911 and the Scamdemic
Mark Oshinskie

Last week, I was talking with three people about the Scamdemic. One said that, given government’s and media’s plainly dishonest and strategic orchestration of an extreme viral overreaction over the past 54 months, nearly any conspiracy—past, present or future—seemed at least remotely possible.

None of us disagreed with that dark notion. For those who apprehended the Covid Scam, any prior faith they had in the government and media has been broken.

This now-permanent scam alert derives both from the top/down and the bottom/up. Not only have governments and the media brazenly revealed their willingness to deceive and manipulate the populace, the masses have reciprocally shown their gullibility and passivity. If, five years ago, you had told me that hundreds of millions of Americans would freak out over a respiratory virus that threatened only a tiny fraction of the very sick and old and would not only accept, but aggressively support, lockdowns, school closures, masks, testing/tracing, shots and mandated experimental shots, I would have waved my hand and derisively dismissed your prediction.

I would have been wrong.

Post-Scamdemic, the plainly visible, unholy alliance of Democrat politicians and media, combined with popular credulity and passivity during an extreme disruption of everyday life, potentiates and portends a wide array of additional, government-driven scams. Though a minority have seen and admitted they’ve been had, I doubt there are enough Covid-forged skeptics to successfully oppose the next, “novel” crisis. Hearing recent news snippets and people I know continue to justify the NPIs and shots, it feels as if the American government and media are Lucy and the public is Charlie Brown, ready to kick a disappearing football again. And again.

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The 9/11 incidents occurred 23 years ago last week. For weeks, months and years thereafter, news watchers heard ceaselessly about a cadre of shadowy Saudi Al Qaeda operatives who conducted mass killings at the behest of some furtive, evil mastermind named Osama bin Laden. Labels like “Ground Zero” and “heroes” and slogans such as “If you stay home, the terrorists win” were repeated ad nauseam.

Analogously, during the Scamdemic, news consumers heard non-stop about a “novel virus,” “Doctor Anthony Fauci,” “spiking cases,” an “heroes,” but this go-round with the opposite exhortation to “Stay home, save lives!” Every publicized crisis has its formulaic buzzwords, slogans, villains and heroes; though the 9/11 firemen seemed more heroic than were the TikTok-dancing Covid nurses.

Just as some people say viruses don’t exist, some 9/11 skeptics questioned if jet-piloting terrorists killed office workers. I watch very little TV and consume very little legacy print/screen news. I question the small amount of news that I see or read; the content is plainly designed to mislead. Sometimes, the media lies outright. More often, they withhold the truth and refuse to ask obvious questions.

I still believe viruses exist. Seeing normally healthy family members fall ill consecutively, and only briefly, on several occasions has been persuasive. I suspect that the vast majority of those said to have been killed by the latest virus really died from other causes. I never thought a respiratory virus was so dangerous that it justified locking down a society. Not even for two weeks, nor even one day. We had never locked down before.

In comparison, I believe that, on 9/11, many vital people had decades stolen from them and that these victims’ families and friends suffered profound losses. But after the government and media’s Scamdemic conduct, I’m not sure who caused the 9/11 deaths. I’m now willing to consider the possibility that 9/11 was some kind of inside job with an ulterior motive.

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Aside from the above-noted differences between 9/11 and the Covid responses, I see at least three common themes.

To illustrate the first, here’s an excerpt of my 9/11 memory:

That morning, I walked, in perfect weather, twelve minutes from the train station to my Trenton office. Shortly after 9:00, I tried to call someone but found my phone line dead. I asked a co-worker what was up. She said some small plane—a Cessna type—had crashed into one of the buildings and the antenna on top had been damaged.

The news soon sharply worsened and created an office stir.

One of my colleagues, a Harvard grad, declared he was going home because our nine-story building was the tallest structure between New York City and Philadelphia and, in his mind, a potential target for a weaponized plane. I was sure he was overthinking the situation. Aside from Trenton seeming very unlike a strategic target, there were two residential towers twice as high as our building right across the street. I said so.

Nonetheless, my colleague embraced the illusion of Life During Wartime. Whether discussing terrorism or a virus, people like to consider themselves victims, or potential victims. Victimhood has become engrained in our culture via news coverage and book, TV and movie plots, and institutionalized in intersectionalism studies and DEI programs that afford preferences based on demographic characteristics, even when those classified as victims have been comparatively privileged. It feels good to perceive oneself as an underdog, surviving against the odds.

Hypochondria and exaggerated personal risk, as during Covid, are forms of appropriated victimhood. If you can’t be an actual victim, you can at least see yourself as a potential victim. Feeling like a potential victim is much easier than being an actual victim; potential victims don’t actually have to suffer.

These numbers were the only statistics one needed to confirm that the one-size-fits-all Covid reaction was a scam. These figures comported with what I and every one of the many people I asked were directly observing: no remotely healthy person under 90 was dying from The Virus. Only a tiny fraction were dying with it.

Nonetheless, during Coronamania, many people eagerly characterized themselves as at grave viral risk. A PhD/jogger/medical researcher I know asserted that he would certainly die if he got Covid because he had some seemingly mild form of asthma. I heard others at very low risk express similar, overstated fears.

Those healthy and under 65—i.e., the vast majority of the population—faced functionally zero risk. They shouldn’t have been restricted, or restricted themselves, in any way.

Those over 65 were repeatedly told, and most believed, that they had crossed some distinctly perilous threshold and were at greatly elevated risk of dying from a respiratory virus. This was false. Even between 65 and 75, 99.88% of reasonably healthy people survived the virus. Only about .12% of the population should rationally see themselves in the bottom .12% of any demographic.

Those declaring potential victimhood didn’t know that the official death tolls were greatly exaggerated. Of the legions whose 2020 deaths were falsely, opportunistically attributed to Covid, many were really caused by medical mistreatment: ventilators, powerful sedatives and kidney-impairing antivirals.

The Covid fearful failed to take basic biology into account: with each passing year, the bodies of those over 60 wear down and develop health problems that incrementally raise their risks of dying from a variety of causes. At advanced ages, death becomes slightly more likely, virus or no virus. Actuarially, it makes incrementally less sense each year to restrict one’s movements, simply to avoid infection. Seize the day. Go as hard as you can for as long as you can.

Moreover, peoples’ baseline health at any given age often varies compared to their same-aged peers. Many healthy people lumped their risk in with same-age people who were in markedly worse baseline health, i.e., those with multiple comorbidities. Laying claim to peril allowed many to self-identify as potential victims and thereby added desired drama to their lives and provided an excuse to “work from home” or avoid contact with unpreferred others.

Secondly, New York City has long held sway over American culture. NYC was Ground Zero not only for 9/11 but also for Covid deaths. In 2020, much of the US locked down in reaction to what was said to be happening in distant NYC. 

Some of NYC’s death stats were quite dubious. Instead of climbing gradually, as one might reasonably expect, NYC Covid deaths reportedly jumped, within a few weeks, from zero to 5,000/week. These death tolls were way out of proportion even with deaths in a tightly packed, three-state Metropolitan area, through which millions move daily. And if NYC’s Covid death surge stats was real, how did the city process 700 extra dead bodies per day? Or was there little to no excess death during that time? Were the vast majority of ostensible NYC Covid deaths actually normal deaths of old people and/or iatrogenic deaths, mislabeled to create panic? Some NYC nursing homes reported death tolls that exceeded their number of beds. 

Despite these discrepancies, people cited as gospel NYC death tolls and wailed about images of overrun hospitals and refrigerated morgue trucks, which, I heard, were derived from stock footage. There was one “overrun” hospital in a city with 70 hospitals. 

The strong national reaction to both 9/11 and “the Coronavirus” arose out of misperceptions of NYC events, which receive more attention than if similar events happen in other regions. After 9/11, I doubted that the media would have focused on 9/11 for nearly as long if a similar number of Ohioans, Alabamians or Texans had been killed, instead of New Yorkers. I also wondered if New Yorkers would have expressed such indignation about 2,750 deaths in those other states that they would have been enlisted to fight foreign wars to avenge such deaths. 

NYC residents used to consider themselves tough and smart. During Coronamania, they showed they were neurotic and naive. 

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Above all, both 9/11 and Coronamania show that people and governments overreact, especially after seeing disturbing video images. They flail in reaction to events that affect tiny fractions of the population. They disregard proportionality between a perceived problem and the measures implemented to address it. People don’t consider that the cure can be worse than the underlying injury. 

After 9/11, extreme security measures were implemented and people were emotionally on edge for many months, especially in the New York area. This fear seemed unwarranted. I suspected only a distinct minority were willing to sacrifice their own lives to kill Americans. It turned out I was right: 9/11 didn’t initiate a wave of US-directed terrorism. Shortly after 9/11, Bill Clinton predicted that life would go on more or less as normal because “most people are builders.” 

While Clinton is badly overrated, I shared his take on 9/11. Most people are working toward something that pleases them and therefore, are unmotivated to sacrifice their lives to kill others. Most people in functioning societies are trying to accomplish stuff within an existing framework, not trying to destroy that framework. 

Prior to March 2020, respiratory viruses were widely seen as biologically self-limiting. Some old people die from the secondary infections caused by such viruses. But most people’s immune systems neutralize infections, herd immunity quickly develops, viruses weaken, and any marginal threat soon attenuates. 

Whether they planned 9/11 or not, the US government used the plane crashes to justify foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq shifted $8 trillion to the already rich and killed 900,000 people, most of them young and vital. 

In what seemed very much like a plan, the US government used Covid to justify extreme social and political control and to print something like $9 trillion, which was largely funneled to the rich and profoundly damaged hundreds of millions of people, especially the young and vital. 

When bad stuff happens, sensible people don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. They value stability and continuity, not simply for its own sake but because stability and continuity afford more opportunities for happiness than do panic and disruption. In March 2020, as in September 2001, most people lost sight of this. In both instances, panicked people saw a snapshot of where they were and disregarded the bigger, longer-term picture.

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As Mencken observed, “The aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Sometimes bad stuff happens. When it does, it’s better to roll with it than to overreact and thereby cause a bigger problem. Everyone should have seen plenty of pre-2020 examples of overreaction in their own lives and in the lives of people they know. 

The difference between 9/11 and Coronamania, on the one hand, and individual overreactions on the other, is that overreacting governments have seriously harmed hundreds of millions of people for many years. In marked contrast, individuals who overreact in their personal matters typically, and only briefly, hurt only themselves or a few others.

I said this on March 18, 2020. But no newspaper would print what I emailed them. And my now ex-friends told me I was “no doctor.”

Attorney, athlete, artist, agricultor, advocate.

substack.com/@markbde