The following 800-word essay, by The Cinephobe of Canada, engages with the question of “immunity” from the Corona-Panic in 2020. It is, at core, a personal essay on why one man feels he himself was “immune.” It is not necessarily meant to propose universalizable standards. I believe The Cinephobe’s reflections are of value in the ongoing question of the Panic’s origins. This essay is a little light is generalizable to some portion of the Anti-Panic side, though I don’t know how large a portion.
The Cinephobe (cinephobia-radio.com) originally published this as a cumbersome series of Tweets (a “Tweet thread”) in January 2023. The contents were (necessarily) somewhat distorted by that medium, as with use of abbreviations and other distortions.
I discovered this last week, and have decided to adapt it for this venue, a more coherent, traditional essay form. This version includes a degree of editing for clarity and flow, and formatting, by me. The title is also mine. Despite these adaptations, the contents are still entirely The Cinephobe’s and not my own. (Note, The Cinephobe also uses the word “Corona-Panic,” as I usually do.)
Following the essay is commentary from me again on the general lessons from The Cinephobe’s essay.
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On immunity from the Corona-Panic
by The Cinephobe of Canada,
January 2023
(edited and adapted by E. H. Hail,
March 2023)
Nearly every single facet of the Corona-Panic was misrepresented by Pharma, regulators, public health, governments, and the media. The reasons for this are myriad and far more complex than many understand, even in the dissident circles.
This remains hard to accept for many, especially so for individuals who lack the ability to critically evaluate mainstream media talking-points, and especially so for those in a moronic subclass who see it as a moral duty to shame, cancel, smear, attack, and ridicule any who do.
Of course, there are excitable people, even the proverbial Calgary Soccer Mom, who believe that the jabs are a deliberate NWO depopulation experiment, that the huckster and shyster Klaus Schwab is running the world, that all liberals are pedophiles who subsist on the blood of babies. There are even some super-smarty people like Whitney Webb fuelling these narratives, with speculative reasoning built upon speculative reasoning. (Incidentally, while Whitney Webb is a brilliant investigative journalist, I do dispute a variety of her deductions.)
Even within the more sensible circles of dissidents, people are often not even close to understanding the complex interactions that produced the pervasive, systemic, and distorted “Corona” narratives. The reason for that is that many of the notable dissidents were “mainstream guys” prior to Corona-Panic, people who believed in the integrity of the media and the medical establishment (as hard as that is for me to believe). They have had a lot of catching up to do.
Like all of you, the Corona-Panic blindsided me because I had virtually no understanding of immunology, epidemiology, vaccinology, virology — basically all the “ologies” one needed in order to have any sensible perspective on the Corona-Panic. What I did (and do) possess, however, is a lifelong obsessive interest in mainstream media propaganda, and in all the complex mechanisms of how the media promotes talking points that favour the corporate establishment.
My interest in media propaganda began in the Seventies. My high-school independent study project was titled, “The Dangers of Television.” It compared Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Unlike many of the new red-pilled pundits out there, who have only realized well into adulthood that the media was lying to them, this is a perspective I’ve had for many decades. It is why I called “Bulls**t!” on the Corona-Panic long before many did.
I also have a background in alternative medicine, which provided me a real-life case study of how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates the medical establishment. The doctor whom the College of Physicians sent to monitor our procedures for prescribing medical cannabis authorizations — for patients to grow their own medicine — admitted that all the onerous guidelines that physicians receive relating to medical cannabis were essentially fear-mongering designed to discourage doctors from prescribing medical cannabis, and that this messaging was drafted by a lobby-group funded by the pharmaceutical industry. The investigating doctor in question knew absolutely nothing about cannabis.
In my line of work, I have often had to call patients’ physicians to request medical records. It’s astonishing to me how clueless many of physicians can be, how easily they’ve been manipulated by the Big Pharma PR, how utterly ignorant they are on the science of medical cannabis, being literally unaware of landmark studies that have dramatically shaped scientific understanding of cannabis-as-medicine. Unlike many of the morons who attacked me, I don’t put doctors on a pedestal. In fact, I have a very low view on the majority of them.
I suppose with this particular background, I had a head start on gaining a critical view of all the Pharma PR, the puppeteered talking points rolled out to prop up the increasingly flimsy, absurd, and contradictory Corona narratives. I boldly predicted that every single point of criticism I had (and for which I was attacked by the morons) would eventually be confirmed in the mainstream media. And this has already happened. It’s just that there’s so much noise out there, battling against a never-ending onslaught of Pharma PR or puppeteered media assaults, many have not paid attention.
I’d like apologies from all the morons who attacked me. But more important, I want you to reach out to me and try to understand how and why I knew the Corona-Panic was all bulls**t from “almost” Day One. Of course, as I admitted at the start, I was caught off-guard due to my ignorance of the science of virology, etc. I have endeavoured to correct that, but it’s only made matters worse, because the corporate narrative is even more ludicrous and contradictory and insane than I ever suspected it would be.
[End of essay by The Cinephobe.]
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Thoughts on The Cinephobe’s essay
In a single word, The Cinephobe seems to identify his own immunity from the Panic as coming from being a “dissident.” He uses the word “dissident” three times in the short essay, each time positively. Other times, he makes implicit-but-still-positive reference to being a “dissident.” He also uses the term “mainstream guys” derisively.
By use of this word “dissident,” I don’t think that The Cinephobe means that he seeks to identify what the “mainstream” is thinking and then always and reflexively takes the opposite view, no matter what. That would be a tiring, pigheaded contrarianism. It would be a cheapened and debased version of “dissident,” and one needs to stretch the term a little to make it encompass freefloating ideological-contrarianism. I don’t know what The Cinephobe has in mind, exactly, when he speaks of “dissidents,” but it’s not that.
The Cinephobe seems to identify amorphous, large, but lesser-grounded circle(s) of “dissidents” as having either embraced the Panic themselves, or as having gone into unproductive directions. The latter is the easily parodied things like NWO microchip conspiracies, satanic cabals, a vaccine-driven “depopulation” plot lifted from a second-rate villain from a James Bond knockoff.
The Cinephobe’s anti-Panic attitude and commitments, which formed early on, stood upon two planks: “media studies” and “alternative medicine.”
Decades of experience with “media studies” is what he points to first. That is the field founded by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian intellectual who prophesied the kinds of harmful effects of “the media” which we now accept as normal.
Advocacy of marijuana use (for its supposed medicinal properties) and other involvement in alternative-medicine is the second basis of The Cinephobe’s opposition to the Corona-Panic, in his self-appraisal. His derisive use of the word “Pharma,” repeatedly, bears this out.
Among other Anti-Panic hardliners you will often find neither of these specific motivating factors. The Cinephobe’s own experience is not universalizable, but is interesting asa case study. The question of what helped immunity from the Corona-Panic will continue.
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The Corona-Panic of 2020-2022 was primarily a social phenomenon. Or, if you prefer, a social-cultural-political-technological-ideological-religious phenomenon. The structural “social” causes of the Panic are, I believe, still with us. We do not yet understand what’s going on. The implication is that future “Panics” of similar kind are possible. The question “What caused some people to be immune from the Corona-Panic,” therefore, remains a relevant Corona-Question even now as other distractions soak up attention.
A word on “other distractions”: One might be so bold as to say that small-scale “CoronaPanic-like events” are happening regularly now. If so, that raises the stakes on understanding the mechanisms ar work, and also the “natural immunity” that exists, as with the Corona-Panic. (Tangentially, is the Corona-Panic best understood as one single thing, or as a series of interconnected-but-lesser-scale panics that were strung together by a strong framing device and central narrative?).
One reason I was intrigued by The Cinephobe of Canada (born circa-early-1960s) is that he remains outraged at the Corona-Panic even in 2023. This in itself seems to prove his bona-fide status as a principled Anti-Panicker. A dilettante would have been long since running after something else by 2023. I don’t know if he had the intention of assessing the origins of his own immunity from the Panic when he began writing what I publish here, but that’s the way it turned out.
The other thing that intrigued me about The Cinephobe’s essay is that his self-identified reasons for immunity from the Panic do not share much in common with my own, the path(s) by which I arrived at Anti-Panic positions beginning in mid-March 2020.
That the Anti-Panic coalition that emerged in spring 2020 had diffuse origins is an observation made often and early. Many were saying as much already by April 2020 (which was early into the CoronaPanic-as-historical-process), and it was a humbling sight to see at the time, for Anti-Panickers saw such disaster ahead that any and all were welcome as allies. In the heated emotion of the time, with its and war-propaganda-like chaos and irrational exuberance by the Pro-Panic side, no one was quite sure what was going on but some people did seem “immune,” but no single common denominator could be identified. In other words, the types who ended up in the Anti-Panic coalition came from all over the place. This held throughout 2020 and 2021, and into the Panic’s endgame stage in early 2022.
There are a lot more thoughts and some very good ideas I have heard over the past year or two, but didn’t have the time to record in a form like this. There is, anyway, no single answer to the twin questions of what caused some people to aggressively embrace the Panic and others to oppose it.
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Hail To You 
I just saw your new post, Mr. Hail, and am looking forward to reading. Before that, still, I want to commend you for doing the yeoman’s work of turning a series of tweets – a more retarded way to communicate has not been invented yet – into your post.
I believe your having done this will be helpful for anyone, on ANY side of the discussion.
Twitter does something to the brains of users, to their thought-processes. This has been much commented on and even studied neurochemically.
I don’t have proper words to describe it. One effect, though, is it undermines any attempt at sincere, complex argument.
It rewards extremism, attention-seeking, alarmism, and wackos. It also rewards dumbed-down and flashy info-gruel. All the above contributed directly to the Panic’s formation process and consolidation processes in 2020, and the drumbeats that kept it up for two dreary years.
The Cinephobe mentions Marshall McLuhan directly as one of the intellectual bases of his own ability to identify the Panic for what it was in 2020. With Twitter and other social media, I can’t help but think of the famous McLuhan coinage, “The medium is the message.”
You are correct in that Twitter (and likely other social media) “does something to the brains of users”. A great deal of government money and study has gone into how best to speak to the unconscious in humans. For those who can look at posts on Twitter objectively, observing subjects and trends and accounts, it’s a bit like a science experiment so to speak.
I fully believe that 95% of Twitter accounts are agents of some sort. There are the usual political pundits (and adjacent accounts) who are meant to keep the outrage stirred constantly by outright lying, taking subjects out of context, keeping a complex subject simplified, etc. There are social type of accounts that are meant to keep stirring division between white and black, between men and women, etc. There are also “schizo posts” which was born out of 4Chan (another spook op) where posts use RageComic art and memes.
Also, I would say close to 100% of videos and photos are completely fake. The technology to create photos of people who do not exist and videos that look like real life are in use now and have been for some time. I’ve made a collection of links to company sites that advertise their ability to do this for advertising and Hollywood and video game makers. I also use applications for reverse image lookup and apps for determing the authenticity of photos. Were it not so powerful (and that power being used for evil), the whole thing is incredibly fascinating.
See my reply below.
Dear Mr. Hail, thank you for posting this. I enjoy the way you examine other’s work. I’ll add my $.02. My husband and I never believed what we were being told from the beginning.
In January, 2020, my son (15 y.o. at the time), came downstairs in a bit of a panic and asked me if we were going to get this new disease that’s appeared in China. As I hadn’t heard about this, I was puzzled and so the two of us opened my laptop and did a search. The first thing I saw was a headline claiming that China was rapidly building a hospital(s?) and it included a video of a bunch of backhoes doing nothing but spinning around. Since my son knows that I am a “conspiracy theorist” from many years ago, I was able to say to him, “This is nonsense. First, notice this equipment is not doing anything, and second, you cannot build a hospital in less than two weeks.” So at this point I was hoping that this was some new psyop for the Chinese and that it wouldn’t be coming here. But I knew better – it was coming here. What I didn’t know and would never have anticipated is how “they” shut down the world.
As for why some could see it and others could not, I’ve wondered that so often. My husband and I tend to have an innate distrust of power and authority and that may play a role. For myself, about twenty years ago, I started looking in to the stories we are told about history and current events. I am not the people you describe in your third paragraph. Those people are limited thinkers. The problem is they taint subjects we should all be putting forth more skepticism towards and thereby keeping everyone from delving further.
This is meant to reference The Cinephobe’s third paragraph, which starts with: “Of course, there are excitable people, …” (though, in one sense it is ‘mine,’ in that I organized thw warm-clay that was The Cinephobe’s Tweet-thread into paragraphs and other adaptations).
See below for some thoughts on that very-early-stage of the Panic in January-2020 and a possible motivation why China might “do a psyop” at that moment.
Last post and I’ll stop cluttering up your comments! 🙂
I wonder if you’ve seen this Twitter account? She’s been studying the beginnings of the panic and it seems that NYC is ground zero with surrounding curious data.
Also, this is interesting reading:
https://pandauncut.substack.com/p/were-the-unprecedented-excess-deaths
I was not familiar with Wood House (@WoodHouse7), who otherwise goes by Jessica Hockett, PhD (born ca. 1976, origins in Chicago area, Methodist family connections, grandfather a pioneering TV newsman in Chicago).
I see that Jesssica Hockett argues for most of the key Anti-Panic positions, in a way people were doing in 2020 itself more actively, still plugging away at the data. People were stigmatized and banned in 2020 and 2021 for making these same points, but she is now in the clear. It’s hard to say what the “center of opinion” is, today, on these things.
It seems Dr Hockett began on Twitter in 2020, then began writing in article form (Substack) in earnest in November 2021. Now she has these kinds of analyses coming out at a rate of several per month. In 2022 she was made a regular by the Brownstone Institute.
great analysis and reflection. it’s important to look back and try to understand what happened and why.
Thanks, Roman.
gewn99 wrote in a comment above:
In the mid-2010s, an old academic phrase “the Attention Economy” received renewed interest, starting with the work of Dr Matthew Crawford who wrote and spoke on it.
By the mid-2010s, Big Tech and Big Money interests (and “Big Influence”) had begun to compete for your attention as an an end, rather than as a means to your money directly. The way this process worked went towards ways unprecedented in human history.
That shift, I believe, was a cornerstone of the Corona-Panic, which came after the process had been simmering for a number of years and had penetrated most of society and culture, and changed the way people interacted with “information.”
Left-wing critics can and sometimes do call this a flaw of capitalism, but in fact most of the Left is also addicted to this new model of life and thought. If they focus on the Big Money interests at the one end of it, a principled Leftist could still have a good critique (if maybe an incomplete one), but I have very seldom heard such a case made. One reason for this is all those Big Tech etc. new sources of influence are on the Left, usually ovevrtly so, sometimes ostentatiously so.
— Thoughts on the early-stage “psyop” possibility and what may have motivated it —
gwen99, writing above, said:
A lesson Westerners have to re-learn every generation, it seems, when dealing with “the East,” is this:
This kind of statement is so common as to be a cliche in inter-cultural observations. You hear new people making it all the time, after a figuring-it-out process or some period of frustration or “culture-shock” (as Westerners often believe everyone is like them), often coming out sounding like 19th-century observers of China etc.
We will recall that Hong Kong was, in 2019, China’s biggest headache. PRC-China had decided to swallow Hong Kong, suffocate-out its government, and end the little people’s aspirations for continued defacto internal-affairs independence. Huge crowds of anti-PRC-China activists successfully created a mass-movement. The biggest crowds ever seen in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was in state of postmodern insurrection: symbolic, livestreamed, embarrassing on info-front; never a threat in hard-power security terms as such, but definitely a threat in soft-power terms. (The biggest acts of violence were when undercover PRC agents roughed-up some protest ringleaders, or when protest groups discovered what they claimed was undercover agent and manhandled him and ran him off, but neither was with armed force or deaths).
I cannot now remember if, in January 2020 (already), I associated the “Mysterious New Virus” line with China’s “Hong Kong problem.” When the Mysterious New Virus problem grew into the disastrous and global-scale Corona-Panic, with its war-like losses to the entire West, the Hong Kong Problem was successfully suppressed.
Today we hear nothing out of Hong Kong, presumably everyone there now knows any independence activists get ‘disappeared,’ and the usual Chinese practice of dealing with subjects is in effect. The Corona-Panic play was so successful, though, that goals perhaps changed, and the small Hong Kong problem receded fast in their strategic thinking into a possible gambit against their regional and global rivals. Soon, though, the Panic far outgrew even China and became something else.