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Brownstone Institute

Who Ultimately Wins in a Society of Flash Mob Moralists?

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From  the Brownstone Institute

BY Thomas HarringtonTHOMAS HARRINGTON

A big story in the hockey world in recent days centers on the Boston Bruins’ decision to offer, and then rescind, a contract to promising 20-year-old defenseman Matthew Miller.

Miller was drafted in the 4th round of the 2020 NHL draft by the Arizona Coyotes, who subsequently renounced their rights to the player when two journalists from the Arizona Republic reported the player had been convicted at age 14 in an Ohio juvenile court of serially abusing a developmentally disabled fellow student of color.

As a result of the same stories, apparently spurred by testimony given by the victim and his family, Miller was stripped of his hockey scholarship at the University of North Dakota.

Two years later, after talking with Miller and his agent the Bruins management decided that Miller was worthy of a second chance.

However, after a fierce media/social media storm ensued—in the midst of which NHL commissioner Gary Bettman announced that he would have the last word on deciding who would be eligible to play in the NHL—the Bruins rescinded the recently signed contract, saying they had discovered unspecified “new information” about Miller in recent days.

And thus ended yet another of our era’s online morality plays, dramas wherein the social capital of personal aggrievement, magnified by the vicarious expressions of outrage emanating from largely anonymous online mobs, invariably rules the day.

I’ve got nothing against morally-infused personal outrage. Indeed, I’ve got plenty of it. Moreover, I am well aware of the role it has played in regulating behavior in social collectives throughout history.

But I also know that one of the things that made the emergence of modern democracies possible was the subordination of mob-style moral outrage, and its twin brother personal vengeance, to the rule of law.

Is the application of the law often imperfect? Absolutely. Does the restitution it offers, when it indeed does offer restitution at all, almost always fall well short of what the victims of the injustice believe is owed to them? No doubt.

The founders of our institutions were not unaware of these limitations. But they believed that flawed justice such as this was infinitely superior to the alternative, which they correctly understood to be a society “regulated” by some mixture or another of personal vendettas and mob rule.

I have read the news reports about what Matthew Miller did to Isaiah Meyer-Crothers during the course of what is said to be several years of bullying, allegedly starting when both were 7 years old. The incident most commonly adduced by the press to exemplify this sad period of harassment—Miller’s getting Meyer-Crothers to lick a push-pop that had been dipped in urine—is repellent beyond belief. And I know that if I were Isaiah and/or his family I’d have a very hard time ever forgiving him for these aggressions and for the way it no doubt damaged the disabled youngster’s psychological well-being.

But does it mean that Miller, himself a probable victim of some sort of abuse or neglect to engage in such sadism at such a young age, has to be a social pariah for life, unable to exercise his skills in the workplace? This, when a veritable host of professional athletes who have done far worse things as adults (e.g. Ray Lewis, Craig MacTavish) have been breezily pardoned and welcomed back into the playing and/or management ranks. Apparently it’s much easier to go after a 20-year-old kid than an established star whose jersey you bought for yourself or your kids.

To pose the above question is not, as so many eager and zealous moralists in the comments section of the oh-so-liberal Boston Globe sports section and other places would have us believe, the same as “excusing what Miller did” or being in any way heedless of the serious damage that his childhood/adolescent actions had on Meyer-Crothers. Nor does it imply that Matthew Miller’s transgressions were just a case of “boys being boys” or that you believe he has been reborn as a moral angel.

As is usually the case, things are far more complex than that.

It is my understanding that Matthew Miller was remitted to the existing system of juvenile justice, did whatever putatively proportional penance was levied on him by the system, discharged, and allowed to get on with his life.

And in keeping with the fundamental precepts of juvenile justice, rooted in the belief that no one should be condemned in perpetuity for acts committed before the onset of full adult moral reasoning, the records were sealed. And as far as I’ve been able to tell, he has not been remitted to the justice system since that time.

When he was drafted in 2020, someone, however, violated the spirit of this principle and brought up Miller’s juvenile transgressions and contacted the victim who expressed his dismay at the possibility that Miller might be afforded the possibility of going on to a life of wealth and fame. “Everyone thinks he’s so cool that he gets to go to the NHL, but I don’t see how anyone can be cool when you pick on someone and bully someone your entire life.”

This is a perfectly understandable sentiment, one that is expressed a lot more tamely than what I might have said were I in his same position.

However, the bigger question is if, in a supposed society of laws, these more than legitimate feelings about seeing your one-time tormentor experience recognition and the possibility for success can and should be used as a means of imposing—through media-social media-business collusion—a de facto form of double jeopardy on someone who has theoretically paid his debt to society?

Do we really want to live in a society where, if you can recruit a posse of infuriated and media-savvy moralists you can supersede not only the intended effects of the law, but perhaps more importantly in the long run, the possibilities of healing in both the aggressor and his victim? Do we really want to effectively lock two young people into the tormentor-victim dynamic for the rest of their lives?

According to this logic, prison education programs like the one I taught in for many years, and where I experienced the most vibrant and meaningful classroom interactions of my teaching career, should not exist.

Rather as someone conscious of some of the heinous things that my would-be students had done, I should, according to the logic at play in the Miller case, have haughtily rebuffed my colleagues when they asked me to join the effort, telling them in no uncertain terms that “I don’t in any way wish to support or dignify ‘animals’ such as these.”

I would then proudly tell everyone that would listen about how I had strongly enunciated and defended my clear and unbending moral principles in the face of requests to glorify criminals and their crimes.

Again, is this really a model of moral comportment that we want to advance and normalize?

Sadly, the answer of many—apparently secure in the belief that  their immaculate children could never, ever be agents of evil—to this question appears to be “yes.”

Indeed, wasn’t it a simple variation of this dynamic of stigmatize, dehumanize and shun—rooted in the idea that evil is always pure and located elsewhere—that psychologically underwrote the worst repressions of the High Covid era?

As bad as this practice of eschewing the prospect of healing in favor of preening self-regard and continued aggrieved tension is, it may not even be the worst part of the new trend toward widespread armchair moralizing.

Arguably more troubling is the damage such practices do to what might be called our society’s “economy of concern.” Like most everything about us, our ability to pay attention to the world outside our heads is limited. The kingpins of the new cyber economy know this, and are laser-focused on getting us to give as much of this scarce and extremely valuable resource to them during the course of our days.

They do so most obviously to sell us things we often don’t need or intrinsically want. But they also do so to keep us from thinking about how the social structures they have a huge say in shaping do or do not serve our long-term interests.

How?

By encouraging us to spend cognitive, emotional and moral energies on people and things that ultimately lie well beyond our own radius of personal control.

Like, for example, on young hockey players who made ugly mistakes as a child and early adolescent or, conversely, on the truly heart-wrenching stories of his victim.

Will fulminating online about the young hockey player’s past really solve any of our real problems?

Obviously not.

But it will take energy away from addressing big and structurally-imposed violations of basic rights happening today.

Every minute spent talking today about a single child-on-child abuse case legally resolved, however imperfectly, 6 years ago is a minute not spent addressing the cruelties and injustices of government-on-child abuse taking place today, much of it on the name of “fighting Covid.” outrages eloquently and passionately denounced here by Laura Rosen Cohen .

In effect, when we allow ourselves to be swept up into object-free campaigns of moral virtue-signaling about past personal cases, we are giving those in big entrenched centers of power much more space to enact and consolidate enveloping systems of citizen abuse and social control. And if you think these entrenched centers of power are beyond thinking of how to stimulate diversionary campaigns of small-bore outrage, then it’s time you wake up to the new realities of our world.

A half-century ago, certain activists declared that now “The personal is the political.” It was an alluring soundbite and like so many alluring soundbites overly simplistic. Should we strive to always inject the personal concerns of the citizenry into policy-making discussions? Of course.

That said, there is, and must always be, as Hannah Arendt reminded us, a barrier between our private and public selves as well as an acceptance, as excruciatingly difficult as it might be to do, of the unfortunate role of unrequited tragedy in the lives of us all.

Do I wish that the pain of Meyer-Crothers could have been eliminated by Ohio’s system of juvenile justice? I obviously do. But sadly, that’s not how it works. A public justice system is not designed to eliminate pain, but rather attenuate its onward march, and in this way, provide a possible opening for healing.

The internet has, for better or worse, created new forms of social organization and political mobilization. As we have seen in the Miller case, the Meyer-Crothers family, backed by journalists and online activists, has sought, in effect, to gain a measure of the moral payback the justice system was unable to provide them.

Is it understandable? Yes. Is it their right? Certainly.

Is using these new methods of mobilization to effectively override the legal system and create what are effectively vigilante forms of retribution good for the future of our society and culture?

Probably not.

While it may make a lot of people feel good about themselves at the moment, it will only further corrode trust in the rule of law— a shift that always favors the powerful—and take valuable energy away from the urgent task of fighting massive and systematic government and corporate assaults on our dignity and freedom.

Author

  • Thomas Harrington

    Thomas Harrington, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

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Brownstone Institute

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

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From the Brownstone Institute

By IAN MILLER

By late 2020, the media and public health establishment had two obsessions. One of their obsessions involved forcing the public to wear masks, even though the mountains of data and several studies had already confirmed that they don’t stop the transmission of respiratory viruses. The second obsession was forcing everyone to take Covid vaccines, regardless of their actual efficacy, risk of side effects, age or underlying health, or the vaccines’ rapidly waning efficacy.

Neither of those obsessions has abated, though even the most extreme, hardened Covid extremists have acknowledged that the vaccines were flawed, mandates were a mistake, and side effects should be acknowledged.

The media, unwilling to give up on the increased power, influence, and moral judgment it gained during the pandemic, has refused to accept that it effectively ended years ago.

So it’s no surprise that media outlets have noticed that, as we’ve seen every single summer since 2020, cases have increased, predominantly across the Western and Southern United States. Thankfully though, Los Angeles media, of course it had to be Los Angeles, has determined the culprit.

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Turns out it’s not seasonality causing the increase, it’s outdated Covid vaccines and a lack of public masking, of course!

NBC Los Angeles “reported” that Covid cases in California and Los Angeles have “doubled” in the last month. This sounds horrifying and scary, doesn’t it? Yet it again, as is so often the case with Covid coverage, is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the current daily average of new cases in Los Angeles County:

Cases are so low they’re functionally indistinguishable from zero.

You can see why the media is scared, given how dramatic this surge appears to be compared to those in the previous four years. And thanks to NBC’s crack reporting and expert analysis, we know why this terrifying increase is happening. Spoiler alert: it’s all your fault that you haven’t controlled an uncontrollable respiratory virus with individual behavior that has no impact whatsoever on the spread of the coronavirus.

“People aren’t necessarily wearing masks; they’re not required to in certain places,” nurse practitioner Alice Benjamin, referenced as an expert by NBA LA said. “We’re traveling, we’re getting out for the summer. We also do have some reduced immunity. The vaccines will wane over time.”

Nowhere in the story is it mentioned that the massive jump in Covid cases in late 2021 and early 2022 happened immediately after LA County Public Health issued a press release celebrating the county for achieving 95+ percent masking rates at indoor businesses. No one seems willing or able to ask this nurse practitioner why she believes wearing masks would reduce this “surge,” if it failed so spectacularly in previous surges.

Endless Misinformation from ‘Experts’

She wasn’t done with the misinformation though. Benjamin warned that not enough Angelenos are getting the “updated” vaccine, which explains the summer increase.

“If you got it in October and later, that’s generally the updated vaccine,” Benjamin said. “If you got it prior to October, double check because if you did get the bivalent which has not been phased out, we recommend you do get an updated vaccine.”

And according to her, everyone should get it. Because the CDC said so.

“Per CDC recommendations, anyone 6 months or older should have at least one of the updated Covid vaccines,” Benjamin said.

Though, of course, no one on the crack NBC Los Angeles team thought to ask Benjamin why the “updated” October vaccine would help against the now common FLiRT variant when it emerged six months after the “updated” vaccine was released. Especially when the “study” process for booster doses is effectively nonexistent anyway. Pfizer and Moderna churn out a “targeted” dose that is supposed to protect against a variant that’s no longer circulating, never has to show any real-world benefit, and the regulatory agencies sign off on it, while the CDC recommends everyone get it.

Rinse, repeat.

Nor did anyone ask her what possible rationale there could be for forcing six-month-old babies to get vaccinated with a booster that has no studied efficacy against the currently circulating variant.

Her comments and the media reaction exemplify the problems with Covid discourse that started in 2020 and will apparently continue forever. A complete and purposeful ignorance of the facts, the data, and the evidence base. A willingness to advocate for the same sort of restrictions and interventions that have already failed. Ignorance of the booster process and endless appeals to public health authorities. Even though those authorities have made countless mistakes and refused to update their findings after being proven wrong.

The obvious question is: How does this type of absurdist discourse ever end? The answer, as we continue to see, is it doesn’t.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”

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Brownstone Institute

The Pandemic Excuse for a Corporatist Coup

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

We’ve just come across a document hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, posted March 2023, but written in 2007, that amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the US, abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. It is right there in plain sight for anyone curious enough to dig.

There is nothing in it that you haven’t already experienced with lockdowns. What makes it interesting are the participants in the forging of the plan, which is pretty much the whole of corporate America as it stood in 2007. It was a George W. Bush initiative. The conclusions are startling.

“Quarantine is a legally enforceable declaration that a government body may institute over individuals potentially exposed to a disease, but who are not symptomatic. If enacted, Federal quarantine laws will be coordinated between CDC and State and local public health officials, and, if necessary, law enforcement personnel…The government may also enact travel restrictions to limit the movement of people and products between geographic areas in an effort to limit disease transmission and spread. Authorities are currently reviewing possible plans to curtail international travel upon a pandemic’s emergence overseas.

“Limiting public assembly opportunities also helps limit the spread of disease. Concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other large public gathering places might close indefinitely during a pandemic—whether because of voluntary closures or government-imposed closures. Similarly, officials may close schools and non-essential businesses during pandemic waves in an effort to significantly slow disease transmission rates. These strategies aim to prevent the close interaction of individuals, the primary conduit of spreading the influenza virus. Even taking steps such as limiting person-to-person interactions within a distance of three feet or avoiding instances of casual close contact, such as shaking hands, will help limit disease spread.”

There we have it: the pandemic plans. They once seemed abstract. In 2020, they became very real. Your rights were deleted. No more freedom even to have house guests. In those days, the rule was to enforce only three feet of distance rather than six feet of distance, neither of which had any basis in science. Indeed, the actual scientific literature even at that time recommended against any physical interventions designed to limit the spread of respiratory viruses. They were known not to work. The entire profession of public health accepted that.

Therefore, for many years before lockdowns wrecked economic functioning, there had been two parallel tracks in operation, one intellectual/academic and one imposed by state/corporate managers. They had nothing to do with each other. This situation persisted for the better part of 15 years. Suddenly in 2020, there was a reckoning, and the state/corporate managers won it. Seemingly out of nowhere, liberty as we have long known it was gone.

Back in 2005, I first came across a Bush administration scheme, an early draft of the above, that would have ended freedom as we know it. It was a scheme for combating the bird flu, which officials back then imagined would involve universal quarantines, business and event closures, travel restrictions, and more.

wrote: “Even if the flu does come, and taxpayers have coughed up, the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings…It is a serious matter when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention. Perhaps such plans for the total state ought to even ruffle our feathers a bit.”

For years I wrote about this topic, trying to get others interested. It was all there in black and white. At the drop of a hat, under the guise of a pandemic that only state managers can declare, real or drummed up, freedom itself could be abolished. These plans were never legislated, debated, or publicly discussed. They were simply posted as the result of various consultations with experts, who worked out their totalitarian fantasies as if scripting a Hollywood film.

The 2007 blueprint is more explicit than anything I’ve seen. It comes from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, which “includes executive leaders from the private sector and state/local government who advise the White House on how to reduce physical and cyber risks and improve the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure sectors. The NIAC is administered on behalf of the President in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act under the authority of the Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security.”

And who sat on this committee in 2007 that decided that governments “may close schools and non-essential businesses”? Let us see.

  • Mr. Edmund G. Archuleta, General Manager, El Paso Water Utilities
  • Mr. Alfred R. Berkeley III, Chairman and CEO, Pipeline Trading Group, LLC, and former President and Vice Chairman of NASDAQ
  • Chief Rebecca F. Denlinger, Fire Chief, Cobb County (Ga.) Fire and Emergency Services
  • Chief Gilbert G. Gallegos, Police Chief (ret.), City of Albuquerque, N.M. Police Department
  • Ms. Martha H. Marsh, President and CEO, Stanford Hospital and Clinics
  • Mr. James B. Nicholson, President and CEO, PVS Chemical, Inc.
  • Mr. Erle A. Nye, Chairman Emeritus, TXU Corp., NIAC Chairman
  • Mr. Bruce A. Rohde, Chairman and CEO Emeritus, ConAgra Foods, Inc.
  • Mr. John W. Thompson, Chairman and CEO, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Brent Baglien, ConAgra Foods, Inc.
  • Mr. David Barron, Bell South
  • Mr. Dan Bart, TIA
  • Mr. Scott Blanchette, Healthways
  • Ms. Donna Burns, Georgia Emergency Management Agency
  • Mr. Rob Clyde, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Scott Culp, Microsoft
  • Mr. Clay Detlefsen, International Dairy Foods Association
  • Mr. Dave Engaldo, The Options Clearing Corporation
  • Ms. Courtenay Enright, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Gary Gardner, American Gas Association
  • Mr. Bob Garfield, American Frozen Foods Institute
  • Ms. Joan Gehrke, PVS Chemical, Inc.
  • Ms. Sarah Gordon, Symantec
  • Mr. Mike Hickey, Verizon
  • Mr. Ron Hicks, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation
  • Mr. George Hender, The Options Clearing Corporation
  • Mr. James Hunter, City of Albuquerque, NM Emergency Management
  • Mr. Stan Johnson, North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC)
  • Mr. David Jones, El Paso Corporation
  • Inspector Jay Kopstein, Operations Division, New York City Police Department (NYPD)
  • Ms. Tiffany Jones, Symantec Corporation
  • Mr. Bruce Larson, American Water
  • Mr. Charlie Lathram, Business Executives for National Security (BENS)/BellSouth
  • Mr. Turner Madden, Madden & Patton
  • Chief Mary Beth Michos, Prince William County (Va.) Fire and Rescue
  • Mr. Bill Muston, TXU Corp.
  • Mr. Vijay Nilekani, Nuclear Energy Institute
  • Mr. Phil Reitinger, Microsoft
  • Mr. Rob Rolfsen, Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Mr. Tim Roxey, Constellation
  • Ms. Charyl Sarber, Symantec
  • Mr. Lyman Shaffer, Pacific Gas and Electric,
  • Ms. Diane VanDeHei, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA)
  • Ms. Susan Vismor, Mellon Financial Corporation
  • Mr. Ken Watson, Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Mr. Greg Wells, Southwest Airlines
  • Mr. Gino Zucca, Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Resources
  • Dr. Bruce Gellin, Rockefeller Foundation
  • Dr. Mary Mazanec
  • Dr. Stuart Nightingale, CDC
  • Ms. Julie Schafer
  • Dr. Ben Schwartz, CDC
  • Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Resources
  • Mr. James Caverly, Director, Infrastructure Partnerships Division
  • Ms. Nancy Wong, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO)
  • Ms. Jenny Menna, NIAC Designated Federal Officer (DFO)
  • Dr. Til Jolly
  • Mr. Jon MacLaren
  • Ms. Laverne Madison
  • Ms. Kathie McCracken
  • Mr. Bucky Owens
  • Mr. Dale Brown, Contractor
  • Mr. John Dragseth, IP attorney, Contractor
  • Mr. Jeff Green, Contractor
  • Mr. Tim McCabe, Contractor
  • Mr. William B. Anderson, ITS America
  • Mr. Michael Arceneaux, Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA)
  • Mr. Chad Callaghan, Marriott Corporation
  • Mr. Ted Cromwell, American Chemistry Council (ACC)
  • Ms. Jeanne Dumas, American Trucking Association (ATA)
  • Ms. Joan Harris, US Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary
  • Mr. Greg Hull, American Public Transportation Association
  • Mr. Joe LaRocca, National Retail Federation
  • Mr. Jack McKlveen, United Parcel Service (UPS)
  • Ms. Beth Montgomery, Wal-Mart
  • Dr. J. Patrick O’Neal, Georgia Office of EMS/Trauma/EP
  • Mr. Roger Platt, The Real Estate Roundtable
  • Mr. Martin Rojas, American Trucking Association (ATA)
  • Mr. Timothy Sargent, Senior Chief, Economic Analysis and Forecasting Division, Economic and Fiscal Policy Branch, Finance Canada

In other words, big everything: food, energy, retail, computers, water, and you name it. It’s a corporatist dream team.

Consider ConAgra itself. What is that? It is Banquet, Chef Boyardee, Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-Wip, Slim Jim, Hunt’s Peter Pan Egg Beaters, Hebrew National, Marie Callender’s, P.F. Chang’s, Ranch Style Beans, Ro*Tel, Wolf Brand Chili, Angie’s, Duke’s, Gardein, Frontera, Bertolli, among many other seemingly independent brands that are all actually one company.

Now, ask yourself: why might all these companies favor a plan for lockdowns? Why might WalMart, for example? It stands to reason. Lockdowns are a massive interference with competitive capitalism. They provide the best possible subsidy to big business while shutting down independent small businesses and putting them at a huge disadvantage once the opening up happens.

In other words, it is an industrial racket, very much akin to interwar-style fascism, a corporatist combination of big business and big government. Throw pharma into the mix and you see exactly what came to pass in 2020, which amounted to the largest transfer of wealth from small and medium-sized business plus the middle class to wealthy industrialists in the history of humanity.

The document is open even about managing information flows: “The public and private sectors should align their communications, exercises, investments, and support activities absolutely with both the plan and priorities during a pandemic influenza event. Continue data gathering, analysis, reporting, and open review.”

There is nothing in any of this that fits with any Western tradition of law and liberty. Nothing. It was never approved by any democratic means. It was never part of any political campaign. It has never been the subject of any serious media examination. No think tank has ever pushed back on such plans in any systematic way.

The last serious attempt to debunk this whole apparatus was from D.H. Henderson in 2006. His two co-authors on that paper eventually came around to going along with lockdowns of 2020. Henderson died in 2016. One of the co-authors of the original article told me that if Dr. Henderson had been around, instead of Dr. Fauci, the lockdowns would never have taken place.

Here we are four years following the deployment of this lockdown machinery, and we are witness to what it destroys. It would be nice to say that the entire apparatus and theory behind it have been fully discredited.

But that is not correct. All the plans are still in place. There have been no changes in federal law. Not one effort has been made to dismantle the corporatist/biosecurity planning state that made all this possible. Every bit of it is in place for the next go-around.

Much of the authority for this whole coup traces to the Public Health Services Act of 1944, which was passed in wartime. For the first time in US history, it gave the federal government the power to quarantine. Even when the Biden administration was looking for some basis to justify its transportation mask mandate, it fell back to this one piece of legislation.

If anyone really wants to get to the root of this problem, there are decisive steps that need to be taken. The indemnification of pharma from liability for harm needs to be repealed. The court precedent of forced shots in Jacobson needs to be overthrown. But even more fundamentally, the quarantine power itself has to go, and that means the full repeal of the Public Health Services Act of 1944. That is the root of the problem. Freedom will not be safe until it is uprooted.

As it stands right now, everything that unfolded in 2020 and 2021 can happen again. Indeed, the plans are in place for exactly that.

Author

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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