For many pilots who have chosen to remain unvaccinated for COVID-19, daily life has become a navigation of Catch-22s not seen since bombardiers were still stationed on Pianosa.
Jason Kunisch, a commercial airline pilot with 20 years experience and co-founder of the US Freedom Flyers, ponders whether OSHA can require him to take a newly approved vaccine, despite his long-held understanding that, “Traditionally pilots are not governed by OSHA… [but] by the FAA,” which prohibits pilots from taking newly approved drugs.
Sherry Walker, a United pilot with more than 24 years experience, and co-founder of Airline Employees for Health Freedom, copes with the reality that, according to her account, despite having received an exemption from United’s vaccine requirement in order to keep her job while unvaccinated, she can longer do her job or receive a paycheck, presumably until she is vaccinated.
Kate O’Brien, the Media Relations Director for the US Freedom Flyers, voices the frustration of her group’s members, as she describes how executive orders supposedly issued to keep Americans employed and maintain the integrity of the supply chain, have arguably led to increases in unemployment and the supply chain’s collapse.
Medical Freedom Organizations Takeoff in the Aviation Industry
Growing up in San Diego, Jason Kunisch learned to fly while still in high school. After earning his private pilot’s license, he attended a four year aeronautical university, graduating with degrees in aeronautical science and business, then went on and earned his instructor ratings before working dispatch for a charter corporation out of California and Texas. From there he went and flew regional jets prior to making his way over to one of the major airlines a little more than eight years ago.
However, over the course of the past year, life took an unexpected turn for Kunisch. Although still working for a major airline when interviewed for this article in late November, Kunisch was now spending a considerable portion of his time immersed in the day to day operations of the US Freedom Flyers, a medical freedom organization he co-founded with fellow pilots Jessica Sarkisian, Joshua Yoder, and Veronica Harris.
When asked to recount what led him to this role, Kunisch detailed the ever-shifting vaccination policies of the major airlines that went from tolerable to utterly unacceptable in his mind, as well as those of his compatriots in just under a year.
“Most of the airlines prior to September 9 [2021] were very reasonable in their approach,” Kunisch explained. “They said, ‘If you want to go and get vaccinated, that’s your personal choice. In fact we’re going to incentivize you to go do that. We’re going to give you days off. We’re going to give you cash. We’re going to give you extra vacation days next year.”
As for those who did not want to get vaccinated, Kunisch said, the companies and the unions took the approach of “‘Hey, we encourage you to do it but at the end of the day it’s a choice between you and your medical practitioner or you and your family doctor or you and your family. Really it’s a personal decision.’”
Yet, at the same time, Kunisch and others had their concerns about how long such a reasonable approach might last.
“We kind of saw the writing on the wall,” Kunisch recalled. The forced masking of individuals, social distancing, and the rules about what one could and could not do with regard to COVID were all disconcerting to him and many of his colleagues.
“So we’re like all right,” Kunisch said. “Really, the next logical thing is the vaccines and vaccine mandates.”
Then, before long, the mandates arrived. “So United Airlines comes out over the summer and says, ‘We’re going to impose our own vaccine mandate and those who don’t want to do it can submit for a religious or medical exemption,’” Kunisch explained.
Sherry Walker, co-founder of Airline Employees for Health Freedom, an organization similar to the US Freedom Flyers, was one such individual from United.
According to Walker, who spoke in an interview as a representative of Airline Employees for Health Freedom, the process of applying for an accommodation was so onerous that many at United who had reservations about taking a COVID vaccine simply acquiesced out of exasperation from the process or fear they might fail to navigate it properly in the time allowed.
Yet, for those that endured, Walker stated, “[United] put every one of us on unpaid indefinite leave.”
Jessica Sarkisian, a 24 year captain and US Freedom Flyers co-founder, had been concerned about something like this happening at her company for quite some time, having circulated a petition on the matter amongst her co-workers as early as January 2021.
In an interview, Sarkisian described the moment her grassroots activism transitioned from an intracompany endeavor to one with a more national scope. “When United announced their mandate, my company said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to mandate it also, but for the 20% who do not want to get the vaccine, [they’ll] get testing options’ and so immediately people started contacting me at my airline because… people already knew how I felt.”
From there the US Freedom Flyers began to take off. “I started collaborating with a few go getters,” Sarkisian explained. “Then I saw Josh Yoder, another co-founder, on the Stew Peters show and I reached out to him and we communicated and I also reached out to the gals at United and communicated with them and just started reaching out to people at other airlines.”
Likewise, Walker’s Airline Employees for Health Freedom saw their numbers grow during this period as well.
Yet, despite this grassroots success for Kunisch, Walker, Sarkisian, and the members of their nascent organizations, it was not long before they would have more to contend with than simply employer mandates.
Pilots Enter Dogfight with the Biden Administration
“So September 9 rolls around and President Biden says he’s going to have a number of mandates and executive orders,” Kunisch said. “[One] is covering employers of more than 100 employees and that is going to be handled through OSHA… That’s the OSHA case. Then there’s the federal contractor case. That’s another one… Initially our response was to raise funds and awareness and to sue the federal government on the grounds of the OSHA issue because that’s what we all thought was going to get us first.”
This though was despite the fact that there was initially some confusion amongst Kunisch and others in their organization regarding whether the OSHA mandate affected pilots specifically, given that they long understood that they were governed by the FAA, not OSHA.
But, before long, whether pilots were affected by a mandate enforced by an agency, that, according to Kunisch, traditionally did not have authority over them, Kunisch and the US Freedom Flyers realized that the OSHA mandate was not actually their most imminent threat.
“What really came to really bite us all was this federal contractor mandate,” Kunisch said. “Now because the airlines have contracts with the federal government to do troop lifts or evacuations and other flying we are considered federal contractors even though we don’t get any of the benefits of federal contractors like better benefits, better pay, etc., etc., holidays off, whatever… I guess we get none of the good, [although] we get all of the bad… Within the federal contractor mandate there’s no provision for testing. So it’s basically get vaccinated or get fired… So that’s a major concern and initially the companies were very strict in their wording. They more or less were saying ‘You get vaccinated because of the mandate or you are on the streets.’”
But the US Freedom Flyers and Airlines Employees for Health Freedom fought back. They continued to grow their numbers. They spread awareness. They became more vocal in the media and with their companies and their unions.
Because of this, Kunisch said, “The companies have started to kind of back off… Southwest was the first to come out and say, ‘We’re not going to fire anybody. We’re not going to let anybody go. We’re going to give medical and religious exemptions and you’re going to be able to continue to work.’ I think Jet Blue has done a similar thing… I think Alaska has done it. But the process is still rather arduous and there are still concerns, very specific grave concerns, with the process with these exemptions that everyone has to go through who chooses not to get vaccinated.”
To give greater context, Kunisch, explained that technically there’s a difference between an exemption and an accommodation. “An exemption is you are exempt from getting vaccinated. However, to comply or to be fully exempt, you need to participate in an accommodation. Now what is that accommodation? That’s the question?”
Depending on the specifics of the accommodation, Kunisch believes this could lead to some form of religious discrimination. If the accommodation is unvaccinated airline employees must wear a mask, while vaccinated ones do not, in essence, those who remain unvaccinated due to their religious beliefs would be getting forced by their employers to wear an outward sign of their religious affiliation.
Kunisch also pointed out how treating unvaccinated people differently from vaccinated people doesn’t even make sense scientifically given recent findings demonstrating that those who have been vaccinated against COVID can still contract and potentially spread COVID.
Possible Paths to Victory
Yet, whether groups like the US Freedom Flyers and Airline Employees for Health Freedom succeed likely will not come down to science, but, instead, a combination of legal technicalities and whether enough people will stand their ground and suffer the consequences while demonstrating their worth to their employers, and perhaps the rest of society, through their absence.
Given the key role the aviation industry plays in society and the narrow margins of personnel that facilitate its continued functioning, this should hypothetically be possible.
According to Sarkisian, it would not take a significant number of pilots or other personnel to cause a disruption for air travel by refusing to get vaccinated. “If you have an aircraft with… let’s call it a crew of seven: five flight attendants and two pilots. One of them calls out, or is not there anymore, that’s going to cause a delay or a cancellation. And then if that’s happening across the board like we’ve seen in the past, it’s going to be quite disruptive.”
Case in point, this is what we saw recently with Southwest and other airlines with alleged sickouts and across the commercial airline industry over Christmas when there were mass cancellations, seemingly on account of omicron.
Additionally, it is important to note that mandates impacting the aviation industry impact more than just commercial air travel.
A FedEx captain, who agreed to a phone interview on the condition of anonymity, described what the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates would mean for his company. “There is such a huge number [of pilots] that have not been vaccinated. And this is far bigger than the pilots. This is maintenance. This is the ground crews in Memphis.”
This FedEx captain went on to explain, “FedEx is centered in Memphis and [has] huge, huge ground crews in Memphis… and a huge percentage of our ground crew workforce is African American which, rightfully so, that group of people are very very distrusting of the government and the vaccine program because…[of] the Tuskegee experiments.”
“In comparison to the pilots,” the FedEx captain continued, “it’s a relatively low paying job where [FedEx is] having trouble having guys work anyway. There’s no possible way they’re going to stick around if a vaccine is mandated for them to work.”
O’Brien also emphasized the impact of vaccine mandates on the transportation of goods when discussing what she sees as the irrationality of the Biden administration’s rationale for their various mandates. “The administration itself has said, has outlined, you know, all the reasons why they feel the mandate is important, is imperative. Some of the reasons were to keep the supply chain intact. Well, we can see that the supply chain is currently in shambles. And why is that?”
Alternatively, on the legal front, both the US Freedom Flyers and Airline Employees for Health Freedom have cases working their way through the courts. There are also similar cases making their way to the Supreme Court. Yet, to be clear, these cases are not about some fundamental question of whether an individual has the right to make their own medical decisions in the absence of government or employer influence or coercion, but more narrow legal concerns such as which government agency has the right to mandate what medical interventions for whom.
Which path may ultimately be more fruitful, or if either will lead to a desirable outcome for the US Freedom Flyers and Airline Employees for Health Freedom, remains to be seen.
Looking Towards the Horizon
But according to the pilots fighting to preserve medical freedom, the simple fact that they are fighting the government on this is having an impact.
“The government put forward these mandates… not expecting the response,” Kunisch said. “I don’t know why they weren’t expecting that. We can come up with reasons. The fact that we are fighting this is the reason why they are kind of on their heels.”
According to Kunisch, this is why the government pushed back their initial deadlines for compliance with the OSHA and contractor mandates. “There’s a reason for [this] and that’s because we’re fighting back. We’re fighting back against these mandates. We’re saying no. We’re not going to do it. We’re not going to be coerced.”
As of November, Sarkisian said the US Freedom Flyers were working with employees from 26 airlines, Amtrak, and trucking companies, as well as the general public. Walker, when interviewed, estimated Airline Employees for Health Freedom had about 4000 members across the transportation industry.
“This isn’t just about crew members,” Sarkisian stated. “This is a fight for freedom for everyone because everybody is obviously affected.”
“The issue is not the vaccine,” Kunisch added. “The issue is medical freedom and anti-coercion.”
Walker, when speaking of the battle ahead, stated, “I have a 16 year old son,” before rhetorically asking, “If I do not fight this now, what world am I leaving him?”
Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
1 Comment
Legacy mainstream media has been sporadically bringing up the topic of podcasts for a while now, in search of ways to enforce censorship in this media format as well; and the New York Times has now done it again:
“The lack of moderation on podcast apps is particularly complicated for Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube. The video streaming site cracked down on videos about election fraud, the conspiracy theory QAnon, and vaccine misinformation, prompting some podcast episodes hosted there to be removed. But the same episodes remained accessible on Google’s Podcasts app. Mr. Bannon’s show was removed from YouTube shortly after Jan. 6, for instance, but the podcast remains available on Google’s Podcasts app.
“Google has argued that its Podcasts app more closely resembles a search engine than a publishing service because no audio is hosted by the company. A Google spokesman, Farshad Shadloo, said the app simply “crawls and indexes audio content” hosted elsewhere and that they have “policies against recommending podcasts that contain harmful misinformation, including misinformation about the 2020 U.S. elections.”
This latest attack against podcasts comes as reports indicate that the medium has gained serious momentum and therefore influence. Joe Rogan, for example, has a larger audience than CNN and Fox News shows.
And that’s not even by a narrow margin, if media ratings statistics for the third quarter of last year from Nielsen and Spotify are to be believed: Rogan’s podcast episodes averaged an audience of 11 million, while Tucker Carlson Tonight was second with 3.24 million. CNN’s Primetime had only 822,000.
Podcasts, whose popularity is generally on the rise, have proven far more resilient to censorship than other platforms and given the content Rogan puts out it would seem that he chose his medium well. Rogan’s success is attributed to his honest and respectful approach to the topics he covers and to his audience.
As social media platforms and networks are under massive pressure to censor content during the pandemic and the US presidential election, podcast creators can speak freely. But would-be censors are clearly trying to find a solution to that “problem” as well.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | New York Times, United States |
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Almost one year on from the riot at the US Capitol Building, it continues to be used by those in positions of power to develop a culture of fear – yet another example of a threat being amplified and raising public insecurity.
There is no need for a pandemic for the hysterical ruling class to constantly turn on the engine of fear. Without blinking an eye, the American political establishment has casually catastrophised the Capitol protest in Washington on 6 January last year.
Almost immediately a political riot by angry protestors was reframed as an “insurrection” and an act of domestic terror. Leading Democratic Party figures even sought to link the so-called coup attempt to Russia, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the rioters were “Putin’s puppets”.
Despite the relentless quest to uncover a malevolent conspiracy to overthrow the elected government of the United States, there is nothing to suggest that what occurred on January 6 was anything more than an instance of angry, violent rioters invading the Capitol Building. Despite their best efforts, the FBI and other agencies could find no proof of any conspiracy. Last August, Reuters reported that “the FBI has found scant evidence that the January 6 attack on the US Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result”.
This absence of evidence notwithstanding, America’s cultural elite, along with the leadership of the Democratic Party, continues to remain in hysteria mode. Indeed, its obsession with the threat of an insurrection or a coup has hardened during the past year to the point that it genuinely finds it difficult to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
The New York Times, once a serious news outlet, has become a slave of its paranoia about an impending civil war. Anyone reading its commentary would draw the conclusion that what happened on January 6 was akin to the violent rioting that accompanies a bloody coup d’etat.
On the first day of 2022, its Editorial Board published a piece titled “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now”. In case anyone failed to get the point of the title, it added, “Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day”. The statement evokes a world where the American “Republic faces an existential threat” and insists that “we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country”. The threat it refers to constitutes the millions of voters who continue to support Donald Trump and deny the New York Times’ version of reality. In its typical alarmist tone, it states, “no self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying it exists”.
This feverish irrationality isn’t restricted to America. Across the Atlantic, The Guardian adopts a similar tone in its treatment of the legacy of January 6. “US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian warns” runs one of its headlines. In this article, the scaremongering prediction of an academic in The Globe and Mail is presented as a sensible assessment of future possibilities. Political science professor Thomas Homer-Dixon from Royal Roads University in British Columbia urges Canada to protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”. And he warns, “We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine.”
Projecting a scene akin to one in a dystopian horror film, Homer-Dixon asserts, “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.”
The editorial team at The Guardian appears to have become addicted to the political pornography peddled by the likes of Homer-Dixon. It also features a piece by Jason Stanley, who imaginatively recasts the contemporary era as akin to the one that led to the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany. In a commentary titled “America is now in fascism’s legal phase”, Stanley paints a picture that looks depressingly similar to the months leading up to the rise of Adolf Hitler. For Stanley, there is a clear parallel between the behaviour of Trump and Hitler. He contends that “as in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump”.
At first sight, it is tempting to draw the conclusion that the catastrophising of January 6 or the constant evocation of the spirit of Nazi Germany haunting America is pure scaremongering propaganda. No doubt there is an element of media manipulation and conscious twisting of reality at play. But on closer inspection, it seems as if the ruling classes in Western societies have genuinely internalised the culture of fear. January 6 is simply one catastrophe amongst the many that preoccupy them.
A striking illustration of how the self-catastrophising masochistic ruling elite thinks was offered by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo in a speech he gave to the United Nations General Assembly last September. Pointing to climate, vaccines, and terrorism’, he stated that “nobody is safe until everybody is safe”. By linking together three different and disparate elements, De Croo painted a picture of a world where threats to human existence are endemic. Add this scenario to the threat of American fascism and we end up with a 21st-century version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
This distorted representation of reality promoted by insecure elites is having a cumulative impact on public life. Put simply, it is raising public insecurity – and at the same time diminishing the capacity of people to confront some of the very real problems they face.
Frank Furedi is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Democratic Party, FBI, United States |
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Driven by climate madness, the environmental movement has become the greatest advocate of destructive industrial development in history.
As Kant said: “To will the end is to will the means”. In this case the means to the phantom end of climate control have led environmentalists to abandon all of their principles. Solar and wind require environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale. Electrification requires the use of toxic chemicals on a similar scale. The hazardous waste stream is enormous.
Solar is the worst because the destruction of forests and open land is complete. Perhaps something lives under these vast solar slabs but not much and certainly nothing like what they destroy and displace.
As I pointed out in my recent article on Virginia’s ill-named Clean Economy Act, we are talking about hundreds of square miles of solar devastation today, for just one state.
To actually meet our need for electricity would require several thousand square miles of destruction just for Virginia. For the whole country the numbers are staggering, easily the biggest environmental disaster in our history.
Wind is environmentally destructive too, just in a different way.
Let me make this personal. I live in the mountains, in far eastern West Virginia. When I drive to the county seat I get a grand view of the big mountain to the west. It is called the Allegheny Front, the height of land between the Atlantic and Mississippi watersheds. My magnificent natural view is now being industrialized, dotted with windmills and more on the way.
I am sure natural vistas are everywhere threatened, because that is where the best wind is. Mind you we almost never get sustained winds strong enough for full power, but that just means they need more intrusive industrial wind machines to produce the juice.
Even worse, there is a viewpoint up on the Front called Bear Rocks, where crowds gather every fall to watch the hawk migration. Great numbers of hawks come by in swirling groups called kettles, working their way slowly southward down the Front. Surely significant numbers will be killed by the growing phalanx of giant chopping blades.
West Texas has something like 10,000 choppers and other states are rapidly going the same way. That the environmentalists can allow the killing of enormous numbers of protected birds is a clear abandonment of their principles. This is Silent Spring in real life, with entire species threatened.
Then too, environmentalists fight hard for roadless areas. Scattering giant wind machines around a mountain top requires a dense system of access roads, one to every tower. In rugged terrain these systems can be complex and so big, destructive land users.
At the other end of the wire we have chemicals, especially enormous numbers of big batteries.
First come the huge battery arrays needed to turn highly intermittent wind and solar power into reliable juice. Then come the myriad batteries needed to electrify our transportation system, which also requires a lot more solar and wind devastation. Note that a lot of juice will go through batteries twice on its way to use.
Minimizing the use of toxic chemicals has been a cornerstone environmental principle. That the movement should now opt for chemical energy as a central feature of our energy system is a complete abandonment of that principle.
Then there is solid waste, which has always been a central environmental concern. Compared to conventional power plants, wind blades and solar panels are short lived, batteries are ridiculously so. In a solar, wind and battery world we are likely talking about billions of tons of toxic waste.
I think just about every principle of environmentalism is violated by the proposed massive buildout of wind, solar and electrification. Why the environmentalists are not screaming and suing to stop this vast open land destroying, wildlife killing and chemically intensive action is beyond me. Clearly environmentalism has lost its way.
David Wojick contributes Posts at the CFACT site. He is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | United States |
3 Comments
Over the past several decades, the progressive Left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci’s famed admonition of a “long march through the institutions”. In almost every Western country, its adherents now dominate the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths.
But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.
Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.
Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.
That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.
While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.
This decline in trust in major institutions, so evident in America, is also rife across Europe and Australia. In Europe, for example, young people express less pride in their cultural and religious heritage, and are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.
The great paradox of progressivism is that nowhere are its shortcomings more evident than in its geographic heartland: the dense urban centre. Conventional wisdom has dictated that America’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas, where superstar companies stand the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.
But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.
The pandemic has greatly enhanced these trends, with downtown neighbourhoods recovering far less quickly than suburban, exurban, and small towns. But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.
Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.
In Canada, we have seen an instance of “flame purification” for everything from old encyclopaedias and maps to Depression-era cartoons. In America, the disconnect between the professoriate and the people also keeps growing, as conservatives head towards extinction on many campuses: on some well-regarded campuses such as Williams, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans reaches between 70 and 132 to 1.
These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.
And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.
Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)
In the past year, this blindness has incited considerable public outrage. Criticism of Critical Race Theory buoyed the Republican win in Virginia in November, and has become a rallying principle for parents around the country, including a recall drive against San Francisco school board members.
Other parents are trying to opt out of the public system altogether. The pandemic saw the departure of more than one million American students from public schools, while 1.2 million families switched to home-schooling last academic year, bringing the total number of home-schooled students to 3.1 million, roughly 11% of the total. According to the Census Bureau, Black and Hispanic families now have the highest estimated rates of home-schooling, at 16% and 12%, respectively.
Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.
But the media’s Maginot Line may prove more vulnerable than expected, and this breach is certainly a far better prospect than those that came with the German flanking. There is a definite challenge not just from the traditional Right but a plethora of new publications which offer intelligent analysis outside the establishmentarian party line, as well as from Substack. Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.
The shift in the media parallels that in mass culture. As late as the Fifties, mass culture was seen as largely neutral. But in recent decades, it shifted towards a more monochromatic look — one which a significant portion of the public are fed up with. Gender flipping may excite progressive creatives, but politically correct remakes of household favourites have proved box offices disasters. Indeed, it’s striking that openly conservative presenters, such as Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, now do better in ratings than their more established network rivals like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.
Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology. Traditionally, the dispersion of ownership and the conflicting views of entrepreneurs and inheritors fuelled the dynamism of democracy: you had far-Left businessmen like George Soros and doctrinaire Right-wingers like the Kochs in competition. They fought it out, and sometimes even aligned. But they came from diverse viewpoints.
Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.
The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.
The question now is whether there will be sufficient pushback to turn the tide. Unlike local school boards, online magazines, and even alternative colleges, it’s difficult to replace or challenge an Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Morgan Stanley. Yet fortunately these institutions do not yet control all wealth. Big companies may have shamed themselves out of oil and gas, but investors are ramping up due to the soaring price of these assets.
So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.
Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Build Back Better, Great Reset, United States |
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It’s been the most astonishing two weeks for American public life, with so many prescient changes, from new censorships, admissions, backtracks, experts speaking out, public outrage, and what strikes me as a progressive unraveling of every orthodoxy imposed nearly two years ago.
Not even the influential and powerful are in a position to defend what has happened to us. They seem to be gradually pulling away from public life, unable to say things that connect to what everyone knows.
Above all else, what’s remarkable right now is the undeniable arrival of Covid to a degree to which hardly anyone could have imagined all that time ago, when so many experts set out to deploy their fabulous new system for stopping the spread of a disease.
There was a goal (stop cases). There was a method (state compulsion). And there was a test (cases were supposed to go down and go away). There would be a war on a virus and the state would win! And now we look around and see the evidence of failure so pronounced, so impossible to deny, that we must face that which so many have worked so hard to deny for so long.
The best way I can describe this is by observation. In the Northeast of the US, and in many other parts of the country, everywhere you go, right now, you see sick people milling around. They don’t admit it and they don’t talk about it with strangers simply because there is such shame attached to having Covid. They complain of a cold, of a flu, or just suffer in silence. But there it is.
After nearly two years of work to control the spread, after brutal shutdowns of the whole country – shutdowns that happened two years too early, as judged by actual case trends (but of course lockdowns never should have been considered in the first place) – Covid is here. Not just here. It is everywhere. The case counts are beyond anything anyone on the planet could have imagined a year or two ago. The spikes make everything that came before look like child’s play.
Here is the global chart.
And we are talking really sick. Not so much death. Not even out-of-control hospitalization. We are talking about being sick in bed or walking around with misery. The nasty bug lasts maybe two days, maybe two weeks, maybe longer but it is vexing and wicked, not like a cold or flu but something more electric and strange.
Which variant? Two weeks ago, the CDC wanted to blame it all on Omicron. That is no longer possible. Perhaps that constitutes 20%; we just do not know for sure because tracking is so weak. Most of it is evidently Delta, meaning very sick but with no serious loss of taste and smell. Most everyone eventually gets well, and that’s what happens here.
We get to endemicity perhaps in a month or so and life will move on, my experts tell me, at least in some areas of the country. What’s striking and truly shocking is that all of the efforts, all of the propaganda, all of the astonishing spending and compulsion – the shutdowns, masking, size limits, travel restrictions, vaccination requirements, the track and trace, the endless testing, the enforcement, the intimidations, the censorship – and what do we have to show for it?
Lockdown architect Carter Mecher promised us as follows: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.” They attempted a version of that, experimenting on the human population in ways without precedent. And let’s say that is true (it probably isn’t). That is not life. That is not society. That is not freedom. That is something else unimaginably horrific.
It was unsustainable. They pushed their theory without regard to the history of public health or, really, the whole of human experience. And now, the true pandemic finally arrived. And what is it? There are a ton of sick people. People are calling in sick because they cannot come to work. Institutions are having to shut down, not because government closed them but because people are too sick to come to work. This is the normal course of events – exactly what one would expect in a pandemic.
And it’s not just Covid. The head of an Indiana life insurance company reports that deaths among people aged 18-64 are up 40%, an astonishing increase. It’s suicide, drug overdoses, and every other manner of horror. And that’s just death. Many others are just sick from other things.
I personally know dozens and they each know many dozens of more people in the Northeast right now who are down for the count, miserable and pathetic, but still testing negative for Covid. Why would this be? It’s because immune systems have decayed over two years. The lack of vitamin D, the lack of exposure to normal germs in life, the isolation and depression, the overconsumption of liquor and drugs – it’s all been a terrible drain on health.
Meanwhile, the actual pandemic of Covid has certainly arrived. And it is far worse than the data indicated. Look at Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, any of these states, and including some Southern and Midwestern states, and what you find is increases of 500-1,000% in cases. And keep in mind that these are just cases as discovered by official testing spots.
Go to any CVS or Walgreens and you find long lines of people buying testing kits. If they are available. If they are not, the wait is weeks. They are $23 a kit and people are buying as many as possible. Why? Partially it’s because employers and schools are demanding negative tests, but it is also just curiosity. People are sick as dogs and want to confirm their illnesses.
People are estimating that real cases are 50x to 100x what the official data say.
But let’s talk now about a real scandal. When you are sick, you need treatment. Every competent medical professional I know is pretty darn sure that the best hope for dealing with Covid is a combination of Zinc, Vitamin D, and (sorry to mention the dreaded name) Ivermectin. This is not ideological. This is what experienced doctors are saying right now. I’m on many email lists with serious medical professionals and they are all saying the same thing. We can add HCQ to the list if you catch it early enough.
But here’s the kicker – and let me be clear that I’m NOT giving ANY medical advice here, merely just reporting the sense of the community out there. What’s remarkable is that people are having a very difficult time getting these basic therapeutics. Vaccines are everywhere but things to make you well once the virus penetrates the vaccine? Those are hard to come by.
There is a problem getting a prescription because state medical boards are actually barring people and preventing them from serving patients if they prescribe HCQ or Ivermectin, as incredible as that sounds. But once you get the prescription – if you have a doctor brave enough to risk it – finding a pharmacy to fill it is another challenge.
Most people in the UK today are getting their therapeutics from India. Americans get them from Mexico. And some are shipping to the US and they are being distributed via gray markets for anyone who is lucky enough to have a contact. It’s a speakeasy nation but this time for distributing basic therapies.
I feel like I’ve seen horrible things for almost two years now, and you feel the same way. But of all the scandals, and there are so many, this one seems to top the list, namely that once the real pandemic has arrived, there are no effective medicines that are widely available. Doctors are actually being blocked from doing their jobs.
Beyond belief. But you know this. I’m sure you have your own stories. I suspect that many of our readers have encountered this virus for the first time in the last two weeks and have dealt with the horrors of just getting basic medicines to get through this.
The NIH has funded almost no serious trials of these generic drugs. It is not in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to fund them either. As a result, we are truly at a loss – nearly two years into a pandemic at a time when people need meds more than ever.
Meanwhile, the FTC is spending its time cracking down on pharmacies that advertise that they have therapeutics available for people. They are sending cease and desist letters all over the country as a way of intimidating providers. I’ve seen these letters. They have invited me to post them but I’ve declined in the interest of keeping people out of trouble.
One merciful upside to all of this is that there is no more talk of lockdowns. At last, even the experts are saying that society must function. Lockdowns are not even being considered. The whole country is fed up with the phony baloney enterprise of virus control. It did not and cannot work.
Nearly two years ago, they deployed a new experiment in stopping a pathogen. It was a plan that was 15 years in the making, hatched by fanatics who imagined that state policy could outwit a virus.
The wreckage was astonishing, and yet what was the payoff? Here we are today with a wave of sickness that defies every prediction, and with collateral damage beyond even the worst predictions (including my own). And the truth of this is all over the data that anyone can see and the stories that anyone can hear.
The country is right now sicker than it has ever been in our lifetimes.
What a stunning repudiation of state policy – the worst failing of public health and public policy perhaps in the history of the US if not the entire world. We are right now living in its last days. Remember these days, my friends. They are legion and mark what is likely the end of the great fiasco.
And yet it is not really the end. There will be decades of hell to pay for what has happened to us.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
1 Comment
A huge new study has found the risk of serious heart problems called myocarditis in men under 40 soars with each dose of a Covid mRNA vaccine – and is sharply higher than the risk from a coronavirus infection itself.
The findings call into sharp question the efforts by American colleges and universities to make their students receive booster shots before returning to school this January – especially since other studies have shown that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis is concentrated not merely in men under 40 but in those aged 16-25.
The study, which British researchers released in late December, showed that the risk of myocarditis almost doubled after the first Pfizer shot in men under 40. Then it doubled again after the second and doubled again after the third – to almost eight times the baseline risk.
For the Moderna vaccine, the risks were even higher, reaching 16-fold after the second shot. (The risk of a third Moderna shot could not be calculated because too few people received it.)
Because each Moderna shot contains 100 micrograms of mRNA, while each Pfizer shot contains 30, the findings suggest strongly that the heart risks are dose-related and likely to continue to rise with each additional shot.
The study also contained some evidence that post-vaccine myocarditis might be more dangerous than other forms of myocarditis. It showed a trend towards higher death rates in people hospitalized for myocarditis after vaccination compared to other myocarditis cases.
Both myocarditis and pericarditis are forms of heart inflammation that can be very serious, even deadly. In an appendix, the researchers reported that 263 Britons were hospitalized for myocarditis within four weeks of receiving a Pfizer shot; of those, 38, or 14 percent, died. Only about 9 percent of people hospitalized for myocarditis that did not follow an mRNA vaccination died.
The researchers did not look at other potential cardiovascular risks, such as heart attacks or irregular heartbeats, although American and European databases of post-vaccine side effects contain many reports of those as well.
The findings come even as many colleges and universities – including public schools like the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, large private schools such as Syracuse University, and Ivy League institutions such as Princeton University – demand that their students receive a booster Covid shot before returning to campus.
For nearly all these students, an mRNA shot is the only viable option, as the Johnson & Johnson shot is no longer in common use.
These colleges are likely subjecting their male students to a risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, a related illness, that is much higher than the overall risk of Covid, which is vanishingly small for healthy teenagers and young adults. Many larger universities are likely to have multiple cases of male students hospitalized for myocarditis as a result of the mandates.
The massive study was is based on data from 42 million Britons who received at least one Covid vaccine dose, including roughly 22 million who received the mRNA vaccines.
About half were given the mRNA vaccines, while the rest received AstraZeneca’s DNA/AAV vaccine, which is not available in the United States. The AstraZeneca vaccine, which works similarly to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, had a lower risk of myocarditis than mRNA vaccines.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK, United States |
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So it’s likely that 1 in 70 teenage boys are affected. That’s not rare. Why isn’t anyone speaking out about this? Is it fear? Of what?
I’ve written earlier about Monte Vista Christian school.
I just heard that there’s another case of myocarditis at the school, so now there are now 4 cases in 285 vaccinated boys (estimate), bringing the incidence rate to nearly 1 in 70, assuming all the cases are boys (285/4=71.25). This is not rare. This is a disaster.
Furthermore, these are just the cases we know about. There could be other cases that we simply don’t know about because the families decided not to tell anyone. And there could be sub-clinical cases where the damage is being done slowly over time.
Nikki Daniels, MVC’s Head of School, believes it is in the best interest of all parties to keep this information confidential so that nobody outside of the school will know. All the parents agree; they could speak out but choose not to say a word to anyone outside the community.
I disagree with that approach. There is nothing whatsoever to keep them from speaking out. They could save hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide if they spoke out and others followed their lead. It would destroy the credibility of the CDC and break people out of their hypnotic trance doing whatever the CDC says.
Instead, Monte Vista behaves just like every other school: keep your mouth shut and pretend that the kids aren’t being injured by the vaccine. Maybe it will all just go away if we don’t say anything.
This kind of behavior doesn’t save lives. It fuels the false narrative and costs lives.
Monte Vista is setting a horrible role model for students
Students learn that if you see people being injured or killed by your government, the right thing to do is to keep your mouth shut and look the other way.
I guess these are the new Christian values that they are teaching kids today.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
1 Comment
In January 2021, tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and MITRE Corporation announced their launch of the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) in partnership with healthcare companies.
On their website, the VCI describes itself as an alliance of private and public organizations dedicated to the development of the ‘issuance of verifiable health credentials’ bound to an individual digital identity.
The VCI idea depends upon a common platform from which digital wallets can be created, and on the VCI website they call for “participating organizations to commit to implementing, testing, and refining the SMART Health Cards Framework within their sphere of influence.”
According to VCI, their ‘SMART Health Cards’ are meant to “work across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.”
SMART health cards as of now include a person’s name, gender, birth date, phone number, and email address, as well as vaccination status. Developers hope, however, that these cards will eventually become all-encompassing universal digital identities that reside within a universal digital wallet.
Josh Mandel, one of the main developers behind VCI’s SMART health cards system, said once that a complete universal digital identity is ‘essential’ to the effort of creating digital vaccination passes.
On their website, the group uses the term ‘digital wallet’ often and notes that SMART Health Cards could soon be used as digital IDs for all activities, including travel and every purchase an individual makes during commercial activity.
According to the ‘about’ section on their website, the group’s members section includes corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and the MITRE Corporation.
Along with the MITRE Corporation, one of the groups listed in the governance section on the website is the Commons Project Foundation, which is the main backer of the VCI and also hosts the VCI website.
The Commons Project Foundation also describes itself as a ‘private and public alliance.’
Listed on the leadership board of the Commons Project Foundation is the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Head of Performance at BlackRock, the senior managing director at the Blackstone Group, and Julie Gerberding, the former director of the CDC. Gerberding once wrote an op-ed in Time Magazine calling for an ‘International Pandemic Surveillance Network.’
There are many other heads of multilateral development banks (MDBs), former Goldman Sachs partners, UN advisers, and other multinational corporations listed on their assembly.
With the help of the World Economic Forum and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Commons Project Foundation runs the Common Trust Network. Like the Vaccination Credential Initiative and the Commons Project Foundation, the Commons Trust Network describes itself as a ‘private and public alliance.’
The World Economic Forum’s website lists the CEO and CMO of the Commons Project Foundation as Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins respectively. Following his career at the US Center for Disease Control, Perkins was on the advisory board for the RAND Corporation, and his Partner Paul Meyer wrote President Clinton’s speeches while attending Yale.
In partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Rockefeller Foundation — as well as an almost endless list of corporations and government agencies — the Commons Project Foundation created the CommonPass.
According to the World Economic Forum’s website, just like the VCI, the Commons Project Foundation seeks to “develop and launch a standard global model to enable people to securely document and present their COVID-19 status to facilitate international travel and border crossing.”
The site states that their ‘CommonPass‘ is powered by their “CommonTrust Network™ Registry and VCI™ Directory.” and will allow individuals to document their “COVID-19 status to satisfy country or state entry requirements,” and “access lab results and vaccination records when you need it.”
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | CommonPass, Commons Project Foundation, Covid-19, Rockefeller Foundation |
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