Docket V of V
Docket V: The Plague Years
Two weeks to flatten the curve. Banned, smeared, vindicated.
In March 2020, the American experiment in emergency government ran its biggest field test yet — and the libertarians ran their usual play: don’t do that, the emergency powers won’t be temporary, the costs will be hidden, and the people calling this tyranny-curious will be called grandma-killers. They were called grandma-killers. This docket is what happened next — the closures, the mandates, the censorship, the wealth transfer — and who was right about every single piece of it.
Exhibit A: “Two Weeks”
The pitch · March 16, 2020
“Fifteen days to slow the spread.” That was the ask — a pause, a breather for the hospitals, then back to normal. The libertarian answer, immediate and unanimous: emergency powers are ratchets. The curve-flattening will become zero-COVID, the two weeks will become two years, and the people enforcing it will never give the power back voluntarily.
Called hysterics, deniers, and — the era’s signature insult — people who “just want haircuts.”
Then what happened. In much of the country, restrictions ran two years. School closures in some districts ran past eighteen months. The emergency declarations themselves ran three years — the federal COVID emergency wasn’t formally ended until May 2023. Two weeks. The libertarians were off by roughly zero.
The Great Barrington Declaration · October 4, 2020
Three epidemiologists — Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) — argued lockdowns were “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” and proposed focused protection: shield the vulnerable, let the low-risk live. Tens of thousands of medical scientists signed.
The establishment response wasn’t a rebuttal. It was a hit job. NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Anthony Fauci on October 8, 2020 — released under FOIA — calling the three “fringe epidemiologists” and writing: “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.” The head of the NIH, coordinating a media hit on Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard faculty. Not a review. A takedown.
Then what happened. Every harm the declaration named came true and is now the consensus record: the learning loss, the deferred cancer screenings, the overdose spike, the mental-health collapse. Collins himself admitted to the Wall Street Journal in December 2023 that the public-health establishment had taken “a narrow view” that attached zero value to disrupted lives. And the finishing touch: in March 2025, “fringe epidemiologist” Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed as Director of the NIH — Collins’ old job. The fringe is now the management.
Interjection — The Science™
Let’s talk about “The Science,” capital T, capital S — the thing you were commanded to Follow. The Science closed beaches and parks while leaving casinos on the essential list. The Science required a mask walking to your restaurant table but not sitting at it, because the virus famously respects furniture. The Science said protesting for the approved cause was immune to transmission while your grandmother’s funeral was a superspreader. The Science was whatever the governor’s office needed it to be that week — a state religion with a lab coat instead of a collar.
And the heretics got the full treatment: censored, smeared, investigated, deplatformed. YouTube terminated the Ron Paul Institute’s channel in September 2021 — no warning, no strikes — and reinstated it the same day after the backlash, calling it a mistake. Rand Paul ate a seven-day YouTube suspension that August for saying cloth masks don’t stop infection — four months before CNN’s own medical analyst called cloth masks “little more than facial decorations” on air. Dave Smith’s verdict on the era, July 2021: “This administration has exposed the useful idiots who call themselves libertarians… saying ‘it’s a private company’ for the last few years, ignoring what is obviously the biggest threat to liberty.” Then the Twitter Files showed the government had been inside the platforms directing the censorship the whole time. Private companies. Sweetie.
Exhibit B: The Kids
Sweden · the control group · 2020–2021
Sweden never closed schools for children under sixteen. No masks on kids, no remote learning, no plexiglass theater. The American and British press predicted a massacre of children and teachers. Libertarians pointed at Stockholm and said: watch the control group.
A natural experiment with 1.95 million Swedish children, run in public, in real time.
Then what happened. A letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, January 2021: among those 1.95 million children with open schools, fifteen ICU admissions and zero deaths — before vaccines existed. Sweden’s teachers had lower risk than other occupations. And over the full pandemic, Sweden’s cumulative excess mortality came in 37th lowest of 42 European countries — the control group the lockdown faithful said would be a morgue. Meanwhile, American closed-school districts produced the worst NAEP score collapse ever recorded — nine-year-olds down five points in reading, the largest drop since 1990, and seven in math, the first decline in the test’s history — with the damage concentrated, as always, in the poorest districts. They sacrificed the poor kids’ education to protect them from a virus that posed them virtually no risk, and called it equity.
Exhibit C: The Theory You Weren’t Allowed to Have
The Lab Leak · 2020–2023
The suspicion, voiced from January 2020: a novel coronavirus emerging in the city housing China’s premier coronavirus lab — a lab doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, partly funded by the US government — might have come from the lab. For saying this, people were banned from Facebook, branded racists, and fact-checked into the shadowrealm. Facebook formally prohibited “COVID-19 is man-made” claims in February 2021.
The whole thing was settled by the experts, you see. What the public didn’t know: Fauci’s own emails, FOIA’d in June 2021, show top virologists telling him in late January 2020 that the virus looked potentially engineered — “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” — days before publishing the paper that declared the lab theory implausible. They said one thing in private and censored the other in public.
Then what happened. Facebook quietly un-banned the claim in May 2021. By 2023, the FBI assessed a lab origin as most likely — with moderate confidence — and the Department of Energy concurred, at low confidence; the rest of the intelligence community stayed split at low confidence, which is precisely the point. The question was never settled in either direction. What was settled is that you were banned from asking it — and then the position you could lose your account for holding became the preferred assessment of federal agencies. Nobody apologized. Nobody ever does. The bans just… lifted, the way the emergencies just… end, three years after “two weeks.”
Exhibit D: The Mandates
Rochelle Walensky · MSNBC · March 29, 2021 / Joe Biden · CNN Town Hall · July 21, 2021
The CDC Director: “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” The President: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Those two claims — the vaccine stops infection and transmission — were the entire legal and moral basis for the mandates, the passports, and the firings.
Biden, September 9, 2021: “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin.” Tens of millions of workers ordered: inject or lose your job — nurses, firefighters, soldiers. Framed as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” — and by December, the White House was promising the holdouts “a winter of severe illness and death.” Unity, healing, etc.
Then what happened. By August 2021, Walensky herself was on CNN conceding the vaccines “can’t prevent transmission” anymore — gutting the stated rationale for mandating them on others’ behalf. Biden — vaccinated, boosted, then boosted again — got COVID in July 2022. Then got it again, a week after “recovering.” The Supreme Court struck down the OSHA mandate in January 2022. The people fired under the retracted rationale did not get their years back. The warners had said, from day one: the argument for mandates collapses if the shot doesn’t stop spread — and if it turns out it doesn’t stop spread, nobody will be held accountable. Two for two.
Exhibit E: The Transfer
The Essential & The Closed · 2020–2021
The libertarian warning, March 2020: lockdowns aren’t shared sacrifice — they’re a sorting machine. The state will decide which businesses live and which die, and it will choose the ones with lobbyists. Main Street will be sacrificed to the Fortune 500, and the money printing (see Docket II) will inflate the assets of the already-rich.
Called class-war paranoia. Then Amazon, Walmart, and Target were declared “essential” while the corner store, the gym, the diner, and the barber were declared lethal.
Then what happened. By September 2020, of 163,735 businesses marked closed on Yelp, 97,966 — sixty percent — were never coming back. Meanwhile, American billionaires gained $1 trillion in the first nine months alone as asset prices mooned on printed money. It was, in the words of multiple economic analyses at the time, the largest upward wealth transfer in modern history — executed by government order, enforced by police, cheered by people who call themselves progressive. And the body count landed where it always lands: drug overdoses hit 93,331 in 2020, up 29.4% — the largest single-year jump ever recorded, in a country whose government had just banned work, church, school, and funerals “for your health.” The libertarians didn’t even get “I told you so” rights on this one; they got called monsters for opposing it, in real time, while it happened exactly as described.
Interjection — The Mask Slips (So To Speak)
The tell was never the policy. The tell was the exemptions. The governor’s aide at the restaurant. The Speaker’s hair appointment. The Met Gala — masks on the servants, smiles on the served. The BLM marches praised by the same public-health officials who’d spent weeks calling your kid’s playground a bioweapon — one thousand of them signing an open letter saying this gathering was fine, actually, because the virus checks your politics before infecting.
Dave Smith’s read on the era is the one that’ll be in the history books: the regime didn’t believe its own rules, because the rules were never about a virus — they were about finding out how much you’d take. And the answer, America, was a lot. Two years of it. The libertarians were the ones standing in the parking lot yelling that none of this was normal, and the country’s response was to yell “grandma killer” from inside a car, alone, wearing two masks. We remember. That’s what this website is for. We fucking told you so.
The Plague Years Ledger
Docket V — Verdict
The libertarians said the emergency would outlast the emergency. It ran three years. They said the closures would destroy the poor and enrich the connected. The data says it was the biggest wealth transfer ever recorded. They said the censors were guessing. The FBI now grades the banned theory as most likely. They said the kids were fine and the schools should open. Sweden ran the control group and proved it. They said the mandate’s premise would collapse and no one would be held accountable. It collapsed. No one was held accountable.
Every “misinformation” label was a spoiler. The cranks were right about the plague years.
They warned you. You laughed. The receipts don’t care.
The crown can bite me.