We are turning back the clock: away from high civilization to a much lower form without a solid guarantee of even the freedom to travel, while giving up the dream of universal human rights. Confidence in a better world with more human connection is being replaced by isolation, fear, and compliance as guiding principles. The price will be very high.
What’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.
Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.
Though many in positions of power would prefer that we forgot, the strict lockdowns that consumed the world in 2020 are extremely well documented. Above all, these lockdowns were a chilling demonstration of just how quickly western officials, policymakers, scientists, journalists, and soon entire populations could be convinced to adopt a degree of totalitarianism in their everyday lives. Until we have real answers as to how exactly they happened, and why, there’s no reason for any thinking citizen to have confidence in the current crop of officials who claim to represent them.
This is about much more than free speech and the operation of media channels without government intervention. The Covid controls utterly smashed American liberty and social functioning, resulting in mass suffering, educational losses, shattered communities, and a precipitous collapse in public health that has shaved off years in life expectancy and caused an explosion of excess deaths. It might have been stopped or at least lessened in duration with some open discussion.
My government, which exists to protect me, arbitrarily removes rights and privileges from people based on false information that it generates. Sometimes they do it indiscriminately (such as during the pandemic); sometimes they pick their targets (such as what happened to me at the airport).
Illogical fear, driven by a hyperactive media, and by cowardly and controlling government leaders and public health authorities ruled the day. One of the most insidious results of our descent into ignorance about medicine, and our discarding of social contracts and human rights, was the rise of self-righteous intolerance for, and censorship of, anyone who questioned what was happening.
Bottom line: the government conspired to remove valid public health messages and social media posts by myself & others, because they disagreed with the viewpoint which contradicted the federal government’s COVID-19 public health message and views.
The Government Conspired with Big Tech to Infringe on Free Speech Read More
The most basic duty of policy-makers is the honest consideration of all reasonably available information that bears on the consequences of their actions – and in so doing, to take care in some proportion to the potential (let alone, the predicted) magnitude of the consequences of those actions. It is the duty of due diligence. Almost all American officials were derelict in that duty.
The victims of casual cruelty, capricious public health diktats and enforcement brutality are owed justice. But what type of justice? It might be helpful to look at examples from the theory and practice of international criminal justice. The sense of justice, fairness and equity is deeply ingrained in human beings.
Covid Crimes and Amnesty, Accountability and Justice Read More
What pertains to Twitter is surely true at Google (therefore YouTube), Facebook (therefore Instagram), Microsoft (therefore LinkedIn), and even Amazon (many great books were blocked from publication and distribution). At this point, one would have to be completely blind about the reality of what we’ve dealt with for almost three years: in the name of virus control, the country, its laws and traditions, its liberties and rights, were taken over by a junta with different ideas.
We had already heard tidbits about his deposition from lawyers involved and the key takeaway was evident throughout the transcript – Dr. Fauci has a terrible memory or he is hiding WHAT he knew. He used the phrase “I don’t recall” fully 178 times.
