Questioning Everything Propaganda
The 2020 Video That Soundtracked COVID Propaganda, Mass Denial, and the Bitter “Too Late” Awakening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj_bTbfAEsc
On May 8, 2020, as much of the world sat locked in homes, streets emptied by government decree, and a single narrative about a novel virus dominated every screen, Puscifer dropped the official music video for “Apocalyptical.” The timing was accidental perfection. The song itself had been written in late 2019—before anyone had heard of Wuhan or “two weeks to flatten the curve”—yet the video, shot in a genuinely deserted Los Angeles, captured the eerie, end-of-days atmosphere of early COVID with unsettling precision.
Directed by Puscifer alongside Meats Meier and Ghost Atomic, the clip opens on ghost-town boulevards and empty beaches that required no special permits; the lockdown had already done the work. A figure in a hazmat suit careens through the city on a Onewheel and motorcycle, desperately hunting toilet paper—the absurd symbol of 2020 panic buying. Maynard James Keenan and Carina Round appear as sharp-suited, red-lipsticked observers, half Men in Black, half cabaret performers, trading lines while executing bizarre, deadpan dance moves: tango, moonwalk, finger guns. The whole thing looks like a fever dream from a retro-futurist 1980s synth nightmare colliding with real-world collapse.
And then the lyrics land like a hammer:
Concrete conclusions be damned
They won’t believe you until it’s far too late
Go on, moron, ignore the evidence
Skid in to Armageddon
Tango Apocalyptical
Jog on, head down, ignore the evidence
Trippin’ over Armageddon
Moon walkin’ Apocalyptical
Dumb dumb be damned…
The chorus repeats the verdict with cold repetition: Be damned, dumb, dumb, be doomed.
Maynard James Keenan has always insisted the track isn’t “about” COVID. It’s about humanity’s timeless habit of ignoring warning signs—environmental, social, personal—until the consequences are irreversible. The digital age simply accelerates the poison. Carina Round noted it was one of the first ideas recorded for the album Existential Reckoning (released October 2020) back in Arizona in late 2019. Yet once the video hit YouTube in May 2020, the song instantly became something larger: a soundtrack for those who sensed the official story was incomplete, manipulative, or outright false.
By mid-2020 the machinery was already in motion. Lockdowns that were sold as temporary became semi-permanent. Dissenting scientists were labeled dangerous. Early treatment options were suppressed. “Safe and effective” became a chant even as real-world data on transmission prevention, myocarditis signals, and waning efficacy began to surface. Those who questioned the experimental mRNA platform, the rushed regulatory process, the pharmaceutical incentives, or the collateral damage to mental health, education, and small businesses were dismissed as “anti-vaxxers” or “conspiracy theorists.”
The video’s central image—people jogging with heads down, deliberately ignoring the evidence while the world burns—felt prophetic to a growing number of observers. The masses weren’t just complying; many were dancing through it, moonwalking into Armageddon while chanting the slogans fed to them.
Fast-forward through the years of shifting goalposts, censored Twitter Files revelations, excess mortality debates, fertility and all-cause mortality signals that mainstream outlets still tiptoe around, and the quiet rollback of many “settled science” claims. A significant portion of the population eventually awoke. They saw the economic destruction, the educational regression in children, the erosion of bodily autonomy through mandates, the pharmaceutical capture of regulatory bodies, and the coordinated suppression of inconvenient data.
For those people, “Apocalyptical” became an anthem of vindication laced with grief. The lyric “They won’t believe you until it’s far too late” stopped being abstract. It described friends, family members, and entire nations who only began questioning after the damage—psychological, financial, physiological—was already done. The “dumb dumb be damned” chorus no longer felt like hyperbole; it felt like diagnosis.
Puscifer never claimed to be making an anti-vaccine or anti-lockdown polemic. That’s part of the song’s power. Great art doesn’t hand you a pamphlet; it hands you a mirror. Listeners projected their own 2020–2023 experiences onto it, and the reflection was ugly for anyone paying attention.
Today, in 2026, the song feels less like a period piece and more like a permanent fixture. The same patterns—information overload, institutional gaslighting, digital-speed propaganda, public compliance through fear—haven’t vanished. They’ve simply evolved. Next pandemic, next climate emergency, next “existential threat,” the same dance is ready: head down, ignore the evidence, tango apocalyptical.
Puscifer’s genius with “Apocalyptical” was releasing a track that works on multiple levels. Surface-level listeners heard a catchy, sinister synth-rocker with weird dancing and empty-city visuals. Deeper listeners heard a ruthless critique of human denial and the machinery that exploits it. The awake minority heard their own story: the frustration of screaming into the void while the majority moonwalked toward consequences they refused to see.
The video has now surpassed 4.8 million views. Every time a new crisis rolls around and the same tactics reappear—fear, censorship, “trust the experts,” “don’t do your own research”—a fresh wave of people rediscovers it and feels that cold recognition: We’ve seen this movie before.
“Apocalyptical” isn’t just a song about COVID propaganda. It’s a song about any propaganda that demands you stop thinking, stop questioning, and keep dancing while the evidence piles up around you. The question it leaves hanging in the air, five and a half minutes of icy synths later, is the one that still haunts:
Will the masses finally look up before the next skid into Armageddon?
Or will they once again discover—too late—that concrete conclusions be damned, and the dumb, dumb, be doomed.