THREAD – Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream is just beginning to realize that the response to COVID was an unprecedented catastrophe. But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. 1/

Rather, the prevailing narrative on the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to COVID is due to state-ordered closures and mandates, while any downside was inevitable due to the virus independent of any state-ordered closures which never happened. Got it? Good. 2/

This perplexing narrative was perfectly encapsulated in this viral tweet by a history professor who griped about the difficulty of convincing his students that government mandates had nothing to do with the fact that they couldn’t leave their homes in 2020. 3/

Similarly, in an interview with Bill Maher, celebrity scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson argued that we can’t assess the effects of lockdowns and mandates because the counterexamples, like Sweden, are too different to be applicable. 4/

Likewise, Charlie Crist, candidate for governor of Florida, accused Ron DeSantis of being “the shutdown guy.” But Crist had sued DeSantis to keep kids out of school, and wrote DeSantis a letter in July 2020 saying the state should still be in lockdown. 5/

Arguments like these are as facile as they are transparent. Does anyone honestly think these people would be arguing that lockdowns didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible to measure their effects, if the policy had been a success? 6/

As is extraordinarily well-documented by data, video evidence, news reports, government orders, testimonial evidence, and living memory, the strict lockdowns of spring 2020 were all too real. And few people publicly opposed them. 7/

The harms that lockdowns would cause, including deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, economic recession, global poverty and hunger, were all well-known and reported when they were first adopted in early 2020. 8/ brownstone.org/articles/gover…

Yet regardless, key officials, media entities, billionaires and international organizations advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date. The resulting scenes were horrific and dystopian. 9/ michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/no-lockdown-…

People lined up outdoors in freezing temperatures to get food. 10/

In many cities, still-sick patients were tossed out of hospital beds and sent back to nursing homes. 11/

Playgrounds were taped up and shut down. 12/

Parks and beaches were closed, and some mainstream commentators argued that those closures should be even stricter. 13/

Many who flouted these closures were charged or arrested. 14/

Police set up checkpoints at state borders. 15/ courant.com/coronavirus/hc…

Mask mandates were administered by force. 16/ nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Churches tried offering drive-in service. 17/ wreg.com/news/coronavir…

But even businesses offering drive-in services were forced to close. 18/ phillyvoice.com/coronavirus-tu…

Stores, and sometimes sections of stores, that were deemed “non-essential” were cordoned off. 19/

School closures caused an unprecedented learning setback, especially for the poorest students. But even when schools were open, kids had to sit for hours in masks, separated by plexiglass barriers. 20/

Many kids were forced to eat lunch outside in silence. 21/

Schoolchildren were subject to a mass experiment in “remote learning” for over a year. 22/

Kids were cut off from their friends. 23/

Universities became machines of lifeless and sterile health bureaucracy. 24/

Countless small businesses were forced to close, and more than half of those closures became permanent. 25/ brownstone.org/articles/did-y…

60% of all restaurants in the US were permanently closed. 26/ thehill.com/changing-ameri…

Cars lined up for miles at food banks. 27/

The Financial Times reported that three million in the United Kingdom went hungry due to lockdown. 28/

The situation was far worse in the developing world. 29/

If these horror stories aren’t enough, the raw data speaks for itself. 30/

The mainstream left’s newfound reluctance to refer to these policies as “lockdown” is especially curious, because they showed no such reluctance at the time they were actually implementing lockdowns in 2020. 31/

A report later revealed that military leaders had seen Covid as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, “shaping” and “exploiting” information to bolster support for government mandates. 32/ nationalpost.com/news/national/…

Dissenting scientists were silenced. 33/ wsj.com/articles/fauci…

Government psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns. 34/ thecritic.co.uk/a-year-of-fear/

Worse yet, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judged the threat of COVID was their own government’s decision to employ lockdown measures. 35/ tabletmag.com/sections/scien…

Those who publicly spoke against lockdowns and mandates were ostracized and vilified—denounced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and health officials as “neo-Nazis” and “white nationalists.” 36/ nytimes.com/2020/05/18/wor…

The collective denial of these horrors, and the refusal of media, financial, and political elites to report on them, amounts to nothing less than the greatest act of gaslighting that we’ve seen in modern times. 37/

Those who spoke against lockdowns in early 2020 showed they were willing to stand up for our freedoms even when doing so was lonely and hard. That fact is now increasingly clear—unfortunately, even to those who did the opposite. Keep all the receipts. /end michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/lockdowns-th…