Letter to the Covid Amnesty-Demanders – Why We Will Never Forget, Nor Let You

by Margaret Anna Alice

You want to know why so many people erupt when you say you “didn’t know,” you “were doing [your] best,” and “mistakes were made” so we should forget about it and move on?

 
Because WE knew, and when we told you, you called us selfish immoral science-denying far-right-wing–extremist anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists.

But we were the ones following the science, and you were the ones following the television. We’re batting a thousand, and your “experts” are zero for zero.

We were like the bystanders in The Birds frantically trying to warn the man standing in the puddle of gas not to throw down his match, only to be persistently ignored until he self-immolates.

And yet you’ll still listen to your priests and ridicule us for sounding evidence-based alarms when the next crisis is unfurled and they promise you it’s “different” this time. This time, it really is “novel”! So you’d better listen to them or else!

As Milton Mayer writes in the foreword to the 1966 printing of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45:

“Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes and dishes ever more exotic before we are able to swallow, let alone digest, those that were just before us.”

Con artists, narcissistic abusers, and politicians always try to hoover their targets back in with “words that scream for your submission” while “their logic ties you up and rapes you.”

And you lap it up every time, just as you’ve been conditioned to.

You panicked on command. You colluded. You volunteered for kapo duty.

The tyrants, philanthropaths, governments, departments, agencies, $cientists, propagandists, and demociders wanted to terrorize you into a fearful state of learned helplessness. They wanted you to ignore your gut. They wanted you to vilify, mock, and distrust the critical thinkers, the independent-minded, the truth-tellers. They wanted you to suffer. Because then it would trigger Sutton’s Paradox and you would beg for the solution. And that’s exactly what you did.

It’s called Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, and they ran us up and down the stages until as many of you complied with their authoritarianism as they could bamboozle, bribe, bully, and bludgeon into subservience.

Instead of blaming the ones abusing us, you sided with them against those of us who were exposing their lies and resisting totalitarianism.

 
And you still do. As Carl Sagan writes:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.”
―The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark

You wanted us fired, remember?

 
You wanted to deny us hospital care.

You wanted us to die.

But we didn’t want you fired.

We didn’t want to deny you hospital care.

We didn’t want you to die.

We were trying to save you from injury and death.

We were cautioning you not to rush over that experimental cliff.

But you joked about us dying.

You wanted to conform. You wanted to “do your bit.”

You believed the coercive messaging and $250-million and £184-million advertising campaigns.

 
You thought your pundits were right and we were stupid Deplorables for asking questions and doing research.

And when you finally realized you got it deadly wrong, you chalked it up to a coin flip instead of acknowledging your failure to recognize propaganda, seek out trustworthy sources, and critically assess information.

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