Do you think that people of today, in our woke and sophisticated society, where social-media and all the other headquarters of communication are lightning-fast and global, could never fall for the propaganda tactics of old?

Think again.

It just happened at record speed across an entire planet. From the New York Times:

As more and more serology tests come in, the data becomes unignorable: Covid-19 coronavirus is far less deadly than initially reported andcloser than previously reported to seasonal flu.

Autopsies in Santa Clara County, California, reveal that Covid-19 was in the United States several weeks earlier than previously thought — or, I should say, at least several weeks earlier.  

Many people with Covid-19 are completely symptomless. Many more have symptoms so mild that they don’t connect it with Covid-19.

[UPDATE: YouTube removed the video I’d posted below — for violating recent updates they’ve made to their terms-of-service, which forbids anything they deem to be misinformation about Covid-19 coronavirus. YouTube is a privately owned company and platform and, as I’ve discussed before, they therefore have every right to do this, and I completely defend that right, even if I disagree with the principle, or with any of their specific criteria, which I do. I only update this post and call attention back to it so that readers might witness firsthand how rapidly and how deeply collective hysteria can grow, complete with a religious-like zealousness and dogmatic clinging to convictions already so entrenched that no discussion of their premises is permissible — and all without any discussion of specific data, including the plunging lethality rates of Covid-19 as testing becomes more widespread.] 

These two E.R. docs are true heroes, and everybody should watch the following video. Everyone. It will inspire you. If you don’t have time to watch the entire clip, I urge you to fast-forward to the 28:00 minute mark and watch for 7 minutes. You’ll understand why this outrageous lockdown will create more sickness:

Meanwhile, unemployment, suicide, spousal abuse, child molestation, et cetera, are rising at an alarming rate.

But that’s the price that good citizens — who exist purely by governmental permission and cannot be allowed to act with common-sense, voluntarily — must pay for fighting a pandemic with arbitrary social-distancing guidelines and a forced lockdown which will, you may depend upon it, cause more and longer lasting destruction than Covid-19.

This is how propaganda works. It’s less overt than religious indoctrination, but have no illusions: indoctrination it is. And the New York Times, chronicling China’s targeted propaganda to which that once-venerable newspaper also fell prey, is fully complicit in propagating this scare-mongering, which has altered modern-day society in an unprecedented way:

The independent thinker is the one who takes the time and makes the effort to use her brain — to sift through the relevant data — and this process is always a long and laborious one, in no small measure because there is a great deal to sift through, and because it’s not easy to separate fact from partial fact from outright prevarication and all that’s in between. The Covid crisis was unique: it happened so rapidly and as rapidly became totally politicized and polarized — so much so that now, a mere six weeks in, the one who would dare question the foundations of the official script is in real danger of being hounded and publicly pilloried by the mob. The long and laborious process of data-sifting is a continual process. It requires a certain doggedness. Which is why most people, preferring ease to rigor, will not take the time or expend the considerable effort to do it and to keep doing it. The platitudes and buzzwords and terminology that solidify into dogma almost as fast as they’re created — “social distancing” “quarantine” “consensus” “denier” “protect the vulnerable,” and of course the growing cult-of-the-mask even outdoors when no one else is around — these things all give people an easy way to avoid the painstaking process of independent thought, and many, many, many doctors and scientists are as guilty as anyone.

If this makes you think about so-called climate change, it’s because it’s the same sort of dogma and catastrophizing at work. As one person recently put it — a fellow who, I believe, was already beginning to wonder about the vagueness of the buzzword “climate-change” — specifically, how it’s so imprecise that it can refer to virtually anything (no matter that the world has never seen fewer climate-related deaths than it has the past decade): “If it appears that we over reacted to Corona virus, the climate change movement is totally fucked.”

Yes, it is. It always was, and here is why I say so.

In fact, if there’s one good thing to come out of this entire buccal-fecal carnival, it is that perhaps people will see more clearly, due to the sheer speed with which it happened, how quickly dogmas can accumulate and take hold and transform people’s way of thinking and their entire worldview almost overnight, making ostensibly intelligent people into true believers, and in a flash turning normal people into housebound obeying conformists walking in lockstep and snitching out those who don’t.

The crux of the issue is, I believe, the difficulty of independent thought continually applied — almost as a state of mind, or even a way of life. There are, however, guideposts — or axioms, if you prefer — and one of those is this: if the proposed measures or solutions call for the obliteration of the individual’s right to life, liberty, or property, and if voluntary, consensual action is deemed off-limits, it is wrong.

The people who aren’t cowed or bullied by the fear-mongering or the hype and who painstakingly continue sifting through the data, looking steadfastly into all the relevant evidence at their disposal — even in spite of the blowback and the outrage — are and always will be heroes. Dr. John Ioannidis is one such — an epidemiologist at Stanford University, whom I’ve mentioned many times the past month, and who throughout this entire Covid-19 crisis has been brilliant and levelheaded and exemplary in the scientific method — despite the howling opposition and true-believer rage directed against him. (The same thing is true of the thousands of climate scientists who, knowing that climate by definition changes, don’t believe current climate-change is catastrophic, and I watched firsthand my friend Dr. Bill Gray (RIP), of the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and who was for many decades the world’s foremost expert on hurricanes, get appallingly smeared, vilified, and misrepresented, even after his death, all because he didn’t believe climate change is catastrophic.) As Dr. John Ioannidis recently said in an interview he gave the Wall Street Journal:

“There’s some sort of mob men­tal­ity here op­er­at­ing that they just in­sist that this has to be the end of the world and the sky is fall­ing… Di­miss­ing real data in fa­vor of math­e­mat­i­cal spec­u­la­tion is mind-bog­gling.”

And yet entirely predictable.

Many agree with him, like Michael Mina, an epidemiologist, immunologist, and physician at the Harvard School of Public Health and also a professor at Harvard Medical School, whom I’ve also cited this past month. His area of expertise is vaccines, immunity, and infectious diseases, and he’s increasingly being vindicated in his early speculations, which were based on logic and not wild guesswork or fear-mongering or walking in lockstep with the party-line. But guess what? Mina has sold his soul. This is what he originally, when his soul was still his own:

Infectious disease specialist Amesh Adalja of Johns Hopkins had also been a beacon of brightness throughout all the hysteria and panic-mongering — that is, before he, too, sold his soul. All of his life, he was an uncompromising advocate for freedom in medicine. In the very beginning, I heard him say this in a podcast interview (and I quote):

“[Covid-19] is probably a little more deadly than the seasonal flu, but not a lot.”

And:

“It’s common sense to know your enemy. Instead, we’re all hiding inside our houses as we wait around for a vaccine — that’s not a good global strategy for battling a dangerous virus.”

Amesh Adalja, I repeat, like Harvard’s Dr. Michael Mina, was corrupted. They both sold their souls.

Dr. John Ioannidis, of Stanford, did not sell his soul. He remains uncorrupted and heroic.

I would like for readers to see the following as well. It is a testament to the power of human ingenuity and human intelligence:

Scientists at Cedars-Sinai are developing an ultraviolet light that is inserted into the lungs of coronavirus patients to kill the virus living there.

It’s called the #Healight

Watch: pic.twitter.com/naGETF2Mfo

— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) April 24, 2020

The guy who posted that is obviously a Trump fan. I am not. But none of that changes the science and technology that happen naturally when humans are left free — free to create and innovate and keep the fruits of what they create and innovate.

This, on the other hand, comes from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who was part of Obama’s administration (yes, the one caught on video advocating actual death-panels for the elderly), and who recently called for a mandatory 18-month lockdown:

Finally, you’ve probably heard different things about Sweden, but I want to assure you that Farr’s Law applies there as well:

I do expect a lot of that.

Just as I expect a lot more people saying over and over and over again now, as part of the official guidelines and party-line dogma, that authoritarian lockdown and forced social distancing is why, after all, the apocalypse didn’t come with Covid-19. But that claim, absurd on its face (especially considering that public transportation remained open in most metro areas and that the main sources of transmission are, in this order, interfamilial, nosocomial, and public transportation), is provably false. If anything, the state-mandated lockdowns and forced social distancing created more death and destruction — the full effects of which are yet to be felt: