Is something ‘big’ coming? It feels as if it might possibly be so. There are serious problems brewing in western societies and the élites are becoming distinctly antsy. We can observe this in the way that the Establishment both are trying to preserve narrative in respect to the virus (‘all must be vaccinated’), whilst – simultaneously – acting to change it, by blaming any narrative deficiency on the Delta variant. Sir Andrew Pollard, a professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, says flatly that achieving herd immunity is “not a possibility” – now that the Delta variant is circulating. Effectively he is saying that the vaccine cannot do what was promised: i.e. bring about herd immunity; yet the professor continues to urge everyone to be vaccinated, anyway. And, too, a senior SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) adviser to the UK government, states baldly that Covid lockdowns can no longer be justified.

In short, their narrative is pointing in every which way. CDC Director Walensky stated last week that the vaccine does not prevent Covid infection, nor does it stop the vaccinated person from transmitting the Covid infection, including the Delta variant; the data shows an equally distributed infection rate, regardless of vaccination status, which is admitted by Director Walensky. As such, it is an admission that undercuts the entire argument for compulsory vaccines. According to the Director, the only benefit from the vaccine now is presumably that it might reduce the severity of symptoms.

If a vaccinated and non-vaccinated person have the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus – with or without symptoms – then what difference does a vaccination passport or vaccination ID make? According to the CDC, both the vaxxed and non-vaxxed person walking into a restaurant, store, group, venue or workplace present the exact same risk to other people there, so how does the presentation of proof of vaccine make the difference?

Infections (again narratively attributed to Delta variant) are spiking: Israel, is a case in point. It is the most highly vaccinated major society (and, according to leading Israeli commentator, Nadav Eyal, supposedly received “higher quality” Pfizer vaccines than the UK), and yet is experiencing a dramatic rise in new cases — severe cases jumping by 70% within just one week. The number of serious cases has increased about 10 times since the beginning of July: 90% of serious cases are people over 50; but also 95% of people over 50 are vaccinated.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, warns that cases may quadruple within three weeks, and that authorities are preparing for new lockdowns (even though lockdowns have proven to be ineffective against stopping the virus). Most Israelis have taken the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.

Again blatant contradictions in the established narrative are striking: Are lockdowns justified, or are they not? Antony Fauci has said that the recent surge in infections is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”; and that 99% of deaths were amongst the unvaccinated. But that’s just a lie. The CDC’s own data indicate that it is 15% of fatalities that had not been vaccinated.

Not surprisingly, the public are becoming deeply distrustful of claims on ‘science’.

What is going on? Well, we are no scientist. However, it was in the spring of 2021, that word began to trickle out that the messenger RNA vaccines had a serious problem with ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement). Once the initial protection from vaccines wore off (a process which took a few months), people who had been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid, than people who had not.

In effect, if this is right, the US and European governments have a self-inflicted disaster on their hands. So, the narrative unsurprisingly took another twist: It was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the population (for ‘herd immunity’). No, now everyone, including those with natural immunity, without exception, had to be vaccinated. If everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it is easier to claim that what is happening is a nasty new variant, rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody would be able to point an unvaccinated control group that is proving to be noticeably less vulnerable.

Some Covid vaccines introduce mRNA (messenger RNA) into muscle cells. These (erstwhile, healthy) cells are thus directed through the action of this synthetic DNA to manufacture synthetic spike proteins that constitute the virus’ main weapon of attack. This is a form of gene therapy. Should those cells create an immune response against the protein (which they themselves helped create), it would in theory, prevent the virus from infecting the body. The reality seems to be, however, that problems with the cardiovascular system, bleeding and clotting, are all associated with the Covid spike protein, which instead of remaining in the muscle tissue is circulating throughout the cardio-vascular system.

Some scientists say there is clear-cut evidence that the vaccines make the cells in our arm muscles manufacture spike proteins, which then get into the blood circulation, and that this spike protein, on its own, is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system. Other scientists disagree.

The core problem, one researcher has observed, are microscopic clots in his patients’ tiniest capillaries. He said: “blood clots are occurring at a capillary level. This has never before been seen. This is not a rare disease. This is an absolutely new phenomenon”. Most importantly, Dr Hoffe emphasized these micro-clots are too small to show up on CT scans, MRI, and other conventional tests, and can only be detected using the D-dimer blood test: “And so, we understand in the end, that the reason why the lungs fail, is not because the virus is there. It is because micro blood clots are there…”.

Complicated stuff! The point here is that ‘breakthrough infections’ are spiking with increasing frequency – and likely, the higher the percentage of the population in that region that is vaccinated with mRNA, the worse they will be. Variants, of course, will be blamed. And the mainstream media will try to say the variants are all the fault of the unvaccinated, even though matters cannot be so easily reduced to a Manichaean pro, or anti, vaxx meme.

Why then, are the élites so ‘sticky’ in staying with their explicitly contradictory narrative? Clearly, they fear a popular backlash if it turns out that some vaccines are health damaging. The deeper reason however, is that the élite class in the US and Europe is locked into a deadly, domestic exchange of smart narrative ‘missiles’. Rational argument or strategy is ‘out’. Anyone who pops his head out from the ‘narrative trench’ will be zapped. Boycotting, shaming and de-platforming work, and are today’s ‘go-to’ tools.

What is different today is that this exclusionary ideology is being turned-in upon itself. Turned-in, within western societies, and not just outwards, towards the West’s foreign adversaries. Now, it is key segments of domestic society (and not just foreign leaders) that are being morally shamed and exiled from full participation in their societies – and threatened with sanctions – which if implemented – could destroy their livelihood.

Primarily, it is the ‘unvaxxed’ who are deemed morally inadequate, but the scope of the new moral ideology extends more widely, and includes those who fail to embrace the green agenda and LBGTQ rights – uncritically. Establishment media insist these politically self-serving narratives on vaccination, the climate ‘emergency’ and LBGTQ rights, represent the new ‘dividing line’, defining majority over minority.

Why is sustaining ‘the dividing line’ more important than getting the policy approach to this virus straight? Most of the élite know that Covid is not the threat that their propaganda implies; but the narrative gives them an opportunity to apply power through “moral judgment”, and so they lie – and they continue to lie about the data, until they think the lie will be accepted as reality.

The ‘underside’ to this noble lie approach is not just about protecting narrative — rather it affords the ‘majority’ the chance to feel pious and superior to those they are determined to harm.

A lingering epidemic, combined with deep job losses, a prolonged recession, and an unprecedented debt burden, will inevitably create social tensions that likely will turn into a political backlash — a long hot, angry summer. The implosion of trust in leadership, and fear of social upheaval however can implant a more profound pathology. It can produce the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called ‘anomie’; a feeling of being disconnected from society; a conviction that the world around one is illegitimate and corrupt; that you are invisible: a ‘number’; a helpless object of hostile repression, imposed by ‘the system’ — a feeling that nobody is to be trusted.

Yet this is not an end to it. The Establishment, with the whiff of desperation hanging about it, has reacted to its vaccine plight through shifting its thrust to a different flank of the cultural-warfare front: Moral ideology is being notched higher. Code Red of the climate ‘emergency’ has been launched, promising truly fearful consequences should new energy use restrictions and ‘lockdowns’ be not accepted by the public. The Washington Post made the subtext clear: Nationalism and Trumpist populism cannot be tolerated in the confrontation with a global climate emergency. The message is replete with tones of moral superiority, and piety.

These then, are the ‘street’ flash points; but what about the élite flash points? What if they become yet more desperate as their Re-set plans tank; their economies sink; their supply-lines are disrupted; shortages spread; and inflation soars? Will they ‘Go Big’, and trigger a new Lehman Brothers moment?

Is this the time for them to pivot away from the existing commercial banking system to a fully Central Bank-ing system centred on Central Bank issued digital currencies – and with Pay-Apps fulfilling most of the functions of the former commercial banks? Is this the way to secure the oligarchs? It is much easier to foreclose on possible bankruptcies and financial crises when the CB controls a digital currency: It determines if the depositor may draw on his or her wallet, or not; it can block, or even deduct, from it; and can allow or disallow expenditure from it, with a digital flip of a switch.

Will that work, or might it cause an intolerable backlash? Is this then, the moment for a diversion? Is Iran approaching nuclear threshold status (it may already have it)? Is Russia threatening Ukraine; is China readying to invade Taiwan? There is a smorgasbord of diversionary possibilities already prepared in the narrative kitchen that can be easily run up, in case of diversionary need.

Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat – a saying from around 450 BC goes: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy … they first make mad’. The words somehow encapsulate the way in which the early Greeks, from Homer to the great tragedians, thought about the relationship between ‘the gods’ (here the invisible psychic forces that shape us), and the wider human sphere.

It does too, express a certain truth, in so far as it suggests that powerful men often become responsible for their own downfall – in so far that they embrace a certain ‘madness’; that of being blind to the obvious. (Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece articulates precisely how a powerful man can bring ‘Heaven and Hell’ crashing-down upon his own head).

The point here is to suggest that the sin of hubris – being so deeply embedded as it is in the whole secular humanist enterprise, and exemplified in the EU – has resulted in many of Europe’s influential cultural and political leaders going ‘mad’ in the sense of being blind to the obvious consequences of what they are doing.

Firstly, they have driven many Europeans close to being demented – by trying to piggy-back on the Covid lockdown ‘war’ for the purpose of imposing an ethos of war-time submission to a centralised ‘war’ command. As a strategy, it might have been somewhat compelling – save for the utter incompetence by which the EU ‘command’ managed the vaccine roll-out campaign – and for the capriciousness in which lockdowns were imposed, lifted and then arbitrarily re-imposed.

That this was all part and parcel to a covert ‘pilot-project’ for a wider social and economic engineering (a re-set) of the public sphere, was given away, firstly, by the EU command ‘fetishizing’ so evidently, its ‘Green’ and LGBTQI ‘revolutions’.

And, secondly, when Christine Lagarde this week put the climate “emergency” at the very centre of ECB policy. Henceforth, ECB bond purchases shall be directed to qualifying assets only: i.e. to Green bonds that conform to EU ESG objectives. Corporate Bond QE has proved a hugely effective central banking control mechanism, by limiting access to capital for perceived ‘bad actors’.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes that even now, the EU ‘command’ doesn’t seem to be able to get its act together:

“Europe has again misjudged the contours, time-lags and politics of the pandemic. Large swathes of the Continent will be in an incontrovertible fourth wave by the end of this month, before they are sufficiently vaccinated to ignore the medical consequences. This will be hard to explain. Covid cases in Catalonia are currently running above UK levels on a per capita basis, and the R reproduction rate is over 2.0. Portugal is tracking the UK’s trajectory with only a slight delay, while France’s health minister Olivier Veran says his country may be overwhelmed by late July.

“Yet Europe’s internal borders remain wide open. The imperative of saving this year’s tourist season has paralysed political leaders.

“We are witnessing a fresh display of the EU’s dysfunctional pathologies. Europe has had the laboratory of the ultra-contagious Delta variant before its eyes in England for weeks; but the EU’s collective system has failed to heed the lesson. The mistake repeats what happened earlier this year when politicians played down the self-evident dangers of the Kentish Alpha variant, when the EU vaccine roll-out had barely begun … The risk is a long messy fourth wave that drags into September, contaminating the French rentrée.

“[Strategically] My guess is that the pandemic has fundamentally changed German public attitudes towards the EU. It has done so at a delicate moment when Germany has also been badgered into large fiscal transfers through the €800bn Recovery Fund, initially presented as a Covid relief plan but in reality a patronage fund for a European Commission with insatiable ambitions”.

What is clear is that the Grand Reopening of the European economy and summer is in trouble. Jacob Nell from Morgan Stanley says the hit to GDP could be 1.5% for Italy, 1.7% for Portugal, 2.3% for Greece, and 2.5% for Spain in a “severe scenario”.

This may not constitute an end to the world in itself, but nonetheless, it represents a further asymmetric shock to already battered and lockdown-fatigued electorates. More pertinently, it will exacerbate existing lines of cleavage – most notably via Europe’s ‘war of choice’: Its embrace of full-on, cultural revolution.

With its culturally woke-style ‘democracy’, LGBTQI, ‘Human Rights’ and ‘climate-emergency’ revolutions, the EU gratuitously has alienated both Russia and China (which it needs to save its economy), and has chosen to launch internal culture war against Hungary and various other EU states over their reluctance to endorse woke culture, but more particularly their rejection of the EU Open Society project for using immigration to dilute ethnic homogeneity.

Politico (EU) reports, “the liberals aim to make it a showdown in the fight against discrimination against queer people in Hungary. They’ll put forward a call for real consequences, to be formalized: “The Council needs to trigger Article 7 against this Hungarian government””.

Regrettably, escalating culture feuds are likely to dominate European politics much as they do in the U.S. The fractures will not remain as between states such as the EU war on Orbán, but will be within states, as well as between them.

One long-time Republican Party operative, Frank Luntz cites the deep divides in voter attitudes in the UK as evidence of the contagion coming from America. Though British politics now is conditioned by Brexit, it is unlikely that European electorates, especially in the more culturally conservative East, will escape a similar process of fracturing.

Luntz’s point here is that Britain is increasingly divided along ‘woke’ versus ‘non-woke’ lines, rather than by traditional social and cultural tensions, such as between north versus south; cities versus rural areas; and even men versus women.

“In his study, which was first reported in The Times, under the headline, Woke Culture War is the Biggest Dividing Line Amongst Voters, around 81% of Tory voters agreed with the premise that the UK was a nation reflecting equality and freedom; whilst a mere 19% said the nation was “institutionally racist and discriminatory”. Among Labour supporters however, only 52% saw the UK as a bastion of freedom, whilst 48% said the country suffered from systemic racism.

When asked specifically about cancel culture, 40% of respondents said they believed the social phenomenon served as a form of “thought and speech police”, while 25% backed it, arguing that those who say something sexist or racist should “face the consequences”.

According to Luntz, these findings are an obvious ‘red flag’: “When you have decided that your country is institutionally racist and discriminatory, you don’t normally go back”, predicting that the chasm dividing voters would only widen with time. He said it was likely that in six months to a year, the “damage” caused by such radically different views about what the UK stands for, will lead to the same vast social upheaval already occurring in the United States.

“The problem with woke[ness] and with cancel culture is that it is never done. The conflict and divisions never end”, Luntz said. “This is not what the people of the UK want – but it’s coming anyway”.

The very obvious point to which Brussels turns a hubristically blind eye is that there is no popular mandate or enthusiasm for cancelling Europe’s long-established culture. Even in the U.S., half its population reject it; and may prove willing to fight it – perhaps literally.

This represents the Brussels’ managerial classes ‘going mad’ – in the sense of being blind to the obvious consequences of what they are doing. Europe has had a cancel-culture ‘war’ before – when the Frankish invaders of Rome, steeped in Old Testament exceptionalism, went to war against anyone, or anything ‘pagan’ – anything that was not aligned to the new Christian doctrine.

The point here is that when Christianity was imposed across the Roman ‘world’ (in 323 AD), Christians were a minority, pitted against an ancient metaphysics, old ways-of-being, that had existed for thousands of years past. It took four centuries of utter oppression – such as burning dissidents alive to light the arena of the Coliseum – to expunge the ancient understanding. Even so, the ancient insight was never finally destroyed. It went ‘underground’ and it is still around.

The Library at Alexandria, filled with the only surviving texts of ancient theosophy, was burned down on the order of the Christian Bishop. Its philosopher-keeper, the beautiful Hypatia, was skinned alive by the mob; pagan books across the Empire were ‘called out’, condemned and burned; teachers ‘cancelled’, and their teaching denounced; ‘pagan’ temples and property were expropriated; Greek statues were defaced with Christian crosses carved into them.

Under Justinian (527 to 565), toleration of any religion other than Christianity was ended. The last Egyptian temple – dedicated to the goddess Isis, on an island in southern Egypt – was shut down in 526. The legendary Plato’s Academy – with no less than 900 years of teaching in its curriculum – was shut down in Athens in 529.

Just to be clear, whereas the adoption of Christian values was on the rise in those early centuries, its obverse facet – Christianity (as illiberal authority, and as a power-project) – became the political tool used to fuse Papacy with Empire, and the tool with which to establish feudalism.

Many contemporary European liberals clearly are well-intentioned in their desire to pursue social justice. It is an admirable aim. But ultimately, when embarking on a culture war with no popular mandate, what starts as ‘liberal’, ends illiberal. That is the nature of cultural war. Ultimately, cultural struggle becomes a utilitarian ‘cover’, hiding a political project.

Are the EU ruling classes truly blind to these consequences, or do they secretly welcome the war’s inherent illiberalism, as the tool by which they might found their centralized EU Empire – just as the Franks used Old Testament authoritarianism to found the Carolingian dynasty?