Debunking the gaslight tag of “conspiracy theory”
By: Rusere Shoniwa
Tags: Covid 19 Crisis, Conspiracy Theories

The global response to Covid has made ‘conspiracy theory’ respectable and sane. Here’s why.

Societies are insane because humans are irrational. Much of that insanity is rooted in a refusal to accept that we are fundamentally irrational. Accepting that you are insane is, paradoxically, the first step towards sanity. But you can never be fully sane. You can only hope to finish the day more sane than you were yesterday. And in the time of Covid, it can often feel like one step forward is rapidly followed by three steps backward.

Amid the swirl of Covid hysteria, a small but growing number of sceptical citizens are searching for answers to the levels of madness now stalking our daily lives. More of us are asking: why are we doing this to ourselves? Yes it’s howling-at-the-moon mad, but is there some method to the madness? It goes without saying that you’re not going to find answers in the mainstream media because it’s still in the grip of the Covidian Cult. If it weren’t in its grip, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

This search for answers, a search for meaning and ultimately sanity, has sparked an interesting phenomenon within pockets of the mainstream media and even The Establishment. The Do-Not-Enter signs are starting to come down as the once obedient and unthinking middle classes begin to flirt with the idea of a trip down Conspiracy Theory Road.

First I chanced upon a YouTube clip of the Conservative MP Sir Desmond Swayne forcefully asserting that the UK government’s adherence to virus suppression policies on the grounds that most other jurisdictions were relying on them amounted to ‘herd stupidity’. Going through some of the more inexplicable elements of the government’s policy, he concluded: “no wonder our constituents are writing to us with ever greater conspiracy theories because our actions defy rational explanation.”

Then I read an article in that bastion of the Conservative Establishment, The Telegraph, titled, “I’m almost starting to think this whole pandemic really is a conspiracy.” While it contains the obligatory denial of any belief that “there are darker forces at play here”, it is, nevertheless, a coy flirtation with conspiracy theory as a valid framework within which to explore the unthinkable — that darker forces might actually be at play. The writer ambiguously concludes that either the inexplicable insanity of 2020 was “all warranted and for the greater good”, or:

“the conspiracy loonies are right: Elon Musk (or is it Bill Gates?) is at the helm of a global plot to turn us all into an army of morose, segregated, muzzled, drone-patrolled test subjects in an alternate reality (purpose as yet unknown) under which free speech is curtailed, curfews dictate our every movement, and bonking is illegal with those outside our designated tribe. Which, upon reflection, doesn’t sound too many lightyears away from our current warped reality.”

But for someone whose values don’t align with those of The Torygraph, having to wade through a politically conservative broadsheet that’s publishing a modicum of sensible opinion on Covid is like having to dip your hand into an unflushed toilet to rescue your new smartphone. And just as surely as The Telegraph giveth with the generous hand of lockdown scepticism, it swiftly taketh with the claw of establishment conservatism. For just when I thought I’d finally been given permission to salvage my sanity in this ‘current warped reality’ by entertaining conspiracy theories, I read this article, also in The Telegraph, claiming that “Our beleaguered, divided, internet-addicted country is a fertile breeding ground for bizarre and dangerous delusions.”

It’s a boiler-plate take-down of all conspiracy theory. It starts with the obligatory expression of horror at the staggering proportion of the citizenry that believe in QAnon’s bizarre take on world affairs, ignoring the fact that a far greater proportion hold a vast range of religious beliefs that are no less irrational. Human irrationality isn’t new news but expressions of distaste for particular forms of it are a good indicator of its perceived political threat. And of course that bloody internet’s got a lot to answer for as the writer bemoans the insidious link between the rise of conspiracy theory and the internet. Then there’s the obligatory linkage between conspiracy theories and anti-semitism. I don’t buy that the internet is to blame for anti-semitism. Bad ideas and bad thinking are the real culprits and they’ve been around a lot longer than the internet. The writer forgets that anti-semitism actually peaked in around 1944 and has been on the decline ever since. The attempt to link any rise in anti-semitism to ‘that internet’ is really a continuation of an age-old conservative tradition — blaming society’s ills on new technology. Before the internet, policemen and politicians regularly appeared on TV to ironically blame TV for all the sins of youth.

In any event, the writer cautions against ignoring the evil of conspiracy theory which, for more than a quarter of a century, has been gnawing away at our “faith in the democratic institutions of the West”. Quite what is to be done is not made clear but the writer highlights another ‘conspiracy theory’ responsible for ‘whittling away’ at the foundations of our beloved democratic institutions. In reality it is not as much a ‘conspiracy theory’ as it is an uncontroversial topic of debate:

“And now almost half of young adults — the generation that will soon be in power — believe that British democracy is effectively kaput, helpless in the hands of a corrupt global cabal.”

Deconstructing conspiracy theory

Before we decide on whether to treat articles like this with contempt, we must demystify the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and strip it of its emotional and propagandistic baggage. A basic understanding of its legal underpinning is the best place to start. In law, a conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future. The law in some countries differs in certain respects such as whether or not an overt act is required to have been taken place in furtherance of either the agreement or the planned substantive crime itself. Interestingly, in US law, there is no requirement for the conspiracy to have taken place in secrecy and one may still fall foul of the law when trying to accomplish a legal end if any actions in pursuance of that end are illegal.

Of course, in the strictly criminal sense, we think of conspiracy as it relates to obviously nefarious acts like fraud or murder but, when we apply it in the looser social setting, we include acts that would invite some kind of censure by the majority. A conspiracy theory is therefore nothing more than attributing the cause of an undertaking or event to a deliberate collaboration between two or more individuals or institutions represented by individuals.

When thinking objectively about conspiracy theory, we need to separate the plausibility of a theory from its proof. A theory might be plausible if, on the face of it, there is some logical coherence to it. We might assess its plausibility by weighing up motive, means, opportunity and probability. The presence or absence of these elements allows us to place the theory on a validity spectrum ranging from plausible and interesting at the positive end through to plain silly at the negative end. Regardless of where the theory lies on the validity spectrum, it remains just that — a theory. Proof of the theory is underpinned by evidence. Once you have the smoking gun, it moves from the realm of theory into observable fact.

Stripped bare like this, you are left wondering why the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ has evolved into an epithet that expeditiously shuts down any debate on the degree to which the cause of an event might be attributable to collaboration between individuals or institutions with influence and power. Which is not to say that conspiracy theory should be your first port of call in the hunt for explanations, but it should be one available avenue of rational investigation.

Conspiracy theory — a thought terminating cliche

The classic anti-conspiracy theory article, like the one I’ve referenced in The Telegraph, propagates a number of logical fallacies which are intended to gaslight you into rejecting all ‘conspiracy theory’ as the product of fractured minds on psychedelic drugs. They start out by equating all conspiracy theory with the most barmy guff like QAnon’s. It’s the Amazon equivalent of: if you liked this book about the legal case for sending Tony Blair to the ICC at the Hague for war crimes then you’ll absolutely love this stuff from QAnon! There’s no equivalence here but that’s part of the gaslighting game the anti-conspiracy theory gang play. Then there’s the unsubtle link between despicable racists and conspiracy theory by linking the worst forms of conspiracy theory that promote anti-semitism to all conspiracy theory.

But the most idiotic of all the logical fallacies is what I call the paradox of benign causal attribution. We all know that bad people do bad things and that two or more bad people will sometimes conspire to achieve their ends. Yet the first requirement of being a good citizen who eschews the ‘whittling away’ of our democratic institutions through ‘conspiracy theories’ is that we reject this basic truth about the darker side of human nature and accept the complete opposite: sinister intent is highly unlikely to be a causal factor behind sinister events. This fallacy gets even more ridiculous because we are also asked to accept that the more sinister the event, the less likely it is to have sinister intent as a causal factor. The basic reasoning for this is that the world is simply too complex to ascribe sinister intent to complex events.

This is partly true. Complex events usually have more underlying factors than a few scheming bad guys. But that doesn’t mean we should reflexively rule out sinister intent from the complex milieu of causality. It’s true that the attraction to conspiracy theory for many, if not most, lies in the desire to arrive at easy explanations for complex events. But it is naive to ignore the fact that today, more than at any other time in modern history, a small group of obscenely wealthy and influential individuals wield an enormous amount of power over institutions that get to decide the kind of world we live in. It’s equally naive to believe that they’re wielding their power to create a utopia that we can unanimously agree on. Those in possession of power tend to use it to shape the world in accordance with their personal values and goals, which may not align with yours.

Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the world billionaires’ private club, has stated publicly his vision of what the future holds for humans:

“What the 4th Industrial Revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities.”

How many of us share this vision? How many of us understand what it means for the quality of human existence? How many of us care? How much influence and power can the WEF wield in implementing this vision? Are we prepared to accept that powerful institutions and individuals, acting without transparent and democratic consent, can shape our destinies, or do we just accept this is ‘conspiracy theory’ nonsense not worthy of discussion, exploration and debate?

One of the paradoxes of the success of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ smear is that we don’t consciously acknowledge the role conspiracy might have played when a sinister hand in events is eventually exposed. Even when it becomes obvious that individuals may have acted dishonestly for ulterior motives, we rarely admit that they conspired to achieve immoral ends. We simply acknowledge human frailty and move on. So let’s just remind ourselves of recent or ongoing events that involve conspiracy to achieve nefarious goals.

Car manufacturing executives in Europe wanted to circumvent emissions regulations in order to sell cars that didn’t pass emissions tests. So they rigged the tests. Banking executives wanted to continue handling dirty money because it’s profitable so they broke money laundering rules. Uncontroversial.

I’ve borrowed a concept from C J Hopkins that best describes the effect, whether intended or not, of the label ‘conspiracy theorist’. It’s a thought-terminating cliché. He uses the term to describe the way in which cult leaders speak to explain their actions and world view, but its use extends equally well to the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label. Because adherence to cult belief is founded on irrational narratives, language must be subverted in order to shut down critical analysis by its followers. The ‘conspiracy theorist’ label has, through its widespread and unremitting use, gained enormous power to shut down critical thought that involves valid narratives of human manipulation.

State sanctioned ‘conspiracy theory’ is just fact. Once exposed, it morphs into “error”.

Recent history is replete with cases of some pretty whopping ‘conspiracy theories’ that turned out to be pretty rational interpretations of events, the Iraq war being the biggest one this century. This one is actually a Russian doll of conspiracy theory, containing theories within theories. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was predicated on a lie that Iraq had become an Al-Qaeda hotbed, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and that, in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, he was preparing to use them against targets in the West. We now know this in itself was a state sanctioned ‘conspiracy theory’ which many simply accepted as fact.

It is also now widely accepted that a small cabal of senior ranking government officials in the US and the UK conspired to exaggerate claims in intelligence documents in furtherance of their goal to gain support for the invasion by having it legally sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Even before the invasion of Iraq, these same officials had drawn up a list of several Middle Eastern countries to be illegally invaded following the invasion of Iraq. Many commentators and analysts believed at the time that there was a conspiracy to manufacture false evidence as a pretext for war. They would have been smeared as ‘conspiracy theorists’. Whether this is the bigger Russian doll housing the smaller doll is a minor detail so take your pick. Their theories were subsequently accepted as uncontroversial and much evidence has emerged in support of them whereas the government’s theory was not only a ‘conspiracy theory’ fantasy but a lie.

It’s crucial to grasp that state generated lies masquerading as plausible theories are treated as facts by the state and its stenographers in the mainstream media, but all theories generated outside of sanctioned outlets are regarded as bonkers. When state sanctioned ‘conspiracy theory’ is exposed as fantasy or lies, the narrative morphs into a benign causative explanation. We begin to hear talk of ‘honest errors’ made by state officials. They’re only human after all. Yes, the intelligence was wrong but government officials concerned for our safety had to act on it at the time, and so on, ad nauseam.

Things are neatly wrapped up with expressions of regret by the stenographers who performed their duty and then it’s groundhog day again when a new crisis emerges, like Libyan military intervention ostensibly to stop Gaddafi from committing genocide. In relation to that venture, a parliamentary report found that this claim “was not informed by accurate intelligence” and that “the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated”. The MP who chairs the committee that produced the report tellingly observed that “the whole business then elided into regime change”. If you had expressed concerns at the time that the government might be using the genocide claim as a pretext for regime change, you might have had the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label slapped on you.

Here’s a more recent example, provided by Caitlin Johnstone, of common or garden variety state sanctioned conspiracy theory that gets treated as fact in the mainstream media:

“A new report by Newsweek warns that 600 community groups in the United States are covertly working to foment US unrest under the direct guidance of the Communist Party of China. Newsweek sources its report in an analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a think tank explicitly designed to manufacture anti-China sentiment that is funded by the US State Department and numerous arms manufacturers. These are the nice friendly people who we’re meant to believe just want to tell us the truth about what’s going on for our own good.”

When you read Newsweek’s report you find that the fake twitter accounts set up to destabilise America’s political system are incredibly useless at it. The language is off, and “of the 2,240 tweets analysed by the earnest sounding Cyber Policy Centre, 99 percent got fewer than two likes, replies and retweets.” Sounds more like a few Chinese students in America having a lark on twitter like the rest of us crazies.

Having dropped this damp squib, the Newsweek ‘report’ goes on to spend most of its time ‘revealing’ how the Chinese state engages in lobbying at the local and state level to influence business leaders and politicians in foreign countries to further its economic and geo political agenda. Activity, of course, that absolutely no other powerful country ever engages in. And what is China’s “magic weapon”? Well, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, it’s the United Front Work Department — “a network of party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the party, both inside and outside China”. And that, my friends, is it. Chinese state officials have a terrifying lobby group with a not-so-terrifying sounding acronym, UFWP. All this would be comical were it not for the fact that this is the sort of garbage that is mass-produced at the drop of a hat to convince gullible electorates in the West to get behind the new cold wars.

The idea that the Chinese have it within their grasp to steal the democracy, such as it is, of the world’s most powerful country monstrously exaggerates China’s power and reduces the whole gamut of America’s civil, security and state institutions to malleable putty in the hands of an imaginary evil empire. Let’s acknowledge this fantasy for what it is: state sanctioned and highly implausible ‘conspiracy theory’, the active ingredient of which is fear, the most powerful lever readily exploited to convince the citizenry that they should surrender more of their freedoms to the tender mercies of Big Brother.

Turning to the Covid crisis, the fear being exaggerated and manipulated is a simple and extremely powerful one: you are one stranger’s breath away from death. One of the UK’s greatest legal minds alive today, Lord Sumption, acknowledges the role that hysteria and fear play in enabling authoritarianism and a police state. He’s not talking about some far-away tin-pot dictatorship. He’s talking about the UK where, he says, we are now living in a police state that was engineered by a government taking advantage of that fear, and manipulating a crisis to increase its power. In his damning indictment of the government’s behaviour and the public’s complicit approval, he concluded:

“The British public has not even begun to understand the seriousness of what is happening to our country. Many, perhaps most of them don’t care, and won’t care until it is too late. They instinctively feel that the end justifies the means, the motto of every totalitarian government which has ever been … The government has discovered the power of public fear to let it get its way.”

Covid and conspiracy theory

There are now at least four reasons for exploring conspiracy theory as one of many valid frameworks for examining Covid hysteria and the insanity now ruling every facet of our lives:

there has never been any science to back the government’s response to the virus despite the repeated claim by its eminently qualified chief scientists that everything they think up is ‘science-led’;

the case for some sort of benign causal attribution is weakening (I’ll explain why) and opening up the possibility for a nuanced, rational and mature approach to conspiracy arguments, and;

a rational fact-based judicial enquiry has been launched, alleging bad-faith actors and potential motives for stoking and manipulating a false crisis.

Let’s explore each of these.

The government’s ‘science-led’ response is anything but scientific.

If you claim to be in favour of responding to a public health crisis with science, then perhaps you need to appreciate just how truly anti-scientific the government’s ‘science-led’ response really is. As the UK and many other parts of Europe endure another prolonged period of lockdown, and as these policies are claimed to be ‘science-led’, it is crucial to understand that there is no scientific basis for concluding that lockdowns, mass testing or anything Western governments are doing in response to the virus is having an impact on deaths caused by the virus. And despite concrete knowledge about the small section of the population most at risk, the UK government continues to eschew an approach that would target that section rather than the entire population. As Martin Kulldorff, Harvard epidemiologist and signatory to the Great Barrington declaration calling for a focused protection plan, explains about lockdowns:

“It’s a unique experiment, and it’s a terrible experiment. I’m amazed — as are many of my colleagues — at the total focus on this disease. In a short time, we are throwing all the principles of public health out the window. Most countries in Europe had a pandemic-preparedness plan which did not recommend lockdowns, but instead proposed a risk-based strategy to protect those at high risk, which is actually the same as the focused protection we put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration. What we are proposing is, therefore, nothing revolutionary.”

In other words, in the inverted reality in which we now live, the views of a group of scientists advocating for nothing more than the agreed scientific approach are being rejected while an unscientific and reckless approach supported by government scientists is being pushed in decision-making circles as the only option available. And it is unquestionably reckless because it causes the greatest amount of harm to the majority of the population who are least at risk from the virus. What’s more, we are living under benign (relatively, and at least for now) totalitarian rule and not a single shot was fired to get us here. Mass hysteria may have lit the match but we now have to ask: what else is driving the best educated government scientists and ministers in the country to keep fanning the flames and to place their hand on the hot plate of lockdowns, not once but twice, in such a short space of time?

The case for benign causal attribution is weakening.

We now know how lethal this virus is. With an overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of between 0.13% and 0.23%, it’s remarkably similar to seasonal flu. If you’re under 70 years of age the IFR is 0.05% or 99.95% chance of survival. If you’re under 50 years old, it’s 0.01%. That’s a 99.99% chance of survival. And in fact, given the over-reporting of alleged Covid deaths, the IFR is likely to be even lower than this.

A stunning way to put this disease into perspective is with this comparison to the 1918 Spanish Flu made by Sebastian Rushworth, an A&E doctor in Sweden and health science blogger:

“The average person who dies from Covid is over 80 years old and has multiple underlying health conditions. In other words, their life expectancy is very short. The average person who died in the 1918 pandemic was in their late 20’s. So each death in the 1918 pandemic actually meant around 50 years more of life lost per person than each death in the covid pandemic. Multiply that by the fact that it had a 19 times higher death rate, and the 1918 flu was in fact 950 times more deadly than covid, in terms its capacity to shorten people’s lives.”

Despite all this, the government continues to spend vast resources on policies that treat the virus as an existential threat while simultaneously destroying the livelihoods of those least affected, not to mention the sickening collateral damage caused by the health system’s total focus on one disease: deaths and illness from untreated diseases, depression and long-term structural unemployment caused by trashing businesses that will not re-open.

Undeterred by these facts, the government’s chief scientists, as justification for Lockdown 2 in the UK, claimed that 93% of the population remains susceptible to the virus and that it could therefore still overwhelm the health system until the magic bullet of a vaccine is found. But there is a compelling expert opinion which challenges this claim. One of the most lucid and critical experts to have emerged in this crisis is Mike Yeadon who argues that most of the UK had, long before Lockdown 2, already reached a level of herd immunity that converts a fast and difficult-to-control pandemic spread into a seasonal and manageable endemic spread.

Aside from the compelling science behind his argument, the other two important things to appreciate about his arguments, insofar as they open the door to more cynical thinking, are:

There has so far been no cogent scientific rejection of his critique of what Sage got wrong.

Yeadon has publicly and repeatedly claimed that, in light of their depth of knowledge, the most senior science policy decision makers know that the claims they have made cannot possibly be correct and yet they continue to blunder on. This seriously calls into question a benign causal attribution such as incompetence and doubling down on actions due to cognitive dissonance.

Again, the serious questioning of a benign causal attribution does not necessitate a full-throated embrace of a controlled conspiracy. It does, however, permit us to entertain conspiracy within a more nuanced framework of what Yeadon terms ‘convergent opportunism’. This term explains how several groups whose interests converge have, in a shark-like manner, seized an opportunity to shape a crisis in ways that benefit them.

We know that the most senior ranks of government and commerce have their fair share of powerful and influential sociopaths who, rather than apply their energies in good faith to a resolution of the crisis, are instead propelled by the maxim, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Under the current circumstances, why would you unquestioningly discount the possibility that darker forces are at work to manipulate the crisis to their maximum advantage?

Could a judicial process expose sinister actors?

The scientific evidence is clear that the worldwide response to Covid has been grossly disproportionate to the actual threat. But a battle is being waged between the rational branch of science, as represented by the likes of those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, and the political branch of science which has retained its grip on governments worldwide. Can the law, another branch of rational thought, provide some respite?

A group of highly trained and reputable legal experts are building a case for an international class-action lawsuit for criminal prosecution and civil damages against governments and individuals they allege are responsible for the 2020 live Truman Show we have been living. A core area of focus in this legal challenge will be PCR testing. Let’s talk a little about that before we get to the basis of the legal challenge.

PCR testing, and the ‘cases’ it delivers, is undoubtedly one of the core pillars on which this mountain of insanity currently balances. More and more experts are renaming this pandemic a ‘PCR pandemic’ owing to the unreliability of the test when used as a screening tool in the general population, which is exactly how it is being used by governments across the world.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is Dr Mike Yeadon explaining how the false positive rate, potentially as high as 90% of reported cases, is driving a completely false perception of the seriousness of the spread of the virus. Here he reiterates that the test is “monstrously error-prone and untrustworthy”, pleading with MPs on 4 November not to vote for lockdown. As if to punctuate the test scandal with not just one but three exclamation marks, directly below Yeadon’s plea to MPs is a first-hand witness account from someone recruited to work at a testing site describing the shambles behind the conduct and administration of the government’s testing plan.

Here is the Oxford University Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine explaining the shaky ground we’re on. Here is Professor Carl Heneghan who has been shouting about it for some time now. Here is a NZ doctor explaining a pretty basic inherent problem with the test itself — it’s not actually testing for the virus (a point made by most of the sceptical experts including Mike Yeadon) — but that it is also a diagnostic test which is being used as a screening test, further eroding its reliability. Here is the same NZ doctor responding to requests she received to remove her video explaining why she could not — essentially because the requestors had not provided credible evidence to contradict her original position and were merely trying to censor an opinion they did not like. Here is the same NZ doctor interviewing a German doctor who also dismisses the pandemic as a PCR pandemic.

Even footballers have waded in convincingly. If you are inclined to agree with the great Bill Shankly when he said, “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that”, then you might also value Christiano Ronaldo’s opinion on the test. He declared it was “BULL****” after being ruled out for a big match after his third positive Coronavirus test while in perfectly good health.

Despite the expert evidence exposing the unfitness of the PCR test for its designated purpose, the government is hell-bent on spending an estimated £100bn, close to the entire 2018/19 NHS budget of £114bn, on its ‘Operation Moonshot’ to conduct up to 10 million tests a day. Given the potential false positive rate of 90% when used as a screening tool on the general population and not a diagnostic tool on sick people, and the resulting lack of correlation between a positive test and actual illness, it would seem that the best way to avoid Covid would be to simply avoid getting tested.

A big, and as yet unanswered, question for lockdown sceptics is why would a Conservative government staking its reputation on fiscal prudence be so determined to almost double the budget of the government’s second largest department while being fully aware, as it must be, of the controversy surrounding the test? What, in the name of all that is good and holy, is really going on? What will it take for us to finally acknowledge that even educated people can be incompetent and cunning at the same time, and that utterly inexplicable behaviour by the officials paid by us to serve us demands, at the very least, an exploration of how much incompetence and how much cunning is really at play?

Shopping for a conspiracy theory to satisfy your brain’s need to salvage some meaning from this cesspool of insanity is an easy matter. Proving it is another. I believe that the gold standard test for proof is a judicial process. And that’s precisely what a group of international lawyers have embarked on. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich has been a consumer protection trial lawyer in California and Germany for 26 years and is one of four founding members, all lawyers, of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee launched on 10 July 2020.

According to Fuellmich, an international class-action lawsuit for criminal prosecution and civil damages will be filed against those responsible for implementing the economically devastating lockdowns around the world, and for allegedly using fraudulent testing to engineer the appearance of a dangerous pandemic. The committee of legal experts led by Fuellmich is trying to get to the bottom of whether the PCR test used to measure infections actually means anything in connection with Covid-19 infection. He’s also delving into whether the pandemic response measures, which were based solely on the PCR test results, serve to protect populations from Covid-19 infection or were actually intended to sow panic in order to make people believe unquestioningly that their lives are in danger, thus allowing pharmaceutical companies to reap enormous profits from the sale of PCR tests, antibody tests and vaccines.

Central to their theory, the committee of lawyers has identified the chief protagonists who they allege lobbied or influenced governments to accept pandemic response measures and roll out testing that was known to be unfit for purpose.

None of these propositions are, on the face of it, outrageous. What they require is proof. In his YouTube video announcing the launch of the committee, Fuellmich states:

“The most important thing in a lawsuit is to establish the facts. That is, to find out what actually happened. That is because the application of the law always depends on the facts at issue. If I want to prosecute someone for fraud, I cannot do so by presenting the facts of a car accident.”

The committee is relying on expert witness testimony to build the case and, as demonstrated, there is no shortage of expert opinion on the dubious value of a key area of the enquiry’s focus — PCR testing. Lots more could be said about the efficacy of the pandemic response measures, the harms caused to wider society and whether those harms have exceeded the benefit in lives saved. Mountains of compelling evidence are ‘out there’ for all to digest, beyond the mainstream propaganda, provided of course that you haven’t yet been gaslit into believing that you will spontaneously combust if you go on Twitter and click on links directing you to expert YouTube video testimonies or informative sites like Lockdown Sceptics.

I am both tantalised by the evidence as it unfolds and circumspect about its interpretation. I will make up my mind when the judges hearing the case have made up theirs. That’s how we should approach conspiracy theory — with an open and objective mind. The implications of a successful lawsuit are staggering and being interested in its outcome does not render you a ‘conspiracy theorist’ in the thought-terminating sense of the term. On the contrary, to be anything less than curious about the outcome of this case would render you at best, a cloistered monk uninterested in the affairs of the world, and, at worst, a brainless zombie.

You cannot resist what you refuse to see

It’s important to have a memory when looking at conspiracy theory.

What is smeared today as a ‘conspiracy theory’ may become an accepted fact tomorrow. And if you’re not curious enough to explore alternative narratives, you severely curtail your ability to fight back if those narratives are real. Acceptance of the dehumanising effects of the government’s unscientific restrictions is underpinned by blindness to alternative narratives and facts that expose the lies we’re being made to swallow. You can’t resist what you refuse to see. Perhaps the worst outcome of burying your head in the sand is you might not even realise you’ve been had. Being unconscious is a far greater sin than being fooled.

Stay curious to stay sane

Humans have an innate need to make sense of the world by giving experience and events meaning. That’s how we stay sane. The ‘conspiracy theorist’ smear, however, has the potential to cause a double bind. As any psychologist knows, a double bind is a threat to your mental health. The double bind for a thinking, rational person in the time of Covid is that we know the current societal and governmental responses defy rational explanation but we are not being ‘permitted’ to think beyond officially sanctioned or ‘normal’ parameters in the search for answers.

Let’s face it — the contradictory government diktat that passes for policy looks like it’s been cobbled together by Stalinist bureaucrats at the end of a Vodka party. The mainstream media have joined the party. Faced with a scale of absurdity and inconsistency in government policy that goes beyond mere incompetence, objective and rational conspiracy theory is simply one of several frameworks that has the potential to unmask the reality. Suppressing our need to explore the meaning of things merely suppresses the qualities that make us human: curiosity, reason and imagination. Now, more than ever, it is your duty to exercise your innate human right to be curious. Don’t be gaslit into a denial of this gift. That way lies madness.