The Branch COVIDians Cometh: The Psychology Behind Mass COVID Hysteria
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Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

There are many reasons for the continuing COVID-19 hysteria. There are politicians who use it to leverage power; in fact, it helped defeat a sitting president last year. Pharmaceutical companies are making billions off “vaccines,” and Amazon and other Death Star retailers can ever rake in copious cash if small-business competition is repeatedly locked down. But the more fascinating matter is why countless millions of people worldwide still, like a hive mind, obediently perform COVID Ritual over a disease that mortally threatens relatively few and is entirely treatable.

Dr. Robert Malone, a co-inventor of mRNA vaccines, has been warning against COVID hysteria and tweeted out a video interview Monday that he believes answers this question. The interviewee is Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. Desmet doesn’t appear a typical social scientist. Avoiding psycho-babble, he introduces viewers to the phenomenon of “mass formation” and explains how masses worldwide have become hypnotized Branch COVIDians.

Interviewed on the Pandemic Podcast by host Dan Astin-Gregory, Professor Desmet explained that along with his psychology qualifications, he’s also a statistician and initially approached the China virus situation as one. He quickly realized that the “pandemic” was overblown; for example, he states that while health authorities had predicted 80,000 COVID deaths in Sweden by last May without a lockdown, the nation resisted that measure but nonetheless recorded only 6,000 such deaths.

But then Desmet noticed something odd: Despite health authorities’ continual prediction- and prescription-related failures, they insisted on “doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result,” as the famous definition of insanity goes. Another example of absurdity was that “from the beginning, institutions like the United Nations actually warned us that probably more people would die as a result of starvation, in developing countries, because of the lockdowns, than the number of victims the coronavirus could ever claim, even if there were no measures taken at all against the virus — which meant as much as: the ‘remedy’ was far worse than the actual disease,” he told host Astin-Gregory. “And still, nobody seemed to notice this. Everybody seemed to be so focused only on the coronavirus victims that people continued to be willing to buy into the story.”  

This was when Desmet realized that this irrationality meant something psychological was at work, and he donned his social-scientist hat.

After some time — and the professor said he was surprised it took so long — he realized that the China virus narrative’s preposterousness was irrelevant because people were in the grip of the aforementioned phenomenon: mass formation.

This “is a sort of hypnosis,” he explained as a July 30 guest of the Corona Investigative Committee (CCC). “What happens is that at that moment, when people experience mental intoxication, it doesn’t matter anymore whether the narrative is correct or wrong, even blatantly wrong. What matters is that it leads up to this mental intoxication.”

Mass formation’s manifestation requires four preconditions:

  • There must be many socially isolated people, people lacking social bonds. In our atomized, balkanized society with its rampant family breakdown, this has long been a problem. China virus lockdowns only exacerbated it.
  • There must be many people experiencing a lack of meaning in life. With the West’s godlessness and related nihilism, this is another serious problem.
  • There must be much “free-floating anxiety.” This is anxiety not associated with a specific idea, issue, or entity.  Unlike feeling anxious because a lion is close by, to use Desmet’s example, free-floating anxiety’s cause is unknown to those experiencing it.
  • There must be great free-floating psychological discontent; i.e., anger and frustration.

Free-floating anxiety “is the most painful psychological phenomenon someone can experience,” Desmet then explained to the CCC. “It leads up to panic attacks, to all kinds of extremely painful psychological experiences,” he elaborated.  

What people then want is something to associate their anxiety with, to explain its existence. “And now, if this free-floating anxiety is highly present in a population, and the media provide a narrative which indicates an object of anxiety, and at the same time describe a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety, then all the anxiety connects to this object and people are willing to follow the strategy to deal with this object, no matter what the cost is,” Desmet further explained.

He also pointed out, in the Pandemic Podcast interview, that the China virus narrative and its “remedies” provide socially isolated people a cause they can commonly embrace and achieve solidarity through. They become one, more cohesive group partially defined by, and identifiable by way of, their unique rituals; in the COVID case, these would include mask-wearing, social distancing, getting the genetic-therapy agents (a.k.a. “vaccines”) and often advertising their jabbed status, and vaccination cards.

In fact, Professor Desmet points out, the more ridiculous the rituals, the better, as they add to the group’s uniqueness and thus distinguish it (video below).

Desmet’s thesis makes sense and explains much. It sheds further light on, for example, why Branch COVIDians shower such hatred upon those rejecting their prescriptions: We threaten an illusion that is satisfying their deep psychological and spiritual needs.

As for Dr. Malone, he also tweeted out what he considers valuable insight from YouTube commenter “Mordock Shram,” who identifies three groups “immune” from the mass formation:

Those who’ve been abused and are suspicious of manipulation attempts.

Those with religious, spiritual belief in a creator, and are aware of evil.

Those who have been scapegoats in their family, and are independent, or have had a hard life and so have life sense.

“And I knew it [the COVID narrative] was a lie from the first moment,” Shram then wrote. “I felt the evil.”

I did, too.

Professor Desmet believes that the best way to combat Branch COVIDian tyranny is to “continue to speak out.” Nonetheless, the underlying problems — social isolation, sense of meaninglessness, and the anxiety and anger — must be addressed. Otherwise, even “if we would succeed in waking up the masses now, they would fall prey to a different story in a few years,” he warned the CCC. “And they would be hypnotized again.”

Yet that “religious” people generally resist Branch COVIDianism, as Shram mentioned, gets at a significant point. What we’re observing in the China virus irrationality was explained well by one of Desmet’s late countrymen, playwright and poet Émile Cammaerts. “When people cease believing in God, it’s not that they start to believe in nothing,” he noted (I’m paraphrasing). “It’s that they’ll believe in anything.” If people had God, the real one, they wouldn’t have to conjure up false ones.

They wouldn’t need their new religion — with a virus as devil and Anthony Fauci as savior — that they’re now trying to impose, by the sword, on our whole civilization.  

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