A Delicious Bowl of Bat Soup, Part One

Conspiracies, Coronavirus, and the Psychopathic Style in World Leadership

In what follows, I propose an interpretation of current events that seeks to resolve many conspiracy narratives. I am definitely not claiming what I propose here is the absolute truth. However, I feel it is crucial for us to consider different ideas and possibilities about what is happening now. We may never, in fact, know “the truth.” Perhaps there isn’t even one singular or ultimate truth. But we must keep inquiring. In what follows, we will go deep into the darkness to try to shine some light.

My personal belief is that we must work hard right now to establish a baseline of shared understanding and coherence, for reasons that will become clear in what follows. We must do this, even if we cannot solve the riddle entirely. Increasingly, it is looking like this could be a matter of life and death for safeguarding our rights and freedoms, if not for preserving humanity as a whole. 

Conspiracy theories often posit the existence of a tiny cabal possessing superhuman knowledge and forethought. It is thought that this group acts as one, with deliberate intention and a well-formulated long-term plan. Many people seem to want to believe that this cabal exists, that its members are incredibly wicked and extremely intelligent — even Satanic. 

Perhaps this is the case. But, as we will explore, it is much more likely that there are a number of factions competing and cooperating at the apex of the pyramid of wealth and power. These factions interact and intersect with each other in various complex ways. Sometimes they oppose or undercut each other. More often than not, they have enough of a shared agenda that they can work toward their goals without explicitly coordinating their actions.

Rather than one cabal, there are various factions of a “power elite.” These groups bond over their arrogance, elitism, and entitlement (the “masters of the universe” mentality). Many of them possess, also, psychopathic or sociopathic character traits. It is well established that a small percentage of humans are innately psychopathic. Others can be influenced or trained to behave in that way. People possessing sociopathic personality disorders tend to thrive in hierarchical corporate, military, and governmental structures. Because they have no ethical compunction when it comes to collateral damage or “externalities,” they steadily rise to positions of power in systems based on domination and exploitation. 

We can all sense many hidden layers and secret agendas crisscrossing beneath the surface of current events. Overall, when you try to comprehend what is underway and what is being perpetrated, you enter a dizzying labyrinth that induces severe cognitive dissonance. How could the bizarre fiasco of the Trump Presidency still continue? Why does the information around the Coronavirus keep changing? Why did the world’s governments react in such extreme ways, causing economic collapse and potentially starvation on a vast scale? It seems inevitable that far more people will die from the residual effects of government action then will suffer from the virus itself, while the lives of hundreds of millions are ruined. Considering the scenario planning done in advance, this was not hard to predict. Yet very little was done to address it. 

Trump’s 2016 “election" was already, most probably, a partly engineered coup. It seems likely that the voting machines in crucial swing states were hacked electronically, as the final tally of votes deviated significantly from reliable poll numbers. This “election" was assisted not just by Russian hackers but by elements in the intelligence agencies and their proxies in the mainstream media. The New York Times, for instance, focused single-mindedly on the non-issue of Hilary’s emails during the election’s crucial last days. We also know that Facebook was manipulated by Cambridge Analytica, another intelligence operation, which figured out powerful mechanisms for targeting voter’s psychological weaknesses.

We know from the Congressional hearings on Operation Mockingbird that the mainstream media is infiltrated and its content is, to a certain extent, controlled by US intelligence agencies. It is widely believed that the US intelligence community is largely against Trump. Probably that is not the case. We might ask ourselves instead: Why did certain factions within the intelligence community (which is integrated with the military industrial and fossil fuel complex) prefer Trump and want him to win? 

It seems there is an underlying purpose around which various factions have united: To subvert and dismantle the institutions of American democracy. This includes a government based on the Separation of Powers, as well as the rights guaranteed to US citizens in the Constitution. A number of these factions saw Trump as a kind of battering ram who would accelerate the dismantling of the liberal nation state with its Constitutional protections and citizen’s rights. 

The US system, formed in the late 18th Century — as deeply flawed and imperfect as it is — does provide basic rights such as free speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to bear arms. These rights became the model or template for constitutional governments around the world.  By dismantling this system of protections within the US, these factions set the stage for ever-intensifying global despotism. 

When the Coronavirus pandemic happened last March, the world went into panic mode. How do we understand the origin of this pandemic? One possibility is that the virus was an accidental and random occurrence, spreading from a bowl of bat soup slurped down at the Wuhan wet market. Another possibility is that Coronavirus-19 was either released intentionally or, once it was released, allowed (even assisted) to spread globally. 

If we explore the second option, we have to consider whether this would have been done by China alone, or if there was collusion behind it. Another question, which I believe we can address, is whether Coronavirus-19 was manmade or natural. Was it an intentionally engineered bio-weapon or an accidentally released pathogen? Or did it just mutate in the Wuhan wet market as mainstream scientists continue to claim? 

Conspiracy theories tend to be simplistic. In reality, there may be a series of levels or gradations between intentionally orchestrated conspiracies where every nuance is plotted out in advance, and scenarios that have been anticipated as probable, possible, or eventually inevitable, with an understanding of what those scenarios offer both as crisis and as opportunity. Those controlling the levels of power from behind the scenes prepare contingency plans for how to use such crises, when they occur, in order to advance their particular agendas or ideology. 

Naomi Klein explored this in The Shock Doctrine. When it occurs in the economic sphere, she called it “disaster capitalism.” She found that financial and corporate interests intentionally capitalize on the worst crises and catastrophes. They use these crises to accomplish objectives which would meet with too much popular resistance in normal times. 

This may help to explain past events like “9-11”, which was another experience of collective cognitive dissonance (cognitive dissonance seems an intentional tool used by the power elite, as a confused and scared populace is easily controlled). Many of those who study the evidence in depth conclude there must have been a conspiracy behind 9-11. There were many anomalous and inexplicable aspects around what happened that day.

As I recall, these anomalies included the way the Twin Towers collapsed straight down, indicating a controlled demolition; the small hole in the Pentagon which seemed to reveal it was struck by a targeted missile instead of a massive jet plane; the immediate recovery of the intact passports of the terrorists miles away from the impact; the collapse of Building Seven later that day; the fact that the terrorist pilots had been trained at a CIA-run flight school in Florida, and so on. However, it was never possible to find the “smoking gun.” Establishment liberals and journalists pointed out that carrying out a conspiracy on such a vast scale would be unmanageable and impossible. This also seemed reasonable and hard to refute. 

And yet, on the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld were part of Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank that published a paper, years before Bush’s election, proposing that the US required a Pearl Harbor-level inciting incident in order to muster the popular will to use massive military force to access the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East. Although the terrorists had nothing to do with Iraq at all, 9-11 was used as pretext for a war in Iraq that resulted in the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians and allowed US military forces to control that oil-rich country. 

Immediately after 9-11, the Patriot Act was pushed through Congress, which was a significant strike against our Constitutional rights, which continue to be eroded now (for instance, due to the pandemic, we have lost freedom of assembly and more surveillance is becoming commonplace). It was totally clear, at that time, that the Patriot Act had been prepared well in advance. Anticipating popular resistance, they waited to introduce it until a national crisis hit, with the compliant media amping-up the collective fear over terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security (a name which already had Fascistic undertones) was formed at that time. It has never gone away. 

We may never know how “9-11” was architected and orchestrated. It may be the case that it was permitted to happen, actively aided and abetted, or entirely plotted out. Many have remarked on the peculiar synchronicity of the Gates-funded Event 201, which brought together experts to run a simulation of a global pandemic just a few months before Covid. On the morning of 9/11, similarly, a number of military training exercises took place. These oddly timed exercises may have inhibited military response to the errant jet planes targeting the World Trade Centers. Scenario planning for a future pandemic included the Dark Winter exercise, conducted by high level government officials in 2001. Dark Winter predicted this year’s events with eerie accuracy, including shortages of basic medical supplies and the use of the National Guard to quell riots. 

It seems almost certain that Coronavirus-19 was engineered in the Wuhan virology laboratory, despite the efforts of establishment scientists, writing in Nature Magazine and elsewhere, to claim otherwise. Scientists working in fields such as biotechnology have a lot to lose, in terms of funding as well as popular support, if it becomes commonly known that Covid was a Frankenstein monster. The level of collusion between the mainstream media and the pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology industry is extreme at this point. This is because pharmaceutical companies, as advertisers and sponsors, provide one of the mainstream media’s largest revenue streams. For instance, it is estimated that 70% of the revenues for Fox News programming come from pharmaceutical advertising. 

The mainstream narrative of the origin of Coronavirus-19 involves cross-species transmission of the virus from a bat to a human at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people, 650 miles from Beijing. What makes this story highly dubious is that Professor Zhengli Shi, the world’s leading research scientist into exactly these types of coronaviruses, ran the Wuhan Institute of Virology, just a few miles away from the market where the transmission purportedly occurred. The Institute is, apparently, "China’s only P4-Level Biosafety Laboratory capable of storing, studying, or engineering Pathogen Level 4 microbes such as other coronaviruses, Ebola, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue.”

For years, Professor Shi — or “bat lady,” as she is known — and her team have not just been studying, but actively creating, new, novel Coronaviruses from bats, experimenting with them so they can cross over to human populations more easily. This research has been partly funded by the US Government, which gave $7.5 million in grants to Shi’s work at the Wuhan Virology Institute during 2014 - 2017. According to The Diplomat, the purpose of the grants “appears to have included work on “gain-of-function”: research that investigates how a virus can gain the ability to infect a new type of animal.”

Shi was part of an international research team that took a Coronavirus from a horseshoe bat, combining it with material taken from HIV to make it more easily transmissible to humans. In a research paper co-authored by Shi, 'Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin’ (2007), the researchers describe how, in technical terms, they were seeking to engineer a bat coronavirus so it can be transmitted to humans: 

"From crystal-structural analysis of the S-ACE2 complex, it was predicted that the S protein of SL-CoV is unlikely to use huACE2 as an entry receptor, although this has never been experimentally proven due to the lack of live SL-CoV isolates. Whether it is possible to construct an ACE2-binding SL-CoV S protein by replacing the RBD with that from SARS-CoV S proteins is also unknown. In this study, a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-based pseudo-virus system was employed to address these issues. Our results indicated that the SL-CoV S protein is unable to use ACE2 proteins of different species for cell entry and that SARS-CoV S protein also failed to bind the ACE2 molecule of the horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus pearsonii. However, when the RBD of SL-CoV S was replaced with that from the SARS-CoV S, the hybrid S protein was able to use the huACE2 for cell entry, implying that the SL-CoV S proteins are structurally and functionally very similar to the SARS-CoV S. These results suggest that although the SL-CoVs discovered in bats so far are unlikely to infect humans using ACE2 as a receptor, it remains to be seen whether they are able to use other surface molecules of certain human cell types to gain entry. It is also conceivable that these viruses may become infectious to humans if they undergo N-terminal sequence variation, for example, through recombination with other CoVs, which in turn might lead to a productive interaction with ACE2 or other surface proteins on human cells.” 

The language is dense, but as one wades through it, the meaning becomes quite clear: The scientists in Wuhan “employed” “a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-based pseudovirus system” to make their novel coronavirus potentially transmissible to humans. Success!

Then eight years later, as Nature Magazine reported in 2015, Professor Shi’s team investigated “a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China… The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them.” Success yet again! 

The project of making viruses that transmit more easily and lethally to humans has a scientific name. It is called “gain of function.” The danger of Professor’s Shi’s gain of function research deeply concerned many virologists. Simon Wain-Hobson from the Pasteur Institute in Paris noted presciently, “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, fretted: “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.” In fact, in 2014, the National Institute of Health in the US prohibited this kind of research. Then, in 2017, it permitted this research again. It is telling that the mainstream media has done little reporting on this. 

Both Chinese and American military are fascinated by the potential use of viruses and diseases as bioweapons — and China has been indulging in international espionage to gain a competitive edge. As reported in many outlets, Canada exiled a group of leading Chinese virologists last July for sending samples of some of the world’s most lethal diseases to Beijing: “Suspected of espionage for China, a group of Chinese virologists was forcibly evicted from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, where they had been running parts of the Special Pathogen Program of Canada’s public health agency. One of the procedures conducted by the team was the infection of monkeys with the most lethal viruses found on Earth. Four months prior to the Chinese team’s eviction, a shipment containing two exceptionally virulent viruses—Ebola and Nipah—was sent from the NML to China.” 

Despite the evidence that Professor Shi’s laboratory in Wuhan was actively engineering novel Coronviruses from those found in bats, designed to be more easily transmittable to humans, incorporating elements from HIV and other sources, mainstream media in the West maintains dogmatic faith in the narrative that Coronavirus-19 occurred accidentally via a cross-species transmission. As in many instances, we find the mass “liberal” media has a rigid agenda. The goal is to program the mass consciousness, including the liberal establishment, who, like a herd of sheep, tend to believe whatever is presented to them in outlets like CNN, The New York Times, Scientific American, and The New Yorker. 

As reported in DefenseOne, over the last years the People’s Liberation Army, a.k.a the Chinese military, has made biological war and the development of bioweapons, which can be used to wage “asymmetric warfare,” a primary focus. As Elsa B Katia and Wilson Vordnick write in ‘Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare,’ China’s new strategy is to fuse military and civil activity, focusing on research in areas like gene editing, viral warfare, and neural implants:

• “ In 2010’s War for Biological Dominance (制生权战争), Guo Jiwei (郭继卫), a professor with the Third Military Medical University, emphasizes the impact of biology on future warfare.  

• In 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu (贺福初) argued that biotechnology will become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense, from biomaterials to "brain control" weapons. Maj. Gen. He has since become the vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, which leads China’s military science enterprise. 

• Biology is among seven "new domains of warfare" discussed in a 2017 book by Zhang Shibo (张仕波), a retired general and former president of the National Defense University, who concludes: “Modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the possibility that “specific ethnic genetic attacks” (特定种族基因攻击) could be employed. 

• The 2017 edition of Science of Military Strategy (战略学), a textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University that is considered to be relatively authoritative, debuted a section about biology as a domain of military struggle, similarly mentioning the potential for new kinds of biological warfare to include “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” ”

Here we learn that the People’s Liberation Army is developing “new kinds of biological warfare,” such as lethal viruses, to target particular ethnic groups or demographics. While, once again, we don’t know that Coronavirus-19 was intentionally released as a weapon of this sort, it is interesting to note that the fatality rate among certain communities, like those of African heritage, seems to be much higher than average. At the same time, the elderly and infirm — anyone already suffering from pre-existing conditions — are in much greater danger from this virus. 

Whether or not the release of Coronavirus-19 was accidental or intentional (as this whistle-blowing Chinese virologist claims), it seems well-documented that, once it was unleashed, President Xi Jiping and the Chinese military decided to let it travel around the world. According to The Economic Times of India, “There is new evidence to show that China locked down all domestic traffic internally by end January 2020 but pushed to open foreign travel till end March. Data from Tom Tom traffic index, a traffic location site that covers 416 cities across 57 countries show that as a result of this strategy, China, intentionally or otherwise, was able to lockdown its cities unknown to the world. While this reduced the spread of the Corona virus within China, China’s aggressive foreign travel policy lead to a virus explosion worldwide.” 

In the months after China stopped all domestic flights, Chinese Ambassadors in Italy, Australia, and elsewhere argued vehemently against international travel bans: “While Chinese authorities limited domestic flights from Wuhan to other Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai in an effort to contain the outbreak in January, it urged international carriers to maintain their flying schedules.” Chinese Ambassadors threatened countries with reprisals if they banned flights from China.

The likeliest scenario seems to be that the initial release of Coronavirus-19 at that exact time was accidental (apparently the safety protocols of the Wuhan Virology Institute were incredibly lax, perhaps intentionally so). Once it was released, the Chinese leadership decided to make use of the event as a real-time opportunity to discover what happens in such a circumstance: How would the international community respond, what level of damage would be created, and so on. They are certainly learning a great deal about viral contagion, fatality rates, and the human immune response to engineered pathogens. 

We might ask, how could human beings do such a thing? The answer could only be that the rulers of China, as in many countries around the world today, are psychopaths with no empathy for human suffering at any scale. This already seems well-established by China’s actions in other areas, such as its brutal suppression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and elsewhere. And in fact, since the Chinese military considers the United States as its most powerful enemy, their strategy has proved amazingly effective, causing economic and social turmoil in the US. 

A compelling tangent in all of this is the peculiar story of Charles Lieber, the former Chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and a leading nanotechnology expert. Lieber was arrested in Massachusetts last winter for setting up a secret laboratory in Wuhan. According to CNBC, Lieber was receiving $50,000 a month from the Chinese government and had established a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology with a $1.5 million fund. What is so peculiar about this is that Lieber was extremely successful with his work in the US. His research firm Lieber’s research firm had received more than $15 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense. He ran a Department at Harvard. So why choose to operate secretly, and illegally, in China? 

It doesn’t seem likely that Lieber was directly connected to the Wuhan Virology Institute or coronavirus research, as some theorists have proposed. He works in a different field, but one that has ominous relevance to the military goals of the People’s Liberation Army, as described above. According to a 2018 interview with Lieber conducted by Nautilus Magazine, he is developing something called Neural Lace, “a lace-like electronic mesh that “you could literally inject” into three-dimensional synthetic and biological structures like the brain.” 

Lieber has already demonstrated that “mesh-brain implants readily integrate into a mouse brain and enable neuronal recordings for at least eight months.” In a 2018 paper in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Lieber co-authored a paper with several Chinese scientists titled Mesh Electronics: a new paradigm for tissue-like brain probes. They write: “To bridge the gap between neural and electronic networks, we have introduced the new concept of mesh electronics probes designed with structural and mechanical properties such that the implant begins to ‘look and behave’ like neural tissue. Syringe-implanted mesh electronics have led to the realization of probes that are neuro-attractive and free of the chronic immune response, as well as capable of stable long-term mapping and modulation of brain activity at the single-neuron level.”

While such probes could be potentially used to treat neurological disorders, they could also be used as tools of absolute control of the human brain. Individuals would become drones, prosthetic instruments of a control apparatus. If you are the ruler of a totalitarian society like China and want to maintain control over a vast population, the possibility that “syringe-injectable electronics” can unfold into a three-dimensional neural mesh that controls your subjects’ brains from inside has to be very intriguing to you. 

I realize this sounds like dystopian science fiction or something from a horror film. Unfortunately, the reality is that this research is happening now, and it seems to be advancing rapidly. One problem is that we don’t know how far it has advanced. 

What is clear, in retrospect, is that the neoliberal approach to China, which we saw under Obama and Clinton, failed spectacularly. Obama and his predecessors pursued a policy of appeasement and conciliation with China, rather than challenging their growing power and influence in the world directly. This was clear in the negotiated Paris Accords, which gave China a long runway before it would need to limit CO2 production.

Presumably the original hope with this policy was that Western liberal values — transmitted via technology, media, and consumerism — would eventually influence China and bring about its liberalization. In practice, however, this has not occurred. Under the autocratic rule of Xi Jinping, the Chinese government explicitly rejected core elements of the Western model such as the free press, the concept of universal humanvalues, and an independent judiciary. If anything, it appears that Western nation-states are tilting toward China, with increasing authoritarianism and surveillance, suppression of civil rights, and so on. A technological control apparatus seems, increasingly, inescapable. We are already there to some extent. 

I consider it morally necessary, even in the face of so many drastic developments, to map out an alternative direction that human society could still take, as well as a plausible path for getting us there. This requires a unified social movement. I will do that at the end of the second part of this essay. Before that, I want to delve into the background of the political situation in the United States in a little more detail.