Thread by @michaelpsenger

SNAKE OIL: HOW XI JINPING SHUT DOWN THE WORLD

Through propaganda and fraud, the CCP under Xi Jinping transformed the snake oil of lockdowns into “science,” the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. This is the story of how he did it, and why. 1/
amazon.com/dp/B09KPJQZWW

The snowball effect of this little lie—China controlled the virus—was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. Within months, they’d been transformed into foaming-at-the-mouth communists, dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate China. 132/

Millions surely suspected the lockdown fraud, but among those who believed China’s COVID-19 narrative—or pretended to—all the authoritarian methods that supposedly contributed to China’s “success”—including censoring, canceling, and firing dissenters—were on the table. 133/

CHAPTER VII - THE WORLD ACCORDING TO XI

“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill; to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” – General Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Spring and Autumn Period 136/

In the early 13th century, a nomadic chieftain led a band of 6,000 warriors to China’s northern border. Baffled, the Jin Emperor sent a dispatch to the chieftain:

“Our Empire is as vast as the sea. Yours is but a handful of sand. What have we to fear of you?”
137/

Even if the warriors survived the impassable Gobi Desert, they faced legions of mercenaries in Heilongjiang. 138/

Even if the warriors defeated Heilongjiang’s mercenaries, they’d be stopped by the forests of Jilin, where the trees stood as tall as mountains. And even if they passed Jilin’s forests, they’d be stuck in the muddy silk fields of Liaoning. 139/

But Temüjin was no ordinary chieftain, and in 1213 AD he laid siege to Beijing. Though he’d begun vastly outnumbered, the scores of mercenaries he’d co-opted in Heilongjiang evened the odds. 140/

Though Beijing was fortified by stone walls, the wood from Jilin made for excellent ladders and rams. Though Jin archers filled the sky with arrows, the warriors’ armor was fortified with silk from Liaoning, trapping the arrows before they met flesh. 141/

This was the end of the Jin empire; and only the first of many such upsets by Genghis Khan. 142/

It was one of the great military catastrophes of all time, and a lesson China’s strategists would never forget. To underestimate one opponent—a single intelligence failure—can be the downfall of even the greatest empires. 143/

The CCP’s lockdown operation appears to have had its philosophical origins in the book Unrestricted Warfare, magnum opus of China’s most influential modern strategists. In Unrestricted Warfare, the authors reimagine warfare for the 21st century. 144/

In Unrestricted Warfare, the authors foresee a pivot away from heavy machinery to attacks on the mind. “Some morning people will awake to discover with surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to have offensive and lethal characteristics.” 145/

In Oct 2019, two months before the SARS-CoV-2 virus was revealed in Wuhan, the Gates Foundation, WEF, Bloomberg, and J Hopkins hosted Event 201—a pandemic simulation. Each organization had close ties to China, and each played a major role in the world’s response to COVID-19. 146/

It’s unlikely that many participants at Event 201 realized a coronavirus was sweeping across Asia at the time. But the CCP may well have manipulated its COVID data to trigger the apocalyptic responses planned by the China-friendly organizations at Event 201. 147/

Event 201 delegates included George Gao, director of China’s CDC, who oversaw the original article on COVID-19 symptoms. Participants discussed controlling “misinformation” in a coronavirus pandemic, and Gao even raised the point of countering rumors the virus was man-made. 148/

Each participant at Event 201 was even gifted a one-of-a-kind Event 201 coronavirus plush (made in China). 149/

From the very start, the COVID narrative overtly suggested a bioweapon. Whistleblowers; residents collapsing; lockdown; novel virus; all science tossed out. But it was all a lie. Reverse psychology. This was how the CCP convinced the world an ordinary virus was a supervirus. 150/

There was abundant evidence SARS-CoV-2 had begun spreading much earlier than December 2019. A widely-published report revealed that orders for PCR tests had soared in China beginning in May 2019, a full seven months before China had reported its first coronavirus case. 151/

It may seem strange that intelligence officials failed to see the clear signs that the CCP was promoting lockdowns and fear of COVID-19. But as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan made clear, national security officials can take many years to admit an embarrassing mistake. 152/

CHAPTER VIII – TOGETHER APART

“Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next… But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.” – Milton Mayer, 1955
155/

Xi Jinping would never forget the day he met Bill Gates. It was May 2012, during Gates’s visit to Beijing. Gates was a longtime Sinophile, and he and Xi met twice more in 2013 and 2015, each time seeking deeper scientific collaboration. 156/

Xi and Gates met again during Xi’s 2015 trip to Seattle, where Xi announced new collaborations with the University of Washington, second-most influential COVID modeler. Bill invited Xi for dinner, but had to cancel when Xi didn’t show up. They were married men, after all. 157/

Gates’ global influence pushed many institutions in a pro-lockdown direction. When COVID broke out, Gates sent tens of millions of dollars to the CCP to assist with China’s response, for which Xi wrote him a personal thank you. Xi would make sure that money went to good use. 158/

Gates expressed exasperation with the west in contrast to China. Gates blamed western “freedom”; China, by contrast, he said, “did a very good job of suppressing the virus,” thanks to the “typical, fairly authoritarian” approach and “individual rights that were violated.” 159/

In Aug 2021, Gates called for “all countries” to be “more like Australia”; parts of Australia were then at 200 days in strict lockdown with COVID cases at all-time highs. Gates went on: “Flu and common cold…we can build tools that, over time, can get rid of those as well.” 160/

We may never know just how many westerners supported the CCP’s COVID-19 narrative because of their relationships with China. But the fact that the pandemic guidelines of the WHO and nearly every developed nation were discarded suggests that the corruption ran very deep. 161/

Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet and lead advisor to the UK, said the world should thank China for lockdown: “It was not only the right thing to do, but it also showed other countries how they should respond…So, I think we have a great deal to thank China for.” 162/

Susan Michie, lead UK SAGE advisor and 40-year British Communist Party member, expressed outrage when asked whether this might inform her draconian policies: “I’ve come on your program as a scientist…” Michie was a behavioral scientist with no background in epidemiology. 163/

Leana Wen, one of the most influential voices in the US COVID response, became famous for advocacy of coercive vaccination measures. A WEF Young Leader, Wen was granted asylum from the CCP to live in the US—but somehow that didn’t stop her from returning to work in China. 164/

Eric Feigl-Ding, another WEF Young Leader, took the COVID con to a whole other level with his wildly-inaccurate pro-lockdown tweets, leading to interviews with CNN and NYT despite his nonexistent qualifications and being denounced as a “charlatan” by scientists on all sides. 165/

Of course, no one toed the CCP’s COVID lines more reliably than Anthony Fauci, who shut down America on nothing but the WHO and NYT’s endorsement of Wuhan’s lockdown, then advocated one totalitarian mandate after another—all of which he’d said were useless in February 2020. 166/

When life for many Americans halted, many flocked to Florida. Gov DeSantis became the first major leader to share his belief the CCP influenced lockdowns: “China was very much invested in promoting lockdowns…until COVID, public health guidance was never…to just lock down.” 167/

No one described lockdown madness with grander eloquence than former UK Supreme Ct Justice Lord Sumption: “We have moral reasons…for not wishing to be like China…now…what began as a public health crisis is…an educational crisis…and social crisis on top of that.” 168/

Of course, every COVID-19 mandate was per se unconstitutional. The initial lockdowns had been intended as a psychological blitz that shocked and overwhelmed normal legal and ethical processes. And the world’s high courts largely stepped aside and let it all happen. 169/

In the US, the Supreme Court used Jacobson v. Mass, a 1905 case in which a man was fined $5 for refusing a vaccine, to justify all COVID mandates. A man of principle, Mr. Jacobson had taken his case all the way to Washington—he shelled out the five bucks and went on his way. 170/

There are many problems with the Supreme Court’s use of Jacobson v. Mass to justify COVID mandates. First, Jacobson had been overruled many times, not least because it was used to justify eugenics in Buck v. Bell—a decision then cited by Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials. 171/

Second, the Supreme Court’s justification for COVID mandates depended on a specific word: “pandemic.” By 2021, lobbyists and the WHO weren’t even pretending they ever intended the “pandemic” to end. “Delta to Lambda…on to the other Greek letters.” 172/

In Oct 2021, Spain’s Minister of Health announced mask mandates would be kept in place for as long as there was still a seasonal flu:

“The masks are here to stay, at least as long we have influenza or other autumn viruses.” 173/
https://t.co/OmXM5TtEzDnotiulti.com/las-mascaras-l…

For two years, the world watched its political class play dumb about how they’d imported a totalitarian “public health” regime from China. Germany even produced a study on implementing a “social credit system like in China.”
174/
https://t.co/2WWNvx6fQFweb.archive.org/web/2021062918…

At the 2021 G7 opening, leaders made a show of masking, forgoing handshakes, and distancing—but the next day posed unmasked in tight groups. The message: “We know you know we’re lying about COVID. To be one of us, you need to keep lying as well.” 175/

Journalist Gerhard Wisnewski characterized the governments’ policies as a series of “completely nonsensical and contradictory measures.” “There is a method behind this madness. It is actually a method of torture…and interestingly enough, they were developed in China.” 176/

In April 2021, the Chinese began downplaying their own vaccine. Just days later, first the WHO, then Fauci, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau followed, dramatically downplaying the effectiveness of vaccines and calling for more lockdown measures. 177/ https://t.co/SbaReUIVQ9apnews.com/article/china-…

Early on, China had rolled out a digital COVID pass system using color codes for vaccination status. Sure enough, the system entertained by the Biden administration’s COVID team a year later used this same color code system. 178/

In the US, the proposal at the federal level was widely seen as a political trial balloon by lobbyists and scrapped. But Europe wasn’t so lucky. In June 2021, the EU Parliament approved digital COVID vaccine passports for travel within the European Union. 179/

For all their inhumanity, it’s unclear that vaccine mandates increased uptake. In Italy, the number choosing to vaccinate declined. Many citizens refused to get vaccines as long as governments tied them to civil liberties. 180/
https://t.co/HMeyaeHMUoreuters.com/world/europe/i…

In cities all across Europe, Australia, and Canada, protesters took to the streets in the tens of thousands to protest against lockdowns, vaccine passes, and other vestiges of CCP-style medical tyranny. 181/

In 2021, as cases rose to all-time highs in Australia despite some of the world’s strictest lockdowns, the military was deployed and police imprisoned and fired rubber bullets at protesters, including at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. 184/

From the beginning, moderates had rationalized their silence about the unprecedented suspension of civil liberties on the basis that COVID lockdown measures were temporary, and if the policies crossed some unspecified line they would speak up. To some degree, that did occur. 185/

But it was too late. As is their perennial error, western moderates failed to recognize the ethical, scientific, and legal indefensibility of the pro-lockdown position. The ultimate red line was crossed in March 2020. Catastrophic and irreparable damage could not be undone. 186/

Since the original egalitarian propaganda of communism no longer fooled most people, the system had to be rebooted with a new lie that would justify the indefinite suspension of the rule of law. Xi had found it in the form of a “virus.” 187/

CHAPTER IX – THE YEAR OF THE RAT

“ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

/End of overview

This thread is just a small fraction of the info contained in the book. Chapter IX is the best part—I won’t ruin the ending here.
Amazon US:
Apple Books: https://t.co/WxI0HiLAe7
Barnes & Noble: https://t.co/rCZyqlQsDy
Amazon UK: https://t.co/91b5UfHu7G https://t.co/5ZBpUT5x6lamazon.com/dp/1957083786
books.apple.com/us/book/snake-…
barnesandnoble.com/w/snake-oil-mi…
amazon.co.uk/dp/1957083786

P.S. Don’t miss the official documentary preview for the book based on the first chapter: Redder than Red, narrated by @katewand.