1/ After reading @MichaelPSenger’s and Gen @robert_spalding ‘s, others’, brilliant letter to intel agencies abs police about China’s network of Western ‘lockdown’ enablers, plus seeing @BrianOSheaSPI ‘s powerful evidence about how China/Big Tech/Big Medical Data ally to profit...

2: from crippling Western ‘lockdowns’, I realize why this time has been so uneasy. We are witnessing ‘solutions’ that are Marxist or totalitarian and not Western. The West has a lot to answer for historically but we should not lose sight of what’s beautiful about free societies..

3/ and Western intellectual traditions. It should not be un-woke to value the Enlightenment, liberalism, scientific process, free speech, ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ and all the gorgeous legacies of Western humanism. Every society has things to treasure and cherish but now...

4/ more than ever we need to champion our traditions of individualism and human rights because we are being bombarded with Chinese Marxist/totalitarian messaging, bots and policies claiming that freedom is an infection and the state’s idea of ‘the good’ should subsume every ...

5/ individuals choice. National policy solutions for COVID are being presented in a very CCP sort of way: only ONE model, which is unwavering, illiberal and inhumane. If it weren’t for China’s capture of ‘lockdown’ policies, leaders in the West, we’d be having a Western response

6/ to this crisis. Dissent, argument, local experiments and solutions, free market solutions, some towns choosing to bring elderly meals at home if they sign to self-isolate by choice, others choosing to build more hospitals or open more outdoor classrooms do kids can take masks

7/ off, a million experiments in safe lifestyles as in other epidemics in the West — ie groups schooling kids together, groups of 30 say choosing to socialize and hang out together while keeping apart from others... elderly people living together after getting tested, rather than

8/ dying slowly alone in brutal isolation etc etc. there would not be shaming of those critical of ‘official’ pronouncements, a very CCP and in-Western idea. Even the language and cliches - ‘social distancing’ - sounds like Mao’s Little Red Book. Back when when we lived in the

9: free West, that would be called choosing to be respectful of others and use common sense. The immense disorientation and discomfort we feel is not just that there is a bad virus loose as there was in the HIV crisis, th, polio etc - it’s that we are being forced into a Chinese

10/ Communist thought process and ‘solution’ matrix in which there is only one ‘authority’, only one outcome for policy, and the bonds, ingenuity, and self determination of individual humans must be crushed. To hear that sociable Ireland is banning visitors or that Scotland,..

11/ which birthed the Enlightenment and much of its science, is issuing restrictions that HAVE no science or that New Yorkers aren’t allowed to innovate their own solutions for safe commerce, shows how we are being stripped of our cultures and Western ways of thinking - precious,

12/ liberal, quirky, individualistic, problem-solving, free, entrepreneurial ways of thinking, if w different flavors in Dublin, Glasgow or NYC - because all thought and every ‘solution’ is modeled on Beijing and coming down to many traitors in charge in the West, from Beijing.

13/ Last thought: our western liberal democracies were birthed in great pain and with great sacrifice. From monasteries that kept books safe in the early Middle Ages to Galileo’s trial to women burned for three centuries as witches, because they understood how to heal, to bloody

14/ revolutions in France and in the baby United States (and again bloodshed two days ago), to the centuries-long fight against the enslavement of Africans to the bloody revolutions in Europe against totalitarian monarchies in Europe in 1848, to the fight for suffrage for women..

15/ and the First World War to defend freedoms...the Spanish civil war... Second World War against fascism... reaction of communist intellectuals of my dad’s generation when they understood what Stalin was doing... the fight for civil rights, lgbtq rights...against Guantanamo..

16/ trials and trials to defend books from the censors from Lady Chatterley’s lover to Howl...people bled, they bled and died, for societies like the kind we in the West took for granted til March 2020. And now if we don’t wake up and understand and cherish and defend these ...

17/ freedoms, 600 years of struggles for a literate, humane, equal and free West — with all the mistakes acknowledged... in which there is a rule of law and your right to have basic self-determination, freedom to worship, bodily integrity and safety from the jackboot at the door

18/ will be gone, gone and unrecoverable. I give it three months before people forget what freedom even felt like it what its reflexes and rights are. And as those who have survived totalitarian societies try and try to warn us, there is something much, much worse than the worst

19/virus. And that is life in a totalitarian state. Don’t throw away what heroines and heroines lived. fought and died for 600 years to give you. Reject CCP ‘lockdown’ policies but also the clearly intentional and strategic crushing of Western liberal/humanist thought.