First, a roundup of culture war updates. There’s the horrifying story of how commentator Dave Rubin rented wombs and purchased children (which he said he’d abort if they proved to be imperfect.) I’ve got a column on the advice trans activists are giving kids; the Texas Heartbeat Act is driving down the abortion rate; pro-life laws are passing across America. In other good news, Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen, who was charged with hate crimes for quoting the Bible, has been declared not guilty on all charges (although the government may appeal).
Additionally, I have a column on why the World Health Organization is a threat to pre-born children; a column on the aborted babies discovered in Washington, D.C.; Viktor Orban wins in Hungary and Boris Johnson comes out against men in women’s sports.
At The European Conservative, I have an essay on the Armenian Genocide (which I researched on a trip to Turkey.)
In The Interim I have a column on how we could ban pornography in Canada.
And on a lighter note, I have a piece on the magic of books. With that, on to today’s essay.
Where Will You Draw Your Line? An Interview with Paul Kingsnorth
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul Kingsnorth has been one of the most interesting writers to analyze our emerging narratives, government crackdowns, and the technocracy springing up overnight. What makes Kingsnorth uniquely qualified for this moment is that he’s been writing about what he calls “the Machine”—a “great agglomeration of capitalism, state power, and technology”—for decades. His 2017 book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, includes an essay titled The Barcode Moment that detailed the inexorable rise of a web of technologies all around us, and asked readers the question: Where will you draw your line?
“At what moment does the direction of travel of the Machine become so obvious, so intolerable, so frightening, that you can no longer acquiesce?” he asked. “What is the breaking point? For some people it was smartphones. For others it might have been social media. These days I think that the really smart people stepped off the carousel at dial-up modems and went quietly into the woods.”
Kingsnorth himself didn’t go quite that far—he moved with his family to the Irish countryside, where he is making a go at a measure of self-sustainability. But with the COVID pandemic, the abrupt introduction of vaccine passports, and the accompanying demonization of the vaccine-hesitant, Kingsnorth has drawn his line. He isn’t against vaccines per se, but he will not participate in the systems being built around us. He laid out why in three compelling essays last year that were published on his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule.
The essays have proven so popular that he subsequently compiled them into a free downloadable e-book, The Vaccine Moment: Covid, Control, and the Machine. He analyzes vaccine passports, propaganda, and the pitched battles unfolding on streets across the West as populist uprisings swell in response to the curtailing of civil liberties.
In the most fascinating of the three essays, he details how some elites would like to utilize this vaccine moment as laid out by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab in his book, COVID-19: The Great Reset. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist, Kingsnorth notes, to observe that the world Schwab would like to build is, in fundamental ways, a post-human one:
This is the essence of the Great Reset: the construction of a future which is at once controlled and catatonic, dystopian and dull, monitored and monotonous beyond bearing. A future in which global corporations are free to build the world they have long desired: a borderless, interconnected market technocracy, in which each human individual is a tracked, traced and monitored production and consumption machine—all in the name of public health and safety.
As nation states and their leaders lose power to the advance of globalization, that power has pooled around a different group—“those who create and control the world’s technological infrastructure”—including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Klaus Schwab, Jeff Bezos, and others. It is important to reject ‘weird conspiracy theories‘ precisely because it is essential that we remain clear-eyed about the world these people want to build. They aren’t hiding it. Schwab wrote a book about it, which you can purchase and have delivered to your home overnight by Amazon, courtesy of Jeff Bezos.
The question, Kingsnorth writes, is whether this is the world we want—or whether it is one we will decide to resist. What follows is my interview with Kingsnorth on our vaccine moment and the new era it is ushering in.
INTERVIEW
Many have noted that the COVID-19 pandemic did not make things worse so much as simply accelerate existing trends. You’ve been writing about what you call ‘the Machine’ for years—would you agree with this analysis? Are there specific instances of trends that have concerned you that have accelerated as a result of pandemic measures?
Absolutely. Covid has acted as an accelerant to pre-existing trends towards digitisation, monitoring, and control. The obvious example would be the rise of Zoom, and the ease with which so many of us have got used to working ‘remotely.’ Even children in schools have been acculturated into this, and now that the pandemic is easing, many employers are seeking to embed this permanently.
Another example, the one that concerns me most, is the normalisation of the vaccine passport. These things are useless from a health point of view—being vaccinated prevents neither infection nor, crucially, transmission of the virus—but the speed with which they were rolled out and normalised, and the way in which the media was used to encourage the persecution of those who refused to comply, was the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in my country in my lifetime.
We should expect all this to continue; much of it was planned in advance, and the virus was a useful means of making it happen. That’s no ‘conspiracy theory’; vaccine passports, for example, were on the EU’s drawing board since 2018, and the notorious Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, wrote a whole book about how COVID could be used to implement his ‘Great Reset.’ I’ve read it: it’s both boring and sinister at once, which is quite a feat.
The phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ used to mean something, but, as you point out, many of the people who received this label turned out to be correct on a number of pandemic developments and predictions of government overreach. How can people of good faith begin to discern the difference between actual conspiracy theory, medical misinformation, and the truth?
‘Conspiracy theorist‘ is a phrase like ‘racist,’ ‘fascist,’ or ‘anti-vaxxer’: perhaps it had a concrete meaning once, but at this point it is purely a propaganda term, which is used to attempt to dismiss an argument or a demonise a person making it. The problem we’ve had over the past two years is an almost total alliance of government, much of big business, big tech, and mainstream media, who together have sought to push one single narrative and to close down, censor, or demonise alternative ways of seeing things or even asking reasonable questions. It’s been extremely disturbing to see this, and for me—a former journalist—it’s given the final lie to the notion that anything like an objective or public-spirited media exists. This makes it harder to discern what’s real, especially amongst the myriad of online claims, some serious and many bonkers.
My way of navigating it has been firstly to ignore anyone who attempts to censor or insult those who take a different position. If they have to lie or bully, they have something to hide and they can’t be trusted. Then also to pay attention to peoples’ qualifications in the field, but also remember that, in my view anyway, the big issue is not so much the science around the vaccines or the virus—which most of us aren’t qualified to comment on—but what kind of a society we want to live in, and who decides, which is something we all have a stake in.
What are some things currently labeled ‘conspiracy theories’ that you suspect will prove to be true in the coming months?
Digital vaccine passports, sold to us as a ‘temporary public health measure’ will become permanent and, citing public health concerns, most countries will require them for international travel. The EU has recently extended its passport scheme “temporarily” for another twelve months, and I doubt it will end there. This is, by the way, the means by which our existing paper passports came about, after World War I, when they were put in place globally due to supposed concerns about security and public health (sound familiar?) after the Spanish Flu outbreak.
This time around, our digital QR code passports will begin to morph, gradually but inexorably, into social credit systems, and within a decade it will seem entirely normal to scan your code to prove you are an all-round good citizen in the eyes of the state and to collect your points for good behaviour from the commercial sector. I hope I can come back to this interview then and be proved completely wrong.
Massive protests in many nations around the world have pushed some governments to begin lifting restrictions and cancelling vaccine passports. To your mind, is this evidence of the effectiveness of grassroots pushback or simply the natural conclusion of a pandemic running its course?
What’s been fascinating here has been the working class uprising we’re seeing, especially in Canada with the truckers, who have now inspired similar revolts in France. The deer-in-the-headlights reaction of Justin Trudeau and the Canadian authorities has been a delight to see. Will this be the beginning of a widespread revolt against the laptop class by the people who actually do useful things? We could say that this is one definition of the ‘populism’ we’ve seen erupting since 2016. It could go in any number of directions, not all of them good. But I’m hugely encouraged to see it—and especially to see its good nature and public spiritedness, even as pseudo-radical media outlets like The Guardian continue to smear working people standing up for their liberties as fascists and lunatics. It’s been fascinating to watch pundits who have long posed as being on the side of ‘the people’ morph into authoritarians when the people actually show up. The pigs are becoming men all over the world, as Orwell would have it.
In nations like Austria, mandatory vaccination and other crackdowns have increased despite protests in the capital every weekend for months. In your estimation, is this a function of the sunk cost fallacy and a desperate need to keep ‘the Narrative’ alive, or a government power grab to exert more control over the population—or both?
It’s a good question, but I don’t know enough about those countries to say. I’ve been interested to see how national character appears to have affected different responses to the virus though—and indeed, local character, as the different responses in some of the U.S. states has shown. Austria is just quite an authoritarian country, it seems. On the other hand, England, which in many ways is extremely centralised, has nonetheless more recently blazed the trail for scrapping restrictions, while Scotland has deepened them.
There’s no obvious common thread to the different reactions in, say, Sweden and Australia, other than endlessly pushing the vaccines and hoping there are no long-term problems with them—which of course we can’t know yet.