Everything is upside-down. The top-down process is becoming bottom-up in terms of the fragmentation of information consumption, and the loss of confidence by the public in experts and policy makers. People increasingly trust and defer to the likes or Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Tim Dillon, and others in the podcast/stand-up ‘clique’, who have over the past few years amassed a captive audiences in the millions, more so than mainstream media and have become moral authorities in their own right, and are on the font lines of defending free speech as the ‘voice of the people,’ because our political leaders have failed us, and the entertainment industry and the mainstream media have revealed themselves as little more than apparatuses of propaganda of a state-approved and controlled cultural agenda. Honesty and candor comes from these decentralized voices and from the fringes, whether it’s blogs (and platforms such as Substack), podcasts, Clubhouse, Signal, online radio shows, or stand-up comedy. BUt it’s not just podcasting and comedy that has bypassed the media: Elon Musk bypassed NASA and has a fully-functioning space program.
Consider Covid, which I believe has irreparably hurt the reputations of the experts and the mainstream media. First, we were told that Covid was as deadly as the Spanish Flu (1-2% IFR) in order to justify the lockdowns, which by April/May was revised down by a magnitude of 10, yet in spite of Covid only being slightly more lethal than the flu instead of 50x as originally feared, the restrictions continued. Then there was the CDC flip-flopping on the efficacy of masks. And then we were promised that if we complied that things would return to normal by Summer. Of course, they didn’t. Many counties are now in their second or third lockdowns a year later even after imposing significant restrictions earlier in the year. Germany and Italy had some of the strictest lockdowns and restrictions in early 2020 yet still had massive second wave by the end of 2020, as evidence of the infectiveness of such measures and how experts were wrong.
Experts and policy makers want everyone to keep wearing their masks and social distancing, even long after the successful deployment of vaccines and as cases and deaths keep falling. When they say ‘new normal’ this is not hyperbole, but an idealization and then actualization how society is supposed to be going forward (or at least until the next crisis, in which the process of creating another ‘new normal’ or paradigm shift repeats).
Even if you are a reactionary, as Moldbug is or professes to be or is, big government is not the answer, because the arc of government is always towards progressivism. This is why I (and others) found how how some on the alt-right defending these mask mandates and other measures, wrong, to put it tersely. I was surprised, as many were, by Mudbug’s April 2020 article defending masks and advocating for a drastic national response to Covid. It was too bad to see someone who is otherwise an independent thinker become a useful idiot, albeit a very smart one, by parroting the Covid lie. It is as if we’re supposed to feel sorry for these Covid victims and out of compassion and empathy forfeit our rights; I don’t, and I won’t (if I can help it). Masks mandates, forced social distancing, and other restrictions is not just symptomatic of the march to serfdom, but the march towards the infantilization and feminization of America. It is like elementary school, but instead of the teacher telling you to do something for your own good, it is the government assuming that role.