Another look at “Operation Lockstep”

(RUMINATIONS)

A curious episode that took place during the Covid panic concerned an obscure report put out by the Rockefeller Foundation a decade before. Perhaps bewildered by the extraordinary events of 2020 that overturned so many lives, many people seized upon this report, claiming that it described a plan to inaugurate a New World Order on the wave of a pandemic such as Covid-19, and that the official government response in many countries was in accord with this. As it turned out, these people had resuscitated a line of thinking that had emerged much earlier surround the report, but which had not gained much traction at the time. In any case, this was another example of conspiracist thinking, one that was readily debunked simply by describing the report in detail, including its overall intention. Nonetheless, there are some striking parallels, as we will see.

Thus, the entire episode is intriguing enough to have another look – and to reflect on further. To begin with, let’s look at the report itself to see what it was that gave rise to some rather extreme claims.

The Original Report

The Rockefeller report was published in 2010 and is still available online.¹ It is an example of what its authors call “scenario planning”, an idea that seems to have a certain cachet among people working in institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation. An explanation of what scenario planning consists of is given in the Introduction:

Scenario planning is a methodology designed to help guide groups and individuals through exactly this creative process. The process begins by identifying forces of change in the world, then combining those forces in different ways to create a set of diverse stories—or scenarios—about how the future could evolve. Scenarios are designed to stretch our thinking about both the opportunities and obstacles that the future might hold; they explore, through narrative, events and dynamics that might alter, inhibit, or enhance current trends, often in surprising ways. Together, a set of scenarios captures a range of future possibilities, good and bad, expected and surprising—but always plausible. Importantly, scenarios are not predictions. Rather, they are thoughtful hypotheses that allow us to imagine, and then to rehearse, different strategies for how to be more prepared for the future—or more ambitiously, how to help shape better futures ourselves.²

This alone, I think, is sufficient to suggest to the discerning reader that what follows is not going to be a substantial intellectual endeavor.

The bulk of the report consists of four scenarios describing possible developments over the next ten to twenty years on a global scale. They go by the names Lock Step, Clever Together, Hack Attack, and Smart Scramble.

From the title and introduction we are given to believe that this is an analysis of the possible impacts of technological advances on contemporary societies. In fact, each scenario is built around a disaster or untoward development that has global ramifications: a pandemic (Lock Step), a series of drastic developments in the wake of global warming (Clever Together), a miscellany of disasters that together overwhelm the resources of societies to cope with them (Hack Attack), and a global recession that along with other similar problems leads to a general economic crisis (Smart Scramble). These in turn lead to different outcomes on the global stage, which provide the titles of the scenarios. In addition, there are brief summaries of possible technological developments that might occur as a consequence.³

Since our focus is the Lock Step scenario, let’s consider it in some detail. As noted, the crisis is set off by a pandemic:

In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain—originating from wild geese—was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months, the majority of them healthy young adults.⁴

It goes on to say how most countries were severely affected, although it singles out China as an exception, due to its draconian measures, which successfully reduced the spread:

The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.⁵

The authors then describe the authoritarian order that emerged throughout the world, with mixed results, especially in “developing” countries due to “irresponsible elites who used their increased power to pursue their own interests at the expense of their citizens “. The eventual outcome was a measure of order, with restricted innovation and a widening gap between the developed and developing world. Eventually, people found the greater restrictions increasingly irksome, and symptoms of unrest began to break out. By this time,

Even those who liked the greater stability and predictability of this world began to grow uncomfortable and constrained by so many tight rules and by the strictness of national boundaries. The feeling lingered that sooner or later, something would inevitably upset the neat order that the world’s governments had worked so hard to establish.⁶

At the end of this section, we are treated to an imaginary vignette, an example of life in the world of Lock Step. It concerns an engineer in India managing a project to purify the water of the Ganges River. It begins this way:

Manisha gazed out on the Ganges River, mesmerized by what she saw. Back in 2010, when she was 12 years old, her parents had brought her to this river so that she could bathe in its holy waters. But standing at the edge, Manisha had been afraid. It wasn’t the depth of the river or its currents that had scared her, but the water itself: it was murky and brown and smelled pungently of trash and dead things.⁷

Now, fifteen years later,

Manisha watched as an engineering team began unloading equipment on the banks. Many top Indian scientists and engineers had been recruited by the government to develop tools and strategies for cleaning the Ganges in more high-tech ways. Her favorite were the submersible bots that continuously “swam” the river to detect, through sensors, the presence of chemical pathogens. New riverside filtration systems that sucked in dirty river water and spit out far cleaner water were also impressive—especially because on the outside they were designed to look like mini-temples.⁸

Interestingly enough, this little vignette seems to be more about extolling government intervention than illustrating the pros and cons of the new authoritarian order.

The other scenarios are laid out in similar ways, but in each case the societal response is different. In the Clever Together scenario (which is clearly the one the authors favor), threats due to global warming are met with increased “international coordination”, leading to a global cap and trade system and a program for carbon sequestration. These activities have long-term consequences:

Inspired by the success of this experiment in collective global action, large-scale coordinated initiatives intensified. Centralized global oversight and governance structures sprang up, not just for energy use but also for disease and technology standards. Such systems and structures required far greater levels of transparency, which in turn required more tech-enabled data collection, processing, and feedback. Enormous, benign “sousveillance” systems allowed citizens to access data—all publically available—in real time and react. Nation-states lost some of their power and importance as global architecture strengthened and regional governance structures emerged. International oversight entities like the UN took on new levels of authority, as did regional systems like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The worldwide spirit of collaboration also fostered new alliances and alignments among corporations, NGOs, and communities.⁹

The other two scenarios paint grimmer pictures. In Hack Attack, straitened financial circumstances force developed countries to cut back international and to raise tariffs. After the resulting loss of military and economic assistance, numerous small wars break out, while criminal organizations spring up and become international in sope. This leads to a situation where, due to sophisticated hacking operations, no intellectual property is safe, while counterfeit products including drugs and vaccines proliferate. In Smart Scramble, similar circumstances lead to heightened localization with some areas adapting better than others. In time, exchange of information across local boundaries began to grow although they remained restricted in scope.

These latter two scenarios are clearly meant to show the problems that arise when there is limited international organization and cooperation. The benefits of such arrangements is the anodyne theme that is reiterated throughout the exercise. To take one of many examples, at the end of the last scenario, there is this paragraph:

By 2025, collaboration was finally improving, with ecosystems of research and sharing—many of them “virtual”—beginning to emerge. Yet without major progress in global economic integration and collaboration, many worried that good ideas would stay isolated, and survival and success would remain a local—not a global or national—phenomenon.¹⁰

Even a brief perusal of the report shows that it is not anything like a serious forecasting exercise. Not only is there a complete confounding of causal factors, since the independent variable changes with each scenario, it seems that in developing these scenarios the authors became so engrossed in putting together stirring narratives that they forgot what they had originally set out to do, which was to study the possible effects of technological developments on contemporary societies.¹¹

In fact, the more one considers this specimen of intellectual confectionary, the more puzzling it seems. Was there really a company built around the production of this sort of piffle? How on earth did it get started? What sort of ding-a-lings at the Rockefeller Foundation thought that an exercise like this was worth funding? (The head of the Foundation for one, a Judith Rodin, since she contributed one of the letters that preface the report.) Who else did Global Business Network pawn this sort of stuff off on?

One of the things one learns when reading the entire report is that the authors are deeply concerned with the situation in developing countries, which hardly sounds like part of a malevolent effort to take over the world. This is reflected in the following paragraph, which appears close to the beginning:

In 2009, the Institute for Alternative Futures published the report Foresight for Smart Globalization: Accelerating and Enhancing Pro-Poor Development Opportunities, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. That effort was a reflection of the Foundation’s strong commitment to exploring innovative processes and embracing new pathways for insight aimed at helping the world’s poor. With this report, the Foundation takes a further step in advancing the field of pro-poor foresight, this time through the lens of scenario planning.¹²

It is also clear that the authors do not favor the Lock Step scenario. As the following figure shows,¹³ based on the two ‘dimensions’ of “adaptive capacity” and “political and economic alignment”, the Clever Together scenario seems to be the one most in line with their own goals and outlook. (In this connection, note the name and accompanying visual.)

At any rate, this is certainly not a plan being laid out or even adumbrated.¹⁴

The report transmogrified

After the report was published, it was picked up very quickly by people on the Right. The first account that I have seen was from a site called Prison Planet under the name, Paul J. Watson, although the original article apparently appeared at the infowars Website and was written by Steven John Hibbs.¹⁵ Focusing on the Lock Step scenario (in fact, it isn’t made clear that this was one scenario out of four), the writer makes the valid point that although the scenario is fictional, the authors clearly approve of the drastic measures that they depict:

It is crystal clear from reading the Lock Step scenario that the oppressive society portrayed in the study is not presented as an admonishment of how governments would cynically seize upon a pandemic to set up a police state and empower themselves as dictators, it’s a ringing endorsement that this approach would be the correct thing to do.

Given this, he more or less jumps the shark:

This is what the globalists want – pandemics, warfare, chaos and crises that they can engineer and then exploit to lock in place a dictatorial society ruled by the elite from their ivory towers, while the citizens are reduced to impoverished, squabbling, dependent peasants tightly controlled with sophisticated big brother technology, far too concerned about where their next meal is coming from to have time to overthrow their new rulers.

Soon after this, the message was taken up and amplified – and explicitly characterized as a statement of intent – by the irrepressible Alex Jones on his network broadcast, where he claimed that here was irrefutable evidence of the elite’s plans for world domination.¹⁶ The text of his 2010 monologue bears quoting from:

I mean, I’m not even worthy to be bringing you information this powerful, and I hope you pay attention to what we cover here minute by minute … Because I’ve had chills since last night. This has confirmed everything else we’ve already researched (significant pause as Jones looks down pensively). A Rockefeller study envisions a future dictatorship controlled by elites, millions being killed, mandatory quarantines, check points, the end of the family. Everything that’s in the other documents, but this dovetails with all the other Rockefeller Foundation documents about the GMO food, [unclear] sterilize you with the forced vaccines, the hell that we’re already living in, that’s just going to intensify until we take our government back from these eugenics madmen. But that story is up on prisonplanet.com.

…

These people are so arrogant that they write policy papers, so many of them that they’re producing policy papers and reports and white papers so fast that you could never read them all. It is an open conspiracy against you and your family.

…

You’re not gonna be able to go to the ballgames anymore. You’re not gonna be able to just go out and get drunk with your friends, You’re not gonna be able to just go out and enjoy yourself all the time. The only thing we’ve got of beating this scientific dictatorship, this creeping death that takes time to incrementally enslave you mentally, psychologically, physically, spiritually. The only way to defeat it is for the rank and file of this planet to realize that you have a choice to make on what your destiny’s gonna be. Once you face this information, once you’ve consciously admitted it to yourself, it will take over your life. It should take over your life. What else, what else could it do?

…

It’s not clear when the plan was given the name “Operation Lockstep”, but it may very well have been a child of Jones’ fertile imagination. At any rate, every reference other than the Hibbs-Watson post that I have found on the Web uses this name.

Another early proponent of these ideas was an investigative journalist named Harry Vox, who brought up the report and read passages from the Lock Step scenario during a televised interview with Paul Derienzo in 2014. Again, the idea was that the authors of the report were describing something they actually intended to implement.¹⁷

Probably because there was little in the way of further facts to sustain them, interest in these ideas seems to have dwindled away rather quickly; at least I have not seen further references from the rest of the decade. But of course, all this changed after the Covid-19 outbreak and the restrictions put in place by government authorities.

A striking example comes from a group in New Zealand, (at a Website called envirowatchnz), who picked up on the report as well as the Vox interview and highlighted them in the wake of the draconian actions taken by then Prime Minister Jacinda Arden in response to the Covid-19 outbreak. To quote from their main post:

“A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership ...” the intent is right from the Rockefeller horse’s mouth. And is it not right now looking just like a police state?¹⁸ (emphasis added)

In the same post the author details the various restrictions that had recently been put into place by the New Zealand government, after which she concludes:

If you doubt that the end game is a Police State scenario, keep watching as the controls increase. On p18 of the Rockefeller document you will see the surveillance cameras at the top of the page. These people have made no secret of their plans. They’re right there in plain sight if you want to look. Unfortunately most folk prefer to keep on listening to mainstream fairyland media and ignore what’s really going on right under their noses.

Of course, Alex Jones was soon back in the public eye, appearing in interviews, in one of which he made this remarkable statement:

My most accurate prediction, going back over a decade, was when I read the Rockefeller Foundation Operation Lockstep, and they described using a virus to bring in world government, bring in a world medical ID. They would then build a social credit score off of, and they would make more masks for fear, that they would shut down sporting events and things like that, and basically phase in this new tyranny. I was able to specifically make that prediction over and over and over again because I was going off their own battle plan.¹⁹

Once they began to proliferate widely, these claims were quickly challenged by members of the modern fact-checking industry writing both in mainstream newspapers and at Websites. These people made the obvious points that the Lock Step scenario was not a “plan”, nor was it specifically favored by the authors of the report. Moreover, it was more than a little daffy to think that a secret plan of this sort would be made available online for anyone to download if they wished.²⁰

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this did not diminish the enthusiasm of the most vociferous Operation Lockstep proponents, as evidenced by a recent article written by the blogger Eugyppius. This was written in response to numerous comments he had received, such as the one quoted below. Thus, many people are still claiming that the account given in the Rockefeller report is proof that the pandemic had been planned all along.

All Eugyppius has to do is to check out the 2010 Rockefeller Foundations [sic] ‘Lockstep’ document and he’ll know for sure it was a coup. They were all in on it.. governments, intelligence agencies, WHO, UN, WEF, Billy Gates and the boys + a whole lot more..²¹

These examples make it clear that these people have seized upon certain elements of the Lock Step account, to justify their own a priori beliefs, without paying any attention to the context from which these elements are drawn. So, if we take what they’re saying literally, it is glaringly false.

This leads one to suspect that these people will not give up a cherished idea, in this case that they have found “the smoking gun”, no matter what facts are brought to their attention. An equally depressing thought is that even if they are induced to abandon this mistaken claim, there will be no real stock taking afterwards, no reflection on the fact that they made claims that were so easy to refute. All this seems to reflect a particular ‘psychology’, a conspiracist mentality if you will, that builds its interpretation of events around a malevolent Other whose only goal is to gain more power and control over the rest of us.

A further look at “Operation Lockstep”

However, this may not be the ‘end of the story’ – or even the most interesting part. If a more subtle view of the relation between language and empirical truth is taken than a simple minded truth-functional one, then perhaps we should not simply ignore what are on the face of it outlandish claims. Because in this case, strangely enough, there are striking parallels between the fervid imaginings of conspiricists and the events that transpired during the Covid ‘pandemic’ episode. Perhaps, then, these people are responding to something real and important even though they have characterized it in ways that are not accurate with regards to the specific facts. And by the same token, perhaps their critics are, in a de facto way, covering something up. In which case the naïve credulity of conspiracists may in some sense be closer to important truths than the superficial sophistication of their critics.

In fact, as noted by Hibbs, there are features of the scenario descriptions in the Rockefeller report that are peculiar and more than a little disconcerting. Not only in the Lock Step scenario but throughout the report, one sees evidence that the authors are not averse to authoritarian governance provided it is carried out in an intelligent, ‘responsible’ manner. The passage quoted above regarding the Chinese response to the pandemic (which, as Hibbs noted, the authors clearly approve of) is an example, as is the story of Manisha, which seems to be telling us that the authoritarianism depicted in Lock Step can be okay when it leads to necessary or beneficial measures being taken. In the same scenario, it is also telling that a significant downside that is highlighted is the “rise of virulent nationalism”.²²

As shown by the paragraph quoted earlier, the same attraction to organized top-down control is in evidence in the Clever Together scenario. Here is another revealing paragraph that appeared a little earlier in the same account:

In such an interconnected world, where the behaviors of one country, company, or individual had potentially high-impact effects on all others, piecemeal attempts by one nation here, one small collective of environmental organizations there, would not be enough to stave off a climate disaster—or, for that matter, to effectively address a host of other planetary-scale problems. But highly coordinated worldwide strategies for addressing such urgent issues just might. What was needed was systems thinking—and systems acting—on a global scale.²³

The same general attitude also sees its reflection in the two latter scenarios where the authors depict the many untoward consequences of the weakening of the international ‘rules-based order’. Although, quite frankly, some of these developments seem quite plausible, the point is that the thrust of these accounts is fully commensurate with attitudes expressed more openly in the first two scenarios.

What we are seeing here, therefore, is not the laying out of an insidious plan (or even a subtle hint to the cognoscenti that there is such a plan), but a reflection of the attitudes and beliefs of the writers, who are denizens of a particular social class and participants in a common belief system, that does wield an outsized degree of influence in society. Therefore, the fact that they obviously approve of drastic measures by governments in the face of a pandemic or a climate crisis is telling; what we are seeing here may well be a reflection of the same mentality that gave us the draconian measures together with an orchestrated campaign of disinformation during the Covid-19 panic.²⁴

In this connection, I want to quote Harry Vox’s statement toward the end of the afore-mentioned interview, in which he summed up the situation as he saw it:

The main thing, … they want to get more control, more turf, and control, and it’s gonna be curfews and quarantines. So what I’m saying is, unless the American people start to get some new, ahm, way to revolt, a new way to organize, new way to protest, unless they can break through the apathy, because it’s what we have now, ah, then it’s going to become a slave state. The ruling class doesn’t seem to have too much resistance, they’re getting everything on their Christmas shopping list, and they’ve been wanting quarantines and curfews for a long time, now they got it. And if you wanna live in a world where you’re tricked into all this stuff, because “it’s for your safety”, right? And if you wanna have a probe and make sure you gotta check your pockets, make sure you don’t have anything incriminating on you before you go out – and when you step outa your house, want the police there and monitors and see what you’re doing, if that’s the world you wanna live in, be apathetic, don’t do anything – you’re gonna get that world very soon, coming your way, definitely.²⁵

In hindsight, this statement does sound like a warning and characterization of what is now well on its way to fruition.

But why would it seem prophetic now if there were not some deep connections between the storylines contained in the Rockefeller report and the actions that were taken by governments across the West and elsewhere in the world in response to the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’? And the most obvious connection that I can see is in the mentality behind the report and behind the draconian actions taken by those in power in circumstances surrounding the breakout of a respiratory virus – circumstances that included not only the virus outbreak itself but also the threat to the ‘ruling class’ and all their fellow travelers posed by the rise of populism across the West and elsewhere and, most of all by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

In other words, this was a mentality whose implications – in the form of action taken in a particular situation – did not manifest themselves until it was faced with a crisis of this sort. But these implications were identified early on by people who were alert to certain cues, even if their interpretation of the cues themselves was in many ways so off-base.

In other words, there were potentials associated with this mentality that did not come out in the Rockefeller report; in fact they were never touched upon. But they became very clear with the dark side of the Covid panic, especially the insistence on everyone being vaccinated and the demonization of treatments that were, in fact, safe and effective. These developments were in stark contrast with the beneficent vision the authors had of ‘responsible’ government control, a vision of a well-run managerial state. And this is clearly the vision that our leaders and the people who gather at Davos have of themselves. (Incidentally, the fact that this vision is wildly out of whack with reality, the fact that the system that actually emerges will be from all indications deeply malevolent in practice, does not mean that these beliefs are not sincerely held.)

This latter aspect of the problem is one that escapes the nets (and apparently the understanding) of conspiracy theorists on the Right – people who also have a completely benign vision of themselves, BTW, as opposed to their adversaries. And that in turn suggests that each side could become dangerous were they given too much power. And it is this one-sided vision on both sides that is at the heart of the real problem.²⁶

Coda

Another issue brought up by this discussion is the eternal problem of balancing freedom and control. There are always going to have to be checks on personal freedom, especially when it affects the freedom and safety of others. For example, we are currently seeing what happens when controls on crime are lifted, since an experiment of this sort is going on in several major cities in the United States – where the freedom and civil rights of criminals have come to trump the security of the general citizenry. And the results show pretty clearly that in this case the proper balance has not been achieved.

By the same token, in a genuine emergency, such as a real pandemic, curtailment of certain freedoms may be necessary. It is always a question of judgment, judgment that is required on a case by case basis.

The primary question is: is our present ‘ruling elite’ still capable of such judgments? And as the Covid-19 episode clearly indicates, it is not, whatever the reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs.

Written January, 2024

Footnotes

1. Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network, 2010.

2. Ibid., p. 9.

3. One observes with some amusement (albeit ruefully) that among the disasters potentially facing mankind, the authors consider a fanciful scenario involving climate change, but they never consider the effects of mass migration despite the obvious build-up at the time, and historical antecedents, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the ensuing Dark Ages.

4. Ibid., p. 18.

5. Loc. cit.

6. Ibid., p. 21.

7. Ibid., p. 24.

8. Ibid., p. 25.

9. Ibid., pp. 27-8.

10. Ibid., p. 45.

11. There is also the issue of actual cause and effect. Needless to say, the authors cannot predict that the outcomes they depict will necessarily follow from the disasters that they posit.

12. Ibid., p. 9.

13. Ibid., p. 16.

14. For a more acerbic discussion of the Rockefeller Foundation report that also provides some useful background information, see: Eugyppius, “Everything you never wanted to know about “Operation Lockstep”, August 9, 2023 (www.eugyppius.com/p/everything-you-never-wanted-to-know)

15. Paul J. Watson (Steven John Hibbs), “Rockefeller study envisages global dictatorship ruled by the elite”, Prison Planet [?], July 16, 2010 (stevenjohnhibbs.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/rockefeller-study-envisages-global-dictatorship-ruled-by-the-elite)

16. A recently made video that contains the original monologue (with new visuals) can be seen at infowarsarmy.com/posts/alex-jones-exposes-covid-before-lockstep/

17. The video is available at envirowatchnz.com/2020/07/22/another-journalist-2014-who-warned-about-operation-lockstep-the-blueprint-for-global-control

18. Pam Vernon, “Under the guise of a pandemic, they are creating a prison state ... the Rockefeller Foundation’s DOCUMENTED plan for martial law... OPERATION LOCKSTEP”, EnvirowatchNZ, May 24, 2020 (envirowatchnz.com/2020/05/24/under-the-guise-of-a-pandemic-we-will-create-a-prison-state-the-rockefeller-foundations-documented-plan-for-martial-law-operation-lockstep)

19. Transcribed from a TikTok video posted by craig202090 (www.tiktok.com/@craig202090/video/7312145853827779882)

Note that at certain points Jones seems to be conflating his own remarks at the time with what is actually in the report.

20. See for example: Chelsey Cox, “Fact check: 'Rockefeller Playbook' and 'Operation Lockstep' are hoaxes”, USA Today, January 24, 2021 (www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/14/fact-check-operation-lockstep-covid-19-conspiracy-theory/6567231002/); Dan Evon, “Was the COVID-19 pandemic planned in Rockefeller's 'Operation Lockstep'?”, Snopes, July 21, 2020 (www.snopes.com/fact-check/rockefeller-operation-lockstep/); Pippa Allen-Kinross, “Covid-19 pandemic was not planned by Rockefeller Foundation”, Full Fact, May 17, 2021 (fullfact.org/online/covid-19-pandemic-was-not-planned-rockefeller-foundation/)

21. Eugyppius, 2023, op. cit.

22. Scenario for the Future, 2010, op. cit., p. 19.

23. Ibid., p. 27.

24. Reading the Lock Step scenario, one has the sense that the authors have very mixed feelings about the authoritarianism they describe, approving of some aspects while unwilling to embrace this mode of governance whole hog. Even their description of a growing resistance to government restrictions is strangely muted.

25. Transcribed from video on the Webpage cited in Footnote 16.

26. This should not be taken as saying that there are not real, nay critical, differences between the two sides in this moment of history. This is clear if one simply looks at the caliber of people who are leaders in the MAGA movement compared to those opposed to them. Or the Magnificent 11 or 14 or whatever it is now in the U.S. House of Representatives as opposed to run-of-the-mill Republicans.

The point is that the real problem here is not being formulated adequately. (And cf. the Coda for another dimension to the problem that is never raised by people on the Right. But why not? Well, that’s a question that this blog is trying to answer.)