The long con continues

By Roger Watson:

Confidence tricks (cons) of any kind only work because the person being conned complies. Nobody engages in a con knowing that the outcome will leave them less well off. They engage because they enjoy the process. They feel virtuous, for example charity scams, or they feel loved, as in romance scams. Sometimes they think they’ll become rich, as in Ponzi schemes or fake business scams.

The cons which are the easiest to implement are the cons where people feel safer by complying and fear some dreadful outcome if they fail to comply. Airport security is one such scam, as is digital ID and increased surveillance. These are always sold to the public as safety measures whereas they are, in the case of airport security, an exercise in ritual humiliation and, in the case of ID and surveillance, simply ways of tracking and controlling people.

But the biggest con, which is based on the illusion of safety, is surely public health and there has been no better example in recent years than the great Covid con of 2020 to the present. The Covid con continues. Although the public health fanatics can no longer whip up the same levels of fear they did over Covid, most people remain convinced that Covid was an existential threat. There is only so long that anything can be used to instil fear and, sadly, most of the public think that the measures taken by the government – the masks, the jabs, the lockdowns etc – were effective.

This brings us to the concept of the ‘long con’. One definition of a long con (obtained with the help of ChatGPT) is:

“A long con is a type of confidence trick that unfolds slowly, often over weeks, months, or even years. Instead of a quick deception for a small gain, a long con is a carefully planned, multi-step fraud designed to win the victim’s trust and extract a large payoff at the end.”

Key features of a long con include:

1. Extended relationship-building: The con artist builds rapport and trust over time.
   2. A convincing backstory: They adopt a plausible false identity.
   3. Multiple staged events: May involve accomplices, fake opportunities, or fabricated proof.
   4. A high-value final sting: After trust is established, the con artist asks for money or access and then disappears.

Each of the four features above can be mapped precisely on to the great Covid con as follows:

1. Extended relationship-building: we are brainwashed into the belief that life as we know it will end if, for example, the NHS did not exist. We are groomed by politicians of all shades to love the NHS and what it provides; it is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of our welfare state, it is there only for our good and we should be happy to part with vast and increasing amounts of our income to maintain it. Nothing demonstrated this better than the weeks of clapping for the NHS.
2. A convincing backstory: fabricated and exaggerated claims about past achievements such as extended lifespans (at least partly accounted for by better sanitation and nutrition) and eradication of disease (the role of vaccination, for example in measles elimination, is exaggerated).
3. Multiple staged events: where to start? The great Covid con involved a range of measures that were as harmful as they were useless: face masks; lockdowns; social distancing; and vaccinations. Evidence of effectiveness was fabricated and the police and major corporations acted as willing accomplices. The whole event was staged even though the threat of Covid to most people was minimal.
4. A high-value final sting: So many people profited from the great Covid con including Big Pharma companies, face mask manufacturers, anybody involved in printing signs (one-way systems, social distancing, wear a face mask etc) and the laptop classes generally who had a year of good weather sitting in the back garden. But the biggest winner was the government who tried and tested methods of control, surveillance and censorship and much to their surprise, found that they worked.

Long cons work by exploiting trust (the NHS is wonderful), providing hope (that we’ll all pull through if we comply), fear of loneliness (this is what it’s like if we don’t comply), social norms (you don’t want to kill your granny), and reluctance to admit being deceived (which describes most people).

And, because it worked so well during the great Covid con, we now have the great flu con. We are told, as we always are, that this winter’s flu will be the worst ever, that the NHS will be stretched (so it must be saved), the threat is global as are the solutions (fulfilling Hudson’s razor, whereby a scam can be identified) and something must be done.

The things that must be done are sickeningly familiar: face masks; vaccination; restricting hospital visitors; and school closures. It is happening again, and the next step – also described by Hudson’s razor – is suppression of dissent. Look out for that one – it cannot be far away.