Let the Great Covid Reckoning Begin

Readers of The Pipeline will be familiar with The Great Barrington Declaration, an early (October 2020) response to the Covid pandemic policies of various governments. Here are its conclusions:

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

The authors of that declaration—stunningly correct in its conclusions and widely disparage by the totalitarian Left—have recently re-formed as the Norfolk Group with the mission of investigating Covid responses now widely seen as mistaken.

America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic failed on many levels of government and in many aspects. Certainly, deaths are unavoidable during a pandemic. However, too many U.S. policy makers concentrated efforts on ineffective or actively harmful and divisive measures such as school closures that generated enormous societal damage without significantly lowering COVID-19 mortality, while failing to protect high-risk Americans. As a result, Americans were hard hit both by the disease and by collateral damage generated by misguided pandemic strategies and decisions that ignored years of pandemic preparation guidance crafted by numerous public health agencies, nationally and internationally.

Written by experts in epidemiology, vaccine development, and biomedical statistics at leading medical institutions (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford), the Declaration was a statement of risk mitigation by scientists whose professional lives have been spent doing exactly that in the field of infectious disease. The Norfolk Group is making the reasonable point that, as we do for major catastrophes in every field, we must investigate what “went wrong” in our reaction to Covid. Nowhere in the literature, for example, were national lockdowns for respiratory diseases recommended prior to the outbreak of Covid-19. Even Anthony Fauci noted, in response to China’s lockdowns in early 2020, that, “…historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”

Unfortunately the Great Barrington recommendations were rejected out of hand, perhaps because they did not advance the objectives of the ruling classes. Consequently, thousands (millions?) of lives were ended unnecessarily, the economy was imperiled, suicide and drug overdose rates skyrocketed, and a generation of schoolchildren had their intellectual and social developments stunted by means of a useless masking and social distancing regime. The negative impacts of these policies are becoming increasingly clear, and will be with us for generations. It's time for some serious payback.

You asked for it.

Ultimately, the Centers for Disease Control begrudgingly and belatedly adopted many of the protocols: focus on the vulnerable, end the lockdowns, and allow those least at risk the freedom our government exists to protect. Masking is now recognized as ineffective (even by the New York Times!), school closures and social distancing of no value, and putting the world under house arrest did nothing to reduce the spread of the virus.

Had the authorities been interested in addressing the pandemic, the declaration at least would have been up for discussion when it was released. Instead, when it wasn't being ignored and its text censored, it was being ridiculed by our public health "authorities." This lack of transparency is among the most-criticized failures of the government's response to Covid. Transparency is at the heart of the mission of the Norfolk Group.

One must wonder whether, had the recommendations of the position paper been adopted, would the mandating of the vaccines that seem mainly to have led to illness, increased cases and deaths and suppressed immune systems, have been considered necessary? Had those not at a higher risk from Covid than they were from influenza been allowed to interact, would herd immunity (which mainstream health authorities are now admitting is superior) have occurred years ago, saving untold lives?

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is urgently called for—minus the "reconciliation," of course. Fauci should be ignominiously stripped of his pensions, the hopelessly inept Rochelle Walensky of the CDC should be summarily fired. The state governors who willfully violated the First Amendment should be recalled (if not gone already) and disqualified from voting or ever holding public office again. But it will never happen.

Why? Because from the perspective of our cultural elites, nothing "went wrong" at all. You got what was coming to you. Now it's time to return the favor.

THE COLUMN: State of Fear

Contrary to the Washington Post, democracy does not "die in darkness." It dies in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty and birthed of instability —an instability that, in the case of the United States of America, has been deliberately cultivated and fanned by the nation's political leadership and other "elite" big chiefs by a decades-long policy of institutional and moral destabilization. And on this Presidents Day, chaos is exactly where we're heading.

Consider the events just since the fall of 2020. An aged, senescent, longtime party hack and lifelong corruptocrat named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., (look up how many Democrat presidents since Carter have been either "Junior" or "the II" or even "the III." Answer: all of them.) somehow won the presidency by drooling at his opponent while "election reform" did the rest.

At the behest of a World Health Organization corruptocrat/terrorist-adjacent operative named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Biden immediately ramped up the induced panic over the Chinese bioweapon called Covid-19—typically Chinese in the ineptitude of its weaponization, but enough to frighten the children—and then unleashed yet another corruptocrat/homunculus named Anthony Fauci to oversee a reign of terror that effectively destroyed the private economies of the West along with the American Constitution. In fact, three years after the greatest hoax in human history first showed its ugly face, the Biden administration still won't lift its "state of emergency" until May 11: the death grip of an 80-year-old man who knows his time on this earth is shortening rapidly.

Continuing on the medical front, doctors and formerly respectable hospitals and universities have gone full Dr. Mengele on several issues, including their fascistic partnership with government and the mainstream media to continue to push an ineffective and dangerous "vaccine" to combat an illness with a survival rate of 99+%, even as evidence mounts of the tremendous damage the ill-conceived experimental gene therapy masquerading as a "cure" does to once-healthy people. Not to mention the recent study that showed that you'd have done just as well not to do anything all about Covid (a claim which would have gotten you banned from social media just a year ago), and let natural immunity takes its course.

In addition to that, of course, they're all in on the sexual mutilation of children as the movement that began with gay marriage has now morphed into "gender identity" and "gender-affirming care," spawned a host of new "pronouns" along with exotic piercings, drag-queen story hours in schools, and lectures about its needs on TikTok, itself demoralizing Chinese spyware from the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. All the social changes being rung by the Left at first went the collective name of "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity"—fittingly, DIE. —until they figured out that some folks might get the right idea, and so an easy fix turned it into DEI. 

And don't even get me started about another insane consensus: that the U.S. should do "whatever it takes" to preserve the reign of the midget dictator of the Ukraine, corruptocrat/Biden paymaster Vladimir Zelensky, so that he might continue to pressure America and other real countries into war with Russia. The spectacle of Robinette Junior cavorting in Kiev while the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, bear the brunt of a government decision to deliberately poison their air and water should get him impeached in the House tomorrow. Or, as National Propaganda Radio daintily put it: "Crews in Ohio successfully release toxic chemicals from derailed tankers." 

Hey, wait a minute—I thought we were against that sort of air, ground, and water pollution! If we are "contributing to climate change" simply by exhaling, isn't this a little much? Shouldn't we just do as Greta does, and hold our breath until we turn blue? With time running out for the third rock from the sun, the oceans rising, the glaciers melting, and little children crying themselves to sleep at night over the certain prospect of their imminent demise, what else can we do but kill ourselves?

In short, we are in the middle of an engineered State of Fear, to use Michael Crichton's term as well as the title of his 2004 techno-thriller, which was the first major expose of the malignant charlatans behind the "climate change" movement. (It is of course purely coincidental that, almost alone among his thrillers, this book has never been made into a movie. The author died at the young age of 66 of cancer in 2008.)

One timely extract from his speech, which comes during a discussion of the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986:

But most troubling of all, according to the UN report in 2005, is that "the largest public health problem created by the accident" is the "damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state."

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event. 

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did. In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

In short, they're trying to drive us crazy. Why? Control, of course. In the opinion of the very silly men who control the technocracy, there are too many of us, we have too much freedom, the Western world (whence come most all the technological and high-cultural achievements throughout human history) is too white and too racist, that borders and biological sex are "constructs," that the civilizational-corroding pursuit of "diversity" is, like "tolerance," a virtue not a weakness, and cultural homogeneity is to be shunned as a high-trust community in which you leave your doors unlocked at night is replaced by a low-trust community in which people shit in the streets. 

There's a name for the cause of all of this, and it is Critical Theory. I Invite you to learn all about it in my 2015 bestseller, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, which outlined the origins of the Frankfurt School and examined its most destructive poisoned gift to Western civilization. Once again they want to invent the New Soviet Man: ex nihilo from the toxic minds and souls of Rousseau and Marx, people who think the right thoughts and live approved lives, who tolerate the increasing strictures of the surveillance state with a peep, people who won't put up a fuss about the occasional herd cull, which is what Covid was meant to be. In other words: sheep. 

This means you, bub.

What a stroke of genius it was to persuade everyone on the planet to willingly carry around their own ankle bracelet in the form of an iPhone or other smart phone, broadcasting their whereabouts to all relevant authorities 24 hours a day. To get them to happily provide reams of personal data and pictures to Facebook in exchange for being turned into the product that the Zuckerverse serves up to advertisers and from which he mints his billions. To express your personal opinions on Twitter regarding just about every subject under the sun, sometimes hiding behind the false and cowardly security of an easily busted alias, and then being hauled up on "community" charges of wrongthink whenever the media-operated Zeitgeist changes course with the speed of a flock of birds. Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein's got nothing on you. 

State of Fear? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

THE COLUMN: 'Vaccine Amnesty'? Not On Your Life

This really says it all: 

Nothing better encapsulates the Stalinist Left's ability to turn on a dime and argue the same set of facts both ways than its reaction to Covid. From the "scientifically" induced panic and hysteria over a fundamentally non-existent threat to the survival of humanity (something one would think the Left would welcome, and in fact they do and are even beginning to admit it) to a state of weaponized HIPPA was but a journey of two years. Beginning as an area of some mild public concern to a fascist boot stamping on a human face for what seemed like forever, the Hoax of the Century has become the Crime of the Century. Without the slightest bit of proof that Covid-19 was indeed a planetary menace, but merely the assertions and "projections" of hypocritical "scientists," cranky lunatics, and foaming totalitarians of every stripe, a near-worldwide lockdown was imposed upon an innocent and trusting populace.

Result: madness. The elderly, dying imprisoned and alone. Families sundered. Children tortured. The rise of an internal, informal Stasi, as neighbor turned against neighbor and ratted him out. It was insane, but even worse: it was evil. Cold, calculated evil. And yet they—and you know who you are, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden, and the rest of you nasty international socialists—now have the unmitigated gall to beg for mercy:

LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Dementia meets malevolence.

Baloney. Of course, they did. Not only did they know, but they enjoyed it, in a way leftist sadists like those at the The Atlantic and their ilk always do. In a way that international moguls like Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum did in his book, Covid-19: The Great Reset. In the same way that all genuine Enemies of the People do, formerly secretly and, increasingly, openly.

Unabashed and unashamed, they have the chutzpah to throw themselves on the temporary mercies of their victims, most of whom still haven't realized that the Rubicon has been crossed, and that there is no going back for the antagonists of Western civilization. So ignore their pleas to "focus on the future." Like Satan himself, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. By their masks shall ye continue to know them.

Here's another amoral monster, feigning a quasi-mea culpa:

We didn't know. We didn't understand. We were just following orders. So, of course, we brought the entire apparatus of the state down on your heads in the name of "safety." It was for your own good, comrade.

Don't forget that, literarily, every Aristotelian drama can be told from two viewpoints: that of the hero and that of his opponent. Narrative storytelling has evolved into a constant clash of good and evil: the protagonist wants X (a woman, glory, power, money), while his opponent it trying to frustrate his goals and desires. Turn the story around, have the antagonist become the narrator, and you have the same story but with an entirely different outcome. In the Leftist narrative, they are the good guys trying to save the world while we, the inheritors and defenders of Western civilization are the villains, stubbornly and bitterly clinging to the old ways and trying to frustrate "progress."

Leftists, being Marxists of either the economic or cultural variety, are great believers in what they call the "arc of history," a kind of quasi-religious determinism that posits "iron laws" of history that must, eventually, result in their triumph. (Any resemblance to the narrative of the Bible, in which all promises of military triumph and spiritual salvation are conveniently located in the unspecified future, is entirely not coincidental.) As I wrote in The Devil's Pleasure Palace: 

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

As these things so often do, the determination to control the world at its most vulnerable and gullible point of entry, health, necessitated a coverup—Twitter and Facebook, take a bow! Overnight, our long-cherished notions of free speech, free expression, the right to "question authority," and even religious observance were overruled by a handful of crackpots aided and abetted by the social-media companies, working in cahoots with governments and the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum to create the Brave New World of the Great Reset. "The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes," I wrote in the introduction to our book on the subject. So also does it beg for "tolerance" when it is at its weakest. 

Against the Great Reset

Fight back.

Now that, once again, they have been exposed for what and who they really are, this is most definitely not the moment to treat them with kindness and empathy which, like "tolerance," is a destructive impulse masquerading as a virtue). Forgiveness, amnesty? Not on your life. Even now, they are plotting their next moves: "climate change" lockdowns, restricted mobility, vaccine-or-carbon tax passports, electric cars, digital currency, the destruction of the fossil fuel industries, artificial scarcity, and misery shared by everybody except themselves. 

Look at the picture at the top of this page, and ask yourselves: if they would do this to your children, what won't they do? And what kind of man are you if you let them get away with it?

 

Bride of Pfizerstein

The “vaccine” fable took a turn recently with Pfizer’s "Director of R & D – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning" boasting that Pfizer is mutating coronaviruses to create new mRNA “vaccines.” As an R&D Director he is aware of the dangers in doing so:

You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere... Covid is going to be a cash cow for us for a while going forward. Like obviously.”

Pfizer, which recently paid the largest-ever fine, $2.3 billion, for false claims, is calling these claims "false."

How could these two things not have been co-designed? That's the purpose of the synergistic pharmacological R&D Pfizer is doing. When you're Frankensteining a virus and a "vaccine," doing both at once increases efficiencies, allowing one to insist work is being done “at the speed of science.”

Die, humanity, die.

Why would government agencies spend time increasing the lethality of viruses? In addition to a $31-trillion national debt, America has unfunded future social welfare (Medicare, Social Security) liabilities over $180 trillion. Years ago Christopher Buckley published a light-hearted look at the future-liability problem in Boomsday. In his novel, the government promises to pay $1,000,000 to the estate of Baby Boomers willing to commit suicide before age 75, to reduce that liability. Is Covid Boomsday?

China is the fastest-aging society on earth, with a fertility rate of 1.3. Italy has the fourth-lowest fertility among sovereign states – and the third-oldest population in the world. Who will pay for Italy’s and China’s aging populations? Which were the two countries hit hardest and first with Covid? Is the “vaccine” simply another weapon in the arsenal of globalists intent on reducing the global population to "sustainable" levels while ensuring that fewer people live to drain national treasuries as they age – a twofer? You decide.

Now that more injectees of the vax are dying from Covid than non-injectees, it seems those deciding against the “vaccine” have proved prescient.

Those aware that vaccines normally require over a decade of development and testing, that previous mRNA technology proved “difficult” (in some tests all the animals died), and that the creators had to be taken to court and forced not to hide their test results for the 75 years they demanded, were not surprised. Who hides success?

The Great Resetters next want to “vaccinate” our food supply (and ourselves) with toxic mRNA alchemy. Initially suggested with comments about putting mRNA into our salads, they’ve progressed to discussing mRNA concoctions in beef . Do we really want to take that risk?

AGAINST THE GREAT RESET: The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'

For the next two weeks, The Pipeline is presenting the remaining excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, which was published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now at the links. 

 

Part V: THE PRACTICAL

Excerpt from "The Great Reset and 'Stakeholderism'," by Alberto Mingardi

Politics has always oscillated between Right and Left. After World War II, Western countries took many a step toward interventionism, regardless of warnings by a handful of intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. If the West went down the “road to serfdom,” that serfdom was bureaucratic, benevolent in its aims and generous with many. Yet in a few years, the consensus for growing interventionism was eroded, leading to the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In recent years, at least since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, politics have moved in the opposite direction, aiming to put an end to whatever “neoliberal policies” (as they came to be known in the public debate) a country ever pursued.

Yet with the Covid-19 pandemic, this process accelerated. Rahm Emanuel’s advice regarding the usefulness of a good crisis had a profound impact on the Western ruling classes: in the U.S. (where unprecedented and previously unimaginable levels of public spending have been reached), in the European Union (where the alleged need for stimulus policies allowed for the first-ever emission of common debt), in the Western hemisphere (where Covid-19 inspired unimaginable restrictions on the freedom of movement of the citizens). Hence, right from its beginning, the Covid-19 pandemic has been considered something more and different than simply a health crisis, however profound and indeed dramatic it’s been. In the pandemic, governments found (and, perhaps, searched for) an opportunity to address other problems. The pandemic was soon compared to a war and it was assumed that after it, like after war, we should “rebuild.” But “rebuild differently.”

How differently? Intellectuals and experts soon realized that it was their business to answer the question. Though the world in 2019 could hardly be seen as a laissez-faire paradise, a common cry has been a call for different institutions to plan, more solidly, from the top down. Technological transitions of the sort that are now typically advocated for (from the “green” economy to central bank digital currencies) indeed presuppose experts picking a technology. Yet the prevailing view seems not to be content with only industrial policies. The very nature of the economic system should change, moving from “shareholder” to “stakeholder” capitalism.

One element that differentiates this approach from previous waves of interventionism is that it goes hand in hand with a genuine revision of the political vocabulary. Think of the very locution “the Great Reset,” which acquired currency thanks to Professor Klaus Schwab, the influential founder and president of the WEF. The very use of those words implied (a) that the world needed a rebooting after the pandemic; (b) that such a rebooting could be done; and (c) that it could come about thanks to a specific set of policies. The discussion over these two terms includes a considerable toying with words.

Against the Great Reset

Now on sale.

The Great Reset and the Stakeholder Model

Professor Klaus Schwab is a German-born economist that most people know as a highly successful entrepreneur: he is the founder and president of the WEF, a not-for-profit foundation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The WEF is most famous for its conferences, beginning with its annual Davos meeting, where business and political leaders reconvene to enjoy the company of some public intellectuals and ponder the world’s future. The WEF success put Davos on the map, and made the village—ten thousand in population, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden—a household name. In 2004, Samuel P. Huntington christened the participants “Davos men… a (then) new global elite… empowered by new notions of global connectedness.” They “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

In media accounts and in public perception, “Davos men” were at times seen as advocates of neo-liberalism, of globalization, of unfettered competition. This was a common misconception: equating the interest of companies and its moneyed classes with deregulation and competition, which most of the time, they dread. In one way, this was also quite naïve, even disingenuous: “crony capitalism,” meaning a system in which private companies and the government collude, is the greenhouse of the global elites. In fact, the spirit of the Davos meeting was always to bring all “stakeholders” around the table.

In Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and the Planet (written with Peter Vanham), Schwab, who coined the locution “the Great Reset,” suggested that we should “use the post-Covid-19 recovery to enact stakeholder capitalism at home, and a more sustainable goal economic system all around the world.” Why? And, in particular, why now? One would expect the aftermath of Covid-19 to see us all busy in getting back to what used to be “normalcy.” The time for reform should come later, not now.

Klaus Schwab: "you will own nothing and be happy."

The idea of “stakeholderism” isn’t new. Schwab himself has been advocating some version of it since the 1970s and is happy to provide an account of his own intellectual enterprise as a struggle against Milton Friedman. An important body of literature grew up around the theme, particularly in the field of business economics and corporate governance. Why should stakeholder capitalism be important in the wake of the pandemic? Why should we all go for it, particularly now? Why has the discussion about it moved out of the circles of experts, to include wider sections of society?

In part, these discussions were rejuvenated by the anniversary of an article published by Milton Friedman in the New York Times Magazine. Fifty years later, in the midst of a pandemic that saw an enormous growth of public spending, Friedman’s piece seemed the ideal starting point to launch a discussion regarding the future of business in the world’s economies. But this would have been a more academic, less heated discussion. Instead, important public figures like Schwab emerged to say that “free markets, trade, and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off… But this is not the reality we’re living in today.”

Schwab is a capable intellectual entrepreneur and a sharp mind. If he believes that “there are reasons to believe a more inclusive and virtuous economic system is possible—and it could be just around the corner,” this means that for him, the rethinking of the capitalist system is not necessarily more urgent because of the pandemic crisis, but such “reimagining” becomes easier, more within reach thanks to the growing role that governments have taken on during the lockdowns and other “emergency” measures. In other words, let’s not let a good crisis go to waste...

Next week: an excerpt from "History under the Great Reset," by Jeremy Black. 

America 2022: Threat Level, Critical

When threats reach a scale that cannot readily be processed, lethargy sets in. People begin to reject investigating calamities so big they cannot understand them, problems so large and so broad that even admitting their existence collapses the senses, and with them any idea, plan, or nascent strategy of dealing with the threat. It is far easier to just accept whatever it is the "experts" are saying and go along with the crowd.

People give up and accept whatever they are told by those holding the threat over their heads. They pretend it will all be over soon, and jump on the collectivist virtue bandwagon, the bandwagon that crushed 100,000,000 human beings last century. Because these issues are so big, and our reliance on experts so complete, we wind up in messes like the ones in which we find ourselves today. When individual status is based on getting along, critical thinking vanishes and society goes along, regardless of the consequences.

Hi! My name's Herbert.

We have at least three of these threats hanging over our heads across the West today as the Baby Boomer “Summer of Love” Marcusian cohort of 1967 ages off history’s stage. Having as their life’s goal the destruction of America, the evil half of the Boomers will not go gently into that good night. Their aging explains the acceleration of the attacks on our freedom and our families of the past several years, and why these attacks on what we and millennia of our common forebears see as fundamental rights will continue to accelerate.

The three principal threats we face now are: the hoax of "climate change"; the manmade bioweapon of Covid-19 and its accompanying, perhaps even more lethal "vaccine"; and virulent, Democrat racism being used to attack both private and public sectors of society, our education, and the military. All are existential threats to freedoms and liberties that only exist in the West, and against which these threats have been created to extinguish.

These made-up crises have one goal, a goal that is a threat so big most seem unable or unwilling to process it: the destruction of the Western middle class: our liberty, freedom, prosperity and the futures of our children, Covid was a bad flu to older people and a minor flu to younger, there is no “anthro” in "climate change," and America is the least-racist society in history. Marxism is the goal of Western elites; they have neither time nor interest in those of us making the world go. We are today's Kulaks. Our mere presence is anathema to them, mucking-up their plans and authoritarian demands.

Each of these crises is based on a lie. Take "climate change." Even the U.N. is honest about its goal:

We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore.

The middle class wants freedom, liberty, law and to live our lives with the fruit of our own labor. The rulers cannot have this, just as they cannot have us point out that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Brix have no clothes and that their “vaccine” for a pathogen that escaped from their labs is increasing infection rates wherever it goes, or that not one single un-corrupted global temperature data set supports the fantasy of “Climate Change.”

We are not going to agree that 2+2=5. Ever. They cannot allow this. Getting us to say “five” is behind these crises, as it is behind the most-expensive-and-under-prosecuted riots in our history, behind the idiocy of the unnecessary war in Ukraine, and behind the coming Ukraine-war-driven destruction of global food supplies and of the dollar as the global reserve currency. Think inflation is bad now?

The Netherlands and Canada seem intent on replicating the Holodomor, and it's coming next to America. Predictably millions will die at the hands of collectivist leadership, just as the last time. Leftists never learn; more accurately, they learn to kill better next time. Stalin only murdered 34-49 million people in the 1930s; 30 years later, Mao murdered 80,000,000. What will be the Reaper’s toll from Davos Man?

Against the Great Reset

Read it and prepare for the worst.

As for Covid? Requiring a “vaccine” that, somehow, was patented ten days after the Covid genome was sequenced for the first time, a “vaccine” that prevents neither infection nor transmission, but that global data show reduces natural immunity across-the-board, that may be killing in huge numbers, and that destroys fertility, would seem to normal people to be counterproductive: 2+2=4, always and forever.

Those not starved to-death in the Third World by our rulers via ineffective and "more harm than good" Covid lockdowns and by the destruction of global food supplies for "climate change" amelioration will be far more docile than those of us in the West who, uniquely among global cultures, outlawed forced labor centuries ago. Which is why they are vaxxing us, and not them.

A fourth crisis, in fact, exists. Yet another threat so big that just conceptualizing it is problematic. And that is the fact of these elites, rulers and governments, themselves.

We will never give them their “5.” In America, we will not give them trucker strikes and manure sprays. Perhaps America’s destroyers will not give us our very own Holodomor because, we, alone among nations, have the ability, the means and the temperament to fight back.

In the face of the largest communist empire in history—so far—an empire dedicated to destroying family, religion, freedom, liberty, law, prosperity – sound familiar? – one man stood firm. He wrote:

I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.

And:

When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?

That man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knew a thing or two or four about communism.

What does 2+2 equal in your calculations?

 

 

Two Years On, Covid Origins Still a 'Mystery'

Covid-19 is a virus with a questionable origin. No “intermediate” animal host or  “progenitor” animal species has been found after more than a year of looking, per the World Health Organization:

The trouble with this hypothesis is that Chinese researchers have not succeeded in finding a “direct progenitor” of this virus in any animal they’ve looked at. Liang said China had tested 50,000 animal specimens, including 1,100 bats in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. But no luck: a matching virus still hasn’t been found.

And,

But research has already forced China to abandon its original tale that the virus leaped from wild animals to a human at the Huanan Seafood market in December.

Zero-Covid or bust!

According to the chairman of a recent Lancet-sponsored origin study, Covid-19 “was an accidental release ‘out of US lab biotechnology’.” Covid has a “genetic footprint that has never been observed in nature.” The oft-discussed, but perhaps not-quite-smoking gun of the Furin Cleavage Site (FCS) has been investigated thoroughly without a solid conclusion,

The reverse complement sequence present in SARS-CoV-2 may occur randomly but other possibilities must be considered. Recombination in an intermediate host is an unlikely explanation. Single stranded RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 utilize negative strand RNA templates in infected cells, which might lead through copy choice recombination with a negative sense SARS-CoV-2 RNA to the integration of the MSH3 negative strand, including the FCS, into the viral genome. In any case, the presence of the 19-nucleotide long RNA sequence including the FCS with 100% identity to the reverse complement of the MSH3 mRNA is highly unusual and requires further investigations.

Yet, further investigation of Covid’s origin has been blocked at every turn and valuable data has been hidden by the U.S.  government at the request of Communist China. Even “Dr Fauci now says he's "not convinced" the virus originated naturally.”

What about the “vaccine”? The U.S. government funded a Chinese Communist Party military scientist who patented a vaccine just five weeks after China first announce human-to-human transmission of Covid-19, and just a few months before the patentee “mysteriously” died.

“This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much ­earlier,” Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the paper.

Although Western governments reacted to this “novel” virus as though it was an extinction level viral strain delivered to earth by an unmanned research satellite, in fact, its lethality seems confined to those already past their actuarial table life expectancy with the added disadvantage of more than a  few comorbidities. Were the deaths of these people tragic? Of course. Did the reactions of nearly all Western governments make the situations worse? Of course. The imposed lockdowns not only were violations of millennia-old rights across Western Civilization, they were totally ineffective at stopping the virus. Added to that, these lockdowns may have caused as many as 170,000 excess deaths in America, alone, per the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Schwab and Xi, got us up a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

But – perhaps not enough people died to please the WEF/Davosie Great Reset Gang intent on using Covid to winnow the pesky Middle Class continually demanding liberty, freedom and the Rule of Law – the current definition of “Far Right Extremism,” for those not paying attention.

These meddlesome deplorables gave the world Trump (gone), Boris (gone), Abe (really gone), and insist that the self-government and liberty we view as our birthright within Western civilization be prioritized over the selfish wishes of our new rising authoritarian class now owning most housing in America, the most farmland in America, as well as the Congress, the administration and most of the courts. We deplorables—believers in America, the Dream and the futures of our children—are not acceptable to the Western P\political establishment or the corporations that have captured it.

Our elites demand depopulation and Marxism and are determined to get it. The Klimate Kult is admittedly and proudly redistributing our freedom to people lacking the sense or inclination to pursue the rule of law and capitalism, with a stated intent to convert the West to communism. Communism has no middle class. For our elites to achieve their goal of communism they must rid the West of our middle class. Notice they are not vaxxing the hell out of the Third World.

Was the virus less lethal than planned, not lethal enough to cause the desired depopulation? Were those young people not at risk from Covid forced to inject an experimental vaccine thanks to the government's overreaction to a pathogen similar to a bad flu clearly has been? And were the immediately-patented “vaccines” and the never-before-used-on-humans mRNA technology simply to increase the body count both directly and through hugely decreased fertility once everyone had chosen, or was directed at the cost of their jobs or school or church, to inject? Let’s look at Sweden.

Is the evidence against this theory any weaker than any other evidence in the long-running mystery that is the attack on the West via climate, ESG, and, now a non-vaccinating “vaccine” to a virus that seems daily to be gaining more plausibility as an invention of these same elites? The West is under attack from within by its own mandarins. They won’t stop voluntarily.

THE COLUMN: 'By Any Means Necessary'

Those of us who weathered the Sixties as teenagers well remember the fraught nature of American society in the annus horribilis of 1968. The Tet offensive in Vietnam. The asssassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Riots in dozens of cities across the land. The self-immolation of a president, Lyndon Johnson. The ongoing mess in Vietnam, a war we didn't have to fight and didn't want to win.

The "student" riots at the Democrat convention in Chicago, at which the donkeys chose LBJ's vice-president, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the quintessential "Minnesota Nice" representative of that quirky state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—which believe it or not, still exists and dominates formerly German-Scandinavian and now Mogadishustanian politics to this day. The election of Richard M. Nixon, back from the political graveyard, in November of that year. And much, much more:

One of the ringing phrases of that decade was "by any means necessary," which was included in a 1960 speech by the black French West Indian radical Marxist Frantz Fanon, "Why we use violence." The phrase may have had its roots in the 1948 play Dirty Hands (Les mains sales) by the Existentialist French playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ("It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary") and then was widely popularized by Malcolm X in 1965 (the year of his own assassination): "We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary." It's a slogan now associated with black American filmmaker Spike Lee, who adopted it from Malcolm while making his eponymous film.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, "by any means necessary" means violence, otherwise known by the 1960s' euphemism, "direct action." 

Well, what goes around comes around and here we are, more than half a century later, as the passions that inflamed Americans back then, while different somewhat in their particulars, are still burning bright. We saw "by any means necessary" and "direct action" in action during the George Floyd summer of 2020, when cities burned during "mostly peaceful" protests over the death of a hitherto obscure minor career criminal who expired while under restraint by the hapless Minneapolis police department. Does anyone even remember who George Floyd was? But his death birthed the Black Lives Matter movement, and his memory still graces a couple of blocks of 16th Street NW in Washington, D.C., just steps from the White House. 

Memento mori on 16th Street.

Things fall apart: when one of the capital's main streets, leading directly to the front door of the White House (hence the address, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.), boasting some of the city's leading hotels, including the Hay-Adams, are effectively closed to through traffic, the rule of law no longer obtains. On both sides: who can forget the colossal error in judgment (at the very least) of the January 6 demonstrations, which has resulted in hundreds of arrests, with many people still sitting in prison, and an ongoing show trail run by the Democrats in Congress designed to punish their mortal enemy, Donald J. Trump?

Just last week, former presidential adviser and campaign guru Steve Bannon was convicted by a kangaroo court for "contempt of Congress," a "crime" one or two rungs lower on the tort list from spitting on the sidewalk or picking your feet in Poughkeepsie. (Former Obama attorney general/wingman Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress in 2014, but amazingly the administration declined to prosecute.) 

The old Soviet Union or National Socialist Germany would have been proud of this farce: unable to mount the defense he and his lawyers sought thanks to a series of adverse rulings by the judge, Bannon's team chose no defense at all, but instead will appeal the conviction to a higher court.

The judge barred the defense from calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and members of the Jan. 6 committee to the stand, prevented it from arguing that the select committee violated House rules by calling on Bannon to testify, and from claiming that Bannon ignored the subpoena on the advice of his counsel or at Trump’s direction. Bannon’s legal team cited the earlier rulings as part of their reasoning for keeping him off the stand, saying the defendant “understands that he would be barred from telling the true facts.”

At this point in the sad history of the decline and fall of the American republic, what patriotic citizen doesn't have contempt for Congress and just about every other institution of government that's been corrupted by money, power, unaccountability, and an unabashed loathing for the nation and its people? Forget home rule; Washington is now run by mob rule, and the government's part of the mob. When things go this wrong, who isn't tempted to agree with Al Pacino in this clip from Norman Jewison's 1979 film, "... And Justice for All"?

But it's not just D.C. where political grievances have been taken to the streets. Protests against a perfectly lawful decision by the Supreme Court regarding abortion (returning the matter to the states) were of course met with protests everywhere, and a would-be assassin even got all the way from California to Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in suburban Maryland before his nerve failed him and he turned himself in. In upstate New York, Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor in one of America's worst and most dysfunctional states, was assaulted with a weapon while giving a campaign speech; the alleged perp was released without bail the next day, but later hit with federal charges. "You're done," he said to Zeldin as he moved toward him, although that may just have been the whisky talking, as the man claimed.

Americans have been driven crazy by events since the election of 2000, which has called into question the validity of every election since, and also by developments abroad, starting with the George W. Bush administration's profoundly witless response to the attacks of 9/11. A long, pointless military exercise against backwater places that had little or nothing to do with Osama bin Laden's private—and extraordinarily effective—jihad against the West culminated in the Biden administration's criminally feckless pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, elevating a rag-tag band of razorless primitives to the best-equipped private army on the planet.

On the home front, a steady diet of woke enormities regarding deviant sexual grooming in the schools, surgical disfigurement and chemical castration of children, the perversion of both biology and the language by woke ideology, the president's son Hunter Biden's open cavorting with hookers, snorting coke, and brokering deals with unsavory places like China and Plucky Little Ukraine, the breakdown of public order, the belated acknowledgment by the media that the Covid "vaccines" neither prevent or ameliorate the damages caused by the virus and may in fact be harmful, and that the entire totalitarian overreaction of 2019-2022 was a great big joke—on us. Not that they're sorry about it, however, because the beta test of tyranny taught the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party that Americans were sheep and can in the future be stripped of their rights and liberties with impunity.

It's that simple!

And then there's the entire "Green Energy" hoax, an all-purpose pretense to raise the cost of fuels, restrict your mobility, and cripple agriculture, all in the name of a demonstrably untrue and malicious Luddite fantasy aimed directly at your survival.

Partisans on both sides of the ideological divide now speak openly of civil war—"direct action" at its rawest—and who can blame them? The country is a mess, its Congress a criminal oligarchy of the elderly, and the presidency controlled by the same few families for the past 40 years (the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Trumps), with a Trump v. Biden rematch possibly in the cards for 2024, unless either sensible heads prevail or the Grim Reaper finally comes to call for the Baby Boomers.

If war comes, however, it won't be geographical but ideological. The states have split between the parties, while the parties have split the electorate in odd ways: rich whites, especially Democrat women, have adopted the Sixties' clenched fists of "revolution," while the working class, including Latinos, has drifted toward the Republicans, hoping to preserve their rapidly declining standard of living while hunkering down and awaiting the possible succor of the fall elections. 

No one seems very confident that the midterms will sort much out. By now, conservatives have zero expectations that a Mitch McConnell-run Senate and a Kevin McCarthy-led House would do much of anything except continue to line their pockets while shadow-boxing with their sham opposition/friends across the aisle. The system stinks and everybody knows it. Everybody, left and right agrees that something needs to be done. The question is, what? We may not have the answer to that yet, but we do know how: by any means necessary. 

There's No Escape from 'Climate Change'

Sometimes random events conspire to drive home unpleasant realities. "Climate change," as this website argues daily, is a fundamentally political mantra used by the globalists to usurp world economies, and direct vast amounts of economic activity toward socialist ends, including The Great Reset. It is a plot. It is a coordinated effort, to destroy vibrant capitalism, which has created the highest standard of living for the most people in history. This is true even during unpleasantly hot summers or cold winters. 

When an idea is based on a lie, it is hard to imagine it winning an essential, worldwide political debate. But in the past few weeks I’ve had three encounters with businesses that have brought home the raw power of the "climate change" lobby, raising harsh questions about whether it can be defeated.

Over July 4th weekend I went to a big chain movie theater in ex-urban Connecticut, to see Top Gun: Maverick, a fundamentally conservative movie about flying planes very fast, which uses up a lot of fuel, not that that’s the point. The audience was older and, presumably, mostly Republican. After the endless coming attractions, a pretty clever commercial played. A CGI dinosaur spoke to a U.N.-like body about climate change. He pointed out that it was killing our planet. And yet we subsidize fossil fuels, which, the velociraptor noted, is like him subsidizing an asteroid. This was brought to us by United Nations Development Program, and voiced by actor Jack Black. 

Commercial American movies have not heretofore included such blatant political propaganda pieces. It was presented no differently than the usual ads for Coke and popcorn, which is horrifying. It was well done enough to have an impact on a younger, or apolitical, audience. Is this suasion a condition of post-pandemic entertainment?

A few weeks earlier I attended an event at which, among other speakers, a Korean-American man described his business of consulting with urban political leaders to create “smart cities.” Urban planning has its place, though it rarely works as intended. It is, theoretically, practical. Though most recent planned cities are a little barren and inhuman. They certainly are not interesting in the manner of old cities that grew up over long time periods.

But with "smart cities," the question is, "what kind of people’s lives are they planning for?" Rational traffic patterns are a fine thing. Decent housing – though you usually get those monstrous blocks of flats—is usually an improvement over slums. But these days the planning is to do without cars, for carbon reasons. And high-rise apartment blocks predominate, in order to squeeze the most people into the smallest space, obviating the need for greater land use, and denying anyone the sort of freedom that is a byproduct of privacy or urban anonymity. One pictures Wuhan, 2020, with the population locked into their apartments by the government, to starve or die if they caught Covid.

Toward the end of his talk he noted that he had just met with the mayor of New York. He shared his disappointment that that New York isn’t interested in "smart" city planning. There was a faint sigh of relief in the room. But it's worth knowing that a very smart Wharton classmate of Elon Musk does this full time, around the world. Clients include Hanoi, Lviv, and various Latin American cities. A great many countries are eager to plan brave new limits for human behavior. This is not climate change driven, per se. But it goes hand in glove.

We've got it all figured out.

Just last week I was invited to attend a Zoom call by a major American media-marketing firm that is working with a European artificial intelligence (AI) firm. The meeting was titled "Is Artificial Intelligence the Solution For Our Most Crucial Climate Challenges?" The presentation fully presumed universal acceptance of the Paris Climate Agreement projections for rising seas and carbon pollution—and the Paris goals for mitigating these "problems."

Reporters were told that AI can measure extraordinary amounts of remote carbon, even micro level footprints of individual products, while gathering data. It is especially helpful in mitigation efforts, including reducing emissions and removing already present carbon in the environment. When it comes to "Adaptation and Resilience," AI is good for "hazard forecasting," for which it can create excellent regional modeling of rising sea levels, or fires. That’s needed to build warning systems. AI also can help determine vulnerabilities, including monitoring for epidemics and strengthening infrastructure. And, of course, AI is excellent for climate research and modeling of needed economic and social transitions. This description includes every "climate-change" buzzword that young businessmen have in their bags.

The young people who work for this firm were earnest and gung ho. They’re smart. They’re applying their skills and formulas to a problem, and they will solve it. Even if it isn’t real. Now multiply this very professional presentation by hundreds of tech firms angling for contracts, which some will win, then tell me how you stop this great march forward. Because it’s not clear. Truth needs stronger defenders.

Life Among the Toddlers

Much has been written over the last 20 or so years about the progressive emergence of the nanny state and the corresponding infantilization of the public. In Portrait of an Obama Nanny State, F. LaGard Smith presciently warned us about the “looming nightmare” of state paternalism. Richard Stanley’s Freedom, Common Sense, and the ‘Nanny State’ skewers the destructive wastefulness of both material and human resources wrought by the executive regime. Economist James Buchanan defines the nanny state as “distributionist socialism”; his Better than Plowing is a valuable contribution to the discussion. 

Equally incisive, Brian Anderson in Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents calls the welfare state and its reductive policies a form of “egalitarian overbidding” and “tutelary despotism,” under which “liberty is lost and a bloated central power administers to the needs of an infantilized population.” In order to “reset” the world, as the current lexicon has it, administrators need to return adults into the condition of children, a task already largely accomplished. The ground has long been cleared for coercive supervision.

Ready for a lifetime of government oversight.

We see the PsyOps strategy, or manipulative behavioral modification, at work in all the ordinary walks of daily life, diluting and even eliminating the virtues of independent thinking, self-reliance and the faculty of mature consideration. Our political masters, corporate hegemons and cultural soothsayers are intent on population control, under the cloak of ensuring our security. Everything now is about safety, not choice and reason, resulting in a lack of personal initiative, an attitude of submission, fear of risk and renunciation of self.

In short, we have become imbeciles—the word itself derives from the Latin for “weak, feeble,” like children who need to be pampered, monitored, taken by the hand, told what to do and kept obedient and “safe.” To adapt a metaphor from Theodore Dalrymple, it is as if we spend our lives demanding safety certificates from bus drivers before boarding. Examples abound in every domain of life.

Thus, a timorous and fearful public could be easily spooked by the Covid scam, including the universal hype about the effectiveness of the vaccines and boosters. Anyone who has been led to believe that a mask will stop a Covid particle, or that a face shield or plexiglass barrier will prevent an ambulatory virion from taking a detour to mouth and nose, is living in a fantasy world, like a child who believes a teddy bear is a talisman against the dark.

Untold millions of gullible grown-ups raced to get their improperly tested, experimental and likely harmful lipid jabs, swallowing whole the media and government line without performing their due diligence. A population so tamely led by the nasopharyngeals, so readily susceptible as children are to group persuasion, was easy picking for the WHO, the WHA, and the Davos bunch in cahoots with compliant medical regimes and unethical or authoritarian governments.

But the Covid panic is only the most glaring contemporary instance of galloping puerility. Everywhere we look we see examples, great and small, of childish obeisance to the rule of dumbing-down, the real pandemic of fright. Take the weather. If we have a heat wave or a week of sultry temperatures, it’s now called a heat dome under which we cower in fear, as if in the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft blotting out the sky and come to wreak planetary havoc. Here in temperate Vancouver, the most recent “heat dome”—the thermometer in the lower 80s—lasted two days. If it rains a lot, we are experiencing an atmospheric river which may conceivably flood our homes. The only possible response is to seek shelter or start paddling. The terminology seals the deal.

"Heart Dome" comin' to get'cha!

And it goes on. We need to be alerted to the fact that a freshly poured cup of coffee at a takeout counter is scalding hot; if we spill it on our laps, we can sue. Like children, we are not responsible for what we may do to ourselves.

We cannot plug in a washer/dryer without being warned that we are in danger of electrocution. I once inserted a bobby pin into an electrical socket and wore a sling and bandage for several months, but I was three years old.

A message several sentences long flashes on our car’s dashboard screen commanding us to pay attention to the road; of course, if we pay attention to the screen, we may shortly find ourselves in an ambulance, which somehow defeats the purpose. Nonetheless, we have been informed that focusing on the road is the thing to do when driving, since we might not have known. The car will even parallel park for us since so arduous a task is obviously beyond our competence. 

University students, old enough to drive, drink, “hook up” or be drafted, clamor for “safe spaces” and are deeply disturbed by something called “microaggressions.” Great books come festooned with “trigger warnings,” if they are not banned altogether, lest they offend a febrile sensibility. If the “wrong” person is elected to political office or a Supreme Court decision is not to their liking or a “misgendered” pronoun floats menacingly toward them, they break down and cry or throw a tantrum.

Similarly, digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter throng with jejune hecklers acting like a pack of spoiled brats hurling insults around the schoolyard, specimens of what Victor Davis Hanson calls “the cry-baby leftist mind,” for whom dialogue, discourse and decorum are beyond their development. Manners, children, manners!

Life sucks and then you die.

The nanny state is determined to confiscate people’s firearms on the pretext, obviously false, that law enforcement is a better option than self-defense. After all, children should not play with guns, and the children, to their cost, generally agree. Never mind that home-invaders have been given carte-blanche.

At the recent G7 summit, oblivious to the rigors of systemic inflation, civil discord, rising taxes, and prohibitive food-and-fuel costs, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and soon-to-be-former British prime minister Boris Johnson enjoyed a good laugh riffing on the standard male joke by comparing the length of their jets, among other such risible trivialities—the contemporary form of mature statesmanship on display.

Anyone can come up with numberless examples for oneself, provided, of course, we have not been diminished to the condition of rug rats. Those who have managed to escape the pubescent cultural climate will be at their wit’s end trying to negotiate their way among a population of adult toddlers, which is what our culture has descended to. It is hard to avoid the feeling that the culture has been hollowed out, that courage, heart and substance have been made to disappear, leaving only function and habit to keep us going.

“You will own nothing, and you will be happy,” as the Davos resetters and their collaborators like to say, treating their subjects as infants beholden to their doting parents who have only their welfare at heart. For when the freedom to be ourselves as mature adults capable of making our own considered and independent decisions, when we have been reduced to the status of callow and artless moppets under the tutelage of their masters, incapable of reflection, rational analysis, personal agency or sensible behavior, then—as David Harsanyi puts it in Nanny State—we are back in the stroller, content to be wheeled along to someone else’s destination. 

The welfare state regards the individual as a molecular constituent of the larger whole, reliant on and fearful of the administrative apparatus which acts in loco parentis commanding allegiance from its demographic wards. The world has been made safe for absolutism and citizens have been freed from the strenuous demands of freedom. The nanny state, or, in the words of Joel Kotkin from The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny, “the progressive clerisy in government and media,” is a preparation for and, indeed, the direct precursor of the regime of rentier Fascism, deceptively known as “stakeholder capitalism,” envisioned by the Great Reset. The road to serfdom is in effect the road to childhood.