Compliance, Subterfuge, and Withdrawal

slipping away from the crisis crisis

Start from an argument I’ve made before: There’s one big fraud, and we just run a bunch of different iterations. Oxycontin isn’t addictive at all, the housing market can only go up, lockdowns work well and aren’t harmful, lots and lots of mRNA injections make you healthy and safe.

But at some point, people stop eating shit.

Steve Kirch asks an important question about mRNA injections: “How do we sway the minds of people who refuse to see the negative data?” The first answer is that we mostly don’t sway anything, because the refusal right up front — I don’t want to see this! — prevents discussion. But that’s also not really the answer. Let’s make the question bigger, and then come back to the specifics.

How do we sway people who refuse to see?

The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians.” What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.

The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide”), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.

All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.

Mark Rutte vs. Jacinda Ardern, no matter how much they want out of the basement, forever

The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters…but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:

The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.

Here’s what the Los Angeles Times says about the Netflix layoffs:

Netflix last week cut 150 full-time jobs in reaction to slowing revenue growth and its loss of 200,000 subscribers in the most recent quarter, the company’s first membership decline in more than a decade….

Netflix also mothballed upcoming animated shows, including “Wings of Fire,” executive produced by Ava DuVernay, and “Antiracist Baby,” based on the book by scholar Ibram X. Kendi. Sources told Variety that these cuts were based on creative decisions rather than budgetary demands. Netflix has been open about wanting its programming to have broad appeal. That may mean less niche, creator-driven or socially activist material.

The company that had the instinct to develop product like an animated show based on Ibram X. Kendi’s toddler board book Antiracist Baby is shedding viewers and employees. This, he says with a carefully blank face, is a huge surprise.

Meanwhile, a neighborhood I lived in a few years ago looks like this:

And so:

So Steve Kirsch asks, “How do we sway the minds of people who refuse to see the negative data?” But then soon after, Alex Berenson posts that mRNA injections for young children are stone-cold dead: “Only 325,000 of the 19 million children under 5 are fully vaccinated, not even 2 percent.”

People are refusing to see the data, and no one will allow themselves to see that the mRNA injections cause considerable harms that (at best) outweigh the quite modest and transitory benefits….

….but somehow the statistical equivalent of every parent in America refuses to subject their young children to the thing that no one wants to see the data for. Everyone is hiding from the dark truth, and they won’t face what the data tell them, but a whole country of parents has also stepped in front of their children and squared off for a fight. What does that mean? It means this:

Everyone knows.

There’s a great deal of social pretending, and a great deal of corporate enforcement, and PayPal and Venmo and Square are unpersoning skeptics and critics as fast as they can. Because social media will still throw you off, and payment processors will still throw you off, and HR will still punish you, large portions of the country are still pretending that they don’t know the mRNA injections aren’t safe and effective.

But at some point, people stop eating shit. “How do we sway the minds of people who refuse to see the negative data?” Their minds are swayed. They won’t tell you that, but try giving it to their children. I would go a step farther and make the bet that some of the Big Tech executives who are throwing people off their platforms for spreading “vaccine disinformation” are among the people who aren’t getting mRNA injections for their children, which would be an interesting thing to prove.

In a time of considerable speech-policing with high social and financial penalties, don’t watch what people say. Watch what they do. They won’t criticize woke television content, but they won’t pay for Netflix. They mouth the local pieties about “our unhoused neighbors,” but they call a realtor in another state. They refuse to see the data on the mRNA injections, but they protect their children from them.

They mimic compliance as they become an absence.

And you can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it.