John Michael Greer | Political Sorcery, Will, & Weaponized Magic

Did the free episode get the discussion of the psychology of the Cult of 'Rona and the High Priests of the Branch Co-vidians?
As a Plus subscriber, I would vote to provide that discussion made free as a public service for collective understanding.

cinger wrote:
Did the free episode get the discussion of the psychology of the Cult of 'Rona and the High Priests of the Branch Co-vidians?
As a Plus subscriber, I would vote to provide that discussion made free as a public service for collective understanding.

He nailed it. Covid crazies are reacting to the archetype of "The Plague", not what the facts dictate. Shockingly to me, this not only includes scientists and doctors, but they seem to have been the most susceptible to it. I think the "lackey class" social dynamic JMG brought up goes a long way to help explain this. Scientists and Doctors today are not trailblazing knowledge discovers and healers, but attaches of the corporate system, they know this and act accordingly--but the dissonance makes them especially vulnerable to archetype issues.

Interesting show. I think Greer spent far too long on the poli-sci undergrad thesis; the magic part of the election were far more interesting and I feel like that took back seat to his class structure conversation.

As someone that became addicted to 4chan during the 2016 election cycle, it seems like his take on the meme magic was soft boiled. Everyone knows about the Hillary falling incident, and the Pepe synchronicities, and it has been documented through multiple podcasts. It was interesting to hear the reasons why meme magic beat wiccan wokeness, but I didn't feel like Greer truly "gets" the 4chan culture. Or "got"; 4chan is dead and will never come back.

Greer made a throwaway comment about how the "alt right" movement on 4chan was a flash in the pan and fizzled after the election due to lack of real interest. This is not a good analysis. 4chan was intentionally dismantled as a platform for change. Or more accurately, it was reclaimed by 3 letter agencies and Mossad.

New users to 4chan have a hard time these days. The catalog flows fast and slide threads outnumber the real threads by a huge quantity. It takes a long time to develop the skills required to discern the different elements for what they are. At first you are annoyed that your witty posts don't get a (you). Then you start noticing that in certain threads, you NEVER get a (you). But then you notice the patterns of what posts get a (you) in those threads. You quickly learn that if you post in that pattern, you will not only get (you)s, but you will get them in a distinct pattern. These are bots. Hundreds and hundreds of bots, using machine learning to evolve in their posting patterns. You will start to notice that new threads in the catalog follow a pattern. These are bots. They post threads, post in their own threads, reply to themselves in their own threads. At this point the bot to human ratio is overwhelming. Not to mention the catalog is curated to your history, like a facebook timeline.

4chan was a different place during the 2016 election cycle, which in my opinion spans from the annexation of Crimea in 2014 through the actual election, encompassing Brexit as well. During that period, the bots were less numerous and less sophisticated. Yes you had bot threads but they were fewer and easily spotted. You could easily find legitimate threads on current events, with on the ground reports from Europe and every part of the USA. You could also find legitimate threads on personal interest subjects like MGTOW and NoFap. (4chan has a lot of teenage boys). When the meme magic threads started, they were REAL PEOPLE, with real emotional energy invested. Greer touched on the pepe meme magic, but didn't discuss the digits threads. Every time someone got "digits", the emotional energy of hundreds of people would get focused on that post. Subsequent digits would increase that energy in a single thread. As the post count grew the number of people focusing their energy would grow to thousands of people internationally. I like the breakdown of "flow state" by Greg in the post show segment. These digit threads would focus the energy of these people not out of some intentioned goal, but out of genuine interest. If your post got digits, it was a genuine emotional response shared by a community, not some contrived ritual to effect a specific contrived goal.

[MEDIA=imgur]waaaOJL

After the election, the bots were deployed in earnest. The flow of MAGA threads was "learned" and replicated. I have zero doubt that Q was a psyop as the vast majority of Q threads were bot posted using MAGA thread structures. Bots posted endless anti circumcision threads, blacked threads, cuck threads, tranny threads; all of the content that had been genuinely posted previously was absorbed and spit out of a bot net as generic slide threads. Bots prevented genuine threads from being made and responded to. The meme magic didn't die, it was killed, by bots.

I still spend too much time on 4chan, but the experience is different. I view it as television, "programming" as Greer put it. But unlike the banal sitcoms, the programming on 4chan is put there directly by the capstone cabal, and unlike television the intent is not to placate, but inflame. Watching the 4chan catalog is like a tarot spread to see how the cabal is operating. It is also interesting to see how the cabal is targeting you as an individual. Switching IPs gives you a completely new catalog of bot threads to absorb. You can see how your personal bot profile differs from the generic geography driven profile. And of course, every once in a while you stumble into a real thread made by real people, and you get to remember what it was like in 2016.

This episode was kind of annoying. I could tell he was on a landline and it was irritating. All he did was pretty much rehash 2016.

jh1517 wrote:
He nailed it. Covid crazies are reacting to the archetype of "The Plague", not what the facts dictate. Shockingly to me, this not only includes scientists and doctors, but they seem to have been the most susceptible to it. I think the "lackey class" social dynamic JMG brought up goes a long way to help explain this. Scientists and Doctors today are not trailblazing knowledge discovers and healers, but attaches of the corporate system, they know this and act accordingly--but the dissonance makes them especially vulnerable to archetype issues.

Just for the record, my brother-in-law DIED from covid19 in April 2020 in New Jersey, right outside New York. If it happens to you or your family, it no longer seems like a hoax or a psychological experiment or overkill (excuse the pun).

dylansdad wrote:
Just for the record, my brother-in-law DIED from covid19 in April 2020 in New Jersey, right outside New York. If it happens to you or your family, it no longer seems like a hoax or a psychological experiment or overkill (excuse the pun).

My grandfather died of pneumonia, on a ventilator and everything, choked to death on his own fluids. Remarkably, nobody thought to shut everything down and lock everybody in their houses and scream all hell was breaking loose. It was 2006 and I guess nobody cared about him and the other hundred thousand or so who die that way each year.

My next door neighbor was in AA. They shut the meetings down. he killed himself roughly a year ago. They couldn't get a cleaning crew because of the shutdowns so I had to deal with the fact of this man's unnecessary death, and the smell, for weeks.

But I won't object the record showing that it doesn't "seem" like a hoax or psychological experiment or overkill to dylan'sdad.

For my part on the record, I don't think it is so much a hoax, but it certainly was a mass psychological experiment and overkill. If you want to use your brother-in-laws death to shield yourself from that reality, I can't do anything about it.

Edit: Apologies to all viewing for the bad vibes I know are present in this post. But it does infuriate me when people weaponized their personal tragedy, especially for internet comments.

Well, I would like to suggest that the medical world authorities were scared as they've seldom been scared by a once per 100 year pandemic and its ability to effectively shut down our hospital ER system, which is almost did. Perhaps you only watch right wing GOP media, but the rest of the world showed us ER's filled to capacity and with entire hospital wings taken over by covid patients. The measures taken were to try to give our medical system time to deal with this inflow of patients.

Pneumonia is a known disease. And people over 55 are told to immunize against it. We have antibiotics that work effectively to shorten the duration of pneumonia for the average person, although the elderly are at severe risk. Hence, the immunization that conspiracy nuts probably think is some new world order plot to turn our elderly into progressives who support free medical care in the USA.

I am really sorry about this so-called friend or neighbor and AA. I live in the 5th largest metro area in the USA and AA was moved to zoom meetings. Of course, not everyone is plugged into the internet.

Did our society over react? Perhaps, but again you are looking in the rear view mirror at a once in 100 year event that people wanted to minimize. If they went too far, history will show this. But what I've found on the internet is that right wing GOP media addicts (Fox, QAnon, Alex Jones, AON, etc.) were told by talking heads like Sean Hannity that wearing a little mask to go to the supermarket was equivalent to the institution of a Marxist world wide Illuminati slave society! A damn little piece of cloth, and the right wing went hysterical like little girls seeing a spider. And commentators like Tucker Carlson, foaming at the mouth along with Donald Trump, turned a simple health precaution into a sign of the End Times and the new Mark of the Beast! Pathetic.

But we may have moved on from this period...or not. We will know in a few weeks. No one wore masks for the 3 day Memorial Weekend. So in a few weeks we will see if the virus is still actively amongst us and there is another upsurge in cases, or if the virus (due to the perhaps over reaction of the authorities) is now dying out. Want to place any bets?

Yes, it is always infuriating when other people do not agree to our assimilated propaganda. The GOP and its huge media empire spewed forth Donald Trump's idiocy about covid, including healing it with Lysol and shoving a flashlight up your butt. And I am sure right wing conspiracy websites went insane spewing forth assertions that covid was being used to bring in a Marxist world wide Illuminati slave empire, all beginning with a little piece of cloth you were asked to wear during a 1 in a 100 year pandemic. THE MASK BECAME THE NEW MARK OF THE BEAST to these hysterical people, all taking their lead from Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, in the world of sanity that the outside world enjoys, covid was seen as an unknowable risk, a once per 100 year pandemic. Did authorities react too strongly? Perhaps. But we have the luxury of hind site with which to evaluate this. I am sure know-nothing pundits on TV (with a political agenda to push) will agree that we were turned into zombie slaves because we had to wear a little mask at the supermarket.

I'd just like to remind you that the purpose of these measures that so infuriate you was to give our medical system a chance to cope. In Phoenix, there were no ER beds left due to the surge of covid patients. Reaching for straws, masks and staying home were pushed as a way to slow down the spread. Even a child could understand this. Alas! Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have never shown the intelligence of school children and ranted/raved about how staying home and wearing a mask was just the start of a Reptilian invasion that would turn us into mindless slaves. And conspiracy buffs just ate it all up.

I have relatives in Scotland. One of them said to me that if Americans had been around during WW2 in London,. they would have refused to turn out their lights during a Nazi air raid. "No government is going to tell me what to do!" BOOM! Bombs going off around you...FREEDOM!!

As for pneumonia, no one shut down the nation for pneumonia because it is a well known ongoing entity. We ask older Americans to get immunized. Those who aren't terrified by right wing media do so. We have antibiotics! We know how to treat pneumonia. But we had no knowledge how to treat covid, so we may have erred on the severe side. We are all alive to criticize this now. As I said, my brother-in-law isn't.

As for AA, most meetings went online with Zoom meetings. I am sorry your example somehow didn't know that or have access.

I confess this is my first time subscribing to a site where conspiracy people hang out. I did this because I so far think that Greg isn't a far right wing loon. He seems to provide a forum for people but not just become hysterical and mindless about taking basic precautions.

No one where I live wears masks now. The CDC has said they don't have to if immunized. Yet right wing fear mongers are encouraging people NOT to be immunized, as if they really want this virus to continue. Since everyone just celebrated Memorial Day, we will see if there is a big upsurge in cases by the end of June. If not, this means the virus is dying out due to the severe measures you so hated. If there is a big surge, it will mean that right wing media have convinced enough saps not to be immunized. I am sorry you are so hateful and angry.

Okay:

"Well, I would like to suggest that the medical world authorities were scared as they've seldom been scared by a once per 100 year pandemic and its ability to effectively shut down our hospital ER system, which is almost did. Perhaps you only watch right wing GOP media, but the rest of the world showed us ER's filled to capacity and with entire hospital wings taken over by covid patients. The measures taken were to try to give our medical system time to deal with this inflow of patients."

I don't watch right-wing GOP media. I worked for the Obama campaign, I voted for Hilary Clinton, and I worked at the UVa health system during this crisis. So let's just get that out of the way.

The media showed us "overflowing" hospitals in primarily in Italy, as that was the only country with a significant outbreak at the time the lockdowns were initiated here. They also had "overflowing" hospitals in the 2017-18 flu season, more skepticism and perspective should have been given. I supported the intial lockdown precisely to buy time and see what was happening, by the end of the first month, it was obvious there was no hospital crisis. Don't believe me? Well, let's look at some numbers I've been looking at for the past year. Here are Virginia's total hospitalizations and capacity

https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/key-measures/

As you can see, never even got close to using "surge" capacity, not even close to touching it. Pattern holds in other states where I've seen similar records kept. We never had more than 60 patients in our entire hospital system for Covid, and we serve a region with close to a million people. We all had to take furloughs and pay cuts due to the lack of patients. And no noticeable crunch even in the Winter surge. Hospitals were perfectly able to handle what was being thrown at them (I know, my father was hospitalized multiple times for other issues during this).

"Pneumonia is a known disease. And people over 55 are told to immunize against it. We have antibiotics that work effectively to shorten the duration of pneumonia for the average person, although the elderly are at severe risk. Hence, the immunization that conspiracy nuts probably think is some new world order plot to turn our elderly into progressives who support free medical care in the USA."

Pneumonia, I've heard of that! Coronaviruses?-- I'm medically illiterate and that's unfamiliar, so whatever TV doctor says is justified! Lock it down! ---This is the ignorance by which you were played. Recognize it. Dead is dead. Communicable diseases kill people, yet society goes on. [Also as an aside, why do you pay a premium membership to a Conspiracy podcast, if you are so glibly using that label? What, are you just here for the hollow earth theories?]. Was there justification in extra medical resources, some additional and direct caution--certainly, but fining people for being on the beach??? Ridiculous and totalitarian.

"Did our society over react? Perhaps, but again you are looking in the rear view mirror at a once in 100 year event that people wanted to minimize. If they went too far, history will show this. But what I've found on the internet is that right wing GOP media hounds think that wearing a little mask to go to the supermarket was equivalent to the institution of a Marxist world wide Illuminati slave society. A damn little piece of cloth, and the right wing went hysterical like little girls. And commentators like Tucker Carlson, foaming at the mouth along with Donald Trump, turned a simple health precaution into a sign of the End Times and the new Mark of the Beast! Pathetic."

Wearing a mask was pointless. Fauci knew this, all of us in the medical community knew this (check out Fauci's new emails if you buy that "The science changed!/nevermind, no it didn't I knew it all along and just wanted to preserve masks for healthcare workers! charade). Then they all got spooked and towed the party line like lemmings. Partly because "hey it is minor", but then "wear a mask and this will end!" obviously didn't work, but the charade ran on. Rates between places with high mask compliance and those without converged. It was a medically pointless, but visually salient means to keep people thinking there was a terrible pandemic when the hospitals (as already established) didn't get overflow.

People rightly saw through the masks as just a hoop of bullshit to see who would jump when they said to. You did, congratulations, you do what they say regardless of how silly or pointless it is (scarves and bandanas prevent sickness! I wonder who gets the Nobel prize for figuring that out! Cotton stops infectious diseases! World changing!). So the line is "do what you're told, don't ask questions", I'm glad people bucked that. Shows some self-respect. Again, I kind of wonder what you subscribe to a podcast like this for if that's your disposition to nominal authorities.

"But we may have moved on from this period...or not. We will know in a few weeks. No one wore masks for the 3 day Memorial Weekend. So in a few weeks we will see if the virus is still actively amongst us and there is another upsurge in cases, or if the virus (due to the perhaps over reaction of the authorities) is now dying out. Want to place any bets?"

NO ONE WORE MASKS for Memorial Day! Oh NO!... Nobody wore masks in many states for weeks if not months, it made no difference. Or I guess everyone in Texas and Iowa and Mississippi are dead. Nobody ever wore masks in Sweden and they stayed relatively wide open and ended up average for Europe across. I guess South America isn't masking hard enough.

This was overblown, and it was definitely a psychological experiment--this was not tried and true science, it was a wild exercise in propaganda and social manipulation the likes of which we have not seen outside of war time, that is undeniable.

You obviously think that recognizing those facts would make people consider you a conservative or a Trumper or something, and that is far more important than the truth.

dylansdad wrote:
. Since everyone just celebrated Memorial Day, we will see if there is a big upsurge in cases by the end of June. If not, this means the virus is dying out due to the severe measures you so hated.

So if we don't see a huge upsurge by the end of June, it will be because people like me were wrong and it all must have worked (even though different states all have different policies and levels of compliance, and there's no discernible pattern--hell, remember how Florida was going to kill us all with Spring Break?). If there's a surge, it will be because, even though it all worked, it was undermined by all the bad people like me (who I guess are all conservatives automatically in your book. My being a conservative Fox News watcher is news to me). You play any other games besides "heads I win, tails you lose"? Since you think this way it is obviously pointless to continue. Please do wear 3 masks, watch tv, and stay home for the rest of your life, it will be doing us all a favor. Wear goggles and wipe down your deliveries too, and get an anal covid test 3 or so times a week!

I have a lot of indignation, I admit. But the hate is on your side buddy. Looks like you were willing to give up every principle and freedom because you hate another political party, and you dress it up to yourself as being careful and considerate and "following the science".

Hey man, whatever let's you sleep at night...

dylansdad wrote:
Just for the record, my brother-in-law DIED from covid19 in April 2020 in New Jersey, right outside New York. If it happens to you or your family, it no longer seems like a hoax or a psychological experiment or overkill (excuse the pun).

I cannot stand this line of thinking. You think 9/11 was an inside job? Would you say that to my cousin's roommate's dead father in law??? How about an NYFD first responder that got killed??? Just because real people are killed during the psyop doesn't mean it wasn't a psyop.

People undoubtedly died while under treatment for COVID. It turns out putting someone on a vent and leaving them there for a month kills them a large percentage of the time. It is no different than the death toll from the first years of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS didn't kill all those people, Fauci did it with AZT. In this case we killed those people with ventilators.

I am still in the "hoax" camp. The positivity rate never exceeded the false positive rate. The vast majority of cases were asymptomatic. The flu magically disappeared. These factors point to one thing and one thing alone, that COVID does not exist, it is merely cycled up PCR tests generating false positives off flu and cold cases (or nothing at all).

Even if you believe COVID exists, despite the evidence to the contrary, how can you be afraid of such a benign virus? No, hospitals were never overflowing. It turns out hospitals are run like everything else in this just-in-time economy. They run lean. An un-filled bed is unprofitable, so over the last ten years hospital staff has been trimmed and beds discarded to achieve the leanest possible conditions. A 90% full ER is a correctly run ER.

The final argument is the excess deaths numbers. I highly dispute the numbers given, as they were a moving target and seemed to get a bump on the final production line. Assuming they didn't monkey with the numbers, I don't find 500k excess deaths at all abnormal in the face of a nationwide lockdown and a Kafkaesque at best 1984 at worst fear porn campaign . It is very interesting to see the effects of stress on health, and after 9/11 New Yorkers were dropping like flied purely because of the stress. People weren't going to the doctors, if you did they killed you with a ventilator, people missed their medications more frequently, people had a more sedentary lifestyle... Oh but the CDC insists that suicides went down in 2020. Good thing they are such a trusted source of information that I don't spit my soda out at that statistical nugget.

dingus wrote:
The final argument is the excess deaths numbers. I highly dispute the numbers given, as they were a moving target and seemed to get a bump on the final production line. Assuming they didn't monkey with the numbers, I don't find 500k excess deaths at all abnormal in the face of a nationwide lockdown and a Kafkaesque at best 1984 at worst fear porn campaign . It is very interesting to see the effects of stress on health, and after 9/11 New Yorkers were dropping like flied purely because of the stress. People weren't going to the doctors, if you did they killed you with a ventilator, people missed their medications more frequently, people had a more sedentary lifestyle... Oh but the CDC insists that suicides went down in 2020. Good thing they are such a trusted source of information that I don't spit my soda out at that statistical nugget.

Also, important to note, who gets to define "excess" and how? According to the CDC's own numbers, the age adjusted death rate in 2020 was exceeded by that we saw prior to 2003:

2020 age adjusted death rates
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm

Historical age-adjusted death rates
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends/index.htm

Basically we have a program where we have been warehousing our elderly, barely alive, in horrid nursing homes as a way to transfer wealth form the state to the private interest who run those hell-holes. Moderate bug comes through and puts many out of their misery, but their living-deaths converting to dead-deaths was used to push the agenda.

(Also as a side note, notice that 1918 wasn't that much higher than it was a decade previous. I read a lot of literature written around 1918, and I have yet to find anyone mentioning the pandemic. If it were so bad, you'd think there'd be references to it outside of newspapers and medical journals. Even reading some books written 30-40 years ago, they seem to downplay the 1918 pandemic relative to day, seems like the theory in the 1990's was that it was a "polydemic" brought on by the bad santiary and nutritional conditions as well as all the traveling from the War. It'd be interesting to see house that story changed to help establish a precedent for them to implement the control measures they did.)