The moral and intellectual sickness of the global governing class is infecting us all. They've poisoned the public sphere.

In the society of the spectacle, authority has become a display; officials gesture and perform with a constant focus on the optics. The act of governing becomes the act of calculated sloganeering: This vaccine is safe and effective. The use of evidence is a conspiracy theory; disagreement is disinformation. What we learned from the discovery process in Missouri v. Biden is that, yes, the government has manipulated what you've been allowed to read and to know. Everyone who gets vaccinated against COVID-19 becomes a dead end for the virus, and don't you dare say otherwise.

The British journalist Laura Dodsworth told us, with considerable evidence, that governments were using nudge units of social scientists to deliberately crank up public terror over the pandemic, embracing mask mandates as a way of planting a symbol of fear on our faces. We wake up every morning knowing that governments lied for the purpose of manipulating our behavior.

Government is to blame for this mentality. The news media is to blame. Everyone who said that COVID-19 vaccines are at minimum 95% effective and that claims to the contrary were conspiracy theories is to blame. Sleazy "fact-checkers" and "disinformation experts" are to blame. Every Twitter account closed for making accurate statements stabbed open society in the heart, and now we squat down in the squalor of a truthless world, rolling our eyes at news stories about piles of bodies at a music festival.