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Prevailing ideological
forms were simply not adapted to the enormous exogenous shock to the
system that lockdowns implied. It was unexpected, especially under
the guise of public health.
Authoritarian/totalitarian government sweep over the country and world, and nearly the entire intellectual class said:
And so I suggested a response:
And such a movement did in fact form.
The fields of battle have been varied and comprehensive, from the scientific journals to journalism to hard-core revolts on the street such as the truckers' protest.
The results have been impressive.
We are back to pretending that the people and not the Faucis of the world are in charge.
There has been no justice, however...
Congress holds hearings on the 'pandemic' response and that's great.
But the mass media does not cover them.
It's a sad truth because people are tired and demoralized and more than ready for normal life again.
But we cannot simply wish away the ugly truths all around us.
No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext.
So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them.
Below are some remaining and new issues we must confront in the coming years.
1. Tech Surveillance and Censorship
Big Tech surveilled before the 'pandemic' response but the quasi-martial law of the period consolidated the power of the government over private data.
This was why those of us in the resistance had such a very difficult time finding each other in the first place.
When they demanded social distancing, they wanted more than human separation of six feet.
As a result, the tools that we once believed were designed for more human connection were deployed to keep us apart.
Yes, there are many lawsuits ongoing that challenge this practice as a violation of First-Amendment rights. Court discovery has produced many thousands of pages, and the decisions seem likely to land in the correct position.
But here's what is spooky:
They are not...
Only Twitter was relatively freed up once Elon Musk took over.
But his new CEO is a champion of content moderation at the behest of the advertisers he hopes to lure back to the platform.
It appears that the platform is going back to the way it was, perhaps with not the same intensity but with the same potential.
The mass media performed abysmally during the entire fiasco, threatening dissidents, amplifying lies, and cheering the compulsion. There have been no admissions of wrongdoing.
We need all new sources of news.
2. Money and Banking
The Federal Reserve (FED) was essential to making the 'pandemic' response possible.
It stood ready to monetize every dollar Congress spent to subsidize the lockdowns and boost spending of the entire public-health hegemon.
It was so essential that on March 15, 2020 - two days after the declaration of emergency and one day before the Trump administration's lockdown edicts - it actually eliminated reserve requirements for banks completely.
In other words,
The bank crisis caused by dramatically increased interest rates - a policy designed to arrest the inflationary consequences of the Fed's accommodation of the Covid regime - has destabilized regional banks and centralized banking operations.
In the background is the stated intention of the Biden administration to reform the whole system using a Central Bank Digital Currency that creates a path for a China-style social credit system of universal control.
The only solution is sound money but we are getting further from that by the day.
3. Business Enterprise
The 'pandemic' response was a massive boom to big business, particularly tech and media companies, and a disaster for small business.
My immediate concern in the earliest days of lockdowns concerned investment in such enterprises:
There has been no compensation for the losses and no attempt at reparations.
A recession will introduce even more challenges.
A major boost to small and medium-sized businesses would be regulatory and litigation reform but today's political environment admits almost no discussion of these crucial topics.
All the energies of Washington's lockdown shock troops are now spent on concocting ways for,
Big business loves this but it is devastating for the middle class.
Champions of free enterprise need to understand that their cause has massively diverged from the interest of big business, which has never been more united with big government in a campaign to monopolize and cartelize industry.
Collusion of this sort is now the norm...
The system bears a lot in common with the corporatism of the interwar period that was later called fascism...
4. Regulatory Capture
Many of us got a thorough education in just how influential bad actors in the private sector are over government agencies.
The revolving door is the main way they do business.
The same is true for the whole of the regulatory state. It is no longer possible to discern which is the hand and which is the glove: government or big business.
This is true for every department in government, including the war machine which operates at the behest of the munitions manufacturers.
And so on...
I suspect not...
This reality has massively reshuffled the political layout.
We have completely left the clarity of the 1980s and entered into a new world of grave complexity and corruption at all levels...
5. Public Health
The public-health bureaucracies took over in 2020 and what did they most neglect? Public health...
Even basic antibiotics lost their luster in the mandate to wait for the vaccine.
And together all these actions reinforced a problem far more vast than infectious disease: chronic disease, including obesity.
What about health?
The American diet has to change.
That in turn connects to the way we live our lives. We all need to learn that not every health problem can be solved by a pharmaceutical.
Indeed, the opposite is true:
The poisoning of the body needs to stop.
The only way out is the old-fashioned way:
It sounds like a cliché but it is a matter of life and death.
Also essential are real and not captive markets. Our systems of delivery of medical services need to become more competitive with doctors granted the freedom to practice again.
The system of insurance serves mostly industry and not customers.
All of this cries out for radical reform.
In addition, over the 'pandemic' period we observe how public health became a trojan horse for martial law.
So far as I can tell, that remains true today.
The problem here is deep and frightening, especially since virtually any social, cultural, and economic problem can be rendered as a health issue.
6. Educational Institutions
There has to be a better way...
And the market for educational services needs to open up to allow a better way.
And yet, new institutions are taking their place. They have to...
In the process of recreation has come a new and much-welcome emphasis on Classics, basics, and genuine educational fundamentals. Sadly the transition will leave many people.
Students are already two years behind in learning, thanks to the cruel closures.
7. The Deep State
Americans had become vaguely aware of this thing called the Deep State before the 'pandemic' response but the experience itself proved it.
There are hundreds of agencies and millions of deep-state employees who are accountable to no one and yet exercise massive power over our lives.
There is nothing about these institutions in the Constitution. The bureaucratic state is a fourth branch of government when there are supposed to be only three.
The tentacles from Washington extend not only to every state and city but all over the world.
This whole problem began in 1880 but massively worsened in the postwar world, and then rallied to hegemony in the 21st century.
This point is obviously very important to the establishment.
The repeal of the executive order that would reclassify many administrative employees as at-will (Schedule F) was one of the first acts repealed by the Biden administration.
8. Crime and War
During lockdowns, traffic accidents massively worsened and stayed that way.
The data are not in yet but they are certain to reflect record crashes and deaths.
Why might this be so?
I spoke to an Uber driver who explained that driving became and remained a venue for the expression of human volition when our avenues for exercising free will were closed off.
Add anger and substance abuse to that and you have disaster on your hands.
The lockdowns coarsened life and blunted the moral conscience.
After this experience, people are no longer mustering the empathy sufficient to care about the well-being of others.
People stopped making eye contact with each other, and then the masks made even basic nonverbal cues impossible. Communication itself was reduced to its most base elements.
The results started to become obvious with the entirely just protests that turned to violent riots in some spots in the summer of 2020. The crime wave has not abated ever since.
Cities now tolerate a level of petty thievery that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. The cops no longer care and the citizenry in general shows far less respect for property and person than in the past.
When government becomes immoral with the blessing of all the commanding heights in society, it sends a message to everyone else. In this way, the 'pandemic' response unleashed a form of ethical nihilism and detached communities from a human connection to each other.
The forced human separation was bad for the soul, and this dabbling in wrongdoing spread around the world.
Even the Ukraine-Russia conflict is a symptom of this loss of rationality and morality. Recall that Putin himself spent at least a year in lockdown, isolated from reality and physical contact, enough to drive an already power-drunk oligarch into a delusional state of mind.
The same could be said of Biden with the mindless funding of the Ukrainian regime...
The clash of these leaders has become an apocalyptic pursuit devoid of diplomatic wisdom, imbued with almost messianic fanaticism. So too for the peanut galleries recruited to cheer one side or the other.
Common sense has been trampled as the funding blows up, more property is destroyed, and lives are lost.
9. Immigration
Never forget that the travel restrictions that began in 2020 kept most of the human population locked in their nation-state residences for years, even those living on islands that used to be sanctuaries.
The right to visit the US for the "unvaccinated" only resumed on May 11, 2023.
The captivity of the people has also driven a desperate desire to flee and find a new home. The massive demographic shifts in the US population, out of lockdown states to open states, is reflected internationally too.
With huge populations on the move, states have been forced to come to terms with migration policies on which there is no political consensus.
This problem is blowing up right now on the US Southern border, leading to tremendous anger that has turned into a major populist backlash under the impression that the country is being invaded.
This is not going to end well for anyone...
The answer has to be a rational and humane immigration policy that can somehow separate worker rights from voting rights, but the US is not prepared to tackle that issue as most nations in the world already have.
As a result, we toggle between legal restrictionism and border chaos.
10. Shattered Lives
The trauma of the last three years has shattered the stability of millions of families and communities.
Couples were torn by travel restrictions but also internal arguments about vaccines. Children could not attend the funerals of their parents and couples held weddings on Zoom.
Many families are dealing with grim deaths not from Covid but from,
Digital addictions of various sorts tore apart familial loyalties. Strange new forms of gender dysphoria have been unleashed in this period too, and that cannot be a coincidence.
Many parents live wracked with guilt about their vaccine-injured children.
The arts experienced wreckage, ruining careers that took a lifetime to build. How can we have a true civilization without the arts? Without them, we are reduced to the status of brutes.
Many small communities had their routines disrupted as civic associations dissolved.
Every person experienced this in different ways:
There is plenty of anger everywhere in plain sight.
These are conditions that can lead to disaster, especially when it is coupled with an economic crisis. It's a powder keg...
11. The History
Vast efforts on the part of Brownstone writers are spent getting the history of this correct.
There are thousands of questions, many of which are mapped out in the independent Norfolk Group document that Brownstone supported.
There are commissions needed in every nation, state, city, and county.
The establishment line is that while mistakes were made, science is hard and officials had to improvise in real time.
That is utter rot...
There was very little about the entire regime that made any sense, and anyone with an ounce of knowledge knew that and also knew the devastation that it would cause.
We have to get this right, and the challenge is intensified by the mandatory secrecy of all the main players.
Still, if we don't get the history discovered and told, we will be stuck with the propaganda version of events, and that serves only ruling-class interests. Nor can we depend on regime historians to reveal unflattering truths.
Generations hence will ask the great question:
We must have the answers...
12. Force as a Policy Tool
To muscle the whole population into a particular pattern of action and belief was the core principle of the Covid response.
It was worse than being treated like lab rats:
It was the ultimate and global experiment in social management under the guise of science.
This is why Brownstone was founded with one ideal that came out of the 'pandemic' policy experience:
Achieving that is our task but the barriers are massive.
The Iron Law of Liberalism formulated by British sociologist Ralph Miliband says that,
That's certainly been the experience in our lifetimes.
In some ways, however, it's not really a 'new ideal'...
It is the trajectory of the idea of human progress for many hundreds of years dating back even to the Magna Carta.
That push has been for enforceable limits on power and fundamental rights to the people. The whole point of representative government was to guarantee that as a living reality.
All of this was taken away to the cheers of all elite opinion, ending in shattered lives and a global loss of trust.
Before this happened,
If we want to restore it, there is work to do.
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