Dancing Nurses

An Essay

Preface

I wrote “Is this a war?”, in November 2021, during what many now recognize as a pivotal moment in the psychological operation that reshaped Western society. Reading it again in September 2025, nearly four years later, I'm struck by how the dancing nurses phenomenon captured something essential about the technique of power we witnessed—not through concealment, but through brazen display of contradiction.

The dancing nurses were never about healthcare worker morale or stress relief. They were a litmus test, a sorting mechanism that revealed who would accept performed contradictions and who would resist them. Those TikTok videos, appearing simultaneously across continents while governments declared medical emergencies, represented something unprecedented in the history of propaganda: authorities demonstrating they could make populations accept two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously.

What we witnessed was not traditional propaganda aimed at persuasion, but something more akin to what abuse specialists recognize as gaslighting at scale. The psychological mechanism was elegant in its cruelty: present citizens with an obvious contradiction—hospitals both overwhelmed and empty enough for choreographed routines—then punish them socially for noticing it. Those who pointed out the impossibility were labeled "conspiracy theorists," while those who defended the videos became unwitting enforcers of the operation.

This essay explores how this technique fits within the broader framework of psychological warfare described by researchers from Paul Linebarger to Michael Hoffman, from Peter Pomerantsev to Annalee Newitz. It examines how the "revelation of the method"—showing the public the manipulation while they remain powerless to resist it—serves to demoralize and fragment resistance.

The dancing nurses were a beta test for reality distortion. Once populations accepted that initial contradiction, they were primed for more: masks that worked except when they didn't, vaccines that prevented transmission until they didn't, two weeks to flatten the curve that became two years. Each accepted absurdity weakened the public's capacity to trust their own observations.

Nearly four years on, we can see how this operation established precedents that persist. The infrastructure of cognitive control—digital identity systems, social credit mechanisms, reality curation through algorithmic manipulation—continues to expand. But understanding the technique is the first step toward resistance. This essay is an attempt to document that moment when the mask slipped, when power showed its face, dancing in empty hospital corridors while the world cowered in manufactured fear.

- Unbekoming

1. The Performance of Power

In March 2020, as governments worldwide declared states of emergency and citizens huddled in their homes awaiting updates on overwhelmed hospitals, something bizarre began appearing across social media: choreographed videos of medical staff dancing in apparently empty hospital corridors. These weren't grainy phone recordings of spontaneous celebrations—they were elaborately produced performances, often set to popular music, featuring synchronized routines by groups of nurses and doctors in full PPE. From Jerusalem to New York, from London to Melbourne, medical professionals performed coordinated dance numbers while the world was told that healthcare systems faced unprecedented collapse.

The dissonance was immediate and jarring. Official messaging insisted hospitals were war zones, that medical systems teetered on the brink of collapse, that healthcare workers were exhausted heroes barely holding the line against an invisible enemy. News broadcasts showed refrigerated trucks allegedly storing bodies, field hospitals being erected in Central Park, and somber warnings about rationing ventilators. Yet simultaneously, these same hospitals produced what amounted to music videos—not one or two, but hundreds, appearing with suspicious synchronicity across the globe.

The Rockefeller Foundation's 2010 "Operation Lock Step" scenario had imagined a pandemic leading to authoritarian control through citizen compliance with emergency measures. That document described how "citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereignty—and their privacy—to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability." But even that prescient document hadn't predicted this particular form of psychological operation: the weaponization of absurdity itself. The dancing nurses represented something beyond traditional propaganda—they were a demonstration of power through the deliberate creation of cognitive dissonance.

Paul Linebarger, in his seminal work on psychological warfare, wrote that effective propaganda must maintain internal consistency to be believed. But here was something different: propaganda that flaunted its own contradictions, that dared the public to notice the impossible juxtaposition of crisis and celebration. When citizens pointed out the obvious—empty hospitals while we're told they're overwhelmed, dancing staff while we're told they're exhausted—they were met not with explanation but with gaslighting. To question the videos was to be labeled a conspiracy theorist, to dishonor healthcare heroes, to spread dangerous misinformation.

This technique appears to draw from what Michael Hoffman calls "revelation of the method"—the cryptocracy's practice of revealing their operations in plain sight, knowing that public inaction in the face of such revelation produces a demoralizing effect. The message becomes: "We can show you the contradiction between our words and actions, and you will do nothing. You will accept both the lie and the evidence of the lie simultaneously." It's a form of humiliation ritual that operates not through concealment but through brazen display.

The dancing nurses weren't meant to convince anyone that hospitals were actually functioning normally—they were meant to demonstrate that power could make citizens accept two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously. This wasn't merely about controlling information; it was about breaking the public's confidence in their own perception of reality, creating what Soviet dissidents once called "the fog" where nothing could be known for certain.

2. The Architecture of Humiliation

The concept of ritual humiliation in psychological warfare operates on a principle that predates modern propaganda: forcing the subjugated to participate in their own degradation. Ancient conquerors understood this when they made defeated peoples crawl beneath yokes or prostrate themselves before victors. The dancing nurses represented a sophisticated evolution of this technique—not humiliating the healthcare workers themselves, but rather the public forced to witness and accept the spectacle.

Consider the specific elements of these performances. Healthcare workers, the designated "heroes" of the pandemic narrative, engaged in frivolous entertainment while wearing the very PPE we were told was in critically short supply. They gathered in groups while citizens were arrested for attending funerals or visiting dying relatives. They demonstrated that hospitals had both the space and the staff availability for elaborate rehearsals while the public was told that medical systems faced imminent collapse. Each element compounded the insult, creating what researchers of psychological operations recognize as a "humiliation cascade"—where each accepted contradiction makes the next easier to impose.

Peter Pomerantsev, in his analysis of modern propaganda, describes how contemporary information warfare doesn't aim to convince but to confuse, to create what he calls "censorship through noise." But the dancing nurses went beyond confusion—they represented something more akin to what happens in abusive relationships, where the abuser deliberately creates situations that force the victim to deny their own perceptions. "That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, it's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it."

The psychological mechanism at work mirrors what Robert Jay Lifton identified in his studies of thought reform: the creation of a "doctrine over person" environment where abstract ideas override lived experience. Citizens could see the contradiction—hospitals both overwhelmed and empty enough for dance routines—but were required to subordinate this observation to the official narrative. This wasn't achieved through force but through social pressure, through the fear of being labeled a "conspiracy theorist" or "covidiot" for pointing out the obvious.

The timing of these videos was crucial. They appeared just as populations were adapting to unprecedented restrictions on their freedom. Locked in their homes, separated from loved ones, watching their businesses collapse, citizens were then presented with images of their "exhausted heroes" performing synchronized dance routines. It was as if the system was taunting: "We've taken everything from you under the pretense of emergency, and now we'll show you it's not even real—and you'll thank us for it."

This represents what Hoffman identified as a core technique of occult psychological warfare: the deliberate revelation of the method coupled with public acquiescence. The real victory isn't in deceiving the population—it's in showing them the deception and watching them accept it anyway. Each accepted contradiction diminishes the public's capacity for resistance, creating learned helplessness on a civilizational scale. The dancing nurses were a test, and largely, the public passed it exactly as intended: by accepting the unacceptable.

3. The Trauma Bond Formation

The dancing nurses phenomenon operated within a larger psychological framework that resembles what trauma specialists recognize as trauma bonding—the powerful emotional attachments that form between abusers and victims through cycles of threat and relief. During the pandemic, populations experienced unprecedented psychological stress: isolation from loved ones, economic devastation, constant fear messaging about infection and death. Into this environment of sustained anxiety, the dancing nurses videos served a perverse function: they provided moments of cognitive relief through absurdity, even as they deepened the overall psychological violation.

The mechanism worked like this: citizens, already destabilized by weeks of catastrophic messaging, encountered these videos and experienced a momentary break from the relentless fear. The cheerful music, the synchronized movements, the smiling faces behind face shields—all offered a brief respite from doom. But this relief came packaged with its own poison. To accept the comfort of the videos meant accepting their fundamental contradiction with reality. It meant agreeing to not think too hard about why hospitals had time for choreography during a civilization-threatening crisis.

This dynamic mirrors what Joost Meerloo described in "The Rape of the Mind" regarding menticide—the systematic destruction of independent thought. He observed that totalitarian systems don't simply impose ideology through force; they create conditions where the mind seeks refuge in accepting contradictions rather than enduring the psychological tension of resistance. The dancing nurses created precisely this kind of double bind: reject them and be labeled a dangerous conspiracy theorist who dishonors heroes, or accept them and surrender your capacity to recognize obvious contradictions.

The production quality of these videos deserves special attention. These weren't spontaneous expressions of joy by overworked staff—they required planning, rehearsal, equipment, and editing. Someone had to organize the staff, someone had to choreograph the routines, someone had to film and edit, someone had to upload and promote. This level of coordination across multiple hospitals globally suggests institutional support, if not outright directive. The message embedded in this production value was itself part of the operation: "We have the resources and authority to make this happen, everywhere, simultaneously."

Michael Hoffman's research into "twilight language" and "revelation of the method" provides another lens through which to understand these performances. In occult psychology, the victim must participate in their own degradation for the ritual to be complete. The dancing nurses forced this participation. Citizens shared the videos—sometimes mockingly, sometimes supportively, but sharing nonetheless. Each share, each comment, each reaction represented a form of participation in the ritual, regardless of whether the participant supported or opposed the content.

The trauma bonding aspect became most evident in how people defended the videos when questioned. Stockholm syndrome describes how captives begin to identify with and defend their captors; similarly, many citizens became aggressive defenders of the dancing nurses, attacking anyone who pointed out the contradictions. They had internalized the cognitive dissonance so completely that protecting it became psychologically easier than confronting it. The system had created its own defenders from among its victims, a hallmark of successful psychological operations that Linebarger identified as the ultimate goal of propaganda: making the target population enforce the propaganda upon themselves.

4. The Technology of Mockery

The dancing nurses represented a new evolution in what Annalee Newitz calls "weaponized narratives"—stories designed not to inform or persuade but to destabilize and demoralize. But these weren't traditional narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends. They were fragments of meaning, delivered through the hyperreal medium of social media, designed to bypass rational analysis and strike directly at psychological foundations. The platform itself—TikTok, primarily—was integral to the operation, its algorithm ensuring maximum penetration while its format discouraged critical thinking.

The choice of dance as the medium was neither arbitrary nor innocent. Dance is pre-verbal, bodily, primal. It bypasses intellectual defenses and speaks directly to emotional and social processing centers. When performed by authority figures in uniform—particularly medical uniforms that society codes as trustworthy and protective—it creates a specific type of cognitive disruption. The brain struggles to reconcile the gravitas associated with medical professionals during a health crisis with the frivolity of choreographed entertainment. This reconciliation failure doesn't resolve; it simply exhausts the critical faculties.

Consider how these videos proliferated. They didn't emerge from a single source that could be questioned or challenged. They appeared simultaneously across multiple platforms, from multiple hospitals, in multiple countries, creating what intelligence analysts call "source laundering"—when the origin of an operation becomes impossible to trace because it emerges from everywhere at once. This distributed emergence gave the phenomenon an organic appearance while serving a coordinated purpose. Individual hospitals could claim their video was just innocent stress relief, while the aggregate effect created a global psychological operation.

The mockery element operated on multiple levels. Surface-level, it mocked the very concept of pandemic emergency—how serious could things be if nurses had time to rehearse dance routines? But deeper, it mocked the public's powerlessness. Citizens who had lost jobs, missed funerals, been arrested for gathering outdoors, watched their children's mental health deteriorate from isolation—these people were forced to watch their "heroes" dance. It was reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's apocryphal "Let them eat cake," except this time the aristocracy made sure the peasants watched them eating it on social media.

Harry Vox's 2014 warning about the Rockefeller Foundation's "Lock Step" scenario proved prescient, but even he hadn't anticipated this particular refinement of control. The document had focused on traditional authoritarian measures—quarantines, mobility restrictions, surveillance. But the dancing nurses represented something more sophisticated: control through performed contradiction, authority through absurdist display. As Neema Parvini later observed, the regime doesn't play 4D chess—they telegraph their intentions. The dancing nurses were the telegraph, the message, and the humiliation all rolled into one.

This technology of mockery serves a specific function in psychological warfare: it identifies and isolates potential resistance. Those who pointed out the obvious contradictions revealed themselves as "problems" to be monitored, deplatformed, or socially destroyed. Those who participated in defending the videos identified themselves as successfully programmed. And the vast middle, confused and demoralized, learned to stay silent rather than risk joining either category. The dance videos became a sorting mechanism, a loyalty test disguised as entertainment.

5. The Fog of Unreality

The dancing nurses ultimately served as a gateway drug to what would become a sustained campaign of reality distortion. Once populations accepted this initial contradiction—emergency and entertainment simultaneously—they were primed for greater violations of logic. Mask mandates for walking alone on beaches while mass protests were deemed safe. Deadly viruses that respected arbitrary six-foot distances and restaurant seating arrangements. Vaccines that neither prevented infection nor transmission but were mandated to "protect others." Each accepted absurdity made the next easier to swallow.

This technique aligns with what Soviet dissidents described about life under late-stage communism—not a society that believed the propaganda, but one that had given up believing anything could be known for certain. Svetlana Boym called this "the communal apartment of the mind," where contradictory realities coexisted without resolution. The dancing nurses helped construct a similar mental architecture in the West: a space where "overwhelming the hospitals" and "time for TikTok" could exist simultaneously without cognitive collapse, because cognition itself had been deliberately fractured.

The long-term psychological damage of this operation extends beyond the immediate pandemic period. By successfully forcing populations to accept obvious contradictions, the operation established a precedent. It proved that with sufficient social pressure and fear, people would surrender their most basic capacity—the ability to recognize when things don't add up. This learned helplessness, what Martin Seligman's research showed could be induced through repeated exposure to uncontrollable contradictions, became embedded in the social fabric.

Those who orchestrated this operation understood something fundamental about human psychology: people will choose meaning over truth when forced to pick. Faced with the choice between admitting they'd been deceived (and thus confronting the terrifying implications about their institutions) or constructing elaborate justifications for obvious contradictions, most chose the latter. The dancing nurses videos became a test case for how far reality could be bent before it broke—and the answer was: much further than anyone imagined.

The operation's success can be measured not in how many believed the hospitals were actually empty (few did), but in how many learned to stop trusting their own observations. When people saw the videos, saw the contradictions, but chose silence over speaking out, they participated in their own psychological subjugation. This is what Meerloo meant by menticide—the murder of the mind's capacity for independent judgment. The dancing nurses didn't kill thought; they taught people to distrust it.

As we emerge from this period, the challenge isn't simply to document what happened but to understand how it worked—how populations were convinced to doubt their own senses, to accept performed contradictions, to participate in their own humiliation. The dancing nurses were never about healthcare or morale or stress relief. They were about power—specifically, the power to make people accept the unacceptable, to break the link between observation and conclusion, to create a populace that could no longer trust its own perception of reality. In this, horrifyingly, they succeeded.

References

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Lifton, Robert Jay. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Documentary Sources

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. (2017). SPARS Pandemic Scenario 2025-2028. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University.

World Economic Forum. (2019). Event 201 Pandemic Exercise. Geneva: World Economic Forum.