CRACKS IN THE COVID WALL OF SILENCE

My friend, Jim, is among the nicest males I’ve met. Though his life has challenges, he bears these with equanimity. He smiles easily and often has something pleasant, funny or interesting to say. He speaks in a “gee-whiz” tone that’s rare in New Jersey and yet, he doesn’t come across as corny.

I met Jim while intermittently working with him on agricultural projects over the past ten years. He’s taught me some stuff about growing food. Sometimes we’ve passed a football back and forth. Despite being easygoing, he shows athleticism.

I don’t limit my Scamdemic critique to Substack posts. Those who’ve been around me for the past six years have often heard me criticize the mitigation and its multifarious manifestations. When, during this time, Jim asked me how I was doing, I would say something like “I’m OK, but I’d be better if my son wasn’t on his computer in his old bedroom 70 hours a week for the past nine months looking for a job in an artificially-frozen economy.”

When I vented, Jim would politely say things like, “Well, the lockdowns are bad. But the nursing home near my house had a dozen people who died from The Virus.”

Whenever he or someone else claimed to know a Covid victim, I asked, “How old were they?” When they invariably said that the decedent was 80 or 90-something, I would respond, without even mentioning iatrogenic deaths or deaths of isolation-driven despair, “80 or 90-something is a long life. Do the deaths of some 80 or 90-something year-olds mean students need to stay home or take experimental shots?”

Perhaps because he values our friendship, Jim never wanted to discuss the Mania at length. Nor did he ever tell me I should get a shot. Though to my chagrin, he once mentioned that he had volunteered at an injection site. He got The Virus at least once and had some other, post-jab health challenges that seemed beyond coincidental. I didn’t suggest such a causal link. Because I value our friendship.

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Since Rutgers DEI’d me in December, 2023, Jim and I haven’t worked together. Nonetheless, we call each other every so often to keep current about what and how we’re doing. He called me last week because he wanted to include me in a minor greenhouse project that we’ll start in late January.

During that call, he told me how he takes fitness walks with his neighbor, who’s a chemistry professor at a small, local college. His voice trailing into an afterthought, Jim said, “Yeah, he was like you about Covid. It turned out you were both right about all of it.”

Jim proceeded seamlessly to the ensuing sentence. I don’t remember what he said next because I was processing his unexpected admission. It was the first time since March 2020 that anyone who had previously supported the Covid overreaction had spontaneously admitted to me that I had been right to oppose the non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. And thus, to impliedly concede they had been wrong to support these.

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Over the past 68 months, the closest I had come to such an experience was near the end of my annual physical in November 2025, when my doctor asked what I did with my days after losing my garden job. I told her I was fixing things in my old house, playing basketball and music, preparing meals, and writing about the Covid overreaction. Then I characteristically delivered a derisive, two or three sentence statement about how fake and destructive the Covid response had been.

While I had conveyed a similar message to her during prior checkups, she listened but didn’t, until this most recent visit, state her agreement that the viral overreaction had caused deep damage, especially to the young people she was seeing in her practice. Unlike Jim’s spontaneous, voluntary admission, I broached the subject with her.

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Hearing Jim’s and my physician’s concessions didn’t make me feel better. These came, as Carole King sang, too late, baby. Way too much undoable damage has been done.

Throughout 2020, I yearned to hear anti-Scamdemic message from people I knew. I thought overreaching politicians might respond to a groundswell of popular opposition. But the people didn’t lead, so the leaders didn’t follow. Nearly everyone I knew bought the lies. Most did so resolutely, despite very tenuous evidence and very dubious logic.

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I typically know when I’ve been right or wrong. I’ve been certain from Day 1 that the viral reaction was wrong. In order to feel validated or vindicated, I never needed to hear someone else change their mind and admit I was right. I just wanted to know that not everyone was crazy or corrupt.

I didn’t think that by opposing the lockdowns, closures, masks, tests and shots from the beginning that I had shown impressive insight for which I deserved praise. To the contrary, opposing the “mitigation” and the injections were super-easy calls. The reaction was obviously theatrical, overblown and tremendously destructive. Why couldn’t everyone see it? My countercultural perspective said more about others’ gullibility than it did about my insightfulness.

Thankfully, over time, due to the signs I put on my house or car, writing and reading Substack posts, publicly wearing my anti-mania t-shirt and later, attending Brownstone Institute retreats, I’ve met hundreds of Covid dissidents in person or spoken with them on the phone. These encounters confirmed what I strongly suspected: while we were a distinct minority, in absolute terms, many saw the Scam.

Most of those who later saw the Scam, or cynically benefitted and profited from it, won’t ever tell me I was right. Doing so would effectively admit they were wrong. Showing humility is above most peoples’ character grade.

Some have called me a Monday Morning Quarterback. In response, I forward them anti-lockdown op-eds I emailed to many newspapers in March and April 2020. None of the papers printed or posted these.

Emotionally, it’s much easier for those who supported the lockdowns and shots to pretend the whole thing didn’t happen. Or if pressed, to blithely and implausibly assert that “We didn’t know” that we shouldn’t have locked down a society over a respiratory virus for the first time in history because a few old Italians and Spaniards were dying. Of something.

I appreciate the few, like Jim and my doctor who’ve admitted they were wrong and acknowledge that I was right to oppose the lockdowns and shots from the outset. By doing so, they showed exceptional humility. But their admissions don’t portend a long overdue wave of admissions from the core Covophobic constituency.

Hearing a few more people I know belatedly renounce the Mania doesn’t restore my faith in the American majority, nor lead me to believe the Scamdemic has chastened the gullible. I won’t take a rosier post-Mania view of the hive mind unless the public surprises me and correctly rejects a series of future media-hyped crises. Given the majority’s terrible analytical track record during Coronamania, it’s unlikely that we’ll see the dawning of some new Age of Aquarius, in which my countrymen and women collectively begin to make good decisions about public matters.

Many will refuse to apologize for supporting the foolish and destructive Covid overreaction because they fear that doing so might be used to impeach their credibility regarding future public issues. This concern shouldn’t stop them from doing the right thing and admitting their error. Besides, I, and others like me, will remind them of their Covid Era foolishness whether they admit this or not.

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This week, I read a book entitled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025). It was a Christmas gift from one of my daughters. The book contains ten essays by an ungrateful Egyptian-American immigrant about American culture and Middle East violence. My daughter told me she selected it for me because the title reflected my view of Coronamania and some other societal experiments, which she’s heard me say will, like a slow-motion train wreck or a frog in stove-top-warming pot of water, end badly.

And to think, I used to do Dad jokes…

On the hardcover book’s stark, black, matte cover, only this message appears, embossed, in small, shiny, gold, upper-case letters: ONE DAY, WHEN IT’S SAFE, WHEN THERE’S NO PERSONAL DOWNSIDE TO CALLING A THING WHAT IT IS, WHEN IT’S TOO LATE TO HOLD ANYONE ACCOUNTABLE, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS.

Though Middle East conflict seems intractable, the book cover’s darkly optimistic prophecy seems likelier to be true in that context than it is regarding Coronamania. The Pharma-sponsored government and media lied non-stop about the viral threat and mitigation measures. Pharma, academia and Public Health apparatus-tainted history books and documentaries will perpetuate these lies. Additionally, the aggregate amount of ego poorly invested in the Covid response by the experts and their many naive followers is more powerful than a vicious, enduring, multi-national, inter-religious, ethno-tribal conflict.

The following sentence concludes Chapter Seven, two-thirds of the way through One Day:

So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.

This dismal observation seems especially true regarding Coronamania. The Scamdemic’s orchestrators knew that most people would either never see the Scam or would see it long after its strategic political, social and economic objectives had been accomplished. And that their victims would forgive and/or forget what the Corona overlords had done to them. At that point, what recourse would the low-information, fundamentally passive majority have?

Thus, the conspirators implemented their devious plan and facilitated tremendous social, economic, cultural, physical and spiritual damage, past, present and future.

While I saw the Scamdemic sooner and more clearly than did most people, the Scamdemic’s orchestrators sized up people sooner and more clearly than I did. As I waited in vain for the majority to see the light, the Scamdemicians exploited the public’s fearfulness, gullibility, short-sightedness and selfishness. They won, albeit via demagoguery, deception and censorship.