"Truth Or Covid?" (Excerpt)
by Michael Lesher
"Remember the good old days at the beginning of the COVID coup – before the new dogmas started to tangle themselves into self-contradictory knots? Back then, if you wanted to know what to think, the Infallible Ones always had simple answers.
What was the enemy? A virus called SARS-CoV-2. Where did it come from? Chinese bats and pangolins. When would it end? After a few weeks of “lockdown” and the introduction of “vaccines.” How did you protect yourself from it in the meantime? By isolating yourself at home, wearing a muzzle, obsessively washing your hands, leaving your shoes outside the door, avoiding other human beings, scrubbing the walls and counters – above all, by obeying whatever orders the Infallible Ones gave you.
And if you didn’t obey? You would die.
But “oh, what a tangled web we weave,” as the poet said, “when first we practice to deceive.” The Infallible Ones’ teachings were soon mired in baffling inconsistencies. A “few weeks” of lockdown gave way to months, which in turn gave way to threats of recurring confinements whenever the authorities deemed it expedient. Summertime assurances of the “success” of the national incarceration – which had upended the health care system, educationally crippled a generation of children, and tossed away the livelihoods of millions of innocent people, though the Infallible Ones seldom mentioned any of that – were succeeded by “expert” scoldings to the effect that we Americans had been too selfish to be confined at all.
When randomized clinical trials proved that face masks were useless, the Infallible Ones told us to wear two masks instead of one. When the Infallible Ones abandoned the canard of “asymptomatic transmission” – after it had fulfilled its function of stoking public hysteria – they adopted the equally silly canard that “the unvaccinated” were unique breeding grounds for viral mutations.
Even the virus itself, which the Infallible Ones had originally pronounced so unique, became the very opposite of unique as the Infallible Ones translated it into an ever-enlarging ensemble of similar viral “strains” in which new ones appeared just often enough to offset the gains supposedly made by the “vaccines.”
And meanwhile – most important of all – what was supposed to be a temporary suspension of constitutional government became a “new normal”; the law, or what had always been the law, turned out to be as obsolete as the idea of dealing with an infectious disease by giving medical treatment to the genuinely sick. In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all.
That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.
The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended."
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