The importance of appealing to moderates

My latest article for the Daily Sceptic

I’ve just published an article on the Daily Sceptic website about the controversy over the award of the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany to Masha Gessen and the legitimacy of making comparisons between the Holocaust and current events. Here’s a link: https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/03/where-were-the-lefts-comparisons-to-1930s-germany-when-the-unvaccinated-were-barred-from-society-so-they-didnt-spread-disease/

The Daily Sceptic began in the early days of lockdown in the spring of 2020 as Lockdown Sceptics but has since extended its reach to cover issues such as the climate and ‘woke’ narratives. It’s essentially a sceptical small-c conservative site.

I wrote some articles last year for the Daily Sceptic about the weaponisation of antisemitism. This is a link to my author page: https://dailysceptic.org/author/andrew-barr/

The Daily Sceptic and I do not see eye-to-eye on the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, so I have had to be very careful in my use of language in my latest article for them. It would have been much more strongly worded if I had written it for my Substack.

I believe publications such as the Daily Sceptic are extremely important because they can connect with moderate sceptics who have not yet ‘woken up’ to the COVID or climate or other frauds but have started to ask difficult questions.

It’s much easier to ‘preach to the choir’ than to go out and try to win over the general population. To achieve the latter, one cannot blurt out everything one has discovered all at once. It necessitates holding back.

For example, I have an enormous amount of admiration for Mike Yeadon, who spoke up against the COVID fraud from the beginning. As I’ve mentioned in a previous Substack article (‘What is Israel for?’), his revelations about the dishonesty of the government’s scientific advisers helped wake me up personally to what was going on. In 2020 I sent links to interviews with Yeadon to as many people as I could. Because he offered the perspective of someone who had worked within the pharmaceutical industry, he could not simply be discounted. But once he started talking about vaccine ‘genocide’ I stopped sharing his interviews. People who are just beginning to ask questions are likely to be scared off by this kind of extreme language (whether or not it’s correct) and retreat into the mainstream.

Moderately sceptical sites such as the Daily Sceptic (and here in Britain also Unherd and Spiked and Triggernometry) are extremely important for winning over people who inhabit the middle ground and encouraging them to embark on their individual odysseys. It’s no use trying to win over people by telling them that everything they have believed up till now is a lie and that what you’re now telling them is the truth; the only approach that works is to emphasise the importance of questioning everything and of doing one’s own research.

A useful technique is ‘pattern interrupt’ – that it just takes one small thing to disrupt someone’s entrenched worldview and to lead them to start questioning everything else encompassed within it. The trick is to be able to identify in each individual case the topic that will interrupt their pattern of thinking.

As Charles MacKay famously wrote last century in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, people ‘go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.’

The criticism that’s often made about moderately sceptical sites is that they serve as ‘gatekeepers’ for the regime. I’ve made it myself. The argument that they encourage people to think that the revelations they offer are all the revelations there are. That there is no conspiracy, only cock-ups – only stupidity and incompetence and corruption.

No doubt many of the people who read these publications do stop there. One often sees the phrase ‘limited hangout’ to describe the deliberate revelation of a certain amount of what has hitherto been kept secret, in order that people will assume that it’s the whole truth and not delve further.

This applies particularly to the matter of the deaths and other serious harms caused by the COVID vaccines (as well as to the Midazolam scandal involving the highly suspicious administration of a respiratory suppressant to people in care homes who were ill with COVID). Moderately sceptical publications tend to shy away from discussing vaccine damage and the excess deaths we’re currently witnessing as a result (never mind Midazolam). It’s instructive that when the independent Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen started speaking out about vaccine harms and excess deaths, the entire editorial team of the moderately sceptical Spiked website piled into him, in a manner that appeared to be concerted (I’ve no idea whether it actually was or not).

The point here is that being aware of issues such as gatekeeping and limited hangouts does not preclude one from working with moderately sceptical publications to win over people who currently inhabit the middle ground.

Many people are not temperamentally equipped to become full-blown sceptics. They can go only so far and no further. They cannot allow their sense of themselves and their place in the world to be undermined by the possibility that their government is not on their side but is deliberately seeking to destroy them. That the system in which they have placed their faith their entire lives is actually their enemy.

I think this explains why many Jews, who have been sceptical about other issues such as the COVID measures and the climate-change and woke narratives, have been unwilling even to contemplate the possibility of Israeli government complicity in the October 7^th  Simchat Torah pogrom (as I’ve argued in my Substack article, ‘What is Israel for?’ updated on my Twitter feed @andrewbarr2020). To believe that the Israeli government could have betrayed its own citizens would remove the ground from under their feet.

It's not easy, living in a world that’s been turned upside down. One can’t force people to make the change that requires. One can only encourage them to take the first steps. In this process, publications such as the Daily Sceptic are vital.