LOOKING FOR NEW ENGLAND

I don’t watch or listen to the news and don’t read much of it, either. Pre-2020, the media’s biases were already obvious. Following its Scamdemic panic mongering, any pre-2020 media cred is gone.

Shooting up the evening news doesn’t much advance a viewer’s understanding of the world. Consuming these partisan accounts often misinforms, rather than educates, news followers. This was never truer than during Coronamania.

Though the years pass and the names change, news themes remain the same: violent crimes and trials about them, natural disasters, election campaigns, armed conflicts—especially in the Middle East—government scandals and celebrity deaths. Presumably, for every murder, flood, drone strike or kickback scheme, many similar events in news-neglected Latin America, Africa and Asia go unreported. But the media never misses the deaths of those as important as Ozzy Osborne or Hulk Hogan. These and press conferences are easy to cover.

I still skim news headlines to see what’s deemed newsworthy. Hey, how ‘bout that Coldplay kiss-cam thing?

But I’ve seen enough characteristically biased presentations, shot through with half-truths, below the headlines that I don’t read the articles. I use the time saved to write Substack posts, move my body, play music and watch dog videos.

—

The Scamdemic was an unprecedented media craze. Most Americans assert that, following the Scamdemic, life has returned to normal, though they can’t specify when or explain why that happened. To the contrary, much has permanently worsened following this radical, cynically strategic policy departure.

While the media presents stories that obliquely reflect Coronamania’s social and economic symptoms, it doesn’t mention these symptoms’ causes. For example, the media reports high interest rates and the stalled housing market without observing the correlation between these high rates and unimaginably profligate and inflationary Covid spending. Possessing cash, hedge funds and other real estate investors don’t need to borrow money. Thus, they snap up houses and convert these into rental properties.

The media declines to note Coronamania-driven damage because they caused these problems when they sold the Scamdemic to a naive public. For example, when they run stories about learning or social development losses, the media doesn’t concede that such effects were foreseeable when the schools were closed. Nor do they note that these closures shouldn’t have occurred because students were never at risk and seldom spread The Virus, especially not to grandmas they seldom saw.

The media avoids altogether some of the other effects of the lockdowns, shots and spending. For example, I don’t see headlines about vaxx-related injuries. The silence is deafening. But true stories on this topic would alienate Pharma advertisers.

Further, Chinese entities are buying American homes and farmlands. Consider the possibility that the trillions of dollars American governments wasted on Covid relief have depleted American wealth such that the US is being incrementally, economically conquered without a shot being fired.

—

Many have observed that “All politics is local.”

Similarly, all news is local. Trends trickle down. Governmental Coronamania policies implemented five-plus years ago still manifest themselves in our daily, local lives and in the places we visit.

A few weeks ago, my wife, Ellen, and I went to Western Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire to visit family and friends. Overall, we enjoyed the trip.

As travelers put themselves in unfamiliar places, they become more observant. I saw some things on this trip that I didn’t see before March 2020. These are Scamdemic legacies.

When Ellen and I travel domestically, we sometimes rent a car. On the morning our trip began, I called the rental company to pick me up and bring me to their retail location. Before speaking to a human, I was greeted by a recorded message. The female robo-voice enthused about the company’s multi-point car-sanitation process.

I was dismayed that public places were being virus-proofed in 2020. The notion that a coronavirus could spread via surface contact was part of the comprehensively terroristic viral theater staged at that time. TVs and newspapers showed men in Tyvek suits spraying subway cars and planes on which almost no one was riding.

Though surface-infection was soon debunked, many people never got the memo. They couldn’t let go of the panicky notion that some deadly virus was lurking everywhere and that only the government could save them from it. I was disgusted that enough 2025 car renters remain so virally spooked that focus-grouping rental companies pander to them.

The government and media that built the Scam still display viral OCD in order to disingenuously and retroactively legitimize the 2020 overreaction. Those who never stop lying never have to admit they lied at the outset.

When the recording ended, a rental agent answered the phone and told me they’d pick me up in ten minutes. My ride didn’t arrive until 45 minutes later. When I climbed in, the car smelled like the driver had just smoked some herb. During the three-mile trip to the rental location, she silently maneuvered just well enough to avoid a collision.

When we arrived, the young woman who processed my transaction at the counter told me she would bring the car out from around back. OK, I figured: another five-minutes.

Thirty-plus minutes later, she brought the car around front. I asked her what took so long. She said she had to clean the car’s interior.

I asked why it took a half hour to do that. She referred to the multi-point sanitation program. I told her to tell her boss that if I feared rental car viruses, I’d use my own car instead. And that I wanted to start my trip on time and that wiping down every nook and cranny of the car’s interior with some disinfectant was far less valuable to me than a timely departure that would have been.

When I returned the car ten days later, the manager walked out into the parking lot with me to check for dents. He asked how my rental experience had been. I told him the car was good. But the delay at the trip’s beginning prevented me from reaching Massachusetts before the sun disappeared and thus, I didn’t get to swim with my brother in a nearby lake. I told the manager how long it took to clean the car and opined that it was ridiculous to still be pretending to eradicate all traces of some unscary virus.

Instead of validating my perspective, he frowned and said, “Dude, you have no idea. People go crazy if there’s a blade of grass in their car.”

To begin, I don’t see a rental car as mine. I know other people have driven any given vehicle tens of thousands of miles. A rental car is a public space. It’s a smaller form of a bus that you can take to remote destinations. I don’t expect a rental car or bus interior, or any public place, to be sterile. Nor do I see my fellow Americans as viral vectors. Over the past five years, I’ve been continually dismayed by either how foolish or cynically opportunistic other Americans have been. But I never feared their cooties.

Coronamania enabled gullible, fearful, OCD sufferers to worsen life for the sane. While some people still cling to the viral peril delusion, any vestige of Scamdemic lunacy should long since have disappeared. Yielding to the mentally frail was societally destructive in 2020. It still is.

Then the manager said to me, “Look, we’re all trying to get raises here. I’ll send you an email with a survey about your rental experience. I’ll deduct a day from your bill if you give us a good evaluation. That’s seventy dollars.”

While I remained displeased about the cleaning mania and its effect on my trip’s first day, my early employment experiences enabled me to empathize with the employees’ job predicament: implementing unreasonable corporate policies designed to please the most finicky customers makes it hard for employees to complete their tasks on time. Besides, even post-Scamdemic inflation, seventy dollars can buy some groceries, albeit fewer than five years ago. So I accepted his discount and tentatively agreed to favorably evaluate the rental location.

Yet, upon reflection, giving a good rating when I disliked the slow start—and especially the bad excuse given for it—seemed dishonest. A schoolteacher I know told me she was paid during the summer for logging onto websites and leaving positive feedback about various products or places she never bought or visited. While people can do worse things, I found it skeevy to mislead others for money. But American public-school teachers supported 18 months of school closures. That tells you more about their lack of integrity than does giving a 10-rating to some Motel 6.

I’ve seen many instances in which statistics have been used to deceive. The rental car manager’s request for me to misrepresent my experience reminded me of how profit-driven hospitals were incentivized by CARES Act subsidies to exaggerate Covid case and death stats by misattributing, to The Virus, deaths from other causes, especially old age, obesity and medical mistreatment. And how news watchers who delusionally saw themselves as well-informed cited these false, “official” numbers as gospel and insisted, based on these lies, that all must support and obey oppressive measures in vain attempts to prevent all infections and ostensible Covid deaths and that only the homicidal would question any of the viral theater and refuse to “Follow the Science.”

By falsely submitting a favorable evaluation about my car rental, I didn’t want to be part of that statistical distortion game. I decided I’d look at the company’s email and see if I could simultaneously praise the experience but complain about the viral mania. And mention the drugged-up driver.

I still haven’t opened the email. I’ll get around to it. Eventually.

—

After visiting my brother and his wife, we visited a student with whom I had worked at the gardens. He was impressively rehabbing, with his own hands, a small, rural Vermont house.

The next day, we went to Burlington. We entered the lobby of a Lake Champlain-front tourist museum there. A trans male staffed the admission counter. “They” was wearing a mask. Because that’s what smart, well-adjusted people do in 2025. Not.

Until the past five years, I saw very few displays of sexual dysphoria. Has some environmental exposure caused more males to want to become females and vice versa? Or, more likely, does the trans trend demonstrate the dysfunctional power of suggestion? Analogously, during Coronamania, did many news watchers believe that, when their throat got scratchy, they had The Virus? Given the tests’ many false positives, it was easy to “confirm” a dubious Covid diagnosis.

A sign in the museum lobby advertised a Sunday afternoon, mask-mandatory session designed to enable immuno-compromised people to “safely” visit. I briefly considered which was more dangerous, cutting off sex organs and injecting powerful hormones for life or entering a museum once, mask-free? I also wondered if moving naked-facedly among others was more dangerous than was eating a lot of Vermont Cheddar Cheese or the sugary ice cream bearing the brand of those bearded, chubby, formerly amiable, yet stridently pro-vaxx Vermont “progressives,” Ben and Jerry.

We saw other Vermont maskers. In Montpelier, a supermarket checker in his twenties wore his black mask up to the bottom of his eyes, which he didn’t use to make social contact with customers. His facial concealment sent out a bad vibe. Has the Scamdemic caused widespread mental illness or has it simply revealed it?

Vermont has many “cannabis dispensaries.” There, and in various states, I’m struck by the euphemistic recharacterization of merchants who not long ago were called “drug dealers.” I wondered if the spread of storefront marijuana has increased THC usage or just put it out in the open? I also wondered if widespread weed use was an effect of passivity and isolation during the Scamdemic or instead, caused it? As in, “It’s OK if the government prevents me from sharing spaces with other humans. I’ll just stay home, get high and eat cookies.”

In Burlington, I also saw large numbers of what a native described as “unhoused persons.” During the past five years, homelessness has become increasingly visible in many states. Putting people out of work, allowing over ten million people to cross the border and glut labor markets and devaluing the dollar, thus raising interest rates and rents are logically linked to increased street sleeping.

—

New Hampshire’s license plates declared: “LIVE FREE OR DIE.”

This seems like a phony motto for a state that failed to distinguish itself from other states when it nonsensically restricted gathering to socialize, worship or conduct commerce. And allowed employers to mandate employees to take mRNA shots.

I also saw very few children in either Vermont or New Hampshire. Nationwide, birth rates are at historic lows. This foreseeably happens when governments isolate twenty-somethings from each other. When I got home, I looked it up: Vermont and New Hampshire have the lowest fertility rates of all of the fifty states.

—

While in New Hampshire, I visited my sister and her fun family and got to swim in the lake near her house. I also visited a Trenton basketball buddy I hadn’t seen in 15 years. He was building an airy workshop building, including a writer’s loft, out of trees he cut down in the adjacent forest and from which sturdy, eye-catching exposed beams had been milled. I also got to stay, and pick variously colored potatoes and squashes, at the Crow’s Feat permaculture and regenerative Farm in Kensington.

Then Ellen and I shared a Concord restaurant dinner for eight with a group of Covid/vaxx dissidents. Being in the company of sane, informed people was uplifting. We agreed that, after all the obvious government and media’s viral lies, and the majority’s willingness to buy these and support a plainly illogical response, it’s hard to see those around us, or our governments, in the same way.

—

The British protest singer, Billy Bragg, has a song entitled “(Looking for) A New England.” I just read about his unsurprisingly ill-informed and illogical Covid stances. For example, he compared the shot mandates to recycling.

Groupthinking, fact-ignoring “progressives” got the Scamdemic all wrong. If there’s a chance to panic over something, they’re all about it.

It’s the ultimate Scamdemic irony that those who’ve spent decades railing against fascism, authoritarianism and economic stratification and exalting the working man and social solidarity went all-in on the oppressive, isolating and unconstitutional lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and mandated, unneeded, experimental and ineffective shots. “Progressives” not only supported the mass-scale suspension of constitutional rights and isolated people from each other, they facilitated the biggest upward transfer of wealth in history from the working-class to those holding stocks, real estate and precious metals. By supporting the Covid potlatch, they permanently deepened the poverty of those who can’t afford these hedges against inflation.

As did other lockdown-supporting liberal laptoppers, Bragg notes that he stayed very busy during the lockdowns, recording new songs. Blithe detachment from other peoples’ harsh Scamdemic reality also helps to explain why Bragg sanctimoniously supported Coronamamania and disregarded the many whose lives he supported wrecking via isolation and unemployment during that period.

Thus, as with many Americans who bought the Scam, it’s hard to see this bloke in a favorable light anymore, though I used to like some of his tunes.