They managed to destroy countless businesses, upend human rights, kill millions, cast hundreds of millions deeper into poverty, strain the mental health of billions, and transfer trillions of dollars in wealth from the world’s poorest to the very richest—all while failing to slow the spread of a virus that was subsequently confirmed to have an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.
We preach non-discrimination, equality, and democracy, but when confronted with what seemed to be a potentially mortal threat to our health and lives, we reverted back to pre-modern forms, almost overnight creating a new caste system, shoving the lessers among us in front of the virus to keep the elites pure and clean.
At the commodity level, the global food index is still up by 28% versus prior year—a figure which may well accelerate substantially over the balance of the year if the soaring price of fertilizers leads to the predicted cutbacks of farmer applications and therefore materially reduced yields this fall.
There is no Cliff Notes version of why we are experiencing these supply chain issues across the world. A host of influences have combined to create a massive disruption to every day life and the things we buy to sustain it. Primarily, however, the problem traces to the shutdowns from more than two years ago, which created unanticipated shortages that will likely get worse.
This shouldn’t be a left wing or a right wing thing. This shouldn’t be a Democrat versus Republican thing. Left wingers and right wingers all have babies and toddlers, and those babies, grandchildren of those of the political left and right, will be starving soon if our leadership doesn’t get its act together.
In the last week, some of the top spokespeople for lockdowns, and all that is associated with that policy of pathogenic control, have come out to defend them plus threatening more now that we are seeing seasonal increases in cases. It’s almost as if they have learned nothing.
Needless to say, we did not heed any of this advice in March of 2020. We instead forged ahead with lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and the rest. When faced with covid, we rejected time-tested principles of public health and embraced instead the untested biosecurity model. We are now living in the aftermath of this choice.
Looking back, there is nothing terribly surprising about any of this. It’s a consequence of safety culture, arrogant elites, and a belief that powerful, rich, and intelligent people can manage the world better than the rest of us. We’ve been here many times in history, and it has always foreshadowed a long period of suffering.
The reason American kids were forced to cover their faces for six hours every day was “that it causes alarm in the other person and so you stay away from each other… But did the mask really help them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not.” Garrett always knew, but continues to support muzzling them anyway.
To establish their utopias, enemies of liberalism will never hesitate to squelch free expression. We liberals, therefore, must forever be ready, understanding the power of words, to challenge with our own words these assaults on freedom of expression and on open, peaceful discourse and debate.
To have a free society we have to have a history, and in this major historical moment, we had a massive betrayal of the social contract — a betrayal committed by millions. The social contract cannot be re-knit without public accountability, confrontations, and even condemnation.
While the CCP engages in active censorship of the misery Shanghai’s residents are currently experiencing, there are both immediate and long-term economic, psychological, and health consequences from this zero-COVID policy that may reverberate around the world.
