Some of us got the Covid scam right from the beginning. Many, even in the alternative media, did not. The interesting question is how many people changed their thinking once it became obvious what was going on. From Jeffrey Tucker at dailyreckoning.com:
The last three and a half years have been times of enormous upheaval.
It has affected politics, economics, culture, media and technology. It’s not just about the spreading of economic, cultural and demographic decay. Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.
What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new.
This particularly pertains to intellectuals. Or should in any case.
If you have not shifted your thinking in some respect over these years, you are either a prophet, asleep or in denial.
The way social media works today, influencers are reluctant to admit it lest risk their followings built out of a prior cultural landscape. This is really too bad.
There is nothing wrong with changing, adapting, migrating and calling out truth even if that contradicts what you once said or how you used to believe.
There is no need to change your principles or ideals. What should change in light of evidence is your evaluation of the problems and threats, your outlook on the relative priorities of focus, your perceptions of the functionality of institutional structures, your awareness of issues and concerns about which you had limited prior knowledge, your political and cultural allegiances and so on.
These days, this intellectual migration seems mainly to have affected the left. Nearly daily I find myself having the same conversations with people in person, on the phone or online. It is from an Obama voter and someone with traditionally “liberal” allegiances.
The COVID era utterly shocked them in what they discovered about their own tribe. They aren’t liberal at all.
It is not true that the legislator has an absolute power
over our persons and our property
since they pre-exist him,
and his task is to surround them with guarantees.
It is not true that the function of the law is to regulate
our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education,
our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, our recreation.
Its function is to prevent the rights of one person
from interfering with rights of another in any of these matters.
— Frederick Bastiat