Michael Senger
brownstone.org
Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. He has been researching the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the world’s response to COVID-19 since March 2020 and previously authored China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign and The Masked Ball of Cowardice in Tablet Magazine.
According to a recent study by the World Bank, published in the journal Nature, lockdowns and the response to Covid-19 have pushed an additional 75 million people into extreme poverty, living on less than US $1.90 a day.
In the typical Walter Duranty style that’s become a kind of twisted journalistic norm since March 2020, the World Bank and Nature of course blame this on “the pandemic” rather than lockdowns. I remain baffled as to how seemingly well-meaning people are able to sleep at night repeating such nonsense—are they somehow blind to the role of their own sycophancy in perpetuating these policies?
Nonetheless, there are signs that the political mainstream is starting to realize lockdowns were a disaster. Today, the Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece titled The Revenge of the Locked-Down Voters, noting the growing political backlash against lockdown politicians from voters at the lower end of the income scale.
This comes shortly after the New York Times quietly acknowledged a study showing that Covid lockdowns and mandates led to over 170,000 excess deaths among young Americans.
Likewise, today the Daily Telegraph, the UK’s centre-right newspaper of record, published an excellent piece titled Basket-case Britain is the definitive proof lockdown was an epic mistake.
And, as in America, this comes shortly after the London Times, the UK’s centre-left newspaper of record, published a cautiously-introspective piece on its support for lockdowns.
These are promising indications that the political mainstream, especially on the right, is coming around to the fact that lockdowns were a policy catastrophe more quickly than some might have worried.
Still, there’s much more to be done. Currently, the mainstream left and right is starting to realize lockdowns were a big mistake, while many career bureaucrats are still stuck pretending lockdowns were the greatest medical breakthrough since penicillin. There really needs to be a bipartisan consensus that lockdowns were an unprecedented policy catastrophe before we can start to see justice and have undue foreign and financial influence taken seriously.