The Covid Reckoning, Part II
History Repeats
I recently wrote an OpEd about our government’s systematic censorship of Americans during the Covid pandemic in clear violation of the First Amendment and the recent opinion and injunction by a federal judge blocking government from continuing those violations. My piece was published in the large newspaper centered in the state capital. Unfortunately, the editor responsible for the lede of the piece, in what appears to be a case of ideological vandalism, chose to repeat a lie about comments I made in a Twitter thread a few year back.
The lie is that I compared government forcing children to wear masks that did nothing to protect them to the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust. I made no such comparison. The full verbatim text of that tweet thread can be found copied at the end of this column. Readers will find a reference to masks and, later, a reference to the Holocaust. What you won’t find, unless you deliberately — and dishonestly —distort the piece to do so, is me equating mask mandates to the Holocaust.
That dishonest conflation is exactly what a local sports blog chose to do two years ago and it was that ideologically based and deceptive framing the opinion page editor chose to repeat.
The editor’s dishonest addition to my op-ed was either deliberately intended to discredit the opinions in my column — possibly because I rebuke those in her profession who cheer on government censorship — or because of lazy reporting and editing standards that merely repeated previously published lies rather than bothering to verify the actual facts. Either case is only a further indictment of declining standards of accuracy and objectivity to which news organizations used to strive to uphold.
Such has been the sordid tale of government misdeeds and the complicity of the press, the professional class, and average citizens for so much of the past three years.
I am Jewish. Over one hundred years ago, my grandparents fled the genocidal pogroms targeting Jews in Russia to find a better life for their children and grandchildren in the United States. My father was a medic in the army in the European Theater during WWII. I have studied the Holocaust in depth and, during my school board service, made sure the Holocaust was unerringly included in our curriculum so children would learn its lessons. I have personally spoken with numerous Holocaust survivors to hear their stories and understand their perspectives.
The Holocaust was and remains a singularly horrific event in human history, particularly for Jews. It is incomparable and should not be compared with any other event.
The lessons of the Holocaust, however, are much more far reaching. They should, and must, be applied as widely as possible, as they often have been. Humanity’s collective failure to learn its lessons is the reason genocides and reigns of terror and abuse have continued to occur over the 80 years since. It is just some of those lessons I was referencing in my Twitter thread, which I wrote two years ago after eighteen months of Covid hysteria and abuses, particularly of children.
I was bluntly informed by some Jewish leaders that the Holocaust is so sacred a memory it is essentially impermissible to speak of or reference it other than as they say. Many of them admitted in subsequent conversations that they hadn’t read my actual Twitter thread but were acting instead on the dishonest framing of it they’d heard or read from others. All of that is utterly contrary to the four millennia of Jewish culture and identity that emphasizes objective evidence over rumor, free inquiry, argument, and debate.
It is also apparently not a universal view as evidenced by this rabbi who recently invoked the Holocaust in his opposition to the Missouri legislature’s decision to regulate transgender medical interventions. It really is an Orwellian world when elected representatives who believe they are protecting tens of thousands of children from medical abuses is like Nazi Germany but unelected propaganda-pushing bureaucrats harming tens of millions of kids is just fine and dandy.
The hypocrisy would be laughable were the politically partisan nature of it not so predictable and the stakes not so high.
Equally common objections to my reference were some combination of: the Covid restrictions were necessary (they weren’t); who was I to question the experts (I questioned their lack of evidence); Israel was doing some of the same things so it must not be as bad as I claim (it only shows that Jews are human too); and were masks and all the other restrictions really so bad that they weren’t worth it “just to be safe”? (If the experts told us to rub mayonnaise in our hair it would have been just as useless and far more safe.)
Since when did unconstitutional population-wide restrictions of liberty and official dishonesty to sell them to the public have to cross a certain threshold of harm before they were prima facie evidence of a government unworthy of the People’s support? Worth it? Hardly.
When in human experience have those who justify the abuse of the trust and freedom of the People “for your safety” ever been on the right side of history?
You cannot prevent any government-led or government-supported tyranny without preventing the precursors to them. You cannot conscript learned professionals and ordinary citizens in that tyranny and oppression without corrupting those professions through censorship and threats of job loss and convincing ordinary citizens that their friends, family, and neighbors were a threat to them if they didn’t follow the government’s tightly controlled narrative.
Virtually every mass abuse of power in history follows the same pattern:
A crisis, threat, or enemy is identified;
those in power and authority assert collective action is necessary to fight it;
such collective action requires declarations of emergency powers and the broad restriction of civil liberties;
official communications exaggerate or distort the threat (propaganda);
unofficial or contrary views are censored;
Scientists, academics, intellectuals, and other “experts” are corrupted into service of the State;
those who reject or question the official narrative are demonized as a threat to others or the State with restrictions of liberty specifically targeting the dissenters;
other citizens are encouraged and conscripted (often unwittingly) to attack or report the dissenters;
children are used as pawns either by threats of harm to keep parents in line or by propaganda encouraging kids to join the fight directly
emergency powers and restrictions are extended well beyond any actual emergency
Our government engaged in each of those abuses during Covid and tens of millions of citizens were harmed by them, including tens of millions of children, with little to no evidence of any corresponding benefits. Worldwide, more than “1000 million” children, who were always at statistically near-zero risk from Covid and not significant transmitters of it either, were deprived of schooling with all of the devastating and lifelong harms that will follow. Despite assurances that kids are resilient, because many are, tens of millions won’t be and their sacrifice most definitely won’t have been worth it.
Those abuses were evident to me and many others two years ago and the evidence has only become far stronger since. I detailed just some of it in my recent piece titled The Covid Reckoning, Part 1.
A few of the questions we must answer about our pandemic response I felt relevant were:
How, in a democratic society, was so much power amassed by so few, particularly unelected bureaucrats?
How was that power retained?
How and why did government authorities label and blame entire groups of fellow citizens as the cause of harm to others despite both weak evidence and, more importantly, millennia of human history demonstrating the profound danger of such policies?
Why did average citizens willingly go along with it?
Why did adults so easily and willingly accept abusive restrictions on children?
What can be done to assure it Never Again occurs?
My use of the phrase “Never Again” also drew attacks from the same crowd, again implying I misused a sacred cry of Holocaust remembrance. There too, my critics were ignorant of both its history and its wide invocation to prevent the next genocide and the wide abuses of power that precede it.
The famous quote generally attributed to George Santayana that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is famous not just for its truth but also for its prescience. He undoubtedly knew, as have others before and since, that such is the ugly and repetitive path of far too much of human history — and its likely future. Humans are far too easily complicit when power is wielded by their political allies against others and far too often fail to consider that same power could be used against them when the political winds change direction. They might want to consider the plaintive words from Pastor Martin Niemöller “First they came for…” describing his guilt at his complicity in atrocities not because he directly participated in them but because he failed to stand up against them.
For additional insights into how atrocities are so easily enabled by ordinary people and why robust structural and procedural checks and balances are needed, please consider reviewing the Stanford and Milgram experiments, which demonstrated just how easily even “good people” are easily manipulated to do bad things.
We will be years, if not generations, from a full reckoning of the Covid debacle. Tyranny in exchange for a promise of safety is a Faustian Bargain that is never worth the price, regardless of which side offers it. A government empowered to restrict the People’s liberty for emergencies — that it alone declares — and without the People’s contemporaneous and repeated consent is a government that will abuse such power.
The evidence has already and will likely only continue to show government responses to the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, particularly across developed democracies, to have been the greatest assault on civil liberties and abuse of power since WWII. And, no, it doesn’t matter that those abuses were imposed with ostensibly good intentions or out of fear of the unknown.
The harms from the pandemic responses have already far outstripped the risks from the disease they were meant to prevent, especially for children, and the toll of those harms will only increase further. That the risks of those harms were known and documented in pandemic planning guides — and then ignored — is another question in need of good answers. Regardless, abuse of power is always wrong and its use in a crisis is far too easy, which is why we must be so guarded against it.
We have proven Santayana’s prophecy correct — again. The only question that remains is whether we will recognize it with enough collective outrage and courage to demand legislation to restrict government’s emergency powers. I listed just a few of those recommended changes at the end of my Twitter thread. Unfortunately, the opposite outcome is currently more likely as governments and the World Health Organization have been arguing for more power, not less. Whether our government’s censorship industrial complex survives to abuse us again will be determined by the outcome of the appeals in Missouri v Biden.
None of that is surprising, of course. Since when have governments ever willingly given up power without being forced to do so?
In the spirit of civil discourse, I would welcome a conversation with anyone who wishes to challenge my views. Those who wish to merely attack again are, of course, free to do so, at least for now and at least as long as Judge Doughty’s ruling stands. (Since I wrote that OpEd, a three judge panel stayed Doughty’s order until the case works through the appeals process.) If his order falls, we would be wise to heed Pastor Niemöller’s all too painful lesson. If a more American reference is more to your liking, consider the words of George Washington in 1873: “…the freedom of Speech may be taken away—and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”
The lessons of history are crystal clear and we must not put any of them off limits for discussion or debate. Freedom isn’t free. It must be defended against all threats, foreign and domestic. It’s loss isn’t easily — or painlessly — recovered.
The bulleted points that follow are the verbatim text of a twitter thread I wrote during the summer of 2021:
18 months into the pandemic
16 months of cloth and surgical masks being recommended and then mandated
Still not a single properly powered and controlled RCT, anywhere in the world, ever, showing masks “work”.
It’s even worse for children who are at statistically near zero risk from Covid, including Delta
Yet 10s of millions have been muzzled, deprived of school and social contact, & told they would kill their parents and grandparents if they didn’t sacrifice
For the 3rd school year
And the AAP, the largest physician organization ostensibly dedicated to children’s health & well being declaring, from exactly zero evidence
That masks don’t harm language & social/emotional development
Because it’s never been studied
I then listed more of what we knew before and had learned over the previous 18 months and the errors made by our leaders followed by how we can prevent it from happening again.*
I understand fear of the unknown, in March 2020
I understand parents desperate to protect their children
I understand the difficult psychology of risk assessment
I understand the Precautionary Principle
I understand science, and therefore reject the notion of “The ScienceTM”*
We know so much more now
We know if masks work at all it is marginal, at best
We know the vaccines work, imperfectly, & so does convalescent immunity
We know scientists and physicians abandoning the principles of scientific and medical integrity has horrific consequences
Our experts and leaders persist in ignoring all we know
I won’t assume their motives because it no longer matters
They’ve been wrong, consistently
A noble lie is still a lie
They should be ignored or defied
And then replaced
And if we are to truly learn from our mistakes the past 18 months
Just as the Jews after the horrors of the Holocaust
We must declare, and implement laws to assure “Never Again”
Never again should we delegate policy authority to those qualified only to provide narrow advice
Never again should we willingly sacrifice liberty without objective proof of imminent harm, and an objective restoration plan — in advance
Never again should emergency government authority extend beyond 7 days without legislative consent, reconfirmed every 7 days
Never again should we blindly follow experts, regardless of the initials after their name, if they don’t provide proof, show their work & admit error
Never again should we EVER sacrifice the needs of children to the unfounded fears of adults
* Note: The sentence and link to The ScienceTM denoted with a “*” weren’t included in the original twitter post and are included here only for reference purposes.