Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

They Will Lock You Down Again, 1984

https://brownstone.org/articles/they-will-lock-you-down-again/
https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-150-comparative-studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
https://www.againstpandemics.org/

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely
that the topic would become the national and international source of
scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here
too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not,
there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.

To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with
zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast
amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for
countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in
the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.

Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And
yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever.
The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never
locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on
their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political
establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue.
Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should
have.

Meanwhile, a few points to consider:

The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration,
has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated
international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no
person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US
for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to
enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been
inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous
controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.

The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency
declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast
powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the
Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the
country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not
controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.

Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public
agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any
solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real
rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been
exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well
established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor
stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.

Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything
like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even
today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently
traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some
Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common.
Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that
sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of
mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the
Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the
courts.

The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the
drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people,
is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming
more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a
temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.

More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents,
including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and
everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans
in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on
them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a
South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next
time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.

The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals,
and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having
made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural,
health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the
govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy
theory.

The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled
in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe
actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing
“support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has
allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against
Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete
with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates
who won election.

Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to
many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main
machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus
control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day
brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time
government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity
seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in
more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained
financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to
prompt any serious rethinking and reform.

In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another
day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the
civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle
for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what
remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity
and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call
“they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.

We cannot allow that to happen.