Conspiracies: The basis for “how everything works”
Having spent much of my life in the media and government, I can say firsthand, news messaging is greased by agendas beyond everyone’s control
Recently I found the above image circulating on my social media feed. The first time I saw this, it took me a moment to realize that it could be read in completely opposite ways. It could be aimed at the ignoramus living in his mom’s basement who’s watched too many Dark Web videos and concluded that Bill Gates is putting microchips in vaccines. Or it could be, as I originally took it, targeting members of the public who twist scientific basics like acquired immunity into enough of a pretzel that they become rightwing anti-vax conspiracy theories because these people “don’t know how anything works” — or conveniently ignore Grade 4 science to reinforce a sociopolitical narrative.
I quickly realized that the image was not intended as a message of support for my worldview. And, putting any offense aside, I took it as sadly ironic. I’ve spent most of my life working between media and government jobs, so I have some insight into “how the world works,” to paraphrase the image above. And I have some breaking news — conspiracies are the background operating system upon which everything works.
Conspiracies that have been normalized go by innocuous names: influence peddling, office politics, public relations, institutional capture, favoritism. Plotting a surprise birthday party is a conspiracy of the lowest order. Plotting to surveil, infiltrate, discredit and disrupt left-wing political organizations through psychological warfare is among the highest. Somewhere in between are the daily conspiracies that govern everything from who gets hired in your office to what you see on the evening news.
Government conspiracies and media corruption have been covered in innumerable books, documentaries, and scholarly articles over the decades. Rather than summarize Manufacturing Consent, I’m going to share some personal anecdotes that have gone some length to forming how I perceive today’s Covid narratives.
I’ll start with an episode from my home city, Vancouver, and how The Vancouver Sun covered up for five years what came to be called the “leaky condo crisis.” During an intense condo construction boom in the 1990s, developers reached into their archives for the cheapest, quickest-to-build architectural blueprints. Those plans happened to be drawn up for buildings in Arizona, where it hardly ever rains. It wasn’t until hundreds of buildings had gone up and Vancouver’s infamous rainy winters had dumped a bazillion gallons of water over the towers that owners noticed the results of the inadequate construction.
Sun journalist Ben Parfitt began covering the crisis in 1993 and cited experts who believed that one quarter of the new condos in Vancouver were seriously water damaged. Once his series began running…
…angry owners phoned him “in droves” with their horror stories. However, Parfitt observed that the more important the story seemed to become, the less play Sun editors gave it. The story debuted on the front page and moved back in the paper as the week progressed, ending near the back of the B section…
After his first stories ran, he wrote, developers associated with two of the projects featured in his series met with then-editor-in-chief Ian Haysom (now managing editor at BCTV), publisher Don Babick (now Conrad Black’s president), and marketing director Ron Clarke. He alleges that some developers were threatening to pull their ads from the New Homes section, which was bringing in $4 million a year in advertising revenue. Parfitt concluded his piece with the claim that “...we have a market filled with rotting buildings and a mainstream press (today’s belated follow-rather-than-lead coverage aside) whose conspicuous silence on the issue helped make a terrible problem even worse.”
The study quoted above also describes newspaper magnate Conrad Black saying to CBC Radio that he hires editors who are “reasonably compatible” with his views. It also notes that none of Black’s newspapers were mandated to run his wife’s weekly rightwing columns, but one senior editor said that it would be “career suicide” not to.
The tale I just recalled would not be considered controversial or particularly stunning to any liberal-minded person then or now. A corporate media owner exercises his bias. His editors bury newsworthy material that hurts the newspaper’s advertisers, and elevate material that pleases the owner.
What else is new? There are countless documented examples of this kind of advertiser and owner-influenced media corruption. It’s just the way everything works.
And yet today you’d be considered a conspiracy theorist for pointing out that Pfizer sponsors every news program, morning show, and interview program under the sun, while Merck spends upward of US$10 billion dollars in advertising and promotion — and then you’d be smeared for tying that money to the same phenomenon mentioned in the five-year leaky condo blackout.
The reality every day is that reporting that hurts advertisers is buried, while news that pleases advertisers and shareholders is elevated. The phenomenon has certainly contributed to the narrative: “Vaccines and Merck-made drugs are the only way out of the pandemic, and you will be smeared if you discuss your adverse events or propose additional viable treatments.”
If you think that I am doing the bidding of the rightwing antivax movement, then you have adopted another curated narrative. I would do nothing to discourage anyone from receiving a vaccine. I believe Covid to be a dangerous disease for many people and that the vaccines provide a great benefit to those who are at high risk. I have disclosed elsewhere on this blog that I am fully vaccinated, but normally this kind of information shouldn’t be necessary to state upfront to just make my argument more credible — such are the times we live in, as anyone who breaks the narrative is considered “antivax.”
Being vaccinated hasn’t turned off my critical thinking skills. Many of us who see the jabs as one major tool against Covid have also wanted to see rational, scientific discussion about lockdown policies, vaccine harms, and ancillary treatments, along with a risk-benefit analysis for each segment of the population. What we have seen is some kind of conspiracy to smear or debunk any expert who deviates from the preferred narrative — even when arguing from a position of protecting public health.
This is what happened to the 49 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists who crafted the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed alternative approaches to Covid than simply initiating widespread lockdowns. Regardless of whether you agree with the declaration, reading its contents, you cannot conclude that these physicians are anything but deeply caring and conscientious.
The scant attention the Great Barrington Declaration received was entirely devoted to discrediting its authors and its message. One article from The Guardian made no attempt to distinguish the 49 official medical signatories from the thousands of public signatures of support, thereby implying that the declaration was being propagated by fake identities. Other articles “exposed” the declaration’s ties to rightwing institutes, despite the 49 authors declaring that their views ranged across the political spectrum, while other critics decried the “oxygen” the declaration gave to fringe groups like Q-Anon.
Forcing this kind of scientific discussion underground is an actual conspiracy, and it is this that gives “oxygen” to the fringe groups. If there was no conspiracy — the silent kind that emanates from a blend of corporate ownership, advertising dollars, and fear of offending the political class — then how did the media universally come to the decision to ignore or discredit every expert that raises legitimate, science-based alternatives to lockdowns and mandates, or suggest supplementary Covid treatments?
TOLERATED EVERYDAY CONSPIRACIES
The conspiracy that happens in that kind of media agreement is no different from a kind of conspiracy that most of the public is familiar with. It happens all the time in offices and other workplace settings. A position becomes available. There is an “open and transparent” hiring process in which every qualified person has an opportunity to apply and be considered in a fair and unbiased way. There is a hiring panel composed of managers and HR personnel. There is a set of questions that fairly represent the neutral job description.
In reality, everyone in the office knows that one person is favored for the position. Managers and HR personnel don’t need to meet and blatantly rig the process. Everyone knows who’s favored, and hints are dropped: “David told me that he applied, and I think he’s a really strong applicant,” says the manager to the HR advisor. Questions are tweaked so that they aim towards David’s experience while staying within the job description. A manager mentions to David at a private moment by the water cooler, “Make sure you’re familiar with Subsection II of the Portfolio Manual.”
David gets the job, and nobody is surprised. Everyone in the office knows that there was corruption in the process, but whatever, it’s just the way everything works. It would be career suicide for another applicant to lodge an appeal or to expose what everyone knows but doesn’t discuss. It’s such routine low-level conspiracies that train us for the larger ones — accept them or suffer social and career consequences for saying the quiet part out loud. Be branded a “difficult person” or get told to “accept reality.”
During my ten years working as federal government administrator, I witnessed those types of situations routinely. We all have stories about managers utilizing any loophole possible to circumvent due process. But I saw other examples where important information was withheld from the public to protect “economic interests.”
The clearest example came from an office I worked in at the federal health department. Our environmental health officers would respond to arriving cruise ships that had outbreaks of norovirus — a severe and unpleasant stomach flu that is highly infectious. Once norovirus gets onboard, a cruise ship becomes a floating petri dish. The ships approaching Vancouver were obligated to report outbreaks to Health Canada before docking. The health officers would board the ship to conduct inspections and begin decontamination protocols once the passengers had been evacuated.
There were about three or four outbreaks every summer, enough to make anyone working in our branch feel queasy about ever going on a cruise. Certain ships were notorious for repeated outbreaks amid unsanitary conditions. Yet we were under firm orders to never discuss the issue with the media. Any enquiries from journalists were to go to our communications office, who would refer the caller to the cruise line’s media affairs office. A communications officer once told some of us, very casually on the sidelines of a staff meeting, that the cruise lines requested the department’s cooperation in keeping silent about such “internal matters,” as word of such outbreaks would hurt them financially. Given how much the cruise industry contributes to the local economy, the government was more than happy to honor the request.
So there you have one relatively benign example of conspiracy between business and government to withhold health information from the public. Having seen how effortlessly and uncontroversially this was done, it would not be difficult for me to imagine the same or similar agencies — Health Canada or the FDA — withholding data that hurt much larger contributors to the economy, such as pharmaceutical companies.
INSIDE VIEWS OF MEDIA MESSAGING
A factor that creeps into media bias is not so conspiratorial, but relates to an unspoken knowledge of which subjects journalists know they should not touch, and how to frame stories “the right way.” I have two personal anecdotes on that front — one from 1991 and another from my current workplace.
During the first Gulf War, I had been working in an operational role in the radio division of the CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster. The organization would build talent from within, so it was not uncommon for a technician, librarian or clerical staff to sit in on production meetings or hang out in a control room to watch a show being put together or broadcast.
I was attending a story-pitch meeting for a program called Almanac, and a producer mentioned a call from Hill & Knowlton, a PR firm that wanted one of their clients interviewed on the show. I had recently read an article in Spy magazine about how Hill & Knowlton — working for the government of Kuwait — had arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to testify to Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers unplugging incubators in hospitals and throwing dying babies on the floor. Her story turned out to be a fabrication, but at the time, it was so disgustingly horrific that it was last straw that pushed Congress into authorizing the war. A public relations success!
So upon hearing the name Hill & Knowlton, I uttered something like, “Merchants of war.” The Almanac host looked aghast. “What!?” she said with her face contorted in disgust. I was just a lowly archive librarian at the time, attending the meeting as a guest, and I realized I had blurted something out of line. I tried to explain what I’d read in Spy, but I was nervous and couldn’t recall all the details. I mumbled something for about 15 seconds, and I’m sure I sounded like a deranged conspiracy nut.
I later worked in various low-level production roles, and it became obvious that even though the CBC had a well-earned reputation as a lefty media network, its journalists chose to remain willfully ignorant of topics that would scare away the government ministers, political operatives, or other sources — such as PR firms — that they relied on to secure interviews and succeed at their jobs.
You can see this “silent conspiracy” playing out in liberal media today. One example: People of all political stripes would say they are against government corruption, but there has been no outrage in liberal media over US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s well documented insider trading, nor was there any attempt to bring down Donald Trump for the ways he used the White House to steer government business into his hotels. It’s not hard to think of a few factors that converge to create this silence. Both the Democrats and Republicans profit from the same practices; reporters don’t want to lose access to the political elites that leak them career-enhancing information; and shareholders have too many lucrative political connections at risk to allow such a narrative to be formed.
Coordination of manufactured narratives is easy when 90% of US media is owned by six companies. In Canada, aside from the CBC, four conglomerates control most of our news consumption. World news in print media comes primarily from four wire services — Associated Press (AP), Bloomberg, Reuters, and Agence France Press (AFP).
Currently I work in an editorial role for a major English-language newspaper in Asia, where we use about 20 wire stories every day covering a number of topics. The narratives they push are narrow and are obviously written by high-income journalists who don’t relate to the issues affecting people who struggle for a living. Regarding Covid, there is consistent coverage from the few places that experience police conflict with protesters — Australia, Austria, Germany. But then on my dinner break, I look at my Twitter feed and see near-daily peaceful protests happening around the world. You’d think there’s a movement worth covering, but no. These matters only get attention when there’s a protester getting pepper sprayed or a cop fighting to put someone in cuffs.
The fixation on police conflict propels the narrative that all the mandate protesters are violent antivaxers. I understand that some of this is just normal pursuit of man bites dog stories. Nobody wants to read about the dog that bit the man — the people who survived their commute to work, the gun that went off and didn’t kill anybody, the protest that the authorities ignored, or the over-99% of unvaccinated people who weren’t hospitalized.
At the same time, any corporate journalist who tries to counter this instinctive bias by, for instance, interviewing the medical experts who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration, or talking with educated and well-informed protesters to hear their point of view, is quickly filtered out of the system — a contract isn’t renewed, or a job is reassigned. But most writers and copy editors just know how everything works in the news biz, and take the right action to protect their jobs.
A clear example of punishment for going against the narrative can be found in TV host Phil Donahue’s treatment by MSNBC during the Iraq War. Donahue was a longtime TV staple through the 1970s into the 2000s. He had one of the best-rated shows on MSNBC. And yet when he began inviting anti-war guests onto his show:
management of MSNBC, owned at the time by General Electric, a major defense contractor, required that “we have two conservative (guests) for every liberal. I was counted as two liberals.”
Donahue’s show was then canceled, despite the advertising revenue it attracted. He was just one of many journalists of the period who were blacklisted for opposing the war.
The same phenomena is happening today with Covid narratives. Liberals and leftists who oppose vaccine mandates and raise questions about vaccine harms are removed from the corporate media sphere, despite whatever science and expertise support their participation in the global conversation.
I am fortunate to ply my trade on a continent where the “vaccine wars” are not taking place. We rarely print these stories. But I know how it goes at papers back home. A journalist gets a call from a hospital with a tip-off about an unvaccinated person who was just put on a ventilator. Even if the reporter knows that this patient is not representative of all unvaccinated people, he knows it’s a “gripping story” and craves to please his editors. In turn, the story “gets people talking,” which is a great way to stay relevant in the business.
If such stories create fear and anger, all the better. You can even do what the Toronto Star did and run a huge feature on the fear and anger you helped create!
This is how the media has consciously and unconsciously curated bizarrely high overestimations of hospitalization rates, helping society conform to extreme measures such as Covid passports to deal with what is now (in Canada) about 6% of the adult population that remains unvaccinated.
Numbers from the US likely speak to a global trend of misperceptions. A poll from December 2020 found that 35% of the public believes that half or more of Covid infections result in hospitalization. Only 18% of the general population knows the correct figure: between 1% and 5%. Another poll from September 2021 said that “92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people.”
Gee, where do people get such ideas?
QUESTIONING WHY TWO THINGS CAN’T BE TRUE AT ONCE
Conspiracy theories develop when mainstream messaging doesn’t add up.
“Extremists from Afghanistan attacked the US. Therefore, we must invade Iraq.” Wait… What? “Oh, we forgot to tell you, Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Wait… What kind of weapons? “Just believe us. An attack is imminent!”
It was the left and some liberals who questioned and theorized about what might have led to the Iraq invasion.
Those who suspected a conspiracy between intelligence agencies and compliant media during the ramp-up to the Iraq war were right. Fabricated information about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” was fed by the CIA to the media — primarily through Judith Miller at the New York Times — which gave the reports credibility when they were presented to the UN and Congress. This has been well documented. And this type of conspiracy is now shrugged off as just how everything works.
There’s a lot about today’s Covid messaging that no longer passes the smell test, just as it didn’t during the Iraq war. Mainstream media call such awareness Covid denial, but to many of us, it’s logic-and-science denial.
Here are some pairings of two things we are told cannot be true at the same time:
The vaccines work well. Therefore, once vaccinated, it is safe to be around unvaccinated people.
Vaccinated people can spread the virus nearly as well as unvaccinated people. Therefore, there is virtually no public health benefit to keeping the two groups separated.
Mainstream scientists are coming to the conclusion that Covid will be with us forever, but will become less harmful over time. Therefore, it is wrong to blame the unvaccinated for the continued existence of the disease.
Natural immunity to Covid is substantially strong. Therefore, people who have had Covid should be granted an immunity passport.
We are in a health crisis that has become difficult for hospitals to manage. Therefore, we should not be firing healthcare workers.
Many countries have achieved high vaccination and low fatality rates without mandates or vax passports (Japan, Taiwan, the Scandinavian nations), often higher than countries using mandates. Therefore, high vaccination rates can be encouraged in ways that don’t involve mandates and vax passports.
I realize that many people would challenge me on these points. For instance, you could say we should fire healthcare workers who pose a health threat to patients. But then many of them have likely had Covid and have strong immunity. Why not let them work given their necessity in a crisis? And vaccinated healthcare workers can spread the virus nearly as easily as the unvaccinated. Or you can argue that recognizing natural immunity dangerously encourages people to risk infection and avoid vaccination. But that hasn’t happened in the countries that don’t have passports or mandates. The circular logic is designed to avoid saying the quiet part out loud — that none of this is about public health, it’s about vengeance toward people who much of society perceives to be of a lower social and intellectual class. (And perceives is the operative word.)
Every argument against one of the above points can be countered with something else on the list, and the end dizzying conclusion can only be that the madness of vax passports and segregating society just simply stinks.
This gives people valid reasons to suspect that people are conspiring to keep this madness going. Without a conspiracy to keep the “passport party” lumbering on, it would vanish quickly.
Some “conspiracy theories” devised to explain such discrepancies will be purely imaginary and unsupported by logic and facts. Others, like ones posed during both Gulf Wars, will turn out to be proven correct. Still others will straddle between valid enquiry and extreme speculation, raising legitimate questions even if overreaching. Dealing with the theories we find “too far out” is the price we pay for legitimate critical enquiry.
Hypothesizing and testing hypotheses are essential, and there is nothing to regret in testing a hypothesis that failed or was superseded by new data and new understandings.
THE RADIOACTIVE “I” WORD
Before I wrap up, I will dare to tread on Covidworld’s nuclear exclusion zone — the absurd media clusterfuck around ivermectin. As much as I’d prefer not to breach this territory, the episode provides a blatant example of the media conspiring to sell a fabricated, agreed-upon narrative to the public.
If you strictly follow the science on ivermectin, there are some basic truths that for some reason were deemed too dangerous for your consumption. This comes from the University of Oxford, and note that there are several facts in the following paragraph that support both views of the drug:
With known antiviral properties, ivermectin has been shown to reduce SARS-CoV-2 replication in laboratory studies. Small pilot studies show that early administration with ivermectin can reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19. Even though ivermectin is used routinely in some countries to treat COVID-19, there is little evidence from large-scale randomised controlled trials to demonstrate that it can speed up recovery from the illness or reduce hospital admission… it’s a well-known medicine with a good safety profile, and because of the early promising results in some studies it is already being widely used to treat COVID-19 in several countries. By including ivermectin in a large-scale trial like PRINCIPLE, we hope to generate robust evidence to determine how effective the treatment is against COVID-19…
The truth is not that there is a scientific consensus that ivermectin works. Neither is it true that ivermectin has been debunked. Following the science, as they say, the truth is that many (actually hundreds) of small-scale studies have pointed to promising (not definitive) results, and led Oxford to conduct a larger study, which hasn’t yet concluded.
Why has that been so difficult to report?
Having followed scientific discussion on ivermectin before it was heavily politicized, I had to wonder: Why did mainstream media in unison cheer for ivermectin to not work? Here we are in this deadly pandemic, a health crisis of immense proportion, and society is angry that something possibly helpful is being recommended in scientific papers.
So here are a couple of other factual pairings that made heads explode:
Ivermectin might work as a Covid therapy and save lives. Therefore, it deserves further study and consideration as one extra tool to combat the disease.
Ivermectin is a safe drug when prescribed in recommended doses by a physician. Therefore, there is no harm prescribing it to patients at a physician’s discretion, even if evidence gathered later fails to confirm that it works.
In the mainstream view, the warnings against ivermectin were justified by the “fact” that people were rushing to animal feed stores to buy the veterinary version of ivermectin and getting sick from it. Yet there were few reports of this actually happening. The most significant article on “horse paste overdoses” turned out to be based on bogus evidence.
The media were absolutely joyous to find one of the larger ivermectin studies to be full of holes, but when fake stories about people rushing to buy horse paste were debunked, there was barely an apology. The train had left the station. So when the unvaccinated podcaster Joe Rogan came down with Covid and said that he was taking ivermectin, among other treatments such as monoclonal antibodies, only one narrative emerged: that Rogan was taking “a debunked horse de-wormer.” Nobody reported that he got the prescription from his doctor, nor that Rogan recovered a few days later. It was likely the monoclonal antibodies and his good health that helped Rogan get better, but regardless, reporting anything positive about an unvaccinated person recovering from Covid is forbidden.
When nearly every major and minor commercial outlet featured virtually the same headline and opening paragraph within an hour of Rogan’s announcement, that suggested silent coordination within the media. Similar to the tale at the top of this essay demonstrating how advertisers and corporate owners create “no-go zones” or “must-go zones” for editors and journalists, nobody has to give an explicit directive. Everyone knows what would be “career suicide” and does what is expected. It’s just the way everything works.
Some media critics said that ivermectin’s hostile coverage occurred because the drug is off-patent and there was no profit to be made, while Merck pharmaceuticals — a company that spends billions in advertising on mainstream news outlets — was about ready to unveil a cash-cow treatment called molnupiravir. It’s a conspiracy! But is it? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly fits with the way the everything works.
ATTEMPTING TO MAKE SENSE IN ABSURD TIMES
Conspiracy speculation should be expected when absurdity replaces critical enquiry and nuance, and when people begin behaving in ways that are contrary to their nature. Liberals in particular are often manipulated into taking rightwing positions in periods of crisis or trauma. Anti-war liberals were tricked into supporting foreign invasions because Western populations were blinded by the trauma of 9/11. Pro free-speech liberals censored and smeared accomplished academics and writers for arcane reasons after 2016 because they could not handle the trauma of Trump’s election. And now liberals are embarking on a campaign of stigmatization and social punishments because they cannot handle the trauma of Covid, the lockdowns, and the fear and panic seen on the news every night.
Perhaps caving to this type of fear is human nature. But at some point, people have to say “enough.” This is the behavior of authoritarians, not liberals.
Most of us are waking up to the fact that the fridge smells bad and something needs to be thrown out. Something is poisoning our culture and needs to go immediately.
Not the vaccines. Not the unvaccinated. It’s the vax passports, the mandates, the anger, and the social divisions that must go.
While the vaccines are one good tool in the fight against Covid, they are not a holy water that everyone must be bathed in. Society is no longer treating vaccination as medical therapy, but as a symbolic ritual that signals compliance to a system that separates the “clean” from the “unclean.” It’s understandable why some people might not want to take a vaccine when it has become a signifier of belief and compliance. When you push someone into a corner and they fight back, you can’t say that’s why they were put in the corner.
When you look at the above lists of “two things that cannot be true at the same time,” it’s not much of a leap to think that some kind of system has indoctrinated us into shoving long-held values and truths down the memory hole, turning us into bullies looking for people to cast out of society.
And if you are still wondering, “But what do we do about the unvaccinated?” I’d just say, stop thinking about them. It’s a virus with over a 99% survival rate. It’s treatable and preventable. Get vaccinated if you feel that’s what you must do, but also get healthy, take care of yourself, and start thinking about the collateral damage of the pandemic.
This hyperfixation on the unvaccinated is looking more and more like mass hysteria, an infectious mental illness that is spreading around the world. And I don’t think I’d be too far off-base in saying that this is all the result of a conspiracy between the interests of the media, politicians, and corporations, all of whom are profiting from our anxiety as well as the pandemic.
Real conspiracies, big or small, require mass compliance to be pulled off… Ensuring that nobody tells Suzie about the surprise party you’re planning. Getting everyone in the office to look the other way when preferred candidates continually land jobs through “unbiased” selection processes. Persuading a nation that it is about to be attacked by a country halfway around the world that has no long-range weapons. Convincing the global public that a segment of society needs to be fenced off because they have evil powers that make our perfect vaccines stop working if they get too close.
Social destabilization might be the goal here. If that sounds like nutty conspiracy theory, I’ll grant you one valid response: “I don’t see who exactly is profiting or benefiting from all of this ‘control’ of the public. It’s not as though governments and hospitals enjoy firing workers. The vast military industrial complex has nothing to gain from this. The vax passports themselves aren’t linked to any other data in our personal lives.”
What if I told you that a global defense contractor has recently developed an app called a “digital ID wallet” that can be “issued by the government” to link “mandatory vaccination” with “government communication to citizens,” bank accounts, medical appointments, job applications, birth certificates, taxes, and overall “ID verification services.”
Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory, right? But this precisely describes the product being pitched by the global defense contractor Thales.
Will national governments shift our vax passports onto the “mandatory digital ID wallet”? Will they use it to cut off banking services or employment benefits to those who don’t comply with mandates? Why is a military contractor even involved with this kind of service in the first place? All we can do is speculate and theorize.
But it’s easy to see how smoothly such a transition would go. Once everyone is used to flashing a government-issued vax passport ten times a day — a concept everyone would have found dystopian and creepy a year ago — adopting this next step would be met with a shrug and a sigh, because that’s just how everything works nowadays.
If “conspiracy theorists” are the only ones mounting a defense against this kind of technological obedience, then count me as one of them.