It occurred to me during the week that it’s pretty much exactly five years since the Covid madness took hold. That in turn was about five years after Trump announced what would eventually become his successful presidential campaign. And now, of course, he’s back. It’s a fascinating collection of five-year blocks:-
2015: Trump begins presidential campaign
2020: Covid “pandemic”
2025: Trump admin part 2
Reminds me of the initial Star Wars trilogy:
Star Wars: A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
This time around, Trump has actually assembled a team that seems to be a threat to the empire. What’s more, they seem to know what they are doing. Maybe they really can find and destroy the Death Star’s main reactor.
What has particularly interested me about Trump Mark 2 is the implications for the collection of societal forces that I have labelled the Devouring Mother. At the head of the list would be the effect on the Munchausen-by-Proxy-as-a-Service “health industry”. Trump has once again withdrawn US funding for the WHO and seems to be intent on cutting off a lot of other money streams to the various “NGOs”. If he follows through with that, that’ll be a hell of a lot less money for interests aligned to the “health industry”. Extra bad news for Big Pharma would be if RFK Junior gets his position at the head of the Department of Health. Some readers might remember that RFK was one of the few mainstream voices that spoke out against the Covid debacle from the start. That’s poetic justice in my book.
There was an even more telling exchange just yesterday that might seem trivial and yet goes right to the heart of the Devouring Mother phenomenon. Some journalist dug up a couple of inappropriate social media posts by one of the young men who is working with DOGE to find all the dodgy payments that have been getting made by various government departments, including this one to fund a Fauci exhibit at the NIH museum. More poetic justice!

Anyway, the DOGE employee was fired but then promptly rehired, which prompted this tweet exchange between JD Vance and a member of Congress:



What’s crucial about Vance’s post is that it’s as close to a direct repudiation as you can get to what has been the main tactic the Devouring Mother used for years, if not decades, to not just shut down public debate but destroy political opposition. Won’t somebody think of the children? If Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy, then Appeal to the Children is the Devouring Mother’s raison d’etre.
Vance’s reply calls out the behaviour exactly as it is. “Emotional blackmail pretending to be concern” is the perfect description of the Devouring Mother’s modus operandi. When applied to her actual children, the point of this blackmail is to win compliance. The emotional blackmail angle works because it paints the Devouring Mother herself as the precious petal who will wilt and die if the children don’t do exactly what she wants. It’s the same deal in the political realm. Weaponised empathy is used to get others to give you what you want just so they can appear to be good people by not being cruel to a less powerful person (which is why everybody wants to be a victim nowadays. Nobody wants to be seen to hurt somebody who’s already a victim).
If that was all there was, Vance’s tweet would already have been a watershed. But he backed it up with a further point about the idea of children making mistakes and growing as a result. That also goes to the heart of the issue because the Devouring Mother does not want her children to grow. She wants to keep them dependent. Turning petty incidents into a matter for shame and punishment is one of the main ways to do that. It prevents the child from taking risks and thereby learning and growing. This is especially poignant because right now a lot of Americans are learning just how corrupt their government is.
It’s hard to imagine a more concise repudiation of the Devouring Mother tactics than Vance’s post. Given the amount of discussion it generated, it may turn out to be just another little sign that the zeitgeist really is changing fast. Could this be the end of the Devouring Mother?
On a related note, I’ve been pondering the idea that was pushed way back at the start of Covid that natural immunity didn’t apply to the “new” virus. Again, this is a classic Munchausen-by-Proxy tactic since it makes you think that you’ll always be sick and always in need of mummy to help you. Of course, it was never explained why all of a sudden natural immunity didn’t exist. But then again, nothing was ever explained satisfactorily with Covid. It was just asserted by hysterical people trying to shut down debate.
It’s occurred to me that maybe the people who pushed that line really do believe their own bullshit. There’s good reasons why they should. Denying natural immunity is equivalent to denying that life evolves, which is a comforting thought if, deep down, you’re really worried that the cookie jar is going to get taken away.
If you’re a Big Pharma marketing guru trying to convince parents that their children really do need 437 vaccine shots before their first birthday, then you want it to be true that natural immunity doesn’t exist. More metaphorically, if you’re a propagandist with the MSM whose job is to control the minds of the populace according to whatever the government wants this week, you really hope that there’s no such thing as immunity to propaganda.
But I suspect these kinds of people do know that natural immunity is a real thing and that people’s immune systems do eventually catch up with the mind viruses that have been used against them. Could it be that we are approaching herd immunity to the Devouring Mother? It’s early days, but it certainly feels a lot like convalescence to me.
Hi Simon,
A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. Wow, it doesn’t get more clear than that.
The wonderful thing about shooting people who make simple mistakes, is that it allows anyone to be shot. Show me a person who claims they never made a mistake, and I’ll point to a liar.
A herd immunity to the pursuit of ideology over common sense perhaps?
I find it very odd that the uncovering of the alleged acts of corruption is not being more widely reported.
Anywhoo, hope your area begins to get some stuff, like road upgrades. The awful truth about safe seats, is that they get no attention. The old timers used to say: The squeaky wheel gets the oil. And it’s true. On that basis, your area is screaming! Well done.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – in the age of the internet, everything gets remembered. It’s still the case, though, that only certain groups get targeted. You could make a videos hours and hours long of world leaders being 100% wrong during Covid and all that just gets conveniently forgotten, yet some stupid post from a teenager is used to destroy their career. It’s just naked power at work.
Hi Simon, You always provide an interesting take on events and I hope that you are right about the end of the Devouring Mother. We might even see some change here in Australia as we are certainly not immune from corruption and wokeism, and we are coming up to a Federal election. On that note, it is good to see that Werribee isn’t a safe Labor seat anymore! What surprises me (although I might just not be seeing it) is that there doesn’t seem to be much mainstream outrage around the US corruption revelations. Maybe people are in the first stage of grief? Sandra
Sandra – i don’t think there’ll be a lot of outrage about it for the same reason that most white collar crimes don’t get much attention, they’re just not dramatic enough. Thousands and thousands of relatively small payments don’t make for a good story, especially when it’s all been laundered through various front companies. Ultimately, what matters is whether the payments can be stopped and it looks like the courts will decide that.
Sandra and Simon,
there will be little outrage about the USAID corruption simply because a certain set, roughly along the lines of the “Covidians”, simply will not hear about it through the media (propaganda) they consume. They hear of it only as a “humanitarian crisis” or tyrannical punishment by evil Trump and his Nazi sidekick Musk, so that even if the actual facts are presented to them they refuse to accept them. Very similar to the beginning of Covid in that sense. Though, now, the shoe is on the precise opposite foot.
Devouring mother out, but what drunken fatherly archetype is Trump ushering in now?…
Cub – true. The social media echo chambers will remain. But if these paid influence networks get defunded, then that’s a big deal. To give just one example, Peter Daszak’s Ecohealth Alliance was not only funding the Wuhan lab but also ran MSM propaganda in the early days of covid. Guess who was getting funded by US-AIDS? https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ecohealth-alliance-receives-millions-in-taxpayer-dollars-despite-involvement-with-wuhan-lab/
As for Trump, he’s doing his old trick of opening the negotiations with crazy tawk. Makes sense. You gotta remember Trump ran a number of different corporations. He knows that most people are dozing off to sleep half the time and need a wakeup call to get them to do something.