Duck and Cover and Burn the Heretics: the Modern-Day Cult of Corona
bad medicine
coronapocalypse
Fear and uncertainty have dominated the media coverage of the Covid-19 epidemic. The novel coronavirus is depicted not as a pedestrian pathogen certain to be beaten into submission by the miracles of modern science any day now, but as an invisible evil lurking everywhere, formidable enough to inspire a respectful terror even in the leading lights of the medical establishment. And in case Americans had any doubt about how they were supposed to regard this new viral threat, the establishment talking heads many rely upon for the self-assured delivery of their news have swapped their usual swagger for apprehension. Amid this 'confidence vacuum,' the popular response to the pandemic has taken on a religious cast. Protective measures like masks have taken on a talismanic quality, hand-washing has been elevated to a ritual performance, and a cult built on naming and shaming 'heretics' has seized the minds of many - while their rights are quietly stripped away and a paternalistic police state substituted in their place.
Unable to see the microscopic "enemy" they are told threatens the lives of them and their family and deprived of a scientifically proven cure, individuals seeking deliverance from Covid-19 are left with only their faith that the protective measures prescribed by health experts –our scientific priest class– can keep it at bay. If it ended there, the Corona Cult would merely be a curiosity - humans have turned to religion in troubled times since before written history began. But its dark side has already reared its ugly head - those who buck the new orthodoxy are already being blamed for the plague.
We've been here before. In the Middle Ages, pious peasants were kept in line by priests who told them God was watching their every move. When a plague appeared, it was interpreted as divine punishment, the wrath of God visited upon a sinful population. Those who wished to stand out as especially devout whipped themselves in public, or wore painful garments called "hair shirts" - in both cases with the aim of 'mortifying the flesh,' literally 'putting to death' their sinful natures.
It's no coincidence that self-flagellation reached its height of popularity during the Black Plague. It was assumed by its practitioners that if they underwent penance by inflicting pain on themselves, they would be spared the God-given pain of the plague. Those who publicly refused to participate in the religious rituals of the day were called out as infidels, heretics, witches or other servants of the devil. They might be chased out of town; many were tortured and even killed, often in shockingly gruesome ways, as the centuries progressed and the Inquisition rose to power. The pious were regularly told their misfortunes were due to the presence of a satanic influence among them, with complex problems declared to be solved by simply casting out the offending presence.
While western society may tell itself it has left those Dark Ages far behind, the lure of simplistic explanations and the desire to find fulfillment in shared suffering - inflicted or endured - are as potent as ever.
Mask of the red death
Face masks have become both the visual symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic and the dominant religious fetish for the Cult of Corona. While cities from New York to Laredo, Texas have adopted regulations mandating them in public places and chain stores like Costco have barred unmasked customers from their premises, it's hard not to notice those individuals so devoted to the mask-wearing ritual that they sport the face-coverings in their own cars (with the windows rolled up) and when running down epidemic-emptied streets. Poor messaging is partly to blame - the Centers for Disease Control has repeatedly changed its narrative on who should wear masks, from "sick people" to "only healthcare workers" to "everyone." However, the Cult of Corona's devotion to the mask extends far beyond following the recommendations of a mere public health agency.
The mask has taken on a supernatural significance that far outweighs its utility in disease protection. Even the N-95 masks health authorities have recommended to protect society from virus-positive individuals have been found largely ineffective in protecting the uninfected from carriers in their surroundings, and the flimsy surgical masks that have become ubiquitous for sale on American street corners are next to worthless in stopping virus transmission. Indeed, some doctors have warned that wearing a mask is counterproductive due to the false sense of security it creates, while others suggest it's actually dangerous due to the risk of hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and hypercapnia (excess carbon dioxide). Yet it's impossible to walk into a supermarket in many cities without something covering the mouth - even as one's eyes remain unprotected and ready to receive whatever viral particles are lingering in the air. Mask requirements thus have nothing to do with health and everything to do with religious faith. They provide a way for the faithful to telegraph their virtue at a distance and recognize one another instantly, while flagging the non-compliant as infidels to be avoided.
In the same way that garlic and a cross were supposed to ward off vampires in times past, the face mask is supposed to fend off the "invisible enemy" lurking everywhere at once. One might feel a little silly driving around with a mask on (or stringing a clove of garlic above one's window), but better safe than sorry - and if you haven't been infected, or had any vampires show up at your bedside, who's to say it isn't working?
Ritual, snitchual
A bevy of rituals has sprung up among Corona Cultists, from the benign if eccentric (swabbing all exposed surfaces with Lysol wipes) to the sinister (reporting neighbors for perceived violations). Even the simplest, most scientifically-sound measures like hand-washing have taken on a ritualistic cast, as the virus-fearing infuse them with a terrified zeal. How else to explain the popularity of the dozens of "hand-washing apps" available for smartphones but that the shock of the epidemic has caused us to question that which we once took for granted? Just as peasants of a previous era might have been spooked into regular church attendance by the specter of the Black Death, their descendants pore over videos of hand-washing on YouTube, determined to live a "cleaner" life.
But another holdover from the Dark Ages has risen its ugly head. While our ancestors might have turned in their oddball neighbor as a "witch," claiming to have seen the merry old spinster cavorting with Satan under the full moon, modern-day snitches are picking up their smartphones and dialing specially-designated lines to report violations of social distancing orders. These services are disturbingly popular - New Zealand's snitch site crashed repeatedly within its first week in late March as over 4,000 people scrambled to turn in their neighbors for violating that nation's harsh lockdown regulations, which separated people into "bubbles" based on their living arrangements and forbid them from interacting with those outside their "bubble."
Snitches come in several stripes. There have always been busybodies who call the police when their neighbor's music is too loud rather than knocking on their door and politely asking to turn it down. But in the Cult of Corona, these miscreants are joined by those driven half-crazy with fear, convinced that the act of turning in rule breakers will somehow protect them from contracting the virus. They'd never say such a preposterous thing out loud, of course - if asked, they merely claim to be concerned for the community, or worried their victim's irresponsible behavior is spreading Covid-19 willy-nilly, perhaps even stating that their decision to turn their neighbor in was "for their own good." Just as the Inquisitor's concern for those they tortured on the rack was supposedly for their victim's "immortal soul," so does the modern snitch rationalize their betrayal of their neighbors by reasoning that the virus police are concerned only for the health of the heretics they rat out - while secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren't the ones being tortured (or placed on a ventilator), this time. Following orders becomes a source of comfort for the snitch deprived of life's normal pleasures by the lockdown - providing an avenue for transformation from victim to hero.
Fueling this schadenfreudisch frenzy are media headlines celebrating the karmic punishment of lockdown violators. Whether it's spring-breakers testing positive for Covid-19 after throwing caution to the wind and partying down on the beach or social-media showoffs boasting about refusing to social-distance, the public smiting of heretics has been a popular topic among Corona Cultists isolated in their homes. John McDaniel, an Ohio man who criticized his governor for shutting down the state, reportedly died in April of coronavirus only for social media mobs to dance on his grave and use his death to attack other "doubters" (including Donald Trump, whose insufficient reverence at the altar of the virus continues to set zealots frothing with rage). CNN's Jake Tapper claimed that "practically every day" he read about a corona doubter succumbing to the virus, blaming conservative media and politicians for their deaths - heresy, apparently, is as contagious as the virus. The New York Post, which ran a moralizing story free of any identifying details about a nameless Kingston, New York barber who'd caught the virus after supposedly flouting lockdown for several weeks to cut hair, also rushed to connect a spike in coronavirus cases in Kentucky with an anti-lockdown protest a few days earlier - even though the virus' lengthy latency period (and the fact that a significant chunk of the new cases were in nursing homes) made it next to impossible the two events were linked. And Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most fanatical government figures in the US' corona cult, implied in a press conference that protests were more likely to contribute to the spread of the virus than other forms of "congregating."
UK PM Boris Johnson was perhaps the most public example of the "divine punishment" phenomenon - his conversion to the Corona Cult (after a few days of timidly suggesting herd immunity might be a better path to public health) came too late to keep him out of intensive care at the hands of the NHS his party has so ruthlessly sought to privatize. When actress Miriam Margolyes declared following his recovery that she had wanted to see BoJo dead, some in the media appeared to agree with her - while making a point of casting such agreement as gleefully subversive. Not only do Corona Cultists find a commonality in rooting for the virus against the dissidents who challenge their worldview, but their own adherence to an exhaustingly cognitively-dissonant dogma is affirmed as the correct path by the heretics' misfortune. Enforced austerity tends to be unpopular with its victims, but when that privation is reframed as a noble sacrifice made by all [except the wealthy] for the common good, it becomes easier to bear the suffering - and much more difficult to tolerate those who refuse to go along.
The real danger comes when zealots feel compelled to "help" the virus smite the heretics (sure, I could wait for God to punish this evildoer in the afterlife, but why not take some of that work off His hands?). The Daily Mail cheered on an elderly woman who threatened to "kick the ass" of a stranger for merely calling the pandemic a "hoax." An elderly patient died in a Brooklyn hospital after another patient knocked her to the ground, cracking her head open - supposedly because she "didn't stay more than six feet away." The violence need not be physical - a British woman told SkyNews she was "named and shamed" by neighbors on Facebook when she accidentally slept through her town's weekly "clap for the NHS" ritual, in which participants lean out their windows and applaud at a fixed time every week in a choreographed celebration of the healthcare workers they believe protect them from the virus. Even viral videos of police abuses, which have been a dime a dozen during lockdowns that embolden the worst elements on the force, have been deluged with comments in support of the cops, charging the unarmed man/woman/child being arrested or brutalized "deserved it" because they were out without a mask/protesting/not standing 6 feet away from the nearest human. Never mind that the cops in the videos are almost never masked themselves, or that it's impossible to maintain six feet of distance while making an arrest - certainly never mind the Kafkaesque paradox of arresting someone for not social-distancing, only to throw them in a jail cell with several other humans per square foot - these poor souls have sinned, and they must be punished. Don't agree? You might end up in there with them.
Gotta have faith
For those whose faith is flagging after two months of lockdowns sapping both their bank accounts and health, polls are being churned out confirming upwards of 80% of Americans and nearly 9 out of 10 Britons support continuing the lockdowns, which combined with social media's growing censorship of anti-lockdown speech gives the false impression of a universal public consensus that government policies are both popular and lifesaving. Fanatical religious adherence is required to enforce belief in such absurdity, given the appalling track records of the High Priests of Lockdown. Imperial College corona czar Neil Ferguson was caught gallivanting with his mistress in defiance of his own policies after two months lecturing Brits about the importance of staying home, but his wildly irresponsible disease model - produced using a defective computer program that was more glitch than code - lives on, haunting the minds of lockdown-lovers who screech BoJo is letting Brits leave home too soon. Indeed, based on his resumé, Ferguson never should have been allowed near public policy. His terrible miscalculations regarding foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 led to the unnecessary destruction of over 6.5 million livestock, decimating the nation's farming industry, while a similar but fortunately unheeded prediction in 2002 that mad cow disease would kill as many as 150,000 Britons was shown up by the reality of 178 killed. As the years went on, his apocalyptic visions only intensified - in 2005, he declared bird flu would kill some 200 million people worldwide - when reality saw some 455 people, total, killed over the past 15 years according to the WHO. His hysterical 2009 prediction that 65,000 Brits would die of swine flu encouraged the government to embrace GlaxoSmithKline's unsafe Pandemrix vaccine, which caused permanent brain damage in thousands of people (mostly children, plus a good deal of NHS workers conned into taking the jab with false claims of its safety and effectiveness) - quite a bit more than the 283 killed by the actual swine flu.
Not that the UK is alone in embracing faith-based "science" as health policy. Trump even appointed the man who led GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine division during the Pandemrix debacle to lead "Operation Warp Speed," his unhinged program to develop a vaccine by the end of 2020 (a process that normally takes five years being crammed into eight months). Like Ferguson, Anthony Fauci - the face of the US' pandemic response - has decades of epidemic failures under his belt at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Starting with the thousands of otherwise-healthy HIV positive people who died in the 1980s thanks to Fauci's shameless advocacy for AZT, which refashioned the toxic drug (too poisonous for terminal cancer patients) into a miracle pill for AIDS, and passing through at least one episode of perjury that saw him deny the existence of encephalitis as a possible side effect of the MMR vaccine (before remembering he was under oath and acknowledging it was "rare"), Fauci has displayed such breathtaking avarice and incompetence at the helm of the NIAID that the US life expectancy has actually declined noticeably under his watch for the first time in history. Yet like the followers of an end-times cult leader who remain loyal even as the appointed date for the end of the world comes and goes, devotees of these public health priests have not dared to learn their lesson. Instead, they ramp up their predictions of doom for heretical countries like Sweden and Belarus that have refused to fall in line with the universal lockdown doctrine.
One level above the public health priesthood is Microsoft billionaire and Pandemic Pope Bill Gates, whose lack of medical credentials or even a college diploma have not stopped the world from hailing him as a prophet based on his "prediction" of a pandemic in 2015 - and his claim to have both the answers and the ability to pay for them. Gates' deep pockets - he's the number-one funder of the WHO, ever since Trump pulled US support - have given him the power to almost singlehandedly direct global health policy, steering it into a pharmaceutical iceberg even as real doctors protest his many conflicts of interest. Since diving into the money-pit of "philanthropy," Gates has more than doubled his fortune; his foundation is heavily invested in the drug companies that make the vaccines that other groups he funds purchase for poor countries. He's also very, very generous with the media, buying the silence of establishment outlets around the world - big names like the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, and National Public Radio - so their journalists don't recoil when he can barely keep from gibbering and squealing while discussing the economic hurt his lockdown policies are inflicting on hapless populations - or research the trail of suffering his foundation has left through the Global South.
Yet even the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex - vaccine advocates like Peter Hotez, the bowtie-sporting tropical disease specialist who was ubiquitous on TV during the 2018 "measles epidemic" attacking so-called "anti-vaxxers" - have expressed alarm at the decision to scrap the animal-testing phase for the Covid-19 vaccine that is supposed to save the world, noting that "there is a risk of immune enhancement" with vaccines for any coronavirus. During animal trials for an aborted SARS vaccine, mice who got the shot developed a severe version of the virus when exposed to it after they were inoculated, while ferrets similarly challenged post-vaccination with the virus suffered "enhanced liver damage." Perhaps trying to get around these roadblocks, Moderna, the drugmaker currently leading the vaccine pack, is banking on a totally new kind of vaccine, one which, rather than lob a softball at the immune system in the form of a dead or weakened form of the virus, will attempt to reprogram our genetic material to create the pieces of the virus, so that the immune system can learn to fight them off. That's how Gates himself describes this "promising" method, at least. Did we mention Moderna has never brought a vaccine to market before? What's the matter - where's your faith?
We may not be turning our eyes heavenward and praying for deliverance, but the leaders of the western world have declared society cannot fully return to normal until a magical perfect vaccine arrives from on high, an absurd one-stop solution that carries echoes of the "duck and cover"-type prescriptions for surviving a nuclear blast, drilled into people's heads during the Cold War. The effect of instilling a powerful capacity for cognitive dissonance - teaching children to hide under their desks even as they were taught the laws of physics, i.e. an understanding that their desks couldn't protect them - turned Americans into gold medalists in cognitive dissonance. Were it an Olympic sport, no one would even come close.
Omnipotence & Omniscience in the 21st century
The contact-tracing platforms - both digital and human-based - being rolled out around the world have their philosophical roots in religious rites of confession, cross-bred with the police-state logic of the National Security Agency ("if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear") and coupled with the religious notion of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity. All deviation from lockdown dogma is logged and reported, including consorting with known heretics, and this Panopticon - attacked when it debuted in China as totalitarian police-state control - is now being embraced in western media as the work of benevolent governments concerned with citizen welfare. While this transformation was laid out chillingly in 'Lock Step,' a hypothetical future outlined in 2010 in the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network's "Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development," any discussion of predictive programming is off-limits. Indeed, Corona Cultists are encouraged to cut off their "conspiracy theorist" relatives, because, in the words of Canadian broadcaster CBC, "conspiracies can be just as infectious, just as dangerous as a virus - so you have to guard against them." Parents in Wales are being warned that conspiracy theorists are a greater threat than pedophiles on the internet. Compounding the seriousness of wrongthink, the WHO has popularized the term "infodemic" - implying ideas are as dangerous to one's health as pathogens - and recommended a "vaccine for misinformation."
Soon, the Corona Cultist will no longer have to self-report their symptoms on a Facebook survey or confess their sins to a contact-tracer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed clothing with embedded sensors to monitor the wearer's vital signs. Enabled by the 5G networks being fast-tracked while any potential opposition is locked down, these sensors will communicate in real time with surveillance smart grids, pinpointing the offender and alerting others to give them a wide berth, refuse to serve them, and eventually have them "neutralized." Their bank account may be frozen until they return home, or even debited a certain fine based on the degree of disobedience ("that'll be 20 Hail Bills…or $20 per minute outside the home, your choice"). Eventually, these sensors will be implanted inside the body - in what sounds like the plot of a science fiction dystopia, Microsoft secured a patent in March for a system that mines cryptocurrency based on physiological signals, theoretically permitting the corporation to 'reward' users based on desirable responses to certain stimuli. While the example they gave was banal - a reward for watching an advertisement - it's no great leap to imagine equivalent punishments for those who respond with disgust to the ruling class' propaganda. The all-knowing, all-seeing God micromanaging His followers, a religious trope that has been used to keep large populations in line for millennia, has finally been realized in the form of the Covid-19 police state. Big Brother wields technology as both carrot - gently shepherding His flock toward transhumanist perfection by offering a facsimile of freedom in return for downloading an app, accepting a "quantum dot tattoo," or showing a "certificate of immunity" on demand - and stick, digitally and literally imprisoning those who deviate from His shining future.
A breathtakingly wealthy coalition of billionaires and their pet statesmen have seized their own slice of the divine by appointing themselves Big Brother's agents on earth. From the messianic glow of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen as she solicits money from cash-strapped European nations, to the aforementioned sweater-vested Gates channelling Nostradamus with predictions of "Pandemic Two," to second-generation New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (whose PR people have laid it on thick with hashtags like #Cuomosexual and #CuomoForPresident even as his state leads the world in infections and deaths and his policies of mandating nursing homes accept Covid-19-positive patients literally "kill Grandma") epitomizing "New York Tough" by acting out #resistance to Trump even as his brother was supposedly laid low by the virus, there's no end of ruling-class Heroes™ basking in the admiration of the Corona Cultists, who offer up their (and everyone else's) rights on a silver platter, never to be seen again.
Can constant surveillance stop the virus? No more than one-way sidewalks, bleaching the beach, or ratting out your neighbor does. There's nothing wrong with clinging to ritual in a time of uncertainty - certainly hand-washing doesn't have a downside, presuming one stops short of wearing the skin off one's hands. But when that ritual harms others, it must be questioned. Covid-19 zealots would argue that they have science on their side, but the science is far from settled on the effectiveness of social distancing and sweeping economic shutdowns.
Pseudoscience on a rampage
As social media censors tighten the screws on what information is permitted to enter the public sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend the Cult of Corona is based on science. Actual science relies upon constant inquiry, testing, and hypothesizing, and even those claims generally attested to by its practitioners are considered "theories" as opposed to unchangeable truths. Science-as-religion, on the other hand, denounces those who put forth dissenting theories as heretics, using slurs like "quack," "charlatan," and "anti-vaxxer" to marginalize, for example, medical practitioners who heal people without the use of pharmaceutical drugs. The social media platforms' decision to unilaterally deplatform content that contradicts the WHO's narrative is anti-scientific in the extreme, sacrificing the spirit of inquiry for the strictures of groupthink. It's rendered even more Kafkaesque due to continuing shifts in the WHO's own narrative, which has changed as more is learned about the virus (as scientific understanding tends to do).
The idea that YouTube's content moderators know better than a medical doctor how to treat Covid-19 would have been considered laughable just six months ago, yet Google's video platform has repeatedly removed videos of licensed, practicing clinicians discussing their experiences. A pair of "rogue" doctors in Bakersfield, California who held a lengthy press conference laying out their findings and questioning the wisdom of prolonged lockdowns - broadcast on a local network TV station - went viral, only for YouTube to remove nearly every copy while pundits denounced the pair as "coronavirus truthers." Their video did not attempt to project their own experiences onto the world - indeed, where they did cite statistics outside of Bakersfield, they used "official" statistics from health authorities, in Sweden and elsewhere, to support their claim that the fatality rate was being significantly overestimated because most cases were asymptomatic. Their video was literally broadcast on "mainstream media," an "authoritative source" in the eyes of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. But its incompatibility with prevailing coronavirus dogma meant it had to be destroyed.
The orthodox narrative also jettisons long-accepted science about immunity. Vitamin D - obtained from sunlight absorbed through the skin - has been proven in study after study to be integral to a healthy immune system, and several recent studies have demonstrated its importance in surviving Covid-19 infection. Likewise, loneliness has been linked to diminished immune function and poor health in general, especially in elderly people (i.e. those most susceptible to Covid-19), and even those who are quite content with being alone are experiencing diminished immune stimulation due to not interacting with other people. The link between isolation and ill health is so strong that even the media establishment has quietly acknowledged it, and solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment in many countries. No less than the World Economic Forum, co-organizer of the notorious Event 201 simulation that served as a dress rehearsal for Covid-19 itself, has called the stay-at-home orders that have confined more than half the world's population to their homes "the world's biggest psychological experiment." The ruling-class conclave warned "we will pay the price" in a secondary mental-illness epidemic, one which its members - heavily invested in the pharmaceutical companies that are among the biggest winners of the pandemic - are no doubt poised to cash in on with antidepressants, benzodiazepines and antipsychotics aplenty. Nevertheless, questioning the wisdom of prolonged isolation in the form of extended lockdowns is still seen as anathema.
Deprogramming
To begin to free humanity from the influence of the Corona Cult, it's important to understand how its programming took hold. Guilt - environmental guilt, racial guilt, class-based guilt - is the primary route of attack. The media establishment initially attempted to link the coronavirus outbreak to climate change, with even the Pope climbing on board the narrative, though no scientific basis exists to support it and it has since been somewhat de-emphasized. Heretics are repeatedly accused of prioritizing their own convenience over the health of society, especially its most vulnerable members - the elderly, the sick, even poor and non-white populations. Depending on the target audience, anti-lockdown heretics are said to be scientifically-illiterate "covidiots" or heartless monsters consigning the disadvantaged to die for capitalism. Guilt and shame are powerful conversion tools, and even those who remain unconverted are likely to hold their tongues in a sociological phenomenon known as the spiral of silence.
At the same time, humanity's innate religious tendencies (present in even atheists - millennia of programming don't vanish just because a person comes to the realization they live in a godless universe) - have been hijacked. It's no coincidence that governments imposing lockdowns have singled out places of worship for particular animus - anyone attending religious services is presumably content enough with their god(s) that they're unlikely to ditch their faith for a virus-venerating cult-come-lately. Constantly bombarded with messages of uncertainty and kept from communing with their usual faith, even people normally secure in their religion will reach for the stability the Corona Police State provides - authoritarianism's flip side is paternalism, and comfort is found in the arms of Big Brother. Among the non-religious, liberal and libertarian populations alike are targeted with the weaponization of medical jargon - a simple "what's the matter, you don't believe in science?" sends weak-willed groupthinkers into shameful silence while their freedoms are methodically amputated.
It is supremely ironic that in this Inquisition, the "real" church has been sidelined. Aside from the Pope, who has wholeheartedly embraced the New Normal, a group of Catholic leaders recently issued a statement calling out governments, the media, and public health experts, denouncing the Covid-19 narrative as cover for "infringing on the rights of millions of people around the world." Cynical scholars of religious history might suggest they're motivated by jealousy - "stop using dogma to control people, that's our job!" - but their concerns are no less valid, and the feeling of envy cuts both ways. The single-minded determination of police to break up even those church services scrupulously observing social distancing with worshipers sitting isolated in their cars can only be explained by eschatological jealousy. To truly force the Cult of Corona down the throats of the people, the competition must be eliminated, whether it's "traditional" religion or logic, reason and the (real) scientific method.
Deprogramming the world from the Cult of Corona cannot be done by force - its backers have too much power, including total control of both establishment and social media. It must be approached strategically. Just as traditional "deprogrammers" will isolate a cult member from the group, reasoning there's a much better chance of re-awakening the original personality when the person is not experiencing the pressures of groupthink, deprogramming Corona Cultists is best done one-on-one, keeping in mind that cultists will ferociously defend their dogma with thought-stopping techniques which can be extremely irritating to outsiders trying to convey dissenting information. Former "Moonie" Steven Hassan's BITE model (above) describes how cults exert undue influence and is useful in approaching deprogramming.
The notion of deprogramming entire societies may seem daunting, but it is the only chance humanity has to retain some semblance of freedom and turn back from the dark path down which our species is heading. The ruling class is imposing a comprehensive, multilayered control grid that has been in the works for decades, and when it is complete, revolution will not be an option. Such a future must be avoided at all costs.