Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting

https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/lockdowns-the-great-gaslighting

https://brownstone.org/articles/governments-were-given-credible-warnings-about-lockdown-harms-but-didnt-listen/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/no-lockdown-instigators-do-not-deserve
https://brownstone.org/articles/did-you-join-the-conga-line/
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/the-real-story-of-the-birth-of-social
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/29/she-shut-down-the-bay-area-to-slow-the-deadly-coronavirus-none-of-us-really-believed-we-would-do-it/
https://nationalpost.com/news/national/defence-watch/military-leaders-saw-pandemic-as-unique-opportunity-to-test-propaganda-techniques-on-canadians-forces-report-says/wcm/22733c97-39f0-4ba4-8a26-478af5e215f3
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/the-silence-of-disinformation-experts
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/faucis-red-guards-lawsuit-reveals
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/
https://thecritic.co.uk/a-year-of-fear/
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-uk-view-covid-threat-lockdowns.html
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/world/europe/coronavirus-germany-far-right.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
https://apnews.com/article/mar-a-lago-tucker-carlson-pandemics-entertainment-ap-top-news-2b6d1118e69841ebdfd722fbd99e21e0
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/no-new-uk-pm-liz-truss-was-not-always
https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1569355850313076736
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-about-Wuhan-Lockdown-Became/dp/B09YNFRTFW/
https://twitter.com/BenIrvineAuthor/status/1571104716859510785
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/covid-19-and-the-will-to-power
https://brownstone.org/articles/sorry-seems-to-be-the-hardest-word/

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political
mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize
that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from
it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn
on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their
narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two
years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really
happened, because governments never actually locked people in their
homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives
and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if
there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable
consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns;
and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict;
but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that
any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the
state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any
downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any
state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which
anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.

This perplexing narrative was perfectly encapsulated in a recent viral
tweet by a history professor who griped about the difficulty of
convincing his students that government mandates had nothing to do
with the fact that they couldn’t leave their homes in 2020.

Similarly, in an interview with Bill Maher, celebrity scientist Neil
DeGrasse Tyson argued that we can’t assess the effects of lockdowns
and mandates because the counterexamples, like Sweden, are too
different to be applicable. (Starting at 2:15).

    We're now learning just how bad the "collateral damage" is
post-pandemic. pic.twitter.com/ECw649U7do
    — Bill Maher (@billmaher) October 18, 2022

Likewise, astonishingly, in a debate on Monday, Charlie Crist,
Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, accused Ron DeSantis of
being “the only governor in the history of Florida that’s ever shut
down our schools.” “You’re the only governor in the history of Florida
that shut down our businesses,” Crist went on, “I never did that as
governor. You’re the one who’s the shutdown guy.”

In fact, as DeSantis pointed out, Crist had publicly sued DeSantis to
keep kids out of school in 2020, and he wrote DeSantis a letter in
July 2020 saying the entire state should still be in lockdown.

    Charlie Crist attempts to paint Gov. Ron DeSantis as "the shutdown
guy" immediately after DeSantis talks about how he rejected Crist's
calls to shut the state down. pic.twitter.com/0XoEbgq4Pg
    — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 24, 2022

Arguments like these are as facile as they are transparent. Does
anyone honestly think these people would be arguing that lockdowns
didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible to measure their effects, if
the policy had been a success?

As is extraordinarily well-documented by data, video evidence, news
reports, government orders, testimonial evidence, and living memory,
the strict lockdowns of spring 2020 were all too real. And few people
publicly opposed them.

As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented
in meticulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all
well-known and reported when they were first adopted as policy in
early 2020. These included accurate estimates of deaths due to delayed
medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an
economic recession, global poverty and hunger. In March 2020, the
Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that
the health damage from lockdowns—let alone the economic damage—would
be six times greater than the benefit.

Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand,
key officials, media entities, billionaires and international
organizations advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented,
devastating policies from the earliest possible date. The resulting
scenes were horrific and dystopian.

People lined up outdoors in freezing temperatures to get food.

    It’s before the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning, yet the line
outside the Winco Foods grocery store on Coffee Road stretches around
the block. Market employees are allowing 15 people in at a time. Some
folks have been in line since 3 a.m. pic.twitter.com/hPYuhnQUwY
    — Eytan Wallace (@EytanWallace) March 14, 2020

In many cities, still-sick patients were tossed out of hospital beds
and sent back to nursing homes.

Playgrounds were taped up.

Parks and beaches were closed, and some mainstream commentators argued
that those closures should be even stricter.

Many who flouted these closures were charged or arrested.

Stores, and sometimes sections of stores, that were deemed
“non-essential” were cordoned off.

School closures caused an unprecedented learning setback, especially
for the poorest students. But even when schools were open, kids had to
sit for hours in masks, separated by plexiglass barriers.

Many kids were forced to eat lunch outside in silence.

    CHILD ABUSE: Kindergartners are forced to eat lunch outside in 40
degree weather at Capitol Hill Elementary School in Portland, Oregon.

    They sit on buckets to social distance from their classmates.
pic.twitter.com/KqFcliTFYf
    — Katie Daviscourt🇺🇸 (@KatieDaviscourt) December 8, 2021

Countless small businesses were forced to close, and more than half of
those closures became permanent.

Cars lined up for miles at food banks.

    Never forget. 59/ pic.twitter.com/Upyu7yev9c
    — LLadany (@lladany) March 29, 2022

The Financial Times reported that three million in the United Kingdom
went hungry due to lockdown.

The situation was far worse in the developing world.

If these horror stories aren’t enough, the raw data speaks for itself.

The mainstream left’s newfound reluctance to refer to these policies
as “lockdown” is especially curious, because they showed no such
reluctance at the time they were actually implementing lockdowns in
2020.

By pretending that all of these horrors were attributable to public
panic, apologists for the response to Covid are attempting to shift
blame away from the political machines that imposed lockdowns and
mandates onto individuals and their families. This is, of course,
despicable and bunk. People did not voluntarily go hungry, or stand in
the freezing cold to get food, or remove themselves from hospitals
while they were still sick, or bankrupt their own businesses, or force
their own kids to sit outside in the cold, or march hundreds of miles
in exodus after losing their jobs in factories.

The collective denial of these horrors, and the refusal of media,
financial, and political elites to report on them, amounts to nothing
less than the greatest act of gaslighting that we’ve seen in modern
times.

Further, the argument that all of these terrible outcomes could be
attributed to public panic rather than state-imposed mandates would be
far more convincing if governments hadn’t taken unprecedented actions
to deliberately panic the public.

A report later revealed that military leaders had seen Covid as a
unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public,
“shaping” and “exploiting” information to bolster support for
government mandates. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Government
psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a
scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.

Moreover, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary
factor by which citizens judged the threat of COVID-19 was their own
government’s decision to employ lockdown measures. “We found that
people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the
government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must
be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found
that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they
supported lockdown.” The policies thus created a feedback loop in
which the lockdowns and mandates themselves sowed the fear that made
citizens believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 was hundreds of
times greater than it really was, in turn causing them to support more
lockdowns and mandates.

Those who publicly spoke against lockdowns and mandates were
ostracized and vilified—denounced by mainstream outlets like the New
York Times, CNN, and health officials as “neo-Nazis” and “white
nationalists.” Further, among those who really believed the mainstream
Covid narrative—or merely pretended to—all the authoritarian methods
that had supposedly contributed to China’s “success” against Covid,
including censoring, canceling, and firing those who disagreed, were
on the table.

Though many now claim to have opposed these measures, the truth is
that publicly opposing lockdowns when they were at their apex in
spring 2020 was lonely, frightening, thankless, and hard. Few did.

The gaslighting is by no means limited to the political left. On the
political right, which now generally acknowledges that Covid mandates
were a mistake, the revisionism is subtler, and tends to take the form
of elites casting themselves—falsely—as having been anti-lockdown
voices in early 2020, when the record is quite clear that they were
vocal advocates of lockdowns and mandates.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson now rightly acts as a champion of the
anti-mandate cause, but in fact Carlson was one of the most
influential individuals who talked Donald Trump into signing onto
lockdowns in early 2020. The UK’s short-lived Prime Minister Liz Truss
stated that she’d “always” been against lockdowns, but she publicly
supported both lockdowns and vaccine passes. Likewise, Canada’s
conservative leader Pierre Poilievre now casts himself as an
anti-mandate leader, but he supported both lockdowns and vaccine
mandates as they were happening.

As Ben Irvine, author of The Truth About the Wuhan Lockdown, has
tirelessly documented, right-wing publications including the UK’s
Daily Telegraph now routinely act as opponents of lockdowns and
mandates, while staying silent as to their own vocal support for
strict lockdowns in spring 2020. And the same goes for countless other
commentators and influencers on the political right as well.

To those who know their history, this wholesale gaslighting by elites
on both the left and the right, while galling, isn’t terribly
surprising. Most elites obtain power by doing whatever is in their own
perceived best interest at any given time. They didn’t support
lockdowns for any moral or even utilitarian reason. Rather, in spring
2020, elites calculated supporting lockdowns to be in their own best
interest. Two years later, many now calculate it to be in their best
interest to pretend they were the ones who always opposed
lockdowns—while sidelining those who actually did.

This revisionism is all the more disappointing because a small handful
of politicians including Ron DeSantis, Imran Khan, and Alberta Premier
Danielle Smith have proven that admitting error in implementing
lockdowns and mandates isn’t that hard, and can even be politically
profitable.

The same should go for the political left. Thus far, we have yet to
see anything remotely resembling regret from any leader on the left,
but this is what a decent, Truman-era Democrat might say in these
circumstances:

    “The lockdowns of 2020 were a terrible mistake. While they were
outside my field, it was my duty to properly vet the credibility of
the advice that was coming from health officials and to end the
mandates as soon as it was clear they weren’t working. In that role, I
failed, and you all have my humblest apologies. Given the
unprecedented harm that’s been done by these mandates, I support a
full investigation into how this advice came about, in part to ensure
there hasn’t been any untoward communist influence on these policies.”

Those who spoke against lockdowns and mandates in early 2020 showed
that they were willing to stand up for the freedoms and Enlightenment
principles for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, even when
doing so was lonely, thankless, and hard. For that reason, anyone who
did so has reason to feel extremely proud, and the future would be
brighter if they were in positions of leadership. That fact is now
becoming increasingly clear—unfortunately, even to those who did the
opposite. One more reason to keep all the receipts.