Commentary
Back in the spring, when the official mantra was “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and “fifteen days to slow the spread,” Americans and others were game to give the fight against the CCP virus a try. After all, we were being asked to briefly surrender our freedom of movement, association, speech, and the exercise of religion in exchange for protecting a medical system about to confront the Chinese Communist Party virus.
But it was all a lie—every word of it.
The hospitals weren’t overwhelmed. The death toll was many degrees of magnitude smaller than so direly predicted. The lockdowns continue in one form or another to this day.
In fact, since that time, the death toll from the novel coronavirus has steadily dropped, even as “infections” have increased—entirely understandably, given the nature of viruses. The first lockdowns were never meant to control or eradicate the virus by denying it hosts. That’s impossible. Instead, all they did was delay the number of people who would eventually get this variation of SARS and the flu, in order for the herd to be culled and immunity to kick on.
And, indeed, those who died were mainly the low-hanging fruit: the extremely elderly, the residents of nursing homes whose remaining life spans were short in the first place, those with compromised immune systems, the grossly obese or suffering from severe comorbidities, such as cancer and advanced heart disease.
As sad as those deaths were, far sadder were the separated spouses and families, the suffering grandparents unable to see their children or grandkids, those waiting for urgently needed hospital treatment who instead found themselves last in line behind phantom Wuhan virus patients who never showed up.
Not to mention the dire fiscal consequences, including lost jobs, annihilated businesses, and lost professional futures.
It’s been an overreaction of unprecedented, malicious folly, continued long past its sell-by date, and has now devolved into a sadistic exercise in petty tyranny and titanic economic destruction. By continuing this farce of face-masking and “social distancing,” the governments of the world have created fear and panic in the feminized West, negated important constitutional protections, and taught the timorous among us to fear and shun their fellow man.
Citizens as Captives
Instead, based on no meaningful “science” whatsoever—but rather guesswork and computer modeling of the crudest kind—most governments adopted the Chinese ant-farm approach, treating their citizens as captives, muzzling them, and charging them with crimes should the comrades step out of line.
This way is unbecoming to the free peoples of the West, an insult to personal sovereignty, a flagrant violation of both the law and the social compact, and an act of hostile aggression against the citizens of the democracies.
Having unwisely acceded to this flagrant bait and switch, Americans and others now find that the goal posts have been moved from last Easter to some indefinite future in which either a vaccine will be found against a disease that kills almost nobody, or the virus itself is eradicated—a fool’s errand if there ever was one.
The commissars have also decreed that it’s not the number of fatalities that now matters, but the number of infections—“cases,” to use the scare term—with the added proviso that even one “case” is unacceptable.
We’ve also swallowed the misrepresentation that the more people we test the closer to liberation day we move because we can now contact-trace the infections to their sources, when in fact the more people who get infected the better it is for our health as a society.
But the governments don’t really care about any of this. COVID-19 is apparently the Worst Thing of All Time and must be dealt with on an immediate draconian basis as if it were World War Three. They’ve thoroughly frightened the population into believing that no price to pay is too great for us to wreck our way of life and our essential humanity, and then to thank—and pay—them for it.
What’s Different
In previous pandemics, the bug was allowed to burn its way through the body politic, its toll just part of the cost of being human. So what’s different about this seasonal malady?
For one thing, it’s occurring in an election year, at the start of which the American economy was firing on all cylinders in a way it hasn’t in decades. When President Trump’s political enemies realized the Covid shutdown could be wielded as a wrecker’s ball against the American and global economies, they jumped at the chance.
For another, a society that has moved from “pay any price, bear any burden” to “if it saves just one life” is no longer capable of facing or dealing with reality. With atheism ascendant, the extension of life (except for that of the unborn, of course) has become the cardinal social virtue.
In the absence of an afterlife, there is literally nothing worth dying for. Saving just one life, however, is meaningless in the scheme of things. Risking and perhaps sacrificing your own existence for the preservation of society and the future of others has become unthinkable.
For a third, governments now have a taste for it, and plan to extend the punishment indefinitely by deeming it the solution to another imaginary threat—“climate change.”
Almost from the start, the Left understood that if they could make the link between consequences of the shutdown and the decline in “carbon emissions”—something that has little or nothing to do with the Earth’s natural cycles of warming and cooling—they could keep the scam going forever.
And so here we are: right on schedule, some European countries are now re-entering lockdown, forbidding travel, imposing curfews. Once again, they lie that that the “counter-measures” against the Dreaded Covid will only last a few weeks or months, that they’ll be lifted by, say, Christmas, and all will be well again.
But we now know that’s not true. As officials and their cheerleaders in the media ramp up their charts and graphs, and point with alarm at the fulfilment of all their dire predictions from early summer, inside they’re laughing at the suckers. Emboldened by the great coronavirus hoax of 2020, they’re now preparing to tighten the screws even further, even as they profit from the hysteria themselves.
Think about it: has a single government official or minister lost his job over any of this? Of course not. On the contrary, more induced panic means more rule-making, more need for government “services,” and more faux “leadership” from men and women who couldn’t get a job in the private sector if their lives depended on it.
Luckily for them, they don’t have to. As for the rest of us… well, that’s our problem.
Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, will be published in December by St. Martin’s Press.
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