It took America 15 years to airlift its whipped, arrogant ass out of Vietnam; in Afghanistan it took 20. All the young men and women our diseased, criminal “leaders” doomed to be killed, mangled, or commit suicide in or after those fake, bullshit “wars” were, in effect, shit-canned by them like rotten meat. Trillions that should have educated, inspired, and nurtured them were wasted and stolen by our rabid, raping Capitalist War Machine.
After 20 years of blustering, pious deception, colluded in by the hillbilly ninnies laughingly referred to as our government, led by four despicable Presidents—as contemptible a set of moral and spiritual monsters as could be dredged up from the foetid latrines of history—this hideous charade can be seen for what it was: a brazen scam to engorge our Death Merchants with blood money.
The coprophagous Corporate Press and its petting zoo of hired political porn stars rage against ersatz villains in this Bozo pratfall of America’s Potemkin regime, imported, installed and bankrolled by this unraveling empire in its last pathetic shot at a grotesque simulation of world hegemony.
One is in awe at the spectacle of the blackguard war pimps who stampeded this simple-minded, helpless country into these exercises in folk murder, pointing fingers and anathematizing anyone but themselves, disgusting human sepsis that they are. The only indisputable truth about the Afghan debacle is that the U.S. War Machine and its wholly-owned Congress and Press, hyped fear and outrage at 9/11 to spin the mythical GWOT and two decades of limitless profiteering using the brutal destruction of a poor, defenseless country as a weapons-testing experiment.
Whether that country could be dominated and pacified, much less remade, had no relevance in their calculus. Outcomes in their pretend “wars” mean nothing: what matters is that the Federal money spigot be jammed wide open and massive profits from their death devices never end. Schopenhauer nailed the war industry a century ago: “Created by the wars that required it, the machine now creates the wars it requires”. Under American assault, Afghanistan and its people who survive, have suffered a devastation of historic proportions, comparable to massacres The Empire inflicted on Cuba and the Philippines in its early days. Nothing can ever alter this villainy, another bloody stain smeared on our long, rabid history. Curiously, though, in a twist of historical irony, The Empire has undoubtedly wounded itself more grievously than it did Afghanistan.
The fact is that after a long chain of blundering, idiotic policy trainwrecks and staggeringly stupid military humiliations—all acts of blatant piracy for the War Machine—The Empire, far from cementing its hold on its craven lapdogs, Britain, Australia, and NATO, is now regarded by the world as an unhinged, imbecile giant without brains, ethics, honor, or even any sense of self-preservation. Nations, universally, stare at us with the kind of bated-breath foreboding that would be felt watching an untethered lunatic venture across Zambesi Gorge on a tightrope.
When the sheer, brute madness and psychotic hubris of a tyrannical regime deceives its people into mortal peril, as the U.S. government has, the inevitable end is overthrow or implosion. Empires fall from their fatal morbid pathology, without exception.
When an entire people is aroused and mobilized against its its tyrants, elites, or aristocrats, there is blood in the streets. In the French Revolution, mass rage exploded in indiscriminate murder of the nobility. Such raging mayhem is not even conceivable to us now, and never was. Even the rising of Americans in rebellion against their ruling Capitalist War Machine is unimaginable. We are stupefied by propaganda into blind, autonomic obedience. Disaster, when it comes, will be horribly mishandled, as all else has been, by our Capitalist criminals and their political whores.
And yet, even given their dull passivity and refusal to face their reality, it amazes Americans tolerate living under this ridiculous, contemptible gang of baldfaced liars, dimwit conmen, and black-hearted slugs: McConnell and Pelosi, Schumer and McCarthy, Mancin and Cruz, and their vomitus ilk. Sure, money buys the commercials that are all the deeply stupid absorb, but even the densest must smell the decayed mummies behind the masks.
These odious moral thugs, who sold America on vengeful, phony “wars”, now join their chorus of shameless flacks, grasping wildly at any alibi for their cowardice and folly. They bayed for revenge and blood, dodging their duty to check the imbecile, Bush, Jr., and his psychically twisted Igor, Cheney, cheered shape-shifting bullshitter Obama, subhuman Trump, and now drub vacuous, impaired Biden for blundering into the only inevitable endgame.
The chaos and dislocation at the end of empires has always been commensurate with their magnitude, reach and duration. The French inflamed Europe; the Spanish and British dislocated the Western financial system; the Nazi and Russian destabilized the world and brought agony and death to hundreds of millions.
The fall of Imperial America, while certain, cannot be predicted as to mode and method. It may come in a series of our floundering, catastrophic military idiocies—though upping the ante against Russia and/or China will put a swift, devastating end to that process—or in a climax of economic spasms leading to flight from the dollar as reserve currency and national bankruptcy. What is certain is that it will be the most cataclysmic disruption the world has ever suffered. Empires, as the terminally ill, cannot self-rescue. They die devoured by their own inherent horrors.
“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
There is a vast and growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor. An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this. They offer a visible lesson in social class.
Houses stand before us like books on a shelf waiting to be read, and when the books are missing, as they are for a vast and growing multitude of the homeless exiled wandering ones and those imprisoned, their absence serves to indict the mansion-dwelling wealthy and to a lesser extent those whose homes serve to shield them from the truth of the ill-begotten gains of the wealthy elites who create the world’s suffering through their avarice, lies, and war making.
Many regular people want to say with Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night:
The fog is where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself….Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?
Yet the rich don’t hide or give a damn. They flaunt their houses. They know they are crooks and creators of illusions. Their nihilism is revealed in their conspicuous consumption and their predatory behavior; they want everyone else to see it too. So they rub it in their faces. Their wealth is built on the blood and suffering of millions around the world, but this is often hidden knowledge.
For many regular people prefer the fog to the harsh truth. It shields them from intense anger and the realization that the wealthy elites who run the world and control the media lie to them about everything and consider them beneath contempt. That would demand a response commensurate with the propaganda – rebellion. It would impose the moral demand to look squarely at the houses of death with their tiny cells in which the wealthy elites and their henchmen imprison and torture truth tellers like Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell; to make connections between wealth and power and the obscene flaunting of the rich elite’s sybaritic lifestyles in houses where every spacious room testifies to their moral depravity.
The recent news of Barack Obama’s vile selfie birthday celebration for his celebrity “friends” at his 29-acre estate and mansion (he has another eight-million-dollar mansion in Washington, D. C.) on Martha’s Vineyard is an egregious recent case in point. If he thinks this nauseating display is proof of his stability and strength – which obviously he does – then he is a deluded fool. But those who carry water for the military-intelligence-media complex are amply rewarded and want to tell the world that this is so. It’s essential for the Show. It must be conspicuous so the plebians learn their lesson.
Obama’s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness.
Trump’s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood’s superstars send the same message.
Take Bill Gates’ sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst’s estate in Citizen Kane, that took seven years to build.
Take the house up the hill from where I live in an erstwhile working-class town that sold for one million plus and now is being expanded to double its size with a massive swimming pool that leaves no grass uncovered. Every week, three black window-tinted SUVs arrive with New Jersey plates to join two white expensive sedans to oversee the progress in this small western Massachusetts town where McMansions rise throughout the hills faster than summer’s weeds.
Take the blue dolomite stone Searles Castle with its 60 acres, 40 rooms, and “dungeon” basement down the hill on Main St. that was recently bought by a NYC artist who also owns seven grand estates around the country that he showcases as examples of his fine artistic taste. “All these houses have endless things to do — it’s just mind-boggling,” he has said. The artist, Hunt Slonem, calls himself a “glamorizer,” and his “exotica” paintings, inspired by Andy Warhol’s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, hang in galleries, museums, cruise ships, and the houses of film celebrities. Like his showcase houses, his exotica must have endless things to do.
What would Vincent van Gogh say? Perhaps what he wrote to his brother Theo: that the greatest people in painting and literature “have always worked against the grain” and in sympathy with the poor and oppressed. That might seem “mind-boggling” to Slonem.
Such ostentatious displays of wealth and power clearly reveal the delusions of the elites, as if there are no spiritual consequences for living so. Even if they read Tolstoy’s cautionary tale about greed, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, it is doubtful that its truth would register. Like Tolstoy’s protagonist Pahόm, they never have enough. But like Pahόm, the Devil has them in his grip, and like him, they will get their just rewards, a small room, a bit of land to imprison them forever.
His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahóm to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.
Where does the money for all these estates, not just Slonem’s, come from? Who wants to ask?
Getting to the roots of wealth involves a little digging. Slonem’s castle was originally commissioned in the late 1800s by Mark Hopkins for his wife. Hopkins was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built by Irish and Chinese immigrants. Labor history is quite illuminating on the ways immigrants have always been treated, in this case “the dregs of Asia” and the Irish dogs. Interestingly enough, the great black scholar and radical, W. E. B. Du Bois, a town native, worked at the castle’s construction site as a young man. No doubt it informed his future work against racism, capitalism, and economic exploitation.
Wealthy urbanites flooded this area after September 11, 2001, and now, in their terror of disease and death, they have bought every house they could find. Their cash-filled pockets overflow with blood-money and few ask why. To suggest that massive wealth is almost always ill-begotten is anathema. But innocence wears many masks, and the Show demands washed hands and no questions asked.
It is rare that one becomes super-wealthy in an honest and ethical way. The ways the rich get money almost without exception lead downward, to paraphrase Thoreau from his essay, “Life Without Principle.”
Since the corona crisis began, investment firms such as the Blackstone Group have been gobbling up vast numbers of houses across the United States as their prices have gone through the roof. The lockdowns – an appropriate prison term – have set millions of regular people back on their heels as the wealthiest have gotten exponentially wealthier. Poverty and starvation have increased around the world. This is not an accident. Despair and depression are widespread.
There is a taboo in life in general and in journalism: Do not ask where people’s money comes from. Thoreau was so advised long ago:
Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick…
But the super-wealthy do not get sick. They are sick. For they revel in their depravity and push it in the faces of regular people, many who envy them and wish to become super-rich and powerful themselves. Of course there are the blue bloods whose method is understatement, but it takes many decades to enter their theater of deception. In many ways, these people are worse, for their personae have been crafted over decades of play-acting and public relations so their images are laundered to smell fresh and benevolent. They often wear the mask of philanthropy, while the history of their wealth lies shrouded in an amnestic fog.
Yet soul murder includes suicide, and while the old and new moneyed ones smoothly justify their oppression of the vast majority, many regular people kill the best in themselves by envying the rich.
Years ago, I discovered some documents that showed that one of this country’s most famous philosophers, known for his lofty moral pronouncements, owned a lot of stock in companies that were doing evil things – war making, poisoning and killings huge numbers with chemicals, etc. But his image was one of Mr. Clean, Mr. Good Guy. I suspect this is typical and that there are many such secrets in the basements and attics of the rich.
But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money. Although “to follow the money” is a truism, few do. If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others. They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people. And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.
Yes, houses speak. But few ever speak of where their money comes from. Those that are on the take – which has multiple meanings – always plead innocent. Yes, I can hear you say that I am being too harsh; that there are exceptions. That is obvious. So let’s skip the exceptions and focus on the general principle. There is a Buddhist principle that right livelihood is a core ethic in earning money. Jesus had another way of putting it but was of course in agreement, as were so many others whom people hold in highest esteem.
Thoreau wrote: “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications.”
The truth is that for most people, work, if they can find it, is drudgery and hard, a matter of survival. The late great Studs Terkel called it hell and rightly said that most jobs are not big enough for people because they crush the soul, they lack meaning. And behind all ledgers of great wealth lie crushed souls. This reality is so obvious and goes by many names, including class warfare, that further commentary would be redundant.
A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. It is advertised as “a house with a heart and a soul.” It is not a house but a mansion, and it was an ostentatious display in Twain’s time. Similar or worse than Obama’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard today. It has no soul or heart. It was built with Twain’s wife’s family money. Her father was an oil and coal tycoon from upstate New York. Twain reveled in opulent respectability. He lived the life of a Gilded Age tycoon, an American magnate. It is not a pretty story, but the Twain myth says otherwise. Not that he catered to popular tastes to please the crowd and his domineering wife and that he lived in luxury, but that he was a radical critic of the establishment. This is false. For he withheld for the most part the publication of his withering take on American imperialism until after his death. He committed soul murder. But his mansion impressed his neighbors and his humor distracted from his luxurious lifestyle. His house still stands as a cautionary tale for those who will read it.
Baudelaire once said that in palaces “there is no place for intimacy.” This is no doubt why in people’s dreams small, simple houses with a light in the window loom large. Bachelard says, “When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut.” For here man and God meet in solitude; here human intimacy is possible. “The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’ It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases, it gives access to absolute refuge.”
He is not espousing actual poverty, but the oneiric depths of true desire, the dreams of hope, reconciliation, and simple living that run counter to the amassing of wealth to prove one’s power and majesty. A humble house of truth, not a mansion of lies. This, to borrow the title of William Goyen’s novel, is “the house of breath” where the spirit can live and pseudo-stability gives way to faith, for insecurity is the essence of life.
There is such a hermit’s hut where the light shines. It is the tiny cell in Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange hangs onto his life by a thread. His witness for truth sends an inspiring message to all those lost in the world’s woods to look to his fate and not turn away. To follow to their sources the money that greases the palms of all the so-called journalists and politicians who want him dead or imprisoned for life, who tell their endless lies, not just about him, but about everything.
The house of propaganda is built on unanimity. When one person says no, the foundation starts to crumble. The houses of the rich dead and crooked souls, erected to project the stability of their bloody illusions, start to crumble into sand when people dissent one by one.
Soon the fog lifts and there is no hiding any more. At the end of the path, you can see the vultures circling overhead as their prey go running out of their mansions in terror.
“Mass psychosis is an epidemic of madness and it occurs when a large portion of reality loses touch with reality and descends into illusions.”
When most people hear the term mass psychosis they think that it applies to everyone else but themselves. In the reality we’re sharing, however, we are all heavily influenced by the same negative forces, which have been assaulting the public psyche for decades now, and have only become increasingly more scientific and efficient in their ability to covertly influence the subconscious mind.
We are all targets in a war that aims to kill the mind, and cut it off from the ability to engage in rational thought and logical, reasonable discourse.
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot. It confuses those who think straight.”
In my quest to understand what is happening to people as a result of the mass-conditioning, mind-control and indoctrination oozing from every seam of our society, I’ve found that in order to root these forces out of your own mind, you can equip yourself with the same tools used against you, namely the reprogramming of the subconscious mind.
With the situation we are in now, we cannot expect for the current trends in media, propaganda and censorship to change in our favor any time soon. If we don’t turn the light of truth onto our own lives, we risk being swept away with the herd, going along just to be part of a tribe that only keeps you unhealthy, dysfunctional and afraid.
The following presentation does a helpful job of distilling the historical and philosophical understanding of what mass psychosis is, and how it manifests in our world as the most devastating social disasters and tragedies.
As a self-mastery coach, I help individuals ferret out the delusions that have been constructed in their own lives by their personal history and by the cultural influences hounding us to conform and join in the panic. They want us to lose touch with reality, therefore, we have to fight back by seizing total control of our own minds, bodies and behaviors.
Totalitarianism is on our door step. It is the obliteration of the individual. Your weapon in this war is your unique individuality, and when you step fully into this possibility, you become, simply, ungovernable and unencumbered by the forces tearing this society apart. If you’d like help in seeing how these forces are compelling you to sabotage your own life and never pursue the path of self mastery, contact me here. I love helping people remember who they really are amongst this insane backdrop of mass psychosis.
We need to clear some things up before they get any further out of hand, as the Dems insist on making this stuff every day’s front page. For starters, please stop saying “Reichstag moment.” Also there was nothing even close to a coup on January 6, and those who fan the flames claiming we were “close” to a coup, overthrow, losing our democracy, etc., have evil designs on freedom and we should not listen to them. Done.
If the aliens flying around Navy ships were to stop long enough to listen to a couple of hours of “news,” they could easily believe Trump is still president, or at least still running against Biden. The MSM has him dominate the news, typically by recycling stories from his time in office, even recently reviving that he is a Russian asset. When Grandpa Simpson and Kamala “Silent Shadow” Harris tottered into the White House, they became president. Done.
Some 500 protestors taking selfies inside the Capitol building is a tantrum not a coup. Among other things, a coup must have some path towards success, in this case, preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. The rioters at best might have delayed the largely ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes until the next day which would not have been a coup, or forced Congress to meet at Starbucks to do its job, also not a coup. Done.
Not done. The latest addition to Coup Cannon comes from then- and somehow still- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, apparently auditioning for a retirement job as a CNN analyst. Milley was so shaken Trump might attempt a coup or take other illegal measures after the election he and other top officials planned to stop Trump. Neither Milley nor any of the others actually spells out what Trump might have realistically done in some Calvinball-like way to make said coup happen. Milley’s Strangelovian performance art is based on nothing but the spittle running down his chin. American soldiers have been required to refuse illegal orders at least since Biden wore diapers, so Milley’s histrionics are just that.
Milley nonetheless felt “growing concern” after Trump placed “loyalists” in positions of power after the November 2020 election, replacing both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Attorney General William Barr. He feared based on his own sizable gut these moves “were the sign of something sinister to come” (Update: Nothing sinister came.) Milley failed to recognize all presidential appointees are “loyalists” and somehow Trump did not replace Milley, who clearly had not read his oath recently, especially the part about taking orders from the civilian head of government.
In fact, if anyone is a threat to democracy it is nutjobs like Milley, who feel free to weave in and out of answering to the Commander in Chief based on their personal “concerns.” The general’s tough love for the Constitution apparently did not include the right to assemble, as he referred to a pro-Trump march protesting election results as “the modern American equivalent of brownshirts in the streets.” Dems now want to make a hero out of a man who feels his judgment is superior to the Constitution.
While Milley was rewriting 230 years of military prudence in late 2020, Paul Krugman of the NYTwrote there were “substantial odds America as we know it will be damaged or even destroyed” by the election (Update: it was not.) He told us to “expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow” until Trump “stops counting of absentee ballots, claims massive fraud, and probably tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result” (Update: that did not happen.) Elsewhere in the Times’ bunker, Thomas Friedman said America today reminded him of the Beirut at war with itself he covered as a cub reporter (Update: Beruit was way worse.)
Over at The Nation they simply assumed Trump would illegally remain in power. The writer’s real concern was “we have the moral high ground. But we don’t have, frankly, the military leadership in place to direct a guerrilla campaign against an illegitimate regime. We don’t have a government-in-exile waiting to take power. We don’t have international allies. We don’t have an underground network of spies and saboteurs. . . but we can lay our bodies down in front of the tanks.” Any hope for the rule of law? Nope. “The Supreme Court too is, fundamentally, an anti-democratic institution run by people who are not subject to the popular will of our diverse society.”
The Nation should not have worried about having to go Red Dawn unarmed. General Milley said “They may try [a coup] but they’re not going to f**king succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.” An interesting take on where power lies in a nation whose founding document begins with We the People…
Milley’s real plan was to prevent Trump from using the military in a coup by using the military in a coup against civilian leadership to gun down American citizens. CNN reports after January 6 Milley feared an attack on the presidential inauguration, telling senior military leaders: “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re Boogaloo Boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”
But Milley is also a liar, claiming publically at the same time “I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this election process. We will not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States” while planning his Ring of Steel (it sounds better in the original German, Ring aus Stahl.)
Our observer from Mars might be confused. As far as a threat to democracy, it is General Milley who was preparing to disobey the Constitution and take a patriot-sized dump on his chain of command. It is progressive porn rag The Nation telling their readers they will fight a guerrilla war against other Americans, and that the Supreme Court, the third branch of government, is an antidemocratic institution. Who again is the threat? Trump’s out of office; Milley still holds command of the entire U.S. military.
And so to the Reichstag. With as little knowledge of history as they have of coups, the MSM turned the Reichstag fire into shorthand for everything they fear Trump would do but somehow never did. The 1933 Reichstag fire was a false-flag arson attack on the home of the German parliament in Berlin. The Nazi Party used this as a pretext to claim communists were ready to overthrow the elected government. Left out of the current misuse of the analogy is Hitler had already become Chancellor before the fire. More importantly, missing when trying to connect 1933 to modern America, is a full lack of context.
Hitler had already achieved power, transparently on promises to conquer the world, implement the Final Solution, and all sorts of other Mein Kampf stuff. He had announced plans to abolish democracy via the Enabling Act, which gave him power to pass laws by decree without the involvement of parliament. That next step needed an excuse, a trigger, to crack down, not a prime mover to seize power. The Germany around him was also over ripe for change, having been humiliated in WWI and suffering near-crippling unemployment and inflation. Historically Germany had had only a few years’ taste of a wimpy democracy, and a long history of autocracy. No matter how dramatic someone wants to portray Trump’s non-actions, none of what never happened came within miles of what the real Nazis did.
If there was no coup on January 6, and no possible road to a coup, why are we still talking about all this? We should be mocking those who have no basic understanding of current events, never mind history. But we are still talking about all this (with Nancy Pelosi’s deck-is-stacked “investigation” looming) because the Biden agenda is stalled. He has decreed a few things that undecreeded a few things Trump decreed, but is unlikely to make much progress on all those promises of infrastructure, immigration reform, or student loans. Inflation is at a 13 year high even as gas prices eat away at what’s left of our middle class. There is no vision to end the COVID panic. The social justice and culture war issues which dominate Democratic mindspace seem even more flaccid with Trump out of office. So what do Democrats have left to run on?
Trump. The Democratic message for the midterms and beyond is Trump, coups, January 6, white supremacy, racism-a-go-go, militias, domestic terrorism, a veritable Nazi renaissance. Dems have little else but fear of things that never happened to work with, and hope to milk the “But at least we’re not Trump” cow one more time. So get ready to party like it is 2020. And just wait for #Reichstagification to start trending.
Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite: under Macron’s pass sanitaire guillotine?
For the few of us who are students of history, and its aficionado travelers, meaning those who muse and wonder, at times, about how significant figures of the past would view our often dire predicament, it is rather obvious that, for example, the founding fathers of the French Revolution such as Danton, Mirabeau, St Just, and Robespierre would be shocked and angry by what has recently happened to their Republic. Even France’s last great statesman General de Gaulle, if alive today, would have likely been deeply enraged by the state of affairs in a country he loved and fought for with his heart and soul.
In the era of President Emmanuel Macron, who is merely a cynical actor, figurehead, and France’s public relation person in chief passing for a statesman, but who truly is a loyal servant of global corporatism, our revolution’s founders, as well as the subsequent republics’ principles, like the one of the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle, have been insulted, slapped in the face, and assaulted by some sort of insidious and limp dictatorship, under the cover of a health crisis. A complex authoritarian strategy using the pretense of shielding French citizens, often against their will, in this new lucrative conceptual war.
This war on a virus is even more advantageous than the previous conceptual one: the war on terror. In General Macron’s war, syringes are the weapons delivery system of choice, needles like billions of little worker bees at the ready to jab you for an invitation to control freedom, and a moderate slice of happiness: the joy once you have obtained the FrenchCOVID pass Sanitaire to go to museums, movie theaters, inside restaurants, and avoid wearing masks outdoor.
French citizens should be aware that the very motto of our dear Republic, Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite is under the assault of king Ubu Macron and could, without a strong popular resistance, be decapitated by the cold blade of Macron’s virtual guillotine. In a form of dictatorial grab of power for the benefit of big biotech and big pharmaceutical companies. Macron’s pernicious pass sanitaire, just approved by France Assemblee Nationale, is a power grab by global corporate imperialism. Of course, all of it done with a wink, a tan and a smile! All of it done for the greater good of ungrateful “Gaullois refractaire” French citizens, in the continuity of the pesky Gilets Jaunes. Science lover poseur Macron, an enlightened modern day Julius Cesar, is bent on defeating obscurantism armed only with syringes to deliver his brand of salvation thru vaccines. Those who have been in the forefront of the street protest in France to resist this hybrid neoliberal dictatorship personified by Macron are the still active Gilets Jaunes.
From war on terror to war on virus: maximum profit for big tech & pharma
Forget about the good old so-called war-on-terror, fading slightly since its start in September 2001 but still a nice little threat in the background, big enough to keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash. A new conceptual global war was needed: the global war on COVID virus came at the right time. This one is even more promising, as it potentially concern the entire world population or 7.5 billion people. The COVID war has also been an easy sell for the general population, as it can be viewed as a war of necessity with humans “all in it together.” It can also provide an astronomical stream of revenue by making vaccination mandatory. In terms of profit from pandemics, vaccine companies have not been the only beneficiaries of this COVID gold rush.
Big tech companies have racked up billions of dollars at a furious pace since March 2020 and the various restrictive measures of lock-downs and curfews. The likes of Amazon, Zoom and streaming media have handsomely benefited from the imposed partial move to a virtual world. As matter of fact, worldwide stock markets have become junkies to this trend: addicted to the war on COVID benefits.
Needless to say, this vast stream of income is also potentially endless because of the virus mutation into different variants. One loses track of this Greek alphabet catalogue. It was Alpha first or the English variant, then Beta or the Brazilian one, more contagious than the rhythm of Samba, and now it is the Delta variant originally called Indian mutation. As the virus mutates, as they all do, it could potentially take us all the way to Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. The side effect of the Delta variant’s rapid spread has been to allow Macron, and soon many others, head-of-states or figureheads, to tighten back the screw on fundamental liberties.
Rule by decree, states of emergency, arbitrary measures, absurd,or not, are a form of abuse of power that neoliberals like Macron are really enjoying. It is an insidious form of dictatorship under a benevolent disguise of the enlightened rulers forcing their citizenry’s behavior. In France a law is about to pass, in parliament, to make vaccine for healthcare workers across board mandatory. If they do not comply by September 15, 2021, they will be fired. In the case of France, this should be viewed as a prelude to mandatory vaccination for the entire population.
Killing personal freedom and liberties
In France, government controlled mainstream media, critiques rightly calling the Macron administration’s sweeping COVID policies a “dictature sanitaire” or healthcare dictatorship have been labeled conspiracy theorists. This is pure disinformation, as what defines a dictatorship, semantically speaking, is a government, elected or not, forcing policies on its citizens. It is done under the premise that it is an action for the benefit of the common good, but nonetheless it is the exercise of authoritarian power on a population.
Through the COVID-19 pandemics, governments have learned that, if fearandparanoia were prevalent enough, and they run a lot of polls in their respective population, any dictatorial measures could be implemented without risking much social turmoil. A great majority of people did, and would likely comply again to other lock-downs, wearing masks outdoors, curfews, but without much protest. Now the final frontier is mandatory vaccination from 12 years-old on, which will give you some sort of health passport. If approved. this pass would give people the right to live almost free. This new type of passport, given to you as a reward to your obedience, will give you access to a mythical promised land often called by Macron “the return of the happy days!”
COVID fear mongering: subterfuge to hide climate collapse threat
There is no doubt, for any rational minds, that contesting the reality of the COVID pandemic is pure conspiracy theory. More than that, it is full blown lunacy! There are two radical anti-vaxers thought processes here: firstly, deny the existence of the pandemic entirely; secondly, which might be even more disturbing, an unshakable belief that the virus was man made, and released on purpose by the like of Fauci, Bill Gates, and a hand full of mad scientists. And, of course, here’s the icing on the cake: they’re all acting on behalf of a cabal of globalist pedophiles. These are the kinds of conspiracy theories that currently get you banned on social media.
As much as they are colorfully insane, this type of COVID-19 conspiracy theory denials are not, in essence, any worse than climate change crisis denial. The difference being that your average run of the mill climate change denier won’t get banned on social media. The nature of the capitalist global corporatism system, where neoliberals like Macron are leading figures, is not to create a crisis from scratch, which is either an impossible or very challenging task, but instead to take advantage of crisis either to further general policy goals, or in most cases benefit punctually from them like an opportunistic predator. This predatory aspect is after all the very nature of capitalism.
Besides the numerous advantages that Macron, his political colleagues and their patrons from the billionaire class have found in the COVID crisis, as explained above, not only huge financial gains for pharmaceutical companies, but also for tech companies involved in this sort of forced quantum leap to the virtual world. In brief, this has been a chance to brutally shock the global economy. Not to make it more equal or sustainable, but quite exactly the opposite: COVID has been an opportunity to concentrate wealth even more in fewer hands with a net result of more social inequality.
Because in today’s press one story is always used to hide another, the pandemic has been also a blessed opportunity to hide, not the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, but instead the 10,000-ton Godzilla wrecking the planet: Godzilla, in this case, being the growing certainty of an upcoming global climate collapse.
Of the “Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite” motto of the French revolution, all the great values have been trampled and gutted. With lock-downs, curfews, mandatory masks and vaccine, Liberte is now gone. In the era of Macron, a former investment banker, nobody can talk about Egalite in a country which is on its way to become almost as unequal as the United States; and last but not least, how could anyone see any Fraternite left? The community sense of brotherhood died quite sometime ago in France. There is no brotherhood left, no deep sense of connection within the nation, we are not “all in this together”.
In reality, there is only all of us, common men and women worldwide, against the billionaire class that controls the levers of the global corporate imperialist machines, with their political servant facilitators acting as heads of state. The specific names within the political class are of little significance, since they represent the identical interests. It’s a bit like the names given to the COVID variants. The Delta variant, portrayed as the top threat right now, started more modestly as India’s mutation. Who knows, perhaps in some billionaire class circles, Emmanuel Macron is just called factor X, LV or MANU.
The Biden Administration’s effort to withdraw nearly all US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq before the end of the year is commendable and it is hoped that a departure from Syria will follow soon thereafter, but one must nevertheless be concerned that the overseas moves are being made to concentrate government resources on the domestic war that has already begun. I am, of course, referring to the ongoing efforts being made to extirpate “extremists” among American citizens who have been further identified as largely consisting of “white supremacists.”
As part of the new war, ideas or even demonstrable facts that are considered to be undesirable are being targeted by the government working together with internet resources, most particularly the social media, to attack critics. It is being argued that the alleged provision of “misinformation” is doing actual harm to the country and the American people. Recently, much of the focus has been on the COVID virus, in support of the government’s intention to have all Americans vaccinated and, increasingly, again compelled to be masked when inside buildings that are accessible to the public. These efforts are being supported by media including Facebook, which features pop-ups directing the reader to a “safe” site whenever a piece appears that challenges the government orthodoxy on the spread of the virus.
One might reasonably argue that there is a national public health crisis that is part of a global problem which requires coordinated government intervention, but the actual statistics that reveal the existing low levels of infection and death in most states would not support that contention. And one might also observe that the growing problem involving the regulation of speech and even ideas by government working in cooperation with large corporations is potentially more serious than COVID or any other virus.
If the United States government and its corporate partners were in an honest way trying to protect the American people one might at least be sympathetic regarding the efforts being made, but both government and businesses have proven to be serial liars and purveyors of egregious untruths to serve their own agendas. Recently, the White House spokesman Jen Psaki suggested that those spreading false information about COVID vaccinations might well be banned from spreading such lies on social media. The implication was that the government could compile lists of such “extremists” and use its regulatory authority to compel companies on the internet to censor individuals and groups in compliance with orders coming from the White House. The justification would be that government in this case gets a pass on limiting free speech and association due to a national health crisis.
Psaki has undoubtedly discovered a certain benevolence in big government which few Americans have noted before. Foreigners, however, being on the receiving end of wars resulting from the stream of lies emanating from Washington might well have a different viewpoint. President Bill Clinton relied on a false narrative to go to war in the Balkans and then used unprovoked attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan to draw attention away from an affair he was having with an intern. George W. Bush and his pack of neocon scoundrels, most of whom are still holding prestigious positions, used what was known to be fake information to justify destroying Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama lied to overthrow the governments in Libya and Ukraine while also attempting to do the same in Syria.
All lies, all the time, and now we Americans are supposed to believe that the Biden Administration is seeking to benefit us? Online one wag quipped that “The party that believes that men can get pregnant now wants to control ‘misinformation’ on the internet?” Never forget that policies that compel all Americans to behave in certain ways, no matter how innocent in appearance, can also be used and expanded upon to mandate something more sinister.
And what about the social media companies? Facebook has long had a censorship group headed by a former Israeli government official. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to Congress that Facebook suppresses nearly all so-called “hate speech” automatically using computer algorithms that rely on word associations to determine what is allowed on the site. Pieces that are considered borderline are allowed only limited exposure, having their distribution among contacts automatically restricted and disabling sharing. Google search uses similar algorithms to make sure that sites and individuals that it does not approve of do not appear among search results. It also uses software to actually “re-direct” users away from sites that it does not approve.
And now PayPal, owned by online auction service eBay and an essential tool for small public interest groups’ support, has now announced that it will henceforth be working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to “fight hate” by cutting off financing of extremist groups. But its definition of “hate,” criticized as highly subjective and inclined to condemn groups disliked by ADL for political reasons, has prompted legitimate concerns about where this all is going. ADL has often been criticized for finding hate virtually everywhere, particularly among conservative white groups. RT cites a recent example of such fervor “in response to an article published in Canada’s National Post, which was denounced by the ADL because its author mentioned that one of the 32 US lawmakers supporting a tax reform belonged to a Jewish fraternity.” In short, any discussion of Israel or of the behavior of Jewish individuals and groups in anything but a positive context will be considered “hate” by ADL and PayPal.
Indeed, PayPal and ADL issued a self-serving statement last week which said “PayPal and ADL will focus on further uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements,” adding that they would also go after “actors and networks spreading and profiting from all forms of hate and bigotry against any community.”
The joint venture will also include the “launch[ing] of a research effort” to determine how “extremist and hate movements throughout the US are attempting to leverage financial platforms to fund criminal activity.” The negative information collected will be shared with police, financial services, and the government, presumably to create an environment where such groups will be marginalized and shut out of the public space completely, to include possibly having their supporters arrested, charged and convicted.
The growing collusion between big government and large public-accessible online information and opinion services is not a good thing. It permits those well-funded and politically connected organizations to work together to limit what the public is allowed to know. Its zeal to eliminate “misinformation” is misplaced, replacing dissident voices that have limited access to a wider audience with massive agenda driven public-private organizations that will essentially determine what is acceptable and what is not. If allowed to continue, it will be the death of free speech in this country as everything that disagrees with the approved narrative will be labeled “hateful” or “extremist,” eventually to include criminal penalties for those who disagree. It is not too much to suggest that we are witnessing the first steps in the creation of a totalitarian de facto one-party state. Perhaps that is the intention.
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”– George Orwell 1984
“People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.” – Frank Zappa
Orwell and Zappa’s words of wisdom have never been truer than they are today. The level of untruth proliferated by the government, mainstream media, central bankers, military leaders, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Corp., and billionaire oligarchs has reached prolific heights. We are lost in a whirlwind of lies, destined to grow into a tornado of tragedy and ultimately result in a cascade of consequences.
Since the installation of the illegitimate dementia patient as president of this dying empire of debt by the Deep State (billionaire oligarchs, surveillance state agencies, military industrial complex, Silicon Valley censorship tyrants, corrupt bought off state politicians, Soros installed bureaucrats, and their propaganda arm – fake news media outlets), the country has further fractured into warring factions.
It has been driven by political party, moral vs. immoral, black vs. white, criminals vs. police, normal vs. abnormal, capitalists vs. communists, Federal Reserve vs. the people, vaxxer sheep vs. natural immunity realists, authoritarians vs. freedom fighters, critical thinkers vs. non-thinking believers, privileged elite vs. common men and women, citizens vs. traitors, powerful vs. powerless, and evil versus good.
As Zappa realized, people believe the narrative they have been conditioned to believe, and no quantity of facts, data or rational arguments will change their minds. Arguing on twitter or facebook is not going to change the mind of those you are arguing against. Our public education indoctrination centers have taught multiple generations to feel rather than think, believe rather than question, obey rather than challenge, and allow their minds to be molded by elitists to follow orders and do as they are told, no questions asked.
This organized effort by men constituting a true invisible government has been a conscious, decades long, manipulation of the minds of the masses, through media propaganda, government cultural indoctrination, and most recently through internet social media platforms.
Those in control have achieved astounding success in exploiting the psychological weaknesses of millions of Americans by inducing them to believe absurd falsities, consume on command, become dependent on government handouts, go into debt, work soul crushing jobs, become addicted to the very technology used to manipulate them and surveil them, and believe anything authority figures tell them to believe. The past seventeen months have proven this to be true.
They convinced an enormous portion of the world’s population a non-lethal virus, for anyone under 80 years old in decent health, was such a threat they agreed to be locked down and masked for a year, destroying the global economy, putting tens of millions out of work, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and benefiting authoritarian government tyrants, mega-corporations, and criminal cabal who stole the presidential election for a senile hair sniffing angry gaffe machine functioning as a Trojan donkey (ass) to implement the Build Back Better, new world order WEF plan.
The Davos elite and their henchmen have accomplished more than they probably thought possible, achieving almost universal compliance and obedience to rules and dictates which have proven to be pointless in controlling Covid, but remarkable in controlling the masses. The throngs have demonstrated their willful ignorance and sheeplike qualities by unquestioningly trusting anything their superiors told them and obeying orders like submissive slaves. Those controlling the narrative took the teachings of Edward Bernays to heart and realized repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
The number of provable untruths conveyed by those running this global psy-op have reached colossal heights of deceit. When trusted medical “experts”, politicians, Hollywood stars, sports heroes, government health apparatchiks, and corporate media all relentlessly repeat the same lies, it is difficult for a dumbed down populace to not believe the official narrative. Anyone who presented factual data to counter the untruths has been immediately censored and disappeared by the Silicon Valley social media tyrants Zuckerberg and Dorsey.
When doctors and journalists, with opinions and views contrary to Saint Fauci and his fawning media minions, are banned from Facebook and Twitter, while a media conspiracy to cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop and documented voting fraud in multiple states is beyond doubt, and an unarmed selfie taking joke of an insurrection where a bunch of boobs were ushered into the Capital by the police has been portrayed as the worse attack than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, you realize your government is controlled by men who are actively working against your best interests. They are acting to make sure you remain enslaved in debt, beholden to token government handouts of money they have already taken from you, and locked down physically, mentally, and socially.
The blatant disregard for truth displayed by our overlords during the last two years is either a sign of utter disdain for the intelligence of the common man or an act of desperation as this global Ponzi scheme of debt, deception and delusion is teetering on the brink of collapse. I do know the Big Lie strategy has been utilized at a level of zeal monumental in scope and shameful in application against the citizens of this nation and the world.
I will try to document some of the more egregious falsehoods being perpetuated by those attempting to control the narrative and accomplish their goal of world domination, complete control over our lives, and accumulation of massive wealth, while we will own nothing and be happy. The execution of their plan has been virtually flawless until now.
I’ll address the numerous lies related to the plandemic, where the weaponization of relatively non-lethal flu to anyone under 80 years old not tipping the scales at 275 pounds has been used to steal a presidential election; destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses while shifting the profits to mega-corps like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target; created division and suspicion among the population making them easier to manipulate and control; effectively implemented authoritarian measures and mandates, putting a final nail in the coffin of our Constitutional rights; unleashed the power of a corporate fascist social media censorship regime designed to silence the truth and punish those who do not comply with the approved narrative; and creating perpetual unfounded fear among the masses in order to make them obey all orders from their oligarch controllers.
One of the biggest lies from the outset has been about masks. All guidance from renowned health organizations prior to 2020, and backed up with scientific studies, unequivocally stated masks DO NOT protect you from viruses. Fauci, the Surgeon General and head of the CDC were not lying in March 2020 when they told the American public masks do not stop the spread of the virus. They have been lying ever since. The manufacturers of the masks even put a warning on the box that they do not work in preventing the spread of Covid-19.
The two charts below prove the point, and I could present fifty more charts from around the world showing the same results. Japan, the most masked country on earth, even when there isn’t a pandemic, was widely lauded early in the pandemic for stopping the spread with masks. Somehow, with 96% mask compliance, they experienced a massive surge in cases in January, another surge in May/June, and now a new surge, just like everywhere. Masks prevented nothing. They are useless against all viruses.
That brings us to the left-wing media whipping boy – Sweden. As the only developed country on earth to not lockdown, close schools, or require masks, they are truly the control group. The NYT, Washington Post and every other left wing fake news outlet wrote numerous fear mongering articles about the disaster in Sweden. They experienced the same exact pattern of cases as every other country in the world, with a surge in April/May 2020 and January 2021.
Their death rate per million people is the 21st highest in the world, with the UK, U.S., Spain, France, and Mexico recording far worse rates despite lockdowns and mask mandates. What becomes self-evident from the graph is they are not experiencing a surge from the Delta variant. Their vaccination rate is in the mid 30% range and virtually no one wears a mask. They have had ZERO deaths “with” covid in the last week. Previously infected people are not catching the Delta variant, while vaccinated people are. It sure looks like Sweden has achieved herd immunity with no lockdowns, masks, or mass vaccinations. But don’t expect the left wing media or Fauci to applaud their undeniable success.
The powers that be are now invoking mask mandates once again. Data and facts are meaningless to these totalitarian tyrants. The masks have never been about safety or stopping the spread. We’ve never been in this together. The point of the masks has been control. They wanted to sow distrust among the masses as nothing but disease spreading parasites. They want to dehumanize us.
They don’t want like-minded people getting together and realizing they are being screwed by their leaders. They want you holed up in your basement, frightened of a flu with a 99.7% survival rate. Smiles don’t exist when you are masked. Giving miserable lonely cat lady Karens a purpose in life is designed to sow discontent, anger, and division. We all become faceless sheep being corralled, shorn, and ultimately sacrificed at the altar of the Build Back Better New World Order.
Again, I could use fifty other charts proving lockdowns did not and do not work, but this chart of the permanently locked down continent of Australia will suffice. The dictatorial lockdowns across Australia didn’t work last July and August, as cases soared, and they have been entirely unnecessary since. A country with 26 million people has recorded less than 5 deaths with Covid since last October. Because the 7- day average of cases (not sick people) in Sydney has “skyrocketed” to 100 (with 1 death of an 80-year-old), the entire city has been locked down.
The propaganda media supports this ridiculous overreach with hyperbolic headlines about super spreader events. At least a portion of their population is fed up and their protests have begun to get violent, clashing with police thugs ordered to silence the discontent. Lockdowns are not for the purpose of keeping you safe. Their purpose is to keep the authoritarian politicians safe, while enriching their corporate and banking benefactors. These politicians and bureaucrats are being bought off to do the bidding of the true masters of the universe – the billionaire class.
This brings us to the big lie about vaccines. It seems both the left and right are in on the vaccine lie. The first lie is this gene altering concoction is actually a vaccine. A vaccine is supposed to trigger your immune system and provide immunity from a disease. This supposed vaccine does nothing of the sort. The polio vaccine didn’t lessen the polio symptoms, it eliminated polio as a disease. The smallpox vaccine didn’t lessen smallpox symptoms, it eradicated smallpox. These covid vaccines were sold to the public as the cure for covid. The CDC’s own website says the vaccine was supposed to keep you from getting the virus. Fact Check – FALSE!!!
Despite the misinformation being promulgated by Dementia Joe and his White House sycophants, vaccinated people are getting covid, being hospitalized, and dying with covid. The vaccine worshipers declared that no one said it was full proof, because its effectiveness was 95%. Of course, there would be a few breakthrough cases. It appears we have a more than a few. The data from Israel, the most vaxxed country on the planet, is proving these “vaccines” to be virtually worthless.
Over 80% of new cases are among the vaxxed and the effectiveness of the vaccines are clocking in at 39%, just a smidge lower than the 95% from the doctored trials. The cognitive dissonance of the vaxxed, rationalizing their stupidity by flailing about with new reasons for why the vaxx works as advertised is fascinating to observe. Just like Zappa said, you cannot change people’s minds, even when their decisions have proven to be asinine.
Now the story-line has changed to it reduces the symptoms and keeps you from being hospitalized or dying. Another Big Lie. The narrative is now 99% of the cases are among the unvaccinated. Untrue once again. They are purposely not testing the vaxxed, but still the data is rolling in day after day of the vaxxed catching covid, being hospitalized and dying. In addition, all the paid off medical “experts”, sports figures, Hollywood stars, and social media influencers appear in the never-ending vaccine marketing blitz commercials, subsidized with your tax dollars, telling you how safe and effective these jabs are. Another huge lie. The VAERS database, which is likely under-counting by a factor of at least three, has recorded 500,000 adverse reactions, 50,000 serious injuries, and over 11,000 deaths from the vaccines.
When the swine flu vaccine killed several people, it was immediately pulled by the FDA as too dangerous. Despite this experimental gene therapy killing and maiming thousands, while not providing the advertised immunity, the powers that be are ramping up the fear volume to 11 in order to sell this Big Pharma profit bonanza (with zero liability for the deaths and injuries caused by this toxic brew) to the public. They have even bought off Republican governors, senators, and the Fox news shills through threats of de-funding or promises of compensation (aka bribes).
They are laboriously ramming the jab as essential for teenagers down out throats, with the assistance of woke leftist university administrators demanding compliance to attend classes. Virtually no one under the age of 19 has died “with” covid in the last 17 months, as the CDC’s own statistics show. The proliferation of myocarditis in young men after getting the jab is being suppressed by the media vaccine complex.
This leads us to the lies required to allow these EUA “vaccines” to be used in the first place. The FDA is only supposed to allow emergency use of non-approved drugs if there are no other treatments deemed capable of providing the same level of success in treating the disease. It was known very early in this scamdemic both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, safe, cheap, and effective drugs, both drastically reduced the symptoms of this flu. Scientific studies and papers were issued.
Many doctors began writing about their effectiveness and life-saving qualities. Even Trump was touting them. Suddenly, the Silicon Valley social media tyrants began censoring doctors, studies, or anyone daring to put forth facts about these cheap, plentiful, safe drugs. Trump stopped talking about them. Only the vaccines could save us. Doctors and hospitals were paid to shut up and deny writing prescriptions for these drugs. There was no money to be made prescribing these life-saving drugs.
How many lives could have been saved if these supposed “do no harm” physicians had not bowed down to Fauci and his Big Pharma co-conspirators. It’s always been about the Benjamins and Fauci has been the Liar-in-Chief during this plandemic, reaping the accolades from the vaccine rollout, keeping the fear flowing, and covering up his role in funding the creation of this virus in the Wuhan bioweapon lab. There are no coincidences when it comes to this engineered and weaponized pandemic. Was it a coincidence Gates, Fauci and Schwab conducted the Event 201 pandemic simulation in October 2019, three months before this bio-engineered virus was released into the world?
Why were Moderna patents for their vaccine obtained before the pandemic began? Why do Fauci and his NIH cronies have financial interests in Moderna? When will Fauci be brought to justice for funding the gain of function research at the Wuhan lab, as he continues to lie to Congress, despite documented proof of his guilt. This troll-like creature is a global mass murderer still lauded by the fake news media and treated like a holy figure by mindless liberal twits across the land. The sheep will bleatingly line up for their Pfizer booster shot, because three must be better than two. The only boost will be to Pfizer’s hundreds of billions of vaccine profits.
Now the latest Big Lie has been revealed, well after the damage has been done. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of the PCR test, had this to say about its use and Fauci:
“The PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody. Those guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They have a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go; they change them when they want to. And they (are smug)—like Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.”
His test was misused by Fauci and his financially motivated cohorts across the medical industrial complex to create a global casedemic, by measuring at greater than 35/40 cycles, creating the illusion of a pandemic by producing a huge number of false positives. As CNN and the rest of the propaganda spewing media outlets provided second by second case counts to frighten the masses into lockdown and mask compliance, only a tiny fraction of these cases were actual sicknesses.
There were critical thinking, rational medical professionals, journalists, and bloggers who argued the test was not accurately measuring the level of sickness in the world. The corporate media gave them no platform to speak, and the social media Big Brother entities censored and banned any discussion about the worthlessness of the PCR test and the level of false positives.
If the test had been conducted at 28 cycles, it would have ruined their agenda of removing Trump, destroying the economy, frightening the sheep into mass compliance, and furthering their Build Back Better New World Order. The moment Biden was installed as president, the guidance from the CDC on the PCR test was reduced from 35/40 to 28 cycles. They needed the case counts to drop to make it look like the vaccine was working. There was a narrative to peddle to the plebs.
Now, the vaccines are being revealed to be ineffective and dangerous. In a shocking development (not), late on a Friday night, the FDA put out a little alert that the PCR test is a complete failure and will be pulled from the market. It seems it accomplished its purpose of stoking mass global panic, and now that vaxxed people are testing positive in tremendous numbers, it has outlived its usefulness. And Fauci and his band of incompetent medical “professionals” won’t even blink or admit their devastatingly disastrous mistake of using a faulty test to shut down the entire planet.
Despite all these lies being revealed, the gullible, sheep-like masses breathlessly await the new proclamations and dictates from Fauci and the rest of the medical frauds dancing to the tune of Big Pharma, Gates, Soros, and Schwab. The narrative has devolved into renewed lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and blaming the unvaxxed healthy people for the “surge” in cases (still 80% below January and 30% below April).
Despite over a year of factual data proving lockdowns and masks do not work, they demand compliance. Despite the fact vaxxed zombies’ contract and spread the virus, they insist on vaccine passports, which would be useless other than as a further control mechanism over the masses.
And lastly if the PCR test is entirely useless, according to the FDA, the surge in “cases” proclaimed by the politicians and compliant media mouthpieces, is a worthless data point and means nothing. What we do know is the entire U.S. is experiencing about 250 deaths per day “with” covid and the vast majority are over 80 with five co-morbidities. This is 93% below the January peak, 60% below the level in May, and 20% below the level in June. For some perspective, 400 people die each day from strokes and 1,650 die each day from cancer in the U.S. This fading faux pandemic is a nothing burger, with a side of fear mongering, and a dessert of permanent lockdowns.
They have pushed their agenda too far and too fast. The UK, France, Italy and Australia have tried to cross a bridge too far. Their totalitarian lockdowns, mandatory vaccine passport schemes, and generally treating their citizens like cattle has begun to backfire. Violent protests are taking place around the globe against the despotic tyranny of their elected leaders. The psychological manipulation and mass media propaganda worked for over a year. They took their foot off the gas by relaxing lockdowns and mask mandates but think their diabolical heavy-handed schemes will work again amid this faux delta variant charade.
The controllers’ hubris has led them to believe their Bernaysian propaganda mind manipulation techniques will work just as well the 2nd time around. As the mass protests attest, there are millions not buying what they are selling anymore. They want their freedom back. It wasn’t a majority that threw the British tea into the Boston Harbor. It was an irate tireless minority who set the brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. The smell of revolution is in the air.
Orwell’s fiction has become an instruction manual for our Big Brother overlords. He understood what power meant to these evil men. They are trying to remake the world by tearing everything apart and remaking it to their benefit.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your choosing.” – George Orwell
The cascade of consequences created by those wielding power across the globe have only just begun. Their boldness in implementing a plan of global control where we will own nothing, eat bugs, be electronically surveilled 24/7, depend on government for an electronically delivered living stipend, be stripped of our rights to free speech, armed defense, and privacy, while living under constant fear of armed government thugs busting down our doors because we committed thoughtcrime, has rendered them recklessly arrogant.
Despite all their efforts to censor and suppress the truth, the internet is too vast and uncontrollable to shut down – unless this was the true purpose of Schwab’s recent Cyber Polygon simulation. As truth tellers across the world have begun to gain some traction, Huxley’s quote becomes more pertinent.
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” – Aldous Huxley
People are getting mad. Those in power want us to direct our anger at each other. They want the vaxxed fighting the non-vaxxed, blacks fighting whites, citizens fighting immigrants, men fighting women, young fighting old, and the country fighting Russia and China. What the oligarchs do not want is our ire to be focused on them. But they have pushed the people too far. The top 1% of Americans own $42 trillion of wealth, 16 times as much as the bottom 50%, with most of that wealth concentrated among a few hundred families. This is not accidental. It’s part of their plan. This pillaging campaign is aided and abetted by their puppets at the Federal Reserve. And this is not reserved for just America. Europe is equally controlled by the few.
The consequence of their traitorous deeds is pointing towards civil chaos and global conflict – as anticipated in the later stages of a Fourth Turning. The protests arising across the globe are just the beginning. The way to chip away at their power is mass non-compliance to their mandates and individual acts of heroism, which will inspire more people to resist. Mocking and ridiculing the oligarchs and their minions will contribute to their decline in status. Boycotting corporations and entities supporting the narrative weakens their sway. Shunning those supporting the establishment, whether they be family, friends, or coworkers, will be essential in shifting the balance of power.
Most people have proven to be followers. We need to shift the narrative to the point where they begin following the truth tellers. The enemy have the wealth, power of the media, and politicians in their pockets. They think they have the police and military, but videos of the police joining the protestors in Italy, offer hope they may turn on the oligarchs. They have families at risk too. Our freedom and our future hang in the balance. Critical independent thought, courage, and fortitude in the face of tremendous adversity will be essential in defeating these global tyrants who think of you as a parasite to be crushed under their boot. Remember Carlin’s first rule. Don’t believe anything your government tells you. It’s all lies.
The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.
Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.
If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.
One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.
The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.
The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse.
The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.
This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?
The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.
The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.
Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”
Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.
The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.
In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.
Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by TheLancet, TheNew England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.
Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”
To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.
They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”
The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Dailyurged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.
The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”
But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.
Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.
But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.
“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”
If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.
Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.
Chart by Jamie Meggas
If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.
A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.
Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journalarticle “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”
The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.
Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.
But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.
Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.
Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.
Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.
The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.
And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.
This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.
“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.
Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.
After the Crash 