We are not in a “pandemic”. We are in a media-generated hysteria combined with an unprecedented grab for world tyranny. All of this took place in a cultural-psychological climate of unearned guilt, overreliance on emotions as tools of cognition, and unleashed savagery and anarchy designed to break the spirit of decent people. Our crisis is so much greater and deeper than a real pandemic would ever be. It’s a spiritual pandemic of low confidence, where the good guys hide and evil triumphs. It may well destroy not only America, but EVERYTHING that civilization worthy of the name has generated for the last several thousand years.
Happy New Year. But this is no time to lie to ourselves about the gravity of what we face. As you sit at home under house arrest, carefully weigh your options.
Some thoughts from Winston Churchill:
“…if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
The governors of all 50 states, and the mayors of many large cities, have assumed unto themselves the powers to restrict private personal choices and lawful public behavior in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.
They have done so not by enforcing previously existing legislation but by crafting their own executive orders, styling those orders as if they were laws, using state and local police to enforce those so-called laws and — presumably when life returns to normal and the courts reopen — prosecuting the alleged offenders in court.
It is hard to believe that any judge in America would permit a criminal trial of any person for violating a standard of behavior that has not been enacted into law by a legislature. We know this because under our system of representative government, separated powers and guaranteed liberties, only the legislative branch can craft laws and assign punishments for noncompliance. This is Constitutional Law 101. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has written that the executive branch cannot enforce a law that it has written. If it does, we will have approached tyranny.
Have we approached tyranny already?
During the past eight weeks, governors and mayors have closed most businesses, public venues and houses of worship, prohibited public assembly and restricted travel — all of which they have unilaterally decreed to be nonessential.
In his terrifying novel “1984” — which posits a future of total control of all persons by the government and total control of the government by one political party — George Orwell argued that he who controls the meaning of words controls the laws as well.
That Orwellian truism has been manifested like never before here in America, where executive branch officeholders have used state and local police to restrain people from engaging in private and public behavior which they concede was lawful two months ago because today it is not deemed “essential.”
Frankly, I am surprised at the ferocity of police enforcement and the lameness of police compliance. The police have taken the same oaths to uphold the same Bill of Rights — it’s not the Bill of Safety; it’s the Bill of Rights — as have all other officeholders. The police also know that it is unlawful for them to obey an unlawful order, particularly when they use force.
The lockdown orders are all unlawful because none of them — none — has been enacted by a legislature, and all of them — all — interfere with fundamental liberties, each of which is guaranteed — guaranteed — by the Constitution.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I recognize the scientific value of personal efforts to control contagion. But under the Constitution, these social-distancing, wear-your-mask, shut-your-business, stay-at-home edicts constitute mere recommendations that should induce rational voluntary compliance, because the government in America is without lawful power to compel compliance.
The governors complain about resistance. They need to know that Americans will resist efforts to interfere in behavior that remains as moral, natural, lawful and constitutional as it was 60 days ago.
Last week, President Donald Trump, sounding fed up with gubernatorial lockdown orders, declared that religious worship is essential — meaning, in his opinion, all houses of worship should be opened — and he offered that he was prepared to “override” any governors who disagreed with him.
When he realized that he lacked any authority to override even unlawful gubernatorial decrees, he dispatched the Department of Justice to begin filing challenges to governors in federal courts and to argue that constitutional freedoms are being impaired by the states.
I applaud this, but it is too little, too late. Where was the DOJ when Catholic priests were threatened with arrest for saying Mass or distributing palms and when Jewish rabbis were put in COVID-19-infested jails for holding funerals? At all these religious events, folks freely chose to exercise their freedom to worship; and to take their chances.
These DOJ interventions provoked the question: Who should decide what goods, services or venues are essential — the states or the federal government? The question is Orwellian, as the answer is: neither of them. The government in America — state or federal — has no power and no right to determine what goods, services and venues are essential.
Those determinations have been for individuals to make since 1776, and those individual choices have been constitutionally protected from the feds since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and from the states since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.
What is essential to the laborer or student or housewife may not be essential to the former Goldman Sachs partner who was elected governor of New Jersey, and who decreed last week, “It shall be the duty of every person or entity in this State… to cooperate fully” with his orders, or essential to the ideologue who is mayor of the Big Apple and who, for all his professed liberality, threatened to close permanently — permanently — businesses and houses of worship that flaunt his guidelines
A duty is undertaken voluntarily or by nature, not by executive command, Governor Murphy. And the government cannot take property away from its owners except for a legitimate public use and only for just compensation, Mayor de Blasio.
Governors and mayors can make all the dictatorial pronouncements and threats that they wish. But they cannot use public assets to enforce them. And when they seek to use force, those from whom they seek it should decline the offer.
In America, we decide for ourselves what produces happiness. We have never delegated to the government — ever — the power to make personal choices for us.
And some of us are willing to take chances and even do “nonessential” things. The essence of the freedoms for which we have fought since 1776 is the liberty to be ourselves.
We don’t need more humility. We need more accuracy. More intellectual honesty. More objectivity. The world is perishing from an insane orgy of arbitrary conclusions, unchecked emotions, self-conscious virtue-signaling and rampant, even willful irrationality. Humility will not stop it. Only the confident, decisive strength of SANITY and reason will.
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“Anonymous Patriot” writes on Twitter: “In a REAL pandemic, there are no haircuts. There are no dinners in Napa. There is no protesting. In a real pandemic there is ONLY death. If you’re still able to go to places like Target and live relatively uninterrupted due to the actual virus itself, you are not in a pandemic.”
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From my Facebook post: When an individual loses his reason, we call him mentally ill. When a whole society loses its reason, we call it “progressive.”
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Nikki Haley says, “The free world must stand strong against China.” WHAT free country? I don’t live in a free country. Free countries don’t have permanent curfews, mandatory vaccinations, permanent lockdowns, fraudulent elections, threatened gun confiscation and virtual censorship. Yes, we should stand up to China. But we must stand up to our own authoritarian government FIRST.
The French writer Jean Raspail died this summer. It was somehow fitting that the man whose dark novel The Camp of the Saints foretold the end of western civilization should pass at a time when everything seemed to be falling apart.
As a summary of the state of the world at the time of his death, one could hardly do better than to quote a passage from Raspail’s prophetic book:
“Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality.”
Three major events intersected in the tumultuous year of 2020: the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter/Antifa-inspired riots that occurred after the police killing of George Floyd, and the vigorous assault on free speech that became known as “cancel culture.” These all preceded a presidential election that degenerated into a calamity.
When the coronavirus first appeared, the neo-Thought Police in the media took pains to refrain from referring to the virus by its place of origin (the “Wuhan virus” or the “China flu”) for fear of being politically incorrect. Notwithstanding the fact that West Nile Virus, Ebola, and Lyme Disease, among other maladies, are named after the geographic origins of the disease, there was an exception made for this one. Using the term Wuhan flu was simply not permitted.
Starting with the contretemps over the name, the virus became entirely a creature of politics: a useful crisis that could serve as the springboard for the progressive agenda. During the first two months of the year, as the virus was spreading from China to the rest of the world, the progressives in the media minimized it.
In the early spring, the Imperial College of London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 500,000 in Great Britain. This became the scientific basis for a large-scale abrogation of personal and economic liberty. The models were later adjusted and by May it had become obvious that the death totals would be far short of that forecast, but by that point it was too late. The lockdowns originally sold as a temporary expedient to “flatten the curve” remained a feature of much of the U.S. economy for the remainder of the year.
On dubious authority, numerous state governors and city mayors forcibly shuttered all businesses they deemed “nonessential” to society and enforced the edicts with penalties, including threats of imprisonment. “Safetyism” became the order of the day. By the end of the year, emboldened politicians were telling people how to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The lockdowns dealt a devastating blow to the private economy, causing the GDP to tumble and wiping out 14 years of job gains. “Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work,” Heather Mac Donald wrote. “They did so at the command of one particular group of experts — those in medical and public health fields — who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.”
To deal with the economic distress, the federal government approved spending of trillions of additional dollars, dramatically increasing the dependence of private individuals and businesses on government. But in practice the lockdown policy was ruthlessly regressive. It most adversely affected those in lower-income occupations and small business owners, those with limited capital and limited opportunities to borrow, and rewarded politically connected big businesses.
Then in the summer of 2020, the cities erupted. Following the death of George Floyd, thousands of people took to the streets (in the midst of a pandemic) to protest “systemic racism,” whatever that was. However, while “mostly peaceful protestors” ran amok, church attendance was strictly limited. George Floyd, who had a long criminal past, was practically turned into Mother Theresa. At a time when normal people couldn’t have funerals for their family members, Floyd managed to have four. The violence that fanned out across the country led to a huge spike in crime in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and other major cities.
Meanwhile, cancel culture went from tearing down statues and public art to censoring speech. Suddenly, words or expressions innocently used for decades and centuries, were deemed to have “racist connotations.” These included, for example, “Peanut gallery,” “Eenie meenie miney moe,” “Gyp,” and “No can do.” The term “master” was viewed as problematic because it supposedly related to the relationship of master and slave. Did anyone ever think such a thing when praising a performance as “masterful” or conferring a “master’s” degree? Does it matter? Liberal writer Andrew Sullivan observed that the use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century is now routine on the Left. The word “women,” is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.”
Political commentator Yoram Hazony noted that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm had been taught in schools for decades. It was all in vain, he concluded: “Liberals never dreamed that when they opened their institutions to ‘Social Justice’ and ‘Identity’ politics, they were setting off down the exact road Orwell had warned against.”
Against this backdrop we held an unprecedented presidential election. COVID provided the pretext for the country to adopt a new system of voting. While it was deemed entirely safe for people to cram into a Wal-Mart, voting in person was deemed to be so unsafe that a new regime of mail-in voting was adopted, at the urging of the Democrats.
Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert at the Heritage Foundation, previewed all of the potential problems with mail-in voting back in August: mail-in ballots are more vulnerable to being altered, stolen, or forged; they run the risk of being miscarried or not delivered by the postal service; and they run the risk of not being not being postmarked, making it impossible to determine if they were mailed on time. For the Democrats, of course, these irregularities were a feature, not a bug.
Moreover, Big Media and Big Tech, acting as official enforcers of cancel culture, censored and suppressed pro-Trump views and news stories that could be harmful to Biden.
It was little wonder that millions of Americans concluded that the election was a farce.
If the progressives’ cultural revolution is successful, Victor David Hansen predicted, “[t]he special targets will be the self-employed successful business class… those
…who run local insurance agencies, the store owners, salespeople, the successful medical practices, car dealerships, large family farms, the millions who keep the country competitive, innovative, and prosperous. All of them lack the romance of the poor and the cultural tastes of the rich, but for the most part, they are just too damn informed and stubborn to be tolerated.”
These were precisely the folks that Hillary Clinton called “the basket of deplorables.”
All year, these deplorables have been told: “Keep your heads down, your mouths shut, and obey the designated experts.”
Their New Year’s Resolution for 2021 must be to respond loudly and forcefully:
The focus of the worldwide public’s attention on masks, lockdowns, infection rates, and vaccines serves to prevent any investigation of Covid’s origin.
Did a disease of bats or some other creature mutate so that humans became susceptible?
If so, why was research on how to make pathogens more infectious going on at the University of North Carolina and allegedly at a US military lab and then transferred to Wuhan where it was financed by Fauci at N.I.H.?
Is the justification for this research—to prepare for a pandemic—a cover for covert bioweapons development? If so, why was Washington working with China on a bioweapon?
Did Covid escape from the Wuhan lab, or did Americans take it to Wuhan during the military games there?
Why were Western countries so slow to stop travel from infected countries?
Is the rapid worldwide spread of Covid an indication that it was intentionally released everywhere almost simultaneously? Are new strains new releases?
Flu vaccines are specific to a flu. How can a Covid vaccine protect against mutating strains? Does vaccination mean a never ending series of vaccinations for each new mutation?
Is public health the focus of mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccinations, or are other agendas being served?
I am sure that there are more questions.
But none are being officially addressed, and the presstitutes have zero interest. This suggests that the origin of Covid is being kept a secret and that a wider agenda than public health is being served.
Sounds like we are being prepared for more control over our behavior, travel, and livelihood. A country in which people are easily regimented is not a place to be living.
As there is money to be made in a “Covid Passport,” private business will lobby it through and help build the Total Police State (TPS). Between the private sector’s greed for money and the public sector’s greed for power, we can kiss freedom good-bye.
America is the “land of the free”? What a sick joke. Most of us are living under “emergency orders”. What is an “emergency”? An emergency refers to a TEMPORARY, brief state. An emergency is outside of the norm, i.e., the rarity, the unfortunate, the painful but brief. We have been living under “emergency” orders for going on a year now. And they’re even telling us the worst is yet to come, and we can expect at least many more months of even worse restrictions to come. For details, look at Britain, our Mother Country where it’s now proposed to restrict the contact among family members WITHIN A HOUSEHOLD. Neither the Nazis nor Orwell ever dreamed of totalitarianism on this scale.
The tyrants don’t believe in their own vaccine, something they WILL impose on us without any liability whatsoever for the vaccine-makers; yet they will also continue to impose controls as if the vaccine doesn’t even exist. The “stimulus” debate over whether we get $600 or $2000 is a metaphor for how it will be once nobody has any income or money, except for the elite. For details, check out Venezuela or North Korea.
Anyone who actually believes these “emergency” orders won’t continue indefinitely if not permanently into the future, under some other rationalization when the media tires of the COVID hysteria — well, anyone who actually believes that will gladly do the 21st century equivalent of hopping on the cattle cars and going to the concentration camps, once the Governor’s directives arrive. You think I’m exaggerating. Have you learned nothing from 2020? And under a one-party (Communist Socialist Democratic) rule with no possibility of losing power in any future sham elections, you can be sure something along those lines will be coming. Going forward, it will either be fight, or die.
More broadly, nearly every conceivable social activity, aside from popping out to a grocery store to stave off starvation (or, possibly, suicide) for another week, was either banned or severely restricted this year for millions of us.about:blank
Don’t like it? Don’t worry, said the experts: If you’re feeling a mite lonely after nine months of house arrest in Papillon-like solitary confinement, just throw a rollicking Christmas “social” event in which you stare, all alone, at a computer screen on a Zoom call, as the most ruthless, repressive, imperialist regime on earth monitors everything you say, and then instantly disables your account if you dare to criticize it. (Soon, no doubt, it won’t only be the Chinese government doing the monitoring and disabling, but our own—supposing it hasn’t merged with the CCP by then).
House arrest for nine months, careers and dreams imploding all around you, relieved only by the odd Zoom call, isn’t exactly my idea of fun—or anyone else’s. Yet you’d never guess that listening to anyone with political power this year (aside from the few remaining non-useless Republicans).
For months, these strange, power-mad robots have evinced zero indication they have any clue what it might feel like to be an actual human (with mouths to feed) suddenly placed under house arrest, forbidden from earning a living, stopped from pursuing activities which support his sense of identity, cut off from most (or all) social contact, fed reams of misinformation he knows is misinformation, and severed from a huge source of meaning in human life—namely, culture.
I’m not here arguing against the measures themselves (I will some other time). I am pointing out the inhuman indifference shown by the Lockdown Leviathans to the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and familial costs those measures have imposed, and continue to impose, upon their suffering subjects.
There is simply no sign they care.
Above, I used the word “subjects.” I used it because although these thugs were all elected, they rule like ancient Asian potentates. No force checks or balances them. Certainly, no one’s heard a single word from any federal law enforcement official about the Incorporation Doctrine, or any federal plan to bring these thugs to heel.
I find that odd.
Back in the 1950s, when the segregationist governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, tried to block black students from schools, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act and sent in the 101st Airborne. Just like that, Faubus came to heel. Eisenhower secured those students’ fundamental rights.
But now, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo kills off thousands of American citizens, and California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti deprive millions of American citizens of their most basic liberties, nothing happens. A space alien visiting America for a few weeks this holiday season would never imagine that America had something called a “Constitution,” and that it sets limits on how governments, state or federal, may treat citizens. He’d be shocked to learn otherwise.
But let me get back to culture. It is a vital source of meaning in human life. Cut humans off from culture—including important social/connecting rituals, like all those I mentioned above—and you inevitably begin draining their lives of meaning. Drain enough of that meaning away, and you wind up with despondent, purposeless human beings struggling to feel any sense of context for, or meaning or worth in, their lives. Their bone-deep existential anguish leads them to try to numb it through drugs, alcohol, or suicide.
A child could understand that. But there’s no sign the Lockdown Leviathans understand it, or care—not even when this sensible assumption passes into the realm of rock solid empirical evidence, which it now has done (see here, here, and here). about:blank
And so, you wonder just how many tears, say, Cuomo and his comrades in gubernatorial malfeasance have shed over the souls devastated—or the lives killed off—by their incompetence and control freakery this year. And then, you conclude it’s probably zero—with “probably” being generous.
Presuming the talk of secession and national divorce subsides; presuming political calm emerges soon; there will be a lot to restore in the coming years. Between the riots and the lockdowns, the hard costs must be in the hundreds of millions. Buildings, businesses, inventories, houses, public monuments, educational careers, savings accounts . . . it’s a lot.
But just as important—in some ways, even more important—will be the task of restoring culture, which is to say, restoring all the important sources of meaning for human life arrested or erased this year. Restoring our Christmas rituals will be one important part, but all the other communal rituals must return, too: the shared civic ceremonies and sporting events, the shared sacrifices, the shared stories and songs, the concerts and theatrical performances, the social clubs and worship services and funerals, the big family dinners, the weekly visits to the grandparents, the book club, the group prayers, the symphonies and parades and weekly date night for husbands and wives—all the natural rhythms of life, and all their infusions of transcendent purpose, worth, and meaning into human life. It all must come back.
And it all must come back, because trying to save lives by demolishing all the things which make our lives feel worth living in the first place, doesn’t really get us ahead. We want to live, yes, but we also want to live lives of meaning, purpose, connection, and contentment.
Sure, there are risks to that. But so what? There’s no point otherwise. That’s what the Lockdown Leviathans don’t get.
Earlier this week, right before Christmas, Congress passed a 5,600-page COVID-19 relief bill that no one could have the time to read in its entirety.
The bill, which the Senate Historical Office said appears to be the longest bill ever approved, was handed to Congress only a few short hours before a vote was scheduled to be held, forcing representatives to quickly scan the document and make a decision without knowing the ins and outs of the bill.
Some members of Congress even took to social media, calling the document a disservice to the American people and noting how their teams were going through the PDF using the “CTRL + F” function to find important information – ridiculous!
And let’s not forget that American citizens are supposed to be able to review the proposed bill as well, giving them time to go to their local representatives to share their thoughts.
Yet by the time it got released for review, we had less than four hours. I certainly can’t read almost 6,000 pages that quickly… Can you?
This is a clear loss of American civil liberties. I had the pleasure of talking with former congressman Dr. Ron Paul this week on the American Consequences podcast. We spoke about how this isn’t the first time Americans have lost their liberties due to the coronavirus, and it won’t be the last…
So far, we’ve lost the freedom to choose to go out when we want to, and the simple freedom to choose if we want to eat somewhere for dinner… We’ve lost the ability to see our friends and family for the holidays, risking potential repercussions for gathering in our own homes. Now, we’ve lost the right to read a bill before it passes.
How can American citizens stand up for their rights with a government that acts this way?
As the virus becomes more and more politicized, lawmakers can push through bills and demand regulation that actively hurts American citizens.
American citizens are being forced to close their businesses, sometimes permanently, while the very people passing these laws have not missed a paycheck since the quarantine began.
But at least $600 to every American citizen should help…
Oh, and let’s not forget $600 to non-American citizens in America as well. Because this new bill, unlike the first relief bill, allows for mixed-status households to also receive the stimulus checks. That’s just one of the many small changes that were pushed through in this fast-vote bill.
President Trump ripped apart the relief package, arguing the legislation includes measures that have nothing to do with COVID-19 and the stimulus checks are far too small to actually help struggling Americans.
Now that the bill has been voted on and the people have had a chance to really dissect it, a few other important pieces of information have come to light.
Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, also joined me on my podcast this week to discuss the interesting, and somewhat frightening, laws that have made their way into this bill. Here are just a few highlights:
$1.3 billion for the Egyptian military, which will fund the purchase of Russian military equipment.
A block of President Trump’s plan to merge functions of the Office of Personnel into the General Services Administration.
$40 million to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (which is currently closed!).
Illegal streaming is now a federal crime instead of a misdemeanor.
$33 million to Democracy efforts in Venezuela.
I am the first person to agree with aid toward Venezuela after all that country has been through as it’s moving toward democracy. But is right now the best time to be spending $33 million of taxpayer money?
Victor and I both agree – now is the time to focus on assisting our own citizens… The stability of our national economy depends on it.
Victor even outlined the potentially disastrous effects of moving forward with so much fiscal stimulus.
“We can’t lower interest any more,” he says, commenting on the fact that it’s hard to borrow any more money while we’re already approaching an enormous amount of national debt.
Instead of locking down businesses and taking away our civil liberties, now is the time to open up the economy. And rather than send so much money to foreign efforts, we should be focusing on reinvesting in the American economy.
But at least now, thanks to the impending stimulus checks, people living in the U.S. can afford to pay for Netflix to avoid federal jail time…
The only demonstrable result of government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns has been the destruction of national economies, the crippling of domestic and cultural life, the suffering and death of multitudes due to untreated prior medical conditions, and the drastic rise in suicide rates. The lockdowns themselves have seemed to do little to prevent the onset of the disease, hence one lockdown after another has led to no discernible effect—apart from the fact that the virus appears to strike primarily a designated older cohort of the population already suffering from comorbidities. A recent graph charting the effects of repeated lockdowns in the province of Ontario would appear to indicate that the lockdowns themselves are super-spreaders. Texas Tech professor Gilbert Berdine sums up: “After taking the unprecedented economic depression into account, history will likely judge these lockdowns to be the greatest policy error of this generation.”
The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the mask mandate, somewhat less destructive but equally absurd. After touting home-made, cloth, and sundry other masks for six months, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam have discovered that Canadians should be wearing three-layer masks—a tacit admission that the single- and double-ply masks we have been wearing for all this time are patently inadequate. Apparently, no-ply also works, given that our Minister of Health Patty Hajdu was spotted at Toronto’s Pearson Airport unabashedly maskless and happily smiling, like her American counterparts Anthony Fauci at a baseball game and Governor Newsom of California at his favorite restaurant.
In fact, masks do not screen out (or keep in) viral microns averaging 100 nanometers in size; the weave of all masks, with the partial exception of the medical N-95, is far too large to repel the coronavirus particle, which varies between 60nm and 140nm. Further, masks may cause hypoxia and consequent immune deficiency through the ingestion of one’s own CO2. It gets worse. A 50-state-wide controlled study showed that there is no correlation between mask mandates and fewer cases. On the contrary, there is a reverse correlation: non-masking states and counties did better than their masking counterparts. There is no weeding around the graphic evidence. One wonders if CO2 -forced immunity depletion had something to do with this.
As for home isolation and travel restrictions, they are not taken seriously by our authorities. According to the Associated Press, Denver’s mayor flew to Mississippi to spend Thanksgiving with his family, after urging others to stay home. A Pennsylvania mayor banned indoor dining, then patronized a restaurant in Maryland. The governor of Rhode Island was photographed at a wine tasting. The mayor of Austin, Texas, flew to Cabo San Lucas on a private jet after hosting a wedding for 20. It’s common knowledge that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker & family have blatantly violated his own travel ban. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s husband was caught attempting to sidestep her shutdown.null
Similarly, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, after declaring that anyone who traveled over the Thanksgiving weekend should assume they were infected with COVID-19 and should limit celebrations to “your immediate household,” traveled to her vacation home in Delaware during Thanksgiving, “accompanied by three generations of her family from two households.” These people must know something the rest of us don’t. As IT professional Alexander Scipio writes, the political, social, and economic devastation we are suffering is not caused by a virus “with a survival rate of well over 99%,” but by a political and financial class—international oligarchs—seeking absolute power via “a weaponized virus from China.” But we go along with it, dutifully obeying the mandates, as if we were characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream bewitched by fairies and spells. “Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
“We as a society are becoming ever less bookish,” writes the great Theodore Dalrymple, which means we are becoming ever less informed, ever less knowledgeable, ever less educated. Indeed, we are on the whole ever more incurious and credulous, which is no doubt the permanent condition and status of the majority of human beings—except that never in the history of mankind has the accessible intellectual horizon broadened, at least potentially, to the extent that it has today: university education on offer for all, books readily available, libraries, museums, theaters, concert halls (pre-lockdown) open to the public, a World Wide Web and computers proliferating as domestic items. And yet studies suggest that genuine IQ is deteriorating, people are as gullible as ever, and mob psychology and identity politics are increasingly replacing the independent thought of the questing individual. One might call it Twitteritis.null
We are content to remain in a low-information twilight zone and, just as bad, to outsource common sense to our political betters, their hired-gun health officials, and so-called “experts” who can’t keep their stories straight. Thus, there is an irresistible tendency, in the face of government decrees with respect to COVID, to behave like lemmings obediently surging toward the cliff, “willing to obey the demands and commands of the world elite,” writes Sucharit Bhakdi, Chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz. He deplores the complete over-reaction to a virus that could have been handled differently and far more wisely. True, one must acknowledge those brave souls who have marched and demonstrated against government imposition of unconstitutional measures, but they are small in number, regarded as dissidents, troublemakers, and “spreaders” by the surrounding population and disavowed by majority opinion.
And there in a nutshell is the marrow-deep problem we are confronting. We can expect our nominal leaders, with few exceptions, to be incompetent, restrictively educated, partisan zealots, profoundly unintelligent, and visibly hypocritical. The spectacle of our politicians brazenly violating the very rules they have sternly imposed comes as no surprise. That is par for the course. But the public that should be keeping our politicians’ feet to the fire are, at least, equally undistinguished, as well as easily malleable and fundamentally incurious.
I speak to my neighbors, to people I meet in the public square, and to our professionals, medical, legal, and otherwise. When I point out certain obvious facts, I am usually met with glazed incomprehension or outright condescension. When I am informed, for example, that Sweden, which did not lock down, is currently experiencing the same winter spike in COVID infections as lockdown countries, and therefore that not to lock down is a failing strategy, I wonder at the incapacity for logical deduction. If the results are the same, I reply, then why in heaven’s name not keep the kids in school, allow bars, restaurants, and small businesses to stay open, and preserve the economy intact? No response. (Sweden, incidentally, remains one of the few sane countries on the planet.)null
When I point out that pro-pandemic agitator and Director of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab of Great Reset fame and a major influence on our Prime Minister has paradoxically confided in his book COVID-19: The Great Reset that COVID is “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced in the last 2000 years,” the reaction is: Who is Klaus Schwab? Should I recommend familiarity with the police-state program called the Great Reset and its partner UN Agenda 2030, again, no interest.
When I suggest that instead of blindly following the government line, or deriving our information from suborned or ignorant journalists churning out a column a day, they might spend a few hours doing their own research and consult eminent virologists and organizations like the Great Barrington Declaration, the Truth Over Fear Summit, Medical News Today (MNT), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), and even the left-leaning The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—all readily accessible on the Net—people turn away as if I were some sort of crank. And yet spending merely a couple of minutes with a recent AIER assessment would help dispel the “fog of disease mitigation.” Citing a W.H.O. report that asymptomatic spread is “very rare,” the AIER concludes that “everything we’ve done over the months—the mask wearing, the grasshopper dance not to be next to people, the canceling of everything, the wild paranoia and premodern confusions—has been a calamitous and destructive waste of time, energy, and money.”null
When I suggest that it might be worthwhile to crack the spines of a few definitive books like Liberty or Lockdown or Corona False Alarm?, written by world-acclaimed specialists and epidemiologists—my interlocutors hem and haw. They are busy with work and family. They already have the truth—it was on CTV or Global. They prefer to park their confidence in the pronouncements of our Provincial Health Officer, who has already changed her mind three or four times.
I suspect my anecdotal observations could be universally generalized. One recalls Churchill’s famous (alleged) remark: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Of course, the same cognitive defect would apply across the board to the citizens of any other political system.
The Surgeon General of the United States Jerome Adams advises, “I hope that people will do their research and do the right thing for themselves and for their communities.” Of course, Adams assumes that people will follow the official guidelines, recommendations, and mandates, the presumable “right thing”—but what if prolonged and meticulously conducted personal research leads to other conclusions? Adams has nothing to say about this outcome. It must be admitted, however, that the odds regarding individual citizens actively pursuing a research program on their own initiative, exercising their curiosity, investigating the validity of government edicts, wishing to learn about what has disrupted their lives, spending a few hours reading a book—is probably statistically insignificant.
I realize I am belaboring the obvious. Still, one works, so to speak, one person at a time. Perhaps we need not wholly despair. Two of my correspondents, employees at the local supermarket who were avid lockdowners and maskers, did in fact follow up, check out my suggestions, and have recently told me they have changed their thinking. They are compelled to wear masks on the job, but discard them as soon as they leave the premises. They recognize that the lockdowns are the height of institutional folly—though they may not suspect the Machiavellian planning behind them.null
Nonetheless, minor victories. At least, something.
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David Solway’s most recent book Notes from a Derelict Culture was delisted by Amazon. It is currently available at Barnes & Noble.
A video of a confrontation between Ventura County, California health officials and restaurant owner Anton Van Happen has gone viral. The health officials were ordering Mr. Van Happen to close his business because he allegedly violated California’s ban on outdoor dining. Mr. Van Happen asked the health officials if the government will pay his employees and his rent while his business is indefinitely closed.
Mr. Van Happen is hardly the only small business owner worried about how to pay bills during the lockdowns. Many small businesses operate on a narrow profit margin, so being forced to “temporarily” shut down or limit the number of customers they can serve is a virtual death sentence.
The lockdowns have already caused as many as 200,000 small businesses to permanently close. Lockdowns, by shrinking the number of employers, lead to long-term unemployment or lower wages for many workers.
While governments have terrorized small businesses, they have typically deemed the big chain stores “essential businesses” so they can remain open. The lockdowns are thus another government policy that gives big businesses a competitive advantage over their smaller competitors.
The benefits big businesses get from the lockdowns — including fewer competitors, more customers, and a job market with more workers competing for fewer jobs — may explain why many big businesses are not fighting the lockdowns. Instead, most big retail chains are requiring their workers and customers to wear masks. Many big businesses may soon deny service to those who refuse to receive a Covid vaccine.
One would think that progressives who claim to oppose policies that benefit big corporations like WalMart, Target, and Amazon would oppose the lockdowns. Sadly, even many progressives are unquestioningly parroting the Covid propaganda and demonizing those who dissent.
By slowing down the development of herd immunity among the population, the lockdowns could put those truly at risk in greater danger. Lockdowns have also had negative effects such as increases in drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic violence. Meanwhile, many schoolchildren are deprived of the opportunity to interact with their teachers and their peers. Instead, these children are subjected to the fraud of “virtual learning.”
Resistance to Covid tyranny is growing as more people figure out that lockdowns and mandates are both unnecessary and harmful. This resistance was largely started by small business owners faced with a choice between obeying the government or making sure they, and their employees, can feed their families. Small business owners have been leaders in recent anti-lockdown protests across America.
Eventually the resistance will grow to the point where the politicians will be forced to either double down on authoritarianism or admit the lockdowns were a mistake. Either way, those of us who know the truth must resist the Covid tyranny until government officials no longer terrorize small businesses for the crime of serving willing consumers.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 