Michael Senger wrote a piece this weekend arguing that the response to COVID-19 was devised by the intelligence community to perform what amounted to a coup.

You can see his point. The IC has been deeply involved in both the censorship regime and the spread of sketchy information that was pushed out. It helped monitor the flow of information, the implementation of draconian policies that limited people’s liberties, and infiltrated social media companies and search engines to manipulate public perception and acceptance of hitherto unheard-of policies that fundamentally altered Western Culture.

Senger’s thesis hinges on the notion that the Western response, after initially rejecting the absurd Chinese response to COVID that was only possible in a totalitarian society, reversed course in February/March 2020. The IC was deeply involved in the discussions regarding the response, and there clearly was a campaign to pretty up China’s involvement in and response to COVID. You can read his reasoning here.

Despite the fact that I sometimes sound paranoid in my ranting about the World Economic Forum and the more totalitarian impulses and policies of the political/cultural/academic elite, I simply don’t buy Senger’s thesis.

Sure, I agree that the IC was deeply involved in pushing these policies, but there was nothing unique about this in the context of the Western governments’ bizarre and destructive policies. Rather, my read is that the IC was simply one voice among many in what became a plot to use the COVID virus as an excuse to implement a “Great Reset.”

Was the Covid response a coup by Western intelligence agencies?https://t.co/2Xat40quZ1

— eugyppius (@eugyppius1) August 6, 2023

The period of the Trump presidency was one long slow-motion coup attempt. Not even a particularly well-hidden one, as the New York Times and the rest of the MSM, spent a lot of time touting the #resistance buried within the US government. The idea of # resistance to legitimate authority is anathema to the proper function of a democratic government, and yet the entire elite embraced it openly. The Justice Department, the FBI, and vast swathes of the federal government spent years exceeding their authority and deceiving the American public, as is well documented to the point of undeniability.

The goal was to deny the results of a legitimate presidential election and neuter the will of the people as expressed in a legitimate election. It was justified by repeated claims that the president was a foreign agent–with precisely zero influence–and the media actually celebrated its existence.

The IC participated in this slow-motion coup, but there is no evidence that it led the charge.

COVID mania was a whole of government effort and indeed was an international conspiracy to seize a unique opportunity to speed up the totalitarianization of Western society. The IC’s participation in this effort was hardly sub rosa. It was no more secret than Fauci’s, Birx’s, or the World Economic Forum’s. Hell, Klaus Schwab wrote a book laying out the plan. They truly believe that what they are doing is a good thing, and the media is working hand in glove to aid the effort.

A Substack author who styles himself Eugyppius and writes a chronicle of the pandemic followed by thousands takes issue with Senger’s interpretation of events, and I am more inclined to agree with his analysis.

Eugyppius agrees with Senger’s chronicle of events, which demonstrates how vital the IC’s participation in promoting and implementing the COVID response was. One reason I suggest reading Senger’s piece is that it ties together disparate facts and demonstrates how key the IC was in developing and implementing policies. Before you think it is paranoid to think that intelligence officials would have been given high-level consideration in devising policies, remember that after 9/11 they were given vast authority and credibility in such matters due to the threat of bioterrorism. Of course they had a seat at the table.

On Thursday, friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger posted an important essay to Substack, in which he asks whether the “Response to COVID” was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community.” Everyone should read it, as it summarises in one place a range of evidence that Senger and others have collected pointing to the role of the defence and intelligence actors in promoting lockdowns, especially in America.

It doesn’t follow, though, that they led the charge in developing the response for any reasons more nefarious than those of Fauci, Birx, or anybody else who sat at the table, or that Fauci would have taken his orders from spooks. Fauci doesn’t seem the type, for one thing. He is an arrogant man who was likely panicked by his unintentional responsibility for the escape of the virus from the Wuhan lab.

One thing that most Americans don’t yet understand is that the response to the COVID pandemic was not only unique in Western history–its only analog is China’s even more draconian responses to COVID–but contrary to all planning that had been done in prior years and to standard medical ethics. Prior to 2020, nobody conceived that it was even possible to implement such policies, and it was similarly commonly believed that such draconian methods would not work with a pandemic (localized outbreaks being a different story).

With the example of China, it was unsurprising that Public Health officials and spooks would fall in love with China’s totalitarian methods. Anybody who has followed the evolution of public health from its origins would instantly recognize that it has followed the typical pattern of any bureaucracy–accumulating new powers and ever wider ranges of authority to impose top-down solutions.

Almost all reporting and government statements on pandemic policy since March 2020 have worked to cover up the fact that lockdowns were not supposed to happen. The Western public health establishment never planned for them; everybody was supposed to do what Sweden did. To obfuscate the significance of the cataclysmic policy reversal that occurred in March 2020, pandemicists now pretend that lockdowns were merely the “social distancing” and school closures and work-at-home advisories that they had always fantasised about.

These blurred distinctions have necessarily coloured alt-Covid discourse too, but if we want to understand the events of early 2020 in particular, we must maintain firm distinctions among three different hygiene regimes.

These are 1) outbreak containment, 2) pandemic mitigation and 3) mass containment.

Plans for 1) outbreak containment had been current since SARS at least. The idea is that limited, confined outbreaks can be contained by harsh quarantines like those which Japanese authorities imposed on the Diamond Princess in February 2020. Should outbreak containment fail, then in the pre-2020 programme only 2) pandemic mitigation remained an option. Mitigation is a fuzzy set of measures that can be everything or nothing. Work-at-home advisories, school closures and “social distancing” had all occurred in mitigationist plans at one time or another.

Work-at-home advisories, school closures and “social distancing” had all occurred in mitigationist plans at one time or another. “Social distancing,” which has become a synonym for “lockdowns” in the Anglosphere especially, is an old concept that achieved particular currency with the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic. Before 2020 “social distancing” was never about locking down. In 2009, the WHO recommended “social distancing” as a “mitigation” measure for “low resource communities.” They described it as “keeping at least an arm’s length distance from others” and “minimizing gatherings.”

What never clearly existed and nobody in the Western public health establishment had ever explicitly planned before 2020 was 3) mass containment, which is the attempt to make 1) outbreak containment operate on the scale of entire populations, where it was previously thought only mitigation would work.

Mass containment is a profoundly stupid idea, especially with a fast-spreading respiratory virus. It would accomplish nothing but break society. And, as you can see, it accomplished nothing (COVID spread as it inevitably would, and the trajectory wasn’t even altered much) and society was indeed broken.

The difference this time was that there was a generalized consensus in the various bureaucracies that this was a good thing, and as Deborah Birx laid out in her book there was a successful effort to deceive the Administration regarding the policies they intended to implement. They chose to “boil the frog,” and Trump was well and truly boiled. Birx has proudly declared that the “14 Days to Slow the Spread” was never intended to stop at 14 days–it was just a way to get buy-in from Trump. And it worked.

As Eugyppius points out, the IC didn’t need to persuade anybody to get radical in COVID responses–in fact, China and Italy went quite radical in their responses early on, and the pandemic analysts were shouting from the rooftops that doom was upon us unless we act NOW!

In this context bureaucrats did what bureaucrats do: seize an opportunity and use it. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

It doesn’t require a conspiracy by the IC to have this chain of events happen, and it gives them too much credit. What we saw was a transnational elite seizing an opportunity to grab more power, and everybody involved agreed it was a great idea. They all wanted the power, and they took it.

I am pretty sure that if the IC representatives were left out of decisionmaking the policies would have remained the same, although the placement of so many FBI and CIA employees at social media companies was crucial to its success.

In short (and I know this is anything but short), Senger here is focusing too much on the arrogance and role of the IC while ignoring the fact that they were all in this together.

Since 2016 there was a coup attempt–Crossfire Hurricane, the steady diet of propaganda that Trump calls “Russia, Russia, Russia,” the #resistance, and the media campaign against Trump. COVID hysteria was simply an extension of a longstanding effort given a powerful boost by the fear that all biological threats create.

The IC does a lot of nefarious things, both for the good of the country and in service of bad ends. Perpetrating a coup using COVID is, I am afraid, not one of them. They were simply co-conspirators, not evil genius leaders working behind the scenes.