This Silence Is Not Golden
By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Brownstone Institute
At least the UK held public hearings, even if they were gamed from the start. There is a smidgeon of honesty that they held them at all. After all, the Covid era of public policy, in the US and all over the world, was the worst deployment of compulsory public policy in our lifetimes. It affected the whole of life in ways that were unthinkable even a year before.
It was not an act of nature. It was designed and deployed by men in power.
A chronicle of what’s been shattered yields a litany of horribles: educational losses, ruined businesses, rampant mental illness, medical injury, homelessness, job upheaval and loss, depleted arts, wrecked families and communities, inflation, ruined national accounts, a generation of students traumatized, bitter political divisions, and a widespread lack of hope in the future.
That list is only a fraction of the cost. And the words above are anodyne to the real experiences of people. Whenever the subject comes up in private conversation, the result is a jaw-dropping accounting of personal despair and tragedy, often followed by tears under some circumstances. Constitutional government was shot and most of what we believed was and was not possible in public life was torched by the sheer ferocity of tyranny pushed by mostly unelected bureaucrats.
None of what you just read is overtly disputed by anyone. Hardly anyone can be found today who defends what happened, except perhaps in the most sheepish terms, and nearly always with the obviously false proviso that “We just didn’t know then what we know now.” That seems like a shabby excuse for what’s resulted. These days – again, mostly in private conversations – hardly any apocalyptic prediction seems beyond the realm of plausibility.
The public silence over this entire subject is beyond bizarre. There are political conventions happening all over the country. They are attended by thousands. Everyone is rallying about and for something. But the Covid response hardly comes up. When it does, it is quick and perfunctory conversation and quickly dropped. The only two candidates who dwell on the topic at all – Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – are systematically marginalized and...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FOR FREE, HERE).
