Let's Revisit The 2020 Moral Panic In Light Of What We've Learned

Here in LA, we're just two days away from having most COVID restrictions dropped, and the outdoor mask mandate has been gone for weeks, but I still see a majority of people on the street wearing masks. Churches have been gradually returning to normal since the new year, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has just announced that things will be fuily back to normal (I assume this includes choral singing and missals in the pews, but we'll have to see) by June 20. Even so, some of our pew friends at pre-2020 mass are struggling for the courage to get back to in-person church.

In other words, the moral panic of 2020 has had lasting effects even as the COVID pandemic is in full retreat. What have we learned since the release of the Fauci e-mails and related developments? The big one is the strange suggestion that by January 2020, Fauci and others in the loop were fully aware that a lab leak had released a highly contagious new virus on the world, and that US government agencies were complicit in funding the lab that released it. Whether the virus was manufactured or not is beside the point for our purposes here, but I think it almost certainly was.

Fauci's flip-flops are completely understandable in this context. His immediate effort in February and early March 2020 was to minimize the potential seriousness of the outbreak. Thus his remarks saying most people should go ahead and go on cruises, his advice not to wear masks, and his objection to a China travel ban. Speaker Pelosi at the same time was taking the line that fear of a Chinese virus was racist, and she made a publicity trip to San Francisco's Chinatown, urging people to visit. At this stage, the people in the loop were pretty clearly hoping the thing would just blow over.

By mid-March 2020, researchers at Imperial College London released their infection model, which wildly overestimated the extent of infections. It recommended lockdowns and widespread closures. For reasons that aren't completely clear, the consensus among media and public health elites immediately switched from nothing-to-see-here to full panic. TV news shows began to broadcast the maps with scary expanding red circles.

Within a fairly short period, the Imperial College model began to be discredited, but its recommendations for lockdowns and closures persisted as the policy paradigm notwithstanding. After March, the narrative shifted from don't-wear-a-mask to masks required. We were locked down in California from March to June, but by the time I could get out, the strange public dance of social distancing was firmly established, with sidewalk signs and six-foot calibrations as a constant reminder. My wife was denounced by a Karen at the supermarket, not for not wearing a mask, but for wearing the wrong kind of mask.

I think the panic model proved useful to the lizard people. The virus was portrayed as a constant threat that could infect anyone at any time, even though hospital ships proved completely unnecessary, and data began to reflect that most victims were elderly with other serious illnesses. Thus people who didn't conform to visible norms -- wearing a mask, or even being outdoors without good reason -- were characterized as the real threat. In many areas, churches and communities of believers were regarded as centers of disease and were subject to specific controls.

Throughout the initial period, goalposts were moved, and justifications for particular measures were changed. I think this was necessary to keep the public off balance and maintain a situation where the plebs, in the form of Karens and snitches, turned on itself. This was needed to distract attention from the ineffectiveness of lockdown measures, the incompetence and hypocrisy of figures like Whitmer, the Cuomos, Newsom, Birx. and Fauci, and possible questions about the source of the pandemic, which those in the loop were fully aware was a leak from a US-funded Chinese lab.

An additional feature of the official tone throughout 2020 was the constant scolding of the plebs. The plebs was not staying home, not wearing masks, always threatening to hold parties or family reunions, never grateful to the elites. If the plebs would get with the program, we wouldn't have the surges. Instead, we had them, so the lockdowns and closures had to resume or continue, no matter the surges kept on whatever the remedies -- only a combination of vaccine and natural immunity reversed them in early 2021.

The plebs was clearly the folk devil, and not just in the COVID panic. The BLM-Antifa riots, which began in May and continued throughout the rest of the year, blamed not just police brutality but "endemic racism" and "whiteness". The plebs was encouraged, especially in corporate training, to be "less white". If anything this indicated an underlying fear of the plebs among media, political, academic, and corporate elites, a result in part of the success of Donald Trump in his incarnation as a politician and the threat a populist movement represented to the established order.

Nor can I completely neglect the potential power of the anti-humanist environmental movement. Those who ascribe to these views, which represent an incoate and completely unworkable fantasy, seek to save the planet by exterminating some large fraction of the world's human population. I can't help but wonder if the scary red circles on the Imperial College model maps were in fact aspirational.

The question remains what those who funded and managed the Chinese virus labs were actually intending to do, no matter their actual product. The leaked COVID virus represented near complete incompetence: if they meant to conduct safe experiments, they certainly couldn't do that, but if they intended to create a weapon, it was at best a damp squib and must eventually anger the wounded bear of the plebs that was its presumptive target.

I think an encouraging lesson from the last year and a half is that, whatever the ill intent among our elites, their incompetence puts a strict limit on the damage they can inflict on us.