I have an entire bookmark folder devoted to "COVID Panic" that I've stored since 2020 to dredge up later to prove the alarms overstated and false. This one was accurate

Joel Kotkin, May 1, 2020: The Pandemic Road to Serfdom

And I saved it because I knew that the author’s description of what was happening and his predictions for the future were as accurate as those of the public health flying monkeys and their captive media were wrong. It’s a lengthy essay, well worth reading over the weekend; here’s teaser:

How the Pandemic Drives Oligarchic Power

The new regime of social distancing, likely to remain influential for years to come, works most directly for the interests of the technologized oligarchy. The long-term decline of travel, convention, and traditional entertainment may mean disaster for millions of workers and many businesses, but it represents an enormous opportunity for those who can deliver food, goods, diversions, and experiences over the relative safety of digital networks.

But as jobs are destroyed on Main Street, others, like those at well-positioned Amazon, are created by the hundreds of thousands. It is also a rosy new dawn for online collaboration applications like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Facebook Rooms, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, the fastest-growing business app on record. Also greatly enhanced will be those who provide the infrastructure for the conquering digital economy, including chipmakers like Intel and cloud-computing behemoths like (yet again) Amazon and Microsoft.

The pandemic seems likely to further consolidate the tech industry shift from its garage-based startup past, with firms like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon increasingly resembling Japan’s long-dominant keiretsu. The pandemic may have squashed many new companies that are now short on capital. In contrast, the oligarchic firms, which control upwards of 80% of such key markets as search, social media, cloud computing, and computer operating systems, now enjoy an even greater edge in garnering ever more of the nation’s technical talent.

Ultimately the pandemic will provide the new elite with opportunities to gain control of a whole set of coveted industries, from entertainment and media to finance and space travel. Perhaps most concerning will be their ability to control all aspects of information as the last vestiges of local and small-town journalism face Covid-driven “extinction level” events. What is now left of the “legacy” media—the Atlantic, Time, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times—has fallen increasingly under their control. Nine of the 13 richest people under age 40 are in the tech industry: the odds are favorable that the new elite will maintain their control over information for generations.

The Secular Priesthood

The barbarians who seized Roman lands took advantage of chaos to fuel their ascendancy in what became the Middle Ages. Pestilence-driven depopulation and weakened political institutions enabled them to establish their hegemony over shrinking economies. Yet to assure their power, the Medieval aristocracies needed more than just swords and armor: they needed a belief system that would allow them to control the lower classes effectively.

Today this role is played by a far-reaching “expert class” teeming with highly-credentialed functionaries. The power of the “expert” professions—education, consulting, law, policymaking, and health and medicine, to name a few—has waxed in recent decades. To a large extent, the gradual demise of the analog economy is hastened by medical experts—at least those largely favored by the media—who call for lockdowns and restrictions that could easily extend to summer and even, according to Ezekiel Emanuel, lead medical advisor to Joe Biden, as long as eighteen months.

Like their Medieval counterparts in the old First Estate, members of today’s clerisy see their intrusions motivated not by self-interest but rather the good of society. They constitute “the privileged stratum,” as the French leftist Christophe Guilluy argues in his recent book Twilight of the Elites, operating from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their right to instruct others.

From the pandemic to the climate, many of the expert class’s marquee predictions have been exaggerated or even plain wrong. (In the 1970s, hysteria among educated elites was mostly directed toward dire predictions that our natural resources, including energy and food, were about to run out, leading to imminent mass starvation.) Like the Medieval clergy, the clerisy, especially in the dominant media and academia, rarely takes itself to task. Instead, it makes deference to “the science” into a form of quasi-religious zealotry. For some, the pandemic is being hailed as “test run” for the true green agenda of less material progress and, ultimately, “de-growth.”

The parallels with the Middle Ages are profound. The lockdowns and economic depression associated with the pandemic will help, as Psychology Today suggests, cure “the human beast,” a phraseology not too distinct from early Christian assessments of humanity’s capacity for sin. This “eco-medievalist” view sees the pandemic as the latest punishment meted out by an increasingly angry and wounded Mother Nature. Conservatives, some of whom predict the pandemic will undermine support for climate extremism, fail to understand the mass appeal of a media-powered movement largely couched in quasi-religious terms.