And how to unlock ourselves.
Panicked by fears manufactured by the ruling class, the
American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest
until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences,
and liberties that had defined our way of life.
Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy
protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury.
Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of
medical care is sure to impose needless
suffering and death. In sum,
the lockdowns’ medical and economic dysfunctions make for multiples of
the deaths and miseries of the COVID-19 virus itself.
Bad judgments and usurpations—the scam, not the
germs—define this disaster’s dimensions. The COVID-19’s devastating
effect on the U.S. body politic is analogous to what diseases do to
persons whom age (senectus ipsa est morbus) and various debilities and corruptions had already placed on death’s slippery slope.
Outside of the few who have gained (and are still
gaining) power and wealth from the panic, Americans are asking what it
will take to end this outrage—not to modify it with any “new normal”
decided by who knows whom, on who knows what authority. Since no one in
authority is leading those who want to end it, Americans also wonder who
may lead that cause. What follows suggests answers.
What history will record as the great COVID scam of
2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often
outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the
production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of
communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by
the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most
Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior
partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian
churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.
Truth
Since obfuscation, pretense, and lies concerning the
COVID-19 are the effective agents of the panic and of the seizure of
arbitrary power, truth and clarity about it are the foundational
requirements for escaping its effects. Here is a dose.
From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on
epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control—presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the
Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s
experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the
COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.
Our “best and brightest,” at first having minimized
fears of person-to person contagion during January and February, during
which the disease spread from China to the West, then declared that the
virus is unusually contagious, and posited—on zero factual basis—that
it would kill up to one in twenty persons it infected—5%
infection/fatality rate (IFR). Based on that imagined fatality rate,
they adopted mathematical models from Britain and the University of
Washington that predicted that up to two million Americans would die of
it.
The U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
(IHME) modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns
were based. Its model also predicted COVID deaths for un-locked-down
Sweden. On May 3 it wrote that, as of May 14, Sweden would suffer up to
2800 daily deaths. The actual number was below 40. Whether magnifying
this falsehood was reckless or willful, it amounted to shouting “fire!”
in a crowded theater. What justifies listening to, and paying, people
who do that kind of science?
Establishing any infectious disease’s true lethality is
characteristically straightforward: test a large sample of the
population proportionately representative of location, age, sex, race,
socioeconomic categories. Follow up with the subjects a month later to
add up the rate of infections and learn the results thereof. Period.
Today, we still lack this definitive, direct knowledge of COVID’s true lethality because bureaucrats
have prevented widespread testing for the purpose of firmly
establishing the one figure that matters most. That is because that
figure’s absence allows them to continue fearmongering.
In May the Centers for Disease Control, by then discredited professionally (though not, alas, in the mass media), was forced to conclude
that the lethality rate, far from being circa 5% was 0.26%. Double a
typical flu. The CDC was able to keep the estimate that high only by
factoring in an unrealistically low figure for asymptomatic
infections—never mind inflated figures for deaths. But the U.S.
government, instead of amending its recommendations in the face of
reality, tried to hide reality by playing a shell game with the
definition and number of COVID “cases.”
During March and April, the authorities had defined as
“cases” people sick enough to be hospitalized, who also tested positive.
Whoever divided the number of reported deaths (a number inflated by a
CDC directive to count deaths due to other causes as being due to COVID)
by the number of cases thus defined, was predictably scared and willing
to heed “the best advice”—namely societal lockdowns—on how to stay
safe. That turned out to be ruinous in and of itself. At the time, they
defined the number of these “cases” as the “curve” which we were
supposed to sacrifice so much to “flatten,” lest the wave of
hospitalizations overwhelm our health care system. Because their
premises were wrong, that wave never came.
Instead, in May, as various non-official surveys were
published showing that the majority of those who tested positive for
COVID either barely knew
that they had been infected or had not known at all, these very
authorities doubled down their dishonesty. They began labeling mere
infections as “cases.” They divorced reporting of these “cases” from
reporting of the number of deaths, and warned the inattentive public
about “spiking COVID cases” as if infection carried a serious risk. They
also promoted widespread testing of wholly asymptomatic persons for
current and past infections, the results of which tests were sure to
produce a surging number of new “cases” thus defined.
And they toyed with reporting deaths by attributing to
COVID any that “involved” or looked as if they might have involved it.
They then included pneumonia, influenza, and COVID into the category
PIC. That is how the death figure came to exceed 100,000. But if the CDC
had used the same criterion that it did with the SARS virus, namely
“severe acute respiratory distress syndrome,” the figure by the end of
June would have been some 16,000.
Such naked ploys could succeed only because the media colluded in them. The New York Times’ May 27 lead story ominously blared: “California is the fourth state with more than 100,000 known cases.” Meanwhile, the number of deaths attributed
to COVID continued dropping from ever-lower bases. By the July 1, even
using the CDC’s inflated figures for COVID-responsible deaths,
COVID-19’s Infection Fatality Rate for people under 70 was 0.04%. But
rather than ask how clarion calls of danger comport with decreasing
reports of deaths that may somehow be associated with it, the ruling
class agitated to reverse returning to normal life. Be afraid, be very
afraid. Heads the House wins, tails you lose.
Irrefutable if indirect indication that COVID is no
plague also comes from comparison between the number of deaths
attributed to COVID-19 during any given period with the number of deaths
due to all causes for the same period—despite official inflation in the
number of deaths attributed to the virus.
The Imperial College, London’s tally
for Great Britain, broken down by age of death, shows that the chances
of dying from COVID-19 infection roughly track the chances of death from
all causes at any given age, except for the very young. For men, the
chances of death co-incident with the virus don’t exceed 1%, or the average death rate, until age 70. For women, they don’t exceed the average death rate until close to age 90. In Spain, the death rate for infected persons over 90 years old was 10%.
The measure of “excess deaths” tells a similar story.
During the six-week peak of the COVID event in 2020, deaths in the U.S.
exceeded deaths during the same period in the previous year by 82,000.
Considering that, concurrently, the 2020 flu season was one of the worst
on record (typically the flu is responsible for some 50,000 deaths
during the season) and given the CDC-mandated conflation of COVID
numbers with others, the COVID-19 pandemic in and of itself did not
amount to much—except in New York City, for reasons only partly known. By
June 20, 2020 the CDC reported ZERO excess deaths—meaning that the
figure for weekly deaths was within the long-term normal curve for that
time of the year.
Not incidentally, in 1957 some 116,000 Americans (out
of a population two thirds of today’s size) died of the flu. Ten years
later, the toll was 100,000 and in 2019 it was 61,000. By June 2020 the
(inflated) toll from COVID-19 stood at 100,000.
In short, COVID-19 is not America’s plague. It did
not shake America. The ruling class shook it. They have not done it
ignorantly or by mistake. They have done it to extort the general
public’s compliance with their agendas. Their claim to speak on behalf
of “science” is an attempt to avoid being held accountable for the
enormous harm they are doing. They continue doing it because they want
to hang on to the power the panic has brought them.
BTW: Whenever you hear someone claiming to speak on science’s behalf, referring to authorities rather than to facts and logic, you may be sure that person is a fraud.
Falsehood
Falsehood extorted shutdowns, which caused deaths and ruined lives.
“Lockdowns” of the general population had to be based
on the premise that everyone is, if not equally vulnerable, then equally
responsible, and hence that everyone must stay cooped up to contribute
to everyone else’s safety. But because every word of that is contrary to
reality, false, a lie, applying the lockdowns’ force to society has
caused needless deaths and suffering.
Prefatory to considering the lockdowns’ specific
effects, we must be clear about what separation of infected or possibly
infected persons from presumably un-infected ones can and cannot do.
This has been known to whomever wished to know it since the Middle Ages,
and repeated even in the humble 1956 study guide for the Boy Scout
Public Health merit badge: protecting the un-infected from infection
by limiting their contact with those who may be infected depends on
knowing that the people to be protected really are un-infected.
Medieval Venetians, to make sure that no one coming
from places infected by the plague would bring it into the city,
prevented debarking from ships coming from such places for forty days (quarantine).
By the same token, quickly finding the few infected among the many
un-infected, and removing them even faster along with those with whom
they had been in contact (known these days as contact tracing), is
effective only to the extent of the bulk of the population’s
near-virginity.
But, once an infectious disease has spread within a
population, quarantines and associated measures are a waste at best.
Personal hygiene and minimizing contact (what we now call social
distancing) retain all their natural importance for reducing any given
individual’s chances of infection to some extent—perhaps even delaying
chances of exposure until the disease has run its course. But, once a
contagion is rooted in a population, these measures make no difference
to general public health. The disease running its course means, in part,
that enough people have been infected and hence will have developed
immunity, that they can no longer transmit it to others (herd immunity).
That is how human communities have lived with and
through history’s countless epidemics. We have seen this once again in
how COVID-19 affected Sweden and U.S. states (e.g. South Dakota and
Arkansas) that never did shut down. When COVID-19 hit Germany,
Chancellor Angela Merkel said that, regardless of what anyone did, some
70% of Germans would eventually become infected. And that would be that.
Isolation makes the biggest of differences, however, to
sub-categories of the population that may be especially vulnerable to
the disease. The Bubonic Plague was an equal-opportunity killer, as was
Smallpox. COVID-19, however, seems to discriminate a lot. Yes, all
diseases are most noxious to those already most debilitated. But this
one seems to have done so more than most.
In Italy, 99.1%
of those who died with or of COVID-19 also suffered from other
diseases. But this virus obviously has a special predilection for those
with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, compromised lungs, and most
of all for the very old—to the point that a study by Germany’s Ministry
of the Interior asked
whether it made any sense to ascribe to any cause the deaths of persons
whose bodies were in the process of shutting down anyhow. By contrast,
COVID-19’s effect on ordinary healthy persons is considerably milder
than those of ordinary respiratory diseases. What sense, then, could
general isolation ever have made in the context of COVID-19?
It made some sense in the context of the U.S. ruling
class’s (tragically wrong) assumptions/pretenses/convictions (take your
pick) that the COVID-19 is so infectious as well as plague-like in its
lethal danger to the general population, that a wave of desperately ill
and dying patients would submerge American hospitals unless its natural
course were slowed. Hence all medical decks had
to be cleared of all other activities, emergency hospitals had to be
constructed in the parks, and the Navy’s hospital ships had to be
brought in.
As we have seen, there was never the slightest evidence
that the COVID-19 virus could produce mass casualties. From the first,
all evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Even in New York, where
Governor Cuomo hyperventilated panic, the hospitals in the park and the
Navy’s hospital ship were virtually empty.
But the ruling class’s attachment to its
assumptions/pretenses/convictions overrode the obvious truth that the
elderly and infirm should have special isolation from contact with
persons possibly infected with the virus and that the rest of the
population should go about its business.
The U.S. authorities, the “experts,” the ruling class, chose to do precisely the opposite.
They “locked down” a general population that is at virtually no risk,
thereby delaying the virus’s spread to people it could not harm and
whose infection would build herd immunity. Keeping millions of people
indoors also worsened their health. Keeping people from interacting and
working normally wrecked economic and social life.
Worst of all, these authorities, these experts, transferred elderly persons known to be infected with the virus into nursing homes.
In Michigan, the authorities even assigned to a nursing home an aide
known to be infected with the virus. As a result, the as-yet fully
uncounted deaths in these facilities, which house about 1.3 million
people (about 0.39% of the population) come to about half of the total
U.S. death toll. That is what happened, and it is perverse. It deserves
punishment.
Doubly so because of the cruelty with which it was
done. As known virus carriers and unscreened persons were moved in, as
the contagion raged, the debilitated, powerless inmates were prohibited
visits from their families. These, being nearly all uninfected, would
have posed no danger. Had the families been allowed to visit, they might
have become aware of what was happening. As it was, they were powerless
to save these innocents who, without advocates, were effectively
condemned. One New York nurse was fired for objecting. Triply perverse,
because some of the officials responsible—e.g. Pennsylvania’s Secretary
of health—knew what they were doing enough to pull their own relatives out of danger.
Others, e.g. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent
4,500 COVID-infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes and blew
off his responsibility for over 5,000 deaths with the words “people
die,” later deflected responsibility onto what legitimately may be
deemed to be national policy. He cited guidance from the Centers for
Disease Control: “’Nursing homes should admit any individuals from
hospitals where COVID is present.” Both the lockdown for ordinary people
and the transfer of COVID carriers to nursing homes, said Cuomo,
followed CDC recommendations. Cuomo did not resist the recommendation.
He was occupied trying to score political points on Donald Trump.
In May Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal COVID team’s most
influential MD, explained the counterproductive national lockdown of
healthy people on national television. Earlier,
he had said lockdowns were needed to preclude the overcrowding of
hospitals. That having proved to be his gross professional error as an
epidemiologist, he now said that extending the lockdowns was necessary
to prevent so many apparently healthy young people from eventually
infecting the old and infirm.
But there is zero evidence that apparently healthy
(i.e. asymptomatic though infected) people infect others with the
COVID-19. The evidence
is that only symptomatic people (ones with coughs and sniffles) do, and
that not through casual contact. Moreover, if separating known
spreaders had been Fauci’s intention all along, why had the CDC ordered
known COVID carriers to be shifted to nursing homes? At the very least,
the man who drove the COVID team did it in a reckless manner that killed
people. He too had other things on his mind—political ones.
Similarly, Governors from New York to Michigan and
Illinois, to California, Oregon, and Washington have ordered citizens to
stay indoors—which always was and once again proved to be the ideal
environment for the transmission of respiratory viruses. Illinois’s
governor criminalized more than two people in any boat. Californians
have been arrested for walking on the beach, and New York City’s mayor
threatened to pull swimmers out of the sea. All in the name of Science.
Online searches find no science that shows viruses thriving in fresh air
and sunshine, never mind in salt water. The mayor of Los Angeles
ordered residents to wear masks at all times outdoors, though there is
no evidence that this virus transmits through casual proximity anywhere,
but especially outdoors.
In July, Anthony Fauci said that masks are necessary. But in March the same Fauci had said they did more harm than good—equally without the slightest scientific proof. Surreally, the L.A. Health Department specified
that persons should wash their hands after putting on unwashed face
coverings, and refrain from touching their faces—except to put on the
face coverings that were supposed to make their hands dirty to begin
with! Science, anybody? Fauci also guided governors to permit people to
congregate by the hundreds at Walmart and Costco, but to forbid them to
do so in churches. This fount of Science also gave his imprimatur to sex
among strangers but advised Christians to refrain from Communion. Too
intimate. What level of partisan credulity does it take to believe any of that?
One may also ask what level of partisan credulity it
takes to take seriously such personages as the governors of New York,
Michigan, and California and the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles, who
personally flout the regulations they try to impose on others.
Restrictions for thee but not for me!
The answer really does lie in the depth of political
party/class solidarity. The governors and officials who imposed,
maintain, and rationalize the lockdowns are all but one (Ohio’s)
Democrats. Their counter-factual assumptions/pretenses/convictions,
their misrepresentations, their falsehoods and outright lies, are all
about their social class’s effort to secure their privileges against an
increasingly recalcitrant general population.
Politics
We begin by focusing on how seamlessly the Western
world’s ruling class has translated the COVID-19 event into yet another
of its weapons in the fight it has been waging this century against
voters’ growing disaffection. Support for the lockdowns has become as
integral to the American Establishment Left, i.e., to the Democratic
Party, as belief in abortion, global warming, open borders, and
censorship of whatever they choose to call “hate speech.” To understand
this, one must realize that the ruling class’s campaign regarding public
health, global warming, race, the rights of women, homosexuals,
micro-aggressions, the Palestinians, etc. etc. have far less to do with
any of these matters than with seizing ever more power for itself.
Intersectionality
We note that the language, the attitudes, by which the
ruling class have hyped COVID’s health challenge have been integrated
into the identities of its constituency’s manifold components so as to
add force to the longstanding demands of each. How readily—how
naturally—activists for Black Lives Matter, Feminism, Global Warming,
etc. have adopted support of all manner of socioeconomic restrictions on
the pretend-basis of saving lives from the COVID as if it were their
own cause, is yet another practical manifestation of the latter-day
Left’s theory of “intersectionality.” As the activists of Black Lives
Matter burn down buildings, they also wear masks supposedly to show
their commitment to social responsibility for public health. Nor
incidentally, they also tout
their commitment to LGBTQ sexuality, for abortion, and against the
nuclear family. The same may be noted about every component’s support of
every other.
By the same token, every one of the ruling class’s
constituencies, the disparity of their foci notwithstanding, has adopted
as its own the demand that voting in American elections must henceforth
be “from home,” with ballots collected or “harvested” by third parties.
That would shift electoral power from those who vote to those who
process and count the votes—i.e. to themselves. Hence it would set the
entire ruling class free from the voters.
Each sub-constituency translates the accusation into
its own idiom. In America, accusations of racism are the lowest (alas
the most common) form of political pandering and intimidation. Securing
over 90% of the black vote being the sine qua non of the Democrat Party’s electoral successes, no one was surprised when the New York Times, followed by the rest of the major media, noted that, the COVID-19 having struck African Americans proportionately harder than other races, proves American society treats them despicably and must submit to reform.
Yet at the Times, CNN, etc. they know that this
is a lie and that, regardless of race, adverse outcomes of COVID-19
infections go along with obesity, type 2 diabetes, etc. And they know
as well as anyone precisely to what extent African Americans exhibit
these very conditions proportionately more than other races, and that
these conditions have more to do with calories today than with slavery
two centuries ago.
The COVID event has also made the face mask into a
physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the sub-constituencies.
Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and
deploring the deplorables. North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper said
that “A face covering signifies strength and compassion for others” and
“wearing one shows that you care about other people’s health.” On the
same day, New York’s Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Wearing a mask is now cool, I believe it’s cool…. Wearing a mask is officially cool.”
Anthony Fauci, who in March had told 60 minutes “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” in May gave his scientific judgment
that masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of
thing you should be doing,” while admitting that they are “not 100%
effective.” He could hardly have done otherwise since the New England Journal of Medicine had said: “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers [the wearer] little, if any, protection from infection,” and is irrelevant
to others in casual contact. Such a symbol of intersectional identity
has it become that, as rioters were burning Minneapolis, its Democrat
mayor urged the rioters whom he let burn parts of his city to make sure they wore masks while doing so.
In sum, the lockdowns have been perpetuated and prolonged by people who care more about your compliance than your health.
Regime of Fear
They are about increasing the Democratic Party’s chances in the 2020 election.
The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous
powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and
privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to
which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try
defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political
equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and
everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running
official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for
feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in
perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements
that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S.
economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a
cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at
straws for ways of getting at him.
By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of
using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was
necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness
were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the
ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain
fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.
In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published
an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which
wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine
his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published
an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real
Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed
eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to
save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications.
Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as
well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that
are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may
people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures
that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.
Without face-to-face contact, television became the
chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way
communication, whose programming and corporate
advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience:
“we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”
It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising
pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American
Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL,
Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard,
McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble,
Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube.
The ruling class.
Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.
A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and
hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand
for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution
networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the
government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick.
Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of
chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have
been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under.
Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of
food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places,
meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money
with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families.
This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food
banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously
except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s
expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food
available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks
of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.
But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown
of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S.
government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between
mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks
for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been
discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and
nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were
closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get
routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans
get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen.
Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been
left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments
forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a
corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering
and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all
while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to
be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.
More than forty million Americans have filed claims for
unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one
must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses
which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that
the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers,
professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued.
Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that
had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to
describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure.
The experts who made this happen stigmatized, tried to
silence, and effectively criminalized dissent as dangerous to health
and, of course, as racist. But there is zero evidence that all or any of
the above measures increased anybody’s life expectancy, and plenty to
the contrary. They wronged America. But why? and cui bono?
Power
All of the above served the ruling class’s overarching
interest in its own power. Are there any categories of people who
benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee
of federal, state or local government who was
furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got
additional power. The federal government created trillions
of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects
involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to
extort concessions as a price for reopening schools. Among them,
restrictions on or elimination of charter schools.
And as independent businesses were throttled, big ones
grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner. The news media,
unrestricted and at the service of the powerful, themselves exercised
unprecedented power. The social media platforms seconded the coup by
censoring dissent from the “line” of their own most aggressive
bureaucrats and officials. Try getting figures for COVID deaths and how
they are counted from Google. YouTube deleted a video gone viral of two
medical doctors who pointed out the truth about the COVID-19’s true
lethality as dangerous disinformation, and Twitter appended a note to
President Trump’s objection to voting by mail for facilitating fraud,
accusing it of falsehood.
Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming
in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited
bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at
church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail,
while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed
limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by. Yet all Democrat governors celebrated
and some joined masses of “protests”—forget about masks and social
distancing. They did this not for anybody’s health but to to secure
another few percentage points of the black vote for their party and to
leverage their seizure of power over police forces.
We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, 1,200 “health experts” signed a letter approving
the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public
health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a
permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus
restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments,
are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the
American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling
class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.
Declaring emergencies to excuse taking “full powers” is the oldest of ploys. Does anybody remember the Reichstag fire?
The prospect of similar things happening in America had been rising
along with the ruling class and the administrative state. The
authorities’ seizure of arbitrary power in the name of expertise is the
deadliest strike at our way of life. Suspending law and rights, issuing
arbitrary rules of behavior, has been mostly the doing of
Democrat-controlled state and local government. But the lead came from
the Democrat-controlled Federal bureaucracy, empowered by a president
elected as a Republican, and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a
majority of Republican politicians.
The ruling class’s gains of power and money have been at the country class’s expense, and have depended on suppressing truth.
An egregious example of forcible official lying is the
ruling class’s political campaign against the drug Hydroxychloroquine.
President Trump had pointed to the truth that this standard treatment
for malaria for more than a half century is effective against the early
and mid-stages of the COVID disease. This fact had been discovered
accidentally and confirmed by studies and practices in France, Spain,
India, and South Korea. In April, U.S. doctors started prescribing it
widely, reported good results, and took it themselves prophylactically.
The ruling class found this intolerable because it contradicted its narrative that nothing could prevent
the sky from falling, but above all because its success might cast a
favorable light on Trump. Hence it set about canceling truth about drugs
from public consciousness and substituting its own narrative.
The ruling class machine began by labeling reports of the drug’s success as “anecdotal.”
Then, the Veterans Administration gave the drug in small doses to some
380 elderly patients dying with/of the COVID. Every major media outlet
touted their deaths as proof of its ineffectiveness and danger. On May
22, the Lancet, arguably the most authoritative medical journal, published
what it called an analysis of the world’s biggest medical data base
showing, definitively it claimed, that Hydroxychloroquine is
ineffective, counterproductive, and dangerous. The Yale School of
Medicine officially concluded that the drug is bad stuff, despite a study to the contrary
by its own professor of epidemiology, Harvey Risch. The great Anthony
Fauci who, when pressed hard, had said that he would take the drug were
he to be sick of the COVID, then backed
the political narrative by quipping that, as of now there is no
treatment for COVID illness. The U.S. food and Drug Administration
stopped clinical trials, pharmacy boards refused orders from physicians
and retailers, and hospitals around the country required their
physicians to stop treating their patients with it.
It turns out, however, that the Lancet study’s
database was part of a fly-by-night, strictly political operation, and
that its details are literally incredible—e.g., the number of reported
Hydroxy deaths for one Australian hospital exceeded the number of total
deaths for the entire country. In short, the report was another
professionally unsustainable hit job. The New York Times reported
that “More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the
authenticity” of the database as well as the study’s integrity. The Lancet withdrew it in shame.
But it was too late. Fauci and the medical
establishment did not apologize. For the media and for headline-readers,
the case was closed. The lie stood. Then, on July 1, Michigan’s Henry
Ford health system published
a peer-reviewed study that shows Hydroxychloroquine significantly cut
death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases. Again, the ruling class
machine ignored the truth. Again: all mainstream news about the COVID
affair is related to health only incidentally. Be very afraid.
Nor has the COVID affair to do with any
emergency—except possibly the 2020 election. Democrat politicians and
the stream of public service TV advertising have left no doubt that the
ruling class’s objective is to establish “a new normal” by extending
into the indefinite future the powers by which bureaucracies have
eclipsed America’s laws and way of life.
But, as the Authorities toyed too openly with the
truth, they impeached themselves and lost authority. Fewer and fewer
believe what they hear from on high. As Russians under Communism
learned, the truth is usually the opposite. Whenever the government
reported bountiful harvests, they stocked up on potatoes.
Default, and Consequences
Fairness requires noting that, regardless of whatever
America’s ruling Left has done, whatever its hopes, plans, or
coordination, what actually happened to the United States of America
consequent to COVID could not have happened had President Donald Trump,
much of the Republican Party, and America’s religious establishment not
concurred in its happening.
This is another way of saying that the ruling class
rules by size and seduction, as well as by intimidation. It did not rush
into imposing the shutdowns, or even into making too big a deal of
COVID. Its parts and personages did not fully commit themselves until
after they had convinced president Trump to give them the preclusion of
opposition without which inflicting so much pain on so many would have
exposed them to official and popular retribution.
President Donald Trump, having cut travel from China on
January 31 and from Europe on March 12 had maintained his grip on
public opinion while pointing to the evidence that that COVID is not
catastrophic. He sustained accusations of xenophobia. But, as the virus
took root in America, the opposition shifted to blaming him for doing
nothing in the face of a plague. Countering that would have required
standing on the truth, attacking the central falsehood that the COVID is
a plague, and its purveyors as liars. Since the experts had been wrong
again and again, this was doable.
But on March 15, Trump asked the country to shut down
for fifteen days to slow the spread of the disease—to flatten the curve.
Then, on March 31 the New York Times crowed victoriously that the previous week, President Trump had been stampeded to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter:
“The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were
overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks
away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death
if the country reopened too soon.” Also, poll questions that framed the
choice just so had helped produce another set of numbers. Said the Times:
he was told that “voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment
measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.” Trump
let himself be scared into sheltering politically under what he supposed
would be the protective professional wings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the
CDC.
Trump believed that Fauci would
cooperate in a plan for reopening, and counted on the Democratic Party
sharing credit for providing near a trillion dollars in relief to the
people who the lockdowns were depriving of livelihood.
But, once Trump let go of the truth,
he ceded control and entered a political blind alley. Trump was giving
the de facto alliance between the Democratic Party, Fauci et al., the
press, and a host of profiteers public credit even as they discredited
him in every way possible.
They had him where they wanted him. As the lockdowns throttled America,
they used the political leverage to raise demands. They aimed at his
political demise as well as at economic, social, and political transformation.
The guidelines for “Opening Up America Again”
that Trump unveiled on April 17 resulted from that imbalance of
political credit and leverage. Far from returning the country to what it
had been, the “data-driven” process they outlined, written by Fauci’s CDC, would
make sure that state and local officials so inclined now have
top-level, pseudo-legal cover for keeping or reimposing whatever
arbitrary restrictions on opponents they think they can get away with,
with whatever data they can manipulate to that purpose.
The Guidelines “advise” (that means
“mandate” for officials who so choose) opening only to a percentage of
capacity, and with restrictions—e.g. no singing in church,—that counter
their reason for being. But churches and small business cannot survive
at less than at full capacity. Schools set up other than for maximum
concentration on the stuff to be learned are counterproductive. In
short, the guidelines give federal sanction to choking America’s “main street” sector.
The guidelines’ arguably most
dangerous legacy may be their recommendation/requirement that
governments certify persons’ safe status for work and public interaction
by tracking and isolating persons infected with the virus—or said to
be. This involves hiring hundreds of thousands of persons to enforce
compliance with decreed regulations on personal behavior—effectively a
“lifestyle police,” empowered at the very least to declare anyone the
equivalent of “medically untouchable.”
The governors of Michigan and
California (there is no dissent among Democratic Party officials) have
already defined “racism” as a major health hazard. Is there any doubt
that these police will be less concerned with health as ordinary people
understand it than with enforcing their chiefs’ will on political
opponents? Thus, without law or trial, anyone could be separated
peremptorily from job, business, or family, pending redress in the
courts—which most people cannot afford.
Were this practice adopted
nationally, it really would be the centerpiece of a “new normal.” By
May, New York’s mayor had already deputized hundreds of (arguably
former) gang members and criminals, paying them to circulate among the
general population to “encourage”—dare we say, intimidate?—citizens to
follow the Mayor’s orders. He also offered rewards for reports on
neighbors’ violations of those orders. This is the beginning of
explicitly partisan policing more as in China than in the America in
which we grew up. Not incidentally the World health Organization—an
extension of China’s government, formally recommended that nations
“observe active surveillance and tracing of their populations.”
Presumably, when the next virus comes along, the ruling class’ arbitrary
powers will ratchet up yet another notch.
Sadly Anthony Fauci, whose
reputation could not withstand any sort of scrutiny, retains the
capacity to mislead because no one with a major national audience has
publicly scrutinized it.
All of this, one must keep in mind,
is so because President Trump’s complaisance with the ruling class’s
falsehoods about the virus precluded high-level affirmation of the
truths that negate the COVID Coup lies and pretenses. That he gave that
complaisance contre coeur is beside the point. When pressed,
Trump stuck by the falsehoods, as he did on April 22, after Georgia’s
Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who had opposed the lockdowns,
announced that he was lifting them in his state. Trump chastised
him publicly in the strongest terms, prompting the media into an orgy
of accusations that Kemp was turning Georgia into a death camp. As it
happened, Georgia got healthy. But that did not matter.
The biggest and most significant
default however, has been that of America’s Christian churches—all of
them—from their hierarchs to their priests, pastors, and ministers.
Their complaisance with the lockdowns set aside a truth far more
important to human dignity than anything having to do with any physical
ailment—the one truth that puts all human power in proper perspective,
the truth on which our civilization itself rests: that no human power
can manufacture true and false, right and wrong, any more than we can
make ourselves, and that, therefore, we are obliged to “render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are
God’s.”
Jewish congregations have been similarly craven.
The churches’ agreement to suspend
public worship and the distribution of sacraments also contradicted
their duty. Until 2020, Christian clergy felt obliged not just to offer
public worship to whomever, but also to search out the sick, to offer
sacraments to the dying, especially in places where victims of plagues
lay between life and death—regardless of consequences. Because
surrendering to secular dictates concerning how congregants should
behave, even in church cannot be justified in Christian terms it would
not have crossed previous generations of churchmen’s minds.
Had this generation of church
leaders simply practiced their faith, even by merely keeping silent
about the ruling class’s claims about the COVID-19 rather than
ignorantly, submissively endorsing them, they would have preserved their
intellectual and moral credit to help the general population to deal
with the growing realization that they had been duped. Instead, they
chose to be complicit with tinpot Caesars. Hence, as Americans face the
bitter fact that we have been hurt worse than for nought, the churches
have largely disqualified themselves as arbiters of truth.
Truth and clarity about what
history will record as the 2020 COVID coup is the necessary condition
for the American people to overcome its effects. Overcoming those
effects must begin with discrediting those pretenses and the reputations
of those who made them.
Who Will Lead Us?
Uncompromised leadership is in short
supply because few prominent persons have resisted ruling-class
pressure to join its COVID narrative. But so anxious are Americans for
truth about what happened, what is happening; so substantively thin are
the lies on which the scam has been based, and so abundant are the
resources for establishing the truth; so hungry are Americans for
examples of successes in countering the scam, that a few courageous
leaders in key places may suffice.
The following outlines how the U.S.
Senate can function as a truth commission concerning the COVID coup’s
several aspects, and how state governors so inclined can provide
practical leadership to motivate, guide, and legitimize life independent
of our dysfunctional ruling class.
With regard to the latter, we note
that the manner in which states and localities run by Democrats have
managed the COVID event differs from that of places otherwise governed
as if they were from regimes, countries, even civilizations, alien to
one another. This is yet more evidence that American society has largely
broken into incompatible pieces, and that avoidance of civil war may
hinge on mutual tolerance of parting ways. More on that below.
Truth Commission
In the past, as the misbehavior of
important persons confused and divided Americans, wise senators summoned
to public hearings those involved in the controversies, put them under oath and hence possible penalty for perjury,
and established the often-uncomfortable truth on which the country came
together. In 1948 Senator Richard Nixon’s (R-CA) hearings showed beyond
doubt how deeply Soviet intelligence had penetrated our government.
Between 1951 and 1957, Senator Estes Kefauver
(D-TN) exposed and hence dismantled the mafia’s control of the U.S.
labor movement. In 1974 Senator Sam Ervin’s (D-NC) hearings left no
doubt about President Nixon’s role in the Watergate coverup. Today, the
COVID scam being based on lies and misrepresentations by countless
important persons, rigorous public testimony under oath can expose them
and those who spread them.
Because of jurisdictions and/or of
particularly able chairmen, the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security
and Oversight, on Health, Education and Labor, on Finance, and on the
Judiciary, each can shine their particular lights on specific aspects of the problem.
Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI)
Committee on Government Affairs, with oversight over the Centers For
Disease Control, can set the record straight about how its relationship
with China’s laboratories, with the World Health Organization and with
the Chinese government itself has shaped how the U.S. government has
dealt COVID. The CDC having grasped enormous powers over American life,
the Committee can inquire about the level of expertise it has brought to
its task. What, if anything, justifies its claim to scientific
management? The Committee can also audit how the CDC’s expenditure of
funds and efforts among a variety of political, non-health topics
affected its readiness to deal with the recurrence of viruses from
exotic places.
Its subcommittee on Oversight and
Emergency Management, under Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), himself a
physician, is well placed to expose who knew what about the COVID-19
virus, when they knew it, who told the public what, and on what basis.
The public has noted with dismay the discrepancy and contradictions
about COVID-19 from supposedly medical experts, most prominently by Dr.
Anthony Fauci.
At different times, these experts
told us that the virus posed very little danger, and that it was a
mortal threat to us all, that masks were useless, and then essential. On
the basis of their many statements, hundreds of millions of American
lives were wrecked, and millions continue to languish under “guidelines”
that make no sense on their face. Expert questioning under oath in
front of the cameras can let the American people judge for themselves
what sense they make. The experts will have to reveal what medical
expertise might have led them to stigmatize young people relatively
unaffected by the COVID for going to the beach while not objecting as
greater numbers of higher-risk black Americans rioted in the streets.
The jurisdiction of Senator Charles
Grassley’s Finance Committee (R-IA) includes unemployment compensation,
social services, and Medicare/Medicaid. The COVID event having caused
some forty million persons to file for unemployment, having placed
unusual burdens on all manner of government services, and having roiled
food markets in ways harmful to health as well as suggestive of possible
price fixing, this Committee is well placed to unravel the causal
threads between the strictures that governments have placed on the
population and the troubles that ensued. Grassley, one of the Senate’s
better investigators, can showcase categories and individuals hurt by
the lockdowns and call governors to square the harm they caused with the
benefits they claim they achieved. Who lost my job? Who destroyed my
business? where do I go to rebuild what I lost? These are some of the
questions that the committee can put to officials on the American
people’s behalf. Grassley and ranking Democrat Ron Wyden (D-OR) can also
bring to bear their staff’s expertise regarding nursing homes to probe
how government policy brought about the holocaust that the COVID-19
wrought in them.
Parents all over America wonder
about the basis on which the 2019-20 school year was cut in half and the
bases on which the 20-21 year was compromised. Senator Rand Paul’s
Subcommittee on Children and Families can put such questions
authoritatively to the officials who made that call, confront the
projected risks with reality, and weigh them against the results of lost
education and social disruption.
Americans ask by what right
governors and mayors essentially put people under house arrest without
due process, and had them arrested for such activities as playing in the
park or paddling in the sea; by what right they shut down religious
services, etc. What else may government do in violation of the Bill of
Rights? Under the U.S. Constitution, what limits are there on a
citizen’s obligations and rights? These are some of the questions with
which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) can confront federal, state, and local
officials summoned before Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the
Constitution. Cruz would also summon officials of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s Civil Rights Division and ask why they have not treated state
and local officials’ denial of the free exercise of religion and of
freedom of assembly as violations of the First Amendment. What is their
understanding of civil rights?
The American people have an interest
in knowing how the mentality of current officials is changing the
practical meaning of the Constitution’s words. Cruz might well ask,
government officials having changed the meaning of the basic bargain
between people and government, what remains of the people’s obligation
to obey the government?
Exemplary Leadership
Publicly contrasting the thoughts,
deeds, and consequences of the officials and professionals who made the
COVID event such a tragedy with those of the officials and professionals
who led in opposite directions would not be the least of the beneficent
results from serious hearings. Most Americans don’t know, but should,
that several U.S. States never did shut down, while others reduced
activities far less than the likes of California and New York. Like
Sweden’s government, these states’ officials never saw reason to believe
that the COVID was the plague and believed that individual persons’
exercise of responsibility for themselves is the surest guarantee of
safety for all.
But the differences in what happened
in California and Florida, in New Jersey and South Dakota do not speak
for themselves. That is why the public would benefit by seeing these
states’ governors defending their widely different perspectives on the
COVID, and their results.
Perspective
It should be clear that the COVID
event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a
political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news
from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the
Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated
elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not
least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political
opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and
elites throughout the Western world.
Through the previous decade, the
various failures and inadequacies of these governments and elites, of
“Davos Man,” had become the prime subject of public discourse. At the
very least, the COVID campaign changed the subject to physical safety
and economic survival. Davos Man tightened control by using the state’s
coercive power more forcefully than in wartime, covering its class by
claiming to speak for “science” in a manner that precludes
counterargument.
In America as elsewhere, there was
no doubt about which sectors of society were on what side, who were the
campaign’s protagonists, winners, and losers. The governments, their
bureaucracies, the major legacy political parties, the celebrities and
the media, Davos Man, were on one side. On the other were middle class
people and their “populist” representatives. As the northern
hemisphere’s summertime was banishing the latest respiratory virus,
Davos Man strove to make as many restrictions as possible part of a “new
normal.”
In Europe as in America, the COVID
affair was but the latest round in which the very same protagonists had
faced off. There as here, the language and attitudes with which Davos
Man denigrated its supposed inferiors in the COVID affair fit
seamlessly into previous patterns of the larger, long-term struggle.
Had there been any doubt that the COVID-19 virus was more an occasion
than a cause, it vanished at the end of May as, on both sides of the
Atlantic, Davos Man switched to berating ordinary people and their
civilization and ginned up yet another campaign to beat back challenges
to its power.
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