COURAGE: the path to safety.

Early on in the pandemic, I wrote about how the political class and media were using a simple post hoc, ergo propter hoc logical fallacy (“it happened after, so it was caused by”) to claim that lockdowns, masks and vaccines were needed to rid the world of a “novel” respiratory virus. All other pandemics eventually went away on their own, without any masks, lockdowns, or universal vaccinations, so it was patently illogical to conclude that this one was any different.

I wrote about how it made zero sense to believe that China eradicated a disease from the whole of its territory with the lockdown of one city, and even less sense to believe that the Chinese border was a magical line across which the disease flourished, so every other country and city on the planet would need an open-ended lockdown to achieve the Chinese result. (Look at Sydney, Australia — they are still doing this military-enforced lockdown thing, eighteen months later!)

I wrote that the politicians selling the panic — via the mainstream media, while stifling and smearing alternative sources —conveniently made themselves into saviors by promoting “the cure”: lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. Can a scam be any more simple? Scare everyone, then offer them the safe-haven of your loving mandates. Stimulus packages, never-ending tests and vaccines to profit your corporate partners, a scared population at home using technology and consuming media.

It’s been about a year now since I first met with Jeffrey Tucker, Martin Kulldorf, and Jenin Younes at AIER — our anti-lockdown movement’s initiation weekend. Back then, I thought mistakes were being made. I thought people were just confused, and could be made to see the truth with sufficient education. I thought the politicians could, and would, gracefully extricate themselves.

Then, in mid-October, my entire outlook changed when I read the text of a WHO press conference given on February 24, 2020. In it, the people supposedly “investigating” the Wuhan outbreak held up various disease curves, and declared that the Wuhan curve was “flatter,” so lockdown worked and everyone in the world needed to do it. How convenient to an entity pushing lockdowns: we don’t even have a baseline for the behavior of this virus, but we don’t need one to conclude it “would have been worse” but for the brilliant, innovative medical invention of the Chinese dictator (clearly a medical genius on top of being a despot). The WHO envoy did not even disclose the testing methodology used to derive this “flatter” Wuhan curve, but we can infer they did not randomly sample the entire population of Wuhan to compare it with the rest of China. Therefore, the disease curves simply depict where tests were done, and how many.

Even more problematic in my mind was The WHO’s blanket declaration that “everyone is susceptible” to this virus. By the date of my reading in October 2020, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was untrue. There was data from the Diamond Princess ship: only ~17% of passengers were ever infected on this floating Petri dish. Multiple studies were also available demonstrating widespread cross-reactive immunity in the population: above 50%. And anecdotally, I knew that my friends who “had Covid” had not even transmitted it within their own households. Their bed-mates did not get infected, yet people are told to believe that they can get this while walking past someone in the grocery store?

Yet the WHO had not corrected these misstatements, far from it. The narrative was going strong despite all contradictory data. I knew then, for certain, that there was simply no way that world governments had ever believed that Zi Jinpeng’s lockdown of Wuhan “worked.” It was simply used to launch the narrative. The only remaining question was, why are they doing this?

I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to answer that question, and although I will never know the full explanation, I have some highly informed guesses. One major action-item on the agenda is clearly vaccine passports. Coming into being is a class of citizens who will be targeted for disenfranchisement: “anti-vaxxers.” The mob is told to believe that anyone who will not take the vaccine is stupid, ignorant, a racist — definitely a Trump voter.

But who are these people, really? The people who don’t want the vaccine? One survey found they are more informed on the science that those who want the vaccine. They realize that the narrative supports corporate profit and tight government control over decisions that used to be sacrosanct to the individual. They understand that their immune systems are perfectly adequate to handle a common seasonal flu virus that mainly kills people over the average life expectancy. They are freaked out by the media generating panic over nothing, telling people to live in fear and bully their friends into submission. They want no part in the scam. They don’t believe the hype, for good reason.

They also think about what will come of “vaccine passports.” Not only will decent, successful people have a much harder time simply conducting their daily lives, but once every person carries around a QR code to swipe on entrance to public venues, the sky is the limit as to what level of control the government can achieve. Perhaps they will link this app to the currency. Perhaps they will regulate energy consumption. You’ll receive credits for travel if your home is barely heated all winter, and if you report dutifully to the clinic every three months for your pointless injection — a rape, to any thinking person.

We have two worlds to choose from. In the first, we choose courage, and in the second, we choose fear. In the first world, we are empowered to care for our own health, so we have no need to blame others for failing to “protect us.” We say what we think, and our friends respect us for it. We disagree like adults, debating our points and ending the evening civilly, perhaps with a new idea taking hold that will ultimately shift our viewpoint.

In the second world, we are perpetual victims, pointing the finger at “the unmasked” or “the unvaccinated” — reliably the political opponents of the power structure seeking to protect and sustain itself. We fight with our neighbors, endure uncomfortable conversations, avoid political discussions and hide our real views. We are nervous to “fall out of line,” and get our merit by showing that we comply with all arbitrary rules.

In this world, eager to comply with whatever will make them “look good,” people are easily manipulated by corporate messaging. They accept every proffered quick-fix cure, and eagerly blame other people for their problems. Witness the obese people carrying around processed food while wearing masks. They are not on the path to health — they are completely misguided. They are encouraged by societal systems to remain sick so they can be sold “the cure.”

These people have already been convinced that their God-given immune system is inadequate, and that pathogens are a definite death-sentence absent corporate-derived injections. They completely forget that every other pandemic went away without universal vaccinations. They don’t need the product. Nor do their neighbors. Yet they volunteer to risk their own health, and trash their relationships, all in service of some government/private agenda — and who knows where it will end.

I often refer to the story of the preacher in Albert Camus’s 1948 novel “The Plague.” This man could have hidden away during the plague — yet he exposed himself to huge gatherings in order to comfort his congregation. He offered himself as an example of the following anecdote, included in one of his sermons to the besieged community. In it, a Bishop in another plague-ridden locality, is held up as a cautionary tale for people tempted to let fear, instead of courage, direct their actions.

Toward the close of the epidemic, the Bishop, having done all that it behooved him, shut himself up in his palace, behind high walls, after laying in a stock of food and drink. With a sudden revulsion of feeling, such as often comes in times of extreme tribulation, the inhabitants of Marseille, who had idolized him hitherto, now turned against him, piled up corpses round his house in order to infect it, and even flung bodies over the walls to make sure of his death. Thus in a moment of weakness the Bishop had proposed to isolate himself from the outside world — and, lo and behold, corpses rained down on his head! This had a lesson for us all; we must convince ourselves that there is no island of escape in time of plague. No, there was no middle course. We must accept the dilemma and choose either to hate God or to love God. And who would dare to choose to hate him? — Albert Camus, The Plague (Vintage Int’l, p. 227–28).

Courage is the only way. We can see that in the vivid example of our response to “covid-19.” We burned the city down because a hurricane was coming. We failed to stay calm. We raided supermarket shelves and wore masks outdoors like scared sheep. We berated our neighbors for any hint of dissent — successful, decent people who are clearly not killers. We messed up. Big time. And there is worse coming for us if we fail to acknowledge this fact on a wide scale, as necessary to change course. Because that’s what it will take. You can’t fix something until you acknowledge it’s broken.

Time is running short. The time for courage is now.