How Performative Activism Enabled Mass Persecution
By: Josh Stylman
By: Josh Stylman, PART I
PART 2 of this article will be published at 3:00 PM today at malone.news
Reality engineering requires three components: institutional power to create the narrative, social pressure to enforce it, and the deliberate persecution of anyone who challenges either. The Covid era provided the perfect case study in how this machinery operates—and revealed how performative activism serves as its most potent enforcement mechanism.
Every major element of the official Covid narrative has been proven false: The origins of the virus, the validity of PCR tests, the suppression of early treatments, the denial of natural immunity, the so-called “safety and effectiveness” of vaccines, and the utility of masks, lockdowns, and vaccine passports. Yet those who questioned any part of it faced unprecedented ostracism and persecution.
The manufactured panic ignored fundamental reality: Covid posed minimal risk to healthy people under 70, but was significantly more dangerous to the elderly and immunocompromised. Rather than focusing resources on protecting vulnerable populations, we destroyed economies, stole childhoods, and enforced measures that made no epidemiological sense.
This wasn’t just about control—it was an engineered economic coup, the largest financial consolidation of power in modern history. While small businesses were forcibly closed, Amazon’s profits soared. As working-class neighborhoods struggled, Wall Street celebrated record gains. The laptop class posted about ‘we’re all in this together’ from their home offices while essential workers were forced into what was portrayed as dangerous conditions to deliver their groceries. The same corporations trumpeting their commitment to “equity” through DEI initiatives were destroying economic mobility for the very communities they claimed to champion.
Just months before Covid, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. An examination of the event reveals that the priority of the exercise centered not on treatment protocols or protecting the vulnerable but rather on how information control could be used to manufacture mass compliance.
When the real crisis arrived, this strategy found willing accomplices in a culture already primed for performative virtue. The height of this hypocrisy revealed itself during the pandemic, exposing not just empty virtue signaling, but active participation in one of the most egregious civil rights violations in recent American history. As millions changed their profile pictures and posted solidarity symbols for social justice, these same voices fell silent—or worse, actively participated in the persecution of two distinct groups: the unvaccinated and the vaccine-injured.
The Profitable Performance of Power
The economic devastation fell hardest on those least able to bear it. While professionals attended Zoom meetings in their pajamas, service workers faced an impossible choice: show up to what was marketed as a deadly environment or lose their livelihoods. The data tells the story:
Black-owned businesses declined by 41% during the first few months of lockdowns
Latino unemployment reached 18.9%, the highest of any demographic
Women left the workforce in unprecedented numbers, erasing decades of gains
The financial beneficiaries were clear:
During the lockdown, ostensibly put in place to “protect the vulnerable”, vulnerable small businesses lost $4.6 trillion in value, with minority-owned enterprises accounting for 41% of closures despite representing only 20% of total businesses. This wasn’t just hypocrisy—it was a calculated consolidation of power under the guise of public health.
The corporate duplicity was particularly stark during the same period when America was reckoning with racial justice following George Floyd’s murder. Nike proclaimed “standing against racism” while terminating minority employees who would not comply with unscientific Covid shot mandates. BlackRock published reports on “workplace equity” while creating a segregated office system. Google celebrated “inclusion” while their mandate policies disproportionately excluded minority workers who had historical reasons to distrust medical authorities.
These same corporations posting solidarity symbols were forcing their lowest-paid workers to choose between experimental injections or feeding their families. Their DEI committees issued statements about “inclusion” while they excluded anyone who questioned the narrative. They celebrated “diversity” in carefully curated public messaging while their mandates disproportionately impacted minority communities—the very people their DEI initiatives were ostensibly designed to protect.
This hypocrisy was essentially economic warfare masked by virtuous platitudes. The professional class’s performative empathy enabled the greatest upward transfer of wealth and opportunity in modern history. Their social media activism provided cover for policies that devastated the working class, particularly in minority communities. While they changed their profile pictures to signal virtue, they changed the economic landscape to enforce dependence.
The hypocrisy reached its peak during the Roe v. Wade controversy. The same voices passionately defending bodily autonomy in reproductive rights enthusiastically supported government-mandated medical procedures—often in the same social media feeds.
I saw this contradiction clearly one day and shared a meme that captured it perfectly: A woman holding a “My Body, My Choice” sign while wearing a “Vaccine Mandate Now!” t-shirt. The irony was obvious—or so I thought. But instead of engaging with the point, a friend of 20 years replied:
“The right to an abortion is at stake and unlike vaccine mandates which remain a choice (granted with heavy weight regarding employment for those who choose against)…Equating the two issues works to piss off women for sure but I don’t think does much to further your cause.”
Her response characterized vaccine mandates as merely a “choice with heavy weight” while referring to reproductive rights as “my cause”—as if bodily autonomy were a partisan position rather than a universal principle. Most telling was what happened afterward: when I shared trial data and peer-reviewed studies about fertility concerns, there was no reply. The conversation simply ended. This pattern repeated itself across countless relationships—the desire to maintain a manufactured reality proved stronger than decades of friendship or even scientific evidence that might protect loved ones.
A simple observation—one that should have been common sense—was treated as ideological betrayal, even with a good friend. That was the moment I realized how deeply people had internalized the manufactured reality, where pointing out contradictions was itself a crime.
While professionals virtue signaled from home offices, essential workers faced impossible choices. Those who built careers championing marginalized communities suddenly celebrated stripping basic rights from their neighbors. It was deeply enlightening to observe those who said they were passionate about fighting discrimination celebrating people losing their jobs for making personal medical choices. Their empathy extended exactly as far as their pharmaceutical stock portfolios and/or unwavering faith in government authority—marching against discrimination until it became inconvenient for their tribal interests, rallying against medical coercion until they could enforce it themselves.
The Manufacturing of Hatred
The demonization of the non-compliant was systematic and crossed into territory that would be considered hate speech if directed at any other group. Major media outlets competed to express the most vitriolic condemnation of the unvaccinated. The New York Times ran headlines like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated, while The Washington Post declared that “remaining unvaccinated in public should be considered as bad as drunk driving.”
This wasn’t just media rhetoric—it directly programmed public perception and normalized extreme views. A January 2022 Rasmussen poll revealed that nearly half of Democratic voters supported not just fining the unvaccinated, but confining them to their homes, sending them to quarantine camps, and even taking their children. Public health officials cultivated and then amplified this hostility, speaking of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” creating a narrative of blame that would be used to justify discrimination at a scale unprecedented in modern America.
The rhetoric from entertainment figures was particularly revealing. Gene Simmons declared “You’re willing to walk among us unvaccinated, you are the enemy.” Sean Penn took this mandate mentality further, stating “It seems criminal to me…if someone chooses not to get vaccinated that they should choose to stay home, not go to work, not have a job…As long as we’re all paying for these streets, we got to ride safely on them.”
His framing perfectly captured the entitled perspective of the wealthy class—comparing basic employment rights to a privilege that could be revoked for non-compliance. Don Lemon advocated for complete social exclusion: “Don’t have the vaccine, can’t go to the supermarket…Can’t go to the ballgame…Can’t go to work…No shirt, no shoes, no service!” Piers Morgan celebrated discrimination: “Love the idea of COVID vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, clubs, gyms, shops. It’s time COVID denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullshit bluff called.”
The dehumanization reached new heights as Jimmy Kimmel mocked the unvaccinated seeking medical care: “Vaccinated person, come right in. Unvaccinated person who gobbled horse goo…Rest in peace, wheezy.” Howard Stern demanded mandatory vaccination while cursing freedom itself: “When are we gonna stop putting up with idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ’em, fuck their freedom.” Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once championed individual rights, declared “Screw your freedom!”
These weren’t fringe voices—they were mainstream entertainers with millions of followers, demonstrating how quickly “progressive” entertainment could normalize discrimination and celebrate the stripping of basic human rights. Their audiences, who typically pride themselves on defending the marginalized, cheered calls for persecution when it aligned with their tribal identity and boosted their social capital.
The absurdity was obvious to anyone who dared think critically. The architects of this deception are now openly admitting what critics said all along. Janine Small testified before the European Parliament, “No, we did not know whether the vaccine stopped transmission before we rolled it out,” justifying this by saying they had to “move at the speed of science.”
These admissions are accelerating. CDC Director Walensky now acknowledges they were “too late” to recognize natural immunity. FDA officials admit myocarditis risks were known earlier than disclosed. Each revelation confirms not just what critics warned about, but what the data had shown from the beginning.
Most telling of all, Dr. Deborah Birx, former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator who was one of the chief architects of America’s Covid policies, finally admitted last week: “What we got wrong in public health is we didn’t explain that COVID vaccines were nothing like childhood vaccines…That is not what the COVID vaccine was designed to do. It wasn’t designed against infection.”
Yet these admissions come only after the damage is done—after lives were upended, careers destroyed, and basic rights stripped from those who simply pointed to evidence that contradicted the official narrative.
For almost five years, anyone pointing out the data and facts now being casually revealed by public health officials faced social and professional exile. The entire justification for mandates, passports, and mass firings was based on claims that public officials and the compliant public never bothered to verify or actively suppressed before coercing millions into compliance.
If the vaccines indeed protected the vaccinated, why did anyone else’s medical choices matter? The answer reveals the deeper agenda: This was never about health—it was about enforcing social coercion. As Matt Orfalea brilliantly documented in one of his viral video compilations, media talking heads robotically chanted “no one’s safe unless everyone’s safe,” while a civilized society descended into tribal psychosis.
This mass psychosis wasn’t accidental—it was the product of sophisticated reality engineering. The same systems that manufactured consent for endless wars were now deployed to enforce medical and social compliance. But this time, they had new tools: social media algorithms, AI content moderation, and real-time narrative control. And at every level, the deception was coordinated from the top down:
Dr. Fauci: “When people are vaccinated they’re not going to get infected”
President Biden: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations”
CDC Director Walensky: “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don’t get sick”
Rachel Maddow: “Now we know the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops”
Pfizer CEO Bourla: “There is no variant that escapes the protection of our vaccines”
Bill Gates: “Everyone who takes the vaccine is not just protecting themselves but reducing their transmission”
Today’s fact-checkers will claim these statements were “taken out of context” but the truth is simpler: These weren’t mistakes or misunderstandings—they were deliberate deceptions designed to drive compliance. Even as internal data contradicted these absolute claims, the messaging remained unwavering.
The Manufacturing of Data
The deception went beyond mere rhetoric. Professor Norman Fenton’s 2021 statistical analysis revealed how trial data was manipulated through deceptive classification of deaths—warnings that were systematically ignored by those who now admit to “mistakes” in coverage. Fenton, along with Professor Martin Neil, has continued this analysis, uncovering progressively more damning evidence of statistical manipulation. Their papers have documented how health authorities systematically misclassified deaths, manipulated test timing, and obscured key data points to maintain the “safe and effective” narrative.
Whistleblower Brook Jackson, a regional director at Ventavia Research Group, exposed fundamental violations of data integrity protocols at Pfizer trial sites, including falsified data, improper unblinding of participants, and deliberate suppression of adverse event reporting. Her revelations, which should have immediately halted the trials, were ignored by both the FDA and major media outlets.
A forensic analysis of Pfizer’s trial data reveals troubling manipulation. A September 2023 preprint paper titled “Forensic Analysis of the 38 Subject Deaths in the 6-Month Interim Report of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trial” documented a subject who was originally in the placebo group but received a Moderna shot on December 23, 2020. This subject was subsequently hospitalized with Covid on December 31, died on January 11, 2021, and was still classified as an ‘unvaccinated death’ despite having received an mRNA vaccine. This deliberate misclassification skewed mortality data in favor of vaccination. Without this manipulation, the data would have shown the vaccinated were 31% more likely to die.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. According to Pfizer’s Post-Marketing Experience Report, released under FOIA, 42,086 case reports of adverse effects were submitted in just the first 90 days after release, including 1,223 deaths. Despite these alarming signals—which should have prompted immediate review—the public was repeatedly assured of the product’s safety, while those raising concerns were systematically silenced. ‘Safe and effective’ may very well be the most consequential lie of our lifetime.
In fact, the FDA attempted to hide the trial data for 75 years—a stunning admission of what they hoped to conceal. Only through attorney Aaron Siri’s relentless FOIA litigation was the public able to access these documents at all. When finally forced to release it, the documents revealed nine pages of previously hidden side effects. Authors like Ed Dowd and Naomi Wolf have meticulously documented these deceptions.
The manipulation continued at every level. Cities like Chicago employed “dastardly definitions” to obscure real data during the Delta wave. But the truth would eventually emerge through institutions too prestigious to ignore. A groundbreaking Cleveland Clinic study of 51,000 employees found the more shots people received, the more likely they were to get Covid-19. In the authors’ own surprised words: “The multivariable analyses found that… the greater the number of vaccine doses previously received, the higher the risk of COVID-19.”
Beyond ineffectiveness, safety concerns mounted. A February 2023 peer-reviewed study in the European Heart Journal evaluated 8.9 million young adults from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, finding that “booster dose is associated with increased myocarditis risk in adolescents and young adults.” Among males, a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine was associated with an “increased incidence rate of myocarditis” within 28 days of inoculation. Studies from Thailand and Switzerland showed similar cardiovascular effects. In a sane and just world, these products wouldn’t have been approved in the first place—let alone mandated or defended at all costs.
This data directly contradicted every justification used to persecute the unvaccinated. UK Health Security Agency surveillance reports from early 2022 confirmed these findings, showing higher infection rates per 100,000 in many age groups among the triple-vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated. In the years since, dozens of peer-reviewed studies from institutions worldwide have consistently validated these observations, forming an overwhelming body of evidence that the original claims about preventing transmission were false. Yet by then, careers had been destroyed, families divided, and lives upended based on a lie. But data manipulation was only one component of a much larger system designed to protect the narrative at all costs.
The Architecture of Control
Social media transformed this engineered reality into an automated system. Platform “adjustments” reduced engagement on vaccine-questioning posts by 95%. Shadow-banning isolated critics while amplifying approved narratives, creating an artificial consensus. AI content moderation ensured only pharmaceutical-friendly perspectives reached wide audiences.
The financial entanglement between media and pharma completed the cycle of influence:
Pharmaceutical companies collectively became the second-largest advertising spenders in the U.S. in 2021, surpassing tech companies, as spending on digital and TV promotions surged
During the Covid-19 pandemic, pharmaceutical advertising increased significantly across major networks, with pharma companies emerging as the dominant advertisers on primetime news
By mid-2021, pharmaceutical companies accounted for a dominant share of ad revenue on major news networks, outspending nearly all other industries
This wasn’t just bias—it was a carefully structured ecosystem of self-interest. The same system that enriched Halliburton through endless wars now enriched Pfizer through endless boosters. The military-industrial complex had found its medical counterpart. The companies selling vaccines controlled the channels reporting on their safety, creating a perfect closed loop of propaganda: from corporate press release to news headline to social media share to fact-checker verification to public policy.
The selective amplification of narratives isn’t an accident—it’s an integral part of reality engineering. Consider this: just last week, West Texas had 58 measles cases, some in the vaccinated, and it made national headlines. Meanwhile, VAERS reports 2,659,050 adverse reactions to the Covid vaccines (including 38,398 deaths) and it’s ignored. The media treats one as a crisis and the other as a conspiracy theory.
While VAERS is designed as an early warning system rather than a definitive assessment tool, the stark contrast in how these safety signals were treated compared to other vaccines reveals a troubling double standard in safety monitoring. And that’s before we account for the fact that VAERS is notoriously underreported.
This coordinated messaging wasn’t coincidental. A well-documented revolving door between regulators and pharmaceutical companies solidified their dominance over public health narratives.
Mark McClellan: From FDA commissioner regulating Johnson & Johnson to Board member
Scott Gottlieb: From FDA commissioner regulating Pfizer to Board member
Stephen Hahn: From FDA commissioner regulating Moderna to CMO of their venture capital backer
James C. Smith: From Reuters CEO ‘informing’ about vaccines to Pfizer Board member
This circular system extended to news coverage itself. Would the public have maintained faith in the “official narrative” if they understood that the “impartial” journalists delivering it had their salaries substantially funded by pharmaceutical advertising? Pfizer alone spent $2.4 billion on TV advertising in 2021. Every “breaking news” segment about the pandemic was effectively “brought to you by Pfizer“—the same company profiting from the promoted solutions. This wasn’t mere bias; it was a fundamental conflict of interest that transformed news programs into pharmaceutical marketing channels with a veneer of journalistic credibility.
The legal framework itself exposed the deception. These weren’t medical products subject to normal safety protocols—they were military countermeasures, allowing manufacturers to bypass regulations while enjoying complete liability protection. On February 4, 2020, with fewer than a dozen confirmed Covid cases and zero deaths, the Department of Defense declared it a “national security threat” and activated emergency powers designed for weapons of mass destruction. Science took a back seat to military protocols, with unprecedented emergency declarations occurring in lockstep across countries.
Even the language itself was manipulated to accommodate these novel products. The CDC quietly changed the definition of “vaccination” multiple times: from “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease” to simply “producing protection”—a subtle but critical shift that lowered the bar from actual immunity to mere “protection.” This wasn’t semantic nitpicking—it was a deliberate reframing to retrofit the definition around products that couldn’t meet the traditional standard. By changing the very meaning of “vaccine,” they could claim these gene therapy products belonged in the same category as traditional vaccines, despite their fundamentally different mechanisms and outcomes.
The implementation of this control architecture wasn’t improvised—it followed a detailed playbook established before the crisis. Event 201’s recommendations went far beyond theoretical discussions about “misinformation.” The simulation explicitly outlined tactics that would later be deployed:
“Flooding the zone” with approved messaging to overwhelm contrary information
Using “trusted voices” (celebrities and influencers) to shape public opinion
Developing surveillance tools to identify dissent before it could spread
Creating pre-bunking strategies to discredit anticipated criticism
Establishing mechanisms to suppress personal testimonials that contradicted official narratives
Most disturbing was how precisely these tactics were deployed against the vaccine-injured. Just as the simulation had rehearsed, those reporting adverse effects were systematically labeled as spreaders of “misinformation”—precisely as the blueprint had prescribed.
The synchronized global response demonstrated unprecedented coordination across political and geographical boundaries. World leaders simultaneously adopted identical phrases like “Build Back Better,” while implementing remarkably similar policies, regardless of their political orientation or their countries’ specific circumstances. This perfect alignment of messaging and policy represents a level of international coordination never before witnessed—suggesting either an extraordinary coincidence or deliberate orchestration beyond national interests. How does a democratically established public health policy manifest identically across dozens of culturally and politically diverse nations? The answer lies in pre-crisis planning through non-governmental organizations and unelected global institutions.
This wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate construction. Reality itself became a manufactured product, shaped and reinforced through social media algorithms, legacy media narratives, and censorship infrastructure. It was no longer about individual facts—it was about the entire context in which those facts existed.
The terrifying part is that once you’re locked into one of these timelines, breaking out feels impossible. Not because people are incapable of critical thinking, but because they are only given the pieces of the puzzle that fit their pre-constructed reality. If your entire media environment tells you vaccine passports were necessary to save lives, then anyone who opposes them must be selfish or dangerous. If your reality tells you vaccine injuries are a rare anomaly, then the people raising concerns must be crackpot lunatics. Once the stage has been set, people don’t need to be actively deceived—they simply need to never see the information that contradicts their version of reality.
And the scariest part? This isn’t just about Covid. This is now the model for shaping public perception on every issue. We don’t just live in an era of misinformation. We live in an era where entire realities are constructed and assigned to us, and stepping outside of them comes at a personal and social cost. It’s not just that people were manipulated. It’s that they were placed inside an entirely different timeline—one where dissent itself is unthinkable.
END OF PART I.
PART 2 of this article will be published at 3:00 PM today at malone.news
This article was originally published at Brownstone Institute Institute and from the Substack of Joshua Stylman
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We should never forget what they did to us, and never let it happen again.
I was doing some work during the “pandemic” at a house of a friend named Steve. Steve is a very intelligent general manager at an extremely large health club I’ve been doing business with for almost 40 years. I’ve known him for decades. Of course I am unvaxed and Steve is very liberal and vaxed to the max!! So our discussion got slightly heated and I told Steve I will never be locked in my house ever or restricted from doing anything I want to do. He said if it was up to him unvaxed people should be locked in their homes and only allowed to go to grocery stores once a week on certain days. Steve happens to be Jewish, which I honestly have no problem at all with, but I told Steve my father when he was 24 years old volunteered to go to Europe to help free his descendants from the same disgusting type tyranny that he seems to think is alright to push on people like me. I told Steve my father was shot in the back and was red tagged to die there on the side of the road in Germany, but was sent back to England where a surgeon removed one of my fathers lungs and saved his life. There was one night during my father’s time there that his whole platoon, 49 men were killed, all but my father. Because of my father’s injuries helping to free your relatives I told Steve, my father died when I was only twenty! So next time you think people should be locked down in their house think of me Steve and know tyrants with ideas like yours will never lock people like me in my house. My father and my family have paid much too high a price for your tyrannical BS. Steve stopped the discussion right then and there and never brought it up with me again.
It is amazing how one gets a feeling that a government program is lying but one can't find the evidence until 3 years down the road when whistle blowers and the honest scientists who laboured hard to uncover the truth finally get it out. That is supposed to be the job of the government. I hope RFK and Trump can reorganize the HHS to be smarter and honest and cast that into stone in the HHS culture.