Editor’s Note: I know that the response from many if not most of our audience will be, “duh!” Yes, we all know ubiquitous and persistent propaganda has been used during the so-called “pandemic” and throughout the “vaccine” push, but I’m publishing this wonderful article by Dr. Joseph Mercola anyway because we all need to have our facts straight to help others see the light. Family and friends who were pro-vaxx before may be more curious today. They may be growing skeptical. This article can hopefully help you guide people to the right conclusion about what has been done to us (and what is still being done to many of us) by the powers-that-be.
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- COVID-19 is the largest, most sophisticated propaganda operation in history. Psychological techniques were extensively used during 2020 to incite fear and panic in the population
- Propaganda strategies were also used to get people to support and defend irrational COVID measures such as masking, isolation, social distancing, lockdowns and jab mandates
- What made the COVID propaganda so much more effective than any previous propaganda operation is the fact that a virus is the perfect enemy. It’s invisible, could be carried by anyone, including those you love the most, and could “get” you anywhere
- Classical rhetoric is about persuasion through argument. It appeals to logic. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a kind of subrational manipulation that appeals to our most basic instincts, such as fear. An informal definition of propaganda is “an organized attempt to get people to think or do something — or not think or do something”
- The Great Lie is possible because the more divorced a lie is from reality, the more likely it is to succeed, as most people are reluctant to think that authority figures would lie and completely ignore reality
In the video above,1,2 initially published in August 2021, professor Piers Robinson, Ph.D. — co-director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, whose research specialty is organized persuasive communication and contemporary propaganda — speaks to Asia Pacific Today about propaganda in the age of COVID.
As noted by Robinson, COVID-19 is unquestionably the largest, most sophisticated propaganda operation in history. Psychological techniques were extensively used during 2020 to incite fear and panic in the population, while other persuasion strategies were used to get people to support and defend COVID measures such as masking, isolation, social distancing, lockdowns and jab mandates.
The Propaganda War
Indeed, propaganda is what allowed for draconian and unscientific COVID measures to be implemented in the first place. Without propaganda and simultaneous censorship of opposing views, little of what we’ve been through would have been possible.
As noted by Robinson, while the use of state propaganda could initially be justified as a necessary means to achieve a public health objective — protecting people from COVID-related illness and death — it quickly became apparent that this was not the case, and likely never was.
Today, three years in, it’s quite evident that COVID is a psychological operation. For example, since 2022 at the latest, COVID has been nothing more than another endemic respiratory infection, much like the common cold, yet the pandemic has not been declared “over.”
We now also have clear evidence that the COVID jabs don’t prevent infection or spread of the virus, which negates the entire premise for vaccine passports, yet they’re being pushed anyway. In short, COVID-19 was (and still is) a means to an end; to suspend and strip us of Constitutional rights and civil liberties, and to further social, political and financial restructuring objectives outside democratic processes.
A Propaganda Masterpiece
Another propaganda expert who has spoken about the overt use of propaganda to create and maintain the pandemic is professor Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., whom I interviewed in June 2021 about the academic censorship he experienced at New York University.
Ironically, it was his teaching students how to question and resist propaganda that brought on the curtailment of his academic freedom, after teaching this important subject for over 20 years. Like Robinson, Miller believes that what we’ve experienced over the past three years is a propaganda “masterpiece” of unequaled scale and sophistication.
It began with the outbreak of an unknown pathogen in China. Media showed images of people allegedly dropping dead in the streets. This has never happened anywhere else since then, which strongly suggests those images were misappropriated for one purpose — to spread fear.
According to Miller, the type of fearmongering used to propagate the belief that COVID-19 was a lethal threat was the most devastating ever used in propaganda history. What made the COVID propaganda so much more effective than any previous propaganda operation was the fact that a virus is the perfect enemy.
It’s invisible, could be carried by anyone, including those you love the most, and could “get” you anywhere. As explained by Miller, in previous propaganda operations, the enemy was typically portrayed as having the ability to “infect” the people and the nation with its evil.
This was the case both with anti-communist propaganda and the “war on terror.” Communism was likened to an infectious disease set to ravage the nation, and terrorists were likened to a pandemic that had to be controlled and combated. With COVID, the propaganda shifted to the thing of fear itself — an actual virus.
Despite a long-held understanding that asymptomatic infection doesn’t exist, the propagandists even managed to convince the public that perfectly healthy people could spread the virus. It was a complete fiction, a scientific falsehood, which is how we know that the pandemic narrative was a psychological operation, yet people were so fearful, they didn’t question it.
What Is Propaganda?
As noted by blogger and propaganda analyst Klark Barnes,3 if we want to be free, we must know what propaganda is and how it works. Classical rhetoric is about persuasion through argument. It appeals to logic. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a kind of subrational manipulation that appeal to our most basic instincts.
An informal definition of propaganda is “an organized attempt to get people to think or do something — or not think or do something.” Propaganda can be true or false, or somewhere in between, and can be used for both good and ill. Public service ads encouraging you not to smoke, for example, are a form of benevolent propaganda.
The problem with propaganda is that it’s inherently biased and one-sided, which can become outright dangerous if the other side is censored.
This is particularly true when it comes to medicine and health, and the censoring of COVID-19 treatment information and the potential hazards of the COVID shots is a perfect example of this. State propaganda and war propaganda also rely heavily on the incitement of fear and anger, which makes people behave in ways they normally wouldn’t.
They Must Constantly Stir the Pot to Keep Fear Simmering
As noted by Barnes, media forecasts of other “imminent ordeals” are also a way “to keep widespread fear and anger simmering:”4
“The possible next acts include a cyber-attack (‘by Russia’); a breakdown of the world supply chain, and consequent food shortages, or famine (likely to be blamed on Russia); a heightened ‘climate crisis,’ necessitating further lockdowns …
‘[T]terrorist’ attacks, by ‘white supremacists’ and angry blacks (portending war between the races); an ‘alien attack’ on Planet Earth, as in The War of the Worlds or Independence Day; and — of course — another plague or two, or three, caused by some further COVID ‘variant,’ smallpox … the Marburg virus, and/or whatever other pathogen, real or imaginary, might serve the same old purpose …
Such looming sequels to the COVID propaganda … would also each inflict a vast amount of further suffering on humanity — and so those of us who study propaganda critically, as public intellectuals, must speak out loud and clear, to set things right.”
According to Barnes, setting things right involves, first and foremost, sharing the truth. Propaganda narratives that must be countered with careful and thorough analysis include but are not limited to:
- The origin of SARS-CoV-2
- The actual lethality of SARS-CoV-2
- How COVID “cases” were fraudulently augmented using flawed PCR tests that cannot identify active infection
- The futility of lockdowns and their catastrophic harms
- The “homicidal impact” of standard COVID treatment
- The availability and effectiveness of early treatment protocols
- How key terms such as “pandemic,” “cases,” “herd immunity,” “vaccine” and “fully vaccinated” were redefined in order to enable the pandemic narrative
- The likely motives behind the alleged crisis
- The ever-growing toll of the experimental “vaccination” program
Over the past three years, I’ve written many articles detailing all of these. But setting the record straight on individual propaganda topics is not enough. If we are to retain our freedoms, Barnes believes the public also needs to get much savvier about propaganda overall.
The Free Press Has Became a Propaganda Juggernaut
For decades, we had a free press that helped keep pro-industry advertising lies in check. Professional investigative journalists working for magazines, newspapers and broadcast outlets would write in-depth exposés, outing the truth behind deceptive advertising and countering industry propaganda with science, statistics and other documented facts.
As a result of the free press doing its job, ineffective or toxic products were often driven off the market. The answer that industry came up with for this problem was to control the press with advertising dollars. By becoming a major revenue stream, advertisers more or less automatically ended up controlling the content.
Even though media management and editors will deny it, if advertisers don’t want you to speak about certain issues that might adversely impact their business, all they have to do is threaten to pull their ads.
At that point, you have to make a decision: Ditch the truth or ditch your income. Most news organizations will ditch the truth for payment, and simply will not run reports that might harm the bottom line of its advertisers. As explained by Barnes:5
“That real-life Ministry of Truth was not set up ex nihilo by some iron faction of totalitarian oligarchs but gradually took shape out of a corporate media cartel with interlocking boards, heavily dependent on the advertising revenues of Amazon, Big Pharma … and the media’s own parent companies … with its assets closely managed by BlackRock, Vanguard and UBS …
[As] that vast commercial system has become more unified, it also has maintained, or even tightened, its covert relations with the military and ‘intelligence community’ …
And while the commercial media system has been thus corrupted top to bottom … the ‘public’ media and ‘alternative’ press — from NPR, PBS, the BBC and CBC … to nearly every single outlet on ‘the left’ — have also been absorbed into the juggernaut primarily by their funding through such sturdy CIA pass-throughs as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Open Society Institute …
[The] ‘free press’ … has been turned into a bio-fascist fear machine, its propaganda services assured by Bill Gates’ ‘strategic media partnerships,’ and the concomitant ‘fact-checking’ operation that he also largely funds.
The propaganda gushing daily, hourly, from that system also has depended on the wisdom of such global PR firms as Weber Shandwick, Edelman and Hill+Knowlton Strategies … and, within the Fourth Estate, the rise … of ‘journalists’ prepared, in university, to be far less concerned with honest journalism than with … serving ‘social justice.'”
The Web of Players Silencing Truth
Indeed, as Barnes notes, advertising companies have likely played an important organizational role in the COVID propaganda. Another major one, which I suspect may have had a central role, is the Publicis Groupe. I detailed some of its many connections in “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth.”
In summary, Publicis represents a long list of major companies within the technology, pharmaceutical and banking industries in more than 100 countries.6 These companies, in turn, have various partnerships with the U.S. government and global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Publicis has ties to NewsGuard/HealthGuard, educational institutions, Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Bing, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, global technocratic institutions like the World Health Organization, national and global NGOs like the Center for Countering Digital Hate. And, it dominates health websites like WebMD and Medscape.
Taken together, this explains how certain views can be so effectively erased. Publicis itself is also a partner of the World Economic Forum, which is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and our way of life. As such, Publicis appears to be coordinating the suppression of information that runs counter to the technocratic narrative.
The Art of the Great Lie
Marshall McLuhan once said,7 “Little lies don’t need to be protected. But the great lies are protected by public incredulity.” Basically, people will deny really big lies by saying “Come on, you’re crazy, they wouldn’t do that.” It’s far easier to call people “conspiracy theorists” than it is to face the possibility that what they’re saying is true.
In a November 4, 2022, article,8 clinical and public health physician Dr. David Bell noted that the more divorced a lie is from reality, the more likely it is to succeed, thanks to the quirks of human nature and normal psychology:
“In a former role I had a boss who lied a lot. The lies were pure fantasy, but massive in scope and delivered with sincerity. They were very successful.
This success was based on the reluctance of most people to consider that someone in a position of authority in a humanitarian organization would completely ignore all semblance of reality. People assumed the claims must be true as fabricating information to that extent in those circumstances seemed to defy logic.
The principle of Really Big Lies is based on the lies being so divorced from reality that the listener will assume their own perception must be flawed, rather than doubt the claims of the person telling the lies. Only an insane or ridiculous person would make such outlandish claims, and a credible institution would not employ such a person.
Therefore, given that the institution is apparently credible, the statements must also be credible, and the listener’s prior perception of reality was therefore flawed. Lesser lies, by contrast, are likely to be perceived as sufficiently close to known reality to be demonstrably wrong. Inventing truth can be more effective than bending it.”
I believe this is precisely the strategy employed by Big Pharma, health agencies, government officials and the deep state propaganda arm over the past three years. Their claims have been so far from any semblance of reality, anyone aware of the facts has been left feeling more than a little crazy.
Unfortunately, while most humans have a moral and ethical compass, few end up following it when confronted by psychopaths in authority and the peer pressure to conform. As noted by Bell, good team players almost always end up supporting false narratives, and those who refuse to go along with what are clearly lies tend to be but a tiny minority.
Refusing False Narratives Has Real Consequences
As Bell correctly points out, over the past three years, health care workers, patients, researchers, academics and public health employees have been forced to embrace a long list of fantasy-based dogmas that are contradicted by prior public health orthodoxy.
But it’s the sharp break from factual reality that makes it impossible to question them because, if you do, you’re now questioning “the entire current hierarchy of public health,” Bell says. To quote Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re not attacking him when you question his irrational flip-flopping, you’re questioning science itself.
If you question these fantasy-based beliefs, you’re a science-denier, and you’re putting your employment and reputation at risk. And, unfortunately, those risks are not imaginary. Many doctors and scientists whose reputations and contributions to public health have been beyond reproach for decades have been stripped of their medical licenses and lost their jobs for speaking out against the reigning COVID narratives.
Transparency and Truth Are the Remedy
So, where do we go from here? How do we end the madness and return to reality-based public health? Bell believes that public health professionals who have misled the public will inevitably pay a heavy price for their betrayal. He writes:9
“Whilst growing their industry’s finances, public health professionals are degrading themselves and betraying society. The betrayal, based on incessant lying, is something for which they will inevitably face consequences …
Eventually, even the most dedicated followers will begin to question the sense of putting on a mask at a restaurant door only to remove it 10 steps later, or vaccinating vast populations against a disease to which they are already immune whilst they die of other readily preventable diseases.
The way out of this is simply to refuse to lie, or cover for the lies of others … [The] truth will catch up, one day, with those who don’t … It is far better to leave early and live with dignity.”
- 1 Asia Pacific Today August 4, 2022
- 2 Twitter Robert Malone August 7, 2022
- 3, 4, 5 Earlking56.family.blog November 19, 2022
- 6 Publicis Top Global Clients
- 7 Samim.io McLuhan Quote
- 8, 9 Propaganda in Focus November 4, 2022
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
