This plea is for the legions of doctors, nurses, college administrators, teachers, students, public-sector employees, corporate managers, pharmaceutical employees, laboratory scientists, media professionals, journalists in mainstream news, and tech workers who know where all the “bodies are buried,” in the metaphorical phrase.
They have lived with this knowledge for more than three years.
They know the players, the plans, the bureaucratic wrangling, the methods, the lies, the brutality, and the victims. They are holding onto memos, texts, conversations, and unforgettable images in their heads. They are aching to speak. They know that what they saw was wrong. But they are also terrified to speak out.
Here’s the problem. It’s easy to make a principled case for doing the right thing. It’s much more difficult to make a practical case.
That’s because there are sometimes huge costs that come with standing up, speaking out, turning over documents, telling stories, and revealing truths. They are deeply uncomfortable, even career threatening. You might not win and you might be hounded to the ends of the earth. All your secrets could come out, too. Indeed, there are powerful people who want it to be so, as a lesson to others.
These costs are obvious. The benefits are elusive. That’s why it’s much easier to say nothing. You keep your job, your sanity, your privacy, your relationships, and your professional standing. You can be comfortable. You also join legions of others doing the same thing, and there’s safety in those numbers. Keep your head down.
You can also convince yourself that by not “burning bridges” you are in a better position to influence the direction of reform. After all—and this is always true—the institution for which you work, whether public or private, isn’t all bad. It has plenty of redeemable functions and employees. They deserve credit and a better life lived with integrity. If you don’t speak out, you can assist in giving it to them.
If you are on the outside, hated and demonized, you will not be in a position to guide necessary reform. At least, that is what you keep telling yourself.
And yet, you know in your heart that this isn’t really true. There will be no reform without outside pressure. Things will continue as they are unless there is some huge disruption that comes via whistleblowers.
The truth is that you just do not want it to be you. You would like it to be someone else. The trouble is that everyone thinks this way. Everyone is positioning themselves and being strategic in their thinking. They are doing what you are doing, which is nothing.
The result is that nothing changes. Yes, there is some mild pressure here and there. Courts are after the tech companies, alumni and parents are asking questions of colleges, Congress is bugging the bureaucracies, Substackers are going after Big Media, and consumers are starting to hold corporations to account.
The trouble is that it isn’t enough. Not enough to make a difference anyway. What is needed are people on the inside with real stories, evidence, anecdotes, and names. People with credibility, on-the-ground experience, and all the receipts. That’s you. You know that you could do it now. We’ve never had so many platforms for you to speak.
Ever more professions are governed by explicit and implicit rules on secrecy. Everything is proprietary and confidential. Ambitious managers and workers often aren’t even allowed on social media at all. A veil of confidentiality has affected everything. This has major implications for the capacity of the system itself to right wrongs. Unless individuals are willing to stand up and speak, nothing will change.
Our stories of heroism past—the people who stood for principle and risked everything for what is right—too often minimize the crucial decision to go ahead. They often make the decision seem like a no-brainer choice between right and wrong. That’s never the case.
For example, many of those who are remaining quiet about hospital protocols in early COVID-19, vaccine failures and unjust mandates, censorship of tech, closures of schools, ridiculous protocols, or whatever, have grave personal responsibilities. They have families to feed. They have spouses to protect. They have careers to build and believe that they can’t change them.
It’s easy to preach “Do the right thing.” It’s impossible to give a full and convincing case for why doing this is always a good idea.
I will report this, however. In the past three years, among all those people who stuck their necks out to stand up for principle, not one of them I know has any regrets about the decision. Yes, they regret the sleep loss, the derision of colleagues, the hounding press, the threats from above, and the lack of certainty about the future. But once that passed, they all rested with a sense of confidence in their newfound freedom and life of truth.
What about jobs? Some of them had to leave their institutions. Some of them faced amazing pressure but survived. Some of them changed careers entirely. But regardless, I don’t know one person who has regrets for their decision to blow the whistle. And these days, some of them are already starting to be seen as heroes.
As time has passed, the people who stood up against COVID-19 protocols and mandates are more and more being seen for the heroes they are. The scientists who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration faced a hell on earth, and so did many doctors who signed it. But these days, a growing consensus is that they were correct all along. And that’s why we are starting to see another round of denunciatory propaganda.
There are moments in the 20th century when people stood up at great personal cost but their efforts served the country well and they survived. William F. Buckley Jr. was inspired by Whittaker Chambers’s stand for truth in his book “Witness” and so penned his own exposé of Yale University upon graduation. He faced an amazing barrage of hate, but he also built a great career from it.
On the personal level, I must say that I feel this, too. For so many months, I felt alone and, yes, faced a barrage of attacks from my first writings in January 2020 and continuing throughout. Many came from people I might otherwise have expected to be allies. But they too were afraid. And yes, I dealt with grim upheavals that hit me hard. But I have no regrets. In the end, I’m in a much better position than I was. Someday I might tell the whole story, but not yet.
Those who are staying on the sidelines now need to think about the long term. How do they want history to judge them? What would they like to be able to tell their children? Do they want to tell the story of courage or do they want to tell the story of strategic survival?
A bigger issue concerns what kind of society we want to live in. Guaranteeing societies of freedom and human rights has always come at a huge cost to the individuals who dare stand up for truth and principle. And, yes, the job can be thankless in many cases. Still, it’s the right thing to do. It isn’t always practical, but it’s always moral. And over the long term, what is strategic and practical does eventually overlap with what is right and true.
There are many truths about the past three years still waiting to be revealed. It’s people who must reveal them, people of courage and conviction. You should join them. No one can promise an easy path, but the hero’s journey was never intended to be a stroll down Easy Street. As Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”
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