No Pandemic Amnesty
On the Importance of Public Indictments
“Those who are set up in a city as the guardians of its liberty cannot receive a more useful and necessary authority than the power to indict citizens before the people or some magistrates or council when they commit any kind of offence against free government.” - Machiavelli [Discourses, I.7]
As you have surely seen by now, The Atlantic published an article on October 31st by a horrible covid cultist named Emily Oster titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” I’ve avoided actually reading it until now, and it is a pathetic and unconvincing plea for mercy where she continues to provide misinformation and deny that malice and greed were drivers of the mania. The only thing she seems to have accomplished is unleashing public fury, which time had calmed down at least a bit. This very much has the feel of a sort of “last battle” before prosecution, insofar as the entire body of covid realists came together and her defenders were few and far between. This episode in and of itself shows how popular prosecution will be when the awfulness of Democrats causes a seemingly inevitable red wave and Republicans take over Congress. As Alex Berenson quipped, “Looks like Nov. 8 may be not just a red wave, but a Red Wedding, with the Democrats playing the role of House Stark.” I’m going to limit my coverage of the reaction, as I’m a bit late to the party because Thursday is my day for starting articles and this has already been extensively commented on [I stay home with my daughter that day anyway and can’t afford to take other days off work, I take donations though!] Instead, I am going to focus the most on the weakness of her argument and how crucial it is to investigate and prosecute a wide variety of people for their crimes against free government- on top of which, their supporters amongst the public should not be forgiven unless they show contrition. Fortunately, Niccolo Machiavelli covered this exact topic in Book I Chapter 7 of Discourses on Livy, titled “To What Degree Public Indictments Are Necessary in a Republic to Maintain Its Liberty.” [All of the following Machiavelli quotes are from this chapter.] Suffice to say, what has been done to us cannot be allowed to go unpunished. There will be blood.
To start, here is a screencap of Oster’s tweet as of November 3rd:
The reason I screencapped this is because the Substack embed feature doesn’t show you the full reaction numbers. In case you don’t use Twitter I should explain; generally, if people like your tweet, they are more likely to “like” it than to comment, and positive commenters will “like” while negative ones will not. If you have more than a 2:1 ratio of comments to “likes” it is called being “ratioed” and it means people hate what you have posted- there is great shame in this in Twitter culture. She’s running about 13:1, which is savage. On top of that, people who like your article will do a normal retweet, and usually “like” as well, whereas a high volume of quote retweets means people are commenting on hating your tweet and no one is sharing it approvingly. Her current quote retweets to normal retweets is 7675:721, over 10:1. What this means, is that unlike the early days of the so-called “pandemic,” where the burgeoning covid fanatics were legion and fighting the madness was difficult and lonely, her people are now overwhelmed and outnumbered by a public who are out for blood.
I realize that Twitter isn’t real life. However, the entire political and media class uses it, and the Republicans who are highly likely to sweep the election are promising covid investigations. On top of that, if you read this newsletter, it is definitely the case that the sort of people you know in real life want justice for the immense harm that has been done to us. Being as we’re believers in freedom, there is little the government can do to punish the public for going along, because contra Dick Durbin, spreading misinformation absolutely constitutes a human right; further, you are free to support whatever horrible political policies you wish or generally be an asshole. However, the careers of people like Emily Oster should go down in the flames of disgrace. Most importantly though, high-level government employees, governors, and corporations can absolutely be held accountable for the vast harm they have caused to our lives and liberty. May it be vicious.
If you are a long time covid realist [and since around June of 2020 few people have switched sides] you don’t need a reminder of how horrible and vicious these people have been or what they put us through. I’m going to do a recap anyway: governments at all levels locked you in your home, shut down hospitals and businesses and churches, muzzled you and your young children, stopped you from seeing dying loved ones [or outright killed your loved ones by forcing nursing homes to take covid patients,] put kids into virtual “school” where learning and socialization did not happen- forcing millions of parents out of work, closed borders for years, changed election rules at the last minute, colluded with big tech to censor people who were sharing accurate information, and used all means of coercion to get you to take poorly tested vaccines which turned out to be incredibly unsafe. All of this while corporations made record profits as your business was forced to stay closed. They did this all while constantly gaslighting you, spreading ridiculous misinformation, and accusing you of being a science denying death cultist if you questioned their insane and constantly changing narratives. Meanwhile, the covid cultists who all had sad miserable lives before this somehow convinced themselves that collecting unemployment or working 2 hours a day on a computer while watching Netflix and eating delivered food was their Normandy Beach and we were some sort of cowardly objectors for refusing to be scared and let a cold virus control our lives.
This all tore apart society. I mean I say good riddance to people who believed this shit being in my life, but still, it was difficult. How many friends did you lose? We were all grandma killers, though over two years in the CDC made what used to be grandma-killing their advice, and of course they never said we were right all along, they claimed things changed. If you want the “receipts” as they say on Twitter, Libs of TikTok has a mega thread for the #NoPandemicAmnesty hashtag:
In short, these people have committed grave offenses against free government. And what’s more, they have absolutely no shame. Fauci is essentially denying he had anything to do with it because no one had to follow his advice. There was also ongoing comparative evidence at the time that Sweden was fine and that despite all of their silly and dire predictions absolutely nothing bad- besides a normal seasonal illness- happened in South Dakota or in states like Florida and Georgia when they entirely re-opened more than two years before some states ended their covid state of emergency. [My state, Washington, ended it but two days ago, after some 31 months.] It is extremely important that they be held accountable, for two reasons beyond our own sanity. Machiavelli writes the following of institutions for trying public indictments,
“This institution has two extremely useful effects upon a republic. The first is that, for fear of being accused, the citizens do not engage in attempts upon the government, and if they do make such attempts, they are immediately suppressed without respect for who they are. The second is that it provides a release for those humours that arise within a cities one way or another against certain citizens, for when these humours have no legal form of release, they resort to illegal means that can bring about the ruin of the whole republic.”
Clearly, as there was no accountability for 9/11 or the Iraq War or the financial crisis despite vast evidence of guilt and incompetence, the deterrent aspect of our system which should have existed did not have the proper impact. Further, their attempts were not suppressed, and were encouraged by almost everyone with power. But we can still right the ship of state. It is necessary that the offended and harmed public sees any kind of justice, even if we can never get back all of the things they took away from us and much of the damage is permanent. He goes on to write,
“How useful and necessary it is for republics to provide through their laws a means of venting the anger the multitude feels towards an individual citizen, because when such legal means are not available, they will resort to illegal ones, and without any doubt the latter produce much worse effects than the former.”
Emily Ostrom wants you to believe that even if they got carried away, it was simply through ignorance and fear. She writes of how her family initially took hikes all wearing masks, and we now know outdoor transmission is unlikely. We knew that in 2019. What is wrong with this argument is they threw out the textbook on epidemiology and pretended to know nothing so they could try any crazy connivance- the more unpleasant and oppressive the better. This only makes sense if they knew the lab-leak theory- which they suppressed as “misinformation”- was accurate and they believed US [Fauci!] funded gain-of-function research would make the virus behave differently from a normal cold, which it did not. My wife, who is just a member of the general public, stayed up one night in December 2019 researching covid and had the ability to determine it wasn’t a threat to our family. There is no excuse for professional scientists going along with the panic when there was readily available data showing covid was only dangerous to the very elderly, obese, and people with multiple pre-existing conditions. On top of that, fear, in one form or another, is always the reason anyone suspends civil liberties, and the only reason the public ever accepts it. The framers of our Constitution were well aware of this, and they knew about pestilence: if the Constitution didn’t apply during pestilence Madison would have written “Does not apply during pestilence,” such as how habeas corpus can be suspended when civil courts aren’t functioning due to insurrection or invasion. When you are uncertain about something wise leadership is holding a steady and cautious course, not testing new and irresponsible innovations in tyranny.
What makes Emily Oster’s article even worse is she spreads misinformation about something where we now have a huge body of evidence and uses it as an example of a well intentioned mistake caused by a lack of information. She writes,
“Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.”
MRNA vaccines are both extremely dangerous and make you more likely to catch covid and be harmed by covid if you do catch it, which as I said they make you more likely to do. Excess deaths are soaring everywhere they are used but not in countries that use a conventional vaccine, so it isn’t hard to see what is going on [and following a real pandemic deaths should go down as the least healthy people are already dead.] It appears that the conventional vaccines are at least somewhat effective and relatively unlikely to harm you. Why the Emily Osters of the world support MRNA vaccines is unknown, but the mass deaths they are causing is one of the things which must be investigated. I can’t even begin to understand why she is making this false claim as an example of benign uncertainty. Despite being some sort of health professor she sure has a way of being completely unable to understand disease and mortality data. She presumably specialized in that field due to an obsessive fear of disease, not because of any specific skill-set.
It can’t be emphasized just how much damage they did to society. And they knew they were doing damage, which is why they became ever more intent on harming and silencing anyone who disagreed with them. The Branch Covidian mobs that harassed and berated anyone who chose to breathe free also need to be held to some account, even if it is only seeing their leadership disgraced and thus them disgraced for having followed along. The blaring propaganda intended to turn neighbor against neighbor had that impact and created a dangerous mob mentality. Machiavelli writes of the danger of such private injuries in a republic regarding the famous rebel Coriolanus,
“Anyone can judge how much evil would have befallen the Roman republic had he been put to death in a riot, because this would have given rise to a case of individuals harming individuals, the kind of injury that generates fear; fear seeks protection, for which partisans are procured; out of partisans factions are born in cities, from which arises their destruction.”
Our country is hopelessly in faction, massively exacerbated by the pandemic scam. There is no way out of it but to dominate the partisans of the covid cult until some sort of justice puts our republic on the right course. I’m skeptical of even that working though, we may have to wait for them to die out while the rest of us rebuild. As I wrote recently in my article “Democrats Really Are That Bad”:
“I see no possible way to re-integrate them into sane society, which presumably means our only option is politically dominating them and managing it as a problem while we wait for them to die from depression, obesity, and quarterly MRNA “vaccines.” At least the upcoming elections look very bad for this hateable faction, but that is a shallow comfort being as we have to continue to live with them in our society and no nation can thrive with cities as malmanaged as ours or so large a section of the public so deranged and servile.”
[Note: In the time since writing that Biden announced on Twitter that you “only” need one clot shot per year for the rest of your life.]
The hostile response to this article- and Emily Oster’s lack of defenders- gives me some hope though. It seems like the covid partisans will duck their heads while the trials go on and then try and emerge behaving somewhat better, perhaps finally convinced or at least ashamed of the gravity of their error. That is why it is so important that these investigations are a political matter with widespread participation and a large audience. Machiavelli writes,
“It is not sufficient to indict a powerful citizen before eight judges in a republic; judges must be many in number, because the few always act in the interest of the few.”
Though the courts have struck down some covid policies, they haven’t shown interest in punishing anyone in meaningful ways. I remain cynical about the prospect of ever seeing real justice, but there is clearly an overwhelming desire for it among the people; Emily Oster’s pathetic supplication did not find a receptive audience even among the elite Democrat and media class who were presumably unwilling make themselves noticed.
Further, we still don’t understand how this happened, why they changed course suddenly in March 2020 and took drastic untested actions with huge, obvious harms. We need to find out what caused the public to go along, besides a lifetime of being indoctrinated into disease fear. [I personally thought our society had far too much disease fear many years before covid began.] What caused global society to launch a kamikaze attack against a cold? It is obvious that a confluence of negative features in our society and public stupidity all came together in a giant shitstorm, and we absolutely must know how that happened.
To some extent China clearly punked us- we know those pictures of people dead on the street could not possibly be real. I remain convinced one aspect of this is that they found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel- as an elderly germaphobe with immense hubris they found what he feared and told him they had a way he could defeat it. But when he asked the nation to lockdown it looked like a hostage video, and somehow he was unable to reverse course when he quickly realized he had made a grave error. Further, Fauci and Birx had vast power, and he didn’t appear to be able to fire them, so who did they work for? Were corporations in on it from the beginning, or did they just see a bonanza and run with it? This is why we can never have pandemic amnesty, it is not just the need for justice or vengeance- though that is a big part. It is imperative that launch investigations to find out who is responsible for the society, economy, and life destroying misery we were all put through and how they did it, and then to punish them. Hopefully that will have the effect of scaring the next generation of would-be tyrants, and teaching the next generation of would-be sheep how, and why, to protect liberty from such monsters. In the mean time, don’t let the covid fanatics pretend they were acting in good faith- we all know they took pleasure in shaming, hating, and dominating anyone who wouldn’t go along.
I’ve been saying for years that these people should be locked up, and now there is a chance we just might see it.
Pray for Nuremberg 2.0
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The colossal backlash against this stupid article has been quite heartening