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Covid Response at Five Years: Introduction

Brownstone Institute | February 27, 2025

This is the way the world ends,” T.S. Eliot wrote in 1925. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Ninety-five years later, the pre-Covid world ended with a nationwide sigh of submission. Democrats remained silent as government mandates transferred trillions of dollars from the working class to tech oligarchs. Republicans dithered as states criminalized church attendance. Libertarians stood by as the nation shuttered the doors of small businesses. College students obediently forfeited their freedoms and moved into their parents’ basements, liberals accepted widespread surveillance campaigns, and conservatives greenlit the printing of 300 years’ worth of money in sixty days.

With rare exception, March 2020 was a bipartisan, intergenerational capitulation to fear and hysteria. Those who dared to object to the freshly-mandated orthodoxy were subject to widespread contempt, derision, and censorship as the US Security State and a subservient media corps muzzled their protests. The most dominant forces in society used the opportunity to their advantage, pillaging the nation’s treasury and overthrowing law and tradition. Their campaign was devoid of the triumph of Yorktown, the bloodshed of Antietam, or the sacrifices of Omaha Beach. Without a single bullet, they overtook the republic, overturning the Bill of Rights in a quiet coup d’état.

Perhaps no episode better exemplified this phenomenon than the House of Representatives on March 27, 2020. That day, the House planned to pass the largest spending bill in American history, the CARES Act, without a recorded vote. The $2 trillion price tag was more money than Congress spent on the entire Iraq War, twice as much as the cost of the Vietnam War, and thirteen times more than Congress’s annual allocation for Medicaid – all adjusted for inflation. No House Democrats objected, nor did 195 out of 196 House Republicans. For 434 members of the House, there were no concerns of fiscal responsibility or electoral accountability. There wouldn’t be a whimper, let alone a bang; there wouldn’t even be a recorded vote.

But there was one voice of dissent. When Representative Thomas Massie learned of his colleagues’ plan, he drove overnight from Garrison, Kentucky to the Capitol. “I came here to make sure our republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent and empty chamber,” he announced on the floor.

Democrats, the self-professed guardians of democracy, did not heed his call to fulfill their obligation to represent their constituents. Republicans, supposed defenders of originalism and the rule of law, ignored Massie’s invocation of the constitutional requirement for a quorum to be present to conduct business in the House. The supreme law of the land gave way to the hysteria of coronavirus, and the Kentucky Congressman became the target of a bipartisan character assassination.

President Trump called Massie a “third rate Grandstander” and urged Republicans to expel him from the party. John Kerry wrote that Massie had “tested positive for being an asshole” and should be “quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity.” President Trump responded, “Never knew John Kerry had such a good sense of humor! Very impressed!”

Republican Senator Dan Sullivan quipped to Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Mahoney, “What a dumbass.” Mahoney was so proud of the conversation that he took to Twitter. “I can confirm that @RepThomasMassie is indeed a dumbass,” he posted.

Two days later, President Trump signed the CARES Act. He bragged that it was the “single-biggest economic relief package in American history.” He continued, “It’s $2.2 billion, but it actually goes up to 6.2 — potentially — billion dollars — trillion dollars. So you’re talking about 6.2 trillion-dollar bill. Nothing like that.”

The bipartisan Covid regime stood behind the President smiling. Senator McConnell called it a “proud moment for our country.” Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Vice President Pence offered similar praise. Trump thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who remarked, “I feel really, really good about what’s happening today.” Deborah Birx added her support for the bill, as did Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. The President then handed Dr. Fauci and others the pens that he used to sign the law. Before leaving, he took time to chastise Rep. Massie again, calling him “totally out of line.”

By the end of March 2020, the pre-Covid world was over. Corona was the supreme law of the land.

The Press Conference That Changed the World

On March 16, 2020, Donald Trump, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci held a White House press conference on the coronavirus. After nearly an hour of unremarkable questions and answers, a reporter asked whether the government was suggesting that “bars and restaurants should shut down over the next fifteen days.”

President Trump ceded the microphone to Birx. As she stumbled through her answer, Fauci flashed a hand signal to indicate that he wished to step in. He walked to the podium and opened a small document. There was no indication that President Trump knew what was coming next or that he had read the paper.

Is the government calling for a shutdown for 15 days? Fauci took the microphone. “The small print here. It’s really small print,” he began. President Trump was distracted. He pointed at someone in the audience and appeared unconcerned with Fauci’s answer. “America’s doctor” continued at the microphone as his boss engaged in a side conversation with someone in the audience.

“In states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.” Birx grinned in the background as she listened to the plan to shut down the country. Fauci walked away from the podium, nodded at Birx, and smiled as the press prepared a new question.

The plan that gave them unbridled joy was unprecedented in “public health.” Despite firsthand knowledge of smallpox and Yellow Fever, the Framers had not written epidemic contingencies into the Bill of Rights. The nation had not suspended the Constitution for pandemics in 1957 (Hong Kong flu), 1921 (Diphtheria), 1918 (Spanish flu), or 1849 (Cholera). This time, however, it would be different.

The press conference that day was never meant to be a temporary means to flatten the curve; it was the beginning, “a first step,” toward their vision to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence,” they later admitted. “We worked simultaneously to develop the flattening-the-curve guidance,” Birx reflected in her memoir. “Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions.” After demanding that buy-in on March 16, the pre-Covid world was over. Longer and more aggressive interventions became reality.

The following day, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a guide on who was permitted to work and who was subjected to lockdowns. The order divided Americans into two classes: essential and nonessential. Media, Big Tech, and commercial facilities like Costco and Walmart were exempt from the lockdown orders while small businesses, churches, gyms, restaurants, and public schools were shut down. With just one administrative order, America suddenly became an explicitly class-based society in which liberty depended on political favoritism.

On March 21, an image of the Statue of Liberty locked in her apartment appeared on the front page of the New York Post. “CITY UNDER LOCKDOWN,” the paper announced. States chained playgrounds and criminalized recreation. The schools closed, businesses failed, and hysteria ran rampant.

War Fever

When Massie arrived at the Capitol, a war-like fervor had taken over the country. Publications including Politico, ABC, and The Hill compared the respiratory virus to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On March 23, the New York Times published “What 9/11 Taught Us About Leadership in a Crisis,” offering “lessons for today’s leaders” in response to a “similar challenge.”

The column did not warn against the dangers of impulsive responses leading to unintended consequences, unaccountable government agencies, unscrupulous ideologues, and untold federal expenditures. There were no analyses of how temporary national fear could lead to trillions of dollars wasted on disastrous initiatives. Instead, the “similar challenge” led to familiar smear campaigns.

Thomas Massie and Barbara Lee have very little in common; Massie, an MIT alumnus, styles himself a “high-tech redneck.” His Christmas card featured his family of seven holding guns with the caption “Santa, please bring ammo.” Lee, a California Democrat, volunteered for Oakland’s Black Panther Party and marched alongside Nancy Pelosi at the “Women’s March.” Both, however, stood as lone voices of dissent in the two most defining crises of this century. They served as Cassandras, issuing prophetic warnings that drew the ire of disastrous bipartisan consensus.

In September 2001, Lee was the only member of Congress to oppose the authorization to use military force. With the rubble still smoldering at the World Trade Center, she warned Americans that the AUMF provided “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events — anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.” A jingoistic press attacked Lee as “un-American,” and she received bipartisan condemnation from her peers in Congress.

When Massie took the House floor nineteen years later, American troops were still in Afghanistan, and the “blank check” had been used to support bombings in at least ten other countries. Like Lee, Massie’s dissent was prescient. He warned that the Covid payments benefited “banks and corporations” over “working class Americans,” that the spending programs were riddled with waste, that the bill transferred dangerous power to an unaccountable Federal Reserve, and that the increased debt would be costly for the American people.

In retrospect, Massie’s points were obvious. The Covid response became the most disruptive and destructive public policy in Western history. The lockdowns destroyed the middle class while the pandemic minted a new billionaire every day. Childhood suicides skyrocketed, and school closures created an educational crisis. People lost jobs, friends, and basic rights for challenging Covid orthodoxy. The Federal Reserve printed three hundred years’ worth of spending in two months. The PPP Program cost nearly $300,000 per job “saved,” and fraudsters stole $200 billion from Covid relief programs. The federal deficit more than tripled, adding over $3 trillion to the national debt. Studies found the pandemic response will cost Americans $16 trillion over the next decade.

What We Knew Then

Time vindicated Massie, but the pro-lockdown advocates have not demonstrated remorse. To evade responsibility for their catastrophic policies, many cower behind the excuse that we didn’t know then what we know now. “I think we would’ve done everything differently,” Gavin Newsom reflected in September 2023. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know.” “Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty,” The Atlantic published in October 2022. The precautions may have been “totally misguided,” wrote Brown Professor Emily Oster, an advocate for school closures, lockdowns, universal masking, and vaccine mandates. “But the thing is: We didn’t know.”

But the evidence from March 2020 refutes the Rumsfeldian invocation of unknown unknowns.

On February 3, 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship was set to return to harbor in Japan. When reports emerged that there had been an outbreak of the novel coronavirus aboard the ship, authorities kept it in the water to quarantine. Suddenly, the ship’s 3,700 passengers and crew members became the first contained study of Covid. The New York Times described it as a “floating, mini-version of Wuhan.” The Guardian called it a “coronavirus breeding ground.” It remained in quarantine for almost a month, and passengers lived under strict lockdown orders as their community went through the largest outbreak of Covid outside China.

The ship administered over 3,000 PCR tests. By the time the last passengers left the boat on March 1, at least two things were clear: the virus spread rapidly in close quarters, and it posed no significant threat to non-senior citizens.

There were 2,469 passengers on the ship under the age of 70. Zero of them died despite being held on a cruise ship without access to proper medical care. There were over 1,000 people on the ship between 70 and 79. Six died after testing positive for Covid. Out of the 216 people on the ship between 80 and 89, just one died with Covid.

Those points became even more clear in the ensuing weeks.

On March 2, over 800 public health scientists warned against lockdowns, quarantines, and restrictions in an open letter. ABC reported that Covid likely only posed a threat to the elderly. So did Slate, Haaretz, and the Wall Street Journal. On March 8, Dr. Peter C Gøtzsche wrote that we were “the victims of mass panic,” noting that “the average age of those who died after coronavirus infection was 81… [and] they also often had comorbidity.”

On March 11, Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published a peer-reviewed paper that warned of “an epidemic of false claims and potentially harmful actions.” He predicted the hysteria surrounding the coronavirus would lead to drastically exaggerated case fatality ratios and society-wide collateral damage from unscientific mitigation efforts like lockdowns. “We’re falling into a trap of sensationalism,” Dr. Ioannidis told interviewers two weeks later. “We have gone into a complete panic state.”

On March 13, Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager famously portrayed by Christian Bale in The Big Short, tweeted: “With COVID-19, the hysteria appears to me worse than the reality, but after the stampede, it won’t matter whether what started it justified it.” Ten days later, he wrote: “If COVID-19 testing were universal, the fatality rate would be less than 0.2%,” adding that there was no justification “for sweeping government policies, lacking any and all nuance, that destroy the lives, jobs, and businesses of the other 99.8%.”

By March 15, there were widespread studies on the mental health ramifications of lockdowns, the health impact of shuttering the economy, and the harms of overreacting to the virus.

Even the Covid regime’s wildly inaccurate models, which overestimated the fatality rate of Covid by multitudes, could not justify the response. One of the main bases for lockdown policies was Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College London report from March 16. Ferguson’s model overestimated the impact of Covid on various age groups by degrees of hundreds but conceded that the young faced no substantial risk from the virus. It predicted a 0.002% fatality rate for ages 0-9 and a 0.006% fatality rate for ages 10-19. For comparison, the fatality rate for the flu “is estimated to be around 0.1%,” according to NPR.

On March 20, Yale Professor David Katz wrote in the New York Times: “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” He explained:

“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.”

He cited data from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and South Korea which suggested that 99% of active cases in the general population were “mild” and did not require medical treatment. He referenced the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which housed “a contained, older population,” as further proof that the virus appeared harmless to non-senior citizens.

Later that month, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya called for “immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns” in the Wall Street Journal. The same week, Ann Coulter published “How do we Flatten the Curve on Panic?” She wrote: “If, as the evidence suggests, the Chinese virus is enormously dangerous to people with certain medical conditions and those over 70 years old, but a much smaller danger to those under 70, then shutting down the entire country indefinitely is probably a bad idea.”

Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff wrote in April, “COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific.” He explained:

“Among COVID-19 exposed individuals, people in their 70s have roughly twice the mortality of those in their 60s, 10 times the mortality of those in their 50s, 40 times that of those in their 40s, 100 times that of those in their 30s, 300 times that of those in their 20s, and a mortality that is more than 3000 times higher than for children. Since COVID-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.”

On April 7, Burry called on states to lift their lockdown orders, which he decried as “ruining innumerable lives in a criminally unjust manner.” On April 9, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who later became the Surgeon General of Florida, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Lockdowns Won’t Stop the Spread.” Ten days later, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reopened his state. “Our next measured step is driven by data and guided by state public health officials,” Kemp explained. Shortly thereafter, Governor Ron DeSantis lifted Covid restrictions in Florida.

Brian Kemp, Thomas Massie, and Ron DeSantis didn’t flip a coin on the Covid issue. They knew they’d be accused of endangering fellow citizens, killing grandmas, and overrunning the healthcare system. If they nodded along to the consensus like their peers, then they could have increased their power and perhaps won an Emmy like Andrew Cuomo. Joining the herd was socially and politically fashionable, but their rationality stood athwart the prevailing madness.

Wisdom was in short supply in American government and media. Anthony Fauci and President Trump attacked Kemp for reopening Georgia. The New York Times stoked racial animus to criticize opponents of the Covid regime, telling its readers that “black residents” would have to “bear the brunt” of Kemp’s decision to “reopen many businesses over objections from President Trump and others.” The New York Daily News referred to “Florida Morons” daring to go to the beach that summer, and the Washington Post, Newsweek, and MSNBC chastised “DeathSantis.” While the slanders and hysteria were temporary, a radical and insidious movement sought to permanently transform the country.

The Quiet Coup

Amid the name-calling and memorable headlines of school closures, arrests for paddle boarding, and urban anarchy, the nation underwent a coup d’état in 2020. The First Amendment and freedom of speech were replaced by a censorship operation designed to silence citizens. The Fourth Amendment was supplanted by a system of mass surveillance. Jury trials and the Seventh Amendment disappeared in favor of government-provided legal immunity for the nation’s most powerful political force. Americans found they suddenly lived under a police state without the freedom to travel. Due process disappeared as the government issued edicts to determine who could and could not work. Equal application of the law was a relic of the past as a self-appointed caste of Brahmins exempted themselves and their political allies from the authoritarian orders that applied to the masses.

The groups that implemented this system also benefited from it. State and federal government agencies gained tremendous power. Unshackled from the restraints of the Bill of Rights, they used the pretext of “public health” to reshape society and abolish personal liberties. Social media giants assisted these efforts, using their power to silence critics of the new Leviathan. Big Pharma enjoyed record profits and government-provided legal immunity. In just one year, the Covid response transferred over $3.7 trillion from the working class to billionaires. To replace our liberties, Big Government, Big Tech, and Big Pharma offer a new ruling order of suppression of dissent, surveillance of the masses, and indemnity of the powerful. 

The hegemonic triumvirate framed their agenda with favorable marketing strategies. Eviscerating the First Amendment became monitoring misinformation. Warrantless surveillance fell under the public health umbrella of contact tracing. The fusion of corporate and state power advertised itself as public-private partnerships. House arrest received a social media rebranding of #stayathomesavelives. Within months, business owners replaced their “We stand with first responders” signs with “Going out of business” announcements.

Once the rule of law had been overturned, the culture was soon to follow.

Ten weeks after the press conference that changed the world, a Minnesota police officer put his knee on the neck of a Covid-infected, fentanyl-laced career criminal. This led to cardiopulmonary arrest, the death of the man, and a cultural revolution. The BLM and Antifa violent protests in reaction to the death of George Floyd sparked 120 days of rioting and looting in the summer of 2020. Over 35 people died, 1,500 police officers were injured, and rioters caused $2 billion in property damage. CNN covered the resulting arson in Wisconsin with the chyron “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS.”

With the notable exception of Senator Tom Cotton, politicians were largely complicit in the mass looting and violence. President Trump was absent; while the cities burned on the weekend of May 30, the Commander-in-Chief was uncharacteristically silent. His only communication was that the Secret Service had kept him and his family safe.

Others seemed to encourage the destruction. Kamala Harris raised money to pay bail for looters and rioters arrested in Minneapolis. Tim Walz’s wife, then Minnesota’s First Lady, told the press that she “kept the windows open as long as [she] could” in order to smell “the burning tires” from the riots. Nikki Haley tweeted, “the death of George Floyd was personal and painful for many. In order to heal, it needs to be personal and painful for everyone.”

And painful it was. Just hours before Haley’s demand for communal suffering, rioters set fire to Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police building. Thousands celebrated around the building as it burned. They looted the evidence rooms as the police inside fled under the mayor’s orders. Two days later, the mobs in St. Louis killed 77-year-old former policeman David Dorn. His death was broadcast on Facebook Live.

Every major institution cowered to the demands of the rising Jacobins. Once proud institutions released statements of self-flagellation, statues of American heroes came toppling down, and crime skyrocketed. In Minnesota alone, aggravated assault increased 25%, robberies increased 26%, arson increased 54%, and murder increased 58%. Vandals toppled Minneapolis’s statue of George Washington and covered it in paint. Minnesota State University removed its statue of Abraham Lincoln from its campus display after 100 years after students complained that it perpetuated systemic racism.

None of this concerned the truth behind Floyd’s death. Typically, deaths in individuals with fentanyl concentrations over 3 ng/ml are considered overdoses. Floyd’s toxicology report revealed 11 ng/ml of fentanyl, 5.6 ng/ml of norfentanyl, and 19 ng/ml of methamphetamine. Floyd’s autopsy concluded that there were “no life-threatening injuries identified,” and the county medical examiner told the local prosecutor that there “were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.” He asked, “What happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?”

Evidently, the answer was a nationwide cultural upheaval. The wreckage spread through the country and beyond June 2020. The racial reckoning left no American institution untouched. “New homicide records were set in 2021 in Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Rochester, Louisville, Toledo, Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Portland, and elsewhere,” Heather MacDonald writes in When Race Trumps Merit. “The violence continued into 2022. January 2022 was Baltimore’s deadliest month in nearly 50 years.” New York City removed statues of Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt; California vagrants toppled tributes to Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key, and Francis Drake; San Francisco vandals dragged statues and prepared to toss them into a fountain until they learned the fountain was a memorial to AIDS victims. Oregon criminals desecrated statues of T.R., Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.

At Rockefeller University, they removed the portraits of scientists who won the Nobel Prize because they were white men. The University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of William Shakespeare because it failed to “affirm their commitment to a more inclusive mission for the English Department.” The soon-to-be 46^th President and his allies announced that there would be racial prerequisites for the selection of its highest-ranking officials – including the Vice President, a Supreme Court Justice, and the Senator from California. The private sector was even worse: in the year after the George Floyd riots, just 6% of new S&P jobs went to white applicants, a result that required mass discrimination.

By Independence Day 2020, the coup d’état had succeeded. The rule of law had been overturned. Former bedrock principles of the Republic – freedom of speech, freedom to travel, freedom from surveillance – were sacrificed upon the altar of public health. A culture that had once championed meritocracy became obsessed with berating the identity of the majority of its population. Hypocrisy in the ruling class grew to the point that there was no longer equal application of the law. The most powerful groups augmented their wealth while the working class suffered under despotism.

This series is meant to outline the freedoms that we sacrificed, and, just as importantly, the people and institutions that benefited from the erosion of our liberties. There are no allegations of the pandemic’s causes. Those speculations, intriguing as they may be, are unnecessary to demonstrate the coordinated upheaval that took place. The bedrocks of liberty enshrined in the Bill of Rights disappeared while the nation panicked. The most powerful people profited while the weakest suffered. Under the pretense of “public health,” the Republic was overturned.

February 28, 2025 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance | CARES Act, Human rights, New York Times, United States | 1 Comment