|
February 27, 2025
Ninety-five years later, the pre-Covid world ended with a nationwide sigh of submission.
Those who dared to object to the freshly-mandated orthodoxy were subject to widespread contempt, derision, and censorship as the US Security State and a subservient media corps muzzled their protests.
The most dominant forces in society used the opportunity to their advantage, pillaging the nation's treasury and overthrowing law and tradition. Their campaign was devoid of the triumph of Yorktown, the bloodshed of Antietam, or the sacrifices of Omaha Beach.
Without a single bullet, they overtook the
republic, overturning the Bill of Rights in a quiet coup d'état.
No House Democrats objected, nor did 195 out of 196 House Republicans.
For 434 members of the House, there were no
concerns of fiscal responsibility or electoral accountability. There
wouldn't be a whimper, let alone a bang; there wouldn't even be a
recorded vote.
When Representative Thomas Massie learned of his colleagues' plan, he drove overnight from Garrison, Kentucky to the Capitol.
Democrats, the self-professed guardians of democracy, did not heed his call to fulfill their obligation to represent their constituents.
Republicans, supposed defenders of originalism and the rule of law, ignored Massie's invocation of the constitutional requirement for a quorum to be present to conduct business in the House.
The supreme law of the land gave way to the
hysteria of coronavirus, and the Kentucky Congressman became the
target of a bipartisan character assassination.
John Kerry wrote that Massie had,
President Trump responded,
Republican Senator Dan Sullivan quipped to Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Mahoney,
Mahoney was so proud of the conversation that he took to Twitter.
Two days later, President Trump signed the CARES Act. He bragged that it was the,
He continued,
The bipartisan Covid regime stood behind the President smiling.
Senator McConnell called it a,
Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Vice President Pence offered similar praise.
Trump thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who remarked,
Deborah Birx added her support for the bill, as did Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin.
The President then handed Dr. Fauci and others the pens that he used to sign the law. Before leaving, he took time to chastise Rep. Massie again, calling him "totally out of line."
By the end of March 2020, the pre-Covid world was over.
Corona was the supreme law of the land...!
The Press Conference That Changed the World
On March 16, 2020, Donald Trump, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci held a White House press conference on the coronavirus.
After nearly an hour of unremarkable questions and answers, a reporter asked whether the government was suggesting that,
President Trump ceded the microphone to Birx.
As she stumbled through her answer, Fauci flashed a hand signal to indicate that he wished to step in. He walked to the podium and opened a small document.
There was no indication that President Trump knew what was coming next or that he had read the paper.
Fauci took the microphone.
President Trump was distracted.
He pointed at someone in the audience and appeared unconcerned with Fauci's answer.
"America's doctor" continued at the microphone as his boss engaged in a side conversation with someone in the audience.
Birx grinned in the background as she listened to the plan to shut down the country.
This time, however, it would be different.
The press conference that day was never meant to be a temporary means to flatten the curve.
It was the beginning,
After demanding that buy-in on March 16, the pre-Covid world was over. Longer and more aggressive interventions became reality.
The following day, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a guide on who was permitted to work and who was subjected to lockdowns.
The order divided Americans into two classes:
Media, Big Tech, and commercial facilities like Costco and Walmart were exempt from the lockdown orders while small businesses, churches, gyms, restaurants, and public schools were shut down.
On March 21, an image of the Statue of Liberty locked in her apartment appeared on the front page of the New York Post.
States chained playgrounds and criminalized recreation. The schools closed, businesses failed, and hysteria ran rampant.
War Fever
When Massie arrived at the Capitol, a war-like fervor had taken over the country.
Publications including Politico, ABC, and The Hill compared the respiratory virus to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
On March 23, the New York Times published "What 9/11 Taught Us About Leadership in a Crisis," offering "lessons for today's leaders" in response to a "similar challenge."
The column did not warn against the dangers of impulsive responses leading to unintended consequences, unaccountable government agencies, unscrupulous ideologues, and untold federal expenditures.
There were no analyses of how temporary national fear could lead to trillions of dollars wasted on disastrous initiatives. Instead, the "similar challenge" led to familiar smear campaigns.
Thomas Massie and Barbara Lee have very little in common:
Both, however, stood as lone voices of dissent in the two most defining crises of this century.
In September 2001, Lee was the only member of Congress to oppose the authorization to use military force.
With the rubble still smoldering at the World Trade Center, she warned Americans that the AUMF provided,
A jingoistic press attacked Lee as "un-American," and she received bipartisan condemnation from her peers in Congress.
When Massie took the House floor nineteen years later, American troops were still in Afghanistan, and the "blank check" had been used to support bombings in at least ten other countries.
Like Lee, Massie's dissent was prescient.
He warned that the Covid payments benefited "banks and corporations" over "working class Americans," that the spending programs were riddled with waste, that the bill transferred dangerous power to an unaccountable Federal Reserve, and that the increased debt would be costly for the American people.
In retrospect, Massie's points were obvious.
The Covid response became the most disruptive and destructive public policy in Western history.
Studies found the pandemic response will cost Americans $16 trillion over the next decade.
What We Knew Then
Time vindicated Massie, but the pro-lockdown advocates have not demonstrated remorse.
To evade responsibility for their catastrophic policies, many cower behind the excuse that we didn't know then what we know now.
The precautions may have been "totally misguided," wrote Brown Professor Emily Oster, an advocate for school closures, lockdowns, universal masking, and vaccine mandates.
But the evidence from March 2020 refutes the Rumsfeldian invocation of unknown unknowns.
On February 3, 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship was set to return to harbor in Japan.
The Guardian called it a "coronavirus breeding ground."
It remained in quarantine for almost a month, and passengers lived under strict lockdown orders as their community went through the largest outbreak of Covid outside China.
The ship administered over 3,000 PCR tests.
By the time the last passengers left the boat on March 1, at least two things were clear:
Those points became even more clear in the ensuing weeks.
On March 8, Dr. Peter C Gřtzsche wrote that we were,
On March 11, Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published a peer-reviewed paper that warned of,
He predicted the hysteria surrounding the coronavirus would lead to drastically exaggerated case fatality ratios and society-wide collateral damage from unscientific mitigation efforts like lockdowns.
On March 13, Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager famously portrayed by Christian Bale in The Big Short, tweeted:
Ten days later, he wrote:
By March 15, there were widespread studies on the mental health ramifications of lockdowns, the health impact of shuttering the economy, and the harms of overreacting to the virus.
Even the Covid regime's wildly inaccurate models, which overestimated the fatality rate of Covid by multitudes, could not justify the response.
One of the main bases for lockdown policies was Neil Ferguson's Imperial College London report from March 16.
Ferguson's model overestimated the impact of Covid on various age groups by degrees of hundreds but conceded that the young faced no substantial risk from the virus. It predicted a 0.002% fatality rate for ages 0-9 and a 0.006% fatality rate for ages 10-19.
For comparison, the fatality rate for the flu,
On March 20, Yale Professor David Katz wrote in the New York Times:
He explained:
He cited data from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and South Korea which suggested that 99% of active cases in the general population were "mild" and did not require medical treatment.
He referenced the Diamond Princess cruise ship,
Later that month, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya called for,
The same week, Ann Coulter published "How do we Flatten the Curve on Panic?"
She wrote:
Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff wrote in April, "COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific."
He explained:
On April 7, Burry called on states to lift their lockdown orders, which he decried as,
On April 9, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who later became the Surgeon General of Florida, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Ten days later, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reopened his state.
Shortly thereafter, Governor Ron DeSantis lifted Covid restrictions in Florida.
Joining the herd was socially and politically fashionable, but their rationality stood athwart the prevailing madness.
Anthony Fauci and President Trump attacked Kemp for reopening Georgia.
The New York Times stoked racial animus to criticize opponents of the Covid regime, telling its readers that,
The New York Daily News referred to "Florida Morons" daring to go to the beach that summer, and the Washington Post, Newsweek, and MSNBC chastised "DeathSantis."
While the slanders and hysteria were temporary, a radical and insidious movement sought to permanently transform the country.
The Quiet Coup
Amid the name-calling and memorable headlines of school closures, arrests for paddle boarding, and urban anarchy, the nation underwent a coup d'état in 2020...
Americans found they suddenly lived under a police state without the freedom to travel.
Due process disappeared as the government issued edicts to determine who could and could not work. Equal application of the law was a relic of the past as a self-appointed caste of Brahmins exempted themselves and their political allies from the authoritarian orders that applied to the masses.
The groups that implemented this system also benefited from it. State and federal government agencies gained tremendous power. Unshackled from the restraints of the Bill of Rights, they used the pretext of "public health" to reshape society and abolish personal liberties.
Social media giants assisted these efforts, using their power to silence critics of the new Leviathan.
Big Pharma enjoyed record profits and government-provided legal immunity. In just one year, the Covid response transferred over $3.7 trillion from the working class to billionaires.
To replace our liberties, ...offer a new ruling order of suppression of dissent, surveillance of the masses, and indemnity of the powerful.
The hegemonic triumvirate framed their agenda with favorable marketing strategies. Eviscerating the First Amendment became monitoring misinformation. Warrantless surveillance fell under the public health umbrella of contact tracing.
The fusion of corporate and state power advertised itself as public-private partnerships. House arrest received a social media rebranding of #stayathomesavelives.
Within months, business owners replaced their "We stand with first responders" signs with "Going out of business" announcements.
Once the rule of law had been overturned, the culture was soon to follow.
Ten weeks after the press conference that changed the world, a Minnesota police officer put his knee on the neck of a Covid-infected, fentanyl-laced career criminal.
This led to cardiopulmonary arrest, the death of the man, and a cultural revolution.
The BLM and Antifa violent protests in reaction to the death of George Floyd sparked 120 days of rioting and looting in the summer of 2020. Over 35 people died, 1,500 police officers were injured, and rioters caused $2 billion in property damage.
CNN covered the resulting arson in Wisconsin with the chyron "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS."
With the notable exception of Senator Tom Cotton, politicians were largely complicit in the mass looting and violence.
President Trump was absent; while the cities burned on the weekend of May 30, the Commander-in-Chief was uncharacteristically silent.
Kamala Harris raised money to pay bail for looters and rioters arrested in Minneapolis.
Tim Walz's wife, then Minnesota's First Lady, told the press that she,
Nikki Haley tweeted,
And painful it was. Just hours before Haley's demand for communal suffering, rioters set fire to Minneapolis's Third Precinct police building.
Two days later, the mobs in St. Louis killed 77-year-old former policeman David Dorn.
His death was broadcast on Facebook Live.
In Minnesota alone,
Vandals toppled Minneapolis's statue of George Washington and covered it in paint.
Minnesota State University removed its statue of Abraham Lincoln from its campus display after 100 years after students complained that it perpetuated systemic racism.
None of this concerned the truth behind Floyd's death.
Floyd's autopsy concluded that there were,
He asked,
Evidently, the answer was a nationwide cultural upheaval. The wreckage spread through the country and beyond June 2020.
The racial reckoning left no American institution untouched.
Heather MacDonald writes in When Race Trumps Merit...:
At Rockefeller University, they removed the portraits of scientists who won the Nobel Prize because they were white men.
The University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of William Shakespeare because it failed to,
The soon-to-be 46th President and his allies announced that there would be racial prerequisites for the selection of its highest-ranking officials - including, The private sector was even worse:
By Independence Day 2020, the coup d'état had succeeded.
The rule of law had been overturned. Former bedrock principles of the Republic - freedom of speech, freedom to travel, freedom from surveillance - were sacrificed upon the altar of public health.
A culture that had once championed meritocracy became obsessed with berating the identity of the majority of its population.
Hypocrisy in the ruling class grew to the point that there was no longer equal application of the law. The most powerful groups augmented their wealth while the working class suffered under despotism.
This series is meant to outline the freedoms that we sacrificed, and, just as importantly, the people and institutions that benefited from the erosion of our liberties. There are no allegations of the pandemic's causes.
Those speculations, intriguing as they may be, are unnecessary to demonstrate the coordinated upheaval that took place. The bedrocks of liberty enshrined in the Bill of Rights disappeared while the nation panicked.
The most powerful people profited while the weakest suffered.
Under the pretense of "public health," the Republic was overturned.
|
