People are asking about the background to a major effort sponsored by Brownstone Institute and many partnering organizations. It is CovidJustice.org, a proposed Senate resolution on the entire epoch that condemns the bad science and coercion and pledges to do better next time. The petition has already attracted 20K signers in two days.
What gave rise to this idea and what is its purpose?
Two years ago, I was saddled up to the bar at an airport awaiting my departure time. The man sitting next to me asked about my bracelet. I said that it says “I Won’t Be Locked Down.” He asked why I would wear such a thing.
I explained that just a few years ago, we were locked in our homes. People were sometimes arrested for going out. Business was forcibly shut. Proprietors were fined if they were caught opening their doors or giving haircuts. Indeed, getting a haircut required paying someone under the table and meeting in secret. Skateboard parks were sanded in and basketball hoops boarded up.
That was just the beginning. The CDC announced that rental payments cannot be enforced. Churches on military bases were closed and then closed all over the country. Parking lots of hospitals and medical offices were empty coast to coast, as people missed diagnostics. Schools were shuttered and students were locked in their dorm rooms and policed for parties.
Drones flew overhead looking for too many cars parked in residential homes and pictures were sent to the media which dutifully reported house parties. Weddings and funerals were out of the question.
I stopped there but could have gone on for another hour. I didn’t even get to the part wherein millions were forced to take an experimental injection that did not stop infection and ended up hurting and even killing people.
He sat there in silence for a moment and took another sip of beer.
“Yeah. We’ve not really had a reckoning over all that, haven’t we?”
“Nope.”
Those words have long haunted me. I don’t see how the US or any nation can move forward past this grim period that harmed so many lives. Students were robbed of two years of in-person education. Millions of businesses were wrecked. Congressional authorization of multiple-trillions in spending turned into inflation that ate away 25-30 percent of purchasing power, gutting the value of savings and capital.
This fiasco in the name of public health ended up harming health. People turned to substances to get by and put on 20 pounds from overeating and sloth. Families were shattered in arguments about the shot. Churches struggled to recover. Many civic groups from bowling leagues to garage bands broke up permanently. Countless numbers lost jobs, changed careers, and fled states that heavily enforced lockdowns and shot mandates.
After a few years, the disastrous experiment in human control and messaging just gradually faded away. Media never really said much. Academia was quiet. Public health just hunkered down in silence. Suddenly we were all told to forget about it and think instead about things like partisan politics, AI, Russia-Ukraine, the Iran threat, the culture war, and so on. Just move on, we have been told.
Think about a historical analogy here with the Great War. It was an upheaval without precedent resulting in shattered communities and nations plus death on a mass scale. It was a horror. Fully six years went by before literature started appearing that dealt with the topic. There was Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque, and many others.
In politics, there were some efforts too, like Albert Jay Nock’s The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922), Merchants of Death (1934) by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen ,and many others.
People don’t know that A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was also constructed as an attack on the war. Milne wanted to write a book about the realities of war. His publisher said that no one was particularly interested, that people wanted it all behind them. That’s when he took up writing children’s books in hopes of raising a generation more committed to peace and community.
Brownstone Institute has been publishing in real time all along. Many wonderful documentaries have been made. We are serving as fiscal sponsor to The Rash by Walter Kirn, which will provide a powerful cultural analogue in the form of dark satire. But what we still lack is at least one major statement by a powerful body that makes it clear that what transpired in those years was contrary to all civilized standards of law and legislation.
Ideally we would have statements from every university, media organ legislative bodies at every level of government, tech companies that amplified government messaging, and every scientific organization. We are getting none of that. The silence is deafening and hence the bitterness and pain remains unresolved, like a terrible stench in the air that just won’t go away.
We need CovidJustice.org now to make it clear that this era is in disrepute. It’s necessary because the World Health Organization is even now pledging to do it all over again. The UK Commission on Covid concluded that the lockdowns and mandates were too little too late (seriously). Even now, Brownstone cannot upload a video to YouTube without having a warning label attached to it. Every major medical journal and media venue continues to hunt down the Covid dissidents and tear them apart. People are still being fired, blackballed, and humiliated for refusing a pseudo-vaccine that everyone knows did not work and caused great harm.
The bottom line: they could do it again. Everyone knows this. What protection do we have?
Even Elon Musk has publicly endorsed this.
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