One of the questions asked in a recently conducted poll of my religious community was “Did your view of the government change at all because of covid?” along with a text box to explain your answer.
The following is an adapted essay version of what I wrote (the original response I posted on Substack).
I used to regard the government as extremely inept/incompetent, fairly corrupt, and facing incentives that pushed institutions/officials to be generally corrupt and inept.
Now, I regard the government as fundamentally evil on par with other classical evil regimes throughout human history — something made clear by the government’s behavior during the pandemic.
1. The government went out of their way to suppress, sabotage, and destroy every available effective covid treatment, which by itself caused hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions around the world. This wasn’t merely the government making claims disparaging the safety and efficacy of covid treatments – the government aggressively marshaled a “whole of government approach” to wield every available political lever to ruthlessly crush any and every treatment. The government took a leading role in targeting, harassing, deplatforming, delicensing, and terminating the careers of heroic dissident doctors who chose to treat covid patients in defiance of the nihilistic guidelines promulgated by the NIH and other agencies to ‘do nothing’ and send patients home until they ‘turned blue.’ The government also was an enthusiastic participant in conducting fraudulent trials for the express purpose of conjuring false data showing that popular effective covid treatments had no efficacy treating covid.
2. The other covid policies – lockdowns, facemasks, and the other forms of social restrictions – were some of the most evil and pernicious policies ever implemented by a society that considers itself to be ethical. It is now clear that the death toll from these policies exceeded the genuine death toll from covid disease (which itself was only significant because of the suppression and denial of treatment as stated above).
Moreover, the very policies championed and savagely implemented by Federal and state governments worsened the morbidity and mortality of covid disease. Forcing people to stay indoors, avoid exercising, avoid social contact, and a bevy of other things that dramatically raised the stress levels and obesity of the population at large made people far more susceptible to covid disease (as well as a host of other medical conditions).
Even more shockingly, these society-upending policies lacked any supportive evidence before they were implemented. It is now well-documented that none of the covid mitigations had any epidemiological impact. Lockdowns had no effect on the transmission or epidemiology of covid waves. Cloth/surgical facemasks did not reduce the spread of covid at all, and even the various types of N95 masks proved utterly useless in the hands of the general population.
Key government officials including Fauci actually admitted that they never took into account the myriad harms that such policies would inflict on society, which is not an ‘oversight’ – the least horrible possibility is that they had no regard for carnage caused by their policies, which is genuinely evil.
3. The covid vaccines – funded, marketed, and mandated by the government – were barely effective for maybe a few months at most, but caused a significant amount of death and severe life-altering injuries (I have done research work in this area, including compiling 3,300+ case report studies documenting various covid vaccine injuries/deaths in the formal academic literature). The government is STILL denying that there were any deaths associated with the mRNA vaccines at all – in 2023, with well over 300 cases of vaccine-associated deaths reported in the formal academic literature (!!!).
The toll from the covid vaccines in just the US is probably somewhere between 100,000-300,000 deaths, and maybe more (this is based on analyses of excess mortality, government disability data, insurance data, pharmacovigilance data, and survey study data). There are probably at least half a million people in the US living with significant injuries caused by a covid vaccine, and possibly more than 2 million. Because of the shockingly poor quality of US data and studies, it is very difficult to sort out the various causes of excess morbidity and mortality (covid disease, covid policies, covid vaccines) or to get a firm idea of how much is “excess” in the first place, but one thing is undeniable: the covid vaccines inflicted mass carnage across society.
4. The government tried to dehumanize unvaccinated people, and largely succeeded according to polling showing that a significant percentage of people if not outright majorities held a variety of shocking views about unvaccinated people including that they are selfish; stupid; a danger to society; should be forcibly confined to their homes; have their children taken away; and be relocated to “quarantine facilities.” A considerable plurality of vaccinated people, in a word, overtly despised the unvaccinated.
This sort of evil abhorrent demagoguery is historically exactly how a society is groomed to accept genocide of a minority group or faction within society.
5. The government prosecuted the most significant and consequential censorship regime in the history of any Western country, which besides for the widespread carnage it caused also demonstrates that the government has no regard for the rule of law or legal norms whatsoever and believes in a radical “ends justify the means” with no clear limitation.
It is worth underscoring that the carnage wreaked by censorship isn’t just the destruction of the social compact of society or the lethal effects of censoring knowledge of effective treatments from people who bereft of them died, but encompasses all sorts of second-order minutiae that you wouldn’t think of, such as suicides by people suffering from various conditions who were disconnected from their support groups when Facebook deleted the group and the personal accounts of its members.
6. The government is now acting like a dictatorial regime to label and categorize the positions of its political opposition as a “terrorist threat” (e.g. parents protesting school boards, religious Catholics, Latin mass adherents, advocates for gun rights, parental rights, etc., opponents of covid and other governmental policies, people who are skeptical of the official “man-made climate change” orthodoxy, et al).
7. The government is persecuting political dissent. The most obvious examples of this are the indictments of President Trump. However, this stretches far beyond the Trump indictments. The political prosecutions of thousands of January 6 protesters – if you pay attention to the actual Jan 6 criminal prosecutions – are a moral abomination. The vast majority of defendants did not do anything remotely violent or even illegal, but were held without bail for years in ‘unique’ prison conditions; denied proper legal representation (their public defenders were on the side of the government); denied a fair trial (a trial by jury of rabid political activists who hate you is a farce); and are being charged for crimes using novel concocted legal theories that have never been enforced for any other type of protester, including the far more violent and societally disruptive BLM/Antifa riots over the summer of 2020. The government also attempted to jail a pro-life activist for a decade on clearly spurious charges for shoving someone threatening his ten-year old child that was (surprisingly) rejected by a jury who found the defendant not guilty.
8. The US government is not only endorsing, marketing, and using its considerable power to impose the barbaric ideology of a litany of sexual deviancies that are nihilistic and depraved even beyond anything ever attributed to Sodom. This includes the federal government’s currently ongoing efforts to force institutions to implement demented wicked barbarism like the psychological, physical, and hormonal mutilation of children as “gender-affirming” care by withholding some types of federal funding for even schools or hospitals that refuse to allow men in the women’s bathrooms (or provide said ‘medical care’ if relevant). The sacrificing of children on the altar of demented gender ideology is quite literally a modern-day incarnation of Moloch.
9. The government is deliberately and willfully trying to impoverish its own citizens, and deprive them of many products that have become staple amenities in society (such as air conditioning, gas stoves, cars, etc etc etc etc). To properly flesh this out and demonstrate the ‘willful/deliberate’ nature of this would require a lengthy analysis of numerous decisions, statements, and actions of the relevant people/agencies that is beyond the scope of this “comment.” I mention this here only because it is one of the standout egregious dimensions of the cold-blooded wickedness that is the weltanschauung of the government today.
10. The government is encouraging and implementing a systematic regime of apartheid, particularly against straight white men. DEI seminars and workshops portraying white people, straight people, and religious people as invertebrate incorrigible evil racists are a ubiquitous feature across government agencies and public sector corporations. This evil and racist ideology is implemented through hiring/admission policies, spending priorities, conditions attached to receiving government grants, and pretty much anything that the government exerts any influence over.
11. The government as a general entity is a pathological liar so much so that if it were an actual person it would make Pinocchio a paragon of honesty by comparison. It is hard to distinguish between the US government and the USSR government at this point – practically everything they say now is a calculated lie.
In a general sense, the government is a diabolical, evil institution that is primarily concerned with pushing twisted ideologies, mutilating children, and persecuting political dissent, while willing to kill millions in pursuit of whatever political or other objectives they are trying to achieve.
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