Yeah, it was all a fraud. RNA viruses cannot even biologically replicate anything like sufficient to cause a pandemic. The whole "science" of pandemics is made of the same ephemeral stuff. Which makes the recent Wuhan brouhaha the latest fraud, distracting accountability away from this government, the DoD and the like experts of that epic mass murderer Fauci.
As you, I knew from day one. Our city- that takes months to get out & fix the potholes, instantly had perfectly pre-cut plastic barriers, pre-printed professional signs, & idiotic floor stickers in place overnight that the biggest social experiment of all time was about to take place. Thanks to people like you Josh, my faith in humanity has not dwindled to zero.
I’ve long distrusted the government, but the scare propaganda was so thorough and intense that I initially fell for the “two weeks to flatten the curve” nonsense. But the day after they refused to lift the lockdown, I felt in my bones this was a ruse and this would not go away. I began to realize that I was living through a time in history the likes of which I had only read about, such as in Weimar, Germany in the 1920’s, or the medieval witch-burning hysteria in Europe. I had been under the mistaken illusion that such societal madness was a thing of the past and that our modern communication systems would stop us from replicating such awful mistakes. Instead, it was the rapid communication through the internet that helped speed up the lies, propaganda, and insane fear that affected so many.
I knew from the beginning that masks were next to useless, that pieces of plastic between us were useless, that 6 feet was useless. I fell for the two week isolation and the vaccine for me, as I have cancer. But as the hammer kept falling and the hysteria abounded I dug in my heels. What little faith I had in our government and it’s agencies is gone, perhaps to never be recovered. My anger hit its zenith when had to sit outside a closed window to talk to my father-in-law who had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t even find us through the glass. Then he went into the hospital where we could not visit him. They strapped him to the bed as he was confused about why he was there and alone and wanted to leave. Three days later he was dead and then, then they all us in to be with his dead body. I literally shook with the intensity of my anger with those that kept him alone and afraid in his last days-then “allowed” us in when it was too late. The absolute inhumanity and arbitrary rules was the last straw. To hell with all of them.
My very logical daughter, background in biology/biotech, said to me in late December "something weird is going on in China". She saw the reporting on the illnesses and started talking to a college friend at the CDC. Whoever "they" are, they worked hard to capture that young, STEM degreed but naive cohort. She and her friend texted endlessly about what said friend was being told. It took my daughter and me about a month after the crazy started to unravel the bullshit. At 6 weeks we both said screw it; and I was not going to stay away from my daughter, my 4 year old, 2 year old, and 3 month old grandsons any longer. She refused to mask the older 2. We didn't ever mask around them. We understood how that impacts a child's development - and we aren't even doctors! Imagine that.
We both realized that the response was bad - but in the early weeks of the pandemic-that-wasn't we were both digging to find out just how potentially bad the illness was or could be. We weren't focused yet on what was happening on the freedoms level. And living where we do, it wasn't quite as crazy as other areas were. It's still difficult to believe some of those places were that bad - and still are! Thankfully there were many people out there pulling threads, so that somewhat quickly we began to realize there was a bigger threat. Talk about going down rabbit holes to ferret out all of the crap...
They are not going to go silently into the night. Everything they've worked for - decreased population, enhanced/perfected humanity, untold massive spoils of a war many don't even realize they are in - they are playing for keeps.
We were right about Ivermectin and early, safe treatments. And they knew it at the time. They wouldn’t even do the minimal and recommend Vitamin D3, which they knew early on was a common denominator amongst survivors.
I say "Amen" to all the comments here. They were so good, especially Josh's, that I'd say you all "covered the waterfront." What's left to say? Perhaps this: we all just lived through a textbook example of the adage, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste." A crisis throws people into confusion, they look for leadership and even consider individuals they know are treacherous - the former NY Gov is a good example. That's because it's any old port in a storm. The view is quite different in govt. A crisis offers the opportunity to expand political power. The situation is too good to resist - and nobody does. We've seen this movie before but fortunately not too often. But something is very different this time. We know who the culprits are and what they did, crimes of both omission and commission. What USED to happen at this point is where the Wheels of Justice would start to turn, slowly perhaps, but finely. This time there is no accountability, nobody is held responsible for anything. I may be wrong, but I believe this is unprecedented. We are also seeing this with other crises - the Russian dossier, the perjured FISA requests, Hillary's cell phone - everybody gets a "Get out of Jail" card. A rule of thumb: when everybody is to blame, then nobody is to blame. I fear where all this is heading and it's not good. In the meantime, the govt has shown it can do profound things quietly. For example, a lot of people filing their '22 tax returns will be shocked when discovering that if they take the standard deduction for expenses, they no longer can claim any charitable donations. This deduction could be itemized until last year. Why? Because Congress quietly allowed this deduction to expire. The current standard deduction does not allow a dime for charity. The Govt needs our money, ya know.
I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, and given what was going on in China when all this started, I think it made sense to be cautious at first, till the experts could see what this was really about and where it was going.
I live in Hawaii. My moment of realization is when the State shut down all the hiking trails at the Mayor’s behest. Not able to hike, I road walked instead, and walked past a restaurant with a lot of windows and doors, that could be easily opened, but were all shut closed. Looking through the windows I could see the restaurant was crowded, with many of the people in their 60s, heavily obese, and not wearing masks as they were eating.
Banning people from parks and trails, or even setting foot in the woods, though we have an abundance of bright sunshine and continuous trade winds, yet allowing people to eat inside restaurants is just fine. They made absolutely no effort to explain the rationale of what they were doing. That’s when I figured it out.
I got very interested in COVID early on, so I did quite a bit of research trying to figure out what we knew. From the initial data coming out of Italy (which had a very high mortality rate in March, something like 10%), it was obvious COVID was mostly a threat to the elderly, above the age of 65, and with one or more comorbidities, specifically obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and to a lesser extent autoimmune disorders. If you read the studies that came out about the same time (Diamond cruise ship), it was obviously contagious but not as contagious as people were making it out to be at the time. So it was like the flu in terms of mortality, except it wasn't at all deadly to children like to flu is. We also, at the time, had no idea where we were in the pandemic, because we hadn't been testing for COVID at all. Masks had long been considered useless against respiratory diseases such as the flu, but suddenly that took a turn as well.
None of these known facts stopped anyone who lived in Portland, Oregon (I lived about 20 minutes from PDX at the time) from indulging in their deepest neuroses and giving their OCD tendencies full power to do their worst in the name of public health. I remember some of my Facebook friends seriously discussing how many days to leave grocery bags out on their front porch before deeming them "safe" enough to bring into the house. I had a veterinarian "lysol" some of my equestrian equipment before using it (as if it wasn't dirty enough anyway LOL). Our idiot governor had a hotline where you could report your neighbors if they *gasp* had more than 6 people over for Thanksgiving that year (THAT was stupid). Basic risk assessment went completely out the window, along with any sense of opportunity cost and the costs to the economic livelihood of millions of people.
When the vaccine was rolled out, the outsized confidence and ridiculous mandates for millions of otherwise healthy people who were at minimal risk for COVID complications only further shattered general confidence in public health guidelines, and IMO have done more damage to confidence in vaccines generally than any whack-job anti-vaxxer could've ever done. Yes, the pandemic was horribly mismanaged, and it is obvious now (3 years later), that the idiots and power-hungry narcissists who drove the mismanagement will do it all again because they not only didn't learn a damn thing, they don't actually care about public health, risk assessment strategies, or the economic health of anyone but themselves.
There are friends I have distanced myself from because I said my piece to them -- in many cases as early as March 2020 -- and all they did was tear me down, call me crazy and chastise me for leaving the house to visit my partner (whom I did not live with at the time).
The only friends I maintain contact with are those who were sceptical and/or willing to break the rules --- plus one friend who fell for the narrative hook, line and sinker but has been really open to hearing my views. I'm slowly working on her... (She's super against trans ideology and I'm trying to get her to see that at their core, this and covidianism are one and the same).
Thankfully, through being vocally anti-covid bullshit on Twitter and joining a real-world civil rights grassroots campaign group, I've made a whole bunch of new friends. It's a relief when you know you share the same values as someone and they won't sell you out to a totalitarian state.
Yeah, it was all a fraud. RNA viruses cannot even biologically replicate anything like sufficient to cause a pandemic. The whole "science" of pandemics is made of the same ephemeral stuff. Which makes the recent Wuhan brouhaha the latest fraud, distracting accountability away from this government, the DoD and the like experts of that epic mass murderer Fauci.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/there-was-no-covid-19-pandemic
We knew something wasn't right, but I don't think anybody ever imagined it was this bad.
As you so often do, Josh, you speak for me.
As you, I knew from day one. Our city- that takes months to get out & fix the potholes, instantly had perfectly pre-cut plastic barriers, pre-printed professional signs, & idiotic floor stickers in place overnight that the biggest social experiment of all time was about to take place. Thanks to people like you Josh, my faith in humanity has not dwindled to zero.
I’ve long distrusted the government, but the scare propaganda was so thorough and intense that I initially fell for the “two weeks to flatten the curve” nonsense. But the day after they refused to lift the lockdown, I felt in my bones this was a ruse and this would not go away. I began to realize that I was living through a time in history the likes of which I had only read about, such as in Weimar, Germany in the 1920’s, or the medieval witch-burning hysteria in Europe. I had been under the mistaken illusion that such societal madness was a thing of the past and that our modern communication systems would stop us from replicating such awful mistakes. Instead, it was the rapid communication through the internet that helped speed up the lies, propaganda, and insane fear that affected so many.
“There were times your age began to show/You were never more dangerous to know.”
- Erin McKeown, “You Were Right About Everything.”
I knew from the beginning that masks were next to useless, that pieces of plastic between us were useless, that 6 feet was useless. I fell for the two week isolation and the vaccine for me, as I have cancer. But as the hammer kept falling and the hysteria abounded I dug in my heels. What little faith I had in our government and it’s agencies is gone, perhaps to never be recovered. My anger hit its zenith when had to sit outside a closed window to talk to my father-in-law who had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t even find us through the glass. Then he went into the hospital where we could not visit him. They strapped him to the bed as he was confused about why he was there and alone and wanted to leave. Three days later he was dead and then, then they all us in to be with his dead body. I literally shook with the intensity of my anger with those that kept him alone and afraid in his last days-then “allowed” us in when it was too late. The absolute inhumanity and arbitrary rules was the last straw. To hell with all of them.
My very logical daughter, background in biology/biotech, said to me in late December "something weird is going on in China". She saw the reporting on the illnesses and started talking to a college friend at the CDC. Whoever "they" are, they worked hard to capture that young, STEM degreed but naive cohort. She and her friend texted endlessly about what said friend was being told. It took my daughter and me about a month after the crazy started to unravel the bullshit. At 6 weeks we both said screw it; and I was not going to stay away from my daughter, my 4 year old, 2 year old, and 3 month old grandsons any longer. She refused to mask the older 2. We didn't ever mask around them. We understood how that impacts a child's development - and we aren't even doctors! Imagine that.
We both realized that the response was bad - but in the early weeks of the pandemic-that-wasn't we were both digging to find out just how potentially bad the illness was or could be. We weren't focused yet on what was happening on the freedoms level. And living where we do, it wasn't quite as crazy as other areas were. It's still difficult to believe some of those places were that bad - and still are! Thankfully there were many people out there pulling threads, so that somewhat quickly we began to realize there was a bigger threat. Talk about going down rabbit holes to ferret out all of the crap...
They are not going to go silently into the night. Everything they've worked for - decreased population, enhanced/perfected humanity, untold massive spoils of a war many don't even realize they are in - they are playing for keeps.
We were right about Ivermectin and early, safe treatments. And they knew it at the time. They wouldn’t even do the minimal and recommend Vitamin D3, which they knew early on was a common denominator amongst survivors.
My contempt equals yours.
I say "Amen" to all the comments here. They were so good, especially Josh's, that I'd say you all "covered the waterfront." What's left to say? Perhaps this: we all just lived through a textbook example of the adage, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste." A crisis throws people into confusion, they look for leadership and even consider individuals they know are treacherous - the former NY Gov is a good example. That's because it's any old port in a storm. The view is quite different in govt. A crisis offers the opportunity to expand political power. The situation is too good to resist - and nobody does. We've seen this movie before but fortunately not too often. But something is very different this time. We know who the culprits are and what they did, crimes of both omission and commission. What USED to happen at this point is where the Wheels of Justice would start to turn, slowly perhaps, but finely. This time there is no accountability, nobody is held responsible for anything. I may be wrong, but I believe this is unprecedented. We are also seeing this with other crises - the Russian dossier, the perjured FISA requests, Hillary's cell phone - everybody gets a "Get out of Jail" card. A rule of thumb: when everybody is to blame, then nobody is to blame. I fear where all this is heading and it's not good. In the meantime, the govt has shown it can do profound things quietly. For example, a lot of people filing their '22 tax returns will be shocked when discovering that if they take the standard deduction for expenses, they no longer can claim any charitable donations. This deduction could be itemized until last year. Why? Because Congress quietly allowed this deduction to expire. The current standard deduction does not allow a dime for charity. The Govt needs our money, ya know.
I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, and given what was going on in China when all this started, I think it made sense to be cautious at first, till the experts could see what this was really about and where it was going.
I live in Hawaii. My moment of realization is when the State shut down all the hiking trails at the Mayor’s behest. Not able to hike, I road walked instead, and walked past a restaurant with a lot of windows and doors, that could be easily opened, but were all shut closed. Looking through the windows I could see the restaurant was crowded, with many of the people in their 60s, heavily obese, and not wearing masks as they were eating.
Banning people from parks and trails, or even setting foot in the woods, though we have an abundance of bright sunshine and continuous trade winds, yet allowing people to eat inside restaurants is just fine. They made absolutely no effort to explain the rationale of what they were doing. That’s when I figured it out.
I got very interested in COVID early on, so I did quite a bit of research trying to figure out what we knew. From the initial data coming out of Italy (which had a very high mortality rate in March, something like 10%), it was obvious COVID was mostly a threat to the elderly, above the age of 65, and with one or more comorbidities, specifically obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and to a lesser extent autoimmune disorders. If you read the studies that came out about the same time (Diamond cruise ship), it was obviously contagious but not as contagious as people were making it out to be at the time. So it was like the flu in terms of mortality, except it wasn't at all deadly to children like to flu is. We also, at the time, had no idea where we were in the pandemic, because we hadn't been testing for COVID at all. Masks had long been considered useless against respiratory diseases such as the flu, but suddenly that took a turn as well.
None of these known facts stopped anyone who lived in Portland, Oregon (I lived about 20 minutes from PDX at the time) from indulging in their deepest neuroses and giving their OCD tendencies full power to do their worst in the name of public health. I remember some of my Facebook friends seriously discussing how many days to leave grocery bags out on their front porch before deeming them "safe" enough to bring into the house. I had a veterinarian "lysol" some of my equestrian equipment before using it (as if it wasn't dirty enough anyway LOL). Our idiot governor had a hotline where you could report your neighbors if they *gasp* had more than 6 people over for Thanksgiving that year (THAT was stupid). Basic risk assessment went completely out the window, along with any sense of opportunity cost and the costs to the economic livelihood of millions of people.
When the vaccine was rolled out, the outsized confidence and ridiculous mandates for millions of otherwise healthy people who were at minimal risk for COVID complications only further shattered general confidence in public health guidelines, and IMO have done more damage to confidence in vaccines generally than any whack-job anti-vaxxer could've ever done. Yes, the pandemic was horribly mismanaged, and it is obvious now (3 years later), that the idiots and power-hungry narcissists who drove the mismanagement will do it all again because they not only didn't learn a damn thing, they don't actually care about public health, risk assessment strategies, or the economic health of anyone but themselves.
Bravo. Well said.
There are friends I have distanced myself from because I said my piece to them -- in many cases as early as March 2020 -- and all they did was tear me down, call me crazy and chastise me for leaving the house to visit my partner (whom I did not live with at the time).
The only friends I maintain contact with are those who were sceptical and/or willing to break the rules --- plus one friend who fell for the narrative hook, line and sinker but has been really open to hearing my views. I'm slowly working on her... (She's super against trans ideology and I'm trying to get her to see that at their core, this and covidianism are one and the same).
Thankfully, through being vocally anti-covid bullshit on Twitter and joining a real-world civil rights grassroots campaign group, I've made a whole bunch of new friends. It's a relief when you know you share the same values as someone and they won't sell you out to a totalitarian state.