By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.

Several incidents in the Covid pandemic's first two years forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality that American society had cracked apart, fleeing the comfort and safety of accepted knowns to float untethered from logic in a foreign ether far from planet Earth. Welcome to Mars.

But prior incidents had already trained and prepared my mind to expect a coming derangement. During the Persian Gulf War and the Northridge Earthquake, I had near-death experiences that lingered for years in memory, forever shaping my future actions. Just as scary as thinking I was about to die were the frightening behaviors I witnessed in those around me. During the Gulf War, a soldier in my division came across an Iraqi mine. Instead of calling for engineers to destroy the device, he decided to flip it away from himself, blowing off his own head. After the 1994 earthquake stopped shaking my condo so hard the refrigerator fell over and the walls seemed close to caving in, I stepped outside to smell gas leaking from the major pipeline that ran beneath our complex and a nervous neighbor lighting a cigarette to calm his nerves.

Terrified someone we couldn't see might be lighting up a smoke elsewhere in the condo complex, my roommates and I fled for safety, driving through a surreal cityscape of gas line fires, while I rode in the backseat with a loaded pistol.

Both wars and natural disasters upend the laws and rules that govern our normal existence. Experience has taught me that such tectonic shifts in society's rules leave many unprepared to adapt and navigate a new ecosystem. My safety and survival, I've learned, sometimes depend on putting my back against a wall to watch those around me whose thinking refuses to acclimate.

The rules are changing dramatically, I posted on Facebook, back in the summer of 2020. And some people won't be able to adapt. You're gonna see people you have long trusted and respected lose their absolute minds, drop trou and show the whole world their entire ass. Be careful.

I knew crazy was coming. I did not expect that craziness to destroy so much trust in our government, media, and social institutions.

How "Follow the Science" Destroyed Trust in Science

Journalist David Zweig documents much of the Covid pandemic craziness in his book An Abundance of Caution. In diligent detail, he marches the horrified reader through a series of mistakes, most still unacknowledged, including the lack of scientific evidence for lengthy school closures and nonsensical "follow the science" requirements for masks and social distancing. The details he describes remain frightening because too many still deny what happened and refuse to admit they did anything wrong.

The month after the pandemic took off in the West, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a February 2020, summary of Chinese data and found just 2 percent of Covid patients were less than 19 years old and no children younger than 10 had died. "Disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild," Zweig discovers, digging up a World Health Organization (WHO) report published that same month.

Just like the study in JAMA, WHO researchers stated that children accounted for around 2 percent of reported cases, with only 0.2 percent of children categorized as "critical disease." This calculates to 0.0048 percent of the total population who became seriously ill.

People interviewed by the WHO investigative team "could not recall episodes in which transmission occurred from a child to an adult."

Despite research showing that kids were at minimal risk from the virus, Zweig records what we all now know: we ignored objective science in favor of subjective values, locked down our cities, shut down our schools, and threw the kids on laptops pretending they would learn. Baseless fears that children were dying in large numbers lingered even six months into the pandemic, long after anyone with eyes could see the virus wasn'...