Five Lessons from Three Years of Covid Authoritarianism

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

I am always happy to welcome new content from The Brownstone Institute, one of the last few beacons of common sense left in the world.

This week - just hours within learning that Covid almost assuredly came from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - they published a great read about the folly of authoritarianism that took place, all in the name of Covid response, over the last three years.

It’s the first in what hopefully will be a voluminous body of work that looks back historically at our response to the pandemic not just as deeply flawed, but as a slippery slope to an Orwellian future that so many in our country have fought to avoid.

I reached out to the publication last year and requested permission to share their content when I enjoy it, in full, with my readers, which they kindly granted. If you’re interested in the topic - or simply just having a grasp on the objective truth - I believe it is a “must read”.

The article is written by Seth Smith, an avid outdoorsman and public librarian based in Missouri. You can contact him here. Photographic annotations have been added by QTR.

Thee years ago few of us knew the impending storm that was brewing; one that would upend the very fabric of global democracy, destroy whole communities, businesses and families and cause a vast number of children and adolescents to become unmoored and disengage from society, among many other deleterious outcomes. 

Perhaps most chilling of all has been the sinister turn in those three years of what was once seemingly a force for good, “public health;” which changed into a punitive and authoritarian entity that wilfully engages in iatrogenesis and the disenfranchisement of those skeptical of the medical-industrial complex through widespread and draconian vaccine mandates. 

In retrospect, America in February of 2020 seems like a libertarian, innocent age compared to our current one. We did not live under the shadow of possible nuclear holocaust. Everyday life was devoid of the nanny-state elements of our current age. Many of us had gone through life never quite knowing what the destructive power of a government run amok looked like. 

Now we know.

Not only do we once again live under the imminent threat of atomic annihilation, as our global “leaders” continue to play out a 21st-century version of Dr. Strangelove, but Covid offered an opportunity to further militarize and subordinate society. For let’s call lockdowns what they were: martial law. 

Moreover, the government and the security state during the last few years has proved itself to be in the service of only a tiny sliver of shadowy and in some cases invisible elites and “experts” whose actions have, in America most especially, been held to little accountability. In the face of lockdowns, which happened to be the most universally undemocratic and destructive event of my lifetime, regular citizens were held in contempt and with little more agency than the serfs of the Middle Ages. Some of us were made completely irrelevant and “non-essential.” 

Yet, amongst this wreckage and horror, many skeptical people, who once believed in benevolent leaders, have been freed from the flawed faith in “good” government. In this freedom lie several important lessons for how to move forward into a (hopefully) less totalitarian future.

Lesson #1: We need to hold the medical-industrial complex accountable.

My skepticism about the medical-industrial complex felt inchoate and somehow unfounded pre-Covid. Sure, I knew I’d be given a lecture at every doctor’s appointment about how I needed to schedule colonoscopies (in my early 40s!), buy new medicines, get blood work done, no questions about my holistic well-being, diet, etc. It didn’t matter which doctor I saw, they were all like that. There was always a feeling that these big buildings and office parks that housed the machinery of the medical industrial complex were, like consolidated public schools or prisons, quite anti-human. But I still . . . believed, more or less. 

What the Covid mania revealed is that much of the medical-industrial complex, like the military-industrial complex, is part of a system of hierarchical relationships that only truly benefits those in power. The beneficiaries being Big Pharma, massive corporate health systems, wealthy physicians and even a security state/biodefense apparatus that sees vast swaths of the global population as dots on a chart to be manipulated, vaccinated and medicalized. 

Pfizer’s CEO, at the World Economic Forum. Because, of course.

Even worse, iatrogenesis – the massive health harms caused by Covid medical interventions – generates unseemly and massive profits, again for a tiny segment of individuals with unfathomable power and wealth (Bill Gates is the prime example). This sinister complex relies on sickness, not health to make their profits. I believe this is one reason why Covid was so intensely medicalized and why we all became pawns of the vaccine industry, instead of public health pursuing more holistic attempts for better outcomes for people with Covid. 

None of us has to take this lying down, though. Health consumers can take back their rights through the great work of organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund and No College Mandates, two groups with writers affiliated with Brownstone Institute. 

Lesson #2: The “real” American left is not MSNBC and has perhaps vanished entirely 

The American liberal-left is a coalition that has deteriorated so far as to be unrecognizable, filled with purity tests, blind obedience to secret service agencies like the FBI, the CIA and shadow organizations in the military like DARPA, with authoritarian leaders who constantly virtue signal and who will censor and cancel those they do not agree with. 

For many years, since the late Obama years particularly, I’ve felt more and more out of place within the cultural ideology of the American left, which has placed identity politics above economic fairness, and in many instances is entirely unrecognizable from the “left” of old. 

Covid remains the demarcation point...(READ THIS FULL PIECE HERE)