Do you remember the year of 2020? Brandon Smith does:
The events of 2020 were meant to initiate the ultimate coup against humanity. The globalists admitted to their plans over and over again. Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum proudly declared covid the catalyst for the “Great Reset” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” They asserted that the lockdowns were just the beginning and that the sweeping restriction on our freedoms would be extended to climate change as well.
They thought they had won without firing a shot, but it’s not that easy. Far more people are awake and aware of their motives than they realized, and, at least in America, over 50 million of those people are armed. The lockdowns are now gone, almost no one took the vax boosters, far fewer people took the vaccine than the CDC claims, and the vax passports were defeated. This victory was made possible due to the efforts of alternative media platforms circumventing Big Tech censorship. It’s that simple.
Today, the COVID-19 “crisis” appears to have been contrived to provide a rationale under which to suspend – or permanently void – all personal and commercial freedom. Virtually everything we were told early in the “pandemic” has proved false. Every measure imposed upon us in the name of preventing the spread of the virus has proved pointless or worse. And of course the much ballyhooed vaccines have been exposed as worse than a fraud: an experimental regimen that mattered more to the political elite than to anyone else.
And today, some years after its first utterance, Rahm Emanuel’s statement:
“You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is that it is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
…is on more peoples’ minds than ever before. For it has become all too clear that a crisis, in the eyes of the Establishment, is an opportunity to increase their power over us.
The COVID-19 “pandemic” passed, but the Establishment threw a second straw to the wind in the form of “monkeypox.” That one didn’t connect. Neither did the patently absurd attempts to frighten us into submission with the Ebola virus. Moreover, as those fizzled, reports about the damage done, especially to children, by the lockdowns and the compulsory masking were making the rounds ever more swiftly. The crisis-mongers were thwarted by a pincer movement of fear exhaustion and good information.
I wrote about fear exhaustion near the beginning of the COVID-19 panic:
Each of us has:
- A certain level of risk-aversion;
- A limited supply of “fear energy.”
If Smith is highly risk-averse and Jones is not, then a threat that would make Smith cower behind a locked door will leave Jones unaffected. The threat might be real, in the sense that some percent of those who don’t take the necessary precautions will be afflicted by it. Some might even die. But Jones is willing to accept the risk involved, whereas Smith is not.
But the “fear energy supply” matters, too. If Smith has been terrified repeatedly over a range of threats, his ability to fear another one actively — call it his marginal fear-reaction capacity — might be down to zero. Under such circumstances Smith is likely to be paralyzed by the new threat. He’ll fear it, but he won’t be able to respond with deliberate action as he has to the threats he already fears.
Quite a lot of Americans are in Smith’s position. Consider the many things the media has tried to get us to fear. Yes, many of them have proved (or will soon prove) to be phantasms. That doesn’t matter to the risk-averse. While the Wuhan virus might terrify them, their capacity to deal with this marginal fear has been exhausted…so they refrain from doing things that those who still possess a non-zero marginal fear-reaction capacity think wise.
Our fear exhaustion, coupled to the proliferation of good information and the inferences we’ve drawn from it, has rendered us more resistant to further fear-mongering than previously. That’s a good thing, considering how much the Left depends on crises and the promotion of fear to advance its agenda.
But beware the ratchet. The compliance too many exhibited as the Establishment pressed its demands upon us constitutes a precedent. Should another “crisis” arise, those in power will cite the “emergency measures” of the pandemic as justification for fresh assertions of authority:
[P]olitical power has a ratchet action; it works only one way, to augment itself. A transfer occurs by which the power cannot be retracted, once it is bestowed. In the lowest illustration of this, a candidate for office may promise the voters that he will reduce taxes, or the number of offices, or the powers of office. But once he is elected, he can use the taxes, the officeholders, or the powers to ensure re-election; therefore the motive of the promise is no longer operative. By cutting down expenditure or the number of officeholders or graft, he will certainly create enemies, so the reverse motive, impelling him to evade his promise, is doubled. The voter can only vote the incumbent out; but the next officeholder will come into those augmented powers, and be still harder to get rid of in turn.
The indications are already on the breezes. “Climate change” is only the most conspicuous. To defeat attempts by the Left to use the COVID-19 precedent as a basis upon which to pyramid even more stringencies, the rejection of the COVID-19 measures must be total and absolute.
It is by no means clear that Americans will stand firm in that case.
See also Robert Higgs’s treatise Crisis And Leviathan.
