The New CCCP

The consequences of the actions of the ruling Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP), unsupported by the Constitution through which the sovereign States created the federal government (Article 7, “Establishment of this Constitution between the States”) to do specific things for the States as their servant… likely are existential.

Using the phantasm of a “vaccine,” the ahistorical “1619 project” and Marxist Critical Race Theory to indoctrinate our children, and the hoax of Climate Change as the basis of CCCP governance, our health, our prosperity, and our future as a free nation intentionally are being destroyed.

Western governments are proving power-mad, simultaneously anti-data and anti-science, and seem to have decided to bend us to their will when they exist only to serve ours. In America, the Biden presidency “wildly” contravenes our Constitution and laws, destroying our liberty, education and prosperity in the massive fundamental transformation promised by his predecessor.

Did somebody say "handlers"?

Rarely mentioned in the unprecedented number of articles from all sides about the conflicts between the administration and the country regarding Covid, CRT racism, and Climate is the increasingly-common, entirely new construct: “Biden’s handlers."

While clear to thinking people that Joe Biden is not in charge of the federal government, people from across the spectrum don‘t find it at all alarming that the world’s most powerful economic and military nation has no widely accepted chief executive; indeed, is being run by a junta elected by no one, visible to no one, accountable to no one, and doing the bidding of who-knows-whom-but-certainly-not-the-People, while wreaking untold and generational damage on our prosperity, freedom and liberty. That this is not supposed to be how America works is obvious to the citizens who care about America’s future.

This anti-American junta has led, predictably, to the emergence of columns and books about secession. Since we have nothing in common any longer, why pretend that we do, or that we still have a nation in any form but geographic? While secession may be the answer, it ought not be the go-to argument for those supporting the Constitution, the rule of law, and what has come to be called “legacy” (i.e. as-founded) America. This is true for an abundance of reasons. Two stand out:

The first of these is that, as with immigration law (the fourth major area of divisiveness after Covid, CRT, and Climate), it is not correct to say that what is not being tried is “broken.” (How would we know?) And what is not being tried is the enforcement of “the supreme law of the land,” the Constitution. How do we fix this? Simple, really – get governors to recognize that they are not in Triple-A ball awaiting a callup to The Show in D.C.; they – the governors – are The Show.

The States as superior to the federal government; this is how the country was designed to work. It ought to be no surprise that when the nation is not working as designed… it’s not working. And it is not working in executive decrees about climate, Covid, education, immigration, transportation, bathrooms – and a host of other things. A host in which the federal government has neither legal nor Constitutional authority for involvement, yet which is being allowed by our governors.

Look to the statehouses, comrade.

For those worried about five unelected persons in black robes – they are a part of that same federal government specifically limited by the States. Did the States, when creating the federal government, grant authority over marriage? Bathrooms? Medical jabs? Nope. When the SCOTUS branch of the federal government colors outside the lines by taking and ruling on cases outside their authority, the legal and Constitutionally-expected action of governors is: ignore them.

Can we fix this? Do we have governors willing to step-up? More importantly, have we citizens and voters willing to reject the overreach of the feds by electing governors putting their state above federal usurpation, as per the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution?

Based on the Virginia election, the answer is, “Yes.” Governors of eighteen States have said “No” to Biden's unconstitutional "vaccine mandates," suing that the mandate is a violation of federal law. Arizona, the nineteenth State suing the feds has sued the mandate as a violation of the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection clause. Why? Because the federal government has neither the authority nor the legal power to make or enforce rules or laws (or mandates) outside its enumerated powers.

These 19 governors are doing their jobs pretty much as the Founders designed, and as currently accepted. Exactly as designed would be to ignore the mandate and SCOTUS. Asking permission for a right already theirs has no upside; it implies a willingness to accept a negative answer the Court lacks authority to give, as well as making it more difficult to exercise that right in the court of public opinion. States are beginning to take back their reserved powers – and it is about time.

Diversity is our strength.

Let’s use immigration law as the example for the second reason.

The difference between authority and responsibility is that the former can be delegated while the latter cannot. The States delegated the authority to the federal government to deal with immigration. Because America is a union of sovereign States, the responsibility for immigration remains with those who made that delegation: the States. The federal government refusing delegated authority does not remove the responsibility from the States to deal with the issue. In SCOTUS’ ruling on Arizona v. United States, the federal government mistook (by an ahistorical, false assumption that the federal government is superior to the States that created it) its delegated authority for responsibility and unconstitutionally usurped the latter; the States retain the responsibility for immigration and should so act.

If governors followed the Constitution, the fact of a barely-sentient president with incontinence issues. would not matter, nor would a Supreme Court making up whatever it wants. Because they don’t, these do.

If California voters want to die of thirst as they go bankrupt in the dark – that’s their choice. If Blue states want to increase their infection rates, they can vax to their heart’s myocarditis content. If adult states recognize that it is better to treat patients using therapeutic drugs successfully all over the world (and which is how herd immunity is achieved) than to deny therapies, they should use ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and monoclonal antibody all they want.

Only governors can make America work again. Virginia is the 20th State to say, “Enough!” and begin working as designed again. Let’s hope we have more to come.

Physician, Heal the Sick -- Not the World

In the last few days the world has been given a series of privileged insights into the difference between the scientific mind and the minds of scientists. The first insight was freely provided by a group of 1,200 medical professionals (many connected with the University of Washington’s Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) who had previously supported enforcement of the lockdown to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus.

According to a laudatory CNN report they had now discovered a legitimate exception to its regulations. If you wanted to join the protest demonstration on behalf of Black Lives Matter, they strongly urged you to do so. Indeed, it seems from the letter that they would shortly be joining protests themselves.

[W]e wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.

It sounds like an excerpt from the plot of a James Bond movie in which a Bond super-villain recruits “top scientists” to spread a deadly virus that would decimate the ranks of “woke” radicals who might otherwise obstruct his plans for world domination and one million dollars. As it happens, the plot of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is eerily similar to it.

And though spreading the Covid-19 virus is not the intention of the 1,200 medics, it’s a risk a risk they are plainly prepared to take. They say as much when they present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism over public health, “including the epidemic response,” on the grounds that “racism” is the greater threat to public health.

This is starting to become a familiar claim. As I argued in a recent article, there’s a growing tendency among doctors and other professions to expand their professional role into a political one. The high priest of this tendency is the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton:

He argues that doctors as doctors have a professional obligation to become political activists and to engage in civil disobedience when they think that a political issue has bad medical consequences for their patients—or indeed for any doctor’s patients. His editorials have made The Lancet notorious for the range of topics, including directly political topics—inequality, for instance, or Iraq war casualties -- which they pronounce to be medical issues for which they have their favorite prescriptions ready.

The weakness of this claim—a disabling weakness--is that while doctors may be experts in combating epidemics, they are no more expert at combating racism than the Man on the Clapham Omnibus. The BLM protests, with their accompanying riots, are at least as likely to be exacerbating racist feelings on both sides of the barricades as of ameliorating them. Nonetheless, some doctors follow Horton’s example and fall easily into the habit of thinking that because they know what’s best for us on matters from coughs to cancer, they know best for us in a more general sense. And when they issue their political prescriptions, they are drawing not on their medical training, but on their political opinions and nourishing the authoritarian temptation in doing so.

One doctor, Justine T Lee MD, made that very clear in a tweet when she responded to someone who had pointed out the inconsistency of forbidding patients to break the lockdown for social reasons while allowing it to attend a protest: "Thanks, I hear you. Well the second wave is coming regardless, and I assure you I’d much rather care for COVID pts who were fighting for a cause after 400 yrs of systemic oppression, than for patients who were out protesting for haircuts + brunch." Further:

Well, I hear Dr. Lee too—at least I think so. If she’s saying that trying to prevent a  second wave of Covid-19 infections is futile and therefore a serious reason for breaking the lockdown justifies the slight extra risk of doing so, she has the germ of a respectable argument. But she loads the dice when she cites “haircuts and brunch” as bad reasons. What if the reason is saying goodbye to a dying relative? Most people would think that more important than attending even a protest guaranteed to be peaceful. And if she thinks that the extra risk of infection is a large one, why does she favor exposing to it those people whom she believes to be inspired by a high and idealistic social morality?

Don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that if I were Dr. Lee’s patient, she would give me the best of care and advice despite my retrograde political views. But when she turns to the universe of patients out there, her judgment is quite as likely to be influenced by her political passions as is my own. And the judgment of Richard Horton and The Lancet is no less subject to the same distorting bias.

Indeed, an example has come to light in the same week as the 1,200 medics signed their manifesto asserting in effect that attending the Black Lives Matter protests would improve public health. Two distinguished medical journals—The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine—retracted two articles which had suggested that the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were “not associated with improved outcomes for patients” suffering from the Covid-19 virus.

The retraction was made at the request of the authors of one of the studies when they discovered that the underlying data on which they relied, supplied by a company, was not in fact reliable. That was important news because The Lancet’s study went so far as to argue that, in the dry tones of medical journalism, use of the drugs “also corresponded to higher mortality.” That in turn had led to the cancellation of other global tests of the drugs, perhaps delaying a valuable treatment for Covid-19 patients and causing loss of life.

Or perhaps not. We have a mystery on our hands, and there will now be a serious investigation into what went wrong and who is to blame.  But the political background to this—namely, that President Trump has urged doctors to consider these drugs as cures and that his opponents have poured scorn on him for doing so—is relevant. Many people have desperately wanted to proof that these drugs would not cure Covid-19 and might harm those patients who tried it.

Did that lead to deliberate fraud by someone? Obviously not the authors of the study who themselves exposed its fragility. Or was the desire to see the drugs discredited so strong for political reasons that it made its reviewers and the Lancet’s editors less skeptical than they should have been? And what does that say about the value of scientific peer review when passions run high?

These questions go well beyond medical science since as Horton himself has argued in relationship to climate change policy:

And yet science itself is strangely reticent. The Royal Society is the UK's leading scientific academy. It is dedicated to promoting excellence in science. But its activities to scale up political action to address the climate crisis are anaemic. The Royal Society has projects on low carbon energy and greenhouse gas removal. Its policy initiatives include work on energy, environment, and climate. But the Royal Society's actions are empty of passion, devoid of campaigning, and seemingly disengaged from politics.

To which we should respond: Well, shouldn’t science be “empty of passion, devoid of campaigning, and disengaged from politics”? Most of us would say yes. And if there’s a large second wave of infections in the cities that have hosted the protests and demonstrations, most people will say it louder. Most doctors too.