic code injections. They want to encourage people to report non-compliant neighbours to the health authorities, who may then involve either the police or psychiatric services. Groupthink may sadly be much more contagious than any biological pathogens. We have a limited window of time to save one of the defining features of humanity: independence of mind.
The public and private opinions of the controlled opposition
Prominent members of the Spiked Online gang, most notably Brendan O’Neill, Tom Slater, Joanna Williams and Claire Fox, have over the last few years gained some street cred among critically thinking anti-establishment types for their well-articulated critiques of identity politics, censorship and the demonisation of working class culture. They supported Brexit from the left and opposed many Draconian covid regulations, unlike much of the former Labour movement who have embraced the unattainable goal of zero covid. While Brendan, Claire and other regular Spiked talking heads pretend to be on your side in the battle against the remote elites, their deceptively subversive operatives have close ties with the biotech industrial complex. Out of the blue, Lady Claire’s sister, Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre, writes a staunch defence of the quangos and scientists, such as the much-maligned Prof. Neil Ferguson, who masterminded the government’s deliberate overreaction to the corona crisis. It should come as little surprise that the Science Media Centre attracts funding from AstraZeneca, GSK and the Wellcome Trust among others. This is hardly out of character. The Spiked Gang have always embraced technocracy. Now you may wonder why Spiked promoted Laura Dodsworth’s excellent book A State of Fear? They never challenged the covid narrative, only the Draconian regulations like mandatory face-masks that accompanied it. Only a couple of weeks earlier Brendan O’Neill came out in support of making mass-marketed covid vaccines mandatory for care workers. Spiked's new line is that we should fear neither covid nor mRNA vaccines, but the whole rationale for digital health passports hinges on fear of an invisible virus and its constant mutations.
In the great debate on the limits of technology, environmentalists warn us of the dangers of overconsumption and catastrophic breakdowns due to our over-reliance on complex interconnected systems few of us can understand. We could call such people techno-pessimists. In the real world, we tend to like technology that empowers us and dislike innovations that enslave us. Billions of us have fallen in love with motor vehicles and the dream of exploring wide-open spaces along empty highways. However, we may not be so keen on the inevitable traffic congestion, noise, pollution and countryside destruction. On the other hand, techno-optimists believe humanity can always overcome environmental constraints with new technology and want us to trust the friendly household names behind corporate behemoths to deliver the goods. While much of the notional left opposed nuclear power and distrusted big pharma, one small group of Marxist intellectuals stood out in their unabashed support for technological progress.
I first encountered the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party in the early 1980s. They seemed mainly interested in recruiting students at the top universities. I only briefly flirted with them but have intermittently kept an eye on this clique ever since. Although their leading light, Frank Füredi, grew up in Hungary, they defended the old Warsaw Pact countries as deformed workers’ states against Western aggression in contrast to the SWP's position which viewed the whole Eastern Bloc as state capitalist. While many on the British left supported a United Ireland, the RCP went one step further and offered unconditional support for the IRA in their struggle against British imperialism, only expressing regret about the loss of human life. In the early 1990s, they rebranded themselves around their magazine Living Marxism, shifted their focus to culture wars and weaved a distinctive critique of the often reactionary and snobbish green movement. They helped form the smokers' rights organisation Forest, defended football fans against accusations of racism and hooliganism and fully embraced the working class’s newfound love of cars, gadgets and foreign holidays. In stark contrast to most trendy lefties, they unashamedly backed nuclear power and ran to the defence of the controversial insecticide DDT. I caught up with them again around 1998 in the run-up to NATO airstrikes over Former Yugoslavia. LM Magazine did admittedly expose some media deception about the Yugoslav conflict and, more controversially, had questioned the mainstream narrative on the tragic 1994 Rwandan civil war, which attracted accusations of genocide denial. LM Magazine famously lost a libel case against ITN (Independent Television News) over Thomas Deichmann’s exposé of trick photography to make an open refugee reception centre in a Serb-controlled area of Bosnia resemble a concentration camp. 3 years later the LM Gang re-emerged as Spiked Online. Their stances over the years perplexed many casual left-leaning observers. Their critique of NATO’s role in the dismemberment of the Former Yugoslavia and of US/UK support for Tutsi insurgents in the Rwandan civil war followed in the best traditions of anti-imperialism and Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism. Yet at the same time, the LM Gang were forging close links with big businesses, especially in the pharmaceutical sector. Their wider circle of contributors now included a number of media-savvy academics and boffins. Dr Michael Fitzpatrick came to the defence of the MMR vaccine, dismissing any links with neurological disorders despite having an autistic son. The mainstream media loved him. In 1998 Channel 4 screened Martin Durkin’s three-part critique of the green movement Against Nature. Its theme was simple. We have nothing to fear from the growing encroachment of technology into every aspect of our lives and even of an eventual merger of man and machine. I recall a scene showing a full-body transplant of a chimpanzee with the narrator wishing for a near future when we could bio-engineer replacement body parts and even augment our intelligence. They claimed that with the wonders of genetically engineered crops and almost limitless cold fusion power we could easily sustain a world population of 32 billion and thus had no need to either reduce per capita consumption or worry about a growing population. On a superficial level, the utopian vision of communism where everyone has access to everything they desire is only conceivable via an idyllic techno-panacea. Yet the LM Gang’s new business partners had other ideas about the future progress of humanity.
Green Technotopians
It’s a funny old world where the WEF (World Economic Forum,), the WHO (World Health Organisation), Prince Charles, Boris Johnson and the Greens all sing from the same hymn sheet. The covid narrative has conditioned many of us to view other members of our species as vectors of disease and thus to accept mandatory genetic code injections as a means to win back tightly regulated freedoms. More important, the authorities have ever so subtly pushed the message that we are not all essential and some of us may be superfluous to the needs of humanity as a whole. Now governments have set a precedent for virus lockdowns, the stage is set for climate lockdowns. Unsurprisingly, vaccine passports have been marketed as green passes in many European countries. Now people can be tracked everywhere they go and can no longer gain access to many essential services without smartphones, which despite fact-checker denials will soon morph into wearable microchips. Digital health passports are effectively temporary movement permits.
Environmental campaigners once distrusted our overreliance on complex technology and preferred local solutions to global problems. Many critics of neoliberal globalisation, such as French farmer and syndicalist Jose Bove or Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, defended the rights of smallholders, craftspeople and factory workers from the left in opposition to an emerging world controlled by a handful of multinationals. Most eco-activists also favoured holistic healthcare with a focus on diet, exercise and natural remedies over lifelong dependence on pharmaceutical products and invasive treatments such as chemotherapy. In many ways, the early green movement with its love of mother nature had much in common with social conservatives. Who would oppose new airports, motorways, high-speed railways and more suburban sprawl? Often concerned local social conservatives would join forces with affluent professional newcomers who had moved to the countryside to escape the hustle and bustle of the cities. The early green movement instinctively rejected both militarism and imperialism, the notion that one group of people, whether organised as countries or corporations, may impose their will on others through coercion. However, as green politicians gained office in regional and national administrations, they soon cast aside their new-age love for self-sufficiency and formed new alliances with tech giants who wanted to transition away from the old fossil fuel economy. In the early 21st century the main drivers of economic growth were no longer cars and other wasteful machines, but smart low-consumption gadgets and digital services. People had to be persuaded to pay for abstract services and ephemeral fashion accessories they did not know they needed.
When the climate change narrative first reached public consciousness around the turn of the millennium, the world’s largest car manufacturers and oil concerns seemed loath to adapt and funded the climate sceptic movement. While the growth in car ownership slowed and then declined slightly in Western Europe, it skyrocketed in much of the developing world. In 2007, Channel 4 broadcast Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle, much to the chagrin of the vocal army of climate change fundamentalists such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot. We soon learned the two pillars of the new religion of scientism, peer-review and the scientific consensus. Superficially, it makes sense for rigorous research papers to undergo methodical scrutiny before publication. If a scientist dependent on corporate sponsorship suppresses key evidence about the safety of her sponsor’s products, it seems fair for a more neutral academic to correct the bias. Science can only thrive with complete transparency and open debate on the interpretation of evidence. However, in practice, peer review often serves as a form of corporate censorship to ensure scientific publications do not contradict the preferred consensus. The latter term no longer refers to a thesis supported by almost indisputable evidence but to the received truth, i.e. a dogmatically enforced orthodoxy. On the MMR debacle, we saw most of the centre-left establishment, academia and the LM Gang adhere strictly to the preferred narrative that the triple vaccines were extremely safe and could not trigger regressive autism in a small susceptible subset of children. Opposition tended to come more from social conservatives, back-to-nature bohemian types and a handful of dissident medics, most notably Dr Andrew Wakefield and Dr Joseph Mercola. Yet on climate change, the LM Gang sided with the mavericks who disputed the IPCC’s scientific consensus. By 2010 any scientist, such as Australian meteorologist William Kininmonth or Canadian zoologist, Susan Crockford, who challenged the consensus would struggle to get their research papers peer-approved. Around the same time, the big energy cartels embraced the transition to a post-carbon economy. BP rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum. All along their main goal had been to hold humanity to ransom by controlling the resources that regulate our material freedom. If all communities were self-sufficient in energy, water, food and essential raw materials, the big energy mafia would be out of business. On the fringes, two visions of our post-carbon future vied for our attention.
One involved the re-localisation of our economy through greater self-reliance and a more frugal existence with fewer but more durable machines. Some envisaged such a scenario might evolve as a natural reaction to a future worldwide economic collapse. When modern distribution chains fail to deliver the goods amid financial mayhem, people will have no choice but to learn once again to grow their own food. However, in many densely populated urban areas, this is simply not a practical option without substantial reallocation of land use and redistribution of population centres. Some have pointed to urban farms in Detroit’s sprawling suburbs as an example, but the city not only had plenty of disused land that could be repurposed, its population had declined.
The other vision of a green utopia harnesses advanced technology on a global scale to radically reduce our collective carbon footprint. It reduces human beings to the status of environmental hazards whose activities must be micromanaged to protect our delicate ecosystem. It’s almost the polar opposite of the loose network of decentralised self-regulating communities that early environmentalists had envisioned.
Green-labelled parties have long strayed from their original focus on ecological sustainability to champion other causes that require greater reliance on remote organisations. Over the last twenty odd years, green politicians have been more interested in welcoming unbalanced migratory flows, allegedly caused by climate change, and in promoting transgender ideology than in saving natural habitats. Such policies inevitably reduce self-sufficiency. If millions more people move to a region that is already a net importer of food and other essential resources, it becomes even more reliant on international trade and finance. Likewise, only male-female partnerships can reproduce naturally and raise the next generation with strong cultural bonds to their forebears. Alternative family structures with single or same-sex parents rely much more on state intervention and biotechnology. Here the new greens, as we may call them, have converged with the classic RCP position that technology would free humanity from the shackles of mother nature. While the LM Gang still lend lip service to free speech and carefree consumerism, the greens pretend to care about the planet and the rights of indigenous peoples. Behind the scenes, the same multinational corporations pull their strings.
The Great Reset
In the run-up to the corona crisis, the notional left in its social democratic, radical chic and eco-warrior garbs had abandoned the settled working classes and called for restrictions on free speech under the pretext of combatting hate crimes. This left a political vacuum for millions of disillusioned voters who felt totally betrayed by successive Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory administrations and unpersuaded by the short-lived UKIP and Brexit parties. The LM Gang made a strategic decision to back the campaign to leave the EU. Claire Fox even won a seat in the European Parliamentary elections after Theresa May’s government had failed to respect the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum. In the same period, the likes of Brendan O’Neill would appear on new alternative media outlets, such as Dave Rubin Show, alongside American intellectuals on the libertarian right. Three core beliefs seem to unite these new media pundits. First state regulation, including limits on free speech, should be minimised. Second, capitalism has been a fantastic success story that has vastly expanded the horizons of billions of human beings. Third, Israel is largely a force for good, but Islam represents a major threat to liberal democracy. How exactly do we square the RCP’s historic support for Sinn Fein, its radical critique of Western meddling in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia with its newfound love of Israel and its abject failure to criticise the growing power of the biotech mafia? The answer is simple. The LM Gang are polemicists who co-opt causes that resonate with a large cross-section of their target audience to demolish the arguments of the principled opposition to the ruling elites. Their disciples could make a radical Marxist case for almost anything as long as they can conveniently distance themselves from their partners in crime. Brendan O’Neill is no stranger to the population debate. He has repeatedly argued against neo-Malthusianism. I find it hard to believe the LM Gang could not have been aware before 2020 that Boris Johnson’s father Stanley has long advocated radical depopulation. Boris himself penned a letter to the Times of London in 2007 urging the government to address the issue of overpopulation. Yet Boris chose to elevate Claire Fox to the House of Lords for her services to the campaign to leave the EU. Her critique of the lockdowns has always stopped well short of questioning the dubious science behind it and, more importantly, the government’s true motivations for spending countless billions of pounds on the mass administration of dodgy mRNA injections. Big Pharma can rely on Claire to provide controlled opposition to the more unpopular aspects of the covid psyop, which was always just a means to an end. The LM Gang treat free speech as an academic debate about toxic identity politics but fail to attack Big Tech’s blacklisting of leading scientists such as Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Mike Yeadon or Prof. Luc Montagnier because privately they agree with the censors.
The virus scare may have served to justify previously unthinkable policies such as antisocial distancing, forced isolation and face-mask mandates, but the medium-term goal has always been a radical shift to a centralised technocratic world order, marketed as the Great Reset. Its proponents will move heaven and earth to bring every human being into their surveillance grid. Both the green and black strands of the technophile left have failed to oppose the biggest transfer of power from the masses to the ruling classes in human history. One can only conclude they are complicit and their apparent differences over demographic sustainability, free speech or the Palestinian question are merely rhetorical. The descendants of the old RCP are in bed with the architects of the technocratic coup.
The liberal consensus over the last seventy-odd years had, until recently, favoured equality of opportunity. As long we all have access to good and inspiring education with a supportive family and wider local community, we can all thrive in our chosen vocations. We may have allowed for a few unlucky exceptions with severe mental retardation, but by and large, we liked to think most people had opportunities galore to be masters of their destiny. There is no easy measure of excellence or success. It all depends on your priorities and expectations. Some people may succeed financially but fail academically. Others may succeed in raising the next generation, but only enjoy modest personal wealth or career progression. Likewise, some may be content with moderate success, while others may feel demoralised if they fail to compete at the top of their league. It hardly mattered if you were a mere sole-trading plumber, factory worker or housewife, you were just as worthy as a surgeon, property speculator or the CEO of a large company, or at least so we were led to believe.
The illusion of equality before the law lasted little more than half a century. In most of Western Europe, it emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. Other countries had to wait for the end of colonial rule or racial segregation. While the managerial classes have long distanced themselves from open support for eugenics, the corona crisis has unmasked their thinly concealed contempt for the uncooperative underclasses.
The new eugenics, as we may call it, builds on the core precepts of modern psychiatry, namely that free will is an illusion and thus all aberrant behaviour can be tamed through psychological conditioning and/or pharmaceutical intervention. Over the last three decades the pendulum has swung from an emphasis on the psychosocial causes of mental disorders to the genetic determinism of all behaviours ranging from sexuality and violence to depression and hyperactivity. Such behavioural patterns may now be considered as immutable as skin colour or biological sex. Indeed feelings, with mysterious genetic origins, may trump more obvious physiological traits. In the absence of free will, a person lacks agency. We can always ascribe presumed misconduct to genes, bad education or a lack of early medical intervention rather than conscious decisions by responsible human beings with minds of their own.
Once people attribute behaviour mainly to genes, it only takes a small leap of faith to link intelligence with genetic inheritance and thus to justify a master race of experts empowered to regulate everyone else‘s lives. Wrongthink, as George Orwell called it in his dystopian novel 1984, means any idea at variance with the orthodoxy of official experts. In just a few years the Overton window of permissible opinions has shrunk from open debate on a range of scientific and ethical issues to complete deference to the cult of scientism. The mainstream media no longer debates whether genetic code injections marketed as covid vaccines are safe and effective but how we can persuade the vaccine-shy to roll up their sleeves. As I have explained amply in earlier posts, the nature versus nurture debate presents a false dichotomy. Our genes do not compete with our environment to determine our personality or intelligence. They form the blueprint for the biological hardware on which our emotional and intellectual software runs. Surprisingly little may distinguish the DNA of a successful brain surgeon from that of a semi-literate unemployable welfare claimant but their phenotypes may differ in some important respects. This may soon change with advent of human genetic engineering and augmented intelligence implants, bypassing limits imposed by natural biology or ecology. We could soon see a rapid shift away from the expansion of human activity that has characterised progress since the industrial revolution to transhuman excellence. Until recently, technological progress relied in large part on intense competition among natural human beings. Only a few of us would ever develop ground-breaking inventions, but advanced societies needed millions of conscientious workers with a diverse range of skills. Not everyone may have had the intellect to invent a new form of locomotion, but we still needed millions of specialised assembly workers and mechanics, many of whom could earn good salaries. Alas with smart automation, industry needs fewer and fewer engineers to drive innovation. The economics of growth is now morphing into the economics of supremacy.
Here we see a paradox. The same global corporations that welcomed expanding consumer markets that thrived on a multitude of human resources have now shifted gear to techno-feudalism with strictly regulated consumption and behaviour. The same advertising agencies that for decades sold us the dream of carefree mass motoring and debt-fuelled retail therapy in a sprawling urban landscape of highways and shopping malls are now selling us both the misnamed Green New Deal and the new concept of bio-security. We even get hybrid neologisms such as a green pass that grants additional rights to people with up-to-date genetic code injections. Green is the new grey, the antithesis of the natural harmony that many pre-industrial civilisations and many in the late 20th century ecology movement championed. Rather than learning to live alongside nature and adapting technology to help humanity as it has naturally evolved over the millennia, the technocratic elite now seems hellbent on radically modifying human nature itself.
The Green-Grey Alliance
The convergence of all mainstream parties and big businesses behind the biosecurity state and the Green New Deal should not have surprised the more astute political analysts among us. The controversial progressive policies of the last decade such as open-door mass migration, gay marriage, gender theory lessons in primary schools and proactive mental health screening did not grow organically from grassroots campaigns against social injustice. All these initiatives came from powerful lobbies deeply embedded in NGOs, academia, mainstream media outlets, private and public sector agencies. They may well have co-opted a few activists from communities with genuine grievances. On the surface, Black Lives Matter is about racial equality. In practice, this well-funded organisation promotes anything that destabilises close-knit ethnocentric communities that value strong families. This is almost the polar opposite of what most Black Africans want. BLM leaders do not just support the LGBTQ+ agenda, paving the way for transhumanism, they’re fully on board with the covid narrative, wear submissive face-masks at staged protests and have yet to utter a word of criticism against the multi-trillion dollar mRNA-vaccine roll-out. Rest assured that BLM did not voice any concerns over the suspicious deaths of five black presidents who failed to cooperate with the WHO’s mass mRNA-inoculation plans. Within little more than a year Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, Tanzania’s John Magafuli, the Ivory Coast’s Hamed Bakayoko and Eswatini’s Ambrose Dlamini died prematurely and Haiti’s Jovenel Moïse was murdered. All presided over countries with very low covid-related death rates and growing populations but had expressed scepticism about mass inoculation. Their successors have all fallen into line with the WHO’s plans. Black lives only matter if someone’s high-profile death can sow the seeds of racial disharmony by blaming the white working classes for the crimes of their ancestral rulers. Not surprisingly, this organisation has enjoyed massive corporate support especially among cybertech, entertainment and sports giants.
More disturbing has been the authoritarian drift within a broad spectrum of the liberal green left. Tony Blair’s support for vaccine passports, around 15 years after trying to introduce mandatory ID cards, should surprise nobody. However, many who once opposed military adventurism, the abuse of corporate power, profit-driven environmental destruction and the over-regulation of people’s private lives, have now embraced zero covid, something that could only be achieved with total biological surveillance putting an end to the last vestiges of personal freedom. Admittedly long before covid entered our daily lexicon, idealists had to reconcile the conflicting demands of wildlife preservation, ecological stability, universal prosperity, human rights, peace, personal freedom and democracy. We had been led to believe we could have our proverbial cake and eat it, but you need not be a genius to see how these virtuous goals conflict with each other. We cannot clear forests and savannahs in the world’s most hospitable regions to make way for more farms, mines, roads and urban settlements without depriving other species not only of their habitats but also of their functional independence. Likewise, once our life support systems depend on advanced technology and supply chains controlled by a handful of interconnected corporations, we too descend to the status of zoo animals. Our freedom is now at the mercy of our technocratic zookeepers and conditional on our compliant behaviour.
Around 2018 Extinction Rebellion appeared on the scene. It recycled the extreme techno-pessimism of earlier radical ecologists. They believe if we don’t cut aggregate human consumption forthwith, we may soon face a man-made cataclysm that may wipe out our species. However, rather than advocate greater self-sufficiency and seek common cause with grassroots opponents of crony capitalism, Extinction Rebellion (XR) targets the consumer habits of the Western working classes. Most of the recent rise in demand for non-renewable resources has come from what we once called the developing world. Most Western countries have fertility rates below replacement level and, since the 2008 banking meltdown, have seen falling per-capita consumption, as young people’s priorities have shifted from car culture to electronic gadgets. Whether you believe our overconsumption of fossil fuels may destabilise our climate or not, growth in India and China would offset radical reductions in Western Europe. XR’s activities would hasten the demise of the Western working classes and, as is already happening, empower the very tech giants they claim to oppose. XR has attracted mainly wishful thinkers and dropouts from the affluent professional classes, whose antics facilitate the transition from the old model of hyper-consumerism to the new model of hyper-surveillance.
The same activists who once campaigned to keep the state and church out of people’s private lives when it comes to consensual sex or recreational drugs now oppose personal freedom when it comes to natural unmasked faces or informed consent on medical procedures. A few years ago, trendy metropolitan professionals may have liked to express their support for progressive causes such as saving refugees, tackling climate change by adopting greener technology or standing up for their rainbow coalition of worthy victim groups. At least their concerns, however impracticable or counterproductive, related to the plight of natural human beings. Now they virtue-signal their compliance with a puritanical narrative that transforms organic human beings into potential biohazards. All of a sudden, the chattering classes have co-opted a compulsive obsession with hygiene and a blind faith in the biotech industrial complex. The common denominator here is the triad of the mass media, academia and NGOs posing as independent charities, trade unions and think tanks. These have come out almost unanimously in favour of stronger corona containment measures and accuse all sceptics of murderous irresponsibility. Their tactic is to frighten us into submission unless we succumb to groupthink and relinquish our personal independence outside carefully monitored environments. Intelligence is no longer a measure of one’s analytical powers or problem-solving skills, but an expression of one’s internalisation of the presumed scientific consensus. This only works if you assume the experts employed by the organs of global governance have your best interests at heart. The growing rift in society no longer runs along left vs right or libertarian vs authoritarian lines but pits conformists against free thinkers. Behavioural psychologists have persuaded a critical mass of ordinary citizens that so-called covid deniers and antivaxxers threaten their freedom and health. Corporate technocrats and environmentalists have perversely joined forces to reset the world’s economy. Now the fake greens and elitist left sing from the same hymn sheet as the WEF (World Economic Forum), the WHO (World Health Organisation), the tech giants, the big banks and retail empires. They have buried their differences over the profit motive and industrial waste and concluded that humanity is the problem.
The New Master Race
Over the last 18 months, many leading scientists and medical professionals have been unpersoned and confined to the dark web of the alternative media. Meanwhile, other approved experts, such as Dr Anthony Fauci in the USA or Prof. Christian Drosten in Germany, have acquired an almost godlike status in the eyes of social conformists. Postmodern deference to scientism differs little from medieval deference to religious leaders. The architects of public opinion have thus simplified complex scientific questions to soundbites about our collective responsibility to each other. Politicians can now get away with sweeping generalisations based on a selective interpretation of available data unchallenged as they talk down to their subjects and dismiss any divergent opinions as mere conspiracy theories. Behind the thin veneer of public relations officers posing as elected representatives or acclaimed academics, a global governance network pulls the strings of the disposable talking heads we may want to hold accountable. Unsurprisingly, we see variants of the same policies rolled out in diverse jurisdictions around the globe.
The technocratic classes probably make up less than one percent of the general population, but they now consider themselves superior both to the plebs and their underlings in middle management. They have now cleverly exempted themselves from most coronavirus regulations that affect the plebs with exclusive travel corridors and resorts. Some may have posed before cameras to publicise their covid vaccinations, but we have no proof they received the same genetic code injections as the underclasses.
On a more serious note, current events across the prosperous world from Canada to Australia via Western Europe, clearly show the global governance classes are acting in lockstep to wage a war of attrition against non-compliant free-thinking citizens and guide the acquiescent majority to a new reality of socially engineered submission.
