Dear readers, it has been a while. I’d like to invite you all out for a coffee, but under the state’s current health orders, that would land me in jail. 

While the generations that preceded us expressed the reckless endeavour of youth by smoking weed, stealing cars, breaking into abandoned buildings, and setting off ill-advised fireworks displays, our rap sheet will make for less energetic reading. 

We are a new breed of miscreants. 

Our criminal record will include harbouring a friend, venturing more than five kilometres from home, and visiting the supermarket with a mate where both of us browsed for an unnecessary loaf of carbs. That last offence also deducted a few digits from our social credit score, which we recovered by kneeling beneath a photo of our supreme leader, Gladys Berejiklian. 

While those of us with commitments find this infuriating, emergencies remain popular with people who have nothing to contribute to society other than a record of compliance. Becoming a cog in the Big State gives the meandering masses purpose. The adrenaline kick of looming danger makes them converge on whichever apocalypse is nearest. To them, ‘vaccination status’ has become the new social currency -– which is why they want to take selfies with needles and brandish their participation award at strangers. 

It is tempting to enjoy the flurry of panic, but if you teach the government that you can be manipulated by fear, it will become their tool of choice. Fear costs nothing except your freedom. 

Social media has a name for people who stubbornly hold on to normality -– Plague Rats. 

We are the individuals who refuse to partake in a global unpaid drug trial. It would be a lot simpler to succumb to the casual threats of permanent segregation and poverty, but as a general rule, I don’t run around mazes for Big Pharma. 

Having learned absolutely nothing from the dehumanisation of those deemed less worthy during the fear-driven National Socialist regime, we have once again decided to divide polite society into two groups. One is led to believe that if they bully and threaten the other, the government will be able to keep them safe and make Australia a better, freer place. 

In order for the state to justify its crimes, it has to convince the community that those who disobey are not really citizens at all. They’re not even people. Human rights count for nothing if dissenters are less than human. 

Throughout history, the victims of oppression have been slurred as vermin; cockroaches, dogs, pigs, and any other creature subject to slaughter. It normalises the violence that is eventually perpetrated against them. The government is not always the chief perpetrator, but its failure of leadership is always the means by which dehumanisation goes viral within a population. 

Australia’s political class have not only allowed society to split itself into a truly bipolar state of victims and oppressors, it has sought to benefit from the barbarity without getting its paws dirty. This is why Scott Morrison entertains the idea of pushing vaccine passports onto businesses when he is prohibited by various international human rights conventions from doing it himself. A good leader would not attempt to circumnavigate a moral absolute by setting a precedent in the private sector. 

Talk of medical segregation by the prime minister legitimises discrimination. The left’s ‘social justice’ movement introduced the idea of ‘positive discrimination’ as a good thing by institutionalising race and gender quotas. Now, the government has a licence to ‘positively’ discriminate against whomever it wants for the greater good. 

When politicians call Australian citizens ‘dangerous’ and ‘a threat’ they inspire members of the public to attack them. How long before we see signs hanging in shop windows with ‘no vermin’ written across them? We are already locked out from essential services if we refuse to check in with a surveillance app born from the union of censorial Big Tech and a coercive government. 

Scott Morrison and his National Cabinet of hypocrites have spent more than a year openly inciting hatred against Australians, who we must remember are all victims of China’s lab leak. If they are not smart enough to see the unintended consequences of their divisive rhetoric, they are not capable of managing this delicate civil situation. 

Australians who simply wish to go about their lives have been placed under house arrest and solitary confinement for the best part of two years. They have had their businesses stolen. Their life savings raided. They cannot travel or see their families. It is not only the threat of being evicted from the family home that endangers their sanity – it is the knowledge that there is no way to provide for the future. Health experts have trapped families with their miseries in a booze-filled pressure cooker only for the government to direct their rage at each other. 

We are not ‘all in this together’ and every time a premier on full pay recites the vacuous platitude, a brick is added to the wall of mistrust. 

Is it any wonder the streets are filling with discontent? 

Premiers have decided to paint a target on ordinary Australians who value the fundamental principles that made this country great. 

Covid has taught us that a terrifying amount of people would trade their freedom for a 0.02% increase in safety. These are the social dividends of a generation raised by helicopter parents, safe spaces, and participation awards. In 2021, freedom is selfish and those who want to preserve their privacy are branded as criminals. 

Our saviour from hell is the billion-dollar vaccine industry. This is not some divine church of moral purity operating for the greater good, it is a machine of risk-versus-profit with a chequered history. The reason regulatory authorities brought in minimum long term testing standards is because of past mistakes, so forgive those who don’t jump at the chance to side-step precautionary measures for a virus that poses a negligible threat. 

‘Trust the science’ doesn’t mean blindly accept candy. At some point we have to remember that Big Pharma represent the world’s largest drug dealers profiting from panic. 

Consider the situation before us. This is not a free market scenario where vaccine companies are in genuine competition with each other to produce the best product. Their manufacturers have been given forward orders by the world’s governments of three doses for every human being on the planet, prepaid with public money. Consumption of the product is all but mandated. Silicon Valley -– which contains benefactors of the vaccine industry -– then helps silence, fine, and in some cases arrest the voices of protest. 

Not only did we watch various players in this game suppress the outbreak’s origin. They went out of their way to censor reported side effects as they emerged to protect the reputation of the lucrative product and unpopular government directives. This is not a healthy or safe state of affairs. You do not need to threaten people to take a free miracle cure. 

“Take this or you’ll never work, travel, or see your family again,” isn’t exactly a reassuring sales pitch. 

Only the intellectually lazy approach this situation with slurs of ‘anti-vaxxer’ aimed at people who have taken a vast assortment of vaccines over their lives. Some of us are perfectly happy to wait and see what happens to those who have taken the vaccine. That is our right. 

Unfortunately, risk triggers an ancient human instinct that our laws normally defend against. 

When part of a group takes on an unknown, they have an urge to force the rest of the group to do the same so that all members experience equal risk. It’s a defensive mechanism to ensure that their genes are not disadvantaged. This is the origin of peer pressure. You do not see this behaviour with a trusted product. Find me the mobs harassing people on the street for refusing to take any other medical treatment. It’s the unknown that sends people crazy, and they resent those who exhibit caution in the off chance they were right. 

Understanding this exposes the inconsistency of Covid policy. If one group of people resist and prove that the government’s outrageous behaviour was unnecessary, well then those people really are a ‘threat’. 

This isn’t polio or smallpox. Because these vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, they remain incapable of creating herd immunity (where the virus is robbed of hosts thus creating an impenetrable wall that causes it to die out). In a blatant display of propaganda, The World Health Organisation decided to change the definition of ‘herd immunity’ to accommodate Covid vaccine shortcomings. 

If these vaccines don’t create true herd immunity, they cannot be used in a strategy of elimination – which is the only argument Scott Morrison has for mass vaccination and vaccine passports. 

The dogmatic and unscientific approach to the pandemic has caused laughable scenarios. Expert medical advice offered in a recent Victorian court case had to conclude that while buying a takeaway cup of coffee is more dangerous to public health than holding a protest sign on your own, the state still views the protest as dangerous and the coffee as safe. 

This is going to come as a massive shock to the fragile reader, but people die. Humanity experiences plagues every century, and as our population increases, these will become more frequent with higher death tolls. Locking civilisation down every time one emerges impoverishes nations to the point they can be picked off by predatory geopolitical neighbours. 

You may think that fear is a valid cause to rescind liberty, but you’d be wrong. If we had shut our liberties down every time a pandemic came knocking, there would be no liberty at all. Safety is not a human right for a good reason. No government can offer to keep you safe while life itself conspires to do you harm. 

Science has always been bastardised by politicians and religious groups using it to legitimise their actions. The profession and its practitioners are not a state of moral authority. The reason we don’t put health officials in charge of society is because the pursuit of their singular occupation, no matter how well meaning, is done to the ruin of civilisation at large. 

If you still imagine yourself a fervent believer in ‘trust the science’, consider it is a fact that AIDS could be eradicated by locking up the world’s infected people. The loss of their rights would surely be a small price to pay for the end of a disease that kills millions? Or, if you’re impatient for a zero case result, you could kill them outright. It’s just science, after all. 

First, ask yourself how far you would be prepared to go in pursuit of a disease, then ask how far the government will go now that it has hitched its political survival to an eradication utopia. Once the normal legal restraints of democratic decency have been cut for ‘safety’, there is nothing to keep the cold hand of logic at bay. 

We are treating the medical profession the same as climate science. Both are the recipients of billions in government grants – both are in possession of alarmist, wildly inaccurate computer modelling used to destroy civil liberties. By all means, if the world scares you – stay home. Don’t go to work. Wear a hazmat suit. Live in a cage, but don’t you dare lock me in there with you. I am not going to jump at shadows because you do. 

Politicians know full well that if Australians were allowed to make their own choices, they would not choose a permanent state of surveillance and obedience. That’s simply not how humans are programmed to deal with threats. In truth, our instinct is to shag each other and make as many new humans as possible. As a species we don’t stagnate – we grow. 

It is difficult to watch so-called conservatives whip the government into a state of absolute power to sate their personal fear. They are cowards. Our freedoms are non negotiable. They are not things to be toyed with, ransomed, or blackmailed back to us with ‘carrots and sticks’ as though we are farm animals. 

Dehumanisation is an essential step in the acceptance of cruelty. 

#PlagueRats has been trending in the hope that it will turn Australians who value liberty into carriers of disease – rodents to be exterminated from society so that everyone can feel safe. 

If you allow yourself to buy into this ‘new normal’, you might as well pick up a shovel and scope out a spot in the gulag, because that’s where this is heading. 

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at Ko-Fi.

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