The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.
During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems—from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty—leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.161 (Emphasis added)
Schwartz’s chilling document goes on to predict that citizens terrified by germs and orchestrated propaganda willingly relinquish their civil and constitutional rights. The population, Schwartz predicts, will not start rebelling against the new tyranny and authoritarian clampdowns for more than ten years.
Intelligence agencies left their fingerprints all over these scenario-planning exercises. Schwartz—like O’Toole, Larsen, Kadlec, Woolsey, and David—is one of the many leading promoters of weaponized vaccines as a foreign policy tool with deep connections to the Intelligence Apparatus. Schwartz’s résumé chronicles multiple touchpoints with spy agencies before and after he authored the “Lockstep” scenario. In 1972, Schwartz joined the Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International), an early pioneer in computer technology and artificial intelligence. Schwartz rose to run SRI’s Strategic Environment Center, at a time when SRI was hosting the CIA’s notorious MKUltra program and actively researching psychological warfare including the sophisticated use of propaganda, torture, and psychiatric chemicals to shatter societies and impose centralized control. Schwartz left to become head of Scenario Planning for Royal Dutch/Shell. He then cofounded the Global Business Network (GBN) in 1987 as a corporate consultant specializing in analyzing intelligence and in “future-think” strategies. Shell Oil was GBN’s highest-revenue client.
In the early 1990s, Ken McCarthy, who would become an early pioneer of practical efforts to commercialize the Internet, met Schwartz at a large Thanksgiving gathering in a remote location in rural Harris, California. Schwartz introduced himself to McCarthy, an anthropology graduate from Princeton, and Schwartz began probing McCarthy’s interest in being recruited for a contract with an unnamed West African country that involved “weakening tribal and family structures on behalf of a federal government.” Recalling the encounter, McCarthy told me, “I found Schwartz’s proposal intensely disturbing.” Schwartz dismissed McCarthy’s qualms as “naive.” McCarthy says, “It made a lasting impression on me—so much so that I’ve recounted the story many times over the years.”162
Schwartz’s client, Shell Oil, had extensive oil holdings in the Ogoni region of Nigeria. In 1995, the Nigerian government executed Ogoni environmental leader, writer, and television producer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other environmental organizers based on charges that they had “incited violence.” Saro-Wiwa’s arrest, trial by a military tribunal, and subsequent execution followed a harassment campaign against him and other Ogoni environmental leaders, which started in 1993 after they repeatedly mobilized peaceful demonstrations against Shell, attracting over 300,000 of the region’s total population of 600,000.163 The United Nations General Assembly and the European Union condemned Saro-Wiwa’s execution, and the United States recalled its ambassador to Nigeria.164
In 1993, Schwartz, along with Stewart Brand and Nicolas Negroponte, was one of the driving forces behind the founding of Wired Magazine, which became the central clearinghouse for mainstream news coverage of the burgeoning online ecosystem. Wired quickly earned notoriety as a clearinghouse for intelligence agency chatter. Prior to Wired, Mondo 2000, the Bay Area’s original tech and culture magazine, reflected the progressive, idealistic viewpoints of many of the pioneer tech innovators. In contrast, Wired, which appropriated Mondo 2000’s look and feel and no small number of its employees, glorified military and intelligence agency celebrities and corporate CEOs who happened to be clients of Nicholas Negroponte’s MIT Lab. Wired gained snowballing prominence in the early 2000s at the same time that the CIA launched its notorious investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to infiltrate the tech industry and put Silicon Valley on steroids with easy terms and government contracts.165 (Scenario planner Tara O’Toole served as In-Q-Tel’s executive vice president.)
It’s worth recalling here that the defense and intelligence agencies had a beachhead in the tech industry from its birth: the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA, created the Internet by building the ARPANET grid in 1969.166 DARPA is the Pentagon’s angel investor and venture fund. In addition to creating the Internet, DARPA developed GPS, stealth bombers, weather satellites, pilotless drones, and the M16 rifle. DARPA was, perhaps, the largest funder of gain-of-function research, outstripping even Dr. Fauci’s NIH in some years. In 2017 alone, DARPA laundered at least $6.5 million through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to fund experiments167 at the Wuhan lab. DARPA funded additional gain-of-function experiments at Fort Detrick and other biosecurity research at Battelle’s laboratory at St. Joseph, Missouri.168 Beginning in 2013, DARPA also financed the key technologies for the Moderna vaccine.169
In 2002, DARPA set off a firestorm among human rights advocates from the Left and Right by creating a comprehensive data mining system under President Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter. Public protests forced DARPA to scuttle that project, but critics have accused the agency of using the technology to help launch Facebook.170 By remarkable coincidence, DARPA shut down its Facebook-like project LifeLog, a venture that involved MIT contractors, the very same month—February 2004—that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook just a thirty-minute walk up the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the campus of Harvard University.