The Greatest Trick of All
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
April 24, 2022
Magic is the ability to make someone believe something that isn't true. It follows, then, that most great magicians are keen observers of human psychology and that magic routines are, at base, a skillfully arranged set of techniques for preying on our cognitive biases.
As impressive as the rabbit-from-hat illusions and the sleight-of-hand deceptions of the masters of stagecraft can be, however, these parlor tricks pale in comparison to the societal manipulations that are conducted by the masters of statecraft every day.
Case in point: martial law. I have long said that when martial law actually comes to the "free and democratic" West, people will be cheering it on. In case you didn't believe me, I present the phenomenon of the public cheering on the most egregious abuses of medical martial law over the past two years as evidence for my contention. All it took was a concerted campaign to get people to fear coronavirus and suddenly the very same people who once denounced those warning of martial law as "conspiracy theory" were loudly applauding the jackbooted thugs of the COVID-1984 police state in their harassment of elderly women and innocent children and random citizens.
Yes, it's one thing to theorize about the Stockholm Syndrome that allows—in the memorable words of Aldous Huxley—"the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude." It's another thing to actually see it taking place.
This ability to get the public on board with policies and practices that are self-evidently against their own interest is not just surprising. I am here to argue that it is a type of magic trick.
I mean this in two key senses of the idea of a "magic trick." Firstly, the would-be social engineers' ability to reliably martial support for ideas and actions that would have been dismissed as lunacy mere moments before is, at first glance, so incredible as to be magical. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this magic, like all such sleight-of-hand, is, at bottom, precisely that: a trick.
Today, let's take a look up the sleeve of the magicians of social control, expose the tricks they use to garner public support for their agenda, and see how we can break the spell they have cast over the masses.
The Trick
Although there are many, many different types of magic tricks, most of them rely on a handful of techniques for misdirecting the audience while the sleight-of-hand is performed. Whether it's smoke and mirrors or a beautiful assistant or a stream of well-rehearsed patter, magicians are masters at keeping attention focused elsewhere while the real "magic" is taking place out of the audience's line of sight (or, even more daringly, in plain sight but out of their field of attention).
Let's look at an example from mentalism, that branch of magic in which the performers "read the mind" of the audience or use their mental powers to "predict" the audience's reaction to certain questions. There are many ways that these tricks can be pulled off: it can be as simple as asking a question in a certain way in order to encourage a particular response or as complex as meticulously planting a series of subliminal suggestions in order to elicit certain pre-determined responses from a mark.
This is how a master mentalist performs the trick on (ironically enough) a pair of advertising execs:
<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>
And this is how a master social engineer performs the same trick on the gullible masses:
No, that's not the blog of a deranged psychopath with a Putin obsession. It is the homepage of switchoffputin.org, a website that has been set up to promote "Switch Off Putin," a report that purports to show how Europe could "switch off Putin" by completely boycotting Russian oil and gas and thus bringing peace and harmony to the world.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe it is the blog of a deranged psychopath with a Putin obsession.
As an idea for bringing peace to the world, it's self-evident claptrap. But as a demonstration of how to successfully influence an audience, it's an example of real-world "magic" that would make any mentalist jealous.
You see, the architects of the New World Order have a problem: most people recognize that the Big Oil version of "environmentalism"—that is, the imposition of a technocratic system of energy rationing and resource restrictions in the name of "saving Mother Earth"—is a crock. Year after year, poll after poll shows that, despite an unprecedented 52-years-long-and-counting propaganda campaign designed to instill fear of climate catastrophe in the public, the threat of global warming still ranks near the bottom of most people's priority lists. And, when push comes to shove, most people are not willing to pay even token amounts of carbon indulgences to the Al Gores of the world in order to appease the weather gods.
Enter the social engineer magicians (related to, but not to be confused with, the "cyber magicians"). They know that getting the public to "spontaneously" and "voluntarily" hit upon the "right" answer—a fervent desire for carbon credits and energy rationing and climate lockdowns and all the other elements of top-down neofeudal control—requires employing the old mentalist trick of posing the right question in the right way.
I covered the magicians' first attempt to pull off this reframing in my #PropagandaWatch episode, "The Pandemic is a Test Run." In that video, I documented the ways in which the successful scamdemic fear campaign was being used as leverage to reframe the climate agenda. Suddenly, the public was being asked to equate the climate "emergency" to the scamdemic "emergency" and to prepare for "climate lockdowns" and other emergency measures commensurate with those that they had just happily accepted in the name of saving the world from the scourge of COVID-19.
Unfortunately for the would-be social engineers, the COVID hysteria is wearing off. In 2022, appealing to people's warm and fuzzy feelings regarding lockdowns and COVID restrictions is far less likely to get them on board with the globalist agenda.
And so, like the skilled magicians they are, the proponents of this agenda are simply taking advantage of the current mania: Russophobia. And—wouldn't you know it?—it turns out that the public's desire to "Switch Off Putin" can be satiated by strict energy controls and resource rationing by a technocratic elite!
Yes, the team behind the "Switch Off Putin" campaign is advocating an immediate European-wide boycott of all Russian oil and gas imports. While such a blanket ban has hitherto been dismissed as impossible, the authors of this report argue that it can be achieved after all . . . if emergency measures are implemented and the entire economy is put on a war footing, that is.
Under the heading, "War Economy in Europe," they write:
Achieving these cuts will require a previously unimaginable level of cooperation and solidarity within Europe. We may need a state of emergency declared, and an explicit political recognition that European economies are now on a war footing in terms of the rapidity of the energy transition. In some ways the speed of the change will resemble the Covid lockdowns, but with a different trajectory in the longer term. [Emphasis added.]
Lest there be any confusion as to what they're advocating or how it will be achieved, they go on to state:
Rationing via fair shares is the only alternative: governments will need to introduce price caps and guaranteed minimum supplies at the household levels so that everyone gets a basic amount and those with less ability to pay are not simply cut off. Turning down thermostats will be difficult to mandate and enforce, but with only a certain amount of gas allowed per household the incentive to stick to it will be substantial. As with Covid lockdowns, social pressure to abide by national restrictions will also play a big part. [Emphasis added.]
The blatant manipulation here—the shameless piggybacking on the biggest news story of the moment to further an already-existing agenda—is not even hidden. The magicians who are using this cheap stage trick on the public openly brag about it. The Bezos Post, for example, just published a piece explicitly linking the IPCC-invented "climate crisis" to the current geopolitical crisis and admitting that the tenuous connection is just a convenient way to repackage an otherwise unpalatable agenda:
The only glimmer of hope is that Putin may have inadvertently simplified the politics of such a global quest [switching over to 100% renewable energy]. Convincing voters requires communicating the need for sacrifice—from sleeping colder in the winters to flying less and paying more when you do. But now politicians can make that case in two ways—as necessary to fight both Russian aggression and climate change.
But as crude as this latest attempt to reframe the old dream of neofeudalism is, it seems to be working. The "Switch Off Putin" campaign, boasting its own polling, claims that "Nearly 70% of Europeans want to 'Switch Off Putin' by boycotting Russian oil and gas." And what, specifically, would these people be prepared to put up with in order to bring peace to Ukraine? The Guardian supplies an answer in its "report" on the figures:
Just over 40% said they would be prepared to accept energy rationing to manage demand, and 52.7% that they would eat less meat to reduce demand on Ukrainian exports.
Or, as Klaus Schwab and his cronies might observe: "You will eat ze bugs and ration ze energy, and you will like it!"
The worst part is, this poll (unlike most "polling" hyped by the MSM liars) probably isn't even far off the mark. Do you doubt for a second that the hypnotized hordes who just spent two years cheering for you to be locked up for the crime of not taking an experimental medical intervention and then dutifully switched to hating Russia and waving blue-and-yellow flags because the media told them to wouldn't go along with whatever their neofeudal lords suggested in the name of "Switching Off Putin"?
Breaking the Spell
This type of trick is, of course, not limited to the climate agenda, and it is not simply a question of reframing old ideas to make them more acceptable to the gullible masses. All of the techniques of misdirection in the magicians' arsenal are employed by the social engineers on a daily basis. But that is a topic for a future examination.
For today's purposes, it suffices to understand this: the greatest trick of all is the ruling elitists' ability to make you desire your own enslavement.
As I have asserted for years, however, the manipulations of the media mockingbirds and the lying politicians and the salesmen of the globalists' agenda are not that hard to spot once you learn what is happening. Exactly as a magician's entire stage show can be ruined by someone explaining how the trick is performed, those who are able to explain the tricks of the social engineers are thereby breaking the spell that has been cast over the credulous public.
In some ways, this is exactly what the independent media has been doing online for the past two years: exposing the false flags and propaganda operations of the establishment for the crude magic tricks that they are. The deceivers, are, of course, adapting to this and adjusting their behaviour accordingly. But there are only so many ways to present the same old ruses; their bag of tricks is not bottomless.
At this point, it is a race against time. Will those who can see through the manipulations succeed in laying bare the lies and breaking the spell before the masses are tricked into supporting the neofeudal, technocratic Great Reset? This is the existential question that the human species is facing.
Whatever the answer, one thing is for certain: only those of us who recognize the magic show as a magic show can hope to see the illusions for what they are. It is our task to educate those who do not yet realize that the daily news feed is in fact a magic show put on to entertain, distract and mislead them. Only then can we reveal the card up the magician's sleeve and bring the show to an end.
This weekly editorial is part of The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter.
To support The Corbett Report and to access the full newsletter, please sign up to become a member of the website.