Brownstone Institute
The Great Demoralization
From the Brownstone Institute
On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest tech and arts trade show in the world, South-by-Southwest, only a week before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city.
In an instant, with the stroke of a pen, it was all gone: hotel reservations, flight plans, performances, exhibitors, and all the hopes and dreams of thousands of merchants in the town. Economic impact: a loss $335 million in revenue at least. And that was just to the city alone, to say nothing of the broader impact.
It was the beginning of US lockdowns. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time – my own sense was that this was a calamity that would lead to decades of successful lawsuits against the Austin mayor – but it turned out that Austin was the test case and template for the entire nation and then the world.
The reason was of course Covid but the pathogen wasn’t even there. The idea was to keep it out of the city, an incredible and sudden fallback to a medieval practice that has nothing to do with modern public health understanding of how a respiratory virus should be handled.
“In six months,” I wrote at the time, “if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease ‘containment’ over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.”
I was right about the conspiracy theorists but I had not anticipated that they would turn out to be right about nearly everything. We were being groomed for nationwide lockdowns.
At this point in the trajectory, we already knew the gradient of risk. It was not medically significant for healthy working-age adults (which still to this day the CDCs does not admit). So the shutdown likely protected very few if anyone.
The extraordinary edict – worthy of a tin-pot dictator of a dark age – completely overrode the wishes of millions, all on the decision of one man, whose name is Steven Adler.
“Was the consideration between maintaining that money, effectively rolling the dice, and doing what you did?” asked Texas Monthly of the mayor.
His answer: “No.”
Clarifying: “We made a decision based on what was in the best health interest for the city. And that is not an easy choice.”
After the shocking cancellation, which overrode property rights and free will, the mayor urged all residents to go out and eat at restaurants and gather and spend money to support the local economy. In this later interview, he explained that he had no problem keeping the city open. He just didn’t want people from hither and yon – the dirty people, so to speak – to bring a virus with them.
He was here playing the role of Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” He was turning the capital city of Texas into a castle in which the elite could hide from the virus, an action that also became a foreshadowing of what was to come: the division of the entire country into clean and dirty populations.
The mayor further added a strange comment: “I think the spread of the disease here is inevitable. I don’t think that closing down South Bay was intended to stop the disease from getting here because it is coming. The assessment of our public health professionals was that we were risking it coming here more quickly, or in a greater way with a greater impact. And the longer we could put that off, the better this city is.”
And there we have the “flatten the curve” thinking at work. Kick the can down the road. Postpone. Delay herd immunity as long as possible. Yes, everyone will get the bug but it is always better that it happens later rather than sooner. But why? We were never told. Flatten the curve was really just prolong the pain, keep our overlords in charge as long as possible, put normal life on hold, and stay safe as long as you can.
Prolonging the pain might also have served another surreptitious agenda: let the working classes – the dirty people – get the bug and bear the burden of herd immunity so that the elites can stay clean and hopefully it will die out before it gets to the highest echelons. There was indeed a hierarchy of infection.
In all these months, no one ever explained to the American public why prolonging the period of non-exposure was always better than meeting the virus sooner, gaining immunity, and getting over it. The hospitals around the country were not strained. Indeed, with the inexplicable shutdown of medical services for diagnostics and elective surgeries, hospitals in Texas were empty for months. Health care spending collapsed.
This was the onset of the great demoralization. The message was: your property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and choices that are inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good. There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you.
This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is exactly where the Austin decision took us.
We still don’t know precisely who was involved in this rash judgment or on what basis they made it. There was a growing sense in the country at the time that something was going to happen. There had been sporadic use of lockdown powers in the past. Think of the closure of Boston after the bombing in 2013. A year later, the state of Connecticut quarantined two travelers who might have been exposed to Ebola in Africa. These were the precedents.
“The coronavirus is driving Americans into unexplored territory, in this case understanding and accepting the loss of freedom associated with a quarantine,” wrote the New York Times on March 19, 2020, three days after the Trump press conference that announced two weeks to flatten the curve.
The experience on a nationwide basis fundamentally undermined the civil liberties and rights that Americans had long taken for granted. It was a shock to everyone but to young people still in school, it was utter trauma and a moment of mental reprogramming. They learned all the wrong lessons: they are not in charge of their lives; someone else is. The only way to be is to figure out the system and play along.
We now see epic learning loss, psychological shock, population-wide obesity and substance abuse, a fall in investor confidence, a shrinkage of savings reflecting less interest in the future, and a dramatic decline in public participation in what used to be normal life events: church, theater, museums, libraries, fares, symphonies, ballets, theme parks, and so on. Attendance in general is down by half and this is starving these venues of money. Most of the big institutions in large cities like New York, such as Broadway and the Met, are on life support. The symphony halls have a third empty seats despite lowering prices.
It seems remarkable that this three-and-a-half year-long war against basic liberty for nearly everyone has come to this. And yet it should not be a surprise. All ideology aside, you simply cannot maintain much less cultivate a civilized life when governments, in combination with the commanding heights of media and large corporations, treat their citizens like lab rats in a science experiment. You only end in sucking away the essence and vibrancy of the human spirit, as well as the will to build a good life.
In the name of public health, they sapped the will to health. And if you object, they shut you up. This is still going on daily.
The ruling class that did this to the country has yet to speak honestly about what transpired. It was their actions that created the current cultural, economic, and social crisis. Their experiment left the country and our lives in shambles. We’ve yet to hear apologies or even basic honesty about any of it. Instead, all we get is more misleading propaganda about how we need yet another shot that doesn’t work.
History provides many cases of a beaten down, demoralized, and increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged, and yet tiny ruling class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as something of a taboo in public life.
There will be no fixing this, no crawling out from under the rubble, until we get something from our rulers other than public preening about a job well done, in ads sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, and given the low bar of expectations for all such political commissions, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report.
Are there words in the English language that fully describe what happened during the Covid years that are not already overused? Calamity comes to mind. Disaster. Cataclysm. Ruin, devastation, catastrophe, unprecedented debacle, fiasco, and utter wreckage – all fine words and phrases but nothing quite captures it.
Given that, there is probably no report on the thing that can properly characterize the whole of it. On the other hand, it’s worth trying.
Meanwhile, the results of Covid commissions of governments around the world have become unbearably predictable. So far they have mostly said their government failed because they didn’t act fast enough, did not enforce lockdowns hard enough, did not communicate and coordinate well enough, and so on.
Everyone in the corporate world knows that when a committee reduces all problems to “communication and coordination” you are being fed a load of bull.
So far, it’s been almost entirely bureaucratic blather, and that helps account for the global loss of confidence in political systems. They cannot even be honest about the most catastrophic policies in our lifetimes or several.
The amount of corruption, waste, and destruction from this period of our lives, lasting from 2020 until 2023 but with remnants of bad policies all around us, is so unspeakable that not one report has yet been fully honest about what happened, why it happened, who really won and lost, and what this period implies for how vast swaths of the public see the world.
Among other astonishing revelations to come from this period was a full presentation of just how many institutions have been corrupted. It was not just governments and certainly not just the elected leaders and career bureaucrats. The problems are very deep and reach more deeply to intelligence agencies, military-based bioweapons systems, and preparedness agencies that guard their activities under the cloak of what is called classified.
This is a major reason why so many questions are being left unasked and unanswered. Then we have the ancillary failures in a whole series of additional sectors. The media went along with the nonsense as if they are wholly owned and controlled by government and industry. Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed.
The tech companies cooperated in a massive censorship operation. The retail end of the pharmaceutical companies enforced the government’s edicts, denying people basic medicines, as did the whole of the medical systems, which heavily enforced mandates on an experimental and failed product mistakenly called a vaccine. Academics were largely silent and public intellectuals fell in line. Most mainline religions cooperated in locking worshippers out. Banks were in on it too. And advertisers.
In fact, it’s hard to think of any institution in society that leaves this period untarnished. It’s probably not possible for a government report on the subject to be fully honest. Maybe it is too soon, plus the hooks that created the whole problem are still embedded too deeply.
All that said, we’ve got a solid start with the highest-level government report produced to date: After Action Review of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward, by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as assembled by the US House of Representatives. The report was written by the majority and it shows.
Coming in at 550 pages with 2,000-plus footnotes (we have made a physical version available here), the preparation involved hearing from hundreds of witnesses, reading thousands of documents, listening to thousands of reports and interviews, and working at a furious pace for two years. Based on the outline and breadcrumbs of the Norfolk Group, while adding in additional material based on critiques of media and economic policy, it is a comprehensive blast against the public-health features of the pandemic response.
The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, and given the low bar of expectations for all such political commissions, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report. It is an excellent breaking of the ice around the topic. Note that this report has received very little press attention, which only further underscores the problem.
Coming in for heavy criticism: gain-of-function research, the deference to the WHO, the lab-leak coverup, the funding of pharma cutouts, business and school closures, mask mandates, the lack of serious attention to disease monitoring, vaccine mandates, the sloppy approval process, the vaccine injury system, the banning of off-the-shelf therapeutics, social distancing, the rampant fraud in business loans, the effects of monetary policy, and more.
The report contains nuggets that we cannot help but praise:
Ignored in the report: the rental moratorium, the frenzy of Plexiglas and air filtration, the push for sanitizing all things, the reopening racket designed to prolong lockdowns, domestic capacity restrictions, the division of the workforce between essential and nonessential, the role of CISA and the intelligence agencies, the CDC’s push for mail-in ballots that might have been decisive in the national election, and the astonishing gibberish over the infection fatality and case fatality rates.
There is so much more to chronicle and criticize that the report could have been 10 or 100 times as long.
To be sure, the report has plenty of problems aside from these exclusions. Operation Warp Speed comes in for praise for saving “millions” of lives but the citation is to a modeling exercise that assumes what it is trying to prove. Look at the footnote: It’s bad science.
The real trouble with this section is not even its incorrect claim that the vaccine saved lives. The core issue is that the whole point of the lockdowns and all that followed was to create conditions for the release of the countermeasure. The plan from the beginning was: lockdown until vaccination. Praising the goal while criticizing the ineffective means diverts the point.
This is precisely what was explained to me in the early days in a phone call from a member of George W. Bush’s biosecurity team, a man who now runs a vaccine company. He said we would stay locked down until the world’s population got a shot in the arm. This phone call happened in April 2020.
Quite simply, I thought he had lost his mind and hung up. I did not believe that 1) the plan was always to stay in lockdowns until vaccination, and that 2) anyone seriously believed that governments could vaccinate their way out of a wave of respiratory infections insofar as the pathogen had a zoonotic reservoir.
The very idea struck me as so preposterous that I was incredulous that an educated and responsible adult could ever advance it. And yet that was precisely the plan all along. Sometime in the last week of February 2020, a global cabal decided to pull the trigger on a worldwide campaign of shock and awe – tapping every asset in civil society for assistance – to bring about worldwide forced medicalization with a new technology.
This was never really a public health response. That was only the cover story. This was a coup against science and against democracy, for purposes of industrial and political reset, not just in one nation but all nations at once. I get it: that is an ominous statement and hard to wrap one’s brain around the whole of it. In completely ignoring this point, the Select Subcommittee has missed the forest for the trees.
Let’s attempt a different metaphor. Let’s say your car is hijacked in Manhattan and you are thrown in the backseat. The goal is to drive all the way to Los Angeles for a drug deal. You could object to the means and goal but instead you spend the entire trip complaining about potholes, reckless driving, warning of the need for an oil change, and complaining about the bad music playing on the car radio.
At the end of the trip, you put out a report to this effect. Do you think that would be strange, to wholly ignore the theft of your car and the destination and purpose of the hijacking and instead focus on all the ways in which the grand larceny could have been smoother and happier for everyone involved?
In that spirit, the Subcommittee’s separate recommendations list is weak, leaving governments wholly in charge of anything labeled a pandemic while only suggesting a more cautionary approach that takes into consideration all costs and benefits. For example, it says on travel restrictions: “It is far easier to undo the restrictions that may have been unneeded than it is to take a ‘wait and see’ approach once the unknown virus of concern has entered our borders and thoroughly spread.”
It seems like the core lesson – governments cannot be masters of the microbial kingdom and allowing them to pretend otherwise for purposes of an industrial and political reset cues up a moral hazard that is an ongoing threat to freedom and rights – is not yet learned, or even so much as admitted. We are still being invited to believe that the same people and institutions who created calamity last time should be trusted again next time.
And keep in mind: this is the best report yet issued!
My friends, we have a very long way to go to absorb the fullness of the reality of what was done to individuals, families, communities, societies, and the whole world. Nor is it truly possible to move on without a full accounting of this disaster. Has it begun? Yes, but there is a very long way to go.
Author
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