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A magic spell in graph form.

Hypnotism is a pseudoscience.

By that I don’t mean to say it’s necessarily fake. Like many pseudoscientific fields, it can describe real phenomena without a satisfactory explanation of their mechanics. In other words, hypnosis can “work” in the sense that it generates highly predictable and reproducible results, but with a broad misunderstanding of how or why. And because it deals primarily with the twin phenomena of mind and agency, there is no possible way of proving which mechanical explanation is most accurate.

In that regard, hypnotism is also a magical tradition, with roots buried so deep in the past that no one can say with any certainty who invented it. Through this lens, the practice lacks in traditional cause-and-effect explanatory power due to the ephemeral nature of the evidence, the strategic obscuring of the mechanics by practitioners, or (most likely) a combination of both.

Something that I do know for certain is that I am not personally hypnotizable. One of the reasons I know this is purely anecdotal, the other (pseudo)scientific.

My first clue came at a traditional show of stage hypnosis, back when I was too young to care how it worked. I was called randomly onto the stage with around ten other people, all of us sat into chairs while the spell was being worked upon us. I turned out to be a pretty frustrating pick for the hypnotist. The audience had a good laugh at our little exchanges and asides, though, so he didn’t kick me off. What I remember most was the feeling that I was supposed to play along with it, but for some reason couldn’t. I watched in amazement as the other subjects did whatever weird, embarrassing thing the hypnotist suggested, and behaved as though they were hearing and seeing things that clearly weren’t there.

Were some of them just pretending? Or all of them? That seemed possible but unlikely. After all, how could the guy keep his job if he was counting on such cooperative subjects every night? Even if half of them were plants, it seemed that a lot could go horribly wrong.

My next experience with it was in my mid-twenties, when I sought out help to quit smoking. I did quite a bit of research beforehand, for the obvious reason that, if hypnotism really worked as advertised, I wanted to ensure the person poking around in my head was legit.

I suspected I found the right guy in the same way we’d know if we found the right professional of any kind. For example, suppose you take your perfectly functioning car to a new garage, in order to test the honesty of its business model. If the grease monkey finds nothing wrong with it and doesn’t charge you for the visit, it’s a safe bet you’ve picked a winner.¹

In this case, the hypnotist advised me at the end of my second visit that this form of treatment simply wasn’t going to work for me. He went on to explain the fundamentals of the Stanford Scale, which revealed that roughly 25% of human beings cannot be hypnotized by any known method. According to him, I was buried up to my eyeballs in that hopeless category, showing every classic response (or lack thereof).

He was also refreshingly honest about why this was the case. While he noted there were various theories floating about, no one in the field had been able to conclusively prove a robust correlation. They could rule out categories like age, sex, race, IQ, education, class and so forth. In fact, they had ruled out so many candidates that the 25% immunity remained a total mystery to them. But the lack of correlates didn’t prevent the further development of technique for the 75% who were inducible. Again, that’s because it’s a pseudoscience (or a form of magic; take your pick). It can therefore leave gaping holes in its explanations without derailing further experimentation.

Anyway, since my first session was free and he didn’t charge me for the second, I figured the guy knew what he was talking about. That’s a good heuristic for any business transaction, but it also left me very curious about the techniques themselves. Not curious enough to do a deep dive, but enough to wonder who might be secretly studying and developing such techniques even further, and perhaps deploying them for nefarious purposes.

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Fast forward to 2020, and to the COVID-19 pandemic.

By late spring of that year, I had told my wife something that she absolutely didn’t want to hear. While I know my role as her man is to comfort her at times, it’s also to tell the plain truth as I see it when asked. She wanted to know when I thought the nightmare would be over. I told her that we were looking at years, plural.

She found this unbelievable at the time. But she still cried, because she’d learned to trust my predictions on such topics. I also told her that the “fear pandemic” was going to be far worse and longer lasting than the biological one. In fact, it already was worse. Small businesses — the very lifeblood of the city — were being shuttered left and right, never to reopen. And this was even before the “Summer of Love” hit its stride, during which we were informed that all the rioting and looting happening before our eyes was really just a form of peaceful and necessary activism. Even the CDC said so, announcing that racism was an even greater “public health crisis” than the coronavirus. When they said that and the majority of the populace merely shrugged, that’s when I really began to suspect something even more sinister than 24/7 fear-porn was in play.

In fact, by early 2021 there was the smell of smoke everywhere with regards to the pandemic and its enthusiasts. Even the concept of a “pandemic enthusiast” would have struck me as totally bizarre two years prior, but I had encountered vast numbers of these people. In fact, I still do. They are instantly recognizable by the dazed, glassy look in their eyes — which is really all you have to go on, as the rest of their faces are covered with a dirty snot-rag, or with the chic new “doggy snout” version.

That they still wear these stupid and unhealthy accessories in the year 2023 — even while walking down empty sidewalks or riding alone in their cars — should be sufficient evidence for the kind of thing that was done to them, on perhaps a scale never before imagined let alone achieved.

But there’s more.

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One of the reasons I seldom write about COVID is because that beat is already very well covered, here at Substack and beyond, including every angle from statistical analysis to biochemistry to legal issues.

There were other important voices early on. They included virologists like Geert Vanden Bossche, whose predictions about the mutant lottery that mass vaccination during a pandemic would spawn turned out to be accurate. Vanden Bossche was also one of the voices who was instantly lampooned, slandered and vilified the moment he made his predictions public. A first-page Google result which the day before would have produced a sterling professional and academic resume was suddenly a solid wall of casual smears, disingenuous critiques and creepy warning labels about COVID-19 disinformation.

Anyone who expressed the slightest bit of skepticism about the mRNA vaccination campaign would meet with a similar fate. The same could be said for anyone who challenged the top-down treatment protocols. Pierre Kory can go from boasting a CV no less impressive than this to becoming a permanent member of the Google-filtered Unerwünscht overnight. No matter how many awards and accolades they’d won for their practices or research, to question any aspect of the regime and its priorities meant being cast into the outer darkness with Russian agents, anti-science rubes and — of course — all the myriad -ists, -phobes, and other hobgoblins of the progressive Left’s increasingly febrile imagination.

As for those priorities, they also became crystal clear, even before lies like “two-and-done” and “100% protection” evaporated as predicted. Other fictions such as limiting vaccination to high risk groups barely took root before they dissolved, because there was never any real argument about where this train was ultimately headed. Having inoculated itself against legal recourse with the EUA, and with the backing of virtually every government and propaganda organ, Big Pharma — a.k.a. The Most Honest and Trusted Industry of All Time™ — would now attempt to push an experimental mRNA injection into every single arm on the planet, milking hundreds of billions of dollars from the government teat in the process. All this in response to a virus that had at worst a 0.1% lethality rate, and which even then mainly affected people with severe co-morbidities.

Furthermore, no one in the pharmaceutical, public health or medical spheres had done any serious work to untangle cause-of-death from said co-morbidities. They were was all too busy making money and accruing power by labeling nearly everyone who died “with Covid” as having died “of Covid” — and this based on PCR tests with such absurdly high amplification that it guaranteed a boundless supply of false positives (what they were calling at the time “asymptomatic” infections).

In other words, they had the tools at hand with which to keep both the panic and the gravy trains rolling for years, plural. Along the way, we would hear that hospitals were running short on ventilators and Remdesivir to kill people with, that a Nobel prize-winning (but, sadly, off-label) medicine was in fact poisonous horse paste, that wearing two-masks was even better than wearing one — but only while the waiter was leading you to your table. Once you’ve been seated, feel free to rip that fucker off and chow down.

A word on this latter ritual: to witness it from outside the bubble of a mind-annihilating hypnotic state is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. The sight of seemingly sane men and women wearing dirty rags on their faces while being led to their dinner tables, only to tear them off when seated (“I jus’ minimuhtized muh contact wit da virus!” Nom, nom, nom) strikes you as something out of a surrealist painting or psychological horror film.

And that’s what I hypothesize much of the pandemic both is and was: a worldwide experiment in mass hypnosis, conducted by the most evil pseudoscientists who have ever lived.

And I think I can prove it with a couple of graphs.

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One of the points my therapeutic hypnotist impressed upon me was that being immune to hypnosis was nothing to brag about. It would be as ridiculous as taking pride in any other immutable characteristic, such as one’s skin color or sex.² In fact, the only correlation that had been in any way established was that at least some degree of cooperation was required on the part of those hypnotized. I took this to mean that one could memorize Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” or the collected works of George Orwell cover-to-cover, and still be hypnotized if they found a suitable reason to cooperate.

When I recounted the story of my participation in the show, he said it made perfect sense to pick me, because children are both more cooperative and more imaginative by nature. They are also more willing to play along, if only out of presumed expectations or the desire for attention. In light of that, the stage hypnotist was making a pretty good bet that I was either hypnotizable, or that I would pretend to be.

To reiterate, practicing hypnotists more or less agree that ~25% of the human population is immune to induction/suggestion, and that nobody really understands why. They also tend to agree some element of willing cooperation is required. In the case of the therapist I was obviously willing, as I was an adult who specifically sought him out for treatment. So it appears that cooperation may at best be a necessary-but-insufficient component.

But here’s a dark thought: given that the techniques themselves have been around for longer than anyone knows, and the intoxicating degree of power their full mastery would represent, what if a power-hungry practitioner figured out a way to reduce the “willing cooperation” component to a form so slight that most victims wouldn’t notice? Or what if the component could even be bypassed entirely, by employing the latest in subliminal audiovisual techniques and instrumental technologies?

This theory runs afoul of a different claim that most hypnotists make, which is that effective hypnosis requires a state of total relaxation in the subject. If so, one would think the storm of constant fear and paranoia surrounding the pandemic would render potential victims impossible to hypnotize. My skepticism of that claim has to do with the subjects in hypnotism shows. Apart from actors, professional public speakers and the like, it seems dubious that such subjects could attain such a state, especially given they may be performing embarrassing feats before a large crowd. But even granting this as a core requisite of known techniques doesn’t negate the possibility that the rule could be circumvented, or even inverted, by cutting edge methods.

We do know that programs such as MK Ultra existed, and that ours and other governments have studied and experimented with psychological warfare and mind-control methods in general.³ Luckily, the CIA has already investigated itself, and determined that none of these experiments ever worked.

But just for the sake of argument, let's say they were lying about that. I know, that's a stretch. But give it a try.

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With that in mind, let’s take a brief foray into politics. Or, more precisely, into the underlying assumptions and priorites that inform them.

When I witnessed the vast majority of people falling in line with ever more idiotic and casually destructive policies, my first instinct was that they were just being intellectually lazy. For example, there were several first order questions that nobody was asking, either from various public pulpits or in private conversation. Chief among them would be the following, directed at public health officials, pharmaceutical industries and their cheerleaders in the corporate media:

If the SARS-CoV-2 virus represents the existential threat that you insist it does, and the mRNA vaccines are as safe and effective as you claim, then why aren’t any of you demanding that Pfizer and Moderna release both their formulas and experimental data to the world?

In other words, if the emergency is so dire that you can dissolve all of our civil liberties in a heartbeat, then why not patent law as well?

From the beginning, I thought this brand of “open source” vaccine development and manufacture would make perfect sense, if the official narrative about the scope of the threat was even slightly true. After all, a Killer Virus is on the loose, laying waste not only to lives, but to schools, businesses, economies and basic human freedoms! Won’t somebody please think of the children EVERYTHING?!

In any case, I knew early on that something important was missing from the picture. This especially seemed to be the case with those on the political Left. Given they are primed to both disdain “corporate profits” and demand “free” goods and services in every other situation, why were none of them beating their chests about Moderna’s anemic earnings having ballooned by nearly 1900% in a single year, based entirely off of government vaccine sales extracted from the taxpayers?

Furthermore, why weren’t they, of all people, suspicious when the FDA and Pfizer (but I repeat myself) tried to keep a lid on the vaccine data used to justify the EUA for seventy-five years, thus only making it public after most of us are long dead? I’ve heard that one of COVID’s symptoms is anosmia, but you don’t need to be a bear cosplaying as a forest ranger to smell this much smoke.

So then why didn’t they? Where were all our Bernie-bros and free-tard friends when we needed them?

The answer to that is complicated by something more mundane than mass hypnosis. In one sense the New Progressive Left is never there when you need them, and the older version that might have demanded answers to these questions doesn’t really exist anymore. Moreover, the priorities of this new skinwalker form don’t have much to do with economics and other kitchen table issues, let alone with civil liberties. These have all been traded in for a form of global-hegemonic imperial religion, which places topics like gender/racial moral panics and climate change hysteria at center stage. Their pandemic questions therefore tended to run more along the lines of, “How can we get the needles into more gay, black, female babies?” and “How can we force Bubba Pickup Truck to wear a mask” than to anything remotely close to the source of the flame (let alone the arsonists who ignited it).

But while this political tendency offers some explanatory power, it starts to fall apart when we look at the bigger picture, because the same distance from the source was apparent in sizable portions of the Center and the Right as well. Significant numbers within these political categories also lined up to be shot for the shot. I can already hear the retort that the Center was just a matter of well-managed groupthink, and the Rightists were merely taken in by Trump’s salesmanship of “(His) beautiful vaccines.” But this version fails precisely because of the substantial number of Trump fans who resisted the vax (recall that the man has been booed at his own rallies for mentioning them).

So while it’s likely that the intensity of the hardcore Left’s embrace of the new biomedical tyranny correlates somewhat with their assumptions and priorities, and the opt-in for the primary series correlates somewhat to those of other groups, neither sufficiently explains the width of the effect. Also unexplained is why a small but significant minority on the Left also managed to see through the fraud and dodge the jabs, even though the vast majority of the propaganda was aimed right at them.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Estimates of U.S. citizens who submitted to the first series (initial jab + booster) range between 73% and 79% of the population. The higher figure is the number produced by the CDC, while the lower one comes from the newer Northeastern University study in the link.

The study is independently interesting in that it exposes some of the CDC’s sloppiness in its data modeling and analysis. Something else to bear in mind is that both Northeastern’s researchers and the CDC’s goals are aligned; they both clearly state they want more people to take more boosters, and so the university’s lower estimate of 73% doubles as a call for action (i.e. more pro-vax propaganda and coercion).

Nevertheless, their final totals aren’t all that different. Average them and we get 76% — or one percentage point off from the Stanford Scale’s suggestibility estimate.

Anyone else smell smoke?

But that’s not all. The uptake rates for additional boosters taper off sharply after the primary series, to the extent that those who’ve received three-or-more injections now more or less match the number who’ve received none at all. It’s proving difficult to find a comprehensive worldwide graph of this tapering-off effect (and I believe purposefully so, as the picture it shows would too closely align with my theory). But here is the CDC’s own version of the U.S. uptake rate by number of doses:

As you can see, the “Three or more” category matches the shape of the other uptake trendlines, but tops out at 34% in October of 2022. After that date, either no more information was recorded or the CDC started tracking bivalent booster uptakes separately. What’s strange about this is that the bivalents were rolled out at the beginning of September, and it’s unclear whether or not these were included alongside monovalent boosters on the chart above. As usual, the vague, catchall term “vaccines” is deployed in a myriad of ways, to suit whichever kind of picture best serves their messaging tactics in the moment.

Also unclear is why the trendline starts suddenly on November 10, at which point the figure leaps from zero to 8%. This is especially mysterious given government press releases articles like this and this, which indicate that the CDC had indeed been tracking uptake numbers throughout September 2022, and were unsatisfied with the early results (~4% by 9/23/22). Again, the use of vague language is used to muddy the waters here.

What is clear in all figures I’ve seen is the obvious and significant drop from 1-2 doses to 3 or more. And given how the Northeastern University study showed the CDC inflates its uptake estimates through poor (or perhaps purposefully misleading) data collection and modelling, we can presume that even the final figure graphed is at least 6% too high. If we average the estimates again, the number is ~31% of Americans who’ve taken at least one additional booster after the primary series. Or, in other words, roughly 6% off from the the Stanford scale’s 25% immunity from hypnotism. And this figure doesn’t even take into account the number of people who’ve received four, five or more boosters. Once more, good luck finding comprehensive figures for these.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that roughly 25% of U.S. citizens have tried to follow the CDC’s shapeshifting guidelines to the letter, which at this point might be anywhere from four to seven injections since the start of the initial 2021 rollout. In terms of hypnosis, this percentage roughly aligns with both the Stanford Scale’s highest susceptibility category and its total immunity group. If we were to also assume some form of mass hypnosis was in play during the vaccination campaign, the question becomes, “Which 25% was hypnotized?” Was it the unvaccinated holdouts like me? Or the vaccine enthusiasts who’ve lined up for at least three shots?

Each group will accuse the other of being victims of the spell, of course. That’s partially due to the core misunderstanding about the technique, which is that its effectiveness has something to do with the gullibility and/or low intelligence of the inductee. In the case of the vax enthusiasts, the claim will be that the unvaccinated are spellbound by mis/mal/disinformation (and are probably a bunch of idiotic -ists and -phobes to boot). But the trouble with this theory pertains to another phenomenon that virtually all hypnotists agree on:

Hypnosis eventually wears off.

This is bound to happen, in every single case. It will happen even without the snapping of fingers, or the utterance of magic words. Even therapeutic practitioners will admit this, and advise meditation and other support techniques to improve the long-term results of treatment. It also stands to reason from a systems viewpoint; because a human being is a complex, dynamic system that constantly regenerates and restructures to incorporate new inputs of material and data, the notion of permanent induction seems implausible, no matter how sophisticated the technique.

Taking into account both the Stanford Scale and the figures above, we can make the uncontroversial claims that roughly 75% of all Americans:

• are to some degree susceptible to hypnosis

• received at least one injection of an approved COVID-19 vaccine

But given the sharp drop between the primary series and the additional boosters, we can also see both the “wearing off” effect and the differing ranges of susceptibility scores in the trendlines. So while a majority of hypnotizable subjects might be induced to do simple things like involuntary eye closure and postural sway, more complex inductions (e.g. catalepsy, hallucinations) will affect smaller and smaller populations, until we arrive at that category of subjects who are fully suggestible. And even then, the hypnotic effect will eventually subside.

To those who can accept the base premise of this thought experiment, the picture couldn’t be clearer: the 25% who resisted vaccination are the unhypnotizable group, and the 25% who continue to vaccinate (against all known evidence of benefit) are maximally suggestible. The remaining ~50% represent the middle rungs of the scale: people who were inducted to lesser degrees early on, and have since fully awoken from the spell. It cannot logically be otherwise, if mass hypnotic suggestion is the presumption.

If we followed this trend on a long enough timescale, the number of additional boosters taken would plummet to the low single-digits. In fact, I predict the uptake numbers at the end of 2023 will more or less align with the combined percentage of the population that suffers from hypochondria, clinical anxiety and other related DSM disorders.⁴ That figure will also include the top scorers on the Stanford Scale (if this particular spell is still being cast by then, which I highly doubt).

Meanwhile, those of us who are still unvaccinated will remain so forever. We will never voluntarily take it. If we were the hypnotized group, you’d expect our trendline to run in the opposite direction. Yet — apart from a certain pro-gambler recently caught on a hot mic — I know of no holdout who suddenly “awakened from the spell” and submitted to the experiment.

If such people existed, prominent or otherwise, they would be heralded in the corporate media apparatus as a saint on a daily basis. Even the gambler’s “redemption” story was scuttled for obvious reasons — one of those being that professional gamblers are notable for accepting much, much higher risk thresholds than the general population. Not exactly the best advertising material, even leaving aside his very vocal regrets about having taken it.

None of this to say the picture is all that simple, or that the problem will self-resolve in time. For one thing, even strong correlation with the hypnotism curve doesn’t rule out more mundane factors like propaganda, legal and economic coercion, motivated reasoning and the general effects of panic on decision-making. All of these measures were obviously in play, and I’m not arguing they didn’t have their effects. For another thing, we don't know the precise mechanics of the hypnotic techniques (if any) that were deployed.

A third problem with this theory is that it risks allowing some very bad actors an escape hatch from accountability. Not every civilian who ridiculed, harassed and threatened us was "under a spell." Some of them were just monumental assholes, who were handed a convenient outlet for their sadistic appetites and malignant self-righteousness.

But I think there is still a very strong signal here, and it serves to explain some of what has until now been inexplicable. I personally know of many brilliant people who were taken in by the fraud of masks, vaccines and other countermeasures, hailing from all political and philosophical backgrounds. It’s true that some of them were brutally coerced, with their livelihoods and their family’s well-being hanging in the balance. But for others, it seemed the increasingly obvious lies that were being fed to us always somehow made just enough sense to satisfy any misgivings they might have normally had.

This group includes emergency medical professionals who were caught in the thick of the day-to-day action. To say they “should’ve known better” feels too much like armchair quarterbacking to me, and lacks the requisite humility we must have when assigning blame. The claim isn’t entirely without merit; motivated reasoning and perverse incentives aside, many of them should have suspected that something was terribly wrong at some point between “back then” and “right now.” But if they happened to also be in a high-induction category, it may explain quite a bit of their more illogical statements and actions in the interim.

The final question is this: If mass hypnosis (or an adjacent technique) is a weapon in our enemy’s arsenal, what can we do to counteract it?

I have some thoughts about that. But this article is getting overlong, and I’d like to hear your own thoughts in the comments.

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P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.

1. I’d actually suggest this as a strategy, by the way, and not just for auto repairs

2. The fact that such absurd expressions of pride typify our Clown Dimension is something that didn’t occur to me at the time, as that spell hadn’t hit anything like its peak yet.

3. A brief recommendation here to

Mathew Crawford

’s stack Rounding the Earth Newsletter, in which he not only conducts important statistical data analysis, but also takes deep dives into the history and praxis of 5GW psychological operations.

4. And I’m sure our good friends at Big Pharma are cooking up new cures for those as well, though they seem to never quite work as advertised.