I blogged this day before yesterday: The Communitarian Nightmare We Feared is Here. Yesterday, USA Today is out with a story about the “COVID culture wars” that pretends the debate is ongoing. The author of the story, Dennis Wagner, has made up his mind. The story is really an exercise in head-scratching over why those who believe in liberty are so unwilling to submit to extraordinary social control.
“When the United States was founded, a Bill of Rights got locked into the Constitution to ensure that personal liberties were protected from a coercive government,” writes Wagner. “Locked into” is an interesting way of putting the matter. Does he mean that the Founders wanted to ensure liberty for citizens yet to be born? Or does he mean that we are stuck with a terrible mistake? “But those freedoms are not limitless,” he informs us.
Yes, Dennis, those freedoms are not limitless. But then neither is government power. At least it’s not supposed to be limitless. That’s why we have a Bill of Rights. Madison’s rights rests on the principle that government must have a compelling reason to limit freedom. It’s not that coercion is forbidden—it’s that coercion must be rationally justified. It must be justified in terms that satisfy the democratic-republican, humanist, and libertarian principles upon which the United States was founded.
In the story, Pamela Hieronymi, a UCLA professor who specializes in moral philosophy, referenced Aaron James’ Assholes: A Theory, wherein the author argues, summary provided by Hieronymi, that “American culture is producing a swarm of annoying, self-righteous people who behave as if they are so special that normal rules do not apply.” This formulation seems to confuse the woke scolds, that “swarm of annoying, self-righteous people who behave as if they are so special,” you know, the ones who shame people for not wearing masks or for not submitting to an experimental vaccine in the face of a growing record of problems, from those who refuse to accept as normal demands they submit to an experimental vaccine in the face of a growing record of problems.
Here’s what the “debate” gets wrong. First, the calculus accepts the justification for coercion as given. The unprecedented and unjustifiable level of coercion has been visited upon the United States is unjustified. Presently, using CDC estimates, which likely undercount infections, the virus kills approximately 0.3 percent of those it infects. Moreover, the virus’s lethality is not demographically uniform. It is only especially lethal for the very old, the very sick, and those with certain chronic health conditions. For many demographic categories, the risk of the vaccine outweighs the benefits (see “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom?). The vaccines appear to drive the mutations that produce new and more virulent variants (see The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). The vaccinated are spreaders of the virus (see Will the Vaccinated Do the Right Thing and Mask Up or Stay Home?). In light of the infectiousness of the vaccinated, Wagner’s use of the Typhoid Mary story is supremely ironic.
Second, and more fundamentally, “At what point should personal freedom yield to the common good?” falsely frames the debate. Personal liberty is the common good. The idea of the common good pushed in this story is the way the Chinese Communist Party conceptualizes freedom, which is that the power of the government is not limited by human rights. To be sure, a lot of Americans want to live in a China-like world. Many Americans today fear freedom. They seek to escape from it. The religious mentality is pervasive and justifies itself with scientism, an ideology that dresses itself in the language of science. The Chinese model and scientistic attitude is antithetical to everything America represents. Authoritarians are using COVID-19 to take us away from America and towards something America was founded to take us away from. They’re characterizing the defense of liberty as selfish and the act of submitting to authority unquestioningly as altruism. They are portraying the defenders of American ideals as assholes. What does that say about American ideals? The 1619 Project captures the spirit of the answer.
This USA Today story is really about freedom and reason versus unreasonable coercion, where the latter is being pitched as “the common good.” Dennis Wagner is reaching a large audience with a propaganda message about what being a good citizen involves, namely submitting to the dictates of the Centers of Disease Control, an organization that, alongside the FDA and the USDA, is a paradigm of regulatory capture. His piece is engineered to reinforce lockstep messaging from the establishment media.
There’s a quote in the story from sociologist Steven Tipton (Emory) that sums up the mentality quite well: “Being a good citizen is being mutually responsible. If you believe in the gospels, wear your mask.”
This blog entry has been revised (August 3, 2021) to include links to research supporting its arguments and to clarify the problem of vaccine-resistant variants.
Since the mantra of mass vaccination has been about altruism, that is about not being selfish, you know, “be a good person and get vaccinated so as not to infect others,” now that we know vaccinated people walk around with the same viral load as unvaccinated people and can infect other people, can we depend on the vaccinated to wear masks, socially distance, and generally stay away from public places in order to protect all those who can’t have or don’t want the vaccine?
Dr. Fauci taking issue with something or another
At my university, and this is pretty standard across the nation, the policy is that those who have been vaccinated don’t have to wear masks and are excused from routine testing, whereas those who haven’t must wear masks and submit to routine testing, thus othering the unvaccinated, marking them as pariah. But we now know that the vaccinated walk around spreading the virus. So why aren’t they compelled to wear masks and submit to routine testing?
Since, as Fauci says, most vaccinated carriers (and there are tens of thousands of them and they are all around us) have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic (which is true for the unvaccinated, as well), then, without testing, we have silent spreaders of COVID-19. The false sense of security that vaccines confer (instead of immunity) means that the vaccinated are a great risk to public safety.
The great irony here is that those who told us to get vaccinated so we could reopen society—who literally held our freedom hostage until we got jabbed—are the ones who will very likely close society again. We appear to have reached herd immunity in late December/early January when case numbers plummeted. As we approached 50 percent vaccination, the cases started rising again. They are now skyrocketing (see chart). The vaccinated may be driving the mutation of the virus, since it is the nature of viruses to mutate to get around barriers to transmission.
Cases are skyrocketing as the mass vaccination program proceeds
The media is slowly waking up to the bad news. We are watching the pivot unfold before our eyes. The Business Insider reports, “According to research published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, vaccinated people—counterintuitively—play a key role in that risk.” This is counterintuitive only because authorities have kept information from the public and marginalize those who try to educate people. As the story goes: “transmission among vaccinated people could lead to new variants that evade vaccines.”
The New York Times responds to this with surprise, as if it’s a twist, as if what we have thought all along has suddenly be upended. The Times reports that “the revelation follows a series of other recent findings about the Delta variant that have upended scientists’ understanding of the coronavirus.” But it is really that surprising? Not if you understand basic evolutionary principle. Those who do have been warning us about this all along. They just don’t happen to be on the dole Fauci administers.
But the pivot is incomplete and the wrong conclusion drawn: “The researchers concluded that, in an environment where Delta is spreading among all people—regardless of vaccination status—it is imperative to get more people vaccinated immediately to prevent the emergence of a new vaccine-resistant variant.” So the virus has more petri dishes to play in? Are they crazy?
They must pivot more quickly. Vaccine resistance is not associated with the unvaccinated. Vaccine resistance is driven by vaccines. You know this already. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is the consequence of widespread use of antibiotics. That’s why you only use antibiotics when absolutely necessary. Imagine the folly of mass prophylactic use of antibiotics and you have some idea of the magnitude of the error here.
The vaccines should have only been given to the very old and the very sick where the risk from COVID-19 was greater than these experimental vaccine. The rest of the population should have been treated with therapeutics. The proportion of the population who was vaccinated should always have remained small and closely monitored. The idea that any of us should be compelled to take this shot is not only offensive to medical ethics but likely to prolong and potentially worsen the pandemic.
We are told to hurry up and get vaccinated before the mutations overwhelm the vaccine. What we now know—in fact, we knew this last year, early in the pandemic—is that it is quite likely that it is the vaccine that is mutating the virus such that it will overwhelm vaccine efficacy, efficacy the authorities quite obvious greatly exaggerated. I agree with Dr. Robert Malone that authorities should shut down the mass vaccination program. They mustn’t be allowed to turn our children into factories generating mutant strains of coronavirus.
* * *
What the evidence of this claim, as well as the problem of antibody-dependent enhancement? I have been relying mostly on the testimony of Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Malone is a virologist and immunologist and the inventor of the mRNA platform used in the most popular of these vaccines. Malone’s arguments concerning the problem of antibody-dependent enhancement (a phenomenon in which virus-specific antibodies enhance the entry and replication of a virus) and the role of a leaky vaccine in provoking the rise of new variants are not speculation, but concerns resting on a body of literature. Here are some studies reporting on ADE and the role of vaccines in generating variants.
In September 2020, Wen She Lee and associates published “Antibody-dependent enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies” in Nature Microbiology. If you understand the peer-reviewed process, which is quite complicated and time consuming (for good reason), this information was known early in the pandemic. From the article: “Data from the study of SARS-CoV and other respiratory viruses suggest that anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies could exacerbate COVID-19 through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).” The researchers base their arguments on previous experience with “respiratory syncytial virus and dengue virus vaccine studies revealed human clinical safety risks related to ADE, resulting in failed vaccine trials.” Malone has revealed that the SARS-CoV-2 was never evaluated for ADE, despite an extensive record of failure with respect to coronavirus vaccines. He uses the dengue virus vaccines as a case study in vaccine failure.
In his article “Two Different Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) Risks for SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies,” published February 2021 in Frontiers of Immunology, well after the appearance of the vaccines, Darrell Ricke, reports on the problem with ADE specifically with respect to coronavirus, writing, “Development of vaccines to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and other coronavirus has been difficult to create due to vaccine induced enhanced disease responses in animal models.” Because of the problem of ADE, he emphasizes the “importance of developing safe SARS-CoV-2 T cell vaccines that are not dependent upon antibodies.” Again, these vaccines were rushed to market and given emergency use authorization by the FDA. We do not know the long term effects of these vaccines. Yet they are vaccinating those twelve year of age and older despite the fact that healthy and young people are not at particular risk of disease or death from this virus.
In their article “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens,” published in July 2015 in PLOS Biology, Andrew Read and associates identify a problem with vaccines in facilitating mutation and the emergence of variants by interfering with the process of natural selection. It is well understood than, in nature, evolutionary processes “remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission.” In other words, a successful virus is a virus that does not kill or disable its host, but one that leaves the host well enough to interact with other organisms and transmit the virus. To increase fitness, viruses become less lethal over time. It follows that “[v]accines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population.”
The researchers show experimentally that immunization against Marek’s disease virus enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, which in turn makes possible the transmission of hyper-pathogenic strains. The authors explain the problem and draw the following conclusion: “Immunity elicited by direct vaccination or by maternal vaccination prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission, thus extending the infectious periods of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.”
Vaccines that allow infection and transmission of viruses are known as “leaky vaccines.” In contrast, “perfect vaccines” mimic the immunity that humans naturally develop after contracting the virus or having the disease the vaccines attempt to defeat. In an article in Healthline, Andrew Reed identifies other leaky vaccines that explain the rise of more virulent strains of a virus. “The most virulent strain of avian influenza now decimating poultry flocks worldwide can kill unvaccinated birds in just under three days,” Read said, because the vaccine against avian influenza is a leaky one. “In the United States and Europe,” he said, “the birds that get avian influenza are culled, so no further evolution of the virus is possible.” Human deaths from avian influenza virus have been reported in China, so understanding variant production in vaccinated animal reservoirs is vital. In light of the risks, Healthline recommends: “Rigorous testing and vigilant monitoring of next-generation vaccines to prevent the evolution of more-virulent strains of viruses.” And this brings us back to Dr. Malone’s concern about the way the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were rolled out. The consequences can be seen in the chart I provided above.
Published in late July, in Rates of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and vaccination impact the fate of vaccine-resistant strains, published in Scientific Reports late July 2021, Simon Rella and associates report that “the emergence of vaccine-resistant strains may come too rapidly for current vaccine developments to alleviate the health, economic and social consequences of the pandemic.” This is the finding that shook up everybody, findings that came with a recommendation that caused the CDC to again change its policy: “Our results suggest that policymakers and individuals should consider maintaining non-pharmaceutical interventions and transmission-reducing behaviors throughout the entire vaccination period.” In other words, those who have been vaccinated should mask up and socially distance. As carriers of potentially more virulent SARS-CoV-2 variants, the vaccinated put the unvaccinated at risk for infection and disease.
At the very least, the vaccines, by leaving enough individuals well enough to walk around and more effectively spread this virus, the mass vaccination program exacerbated the effects of the delta variant. If you have been vaccinated, knowing now that your viral load is the same as the unvaccinated, will you mask up or stay home?
* * *
I’ve got some unfortunate and difficult news to share. I know many of my close friends and family would’ve preferred to hear this privately first – and I apologize for the public nature of my disclosure, but I don’t know how to have this conversation multiple times. 1/17
Read the entire thread. Pete speaks for a lot of people who cannot or should not be vaccinated. Understand that not everybody’s doctor is on top of things like Pete’s doctor is. Given philosophy, ignorance, sell-out, and extraordinary degree of social coercion, many doctors won’t give their patients exemptions or explain to them risk : benefit. The media wants to make it feel like those refusing vaccines are nutters. This is a hateful propaganda campaign. There are many people out there who, because of allergies and autoimmune disorders, should not take this vaccine, and shame on those who try to pressure them into taking a shot. These scientistic woke scolds need to get over their narcism and pathological desire to virtue signal and work on empathy, humanity, and compassion.
Imagine a crowded planet, overpopulated to the point where babies threaten the environment (we’re there already) and corporations and the state say that women must go on birth control. Either go on birth control or be subjected to weekly pregnancy tests, the President says. You need to wear a condom when you have sex. Sex without protection can make you pregnant. If found pregnant you’ll be excluded from employment and other highly prized life activities and opportunities. It’s time we get serious about making sure women are on birth control. There have to be consequences for sex without protection. Yes, there are breakthrough pregnancies even if you’re on birth control. That’s why you still need to wear a condom even if you are on the pill. Your body, your choice, right? No. The community is more important than your individual desire to go unprotected, to exercise reproductive freedom. Your decisions affect all of us. What, you disagree? Are you one of those anti-birth controllers? You sound like an extremist.
* * *
Back in the 1990s, Democrats wanted to debate communitarianism verses libertarianism. They wanted to discuss abandoning America’s founding in the liberal principles of civil rights, personal liberty, and small government for the sake of big intrusive government and community standards. Maybe you don’t remember Israeli sociologist Amitai Etzioni, endorsements by neoliberals such as Bill Bradley adorning his books, but I do. (See Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda.) He rooted his ideas of the good moral order in the structural functionalist tradition of his discipline.
At the time, America politely told Etzioni and the Democrats to go fuck themselves. But now, without any debate, with corporate power at their backs, Democrats have decided the matter for us: we will be a nation of communitarian values—our libertarian founding and traditions be damned. All this while they stealthily colonized the minds of enough of the public (especially the new middle class) to prepare them for willing submission to state corporate control. They even turned many into woke scolds who patrol the Internet and college campuses attacking those who still hold on to liberal values.
Communitarianism is ostensibly an ideology that emphasizes the responsibility of the individual to the community. At best, its advocates argue, individual rights must be balanced with community rights—as if abstractions have rights. But what communitarianism really is is an ideology that attaches the label “community” to powerful controlling and exploitative organizations, such as the “business community,” and then emphasizes responsibility of individuals to those communities. This is why Etzioni’s movement so neatly dovetails with neoliberalism. This is what lies behind government officials beseeching the “business community” to mandate vaccines. And now governments are doing the mandating, too. Axios alerts us to the coming troubles: The floodgates have opened for vaccine mandates.
Business is not a community. Government is not a community. A university is not a community. Facebook is not a community. These entities don’t have standards. They have rules. In the age of corporate governance and technocratic fiat, these rules are arrived at neither deliberatively nor democratically. And the old communitarian appeal to the social importance of the family unit, of real community? Forget about those things. They have your children now.
“COVID-19 is worse than the flu.” You hear it all the time. You deserve to be scolded if you imply otherwise. Worse than the flu for whom? This has been a problem for this entire pandemic: progressives inside and outside the government don’t want you to know information that would allow you to perform a reasonable risk analysis. They tell you to follow the science, but they don’t want you thinking like a scientist. After all, they aren’t thinking like scientists, why should you? They practice scientism, a faith-based simulacrum of science serving corporate and government interests. They are terrifying people with gross overgeneralization of risk for profit and control. They need a crisis great enough to justify taking away your liberty. Have you read about what’s happening in Sydney, Australia? They sent to military into the city to force people away from each other and into their homes. Is this coming to a city near you?
The answer to the question about risk is that COVID-19 is worse than influenza for the very old, the very unhealthy, and the very sick, but, for most age categories and health statuses, COVID-19 it not more deadly than influenza. In fact, for some age categories, COVID-19 is much less deadly than the flu. For instance, influenza is deadlier for school age children than is COVID-19. For healthy teachers, COVID-19 is not deadlier than influenza. So why the draconian measures being taken in public schools? At my university, if you have not been vaccinated, you have to submit to biweekly surveillance and wear a mask. Exemption from the policy requires employees and students proving access to administrators to the state vaccine registry. But the vaccinated, we now know, can catch and share the virus. My local school board just voted to require masks for younger children in the classroom.
In this blog, I will focus on school age children, since this is driving public school policy and illustrates most clearly the irrationality of the technocracy’s policy prescriptions. Progressives use children to justify their worsening authoritarian impulses. They aren’t just using children; they are harming children, not only because they are traumatizing them (that’s bad enough), but they are making them sick. The vaccine has serious adverse health effects. The vaccine appears to be making the virus more virulent and harmful. Since the facts indicate that influenza is a very serious problem in human societies and it is worse for children than is COVID-19, given the novel demand for mass vaccination, routine testing, and masks and social distancing, what has changed?
When I read and watch the news reports of people from their hospital beds telling others to take COVID-19 seriously, they will get no disagreement from me. I am approaching 60 years of age and have many of the comorbidities associated with negative health outcome with this disease. I take precautions with this disease and dread getting it (although I suspect I had it in March 2020). But when folks from their hospital rooms compare COVID-19 to the flu in the way they do, they leave the impression than nobody is hospitalized or dies from influenza. They make it sound like influenza is “just a cold.” They are doing exactly what they are accusing others of doing: downplaying the seriousness of disease and not listening to the science. The fact is that, across the nation, for decades, people have been hospitalized and died from influenza. Since they are so fond of anecdotes, for that person, how is COVID-10 worse? Completely missing from the news reports are all those who have been injured, sickened, or died from the vaccine. Are there no injured or sickened persons who regret taking the vaccine?
We know that, as of July 22, 2021, from the onset of the pandemic, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), about 4.13 million children have tested positive for COVID-19. The AAP believes the number of reported COVID-19 cases in children likely is an undercount because children’s symptoms often are mild, and they may not be tested for every illness. Based on CDC extrapolations, the range is probably at least 18-20 million cases of juvenile COVID-19. But even that is likely an undercount, as the metric is based on all ages. Since children are much less likely to experience symptoms, the factor is certainly greater. This is a good thing, since it means that herd immunity is building among the very young, and since this virus is not going away, that will put them in good shape for the future. This benefits all of us. I anticipate the response of some readers: you would have us build herd immunity to a deadly virus on the backs of children.
How many children have died from COVID-19? I did a deep dive on this back in May (A Moral Panic. A Year Later) and found that, for the entire period of COVID-19 to that point, 287 people aged 0-17 had died where COVID-19 was listed on the death certificate. I hasten to add that we know that rarely is COVID-19 the only factor in a death. Indeed, it is more often a case of death with COVID-19 than from COVID-19. Most of the cases presented with significant comorbidities. Associated comorbidities were diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Want to protect kids from disease? Take on the food industry and demand the government provide resources for parents to properly feed and exercise their children. Where among progressives is the mass hysteria over corporations engineering food that make children sick? Probably in the same place as the hysteria over corporations engineering medicine that make children sick.
What is it for the flu? Keep in mind that the CDC measures flu seasons. They don’t run together multiple seasons. It would be horrifying if they did. Well, it’s horrifying enough: CDC estimates of the burden of illness during the 2017–2018 season are 48.8 million sick with influenza, 959,000 hospitalizations, and 79,400 deaths. The number of deaths from the flu could have been as high as 95 thousand. But let’s go ahead and make it it comparable to the way COVID-19 is being reported. If we combine 2017-2018 stats with those from the previous year, the number of cases rises to 86.8 million cases (more than 100 million top-end estimate), more than 1.4 million hospitalizations (maybe as many as 2.3 million), and around 117 thousand deaths—top end estimate as many as 156 thousand. These numbers didn’t warrant mandatory vaccination, biweekly testing, and masks? Influenza was deadly to as many 156 thousand Americans 2016-2018.
To be sure, there were more deaths under COVID-19 than influenza during a comparable period. But we have to come back to this: for whom is COVID-19 more deadly? That is what you need to know for rational and evidence-based risk assessment and public policy. The CDC estimated 11.5 million cases of influenza in children for the 2017-2018 seasons, with more than 48,000 hospitalizations for the flu, and 643 deaths for children aged 0-17. For 2016-17, there were 251 deaths for children aged 0-17. That’s a combined 894 juvenile influenza deaths. That is more than three times the deaths from COVID-19. And given that the estimates of juvenile influenza are much lower than for COVID-19, the rate of death from influenza is much higher than for COVID-19. Why aren’t health authorities aggressively pushing the influenza vaccine for children?
The evidence clearly indicates that the influenza burden and the rates of influenza-associated hospitalization are much greater for the young compared to COVID-19. Juvenile hospitalization and death rates are much higher for influenza than for COVID-19. (You risk being censored on social media for stating this fact.) Where was the demand for mandatory vaccination, biweekly testing, and masks in public schools for influenza all these years? Where was the moral panic over influenza? Where were the teachers and their unions with their apocalyptic scenarios? What changed?
* * *
Must watch program from this morning. Dr. Robert Malone and Peter Navarro weigh in on the risks on the virus and how authoritarian rule is burying truth.
Evidence-based, research-based—this is what I am all about here on Freedom and Reason. So it is alarming to see how little progressives and their corporate think-masters think or really care about science. More than this, they attack those who really do think and care about science. If you criticize public policy, which is what a citizen is supposed to do in a free society, even if you support vaccination as a general rule, you are tagged an “anti-vaxxer.”
The facts are very clear: the corporate state establishment has established a vast propaganda network that promulgates big lie campaigns and cancels and marginalizes citizens who resist them.
The media told us the reason COVID-19 cases were dropping was because of the vaccine. This is why we have to be vaccinated. But the fact pattern indicates that the decline in cases began when zero percent of the population was vaccinated and began to rise again as the number of those vaccinated approached 50 percent (see the chart below). The vaccine narrative is a big lie. A big shifting lie. And not a noble lie as some are saying.
The official experts told the public that that the reason to get vaccinated is to reach herd immunity so we can go back to some degree of normalcy. This narrative has always been unscientific, not only because the most pushed vaccines (mRNA therapy) do not effectively confer immunity, but also because the narrative excludes from herd immunity thresholds (which Fauci is always changing) those who have already had the virus, this despite the fact that having the virus confers lasting and effective immunity from COVID-19.
If the authorities actually cared about herd immunity they would have at least performed antibodies tests on all those seeking vaccines and, if they tested positive for antibodies, excluded them from what are in fact trials of experimental vaccines, vaccines that carry a great number of serious other effects, as well as injuries and even death.
But the so-called experts were never really concerned with establishing the facts concerning COVID-19 infection as a means for rational policymaking. They were only concerned with getting people to take shots. The reason for this was twofold: corporate profits and government control. Pfizer is pleased. It’s earnings are way up. The government is pleased. Americans are living in terror and suspicious of their neighbors. Your tax dollars and a fear campaign made all this possible.
“Thank you, Sir. May I have another?”
Whatever their efficacy, the vaccines were unnecessary and very likely counterproductive. Using the CDC metric for estimating infections, more than 170 million people in the United States have had COVID-19. In other words, half of the population has already had COVID-19 and are now immune from the disease.
Because we achieved herd immunity without the vaccine, cases began sharply dropping after January 8 (the day we reached the peak number of cases). By late June, cases had fallen to close to an 11,000 7-day rolling daily average from more than 250,000 7-day rolling daily average in early January 2021.
Today, as vaccination approaches half the population, we no longer see cases falling. We see cases rising, And they are rising rapidly (see above). We are now at a 7-day rolling daily average of more than 66,000 cases. There were more than 100,000 cases reported on July 27 alone. The experts are telling us to mask up again. Yes, even the vaccinated should mask up. Indeed, it seems that especially the vaccinated should mask up. So much for the claim that vaccination would return us to normalcy.
In the face of facts it could not dissimulate, or that are perhaps strategically useful, the Ministry of Truth has shifted the narrative. Now the main reason to get vaccinated is to reduce the severity of the illness. (I write about this, scientism, and the problem with mRNA technology in my recent blog Anthony Fauci’s Noble Lying.) But this narrative was immediately troubled by the fact that those who have been vaccinated can get and transmit the virus. Worse, vaccinated people can get sick, go to the hospital, and die. The director of the CDC, Rochelle P. Walensky, estimates that around ten percent of those who are vaccinated will be infected if exposed to the virus.
The Orwellian rationalization for these facts is “breakthrough cases,” said to be a term of art in the field. The term of art is a cover for the truth that blows up the big lie. The truth is that these vaccines were unnecessary and very likely counterproductive. Bell’s palsy, clotting blood, Grave’s disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis, and even death, are just some of the consequences of these vaccines.
And now there is evidence in practice of what scientists warned us about years ago, that vaccines are driving mutations that lead to new and potentially more virulent variants. You may have thought Fauci dropped a bomb on Chris Hayes’ show when he told his host that those with the Pfizer vaccine have the same viral load as the unvaccinated. Dr. Robert Malone, the invert of the mRNA technology tells us that actually the viral loads are probably higher in the vaccinated. These gene therapies are turning people into virus factories.
This is why authorities are telling the public mask up again. The House of Representatives is reinstating its mask mandate in the wake of the shift in guidance from the Centers from the CDC. The media is reporting that a White House press representative was seen swapping a sign saying people are required to wear masks if unvaccinated with new sign saying masks are required regardless of vaccination status. They are also calling for medical-grade masks this time.
These authorities foisted all this on the nation. They should come out and level with the nation. We could have been through this thing months ago if governments had not locked down society and instead allowed healthy adults and children go about their daily lives. Half of the country contracted the virus virus despite the lockdowns. All the lockdowns did was delay herd immunity. In other words, most people were going to get this virus, the government just made it so it took longer to get there.
But readers of this blog know that I have been saying this all along. Way back on April 14, 2020, I blogged this Future Containment of COVID-19: Have Authorities Done the Right Thing? In that blog I write: “I fear the authorities who claim to know best have made a terrible mistake. In the absence of an effective vaccine (or any vaccine at all) for SARS-CoV-2, they have prevented the population from developing widespread immunity to the virus, what we call ‘herd immunity’ (or ‘herd protection’). Since this virus is now part of the seasonal mix (that’s right, it’s not going away), this means that the same situation experienced this spring will be re-experienced in the future. If we had to lockdown on account of this virus this time, that is, if the lockdown were necessary, then we will have to lockdown again next time. But we won’t. This suggests that not only was the lockdown unnecessary, but that the whole exercise was counterproductive to the ends of reducing future outbreaks of the virus.”
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Remember these words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Watching cops as weeping victims after months of cops as racist killers. With whom is Oceania now at war?
What do I think about Pelosi’s hand-picked committee? I would like get an explanation for why police officers were letting protestors into the Capitol building that day. I would like to know the identity of the man who killed Ashli Babbitt. I would like to know if and how many FBI agents were involved in the planning and execution of the riot (The Michigan Kidnapping Plot and January 6—Is There a Connection?). But Pelosi’s committee is a staged propaganda event to manufacture a lie that the threat to the republic is populist-nationalism and not the globalism the establishment promotes. Having twice failed to remove the President via impeachment, the establishment is reduced to making mountains out of molehills.
I’m a law and order guy. Those who committed violence on that day and broke the law should be punished. I’ve always said this. (The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capitol Buildings.) But getting to the bottom of those acts is the work of ordinary police work, not a 9-11 style government inquiry. January 6 was not the work of a grand conspiracy—at least not by the majority of those who were arrested in the wake of those events. The rabble was overcome by a moment of passion. And while I do not condone law breaking, I understand their passion. Besides, if their goal was to stop the certification of Electoral College votes Biden as president, then their actions had the opposite effect. And that does make me suspicious.
As I reported on Freedom and Reason, most of those who entered the Capitol building who have been charged (presently 510 individuals) have been charged with rather minor offenses (because their offenses were rather minor), but you wouldn’t know it by the draconian measures thrown at them. Participants are being held in solitary confinement in Washington D.C.’s city jail. The justification for “restrictive housing” for the accused was promoted as a safety measure. They are now alone in a cell for 23 hours as day. This is not pretrial detention. This is action designed to make minor offenses appear serious. And it is torture.
A big giveaway to Pelosi’s idea behind all of this is the selection to the panel of Liz Cheney, a well-known neoconservative establishment figure. She represents the Bush-Cheney warmongering side of the Republicans. These people are snakes (see War Hawks and the Ugly American). And while Pelosi is keeping Republicans with integrity off the panel, the panel she created is allowing dramatic liars to “testify.”
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn states that Officer Brian Sicknick "died from injuries sustained" on January 6th, though the DC medical examiner found that it was natural causes. pic.twitter.com/kmvH7MdylO
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 27, 2021
The threat to the American republic is not those Americans who throw their support behind Trump and his ilk. They are a threat to the establishment that threatens the future of the American republic. Whatever you think of conservatives, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Don’t you wish you could take this class? This is what my students are reflecting on next week in Freedom and Social Control (Democracy and Justice Studies, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay):
What are Max Weber’s views on politics, the state, and violence? Why, according to Weber, is capitalism different from previous societal systems? What is the Protestant Ethic? What is its logic? According to Weber’s rationalization thesis, what is distinctive to Western society and increasingly dominating the world? What did Weber mean when he described modern bureaucratic society as an “iron cage” or a “steel casing”? What role does the Protestant Ethic play in all this?
There is a reading in this module by George Ritzer, “Ritzer McDonaldization and its Precursors” that discusses rationalization and the Holocaust. This is the reading associated with Zygmunt Bauman and his history of the Holocaust, which depends a great deal on Weber’s analysis, which I covered in the lecture on irrationality, authoritarianism, and war. Ritzer organizes his argument with four principles of rationalization: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. This helps to understand Frederick Taylor and scientific management.
Many social theorists posit that these irrational and freedom-suppressing developments are inherent in a capitalist system, whether its form is liberal or state capitalist. This was Weber’s position. This view is reflected in the scholars associated with the Frankfurt School discussed in lecture: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, and Herbert Marcuse. Be familiar with these ideas. They would make for an interesting reflection essay.
Related to the previous paragraph, what is the connection between bureaucracy, corporatism, and fascism? For instance, what is the relationship between authoritarian capitalism and war? What does Benjamin say about this? I discuss the work of Sheldon Wolin’s in his landmark work Democracy Inc. What is the difference between totalitarianism and inverted totalitarianism? Be able to recognize C. Wright Mills and his notion of The Power Elite.
One view especially emphasized in lecture is that of Erich Fromm, who distinguished between negative and positive freedom, describing the causes of and nature of the “escape from freedom” that plagues liberal societies, manifesting itself in authoritarianism and fascism. Be familiar with Fromm’s argument. A reflection essay connecting this to the first module and then discussing the various things from the previous paragraphs would make for an interesting reflection essay.
And you thought I was a crazy conspiracy theorist. But, really, I’m just a run-of-the-mill sociologist. If you didn’t learn this sort of stuff from your sociology teachers, then you were cheated.
Here’s what students are reflecting on this week:
George Orwell wrote two novels that are widely read and serve as powerful critiques of totalitarianism. Animal Farm is a fable that works as an allegory. What group do the animals represent? What group do humans represent? Who does Old Major represent? What is his argument? How do Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer develop his ideas into a complete system of thought? Who does Napoleon likely represent? Snowball is almost certain which historical figure? What methods do the pigs use to control the other animals? Who is mollie and what does she represent? What does it mean that, at the end, the other animals cannot tell the pigs apart from the humans?
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell tells the story of a terrifying dystopia in which the West is organized under a socialist government where thought and knowledge are centrally controlled by the Party. Although you may not have read this book, your teacher summarizes it in a video lecture. What are the four ministries that run society? Why do they carry names that represent the opposite of what they actually do? What is the significance of “2+2=5”? Why is it do important to control the telling of history? Why is it so important to control language?
Edward Bernays is famous for developing the concept the “engineering of consent.” Walter Lippmann also identified the concept, calling it “manufacturing consent.” What do they believe about democracy? According to Noam Chomsky, the actual functions of the mass media are to control of the masses through the systematic use of propaganda and persuade people to consume more goods and services sold by business. But it does more than that. What else is propaganda for? What are the “filters” in Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model? What do we mean when we say there is a “media monopoly”?
Mississippi’s argument against abortion concerns viability. People have long argued about how such a thing is or could be determined. But viability is a red herring. The real issue is right to life in tandem with personal liberty. No person has an absolute right to life. It depends on the circumstances. Break into my house at night and see whether I recognize your right to life. On second thought, don’t. ‘Cause I certainly disrespect your right to life.
In other words, don’t be confused about what it as stake here. This is not about life. This is about freedom. Without that, is life really worth living? The paramount right is that of a woman to not be used as an incubator against her will. If women do not have the right to refuse to be or remain hooked up to another person in order to keep that person alive, then women are not considered fully human. Government or corporate control over reproduction is the paradigm of tyranny.
I have written several essays on this topic. Here are some previous entries so you can better understand my argument.
In The Fetus is a Person. Now What? (2008), I lean on Judith Jarvis Thomson “A Defense of Abortion” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, Fall 1971) to argue that advocating state control over women’s bodies is incompatible with the principles of liberty underlying the legal and moral order necessary for a free society. The pro-life position has no reasonable justification for its advocacy for tyranny.
April 2013, I write in Abortion is Really About Freedom, “The question of the permissibility of abortion is not about the status fetus but the right of a woman (or any person) to determine what purposes her body is used for, presuming she is not a slave (and if she it, she must be liberated).” And this: “Personal autonomy is the first right—every person must be free from oppression. Life can be and often is sacrificed to preserve this right. If a woman cannot determine how her body is used, she is not free.”
In Liberty is America’s raison d’être. Preserving Reproductive Freedom for the Sake of the Republic (2020), I contend that the desire to control a woman’s reproductive capacity stands condemned for its double standard. Advocates of restrictions would never willingly agree to a regime that commandeered men’s bodies to exploit their organs for the sake of exclusively preserving individual life. That it is so easy for so many to disregard the personal sovereignty of women suggests a stealth misogyny, one masquerading as empathy for the fetus. It’s the worst form of objectification, for it denies the woman’s humanity.
Before reading this blog, I recommend you read this July 21 blog, On Herd Immunity, Establishment Disinformation, and Gain-of-Function. There you will learn about several recent development that inform the present blog. I have written many things on the coronavirus, but one other entry bears considerable interest in light of the present blog, Some Virus Did Something. There, in the early days of the pandemic, I prepare readers to detect the presence of the corporate state project to amass wealth and subdue popular uprising against technocratic control by exposing the Orwellian function of war metaphors. In conjunction with the present entry, that April 2020 blog is useful in showing how propaganda tactics evolve. Now, there is a vaccine and the unvaccinated and those who criticize vaccines have become the enemies. But with vaccines failing to live up to their hype, and, moreover, the growing list of their negative effects—Bell’s palsy, clotting blood, Grave’s disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis, and even death—the narrative is evolving again.
The Associated Press headline, “Fauci says US headed in ‘wrong direction’ on coronavirus,” provides an opportunity to make an important observation: The US is indeed headed in the wrong direction on coronavirus and Fauci is the tip of the spear. The truth of the matter is that, from the git-go, world leaders, governed by corporate power and not the people who suffer that power, took the wrong path. We should never have locked down. We should never have masked up. We should never have suppressed therapeutics. We should never have put our hopes in a vaccine. We should have never hesitated for a second to investigate China and the Wuhan Lab, or Dr. Anthony Fauci and the US National Institute of Health and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Challenges to these errors haven’t gone away (they are growing) and the establishment, faced with mounting evidence that the vaccines don’t work, is desperately trying to save the project.
We are in the witch hunt phase of the moral panic (see my Priming for Control: How Mass Psychology is Used to Transform Lifeworlds; Panic and Paranoia Deaden Humanity and Sabotage Its Future; A Moral Panic. A Year Later). The Seattle Times goes after physician Joesph Mercola, whom the dark money funded pro-industry outlet Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) declared in their report public enemy number one (the White House is using the CCDH hit piece to persecute experts who challenge the industry narrative). The Seattle Times accuses Mercola of saying that the injections do not prevent infections. Nor do they provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease, he is accused of saying. The Seattle Times tells us that these “assertions were easily disprovable.” Only we are now being told that the injections do not in fact prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease. Apparently the Seattle Times didn’t get the memo that the propaganda message has shifted. The propaganda machine is vast and, however nimble it can be, there are still true believer outfits that fall behind.
The new message is to pretend that Big Pharma was saying these things all along. Therefore, those who tell you tell you things are trying to make something out of nothing. The Seattle Times also goes after Mercola for saying that the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.” But that’s what mRNA technology does. They’ve been saying this all along, too. The inventor of mRNA platform himself, Dr. Robert Malone, is warning people that these vaccines were rushed and the side effects that are making people very sick and even killing them were unavoidable. He hopes next generation product addresses the problem of the toxic effects of the spike protein the mRNA technology teaches your cells to produce. But in the meantime, there is no good reason for most people to get the shot. Indeed, there are a lot of good reasons for not taking the shot. Malone tells us that, for sure, these shots will not get us to herd immunity because the shots are not designed to do that. No T-cell memory. No antibodies. Again, the shots were only designed to train cells to produce a toxic protein in the hope that this would reduce the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. But the shots don’t do that, either. The Seattle Times, by treating the telling of a simple fact as the work of somebody who wants his audience to believe a terrible thing about the Pfizer shot telegraphs the terrible thing about the Pfizer shot: that it will “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.”
As I reported in my previous blog on this topic, after terrifying the public into getting injected with the experimental mRNA technology, so-called “breakthrough cases” started popping up everywhere. As I explained there, this is the rationalization covering cases where a fully vaccinated person is infected with the virus. We now know that breakthrough cases are hardly rare. CNBC is compelled to report that “Israel says Pfizer Covid vaccine is just 39% effective as delta spreads,” while hastening to add “but still prevents severe illness.” We were told that these vaccines were over 90 percent effective against the virus (Israel led the cheerleading with that statistic, you may recall), leading the public to believe that the vaccine was highly effective in conferring immunity, and that therefore they could go about their daily lives again (now states are preparing to mask up the vaccinated).
CNBC assures its readers, the vaccine “still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness, according to the Israeli data.” What CNBC fails to tell readers is that the vast majority of people who contract SARS-CoV-2 will also never develop serious illness nor be hospitalized. CNBC can leave out this important fact knowing that more than 40 percent of US progressives believe COVID-19 puts half of those who get in the hospital and a majority of British citizens and residence believe COVID-19 has killed ten percent of those who contracted the virus. This is lying by omission to a gullible audience. It’s shocking (not really) to learn that those who tell me to “believe in the science” can be counted among those possessing the same quality of mind progressives mock for believing in the devil (except many of the latter aren’t stepping up to participate in a reckless and sloppy mass experiment).
The public is now being told that no authorities ever claimed those who were vaccinated were immune from the disease or wouldn’t wind up in the hospital. According to Dr. Malone, the Pfizer and Moderna technology was never tested for efficacy to infection and transmission (the government told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there were never any studies on human safety at all). These shots were only designed to reduce the severity of illness—they believed. Moreover, the technology was rushed to market. They knew that the spike protein the recipient’s cells are taught to manufacture is a toxin (which is why the technology is sickening so many people) but they jabbed people with it anyway and have now pushed the experiment down to twelve-year-olds. They have so manipulated the public that progressive moms are frantically asking when their infants can be jabbed. And please don’t forget that the misleading messaging surrounding vaccines has made those who received the shot believe they are immune when, in fact, not only risk contracting the virus, but they risk spreading it to others. Those who cannot get vaccinated (for example, those who suffer from autoimmune disorders) are thus put at risk by vaccinated people who think they can’t catch and transmit the virus. Don’t kill grandma!
Skyhorse publishing (the same publisher that published a new edition of The Communist Manifesto with yours truly penning the Introduction), is out with a book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Kennedy knows as much on this subject as anybody and, crucially, operates from a critical populist framework that puts the interests of people ahead corporate profits. Our democracy and our freedom depend on people understanding the problem of regulatory capture, technocracy, and corporate governance, and acting on this understanding.
From The Real Anthony Fauci web page:
When the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since November 1984 and the leading architect of “agency capture”—the corporate seizure of America’s public health agencies by the pharmaceutical industry—happen to be the same man, conflicts of interest arise. Wearing both hats, Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci, tasked with managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, peddled and back-pedaled his prescriptions as Pharma profits and bureaucratic powers grew and public health waned.
Working in tandem with his long-term partner, billionaire Bill Gates, to corral Americans toward a single vaccine solution to COVID, Dr. Fauci committed zero dollars to studying or promoting early treatment with various drug combinations that could dramatically reduce deaths and hospitalizations. Meanwhile, in an assault on our First Amendment guarantee of free speech, Dr. Fauci’s Silicon Valley and media allies dutifully censored criticism of his policies on mainstream social media and collaborated to muzzle any medical information about therapies and treatments that might end the pandemic and compete with vaccines.
After effectively abolishing the First Amendment right to free speech, Dr. Fauci subverted our Seventh Amendment rights to jury trials by arranging to shield reckless and negligent pharmaceutical corporations from liability for injuries from any COVID countermeasures, including vaccines. His lockdowns targeted First Amendment religious freedom by closing churches—while keeping liquor stores open as “essential businesses”—and abolishing century-old religious exemptions to vaccination. Dr. Fauci’s enforced quarantine trampled the Constitutional rights of assembly, of association, and to petition the government, and our Fifth Amendment protection against uncompensated taking of private property. His arbitrary mask and lockdown diktats, without public hearings or rulemaking, strangled our Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment due process guarantees. His tracking and tracing initiatives bulldozed Constitutional rights to privacy and travel, and our Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches and seizures.
Finally, readers will see how Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates, asserting biosecurity rationales, worked together to finance and promote the very gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan that may have released the COVID-19 pathogen.
We have arrived at what Sheldon Wolin, in his terrific book Democracy, Inc., calls “inverted totalitarianism.” You must share this information. Please tell your family, friends, and neighbors about this book and about my blog. Tell them about Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA platform (these faux-vaccines that are sickening people). He appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room Pandemic yesterday (with Kennedy) and blew everyone away. I am sharing the podcast below. People need to know. Don’t believe the corporate propagandists. Follow the science. Follow the money.
Episode 1,120 – Dirty Dozen: The 12 Most Dangerous People in America Pt. 1
Episode 1,121 – Dirty Dozen: The 12 Most Dangerous People in America Pt. 2
The fallacious character of the argument is striking. It’s textbook appeal to authority. It’s also misinformation. It’s hardly a “couple of discredited doctors” pointing out the problems with the vaccine and public policy about COVID-19. It’s doctors and scientists who are not driving the corporate gravy train. And that is a lot of experts. But, yeah, so expertise matters. And that is why you should come to Freedom and Reason and read my blog. I am a scientist with a PhD who understands demographics, epidemiology, and statistical inference. So when you question whether I should write about COVID-19 as somebody who is not an expert on infectious diseases, please know that, chances are, you are hardly in a position to really know who I should listen to. You said so yourself.
Somebody already conveyed the spirit of this post in a fraction of the words. Social influencer, Ethan Siegel, in a discussion about why we should just trust Fauci and the CDC put it like this, “Don’t Even Think About It Bro.” Now that’s a meme. What is so sad about all this is how many people will read the post and think, “Yep, that’s me, Average Citizen. I don’t know jack shit. I don’t even have the capacity to figure out shit for myself. Please tell me what to do.” I call that cerebral hygiene. This is the religion of the progressive: scientism. It leaves you with just believing the authority who agrees with you. That is what confirmation bias really looks like. Like all those people who for decades couldn’t believe the Catholic Church—and the congregants, politicians, and police who enabled the church—would lie about pedophile priests. Consider how massive that conspiracy was.
I will leave you with a few memes. A little heaven and hell:
On October 11, 2020, in a blog titled Antifa and the Boogaloos: Condemning Political Violence Left and Right, I included reporting on the Michigan kidnapping plot. Recall that the Justice Department alleges that, over several months in 2020, members of the extremist group Wolverine Watchmen plotted and trained to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for tyranny. Authorities arrested the plotters before any part of the plan was executed. The men also discussed storming the Michigan capitol and taking politicians hostage. This is an important detail.
It is now being reported that the FBI allegedly used at least twelve informants in the Michigan kidnapping case, associates of that agency thus making up a majority of the plotters. Defense attorneys are crying entrapment, arguing that the FBI “induced or persuaded” the defendants to go along with kidnapping plot. If you are familiar with how the FBI works, it is not surprising that the plot was organized by or at least with the help of the FBI. The agency justifies developing apparent inchoate offenses to ostensibly disrupt the plans of domestic terrorists. There are hundreds of instances of the FBI doing this. The agency sees it as its job to have ears to the rails to hear approaching trains. (One may reasonably ask whether the practice gives the agency cover to run operations against political opponents.)
The mob at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, January 6, 2021.
I am not here to interrogate the Michigan case. Rather the case compels me to ask a more immediate question: How is it possible that, only a few months before the events of January 6, when a mob that included members of right wing extremists breeched the US Capitol Building at the nation’s Capitol (“A republic, if you can keep it”; A Peaceful Transition of Political Power), the very agency involved in hatching a plot that included plans to storm the Michigan capitol could be caught so flatfooted? No ears to rails for this train? Are we seriously expected to believe that January 6 was an intelligence failure?
At most, only one-tenth of Capitol arrestees can be classified as supporters of militias or militia-like groups such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters (“A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous). Presumably Nancy Pelosi’s commission will show that a handful of organized extremists instigated the breaching of the Capitol building. However, especially considering her rejection of Jim Jordan to sit on the commission (an action prompting House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to pull all of his choices from the panel), one question that probably won’t be addressed is how many FBI informants were involved in the planning of the events on January 6. Not only would the FBI face charges of incompetence and illegitimacy as an intelligence organization for failing to thwart the breech that day, but they might also be implicated in it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, decided to create a select committee to investigate the January 6 riot Senate Republicans filibustered a bipartisan bill to set up an outside commission.
What is the point of Pelosi’s commission? I grasp the importance of January 6 to the propaganda campaign to paint populist-nationalism as the greatest threat to American and marginalize those who question Joe Biden’s legitimacy as president. This is what was behind the Democrat’s (second) failed attempt to convict Donald Trump. Will the committee, in the context of a spectacle portraying January 6 as a Trump-inspired insurrection, cover up FBI involvement in it? (See also Cancelling Half the Nation: Progressives Reach for One-Party Rule.)
Far from attempting to preventing certification of the election, the riot instead stopped the process of interrogating state certifications, a process that would have returned the matter to the states, where there is clear evidence of election irregularities (see the Navarro Report). Is it not obvious that the establishment needs to raise the profile of a particular narrative of January 6 to distract from the November 3 movement to get to the bottom of the 2020 election? November 3 is what the Congress should be investigating. Where is that commission?
Will we learn the truth of Ashli Babbitt’s death at the hands of a gunman inside the Capitol? Who killed Babbitt? (To learn more about Babbitt see (“A republic, if you can keep it”; A Peaceful Transition of Political Power.) Will we learn the truth about what happened to Officer Brian Sicknick? We know that he was not killed on January 6. How did he die?
freedom and reason 