ON THE EVE OF CORONAMANIA DESTRUCTION

Dear Readers: In May, 2020, I started writing stories about Coronamania. Until now, I hadn’t written about the beginning of the craziness; I was focused on the present. I’m interested in your Corona stories, generally, and especially stories about those first few days, weeks or months. If you wish to share these but don’t want to do so in the Comments, you can e-mail these to me at forecheck32 at gmail. Thanks.

It’s been two years since the lockdowns began. One hundred and five weeks since we were told to stay in our homes for two weeks, “to flatten the curve.”

The night before the lockdowns began, I laid in bed, listening to the radio in the dark. A newscaster grimly announced that Cuomo would, the next day, issue a “Shelter in Place Order.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Keep people inside their homes? Over a respiratory virus that was linked to deaths of a tiny fraction of old, overweight Italians and Spaniards? Over a hokey video of some Chinese guy laying on the sidewalk scissoring his legs? When had healthy people ever been locked down?

Exclamation points should follow each of the preceding questions.

That same week, Trump also succumbed to this foolishness. During a March 16, 2020 press conference, he gave the unelected Birx the mic and nodded his approval while she confidently announced that an Emergency Declaration, for the same two weeks, would flatten the curve. Trump was failing to show leadership or discernment. He was a germophobe, as clueless about Biology as I am about commercial real estate. The stable genius was being played. Didn’t he see that he was opening the door to a massive societal disaster?

How could government take away peoples’ basic freedom to move through their world in order to pursue happiness? How were lockdowns going to solve anything? How could a thoroughly globalized nation of 330 million people or a New York Metro Area with 25 million residents in a 50-mile radius be permanently made sterile? Didn’t people know how tiny, pervasive and adaptable viruses were? After millennia of human history had enabled the world population to grow to 7.6 billion, why would anyone expect a virus unlike any other to suddenly, unprecedentedly burst onto the scene and decimate humanity?

More exclamation points omitted.

Obviously, locking down was about politics, not public health. Life needed to go on, with people assessing and managing their own risk. Life is hard enough for most people—especially the young—under normal conditions, without adding the extensive challenges that mass isolation would create.

And “two weeks?” I remembered what sending “teams of advisors” to Vietnam, Nicaragua and Iraq turned into. A two-week lockdown was a running leap onto the slippery slope.

I shut off the radio and stared into the darkness, uncharacteristically filled with dread. When I awoke in the morning, I made two signs. On my front porch, I displayed one that said “OVERREACTION.” I put another on my car that said “FLATTEN THE FEAR.” I wrote an anti-lockdown op-ed nixed by various newspapers.

Most mornings, I drove to my “essential” job on normally busy roads that had become post-apocalyptically empty. In the afternoons, the parks to which I would typically go were barricaded. At night, I illegally strolled on deserted streets as curfew-surveilling police sat in parked cars. None of them asked me why I was out and about.

While some ordered groceries, anyone could still boldly shop in-person at their local supermarket, Walmart or Home Depot. They could still—public health be damned—go out and buy tobacco, alcohol and two-liter Cokes, as long as they wore masks. But small stores, restaurants, libraries, churches, colleges and schools were closed, mask or no mask. (Over a year later, the experts would decide that schools were safe, after all, as long as students wore masks and sat behind Plexiglas; even though students were never functionally at risk from the virus. But I’m getting ahead of myself).

It was clear, in March, 2020, that these policies were thoroughly inconsistent and incoherent. They were all theater.

I reached out to some people whom I hoped would agree that locking down healthy people and closing public places were unacceptable. I imagined that we could network and protest. Instead, nearly all of those randomly sampled actually supported lockdowns. Some called me “selfish” and “a grandma killer.” They told me I knew nothing because I wasn’t an MD. They disregarded my observations that the virus was only linked to deaths of very old, sick people and that many thousands of old, sick people died every day, virus or no virus. They ignored my questions about whether a virus was crushable. Eerily, they each parroted the same phrases, like “novel virus,” “global Pandemic” and “we’re all in this together.” They insisted that locking down was no big deal because it was “temporary;” to them, it was just a series of snow days.

Almost no one I surveyed—including the college students with whom I worked—was thinking or talking sense about the viral response. They had simplistic, reductionist views of nature, societies and economies. Aside from naively believing that a virus could be isolated into extinction, nearly every person with whom I spoke seemed oblivious to the vast social, economic and psychological harm that lockdowns would cause. To them, all of the dislocation was worth it “if we could just save one life!”

They liked to use exclamation points.

Most of the NJ/NY liberty-deprivation advocates I surveyed were liberals with white-collar jobs who were either financially set up and/or could work remotely. As I know there are many Democrats, I disappointedly could not but conclude that my ad hoc survey reflected wider, albeit irrational and emotional, support for lockdowns.

Relying on “Emergency Authority,” governors and mayors serially decreed a long series of goofy, showy rules and policies, e.g., OCD Lysol-ing subway cars, interstate travel bans, mass asymptomatic testing, and mask mandates, including requirements that masks be worn before, but not during, meals at reopened restaurants. This tangled web of rules simultaneously fueled public anxiety and convinced the gullible masses that smart experts were in control and were implementing public health measures with surgical precision. RuleFest also imbued rule followers with a neo-religious zeal and a sense of comparative righteousness. The rule-obedient self-identified as lifesaving heroes. They deemed rule skeptics stupid and reckless, even homicidal. On Twitter, the followers wished the skeptics dead.

In all caps. With multiple exclamation points.

It was beyond ridiculous. Besides, how could I admire their awesome nose rings and tongue piercings when their masks were covering their faces?

Nevertheless, the media and government were able to sell a panic narrative, even though there was no evidence, among people the lockdowners knew, that the virus threatened the healthy. I often asked others if they directly, or indirectly, knew anyone healthy under 85 who had died from the virus. None did. Two years later, this is still true. And yet, throughout, lockdowners/maskers/vaxxers have resolutely believed the media, the lockdown governors and mayors and an arrogant, elliptically-speaking gnome who told them that everyone should be afraid. Very afraid.

The frightened self-abasement was pathetic. But you do you; it’s a free country. Or at least that’s what they used to say. Far more important than any mask-wearers’ uneducated opinions of the unafraid, life became less enjoyable for the sane because so many places remained closed to all.

Few noticed that none of the rules worked. The most locked down/masked up/tested and traced/vaxxed states had higher death rates than those that had inched back toward normal. Somehow, people forgot that governments and the media had historically, routinely engaged in hype and misrepresented reality.

As the Corona reign of terror dragged on, I concluded that Americans had watched too many doomsday movies and were badly misled by biased and sensationalized TV and Twitter/Facebook news. They also were very poor risk assessors. And some had experienced no real-life challenges and wanted a historical crisis to call their generation’s own, and to conquer. If that meant staying home and watching Netflix while eating DoorDash on the sofa, they were up to the challenge. Indolence became a virtue.

I occasionally heard radio interviews with credentialed anti-panickers like David Katz, Alex Berenson, Martin Kulldorf and Scott Atlas, whose views largely aligned with mine. Unfortunately, such perspectives were distinctly under-publicized.

As months passed, more people began to see that the Corona Emperor wore no clothes. They belatedly sensed that a tremendous, politically and economically opportunistic overreaction had been orchestrated. But peer pressure, TV footage of people hooked to respirators—something seen in every hospital, every day, for as long as there have been respirators—and greatly exaggerated death tolls prevented many skeptics from saying what I was saying about what they saw right in front of them.

Meanwhile, journalists asked no objective, thoughtful questions and aggressively suppressed Coronamania critics and vexing, counter-panic-narrative facts. Their target audience craved crisis. The newsrooms delivered the goods.

For months, public gatherings were banned, unless they were demonstrations for PC causes. Most lockdown opponents were passive and eschewed public protests. I learned of two in anti-lockdown rallies in Trenton, in early Summer, 2020. I attended both, along with about fifty other people.

To placate women, hair salons reopened. To anesthetize men, professional sports resumed; though without in-person spectators, because the illusion of crisis had to be preserved. Later, mega football stadiums were filled nationwide, without causing ceaselessly threatened “super-spreader events.”

Government officials continually said that any such changes were “based on The Science” and “The Data.” Of course, this was preposterous. Specific epidemiological goals were seldom stated. When they were stated, these goals were arbitrary and unattainable. Further, the data needed to assess whether these goals were fulfilled were ultimately derived from PCR tests, which were plainly manipulable and, therefore, fundamentally unreliable.

The 24/7 availability of the Internet, especially Netflix, mollified people. And the privileged were happy to skip their commutes and work in their PJs or, like teachers, get paid to do no work at all. Printing and giving away trillions of dollars to people to goof off or declaring eviction moratoria pacified the nation and quelled lockdown opposition. Few considered that this potlatch would cause inflation that will beset Americans for the rest of their lives, rendering them unable to buy houses, afford college, etc. More money could always be printed for that stuff.

Napoleon said, “History is a set of lies, agreed upon.”

So were Democrat government Corona policies. Biden demagogically lied about all things Corona (and all things laptop), including death tolls. After largely hiding from the public, he prevailed in an election skewed by ostensibly spread-stopping mail-in ballots. Thereafter, he repeatedly, angrily and falsely asserted that jabs and masks stopped viral spread and—after promising that the shots would be optional—unconstitutionally mandated that all workers take them to avoid a “Winter of Death.” Mandate manic Sotomayor likened uninjected human beings to defective factory machines and falsely asserted that 100,000 children were simultaneously hospitalized with Covid. How could people this dishonest and dim-witted have any authority over anyone? Meanwhile, ostensible government Covid death tolls were belatedly, quietly, being revised downward.

For much of the past two years, I underestimated people’s timidity, gullibility, passivity and political tribalism. Eventually, and to my dismay, I learned that, for many, these traits had no limit, either in extent or duration.

The Covid overreaction has already caused tremendous damage to America and other overreacting Western nations. Depression, substance abuse and waistlines grew visibly. There were many fewer weddings and births. Friendships, families and marriages were broken. Two irreplaceable years of relationship-building and memories were stolen from young people. Children were isolated, masked and taught to fear. Many will become maladjusted adolescents who turn into maladjusted adults.

But we have pills for that.

We also have shots. But two years post-lockdown, endlessly hyped and widely-mandated injections have failed miserably and harmed or killed tens of thousands of people. The “vaxxes” longer-term effects loom like a large, dark cloud that the Six O’Clock weatherwoman won’t mention. And Fauci has recently re-emerged from his grotto, still blathering about “mitigation;” as if, after having been so reliably wrong for two years, he had any remaining credibility. Despite the injections’ plain failure, he and many other purported experts are still huckstering “boosters.”

The mid-March, 2020 state Shelter in Place orders and Emergency Orders initiated the biggest PsyOp in history. Hundreds of millions fell for it, and vilified those who didn’t. If, three years ago, you had predicted any of this, you would have been institutionalized. Justifiably.

One night during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bob Dylan hunkered down in his room and wrote A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, which foretold what he thought was imminent nuclear war. I felt the same profound dread on the eve of the Scamdemic.

The Scamdemic turned out to be far worse than the nuclear exchange that Dylan predicted. Because the Scamdemic has really happened. And the fallout from it will last much longer.