Malone's Tension

Dr. Malone seems to have become an important spokesperson, imbued with the gravitas of medical/scientific expertise, of the Movement Still So Disorganized It Doesn’t Yet Have a Name (but which for now, as they continue to try to get their shit together, we can call the “Anti-Covid-Narrative Movement” or the “Covid Dissident Movement” etc.).

I’ve noted before his Berensonian tendencies; which are not singular, as it seems most of the Leadership (such as it is)—and Followers—of this Movement have such tendencies to one degree or another.

However, unlike Alex Berenson, Dr. Malone’s perspective seems to have a tensional counterpoint, creating an asymptotic dynamic potentially open-ended—or potentially perpetual in its “getting closer and closer, but never quite arriving” factor.  That counterpoint is his increasing willingness to “go there” toward conspiracy.  He’ll say, for example, things like “the future of global totalitarianism is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”.

However, the countervailing pressure of his ‘inner Berenson’ seems to be preventing him from “going all the way” to the C word—not Covid or Cunt:  but Conspiracy.

And he’s found an effective mechanism to fend off that C word (for now):

WHY DO SO MANY STILL BUY INTO THE PANDEMIC NARRATIVE?

he tweets, and offers an answer in the form of Mattias Desmet, Professor at Ghent University, whose sociologico-psychological theory about "Mass Formation" adumbrates an explanation of “mass psychosis” or “mass hypnosis” going on.

Certainly this is a major component of the Covid Catastrophe; but it’s implausible to think that’s all that’s happening—that relatively suddenly, “overnight” as they say, the entire world (including tens of thousands of professionals in medicine, academe, science, government and news media throughout the West) went mad in March of 2020.  And not only that, but that then that madness became worse and worse until our  maddening present, where it continues to metastasize with no end in sight.  Such a theory whether wittingly or unwittingly attempts to eliminate from the explanation for this complex phenomenon any significant human agency, planning, intention, implementation, goals—all components of a conspiracy.