Aftermath of a scamdemic: "A terrible beauty is born"

Before I begin to address the hateful crusade of psychological terror and targeted demoralization that launched into full swing in March of 2020, I must, I am afraid, devote a bit of time to a potentially tiresome matter: namely, the issue of semantics.

It is certainly true that not a few sophistical hucksters tend to get quite opportunistically hung up on the question of word choice. They will employ rhetorical sleight of hand in an effort to confuse or befuddle their readers, and will generally behave with enormous intellectual dishonesty. I have no truck with such people, and have indeed severed ties with quite a few former friends or acquaintances who have behaved in this manner. It is impossible for me to respect such people, as it frankly galls me even to converse with them.

Suffice to say, then, I do not dwell on semantic issues here in anything resembling a frivolous or whimsical spirit.

Still, I find that I simply cannot abide the labels that are used to designate this subject. The commonly-employed designations, I find, either assume too much or too little, or worse, they tend to bestow implicit legitimacy to that which was, at its core, entirely illegitimate.

This is why I cannot abide calling the span of time in question "the Covid era" or just "Covid," a shorthand unthinkingly adopted by many. It is true that such a term may be technically appropriate, as "Covid-19" was the name of the postulated virus that authorities across the world used as a pretext for taking various draconian and tyrannical measures, which wound up crippling economies, bankrupting small businesses, destroying the livelihoods of so-called "non-essential" workers, and forcing huge swathes of the population-- most egregiously children-- into crippling and debilitating social isolation.

It strikes me, however, that referring to this period as "Covid" or "the Covid era," allows the petty tyrants a kind of undeserved rhetorical upper hand; that is, it grants their extremely dubious claims that a newly-minted upper-respiratory virus ought to be held responsible for all of the despicable shenanigans engaged in by the principalities and powers, with callous arrogance and utter disregard for ordinary people's financial, spiritual, and mental health.

I will also not refer to the time in question as "the Covid era" because I emphatically decline to give assent to the imposed hypothesis that there is, in fact, such a thing as "Covid-19." Given that the virus apparently cannot be isolated, and given that what has been sold as "the Covid test" is in fact no such thing; that is to say, the "Covid test" does NOT test for the presence of a discrete, unique viral organism labeled "Covid-19," since-- as was established above-- the virus cannot be isolated-- I therefore reject using the name of this ostensibly real, but never isolated, therefore never truly proven to exist, "virus" as a designation for the era.

Neither will I label it "the pandemic," (as in "during the pandemic" or "in the middle of the pandemic,") etc. That term "pandemic," lest anyone forget, was shamelessly bandied about by various disingenuous institutional mouthpieces and their paid-off social media "influencer" minions as a rhetorical weapon, through which they set out to attempt to bludgeon a captive population into compliant submission. One was made to believe that there was something uniquely terrifying about people finding themselves afflicted with upper respiratory distress, as if people hadn't in fact been getting coughs, fever, headaches, and nasal congestion for thousands of years.

Perhaps, technically speaking, the ostensible spread of this alleged virus-- if we grant for a moment that said virus actually exists-- could have satisfied the definition of what appointed "health experts" (cough, cough) call a "pandemic." Still and all, even if such such a definition adequately and accurately fulfilled the denotative conditions necessary to label what happened a "pandemic," the fact is that those who fetishized this term mined it for its connotative resonances; because the term sounds scary, it could be invoked in ways that were wholly inappropriate and indeed quite abusive. Carrying on about "the pandemic" enabled the officially-placed alarmists-- all of whom, without exception, were given a massive degree of attention by a cowed and compliant media and a generally intentionally misinformed populace-- to engage in shameless, skulduggerous scaremongering.

The connotative resonances of "pandemic," after all, are all unambiguously dire and alarm-inducing; upon hearing this word, one automatically imagines bodies piling up in the street, in every city, town, village, and secluded hamlet, all across the world (the prefix "pan" meaning everywhere, of course, and implying that there is no escape). The fact that previous alleged outbreaks deemed to be "pandemics," like SARS in 2002 and "swine flu" in 2009, didn't in the least precipitate the contrived campaign of panic, nor the effectual shutting down of the world which took place in 2020, doesn't in the least detract from the dishonest fearmongering engaged in by most of those who cynically invoked this term for maximum effect.

It will not do, then, to designate this period of time as "the Covid era" or "Covid" or "the time of the pandemic," for the reasons stated above. What, then, shall I call it?

It must be called something, because it was a deeply significant period of time. I cannot simply ignore it, much as I would like to, since to me it represents a series of events which I deeply, earnestly wish had never happened, so thoroughly disillusioning, disheartening, frustrating, and enraging has its effects been upon my consciousness. (I do not exaggerate here, and I am not in the least indulging in hyperbole, nor, I daresay, am I at all alone in holding this conviction.)

So what will I call this time period? I have alighted upon the term "scamdemic." It's a bit gimmicky, and not all that original, but I'm going to go with it anyway, because it seems to be the best rhetorical choice available. "Scamdemic" accurately designates the period of time in question while also evincing the proper perspective on the traumatic events of that startlingly recent era, in whose wake nearly everything familiar seems to have transformed. Indeed, as Yeats once famously put it, under similar cultural circumstances, "a terrible beauty" has been born.

The scamdemic indeed hit us like a massive psychic tidal wave, ravaging our collective consciousness. But the scamdemic did not just "happen." Rather, it was imposed from above, and those who sicced it on us are not indominable forces of nature. They are simply people.

People, that is, with names and addresses.

People who so far have not yet tasted the blade of justice for their egregious crimes against humanity.

(to be continued)

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist and Muze, as well as the soon-to-be published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.