COVID Chaos: A Prison without Bars: "These (purposefully) chaotic times are an opportunity for a movement toward government control and the suppression of individuality. Lockdowns keep us apart and stifle the free exchange of ideas and social communion.".

• Author: Singleton, Marilyn M.
• Position: LIFE IN AMERICA

THE COVID-19 lockdown has its benefits: a chapter a day of the unabridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a study in fear and redefined "normal" values, among many other lessons.

Lately I have seen face coverings stenciled with "I can't breathe." The beauty of the statement is its dual meaning. It can be a nod to George Floyd, an arrestee who suffocated at the hands of a rogue law enforcement officer or a statement of the wearer's condition behind the mask. More generally, it can be a statement about the suffocation of society as a whole.

Free speech is the bedrock of our politics, but media manipulation now is rampant. Under the guise of fact-checking, our modernday newspapers--YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter--have become the arbiters of what constitutes a worthy opinion or fact in contrast to "misinformation." Scientists were certain that something heavier than air could not maintain flight. The misinformed Wright brothers proved them wrong.

Vladimir Lenin recognized that the media are propagandists and their information presented should be "easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive." With COVID-19, the media creates irrational fear with daily charts of deaths and case numbers without corresponding recoveries. They fail to mention that many deaths were of patients with serious underlying conditions or who already were in hospice and had weeks to live and coincidentally tested positive. The raw numbers are unaccompanied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's instruction to classify a death as COVID-19 even if merely suspected or, in some cases, with a negative test. There is no corresponding warning with blinking lights that the tests have false positives or that the daily report of "increases" includes old tests that were not previously reported.

As Lenin noted, "Ideas are much more fatal than guns." Thus, where propaganda and media bias do not succeed, censorship will. Currently, a vocal physician is being silenced and investigated for questioning the motives and possible over-reporting of COVID-19 as the cause of death. Censorship is our polite version of "disappearing" dissidents.

We are not Communist China and cannot allow the treatment of Dr. Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist to be the "new normal." In December 2019, he courageously warned his colleagues on social media about the new SARS-like pneumonia cases but knew that he "would probably be punished." Indeed, Chinese...