… turned the West totalitarian.

How China did it is explained very well by Michael P. Senger at Tablet:

“Lockdowns” –  the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people – have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?

Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of press conferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.

The world has been fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that transforms the world into China. But if the national security community has noticed this bizarre development, they haven’t said so. Instead, their preoccupation has remained largely unchanged since February 2020. Insiders have confirmed that by spring 2020 the national security community was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was a supervirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, explaining why many supported lockdowns. Yet the key pieces of information that gave rise to the lab leak theory were the videos of Wuhan residents suddenly falling dead, the contrived tale of heroic whistleblower Li Wenliang, and Xi Jinping’s apparent success locking down Wuhan, the city with the lab in it.

One national security official after another has claimed to know the virus came from the Wuhan lab, even as the underlying intelligence information has changed little. If these officials are as confident as they claim to be, great !It does not change the fact that Covid’s average infection fatality rate (IFR) across all age groups is under 0.24%. It’s long past time to address the more concerning question to which the rest of the public has long since moved on: why governments across the world have copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19.

One by one, governments of the world imported China’s totalitarian lockdown measures. Neil Ferguson [of Imperial College, London] , whose series of alarmist, wildly inaccurate models fueled lockdowns around the world, recalled how China’s example had inspired him:

I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March … It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could … If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.

In the U.K. Government’s official Coronavirus Action Plan from March 3, 2020, discussing social distancing, school closures, and rapid COVID test and vaccine development, nearly every source the U.K. government cited was from China. All the measures outlined in New Zealand’s official COVID-19 Elimination Strategy document—“physical distancing” “widespread testing” “surveillance”—were adopted from China based on the reported success of the CCP’s Wuhan lockdown. The New Zealand Department of Health deleted this document from their website one day after it received widespread attention on Twitter, after having been posted there for over a year.

In Germany, the federal government commissioned a confidential strategy paper “based on the scientific findings of expert teams from the University of Bonn/University of Nottingham Ningbo China” containing a “catalog of measures” to be implemented by Germany’s CDC, later obtained upon FOIA request by Germany’s independent Corona Committee. The strategy paper outlined, in detail, the steps to implement lockdowns, mass testing, and quarantine facilities, among other draconian measures. The paper specifically suggested “appeals to the public spirit” including two words that would soon become a worldwide propaganda slogan during the COVID-19 crisis: “together apart.”

Of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails that led to the publication of the German strategy paper, 118 pages were blacked out entirely. The emails contain frequent discussion of China, but nearly all of these references are redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”

One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed. The Dutch government knowingly took a course of action that would cause health damage—let alone economic damage—six times worse for the Dutch people, out of a concern for optics.

Based on WHO guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, doctors around the world began putting patients on ventilators en masse, killing thousands before a grassroots campaign stopped the practice. Based on the WHO’s guidance on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are false positives, as confirmed by The New York Times.

The WHO’s PCR guidance was paired with new international ICD-10 codes for COVID deaths to make COVID-19 quite possibly the deadliest accounting fraud of all time. According to this coding guidance, if a decedent had either tested positive or been in contact with anyone who had, within several weeks prior to their death, then the death should be classified as a COVID-19 death. The result was a terrifying number of supposed “COVID-19 deaths” that bore little relation to the number of “excess deaths” in a given year, even in states and countries that employed few lockdown measures. This absurd number of “COVID-19 deaths” has been used to rationalize any manner of devastation caused by governments’ response to COVID-19—from bankruptcies and mental health crises to deaths from lockdowns themselves.

What’s transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative. The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments. Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP’s narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP’s policies. Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.

Articles from March 10, 2020, illustrate how media outlets adopted China’s narrative in unison. “How China Slowed Coronavirus: Lockdowns, Surveillance, Enforcers,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “Those containment efforts do appear to have been successful, with the number of new cases slowing to a trickle in recent weeks,” CNN admired. “Xi asserts victory on first trip to Wuhan since outbreak … China’s epidemic statistics suggest that its efforts have been effective,” trumpeted The Washington Post. “The World Health Organization has praised Beijing’s response … ‘This epidemic can be pushed back,’ Dr. Tedros said, ‘but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government,’” The New York Times repeated.

For journalists, indulging the fiction that China controlled the virus appears to have begun as a little white lie—a little something in exchange for all those goodwill seminars and ad placements. It was silly, of course, but what harm could that do?

The snowball effect of this little white lie, that China had controlled the virus, was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. One after another, they fell victim to their own collective propaganda. Global media outlets legitimized a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies. Within months, they’d begun to sound like foaming-at-the-mouth communists, their every word dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate China.

“The U.S. has absolutely no control over the coronavirus. China is on top of the tiniest risks,” The Washington Post gushed. “The verdict is in,” Politico ruled, “China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.” “U.S. Says Virus Can’t Be Controlled. China Aims to Prove It Wrong,” The New York Times admired. “China beat the coronavirus with science and strong public health measures, not just with authoritarianism,” the Conversation lectured. “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,” The New York Times suggested. “China eradicated COVID-19 within months. Why won’t America learn from them?” Salon whined.

It’s hard to think of many things worse than marching the world toward totalitarianism out of embarrassment for failing to prevent the world’s march toward totalitarianism. But sadly, embarrassment and denial appear to be the primary motivations of world leaders today. From the courts to intelligence agencies to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretenses, and whether those policies actually work.

Everything since “15 days to slow the spread”—from the fear propaganda to the masks to the school closures and vaccine passes—has been a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of the insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real.

Read the rest, read it all here.

China has outwitted the West. Wrecked the economies of nations. Made us poorer, afraid, and less free.