This form of cognitive dissonance faces almost the entire population of the country with respect to lockdown. For the actual decision-makers, such as Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, admitting that lockdown was a mistake would be intolerable because it would mean also admitting to themselves that they made probably the biggest unforced error in peacetime history and are therefore not half as clever as they purport to be. For the hoi polloi, on the other hand, it would mean admitting to themselves that they were gullible and foolish, and in a moment of crisis simply decided to follow the herd – which, again, would hardly be a flattering self-portrait. Holding in one’s mind the notion that lockdown was a mistake is, in other words, irreconcilable with the notion that one went along with it and is an intelligent, thoughtful, rational actor. Nobody wants to experience the psychological consequences of trying to reconcile those notions, and they will therefore continue to avoid doing so.
– Dr David McGrogan writing about ‘Why there will never be a reckoning for Lockdown’.
I’m quite happy to acknowledge that I went along with lockdown without resisting, and in so doing may well have been a fool. I believed COVID was a serious threat, worth taking seriously. The Spanish Flu killed millions. It wasn’t credible to me that COVID was seen as being quite as deadly as it was portrayed to be right away, without evidence, but not knowing exactly how serious it was it seemed pretty sensible to me for those who could to work from home and avoid unnecessary travel, reduce shopping trips to one per week etc. Masks too seemed reasonable – unless the evidence showed them to be ineffective. The usual groupthink that develops in most situations was inevitably going to develop in this situation, and it should have been the role of the media to question how effective the measures were, how necessary.
But our media are now interested in scare stories. The Irish Times, today, is running a scare story about “poisonous” spiders (they mean venomous), a species that has been spreading for decades without any serious impacts. Certainly not worthy of serious attention, even during silly season. The journalists are incompetent, perhaps they always were to some degree but they had editors who pushed them to go back to the source with critical questions, and copy editors that corrected the most egregious errors of misuse of the language. We live in a time when all those who pushed, question, argued have been sacked or “retired” and credulity is the standard of the day, all prognostications of doom gratefully received by journalists straight out of college, colleges which too reward conformance over questioning, present tick-box answers to questions lifted from the textbook, tick-box journalists in a world of tick-box politicians and tick-box “scientists” who glory in their overeducated confidence that they can answer any question, but don’t really understand the reasoning behind the “Science” they have elevated to a religion.
It did, long before any lockdowns or mask mandates. The BMJ published the results of research in early 2020 that came to the conclusion that masks were at best ineffective and at worst, counter productive. The mask mandate was in defiance of the evidence.
I’m not sure “the hoi pollo just went with the herd” when the police were arresting people. It wasn’t like masking and vaccines were a fad like acid-washed jeans or planking. It was “do this one else” for most of the s with else ranging from being shunned by polite society to the rear of watching one’s family die to the police putting cuffs on folks.
Except it was the plebs that were being harassed by coppers while they were going about their lawful business along with being threatened with crippling fines and other sanctions for merely trying to get on with their normal day-to-day lives.
All very well to say that “the populace behaved like sheep”, but they were being corralled by wolves in police uniforms.
Sure, not everyone among the populace was against lockdowns, there were plenty of the usual idiots (who saw it as a way of bankrupting and bringing down the government so they could institute their Communist utopia).
There were others who swallowed the Fergusson fiction of “Report 9” hook, line and sinker, who genuinely believed that following the science would save granny and not doing so would kill millions. At best they were gullible, at worst they acted as Judas Goats for the recalcitrant.
I don’t blame the populace for behaving as they did, I blame the government and it’s advisors for creating a culture of fear where it became inevitable.
I think most people did not need to be threatened by the Old Bill, given how many dirty looks I got for being maskless.
@John Galt
I don’t blame the populace for behaving as they did, I blame the government and it’s advisors for creating a culture of fear where it became inevitable.
As I said elsewhere, why does that surprise anyone? The scorpion stings the fox swimming across the river. That is their nature. To expect politicians of all people to put other people’s interest before their own is the victory of hope over experience.
No, who I blame are the press and especially the big tech companies. How exactly are all the “hoi polloi”[*] supposed to judge the claims of competing scientists if the ones who disagree with the party line are silenced? I think the public’s response has been really quite disappointing. It is a sign of the utter degradation of civics and self reliance that freedoms are tossed aside like garbage. But ultimately it is the appalling press, and the even worse big tech companies that are really to blame.
[*] the grammar pedant in me cannot resist pointing out that ‘the hoi polloi’ has a horrible redundancy in it since “hoi” here is Greek definite article and so preceding it with “the” is very distracting to me and pedants like me. Of course there is an argument to be made that “hoi polloi” has become an English substantive in its own right, irrespective of its etymology, and so should indeed take an article. Regardless, I find the phrase rather bothersome.
We were not told the truth, by the Government, by SAGE (Sunak claims that the minutes of their meetings were edited to deceive Ministers) and by the MSM.
This was deliberate.
Outside the readership of sites like this one how many people do you know who could summarise the ideas of the Great Barrington Declaration; how many have even heard of it?
The police did not make people stand outside for 5 minutes banging saucepans. They didn’t make it mandatory to stick children’s drawings of rainbows in windows. People did all that and more themselves and hissed like little snakes at anyone who failed to join in.
Once it became obvious that we weren’t all going to fall dead in the street, despite the unhelpful videos from China being widely circulated on social media, a lot of people were just fine with the idea of taking a few months off work and still getting paid. Then after a short period of actually having to get out of bed and go into the office a second lockdown, still furloughed, seemed rather attractive.
Slightly O/T but I wonder if this co-opting of the rainbow symbol to the nhs was in part responsible for the endless “re-drafting” of the original pride flag.
They seem to have vanished down the memory hole 🙁
I still meet people who claim hundreds or even thousands died because the government locked down too late in 2020.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the opposition to the government from Labour, Liberals, Greens, SNP etc etc all wanted lockdowns to be started earlier, to be more draconian and to end later if at all. This view was hardly challenged by any MSM.
I don’t know what political ghetto you live in, but I never saw any of that happening here. Most people generally appreciate the NHS, but that’s about it. Those with actual experience tend to be mixed.
Too many people have relatives who’ve had to wait years for treatment or whose cancer diagnosis came too late to do anything that made a difference.
This idea that the NHS is venerated is as much an Islington myth as anything else (presumably amongst those who don’t need it or go private), little more than Soviet style propaganda from the BBC organ.
I live in an old-fashioned and highly patriotic south coast town. Armed Forces Day and Remembrance Sunday are a very big deal, ideologically we’re a long way from Islington.
I honestly don’t think that around 30 people banging and clapping in my street were political animals. They just believe everything they’re told by the bbc.
There were plenty of people in my area banging saucepans and clapping away for a solid 5 minutes or so on NHS devotion nights. I found it rather surreal, and it reminded me of how utterly herd-like the general population is.
Where I live it was virtually every house in our street for a brief period. I don’t like partaking in such public displays so I timed walking the dog to coincide. That allowed me to see a much wider area. And I could see it was pretty common for a while but it subsided gradually. At the end it was still going on albeit maybe 50% of the strength at it’s height.
FYI, my ward flips between Conservative and Liberal. A Labour/Liberal ward abuts and it was no different there.
To admit one has made a terrible mistake is difficult – and the lockdown was indeed a terrible mistake, it did not “save lives” quite the contrary.
When I see the clownish behaviour of Mr Johnson (for example still supporting “New Zero”, or pretending that the NHS and the Metropolitan Police are doing wonderfully well, or answering questions about impending economic collapse by saying something about “broadband”) I am reminded of a terrible mistake that I made – supporting this man to be leader of the Conservative Party in 2019.
“How could I have been so stupid?” is an unpleasant thought – and the mental evasions of “well I did not really support him” or “perhaps, on balance, he was not so bad” are tempting.
Tempting but untrue – as I did support Mr Johnson in 2019, very strongly (even repeating the line about his “libertarian instincts”), and he proved to be a terrible Prime Minister.
It is not “just” the disaster of the Covid response (the lockdown and all the rest of it – including the demented clapping and banging of pots in strange NHS worship rituals), it is the botched independence from the European Union (leaving Northern Ireland under the E.U. having sworn he would not do that, betraying British fishermen, failing to get rid of any major E.U. policy…), the failure to control the borders of the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom could have left the European Convention on Human Rights at any time – but instead Mr Johnson broke his word to control migration into this land, even things such as “HS2” – the vast money pit (what is now – over a 100 Billion Pounds?) that Mr Johnson was supposed to stop.
How could I have been so stupid as to support this man?
I so wanted a pro liberty Prime Minister that I projected what I wanted on someone who was nothing of the kind. Someone, Mr Johnson, who pretended to be a man of individual liberty like Prince Rupert – but had the faith in state control (and state institutions) of Thomas and Oliver Cromwell.
I cannot even pretend that I was not warned – everyone from ex employers of Mr Johnson, to the local Conservative office in Kettering warned “he is more of a libertine than a libertarian”.
I cannot even pretend that I was not warned – everyone from ex employers of Mr Johnson, to the local Conservative office in Kettering warned “he is more of a libertine than a libertarian”.
The defining characteristic of Mr. Johnson is that he is at his core dishonest. He will say anything that suits him at the time.
Even his unkempt hairstyle is dishonest. There are enough stories of him deliberately ruffling his hair.
But he has charisma. I can’t see that charisma but it must exist for so many people to be willing to overlook his fundamental dishonesty.
And his rhetorical style of a few florid phrases interspersed with frequent ‘er’ and ‘um’ has fooled a lot of people.
Why, or how? I don’t know; I cannot see any charm or ability in the man. I despise him and have done so for years.
Sadly I saw it happen several time (South Kensington).
“The defining characteristic of Mr. Johnson is that he is at his core dishonest. He will say anything that suits him at the time.”
Apologising to a bunch of greens for Britain starting the industrial revolution for instance. Industrial strength stupidity but fine for the audience that he was addressing at the time.
Regarding the failure of the MSM to ask any hard questions over lockdown. How did we arrive at a situation where the whole of the media are in lockstep just parrotting the views of the establishment?
I would like very much to know who exactly Mr. McGrogan spends his time with:
It comes up in conversation 3-4 times per week, in my experience. I also know at least 8 people who HAVE GOTTEN COVID just in the last couple of months (including my wife). I also know probably 50 people who will likely never stop thinking/talking about it if I live to be 100 years old. And I doubt that my experience is unusual.
Trump was initially against the lockdowns. Didn’t Trump and Johnson flip around the same time when all hell broke loose in Italy and Spain, and when the half baked London Imperial College modeling came out.
The Brownstone Institute (don’t know anything about them) claim that Birx, et al, told Trump that SARS-2 was a frankenvirus.
My problem with this hypothesis is that why would Trump run cover for them in 2022, unless Wuhan was a known secret, and a lot of governments were implicated. But still why would Trump not blow the whistle?
Exasperated – President Trump never really did fully flip, the bureaucracy worked round him – and he refused to impose lockdowns on States (such as South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming…) who refused to have lockdowns.
Where President Trump can be faulted is his failure to denounce the bureaucracy, his failure to really oppose them from the start.
And that is true of other things as well as Covid.
The difference between President Trump and Prime Minister Johnson is that President Trump did not seem to know how to fight the bureaucracy – and Prime Minister Johnson sold his soul to them, even parroting the “Build Back Better” international slogan, “Net Zero” and all the rest of it.
I am not a forgiving man (it is one of my faults – a character flaw) – but even a forgiving person could not forgive all this.
As for President Trump – he did say that he thought the virus was artificially produced in Wuhan, and the media mocked him for that (viciously).
And President Trump suggested Early Treatments that would have saved many lives (by the wonders of the internet I have talked with some of the medical doctors who suggested these treatments to President Trump – and used them themselves, saving thousands of lives) – and the media (and the bureaucracy) said he wanted to inject people with bleach – the medical bureaucracy (and the media – and Social Media companies) lied, and people, vast numbers of people, died.
Trump closed the border to China on the same day as the Italian gov. did, and was called a racist for it by the people who blamed him later on for not imposing a nationwide lockdown and mask mandate.
Trump could not flip around on lockdowns, because he does not have the constitutional authority to impose them (I believe).
Boris “flipped around” when all hell broke loose IN BRITAIN, not in Italy or Spain. He is a silly English twit who thought that things would be different in Britain, until it was clear to anybody with a functional brain that they weren’t.
Once Boris “flipped around”, it was too late for him to think clearly about what to do. Time was short.
Yes, I’ll rephrase, my recollection is that he did not support lockdowns and then went along with them reluctantly.
OK, but i don’t even know whether Trump had the authority to veto lockdowns. Although Dr Brix’s book seems to imply that he did.
I myself would not have vetoed the lockdowns: let the Governors decide, and let them take the praise or blame for it.
I don’t think that it is the responsibility of POTUS to prevent the people of a US state from suffering the consequences of electing an insane Governor.
McGrogan may be rating these people too low in one sense, too high in another. Rishi has already gone off script. Boris Johnson is hardly ‘above’ doing so. Dominic may be too proud – or there again, now his grudges are vented, he may have time to think. (McGrogan may be right about Hancock but who cares.)
The same dichotomy applies to many of the hoi polloi. On the one hand, ordinary people feel less bound by a past of having obeyed lockdown laws than are those who wrote those laws. Compared to the number of Germans who managed to “remember” not being keen on killing Jews, or not even knowing about it, it is trivial for many British people to remember that they obeyed the lockdown laws but had doubts about their wisdom. And given that there were Germans who did actually manage to feel sorry about doing nothing (or worse than that), by comparison I think many a Briton may be able to bear remembering falling for it back then even as they know better now.
Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan. For good reasons and bad, people are willing to distance themselves from a policy that has failed.
Mass Formation Psychosis was Dr Drew’s topic this evening.
BTW had anyone heard that, in a Southwest Airlines cockpit, at least one of the pilots is unvaccinated. I have to listen again to make sure I heard that right. Or, maybe, I am the only one who was in the dark.
https://drdrew.com/2022/dr-robert-malone-inventor-of-mrna-vaccines-speaks-live-w-dr-kelly-victory-ask-dr-drew/
Good lord! Appalling if true! Please confirm either way.
See the link to Dr. Drew’s podcast above. The discussion on pilots begins at @48 min, specific info on Southwest Airlines is at @54 minutes.
Maybe we can find more confirmation.
I am sure a “President Joseph “Joe” Biden” would have pretended to have the Constitutional power to impose nation-wide lockdowns.
And the entire establishment would have supported “the Big Guy” – or whoever controls this puppet.
“You are talking about Constitutional niceties – you MURDEREING FASCISTS!” the media would have said, with no sense of irony (it is, of course, Fascists, supporters of “Stakeholder Capitalism” as Dr Schwab and the international establishment calls the Corporate State, who reject “Constitutional niceties” and support unlimited state power).
The lockdowns did not save lives – but that was never the point. The point was to see how far the establishment could go – what the population could be conditioned to accept.
As Donald John Trump once said, “they are not really after me, they are after you – I am just in the way”.
If only he had been “in the way” rather more.
With President Trump I am reminded of a man pulling leavers – and finding, to his horror, that they were not connected to anything.
Senator Conkling warned of this – way back in the 19th century. The bureaucracy, if created and allowed to grow, would eventually take over – making the elected leaders little more than a figurehead.
A President, with the consent of the Senate, must appoint staff he or she can trust, and dismiss people he does not trust – especially in important sections of the government.
And a President must have the moral courage to do that – for example when President Trump said (almost with pride) that he did not know Bill Barr before appointing him Attorney General, my heart sank.
Someone you know and trust may betray you – but they also might not betray you. Someone you do not even know will certainly betray you, as soon as the establishment tell them to. Sometimes without even been told to.
I remember watching an American bureaucrat being interviewed for a documentary. The man gloated that when President Trump ordered that Early Treatment be made available for people suffering from Covid 19, the bureaucrat and his colleagues so rewrote the order that the treatments could only provided after someone was hospitalised – i.e. when it was TOO LATE.
I repeat, the bureaucrat gloated about this, he was not ashamed – not at all. Even his implied statement that Early Treatment would not have worked anyway was done half-heartedly (he did not really care if Early Treatment would work or not).
They have no conscience – or they have so crushed their inner voice of conscience that they act as if they had no conscience.
If very large numbers of people do not die, then you do not have the justification to do the things (such as lockdowns) that you want to do for other reasons.
Stand by for de facto Climate lockdowns – the dress rehearsals have already taken place.
My opinion: I think one of the reasons he had difficulty finding loyal personnel is that many of the potential appointees, the ones with gravitas, declined to be associated with Trump. It would be a career killer. Since he was an outsider, he didn’t come with a team of cabinet ready candidates, like maybe a governor and senator would.
Unfortunately, I don’t think he expected the government bureaucrats to be as corrupted and anti-American as they are.
“I don’t know what political ghetto you live in, but I never saw any of that happening here.”
Yes it happened here, too. There were even attempts by some friends of mine to guilt-trip me for refusing to taking part.
But tbf I do live in Sturgeon’s Scottish Socialist Republic, so anything’s possible…
Consider what the pygmies of the Bureaucracy did to General Kelly, the sneaky, dirty, underhanded tricks. That was a pretty clear warning.
Look at the unprincipled shill, Liz Cheney. I get why she hates Trump, but if she didn’t want to appear the tool, she could have demanded a fair hearing, a level playing field, demanded that all the evidence, including exculpatory, be presented, she could have decried the sneaky, underhanded leaks.
Exasperated – you have spoken the truth and spoken it well.
Just found this substack article thanks to Instapundit.
I’ll add a few comments later.
A tactic they are continuing now with many good lawyers who say they would love to defend Donald Trump from the bogus Mara largo raid (& Jan 6th committee hearing) but won’t for fear of “career suicide”. Alan Dershowitz says he has heard as much from many lawyer acquaintances of his who fear being “Dershowitzed” an apparently new term for being “cancelled” (both career wise and socially) because of any perceived support of Donald Trump.
“I am sure a “President Joseph “Joe” Biden” would have pretended to have the Constitutional power to impose nation-wide lockdowns.
And the entire establishment would have supported “the Big Guy” – or whoever controls this puppet.”
Yes. Like a federal judge pretended he had the authority to change a presidential order with a built in expiration date (DACA) that was “cancelled” (Trump elected not to keep renewing it) by arguing that he (Trump) hadn’t articulated a good enough reason in the judges’ judgement to not keep extending it indefinitely. He the judge just pretended he had that authority to backed up by the media until he effectively he did/does.
Talk about your cognitive dissonance. Holy cow! Supposedly Joe “Boomerang” Biden is denying his speech last might, you know the one with the Goebbels/colorized Riefenstahl tone.
Was it deliberate or the greatest f’-up in US political history. Nobody’s ruling out both.