by Nathan Smith

The conspiracy theorists have won the conversation beyond their wildest dreams, but they have no idea what to do with their victory.

Consider this story:

“Kathleen Kelly got two doses of the [Covid-19] vaccine to keep her shop open during the pandemic, but she suffered a devastating allergic reaction to the jab. Since then, she has had 11 surgeries to her heart and been admitted to hospital 29 times.”

That’s just the latest media coverage of injuries likely caused by the Covid-19 vaccines. Kathleen’s tale was recorded by A Current Affair, a major news show in Australia owned by Nine Network. Here’s another story from this week from The Telegraph in Britain:

“When Nikola Brindley was asked to have AstraZeneca’s Covid jab in July 2021, she agreed without hesitation. But within hours, Brindley was in A&E fighting for her life as an allergic reaction began to shut down multiple organ systems. ‘I collapsed on the doorway, and pretty much lost the ability to walk,’ she recalls.”

I think we’ve got another decade of these stories being drip-fed in a way that normalises the idea of mass vaccine injuries while ensuring enough time has passed to limit public outrage and any calls for retribution or compensation. This is classic propaganda.

When people are presented with a problem designed not to be solved, most will rationally conclude it is unsolvable. The more times the problem is raised and unsolved, the more likely people are to think it is unsolvable. Not too long ago, news that Covid vaccines caused harm would have been shocking. Now it’s a sidebar piece in the “medical” section of a newspaper. The stretching out of such revelations through numerous takes, teases and slow, continuous release neuter the information. Even the most explosive revelation, when repeated but not resolved, becomes numbing. Nothing being resolved is key to learned helplessness.

Very simply, what is no longer revelation is normalised. The system marches on. The slippery slope gets slipperier. The propagandists know exactly what they’re doing, so it’s not entirely your fault that you fall for their tricks. The human brain can get used to anything. It has an almost infinite selection of ways to cope with trauma: Stockholm syndrome, trauma bonding, dissociation, reaction formation, cognitive dissonance, learned helplessness and dozens of other brain acrobatics.

Do you want to know the scary part? Normalisation will even work just as well on those of us who knew the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines from the start.

This brings up an important point. Knowing the truth means nothing on its own. Truth is not power. Power is power. Power is not really even enhanced by truth. If you don’t have power, you will only ever be a peasant who knows things. That’s all.

In fact, knowing things is usually just another coping mechanism. When a person has power, he can act. When he lacks power, he wants knowledge. Those who say “knowledge is power” have been castrated. Only power is power. Knowledge is masturbation in the absence of power. The weak man’s consolation for impotence is to pretend to have knowledge.

Knowing the truth about Covid-19 vaccinations did not matter one iota to the regime. If things had gotten worse, they would have arrested me all the same and forced a vaccination into my arm. That’s power. And now that more people know the truth about the vaccines, this knowledge will not stop the regime from taking its next step, nor can this knowledge compel that regime to face justice for its actions during the pandemic.

The truth is, knowing is not half the battle. The reality of power is that, for an event to happen, the public only needs to allow it in the moment. The moments before and after the event do not matter. Those who gained power through the event do not care that you know about it afterwards. By the time you’ve put the puzzle together, the planners will have all the power, and you will have none.

The only time power might be concerned about knowledge is when a technology appears that drops the half-life of a secret from months to just hours. The internet is just such a technology (infinite knowledge, zero power). People pick up on the plans of power far more quickly with the internet, and they can use this technology to pass this knowledge on in real time, so everyone can watch as those in power perform their little tricks. Yet even if you could watch a conspiracy play out live on YouTube, would that give you any extra power? Of course not. You can use knowledge as a defence against feeling impotent (“I know what’s going on!”). But it doesn’t work when power has all the guns and soldiers.

The lesson of Covid-19 is that power does not care if you know. Knowing things does not stop evil from winning. Lies are only destroyed by power. Knowledge must be transmuted into action, or it remains masturbation.

The TV personality Alex Jones understands this now. Last week, Jones’ show InfoWars was forced to close after a US court fined Jones $1.4 billion (yes, you read that correctly) in a civil lawsuit for defamation. Jones was found to have made persistent false claims (according to the court) about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.

Jones had plenty of knowledge about what really happened at Sandy Hook. Some might even say he knew the truth. Jones made a decent living for more than two decades, knowing true things and explaining them to his audience. But none of his knowledge mattered in the end because the truth brought him no power. Power had power, and power used its power to crush Jones like a bug.

For years, Jones was also screaming about the dangers of fluoride in the water, and it turned out he was correct. The “scientific consensus” today is that fluoride either slightly or quite dramatically lowers children’s IQ when exposure is high enough. This danger threshold is exceeded and doubled in many US municipal water supplies. One meta-analysis reviewed 74 studies and found significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ. Another longitudinal cohort study found an association between prenatal fluoride exposure and children’s cognitive outcomes. Yet fluoride is still being added to drinking water in most places in the US. Power does not care about the truth; it only cares about a more effective lie.

Or consider the collapse of the global warming narrative. The reason the Green Party never seems to gain any political momentum is that not one of their breathless climate change doom narratives ever came true. The environmentalists screeched about the end of the world, but it never came. We’re still here, and the world is using more oil than ever before.

And yet, every other day, there seems to be another crazy restriction on goods and services in the name of saving the climate. Just this week, Amsterdam decided to use the same propaganda tricks deployed against smoking to stop people from eating meat and using fossil fuels, flights and high-carbon products. Everyone knows the truth that the climate change narrative was nonsense, yet power does not care. Power only cares about a more effective lie.

Power can abandon any ideological position when reality starts to hurt it more than you. Power never believed in “renewables” or “Team of 5 million,” that’s stupid. Power creates unsolvable problems on purpose for the benefits of social engineering. Ideological justifications are post hoc to the agenda. Power can change its mind whenever it likes – one moment it is pro-climate, the next moment it is pro-business – because power, not the truth, is the only thing that matters to power.

We’ve entered a strange point in human history where everyone knows what’s going on, even down to the names and home addresses of the powerful. Yet, none of that knowledge translates to power for the average person. All the levers we are offered to pull, such as voting, protesting or boycotts, lead nowhere. We can yank on those levers all we like while saying “I know what you’re up to,” and nothing will happen.

I know it feels powerful to know things. You’ve been told that truth will defeat lies, which convinces you to gain more knowledge. But truth is only a weapon if you already have power. Yes, you were right. You know the truth. What has this knowledge done for you? How has it gained you any power?

The goal of this column has always been to outline what you should practically do if you’re interested in power. If that’s what you want, I encourage you to read through the archives.

But if you take one thing from this column, it should be that only power is power. Everything else isn’t.

Originally published on The Good Oil.