Author: The FAR Platform

In this farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower, two-term President of the United States, and Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force in the European theater in the great war against Fascism, said the following:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. 

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Many of you will recognize these words. Particularly those of you on the libertarian left who are concerned with the concentration of power in the military-industrial complex. Much as been made of them. However, less has been made of the words that immediately followed:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

We have become Eisenhower’s worst fears. Enabled by progressivism, the technocracy has won. Science and technology are now concentrated in the hands of a vast corporate power, the media mouthpieces of this small network of corporations running interference by projecting an official scientific outlook while marginalizing those doing the important work in science: dissenting from doctrine.

Famously, albeit years late, and too partisan for my tastes, political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, described our situation as “inverted totalitarianism,” a managed and illiberal democracy, run by corporations, economic concerns trumping all other considerations.

Richard Grossman, director of Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, understood inverted totalitarianism as progressivism’s triumph over populism, the latter an attempt to bring power back to the people, to make government accountable to concerns closer to them. Grossman lay out his argument in several talks available on the Internet (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”). In his account, progressivism, its institutionalization totalized under the Roosevelt Administration in the crisis of depression and war, vanquished populism; or, more accurately, banished it to conservative circles, and with it labor democracy. This was the roots of the war on labor and the left Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pursued in earnest, laying the groundwork for the aggressive transnationalization of the corporate establishment, successive administrations moving farm and factory overseas and drawing cheap labor here to replace American workers, ceding national sovereignty to the international order of financial innovators. In a word, globalization.

As Grossman points out, not even the monarchs of feudalist and early capitalist period tolerated corporate power when it threaten sovereignty. Indeed, as Grossman tells us, corporations held power under absolutism, as well, but it was power delegated by the monarch. Corporations that exceeded their authority were called before the king to be reprimanded, the recalcitrant not dressed down but dismantled, their charters revoked. This is why Thomas Jefferson, a primary author of the American Republic, said of banks and corporations that “the selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” His conclusion from the observation: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” The “aristocracy of moneyed corporations” is an accurate description of power in the present-day state of affairs.

In theory, corporations are animals of the state. But, unlike their predecessors, states are now the servants of corporate power. Corporations have not only captured politics. They have captured science. And they relentlessly distort its assumptions, methods, and findings.

So we see a thing like the permanent-military complex come into existence in the post-WWII period, fully arrived in Eisenhower’s day. The trepidation in his words telling us that he didn’t see it coming or he was keen on convincing himself that its coming lay in the future. In the latter, he could then could wax noble in his farewell and warn of its coming, while absolving himself of the tyranny realized in his day, that emerged under his watch, masking his failure to stop it. Frankly, he looks haunted in that video.

Whether Eisenhower saw it in real time, C. Wright Mills saw it clearly in the moment. In The Causes of World War Three, written in 1959, he wrote:

The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as “functions” of a rational social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? Auschwitz and Hiroshima—are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally—and absurdly—planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.

Weber might have written these words. Indeed, he did write these words in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905:

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.

Military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory…. organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the help of suit-able methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production. On this basis, the American system of “scientific management” triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines—in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is robbed of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm though the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort

This whole process of rationalization, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.

Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963, analyses the situation of a man who was merely “doing his job” and “obeyed orders,” that he “obeyed the law.” The work covers the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962. Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, had tasked Eichmann with managing the logistics of transporting Jews from the ghettos to the extermination camps during the Judeocide. Eichmann carried his task forward with no inconsiderable success. His ambitions, Arendt argues, were more bureaucratic than ideological.

Noam Chomsky, author of the landmark Manufacturing Consent, put this well in his notorious debate with William F. Buckley on Firing Line in 1969:

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.

One of the benefits of listening to voices who see things clearly and see things coming is that they give us a perspective beyond the consciousness that blinds us to the enslaving structures that produce that consciousness. It may be the case that in a future world we won’t be able to see the reality in front of us. For many people, that world is the present one. Contemporary progressivism is a clinic in false consciousness. The scientific-industrial complex, its latest manifestation the medical-industrial complex, has become an ideological force shaping our worldview. It appears to be even more destructive than the military-industrial complex, which of course it includes, but taken on its own reasonably reassessed as a tick of American-style rationalization. The scientific-industrial complex has overtaken the world.

This essay is a follow up to a recent blog entry: Science and Conspiracy: COVID-19 and the New Religion. I encourage you to read it.

This essay is not about Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death at the hands of Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael. The men have been charged with murder and a court will likely hear the case. This essay is about the way a collection of moral entrepreneurs are plugging the shooting into a narrative they portrays contemporary America as a country where anti-black prejudice is ubiquitous. From that standpoint, Arbery’s death is not just the homicidal actions of two white men with guns in a pickup truck, but the result of a pervasive white supremacy that puts all black men at special risk for racist violence.

There was a time in our country where such a generalization would hold up under scrutiny. The literature on the history of racism and lynching in the United States is extensive. I have contributed to this literature in an essay published in The Journal of Black Studies, “Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide,” and an empirical article in Crime, Law, & Social Change, “Race and Lethal Forms of Social Control: A Preliminary Investigation into Execution and Self-Help in the United States, 1930-1964.” I also blogged about this on Freedom and Reason, in the entry “Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.” But the narrative no longer holds up and I’ve become increasingly troubled by the ideological practice of selecting and amplifying events in ways that distort the relative risks black people face in America.

Before moving to a discussion of why the narrative is not only wrong but harmful to black Americans and the general interests of the American working class regardless of race, I want to clarify the matter of appropriate and inappropriate resort to abstraction. Race is a social invention constructed from ancestry. Racism is the ideology in which phenotypic or physically apparent variation are said to be meaningfully organized into groupings called “races.” Since there is no underlying biological truth to this claim, supposing race is a real thing commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or reification. However, aggregate statistics on demographic and behavioral characteristics can provide evidence for meaningful generalizations. Whereas it is inappropriate to substitute an abstraction, such as white person, for a concrete individual identified as white and attempt to make all whites responsible for that individual’s actions (there is no empirical basis for such a generalization), it is appropriate to look at the demographic patterns of crime and violence to determine the relative risk individuals with certain identities face. The progressive left elevates the inappropriate resort to generalization to the level of truth, while dismissing the appropriate use of abstraction as so much noise. This is emblematic of the postmodernist sensibility that underpins identity politics.

Let’s look at appropriate abstractions. Blacks constitute approximately 12 percent of the US population. Black males are less than half that percentage. Yet black males are responsible for more than half of all homicides that occur in the United States. The victims of black male homicide are overwhelmingly other black males. The intraracial character of crime is typical across several Index Crime categories identified in the Uniform Crime Report published by the FBI. While the UCR has been problematic in the past, it is accurate with respect to the most serious crimes. Moreover, overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime is also found in the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

These facts are not controversial in terms of their broad accuracy of representing actual phenomena. To the extent that there is interracial homicide, white people are more likely to be victimized by a black perpetrator than a black person is to be victimized by a white perpetrator. When it comes to robbery, to take another serious crime of violence, black males are much more likely to target white victims than the other way around. The brute fact is that black males are overrepresented in serious crime. Indeed, over half of all prisoners are violent offenders and their overrepresentation in our penitentiaries is explained by their overrepresentation in serious crime. (See “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.”)

In sum, the facts do not support the claim that the greatest risk to black males are white people. Quite the contrary.

Moreover, the statistics do not support the claim that black men are more likely to be killed by police officers than a white man, a particular narrative Arbery’s death is (inappropriately) being leveraged to sustain (social media is flooded with memes of this character). See the work of Roland Fryer’s 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” See also my entry on this topic which summarizes these and others findings: “Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect.”

So while it is true that the police are more likely to interact with black civilians, as pointed out by Kevin App and colleagues in Pulled Over, in part because blacks are more likely to be engaged in activities that draw the attention of the police, police are loathe to shoot black males. What we are seeing presently in the moral panic about the shooting is not based on a legitimate resort to evidence, but the agenda of progressives trying to resurrect Black Lives Matter in an election year, for political purposes, a movement that was from the beginning based on a myth about interracial violence present-day America. Whites are being made out to be folk devils sui generis.

This agenda has been given a powerful voice in the figure of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a possible Vice-Presidential candidate to run alongside former Vice-President and long-time Senator Joe Biden (who has a troubled history with respect to race relations), who accuses President Donald Trump of using rhetoric that green-lights racists. Bottoms claims that the lynching of Arbery (and I will leave to one side conceptual quibbles about how lynching should be defined) can be traced back to Washington.

“With the rhetoric that we hear coming out of the White House,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union, “I think many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that we otherwise would not see in 2020.” The connection between Trump’s rhetoric and Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael is a claim made without any evidence. I could not with any integrity pin this shooting on Trump. I suspect that he is as horrified by the video as the average person. But readers should note that Bottoms is in the same breath acknowledging that what happened to Arbery is so rare that it would likely not have happened without a Donald Trump presidency. Just leave out the bit about Donald Trump and Bottoms is on solid ground.

What Bottoms’ admission means is that those journalists who make this shooting out to be representative of race relations in America, especially those progressives who have taken to social media to once more raise the alarm about white privilege, are wrong to leverage such a horrific event in this way, even if the perpetrators acted with racist motive. This is not the America of the post-Reconstruction period. It is a very different America, an America where the risk to blacks by white racist violence is vanishingly small, extraordinary in its occurrence.

Indeed, the risk to blacks in America is far greater in the black community, where structural inequalities and cultural attitudes have disorganized society and made violent crime an ordinary fact of daily life. Rather than dealing with this reality, the progressive left, while skirting the problem of social class (which I will come to), reflexively strives to portray whites as the singular cause of the problems of the black community, a claim for which there is no evidence, wrenching out of context a rare event and misrepresenting it as a sign of an epidemic of white supremacist violence enabled by the original sin of white privilege. This claim has the character of theological truth, This is not our reality.

Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death at the hands of the McMichaels is a terrible thing. The justice system is working as it should in bringing them up on charges of murder (although it may have hesitated when it shouldn’t have). But Arbery’s death cannot (or at least should not) be purposed in the way pundits, politicians, and progressive memes suggest. More than the inappropriate resort to generalization, to only care about the victims of homicidal violence when their perpetrators are white or police officers suggests a genuine lack of concern about the fate of black males in American society.

All this indicates that black homicide victims are only important when they can be used to perpetuate a political agenda that claims that the United States is a society that operates fundamentally on the basis of white supremacy, an objectively false narrative. And it must be pointed out that the exploitation of Arbery’s deaths for these purposes functions to further divide the proletariat by race, disorganizing the solidarity the working class so desperately needs in its struggle against capitalism. What lies ultimately at the heart of the urban violence that disproportionately harms black Americans is a social system that is inadequate to human rights and needs. Progressivisms appear to exist today only to disrupt our consciousness of this reality.

The divisive piece is why Joe Biden has taken up the agenda. His pandering has a grand purpose. Arbery’s shooting “resonates in so many ways across threads of our history into the present day,” he said at a virtual roundtable with black lawmakers, pulling the past too easily into the present. “By now many of us have seen that harrowing footage of Ahmaud Arbery out on a jog on a beautiful day in February in Florida, in Georgia, shot down in cold blood, essentially lynched before our very eyes, 2020 style.” It’s as if only the year has changed. Biden noted that the family deserved justice before adding: “But our nation deserves it as well. We need to reckon with this, this goes on. These vicious acts call to mind the darkest chapters of our history.” 

“This goes on.” Let those words roll around in your brain. It does not go on. Those dark chapters are in our past. We have reckoned with this. Decades ago. To be sure, our history is undeniable to those prepared to admit to it (count me among them), but it is also undeniable that the supremacy of whiteness is not our present or our future. To make this murder out as an indictment of America not only sustains a false narrative about our country, it denies the progress we have made as a country. That we overcame white supremacy is a sign of what is right about the American project. Denying this accomplishment drives a wedge between the working people of this country on the basis of race, which, when you strip everything else away, is what racism was about in the first place.

As with the press conference with doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, California on April 24, 2020, Plandemic, a documentary about the COVID-19 hysteria, is being pummeled by the running dogs and useful idiots of the medial-industrial complex. As with the doctor’s press conference, YouTube (along with Facebook and other social media platforms) quickly moved to censor the documentary. While this blog entry, as was my blog entry on the Bakersfield doctors, is inspired by the media frenzy and social media action surrounding the documentary, I will not pursue here a defense of Plandemic. I simply cannot pursue that matter right now given other commitments. However, I will take this opportunity to make some points about how the rhetoric and status of science are used by corporate propagandists and their lackeys to discredit and marginalize those who raise objections to the medical-industrial complex.

This would be the case regardless of whether Plandemic was correct in whole or part. It was not unexpected that Plandemic would trigger pro-vaccine zealots. The memes and takedowns had to come fast and furious on social media. It’s a reflex. As some readers will surely already know, one of the targets of pro-vaccine zealotry has been lawyer and environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The true believers go after him the same way industries across the spectrum went after Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson (remember how the chemical manufacturers came after her?), and anybody else who stood and stands up to corporate power and the corruption of conflict of interests. It doesn’t matter whether RFK, Jr. or Dr. Judy Mikovits, the research scientist featured prominently in Plandemic, is a crank. RFK, Jr. is routinely painted as an “antivaxer” even while he is pro-vaccine. “I am for vaccines,” RFK, Jr. said in an interview with Science. “I am pro-vaccine. I had all my kids vaccinated. I think vaccines save lives.” But if you don’t swallow hook, line, sinker the claim of the pharmaceutical oligopoly, then you are an “antivaxer” even when you vaccinate your own children. Just like if you question what chemicals we should inject into our environment and bodies and with what processes we manufacture these chemicals you suffer from a psychiatric disorder called “chemophobia.”

Why does the truth matter so little to these people? Because it is the demand that the medical-industrial complex change the way it does business that is at issue not vaccine safety. Vaccine safety doesn’t matter to the industry. They are protected from liability anyway (learn about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and its billions of payouts bankrolled by your tax dollars). What matters is the billions in profit vaccines generate. Its about the shareholders not the stakeholders. Given the number of viruses in the world, the sky is the limit in terms of large and sustainable profits for the investor class. So industry propagandists recode skepticism as paranoia. This is a standard method for shutting down critical thinking. This intervention has been most powerfully effective among progressives, who operate with a profound double consciousness concerning regulatory institutions such as the CDC and the FDA. On the one hand, we must uncritically accept their claims regarding pharmaceuticals, while acknowledging that the Washington establishment is beholden to the industries polluting land, air, and waters, what is called regulatory capture. Progressives are horrified by the FDA and USDA regulation of the meat industry, to take the obvious example. Pharmaceuticals? Meh.

So here we are with folks in a frenzy on social media admonishing us in the most strident terms imaginable to “trust science.” Be a good dog. Don’t spit in the fan. But, hell, a good scientist doesn’t even trust himself. That’s why a scientist never claims to have proven anything and why he gets up everyday trying to disprove his claims and the claims of others. Faith in science is why the history of science is littered with the corpses of stupid ideas—and the human and other victims of policies and practices based on those ideas (not to mention the research subjects upon whom those ideas were “established”). They never talk about how scientists as human beings are status and wealth seekers with massive egos, insatiable appetites, and destructive ambitions. They never talk about how industry pulls eager scientists into their money-making web, directs their research, and corrupts them.

Have you noticed that most of the people saying “trust science” are not scientists themselves? How they will mock those who also aren’t scientists for thinking they know science when they themselves are not scientifically literate but are absolutely sure they know which scientist is right? How they don’t usually even spend any time actually looking at the science in question? Rather they appeal to some authority who “confirms” their opinion, opinion generated by partisan ideological commitments. Or they just attack those whose claims do not align with their opinions with memes and ridiculous analogies, even when their targets are scientists. The “new skepticism” on the progressive left is not skepticism at all, but a mob who finds (more like fed) experts in support of their views and then promote them as if they represent the One True Science. Actual skeptics become conspiracy theorists, cranks, quacks, and wing nuts—like the person who might ask the Witchfynder General whether the Malleus Maleficarum is the best way of dealing with persons with disturbed psyches. Or, for that matter, whether the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association is. Watch out for pitchforks and torches while they gaslight you.

If two groups of scientists make competing claims, who are you supposed to trust? Of course you go with the group of scientists who are saying what you wish to be true. Wrong. Confirmation bias. You educate yourself and study the science. Or you tell the truth: “I don’t know.” Or, even better, be honest and say, “I don’t care to know. I only care to believe this because it serves some agenda I may or may not know I serve.” Appeal to authority is not science. Experts make stupid claims—often claims that they don’t even believe. Take Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College (please!). This isn’t the first time this man has been spectacularly wrong. “But he is an expert!” Yeah, so were the monsters who performed lobotomies. Thanks for the global economic meltdown, Neil. Hope your trysts were satisfactory (I hope she or her family are not at risk from your COVID-19 infection).

The appeal to authority is a faith-based exercise. Cherry picking scientists you want to tell you to be afraid so you hide in your basement is like relying on clergy for doctrine and guidance. COVID-19 is like the devil. What does Donald Trump call it? “The invisible enemy”? Whatever we think we can trust in the world, the last trustworthy practice is that which is based in faith. Yet, after centuries of Enlightenment, people are treating science like religion. And since there are plainly different churches on the terrain of this picture of science, scientific debate becomes a sectarian affair. Each have their own clergy. But only one of them has the truth. And that is why the zealots want social media corporations to censor information. They have to smash the heretics. And they have the corporations and the assets class at their back.

So it is that you either you believe that the virus was the result of a person in eating an infected bat at a wet market in Wuhan China (the theory the Communist Party promotes) or you believe it was a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese government (which the Chinese Communist Party denies). Are these the only two options available?

We might as well just toss away the first option without much trouble. The first documented cases weren’t found in people eating bats. Bat-eating proles represent the Chinese Communist Party slagging the average Chinese person, whom they loathe (you do not deny people freedom if you love them). The authorities bleached the wet market in question so it’s not like you can falsify the claim anyway. It’s a stupid theory.

As for second option, why would the virus necessarily need to be created in a lab? Is it not possible that the biotech labs in Wuhan working with coronaviruses, in particular SARS type coronaviruses (this one is SARS-CoV-2, the successor of SARS-CoV), had an accident? Why, in 2018, were US science diplomats sent on repeated visits to the lab working on this reporting back to US State Department of serious problems with the work being conducted there, especially around safety? (State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses, The Washington Post.) Why would the chief researcher at the Wuhan Institute of VirologyWuhan, Shi Zhengli, tell Scientific America that, when the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention called her in to look at samples of the virus, she wondered, “Could they have come from our lab?” (“How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus.” She changed her story to say she knew it could not possibly have come from her lab.) Why would this researcher suspect the virus came from her lab if her lab wasn’t working with SARS-Cov viruses? Why would they call her in if they assumed that it was possible that it did? Why did the international community come together in 2014 to emplace a moratorium on gain-of-function research when it learned that researchers were altering potentially lethal viruses to become infectious in humans? And why would the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci at the heart of this research, announce in 2017 that they would resume funding gain-of-function experiments involving, among other things, SARS coronavirus. (“Ban on gain-of-function studies ends,” The Lancet.) Is it troubling that Fauci is so sure that this virus did not come from a lab? Is it not true that the SARS-Cov virus from 2003 has on more than one occasion escaped containment and sickened individuals? All these questions are based not on conspiracy but on facts. All these questions are simply matters of record turned into questions. Does anybody really believe that the Chinese Communist Party intends to abide by international law? The CCP is the modern-day equivalent of the Nazi Party. They put people in concentration camps and harvest organs from prisoners and political enemies. It appears that blind trust in science begets blind truth in communists. But why is the United States taxpayer funding research in knowingly unsafe labs in China working with SARS viruses?

So how about a third option? All the evidence suggests that this came from a lab accident that the CCP tried to cover up, thus allowing the virus to escape China and infect the world. This is branded a “conspiracy theory.” Why is challenging the official narrative of the Chinese Communist Party and the scientists in their employ a conspiracy theory? (By the way, there are conspiracies and one can have theories about them. Ask any prosecutor who has works a criminal conspiracy case.) Whose side are people on? The people of the world, which includes the Chinese people, or the Chinese Communist Party?

As for Plandemic and the people asking how to stop it, you don’t stop it—you rebut it. And you do so in a sober and charitable manner. Like a good scientist. That’s the way things work in a free and open society. Totalitarian societies like China remove posts and videos. Free societies don’t. I understand why Forbes and other corporate state propaganda units push totalitarianism. Liberty is for them contingent on their interests. I know progressives admire China’s approach. For them, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is an instruction manual (sorry to be cliché). But this is America. Wave the freedom flag high. Trust the proles to figure it out. Stopping being such an elitist snob.

This is grim work, but it has to be done. Looking at deaths per million, from all causes, and calculating deaths in excess of the average deaths for a given period, one finds that, whereas healthcare services in Great Britain are reporting more than 32,000 deaths in that country over the initial six-week period, the metric measuring all deaths over the same period finds around 11,000 deaths above the normal, roughly two-thirds that number, assuming all excess deaths are attributed to COVID-19. These deaths are disproportionately occurring in long-term care facilities. In fact there is a record number of deaths in long-term care facilities against comparable periods. One finds a similar pattern in Sweden.What this suggests is that a significant proportion of deaths that are occurring are being attributed by healthcare services to COVID-19, deaths that otherwise would be attributed to something else, typically influenza. But, strangely, influenza deaths have come to a sudden halt and now most pneumonia cases are being attributed COVID-19.

We use deaths per million because that allows us to know if something unusual is occurring in a population and to then look at what might explain excess deaths. This is why demography is so important and why reporting by bureaucracies are problematic (for example, bureaucracies are subject to definition creep). Average deaths in comparable periods do not normally vary much without extraordinary cause. If 30,000 people die in the United Kingdom from a single cause, then that is an unusual occurrence that would be reflected in deaths per million. We would see approximately 30,000 excess deaths for the period. But excess deaths are one third that figure for the same time frame. We could assume that 20,000 deaths were somehow avoided to allow room for 20,000 COVID-19 deaths. But why would that be the case? Why are we expecting there to be 20,000 fewer deaths in this time frame? It was not the lockdown that was implemented on March 23 that kept people out of their cars, for example. At best that would have only a minimal impact. If we are reasonable, then we consider that 20,000 deaths are being attributed to COVID-19 that would otherwise be attributed to another cause or other causes, but very likely influenza. In other words the 30,000 being attributed to a cause are consuming a large proportion of normal deaths in the comparable period.

So, suppose in a normal year in the UK there are 20,000 deaths from influenza. These are pneumonia cases typically explained by influenza. Without blood serum tests, it is difficult to distinguish between different causes of pneumonia. But health services usually chalk up those deaths to influenza. Deaths from influenza are relatively stable over time. Suppose that we find in a comparable period a year with 10,000 excess deaths. We look at them and see they are pneumonia deaths. We could say that this was a bad influenza year. But let’s say they are COVID-19. But the NHS says there are 30,000 deaths from COVID-19. That not only means that 10,000 of those excess deaths from pneumonia are from COVID-19 (and we are assuming this), but that there were 20,000 fewer pneumonia deaths from influenza. There is no reason to believe this is true. It would contradict the standard epidemiological models that successfully predict the influenza burden every year.

Here’s a dramatic analogy to illustrate the point. Suppose the world alleges a genocide occurred in a communist country taking 3 millions lives. Suppose we look at deaths per million and find an excess of 100-200 thousand deaths. We would not suspect that this was just an odd year in which millions of expected deaths did not occur in order to allow for 3 million deaths by genocide. Maybe there was large-scale killing. One-two hundred thousand is not a small number of deaths. And in this case at the hands of human agents. But it wasn’t 3 million people who were killed. We would reasonably suspect that normal deaths—say, from poverty and hunger—are being redefined as deaths by genocide that in fact had other causes. Why would we redefine deaths from other causes to represent deaths by genocide? Politics. Ideology. 

* * *

Obviously I’m down with worker protections. But the threats made by teachers unions in the United States to keep schools closed is absurd. Protect the vulnerable. Let the rest of humanity go about their business. I heard an idea being floated that we should test students every week and do contract tracing. Anybody who suggests that’s feasible, let alone reasonable, is talking out of their ass. It’s as if people have collectively forgotten basic scientific understanding and moved to full-on stupid panic. How could anybody with any experience in a public education setting believe that you could contain the spread of a virus or any other crud short of shuttering the schools? Children are viral and bacterial factories. If the virus is so awful, then end public education now. But if it’s so awful that we had to shut down society, then we should never re-open society because the virus is still just as awful. 

Except that it’s not. For those people who are not in the high risk categories, this illness is rarely fatal. If there is a fatality in a healthy person, then one should look very carefully into the patient’s history to find out if there was an underlying condition. Half the people who get this virus are asymptomatic. In around 90% of the people who get this virus, it is, at most, mild. The majority or large pluralities of deaths from this virus are occurring in long-term care facility among those who are severely ill. Sorry to be blunt about it but many of these individuals would have died this year or next year anyway from the conditions that made COVID-19 dangerous for them—especially in light of the inadequate facilities housing them. We have never treated a virus this way. And there have been viruses to come down the pike that have been a lot worse.

During the 1957-58 influenza pandemic (H2N2), 116,000 Americans dead from the Shanghai flu—out of a population of 175 million. During the 1968-69 influenza pandemic (H3N2), 100,000 dead Americans from the Hong Kong flu—out of a population of 200 million. During the 2019-20 COVID-19 pandemic, 38,000 Americans dead from the Wuhan virus (so far)—out of a population of 328 million. These are all CDC numbers. The fact is that SARS-CoV-2 is not the worst virus to hit America since the Spanish flu (the H1N1 strain that is still with us). Not even close. Deaths per millions statistics with the Shanghai and Hong Kong flu seasons were much, much higher than the deaths per millions statistics for the Wuhan virus. 

I was not alive in 1957, but I was in 1968. I don’t remember hearing anything about the Hong Kong flu. Had we gone through a panic like the one we’re going through right now, I would surely remember it.

* * *

This virus is generally safe among healthy adults and children. There have probably been at most around a thousand deaths in those 45 years of age or younger. At most only around 100 deaths for those 25 and younger. Those persons who do die in these age ranges likely have underlying conditions and immunocompromised systems. Even those over the age of 45 are very unlikely to die from this disease without other health problems. This virus rarely kills on its own. There is a heightened risk for death among the elderly. But those who are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities are especially at risk for death. Only about 5% of the elderly are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Yet in the state of Pennsylvania 70% of those who died from COVID-19 were in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. There are similar numbers across the country. This is horrifying.

There are two big scandals surrounding the COVID-19 situation. First there is the scandal of locking down society when the vast majority of population is not at risk of serious problems from this virus. That’s the really big scandal. We shut down society for a virus that isn’t particularly lethal. The second scandal is how horrible our nursing homes and assisted living facilities are. We need a congressional investigation into the conditions in which our most vulnerable populations live. And we need to hold the administrators of these facilities criminally responsible for large scale death among these populations. The very groups that are institutions are supposed to look out for the most utterly failed to keep those populations safe. Clearly locking down society did not protect the most vulnerable among us.

* * *

You can’t run an epic fear campaign this hard and for this long and not expect to see dramatic effects. A poll found that 8 in 10 respondents said they would not feel comfortable dining in at a restaurant, and two-thirds wouldn’t want to shop in a clothing store. They’re being told by authorities that they shouldn’t feel safe in these situations and it has worked. Rationally, they are in no appreciably greater danger in these places, so it is not a matter of the public coming to this position based on reason or experience. The fear has been manufactured. This has been the most successful propaganda campaign since the crime wave hysteria in the post-WWII period. The public appears well-conditioned to accept totalitarianism. 

US payrolls fell by more than 20 million jobs last month. That’s a decade’s worth of job gains wiped out in few weeks. The economic consequences of this will likely last for a decade or more. The government will not subsidize millions of workers to shelter in place. Eventually, people will have to come out of their caves and go back to work. Millions have lost savings, health care, homes, and memories. The attempt to mitigate a virus has produced an unmitigated societal disaster.

* * *

Here’s a few things that I’m going to say right now to get it out of the way. I will not get a vaccine for this—if they develop a vaccine. Get jabbed if you want. I’m not getting jabbed. If that means that I get passed over for opportunities in life, then consider my refusal and suffering a protest against irrational and oppressive demands. I will not wear a mask unless I am around vulnerable people in close quarters. In other words, I will wear a mask in situations where I would wear a mask anyway. And then not for my safety, but for the safety of the vulnerable. I will take no special precautions in my social activities for this virus. I am not going to treat my brothers and sisters as disease vectors. I will not support policies that stigmatize people for carrying this virus. Social distancing and social isolation are cruel and unusual and reveal the pathology of safetyism, a crippling new religion of fear of the normal. The mask, the isolation, the mocking, shaming—these are rituals to reinforce the myth that social life of dangerous. It makes a fetish of mere existence.

The CDC announced today that 37,308 have died in the United States from COVID-19, a far cry from more nearly 70 thousand claimed by the media. These CDC numbers, based on death certificates, are updated through May 1, week ending April 25 (from February 1). The number one will find in a Google search, which presently stands at 68,276, are from the World Health Organization, the running dogs of the Chinese Communist Party.

This virus is not as deadly as they told us even if we calculate the numbers using confirmed cases. For those who are not very old or who suffer from a handful of health conditions, this virus is not very deadly at all. Those younger than 45 years of age, have seen fewer than 1000 deaths from this virus. That’s a death rate of 0.08% (assuming 1.18 million confirmed cases). If you look into those cases you will no doubt find a condition which made those persons vulnerable. For those younger than 25 years of age, there have been fewer than 100 deaths associated with this virus. That’s a death rate of 0.008%, a vanishingly small number. Again, there will be health problems that explain this. When you consider that the true number of cases is between 25 and 85 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, then the death rate is many times lower (I true you can do math). These deaths, as tragic as they are, do not justify all of the harm to health, jobs, security, and well-being, that this shut down has brought about.

I’ve been saying from the beginning that we should’ve protected the vulnerable and let this virus burn through the population. We should do that now. We should not go a day longer with the lockdown. The evidence is clear that the policies pursued by the federal government and the various states represent a monumental error. We are all paying dearly for this mistake.

* * *

As expected, those who are confronted with these numbers thank the lockdown for “fattening the curve.” But what is the evidence that the lockdown saved lives? Hospitals across the country laid off employees because they canceled appointments to make room for a wave of patients who never materialized. Hospitals have ventilators coming out of their ears. Only in a few places were hospitals overwhelmed, and that wasn’t because of the virus but because of mismanagement and ruthless cost cutting to maximize salaries of administrators, doctors, and shareholders. Flatten the curve is not science. It’s ideology.

However, social distancing probably accomplished this: keeping the population of health persons from developing herd immunity, which means we’re going to have to suffer this virus in the future with a greater force than we would have had we done what I recommended.

For our awareness of the disease until mid-March, there were fewer than fifty deaths. For a pneumonia season, COVID-19 was sharply truncated arriving when it did (likely from a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China). Next fall we’re going to have a full season of COVID-19, and we will confront the virus without having acquired herd immunity. Moreover, there will be no vaccine (there may never be). So to the extent that one could say that we saved lives this time around, when we weigh that against the health, security, and well-being of people next time around, we see that the policies pursued still amount to a monumental error. In an previous blog entry, I called it a pyrrhic victory.

Had we let healthy adults get this virus, those who are vulnerable would enjoy more protection, because there would be fewer carriers of the disease. We’re told that opponents of the lockdown want the vulnerable to die. But it’s actually the opposite of what they claim. If healthy adults get the virus, they will likely have an immunity to it. Since most people don’t know they have it, fewer people with it means fewer transmissions of the disease. Herd immunity reduces community spread.

On top of more COVID-19, we will likely be mired in an economic depression, which means that we will be severely hampered in dealing with this disease—and a myriad of other health matters—next fall. Real swift thinking there, flatten-the-curvers. Thanks for chucking basic biology out the window.

* * *

Re: this obnoxious claim that those who want to open society “want to kill grandma.” Here’s their dilemma. Approximately half a million people are killed every year in Europe from air pollution. Around 5 million people are killed globally annually because of air pollution. That number must be very great in America, as well, much greater than deaths from COVID-19 (and now even greater than when I put this challenge to Facebook’s fearmongering wokescolds on May 1). Deaths from air pollution are set to decline substantially because of the economic shutdowns across the globe. When the shutdowns are lifted, dirty economic activity will resume. Which means that the pollution that kills so many people will return and kill again.

Are those who argue that those who want to re-open the economy want to kill grandma with COVID-19 going to also argue that those who want to re-open the economy want to kill grandma with air pollution? Are they prepared to be consistent and argue that we should not reopen the economy because pollution has lethal consequences? Moreover, are they prepared to accept responsibility for the benefits of economic growth that has killed so many people in the past? After all they were prepared to tolerate tens of thousands of flu deaths every year for the sake of keeping society open. Why COVID-19 and not pollution? Why COVID-19 and not influenza?

* * *

This “flattening the curve” business is absurd even if limited to the claim that we didn’t want to overwhelm hospitals. You don’t close schools and shutter the economy to not overwhelm hospitals. Those populations are extremely unlikely to get sick from this virus. You want hospitals for people who need medical attention; you don’t cancel tests and procedures in anticipation of a crisis that, for most places, never occurred, nor was likely to occur based on what we were seeing. A lot of people saw their cancer go undiagnosed and grow during this period. Cancer and a lot of other medical conditions. There is no evidence that bottlenecks in our hospitals had anything to do with the virus. It had to do with the way the health care system operates. And then only in some places. That’s a scandal that the media should look into.

* * *

Among the left-liberals freaking over people protesting the lockdown, it makes sense that a population sheepishly submitting to extreme restrictions on the freedom of movement would be less inclined to defend other basic freedoms of citizens such as assembly and speech. The lockdown has been effective in entrenching a general authoritarian attitude among progressives. They see individuals with guns as an opportunity to trash liberty and validate their own authoritarian desire. The call for the Bill of Rights to be abrogated by the public health authorities.

This brand of authoritarian sentiment is all over social media. People are clamoring to not only have their own freedom stripped from them (and then glorify their sacrifice), but to see the freedom of everybody taken away. If this was the point of this exercise, then mission accomplished. We’re becoming Communist China. Of course, their authoritarian is qualified: those measures perceived as restricting those freedoms with which they identify, even if imaginary, are great injustices justifying protest. They just don’t think those who have a different point of view should have that same freedom.

COVID-19 doesn’t scare me. I’ve looked at the evidence and there’s nothing really extraordinary about this virus, certainly nothing that justifies the state’s response to it. we are plainly in the midst of mass hysteria. It’s the left-liberals and progressives who demand the shuttering of society, the radical curtailment of personal freedom, and the arbitrary violation of basic human rights, and shame of those who still wish to be free—they’re the terrifying element in all this. 

I might have expected that politicians would impose draconian measures amid a manufactured crisis. Those actions represent a long trend in the diminishment of freedom and democracy in America and around the world. Remember what we know: the world is governed by a corporate state apparatus that routinely dispenses with democratic principle and individual liberty. Now they’re using public health to justify totalitarian action. What can’t they justify with this new authority?

* * *

Finally, on this accusation of selfishness, I have an autoimmune disorder and two of the leading comorbidities that put me at special risk for serious complication from COVID-19 and a host of other diseases. I’m spring chicken, either. I would hate to think people would lose their jobs, homes, and savings on account of my personal circumstances. I don’t want my age or conditions to hurt or oppress others.

I wouldn’t care much for the wellbeing and freedom of others if I desired that they be shackled by my infirmities. I don’t like to shame people, but it’s a selfish way to think about one’s existence to think otherwise. Please don’t stay home or wear masks for my sake. Live your life. If you need my permission, then I’m giving it to you. But you really don’t need my permission. You need to get the government off your back. Liberty is the most precious thing in the world.

Remember, defending liberty is not a rightwing issue.

In this essay I take on the “debunking” claims surrounding the claims of Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi of Accelerated Urgent Care, whose press conference was removed from YouTube for violating its community standards. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of that social media platform, announced on April 23, the day before Erickson and Messihi’s press conference was posted, “Anything that goes against WHO recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so remove is another really important part of our policy.” I will focus on the criticisms of Erickson’s arguments. They are often uncharitable, irrelevant, or wrong.

The alleged debunking is best described as the action of a fog machine. Because the video was widely shared and is particularly effective (and Erickson is a compelling figure), those who wish to keep alive the myth that COVID-19 is a unique threat to Americans and who insist, therefore, that extreme government measures of shelter-in-place, social distancing, and the wearing of masks are justified, recognize they need to delegitimize the messenger.

Of course, one may quibble with aspects of the claims made in the video. But highlighting the adversarial character of normal science is not debunking. Few studies are without criticism. Indeed, the frenzy of media claims that the doctors’ presentation have been debunked substitutes for any actual debunking. And while consumers of the articles and videos claiming to be debunking are distracted by this manufactured controversy, the antibodies studies that backup the doctors’ arguments are disappearing from the news cycle, hidden in the fog.

In fact, many the counterarguments to the claims in question don’t work. I show you why in this essay. I will trust readers to be familiar with the arguments. If it appears at any point that my characterization of a point amount to a straw man argument I am more than happy to make corrections.

First, I need to make sure readers understand the simple fact that the true number of cases is much higher than the number of confirmed cases. This is an uncontroversial fact in the scientific community even if the media continues to neglect or distort that fact. That means that the actual death rate is much lower than what the public is being told or led to believe. But the media continues to obscure this reality.

For example, a CNN article published today on the Michigan protests states: “More than 41,000 people in Michigan have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 3,789 have died, according to state health officials. Only two states have more coronavirus-related deaths.” Whenever the media state the figure this way alongside the death toll, they’re engaging in an exaggeration of the lethality of this virus. Putting it like this makes the death rate appear to be over 9 percent. They never do this with the flu. If they did, the death rate from the flu would be over 9 percent. That is revealing in itself. However, this is the correct way to put the statistic: “More than 41,000 people in Michigan have tested positive for the coronavirus.” It must be put this way because we know that many times the tested number have been infected with a virus.

What is the true prevalence of this virus? Here are scientific studies that address the matter:

• Just updated (April 30, 2020), researchers at Stanford University published a study, “COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California,” that, using a sample of 3,324 specimens, weighted for population demographics, found that 2.8% of the county’s residents, that is 54,000 persons, have been infected with the COVID-19 virus. That is many more times the 1000 confirmed cases at the time of the survey (April 3-4). In other words, the actual prevalence of COVID-19 antibody was 54 times higher than the number of positive blood serum tests. The upward confidence bound found that it could be 85 times higher (or 4.2%).

• A study of Los Angeles County, conducted by the University of Sothern California, published on April 20, 2020, found that, an estimated approximately 4.1% of the county’s adult population, and possibly as many as 5.6%, had antibodies to the virus. That translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection, an estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. The large number of participants were recruited using a database that is representative of the county population. “We haven’t known the true extent of COVID-19 infections in our community because we have only tested people with symptoms, and the availability of tests has been limited,” said lead investigator Neeraj Sood, a USC professor of public policy at USC Price School for Public Policy and senior fellow at USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. 

• A study of New York State residents found that 14.9% of people tested positive. In the New York City, 24.7% of have antibodies for the virus. The results of this study were announced by Governor Andrew Cuomo on April 23.

Any serious critique of the doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care would keep these numbers in mind. More than this, the principle of charity, if observed, would cite these studies in every communication about this case as supporting the doctor’s claims. Any decent human being, knowing the extent and depth of fear experienced over this virus would assure people that it is not nearly as dangerous as they have been led to believe or might have come to believe on their own without access to pertinent and accurate information. To fail to do these things is an intentional act to keep from the audience important information it needs to make a reasoned judgment. It is, in other words, propaganda.

It’s not as if we haven’t known this all along. Consider the writings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the lead members of the  Trump Administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. For example, on February 28, 2020, in an editorial published in The New England Journal of Medicine, he writes, “On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

Here are the main criticisms and my rebuttals:

• Random sampling is necessary to extrapolate in the manner Dr. Erickson extrapolates. His thousands of tests, encompassing half of the residents in the country he serves, finding that 6% of those tested had positive results, are not representative of the population. But do they need to be? It is not explained why if so. They are in line with the number of those who tested positive for antibodies in the other studies and these are representative. The critique deploys technical language to obscure the significance of the fact reported.

• The representativeness of the tests he administered is a bit of a red herring since Dr. Erickson relies on California state numbers available at the time for his primary extrapolation. These are big numbers. There were 33,865 positives from 280,900 blood serum tests in California at the time of the press conference. That means that 12% of cases tested positive. Critics say this is not random, either. But, again, does it need to be? What we should be emphasizing is that this is not the number of cases, but the number of positive tests. To repeat, the true prevalence of the disease is much higher, as the scientific studies cited earlier clearly show.

• Dr. Erickson performs the extrapolation using the population of the state of California (39,500,000), the number of positive tests, and the 1,227 deaths assigned to COVID-19 the time: 1,227/(0.12 x 39,500,000) = 0.00026 or 0.03%. He concludes that COVID-19 is not worse that influenza. Crucially, the tests are mostly those who are sick. Even without a random sample, it is a reasonable extrapolation; Erickson can be off by a lot and still have his argument. Do the calculations using the antibody tests cited above. We know from the antibodies studies in California that the rate of infection is between 28 and 85 times greater than what testing shows. For New York, the prevalence is even greater than Dr. Erickson’s extrapolations. The studies confirm the rough order of magnitude of his extrapolation.

• If these are sick people, two things follow: (a) they are sick from something else (like influenza); (b) the finding is a death rate is 0.03% among people sick with COVID-19. For (a), since most cases were not positive for SARS-CoV-2, many of those cases of flu-like illness are likely influenza. It would be much lower than this if all of those who are not sick but who are infected with the virus are considered. For (b), we know that, for the vast majority of people, the disease is asymptomatic or mild, estimated to be somewhere between 80 and 95% of cases. They generally aren’t tested. In all likelihood, his number is too conservative.

• Another complaint is that, without COVID-19, those with comorbidities would not have died. It is said that comorbidities merely help COVID-19 kill people. But many people die with COVID-19 not from it. The public is not told this obvious fact—and not because it is obvious. Most people who die from COVID-19, given risk of death in light of age and condition of health, will die this year or next year without COVID-19. Moreover, those likely to die with COVID-19 are not only at risk to die anyway from their ailments (sorry to be blunt), but, since they are not testing many of these patients, they can’t know if they died from influenza or a bacterial infection. We know from the tests that most sick people test negative for SARS-CoV-2, which means that what is sickening them is another pathogen, probably influenza (at least the CDC would have said so in another year), which has conveniently disappeared from the landscape. In other words, if a person have pneumonia, it may not by SARS-C0V-2 causing it. If they are on a ventilator, it is not be because they have COVID-19.

• Since the vast majority of healthy persons survive COVID-19, it is obviously not true that COVID-19 kills people with the certainty the government and media claim. A bullet to the head will very likely kill a healthy person. COVID-19 is very unlikely to kill a healthy person. This matters when we talk about causation. I say that to say this: that the comorbidities associated with death in suspected cases are common only means that these ailments are more likely to be the cause of death. The claim that if there were rare one could say COVID-19 isn’t what killed them, a critique one hears, is nonsensical. If these cormorbidities were rare, they would easily be ruled out as a cause of the death, since most people would die without them. But they don’t. So the argument is backwards.

• Dr. Erickson is criticized for saying that the death rate from the flu is the same. His claim is countered with studies showing an overall death rate from COVID-19 is higher than 0.03%. A typical account uses a widely accepted study from China showing that the death rate is 0.66% overall. That is higher than 0.03%. Interestingly, the estimates used in this study rely on undiagnosed cases, they are extrapolations, which, according to his critics, should disqualify it (which disqualifies much of what the CDC does—but then, the critics operate with a double consciousness on estimating virus cases). However, this statistic is revealing in that, while 0.66% is greater than 0.03%, it is much smaller than the case-fatality rates routinely cited or suggested by the media. And, by the way, the same study shows that the death rates for children 9 and younger is 0.0016%, while people over 80 years of age die at a rate of 7.8%. In other words, the death rate for healthy adults is much less than 0.66%. So is it worse than the flu? Maybe. But the point is that it is much less worse than the public is led to believe by government and media. Much, much less worse. In other words, it is not unusually deadly.

• Another criticism is that the claim that the failure of COVID-19 to kills massive numbers of people means the initial models were wrong does not take into account the impact of social distancing in changing those projections. But the claim that social distancing reduces deaths is not supported by the evidence. Governments and media outlets keep saying this, but they have no data to back up that claim. That chart we keep seeing with the trend lines is propaganda. All social distancing is likely doing is preventing the population from acquiring herd immunity. And that is a bad thing. Which is one of Erickson’s points about the problem with the lockdown. And he’s right. We need immunity for this thing. There is no vaccine and it will come back.

• Finally, there is a claim that, whether or not we think that COVID-19 is especially deadly, we are doubling deaths because COVID-19 piggybacks off of the flu and that, somehow, this is an important rebuttal to Dr. Erickson’s argument. It’s a red herring. But it does raise a problem for the pro-panic crowd. Flu deaths have been running over the last nine years at around 50 thousand annually. There is not much variation around mean in the long-term, but the last several years have been particularly bad at around 60 thousand. Yet, this year, the CDC says we’re done with flu deaths at 24 thousand. Just in time for COVID-19. There is no explanation for why deaths from the flu are so much less than they have been in past recent years. Moreover, there isn’t a doubling in pneumonia deaths, which is what we’re actually talking about (since most pneumonia deaths do not have an established cause). There is a greater number of deaths this year than last year, to be sure, but the CDC estimates that as many as 95 thousand people died in the 2017-18 flu season. So we are at this point pushing up against the 2017-2018 numbers, numbers that were regarded as so unremarkable that the media did not even bother to report them. And to stop you from asking why they simply say, “This is not the flu,” a true statement that is beside the point.

As I stated at the outset, the alleged debunking is best described as the action of a fog machine. It’s a propaganda campaign by desperate authoritarians. Because the video was widely shared and makes a compelling argument from a confident doctor, those with power and purchase who desire to keep the COVID-19 myth of extreme death going recognize they need to kill the messenger. YouTube did its part by making it difficult to see what Dr. Erickson actually argues by removing the video. So this has become something of a one-sided conversation. I am bringing the other side back into the debate.

It’s ironic that the public is asked to tolerate vaccine injuries among the few for the sake of the masses, by producing herd immunity, yet during the COVID-19 pandemic the masses are asked to forego herd immunity for the sake of a few. 

Before there was a vaccine for chicken pox many parents made sure their kids got it so that the risk to adults who had not gotten it would face less risk. And the parents benefitted, as well, as their immune systems got a boost. 

Chicken pox is not fun. And it’s not risk free. Some kids develop serious complications. But we were infected as kids because the disease was a lot more serious among adults. And not a few adults. Get it now so you don’t get it later. 

COVID-19, like influenza, is a risky proposition for older people. If we want to protect people in the future, then we need herd immunity to this disease now. We also need this now so people will be healthy to go about their lives. We live in an economy where we depend on people being at work. We need healthy children and adults to get this disease and carry the antibodies.

People like to come back and say that it is unclear that this disease produces antibodies. They add to the horror of the unknown about the virus when they say this. But why is this claim useful? Since the vast majority of people survive this infection—most don’t even know they have it—there is nothing to lose by treating it like other viruses.

I am continually amazed by the public policies of so many countries surrounding this event. The time to contain the virus was before it left central China. Once it was out, the only thing to do was to protect the vulnerable and let it blow through the population. We should not have closed down our schools.

It’s as if world governments acquired a strange tunnel vision. There was no thinking about the future. There was no big picture thinking. They forgot the basic science of infectious diseases. That we have immune systems.

Make sure to note this. Put it in your journal. It’s the left-liberals and progressives, those who claim to be the scientifically-minded ones, who make fun of conservatives, who got this the most wrong. They’re the ones on Facebook shaming people for not staying home or not wearing masks when they go out. They’re the ones who are demanding people sacrifice liberty for the sake of their poor understanding of science and penchant for overreacting to the realities of the world.

The news story, “Brown Count COVID-19 Cases Increase to 856 Amend Aggressive Testing at Plants,” is quite revealing even if it doesn’t mean to be. This is the buried headline in the story: “The rise in positive tests is attributed to aggressive testing.” Pay close now. “Brown County has received 2,200 testing kits from the state to use on workers at the meat packing facilities.” Paying attention?

The CDC did not provide the county with thousands of tests to conduct a scientific study of the county. Why? We can debate that, but this part is not debatable given everything we know and have known for weeks: if the CDC had mandated testing countywide we would “discover” that SARS-CoV-2 infection is not unique to these facilities. SARS-CoV-2 infection is everywhere. They’re now saying that it is likely that a billion people will be infected worldwide. Don’t panic. A recent tests of thousands of prisoners found thousands of prisoners have been infected and over 95 percent of them have no symptoms. The vast majority of people who have SARS-CoV-2 don’t even know they have it.

I’m a criminologist by trade and our discipline saw a very similar thing happen in the 1970s when more reporting and better record keeping—the reporting and record keeping used to produce the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) by the Federal Bureau of Investigations—produced a dramatic jump in crime rates, statistics that were then used by authorities to justify vastly expanding the carceral apparatus and warehousing millions of people.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), conducted by the United States Department of Justice, found the opposite trend during the same period. Why? Because the NCVS uses representative sampling and thus can be used to draw inferences about patterns in the population. It’s called science. The UCR, in contrast, is based on crimes reported to the police. Not science. It’s the difference between scientific polling and a website asking you to vote for the greatest heavy metal band.

There is a direct analogy here with the way the COVID-19 moral panic is being represented. Those representing the facts are not ignorant of science. The distortion of the situation must deliberate. Again, why they are doing this is debatable. But they appear scaring you in order to justify shuttering society and disrupting the supply chain. In any case, that is the function of the representation.

I want people to understand that, as more tests are conducted, there will be more reported COVID-19 cases. More reported cases does not mean more death or even more disease. The actual presence of COVID-19 is not determined by testing. In other words, the test does not give you COVID-19. Get it? That wasn’t obvious before? What it does mean is that as the number of reported cases go up, the proportion of deaths assigned to COVID-19 (and there are shenanigans going on there, as well) goes down.

Let me repeat what should be obvious to anybody with a working knowledge of inferential statistics. The jump in cases in these facilities is because of selective testing. Go back to the buried headline of this study: “The rise in positive tests is attributed to aggressive testing.” They are telling the public what they are doing. This way they cannot be accused of lying. But there are different ways to lie.

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. … The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” —Stanley Milgram

There were four prods when subjects resisted: “Please continue.” “The experiment requires that you continue.” “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” “You have no other choice, you must go on.” Often not reported is that the fourth prod met with the greatest resistance. In fact, in the studies I have looked at, all subjects refused to continue with the experiment when the authority told them, “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

That’s why we are seeing Americans taking to the streets in defiance of the lockdown orders. As the government moved through the prods—“Please shelter in place,” “Public health requires that you shelter in place,” “It is absolutely essential that you shelter in place”—the public followed orders. They still do. It makes them feel like they are part of something greater than themselves, that their choice is for some greater good. But then the government said, “You have no choice but to shelter in place.” And a number of people said, “Fuck that,” and gathered in public to make their defiance known. That’s mutual knowledge. Good for them. What’s wrong with other people that they would submit to destructive demands backed by threat of punishment? And why are they shaming those who are resisting authority—or in this case power, since for power to be authority it must have legitimacy.

I was just out walking in Allouez. I had to wait to cross the street because there were more cars traveling down Baird Street than I have seen on all the other days since the lockdown combined. Once on the other side, on my way to the East River trail, I had to walk in the road repeatedly because the driveways and roadsides were filled with cars. The smell of barbecues filled the air. Music was pumping. People were laughing. Three cop cars huddled by the trail. The looks on the cop’s faces told me they were looking at a level of defiance that they could not deal with (maybe they didn’t want to). This follows the police order that those who engage in precisely the behavior folks were engaged in at that moment would be subject to hefty fines.

What I saw out there today was “Fuck that.” Good for them. Maybe they’re paying attention to the news that this was overblown. Whatever the case, it made me feel good about my fellow man. Roy Batty’s words filled my ears—“That’s the spirit!” And that is a feeling I have been sorely missing over the last several weeks.

Thank you, Allouez.

As the evidence mounts that the COVID-19 hysteria was an overreaction, for those who have invested tremendous emotional energy in virtue signaling and scolding others—extreme social distancing measures have become articles of faith in what amounts to a cult of safety—seeing friends change their opinion or challenge the opinions of cult members on the basis of facts and logic is so distressing that a pattern of strategic unfriending unfolds. I’m watching the process in real time. This is what happens when a community of zealots sees members of the congregation leaving the faith or realizes that friends were never fellow travelers. Since articles of faith are the most important things in the world to them, giving them meaning and status in a largely imagined community, those who would dissent from the articles of faith become intolerable in their presence. It’s not enough to unfollow them. Excommunication is the only course of action. From their bubblized worldview, this is banishment. They are powerful in their conviction. Now their room is clean.

It’s fascinating to watch the psychology of the unwinding of a moral panic play out on social media. As the evidence mounts that the COVID-19 hysteria was an overreaction, for those who invested tremendous emotional energy in virtue signaling and scolding others—extreme social distancing measures have become articles of faith in what amounts to a cult of safety and petite snobbery—seeing friends change their opinion or challenge the opinion of cult members on the basis of facts and logic is so distressing that a pattern of strategic unfriending and blocking unfolds.

I’m watching an unwinding unfold in real time. Not just on my Facebook page. It’s happening to my wife, as well. She has a different circle of friends, but the unfrienders and blockers have something in common—they share a faith: passion for the Democratic Party and an affinity for progressive politics.

The reaction is typical of a community of zealots when members of the congregation leave the faith or the realization sets in that friends and colleagues were never fellow travelers. Since the articles of faith are the most important things in the world to the self-righteous, giving them meaning and status in a largely imagined community, those who would dissent from them are intolerable in their presence. 

It’s not enough to merely unfollow. Excommunication is prescribed. From their bubblized worldview, unfriending and blocking amounts to banishing—they are cleansing. Mighty in their convictions, their room is clean. From the point of view of the vanquished, the zealots are fleeing, chanting slogans with their fingers plugging their ears. They’re gone before the fun begins.

You’d think for all their talk of justice, liberation, and popular democracy these progressives would resist extreme measures that hurt ordinary people. How does a cult of safety and petite snobbery come from the professed ideals articulated and values expressed? There are two psychological pulls that make it easy to manipulate progressives into supporting lockdowns.

The first pull stems from emotional need, the need to scold (self-righteousness) and to virtue signal (self-importance). You might recognize these as the characteristics of the authoritarian personality—conformism and narcissism. Despite the appeal to freedom, progressives fear it—they seek to escape from it—because it opens up space for disagreement. And those who disagree with the progressive articles of faith are not merely wrong; they are immoral and dangerous.

The progressive is an identitarian, and the identitarian’s world is built on imaginary structures of intersecting oppressions. The disagreeable don’t merely hold a contrary opinion. They’re up to no good. In their postmodern view of things, power and feelings—not reason, not facts—control discourse. It therefore follows that discourse is a reflection of power and emotion. The only truth is their doctrine; others who do not adhere to it are apostates or heretics. It’s like any fundamentalist religion. The contrary opinion cannot be considered because it is destructive and oppressive.

The virtue signaling piece is straightforward. Like mass marchers wearing knitted pink pussy hats, the quarantiners and their homemade masks (which they either wear around the house or at least while posing for the selfies they hope will be showered with likes) are the easy signs of wokeness. (This is why, by the way, progressives are so enamored by the hijab. The hijab is a blatant sign of belonging to an imagined community of relative truth. So enamored are they by this sign that some Muslims and their allies have set aside a day of ritual sharing where allies can wear hijabs, too. Are they praying that the ritual will be conducted virtually next swing around the sun? If they go full burqa they won’t even have to wear their masks. Are pussy hats haram?)

The second pull involves a human totem: Donald Trump. The president is the folk devil of their myopic moral universe. The ritual loathing of Trump is so pathological that economic collapse and widespread suffering are acceptable if these discredit the president and hurt his chances for reelection. Two Minutes Hate with a snooze alarm.

Progressives know that presidential elections tend to track economic performance. They are convinced that a failed economy will hurt Trump’s chances for re-election. Since the Trump presidency is the single worst thing to ever befall their country (their trauma and wailing prove it), economic collapse is worth it.

In the Dark Ages, the Inquisitors rended the bodies of the possessed. Evil spirits justified the worst things men could do to other men. Given the relative affluence of progressives, they won’t quite suffer in the way the people they claim to speak for will. But it’ll be worth it. It’s for their own good. After all, suffering is a virtue in their faith—especially the suffering of others (it proves they were victims all along).

The emotional satisfaction of having driven the orange demon from his high place will be golden. The culmination of The Resistance™. They will have quite the symbolic achievement to tout in the end. In their world anyway.

So it is that, in the face of mounting evidence showing that society has probably all along been in the thrall of mass hysteria, progressives frantically toil to keep alive the moral panic with denunciations and dank memes, and by raging at the deplorables. But their bubble is collapsing.

In closing, I want to emphasize that I am not talking about all progressives or Democratic Party supporters in this essay. I am talking about a particular expression of progressive Democratic sentiment that marks the personality type of the true believer. They are common enough that something useful may be said about them. I am sure my wife and I are not the only ones who have experienced their tantrums. But it almost must be said that they do the work of a larger political ideology. By unfriending and blocking, and thus limiting criticism for their claims and opinions, their ritual actions polarize and shrink the universe of debate and discussion. For every public outburst of disgust, there are many others who nod their heads in agreement.