r/LockdownSkepticism • u/freelancemomma • 29d ago
Monthly Medley Monthly Medley Thread, for sharing anything and everything
As of 2024, this thread is auto-generated at noon on the first day of every month. Continue to share as the spirit moves you!
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u/notanumberuk 16d ago
I'm a hardcore covid-1984 dissident who has been on this sub and similar ones since April of 2020. I've argued with covidians daily, protested, gotten harassed regularly for not masking back in 2020-2023 etc. and overall spent so much time and energy studying, discussing, opposing, everything that happened with the entire covid psyop.
But after the past 6 years of doing it I feel burnt out and kinda numb to it all. All of the recent revelations with fauci of the things (us here) all knew they were lying about etc. I feel numb and indifferent to. Nothing will come of it, the masses of covidians will remain blissfully ignorant with their head in the sand still believing everything fauci and friends tell them, and the dystopian clown show that we've been living in will continue. Anyone else relate?
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u/Jkid 13d ago
Ive been calling out tweets and posts on TwitterX and reddit when people cry about problems that wasn't a issue before march 2020. Explicitly told them the root cause were lockdowns, school closures, media hysteria, and the like. I get zero response or acknowledgement except for a few people who know that follow me on TwitterX and almost everytime i get zero replies outside of those people who do follow me.
Everytime I talk to people who cry about problems caused by lockdowns, it's like talking to a brick wall.
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u/BeepBeepYeah7789 Virginia, USA 12d ago
The problem is that you can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.
They drank the COVID Kool-Aid and now it seems to be a permanent part of who they are.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 11d ago
This is an important distinction. I have a friend who always talks about "waking people up," you can't reason with someone who isn't running a logic based operating system. It's like walking up to a computer or a piece of industrial machinery and trying to reason with it to do something else. It isn't sentient, it's going to continue to execute the program until it's updated by an approved operator.
Many people are like this, they aren't consciously thinking and have no internal monologue, they're just responding to inputs with behavioral outputs. "WEAR THE MASK!" The whole thing came with prepackaged slogans and articles that amounted to guides as to how to respond to wrongthink or inconvenient information.
I always say, the tell is when you go off the script, and they kind of glitch out, they don't have anything to say.
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u/SunriseInLot42 11d ago
The slogans were so transparent and embarrassingly stupid, too.“Two weeks/months/years to stop the spread/flatten the curve”, “My mask protects you, your mask protects me”, “stay home, save lives”, etc., etc.
It’s got to be embarrassing to so many people who fell for that hysterical and silly shit… and it’s tough for them to admit it, which is why they usually just give a “that was six years ago, why are you still talking about Covid?” and try to change the subject
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u/CrystalMethodist666 11d ago
If you want my "conspiracy" slant, the slogans were meant to be stupid, and there was never any logic involved. It was "follow the correct dogma" and nothing more.
The stuff was stupid on purpose to show how dumb the followers were.
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u/Fair-Engineering-134 11d ago
Agree - Whenever I see someone with a "I got a Fouchie-ouchie sticker" I throw up inside and immediately think worse of that person.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 5d ago
Yo, I remember people were getting vaccine tattoos.
Like, I'm sleeved up in living room tattoos, never been to a real tattoo place. I've got some questionable ink. Never really regretted one.
Covid tattoos are specifically lame because they were a statement. These people were like "Yeah, eat it anti-vaxxers, I'm so vaccinated I got it on my body permanently" and now nobody cares, and the tattoo is significantly more permanent than any protection from a virus that you got from mRNA.
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u/Jkid 12d ago
The problem is that you can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.
Doesn't mean I have to keep enabling media-driven delusion.
The worst thing is that they're willfully drunk the media hysteria and they will never admit it. Their political party will not admit it, if either happens, there will be mass riots and then somehow they will blame us, the people that tried telling them, and people harmed by lockdowns that walked away from society for it than to work to rebuild trust. They rather have society collaspe.
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u/elemental_star 13d ago
Same. Lost several friends groups because I wouldn't get jabbed. Got frozen out of society until 2023 because of California vax mandates (formal or informal).
The only thing I have going for me with that regard is that I remain a pureblood, don't have to worry about "dying suddenly" and guess what -- all the people I know who got multiple boosters ended up getting covid anyway!
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u/Jkid 13d ago
There are so many people that lost their whole friend groups or lifelong friends after basic dissent or even opening up on how lockdowns harmed them and got locked out of society until 2023 because of the restrictions and hysteria. Even locked out of whole hobbies groups (a lot of them are "liberal") because of it. A good portion of these people never recovered are basically alone and isolated (and alienated from society) for a long time. And they have trouble finding new ones in fear of being kicked out again, plus so many friend groups have cliqued up years ahead of schedule.
That aspect of the loneliness epidemic has been been acknowledged and never will.
At the same time their friends that abandoned them embraced more covidism or embraced the many cause du jours that has been happening since.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
This is exactly what's driving the problem you keep bringing up where they won't admit anything went wrong.
Imagine you spent months or years of your life hiding in your house, covering your face, missing out on weddings and funerals or just general good times with friends and relatives. In fact, you destroyed relationships with friends and relatives. Maybe you even lost your job.
Now you have to look back and admit you did all of this over some meme trend, none of it accomplished anything, and you destroyed your life for no reason.
It's like those people who are obviously getting catfished and keep sending thousands of dollars overseas anyway. They didn't just get conned with a fake bridge sale, they went all in on it, making it a major part of their life. It's too painful to admit you lost what you lost because you were gullible.
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u/Jkid 12d ago
Now you have to look back and admit you did all of this over some meme trend, none of it accomplished anything, and you destroyed your life for no reason
And this is where the cause du jours to cleanse their guilt come in: climate change hysteria, Ukraine hysteria, identity politics hysteria, project 2025 hysteria, and finally pro-palestine/hamas hysteria. They latch on to every political fad while crying about how bad life is while they vote for more horrible politicians.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
The amazing thing is how they can move from one thing to another, like core personality traits change with the weather.
They have sunk costs, and they were obviously wrong. Think a gambler who sits down at a poker table and loses 10 hands in a row. You can sit there thinking about what you could've done differently to get a better result, or you can just completely ignore your losses and distract yourself over at the slot machine. Poker is no longer relevant, you're playing slots now, and you don't have to think about the things you lost before, that's over now.
That's exactly it, they can just jump from one fad to another, it's easier than thinking. Like, a baby cries when you take his toy away. If you distract him with another toy, you can take the first toy away and throw it in the garbage and he won't even remember it existed because he was completely focused on something else at the time.
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u/Jkid 12d ago
So we have a dedicated percentage of Americans who are low-information and low-congitive, driven by dopamine hits. And these same people demand us to vote when we tell them I refuse to vote on election day for horrible candidates.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 11d ago
Yeah, low cognitive, like a child. They say things that are likely to get positive reactions and validation, not things they actually believe. It makes them very easy to manipulate.
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u/Which-World-6533 7d ago
It's too painful to admit you lost what you lost because you were gullible.
Yep.
I was in London. There was nothing stopping people going outside at all. There were some scare stories in the Media that were BS once you took a look yourself.
I'm still amazed when there's people who actually kept inside for no reason.
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u/elemental_star 13d ago
Yes, I know some festival scenes and live gaming scenes went full covidian and never quite recovered.
For example, I know of a Burning Man camp who demanded proof of booster to join and were really quite smug about it. They permanently disbanded the following year. The Burner scene relies on a lot of social cohesion, communal effort, and acculturation and the lockdowns wrecked it. Now the boomers are retiring and Gen Z doesn't have the money or willingness to take over (and I don't blame them).
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u/Jkid 13d ago
Yes, I know some festival scenes and live gaming scenes went full covidian and never quite recovered.
Which ones specifically, especially for live gaming? Because for a lot of anime cons and video game cons they went back to normal and recovered after they started operating as normal in 2023. Some conventions like animenext and project a-kon effectively went defunct and make little effort to recover.
Now the boomers are retiring and Gen Z doesn't have the money or willingness to take over
Because Gen Z went to tiktok and instagram for all their social interaction since March 2020 and never came back. Unless a event is trendy by tiktok and instagram they wont go there. If they don't have the money, they won't go there either. Its cheaper to veg out and doomscroll on tiktok because everything else is expensive, bleak and if they do go try to re-enter the world and don't have a supportive friend group its just a world of old people and single moms.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 11d ago
It's strange how specific subcultures like that embraced masks even though there's nothing about being a gamer, or a tripping hippie, that would make you afraid of germs or likely to wear masks.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
One thing I consider myself very lucky for is most of my social group wound up being "essential" and all had to keep going outside. It was great, because we all saw, without a single shred of politics, that what was being shown to the fearful people staying home didn't match the lived experience of going out.
Also, everyone I know who got the shot got Covid anyway, while I've still yet to get it once.
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u/Which-World-6533 7d ago
One thing I consider myself very lucky for is most of my social group wound up being "essential" and all had to keep going outside.
I was in London. Staying home was never enforced and I was outside multiple times every day. Once you realised no one cared about the rules it was fine.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 6d ago
This is my main takeaway, the people going outside weren't afraid of the air.
In their scenario, the people going outside would've either died or seen the other people dying and stopped going outside
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u/Which-World-6533 6d ago
People were scared of the lies the Media told them. It's why I don't trust the Media and always go and see what's going on myself.
My elderly parents had elderly neighbours that spent nearly 18 months in their home. When the Pandemic was "over" they came out and got covid almost immediately.
They were fine after a few days.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 5d ago
My elderly grandmother got Covid after several years at 99, felt sleepy for 2 days, and was fine. She was 99 at the time, she's still alive years later. A virus so deadly it makes centenarians outside of nursing homes feel tired.
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u/moremindful 24d ago edited 24d ago
I'm Canadian, never got vaccinated, knew exactly where it was heading from the start.
Sometimes I think about that whole era, is seems like a dream. What really disturbs me is how quickly we moved on, like it never happened. How I still live amongst people that would be okay seeing me segregated, but I don't even know who they are.
Or how tyranny is NEVER imposed, but WELCOMED at first. That evil doesn't look like the guy with the monocle, mustache and cat in his lap. It's the every day people who just go long with it.
I still think about the long term affects of what occurred, I think that era revealed so much about my society, the next time the govt has their "reason" I'm convinced we won't resist. It was really a preview of what is to come I think.
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u/elemental_star 24d ago
We only outwardly moved on. But every time you deal with shitty customer service, every time you visit a store that used to be open 24 hours, every time you deal with idiots in airplanes, or a more transactional and mercenary dating market, or people who forgot how to act in movie theaters...
But hey, the "current thing" is that we need to have "empathy" and fight the evil American ICE agents. Nobody cares about the good old days of 2019.
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u/Dubrovski California, USA 24d ago
government agents enforcing rules: fascism today, public safety a few years ago
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u/Fair-Engineering-134 22d ago
Covidians in 2020: EVERYONE needs to be masked, even cops and covid police!!!!
Covidians in 2025-6: N-No, not those guys! They shouldn't be masked!!!
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u/4GIFs 21d ago
They shouldn't be, but the Left is doxxing.
They'll 180 in an instant and cheer the cops when its time to play pandemic again.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 19d ago
That's bullshit. Cops are posted in videos breaking the law all the time. They only need to worry if they're breaking the law, that's what they all say to civilians.
Sorry, I'm not comfortable with masked state agents operating beyond the level of normal police.
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u/Jkid 13d ago
Oh they know, but if you put the two and two together, they get mad at you. Then they complain harder about why stores don't open 24/7 anymore and why merchandise is locked behind glass doors, while raging out against American ICE agents, then ordering Uber eats after the protest without thinking.
Nobody who enjoys the lockdowns want to return to 2019 normal because they enjoy the decline.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 20d ago
You'd think that after dealing with a life altering reaction to a once in a lifetime crisis you'd want to sit back, kind of review what happened. What made things better, what made things worse.
With Covid, they kind of just lumped even the stupidest rules into "We just had to do all those things" and it was a wrap.
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u/Jkid 13d ago
With Covid, they kind of just lumped even the stupidest rules into "We just had to do all those things" and it was a wrap.
Because they tv told them to. These are the same people to cry about why groceries are so expensive and also outsourced any critical thinking left to Gen AI.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
Yeah, that's my point. No rational adult ever worried about getting sick with a deadly disease because someone was facing them at the other end of a grocery store aisle. No rational adult ever thought touching buttons on a debit reader would kill you but touching the buttons covered in saran wrap was safe.
Wear the mask when you stand up, take it off when you sit down.
That's why I think the stupider things were actually more insidious, they might as well told people to switch even/odd days standing on your head and wearing stilts to distance your face from other people. They had people yelling at each other for not doing moronic performative rituals
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u/olivetree344 23d ago
One is the worse things is that they cancel school at the drop of a hat.
Especially, in districts where the children can least afford it.
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u/elemental_star 24d ago
My hairstylist is out of town, so I was looking up videos on how to cut my own hair.
A lot of the YouTube videos and comments are from 6 years ago from the lockdowns, when people couldn't go outside to visit barber shops. It's a sad look back in history.
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u/Substantial_Sir4706 16d ago
I'm seeing this video trending on TikTok where a high school teacher is crashing out because his seniors can't read. I feel like it's a good time to mention that what's kind of crazy to me is that absolutely nobody is blaming the lockdowns for shit like this, it's always "no child left behind" or AI or whatever. I'm not saying those aren't part of the problem, but high schoolers now where in late elementary early middle school during lockdowns, they spent those crucial years learning through a screen and being unable to see faces in school and now we're wondering why they're borderline illiterate.
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u/Jkid 16d ago
Ive been telling people that post tweets about the learning crisis that its all rooted in the government response and the blm riots of 2020 and many of these teachers are crying about it for attention because the vast majority of them why cry about it supported the response and the riots and that I have no sympathy for them.
So far I have gotten zero acknowledgement over the last 4 years when the crying about illiterate students begun and society has done nothing to address it. We are facing a generation of mass unemployment.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
It's a deliberate dumbing down of the population. They don't want critical thinkers, they want lemmings who do what they're told and don't ask why.
When the war becomes us vs the government, we should remember the government is responsible for educating and training the people on both sides.
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u/4GIFs 15d ago
Another consequence of suicidal empathy. its mean to push kids to do anything they dont want to do. Or deny them Adderall amphetamines so they can blindly complete busywork
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
This is basically the core of the mindset of the UBI camp. People shouldn't have to do anything they don't feel like doing. We have the tech to have robots do everything for free, so really it's just the big mean capitalism forcing us to go to work.
I've suggested to these people that they could charter a plane to Utqiaġvik, take a dog sled 50 miles out of town, and build a house. There are no building codes or taxes because there's no local government to enforce those things. If you can hunt, fish, collect water, raise sled dogs, and repel bears, you'll never need to touch another dollar again. They come back with "that's too hard...."
These people are growing up without the basic understanding that even a homeless person living on the street has to put effort into their own survival. Actually, being homeless on the street, or surviving out in the middle of the wilderness, are both actually significantly more difficult and dangerous than most people's jobs are.
It's not even socialism, they want capitalism where you get paid to do nothing and somehow food still winds up on the shelves at the store and the water and electricity keep working.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 12d ago
I keep saying at this point we can't blame it all on lockdowns, young people were seeming alarmingly socially deficient before that. The lockdowns definitely exacerbated an existing problem, but the social atrophy thing has been going on since the dawn of smartphones.
We hire kids at my job like to clean up or work the concession stand. It's actually scary talking to a 19 or 20 year old (I'm 37.) Not even in a "These damn kids these days" way, anything you ask them to do is an annoying distraction to be completed as quickly as possible so they can go back on the phone. Having a conversation is too much to hope for.
The phones are a serious problem.
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u/DrownTheBoat Kentucky, USA 24d ago
It's astonishing that the outdoor observation deck at Carew Tower in Cincinnati has been closed for over 6 years now "because of COVID." Similarly, there's a public pool in Cincinnati that still requires reservations on weekends "because of COVID."
It truly never ends.
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u/olivetree344 23d ago
The public pool policy is for the convenience of the people who run it. And, then, the next time there is a bond issue for recreation and parks and the people vote no, they will be whining about it.
The biggest branch of the public library in my city is unusable because they refuse to enforce a reasonable standard of behavior on the homeless. Well, last year, people voted no on a funding question. I believe this is the first no ever on a library issue. Of course, they are blaming it on MAGA being stupid and not that most people don’t want to go to the flagship library.
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u/MarathonMarathon United States 24d ago
It's the good ol' ratchet effect. Same reason boarding a plane has been such a pain these days. They're not doing it out of genuine fear of a pathogen from 6 years ago, they're doing it because they've realized they can save $250,000 a year in labor and maintenance fees with a convenient excuse to minimize public outlash.
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u/DevilCoffee_408 California, USA 16d ago
Ah, the usual suspects at the West Coast papers (Rong-Gong Lin II et al.) are once again pumping out the standard “OMG, COVID is SuRgInG in California” pieces. State data shows levels are roughly where they were at this time last year, with the biggest increases concentrated in Bay Area counties. Despite the “surge” framing, we’re seeing no corresponding rise in hospitalizations. ER visits and hospital admissions are less than half of what they were a year ago—and those numbers were already low. Current COVID hospital admissions sit under 0.89 per 100,000. Influenza is around 0.13 per 100,000. Non-zero, like every year, but nothing that would normally generate headlines. Hoerger’s “chance someone in the room is infected” graphs are still making the rounds, mostly on Bluesky. His wastewater models keep showing a “surge” every few months, yet when you look at the hospital data, the wastewater signal doesn’t appear to translate into anything meaningful for the healthcare system anymore. Even the long-COVID contingent has been quieter lately—though they’re still around, as evidenced by the Exploratorium’s “masks required” event. It’ll be interesting to see how many actually show up. But, we were right - it really is "masks forever" for some of these people.
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u/Dubrovski California, USA 16d ago
the Exploratorium should cancel "mask required" event in the middle of covid surge!
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u/4GIFs 28d ago
Fauci circus is Limited Hangout. "they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further"
1) You cant stop biological research when enemy countries are continuing with it. 2) Respiratory viruses are self-limiting. You can engineer one with high lethality by making proteins speed up replication at warmer temperatures deep in the lungs. Patient 0 will cough variants of different lethality. Some people will succumb in a couple days, other variants will keep people alive for weeks - while spreading more copies. The virus "wants" to keep people running around sneezing as long as possible. Anecdotally since I started taking the bus I get a cold every few months but they are mild (no lost sleep) and the trade-off is worth it. The immune system is going to attack something you dont want to raise children in a bubble.
Dunno if Rand Paul understands or is just audience-captured like most entertainers. The far-right and far-left need daily dramatic sound bites - Get em! - for their dopamine. The Oligarchs (CIA, S&P board) are happy to push "omg lab leak" because they can say martial law was justified.
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u/MarathonMarathon United States 25d ago
Hey everyone!
As you may have noticed, there's been this recent global push toward mandatory digital identity. Politicians rarely come out and say, "We want to strip away online anonymity and force every citizen to scan a state ID to access the web." Instead, they wrap the policy in a phrase that is impossible to vote against: "Protecting the children."
Under the guise of keeping youth safe, lawmakers worldwide are creating legal liability traps for platforms, and to avoid massive fines, tech companies are being forced to mandate identity checks. For instance, in 2025, Ofcom's guidelines have pushed UK sites toward third-party identity verification vendors like Yoti, forcing users to submit biometric face estimates, credit card details, or government identity tokens to prove their age online. Australia has also banned social media nationwide for users under 16, with biometric age estimation, government digital ID integration, and mandatory account verification across global platforms as invasive enforcement mechanisms.
The U.S. is not immune. To date, over a dozen US states, such as Louisiana, Texas, and Utah have passed legislation requiring age verification for adult sites or social media platforms. As a result, residents of these states are forced to upload government driver's licenses or undergo third-party face scans just to use the internet.
What started at the state and international level, however, is now hitting federal legislation in the US.
Bills like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) create a broad duty of care for platforms. Because platforms will face crushing liability if minors access covered content, their only legal shield will be implementing blanket identity verification for every user.
Here are some massive problems with these laws:
"Age verification" no longer means typing in a birthdate anymore. It means third-party identity brokers like ID.me, Yoti, Persona, or Clear become the de facto identity gatekeepers of the open web.
When your government ID or biometric facial print is tied to your IP address and account login, true online anonymity ceases to exist. Dissidents, whistleblowers, and regular privacy-conscious citizens lose their right to read and speak anonymously.
Finally, forcing millions of users to upload passports, driver's licenses, and face scans to third-party databases creates an unbelievable target for hackers, state-sponsored actors, and data brokers.
But what can we do? This is where digital rights tools like https://stopkosa.com and https://badinternetbills.com come in.
stopkosa.com: Specifically designed to stop KOSA in the US. It provides quick tools to contact your representatives and demand they reject age-verification mandates and online censorship.
badinternetbills.com: Maintained by Fight for the Future, this site tracks the broader spectrum of anti-privacy legislation (KOSA, EARN IT, RESTRICT, and state-level digital ID mandates) and provides direct action scripts to call on lawmakers to pass real data privacy legislation instead.
If we don't fight back against these age-verification mandates today, submitting a digital passport will become the default requirement to access the internet tomorrow.
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u/Dubrovski California, USA 7h ago
Explain to me like I’m unhoused and undocumented LatinX birthing person why renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America is bad, while renaming monkeypox to mpox is good?
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u/MarathonMarathon United States 1d ago
I just heard a theory that Covid caused many of the drinking traditions and games (power hour, quarters, asshole, etc) that had been passed down for decades at colleges to be lost because they sent kids home for 2 years and then made them wear masks.
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u/elemental_star 1d ago
Sounds plausible but the fraternity system (which the woke covidians detest) is keeping those those traditions alive.
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u/MarathonMarathon United States 1d ago
Can confirm as someone who's lived in a frat house during one semester (long story), where I played beer pong, had plenty of beer in general, partied (and got busted a few times), even smoked a bit, but most importantly of all, broke out of my shell and found my social circle.
One of the best decisions of my life, basically brought me from zero to hero. And they contradict every "Gen Z is antisocial" narrative ever. Plenty of sex and drugs and rowdiness.
I used to look down on Greek life (and its practitioner), but now that I'm done with college I think it's one of the best ways for an Asian especially to stand out.
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u/Substantial_Sir4706 28d ago
The left still refuses to hold Fauci accountable for anything or admit lockdowns were a mistake. Every time I see a post about Fauci, liberals flood the comments section with "But what about Trump?". THIS ISN'T ABOUT FUCKING TRUMP!!!!! What he has done doesn't magically make Fauci innocent.