The Dumbest of All
Originally published on Goblins Under the Apple Tree.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row
-Bob Dylan
the smartest dumb man I ever met – György Ligeti on Theodor Adorno
There’s a Simpsons episode in which the townspeople find themselves with money to spend. Marge is all for repairing Springfield’s heavily damaged Main Street. But at this point the unctuous Lyle Lanley oozes in to pitch them a monorail. He is of course a total con man and little Lisa is on to him.
She pipes up with this question: “I’d like you to explain… why we should build a mass transit system… in a small town with a centralized population?”
Lyle responds with a chuckle and “Young lady… that’s the most intelligent question I’ve ever been asked”. Lisa responds with a pleased, “Really?” and Lyle sidles up to her to mutter, “Oh, I could give you an answer. But the only ones who’d understand it would be you and me… and that includes your teacher”. Lisa giggles in glee. And the huckster moves on with his scam.
See what just happened? The hoaxer didn’t even bother to address Lisa’s concern but has her fully on his side. How so? Because he appealed to her vanity. She is tricked through her very self-assurance of her own cleverness.
So much of the covid con depended on this device. And The Left were the target. Because covid marked that point where the media decided to go all Left. Like all hucksters, the media propagandists knew how to weaponize the prejudices of their audience. And The Left have their list of magic condemnatory noises. Consider these:
“Right Wing”
“Far Right”
“Reactionary”
“Shockingly Reactionary”
“Regressive”
“Fascistic”
In the following I want to focus on this marvellously effective technique of conning clever people through their very cleverness. Or rather – through their very self-assured assumption of their own cleverness. Which isn’t clever at all.
Consider the World Socialist Web Site, the online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement. Henceforth the WSWS. There is a certain follower of this site, one of their most devout groupies who I shall not name as I’d like her to at least preserve some shred of dignity. I shall refer to her as Carol Zadok. Yes, that has a nicely mysterious Lovecraftian ring!
Well, our Carol is a “Progressive” with a capital “P”. Indeed, the biggest “P” you’ve ever seen! When Carol first got a whiff of covid, she stormed right to the front of the self-proclaimed communist hordes and bared her arm, demanding immediate injection with the magic elixir bestowed by those white clad magicians toiling in their sacred laboratories. To this very day, she calls attention to the punctures all over her body signalling how many of the wondrous jabs she’s had this week alone.
Well, Carol was delighted when all those rebel rockers jumped up on that carefully prepared stage to shill the vax. But then came a discordant note. The frightfully Right Wing, Far Right, Reactionary and indeed Shockingly Reactionary, Regressive and Downright Fascistic Van Morrison broke ranks and told the vaxxers to go fuck to themselves.
Carol’s world dissolved into a red mist as she shrieked in fury and took a torch to her old copies of Astral Weeks and Moondance. “He is dead to me!” she thundered, whilst figuratively sending the corpse of the Irish musician on a burning boat to the innermost circle of proggie hell.
Consider the above an introduction to the machinations of the WSWS. There is no better example of the Leftist cover for Tale of The Great Plague. The moment covid hit the footlights our Trotsky boys leaped into action with nary a microsecond’s hesitation.
It would take the rest of my life to catalogue the proliferation of pandemic palpitations of this pseudo-prole paramilitary. I could cover it by saying: Just think back on any bit of covid fear porn and the WSWS covered it – and, as already indicated, without even the merest hint of a cautionary hesitation. Indeed, if the media said a hundred people just dropped dead with the virus, the WSWS would likely respond with, “Why are you lying? It was ten thousand who just dropped dead!”
This was when I had my first vision of that peculiar reversal of the media’s political rhetoric. Before Covid, I had started to conceive of the media’s “Left/Right” presentation as a kind of “Good Cop/ Bad Cop” routine. With Covid, the Left somersaulted over the head of the Right to present “Right/Left” as “Bad Cop/Even worse Cop”.
And so, some examples.
Do you remember this?:
A scene that reverberates with the interminable X Files/ post-nuclear holocaust/ Auschwitz type imagery that has been floating around for decades now. And all across the media, photos of menacing PPE clad figures digging graves in lonely wind whistling blasted heaths proliferated. The WSWS naturally were no slouches here:
The apoplectic reporter gasps:
Burials on Hart Island, the city’s burial site for unclaimed bodies for over a century, have gone from 25 a week before the pandemic to about 25 a day—a five-fold increase. Those interred on the island have been unclaimed by any family members and are overwhelmingly poor. The quintupling of burials is due both directly to COVID-19 and indirectly, as every aspect of medical, social and governmental infrastructure gets overwhelmed by the death toll.
Careful readers may note that sly bit at the end: “indirectly, as every aspect of medical, social and governmental infrastructure gets overwhelmed by the death toll”. Oh those little teases! You see, this regular activity of burying unclaimed bodies had a little boost when, in the wake of the (ahem!) “expectation” of a tsunami of covid corpses, morgue regulations had been altered to shorten the time allowed for corpses to remain unburied. This naturally resulted in a short-term acceleration of burials. The media gets its cloak-and-dagger Armageddon style footage and the horror show is up and running.
Nice one!
And then there was the case of four-year-old Kali Cook of Galveston whose story was the perfect morality tale for the rising covid theology. Kali “died of covid” and, being so young, was a perfect illustration of how covid didn’t just affect old fogies. That Kali’s mum was an “anti-vaxxer” who now bitterly “repented of her sin” was also perfect.
Did our WSWS exercise objective caution? Apparently not:
Four year old dies from COVID-19 in Texas as cases in children skyrocket across the US
….
Kali’s mother was unvaccinated and had tested positive for COVID-19 the day before. “I was one of the people that was anti, I was against it,” she told Daily News. “Now, I wish I never was.”
We read that the “sudden death of Kali Cook is a rare occurrence, but it is by no means an isolated incident. COVID-19 cases among children are exploding across the country just weeks after the reopening of schools, and the number of child deaths continues to rise.”
Exploding!
But by November, the story had shifted – at least outside the new revolutionary realms of the barricade storming mainstream:
4-year-old had COVID but didn’t die from it, Galveston County chief medical examiner says
….
Dr. Erin Barnhart, the chief medical examiner, said tests done on Kali’s body were positive for COVID and a couple of other viruses, but it’s unclear what caused her death.
click2houston.com concurs:
4-year-old Galveston girl’s death now ruled ‘undetermined’ after it was blamed on COVID
At which point, the mainstream media curiously lost interest. And trying to access the story even now leads to some interesting results. On googling “kali cook” with “galveston”, I obtained a list that had this:
Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com › texas-girl-kali-cook-dies-…13 Sept 2021 — Texas child
Kali Cook, 4, is believed to have died from coronavirus, although Galveston County Health District is reportedly yet to confirm …
Clicking on the link delivered me to this:
Oh dear. Well, it’s such a delicate matter.
By 2022, enough people had started to query the covid quackery to start making their troublesome presence felt. At which point, the shady figure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. enters to introduce that good old Nazi meme which the WSWS riffed on. An interesting manoeuvre. Had the vax shillers been the first to intrude on Godwin’s Law, they would have got the blame for overstating the case. But, no. It was the vax deniers who “did a Hitler” first. Thus legitimising “Holocaust comparisons” in the WSWS:
During his delusional remarks Sunday, Kennedy Jr. denounced the COVID-19 mitigation measures—which are extremely limited
(??!!)
—still in effect in some parts of the United States. He suggested that measures to stem the spread of the deadliest pandemic in a century,
(???!!!)
which has already claimed the lives of nearly 1 million people in the US,
(????!!!!)
constituted a worse fate than that suffered by Anne Frank, the 15-year-old Jewish girl who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after evading Nazi capture by living in a tiny attic with her family for two years.
The WSWS favourably quoted The US Holocaust Museum: “Those who carelessly invoke Anne Frank, the star badge, and the Nuremberg Trials exploit history and the consequences of hate.”
It’s so gratifying to the sense of moral outrage when “the other guy started it”!
And now that we’re back on that reassuring ground of the old World War 2 scenario:
While anti-vaccine advocates were trivializing the Holocaust in Washington D.C., a small number of fascists were continuing to distribute anti-Semitic propaganda across the US, claiming the pandemic is the fault of the Jewish people.
And so on and on.
The Trotsky boys continue to hyperventilate to this very day. At the time of writing (20/09/2025) a search on the word “covid” on the main page of the WSWS brings up no less than 24 hits. But then they have an entire section labelled “The Coronavirus Pandemic”. Does anyone else still refer to “coronavirus”?
And they’ve even decked their covid horror panel with this:
No, you are not hallucinating. They really did say, “Covid 19 Heat Map”.
(And note that subtle tie-in with the global warming franchise.)
But it ain’t just covid. Our Necromantic Narks have also fallen for the transgender tripe.
Note that the WSWS have the same unhesitating impulse to label Imane Khelif as “she” as they had with considering covid to be the end of things. Also note the familiar rhetorical denunciations:
A mob of far-right social media commentators …Anti-trans bigot and children’s book author J.K. Rowling …fascist former president Donald Trump …Italy’s Mussolini-admiring Prime Minister Georgia Meloni…The fascistic rabble persisted…the social media site owned by fascist oligarch Elon Musk.
We also get the downtrodden prole against military dictatorship saga. We read that Khelif comes “from an impoverished rural part of northern Algeria” and that “Her (sic) home country of Algeria, ruled by a military camarilla, has banned gender-affirming treatment, placing both her and her family in danger at home due to the baseless witch hunt”.
The “gender-affirming treatment” banned by the evil fascistic yadda yadda is of course the alchemy needed to transform each gender into the other.
But the full revelation of where the WSWS really stand came with the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” that opposed vax mandates. This required some major necromantic inversion. The convoy proletarian? Not a bit of it!
A powerful faction of Canada’s ruling elite, including the official opposition Conservatives, much of the corporate media and sections of big business, have incited and promoted the far-right Freedom Convoy, which has been besieging parliament and downtown Ottawa for the past 22 days.
Also,
A crucial element in this political conspiracy has been the promotion of the Convoy as a grassroots movement of truckers.
But the WSWS ain’t buying any of that. Want to her what the convoy is really about? Get ready for The Mantra yet again:
… intimidating workers, and waving Confederate flags and swastikas…comprised of notorious right-wing extremists and outright fascists…drawn from a cesspool of far-right, anti-Muslim, Christian fundamentalist …. libertarian groups. … far-right truckers’ group …
And even the bully boy tactic of freezing the bank accounts of the protesters doesn’t faze our Trots. They don’t even mention that in their report on the matter from later in the year. Well, it might reveal the true structure of power at work.
And now do you see the secret of the magic? It’s all bound up with that Pavlovian association. You can throw in any old crap as long as you accompany it with the terms “progressive”, “Left”, “enlightened”, “advanced” etc. and a certain portion of the masses will be orgasmic in their enthusiasm to follow. Similarly, you could say the most obviously sane and reasonable thing in the world but label it “reactionary”, “Right”, “fascistic”, “regressive” and the same lot will be palpitating in terror to get away.
I’ll leave the last words to Mr Dylan:
They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
