In 2020, I was a model citizen. Then, I started to question the politicians who were supposed to represent me, as well as modern politics in general. This led me to make drastic changes in my life. The following is my story.
_______
“The pandemic is finally over, and we can all go back to normal.”
Well, that was naïve of me. That is what I genuinely thought.
It was late summer 2020; I was newly of legal age and starting to take on the role of a responsible adult with real conviction. Closely following the news? A civic duty!
I tracked the numbers, absorbed the briefings, and trusted the framework. The German government had serious people running its institutions. They would read the data, adjust, and steer us back toward something resembling ordinary life.
Sure, people make mistakes, but my elected representatives and their trusted experts were working hard, day and night, to make my life better. Right?
After months, it was clear that heavy restrictions on normal life had been ineffective at best and actively harmful at worst. But back then, we didn’t know better. Or so I told myself.
And then the restrictions came back. Harder.
For the most part, I stayed analytical. I was watching the numbers. I still hoped we would recognize the overreaction and return to normal. Soon. Politicians would look at the evidence without the narrative scaffolding, shrug, and admit they had overreacted.
Instead, we got escalation. The narrative shifted twice a week. “We are all going to die!” “The hospitals are overrun!” “You are going to kill grandma!” The metrics shifted too: cases, incidence, hospitalizations, deaths, excess deaths—whatever best served the goal of frightening people.
That gap between the rational governance I expected and what actually happened was small at first. Barely worth naming. But gaps like that have a way of widening.
The Power of Reading
Bitcoin entered my life around the same time. Saifedean Ammous's The Bitcoin Standard raised questions and shattered illusions. It was the kind of book that doesn't just introduce a new idea but makes the old ones look structurally unsound.
The book made me question the state's supposed neutrality as an economic steward. Over time, I learned that politicians use money, like anything else within their reach, to steer the population as they see fit.
The alternative was extreme: hard money, fiscal discipline, and the radical notion that citizens could manage their own economic lives without a central authority inflating away the value of their labor.
Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action deepened that skepticism. It didn't just argue against interventionism but showed in detail why intervention tends to generate the very catastrophes it claims to prevent.
I hadn’t known much about economics before. Human Action is a nine-hundred-page treatise that takes the time to explain sound economics to newcomers. Understanding its arguments doesn’t require a degree. If you can reason like a human, you can follow the argument.
Price controls produce shortages. Subsidies distort the incentives they were meant to correct. Regulations entrench the large players they were supposedly restraining.
Mises did not work like modern economists. He didn't build a model of how human beings should behave and then scold reality for non-compliance. He started with how people actually behave and built outward from there. That methodological honesty was, to me, more radical than any of the conclusions.
Orwell’s 1984 reinforced the trajectory. Alongside this reading, I followed accounts on Twitter: individuals questioning the official covid narrative, the coziness between regulators and pharmaceutical companies, and the gap between what was reported and what the data actually showed.
The combination of rigorous economic theory and well-reasoned suspicion of institutions made me a huge skeptic of any government policy.
When Reality Confirmed the Theory
Small doubts had appeared in the early summer of 2020 and hardened over the following months. By late summer, I was genuinely shocked.
We had the data. We had months of evidence about what worked and what didn't. And the response was to run the same play again, with the same confidence, expecting different results.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
—often attributed to Albert Einstein
What made it worse was the silence. No one pushed back. Nearly everyone simply absorbed the new rules. Some people around me did hold an opposing view, but few would declare it publicly.
Others repeated the “expert consensus” back at you the moment you asked a question. Some were true believers—devotees of the state and its priests in lab coats. Some spoke from habit—the habit of outsourcing judgment to credentialed authority and calling it informed opinion.
After half a year of covid tyranny, the Querdenker protests gained traction in Germany. I disagreed with some of the wilder theories. I do not, for instance, subscribe to antisemitic conspiracy claims. Still, the central point they were fighting for was freedom.
They fought for the freedom to move, to associate, to disagree. Yet many people who privately opposed the lockdowns still parroted the media line: all Querdenker protesters are unhinged cranks who want to kill your grandmother.
Shadows of the Past
In the following year, the Overton window shrank visibly. The range of acceptable opinions narrowed. People who had never engaged seriously with epidemiology, virology, or public policy were citing “the experts” with the certainty of converts.
Ask a clarifying question and you were endangering lives. Rigorous questioning, the core of the scientific method, was out the window, even as “the science” was invoked at every turn.
The policies were bad enough. The thinking—or rather, the replacement of thinking with recitation—was alarming.
By international standards, Germany has done an admirable job, perhaps the best, of confronting the horrors its ancestors committed. Unfortunately, the emphasis is misplaced: instead of teaching how tens of millions of ordinary people were drawn into and sustained Nazi ideology, the lesson has been reduced to “the Right is bad.” (And then they define “the Right” broadly and tendentiously as “anything we don’t like.”)
When it comes to spotting warning signs and preventing such a tragedy from recurring, the operative goal seems to be suppressing votes for right-wing parties. The fact that tyranny can emerge from any point on the political spectrum is a lesson mostly ignored.
It may sound hyperbolic today, but footage from the covid years shows the unvaccinated being treated with a social hostility that echoed how Jews were treated in mid-1930s Germany. They weren't sent to camps (yet), but every social ill was blamed on them.
A Good Crisis
By 2021, the landscape looked bleak. Vaccine passports, to use the preferred euphemism, looked permanent. The noose around dissenters was tightening.
I felt we were beginning to relive the trajectory of 1930s Germany. Again, this might sound exaggerated to many, but take a look at the news in 2022. The people in 1930s Germany did not anticipate what was about to happen either.
Whether you agreed that vaccination was a good idea, were pressured into it, or managed to resist entirely, the coercion being applied to ordinary people should have alarmed you.
Considering how normalized tyranny had become, I was amazed that the covid measures ended at all. But the end of emergency measures did not mean that things returned to the way they had been before. The state grew during those years, and it did not shrink back.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
—often attributed to Winston Churchill
The Land of the Free
A question took shape: “Is this where I want to build a life?” Some Germans complain that they aren't allowed to express patriotism. And I always think: Patriotism about what, exactly? About politicians and neighbors who treat your freedoms as an obstacle to be managed rather than a birthright?
I was done. I knew I had to leave. But where?
I was searching for a land of the free. The answer was clear: The Land of the Free. I had concerns about some of what was happening in the United States, but I could always move to Texas instead of California.
In my mind was the America the Founders envisioned, one where I could be left alone to live my life as I saw fit.
At the time, I was completing a duales studium—alternating between hands-on work at my employer and university coursework—the kind of arrangement German institutions do well and that companies value because it produces capable workers quickly.
My plan was simple: finish my studies in 2023 and find a position—with my current employer or, if necessary, another—in the United States.
How this plan played out will be the subject of our next installment.
