Empty Gestures: The Covid 19 Psyops

Joshua Stylman

How Performative Activism Enabled Mass Persecution

Reality engineering requires three components: institutional power to create the narrative, social pressure to enforce it, and the deliberate persecution of anyone who challenges either. The COVID era provided the perfect case study in how this machinery operates – and revealed how performative activism serves as its most potent enforcement mechanism.

Every major element of the official COVID narrative has been proven false: The origins of the virus, the validity of PCR tests, the suppression of early treatments, the denial of natural immunity, the so-called “safety and effectiveness” of vaccines, and the utility of masks, lockdowns, and vaccine passports. Yet those who questioned any part of it faced unprecedented ostracism and persecution.

The manufactured panic ignored fundamental reality: COVID posed minimal risk to healthy people under 70, but was significantly more dangerous to the elderly and immunocompromised. Rather than focusing resources on protecting vulnerable populations, we destroyed economies, stole childhoods, and enforced measures that made no epidemiological sense. This wasn’t just about control – it was an engineered economic coup, the largest financial consolidation of power in modern history.

While small businesses were forcibly closed, Amazon’s profits soared. As working-class neighborhoods struggled, Wall Street celebrated record gains. The laptop class posted about ‘we’re all in this together’ from their home offices while essential workers were forced into what was portrayed as dangerous conditions to deliver their groceries. The same corporations trumpeting their commitment to “equity” through DEI initiatives were destroying economic mobility for the very communities they claimed to champion.

Just months before COVID, The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. An examination of the event reveals that the priority of the exercise centered not on treatment protocols or protecting the vulnerable but rather on how information control could be used to manufacture mass compliance.

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The Profitable Performance of Power

The economic devastation fell hardest on those least able to bear it. While professionals attended Zoom meetings in their pajamas, service workers faced an impossible choice: show up to what was marketed as a deadly environment or lose their livelihoods. The data tells the story:

Black-owned businesses declined by 41% during the first few months of lockdownsLatino unemployment reached 18.9%, the highest of any demographicWomen left the workforce in unprecedented numbers, erasing decades of gainsSmall businesses, the primary path to middle-class stability in minority communities, closed at triple the rate of their corporate competitors

The financial beneficiaries were clear:

Amazon’s market value increased by $570 billionZoom’s stock rose 396%Moderna executives became billionaires overnightPfizer reported record profits of $100 billionBlackRock acquired 34% of single-family homes in major markets

During the lockdown, seemingly put in place to “protect the vulnerable”, vulnerable small businesses lost $4.6 trillion in value, with minority-owned enterprises accounting for 41% of closures despite representing only 20% of total businesses. This wasn’t just hypocrisy – it was a calculated consolidation of power under the guise of public health.

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These same corporations posting solidarity symbols were forcing their lowest-paid workers to choose between experimental injections or feeding their families. Their DEI committees issued statements about “inclusion” while they excluded anyone who questioned the narrative. They celebrated “diversity” in carefully curated public messaging while their mandates disproportionately impacted minority communities – the very people their DEI initiatives were ostensibly designed to protect.

This hypocrisy was essentially economic warfare masked by virtuous platitudes. The professional class’s performative empathy enabled the greatest upward transfer of wealth and opportunity in modern history. Their social media activism provided cover for policies that devastated the working class, particularly in minority communities. While they changed their profile pictures to signal virtue, they changed the economic landscape to enforce dependence.

The hypocrisy reached its peak during the Roe v. Wade controversy. The same voices passionately defending bodily autonomy in reproductive rights enthusiastically supported government-mandated medical procedures – often in the same social media feeds.

I saw this contradiction clearly one day and shared a meme that captured it perfectly: A woman holding a “My Body, My Choice” sign while wearing a “Vaccine Mandate Now!” t-shirt. The irony was obvious – or so I thought. But instead of engaging with the point, a friend of 20 years replied:

“The right to an abortion is at stake and unlike vaccine mandates which remain a choice (granted with heavy weight regarding employment for those who choose against)… Equating the two issues works to piss off women for sure but I don’t think does much to further your cause.”

Her response characterized vaccine mandates as merely a “choice with heavy weight” while referring to them as “my cause” – as if bodily autonomy were a partisan position rather than a universal principle. Most telling was what happened afterward: when I shared trial data and peer-reviewed studies about fertility concerns, there was no reply. The conversation simply ended. This pattern repeated itself across countless relationships – the desire to maintain a manufactured reality proved stronger than decades of friendship or even scientific evidence that might protect loved ones.

A simple observation – one that should have been common sense – was treated as ideological betrayal, even with a good friend. That was the moment I realized how deeply people had internalized the manufactured reality, where pointing out contradictions was itself a crime.

While professionals virtue signaled from home offices, essential workers faced impossible choices. Those who built careers championing marginalized communities suddenly celebrated stripping basic rights from their neighbors. It was deeply enlightening to observe those who said they were passionate about fighting discrimination celebrating people losing their jobs for making personal medical choices. Their empathy extended exactly as far as their pharmaceutical stock portfolios and/or unwavering faith in government authority – marching against discrimination until it became inconvenient for their tribal interests, rallying against medical coercion until they could enforce it themselves.

The Manufacturing of Hatred

The demonization of the non-compliant was systematic and crossed into territory that would be considered hate speech if directed at any other group. Major media outlets competed to express the most vitriolic condemnation of the unvaccinated. The New York Times ran headlines like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated, while The Washington Post declared that “remaining unvaccinated in public should be considered as bad as drunk driving.”

This wasn’t just media rhetoric – it directly programmed public perception and normalized extreme views. A January 2022 Rasmussen poll revealed that nearly half of Democratic voters supported not just fining the unvaccinated, but confining them to their homes, sending them to quarantine camps, and even taking their children. Public health officials cultivated and then amplified this hostility, speaking of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” creating a narrative of blame that would be used to justify discrimination at a scale unprecedented in modern America.

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These admissions are accelerating. CDC Director Walensky now acknowledges they were “too late” to recognize natural immunity. FDA officials admit myocarditis risks were known earlier than disclosed. Each revelation confirms not just what critics warned about, but what the data had shown from the beginning.

Most telling of all, Dr. Deborah Birx, former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator who was one of the chief architects of America’s COVID policies, finally admitted last week: “What we got wrong in public health is we didn’t explain that COVID vaccines were nothing like childhood vaccines… That is not what the COVID vaccine was designed to do. It wasn’t designed against infection.”

President Biden: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations”CDC Director Walensky: “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don’t get sick”

A forensic analysis of Pfizer’s trial data reveals troubling manipulation. A September 2023 preprint paper titled “Forensic Analysis of the 38 Subject Deaths in the 6-Month Interim Report of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trial” documented a subject who was originally in the placebo group but received a Moderna shot on December 23, 2020. This subject was subsequently hospitalized with COVID on December 31, died on January 11, 2021, and was still classified as an ‘unvaccinated death’ despite having received an mRNA vaccine. This deliberate misclassification skewed mortality data in favor of vaccination. Without this manipulation, the data would have shown the vaccinated were 31% more likely to die.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. According to Pfizer’s Post-Marketing Experience Report, released under FOIA, 42,086 case reports of adverse effects were submitted in just the first 90 days after release, including 1,223 deaths. Despite thes

Beyond ineffectiveness, safety concerns mounted. A February 2023 peer-reviewed study in the European Heart Journal evaluated 8.9 million young adults from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, finding that “booster dose is associated with increased myocarditis risk in adolescents and young adults.” Among males, a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine was associated with an “increased incidence rate of myocarditis” within 28 days of inoculation. Studies from Thailand and Switzerland showed similar cardiovascular effects. In a sane actives reached widadverse reactions to the COVID vaccines (including 38,398 deaths) and it’s ignored. The media treats one as a crisis and the other as a conspiracy theory.

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The Experiment Without Consent

Perhaps most chilling is the complete absence of informed consent. The crisis revealed how quickly we abandoned our most sacred protections. The First Amendment wasn’t just challenged – it was systematically dismantled. Free speech, designed to protect the flow of information and allow people to hear all sides, was replaced with coordinated censorship. The same voices who once defended “speaking truth to power” now demanded power to silence dissent.

These actions violated not just ethics, but the foundational principles established after World War II to prevent exactly this kind of coercion. The very protections created to prevent medical experimentation without consent were themselves abused.

The public was never told they were participating in what amounts to the largest medical experiment in human history. The formulation that received FDA approval was never actually administered – a bait-and-switch that would be criminal in any other context. We still lack proper testing data, with the general population serving as unwitting test subjects.

The absence of informed consent was particularly egregious for pregnant women and those of childbearing age. Pfizer’s own December 2020 documents, published by the UK government, recommended against administering these shots to pregnant and breastfeeding women. Their trial informed consent documents explicitly stated:

Source: Pfizer Trial Documents, Page 12

Yet public health officials aggressively promoted these products to pregnant women and young girls without disclosing these warnings.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) rapidly reversed decades of cautious protocol by recommending these products for pregnant women in July 2021, despite the absence of completed clinical trials in this population. This unprecedented departure from established safety procedures placed an entire generation of mothers and their unborn children in an uncontrolled experiment.

Those who raised concerns about giving experimental drugs to expecting mothers were branded as dangerous misinformation spreaders. Most shocking of all, the “studies” used to justify safety in pregnancy weren’t conducted on pregnant women at all – they were only done on mice.

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VAERS reports of miscarriages and stillbirths increased by 450% in 2022 compared to the previous decade’s baseline. While similar vaccines showed no such signal, authorities dismissed these reports without investigation.

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While the CDC and public health officials kept assuring the public that the mRNA stayed isolated to the injection site, Moderna’s pitch to Wall Street told a very different story. In a presentation to investors (later removed from their website but archived via the Wayback Machine), Moderna openly boasted about their technology’s ability to deliver mRNA to bone marrow, leading to “HSPC transfection and long-term modulation of all hematopoietic lineages.” Their slides proudly displayed how different LNP (lipid nanoparticle) formulations and repeat dosing could “enhance transfection” across various systems, including bone marrow and human HSPCs (hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells) in “humanized-mouse model systems.”

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Via https://stylman.substack.com/p/empty-gestures