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The Bizarro-World Of The Forever Maskers

The Telegraph has a story about the ‘Zero Covid’ zealots refusing to re-enter society.

Not only that, but these forever maskers want everyone else masked up in perpetuity too. It’s a remarkable instance of the emergence of a new form of cult based on a surreal new ritual. And just for good measure, it seems that those leaning Left are most likely to be on board:

The claims of links to Covid circulating online amid the deadly chaos were not always proved beyond doubt, but in this climate of fear and confusion, a determined ‘Zero Covid’ community emerged. Co-opting a phrase that was originally an official public health policy, the ‘Zero Coviders’ believed they were watching a massacre in real time, and the maskless – especially those who were unvaccinated – were to blame. As governments relaxed the restrictions, they felt they needed to step up.

“I was like, ‘Okay, this is not right. This is f—–,’” says [Alyson] Hardwick, a second-year university student who does not have any underlying health conditions. The last time she ate indoors at a restaurant was in October 2022 for her 31st birthday. “I felt sketched out [uneasy],” she recalls. “I was leaving every place I was going inside without a mask, wondering, ‘Did I get it?’”

Hardwick began wearing a respirator mask – specialised, disposable facepieces called N95s or N99s which offer more comprehensive protection than a surgical mask – and spending most of her time alone.

She’s ostracised herself from other people and posts thousands of clips online and argues that it’s everyone else, not her, who is living in fear. “Denial is a fear response,” she insists.

Hardwick’s stance exemplifies the increasingly fraught Zero Covid movement – a citizen-led campaign across the Western world to keep the air clean. She is just one of thousands of geographically disparate people, many of whom are not immunocompromised, who are still living in their own self-imposed lockdowns, fearful of becoming one of the millions to suffer with serious long Covid symptoms, or anxious about transmitting the virus to someone less fortunate. Zero Covid has adherents across North America and Europe, including some in the UK, but followers from the US and Canada are the most visible online.

The charged movement to end ‘pandemic denialism’ has some high-profile advocates, including Left-wing US journalist Taylor Lorenz. “If ur [sic] not masking ur absolutely facilitating eugenics,” Lorenz posted to her 350,000 followers on X on December 6th.

“Refusing to mask during an ongoing pandemic is absolutely violent and it’s undeniably participating in social murder,” she said in another recent post, as well as calling out Leftist “super spreader” events. “You are actively *killing* and maiming people around you by intentionally spreading airborne disease during an active pandemic.” (Separately, she pilloried non-maskers for “raw-dogging the air and spewing ur disease laden breath all over ur elderly neighbours”.)

By 2022, the pandemic and the panicked measures were retreating into the past:

But the cautious, despite getting vaccinated and then boosted, couldn’t move on. Online communities became lifelines as in-person social circles frayed. Campaigners pushed ‘clean air’ as the next public-health frontier, and offered seatbelt analogies for masking: mildly inconvenient, obviously protective.

Masking was increasingly framed as an act of love, and it was overwhelmingly Left-wing groups which encouraged – even mandated – their continued use. Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac encouraged continued mask wearing. “I f—— hate the masks, but I wear them,” she said. “People give you dirty looks. I dare anybody to give me a dirty look. I would just say, ‘Hey, you know what? I’m Stevie Nicks.’”

That would presumably be the same Stevie Nicks who reportedly blew a hole through her nose from snorting cocaine. By 2023 mask use was largely discredited, but the Telegraph quotes a Mayo Clinic source:

“People who rebuilt their entire lives and recast their identities around reducing the risk of catching Covid to zero couldn’t deal with this,” one former ardent Zero Covider recalls, speaking to me on condition of anonymity.

“The movement devolved into a massive online circle-jerk where members blindly validate each other on taking disproportionate precautions.

One ardent proponent of masking says that’s the way he’ll spend the rest of his life:

“I don’t just, like, go out the way I used to,” says Evan Sachs, who is in his early 30s and lives in New York with his three cats. He always wears a mask outdoors.

“Sometimes it’s a bummer.” Not because masking is keeping him from living his life, he adds, “but because other people [selfishly] aren’t doing the ‘wearing your pants’ levels of easy things” to keep everyone safe. He runs a ‘bloc’ in the Washington Heights area of New York which distributes personal protective equipment (PPE) to less well-off communities. “I do not have Long Covid, thank goodness,” Sachs adds. “I am very, very lucky on that front.”

He doesn’t want to get it either. “I honestly think I would [mask forever],” he says.’

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Teen Marijuana Use ‘Remained Stable’ As Legalization Expands, Federal Health Officials Acknowledge

Teen marijuana use “remained stable” this year even as more states have enacted legalization, according to an annual federally funded survey

The Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey—supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and conducted every year for decades by the University of Michigan—examines substance use trends among 8th, 10th and 12th grade students. And the latest results add to a large body of evidence contradicting prohibitionist claims that state-level legalization would drive increases in underage cannabis usage.

The rate of past-year marijuana use for 12th graders was 25.7 percent, which is relatively consistent with recent years but at its lowest level since 1992. It was the same case with 10th graders, 15.6 percent of whom used marijuana in the last year. Among 8th grade students, 7.6 percent reported past-year cannabis consumption.

For past-month cannabis use, that rate was 17.1 percent for 12th graders, a slight uptick from the prior year but significantly lower than its record high of 37.1 percent in 1978 before any state had legalized cannabis for adult or medical use. For 10th grade students, the rate this past year was 9.4 percent, and for 8th grade it was 4 percent—consistent with recent years.

“We are encouraged that adolescent drug use remains relatively low and that so many teens choose not to use drugs at all,” NIDA Director Nora Volkow said in a press release. “It is critical to continue to monitor these trends closely to understand how we can continue to support teens in making healthy choices and target interventions where and when they are needed.”

The survey also found that students who reported past-month abstention from marijuana , alcohol and nicotine were “stable for all grades” (66 percent for 12th grade, 82 percent for 10th grade and 91 percent for 8th grade).

The survey also asked about the use of hemp-based cannabinoid products, including intoxicating compounds such as delta-8 THC. It found that 9 percent of 12th graders, 6 percent of 10th graders and 2 percent of 8th graders used products in that category in the past year.

This year’s MTF survey was based on data from 23,726 student surveys submitted from 270 public and private schools from February-June 2025.

To reform advocates, the results of the survey reinforce the idea that creating a regulatory framework for cannabis where licensed retailers must check IDs and implement other security mechanisms to prevent unlawful diversion is a far more effective policy than prohibition, with illicit suppliers whose products may be untested and where age-gating isn’t a strictly enforced regulation.

To that point, a separate federally funded study out of Canada that was released last month found that that youth marijuana use rates actually declined after the country legalized cannabis.

The study was released about three months after German officials released a separate report on their country’s experience with legalizing marijuana nationwide.

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Hunter Biden SHOCKS Democrat Establishment, Denounces Joe Biden’s 4 Years and Says America Should NOT Prioritize Illegal Immigrants

Hunter Biden – the embattled son of Joe Biden – delivered a blistering critique of illegal immigration during his marathon, unfiltered sit-down with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan on the popular “Shawn Ryan Show.”

What emerged was something no one in the Democrat establishment expected.

The interview landed like a political grenade inside Democrat circles because Hunter Biden openly contradicted the core immigration posture of his father’s administration.

While the Biden White House spent four years insisting the border was “secure,” Hunter acknowledged what millions of Americans have lived with: unchecked illegal immigration drains public resources and displaces priorities away from veterans and working citizens.

“We need a vibrant immigration,” Hunter said, “but we don’t want immigrants that are coming here illegally, draining us of resources and being prioritized above people that are actual literal heroes that are coming home, that are still recovering from 20 years of endless war or anybody else in our society, right?”

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Land of Confusion: The Great Reset in Motion

The global disruptions we have seen in recent years are frequently presented as a chaotic sequence of events: a ‘pandemic’, inflation, energy shortages and war. Little wonder that most people are confused. However, a structural analysis reveals a more deliberate controlled demolition of the 20th-century social contract.

We are witnessing a transition from a productive capitalist model, which required a healthy mass labour force, to what Yanis Varoufakis calls a techno-feudalist order.

The engine of this transition was a desperate financial stabilisation strategy carried out by means of a public health event. As identified by Professor Fabio Vighi, the global financial system reached a point of terminal instability in late 2019, evidenced by the collapse of the US repo market (where banks lend to each other).

By freezing the real economy through lockdowns, central banks performed massive liquidity injections to save the banking-finance tier. If that money had entered a functioning economy, it would have triggered hyper-inflation. By keeping the population at home, the elite performed a stealth bailout that preserved the dominance of the financial class by sacrificing the productive middle class.

However, a geopolitical reset also had to take place. For decades, Germany’s economy relied on three pillars: cheap Russian gas, high-tech exports to China and a US security umbrella. By late 2025, all three have been fractured. As Prof Michael Hudson notes, the ‘sabotage’ of the Nord Stream pipelines was a structural necessity for the Western financial elite.

If Germany continued to integrate with Russia and China, it would have created a power pole independent of the US dollar. The conflict in Ukraine served a purpose: it resulted in Germany replacing Russian pipeline gas and being forced into a massive build-out of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure and reliance on LNG from the US. Unlike pipeline gas, LNG must be super-cooled, shipped and re-gasified, a process that is inherently 3–4 times more expensive.

The result is that, in 2025, German industrial output is at its lowest since the 1990s. Heavy industries like BASF (chemicals) and ThyssenKrupp (steel) are relocating to the US or China. Meanwhile, Germany is pivoting from an industrial giant by betting on creating jobs in the likes of the green energy sector (including becoming a ‘hydrogen hub’), semiconductors and microelectronics, robotics and biotech and diverting its capital into a €150 billion annual defence spend.

At the same time, while Germany collapses, the City of London thrives on global volatility. Among other things, the City is the global hub for war risk insurance and energy brokerage. When a pipeline is destroyed or a strategically important shipping lane is threatened, the price of war risk insurance triples. The London insurance market (Lloyd’s) extracts these ‘risk premiums’ from the global economy.

The City’s brokers treat geopolitical instability as a volatile asset class. Even as British households are crushed by energy bills, the financial centre remains profitable by extracting wealth from the very chaos that foreign policy helps to manufacture.

Moreover, the City of London has secured its position as the indispensable middleman of the transatlantic energy pivot. While the physical gas originates in the US and is consumed in Europe, the financial and legal architecture of this trade is almost entirely managed in London.

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UK Govt Minister Steps In To Defend Met Office As Fake Temperature Scandal Escalates

In a couple of weeks’ time, the Met Office is likely to announce another ‘hottest year evah’ in the UK. The message will be broadcast faithfully by trusted messengers in mainstream media, keen to prop up the fading Net Zero fantasy, but greeted with howls of derision across social media. Eye-opening investigative research over the last two years has revealed a national temperature network mainly composed of ‘junk’ inappropriate sites and massive data inventions across over 100 non-existent stations.

Now the British Government has stepped in with the suggestion that questioning the Met Office’s shoddy measuring systems “weakens trust in science”. Misinformation is said to have proliferated on “conspiracy networks”.

Step forward Lord Patrick Vallance, the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser at the heart of the Covid lockdown panic but now an unelected Science Minister in the Labour Administration.

“There has been a growing online narrative in some online and social media spaces attempting to undermine Met Office observations and data,” he observes.

Vallance’s conspiracy claims echo similar comments made earlier in the year by the Met Office. The investigative efforts of a small number of people were said by the state meteorologist to be an “attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world ‘s changing climate”.

Only in the world inhabited by Vallance and the Met Office can a conspiracy be whipped up when rigorous examination and questioning is applied to scientific data.

From Covid to climate, it seems the scientific process is a closed book to state scientists following the settled political narrative. One of the ‘conspirators’ is citizen sleuth Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of nearly 400 individual Met Office recording stations. Commenting on the official ministerial response, he observed that not one word constituted a scientific approach. “It is a political monologue of the lowest order,” he opined.

Regular co-conspiratorial readers will of course be aware of the reporting problems at the Met Office.

Over the last 18 months, the percentage of sites in junk CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ due to nearby unnatural obstacles of 2°C and 5°C respectively has climbed from 77.9% to over 80%. In that period, the number of pristine Class 1 sites capable of measuring an uncorrupted ambient air temperature over a large surrounding area has fallen from 24 to just 19. Ray Sanders has catalogued most of the unsuitable sites producing measurements taken by airport runways, in walled gardens, near main roads and in the middle of solar farms. Daily high unnatural heat spikes, amplified by the recent introduction of more accurate electronic devices, are an obvious unaddressed problem, but they are often fed into the official statistics. One such 60-second spike in July 2022 pushed the temperature at RAF Coningsby up to 40.3°C, a declared national record that is widely publicised.

Meanwhile, temperature databases are awash with non-existent stations and invented data. Explanations that the ‘estimates’ are taken from ‘well-correlated neighbouring stations’ might be more convincing if those stations could be identified. Freedom of Information (FOI) efforts by Ray Sanders seeking such details have been dismissed as “vexatious” and “not in the public interest”. The picture has emerged of a very rough-and-ready network, suitable for specific local temperature reporting at places such as airports, but unconvincing in promoting widespread average temperatures down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade.

The Vallance explanations are contained in a letter written to the Conservative MP Sir Julian Lewis following concerns raised by Derek Tripp, a local councillor in his constituency. He notes that in September, the Met Office decided to remove estimated data from three non-existent stations on its historic temperature database.

“They recognised that confusion could be caused when there appears to be a continued flow of data on this website from stations that have closed,” he said.

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Indictment Watch: John Brennan is the “Target” of Florida Grand Jury Russiagate Probe

*Indictment watch*

Former CIA Director John Brennan is the “target” of the grand jury Russiagate probe in South Florida, according to his lawyers.

In July, it was reported that former FBI Director James Comey and John Brennan were under FBI investigation over their involvement in Russiagate.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred Brennan and Comey for prosecution over the summer.

US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones is in charge of the investigation.

Last month, Fox News reported that a federal grand jury subpoenaed John Brennan, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former FBI counterintelligence special agent Peter Strzok.

Peter Strzok was fired from the FBI in 2018 for violating bureau policies after he launched the ‘Crossfire Hurricane‘ Trump-Russia probe in July 2016.

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Google and Substack Warn Britain Is Building a Censorship Machine

Major American companies and commentators, including Google and Substack CEO Chris Best, have condemned the United Kingdom’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), describing it as a measure that risks censoring lawful speech while failing to make the internet safer for children.

They argue that the law normalizes digital surveillance, restricts open debate, and complicates how global platforms operate in the UK.

Their objections surfaced through The Telegraph, which published essays from Best and from Heritage Foundation researchers John Peluso and Miles Pollard, alongside new reporting on Google’s formal response to an Ofcom consultation.

That consultation, focused on how tech firms should prevent “potentially illegal” material from spreading online, closed in October, with Ofcom releasing the submissions in December.

Google’s filing accused the regulator of promoting rules that would “undermine users’ rights to freedom of expression” by encouraging pre-emptive content suppression.

Ofcom rejected this view, insisting that “nothing in our proposals would require sites and apps to take down legal content.” Yet Google was hardly alone in raising alarms: other American companies and trade groups submitted responses voicing comparable fears about the Act’s scope and implications.

Chris Best wrote that his company initially set out to comply with the new law but quickly discovered it to be far more intrusive than expected. “What I’ve learned is that, in practice, it pushes toward something much darker: a system of mass political censorship unlike anywhere else in the western world,” he said.

Best describes how the OSA effectively forces platforms to classify and filter speech on a constant basis, anticipating what regulators might later deem harmful.

Compliance, he explained, requires “armies of human moderators or AI” to scan journalism, commentary, and even satire for potential risk.

The process, he continued, doesn’t simply remove content but “gates it” behind identity checks or age-verification hurdles that often involve facial scans or ID uploads.

“These measures don’t technically block the content,” Best said, “but they gate it behind steps that prove a hassle at best, and an invasion of privacy at worst.” He warned that this structure discourages readers, reduces visibility for writers, and weakens open cultural exchange.

Best, who emphasized Substack’s commitment to press freedom, said the OSA misdiagnoses the problem of online harm by targeting speech rather than prosecuting actual abuse or criminal behavior.

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Brown University Police Chief Placed on Leave

Brown University announced on Monday that they had placed the school’s chief of police, Rodney Chatman, on administrative leave.

“Vice President for Public Safety and Emergency Management Rodney Chatman will be on administrative leave, effective immediately,” the university said in a statement.

Along with the suspension, the university is commissioning an externally-led after-action review, a move that the university says is standard practice. The review will include “a complete assessment and evaluation of campus safety in the period leading up to the tragedy, the preparedness and response on the date of the shooting, and the emergency management response in the aftermath.”

Brown will also be engaging a rapid response team to increase security ahead of the new semester. They will also be conducting an analysis of their campus security policies with an “on-site physical security assessment of the perimeter of buildings, access points, cameras and technology, and other infrastructure conditions, and will build on work underway to enhance security immediately”

Former Providence Chief of Police Hugh T. Clements will serve in both of Chatman’s former roles in the interim.

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Judge rules against UCLA prof suspended after refusing lenient grading for black students

A judge has issued a tentative decision against a professor who sued UCLA after he was suspended in the wake of the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter riots after refusing a request to grade black students leniently.

Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford’s recent ruling against UCLA accounting lecturer Gordon Klein sides with UCLA on all three causes of action: breach of contract, false light, and negligent interference with prospective earnings. 

Klein’s legal team has filed an appeal, and Judge Ford is scheduled to consider that request, or enter a decision finalizing his tentative ruling, at a hearing scheduled for Jan. 9. 

If the judge does not amend his tentative ruling, Klein will receive nothing in a case in which he sought a $13 million dollar award, alleging the university and a former UCLA business school dean destroyed his lucrative expert witness practice when it publicly suspended him. 

“It’s a bloodbath against Klein. It rewards him nothing,” said documentarian Rob Montz in a documentary on the controversy he published last week first reporting on Ford’s Dec. 1 ruling titled “When a Professor Took His Cancellation to Trial.”

“No punitive damages, no compensatory damages,” Montz said. “Gordon doesn’t get a dollar.”

Klein, who has now taught at UCLA for about 45 years, argued in his lawsuit he averaged about $1 million annually as an expert witness in many high-profile corporate cases. 

But he argued his suspension meant he would have to disclose that administrative punishment, hurting his credibility with jurors and effectively making him undesirable as an expert witness. 

Ford, in his 30-page ruling, agrees UCLA had the contractual right to place Klein on administrative leave while it investigated the massive controversy surrounding Klein’s email to a student rejecting his request to grade black students leniently and the viral uproar it created. 

“UCLA had the right to determine what public response was necessary to address and mitigate the immediate [and] extraordinary public outrage toward both Klein and UCLA arising from the public disclosure of Klein’s email,” Ford wrote.

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Trump Administration Halts Offshore Wind Farms, Citing National Security

President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior (DOI) announced on Monday that it is pausing leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects off the East Coast.

“Due to national security concerns identified by @DeptofWar, @interior is PAUSING leases for 5 expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized offshore wind farms,” DOI Secretary Doug Burgum posted on X. “ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED.”

President Trump “is bringing common sense back to energy policy and putting security first,” Burgum added.

In a separate news release, the DOI stated that the pause was also connected with “national security risks” identified by the Department of War in “recently completed classified reports,” according to reporting by Fox News.

According to the news outlet:

The department highlighted unclassified reports from the U.S. government in the past that have “long found” that massive turbine blades in large-scale offshore wind projects can create radar interference called “clutter” that can obscure legitimate moving targets and generate false targets.

In 2024, a Department of Energy report found that while the radar threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce some of that “clutter,” the radar can “miss actual targets” when that threshold is increased.

However, on Monday the New York Times called the pause “a major escalation of President Trump’s crusade against offshore wind power.”

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