The truth about Covid McCarthyism – spiked
It will take some time to measure the impact of this empire of Covid censorship on our societies. To my mind, it didn t only prevent the expression of certain views, which is a grave enough offence in itself, arguably the gravest offence a society can commit. It also left us catastrophically unprepared for the post-lockdown era. The punishment of dissenting voices that wondered out loud if lockdown might lead to deadly backlogs in the health system, and to a decline in people s mental health, and to a regression of children s social skills, and to an economic downturn that might have severely negative consequences, meant we never properly talked about those things. Which means now that all those things are happening it turns out some of the dissenters were right our societies are startled, and clueless.
There s a lesson here: censorship is an incredibly destructive force. The suppression of dissent is always, in every single situation, a bad idea. It reduces a society s ability to explore angles, examine possibilities, imagine future scenarios. Going forward, we must never again allow experts to suppress whatever they decree to be anti-scientific or dangerous thought. On every issue, from pandemics to the climate to the economy, people s freedom to think and speak and warn must reign.
Brendan O’Neill.