I’m mostly interested in Mike Pence’s book So Help Me God for what he says about the experience of Covid controls, for this is what wrecked the administration he served. That will be my focus in what follows but let me first address what everyone is right now thinking: how could anyone give their autobiography such a self-serving filiopietistic title?
I don’t have the answer but he certainly leans in. He must have hired an editor to sprinkle the text as much as possible with Bible verses and other invocations of his deep connection to transcendent concerns, all of which serves as a helpful cover for what he actually did.
And what did he do? From the Birx book, the Kushner book, the WashPo book, and every other of the insider accounts we have so far, he provided cover to Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield in their drive to convince Trump of lockdown orders, and then protected the lockdown crew in their national drive to push controls long after Trump had lost the faith. Later, he stuck the knife in deeper and then bailed.
We know that this is true now from his own account. To be sure, his main theme is that the Trump administration, thanks to him and his spiritual maturity, did almost everything correct in 2020. Then the Biden administration showed up and messed everything up using a ‘top-down’ and public-sector approach that the Trump administration rejected. This is a brazenly partisan take at multiple levels.
As he summarises (emphasis mine throughout):
We reinvented testing from a standing start, produced and distributed billions of pieces of personal protective equipment, and manufactured tens of thousands of ventilators. In nine short months we developed three safe and effective vaccines; when we left office in January 2021, we were vaccinating a million Americans a day. Together, we saved millions of lives in the greatest national mobilisation since World War II. It took all of us, the whole of Government, the whole of America. But we did it. Only in America.
There is no evidence, obviously, of this claim that “we saved millions of lives,” but I’ve come to expect this sort of language. ‘Saved millions of lives’ has become a rhetorical stand-in for: please do not criticise my appalling failure. And by the way, the line ‘Only in America’ is deployed constantly throughout the book but this too is ridiculous. The lockdowns and deployment of other NPIs were global in scope. He surely knows this so the phrase is just more self-serving jingoism, which he must assume plays to his potential voting base.
He claims, of course, that the decision to block China was his idea and Trump went along with it:
If this virus, COVID-19, was pouring out of China, we had to try to cut off its ability to reach us. I sensed, though, how unprecedented and likely subject to wide-ranging criticism doing that would be. As the conversation in the Oval Office reached its conclusion, for the President’s benefit, I asked members of the task force, “Has any president in American history ever suspended all travel from another country?” The answer was no. Trump sat back in his chair, pondered all that he had heard, and made a decision: the United States would temporarily suspend all travel from China.
Goodness, how could he have been so smart and far-seeing?
What gave me confidence was that I had been a Governor and had gone through two different health crises, one including the first MERS case in the United States and the other an HIV/AIDS epidemic in a small Indiana town. I had seen firsthand how the state and federal governments could work together during a health crisis. I understood and readily accepted the challenge.
Oh, and also God and country was at his side:
I stood up, walked out of the Oval Office, headed down the hallway, and pulled the team together in my West Wing office for my first meeting as head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Not knowing what lay ahead, we bowed our heads and opened that first meeting in prayer. From that moment a seriousness settled on me that was nothing short of God’s grace. I didn’t know what was ahead, but I knew America would rise to the occasion.
Also Pence rescued Americans from a cruise ship. I kid you not. This is what he believes. Can you even imagine? Here you are on a delightful cruise and a flu starts going around. Too bad but hey people get sick. Stay on the upper deck and get some sun! Then the helicopters arrive to ‘rescue’ you when you are merely trying to enjoy a vacation. Here is Pence’s account of his own heroics:
As other nations shut down travel in February, almost ninety-five thousand Americans were left stranded abroad. The task force launched a rescue mission to bring them home safely. A number of Americans who were unable to get back home were on cruise ships… The task force launched a complicated mission to evacuate the passengers, many of them elderly and vulnerable. We coordinated with air force bases in California, Texas, and Nebraska to receive the passengers, who had to be safely transported off the ship and into quarantine on the bases.
You know, that sounds kind of like kidnapping or hostage-taking or something. I doubt seriously that the passengers appreciated being ‘rescued’ in such a way only to be forcibly quarantined. All of this speaks to something extremely strange about these days, the conflation of an infectious-disease outbreak with a military operation requiring martial law and extreme invasions of liberty and property.
As Debbie Lerman has proven, this is exactly what happened. Sorry to say but Pence, knowingly or not, was at the centre of it. As even he says, “It was important, then, to have not just public health and national security officials involved in the decision-making…”
Pence further takes credit for solving the testing debacle. Birx was running around freaking out that we needed millions and billions of tests, else everyone would die. Pence stepped up with his astonishing leadership skills:
Thirty minutes later, the CEOs of America’s biggest testing companies were all on the line, including Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics. We explained the testing crisis and made it clear that we wanted the industry to work together. I told them that the pharmaceutical companies would have to create a consortium to work together to develop medicines and vaccines and I wanted the diagnostic companies to do the same. They were eager to help and said they would discuss it in a meeting of the industry to take place the next day. “Can you all be at the White House later this week?” I asked. They all said yes, they would be there. I hung up. Birx was in disbelief. “How did you do that?” she asked. “Welcome to the White House,” I said.
Wow, such drama! What happened next?
I told them, “Make as many tests as quick as you can, and the federal Government will buy them from you. Make a billion a month if you can.” And with that we launched an effort to redesign testing.
Yes, you can roll your eyes.
Also, Pence is the reason we had so many masks! He was campaigning around the country when God spoke to him:
As I was thinking about the nation’s supply of personal protective equipment, I realized that Minnesota was home to 3M, which happens to be the nation’s largest producer of masks. It was God’s timing. I asked Birx and Stephen Hahn, the director of the FDA, to come along. We got onboard Air Force Two and landed in Minnesota on our way to Seattle.
What a man! Then what happened?
I knew [CEO Roman] Walz from Congress – we had been in the House together – and our governorships had overlapped. I asked them how 3M could increase its production of masks. Roman explained that the company produced 35 million masks a month, but only 10% were for hospital use; all the rest were for construction workers. “But are they essentially the same mask?” I asked. The answer was yes. “Great, then, can we just purchase those for hospital use?” No, I was told, the masks had not been approved for medical use by the FDA. The company could be sued if they were used in hospitals. “What’s the answer here?” I asked. Roman explained that if 3M could be afforded legal protection by Congress, we could sell them across the country. So after the meeting ended, I grabbed Walz by the elbow. I told him he would have to call Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer – Congress was quickly putting together a Covid emergency bill – and tell them we needed the Democratic leaders to put language into a bill that would provide temporary protection for companies such as 3M to sell their masks for medical use, which he did. With that reform alone we went from having 3 million N95 masks available to 20 million when Trump signed the bill a week later.
A better saviour for the country one cannot imagine! And yet he was more than just an incredibly competent testing and mask master. He was also a spiritual counselor to the President’s son-in-law!
Shortly after I took over the task force, Jared Kushner approached me. He told me he was dropping everything he was working on to help me in whatever way I needed…. Two weeks in, on the evening of Sunday March 15th, he called me. When I heard his voice on the other end, I could tell he was discouraged about the challenges we were facing in ramping up testing, getting enough medical supplies distributed, and coordinating that effort at the ground level. “We can’t do this from the White House,” he confessed. “It’s too much, we will never be able to meet the needs.” “You want me to make you feel better?” I asked, not even waiting for his answer. “We don’t have to,” I said. “The framers of the Constitution gave us a system of 50 CEOs leading states across the country.… We just need to make sure they have what they need, and they will get it done.” To that, he sighed in relief, saying, “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” adding, “You know what? You’re right!”
Is there no problem this man cannot solve? The answer is obviously no, if we are to believe his autobiographical account.
He further proves this on the subject of ventilators, which he knew from his extensive experience in hospital therapeutics that we desperately needed.
When it came to the matter of the nation’s ventilator supply, we faced another shortage with dire consequences. In severe cases of covid, the patients’ lungs become so inflamed that they can no longer deliver oxygen to the bloodstream. Ventilators provided a lifeline to the lungs while patients fought off the virus. The Strategic National Stockpile hadn’t been refilled since the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, and at the outset of the year, we had ten thousand ventilators on hand. It wasn’t nearly enough. In the first few weeks, we had requests for 55,000 ventilators from the states. If there was anything that kept me up at night, it was the idea that any American who needed a ventilator could be denied a ventilator.
All you widows out there whose husbands were vented to death in those days – we might be talking many thousands – are surely comforted to know that Pence lost sleep worrying that there weren’t enough. And you can predict the ending of the ventilator vignette: Pence got the ventilators we supposedly needed but actually did not.
As for his relationship with Fauci, it was tight. He has no words of criticism at all.
And I was glad [Fauci] was there. He was a reassuring voice to the public; Mitch McConnell had advised me, correctly, that Fauci would be a valuable member of the team because of his stature. He and Dr. Birx had known each other for years; they had almost a mentor and mentee relationship. Fauci played an invaluable role in helping the President and our team understand the true scope of the threat… I always worked well with Tony, as he was keen to stay in his own important lane. He offered his expertise and advice, but in all our dealings he always recognised that there were economic and social factors to consider in the President’s decisions. I never thought his role was to lead the Government’s response to the pandemic or be its point person, and neither did he.
That takes us to the lockdowns. Here is Pence’s justification:
By the second week of March 2020, with cases on the rise in several major cities and the threat of an outbreak that could overwhelm our health care system, the task force took a plan to the President, developed by Fauci and Birx, to shut down much of the U.S. economy for two weeks. We called it “15 Days to Slow the Spread”. It was a mitigation tactic driven by the knowledge that the virus was extremely contagious. The President urged citizens who could stay home to do so and to avoid interacting with others, and temporarily shut down huge parts of the economy, other than businesses and workers deemed essential. Ramping up testing, bolstering the nation’s supplies of medical equipment, and getting it all to the states was an effort to save our medical system from collapsing under the weight of the virus. The goal of the so-called lockdown was never to stop the spread of the virus; it was to slow it to buy time for the U.S. health care system while its innovators got to work producing supplies and developing a medical arsenal.
Incredible, because none of this is true. The medical system was never collapsing. Hundreds of hospitals furloughed nurses because the hospitals emptied out! This is because the Trump administration issued nationwide orders to reserve hospitals for Covid patients while blocking all diagnostics and elective surgeries. But of course we don’t hear a word of this from Pence’s book.
How does he justify having a central Government under an effective dictatorship issuing a nationwide edict that closed all places where people congregate? It was an incredible and totalitarian dictate. Pence simply says the following: “I believe in limited government; I am not anti-government.”
Oh. And here, so far as he was concerned, government was merely doing what it is supposed to do.
Of course, it was never going to end in two weeks. Pence tells the story:
They informed us that if we failed to keep the mitigation in place for another thirty days, up to 2.2 million Americans could die before the year was out. The graph presented two waves, the worst-case scenario in dark blue, the ‘if we do everything right’ outcome in light blue. The former looked like a mountain; the latter was significantly smaller but still heartbreaking in size. The president digested it all for a quiet moment. It was another hard decision, but he made it. On March 31st, we presented the chart to the American people and extended the 15 Days to Slow the Spread protocol for another 30 days.
The pathology or stupidity here is simply astonishing! They looked at some bogus modeling chart with colors and decided to abolish the Bill of Rights for longer? Yep, that happened and Pence blessed it. So far as I can tell, Pence is not mortified but proud of this decision that ended up tanking the entire Trump presidency. “I know we saved millions of lives,” he says.
I know you are tired of this review already but I must share with you another virtue of Pence. He is also a blessed peacemaker:
In a weekend series of tweets, President Trump called [Michigan Governor] Gretchen “half Whitmer” and said she was “way over her head.” At a Monday press conference, Trump said he told me not to call “the woman in Michigan.” I called her. When I did, she said we had done a great job but she was going to keep pushing for more. I respectfully asked her to talk to me if she needed anything rather than take it to cable television. The next day, President Trump said he had had a “productive conversation” with Whitmer. Blessed are the peacemakers.
What about when the lockdowns were ending but sustained in many places? We know from the records that this was due to nationwide tours by Birx, Redfield, and Fauci who would show up in governors’ offices to urge them to keep schools closed, force everyone to wear masks, and otherwise ban large gatherings. By this time, Trump was fed up with that whole kabuki dance but his team had already gone rogue and tried to keep lockdowns going until November.
How in the world did they get away with this? Guess what? It was Pence and he admits it:
When our press briefings waned, I encouraged Birx and Redfield to visit the states and meet with governors and health officials. I believed that our role was to give our best counsel but respect the state leaders – which we did without fail.
I don’t even need to report that he is enormously proud of the vaccines too, even go so far as to report, without irony, that “they were both nearly 95% effective against contracting covid:”
To have two safe and effective vaccines available to the American people within nine months of the start of a pandemic was a medical miracle. While those research companies are to be commended, so, too, are the leaders of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui and HHS assistant secretary Paul Mango, who shepherded the vaccines through the process in record time, and General Gus Perna, who worked with states and American companies such as FedEx to distribute the vaccine across the country before the year was out. The day we left office in 2021, we were vaccinating a million Americans a day. Only in America.
We can stop there and finish by observing that nothing in this book contradicts what we’ve learned over these two years, namely that Mike Pence served as both a carrier pigeon and protecting veil for the national security state that took over the country in March 2020. It was he who gave the okay to Birx’s subversions. It was he who assisted in convincing Trump of the lockdowns. It was he who pushed the panic that led to massive spending, overpurchases of masks and ventilators, he who pushed for the deployment of the Defense Production Act, and he who sent the Navy hospital ship to New York that went unused. And he not only defends all his actions but implies that they were all blessed by God.
And now he encourages us all to stand back in awe and, quite possibly, elect him as the next president. As Pence might say, only in America.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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Can’t help thinking that this writing is a perfect example of narcissism. Pretentious and only very slightly accurate.
Using classical words to describe an ‘original’ observation is a tried and trusted way to establish your ‘authority’ over the subject because anyone who does not follow what you are saying (because it’s either rubbish or non existent) can be regarded as stupid or at least in need of instruction from the new priesthood of which the author is Chief.
Coincidentally I was just watching a film on one of my favourite YouTube channels, The Ushanka Show which is hosted by a very ordinary former citizen of the Soviet Union.
In it he responds to the question
‘Was life better during the Soviet Regime or after it?”
Instead of using political theory dressed up as science he compares it to living life in the shallow end of a swimming pool with very strict bodyguards. Fascinating and illuminating stuff.
To clarify, by the word ‘you’ I mean the author of the article, my opening remarks were not directed at ‘you’, Ron Carlin.
The use of ‘special language’ by specialists is a problem that doesn’t seem to go away. I suppose the specialists feel that if they used normal language then any old person would have a chance of understanding what they were saying and perhaps realise it wasn’t that difficult at all. It also marks out ‘the club’ — if people only use normal language then it marks them out as a non-specialist and thus they can be safely ignored, and perhaps belittled if they don’t go away.
In general, you should always at least try to write at a level that the intended readership can understand.
Beyond this, I have a feeling that people with truly complex considerations to get across often try to explain using simple language and logical progression of the argument (perhaps fail, but try), and they’ll usually try to do it in as short a piece as possible… whereas people with a very simple message will often stick to specialist language and even pad things out a bit to get things longer. I’m not entirely sure why this should be the case, but it does seem to be a common theme.
Chris Hitchins and Sir Roger Scruton did not have to resort to linguistic obfuscation to hide the shallowness of their ideas.
You mean that Hitchen’s and Scruton’s ideas were shallow? You might mean the opposite, but your statement is a bit ambiguous. Can you clarify?
Apologies, written under the influence of meds.
. . . whose ideas were not shallow yet did not resort to linguistic obfuscation to express them.
I read this earlier (link on right-hand side) & wished to comment but wasn’t available at the time, I had more to say then, but having thought about it, It’s everything that’s wrong with academia & intellectuals. There is no nice totalitarianism, everyone’s selfish & socialism is one of the most selfish acts available.
What’s happening in the covid era isn’t anything new, it’s the same old subjective emotive story repeated through history. Coming from the same people (liberal middle-class) & the same old direction, academia. Even our own contrarian TY spends much time defending his position, by debating the “science”. What’s happening has nothing to do with science & everything to do with natural competition between 2 rival factions battling for the direction of our species.
I hate to tell you we are losing, mostly because we are trying to keep to Queensbury Rules, whilst the other side cheat, lie & hit below the belt.
My thoughts exactly. I think modern comfortable life and technology has to an extent enabled the particular way in which covid has been used as a cover for a power grab, but a power grab it remains and humans have been doing that since the dawn of time and will continue to do so probably until the end of time.
Ten years, I was sarcastically commenting on how it’s almost as if we were slowly enticed & tricked into adopting the internet & mobile phones by a covert establishment operation, so they could control us. Little did I know how right I was & being right doesn’t give me any satisfaction.
“Coming from the same people (liberal middle-class) & the same old direction, academia.”
Which is why it isn’t the rich that needs taxing. It’s the Guardian Class – who have enough money that they don’t have to worry about material survival and can instead go around telling everybody else what they can and can’t do.
We need to drop them down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Perhaps not as far as acquisition of oxygen, however tempting that may be.
People tend to require some sort of “spiritual” aspect to their lives. The decline of popular organised religion, particularly Christianity, has left a vacuum which has been filled by a plethora of other belief systems and communities. This is but one. There are plenty of others from supporting a football team (innocuous) to embracing fear of catastrophes like covid and climate change (highly dangerous). And let’s not forget the deification of the NHS.
Is politician’s weaponization, no one really believes it, it’s just gaslighting. It’s BS!
Increasingly becoming the Nazi Health Service.
IMPORTANT NEWS
There is serious illness now in the vaccinated in Israel.
“they seem to have gone through immune erosion.. 83 dead in the past month…15 seriously sick….we have no data to learn from…no other country has vaccinated to this extent…”
They also complain that the Health Ministry is being secretive ands not sharing data with the public
https://www.bitchute.com/video/eosnwyX7qNUT/
Israel appears to be in serious trouble.
Oddly, there’s evidently open discussion on TV.
The professor is asked if he has a clear position on boosters.
He replies that the rationale for boosters is not found anywhere in Pfizer’s clinical dossiers.
He says that there’s no good scientific rationale for a 3rd dose or for mass vaccination of the population.
But they’ll mandate a fourth dose anyway.
As Israel is roughly 2 months ahead of us in mass stabbing this could be aa early sign of ADE as warned by those in the Vax business.
Watch this space….
https://www.bitchute.com/video/vea4oV9dhJ9j/
REINER FUELLMICH SPEAKS TO PSYCHOLOGIST ON WHY SO MANY FOLLOW THE COVID/VAXX NARRATIVE
This is a useful discussion even though it covers many previously known points as it is clear about the mental state of those still unawake, and may help those of us who have family and friends still in this condition.
If anyone here has experience of dealing with sociopathic people (as I have) you will know that when under stress they lie more.
So I expect our governments to use the increase in sickness (in the vaxxed) to increase the assault on the UN-vaxxed.
My experience is that once you have exposed one lie, you are met with many more, but as these people are degraded and inadequate individuals, their lies become increasingly unbelievable to the normal people they think they can delude. They are essentially truncated and inadequate people.
These sociopaths do not realise that they are losing credibility with the normals, as their own personality deficiency prevents them from understanding this.
I think more and more people will wake up, confronted with stratospheric levels of fantasy and corruption from our rulers
Given that the DS site is (presumably) hoping to attract a broad based readership, I would venture to suggest that the mere title of this article is as likely to appeal to many potential readers as the promise of a red hot poker in the eye, or any other body orifice.
Just my opinion of course.
Pretentious twaddle my mum would have called it.
And, as we know, Mums always know best! (Just in case that is mis-interpreted, I am not being sarcastic).
I suspect my mum would have said much the same.
Toby: “Worth reading in full” links to a different article.
Probably just as well!
I can’t imagine many people bothering to follow it, frankly.
IMO there are obvious parallels to our times re. ‘Gnosticism’, just not at all related to the above piece.
I’d think that most people that have heard of Gnosticism link it with the genocide of Cathars in southern France by the Catholic church in the 13th century. I note that:
It looks to me like humanity has a problem with people being whipped into a frenzy and making decisions that end up being terrible for everyone apart from a very select few.
There lies the problem I think.
I imagine more people would have full knowledge about the price of fish.
I had heard of Gnosticism knowing it to be related to Christianity but it’s an old memory that you have rekindled of events going back to the early medieval.
Funnily enough it is an old memory for me — stupid knowledge about useless subjects is the realm of the young male, be it dinosaurs, steam trains, astronomy or medieval history.
I think I should state that unlike our leaders/politicians, I have had training and a career in science, and don’t have a degree in ancient history or a PPE from Oxford.
That’s good to know,
I can imagine however, that Bozo would probably enjoy a pompous debate about the rather pointless topic of this article – which it is pointless in relation to the real world today.
I doubt Bozo even attended a science lesson if he could help it.
I can’t agree that knowledge of steam trains, medieval history and astronomy is useless if:
You’re driving a steam train.
You don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past.
You want to provide warning of an astronomical event that can affect the planet.
Hmm. The covidians are the Gnostics. And they were and remain a threat.
Read Norman Cohen’s ‘Pursuit of the Millennium’. Sometimes heretics need persecuting…
They’ve had free reign for decades and now this.
The article’s gone down like a lead balloon! It’s a bit baggy, to be sure, but the situation is new and weird and hard to capture. A better and more concise synthesis (sorry) will be made.
Other commenters seem to prefer a one dimensional explanation, like ‘evil’. I sympathise with, and like, the frame-shift from a ragbag of secular motives (financial, political, class prejudice, nihilism) into one transcendent one (‘demonic’). That urge to simplify doesn’t make it so though. But even if it isn’t so, doesn’t mean a shift to a religious response isn’t the best. I’m as confused as anyone else.
Anyhow, what we do have is the convergence of conventional power strategies, like centre+periphery against middle, and a nihilistic art movement, and a set of very gloomy objective facts about energy and resources. All of this is in this essay, but it does need to be sloganised better. Zero cult is quite good, because it has zero use for most of its devotees.
“the frame-shift from a ragbag of secular motives (financial, political, class prejudice, nihilism) into one transcendent one (‘demonic’).”
Well, what is the seeking of financial gain, political power etc at the expense of others, using deception if it’s not evil?
Some of the routes and methods and tendencies might be novel, but what underlies it is eternal.
The reading in full link points to the previous article.
Correct one: https://dailysceptic.org/narcissistic-gnosticism-a-21st-century-political-religion/
Interesting read.
Misuses the term narcissm, though. This comes from the antique legend of Narcissus who was a young men so much obsessed with his own beauty that he did nothing but watch his own mirror image in a lake. It really means being obsessively in love with oneself. What the article refers to would be more aptly called vanity, ie a desire to impress others with oneself.
I also think that this common criticism of the social media universe is in itself more than a bit driven by envy. The idea that the main motivation behind communication is not – well – communication but transmitting a favorable image of oneself to others comes from some fairly modern US bullshit called signalling theory. It’s based on the observation that many animals signal their reproduction worthiness by optical means, eg, peacocks. A desire to impress is then ascribed to these animals which makes absolutely no sense as they act instinctively. It’s then assumed that the main reason humans communicate is because of the same desire to impress. This is really just another justification for ignoring the content of other people’s statement in favour of constructing an improper ad hominem, something Schopenhauer (Eristische Dialect) would have called an ad personam argument. Ie, a personal attack in lieu of an argument.
I’m not sure I understand what the article is going on about
The link takes you to a different piece