More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the Left, is just beginning to realise that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.
But that realisation hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream Left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.
The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there was any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.
Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream Left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.
This perplexing narrative was perfectly encapsulated in a recent viral tweet by a history professor who griped about the difficulty of convincing his students that government mandates had nothing to do with the fact that they couldn’t leave their homes in 2020.
Similarly, in an interview with Bill Maher, celebrity scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson argued that we can’t assess the effects of lockdowns and mandates because the counterexamples, like Sweden, are too different to be applicable. (Starting at 2:15).
Likewise, astonishingly, in a debate on Monday, Charlie Crist, Democratic candidate for Governor of Florida, accused Ron DeSantis of being “the only Governor in the history of Florida that’s ever shut down our schools”. “You’re the only Governor in the history of Florida that shut down our businesses,” Crist went on, “I never did that as Governor. You’re the one who’s the shutdown guy.”
In fact, as DeSantis pointed out, Crist had publicly sued DeSantis to keep kids out of school in 2020, and he wrote DeSantis a letter in July 2020 saying the entire state should still be in lockdown.
Arguments like these are as facile as they are transparent. Does anyone honestly think these people would be arguing that lockdowns didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible to measure their effects, if the policy had been a success?
As is extraordinarily well-documented by data, video evidence, news reports, government orders, testimonial evidence and living memory, the strict lockdowns of spring 2020 were all too real. And few people publicly opposed them.
As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in meticulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported when they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty and hunger. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdowns – let alone the economic damage – would be six times greater than the benefit.
Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, key officials, media entities, billionaires and international organisations advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date. The resulting scenes were horrific and dystopian.
People lined up outdoors in freezing temperatures to get food.
In many cities, still-sick patients were tossed out of hospital beds and sent back to nursing homes.
Playgrounds were taped up.
Parks and beaches were closed, and some mainstream commentators argued that those closures should be even stricter.
Many who flouted these closures were charged or arrested.
Stores, and sometimes sections of stores, that were deemed “non-essential” were cordoned off.
School closures caused an unprecedented learning setback, especially for the poorest students. But even when schools were open, kids had to sit for hours in masks, separated by plexiglass barriers.
Many kids were forced to eat lunch outside in silence.
CHILD ABUSE: Kindergartners are forced to eat lunch outside in 40 degree weather at Capitol Hill Elementary School in Portland, Oregon.
— Katie Daviscourt
They sit on buckets to social distance from their classmates. pic.twitter.com/KqFcliTFYf(@KatieDaviscourt) December 8, 2021
Countless small businesses were forced to close, and more than half of those closures became permanent.
Cars lined up for miles at food banks.
The Financial Times reported that three million in the United Kingdom went hungry due to lockdown.
The situation was far worse in the developing world.
If these horror stories aren’t enough, the raw data speak for themselves.
The mainstream Left’s newfound reluctance to refer to these policies as “lockdown” is especially curious, because they showed no such reluctance at the time they were actually implementing lockdowns in 2020.
By pretending that all of these horrors were attributable to public panic, apologists for the response to Covid are attempting to shift blame away from the political machines that imposed lockdowns and mandates onto individuals and their families. This is, of course, despicable and bunk. People did not voluntarily go hungry, or stand in the freezing cold to get food, or remove themselves from hospitals while they were still sick, or bankrupt their own businesses, or force their own kids to sit outside in the cold, or march hundreds of miles in exodus after losing their jobs in factories.
The collective denial of these horrors, and the refusal of media, financial and political elites to report on them, amounts to nothing less than the greatest act of gaslighting that we’ve seen in modern times.
Further, the argument that all of these terrible outcomes could be attributed to public panic rather than state-imposed mandates would be far more convincing if governments hadn’t taken unprecedented actions to deliberately panic the public.
A report later revealed that military leaders had seen Covid as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, “shaping” and “exploiting” information to bolster support for Government mandates. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Government psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.
Moreover, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judged the threat of COVID-19 was their own Government’s decision to employ lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the Government imposed a lockdown – in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if Government’s taking such drastic measures’. We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.” The policies thus created a feedback loop in which the lockdowns and mandates themselves sowed the fear that made citizens believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 was hundreds of times greater than it really was, in turn causing them to support more lockdowns and mandates.
Those who publicly spoke against lockdowns and mandates were ostracised and vilified – denounced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and health officials as “neo-Nazis” and “white nationalists”. Further, among those who really believed the mainstream Covid narrative – or merely pretended to – all the authoritarian methods that had supposedly contributed to China’s ‘success’ against Covid, including censoring, cancelling and firing those who disagreed, were on the table.
Though many now claim to have opposed these measures, the truth is that publicly opposing lockdowns when they were at their apex in spring 2020 was lonely, frightening, thankless and hard. Few did.
The gaslighting is by no means limited to the political Left. On the political Right, which now generally acknowledges that Covid mandates were a mistake, the revisionism is subtler and tends to take the form of elites casting themselves – falsely – as having been anti-lockdown voices in early 2020, when the record is quite clear that they were vocal advocates of lockdowns and mandates.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson now rightly acts as a champion of the anti-mandate cause, but in fact Carlson was one of the most influential individuals who talked Donald Trump into signing onto lockdowns in early 2020. The U.K.’s short-lived Prime Minister Liz Truss stated that she’d “always” been against lockdowns, but she publicly supported both lockdowns and vaccine passes. Likewise, Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre now casts himself as an anti-mandate leader, but he supported both lockdowns and vaccine mandates as they were happening.
As Ben Irvine, author of The Truth About the Wuhan Lockdown, has tirelessly documented, Right-wing publications including the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph now routinely act as opponents of lockdowns and mandates, while staying silent as to their own vocal support for strict lockdowns in spring 2020. And the same goes for countless other commentators and influencers on the political right as well.
To those who know their history, this wholesale gaslighting by elites on both the Left and the Right, while galling, isn’t terribly surprising. Most elites obtain power by doing whatever is in their own perceived best interest at any given time. They didn’t support lockdowns for any moral or even utilitarian reason. Rather, in spring 2020, elites calculated supporting lockdowns to be in their own best interest. Two years later, many now calculate it to be in their best interest to pretend they were the ones who always opposed lockdowns – while sidelining those who actually did.
This revisionism is all the more disappointing because a small handful of politicians including Ron DeSantis, Imran Khan, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith have proven that admitting error in implementing lockdowns and mandates isn’t that hard, and can even be politically profitable.
The same should go for the political Left. Thus far, we have yet to see anything remotely resembling regret from any leader on the Left, but this is what a decent, Truman-era Democrat might say in these circumstances:
The lockdowns of 2020 were a terrible mistake. While they were outside my field, it was my duty to properly vet the credibility of the advice that was coming from health officials and to end the mandates as soon as it was clear they weren’t working. In that role, I failed, and you all have my humblest apologies. Given the unprecedented harm that’s been done by these mandates, I support a full investigation into how this advice came about, in part to ensure there hasn’t been any untoward communist influence on these policies.
Those who spoke against lockdowns and mandates in early 2020 showed that they were willing to stand up for the freedoms and Enlightenment principles for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, even when doing so was lonely, thankless and hard. For that reason, anyone who did so has reason to feel extremely proud, and the future would be brighter if they were in positions of leadership. That fact is now becoming increasingly clear – even to those who did the opposite. One more reason to keep all the receipts.
Michael P. Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. This post first appeared on his Substack page, which you can subscribe to here.
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The “defence” that I hear most often is that it was all a mistake “but we didn’t know at the time so we had no choice”. In many ways this is a much more dangerous one, because it shows that the utterly daft idea that anything slightly “unknown” requires mad panic and unprecedented measures is now baked into collective psyche.
Of course we know it wasn’t “unknown” – see Diamond Princess.
The Diamond Princess was the best example of how the virus acted, yet it was ignored! It was at that point I really became a Sceptic.
Agreed 100%
Me too… And yet no-one would listen. I also looked at our local statistics and calculated the risk of getting the thing and then, of course, the statistics became altered or disappeared.
I’m surrounded by people who say we had no choice and that they just went along with things as we didn’t know any better. Ditto the vaccines. They are all liars.
Sometimes I just hate them all – including family members with assorted higher degrees and doctors. I am an angry woman and I’ll never forget.
Yes, that argument – “We had no choice!” – really, really f*cks me off. Usually made by the shiny-new-laptop warrior class, happy to drink in the wine, Netflix and Deliveroos from the comfort of their spacious kitchens and flowing gardens.
No, my bitter bile runeth over. Never forget. Never forgive. Keep the receipts.
“Keep the receipts.” Love that!
Its so easy to laugh its so easy to hate, It takes strength to be gentle and kind.
I have to be kind to the idiots in my family but I still find it difficult not to despise them to some degree. A sad admission I know. For the remainder, who rank now as associates at best I retain my civility but when the opportunity arises I delight in rubbing their noses in their gullibility.
No, I’m with you on that. I now have a husband with a heart arrhythmia. He had 2 pfisser stabs followed a few months later by episodes of collapsing and breathlessness. Any suggestion that there is a connection between these events is met with derision – his cardiologist says there is no connection so that’s that. Doctor Son agrees so I’m on my own.
I’ve got the receipts and they say very clearly that in March 2020 I was warning that this was NOT a new illness but actually a very, very old illness. It’s called Mass Psychosis and most people will be familiar with the best known previous example, the Medieval Witch Trials.
Of course, that could NEVER occur again as we are far too intelligent and technologically advanced to fall for that again especially as we now had PCR and a genetic explanation for this ‘new’ virus.
I’ve also got the receipts that the explanation for the apparent lessening of the deadliness of Covid would be attributed to ‘mutation’ and that there would soon be lots and lots of people who, of course, ‘knew all along’.
Obviously I was mercilessly ridiculed as an absolute fool, the more so because I work in the medical profession, for daring to claim that the ONLY place this virus actually existed, was in our minds.
I remember those videos from China.
I tried to find them a while ago, seemed to have completely disappeared…
It was all a dream…
Excellent. I’ve always been known for my good memory…
And the Government had a Pandemic Plan updated in 2011 to deal specifically with such occasions, and essentially the same plan was published on the WHO website until suddenly it disappeared after lockdowns and masks, which were contrary to the recommendations in these plans, became popular.
It wasn’t just those on the left, never forget the “libertarian” Chris Snowden or by whatever his name is who blocked anyone on twitter who claimed epidemic curves could turn without npis, as if locking up the well was some great new scientific innovation. As well as the mp Neil O’Brien who set up groups to hound scientists who had anti lockdown views. These ppl should not have careers any longer.
First thoughts – a well written and extremely welcome article. Fortunately or sadly this is one topic for mining which will never be exhausted. And nor could it be.
Please keep digging.
It was THE greatest crime against humanity and we are still awaiting Justice! Will I ever trust the authorities again? Absolutely no way!
It’s no surprise to me that the authorities seem to be doubling down on the covid deception. They know the calamity that awaits them if the dam bursts and they are held to account.
Most of us know when we are being lied to. Whether it’s that email asking you to log in to your online banking or that phone call from a guy called ‘mike’ with a strong Asian accent who says your broadband isn’t secure, you suspect something is wrong. For many of us it was the same in 2020, we suspected we were being misled because the message was coming from the mouths of known deceivers. We should welcome all late converts to reality but they should understand they are not the heroes. That accolade should go to the Mike Yeadons and Peter McCullochs of this world: those people who put pretty well everything on the line for the sake of the truth.
Hear, hear.
Bang on point. These Machiavellian vipers who change with the political tide are no so obviously poisonous, I’m surprised they air their opinions in the face of the public. Yet brazenly they remain in the public eye.
For their own particular reasons Matt Hancock, Nadhim Zakawi and Piers Morgan all instantly spring to mind.
hear, hear
Absolutely!
Correct. I never really complied much with the lockdown but I did watch about 5 of Johnson’s Daily Briefings. Then I said to my son (who had moved back home for the lockdown) something along the lines of “they’re not putting any of these deaths and infections into context …. it’s just propaganda.” None of it struck true and I never watched another one; started trawling the net and pretty soon found the online sceptics and honest scientists.
It was obvious from very early on that they were telling us a shed-load of blatant lies.
Can’t be long now before the chorus of those pretending that actually they were anti-vaxxers all along, will start.
Actually when the truth actually lands on the pretenders I suspect some of the kickback might become extremely vicious.
A stark reminder that we allowed it to get so far as to make pre school children eat there lunch 2 metres apart in 4 degrees C temperature, sat on plastic buckets in masks in silence. Like some kind of maudlin death cult. A ritual sacrifice to their god ‘The Science’. It makes me sick to my core. What a awful reminder that man’s inhumanity to man is of an individual’s own free will. When you surrender that you crush your own spirit. Worse is yet to come through fear… Hope and pray for the best.
It’s a sad but undeniable fact that most people lack moral courage.
We are completely surrounded by people who will give in to coercion the moment they see everyone else around them doing so.
And these very ordinary, very common, very feeble humans will equally bleet their new found disapproval of lockdowns the moment they see everyone else doing it.
And if they see people around them condemning covid jabs, they’ll do that too.
I know it, DS readers know it, Bill Gates knows it, Klaus Schwab knows it, Fauci knows it. Even the dumb sheep, deep down, know it.
Neil Oliver on GBN this evening (from 18:00 BST, available via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAO2ROhBaU ) made a robust attack on the “rewriting history” affair, being done by a range of different people. It made a lot of sense to me.
I’ve certainly got my receipts.
A sceptic from March 2020 I’ve posted on social media against lockdown, untested vaccines, mandates, and taken the p*** out of the ludicrous rules imposed.
I’ve written to my MP begging him not to vote for vaccine mandates for carehome workers, and then NHS staff – and had quite a few interesting exchanges with him over our wildly differing viewpoints.
I marched in London against the mandates.
I took a rain check on the jab as I wasn’t a) scared of Covid b) trusting of something that would normally take 8-10 years of trials to be deemed ‘safe’, being rushed out in a few months and then injected into my body.
Every day that goes by just makes me more sure that everything I did, said, wrote, was right.
I just wish I could have persuaded some people I care about not to have had the jabs.
At the end of WW II it was said that all Frenchmen and women were in the Resistance!
Conniving, cowards, now they gas light us. whatever they say they cannot get away from what they have done, they are damned, they are Godless, lost souls. I hope for justice but as there are so many of them in positions of power I don’t believe it will ever really happen. As an individual I never followed the lies from the start, didn’t take the poison and certainly will never vote for any of them again, I regard the medical and the Pharma industry as much worse than the Arms industry, the latter does not pretend it is anything other than it is, and yet the former two have presided over the deaths of millions knowing that their failed product would cause damage, but at the same time would line their pockets. Every single individual who still injects these products into another human is complicit I hope the money they receive for their actions has been worth all the destruction they cause
Excellent article.
Two good reads in conjunction with this article:
https://www.coronababble.com/post/reflections-on-the-covid-era-shock-loss-retribution?postId=7ea07e11-374c-4e2c-a6fb-a08ba6b938bf&utm_campaign=9aa81848-e961-45a0-84e0-9333a606a24d&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail_lp&utm_content=07357833-0daa-41d9-8191-4c4938fd68c9&cid=c419ec00-3589-4c5e-bf5e-e2331f13dde4
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/a-lost-small-town
The commentators are much less inclined to forgive.
Ultimately, if absolutely forced to do so, they will claim it was cock-up not conspiracy. And the likes of Toby Young will go along with it.
But the evidence clearly shows that conspiracy is exactly what it was, and is.