I remember being in Australia when it still news when a single person had covid in mid 2021, when the US had cracked 650,000 deaths

Seppos were not very happy about this

In National Review, the flagship magazine of mainstream conservative thought, various headlines have read “When Will Someone Hold Human-Rights Hearings on Australia?,” “Australians Are Suffering from Excessive COVID Lockdowns,” and “When a Western Society Goes Insane.”

A Sept. 9 article in The Federalist declared: “The once free and open Australian continent has effectively become a giant prison for its 26 million residents.”

That same month, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mused aloud: “Is Australia freer than China, communist China, right now? I don’t know. The fact that that’s even a question tells you something has gone dramatically off the rails with some of this stuff.”

On Sept. 30, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, devoted 12 minutes of his show to Australia, documenting its supposed slide into authoritarianism. “One moment the English-speaking world is mocking China for being dystopian and autocratic,” he warned. “The next moment they’re aping China and hunting people down who are two blocks from their homes and smoking a cigarette.”

Two months later, Carlson referred to a quarantine facility in Darwin, Australia, as a “Covid concentration camp.”

In October, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, got into an exchange with the leader of Australia’s Northern Territory after tweeting, “I’ve always said Australia is the Texas of the Pacific. The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful & sad. Individual liberty matters. I stand with the people of #Australia.”

In November, Joe Rogan, mistaking satire for a real ad, posted on his Instagram account: “Not only has Australia had the worst reaction to the pandemic with dystopian, police-state measures that are truly inconceivable to the rest of the civilized world, but they also have the absolute dumbest propaganda.”