Games without frontiers

Not everyone in media betrayed their audience during the Covid years.

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“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

• Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes).

“It was inevitable that the relentless assault against fossil fuels would manifest in economic hardship for the lower and middle classes, and as the Northern Hemisphere heads into winter, it is once again rolling the dice on energy policy. This time the signs of crisis are emerging in a vital commodity that, unlike natural gas, has no substitutes. The market for middle distillates like diesel and heating oil is showing real signs of stress, especially on a seasonally adjusted basis, leaving an opening for our geopolitical opponents to drive a polarizing wedge into our domestic politics..

“As the reality begotten by climate policies causes some on the soft left to embark on a strategic retreat, hard left climate alarmists are in full-blown panic mode. Fresh off his attempt to reframe climate change as “global boiling,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres kicked off a climate summit last week with unhinged hysterics, boldly declaring, “Humanity has opened the gates to hell.” As we predicted in “It Was Never About Emissions,” the Guterres crowd is steadfastly opposed to carbon capture and sequestration technologies, proactively shifting the focus away from reducing emissions and toward eliminating the burning of fossil fuels altogether.

“With COP-28 approaching, quivering under the fresh sting of their weakening political power, expect the hard left’s hyperbolic rhetoric and ugly protests to accelerate. Meanwhile, the stark reality of trade-offs will force leaders and individuals alike to select between the Sunak camp (the “soft left backpedal”) and Macron camp (the “hard left double-down”). We suspect we know which way most will choose, and while we’ll certainly enjoy observing the spectacle from afar, we’ll also be keeping a close eye on the most important chart in the world:

“The price of diesel.”

• Doomberg, ‘The Great Backpedaling Is Upon Us’, 27 September 2023.

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Credit where credit is due. Not everyone in media betrayed their audience during the Covid years. Michael P. Senger for ‘Tablet’ published a revelatory piece in September 2020 about the provenance of lockdowns. (Spoiler alert: they were a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) psy-op.) From that piece: on January 7, 2020, Xi Jinping informed his inner circle that the fast-developing viral situation in Wuhan would require their personal supervision.

“Two weeks later, Xi personally authorized the lockdown of Hubei province based on his philosophy of fangkong, the same hybrid of health and security policy that inspired the re-education and “quarantine” of over 1 million Uighur Muslims “infected with extremism” in Xinjiang. The World Health Organization’s representative in China noted that “trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science … The lockdown of 11 million people is unprecedented in public health history, so it is certainly not a recommendation the WHO has made.

“The CCP confined 57 million Hubei residents to their homes. At the time, human rights observers expressed concerns. As one expert told The New York Times, “the shutdown would almost certainly lead to human rights violations and would be patently unconstitutional in the United States.”

“Regardless, on Jan. 29, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom said he was “very impressed and encouraged by the president [Xi Jinping]’s detailed knowledge of the outbreak” and the next day praised China for “setting a new standard for outbreak response.” Yet only six days in, the lockdown—“unprecedented in public health history”—had produced no results, so Tedros was praising human rights abuses with nothing to show for them.

“International COVID-19 hysteria began around Jan. 23, when “leaked” videos from Wuhan began flooding international social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—all of which are blocked in China—allegedly showing the horrors of Wuhan’s epidemic and the seriousness of its lockdown. Viral videos claimed to show residents spontaneously collapsing in the streets in scenes likened to the movie Zombieland and the show The Walking Dead. One video purportedly showed a SWAT team catching a man with a butterfly net for removing his mask. But in hindsight, this crisis theater is somewhat comical; in the infamous video, the “spontaneously collapsing” man extends his arms to catch himself.

“Official Chinese accounts widely shared an image of a hospital wing supposedly constructed in one day, but which actually showed an apartment 600 miles away..”

“In a viral tweet on Jan. 25, an epidemiologist with little background in infectious disease wrote, “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” This was the first of a monthslong series of dubious, widely shared tweets by the previously unknown Eric Feigl-Ding, prompting a prominent Harvard colleague to denounce him as a “charlatan.”

And then the Chinese Communist Party reported an exponential decline in coronavirus cases, until March 19, when they announced that lockdown had eliminated domestic cases entirely.

“In its Feb. 24 report, the WHO waxed rhapsodic about China’s triumph. “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response” (emphasis added). Scientists quickly began drafting plans in many languages to imitate China’s lockdowns. ‘The New York Times’ immediately cited WHO’s report, forming a pro-lockdown stance it has clung to for months with surprisingly little introspection: “China ‘took one of the most ancient strategies and rolled out one of the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease-containment efforts in history.’”

“On Feb. 26, WHO’s Bruce Aylward of Canada—who later disconnected a live interview when asked to acknowledge Taiwan—put it bluntly: “Copy China’s response to COVID-19.” In April, Canada’s parliament summoned Aylward for questioning, but the WHO has forbidden him from testifying.”

Then on March 9, Italy – the first major European country to sign up to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative – elected to follow WHO advice and became the first country outside China to lock down. Hypothesis: the CCP lied about the origin of Covid-19 (if it even exists) and then lied about the efficacy of lockdown. And the WHO and ‘The New York Times’ and Italy took the bait. And then most of the rest of the world followed suit.

“Italy was simultaneously bombarded with Chinese disinformation. From March 11 to 23, roughly 46% of tweets with the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia (Go China, go Italy) and 37% of those with the hashtag #grazieCina (thank you China) came from bots..”

“Initially, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also opted for herd immunity. But on March 13, suspicious accounts began storming his Twitter feed and likening his plan to genocide. This language almost never appears in Johnson’s feed before March 12, and several of the accounts were hardly active before then. Britain locked down on March 23.”

And the rest is – quite astonishingly shameful – history.

Senger concludes:

“The most benign possible explanation for the CCP’s campaign for global lockdowns is that the party aggressively promoted the same lie internationally as domestically—that lockdowns worked. For party members, when Wuhan locked down it likely went without saying that the lockdown would “eliminate” coronavirus; if Xi willed it to be true, then it must be so. This is the totalitarian pathology that George Orwell called “double-think.” But the fact that authoritarian regimes always lie does not give them a right to spread deadly lies to the rest of the world, especially by clandestine means.

“And then there’s the possibility that by shutting down the world, Xi Jinping, who vaulted through the ranks of the party, quotes ancient Chinese scholars, has mastered debts and derivatives, studies complexity science, and envisions a socialist future with China at its center, knew exactly what he was doing.”

In important matters of economics and statecraft, it never hurts to ask cui bono ? A more cynically inclined observer might conclude that China under the CCP stood to gain massive comparative economic advantage by tricking the rest of the world into lockdown.

And then there’s the race to install Digital ID, a policy that never featured in Labour’s manifesto before a loveless landslide swept it into office in the UK, but a policy that forms a cornerstone of Chinese social surveillance under the CCP.

And then there’s the Gadarene rush to pursue ‘renewable’ energy – forms of energy generation that are unpopular outside the Green lobby, wildly unreliable on an intermittently breezy but cloudy little island, and only made ‘viable’ via vast and compulsory taxpayer subsidy.

All of these policies are promoted in the name of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ of the sort advocated at Davos by the WEF.

“Stakeholder capitalism,” writes Michael Shellenberger, “had no visible impact on the trajectory of fossil fuel use, which rose globally by 34 percent between 2000 and 2025. What it accomplished was transferring trillions in wealth from the public to bankers, renewable energy investors, and the managerial class of bankers and consultants who attend Davos.”

But China earns twice over from misguided western ‘greenery’. It ignores any moral requirement to cut back on its own consumption of so-called fossil fuels, and it profits from supplying credulous western corporate executives and politicians with renewable energy infrastructure (whose ‘green’ credentials are highly questionable). The West has not shrunk its carbon footprint, merely expensively and fatuously offshored it.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. A more cynically inclined observer might come to the conclusion that on the basis of their promotion of health, surveillance, economic and specifically energy policies for which they had no legitimate democratic mandate granted by their electorate, multiple politicians throughout the West have been bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. This, of course, would qualify as treason.

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Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.

Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds.