"Covid-19," Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy, One Year On

Reflections on my book on the first anniversary of its publication, as well as on the fallen state of academia

On April 18, 2024, my first book was published by Palgrave Macmillan: “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy, Volume 1.

On the first anniversary of its publication, I thought I would offer some brief reflections.

My initial reaction to the publication of the book was a combination of shock and delight. Shock because the final manuscript was submitted in June 2023 and it took ten months to publish (I honestly wondered if it was being stealth-censored, but it was just a very disappointing experience with the publisher). And delight because I knew what a major impact this book would have in open access format.

When I submitted the manuscript, I was told that it would be published in October 2023. I did not have the funds to make the book open access, nor did I expect to acquire such funding. The academic publishing world is massively exploitative: it typically costs well over £10,000 to publish an open access monograph.

I never stood to make a penny from sales of my book. It is commonplace in academic publishing that authors make nothing, with the academic publishing houses exploiting the fact that authors rely on the “prestige” of the publisher to advance their career. Academic monographs are typically very expensive, and much of the profit comes from university libraries buying hard copies and/or paying for digital access.

As I became increasingly stressed and frustrated in November 2023 by the publisher’s continued inaction, something astonishing happened. Through the networks that my “Covid-19” journey had opened up, an unexpected funder appeared. They had read my manuscript and thought it worth backing. Even then, I was not sure whether they would actually deliver, and as late as March 2024, I still had my doubts. But they came through when it mattered.

Without the generosity of that funder to pay for open access, my book would likely have disappeared into obscurity. Priced at £109.99 for a hard copy (and there is still no paperback edition), it would have been available digitally to academics through university library subscriptions, but very few members of the public would have known about it or been willing to pay so much money for it. Its impact would have been minimal.

Instead, the book’s Creative Commons 4.0 license means that anyone is legally allowed to download and redistribute the book for free, provided they credit the author. As a result, “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy has been accessed 227,000 times at the publisher’s website, 17,000 times on my Substack, and has been redistributed across the internet. It is gratifying to see such a wide public appetite for it, given all the work that went into writing it.

In September 2024, my editor wrote to me agog at the book’s metrics. Academic monographs typically have a low readership, owing to their cost and specialist nature. She sent me a chart showing the median number of monthly downloads for comparable books to mine (shown in red) vs. my book (in blue):

Needless to say, it is highly unusual to see such metrics for an academic book. The public clearly recognizes something of value in my work.

Not so academia, however! I have previously commented on how my peer-reviewed journal article on “9/11” in 2020, which was behind the publisher’s paywall and thus was most likely being read by academics through their university library subscriptions, attracted an unusually high (for an academic journal article) number views and downloads, yet almost no citations. Here is an up-to-date count:

I joked that perhaps I held some strange record for the highest ratio of views/downloads to citations of any peer-reviewed journal article ever published. Five years on, for every one citation generated, there have been 7,838 (!) views/downloads. I challenge any academic to beat that!

Well, it seems I have smashed my own record. If we use the publisher’s figure of 227,000 views/downloads for my “Covid-19” book, and the Altmetric figure of two citations, then, after one year, we are looking at 113,500 views/downloads per citation! I am confident that this is a record that will never be beaten, and that I have taken my place as the most read yet least cited author in the history of academia. Perhaps I should approach Guinness World Records!😜

On a more serious note, there is something sinister about academia’s refusal to address arguably the two most important political events of the 21st century, i.e., “9/11” and “Covid-19,” in any way that speaks truth to power. For any intellectually honest person, it is a relatively simple exercise to look at the empirical evidence regarding both events and to deduce that the official story in each case is a Big Lie.

Furthermore, those Big Lies have been used to reshape society in ways that have served to hollow out liberal democracy and pave the way for totalitarian technocracy. It is intellectually, politically, and morally unacceptable to bury one’s head in the sand and pretend that all this evidence does not exist, or that what is happening is not happening.

At the same time as my book came out, UK academia was, through sector-wide job cuts, being metaphorically decimated (in the original meaning of the word). According to Merriam-Webster,

As most UK universities looked to reduce their workforce by around a tenth owing to sector-wide financial pressures, it did not take a genius to work out that those guilty of thought crime — i.e., of mutinying from official narratives — would be among the first to be shown the door, and that the remaining nine-tenths would be terrorized into obedience to out-of-control bureaucracies that serve power above the pursuit of knowledge.

So I choose to leave the profession. I remember the unexpected sense of calm with which I took that decision. On April 29, 2024, I gave the first of what proved to be dozens of interviews to Richie Allen.

Unlike many people, I always knew what it was that I wanted to do career-wise. From the age of 18, I knew that I wanted to become an academic. I went to Christ Church, Oxford, and acquired undergraduate and Masters degrees. I went to Duke University for my first Ph.D., which I was awarded in 2006. Then I discovered that German Studies departments everywhere were closing and that my Ph.D. was not marketable academically.

I spent a few years trying out other things — property renovation, management consultancy, being the primary care giver for my first-born, plus 13 miserable months working for PwC — before realizing that I had been right all along and that I was meant for a career in academia.

So, I bit the bullet and did a second Ph.D., this time in International Relations, on a funded scholarship at Oxford Brookes University (2010-2013). It did the trick in terms of opening the door to my first one-year post, at the University of East Anglia.

I received an apologetic confidential email at that time from one member of a three-person interview panel at a highly prestigious UK university informing me that he thought I should have got the job but was edged out in favour of the internal candidate, a Ph.D. student of the full professor on the panel.

Little did I know at the time that UEA would be the first of four one-year fixed-term appointments (the others being at Royal Holloway, University of London, which was renewed for a second year, and Nottingham Trent University). My second son was born in 2014, so the precarity was very stressful.

Over the course of those four years, I applied for literally hundreds of academic positions, each application taking many hours, if not days. Applying for jobs became a job in itself. I began to get called for more and more interviews. Each interview involved a huge amount of preparation time, not to mention travel time and stress.

At one university, I and the other candidates were subjected to a two-day boot camp to make sure we were the “correct fit.” At another university, the entire faculty had evidently been ordered to attend interviewee presentations (for a one-year post!), and I remember presenting to an over-crowded room.

Another university invited five interviewees, one of whom had to travel eight hours each way. She asked me if I had noticed the handwritten list of candidates that had accidentally been left on display showing the forename only of an internal candidate, and predicted that the internal candidate would get the job. He got the job.

My “favourite” interview — only because things sometimes go so far south that they turn out to be funny — was at Exeter University. I was living in Norwich at the time, and by unfortunate coincidence was invited to interview at Exeter, then Newcastle, then the London School of Economics within the space of a few days. If you look up these locations on a map, you will see the considerable amount of driving involved.

Anyhow, I made it down to Exeter, where the first event was a dinner at which I was seated next to the Head of Department. I couldn’t stand the guy and found him pompous and arrogant. About 15 hours later, I was on the opposite side of a table to him and the interview panel. For some reason — I think pure tiredness — I bombed the first few questions. I just couldn’t think straight. I remember the astonished look on their faces as I casually got up and left after only five minutes, knowing it was pointless to continue.

But it is what happened next that cracks me up. As I strode out the room, ready to begin the long drive north to Newcastle, I found myself lost in a rabbit warren of a building. I couldn’t find my way out! After getting more and more annoyed by the situation in which I found myself, I finally burst through the exit doors in my pristine interview suit and walked forthright into the open air. I was okay for about ten seconds.

And then the heavens opened. It was not like normal rainfall in the UK. One moment, there was no rain. Then, within a few seconds, it was as though someone had poured an entire bath over me. I had no umbrella. I distinctly remember walking along, soaked to the bone, feeling at an all-time low career-wise.

I recount these experiences, simply to give a flavour of what I went through as part of my quest to obtain a permanent post in academia, and how much it meant to me. I once read that only 19% of PhDs in the UK go on to obtain a permanent academic post. There are many others, who were in a similar position to me, who never made it.

But I did. Following a string of interviews in which I was told I had come second (out of hundreds of applicants), I was interviewed by the University of Lincoln on December 5, 2016, and was offered a permanent post the next day, which I accepted.

In a bizarre twist of fate, I had my “wake up” moment just three days later, on December 8, 2016, as I contemplated the similarities between the Vietnam War and the War in Afghanistan for my US Foreign Policy course. Both wars were long and costly, involving PTSD for the soldiers. The escalation in Vietnam was premised on a false flag event (the Gulf of Tonkin incident). “9/11” was premised on — wait, what? Surely those “conspiracy theorists” couldn’t be right, could they?

It only took me about an hour of looking at “9/11 conspiracy theory” videos on YouTube (before all the censorship began) to see with my own eyes that the Twin Towers evidently did not undergo a gravity-driven collapse, as per the official narrative.

The rest, as they say, is history. I was pursuing the path of truth, while academia was slavishly doing its best to stigmatize anyone asking critical questions of official narratives. It would only ever be a matter of time before the two paths collided.

With “Covid-19,” tensions between the truth and academia’s propaganda function reached extreme levels. As in other professions, anyone asking critical questions about “the narrative” was ostracized, demonized, hauled before a disciplinary committee, or simply cancelled. I have written about this in Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State. The parallels with 1930s Nazi Germany are non-accidental.

And so, when push finally came to shove, I found myself unexpectedly — given the sacrifices I had made for an academic career — deeply at peace with my decision to leave the profession.

The whole reason I had always wanted an academic career was my belief that academia is fundamentally about the pursuit of the truth, without fear or favour, wherever it might lead. I naively believed there was such a thing as “academic freedom.”

In 2025, universities are completely co-opted, and as the cases of “9/11” and “Covid-19” show, academia cannot be relied upon to tell the truth about the issues which matter most. It has fundamentally failed in its civic duty. As epitomized by Neil Ferguson’s “modelling,” it simply produces “knowledge” that is in line with the priorities of the State and of powerful funding bodies.

Understanding this, my decision to leave academia was surprisingly easy. Especially having studied Gleichschaltung in 1930s Nazi Germany, in which universities all aligned themselves with the power of the Nazi state, why would I go along with a similar process taking place today, only with a novel, global technocratic form of totalitarianism emerging?

Ultimately, I hope that “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy will stand as an historical landmark — perhaps the last great attempt within academia to challenge the tyranny that is gradually enveloping our world.

There is no other text like it, and nor will there be, at least not from within academia in its current form.

P.S. I mentioned that I make nothing from book sales, but I did set up a Buy Me A Coffee for anyone who has read the book for free and wants to give something back in recognition of the three years of hard work that went into writing it. Other support options can be found here.

P.P.S. I am hoping to get the book translated into other languages. Presumably, the most efficient way of doing this would be to use A.I. and to get native speakers to check the prose. Any suggestions for which A.I. to use and where to find reliable native speakers would be gratefully received!