I still remember stocking hand sanitizer and black nitrile gloves in my retail stores, late February 2020. That was us getting ready.
Jump to the second week of March and California announcing a stay-at-home order. I had to go secure our stores for being unoccupied. On the way there is was dozens of miles of empty LA freeways, and news radio all about people suffocating on ventilators and sanitizing everything that came into your house. Then, walking alone through empty malls, avoiding anyone else who was there. It felt like we were shutting down the for good.
You already couldn’t find those things near me by mid-late February.
low key wish it made me blackout forever instead of for a minute or so walking up stairs. this was in October the year before they announced anything. worst ‘flu’ (only flu Infact) I’ve ever experienced as an adult.
I had a family friend who also had a really bad “flu” in November, 2019.
Then she stayed sick for several months before she had a seizure at home and ended up in a coma. Eventually woke and had to relearn how to walk. She’s mostly back to her normal self, but as far as I know, she never got an answer about why the flu she got just before COVID was spreading in the U.S. caused such a serious string of health related events.
Shout out to the broligarchs who stepped in by early March to use cutting “edge technology” to keep COVID disinformation from spreading across social media:
March 2020: White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus
In a phone call, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios implored the companies to help out with an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to fight the new coronavirus. “The White House’s top priority is ensuring the safety and health of the American people amid the COVID-19 outbreak,” Kratsios said in a statement. “Cutting edge technology companies and major online platforms will play a critical role in this all-hands-on-deck effort.” According to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, top tech trade groups and companies participated in the call, including Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and others. The meeting revolved around how the tech industry can better coordinate with the government to get out authoritative facts about the coronavirus while cracking down on the spread of bunk cures and conspiracy theories spreading online.
Remember how we didn’t know for the longest time if we all should be bothering with masks? Crazy how so many people died because of that little “misunderstanding.” I’m pretty sure the U.S. was like the only country where it was even really debated…
Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers. Public health experts such as Larry Gostin stated that federal officials should have recommended mask-wearing sooner;others noted that US government guidance lagged significantly behind mask recommendations in East Asian countries and likely exacerbated the scale of the pandemic in the United States.
I wonder why masking ever became so debatable on social media, and only in the U.S. when these guys were trying to keep disinformation from being spread? Oh well, when a billionaire decides to bother trying to help you, I guess the least you can do is show how grateful your are and say thank you, so I guess thank you for your services broligarchs 🫡
Even if you couldn’t stop the mask debate from spiraling out of control, it’s not like y’all intentionally didn’t want people masking up right? Like what incentive could tech bros (including Peter Thiel’s protege, Michael Kratsios) have possibly had in March of 2020 to try and discourage people from masking?
•March 2020: Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich •March 2020: What is Clearview AI and why is it raising so many privacy red flags? •May 2025: The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI
When the Department of Defense scheduled a meeting in January 2020 for Clearview to pitch its services, the invite included Johnson. The following month, Ton-That sent his friend a proposal to compensate Johnson in Clearview stock for advisory services he provided to the company “with respect to developing, marketing and selling its technology.” In July 2020, Johnson helped Schwartz draft a letter for Rep. Matt Gaetz—a personal friend of Johnson’s—to send to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, lobbying them to use Clearview to smoke out spies among the “400,000 Chinese nationals who enter the U.S. every year as foreign students.”
By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country.
July 2020: Peter Thiel’s New Man In The Defense Department
The Pentagon’s new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Too bad their plan to fight online disinformation about masking failed, I guess…
