The Covid mandates, lockdowns and resultant tyrannies were very much a testing ground for what the elite could get away with. And I think they were amazed at how compliant the sheeple were. In fact, my image is more along the lines of poultry, cooped up in pens, obvious of Christmas approaching. Oh, sure, people were threatened by losing their jobs, I know. But, looked at in terms of history. Do you think someone like King Leonidas I (540-480 BC) and the 300 Spartans, who fought and died against two million Persian warriors of King Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC), holding them back for days, would have feared losing a job, say teaching foreign students (maybe modern Persians) at some moth-eaten university? In more modern times, how about the ANZACS on the Kokoda Trail?