In April 2020, the New York Times published the Red Dawn emails – email threads that included many high-ranking officials in the United States, including Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield. They showed what officials and researchers were sharing with one another about the developing situation from late January. In a way, this is the ‘conspiracy’ that some suggest was going on to push the world towards lockdown, in that here we see what U.S. officials and researchers were hearing and saying in the run-up to the shut downs – though it isn’t exactly the conspiracy most have in mind. Rather, it shows researchers and officials scrabbling around to analyse the limited data, attempting to work out what’s going on and how to respond – plus some serious pushing for restrictions, with Carter Mecher and Eva Lee in particular making an urgent case for NPIs as early as January. As a taste of the alarmism, Mecher wrote on January 28th 2020: “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Brownstone Institute has republished the emails for those who missed them or had forgotten about them. This is from his introduction.
The gigantic mess called lockdown began with an email thread called Red Dawn in early 2020, based on the old movie about a Russian invasion of the U.S. The idea was that the virus was the invader. The public health lockdowners and fanatics on the list who urged the overthrow of American life as we knew it imagined themselves to be the saviours.
You can read many, but not all, of the emails below. They were enormously influential in generating the necessary panic to kick their sadistic social experiment into high gear. The participants are listed at the top in this file assembled by the New York Times, and include top officials at all levels plus intellectuals.
What actually happened was a different kind of invasion. It was the saviours who invaded our schools, churches, sports, commercial lives, and even our homes. They took total control, issuing random edicts by the day concerning what we could and could not do. They enforced these edicts at the point of a gun, thus wrecking countless businesses, driving millions into depression, violating all human rights, and shattering the lives of countless hundreds of millions not only in the U.S. but all over the world.
All they needed to do to accomplish this was to tap into a pre-modern and unscientific (and essentially childish) penchant to believe that the right way to deal with a virus is to run and hide from it, as if human beings didn’t evolve with viruses in a complicated dance for a million years. Forget everything we’ve learned from science over the 20th century; instead, we should behave like Prince Prospero in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story Masque of the Red Death.
To this end, society gave up all its ideals: concern for the poor, high regard for civil liberties, opposition to biases against The Other, its celebration of the arts, and even its attachment to public schools and personal privacy. Other ideals were given up too: limited government, the Constitution, and human rights all had to bow to the great agenda of virus control…
We are nowhere near coming to terms with what has happened to our world. But in the course of the investigations, which should continue for years, this set of emails should prove instructive.
Read the emails at the Brownstone Institute here.
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