By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The Covid era cut through traditional ideological paradigms like knives on tissue. Nothing behaved as we might have expected. The civil libertarians were nowhere in sight. The courts did not work. Big business and media fully cooperated. The major religions caved. The national security state thrived, while both parties let it all happen. The population was mercilessly propagandized and pillaged with no resistance from the commanding heights.

Seemingly out of nowhere, pharmaceutical companies revealed themselves as more powerful than any industrial monopoly in human history, capable of shutting down the entire world in order to panic people into consuming their product.

As for the old distinctions between the public and private sectors, they melted away. The state did not save us from large corporations and the top layers in commercial society did not save us from the state. They worked together to strangle the liberty of everyone else. Which was the hand and which was the glove was unclear throughout.

As for the politicians, they were almost entirely useless, fearful only to save their own lives and careers, shovel money to their constituents, and otherwise hide under their sofas.

For the entire period, the protections we all assumed were there for our rights and liberties vanished, to be replaced by surveillance, censorship, mandates, subsidies, penalties, subterfuge, duplicity, deception, fake science, and nonstop psyops from agencies, media, influencers, medical associations, and screaming hacks from all corners. They recruited gendarmes from within the population to demand compliance and demonize non-compliance. Yes, it was Orwell come to life.

On the other hand, it was a learning experience. It sets up those who care about freedom to reframe the argument and re-understand both the threats and the answers in a different way than before, one that is more realistic. The powers that be showed their hand, revealed their goals, and tested out their dystopian plans. The schemes are still with us but at least we know now what they are and what we might do about them.

With some benefit of hindsight, and lessons learned from having lived through this, here is a suggested reframing of a pro-freedom outlook and agenda.

1. The Problem of Poisoning

We did not know it in the Spring of 2020 - though many OGs had their suspicions - that the lockdowns and ridiculous non-pharmaceutical interventions were all structured to pave the way for the pharmaceutical interventions. It was all about the vaccine all along, which is why the Great Barrington Declaration panicked the elites. It spoke of endemicity through natural immunity. The powers that be wanted only one solution, the shot, which is also why they took proven therapeutics off the market.

The driving engine of this industrial project was the pharmaceutical companies and their new toy: mRNA shots. Untested, experimental, and dangerous, they held out huge potential for infinitely scalable distribution. Covid was the industry's chance to gain a foothold since the technology had not previously been approved.

The emergency provided the pretext to unleash the product on the population. No, it did not fix the problem and it caused unprecedented injury and death but an industrial taboo had been broken. Now the essential work is to normalize it and apply it ever more broadly as the fix for every malady.

Watching this unfold, other sectors have come under suspicion such as the food supply. Agriculture is similarly afflicted with chemicalization via cartels, including industrial pesticides for which the industry is currently seeking legal immunity for harms caused.

Patented products for fertilizers and genetically modified seeds are without precedent in the history of farming, even as traditional methods are legally deprecated and prohibited. We are once again being treated as lab rats in their experiments. The partisans of whole foods, raw milk, free-...