The New Movie Eddington Depicts How Evil the COVID Lockdown Measures Really Were
I’m not in the business of recommending movies here — especially R-rated ones with adult content. But films play a large role in our culture, even if most of us now watch them on streaming channels from our couches. That’s a habit we were forced into during the darkest period in my lifetime, the COVID Panic.
Now a new film from a mainstream Hollywood studio has shocked moviegoers and critics alike by actually depicting the madness to which our elites subjected us in 2020. That film is Eddington.
It stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Emma Stone, and is set in a tiny town in New Mexico. The story revolves around the fight between the slick, woke mayor (Pascal) who’s championing draconian lockdown policies in a town with zero COVID cases and the rebellious, MAGA sheriff (Phoenix), who’s flouting the mask- and social-distancing mandates in the name of personal freedom.
There’s a lot wrong with the movie, including gratuitous nudity and some shark-jumping plot twists that might well spoil your viewing experience. But there are also amazing scenes that catapult the viewer straight back into a time he might rather forget: the paranoid, death-haunted atmosphere our elites whipped up with wild warnings that millions of Americans might perish. This is one of the first films to depict the COVID madness, and will probably be the last. These are memories our elites don’t want us to summon.
Memories You’d Rather Purge
Remember when you couldn’t go anywhere without a useless, sweaty mask over your face? How about the people who’d scream in your face if you got closer to them than six feet? Was your employer threatening to fire you if you didn’t take an experimental gene therapy derived from aborted babies? Remember your church closing down while abortion clinics and casinos chugged away? Have you forgiven CVS and Walgreens for refusing to fill prescriptions for safe medicines like ivermectin, forcing you to order it from a feed store? I haven’t.
How about the manufactured hysteria over George Floyd dying in a botched arrest while still high on a toxic dose of fentanyl? Suddenly, mobs of angry, menacing protestors materialized as if on cue, then started looting and burning our cities — as media stood before smoldering small businesses, assuring us that the protests were “mostly peaceful” and didn’t violate COVID mandates because “racism is a threat to public health.” Some of the same people who shed crocodile tears for Floyd publicly sneered when Herman Cain died of COVID after attending a Trump event. He was the wrong kind of black person: an entrepreneur and Republican, not a career criminal.
Do you remember the government closing beaches, lakes, bars, and schools to “protect the vulnerable” while housing COVID patients in nursing homes to spike the death rate — just enough to justify fraud-ridden mail-in balloting, just in time for the 2020 presidential election? I regret to say that I do.
Did you see the footage of elderly Americans trapped behind plastic sheeting, denied visits from family members and sacraments from clergy? And how, when they died, they were bagged up and disposed of as medical waste? I’m haunted by such images, which guilty governors like Andrew Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer hope you have forgotten completely.
A Few Heroes, Countless Villains
One of the few heroes of the COVID Panic was Jeffrey Tucker. He leads the Brownstone Institute, which helped expose the countless lies deployed by the government, Big Pharma, global health authorities, and the pastors who were paid to repeat the COVID party line. Tucker deeply admires the film. He wrote:
Rarely has my heart raced so fast in a movie. Eddington (2025) is nuts. Brilliantly crazy. Beyond belief. Beyond words. It might be the most politically and culturally realistic film I’ve ever seen.
It is particularly gripping because it deals with a madness that everyone tries to forget but which we dare not. It covers the strange period of the Spring and Summer of 2020, times that will go down in history. This is about as good a presentation of historical fiction as one can expect….
All the themes of this period make an appearance here. We have mask conflicts. One-way grocery aisles. Capacity restrictions that force people to line up outside the store. Social distancing. Hydroxychloroquine. School and business closures. Event 201. Stay-at-home orders. SSRIs, liquor, and pot. Social media everywhere. Christian nationalism. Antifa. Epstein. World Economic Forum. Fauci. Gates. A Big-Tech data center with a wind farm.
It’s all here, a crazy, mixed-up melange of insanity, paranoia, accusation, and anger. It is also a powder keg.
The film skewers all sides. First it goes after the smug authoritarians who cynically stoked the COVID panic, using it to make billions for pharmaceutical companies, accusing honest dissenters of literally killing people. The film shreds the self-righteous “antiracism” of disaffected youth looking for any excuse to smash a few store windows and claim the moral high ground. Eddington also pokes sharp fun at the most outlandish conspiracy theorists, as well as self-proclaimed populists who prove themselves to be nothing but opportunists.
No political group will be wholly pleased by Eddington, in other words. It’s offensive to nearly everyone, as an even-handed satire should be. It summons ghosts we thought we’d safely banished, and reopens wounds that never properly healed. And for all those reasons, I’m glad I saw the film, though it’s certainly not for everyone.
You know what is incumbent on every one of us? The duty to remember, to expose and punish the guilty, and make sure we don’t get fooled again.
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.