Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from Brendan O’Neill’s January 12th, 2022, Spiked essay, “After Covid“:

And what about the culture of freedom? Forget, for a moment, the way our legally guaranteed liberties were put on ice during this crisis. That was bad, no question. But a more injurious if sometimes intangible process was taking place alongside this temporary unwinding of our rights. The culture of freedom was undermined. The individual self-confidence and social trust that freedom depends upon, which freedom cannot exist without, was pummelled, day in, day out. We were educated to distrust others, to distrust ourselves. People are vectors of disease, the messaging went, not fellow citizens in the cause of the common good. Your friends, your neighbours, your colleagues, they will infect you. They’re bad for you, and you are bad for them. That was the propagandistic menace through which lockdown was maintained. Anyone who thinks that such weaponised distrust will not have consequences beyond the crisis itself is kidding themselves. You cannot sow suspicion, tear citizen from citizen and criminalise community life and then expect everything to be hunky-dory once you say: ‘Right, back to normal!’ The beast of fear is easy to unleash, but rather more difficult to heel.