The Future is Local: The Terrible Twin Temptations of Pandemic Amnesty
It's a trap!
As many (including myself) have long predicted, we have reached the stage of the post-lockdown reckoning where the lockdown tyrants are asking that everybody just calm down and let it go. Mistakes were made, sure. But let’s all learn from it. There’s no need for bitter recriminations. We all have to move forward together. We’re good, right?
Here’s patient zero of this new cancer:
And here’s how it metastasizes into other people’s voices and social media feeds:
Some of you reading this may call yourselves politically conservative, and you have fought hard to defy all the madness of the last couple of years. There’s a lot of chest-beating going on among the Defiant Ones of the past couple of years, trying to stay hyped to resist. You may yourself read the above and shout "never surrender!" with a triumphant laugh.
But as a Libertarian who has been your ally in this fight, I write this to you as a warning. I want to point out here two underpinnings of the broadly conservative mindset and how it sets you and your friends up to lose this argument. Be mindful of these.
One: You want to forgive
That's a good thing. It's laudable. It's righteous. Most religious traditions bake it into their commandments. And it feels good to do. It feels good to let stuff go. That's all totally normal, and there's nothing wrong with you for wanting to do that generally. And even the chest-beaters currently mocking the idea of "just forgiving" the lockdown tyrants and letting it all go probably perceive a little angel sitting on their shoulder saying “you know it's the right thing to do.”
But you've been victimized, and mercy requires justice. Forgiveness requires contrition. The lockdown tyrants are not trying to avoid getting yelled at. “Let’s all just let it go” is a we-trap they are setting to convince you to let them avoid all accountability entirely. But if nobody's accountable, it can only mean there has been no crime committed. If there is no crime, no justice can be brought to bear on anyone. If no justice is bearing on anyone, there is nothing to forgive. If there is nothing to forgive, forgiveness is meaningless. “Pandemic Amnesty” is an ax, which the lockdown tyrants now seek to use to chop out the root of your entire belief in forgiveness. You believe forgiveness holds real spiritual power. “Pandemic Amnesty” is a lie built to make you complicit in rendering that power impotent by conflating the words “amnesty” and “forgiveness.” It’s a seductive lie, but it is a lie nevertheless.
Amnesty is by definition an act performed before any process of justice begins. Amnesty is a declaration that there will be no pursuit of justice, effectively creating a situation in which there is no crime to account for. It is not forgiveness, and conflating the two terms is a dreadful mistake. It’s a mistake the lockdown tyrants want you to make. They don’t want you to forgive their crimes. They want you to agree (with them) that there are no crimes. “We” all just misunderstood.
But there are real crimes here. People had their livelihoods destroyed. Children had their emotional and educational growth stunted. The defiant were publicly screamed at by unhinged Karens (when they weren’t being assaulted by the police). Supply chains were devastated as traders were forced to stand down for nobody knew how long. Families were mutilated as elders were siloed, many dying alone while their grieving families were locked out of the building. A monstrous collusion between government tyrants and the press led to the silencing of inconvenient truth across all media, an alliance dedicated to viciously demonizing all whiffs of dissent. Millions of people were bullied into accepting an experimental injection of dubious efficacy, with unknown side-effects (that are now becoming horrifyingly known) and total liability-shielding for its manufacturers. And even as all that was going on, massive (and politically convenient) demonstrations were given a free pass nationwide. The lockdown tyrants praised race-rioters for bravery while demanding that grandma be denied visitors in perpetuity and junior wear a mask in his own bedroom for zoom school. Vast damage has been done. Abuse rates (spousal, child, substance) have skyrocketed. Honest researchers will be counting the cost (both seen and unseen) for generations to come. The lockdown tyrants want you to just let all that go.
They use the word “forgiveness,” but it’s a scam. They don't want forgiveness. Forgiveness would require that they accept accountability. They want amnesty, which means what they really want is to never have to account for anything. Ever. They don't want you to ever oppose them again. This whole amnesty idea is designed to get you to do one thing: stop resisting. Which brings us to the second trap.
Two: You detest politics
I purposefully used a word other than “hate” there. This isn’t about hate. You don’t hate politics. Rather, you generally accept that politics are inevitable (the unnamed third partner of death and taxes) but you detest them. You regard them as gross. You just don’t want to get involved. It takes too much time, and involves too many stupid people arguing over stupid things, and you just don’t have the patience for that.
But then you came to hate what was being done by the lockdown hystericals. Some of you watched people lose their jobs. Some of you had your own employment destroyed. Some of you finally got to see what was going on in your kid’s classroom. And you hated it. That hate animated you. It roused you to go shout at your local school board or city council. It roused you to defiance (and maybe even a little agorism). If you were one of that roused and enraged cadre, great! Stay roused!
Note that I’m saying to stay roused, not hateful. Hate is something you can’t sustain. It’s a hot-burning fire, and sooner or later it’s going to run out of fuel and you’ll calm down. It’s not healthy to keep your hate stoked high. But therein lies the core of this temptation. As the reason for your hate fades away, and your hate fades with it, your default position on politics (you detest them) will try and reassert itself. You are going to want to go back to the way things were. You’re tired of all the nonsense, and you’re going to want to be able to declare “mission accomplished,” stop resisting, and get back to the things you love about life. You might already want that.
After all, the fight was won, right? Mask mandates got called off. Emergency powers are finally being allowed to expire. Businesses are back open (the ones that survived, anyway). Schools are back open. Little leagues are recruiting again. TV shows aren’t masking their characters anymore. Sure, there are still the occasional mask-wearers (the ones masking alone in their cars are still out there), but as long as nobody’s messing with you over it, people can do their thing. All you ever wanted was to be left alone to live your life, and now that’s kinda sorta back. You can stop fighting now, right?
Unfortunately, no. But you are going to want to believe that. Your fundamental sense of decency, coupled with your rose-colored-glasses vision of “how politics used to work,” will make you want to pack it up and go on home. But the moment you do, you lose. The lockdown tyrants aren’t sorry. They aren’t apologizing. They haven’t, and they won’t. They want you to believe that they have heard you. But that’s a trap. They’ve never heard you. They’ve never respected you. They’ve never cared a whit about you. “Pandemic Amnesty” is a false surrender designed to get you to leave the arena, so they can reclaim victory as soon as you’re gone.
You have been roused to attention. You have looked at your local government apparatus, how your school board and your city council blundered and dithered and rolled over, passing the buck like mad and calling it “following the scientific guidance” and hoping nobody noticed. You have hated what you saw. Let that burning hate now forge in you a steel resolve to fix it. The “Pandemic Amnesty” cancer will be spreading to your local electeds any day now. It may already be among them. You may have already heard one or more of them shrug and sigh and very sadly say “we just didn’t know. We were doing the best we could. Nobody knew.” Except plenty of people knew. Even the lockdown tyrants knew. They just didn’t care. They now want you to actively ignore their incompetence (or abject cowardice, or both). They are counting on your baseline disdain for politics to eventually make you fade and go home. They’re trying to wait you out. Deny them this. You’re involved now. Stay involved.
The future is local. If you back away from your local government now, the next set of rules they impose on you will be even worse. They’re planning it right now, and they’ll want you to just “let that go,” too. Stay in the arena. Don’t let up on your local boards and councils. The fight for liberty is not over. It’s not even close. Don’t stop fighting until the fight is done.