A security fence topped with razor wire surrounds the US Capitol in Washington.

Is this the best journalist in Australia, the one who wrote this: Plague panic chills reason and chokes liberalism. Who else says anything like this anywhere?

“Once the capital of the land of the free and home of the brave, the compliant and scared have taken their place in Washington, DC….

Deaths are sad, but COVID-19 has taken far more than loved ones. Conventions going back centuries restraining democratic governments have been dumped….

A few weeks ago former British Supreme Court judge and historian Jonathan Sumption gave the most eloquent and cogent critique of the “despotic and irrational” lockdown and mask obsessions that have “deprived everyone of what makes life worth living” and “thrown science out the window”….

Please watch it before Facebook, Twitter and Google remove it from the internet as part of a worrying trend towards censorship by firms that once praised free speech online….

A year on from the start of lockdowns around the world, we have learned three lessons. Foremost, we are far more compliant than we thought….

The pandemic also has revealed levels of intellectual laziness and credulity we might not have expected from ever higher spending on education….

Finally, despite decades of globalisation and internationalism, both Australians and Americans have evinced profoundly parochial sentiments….

Freedom and democracy aren’t the same. In the 19th century, the liberal John Stuart Mill worried that the gyrations of public sentiment would erode the individual rights of free association, movement, protest and speech.

His contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous observations on the US, said democracy unchecked would tend to “reduce each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd”. COVID is proving them right.

If he’s not the best, he is certainly the bravest. This is the Best Comment found at The Oz where the article appeared.

Adam [Creighton], love your work (I mean all of your articles on this bender of public fear called COVID 19). I’ve always found it odd that myself and four of my siblings, now middle aged and over, reacted with anger and outrage the moment governments here started implementing COVID policies that curtailed personal liberties. We didn’t argue amongst ourselves, or cajole, bully or debate each other on the issue – we all saw red collectively. I see a similar outrage from some commenters here in the Australian (but more seem to argue for restrictions), and I don’t see any outrage or indignation in my workplace or amongst friends and acquaintances on the subject. The recent Qld election rout shows just how many are happy to be kept safe by Big Bro, too. The vast majority of Queenslanders are compliantly wearing masks – even when not required – while myself and fam avoid public places and seethe with anger and frustration behind our masks when we have to. I guess I’m confused as to why something that comes naturally to me and mine doesn’t come naturally to the majority, but Adam, I’m happy that we have you and your eloquence in our court.

And just below that comment was this:

Watching the West hand a decisive, overwhelming economic and industrial advantage to a huge dictatorship on the rise, China, over the last decade and more, by crippling ourselves with our Left’s insistence on industrially prohibitive expensive and unreliable energy, has been enough to cause many astute observers to conclude that the classical liberal ascendancy’s time is likely running out. Watching the West implode with Covid put it beyond any doubt. For so many years we thought, in our complacency, that giving China an easy run in the WTO and in trade & climate agreements would make China more liberal, more like us. After Covid, we’re more like them, except that the downsides of Western modern ‘liberalism’ – the loss of social cohesion, the attacks on our long-standing institutions, the loss of cultural identity, the poison of identity politics and the demonisation of our historical legitimacy have only gotten worse. All the attacks on our societies by our Left are now harnessed by the CCP. Observe the speechlessness of the new left-wing administration in the US in the face of CCP criticism at Anchorage. How could the US representative contradict China’s charges when the charges came straight from the US Dem’s political playbook? Our cultural self-loathing has become our adversaries’ most potent weapon. We can now either learn from our extreme over-reaction to a ‘pandemic’ which doesn’t even come anywhere near as serious as those of the past such as the Spanish Flu of 1918-20, or we can continue down the path of totalitarianism towards the CCP model. Given the relentless denigration of our culture and history by the left-wing educators and media that dominate, however, it’s unlikely we’ll have the motivation to fight for what is being lost. Worst of all, China remains free of the self-demonisation we have to endure, while we won’t be, under the increasingly censorious and illiberal trend of our governments, MSM and big tech. I don’t envy the Western young.