If only we’d been able to see sooner that the disease wasn’t the hoax, the response was.
How do we even know now? Pigs are flying everywhere. The media are fessing up. After fanning COVID panic for a year, Democratic newsletter Salon admits it was all for partisan purposes: “Americans have been sucked into an all-or-nothing approach, with your choice of all or nothing depending largely on your partisan identity.” Salon continues:
Trump’s rejection of sensible precautions caused many of his political opponents to run hard in the opposite direction, embracing the lockdowns as if they were a point of personal virtue and inherent good, instead of a temporary and deeply unpleasant measure necessary to contain the virus. Worse, liberals were so protective of lockdowns that even sensible criticisms were ignored, and liberals often acted like, well, cops. There was a lot of social media shaming for any activity, no matter how safe it was. And in behaving this way, a lot of well-intentioned people made the pandemic much worse.
The Hill confessed:
Lockdowns don’t work: Remember 15 days to slow the spread? Well, since those fateful words were uttered, we have had a year of various efforts to slow down a virus that has an infection fatality rate of less than one percent. And what we have learned is that viruses are gonna virus. California, the United Kingdom, Florida and Sweden show the futility of lockdowns.
The Hill adds “The media is complicit in furthering the Panic… how you could die tomorrow, from a virus that kills virtually nobody healthy under the age of 70.”
And the Atlantic wrote a year into the pandemic,
Traditional and social media have been caught up in a cycle of shaming — made worse by being so unscientific and misguided. Cities closed parks even as they kept open indoor dining and gyms. Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts banned students from taking even solitary walks… pictures of people outdoors without masks draw reprimands, insults, and confident predictions of super-spreading — and yet few note when super-spreading fails to follow.
All but those surnamed Cuomo now admit the response was partisan and overblown. We know lockdowns have little effect on transmission even as they devastate people economically and psychologically. The media cheerlead the kneejerk panic response by government, unapologetically correlating suffering with virtue, and pain with progress. If only, somehow, we could have known this a year ago and used it as a guide to a more prudent response.
As America reprogrammed into one big Crisis News Network, every story reported with a flashlight under the announcer’s chin, I wrote on March 5, 2020, about how COVID fear was being used to manipulate people. I said the reaction to the virus will result in long-term damage to the nation well beyond the health effects of the virus. On March 26, 2020, I explained how the same playbook (terrify the American people for partisan goals) was run against us after 9/11. I wrote a second article on how the “cure” of lockdown was going to be worse than the disease on March 31. Last year.
I’m not bragging. The information was as obvious as you wanted it to be. For example, in October 2020 a group of infectious disease epidemiologists wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, laying out “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of prevailing COVID policies,” such as sweeping lockdowns. They were largely ignored, though US News found time to label it all reckless in calling for “focused protection.” The nation was as intolerant of COVID dissent as it was of anti-war dissent in 2001, almost as if there was some sort of pattern.
The playbook run against Americans with COVID and 9/11 goes back as far as 1984, the book, not the year. George Orwell envisioned the need for a massive Ministry of Truth to create a state of fear, then to manipulate that fear into support for specific policy. In 2020 all it took was an initial handful of deaths, some of what Orwell labeled prolefeed—entertainment for the masses about whether calling COVID “Chinese flu” was racism—and a dash of sky-is-falling articles piled on to existing anti-Trump night terrors. We’ll never have enough ventilators (ICU beds, nurses, masks, PPE, tests, restrictions…) so we’re gonna die!
The goal is always to make fear of something the problem and then empowering the government the solution. Substitute in “terrorism” if you like. You have to give things up for a safe society. It just is no longer practical to have freedom and security, you will have to choose. If you don’t wear a mask, you’re selfish; you’ve committed a crime against your compliant neighbors, society itself (more Orwell). A new MSM theme, that mostly Republicans are refusing the vaccination, plays off this.
Fear is powerful. It rubs on the fight or flight part of our lizard brain, especially when you involve family members as potential spreaders who want to kill grandma, or as victims (grandma again). Fear is also self-reinforcing. We feel embarrassed when we’ve been fooled into over-reacting, like when our friend made us jump, springing from his hiding place at a party. So after you sold off your stocks at a huge loss in March 2020 fearing a global depression that never came, you were ready with self-reinforcing gab instead of admitting fear drove you into a 30 percent capital loss.
Fear of the virus was melded into the fear that Trump would find a way to kill us all. That made it easier to believe he would seriously suggest we inject bleach. The MSM told us the vaccines, the scientific answer to the virus, were being rushed through, that Trump would manipulate the approval process for political gain and release dangerous drugs. The MSM throttled the black community with racist claims about the vaccine, invoking the 1943 syphilis experiments during last year’s Summer of Racism. Of course none of the media admit blame for today’s resistance to the vaccine.
The COVID fear playbook is nearly identical to the post-9/11 playbook, though kudos to those Bush officials who pulled it off in 2001 without the help of social media and just less than 3,000 dead. They turned Americans into such fearful creatures they signed off on multiple wars, a torture regime, and the effective end of privacy in American life. We were conditioned to new precedents of control over personal decisions, civil life, freedom of movement, education, and an increasing role for government and the military in health care. We wanted soldiers on our streets.
Read the rest here.
