The Covid Rules

First Published on March 15, 2022

February 3, 2024, note: We’re just going to take a mulligan. As of this writing, the shot requirements are pretty much gone, as far as I know. They may be required in hospitals still, but I’m not sure. Masks are no longer required at the majority of places, though I’m sure there are still stragglers here and there. All the retarded arrow stickers have been pulled up. Here and there, on a bulletin board tucked away in a corner, you’ll find an admonition poster about social distancing or washing hands or wearing a mask to stop covid, but for the most part these are gone, too. Nobody cares. Collectively, we’ve just decided we’re taking a mulligan on this whole covid hoax.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: If the mainstream media hadn’t created a panic, no one would have noticed covid. It would have just been a cold during cold season. Whereas there ought to be investigations, empowered panels of truth-seekers, trials, and jail-terms, we are getting none of that. No correctives. That means that this will happen again. We’ve learned absolutely nothing. My mind travels further, wondering, is anything I “know” about American history true? Is it lies and propaganda all the way down, layer upon layer of bullshit?

As of today, March 15, 2022, the West has entered into what seems to be a period of muted reckoning about the events of the past two years. Quietly, reports are leaking out here and there on the back pages about the side-effects of the covid shots, about the poor efficacy of the covid shots, about how the case numbers were overcounted, about how masks never worked, about how the PCR tests were unreliable, and such as that, always buried on the back pages. Covid csar Anthony Fauci, who was for two years the face of covid propaganda, has gone MIA, and psychopath Leana Wen, who was routinely trotted out on mainstream media shows as voice of covid authoritarianism, has abruptly changed her tune. Probably, this has to do with the looming November mid-term elections that are potentially a disaster for the Democrats, the party of covid authoritarianism, and I think these power brokers want nothing more than for most of the covid authoritarianism that marred the past two years to slide down the memory hole. Thus, this piece is meant for posterity, to preserve the absurdities even if just for my own sake.

Firstly, I want to make this crystal clear for posterity: I lived through the covid “pandemic” of 2020, yet I scarcely noticed the disease itself. Now, the covid may have in fact been a real disease, but I have to frame it like that for several reasons. The biggest is that the covid scare revealed that you cannot trust the medical establishment to speak truth. Pre-covid, I trusted doctors. Post-covid, I do not. Doctors, with some notable exceptions, will say whatever they are paid to say, just like pretty much anyone else. Secondly, since I cannot rely on the medical establishment to speak truth, I need to see irrefutable evidence that the virus exists. Without that evidence, I would be taking it strictly on faith, and I am unwilling to do that in a scientific realm of inquiry. Thirdly, when people I knew caught covid, they universally described it as a mild cold, indistinguishable from the common colds we lived with prior to 2020. That is very different from, say, the virus that causes the chicken pox. Your experience, your anecdotes, may be different from mine, so I reserve space in my opinion to allow that the covid may have been a real disease, but I must leave room also for the possibility that the covid is nothing more than a rebranded common cold/influenza.

The realness of the virus, though, is irrelevant to a discussion about the “pandemic”. One is a miscroscopic DNA envelope and the other is a media phenomenon. I contended in April of 2020, and I still contend today that if the mainstream media had never mentioned the covid, never scare-mongered about the covid, almost no one would have thought anything of it. It would have just been another seasonal bug. The University where I currently work enrolls 8500 students, and not one student died from the covid. At the very least, that’s pretty damned good for a global “pandemic” that the media hyped as the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

My point is just this: The negative effects visited upon us by the “pandemic” were a result of mainstream media propaganda and draconian government policy, not from the virus itself. The virus may have been real, but the “pandemic” was a creation of the corporate media. All along, from the very beginning, there were tells that this was more about social engineering than actual disease. After all, had the disease been a highly contagious bleeding-out-the-eyes nightmare, no restrictions nor rules would have even been necessary because people would have hidden in their homes quite voluntarily.

So there’s a one-ring-to-rule-them-all master rule that governs all the others: A totalizing media/government narrative. The narrative shifted quite a lot, but like a school of fish, the government and the corporate media moved in unison, and I cannot emphasize this enough. If prior to covid you noticed this in fits and starts, that big-tech and big-media and big-government seemed to be working together in a proto-fascist fashion, all of that congealed under the covid narrative. Today, no one can have any doubts now that they are all working off the same page.

Rule 1: Medical Establishment Exposed: Follow "The Science"

In a sane and rational world, you might think that the medical establishment, with its connection to the scientific disciplines, would have been the guard/watchdog for all of this covid madness. In what is to me chief among the most eye-opening and downright frightening developments of the Great Gaslighting is that the medical establishment was probably the most ardent and vociferous proponents of the covid hoax. Despite, for instance, that medical doctors must take courses in microbiology to earn their degrees and they surely know how small a virus is and how it is impossible to filter a virus out of air with cloth, doctors pushed masks the hardest. When people got sick with covid, they were isolated from everyone else and in many many cases allowed to die on ventilators while their loved ones were forced to mourn elsewhere. This is despite the fact that covid was known early on to have a survivability rate above 99% and that it was not a deadly disease for healthy people and young people.

The medical establishment pushed Remdesivir and ventilators as a covid treament, which killed probably tens of thousands of people.

The medical establishment propagandized against the drug Ivermectin despite the reams of evidence that it was an effective and safe treatment for covid, calling it horse de-wormer and horse paste. Pharmacists refused to fill those prescriptions.

Going to a doctor’s office during the pandemic one was forced to wear a mask, santize hands, and wait in the car until an aid came out to get you.

The list is long, and these are just the ones that come to the top of my head. Again, medical professionals, in a sane society, ought to have been the most vocal and sane voices against the covid propaganda, but they were in fact its biggest propagandists. I still don’t know what to make of this, but I can tell you I no longer have anything like the blind faith in the “do no harm” oath-takers that I used to have. Hospitals and doctors appear to me to be completely bought and paid for by Big Pharma and at the beck-and-call of the federal government with the rights and needs of the individual patient not even a secondary concern. It has probably been like this for a long time (cure for cancer, anyone? Beuller? Beuller?) but covid pulled back the curtain and severe and draconian corrections ought to occur because of it. Probably thousands of doctors and adminstrators ought to go to prison for life. That’s not hyperbole. If proper investigations happened with an independent and walled-off and legally-empowered committe, I have no doubts that scores of cases of fraud and criminal negligence would be uncovered, the likes of which we have never before been seen.

Rule 2: You could never catch covid at big-box stores.

This was the first unmistakable tell that the “pandemic” was a hoax. Intead of closing, the big-box stores just put up plexiglass barriers at the cash registers and fancy info-graphic arrow stickers down the isles. That’s when I knew everyone was just larping (live-action role playing). Obviously, if covid had been a threat, everything would have shut down and no one would have gone to work because the risk would have been too high. To accept that covid was real, people had to accept that covid spread was stymied by the size of the business. Big box stores like Kroger or Wal-Mart never shut down, but you could certainly catch it at a small store, such as the music store where your daughter takes guitar lessons, or the cute little boutique where you got your towels monogrammed. One of my students who ran a barber shop went into work to open his shop on a Monday morning to find it locked down by the city with a note on his door that if he opened he would be subject to steep fines. Pretty much universal, across the country, small businesses were forced to close, but big box stores never closed. Question: Was the rate of covid infection sky-high for big-box workers compared against the general population? I mean, since they never closed, their employees ought to have dropped like flies, making it extremely difficult to remain opened. These big-box stores became the public square. A woman I know who manages a local big-box grocery store told me that March and April of 2020 saw record-setting sales with toilet paper flying off the shelves at break-neck speed. How did her employees survive?

Overnight, plexiglass barriers went up on the counters between cashier and customer, most of which still stand to this day. In my classrooms, plexiglass barriers went up at my computer’s workstation at the front of the classroom. Arrow stickers when on the floors in big-box stores that created these one-way streets. “Social distancing”, a phrase I’d never before heard prior to covid, was suddenly on everyone lips, with all big stores putting stickers in the check-out lines that marked off 6 feet. All of this happened at break-neck speed.

Rule 3: Wear A Mask, Bigot.

The converged media/government narrative pretended that the covid could be filtered out of the air by a cloth mask of any type. Material, construction technique, or any factor at all, really, were irrelevant. It never mattered what the mask was made of. It only mattered that you wore one. Putting any other input aside, that was a tell that this was bullshit on the face of it (pun intended). Because, it would have been of utter importance that the mask had the right filtration characteristics, but that never came up.

Let’s back up a step or two: At first, in March of 2020 the corporate/government narrative was that masks were ineffective at filtering a virus out of the air, with Anthony Fauci himself emphasizing this. In April and May of 2020, without any reason given, the narrative pivoted 180 degrees to masks are absolutely essential to protect your health, that they absolutely do filter a virus out of the air. Then, months later in one of the more comical narrative turns, they started pushing for two masks, with Fauci himself sporting two masks in his media appearances. At that point, anyone who cared to notice at the very least saw that Fauci would say whatever he was paid to say, that the man had not even a sliver of integrity. That all of this mask theater was inconsistent was never questioned by the in the mainstream media narratives. Nothing to see here.

Masks never made any sense at all, ever, and were never based on anything resembling logic or reason, but the most brilliant rhetorical turn made in the narrative was this: In a weird perversion/inversion, the media narrative marketed masks as something you do out of a sense of altruism, something you do for other people. So, the old default when I wear a mask when I use my sander is that I don’t want the wood particles junking up my lungs. In covid rules, you wore a mask to prevent your covid virus from infecting other people; however, If you had a negative covid test that indicated you had no covid to spread, YOU STILL HAVE TO PUT ON A MASK, BIGOT. A mask, then, became a symbol of basic human decency and goodness. It transcended physical reality.

That’s when the mask itself became a political symbol. Democrats and liberals wore them as political badges. Conservatives did not. I attended a Trump rally in October of 2020 and no one wore the mask. LOOK AT ME! I’m wearing a mask and I’m definitely a good person! Look at those maskless MAGA assholes over there, though. They are literal Hitlers. Of course, masks do not work to filter a virus out of the air. That’s impossible because the virus is far too tiny to be filtered by the cloth fibers of a mask. By the end of the “pandemic”, physical function was entirely irrelevant. Whether or not masks work to filter a virus out of the air was beside the point of wearing them.

Interestingly, as of this writing, the masks have mostly disappeared with the lone exception of black people, who still wear them in great numbers. Early on in the covid media blitz black people were targetted explicitly to put them in line as the most reliable and stalwart voting bloc of the democratic party. Covid was marketed to black people as especially deadly, and they got right in line. Recently, I had a job interview by committee that consisted of three black people and two white people. The blacks wore masks, and the whites did not. I am fascinated by this political signifying that the masks enabled.

Further, it is striking to me how big of a change this is from pre-covid-scare. Before covid, many banks posted signs on the doors that all sunglasses and ball caps had to be removed before entering so as to get a clear picture of your face on camera. Today, the mask is a personal choice, and no bank would ask you to remove one, and during the height of mask-madness, they were actually required to enter. I’ve never read an article about how this is a boon to criminals intent to rob banks, but surely it was and still is one of perks of the pandemic for scofflaws.

Rule 4: Ventilation Never Mentioned

In one of the biggest missed opportunities of all time, perhaps, manufacturers of air filters didn’t sieze this opportunity to market their products. Maybe the industry lobby in Washington is too weak, I don’t know. I do know that ventilation systems were never a message in the mainstream covid propaganda. I find that odd since Covid was airborn, so one would think we’d talk a lot about how to filter the air and how the air circulated, and lots of conversations like that. Do you remember anyone talking about ventilation systems ever? Media reports about ventilation? I never caught a word about it. Heat. Air conditioning. Never mentioned. In any indoor situation, the air is being circulated across the entirety of the store via the air ventilation system. A dude with covid could easily spread it to everyone in the big box store via the ventilation system. What sorts of air filters were being used in these stores? We’re they small enough to filter out viruses? Never discussed. This happened a lot during the covid scare. What was omitted from the discussion was just as interesting as what was included.

Rule 5: Wear a Mask While Walking to your Table (or Browsing the Isles)

So, so much of the covid rules were an assault on human intelligence. This one is a glowing example of that. In restaurants, the covid could only get to you on your way to the table, but not when you were sitting down at the table. Sir, can you please put on a mask so we can seat you? Sir, can you please jump through this hoop on your way to the table? Thank you. I always refused, politely, because that’s the only thing I can do when faced with an insult to my intelligence, and in many of these instances, I was explicitly denied service. Red Lobster, I’m looking right at you, and I will never set foot in any Red Lobster again for the rest of my life, and you can count on that. Because I refused to acquiese to this rule, I was explictly denied service there. “Sir, we cannot seat you if you refuse to wear the mask to your table.” As I write this, it sounds so goofy so as not to be true, but I can promise you it happened, all over the place, with regularity.

This carried over to smaller corporate shops once they were allowed to reopen. I went into a Tandy Leather in Birmingham, Alabama, and I was accosted by an employee there, “Sir, I have to ask you to put on a mask.” And when I refused, he said, “Sir, then I must ask you to leave. I can get you anything you need and bring it outside to you.” But what if I don’t know what I want and I just want to browse? “Sorry sir, I can’t allow you to shop without a mask.” Think about how completely upside-down that is. Stores actually put wearing the mask above their profit motive. A mask that did absolutely nothing to filter a virus out the air. And no one batted an eye at this aburdity.

Rule 6: Alcohol-based disinfectants are okay again.

Pre-covid, the media used to run reports about the folly of using alcohol-based disinfectants to kill bacteria because of the danger of creating resistant superbugs (this is true). Soap and water is all you need, they said. That went out the window with covid as alcohol-based sanitizers were encouraged and EVERYWHERE. This is despite the fact that covid is airborn. Didn’t matter. How is an alcohol-based hand sanitizer going to prevent me from inhaling an airborne virus?

Rule 7: Racism is a Threat to Public Health: Enter Saint George Floyd

In what is without question among the worst qualities of humanity, it is completely obvious that the media directs the attention of the public wherever it wants. That’s nothing new. The awfulness of it is that for most people they can absolutely understand that, yet still fall for it every single time. There’s no reason in the world I ought to know anything about George Floyd, who was a low-level criminal, pornographer, and drug addict eeking out a miserable existence passing counterfeit bills and sucking on fentanyl in Minneapolis, yet when he died with the optics of a policeman pinning him down, the media pivoted instantaneously away from the covid scare and took up the narrative that racial injustice was more deadly than the covid, and this narrative completely and utterly obsessed the national hivemind for the next month, basically the entire month of June, so much so that no one was even celebrating faggotry during pride month (which as it turns out is probably the best thing George Floyd ever did).

It was the clown show to end all clown shows. As long as I live, I doubt I will ever again see anything quite like it, and based on my prior experience with how the media works, at the time I understood that the covid scare was officially over, for two big reasons. First, the fascist government and corporate alliance pivoted completely away from covid and encouraged the rioting. Oh, and there was a lot of rioting that racked up billions of dollars worth of property damage. Health experts that had been hyping covid as the worst plague in the history of plagues and who were telling people to sit at home scared and isolated (for health) were now saying get out there and burn shit down. The covid was officially exposed as a joke narrative at that point. This was undeniable and unmistakable. And a second reason is how the media, in the past, would ride a horse as hard as it could before switching to another one, and once discarded, the old narrative never again regained its prominence.

In a turn that as far as I can tell was unprecedented, the media, once it had flaggellated the Floyed narrative as much as possible, successfully pivoted back to covid. This is when I knew something different was happening. Again, under normal circumstances, George Floyd and 2020 race riots would have exposed the covid as fake and killed it, but the media simply shifted back to covid, and I mean they did it hard. I remember, I don’t know, during the first or second week of July give or take, I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things and almost nobody had on a mask, and it was remarkable to me because I called my fiance to tell her about it, that it looks like the Floyd narrative killed covid. It wasn’t a week later that the media snapped back and snapped back hard. It was remarkable.

1. Covid is the worst thing ever.
2. Racism is the worst thing ever and race riots are awesome
3. Covid is the triple-worst thing ever.

The Floyd Affair was when, unless you were a total idiot, it became clear that the covid “pandemic” was a creation of the media cut from whole cloth, right out of thin air, because the media, right before our eyes, reconstituted it out of thin air.

Rule 8: The CDC is Political

Before the covid scare I held the CDC in the highest regard as a gold standard of medical information. During the old vaccine debates (remember Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy?) this would sometimes come up in class discussions about current issues and I’d cite the CDC’s information about vaccines as the gold standard of evidence about vaccines. The covid scare revealed that the CDC is a political entity and not a medical authority. Forevermore, for my part, I’ll never cite it again for that very reason. It is a source of political narrative, not truth. The CDC never adjusted when the death/survival rates became clear, no adjustments were made. The sky was always falling. When it was clear that school kids were not at risk, the CDC didn’t adjust. When it was clear that college-aged adults were at a greater risk of dying in a car wreck on the way to class than from catching covid in class, universities did not adjust and stop requiring the stupid masks. Hospitals kept on with their stupid quarantine rules. Everyone followed the CDC’s guidelines, which were not medical but poltiical.

Rule 9: Enter the Clot Shots: No More Informed Consent

When the covid shots, which are experiemental MRNA gene therapies and not true vaccines, came on the market, because of the clarity that came out of the Floyd narrative that showed the “pandemic” was a media narrative, I automatically looked at them with skepticism. I decided I’d let everyone else take them before I did. If they had turned out to live up to their “safe and effective” marketing, I probably would have taken the shots because I hold out the possibility that the covid is a real disease, but in short order reports of blood clotting and myocarditis started turning up in sources I trusted. But then a couple of turns happened that made the shots something I would never take under any circumstances: 1. The media converged on the shots narrative, which told me it was false. It is really just that simple. If the media converges on a single narrative, you know that narrative is false. So, when the media converges on the narrative that the shots were “safe and effective” you immediate knew that was false.

And 2: Informed consent was impossible. No long-term studies. Information about the side effects and risks to taking the shots was nowhere to be found. If one googled “covid deaths” he could find an up-to-the-second counter of how many people had died from covid. If you googled “vaccine deaths” no number could be found anywhere but instead he found propaganda about how the vaccines were “safe and effective.” The propagandaizing was off the charts with so-called “anti-vaxxers”, skeptics like me, were painted as rubes and literal Hitlers. At that point, I don’t see how anyone justified taking the clot shots, but millions of people were forced to take them in many cases. President Biden, for example, forced the military to take them, and he pulled every lever of power available to him to force private companies to force their employees to take them. All without the ability to give informed consent. The fact that the federal government really, really wanted people to take the shots was yet another red flag that no one should take the shots. Prior to the Great Gaslighting, I thought most people well-understood that the federal government is not interested in anyone’s health. Post-Gaslighting, it turns out that a huge number of people never got that memo.

Rule 10: Corruption, Censorship, and Woke-Splosion

For my money, the most important rules to come out of the covid “pandemic” was that it revealed that the Western tradition of rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, and so forth, is over and we’ve entered into a new era marked by corruption from the top to the bottom. The old days of muckraking journalism are over. The press no longer functions as a check on government corruption. It is part of the scheme. The only mainstream corporate journalism we got supported the master narrative, and Big Tech, with its control of social media, censored any independent journalism that didn’t support the master narrative. Covid exposed all of this, blared it all right out in the open, and one might be tempted to call that a good thing to come out of the covid “pandemic”, but breathtakingly, it doesn’t seem to matter because every single entity has become corrupted. We are living is truly frightening times and this is the reason. As of this writing, no corrections are in the works. No investigations, and certainly no jail terms, are in the offing. The old Americanism, truth, justice, and the American Way, is dead, supplanted by corporate-sponsored wokism. The American left is dead. Entire fields, from journalism to medicine, are corrupted and captured by the wokist and corporatist narratives. It had no doubt been incubating for some time, but the covid made it clear, ushered it right out into the open, and here we are, at this particular point in history. What people naively believed could never happen in America has happened.

A Concluding Question

As I sit here writing this, it occurs to me that it is an open question as to how historians in the future are going to interpret these events. Academia, you see, was the incubator of wokism, and I’ve worked in academia for 22 years, and I can tell you without hesitation that the vast majority of academics are abject cowards and go-alongs. Think about the source materials that are going to be available to historians, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two biggest papers in the U.S., neither of which at any point published anything true about the “pandmemic”. If those are one’s sources, then the master narrative is what gets recorded as historical, and nothing approaching the truth will emerge. Thus, I’m writing this for posterity. Maybe it gets archived somewhere. Maybe some future historian with a set of balls and a spine deduces that the master narrative is false, rolls up his sleeves and does some real scholarship. I am a pessimist by nature, but even I can muster up the optimism to suggest that there is always that possibility that the truth will win after all is said and done.