Studying this protracted, weird devolution of the West (and its neo-colonized Rest of the World) in the Age of Covid, I notice the excruciatingly small, albeit apparently growing, movement of disaffected dissidents, skeptics & critics is not a monolithic block. It is diverse, not only in socio-economic characteristics and geographical location, but also in terms of what position and/or degree of dissidence is being described and/or advocated.
As with any spectrum, there are with this spectrum two extreme antipodal poles on either end, and there is a range between them. On the radical extreme, we have Christine Massey, David Crow,
Andrew Kaufman and Tom Cowan (about which I wrote in an earlier essay here), who not only believe the Covid virus doesn't exist, they go further and believe no viruses exist, that virology itself is a tissue of incoherence & deceit, and that the "germ theory" it was built on historically is also a tissue of lies. On the opposite extreme, we have dissidents who merely oppose the degree and nature of lockdowns per se, but who nevertheless acknowledge there is a deadly pandemic called Covid that we need to be "careful" about to ensure we stay "safe" from -- just not to the extent of the lockdowns.
Case in point, we have Judge Jeanine Pirro -- vaunted "conservative" and ostensible Trump supporter -- and on her FOX show Dr. Marc Seigel, a well-known Mainstream voice who regularly goes on FOX to push ever so gently against the Mainstream Narrative. Look at this recent exchange between them:
Marc Seigel: ...if you haven’t had Covid, I would say this: the
vaccine is much less dangerous than Covid is, because you get a lot of those
long-term side effects from having had Covid.
Judge Jeanine: I agree, totally agree with you. If you haven’t had it, the vaccine makes
sense. If you have, you gotta wonder
what’s going on with Big Pharma.
[bold emphasis mine].
Some boldly conservative Covid Skeptics they are, right? LMMO (Laughing My Mask Off).
Another example, somewhat subtler, is that of a doctor featured in a Mainstream paper (the UK's Daily Mail), one Dr. Renee Hoenderkamp, who says nicely dissident things like this:
Already, we are so cowed and docile that no one is asking the obvious
questions such as what is the point of these restrictions currently? Are
they serving any positive purpose at all?
And this:
As a GP, I do not accept that there is any valid medical reason for
carrying on with any level of lockdown that overrides the multiple
compelling reasons for getting back to normal.
However, when you read the article more closely, you see she is predicating this on a reinforcement of the Covid Narrative that has led to the very things she opposes:
Today, when half the population has already had both vaccine doses,
there should be no danger that our hospitals will be unable to cope with
the virus, even given the increased transmissibility of the Delta
variant.
One (a Covid Dissident one, that is) could say they suppose it's on balance good that doctors like Dr. Hoenderkamp are voicing their concerns about the Covid lockdowns; however, months and months of exposure to one of the veritable Kings of double-talking waffling equivocation, Alex Berenson, has made me ambivalent at best, and intolerant at worst, for such mealy-mouthed jello in the face of this disastrously metastasizing monstrosity. And before Berenson, in an entirely different context -- the problem of Islam -- I had developed an analytical argument for a multi-pronged approach to what I called "Counter-Jihad Softies" (see this ancient posting from September of 2012, for example), from robust critique to outright rejection of their attempts to "help".
