I recently had the pleasure of speaking again with Bretigne Shaffer on her What Then Must We Do? podcast, this time to discuss why authoritarianism is not the solution to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is a brief overview of topics we covered:
- Why the government should not have a role in dictating, for example, whose labors are “essential” versus “non-essential”
- How the authoritarian “lockdown” measures bode ill for the future of humanity
- Why we need to be listening to experts other than just those whose expertise is with infectious diseases
- How lockdown advocates ignore the harms of the measures they favor
- How the mainstream media aren’t talking about the harms of lockdown measures
- How the media serve the function of manufacturing consent for harmful policies by doing policy advocacy rather than journalism
- Why there is reason for optimism that the masses are awakening to how they are being lied to by the government and mainstream media: awareness of the phenomenon known as natural herd immunity and how antibodies do not equal immunity
- Why centralized decision-making is not a solution to COVID-19 (or economic planning or vaccinations)
- How no politician has the requisite knowledge to be able to reasonably make decisions on behalf of every other individual in the population
- What is it going to take to awaken the masses to the reality that these clueless politicians have no business dictating to us what our behaviors should be?
- What a sensible policy response to COVID-19 would have looked like versus the lockdown measures that were implemented
- The shifted justification for the lockdown measures
- Why there needs to be a paradigm shift away from the view that viruses and bacteria are our enemy that need to be eradicated toward the goal of establishing symbiosis with nature and balance in our environment
- Why certain approaches to disease control in modern medicine are extremely narrow-minded and shortsighted
- How vaccination has opportunity costs that must be (but aren’t) taken into consideration
- How the lockdown policies cause massive harms and have opportunity costs that policymakers refuse to consider
- How Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s executive lockdown orders were ruled unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court
- Why medical licensing is a problem and how some influential policymakers view the role of doctors not as practicing medicine but fulfilling an administrative role for the state
- How there was a mainstream media blackout over the Michigan Supreme Court’s overruling of Whitmer’s lockdown orders
- How news consumers can evaluate information to be able to determine the truth for themselves rather than relying on others to tell them what to think
- Why journalists need to do a better job to empower news consumers with the knowledge they need
- Why there is a huge opportunity right now for independent journalists, and how we can all be citizen journalists
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