Lockdown evoked a political and conceptual earthquake in my life
By: Raelle Kaia
Tags: Perception, Covid 19, Freedom, Authoritarianism, Democracy

And all I got was this lousy mask

This is the story of how 2020 completely upended my perceptions, worldview, politics, and my sense of what and who I trust. This story is relevant to those who are interested in communicating across the gaps of perception and belief — my experiences this year have cracked me open. The result is a firmer footing on more uncertain ground.

Two companion articles accompany this one: The Sacred Left and Right explores the political upheaval in detail, and What to Make of Covid and the Lockdowns? provides a thorough overview of a dissenting view regarding the mainstream covid narrative.



I was truly afraid of the virus in March and April. I was doing things like compulsively washing my hands, wiping down my cell phone with rubbing alcohol, and avoiding grocery stores; anxiety was ripping through my body at a constant clip. Despite my fear of the virus, but because I had so much trouble containing the anxiety, I relapsed on smoking cigarettes. I was sucking down a pack a day — all the while terrified that I was increasing my chance of death by harming my lungs — but desperately in need of soothing relief for my nerves.



I was all on board with “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and maybe a few more weeks just for good measure. But as afraid as I was, it never occurred to me in my wildest nightmares that we as a society, and across the globe, would convert those few weeks into an ongoing permanent state of imposed isolation. The concern began creeping up on me gradually. I had never thought the flatten the curve lockdown would apply to our existing friends and family members — obviously that would be going too far. The whole point, I thought, was to avoid crowds of strangers where the infection could spread rapidly to many people without the ability to trace the chain of contact. Within days my friends started informing me that they would no longer permit me to be in their presence. A chill set deeper into my heart as the government started closing parks, beaches, and outdoor spaces — surely these were not the places the virus was likely to spread — and going outside to get fresh air, sunlight, exercise, and contact with nature is good for mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. But bans were then imposed on non-essential travel — we were told we couldn’t even go outside except for taking walks in the neighborhood for exercise — as long as we stayed 6 feet away from everyone. Articles in the corporate press insisted that even taking walks alone in the park was probably a shameful thing to do, at the very least because it was “setting a bad example.”



Then, after a few weeks, when the death toll turned out to be not nearly as high as we’d been told to fear, and the curve had been flattened, I started getting confused as to why all the restrictions were not being lifted. I was still afraid of the virus at this point, but I began to realize that as scared as I was of the virus, I was far more afraid of continuing to live in this isolated way. I was also far more afraid of living with constant anxiety rocketing through my body than I was of actually dying. I ran across good news that showed the virus was actually far more prevalent than we had thought, and had been with us for far longer. This meant the death rate was actually much lower than we had feared. It also meant that I may have already had the virus: I had suffered through the worst flu of my life in January. I rushed out to get an antibody test, hoping I would show immunity. I could tell all my friends I was safe, that it was okay to be near me again, to touch me again.



I was deeply disappointed when my test came back negative. In that moment, I realized something: not only did I wish I had already had the virus, I was starting to wish I could get the virus, get my immunity, and just get all of this over with. I made my peace with what I then believed was a 1–2% chance of death. I realized that my human life with other people, with touch, hugs, kisses, faces, dating, and everything good, was something worth risking my life for — something I wanted to risk my life for. What better cause was there to risk one’s life for, I wondered. I was feeling confused that very few others were coming to feel the same way I was.

They told us we were all in this together. I believed that at first. I repeated these words to others, about how we were all going to look out for each others’ needs, how we would work together to “flatten the curve.” We were all scared, but how great it was that we would get through this fear together, take care of each other, etc. But I started to realize that my needs didn’t matter to the collective. I lived alone. I didn’t have a family, and wanted one, but single at age 40, I was running out of time. How could I find love and start a family when no one was willing to meet me or touch me? Two months went by in isolation. I was only touched once, by a friend who decided I was safe to touch because I was so utterly isolated. When she came to my apartment and hugged me, I broke down in tears and sobbed for half an hour until she left. She did not come back to hug me again. I began to realize that my needs were seen by others as in direct opposition to their needs. I needed to have my life back again. I needed people, touch, community, and a chance for love. The majority of others already had their families and their love — or else their desire to protect themselves or loved ones from perceived risk of death was greater than their need or desire for human touch and connection. My needs had to be sacrificed so their needs could be met, and they existed in greater numbers than me. We were not in this together.

I ran across more confusing articles. It turned out the antibody tests were only 20–25% accurate. I might have had the virus after all. I might be immune after all. What’s more, the case rate was likely 4–5 times higher than we had thought, which would correspondingly lower the death rate 4–5 times. How could this be? I read more, and learned about T-cell immunity. Some people who got the virus developed T-cell immunity instead of antibody immunity. And as many as 30–40% of people were likely already immune, from previous coronaviruses. That would mean the true death rate was lower still! Perhaps as low as 0.2%. Vast majorities of people who died with covid were at, or past, the age of life expectancy. The figures were starting to show that covid was only slightly more life threatening then, well — life itself.

And then I started reading more — and I learned how the covid death count included people who died of anything at all, as long as they had a positive covid test (sometimes even without such a test, but only if they had flu symptoms). How many of these people were being counted as covid deaths, but did not actually die of covid? All the news was good news. It meant we could exit the lockdowns, end the social distancing, forget about masks, gather in groups again. The coronavirus had turned out to be just a tough case of the flu — like I had experienced in January.

But I was told by the news articles that this was the wrong interpretation. If the antibody tests were inaccurate, then a false positive meant we didn’t actually have the antibody and we could get coronavirus at any time and infect others. If we had a false negative, it meant that there was way more coronavirus out there then the tests showed, and we should be more sacred. If the hospital death counts were counting people who didn’t actually die of covid, we were to interpret this as making up for all the people who must be dying of covid secretly, and uncounted. If anything, the death count must be higher, not lower, due to over-counting. And if you did have covid and had the antibody, you should assume that your immunity would disappear and you would get covid again. Sure we had flattened the curve, and hospitals were half empty, but now the agenda had suddenly changed. We were now supposed to remain socially distanced until we got saved by a vaccine. But how could the vaccine work if we were supposed to believe our antibodies would just go away after a few months? I guess you just keep taking the covid vaccine over and over again for the rest of your life…

Nothing made sense. When the anti-lockdown protests began, I started thinking to myself “I’m so glad someone is protesting this,” but I kept the thoughts to myself, because I knew the thought I was “supposed” to have: how selfish and irresponsible and deranged these protesters were, and how they should probably be stopped (despite the Constitution), because they were putting us all at risk. But in my heart, I didn’t feel the way I was supposed to.



Then the BLM protests started, and I was shocked that suddenly up was down and black was white (pun intended). I was now expected to support these mass gatherings that the week before I had been told were tantamount to murdering others. I noticed with shock that the CDC declared that these protests were not only permissible but recommended because of the need to oppose racism “as a public health measure.” The CDC was now staking out matters of public policy and political belief as falling under the rubric of public health. If we were to accept that as the case, it would mean the end of democracy, replaced by a public health dictatorship.



And then there were the other contradictions. When I was scared of the virus, I learned from the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the Surgeon General that masks didn’t help, and either they would make no difference, or have slightly adverse effects. I wasn’t sure about that, and I wanted to be safe, so I did a little research, and found that what they were saying made sense. Multiple controlled studies over the course of decades had shown that virus particles are too small to be stopped by masks, that there are other reasons why masks may actually increase health risks, and that use of masks were repeatedly found to have no effect on the spread of cold or flu viruses, positive or negative. Then Dr. Fauci announced that he and the others were actually all lying to us before. Now masks were good and would help. He explained they had been lying before because that particular lie was considered useful to induce behavior in line with their public policy objectives. Now their policy objectives had changed, and they desired different behavior from the public, so they were telling us the opposite was true from what they said before. I was supposed to believe that they were only lying then, but they weren’t lying now. Presumably if they were lying again this time, they would tell me about it later, if they decided me hearing the truth from them was in line with whatever induced behavior and policy objectives they had in mind for the future.

I had already verified that their previous message about masks made sense according to the science and was confirmed by multiple studies over the past decades. Now, all of that evidence was not only being thrown out the window, but the newly announced science that masks would stop the spread was so certain, so ironclad, that people all over the country and the whole world were now to be forced to wear masks against their will. Even if that were true, why wear a mask if you’re not sick? We were now being told that every single person in the world was to be considered a possible asymptomatic spreader of the virus.



It all begs the question: when are the authorities lying to me, and when are they telling me the truth? The only way to know is to do my own research. It also became important to consider what the desired beliefs and behavior were that these authorities wanted to create in me and in other members of the public — and why. I started to notice how every possible bit of information released was always interpreted by these authorities and the media so as to encourage more fear of the virus, more fear of death, more surveillance, more obedience to masking and lockdowns (and longer, stricter lockdowns), more elimination of rights, more isolation from others, more censorship and silencing of debate, more certainty that the only possible solution to covid is a vaccine and that no therapeutic treatment can have any positive effect, and more submission to technology replacing in-person interactions and activities. Every time information was released that countered these beliefs and behaviors, such as when the WHO announced that asymptomatic transmission is rare (which would invalidate any possible rationale for a universal mask mandate), there would be a hue and cry in the media followed by a retraction and insistence that they didn’t really mean it when they said it the day before.



I also began to notice that any time other information would appear that contradicted the above list of desired behaviors and beliefs, even when it was data coming directly from the CDC or WHO, it would get buried in the news and ignored. If it later became widely noticed enough to require a response, there would be a series of fact-checker or debunker articles that would use straw man arguments to obscure the data and misconstrue its implications. These would be followed by a constant stream of articles explaining the psychological pathology of those questioning lockdown measures or the severity of covid. Or articles about the Dunning-Kreuger effect, which proves that commoners should never trust their own reasoning if it leads to different conclusions than those recommended by the Experts. (But only the experts the government and media tells us we’re allowed to listen to — experts who disagree with them must be silenced, censored, denounced, and then ignored.)

Not to mention that the whole thing began with a lie. When the virus started spreading in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities lied to everyone about it, and kept it secret for two months. When they finally admitted it existed in January, we were told to believe that it had jumped from a wild bat into a wild pangolin, and that it had then jumped from the pangolin to humans at a meat market. A meat market that just happened to be located 1000 feet away from one of the few research facilities in the world that was doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Found in bats.



And so it has gone. I reached a breaking point with all this in June. I was trying to understand why “Flatten the Curve” had mutated into “Lockdown Until a Vaccine,” so I started looking into vaccines and those who benefit from their widespread use. As part of this research, I encountered an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about vaccine safety. I had listened to RFK Jr. years ago when he had a radio show on Air America, and I respected him greatly. I had never looked into the vaccine question before. I had figured they must all basically be safe, since the entire medical establishment agrees they are, but I was agnostic on the issue. I never understood why there was so much hostility against those who refuse vaccines. Why worry if some people don’t want to take them? The rest of us can take the vaccines and be safe, and those who don’t want them will only put themselves at risk. There might be a question about kids being at risk, but their parents would need to decide whether their children are at greater risk from exposure to a particular vaccine, or whether they are at greater risk by not receiving that vaccine. We’ve got to let parents look out for the safety of their own children; it’s just fundamental to humanity.

Well, RFK opened my mind to credible risks of various vaccines, and massive conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, the government, and the media regarding this issue, and the silencing of debate. And then I realized in horror that I had accidentally just become one of those people that everyone hates and is terrified of — the dreaded vaccine skeptic. But I couldn’t pretend to ignore the sound logic and evidence I was being presented with. I realized I had just trusted the fact-checkers and debunkers in the past to have done the research, and I believed they had proven that safety concerns about vaccines were groundless. But they never actually showed their work. They never actually addressed the merits of the claims; they only created straw man misrepresentations of the claims and then tore those straw men to pieces. The claims have merit, as I had just learned, to my dismay. I didn’t want to be someone everyone else hated and feared. It was already bad enough that nobody would touch me or be near me. Now, if I were to be honest with them about what I had learned about the possibility that certain vaccines were laden with neurotoxins and other materials detrimental to the immune system, they would shun me from society altogether.

I had always been skeptical of the corporate press and the government, or I thought I was. But the imposition of an authoritarian lockdown I could never have imagined, justified by a narrative riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese, had completely shattered my trust. Tying this into what I was learning about vaccines, especially since the entire justification for the lockdown was based on vaccines as a magic bullet, had also shattered what was left of my trust in medical science. And with the two things put together, I became aware that a lockdown justified by medical necessity, backed up by a fraudulent medical science, was a recipe for totalitarianism.

Not only this, my politics were turning inside-out as well. For the past 20 years, I had firmly considered myself to be a left-winger. In fact, I had identified myself as a member of the far-left, always dissatisfied with what I saw as a center-right Democratic Party and a right-wing corporate press (contrary to the moanings of the conservatives about the supposed liberal media). I thought being left-wing meant commitment to personal human rights, civil liberties, democracy, the questioning of authority, and opposition to entrenched power attempting to subdue the common people.



And yet I now felt I’d gone through the looking glass. The entire Left was marching in lockstep with the desire for ever-more extreme and draconian lockdown restrictions, and it was only the right-wing that was resisting or questioning! And even with BLM, which I had been supporting for years, it suddenly seemed different. At the very moment the whole country seemed to be more in favor of the movement than ever, I was finding myself disturbed to encounter the newly recommended antidote to racism offered by the Left. This was to insist on seeing each other and ourselves through the immutable lens of racial categories, treating people assigned to different racial categories differently from each other, and to prohibit (and compel) certain kinds of speech, beliefs, and behavior based on racial categories, under the penalty of cancellation and excommunication if one did not comply.



I suddenly saw what the right-wing had been afraid of and complaining about for years, regarding the dangers of socialism, and how it can lead to a totalitarian society in which speech, belief, and conscience are no longer sacred rights of the individual. I had always thought such concerns were nothing but bad-faith right-wing propaganda before. But I had only been thinking about socialism in terms of economic justice and redistribution. And I had thought that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were anomalies that didn’t have anything to do with what the Left was really about. Now it seemed, however, the new zeitgeist of the Left was that a person’s very ideas and beliefs are to be considered to be a kind of violence or harm against others — and therefore ideas and beliefs should be, must be, subject to control.

And this goes along with the latest wrinkle: every single person is now to be considered in their very body, being, touch, and breath — a threat to the health and safety of all other people. Therefore, every single person’s body, being, touch, and breath will also be subject to control by the state. The same logic for totalitarian control over all people’s bodies applies just as well to any infectious disease as it does to covid, and therefore, if one accepts this logic regarding covid, one accepts this logic permanently. Furthermore, since people’s beliefs and speech can (if listened to) result in people deciding to touch or share breath with each other, beliefs and speech must be made subject to the very same totalitarian control as the body itself.

My whole sense of the world and my place in it was turning upside-down, and I was terrified to tell anyone what was going on for me. Every friend I had, everyone in my life, was left-wing. I saw what was happening to people; it could happen to me. People I thought were my friends would cancel me and pull away. They had already stopped touching me or allowing me near them. Now they would stop talking to me and stop loving me. So I got in touch with my old counselor. I had worked with her off and on for five years, but it had been a year and a half since I last saw her. We started up sessions again, and on our first session I told her what was going on for me. I needed to have her to talk to because it wasn’t safe to talk to anyone in my social life without fear of being canceled. I told her what was coming up for me around covid, vaccines, and BLM, and my fears of society moving in this new totalitarian direction.

The next day, she sent me an email, informing me that she had refunded my money and could no longer work with me because of what I shared. She said she hoped I could find another counselor who could support me. And just like that, my counselor of five years canceled me! It was a devastating emotional blow. I’ve written in detail about the surreal events of that day in the essay: Part of the Problem.



Now here I am, having seen the destructive lies of the right-wing through the eyes of the Left for the past two decades — but suddenly now seeing the Left in the same light through the eyes of the Right. All at once, it has become glaringly clear in my awareness how the Left cultural-media bubble sees reality through their own unquestioning lens that distorts facts and truth, and requires that one reach the correct conclusions, just as much as the Right cultural-media bubble does. And I see how the vision for society the Left has arrived at in 2020 is now a recipe for totalitarianism. There has never been a political issue in my lifetime more important to me than the dangers and implications the covid lockdowns and dictates pose to democracy and the free dignity of human beings. And after 20 years in which I was clamoring with anxiety and desperation in my heart for society and politics to move further left in every way possible, an ideological earthquake has occurred in my soul that leaves me fearing the Left more than I ever feared the Right.



I cried all night long the night Trump was elected, and I was in a trauma shock for weeks afterwards, barely able to even sleep. I thought there was a good chance democracy wouldn’t survive Trump and we needed to do everything we could to hobble him and his designs. After 2020, I became more concerned than ever about democracy not surviving Trump, but in an absolutely surreal way: I became concerned that Trump’s weakness, poor leadership, and narcissistic venality would render him unfit to lead a resistance against the totalitarian politics of 2020 that have captured the Democratic Party and are sweeping the nation and the world.



I understand the Left’s point of view; I was still firmly entrenched in it as recently as March. I now understand the Right’s point of view — a point of view that had baffled me for the past 20 years. I see how both points of view make sense when one places their trust in certain authorities — different authorities for each point of view — and because of this trust, certain facts and certain ways of reasoning just fizzle into nothing and are forgotten because they don’t fit the Narrative. And I now see how both Narratives are set against each other in a Hegelian dialectic that obscures the designs of the true power that hides behind the throne.

I couldn’t vote for Trump, and I couldn’t vote for Biden. I ended up writing my own name in for president in 2020. Voting is not going to be the thing that makes the difference in this world. I never saw that before, but I see that now. The power behind the throne is not dislodged by the outcomes of elections. My perception slowly changed during this lockdown from believing we were all doing something good for each other together, to realizing we had just been subject to the greatest authoritarian power grab in the history of humankind. And I realized something else: The power of authoritarianism only exists in the power we give to it — democracy or no democracy. Authoritarianism can only exist because enough people collectively go along with it.

The struggle exists within one’s own mind and consciousness. There are coordinated forces who have weaponized ideas and colonized our minds, our beliefs, and our dreams. They describe a reality for us, and they turn us against ourselves and our neighbors. They convince us we can’t trust ourselves, that it’s our duty to turn against our own hearts, our own needs, our own humanity. We are conditioned to go along with the version of reality that has been scripted for us. But do we really know that it’s true?

What if the truth is that we are all immortal beings of light and love — that we have forgotten who we are, and we have ventured into this world of boundary violations, deceptions, and trust wounds — that we have come here to heal the trauma — and awaken to the beauty all around us — to awaken to the reality that we are truly safe, and always will be — and that even the psychopath billionaires pulling all these strings to deceive us and harm us, that they also are in truth, beautiful light beings of love, who have just forgotten for a little while. Just like all of us have forgotten for a little while.

We have forgotten so much. We have believed ourselves into remembering a frightening, sad fantasy about who we are and what the world really is. A remembering that is actually an imagining of shadows and fear, that obscures the true remembering of the light and the love that has never gone, that is always here. What if that is the truth we realize after we finish sifting through all the lies and deceptions, the murky mazes and hallways of doubt?

This July I saw a UFO. I had never seen one before. I have no idea what it was. It appeared to be a star at night that rose from the horizon due west, and lifted itself well into the sky in an arc that traversed over 90 degrees before descending back down to the horizon line slightly east of due north, taking about 5 minutes to move in this way. It seemed to wobble slightly along its journey, although that could have been a trick of the eyes. I searched my mind for explanations: it wasn’t an airplane; the trajectory was all wrong for any airplane I had ever seen or imagined. A satellite? A comet? A meteor? Some kind of projectile fired into the air? Nothing made sense. Perhaps someone reading this will have some explanation that converts this UFO into an (Identified) IFO in their minds.

What else could it be? An alien craft? An angel? A light being or light guardian? Perhaps an omen sent for those who were watching to see — a reminder that we don’t know what’s really true. A reminder that despair is nonsensical. When we are at peace, when we are still — doesn’t our heart speak truly? Doesn’t it remind us that we are safe and whole, that we have always been so? That the vastness of existence and being is so far beyond what we think we can know with any science that the thought of it is laughable? A laughter not of mockery, but of joy and delight.

And so, when we are trying to understand how to tolerate the beliefs and viewpoints of others, whether left or right, centrist or populist, whether technocratic credulity or Gaian mysticism, whether conspiracist or normie, I think it’s not that hard, or it doesn’t have to be. Just remember that you are a divine being of light who has forgotten, speaking to a divine being of light who has forgotten, and that sometimes we talk to each other to remember what we have forgotten, and sometimes we talk to each other to protect ourselves from remembering — and that an infinite sea of beliefs and certainties are possible, depending on which direction one wants to look.

There’s something in me that says, “Watch out! We’ve got to all believe the right thing, or we’re all screwed! It’s almost too late! Convince the others! Hurry!!”

And there’s something else in me that says, “I am already home. I am already at peace. Those things I thought I needed to do, to be, to have — that safety I thought I had to fight for, to cling to — all of that is already within me, and within you. We are already healed. Nothing can ever be done to harm who we truly are.”

I want to spend my time here on this material world embracing the enjoyment of a human life, with touching, dignity, closeness, trust, song, and dance, with freedom and sovereign respect for every being to be who they are, create and announce who they are — none ever subject to definition by the other — none ever told what is true for them by the other.

It’s just fine for me to want that. And I hold the beauty of that vision like a lamp for any others to whom it calls. I’m not going to try and convince anyone to live in love and release the fear. Only one’s own heart can provide that kind of persuasion. It’s just a matter of relaxing into trust.