We are only beginning to grapple with the damage from lockdowns and vaccine mandates and Covid censorship

For two years, we gave up our freedoms for NOTHING. And the people who took them have not even acknowledged what they did, much less apologized or been held accountable.

I have mentioned Eugyppius before. He’s a German academic on Substack, smart, deeply skeptical of Covid interventions and vaccines.

Lately he’s been writing about Ukraine. I don’t agree with him. Like some of you, he’s in the pox-on-both-their-houses camp, a view I find essentially nihilistic.

I’m a cynic, not a nihilist.

The cynic understands and is unafraid to explain that the West left Ukraine exposed because of its green energy fantasies. The nihilist can’t or won’t draw a distinction between Russian soldiers and the Ukrainian civilians they are killing. Nihilism is its own kind of magical thinking, made worse because it’s disguised as gimlet-eyed realism.

But Eugyppius can’t see a difference between the West and Russia anymore. He’s angry. He’s angry at his leaders, and his fellow citizens. He’s angry at his country, and his continent, and the entire Western democratic experiment. Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

People in the West do not have much voice in government, they are not free… and western assimilated governments do not care about anybody’s rights. He illustrated the story with a photo from an anti-lockdown protest in the Netherlands a year ago.

Though the photo could have come just as easily from Australia six months ago. Or Canada last month.

Oh the places we and our leaders have gone in their hopeless quest to do something, anything, about Covid.

In the United States legal and cultural obstacles kept us from becoming quite as authoritarian. Until the last two years, I had never really understood the value for federalism and the brilliance of the Constitution.

Still, we went a long way. Millions of Americans - possibly tens of millions - were forced to take shots of a never-before-used biotechnology in order to keep their jobs. If Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the public health authoritarians had had free rein, we would have gone even further.

Eugyppius is angry. And he’s right to be. The fact the mRNA shots have failed - a failure that appears to be worsening by the day, I have to write about the crisis unfolding in South Korea next - is the icing on the cake.

But the failure is NOT the most essential point. It’s not the cake.

The cake is this: even if the Covid interventions had worked, they were not merely unjustified but anathema to the West’s core values. Encouraging people to stay home or be vaccinated and requiring them to do so are entirely different.

Most of the Covid fanatics want desperately to forget how they behaved (except for a few of the true fanatics, who are getting ready for the next round). And, yes, it is cynical (but not nihilistic) to understand that their desire to forget is one reason they have focused so intently on Ukraine.

But we cannot forget, or let them forget. Not just because another wave of Covid is coming - in fact, it is already here in many of the mRNA-vaccinated countries - but because even if they do nothing more what they have already done has been so damaging to the West’s idea of itself.

And though the lockdowns and vaccine mandates are gone, the efforts at censorship are not. It is time to uproot the word “misinformation” from the vocabulary of every government official in every Western country. Governments should not be allowed - on their own, or through “partnerships” with private companies - to define what facts are acceptable for their citizens to see.

A country that claims to stand for freedom must itself be free.

Otherwise it is nothing more than the well-oiled propaganda machine that Eugyppius and his fellow nihilists claim.