Disclosure: I own no shares in any of the authors mentioned. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business (or other!) relationship with any author who is mentioned in this article.
To say that the last few months have been like living in cloud-cuckoo land is not really fair on clouds or cuckoos. The list is long: proxy wars, fighting inflation by printing more money, alleviating fuel poverty by mandating an eye-wateringly expensive switch to unreliable power sources that are unsuited to our current grid infrastructure, wilful blindness to facts and the shrill promotion of erroneous official narratives through the deliberate conflation of words and their meanings (e.g. weather/climate) or just plain redefinition of terms (“safe” and “effective”).
However, this article is about a more specific matter. Cutting to the chase: it was obvious (from before they were implemented) that draconian lockdowns were both unnecessary and would create immense harm. I’ve written about this extensively (e.g. recently here and – in my first published article on the matter back in 2020 – here), so I am not going to repeat the evidential base for this fundamental tenet.
Given the propensity for societies to be taken in by collective delusion, we should probably not be surprised that it has taken so long for public discourse to cautiously allow this matter to be broached. Finally, 30 months on (after gargantuan human & financial cost stemming from this most epic of blunders), even previous tub-thumping supporters of restrictions such as the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph are seemingly coming clean. But can we trust these outfits not to whitewash recent history?
If we are going to ensure this can never happen again, we must be honest about cause and effect. The March 2020 official narrative was so hopelessly flawed that post-hoc rationalisation has required Orwellian newspeak in order to hammer home TheScience(TM), continuous goal-post shifting and the adoption of compounding (and flawed) consequential policies. And many, many people – including retrospective lockdown sceptics – went along with it, and did not speak up. So while it is useful that people are coming round to the idea after the event, this post-hoc societal learning provides only a very specific defence against such future atrocities. How do we ensure that the levers of state cannot be pulled – by design or through cowardly leadership – if a new mania emerges that demands the ritual sacrifice of our firstborns, or other such unspeakable nonsense?
As much as we might want to blame Blofeld-type uber-villains for the fate that befell us (and I am not saying that such nefarious characters do not exist), the sad truth of the matter is that society should have had the checks & balances in place to resist societal panic. This point is put rather eloquently by Mark Changizi:
The criminals responsible for the draconian and destructive Covid interventions are politicians, journalists, WHO, Big Tech & Pharma etc. who pushed them.
Does it excuse any of them if they themselves got swept up in mass hysteria?
No!
Are they only culpable if they themselves (impossibly) planned the mass hysteria?
No!
For those that are not aware of Mark, he made this very astute observation very early on in this sorry saga:
How right he was. This tweet was put out on 17 March 2020, just about the point that they were closing schools in the UK at the unions’ behest, to nary a howl – not even a whimper – of protest from the majority of the population. Why? Only days previously, the government and its advisors had been keeping calm & carrying on, making careful preparations in line with the pandemic preparedness plan. How did public opinion change? There was a deluge of fake electronic messages & social media propaganda, though who was pushing this is not known. Why do we still not know this? An honest investigation is required as we are still wholly susceptible to a repeat performance.
If we are to draw any more general conclusions about March 2020 about how to avoid a repeat of these tyrannical & authoritarian government responses (in what we previously assumed was the civilised West), it is essential that the facts of what happened are documented and publicised. We need to unemotionally piece together what mistakes were made and crimes committed, who they were made/perpetrated by and how we can avoid these circumstances occurring again: a no-holds-barred truth and reconciliation commission (and not a Westminster whitewash).
After all, our nation has resisted such propaganda attacks before. The role of the fourth estate and the political opposition is not just to keep authorities honest, but also to make it harder for them to be misled, blackmailed or threatened into perpetrating activities that might harm the nation. Yes, our political leadership failed us: but even at the time (and most certainly since then), journalists and opposition politicians have – almost to a man and woman – failed to investigate why they failed us. Whether Covid was social hysteria, a planned hit-job by an overweight software tycoon, or a satanist plot to bring down the West is actually frankly irrelevant – given what was known by the 2020 Ides of March, there is no way the system should have done anything other than implement the pandemic preparedness plan and let the epidemic wave blow over:
It seems that the government had been on the run during March due to organised manipulation of public opinion (the origin of which is unclear) and demands from unions. These were the true seeds of lockdown destruction: rather than stand up to this nonsense, the government chose the easy option of caving in to the hysteria. If the government – and its cheerleaders in the press – had instead chosen Churchillian leadership and a “keep calm and carry on” message, the Covid outcome would likely have been no different, but we would have avoided devastating lockdown damage.
Ben Irvine, an independent journalist, puts its more bluntly:
Why have journalists, politicians and lockdown sceptics not been asking questions about how and why the leadership caved in? After all, social hysteria, overweight software tycoons and satanist plots will always be with us, but we used to have a functioning democracy that would have seen off such challenges with aplomb. Instead, we’ve had journalists pushing agendas, spineless opposition leadership and lockdown sceptics screeching about (admittedly unsavoury) supra-national organisations. None of this explains why, in the run-up to 23 March 2020 (the day the UK lockdown was announced), the majority of people in these categories accepted the so-called ‘need’ for draconian restrictions. After this moment in time, the die was cast and the Covidean Cultists – powered by continued pressure from various unions – were the only show in town. It was a lonely time for those of us who railed against the madness from before that fateful announcement. After all, the school closure announcement the week before had been just as senseless… similarly the shuttering of public pubs, swimming pools and the like. What caused these dominoes to fall?
Irvine has been causing irritation to some prominent lockdown sceptics with his challenges. But he rightly points out that after-the-event lockdown sceptics look somewhat hypocritical if they are just moving seamlessly with public opinion now that lockdowns are out of fashion. After all, shrieking at the WEF is as useless as howling at the moon and will do nothing to stop union bosses continuing to pressurise the government of the day to commit heinously damaging acts that impoverish its inhabitants and adversely impact their futures. And these tantrums seem even more put on if said lockdown sceptics were actually publicly in favour of these measures back in March 2020.
If we do not address the root cause of precisely how the authorities (and possibly their puppetmasters?) subverted our democracy in March 2020, we may leave ourselves totally exposed to a repeat showing. All the insanity and irrationality that followed – community masking, repeat lockdowns, ‘saviour by injection’, injection mandates, movement licences – would not have happened without these initial mis-steps. Multiple wrongs don’t cancel out to make a right.
Irvine’s ‘truth and reconciliation challenge’ to lockdown sceptics (well, those that are hoping to whitewash their past mistaken support for draconian interventions) is not an ideological purity test or witch hunt. It is simply a challenge to openly admit what we got wrong, and then join the team that is confronting the absolutely baloney official narrative that (still) seeks to justify the unjustifiable.
So here goes. Please join Team Reality. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is needed. The only requirement is honesty about one’s past support for unconscionable nonsense and making a simple apology. That’s it; a trivial request. So here’s mine:
I’m sorry for not being more patient – and doggedly irascible – with those who tried to defend the indefensible in those early days of lockdown hysteria. I’m sorry for not questioning my faith in our political system earlier (even after learning painful lessons after the second war in Iraq). I’m sorry for burying myself in my work – essentially accepting an easy life of compliance in 2020 – and railing in private when I should have been protesting on the front line. I’m sorry for initially limiting myself to minor subversive acts of defiance.
I agree with Toby Young’s recent article in the Daily Sceptic that it is time for pro-lockdown fanatics to fall to their knees and beg for forgiveness. But like the biblical parable about motes and planks in eyes (Matthew 7:3-5), public opinion turning against past lunacy is an easy cover for previous inaction. It does not exonerate those who went along with the madness in the first place – especially those who had an audience and could have influenced public discourse at the time. It is also a bit pointless to debate the fundamental flaws in the contorted arguments presented by the Narrative Ninnies when one has similarly adopted them in the past: far more powerful – and disarming – to humbly acknowledge past mistakes. Own it, occupy the moral high ground and convince others to join you – or look little different from hypocrites on the other side who renege on their own medicine.
Irvine strikes me as a John the Baptist character: fiery, uncompromising, uncouth, irritating, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness”. Continuing the biblical theme, lockdown sceptics who point the finger at him for challenging their sanctity are potentially as ridiculous as holier-than-though (yet attend-only-on-Sundays) Church of England stalwarts who wrinkle their noses at a modern-day camel hair-shirted John and wonder why such a ruffian hasn’t washed before turning up for the 9:30am service.
They have missed the point.
It’s time to come clean, ‘fess up to past misjudgements and join the fray. There’s lots to do. Team Reality needs you.
Well said!
It's amusing to watch people fume at Ben Irvine! He certainly takes no prisoners!
I don't think there will be any decent enquiries or investigations into the last 2.5 years. Too many people in all walks of life were involved. A fair amount of the public wanted to be scared and were happy to be paid to stay home and enjoy a nice summer of pseudo fear. People in the public eye enjoyed being interviewed about their belief in all the nonsense. The people who made the decisions will all have gone off with hefty pensions and directorships before any enquiry even starts. Any enquiry will target the little people who goose-stepped around and finally the statement will be "lessons will be learnt".
It's depressing how many people I know who are still regularly testing themselves and boasting about having covid again. Will they all queue up for booster jabs? Probably. It's difficult to believe you were played for a fool for over 2 years - easier to keep up your illusions of following the science.
As for the unions - they appear to have moved on to striking for better pay and conditions. I reckon they see covid restrictions as the dead horse not worth flogging any more. Bashing the govt over the economy will be the thing for a while.