freedom and reason

Somebody asked me to explain why a vaccine that does not prevent infection but is associated with less severe symptoms among the infected compared to those of the unvaccinated is a problem. “So the vaccine becomes something of a therapeutic,” the person remarked in so many words. “Isn’t this a good thing?”

Not necessarily. The reason is found in grasping basic evolutionary biology, a paradigm that is exquisite in its logic and powerful in its explanatory power. Wherever the discipline of biology is on the question of ontogenesis, there is, outside of a handful of creationists, little doubt among scientists that the theory of evolution explains how, once life appears, all life changes over time. That same exquisite logic applies to microbes, including viruses (even if the question of whether viruses are properly living things is not finally settled).

Here’s how I explain the problem. A virus has no interest in killing or immobilizing its host. The virus needs relatively healthy people to be up and moving about and interacting with other potential hosts to transmits itself. It needs the host’s cellular machinery to reproduce itself. A virus that kills or immobilizes a significant number of its hosts won’t get around as much as a virus that produces mild to moderate symptoms. For example, cold viruses (of which coronaviruses is one type) have evolved via natural selection of random mutation (mistakes occurring in the process of the virus copying itself) to be more contagious but, for those with reasonably intact and experienced immune systems, either asymptomatic or associated with only mild to moderate illness.

This process yields circumstances in which children get half a dozen or more colds a year, while adults get one or two colds annually (having more experienced immune systems), and life goes on. Thanks to the process Darwin describes to explain his discoveries, over time the less dangerous variants of a virus become the dominant variants of the virus and life goes on. Herd immunity works alongside decreasing severity of illness to produce situations in which humans live, work, and go to school in environments teaming with microbes that rarely severely sicken them. (Influenza is a bit different because of the way it ravages cells. But its dominant variants nonetheless present with less severe consequences over time, as well. It makes you a lot sicker than an adenovirus or rhinovirus, but the vast majority of people live to tell about the experience.)

One of the ways this evolutionary process may be disrupted is the development of interventions that allow persons with more dangerous variants of a virus to suffer less severe illness sufficient to allow a greater proportion of the sick to be up and moving about interacting with other potential hosts than they would otherwise. Good for them, of course. They are not as sick as they could be (at least proportionally speaking, since many still get very sick and some die). But this can be bad for a population.

If a vaccine is highly efficacious in preventing infection, and a sufficient number of people are vaccinated, or have acquired immunity through infection, then the virus struggles to find those who are not adequately protected and the vaccine is successful. However, if the vaccine is leaky, that is, the vaccine suffers low efficacy with respect to preventing infection yet continues to enjoy significant efficacy in preventing severe symptoms, then this allows the vaccinated to carry more dangerous variants of the virus to more people, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Mutations that would have likely been weeded out during natural selection may indeed thrive in a context where the typical natural trajectory has been derailed. Add to this low durability of a vaccine and those who are vaccinated themselves increasingly begin to suffer severe symptoms.

It may be that, in time, the virus will continue to evolve to become less dangerous, but its path to this end will have been drawn out by the intervention. More troubling, it could also be the case that more deadly mutations survive to produce an even more dangerous situation for everybody.

Imagine a scenario where a population, appearing to have reached herd immunity via natural acquisition to a virus, suddenly sees an explosion of infections with widespread deployment of a vaccine. I hasten to emphasize that the problem is not vaccines per se. The problem is leaky vaccines with low durability. One would expect that the medical-industrial complex would not confront such a development with humility, but would instead double-down on hubris while casting aspersions on the skeptic. The vaccinated could not possibly be the problem. They follow orders.

Yesterday we learned that, in Los Angeles, 30 percent of new COVID-19 cases are so-called “breakthrough cases.” That term “breakthrough case,” is an industry euphemism for poor vaccine efficacy. It means that fully-vaccinated individuals fail to develop effective immunity for the target pathogen. Data show that, of the vaccines, the most efficacious, the Pfizer mRNA platform, is less than 40 percent effective in preventing infections.

Despite this, it not only continues to enjoy emergency use authorization, but is set to be approved by the FDA next week. If you were worried about mandates before approval, brace yourself for approval. It’s not like the authorities have ever been concerned about Nuremberg. Now they will hammer the vaccine hesitant relentlessly. “What’s your objection now?” As if there is not good reason to object to these vaccines. No matter. Whether the thing works or not, you will need that vaccine card to be a functioning member of society. Passports are here. And they don’t come with free masks.

It’s highly likely that the number of “breakthrough cases” in Los Angeles and around the nation is much greater that what is being reported. A vaccinated person has reason to believe, based on the propaganda he received from trusted sources (the CDC and Anthony Fauci, CNN and MSNBC, Facebook and Twitter), that the cold symptoms he is experiencing—if he experiences any symptoms at all—do not indicate COVID-19 and therefore there is no need for a COVID-19 test. Maybe he doesn’t need to get tested. But his reasoning for not doing so is faulty. Hospital testing as part of routine intake assessment is discovering that COVID-19 infection is rampant among the fully vaccinated.

The authorities are telling us that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That is not true. Scientific study shows that the fully vaccinated carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated and, given that the vaccinated tend to be healthier individuals able to interact with others in social situations, their positive status unsuspected, the vaccinated are almost certainly major contributors to the rise in COVID-19 cases. Operating with a false sense of security, they are infecting other people, vaccinated and unvaccinated. But this reality has to be pushed out of view. After all, we need to get shots in the arms of children and infants.

Looking at the chart, it appears, as I warned only a few days ago, that the progress the nation made prior to widespread vaccination, when it appeared we had reacher herd immunity, has been erased with the introduction of the vaccines. I am not necessarily saying this rise is mostly due to vaccines. But you might consider that possibility. The media won’t. And now deaths are rising, too (see chart below). Thankfully the case fatality rate is down, which is likely the result of the expected evolutionary path viruses take to become less lethal and thus more communicable, a path again very likely helped by those healthy enough to socially engage with others.

That these trends are occurring during the summer months is alarming. If you look at the trends in the first chart, last year’s cases went down during late July and August. They didn’t start significantly rising again until late October. Moreover, the numbers then were nowhere near the numbers they are presently at any time prior to peaks experienced during the fall and early winter 2020-21 when viruses usually prove most devastating due to cold weather and confined social spaces. 

The speed and incline of the current upward sweep does not bode well for the upcoming COVID-19 season. COVID-19 may very well be sweeping the nation again. And with our borders open wide on the south, the millions pouring into the country are bringing new strains of the disease, as well as other diseases long ago eradicated in the United States (more than half the world’s nations are represented among the immigrants, and the vast majority of them are Third Worlders), this winter may be catastrophic. Where are the immigrants going when they get here? I suggest you take look at what’s happening across the souther United States.

I leave you with several clips from today’s War Room Pandemic’s special on vaccines and therapeutics and corporate state machinations. Remember, vaccine hesitancy is the rational default position.

Western civilization, the pinnacle of world historical development, materially and morally, is facing two foreign totalitarian threats: the People’s Republic of China and Islam. The PRC is the secular paradigm of authoritarian statism, an Orwellian nightmare world of total control (China Represents the Existential Threat of our Time—and the Democratic Party is an Enabler). Islam, not quite the threat the PRC represents, is nonetheless the most aggressive form of clerical fascism in the modern period, its doctrine of subordinating all of society to God plagiarized from the worst of ancient Western Asian ideas, maintaining the cruel grounds its sources, Judaism and Christianity, long ago departed. Collapsing the profane into the sacred and the backwardness that ensures, and without effective Western opposition, a substantial proportion of Islam’s 1.8 million adherents is ripe for incorporation in the Middle Kingdom’s sphere of influence.

Considering these threats, especially in light of the global order Western transnationalists have sought for decades, this conjuncture, a gathering historical moment that appears as an unfolding, could not have come with a worse US president. Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski began this debacle in the 1970s—allowing Iran to fall to the Islamists (Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?) and building up Islamism in Afghanistan, the later ultimately producing the Taliban and preparing the way for al-Qaida to establish a base of operations (Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan), so it is in some sense expected that Biden should be installed to finally betray the Afghan people—and the world.

The seriousness of the threat makes telling people “told you so feel” feel cheap and petty. But there is truth in there: the Democratic Party is aligned with the transnationalists managing the decline of America and the West; the consequences of Party hegemony is predictable.

Biden is compromised by his decades-long association with Chinese Communist Party (“Dear Hitler…” or Joe Biden is the Neville Chamberlain of Our Time). But he is not the only one who desires the rise of the PRC. Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, who advised Biden as Vice-President and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of the State, is on record as not only encouraging the PRC’s rise but creating “an environment more conducive to a peaceful and positive-sum Chinese rise.” The rhetoric of cooperation with the totalitarian People’s Republic comes with the expressed desire to gently push the PRC is a democratic and liberal direction. As if that is possible under totalitarian communism. As if the West hasn’t fallen down on its commitment to either value. If it was hard to detect two years ago, the ensuing two years made it plain that the CCP model of social control was one of the PRC’s major exports.

The managed decline of America is an integral part of the transnational project to shift global hegemony eastward as a step towards materializing the dream of a one world corporatist government—the realization of which requires cancelling the Enlightenment (The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). Hence lockdowns and vaccine passports, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, and the postmodernist rejection of scientific truth and objectivity (what Brown University economist describes as “identitarian epistemology”), all of which I have blogged about extensively on Freedom and Reason. Full of the hubris that a life disconnected from reality and money-power intoxication bring, and dismissive of the Thucydides Trap, the transnational elite appear to believe they can finesse the decline of America and the West. If so, then their derangement threatens humanity. But there’s more to it than conceit and ignorance (See Why Did The West Build Up China? America at a Crossroads: Corporations Poised to Take Control of the Republic.)

What is the Thucydides Trap? Harvard political scientist Graham Allison coined the term to describe the dilemma the United States faces with a rising China. Based on his analysis of sixteen cases over 500 years in which twelve resulted in Kinetic war, Allison warns that the likely result of a situation where a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one is military conflict. The dilemma gets its name from the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” It is not always possible to escape a process with military conflict as its apparent terminal point, but it should be obvious that the strategy of managed decline of the ruling power coupled with building up the rising power is precisely the wrong strategy if one wants to avoid war—unless the goal is to incorporate what remains of the former into the latter. In concrete terms, that would mean dismantling democracy and liberty and assigning the peoples of the West to the role of serf in a global neo-feudalist order governed by transnational corporations (see section three of Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics; see also What the Flag Officers 4 America Letter Gets Wrong). Of course, the other option in avoiding war is to stop building up the rising power.

One only needs a handful of facts to understand this existential problem. I will use one to illustrate: China’s control over the means of the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions.

Under cover of global climate change, Western elites are transitioning their economies from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles. The batteries that run electric vehicles depend on rare earth minerals (REMs). Leveraging US and Europe’s pension funds and other money-capital to fuel the rapid development of its high-tech sector, the establishment of free trade zones, and expansion of PRC-controlled infrastructure around the planet—Western finance pumps hundreds of billions of dollars of direct investment into China annually—the CCP now effectively controls most of those regions where REMs are found. China alone is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the world production of REMs. China produces three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and half of its electric vehicles. Afghanistan is one of the richest countries in terms of REMs. Last year, REMs in Afghanistan were estimated to be worth between 1 trillion and 3 trillion dollars. Biden has just effectively handed Afghanistan to the CCP.

Beyond Afghanistan’s resources, Biden gave the CCP the greatest gift a world power could give: the abandonment of the Afghan people signals to Xi Jinping that the US will likely not intervene when Taiwan falls to the PRC. Taiwan is the center of advanced chip design and production. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing is to the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions what fossil fuels were to the Second Industrial Revolution. (Without mentioning China, the Party of Davos, i.e., the World Economic Forum, tells its audience what’s at stake in this article: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond.”) The nation that dominates in this area will control the economic—and political and military—power in the world. When the United States under Trump limited Huawei’s ability to outsource its chip designs to the Taiwanese chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the CCP threatened to retaliate. The CCP understands what is at stake. Deprived of these foundries, US consumer and defense industries would be set back at least several years (see “The Chip Wars of the 21st Century”).

The progressive left screams “Western imperialism!” when one expresses concern over the loss of control over the global means of production. But the question is what sort of world do you want to live in? One in which the people are governed by a democratic republic with a bill of rights focused on individual liberty? Or one in which a centralized state governed by corporate power controls every aspect of human affairs? What sort of world do you think the rank-and-file Chinese want to live in? The United States is the paradigm of a nation founded on individual liberty and human rights—proving its validity by realizing its founding ideals in history by ending the slave trade, abolishing chattel slavery, recognizing universal suffrage, and granting equal rights to all regardless of race and sex. The secular nation-state our founders established is a blueprint for people around the world to adopt in building more equal and just societies. Why are Western elites giving up on these values?

Establishment ideology tells us what progressives elites have in store for us. Its followers live in a dream world where the West is evil and those outside it are the enlightened ones. To speak of American and Western exceptionalism is “ethnocentric” and “nativist.” To criticize cultures that do not recognize the ideals democracy and liberty is “racist” and “xenophobic.” In the eyes of progressives, and this is explicitly articulated in the rhetorics of critical theory and thirdworldism, the West is a vehicle for white supremacy and patriarchy. There can be no progress here—the system merely periodically reconfigures itself to sustain race and sex privilege.

In their deep loathing of America, and fetishization of simulacra of the exotic, progressives pine for a mythical world beyond experience and knowledge—a world where people live simple uncomplicated lives. The brutal truth is that the world outside the West is a world where men own women and girls and throw homosexuals from towers. It’s a world of total surveillance and control. Islam erases the line between government and religion, asserting only one true God and doctrine, casting everybody into a hell on earth. Chinese communism is a religion where the Party is God—and that God promises an earthly heaven, what the Chinese have long referred to as the Middle Kingdom. Our enemies don’t think in terms of months and years. They think in terms of decades and centuries.

The social class location of an individual is determined primarily on the basis of that person’s relationship to the means of production. The class that buys labor is capitalist, the class that sells labor is worker, and so forth. It may be the case that people can, unlike race (a caste relation), leave the working class and become a capitalist, or fall out of the capitalist class and have to work, but this does not change the structure of a society, since there are still those who buy labor and those who sell labor and, overall, those who buy labor, that is, those who earn their income through profits (which are derived from the labor of workers), enjoy more power and privilege. This is reflected in the fact that government policies reflect the interests of the wealthy primarily, whereas the preferences of the general population, which is mostly working class, have little influence on policy (see Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” in Perspectives on Politics, 2014). Moreover, because of inherited affluence, which includes social and cultural location, there is actually very little social mobility.

Concerning the functionalist theory of stratification, which is also the classical economic liberal’s perspective, the claim that poverty has always existed is false. Most human societies down through history were egalitarian. Inequality only emerges with the state and religion around 6,000-8,000 years ago. Humans have been around for at least 200,000 years and possibly date as far back at 800,000. And even before then, their predecessors, who weren’t much different than modern humans, also lived in egalitarian communities. Class stratification is, therefore, in the long view of things, a recent development. Put another way, the natural distributions of intelligence and talents do not explain social class or economic inequality.

With respect to race, this interview with the late Richard Lewontin is excellent. So is this interview with Stephen Jay Gould. Lewontin is a pioneer in genetics research and his argument is the state-of-the-art. Race is a social construct, and it is constructed by the system of racism, which has two aspects: (1) the ideology of racial classification and associated hierarchy; (2) the structure of social and economic and occupational segregation. Race does not exist apart from these aspects. In other words, race is not a natural category, but an invention. Historically speaking, race is a very recent development, emerging with capitalism (which is itself a new system), and is the result of European colonization of the world and the need to control labor populations. Race was very consciously created by the capitalist class, what Barbara Fields has usefully termed “racecraft” (read an interview here). Colonial powers wrote laws defining and dividing populations and developed an ideological system that explained the system of exploitation in terms of innate racial differences.

A similar argument is made with respect to class when it is supposed that people are rich because they have some biological characteristics that allow them to out-compete others. This is Hayek’s argument in his Constitution of Liberty. Hayek avoids the race question, but the claim that class inequality is explained by biology mirrors the racist argument: if people are poor because they are inferior to those who are rich, and if black people as a group are poor compared to white people as a group, and if this is not because of racism but innate differences, then it follows than blacks are racially inferior to whites. But the explanation for why blacks as a group are poorer than whites as a group does not follow from racial differences because race is not a real biological category. Thus the explanation lies in something else. It is the result of political economy, just as class inequality is the result of political economy (see above).

Finally, with respect to gender inequality, it is true that occupation and life choices explain much of it. Women as a sex-class do appear to prefer work in helping professions (teaching, nursing, etc.). Whether this is biological or environmental, i.e. the result of socialization, or both is not that important in explaining gender inequality. To explain inequality between the groups one must ask why occupations in which women are more likely to work are associated with lower pay and less prestige.

One might use the functionalist theory of stratification to explain that the work that men do enjoys higher pay and more prestige because their work is more valuable to society. But the functionalist theory doesn’t work. We can see why from what I said previously. On a functional basis, what is more valuable to the survival and wellbeing of a society than childrearing, childhood education, and keeping the population healthy? How is a CEO maximizing shareholder profit more valuable than those functions? It’s not that the jobs men do commands higher pay and more prestige because these jobs are more important than lower paying and less prestigious jobs. Rather, the consistent factor in all this is that, generally speaking, the jobs that command higher pay and prestige are the jobs in which men are overrepresented.

Clearly another explanation is needed. Even if the differences in occupation and life choices are attributable to biological differences between men and women, there is no reason why this would explain gender inequality. After all, most human societies were matrilineal and egalitarian. It was not until 6,000-8,000 years ago that gender inequality emerges. It is with the emergence of class inequality, the state and law, and religion that we see gender inequality. Economic-class and sex-class inequality appear roughly the same time in history throughout the various civilizations They are historical developments, not natural facts. Same with race, also not a natural fact, which only emerges within the last 500 years as a capitalist strategy to control the working class.

This slogan “Intentions don’t matter” is an attempt to get around the rational requirement that a speech act—or even a physical act—is explained or understood by the intent of the actor. To be sure, the effect of an action is a big part of holding wrongdoers responsible. The Latin term for this is actus reus, the standard definition of which is voluntary action or conduct that is a constituent element of a crime as opposed to the accused’s mental state. Actus reus generally refers to voluntary physical action causing harm forbidden by law (not all physical harm is forbidden). However, intent is a big part of determining not only the severity of punishment, but whether a person is at all responsible for the act that may find him facing punishment. This is called mens rea, and it means “guilty mind.” Mens rea is having as one’s purpose to commit or knowledge of wrongdoing that is a constituent element of a crime over against the voluntary action or conduct of the accused.

These days the slogan “Intentions don’t matter” is aimed at speech. Straightaway, the idea that people are to be punished or disciplined for the impact of their speech is problematic in light of the free speech right. In my case, as a college teacher, there is an extra layer of protection that comes with academic freedom. I have a responsibility to be true to the facts of history as I know them. Furthermore, I have to be free to use words for effect and realism. Not only must I resist the desire to sanitize history (for sanitizing history isn’t merely revising history, which may occur in light of new facts, but the act of suppressing it), but I must also reflect the reality of the people I study, a reality that is conveyed and experienced symbolically. Words indeed matter—which is why we must not censor them.

I show a documentary in class, The FBI’s War on Black America, in which the word “nigger” is used several times. Bull Connor, for example, uses the word in glorifying violence perpetrated against civil rights marchers. I have yet to have a student complain. But, in this climate, every time I show the documentary, I worry just a little. I worry because of cases in which a teacher is disciplined for saying something that affected one or more of his student.

For example, in 2020, Harvard dismissed a Title IX complaint made by a transgender student who accused anthropology professor Arthur Kleinman of sexual misconduct for comments made in a general education class concerning the risk of violence transgender individuals faced in a nonwhite culture after the student expressed support for excluding white people from certain spaces because, “as a transgender woman of color,” it made her feel safer. Kleinman apologized to the class for his comments. Did he feel he had to?

More recently, again at Harvard, human evolutionary biology lecturer Carole Hooven made comments on a Fox News show defending the usage of the terms “male” and “female” to refer to biological sex in medical classes. Graduate student Laura Lewis tweeted that Hooven’s remarks “appalled and frustrated” her and characterized them as “transphobic and harmful.” Lewis countered that transgender men can also be pregnant, which of course is true, since they are biological females. Hence the controversy. (Hooven explains the situation on this podcast.)

In the realm of speech acts, if I use a racial slur in a discussion about the history of racism, my intent is very different than if I use that slur to angrily insult a person or to publicly diminish them. If my intent in referring to male and female in terms of the size of the gametes in a lecture on biological reality is to accurately convey the science of sex differences, not to diminish those who do not conform to traditional gender identities vis–à–vis their sex, it should not change anything to say that it does not matter what my intent is because effect is all that matters. That will only change things if we allow it to. Why would we? Who determines their effects if intent is irrelevant? It must be the person who claims to have been affected.

Therein lies the rub. By reducing words to effect only, and then leaving the truth of intent to the person claiming to have been affected, and emplacing a system that punishes people for their utterances, a person may be punished for the utterances regardless of intent. This is a terrifying world. The person who claims to have been affected determines the truth of another person’s speech act. Based on what? His feelings. Any burden to prove intent has been lifted from the accuser. The “victim” determines what is right and wrong on the basis of his subjectivity. Even if the least of it is the expectation that the person who uttered the offending words will apologize for uttering it, this is unacceptable if we mean to live and work in an objective and rational world.

“Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, ‘Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?’ The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’” This was said on Monday, September 16, 1963, by a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man, who stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men’s Business Club and delivered a speech about race and prejudice.

This is the theme of Andrew Cohen’s 2013 Atlantic essay, “The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing.” He claims that Morgan was forever shunned for saying this. While I do not support forever shunning (any length of shunning, actually), Morgan does deserve severe criticism for making such an argument. For it is not everybody who did this. The people who threw the bomb did this. They alone are to blame. We know it was four members of a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan who committed this crime. They were tried for and convicted of the murders.

If the argument is that those who bombed the church did so because of anti-black prejudice, and that, since anti-black prejudice is socially conveyed, we are all responsible for prevailing social conveyances, then the argument still fails, since, while anti-black prejudice may indicate the bomber(s) motive (I think it does), and thus explain the bombing, and while we should condemn anti-black prejudice (although there is no required for individuals to do this), the fact that the prejudice was learned can in no way implicate society in the act, since individuals either choose to perpetrate wrongdoing or they are not responsible for their actions. Actus reus requires that an action is voluntary to be a crime. Society is not a voluntary actor.

It’s rhetoric like Morgan’s that deranges the civil rights struggle. Civil rights becomes a quasi-religion at this point, replete with transcendent notions of collective and intergenerational guilt. That Morgan’s words echo down through history as if they bent the arc of the universe a little towards justice, as Cohen claims, tells us just how much popular understanding of justice has been shifted from one of rational adjudication of the facts to that of magical thinking and superstition. Because we all know that belief in collective guilt is widespread in American society.

This way of thinking is easy because it happens in the context of a culture of believers. Because of ubiquity of religious thinking in the United States, the majority is primed to believe in such magical and superstitious notions as collective guilt, to see individuals whose behavior is not directed by an organization as belonging to abstracts grouping that do direct their actions. Thus, without a directive or chain of command, by virtue being in society, the individual is responsible for actions taken by others. This is the irrational basis of such constructs as white privilege and the demand for reparations.

Those who believe in the supernatural expect to see ghosts—to be haunted by them. They are prone to accept claims that root in the spirit realm of sin and salvation. None of this is true, of course. But, in any case, none of this can be part of a secular system in which religious belief is the prerogative of the individual but the obligation of none. We see in Morgan’s speech (much of which is reproduced in Cohen’s essay) the logic of critical race theory. Critical race theory, a quasi-religious system, eschews the burden to prove intent. And we should shun critical race theory.

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Horrified? That was the ruling of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, 274 US 200 (1927), a decision that upheld the power of the state to force women onto an operating table.* The compulsory vaccination rule he refers to is the Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905). That decision upheld state government’s power to compel smallpox vaccination, ruling that, under certain circumstances, citizens are subject to the police power of the state on matters of public health.

At least that is the way it is being used. It was Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only judge to dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, who authored the majority opinion in Jacobson. In his defense, Harlan warned against “arbitrary” or “oppressive” regulation and expressly associated compulsory vaccination with the scourge of smallpox. But the keen sense that could see the future legacy of separate-but-equal failed to anticipate the blunt instrument Jacobson would become in the hands of technocracy.

A 2008 Harvard Law Review article notes that “Jacobson is a foundational public health law case. Its reasoning and logic pervade vaccine law decisions to this day.” And more than vaccines. In Vernonia School District v Acton, 515 US 646 (1995), Jacobson was used to justify the random drug testing of students (despite the Court recognizing the action as constituting searches under the Fourth Amendment). More recently, Jacobson has been cited as a precedent in rulings concerning face masks and home confinement orders. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a court extended Jacobson to cover matters of reproductive liberty. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit leaned on Jacobson to uphold a Texas ban on non-essential medical services and surgeries that included abortions. (See The 115-year-old Supreme Court opinion that could determine rights during a pandemic).

The matter of reproductive freedom cannot be ignored by those of us who care about bodily integrity and personal sovereignty—our most fundamental human rights. Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett just refused to block Indiana University’s vaccine mandate presumably on grounds Jacobson established. She gave no reason, but just wait until she gets her hands on an abortion case. If the state can compel the vaccination and sterilization of a person for the sake of others (Buck v. Bell still stands), then does it not follow that a woman can be compelled to carry a fetus to term? You thought it was “your body your choice,” but the abuse of Jacobson may prove otherwise. Did you forget? The Supreme Court has been Catholicized.

The Harvard Law Review article I earlier cited notes that “Jacobson was decided in a different time. It addressed issues about medicine, disease, and society that are no longer relevant today.” Indeed. Why are courts leveraging a precedent from a time when rights and science were in a very different place? Compared to the revolution in rights that followed the horrors of Nazism, freedom for early twentieth century Americans was sharply constrained. It was the Progressive Era, and its technocrats desired totalistic control over the masses. It was during this period that, among other things, alcohol was prohibited, drugs were regulated, and eugenics programs operated in a majority of states. Moreover, today, science has become a quasi religious system (see The Problem of Scientism).

With the emergence of corporate governance in the wake of the Civil War, enabled by the Supreme Court’s recognition of corporations as legal persons, person with the rights of human citizens sans conscience, the regulatory apparatus was soon captured by big business, which, as Richard Grossman has pointed out, is a clever way of distancing progressivism from corporatism; regulatory capture was the point of progressivism all along. For progressives, mass society is too massive for self-government, whether on the plane of individual sovereignty or the populist collective, neither finding the people up to the task, so the management of people becomes the responsibility of a technocratic elite. (The writings of public relations industry pioneers Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann is paradigmatic of the attitude that pervades the organic intellectual space of progressivism.) (See We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears: The Establishment of the Scientific-Industrial Complex; Progressivism—an Excerpt from The 1776 Report.)

That same technocratic desire prevails today. Astonishingly, in the wake of the horrors of Holocaust, where the Nuremberg Code was established to protect the rights of individuals from the power of the state to force medical interventions, and the Declaration of Human Rights to cover many more, courts in the United States are ruling on matters on the basis of an arcane precedent established more than a century ago during a period in US history where censorship, compulsory sterilization, prohibition of contraception, de jure racial segregation, open borders. Justice Barrett’s ruling proceeds without apparent recognition of the horrors of the past, nor with regard for the spirit of our founding or appreciation for the progress of human freedom. Barrett is as blind to the past on this matter as Harlan was to the future. (See On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination.) It seems that the post-WWII period of expansive individual freedom was exceptional.

This blindness is pervasive. A profound disconnect (or dishonesty) appears in the way the establishment media talks about the ethics of vaccine mandates. Liam Drew, in an article for Nature, writes, “Governments can never force someone to get themselves or their child vaccinated—it is a foundational principle of medical ethics that consent must be given for any procedure.” Well said. Yet, in the very next sentence, Drew contradicts the principle he so clearly articulates. “The decision to make vaccination mandatory is therefore a decision to impose some form of penalty on those who do not follow the law.” If one is punished for not doing something, then one is being forced to do something. I believe I can make this point obvious to the reader. If a man straps a bomb on your body and instructs you to rob a bank or suffer death, while you may choose not to rob the bank, no court is going to deny that you were forced to rob a bank if you choose life. One does not consent with a gun to his head. At the very least, we must admit that the person who is punished for exercising his right does not really possess that right. It cannot be said, for instance, that one enjoys a right to freedom of speech if one is punished for his utterances.

What about the scourge of COVID-19? What about it? Every third person died from smallpox, and the rate was even greater for babies. Survivors were often blind and scarred for life. The modern smallpox vaccine, developed in the nineteenth century, is a live virus preparation of the vaccinia virus, which is safe and cross-protective for cowpox, monkeypox, and smallpox (variola). The smallpox vaccine is effective in preventing infection in 95 percent of those vaccinated. Get back to me when SARS-CoV-2 becomes that lethal and there is a vaccine that successful. (See The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart; The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg; The Communitarian Nightmare We Feared is Here; Somehow, a Bill of Rights got Locked into the Constitution.)

* * *

Note:

* Holmes, by the way, a man beloved by progressives and pragmatists, is the same man who, in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), in a judgment anticipating the attitude of the People’s Republic of China, used the utterly absurd analogy of “shouting fire in a crowded theater” to explain his reasoning that speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. I note this to establish a pattern indicating Holmes contempt for liberty. (For more, see Fire in a Crowded Theater: Failing Free Speech and the Manufacture of Consent.)

“The apparent homogeneity within races as compared to the ‘obvious’ difference between them stems partly from the fact that our consciousness of racial differences is constantly being reinforced socially because racial distinctions serve economic and political ends.” —Richard Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (1974)

There are few people more perceptive vis–à–vis the role scientism plays in the cultural and social relations of economic and political power than the late Richard Lewontin (Lewontin passed away July 4, 2021). Anticipating Barbara Fields’ arguments from her domain of social history, Lewontin’s natural history makes it clear that the constructs of racism (scientific or otherwise) manufacture the existence of race rather that discover and clarify it. Race is really an illusion. Like the phantoms of theology, we make race significant by confusing myth with reality.

Although Lewontin was situationally engaged with the persistence of race thinking on the political right, his observations of 1974 speak to the problem with the political left’s rhetoric of race essentialism dominating today’s discourse. Antiracism, Black Lives Matter, and critical race theory are counterproductive to their professed goal of fighting racism because, like the race realism and white supremacy hailing from the right, proponents essentialize race rather than assign it to history or insignificance. By recentering race, by making skin color significant for purposes other than combating discrimination to insure equal treatment across institutions, the antiracist means to resurrect and repurpose systemic racism for economic and political ends.

If progressives really believed in combating racism, they would demand equal treatment for all individuals regardless of the racial categories inherited from the racist past. But that’s not what progressives do. Instead, they insist on living in the past by continually reifying the racial categories scientists such as Lewontin have debunked and transcended. Compounding the problem of reification is the practice of redefining racial—even ethnic and religious—categories to elevate or diminish the presumed power of one or more groups, while strategically expanding the scope of racial oppression in order to enlarge a list of grievances, demand special treatment, and diminish individuals defined as oppressors. As I noted in a recent blog (Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), progressive rhetoric on race is being used to plan the large-scale expropriation of wealth based on racial categories. This has always ever been the purpose of systemic racism.

Every time a progressive charges an “oppressor” with “cultural appropriation” for wearing clothes or playing music associated with a race to which he does not belong, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially and expanded to include nonracial things. It signals the progressive investment in racial categories. By conflating culture with race, the system of racism is not only elaborated, but escapes being assigned to the past by moving the goalposts. Every time a person who personally identifies as a race other than the one to which the (customizable) rules of racism assign her, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially. How is one a race imposter if race isn’t really real? Confusing race with ancestry has always been a method of racecraft. Every time a group historically presumed to be white (for example, Arabs or Jews) is redefined racially, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially. Every time an ethnicity (for example, Mexican or Palestinian) or a religion (Islam) is treated as a racial category, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially. (See Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were?)

Antiracism, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory—these are part of a campaign to make racial distinction serve economic and political ends. Ask yourself how the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with its emphasis on equal treatment of individuals regardless of race, was soon eclipsed by an overarching system of “positive” racial discrimination. The answer is obvious from a class analytical standpoint: the system of corporate governance requires an ideological system and set of political practices disruptive to the class consciousness that might challenge its power. If individuals are no longer focused on racial differences, even if they still believe they see them, they are left to refocus on what most individuals share: their common existence as proletarians exploited in a capitalist system. Racial consciousness has proven to be an effective strategy to prevent this from happening. (Before you accuse me to repurposing a biologist’s argument for economic and political purposes, know that biologists can be Marxist, too. And Richard Lewontin was.)

I close with a note. This blog is inspired by Joseph L. Graves Jr.’s August 8, 2021 article “Richard Lewontin: Race Science for the People,” in Science for the People. Graves argues that Lewontin’s “analysis of the fallacy of racial classification in humans is one of his most important.” I agree (for a summary of Lewontin’s views, see his “Confusion About Human Races”). In his essay, Graves pushes back against the argument that, with the advancement of genetics, race science is regaining legitimacy. He cites, for example, a March 23, 2018 article in The New York Times by Harvard geneticist David Reich “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of Race.”

I will discuss this matter in greater depth in a future blog on Freedom and Reason, but it should suffice here to note that we know from large-scale population genetics studies, as well as from archeology and physical anthropology, that our common sense notions of race align with the geographical distribution of phenotypic features, these the result of evolutionary processes and patterns of migration. It is likely that, despite common sense understandings existing on a different plane from scientific ones, populations around the world, operating from varied worldviews, would arrive at a simultaneously false yet uniformly common understanding of race. For this reason, it is just as unlikely that racial thinking will disappear in light of arguments by preeminent scientists such Richard Lewontin. But this is all the more reason to insist on equal treatment of individuals despite their racial classifications.

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Note (later the same day): The Guardian and other establishment newspapers gleefully spin the new US census numbers. Good news: whites are losing. Bad news for Republicans, who will have to draw their districts even more tightly.

“Non-hispanic whites now account for around 58% of America’s population, a drop from 2010 when they made up 63.7% of the population. It was the first time that the non-Hispanic white population has fallen below 60% since the census began.” The trick is the contrivance “non-hispanic white.” (The idea of non-white Hispanic is meaningful, however.) The trick is also played as “white-only.” (They Do You This Way; How to Misrepresent the Racial Demographics of Mass Murder.)

“The Hispanic or Latino population grew by 23%,” the Guardian tells its audience. But here’s what it doesn’t tell them: two-thirds of Hispanics are white. The facts that Asian population numbers rose even more than hispanic but that Asians are a small percentage of the population, whereas Hispanics are the largest ethnic group, and black population numbers rose considerably less than the Asian numbers, means the white majority did not really shrink by that much, especially if most of the rise in Hispanic numbers were racially white. (Asian and Black are racial categories, Hispanic, like Arab, is an ethic category.) Moreover, overall, America’s population achieved its second lowest decadal growth in US history (good news, but it could stand being even lower).

Update August 10 (a day later): As I predicted, YouTube removed the video. Reason given? You know what it is:

So we turn to Rumble. See below for original blog with commentary and transcript.

Why do I understand science? Because I am a trained scientist who is not deluded by scientism or the army of official experts selected by our corporate overloards over which progressives gush. Dr. Dan Stock understands science, too. You must see the video below.  

I ripped the video because I do not expect it to be available for very long. I will post it to Rumble if YouTube takes it down. We cannot be quiet. We’re in the midst of a big lie. Why are they lying? We’re being governed by sociopaths and Cluster B personality types working through agencies entirely captured by corporate power—so for no good reason. This is not a noble lie. I provide a transcript below the video.

“Oh, I can’t read that.”

“Looks like a doctor’s signature to me.”

“Well, that’s why I can’t read it.”

“Guilty as charged. Dr. Dan Stock 5777 West Seminole North McCordsville, Indiana.

“To address your combat: gee, it’s hard to believe we’re 18 months into this and still having a problem! And I would suggest the reason we still have a problem is because we’re doing things that are not useful, and we’re getting our sources of information from the Indiana State Board of Health and the CDC, who actually don’t bother to read science before they do this.

“I’m actually a functional family medicine physician. That means I am specially trained in immunology and inflammation regulation, and everything being recommended by the CDC and the State Board of Health is actually contrary to all the rules of science. So, things you should know about coronavirus and all other respiratory viruses: they are spread by aerosol particles which are small enough to go through every mask. By the way, the literature that supports all of that is in a flash drive that we’ve presented to you. It has been given to the Secretary. As a matter of fact, it quotes at least three studies that are sponsored by the NIH to that exact fact, even though the CDC and the NIH have chosen to avoid—to ignore—the very science that they paid to have done. That is why you keep struggling with this. It is because you cannot make these viruses go away.

“The natural history of all respiratory viruses is that they circulate all year long waiting for the immune system to get sick through the winter or become deranged, as has happened recently with these vaccines, and then they cause symptomatic disease because they cannot be filtered out. And they have animal reservoirs. And this is very important point—no one can make this virus go away. The CDC has managed to convince everybody that we can handle this like we did Smallpox where we could make a virus go away. Smallpox had no animal reservoirs. The only thing that it learned to infect was humans. That’s why we were able to make that virus go away. That will not happen with this any more than it will with influenza, the common cold, respiratory syncytial virus, adenoviral respiratory syndromes, or anything else that has animal reservoirs. So, the reason you can’t do this is because you’re trying to do something which has already been tried and can’t be done.

“Equally important is that vaccination changes none of this—especially with this vaccine—and I would hope this Board would start asking itself before it considers taking the advice of the CDC the NIH and the [Indiana] State Board of Health, ‘Why we are doing things about this that we didn’t do for the common cold, influenza, or respiratory syncytial virus?’ and then ask yourself, ‘Why is a vaccine that is supposedly so effective having a breakout in the middle of the summer when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that?’ And to help you understand that, you need to know the condition that is called ‘antibody-mediated viral enhancement.’ That is a condition done when vaccines work wrong, as they did in every coronavirus study done in animals on coronaviruses after the SARS outbreak, and done in respiratory syncytial virus, where a vaccine used in a vulnerable individual—done the wrong way, which by the way, cannot be done right—for a respiratory virus which has a very low pathogenicity rate, causes the immune system to actually fight the virus wrong, and let the virus become worse than it would have with native infection. And that is why you’re seeing an outbreak right now. In fact, in that flash drive you’re going to have coming to you, and in the emails with six extra, will be a study showing that 75 percent of people who had COVID-19 positive symptom cases in the Barnstable, Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated. Therefore, there is no reason for treating any person vaccinated any differently than any person unvaccinated.

“You should also know that no vaccine—even the ones I support and would give to myself and my children—ever stops infection. In 2014 there was an outbreak of mumps in the National Hockey League. The only people who came down with symptoms were the people who were unvaccinated, or unknown vaccine status. Boy, that sounds like a great argument for vaccines but a question that you should ask yourself—knowing that half of the people who came down with symptomatic disease had no contact with an unvaccinated or unknown vaccine status individual—is, ‘Where did they get the disease?’ And the answer was: ‘From the vaccinated individuals.’ No vaccine prevents you from getting infected. You get infected. You shed pathogens—this is especially true of viral respiratory pathogens—you just don’t get symptomatic from it.

“So, you cannot stop spread. You cannot make these numbers that you’ve planned on get better by doing any of the things you’re doing, because that is the nature of viral respiratory pathogens. And you can’t prevent it with a vaccine, because they don’t do the very thing you’re wanting them to do. And you will be chasing this the remainder of your life until you recognize that the Center for Disease Control and the Indiana State Board of Health are giving you very bad scientific guidance, and instead read the articles that are going to come on the email, and are on this flash drive, and listen to the people in this audience here tonight, who actually have recognized the advice they are getting from the CDC and the NIH is counterfactual. And that’s why you’re still fighting this with this vaccine that supposedly was going to make all of this go away, but it suddenly managed to make an outbreak of COVID-19 develop in the middle of the summer when Vitamin D levels are at their highest, by the way.

“The other thing that would be necessary for any vaccine restriction to be considered is: if there were no other treatment available. And I can tell you, having treated over 15 COVID-19 patients, that between active loading with Vitamin D, Ivermectin, and Zinc, that there is not a single person who has come anywhere near the hospital and we already have studies that show that if you achieve a 25 hydroxy Vitamin D level greater than 55, your risk of COVID-19 death will drop down to through one quarter of the population average for the United States. And there are active treatment trials included on that flash drive that show the same is true. So if you were going to discriminate based upon vaccine you should also discriminate based upon 25 hydroxy Vitamin D level, Zinc taste test response, and probably previous infection, since there are also studies on that flash drive that show that people who have recovered from COVID-19 infection actually get no benefit from vaccination at all—no reduction in symptoms, no reduction in hospitalization, and suffer two to four times the rate of side effects if they are subsequently vaccinated.

“Therefore, the policies that you are basing on are totally counterfactual. I don’t blame this Board for that, because I know you aren’t scientists and you thought it was reasonable to listen to the CDC, NIH and the Indiana State Board of Health, but I would encourage that instead you listen to the people out here in this audience, and read what’s on that data drive. And if anybody here on this Board has any questions about anything on that, I will happily come back and sit with you individually if you would like me to explain the science behind this. And if you’re worried about being sued by somebody because you don’t follow the guidance of the CDC and the NIH, I will tell you, you have a free ‘pro bono expert testimony’ at your disposal. I will testify in defense of this Board turning down all these recommendations—for free—at any time, in any court. Thank you.”

AP News reports Apple to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse. When I first heard about this I thought, “This cannot possibly be true.” You mean, I take a photo of my 3-year-old daughter taking a bubble bath and upload it to the Cloud and Apple-deployed AI scans my phone to detect child porn and, if my account is flagged, a human being will look at my naked daughter and alert the authorities? “Apple unveiled plans to scan US iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, drawing applause from child protection groups.” So the answer is yes. That answer is horrifying and I do not find at all convincing AP News reassuring the reader that “[p]arents snapping innocent photos of a child in the bath presumably need not worry.” Presumably?

Apple’s tool designed to detect “known images of child sexual abuse” is called NeuralHash. It “will scan images before they are uploaded to iCloud,” AP News reports (emphasis mine). “If it finds a match, the image will be reviewed by a human. If child pornography is confirmed, the user’s account will be disabled and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified.” The depth of surveillance doesn’t end there. “Separately, Apple plans to scan users’ encrypted messages for sexually explicit content as a child safety measure.” So if I engage in fantasy role-playing with others, an Apple-deployed program will scan my text and, if it sounds like child porn, then Apple turns me over to the authorities?

Not everybody AP News consulted for the story is applauding. “Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, warned that the system could be used to frame innocent people by sending them seemingly innocuous images designed to trigger matches for child pornography. That could fool Apple’s algorithm and alert law enforcement.” Green told AP News, “Researchers have been able to do this pretty easily.” In other words, Apple’s system can be manipulated to engage in a high-tech form of swatting. It is not hard to imagine corporate and state actors using this tactic to harass opponents by raising suspicions about them with law enforcement agencies. It’s not like the deep state hasn’t done things like this before.

* * *

USA Today is reporting that Dr. Anthony Fauci expects ‘a flood’ of COVID-19 vaccine mandates after full FDA approval. I have blogged about the problems surrounding this on Freedom and Reason (On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination; The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg). What I want to draw attention to today is this myth Fauci repeats that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” This is a slogan designed to keep alive what is becoming quite obviously a counterproductive vaccine program. The evidence suggests that in fact it is the vaccinated who are prolonging the pandemic. Fauci knows as well as anybody that the vaccines are not efficacious in conferring immunity (only the virus can do that) and that the recent rise in cases (see above chart) is, at least in part, fueled by vaccinated people infected with SARS-CoV-2 exposing others to the virus.

Today, on Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic, pathologist Dr. Kevin Homer provided a paradigm of what skepticism about all this should look like. CDC policy has Homer scratching his head. In the past, he explains, if a person had a virus, then one presumes he has developed immunity to the virus and therefore does not need a vaccine. Why expose a person who has survived a virus to the additional risks of a vaccine? If virus-acquired immunity was in question, tests can be be performed to confirm this. Gathering these data also provides facts for determining the extent of herd immunity. Moreover, as Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA platform, tells us, if you are healthy, there is no need to take the vaccine, as the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risks of the disease. (See “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom? Will the Vaccinated Do the Right Thing and Mask Up or Stay Home?)

I have written about the risks these vaccines pose to human health (The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). Perhaps the most risky thing about the mRNA platformed vaccines is the technology’s very mechanism of action, that is teaching cells to manufacture the spiked protein that causes COVID-19. The spike protein and a dysfunctional immune response to it lies at the root of the inflammation of the body’s organs and the problem of clotting blood associated with the advanced stage of the disease. This is why many vaccine recipients presents as a victim of long haul COVID-19. Since SARS-CoV-2 is not a sufficient condition to cause COVID-19, rather the spike protein is, indigenous production of the spike protein may prime the vaccinated for disease. Moreover, since the mRNA vaccines only teach the body this trick and do not confer immunity to the virus, those vaccinated with this technology are prone to become viral factories, endangering others.

“This is a dystopian world we’re living in,” Fauci remarked. As is his reflex, portraying the vaccine hesitant as ignorant and stupid, Fauci said if them that “they are being misled.” Certainly the public is being mislead. COVID-19 is a global propaganda operation. Ironically, standing outside the ideological bubble of progressivism tends to make one immune from the effects of the operation. The very people Fauci and other elites treat as irrational believers of rightwing conspiracy theories are the ones who are demonstrating the proper degree of skepticism. As for the hybristic progressive, elite propaganda portraying populist-nationalism as beyond the pale works best on those who put their political identity and virtue projection before the values they profess.

* * *

A tip to The National Pulse has unearthed an 21-page document from April 2017 entitled “9 Solutions to Secure America’s Elections” wherein a Biden-linked group, Center for American Progress, chaired by chief Democratic Party strategist John Podesta, and featuring Stacey Abrams, demands “robust” audits of elections. Why? Because of the wide array of problems associated with machine voting and the importance of election integrity in ensuring confidence in American democracy. Among other things, the Center for American Progress reveals that voting machines are hackable even without Internet access.

I encourage you to read The National Pulse article, but I want to share a few passages from the Center’s paper.

“Voting machines that record votes and tally them are run on software that is vulnerable to cyberintrusions. Well-resourced hackers, whether funded by foreign governments or criminal syndicates, have the access, ability, and motivation to infect computerized voting machines and tallying systems across America. This can occur even if the machines are not connected to the internet. Attackers, for example, can deploy software such as Stuxnet and Brutal Kangaroo to target offline voting machines.” The authors emphasize: “Even with strong chain-of-custody practices, hackers can remotely infiltrate an electronic machine’s operating system, and without paper-ballot records, it is impossible to know whether a hack occurred or if votes were changed.” Actually, this is not precisely true. It is more difficult. But there is a record of activity stored on the machines, which is why a forensic audit that includes inspection of machines is vital for ensuring election integrity.

“[The problem with electronic voting] is why there needs to be a paper ballot—which is software independent—for every vote cast. A paper ballot offers a record of voter intent, which will exist even if voting machines are attacked and data are altered. Paper ballots or records are necessary both to conduct meaningful postelection audits able to confirm the election outcomes, and to enable post-hoc correction in the event of malfunctions or security breaches.” That bit about enabling post-hoc correction is crucial. To translate, if an audit finds significant discrepancies, the vote should be corrected to reflect the will of the people. (Are you starting to wonder what changed between April 2017 and November 2020?)

“The utility of paper ballots and voter-verified paper records is only useful for ensuring that the outcome of an election is correct if election administrators commit to carrying out robust postelection audits,” the paper continues. “Many jurisdictions are not doing enough to conduct audits on an adequate number of ballots to ensure election accuracy and detect manipulation of vote totals caused by failing machines or hackers.” You will have noticed that, for example in Arizona, when Republicans organize an audit, they are attacked by Democrats and the corporate media for attempting to weaken the legitimacy of the 2020 election by calling into question the process. But only a few years before: “Given these facts, postelection audits—which are robust enough to create strong evidence that the outcome is accurate and to correct it if it is wrong—must be conducted after every election.”

The Center’s paper portrays Democrats as believing that election integrity is crucial to voter confidence in the democratic process. Yet, in 2020, because the correct outcome was secured, i.e., Donald Trump was removed from office, the story is not that confidence in the democratic process is undermined by election integrity. In hindsight, the paper seems not so much a plan of action for robust post-election audits, but instead instructions for how to steal an election. As several news sources have reported, Podesta played Joe Biden in an election war-game that took place ahead of the 2020 election, wherein he refused to concede defeat in the immediate aftermath of a clear Trump election-night victory. This was revealed in a report from the Soros-linked Transition Integrity Project.

According to reporting by Natalie Winters of The National Pulse, the D.C.-based Center for American Progress (CAP) has also repeatedly partnered with the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) on sponsored trips to China and other endeavors for more than a decade. Podesta’s lobbying group recently employed Terry Neal, who subsequently worked to “provide strategic communications advice” for Huawei, a China-based technology company. Podesta’s brother, Tony, is also believed to be lobbying for Chinese Communist-linked tech giant Huawei. This is significant. The US government labels Huawei a “national security threat.” Huawei not only collaborates with the People’s Liberation Army, but provides the Chinese Communist Party backdoor access to its devices and networks.