Fighting Goliath (part 2)
Minority reports from Prof Martin Neil
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
This is the second part of an article in relation to Fighting Goliath, a recent book by Prof Norman Fenton and Prof Martin Neil:
The first part, featuring Prof Fenton, can be found here:
And the post on minority reports which inspired this article can be found here:
For context, here is Prof Neil’s page on the Queen Mary University of London website:
He is a (full) Professor in Computer Science and Statistics whose research interests cover Bayesian modeling and risk quantification in diverse areas. His work covers a wide range of subject including medical analytics, legal reasoning, finance, cyber security and football prediction.
This post is essentially a transcript of much of this recent interview with Kate Wand, along with occasion additional input:
My hope is that having the interview in written form will bring it to a wider audience. The issues raised are important for everyone.
On the nature of the covid event
[KW] So… you and Norman Fenton have written this book, Fighting Goliath. Can you tell me what the subtitle [of the book is]…?
[MN] “Exposing the flawed science + statistics behind the covid 19 event”… one of the key [things] here is the use of the word “event”. We don’t call it a pandemic. And the word “flawed” we are using quite flexibly. We did consider other words — like fraudulent, fictitious [and] false. There’s lots of synonyms that we could we could potentially have used… but one of the key things is that we don’t think there was a pandemic in the genuine sense that people think pandemics occur. And it took us quite a long time to come round to that point of view. There are other people that came to that conclusion very rapidly… maybe on the basis of much less evidence — certainly much less analysis — but that’s where we ended up.
[KW] For me it was a gut feeling… I’m not a scientist. I read academic papers more than I’ve ever read in my life during that time. But that was… my intuition just because of the way that it was managed… if there [were] this life-threatening pandemic, then you wouldn’t need to impose lockdowns because everybody would just decide on their own individually, “I’m not going outside. I’m going to stay in. I’m going to avoid the public as much as I can.” So those were the kinds of intuitions that were… leading [me to think] “There’s something fishy going on…”
[MN] I think that’s quite a sensible reaction… [based on] the sheer absence of reason and rationale coming from the other side… [people] trying to be persuaded to adopt these actions… [that] don’t make any sense and there’s no attempt to persuade… in a rational way… that’s enough to set your alarm bells going… The flawed and manipulative thinking that really underlies modern virology and epidemiology and respiratory medicine, and ultimately Public Health… Those who had their eyes wide open could see through the manipulation… through the lies and the flawed reasoning without any real need to consult a literature. In some ways Norman [Fenton] and I were hampered by our need to do things properly.
[KW] I see them… as being two complementary things, because I think that it’s one thing to say “I'm sceptical about this whole thing” but if you don’t have evidence to back it then you become a “flat earther” right at the same time… We see… the whole other side of this where people have now also become [sceptical] about everything that is a consensus traditional narrative that has been maintained over long periods of time. And so there’s a danger in only using what you assume is your intuition because sometimes it’s not your intuition. Sometimes it’s paranoia, sometimes it’s other things. There’s a whole bunch of psychological factors in there…
[MN] On an evidential basis… the amount of evidence and the coherence of your arguments don’t have to reach some sort of legal threshold or some sort of scientific threshold because you’re making your own personal decisions. But because we were motivated to expose what had happened, and we certainly had held a hope that there would be accountability, that questions would be asked, and maybe there would be court cases or inquiries where they would need evidence… that sets the bar quite high.
So we set ourselves that bar… [at first] it was the prospect of the immediate need to try and stop the lockdowns… stop the vaccine rollout… stop these dreadful propaganda campaigns and manipulation. But we also wanted to document it in order to have… a historical record of what happened evidentially that could be as foolproof as we could make it… That’s why the book has has almost a thousand references in it… hundreds upon hundreds of scientific papers, because we leave no stone unturned. I imagined that we’d be in court one day, maybe for six months, presenting all that evidence so we’d have to have it all at hand. So it’s very meticulous. Hopefully it’s still readable. And it’s still thorough and rigorous… but it’s all there. It’s solid work [that is] properly academically respectable — if anyone has respect for academia anymore.
On the nature of science
[KW] What’s happened here is a lot of those cherished institutions have become undone in this whole time. And so [it’s] also important to have people who are following the scientific process, the scientific method, who are falsifying their own hypotheses [and] who are really trying to get closer to the truth…
Let’s talk a little bit about definitions. What is science? And what is “the science”? What’s the difference?
[MN] Science is a process of discovery in the face of uncertainty and doubt. Science produces facts with a small “f” [and] these facts are always capable of being overthrown as evidence accumulates and better theories and explanations arise. It’s a complex world… lots of interactions, lots of uncertainty and doubt, lots of bias and prejudice, lots of noise in how we collect and use data.
Science is an attitude and a process. It’s not static. It’s a dynamic thing. It evolves. Whereas “the science” is a presentation of some ossified solid body of received wisdom and fact that is then imposed on the populace by some authority figure. And I think over time people have been taught to see science as almost like a religious set of facts and conceits, rather than say it’s something that’s an evolving… frame of mind where people are open to evidence and persuasion. Scientists present theories that can be falsified and challenged. So criticism is the key element to science. Without criticism, that two-way street discussion through critique, there can be no science, so “the science” is by definition not scientific.
On a potential return to the dark ages
[KW] I think that’s a great explanation and it ties to what I was saying earlier about people now who are coming from the covid sceptic group of the population who [have] become anti-science because they think “the science” is actually science and not a set of religious dogmas it’s describing… it’s like there’s a breakdown of our understanding of the world, and I think that that’s really interesting. And I wonder if it’s also dangerous… Could this kind of thing instigate a kind of nouveau dark age?
[MN] Well we always imagine that it’s the other side — those who have tormented us for the last four years — that would take us to the dark age of feudalism. But given how the [so-called] freedom movement has evolved, especially over the last 18 months… we can see that the received wisdom and civilised norms that we all enjoyed, or supposedly enjoyed, pre-covid… even in an idealised form… for many those have been junked. Because they’ve been perverted… they’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. [And] there’s nothing to replace it with. All it is is a set of hotchpotch maybe conspiracy theories that some might have some support on their own merit. But I think there’s a belief that nothing’s believable therefore everything’s believable. And then it becomes an almost wokeish-type perspective. They have their own personal truth which is their own set of theories that they agree with. And you can’t dispute them because there’s no mechanism for critique, so we end up in the same place.
On the nature of truth
[KW] That’s interesting because that’s like the post-truth era… the postmodern era… [where] I have my own truth [and] there is no objective truth…
I have a question for you that’s kind of philosophical, which aligns with everything we’re talking about here. As a kind of a scientist… a mathematician… do you think that there is such a thing as objective truth?
[MN] No. Norman and I are both Bayesians…
Bayesians = advocates of a particular way of approaching probability and statistics
NB it is important to keep reading to the end of this section to understand the context for what is being said here
[MN] We’re not involved in the ship that went down. We weren’t skippering the ship or piloting it in any way. [And] Bayesianism is rooted in probability, where probability is an expression of your degree of belief and the truth of a proposition, so it’s inherently subjective.
We all have different beliefs that you can express, maybe numerically, based on your own experience and understanding of the world. But if we have shared beliefs they should maybe converge in some way. So we can talk about statistics and probability and reason in a scientific way even though we can root it in the idea of subjective belief. But the mere fact that we share a reality means that we can share these beliefs and somehow they may converge.
So it’s central to the scientific method. And if you don’t have subjective belief, and you don’t entertain or support or allow differences in belief, then you can’t have science because you have to have difference… in critique and discussion in order to discover and move on and change and to create new theories and new explanations.
That might sound like you’re abandoning objectivity. But objectivity is there so that you test your beliefs against reality. That empirical test is a critical part of the method. And you do that as best you can, assuming and accepting that you have no unique access to absolute truth, which is a humbling experience, and that’s a reality we all share… I don’t know if that’s a good answer to the question?
[KW] I think that that’s a great answer… but then if there is no objective truth, is the scientific method in a sense…
[MN] We’re not denying that there are objects and there is objectivity. We just don’t have full access to it. Reality is out there… it’s just that no-one has a monopoly on truth.
[KW] Somebody who might believe in God might say He’s the only one who knows the objective truth…?
[MN] But they can’t impose that on anyone else, because we’re all flawed… No-one has unique access…
On the content of Fighting Goliath
[KW] Let’s go back now… with the word “flawed”… Let’s come back to your book… What are people going to get when they open up these pages? What’s going to be inside?
[MN] We made a decision early on to present the book chronologically. We start off with our first series of articles that we wrote back in 2020 when our understanding of of events was, with hindsight, quite… I wouldn’t say poor… but there [were] certain things we weren’t aware of…
When there’s such a level of lies and deceit… like any other member of the population… there are certain things we take at face value [and] simply accept. So with things like the PCR test, we assumed that if [we were] rolling [out] these PCR tests and and spending billions on them, maybe they work. So we… built some early models to predict the fatality rate and infectivity rate for the virus and [we] were quite pleased with that and we got [that work] published.
In the early chapters we look back [and] we were actually completely wrong. But what we didn’t want to do [was] to present the reader with a fait accompli to say, “Look, we had worked everything out right. Here’s the answer.” We wanted to give an insight into the evolving mind of a scientist and how they look at evidence and information and fuse it in. And we wanted to alert people to when we got things wrong and we started different groups of investigation.
So it’s more or less like a detective novel in a way, a scientific detective novel, where we try and navigate towards the answer… the exposure of what’s actually happened. And so the early chapters are dealing with some of the raw statistics around hospitalisations… death… how deaths were classified and misattributed by the method of classification that was imposed by the WHO. All those people [who] supposedly died of covid actually died of something else… a huge majority of them. We record the fact that hospitals... mainly in the UK… were empty. You couldn’t see evidence of a pandemic in hospitalisation data, ambulance data and so on… And mortality data… there was blip… there was an increase in deaths but not at a level that we would associate with a pandemic.
The early chapters deal with what happens in 2020 moving into 2021. And then the vaccines come along [and] we were pioneers. And that’s recognised by the fact we’ve got so many testimonials from people, including Robert F Kennedy Jr, acknowledging that we were pioneers and exposing the [fact that] the evidence wasn’t there to support any assertion that [the covid vaccines] were safe and effective. We’ve illustrated that… we looked at the clinical trials behind the vaccines for Pfizer and so on, and we looked at all of the research papers that have been written about effectiveness of the vaccines, and we show… [that] a number of statistical tricks… [including] one which we call the Cheap Trick… were deployed to try and make [the injections] look efficacious when you could show that a placebo that did nothing could [appear to] have 95% effectiveness…
We took on the authorities here in the UK — the Office for National Statistics. We took on [the BBC] quite heavily. The book contains all of the correspondence we had with these organisations, where they responded and redacted material, how they manipulated statistics, how they used the statistics in propaganda, how they told lies about the proportion of people that were actually vaccinated when they weren’t, and so on. It covers censorship. Goliath [in the title of the book] is the establishment in all of its different organs. And we took them all on here in the UK — Norman and I and a few other brave souls.
So that takes us into 2021, 2022. And then we started to dig even deeper. We started to reveal things about the PCR tests that were absolutely shocking. They were unreliable and inaccurate, and at that time everyone believed that there was a virus, SARS-CoV-2, and it was prevalent, it swept the globe… and that the PCR test… even if they were inflating the amount of viral particles that were in people’s noses or in their throats, there was still a virus there.
But we were the first to point out that the PCR tests were actually picking up false positives from other viruses — colds, influenzas and so on. And it took us a good 18 months to fully flesh out our investigations in that area. And it wasn’t until last year and early parts of this year that we discovered [in] published papers — the statistics and science is there — showing that some of the early PCR tests were 100% inaccurate for RSV coronaviruses… influenza viruses. So if you had a flu, it was being coded as covid-19. They had hijacked the normal swarm of viruses that were going around year in year out, and [labelled] them as SARS-CoV-2.
Now that doesn’t mean to say that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t exist. It just means that most of the viruses that we might experience in terms of the symptoms… they’re identical no matter what virus you might have. So the nasal swabbing and the PCR test were picking up the normal background signal and re-presenting it as this [supposedly] novel, dangerous, lethal pathogen. So that, coupled with some other evidence, naturally leads us to the conclusion that there was no pandemic.
Clare Craig… called us the “dissidents’ dissidents” because we’re probably the only ones of any sort of reputational stature who have come out and said there’s no pandemic. Denis Rancourt has, and a few others. We’ve done it in a slightly different way from Denis using different evidence and arguments, but we’ve come to the same conclusion. But there’s so many people in the Freedom Movement that are still pushing the deadly covid virus narrative. They’re certainly against the vaccines, but this idea of pandemics that occur the way that they do is nonsense in our view now.
On why things happened as they did
[KW] Did you get into… the question of why [things happened] this way…?
[MN] That’s the first question I get, because you write a science book and you have to keep motivation out of it. Again, if it’s evidence we’re presenting in a court of law we’ve got to be expert witnesses. We simply present the evidence and contextualise it scientifically. We can’t ask questions about motivation, so we more or less don’t.
Dr David A Hughes of Lincoln University, featured in this article, is one UK academic asking — and attempting to answer — such questions:
[MN] We might have our own ideas of what the whys might be, but it would detract from the power of the work for us to superimpose those and place them in there because then we’d be be tainting it.
[KW] It’s like when you watch a documentary and then at the end you have somebody give their whole ideological reason for why this happened and what should be done instead. Sometimes it can totally ruin the experience because you want to be able to think about it in your own way.
[MN] Exactly. So why should I pollute your own appreciation of the evidence… We can’t fight too many battles at once. We couldn’t properly go down that particular rabbit hole and document it properly. It would be a book that would be three times the size!
On whether people who have broadly accepted what we have been told should read the book
[KW] What if you’re a person who, still to this day, thinks that everything is hunky-dory? Should you read this book…?
[MN] Well, imagine the shock on their face if they got this book as a Christmas present…
[KW] That’s what I’m planning…
[MN] What you should do is just ask them to read the final chapter because that’s the summary of everything in the book. The final chapter is an aide-mémoire. It’s a bullet point list of all the conclusions, and each one is a killer blow against the narrative. And each one would shake people to their very foundations about what they assumed… unassailable truths about what happened over four years.
And that would then hopefully — once they see that and if they’re brave enough — they [might] say, “Okay, these things must be evidenced.” And if they’re rational enough then they would want to go off and say, “Okay, I don’t believe this. and I want to find out what their arguments are.” I think coming at it cold and reading it from start to finish… if you don’t want to challenge yourself… isn’t necessarily going to happen. But doing it in reverse is a great way to read the book. If you buy a detective whodunnit, let’s find out who did it and then work out how they did it.
This is a great testimonial [in the book] from Steve Kirsch: he says that the book was a double-edged sword. It gave some insight and revealed the methods by which they made this happen… how they committed the fraud if you like… behind what we call the covid-19 event. So if you want to find out… how to fake a pandemic and roll out a fake unsafe vaccine then it’s all there. It’s a real good cookbook. So you can start at the end and say, “Okay, that’s what they did. That’s the recipe.” If you fancy yourself as a future totalitarian dictator, then this is the book for you.
On academic censorship
[KW] I want to talk a little bit about the ideas of censorship… over the kind of research that you were doing [and] the omission of this research into the literature that was available among scientists who were following the consensus narratives around covid and “the science”… What was that like to experience on your end?
[MN] There’s the overt censorship because we were saying things that were uncomfortable. So we were ostracised by colleagues and friends, which we’ve all experienced during covid if you were a dissenter. We suffered in the sense that you could no longer get research grants, you got called nasty names… conspiracy theorist etc… could no longer publish, so all of our research papers were being rejected, not just ones around covid but traditional areas of research. So that had a huge effect. Plus it had an effect on people associated with us, so researchers… they had I guess no choice but to distance themselves from us because it would affect their academic careers. And I can sort of sympathise with that a little. If you’ve got young kids and so on… in a past version of me when I was younger I would have… asked some hard questions about whether I would want to pursue this particular line of questioning. So that’s one level of visible censorship.
On the extent to which epidemiology, virology and respiratory medicine are built on very weak foundations
[MN] But the other thing that really surprised me once we got to the end of investigations was the extent to which those areas which back in 2020… we thought must have firm scientific foundations — like epidemiology, virology, respiratory medicine, all of these key assumptions about how viruses spread… how you can attribute death to a virus… what actually kills these people, whether past pandemics and this one… were caused by a virus… All of these things were built on very, very weak foundations. It was shocking, actually, to see.
For instance, one good example is… we assume if you’re in hospital and you have a respiratory problem, you take a swab, you can send it off and it might come back and tell you you’ve got influenza A, B, coronavirus, OC-43, or any other kind of human coronavirus, or SARS CoV-2 — covid. And the assumption is that, if you come up positive for one of those, that’s the causative agent that’s causing your symptoms. And if you then die, that’s what killed you. That’s the very simple cause and effect chain we’re asked to accept.
But it’s just nonsense. It doesn’t make any sense, because what we found is that there was a series of trials done, called the EPIC Trials, by the CDC in 2015, where they found that through sampling for lots and lots of different agents and doing gold-standard tests… bronchial lavage tests in the chest, and asking, “What’s happening in the air filter? Is it causing the engine to fail?” There wasn’t sufficient evidence to support that at all. You could only find what you set out to find… it could have been any causative agent interacting maybe in any mixture that was causing your symptoms. And then, ultimately, what was killing people, when they die of respiratory problems like that, is bacterial in nature. It’s not viruses at all. It’s bacteria.
And one of the key things about the pandemic is that, despite documented plans for people in the pandemic preparedness industry, to ensure there would be stockpiles of antibiotics, antibiotics weren’t recommended for covid-19. They knew it was bacterial pneumonia that would kill people. So why isn’t this common knowledge in virology and epidemiology? Why did it persist… continuing with these flawed theories in the face of very, very strong — almost unchallengeable — evidence? And I’m talking not just about the Anthony Faucis of the world. I’m talking about people on the other Side. It just doesn’t make sense. So the science is very vulnerable to being exploited because… the naked emperor is never challenged.
If you take dead bodies and you just do swabs on them, you find viruses. And you could say they died of anything you like really, depending on what test you run.
And this was documented pre-covid. If you were a malign actor, and you were going to design… a fake pandemic, you could study the literature ever so closely, look at the vulnerabilities and how people are taught to think, see the gaps, and then exploit it...
See e.g. this 2007 article from The New York Times:
On the failure of institutionalised science
[KW] So this book is going to give you more questions than answers in some sense…
The optimistic part of me thinks that… you’re in the dark ages but there is a kind of renaissance that’s happening at the same time... There’s all of this darkness where people don’t believe anything anymore, and at the same time there’s all of this research into established scientific premises that you’ve believed for so long. Is that where you’re at?
[MN] What we’re saying is that, in the right hands, the scientific method can still help. That’s good science. Science isn’t dead. You can arrive at conclusions which are… helpful.
But what it does indicate is that institutionalised science is dead, that science itself can’t reflect on the frontiers of its knowledge. So everything I’ve said there about what we know about respiratory viruses — and this is known — the discipline is incapable of reflecting on it and adjusting and updating its behaviour, updating its protocols, its procedures, its state of knowledge. So it has stayed locked into a flawed scientific model.
[KW] Why is that?
[MN] The question of “Why?” is a big one. But I think so many scientists are locked into their own particular research agenda, so they know more and more about less and less every year, and nobody joins the dots. Nobody’s funded to join the dots. Nobody’s asked to assess the state of the field at the moment. Nobody goes off and and speaks to the dissenters, including all the people who believe there is no such thing as viruses — who shouldn’t be ignored… just talked to. But that doesn’t happen. So they just build a fortress against criticism when the foundations are massively weak. So it’s institutionalised science [that] is dead. We need to be freed up from these central controls. The whole thing needs to be decentralised. And good science, when it competes, should work.
On the problems with virology, climate science and the social sciences
[KW] It’s interesting… at the beginning of this you were talking… about how “the science” has become this religion. And what you’re describing in a way is… [how] institutionalised science in a sense has become “the science” and has strayed from the path of being about the scientific method. Would you say overall that’s how you see it?
[MN] Yes. I think that’s happened not by accident but more or less by design.
There was a very interesting podcast I watched last night with Eric Weinstein — Brett Weinstein’s brother — and he was talking about what’s going on in physics. He put forward this quite revolutionary insight theory — a conspiracy theory if you like — that physics post-World War II was such a potentially dangerous instrument, because people doing genuine research in this area could discover more or better ways to produce nuclear bombs. So maybe one way to prevent that happening is to tacitly, behind the scenes, fund garbage science.
Yeah, everybody can do physics, but we’ve just got to make sure it’s physics that doesn’t work. Let’s call it string theory. So you have an academic endeavour that’s central to humanity… that people have decided maybe this is too dangerous for the plebs. So we’ll give them duff physics that doesn’t work… call it string theory… and then we’ll make sure that we put in place gatekeepers and enablers who will keep people out of the literature, that can destroy PhD research proposals, destroy people’s careers in order to keep the fake science going.
And I was blown away that he said that, because we’ve got the same problem in virology. We’ve get the same problem in climate science. We might have the same problem in different branches of sociology… that all of these fake sciences — fake “the science” — have been manufactured and none of them really work.
It’s a mind-blowing prospect. If you had asked me that four years ago I [would have said that I] think that would be a crazy theory. But after going through all the stuff with covid… being deeply immersed… as an outsider — I’ve got outsider’s advantage [as has] Norman — you start to think, “Oh my God! What’s going on?”
On why it is so difficult to challenge “the Science” around vaccines and pandemics
[KW] It’s really interesting because it comes back in my mind to this idea about objective truth or the pursuit of truth. And if what you’re talking about here is actually happening on a large scale… we’re moving… away from truth. And at the same time we’re establishing this non-truth as the dogma that people must believe…
You’ve obviously in the last few years… looked into the covid vaccines — if you want to call them that. But what we see as an establishment kind of narrative is that, if you talk about any of these things, you’re an “anti-vaxxer”. And that of course covers all vaccines as well. Why do you think that “the Science” established around vaccines is so rigid? Why is it so difficult to challenge that?
[MN] That’s a tricky one. As I said, in the book we try and keep to the much narrower question, rather than the societal, political and ideological questions. But that is such an interesting one.
What I found fascinating is that we imagine that we live in an age where these questions are new to humanity, and that we are the first people that have been grappling with these questions about safety of vaccines and so on. And with pandemics. And when you look back in history… I was shocked… that there’s nothing new under the sun.
In the UK in the late Victorian age we had a massive anti-vax movement… changes to legislation in the UK against mandatory vaccination. Mandatory vaccination was a big thing. People would lose their jobs. They would be ostracised if they didn’t get vaccinated and if they didn’t get their kids vaccinated. So we’ve been here before… It’s quite shocking. And that goes way back to the introduction of of vaccination.
And then you can ask similar questions about pandemics. Why, during the Great Plague of London, did the rich survive? In 1666, with the Great Plague of London, it’s one of the first things we got taught at primary school here in the UK... the rich survive, they leave London, and then those who are suffering from the pestilential plague get locked into their houses… they suffer lockdowns.
The sick get locked down, not everyone. And there’s a red cross drawn on the door. And no one’s allowed to enter or leave for 14 days. If they can afford it they can buy food and have it left for them. But if they can’t, they’re basically locked in for two or three weeks. And, amazingly [not], a lot of people die. And they die [from] the obvious: no food, no social contact, no water. They’re locked in maybe with the rats or lice or fleas or whatever has given them… probably a bacterial or fungal infection. And it’s only when they lift these lockdowns that they see the death rates going down.
It’s quite amazing. And there’s no sense that these things are sweeping the country. There’s no path of the virus moving through the country. It happens in a sort of pinpoint “pandemic” fashion even then. So all of our notions about pandemics… it’s what I call the fallacy of the single cause. You’ve got a dead body and they say, “Well it must have been the virus.” You mean it’s not the treatment that you gave them? It’s not the fact that you locked them up at home with no food or water for two weeks...? Might that be nothing to do with it?
And you see that for all of the pandemics. They proclaim a fatality rate for MERS — Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome — or SARS 1. And they say, “Well these are deadly diseases.” Well, no, because the treatments that they put in place upon discovery of this supposedly novel pathogen involve withdrawal of antibiotics… ventilation which might have a 90% death rate. And the people who are supposedly infected usually have a huge array of co-morbidities and illnesses. So they become patsies to proclaim the new deadly virus. Then over time the fatality late drops. [They] declare everybody else asymptomatic carriers. And then at the end they say, “Well, it was just a cold after all. Let’s move on.”
On the link between authoritarianism and pandemics, and the psychological effects of covid propaganda
[KW] [In the context of discussion of outbreaks of typhus in the Soviet Union in the 1920s] …there seems to be this kind of link between authoritarian — or totalitarian — diktat and pandemics…?
[MN] Yes, they seem intrinsically linked, don’t they, totalitarianism and war… same mechanism. Lack of access to good nutrition over a long period… stress… a massive amount of stress can can reveal itself in illnesses. We’ve known this for a long time. Nocebo effect… just the expectation that you’re going to be ill can make you ill. But… the primary mechanisms would be more obvious in those [Soviet Union typhus] cases: starvation, malnutrition, abuse, psychological torture, terror…
We were terrorised during covid. The propaganda was a form of terror. That just kills people. You don’t need a virus.
[KW] I see that… and I think that there [are] some people who may never come back from that… when you are terrorised that way… like what we saw in this campaign over the last few years of psychological propaganda that really has embedded itself deeply into people’s minds… Do you think that that causes some kind of permanent damage? Have you done any kind of research on… the psychological aspects?
[MN] One of our colleagues, Dr Jonathan Engler, who’s a co-author in some of the chapters in the book… he’s been doing some research and, again, it’s well-established in the scientific literature. People just need to pick up the papers and read them. He’s done research on things like the nocebo effect which I mentioned a second ago and the psychological impact when people were living a constant… highly emotive stressful state.
If you’ve got your fight and flight signals constantly firing then the stress in your body… it can’t attend to its normal everyday function so the immune system becomes affected… suppressed. And then people become maybe more susceptible to contracting… bacterial or fungal infections or illnesses, maybe viruses and/or other… cancer and so on. And that itself can lead to illness and death. We all know that when we are highly stressed… we go through very emotive stress periods… usually followed by a bout of illness of some kind… the literature is very well-established. Terrorised populations… react with terror. The clue’s in the word.
On prospects for the future
[KW] Let’s think about the future… [Are] there any kinds of positive effects that you think people will get from reading this book…?
[MN] It’s unremittingly bleak in the sense that it’s describing a terrible event and uncovering some home truths about the event that people might find surprising and very upsetting. It’s almost like writing a book on the Holocaust in a way. It’s not sunshine and light, and it can’t really be because we’re talking about significant events… a huge impact… deaths, illness, fraud, lies. None of this is Happy Valley stuff…
If you want to look for a silver lining, the only redeeming feature is to look at this and say, “Do we want to repeat that? How do we repair society to avoid this kind of calamity? How do we rebuild institutions?” Talking about institution building, one of the biggest disappointments we have had in this “Freedom Movement”, the dissident movement over the last four years is its complete inability to build alterative ideological and intellectual infrastructure.
What we got — and this is no criticism of you Kate — is a lot more really good podcasts. And that’s great. It helped spread the word. It’s almost like pamphleteering during the English Civil War. It’s needed. But those institutions that you need to put in place — the Protestants produced new communities, new churches, new businesses. They moved as communities [and] there’s been very little of that. As an academic there’s no home to go to. There’s no university [where] you would feel at home and be welcome because of your dissenting point of view. So that’s closed to us now.
We talk about revitalising science but there’s no base from which to do it. I think there’s been a complete failure to address the need for homes and institutions for those who are going to fight the battles and put in place the civilisational infrastructure that we need to rebuild society. And if you think about what the other side have done — maybe this is overstepping the mark because I’m supposedly talking about science — it’s taken them well over a hundred years to put in place the slow infiltration of the institutions that they need… if you want to call it socialism… so the long march through the institutions… In terms of grit and determination and buckling down and taking a long-term view, they beat us hands down every time.
[KW] Why? I know this is not a scientific question either, but why?
[MN] I think in some ways we’re strong individualists so we don’t form groups very well… We like to investigate… all of the positives that we discussed… But how do you get people to conform to a central organisation in order to pursue a programme of decentralisation? A tricky conundrum, but there’s the rub, that’s the challenge…
We’re struggling with these things and I don’t see any of the bigger… political thinkers [addressing] these issues. How do we build homes for the civilisational wherewithal we need to bring bring back what we have lost, or build something new?
On the lack of fightback against “Goliath”
[KW] The world obviously is changing quite rapidly, and I think that this happened before the covid event, and that the covid event is a symptom of… you’re talking about decentralisation… well, the internet and the technological revolution has ushered in this era of decentralisation in a sense. And I think that in order to try and re-centralise — to go against what is natural and organic — things like the covid event happened…
I see it… [as] a way to try and re-consolidate power… to try and say, “We’re going to take the ring of power.” But this is not… in the trends… the internet has… allowed for people like you and I to talk… for you to connect with other academics that are across the world…
[MN] Yes, but what they don’t do is put bread on the table. You can’t have people specialising in what I call the civilisational capital… universities, medical care, legal ethics. These things don’t just happen in the podcast for you. So how does that get built around? How do we recreate a conservative society, if you want, with a small “c”. Because without being able to put bread on the table so that people can continue… they’ve got no place to go. There’s no home, so…
I’m noticing all these grey hairs on my beard when I do these podcasts… we’re the kind of people that should go out and and face down authority. But it’s the younger ones coming up… how do they make a life… independently of the machine?
I was hoping that there would be more small to medium-sized enterprises — the very people that were threatened during covid, the businesses that were threatened — who would realise that they should be the spearhead of helping fund something… some replacement for the system, some way for people to survive separately from it. And that didn’t happen. These are the entities — these middle-class entities — that are the ones under the direct threat of the change and direction of society. But they’re blind to it.
[KW] They would have to go against Goliath… and not everybody wants to do that.
[MN] Thanks for bring it back to the book, Kate. Perfect.
Solutions are alas unlikely to come from the top down any time soon, if at all.
And we should I think be cautious in relation to well-known figures who might appear to be offering solutions to the problems that have largely been created by the powers that be. I wonder (for example) how anti-establishment high-profile figures such as Nigel Farage and Donald Trump actually are. “Do not put your trust in princes…” comes to mind.1
In terms of grassroots movements, among the more promising that I am aware of are:
The Hope Accord, featured in this post:
Together (or search “Together Declaration”):
As to whether we can collectively fight and defeat “Goliath”, only time will tell. But in any case — and as some perceptive people are recognising — we may reasonably view what is currently happening as part of a much bigger story.
Dear Church Leaders articles (some of which, including this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns)
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered