Memes by Themes #16: The COVID Big Lies

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of men who can fabricate it.”
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
—Søren Kierkegaard

“The longer you believe in the con, the harder it is to admit you’ve been scammed.”
—Elizabeth Winkler

Today, March 11, 2025, marks the five-year anniversary of the WHO’s declaration of a COVID-19 pandemic—and voìla, the world was automagically transformed into a military-intelligence–operation-coordinated global totalitarian prison for The Greater Good! Wheeee!

The CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline states that on this date:

“After more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic.”

Curiously, this is what they list for March 12, 2020:

“FDA no longer requires CDC to perform confirmatory testing for a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.”

Isn’t it amusing how they don’t even try to hide it? They brag about it. Rub it in our faces to humiliate us.

What Theodore Dalrymple says of communist propaganda applies equally to COVID propaganda:

“The purpose … was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.

“A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”

Next, the COVID Big Liars rolled out the blood-red carpet for what Mike Yeadon called “the central operational deceit” (PCR test) and “central conceptual deceit” (asymptomatic transmission) in his April 10, 2022, report The Covid Lies.

In a February 21, 2025, phone conversation, my rabble-rousing rebel sister Apocaloptimist Vera Sharav told me:

“You cannot trust anything they tell you, that government tells you. And once you know that, you’re okay, but as long as you listen at all, you’re going to be misled. That’s how it is.”

Mistakes Were NOT Made (Video: Vera Sharav)

This is why, from the beginning of my Substack, I have focused on revealing the magician’s tricks used in the dark arts of propaganda, public relations, stagecraft, menticide, consent-manufacturing, coercion, psychological manipulation, and mass persuasion.

When I published my second essay in May 2021, COVID IS OVER! … If You Want It, I was trying to show people COVID is a mind trick, a rebranding campaign, a mass delusion devised by behavioral psychologists and propagated by the Biggest Liars in history.

There Was No Pandemic

All people need to do to become the free, sovereign beings they truly are is to tear off their cognitive blindfolds—but they have to know the blindfolds exist in the first place.

That’s what I’ve been trying … and trying … and trying to show them, but it’s a nigh-impossible task when the belligerently bamboozled think reality is the movie playing inside the blindfold and that anyone who suggests there is a reality beyond that projection is a conspiracy-spouting–right-wing-extremist–anti-vaxxer–Nazi.

Sigh.

As Gustave Le Bon so succinctly reminds us in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind:

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

This is the power of the Big Lie meets repetition meets a digitally ubiquitous programming apparatus that would have given Bernays the vapors.

The American Psychological Society defines the Big Lie as:

“a propaganda device in which a false statement of extreme magnitude is constantly repeated to persuade the public. The assumption is that a big lie is less likely to be challenged than a lesser one because people will assume that evidence exists to support a statement of such magnitude.”

And now, I’ll turn the floor over to several master propagandists and their analysts on the technique of the Big Lie before segueing to the 270-ton memealanche (there are a lot of COVID Big Lies, making this Memes by Themes appropriately monumental for the five-year anniversary of the Big Lie):

“All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kämpf

“One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”
—Joseph Goebbels, “Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik” (“Churchill’s Lie Factory”), Die Zeit ohne Beispiel, January 12, 1941

“[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
—Walter C. Langer, circa 1943 report on Hitler’s psychological profile for the United States Office of Strategic Services; later published in The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1972)

“To tell the truth is a petty bourgeois habit, whereas for us to lie is justified by our objectives.”
—Vladimir Lenin

“Thanks to printing and the press, we have today means of intellectual propaganda that the ancients did not imagine. Without going to converse in the shops and preach in the squares, we send the radiations of our thoughts directly in the hearts of men of good will.”
—Theophile Thore, Communist pioneer at his 1840 trial, cited by Russell Blaylock in Managed Truth: The Great Danger to Our Republic

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
—Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“It was called ‘the Big Lie’ technique.… Just sound like you know what you’re talking about—as if you’re reciting facts. Talk very fast. Weave your lies … and repeat your assertions over and over again. Those who want an excuse to hate or blame—those with big but weak egos—will leap at a simple, neat explanation for the way the world is. Those types will never call you on the facts.”
—David Brin, The Postman

“Repetition is important, because the Big Lie works through indoctrination. The Big Lie then becomes its own evidence base—if it is repeated enough, people believe it, and the very repetition almost tautologically becomes the support for the Lie.… Hear something enough it becomes truth. People assume there is an evidence base when the lie is big (it’s like a blind spot).… [People also fail to realize] that there are people in our midst that lack empathy, have no care for the common good, are grandiose, arrogant, and willing to exploit and manipulate people for solely their own egocentric needs.… [Instead] a sort of halo effect imbues leaders with presumed expertise and power—when that is not at all the case (most if not all megalomaniacal leaders, despots, tyrants, oligarchs share narcissism/psychopathy as a trait).”
—Dr. Ramani Durvasula

“If the main pillar of the [totalitarian] system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why [the truth] must be suppressed more severely than anything else.”
—Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

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