The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

***

On February 15, 2020, as people were just learning about Covid, the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.” His statement came almost a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a pandemic. The “infodemic” not only preceded the physical pandemic, it was, in the words of the world’s foremost health authority, “just as dangerous.”

The following month, all the major tech platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube — released a joint statement pledging that they would be “jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus” while also “elevating authoritative content”.

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“The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise,” wrote Klaus Schwab, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF), in a book published at the start of the pandemic that announced its aims in the title, COVID-19: The Great Reset. The global surveillance network Schwab described had a second purpose. Beyond detecting the spread of new viruses, it could monitor the information environment and shape the public’s response to new policies. Yet the category of “authoritative information”, which would supposedly prevent future “infodemics”, was less reliable than its name suggested.  

Members of the public who had eyes to see could not help but notice that whatever the experts vehemently declared about Covid could be reversed a day later. Health authorities like the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were often acting on incomplete information to rush out policies heavily influenced by political considerations in the name of “science”. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, said her platform’s publishing policy called for “removing information that is problematic”. Examples of problematic information she named included people advocating vitamin C and turmeric as cures for the coronavirus and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”. Meanwhile, the WHO frequently changed its recommendations, which meant the meaning of misinformation changed from day to day.

By following its own rule, Google would have been forced, at various times during the pandemic, to ban posts that advocated wearing masks, that characterized the virus as highly contagious, or that suggested that it might have come from a laboratory, since all those went against official stances taken by the WHO. The CDC was similarly inconsistent, changing its policy on masking at least three times in the span of two years. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, then finally acknowledging that the cloth masks most Americans used could not stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — a fact that Anthony Fauci had privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email.

Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton suggested that Covid-19 could have escaped from the Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan at the epicenter of the outbreak, he was swiftly attacked by journalists who all seemed to use strikingly similar language. The Washington Post labeled the idea of a possible lab leak a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. A reporter who was then at Politico accused Cotton of “spreading rumors… that were easily debunked within minutes”, while The New York Times chided Cotton for spreading what it called a “conspiracy theory.” Given the apparent consensus, Facebook banned users from discussing the lab leak theory under its misinformation policy. That May, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote that it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. A year later, Kessler published a new article explaining “How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible.” And a short time after that, Facebook quietly reversed its policy, posting a notice that read, “In consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In June 2020, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, sponsored the creation of a nominally independent organization called the Election Integrity Partnership whose mission was to monitor and remove election-related misinformation online in the lead-up to the November election. A consortium of four groups (two universities, a private defense contractor, and a Washington think tank), the EIP’s mandate, according to one of its founders, a former chief security officer for Facebook, Alex Stamos, was to “try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves”. With more than 100 employees scouring social media sites for speech that they deemed misinformation and flagged for suppression or removal by the tech companies, the EIP did the kind of work, according to Stamos, that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do on its own.

Immediately after the election, one of the four groups that made up the EIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory, spun off into a new information-monitoring initiative called the Virality Project. In a seamless transition from elections to public health, the project collaborated with the surgeon general’s office and the CDC while policing social media for what it labeled vaccine and pandemic-related misinformation. One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described “stories of true vaccine side effects”, specifically “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”. 

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law… not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.

***

At 77, Joe Biden was the oldest major-party candidate to ever run for president, and it showed. Heading into the November 2020 election against Trump, he looked unsteady, even feeble, in his limited and carefully stage-managed public engagements. Biden’s voice would trail off mid-sentence. He would forget what he was talking about or refer to someone who had died as if they were still alive.

Given his frequent verbal gaffes, blank stares, and ghost-white pallor, there were concerns about his health and mental fitness for office. But the powerful fact-checking bureaus in the press dismissed these concerns as Right-wing conspiracy mongering, misinformation, and ageist discrimination. One Homeland Security bulletin leaked to the media detailed an alleged Kremlin plot to manipulate American voters by spreading “unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden’s declining mental health.

With the election only a few months away, Biden’s campaign announced that he would not hold any public campaign rallies due to Covid-19. Biden added, in an offhand comment to reporters, “This is the most unusual campaign I think in modern history.” Not long after that, Biden won a most unusual election.

After losing the election, Trump spent two months challenging the results and stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “Stop the Steal” campaign that mixed reasonable questions of electoral interference with absurd and wildly irresponsible claims that prodded at the fragile basis of civic peace. The effort culminated on January 6, 2021, when a large pro-Trump demonstration that had assembled in Washington, DC, to challenge the election results splintered off into a riot at the US Capitol building. Ugly scenes of Trump supporters rampaging around the Capitol and fighting with police officers blanketed the news.

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In a symbolic register, the images of protesters dressed like Vikings marauding inside the Capitol building were uniquely threatening to American democracy. But, despite the symbolism, the riots were disorganized and ineffectual. Moreover, January 6 fit into a larger pattern of political violence that had played out over the previous year. The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which had taken place six months earlier, were orders of magnitude larger and more destructive than the pro-Trump riot. Nineteen people were killed in violence connected to the BLM protests, which spread to more than a hundred cities across the US and caused over $1 billion in damages.

And yet the elite establishment overwhelmingly supported the BLM movement and sympathetically pandered to its demands such as defunding the police. Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Speaker of the House, posed for a photo op kneeling in a brightly colored African kente cloth to show solidarity with the protesters. Public figures who for months had vilified public gatherings as deadly superspreader events suddenly celebrated the sight of tens of thousands of demonstrators crowding in the streets for BLM marches. One petition signed by more than 1,200 health officials declared it incumbent on members of the medical profession to offer “unwavering support” to the protesters. The ruling tech platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all vocally endorsed and amplified the BLM movement.

In contrast, the response to January 6 was as swift and decisive as any political fallout in recent history. One day after the Capitol melee, Facebook banned the sitting president from posting on its platform. Then Twitter banned Trump permanently, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence”. PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organizing the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protesters. GoFundMe announced that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the election. 

To be sure, one could reasonably argue that the threat posed by rioters storming the Capitol and threatening to overturn the election justified the response. That was a political judgment. But the coordinated campaign of digital disconnection reflected a profound transformation in the American system of government. It exposed the outline of a new power structure that operated outside of the formal government by controlling the strategic heights of the information space. A cartel of Silicon Valley tech companies had accomplished in days what Congress failed to do over four years: it shut Trump up and silenced his movement. For a while, at least.

Biden’s inauguration a week later came as a mere formality. The first Trump presidency ended the moment he lost his means of speaking directly to the public, which social media had initially provided, propelling him into the White House, and then unilaterally revoked. The invisible hand of the information regime, once it decided to reveal itself, simply hit mute on the most powerful man in the world. In doing so it revealed an essential rule of power in the digital age: sovereign are they who control the information.

This is an edited extract from The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt & Company).

In short, we get a policy that will over time make the UK poorer in a quest to keep it rich. Yet as damaging as it is to the country’s long-term economic prospects, nobody can bring themselves to end it. And so, logically, amid economic stagnation or reversal, if some groups can maintain or even grow their wealth and income, as is the case with the triple lock, others must experience falls in their living standards and life opportunities. So even amid tepid growth, degrowth has started for some — namely, those whose livelihoods depend on income from labor rather than proceeds from capital.

Mind you, this revived class struggle now brings a novel twist: the owners include not just the uber-rich but people with comparatively modest incomes, such as pensioners whose capital is tied up in the funds that are today among some of the world’s biggest investors. Nevertheless, their livelihoods require preserving asset values no matter how sluggish the growth. The inevitable outcome is that workers get squeezed, both directly and indirectly: directly through higher taxes on labor — out with free tuition, in with the triple lock — and indirectly through fiscal and monetary policies that ensure asset values rise faster than the economy.

At the heart of this deepening political rift between capital and labor, driving a resurgence of anti-systemic populism on both the Left and Right and a turn against democracy by young people, is a reality that few whatever their politics want to confront. The rapid economic growth rates of the postwar period, which made possible the expansion of the welfare state and promises of future benefits that presumed an endlessly rising supply of resources, are not returning — because, as with the pursuit of the triple lock, we’re now trapped in a cycle where the pursuit of growth produces degrowth.

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Western economies have been slowing for decades, and a handful of rich countries have crossed the threshold between growth to degrowth in per-capita terms: while gross domestic product has kept rising in Germany and Canada, real per-capita income has begun declining. Almost everywhere else in the developed world, including Britain, growth has been close to stagnant since before the pandemic. And even the supposed star performer of developed economies, the US, whose real per-capita income has continued rising steadily, hasn’t escaped this trend towards deceleration, because its added growth results from added debt. If you deduct debt from growth to come up with a true picture of the economy’s dynamism, the country would have already started going backwards.

This partly has to do with profound shifts in the world economy, and in particular the relative decline of the West compared to the rising global periphery. But increasingly, there’s evidence of endogenous forces which act to inhibit growth — something I refer to as the “Icarus effect”. Simply put, as an economy grows richer, its growth rate slows, because it encounters forms of natural resistance that slow and eventually reverse growth.

The growth-retarding effect of Covid-19, the first truly global pandemic in history, has been obvious, but the bigger threat will come from climate change, whose deleterious effects are already creeping up on us. With the average annual number of extreme weather events having so far increased sevenfold since the Sixties, not only will capital be depleted but inflation will remain permanently higher due to the rising costs of production (the recent Mediterranean storms being just the latest event likely to jolt food prices this winter).

Yet while such feedback loops inhibit growth for the whole world, there also appear to be changes which specifically affect the countries where growth has advanced the furthest: the rich ones. Because in addition to external pressures, we’re now starting to better understand changes which occur in the internal environment — which is to say, within us, as individuals and societies. As a society grows richer, it undergoes social, political and cultural changes which reduce dynamism, raise vulnerabilities and diminish resilience, all while increasing the cost of preserving wealth.

To begin with, fertility declines, which raises a society’s average age. From there, the economically productive share of the population declines. As a proportion of total economic output, consumption therefore rises and investment declines. Meanwhile, the investment which does occur shifts in character, becoming more focused on dividends rather than long-term growth (which favors legacy industries). It also becomes more risk-averse, one manifestation of which is a shift towards real-estate investment: and real estate, of course, produces nothing. Consider Canada, Germany and Italy, all which have been among the slowest performers, even as real estate now accounts for a third of fixed capital formation.

Adding to this, fiscal and monetary policies become increasingly oriented towards preserving asset values, through such measures as Nimbyism and the shoring up of asset values after market corrections with bailouts and easy money — real interest rates were kept near or below zero for years after the financial crisis — since any fall in asset values would hurt the growing share of the population which lives off them. The anti-growth measures which follow are thus more a symptom than a cause of the Icarus effect, but the consequent rising cost of capital makes it harder for new businesses to form, reducing dynamism in the economy.

In addition to these changes, vulnerability to external shocks rises as a society grows richer. For starters, the more capital you have, the more there is to be destroyed in natural disasters, and while mitigation measures can reduce risks, they further increase the price of wealth preservation. But just as importantly, and in contrast to the prevailing assumption that “rich is resilient” — the assumption being that wealth provides you with the resources needed to adapt to and bounce back from exogenous shocks — there’s compelling evidence that the reverse may be the case.

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The first hints of this came during the Covid pandemic, when it was widely expected that poor countries would do far worse than rich ones. The latter, so the theory went, could not only care for their sick but pay people to stay home and reduce transmission. In fact, on balance, poor countries emerged no worse from the pandemic than rich ones, and in many cases actually did better, all at a fraction of the cost borne by rich countries. For every dollar spent per capita in a developing country fighting the pandemic, developed countries spent 12; for all that money, the average death rate in the rich countries was only marginally better than in poor ones, while many of the poorest nations on Earth — especially in Africa — were star performers.

This probably shouldn’t surprise us. There’s a growing body of research in public health which suggests that regular exposure to disease prompts stronger immune response. Known as the hygiene hypothesis, this theory suggests that frequent exposure to natural shocks, from storms to floods, forces people to be adaptable and flexible. This research has been widened to look at societal resilience and finds exposure to shocks makes societies more resilient — in part because the weak states of poor countries make for strong societies, providing individuals with adaptive support through stressful times. Anyone who has lived in a developing country will be familiar with the community groups that form in neighborhoods or at churches, mosques and temples, and which provide everything from basic welfare and storm preparedness to watch groups in under-policed areas.

The upshot is that the mix of declining economic dynamism and resilience with rising vulnerability will mean rich countries take bigger economic hits from ecological feedback loops. Given their already slowing growth, moreover, this means they’re especially at risk of getting knocked backwards — when a country’s annual economic growth rate is around 1%, a shock like a pandemic or severe flooding can quickly tip it into recession.

Degrowth isn’t inevitable, but two things could make it so. The first is if Western countries try to carry on as we always have in the expectation growth will somehow return to past levels. That would only hasten the degrowth that has begun. The second is if we neglect the externalities of growth, especially climate change, in a quest to prioritize growth. That will produce the perverse outcome of accelerating our decline.

***

Icarus Economics: Why Rich Economies Are Struggling – and How to Fix Them (Atlantic Books) is out now.

The strategy draws inspiration from Poland, where housebuilders are now legally obliged to include bomb shelters in new builds, and Germany, which is reviving Cold War-era civil defense schemes with a bunker geolocation app. Meanwhile, Norway is advising people to stock up on iodine tablets in the case of a nuclear attack.

The EU wants its citizens to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours, recommending households stockpile food, water, medicine and — why not? — playing cards and power banks. Because, of course, should nuclear war break out, a good round of poker and a fully charged phone will see us through.

Yet, as ludicrous as these preparations might seem, they should worry us all. The Preparedness Union Strategy is only the latest layer in an architecture of control that has been building for decades. It rests squarely on the shoulders of the EU’s recent defense policy reboot, ReArm Europe, now renamed less ominously, “Readiness 2030”.

The core narrative behind this push is simple and endlessly repeated: the idea that Russia is likely to launch a full-scale attack on Europe in the coming years, especially if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine. The European Parliament resolution in favor of the ReArm Europe programme warned that “if the EU were to fail in its support and Ukraine were forced to surrender, Russia would then turn against other countries, including possibly the EU member states”. As Macron recently put it, Russia is an “imperialist” country that “knows no borders… it is an existential threat to us, not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbors, but to all of Europe”.

But the notion that Russians are massing at the borders, with designs on Paris or Berlin, is a fantasy. Indeed, when we’re told to prepare for war by packing a power bank and a waterproof pouch for our ID, it’s hard not to be reminded of Cold War absurdities like “Duck and Cover”, the “preparedness strategy” of the time designed to protect individuals from the effects of a nuclear explosion by instructing people to crouch to the ground and cover their heads. That campaign, too, sold the illusion of safety in the face of annihilation. And beneath the clownish veneer of the push lies a calculated aim: the EU’s attempt to further consolidate power at the supranational level, elevating the Commission’s role in security and crisis response — domains traditionally under national control.

The EU’s preparedness plan is based on the recommendations of a report from the former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, which calls for the establishment of a central operational crisis “hub” within the European Commission; greater civilian-military cooperation, including by conducting regular EU-wide exercises uniting armed forces, civil protection, police, security, healthcare workers and firefighters; and developing joint EU-Nato emergency protocols.

When considered alongside the EU’s rearmament plans, it suggests a comprehensive, society-wide militarization, something which in the years ahead, will become the dominant paradigm in Europe: all spheres of life — political, economic, social, cultural and scientific — will be subordinated to the alleged goal of national, or rather supranational, security.

Western governments have been resorting to fear as a means of control for a very long time. Indeed, it’s a telling coincidence that the EU’s announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, which ushered in the most radical experiment ever attempted in fear-driven politics.

The pandemic response used a totalizing narrative that wildly inflated the threat of the virus to justify historically unprecedented policies. As the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, put it, it was everyone’s moral duty to “come together against a common enemy” and “wage war on the virus”. In this struggle for the greater good — public health — virtually any action was justified.

From the perspective of “crisis politics”, the widespread use of the war metaphor to frame the Covid pandemic was no coincidence: war is, after all, the emergency par excellence. Across the globe, we saw an authoritarian turn as governments used the “public health emergency” to sweep aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarize societies, crack down on civil liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control.

Throughout the pandemic, we witnessed — and populations largely accepted — the imposition of measures that would have been unthinkable until that moment: the shutdown of entire economies, the mass quarantining (and enforced vaccination) of millions of healthy individuals and the normalization of digital Covid passports as a regulated requirement for participating in social life.

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All this prepared the ground for the collective reaction of Western societies to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a real war at last, after years of rehearsing metaphorical ones. In terms of communication, we immediately saw the emergence of a similarly totalizing narrative: it was Western societies’ moral duty to support the Ukrainians’ fight for freedom and democracy against Russia and its evil president.

However, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Ukraine is losing the war, and as the world is faced with Trump’s attempt to negotiate peace, European elites are recalibrating their narrative: it’s not just Ukraine’s survival at stake — but that of Europe as a whole. The threat is no longer over there but right here at home: not only is Russia preparing to attack Europe, but, we are told, it is already waging a wide array of hybrid attacks against Europe, ranging from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to election interference.

All this suggests that Western elites learned an important lesson during the pandemic: fear works. If a population is made anxious enough — whether about disease, war, natural disasters or some polycrisis cocktail comprising all of the above — they can be made to accept almost anything.

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The EU’s Preparedness Union Strategy could, therefore, be read within this broader context. It is not really about water bottles and power banks. It is a continuation of the Covid-era paradigm: a method of governance that fuses psychological manipulation, militarization of civilian life and the normalization of emergency rule. Indeed, the EU explicitly talks of the need to adopt, in case of future crises, the same “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach first spearheaded during the pandemic.

This time, though, the attempt to engineer yet another mass psychosis seems to be failing. Judging from the social media reaction to a cringeworthy video by Hadja Lahbib, EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management, there appears to be widespread skepticism about the bloc’s fearmongering. But while this is good news, the worry is that as propaganda falters, those in power are increasingly turning to repressive tactics to muzzle political rivals — evident in moves like the electoral ban on Le Pen. This strategy of mounting authoritarianism, though, is untenable in the long run: fear and repression are no substitute for actual consensus, and in the latter’s void, new forms of resistance are bound to emerge.

But the kids are not alright. Back in 2020, we had no idea what the impact of lockdown would be on those young people whose normal development was so casually interrupted. And while every parent has a lockdown horror story, it was the most vulnerable children who were worst afflicted. Lockdown widened the school attainment gap, delayed children’s development, and plunged a generation of tweens and teens into psychiatric turmoil. But it didn’t just harm children; it also formed them. Especially for those who came of age concurrently with lockdown, the sheer strangeness of that period was itself a worldview-shaping experience — in ways we’ve scarcely begun to grasp.     

Some of this was an effect of lockdowns forcing ordinary life online. This sense of reality coming unstuck preceded Covid, but was sharply intensified by it. I recall being taken aback when, toward the end of the Covid era, I had a conversation with a woman in her early twenties who cheerfully argued that not only is the earth flat, but also birds aren’t real. She might have been joking; but it felt like she wasn’t. Then again, if you’d just spent two formative years with nothing to do but scroll, you might be forgiven for concluding that there’s no meaningful difference between reality and internet memes. After all, in that situation most of your reality is internet memes. 

This sense of generalized unreality seems to have become, especially for the young, a permanent fixture. Just recently, Channel 4 warned that Gen Z has lost trust in authoritative sources of information, preferring online sources of information, gathered in a “magpie” fashion and validated by peers. This echoes a broader trend noted last month by liberal commentator Anne Applebaum, who deplored the rise, across the globe, of a politics fusing New Age beliefs with anti-democratic practices. In this worldview, she laments, “superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction”. She contrasts this critically with her own worldview, in which — she says — “logic and reason lead to good government”, and “the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes”.

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But from the perspective of the “Birds Aren’t Real” cohort, we might ask: where was Applebaum’s logic and reason, during the multi-year collective freakout in which buying a Scotch egg prevented Covid infection, and children cut mouth holes in N95 masks to play the flute? For the unreality wasn’t just online; it was everywhere, often accompanied by vigorous social shaming and coercive state power. Asking zoomers of my acquaintance for their memories of Covid, the most common theme was the absurdist tyranny of Covid rules — and then how politically formative it was to defy them. One young friend describes seeing a group of “Covid marshals” exit the van in which they’d traveled together unmasked — and then, after climbing out, donning masks and fanning out through London streets to enforce mask-wearing and social distancing among pedestrians. Another remembers quietly abandoning mask mandates, and realizing that doing so had no effect.

I don’t want to get bogged down in who went crazier. My point is simple: a whole microgeneration experienced, on the cusp of adulthood, a collective and officially enforced reality in which every rule suddenly turned nonsensical and authoritarian, at their expense and in the name of a threat that didn’t really affect them. How do you respond to an experience of this kind? At the extremes, the answer seems to divide between those who concluded that when the world is so arbitrary, there’s no point trying to do anything; and, conversely, those who concluded from this there are no limits at all on what could be done.

At one end of the spectrum, Gen Z has checked out. The youth mental health crisis preceded Covid, but lockdown escalated it. In its wake, disability claims have risen most sharply among teenagers and young people. Among claimants under 25, 70% were for mental or behavioral conditions, accounting for more than half of the rise. Labour’s Wes Streeting recently asserted that such conditions are “overdiagnosed”, and this may be the case. But it may also be the case both that the distress is real, and also that these young adults are just doing what they were conditioned to do. Given that they spent two years forcibly shut in with only the internet for company, while the government paid for everything, it would not be surprising if some of those young people might be a bit screwed up. Nor would it be surprising if many of them simply view this situation as normal, and expect it to continue.

Some of those young adults are now spiraling in psychological distress, and perhaps also learned helplessness. Lest anyone mistake me, I absolutely don’t want to shame those people. The shame should be on everyone who assented to policies that deprived a generation of normal coming-of-age experiences, in the name of a virus that posed little risk to them. What we owe to these now perhaps deeply damaged young men and women is not disability benefits, but contrition, reparations, and a way out of the hole we shoved them in.

But at the other end of the spectrum are those young people who drew the opposite conclusion, and are as a result exiting the political mainstream altogether. Again, small wonder: their entry into adulthood was equal parts internet unreality, nonsense rules, and finding that the only way to get laid was by flouting the mandates. Scale that up to a whole microgeneration, and the likelihood is that they’re not going to spend their adult lives coloring inside the political lines. For example, we should perhaps not be surprised that Channel 4’s study finds 52% of 13-27-year-olds would welcome “a strongman leader unbound by elections or Parliament”. Like the mental health crisis, the slide toward authoritarian views is a macrotrend that predates Covid; but there’s no question that Covid represented, for many, a definitive rupture. This is, after all, a generation that experienced two years of arbitrary, capricious, and profoundly post-liberal state power. Yes, lockdowns were a form of collectivist authoritarianism; even so, is it really so strange that some would afterwards gaze approvingly at the strongman variety? As one anonymous young commentator put it in 2023, it was “all wisdom of the wise was broken, torn up and transgressed purely to advance the interests of old people”. As a result, the author suggests, those who were young during Covid have concluded that “there is no limit to what politics can achieve”.

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Across many European nations including France, Germany, and Spain, the sharpest rise in so-called “far-Right” parties is consistently among the young — and, especially, young men. Just recently The Atlantic described the same phenomenon in the United States, linking it explicitly to Covid. In the UK, when we compare the 2019 and 2024 general election breakdowns, it’s clear that while the Right-wing youth vote hasn’t grown significantly in absolute terms, those young people that do vote Right opted in increased numbers for the party to the Right of the Tories: Reform.

But it’s not just a Rightward tilt; it’s an anti-mainstream one. The same vote breakdown shows the percentage of 18-24-year-olds who opted for the two mainstream parties fell by a quarter, from 77% to 50% of young voters. Along with Reform, the biggest winner among the youngest voters was “Other”.

Coming of age under lockdown, then, seems to have effected a generational exit both from any sense of shared reality, and, by extension, from political normativity. Will this right itself over time? Maybe. But looking around modern Britain, I see few obvious reasons why a twentysomething would feel motivated to salvage a political order that mortgaged future tax revenues to fund years of furlough and misspent PPE procurement, to no measurable benefit over countries that didn’t lock down and to the considerable economic detriment of the young. It is a political order that’s depressing white-collar wages through AI, and blue-collar ones through mass immigration; that’s squeezing young professionals and letting house prices soar, but safeguarding the triple lock.

In his push to get Gen Z to forsake PIP and re-engage, Wes Streeting should perhaps be careful what he wishes for. As this generation reaches political maturity, we should expect British politics to get angrier, more radical, more plural and fractious — and, perhaps, considerably less democratic.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centers of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

For decades, the Texan capital was synonymous with a single word: weird. Unlike the conservative countryside, or else oil towns like Dallas, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Austin was a place of lively bars and soul-filled clubs. There was Rainey Street, too, a charming Latino neighborhood filled with pretty tree-lined cottages. When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I was reminded of nothing less than Haight-Ashbury — the San Francisco neighborhood so beloved among artists and hippies.

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Now, though, this older, shabbier Austin is slipping away. Quite aside from landmark developments like the Waterline, that’s clear enough in the numbers. Since 2000, downtown’s population has tripled to 15,000. In large part, in fact, Kevin Burns argues the ultra-modern vibe can be understood by sheer demand, with the rising forest of towers appealing to young professionals tired of life in the suburbs. “The driver is quality of life,” says the bearded 47-year-old real-estate developer, sipping a coffee as the sound of construction echoes around us.

It’s not hard to see what he means. Life by the Colorado, still feverishly in the making, is pleasantly walkable. There are yew-scattered parklands, and bike lanes and creeks. It’s all surely a step up from the convention centers and stadiums that once got urban developers excited. There’s also plenty to do: dozens of bars and restaurants open in Austin every month, dovetailed by yoga studios and comedy clubs. Yet if the new Austin promises paradise for wealthy hipsters, the hippies of yore seem far less welcome. Downtown, after all, is expensive, hardly surprising when so many of the new arrivals are tech workers, “empty nesters” with far fewer children to feed than their peers elsewhere. An apartment in the sky here will set you back $170,000 more than other parts of Central Texas, doubtless explaining why so many new downtowners are white.

All this speaks to a younger, hipper crowd, especially compared to the vast suburbs of somewhere like Houston. Nor is demography the only way downtown is different. As Hannah Rangel says, this is fundamentally a place to live, not work, with the vice president of Austin Downtown Allies explaining that offices are smaller than elsewhere. Once again, that’s probably a function of the city’s tech boom: with startups needing little more than coders and their Macbooks, they need far less floorspace than their corporate competitors.

Factor in the remote work revolution and it’s little wonder places like the Waterline are so popular, with residential and mixed-use construction easily outstripping office builds right across town. Nor, of course, is this unique to Austin: even America’s classic urban cores are going the same way. New York has its own planting of residential towers, while the Rust Belt undergoes a similar transition.

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Reviving the grand architecture of the dead industrial past, downtown Milwaukee is one good example here. Another is Detroit, with its gaggle of neoclassical skyscrapers. Then there’s the Renaissance Center, all Seventies steel, abandoning offices for flats and entertainment. And where houses are coming, business is going. According to one recent report, residential conversion projects were set to double through 2024, even as demand for new office space tumbles.

Given the apparent enthusiasm for remote work among finance and professional services — the sectors that long kept downtowns afloat — it’s tempting to assume that the new Austin will soon become the new America. In truth, though, Wells’s “brilliant and entertaining agglomeration” isn’t a sure thing. One way of thinking about this is by digging into the numbers. Yes, the population growth along the Colorado is impressive, but roughly 98% of newcomers to Austin still settle in suburbs and exurbs. And why not? With WFH allowing employees to make money anywhere, many still prefer a yard and a picket fence over an apartment in the sky.

For those companies insisting on in-person attendance, meanwhile, America’s hinterland remains appealing. Once more, the statistics are telling, with jobs and homes across the sunbelt increasingly shifting to shiny new suburbs, with plenty of space for office parks, and where the overbuilt apartments are cheap. As far as Austin is concerned, certainly, outlying areas north of the city are wildly popular. The Domain, which lies just outside the city, is thriving, offering a car-oriented vision of suburban life. Though there’s some dense development, the surrounding area is covered by single family homes. Compared to downtown, it’s easy to park, and has fewer street-level hassles. It’s a similar story across the country, whether in Irvine, California, or New Albany near Columbus.

And while the denizens downtown are richer than average, the urban analyst Bill Fulton warns that their “niche life” remains at odds with the average high earner — most of whom still reside outside the urban core. One good example is Brian Niccol, the new CEO of Starbucks, who runs the coffee giant not from downtown Seattle, but rather from the warm weather and easy lifestyle of coastal Southern California.

In a sense, this is unsurprising. The American job market began spreading its tentacles into the suburbs as early as the Fifties. Prodded along by the automobile, and perhaps too by the enduring power of the traditional American Dream, a recent MIT study found that 80% of America’s metropolitan population now live in car-friendly suburbs, while just 8% live downtown. Nor are all suburbs created equal: though the sprawl is as popular as ever, the brownstone streets of Brooklyn or Georgetown, designed with mass transit in mind, are home to just 13% of people.

Simply put, then, the old urban model is dissolving, though what comes next remains unclear. As that last statistic implies, one issue is transport. Especially since the pandemic, networks across the US are struggling, with many short of money and plagued by crime and squalor. In 2023, some still operate between a third and two thirds below their pre-Covid levels, while in Austin barely 5% of people downtown make use of buses or the city’s light rail system.

It’s just as well, then, that Burns pins his hopes not on trains but Uber, or else the increasingly ubiquitous Waymos, which cart people about in driverless vehicles. “The Ubers are here now,” Burns says, “but the Waymo’s are going to change cities, and make places more attractive and connected.” Austin, with its tech-oriented elites, seems an ideal place to become, in the words of former mayor Steve Adler, “the Kitty Hawk of driverless cars.”

Yet if getting around in Austin may soon become a private-sector affair, Big Tech can’t hope to do everything. Indeed, Burns’s biggest worry is the proliferation of criminals and vagrants stalking inner-city streets. Stroll between downtown and the Capitol and you’ll see drug addicts and alcoholics sprawled by the gutter, albeit in far fewer numbers than other big cities. And, to be fair, some of these residual challenges do seem to be subsiding, especially with a new mayor who takes street-level disorder more seriously. Even so, Burns remains skeptical of Jose Garza, Austin’s radical DA, complaining that he “does not enforce the law” amid rising chaos on the streets. Given the grim decline of towns like Oakland and Chicago, these fears feel justified.

A more intractable problem with the new Austin — typified by the Waterline tagline that “work is rooted in wellness” — is that it has a limited market. Much of the original appeal of downtown’s earlier iteration was its funkiness, its scruffiness, when its dives and honky tonks were spots where anything, it felt, could happen. Good luck recreating that at Whole Goods. The offbeat charm of Rainey Street has vanished too, with just two of its bungalows remaining and its Latino residents priced out.

We probably shouldn’t mourn these shifts too much. Cities, after all, are always changing. Yet walk the streets of downtown Austin and this historic neighborhood, once so full of life, feels as sterile as Singapore. In that, it shares the fate of Spitalfields, or Hudson Yards, once the “great galleries” of Wellsian imagination, but now little more than vast amenity districts for a small and well-heeled elite. Better than dystopia — but hardly transformative for the mass of urban residents.

This is one thing that the organisation gets right: Beijing’s behaviour has been disgraceful. But as WHO faces the threat of losing its biggest donor with Donald Trump’s looming return to the White House, perhaps it should have been more honest — especially since its next post was a pledge to fight misinformation. For let us not forget it performed woefully in the pandemic. It assisted China’s cover-up, which inflamed the disease’s spread, and amplified early lies claiming “no clear evidence” of human transmission. It failed to investigate the origins properly. And even now claims its Chinese office “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ on December 31 2019”, when, in fact, it was alerted by Taiwanese health authorities, on guard against another outbreak of Sars.

But we should not be surprised by a body that follows the diktats of a Communist dictatorship in refusing to recognise Taiwan. By the end of 2019, China’s scientists had already sequenced the genome of the virus. Yet WHO kowtowed so shamefully to Beijing that their joint inquiry into Covid’s origins — with a team of “experts” sent to Wuhan in early 2021 amid huge publicity — promoted a ludicrous theory that the disease jumped to humans from frozen food. To compound these failings, it hired Sir Jeremy Farrar, despite the former Wellcome Trust boss’s exposure as a central player in the bid to stifle debate by branding any suggestions Covid could have come from a laboratory as conspiracy theory. These efforts — led with his friend Anthony Fauci — were a grotesque betrayal of both science and the wider public, yet still this tarnished figure was appointed as WHO’s chief scientific officer.

Sadly, this is all par for the course. The pandemic revealed the arrogant and contemptuous behaviour of leading scientific figures, aided by prominent academic journals, patsy journalists and weak politicians. It is now beyond doubt that they strove to dampen speculation that Covid could be tied to a cutting-edge Wuhan laboratory with financial links to Washington. In recent days, we have seen how this corrosive rot even infected the security world after the Wall Street Journal disclosed suppression of a Pentagon study finding the virus had been manipulated in “gain of function” research. “What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” said one FBI scientist.

We must hope all the evidence available to federal authorities on this weirdly contentious issue will be re-examined with Trump’s restoration — especially given his choice of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency that helped fund controversial experiments in Wuhan. The Stanford University health economist and lockdown sceptic has said the evidence for a lab leak is “compelling” while criticising establishment efforts to silence dissident voices.

Unfortunately Trump’s outbursts after the pandemic emerged about “the China virus”, and his promotion of daft ideas such as injecting disinfectant to treat Covid, made it easier to ostracise experts who dared question the orthodoxy of natural zoonotic transmission. The concept of an accidental lab leak became bound up in frenzied talk of bioweapons and malevolent activities. Yet his last administration concluded with a carefully worded State Department statement raising valid questions about sick scientists and risky research in Wuhan.

Dismissal of a possible lab leak — and for this to become such a sectarian issue — was always a curious stance in the absence of any firm proof. There were, after all, more than 300 known laboratory-acquired infections and 16 escapes of pathogens in the first 21 years of this century. The same year that Covid erupted in Wuhan, 10,000 people fell ill following leakage from a veterinary research centre in another Chinese city. Even in the weeks before Covid emerged, Farrar and Fauci helped oversee a WHO report highlighting growing risk of global pandemic from an escaped pathogen, which pointed out how scientific advances allowed “disease-causing micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”.

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A quick reminder of some facts: Wuhan was home to one of China’s two maximum bio-security labs — and hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with most similar coronaviruses. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) contained the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses, had known safety concerns and conducted high-risk “gain of function” research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. Its database of 22,000 samples and many unpublished sequences was taken offline in September 2019 — when some believe the virus emerged.

Yet Farrar was among 27 scientists who signed a now-infamous letter in The Lancet praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by Peter Daszak, whose New York-based EcoHealth Alliance funnelled US taxpayer dollars to WIV, following a teleconference call on February 1 2020 that sparked efforts to discredit lab leak theories.

This call was organised by Farrar in tandem with Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of NIH. Under their guidance, four participants and one other expert wrote a notorious Nature Medicine commentary saying they did not think “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Yet it emerged later that these scientists feared a lab link was ‘“so friggin’ likely” even as they drafted their statement. Farrar complained about “Wild West” biosecurity in Wuhan with Collins. And a senior adviser to Fauci told Daszak he had learned how to make emails “disappear” from freedom of information requests “so I think we are all safe”.

Tragically, every sliver of evidence that has slid into the open since the pandemic has chipped away at public faith in science and politics thanks to the cavalier attitude of certain scientists, the arrogance of self-serving experts, and the complicity of a cabal of prominent figures attempting to deceive the world. Boris Johnson, prime minister during the pandemic, now says “the awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made”. Yet still Lord Vallance — who, as his chief scientific adviser, joined that clandestine teleconference call — was elevated to the House of Lords and appointed science minister by Keir Starmer last year. Needless to say, my freedom of information requests to find out more about his involvement have been thwarted.

We still do not have a conclusive answer to the conundrum of Covid’s origin, despite growing acceptance of a possible lab leak. Yet this remains a crucial debate, important both in terms of accountability for a global public health disaster and to assist protection from another pandemic in the future. There have been jitters again in recent days over fresh scenes of Chinese hospitals overrun with masked people after a surge in cases blamed on flu-like human metapneumovirus — although unlike Covid, this is not a new disease, so there will be levels of immunity in the population from previous infections.

We should not forget, however, this attempted concealment of facts was exposed only by the diligent efforts of a few brave scientists, dissident journalists, data experts and online investigators prepared to challenge the consensus. As one of those involved, I was even subjected to a Facebook shadowban for one UnHerd investigation, which was labelled misinformation until I protested. It was gratifying to be recognised later in Congress as the first to lay out the lab leak hypothesis in mainstream media — but how depressing to see the sluggish response from many colleagues that still clouds this issue.

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Most significantly, it was the Drastic group of investigators who released the Defuse research project dating from 2018. This sought to create viruses with the defining feature of Sars-CoV-2: the furin cleavage site that allows its spike protein to bind so effectively to cells in many human tissues and is not found on any of the other 800 known Sars-releated coronaviruses. The proposal came from EcoHealth, WIV and Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina coronavirologist who pioneered such controversial gain of function research. It was rejected by US funders. Yet Shi Zhengli, the leading bat disease researcher at WIV, refused to answer when asked by a German reporter last year if she had pressed on with such experiments, claiming the issue had “nothing to do with the origin” of Covid.

This was a dynamite discovery. It showed that scientists in Wuhan with their long-standing US collaborators proposed to construct genetically modified coronaviruses. And hey presto — one year later, a novel Sars-related virus emerged suddenly in their city. It was either the most stunning coincidence — or a smoking gun. Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, was among those experts who saw this document and its drafts as the “blueprint for creating the virus that causes Covid-19”.

Yet still there is a cabal of scientists and media allies pushing the idea that the virus flared up in Wuhan’s bustling wet market. “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like that the market is just another victim. The virus existed [before the infections happened in the market],” said George Gao, head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, in May 2020.

Gao, an Oxford-educated virologist, later published a paper confirming that no animals tested positive from 1380 samples collected there in January 2020, adding that positive environmental samples they collected had been derived from infected humans, not animals. And even Baric – the world-leading expert who had warned US biosecurity chiefs that a lab leak might have caused the pandemic before WHO had declared a worldwide public health emergency, later told Congressional investigators that he believes the market was just “a conduit for expansion”.

But the theory keeps bouncing back like a bad penny. “Once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off,” said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, in private discussions among the Nature Medicine authors. Yet his colleague Eddie Holmes, a British biologist at the University of Sydney who had visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, said “no way” there could have been sufficient selective pressure to evolve a furin cleavage site there due to “too low a density of mammals” with small clusters of three or four animals kept in cages. As another of the team said, this begs the “million dollar question”at the core of the creation and spread of Sars-CoV-2.

First they blamed the pandemic on pangolins, then they turned the spotlight on raccoon dogs, which had been seen in the market by Holmes. Last year, there were excitable new headlines over a scrap of data obtained by Chinese researchers. ‘“Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” declared The Atlantic. “New data links Covid-19’s origins to raccoon dogs at Wuhan market,” reported The Guardian. “Have we found the ‘animal origin’ of Covid?” asked the BBC breathlessly.

The answer turned out to be no. The presence of these critters in the market was so well known it was even mentioned by WHO during its negotiations with China for access. The new report simply showed again that raccoon dogs and other mammals susceptible to Sars-CoV-2 were sold in Wuhan before the market was shut down on 1 January 2020, while saying that positive swabs from the market also contained trace quantities of genetic material from raccoon dogs. “Now we have definite proof that animals were there that could carry coronaviruses at the time of the outbreak,” insisted Peter Daszak, whose organisation is now blocked from US federal funding after misleading officials over work in Wuhan. “It’s another piece of evidence that the market was where it began, not the lab.”

Then the Chinese researchers posted their own analysis of the data. It confirmed yet again the presence of raccoon dogs on sale in the market. “However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected,” they wrote emphatically. “Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out human-to-animal transmission, as the sampling was carried out after the human infection within the market. Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans… cannot yet be ruled out.

Many experts believe a debunked idea is being pushed as a deliberate diversion. “The incessant fixation on the market by one group of virologists — to avoid having to admit the science was compromised from the beginning — is preventing any other scenarios from being properly examined lest you are labelled a conspiracy theorist,” said molecular biologist Sigrid Bratlie, a strategic adviser on biotech to Langsikt Policy Centre in Oslo who admits to being astounded by the scale of efforts to suppress the lab origin theory.

Astonishingly, there still remains no conclusive proof over how this virus exploded in Wuhan. Yet we do know Beijing’s dictatorship tried to cover-up the initial outbreak, and then blocked outside investigations of the origins. Scandalously, we have discovered this disturbing obfuscation over Covid’s origins was assisted by some of the most prominent figures in Western science. This was the real conspiracy — and it is still being pushed today by the Chinese Communist Party’s useful idiots.

Over the past 10 months, however, there has been a notable exception to this rule: at anti-Israel protests, where masks are still not just the norm but often mandatory. Sometimes, a keffiyeh will be fashioned into a balaclava; more often, a surgical mask or N95 respirator will be worn. All three were on show outside of last week’s Democratic Convention.

Yet it was more than 1,000km away, in a populous suburban region adjacent to New York City, that the latest battle in America’s mask wars was unfolding. Earlier this month, legislators in New York’s Nassau County signed the country’s first mask ban into law, a strange inversion of the mandates that prevailed state-wide between 2020 and 2022. Although exceptions for health and religious grounds may make the law unenforceable in practice, it threatens recalcitrant public maskers with a stiff fine of $1,000 and up to a year in prison.

The legislation was introduced by local lawmaker Mazi Pilip, a former IDF paratrooper who gained a national profile when she ran unsuccessfully for the congressional seat vacated by the disgraced George Santos, and signed into law by county executive Bruce Blakeman. To justify the new law, Pilip raised the alarm about Gaza protesters “hiding behind the mask and terrorising the Jewish community”, while Blakeman argued that the anti-mask bill “protects the public”. Like the mandates it inverts, then, the ban has been presented as a means of keeping the citizenry safe from a real and immediate danger.

Pilip and Blakeman are Republicans, so to a certain extent the ban reinforces the Covid-era partisan split over masking. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Indeed, the first high-profile New York politician to endorse such a measure was Democratic governor Kathy Hochul. In June, after a viral video seemed to show pro-Palestinian demonstrators harassing Jewish passengers in a subway car, Hochul was reported to be considering a ban on face coverings on public transit, and several Democratic state legislators drafted a bill doing just that.

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Versions of the same idea had also been floated on both the Left and the Right in response to an upsurge in shoplifting and other crime in the wake of the pandemic. Widespread masking clearly played some role here by enabling thieves to conceal their identities from employees and surveillance cameras. Though he stopped short of calling for a citywide ban, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, suggested to small business owners last year they should ban customers who refused to uncover their faces.

A paradoxical secondary effect of the draconian rules imposed during the pandemic was to create conditions for a severe collapse of public order in urban areas. For one thing, the collective retreat of much of the population from public spaces in effect abandoned large areas of cities to homelessness and delinquency. Meanwhile, universal masking norms — combined with cutbacks in policing —helped create conditions for impunity for petty crime.

But there are deeper roots, too. The Left-wing embrace of masking on public health grounds also coincided with the prominent role of antifa during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, another source of major public disturbances that year. “Black-bloc” masking, long practised by antifa militants, gained greater respectability as face-covering became nearly universal in pandemic-era Left-wing protest.

By the time of the October 7 attacks, the continued progressive attachment to Covid precautions and the greater acceptance of black-bloc-style tactics ensured that anti-Israel protests were heavily masked affairs from the outset. The concentration of protest on elite college campuses evidently strengthened protesters’ resolve to conceal their identities, given most were students worried that the public exposure of their activism might derail their promising careers.

The Nassau law, then, is a response to several highly contingent developments of the past few years. But even so, the bans themselves and the issues they raise aren’t new in American or New York politics. Indeed, prior to 2020, a mask ban had been on the state books since 1845. Back then, a law was passed to squelch the “anti-renter” movement of tenant farmers who had revolted violently against the harsh terms dictated by their landlords, donning elaborate Indian costumes when attacking their nemeses. The landlord-allied state government responded by making it illegal for three or more people congregating in public to mask, with an exception made for “masquerade parties”.

Nor did the ban fade entirely into obscurity along with the anti-renter movement. Over the recent decades, New York police used the 1845 law to arrest anti-globalisation protesters, Occupy Wall Street militants, and Pussy Riot supporters, as well as to constrain the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, extensive litigation followed a 1999 Manhattan rally by the latter group, in which city officials prohibited them from covering their faces. Anti-masking laws in several other US states were devised specifically to rein in the Klan — a precedent sometimes cited by lawmakers advocating crackdowns on masked Gaza protesters, whom they claim are engaged in a campaign of racist intimidation.

These older mask ordinances have faced legal challenges, as the Nassau law likely will. So far, American jurisprudence has remained divided on their constitutionality, with some courts finding that masking is not a form of expression and thus enjoys no first-amendment protection, and others determining that the anonymisation enabled by face coverings offers a means of protecting the expression of unpopular views. Those arguing against the right of Klan members to mask have made a case critics of Gaza protests have repeated recently: that masks are a tool of intimidation. “[A] faceless figure strikes terror in the human heart,” as a 1990 Georgia Supreme Court decision put it.

Yet we are, of course, living in very different times. And what sets apart the new round of controversy isn’t just the conversion of the mask into a symbol of politicised public health, but the contradictory effects of the new electronic media landscape on how we conceive of our public identities. Perhaps most obviously, online existence has made younger generations of protesters take the constant availability of anonymous or pseudonymous modes of expression for granted. Today, every one of us, when we communicate by way of a digital profile, is at least partly “masked,” which makes our publicly exposed faces feel all the more naked. This is all the more true as facial-recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous and accurate.

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Thus a paradox emerges: at the same time as they furnish new means of anonymisation, digital technologies also elevate the risk of exposure. Political protesters in the late 20th century were unlikely to have their participation made public unless a news camera happened to capture them. Conversely, in today’s crowdsourced panopticon, any public activity is a viral video waiting to happen, which might well upend the life of anyone unlucky enough to become the main character of the day. Our technologies incite us to make our views public on a scale rarely possible for prior generations, and at the same time threaten us with dire consequences if the expression of those views provokes a backlash.

As long as these conditions hold, several things will be true. The availability of anonymous means of expression online, as well as the premium accorded by the attention economy to the extreme, will ensure that controversial and often hateful views enjoy a visibility they wouldn’t have otherwise. This, as well as the general decline of public order exacerbated by the collective retreat into digital life, will continue to provoke a general sense of unease and vulnerability, creating constituencies for various sorts of “safetyist” appeals — such as laws targeting disinformation, hate speech or masked protest.

And in the meantime, the conflict over mask bans will remain legally and politically unresolved because it pits two goods against each other: on one hand, freedom from intimidation carried out under the cover of anonymity; on the other, the protection of unpopular views from retaliation. As long as it can be plausibly claimed that both of these values are severely compromised, an end to this decade’s mask wars is unlikely to arrive soon.

In hindsight, it’s now accepted that the therapists were frequently implanting these “memories” in their suggestible patients. Recovered memory was a social mania — a.k.a. a moral panic, social contagion, mass formation psychosis, or mass hysteria. In the throes of the popular delirium, many people found this exercise in psychic archaeology wholly convincing (and no little titillating). For a few years, recovered memories were even accepted as factual testimony in American courts. Only from a distance does the sordid psychological dowsing look barmy.

For me, since roughly 2012, what has therefore been more disturbing than the content of any given hysteria is our continuing susceptibility to collective derangement, which can spread and take hold with alarming rapidity in a digital era. To examine the unnerving phenomenon of the communal fever, often destructive but rarely contested at its height, in my most recent novel Mania I invented my own. Suddenly everyone accepts that all humans are equally intelligent, and “cognitive discrimination” is “the last great civil rights fight”. In other words, there’s no such thing as stupid. Because that assertion is itself stupid, my concocted mania seems apt.

Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10 years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.

Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained to men. Abruptly circa 2012 — on the heels of such a successful crusade for gay rights and even gay marriage that homosexuality became passé — a profusion of television documentaries hit our screens about little boys who wore dresses and played with dolls. Fast-forward to the present, and the renamed diagnosis has exploded by thousands of percent across the West and now pertains abundantly to girls. Teachers tell toddlers that they have to decide whether they’re a girl or a boy or something in-between. We’re subjecting children to powerful, life-altering experimental drugs and surgically removing healthy breasts and genitals, even at the cost of permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility. “Some people are born in the wrong body” has become a truism, which sounds to me as medically credible as phrenology or bloodletting.

The social mania displays a few consistent characteristics. First and foremost, it never seems like a social mania at the time. In the thick of a widespread preoccupation, its precepts simply seem like the truth. Trans women are women; get over it. Or: masculinity is toxic; virtually all women have been subject to sexual torment and male abuse of power; regarding any accusations they make, no matter how far-fetched or petty, women must be believed. Or: Covid-19 is so lethal, and such a threat to our endurance as a species, that we’ve no choice but to shut down our whole economies and abdicate our every civil liberty to contain the disease. Or: all Western countries are “systemically racist”; all white people are genetically racist; the police are all racist (even if they’re black) and should be defunded or abolished; the only remedy for “structural racism” is anti-meritocratic, over-compensatory racial quotas in hiring and education.

While the seeds of a mania have often been planted earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere. Transgenderism rocketed to a cultural fetish over a matter of  months. After one fully fledged creep was exposed as a serial sex abuser, #MeToo spread on Twitter like potato blight. Literally overnight, citizenries in March 2020 took it for granted that their “liberal democracies” could justifiably deny them freedom of movement, assembly, association, press and even speech, while many became eager enforcers of the chaotic, despotic, and sometimes positively silly new regime. It took only a few days for George Floyd’s death to trigger huge protest marches all over the world. This hyperbolic response to a single undeserved killing in a one mid-sized American city was partially fed by the pent-up frustrations of whole populations under house arrest during Covid. But for Koreans to troop down the streets of Seoul chanting, “Black lives matter!” when the country has hardly any black people was insensible. Likewise, Britons chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when their constabulary is unarmed. Moreover, all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more international in scope than ever before.

Manias are fuelled by emotion. The cult of trans has capitalised on our yearning to seem enlightened and compassionate.  It has been presented as the logical next step after gay rights, the movement plays on our craving to feel ultra-contemporary. #MeToo both fed off and promulgated resentment, self-pity, and vengeance; in standing up to abuse of power, it tempted some women to abuse their own power to ruin men’s lives. Covid lockdowns stirred primitive terror of death and contagion, until we came to view other people as mere vectors of disease. BLM stimulated the nascent Christian proclivities for guilt, repentance, and penitence even in the secular, while offering black people opportunity to vent frustration, self-righteous fury, and even hatred. All manias thrive on our desire to be included by our own herd and on our anxiety about being exiled — or, if you will, about being UnHerded.

Because a proper mania brooks no dissent. In its grip, everyone believes the same thing, says the same thing, and even uses the same language. A quasi-religious fervour makes anyone outside the bubble of shared obsession seem heretical, dangerous, insane or outright evil. Opponents of lockdowns were granny killers; the unvaccinated were pariahs who shouldn’t be allowed to fly, eat out or obtain healthcare, while some argued “anti-vaxxers” should be imprisoned or put to death. Their rhetoric and affect often violent, transactivists tar critics as murderers; not long ago, writing a single discouraging word about the mutilation of children would end your career. (Self-protectively, I kept my own journalistic mouth shut for a good four years; most journalists are still prudently bumping along on the trans bandwagon.) Women who expressed reservations about the indiscriminate sweep of #MeToo were traitors to their sex. In 2020, even tweeting “All lives matter” got you sacked.

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Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme, accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions. Stalin’s show trials, Cambodia’s killing fields, Mao’s cultural revolution, obviously Nazism; the eugenics movement in the West (which we like to forget), the rage for lobotomies, and the paranoia about Satanism in day-care centres and the contagion of multiple personality disorder of the Nineties — all these misguided infatuations got worse before they imploded.

Hula hoops were harmless, but most manias are malign. The trans movement has warped primary school education, demented our culture with confusion over biological reality, condemned thousands of children to painful surgery and pharmaceutical side-effects, encroached on women’s privacy, and corrupted female sports. #MeToo contaminated relations between the sexes with such mistrust that it may have alone lowered the Western birth rate, while destroying the careers of countless men whose sins were at most venial. Covid lockdowns ravaged our economies, fuelled inflation, and exploded sovereign debt, while damaging the prospects of a generation of school children. BLM has exacerbated racial animosity, demonised meritocracy, and fostered a wasteful, parasitical managerial class of DEI enforcers whom it will be laborious to get shed of.

Yet both the priests and disciples of moral panics are driven by good intentions. They genuinely believe they are doing God’s work. Aggressively virtuous, “wokeness” is one big bundle of mania.

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Some hysterias die an easier death than others. Although the fragile, whiny accuser of a US Supreme Court nominee was once heralded as awesomely “courageous”, Christine Blasey Ford’s recent memoir has drawn weary disdain. Ergo, #MeToo is over. Nevertheless, a social frenzy seldom subsides because its agitators announce they were addled, just as the masses of ordinary people caught up in the derangement seldom acknowledge having been led astray. Everyone simply moves on, only to become consumed by something else.

There’s rarely an identifiable point at which a mania is debunked (barring a world war or counterrevolution). Few will recant, much less apologise to the victims of their excesses. A funny amnesia sets in, as forgetfulness is more palatable than shame; the Chinese have simply erased the cultural revolution from their history books. Occasionally, when folks outside the dogmatic bubble prosecute, the cheerleaders of utter tosh are called to account. We did have Nuremburg, and the belated Pol Pot trials in Cambodia. By contrast, the UK’s farcical Covid inquiry is conducted by the same establishment it’s investigating. The subsequent report may criticise single politicians for not having locked down sooner, but it can’t conclude that the lockdowns were a cataclysmic mistake, lest practically everyone at the top be implicated.

Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with. Having contracted Covid five or six times post-vaccination, multiply boosted mRNA fanatics aren’t prone to advertise their vicious denunciation of the unvaccinated only two or three years ago — any more than recovered memory patients are inclined to advertise that they destroyed their relationship with their parents over an erroneous psychiatric fad. We like to think that we’re “modern” (and what peoples in the present have ever fancied themselves otherwise?) and that we base our beliefs on fact. But we’re just as prey to mass delusions as we ever were.

Accordingly, how’s this for mania number five. It isn’t a mania; it’s just the truth: check. It’s suddenly all anyone in the media seems to talk about, and they use all the same language: check. It’s powered by emotion: check. It brooks no dissent, refuses to acknowledge there’s even a debate to be had, and doghouses all sceptics as evil “deniers” who will bring about the end of world: check. It’s malign, getting increasingly extreme, and is driven by the very best of intentions: check, check, check. I’m not about to get into the argument here, but the escalating hysteria over climate change — or the climate “emergency”, climate “crisis”, or climate “collapse” — displays all the markers, does it not?

But Ichinono is special. In 2022, for the first time in two decades, a child was born there. Kuranosuke, writes the FT, is “cherished by a cooing, tribute-bearing platoon of surrogate grandparents from around the village”. Poems are written about him. A haiku is engraved on a plaque outside the toddler’s home. He is “a hero for simply existing”.

I thought about Kuranosuke while I was reading “The Big Ambition”, a new report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel D’Souza. Its lead finding is that children don’t feel listened to: “Just one in five children in England believe their views are important to the adults who run the country, while only 10% of teenagers believe they have the power to influence the issues they care about.” This report, writes de Souza, “is a call to action to all politicians and policymakers in this general election year: listen to children and act on what they are telling you.”

A manifesto for children! Big votes for eliminating all bedtimes and free pick ’n’ mix! Except actually, the ambitions of the children in the research are modest and reasonable: an end to child poverty, proper support in schools, fairness for foster children and places to play in. These are not radical flights of juvenile whimsy. They’re the kind of things that a country with any interest in its young people should be investing in anyway.

That this is not a country with a great deal of interest in its young people is hardly worth pointing out by now. Over the past week, the news cycle has been dominated by stories that are effectively about old people retaining their perks. First, there were the “WASPi women”, who claim to have been unfairly caught in the Government’s plan to equalise the state pension age, so that rather than collecting their pension at 60, women collect it at 66 alongside men.

It’s very hard to mount an argument against this in principle, given that it effectively eliminates a residual perversity in the system from the days when female wage earning was seen as an eccentricity. Yet the parliamentary ombudsman found that the DWP had failed to adequately inform the affected women, and should pay compensation of between £1,000 and £2,950 per person; campaigners had been asking for an eye-watering £10,000 each.

That strikes me as inordinately entitled — and so far, the DWP is declining to pay up — but pensioners are used to being indulged. As this story was being debated, chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the retention of the pension triple-lock would be a Tory manifesto commitment — meaning that the Government will raise publicly funded pensions annually by whichever is highest out of average wage growth, inflation or 2.5%.

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It’s an astonishingly generous settlement, unmatched in any other area of public spending, and one that has proved immune to austerity economics. The reason for this is straightforward: older people get what they want because there are a lot of older people and they tend to vote. No one ever lost an election pandering to the grey vote. All noises from Labour suggest that they have no intention of rescinding it.

Meanwhile, the generation whose hopes and dreams are captured in the Children’s Commissioner’s report have the privilege of being taught in schools that are literally falling apart, while the £4 billion hole in council funding means ambitions of safe, open spaces to hang out and play are unlikely to be realised. The more complex recommendations in the report around foster care and prevention models for young offending are hopelessly remote.

These terrible facts of national life can seem too entrenched to even think about changing. And yet, as the report points out, these young people know from their experience of lockdown that governments are capable of sweeping — and effective — action. At the same time, lockdown may also have taught them that these powers are highly unlikely to be exercised in their favour.

The errors of the pandemic years must be forgivable given the number of unknowns and the huge risks that insufficient caution might have had, but it seems obvious now that closing the schools was a terrible overstep. That decision cut children off from their education. For many of those who were unhappy at school already or suffering from a chaotic or dangerous home, it denied them an academic future, let alone an escape.

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In short, these children have paid a high price in order to protect older people from Covid, and are going to be asked to pay a high price again when they enter employment, at which point they will likely be working to fund a standard of living for pensioners that they will never be offered. Why won’t they be offered it? Because while the UK is in a slightly more robust place than Japan demographically, a birth rate of 1:49 means we are still facing the future with an ageing population. Eventually, economic logic dictates that old-age perks will become unsustainable.

The tragedy of all this isn’t hard to glean. A society that relies on young people should treat them well. Even if children aren’t quite as scarce and precious a resource as toddler Kuranosuke is in Ichinono, they are still too valuable to be taken for granted. Their taxes will keep the welfare state creaking along; their hands will perform the care that older people inevitably need. But the rewards they will receive for that are highly uncertain.

So, at the very least, they should be listened to now — if not exactly worshipped. For the older villagers of Ichinono, the tributes they pay to their child king are an act of hope: a promise that perhaps their village won’t die and leave them forgotten. Similarly, a more generous attitude to our own young people would show that this country has a future. The alternative option of elders hoarding their wealth and political interest would send the exact opposite message, and tell children they have nothing to look forward to but their own decline. There could be no surer way to break down the generational contract holding society together than that.

In reality, generation gaps are very rare. The UK’s last experience of one was during the Sixties, when the “cultural revolution” that consumed Western Europe and North America led to an explosion of books and articles trying to make sense of the apparent gulf between the generation that won the war and the kids growing up in the peace.

In my years researching generational conflict, I have cautioned against overheated claims that we are living through a period of strife between younger and older people: for instance, the argument that the Baby Boomers have taken more than their “fair share” of society’s wealth and are bleeding young people dry with their triple-locked pensions, or that the Sixties generation are to blame for climate change, with their record of hedonistic consumerism and careless globe-trotting. I was firmly opposed to the Covid-19 lockdowns, and wrote considerably about their deleterious impact on young people. But I could never buy the line that these restrictions were designed to protect the old at the expense of the young. It wasn’t Grandma in charge of health policy, after all, but that mewling, toddler-esque Gen X-er, Matt Hancock.

Yet as we stagger through the unfolding permacrisis of the 2020s, I perceive a true generation gap emerging — possibly as seismic as the Sixties upheaval. This goes far beyond the everyday friction that exists between different generations, as young people struggle to find their place in the world and older people struggle to guide them in a reality that is constantly changing. It is about the gap in which we all find ourselves, between the “normal” we grew up with and the chaos that we find ourselves navigating now. This is not the “new normal” confidently predicted by those who thought lockdowns would change the way we worked forever: in many ways, what is striking is how much it feels like the “old normal”, as if the lockdown experience has been memory-holed. But we know, deep down, that something quite fundamental is changing.

Generation gaps, such as those evident in the period between the First and Second World Wars and during the Sixties, emerge when there is a distinct and rapid shift in the social order. Such occurrences throw established norms, values, conventions and institutions into disarray, without a consensus about what new form of order should replace them. Those in authority find themselves contested, while newer potential forms of authority jostle tetchily for position. Caught in the eye of the storm are young people coming into adulthood, who are trying to make sense of themselves and their place in a society that is palpably at odds with itself.

The tensions involved in integrating young people into the social world during periods of rapid change have long been a staple of “generation question” in the social sciences. An insightful collection published in 1963 brought together contributions from the sociologists Talcott Parsons and S.N. Eisenstadt, psychologists Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, Kenneth Keniston and others, in a properly interdisciplinary discussion of what Karl Mannheim, back in the Twenties, had termed “the problem of generations”. Mannheim observed how periods of accelerated social change give rise to distinctive forms of generational consciousness, in which people on the cusp of adulthood develop a very different orientation to the world than that of their elders. This temporal dislocation can result in a schism between the generations, as young people, being closer to the problems of their time, “are dramatically aware of a process of de-stabilisation and take sides in it”, while “the older generation cling to the re-orientation that had been the drama of their youth”.

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Friction between generations is therefore both the product of wider social and cultural conflict, and helps to cause it. Here, “generation gaps” mark a break in continuous time, forcing an abrupt re-evaluation of how we understand our society and what we can take for granted. And as every parent of teenagers will be sharply aware, the conflicts don’t stop at the front door. Because generations also operate at a family level, these tensions invariably also arise from, and bleed into, conflicts between parents and children. Back in 1940, the sociologist Kingsley Davis identified “the rate of social change” as one of the key variables in the production of “parent-youth conflict”. Within “a fast-changing social order”, he explained, “the time-interval between generations, ordinarily but a mere moment in the life of a social system, becomes historically significant, thereby creating a hiatus between one generation and the next”.

It is this sense of “hiatus” that seems to characterise the historical moment that we are currently experiencing. After decades of stasis, in which the collapse of communism led Fukuyama to contend that history had reached its “end”, we seem to have entered a period of dramatically destabilising social change. From international conflicts escalating abroad to the “culture wars” ripping Western nations apart at home, the old order is clearly unravelling, but what comes next is far from decided. The historian Robert Wohl described the First World War generation as “wanderers between two worlds” — a century on, to some extent, it feels like we are walking in their shoes.

Of course, we are living in very different circumstances. But even if our present culture wars don’t claim the physical casualties of a military conflict, we shouldn’t underestimate their destructive trajectory, or the level of destabilisation revealed by vicious battles over questions such as “what is a woman?” Nor should we deny that young people, as in any conflict, are on the front line — either propelled there by dramatic idealism and a desire for change, or deployed as cannon fodder by the elites running the show.

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But there are some important ways we can make this less bloody. First, we should be very clear that young people are socialised into, and come to live by, ideas that are not their own. The spotlight has recently fallen on the aggressive promotion of contested statements about gender ideology, racialised thinking, and climate emergencies by schools and universities, leading to concerns about the blurring of the line between education and indoctrination. It would be naïve to think that kids coming home fluent in the language of LGBTQIA+, or distraught that forest fires herald the imminent end of the world, are divining an enlightened new reality of their own accord. These ideas are being taught, rather than conceived.

Yet as young people grow into adulthood, they do start thinking for themselves. They are not passive recipients of indoctrination, but alive to both the internal contradictions and wider criticisms of the things they have been brought up to believe. The positioning of student activists as the “voice of a generation”, whether for better or for worse, misses the fact that, as Kathleen Stock has argued, many university students “tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other.” Precisely because they are growing into adulthood during a period of cultural strife, young people from all walks of life are absorbing a range of ideas and making them their own.

A second bulwark against outright generational conflict is the existence of some friction between the generations. For all the Zeitgeist pushes young people to reject the advice and guidance of their elders, they are crying out for it — not least as something to argue against. Children have always pushed boundaries, in order to work themselves out; yet parents and teachers are increasingly warned that boundaries threaten a child’s self-esteem and identity, and that what they should be doing instead is affirming how children feel about themselves. Though presented as an act of compassion and understanding, the culture of affirmation is better understood as the rationalisation of neglect. Shying away from their responsibility to guide their children, adults place the full burden of their children’s fleeting choices upon their immature shoulders. It’s easy to flatter ourselves that we are being nicer, kinder adults by avoiding confrontation, but confrontation is sometimes exactly what the young need from us.

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We must remember this as we seek to address our new generation gap — our sense that the world is shifting. In times of both chaos and stasis, society is always a mess of people with diverse ideas, experiences, and personalities; life in communities does not conform to the shrill dichotomies of the online culture wars, and our physical, everyday interactions counter the relentless cultural pessimism of the current political moment. In the midst of a punishing cost-of-living crisis, escalating international tensions, crumbling infrastructure, a health service on its knees, and an education system fatally wounded by its lockdown-imposed gap year, we are surrounded by people trying to make things work. Exhausted doctors, nurses, care workers and teachers demonstrate levels of professionalism and commitment that never make the news; railway staff fighting replacement by machines act as a daily reminder of why people do the job better. Parents carry on having arguments with their kids, showing that they care enough to be unpopular.

Life in the hiatus goes on; and if it feels that we are biding our time until the next disaster strikes, maybe that’s no bad thing. It reminds our children that this strange temporal dislocation is a storm that we will all have to weather — and that this new generation gap is not unbridgeable, provided we remember to keep a foot in both the old world and the new.

For this reason — and also because my own books feature murder, mayhem, and severed body parts in kitchen sinks — I make it a rule never to assume that the views expressed by a fictional character also belong to that character’s creator. But I have made an exception for Stephen King’s latest novel, Holly, because it includes a note from King himself, at the end of the book, stating that the novel’s politics are also his own.

The novel is set in 2021, in the thick of the Covid pandemic and addresses the country’s pandemic policies directly. King writes: “A considerable portion of the American population — not a majority, I’m relieved to say — are anti-vaccination” — but those people, he says, will probably find his heroine’s Covid takes “preachy”. After her own unvaccinated, Trump-supporting mother dies of the virus, the eponymous protagonist, Holly Gibney, spends a good portion of 450 pages obsessively masking, inquiring after other people’s vaccination status, and bemoaning the selfishness of the unwashed, unvaxxed Right-wingers without whom the virus would surely have been tamed by now.

King admits: “It’s true that my opinions match hers on the subject.”

Other critics have lamented King’s lack of subtlety, but to me, what’s more striking is the lack of craft. I’ve read — and in many cases, re-read — virtually everything the man has ever written; this is the first book of his I’ve ever struggled to finish. A hallmark of King’s oeuvre is how human the horror is, how rooted in a world that is familiar and recognisable. Holly, on the other hand, feels like it was written by someone who’d been locked down for so long that he no longer remembers the basic rhythms of normal in-person conversation. Insofar as the world it depicts is recognisable, it’s only because it’s the world as it appeared online during the pandemic, filtered through the lenses of social media and cable news. Holly is nominally a detective novel, but the mystery is like a whisper-thin web that strings together one trendy Covid narrative after another, the kind of stories that went viral on Twitter because they confirmed the biases of its highly educated, politically progressive user base.

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The irony is that a number of these viral narratives were themselves fiction, fed to us by a media that had gone all in on the pandemic as a politicised spectator sport and didn’t particularly care if the stories they aired were true. It’s a bit grotesque, to see how fake news becomes repurposed, and legitimised, in fiction: when Holly’s mother catches Covid at an anti-mask rally and dies gasping to her last that the virus is a hoax, one assumes that King must have caught the relevant segment on CNN — but not the later reporting that revealed it to be a fabrication.

And while Stephen King has never shied away from addressing political topics in his work, the pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-vax messaging of Holly is different — not in degree, but in kind. If there’s such a thing as a unifying political principle in King’s books, it’s anti-authoritarianism. Look at who his heroes are: bullied teens, rogue gunslingers, plucky outsiders who follow their principles instead of just doing what they’re told. And his villains? They’re the corrupt bureaucrats, the officious rule followers, the control freaks-in-chief who must insist you take your medicine — for your own good, and for the greater good.

Consider The Institute, his 2019 novel in which children with supernatural abilities are kidnapped, tortured, and weaponised by a shadowy government organisation that believes itself to be the keeper of a precarious world peace. Consider Firestarter, featuring a young family on the run from the state agents who want to imprison and experiment on them. Consider Carrie, whose protagonist is failed by every authority figure in her life until the story ends in a literal bloodbath — or The Running Man and The Long Walk, both set in dystopian futures where human suffering doubles as state-sponsored entertainment. Even Annie Wilkes, the iconic villain of Misery, is terrifying not because she’s an agent of chaos but because she’s a stickler for the rules, and as such, capable of perpetuating astonishing cruelty under the guise of giving care. If Wilkes had been around during Covid, she would have loved kicking people out of their dying loved one’s hospital room in the name of social distancing protocols.

The critical consensus in certain corners is that this is the result of King having gone woke — perhaps in an attempt to stave off cancellation for work that hasn’t aged well. There may be something to this — King’s pre-Y2K oeuvre makes heavy use of the Magical Negro trope, not to mention the n-word, which white authors are no longer allowed to put in the mouths of their characters. And some of his more recent books do carry a whiff of attempted atonement for past political incorrectness. Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen, is an enjoyable thriller that nevertheless also reads like a 700-page plea for membership in the Good Male Feminist club (as do many of King’s tweets). Billy Summers, published in 2021, features a protagonist whose inner monologue is deeply disdainful of Donald Trump, and King himself has said that The Institute is intended as an allegory for the Trump administration’s border policies.

Pandemic aside, Holly definitely has the fingerprints of 2020 political Twitter all over it. The book’s female villain, one half of a pair of cannibal murderers who think they’ve found the proverbial fountain of youth in the form of human brain parfaits, is basically Karen incarnate, written to embody the stereotype of the older white woman who became a national object of fear and loathing during the pandemic. She’s not only anti-vax and anti-mask, but also anti-black and anti-gay. In one particularly on-the-nose scene from the book’s denouement, the female villain’s diaries are discovered: they contain a detailed record of her crimes interspersed with page upon page of all-caps racial slurs, in keeping with the contemporary belief that people do not contain multitudes, that any person who is one kind of bad thing must be every kind of bad thing.

But there’s something different, and tragic, about how this plays out for Holly — not the book, but the character. Holly Gibney had all the makings of a classic Stephen King heroine, an eccentric and iconoclastic outsider who has become an increasingly complex and confident character over the course of several books. Yet here, in this novel with her name on it, she’s practically unrecognisable: a model of pandemic paranoia, the personification of dull and dutiful compliance. King’s author’s note suggests that Holly just happens to share his views on the topic of Covid, but reading the book, she seems more like a mouthpiece for them, a character being used by her creator to send a message rather than tell a story. If you had any fondness for Holly Gibney, this hollowed-out version of her is dismaying to see.

Still more dismaying is to see an author who has written so poignantly about the triumph of the human spirit, of heroic free will, tweeting his earnest belief that unvaccinated people should be fired from their jobs and unpersoned by their government: “We are in a war here. Thousands of Americans die each week.” This sudden enthusiasm for empowering the state to strong-arm people into compliance is quite a change, coming from a guy who used to have nothing but contempt for such meddlesome overreach into ordinary people’s lives. As the narrator of Firestarter observes, “No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”

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There’s something decidedly Boomer about King’s political and creative evolution. His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made “Never trust anyone over 30” into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation’s elected offices. For some, this identity crisis expresses itself in the form of frantic current thing-ism, as aging members of the protest generation glom onto LGBT pride, or the war in Ukraine, or anti-racist book clubs, all for the sake of aligning themselves with whatever passes for a movement these days; for others, it’s all about white-knuckling those last few years pre-retirement, praying to make it through without being cancelled by their 23-year-old assistants.

But if the boomers were set off balance by culture’s great awokening, the pandemic awakened something else: the terrifying and unavoidable awareness of their own mortality. The virus, as it turns out, does not care how young you feel.

Which brings us back to Holly, and more particularly to its villains. This couple, these cannibals, are terrified of aging, deteriorating, dying; consuming the flesh of younger, fitter people is how they buy themselves more time. It’s a perverse inversion, to sacrifice those at the beginning of their lives for the sake of those who’ve already lived full ones. But it’s one that we might recognise: what did so many of our pandemic policies accomplish, if not to prioritise the safety of vulnerable octogenarians over the health and happiness of kids?

There was a time, not long ago, when Stephen King might have objected. “Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, it’s superstition,” he wrote in The Institute. But of course, that was before the Science, and its self-appointed interpreters, decided that children were nasty little vectors for disease, and that maybe a little sacrifice on the altar of probability — just the education of an entire generation or so — was in order.

When you’re old, and scared, and vulnerable, maybe a government folder with your name on it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. Someone has to protect you, after all, from all those irresponsible youths who don’t understand that it’s more important to be safe than free.

Shasta County has always attracted American outliers, a laboratory for both success and failure. These are the valleys and mountains where John Steinbeck sent his characters in Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, escaping from the restrictive cities and scarce land of the Midwest. In the Seventies, hippies fled the fading counterculture of the Bay to live communally here. Today’s exiles take the form of a conservative militia.

When the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom enacted America’s first state-wide stay-at-home order, before introducing some of the country’s strictest measures, closing schools and mandating the wearing of masks in public buildings. The health officials in Shasta, aware of local sentiment, attempted to limit the extent of these policies and consequently implemented some of the most lenient lockdowns in the state. However, if the fiercely independent residents of Shasta bit their tongues and did as they were told, it was grudgingly, and only up to a point. According to many libertarians in Shasta, lockdown measures threatened their livelihoods, while vaccine mandates were viewed as a further infringement on their personal liberties. So, when Shasta County’s elected Republican Board of Supervisors suggested residents take up their grievances with state legislators, enraged residents took matters into their own hands.

Over the past three years, the established local political elite — a wealthy class of Reagan Republicans that has traditionally run the county from its ranches and legal offices — has slowly found itself recalled and replaced with libertarian newcomers. Post-Covid, only Mary Rickert, a local cattle rancher who describes herself as an “incredibly conservative Catholic” (though others in the town label her a “rhino” — Republican in name only), remains in office.

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Patrick Jones, whose family owns a local gun store, helped to overturn the once mighty Republican majority by convening a new movement made up of libertarians, evangelical conservatives, the local Cottonwood militia, the Shasta-based Liberty Committee, and anti-California secessionists. Jones and his three other newly elected insurgent supervisors — Kevin Crye, Chris Kelstrom and Tim Garman — are backed by Right-wing millionaire Reverge Anselmo and Mike Lindell, a leading Trump associate. And now that lockdown is over, this militant faction has even bigger targets: their goal is to return Shasta to traditional ballot-box voting, to abolish what some consider to be California’s unconstitutional gun laws, and to secede from Sacramento and become part of a new breakaway State of Jefferson.

High on mutinous ambition, residents of Shasta County (population: 182,139) find themselves at the confluence of several distinct American forces, each with its unique worldview and a disregard for ideological enemies. There is little consensus to be found beyond a shared sense of American crisis. There is also fierce resistance from Rickert and her equally odd coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, conservatives, public worker unions and local media outlets; the rare Democrats and liberals who reside this far outside the Bay Area have to work closely with Republicans.

Yet no matter what side of the conflict they occupy, the people here are keen to describe how the state of California has abandoned its rural peripheries, exporting state-wide problems around drug abuse, homelessness, farming, land use, water access, forest fires and property prices.

Another element to consider, whose presence is felt everywhere in Redding, is the powerful Bethel Church, led by pastor Bill Johnson; it espouses an overtly political theology and counts many local politicians among its flock. Almost everyone I stayed with was a member of this megachurch, which espouses an extreme form of Pentecostalism. One host, with a beard of biblical proportions, prayed over me in tongues while a taxi driver offered to cast out my demons. Yet when I asked about the church, people often went silent, perhaps fearful of the last time they were dragged into the media. In 2019, members of the church — which practises grave-soaking, whereby the energy of deceased Christian leaders is “sucked” from tombs — attempted to resurrect a dead toddler. Since then, however, Bethel’s influence has continued to grow: its music division still racks up millions of views on YouTube. And yet, Bethel was the only organisation in Shasta to decline my request for an interview.

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I arrive in Redding by train after dark and look for somewhere to see out the night, but the station’s main building is locked up and surrounded by a large spiked fence. A torch flicks on, and a security guard asks where I’m heading and where I’m from. He tells me the station was closed because of homelessness: “They shit everywhere and ruin the place. They’re coming up from San Francisco and LA, or they’re being sent… Who knows?” Instead, I find a bench beneath a poster warning against fentanyl use.

The next day, I walk to my hotel across town and amble past a roadside rally of MAGA flags, libertarian regalia, and what look like old Tea Party signs from the 2010s. A huge truck blasts its horn in support as it speeds down the freeway. An old man standing behind a stall filled with Trump leaflets gives me a nod as families and individuals stop to talk.

Later, I join the open session of the local Board of Supervisors, which, in 2020, was the focus of tense protests and debate over lockdowns. The hall slowly fills up; the majority are retired hippies or conservative ranchers from out of town. What starts as a regular local government meeting dealing with the prosaic business of water reservoirs and local art foundations quickly escalates into a debate about Trump, Covid and voting fraud.

Speakers from the floor discuss the pros and cons of Dominion voting machines, whose manufacturer was recently paid $787.5 million by Fox Corp to settle a defamation case involving cable news pundits and conspiracy theories. The conversation soon spirals out into stolen elections, national corruption, drug addiction and the “lies” of the media class. One local stands up and claims she had seen buses run by the San Francisco government dropping scores of homeless people in Redding at night. Another man in a trucker hat points to the serried ranks of local journalists and shouts: “I’m watching you. You don’t intimidate us anymore.” Yet the tenor of today’s political debate is comparatively anodyne; three years ago, amid lockdown controversy, one constituent told the board that “you have made bullets expensive ­— but, luckily for you, ropes are reusable”.

Although the recall efforts have a large civic element, they have also been bolstered by the Cottonwood Militia, one of several active groups across California. It was started by local barber Woody Clendenen in his barn back in 2008 and counts around 1,000 local business owners and ranchers among its ranks. Indeed, Cottonwood Militia members often intersect with other organisations such as “the Jefferson Movement”, “Red, White and Blueprint” and local evangelical churches.

“They’re different legs of the same spider,” Carlos Zapata, a Cottonwood militia member and restaurant owner tells me over a drink in the local saloon of the nearby town of Palo Cedro. For Carlos Zapata, the militia “is here with a message that we’re not going anywhere…we’re here to fight [government overreach]. We want to take this project into rural America and the nation in general.” Zapata, like many others in Shasta, was drawn to the militia during the pandemic. He tells me: “Covid was like this Great Awakening. People started showing up to protest in droves — they wanted to join something because they thought we were going to civil war against the opposition. Do we need a civil war? I’d hate to think we’d need a civil war, but how do we get past this?”

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“I had heard about a militia my whole adult life in Shasta,” says Doni Chamberlain, a local reporter. “And I kind of thought: ‘It’s just a bunch of guys out in the woods with paintball guns.’ I had no idea until George Floyd’s death. During the 2020 riots in Portland, there were all these crazy stories about Antifa coming down with truckloads of bricks. We had a protest here in Shasta. That was the militia’s coming-out party in Redding. There were more militia members than there were protesters. There was a mix of open and closed carry guns.”

“They’re faux-cowboys,” she says. “Most of them, I would say, are from average California towns. I think they’ve just embraced the whole gun culture because they believe that a civil war is coming — us against them.” She later describes how one resident told her that she “should be publicly executed… that the only way people like me learn is to be dragged behind a car”. And yet, she argues that many people in the county are acting in good faith, even if they are fundamentally misguided: “I understand there are some people who joined the militia for what they thought were good, valid reasons. What’s more American — or manly — than protecting your city from riots?”

A few days later, I meet Patrick Jones at the family shop, Jones’s Fort. (“Come to my gun store,” he says, “you’re English — you probably don’t get to see many.”) The shop is a large building on the edge of town where the heads of elk and bison hang beside the racks of rifles and shotguns. In a back room adorned with two massive buffalo heads, he leans up against a chair in a pair of old cowboy boots.

“I’ve been in local politics a while,” he tells me, “but when I won my [Board of Supervisors] primary in 2020, that’s when a lot of the excitement started. I’m a traditional, small-state conservative”, emphasising that his political vision is regional rather than federal. Indeed, much of what he and others argue is in step not with contemporary protectionist Trumpism, but with the earlier Tea Party movement. During the 2010s, the Tea Party was concerned with fiscal conservatism, national debt reduction, lower taxes and a small state. “This area is conservative, and it should have a government that reflects that,” Jones continues. “We rose up and did something about it. It’s our job to push back.”

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Indeed, Jones has long been associated with the State of Jefferson (SoJ), a movement that opposes the cultural and political dominance of Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The SoJ is a group with roots in the 19th century when the remote north became a natural resources hub for the cities. By 1941, SoJ activists had set up armed roadblocks around Northern California and Southern Oregon, unilaterally declaring succession before the Second World War interrupted.

Jones maintains that a break from California and the creation of the SoJ — from the northernmost counties of California and parts of neighbouring Oregon — will take an uprising. “There have been hundreds of attempts to split the state. But there’s no way, legally, for us to break away,” he says. “The only real way, if it’s ever going to happen, is for the people here to rise up and make it happen. Rural parts of California have no representation today. So splitting the state would allow us to form a more conservative government where you are paying less tax and are more free. We’re setting a trend. We have five counties in California watching what we’re doing here right now.”

Leaving Jones, I head to the Shasta County office to talk to Supervisor Mary Rickert. I’m joined by her husband Jim. Both are long-time cattle ranchers whose families have farmed in Shasta County for five generations. Neither believes that a libertarian SoJ would solve any of Shasta’s problems. “Some 85% of our funding comes from state and federal dollars,” Rickert says. “We’re a taker, not a giver. We couldn’t survive.”

However, she shares Jones’s distrust of Sacramento’s ability to effectively govern Northern California. “Gavin Newsom is not agriculture-friendly,” she says, giving a stark example. Under Californian law, she can’t shoot the wolves that threaten her cattle. “But why is a wolf’s life more valuable than a cow’s?” She maintains this isn’t really a priority for the militia. “I’ll be very clear, I believe they’re using Shasta County to elevate themselves. To his followers, Jones talks about not working with the government,” Rickert argues. “But behind the scenes, he’s for his personal gain through government grants to promote a new gun range.”

Before I leave Redding, I call Mark Baird, the leader of the SoJ movement. When he picks up the phone, the line is hazy; he’s under the wing of a small aeroplane in remote Siskiyou County, where he works as an aerial firefighter.

Baird identifies two flashpoints in Northern California history. The first is the 19th-century discovery of gold, which transformed the region into a resource hub with less settled urban populations than the powerful South. For Baird, second in importance are the constitutional reforms of liberal Republican governor Earl Warren during the Fifties that reduced rural representation at the state level. “We have a model in California, where the northern third of California has six state-level representatives and the other two-thirds has 114,” Baird tells me. “As you can see, the natural resource counties, and the rural counties, never win. We never get anything we want [and then] all of this lunatic bullshit comes up from Sacramento. The State of Jefferson is really about ‘Rule of Law and Liberty.’ As Thomas Paine said in his funny little pamphlet, oddly enough called Common Sense, all parts of the colony need to remain representative.”

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For Baird, state and national politics, across all parties, have fundamentally betrayed these principles and grown distant from their voters. “It’s time for the people to take back the government that they formed to represent them,” he tells me. “They’re not doing anything for anybody — except lining someone’s pocket and I guarantee you that someone lives in Sacramento.”

In some sense, America has always looked back to its early leaders for political prototypes. At the national level, the current arena seems to be dominated by a contest between Biden’s technocratic and institutionally focused Hamiltonianism and the plutocratic Jacksonian populism of Trump. On the open frontier, however, far from centralised power, a third model appears to be re-emerging: that of Jeffersonian yeoman democracy. Whether this very American brand of folk libertarianism will survive a 2024 national election year remains to be seen — especially if the race becomes defined, as seems likely, by the need for an economically interventionist policy in the face of mounting competition with China.

Despite all this, many in Shasta County seem determined to mount political resistance against a changing world. Much like the cowboys of old, they’ve barricaded the saloon, and they’re waiting, guns drawn, for a showdown at dawn. From this distance, however, it’s hard to tell whether the pistols and hats are even real.

So how strange to discover that this same man had previously warned that risky research was “intensifying” threats from “lab-enhanced viruses”. In fact, two years before the pandemic erupted, Daszak was involved in drafting a presentation about the dangers of engineered viruses being accidentally or even deliberately released into the world.

In this newly uncovered presentation, the scientist warned that “gain-of-function” research — which boosts the transmissibility of viruses — was “elevating the risk” that “deadly novel biological agents” could be released through accident or design. The document, demanding the urgent development of counter-measures, put such risk at the same level as natural spillover from the wild. It even focused on the specific threat from coronaviruses.

Yet after the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, Daszak headed the charge against those claiming the mysterious new disease might be potentially linked to research in the city, with even the British Medical Journal branding him the leader of the campaign to label such critics as conspiracy theorists.

Little wonder the disclosure of this document has provoked angry claims of hypocrisy. Richard Ebright, an expert on biosecurity and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told me it meant that Daszak and his allies have spent the past three years not telling the world the whole truth. The revelations, he said, underlined “the shocking recklessness” of funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan that was being carried out at a low-level biosecurity lab “with no protections beyond a pair of gloves, a lab coat and a hood”.

Today, Daszak is the $460,368-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group that channelled US research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology until the payments were exposed and terminated by President Trump in April 2020. The former Kingston University snail researcher responded with outrage, rounding on suggestions that research in Wuhan might have sparked the pandemic. Typical was a June 2020 article in The Guardian entitled “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” that insisted claims of “frankenviruses” made in labs were “the latest chapter in a tale of blame, misinformation and finger-pointing”.

Most infamously, he was the covert organiser of a statement in The Lancet journal that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and absurdly praised China’s “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. Signed by 27 experts, the document helped to crush scientific, political and media debate on whether the new virus might have been manipulated or leaked from a laboratory. The journal was forced later to add a note clarifying Daszak’s “competing interests” and he was removed from heading up its own inquiry into the virus’ origins.

Yet the presentation for the launch of his Global Virome Project (GVP) suggested something very different: that the risks of lab leaks and gain-of-function research needed to be taken seriously. It was seeking $1.3 billion funding over 10 years to help end “the pandemic era” by identifying viruses with the “greatest potential to infect humans and their laboratory-enhanced variants so we can prepare for them before they jump to us”.

The GVP was chaired by the infectious diseases expert Dennis Carroll, another of the signatories to The Lancet statement. Daszak was the project’s director, secretary and treasurer and emails obtained through freedom of information requests demonstrate that he had helped draft the pitch document.

The 40 slides prepared for the 2017 presentation focus on “dual threats” posed by both natural emergence of diseases and the accidental or intentional release of “laboratory enhanced variants”. They warn that gain-of-function research is inflaming the danger of “illnesses and deaths” along with “mass hysteria and panic”. They propose a 10-year project to “develop countermeasures” and build a huge database of viruses to enable their “rapid detection of natural and laboratory-enhanced threats”.

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This presentation reflects sensible fears held by many sensible scientists. One page discloses plans for quick identification of engineered viruses. Another underlines the need to “rapidly recognise a lab-enhanced virus”. A third highlights the evidence of Sars-like coronaviruses in Yunnan — a tropical region of southern China where bats roost and scientists from Wuhan Institute of Virology went to collect their samples — while finding no signs of such infections in Wuhan itself.

A version of the slide deck came to light in an email exchange between Daszak and his GVP colleagues, obtained in a freedom of information request from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group. The full set was found by Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist and member of the Drastic group which challenged the science establishment’s narrative that Covid almost certainly spilled over naturally from animals.“When Daszak needed to protect his back,” says Demaneuf, “anybody who dares say exactly what he wrote in these slides was called a conspiracy theorist — or worse.”

Emails indicate that the GVP organisers also held discussions on their plans with Washington defence research agencies. Last month, FBI director Christopher Wray said his agency had “for quite some time assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. It is now backed by the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of laboratories engaged in advanced biology, although other US intelligence agencies disagree with their conclusion.

After the pandemic started, the GVP stalled. Three months ago, a federal watchdog accused US funding authorities and EcoHealth Alliance of “deficiencies” in their monitoring and oversight of the work conducted on coronavirus strains at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak has collaborated on extensive field research in Yunnan and 17 scientific papers since 2005 with the laboratory’s leading bat coronavirus expert Shi Zhengli.

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Last month, EcoHealth Alliance boasted of winning fresh US grants to “identify” spillovers of bat coronaviruses in three other Asian nations by sampling thousands of bats and other mammals. “This will help identify the potential role of other wildlife as intermediate hosts in the transmission of bat CoVs — and may also help to shed light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” it claimed. The body did not respond to requests for comment on the GVP presentation.

Critics of virus hunting schemes argue that they present high risk while delivering few tangible benefits. A year-long investigation by The Washington Post concluded that such research could be placing the planet in greater danger of another pandemic, accusing the US of continuing to funnel big sums into overseas research despite insufficient oversight as regulation fails to keep pace with new technologies.There are thought to be thousands of biocontainment labs handling dangerous pathogens, although the precise number around the world is unknown.

Simon Wain-Hobson, the virologist who discovered the genetic blueprint of HIV, is among those wanting to see a ban on gain-of-function work.  He told me that Daszak’s presentation exposed the “fallacious logic” of suggesting engineered viruses could help to predict pandemics or assist production of preventative drugs and vaccines. “The science fiction goes on,” he said.

I was once one of those people. I’m a lower-middle class, suburban British bloke from Generation X, who was brought up to believe that the system broadly worked and was mostly fair, at least for people like me. The government did its best, though sometimes the wrong people got in; the police were here to help; there were career ladders and housing ladders, and if you worked hard and behaved responsibly and paid your taxes, then society would reward you for it.

Of course, this was a partial story, as all stories are. Plenty of people would have cackled cynically at it from the start, while others, including me, disabused themselves of it by degrees. I spent 30 years writing about the degradation of nature and culture by the state-capitalist technocracy that governs us, so I imagined I was a hard-bitten realist. But the last few years taught me that I was still too naive about the mythic “social contract” with the state that I apparently entered into at birth, despite having never signed a thing.

As I say, it’s not just me. The loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years has been radical. When, I wonder, did that contract expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the Iraq war was launched were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or maybe later, in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European “populism” happened, and suddenly any opposition to liberal globalism became fascism or bigotry or the work of Russian bots.

But it was the pandemic — or rather, the response to it — that changed everything for me. I hadn’t been prepared see, in my allegedly free and democratic country, a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. What the Covid regime brought home to me was that I had not, despite what I believed, really understood the real nature of power until I saw it exercised in its raw form over my life. Specifically, I had not understood the power of the state.

Nothing has the power or reach of a modern state. Its sheer scale and strength gives it the ability to corral, organise, define, measure and control its population in a manner that is unmatched in human history, and that power only grows and deepens. The momentum of a state is always towards the centre, always towards the agglomeration of more power. A state is like a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence. Democracy, liberty and progress are some of the more recent banners beneath which state power has gathered, but there have been others: racial or ethnic homogeneity, human equality, religious purity. All of these stories have the potential to unite a people around a state core.

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What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? This has been the story of the world since 1945, and the result is the world’s first truly global system. The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling.

Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control, is the inevitable result, and the pandemic overreach will not be the last example. So what is the correct response to the problem of power, and the reach of the state? Avoid it? Hide from it? Confront it? Ignore it? All of these? Or something else? Can we escape the state and live differently? If so, how?

Jacques Ellul, the great theorist of technocracy, had his own answer to these questions: “The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilisation is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society.” Ellul, I think, was right. The state is the chief enemy of human freedom. It cannot be conquered or replaced. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, it can be evaded.

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott offers up some historical examples. Scott’s aim is twofold: firstly, to lay out the history of a vast upland region he calls “Zomia”, straddling territories from India to Malaysia, which has managed over centuries to avoid assimilation by encroaching states. And secondly, to rewrite the standard story of historical progress as it applies to the region. The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend.

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The state, says Scott, is fundamentally a colonial entity. In its youthful vigour, it will institute a process of “internal colonisation”, creating a homogenised “national identity” from the various cultures it governs, flattening language and dialect and telling a story in which loyalty to community or place becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the state. Later that colonisation process may move beyond its borders, as the state projects its power onto more distant peoples, assimilating them too. This is enclosure at work, and it is never voluntary. Like laissez-faire capitalism, or aristocracy, the state — which has only existed for the last 1% of human history — did not simply “evolve” as some logical phase of human “development”. It was created, by the use of raw power, through land seizures, slavery, enforced labour and taxation.

For this reason, escaping from state power and creating different ways of living in the “shatter zones” was an attractive option. Those zones were usually to be found in hard-to-reach places; in Southeast Asia, this meant the hills and mountains. Their peoples — the “tribals” or “Adivasi” or “savages” — would not, in most cases, be entirely cut off from lowland life; they would often trade with urban centres, for example, and some would raid them, too, if they got the chance. But they would keep their distance, wary of being corralled by the state machinery.

The Asian states, as they expanded, sought to impose the religious, cultural and economic practices of the dominant ethnic group — be it Thai, Burman, Han or Kinh — onto disparate peoples. When European colonists arrived in Asia, they simply continued the process, with a new cultural flavour. The official religion now might be Christianity rather than Buddhism, and “civilisation” might mean British rather than Han manners, but to the peripheral peoples the result was little different. British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, when he wrote of Sumatra:

“Here I am the advocate of despotism … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.”

But such localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer. In the 1890s, the British found the conquest of the Kachin and Palaung hill peoples in Zomia almost impossible. Because they had “never submitted to any central control”, complained the chief commissioner responsible for the process, they had to be attacked “hill by hill” to ensure their submission. The historian Malcom Yapp invented a wonderful term for this kind of dispersed culture of refusal: jellyfish tribes. In Scott’s words, jellyfish tribalism is “a process of defending cultural and economic autonomy by scattering” to “make the group invisible or unattractive as object of appropriation”. The Berbers of North Africa, faced with colonisation by the Arabs, had their own way of putting this: divide that ye be not ruled. Lois Beck, who studied tribal culture in Iran, pointed to the same tactic in use there: “Large tribal groups divided into smaller groups to be less visible to the state and escaped its reach.”

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All of this points to some potential ways forward for those who fear the continued expansion of the increasingly globalised, technocratic state today. The challenge, it seems to me, is to move beyond pat political formulations of “resistance”, and begin to think instead like the hill tribes of Zomia. To think about becoming barbarians by choice. To begin to build parallel systems — economies and cultures — which are hard to assimilate, and have a robustness to them which can last. To construct “cultures of refusal”.

But how could this actually be done? The modern West is not like Zomia — indeed, as Scott himself points out, modern Zomia is not like Zomia used to be either, with many of its stateless people now being rapidly absorbed into state systems, which new technologies have made more powerful and far-reaching than ever. What hope of any kind of alternative life in a hyper-connected, monitored, digital age? Even if we wanted to retreat to the margins to build our own community, how many of us could do it? And what would make that community more robust than the last counter-cultural wave of “intentional communities”, which sprang up after the Sixties, and failed to create utopia?

This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail — but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal; survival in order to uphold the values of a true human life. There is no easy or standardised way to emulate what Scott calls the “state-repelling characteristics” of the Zomians, but there is one question it might be useful for anyone who seeks to evade Leviathan to ask themselves: what kind of barbarian do I want to be?

In ancient China, the state distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsider: the raw (sheng) and the cooked (shu). A 12th-century document detailing the relationship of the Li people with the Chinese state speaks of the “cooked Li” as those who have submitted to state authority and the “raw Li” as those who “live in the mountain caves and are not punished by us or do not supply labour”. But while the raw Li were clearly enemies of the state, the cooked Li were not exactly friends either. State officials “suspected them of outward conformity while slyly co-operating with the raw Li”. The raw barbarians lived outside the walls and the cooked lived within, but neither were really to be trusted.

What we see here, then, is two potential escape routes: one outside, one inside. Shatter zones do not have to literally be in the hills: they can be within our homes and even within our hearts. My heart soars whenever I hear of some remote monastery or surviving rooted community with no online access or even electricity, whose people know exactly where they stand: outside the state, the better to see God and experience creation. Such places are the work of the raw barbarians, and we need more of them.

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By Jonathan Sumption

But most people are cooked barbarians. We are, to different degrees, in the state but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But if we coalesce as a jellyfish tribe, we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the state, while creating alternatives to it. Plenty of people are already doing this. They create cultures-within-cultures, parallel economies and ways of living. Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of the tyrannosaurs, we can thus build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very un-sustainability of technological modernity. The mice don’t attack the dinosaurs, and neither do they wait for them to die out: they just avoid them as best they can, and get on with their work.

What Scott’s book shows me above all is that the tension between expanding power centres and free peoples is eternal and never-ending. Throughout history there has been an ongoing flow of assimilation and breakout, consolidation and collapse. There has never been any system as large, as overwhelming, as inhuman, as all-seeing, as technological modernity, and yet Rome and Babylon and Han China operated on the same principles. The shatter zones that rise in response are sometimes geographical, sometimes psychological and spiritual, and often all of these at once. Today, some of those shatter zones are at least partly online; and despite my own instinctive Luddism, I have to accept that such spaces are meeting points for state-repelling people who might never meet in real life. I have to accept, too, that using technology to resist technocracy can be of benefit, even though it can also be a trap.

In the age of Starlink, eyeball scans, AI bots and digital passports, it is getting harder and harder to find anywhere to hide. But humans are creative. There are countless practical ways in which cultural refusal can manifest in our everyday lives. I am a writer, for instance, who is currently watching the publishing industry being taken over by political puritans who are purging incorrect thoughts from the shelves, while rooting around in the past for baddies to cancel. I can whine about this, or I can support or start new publishers on the margins who do things differently. The same might be true for music, art, academia, food-growing. Everything is compromised; nothing is easy. But building anew, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and establishing your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: what else is there?

Whatever culture you come from, it will offer up at least one folk hero who earned his or her status through state-repelling behaviour. In England, we have hundreds of pirates, highwaymen, outlaws and rebels to choose from. You all know the name of the most famous: England’s shadow self, Robyn Hode, who flits through his shatter zone, the English greenwood, with his merry band of refuseniks in tow. We could do worse than to find our own greenwood and take our stand there, beneath the shelter of its great, ancient oaks.

*

A longer version of this essay was first published at the Abbey of Misrule.

Yet for the past two years, he has hardly been seen. Stuck at home during the pandemic and shackled by his family’s financial insecurity, Shaikh abandoned education in 2021. Since then, he has been working on haulage trucks, transporting goods to nearby cities as a “cleaner”, assisting the driver and maintaining the truck. Once an outgoing teenager, now Shaikh only visits home every few days, often for just a few hours between trips. His childhood, as he knew it, is over.

Shaikh’s story is far from unique. Three years on from the pandemic, the entire world is still reeling from its effects. But in India, the restrictions were particularly extreme: in March 2020, when the whole world was shutting down, the Modi government imposed what became one of the world’s harshest lockdowns. With just four hours’ notice, more than a billion people were confined to their homes — and 1.5 million schools were closed. The country’s 247 million children were then condemned to “online” learning, little more than a euphemism in a country where only a quarter of students had any internet access. The long-term social effects of lockdown are slowly becoming apparent across the world — but in India, where education was already stratified by savage disparities of wealth and resources, its crippling consequences are already devastatingly clear.

In the region where Shaikh lived, smartphones and the internet were even scarcer than the Indian average. Local activists say internet coverage stood at less than 5%. “That’s when we realised that it was futile to think that we could deliver education digitally in rural India,” says Rahul Bais, who set up Swarajya Mitra, a local not-for-profit that campaigns for children’s rights. But while those on the ground like him realised the futility of online education, the Indian government pushed ahead. In a statement in August 2021, the Modi government highlighted the steps it had taken to ensure “no loss of education” during the pandemic. Topping the list was a government website named “DIKSHA” which hosted material such as school textbooks, educational TV and radio programmes, and YouTube videos.

Except, in areas like Wardha, none of it could reach students. S.S. Athawale, the principal of a government-funded secondary school in the area, the Dr Devidas Karale Vidhyalaya, explains: “Of, say, 100 students, only 20-25% of the children’s families had mobile phones. But 10% had analogue phones, and the 10% who had smartphones had no money to top-up their data. So, we were really able to reach only 5% of the children, depriving the remaining 95% of even basic education.” And even when students had both smartphones and the money for a data plan, the patchy internet connectivity in their villages stymied their efforts. Many students, faced with the seemingly indefinite interruption of their education, simply lost interest in their studies or turned to work to support their struggling families. When schools finally reopened for offline education in 2022, students in Shaikh’s position never returned.

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And the effects of this are already tangible. A countrywide study, the 2022 Annual Status of Education Report, which surveyed more than 700,000 Indian children, found that children’s basic reading abilities had deteriorated to levels last seen in 2012, while their basic arithmetic skills had also regressed sharply to levels lower than in 2018. In another survey of school teachers in Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states, 53% admitted that most of their pupils had forgotten how to read and write.

Shaikh’s story echoes across the villages of Wardha. Overnight, the pandemic forced many children to become adults. In the tiny village of Kinhala, just a 20-minute drive from the state highway, the single road barely sees any traffic. Instead, throughout the day, the road sees a steady stream of young children, mostly girls, walking up and down the street with steel pots. The village’s common source of water is a well, around 600 metres away from the village. Children who dropped out of school now find themselves huddled around the well several times a day, waiting for their turn to draw water.

Among them are 16-year-olds and best friends Amruta Shelke and Nikita Dabhekar, both of whom are no longer at school. Shelke’s mother passed away after an illness two years ago, coinciding with the pandemic. Since then, she has had to shoulder the burden of running the household while her father Prakash works in the family’s farm, cultivating cotton and soybean. “He looks after the farm while I take care of the household duties like cooking and cleaning and tend to the cattle,” Shelke says, standing outside the hay-roofed cattle shed adjoining her home.

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Her friend Dabhekar has a similar story. Her father died during the pandemic, threatening the family’s financial stability. Debhekar had no choice but to work full-time as a labourer in the farms, earning £1.50 a day for a seven-hour shift. For years, Dabhekar had been straddling the world of labour and education — she would work for a week or so, before going to school for a couple of days and then back to work. But the pandemic disrupted this cycle of intermittent educational forever. She hasn’t given up on her education yet. But, she says, “we’ve just not been able to make enough money, so I have to keep working”.

Although similar stories abound across the region, official government data stubbornly refuses to reflect the self-evident crisis. Last year’s government report claimed that more than 785,000 additional students were enrolled in schools at all levels, from pre-primary to secondary, between April 2021 and March 2022 when compared to enrolment the previous year. But this claim relies on dubious data-keeping practices, as local teachers and principals admit. “Even when we know that a student is unable to come, we keep their names on the rolls because, that way, they’ll be easily able to come back whenever they want,” said a teacher at a secondary school in the area, who did not want to be named.

According to his mother, Shaikh himself, who has not been to school since 2020, is still on the school’s rolls as a student, and is officially in the tenth grade. Students like him only visit school to appear for examinations and are often allowed to go through the years without a strict test of their abilities. Teachers insist that such steps are taken out of compassion for students, but local activists say this “compassion” also conveniently allows schools to escape scrutiny for their absentee students.

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Bais argues that many in Shaikh’s position have at this point lost interest in schooling, having instead tasted the freedom that earning a salary brings. And others are put off returning by the sense that they have fallen irretrievably behind their peers. “We tried to re-enroll students who had dropped out, but we realised that they were too anxious about how other students around them would make fun of their ignorance,” Bais says. “The pandemic has shattered their confidence.” Shaikh’s mother Rehana, who had steadfastly refused to let her children work, have had no choice but to acquiesce to their children’s wishes. “My son tells me when we need money, no one will help us. So let me go and earn,” she says.

In a country that is both the world’s largest democracy and an aspiring superpower of the coming century, the long-term implications of this silent crisis could be stultifying. “After the pandemic pushed children into earning a living, many children started wondering why education was even necessary,” says Bais. “They would see their parents were doing similar work. As a result, many children asked us, ‘if we have to grow up and do this exact same work, why even bother finishing our education?’” Three years later, this is the true effect of lockdown in rural India — one that will take years to remedy.

***

The Children of Nowhere is released today.

Here was a prominent figure dedicated to the role of science in solving global problems — even if he did display flashes of the egotism that led him to serve on the Sage advisory body during the pandemic and then quit to rush out a book lamenting other people’s failures.

“If we do revert to a lack of evidence, a lack of information — if we’re going back to the era where we’re just making policies up with no evidence behind them, the world is in a worse place. And we’re moving away from an era of sort of 20th, 21st-first century enlightenment to something darker,’ he concluded with a flourish. ‘We can’t let that happen.”

Who could argue with the need for evidence-based science and the unfettered flow of information to help make the world a better place? It was no surprise, however, Farrar chose The Guardian for his valedictory interview as he heads to Geneva for a new post as chief scientist of the World Health Organization. For this ensured there would be no challenging questions over his central — and profoundly anti-science — role in stifling debate on the pandemic origins and effectively pushing his own conspiracy, cooked up with a handful of influential colleagues, including Anthony Fauci in the US, which suggested any idea that Covid might have emerged from some kind of laboratory incident in Wuhan was crackers.

Never mind all the evidence that has emerged showing how members of a group of experts that Farrar marshalled to squash the lab-leak hypothesis harboured their own doubts over the disease emerging naturally, based on its location and unusual properties. Let alone his own initial fears on this vexatious issue — or indeed, his recently-revealed verdict on high-risk experiments on coronaviruses being carried out in low bio-security laboratories in Wuhan as “Wild West” research. Instead, his interviewer, a long-serving health reporter, dutifully told her readers that “Farrar’s position is that while it is likely to have come from animals, it is important to stay open-minded and gather evidence. Above all, we need transparency, he says.”

This is, sadly, typical of the pitiful reporting seen on this particular issue from The Guardian. Presumably this continuing failure is a legacy of the media group’s reaction to Donald Trump’s promotion of the possibility of a lab leak, a response shared with The New York Times. The Guardian, however, even allowed British scientist Peter Daszak to publish an article headlined “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” without disclosing his organisation’s financial and research links to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) until forced into hasty clarification. Farrar, incidentally, promoted this risible piece on Twitter: “As always worth reading @PeterDaszak”.

Yet The Guardian was far from alone; almost all Western media failed in their duty to challenge powerful players and vested interests on the crucial issue of the pandemic origins. Patsy journalists churned out reports fed to them by prominent scientists that dismissed “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab leak, placing more faith in a brutally-repressive Chinese dictatorship than an elected US government. They kept pointing to an animal market in Wuhan as the most likely source of SARS-CoV-2, a theory dismissed even by the Chinese authorities and despite obvious flaws in this argument given earliest cases. Ultimately, much of the media ended up presenting a collective idea that there was settled consensus, sweeping aside the voices of bravely-dissenting scientists.

Farrar was at the centre of this deceptive web, spinning lines to impede unfettered debate on the origins of the biggest public health crisis for a century. Along with two of his Wellcome Trust colleagues, he joined 24 other scientists to sign a key letter in The Lancet journal sycophantically praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later discovered to have been covertly organised by Daszak, who had spent years working with his friend Shi Zhengli, the celebrated lead researcher into bat coronaviruses at WIV.

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Farrar also hosted a conference call on the first day of February 2020 at the behest of former presidential adviser Fauci. They were joined by Francis Collins, then head of the biggest US science funding body, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, and at least 10 other experts. We know now that several taking part held concerns over the virus being engineered. Even after the call, Farrar admitted he was “50:50” on whether it came from a lab. Yet he oversaw the near-instant drafting by four participants and one other author of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, another hugely-influential article published by Nature Medicine stating firmly that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Dr Robert Redfield, an eminent virologist who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the outbreak began in 2020, has long feared Covid resulted from a lab leak. Now his suspicions are backed by two US intelligence agencies. FBI chief Christopher Wray admitted last week they have “for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. Yet Redfield told a congressional committee hearing into the virus’s origins this week that he was deliberately “sidelined” by the likes of Fauci and Farrar: “It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view. Science has debate and they squashed any debate.”

Redfield’s written submission to the committee rightly argued that both theories on the origins “needed to be aggressively and thoroughly examined” — although his own view “indicates Covid-19 infections more likely were the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event”. This conclusion, he explained, was “ based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high infectivity for human to human transmission… as well as a number of other important factors to include the unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019”.

Many other experts disagree. This is how science works: through the clash of ideas and rooting out of evidence to test theories. Yet Redfield told investigative journalist Paul Thacker last year that he believed Fauci and Collins used their political power in the scientific community to set the narrative and exclude dissident voices such as his own, using Farrar as “the front person”. He claimed The Lancet statement, as well as the Nature Medicine missive, “was orchestrated by Jeremy Farrar — I think under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin”.

This is incredibly damning: these two documents were the most influential papers on the pandemic’s origins — accessed by millions, widely shared, heavily quoted and even used by social media to suppress publication of “conspiracies”. Meanwhile, Farrar pointed to the Nature Medicine statement when questioned on his belief that natural transmission was the most likely cause of the pandemic. “Jeremy’s belief is that the Nature Medicine research paper remains the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus to date,’ his spokeswoman told me in June 2021.

Prior to this week’s hearing, Republicans on the committee issued a sharp memo asking why Farrar’s work on the Nature Medicine paper — which his spokeswoman confessed to me he had helped to “convene” although it now emerges he made at least one edit to toughen its tone — was uncredited by the journal. A fair question. They also quoted an email from lead author Kristian Andersen dated February 8 — eight days after that secretive conference call — to German participant Christian Drosten, which admitted “our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory”.

Yet before the conference call, Anderson was “60-70%” convinced the virus came from a lab, according to Farrar’s book, alarmed by properties such as its receptor binding domain which “looked.. like a perfect key for entering human cells”, and the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses.

Concerns have grown after it was discovered EcoHealth Alliance, the group run by Daszak that funnelled US funding to support research at WIV, sought a grant in 2018 from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proposing to insert a furin cleavage site into SARS-like bat coronaviruses to assess their ability to infect cells. The bid was declined, due to the risks. Daszak insists the collaborators have not pursued the research to his knowledge. But who knows exactly what really went on in those Wuhan labs given the stonewalling of outside inquiries? They could have continued the work with other funds for all we know.

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Let me state again with absolute clarity: we do not know the pandemic’s cause. It might have been through natural transmission. Or it might be the legacy of some kind of unfortunate laboratory incident. There is no hard proof for either theory, despite intense efforts to find an intermediate species of animal that might have “amplified” a bat virus to spill over into humans. Yet it was foolish to ignore that SARS-CoV-2 erupted 1,000 kilometres from the closest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses. And in a city that was home to China’s only maximum bio-security laboratory — especially when WIV held the biggest repository of bat viruses in Asia, had known safety concerns, suddenly took its virus databases offline weeks before the pandemic emerged, and was carrying out risky gain-of-function research to boost infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice.

Whatever the origins, it seems alarmingly clear that a group of influential scientists, empowered by holding the purse strings for research, set out to deliberately stifle debate over the birth of a pandemic that has caused such devastation — often while saying that we must “follow the science” and despite their own early concerns over risky research in Wuhan and the virus’s strange properties. They pushed the toxic notion that anyone asking valid questions was inflaming conspiracy theorists and backing “implausible” ideas — and were aided by weak politicians, supine journalists and complicit science journals. Such was the influence of these funding behemoths, they set the tone across Europe. This was the real Covid conspiracy.

We can only guess why they adopted such a stance, although I suspect it was through misguided desire to protect both science and some of their own reputations having backed gain-of-function research. Regardless, their stupidity risks harming their profession through sinister efforts to crush free debate, a doctrine that lies at the root of scientific advancement. Sadly, all those journalists who failed to do their job of challenging powerful players and vested interests have also undermined my own profession again. This should provoke soul-searching, especially on the Left, over allowing partisanship to override fearless interrogation of important issues.

We can, however, now see the reason for the shameful silence in Westminster and Whitehall following the furore over former health secretary Matt Hancock’s leaked WhatsApp messages. These reveal how the Government argued behind the scenes that the outbreak’s location was “entirely coincidental” and that any discussion of a possible lab leak risked “damaging national security”. So our bureaucrats, politicians and spooks put their desire to appease a Communist dictatorship in China above the global quest to discover the truth about the pandemic origins, which might help us to prevent subsequent health disasters. No wonder my Freedom of Information requests on this issue have been stymied in both London and Edinburgh.

These inquiries still have some distance to travel, although slowly but surely the truth is emerging. “Recently released unredacted email messages make it clear that in early 2020 science funding heads Fauci, Collins and Farrar were informed by Anderson and three others that the genome sequence of Sars-Cov-2 raised the possibility that it was a laboratory product. The funding agency heads told them this threatened “great potential harm to science and international harmony”. The four scientists, following their paymasters’ lead, published a commentary in a journal falsely affirming that science ruled out the possibility of laboratory origins. “This false narrative still colours discussion, having dominated the debate for a year,” said the biosafety expert Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.

But this begs a question: how can Farrar, having corroded the brand of one of our nation’s finest institutions and played such a role in promoting this narrative, now be handed the influential role of chief scientist at the WHO? “In this context, the appointment is a major error,” says Ebright rightly. This is another disastrous own goal by a UN body that has performed so badly in the pandemic from the earliest days. This post, arguably the most influential scientific role in the world, has been given to a figure who was at the epicentre of spinning a web of deception that stifled scientific probing of the first global pandemic for a century. It suggests that we are sliding from an era of enlightenment to something darker — and as Farrar says, we can’t let this happen.

It is a useful phrase to measure core beliefs because it takes us beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, with all their distracting details and absurdity, to the underlying intuition that fuels them. In this world view, the “elites” are faraway and malevolent, exercising control in self-serving ways; meanwhile, democratic politics and the mainstream media are regarded as little more than distractions, likely in the service of powerful secret masters.

Whatever people believe about specific conspiracies — and this week offered no shortage of them, from UFOs over North America to hushed-up explosions in Ohio — our findings reveal how widespread the underlying mindset is that propels them. Thanks to our partner Focaldata and a statistical process called MRP, we can now see which constituencies are the most and least conspiratorial in the country. The results shed new light on how these voters should be viewed by the main political parties.

First, it is clear that conspiratorial thinking is not a “Right-wing” phenomenon. Voters who believe in a controlling secretive elite are much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and much more likely to live in a safe Labour constituency. By this measure, the 10 most conspiratorial constituencies in the country are all safe Labour seats, whereas the 10 least conspiratorial constituencies are all Tory (except Chesham and Amersham, which switched to Lib Dem in the 2021 by-election).

As the above table shows, the “most conspiratorial” list is made up of poor and highly diverse inner-city constituencies, which may explain why people come to feel so alienated and suspicious. In these places, a conspiratorial world view is the norm — in Birmingham Ladywood, for example, only 14% of people disagree with the statement. Meanwhile, in the rolling Chiltern hills of Chesham and Amersham and the affluent enclaves of Henley and Mole Valley, where the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side, few are concerned. It is a useful reminder to politicians of all parties that, while they may find conspiratorial voters troublesome, many come from the most disadvantaged communities.

Second, the results should encourage new anti-establishment parties on both the Left and Right. Thanks to our unusually large sample size of more than 10,000 respondents, we were able to measure the attitudes of voters who chose even the smallest parties in 2019 with a high degree of confidence. More than any of the mainstream parties, including Labour, the voters most prone to a conspiratorial outlook come from the anti-establishment parties: 54% of Brexit Party voters agree with the statement, alongside 45% of Plaid Cymru voters and 43% of SNP voters. So, while the Brexit binary pushed a larger proportion of voters towards the two main parties in 2019, it seems there are millions of voters who remain potentially open to new populist appeals.

There is a specific lesson here for the Labour Party. When I first tested this phrase at YouGov during the Labour leadership election of 2015, the belief that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” was revealed to be a defining characteristic of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: 28% of Corbyn’s backers strongly agreed with it, compared to 16% of Yvette Cooper’s and just 7% of Liz Kendall’s. Today, 42% of Labour voters agree with it, of whom 18% strongly agree. Antisemitism may have finally been dealt with in the Labour Party, but the mindset that drove it has not disappeared.

This suggests that, rather than Brexit or the election of Trump, the shock outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election was the first real marker of the new era of low-trust and high-volatility politics; and the best way to understand it is by looking at the general election that took place immediately before. Today, it seems almost comic to recall, in the context of the eye-watering sums borrowed by successive Conservative governments, that the 2015 election was dominated by technical discussions of exactly what percentage point of austerity was appropriate to cut the deficit. Tory strategist Lynton Crosby calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that if nothing more interesting were discussed, the Tories would win by default. It was a cynical way to treat an electorate, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, meanwhile, frightened of seeming weak on economics, committed a Labour government to “austerity-lite”.

Come the election, the differences between the main parties were marginal; voters sensed a stitch-up in which the Tories and Labour had colluded to starve them of a more meaningful choice. It is hard to say they were wrong: 2015 saw the UK’s highest ever immigration numbers, for example, but this topic was hardly mentioned in the campaign. A rejection of this non-choice sowed the seeds not only for Corbyn’s election but for the Brexit result the following year.

The story of what happened in the years since 2016 is well-known. First came the attempts to frustrate the Brexit vote, which confirmed voters’ worst suspicions about cross-party collusion and elite disregard for the democratic process. And then came the rolling Covid lockdowns, which in turn radicalised a whole new constituency. There has perhaps never been a policy so life-altering and so little-debated, with a cross-party consensus parroted throughout much of the media. In those dystopian months and years, millions of people lost trust in authorities and turned to alternative explanations. These were not Right-wing activists or spotty teenagers in basements: they were mothers, grandparents and people who had never before been political. It’s hardly surprising that Google recorded the all-time high of searches for “conspiracy theory” in March 2020.

The pattern, from the 2015 election through to the pandemic, is that whenever views are suppressed, distrust and alienation follow. It is when the “Overton Window” is too narrow, not too wide, that politics feels fake and conspiracies abound. The distrust that now cuts across society is not the fault of a few small-time cranks and bad-faith opportunists — it is overwhelmingly the creation of elites who consistently tried to deny the electorate real choices.

Fast forward to the past few months, with the ejection of Liz Truss as prime minister and the rehabilitation of pre-2015 figures such as Jeremy Hunt, and many will be hoping that the era of political turbulence is finally coming to an end. It certainly feels it; for the first time since 2015, there are two technocrats at the helm of Britain’s major political parties. Centrists in both parties are hoping that as Corbynism and Brexit recede into history, the “grown-ups” will be back in charge.

But today’s UnHerd Britain data suggests that, beneath the surface, voter distrust and suspicion are more present than ever; and that the currents that propelled both Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit still run right through Labour’s heartlands. If the 2024 election is anything like 2015 — with the mainstream parties becoming harder and harder to tell apart — it could be the beginning of a whole new wave of democratic revolts.

But, as Big Brother Watch revealed on Sunday, the activities of these units went far beyond refuting claims such as “gargling warm water cures Covid”. The Counter Disinformation Unit, first used in 2019 to monitor potential interference in elections, was intended to combat deliberately misleading online content. In March 2020, however, its scope was extended to include misinformation and to work even more closely with social media platforms. This may not be an official censorship regime — departments have a hotline to these platforms to ask that material is removed — but it is a very easy way for the Government to reduce the spread of posts it disapproves of.

Based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the CDU has also been active in relation to COP26 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Freedom of Information requests and questions from MPs have failed to discover its budget or how many people it employs. The Big Brother Watch report has, however, identified a number of contracts with firms which specialise in using AI and automated systems to detect “harmful and illegal content” online.

During the first months of the pandemic, both medical theories and government policies were highly contested. Epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of Sage, criticised lockdowns as a policy response to Covid as early as August 2020, while a number of experts openly disagreed over the assumptions underlying the computer models used to make policy decisions, including the Imperial College model used to justify the first national lockdown in March 2020. Nevertheless, public questioning of Covid policies, or close examination of the scientific evidence, was enough to earn an appearance on the weekly CDU report. Conservative MP David Davis was among those cited as “critical of the Government” after he questioned, on Twitter and in the Daily Telegraph, the mathematical reasoning of the Imperial model.

Similarly, when vaccines against Covid were created, the CDU worked to counter a number of falsehoods, including the conspiracy that they make people (especially those from ethnic minorities) infertile, or the fanciful idea that they would turn people into monkeys. But the CDU didn’t stop there. Included in its file on “vaccine sceptics”, for instance, were many who objected not to vaccines, but to policy measures such as vaccine passports or mandated vaccination for care workers. Here, a matter of public debate was deemed beyond discussion — and turned into a target of countermeasures by a state unit that is not even subject to scrutiny by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.

Nor is the CDU the only unit engaged in this kind of narrative-management. The Cabinet Office has its own Rapid Response Unit (RRU), set up in 2018 and focused since 2020 on rebutting or removing (via social media platforms) “false and misleading narratives” about coronavirus. It monitors both social and traditional media, reporting on engagement with narratives and countering (or suppressing) those it deems harmful.

The RRU also uses media monitoring services which can report on audience demographics as well as content and sentiment analysis. Even sharing news articles critical of government Covid policies was enough to get an RRU flag. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, for example, appeared in RRU analysis, after voicing concerns about the effectiveness of localised restrictions. Expert criticism of data used in public briefings, personal testimonies of the impact of anti-Covid restrictions, and even jokes about the complexity of travel rules, were all included on RRU lists. Here, the scope of RRU activities goes far beyond false information to include opinions that question or contradict government policies. Again, it’s hard to see this as misinformation, let alone disinformation.

Yet for the Government, this was war. According to a whistleblower from the 77th Brigade, normally the British Army’s cyber-warfare unit, extra personnel were recruited to monitor social media for keywords — ostensibly looking for accounts that might be foreign agents spreading disinformation, but with no measures in place to ensure they were “not being directed at the UK population”.

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The whistleblower claims that screenshots of social media posts were collected and sent to the Cabinet Office. “We learned… that the Government were very keen on hearing what the public thought about their Covid-19 response and how scared people were,” said “AB”. “However, these posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated — it was simply fear and domestic dissent.”

The UK is not the only country to invoke the spectre of disinformation to seek to control public conversations. Greece passed a law against spreading false information in 2021, with a penalty of five years in prison, while Malaysia used emergency powers to pass a “fake news” law imposing jail terms for anyone spreading “wholly or partly false” information about either the pandemic or the state of emergency itself. Elsewhere, Turkey passed a law in October last year which threatens those who spread misleading news with prison, and social media platforms with fines for failure to remove content or disclose a user’s identity. Arrests have already been made.

But, as the wide-ranging activities of the UK’s CDU, the RRU and even the 77th Brigade reveal, allowing governments to define what counts as disinformation and misinformation is a slippery slope. As they extend their powers beyond falsifiable facts to policy debates, and even narratives, there is no limit to who can find themselves under scrutiny.

Throughout the pandemic the Government displayed a woeful lack of trust in the population to make sensible decisions, to act in a public-spirited manner, and to understand complex and changing information about a novel disease. Suppression of dissent and discussion is a symptom of that low opinion of the public. It’s the same paternalism that suffuses the Online Safety Bill: the politicians offering to keep us safe online by requiring technology companies to exercise a poorly defined “duty of care” are the same politicians working with those same companies to remove critics of its policies from the public square.

Government departments cracking down on false coronavirus information to protect us from dangerous falsehoods and malicious conspiracy theories? Don’t take their word for it. It’s Fake News.

Some researchers sounded the alarm, but were largely ignored by governments, public health authorities and the mainstream media. It was a curious response from those who in the previous two and a half years had justified the complete upending of human societies on the basis of “preserving life”. Throughout the second half of 2022, however, excess deaths have continued to rise at faster rates, and have continued to do so in the first weeks of 2023, to the point that the problem has become impossible to ignore.

The BBC recently reported that more than 650,000 deaths were registered in the UK in 2022 — 9% more than 2019. That’s around 50,000 excess deaths, most of which have been concentrated in the second half of the year (since July, there have been an average of 1,300 additional deaths per week). Excluding the pandemic, this represents the highest excess deaths level in 70 years — and only a fraction of these deaths are attributable to Covid. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that excess deaths were almost 3,000 higher than normal in the second week of January alone — more than 20% above the average. Covid-19 accounted for just 5% of the total. The week before, overall deaths were 30% higher than expected.

If we break the numbers down by age groups, the results are even more surprising. While excess deaths in most age groups, even if above average, tend to be lower than they were in 2020 and 2021, as you would expect, there is one outlier: people between the age of 0 and 24 registered lower-than-average death rates in 2020 and 2021. Throughout 2022, on the other hand, they have been dying at higher rates than expected. In other words, more young people are dying today in Britain than before, or even during, the pandemic — and we don’t know why.

And yet, despite this stark discrepancy, there has been a notable lack of public acknowledgement of the non-Covid mortality crisis — let alone any meaningful explanation as for what’s driving it. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Steve Barclay told Sky News that “it’s extremely complicated as to what the drive of those excess deaths are”. Meanwhile, health experts say the causes could include anything from ambulance delays, long waits in A&E and major backlogs for routine NHS care to high flu rates and long Covid. Indeed, the consensus seems to hold that the general breakdown of the NHS is largely to blame for the increase in excess deaths.

But there is a hole in this argument: excess deaths are a problem in a number of other high-income countries, where the “NHS is broken” argument doesn’t hold. According to EuroMOMO, a European mortality monitoring activity supported by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), many European countries are showing elevated levels of excess mortality in all age groups — around 35% above average — and did so throughout 2022. In fact, despite relatively low Covid death rates, overall excess deaths in all age groups in Europe in 2022 were as high as in 2020 and higher than 2021 — even in the oldest cohorts. Beyond Europe, the situation is much the same: Australia and New Zealand recorded, respectively, 16% and 9% more excess deaths than the historical average in 2022, while in the United States, CDC data shows that the rate of non-Covid excess deaths in the first half of 2022 was even higher than in 2020 or 2021.

In short, a significant number of Western countries are experiencing a surge in excess deaths across all age groups. And there is no single explanation for this. Rather, each country seems to have its own theory — none of which have anything to do with the NHS. In Portugal, December saw excess deaths which beat all records of the previous 13 years, including during Covid-19, which the press attributes to an ageing population, and the resurgence of other respiratory viruses alongside the summer heat waves. In France and Spain, the summer heat waves are also seen as a clear cause of the excess deaths, while in Chile one additional cause of the surge in mortality was seen as “deaths avoided during the pandemic owing to the lower risk of certain events, like traffic accidents or injuries at work”.

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Where countries share one phenomenon — in this case, excess deaths — and attribute it to different causes, it is reasonable to ask some questions; the problem today seems to be that our public-health experts are not asking the right ones. At the end of last month, for instance, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Chris Whitty suggested that a lack of access to statins during the pandemic may have caused an upsurge in coronary heart disease, which has been the main driver of excess deaths. People did not attend medical services as much as usual, and the shortfall was having devastating consequences. However, as Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson pointed out shortly afterwards, it takes roughly five years for statins to have a notable impact on mortality reduction — so reduced medication since 2020 cannot have led to these outcomes.

So, what explains the rise in heart disease? The collapse in routine healthcare appointments (due to the single-minded focus on Covid at the expense of all other pathologies) is fairly obviously one part of the story, but is there anything else at play? One potential explanation is the impact of lockdowns on people’s physical health. After all, Whitty himself noted in March last year that lockdowns had increased young people’s obesity, which could lead to lowering life expectancy. Moreover, the political and social intrusion of the state into peoples’ emotional well-being, and the consequent breakdown of the pre-existing social contract, is also known to affect a citizen’s health. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, there was a significant increase in mortality in Russia, much of which was triggered by vascular disease. There is a clear precedent in living memory, then, for immense social and economic shocks leading to surges in heart disease.

Also relevant to the elderly is the increase in isolation produced by lockdown policies. According to the WHO factsheet on dementia, “risk factors include depression, social isolation [and] cognitive inactivity”, all of which were widely increased by the lockdown response; one 2015 study even found that social isolation increased the risk of mortality by between 26-32%. The lockdowns therefore are almost certainly a contributing factor to what we are currently seeing, particularly as the UK government itself has noted that those who die from dementia often have proximate additional causes of death in strokes or heart disease.

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Finally, there is one possible explanation that has to be considered, at least as a contributing factor for the rise in non-Covid excess deaths: the role of the vaccines, in particular those from Pfizer and Moderna that use the new mRNA technology. This is a hyper-polarising issue, so let’s start with what we know: the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are associated with a higher risk of developing myocarditis (heart inflammation), especially in younger males (possibly due to the spike protein generated by the vaccine circulating in the blood), and other serious adverse events such as blood clots. This is confirmed by a number of studies (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here) and even by the CDC’s own data. There is quite a lot of variability between the studies, but they appear to suggest that, with young people, the risk from the vaccine may well outweigh the risk from Covid or from post-Covid myocarditis.

That said, proving a connection between vaccine-related harms and the disproportionately high number of young people dying at the moment is not straightforward. However, a number of studies — such as a recent analysis by Martin Neil, professor of computer science and statistics at Queen Mary University in London, and Norman Fenton, a mathematician and leading expert on risk assessment and statistics — do show a statistically significant correlation between vaccination rates and excess mortality.

To what extent this correlation actually implies causation does, of course, remain unclear. But just as lockdowns are clearly a factor, it seems unwise to rule out the vaccines as a contributing factor without proper investigation — the point is that we simply don’t know, as we don’t have enough data to establish or disprove a link. Ultimately, the causes of the excess deaths are probably varied, and involve a combination of factors. This shouldn’t be surprising, since lockdowns and vaccines were always connected in the pandemic response. But we shall never know for sure if we don’t start asking these uncomfortable questions — especially when our politicians and public-health experts seem reluctant to do so themselves.

It has been gruelling stint, taking in not only the pandemic, but also the biggest terrorist attack in her nation’s history and a volcanic eruption that claimed 22 lives. Having faced  sustained vitriol from some of her opponents, and with a young daughter born while she was in office, it’s perhaps understandable, if disappointing, that the inspiration for working mothers the world over might now want to leave politics to spend more time with her family.

Ardern insists that she is standing down for personal reasons, and not “because it was hard”. But her political woes must have made that decision easier. Ardern’s popularity has been sinking for over a year, the country faces a crippling cost of living crisis, and her Labour government faces a daunting election this year against a resurgent centre-Right National Party. It is a far cry from 2020, when she was re-elected to become the first NZ Prime Minister to win an outright majority under an electoral system designed specifically to preclude such an outcome.

This is the leader who inspired “Jacindamania” and became an international progressive superstar. How did she fall from grace so spectacularly?

Covid-19 did play a part, but not in the way generally understood. Ardern’s Zero Covid strategy was driven by the cold reality of a health system that wouldn’t stand up to even a mild outbreak after decades of austerity. And contrary to critiques from abroad about “Covid dictatorship” and “never-ending nightmares”, the policy was actually successful. Within three months, New Zealand eliminated Covid, lifted all restrictions except closed borders, and life in the country returned to normal while the rest of the world descended into chaos. No wonder her pandemic management strategy was wildly popular, supported by 75% of the population as late as July 2021.

The problem, though, was the government’s failure to prepare an exit strategy. Complacency meant that vaccination roll out was slow, and the country was unprepared for the next wave: the Delta variant’s arrival, in August 2021, sparked a three-month lockdown in the largest city, Auckland. Once it became clear that the country’s success relied on luck and ad-hoc measures rather than enlightened leadership, Ardern’s popularity tanked.

The plan for re-opening once high vaccination levels were reached was similarly poor. Despite having watched Australia’s failures, New Zealand repeated many of their mistakes, with shortages of testing leading to an explosion of cases at the end of 2021, as well as staff shortages in shops and hospitality, and supply chain disruptions, and a health system still on the verge of collapse.

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More controversially, New Zealand relied on vaccine mandates; Ardern described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom”. When the mandates sparked a protest movement that occupied the lawns in front of Parliament, the government refused to engage. The weeks-long standoff ended in violence when police moved in to clear the protesters, and it has rent the country’s social fabric, with 64% of New Zealanders believing the country is now more divided than ever.

It is this division, more so than any pandemic mis-management, that ultimately toppled her — it’s a division she was elected to address.

Ardern’s initial victory, in 2017, was based on promises to fix the widespread socio-economic disadvantage plaguing the country following four decades of neoliberalism and post-2008 austerity that would make even George Osborne blush. At the time of her election, over one in five children lived in poverty and inequality was high, with the wealthiest 10% owning 59% of all of the country’s assets, while the poorest half owned 2%. Housing affordability was a perennial issue — the average house would cost seven times the median income — while the country had the worst homelessness rate in the OCED, with almost 1% of the population living on the streets or in shelters.

Yet, almost six years on, what’s changed? Child poverty rates remain unchanged, while inequality has increased. House prices have increased by 58% over the past five years, with the average house now costing 8.8 times the average income. New Zealand, according to one economist, is now a country of “the landed gentry”, which dominates wealth and housing opportunities. Meanwhile, homelessness has worsened considerably, with more than 26,000 people waiting for social housing, up from 5,000 five years ago, as targets to build social housing have been badly missed. Even sympathetic commentators are examining Ardern’s legacy and asking “what was the point of all that?”

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Undoubtedly, the pandemic thwarted some of her ambition and the government’s response exacerbated some of the problems. Record high inflation won’t have helped. But Labour was struggling to make progress with its agenda well before Covid struck. Indeed, this was the reason it was trailing in the polls in late 2019, which the pandemic masked for a while: a failure of imagination.

On housing, for example, Labour backtracked on closing tax loopholes that only benefit investors and drive up prices, while its grand plans to build 100,000 “affordable” homes in the decade came to nothing, as it struggled to incentivise the private sector to do so. Likewise, the solution to the homelessness crisis has been to put people in emergency housing, usually motels. With scant progress on building new social housing, the average stay in this “transitional” system has increased from 3 to 21 weeks over the past five years. On child poverty, it has relied on inadequate increases to welfare spending, rather than any structural changes that would address poverty and inequality.

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This, then, will be the legacy of Jacinda Ardern: a missed opportunity. Ardern recognised the need to address the socio-economic disadvantage brought by 40 years of neoliberalism, and made bold promises of state action to do so. Yet when it came down to it, neither she, nor her government were able to break free of the Blairite Third Way mentality.

Despite talking a big game where the “days of thinking that the state can be a passive bystander and the market will provide…are over”, her government relied on short-term fixes, deferred to the private sector, advanced the interests of the asset class, and tinkered around the edges of child poverty or homelessness. Ardern leaves her country facing a cost of living crisis, and her party with no clear successor with fresh ideas how to address it, or the other social ills crippling it. Despite being hailed as the harbinger of a new, progressive Left, Ardern simply turned out to be more of the same.

Many factors connected to the pandemic response are at the heart of Africa’s current crisis, even if many economists choose to ignore them. Some point to the fact that Africa’s long-term loans more than doubled in the 2010s, both across the continent and in specific regions such as Eastern and Southern Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, the country’s external loan value reached $28.57 billion by December 2020, meaning an extra $21.27 billion of debt had been accumulated in the five years before the pandemic.

Yet the reason for the increasing loans prior to Covid was not that the continent was already in economic difficulty. On the contrary, it was the booming nature of Africa’s macroeconomic position before Covid hit that saw it accumulate this debt. In the 2010s, as countries such as Ethiopia saw an increase in GDP of almost 30% per year at some points, economies grew and so did the capacity of African countries to take out new loans to build infrastructure.

This all amounted to fairly standard economics — until the pandemic hit, when these plans were upended almost overnight, and mainstream economists tried instead to blame the impending austerity on overextended finance. First, there was the worldwide collapse in GDP in 2020, which led to an average fall of 4-5% across the continent; while, according to the African Development Bank, one of the very few African countries to ignore WHO policy advice, Tanzania, saw its economy grow by 4.5% that year. On top of this, there was the fall in remittances from the diaspora, triggered by the collapse in service sector jobs in wealthier countries such as the UK: remittances to Africa had surpassed foreign aid in 2019, but fell by 14% in 2021.

The combined impact of these colossal declines in economic activity was catastrophic: in South Africa, 47.2% of small businesses were forced to close in 2020. Meanwhile, global lockdown policies also triggered widespread inflation which long predated the Russian war in Ukraine — even if this has also exacerbated it. All this means that while GDP has started to recover in Africa, its gains are largely wiped out by the soaring price of goods, which makes it harder to keep pace with debt repayments.

This toxic mess created a debt crisis which was predicted from the start. Emmanuel Macron initiated calls to address the debt crisis as early as April 2020, but the plans which were put together failed to address its underlying issues or the continent’s pandemic policy responses. Elsewhere, a number of African countries were wary of taking up the offers to suspend debt repayments for fear it might impact their credit ratings. And with many of the additional loans being offered by the World Bank linked to purchasing stocks of Covid vaccines, rather than anything to deal with the real debt crisis, none of this relieved any of the fundamental issues at stake.

Compounding this is the fact that while income has fallen across the board, the cost of servicing the continent’s debt burden has soared along with the value of the dollar. As it stands, the US has emerged as the one major macroeconomic winner of the global pandemic policy response — and with debts held in dollars, this is catastrophic for low-income countries whose economies have not fully recovered from the carnage of 2020-1.

For most of Africa, the signs are bleak, with some commentators already labelling the policy framework “Structural Adjustment 2.0” — a revamp of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund following the debt crisis in the Eighties. Triggered by the oil crisis of the previous decade, and the spiralling interest rates that followed, this policy came at the worst possible time for newly independent African countries, which had taken out extensive dollar loans to build new infrastructure. The original SAP bailout loans were predicated on the sell-off of African state assets to private (usually Western) corporations, and the erosion of public services on the continent such as healthcare and education. The arrival on the scene of the new NGO industry to pick up the pieces swiftly followed.

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The current situation certainly seems reminiscent of the early Eighties. Then, as now, a decade of booming economies was abruptly reversed by a severe external economic shock. Back then, external lenders “helped” to stabilise debts with SAP 1.0, in return for a fire sale of state assets to predatory external corporations; today, the connection of “bailout loans” to future austerity and asset-stripping (privatisation) was clear right from the outset of the pandemic policy response. Oxfam warned in 2021 and 2022 that the vast majority of the IMF Covid loans to low-income countries were predicated on future austerity. The impact of this was apparent three months ago, following reports that half of the world’s low-income countries had cut health spending during the pandemic. The stark reality is that the global Covid policy response has crippled the continent’s economies, and will result in lowered spending on healthcare for years to come — and all to fight a disease which, given the continent’s median age of 19.7, did not pose a great threat to the vast majority of Africans.

Alongside a looming decade of austerity, a decade of uncertainty is starting to take shape. Last month, Ghana defaulted on most of its international debt, following a crisis that had been brewing for months. Meanwhile, in nearby Nigeria (which faces elections next month), the country’s debt crisis is deemed “insurmountable”. And with debt interest payments for low-income countries projected to rise by 35% in 2023, things are not about to get any easier, increasing the potential for civil unrest.

What this might look like became clear in Senegal’s New Year’s Eve protests, led by young people furious at the release of a report which showed widespread government corruption in the funds released to “deal with the pandemic”. As in the UK and the US, the printing of vast sums of money to chuck at the new suite of pandemic policies was inevitably accompanied by widespread fraud — while, in the African context, producing mountains of debt which now seem almost impossible to repay.

With Senegal’s informal economy yet to show even minimum signs of recovery, this anger can only get worse. As one Senegalese resident told me recently: “If this government seeks re-election, there will be a genuine revolution.” People, he explained, are angry at the corruption of government Covid contracts, at the fact that Covid saw the largest Senegalese government spending in history where there are many other priorities, at the roll-out of policies which have destroyed people’s livelihoods, and at the promise of years of austerity to pay for it all.

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It is true that some silver linings may yet emerge from this catastrophe. In March last year, Ghana introduced a new electronic levy to tax internal money transfers at 1.5%, partly in an attempt to deal with its looming debt crisis. Though the source of much anger at the time, a more stable tax base is surely a prerequisite for building governments which do not require expensive foreign loans to subsist, and could seem like a wise move in 10 years’ time.

For the time being, though, many people are worried as to what the more immediate future may bring. A senior figure in international development recently described the Covid response to me as “the most regressive policy in three decades, and yet no one’s talking about it”. This may change in the year ahead, as the debt crisis becomes impossible to ignore. On the basis of recent events, there is going to be a desperate effort by policymakers to avoid looking at the true causes of this human disaster, and at their role in creating it — but as the recent Senegalese protests suggest, Africans may have other ideas.

A preview of the tension this will inevitably arouse was revealed towards the end of last year, when a film about rural China became a surprise box office hit in the country — before being pulled. Return to Dust, directed by Li Ruijun, portrays a rural couple (played by renowned actress Hai Qin and farmer-turned-amateur-actor Wu Renlin) who are pushed into an arranged marriage. Over time, they develop a quiet, understated love while dealing with countryside poverty. The luminous and deeply moving story ends in a muted tragedy.

The film received international accolades, but in September, it was abruptly removed from Chinese streaming services and discussion of it was censored on social media. No official reason was given, though there was speculation that the film’s bleak and unglamorous view of rural society was unwelcome just before the 20th Party Congress, when Xi Jinping would seek (and gain) an unprecedented third term in power.

Before it was banned outright, there was a brief moment when the distributors tacked a more upbeat ending onto the end of the film. There is a long tradition of this tactic. Back in 1950, one of the first films made under the new Maoist government was This Life of Mine, directed by the brilliant Shi Hui, and based on a story by the novelist Lao She. The story is bleak: across the first decades of the 20th century, a policeman falls lower and lower in social status as his economic situation worsens. Eventually he falls down dead. Although the film was an indictment of the old society that had been ended by the 1949 revolution, the censors clearly thought that such a downbeat ending was too depressing for audiences in a glorious new China. So they added some gratuitous but rousing footage at the end of People’s Liberation Army soldiers storming towards victory.

Yet the desire to change narratives in films about contemporary issues is a thread that runs through the Chinese Communist Party’s political tactics. Gao Xiang, the historian who has just become president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), recently reiterated the importance of treating history as a “Marxist” subject; in other words, one that has a definite grand narrative, based on “objective” factors. The rise to power of the CCP is the grandest possible such narrative, and the transformation of Chinese society the inevitable consequence of its rise.

That certainty sits in stark contrast with the story that the CCP tells about the pre-1949 world. This Life of Mine made the cut in the Fifties because it was primarily about a supposedly feudal society that had now been eliminated, one where individuals had little control over their own fates. There are scenes in Return to Dust that could easily fit into the 1950 film — for instance, a moment when the protagonist is pushed into donating blood to save the life of a local landlord, in the hope that he’ll be given some leeway on his rent (he isn’t).

As metaphors go, this one isn’t subtle. Yet this isn’t the bad “old society” but the 2020s, a decade after the initiation of Xi’s “new era”. In this context, the implication that ordinary Chinese citizens, particularly the peasant farmers who were at the heart of the revolution, have turned into passive victims of fate, is an indictment of the CCP. After all, in the Forties, the revolution was made in the countryside, with “land reform” used euphemistically to describe the violent seizure of land, and public humiliation and lynching of thousands of landlords by poorer peasants, all organised by the Party in campaigns to “speak bitterness”. Today, that same party does not welcome hints that seven decades of reform have not eliminated that bitterness.

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Here, the countryside is a particularly sensitive subject. China’s rural areas did suffer during Covid, but less from the effects of the disease than from its knock-on effects. Online teaching, relatively easy to arrange in well-connected cities, proved much harder to arrange outside of urban areas. The capacity crisis was further exacerbated by longer-standing problems that have dogged China’s attempts to improve rural education in the past few decades. China offers free primary education, up to grade 9 (aged 14-15), but textbooks and tuition fees then fall on family shoulders during high school. Many parents move to the city to earn enough money to pay for their families. However, the internal passport (hukou) system means that if their children come with them, they can’t register at local schools (although there are charities that do provide some schooling for migrant labourers’ children in some cities). And if their children stay at home, they do so in the care of grandparents or state boarding schools, which are a long way from the elite high schools in Shanghai that nurture youthful genius in maths and music.

Local governments are expected to foot the bills, but they are almost all strapped for cash and loaded with debt. (One of reasons for the Zero-Covid protests was that the central government created the legislation but local governments were expected to pay for its implementation, including expensive PCR tests). Then, even if you have funding, it is very hard to get good teachers. Few urban graduates want to spend years in what they consider backward parts of the country on miserable salaries.

Back in 1987, Chen Kaige directed King of the Children, which dealt with the dilemmas faced by an idealistic teacher going to an impoverished area of southwest China. Today, however, there are too few real-life equivalents to his fictional hero, meaning that some 60% of rural children drop out of high school. This doesn’t bode well for a country whose shrinking population means that it will have to develop a highly educated workforce serving a high value economy. There are more signs of this change in southern China, where the financial power of Hong Kong and the emergence of the Shenzhen tech hub have created a much stronger set of economic drivers. But in the impoverished north-west, the need for levelling-up makes Britain’s gap seem tiny.

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In one scene in Return to Dust, we are shown a “solution” to the rural dilemma which is becoming all too common. The couple’s land is purchased at a low price, under pressure from local elites, and they are scheduled to move into one of the new, underpopulated tower blocks that mark so many of the instant cities thrown up during China’s property boom (now in danger of becoming a property crash). “Where will my donkey go?” asks the protagonist plaintively. It’s not just donkeys who are cut out of the picture in the new cities, but also the rural way of life as a whole. Simply creating instant urbanites, without lives and structures to replace what they have lost, is a huge challenge. No wonder that nearly 100 million Chinese suffer from mental health or anxiety disorders.

Some might suggest that Return to Dust, though beautifully shot and movingly performed, is slow and doesn’t have a definitive conclusion. But that, in a sense, is the point. There are plenty of narratives created by China, and by others about it, that have conclusions either transformative or apocalyptic: from the power of its economy to its threats over Taiwan. Yet for many Chinese, it is the slow but very real crises in the countryside that are likely to create dilemmas on a day-to-day basis. These can be the specifics of poor education or rising Covid rates. But they might also be the anomie that comes from a growing realisation that China is a fast-modernising society which has yet to develop a convincing story about how its peasant farmers, for thousands of years the backbone of society, are going to fit into its national story.

***

Return to Dust is available to stream online (outside China).

As the past year came to an end, the same stubborn arguments which have been spinning around the world’s hamster wheel for the last three years were aired again — this time about China’s decision to abandon Zero Covid, and what this might mean for the rest of the world in terms of variants, Covid spread and the health of the general population. We don’t want to rehearse these arguments again, but they are vital: they cut to the heart of what lessons global societies will take from the Covid-19 pandemic and associated policy response, and how institutions will balance health and disease in the future. It’s too easy to say that we should just move on, because the future health of human societies depends on what decisions now are taken.

It’s pretty clear that China abandoned Zero Covid because it didn’t work, was causing huge socioeconomic and psychological harm, and threatened to undermine the political control of Xi Jinping. The writing was on the wall when footage emerged in August of shoppers in a Shanghai Ikea stampeding for the exit after authorities sought to seal off the store and send everyone in it to quarantine following the discovery of one shopper who had been exposed to an asymptomatic six-year-old child. Once mass protests began to spread in November, the decision was taken to move on before they became a threat to the regime.

To us, a number of conclusions can be drawn, which we discuss in The Covid Consensus. Clearly, lockdowns could only work in a very limited way, to reduce spread for a short period of time; they were therefore impractical for any length of time without causing enormous harm, which is why Zero Covid was impossible. Moreover, in spite of China’s severe attempts to prevent travel, the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus cannot be shut down completely in the era of global supply chains, even with hermetically sealed borders, as proved to be the case in Australia and New Zealand.

Nevertheless, many seem to be trying to draw different and nonsensical lessons, showing that nothing has been learned from the past three years. Once again, the Western media is stoking unnecessary fears with panic-stricken reports of “China’s new Covid nightmare”. The rapid infection of potentially more than a billion Chinese people, we are told, is likely to result in countless deaths among the population, and spark the emergence of dangerous new variants that could lead to “a global catastrophe”, as millions of potentially disease-carrying citizens prepare to celebrate the reopening of the country’s borders by travelling to all corners of the world.

So, instead of celebrating the end of the Zero Covid prison in which so many Chinese have been incarcerated, during the past week, several countries — including the US, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and, most recently, the UK — have reacted by reintroducing restrictions for passengers from China, requiring them to show a negative PCR or antigen test before boarding.

But are such fears justified? First, let us explore whether China is really heading for a public health disaster of apocalyptic proportions, as the news would have us believe. According to the Chinese government, the country is registering around 5,000 new cases, and only a handful of Covid deaths, per day. Official deaths since the start of the pandemic are just over 5,000. These numbers are universally considered to be hogwash; China has routinely been accused of downplaying infections and deaths for political reasons. The World Health Organization, for example, reports around 150,000 new cases, and 400 deaths, per week, and a total of just over 30,000 deaths.

As far as the latest wave is concerned, there is at least an official explanation for the discrepancy: China recently announced that it will include only deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official Covid-19 death toll; deaths that occur in patients with pre-existing illnesses, on the other hand, will not be counted as Covid-19 deaths. If true, this contrasts starkly with the very “liberal” approach to Covid-19 deaths (and hospitalisations) adopted by most Western countries throughout the pandemic, and still widely used, whereby any deceased person who has recently (or even not so recently) tested for Covid is classified as a “Covid death”, even if the death was manifestly unrelated to Covid. Figures related to new cases are even more unreliable, since they obviously depend on the number (and method) of tests that are carried out.

One thing, however, is certain: in the coming weeks and months, a huge portion of the Chinese population is going to catch the virus. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, estimates that around 1 million Chinese people are already getting infected every day. Some reports claim that 250 million people across the country have been infected just in December. How many deaths this leads to depends on a number of factors, including the ability of the Chinese authorities to put measures in place to protect those who are actually at risk of developing a serious illness from Covid-19, namely the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. The IHME expects close to 300,000 Covid deaths by April 2023 — roughly 100,000 deaths per month (3,000 per day).

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These numbers may seem shocking, but they need to be contextualised. Assuming that a large percentage of the 1.4 billion-strong Chinese population eventually catches Covid, as seems likely, this would amount to a minuscule infection fatality rate (IFR) — less than 0.001%. Most of the deceased are also likely to be very elderly people who would have died within a short time — as was the case for the overwhelming majority of Covid-related deaths in Western countries. In fact, since more than 10 million people died in China in 2021 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), this figure — even if it continued at that rate throughout the year — would lead to around a 12% mortality increase, broadly in line with global averages elsewhere in 2020.

We also need to keep in mind that the dominant strain in China at the moment appears to be a subvariant of the Omicron variant BA.5 (BA.5.2.1.7), also called BF.7, which we know to be more transmissible but much less lethal than previous variants — exactly the kind of evolution you would expect to see in a virus like SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, Chinese authorities have confirmed that the virus causes relatively mild symptoms in the vast majority of those infected. There’s little reason to doubt this, as much as one may be sceptical of the information coming out of China.

And yet, Western politicians are now telling us that the reason we need new restrictions is that, as the Chair of the Defence Select Committee Tobias Ellwood said, “we simply cannot trust Chinese data”. Such claims would hold more water if that same Western establishment hadn’t spent the best part of the past three years taking the Chinese Covid-19 statistics at face value, and using them as evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns. Up to March 2020, 39 of 42 reproduction number estimates were based on Chinese data, as was the Imperial College report that predicted 510,000 deaths in the UK, which would fall to somewhere between 5,700 and 39,000 with Chinese-style “suppression” measures. Needless to say, those predictions turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

In other words, the Chinese data was deemed perfectly reliable insofar as it was useful to justify restrictions in the West. Today, on the other hand, it is accused of being unreliable… in order to justify restrictions in the West. The doublethink is jarring — and the results are likely to be similarly flawed. Just as lockdowns failed to contain the spread of the virus within countries, previous attempts to prevent Delta and Omicron variants from spreading beyond India and southern Africa, respectively, also failed miserably. Even the WHO considers travel bans to be “usually not effective”, while Andrew Pollard, chairman of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, also admitted that “trying to ban a virus by adjusting what we do with travel has already been shown not to work very well”. Neither is there any evidence that pre-departure testing will “help slow the spread” of the virus, as claimed by the CDC’s director Rochelle Walensky. In July, for example, French researchers found the Omicron variant in wastewater from two commercial airplanes that flew from Ethiopia to France in December 2021 even though passengers had been required to take Covid tests before boarding, concluding that mandatory testing before boarding “did not prevent massive importation of Omicron variant into Europe”.

More importantly, why would we want to do that? Data from last month suggests a majority of people in Western countries have had coronavirus infections, and that prior infection, even in the unvaccinated, offers strong protection against BA.5 Omicron hospitalisation. Moreover, the Omicron subvariant that has been spreading in China has been detected in the US, Europe and rest of the world for many months, which means we also have good levels of natural immunity to that subvariant (as well as high vaccination rates, which were told were the golden bullet to end the pandemic). So, there’s no reason to fear coming into contact with a Chinese tourist any more than there is to come into contact with any other human being.

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Furthermore, not only is there “currently no evidence” to suggest that a new and dangerous strain of the virus has emerged in the Chinese population, but there’s no reason to believe this is likely to happen either — or at least it’s not more likely to happen in China than anywhere else. “The likelihood of variants emerging [in China] is the same as it is in other places where there are Covid waves,” said Pollard. Besides, as noted already, even if it were to emerge, it would spread across the world regardless of the measures put in place, just like all previous variants.

Why, then, are policymakers once again going down this route? Part of the explanation is that politicians, by peddling a pro-lockdown narrative for the past three years, have now created an artificial demand for restrictive measures among their fear-stricken constituents, some of whom are now even making the case for wearing masks forever or for the permanent institutionalisation of what Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life”. Even more worryingly, it appears to indicate that Western governments have little intention of giving up the powers they’ve claimed under the guise of “fighting the virus”. While these current travel restrictions won’t affect the daily lives of Western citizens, they nonetheless show how easily “lockdown laws”, many of which remain in place in the UK and other countries, can be reinstated. If restrictions can be arbitrarily brought back at any moment in the name of public health, what’s to stop governments from abusing these powers once again in the future? For instance, the British government’s “Living with Covid-19” guidance, published in February 2022, states that it “will retain contingency capabilities and will respond as necessary to further resurgences or worse variants of the virus”.

The threat of such “capabilities” relates to a more fundamental issue, which is how human societies relate to illness and disease. The pandemic threw this into the foreground, and offered two contrasting approaches. The first is the biomedical approach, which has been championed by Bill Gates in his book on the pandemic and subsequently by Joe Biden in his new pandemic policy, which relies on the rapid production of vaccines, while citizens will need to wait in lockdown until these new products are available.

The alternative requires us to move beyond the guidance — or tyranny, depending on your point of view — of “the science”, and to recognise the role that philosophy and humanistic knowledge has in human life. Whether or not humans choose to embrace this way of living is ultimately a question of values. We can either confront the truth that death is — and always will be — a fundamental part of life, embrace the case for living well and healthily while we are alive, and recognise the place that human contact, exchange, and the sharing of bodily and social space has in well-being and therefore in health. Or, we can assign more value to the technical shield which we have been constructing around ourselves for the past decades. Looking at what’s now playing out in China, we know which we prefer.

He spoke exclusively to Freddie Sayers about that visit, what he and Musk discussed, and the wider implications of his suppression by Twitter.

What does being put on the Twitter “trends blacklist” actually mean?

What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages. So I’m talking to my group, and I think everything’s fine, but my messages have an upper limit on how far and wide they go.

And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.

That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.

Tell us about how Elon Musk got in touch and invited you to visit Twitter HQ.

So I get a Skype message from a common friend, someone who knows Elon and knows me. And it says, “Jay, I have an early Christmas present for you”. And then I’m on a signal group with Elon. And the first message from Elon is just “Hi”. And then he says, “Can you come this weekend to Twitter headquarters so we can show you your files, we can show you what’s what, what exactly Twitter 1.0 did?”

So describe the scene for us: what is Twitter HQ like in this new era?

You walk into Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and it looks like a five star hotel that’s been abandoned. There’s a very fancy restaurant, there’s all kinds of decorations and artwork… But nobody’s there, almost nobody’s there, everything’s empty, except when you go into the engineering area, with all of the cubicles, it’s filled with lots and lots of people trying very hard to make sure Twitter doesn’t explode. It’s Saturday, during the day, and they’re working hard.

You spoke with Elon for almost an hour. How was your conversation?

The topic, of course, was censorship. My sense is that he bought Twitter in part because he is deeply offended by the idea that something like Twitter, which is so important for public communication… had put their thumb on the scale. It wasn’t specifically about Covid. Generally, his sense was that one side of the conversation wasn’t being heard on many, many issues… I think he views this as: he’s in a very privileged position that allows him to restore free speech, allow for free discussion of ideas. And he wants to use what gifts he’s had for that purpose. He even made a joke: I could have bought an island with the $44 billion, but this was a much better use of the money.

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Was he a lockdown sceptic during the pandemic?

I think he generally was a lockdown sceptic… He famously, early in the pandemic, protested against being locked down when the shutdown orders came, and then moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas… He was very clear that he was aware of the harms of lockdowns. He mentioned the early days of the pandemic — that he had a number of plants in China, with tens of thousands of employees. He said: “Look, if somebody dies in amongst my employees, I find out immediately, because we stop paying them.” But he noticed that there were very, very few deaths on that metric early on. So his view was that it wasn’t clear that the case fatality rate numbers that were coming out matched reality in China itself, even from the earliest days of the pandemic… Certainly at this point, he was very sympathetic to my message about the harms to the poor of the world threatened by the economic dislocation caused by lockdowns, the closing of schools — all of that I think he opposed.

So then an engineer shows you your files. What did you find out?

An engineer comes to me, we talk in this little cubicle. And so it turns out that there are two major sources of information for the journalists that are looking at this. First, there’s this tool, which Bari Weiss made famous: for each person, they’ll have the status of the person and history of the status of that person… That includes some personal identifying information, which is why you’re not seeing a dump of those files for everybody, because they’re not supposed to share that… I had got permission to look at myself of course. And I asked for permission to look at Martin Kulldorff.

Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?

He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.

Is it still active for you?

It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.

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The engineers that were talking you through this, are they part of a minority of engineers that remain and are loyal to the new regime in some way?

The employees that are left are obviously very dedicated to making sure Twitter runs. The particular Twitter engineer that I worked with, he was moved over from Tesla. A number of the deputies of Elon were moved over from Tesla to help fight fires at Twitter… What they told me is that Elon is there ’til three o’clock at night… The people there are very dedicated to making sure that the site works and runs with a with a different philosophical basis, one of openness tied to free speech rather than suppression of ideas.

Do you think the pandemic response might have gone differently if voices such as yours were not suppressed?

Yes… I do really believe censorship kills, and censorship killed during this pandemic. The policies could have been so much better… The policies that were adopted were incredibly damaging to the lives and livelihoods of so many people. 100million people thrown into poverty worldwide: that’s the estimate from the World Bank. Just the consequences of that itself are going to have tremendous effects on the lives and livelihoods of people going forward. And of course, all these children were robbed of an education for years. Those are absolutely monumental outcomes of the policies we adopted during the pandemic, and they should have been freely discussed. My view of the scientific evidence is that it was so clear, even at the time, that we should not have been closing schools. And if we had been allowed to have a free and fair discussion, I think the schools would not have closed — if there hadn’t been this sort of demerit system for people who spoke up against these kinds of policies.

Do you worry that, with Twitter messages like “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”, Elon Musk is going too far and will imperil his project?

It’s not what I would do were I in his position. But on the other hand, I don’t have $44 billion to buy the company. The ideal person for this may not exist… we have to deal with the people we have in front of us. And Elon is, I think, a big step up from the previous ownership, who obviously weren’t that committed to free speech… I agree that it’s not the wisest use of his power. I think it would have been wiser to be more temperate in talking about, for instance, Tony Fauci. I think that Fauci made tremendous mistakes: he abused his power during the pandemic. And it’s led to a lot of problems. But I think the right redress is not to prosecute him, but for history to remember him having made those mistakes, and that in fact, although he may have committed his life to healing, the prescriptions he gave during the pandemic made the lives of so many people worse. 

***
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I stared at it, then I was in tears.

Humans are resilient. Bad things happen, and eventually we move on. But we remember, too. We just wrap those memories up and store them in unexpected places, such as a box of Christmas tree ornaments. 2020 still feels like a blur to me: one long horrible Groundhog Day. But that little snowman abruptly took me right there. Lovingly painted, its little face-mask trying to make something fun of something nightmarish, it captures the heroic efforts of everyone with children in their care. So many parents and carers, making the best of something utterly beyond the capacity of an infant to understand: an official ban on almost all spontaneous touch and social connection.

What does Zoom mean to a toddler? So much of a child’s social world is wordless, conducted in the language of touch, face, and gesture. A loved and trusted other is not a face on a screen but a living, breathing, warm, huggable entity. And for this group, a virus which posed relatively little risk to them meant almost all of this was abruptly taken away. More under-18s died of influenza than Covid-19 in 2020, but we don’t shut the world down for the flu.

We did for Covid. Was it worth it?

How do you calculate something like that? We know that maternal post-natal depression can have lasting negative effects on a developing child. What, then, about the fact that rates of perinatal depression doubled during lockdown, affecting nearly half of all mothers of newborns? What of the children, now toddlers, who didn’t interact with anyone other than their parents for months or even years of their earliest life, and are now developmentally delayed on a raft of measures compared to previous cohorts?

Was it worth it for the millions of children left to scroll unspeakable corners of the internet, unsupervised, for months on end, while their parents tried to keep up with Zoom work? Those all the way up to university age who lost years of education? What about the depression and PTSD that rocketed in kids between seven and 12 between March and June that year? Was it worth that? What about those trapped at home with abusive or neglectful parents?

But just as the downsides of lockdown weren’t evenly distributed, nor were the risks of Covid. Someone elderly or immune-compromised might say: yes, kids were not at great danger from the virus. But why should the demographics most at risk of severe illness and death be recklessly endangered, for the sake of children with their whole lives ahead of them? And this is the nub of the problem. Every human culture prior to our own understood the tragic dimension of human life: that is, the truth that some situations have no good outcome, only messy choices and their painful aftermath. In the Christian tradition, we see something like this in the doctrine of original sin, which holds that we can never make life on earth perfect — because each of us carries a taint of wickedness, and can only hope and pray for salvation.

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Nor is this downbeat assessment only a feature in the Christian worldview. We see it, for example, in the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, a man whose parents sought to avoid the monstrous actions the gods foretold he would take, by abandoning him on a hillside, only to bring about precisely that fate through their actions. In Hindu myth, times of high civilisation and towering achievement are inescapably followed by ages of decline and destruction, before the cycle begins again.

No doubt, for non-Christian and Christian premodern cultures alike, this downbeat view of what’s achievable on earth was informed by being on everyday speaking terms with hunger, illness and death. But a core belief of the modern world is that weighing two competing dangers is a thing of the past. Instead, thanks to the wonders of innovation and rising prosperity, we can defy gravity and have all the good things at once — even things that previously seemed in conflict. Powered by cheap fossil fuels, we convinced ourselves we were on our way to eliminating hunger and illness, and could set our sights on death itself. And among all the other things fuelled by cheap energy, perhaps the most pervasive has been the conviction that we could escape life’s tragic dimension.

We could have freedom from family obligations, while ensuring the old and young were cared for. Rising prosperity replaced the duty to welcome the stranger, and the injunction to love your neighbour. We could be intensely relaxed (as Peter Mandelson famously put it) about some people getting filthy stinking rich, because some of that money can be collected in taxes and redistributed. And we could do this while leaving everyone free to pursue their own vision of the good. As long as we adopt the same overall rules, and accept the same bits-and-atoms understanding of what’s real and important, we can be as values-pluralistic as we like.

“Progress” means, in a nutshell, the ability to trade in-person social bonds for freedom, while our basic needs are met via paid-for services and labour-saving machinery. In other words, technology replaced moral frameworks, or rather became the moral framework: a machine theology. In this worldview there are no moral choices, only rational ones. Its corresponding mode of governance is technocracy, where the legitimacy of political choices rests in their adherence to “evidence” and “data”. And humans, too, are unconnected atoms: you’re a person to the extent that you can be free, with no obligation to share values or social codes.

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Except it turns out that there are still situations where we can’t just “do our own thing”. When each of us is a potential disease vector, everyone else absolutely has a stake in what we do. And at the collective level, sometimes there’s no “neutral” option. Faced with a rapidly-spreading virus of still-unknown severity, doing nothing is as much a decision with consequences as making active interventions.

So Covid presented a new universe of tragic choices. But we had little mental furniture for grappling with them. No wonder so many ended up hiding behind “science”, and sought to justify their preferred policies in those terms. But the truth is that no one is very rational when lives are in danger — and so the pandemic exposed the underlying, enduring truth that data-driven decision-making can only ever be a fig-leaf for the real business of governance, which is tragic moral choices.

How do you weigh incommensurable alternatives, where every side has horrible trade-offs? How do you weigh granny’s life against a generation of developmentally-delayed babies and toddlers? Short answer: you can’t. At least, there’s no way of doing so rationally, using data, without some kind of moral framework.

And from this perspective it’s easier to see why we accepted the choices we did — or at least found ourselves at a loss to protest, even if it felt wrong. For what we needed to navigate Covid were the very moral frameworks we’ve spent so long carefully dismantling, in favour of moral pluralism underwritten by the lonely unity of machines and the market. No wonder, then, that when in-person contact suddenly seemed a danger to life, we told ourselves all of it could be replaced with money and machines — for money and machines are the moral framework now. And no wonder we looked away from those groups for whom in-person contact is life.

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We accepted the sacrifice of almost all in-person social contact, on our children’s behalf, for months on end. In some parts of the world, it was years. Perhaps, accustomed to a machine theology that dismisses relationships as an optional extra, we didn’t think it much of a sacrifice. It was a moral choice, founded in a culture that insists everything inconvenient about love can be replaced by money and machines. But we didn’t defy gravity. Instead, the heaviest burden fell on the slightest shoulders. Now, we’re living with the aftermath. Two Christmases on, I’m still feeling the disintegrative aftershocks of Covid in my own family, and a sudden reminder of 2020 in the Christmas box can leave me choked. As inflation soars and everyone hunkers down, we’re feeling it at a national level too.

That little snowman will go back into its box on Twelfth Night. But we can’t just pack away the memory of that fearful, isolated time — especially as China faces its long-postponed reckoning with Covid, driving fears of new variants spreading overseas. We can’t just forget again what it was like to see a generation of children stripped of social worlds they couldn’t do without. A generation of the young, two years older now, living with the cost of our refusal to defend love in the face of death. As families gather for another Christmas, we must say: never again. That experiment can never be repeated.

These social, political and economic shocks might have traumatised a lesser nation, but China has managed to maintain relative stability. Indeed, the Communist Party has ruled over the country for three-quarters of a century — a product not merely of its authoritarianism but also, as Kerry Brown has argued, its ability to provide ordinary Chinese with a unifying national narrative around “which the Communist Party relates to their daily lives”.

When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, this unifying story became known as “The Chinese Dream”, a slogan that was plastered over billboards and hoardings across the country. Through the Chinese Dream rhetoric, Xi confirmed that the country would become “moderately prosperous”, employment opportunities would improve, and individuals would thrive. Xi was laying the foundations, as he put it, for the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

The Chinese Dream was symbolised by social engagement, as opposed to the American Dream, which reflected Western individualism. To demonstrate the seriousness with which he took this notion of communal solidarity, Xi directed the authorities to clamp down on corruption and personal aggrandisement within the ranks of the CCP. For him and the country, social improvement was to be a collective effort, and all would reap the benefits. These included the promise that GDP per person would double within Xi’s original term of office, that citizens would have access to massively improved welfare provisions, and that China would start to develop a military “capable of fighting and winning wars”.

It was all going so well — until Covid-19 hit. Even when China was initially building a consensus for lockdown, the restrictions were sold as a selfless, patriotic duty. While the Covid-related fatality statistics remained low — perhaps implausibly low — people bought the narrative of a paternalistic party protecting its people. But over the last few years, China’s lockdowns have done untold damage to people’s families, their businesses, and their health. As time dragged on and Chinese citizens gradually realised that the government had no Plan B, they slowly began to withdraw their loyalty.

Until recently, demonstrations of frustration with the state and its armed goons have been curiously middle-class affairs, like the tang ping (lying flat) movement of students who refused to get out of bed. That was a form of passive resistance, and therefore fundamentally unthreatening. The real attack on Chinese authority came when striking workers broke out of the Foxconn plant, and then unemployed youth united with ordinary people and began tearing down Covid barriers and demanding freedom.

During the course of the demonstrations in November, many shouted slogans insisting that Xi Jinping step down, called for an end to CCP rule, and demanded greater civil rights — a direct challenge to the Communist Party. China has responded by becoming the only country to have overturned Covid policy in response to popular anger, which is ironic given the caricature of Chinese people as passive subjects of their rulers.

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The problem now facing the CCP is how to rebuild its popular legitimacy — and rewrite its national narrative — as nearly three years of Covid policy end in disastrous failure. What kind of narrative will Xi turn to in order to explain all this away?

For a hint, we can look at the “For a Life of Contentment” report, published last week by the state media’s think tank, New China Research. It sets out a strategy to recapture “harmonious” public order by outlining China’s place in the world. The document has been a long time in production, but its release has clearly been rushed out after the shock of the anti-Party disturbances. It tells a new narrative — one that is more strident, authoritative, and decisive than the Chinese Dream. And, in a bold move for China, it puts human rights centre stage.

China has long held pretensions of challenging America’s hegemonic role in world affairs. The party’s concept of Chinese rejuvenation — dubbed the “New Era” — was always premised on developing sufficiently to rival America. In 2017, for example, China was insisting that it was prepared to “take centre stage in the world”. Five years later, Beijing is sounding a more defensive, pessimistic note. It says: “the Cold War mentality as well as the hegemonic practices of putting one’s own country’s interests above the interests of others and even the international community at large, and pointing fingers at other countries are not welcome.”

This is not to say that China no longer has global pretensions — only that it is a little more circumspect. It seems that the street protests have rocked the confidence of the ruling party, and Xi needs a new narrative. Faced with widespread popular anger, for instance, the idea that the Chinese state “cares for its people” is clearly not going to work as it has over the last seven decades. Xi is going to have to earn some trust.

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And so to “human rights”. China’s conception of human rights is a pragmatic (and self-serving) one. The CCP clearly believes that it can improve its image at home by advancing the lot of Chinese people; when in doubt, the party has long fallen back on giving people more money. It claims that happiness is the ultimate basis for human rights and thus, by providing material benefits to the population (better infrastructure, jobs, pay and conditions), the regime is also promoting human rights. Ironically, China appears to be tapping into the “happiness agenda” beloved of Western environmentalists by turning the “abstract concept of human rights into a set of tangible rights”.

Of course, the CCP is banking on the fact that the West still relies on it. If the party can reinvigorate the Chinese economy and hold onto the reins of power, it will be a lifeline for ailing Western economies. If China can say that their minorities are exploited but happy, that their peasants are over-worked but with cash in hand, that the Uyghurs are denied rights but have decent pay and conditions, will Western leaders really condemn it? Tapping into Western relativism, China says: “There is no fixed model of human rights protection in the world. Different countries have different national conditions, histories, cultures, social systems and economic and social development levels. A proper path of human rights development should be explored to suit national conditions and the needs of the people.”

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China, then, appears to be regrouping, and a weakened West is giving it the time and space that it needs. Beijing says that it wants to bring “novel ideas, measures and practices in terms of how to respect and protect human rights (as) a refreshing addition to the global human rights cause and to the diversity of civilisations”, as well as offering “inspiration for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries”. In other words, Beijing might be in a weaker-than-normal position, but it is still trying to export its social and political model overseas. It knows it cannot afford to be completely defensive. Whether Xi can get away with this in the fragmented international community is one thing — but as the past month has shown, whether the Chinese Communist Party can convince people at home is quite another story altogether.

***

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This new festive tradition, where we tell our wizened elders to piss off and keep their grubby hands and lips to themselves, obviously has its roots in the all-consuming contemporary dialogue about consent. But this holiday season it hits differently. Rejoice, for gone are the grim days of socially distanced drive-by birthday parties and Thanksgiving over FaceTime; once again, Grandma can be treated like an avatar for child molesters the world over right to her face. The recirculation of articles like these coincides with another notable entry into the every-touch-is-a-bad-touch canon, triggered by a recent update on the MeTooing of author Junot Diaz. Diaz, a Pulitzer-winning fiction writer, was mostly (not fully) cancelled in 2018, after an accusation from writer Zinzi Clemmons that he had once “cornered” and “forcibly kissed” her. Accounts of verbal abuse and interpersonal cruelty from other women swiftly followed, along with rumours that dozens of additional allegations were coming down the pike — or would, if not for the victims’ fears of retaliation for speaking out. As summarised by Ben Smith of Semafor, a media firestorm ensued: “Publications from The Washington Post to New York Magazine ran with headlines about allegations of ‘sexual misconduct’.”

The bombshell, four years later, is a heretofore-unreported revelation in Smith’s article: that the kiss in question was not the open-mouthed, tongue-thrusting assault most readily conjured by the word “forcible”, but a peck on the cheek. Yet for every person who was thrown for a loop by this information, there was another just as willing to die on the hill of “A kiss on the cheek without explicit prior consent is assault, actually”. In the former category was the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, tweeting bewilderedly: “Imagine getting up and preparing to publicly accuse someone of assault and knowing full well that what you were actually referring to was a kiss on the cheek.” In the latter category was Diaz accuser Monica Byrne (who described a public but heated dinner party conversation with the author as “verbal sexual assault”), as well as recently-fired Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez, herself one of the #MeToo movement’s more controversial figures.

Needless to say, such assertions might (and did) invite a certain amount of snark (France, anyone?) — but there’s also a sober, and sobering, discussion to be had about what this all means in a diverse, high-trust society. The planet is presently home to more than eight billion people, and some fraction of these are bound to behave in ways that are grating to some fraction of the other eight billion; the cultural norms surrounding a kiss-kiss greeting notwithstanding, the world is also full of close talkers, arm-touchers, people who spit a little when they get excited. Annoying? Yes. Within tolerable limits of human diversity? Ah, well, they used to be.

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But that was before we became so accustomed to the total elimination of quotidian friction from our lives that even the most fleeting moment of irritation or discomfort began to feel like a tragedy. This is not the first time I’ve observed that the notion of a voicemail as a violation arose roughly in tandem with our ability to use an app to replace an ever-growing list of interactions, but it did. The lack of an online option has become so unusual that when I discovered a local pizza place that still takes orders exclusively by phone call, it felt like an aggressive albeit implicit declaration that those under the age of 35 should get their pepperoni-and-stinger pies elsewhere.

There’s a metaphor here about sensitivity, vulnerability, and how insulating oneself in a bubble can yield the opposite of the desired result, except that the metaphor is lately made real: the US, like many other countries, is currently weathering a wave of infections from all the diseases we didn’t get for two years while we were hiding out, trying not to get Covid. (In the UK, the surge in cases of Strep A among kids has been attributed to the fact that they weren’t allowed to mix in lockdown.)

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This was entirely predictable, and yet a remarkable number of people seem to believe that the solution is not to resume normal life and regain normal immune function, but to make our socially-distanced and sanitised bubbles a permanent state of affairs. Some of America’s top pandemic pundits are begging us to bring back masks and other distancing measures, while others appeared to praise China’s draconian Zero Covid strategy, even as the country was rocked by protests. In Los Angeles, home to a particularly relentless public health apparatus, a mandate remains in place that if a person has been infected with Covid, everyone in the household must wear masks at all times, including at home. It is a new vision of normal: Safer. Healthier. Cleaner. Lonelier.

Here the fear of Covid becomes difficult to disentangle from the creeping influence of consent as a framework to govern any interaction in which another person might hug you, touch you, or breathe on you. There’s a sense that if we just create enough rules, enough boundaries — confining every visit, every conversation, every human interaction sexual and non-sexual, within a set of strict limitations — the ordinary discomforts of coexisting with other people could be eradicated.

It does, however, have the peculiar side effect of making every instance of physical touch both existentially fraught and sexually tinged. This is not just about the inexpressible, ugly weirdness of kids being instructed that it’s okay to recoil from Grandma because her hugs are non-consensual (while Grandma is in turn instructed that if her feelings are hurt, she’s guilty of the same horny entitlement that leads men to commit sex crimes). It’s about the pathologising of normal human togetherness, and the normalising of an extremely online brand of misanthropy, all with the pretence that this is the only way to be a decent human being, the only way to show you care.

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One of the most remarkable responses to the Junot Diaz cheek kiss was: “It’s okay not to want any intrusions into one’s space and that should be in fact, the standard.” It’s the “standard” that gets me, which if implemented would establish those of us who enjoy physical contact as deviations if not deviants, in need of stern correction. But this idea, so strange by ordinary measures, became truly ascendant during the pandemic: that the emergency-induced state of isolation is better, actually, both scientifically and morally. That we should, indeed, recalibrate society in accordance with the preferences of the most anti-social people in it, the ones who don’t especially like or trust other human beings, the ones who don’t want people in their space. You’d think the paradox of this would be cause for reflection. Reorganising society per the preferences of the anti-social seems, at the very least, a self-contradictory endeavour — on the same level as putting a vegan in charge of the menu for your Festival of Meats. And yet, the beat goes on.

Much has been made in recent weeks of a study showing that Americans now spend an increasing amount of time alone. This was a trend exacerbated by the pandemic but not original to it. I suspect it has been taking root for at least as long as the social web has existed, or perhaps longer, dating to that first moment at which the internet turned society’s shut-ins from solo hermits into a global community — a community with an outsized voice, owing to the propensity of its members to never not be online.

The writing of our impending isolation was surely on the wall amid the unofficial introvert awareness movement of the early 2000s, which led to a Tumblr-fuelled fetishisation of solitude that turned pathological reclusiveness into a point of pride, even an identity. (Sure, sex is great, but have you ever canceled your plans and stayed home on a Saturday night wearing fluffy socks?) Granted, the meme-ified introvert persona was in many cases indistinguishable from a person with clinical depression, but dressing up social withdrawal as an adorable and extremely online personality quirk made it all but impossible to criticise. Those who found it alarming just didn’t understand; they were probably (ew) extroverts.

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It’s that frictionlessness again: here is a social milieu where everything from intellectual debates to sexually-charged banter can be shut down at the literal click of a button. Where there’s no threat of folks touching you, breathing on you, or noticing that you’re not wearing pants. Where other people are not only not in your space but cannot be, ever.

Is this better? We certainly tried to convince ourselves as much, in those long months when staying in went from choice to necessity. In addition to fear and stress and Tiger King on Netflix, the pandemic was characterised by an almost frantic forced enthusiasm for the concept of being alone together, the operative word being alone. Browsing the art museum’s collection online was all the culture, without the crowds. Streaming services introduced “group-watch” features to replace going to the movies; rowdy trivia nights at the local pub turned into sterile (but safe!) late-night Zoom affairs. Anything you could do in the real world, you could do better in virtual space: happy hours, birthday parties, conferences. School, work, therapy. Funerals. Especially funerals, given what a veritable minefield they are of both germs (all that sniffling and sobbing) as well as all kinds of nonconsensual hugging and hand-clasping.

In trying to persuade ourselves of the superiority of a socially distant life, we gave our most anti-social tendencies not just a pass but the imprimatur of moral authority. And while the threat of Covid has receded, this new paradigm has not. As recently as two months ago, the advice given in a national newspaper to a person whose continuing reluctance to socialise indoors had left her struggling under “waves of misery and loneliness” was to recast herself in her own mind as a heroic martyr to the cause: “It might help to see your decisions as marks of solidarity with people who do have underlying conditions,” wrote the Guardian‘s columnist. “If you can see these things as badges of consideration for the people most hurt by the pandemic, it might be something you feel happier to be conspicuous for.”

I wonder if it helped this woman even a little to be told that her aching loneliness was actually a badge of honour, that the best way to show her care for other people was to hide herself away from them. I wonder what kind of person would be comforted by this. And I wonder: until when? Having successfully flipped the script so that those who yearn for human contact became the avatar for destructive selfishness, while the recluses in their hermetically-sealed bubbles are the heroes holding society together, how are we meant to come together again?

An introvert and a misanthrope are two different things, but the discourse around how we should live now leaves little distinction between the two. The question of how the lines became so blurred is one thing. The question of how to rediscover the distinction, let alone rediscover the goodness of gathering, of holding each other close, and of refusing to abandon each other to the sanctified isolation of eternal quarantine, should perhaps be answered first.

***

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Few of these protests have been quite so explicit in their demands — their defining slogan is a blank piece of paper. Borrowing from the experience of dissenters in Hong Kong and Singapore, they are defiantly saying nothing at all. The act itself is the protest; the challenge to the authorities is clear: find a pretext to stop me. So far, the prize for the most obscure placard goes to the students holding up sheets of paper bearing a mathematical formula describing “the expansion of space in homogeneous and isotropic models of the universe within the context of general relativity”. It’s a Friedmann Equation, get it? “Freed man”… These are not slogans that are going to connect with the masses.

These students have endured long lockdowns with no end to Zero Covid in sight. But for weeks their ennui has lacked a focus. We’ve seen absurdist performances, including groups crawling around on all fours and tens of thousands taking cardboard dogs for walks. Now, however, something has shifted. The deaths of at least 10 Uyghur people in a fire, apparently while locked in their apartment block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, and violent protests by workers at the vast Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou have triggered a sense of purpose. The final straw may have been the sight of huge crowds of unmasked football supporters at the World Cup in Qatar broadcast to every television and mobile device in China, a reminder that the rest of the world has moved on from Zero Covid.

It hardly needs stating that this is a delicate moment for the Communist Party. Giving the protestors what they appear to want — a relaxation of Covid controls — will almost certainly lead to a massive wave of death across the country. The impact of many Covid variants on a poorly vaccinated population of 1.4 billion, and the medical services that sustain them, will be catastrophic.

But not giving the protestors what they want will also cause the pressure on the system to increase. Prospects for many young people in China are bleak. Official youth unemployment stands at 18%, with hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents voting with their wallets and sending their precious offspring to study abroad. As growth continues to slow at home, even those studying at elite institutions feel pessimistic.

Yet what do these young people actually want? It is not even clear that they know the answer. The fact that some protestors were singing the Internationale doesn’t make them revolutionaries. The Leftist anthem, like the blank pieces of paper, is a plausible alibi; choosing to sing the Communist Party’s official tune is merely an attempt to create a bit of political shelter. They might as well yodel: “You don’t have any reason to arrest us.”

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It is unlikely that this will cut much ice with the Communist Party, however. If the Party wants to snuff out collective action, it doesn’t need to worry about legal niceties. The catch-all charge of “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble” is usually enough to quash any unauthorised activity. Arresting the few students who were shouting “down with Xi Jinping” will probably be enough to discourage the others. There is, after all, no organised protest movement — just tens of millions of pissed-off people.

Nonetheless, the Party is in a quandary. Its bureaucracy is struggling to reconcile the leadership’s contradictory instructions. Earlier this month, the Standing Committee of the Politburo ordered a new approach to controlling the virus, ostensibly allowing local authorities to have greater flexibility in imposing lockdowns. It appeared to be a “having-its-cake-and-eating-it” strategy: a “smarter” approach to Zero Covid that simultaneously kept a lid on infections while reducing control measures in lower risk localities.

The reality appears to be the reverse. The disease is spreading, more than a quarter of the total Chinese population appears to be living under some kind of lockdown and discontent is rising. At the sharp end of local administration, where the Party’s neighbourhood warden system (shequ) faces the residents they monitor and manage, confusion abounds.

Danson Cheong, China Correspondent of the Singapore-based Straits Times, yesterday described the buck-passing between the shequ in his neighbourhood, the company that manages his apartment block and the central government’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC). A positive Covid case was discovered and the shequ ordered a lockdown, but the property company refused to impose it without an order from the CDC. The CDC was backlogged with other cases and couldn’t issue the necessary paperwork, so no lockdown was imposed and the residents of the block were left free to spread the virus.

This would not have happened at the start of the pandemic, when the political pressure to impose a lockdown would have overridden any jobsworth who attempted to stand in the way. But now at least a few jobsworths feel empowered to drag their heels and avoid a conflict with the people they must face every day. A breakdown of order is becoming crystallised, but inside the bureaucracy rather than on the streets. And this will terrify the leadership.

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Hidden from view, this insecurity will be driving divisions within the system, between critics of both Zero Covid and Xi Jinping himself. There will be those with axes to grind and others with wider agendas. Yet Xi hasn’t risen to the top without learning how to deal with challenges along the way. He has been ruthless in dealing with apparent plots against him, while October’s Party Congress saw him place his allies in all the key positions.

Meanwhile, outside the corridors of power, the Party has mastered the dark arts of public opinion management and social control. Its officials may have decided to allow a little release of the pressure on campuses and a few city streets in order to stabilise the overall system. By Saturday, for instance, the state media had started to challenge the narratives that fed the initial dissent over the fire in Urumqi and the protests in Zhengzhou, reporting that lockdown restrictions could soon be eased. At the same time, directives are presumably being issued to party units to step up their vigilance and “seriously” implement their instructions.

Anyone who doubts the Communist Party’s determination to remain the country’s sole political force clearly hasn’t been following events in Hong Kong, Xinjiang or anywhere else in China for the past decade. Whenever there has been a choice between control and disorder, the Party has chosen control, even at the expense of reduced economic growth and popular dissatisfaction. That is why, for all the bravery of the weekend’s anti-lockdown demonstrators, they will not succeed. Yes, the Party faces another systemic problem — but it will take more than a few photogenic protests to make them change course.

He was under pressure from all sides to introduce strict restrictions. Among Nicaragua’s neighbours, El Salvador registered its first case on 18 March and imposed a lockdown two days later; Honduras did the same; Costa Rica imposed a lockdown on 16 March and three days later closed its borders completely. These neighbouring governments, all politically hostile towards Nicaragua, insisted that it join in closing the regional economy.

Within Nicaragua, vociferous opposition groups and media were also calling for the economy to be shut down. But the country had barely recovered from a violent confrontation in 2018 between these opposition groups and Ortega’s socialist Sandinista government, which had resulted in more than 200 deaths. A lockdown would only put further strain on the divided nation.

When Ortega declared publicly that there would be no lockdown, most Nicaraguans quietly accepted that while his decision might be risky, he had little choice. Inevitably, the Right-wing opposition accused him of being in denial about the pandemic. Worse still, they spread fear and suspicion with their predictions that the health service would collapse. An opposition thinktank projected 120,000 Covid cases by June; a local Right-wing media channel, 100% Noticias, topped that by saying that 23,000 Nicaraguans would be dead within a month. Once the government started producing Covid statistics, a rival “citizens’ observatory” was set up, which never declared its membership or source of funding. It began to produce weekly reports contesting the government’s figures (although the small print on its website reveals that its own statistics were based on social media reports and even “rumours”). Many Nicaraguans, including some I knew, were so scared of going to hospital when they developed Covid symptoms that they left it too late.

This dishonest narrative soon spread abroad, where Nicaragua’s opposition figures enjoy good contacts with the international media. On 4 April, BBC World claimed that the Ortega government had taken “no measures at all” against the virus threat. It invented a media trope: Ortega’s “long absence” from public view. Two days later, the New York Times asked “Where Is Daniel Ortega?,” saying that his government had been “widely criticised for its cavalier approach”. The Guardian joined the chorus, claiming that Ortega was “nowhere to be seen,” adding four days later that the “authoritarian” Ortega was one of four world leaders in denial about the virus. The Washington Post said that Ortega had “vanished,” leaving a government operating a “laissez-faire approach” to the pandemic. On 6 April, The Lancet published a letter calling Nicaragua’s Covid response “perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date”. By May, according to the New York Times, Nicaragua — “one of the last to reject the strict measures introduced globally” — had become a country of “midnight burials”.

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The liberal media’s lies could not have been further from reality. Ortega’s government had prioritised health spending since he returned to power in 2007, raising it to 19% of the national budget by 2020, one of the highest levels in the world. Nicaragua was also one of the first nations in the region to set out its Covid strategy, issuing a joint protocol with the Pan-American Health Organisation (the Americas branch of the WHO) on 9 February. Its 36,000 health workers had received training on dealing with the virus before the first case arrived. One hospital was designated to deal solely with respiratory illnesses and 18 more were equipped with Covid isolation wards. Health “brigades” worked locally, eventually making five million house-to-house visits to educate people, identify possible Covid cases, and counteract misinformation. That’s about four visits per household on average.

So much for taking “no measures at all” against the virus. A “track and trace” system was in place and health checks were being made at border crossing points months before similar measures were taken in the UK or US. While tourism stopped and hotels and restaurants closed, many other businesses stayed open with precautions in place. Mask-wearing, never imposed by law, became almost universal. Private schools closed but public ones stayed open, with voluntary attendance, because many children rely on the free school meals served to every pupil.

What was the outcome? There was an intense peak of Covid cases and deaths between May and July 2020, but by August numbers were gradually falling, although they peaked again in mid-2021. My local hospital, one of the 19 equipped for Covid, was able to hold a small celebration in August 2020 for patients who had been discharged.

None of this early success dulled the criticism. The Lancet article praised the lockdown policies of El Salvador and Honduras. In the former, President Nayib Bukele forced people to self-isolate, offering a subsidy of $300 per family which caused massive, unregulated queues and then rowdy protests outside government offices. In some areas its lockdown was reportedly enforced by gangs with baseball bats. Meanwhile in Honduras, a “militarised quarantine” led to police violence, more than 1,000 arrests and the confiscation of almost 900 vehicles, according to human rights group COFADEH. Honduran schools stayed closed for two years. Yet both countries had higher reported infection levels than Nicaragua. So did Costa Rica, which sustained the fiercest barrage of criticism of its neighbour and for many weeks even prevented food transport between the two countries.

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The international media didn’t question whether lockdowns were in Nicaragua’s best interests or whether they were even feasible. The truth only came out towards the end of the pandemic, when the World Health Organisation, The Economist and Amnesty International produced differing estimates of excess deaths related to Covid. All showed that, compared with the rest of Latin America (and indeed the UK and USA), Nicaragua had done relatively well. The WHO ranked its excess death level as 14th out of 19 countries in the region, better than all four of its immediate neighbours.

When it came to vaccines, Nicaragua was at first at a disadvantage as, unlike its neighbours, it received no early vaccine donations from the US or China. However, once supplies arrived via the WHO Covishield mechanism it advanced rapidly. Its community-based health teams have ensured that 86% of the population is fully vaccinated, the highest rate in Central America, and 91% have had at least one dose. This was all achieved without the coercive vaccine mandates of many Western countries.

By refusing to lock down, President Ortega saved his country from economic disaster. Nicaragua’s economy has recovered swiftly from the pandemic, with GDP growing by more than 10% in 2021 and forecast to be 4% this year. The government resumed its investment programmes, and now has 24 hospitals built or nearing completion as well as investing in renewable energy, paving rural roads, remodelling schools, and achieving the highest level of electricity coverage in the region.

Latin America’s experience of Covid was hugely diverse: Brazil, Mexico and Peru were — like the UK and US — among the 20 countries with the highest levels of Covid-related deaths. By contrast, according to Johns Hopkins University, Nicaragua had one of the lowest death rates per 100,000 population in the world — 189 compared with 276 for the UK and 374 for the US. But the international media have done nothing to redress the unbalanced reporting of the early months of the pandemic. To date, no one has asked why Nicaragua’s performance was better and what might be learned from its experience. It would be worth finding out before the next pandemic.

***

John appears on this week’s Collateral Global podcast.

“It’s crisis upon crisis,” says Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of Aurora New Dawn, a charity that provides services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Hampshire and the Thames Valley. Organisations like hers have not yet fully recovered from having to deal with the increased demand caused by Covid, and now they are braced for a flood of new calls for help. Back in March 2020, government ministers were warned by MPs, charities and campaigners against domestic violence about the deadly impact lockdown was likely to have on vulnerable women and children. “Stay home” was a bitter message for women who suddenly found themselves shut up, 24 hours a day, with abusive partners. And lo and behold, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by 60%, some of them made by concerned neighbours who heard alarming noises from next door.

Dillon recalls the early days of lockdown, when staff trying to deal with a deluge of calls from desperate women had to wait weeks for the government even to designate them as key workers. I tell her about sitting in on remote meetings organised by City Hall in the spring of 2020, as charities and local authorities struggled to respond to the crisis: attempts to set up emergency accommodation to save women from injury and worse were being frustrated by government departments, each of whom — Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — claimed it was someone else’s responsibility. Perpetrators fully exploited the situation, telling police officers summoned by a 999 call that they couldn’t enter the family home because someone inside had Covid. They put trackers on phones and cars in case a woman managed to escape on the rare occasions she was allowed to leave the house, to go shopping or take the kids to the park. Social workers moving women to emergency accommodation had to learn how to check for such devices to prevent the victim being followed.

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Today it is not lockdown that is being exploited, but the high cost of living. Anxiety about making ends meet is creating ideal conditions for coercive control, a form of abuse that is not as widely understood as physical violence. Of course, the two often co-exist, with a history of financial abuse being revealed only when a victim is being treated for physical injuries. Money problems do not cause abuse but they make it worse, providing extra “leverage” for men who are already threatening and isolating their partners. “My abuser would check accounts when I had the debit card,” one survivor of financial abuse told Women’s Aid. “If I was food shopping, he would ask how much I’ve spent to see if I was truthful as he had already checked online. He would not top up the gas and electric meters so I had to spend all day with no gas or electric.”

Dillon is all too familiar with how coercive control operates. Survivors have told her about men who say: “You’re not feeding your kids. They’ve got holes in their shoes. I’m going to tell social services you’re a bad mother.” That is a terrifying threat to make to a woman who, through no fault of her own, is struggling to put food on the table or having to rely on charity shops to clothe their children. They already feel intense shame about their supposed shortcoming as mothers, something perpetrators understand very well and are eager to exploit. Women fear losing their children above all else — and abusive men can sound very plausible. How can a woman prove she’s not to blame — that money is being kept from her deliberately — when her partner sounds so reasonable to outsiders?

Shortage of money increases the pressures within relationships in other ways, as men who can’t afford to go to the pub or a football match spend more time at home. Researchers used to wonder why intimate partner abuse rises during big sporting occasions, such as the football World Cup, speculating that perpetrators were punishing women when their team lost. The answer turned out to be much simpler: domestic abuse increases whenever men spend more time at home, which is why the big rise during the Covid lockdowns came as no surprise to anyone. There were a spate of domestic homicides — 16 in three weeks — in the first month of lockdown.

Eventually, the government noticed. Covid “acted as an escalator and intensifier of existing abuse”, a joint report from the Home Office, National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing belatedly admits. “It seems to have been weaponised by some abusers as both a new tool of control over victims and… as an excuse for domestic abuse and even homicide.” Two men, Anthony Williams and Hussein Egal, blamed stress caused by Covid when they were charged with killing their wives. Egal inflicted 70 injuries on his wife, Maryan Ismail, after (he claims) she had threatened to throw him out for having the virus. Williams strangled his wife to death, and then pleaded guilty to manslaughter, having told the police that lockdown restrictions had had a negative impact on his mental health. He received a reduced sentence of five years. It remains to be seen whether, in a few months times, men accused of murder will claim they were driven to it by anxiety about not being able to pay the mortgage.

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Homicides were not the only deaths linked to domestic abuse: there were also 38 suspected suicides of victims in the first year of the pandemic, a phenomenon so under-researched that we do not have previous years’ figures to compare it with. It attests to the desperate circumstances some women found themselves in, locked in with their abusers, as well as important questions about whether the women’s actions were voluntary.

Surely, surely, ministers would never make the same mistake again? But that appears to be exactly what is happening. “The suicide rate will definitely increase,” Dillon predicts. “It will happen if women can’t flee safely.” She asks herself every day how she can help victims, knowing that her organisation is struggling with its own costs, including soaring heating bills. Some of her employees are single mothers and survivors of abuse, and the cost of living is already hitting them hard. “I’m worried about my staff,” she says. Most earn between £24,000 and £26,000 a year, when they could get more than £30,000 in less stressful occupations. “We are going to lose staff hand over fist. We’re constantly fire-fighting,” Dillon says wearily.

Women’s Aid has addressed the looming crisis in an August report, offering a stark warning: “The cost of living is preventing women from fleeing domestic abuse.” Two-thirds of survivors told the organisation that abusers were using the cost of living increase as a tool for coercive control, “including to justify further restricting their access to money”. Almost three-quarters said that shortage of cash had prevented them from leaving. With private rents beyond the means of most victims, and mortgages prohibitively expensive, women feel trapped. “I feel like my only option to keep my kids is to go back to the marital home where he nearly killed me,” one survivor told the organisation.

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Two months ago, a group of charities said they were “disappointed” by the lack of government action on tackling the cost of living crisis. Women’s Aid is calling for mortgage payment holidays for victims, an emergency domestic abuse fund, and discounts on energy bills for organisations that provide services for women and children. Refuge has asked for the £20 universal credit uplift to be restored. The government says it is working across departments to ensure that victims, survivors and their families are fully supported, citing a £230m investment in its Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan.

What the government did not say, however, is just as important. The plan was announced in March, under a different administration, and some of the money is earmarked for long-term projects such as training to recognise abuse. The vast scale of the economic crisis has since become clear, yet one of Liz Truss’s first actions as prime minister was to abolish the role of women’s minister. The decision has been criticised by some Conservative MPs, including the chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes. Having a dedicated women’s minister gives us a voice — and also acts as a brake, forcing government departments to think twice about the impact of policies on women and girls.

If the government is planning a substantive response to a situation many women regard as an emergency, it is keeping very quiet about it. This time round, with so much evidence of the disastrous consequences of its predecessor’s tardy action in lockdown, it has no excuse. Another crisis is playing into abusers’ hands — and there is very little time left to save their victims.