From David Solway: Climate and COVID: The Erosion of Common Intelligence and Common Sense pointing out that there appear to be neither at the centres of our political domains, or at least severe shortages of both.

With regard to climate: Untold millions credulously buy into long-exploded pseudo-scientific fables like anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the utility of wind turbines and solar arrays, attesting to the ongoing debility of critical inquiry and independent reasoning, qualities associated with intelligent thinking. The unsightly despoiling of the environment, the distribution of these monstrosities in fields and pastures across the national landscape, and the hecatombs of bird and insect species caused by these lookalike Imperial Walkers should give us pause….

And then there’s the Chinese flu.

The massive public accommodation to the onset of the coronavirus and the draconian measures deployed to combat it have proven to be useless and, indeed, ruinous. Support for such oppressive measures remains high, despite the fact that public health lockdowns are unprecedented in the West and testify, as former Clinton advisor Naomi Wolf and American Institute for Economic Research senior fellow Donald Boudreaux warn, to the imminence of totalitarian rule. These measures are instruments of political control, more suited to the police state than to a democracy. Tucker Carlson gets it right in his February 23/21 segment. Even so, the masked stream by like armies of the living dead or creepy, beaked creatures from outer space, scarcely humanoid.

David associates this with The Decline of Intelligence in the West but there is something more sinister there, I fear, which is the absence of civic bravery and the willingness to face danger squarely. We are, no doubt, looking at stupidity, but there is also a cowardice to face up to totalitarian threats that seem to be rushing us towards the end of Western Civilisation and the rise of a new feudal society.