Bruce Dowbiggin
Three Books to End the Silence
From the Brownstone Institute
My first thought upon reading it was: I cannot believe that this was allowed to be published! That’s the interesting part. Despite every attempt by the national security state and the vast army of censorial bureaucrats, we still have enough freedom to get the word out, for now.
Think of this. In the time since the Covid crisis has passed, no aspect of any federal power that was deployed to wreck a functioning society has been repealed. Not one law, regulation, edict, or power.
Some courts have struck down certain bureaucratic practices, such as the nationwide mask mandate and the eviction moratorium, which were, respectively, huge attacks on bodily autonomy and property rights. Those were ruled inadmissible, at tremendous expense to plaintiffs.
Otherwise, the bureaucracy has not budged an inch.
At the onset of this disaster, the CDC started simply posting edicts. They started with washing hands and staying home if you were sick. Quickly, they got carried away. Every business needed stay-at-home policies, canceled meetings, posted signs warning of omnipresent danger, sanitizer stations everywhere, no sharing of pens and scissors, plus Plexiglas everywhere.
Any CDC bureaucrat with logins could add a point of “guidance” but for most people, they were law. What a rush for the rulemakers! The edicts were passed on to state health departments, which sent them to counties, and they landed in HR departments in every company. For practical purposes, these were law to most people, because the consequences of disobeying were essentially unknown.
What about now? The CDC simply deleted its webpage. No apologies, no repeals, no reforms, just a delete button. It was there then it was gone.
When first issued it looked like this. A year later, it became a vast machinery of control, as you can see here. With each new update, the screws tightened. (Someone could have a great time parsing every word of every iteration and documenting it.)
Complying with everything would require vast expenditure and a crazed kabuki dance of extreme germophobia, such that it is hard to see how business could get done at all. Every sentence talks of guidance and advice but none cites “science” much less any authority for how any of this was legal. And yet millions of businesses either shut forever or experienced massive financial stress, which hurt everyone. Of course some enterprises thrived: those lucky enough to be considered “essential” and received the bulk of federal funding!
It’s more than obvious that we cannot depend on the federal government to get us to the truth about what happened. Vast amount of content on Brownstone.org explores this daily. In addition there are three books that everyone needs to digest now to get a full sense of the whole. There was much more going on that simple bureaucratic incompetence.
Our Enemy, the Government by Ramesh Thakur is the most scientifically sophisticated and yet accessible account of the amazing screw-ups of public health during this period. Keep in mind that the policy response was mostly the same all over the world but for a few nations. Thakur’s focus is on Australia but people in every nation will recognize the pattern. Each chapter takes on a new element, from the wild exaggeration of the universal threat of Covid, to the faulty testing regime, to the death misclassifications, to the spending mania, to the flurry of insane edicts on masking, vaccination, and forced human separation. It’s a tour de force for the ages, and leaves a devastating impression.
Keep in mind that Thakur is not just some writer. He was once the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations under Kofi Annan in addition to being a famed scholar. He has risked everything in writing this book but once he started peeling away at the onion that is the Covid response, he simply could not stop. He had to do the right thing and go the full way. The book is overwhelming in terms of charts, data, evidence, and citations but this is what is necessary to smash the paradigm. His main concern is the health and well-being of the human population. It was this that was wrecked over three years.
Next comes Rand Paul’s Deception. Throughout these awful years, Senator Paul has been an absolute godsend, and for two reasons. He is a medical doctor and extremely smart, so he was never intimidated by Anthony Fauci’s pseudoscientific gobbledygook. He saw right through the guy from the very beginning.
Crucially, as a US Senator, he had unusual access to Fauci that enabled him to question him directly. This is something that Fauci had tried to avoid from the beginning. We know from his email and scheduling that Fauci was extremely careful through the whole period to grant only friendly interviews on captured venues. This was a main objective, and precisely why he got away with it. But with Rand in the Senate, he was entitled to a limited amount of time to ask questions. He used every minute well. The results are gold.
His book is the full account of how Fauci worked from day one to avoid any culpability for the funding of the Wuhan lab through third parties that might have been responsible for the leak of the virus. The book, then, reveals the scandal of the century. Fauci has been enormously powerful, controlling billions in grant funding. He deployed all his power, money, and connections to avoid his direct professional responsibilities and scrub his record to make himself unaccountable. Rand has all the receipts, and bravely presents them in this important book.
To deepen the plot, we have The Wuhan Coverup by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is a much more focused and tighter work than his previous book on Fauci. I swear that anyone who grabs it and reads it will never think about government the same way. It’s that powerful and comprehensive. At issue for Kennedy is the US bioweapons program that began after the Second World War and continues to this day. It is responsible for vast corruption, the empowerment and entanglement of pharmaceutical companies, and the use of secretive classification powers to keep the American people in the dark.
If you suspected that the national security apparatus had some role in the pandemic response, you would be correct about that. This book is the one that has gone further than any other to document this scary reality. The Department of Defense and the CIA had a huge role in making rules for the rest of the population to prepare the way for the presumed antidote that was rolled out with tax funding and legal indemnification against harms, by companies that owned the patents and had publicly traded stocks you could buy. Nothing about this whole machinery has anything to do with things like freedom and democracy but there it is, malicious corporatism in a nutshell.
RFK has laid it all out in eye-popping page after page. My first thought upon reading it was: I cannot believe that this was allowed to be published! That’s the interesting part. Despite every attempt by the national security state and the vast army of censorial bureaucrats, we still have enough freedom to get the word out, for now. This is why it is so important to get this book now and digest its contents. There could come a time when we won’t be allowed to read such things. That is clearly the ambition in any case.
Did the pandemic response affect your life? Your kids? Your community? Yes, and profoundly. As a citizen you have every reason to care about how and why terrible things were done to us.
It’s not enough just to forget the whole thing like a bad dream. We cannot just delete the page from the history books, as the CDC has done, and pretend like it is over and done and nothing needs to change. We must deal with reality. And these books take us to new levels of understanding. That is the first step toward change.
Author
Who knew when we tuned in Saturday night to Hockey Night In Canada that we would be witnessing playoff history. Nay, not just playoff history but hockey history. According to what we saw and heard on HNIC just ONE TEAM played on Saturday. And they lost. It goes without saying that the team was HNIC’s beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.
Those of us who’d stuck with the telecast all evening could’ve sworn there was another team on the ice in black and gold. Rumour has it they were the Boston Bruins, but don’t quote us on that. Also, take it as a rumour that Boston’s 3-1 win gave them a 3-1 lead in games over Toronto heading back to Boston for what most expect will be the coup de grace for the blue and white. Again.
But when time came to discuss the game afterward the Toronto-based panel told us that the Leafs had beaten themselves. Yes, in some hockey version of metaphysics Toronto had transcended the third dimension. The Bruins were like The Fugitive, lurking far out of sight. Brad Marchand had had nothing to do with breaking up Toronto’s neutral-zone speed nor Charlie McAvoy clearing the front of their net. Jeremy Swayman, who he?
Instead the talking heads dissected the loss in shades of blue.
For those who were washing their hair or another vital task on Saturday, the Leafs had more story lines than a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (insert your joke here), They finally got their migraine-afflicted star William Nylander back in the fold before a delirious Scotiabank crowd who’d probably paid about a $1000 a ticket to attend. But their star sniper Auston Matthews (allegedly) had food poisoning or a gall stone or a tee time next week back home in Scottsdale. Hard to say.
There was also a goaltending controversy, a Mitch Marner controversy and a Keith Pelley controversy (more on MLSE’s new CEO in a moment). And the, you know, 1967 thing. Despite the hysteria of their long-suffering fans at puck drop, postgame analysts hinted the Leafs seemed to be disinterested. Or, to those who actually watched the game, they were schooled by a better Boston team.
By the middle of the second period, despond and a 3-0 deficit had settled on the Leafs. Despite being the ONLY TEAM on the ice their well-compensated stars were bitching at each other on the bench. While Matthews looked glumly at his pals, Marner had a hissy fit throwing his gloves to the floor. Nylander lip-synched a rebuke to Marner along the lines of Grow up, this ain’t junior hockey. Did we say the crowd booed them off the ice after the second period? Yeah, that too.
Which led mild-mannered Kelly Hrudey to scold Marner for a bush-league behaviour in the break. Remember, Hrudey’s the nice guy on the HNIC panel. Where others see an alligator chomping on their leg Kelly sees a chance to get up-close with nature. So the rebuke for Marner was incendiary. By the time they dropped the pick for the third period you’d have thought Bob Cole wasn’t the only person to pass away this week. Gloom.
Making matters worse, Matthews was nowhere to be found. (According coach Keefe, the doctors had pulled him from the game. Whatever.) When the contest ended with a Toronto loss, the postgame chatter was once more obsessed with Toronto’s failings, as if another team were not having its way on the ice. Where was the effort? Where was the intensity promised when Leafs management spread dollars like Easter candy among its Core Four?
Kevin Bieksa, typically the most salty one on the panel, reminded everyone there was a Game 5 Monday and that 3-1 leads have been overcome. But with Toronto’s success in comebacks being nil he sounded like a guy trying to sell you a penny mining stock.
The dressing-room afterward was mint. “You know what, that’s just the way we are,” Nylander said. “I mean we expect a lot from each other, and we love each other.”
“I don’t think there’s any (frustration),” Marner added unconvincingly. “We’re grown men. We were talking about plays out there that we just want to make sure we’re all 100 percent on and know what we’re doing… We’re not yelling at each other because we hate each other.”
Chris Johnston of The Athletic called it the end of the Maple Leafs as we know them. “They’re making more mistakes at five-on-five, they’re soundly losing the special-teams battle, and they’ve transformed from being one of the NHL’s best offensive teams in the regular season to one that can’t score more than two goals per night in the playoffs. Wash, rinse, repeat.”
Coach Sheldon Keefe, whose shelf life has about 60 minutes left, was enigmatic in the face of cruel destiny. “You can question a lot of things; you can’t question the effort,” he said.
He’s right about one thing. When this first-round ends in ignominy there will be plenty of questions from Pelley, newly installed at the top of the MLSE pyramid. Such as, why should I keep this management team that teases Waygu beef in-season but delivers ground chuck in the playoffs? It’s long been said that the league the Leafs have been built for doesn’t exist in the postseason. So why keep pretending it does?
For those not in the know, Pelley has spent the last few years dealing with the Saudi’s LIV golf enterprise in his role as CEO of what used to be known as the European Tour. (Insert your barbarism reference) So he’s used to dealing with nasty situations.
Maybe his first act on the Leafs file is reminding everyone that two teams play each other in the playoffs, and it might be a good idea to learn from what the winners are doing.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. Launching in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
Just In: The Trudeau government intervenes at last minute to save a convicted climate agitator from deportation. The Pakistani co-founder of Save Old Growth— who first came to Canada in 2019 on a study permit— has been arrested at least 10 times and convicted of mischief. Zain Haq was due to be deported to Pakistan on Monday.
Despite a judge’s ruling denying his last hope of staying , Haq got a call from his Liberal MP’s office saying he gets to stay in B.C. after all. Good, because we’d hate for him to feel oppressed by the country in which he’s squatting. The news thrilled the nepo babies who have B.C. by the throat.
So Haq goes from unrepentant jerk to Christ crucified. Naturally. Victim politics have become the animating impulse in Western society. Attaching yourself to a forlorn cause like Haq is grounds for beatification And make no mistake, there are legions in identical little tents on campus quads who are cheering a non-Canadian defying The Man.
To generations brought up on the travails of feminist oppression, climate degradation, indigenous grievance and gender dysphoria there is nothing so sacred as a victim is all his purity, crushed by the Great White Satan of western culture. Haq is just the latest in a police lineup of wobbly performance artists taking a rhapsodic bow before the Liberal/ NDP/Green clique. While thumbing his nose at Canadians.
That’s why the current fetish for Palestinian outrage has such legs as it spreads across campuses and governmental buildings in the West. Anyone (but a white, straight male) can apply for the designation of victim. Join the party! And what a model it is! While many have tried to emulate them, none have managed the nihilist hat trick of violence, obstinacy and craven guilt quite like the Palestinians who’ve been pushing this agenda since the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Having eschewed frontal military attacks on Israel and western targets as ineffective, the PLO and its successors discovered that the more grisly the attack, the more black their message — in Munich they massacred 11 Israeli athletes— there was a segment of leftist Western culture that couldn’t get enough of their heinous tactics. (Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich pitied his fellow Jews killed in Munich but concluded that all this revenge stuff was a dead end.)
Huh. Their Arab neighbours want nothing to do with Arafat’s Children. Egypt has a wall preventing Gazans from entering their county, Jordan has expelled them for counter-insurgency, Saudi Arabia ignores them. Only Qatar offers refuge. And then only to the billionaire kleptocrats who run Hamas from penthouses in Doha.
The Oct. 7 massacre is just the latest in this dance of death with western liberals. People of a certain age will recall the Marxist-besotted Vanessa Redgrave brandishing a Kalashnikov while dancing with the PLO and its rascally leader Yasser Arafat. Her 1977 film The Palestinian was an orgy of guilt and hatred toward Israel. She’s had plenty of imitators in the media ever since. In 2021 over 100 actors— including Richard Gere, Claire Foy, Tilda Swinton, and Susan Sarandon— slammed the terrorist designation of Palestinian “rights groups”.
The same apologists are now saying that, sure, Oct. 7 went a little too far, but Palestinian repatriation means a few eggs are going to get smashed in the making of a terror state. They want a cease fire with good taste.
Were the PLO successors in Hamas and Hezbollah able to articulate some coherent vision of the future beyond slaughter then these western struggle sessions might seem justified. It’s no surprise that Arafat was the epitome of “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” in negotiations. If there’s one constant in the multiple denials of treaties with Israel it is their unflinching demand that Palestinians throw every Jew they encounter into the Mediterranean on a march from “the river to the sea”.
The implacable marriage with extreme violence and racial hatred is their one and only position. Non-negotiable. None of this has any effect on the hot-house Marxists and anarchists who’ve set up shop in the universities and colleges of the West. In their protected status among the leafy tendrils of the Ivy League, a little brush with terror seems to titillate them. Occupying the quad in identical tents suppled by unnamed international groups dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism is their bougie weekend of roughing it in the bush.
Most probably wish they could experience a little of the martyrdom like the Palestinians (a gentle martyrdom naturally) or at the very least a cinematic clash wth authority such as their parents experienced at the hands of Chicago mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 Democratic convention. A tender tussle covered by their parents Medicare.
Who will stand up to these playtime antisemites? Alas, the grownups in the schools administration and in governments are cut from the same cloth. Having created safe spaces from micro aggression on their campus , they excuse the youthful exuberance of their students. (If your politics are radical, that is.) Like president Joe Biden they do the suck-and-blow of modern debate. They decry antisemitism while cautioning that we just don’t understand the depths of Palestinian oppression. Evan as students call for a new Holocaust.
Having it both ways with Hamas means a one-way invitation to more chaos. Because there is no agenda beyond the performative terror extolled by demonstrators against Israel there is no way to rationally critique Hezbollah or Hamas. At least the Nazis proposed some freakazoid homeland for their people as they heartlessly slaughtered anyone who got in their way.
So it all becomes mob mentality packaged for feckless media. The Hamas doctoral groupies don’t demand anything from Hamas beyond their faux-serious chants and designer kaffiyehs in the House of Commons. No doubt Zia Haq will be joining them again soon in the struggle. If Stephen Guilbeault can go from criminal to cabinet, Canada is wide open to him now.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. New from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin now for pre-order: Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. Launching on paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week.
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