I have a friend I’ve known since the summer of 2021. She lives in a little cabin in the woods of northern Vermont with no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no phone line, and no internet (other than a very weak cell signal). She has some small solar panels mounted to the side of of her cabin that allow her to charge her iPhone, iPad, and some cordless power tools. She heats with wood and hauls drinking water from a spring-fed pump log a few hundred yards away. She has a little outhouse a few feet from the cabin. She does laundry in tubs of rain water collected in 55 gallon drums from roof runoff.
All in all, a rather rustic lifestyle, somewhat isolated from the world, but not all that unusual for northern New England. After I’d known her a while, she told me that her isolation got worse the year before, when she had what she calls a “mental break”. She suddenly became even more fearful of people, to the point where she almost never drove her car any more, was terrified of going to her usual weekly drumming circle, and almost complete stopped visiting friends in the nearby largish town. Naturally, she took the two Pfizer clot shots that her doctor recommended when they became available in 2021.
I asked her when this “mental break” occurred. The answer: early March 2020. Ding ding ding! Remember what happened that month? We were suddenly and unexpectedly inundated with fear propaganda designed to terrify us about being around other other people, to regard other people as agents of death, to isolate ourselves at home, and to wear magical but useless talismans (face masks) to ward off the greatly exaggerated death threat.
I told my friend that I was pretty sure her “mental break” was caused by this fear porn. But she disagreed: the “break” had happened when she was driving home from a yoga retreat center in Virginia, where she’d spent the winter, and where she hadn’t listened to radio or watched TV.
But I remember what it was like that month. Even if you didn’t listen to mainstream media, you were surrounded by the fear exuded by other people. And as I mentioned earlier, my friend has an iPad, and I noticed that she used Apple News every morning to get “news” — which in the case of Apple News, is a censored, curated, and filtered version of “news” that completely eliminates any mention of ideas or facts that contradict the Scamdemic Narrative.
My friend still doesn’t really believe my theory about her “mental break”, and still thinks that masks work, and that lots of people were dying in hospitals of the Scary Virus (she didn’t know about the death-inducing, money-incentivizing hospital protocols). I’ve tried to talk to her about these things, but she has never really believed me, calling me a “conspiracy theorist” at one point, and never showing any curiosity about what really happened in the Scamdemic.
This same friend recently tried to do something about her isolation and loneliness by signing up for a one-week tour of Canada that someone she knew was organizing for other “golden years” people (my friend is 70). But the tour needed 15 people, and only four people signed up, so it was cancelled. My friend was in tears as she told me about this. The organizer told her he’d tried several times to get this tour off the ground in the last couple of years, but had failed each time, and was finally throwing in the towel. He said it was “Covid” wot dun it — people were just staying home now.
Back in my little town in central Vermont, I had high hopes that when the library where I volunteeer got a new, younger director last summer, maybe the library’s obsession with masks and sanitizing books would relax. But I was mistaken. The new director is just as enthusiastic about masks, and I’ve seen her whip one on her face when I walked into the library. At least the library doesn’t require masks any more, but there’s still a sign out front pleading with patrons to put one on. So I’ve gone back to only entering the building when it’s closed (one perk of being a volunteer); I just can’t face the mask madness after four years of it.
And then there’s my mother and my sisters, who believe every part of the Scamdemic Narrative and take every booster of the clot shot. At least my mother no longer wears a mask or requires me to take a rapid antigen test when I visit her, so that’s a little bit of progress.
And then there’s my real estate agent, who told me the day before my house’s first showing that he’d just gotten a clot shot booster and wasn’t feeling so great. I kept hoping and praying (even though I’m not religious) that he wouldn’t die suddenly and unexpectedly. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to have been harmed, and the house sold in less than 24 hours.
I really do think that the Scamdemic broke society at large, and not just the few people in these anecdotes. I’m not sure the damage will ever be completely undone in my lifetime (I’m 68), because little kids were subject to the same conditioning and propaganda as everyone else. It might take two or three generations to unwind the damage, in the unlikely event that our “leaders” don’t do the same stupid, harmful stuff again. But I could be wrong — I hope so.
You're so right, Mark, it really did break us. I use your letter to Sonata and your excellent calendar in my latest, where a deep conversation is going on: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/max-vax-madness. YT took it down, just to remind us it's not over, but it's up on Rumble.