The idea that the Covid pandemic is all part of some nefarious globalist population reduction plot enjoys some currency on the wackier fringes of conspiracy-dom. Yet it is, on the face of it, a pretty far-fetched idea. Certainly it’s an extraordinary claim.

Here’s the thing: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Just gibbering a mish-mash of illogic, ridiculously stretched claims, and outright misrepresentations, and sprinkling it all liberally with the usual name-drops (Rockefellers, Bill Gates, Charles Darwin, etc.) does nothing to convince me otherwise.

Which brings me to the following rather overheated farrago.

A friend of mine recently openly scoffed at me when I mentioned that eugenical thinking was animating the current pandemic response. And because her thinking is likely to be shared by many others, I thought it might be worth explaining why I think this is so. If you back up two hundred years and understand the history of the ideas that animated the eugenics movement then it’s easier to see how these same ideas are still in operation.

And this is where the silliness starts. It’s one thing to acknowledge that eugenic thinking still tacitly persists in some circles, quite another to link it to “the current pandemic response”. It doesn’t help when the conspiracy theorist proceeds from a false equivalency: that population control is the same as eugenics.

“Eugenics” literally means good birth, and refers to the idea of “improving the race”, by weeding out the infirm and unfit. This clearly not the same as population control, per se, which simply argues that overpopulation is a problem that should be solved by a general reduction in the population.

Taylor also mischaracterises Charles Darwin (with, it would appear, a tacit Creationist agenda) and the influence of Malthus on his theories: “one of the most curious and misunderstood in the history of ideas”, as Gertrude Himmelfarb noted). Most notably, Taylor makes the common mistake of assuming that the phrase “survival of the fittest” (which Darwin did not coin, but certainly approved of) is somehow eugenic. But what is meant by “fittest” is not “strongest” or “physically superior”, but simply “best fit for their environment”.

Otherwise, Taylor generally gets the history of Malthusian thinking and how it fed into eugenics right at least in outline. Somewhat ironically, the eugenicists made exactly the same mistake as Taylor: assuming that “survival of the fittest” was some sort of call to selective breeding and culling of the human population.

Still, it was from this false assumption that eugenicists indeed proceeded.

How do you produce a society where everyone is healthy, everyone has enough food, where there are sufficient resources to educate everyone, where the world is free of crime and where you have even eliminated war (because people don’t have to fight over resources anymore)? Well, one way to achieve all this it to eliminate “the unfit” – the mentally ill, the disabled, the sickly, the weak, the poor, the unintelligent… as Margaret Sanger called them “the human weeds.” In this way, population reduction inevitably leads to eugenics.

Except that it doesn’t. Population reduction only leads to eugenics if you wrongly read Darwin in the same way as Taylor and the eugenicists she criticises.

Still, as Taylor correctly points out, eugenics does entail authoritarianism. Thus, we saw the “greater good” arguments of the eugenicists lead directly to the gas chambers. Taylor is also correct that, following that horror, the eugenicists rebranded themselves and pursued a “softer” form of eugenics.

But then she goes off the rails again. Yes, figures such as Nelson Rockefeller funded “family planning” and adopted a program of population control, in developing countries especially. But, once again, “population control” and “family planning” are not synonymous with “eugenics”. Gibbering about “Big Pharma” and the Pill doesn’t help, here, either.

It’s certainly damning that, supposedly, International Planned Parenthood Federation was involved in developing China’s One Child Policy. Such an allegation certainly deserves to be explored and publicised. But that doesn’t, ipso facto, make them responsible for Xi Xinping’s genocidal policies in Xinjiang.

Things go off the rails again, now.

If we then examine the work and objectives of Bill Gates (whose father was a Director of Planned Parenthood), we can see the same Malthusian way of thinking animating his “philanthropic” work on behalf of humanity. He wants to reduce infant mortality in the developing world through vaccinations – ostensibly a noble goal – but this is also part of a deeper policy objective, which is population reduction. Gates argues that when people have a greater expectations that their children will survive to adulthood, they naturally choose to limit their family size. Similarly, the Population Council is very busy educating women in the third world – it’s a policy I applaud – but the purpose of this work is because they have noticed that educated women have fewer children. So this is the end-objective of all these policies.

So what? To drive the point home again, population control is not eugenics.

But, how does all this join up with the Covid pandemic? Put your foil hats on…

It is not a conspiracy to note that there is a group, who think of themselves as an elite, who have been practicing and perfecting techniques of mass manipulation or mass control for many decades. In a 1962 lecture given to Berkeley University California, Aldous Huxley openly admitted:

“[W]e are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy that have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude” […] Suggestion and hypnosis were possibilities because, as Huxley tells us “20% of people really can be persuaded into believing almost anything.” Pharmacological methods and mind-changing drugs were other techniques contemplated by Huxley.

One again, Taylor is misrepresenting her source. Huxley was criticising, not “openly admitting”. In the same speech, he called such a possibility “ the ultimate in malevolent revolutions”. To posit Huxley as part of some kind of world-controlling elite cabal is ridiculous beyond measure.

Now we board the last train to Crazy Town.

When we come to the global pandemic response, it is not so much a question of “how do we prove that there is a global elite that would like to control the world and cull the human population”? We know that such a group exists, we know they have established themselves in positions of significant influence and have formed a network of global institutions, ostensibly working for the public good. The real question is “how can we be sure these people are not driving the pandemic response?

The Good Sauce

In other words, I can’t prove my conspiracy theory, so it’s up to you to disprove it. This is a complete reversal of the fundamental rules of logic.

If you’re going to try and convince me that Globalist cabal is using the pandemic to reduce the global population — how, exactly, is never explained, it might be noted — you’re going to have to do better than this.

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Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade...