The kids are two years behind in education. Inflation still rages. White-collar jobs are disappearing thanks to the reversal of Fed policy. Household finances are a wreck. The medical industry is in upheaval. Trust in Government has never been lower.
Major media too are discredited. Young people are dying at levels never seen. Populations are still on the move from lockdown states to where it is less likely. Surveillance is everywhere, and so is political persecution. Public health is in a disastrous state, with substance abuse and obesity all at new records.
Each one of these, and many more besides, are continued fallout from the pandemic response that began in March 2020. And yet here we are 38 months later and we still don’t have honesty or truth about the experience. Officials have resigned, politicians have tumbled out of office, and lifetime civil servants have departed their posts, but they don’t cite the great disaster as the excuse. There is always some other reason.
This is the period of the great silence. We’ve all noticed it. The stories in the press recounting all the above are conventionally scrupulous about naming the pandemic response, much less naming the individuals responsible. Maybe there is a Freudian explanation: things so obviously terrible and in such recent memory are too painful to mentally process, so we just pretend it didn’t happen. Plenty in power like this solution.
Everyone in a position of influence knows the rules. Don’t talk about the lockdowns. Don’t talk about the mask mandates. Don’t talk about the vaccine mandates that proved useless and damaging and led to millions of professional upheavals. Don’t talk about the economics of it. Don’t talk about collateral damage. When the topic comes up, just say “We did the best we could with the knowledge we had,” even if that is an obvious lie. Above all, don’t seek justice.
There is this document intended to be the ‘Warren Commission’ of Covid slapped together by the old gangsters who advocated for lockdowns. It is called Lessons from the Covid War: An Assessment. The authors are people like Michael Callahan (Massachusetts General Hospital), Gary Edson (former Deputy National Security Advisor), Richard Hatchett, (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, CEPI), Marc Lipsitch (Harvard University), Carter Mecher (Veterans Affairs) and Rajeev Venkayya (former Gates Foundation and now Aerium Therapeutics).
If you have been following this disaster, you know at least some of the names. Years before 2020, they were pushing lockdowns as the solution for infectious disease. Some claim credit for having invented pandemic planning. The years 2020-2022 were their experiment. As it was ongoing, they became media stars, pushing compliance, condemning as disinformation and misinformation anyone who disagreed with them. They were at the heart of the coup d’état, as engineers or champions of it, that replaced representative democracy with quasi-martial law run by the administrative state.
The first sentence of the report is a complaint:
We were supposed to lay the groundwork for a National Covid Commission. The Covid Crisis Group formed at the beginning of 2021, one year into the pandemic. We thought the U.S. Government would soon create or facilitate a commission to study the biggest global crisis so far in the twenty-first century. It has not.
That is true. There is no National Covid Commission. You know why? Because they could never get away with it, not with legions of experts and passionate citizens who wouldn’t tolerate a cover-up.
The public anger is too intense. Lawmakers would be flooded with emails, phone calls and daily expressions of disgust. It would be a disaster. An honest commission would demand answers that the ruling class is not prepared to give. An ‘official commission’ perpetuating a bunch of baloney would be dead on arrival.
This by itself is a huge victory and a tribute to indefatigable critics.
Instead, the ‘Covid Crisis Group’ met with funding from the Rockefeller and Charles Koch Foundations and slapped together this report. Despite being celebrated as definitive by the New York Times and Washington Post, it has mostly had no impact at all. It is far from obtaining the status of being some kind of canonical assessment. It reads like they were on deadline, fed up, typed lots of words, and called it a day.
Of course it is whitewash.
It begins with a bang to denounce the U.S. policy response: “Our institutions did not meet the moment. They did not have adequate practical strategies or capabilities to prevent, to warn, to defend their communities, or fight back in a coordinated way, in the United States and globally.”
Mistakes were made, as they say.
Of course the upshot of this kvetching is not to criticise what Justice Neil Gorsuch calls “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country”. They hardly mention those at all.
Instead they conclude that the U.S. should have surveilled more, locked down sooner (“We believe that on January 28th the U.S. Government should have started mobilising for a possible Covid war”), directed more funds to this agency rather than that, and centralised the response so that rogue states like South Dakota and Florida could not evade centralised authoritarian diktats next time.
The authors propose a series of lessons that are anodyne, bloodless and carefully crafted to be more-or-less true but ultimately structured to minimise the sheer radicalism and destructiveness of what they favoured and did. The lessons are clichés such as we need “not just goals but roadmaps”, and next time we need more “situation awareness”.
There is no new information in the book that I could find, unless something is hidden herein that escaped my notice. It’s more interesting for what it does not say. Some words that never appear in the text: Sweden, Ivermectin, Ventilators, Remdesivir and Myocarditis.
Perhaps this gives you a sense of the book and its mission. And on matters of the lockdowns, readers are forced to endure claims such as “all of New England — Massachusetts, the city of Boston, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine — seem to us to have done relatively well, including their ad hoc crisis management setups”.
Oh really! Boston destroyed thousands of small businesses and imposed vaccine passports, closed churches, persecuted people for holding house parties and imposed travel restrictions. There is a reason why the authors don’t elaborate on such preposterous claims. They are simply unsustainable.
One amusing feature seems to me to be a foreshadowing of what is coming. They throw Anthony Fauci under the bus with sniffy dismissals: “Fauci was vulnerable to some attacks because he tried to cover the waterfront in briefing the press and public, stretching beyond his core expertise — and sometimes it showed.”
Oooo, burn!
This is very likely the future. At some point, Fauci will be scapegoated for the whole disaster. He will be assigned to take the fall for what is really the failure of the national security arm of the administrative bureaucracy, which in fact took charge of all rule-making from March 13th 2020 onward, along with their intellectual cheerleaders. The public health people were just there to provide cover.
Curious about the political bias of the book? It is summed up in this passing statement: “Trump was a comorbidity.”
Oh how highbrow! How clever!
Maybe this book by the Covid Crisis Group hopes to be the last word. This will never happen. We are only at the beginning of this. As the economic, social, cultural and political problems mount, it will become impossible to ignore the incredibly obvious. The masters of lockdowns are influential and well-connected but not even they can invent their own reality.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
Stop Press: Watch Richard Hatchett’s appearance on Channel 4 News on March 6th 2020, where he said: “This is the most frightening disease I’ve ever encountered” – more so than Ebola – compared it directly to Spanish flu and called for “aggressive” “social distancing interventions” as part of a “war” on the virus comparable to World War II.
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What can any of us say about these people, call them evil, morally corrupt,misanthropic, Godless, and delusional. The truth is, they have and will get away with what they have done and would do all over again, they have inflcted misery, death and economic harm on millions and yet they still draw their salaries, they will still draw gold plated pensions and they will strut the world stage putting forward their shiny smiling faces, whilst inside they are diseased.
If curses worked I would wish misery on each and every one, but that would make me no better than they. Perhaps one day they will have to own up and face what they have done to many of us, I hope I live to see it.
Me too.
But, worry not, if they don’t meet justice here they surely will when they meet their maker.
My preferred list is very long, but always begins with Blair.
“Because they could never get away with it, not with legions of experts and passionate citizens who wouldn’t tolerate a cover-up.” He’s having a giraffe, right? This is politics in America. Just look at what 2 Clintons got away with, the Bush dynasty, Obama, the Biden crime family, Nancy Pelosi, the leadership of multiple Democrat run cities and states, the FBI, the CIA, BLM, antifa, and on and on. America has now entered its post democracy phase, prior to complete collapse…
They lied about 14 days to flatten the curve
They lied about everyone being equally at risk
They lied about the risk to children
They lied about asymptomatic transmission
They lied about vitamin D
They lied about early treatments
They lied about wet markets
They lied about masks
They lied about social distancing
They lied about protecting the vulnerable
They lied about mRNA technology being safe
They lied about the jabs being effective
They lied about the jabs preventing infection
They lied about the jabs preventing transmission
They lied about a pandemic of the unvaccinated
They’re lying about excess deaths
Why would anyone believe another word the authorities have to say about anything ever again?
A few more:
They lied about themselves (“most frightening disease I ever encountered”).
They lied about their methods (forcing everyone into social isolation and an irrational state of fear of its fellow humans out of compassion for mankind).
They lied about what they knew and we didn’t (coevolution of man an viruses for hundredthousands of years, functioning of the human immune system).
They lied about what they didn’t know (this is a NEW virus and nothing like it has ever occurred on earth).
They lied about their political pet causes (BLM riots decrease the risk of COVID spreading, anti-measures protests increase it).
They lied about their goals (GBD is a strawman because nobody wants another lockdown in October 2020).
On the one hand, I agree with the last statement that in the end, truth and the inevitable weight of reality prevails.
On the other hand, I look at North Korea and see that it is possible to subjugate indefinitely. With enough power, will and resources a tyrannical state can impose itself.
The Soviet Union fell eventually. But I do wonder whether new technology will make it easier for tyranny to prevail.
The Soviet Union imploded, as all arrogant, socialist, elitist, technocratic, authoritarian organisations inevitably do after killing the dissidents and exhausting the accumulated wealth and goodwill of the population in their grand experiments, but those impulses are still going strong, all over the planet.
Now that we’re starting to see the result of training AI on the biased feedstock of hard-left academia, I’m inclined to agree. Technology is being trained to believe in lies, and to hate individualism and freedom.
I fear you are right.
It depends how it’s used. I was musing as to what might have happened in East Germany if the wall hadn’t fallen before the world wide web was developed. A lot of modern kit might have been ideal for the STASI, but would they have gone the other way, being scared of it’s potential? After all, these days it’s really easy to dish out huge volumes of data about your activities to the spies, so much so that they are overloaded, more than likely.
I think I would always back the state to outgun Joe Public in terms of manipulating technology, though I suppose the existence of the Dark Web (assuming it does indeed exist) maybe disproves that.
The Soviet Union had a fairly unified, very powerful Western world standing up as an example against it.
The ideological alternative was very appealing and widely available.
I look today around the world to find an ideological alternative to stand up to the technocratic tyranny advancing on us and I don’t really see one.
Florida? Texas? Elon Musk? Slim inadequate pickings.
The picture is gloomy to say the least.
Definitely not Elon Musk. If ever there was a false prophet, he is it.
Hard one. I try to think, if I was in his position – space company, giant car business, huge amounts of money and genuinely wanted to defend free speech – what would I do differently.
I struggle to think how I.kight do better.
Not to say he’s real or fake, I don’t know.
Well all we can do is judge him but what he has done, which seems generally positive for our cause. I suppose some people might see him as a prophet, but I doubt many who post BTL here do. I certainly don’t. Just a man, full of flaws as we all are.
Yes, of course, he’s no prophet. His dumb, mineral exploiting, Tesla cars and space rockets are futile and no solution for anything. But, unwittingly, his intellect, and his championing of free speech may be far and away his greatest contribution to the maintenance of democratic Western civilisation and the First Amendment.
South Dakota, Hungary. Not sure where else. Maybe Africa, for different reasons, though God knows I wouldn’t want to go there.
You make a good point.
Schwab has told us what they’re aiming for: Chinese-style control.
And there’s no ideological alternative on offer, unless you count militant Islam. Devil v Deep Blue Sea.
Anyone who pushed the whole scamdemic response also pushed the death jabs, persecuted those who exercised their rights and declined and fragmented society as a result. This 10min vid has already been shared by ebygum but it’s gone viral and for good reason. These nasty f*%#ers must never be allowed to slither away unpunished.
https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/truly-epic!-the-best-liars-compilation:3
And also available (at present!) on his YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/@IvorCumminsScience
“The public anger is too intense”
Maybe in the US where Tucker is. Not in my little world in the UK. Aside from the tiny handful of Covid sceptics who were on board from the beginning, nobody ever mentions Covid now to me. It’s as if it never happened.
“nobody ever mentions Covid now to me. It’s as if it never happened.
Same with me tof. It’s as if society at large has packed the last three years in to a suitcase, loaded it on to a rocket and blasted it in to outer space. God knows how most will cope when Scamdemic ll is launched.
Yes I agree with this analysis. This website plus you guys(Huxley pigs, Transmission et al) has helped keep me sane over the past three years.
As a, possibly slightly, left of centrist it has also made me appreciate the outlook and contributions of the those on the ‘right’ with considered and moral objections to the, primarily, leftist tyranny that has prevailed since 2020. In any case Left/Right sensibilities seem to have been somewhat diminished over this time.
No one seems to mention CJ Hopkins on this website (he of The New Normal Reich). Maybe his leftism puts some of you off but, personally, I think his perspective of what’s happening resonates most for me. We’re in the era of Trans Politics (nothing to do with sex/gender etc) as described by David Martin Jones on Cieo website. Those of us opposed to The Narrative need to stick together, whatever our perspectives prior to 2020. GloboCap doesn’t differentiate, we are all Denialists/Far Right Conspiracy Theorists to them.
Many thanks for your kind words.
Personally, and especially here on DS I have no gripes or issues with left or right thinkers, what matters most is the stand against the Davos Deviants and their anti human, genocidal onslaught.
The number one priority at this time is that we must fight back and say ‘NO.’
“nobody ever mentions Covid now to me. It’s as if it never happened.”
It’s completely understandable that they don’t want to talk about it – if they’ve been vaccinated.
If they’ve been vaccinated, they can’t undo it, there’s nothing they can do about it, so it’s comforting for them to believe that the vaccines are at least safe, even if they’re not effective. If they talk about Covid, they might find out that the vaccines are not safe. Therefore better to not talk about it.
And it’s understandable that they would think the vaccines are effective too, despite all the evidence that they are nowhere near as effective as was claimed. Because if the vaccines are not effective – after we were all assured that the vaccines are “safe and effective” – then that would suggest the vaccines might not be safe either. If the medical community were wrong in claiming the vaccines are effective, they could well be also wrong that the vaccines are safe. So better to keep believing that the vaccines are “safe and effective”. This applies to very well informed and intelligent vaccinated people too. it’s difficult for vaccinated people to accept that the vaccines might not be “safe and effective”, it can cause a great deal of anxiety, it’s easier for them to bury their head in the sand and not face up to the risk to their health they have (in most cases) unnecessarily inflicted on themselves.
Nobody knows just how unsafe these Covid vaccines are. Only time will tell.
Indeed
I’d love to know what they really think
Surely they must be, deep down, absolutely terrified.
That in itself will probably make them unwell. (nocebo effect).
My reading is that most are bored or embarrassed
“The Covid War.”
Well if that’s your title, your starting point, what follows can only be a monumental, grotesque sequence of manufactured lies.
Staggering in its chutzpah but only to be expected.
Indeed. The war on drugs, the war on terror, now the war on viruses. A perpetual state of war, rooted in the fear of death, coalescing power and money and control to an elite who pretend to keep us “safe”, while fleecing the public.
You forgot the wsr on fossil fuels.
The granddaddy of the war on Covid and the latter introduced deliberately because they needed to “warp speed” the aim to destroy the West, and to grab power and obscene wealth.
Even after lopping off 25% of the bogus 2°C death threat, the hiatus in the trivial warming and the obvious absurdity of relying on weather ruinable energy, were both making their power grab plans less likely to be successful.
“We realised we could get away with it!”
Thanks, Professor Pantsdown. Perhaps the only true words the turd ever spoke.
The remarkable thing here is that all our civil life is supposed to be about war on this, war on that and war on something else. But apart from that, war is evil and must not happen.
Profs Fenton and Neil’s latest focusing on Canadian excess death data ( featuring a recent good vid from John Campbell ) but scroll to the bottom to see a damning graph of UK excess deaths. The causality of lockdowns and Covid jabs on people dying couldn’t be clearer, and because we hear crickets from the authorities on this, that is proof enough for me that this is all premeditated democide. They scrabble around for some intelligence-insulting excuse but there is none other than the blindingly obvious, and they themselves are the culprits.
”But of course, if you ignore (as the mainstream media does) the possibility that the vaccine may be a contributory factor, then it’s all a mystery as Prof Coleman in that article suggests. He can’t understand why excess deaths are higher when they should be lower after pandemic. But he highlighted two key reasons for excess deaths spike: “Britain’s getting older, and gaining a larger average Body Mass Index.”
Of course, it could be people not taking their statins. Honestly.”
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/manipulating-mortality
Don’t worry, Johnson, Sunak, Whitty, Vallance, Starmer, Hancock; et al. The public will never forget what you did.
Jeffrey Tucker has been the most effective intellectual champion of and for the people throughout this debacle. Ironic, because his fellow Libertarians have been AWOL, for the most part.
I think its important to make it clear in the Stop Press: how crazy Hatchett’s appearance and what he said on Channel 4 was. Some people will believe it all again if we aren’t careful.