I Remember a ‘Pandemic’

Do you?

An account of the lockdown years and their aftermath. If you supported lockdowns, wore a mask, got yourself ‘vaccinated’, and criticised those who objected to living in a bio-security state, what follows will make difficult reading. I suggest you deal with this difficulty by getting agitated and then, to get rid of the agitation, either finding a reason to throw your hands into the air and walk away in the first two paragraphs, or by looking for one or two doubtful claims, countering them with a few facts of your own, and declaring the whole thing an outrage. Do not, under any circumstances, take in the whole argument.

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Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

Marshall McLuhan.

I remember a worldwide ‘pandemic’, which occurred between 2020 and 2022. During these three years the world population grew,¹ all-cause mortality rates were not wildly abnormal,² hospitals often stood empty (sometimes so empty staff could spend their time making amusing dance videos³) and the good old-fashioned flu mysteriously vanished from medical records as a cause of death. The IFR (Infection Fatality Rate; the percentage of people infected with a disease that are expected to die) of this ‘pandemic’ was similar to a bad year of the flu, perhaps a very bad year (such as the 1957 flu epidemic).⁴ It overwhelmingly struck people in their seventies and eighties (i.e. at the age they die anyway), it did not kill children, those most susceptible to deadly illnesses of this sort, it did not kill celebrities under the age of 50, and, miraculously, it left the whole continent of Africa unscathed.⁵ I also remember that the data that revealed all this was openly available at the time, just as it is now.

There clearly was a rise in all-cause mortality during the ‘pandemic’ years, there clearly was a virus killing people. The reason I am making it possible to instantly dismiss my position, by putting ‘pandemic’ in scare quotes, is because, firstly, I draw the line where the WHO used to in its pre-Covid definition of pandemic, as an enormous number of deaths and illness,⁶ which is to say an event which, by virtue of its enormity, is visible, which can be verified by the senses (and I am not interested in arguing with people who don’t access reality through their senses⁷). And secondly, putting aside the various co-morbidities which were roped under the rubric of Covid deaths, and putting aside the fact it was laying waste to eighty-year olds, in many cases it wasn’t Covid that was killing people at all; it was the authorities, who were depriving them of their livelihoods, depriving them of a healthy life and depriving them of treatment.

I remember the height of the ‘pandemic’.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ which the UK government spent half a trillion pounds tackling. Not by making available cheap drugs and treatments well known to address such a disease — such as ivermectin, vitamin D and anticoagulants⁸ — but by pumping oceans of cash into a locked down economy.⁹ Amazingly, and purely coincidentally, this act was instrumental in cooling down an overheating financial system on the brink of collapse (while insulating the real economy from inflation), but to suggest that all the money was spent for anything other than a purely altruistic desire to improve public health, a famous concern of governments everywhere, or to suggest that mask-mandates, forced vaccinations, digital IDs and similar bio-security measures might not be in the interests of ordinary people, was instantly dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory.’

I remember the videos of the ‘pandemic’ which came out of China in the early days, of people falling down dead in streets that had to be cleaned by men in Hazmat suits. For some reason these vanished. I remember images of overfilled morgues in Italy, which, as Reuters eventually admitted, were from 2013, when a large number of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. I remember having to keep two metres distance from my fellow humans and stand in front of thin pieces of plexiglass that viruses were unable to get round. And of course I remember the lockdowns which, apparently, were necessary to tackle the ‘pandemic’, despite the large number of studies¹⁰ which showed they did not work, and could not work, and despite the very government which told us lockdowns had to be imposed because this virus was so deadly, ignoring them.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ which was made up not of deaths from Covid, but by deaths with it, a veritable obsession with cases. These statistical objects were detected with PCR tests, developed at light-speed by a man, Christian Drosten, who said ‘we wouldn’t even know the virus existed if we didn’t test for it’, a fact backed up by the many criticisms of his foundational Corman-Drosten paper,¹¹ as well as by Antony ‘The Science’ Fauci, who said that PCR tests were useless and misleading and eventually even by the WHO which ended up presenting it as an aid for diagnosis, and not a test for it.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ in which you could wake up feeling asymptomatic, pop down to the local deserted test centre, have a swab rammed up your nostril, be told that, although you feel completely fine, you were a ‘case’ now carrying a civilisation-destroying disease, rush home to self-isolate, get hit by a bus in your scramble to safety, die of internal bleeding… and be counted as a coronavirus death. Even if you died a month later you’d be put down as death by Covid; not unlike having a swim, dying 30 days later from cancer and having cause of death recorded as ‘drowning’.

I remember a ‘pandemic’ which spread, unlike any other epidemic in history, by asymptomatic transmission. Before the ‘pandemic’ it was an established fact that although people without symptoms can pass on illness, asymptomatic people are not vectors for contagious diseases, for the simple and transparently obvious reason that they are healthy. That’s what (amongst other things) ‘healthy’ means, or did mean before 2020; not having symptoms of ill health. For the first time in history this fundamental fact was turned inside out, presented to human beings as the truth and then widely accepted.

I remember millions of deaths around the world from shut-down health-services, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted logistics and wiped out working-class income (often ascribed to the ‘pandemic’); but none of that was as important as ‘caring for the vulnerable,’ because protecting 80 year olds in care homes is what society is all about. I remember the minds of the young being ruined by two years of solitary confinement. I remember an unprecedented expansion of state control, groundless suspension of civil liberties, the abolition of informed medical consent, and, despite the most conspicuously totalitarian initiatives of the ‘pandemic’ years being laid aside, a decisive lurch towards the dystopian technocratic future we’re still facing. And I remember widespread fear, distrust, paranoia, hysterical panic and suppression of all forms of dissent, or even doubt.

I remember killing these people.

I remember that many doctors and scientists who pointed out that deaths were exaggerated, lockdowns were useless and the ‘vaccines’ potentially dangerous were ignored during the Covid epidemic; and not just ludicrous fringe figures (such as David Icke and Piers Corbyn, who fulfilled their function of being targets for conspicuous ridicule), but epidemiology experts and professors of medicine at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, as well as a chief medical officer, an ex vice president at Pfizer and even a Nobel prize winner.¹² I remember that they were not just ignored for expressing scepticism — sometimes extremely mild and cautious doubt — but censored, harassed and vilified. Even arrested. And that’s without counting the doctors and medical scientists who, threatened with losing their jobs, were too scared to speak up.

Talking of cowardice, I remember professional-class dissidents and radicals, including just about the entire left-wing¹³, remaining silent or actively pushing for harsher lockdowns or more vaccinations; including Noam Chomsky,¹⁴ John Zerzan,¹⁵ Slavoj Žižek,¹⁶ Judith Butler, Chris Hedges, Paul Street,¹⁷ Jürgan Habermas, Bruno Latour, John Pilger, Media Lens, David Graeber,¹⁸ Irvine Welsh, George Monbiot, George Galloway, Jonathan Cook, Daniel Pinchbeck, Paul Kingsnorth, Dougald Hine, Rachael Swindon, Glenn Greenwald, South Park, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Loach, Bernie Sanders, Peter Limburg, Russell Brand, Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, Caitlin Johnstone,¹⁹ Ran Prieur, The Stranglers, Sonic Youth, The Dead Kennedys and, appropriately enough, Rage Against the Machine. They, like the crowds of silent slebs, didn’t mind that lockdowns destroyed the livelihoods,²⁰ and the lives, of the poor people they [sometimes] pretend to care about, while allowing for a colossal transfer of wealth and power to their putative enemies—transnational corporations and their shareholders.²¹ A few ‘spoke out’ later, when it was safe to do so (Kingsnorth, for example, and Brand), but were either actively complicit or silent in 2020 and 2021, when it actually mattered.

I remember the left fetishising abstract conceptions of nature, life and society to an hitherto unprecedented degree. The danger was not something which we human beings had it in our power to assess for ourselves; just as we had to be reminded that Covid existed with terrifying videos and posters, so we had to go via charts, graphs and similar such expert-interpreted spectacle in order to grasp the severity of the situation. Likewise, we couldn’t handle Virus ourselves, deal with it intelligently and collectively; for it was an autonomous, sovereign, all-powerful master which we had to prostrate ourselves to, just as we do to the perils of climate change or of official enemies. It was not leaders, politicians or officials who decreed we had to imprison ourselves in our rooms and treat our fellows, even our children, like enemies. No, no; it was Virus. See—here are the graphs! The reason for all the outrageously invasive forms of social control was not to preserve the system or enrich those with most power in it. No, no, no, it was all done for life, for society! We had to save lives at all costs. Freedom, autonomy, individuality, dignity, even family, even, oddly enough life itself; all were expendable before abstract ideas of ‘nature’, ‘life’ and ‘society’.

I remember that to protect children, whose mortality rate was ‘two per million’ (Smith et. al, 2022) we had to do this kind of thing.

I remember that many people at the time were surprised by the left’s hypocritical support for a war on the poor (not to mention on the ‘people of colour’ they fetishise) and for its enthusiastic acceptance of a massive expansion of the technocratic system. Very few people understood then, or now (for the people above are still taken seriously), the self-interest of the left (its instinctive bias towards professionalism and civilised institutionalism), its managerialism (viewing people as manipulable objects or medical cases), its repressed hatred of the poor (disguised by moralising pity and justified by fomentation of moral panics), its irresponsibility (personal duty is handed over to the professionally managed, democratic mass), its self-contempt and low self-esteem (and consequent hysterical hyper-sensitivity to both criticism and intimacy), its morbid fear of physicality (dirt, disorder, death, belching, farting), and its pathological oversocialisation (and compulsive need to suppress individuality under the fig-leaf of ‘pacifism’); very few people understood all this and so very few people understood why the left didn’t just support professionally-managed, poor-destroying, tech-enhancing lockdowns against a flu-like illness but enthusiastically campaigned for harsher, more repressive measures.²²

Given the nature of the professional management class (or PMC),²³ you’d expect it, a class of people whose power and identity depends on managing people within institutions, who have both the need and the power to substitute society for submission to institutions and who never have to face their fellows outside of institutions, as individuals; you would expect these institutionalised aphids to be cowards, wouldn’t you? Similarly, you’d expect people who own nice, spacious properties to be sanguine about locking down poor people into the cupboards they rent from the professional-class. You’d expect all that; but I remember that many ordinary people went along with it all too. Personally, I found this most depressing. Even those who knew that it was all bullshit were afraid not just of fines the government imposed for not wearing a face mask, not just of the police slapping their wrists for visiting friends, but of shop assistants! Of course grown men couldn’t tell themselves they were afraid of supermarket security guards, much less of clasping a stranger’s hand or getting a bit dirty, so they invented some other reason why they were putting on masks.

I remember lots and lots of people wearing masks. Sometimes when cycling, sometimes even when alone in their cars! Why? Fear, for the most part, and ignorance. That’s easy to explain. More perplexing is why were masks were mandated at all, when they cannot stop the transmission of viruses (surgeons don’t wear them for that reason) and were demonstrated, in study after study,²⁴ to be useless (even if they are clean, properly handled and only used once — which ‘pandemic’ masks certainly weren’t). Masks did however, like all the hand disinfectant everywhere and the one-way arrows on the pavements, have a symbolic function; they reminded people of the mortal danger that their fellow men and women represented and they reminded them of the hygienic virtue of following rules that were designed, from pure love, to protect ‘society’.

I remember that the media served their function.

And, talking of protection, I remember the ‘vaccines’. Do you remember those? They weren’t really vaccines, which are fragments of dead or weakened pathogens which the body develops an immune response to, but something entirely new; synthetic molecules that programmed cells to synthesize pathogens in the form of a ‘spike protein’ that the immune system then had to fight off, perhaps forever. I remember, even though we knew at the time that the absolute risk reduction from ‘vaccines’ was between minuscule and non-existent, and that not one independent study confirmed their safety and efficacy,²⁵ that millions of people chose to be injected with them. That’s right, they chose to be injected with a rapidly deployed, poorly tested synthetic substance²⁶ which caused their immune system to attack their own bodies, quite possibly for the rest of their life, because… their government told them to.

Can you believe it? Millions and millions of people allowed themselves to be injected with experimental gene-hacking chemicals produced by massive drug companies that, after securing complete indemnity from risk, made billions from their ill-informed and coerced consent. They put these chemicals into their bodies and into the bodies of their children,²⁷ without doing any serious research (beyond mainstream bromides), not just once, not twice, but sometimes three times, four… some people are still doing it… for no other reason than that they were told to, either by their boss, or by the government, or by impartial computer-salesman, Bill Gates. Of course only an expert could say whether all the blood clots, heart problems, myocarditis, aggressive cancers²⁸ and sudden deaths since the pandemic²⁹ — are due to these ‘vaccines’. I’m not an expert, so I don’t know. I wouldn’t rule it out though, would you? If so, perhaps you’d like to seriously address the leaked data from New Zealand³⁰ on ‘vaccine’-related mortality? Or perhaps you’re ready for your sixth or seventh shot — they’re still available you know.

My final memory of the epidemic was the start of NATO’s war with Russia in the Ukraine, which started practically to the hour that the coronavirus emergency was declared over. A coincidence no doubt, but quite handy for the system, given that perpetual emergency, specifically perpetual war — on drugs, on AIDS, on terrorism, on paedophiles, on climate change, on the evil Rus — plays a central role in keeping the capitalist bubble pumped up, distracting the population from social collapse and securing its support for moral crusades that justify both the printing of money on an unimaginable scale as well as well as more and more oppressive social control. So it’s to be expected that some existential threat would appear when Virus had run its course. Not, I hasten to add, because a Secret Them controls the world. The technological system has its own totalising technical-financial logic which its owners and managers must conform to—which is why all conspiracy theories (both the nutty ones and the reasonable ones) are beside the point. Right now the system demands, along with its perennial thirst for West Asian oil, a controlled demolition of the world economy and extremely tight management of the masses within that economy so that is what those who own and manage the system are working on.

Talking of ‘conspiracy theories’, one last memory of the ‘pandemic’. I remember that any kind of doubt or dissension about the severity of the terrible scourge of Covid — any kind, mind you — would be associated with the most preposterous ideological posturing, such as the terror of the professional-class, ‘racism’. The reason for this was partly to damn unacceptable criticism by association, but principally to conceal class war. As I say, the middle class fear, and therefore hate, the working class, but because they cannot openly express their hatred—it’s just not nice—they cover their anxieties and ambitions with moralising pity and ‘solidarity’, with indirect attacks on the taste of the lower class—their taste in politics, in rituals and beliefs, in art, in dress and even in names— and with endless chatter about the dangers of capitalism, intolerance, fascism and so on which the working class are tragically susceptible to. Fortunately, the ‘pandemic’ enabled the professional-managerial left to make enormous strides in dealing with ‘capitalists’, ‘fascists’, ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘gammon’, ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘white supremacists’ who, coincidentally enough, also happened to be their longstanding [white³¹] working class enemies.

To summarise, I remember a ‘pandemic’ which was almost entirely a media-generated spectacle, which never really existed. There was a virus, it did kill many people—there was, in short, a flu epidemic—but there was not a 1918-type bio-medical catastrophe. I remember a ‘pandemic’ in which everything done to combat it made us sicker, more anxious, more afraid, more lonely, poorer and more dependent on an inhuman, unnatural, technocratic system owned by a morally crippled class of capitalists and managed by a bloodless class of professionals. I remember a ‘pandemic’ which revealed all but a handful of people to be either fools, who believed in the lies of the system, or, far worse, abject cowards,³² who didn’t believe in them, but who went along with it all anyway, ‘for an easy life’.

Do you remember that ‘pandemic’? If you are neither a fool nor a coward then probably you did. Probably your memory of it is as sharp as mine. If not, I would imagine it’s all getting a bit hazy in your mind, as shameful events, those that you participated in, tend to.³³ But don’t worry, because I remember, and I’m not alone. You can find others who remember. It wasn’t that long ago, after all. That said, if there is another ‘pandemic’ soon, or perhaps a ‘climate emergency’ which necessitates similar measures to those proposed during the Covid ‘pandemic’ (lockdowns, digital IDs, CBDCs, resource-rationing, social restrictions, etc, etc.), I might not write about it as I did [throughout] the last one, I’m not sure it will be quite as necessary; but I won’t forget it, and hopefully neither will you.

Hopefully next time you’ll stand up for what you know to be the truth.

See Also

1. Presumably the counter argument here is that it grew because of lockdowns and masks and whatnot. Even putting aside the fact that this would be an example of a ‘post hoc’ fallacy (assuming that because one event preceded another, it must have caused the second event) the data on the efficacy of lockdowns, as well as population figures for countries which lightly locked down or not at all, shows it to be questionable at best. Occam’s razor would suggest that the reason the world population grew in the years of the ‘pandemic’ was the same reason it grew in the years preceding it; not because Western countries liquidated small businesses and psychologically tortured school children, but because there was nothing particularly lethal to stop such growth.

2. There was a rise in all-cause mortality, and in some parts of the world it was comparable to the Spanish Flu, but this was almost certainly not the result of Covid.

It’s also worth taking into account the Human Mortality Database. I invite more patient readers to correct my admittedly casual findings, but the mortality rates presented by lockdown enthusiasts during the ‘pandemic’ compared deaths with only a few years prior to 2020 (this excess mortality graph for example compares ‘pandemic’ era data only with average deaths from 2015-2019). They didn’t go back ten, twenty, fifty years. According the HMD, from what I can see, there was nothing particularly strange about death figures in 2020 or 2021.

3. The number of hospital beds in the UK is half what it was forty years ago (when the population was 16% smaller). Some hospitals were therefore, on a few occasions between 2020 and 2022, critically overloaded. This is why we occasionally heard, from doctors and nurses ‘on the front line,’ that we were in the midst of an unprecedented ‘pandemic’. But this was based on a contextless experience of their hospitals under duress. Just because your house is on fire (or set on fire by the government), doesn’t mean the whole world is burning. Many people today still believe there was a pandemic because there were not enough hospital beds for the sick, or because ‘I know someone who worked in a hospital’.

On the subject of doctors and nurses, I remember here in the UK that every week, starting in March 2020, the whole country went outside their houses on a Thursday evening and ‘clapped for our carers’. This stopped in May and did not start again. The Wikipedia article on the phenomenon concludes:

In January 2021, Annemarie Plas and her family received online abuse for bringing back the movement under the name ‘Clap For Our Heroes’… The comeback attempt was not well received by the public and very little turned out, thus causing its permanent ceasing.

I wonder why it was ‘not well received’? Probably toxic masculinity, or white supremacy, or something like that.

4. The median IFR for the coronavirus was 0.23% and between 0.00 and 0.31% in people younger than 70. The IFR for the ‘57 flu was similar, between 0.1% and 0.3%. Neither were anything like the Spanish flu of 1918 which reached a massive 2% IFR.

According to the Human Mortality Database, in 1957/58 around 16,000 70 year olds died in the UK. In 2020/2021 the figure was around 11,000 — a drop of five thousand. Figures for younger ages are broadly similar to each other (i.e. around 1200 40 year olds died in both 1957 and 2020).

5. Total deaths for;

Congo (population 100 million); 386
Ethiopia (population 123 million); 7574
Ghana (population 33 million); 1462
Nigeria (population 218 million), 3155

And so on. Obviously these countries weren’t assiduously collecting data like Western countries were, or counting murders, heart-attacks and pneumonia deaths as Covid.

6. Although the definition wasn’t changed for Covid.

7. It is impossible to convince a Covid-fanatic of their illusory beliefs, for the same reason it is impossible to release the grip of an atheist or a Christian on theirs, because it is not a matter of knowing this or that fact, but of being invested in a representation of reality. Ultimately, the believer is that which he believes in.

8. ‘50 to 75% of all Covid-19 deaths were a result of endothelial dysfunction and blood clotting. Conditions that would not have been fatal if timely out-patient treatment had been made available to the victims.’ See The Ethical Skeptic, Denial of Early Covid-19 Treatment - A Crime Against Humanity. Can’t confirm this myself, but the argument seems quite solid to me. As for Ivermectin, try this meta-analysis summary of over 100 studies that demonstrate its effectiveness.

9. A consequence of, as Fabio Vighi puts it, senile economics. See also Vighi’s analysis of the ‘controlled demolition’ of Covid and his 2024 autopsy of the whole ‘pandemic’ for a thorough analysis of the role that the colossally fraudulent international monetary system had in the ‘pandemic’. Vighi is a Marxist and so ideologically committed to the false proposition that ‘labour-power is the only source of value’ and thus unable to recognise the foundational role that energy plays in the senility of casino capitalism, but he is quite right in pointing out the apocalyptic consequences of replacing labour-power with machine power / artificial intelligence, and his basic assessment of the priorities of those with most influence over the machine seems to be sound:

There is no doubt that the technocrats at the helm of the ship have sensed that it is speeding towards an iceberg. Having long since run out of economic policy bullets (as in the ‘austerity or stimulus’ debate), they have chosen to accelerate an agenda of manipulation and propaganda in the hope of managing the unmanageable. In particular, they have realised what to most of us can only seem counterintuitive: that systemic collapse can only be governed through 1) a steady stream of global emergencies, 2) the controlled demolition of the real economy (via inflation), and 3) the migration of liberal democracies toward new forms of authoritarianism reflecting current advances in digitised technological surveillance and disciplining.

10. Such as this metastudy of a hundred of them. Plenty more of those. See, for example, this summary. We might also note that the predicted apocalypse did not visit Sweden, which did not lock down at all, and ‘got through the pandemic better than comparable countries’ (with lower excess deaths than any other European country), Countries that locked down the hardest did much worse than those who locked down lightly or not at all, a fact that, at the time, was greeted by calls for tighter lockdowns!

11. Borger et al., 2020. See also Simon Goddek, How Scientific Fraud took the World Hostage.

12. Not that all these people—and there were a lot of them—could necessarily be trusted of course, certainly not without serious investigation. Good Lord there are cranks everywhere; but their concerns, which couldn’t possibly all be founded on pure air, were not even listened to. They were instantly dismissed.

13. With honourable exceptions; David Cayley, Simon Elmer, OffGuardian, CJ Hopkins, Dmitry Orlov, Giorgio Agamben, Neil Oliver, Paul Cudenec, Danny Shine, Mark Crispin Miller, Fabio Vighi, Naomi Wolf and, with great circumspection, Charles Eisenstein, Byung-Chul Han and Piers Robinson. Not that I necessarily endorse all these people — I’ve fallen out with three of them — but I applaud their integrity during the ‘pandemic’. It wasn’t easy to speak out.

It was even a bit more difficult to sound the alarm if you were on the left, because dissent didn’t expose you to right-wing rejection in the same way, given that large swathes of the right, which has always valued the rights of the individual [particularly to subjugate others], were vocally opposed to lockdowns and vaccines. When Putin replaced Virus the opposite became the case.

14. Noam Chomsky said that the unvaccinated should ‘remove themselves from society,’ and, if they should starve that was ‘actually their problem’.

Uh huh, and what if they don’t want to ‘remove themselves’ Noam? ‘Measures have to be taken to safeguard the community.’

15. Plodding anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan equated criticism of lockdowns, and of the high-tech totalitarian takeover of the world they helped consolidate with QAnon and, exposing his leftist priorities, with ‘racism’. Why? Because opposition to the coronavirus illusion deprives Africa of vaccines! He didn’t seem to be aware of how Africa miraculously escaped the scourge of the deadly ‘rona with only 6% vaccinated.

16. Slavoj Žižek, like many on the left, welcomed the lockdowns. ‘Monitor and Punish?’ he wrote, ‘Yes, Please!’ This was a reference to Michel Foucault’s seminal account of bio-political repression, a critique in which, following Žižek, leftist academic Benjamin Bratton, in Revenge of the Real, finds ‘an executable program of governance.’ See Shullenberger, 2024 for a critique of Bratton’s (and Žižek’s) fabulous ‘real’ and the nightmarish ‘positive biopolitics’ he tells us we need to manage it.

17. Paul Street, regular at leftist news pump, Counter Punch, had this to say;

I am not kidding here; when is someone going to draft legislation for interment camps and separate quarantined regions for Amerikaners who simply refuse vaccination and masks? I’m sorry to have to say this but we get a big fourth wave because of this partisan and social Darwninan (sic) and individualist madness and I’ll draft the legislation myself. I am so not an anarchist and so much an authoritarian on this issue. I mean perhaps we need to stake out some tens of thousands of acres… and keep these people there. If they want to attain herd immunity through mass death, fine, that’s their choice, but maybe do it under lock and key in Covidiot Banustans under the coordinated control of the Department of the Interior, Homeland Security, CDC, Department of Defense and Border Patrol. Go ahead, call me a fascist, whatever.

Fascist.

18. David Graeber died six months after the first lockdown; more than enough time to have and express an opinion. Given his system-friendly output (discussed here), it’s very unlikely he would have deviated from the lockdown leftism of his fellows.

19. Who declared the whole thing ‘irrelevant and boring’, a hissy-fit from people who can’t ‘go to Nando’s for a bit’. People still listen to her, just as they still retweet Media Lens, praise Russell Brand’s ‘courage’, bewail Corbyn’s fall, and so on.

20. ‘Lockdowns caused the first rise in extreme poverty since 1998, with the number of people earning under $1.90 a day rising from 645m in 2019 to 751m by 2021, with women and youths worst affected (United Nations, 2021). Many scholars concluded that the harms of lockdown vastly exceeded the benefits—especially for the poor (De Larochelambert et al., 2020; Bjørnskov, 2021; Briggs et al., 2021; Herby, Jonung and Hanke, 2022; Jones, 2024).

21. From March to December 2020, global billionaire wealth soared by US$3.9tr, while worker’s combined income fell by US$3.7tr. Mostly this vast wealth transfer, the consequences from which we (particularly here in the UK) can see around us now, occurred through the ruinous liquidation of small and medium-sized businesses and the phenomenal boost to the profits of vaccine-manufacturers. Not that I care particularly about the petit-bourgeois landlord or shop owner, any more than I do for the equally bourgeois (and equally small-minded and hard-hearted) farmers being forced off their land. The point is that they are being squeezed out of the economy by far more evil forces.

22. It goes without saying that the right shares, with a few modifications, most of these features. The right, for example, replaces managerialism with capitalism, over-socialism with egoic individualism, and fear of dirt with with fear of intimacy.

23. Particularly of course ‘contemporary leftism’, the identitarian or ‘woke’ professional leftism which emerged in the 1980s. What we might call the ‘traditional leftism’ of the early twentieth century, defeated by neoliberalism, was more directly influenced by Marx and had closer ties with, and more genuine concern for, the working class with which it occasionally made inspiring alliances. Nonetheless, all forms of Marxism are authoritarian, institutionalising and tyrannising, for reasons explained here.

24. e.g. Jefferson et al. 2023. Or Juutinen et al., 2023. Or if those aren’t convincing, try one of these 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms.

Although of course the big question, ‘should we wear masks?’ is loaded, like asking ‘should we beat our children with slippers or canes?’ or ‘should we defend ourselves from devils with moral purity or magic charms?’

25. As far as I know at anyrate. Remember the famous Israeli study, the one conducted by 15 scientists, 8 of which had stock options in Pfizer? That one? The one used as justification for the international roll out of the ‘safe and effective’ shots? I do. If it escaped your notice at the time, take a read of this account of its flaws; and the Lancet’s outrageous reaction to their being exposed — a follow-up study to the same author’s revealing review of ONS data in the UK which ‘provides no evidence that vaccines reduce all-cause mortality.’

26. Which one of the scientists who contributed to developing it, Robert Malone, had grave doubts about.

27. A recent FDA study found a statistically significant signal of seizures in children aged 2 to 4 years after the Pfizer ‘vaccine’ and children 2 to 5 years after the Moderna ‘vaccine’. Once again, who knows—but was it worth taking the risk? Really?

28. Japan’s most senior oncologist, Dr. Masanori Fukushima, described the Covid vaccination drive as ‘essentially murder… an abuse, a misuse of science and an evil practice of science, to be frank.’

29. A conspicuous spike in excess deaths; three million according to a recent study in the BMJ (Mostert et al, 2023) Or try this analysis.

30. Leaked because countries aren’t, for some unfathomable reason, releasing record-level data on vaccine-related mortality.

Denis Rancourt (referenced in note 2 above) published an analysis of mortality in southern hemisphere countries which came to the same conclusion. I don’t take Rancourt very seriously, as, like many anti-lockdown voices, he denies man-made climate change and the existence of viruses, both of which strike me as not just extremely dubious claims, which they are, but far more importantly, like fretting about ‘chemtrails’ and whatnot, completely irrelevant to the nature of the system. That doesn’t mean Rancourt’s claims, whatever they are, shouldn’t be given an ear. I for one am prepared to accept the unlikely possibility that viruses don’t exist or that industrial activity hasn’t warmed the earth. Why not? But either way, it really doesn’t matter.

31. The non-white working class, like women, homosexuals and the disabled, now have, in comparison to poor, white, able-bodied heteros, a privileged position, as they can appeal to the middle-class totem of ‘diversity’ in order to further their careers — which is to say their ascent into the professional world, where they can join the powerful alliance between the new left and minorities. As pretty much the only people who intelligibly object to this situation are the hyper-capitalist right (which is to say; rich, white, able-bodied heteros), criticisms can easily be swept away as a kind of rabid Nazism.

32. Fools can, all things being equal, be trusted, at least to some extent. Cowards, absolutely not. Personally speaking, as someone who has been, on many occasions, both extremely stupid and overwhelmed with terror, I have a great deal of sympathy, tolerance and forgiveness for fools, as well as for people who feel profound fear. But for cowards, those who know what is right, but who act on their fear, I feel nothing but ethical revulsion.

33. Similarly, it must be said, those who don’t participate in shameful crimes have a tendency to exaggerate their courage and intelligence, as well as the guilt — or agency — of those who go along with it all. This is particularly the case with right-wing loons. The vast majority of people who submit to mass-psychosis are unconscious, ‘asleep’ as fashionable language has it, so they can hardly said to be fully, knowingly, complicit. Not that that absolves them of responsibility or blame. Or punishment.