LIVING WITHOUT REGRET

Shortly before the Scamdemic began, I read a story about Mark Ingram, a former pro football player, who had been imprisoned for fraud. He told the interviewer that he was grateful for his jail time because it showed him who his real friends were.

It seemed that Ingram was rationalizing. Yes, it’s good to know who your friends are. But to me, the suffering entailed by incarceration wouldn’t have been worth gaining that knowledge. I’d rather be overinclusively delusional about who I consider friends than be kept in a cage and eat bad food. One typically figures out who his friends are at much lower personal cost.

I’ve heard numerous people say, near the end of their lives, that they had no regrets. I’ve long thought that this claim revealed either, or both, deficit/s of candor and/or of memory. Any remotely self-aware person has done things they wish they hadn’t. While I’ve made many good decisions, I’ve also made plenty of bad ones. I’ve posted a few stories about some of these. I could write a bunch more. Some are, in retrospect, kind of funny. Others I’ll admit only in a general sense; I won’t share details with the world.

Most of my regrettable decisions seemed reasonable enough to me at the time. But I messed up because I had failed to learn some important fact, or because I gave extrinsic factors undue weight. Sometimes I exhibited inexperience or a lack of presence while sizing up a situation that I had only seconds to consider. And some calls were too close to make confidently. As Jean Renoir and others have observed, “The hell of life is that we all have our reasons.”

I take responsibility for all of these failures of discernment, though some of the consequences may have been out of proportion to the magnitude of some of the errors. A seemingly small, extemporaneous or careless mistake can cause big, long-term consequences. I’ve typically borne the brunt of my own mistakes and didn’t externalize these upon others.

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I recently found an April 2024 poll by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation regarding measures to stop the spread of Covid. The pollsters asked slightly over 1,000 people if they thought the Covid response had been appropriate.

A majority of those polled opined that several key policies were generally appropriate:

• Mask requirements in stores and businesses – 70%

• Healthcare worker vaccination requirements – 65%

• Indoor dining closures – 63%

• K-12 public school closures – 56%

I would have asked at least one more question: should the federal government and Federal Reserve have injected nine trillion dollars into the economy to facilitate the Covid shutdowns? I suspect the majority of poll respondents would have agreed doing so was worth every dollar. Many of these same “if it just saves one life” people are now dismayed that they can’t buy a house and that a dozen eggs costs $6.

Be that as it may, in April 2024, forty-two percent of Americans said that all four of the above-listed policies were good ideas and another third (37%) said only some of these measures made sense. Only 20% concluded that all were bad ideas.

Count me in that latter group, not just in April 2024, but in mid-March 2020.

Unsurprisingly, views on these Coronamanic policies varied by subgroup characteristics, including political party affiliation, race, ethnicity, and metropolitan status. These percentages of various demographic groups said all four policies were generally a good idea:

• Democrats (71%); Independents (44%); Republicans (18%)

• Black adults (62%); Hispanic/Latino adults (55%); white adults (32%)

• People living in urban areas (55%); suburban areas (39%); rural areas (29%)

The poll also found that Americans had differing beliefs about how severe the threat of Covid was in 2020-21. Many said, in 2024, that Covid was not a serious health threat to everyone in 2020-21. This includes 14% who said it was a serious health threat only to people who are very old or frail and 45% who say Covid was a serious health threat to the very old or frail, as well as those with underlying medical conditions. About one-third (37%) said it was a serious health threat to everyone in 2020-21. Those who said the threat was more widespread were more likely to say the Corona measures were worthwhile.

Public health pollsters seem inclined to validate, not discredit, their overall Coronamanic project. Thus, one would expect them to design, conduct and interpret polls to find that the public approved of the various ostensible public health measures taken in response to a respiratory virus.

There may also have been various response biases among those polled. For example, when asked, by a Harvard Public Health pollster, about the effectiveness of various ostensible virus control measures, those polled may have endorsed the Covid interventions because they thought that’s what an Ivy League public health subsidiary wanted them to say.

Certainly, very few people saw the Scam off the bat. During my 2020 communications with friends, families and neighbors, fewer than 10% agreed with me that the lockdowns and school closures were terrible ideas. Or that masks were just silly. In 2021, I thought it was crazy for anyone healthy and under 75 to take an experimental shot with no long-term safety record to prevent an illness that had virtually no chance of killing them.

Even with the ability to change their answers given the passage of time, and knowing how things turned out, most of those polled in 2024 stuck to the 2020-21 pro-mitigation and jab orthodoxy. I suspect that if they’d been polled in 2022, even more of those sampled would have endorsed the 2020-21 overreactions.

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Despite any underlying biases or methodological shortcomings, I suspect the 2024 poll’s results roughly reflect majority sentiment in 2025. As did those polled, many of the lockdowners/maskers/testers/jabbers still tell me that their governments and they did the right thing. They need to tell themselves this to preserve their self-image as smart people.

Some admit their errors, but only obliquely. Instead of expressing regret, this cohort excuses their prior stances by saying "we didn't know then what we know now."

Who is “we?” I knew, and said, from Day 1, that the mitigation measures and shots were terrible ideas. No one had given me secret documents before I so concluded.

It wasn’t a close call. Why would the worst virus in history suddenly emerge? When had healthy people ever sheltered in place? Why isolate everyone when only the old and sick were at any risk? What proof did people have that all of these old strangers were truly “dying of Covid?” Wouldn’t the lockdowns and closures cause tremendous harm?

By telling themselves that “nobody knew,” Coronamania backers don't have to confront their complicity in this extremely destructive process or admit that they fell for a massive scam. Many tell themselves that, despite some collateral damage, the government response was crucial, clever and saved millions of lives. They had to break some eggs to make an omelet. Or something like that. Relying on inapt metaphors causes many to misperceive reality and make poor decisions.

Those who still think the Covid response was appropriate and effective likely share a fearful worldview, a deficit of knowledge regarding biology, humanistic delusions about control over the lifespan and a belief that the government, media and Med/Pharma personnel are truthful, earnest, competent public servants. Those who still see the mitigation measures as good ideas likely watch a lot of TV and/or read the legacy news sources that zealously sold the universal peril/lockdown-until-vaxx- rescue narrative.

To survive emotionally, Scamdemic supporters must continue to believe these notions and trust these institutions. It's too hard to get out of bed thinking that sinister people control your life, love to mess with you and will lie to you without compunction. Those who’ve been indoctrinated to believe the government, media and medicine can’t admit that these entities have betrayed them and will continue to do so. If they did, they would, like Michael Stipe, be losing their religion.

Thusly in denial, unless asked by pollsters, most now say or think nothing about the Scamdemic. Ignorance—whether from lack of inquiry or by affirmatively closing one’s eyes and ears—is bliss. Or at least it enables the ignoring party to evade accountability and to take refuge in distraction.

It’s even harder for lockdown/mask/test/vaxx opponents to be happy or optimistic when we consider that so many of those around us bought into Coronamania and supported the mitigation sham and the shot crusade. And when so many still believe, despite all of the destruction, that the viral control project was smartly, effectively and constructively executed.

Yet, here we are.

Without going to jail, I found out which of my friends and how many people, overall, could think. But learning that wasn’t nearly worth the price I, and millions of others, have paid for the Covid overreaction. I’ll never see people in the same way again.