2022 Was the Year the COVID Mandates Collapsed. Let 2023 Be the Year of Reckoning.
Curt
by Michael P Senger
Looking back over the course of 2022, it’s hard to believe just how rapidly the world has changed. At the start of year, most liberal cities and countries were still enforcing draconian vaccine pass systems. Some of the most fanatical governments, such as those in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, were still imposing strict lockdowns and movement restrictions. Mask mandates were ubiquitous. Countless thousands of protesters were pouring out into the streets on an almost daily basis in cities across Europe, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere to demand an end to the ceaseless insanity.
The people of Amsterdam begin the new year in defiance of their government’s ban on protests, with tens of thousands taking to the streets in a massive protest against ongoing lockdowns, vaccine passes and COVID tyranny despite a vaccination rate over 75%.pic.twitter.com/qvYAJTDb9b
Incredible demonstration in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, as the French take to the streets for a 30th consecutive week of protests against vaccine passes and COVID tyranny.pic.twitter.com/2Djh1ajqa3
Incredible speech from Brian Peckford, last living signer of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, at the Freedom Convoy protest in Victoria, British Columbia.https://t.co/lbXNSvTXU9
Canadians set off fireworks last night as the truck convoy passed in protest against vaccine mandates and COVID restrictions. At over 70km long, Canada’s convoy shatters the prior world record for longest truck convoy ever recorded.https://t.co/ujPYScL2Cw
In Naples, Italy, the mayor cited COVID to announce a ban on fireworks for a second straight New Year’s Eve. This was the response from citizens.pic.twitter.com/duu7Jkb7yK
Then, just like that, around February and March, the mandates collapsed. One by one, governments began copying each other, rolling back their public health orders almost as quickly as they’d first implemented lockdowns back in spring 2020.
The Omicron variant gave them a cop-out, but with “cases” at all-time highs, governments had no real scientific reason to roll back the mandates when they did. At some level, the decision was simply made that popular resentment toward these policies could no longer be contained. They decided the best strategy, politically, was to essentially “split” from the crime scene—roll back the mandates in the blink of an eye, pretend nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened, and let the public gradually forget and move on.
Part of that gaslighting campaign meant ramping up censorship across media platforms even as the restrictions and mandates were being rolled back. I, personally, became a target of that censorship campaign, and was banned for most of the year from Twitter—by far my largest platform—with the COVID cabal apparently hoping that by silencing the most knowledgeable anti-lockdown voices, the debate surrounding the provenance of these policies would gradually be drowned out and die off.
That strategy was somewhat effective. With the end of the restrictions, the debate surrounding COVID policies received less attention. Many have, quite sensibly, moved on and tried to reclaim normal lives. The COVID debate did, to some degree, get drowned out.
But interest in the subject hasn’t waned. The response to COVID was no ordinary policy failure. An entire generation of children and young people was robbed of some of their brightest years.
