Scares and Counter-Scares

James Delingpole:

Unless you live somewhere enlightened like Sweden, you’ll have had personal experience of this authoritarian lunacy – compulsory masks, extended quarantines, and so on. To anyone familiar with the nature of the pandemic it seems as if the entire global political and administrative class has lost its head.

But the question is: why?

Why are politicians and civil servants overreacting in this way? And why are so many people actually applauding as more and more of their freedoms are curtailed and their economies are destroyed in the name of health and safety?

My view is that the climate change scare has a lot to do with it. For nearly three decades — it started with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit — the West, especially, has been relentlessly propagandised into believing that the end of the world is imminent and that urgent, expensive and disruptive action must be taken to prevent it.

The Coronavirus scare has only been under way for about 8 months, while the climate change scare has been up and running for about 30 years. But the War on Tobacco has been going for at least 70 years, if not a good deal longer, and has an even greater claim to being the foundational scare underlying all the others.

All of them entail relentless propaganda directed against a largely invisible threat – the common cold virus, carbon dioxide, or tobacco smoke . All of them entail ever-mounting authoritarian lunacy of one kind or other. In the UK, it arguably began with…

the Children’s Act of 1908. The act prohibited the sale of tobacco products to youths less than sixteen years of age…

And there’s a lot of money to be made from these scare campaigns. In the case of tobacco, via the Master Settlement Agreement:

The states settled their Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry for recovery of their tobacco-related health-care costs.[1]:25 In exchange, the companies agreed to curtail or cease certain tobacco marketing practices, as well as to pay, in perpetuity, various annual payments to the states to compensate them for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. The money also funds a new anti-smoking advocacy group, called the Truth Initiative, that is responsible for such campaigns as Truth and maintains a public archive of documents resulting from the cases. (my added emphasis)

The playbook is the same. First establish and promote the existence of an invisible health threat of one kind or other. Then monetise the threat by imposing taxes on those deemed responsible (fossil fuel industry, tobacco industry). Finally, ensure that the threat never goes away:

Advisor To British Government Warns Coronavirus “Might Be With Us Forever”

Each new scare adds a new burden of taxation on the population. Each new scare also adds new restrictions on people’s behaviour. And each new scare acts to push the economy into recession, and even depression. In the case of the Coronavirus,

Congressional leaders ,,, are in the early stages of drafting a fifth mammoth aid bill to stave off a total collapse of the U.S. economy while infusing cash in health efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic.

With the Coronavirus scare, the economic impact has been intensified because it has been added on top of pre-existing scares (the global warming scare and the tobacco scare, and most likely several other scares as well), all of which push the economy towards recession.

Where does it end? With scare-mongering unchecked, it can only end in economic collapse, now visible in the empty streets of New York City:

Once the economy crashes, the flow of money into the parasitic scare rackets dries up, and the scare-mongers go broke as well. This includes the mainstream media, who have been among the principal scare-mongers. It must also include the scare-mongering Public Health industry, and the scare-mongering WHO. It will probably include the supine tobacco companies that signed up to the Master Settlement Agreement.

But in any economy there is always a demand for the products on sale in it: food, fuel, shelter. But there isn’t any corresponding demand for scares, which always need to be manufactured by scare-mongers. So the post-crash world will likely be free of scares. It will anyway be scary enough in itself, with mass unemployment and poverty. With nobody actively pushing them, the Coronavirus scare and the Global Warming scare and the Tobacco scare will all fade away. A new optimism will grow up in their place. After the worst of it, things will only get better.

Of course, in time the cycle will repeat. It always does. What will be the next big scare? My own guess is that the Global Warming scare will be replaced by the Ice Age counter-scare, particularly since an economic crash will see a large reduction in the human CO2 emissions that are driving the current Global Warming scare. But with luck it’ll be a few decades before the climate alarmists to flip from warming to cooling alarmism. Although it’s already started:

To The Horror Of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here

We may also expect that the current Obesity scare will be replaced by an emaciation or anorexia counter-scare. And, who knows, the current Tobacco scare will be replaced by a counter-scare as all the benefits of tobacco begin to be recognised in a tobacco-free world (not least of which is the protective effect of tobacco against Coronavirus).