“Just watch kids with runny noses and coughing and sneezing and touching one another (especially the younger ones),” the memo says. “You couldn’t design a better system to spread disease. Schools and daycare centers are clearly amplifiers of disease transmission…. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves searching for perfect solutions to address all these challenges associated with the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of school closure.”
The gigantic mess called lockdown began with an email thread called Red Dawn in early 2020, based on the old movie about a Russian invasion of the US. You can read many, but not all, of the emails below. They were enormously influential in generating the necessary panic to kick their sadistic social experiment into high gear. The participants are listed at the top in this file assembled by the New York Times, and includes top officials at all levels plus intellectuals.
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%.
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.
Naomi Wolf, author of The Bodies of Others, assesses the future of human liberty after catastrophic Covid policies and what they mean for human rights. She is interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone Institute.
On February 21, 2020, 15 cases of Covid were detected, and a Chinese-style lockdown of ten towns in Lombardy was immediately announced for 15 days to slow the spread. This lockdown order was officially signed into law by Health Minister Speranza two days later on February 23, 2020—the first lockdown order ever signed in a modern western country.
No authority can substitute for the activity, creativity, and adaptability of the human mind. We need systems that celebrate that, and not attempt surreptitious methods for imposing Orwellian-style thought control. Ideas are more powerful than armies, and the urge to censor is an implicit recognition of that. Still, it didn’t work in 1798 and it surely cannot work in 2020.
The main thing is Germany once again recovered. This rates thought and repeated thought as a reminder of the stupidity of bailouts and intervention in countries like the U.S. As readers will learn from Aftermath, nothing is forever.
Based on Mill’s arguments, the classical liberal tradition toward contagious diseases refuses the right of authorities to oblige individuals to be tested on suspicion. It also opposes the confinement of individuals exercising their individual rights.
Finally we come to the biggest problem of all. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule?
Over those first several weeks, fear had taken hold of the public. Media commentators and even policy experts, many of whom had no expertise on health care, were filling the airwaves and opinion pages with naive and incorrect predictions. This misinformation was going unchecked, and was indeed repeatedly endorsed and sensationalized.
If the authorities in the West make politicizing medicine a policy, it could quickly destroy the doctor-patient trust beyond repair. We should never allow what the CCP did in China happen in the free world. We still have some time. We should remain aware and be willing to fight to preserve the integrity of modern medicine.
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