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   Freedumb, You Say?   
      
   By Gabrielle Bauer   December 10, 2024   Censorship, Public Health, Society   
      
   didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63.   
   Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then   
   the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to   
   “stay the fuck home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too   
   important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family   
   businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that   
   kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving   
   grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or   
   practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong   
   to me on a cellular level.   
      
   Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour   
   misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly,   
   to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot   
   back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said   
   one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my   
   all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”   
      
   From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than   
   a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform   
   our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices   
   are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and   
   safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was   
   skipping to an easy victory.   
      
   It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane   
   rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school   
   students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind   
   instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene   
   reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the   
   “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease   
   Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened   
   my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.   
      
   One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh   
   freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a   
   tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles   
   while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming:   
   “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom   
   is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an   
   aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.   
      
   Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I   
   wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of   
   Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19   
   had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives   
   meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the   
   Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago   
   have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my   
   eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared   
   authoritarianism more than death.   
      
   Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went   
   nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the   
   mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the   
   “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public   
   vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they   
   die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”   
      
   This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused   
   the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance.   
   If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by   
   all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly   
   blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got   
   five Covid shots.)   
      
   One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of   
   expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration   
   of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown   
   faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing   
   news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83   
   governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful   
   exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.   
      
   “Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed   
   critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted   
   vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,”   
   the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists,   
   activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who   
   have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”   
      
   But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash:   
   misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of   
   us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against   
   misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to   
   provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas,   
   which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for   
   further testing.   
      
   Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official   
   sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than   
   informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the   
   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that   
   “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci   
   maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of   
   transmission? I rest my case.   
      
   The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and   
   arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be.   
   It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth.   
   There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to   
   consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning   
   circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now   
   the Wild West of X.   
      
   Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk,   
   with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift   
   through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)