In 2023, the “health freedom movement” completely collapses, reduced to disparate, mutually suspicious, antagonistic pockets. Fractures appeared early on, matured in 2022, and flourished in 2023. The main camps are constituted by those who believe that,
(a) viruses do not exist;
(b) Covid-19 does exist, and was accidentally leaked from a lab;
(c) Covid-19 is a lethal bioweapon, deliberately engineered as such;
(d) Covid-19 is just another naturally circulating respiratory virus, probably not novel;
(e) Covid-19 was actually activated by 5G signals which produced sickness (but it could also have been snake venom);
(f) Covid-19 was just bacterial pneumonia, afflicting fat people in the southern US;
(g) the “vaccines” are of shoddy quality, poorly produced;
(h) the “vaccines” are actual kill shots, designed to deliberately injure and kill;
(i) the “vaccines” contain microchips—or nanotubes—or graphene—or shards of metal and glass—or nanobots—or plasmid DNA;
(j) only some lots of the “vaccines” are lethal (hot batches), but others are mostly saline solution;
(k) safety and efficacy do not matter—what is really in question is authoritarianism, coercion, and the harms caused by lockdowns;
(l) there was a pandemic, and it was pre-planned: a plandemic, engineered by a cabal;
(m) the cabal consists of globalist elites, who all want to demolish the economy, create CBDCs, and engage in global depopulation;
(n) the cabal is dominated by Jews;
(o) there is no cabal;
(p) we must support those who seek religious or medical exemptions from mandatory vaccination;
(q) exemptions reinforce the mandates, and are not resistance;
(r) vax injured people brought it on themselves, by complying;
(s) we must show compassion and come to the aid of the vax injured, who are true victims;
(t) national leaders were just incompetent, did not know what they were doing, and just copied each other;
(u) the public was hypnotized, and suffered from “mass formation psychosis”;(v) there was no mass formation, it was all the doing of “global predators”;
(w) the phenomenon of “the pandemic” was cultural, long-term in its origins, ritualistic, and representative of a secular religion;
(x) mRNA is dangerous as such;
(y) mRNA is not dangerous as such, and can be used for good;
(z) there is a massive global die off taking place (or not).
(What does this prove? (a) That I know my alphabet. (b) That I love lists. (c) That I have had enough.)
To make matters more complicated, one or more of the camps can combine to form a distinctive camp, opposed to all others. They have equally diverse views of what freedom means, ranging from a strong state under Trump, to no state, to leaving one's country, or leaving the city for the country, homesteading, taking up arms, or just making more videos.
They are divided politically between those who identify with the right, the left, or the position that there is no left vs. right anymore. In the US, they are divided between followers of Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy; Ron DeSantis, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some have chosen to overlook Trump’s launch of the “War on Covid,” Operation Warp Speed, coercing states into imposing and/or maintaining lockdowns, championing the “vaccines,” all while ensuring that Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx retained special prominence in “managing the pandemic response”. Otherwise, there is no sympathy for a Justin Trudeau, who did much the same, and whose characterizations of the opposition were proven to be partially true if highly exaggerated.
Each camp actively polices its borders. They produce their designated leaders—typically men in White Coats, or some “social media influencer” who pretends to have advanced medical knowledge. They each have their own video channels and preferred podcasts.
The different camps accuse each other of being “controlled opposition,” such that collectively they become a quasi-opposition that can be easily controlled and defeated, destined to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. They also accuse each other of producing “distractions”: Ukraine, Israel, the New Zealand data, just to name the latest. Anything that deviates from one group’s preferred narrative is dismissed as a “distraction”. Few understand the actual meaning of “controlled opposition,” but they insist on (mis)using it nonetheless. Similarly, they do not appear to understand what is a “shill,” yet they routinely accuse each other’s leaders of being “shills”. People are accused of “gaslighting,” even when there is no gas-lighting.
The end result is easy to comprehend: we have (had) a movement without moves, that is moving nowhere.
This also means that should there be a “next one” soon (and there are, predictably, multiple camps divided on this point too), we will have no movement to aid, protect, and lead us. Indeed, it is disputable if we had any such movement at all during the past three to four years. This is all very troubling because if I can know this, thanks to my unplanned ethnographic immersion in multiple camps, it means that various intelligence agencies and regime media spies know this too, and quite possibly know much more.
So if there is a “next one”—a Disaster X—it will mean turning back to some very old urgings: “Every man for himself!” or “Head for the hills!”.
On a personal note, much of the above explains my utter public silence outside of my Telegram channel, without any article published online for several months now. And yet, I have a backlog of over 100 essays lined up, and 68 books waiting to be reviewed. As I exit academia, and much of everything else, I suspect that I will also exit any online platform before too long, leaving a great deal unsaid. Maybe that is how it was meant to be.
I think your concern is warranted, and should be considered seriously. I'm a bit more optimistic than you on people's ability for reform resistance when the next "disaster" hits, but I wholeheartedly agree that many useful things have been needlessly lost.
I've wondered how much it is always like this. Is the "first mover advantage" so strong that all movement's inevitably fall this way?
Thanks for this post. I was wondering what happened to you. I, too, have been immersed in multiple camps, though perhaps not in the same way as you. I’ve been struggling to set up my own substack but have been too overwhelmed trying to keep up with the deluge of information and conflicting perspectives. I’m still hoping to set it up. It will not be about who or what is right, but about how to tell who to trust about what, and why you might be able to trust them.
Your attitude seems to me to be a little like what happens when foreseeing one’s own looming death - hopes dissipating in the recognition of the inevitable. Yet, there may be a few things that still can be done: mitigating disaster is something worth doing even though the disaster cannot be stopped.
I cannot say that you should continue to publish here, for only you can know what’s best for you to do. But I can say that if you disappear I will miss you, and that I would like to see some of that backlog.