Malice Through the Looking Glass

Anniversary Post - re-read this essay from a year ago. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”

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Malice Through the Looking Glass

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” The topsy turvy world of reversals and inversions.

It feels as though the menace has only just revealed itself, but the world has been turning upside down for a long while now. By menace, I suppose I mean a generalised malevolence of the multi-pronged attack upon western values. And by world, I mean a world of shared understanding or culture. Notice that I do not use the cloying word ‘planet.’ Those who revere the planet turn the world into a deity situated in some fantasy ‘outer space,’ which is claimed only to be there by chance.

Nothing is by chance.

In Lewis Carroll’s tales of Alice in Wonderland and in particular, Through the Looking Glass (1865), Alice and Humpty Dumpty argue about the meaning of a word.

“But glory doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”

Alice’s stories are fun because they take you to a strange world of absurdity and when you’re ready you can close the book and return to a world of logic and sense, or, at the very least, life’s hum drum everydayness. These days, it is the world itself that is utterly absurd. Now we dive into a surreal book or film in order to gain our footing, our equilibrium and balance.

Humpty Dumpty speech codes are now, along with everything else, inverted into lore. It is as though all we once knew has been turned upside down and inside out. Words mean what I want them to mean, and ones I don’t like will be purged. Where once, Humpty Dumpty was a laughable invention not to be taken too seriously, he can now compel you to use his speech codes. Will you say ‘they’ when you really mean he, or she, or ze or…well, what exactly?

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Humpty’s is the master.

The wheel turns. And we are upended, suspended.

This is not merely another point of view.

Once you notice the pattern of reversals, so many examples come rushing into focus. It would seem that everything now carries its opposite meaning from the one we all knew and shared until (to use a Douglas Murray-ism) yesterday.

Everything is now viewed through the looking glass. It’s the wrong way round.

In Toby Green and Thomas Fazi’s book The Covid Consensus (2023) a number of such reversals are made clear. The authors draw attention to Pope Francis’s apparent condemnation of abortion on one hand (this being his public face) and on the other, his enthusiastic embrace of injection technology which utilises products of aborted foetuses for its development.

Along with some other religious leaders, the current Pope now tolerates all manner of things associated with breaking the rules of Catholicism. Being ‘inclusive’ now matters more than catechism. In a reversal of the Genesis creation story, we now take what is ordered and spin it into chaos.

Francis has not seen fit to comment with any emphasis upon the recent egregious abuses by governments. Nor, in an astonishing reversal of priorities, does he seem bothered anymore about the ‘poor’ who were once his overriding concern. On the contrary, he has played his part very nicely supporting the new agenda with gusto. That he has sidestepped his main function seems not to occur to many of the clergy nor the laity, and if it did, the silence is palpable to their eternal shame.

As Green and Fazi passionately reveal in a recurring thread throughout their book: self-professed left wingers endorsed the biggest transfer of wealth from the poorest to the rich worldwide that we have ever known. They actively encouraged a process by which millions in the world starved, millions of children suffered, women suffered domestic abuse (and in the UK, they mention the example of fifty such women being killed as a result), the elderly were cruelly abused, inequalities increased exponentially, and new billionaires were created as millions lost their livelihoods, their lives, or starved.

You can blame the absence of detail in the legacy press if you want. However, the Great Barrington’s Professor Sunetra Gupta warned the world emphatically about this possibility and was summarily vilified. This happened so quickly and across the board by design as we now know from Anthony Fauci’s subsequently released emails. In the glare of the looking glass, the reflection sours. We would once have honoured this distinguished and highly qualified professional whose expertise might have been harnessed to save lives and alleviate suffering. Instead, she was smeared as some sort of irresponsible right-winger (whatever that is). This meant she felt obliged to declare her formerly private political stance on the world’s stage, and deal with a public fall out she was unprepared for. Yet even being left wing did not save her.

It was not that difficult to find out what was going on if you made the effort. Perhaps if more had done so, there would have been less pain, suffering and scope for the vilification of decent people who, believing there really was an emergency, wanted nothing more than to help. Perhaps if we had a free press, things would not have escalated in the way that they did.

Sadly, the press was bought and played its part like the tatty prostitute it is. It is widely known that Bill Gates and his foundations funded the press so that it remained on message. And one might presume that Gates would know a thing or two about getting the prostitute to do his bidding. What are the limits when you submit to being a purchased person? It would seem that there are none.

The solicitous Guardian newspaper stands out as the most hypocritical of all as it utterly failed in its stated aim to be a paper on the side of what it terms ‘social’ justice. Whatever this was, justice it was not. Progressive it was most definitely not.

It was shameful.

You can almost feel Fazi and Green spitting out their contempt for the Guardian as you read their account. In one section, they name Devi Sridhar as the Guardian op-ed writer who wrote over forty columns with no expertise in immunology, vaccines or infections diseases. And yet, figures such as Martin Kulldorf and Sunetra Gupta who were both eminently qualified to make a significant contribution to public health were, in their words, “repeatedly trolled for diverging from the mainstream view.” This “view” as they established in the book, was a constructed singular narrative from which no one was to deviate under pain of various sanctions.

(The ire over the Guardian’s malevolent ideological approach continues to draw criticism even as I write. Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan’s Substack, “Are opeds Going to Take Over the Scientific Process?” has just arrived in my inbox which shares Vinay Prasad’s video taking apart the inevitably flawed arguments in the Guardian’s latest op-ed).

Fazi and Green’s concluding questions reveal the looking glass world. Why did the scientific establishment respond to the crisis in this way, cohering around the opinions of scientists who often were not relevant experts, and dismissing those who often were? Part of their speculations include the possibility that the colonial backstory of western science and medicine was informing much about the unfolding situation. Nigerian journalist, Tope Fasua observed that scarce resources were poured into a vaccine factory “to produce what no one will readily accept.” And on the lockdowns, Fasua criticises “the way we were shut down” as speaking “to open racism and a desire by a few to profiteer from other people’s misfortunes as they positioned to sell vaccines to the world.”

In yet another about-turn, Fazi and Green refer to vegans who so easily slid away from their strict ethical codes to accept animal testing in respect of the vaccines. Yet even many omnivores disapprove of animal testing. One of the main objections, apart from the obvious, is that the results of such experimentation rarely chime with the human organism. As it happens, we have learned that animals injected with mRNA died. Yet the thing still got ‘emergency approval’ for human use with all of the unfolding consequences we continue to see.

And so the wheel keeps turning.

We know that in the new upside down, back to front world, it is the fact-checkers who ensure that facts are nowhere to be seen on social media. Let’s be clear, they are actually fact checkers in that they check which facts are circulating and then take them out of circulation.

Universities have been joining in with this game for decades. It is no longer the job of a university to seek truth, but to produce it to order. Their funding depends upon it. There can be no mathematical proofs any longer, merely statistics and modelling. Here then, we guarantee that no irritating truths shall ever escape the ivory tower to clutter up the world of funding and profit. To use a cliché, post-modernism has been the gift that keeps on giving in this respect. Think of all those juicy Humpty Dumpty words. Meaning what they choose them to mean, neither more nor less.

If you happen to be puzzled about that, consider the following redefinitions made over the past three years. Herd immunity. Vaccine. Pandemic. And then consider the flipping of the phrase safe and effective.

Do you see? A word means what I choose it to mean. Neither more, nor less!

The universities have helped to establish a ‘looking glass’ sense of competence. Many a commentator has puzzled over the apparently strange choice of Neil Ferguson (Imperial College, London) to provide modelling for the spread of the virus. This was because his previous attempts (Foot and Mouth being the most egregious) were so wide of the mark, so utterly exaggerated, it was laughable that he could be taken seriously. Yet it has not occurred to some of these writers to consider the very real probability that this was precisely the reason he was employed to do this work.

Ferguson’s conjuring to order further demonstrates the likely reason that he was caught breaking the very rules he was party to creating. He was simply not frightened of catching the virus because he knew there was no real danger.

Truth has long ceased to be the objective of university learning, and ethics have been transformed into goodly appearances, performances and virtue signalling.

How about this for an inversion. Not that long ago the universities were lamenting the British exit from the European Union, fretting over funding (as usual) and crying about the supposed ‘far-right’ desire for national borders.

“No Borders!” was the cry!

But that was then, and this is now. And oh my, borders are back with a vengeance. And there is not even a whiff of irony. Being nation-centred also returned during the Covidian phase. Australia and New Zealand’s border closures were posited as progressive in a pirouette worthy of the Royal Ballet.

However, borders are making a much bigger come-back than even the Covidian phase could muster. The rapidly emerging plans for 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighbourhoods will form a plethora of borders around everyone’s worlds like never before. Your neighbourhood scheme might require you to pay fines for your visits to family who live across one (or more) of these shiny new borders. These Berlin walls! Ah, but not some international border where a passport is required, merely another part of your own district upon which a computer modeller will arbitrarily decide. (Or worse, that other progressive shiny new thing ‘AI’). You will inhabit a ghetto. The modeller will have no understanding of your environment nor your cultural norms. He will just have an application, an ‘app’ that will determine the truth of your dwelling in the new world order. And guess what. Like the Little Britain sketch:

Computer says ‘no.’

The excuse for this (and reason would not be the right word; reason has nothing to do with it) is that other prong in the menace, the climate religion. Only one narrative is allowed which suggests not that the science is settled, but that the scientific method has been dispensed with. If you forbid other voices and hand over all decisions to political prostitutes, you can be sure that it will be the pimps whose interests are primarily served. Not yours.

One thing is for sure, the idea that politicians were supposed to serve you has long been inverted. The wheel has flipped, and they rule over you. And it is they who will ‘vote’ you out of office.

The looking glass world is also revealed in the act of prioritizing computer modelling over real-world experience. They may bleat about ‘lived experience,’ but you must not build your community around the idea. Apps on computers know what’s best. Just look who programmed the apps!

Perhaps the worst example of a reversal by far is that of the medics and scientists. It beggars belief that those who have learned the scientific method and imbued it to heart, should countenance the shredding of this enlightenment principle for the furtherance of a certain kind of reputation, a salary, and social standing. These are the people who will scoff at your health supplements, alternative medicines or your religious beliefs treating them as mere superstitious nonsense. And there they are with their remdesivir (apparently nicknamed run death is here) their silly splashguards (all hail!) their ventilators, their midazolam, their mRNA poisons, their refusal of re-purposed drugs and wilfully blind attitudes.

First do no harm is naturally reversed through the looking glass.

Obviously, they are following orders. We have seen this particular reversal before. In National Socialist Germany, the whole project would have been impossible without the collusion of medical doctors and nurses. And so it is today. The surgical splashguard devotion reveals itself as a symbol of adherence to the Covidian cult. It is as visible a sign of compliance as a swastika armband was back in the day.

Do these people not realise that they, too, will own nothing, have no privacy and be ‘happy’ about it? Schwab’s sickening plans, openly available like Mein Kampf before them, are laid out with gruesome, transparent detail. It’s no good claiming ‘conspiracy theories,’ as none of it is hidden. None of it. You cannot say you did not know or that nobody told you. It is all there. The danger is that like Alice, we cannot argue when the meanings of words keep shifting like the sands.

Now we see, with astonishing clarity, how some Germans adjusted themselves to evil. The question is not how could they have fallen for it. Rather it is: why did we not teach people how to avoid any repetition of the menace? Because instead we seem to have taught them precisely how to do it.

Get them behind a good cause!

And there are plenty of causes to choose from within the multi-pronged menace. If the Covidian cult is not quite your thing, then you can get all Malthusian down with the climate kidz, or if that does not float your boat, how about the question of sex and gender? If trans does not do it for you, there is always the skin colour game and embodied guilt to ponder. If all else fails, you can decline to march against a war these days, in yet another curious and maddening reversal.

This world is not this world. Things look the same, people go about their business, we shop, we eat we talk. Yet for all that, although the world seems to be the same, it has completely changed.

And, in the worst looking glass reversal of all, everything we have built up over centuries of progress, our learning, spiritual development, science, knowledge, our precious institutions, treaties and international agreements, all of it has now gone.

Changed forever. Through the looking glass.

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