email from Tom Woods:
"It's been so rare over the past 14 months to encounter someone who looks back on the madness and says, "I was wrong."

Well, today I want to share some honesty with you, courtesy of @angrybklynmom on Twitter.

I think you'll appreciate it.

I have to make some confessions. Last year, I was absolutely insane and I was one of those people who yelled at people outside for not wearing a mask. It wasn't actually the virus that I was afraid of, but the lockdowns.

I was so deeply psychologically damaged from the NYC lockdown in the spring that I lived in perpetual terror of it happening again. Cuomo spent the entire summer and fall threatening and browbeating us for our "bad behavior" and I deeply internalized this message.

I remember screaming at my neighbors and telling them that if they didn't put on a mask, they were going to face my wrath if my kids' school was closed. At one point, Cuomo put us into an arbitrary microcluster and we escaped closed schools by only a few blocks.

I spent the entire school year watching every stupid metric and desperately trying to get three steps ahead of Cuomo. I was very lucky that my children's (Catholic) school was never closed. One child had two quarantines (and one was over a break). We got incredibly lucky.

To be clear, I never supported the lockdowns. I thought they were an abomination. Pure psychological torture. Masks felt like the compromise to keep us out of lockdown, and I got angry when everyone wouldn't comply to keep us out of lockdown.

If you go back and watch Cuomo's briefings, the threat of closures (dependent on our behavior!) was a daily phenomenon. And when they happened, they were metric-free, indefinite in nature, arbitrary and capricious. Completely at the whim of one man, and one man only.

After her thread went viral, she clarified a few things:

The reason I wasn't as personally concerned about the actual virus as I was about the lockdowns is that I felt confident that I knew how to protect my family; data already showed the severe age stratification.

But lockdowns were something completely out of our control. We opened the door to something new and nefarious: (inept) governmentts having 100% power over their citizens' doings, with fear as a powerful motivator for compliance. My fear was that we might never fully claw back that power.

I had no trust in our government's competence, nor in its ability to put the well-being of citizens ahead of their own aspirations and desire for power. I had no trust that they were consulting the right experts, or were effectively leveraging the data to make informed decisions....

It shouldn't need to be explicitly stated that it's not sustainable (or humane) to demand people sacrifice time with loved ones, education, livelihood, and socialization for months on end, or even YEARS. Yet, this was/is unapologetically the expectation in many parts of the US.

To this day, this is still an expectation in some areas, even after having a year+ worth of data from restricted vs open states proving that these profound sacrifices are not correlated with better viral outcomes.

There are plenty of awful things that were done to us in 2020 whose effects we can measure. But it's impossible to quantify the consequences of tearing the social fabric and pitting people against each other in a ludicrous contest to see who better obeyed the useless measures the government imposed.

Family relationships and long-term friendships have been strained or even destroyed, all because of this foolishness.

There are some aspects of society that will go back to normal. But this, well, it only deepens the already profound divide in our country.

And as I mentioned yesterday, who isn't looking to the future with apprehension at this point? I remember complaining about the state of the country ten years ago, but I'd take 2011 in a heartbeat now.

Whether it's Big Tech suppressing dissident voices (i.e., yours and mine), or vaccine passports, or skyrocketing spending and debt, or civil liberties violations, or an education system designed to indoctrinate the kiddos, it's pretty rough out there.

So when the makers of a new docuseries called Endgame asked if I'd like to be interviewed on these topics, and what people should do about them, I jumped at the chance.

They're making the documentary available for free to anyone who registers in advance. After that, they'll be selling it.

I'm hopeful that if I'm able to bring them some viewers, maybe they'll have the old man here back again sometime.

My readers and I have loved their previous documentaries (on wine, pain management, money, and other topics), and I feel sure you'll enjoy this one, which wrestles with the very problems you and I face right now, as we look with trepidation toward an uncertain future. Please sign up to watch for free:

http://www.tomwoods.com/endgame

Tom Woods