I was right about everything
Well, almost everything.
In this post, which I hope will be my last on the madness we have endured, I boast of my sagacity in seeing lockdown measures for the disasters they have been. As more and more are waking up to the terrible damage inflicted on countries by their own governments on the pretext of fighting a virus, I go all Trump and show off, pointing to my 2020 posts that say exactly the same things that many commentators are now saying, but certainly were not at the time.
The reason I set this blog up was Toby Young. I emailed him a piece I had written entitled ‘Whatever happened to Boris Johnson?’ and he responded to say that his website Lockdown Sceptics (as it then was) would link to it if I published it online. So I created Mad World expressly for that reason, published my Johnson article on it, sent it to Toby - and he responded: “This isn’t for us, Russell”! I was gutted! And slightly annoyed. I wanted to whimper in response “But… but… you said you’d link to it if I put it on a blog…”, but I never did so, and after much thought I decided to put my disappointment behind me and press on with publishing more articles, send them to Toby, and hope that some would get the seal of approval. So that’s what I did, and they did: the Daily Sceptic, as it now is, has linked to or published a dozen of my articles on this blog, for which I am extremely grateful. My most popular one is The 19 most scandalous things the government has done during this tragic debacle, with nearly six thousand page views at the time of writing. Additionally, two of my articles have been published on The Reprobate website.
We are now in a place where many in the media and political class are admitting that lockdowns should not happen again. Whether it be Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting saying that, “[We need to] learn to live well with Covid will prepare us to get through the next wave of infections without more restrictions on our lives, livelihoods and liberties”, or lockdowner David Aaronovitch acknowledging in his Times column that the measures ushered in authoritarianism, or one of Denmark’s leading newspapers apologising for its journalistic failure during Covid by mindlessly parroting the government line, or deranged safetyist Piers Morgan finally querying the difference between those who died ‘with’ Covid and ‘of’ it, it’s been bittersweet reading for those of us who have been banging on about this for at least 20 months.
More and more information has become more widely disseminated. After a freedom of information request, the ONS released the figures on the number of people in the UK who died solely because of the disease: 17,000. And that’s over two years; the amount of people who die of flu in just one year can often surpass that. And yet the British government spent £400,000,000,000 of our money because of it. Read that paragraph again. And weep.
But typing “17,000 covid deaths UK” into Google produces many different search results to when you type the term into Bing or Yandex; what a surprise that Google, whose Search page frequently features jolly looking cartoon characters who implore you to “Get vaccinated. Wear a mask. Save lives” - dubious statements that already feel well out of date - prioritises results that promote the narrative of the global establishment: that this disease is one of the biggest threats mankind has ever faced and vaccines are the only way out. (YouTube is just as bad - on my YouTube page that I use at work only to listen to music it often uncritically bigs up the vaccines, or promotes news stories that go along with the official narrative.) The sinister goblins of big tech continue to push their ignorance out to the whole world.
Then there was the study commissioned by the government to examine the efficacy of masks in the classroom; not surprisingly, it found that masks were ineffective. Anyone with a small amount of scientific nous, or who had studied global data, could have told you this a long, long time ago. Find a recent, incredibly thorough article exposing the hellish consequences of masks here.
A day hardly passes now without some admittance from public figures that what we have done has come at a terrible cost. Well, me and a few other hardy souls were there from near the beginning saying such things. And here’s my evidence.
My first piece, Whatever happened to Boris Johnson? went up on August 26, 2020 but, as I say, was written a couple of weeks before that. A few of the predictions I made were as follows:
“The move to impose a heinous, draconian lockdown on 65 million citizens will go down as the worst decision ever made by a British PM in the history of our island.”
“No courage was demonstrated; no foresight was shown; no serious analysis was undertaken of the horrific collateral damage resulting from a lockdown.”
“A mental health tsunami will be upon us in no time, as will tax rises, inflation, mass unemployment and social unrest.”
Okay, so I was wrong about mass unemployment - possibly because hundreds of thousands of workers either left the UK or took early retirement/gave up being available for work - and social unrest hasn’t been too extensive yet (although there are isolated incidents everywhere, as well as protest marches), everything else I wrote over a year and a half ago was, I reckon, on the money. On 18 January 2022, Fraser Nelson wrote that “the lockdowns – and the Prime Minister’s behaviour during them – may eclipse everything else he did, even the Brexit deal.”
In The Not So Great Cover Up, posted on the same day, I strongly argued against mask rules and wrote:
“We are replacing viral illness with mental illness (and mental illness that will afflect vastly more people than Covid-19 has). Will children in schools, absurdly, soon be required to wear one? We are on a slippery slope; I wouldn’t put anything past this highly authoritarian government.”
Right again: this authoritarian government did of course later decide to make children mask up, despite a lack of evidence for their efficacy, and the prime minister claiming that that to do so would be “nonsensical”. A generation of children will feel the malign effects of this for decades to come.
In an article entitled Jordan Peterson and 2020, published on September 12 of that year, I pondered what the world’s greatest public intellectual would say about what was going on when he returned to form after being unwell. I wrote:
“It will be fascinating to hear what he has to say about 2020’s mind-boggling global hysteria. Was it because of group-think? Health and safety gone (genuinely) mad? The product of complacent, lazy, ignorant societies? The domino effect? The year the petty authoritarians gloriously triumphed? It will be fascinating to see what conclusions Peterson comes to, and I hope that my small-fry, partial pontificating has not been too wide of the mark.”
My pontificating was not far off: in the last few months Peterson has, on his Twitter feed, and in interviews like this one, and in articles like this one adopted a position highly critical of lockdown measures. Sample quote: “Our response to the pandemic caused more death and misery than the pandemic itself.” It’s reassuring to me that such a brilliant man as Peterson is on the same page as me. I wonder how much difference he would have made in 2020 if he’d been well?
In an article posted on September 14, 2020, entitled What Tony Benn’s diaries tell us about lockdowns, I took aim at group-think, by comparing Benn and his colleagues’ doomed attempts to bolster British industry with the equally misguided efforts of Sage members’ to combat coronavirus:
“We have a group of floundering suits ('experts') in Downing Street who are simply unable to break out of group-think and cannot see over the hedge that they themselves constructed. They are stuck in the same sort of paralysis in their reaction to Covid as most governments in Britain were between 1945 and 1979 in relation to industrial policy. Whitty, Vallance and the rest might look to the common observer as knowing what they are doing, but they really don't: they are prisoners of their own very narrow, specialist outlook on life.”
Intellectual Dark Web member Bret Weinstein made some excellent points about the calamity of the public health response to this virus on his and his wife Heather's recent Dark Horse podcast, saying that it was an "unprecedented catastrophe" and the authorities showed "utter indifference to the suffering of human beings".
In Random thoughts, published on September 17, 2020, I pointed out what many doctors and journalists have now finally got around to saying:
“The government … said the lockdown was to protect the health of the nation.
How does it help health if you shut the gyms and sports centres?
How does it help health if you tell people not to go outside to get fresh air, exercise and sunshine?
How does it help health to close the dentists?
How does it help health to stop cancer treatments, routine check-ups and many other medical procedures?
How does it help MENTAL health if you keep people under virtual house arrest?”
And I added:
“This virus has been a godsend to governments around the world because it allows them to bully their people and make them do exactly what they say. This is madness, and it's quite incredible that so many have gone along with it.”
Former lockdown supporter Rod Liddle has just said something very similar in The Spectator.
In Why was our response to Covid-19 so unbelievably deranged?, posted on September 21, 2020, at the time Johnson was riding high in the polls, in contrast to his current dismal ratings, I said:
“We have a leader who does not lead, he follows. And because he follows a culture that has mutated into something disconnected with real life we have debilitation and desolation in our country, which will only increase in the months and years to come.”
I should note that some commentators, including those ennobled by the PM, are now saying he 'got the big decisions' right, but that is risible. So allowing people to die alone and shutting down functioning businesses was good policy? Psychologically traumatising the nation for nearly two years with pervasive terror messaging was a good decision?!
In The government’s six-point plan explained (September 24, 2020), I correctly predicted the economic hardship that would eventually arrive, and has now arrived, due to the government’s actions. Points in the plan, I wrote, included:
“3 Take incredibly expensive measures (eg furlough, Eat Out To Help Out) to alleviate the gargantuan problems the scare campaign has created.
4 See the national debt soar.
5 Either raise taxes or slash public spending (probably the former) to furnish this, and further enervate the economy.”
Yep, called that right too, as this spring’s Budget will indubitably prove.
In The word 'health' is in 'mental health', prime minister, posted on September 27, 2020, I was not wrong when I highlighted more detrimental effects that government policies would have:
"Spare a thought for the lonely; spare a thought for those in care homes who haven’t had a family visit in months; spare a thought for those in the creative industries who have had the soul ripped out of them, their reason for being."
"Our government appears to only be interested in focusing on physical health, not mental. Actually, scratch that. They appear to be only interested in one aspect of physical health, Covid, rather than cancer, heart disease, strokes and many other ailments, the death tolls of which continue to mount.”
Brendan O'Neill has written about the Labour Party's comment on inhumane restrictions, in January 2022, and only in that month did its MPs properly bemoan the cruel rules - you ask yourself: where the hell were they in 2020?
In A Saturday night out in Newcastle, posted on October 4, 2020, I highlighted the anger increasingly being felt by members of the public towards Johnson. In December 2021, darts crowds were singing “Stand up if you hate Boris” - as I chronicled, there were stirrings much earlier than this:
“…the landlord, forced to kick us out at 10pm sharp. He bellowed: ‘I f**kin hate it, but yous all gotta gan hame because of that f**kin arsehole Boris.’ Hah. Think the hospitality vote may have slipped away, Mr Johnson...”
In Lockdowns should be made illegal in international law (October 5, 2020), I voiced thoughts that many are only now voicing:
“Except in truly exceptional circumstances, where all other options have exhaustively been shown to not work, lockdowns should never be considered. There is a reason that they have never before been implemented in human history. Copying the example of one of the most horrible totalitarian regimes on Earth has been a tragic mistake that should never be repeated. Lockdowns bludgeon the human race, and the scars caused by them in 2020 will be long to heal.”
On January 23, 2022, former esteemed New York Times journalist and former lockdown supporter Bari Weiss went on the influential Real Time With Bill Maher show and said that she was done with Covid: according to her, the pandemic-related rules will be "remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime".
In Ten ways Britain has gone mad in 2020 (October 11, 2020), I was back discussing this government’s economic suicide mission, which will give us what is now penned in to happen in 2022 and 2023: a rise in National Insurance contributions; income tax thresholds not raised in line with inflation; a massive increase in corporation tax; higher interest rates and much more.
“The eye-watering national debt is added to, week by week, by this blundering, profligate administration, ploughing incredible amounts of money into the economy purely because of the calamitous mistakes they have made due to their relentless scaremongering and failed strategies. This stores up gargantuan problems for the future: growth will be slower, and taxpayers will be paying the bills of Rishi Sunak long after most of us have gone to our graves.”
STOP PRESS: In early February 2022, a meta-analysis carried out by Johns Hopkins University concluded that lockdowns were 'ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument' going forward. An analysis of 24 different empirical studies found that lockdowns caused just a 0.2% reduction in virus deaths at 'enormous economic and social cost'.
In So we still have to 'stay at home' in Bath?, posted on October 13, 2020, I photographed a sign outside my GPs that featured the counter-productive slogan 'Stay Home, Save Lives’ living on, six months after the death rate from Covid peaked, and said:
“When we look at the huge cancer death rates next year let's remember just why they are so. When we wonder why so many people didn't get minor pains that later turned into major pains checked out, we should just turn our attention to pervasive government messaging that is doing such terrible damage.”
In November 2021, Macmillan Cancer Support said that there are 50,000 ‘missing’ cancer cases in the UK, and the scale of the cancer backlog had ‘yet to hit the NHS’.
In Government says No (October 14, 2020), when most commentators were still singing Johnson’s praises, I had this warning:
“The court jester of Downing Street believes that he has four years before an election so his cataclysmic mismanagement of this crisis will be forgotten by then (if he is indeed still PM), but I can assure you prime minister, it won’t be. It won’t be.”
Polls conducted in January 2022 found that Johnson's approval rating has hit record lows, with a majority of voters thinking he should resign (although I admit this is in large part due to the exposure of his lockdown hypocrisy - but I'd argue that that hypocrisy was always there waiting to be exposed; it was inevitable because our rulers knew the disease was not as bad as they were telling us, and acted accordingly).
On October 17, 2020, I actually named my post Predictions and made a fair few. I knew not all of them would come true, and not all of them have (or probably will), but as I continue in Trumpian mood, let me highlight a few that did:
“Support for the government will ebb away, and more particularly, support for the government’s policies to combat the virus will deteriorate. As the government is either mocked or ignored, its authority will continue to wane."
“With the government crumbling and its poll ratings in free-fall, it will come apart at the seams. There will be resignations and sackings. Next May’s local elections will be a blue blood bath.”
I may have been a year early on that one, as I was talking about May 2021’s elections. The same with the following, but perhaps it’s just proof that my predictions were too good!
“By next summer Johnson too will be fighting for his political life, and is likely to step down. No retrospective would ever be able to show his conduct in 2020 in a good light; costs and benefits will finally have been weighed up.”
And I was right-ish with the following prediction, although you could argue that this is only in relation to England. Much of the rest of the world remains in a vortex of madness.
“It won’t be until at least 2022 that many facets of previous ordinary life - proper weddings, events, foreign travel, festivals and more - revert to anything like before.”
Another thing I - hands up - got wrong was when I wrote the following in The negative effects of lockdowns are worse than you can possibly imagine on October 22, 2020:
“Boris Johnson will initially resist, but as we know by now that he is a feeble-minded buffoon, he will cave, the referendum will happen, and the Scots will break with England.”
Well, it hasn’t happened yet anyway.
In Wanted: a vaccine against ignorance and hysteria (November 15, 2020), I wrote:
“Lockdowns are the biggest scandals of all time, this land’s greatest ever political, moral, economic and health disaster.”
Coming out on February 24 this year is The Year The World Went Mad by Sage member Mark Woolhouse, in which the distinguished epidemiologist warns that we must not panic as we did in 2020, that long lockdowns did more harm than good, and we must never again make a global crisis worse. Even lockdown zealots The Observer published an interview with him to promote the book!
In Lockdowns and the decline of Western civilisation (November 28, 2020), I again probably looked hyperbolic. I’d like to think it doesn’t look hyperbolic now:
“Our response to a virus that killed 0.2% of those who got it, 94% of whom were already very ill or very old, was to plunge the economy into the worst recession for 300 years, pursue the greatest curtailing of freedoms in our history, wreck children’s education and mental well-being, cause three million people to miss cancer screenings, in a single year borrow £394 billion (up from an expected £40 billion), and much more besides.
“They went from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘suppress this virus by doing whatever we can no matter what the ruinous consequences of this are’ and it became all about PR, in keeping Covid numbers down so the press wouldn’t yell about them. It all speaks to a failure of government and media on a truly gargantuan scale, the greatest failure these institutions have ever been part of, and a clear indicator of the decline of the West. In the future the word 'lockdown' will come to be as associated with horror as the word 'thalidomide'. When you throw decades of textbooks on disease control out the window and embrace the methods of a Communist state, and you're egged on to do so by a febrile media, what you get is misery and destruction on a massive scale. Lockdowns are evil: they are broken glass and barbed wire stuffed inside a teddy bear.”
On 23 January, 2022, the BBC reported that an inquiry has been launched to find 100,000 school pupils absent in England in the wake of national lockdowns. Online child sexual abuse images tripled in lockdown, according to UnHerd. Paul Embery tweeted fresh NHS data that shows that the total number of Covid-related deaths in hospitals in England under the age of 80 with no pre-existing condition is 3,037. This is the number of people who, in a normal year, die in the UK roughly every two days. This was the most catastrophic public health over-reaction in history, and yet only a few of us were saying so back in 2020.
In what I called My final blog post (probably), published on New Year’s Eve 2020, I said the following:
“You never heard that just one in 100 infections occurs outdoors, or that anyone under 50 who catches the virus has a 99.98% chance of recovery, or that of all the deaths that occurred worldwide this year, just 2% were attributable to Covid, and the vast majority of those deaths would have occurred anyway, as around 94% of victims had severe co-morbidities.”
I was wrong in saying it was my final blog post but I continued to be factually correct and I was dedicated to putting the truth out there that only now others are expressing. On January 18 Health Secretary Javid finally admitted that Covid death rates were massively bolstered by including people who did not die of the virus. In the US, the CDC announced that over 75% of supposed Covid victims had four co-morbidities.
Do I deserve a knighthood for all of the above? ; )
I've only linked to my 2020 posts here, but my 2021 posts are similarly prescient. And the future will go on proving me right. For every one commentator or book saying the restrictions were right, there will be a hundred saying they were wrong. It is the way these things are. Lockdown supporters will become as rare as red squirrels. But me and a few others opposed them from early on.
"The only this necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
ReplyDeleteYou are a Good Man .... and you did a great deal to try and stop the triumph of evil. If nothing else, when you go to meet your Maker you will at least have a clean conscience, unlike the evil tyrants who imposed it on us; the willing participants in the medical profession and their foot soldiers in the media.
When the post-Covid Sham Inquiry eventually reports, there won't be enough whitewash to hide the catastrophe the Establishment created.
Many thanks for your kind words.
ReplyDeleteMy fear is that the establishment will succeed in covering up their crimes, such is their power. The likes of Fauci will probably be long dead when the true exposé arrives. I'm sure he'll be in a very warm place, though...
I became aware of the total idiocy of lockdowns, school closures etc when I read an amazingly prescient article by Rocco Forte in May 2020. He quoted the Hong Kong flu epidemic of1967/8 when over 80,000 died, yet there was no mass panic- in fact, as a student at the time Inhad forgotten about it! Since then I have had my own mental problems totally related to the insane draconian measures introduced by Johnson and his organ grinders the so called experts. I can only hope that when eventually the promised public enquiry homes into view it will take evidence from Gupta ,Henegan, Sumption, and the other intelligent souls who have been condemned by the MSM .
ReplyDeleteWe can only hope.
DeleteInteresting what you say about the Hong Kong flu. I've read several books that extensively chronicle the era, including Dominic Sandbrook's White Heat and Tony Benn's diaries, and it isn't even mentioned.