Time to End the COVID Emergencywas written by Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. This op/ed was originally published by the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
The time has come for states and the federal government to end their COVID declarations of emergency and the accompanying closures, restrictions, propaganda, distancing requirements, forced masking and vaccine mandates. COVID may circulate at some level forever, but Americans can now protect those vulnerable to it with standard medical procedures. They can treat it as they would the flu.
Emergency measures need continuous justification and there isn’t one anymore.
Omicron has become the dominant variant. Over the past two months, the Delta variant strain—Omicron’s main competitor and the most recent aggressive version of COVID—has been declining in the U.S. That is true both in proportion of infections (62 percent on Dec. 18 fell to 2 percent on Jan. 15, then to 0.1 percent on Jan. 29) and the number of daily infected people (97,000 to 14,000 to 400), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the next two weeks, Delta cases will almost certainly decline to the point that the variant essentially disappears, as did the strains that came before it.
Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many in high-risk categories, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. In America, many of those vulnerable to COVID are already vaccinated and protected against severe disease.
Treatments have also vastly improved since the early days of the pandemic. The medical community has learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like vitamin D to reduce severe disease risk, and there are a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. For young people, the risk of severe disease—already low before Omicron—is minuscule.
There’s evidence that Americans have built up additional immunity through the recent Omicron wave. Daily Omicron infections peaked around Jan. 11 and have been declining. Mortality from COVID, including some from remaining Delta cases, is now declining as well. Influenza in typical seasons peaks in mid-February. That Omicron has been decreasing since early January suggests that the decline may have less to do with seasonal factors than built-up population immunity. If substantial new variants arise, this suggests case and death counts could still remain relatively low.
There is no longer any justification for the federal government and states to maintain their declarations of emergency. The lockdowns, personnel firings, shortages and school disruptions are doing at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus. The state of emergency is unjustified now,and it can’t be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of a more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If the government can grant itself such power, then the limits imposed by the federal and state Constitutions are effectively meaningless.
Americans have sacrificed their rights and livelihoods for two years to protect the general public health. Government officials must now do their part and give Americans their lives back.
Race obsessed-leftists want it both ways: force the NFL to have fewer white coaches and owners, while still signing NFL players based on their performance.
The efforts of leftists to destroy the world of sports took another Great Leap Forward last week with the news that former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action suit against the NFL and all 32 NFL teams for racial discrimination. Flores was fired in January after three seasons with the Dolphins, and he recently interviewed for the New York Giants head coaching job that instead went to Brian Daboll.
Flores’ lawsuit is an unhinged, 58-page rant that focuses more on topics like professional football history and George Floyd rather than Flores’ specific allegations because his allegations are preposterous. Flores says the NFL “remains rife with racism” when it comes to hiring and retaining black coaches, and that the league “is managed much like a plantation,” yet he has been employed as an NFL coach for the past 14 years, and made upwards of $3 million per season as the Dolphins head coach.
The thrust of Flores’ suit is that since 70 percent of NFL players are black, and anywhere between 3 percent and 34 percent of coaches and executive personnel are black, that is prima facie evidence that the league is “racially segregated.” But Flores himself was an enthusiastic participant in this supposed “injustice,” since nearly 75 percent of his own coaching staff during his tenure with the Dolphins were white. And nowhere in Flores’ lawsuit does it mention that he was fired in Miami by a black general manager, Chris Grier.
Also unmentioned in the lawsuit is precisely how Flores would remedy the situation. If we want an NFL that proportionally “looks like America,” as Joe Biden is so fond of saying, then 3 or 4 of the 32 head coaches, general managers, and team owners would be black, but 75 percent of the players would be white or Hispanic. It’s doubtful that Flores is advocating for two-thirds of black players to be fired and replaced with whites.
Is there any reason, other than “discrimination,” why NFL rosters are still 100 percent male? Why is neither team in the upcoming Super Bowl starting a transgender female at left tackle?
In all my years of playing football, from high school to the NFL, I never heard any teammate of any race complain about a team’s racial composition. Players understand that sports are the ultimate meritocracy, where the currency of the realm is performance, not skin color or political correctness. If a player doesn’t think he’s getting enough playing time, it doesn’t do much good to cry “racism!” The only rational thing to do is to work harder and play better.
Part of the reason this wisdom hasn’t been applied to the coaching world is due to absurd racial quota systems like the “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which forces teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy.
The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season.No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002. A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.
This is not a defense of the NFL. The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.
The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.
OTTAWA: The Justice Centre today challenged Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson over his accusation that peacefully protesting truckers are “a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons or substantial damage to property.”
Mayor Watson has not divulged publicly what facts he might rely on to justify his assessment of truckers as posing “a danger of major proportions,” in light of their law-abiding behaviour since arriving in Ottawa more than one week ago.
The definition of “emergency” under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act is “a situation or an impending situation that constitutes a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons or substantial damage to property and that is caused by the forces of nature, a disease or other health risk, an accident or an act whether intentional or otherwise;”
“This is a truly disturbing overreach and misuse of emergency powers,” stated lawyer Nicholas Wansbutter.
According to affidavit evidence filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Freedom Convoy has been working closely with the Ottawa Police Service, the RCMP, and the Parliamentary Protective Service. It was one of the Freedom Convoy truckers who reported to police a property damage offence and an assault, committed by individuals not affiliated with the truckers. Convoy leaders have asked all truckers to refrain from honking their horns between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.
One of the witnesses in the court action has stated under oath that truckers and their supporters “are feeding the homeless on Wellington Street and filling their backpacks with food. Truckers have taken a whole trailer full of food to the homeless shelter. Truckers are maintaining the cleanliness of city streets, including picking up discarded masks on the ground, centralized garbage collection, shoveling snow at the War Memorial and the Terry Fox statue, and decorating and providing security for the War Memorial and Terry Fox statue.”
Another witness, an Ottawa resident, swears that “the truckers I have interacted with have, at all times, been friendly, courteous, humble, considerate and peaceful. I have not observed any aggressive or inappropriate behaviours.” He says the truckers are diverse, including Sikhs, Blacks, Aboriginals and others. He has “observed truckers decorating the tomb of the unknown soldier with flowers and guarding it” and has “not seen any violent or threatening behaviour.” He notes that “the truckers do not honk their horns at night. My everyday life has not been disrupted by any noise related to the Freedom Convoy during the day.” He asserts: “My ability to park and to travel in downtown Ottawa, or to and from Parliament Hill has not been impeded by the presence of the truckers.”
Another Ottawa resident, who works for Statistics Canada, describes reality on the ground as follows: “The protesters were peaceful and respectful, I saw no violence or harassment. I was not impeded in any way, and could walk about freely and safely. I did not see any hateful symbols, in fact, I saw an abundance of Canada flags and Quebec flags as well as countless signs calling for freedom and the end of Covid related mandates. I did see some anti-Trudeau flags using harsh language. However, I would describe the scene as a peaceful, pro-freedom demonstration. My everyday life has not been disrupted by any noise related to the downtown demonstrations.”
“There is no factual basis to support the Mayor’s declaration of an emergency,” concludes Mr. Wansbutter.
Ben Bartee writes at Daily Bell COVID Propaganda Roundup. Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
How the Biomedical State Maintains the ‘All the Experts Agree’ False Consensus
The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.
We’ve previously explored the mind-numbing “experts say” mantra that the corporate media parrots non-stop. Talking heads incessantly implore the peasant class to “respect the science.”
The purpose is to create a mirage of consensus in order to discourage real journalists or normal people from looking into matters themselves. This tactic is pervasive, but nowhere has it been more widely employed than in the COVID era.
Because, if three key facts were permitted to infect the public consciousness, they would inevitably result in mass upheaval of the ruling class that perches on top of society, feeding on it like vultures:
A.) the original virus almost certainly escaped from a Wuhan lab (if it wasn’t purposely released; let’s not underestimate the hubris of the biomedical state). Worse, that leaky Chinese lab relied on funding from the United States National Institutes of Health (funneled through a “non-profit” called EcoHealth Alliance) to perform dangerous the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
B.) The vaccines (which are actually mRNA gene therapies) do not work to prevent infection as promisedand cause extensive side effects that were covered up in the original trials.
C.) The “social distancing” lockdown measures – which plunged untold billions worldwide into poverty, death, and despair – were totally ineffective at preventing the spread of the virus: “Shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits.” Imagine the criminality of all the suffering for no good reason.
At every turn, the “experts” got it wrong.
The biomedical state uses multiple mechanisms to discourage scientists from dissenting from the approved narrative
You’ve heard the talking point ad nauseam: “99% of scientists agree the vaccines are safe and effective.”
First of all, that figure is not vindicated by any actual polling; it’s just an offhand catchphrase.
Second, what happens to scientists who deviate from the “safe and effective” slogan?
♦ Their message will get censored or distorted (or both) ♦ Might lose their professional license ♦ Ostracized by their peers ♦ If they’re a researcher, they’ll risk wrecking their career and losing critical funding from NIH and pharma corps.
JFK Jr. explains:
“As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward.”
And, You’ll get smeared in the corporate media
Exhibit A: Epidemiologists at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford – three of the most highly-regarded mainstream institutes of higher learning in the world – authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.
The gist of the document (which you can read here) is that a COVID Zero policy (the elimination of the SARS-CoV-2) virus in the population is a pipe dream. The social distancing and lockdown orders had devastating effects on public physical and mental health. Those at risk of severe illness or death from infectious disease should be protected while the non-vulnerable (the vast majority of the population) should resume normal life.
Those rational, science-based propositions should have been aired publicly in a healthy national debate.
But, predictably, open debate is not how Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, NIH Director, do things. Instead of debating the merits of the Barrington Declaration, Collins sent an email to Fauci on Oct 8 (later leaked) that read:
“This proposal from three fringe epidemiologists… seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt and Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t think like that on line yet – is it underway?”
Does that sound like the language of a public health servant doing God’s work to protect the people from a deadly virus – or that of a cynical political operative?
Is coordinating a media hitjob on ideological opponents part of the NIH Director’s job description?
More importantly, though, if they can orchestrate a smear campaign against three “fringe” epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, what signal does that send to a run-of-the-mill MD in Wisconsin who might be inclined to ask critical questions?
The message is obvious: “shut your mouth or we’ll come for you.”
It doesn’t matter how good the analyst is if the data is fake…
The conclusion will likely be faulty – even if the scientist is immune to the social pressures to conform to the narrative.
We reported previously on Pfizer’s vaxx trial fraud in which the company’s contractor intentionally hid side effects of the drug.
The reported COVID fatality rate was dramatically over-counted by the governing authorities.
Hospitals counted fatal motorcycle accidents as COVID deaths merely because the victim tested positive for the virus before succumbing to his injuries.
CDC Director Refuses to Answer: Dying ‘With COVID’ vs Dying ‘From COVID
Even the corporate media has been forced to confront the obvious rouse.
Via Newsweek:
“‘When asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier if there was a breakdown of how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. were ‘from COVID’ or ‘with COVID,’ Walensky gave a non-committal answer.”
Notice that Baier asked about the alleged 836,000 deaths over the course of the two-year pandemic.Walensky, in a bid to avoid answering, finds a lame excusing by pivoting to the Omicron death count, which is barely weeks old.
Do you think that the average “expert” — a college professor teaching public health at a mid-size state school, or an epidemiologist researching Ebola or some other totally unrelated pathogen – has the time, resources, or personal dedication to parse the CDC’s COVID bullshit from the veritas?
Or are they just going to follow the lead of the “expert” higher up on the food chain?
Is the average scientist human or superhuman?
The above is how the “consensus”-rigging game is played, and why you should never again place a modicum of trust in the rotten biomedical establishment, nor the scientists who vocally support it.
Supporters arrive at Parliament Hill for the Freedom Truck Convoy to protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions in Ottawa, Canada, on January 29, 2022. – Hundreds of truckers drove their giant rigs into the Canadian capital Ottawa on Saturday as part of a self-titled “Freedom Convoy” to protest vaccine mandates required to cross the US border. LARS HAGBERG / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
If the prime minister of a North African or Middle Eastern nation was forced into hiding by a protest occupying his capital city, Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton would materialize from thin air to call for U.S.-backed regime change.
“Government Loses Popular Support,” newspaper headlines would blare, amid calls for sanctions, State Department-NGO initiatives and the inevitable “nation-building” exercises.
Justin Trudeau can rest easy, however.
No such song and dance routine is in store for America’s northerly neighbor despite thousands of protesting truckers in Ottawa sending the prime minister underground. While imagining intervention in America’s northerly neighbor rightly seems risible, it does bring President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” to mind. We expect Canadians can handle their own affairs. Those Arab Spring nations of yesteryear obviously needed the Western man’s help, though.
But increasingly, it appears Canadian politicians are not actually demonstrating an ability to manage their own affairs, nor to bring logic or rationality to this scenario, brought about by some of the most restrictive COVID-19 policies in the world.
Nor, until now, has it appeared they cared when anyone raised objections to those policies.
Only when thousands of truckers replete with their 18-wheel freedom-fighting machines descended on Ottawa did the Canadian government begin to acknowledge the existence of dissenters in their midst. This very fact is the political casus belli for the protesters on Parliament Hill. It is also why they shouldn’t leave until some very concrete demands are both met and kept. There should be a prolonged presence of truckers in Canada’s capital.
It appears to be the only language Trudeau’s government understands.
Were it not for a compliant national media willing to almost exclusively echo the claims of the government, the situation could have already resolved itself with a hasty Trudeau exit from office.
Canada’s broadcasters have focused their attention on the appearance of two flags—one Nazi, one Confederate—at protests over the past week. The culprits remain as elusive as the January 6th pipe bomber, though their presence has allowed the government to paint tens of thousands as extremists, racists or worse.
According to the CBC, “there’s concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as the protest grows, and perhaps even instigating it from the outset.”
[Note: Journalists showed great imagination in making the leap linking the convoy to Putin. No such creativity was applied to finding the identity of a person, the only one in the crowd wearing a mask, only one who waved a swastika. I’ll do the media lackeys’ work for them: It was someone who knew the act served the interests of the leftist media and government, so most likely Antifa or a wannabe.]
Even when acting Conservative Party leader Candice Bergen (no, not that one) tasked the government with offering an olive branch and reaching a resolution to the impasse on Parliament Hill, Trudeau’s stand-in, Chrystia Freeland, pivoted to blanket statements condemning the swastika, as if such condemnation were even necessary in the Canadian parliamentary chamber circa 2022.
Bergen rightly riposted, “That, I’m afraid, is classic gaslighting.”
It’s an appropriate characterization of the Canadian government’s approach thus far. A prime minister in hiding, a national capital in counter-lockdown, and the government’s most critical concern is the freshly unfolded flag of a defunct foreign navy that existed almost 200 years ago and 1600 miles away.
Meanwhile, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta are bucking the national trend, announcing an end to COVID-related restrictions. It’s quick progress for an actual peaceful protest that has yet to cause billions of dollars in damages, injure or kill any cops or seek anything but constitutionally guaranteed liberties.
It is of course a back-handed compliment to right-populism that the antagonistic shrieks are less, “Oh my God, what are they doing?” and more, “Oh my God what might they secretly believe in?” It’s also a sign that there is a long road ahead, as politicians and the media attempt to ascribe ulterior motives to the protesters’ actions.
Like France’s gilets jaunes, Canada’s “freedom convoy” may find itself entrenched against its own establishment for some time, and they might just inspire American counterparts.
Yes, the old communist call of “workers of the world, unite!” may have been successfully appropriated by the political Right. The next line isn’t, “No, not like that!” but, truer to what Marx originally expressed, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The denigration of the Canadian trucker protest convoy exemplifies how freedom is now the biggest villain of the Covid-19 pandemic. A Washington Post cartoonist portrayed the trucker convoy as “fascism” incarnate while another Post column derided the “toxic ‘Freedom Convoy.’” Anyone who resists any government command is apparently now a public enemy.
The trucker protest was spurred by the Canadian government’s sweeping Covid vaccine mandate. Many truckers believe the risks of the vaccine outweighs the benefit and, more importantly, that they have the right to control their own bodies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared on Monday, “There is no place in our country for threats, violence or hatred.” Except for the hatred Trudeau whips up by denouncing vaccine mandate opponents as “racist” and “misogynistic.” And except for the “threats” and “violence” used by government enforcement agents to compel submission to any pandemic decree issued by Trudeau or other politicians.
Since the start of this pandemic, many people who boasted of their trust in “science and data” also believed that absolute power would keep them safe. According to their scorecard, anyone who objected to government commands was the equivalent of a heretic who must be condemned if not banished from everyplace except the cemetery. North of the border, Quebec epitomizes this intolerance with its new edict prohibiting unvaccinated individuals from shopping at Costco or Walmart.
The same critics who latch onto any obnoxious behavior by a few wayward Canadian truckers (MSNBC denounced them as a “cult”)’ to condemn freedom are also happy to exonerate any American politician who pointlessly destroyed freedom during the pandemic with bizarre edicts. In December 2020, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” The mayor (who was caught violating California mask mandates at the NFC championship game) offered no evidence to justify placing four million residents under house arrest. Governor Ralph Northam dictated that all Virginians must stay indoors from midnight until 5 a.m, with a few narrow exceptions. Federal judge William Stickman IV condemned Pennsylvania’s restrictions:
“Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.”
Preventing politicians from obliterating freedom is now the worst form of tyranny. On Thanksgiving Eve 2020, the Supreme Court struck down Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s edict that limited religious gatherings in New York to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate. The Court declared that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted that “the freedom to worship… does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf warned that the Supreme Court was becoming “a place like Gilead — the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Many progressives talk as if America faces a choice between reckless freedom and paternalism – i.e., submission to a benevolent elite. But regardless of Fauci’s boundless conceit, omniscient officials have yet to come to the rescue. Government agencies have blundered catastrophically since the start of the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control bollixed America’s initial response by sending out faulty, contaminated test kits to health agencies that failed to detect the rapidly spreading virus. Governors panicked and shut down schools, resulting in vast losses in learning and widening the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. The vast majority of small businesses were locked down and thousands were bankrupted in a futile effort to prevent an airborne virus from continuing to spread. Placing scores of millions of people under house arrest led to record-breaking fatalities for drug overdoses and a tidal wave of depression and anxiety. New York City’s covid vaccine passport regime failed to prevent the Big Apple from becoming the hottest spot in the nation for the omicron variant.
President Biden portrayed the vaccines as a magic bullet and falsely promised that people who got injected would not get Covid. The C.D.C. stopped counting “breakthrough” cases of Covid among the fully vaccinated, paving the way for a resurgence of the virus that has now infected more than 70 million Americans. Or maybe 200+ million Americans since C.D.C. previously stated that only one in four cases are diagnosed and reported. Whatever. The Food and Drug Administration is seeking to delay fully disclosing Pfizer’s application for its Covid vaccine approval for 75 years. After Biden issued a mandate that forced hospitals to fire healthy unvaccinated nurses, the CDC said it was OK for hospitals to rely on Covid positive nurses to treat patients – one of the biggest absurdities of the pandemic.
Freedom is not a panacea for every challenge in life. But it is far superior to boundless submission to tinhorn dictators who know far less than they claim. Politicians like Trudeau and Biden who fuel mass rage against any group that does not kowtow to officialdom are sowing seeds of hatred that will proliferate long after the pandemic ends.
In the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.
Which poll do you think better reflects the mood of Canada? The professional one with a select panel of participants or the reaction of tens of thousands on social media?
As the Freedom Convoy 2022 rolls toward Ottawa, a national poll reveals “only one-in-three Canadian’s fully support allowing unvaccinated truckers to cross the US/Canada border.”
A “national survey,” posted Thursday by Maru Public Opinion, indicates just “28%” are for truckers crossing border “without any difficulty in order to deliver food, goods, and other materials to a variety of Canadian destinations.”
Says Maru: “On the other hand, a full majority (72%) of Canadians believe that the borders should be flat out closed to truckers unless they are either fully vaccinated (36%) or, as an alternative middle-ground between the two extremes of being barred or having unfettered access, they show proof of the results of a negative COVID test taken within the previous 72-hours (36%).”
But unlike with most polls, this time there is something to compare it to. For example, while highly-respected Maru’s survey, put out by the company and not paid for by a sponsor, said it polled 1,500 people across the country, a GoFundMe page posted this month has raised more than $6.2 million from more than 80,000 donors.
And a Freedom Convoy 2022 Facebook page — Convoy to Ottawa 2022 — has more than 700,000 followers. Not exactly a “small fringe” group of people, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed Wednesday.
Trudeau’s harsh words toward this group, and the scrutiny the media has put it under, outweighs vetting other polls typically get.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre dealt with that double standard Thursday as he asked reporters “when was the last time the press gallery went through the social media posts of every single person attending a left-wing protest to find and report every crazy comment made” while saying it’s wrong to “disparage the thousands of hard-working, law-abiding and peaceful truckers, who quite frankly have kept all of you alive.”
Some professional polls may show low support for the convoy, but tens of thousands of Canadians, who put their money where their mouths are, may disagree.
Update Feb. 4:
Canadian truckers protesting COVID-19 rules said they are lawyering up after GoFundMe suspended their fundraising page. The page surpassed its $10 million goal, but GoFundMe pulled the plug as it investigates the effort for potential violations.
“This fundraiser is currently paused and under review to ensure it complies with our terms of service and applicable laws and regulations,” read a notice at the top of the convoy’s GoFundMe page. “Our team is working 24/7 and doing all we can to protect both organizers and donors. Thank you for your patience.”
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a Calgary-based firm, confirmed it is representing the Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa and “has a team of lawyers on the ground providing legal assistance and advice.”
The U.S. press, like the U.S. government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.
The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works.
The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity.
What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. “The culture of lying,” he writes, “is the discourse and behavior of officials seeking to enlist the powers of journalism in support of their goals, and of journalists seeking to co-opt public and private officials into their efforts to find and cover stories of crisis and emergency response. It is the medium through which we Americans conduct most of our public business (and a lot of our private business) these days.” The result, he says, is a distortion of the constitutional role of government into an institution that must continually resolve or appear to resolve crises; it functions in “a new and powerful permanent emergency mode of operation.”
Wary of making decisions based on opinion or belief, the U.S. public has come to rely on facts, data, surveys, and presumably scientific studies. People are increasingly reluctant to believe any assertion that is not supported by statistical research. Yet, Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.”
A growing industry has thus developed to create the research to legitimize policy positions or marketing objectives. Public policy debates now commonly revolve around competing estimates of cost, effectiveness, or risk, rather than around the intrinsic merits of a proposal. Much of the health care debate raged around differing estimates of the numbers of citizens without health coverage and the costs of the various proposals to cover them. When President Bill Clinton promised Congress that he would rely on the forecasts of federal spending and deficits of the Congressional Budget Office rather than on those of the executive branch’s Office of Management and Budget, the representatives and senators cheered; they consider the CBO’s forecasts to be more favorable to Congress’s spending proclivities than those of the more cautious OMB.
Concocted or inaccurate surveys and studies taint our perceptions of what is true, and they distort public policy debates. Crossen concurs with Weaver that the media’s desire for drama encourages the distortion and corruption of public decision making. “The media are willing victims of bad information, and increasingly they are producers of it. They take information from self-interested parties and add to it another layer of self-interest—the desire to sell information.”
A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.”
Footnote:
If you read the excerpts or followed the link, you will have realized this knowledge was published in the Harvard Business Review May-June 1995.
First, we live in an age where narratives can’t be questioned without you being considered a conspiracy theorist. Substack is filling an important free market demand for uncensored content. I first touched on this when I started writing on Substack back in August of 2021 in this article called “Ending Social Media Censorship And The Meteoric Rise of Substack”.
There are two narrative shifts occurring right now: Covid and inflation.
Inflation Marks An Impasse For the Fed
Regarding inflation, the Fed is at a fork in the road between popping the stock market bubble or allowing persistent inflation to brutalize the middle and lower class (or, as Jerome Powell put it this week, ‘some people are prone to suffer more’).
The Fed is trapped, and unlike in the past, they don’t have a viable way out. In the past they were able to avoid inflation and the Fed was able to pretend to successfully engineer the appearance of monetary prosperity. Now, there is no way for the average person to ignore Fed policy with high inflation. The Fed is running out of excuses and room to wiggle.
The Fed’s feet are being held to the fire in a way that has never occurred before…politicians aren’t going to be able to overpromise anymore, as reality takes hold. Inflation is now the number one political issue in the country.
Also crypto has brought financial understanding to a new generation who want to understand monetary policy. Despite my criticisms of crypto, namely that:
(1) many of its advocates are charlatans,
(2) it is most certainly a risk asset and,
(3) we can never be certain a cataclysm in crypto won’t occur,
still it is helping a younger generation to quickly understand the flawed nature of our existing system.
This, in turn, is a huge problem for the Fed because the new generation understands the Central Banking ponzi scheme.
A Hyperinflationary Mindset Is Right Around The Corner
We’re not far from a hyperinflationary mindset in the country and our leaders are terribly ignorant, believing they can micromanage the economy and stunned when their actions don’t work, . I wrote about this months ago when President Biden shut down the nation’s oil pipeline projects and then mulled the high price of gas in the coming months.
Instead, Harris Kupperman in a recent interview with me told me that oil traders “will break the Fed” and will make Jerome Powell “cry uncle”. Kupperman thinks oil prices are going higher and simply cannot be stopped.
The Covid Pivot Is Next, And Beware Of The Great Reset
I think capitalism and common sense are going to end vaccine mandates and intrusion into our lives – something I wrote about at length just hours ago.
Finally about Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” idea. I note that a large amount of people are seeing the global elite’s future plans for a system that will strip us of civil liberties while enriching central planners. I tell Tom that I don’t believe globalists have a viable way out of the system as it stands today.
Two sides of the same coin.
This runs hand-in-hand with Part 1 of an interview with George Gammon I did this week, where George reminded us that the global only care about “usurping control”.
The more educated people become to the system, the fewer options will be left for the elite. “We’re all just in different stages of waking up.”
The resistance reveals itself always in unexpected ways. As I type, thousands of truckers (numbers are in flux and are in dispute) are part of a 50-mile-long convoy in Canada, headed to the capital city of Ottawa in protest against an egregious vaccine mandate imposed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
They will be joined upon arrival by vast numbers of protestors who are defying the restrictions, closures, and mandates of the last nearly two years.
The triple-vaccinated Trudeau, meanwhile, has decided that he has to go into deep hiding because he was exposed to Covid. A clean, ruling-class, fit, and fashionable lefty like him cannot be expected to face such a pathogen directly. As a member of the vanguard of the lockdown elite, he must never take risks (however small) and must keep himself safe. It is merely a matter of coincidence that he will be locked away in hiding as the truckers arrive together with hundreds of thousands of citizens who are fed up with being treated like lab rats.
Previously, Trudeau had said nearly two years ago that the truckers were heroes. On March 31, 2020, he tweeted: “While many of us are working from home, there are others who aren’t able to do that – like the truck drivers who are .working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked So when you can, please #ThankATrucker for everything they’re doing and help them however you can.”
It’s true. Like many “essential workers” in the US, these truckers bravely faced the virus and many already gained natural immunity, which Canadian law does not recognize. Trudeau decided that they needed to be forced to get the vaccine anyway. Keep in mind: these are the people who get food to the stores, packages to homes, and all products that keep life moving. If they don’t drive, the people don’t eat. It’s that simple. Now Trudeau must deal with #truckerconvoy2020.
Few events in modern times have revealed the vast chasm that exists between the ruled and rulers, especially as it pertains to class. For nearly two years, the professional class has experienced a completely different reality than the working class. In the US, this only began to change once the highly vaccinated Zoom class got Covid anyway. Only then did we start seeing articles about how there is no shame in getting sick. It appears that in many countries, the working class that was forced into early confrontation with the virus are saying that they aren’t going to take it anymore (and many are playing that song to make the point).
It’s a massive workers’ strike but not the kind of communist dreams. This is a “working class” movement that stands squarely for freedom against all the impositions of the last two years, which were imposed by an overclass with almost no consultation from legislatures. Canada has had some of the worst, much to the shock of its citizens.
The convoy is an enormous show of power concerning who really keeps the country running.
The convoy is being joined by truckers from all over the US too, rising up in solidarity. This is easily the most meaningful and impactful protest to emerge in North America. It is being joined by as many as half a million Canadian citizens, who overwhelmingly support this protest, as one can observe from the cheers on the highway along the way. Indeed, it’s likely to break the record for the largest trucker convoy in history, as well as the most loved.
Trudeau, meanwhile, has dismissed the whole thing as a “small fringe” of extremists and says it means nothing to him and will change nothing. This is because, he says, these truckers hold “unacceptable views.”
This is setting up to be one of the most significant clashes in the world in the great battle between freedom and those governments have set out to crush it.
Meanwhile, I’m looking now for information on this in the mainstream media. It is almost nonexistent outside social media. Fox is covering some of it but that’s about it. The Epoch Times is a wonderful exception, as we’ve come to expect in recent months. It’s not being covered in any depth in Canadian papers and TV. All the usual subjects in the US have completely ignored this mighty movement.
It’s almost like these venues have created an alternate version of reality, one that denies the astonishing reality that anyone can see outside the window.
Yes, I know that we have all come to expect that the corporate media will not cover what actually matters, and much of what it does cover it does only with a strong bias toward narratives crafted by ruling elites. Even so, it seems to stretch credulity beyond any plausible extent for the major media to pretend that this isn’t happening. It is and it has massive implications for the present and the future.
This is not really or just about vaccine mandates. It’s about what they represent: government taking possession of our lives. If they can force you to get an injection in your arm over which you have doubts, all bets for freedom are off. There must be evidence that you complied. The phone app is next, which gets tied to your bank account and your job and your access to communications and your ability to pay your rent or mortgage. It means eventually 100% government control over the whole of life.
The technology already exists. Everything going on now with these passports is driving to this point.
This is why the truckers are striking this way. It is an act of bravery but also of desperation. Once the tyranny of health passports arrives, there will be no escape. The window of opportunity to do something about this will have closed. So this is the moment. There might not be another one. Something needs to be done to fight for human rights and freedom, and put in place systems that make lockdowns and mandates impossible in the future.
This is the largest and latest example of the revolt and one that could make the biggest difference yet. But it is only one sign among many that the ruling elites in most countries have overplayed their hand. They have arrogantly imposed their plans for everyone else based on the opinions of only a few and without real consultation with experts with differences of opinion or with the people whose lives have been profoundly affected by the pandemic response.
In the US the revolt is taking many forms. There was the rally in DC this past weekend. It was impressive. Also the latest polls on political alliances show that the Democrats have lost a major part of their base. Virginia right now points to where this is headed. The party lost vast amounts of its political power in elections last year and now Republicans rule the state with great popularity.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at Biden’s latest poll numbers. I almost cannot believe my eyes. We are talking about an overall 14-point split between approve and disapprove. If this is an indication of what happens to the pro-lockdown political elite, it stands to reason that Trudeau should be worried.
In the Vietnam War, many Americans fled the draft by going to the safe haven on the northern border. That’s one way that Canada had earned its long reputation for being delightfully normal, peaceful, and mercifully boring. Pandemic policies in Canada changed that, with some of the longest-lasting stringencies in the world.
No one asked the workers. Now they are rising up. Nor does it matter that 90% of the Canadian public is vaccinated. Possessing that status alone does not mean that people no longer feel resentment for being forced to accept what they do not believe they needed and did not want in the first place. The vaccinated do not automatically give up their longing to be free and to have their human rights recognized.
The resistance to tyranny in our times is taking many unexpected forms. There will be many confrontations on the way, and there is still a very long way to go. At some point, and no one knows when or how, something has to give.
A resolution has been submitted to the rules committee of the Wisconsin State Assembly listing the many violations rendering the 2020 election results untrustworthy as they concern the US President and Vice-President. The full document is:
This synopsis provides the bullet points detailed in the document, in italics with my bolds.
♦ the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) enabled the illegal use of over 500 voter drop boxes in Wisconsin
♦ Dane and Milwaukee County Clerks issued guidance on Facebook suggesting all voters could declare themselves indefinitely confined because of the pandemic
♦ certification of the 2020 election was rushed before time for filing an appeal of the recount had passed
♦ 3,000 documents and e-mails show connection to election manipulations by the CTCL in five of Wisconsin’s largest cities
♦ data expert studies of historical voter trends reveal a statistical impossibility
♦ WisVote database reflects 7.1 million registered voters in a state with a population of 5.8 million and a voting age population of 4.5 million
♦ grassroots canvassing efforts reveal 200 addresses in 31 counties in Wisconsin that have 200 to 400 registered voters at a single address,
♦ upgrades on Dominion voting machines were allowed on September 9, 2021, with no reassurances of protecting the data of the 2020 election
♦ the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau identified 44,272 voters who did not provide proper voter identification in the 2020 general election
♦ 50 of the 69 county GOP parties released letters of support or resolutions asking for further investigation into the elections process
♦ Elections Commission prevented the deployment of special voting deputies to care facilities
♦ a multitude of irregularities in Wisconsin voter rolls, including that 93.7 percent of active voters participated in the 2020 general election, 205,355 voter registration applications were dated November 3, 2020
♦ Wisconsin voter rolls were inflated to the maximum possible number of voters according to census population data for every presidential election in Wisconsin since 2008 and then the voter rolls were purged shortly after each such election
♦ money provided by the CTCL and Mark Zuckerberg to local governments in Wisconsin relating to the 2020 general election violated Wis. Stat. § 12.11, which prohibits election bribery
♦ CEIR also received funding from Mark Zuckerberg, along with the CTCL, and the CEIR is seeking to provide pro bono defense attorneys to election officials who used the CTCL money in the 2020 general election
♦ ballot harvesting and returning absentee ballots to drop boxes are not legal methods to cast absentee ballots in Wisconsin
♦ the U.S. Supreme Court has found that fraud vitiates and nullifies any contract
Whereas, the November 2020 Wisconsin general election, as regulated and directed by the Elections Commission, was one of the most haphazard, controversial, and poorly managed elections in state history, shaking citizens’ confidence in fair elections across Wisconsin, and with the culmination of these evidences, prove the results of the commission’s certification of the 2020 election are considered fraudulent; now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the assembly, the senate concurring, That the accumulated evidence proves the actions taken by the Elections Commission to certify the 2020 presidential election shall be considered contrary to law and fraudulent under Wis. Stat. §§ 6.84, 6.87 (6), 6.875, 12.11, and 12.13 (2) (b) 7
Resolved, That the Wisconsin Legislature, pursuant to its authority under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution and 3 U.S.C. § 2, and consistent with guidance provided by the Constitutional Counsel Group in a memorandum dated December 30, 2021, acknowledges that illegality took place in conducting the 2020 general election and reclaims Wisconsin’s 10 fraudulent electoral ballots cast for Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Harris; and, be it further
Resolved, That the Wisconsin Legislature shall pass legislation with the intention to clean up the WisVote database and create separate servers for active and inactive voters; and be it further
Resolved, That the Wisconsin Legislature supports a full forensic physical and cyber audit of the 2020 general election, that this full forensic physical and cyber audit should be conducted by an independent and nonpartisan auditing firm with a scope statement approved by the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections.
Disney’s portrayal of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in over his head.
Our time is marked by progressives seeking to transform societies with magical words and rituals. The damages from these mistaken projects is becoming more evident and likely to worsen unless they are stopped and reversed. Anthony Matoria explains in his American Thinker article The Infrastructure of Progress. Excerpts in italics with my bolds, headers and added images.
A Parable from the Soviet Era
At the end of World War II, stories circulated of returning Soviet soldiers, many from undeveloped towns and farms, who were impressed by the modern amenities that they observed in defeated Nazi Germany. They were especially impressed with electrical lighting and indoor plumbing and, consequently pilfered light bulbs and plumbing fixtures to take back to their more primitive homes in the hopes that they too could have electrical lighting and indoor lavatories.
The stories have something of the nature of a parable. It is tempting to mock the backwardness and naivete of thinking that one can have electric lighting without an electrical distribution system, or indoor running water without external supply and sewer lines. The stories highlight the apparent folly of thinking that one can experience the benefits of technological progress by acquiring only the most visible aspects of that progress, e.g., light bulbs and commodes, without regard to the more extensive and hidden elements that make the whole thing work. It is also tempting to ridicule someone who is so unsophisticated and backward that they do not recognize that folly.
Yet, this same folly is apparent in the agenda of the political left in Western societies.
To the extent that the stories of the simple Soviet soldiers is a parable, the lesson that is illustrated is that progress has preconditions. It requires a type of infrastructure that is congenial to the changes that are intended by reformers. The modern Left often misses this point. There are multiple examples of this.
Political Authority Fallacy
The most obvious fallacy is that a President can fundamentally transform a Republic without a clear popular mandate to do so. Mistaking a transient and tenuous legislative majority for such a mandate is as fallacious as thinking that having a light bulb is all that is necessary to have electric lighting. Similarly, imposing unpopular and capricious mandates is futile if there is insufficient public willingness to abide by them. Public acceptance and consent beyond simple majorities is a form of political infrastructure that is necessary to properly functioning government, and overwhelming acceptance and consent is necessary for “fundamental change.”
Social Engineering Fallacy
The folly of the leftist enterprise is more extensive than merely mistaking a majority for a mandate. The fallacies do not stop with superficial legislative and bureaucratic pronouncements, but involve deeper misjudgments regarding the lives of average, decent people. One such fallacy is that which is often cited by Glenn Reynolds: that governmental schemes to create the benefits of good character and diligence, e.g., home ownership, a college degree, and productive employment, without requiring good character and diligence is not only futile, but ultimately detrimental. Good character, i.e., honesty, responsibility, resilience, respect for others, etc., are a type of infrastructure necessary to personal success and societal flourishing, and thinking that they can be replaced by government subsidy or intruding regulation is every bit as ridiculous as shoving a shower head into a mud wall and expecting it to produce hot water.
Institutional Power Fallacy
Progressives are confident that they do not need popular assent to policy, or civic virtues beyond those that are useful to their agenda as long as they have “the institutions.” This is another fallacy. It is certainly true that usurpation of institutions such as the educational system, corporate boards, the media, and local prosecutors’ offices can produce change, but the change is uniformly destructive. One can certainly change the quality of society by refusing to enforce criminal laws, pandering to identity group grievances, and expanding government at the expense of personal liberty. Such change will not be improvement. Crime, grievance and loss of liberty are inherently destructive and incapable of producing any sort of tangible benefit beyond the abstractions and indulgences of self-assured ideologues.
Behavioral Training Fallacy
The progressive “march through the institutions” makes some assumptions that are unsupported by common experience. The most prominent of these is that people can be taught to want certain things, and that all behaviors are essentially learned behaviors. The progressive enterprise presumes that personality traits, moral character, the lessons of personal experience, and individual affections and aversions can be overcome by pedagogy and propaganda. What the progressive overlooks in his zeal for control of modern society is that individual personality traits, moral character, personal experience and individual affections and aversions are the infrastructure necessary to a healthy society. The progressive may take some encouragement from the experience of totalitarian regimes and religious cults that there is a measure of efficacy in indoctrination and programming, but only with the condition that such does not produce healthy societies or, in fact, produce anything that endures. There is a particularly blinkered and anti-human notion that the nuclear family is undesirable, when it is the infrastructure of every enduring civilization throughout history. Families are vital because they are unique, just as people are unavoidably unique. The progressive notion that there is virtue in uniformity is an idea best suited to anthills and beehives, and is unworthy of the dignity of human beings.
It is unsuited to a population that finds happiness and joy in a vast variety of different experiences and ambitions, and is a prescription for stagnation and decay.
Information Control Fallacy
Free expression and the competition of ideas is another form of infrastructure that is necessary to flourishing and enduring societies. The progressive idea that thoughts and facts can be suppressed as “misinformation,” so that ideas that are friendly to progressive ideologies will prevail, is naïve to the point of delusion. Such a scheme assumes a level of credulity and lack of curiosity and creativity on the part of the citizenry that is hopelessly unrealistic. Facts are stubborn things, and people tend to believe their own experience over the harangues of the self-interested elite. Ideas that cannot survive competition with other ideas will not survive human nature or the unsentimental realities of the world. Truths do not become less so because Twitter and Facebook do not like them.
The ability to recognize and evaluate facts and infer truth from them is essential infrastructure without which no society or civilization can flourish.
Fairness Fallacy
Justice also has an infrastructure. It does not arise from grievances that are pursued to the point of fanaticism, nor from bigoted theories that all humans are defined as either oppressed or oppressors. The infrastructure of justice is not fairness or empathy, desirable as those things are in a just system. The infrastructure of justice is recognition of the dignity and worth with which all humans are born. This requires respect for the persons and property of others, and understanding that individual choices have natural consequences, which denial of responsibility cannot negate.
Disdain of History Fallacy
The progressive disdain for the institutions and traditions that have produced the modern world is, at base, an ignorance of the conditions and structures that are necessary to civil society. They arise from an arrogance that believes that ideologies are facts and that policies can command nature. Societies and states may improve the imperfect levels of justice, opportunity and well-being of their citizens, but they cannot do so while ignoring and attacking the very truths, traditions and institutions that have provided the highest degree of justice, opportunity, and progress that the world has ever known.
Ben Bartee writes at Daily Bell 
An insightful essay into this movement comes from Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone Institute 
Science Matters 