Ignorant and Afraid: Politicians and bureaucrats aren't immune to their own propaganda, and they really are as ill-informed as they seem.

I’ve mentioned this episode a few times: On 11 March 2020, Angela Merkel held a press conference where she remarked that the best hope was to slow the spread of SARS-2, and that 70% of Germans could be infected. The Italian lockdown was only a few days old, and it was plainly not Merkel’s intent to go down the path of mass containment. The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and likely a few other countries too still planned for an ordinary approach to Corona, with minimal mitigations.

All the while, though, Team Lockdown was hard at work behind the scenes, to bend policy in their direction. As this leaked email from 20 March shows, German medical bureaucrats deputised by the Ministry of the Interior were soon consulting experts on how best to instil “fear and a willingness to obey in the population.”

Because Western governments doubted their capacity to enforce Chinese-style lockdowns, fomenting mass panic became a non-pharmaceutical intervention in its own right. The histrionic media messaging has continued to this day, and it has contributed to a profoundly important division in our society: There are on the one hand those people in essential roles, who have endured exposure to Corona from the beginning, and most of whom have had the virus by now. And there are on the other hand those in Martin Kulldorf’s “laptop class,” that is to say well-off urban professionals, who have spent most of the last 21 months at home, hiding from a virus that many of them believe is approximately as dangerous as SARS. Mass infections among these people are only starting to happen right now.

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To the profound disappointment of Merkel and everybody like her, the vaccines have not eradicated Corona. Every day, the prospect of personal infection looms for these people as a new, uncomfortable certainty. Every day, they and the rest of the work-from-home bureaucracy become ever more terrified. The prime minister of Austria is so afraid that he has confined all unvaccinated Austrians to their homes. When asked, he declared that this measure would have no end date. The Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory is terrified. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is terrified.

You know who isn’t terrified right now? Everyone outside these circles. I and many of the people I know have had Corona, and we’re not terrified. Blue-collar workers have mostly been infected, and they’re not terrified. Grocery clerks, nurses, police officers and bus drivers aren’t terrified. All of the terror is at the top, blaring down at us all of the time. All these people know they are going to get sick in the next few months, and they are railing against this reality.