Lots of prattle about “long Covid” which, if you can be bothered to listen, is a real or imagined aftermath of real Covid. But the real aftermath of the exaggerated ‘flu is the assumption by elites, elected and unelected, that they will be able to take away more of our rights - as we let them do during the pandemic. And most of us have put the Covid atrocities behind us; ‘got over it’ as the elites said we should, as they soften us for their next authoritarian whim and assault on our rights.

You've written a moral fable, Renno (Renord?), not a political analysis.

Your entire argument hinges on one claim: that Covid wasn't messy policy under pressure, it was coordinated bad faith by a corrupt elite. That's a big claim. If you're going to make it, you need more than phrases about "therapeutic priesthoods" and imperial bodies. You'd need evidence that people knowingly lied, not just that they were wrong, overconfident, or heavy-handed.

Cuckoo!

Policies varied dramatically across countries. Courts overturned mandates. Elections reshaped leadership. Scientists openly disagreed in public. That's not what coordinated authoritarian capture looks like. That's just messy pluralism under stress.

You convert trade-offs into sacrilege. Employment mandates become "bodily desecration." Public health restrictions become civilizational rupture. But public health has always involved coercive elements: quarantine, isolation, mandatory vaccination in specific contexts. The debate is proportionality, not metaphysics.

Invoking George Orwell doesn't solve this, either. Orwell opposed totalitarianism, not emergency governance during a pandemic. Equating flawed pandemic policy with totalitarian indecency dilutes the meaning of both.

You also romanticise MAHA as uniquely immune to the lust for power that infects other movements. History offers little support for that optimism. Every insurgent movement claims moral purity. The test is institutional restraint once power is obtained. What safeguards does MAHA support to constrain itself?

If the core grievance is lost trust, say that plainly. Institutional trust did erode. That's a legitimate topic. But moving from "trust was damaged" to "we were ruled by a clerisy engaged in coordinated violation" is a leap that demands proof.

Emotion is not evidence. Dignity is not data. And moral language, however lyrical, is not an argument.

Overall?

3/10: Needs more effort

Here’s the million dollar question:

1. Is “defeating the establishment” even coherent if ruling structures inevitably exist?
2. If a ruling structure is overthrown, what replaces it—and by what force?
3. Why not emulate groups that appear to gain power by leveraging existing institutions (e.g., “Muslim enclaves in the West, and their current combined strategy of imposing their rule by manipulation of existing democratic structures)?

Evidence points to number three, and the need is urgent!

Muslims have offered themselves to the existing elite as a shock force to control the streets, viz a vee, the love affair encouraged by the elite, of Palestinians and their terror groups such as Hamas; the acceptance of bribes paid to the elite by ME terror States such as Qatar through institutional capture, particularly obvious with the University Educational institutions.
The direct capture by bribe, of politicians eg Donald Trump, who is hopelessly mired in the trap.

Dreaming on like this article does, wastes time and effort!

If a ruling structure is overthrown, what replaces it—and by what force?
diver dan,
yes, exactly like pay rises !

All this 'them and us' is a bit over the top.
Remember, the 'them' are those we choose to guide our daily lives.
And I emphasise: we choose them!
I am sure they make mistakes, but overall they don't do such a bad job.
We need to accept their dicta, whilst all the time evaluating what they do.
So we can change them if they don't come up to scratch.

Its hard to exaggerate how much I like this article. I've read quite a few articles and essays recently with the general theme that covid (or more exactly the 'expert' response to covid) was the death of the cult of the expert. But this pulls together all sorts of stands to that observation in a highly erudite way.

Read it twice and saved it for future reference. I particularly liked the way Orwell was drawn in. As Orwell once wrote: "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”. Lockdowns was one of those.

The collateral rise of MAGA and MAHA represents a revolution in the administration of the state. It may well be nipped in the bud because the global elite and the US deep state don't take these attacks on their wealth and power laying down.

Bhattacharya, mentioned in the article, and now head of the NIH was one of the first to recognise that the lockdowns and the entire reaction to covid was wrong and to urge a different path. The medical authorities ruthlessly shut him down, but he has risen triumphant both in his career and in the way his original observations were shown to be correct.

The reaction to the death of expertise is enormous. There was a time when merely asserting that "experts say" was enough to end discussion. No more. But its not all good. The distrust that the lying about the covid vaccine has engendered will have negative impacts as people reject vaccines whose efficacy aren't in question - eg whooping cough and measles. The authorities including MAHA have a lot to do to rebuild trust in those type of vaccines.

But all in all, a very satisfying article