Old Mortality: How the Corona Coup Tortures the Elderly – and Everybody Else

Michael Lesher

I want to report a crime.

Here are the facts:

About a year ago, my 85-year-old mother was kidnapped by a gang of charlatans and dragged off to Coronavirus Neverland – whence, on her captors’ instructions, she’s been making frightened phone calls to me and other relatives ever since.

What did she say, you ask? Well, in one of the first of those calls, she warned me that I was never to bring my shoes inside my apartment. If I did, according to her kidnappers, something terrible would happen – to me, if not to her.

She also cautioned me against bringing my clothes inside the apartment once I had been exposed to the outside world. Instead, I was to shower and change after each walk or shopping trip. The kidnappers insisted, further, that I was to disinfect all my apartment’s walls and floors at least once each day. (I didn’t tell my mother that the drug store and supermarket shelves were practically bare of cleaning fluids in those days, as panicked shoppers grabbed everything they could carry for daily orgies of sterilization. Apparently, she wasn’t the only kidnap victim.)

As for my hands – well, they had to be scrubbed carefully every few hours, no matter how blistered they might already be from a day spent soaping, showering, sanitizing, mopping, shampooing and sterilizing everything in sight with whatever cocktail of disinfectants my mother’s captors had told her about the previous evening.

All this came garnished with a threat: if my mother and her family didn’t obey all of the kidnappers’ commands, no matter how absurd, we might never see her again.

That was a year ago.

Now things are even worse.

Recently, my mother’s kidnappers have bullied her into submitting to the injection of an experimental drug for which the manufacturer bears no liability, for which there is absolutely no medical necessity, and which our government refuses to subject to the same testing regimen it applies to contraceptive pills or routine antibiotics.

That’s the crime. Now, can’t someone be punished for this?

Yes, I know my mother isn’t the only one being tortured – forgive me if I seem to be minimizing the scope of the rights-busting, society-destroying coup that is abusing us all.

But there is a certain justice in singling out the crime committed against my mother. Haven’t the lockdown-lovers singled her out already, making harmless old people the prime targets of their toxic benefactions?

Bad as the whole coronavirus charade certainly is, it’s hard to find a parallel for the sheer perversity of the propagandists’ abuse of the aged. The “experts” are never more self-righteous than when they thunder at us that the smallest deviation from their New Normal prescriptions amounts to killing off our elders. But no one has ever treated the old with more cynical cruelty – or with less justification.

Think of the title of an article published by one Rabbi Shai Held in the Atlantic – one of the most relentless purveyors of coronavirus propaganda – a year ago:

The Staggering, Heartless Cruelty Toward the Elderly.”

When I first saw those words, I thought the Atlantic editors had suddenly seen the light and wanted their readers to know about the evils of the harsh nursing home confinements recently ordered by governors-turned-dictators in states like New York and New Jersey.

But no. The Atlantic was only showcasing a spiteful sermon from the rabbi about some obnoxious people – Trump supporters or similar unworthies, I assume – who, it was said, were claiming that COVID19 wasn’t really so bad if it only killed old people, who after all were going to die soon anyway.

I don’t know of any real people who said such things – not that facts would have mattered to the Atlantic. What I do know – and what the Atlantic’s Rabbi Held never mentioned – is that officials like Governor Andrew Cuomo, to the applause of the propagandists, forced old people into crowded nursing homes where they were isolated from friends and relatives, forbidden to leave, told they were surrounded by a deadly disease they could not escape, and otherwise either neglected or “helped” by terrified attendants dressed in space suits – a grotesque scenario that could only have added to their sense of danger and hopelessness.

Not surprisingly, many of those inmates died.

Now that’s cruelty.

I’m still hearing stories of people who have not been allowed to visit elderly relatives for months on end; many of us have friends or acquaintances who were prevented from saying goodbye to a dying friend or cousin or grandparent or uncle. This is taken almost for granted nowadays.

Some of the stories I hear are even worse. One man reports being told that his aged mother, a patient last spring at a crowded New York hospital, would not be treated for her COVID19 infection as a matter of “hospital policy” because she had signed a “do not resuscitate” order: since the hospital staff didn’t know how to treat COVID19, a nurse told him, they were treating her illness as terminal.

In other words, they would let the old woman die even if they believed that giving her oxygen could save her life.

A policy like that – if indeed it existed – violated New York law. And when propagandists point to the high death rates at those New York hospitals in March and April as “proof” of the dangers of the coronavirus, I can only wonder how many of the patients they have in mind were killed not by an infection but by medical malpractice.

And what about reports – this time not from patients’ relatives but from a medical professional with first-hand experience – that another New York “hospital policy” involved excessive use of ventilators, likely resulting in damage to the patients’ lungs and possibly hastening their deaths?

The propagandists never mention this; such things, too, are taken for granted.

And these people have the nerve to complain about “cruelty toward the elderly”? If you ask me, they should be giving lessons on the subject.

I’ll say it again: I know that lots of younger people are being tortured too. If you want evidence of how bad things really are – and from the horse’s mouth – take a look at this sadistic effusion in the Atlantic’s February 4 issue, from a woman who watched her husband suffer:

At about 2am on Thursday morning, I woke to find my husband shivering beside me. For hours, he had been tossing in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, nursing chills, a fever, and an agonizingly sore left arm. His teeth chattered. His forehead was freckled with sweat.

A cautionary tale about the ravages of the “deadly virus”? That’s what it would have been if the poor man had tested positive for COVID19 six months earlier. But now her spouse’s torment is the cue for a flood of joyous propaganda:

[A]s I lay next to him, cinching blanket after blanket around his arms, I felt an immense sense of relief. All this misery was a sign that the immune cells in his body had been riled up by the second shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, and were well on their way to guarding him from future disease.

Ah, the innocence of ideological purity! For the Atlantic apparatchik, her husband’s “misery” meant “an immense sense of relief,” just as being burned alive in a bombed building in 1941 moved a British Communist Party member to bless Joe Stalin (as related years later by her friend Teddy Prager):

My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam [that trapped her], but nothing moved. Poor Freddie…. It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin…Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Goodbye boys, goodbye Teddy.

Isn’t it nice to know that indoctrination still works? Long live Pfizer! Long live experimental drugs and human guinea pigs! Hurray for Joe Biden! Who cares what happens to my husband, so long as the corporate bosses and mask-maniacs and police-state enthusiasts get everything they want?

So yes, every detail of this sinister farce is ugly. But the lockdown-lovers have always claimed to be driven by particular solicitude for the aged. And so it is especially disgusting to watch them lie to old ladies in order to make them submit to dangerous drugs, after terrorizing them for a solid year with fictions intended to leave them more vulnerable to the next round of fraud.

And let’s not mince words: fraud is the right name for what they’ve done to my mother (and so many others). The evidence of all-cause mortality figures in the US (and elsewhere) demonstrates clearly enough that COVID19 has had no significant impact on medical death rates, at least since last summer.

On top of that, a study conducted by several prestigious scientists, chaired by the estimable John Ioannidis, recently concluded that the drastic lockdowns imposed in 2020 did not stem the spread of the virus any better than far milder measures would have done. There is no COVID19 emergency – and if there ever was, which is doubtful, the hysterical official response did more harm than good.

And yet most of the United States still languishes – illegally – under quasi-dictatorial rule, with the acquiescence of mainstream media, which apparently never thought ordinary people should be allowed to control their own lives in the first place. One result of this coup (the only accurate word for it) was the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, engineered in significant part through dishonest COVID19 reporting, and spurred by mail-in voting procedures that almost certainly would not have been approved by the legislative processes required by the relevant state constitutions.

But don’t expect any outrage about this political chicanery from the people who regularly denounce illiberal government in places like China or Venezuela. Representative democracy was largely scrapped in the US a year ago, so it just doesn’t matter that the presidential voting system was illegally altered in order to promote a Democratic victory – just as it doesn’t matter that the mainstream media produced a torrent of worthless claims about Trump’s “mishandling” of the virus in order to make voters blame him for 200,000 deaths as they cast their ballots.

Mention these facts and you are a “conspiracy theorist.” Pretend not to know them and you are “following the science.”

And what if you happen to care about the welfare of elderly people – or of children, whose vulnerability has always been supposed to entitle them to special consideration? Well, if you take your cues from coronavirus propaganda, there’s only one right way to treat both groups: cynically exploit them so as to spread the fear porn as thickly as possible.

Consider, for example, a bizarre January “news” story in which children in California were described making tearful apologies to their grandparents as the latter died, allegedly from COVID19, in off-limits hospital rooms.

The “experts” and the reporter just knew those kids must have infected their elders after attending a Thanksgiving or Christmas party. True, there’s little real evidence that children function as contagious carriers of COVID19, let alone that any have actually passed the infection to an elderly relative. But why let facts get in the way of cruelty? The kids had to learn a lesson: enjoying an innocent holiday celebration meant killing off Granny.

No one in mainstream media challenged that piece of cynical sadism, as far as I know – just as no one challenged the claims of California “health” officials during the same period that the state was experiencing death tolls from COVID19 of over 400 per day. (In fact, for the week ending January 9, the putative daily death tolls for the state edged closer to 500.)

But was that even true?

According to the all-cause mortality figures shown on the CDC website, during the weeks ending January 2 and January 9 there was a total of 8,958 deaths in California, as compared with a total of 11,761 deaths during the same period a year earlier, before any “pandemic” was declared.

In other words, during the same period when California “experts” were screaming about 400-500 extra deaths each day from a disease that presumably wasn’t killing anyone the previous January, the total number of deaths actually decreased by an average rate of 200 per day as compared with the same period a year earlier.

To square California’s claimed coronavirus deaths with those facts, we would probably have to suppose that heart disease, cancer, traffic deaths, diabetes and so on were all so drastically reduced in California that their daily death tolls diminished by more than 600 per day since the previous year.

Yes, miracles do happen, as Forrest Gump reminded us. But the more reasonable interpretation is that the COVID19 horror story California “health” officials were telling us in January was a fiction made out of numbers-juggling. Which is pretty much what the whole “deadly plague” story has been from the start – a combination of alarmist and unscientific “projections,” unreliable and over-used tests, arbitrary diagnoses, fear-mongering and politically-driven cause-of-death classifications, which were then fanned to hysteria by power-hungry politicians and a compliant “news” media, not to mention corporate behemoths that stood to gain from the panic.

So I return to my mother – now 86 – and her psychological kidnapping by a bunch of frauds and fear-porn peddlers pretending to be “experts.” Since no one in a position of authority will help, what can I do for her?

Well, one thing I can’t do is to remain silent.

Our country – hers and mine – is being torn apart by measures that the public and its elected representatives have never been permitted to debate, let alone to approve. Maybe I can’t persuade my mother that she’s being lied to. But at least I don’t have to lie myself. Maybe, one of these days, something I say will help her – or if not her, then someone else’s mother who has fallen into the clutches of the same captors.

Can I preserve the principles of civil rights in an era when the very notion of freedom is scoffed at from the headlines of every “liberal” newspaper in the West? I don’t know. But I can do my best to ensure that it won’t happen with my consent, that I won’t be an accomplice in my own victimization – or my mother’s.

And I’m confident of one thing: that when I am 86 years old, I will not be telling my grandchildren that when the chips were down I was too busy washing my hands and marching to the police state’s every command to speak up against the destruction of everything I believe in.

The crimes against us all may continue. I will not contribute to them.

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.