In the first week of March 2020, as news of a virus was everywhere, intellectuals associated with the Yale University School of Public Health penned a letter expressing the conventional wisdom of the moment: we should not lock down. That harms the poor and vulnerable populations. Travel restrictions achieve nothing.
Quarantine, if it is deployed at all, said the letter, should only be for the very sick and only in the interest of the health of the community. Government should never abuse its powers but instead find “the least restrictive measure” that still protects community health.
The letter writers gathered signatures. They found 800 others in their profession to sign it. Of course the whole text was discarded by governments at all levels everywhere in the world.
Reading it now, we will find that it makes mostly the same points as the Great Barrington Declaration that came out seven months later. After that document, which was wrongly seen as partisan, many of the people who signed the original Yale letter then signed a new letter, this one called the John Snow Memorandum, calling for a zero-Covid policy and universal lockdowns.
What happened? It’s like the world had turned upside down in a matter of months. The ethos changed. The lockdowns happened and the authorities backed them. Nobody is as talented as intellectuals in discerning the mood of the moment and how to respond to it. And respond they did.
What had been unthinkable was suddenly thinkable and even a mandatory belief. Those who dissented were dismissed as “fringe,” which was crazy since the GBD was merely expressing what had been the conventional wisdom less than a year before.
It’s usually best to take people’s statements on face value and not question the motive behind such shocking turns. But in this case, it really was too much. In the course of barely a few weeks, an entire orthodoxy had changed. And the intellectuals changed with it.
The signers of the original Yale letter were hardly the only ones. Academics, think tankers, authors and major public pundits all over the world changed suddenly. Those who should have opposed lockdowns switched to favour them once every major nation in the world other than Sweden adopted them. This was true even of the scholars and activists who had made names for themselves in favour of human rights and liberties. Even many libertarians, whom you might think of as the last to side with such senseless, destructive governmental policies, were silent, or, even worse, invented rationales for these measures.
It was only the beginning. By the fall of 2020, we heard major figures, who later said the vaccine should be required for everyone, were warning against Trump’s vaccine. The people who urged against taking the Trump shot included Anthony Fauci, Senator Kamala Harris, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Dr. Eric Topol, Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Ashish Jha. They all said that the public should be extremely wary.
Every last one of these sceptics became convinced converts only a few months later. Based on no data, no evidence, no new information other than that Trump had lost and Biden had won, they became enormous proponents of the very thing against which they had previously warned just a few months earlier.
Once again, they turned on a dime. It was an experience lifted straight out of the pages of Orwell, truly stranger than fiction. From opposing the shot, they came around to the idea that it should be mandated, based mostly on who was in power.
Here we are four years later and the deck is still massively shuffled. It is hard to predict these days where any particular public intellectual stands on lockdowns, mandates and the entire calamity of the response to Covid. Very few have apologised. Most have moved on as if nothing has happened. Some have dug into their own apostasy even more deeply.
One reason seems to be that much of the professional intellectual class is currently dependent on some institution. It is not lost on anyone that the people today who are most likely to say what is true about our times – and there are some major and brave exceptions to this – are mostly retired professors and scientists who have less to lose by speaking truth to power.
That cannot be said for many who have undergone a strange metamorphosis over the last several years. For example, I’m personally sad to see Stephen Davies of the Institute for Economic Affairs, formerly one of the most compelling libertarian intellectuals on the planet, come out for travel restrictions, universal disease monitoring and turn-key crisis management by government, not only for disease but also for climate change and any number of other threats. And why? Because of “unusual vulnerability” to global catastrophic events caused by human activity plus artificial intelligence… or something that is hard to follow.
Maybe Davies’s book Apocalypse Next, which is published by a division of the United Nations, deserves a full and thoughtful critique. It shows no evidence of having learned a thing from the experience of the last four years in which governments of the world attempted to wrestle with the microbial kingdom and ruined whole societies.
I was preparing a sincere response but then stopped, for one simple reason. It’s hard to take seriously a book that also promotes “effective altruism” as any sort of solution to anything. With this slogan, one detects a lack of sincerity. A year ago, this slogan was unearthed as nothing but a cover for a money laundering racket pushed by the company FTX, which was accepting billions in “venture capital” funding to hand out to the pandemic-planning industry, including many of the very same catastrophists with whom our author is now aligned.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s mentor was author William MacCaskill, the founder of the movement who served on the board of FTX’s Future Foundation. His Centre for Effective Altruism plus many affiliated nonprofits were direct beneficiaries of FTX largess, receiving at least $14 million with more promised. In 2022, the Centre bought Wytham Abbey, a massive estate near Oxford University, and currently has a $28 million per year budget.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of this, as much as I’ve looked. Still, it is deeply discouraging to see the framework and lines of thinking in this strange new ideological penchant, which is bound up with a several trillion dollar pandemic planning machinery, show up in the work of a great scholar.
Forgive me, but I suspect there is more going on here.
And in so many ways, I’m deeply sympathetic. The trouble really comes down to the market for intellectual services. It is neither broad nor deep. This reality goes against all intuition. Looking from the outside in, one might suppose that a tenured professor at an Ivy League university or famous think tank would have all the prestige and security necessary to speak truth to power.
The opposite is the case. Taking another job would at the very least require a geographic move, and this would come with a likely downgrade in status. In order to ascend up the ranks in intellectual pursuits, you must be wise and that means not bucking the prevailing ideological trends. In addition, places where intellectuals live tend to be quite vicious and petty, instill in intellectuals an eye toward adapting their writings and thoughts toward their professional well-being.
This is especially true in working for a think tank. The positions are highly coveted as universities without students. A job as a top scholar pays the bills. But it comes with strings attached. There is an implicit message in all these institutions these days that they speak with one voice, especially concerning the big issues of the day. The people there have little choice but to go along. The option is to walk away and to what? The market is extremely limited. The next-best alternative is not always clear.
This kind of non-fungible profession is different from, say, a hair cutter, dry-wall installer, restaurant server or lawn-care professional. There is a huge shortage of such people so the worker is in a position to talk back to the boss, say no to a customer, or simply walk away if the working conditions are not right. Ironically, such people are in a better position to speak their mind than any professional intellectual is today.
This creates a very odd situation. The people we pay to think, influence and guide the public mind – and possess the requisite intelligence and training to do so – also happen to be the least capable of doing so because their professional options are so limited. As a result, the term “independent intellectual” has become nearly an oxymoron. If such a person exists, he is either very poor or otherwise living off family money, and not likely making much of his own.
These are the brutal facts of the case. If this shocks you, it certainly shocks absolutely no one employed in academic or think tank spaces. Here, everyone knows how the game is played. The successful ones play it very well. Those who supposedly fail at the game are the principled people, the very ones you want in these positions.
Observing all of this for many years, I’ve encountered perhaps a dozen or so earnest young minds who were enticed into the world of ideas and the life of the mind out of pure idealism, only to discover the grim reality once entering into university or think tank life. These people found themselves exasperated with the sheer viciousness and factionalism of the endeavor and bailed very quickly to go into finance, or law or something where they could pursue intellectual ideals as an avocation instead.
Was it always this way? I seriously doubt it. Intellectual pursuits before the second half of the 20th century were reserved for the extremely gifted in rarified worlds and certainly not for mediocre or petty minds. The same was true of students. Colleges and universities catered not to people headed to applied fields in finance or industry but rather focused on philosophy, theology, logic, law, rhetoric and so on, leaving other professions to train their own. (One of the first professions in the 20th century to be devoured away from practitioner-based training to academic training was of course medicine.)
Years ago, it was my great privilege once to walk the halls of the amazing University of Salamanca in Spain, which was the home of the greatest mind of the early Renaissance who had been schooled in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. There were the graves of Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Luis de Molina (1535-1600), Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) and so many others besides, along with all their students. Another remarkable thinker writing in Madrid was Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) who wrote ferocious works against power, and even defended regicide.
Perhaps we over-idealize that world but these were incredibly brilliant and creative thinkers. The university was there to protect their ideas from a dangerous world and grant such great minds financial and professional security to come to a great understanding of the world around them. And they did just this, while arguing and debating with each other. They wrote treatises on law, economics, international relations and so much more, that ushered in the modern age.
Being there, you could feel the spirit of learning, listening and discovery in the space.
I’ve never worked directly at a university but I’m told by many who do that collegiality and the free exchange of ideas is the last thing you find in these institutions. There are exceptions to be sure, such as Hillsdale College and other smaller liberal arts colleges, but in major research universities, genuine colleagues are rare. Meetings are not really about big ideas and research but are more often characterised by one-upmanship and plots of various sorts, toxic settings for true creativity.
The truth about these places is being revealed these days, with terrible revelations out of Harvard and other institutions.
How can we recapture the ideal? Brownstone Institute last year began a series of retreats for experts in the many fields in which we take an interest. They take place in a comfortable but not expensive location with meals provided. The meetings are set up not in a classroom environment but a salon. There are no long speeches but rather relatively short segments of presentations that are open to all participants. What follows is unstructured, fundamentally depending on the good will and open mindedness of everyone there.
What emerges over three days is nothing short of magic – or so everyone who has attended has reported. The environment is free of back-stabbing faculty politics and bureaucracy, and also emancipated from the performance that comes from speaking in front of the media or other audiences. That is to say: this is an environment in which serious research and ideas are put on display and highly valued for being what they are. There is no unified message, no action items and no hidden agenda.
Brownstone is holding its third such event in the coming two weeks, and another is planned in Europe this spring. We are looking toward doing something similar in Latin America as we approach the fall.
True, these are not year-round but they are enormously productive and a tremendous respite from the clamour and corruption of the rest of the academic, media and think tank worlds. The hope is that by holding such idealised meetings, we can make a contribution toward rekindling the type of environment that built civilisation as we know it.
Why are such settings so rare? It seems that everyone has some other idea on what to do. In addition, these are difficult to pay for. We seek out benefactors who are willing to back ideas for their own sake rather than pushing some agenda. That is not easy these days. They do exist and we are deeply grateful for them. Perhaps you are one of these people and can help. If so, we very much welcome that.
The number of intellectuals who have let down the cause of freedom over these terrible years is astonishing. Some of them used to be more personal heroes. So, yes, that hurts. Tom Harrington is correct to nail this as the treason of the experts. That said, let’s grant that many are in a tough spot. They are trapped by their institutions and walled in by a limited range of professional options that prevent them from telling the truth as they see it. It should not be this way but it is.
We’ve lived through this and seen too much to have the same level of trust we once had. What can we do? We can rebuild the ideal as it existed in the old world. The kind of genius we know was on display in a place like Salamanca, or in interwar Vienna, or even in the coffee houses of London in the 18th century, can return, even if on a small level. They have to, simply because the shape of the world around us depends fundamentally on the ideas we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Those should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute.
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Could it be that all politicians don’t like being ignored and the quickest way to get a politician to do a U turn is to say F you.
Only22 months too late to get any praise.
There’s still a load of pubs that have banned him for life.
Drakeford and Co are still evil globalist shills
“All despotism is to end, except for the despotism which is not to end.”
The systems are being kept in place, of course, awaiting the roll out of COOFS-22, or to ration recreation in order to fight the Climate Catastrophe, or to ensure Social Justice.
The development of those systems, under the cover of COVID spending, was undoubtedly one of the big objectives of the NWO under the guise of Build Back Better. With those objectives now achieved they will await the next phase of the grand plan.
All they need to do now is ditch Dripford.
How has it come to this?
Complete sad sack ball bags like this actually get elected into power.
What the hell is wrong with voters?
I just watched a GB news interview with Steve Baker MP talking about the insanity of net zero policy and the lunacy of general governemnt policy.
There I watched a man who clearly comprehends the hole we are in and the clear and rational things that need to be done to get us out yet we end up with the fat fraud Boris, a more dishonest, corrupt and incompetent man it would be hard to find.
As we know, the trouble is, all over the world, those politicians with common sense and sensible policies are outnumbered by complete sacks of shite like Senile Joe, Turdeau, Hardon, Putitin, Micropenis, shortJohnson etc. If only we had politicians like Baker, De Santis, even the Donald.
No, not the Donald, not Captain Underpants.
Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem would be ideal.
You know how, the public has ignored the problem for so long we are now surrounded by these corrupt, brain-dead cultists who do not serve humanity.
Interestingly, a friend in the shipping business has told me that his line – and a number of others – have decided that they will no longer carry electric cars on roll-on-roll-off vessels, or lithium batteries or other…….
……..huge fire risk apparently.
Search for the Felicity Ace. The fire risk is very real.
Owing to the cost of transporting the batteries, car manufacturers are opting to co-locate the car and battery factories. The fire risk is still present in the completed automobile.
One German city has withdrawn its fleet of electric buses after a battery fire in one bus destroyed the bus depot.
If I remember right, there was a piece in The Sunday Times recently, about the numbers of electric cars that spontaneously combust. The Spiked Online article, linked above, is also very interesting on the question of the environmental costs of these vehicles.
As this article points out… Shame more people won’t see it.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/03/03/the-truth-about-electric-cars/
Interesting thing on YouTube from a chap in the IoM, who tears down a lot of electronic and electrical stuff. Apparently, lithium cells, if they short out, go into something called “thermal runaway”. After the “Felicity Ace”, I doubt any line would want to carry lithium cars and batteries, and if they did, it would be at great cost and/or limited quantities.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtM5z2gkrGRuWd0JQMx76qA
Big Clive Dot com
Big Clive’s YT channel is useful. I’ve acquired some useful practical knowledge from that to do with repairing failed products in the last year or so.
Especially Teslas.
The obvious answer is that providing sensible, rational solutions to actual problems isn’t what gets one “elected”.
By “elected” I mean previously selected by the system of power to be then picked by the electorate, in much the same way you pick the card the magician wants you to pick in a card trick.
Exactly. Critical-thinking, pragmatism, realism, honesty, ability to take difficult decisions, and favouring long-term solutions over short-term vote-winners, are exactly the qualities that will make sure that you never ever become a candidate for a major party. Favoured attributes are stupidity, malleability, lying ability, blind loyalty, wokeness and psychopathy. Until large political parties are outlawed, nothing will change.
I’d imagine that Steve Baker MP might be one of those rare politicians who has NOT sold his soul to the WEF, so unfortunately, both for him and for us, he is not in the know about their plans, and that is why he speaks such common sense.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a system whereby nobody was allowed to campaign to be elected into power. Rather, if we all put names into a hat and the one with the most votes MUST take the position.
That way, you’d end up people who – likely – don’t WANT the power. They’d do as little as possible.
I understand Iceland operates like this, broadly. And, apart from the boss, all the MPs maintain proper jobs. They’re allowed time off to fulfil their civic duties.
Yet Iceland still had insane pandemic policies, and so we’re twice as worse off than the Pharoe Islands, so that system is no guarantee of sensibility.
‘Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.’
On this occasion the mod has decided that you have an unassailable defence.
My defence is that the Govt are demonstrably s**t brained WEF lackeys. But in a world where rhetoric & stupidity now seems to trump evidence & rationity, well …
Does Drakeford and others know when machine media stop protecting him he will find life a bit tough? I hope he enjoyed being the Covid Wizard of Wales.
Except what he did wasn’t wizardry, but witchcraft.
Another bedwetter turns tail. It’s a pity that there will be no floggings until morale improves.
“Wales has been among the most cautious of the home nations in keeping coronavirus restrictions in place” – restrictions are not cautious, any more than punches from Frank Bruno are cautious.
It’s the old ‘precautionary principle’, which is one of the most dangerous constructs there is. Whenever you hear it, run a mile.
Possibly. Perhaps that is the reason restrictions are presented as cautious by both proponents and opponents of lockdown.
It is self-defeating for lockdown opponents to concede defeat on this principle.
It seems ages ago now that the Stazi Heddlu were threatening people daring to cross the border into Dopeford’s self acclaimed socialist state. I’m looking forward to seeing him hung by piano wire from a lamp post in Llandudno. Horrible insignificant twerp of an excuse for a man and politician. He’s got all the charisma of 4 week old limp leak left out in the sun. Surely, Wales has someone better to offer than him.
He’s got all the charisma of 4 week old limp leak left out in the sun.
A perfect summing up.
If Castrol made oily drips this is the poster boy. You just know he’s never had any mates. A bloke in search of a spine.
It could be argued that those who live in Wales have no spine as they haven’t got rid of Drakeford after all this time. He wouldn’t be where he is without support.
Don’t ask for any gratitude. Beg for exemption from prosecution for horrendous damage caused.
Shane warn cricketer died of sudden heart attack at 52 I got to ask the question. when did he have his Covid vaccination?
2nd Jab by Aug ’21 according to his feeds (caught CV19 after it).
Unsure about booster, maybe around the time he gave Djokovich a hard time (last month)
There was a time when the Welsh were proud and would have shoved this pathetic fool off a political cliff. Now, they have been inbred with the Sheep too long and just say “Maaah”. Pathetic.
Time for an inquiry and heads must roll. The great people of Wales must insist upon it!
Mark Drakeford is THE threat to everyone’s health.
Various doctors say families of loved ones hospitalized with covid19 are resorting to desperate measures when approved treatments(slow death protocols) have failed. When it’s not too late, some have seen tremendous success by sneaking Ivermectin medication prohibited by hospitals to patients. It is really sad situation what has our country become. You can get your ivm by visiting https://ivmpharmacy.com
Does this constant advertising of Ivermectin count as spam?
No more so than “save the NHS”! Save it from what? Sick patients!
The.stupidity of this man and his cabal “Senedd” is once more demonstrated. Apparently he believes SARS-CoV-2 is dangerous for another 3 weeks and suddenly vanishes.Sadly that disappearing act does not work for politicians,
Also the virus can’t cross the 168 mile border! It was a pleasure to be in England last week and be treated as an adult.
No, he doesn’t ”believe” it at all. He knows EXACTLY what he’s doing, and why. He and his handlers know full well that it should be NOW that all this tosh ends. Right now. Not in three weeks’ time. But they want the mystique to continue just to make a point.
What a useless “leader” Drip Drakeford has been. Oh, hasn’t Wales done well with all his “we must be cautious” drivel. And as for his “experts”, don’t start me on those 3rd rates.
Interestingly it is the Welsh Conservatives that have been most anti-restrictions – unlike their Westminster colleagues. Plaid Cymru and Labour have colluded to wreck Wales. I always thought Plaid was for Wales but we now know they are just in it for themselves, like 99% of politicians I suppose.
Time to also ditch Dripford.
What qualifies people for leadership positions these days? My old university once put up a parrot for union President and it won a landslide. I understand that nobody noticed much difference in the services provided and Charlie served a full term. Perhaps a similar approach could be tried for the next Welsh Assembly elections and indeed more widely?
Daffy Duckford is such an odious, arrogant, posturing little oik that I am amazed that he hasn’t been shoved off what he sees as his pedestal. Isn’t it strange how little has been said about HIM partying muzzle-free and speaking disparagingly of ‘his’ people? The Welsh press is obviously on his side.
Nobody had heard of “wet flannel” Drakeford until two years ago. He must be distressed that his moment in the spotlight will soon be gone.