The threat of voluntary lockdowns should lead lockdown sceptics to cast their net beyond the institutions of the State and bring them to confront the harder-to-limn, bottom-up drivers of lockdown like parental socialism. They need to find ways of addressing our collective self-infantilisation and to reemphasize the value and importance of free agency.
Recent attempts to rebrand the work of the censorship-industrial complex with more anodyne euphemisms—”information integrity” or “civic participation online”—don’t change the fact that this is not disinterested academic research, but cooperation in state-sponsored suppression of constitutionally protected speech, always in favor of the government’s preferred narratives.
Dr. Scott Gottleib has been one of the most influential voices during the COVID crisis. His rapid career advancement and consequent role in the pandemic including lobbying for this new intelligence office during a time when he was NOT working for the government – but rather was working for Pfizer and one of the largest venture capital funds in the world- raises a key question. What is his actual role in the US intelligence community?
The major media is tacitly conspiring with the political establishment, the corporate sector, and the administrative state to pretend like that fiasco was completely normal and also entirely forgettable, not even worth naming. We did the best we could with the information we had so just stop complaining about it!
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, who imposed the world’s longest Covid lockdowns on his state, officially steps down from his position today. Andrews earned the nickname ‘Dictator Dan’ for his strongman style of leadership during the pandemic years. He leaves a legacy of brutality, debt, and corruption.
What AI cannot do is incorporate into a single entity all of the specialized skills that the entrepreneur has; the abilities to calculate, plan, and execute, the personal acceptance of profit or loss, and the continued span of consciousness over time which makes the pursuit of wealth purposeful.
Society now finds itself a passenger on a ship which has been taken over by ideologues. The ship is heading for the rocks. Lookouts stationed high above can see the disaster unfolding and urgently inform the captain of the ship. The captain solves the problem by throwing the lookouts overboard. This is the dystopian world in which we now live.
If this whole scenario is true, it means that all along Fauci was merely playing a role, a front man for much deeper interests and priorities in the CIA-led intelligence community. This broad outline makes sense of why Fauci changed his mind on lockdowns, including the timing of the change. There are still many more details to know, but these new fragments of new information take our understanding in a new and more coherent direction.
Cable hosts can bicker over Anthony Fauci, but the source of Covid tyranny was far more insidious. In the shadows, the US Security State undermined American democracy in a technocratic coup d’état. Now, the Fifth Circuit has a second chance to defend free speech against the coordinated assault from CISA and its cohorts at the State Department.
Censorship is the death of science and inevitably leads to the death of people. America should be a bulwark against it, but it was not during the pandemic. Though the tide is turning with the Missouri v. Biden case, we must reform our scientific institutions so what happened during the pandemic never happens again.
So remember the lanternfly. Remember how silly and how ephemeral was the story of its threat to us all. And yet, how seriously we were lectured that the lanternfly meant the End of the World. Remember it the next time you’re told that the entire globe is about to burn because people are driving cars or cooking with gas stoves. Or that somebody’s sniffles are going to kill you. Or that censorship is meant for your protection. Or that democracy and freedom aren’t really in your best interest.
