Steve McCann writes for the American Thinker about the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recently, I was asked what I thought was the seminal event in the first quarter of the 21st Century. The past twenty-five years, beginning in January of 2000, have been fraught with wars, terrorism, religious persecution, natural disasters, political intrigue, and financial instability. Yet nothing compares to the impact, both short and long-term, of the global elites’ malevolent exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic to permanently embed an authoritarian international world order.

The politically motivated and unprecedented overreaction to a virus with a 99.5% survival rate was launched in March 2020, unleashing what can best be described as a once-in-a-century fiasco. Nearly five years later, it is impossible to look at the United States and the world and not conclude that this country and many nations throughout the globe were in the grip, not of a virus, but of delusional madness and malevolence.

The governing elites throughout the West, the vast majority of whom worship at the altar of globalism, were so successful in propagandizing and fearmongering the populace in America and virtually all Western nations that fear of the virus made far too many people open to choreographed exploitation as the citizenries wallowed in anxiety, depression, and hopelessness.

Thus, a vast majority of the inhabitants of these countries were, by design, rendered extraordinarily susceptible to surreptitiously accepting the tenets of a de facto world government dominated by self-styled elites. The coronavirus crisis offered a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power.

In the spring and summer of 2020, the globalist bellwether, the World Economic Forum (WEF), openly and unabashedly argued that the COVID pandemic was an opportunity to address what they considered to be the burning issues facing the world and would be the catalyst in triggering the “Great Reset” or transformation of world governance.