The emerging COVID State is a rich mix of both, delivered all at once.

Each day brings fresh evidence of global and local madness, bullying, lies, dobbing, demonisation, wanton exaggeration and brainwashing.

MADNESS

You look at the morning papers and think – where to start? Someone needs to write a book about COVID madness, similar to the web site that lists all the things laughably said to be caused by global warming.

Not only did we have “Covidiot” St George-Illawarra Dragons rugby league players having an outrageous barbecue in Shellharbour – a place not even in Sydney, not anywhere near the “outbreak”.

The Covid-shaming of footballers has spread to the southern code as well. According to Fox Sports:

“North Melbourne’s Jaidyn Stephenson has apologised for ‘ill-informed’ social media comments about the COVID-19 pandemic, vowing to ‘further educate myself on this topic’.

So what did he actually say, prior to his (probably) forced re-education and grovelling mea culpa?

“If there’s no media then I don’t think COVID is such a big thing. It’s just my opinion.”

It was simply an answer to a fan’s question. It wasn’t a press release. He wasn’t in a pulpit. He said at the time it was an “opinion”.

Never were truer words spoken, Jaidyn. You are decidedly not ill-informed. You do not need re-education “on this topic”.

The idiots now coaching you in newspeak are the ones who need re-educating.

It is a fact that the whole COVID hysteria is driven, and only maintained, through the legacy media and its now twenty-four-hour news cycle. In a diabolical collaboration with the COVID State.

Without daily pressers and breathless announcements of new cases and new lockdowns, there would be no COVID hysteria.

The adage that virtually no one knows anyone with COVID, or even knows anyone who knows someone with COVID, rings true.

EXAGGERATE

Who would even know a bad flu season, or even remember which preceding years were bad for flu, or good for flu, without the aid of Google and old health statistics?

No, COVID is “real”, a crisis, because the media say it is so. The media don’t merely exaggerate COVID. They make it a thing. Young Jaidyn knows this, and said so.

COVID isn’t the only phenomenon created by the media.

Consider so-called climate change.

If not for the members of the alarmist archipelago and their breathless friends in the media, no one would ever suspect it was happening.

Since sea levels have not, in fact, risen in a way that anyone can actually see evidence of it, and no-one would ever have thought that there were higher temperatures now than before.

Or more and more severe floods. Or more frequent and worse droughts. No, climate change is a thing solely because it is talked up, and endlessly talked about, by the virtue-signalling chattering class.

Endless, pious repetition brings something into existence.

Make it scary. Then make it even more scary (see the Delta variant, described as a “game changer” by the Unspellable Armenian who runs NSW).

MORAL PANIC

And not only climate change.

The media maketh the moral panic, then they simply recycle ’til it is conventional wisdom. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Cardinal George Pell was jailed on the back of a moral panic (aided, of course by a half-billion-dollar Royal Commission, dodgy cops, priest-chasing lawyers, ABC fembots and a tainted judiciary).

And Pell isn’t alone. The true fact is that a tiny per cent of Catholic priests are child abusers. He was not one of the tiny per cent.

Yes, embedded public opinion is a powerful thing.

So, what Jaidyn Stephenson said was spot on. So why the apology?

Douglas Murray has opined (in The Madness of Crowds and elsewhere) that only the retired, the independently wealthy and those not employed can expect to have true freedom of speech in the age of political correctness, cancel culture, enforced conformity and social media pile-ons.

Of course, the same applies to contractors and the self-employed. Anyone who has ever had a contractual relationship with a government agency, a corporate or – especially – a sporting body in the public eye, is ripe for the demand for a cringe-worthy apology for any transgression. Even over COVID now, for heaven’s sake.