Witnessing Beatlemania foreshadowed Coronamania. While the manner of expression of group identity and hysteria differed in these two contexts, both reactions were extreme and unreasonable. Actually, Beatlemania made more sense. When I walked out of the theater and back into the disorienting 1965 late-day light, life immediately returned to normal.
In her “excruciating story” of the pandemic, The Silent Spread, Deborah Birx does not even try to make coherent scientific or public health policy arguments in favor of the Chinese-style totalitarian measures she advocated. Instead, she provides nonsensical, self-contradictory assertions – some downright false and others long disproven in the scientific literature.
We are all watching as all the things we love – the way of life that many generations have fought to protect – are being swept away. And it is happening with not nearly enough explanation or protest.
The most revealing parts of the book are the claims about Birx herself that, upon close inspection, make little sense, contain strange inconsistencies, or contradict other claims made in the book and elsewhere.
By way of one Health Minister Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21, 2020, the first lockdown in the modern western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9. By April 2020, more than half the world’s population—some 3.9 billion people—had been placed under lockdown.
The Dragnet in Lombardy: Patient Zero of Lockdowns Read More
The key piece of information comes from a new book, The Messenger, published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon.
New Evidence: Fauci Imposed a Vaccine Delay that Cost Trump the Election Read More
The men and women of Germany in the 1930s and 40s were not unlike Americans in the 2010s and 20s—or the people of any nation at any time throughout history. They are human, just as we are human. And as humans, we have a great tendency to harshly judge the evils of other societies but fail to recognize our own moral failures—failures that have been on full display the past two years during the covid panic.
The significance of this pro-lockdown campaign in 2014 can’t be overstated. Even among lockdown skeptics, the widely-held view is that the world essentially bumbled into lockdown in 2020. Although China’s global lockdown propaganda campaign utilizing tens of thousands of bots in virtually every language and dialect across the world is well documented, moderates have argued that this campaign merely represented China celebrating its own “success” against Covid—whether real or not—rather than any premeditated plan to export lockdown as policy.
Fauci demonstrated at that press conference special knowledge of a fine print that not even the president of the United States had seen. He was itching to read it. Did he have a hand in its creation? Most certainly. And what about the typesetting? Are we really supposed to believe that it was an accident that the text with the devastating material was so small as to be barely visible whereas the large text featured mostly common hygiene tips?
The great debate between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and despotism, between a government by the people and a government imposed upon the people is here at last. I’m glad for the clarification of terms. They are saying the quiet part out loud: they want dictatorship. All partisans of freedom should similarly stand up and say the loud part even louder: we tried life without freedom and found it intolerable. We are never going back.
What drove each of these people to get behind the closing down of society as the ‘solution’ to a respiratory virus? We can largely see now who did what and when. What’s mainly missing is the why.
That attitude, requiring us to spend our intellectual resources to an extent that may be comparable with that to which Canguilhem exerted his intellect in writing The Normal and the Pathological, will exhaust us. But we must remember that is precisely what we adults should do.
