The post-covid inversion of power
The Covid crisis revealed how censorship, lies and manipulation of information by public authorities and mainstream media weaken our democracies. Today, the inversion of power fortunately rehabilitates yesterday’s dissident voices, but unfortunately presents other new dangers.
The courage not to bend
During the Covid period, those who had access to, or chose to access, alternative sources of information to traditional media, even through social networks like TikTok, could observe the existence of biases in health policies. The exclusion they faced revealed a totalitarian principle at work. This fracture manifested itself even within families and friend circles, where unprecedented tensions emerged around public health issues. If the scientific consensus on public health had been as obvious as they wanted us to believe, such divisions would never have occurred.
During this period, I personally chose to maintain my connection with what I perceived as the truth, assuming the social risks that resulted. I continued to defend my freedom of expression, even if my thinking diverged from majority opinion. For the democratic principle rests precisely on the confrontation of viewpoints to develop collective decisions, not on the imposition of a single thought and the systematic rejection of dissident voices, as this is what characterizes totalitarianism or dictatorship, two concepts I will distinguish later.
Meticulous documentation of the controversy
I methodically documented this period by compiling documents of the controversy. I analyzed all available opinions and acquired more than one hundred and fifty works, from France and other countries, written by scientists, not journalists, on the subject. While striving to avoid confirmation bias and maintain critical distance, I came to the evidence that censorship had been massive and that the Covid crisis mainly constituted a commercial opportunity for pharmaceutical laboratories, imposed through vast networks of conflicts of interest. This is not a “conspiracy”, it’s an opportunity that was seized, with the success we know, since in two years the richest shareholders on earth saw their fortunes multiply by two.
This is in no way about denying the severity of the epidemic, but questioning its management in the context of potential profits achievable through the instrumentalization of collective fear and the censorship of any contradictory information. This censorship was essential to the system, as official recognition of alternative treatments to vaccines would have prevented their commercialization in the experimental phase. The psychological domination exercised over populations, the collective psychosis orchestrated by a media system financed by the same shareholders as those of pharmaceutical laboratories, thus served the interests of part of the large capitalist groups.
The lessons of history
I sensed that one day, power would reverse. Without wanting to establish a direct comparison, let us recall that during the Second World War, those whom history honors today as “resistance fighters” were then called “terrorists”. The French majority was Pétainist, convinced that this path would save the country. Only a tiny minority, which gradually formed, thought differently. These resistance fighters contributed to the radical inversion of political power.
During the Covid period, I wondered how this inversion of power would occur, how scientific truth would ultimately triumph. While keeping in mind that the resistance fighters of the Second World War were not necessarily more virtuous than the collaborators, the post-war period revealed terrible violence, particularly in popular settling of scores.
The ongoing inversion
Since early 2025, we have been witnessing this inversion in the United States. The process had begun as early as 2022 with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his decision to lift censorship, including for far-right viewpoints. One can legitimately consider that he restored Twitter’s (X) capacity to be an echo chamber for the far right, but also for other divergent perspectives.
David Colon, in his work Propaganda, Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World (2019), explains that democracies rest on adherence to a dominant thesis presented as the correct worldview. Even before Donald Trump’s election, Mark Zuckerberg had made amends in a video intervention, acknowledging the pressures exerted by the Biden administration to censor any contradiction during the Covid crisis. It had become forbidden to ask legitimate questions. The fact-checkers, who presented themselves as guarantors of objective truth, actually functioned as censors of any idea diverging from the line defended by their funders.
A paradoxical rehabilitation
In January 2025, after Donald Trump’s election, Robert Kennedy Jr. became Health Minister. Author of critical works on Covid health policies and committed environmentalist, Kennedy embodies this reversal. The new rulers promise radical changes, with a violence I do not condone, just as I did not defend their predecessors. We are witnessing two different versions of totalitarianism.
Irony of history: the traditional media, which just yesterday vilified dissident voices, are beginning today to rehabilitate these same “conspiracy theorists”, sometimes presenting them as visionaries or heroes. This media about-face perfectly illustrates the opportunistic nature of informational power.
These new leaders indeed support the far right. Paradoxically, during the Covid crisis in France, only far-right parties defended individual freedoms against health policies. Not being far-right at all, I found myself in the strange position of demonstrating alongside them to defend democracy. As during the Second World War, the resistance brought together people from all political sides, left, right, far right, united to defend democracy. It is false to claim that the far right was solely collaborationist; it included different currents.
The most pernicious aspect of this media rehabilitation is the erasure of responsibility. The journalists who rehabilitate “conspiracy theorists” today are often the same ones who lynched them yesterday. This collective amnesia prevents any memory work necessary to avoid the repetition of such abuses.
The price of democratic abandonment
During the Covid period, the protest discourse, the defense of freedoms and constitutional respect were carried by no political party except the far right. Today, the return of freedom of expression on social networks naturally benefits this current, in the absence of structured opposition from other parties to democratic attacks and population submission.
Mark Zuckerberg’s new message announcing the removal of fact-checkers and his support for Donald Trump reveals striking opportunism. This about-face, initiated even before the election, already testified to the change in political wind direction. While I called for this reversal and patiently waited to see it arrive and witness the coat-turning, its current form proves worrying: access to certain truths is accompanied by manifest violence and contempt, notably in Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s positions on gender and immigration issues, as well as their fabrication of other post-truths.
At the time, the so-called democrats, from right and left, should never have thus followed the capitalist power and also cultivated the scapegoat system (young people then the unvaccinated), they thus reserved the contestation of totalitarian policy to the far right, strengthening it all the more.
Towards a true informational democracy?
I was expecting this power inversion, comparable in its dynamics, not in its nature, to that of the end of the Second World War. We are at the heart of this shift, but its violently political form exceeds my anticipations. This evolution confirms, if proof were needed, the eminently political dimension of the Covid crisis and the cyclical nature of power relations in our societies. Today’s heroes were yesterday’s pariahs, and the media rehabilitating them today are the same ones that reviled them. This history lesson should incite us to the greatest democratic vigilance, at all times, and especially in times of crisis.
The post-Covid power inversion reveals the fragility of our democracies in the face of information manipulation. While the fall of the Covid censorship system is a victory for freedom of expression, the way it is happening - between media opportunism and political recovery - raises fears of new forms of control.
The real lesson of this period should be the need to structurally protect information pluralism and contradictory debate. Instead of moving from one hegemony to another, we should build institutional safeguards ensuring that no power, whether health, political or economic, can ever again monopolize the truth. This is unfortunately not at all the trend of the political leaders currently in charge, particularly in France, who are extremist, what historian Pierre Serna has called “Extreme center”, basing their power on repeated lies and denials. When speech thus no longer has any value, it is the psyche of citizens that collectively wavers, losing its collective and political support.
The rehabilitation of dissident voices must not be a simple role reversal where yesterday’s censors become tomorrow’s censored. It must be an opportunity to fundamentally rethink our relationship to information, science and democratic debate. For if history teaches us one thing, it is that power corrupts, and that only citizen vigilance can preserve our fundamental freedoms.
Mechanisms of domination and paths to emancipation
Contemporary power no longer operates so much through visible constraint as through the manipulation of narratives and the manufacture of consent. We too easily forgive the moral failure of those who govern us, we accept calling “freedom” what is authorization, we let information lull us into voluntary submission. The health crisis revealed this fundamental confusion: the authorization regime replaced the freedom regime under the guise of protection. The post-Covid inversion of powers shows how censorship and state lies weaken our democracies while paradoxically rehabilitating yesterday’s dissident voices. Faced with the calm crowd that submits, faced with manufactured consensuses that stifle debate, resistance passes through a lucid presence that refuses the attraction of submission. The left itself, prisoner of the system it claims to fight, must rediscover an authentic political consciousness, distinct from the good conscience that contents itself with moral postures. Restoring democracy requires creating spaces where all discourses are authorized, where complex and partial truth can emerge from dialogue rather than being decreed by experts or algorithms. Authentic politics is born from this tension between care for the collective and resistance to biopower that controls bodies and minds.
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