Another day, another politician violates their own rule. Do as I say not as I do; this has been the prevailing theme of the pandemic as politicians openly flout the laws and recommendations they advocate for. From people like Speaker Nancy Pelosi to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to local county supervisors in Los Angeles, hypocrisy thrives at every level of government. Our leaders tell society to suck it up and lock down while providing little justification or direction. Meanwhile, they reserve the right to travel, dine out, and see their loved ones for themselves after devoting effort to prevent the rest of us from doing so. As they enjoy these luxuries, their policies bring economic devastation, social deprivation, and encourage fellow citizens to turn on one another.
Another public official to be added to this long list of hypocrites is Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. AP Newswrites,
“The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households. Birx, her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren were present.”
This is of course after she and her colleagues made a number of recommendations not to travel or gather on Thanksgiving. According to the New York Post,
“Birx had urged people in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to keep gatherings to “your immediate household.”
“I don’t like it to be any number,” Birx said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“Because you know, if you say it can be 10, and it’s eight people from four different families, then that probably is not the same degree of safe as 10 people from your immediate household.”
Birx said at the time that every American is obligated to make sacrifices to stop the spread of the virus.”
Dr. Birx believes that we should not gather with anyone besides those in our immediate household yet here she is just like many politicians before her. The New York Post also writes that when confronted on the matter Dr. Birx attempted to justify the trip by stating that she was going to “winterize the property before a potential sale.” On the matter it reports,
“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in a statement.
She argued that the members of the trip belong to her “immediate household,” though she acknowledged they live in separate homes.”
As unconvincing as that sounds, even if Dr. Birx didn’t go to celebrate Thanksgiving that doesn’t change the fact that she was meeting with people from different households. Preparing the house for sale doesn’t change things either as American businesses have been crumbling under the boot of lockdowns since March. Although failing to prepare her house for sale might have lasting and adverse consequences, every day Americans have been making these sacrifices for months.
The New York Post provides a follow up on this situation when it reports that to justify her visit Dr. Birx said the following,
“My parents stopped eating and drinking because they were so depressed,” the 64-year-old complained to Newsy.
“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed,” Birx said of the need to “recover from the trauma of the last 10 months.”
Although this is certainly a compelling reason to visit her family, the problem is that this is what countless Americans have been dealing with as well. Dr. Birx has simply realized what the consequences of her policies have been. For many Americans, lockdowns have generated the social agony her family has experienced. Plenty of Americans have also lost jobs and livelihoods. According to data from Yelp, 60 percent of businesses that closed will never open again. For many Americans, they have experienced even worse. According to the CDC, drug overdoses have skyrocketed in 2020, expanding the list of self-inflicted deaths both intentional and unintentional. Despite all this, the average American has obediently complied with these guidelines even though they have every right not to.
Should We Forgive Dr. Birx?
Dr. Birx and the countless politicians like her should be forgiven under the following condition: That they learn from their mistakes and empathize with the average American’s struggle with their policies. To understand the eternal lesson that policy intentions do not equal policy results. If we could have more people in power who understand this truth then society would be better off. Lockdowns are a classic example of a policy that seemed to have benevolent intentions but wound up having lethal consequences. There are laws that work and those that don’t. Lockdowns and all the arbitrary restrictions that come with them promote contempt for the rule of law while doing little to control the virus. They have not only done little to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but they have wrecked society as a result. Part of the process of leadership is having the humility to admit that you were wrong and understanding that you can’t force a square peg through a round hole. Likewise, you cannot drastically shut down society and prohibit everything it means to be human without expecting terrible results.
“The basic source of social order, however, is not a deliberate decision to adopt certain common rules, but the existence among the people of certain opinions of what is right and wrong…. Except where the political unit is created by conquest, people submit to authority not to enable it to do what it likes, but because they trust somebody to act in conformity with certain common conceptions of what is just. There is not first a society which then gives itself rules, but it is common rules which weld dispersed bands into a society.”
Hayek spoke of lawmaking as a sort of discovery process of policies that are compatible with society rather than simply forcing one’s will on society. Lockdowns are a clear example of an unsustainable law that is not only incompatible with society but impossible to follow. Dr. Birx has learned firsthand that her recommendations are not sustainable in the long run and even she of all people can’t follow such an edict. Rather than feeling humiliated and ashamed, she should attempt to enlighten her colleagues about her discovery. Otherwise, this will go down as another one of countless instances of elitism and hypocrisy exercised by our public servants.
Dr. Birx may have saved her family from emotional trauma or worse by visiting them. Surely she had taken the necessary precautions to ensure that her trip was as safe as possible. It would certainly be reasonable to make such a trip given the circumstances. She weighed the dangers and rewards of the actions she was taking and made a thoughtful decision. Rather than apologizing and retreating, she should fight for the average American’s right to do the same. One could only wish.
Ethan Yang joined AIER in 2020 as an Editorial Assistant and is a graduate of Trinity College. He received a BA in Political Science alongside a minor in Legal Studies and Formal Organizations. He currently serves as Local Coordinator at Students for Liberty and the Director of the Mark Twain Center for the Study of Human Freedom at Trinity College.
Humanity should sacrifice “personal freedom” just as many nations did during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to successfully fight climate change, a German MP has said, adding that there will “never” be a vaccine against CO2.
Germany had barely started its coronavirus vaccination campaign when a Social Democratic MP, Karl Lauterbach, warned that his compatriots need to brace themselves for yet another challenge: global warming.
“We need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic,” the professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne wrote in a guest piece for Die Welt newspaper. He added that he hoped climate change issues would play “a dominant role” during the upcoming election campaign ahead of the federal ballot scheduled for September 2021.
The politician said he “had an impression” that Germany, Europe, and particularly the US “would not have been able to defeat the Covid pandemic without the development of a vaccine.” All these nations are still quite far from defeating the virus, as their vaccination campaigns have only just started, and the number of new infections in these nations remains relatively high. But he appeared much more concerned about the fact “there will never be a vaccine against CO2.”
Lauterbach admitted he was rather skeptical about whether his dream future, in which humanity would beat climate change through the sacrifice of freedoms, would ever be achieved. “My experience of combating the coronavirus pandemic has unfortunately made me extremely pessimistic about whether we will be able to successfully stop climate change in time,” he admitted.
According to the MP, the problem lies with the fact that Germans have “underestimated” the pandemic and continue to do so. Now, as the vaccination campaign kicks off, some might be too tempted to throw off the shackles of yet another lockdown well before the time is right to ease the restrictions, he warned.
It is “necessary” for the lockdown to remain in place until the number of new cases falls “well below 50 per 100,000 people in a week,” the epidemiologist said, calling on fellow citizens to “have discipline, altruism and … patience to achieve this.”
However, many Germans seem unlikely to agree with such advice. The nation has repeatedly seen massive protests against coronavirus restrictions. The government’s decision to re-introduce a partial lockdown in early November sparked a new wave of demonstrations, some of which turned violent. Some of those opposing the lockdown went as far as to compare themselves with the anti-Nazi resistance, provoking a harsh rebuke from Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
The fact that Christmas parties in Germany were limited to close family members would have done little to brighten the nation’s mood. The ban on drinking alcohol in public and buying fireworks for use on New Year’s Eve probably came as unwelcome news too.
The nation launched its vaccination campaign on Saturday – a day ahead of the joint EU inoculation drive. Ensuring the German population is immune to the virus will likely still take some time, since each European country has so far received only around 10,000 doses. More are expected to be delivered in January.
Once it became clear to the Western elite that their subjects would readily accept draconian anti-Covid measures, it encouraged them to usher in a code-red lifestyle where there will be no ‘return to normal’ in the foreseeable future and, possibly, ever.
If nothing else, nobody can say we were not warned about the madness that would descend upon leap year 2020, making it one of the worst 366 days ever recorded on the Gregorian calendar.
On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the incredibly visionary Event 201, an exercise that simulated the outbreak of a pandemic “transmitted from bats to people that eventually becomes… transmissible from person to person.”
The simulation proved to be so uncannily similar to the real thing that started just three months later – from imagining a dramatic drop in air travel and business, to breaks in the global supply chain – that Johns Hopkins eventually felt compelled to release a statement saying their exercise was not intended to be a prophecy of future events.
“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise,” the statement read, in what just might be the creepiest caveat ever. “For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction… We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”
Shortly after the global elite played Nostradamus, on January 15th to be exact (the very same day, incidentally, that the Democrats presented articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the Senate), the first Covid-positive person arrived in Seattle from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease is said to have sprung to life. From there it has been a non-stop roller-coaster ride of government-sponsored insanity.
Before continuing, it is important to remember the context with which the pandemic has been happening, that is, in the most consequential U.S. presidential election in recent memory. It should thus come as no surprise that the Democrats and Republicans would use the scourge to achieve some sort of advantage, demonstrating Machiavellian opportunism at its very best. Indeed, such is the nature of the political beast.
For example, although Trump shut down the U.S. border on January 31 to Chinese nationals, the Democrats and leftist media pounced, saying the U.S. leader responded too late to make a difference. Even Trump’s use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ was slammed by his opponents as ‘racist.’ Meanwhile, it was the Democrats themselves who were the pioneers in taking the first draconian steps of locking down society to stop the contagion.
On March 16, 2020, six counties in northern California and the city of Berkley ordered an unprecedented stay-at-home order for some 7 million Bay Area residents. This was all part of “flattening the curve” logic that would “buy time for hospitals to gear up for the onslaught…” Well, 233 days later political leaders are not only still flattening the curve, but flattening their economies as well. Today, although the survival rate for those infected with Covid-19 is reported to be in the neighborhood of 99.85 percent, harsh lockdowns continue to wreak havoc, not least of all for small businesses.
This is criminal. Complete BS!!! I guess this is “science”! RT @ClayTravis: Watch this video of an LA bar owner that perfectly crystallizes the absurdity of California’s absurd and ridiculous shutdown rules. pic.twitter.com/XVLmAVyy70
Consider the situation in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has mandated yet another ‘shelter-in-place’ order, which has shuttered, among other businesses, hair salons, barbershops, personal care services, movie theaters, wineries, bars, breweries, family entertainment centers and amusement parks. What is hard to fathom, however, is how the corporate big-box stores are considered “essential businesses,” apparently immune to the scourge, while the small business owner is trashed as expendable.
By way of example, consider the tragic plight of Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Los Angeles. In an effort to comply with the ever-changing anti-Covid rules, Marsden spent over $80,000 to build an outdoor patio so she could stay in business during the pandemic. With Newsom’s latest lockdown restrictions, however, city officials denied her permission to serve clients on location, even in the parking lot.
To add insult to injury, the authorities granted permission for a film company to set up a large outdoor eating area for its staff just across the road from where Marsden had built her patio.
“I’m losing everything,” she exclaimed in a video posted to Twitter that has been watched almost 10 million times. “Everything I own is being taken away from me. They have not given us money and they have shut us down. We cannot survive; my staff cannot survive…”
For the Fortune 500 companies, however, the pandemic has translated into a windfall. Between April and September, at a time when thousands of small business were quietly getting crushed underfoot, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded American companies turned a profit, according to the Washington Post.
At the same time, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms slashed their workforce this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers, while at the same time distributing billions of dollars to shareholders. As just one example, Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while terminating 1,200 office staff.
To put these figures another way, since mid-March – when President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires saw their net worth explode by $931 billion in total. Jeff Bezos, for example, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, saw his private wealth go from $73.2bn since the start of the crisis to a record $186.2bn.
It would probably come as no surprise that the very individuals who helped pave the way for astronomic wealth generation among the 1 percent, are the same ones breaking their own rules. Governor Newsom and his wife, for example, attended a birthday party with a dozen friends at the French Laundry restaurant in San Francisco. Equally maddening is that Dustin Corcoran, the CEO of the California Medical Association, was also in attendance. And who could forget the photo of Nancy Pelosi walking through a California hair salon when such businesses were deemed ‘super spreaders’?
Such incidences only served to reinforce the idea that the draconian lockdowns, the worst of which are centered on Democratic-controlled states, were specifically designed not to contain a contagion, but to foster as much anger and frustration among the general population in the most consequential presidential election in many decades. After all, unhappy people have a tendency to vote out their leaders whom they believe are responsible for such dire circumstances. And with the mainstream media almost totally in the Democratic anti-Trump camp, placing the blame on the president has proven no difficult task.
So where do we go from here? Now that we have reached the end of 2020, will the situation begin to improve? Will political leaders begin to loosen the screws and let some semblance of normality return once again? Or will people be forced to rise up and demand the return of their freedom and liberty?
At this great loggerhead in human history, there has been much talk about creating ‘freedom passes’ that will be demanded from people before they are allowed to travel or visit any sort of entertainment again.
“People who test negative for coronavirus could get a five-day freedom pass to attend big events or access public buildings, under plans being considered by public health experts running a trial program in England,” reportedBloomberg in November.
Already, five global airlines – United Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Swiss International Air Lines and JetBlue – have announced they will observe the so-called CommonPass to passengers on some flights from December.
“The project, developed by non-profit group The Commons Project and backed by the World Economic Forum, uses a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone to show a passenger has tested negative for Covid-19,” according to the Financial Times. Here is the kicker: “The airlines are not making the CommonPass mandatory, but in time it will also be used to provide proof of vaccination.”
It seems rather obvious where all of this is heading: mandatory vaccination for anyone who ever wishes to board an aircraft or visit another entertainment venue again. Over time, it is not difficult to imagine a vaccine regimen extending to all human activities, including shopping and even getting a job. Yet what about the millions of people who have expressed extreme skepticism in being administered a vaccine that has been developed so quickly?
Whatever the case may be, should such a plan of action become mandatory, peoples’ lives will be entirely dominated by fears over a virus, together with an endless bureaucratic process of being tested and approved to move about. Vaccines will become a regular requirement since viruses are in a state of constant mutation, which makes them the authoritarian’s dream instrument of domination.
Such a system of totalitarian control, should it ever come into fruition, will have achieved in mere months what fascism could not in years: the pacification and unification of a great swath of the world’s population not by bayonet, but by syringe. In fact, today the people of London are fleeing their fair city not out of fear of the virus per se, but out of fear of the lockdown restrictions put in place by the authorities. To put it otherwise, the world gave an inch and the globalists took a mile, and a person would have to be a fool to believe it could have turned out any other way.
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Postreported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reportedThe Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” APnotes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
I graduated from medical school in January 2020. Long before starting to study to be a doctor, I had become interested in how diet and health are related, with a particular interest in the paleolithic diet. I think this was borne primarily out of my strong interest in evolution and biology – it just made sense that the diet humans were evolutionarily adapted to over the course of millions of years would also be the diet that is healthiest for us.
During my five and a half years of medical training, a few things became clear to me. First, while doctors receive a lot of training in how to deal with medical emergencies, they are taught extremely little about how to avoid chronic disease and maximize long term health, and much of what they are taught is wrong. Over those years, I think I received a total of three lectures about nutrition. In other words, three hours during five and a half years were spent learning about how to avoid chronic disease in the first place.
One of those lectures, during the last few months before graduating, struck a very strong chord. The lecturer showed a powerpoint slide, and said, “this is your bible. This is what you are going to tell people.”
Here’s what was on that list:
Eat more fruit and vegetables.
Eat more fish.
Eat more whole grain cereals.
Eat less sugar.
Eat less saturated fat.
Eat less salt.
Eat low fat dairy.
Eat less meat.
Since I have a strong personal interest in nutrition, and have spent a lot of time going through the science, I knew that at least half of the advice on that list was complete nonsense, not supported by the scientific evidence. And yet we were being told that this was our “bible”. Just the word chosen showed clearly that this was not science we were being taught, it was religion.
Another problem with medical school is that we were taught what to do in different situations, but we were rarely given any nuance in terms of the probability of success, or size of benefit, of a treatment. For example, we were taught that, after someone has a heart attack or a stroke, they should be prescribed a statin. But we were never told what that would really mean for the patient. How much longer could they expect to live?
I decided that, after graduating, I would start a blog about health and medicine, to try to get the truth out as much as possible, both to patients and to colleagues in the medical profession. Apart from helping others, it would also allow me to delve deeper in to many of the topics I hadn’t been taught in medical school.
Anyway, three days after graduating, I started working in the Emergency Room of one of the hospitals in Stockholm. For the next few months I was too busy to think further about my blog idea. And then, just a few months in to my new job, came covid.
It came suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. One day it was something happening far away, in other countries, in Italy and South Korea, and China. The next it was everywhere. For a while, it felt like every single covid test I ordered came back positive. I even had a case where a patient came in with a nose bleed, and for some reason someone decided to take a nasal swab to test for covid. The test came back positive.
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the Emergency Room was being overwhelmed, because that would be false. I went from seeing eight or more patients per shift to seeing two or three. While a very large proportion of the patients were covid positive, there were in total many fewer patients than usual. All the usual suspects in the Emergency Room were gone.
Official statistics bear this out. They show, for example, that hospital admissions for heart attacks in Stockholm were down 40% during the spring covid peak. Presumably people were choosing to stay home rather than go to the hospital and risk getting covid. And presumably this was resulting in unnecessary deaths – indirect deaths, not due to the virus itself, but rather due to the hysteria surrounding the virus.
This continued for about a month, and then the covid patients started to disappear. More and more of the tests came back negative. I noticed that the official statistics were telling the same story. From mid-April until early August there was a continuous decline in the number of people dying of covid in Sweden.
I follow the medical literature quite closely, and there seemed to be a clear consensus among the experts at that point that covid was not a seasonal virus. Putting these two pieces of data together, the decline in deaths and the lack of seasonality, I figured that we must have reached the point of herd immunity in Sweden. I was surprised that it came so quickly, but if both suppositions were true, then nothing else could explain what we were seeing in the data.
I figured that, if this was the case, then the virus could not possibly be anywhere near as deadly as it was being portrayed in the media. Only 6,000 people had died, out of a population of 10 million, and the pandemic was over. So it seemed.
I was given a few weeks holiday in late July, and with more time on my hands, I decided to start the blog that I had been planning for several months. Around this time I had a conversation with my mother, who follows the mainstream news media closely, about covid. I hadn’t been following the news myself, but had rather been going straight to the source for my information, looking at the official statistics and the scientific studies, and it became clear that we had very different world views in relation to covid.
From my perspective, based on my experience in the hospital, and what was being shown in the official statistics and scientific studies, it was clear that covid was no worse than a bad flu, of the kind seen several times per century. It was certainly nowhere near as bad as the horrific 1918 flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed 3% of the world’s population, and which was particularly dangerous to young people. And yet covid was frequently being compared to that pandemic in the media.
By summer, it was clear that covid was nowhere near as bad as had initially been feared. In Stockholm a large field hospital had been erected to deal with the expected deluge of covid patients, but it never had to take a single patient. And yet, the reaction from media and governments seemed more in line with a global ebola outbreak than a bad flu.
I realized that my mother was typical of most people, who were getting their news from the mainstream sources, and so I decided to write an article about it on my new blog. After writing the article, I sent it to Malcolm Kendrick, a British doctor I admire, who had written a couple of very skeptical articles about covid, in order to see what he thought about it. He liked it so much that he asked if he could re-post it on his website.
I had a feeling that the article might generate some interest, but it immediately went viral. In less than two weeks, my blog had received half a million visits. The Spectator newspaper in the UK contacted me and asked to reprint my article, as did several other newspapers and blogs. And multiple TV and radio channels asked to interview me.
It was clear that there was a huge hunger for an alternative view of the pandemic to that being presented in mainstream media. At the same time, I had only just started the blog, and it wasn’t really a blog about covid. My main interest is in what people can do to maintain their long term health, and that is what I want my blog to be about. So, although I wrote the odd article about covid over the next few months (mainly because I kept getting a large number of e-mails from people asking me about my opinion on different things to do with covid), I tried to focus on the other things, that I personally think are more important and interesting over the long term.
Then came autumn, and with it the second wave. Considering that the consensus among the “experts” was that covid wasn’t seasonal, I was surprised, again. “Non-experts”, like Ivor Cummins, who had said all along that covid was acting in a seasonal manner and would be back in autumn, were right. And with the second wave came a renewed wave of hysteria that was in many cases worse than the first time around.
In Sweden, that was certainly the case. The Swedish government struck a much more alarmist chord the second time around, even though it was clear that the first wave had been much worse, at least in terms of the number of people dying. And even though there was now robust evidence that the fatality rate was much lower than had been believed initially, and increasing evidence that the fear mongering and lockdowns during the first wave had done much more harm than good, there were renewed calls for even stricter measures. Just as with the official dietary guidelines, the mainstream response to covid started to feel more like it was based on religion than on science.
Amid the renewed hysteria, I was contacted by a publisher here in Sweden, who asked me to write a book about covid, to get a more nuanced and scientifically sound view out in to the public arena than was being presented in mainstream media. I’ve now been working on that book for a few months, and I’m currently putting the finishing touches to it. It will be out in the early part of 2021, in English and Swedish, and my hope is that it will contribute to changing the way the world thinks about covid.
Let’s hope 2021 ends up being a saner year than 2020.
The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)
In his book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab writes that the covid-19 crisis should be regarded as an “opportunity [that can be] seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on the path toward a fairer, greener future.”1 Although Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset for years, the covid crisis has provided a pretext for finally enacting it. According to Schwab, we should not expect the postcovid world system to return to its previous modes of operation. Rather, alternating between description and prescription, Schwab suggests that changes will be, or should be, enacted across interlocking, interdependent domains to produce a new normal.
So, just what is the Great Reset and what is the new normal it would establish?
The Great Reset means reduced incomes and carbon use. But Schwab and the WEF also define the Great Reset in terms of the convergence of economic, monetary, technological, medical, genomic, environmental, military, and governance systems. The Great Reset would involve vast transformations in each of these domains, changes which, according to Schwab, will not only alter our world but also lead us to “question what it means to be human.”2
In terms of economics and monetary policy, the Great Reset would involve a consolidation of wealth, on the one hand, and the likely issuance of universal basic income (UBI) on the other.3 It might include a shift to a digital currency,4 including a consolidated centralization of banking and bank accounts, immediate real-time taxation, negative interest rates, and centralized surveillance and control over spending and debt.
While every aspect of the Great Reset involves technology, the Great Reset specifically entails “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,”5 or transhumanism, which includes the expansion of genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics and their penetration into human bodies and brains. Of course, the fourth Industrial Revolution involves the redundancy of human labor in increasing sectors, to be replaced by automation. But moreover, Schwab hails the use of nanotechnology and brain scans to predict and preempt human behavior.
The Great Reset means the issuance of medical passports, soon to be digitized, as well as the transparency of medical records inclusive of medical history, genetic makeup, and disease states. But it could include the implanting of microchips that would read and report on genetic makeup and brain states such that “[e]ven crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”6
On the genomic front, the Great Reset includes advances in genetic engineering and the fusion of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.
In military terms, the Great Reset entails the creation of new battle spaces including cyberspaces and the human brain as a battle space.7
In terms of governance, the Great Reset means increasingly centralized, coordinated, and expanded government and “governmentalities,” the convergence of corporations and states, and the digitalization of governmental functions, including, with the use of 5G and predictive algorithms, real-time tracking and surveillance of bodies in space or the “anticipatory governance” of human and systems behavior.8
That being said, “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as the New York Times has suggested,9 the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking”10 of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders”11 and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.
In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared destiny,” among other euphemisms.12 Together, such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism13 (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).
I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in their thrall. The mass of humanity, the planners would have it, will live under an economic stasis of reduced expectations, with individual autonomy greatly curtailed if not utterly obliterated. As Mises suggested, such planners are authoritarians who mean to supplant the plans of individual actors with their own, centralized plans. If enacted, such plans would fail, but their adoption would nevertheless exact a price.
1. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (n.p.: Forum Publishing, 2020), p. 57.
2. Schwab, Klaus. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business, 2017), p. vii.
6. Klaus Schwab and Nicholas Davis, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Guide to Building a Better World (New York: Currency, 2018), p. 173.
Professor Roger Seheult, MD explains the important role Vitamin D may have in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Seheult illustrates how Vitamin D works, summarizes the best available data and clinical trials on vitamin D, and discusses vitamin D dosage recommendations. Roger Seheult, MD is the co-founder and lead professor at https://www.medcram.com
He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine and Assistant Prof. at Loma Linda University School of Medicine Dr. Seheult is Quadruple Board Certified: Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine Interviewer: Kyle Allred, Producer and Co-Founder of MedCram.com REFERENCES: The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS)… (J. of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology) | https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…
Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis… (BMJ) | https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.i…
Randomized trial of vitamin D supplementation to prevent seasonal influenza A… (The American J.of Clinical Nutrition) | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20219…
Effect of Vitamin D3 … vs Placebo on Hospital Length of Stay…: A Multicenter, Double-blind, Randomized Controlled Trial | https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…
Short term, high-dose vitamin D… for COVID-19 disease: a randomized, placebo-controlled, study [SHADE study] (Postgraduate Medical Journal) | https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/202…
Analysis of vitamin D level among asymptomatic and critically ill COVID-19 patients… (Scientific Reports from the Journal Nature) | https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159…
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All coronavirus updates are at MedCram.com (including COVID-19 developments, cholecalciferol, vitamin d benefits, etc.) We offer over 60 medical topics on our website. Media contact: https://www.medcram.com/pages/media-c…
MedCram medical videos are for medical education and exam preparation, and NOT intended to replace recommendations from your doctor. #COVID19#SARSCoV2#VitaminD
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the epidemiologist revered almost religiously as a hero by mainstream media outlets and Democrat politicians, has admitted that he lied to Americans to manipulate their acceptance of a new Covid-19 vaccine.
The intentional deception involved estimates for what percentage of the population will need to be immunized to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 and enable a return to normalcy.
Earlier this year, Fauci said 60-70 percent – a typical range for such a virus – but he moved the goalposts to 70-75 percent in television interviews about a month ago. Last week, he told CNBC that the magic number would be around “75, 80, 85 percent.”
When pressed on the moving target in a New York Timesinterview, Fauci said he purposely revised his estimates gradually. The newspaper, which posted the article on Thursday, said Fauci changed his answers partly based on “science” and partly on his hunch “that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
Fauci added that he doesn’t know the real number but believes the range is 70-90 percent. He said it may take nearly 90 percent, but he won’t give that number because Americans might be discouraged, knowing that voluntary acceptance won’t be high enough to reach that goal.
The article was published on Fauci’s 80th birthday, which was celebrated in the nation’s capital as “Dr. Anthony Fauci Day” after being proclaimed as such by Washington’s Democrat mayor, Muriel Bowser. CNN and other media outlets covered the occasion glowingly, including Fauci being surprised with a “serenade” by emergency medical workers as he left his office at the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday. A CNN video of the serenade included an audio clip of President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, singing the birthday song.
You have been a beacon of scientific thinking and enlightenment during “these dark ages” of ignorance and superstition. Thank you!
But the doctor’s changing story on herd immunity is only the latest in a series of Covid-19 flip-flops, including 180-degree shifts on such core issues as whether members of the general public should wear masks and whether children should be sent back to school.
Just as his tone on herd immunity changed, his view on prospects for a return to normalcy shifted dramatically. A few days before the November 3 presidential election, he echoed Biden’s gloomy Covid-19 outlook and implied that the Democrat challenger would deal with the crisis more seriously than would President Donald Trump. After the election, he turned far more optimistic.
Of course he does, remember when he said face masks don’t work and he doesn’t recommend them, then now he says they do and are essential? The fact that people still listen to these experts is the most worrying thing.
“This is not the first time that Fauci has admitted to deceiving the public for utilitarian purposes in regard to coronavirus,” journalist Ari Hoffman tweeted. Another observer agreed, pointing out Fauci’s flip-flop on masks. “The fact that people still listen to these experts is the most worrying thing,” he said.
Setting expectations for getting economic activity back to normal is virtually impossible without realistic projections for the vaccination rate that would provide herd immunity. Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s vaccine rollout, said in late November that “true herd immunity” would take place without about 70 percent of Americans inoculated, which might be achieved by sometime in May 2021.
Fauci’s admitted Covid-19 deception is symptomatic of how government officials “infantilize the American people,” one commenter said. “We’re going to be in trouble when we don’t have Trump to blame everything on and people have to find a way to cope.”
But the doctor remains a superstar in the minds of many Americans, with some Twitter users calling him a “beacon of scientific thinking and enlightenment during these dark ages of ignorance and superstition.”
Radio host John Ziegler offered a theory as to how Trump got the blame for 326,000 US Covid-19 deaths, while following Fauci’s policy advice, while the doctor was elevated by the media as a hero and genius. “Fauci is really loved because it is perceived he took down Trump, not Covid,” Ziegler said.
The most insane COVID media narrative… Dr. Fauci is a hero/genius.But the USA response he led was a disaster.And Trump, who did everything Fauci told him, is responsible for over 300,000 deaths!Fauci is REALLY loved because it is perceived he took down Trump, not COVID!
In this three-part series we will exam the transformation from COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns. Part I we established a timeline of the dark side of the environmental movement. In Part II we looked into the specifics of what a climate lockdown really means and what impact current lockdown measures have had on the environment. Now we will see how it fits into the bigger picture of sustainable development as described by international organizations such as the United Nations and what can be done to derail this agenda.
The time has come to step back and look at the bigger agenda of what’s behind climate lockdowns. The groundwork for Mazzucato’s proposals have already been laid and seeded into the public consciousness. This agenda goes by many names and has many faces but at it’s core it is a deception which promotes sustainable development to combat climate change through organizations like the United Nations.
The deception rests on the successful deployment of the Hegelian Dialectic, also known as problem, reaction, solution. In this case governments and institutions have deemed climate change to be the most pressing issue facing civilization (create the initial problem), the public then demands protection and aid in combating this problem (manage the public reaction), and lastly come to the rescue with sustainability goals (sell the pre-planned solution) which can be brought in without any resistance.
It is through these central pillars that we will conclude this series and present solutions for derailing this dystopian vision of the future.
The Truth About Sustainable Development
Though her work is presented as an opinion piece, Mazzucato is simply promoting a larger agenda. The agenda is pushed through everything from The Green New Deal and The Paris Agreement to The Great Reset crafted by the World Economic Forum and the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda (formerly Agenda 21). These are the instruments which serve as tools for the elite to spread their globalist philosophies. Those familiar with these organizations and accompanying legislation are rightly skeptical of presidents and prime ministers mixing with hedge fund managers, CEOs, European royalty, unelected technocrats, and career bureaucrats to dictate the future of the world. Supposedly this is done in the interest of saving the planet but a closer look at what’s behind these agendas tells a very different story.
At the core of these visions of the future is sustainable development. The United Nations and it’s acolytes in the mainstream media promise a world where economic growth still flourishes without harming the environment, so long as the world adopts their 17 goals for sustainable development. These goals include No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Affordable and Clean Energy, and Quality Education. When presented in this simple way it is difficult to find issue with those goals. After all, who doesn’t want a world where poverty has been eradicated and children aren’t going hungry?
While photos of smiling African children or wind turbines against a pastoral background usually accompany reporting on the goals there is little context given to the history or players involved in their creation. How these goals will actually be achieved is a question mostly left unanswered as well. Once these issues are addressed one really wonders if this agenda is what they say it is, or if there’s more to the story.
So where did the term sustainable development come from and how did it become the core of the United Nation’s goals for the future of mankind? In 1983, Agenda 21 began taking shape in the UN as part of the Brundtland Commission who’s goal was to unite the world on a path towards sustainable development. What came out of this commission was a work called Our Common Future which popularized the term sustainable development and defined it as, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Short, sweet, and without substance.
The commission conveniently featured a cadre of people close to the Rockefeller Family, who’s fingerprints on the environmental movement can be found everywhere. It was headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission who would go on to become the Prime Minister of Norway; oil man and Rockefeller associate Maurice Strong; Italian politician Susanna Agnelli who’s brother Gianni considered David Rockefeller to be in his inner circle; former EPA head William Ruckelshaus who ran in the same circles in Washington D.C. as Nelson and David Rockefeller; and Canadian environmentalist Jim MacNeil who co-authored Beyond Interdependence, a work on sustainable development for the Trilateral Commission.
The United Nations’ Plans For The Future
The agenda was updated and made public in the form of a 300-page document in 1992 at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and was adopted by 178 governments. The agenda was expanded upon in the 1995 report, Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA) which elaborates on how society needs to be transformed in the name of sustainability. These works leave no stone unturned when it comes to reshaping the world but there are three factors that are of particular use for creating a control grid: the abolishment of private property, population control, and total resource management.
Perhaps the most far-reaching transformation is with regards to private property which will largely be prohibited. They explain that, “Property rights can still be allocated to environmental public goods, but in this case they should be restricted to usufructual or user rights. Harvesting quotas, emission permits and development rights… are all examples of such rights.” This in essences turns over all land, resources, and property to be managed and distributed by bureaucrats who will usher the rural and suburban populations into designated urban spaces. In the United States the map of habitable zones will look something like this (more background on this map here). The smart cities of the future will be unbearably dystopian.
One interpretation of Agenda 21 includes population control as part of the equation. To maintain current standards of living in North America the authors of the GBA estimated that the world population would need to be one billion, two to three billion if “frugal European standards” were desirable. The implicit choice there is that either those standards of living must become a thing of the past or that much of the world’s population will need to be done away with. The authors do not mention how we would return to those levels but with eugenicists like the Rockefellers in support of this agenda it is frightening to imagine the possibilities.
The ability to inventory the world’s production and consumption of any and all resources was a desired but far-off dream of the technocrats of the early 20th century. This dream was closer to being possible in the mid-90s when the GBA stated their goal to:
Expand or promote databases on production and consumption and develop methodologies for analyzing them… Assess the relationship between production and consumption, environment, technological adaption and innovation, economic growth and development, and demographic factors… Identify balanced patterns of consumption worldwide.
The language used here makes this sound like a boring exercise in record keeping but this banal language, when put in the context of a plot like Agenda 21, becomes much more nefarious. Researcher Rosa Koire has been studying the UN’s environmental agendas for decades and calls this cataloging, “The action plan, the blueprint to inventory and control all land, all water, all plants, all minerals, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, all energy, all education, and all human beings.” In today’s technologically-driven world, and with the growing Internet of Things, this is a very real possibility.
It became clear in 2015 that 2021 was an unrealistic goal and the agenda once again received a facelift and became Agenda 2030. The agenda outlined in Agenda 21 was reframed as the UN’s Sustainable Goals, 17 interlocking items meant to serve as the blueprint for a sustainable future. They can be read about in great detail and are very appealing on the surface. The catch is that the technocrats in charge of pushing this agenda have to be trusted and as has been outlined previously, and well-documented in other places, this is a huge ask.
A Look At The Green Economy
These technocrats are also asking to be in charge of world finances. Both the World Bank and International Monetary Foundation were spawned from the United Nations and represent, among other institutions and central banks, the financial arm of the elite.
Those in support of this agenda perpetually claim that capitalism has failed us and that along with this reorientation towards sustainability the foundations of our economy will need to change. Patrick Wood, in his seminal book, Technocracy Rising outlines how this will work in the green economy of the future:
It is plainly evident today that the world is laboring under a dysfunctional system of price-based economics as evidenced by the rapid decline of value in paper currencies. The era of fiat (irredeemable paper currency) was introduced in 1971 when President Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold. Because the dollar-turned-fiat was the world’s primary reserve asset, all other currencies eventually followed suit, leaving us today with a global sea of paper that is increasingly undesired, unstable and unusable. The deathly economic state of today’s world is a direct reflection of the sum of its sick and dying currencies, but this could soon change.
Forces are already at work to position a new Carbon Currency as the ultimate solution to global calls for poverty reduction, population control, environmental control, global warming, energy allocation and blanket distribution of economic wealth. Unfortunately for individual people living in this new system, it will also require authoritarian and centralized control over all aspects of life, from cradle to grave.
What is Carbon Currency and how does it work? In a nutshell, Carbon Currency will be based on the regular allocation of available energy to the people of the world. If not used within a period of time, the Currency will expire so that the same people can receive a new allocation based on new energy production quotas for the next period.
Because the energy supply chain is already dominated by the global elite, setting energy production quotas will limit the amount of Carbon Currency in circulation at any one time. It will also naturally limit manufacturing, food production and people movement.
The elite know this is coming and have already positioned themselves accordingly. Al Gore has already profited nicely off his green investments; members of the Rothschild family are backing sustainability; the Rockefellers have divested from fossil fuels without hurting their net worth; companies like Tesla have made people rich in the name of being eco-friendly. As a matter of fact, a bank (discussion begins at 39:41) has already been set up to facilitate this transition into a new economic paradigm.
It’s another case of new boss, same as the old boss. With most private property rights gone, bodily autonomy in the hands of the ruling class, and complete centralization of the economy there is really nothing outside of the grasp of the elite in this system.
How To Derail Sustainable Development
The cynicism held by those behind this agenda is astounding. They believe that humanity is so distrustful and irresponsible that every facet of their existence must be restricted and controlled. This doesn’t even touch on the eugenicist beliefs held by many within their ranks who would rather see most people simply done away with so they can live in a world unspoiled by their inferiors.
While the fight against such an overarching plan may seem impossible there is a part each person can play in resisting this nightmarish takeover of the world. If the problem is framed as a battle of David v. Goliath, in which the dismantling the UN or wresting away the fortunes of the Gates and Rockefellers of the world are the goals, then the task seems insurmountable. The much simpler resolution to this problem, and one which allows everyone to do their part, is to just opt out and build anew.
It is pure myth to assume that these bureaucracies need to exist or that the billionaires need to have the power that they claim to hold. It is simply a choice to walk away and disavow the system. There are problems in society that need addressing and there are certainly environmental issues that need fixing but these can be handled in a decentralized fashion. To think that a technocratic elite knows what’s best for each man, woman, and child on the planet better than they themselves is ridiculous. Instead we need a free market of ideas, innovations, and technologies where individuals and communities can voluntarily collaborate to create the solutions. A world where mankind works hand-in-hand, not as mortal enemies, could lead to levels of advancement and abundance of society unthinkable by these psychopathic elite.
Once this is understood on a wide scale the work can begin on a large scale. However, nobody has to wait that long as there are already individual tasks that can be done. Some examples:
– Look for signs of these agendas being deployed in your community and push back. Local Agenda 21 serves as the vehicle for taking the larger agenda of the United Nations and reformulating their goals to make them adoptable at the local level.
– If these goals are rolled out it will be much harder to connect with like-minded people in the smart cities of the future. Form Freedom Cells and other voluntary groups to organize, share skills, build community, etc.
– The mainstream media collaborates with the United Nations and governments around the world and therefore cannot be trusted to tell the truth on these issues. Find alternative sources of information on these matters.
– The Internet of Things will be used to spy on the public and under sustainable development goals they will be used to ration resources. Do not allow these devices in your home. Instead, go off the grid or turn to decentralized technology.
– Central planning of the food supply in the Soviet Union and in Communist China led to widespread famine and starvation and yet this is the model the UN hopes to replicate. Grow your own food and support your local farmers. Decentralizing the food supply is critical to preventing food shortages while helping to build community.
– Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and all the other tech giants all collaborate with the United Nations to push this agenda. Opt-out of these controlled platforms and move towards open-source alternatives.
– When the Dollar, Euro, Yuan, etc collapse the central banks will have controlled digital currencies at the ready. To insulate yourself from the fallout it is worth considering diversifying away from fiat currency. Precious metals, cryptocurrency, local currencies, cash, barter systems, and real assets are all alternatives.
– Take steps to become more self-sufficient. The less you have to rely on technocratic institutions, the state, controlled technological platforms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc the less they can interfere with your life.
– Digital censorship is a serious threat to freedom so please share this information. Spread links to websites like this, host documentary screenings, start a book club, distribute USBs loaded with information, bring up Agenda 2030 in conversation, etc. There really is no wrong way to do this last one!
This list is hardly exhausted and will mean different things to different people but that’s really the point. Nobody is better suited to direct your life than you. As we all learn, share, and grow this destructive agenda can be dismantled while a beautiful new chapter of humanity begins.
One of the big reasons why so many Americans are angry about the size of the “stimulus payments” in the COVID relief bill that Congress just passed is because this year has truly been a “financial disaster” for millions upon millions of people.
More Americans than ever before are just barely scraping by from month to month, and $600 is just not going to go very far. In 2020, small businesses have been getting slaughtered by the thousands, millions of Americans are in imminent danger of being evicted from their homes, and more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed since the COVID pandemic first started. The U.S. has plunged into a brutal economic depression, and most of the country is desperately hoping that the federal government will do more to bail them out.
Of course the truth is that we can’t actually afford another 900 billion dollar “stimulus package” on top of all the other “stimulus packages” that were already passed this year.
We are already 27.5 trillion dollars in debt, and all of this reckless spending is putting us on a highway to hyperinflation.
But most Americans don’t really care that we are literally destroying our national finances. Most people are in desperate need of money, and the vast majority of them want checks from the government as soon as possible.
A OnePoll survey that was just released asked Americans about the current state of their finances, and that survey discovered that a whopping 55 percent of us consider this year to be “a personal financial disaster”…
While there is no question 2020 has been an unparalleled health challenge, many are not losing sight of how devastating the year was for their wallets as well. A new survey finds over half of Americans (55%) consider 2020 a personal financial disaster.
That is over half the country!
And for those that are employed, that same survey found that 62 percent are planning to take on a second job in 2021 in an attempt to make ends meet…
Among employed respondents (59% in total), seven in 10 say they need a raise at their job in order to make ends meet. Sixty-two percent plan on taking on a second job in 2021 to meet their financial goals next year.
That number can’t possibly be correct, can it?
Of course there aren’t that many jobs to go around. Already, there are millions upon millions of Americans that can’t find a “first job”. As I discussed the other day, we have got unemployed workers sleeping in lawn chairs or sleeping in their own vehicles because that is all they can afford at this point.
We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and this latest wave of lockdowns is making things even worse.
With so many Americans financially hurting, it shouldn’t be a surprise that millions of households are getting behind on their rent and mortgage payments…
One-in-seven renters with family incomes from $35,000 to $100,000 were not current on their rent in November. The overwhelming majority of these renters – 79.9% — expected to face eviction within two months. Similarly, 9.6% of homeowners with a mortgage were not current on their mortgage in November. And 56.1% of those homeowners expected they will be foreclosed on in the subsequent two months.
Congress keeps extending moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments, and that has been financially devastating landlords and mortgage holders.
At some point the moratoriums must end, and when that happens we are going to see a tsunami of evictions that will be absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, many Americans are going very deep into debt in a desperate attempt to keep themselves afloat financially…
More than one-third of households with incomes between $35,000 and $100,000 borrowed from credit cards, other loans as well as from friends and family to pay for their current expenses in November. Soon, debt payments will come due, burdening families that still suffer from long-term unemployment and added health care costs. This could mean rising credit default rates as well as spillovers of economic pain to other households, from who people borrowed to pay their bills.
If economic conditions were to “return to normal” in 2021, most Americans would be able to weather this financial storm just like they did in 2008 and 2009.
But things are not going to return to normal next year.
Instead, this new wave of lockdowns is going to cause thousands of more businesses to close and will force millions more Americans on to the unemployment rolls.
What we are doing to our small businesses is absolutely criminal. At this point, small business revenues are down more than 32 percent nationwide since the month of January…
Small business revenues have also taken a hit nationwide. The national average is a decrease of 32.1 percent in small business revenue since January. Washington D.C. had the worst loss in the nation at 61.6 percent. Oregon small businesses lost 16.3 percent. Illinois small businesses saw 39.2 percent decline in revenue since January.
Every day, more small businesses are closing up shop permanently.
Millions of hopes and dreams have been brutally crushed, and there is nothing that our politicians can say or do that will bring those businesses back to life.
If you have lost a business or a job this year, then that would definitely qualify as one of the “personal financial disasters” of 2020.
And as you have seen in this article, you are far from alone.
In the short term, “stimulus payments” from the federal government will definitely help tens of millions of suffering Americans.
But of course every additional dollar that our government borrows and spends just makes our long-term problems even worse.
A national economic meltdown has begun, and our politicians will try lots of things to mitigate the damage, but all of their “solutions” will only help temporarily.
This is going to be an exceedingly dark chapter for America, but most Americans still do not understand the true nature of the crisis that is now unfolding all around us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Let me boil this down for you. Claiming a new “mutant strain” of SARS-CoV-2 is 70% more deadly than the original, computer modelers in the UK have advised Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to lock down the country at a much stricter level.
The computer model was concocted at the Imperial College of London. The accompanying text actually admits it’s too early to tell whether the mutant strain is a major threat.
Nevertheless, Boris Johnson has issued the new vast lockdown order. [1] [2]
Who is on television promoting the need for the lockdown? None other than Neil Ferguson, the disgraced and failed computer modeler. [3] [4]
He didn’t author the new model/study at the Imperial College, but he’s now the face of the “science.”
Ferguson’s prior model predicted 500,000 COVID deaths in the UK and 2 million in the US would occur by last summer. This absurd and criminal estimate directly influenced Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to declare states of emergency, and abandon plans to keep their national economies open.
Then Ferguson violated his own lockdown recommendations by carrying on an affair with his mistress, who lived in her separate home with her husband.
And now he’s back, on television, warning citizens about the new “mutant strain” of the virus and the need for a higher level of lockdown.
Other scientists are outraged at the latest computer model; they are demanding to see the actual evidence of the increased threat. They’re saying they don’t even understand what “70% more deadly than the original strain” means.
How much more economic devastation can the people of the UK take?
Here is my original piece on Neil Ferguson, written as his prior computer model was being trashed—but followed by political leaders in the US, UK, France, and Germany. Buckle up:
Neil Ferguson: the ghost in the machine [5]
Why do governments salute when he predicts a pandemic and tells them to lock down their countries?
Does anyone care about his past?
Why does he still have a prestigious job?
Who is he connected to?
by Jon Rappoport
Neil Ferguson, through his institute at London’s Imperial College, can call the shots on a major percentage of the global population.
He’s Mr. Genius, when it comes to projecting computer models of epidemics.
Fellow experts puff up his reputation.
According to the Business Insider (4/25) [6], “Ferguson’s team warned Boris Johnson that the quest for ‘herd immunity’ [letting people live their lives out in the open in the UK] could cost 510,000 lives, prompting an abrupt U-turn [massive national lockdown in the UK]… His simulations have been influential in other countries as well, cited by authorities in the US, Germany, and France.”
Not only cited, not only influential, but swallowed whole.
Business Insider continues: “On March 23, the UK scrapped ‘herd immunity’ in favor of a suppression strategy, and the country made preparations for weeks of lockdown. Ferguson’s study was responsible.”
There’s more. A lot more.
Same Business Insider article: “Dr Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator to the Trump administration, told journalists at a March 16 press briefing that the Imperial paper [Ferguson’s computer projection] prompted the CDC’s new advice to work from home and avoid gatherings of 10 or more.”
Ferguson, instigator of LOCKDOWN. Stripping away of basic liberties. Economic devastation.
So let’s look at Ferguson’s track record, spelled out in the Business Insider piece:
“Ferguson co-founded the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, based at Imperial, in 2008. It is the leading body advising national governments on pathogen outbreaks.”
“It gets tens of millions of dollars in annual funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and works with the UK National Health Service, the US Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), and is tasked with supplying the World Health Organization with ‘rapid analysis of urgent infectious disease problems’.”
Getting the picture?
Gates money goes to Ferguson.
Ferguson predicts dire threat from COVID, necessitating lockdowns—thus preparing people to accept a vaccine. The vaccine Gates wants.
Ferguson supplies a frightening computer projection of COVID deaths—to the CDC and WHO. Ferguson thus communicates a rationale for the Gates vaccine plan.
National governments surrender to WHO and CDC. LOCKDOWNS.
Business Insider : “Michael Thrusfield, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, told the paper he had ‘déjà vu’ after reading the [Ferguson] Imperial paper [on COVID], saying Ferguson was responsible for excessive animal culling during the 2001 Foot and Mouth [mad cow] outbreak.”
“Ferguson warned the government that 150,000 people could die. Six million animals were slaughtered as a precaution, costing the country billions in farming revenue. In the end, 200 people died.”
“Similarly, he [Ferguson] was accused of creating panic by overestimating the potential death toll during the 2005 Bird Flu outbreak. Ferguson estimated 200 million could die. The real number was in the low hundreds.” HELLO?
“In 2009, one of Ferguson’s models predicted 65,000 people could die from the Swine Flu outbreak in the UK — the final figure was below 500.”
So you have to ask yourself, why would anyone believe what Ferguson has been predicting in this COVID hustle?
Are his fellow experts that stupid?
Are presidents and prime ministers that stupid?
And the answer is: This is a monumental covert op; some people are that stupid; some are caught up in the op and are afraid to say the emperor has no clothes; some are aware of what is going on, and they want to destroy national economies and lead us into, yes, a new world order.
Gates knows he has his man: Ferguson. As the recipient of tens of millions of dollars a year from the Gates Foundation, Ferguson isn’t about to issue a model that states: COVID is nothing to worry about, let people live their lives and we’ll be all right. The chance of that happening is on a par with researchers admitting they never properly identified a new virus as the cause of illness in 2019, in Wuhan. [7]
In order to justify injecting every man, woman, and child in the world with heavy metals, synthetic genes that alter genetic makeup, a host of germs, and who knows what else, Gates needs A STORY ABOUT A DEADLY VIRUS THAT NECESSITATES SHUTTING DOWN AND IMPRISONING THE PLANET, ACHIEVING A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE.
He’s got the story, all dressed up in a computer model, composed by a man with a past record of abject and devastating failures.
Neil Ferguson is the ghost in the machine. The machine is the World Health Organization and the CDC. The man behind the ghost is Bill Gates.
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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