Herd Immunity, Tyrant Style
Back at the very beginning of Global Totalitarian Lockdown Fever, in Italy, the justification offered for the extreme assault on individual liberty was that the death rate from COVID-19 was so terrifyingly high that governments ought to spare absolutely no effort to curtail the spread of the virus at all costs. At that time, I argued loudly and repeatedly that this reasoning was absurd, and that the supposedly shocking death rate was simply a function of the authorities and propagandists having no idea how widely the virus had already spread, and therefore (conveniently) mistaking known cases with actual cases.
Over the summer, as the death rate continually dropped due to wider virus testing, and the actual rise in death numbers slowed, the social manipulators subtly and cleverly changed their rhetoric in a desperate attempt to sustain the atmosphere of mass hysteria that facilitates further totalitarian measures. Specifically, they began to focus the propaganda effort almost exclusively on the rising number of cases, rather than deaths. Having established widespread panic about the doomsday virus during the spring, they calculated, correctly, that henceforth, merely reporting a new case in the neighborhood would be enough to coax the majority of the population into abject submission.
Of course, “cases,” as this term is used in the propaganda, means only “positive tests.” As I have continually argued, it remains obvious that with respect to a virus which causes no symptoms in the vast majority of its “victims,” the number of positive tests indicates, at most, only a general trend in real infections. The total number of infections will undoubtedly be far, far higher than the number of officially confirmed cases.
Today, I read a headline announcing that the U.S. CDC has estimated that the number of real coronavirus infections might be eight times higher than the number of confirmed (tested) cases. For a moment, I thought this admission from the CDC might have the effect of blowing the tyrannical case for lockdowns, economic destruction, government-as-savior stimulus packages, and the rest of the Cloward-Piven strategy for radical reform, out of the water. After all, if a fifth of the U.S. population has already been infected with this virus, then it seems counterintuitive to imagine that coerced “distancing,” the psychological torture of social isolation, and the destructiveness of imposed economic mayhem, could still be judged beneficial, let alone cited as grounds for creating despotic government powers.
Then, however, I quickly realized that this announcement from the CDC was intended to have — and will have — exactly the opposite effect from the one it would have on a rational citizenry. The world has been terrorized for ten months with end-times propaganda about a virus that simply has not (in itself) had anywhere near the societal impact of a truly catastrophic pandemic, and most people have learned to swallow that propaganda whole — the human mind can only withstand so much repetition and ubiquity of nonsense before it starts to sound like sense. Hence, the declaration that the case numbers might be eight times higher than previously reported will serve not as a reminder of the absurdity of all these lockdowns and all this panic, but rather as a source of new bleats of submission from the hysterical sheep. Having already successfully manipulated the public into hearing the word “cases” as rhetorically, emotionally equivalent to the word “deaths,” this new and sudden “escalation” in the number of “cases” — “eight times more than you thought!” — will only bring a mentally broken public even more fully to its slavish knees.
America’s authoritarians have come closer than ever before to their ultimate goal of herd immunity — that is to say, the popular herd’s perfect immunity to rationality and common sense.
Have many people around the world died this year from complications arising from a COVID-19 infection? Yes — though I strongly believe the numbers are being inflated in some jurisdictions, most obviously including the U.S., by public officials eager to create pandemonium through mathematical distortion.
Has COVID-19 — the illness itself, rather than the public policies initiated during the pandemic — had the kind of social and economic effects that the news media and governments of the world are claiming? Obviously not — almost all of the real social and economic catastrophe of 2020 has been the direct and easily traceable result of government policies.
Has the universal paralysis of family life, work, study, and productivity during this pandemic, forced entirely by government mandates, done anything to improve the safety and overall well-being of the one large social cohort that is at significant risk during this pandemic, namely the very old and infirm? Well, judging from the bleak percentages of COVID deaths occurring in seniors homes around the world, and the continual injunctions against visiting and physically comforting those in their final years or months of life, regardless of their wishes, I would say all our supposed “concern for the elderly” has caused them far more harm than benefit in the final analysis.
The alarmists’ and authoritarians’ attempts to reduce those of us refusing to bow our heads and receive the yoke peacefully to “conspiracy theorists” and “deniers” is disingenuous and propagandistic, as usual. The virus is not a hoax. The pandemic is not a hoax. The tens of thousands of COVID-19 deaths — most of them among people already weak and susceptible, but deaths nonetheless — are not a hoax.
But tyranny is a hoax. The claim that totalitarian social control is the proper or best solution to a public health problem is a hoax. The rhetorical position that any doctor or scientist who plumps for tyranny as a means of advancing his career is an “expert,” whereas any doctor or scientist who stands against the tide and defends realism and rationality is a crackpot and untrustworthy, is a hoax. The deliberate public framing of this moderately disruptive pandemic as the single most severe social crisis or health event of the century is a hoax. The strategy of exploiting ginned-up public fear to push an ignorant citizenry into accepting violations of their natural liberty entirely disproportionate to, and uncalled-for by, the actual nature of the problem, is a hoax.
Put simply, i.e., in the only tenor suitable to these times: Virus bad. Tyranny more bad.
