Just a few days back, I was lunching with a friend. Over a plate of meatballs and spaghetti, he remarked how radically his professional direction and political orientation had changed over the years 2020 to 2022, the Covid ‘pandemic’ era.
He went on to say, “There are people I once trusted and respected who I can no longer trust and respect; and there are people I once distrusted who I have learned to respect.”
I know what he meant – and there are a great many others who today could say much the same of their own experiences, sharpened (or shattered) by the Covid time.
People who once eyed one another across great divides – measured by politics or philosophy, culture or religion, much education or little, profession or trade – have been drawn unexpectedly together by the force of events revolutionary in character.
There should be no need to restate these but, to provide my present remarks with a firmer context, I’ll quote an earlier summation of the crisis as I saw it:
…the mass destruction of Australian small business; the vast increase in the debt incurred by Federal and State governments; de facto compulsory vaccination with an experimental drug; the refusal of effective early treatments to those infected by the Wuhan virus; the abandonment of national health decision-making to an unelected, globalist health bureaucracy; the failure of the federal government to exercise its responsibility for quarantine and to uphold the free movement of our people across state borders; and, finally, and most dishonestly, enabling, via its vaccine certification system, the imposition of vaccine passports by the State and Territory governments.
As it happened, the “imposition of vaccine passports” within Australia broke down in practice. We cannot, however, be confident that, with the same political class in power today that gave us the Covid ‘crisis’ back then, another emergency of whatever kind might not be used to enforce similar measures of social control.
So it was late last year (November 18 – 19), that I attended in Sydney the inaugural conference of Australians for Science and Freedom – an initiative whose first movers were a Melbourne GP, Dr Arief Farid, and a Sydney Professor of Economics (UNSW), Gigi Foster.
Hellbound and Down 