OPRAH AND THE OTHER CORONAMANIACS WERE SURE THEY WERE RIGHT
Oprah Winfrey published a popular compendium of platitudes entitled What I Know for Sure. The title struck me as funny because, when I scanned that book’s pages, most of the notions expressed rang hollow. At best, some were arguably true, though as trite as a 1970s college dorm poster.
But if Oprah is sure that these bromides make sense to her and inspire her readers, great! Oprah speaks to a much bigger audience than I do. Though I have a strong, fun marriage, raised three responsible kids and maintain an appropriate weight. So maybe I know some stuff that Oprah doesn’t.
On our respective life journeys, we all reach various places where the road splits in two—or more—ways and we must make a consequential choice. Often, these decisions are difficult because neither option is obviously superior. One might, at these times, feel uncertain regarding the choice one has to make. Weighing such a decision can keep us up at night, for a series of nights.
Some people posture and say that they make choices and never look back. And sometimes, the choice that one makes turns out well and causes no regret. But at other times it takes a while for a decision’s results to reveal themselves and/or results are mixed. Often, there’s no way to know or compare how taking the alternative path might have worked out. And sometimes things clearly turn out poorly. People can front all they want: both pre-and post-decision uncertainty can be appropriate.
That’s what’s been really weird about support for the various Covid “mitigation” strategies: despite the obvious illogic of these interventions and the vast, lasting and foreseeable harm they caused, many people were certain that the lockdowns, the school closures, the masks, the tests and the shots were good ideas.
None of these measures made scientific or social sense, not even for fifteen minutes. Respiratory viruses are ubiquitous. We can’t stop their spread. Coronaviruses, including those of the past three years, threaten only a small, clearly identifiable slice of the population. Thus, we shouldn’t have locked down, closed schools, masked up, tested the asymptomatic or taken experimental shots to try to do what had never been done before, despite decades of research, i.e., immunize people against a Coronavirus.
To the contrary, since mid-March, 2020 and despite the conventional unwisdom, I suspected, wrote and said to anyone who would listen that each intervention would fail and cause much harm. People hated my message and, consequently, me. But it turned out that I was I was prescient. About all of it. I’m not bragging; even though I was in the minority, it was a very easy call.
Throughout the past 33 months, it’s astounded me that people advocating such extreme, unprecedented interventions were not only plainly wrong about these measures’ efficacy, they were simultaneously sure they were right. None of the Coronamaniacs said, “I think the government’s measures might be a good idea and I’m going to follow them to protect myself. But it’s a free country and I understand that you might disagree. So you do you.”
Instead, those who were poorly informed and afflicted with misplaced certainty took their poor judgment and ran 180 degrees in the wrong direction with it: they demanded that others share their panic and their foolish overreaction.
They were certain that Coronamania detractors were “selfish” and “anti-Science” for questioning the mitigation measures and for declining to adopt them. Team Panic unreservedly, arrogantly and ignorantly bought the propaganda and aggressively backed the authoritarian craziness. Even though they had no factual or logical reason to be certain, the Corona Mitigators were a stampeding herd that tolerated no discussion, much less dissent. In-person and on-line, the Mitigators vilified, and blocked the messages of, those who disagreed with them. They argued that non-vaxxers should be barred from schools, lose livelihoods and forfeit medical treatment. Some even wished the non-hiders/non-maskers/non-vaxxers dead.
At every opportunity during the past 33 months, I’ve challenged people to defend the various interventions. I’ve typically received angry and unrealistic responses. When I asked, for example, whom they knew that had died from the virus, most admitted they knew no one. Several expressed indignation that I would ask such a question. One self-righteously answered that his friend’s father-in-law had died in his late eighties. Another cited her 93 year-old, Alzheimer-ed mother-in-law; as if some old, sick people didn’t normally die. Moreover, the Mitigators could never explain how lockdowns or masks could cause a virus to vanish into the ether. Throughout, Team Panic members were oblivious to the costs of the interventions.
Overall, regarding lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and the shots, the Mitigation Mob parroted demagogic, propagandistic phrases they heard from Birx, Fauci, Pharma execs, NPR, PBS, NYT and The Atlantic, etc. The Coronamaniacs trusted these sources instead of trusting what they should have witnessed in real life, namely that this virus simply did not threaten basically healthy, non-old people.
Why were some people certain that various governmental interventions made sense, when uncertainty would have been far more appropriate? To begin with, inertia is powerful; psychologists have long known that after someone makes a decision, they tend to become more certain they were right; a classic study about gift selection supports this conclusion.
Once people take sides, most people won’t consider logic or facts that contradict what they initially believed. Changing their minds would result in loss of face. Admitting an error damages most peoples’ self-esteem. They lack the strength of character to admit they were wrong.
Perhaps intransigence is biochemically-driven. Perhaps having made up their minds, people avoid spending any additional mental energy on thinking.
Yet, as Socrates said, “To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.”
Especially here. It’s odd that, in a subculture that purports to value “nuance,” shades of gray and continuums—even of gender—that so many took such a polar, irrational and deeply destructive approach to Corona management. The many who easily fell prey to peer pressure jumped on the Covid bandwagon, never considering that they could be wrong or that their stance was wrecking the lives of many other people. Instead, they illogically and angrily insisted that those who were unwilling to participate in the mitigation charade were somehow threatening others. How could this be? If hiding from others, wearing masks and taking tests and shots worked so well, why did those who used these methods feel vulnerable?
Coronamania was fundamentally tribal. Orwell was right: The Left tolerates no dissenters. It ostracizes and cancels those with the audacity to think and disagree. Liberals fear a raised voice or even a raised eyebrow. The Japanese say that “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Progressives have internalized Japan’s conformism; it’s as if they’re turning Japanese. I really think so.
The Mad Mitigators were unwilling to consider alternative Covid perspectives because they live in an echo chamber; no one in their cultish social circle or their media bubble raised any questions regarding the propaganda or interventions. Unwilling to engage in dialogue, the Coronamaniacs never learned either the basic data revealing the virus’s vanishingly low lethality or the basic science that militated against lockdowns, masks, asymptomatic testing and vaxxing. Disregarding the costs/harms of these measures, they could only accommodate the nonsensical dogma presented by their preferred media and other Party operatives. They were not, per the Sociologist Emile Durkheim, “given permission” to think for themselves.
The resultant, misplaced certainty enabled terribly destructive outcomes. As Mark Twain said, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that Twain and Socrates were smarter than Oprah. Oprah was so certain that the virus was dangerous that she “literally” confined herself in her house for 322 days. After vaxxing, she “felt [such] an overwhelming sense of relief” that she “wanted to cry.”
Oprah’s agoraphobia and hyper-emotional overreaction to the injection exemplify how delusional she and the millions of other Team Panic members were to hunker down in their homes, mask, test and inject an ineffective, harmful, experimental substance and to demand others to do so. “You get a shot, you get a shot and you get a shot!”
Uh, no thanks. Someone else can have mine.
Perhaps Oprah consulted Dr. Phil. He told everyone to jab to protect other people. He said that the decision to vaxx was “checkers, not chess.”
As was Oprah, Dr. Phil, a strangely trusted “man of Science,” was sure he was right.
I’m not sure how the shot is working out for Dr. Phil. But it’s not working out well for many others. Millions of the vaxxed have been infected; many have been hospitalized or died. Excess mortality has increased 15% in highly-vaxxed nations.
The self-assured, closed-minded and consistently wrong Mad Mitigators should be permanently discredited, de-platformed and disqualified from holding public office, teaching or voting.
Yes, I’m sure.
The entire worldview and world order of the educated, professional class is defined by allegiance to that system that bestows upon them this identity of being "an important person in society." They have no sense of humanity or dignity. Most of these trained professionals are sociopaths. They would turn on their family before giving up their careers and that sense of imperious self worth that that identity gives them.
If you try to turn that world order upside down they will turn on you quite quickly and viciously. Until that point they will appear to be 'nice' as that order demands.
I think there are substantial numbers, especially in the professional class, that are haunted by what they have done not only to themselves but also to their children. They can never admit this openly as it threatens their bloated egos and their standing in their social circles. They would rather nosedive the plane into the ground than admit they were wrong , especially on something of this magnitude, even if their kids are in tow.
Would these people inject themselves and their children (and everyone around them if they could) with an experimental neurotixn produced by a serial felon if their careers and egos depended on it?
Now that's a weighty question and if we asked these very same people that question 5 years ago they would have scoffed at you and resoundingly replied, "No."
Yet here we are, no longer in the world of the hypothetical- the answer is there for all to see.
There are laws against falsely shouting Fire! in a crowded theatre. When encountering someone physically wounded you always tell them to remain calm. When the U2s rained onto British innocents it was Churchill's inspiring radio broadcasts that bolstered the courage necessary to mitigate fear and keep England from coming apart at the seams.
It is a fact that the bedrock of crises management is to always mitigate fear and alarm.
Neuroscience has known for a long time that fear triggers a primitive fight or flight response that extinguishes logic and reason and exaggerates reaction. The reptilian portion of the brain kicks-in and obliterates sensible, orderly thinking.
That's how people get trampled to death in a mad rush for exits. Or a soldier bleeding out in a foxhole attempts to get up and run. The adrenal response makes one physically and mentally unstable.
Suspiciously the voice of the pandemic was never calm and rational. Our devices were spewing a perpetual message of case counts, deaths, and mass hospitalizations. China was more than happy to help with the fakery of the falling down man and men in hazmat suits uselessly and theatrically wielding foggers.
Curiously at no time were we ever comforted by an institutional message of, stay calm, we got this. We'll get this handled. That's what we're here for.
Since when has it been the least bit important to mass test for a disease? It stands to reason the more they test the more cases will be found. Mass testing and color coding regions based on case counts serve only to incite fear.
The only stats of interest are hospitalizations and deaths. But those were manipulated as hospitals were given financial incentives, death certifications were redefined, and the lines between dying "of or with" were blurred.
Instead of heralding a calm and measured response, inside the theatre of covid our institutions were shouting, Fire!
In the fear and alarm the Nuremberg codes were trampled, Constitutional law shelved indefinitely, personal liberty torn away, Western democracies dissolved, and a bevy of utterly illogical and damaging protocols foisted upon society.
We were being herded to exits as we blindly trampled freedom were, lockdowns, masks, ventilators, expensive sketchy drugs, and the biggest exit of all, experimental gene therapies posing as vaccines. All under EUA legal immunity. If any of this caused harm the purveyors faced zero liability.
Nothing illuminates this farce like the FDA approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine. Been well over a year and this version has never been available in the USA anywhere.
The VAERS system of voluntary reporting vaccine adverse events has blown up with negativity over covid vaccines. But after decades of uncontroversial use we are now told it is controversial. Don't pay any attention.
Under the manipulation and blackout of information informed consent isn't just impossible it's actually been deemed officially unnecessary by the FDA.
The FDA wishing to block data for an absurd 75 years, and the negative stats emerging from FOlA requests are nothing to question. Just take your shots and give them to your kids too.
The terror they ceaselessly foisted upon people is unseen by many because the terrorized are not thinking straight. These monsters are not above
terrorizing children, too.
Toilet paper hoarding, shortages of hand sanitizer and thermometers. Banning of HCQ and IM, not to mention supplements like NAC.
Obsessive hand washing, washing of groceries, elbow bumping and masks are examples of a terror taking hold that curiously did not phase those who were calling the shots for the rest of us.
Dr Neal Ferguson, Fauci, Baric, Daszak, Pelosi, Cuomo, DeBlasio, Trudeau, Newsome, Lightfoot, Whitmer, BLM, Antifa, and many more flouted the health standards mandated for our supposed safety.
Seems strange given the horror they sold to everyone of lungs melting en-masse if you simply went to church.
Speaking of faith, the Amish are famously skeptical of government, education and healthcare. They refused the shots. Yet, almost 3 years later their numbers are not decimated. They, like the unvaccinated homeless and illegals pouring into this country are largely unaffected. These people are the control group we curiously never hear about. Just obey, give up your rights and take your shots.
The abject demonization of those who resist is clearly indicative of a plot for blind compliance. There's no other way to view it unless we actually believe the powers behind the curtain really care about our health.
This smacks of never letting a crises go to waste. So they turned the fear knob up to 11 and let nature take its course. Once scared enough people could be led to do and believe anything. Many did.
Another oddity of human nature is once minds are owned you will never get them to admit it.
The justifications pour forth like torrents in a river of excuses.
This entire event has been a covert demonic psychological process on many fronts.
Designed to change our lives in ways nobody would have agreed to had they not been frightened into submission. That is why the standard crises management of calm, measured, logical action was never on the table.
Still isn't.
Covid panic was used to successfully advance liberal policies and politics early on.
And, now that it is politically expedient Biden says, relax, it's over. Yet at the same time HHS is set to renew the Emergency protocols for the umteeth time. The serpent hisses from both sides of its forked tongue.
From its inception Covid has been all about dominance through fear to advance the politics of not only Democrats but of all Globalists supporting the WEF's Agenda 2030.
And it isn't over. Bill Gates and China did not buy up most of our farmland for nothing.
People that speak of a coming civil war miss that the war officially started March 2020.
There have already been over a million ignored casualties.
I am disappointed because many claiming to be at the forefront in defense of liberty turned out to be cowards. Since covid began many have not been willing to see it for the planned destruction of our Republic that it is.
The virus isn't only about China. Or ARDS. It is much larger than that. America is culpable at the governmental, corporate and educational levels. This is a large operation.
And, yes, l acknowledge that covid has damaged people. But the unfortunate reality is under the aforementioned blanket of tightly woven obfuscation nobody, not even those in healthcare, have an accurate tally of how many. But I'd stake my life that the reported numbers are have been wildly overblown for effect. See Amish, homeless, and immigrants for context.
Nobody expects everyone to have all the answers, be happy about this or, be expert epidemiologists. I'm not suggesting we take up arms and go on a rampage. But I do expect interest, learning, admission of mistakes and a promise never to fall victim to this level of fear mongering again.
Once one cuts through the noise covid is about;
Domination Through Fear.
Personally I refuse to be feared into control. I'd like to believe most feel the same. But when I look around I feel nothing but disappointment.
What's going on today is very serious. The most egregious politically motivated event in my lifetime since the Vietnam war. This beast warrants every patriot's enthusiastic focus and real time assessment.
People that do not feel the same grate on my nerves. I make no apologies for feeling this Way.