Of all the MSM headlines and Twitter posts you included in this interesting article, the one that summed the whole debacle up for me was from WaPo: “China is on top of even the tiniest risks”. When we are no longer free to decide what personal risk we will take on any given matter, we have lost the battle for sovereignty and are now wards of the state.
I was suspicious of the whole thing from the start but I found Neil Ferguson summed the evil well when he ADMITTED the scam: “We couldn’t get away w/ it...& then Italy did it. And we realized we could”
Ugh Ajax, he has not been disgraced, tarred, feathered or arrested & tried just like all the rest - still in position of authority like so many of the worst. What will it take for these people to be held acct for their crimes??!
Indeed, it is taking far too long to hold these ghouls accountable. The pharisaical Ferguson resigned in disgrace due to his hypocritical sex scandal, as did Matt Hancock later, but neither were held accountable for their real crimes. Retail sins (or peccadilloes) are apparently so scandalous, while the real big wholesale sins are apparently treated as business as usual.
Look @ Faux-Xi here in the States! He will “retire”, pension intact & probably become a regular contributor in lame street media! It’s despicable & depressing all the way ‘round to see all of them maintain power….globally
Call me cynical, China is not doing this for the sake of science or to save their citizens from risk or to be a good global role model. They are doing it to set up a mode of authoritarianism so the progressives in the West emulates them. They dont care about their own citizens as the death toll of 75 million murdered by their communist regime in the last 80 years shows. They know the majority of the citizens of the free West do not know how to effectively combat totalitarianism in their own governments. They know in general, most of us are not motivated, but are still consumed by luxury and easy living. This is purely a strategic tactic of waging war against us. We need to tell them, "we are not falling for it again."
I also agree. The solution in the west is to resist any digital ID, CBDC’s or Universal Basic income. It may mean only using cash, throwing away your cell phone, refusing “free money”, not traveling and more. But it will take us being willing to suffer and be inconvenienced if we are to resist their totalitarian tactics. Otherwise if they succeed in getting us all on digital ID’s and CBDC’s both connected to our social credit scores, we’re doomed and there would be no way to resist at that point. The time to resist is NOW.
Amen to that! Like The Who (not the WHO, but the band) famously sang, "we won't get fooled again!"
Some people on the very, very fringes in the West (including even some who claim to be on OUR side, but also some of the remaining extreme Zero Covid cult types of course) still seem to subscribe to and peddle the view that the supposedly lab-created virus is somehow a FAR worse bioweapon than anyone ever thought, and China has to pursue this draconian strategy indefinitely since they know just how bad the virus is, particularly in terms of alleged and nebulous long-term effects from even the mildest infections. (They long since abandoned their original long-debunked view that the virus will wipe out half of the population or more without lockdowns, so they quickly pivoted to putative long-term effects instead.) This view literally plays right into the hands of the CCP regime, and needs to be rejected as part of consensus reality, as giving it credence will only reify and reinforce the CCP position. Whether the virus is natural or manmade, we have known for over two and a half years that this virus really isn't all that special, and these lockdowns do more harm than good. THAT needs to the be the message to disarm the other side for good.
We know for certain that the CCP doesn't care one iota about human life. Mao himself proved it with his monumentally democidal "Great Leap Forward", without even so much as an apology for the millions of people he killed. So anything they do is ultimately about power and control in some way.
No, I think the CCP's propaganda campaign is targeted more at its own people rather than foreigners.
Back in the 1970s, communist ideology lost credibility in the eyes of both the Soviet and Chinese people, so the ruling communist parties needed an alternative justification for their rule. The Soviet approach (which has now been taken to an even greater extreme in Putin's post-Soviet regime) was to replace hope in a bright communist future, with the pride of feeling that the sacrifices of their people in World War II saved the whole world from the Nazi scourge.
The Chinese approach was to find legitimacy through prosperity: they achieved this using the same mercantilist economics as Japan and later the Asian Tigers, but with the extra boost given by China's unusually favourable demographics: the sudden collapse in birth rates (as Maoist pro-natalism gave way to the One Child Policy) gave China lots of hardworking young adults but few dependent children, (or indeed dependent elderly, many of whom would have died during the Great Leap Forward famines, or earlier at the hands of the Japanese invaders). Similarly favourable demographics gave West Germany its post-war Wirtschaftswunder, as the children born under Hitler's pro-natalist policies finally came of age.
However this meant that the Chinese economic miracle was doomed to run out of road in the 2020s as the large generation born under Mao became too old to work. The CCP thus desperately needed a new way to justify its rule, and has pivoted from "we knew how to grow the Chinese economy and raise your living standards" to "we are the only government that can properly protect its citizens from Covid".
Indeed, their various experiments in social engineering (to put it mildly) appear to have backfired, so on to the next experiment in social engineering, which also backfired, and so on. After the Zero Covid experiment is finally done, will they pivot back to Great Leap Forward 2.0 perhaps? I shudder to think!
I think neither the era nor the current Chinese level of development would permit a Great Leap Forward 2.0 to gain political traction: if Zero Covid fails badly enough that even the CCP cannot deny it (and the CCP doesn't fall as a result) then I suspect militarist nationalism would be the more likely go-to to restore faith in the regime.
totally agree Cindi ! I had a few friends here that ran to the jab court, and treated me like i had pestilence. Luckily I also found a few jab refusers right here close by, and now have a couple of good friends again. But the Substack saved my sanity for sure ! In the summer of 21 I even got depressed because no one wanted to visit. They want to come again, but that is a no no now.
Ingrid, I have friends STILL running to the jab court but they seem to have evolved somewhat into doing what they want to do (slowly kill themselves) but not demand or expect me to do same. But my communities where I can feel sane are HERE
dad got 5 jabs already. So has mom, but she has dementia so she does not realize it. Former friends have stopped at 3. Two seem to be okay but the third had a seizure and is now scared to drive. The rest does not tell me a thing anymore so I don't know and I don't want to know. At least we have friends here Cindi !
Indeed. Five Finger Death Punch once sang, "half the population is happy on their knees". I think they were a little too optimistic, as it seems like a LOT more than half!
In Australia, the left labelled anyone protesting extreme lockdown measures with the following slogans “ Freedumb” & “cookers” . Also the use of Nazi’s made another easy to throw slogan.
Watch them sympathise with the Chinese protesters. I continuously question the growth of the moronic brainless people whom the internet seems to have fried their brains. There is a concern that China’s lockdowns might have an element that is beyond what we think we know
When did Freedom become “Freedumb”? Anyone who calls it Freedumb deserves every authoritarian rule that is dictated to them. Unfortunately, they will welcome it - “please keep masking mandates in place” or “I’m not comfortable unless everyone is octo-vaxxed” - and the rest of us will suffer for their cowardly submission. Freedom! I think I need to watch Braveheart again.
Australia was different in that its geographic isolation actually made Zero Covid look plausible there (at least before the super-contagious Omicron variant came along). Its advantage (shared by New Zealand and Taiwan) was that it was an island state with no land-borders, and no truck-borne international trade (in Australia and NZ's case because their remoteness made it uneconomic, in Taiwan's case because it was in a state of war with the only close-enough country).
In China, what made Zero Covid workable was the combination of a totalitarian state with the design of the Chinese urban environment itself. Chinese cities are very easy to lock down because a typical Chinese household lives in an apartment with only one way in or out, which is in a tower block with only one way in our out, which is in a xiaoqu (gated community) with only one way in and one way out. For this reason, the Chinese could lock down 20,000 people with just a couple of security guards, while enforcing a Chinese-style lockdown on a similarly-sized Western community would require at least a battalion's worth of soldiers.
I doubt it: surely if it is politically motivated (rather than driven by high land prices) then it is more likely motivated by a desire to increase urban density in order to reduce automobile dependency?
You’re right; it’s totally political. The cities have been taken over by by far-lefties and once beautiful places are crime-ridden, dirty and unkempt. But at least driving is more difficult for those of us to insist upon using internal combustion engines to get around. They’ve done their job.
Isn't the real pattern that has ruined a lot of American cities pretty much as follows?
1) White residents move out of the city to the surrounding county. They pay less tax but continue to travel into town for necessities,
2) The city loses tax revenues so raises taxes to compensate, and MORE people (whites and blacks that can afford to) move out, and the cycle continues until you have a city with no tax base trying to support a crumbling infrastructure that no one is willing to pay for and everyone blames their political opponents for it.
3) The new black city politicians who had no experience before winning turn out to be even more corrupt and incompetent than the white guys they replaced.
4) The good ole boys make sure to gerrymander the districts (state and federal elections) so that Republicans (ie the White People's Party) maintain control at all levels except the cities which they declare 'lost causes' and 'hell holes of crime'.
I suppose an obvious way to combat this is to merge city and county government (like Memphis, Nashville and Indianapolis) so that suburbanites can't free-ride on city services.
That is true. The temporary "success" of these outlier countries could not really be replicated anywhere else in the world. Even then, Omicron ultimately called their bluff too due to its extreme contagiousness. Also all of these countries you mention are relatively wealthy (including China, albeit with extreme inequality), and poorer or middle income countries would simply starve if they emulated them for too long.
From my British perspective I found it particularly galling that Zero Covid advocates here tended to be people who opposed Brexit, even though it was the way in which the UK had developed as part of the EU (for example, in getting a large part of its food supply from mainland Europe via the Chunnel or RoRo ferries) that meant that it could never have sealed its borders to the extent that a Zero Covid policy requires.
Vietnam (to take one of the few examples outside China of a non-island Zero Covid country) was able to Covid-proof its border crossings by changing drivers at the border and disinfecting the truck cabs, but their throughput was only about 150 trucks per day. The UK's trade across the Channel is more like 7,000 trucks per day.
Given what I said about the built environment of Chinese cities, would you agree with me that what Chinese lockdowns amounted to was the addition of guards to a pre-existing prison environment?
My point is more that other countries couldn't copy China's approach unless they rebuilt their cities to be more like Chinese ones, which would both never be accepted by the population, and would take too long regardless.
9 out of 3711 on the Diamond Princess died, after a month locked on the ship, all of the deceased were over 70. That is 0.2% fatality.
That boat is the perfect reason not to lock down, the disease is very fatal. If those clowns want to hide in their palatial estates, please do so, just leave the rest of us alone.
Thanks for mentioning that cruise ship outbreak. The data from that covid outbreak is better than trusting the CCP data or computer models projecting everything awful w/o lockdowns. I think there should be a documentary on the Diamond Princess cruise covid outbreak.
Promoting the policies of a hostile foreign nation led by a totalitarian dictator that if implemented would directly lead to economic, social & political instability, and that would have a huge negative impact on citizens' health, safety and quality of life is surely treason?
Not quite: fascist governments didn't AFAIK restrict movement (except during a hot war) and did generally allow dissidents to leave the country. What they did do was to rob their opponents of their wealth before letting them leave (which is why so many countries were unwilling to take Jews fleeing the Nazis: during the Depression they didn't want to be burdened with penniless refugees).
China doesn't care about its citizens. They are drones for the state. More likely about saving face. But also, the tentacles of the CCP have a very long reach indeed I think there's never any room for complacency where China is concerned. They are a threat to every western nation.
The lockdown apologists are out of arguments and are now down to some flavor of this last one in regards to China: "But at least millions of people are still alive that otherwise wouldn't be".
I wonder if the greening of the Western left (which had already got them into the mindset that bare biological survival is all we can hope for) played a part in making them comfortable with the Chinese biosecurity state?
Thank you for holding our fanatical globalists and their corrupt media to account in this post. The more people beat this drum, the better in my opinion.
Re: "It’s possible that when we get to the bottom of this story, we’ll find that these elites had perfectly good reasons ...", surely you jest.
Re: "It’s an open question why the CCP remains so obsessively dedicated to this policy of Zero Covid", is the best theory not simply the fact that it is totalitarian technocracy, and as such it is behaving the way all totalitarian societies eventually would or will, if given the opportunity?
Michael, a very sobering essay, thank you. Not a single authority in the West that EMBRACED the CCP lockdowns have been taken to task for doing so. The BIG corporate/government cover-up! As you correctly pointed out:-
'This in sharp contrast to the countless professionals who lost their positions due to noncompliance with Covid mandates, or those—as I found out the hard way—who’ve been censored for the mere suggestion that we may need an inquiry into why all these elites suddenly felt it appropriate to advise their countries to adopt one of the CCP’s most ruthlessly totalitarian policies.'
There must be a reckoning for all of this!
Worth listening to this scoundrel again. This interview should be used in testimony AGAINST Fauci 🤮https://t.me/Jack_Posobiec/19637
We can agree government has a role in public health, while disagreeing over the degree. But when government proposes a public health measure and the public responds "No thanks," that should be the end of it.
If a virus comes along that is truly lethal, accurate reporting will frighten people into isolation, no mandatory lockdowns necessary. They tried to frighten us into compliance (with inaccurate reporting), but failed, and were surprised at the resistance against the mandates. I think the authorities thought it would be easier, but it was apparent early on to everyone who was actually paying attention that COVID wasn't any more threatening than the seasonal flu.
East Asian countries were a lot more willing than Western countries to adopt the measures that actually worked initially (sealed borders and centralized quarantine) because of their brush with SARS: a virus 10 times deadlier than COVID.
Yes, they did. But COVID-19 was never a threat to the general public, as assays have shown of blood taken before the introduction of the vaxxes. COVID turned out to be dangerous on the order of a mild flu. Seventy percent of deaths due to COVID in the US were of people over 80 years old. Sealed borders and lockdowns weren't necessary. Our western governments panicked, and when better information became available they not only refused to back down and admit error, they doubled-down with vaccine mandates. (Mandates for a vaxxes that turned out to be equally misjudged in their efficacy.) (BTW, "quarantine" is a medical term that refers to an action taken with people known to be infected. "Isolate" is what you do with people known to have exposure. You don't "quarantine" or "isolate" entire populations. The CDC issued a study in 2018 that recommended against lockdowns as "ineffective", and then proceeded to allow itself to be stampeded by the rest of the world.)
Of all the MSM headlines and Twitter posts you included in this interesting article, the one that summed the whole debacle up for me was from WaPo: “China is on top of even the tiniest risks”. When we are no longer free to decide what personal risk we will take on any given matter, we have lost the battle for sovereignty and are now wards of the state.
Excellent point.
even parrots don't want WP in their cage
I was suspicious of the whole thing from the start but I found Neil Ferguson summed the evil well when he ADMITTED the scam: “We couldn’t get away w/ it...& then Italy did it. And we realized we could”
Neil "Professor Pantsdown" Ferguson is such a disgrace. May his name and memory be blotted out.
Ugh Ajax, he has not been disgraced, tarred, feathered or arrested & tried just like all the rest - still in position of authority like so many of the worst. What will it take for these people to be held acct for their crimes??!
Indeed, it is taking far too long to hold these ghouls accountable. The pharisaical Ferguson resigned in disgrace due to his hypocritical sex scandal, as did Matt Hancock later, but neither were held accountable for their real crimes. Retail sins (or peccadilloes) are apparently so scandalous, while the real big wholesale sins are apparently treated as business as usual.
Look @ Faux-Xi here in the States! He will “retire”, pension intact & probably become a regular contributor in lame street media! It’s despicable & depressing all the way ‘round to see all of them maintain power….globally
So true, unfortunately.
And knowing this, people still complied and continue to comply. It’s a sad state of affairs
It does not inspire confidence, Celayne 😔
Not at all!
Call me cynical, China is not doing this for the sake of science or to save their citizens from risk or to be a good global role model. They are doing it to set up a mode of authoritarianism so the progressives in the West emulates them. They dont care about their own citizens as the death toll of 75 million murdered by their communist regime in the last 80 years shows. They know the majority of the citizens of the free West do not know how to effectively combat totalitarianism in their own governments. They know in general, most of us are not motivated, but are still consumed by luxury and easy living. This is purely a strategic tactic of waging war against us. We need to tell them, "we are not falling for it again."
I agree with that view.
I also agree. The solution in the west is to resist any digital ID, CBDC’s or Universal Basic income. It may mean only using cash, throwing away your cell phone, refusing “free money”, not traveling and more. But it will take us being willing to suffer and be inconvenienced if we are to resist their totalitarian tactics. Otherwise if they succeed in getting us all on digital ID’s and CBDC’s both connected to our social credit scores, we’re doomed and there would be no way to resist at that point. The time to resist is NOW.
Amen to that! Like The Who (not the WHO, but the band) famously sang, "we won't get fooled again!"
Some people on the very, very fringes in the West (including even some who claim to be on OUR side, but also some of the remaining extreme Zero Covid cult types of course) still seem to subscribe to and peddle the view that the supposedly lab-created virus is somehow a FAR worse bioweapon than anyone ever thought, and China has to pursue this draconian strategy indefinitely since they know just how bad the virus is, particularly in terms of alleged and nebulous long-term effects from even the mildest infections. (They long since abandoned their original long-debunked view that the virus will wipe out half of the population or more without lockdowns, so they quickly pivoted to putative long-term effects instead.) This view literally plays right into the hands of the CCP regime, and needs to be rejected as part of consensus reality, as giving it credence will only reify and reinforce the CCP position. Whether the virus is natural or manmade, we have known for over two and a half years that this virus really isn't all that special, and these lockdowns do more harm than good. THAT needs to the be the message to disarm the other side for good.
We know for certain that the CCP doesn't care one iota about human life. Mao himself proved it with his monumentally democidal "Great Leap Forward", without even so much as an apology for the millions of people he killed. So anything they do is ultimately about power and control in some way.
No, I think the CCP's propaganda campaign is targeted more at its own people rather than foreigners.
Back in the 1970s, communist ideology lost credibility in the eyes of both the Soviet and Chinese people, so the ruling communist parties needed an alternative justification for their rule. The Soviet approach (which has now been taken to an even greater extreme in Putin's post-Soviet regime) was to replace hope in a bright communist future, with the pride of feeling that the sacrifices of their people in World War II saved the whole world from the Nazi scourge.
The Chinese approach was to find legitimacy through prosperity: they achieved this using the same mercantilist economics as Japan and later the Asian Tigers, but with the extra boost given by China's unusually favourable demographics: the sudden collapse in birth rates (as Maoist pro-natalism gave way to the One Child Policy) gave China lots of hardworking young adults but few dependent children, (or indeed dependent elderly, many of whom would have died during the Great Leap Forward famines, or earlier at the hands of the Japanese invaders). Similarly favourable demographics gave West Germany its post-war Wirtschaftswunder, as the children born under Hitler's pro-natalist policies finally came of age.
However this meant that the Chinese economic miracle was doomed to run out of road in the 2020s as the large generation born under Mao became too old to work. The CCP thus desperately needed a new way to justify its rule, and has pivoted from "we knew how to grow the Chinese economy and raise your living standards" to "we are the only government that can properly protect its citizens from Covid".
Indeed, their various experiments in social engineering (to put it mildly) appear to have backfired, so on to the next experiment in social engineering, which also backfired, and so on. After the Zero Covid experiment is finally done, will they pivot back to Great Leap Forward 2.0 perhaps? I shudder to think!
I think neither the era nor the current Chinese level of development would permit a Great Leap Forward 2.0 to gain political traction: if Zero Covid fails badly enough that even the CCP cannot deny it (and the CCP doesn't fall as a result) then I suspect militarist nationalism would be the more likely go-to to restore faith in the regime.
Everyone needs to just not comply. With any of it. ‘They’ can only do to us, what we let them.
But so very many “let them”. That was the shock, for me & made me feel very alone until I found community here on Substack
totally agree Cindi ! I had a few friends here that ran to the jab court, and treated me like i had pestilence. Luckily I also found a few jab refusers right here close by, and now have a couple of good friends again. But the Substack saved my sanity for sure ! In the summer of 21 I even got depressed because no one wanted to visit. They want to come again, but that is a no no now.
Ingrid, I have friends STILL running to the jab court but they seem to have evolved somewhat into doing what they want to do (slowly kill themselves) but not demand or expect me to do same. But my communities where I can feel sane are HERE
dad got 5 jabs already. So has mom, but she has dementia so she does not realize it. Former friends have stopped at 3. Two seem to be okay but the third had a seizure and is now scared to drive. The rest does not tell me a thing anymore so I don't know and I don't want to know. At least we have friends here Cindi !
Ingrid, agreed we are & have friends here 🥰
Indeed. Five Finger Death Punch once sang, "half the population is happy on their knees". I think they were a little too optimistic, as it seems like a LOT more than half!
excellent remark Cathleen ! if everyone had refused to jab, what would they have done ?
In Australia, the left labelled anyone protesting extreme lockdown measures with the following slogans “ Freedumb” & “cookers” . Also the use of Nazi’s made another easy to throw slogan.
Watch them sympathise with the Chinese protesters. I continuously question the growth of the moronic brainless people whom the internet seems to have fried their brains. There is a concern that China’s lockdowns might have an element that is beyond what we think we know
This happened in Canada too.
The name calling (encouraged by our PM) is still rampant here.
Check this excellent clip with Trudeau describing the Freedom movement and the truckers https://twitter.com/itsTim_eh/status/1489352037280235525?s=20
I saw that one. 😁
Damned "terrorist" truckers and their bouncy castles...
Castreau has revealed himself to be a real totalitarian jerk. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, it seems.
It’s very much a lefty thing here, easy slogans for the people to repeat, doesn’t require much thought & only surface level thinking
When did Freedom become “Freedumb”? Anyone who calls it Freedumb deserves every authoritarian rule that is dictated to them. Unfortunately, they will welcome it - “please keep masking mandates in place” or “I’m not comfortable unless everyone is octo-vaxxed” - and the rest of us will suffer for their cowardly submission. Freedom! I think I need to watch Braveheart again.
Amen to that! People who spell it "freedumb" really can't see the irony in their own beliefs.
They really expose themselves as the fools they are.
It was a moral panic.
Australia was different in that its geographic isolation actually made Zero Covid look plausible there (at least before the super-contagious Omicron variant came along). Its advantage (shared by New Zealand and Taiwan) was that it was an island state with no land-borders, and no truck-borne international trade (in Australia and NZ's case because their remoteness made it uneconomic, in Taiwan's case because it was in a state of war with the only close-enough country).
In China, what made Zero Covid workable was the combination of a totalitarian state with the design of the Chinese urban environment itself. Chinese cities are very easy to lock down because a typical Chinese household lives in an apartment with only one way in or out, which is in a tower block with only one way in our out, which is in a xiaoqu (gated community) with only one way in and one way out. For this reason, the Chinese could lock down 20,000 people with just a couple of security guards, while enforcing a Chinese-style lockdown on a similarly-sized Western community would require at least a battalion's worth of soldiers.
Maybe that explains the push in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for more high rises and fewer single family homes.
I doubt it: surely if it is politically motivated (rather than driven by high land prices) then it is more likely motivated by a desire to increase urban density in order to reduce automobile dependency?
You’re right; it’s totally political. The cities have been taken over by by far-lefties and once beautiful places are crime-ridden, dirty and unkempt. But at least driving is more difficult for those of us to insist upon using internal combustion engines to get around. They’ve done their job.
Isn't the real pattern that has ruined a lot of American cities pretty much as follows?
1) White residents move out of the city to the surrounding county. They pay less tax but continue to travel into town for necessities,
2) The city loses tax revenues so raises taxes to compensate, and MORE people (whites and blacks that can afford to) move out, and the cycle continues until you have a city with no tax base trying to support a crumbling infrastructure that no one is willing to pay for and everyone blames their political opponents for it.
3) The new black city politicians who had no experience before winning turn out to be even more corrupt and incompetent than the white guys they replaced.
4) The good ole boys make sure to gerrymander the districts (state and federal elections) so that Republicans (ie the White People's Party) maintain control at all levels except the cities which they declare 'lost causes' and 'hell holes of crime'.
I suppose an obvious way to combat this is to merge city and county government (like Memphis, Nashville and Indianapolis) so that suburbanites can't free-ride on city services.
That is true. The temporary "success" of these outlier countries could not really be replicated anywhere else in the world. Even then, Omicron ultimately called their bluff too due to its extreme contagiousness. Also all of these countries you mention are relatively wealthy (including China, albeit with extreme inequality), and poorer or middle income countries would simply starve if they emulated them for too long.
From my British perspective I found it particularly galling that Zero Covid advocates here tended to be people who opposed Brexit, even though it was the way in which the UK had developed as part of the EU (for example, in getting a large part of its food supply from mainland Europe via the Chunnel or RoRo ferries) that meant that it could never have sealed its borders to the extent that a Zero Covid policy requires.
Vietnam (to take one of the few examples outside China of a non-island Zero Covid country) was able to Covid-proof its border crossings by changing drivers at the border and disinfecting the truck cabs, but their throughput was only about 150 trucks per day. The UK's trade across the Channel is more like 7,000 trucks per day.
Given what I said about the built environment of Chinese cities, would you agree with me that what Chinese lockdowns amounted to was the addition of guards to a pre-existing prison environment?
Basically yes, that is a great way to describe it. A prison state dystopia.
My point is more that other countries couldn't copy China's approach unless they rebuilt their cities to be more like Chinese ones, which would both never be accepted by the population, and would take too long regardless.
That is true. Either that, or the other countries would have to be literal islands who sealed themselves off completely and with perfect timing.
9 out of 3711 on the Diamond Princess died, after a month locked on the ship, all of the deceased were over 70. That is 0.2% fatality.
That boat is the perfect reason not to lock down, the disease is very fatal. If those clowns want to hide in their palatial estates, please do so, just leave the rest of us alone.
Thanks for mentioning that cruise ship outbreak. The data from that covid outbreak is better than trusting the CCP data or computer models projecting everything awful w/o lockdowns. I think there should be a documentary on the Diamond Princess cruise covid outbreak.
Promoting the policies of a hostile foreign nation led by a totalitarian dictator that if implemented would directly lead to economic, social & political instability, and that would have a huge negative impact on citizens' health, safety and quality of life is surely treason?
Apparently not.
Nothing sticks to Teflon Justin Trudeau.
The public inquiry (Rouleau Commission) into the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act concluded on Friday.
After his late arrival into the hearing room, Trudeau was questioned.
CTV, Global News and the publicly funded CBC said Trudeau had a "good day".
He actually (provably) lied his face off. Under oath.
#TrudeaumustgoNOW 🆘️
if you find a judge to say that
And some are still advocating for us. Fauci just admitted he simply followed China!
Movement restrictions are hallmarks of Communist governments in particular. Internal passports were a key part of the USSR.
Indeed. Just like their kissing cousins, the Nazis and fascists. Horseshoe Theory in action.
Not quite: fascist governments didn't AFAIK restrict movement (except during a hot war) and did generally allow dissidents to leave the country. What they did do was to rob their opponents of their wealth before letting them leave (which is why so many countries were unwilling to take Jews fleeing the Nazis: during the Depression they didn't want to be burdened with penniless refugees).
China doesn't care about its citizens. They are drones for the state. More likely about saving face. But also, the tentacles of the CCP have a very long reach indeed I think there's never any room for complacency where China is concerned. They are a threat to every western nation.
The lockdown apologists are out of arguments and are now down to some flavor of this last one in regards to China: "But at least millions of people are still alive that otherwise wouldn't be".
And my response? "If you call that living."
I wonder if the greening of the Western left (which had already got them into the mindset that bare biological survival is all we can hope for) played a part in making them comfortable with the Chinese biosecurity state?
It probably did play a significant part. For some of them lockdowns were kind of a dream come true.
You must be running out of storage space with all these receipts you keep having to save.
Yep. They can erase my Twitter account, but unfortunately for them, they can’t erase the receipts.
Big fan of your book, Michael.
Thank you for holding our fanatical globalists and their corrupt media to account in this post. The more people beat this drum, the better in my opinion.
Re: "It’s possible that when we get to the bottom of this story, we’ll find that these elites had perfectly good reasons ...", surely you jest.
Re: "It’s an open question why the CCP remains so obsessively dedicated to this policy of Zero Covid", is the best theory not simply the fact that it is totalitarian technocracy, and as such it is behaving the way all totalitarian societies eventually would or will, if given the opportunity?
True. Thank you Dave!
MAybe alot of these media types and pols in the west are getting bribes from the CCP
These are the same people who want to declare endless pandemics.
Your last paragraph is intriguing, as if you suspect something you're not saying.
Michael, a very sobering essay, thank you. Not a single authority in the West that EMBRACED the CCP lockdowns have been taken to task for doing so. The BIG corporate/government cover-up! As you correctly pointed out:-
'This in sharp contrast to the countless professionals who lost their positions due to noncompliance with Covid mandates, or those—as I found out the hard way—who’ve been censored for the mere suggestion that we may need an inquiry into why all these elites suddenly felt it appropriate to advise their countries to adopt one of the CCP’s most ruthlessly totalitarian policies.'
There must be a reckoning for all of this!
Worth listening to this scoundrel again. This interview should be used in testimony AGAINST Fauci 🤮https://t.me/Jack_Posobiec/19637
True. Thank you SN!
So true!
We can agree government has a role in public health, while disagreeing over the degree. But when government proposes a public health measure and the public responds "No thanks," that should be the end of it.
If a virus comes along that is truly lethal, accurate reporting will frighten people into isolation, no mandatory lockdowns necessary. They tried to frighten us into compliance (with inaccurate reporting), but failed, and were surprised at the resistance against the mandates. I think the authorities thought it would be easier, but it was apparent early on to everyone who was actually paying attention that COVID wasn't any more threatening than the seasonal flu.
East Asian countries were a lot more willing than Western countries to adopt the measures that actually worked initially (sealed borders and centralized quarantine) because of their brush with SARS: a virus 10 times deadlier than COVID.
Yes, they did. But COVID-19 was never a threat to the general public, as assays have shown of blood taken before the introduction of the vaxxes. COVID turned out to be dangerous on the order of a mild flu. Seventy percent of deaths due to COVID in the US were of people over 80 years old. Sealed borders and lockdowns weren't necessary. Our western governments panicked, and when better information became available they not only refused to back down and admit error, they doubled-down with vaccine mandates. (Mandates for a vaxxes that turned out to be equally misjudged in their efficacy.) (BTW, "quarantine" is a medical term that refers to an action taken with people known to be infected. "Isolate" is what you do with people known to have exposure. You don't "quarantine" or "isolate" entire populations. The CDC issued a study in 2018 that recommended against lockdowns as "ineffective", and then proceeded to allow itself to be stampeded by the rest of the world.)
I thought it was the other way around: "isolation" is for the known-infected while "quarantine" is for those of unknown status?