Memetic Judo, Biopolitics, and Exopolitics

If you reflexively think the opposite of what you’re told to think, you’re still being told what to think.

Pablo Dominguez

We’re over three years out from the societal salve et coagula initiated in the name of SARS-CoV-2, and it’s easy to forget the prologue to the mass psychosis that gripped the world in March of 2020. For years now, positions on medical tyranny have been politically coded: if you’re on the left, it was wise and wonderful, and if you’re on the right, it was a power grab justified by a sketchy psyop.

Before things really got rolling, positions on COVID-19 were the precise opposite.

Many were shaken awake over the last few years. Before their lives were turned upside-lockdown, they were normies, perfectly content to accept that the world was more or less as they were told it was by the established authorities. As such, during the quiet lead-up, they weren’t paying much attention to the events in Wuhan. The New York Times assured them that it was just the flu, and that anyone saying otherwise was an excitable, xenophobic conspiracy theorist.

As an excitable, xenophobic conspiracy theorist, I was of course keeping a wary eye on events in Wuhan. At that point we had no reason to be skeptical of the footage of people dropping in the street. An entire city being put under medical martial law by platoons of troops clad in biohazard suits, spraying down the streets with disinfectant, and welding citizens into their apartments, was something straight out of the opening scenes a zombie flick. That the lying press was united in its insistence that there was nothing to see here, go about your lives, citizens, certainly didn’t prove that there was in fact something to be potentially worried about. But it was a strong datapoint in favour of that hypothesis.

And so, as Wuhan simmered and the media obscured, 4chan flooded with memes celebrating its waifu of the month, Corona-Chan.

Personifying a potentially apocalyptic event with a cute anime girl might seem a bit macabre, but that’s 4chan for you. Gallows humour to the end, mixed with the bored ennui of a generation so demoralized that they pray for something, anything, no matter how horrific, to burn away the timbers of the longhouse so that they can escape the smothering embrace of the devouring mother.

As it turned out, COVID-19 was in most ways a nothingburger for anyone under 80 and/or 300 lbs. The young and healthy had nothing to fear from it. This was obvious by the time we had the initial estimates of the rates of contagion and infection fatality from the natural laboratory provided by the Diamond Princess, and so I concluded that there was probably nothing to worry about, as did many others who had been following the story.

And then the world lost its mind. Overnight we found ourselves living under mass house arrest in an planetary open-air prison.

It gave me whiplash. Without missing a beat the legacy media pirouetted from ‘it’s just the flu, bro’ to ‘it’s the black death’, and the normies all fell for it, showing no evidence of any awareness that just days before they had been assuring me that it was nothing to worry about.

I’ve since wondered if the months during which the media insisted that SARS-CoV-2 was harmless was a preparatory phase in the psyop. The propaganda networks had been struggling for years against the growing influence of the alt-media. Chaotic as the social networks are, the one thing that independent media will reliably speak with one voice on is opposition to whatever narrative is being pushed into the mainstream by the cathedral. Whether that opposition takes the form of counter-narratives, open source fact-checking, or simple mockery, the net result is to provide ideological friction, peeling away minds from the influence of network anchors, bought academics, and government officials, and thereby reducing support for whatever policy the ruling class is trying to popularize.

We’re all familiar with the standard tactics used by the establishment to reduce the effectiveness of the irregular partisans in the info-war: censorship, banning, shadow-banning, doxxing, debunking, and so on.

But why not use a judo move to make sure that things start off on a strong foot?

Spend a few months insisting that the worrying videos emerging amid unprecedented actions from the Chinese state are absolutely nothing to worry about. You know your opponents immediately distrust everything you say, to the degree that ‘believe the opposite’ is practically a maxim. So this will attract their attention likes flies to feces. The meme machine will start working overtime generating memes intended to propagate awareness of the phenomenon through the Internet’s collective subconscious.

Major personalities within the influence networks will start staking out positions, jostling for clout around a rough consensus of whatever is the opposite of what you’re saying. Many of them will go all-in, convinced that they’re raising the alarm over a genuine threat the institutions, out of incompetence or malice, are misrepresenting.

The abrupt course reversal will then catch the entire dissident media ecosystem off guard. All of their memetic momentum will be going in the direction you want it to go, and they’ll stumble forward, right into your trap. For a few weeks, both regime and dissident media will be pushing in the same conceptual direction, and the result will be that there is effectively no resistance to your message.

I don’t know for sure that this was a deliberate strategy, but I do know that the dissident right was a fractured shitshow for about a year or so after the lockdowns began. Numerous erstwhile opponents of officialdom had aligned themselves with what became the official narrative, numerous others had taken the opposite side, and instead of presenting a united front in opposition to the regime they squabbled amongst themselves. Internecine warfare raged on Twitter, on the front pages of Unz, in the comments section of every right wing blog, on 4chan, in the badlands of Telegram, with political dissidents divided into armed camps, one sneering that skepticism of the vaccine was schizo nonsense because how could a pandemic be political, and the other incredulously pointing out that the people orchestrating the medical tyranny were the same bad actors who had been eating away at Western civilization for generations.

So. Aliens.

Prophetic 2020 calendar meme, only off by a few years.

Ever since WWII pilots started reporting foo fighters in the skies over Germany, flying saucers have been considered, officially, the domain of conspiracy kooks, a mythology built from hallucinations, drug trips, psychotic breaks, wishful thinking, and mistaken identifications of Venus and weather balloons.

Up until the last couple of years, that is.

Now we have an intelligence officer testifying before Congress that crashed UFOs have been recovered with ‘nonhuman biologics’ aboard, while Air Force pilots affirm to the same congressional committee that they have in fact seen inexplicably advanced aerospace technology with their own eyes. Suddenly it seems that the conspiracy theorists are the ones who don’t believe the CIA is contact with little green men.

So far, the reaction has been muted.

Under the circumstances, the desultory shrug that has greeted the news that aliens might actually be real is understandable.

It’s been a rough few years.

NBC’s complaint about audience disinterest got shredded by respondents on Twitter, with this meme popping up multiple times:

A lot of people wonder why we aren’t getting the dirt on more relevant conspiracies.

The fashionable sentiment among Internet kynikoi is that it’s all just another psyop.

I tend to agree. The latest round of UAP discussion was kicked off by David Grusch, a “former” intelligence officer who gave an interview to an online news outlet with some pretty remarkable claims, such as, but not limited to, the Vatican turning over a crashed UFO recovered by Mussolini during WWII to the US government. Grusch doesn’t claim to have seen anything himself, nor does he provide any hard evidence for any of his claims. He only relates what he (says he) has been told by classified sources. In principle, if his claims are not true, he perjured himself before Congress, but that would hardly be the first time that’s happened in the last few years.

A spook saying “just trust me bro” to a panel of credulous congressmen and congresswomen doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

So, psyop.

But. But.

If it’s a psyop, the next question is: what is the purpose of the psyop?

The low-hanging fruit is something like, it’s a distraction. But a distraction from what? Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings? The failing economy? In any case if it’s a distraction it’s a lot of work for very little payoff. The media isn’t exactly shouting about it, and the public hasn’t exactly fixated on it. If it was an attempt to hijack the news cycle, it has been an abject failure.

Project Bluebeam is a perennial favourite in the schizosphere. This is the idea that an alien invasion will be faked with holograms and Orson Welles style media operations in order to justify the imposition of a One World Government in the name of repelling it. In addition to being the plot of The Watchmen, supposedly Werner von Braun made a deathbed confession to the effect that this was the plan. If this is all part of Project Bluebeam, then all of these UFO hearings, whistleblower leaks, and so forth are just setting the stage.

Nikita Pilyukshin

But I’m not really sure that the regime’s behaviour is consistent with this. Much as the media seems bemused by the lack of a strong public interest in the topic, the media itself doesn’t really seem like they know what to do with the story. They’re covering it, but it’s hardly being blared at top volume. They aren’t screaming “PANIC!” they way they did with Corona, or “RUSSIAN AGENT!” the way they did with Trump after his election, or “TERRORIST INSURRECTION!” the way they did after the American people objected to the theft of Trump’s second term. They aren’t doom-mongering with a single voice the way they do about the weather changing, or screaming about war crimes as they did during the multiple attempts to gin up enthusiasm for a Syrian invasion via false flag gas attacks.

To the contrary, the tone is rather subdued. Maybe that’s just them being subtle, playing coy as they let the narrative work its dark thaumaturgy on the public subconscious.

Or maybe that isn’t what’s going on here. Project Bluebeam has always seemed like a long shot to me. Quite apart from the difficulty in hoodwinking the entire planet with glitchy holographic projections, which just doesn’t seem technically feasible, the underlying narrative looks implausible. It relies on the sci-fi trope of humanity uniting as one when it realizes it is not alone in the universe, which is about the least realistic outcome I can imagine. Is that what happened in the Americas after the Europeans made contact? Quite the opposite: the various nations immediately started making alliances with the newly arrived European powers in order to gain an advantage over their local rivals. Exactly the same thing would happen if aliens really showed up ... and if the aliens were no more than industrial light and magic, I sincerely doubt the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and so forth would fall for it. They’d want something more substantial than a low-rez, transparent mothership flickering above one of their cities before they agreed to subordinate their national interest to the United Nations.

Another possibility is that this is all a game of rope-a-dope. The Congressional hearings were a bipartisan affair, with participation from Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gaetz is despised by the RINOs and Ocasio-Cortez is not popular with the Nancy Pelosi wing. As for Luna, these hearings were the first I’d heard of her, but apparently she’s an open 2020 ‘election denier’, an abortion-banning extremist, a peacenik opponent of US adventures in the Middle East and support for Ukraine, and on the economy an America-First autarkist. All three are precisely the kinds of politicians that the Swamp would love to discredit. Maybe Grusch was sent in purely to make them look ridiculous?

During their opening remarks, several members of the House Oversight Committee stated their desire to restore some degree of transparency and, therefore, trust in the US government, which they are quite aware is at an all time nadir. The same of course is true for their partners in the corporate media, who burned through their credibility over the last few years with their breathless panic-mongering, blatant partisanship, and shameless fabrication.

On the face of it, treating the subject of UFOs seriously would seem like an absolutely insane way to burnish Uncle Samantha’s credibility, like trying to lend gravitas to legal proceedings by having the court staff dress up in tutus.

But what if there’s something to all of it? If it isn’t all just BS?

Say they let the UAP story play out for several more months, with more crazy revelations backed by no particularly convincing evidence. The Internet continues to roll its giant compound eyeball, the alt-media influencers who deign to pay attention to the story at slow points in the news cycle continue to smugly proclaim that it’s all a faek & ghey distraction that they of course are too smart to fall for, while the legacy media remains carefully noncommittal. Then, the big reveal: convincing evidence of something otherwordly is finally produced.

Ah hah, they can say.

You see?

We were telling you the truth this whole time.

You can trust us after all!

(oh and by the way don’t listen to anons they have no idea what they’re talking about).

I don’t know for sure that this is the play. I don’t even know for sure that it even is a play, although it would be shocking if there wasn’t an agenda. Nothing happens accidentally at that level, and things are rarely as they seem.

But I’m seeing a whole lot of people on our side of things staking out positions that there is absolutely nothing real here, in just the same way that they staked out a position that there was something to be concerned about in Wuhan during the first few months of 2020, and I can’t help but wonder if this is another memetic judo move. It’s just a feeling I have. In the lead-up to Corona the play was to get the alt-media to commit to the position that COVID-19 was a deadly, potentially world-ending pathogen, by insisting that there was nothing to worry about in the face of what seemed to be clear evidence that there very much was something to worry about, and then abruptly reversing course such that there was no intellectual resistance when it came time to lock everything down, destroy the economy, and genetically modify the human species (which is the kind of sci-fi scenario that would have seemed quite insane just a few years ago). The strategy worked largely by leveraging distrust of the regime media. Now, the play could be similar, leveraging that same reflexive skepticism, but this time really leaning into it by making outrageous claims while providing no evidence whatsoever in order to bait dissidents into staking out a clear position that this is all obvious nonsense, and then, once they’ve firmly committed themselves, claw credibility from the opposition back to the regime by producing that evidence.

Like I said, this is just a feeling I’ve got. We certainly shouldn’t take anything at face value, and there are very good reasons for skepticism here. But I think ignoring it is a mistake. The regime lies, yes, obviously, but with rare exceptions those lies often have a core of truth to them. COVID was real, for example; they simply exaggerated the threat it posed, while obfuscating its origins (speaking of secret government research programs....)

On the one hand, if there’s any truth at all to this topic, it is by far the most important story of the century, and probably in human history. Indeed it will likely require our very understanding of human history to be entirely revised.

On the other hand, if the whole thing is a psyop, that in itself is fascinating: we’re now living in an official reality in which, fake as it is, aliens are real.

On the gripping hand, just because it’s a psyop doesn’t mean there’s no signal buried in the noise. It’s absolutely possible for a lie to be 99% true. The most effective lies invariably follow this pattern. Consider the possibility that the flying saucers are real, and that whatever the nature of the manipulation it’s something more subtle than a flat-out lie. If it’s a limited hangout, why now, and what’s the goal?

Whichever way it plays out, a reflexive position of ‘everything they say is a lie’ is dangerously simplistic, because it is predictable. If you simply think the opposite of what you’re told to think, you’re still being told what to think.

So what do you think?

Geeze. Almost 3000 words and I didn’t say everything I wanted to on this topic. Exopolitics fascinates me, and I’ve got a lot more ground I want to cover. I barely scratched the surface here, really. You should subscribe to make sure you don’t miss the next instalment in this series, or whatever else I decide to write about. My subject matter tends towards the eclectic. Some of my most popular essays are collected here.

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Josh Burns