(In this dispatch I give you not one, but two op-eds that were submitted to “Conservative Inc” publications on the advice of someone with connections to that world. After long discussions and considerations, both were declared to be too fringe to print. But Con Inc’s loss is your gain — maybe — as I herein present both of these editorials. Beware: Dangerous ideas lay ahead!)
We Need a National Lockdown Memorial (Op-ed 1)
In March of 2020, all across the United States, the most dramatic social experiment in our nation’s history began. Hundreds of millions of people were told to stay home and leave their homes only for “essential” trips. Businesses were shut down. Schools were closed. Sports were suspended. Students were sent home and told to log on to Zoom instead.
You know this because you lived through it. Based on the popularity of these measures at the time, there’s a good chance you were one of the people who supported them. They seemed so reasonable, didn’t they? Just two weeks to to flatten the curve, to keep our vital hospitals from being overrun. That’s all they were asking, right? Was that really too much to ask to save grandma?
Some of us were less sanguine about the idea of freeze-drying the economy for two weeks, and even less optimistic that those two weeks wouldn’t turn into, well, how long did those emergency powers last? Is everything back to normal yet where you live?
We can’t undo these past decisions, but there’s nothing stopping us from a proper accounting of the costs of these measures, even as they continue in many places through mask mandates and vaccine passports. It’s never too early to recognize the victims, or to acknowledge their losses.
And yes, those who suffered as a result of the the lockdown measures are victims, of those who made the mandates, and of those who enforced them. And yes, those losses have been tremendous! They include a 30% cratering of GDP during the second quarter of 2020, the destruction of about 40% of all small businesses, and an increase in overdose deaths of 32% from the previous year.
Long term health consequences of the lockdowns are yet unknown, but we already have some hints as to what they will be. The CDC reported in September that for children between 2 and 19, the rate of increase in body mass index (one measure of obesity) “approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a prepandemic period.“ Likewise, there’s no way to know exactly how bad the long-term health effects will be for all those missed cancer screenings and preventive doctor’s visits, but if these existed for a reason, their removal is sure to have negative consequences.
If that first statistic about that huge drop in Gross Domestic Product seems to pale in comparison to the other costs, I think it’s worth pointing out that GDP isn’t just some number floating in space, it’s not just a series of zeros and ones stored on a computer in the Government Accounting Office. Every single dollar represents a good or service produced by an American, and most likely consumed by another American. GDP is the corn on your table, the car in your garage, the hour of work you were able to swap for water that flows through your pipes. GDP is a measure of our collective standard of living, and in the long run it’s vital to our strength as a nation. Reductions in GDP have a massively negative effect on us as a country.
It would take much more than a short article to convey the full impact of our attempt to slow the spread of a virus by mothballing the economy, nor could a much longer article fully capture the extent of the suffering. This is why I’m proposing a national memorial museum to the lockdown victims.
We need a physical space, right now, to recognize these victims and their suffering. It may be impossible to fully understand this suffering (even if we ourselves were lockdown victims), but through immersion in the stories, photos, videos, and testimony of others, we can appreciate what they went through. And, just as importantly, we can recognize the sacrifices imposed on them in the name of public health.
Ideally, I envision a long, narrow, dark pathway that recreates the experience so many of us had for so many months. The narrowing of our options through mandates, the limiting of our experience to ever smaller geographic and social spaces, as so many branches of normal human life were cut off from us, from restaurant dining to funerals to weddings. Along the way there were many moments of false light, openings that turned back into closings, and an atmosphere of pervasive fear and uncertainty.
For some of us, this darkness endured until we were forced to abandon the places we lived, exiting a narrow corridor to get back into the light of normal living somewhere else. For others, and this could be replicated in the memorial’s layout, some branches would lead instead the narrowest of spaces, the catacombs that represent final resting places for the ultimate victims of lockdown, both now and in the years to come, as we continue to pay the human price for our policy choices.
It’s Time to Sanction Australia (Op-ed 2)
Unless you spend a lot of time looking at news online, you may have missed the video. In it, a group of protestors is gathered around a large memorial. They hold up signs that say “Freedom”. They chant slogans, sit on the memorial steps, enjoy the sunlight. Nearby, a large group of police form a line. They declare the protest illegal and move in. Protestors who don’t move away quickly enough are beaten with batons. As other protestor begin to run away across a nearby field, black-clad officers shoot at them with rubber bullets, hitting some in the back. Other protestors duck behind obstacles to avoid getting shot by the advancing police.
Based on what happened, you might think this scene took place in some third-world nation, a place where dissent is a crime and democracy is an illusion at best. But this crushed protest took place in Australia at the Shrine of Remembrance, a memorial built to honor the lives lost defending the freedoms of fellow citizens. Nor was this an isolated occurrence.
In another video, two police officers spray chemical irritant directly into the face of an elderly woman who was already knocked down for protesting. In dozens of other videos, Australian police tackle people for being in public without a mask. In one, police take a cup of coffee from a man who is walking and check that it isn’t empty, to make sure he has a valid reason to have lowered his mask. In another, two cops show up at the home of someone who they accuse of being at a protest, based on his posts to Facebook from 6 months earlier.
To say that Australia has changed since the pandemic response began would be an understatement. Many of its states have tightly restricted the movements their citizens; in some places people must remain within a 5 kilometer radius of their home. Travel between states is so restricted that four babies died last year after they were denied medical transport from Adelaide to Melbourne, the nearest city for pediatric heart surgery. Travel to and from Australia itself is now illegal in almost all cases. The country that began as a penal colony has become one again.
These changes, which have given rise to the widely used tag #AustraliaHasFallen
on social media, require a response from us as a nation. No, we don’t need to send troops into Melbourne to liberate the Aussies, but we must, as a nation that’s dedicated to defending freedom at home and abroad, take action. At a minimum we should impose economic sanctions against Australia and revoke their status as a Most Favored Nation for trade. At the state and local levels, our government entities and pensions should divest themselves of any Australian holdings they have.
If this economic measures seem extreme to take with a nation that we think of mostly as a benign exporter of crocodile hunters and pop-synth bands, keep in mind that freedom and democracy aren’t self-perpetuating. And when a country begins to exclude entire classes of people from participation in the political process, as the state of Victoria did recently by banning unvaccinated MPs from entering parliament, it’s time for the rest of the world to stand up and condemn these moves towards tyranny. Australia is no longer a respectable member of the community of free nations, and it shouldn’t be treated as such.
We need to send a strong message, backed up by sanctions, that we are well beyond the moment for emergency measures that restrict the fundamental rights of citizens, if there ever was a time when these were justified. America used to export freedom through rhetoric and action, at the individual and collective level. Ronald Reagan was right in 1987 to call for Russian leader Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall as a condition of respectability, and as a moral imperative. Likewise, we played an important part in pressuring and shaming South Africa into ending their system of apartheid. Over the years, we’ve inspired movements for freedom and democracy throughout the world. It’s time we put a strong hand on a shoulder of our friends down under and tell them, in no uncertain terms, that it’s time to open back up and rejoin the community of respectable nations.
As a Melbournian, this one hits close to home. I live about 10 minutes from the Shrine of Remembrance where those protests took place.
For those interested. I'll give you one personal experience (I have many more to tell) of mine. It involves a small protest I attended in Melbourne. Protesters were angry but peaceful (i.e. sometimes shouting at police and calling them cowards etc.). The police turnout was large, almost outnumbering the protesters in this case. As a group of 5 or 6, they would lock on to an individual in the crowd, then go up and fine or arrest them.
It was hard to tell what the person was getting in trouble for without getting up close and listening in on each conversation. At one point I left the crowd to film some cops fining/arresting someone. I stood about 20 metres away. 6 or so cops seemed to notice me. They whispered to each other and then started moving in my direction.
Hoping I was wrong, I stopped filming, and began to casually walk away, back into the crowd. Looking over my should, they were speeding up towards me. I walked on an angle to figure out if it was me they were following. It was. They changed their angle in line with me and sped up further.
At this point, I though, "fuck". These were fully armed men who I'd just seen mishandling a bunch of people for no reason, and now they were coming for me. So I ran. And they ran. Fortunately I'm fit. They weren't fit, and they had a lot of extra weight with all their gear. After 30 metres or so they gave up and I managed to get out of the suburb. But it scared the crap out of me. I've never had any run-ins with the police, no criminal record etc.
Why did they choose me? My best guess is that didn't have a mask on (most people at the protest didn'), so I was an easy target. I was also tall, stood out, and was wearing a leather jacket.
But that's just one story. Needless to say, if pressure by the US government on the Australian goverment to be more free, has the effect of producing more freedom (or at least updating the common knowledge that what our government is doing is really bad), then I'm on board.
I like both editorials. Both are ideas worth keeping alive.