Lockdowns killed or debilitated millions of people who relied on "recovery" gatherings
Most of those meetings and people are never coming back, and most Americans are still taking orders from their soulless killers
The Boulder Alano Club is a multi-room facility dedicated to group “recovery” meetings that opened in October 2018 a ten-minute walk from where I live. There are Alano clubs all over the country, and from what I can gather, they exist mainly because they can be privately funded by specific donors, named or unnamed, as Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step relatives don’t allow leases or anything redolent of formal business arrangements.
The B.A.C. (I know, right?) is in the back corner of a shopping center, next to a bagel and coffee joint where I occasionally hung out while typing things for money before getting a dog and doing this “work” almost 100 percent of the time from home. I got Rosie at around the same time signs were appearing on the windows of the empty property next to the bagel dispensary announcing that the B.A.C. would soon occupy said property.
When the club opened, I was almost two years ethanol-free. I was plenty busy with “work” then, but I had just abandoned my “run some races so I can hate myself even more” phase, and had time on my hands, always. So I attended a few meetings. But as usual, I quickly became bored listening to heartfelt but repetitive banalities and forced groupthink nonsense—hardly the sole purview of Alcoholics Anonymous—and stopped going.
I have never been much of a 12-step person anyway. This is mainly because, all my life, I have at best only tolerated and never enjoyed gatherings of seated humans, especially indoors. A.A.’s fundamentalist Christian origin and traditions don’t appeal to me, but they aren’t off-putting. In my view, any meeting that advertises and maintains a common and positive purpose, and costs nothing to attend, has the potential to be a fantastic resource no matter what it’s labeled.
And it was clear that the B.A.C. was a great recovery resource. As a place dedicated solely to meetings—which churches, hospitals, and other popular sites of 12-step meetings obviously aren’t— the B.A.C. was open from early morning until well into evening. It has small side rooms where people can talk privately, or play the bassoon (this happened at least once). Homeless people were well tolerated.
If you’re not the sort of person interested in sponsorships or following the steps, you can still go to A.A. and benefit greatly. With modest effort at most, you’ll find people who both want to live alcohol-free lives and envision A.A. itself the same way you do, whether you see it as a pure life-saver or as a flaming shipwreck of brainwashed cultists and chain-smokers. I hate everyone alive, and as a result I have few friends; I met a few of these friends at A.A. meetings, and they, too, hate everyone alive, allowing for the automatic forging of deep and inseverable ties bordering on love. None of us has gotten drunk over this in years, but we often solemnly wonder, more every day, why anyone bothers giving up lethal habits. You can find kindred spirits practicing “recovery” in all sorts of ways.
In the fall of 2019, by which time absolutely nothing had changed in my life, one of those friends told me a 10 p.m. Saturday night B.A.C. meeting had gotten underway. As demented as such a thing sounds to a normal person, this made a lot of sense to me. I was nocturnal by nature, the place was close, and this meeting included mostly younger people cavalier about 12-step dogma. As a bonus, it was dog-friendly. I actually made this one a habit, sometimes ending evening runs there to coincide with the start of the meeting, and even kept going after my friend decided to go to Phnom Penh for an appendectomy (that’s the truth, albeit a misleading version).
I even volunteered to be the group’s treasurer. This is not a hard job except for actively drinking A.A. treasurers, who erelong blow the group’s cash reserves on booze before disappearing, like microscale Sam Bankman-Frieds.
In the first week of March 2020, the club was shut down along with everything else.
It’s absolutely vital to realize and accept that not only do we* know lockdowns were pointless and actually extraordinarily harmful now, but the public health officials responsible for their institution are monsters who fully understood this in real time. They knew that coronaviruses are airborne and that there would be no way to keep a virus that contagious from ultimately spreading throughout the entire population. They also knew a minuscule portion of the population was at serious risk of dying, but, as harsh as this sounds, the sheer contagiousness of the virus—and this was just the delta variant, assured of inevitably spawning more-contagious descendants—made lockdowns pointless no matter how deadly the virus was.
These officials also knew a great deal about the species of coronavirus that will always remain a marker of the collapse of truly free Western civilization. No one can say how the virus escaped into circulation, but no serious actors are denying that it appears to be a specific product created intentionally by researchers in a Wuhan laboratory that was funded in part by the Francis Collins-led U.S. National Institutes of Health, of which Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is a component. We didn’t know this part at the time, but some people had suspicions or actual knowledge, and when they speculated about or reported any of this, they were banned—and undeniably on government orders in most cases, as we’ve been learning—from every major social-media platform, while also being vilified in the mass media. America!
But Fauci made sure to maximize the level of public panic with carefully chosen words. As the economist Jeffrey Tucker recently wrote of Fauci’s statistical shuck-and-jive: “The substance of what he said, at the same time, was clearly designed to generate panic and create the conditions for a full lockdown.”
And every public statement that beagle-torturing, AIDS-patient-killing witch doctor has made since has been aimed at exactly the same end. And no matter how insanely self-contradictory he’s been or how many video compilations of his lies are circulating furiously around the Web, most people I know still trust him, or at worst think he and his team made earnest mistakes. None of that is true whatsoever.
When the local Alano club was shut down, it quickly made online meetings available via Zoom. (Reinforcing the grave public misunderstanding of the virus itself, someone also posted a sign on the door in late March proclaiming that no club regulars were known to have gotten covid-19.)
The New York Times soon ran two stories about the phenomenon.
The NYT doesn’t even hide what it’s doing here. The first story is about addicts in a poor, predominantly black Cleveland neighborhood who are struggling to say alive—going though “pure hell.” The second is a column by some cunt giggling about being a camgirl who thinks eating a cereal made for children out of the box constitutes trauma.
Most of those Cleveland addicts don’t have access to Zoom meetings. Even if they have smartphones or laptops, many of them live in group settings if they have stable homes at all, or live in small cramped apartments surrounded by kids and noise, or just don’t have a private space to set up for talking out loud about intimate things.
Despite having my own place, I run into these issues, at least often enough to dampen the experience into unrecognizability. Going to a meeting in person is actually far more convenient for me than it is to “attend” from home. And it’s just not close to the same experience anyway. It’s difficult to handle disruptors, and the whole thing, while nobly intended, can’t even be described as a passable knock-off of the real thing. And for those of us who “work” online, a Zoom meeting is the least appealing means of escape imaginable.
This is also evidently true of a lot of the people I used to see at meetings, as many of them have suffered more than I have. As soon as the in-person meetings shut down, I set about trying to return the $114 I was holding on to from the late-night meeting I’d been the treasurer for. This was surprisingly hard; it should never be difficult to give cash money to alcoholics, but at least one of the club principals moved, and I presumed others to be drinking because they didn’t return my e-mails.
The NYT has helpfully kept track of how the lockdowns have affected substance abusers nationwide in the past two years. This is an incomplete sampling of its headlines.
Always remember that Black Lives Matter to corporate America, because a disproportionate number of these victims were nonwhite.
The New York Times was and is of course a huge and incessant proponent of lockdowns, masks, boosters for all, and every extreme measure introduced by the government. Arthur G. Sulzberger, the bug-person who inherited the job of publishing this newspaper from his father in a long and inglorious family tradition, is among the most dangerous people on Earth. He’ll probably be around for a long time, and he will be a de facto agent of the security state throughout his tenure if current and probably immutable trends continue.
He has no choice. Power flows through him; A.G. Sulzberger wields only so much decision-making power himself.
After giving up quickly on Zoom meetings and most of my A.A. contacts, I just went about my usual business, only this time I didn’t have a job, with the previous one having been sacrificed to Wokism (a different story, but one with overlapping pathos and gripes). I didn’t drink, but as now, I still conducted most of my commerce at the same shopping mall. About a year after the lockdowns started, I noticed a sign on the Alano Club door that announced the tentative reopening of in-person meetings.
A similar notice remains on the club website, almost two years later.
The “post-covid” (ha!) in-person meetings never gained much traction, from what I can tell. There are only a handful of them. I went to one at 7:30 p.m. on the Saturday before my sixth alcohol-sobriety anniversary, and there were only about a dozen people there, all of them older than me and most looking defeated. I felt like I had never even been in the same room. I tried to not contextualize the experience, but I couldn’t help it. And how the place has been paying the rent since March 2020 is a mystery, but Elon Musk’s brother lives in Boulder, so there’s that.
I have tried a couple more meetings since then in different parts of town, but it’s pretty clear that, at least around here—where I see people driving around alone in snowstorms in tin-can cars while wearing masks—Alcoholics Anonymous and its cousins are dead. Even The New York Times, which extolled the value of the Zoom meetings that were stepping in to rescue the Upper West Side and trust-fund laptop class, has helpfully documented the lethal impact if the unnecessary lockdowns on millions of people.
But those people don’t matter. Addicts especially, and the sooner all of them fucking die, the less of a burden they’ll be to the system. Most addicts don’t have stock portfolios or donate to political parties. They don’t bother voting because they’re ahead of everyone else, however incidentally. They—we—are disposable to the system that includes Fauci, Bill Gates, the stammering husk of Joe Biden, Wall Street, and the entire U.S. Government security-state apparatus. Our unstable health is an inconvenience to the aim of reducing the human herd to appropriate reproducers and no one else.
This is not made up; you’re watching it happen, and so you can more easily absorb the ghastliness of it without cognitive resistance, you’re being gaslit in multiple directions: Men can have babies and demonizing white people isn’t racist and you can’t catch covid while peacefully looting and destroying property and the CIA-driven proxy war in Europe is an effort to stop the takeover of that continent rather than an basic enrichment of U.S. defense contractors. Oh, and Robert Malone is a crank. That one still has speedy legs.
The entire production is openly insane. The Centers for Disease Control, having miserably and completely failed and at this point begging to be dissolved and rebuilt as something else, is now joining the language police. What’s a four-letter word for Rochelle Walensky?
These are unforgivable offenses. The corporate media are stoically and hilariously ignoring the Twitter Files, and most of America’s drones are ignoring it along with them, blissfully unaware of the fascism being perpetrated by their dear Uncle Sam. So one more guy ranting on a blog isn’t going to convince people to not watch cable news. I occasionally hear from people who say, '“Well, I’m not a idiot, and you should know that…” and then unspool exactly the same rank-ass bullshit they only could have seen on television or in some TDS-charged Facebook group.
I have given up on even changing a single mind; this project is a release and a protracted death-knell, hopefully rich in bleak entertainment interspersed with running content. But I will continue to write what I believe to be true, however jarring it may be. At the same time, I hate writing now too. I have full confidence in my ideas yet zero in my own worth or humanity—not a “place” I thought I would ever inhabit.
I wrote a post last year explaining where I get my information from, but most people don’t follow links, either because they already trust me or because they aren’t interested in my sources and probably never will be. That’s fine, I get it, you’ve been fucking brutalized and not by me or anyone who looks like me or has my standing in the world. You’re also busy with normal fulfillments like kids and spouses and jobs and have no time to do the kind of digging I have done. Some of you also sleep.
We’re all reacting differently to the new and darker ways of a corrupted world, depending on what it is we’re trying to protect. It would be nice if this led to a harmonious path or at least a more unified sense of who the real enemies are, but the bastards are just too good at what they’re doing, as it means everything to them.