We’ve seen through the charlatans like Fauci, claiming that they are the experts, and we are not. In fact, we have what they fear most: plain, honest, and straightforward common sense. We are individuals with our own capable minds, and we will continue to question and debate and draw our own conclusions. 

When the pandemic struck, I was living in Luxor, Egypt. I had started the first boxing club for girls on the West Bank and had hoped to start a writing and art program connecting kids in Luxor with kids in Los Angeles. Then this mysterious illness called COVID-19 appeared and the programs fizzled out.

Word traveled fast through the villages. The illness had been identified on a cruise ship that had docked in Luxor. Authorities made a few half-hearted rules, but nobody paid attention.

Life in Luxor went on as normal. Masks? Only women covered their faces! Social distancing? An impossibility when families lived so close together. After a few days of uncertainty, I went back to my daily routine of meeting friends at a favorite arts café, shopping for food, riding my bike along the Nile and to the Valley of the Kings.

The tourists quickly fled back home to lock themselves inside. From afar, I watched as the Western world fell victim to hysteria and fear.

I’d been raised by God-fearing parents to have a healthy skepticism of the media and government. But nothing prepared me for the lies and manipulations that became the story of COVID.

Stories are the most powerful force we have, either to solidify beliefs or to change them. People quickly invested in the official COVID narrative, trusting Anthony Fauci’s assertions that only through mindless submission to the rituals of obsessive cleanliness, masking, and lockdowns would people be saved from illness and death. Even when evidence surfaced to the contrary, people still clung to their newfound faith.

From my vantage in Luxor, I was able to see the big picture without being engulfed in it. I noticed how every story popping into my newsfeed parroted state propaganda. In the 1980s, I’d lived in Yugoslavia under communism and the coordinated, almost hypnotic repetitiveness of the media was beginning to look eerily familiar.

Social media descended into a dark and cruel place policed by “fact-checkers” and social justice warriors. Those who dared to question the official narrative were labeled “grandma killers” and in some cases disowned by family and friends. Doctors and scientists who bravely stood up against the lies were demonized and their careers were ruined.

The message was clear. Expressing alternative viewpoints was selfish and irresponsible, endangering not only your life but the lives of the “collective whole.” State-sanctioned “experts” knew what was best for you. Leave the thinking to them.

By late June 2020, I had managed to get out of Egypt under challenging circumstances (a whole other story) and back to Los Angeles. I started researching and writing about what was going on.

When Fauci admitted with all the arrogance of a self-identifying demigod that he had lied to the public about masks, complaining in the same breath how “antiscience” the doubters are who “don’t believe authority,” I thought surely people would object.