The Brew: Did the COVID Panic Wake Up the West and Shatter Leftist Groupthink?
There must have been a moment when Noah’s wealthiest, wickedest neighbors looked out at the weather and realized: “You know what? It never stops raining. Whatever could that mean?”
In that spirit, The Atlantic just published an essay by an author who was shocked — shocked! — to learn that the COVID panic and global lockdown pushed young people to the right. He writes:
“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.
The rest of the story is behind a paywall, and I’d rather send a check directly to the Chinese Communist Party than to The Atlantic. But I doubt we’re missing much. You and I lived through 2020, and so we in fact remember what it was like to live through a totalitarian takeover as thorough — and in some ways as brutal — as what the Soviets did in Poland, Hungary, and other conquered countries in the wake of World War II. As I noted last week, our elites weaponized the COVID panic to
- impose a public health dictatorship,
- lock us in our homes,
- close our churches,
- censor our media,
- force untested vaccines into our arms,
- kill our seniors by dumping virus patients in nursing homes, then incinerating them as medical waste,
- graft the cells of newly aborted babies onto the scalps of mice (using taxpayer funds, approved by Regime evangelical Francis Collins, who was never criticized by globalist Pope Francis),
- steal the 2020 election, and
- imprison peaceful protestors.
And what do you know? A surprising number of young people all across the West — sitting locked in their homes and isolated from their friends in the name of a virus that likely wouldn’t harm them — got angry at their jailers. As the lies they’d been told about COVID got exposed and debunked, from its likely origin in a U.S.-funded biolab to the health risks of the untested, abortion-tainted “vaccine,” these young voters began to wonder what else their elders were lying about. Maybe that included the benefits of importing millions of military-age angry Muslim men into their countries. Or the Nazi smears employed by corrupt ruling leftist parties to outlaw their political opposition and censor both mass media and even private social media posts.
Nyah, Nyah, We Fooled You
What has happened politically in the U.S. — and is starting to happen in Europe — is something like one of those films with an unreliable narrator, where late in the third act the filmmaker reveals to you the truth: that he has been fooling you all along. No, there’s no such person as Tyler Durden in Fight Club; the hero has been talking to himself and even fist-fighting himself all along. Maybe a better analogy is one of those M. Night Shyamalan “surprise” ending movies that so infuriate audiences. We don’t like being lied to and spoon-fed illusions, even while watching a fictional film. So when our political masters do it to us on a global scale to Hoover up power over us and experiment on our immune systems, we might lurch into outrage. Especially young people, who naturally chafe at authority.
Our authorities discredited themselves completely, along with our public health officials, our “trusted” media outlets, our state medical regulators, most of our politicians, and even most of our pastors. They all either colluded consciously in a global campaign of deception, or soiled themselves from terror at the prospect of maybe, possibly, losing their little earthly lives. So instead they sold their souls for pennies on the dollar.
In a long talk with Eric Metaxas, one of the few public Christians to speak out courageously all through the COVID panic, I analyzed the public health dictatorship imposed by our prostituted institutions and the backlash they all deserved.
I’ll admit that at the time I didn’t dare to hope for a correction as savage and systematic as the one Donald Trump and his team are now pushing forward. Expect every day for another appalling revelation about the callousness, malice, and pathological dishonesty that crouched in our halls of power, and still clings to influence via lawless federal judges, to be revealed. Rally behind the president and his team, who are marching through the corridors of corruption like Allied troops through Hitler’s Europe. This is no time for a premature truce. As Steve Deace has written, what we need are Nuremburg Trials.
Fooled Us Once, Shame on You …
One of the few organizations that was consistently honest, courageous, even prophetic throughout the COVID panic was the Brownstone Institute. So we should heed its warning: the same villains who sold us the global lockdown in 2020 are ready to try it again, and for the same motives: to cripple Trump’s presidency and solidify their power over ordinary citizens. Dr. Clayton J. Baker warns:
The key to understanding the current Bird flu panic is this: Bird flu is a complete rerun of the Covid script. There is just one twist:
Last time, with Covid, the pandemic-planning bioterrorists directly blackmailed us by taking away our civil rights, in order to coerce us to accept their unsafe and ineffective vaccines.
This time, with Bird flu, the pandemic-planning bioterrorists are indirectly blackmailing us by targeting our food in order to coerce us to accept more of their unsafe and ineffective vaccines into our food supply and those who supply it.
Go read the whole thing, and let your elected officials know we won’t be fooled again.
How Obama’s Team and a Pedophile Cardinal Opened the Doors to Child Sex Trafficking
Children’s advocate and faithful Catholic Elizabeth Yore traces the dark, disturbing connections between disgraced ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and decisions made by the Obama administration that led to a massive influx of unaccompanied minors into the U.S. — thousands of whom remain unaccounted for and are likely being trafficked in the sex industry or working in U.S. sweatshops.
Citing the new book
Trump’s Team Says No to World War III
Just a few short months ago, we here at The Stream were honestly, seriously worried that the corrupt, doddering Biden administration might stumble into a military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine. The shadow of August 1914 hung heavy over the world as late as August 2024. What a blessing, what balm from Gilead, it is to see Trump’s new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, reestablish normal diplomatic contacts with the powerful, unpredictable Russian government, and seek a sane resolution that will end the futile bloodshed in the long-suffering nation of Ukraine.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlines three points on U.S. and Russia discussions to end the war in Ukraine after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Saudi Arabia:
1 – Reestablish diplomatic facilities in each respective country.
2 – Appoint a high level… pic.twitter.com/tFQ04RqLKf— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 18, 2025
Along The Stream …
Watch dogged journalist and author Naomi Wolf intervew Dr. Peter McCullough, a famous cardiologist who was canceled and driven from his medical practice for telling the truth about the COVID panic, as McCullough warns the Trump administration about the next “pandemic” our elites are likely to use to derail his administration and reimpose their power.
Don’t miss the fascinating interview by former mafioso, now born-again Christian, Michael Franzese of the prosecutor who helped bring down his crime family, Rudolph Giuliani. Since then, Giuliani himself has been the target of systematic lawfare by corrupt public authorities. Watch these two former enemies talk about the forces that threaten us all today.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.