The Great COVID Purge

The Great COVID Purge
President Joe Biden holds a meeting with his science and technology advisors at the White House on April 4, 2023. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Jeffrey A. Tucker
4/11/2023
Updated:
4/12/2023
Commentary
The announcement that came from the White House is spooky in its brevity. It was just one sentence announcing the end of the COVID-19 emergency. The “15 Days” announced on March 16, 2020, which implemented the national emergency declared a few days earlier, ended up lasting 1,135 days.

What resulted? National ruin. We see it in every aspect of our lives: cultural, economic, educational, public health, familial, community, and trust in institutions. Life expectancy is in free fall, not from COVID-19 but from the fallout of the response. Cities are wrecked. Millions of people have been professionally and demographically displaced.

It’s not even clear that we live under the Constitution anymore.

And yet this is how they dare to end it—or, at least, claim to have ended it.

It’s a serious question as to whether it has really ended. The administrative state effectively executed a coup against the elective government on March 13, 2020. That power hasn’t been given back. Biden’s signing of the House-initiated emergency termination seems pro forma, a cosmetic tip of the hat to the idea that we still have government by the people. But that’s generally not true anymore. The administrative state seized power in those days, and it hasn’t given it back.

As if to underscore the point that nothing has changed, the Biden administration just released another $5 billion for vaccine development, as if these companies didn’t make enough profit over the past three years by conscripting hundreds of millions of unwilling customers to accept its product.

Wait, didn’t the vaccine fail? Of course it did, and everyone knows that. Their excuse is that it was just an early test of a brilliant idea, like Windows 95. Yes, there need to be tweaks. However, because mRNA is a platform technology, like the body’s new operating system, they just have to keep iterating with development until everyone is on the subscription plan.

Looking back, it’s increasingly clear that the power and profits of the pharmaceutical companies was the main point all along. But it wasn’t the only point.

In addition, all institutions in the United States faced a kind of political purge of dissidents. It all began with a media frenzy about a virus on the loose. We couldn’t see it. We didn’t know if it was there or not. We were told to trust the voices of authority. In those days, there was a lot more trust, so many people went along. After all, why would they lie about such a thing?

Over time, people began to be suspicious of their claims that this would be 10 to 100 times worse than the flu and that everyone could die. There were so many parts to the manipulation of the public mind.

The PCR tests were known to be wildly inaccurate, detecting not sickness but the presence somewhere of a tiny particle. Then you had the open admissions that they were misclassifying deaths on purpose. Between bad tests and misclassifications, it almost seemed like any powerful person could make a pandemic appear and disappear using technology and media amplification alone.

Still, many people panicked. What were we supposed to do about it? There were three rounds of mandates. It began with solitary confinement of the whole population, except for those deemed absolutely essential. Who decides? Some bureaucrat somewhere. You'll never know his name. But he was in charge of characterizing your profession and life, and you had better comply.

One had to be willing to impose solitary confinement, celebrate it, and endure it in order to enter the gates of “woke” heaven. And if you didn’t, prepare for the onslaught.

Then, there was the second mandate. Once having exited quarantine, one had to cover one’s face at all times. Of course, we knew that this wouldn’t work. Dr. Anthony Fauci even said so, while later claiming that the truth he accidentally stated was itself a lie. So our breathing was restricted. Our ability to express ourselves was truncated and our ability to see others’ mouths came to an end. Children developed learning disabilities. As for the disabled themselves, they had no rights at all.

For those who passed those two tests, quarantine and masking, there remained the biggest challenge of all: Accept the government’s potion into your arm even though you didn’t need it under the best scenario and it would endanger your life under the worst. Still, you had to trust. How much do you believe the party? Show us.

There were, of course, many of us who didn’t go along. Even from the first day, we doubted the whole thing. How were we treated? We were marginalized and excluded.

What was purged? The public sector. The military. The media. The universities. Even whole cities. Those who disagreed were silenced, humiliated, displaced, and made to feel stupid and powerless. Canceled, as they say.

By the end of this ordeal, the final purge of soldiers, employees in large firms, civil servants, students, faculty, intellectuals, journalists, and administrators was complete. Those non-woke voices that remain are too demoralized and afraid to speak up.

The revolution is complete. As a result, the older conception of public health, the university, the military, the media, and so much more seems almost entirely gone.

Millions of people are still trying to piece their lives together, but we truly live in new times with a new form of government. It goes by many names: the biosecurity state, digital leviathan, technocratic hegemon, or despotism by the administrative state. The sooner we recognize this reality, the better.

Where are the silver linings? We now know what we didn’t know before. We know that the mainstream media is largely captured by the Deep State. We know the same about most large corporations. We’ve learned that we can’t trust public health or even public schools.

With that knowledge, people have started building new institutions. Homeschool is the norm and private schools are bursting at the seams. People have moved to states and cities friendly to the idea of freedom.

Something is brewing out there, and it isn’t Bud Light. Do they think they can just make this go away with a one-sentence press release? No way. We must have the truth. We must have accountability, no matter how long it takes. Freedom is our birthright. We never should have acquiesced to having it stolen from us.

The growing ranks of people who are determined to not live as captives of the new system are finding new ways to reclaim their rights, health, education, faith, and freedom. In the end, and despite the unspeakable pain, the lockdowners, technocrats, and oligarchs won’t win this. The human spirit is too resilient finally to be fully controlled.

They showed us who they are and what they can do. Now we know. We must now act on that knowledge.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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