Tirien Steinbach’s censorious and sanctimonious diatribe embodies larger trends of the modern era: institutions’ abandonment of free speech principles, the most powerful people in the country posturing under the banner of victimhood, and the entitlement of wrongdoers who regurgitate the proper shibboleths.
The puzzle of why there was a worldwide cascading abandonment of a hundred years of accumulated knowledge by scientific and policy advisers will occupy researchers for many years. The result is that old lessons are having to be relearned. Judging by the rush of studies now coming through to contradict key tenets of the 2020–22 narrative, there’s hope that the wall of silence rooted in groupthink and fear of consequences to career and reputation might have been irreparably breached.
The Virality Project however is just part of a broader cultural shift that reverses long standing liberal/left commitments to free expression and allows censorship in the name of protection and safety. However in suppressing “stories of true vaccine side effects” the Virality Project put people in danger. Rather than keeping people safe they exposed us to the depredations of BigPharma.
As opposed to fifty years ago, today’s protesting students do not exhibit an instinctive aversion to authority. With each controversy, they join the country’s most powerful forces in calling for more censorship, fewer civil liberties, and less tolerance for dissenting viewpoints.
Most Washingtonians I meet are color blind to other people’s freedom. At the start of the pandemic, government officials trumpeted terrifying statistical extrapolations of potential infection rates. Thus, they automatically became entitled to lock people in their homes, shut down their businesses, and padlock their churches. The credentials of experts receive infinitely more respect inside the Beltway than Americans’ constitutional rights.
The regulation allowed them to use law enforcement to enforce their orders of isolation or quarantine, which means you could have received a knock at the door from your local police or sheriff telling you that you had to go with them… by order of the Health Department.
How do we know for sure that Trump was not selling his advisors on lockdowns rather than that reverse? We do not actually know that. The most plausible scenario is that everyone in that hot house of Oval Office power pretension was equally enthusiastic for the most catastrophic public-health decision in modern history.
Interventions rooted in panic, driven by political machinations, and using all the levers of state power to terrify citizens and muzzle critics in the end needlessly killed massive numbers of the most vulnerable while putting the vast low-risk majority under house arrest. The benefits are questionable but the harms are increasingly obvious. The Johnson government in general and Hancock in particular revalidate Lord Acton’s astute observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
State officials across the nation can help usher in the “new generation of Republican leadership” that Governor Sanders described. They can fight against the federal government’s insulation of Big Pharma, affirm their commitment to the justice of the Seventh Amendment, and champion the rights of their citizens against the widely distrusted, highly profitable industry.
Like the ticky-tacky crosswalk cop, people should have tuned out the Covid “experts” and politicians from the beginning and instead trusted their own observations and common sense. Instead of heavy-handed, top-down, theatrical top-down mitigation measures, society would have been far better off if people had been allowed to live normally. The experts’ advice and government mitigation measures were—and are— nagging, nugatory and negative.
One might suppose it would be top headlines that the man who crafted the Covid response for the world was merely using this as the lever to reverse 12,000 years of human history. Indeed in that sense, “going medieval” is a mere step in a long road back. Forget the Constitution. Forget the Enlightenment. Forget even the golden age of the Roman Empire. Fauci wants to take us back long before there are any actual historical records: a conjectural Rousseauian state of nature where we lived by foraging for food around us and nothing more.
To this day, it remains unclear where Pueyo got the ideas for virus containment for his 2020 articles. To some degree, Pueyo’s ideas mirrored those of major lockdown proponents like Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson—architect of the wildly-inaccurate COVID models that instigated lockdowns across the free world—who’d already endorsed global lockdown measures. Yet outside of a niche epidemiology community, these ideas were far from well-known. For the most part, it wasn’t until Pueyo’s articles that these ideas for strict virus containment measures reached the mainstream.
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