A few weeks back, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Bill Gates said some surprising things. In the course of a 56-minute panel discussion the vaccine-pusher extraordinaire admitted (starting at the 18:22 mark) that the Covid vaccines do not block infection and that the duration of whatever protection they bring to the table is extremely short.
He later talked (starting at 51:00 mark) of the absurdity of implementing any Covid passport program—and one can logically deduce any other measure to segregate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated—when the injections have shown no ability to do the least that one should expect from a vaccine: prevent infection and transmission.
These admissions violently kick the stool out from under the arguments made in favor of the more assaultive and damaging Covid “containment measures” taken in the past two years, many of which are still being pursued with pitiless vigor by public officials, CEOs, and educational “leaders” all around the world.
It’s a nice thought. But I don’t believe it to be the case.
No. Bill was simply engaging in one of the more tried-and-true techniques of elite information management, the limited hangout, or what I prefer to call a drive to “save the frame” of an argument that is quickly taking on water.
Since Bill and many of the people he has paired up with to force the experimental and often harmful vaccines upon the world effectively own or have donated untold amounts of money to many of the world’s more important media outlets, he knew beforehand that he did not have to worry much about his words being widely circulated.
And so it was. Only relatively small independent news gatherers took any note of what he said.
So who was he addressing his words to and why?
He was speaking to the fellow true believers and providing them with a rhetorical model for handling the loss of faith some among their ranks are having in the face of the vaccines’ abject failure.
The key to understanding the frame game here is the clause Gates uttered right before the “but” with which he introduced his truthful words about the “vaccines” pitiful infection-blocking capabilities and short duration of effectiveness: “The vaccines have saved millions of lives.”
Those familiar with the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, or the activities of pollster and so-called political wordsmith Frank Luntz, will know what I’m talking about.
What these two men have in common—despite their divergent political allegiances—is their belief in the extraordinary power of rhetorical framing; that is, the tendency of the human brain to subordinate the careful analysis of empirically proven details to the embrace of an overarching cognitive metaphor that appeals to their deeper, if often unstated, cultural and emotional values.
The goal here— as it was in the case of Gates at Davos—is to preserve, in the face of abundant empirical evidence to the contrary, the frame that presents the forced administration of vaccines as the great slayer of the pandemic and gifter of our vanquished freedoms, and to turn that suggestion into an established fact through constant repetition.
But, of course, neither Gates’s claim about the vaccines saving “millions of lives” nor the CDCs’ assertion that “widespread vaccine uptake” was the key reason for ending the pandemic are established facts. Far from it. Indeed, there are no scientific studies that l know of capable of authenticating either claim. But that’s just the point.
The elites that deign to rob us of our bodily sovereignty and so much more in the name of Covid, or whatever other “mortal health threat” that they choose to publicize next through their carpet-bomber control of most media, have all done their homework on the frame game and carefully tailor their communications to fit with its imperatives.
Unfortunately, most citizens are still not clued in to how it operates in their lives. Verbal details such as the ones cited above matter because they play an enormous role in establishing and maintaining what the now sadly tarnished Chomsky once brilliantly called the field of “thinkable thought” in our public discussions.
To open up that field we need to smash their frames. But to smash those frames we first need to admit they exist, and where we can go to find them.