2020—the year of the lockdowns and masks, of newly overt social media censorship, and the summer of riot-protests and corporate capitulation, all capped off by strong evidence of an election steal.
The image: a man has lived in a house from childhood; one day, noticing cracks in the plaster, he goes down to the basement to inspect its concrete foundation, and behold, the slab has at some point silently transmuted, all to sand.
2021—continued lockdowns and social media censorship, sure, but for a moment in the spring a feeling of reprieve as the vaxxes were distributed; the big event, though was the mandates/passports, an outright apostasy from the principles of liberal democracy. Also, by the fall, the first driblets of evidence—some of them horrifying stories--that the vaxxes were turning out not just to be of highly limited efficacy, but were positively dangerous, began to widely circulate.
The image: Satan.
The instant one turned on any of the “regular” channels, it was wave upon wave of propaganda, and an old U2 lyric sounded: If you just close your eyes, you can feeeel the Enemy.
2022—the year the attentive learned that the vaxxes had been so botched that they were killing myriads—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, more? No one knew. A hundred conspiracy theories bloomed, and the motto of the Eugyppius substack loomed large:
We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science. The world will never be the same.
The image: as in a nightmare, you’re here and there with the crazed Bruce Willis character James Cole from the original film version of 12 Monkeys, racing against time to figure it all out.
That is, the image is of the half-insane conspiracy theorist you are obliged to take seriously, obliged to become in part, because he is clearly half-right about the crisis at hand. At least that much. But will you keep your sanity by his side, oscillating back-and-forth, one day crying Doom, the next day embracing “normality” with a tight, tight grip?
And 2023?
The image is of people you once trusted looking askance, and then, turning away: that is, the image is of a turned-back.
By about the fall of 2022 and getting stronger 2023, those who called for full investigations and discussions of the Covid-19 vax-harm claims, and other aspects of what I label1 the Covid/Vax Disaster-- call these persons the dissidents--had arrived a new level of confidence. Out of the confusion of late ’21 and early ’22 a clearer picture of the scope of the harms had begun to emerge (and by mid-’23, much of the intra-dissident turmoil that had seemed so dismaying when it first began, had settled down or fallen into predictable patterns); most importantly, there had not been debunkings of the major dissident claims—I means the ones regarding Covid issues, and especially the vax-harm ones. If a prediction here and there, by this figure or that, had proven wrong, or the importance of this data-release or that had proven over-sold, it did not amount to much. I can link to piece after piece, video after video, of truly shocking claims about the vaxxes, and with work, I could provide long lists of the major claims made in each item--some of them contain up 30 of these! (see the many links, esp. in the footnotes, of this piece) What I cannot do, however, is then supply countering lists of pieces in which these claims have been carefully addressed by the jab-defenders in a way that would give us serious pause, or cause us to regard it as debunked claim. Almost always when a major dissident harm-claim has been debunked or readjusted, it has happened at the hands of fellow dissidents. And these readjustments have been few compared to the overall list of claims. In sum, our opponents have nearly nothing of rational heft in their quiver, merely an apparatus of suppression.
But what an apparatus!
As everyone with eyes sees, the Covid/Vax Disaster is linked at the hip with the Censorship Scandal. The receipts on this scandal began to emerge in ’22, but 2023 saw them mount up to tome-length catalogues of specific regime and corporate sins against the Letter and Spirit of the First Amendment. See the substacks of Aaron Kheriaty, Michael Shellenberger, etc.
And as I have shown, beyond legally actionable censorship, there is the larger problem of suppression.
I think up until about mid-2023, all the dissidents felt a feeling of urgency—we needed to get the word out! Once certain key moderate-in-spirit figures understood what we had found, everything would change! The Reckoning would commence!
Every month, then, seemed a drama: how much will get into the mainstream discourse this month! How many letters can we write?
But again, midway through ’23, I believe, most of the dissidents came to realize that the Reckoning will be a looonnggg-term one. The lists of the guilty are endless, the patterns of Denial remain strong, and the powers-which-be will nix open discussion on the channels they control of the facts till their dying days. A few will repent here and there, but it will be nearly in private, they will be instantly removed from their positions once their disobedience to the Narrative becomes known.
2023 was really the last chance for those on the fence, for those we might have had some hopes for making a public repentance that could make a kind difference, to step-up in a way that would have had a kind of dignity. That could claim the excuse of half-innocent ignorance. In different ways, dissidents made overtures to these potential late-arrivers at the truth, but…were spurned. Found the back turned against them.
And by this point, we know that more-connected figures we’re speaking of here, persons in journalism, politics, various kinds of leadership, know. They know they are in the wrong—but they remain silent, remain complicit to the suppression or the adjunct suppression. Whether they are ones who have betrayed their duties to science, to academia, to journalism, to a religion, to conservatism, to libertarianism, to old-school liberalism, or to democratic socialism, they increasingly can only keep up the illusion of their own uncertainty, of their blurred confusion about the jab-harm Disaster, and the linked one of the Censorship/Supression Scandal, by way of ever-dodgier self-deceptions. They know. And the better ones know they lost a key opportunity in 2023 to come clean, to heed friends who implored them to do the right thing.
It was a squandered year, a “locust” year, and one in which many trained their souls, willy nilly, in miserable habits of pretense.
From those dissidents that are Christians, the hand of forgiveness will ever be extended out to those who turn their back around, and who come to face what they must. The damage to their souls (and reputations) will be all the worse if by the end of ’24, and those of other New Years Days to come, they remain in the camp of the Suppressors and Denialists. And it will be worse yet for their souls if this camp “wins.”
In any case, the vital conversation moves on. It is not a discussion “obsessed with one topic,” but rather, the only one which can claim to abide by what Burke Solzhenitsyn called the “courage to see,”2 and the only one whose vantage point allows for truly prudent judgment of the other issues of the day, and how they all connect to the larger threat of 2020s Despotism.
By their 2023 you shall know them.
Alas, yes.
Any terms boldfaced in this piece are explained in the piece linked here, “My Covid/Vax Disaster Lexicon.”
I made a correction here, because, as Paul Seaton pointed out, the phrase “courage to see” comes from Solzhenitsyn, not Burke. My memory slip-up was in part caused by this artful parallel of Burke’s and Solzhenitsyn’s insights in Daniel Mahoney’s excellent The Statesman as Thinker, pp. 56-57:
“But once the ideological temptation is afoot in the human world, moderation must be accompanied by courage and no inconsiderable amount of spiritedness if civilization is to survive. When many in the English political class mistook post-Robespierre France as an ordinary European power…Burke took aim at a ‘misguided prudence’ that confused cowardice (or confusion) with humility. Burke saw ‘imprudent timidity’ all around him… [shades of 2023!] …[He] attacked the ‘unworthy hesitation’ that flowed from the lack of ‘the courage to see’ (to use a phrase of Solzhenitsyn’s…). [Burke scholar] Greg Weiner draws our attention to a distinction Burke introduces in the Letters on a Regicide Peace between ‘courageous wisdom’ and a ‘false, reptile prudence’ that arises not of salutary ‘caution’ but out of ‘fear’ and misjudgment perhaps rooted in the failure to cultivate the ‘courage to see.’”