Experiments in Authoritarianism: The Boston Bombing and Covid Lockdowns

(courtesy History.com)

Boston, 2013. A pressure cooker bomb explodes along the route of the famed Boston Marathon, killing three people. Police almost immediately name two suspects.

At any previous time in American history, the authorities would have broadcast the suspects’ identities, all-points bulletins(remember APBs?) would be issued to all law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for the wanted criminals, and Boston and Massachusetts State Police would have laid down a dragnet.

For the most part, everyone else would go about their business. This didn’t happen in Boston in 2013. Instead, authorities almost immediately ordered a lockdown of an entire major American city for four days, shuttering businesses, schools, and all public gatherings while authorities looked for—not wanted fugitives, not dangerous criminals—but foreign terrorists.

This was unprecedented. Surely, Bostonians must have thought, the authorities must have a good reason for this lockdown. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have done it. After all, they’ve never done anything like this before.

It was understandable why they should think that, but they were mistaken. Two very misguided young men committed this crime, but they were caught within a week, which history assures us is the most common outcome of such manhunts without the need of any damned lockdown.

At the time, I wondered who had ordered the lockdown. Whose idea was it? To this day, I don’t have a name. I also wondered if the authorities, specifically the authoritarian Obama Administration—which abolished the right of habeas corpus in the name of security—had conducted an authoritarian experiment.

After all, if they could sucker famously stubbornly individualistic and skeptical Bostonians into cowering in their homes for no good reason, then they could sucker most of the American population into doing the same thing out of fear of something else.

Then along came Covid in 2020. It was a dangerously deadly disease to everyone, they said. We had to wear masks to stop the spread, they said. We had to shelter together with our families and eliminate as much human contact as possible, they said. Schools, libraries, public places, parks, beaches, small businesses, they all most close until we say it is safe, they said.

It’s OK some large corporations providing what we deem essential services can stay open, they said. Essential workers must keep physically going to work, they said. (For the record, I was one of them.) If you disagree about which businesses and public facilities must stay open then you are a selfish and terrible person, they said.

If you are a renowned immunologist and point out that public mask-wearing cannot stop the spread of a respiratory virus, because they never have and never will, you should lose your job and be shunned, they said. Natural immunity to Covid is not a thing, they said. The Covid vaccine will stop the spread, they said. If you refuse to take it, you want to murder your neighbors, they said.

The Covid vaccine does not stop the spread, so you must get boosters, they said.

SCREECH!!! FULL STOP.

Natural immunity to Covid is as much of a thing as it is with every other coronavirus, which all frequently mutate into more contagious and less symptomatic forms. That’s just how those little strands of RNA roll.

If you catch a common cold and recover, you will never get that particular strain of the common cold again, though you will catch a future mutated strain that won’t make you as sick as the first one did because your immune system already kinda knows how to fight the new one. BTW, common colds are often coronaviruses.

We know now that the lockdowns did not stop the spread of Covid, and they never could have. We know that because they didn’t stop the spread in China, and they went all in on the Zero Covid policy. It failed.

We have known since 2020 that Covid deaths were exponentially exaggerated, since the head of the Illinois Department of Health said a man who was shot to death officially died of Covid because he tested positive for Covid in the autopsy, as required by CDC policy. (Jimmy Dore and others have clips on this).

So the vax wasn’t a vaccine that stopped the spread, public masking didn’t stop the spread and they knew it couldn’t at the time, Covid had a death rate of well under 0.1% by its lonesome—as opposed to smallpox, which has a 30% death rate in populations with some hereditary immunity(source: ourworlddata.org) —so the lockdowns were not done for the sake of our health.

The lockdowns did provide a lot of data on just how many people, and in which countries and regions within countries, will acquiesce to the authorities completely disrupting their lives and for how long.

My conclusion is that the Covid lockdowns, in the United States, Canada, and the European countries for sure(I’m not sure about China) were an experiment by the authorities to see just how far they could go in telling us exactly how to live our lives every damned day.

I also conclude that while the Canadian government is pretty happy with the results, the American one is disappointed with the majority of the population in the majority of the Several States, but that’s another story.

Thank you for reading, and Happy Walpurgisnacht and especially May Day!