I am writing a book

Also open thread.

My desk right now.

I’ve alluded a few times now to the fact that I am writing a book. I fear this will mean some interruptions to your regularly scheduled programming, which will continue for a few more days. I hope, though, by the coming Sunday to have enough of the heavy lifting done to return to an ordinary posting schedule.

I’m not yet sure what the book will be called, but its topic is ‘Pandemicism,’ a term I’ve developed to describe an interrelated scientific and ideological system which operates throughout the West, and which is in thrall to the twofold belief that 1) pandemics are an imminent threat to human well-being, and that 2) this threat can be mitigated or eliminated by public health interventionists. The pandemicists are a well-networked international mob of scientists, medical bureaucrats, philanthropists and ideologues, who are well embedded in the public health establishments of all of our countries. Through internal processes of ideological regulation, they are able to enact uniform responses to pandemic events across the world, as we saw in the response to the Covid outbreak of 2020.

My book will draw together a lot of disparate material I’ve gathered here since 2021, but I want it to be much more than a simple reprinting of assorted blog posts, which would be as boring for you to read as it would be for me to assemble. My views have also evolved over time, both in response to ongoing leaks and revelations about the internal deliberations of the pandemicists and government planners, and also in light of the many books and articles that others have published in the growing alt-Covid sphere. Old readers will recognise many of the citations and proofs, but the whole thing will be, from start to finish, a new, cohesive monograph.

Right now, I plan to produce two editions. The first, much shorter version, will appear in German, if the Antaios Verlag will have it. It will consist of a compact argument across four chapters, and resemble more a booklet than a full book. It’s this version that I’m writing right now.

The first chapter, on “Pandemic Paradigms,” will consider how other people have conceived of the pandemic, whether as an instance of Science Following or a Great Reset, or a manifestation of “mass formation” (Mattias Desmet), or an exercise in Faucian bureaucratic corruption (Robert F. Kennedy). Aside from the Science thesis, I think there is some insight to take from all of these schemata, but obviously I wouldn’t be writing my own book if I thought they were fully explanatory and complete.

The second chapter on “Pandemicists and the Administrative State” will outline my views of how governance works in modern liberal democracies, and how the pandemicists have established themselves in this new system of distributed, diffuse power. The third study all available evidence for how lockdowns in particular came about – as policies developed in China, sold to the world by the WHO, and then implemented across the West via the very mysterious, coordinated actions of a Lockdown Cabal that gained ascendancy in February and March 2020. These actions succeeded above all in convincing the pandemicists themselves to support mass containment and to abandon their prior, milder plans for mere mitigation. The final chapter will use later leaks and related revelations to study the internal dynamics of lockdown policies and their self-propagating, self-reinforcing nature. It will also consider how these invasive, authoritarian public health interventions influenced the mass vaccination campaign and made it vastly worse than it would’ve been otherwise.

To make the argument as tight and direct as possible (and also because I’m working against an August deadline), I’ve been ruthless in what I’ve chosen to exclude from the German edition. It will focus almost entirely on those elements of the pandemic response that were novel to the pre-2020 pandemicist programme. It is, in other words, about mass containment specifically. An expanded English version will appear later in 2024. It will consider earlier pandemicist planning much more comprehensively, particularly their abundant tradition of pandemic war-gaming. I also want to add a chapter on the recent history of vaccination campaigns and the influence of Big Philanthropy on pandemicist aspirations, and to consider the various contrasts and parallels to climate change policy. At some point I’ll probably release the four chapters of the German version here, in English, for my subscribers, as a preview of the full book to come.

So, that’s what I’m working on. I have to say that it feels really good to be writing a book again, but it is also rather consuming intellectually.