Are We Ready To Talk?
A Pandemic Portrait Of Real-World Mind Control
It was unsafe to talk about certain things during the pandemic. Topics like natural immunity, lockdown skepticism, alternate drug therapies, and vaccine injury were off limits to polite conversation because of the chain reaction they could set into motion. We were given one pathway through the biggest global emergency that we had seen in our lifetime, and any speech that could dissuade enough people from towing that line — masking up, locking down, and getting vaccinated — was considered dangerous. The wrong ideas, we were told, could literally cost lives.
Many of us proudly proclaimed the limits to free speech, often reminding others that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre, or say with impunity something that leads to harm — especially during a worldwide state of emergency. So we made special allowances for increased censorship and normalized the peer-to-peer policing of nonconforming speech.
But four years later, the crisis is over, and the stakes are much lower for discussing these topics. SARS-CoV-2 has become endemic; most of us have given up on boosters and see no need to mask in any setting. Many of the ideas that would’ve been unbecoming in 2020 or 2021 are openly being discussed — and with much more credibility.
Today, one will receive almost no pushback for saying that lockdown caused more harm than good. Ivermectin is no longer derided as horse paste (one of its forms) and is back to being recognized as an anti-parasitic wonder-drug that clinicians were quietly prescribing off-label to save COVID patients. Likewise it is OK now for the medical community to talk about natural immunity acquired from previous infection, now that it doesn’t threaten vaccine uptake. And the shots themselves are slowly being understood to have been too-broadly foisted onto all groups and wildly overrated on safety and efficacy.
There is nothing wrong with these ideas now, just as there was nothing wrong with them at the height of pandemic. In fact, we would have been better off — without prolonged, blanket shutdown of schools and businesses; with the option for alternate therapeutics; and with some informed consent about the function and efficacy of the mRNA COVID shots. We might’ve had a more balanced, sane approach to the pandemic if we were able to talk about these things without triggering a fight. We might’ve even saved more lives.
But somewhere a decision had been made that certain views were too dangerous to discuss. So an effort was made to shape how we would respond to them. Rather than being allowed to encounter these ideas in an open marketplace where we might’ve given them the consideration they were due, we were told what to think of them as the conversation was happening.
Anyone who questioned lockdown was called anti-lockdown, anti-science, and a bigot in all ways on top of it. Toronto press coined “COVIdiot” to describe attendees of an April park gathering. You were backwards if you wanted “horse paste,” and there was no bad name spared for the anti-masker and the anti-vaxxer, regardless of their reasoning. COVID dissidents were loudly blamed for the continuing trauma of health policy, which the majority never dared to question — just to avoid the stigma.
As a result, people prided themselves on compliance, dismissed their own doubts, and made enemies of people whose voices they should have heard. And we were no better off for it.
History will remember COVID as a fascinating case study on human psychology. We witnessed an effective strategy for mind-controlling the public into obedience, an effort we allowed to stand because we truly thought it might have been for our own good.
We gave up on the truth during the pandemic, forgetting that it can’t be decreed by governments and experts with so much certainty that it should resist debate. It can’t be disappeared by calling it dangerous when the circumstances permit, or made repulsive by mocking the people who speak it.
Free speech defends what’s true when everyone else has it wrong. So it’s especially during times of emergency and of heated contention when it’s needed the most — unencumbered by bullying and coercion — because it’s sometimes the derided outlier view that is seeing anything clearly.
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