It was the 800-pound gorilla not in the room at the debate. It was the elephant not in the room either at the debate or during the Tucker Carleson interview with Trump, although it has a lot to do with Trump. The Fox moderators did not utter the word COVID the entire night, nor did Tucker ask Trump about his doubling down on the vaccines and refusing to acknowledge any mistakes with the lockdowns, even as the biomedical fascists begin bringing back COVID fascism. A debate where UFOs were discussed more than the worst tyranny and genocide in American history is no debate at all.

It's the policy that led to the greatest loss of life and now permanent destruction of the economy. Nearly every policy vice we are dealing with today flows fully or partially from the decisions that created COVID and induced the tyrannical response to it. Yet because the leaders of both parties and their respective media mouthpieces – including the top GOP gun himself – were all in on it, nobody wants a reckoning. We have not had a reckoning on emergency powers, lockdowns, masks, blocking of treatment, or the deadly vaccines and remdesivir.

As Steve Deace and I warned in our book, “Those responsible are without remorse, so there must be a reckoning. Barring that reckoning, we promise you they will make us remorseful later for not holding them accountable now.”

Well, here we are with multiple colleges and businesses, including those in red states, pushing inhumane and illogical mask mandates again. Here we are with the FDA about to approve more dangerous COVID variant-chasing shots for the fall. And here we are with the FDA approving another dangerous Pfizer shot for RSV for pregnant women, despite terrible reproductive safety signals with the company’s COVID shots and now concerns of preterm birth with its RSV serum. Operation Warp Speed was not an anomaly but a new paradigm. Public health surveillance and restriction were not an aberration from life but a new way of life for these people.

Then there is the economy. Obviously, the economy chewed up a substantial portion of the presidential debate, as well as most of our daily political discussions. But nearly every economic ill that ails us today is the result of the COVID money-printing policies. The trillions of dollars of monetary and fiscal spending created the greatest wealth gap in American history, as well as a permanently elevated cost of living. DeSantis was the only one on the stage to trace the excrement sandwich we now call our economy back to its obvious source. Otherwise, the entire existence of the past three years from hell would never have been recalled, even as many of the policies are making a comeback, with a number of them – from rushed vaccines to inflation – never having left.

The coverage of the COVID abomination even from conservative media has been muted from day one – ever since “15 days to stop the spread” supplanted life, liberty, property, and economic prosperity until this very day. I’m not going to speculate as to the rationale for this obfuscation, but it is jarring that Tucker Carlson did not ask Trump a single question about it during his carefully timed pretaped interview aired at 9 p.m. Eastern Wednesday night.

For those who think COVID fascism is over, just keep in mind:

• The FDA and CDC are still funding and promoting dangerous vaccines at an even quicker pace.
• Remdesivir is still the treatment for COVID to this very day.
• Governments are still tracking and surveilling vaccination status.
• Masking is still the go-to policy in many settings whenever respiratory viruses spread.
• Our government has not slowed its gain-of-function aka vaccine research one bit.

The Biden administration just announced another $1.4 billion to develop the “next generation” of COVID shots. Where is the outrage from the GOP or even the promise to defund these shots in the upcoming fiscal year budget just weeks away?

The lesson of the muted response to COVID from the so-called right is that clearly things have not gotten bad enough. The sad and terrifying thing is that whatever they must throw at us to elicit a righteous and unified policy response will now have to be so devastating that we will likely never have the political ability to fight it even if we wanted to. Meanwhile, the vanity and political circus will continue unabated.