Our recent photography competition winner Ross Novie joins Frank Armstrong to discuss his winning entry, featuring his masked daughter on a family outing to Yellowstone National Park in Montana. Ross is a TV producer living in Los Angelas who grew increasingly concerned at the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on his children. In response to his two teenagers being kept out of school for almost a year-and-a-half he founded an organisation called LA Uprising to campaign on their behalf. This podcast explores how political polarisation and groupthink led to the imposition of some of the United States’ most stringent controls in the state of California, and how a ‘priestly’ caste of experts were deferred to throughout the period, as politicians relied on fear to engineer consent.