{"id":13219,"date":"2022-02-12T11:27:53","date_gmt":"2022-02-12T11:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=13219"},"modified":"2022-02-12T11:27:53","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T11:27:53","slug":"the-strawman-conspiracy-theorist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2022\/02\/12\/the-strawman-conspiracy-theorist\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cStrawman\u201d Conspiracy Theorist"},"content":{"rendered":"

In two hundred years doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade maybe \u2013 but it reigns. And all science must culminate in the science of healing \u2013 not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to live\u2026 to live.
\n<\/em>Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent<\/em> (1907), p.263<\/span><\/p>\n

This article charts the origins and development of what often appears to be a strawman conspiracy theorist over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through \u201cfact checker\u201d initiatives operating at the behest philanthrocapitalism<\/a><\/span>. This appears to have insulated regulatory agencies long prone to capture<\/a><\/span> from adequate journalistic scrutiny, leading to a groupthink amidst an effective censorship of alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response.<\/p>\n

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Losing Our Grip?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In May, 2020, veteran Guardian<\/em> journalist John Naughton<\/a><\/span> explored the origins of Plandemic a \u201cdocumentary\u201d video \u2018featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.\u2019 Naughton relates how the video migrated from mainstream social media into the dark recesses of the Internet.<\/p>\n

As he put it: \u2018The cognitive pathogen had escaped into the wild and was spreading virally.\u2019 Ultimately, the New York Times<\/em> \u2018traced it back to a Facebook page dedicated to QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory, which has 25,000 members.\u2019 All this Naughton said: \u2018confirms something we\u2019ve known since at least 2016, namely that conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around. And when they have a medical conspiracy theory to work with, then they are really in business.\u2019<\/p>\n

In May, 2020 The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Jeff Goldburg<\/a> <\/span>announced that conspiracy theorists were winning, and that America was \u2018losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.\u2019 Thus a 2014 study estimated that half the American public<\/span><\/a> \u2018consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory,\u2019 a proportion that had risen to 61% by 2019, suggesting the Internet was accelerating the trend. Another survey indicated that 60% of Britons were wedded to a \u2018false\u2019 narrative.<\/p>\n

Adjudicating on the falseness, or otherwise, of a narrative is not always, however, a straightforward exercise. Indeed, it will be argued that justifiable concerns around recent impugning of expertise have been weaponised to create another layer of disinformation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

The \u201cwild-eyed\u201d conspiracy theorist \u2013 often referred to as \u201cmembers of the tin foil hat brigade\u201d \u2013 has become a widely derided figure. This appears to be a belated response to so-called \u201cpost-truth\u201d accounts, associated with supporters of Donald Trump in the U.S. and proponents of Brexit in the U.K., dismissive of expertise. This challenged a board consensus around such issues as the importance of mitigating climate change. But in confronting genuine disinformation it appears that many on the left, in particular, failed to interrogate vested interests during the pandemic.<\/p>\n

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\u201cTotalizing Discourse\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Charles Eisenstein<\/a><\/span> defines conspiracy myths as \u2018a totalizing discourse that casts every event into its terms.\u2019 He traces these overarching explanations \u2013 relying on observed phenomena only insofar as these fit with a preordained pattern \u2013 to the first century Gnostics, who believed that \u2018an evil demiurge created the material world out of a pre-existingdivine essence.\u2019<\/p>\n

The \u201ctotalizing\u201d nature of such an approach has previously been dismissed by Karl Popper since \u2018nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.\u2019[i]<\/a> Oliver and Wood<\/a> <\/span>(2014) identify three facets to an approach that has traditionally pointed to Freemasonry \u2013an \u201cilluminati\u201d \u2013 Jews and Jesuits, and, in more recent times, intelligence agencies such as the CIA, KGB, MI5 or Mossad:<\/p>\n

First, they locate the source of unusual social and political phenomena in unseen, intentional, and malevolent forces. Second, they typically interpret political events in terms of a Manichean struggle between good and evil \u2026 Finally, most conspiracy theories suggest that mainstream accounts of political events are a ruse or an attempt to distract the public from a hidden source of power (Fenster 2008)<\/em><\/p>\n

In her seminal 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em>, Hannah Arendt <\/span>identifies such a tendency as a precursor to mob rule, describing how a conspiracy theorist \u2018is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.\u2019[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet certain conspiracy theories in our time, such as suggestions the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to plunder oil resources rather than decommission weapons of mass destruction, or that the fossil fuel industry deliberately sowed confusion over climate change, remain plausible, even if we lack clear documentary proof.<\/p>\n

A problem lies in how individuals with minimal academic attainment treat conspiracies as objective truths rather than conjectures based on circumstantial evidence. The likelihood of a conspiracy is often portrayed as \u201cbeyond reasonable doubt\u201d, as opposed to \u201con the balance of probabilities.\u201d A formally educated observer may be repelled by an insistent approach that does not allow for reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n

The intuition relied on by confirmed conspiracy theorists thus generally fails to acknowledge uncertainty, and lacks scientific or historical rigour. Yet these accounts may still occasionally yield insights when empirical methods fall short. After all, suspicions raised by conspiracy theories are often vindicated. Rather than dismissing out of hand such \u2018magical thinking\u2019, it is useful to consider these as unproven hypotheses, and not necessarily untrue, simply because an individual is overstating a case.<\/p>\n

For example, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly persuasive evidence<\/a><\/span> has emerged of a laboratory leak \u2013 perhaps from so-called \u2018gain of function\u2019 research \u2013 giving rise to the pandemic. But in February, 2020 The Lancet <\/em>published a letter<\/a><\/span> from a number of prominent scientists who \u2018strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.\u2019 This had a chilling effect on the scientific debate during the early stages of the pandemic.<\/p>\n

Notably also, the \u2018father of economics\u2019 Adam Smith opined that \u2018People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.\u2019[iii]<\/a> Smith\u2019s portrayal of commercial calumnies is reflected in a question posed at a medical conference in 2018 by a Goldman Sachs executive<\/span><\/a>: \u2018Is curing patients a sustainable business model?\u2019<\/p>\n

Previously, a succession of pharmaceutical scandals led Ben Goldacre<\/span><\/a> MBE to take a sympathetic view of so-called \u201canti-vaxxers\u201d, who are now consistently conflated with \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d: \u2018I think it\u2019s fair to say that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are a kind of poetic response to regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.\u2019<\/p>\n

Similarly, Tom Jefferson<\/a><\/span> \u2013 editor of the Cochrane Collaboration\u2019s acute respiratory infections \u2013 in an interview with Der Spiegel<\/em> in 2009 in the wake of the Swine Flu pandemic-that-never-was pointed to shadowy pharmaceutical forces: \u2018Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.\u2019<\/p>\n

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UNESCO’s World Trends Report 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Journalism Under Threat<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

An assumption of malevolent or self-serving \u2013 cui bono<\/em>? \u2013 motivations (particularly concerning a Big Pharma industry with a shameful record of distortion and manipulation) is almost a prerequisite for being an investigative reporter. Stories don\u2019t drop out of the air. Unless a journalist assumes wrongdoing \u2013 in essence a conspiracy theory \u2013 there would be no reason to begin digging.<\/p>\n

The key distinction between genuine journalism and conspiracy theorising is that proponents of the latter tend to blurt out their \u201cfindings\u201d without marshalling supporting evidence, with the Internet providing anonymity as required. This, however, makes such accounts easy to ridicule to the detriment of journalism with an evidential basis.<\/p>\n

Journalists have long been deflected from investigating large corporations. In a recent memoir the great American journalist Seymour Hersh fumes at how in the late 1970s The New York Times<\/em> shut down his attempt to investigate corporate America \u2019<\/em>when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.\u2019[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

This challenge has increased significantly in the wake of the Internet. After the \u201cOriginal Sin<\/span><\/a>\u201d of free online publication, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009, a pattern seen across the world. As revenues diminished, workloads increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories, discovering the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. To put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time to do the same job.[v]<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cFact Checkers\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the course of the pandemic a strawman conspiracy theorist appears to have been consciously developed to deter valid journalistic interrogation, in particular, through so-called \u201cfact checking\u201d initiatives. It has reached a point where, as Charles Eisenstein<\/a><\/span> observes: \u2018\u201cConspiracy theory\u201d has become \u2018a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory\u2019<\/p>\n

In the absence of adequate journalistic scrutiny during the pandemic corruption has been rife. The executive director of The British Medical Journal<\/em> Kamran Abbasi<\/span><\/a> described \u2018state corruption on a grand scale\u2019 that is \u2018harmful to public health\u2019 Abbasi observes how the pandemic \u2018has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency\u2014a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.\u2019<\/p>\n

This also occurred in the context of unregulated social media, where companies set their own rules. In March, 2020, having previously styled itself \u2018the free speech-wing of the free-speech party\u2019, Twitter moved to address concerns around conspiracy theories. In future it would be<\/a><\/span>: \u2018Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.\u2019<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, free reign was given to \u201cclick-bait\u201d alarmists such as Eric Feigle-Ding on Twitter, who saw his following mushroom from just two thousand to almost a quarter of a million. Angela Rasmussen<\/a><\/span>, a Columbia University virologist, identified a pattern: \u2018He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.\u2019<\/p>\n

Twitter did not act alone in upholding an apparent orthodoxy that often lapsed into an extremism that deterred legitimate questioning. Google<\/a><\/span> took unprecedented steps to erase material violating \u2018Community Guidelines\u2019: \u2018including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.\u2019<\/p>\n

Initially at least, Facebook adopted a more laissez faire<\/em> approach, although users who had read, watched or shared \u2018false\u2019 coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation\u2019s website. In November, 2021, however, the editors of the British Medical Journal sent an open letter<\/a><\/span> to Facebook in response to \u201cfact checkers\u201d undermining their investigative report into \u2018a host of poor clinical trial research practices\u2019 at Pfizer\u2019s original vaccine trial.<\/p>\n

Thus, the approach of the social media giants was bolstered by an unprecedented journalistic effort to \u201cfactually\u201d repudiate conspiracy theories during the pandemic; notwithstanding how \u2018uncontested facts\u2014things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable\u2014tend to be elusive<\/a><\/span>.\u2019<\/p>\n

Preparations for the \u201cfact-checking\u201d initiative began in January, 2020 when a global #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, comprising more than one hundred \u201cfactcheckers\u201d around the world, described as \u2018the largest collaborative factchecking project ever,\u2019 was launched by the Poynter Institute<\/a><\/span>, \u2018when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally.\u2019 It said that the WHO had classified the issue as \u2018an infodemic \u2014 and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.\u2019<\/p>\n

From March 2020, with the support of these \u201cfact checkers\u201d, outlets such as Reuters<\/a><\/span> responded to an anticipated wave of conspiracy theories, taking particular care to address allegations against Bill Gates. He has been described as \u2018the world\u2019s most powerful doctor<\/a><\/span>\u2019 despite not having earned a medical degree due to the Gates Foundations being the second largest funder of the WHO<\/span><\/a>, after China. This included allegations that he had apparently planned the pandemic, and wanted to commit genocide through vaccines.<\/p>\n

For example, on May 30, 2020 a BBC article<\/a><\/span> purported to defuse claims the pandemic was \u2018a cover for a plan to implant trackable microchips and that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind it\u2019; although it acknowledged Gates had said that \u2018eventually \u201cwe will have some digital certificates\u201d which would be used to show who’d recovered, been tested and ultimately who received a vaccine,\u2019 and also referenced \u2018a study, funded by the Gates Foundation, into a technology that could store someone’s vaccine records in a special ink administered at the same time as an injection.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Front building of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gates Foundation<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When it came to outlandish conspiracy theories around COVID-19 all roads led to Bill Gates and his $47 billion philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation \u2013 besides a personal fortune of $115 billion, and growing, as of October 2020<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

For many of world\u2019s population under stay-at-home orders the pandemic was viewed through a digital prism \u2013 often at a remove from morbidity or mortality itself. At that stage, Gates\u2019s 2014 Ted Talk \u2018The Next Outbreak. We\u2019re not ready<\/a><\/span>\u2019 seemed almost prophetic.<\/p>\n

He opined: \u2018If anything kills over ten million people in the next few decades it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.\u2019 The failure of Western governments to prepare for such an eventuality seemed to have been laid bare \u2013 in particular the Presidential administration of Donald Trump, who according to a Cornell University study<\/a><\/span> \u2018was likely th\\\\e largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation \u201cinfodemic.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

Gates\u2019s Ted Talk, however, failed to discuss the false alarm of the Swine Flu Pandemic<\/a><\/span>, when the WHO estimated that between 2.0 and 7.4 million could die, assuming the outbreak was relatively mild. This proved a wild exaggeration as less than 300,000 were estimated to have died globally<\/a><\/span>, with Western governments stockpiling millions of dollars\u2019 worth of GlaxoSmithKlein’s Pandemrix vaccine, which\u00a0 brought an elevated risk of narcolepsy<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Gates\u2019s main reference point appears to have been the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 \u2013 the Ur-pandemic of modern times<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 \u2013 that led to up to fifty million deaths<\/span><\/a>, many of them young men in their prime, at a point when the global population was approximately two billion. In contrast, the infectivity and severity of SARS-CoV-2<\/a><\/span> \u2018are well within the range described by respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries (where the 1918\u201320 influenza is the clear outlier).\u2019<\/p>\n

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Neil Ferguson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cScientific Groupthink\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In March, 2020, Imperial College\u2019s Neil Ferguson told the New York Times the \u2018best case outcome<\/a><\/span>\u2019 for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario, a projection that has proved wildly inaccurate. Yet, alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response to the challenge were virtually ignored in legacy media at the time. Thus, an Oxford University paper, which included Sunetra Gupta as an author, countered what the New York Times<\/em> described as the \u2018gold standard<\/a><\/span>\u2019 Imperial modelling underestimated immunity<\/span><\/a> from prior coronavirus infections and posited a far lower infection fatality rate.<\/p>\n

But in March, 2020, the Financial Times<\/em><\/a> <\/span>warned that Gupta\u2019s group\u2019s modelling was \u2018controversial and its assumptions have been contested by other scientists.\u2019 Implicitly, the Financial Times<\/em> was accepting the \u201cgold standard\u201d Imperial paper.<\/p>\n

Moreover, in November, 2020 an article in the Scientific American<\/em> describes how Stefan Baral<\/a><\/span>, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, wrote a letter about the potential harms of lockdowns which was rejected from more than ten scientific journals (and six newspapers) in April, 2020. Baral recalls, \u2018it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.\u2019<\/p>\n

The article also recalled that, \u2018highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.\u2019 The authors concluded that the \u2018net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of \u201cgroupthink\u201d\u2014a problem that carries its own deadly consequences.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the absence of access to authoritative, diverging scientific accounts, opposition to lockdowns could easily be dismissed as being the preserve of conspiracy theorist cranks associated with \u201canti-vaxxers\u201d and even a \u201cfar-right\u201d fringe.<\/p>\n

\u201cScreen New Deal\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Apart from offering pharmaceutical companies the huge financial incentive \u2013 grasped within open arms<\/a><\/span> \u2013 of developing a vaccine for universal application, lockdowns and social distancing measures also brought soaring profits<\/a><\/span> for major technology corporations. Moreover, restrictions provided a testing ground for the Gates Foundation\u2019s long advocacy of technological approaches in education.<\/p>\n

In May, 2020 Naomi Klein<\/span><\/a> identified collusion between state and Big Tech interests in what she described as \u2018A Screen New Deal.\u2019 She referred to New York Governor Mario Cuomo\u2019s courting of Google and the Gates Foundation: \u2018Calling Gates a \u201cvisionary,\u201d Cuomo said the pandemic has created \u201ca moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates\u2019s] ideas \u2026 all these buildings, all these physical classrooms \u2014 why with all the technology you have?\u201d he asked, apparently rhetorically.\u2019<\/p>\n

Remote learning technology permitted extended school closures around the world, despite the chance of death from COVID-19 being \u2018incredibly rare<\/span><\/a>\u2019 among children. Research<\/a> <\/span>now suggests many students made little or no progress while learning from home, and that learning loss was most pronounced among disadvantaged students. As a consequence, up to 20,000 children in the U.K.<\/a><\/span> went missing from school rolls during the pandemic. Nor is it apparent that teachers<\/span><\/a> faced any greater risk compared to the wider population in fulfilling classroom teaching.<\/p>\n

Media Funding<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Popular consent on a global scale for lockdowns, particularly from those identifying on the left, seems to have been manufactured through vast \u2018philanthropic\u2019 funding of journalism, in particular of publications associated with progressive outlooks.<\/p>\n

By June 2020, the Gates Foundation contributed $250 million to journalism, which according to Tim Schwab in The Columbia Journalism Review<\/em><\/a><\/span>, \u2018appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world\u2019s most visible charity.\u2019<\/p>\n

A theme of \u2018we are in this together\u2019 inhibited criticism and enquiry. This quiescence has been criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris<\/span><\/a> who wrote: \u2018What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.\u2019<\/p>\n

Tim Schwab calculates that $250 million had been devoted to journalism by the Gates Foundation for the six months up to June, 2020,. Recipients included BBC, NBC, Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal<\/em>, The Guardian<\/em>, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times<\/em>, The Atlantic<\/em>, The Texas Tribune<\/em>, Gannett, Washington Monthly<\/em>, Le Monde<\/em>, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as the BBC\u2019s Media Action and The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Neediest Cases Fund.<\/p>\n

Schwab adds: \u2018In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations\u2014which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates\u2019s funding into the fourth estate.\u2019<\/p>\n

As a result, he says:<\/p>\n

During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid\u2014even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively\u2014both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from \u201cfalse conspiracy theories\u201d and \u201cmisinformation,\u201d like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation\u2019s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A colonial legacy, a distrust of a mercantilist pharmaceutical industry and erosion of democracy jeopardise preserving population health through vaccination write MSF's Francoise Duroch & Duncan McLeanhttps:\/\/t.co\/brW41215h9<\/a>@broadsheet_ie<\/a> @BallouxFrancois<\/a> @FrancoiseDuroch<\/a><\/p>\n

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 16, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n