What Magic Tells Us About Propaganda & The End Of The Coronadoom Panic

What Magic Tells Us About Propaganda & The End Of The Coronadoom Panic

The coronadoom panic came to its ignominious official end last week. A panic created, embraced, exacerbated, and perpetuated by elites, rulers and Experts. Especially Experts.

I was on long drive, listening to the radio—which was playing the same songs on the same station as when I was in high school—and Fox News came on, reporting the end of the “emergency”, and the only thing these erstwhile reporters could think to mention was….

…wait for it…

people will now have to pay for their tests! Not one word that the emergency went on far too long. Not one word that the panic was never necessary. Not one word that the official response was asinine from the get-go. Not one word about the mass idiocy, hersteria and outrageous overreaction, here, there, the world over.

Not one word on the murderous repellent Expert-led lockdowns and punishing deadly vaccine mandates.

Not one word on the massive accumulation of wealth and power by elites, silence on the incredible increase in government control. Nothing except earnest warnings that a handful of paranoid whimpering frightened fools who obsessively test will now have to pay for their tests themselves.

Pathetic.

This sad episode reminded me, not that I needed the nudge, of how easily people are led, of how susceptible most are to propaganda. And therefore how dangerous, and useful, propaganda is.

Old-time readers will recall I have an interest in performance magic, especially mentalism, the trick of convincing people you have mental powers like ESP. I once did a mentalism mini-act, live on the strip in Las Vegas, which qualifies me as a pro. (Max Brooks, author of World War Z, opened for me. True story.) Well, my act was only one trick, so maybe I’m not a pro, but I am an interested hobbyist (I scored an autographed copy of Mind, Myth & Magic when I chanced upon TA Waters in a Hollywood magic store).

Now whenever you see a magician perform a card trick, even if you can’t figure out how it was done, you know it’s a trick. You are certain—you have no doubt—that no occult forces are at work changing the King to a Queen. (That only happens at Expert-led hospitals.)

But when mentalism happens, you’re not so sure there was a trick. Many believe what they’re seeing could be, and even is, genuine. Maybe people really do have the power to read minds!

For a performer, what’s appealing about mentalism is the relative lack of apparatus, and the slighter requirements for setting up than with ordinary magic. You don’t need many, or even any, gimmicks or gaffed decks.

This is why cold reading is popular among mentalists. This is where the performer uses nothing but his voice, but still convinces his audience, usually just one person, he has “vibrational” powers. Cold-reading “psychics” can sit you down and tell you exactly what you’re thinking, and what will happen to you. They can. I mean it.

Here is where the coronadoom panic comes into the discussion, though it won’t be immediately obvious how.

Reading magic is easy to pull off. We even have a mnemonic: CHARMED. C is career, H is health, and you can figure the rest out yourself (I can’t give away all secrets!). All the performer has to do is chat with their victim, and be sure to hit each letter in the mnemonic. It will be obvious—you’d be surprised how obvious—that one or more of the letters trigger a response.

The performer then hits just that letter. The victim will assist, giving plenty of feedback, which the performer rewords and says right back.

You will be doubt me—well, everybody doubts until it happens to them—but everybody swears that they will not fall pray to the psychic’s propaganda. But almost all do. Probably you, too.

Afterwards, the victim will say something like, “He (the psychic) knew my boyfriend’s name was Paul! And that I had just got promoted at work, even though my rival hates me. He says I don’t have to worry about that illness.” Whatever. The victim never remembers it was she who told the psychic these details. She never remembers all the many failures, those other letters that didn’t hit. If she thinks of them at all, she’ll put these down to the psychic being conversational and friendly.

Words are crucial in ordinary magic, too. A performer will be doing his thing, maybe with a volunteer from the audience on stage. He’ll be moving about, joking, and then there will come a point at which he says something like “And now the trick is about to begin.”

Then he pulls off a miracle. That nobody can guess.

That’s the because when he says “Now the trick begins,” it’s over. Long over. He’s already pulled off what he had to. There is nothing left to see. But his words conditioned you. They were an order—start watching me now. You follow that order. You won’t see anything, because there’s nothing to see. Later when you’re recalling the trick, you’ll start your reminiscence when he told you to.

And if he can’t pull off the trick until the end, because it requires some manual manipulation, he’ll use other words to misdirect you. Sleight-of-hand and all that is important and necessary, yes. But the words are the more important (even silent performers use sign language). The propaganda.

Magicians pay other magicians to teach them, or they write books (I have many), discussing what words to use and when. They will have long debates about changing a single word at one place, and argue which is more deceiving.

You won’t hear the results of all this. That is, it won’t sound like a clinical discussion when the magician is performing. It will sound like he’s talking to you like an ordinary person. This is why magic is an art. Again, yes, the physical performance, like palming objects, is crucial, but that’s just mechanics that almost anybody can learn (with vast amounts of practice). Pulling off the propaganda is the real trick, the real magic. It’s like how some can write jokes but can’t tell them.

Now I got involved in all this many years ago to show people how not to get taken in by frauds and fakes. I even wrote a book, So, You Think You’re Psychic?, a skeptical framework for testing would-be psychics. (You can download the free PDF, or buy the softcover. This was written long before I figured out the true meaning of probability, but you can ignore those bits. If I ever have time, I’ll update the book.)

I knew then, and you know now, or should after three years of panic propaganda, how easy it is to fool people, to get them to think along the lines you direct.

I just watched a video by the woman (Linda Yaccarino) who will take over Twitter. She is advocating, as strongly as she can, wearing masks. The video was shot mid-panic. Yaccarino couldn’t know anything about masks, except what she was told by propagandists. Propaganda she lapped up, with gusto. She is no different than the psychic’s customer. Most people were not.

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14 Comments

  1. Hagfish Bagpipe

    ”I knew then, and you know now, or should after three years of panic propaganda, how easy it is to fool people, to get them to think along the lines you direct.”

    It was indeed an astonishing lesson. We watched friends and family, entire nations, millions of hypnotized people putting on masks, locking down, taking injections — doing whatever their hypnotists instructed them to do, like zombies without a will of their own. Your “Magician/Mentalist” analogy is highly plausible, maybe add a dash of the “madness of crowds” along with people’s susceptibility to sin and you get a powerful explanation, in whole or part, for what we just witnessed.

    Especially considering there probably wasn’t even a pandemic to begin with. The entire thing may be a hoax concocted of rebranded cold/flu, fake PCR tests, propaganda magic, and gullibility. Check out Kit Knightly’s recent piece at Off-Guardian: 40 Facts You NEED to Know: The REAL Story of “Covid”, which meshes nicely with Briggs’ Magic Mentalist Show. It was all theater, not real. Consider: the magician would not release an actual plague because he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t catch it himself. Much safer to conjure it up in susceptible minds.

    All of which should alert us to the existence of a cabal of magicians living among us whose craft it is to bamboozle, subvert, and destroy people for money and power. It’s as Briggs describes his Las Vegas magicians and mentalists honing their craft, but this cabal plays for higher stakes. This cabal long ago observed people’s weakness for deception and sin, and set out to master the tricks of the magician’s trade so as to make tricksters and deceivers, liars and murderers, the masters of the world. Or so they hope.

    Makes you wonder — if they could so easily conjure up a global pandemic like this — and you know this wasn’t their first magic show — what other historical events are also fake?

  2. JohnM

    Now whenever you see a magician perform a card trick, even if you can’t figure out how it was done, you know it’s a trick. You are certain—you have no doubt—that no occult forces are at work changing the King to a Queen. (That only happens at Expert-led hospitals.)

    Very subtle.

  3. Ann Cherry

    As Prof. Briggs says, all of the work was done before-hand, and “when he [the magician] “says “Now the trick begins,” it’s over. Long over. He’s already pulled off what he had to. There is nothing left to see.”

    Think of this: after the “accidental” lab leak, (or a bat virus from a nearby market that didn’t sell bats), a well-recognized and well-compensated magician-scientist produced a “model”, and told it to say that hundreds of millions might die if Covid was allowed to run its course and no extraordinary measures were taken.

    Based on this “model”, and exaggerated Covid death numbers coming out of Northern Italy (home of the Wuhan-based textile industry), an enormous hospital ship was towed into NY harbor, and Franklin Graham’s Samaritan organization set up a hospital ward in Central Park. Neither were used, as I recall. Not a New Yorker so the details are vague, but their Governor sent Covid patients to nursing homes instead, where they infected and killed people.

    Remember the nation-wide clamoring for ventilators, “re-purposing” of auto factories to build more, the shut-downs and lock-downs and school closures, some lasting almost two years. The forced masking, even and especially of children. The forced vexxing, even of pregnant women, if they wanted to keep their jobs.

    Remember how these magicians helped most of us forget everything we knew: that the 1918 flu pandemic deaths were mostly from pneumonia, before there were antibiotics; that masks don’t stop viruses; that population immunity will always develop in a year or two; that isolation and lockdowns kill, and that you never vaccinate during a pandemic.

    Remember the exaggerated Covid death numbers, when as many as 9 out of 10 died of other causes, but if they tested positive it was treated as a “Covid death.” In return, hospitals were compensated (by us taxpayers) $11K per Covid-positive admittance, and about $45K more it they were put on ventilators, a treatment that could, in itself, be deadly.

    Remember that generic therapeutics were outlawed, which along with an exaggerated death rate, paved the way for “emergency authorization” of the untested mRNA bioweapon, which causes our own bodies to create spike proteins, the deadly part of the Covid virus.

    In only three years, trillions were transferred from the have-nots to the haves; preparations are well underway for a surveillance state and digital currency; our energy infrastructures are being rapidly “de-commissioned” (less messy and ultimately more permanent than bombing), and our food supplies….are being greatly downsized. We are living on last year’s savings, and we are eating last year’s crops.

    Now, says the Magician, the trick begins….”Life as we’ve always known it: now you see it… now you don’t.”

  4. Milton Hathaway

    I’m dubbing the last few years “The Era of Gaslighting”. It’s a daily barrage now; any pretense at subtlety has vanished, enforced by cancel culture, or failing that, simply shouting down or drowning out any voices of sanity.

    My response has been mostly to just tune out and wait for better days, as my reservoir of outrage energy is depleted. Yes, I do feel guilty walking away from debates with the Kool-aid mustachioed, but that seems preferable to pounding sand in an intellectual desert, from a self-respect point of view.

    I’m certainly no genius, and somewhat lacking in common sense, but why did so many people around me get so incredibly stupid over the last several years? I’m an engineer, paid to be skeptical and require every sales pitch to be proven out – is that what saved me from the horrible fate that has afflicted so many? I’ve never had Covid – does it kill off brain cells?

    The young were famously immune from Covid, but maybe it migrated to their brains and silently did it’s damage there, turning them into unquestioning zombies? In the past, this would have been an interesting plot line for a horror movie.

  5. cdquarles

    Why? In part by “killing” God. These people have been at it for centuries. Latest technology just allowed very rapid spread, coupled with deliberate gaslighting for decades. God will not be mocked; and the current mania will end as it always does: badly.

    Oh, it wasn’t just that generic therapeutics were outlawed. Any competitor that wasn’t a “vaccine” was outlawed. Any clinician who did off label trials were threatened by deliberate, in my opinion. misuse of “evidence” based medicine.

  6. For subtle magic, you really have to hand it the world’s bankers. Their 5,000-year run of criminal accounting fraud is ongoing, and still nobody has worked out exactly how they get away with “creating” 97% of the world’s money supply (as “bank-credit”).

    One economics professor, Richard Werner, came close to identifying their magic trick in 2014, when he said, “The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks out of thin air.” [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.07.015]. Unfortunately he was unable (or unwilling) to describe the accounting reality behind his ‘fairy dust’ allegory.

    What Werner had missed is staring everyone in the face, on the first two lines of every bank loan account statement. Either (i) the left (Debits) column heading is incorrectly labelled “Withdrawals”, or (ii) the first entry in the “Transaction Description” column is incorrectly called a “Loan Drawdown”.

    Not one accountant I know has realized that either one of these ‘mental conditioning’ tactics alone – either the “word-position-error” @ (i) or the outright false statement @ (ii) – SEEMS to convert the actual “customer’s deposit” of a valuable negotiable instrument (a promissory note) into a mythical “bank withdrawal” from an EMPTY account, but [and “here is the magic”] without any “withdrawal” or “Drawdown” happening in reality.

    Their ‘secret’ is the tactical misuse of false words to create the “illusion of a withdrawal” where no withdrawal is even possible.

  7. All it proves is what we would expect from actual science, that the majority of people are just smart enough to stay alive and reproduce and no more. It make no sense that it be otherwise. The only puzzling thing is that psychopaths manage to coordinate their actions to rule, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense. Hence my dinosaurs are in charge hypothesis.
    The useful questions to ponder at this point are:
    * are they indeed actively working towards the 500 million managed / eugenicised humans as per Georgia Guidestones?
    * will they have yet another pandemic circus to cement and confirm control over the peoploids and, if so, when?
    * what other magical circus is waiting to be deployed to pacify the useless eaters? (I’m hoping for Project Blue Beam, unsurprisingly).

  8. Mercury

    Here in Australia the Therapeutic Goods Administration has quietly allowed Ivermectin back on the “safe” list. This after it was banned from use in the early days of the “pandemic”.

  9. Uncle Mike

    Playing mind games with captive audiences goes back in history to before the beginning, before Machiavelli, before the Caesars of Rome, before the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, before even Gobekli Tepe.

    Modern intellectual rationality is no prophylactic or antidote. The people will be fooled again and again. As a direct and certain result more wars, genocides, Holocausts, and Holodomors are coming — sooner rather than later. Human beings are chumps, and our manipulators are grasping, violent, and blood-thirsty.

    What’s a body to do when his or her neighbors have gone massively insane, again? Pray harder? Smack some sense into those within reach? Hunker in a bunker? I wish I had the answer, but I don’t.

    China flu, global warming, race war, tranny war, blame the Jews, whites, browns, blacks, yellows, pinks, Christians, Catholics (we’re now officially terrorists for going to mass), people who mow lawns, pet owners, babies, children, the Devil, God — no hobgoblin will be ignored. What’s that rustling in the tall grass? Better kill or be killed.

  10. Rudolph Harrier

    There’s a video of Penn and Teller being challenged to figure out a card trick from another magician. When the magician tells them that they can put their card back wherever they like in the deck, Penn gets visibly upset. This is because he knows that this only happens after the choice being made no longer matters. Therefore the trick already happened and he missed it.

  11. Briggs

    Rudolph,

    That’s exactly it.

  12. Forbes

    –>”I knew then, and you know now, or should after three years of panic propaganda, how easy it is to fool people, to get them to think along the lines you direct.”

    This is why the control of media, e.g., Twitter, FB, FOX, NYT, WaPo, etc., is so crucial–and why the control of the Official Narrative via “debates” over mis-, dis-, and mal-information are center stage in everyday life. C-19, election fraud, Ukraine, crime and crime rates, ESG, DIE, gender dysphoria–you name it–has an agenda and an Official Narrative associated. We’re being manipulated–fooled–every day.

  13. DAA

    One very important aspect: the film and TV industry. The films, documentaries, and series on and on about plagues and outbreaks, creating the impression that there is a real risk of such and such, but that the Science TM and the Institutions (UN) are all over it. The trick had already happened, all we witnessed was the ‘prestige’. It was as if illness and health were a mechanical problem, compass and T-ruler, like Euclides’ Elements. Science on TV seems so easy and linear.

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