Brownstone Institute
Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
From the Brownstone Institute
It’s been more than obvious since April 2020 that lockdowns were far too costly for individuals and society and could never earn a rational public-health defense. And the evidence was rolling in from one year later that the vaccine mandates were similarly indefensible.
Both tactics had in common the enormous use of state coercion that flew in the face of every principle of civilized government.
As we are constantly told, both people and government were panicked, and needlessly so. As it turns out, the infection fatality rate was not 2-3 percent, as the WHO had said early on, or 1 percent as Fauci told the Senate in March 2020, but rather 0.035 percent for anyone under the age of 60 (which is 94 percent of the population).
Covid has been highly transmissible and with it the resulting protection of natural immunity. The correct policy should have been to maintain all social and market functioning while the actual vulnerable population protected itself as it awaited widespread immunity. That’s how every generation for 100 years has handled infectious disease: as a medical and not political matter.
In other words, politicians and officials the world over made enormous and obvious errors, just not later but from the outset. This is not really worth arguing any more. The evidence is now 2.5 years deep. Insisting on 85 percent coverage of an ineffective vaccine was also an egregious error becaus people are not stupid and knew that they did not need this vaccine, especially since it protects not against infection or transmission and its approval bypassed all normal standards of clinical trials.
Where are the apologies? Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Faced with enormous failure, the machinery that did this to us has generally refused to say the simple word. It’s the hardest thing for people with power to admit their fallibility. Even though the whole world knows what they did and vast and increasing numbers are aware of the utter failure, the political class still insists on living in a fantasy land of its own creation.
There are exceptions.
Prime Minister Imran Khan apologized for lockdowns in April 2020.
Ron DeSantis of Florida has repeatedly said that the lockdowns were an enormous mistake and will never happen again so long as he is in charge. That’s very close to being an apology, though many residents are still awaiting the magic word.
Also in 2020, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg went on Norwegian television to say that she and others panicked and “took many of the decisions out of fear.”
That’s close to being an apology.
So far as I know, that’s about it. Until yesterday. The new Premier of Alberta Canada Danielle Smith has offered an apology to Albertans who were discriminated against because of their COVID-19 vaccination status. “I am deeply sorry for any government employee that lost their job and I welcome them back if they want to come back.”
Glory be! That’s precisely what we are looking for. Not just from a few but from all. The near absence of such apologies is driving the massive political realignment the world over, as furious voters demand admission of wrongdoing and justice for the victims.
They are not forthcoming and therefore the anger is only rising. The storm clouds are gathering around the impossibly arrogant Anthony Fauci, with a new hit movie making the rounds and a judge demanding that he be deposed in a powerful lawsuit filed against his hypercritical collusion with social media companies to censor truth.
Now nearly three years into this disaster, the worry that humanity would just accept the outrage and move on is proving unwarranted. People are discovering that there is plenty of dissent out there, and it stretches across the partisan divide. The resulting cultural and political realignments will echo long into the future, like other major upheavals of the past.
Think of the big historical events that echoed for generations in American politics. The struggle over slavery. World War I. Prohibition. The New Deal. World War II. The Cold War. The last one I know well, having come of age in the latter years. In retrospect, the long episode of the Cold War was packed with mythology. Still, the struggle was expressed in ideological terms of freedom vs. communism. The alliances that lined up remained for decades and impacted cycle after cycle of political controversy at home and abroad.
For strange reasons of timing and loss of principle, the “woke” left found itself mixed up in lockdown politics and then the vaccine mandate. Many of them lined up with policies that violate the very rights they had spent decades defending. So much for the Bill of Rights, the freedom of movement, the appreciation for the classless society, bodily autonomy, and so on. The left lost its soul during these years, and thereby alienated multitudes of sane lefties who watched in horror as their own tribe abandoned them in favor of the authoritarianism they had long decried.
Lockdown/mandate vs not: this has the capacity to be a theme that will resonate far into the future. It also unites people on the political “right” again with small business, genuine civil libertarians, and champions of religious liberty. It permits the “left” to again find its voice for human rights and freedoms. For that matter, they do not have to be activists; they only need to be people who do not want their houses of worship padlocked, their business closed and bankrupted, their speech curtailed, or their bodily autonomy violated.
It also put the emphasis on the correct point: the protection of American liberties not from some shadowy foreign enemy but from our own governments. It also draws in the left that has long been suspicious of the place of big business, and, in this case, rightfully so. The largest corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook), for all the good that they achieve in this world, have leaned decisively in favor of lockdowns.
Same with Big Media. The reason is not just that they are harmed less by lockdowns and, in many cases, actually benefited from them. It’s because the people ruling these companies enjoy ruling-class lives, and they see the world through them. Lockdowns were the favored policy for cultural and political reasons, which is itself a scandal.
There is another group of powerful people in a position to dedicate themselves to the anti-lockdown/anti-mandate cause: parents. In an astonishing act of despotic ignorance, governors closed schools down all over the country, with zero medical benefit and grotesque levels of abuse for children and parents.
These are schools for which people pay heavily in property taxes, while parents using private schools pay twice. Governments shut them down, robbing parents of their money and smashing their settled lives. Many children in this country lost two years of education. Many families with two incomes had to drop one of them in order to babysit their children at home as they pretended to learn on Zoom while being denied access to peers.
Then once schools were operating normally, the CDC approved without evidence the Covid vaccine as an addition to the childhood schedule. Parents are not this dumb. They will never go for it. They will pull the kids out of public school and into private and homeschooling, causing a real crisis for one of the most settled institutions in American life.
Then you have the problem of colleges and universities. Rightly or wrongly, parents and students make extreme financial sacrifices to pay for college in the hopes that the right education and degree sets people up for a lifetime of success. Whether this is true or not, parents are risk-averse with their children’s future so that they do whatever is necessary to make it happen.
Then one day, the kids were locked out of the universities that they pay to attend. No parties. No study sessions. No going to other people’s rooms. No in-person instructions. Many thousands of students in this country have been fined and harassed for noncompliance. They’ve had masks forced on them even though their risk from the virus approaches zero, and the memory of this humiliation will last a full lifetime. Then came the vaccines, forced on college students who did not need them and are most vulnerable to adverse events.
Why have the people put up with this? Under normal conditions, they never would have. None of this would have been possible. The one reason they did this time: fear. Fear of getting sick and dying or, if not dying, experiencing permanent health effects. This emotion can last far longer than one might think. But eventually emotions do catch up with facts, among which is that the danger of severe outcomes was wildly exaggerated and the lockdowns and mandates achieved nothing in terms of disease mitigation.
You mean all this suffering and horror was for naught? Once that realization dawns, fear turns to anger, and anger to action. If you understand that dynamic, you can see why the architects of lockdowns from Dr. Fauci to the CDC are doing their best to delay that dawning, with daily doses of alarmism designed to keep people languishing in fear and ignorance.
The fear however is breaking. We will reflect on all the incredible health theater to which we’ve been subjected for two and a half years, the hopping around people to stay 6 feet away, the silly ban on restaurant menus, the on-again-off-again mandatory masking of the people, the curfews and capacity limits, and we’ll realize that the people who passed on all these emergency measures were just making things up in order to appear decisive and precise.
We will look back and feel mortified at how we treated each other so brutally, how so many turned into rats hungry to get our friends and neighbors in trouble with the compliance police, how we willingly believed so many untrue things and practiced such preposterous rituals out of a belief that we were avoiding and thus controlling the enemy pathogen we couldn’t see.
None of this will soon be forgotten. It’s the trauma of our lives. They stole our freedom, our happiness, our way of life, and attempted to replace them all with a stern regime with puritan sensibilities that rivaled the Taliban, forcing the whole population to hide their faces and live in fear of the American Mandarins who then came after the whole population with needles and woefully vetted shots.
Karma is already turning on the whole gang of coercive totalitarians here and abroad. While the virus is invisible, the people who dreamed up and enforced lockdowns and mandates who wrecked the country are highly visible. They have names and careers, and they are right to be very worried about their futures.
The sociological basis of the Catholic institution of auricular confession is to habituate people into the psychologically most difficult practice of admitting error, asking forgiveness, and pledging not to do it again. Saying it out loud within earshot of others is harder still. Every religion has some version of this because doing so is part of becoming a responsible human being.
The best approach is a simple word: sorry. So rare but so powerful. Why won’t more follow the lead of Danielle Smith and just say it?
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For me, it’s not difficult to see what the world’s real rulers are trying to achieve. They’re trying to obtain more power and control for themselves. In fact, they’ve largely already achieved this goal. The terrifying thought is they are far from done.
We know they are not finished because their most conspicuous initiative at the moment is their quest to slay the petulances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The correct definition of misinformation/disinformation is any speech that challenges what authority figures say is the truth.
The world’s real rulers don’t want their pronouncements challenged, as this would pose a grave risk to their continued rule and their ability to implement myriad programs that will effectively defeat, once and for all, human freedom.
As long as persuasive dissent doesn’t go viral, the Powers that Be know they will achieve their objectives, which are authoritarian world government much closer to the communist utopia envisioned by thinkers and tyrants like Marx, Mao, and Lenin.
But real communism is not the real goal either, as communism was supposed to make every person equal. The modern form of communism, not unlike all previous forms of communism, ensures the world’s elite organizations will remain ultra-powerful while the proletariat will beg for crumbs.
Who are the World’s Elite Organizations?
They are every important organization – those with great influence (and police-state powers) – including all governmental agencies and departments as well as international government organizations like the UN, WHO, and European Union.
They are also all the major “crony” corporations that benefit from close ties to government and non-governmental organizations.
Plus, foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which have more money than many nations and certainly more ideological commitment to deploy their resources to implement their agendas.
A simple method to define the establishment organizations would be to simply identify the world’s key authorized narratives and then ask yourself what organizations zealously support these initiatives (aka “The Current Thing”).
In the last four years, any organization that vociferously supported all the Covid protocols would be examples of “captured” organizations that enthusiastically supported the Current Thing.
But these same organizations also support all the other ascendant political movements, such as the fight against (allegedly) man-made Climate Change, numerous wars or “interventions” to advance “democracy,” central bank digital currency, and ever more mRNA “vaccines.”
Furthermore, it’s obvious these same organizations support initiatives designed to discredit long-accepted cultural norms in favor of more “progressive” thinking that normalizes gender reversal, race grievances, LGBT+ initiatives, or any reform that advances “diversity, inclusion, or equity.”
The promotion of policies that make mass illegal immigration much easier to achieve has also become a crucial program of our planet’s establishment rulers.
I believe the above summary provides an accurate assessment of the state of the world today.
I also note that it’s an undeniable truth that every program of these establishment organizations has made the world a darker place, with future developments planned by our leaders guaranteed to decrease the qualify of life for children or young adults who may live another 50 to 80 years.
For example, at the moment, unelected delegates who serve on the World Health Organization continue to deliberate in secret as they finalize a new health treaty and make changes to “international regulations” that will affect virtually every citizen on the planet in decades to come.
The salient point about the WHO is that this agency was provably and disastrously wrong on every policy and piece of guidance it issued involving the response to Covid-19.
Another way to identify the members of the Establishment ruling class is to simply identify those who were spectacularly wrong on every key issue of our times. These are the people and organizations who are seeking even more power and control.
Who Will Prevail in the End?
The good news is our side – those who still believe in human liberty – vastly outnumbers the group that is clearly aligned against us.
Above I listed many of the world’s captured organizations. These organizations are staffed by probably a couple hundred thousand key leaders who are committed to supporting the nefarious and freedom -eradicating components of “The Current Thing.”
As I’ll show below, the numbers who identify with “our side” surely exceed tens of millions of citizens.
The bad news is the the enemies of freedom – the worshippers of Big Brother – control all of the institutions and organizations in the world that actually matter.
Whoever sought to capture all of these organizations – from the CDC, the military, the Federal Reserve, the WEF, and the mainstream press – didn’t embark on these projects just to entertain themselves. They did this for a reason. This reason? They wanted to use these organizations to advance/achieve their goals.
To be more specific, they must have known that if they captured all of these organizations it would be almost impossible for any private citizens to stop their plans.
Our Side Actually has a Major Numeric Advantage
Still, the committed generals and staff officers who are seeking even more global control of the masses are…greatly outnumbered by people who are repulsed by their programs.
I’m currently working on a business idea that might supplement the dissident class of independent writers or “citizen journalists” found in the alternative media and on Substack.
In working on this project, I’m very interested in gauging the size of the market for content that resonates with the world’s population that still values freedom. This would be the group of citizens who is skeptical of the authorized narratives and values (genuine) “watchdog” journalism.
My estimate is there must be tens of millions of people who think like I do, people who would like to stop all the goals of the WEF, Davos, and WHO crowd.
The Tucker Carlson Metric
Perhaps the simplest way to estimate the size of this market is to examine the audience of one of the world’s best-known “contrarian journalists,” Tucker Carlson.
Before Carlson was fired by Fox News, his nightly news show routinely drew four million viewers per night, which made it the top-rated news program in North America. Over the course of a month, the show might have attracted 10 million viewers.
As we all know, Carlson was fired for producing content that was extremely popular with millions of adults. But Carlson didn’t disappear or stop producing “taboo” commentary and news segments, he simply moved to Twitter (now X) and kept doing the exact same thing.
Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin garnered more than 150 million views and his various streaming podcasts routinely double or triple the number of people he was reaching on Fox News.
Since Tucker covers many of the same “taboo” subjects I do, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 million of Carlson’s regular viewers strongly oppose everything the world’s so-called leaders want to make a reality. And that’s just Carlson’s audience.
Substack has more than 35 million subscribers, probably 20 percent of whom are searching for content they know they won’t find in, say, the New York Times or CBS News. That would be a “market” of 7 million freedom-supporting citizens.
Tucker was recently the guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast show. Rogan probably has an audience just as large and loyal as Carlson. Indeed, in their wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rogan made the point that shows like his and Tucker’s should now be considered “mainstream”…because they reach far more viewers than, say, the newscasts of the big TV networks (which actually aren’t so big anymore).
As far as I can tell, all the “alternative media” outlets are growing rapidly while all the traditional news outlets are Dead Men Walking.
Again, this is an extremely encouraging sign for anyone who believes that skeptical and independent speech is important to help ensure a world where real freedom might continue to exist.
But I Haven’t Mentioned the Biggest Group of Citizens
While “our side” greatly outnumbers the figure of key employees occupying all the captured organizations, the real population group that matters is the immense group that is sitting out this existential battle for freedom.
The citizens who will probably determine the outcome of this battle are the people who have not discovered the Substack contrarians or who never watch Joe Rogan…or who think Tucker Carlson is a dangerous extremist who should have been fired by Fox (and should now be fired by Elon Musk and X). This group numbers in the billions.
(This would be the group that doesn’t want to think anymore about the Covid response or think about the possibility that scary-looking, worm-like clots might be in their veins and arteries right now.)
This group just wants to get through each day with adequate supplies of bread…and if they’re given a few mildly entertaining circuses to distract them from the challenges of their daily lives, that’s enough.
For this segment of the population, any big debate on “freedom” is either boring, not germane to their lives, or they love and appreciate Big Brother and are convinced he is protecting them.
What this means to you and me is that the denouement of this historic battle will be determined by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population.
On one side, we have the 200,000 or so leaders of thousands of important captured organizations. On the other side, we have 10 to 20 million citizens who’ve found each other in the alternative media. In the middle, we have a couple billion people who are oblivious to what’s really at stake.
Whatever way this massive middle group swings in the future, so goes the world.
One suspects the world’s real rulers know that their track record and planned agendas won’t stand up to close scrutiny. They know that their arguments are not as persuasive and could easily be debunked if our side’s arguments were to “go viral.”
To help keep this middle group indifferent or on their side, the Deep State concocted the concepts of disinformation and misinformation to smear or throttle the influence of those on our side.
The ever-growing Censorship Industrial Complex has performed its most important job with (disgusting) distinction. For now at least, the depressing truth is the masses don’t seem to care much about the issues that some of us think are tectonic.
This means recruiting the legions of people we need to recruit will be a strangely tough sale.
Our charge of persuading more of our neighbors to join our side has been made far more difficult by the false narrative that all of the important disinformation is coming from citizens like us, when, in fact, we don’t control any of the important information.
If and when the masses realize who’s been producing the real disinformation, freedom might pull an upset victory.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
Japanese study finds ‘significant increases’ in cancer deaths after third mRNA COVID doses
Maxime Bernier warns Canadians of Trudeau’s plan to implement WEF global tax regime
A Coup Without Firing a Shot
WHO Official Admits the Truth About Passports
-
COVID-192 days ago
Japanese study finds ‘significant increases’ in cancer deaths after third mRNA COVID doses
-
Business2 days ago
Maxime Bernier warns Canadians of Trudeau’s plan to implement WEF global tax regime
-
Brownstone Institute2 days ago
A Coup Without Firing a Shot
-
COVID-192 days ago
WHO Official Admits the Truth About Passports
-
Bruce Dowbiggin2 days agoCoyotes Ugly: The Sad Obsession Of Gary Bettman
-
Energy1 day agoAnti-LNG activists have decided that they now actually care for LNG investors after years of calling to divest
-
Freedom Convoy2 days agoOttawa spent “excessive” $2.2 million fighting Emergencies Act challenge
-
Censorship Industrial Complex1 day agoDesperate Liberals move to stop MPs from calling Trudeau ‘corrupt’