Covid Taught Americans To Stop Trusting A Government That Puts Them Last

BY: ELLE PURNELL

When Donald Trump first sailed into the Oval Office, his detractors shrieked that his blunt rhetoric was dividing the country. His supporters pointed out that Trump wasn’t so much creating division as he was revealing divisions that had been growing in America for a long time. 

The reaction to the novel Wuhan coronavirus did the country a similar service, by revealing a new fault line: two sets of rules, which were applied differently to Americans depending on their membership in certain political cliques. For the average American who assumed his political leaders still shared the belief that all men are created equal, it was a cruel betrayal.

Coronavirus lockdowns alerted Americans to an uncomfortable reality: the institutions to which they’d entrusted their liberties were no longer trustworthy. If the 2024 election is any indication, they got the message.

In the Covid times, hardworking people were deemed “nonessential” and lost their jobs while watching Tony Fauci’s net worth climb. They were banished from church while thousands gathered in the street to worship George Floyd. They watched their kids fall behind in school while Nancy Pelosi and Lori Lightfoot broke the rules to get their split ends trimmed. Their dying loved ones left this world alone, while Obama danced with Hollywood stars at his 60th birthday bash. To add further insult, those loved ones were denied proper funerals, while 10,000 people gathered to eulogize a drug-addicted criminal in a gold casket on television. Only some Americans were authorized to print their opinions online, while others were punished and censored.

The delusion that we were “all in this together” didn’t survive for long. A certain set of rules applied to the BLM protesters, the Democrat politicians, and the Hollywood elites, and another set of rules applied to everyone else. Americans started to realize they were being had. 

When Covid vaccine mandates rolled out, the dichotomy was even clearer. For the vaccinated class, there were jobs, service academy appointments, college acceptances, and social acceptance. For the unvaccinated, there was talk of denying them entry to airplanes, restaurants, and stores, or even putting them into camps.

Once the double standard was exposed, it became visible everywhere. The Bidens got away with selling White House access because of their last name, while Trump was relentlessly prosecuted for made-up crimes because of his. Peaceful pro-life protesters were dragged to prison while abortion supporters got away with firebombing pregnancy clinics. Ukrainian oligarchs got billions while we watched the buying power of each paycheck shrink. Our government seemed more interested in caring for citizens of other countries who broke our laws than in looking after its own. Our president was more interested in apologizing for using the term “illegal” to describe Laken Riley’s murderer than he was in apologizing to Riley’s family for inviting her killer across the border. Our speech was muzzled as a “threat to democracy” while partisans gleefully dismantled our republic.

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans told Trafalgar Group pollsters in 2022 that they felt they were living under a two-tiered justice system. 

If Covid brought the double standard into focus, the racial turmoil of 2020 confirmed leftists’ belief that it was a good thing. Americans were given different rules to live by, depending on the color of their skin. White Americans were expected to engage in public spectacles of guilt and self-hatred for their own inherent racism, examine their white fragility, pay “reparations” to their black friends, and accept fault for all of society’s ills. Black Americans were encouraged to celebrate their “black pride” and demand preferential treatment. The Smithsonian released an infographic saying traits like being “polite” or on time were hallmarks of “whiteness,” with the overly racist implication that black Americans should not be expected to do either. Hiring quotas were installed to reflect the principle that black and white people should be treated differently. 

The ideology represented by the shorthand “DEI” turned this discrimination into a $9 billion industry. DEI didn’t just institutionalize racial discrimination, it also implemented discrimination based on sexual preferences. While white guys got blamed for society’s faults, white guys who dressed up as women got special victim status and Bud Light brand deals!

Americans who still believed God created each man and woman with equally valuable souls were offended at the creation of artificial hierarchies that turned true equality on its head, doling out special privileges based on a person’s race, politics, or sexuality. As institutions — from media to academia to government — led the way in imposing those hierarchies, Americans stopped trusting them. 

Like Trump’s uncovering of deep-rooted political divisions in 2016, that loss of trust was as necessary as it was uncomfortable. It almost certainly played a role in Gen Z’s rightward swing. It was a huge step in shrinking the power of the leftist-dominated corporate press, which beclowned itself by uncritically repeating the government’s talking points about masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and Covid’s origins. And it laid the foundations for Americans, after four years of the Biden regime, to embrace Trump’s swamp-draining attitude more enthusiastically than ever.

The years of Covid paranoia and power-grabbing were an experiment in trusting The System, and whether Americans accepted or rejected it revealed as much about them as the 2016 election did. But it also revealed a lot about The System — and all the institutions of power that comprise it — to Americans. 

They realized the system wasn’t going to save them. They were going to have to do it themselves.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/12/covid-taught-americans-to-stop-trusting-a-government-that-puts-them-last/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) obtained evidence in the early days of the pandemic that convinced it that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory, Die Zeit and Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) newspapers reported on Wednesday. Berlin decided to keep the conclusion secret out of fear of a possible mistake and political fallout, the media outlets said, citing their own investigation.

The BND dispatched a team of specialists to investigate the origins of the virus in the early weeks of 2020, the report said. They focused on Chinese government agencies and scientific institutions, including the Wuhan laboratory, where they reportedly discovered documents the German media describe as “fascinating and explosive.”

The German intelligence agency’s findings reportedly included data on experiments with coronaviruses, as well as a series of unpublished studies from 2019 to 2020, including those dealing with effects of coronaviruses on the human brain.

“The material suggests that an unusually large amount of knowledge about the supposedly novel virus was available in Wuhan at an unusually early stage,” Die Zeit reported.

The materials were reportedly evaluated by a team of BND analysts led by a virologist. The team cross-referenced the data with publicly available studies and materials obtained from other nations and concluded “with 80 to 95% certainty” that Covid “likely originated in a Chinese laboratory.” The BND reportedly believed that the outbreak was caused by an accident stemming from lax safety rules in the Wuhan lab.

The results were presented to former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, but it was skeptical and decided not to share the information with anyone, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the German parliament, according to the media. Berlin was reportedly afraid of potential complications in relations with Beijing and Washington.

The government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which succeeded Merkel’s, also reportedly did not find the BND conclusions convincing enough and initially decided to keep them under wraps. It was only in late 2024 that the BND was allowed to share its findings with the CIA and a carefully selected group of scientists, according to the outlets.

The CIA said in January 2025 it believed “with low confidence” that Covid-19 likely originated in a lab. The Chinese government has repeatedly rejected the lab-leak theory. Another major theory suggests that Covid-19 emerged from a natural source, specifically through zoonotic transmission from animals to humans.

Following SZ’s and Die Zeit’s inquiry, Berlin said it would share the BND findings with the German parliament and the WHO and release some materials related to the scientific assessment of the agency’s conclusions to the public at some point in the future.

https://www.rt.com/news/614106-covid-lab-leak-germany/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

WERE THE GERMANS STOPPED BY THE US TO RELEASE THEIR FINDINGS OR DID THEY FIND THAT THE USA WAS THE CULPRIT AND AVOIDED CONTROVERSY?....

Covid Tyrants Were Perpetrators, Not Victims

BY: JOSHUA MONNINGTON

Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no shortage of analysis personifying the virus as the villain. In a sense, it’s understandable: SARS-CoV-2 was the catalyst and the killer that drove much of the pandemic destruction. But painting public health leaders as innocent bystanders and Covid as the boogeyman who made people sick and locked down the economy, destroyed businesses, shuttered schools, censored speech, masked children, and suspended constitutional rights and sacred rituals is deceitful historical revisionism.

On Thursday, a Washington Post headline asserted that “Covid shut schools five years ago. Anxiety, learning loss and more linger.” On Monday, a PBS FRONTLINE headline heralded “A Look Back at How the COVID-19 Pandemic Disrupted the World.” Last week David Wallace-Wells wrote about “How Covid Remade America” in The New York Times. According to Wallace-Wells, “It” — that is, Covid — “broke our faith in public health,” “shackled the U.S. with debt,” “scarred children,” and “turned us into hyperindividualists.”

In other words, when the media, public health “experts,” and government officials aren’t blaming the woes of the pandemic on Trump’s “unscientific” response, the unmasked, or vaccine skeptics, they’re blaming Covid, as if the virus were the only entity with any real agency during the pandemic years.

But Covid didn’t order lockdowns and issue stay-at-home orders. Covid didn’t mandate masks and vaccines. Covid didn’t close schools. Government officials did that, and, yes, they actually had agency and alternatives to Covid tyranny.

As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean noted in Intelligencer, “there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic.” They went on to cite 50 studies indicating that the lockdowns did little to reduce Covid mortality. An examination of state Covid orders by two Princeton professors does not show a correlation between stay-at-home order duration and Covid deaths. Sweden’s no-lockdown approach led to an excess mortality rate of 4.4 percent during peak pandemic years, data shows — the rate in the United States was more than double that number. As Nocera and McLean observe, “It is not unreasonable to conclude from the available data that the lockdowns led to more overall deaths in the U.S. than a policy that resembled Sweden’s would have.”

Furthermore, the decision leaders made to put the nation under house arrest wasn’t just ineffective and anti-constitutional; “shelter-in-place” orders had devastating societal consequences. To summarize briefly, lockdowns “increased poverty and wealth disparities, spurred a dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety and depression, contributed to a surge in fatal drug overdoses, and led to devastating learning losses in schoolchildren, who have yet to recover, according to scientific studies,” according to reporting by the Boston Globe. “As of last spring, the average American student remained half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading.”

Despite the lockdowns’ disastrous consequences, it’s common for the media to bemoan Americans’ diminishing trust in “science” and public health guidance — as if the virus itself is responsible.

But Covid didn’t break “our faith in public health;” public officials did that. Covid just helped them do it by giving them an opportunity to display their narcissistic megalomania. They could have respected and upheld the constitutional freedoms and principles that have long served as the backbone of our republic, but they did the opposite. In addition to instituting indefinite lockdowns, the “experts” descended monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily with new pronouncements from on high. Cosplaying as Moses on Mount Sinai, they proclaimed their health commandments: masking between bites, arrows on grocery store floors, the made-up six feet of “social” distancing. Unlike Moses, they mustered no signs of divine origin for their edicts — no thunder, no fiery mountain, no inscribed tablets of stone.

Government officials, particularly those on the left, melded Covid guidelines into a new, legalistic morality. Those who followed (or virtue-signaled their attempt at following) the rules were deemed “loving.” They kept their masks on as they walked to the restaurant table, avoided “large” gatherings, and got vaccinated — and then boosted, again, and again, and again. Political and institutional leaders, along with the media, vilified anyone who failed to abide by their ever-changing guidelines and essentially accused those who opposed the guidelines of murdering elderly people.

Lacking the willpower and the ability to enforce social-distancing, shelter-in-place, and masking requirements in all places at all times, Covid tyrants manipulated and intimidated businesses, schools, and churches into cramming down compliance on their fellow citizens. Legacy media outlets faithfully fanned the flames of fear and hysteria while scanning the horizon for minor Covid infractions, eager to pounce and destroy the reputations of those who violated the new morality. Unsurprisingly, Americans have not responded by expressing credulous faith in the public health “expert” class (or the corporate media).

When it comes to Americans and “science,” a Wall Street Journal headline from November of last year is representative of the media narrative: “How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics.” The subhead warns that “officials worry they won’t have ample clout for the next crisis.” Given how badly they failed during the last pandemic, that shouldn’t be a surprise. But the bigger issue with the framing is that Americans’ lack of confidence in public health officials — or even in scientists — does not equal lack of confidence in science. The “experts” are not “the science,” contrary to Anthony Fauci’s infamously ridiculous claim.

“Science” can refer to a body of established knowledge, but the “knowledge” Fauci and his followers were peddling wasn’t based on a systematic study of physical reality guided by scientific principles. Instead, all too often, they just made it up — on lockdowns, masking, and vaccines stopping transmission of the virus, to give a few examples. Yet politicians and officials at the national and local level became instant celebrities, appearing behind podiums and on nightly television, unmasked and uncensored, because they had something significant to say: no weddings, no funerals, no saying goodbye to loved ones who would soon be gone forever. What they had to say was significant, however, because of how much damage it would cause, not because it was true, and Americans are still paying the price five years later.

The Covid “experts” — whether politicians, public health officials, scientists, or local leaders — weren’t victims of the virus. They chose the unscientific tyranny of lockdowns, mandates, and petty, ineffective, legalistic rules, and they didn’t have to. If these tyrants really want to regain the trust of the American people, they should start by refusing to embrace totalitarianism the next time anti-liberty constituents and the media clamor for them to turn the republic into a police state.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/14/covid-tyrants-were-perpetrators-not-victims/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.