I never understood what purpose those stupid dancing nurse videos were supposed to serve, nor did I realize how prevalent they were since I wasn’t on Twitter, Tik-tok, or Facebook. But since I was personally acquainted with two nurses during that time, I was aware that they were nonsense and that real nurses working in real hospitals weren’t wasting their time learning choreographed dance routines and performing them for the purposes of their own morale.
Dancing nurses were never about the morale of healthcare workers or stress relief. They were a test, a sorting mechanism, revealing who would accept the contradictions and who would resist them. These videos on TikTok, which appeared simultaneously across all continents while governments declared medical emergencies, represented something unprecedented in the history of propaganda: the authorities showed that they could make populations accept two mutually exclusive realities at the same time.
What we witnessed was not traditional propaganda aimed at persuasion, but something more akin to what abuse experts recognize as gaslighting on a large scale. The psychological mechanism was elegant in its cruelty: it presented citizens with an apparent contradiction—hospitals that were both overcrowded and empty enough for choreographed routines—and then punished them socially for noticing it. Those who pointed out the inconsistency were labeled “conspiracy theorists,” while those who defended the videos unwittingly became pawns in the operation.
This essay explores how this technique fits into the broader context 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“ — which shows the audience the manipulation while remaining powerless to resist it — serves to discourage and fragment resistance.
The dancing-nurses were a test for the distortion of reality. Once populations accepted this initial contradiction, they were prepared for more: masks that worked, except when they didn’t, vaccines that prevented transmission until they stopped preventing it, two weeks to “flatten the curve” that ended up being two years. Each accepted absurdity weakened the public’s ability to trust their own observations.
Almost four years later, we can see how this enterprise created precedents that persist. The infrastructure of cognitive control—digital identity systems, social credit mechanisms, curation of reality through algorithmic manipulation—continues to expand…
This technique seems to draw inspiration from what Michael Hoffman calls “method disclosure“ — the practice of cryptocracy revealing its activities in plain sight, knowing that public inaction in the face of such a revelation produces a discouraging effect. The message becomes: “We can show you the contradiction between our words and our actions, and you will do nothing. You will accept both the lie and the evidence of it.” It is a form of ritual humiliation that works not through concealment, but through unabashed display.
The dancing nurses were not trying to convince anyone that the hospitals were functioning normally—they were trying to show that the authorities could make citizens accept two mutually exclusive realities at the same time. It was not simply a matter of controlling information; it was about breaking the public’s trust in their perception of reality.
The lesson of Clown World is this: if it doesn’t make sense, then it is definitely fake and probably gay.