Podcasters Alex McCarron (Escape from Lockdown) and Paul Rodriguez (State of the Markets) have a debate on the ideas in currency about whether all things Covid (and more) are the fruits of a ‘plan’ or not. Arguing that there is a plan was State of the Markets co-host, Tim Price. In the other corner was Country Squire’s James Bembridge.

The climate war has often thrown up claims of conspiracy theories. There are the cod-psychologists who have attempted to embellish elaborate theories about sceptics’ being prone to conspiracy theories — ‘ideation’, as the climate shrinks want to call it — using exotic statistical methods that are not appropriate to the tasks. Others have followed the cause of psychology as political smear-mongering — essentially libelling people who disagree with the cosy consensus of tired academe. It turns out that attacks on democracy from lofty towers that trade on defending those towers from criticism using ‘conspiracy ideation’ as a stick to beat down such criticism only expose the shortcomings of their science. It’s too easy to see it for what it is: grubby, cod psychology, recruited into political campaigns, to use the authority of academic institutions to belittle opposition to a political agenda.

Is that a conspiracy theory or is it a statement of no confidence in what is, on any reasonable analysis, a very poor science indeed, which nonetheless has political utility? Calling politically-motivated academics bullshit merchants is not a conspiracy theory. But they would maintain it is, because they believe that the Academy is the only place in which authorised thought may occur. QED.

Anyway. The response to covid has taken everyone by surprise. On many a view, lockdown and the suchlike has left far more lives in tatters than the virus. And this raises a massive question mark over what caused the response, which includes the idea that a plan of some kind must have been in effect. I initially wrote the following in response to Alex’s request for questions to the debaters. But it soon grew too long. So I’m posting it here instead. I do not believe there is a plan, and I think it is a shame that many have rushed to claim that plans — among other things — must exist, because there is no other way to explain how things have unfolded. On the other hand, the last 18 months really do require a hell of a lot of explanation.

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Of course there is a plan… in the middle of the last century, the United Nations very quickly formed around the idea that national sovereignty must be heavily modified, if not entirely dismantled, and the nation state made subordinate what was candidly called ‘world government’. These ideas are clearly stated in its founding texts and in its machinations. Among its leading proponents in that era were Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, who having urged for the creation of the atom bomb during WWII, then argued that only science could regulate global society in the aftermath of its creation. But this was an impossible dream, given the emerging geopolitics created by the bomb. The USA and USSR could not be reconciled in that way.

In fact, the idea of ‘internationalism’ preceded WWII, the bomb, and the UN – the League of Nations – and was advanced by many, including the architect of Apartheid and founder of ecological holism, Jan Smuts. That is to say that the idea of a world political order, led by Europeans (i.e. white people), founded on seemingly scientific principles of ecology preceded Greta’s emergence by some 100 years.

The idea of technocracy was well and truly established by Technocracy Inc. in the 1930s. These ideas have gripped wealthy and powerful people throughout the following century, who saw opportunities to influence designs for social organisation in their interests. Initially, they were able to influence the UN. The UN Environment Programme, for example, was established I the 1970s by oil tycoon Maurice Strong, and supported by the Rockefeller family, among other green billionaires.

However, the UN proved to be too inflexible and slow-moving for their ambitions. The raft of weirdo outfits like the WEF/Bilderberg/Trilateral were established as a parallel UN, because their convenors believed that international governance based on the cooperation of governments of sovereign nations was clumsy and outmoded. They believed that global society should be regulated by business leaders and ‘stakeholders’ – i.e. a neo-feudalism, in which democratic governments are diminished, and serfs represented only to the extent that NGOs take an interest in their lives.

Those are the plans. But the historical detail has been lost, and the rightfulness of global institutions (including Bretton Woods institutions) was first taken for granted, and then taken as the necessary solution to every conceivable ‘problem’ with a global dimension.

But of course there is no plan. Though everyone can see the problem with globalists’ designs for a new world order, some notable fantasists and blowhards have presented open, easily accessible, recorded but boring historical fact as evidence of a nefarious, secret plot. By overstating what plans are capable of, and the plotters’ abilities to assert their plots on society, a sober reading of history and the present are obscured.

The plan is the ‘great reset’. Or the plan is Satan. Or the plan is to smash planes into skyscrapers. Or the plan is to activate a modification of human bodies using nanoparticles activated by the 5G network. Or the plan is Agenda 21. These claims – and more besides – fill gaps in their authors’ historical knowledge and understanding to replace them with elaborate fantasies. They conceal an inability to explain the problem with ideologies from first principles. And the notion of a plot simply raises the question mark over the good faith of conspiracy theorists, who seem keener on promoting themselves than developing robust ideas.

The plan does not need a “plan”. Ideology establishes the basis for institutions, and institutions take opportunities to advance themselves and the ideologies on which they are founded. As sure as the maxim ‘when you’ve only got a hammer’, an institution established to protect society from novel viruses will see every new pathogen as the re-emergence of Spanish flu (or worse) and will act accordingly.

Ditto, every natural disaster will seemingly highlight the urgency of global institutions required for the amelioration of global warming. But notice that greens did not need to cause the disaster, even if they did lie about the frequency, intensity and destructive potential of extreme weather. It is green ideology, not a plot, that drives the agenda.

The ‘plan’ is the ideology. And any criticism of the ideology that requires a plot – such as a document like Agenda 21, or Schwab’s dire prose, or a plot like 911, or nanoparticles – overreaches, even if it is offered in good faith.

The questions that get neglected by a preoccupation with plots are: who the F does Bill Gates think he is? What are the competencies of global institutions? What legitimate role exists for ‘philanthropists’ in global society, and public life? Why have seemingly democratic representatives been such an open door for global projects, but at our expense? And why should we take global institutions’ (or even any institutions’) good faith for granted, and at face value?

Worse, attempting to explain that what has been ‘exposed’ is not what it seems, is prosaic or incredible, draws the ire of people who have been frankly lazy in their search for evidence and making sense of history, in otherwise well-meaning attempts to explain their sense that something is wrong. In seeking to understand the world, they may well have fallen for ideas that are no better than the WEF’s ambitions to create a dreary existence for us.

The desire for smoking-gun evidence of a plot is understandable. But even a video of Bill Gates on Epstein’s private jet, an underage girl on his knee, with a bottle of poison mislabelled ‘vaccine’ in one hand and the blueprint for 5G-enabled nanobots in the other, while explaining the whole wretched scheme to the camera, would tell us nothing. It may humiliate him, and perhaps undermine organisations that he was involved with. But others will take their place, and plots do not explain how money and power work, and how ideologies fester. It distracts from ideas about how to resolve the problem.

Let’s focus on ‘plans’ as ideology, not as plots. All of the plots that need be discovered, and that are required to understand the world were published by the conspirators and given full exposition in countless boring documents. There is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, such that the scales will fall from people’s eyes. To see a situation with clarity and perspective requires hard work, discrimination, self-reflection and criticism from friends and allies. There are no short cuts.