Why do celebrity “truthers” cherry-pick truth from the branches while turning a blind eye to the roots?

Where are the spokespeople of “truth” when it comes to derailing the juggernaut of assumptions that keeps the story of pandemics rolling along?

How have all the best-selling authors of books on the subject of the alleged COVID-19 pandemic, such as Laura Dodsworth and Naomi Wolf, managed for three years to avoid any serious scrutiny of the most crucial anti-scientific components that made the whole crime possible?

The same question should be asked of big name personalities such as Robert Kennedy Jr and Del Bigtree, along with doctors and scientists like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone and Joseph Mercola. That’s not to disparage all the good work they have been doing, but simply to highlight the important things they have not been saying.

After all, these are the people who seem to have become the de-facto leaders of the “truth movement,” even while the most fundamental truths lie wilfully neglected on the outskirts of their peripheral vision.

You might hear them use words like “flawed” or “unreliable” to describe the PCR test, which in reality was never designed to do the job it’s being used for and thus, by definition, is neither flawed nor unreliable but diagnostically useless.

And they stubbornly refuse to confront the even sticker question of the elusive SARS-CoV-2 virus, the isolation of which (in any meaningful sense of the word) has yet to be proved.

Without the latter, there is nothing for the former to work with – apart from a fictional genetic sequence simulated inside a computer – which makes any result, no matter how it is obtained, inherently meaningless. So it’s not exactly a minor issue, is it?

On the other hand, if your influencer status depends on promoting the popular view that “the global COVID-19 pandemic” is an actual fact that was caused by a new virus called SARS-CoV-2, which is also an actual fact – and that those facts were then “seized upon” and opportunistically used to forward an agenda – then it’s in your best interests to keep the blinkers firmly on.

Otherwise you might be forced to admit that what you accepted as facts were really only assumptions. And if you were to dwell too long on that unwelcome fact, it might cause you to doubt your whole belief system.

And if that were to ever happen, your loyal audience (who adhere to the same faith) might begin to doubt you.

And your publishers, who need to think about their market, might see you as a risk.

And then you could lose the endorsements of all those prominent people with a stake in your success, and pretty soon you’d be waving goodbye to the middle-of-the-road respectability you worked so hard to secure.

God forbid, you might end up relegated to the lunatic fringes where people get banned for daring to point out the obvious. For it is they who are the real threat because they are the ones who refuse to compromise. They have one unwavering aim that will never be watered down: to expose the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

And that is a place where our friends, the spokespeople of “truth” have so far feared to tread.

However, there is one thing you can be sure of: when it no longer threatens their bottom line, and the popular mood (which is governed by the hive mind) becomes more amenable to the idea, they will slowly begin to extend the outer limits of their “truth” enclosures to embrace what they formerly eschewed.

At that point, the intellectual myopia that has inflicted them for so long will be miraculously cured overnight. And leveraging all the pulling power of their popular platforms, the untouchable truth that they have suddenly stopped ignoring will be proudly announced as though it is breaking news.

“SCOOP!” they will cry to their hundreds of thousands of readers, viewers and followers, who will largely believe that it is.

Because, of course, it should never be underestimated how many of the “awakened” still need thought leaders and influencers to tell them what to think — and when to start thinking it.

And that is the trouble with Truth Leaders. While they lead under the banner of truth, they are led less by truth themselves than by the shifting demands of pragmatism. The truths they disseminate only go so far as their audiences are ready to stomach, or their sponsors are ready to permit, or their own educated assumptions are ready to concede. So in this sense they are no more virtuous than their mainstream rivals, because like them, they are engaging in the practice of promotion and suppression.

They may not suppress as much, and it may ‘only’ be suppression by omission, but by omitting the core truth about virology, they are equally guilty of pandering to a false belief system rather than challenging it. They are equally guilty of propping up a theory that was discredited in the 19th century but institutionally perpetuated for ideological and very profitable reasons.

And they are equally guilty of prolonging the heinous lie of pandemics, which will be played out again and again just as long as the whole unyielding truth is only semi-seen by people who shout “truth” the loudest.

The dam will break eventually, but maybe not for a while yet. The whole painful pantomime will have to run its course first: singing from the same hymn-sheet, the half-truthers in perfect harmony with the wholesale liars. Because, let’s face it, until the front end and back end of the pantomime horse go their separate ways, the Hollywood movie script about lab leaks is a way more tantalising draw than scientific reality.

(First published, June 21st 2022. Updated, 26th March 2023.)