4 Years Later

4 Years Later
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Jeffrey A. Tucker
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Commentary

Has the dust settled?

Far from it. It is everywhere. We are choking on it. The dust storm comes in many forms: inflation, learning losses, ill-health, high crime, nonfunctioning government services, broken supply chains, shoddy work, displaced workers, substance abuse, mass loneliness, discredited authority, a growing real estate crisis, censored technology, and overweening state power.

For that matter, consider that Easter, the day to celebrate the Son of God’s triumph of life over death, was itself canceled for public worship just four years ago. That actually happened. Not even at the height of World War II was there a consideration of such a thing, or even canceling baseball. When the idea was suggested in a famous movie script (“Woman of the Year,” 1942), Spencer Tracy asked, “Why would you abolish the thing you are trying to preserve?”

Good question. What precisely was the point of the hell we went through during lockdowns? Who did it to us, and why? Why did it last so long? Why has there been no official accounting?

The lack of any real accountability or even so much as an apology is a foreshadowing: They will keep their newfound powers and try it all again.

Meanwhile, the world is on fire with war, mass killings, crime, hunger, and revolution.

All of this traces to lockdowns that began in March 2020, the subject that no one in polite society speaks about. It was a painful period, to be sure. The people who did this to us are hoping that we are too traumatized to pursue accountability, much less justice. To the extent we feel that way, we are playing right into their hands.

Too Many Questions Remain

Even now, there are hundreds and even thousands of questions.

Why were there no widespread seroprevalence tests of the population before locking down? This would have been a great way to measure the level of preexisting exposure and assess whether Deborah Birx’s stated objective to bring about “zero COVID” had any chance of success.

Where did the World Health Organization (WHO) get the completely bogus 3.4 percent infection fatality rate number, and why did they push it out?

For that matter, why did the lockdown architects not bother with the vast literature already extant, accepted as definitive in the public health world, that lockdowns achieve only destruction and that no form of physical intervention had any hope of stopping a virus destined to spread to the whole population?

These were known about at the time, as were the broad outlines of the impact of this virus. So let there be no more talk about how little we knew at the time. We knew.
We still don’t know the answers to the following questions:
  • How did they talk President Donald Trump into reversing his anti-lockdown stance on or around March 10, 2020?
  • To what extent was the sudden spread of the virus fueled by testing, and how accurate were the tests?
  • Was the sudden wave of early death panic-based or iatrogenic or actually the virus?
  • How did previously obscure agencies gain the power to manage the U.S. workforce and censor media?
  • Who precisely gave the order to lock down U.S. hospital care, and why?
  • Why did the government try to drive conventional antivirals out of the marketplace?
  • Who pre-wrote the thousand-page bills that authorized $2 trillion in spending that broke the budget and unleashed an experiment of universal basic income?
Strangely, much of this can be explained by the crazed ambition to preserve population-wide immunological naivete while waiting for the vaccine to arrive in mid-November 2020, eight months later. Was that always the idea? If so, was the “15 days to flatten the curve” known to be complete gibberish? If this is the case, the arrogance and sadism of the policy goal here boggles the mind.

And if that is true, why? Was it to deploy a new platform technology called mRNA that otherwise would obtain no chance for a generalized trial through normal paths? Is that why Anthony Fauci went after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine early on, as a tactic to drive it out of the market and prepare a clean slate for Pfizer and Moderna?

If that was the goal, was it ever stated in private, and by whom? Who knew the goal from the beginning?

That anyone among the ruling class could even consider conscripting the whole population into such a biological experiment gives rise to wartime ghouls of a past we thought we had left behind.

These questions only scratch the surface. Even after four years of researching this topic as part of a very large team that has scoured through a million pages of documentation and stories, having written two books and many thousands of articles, and being fueled by a burning desire to know, most of us still have no clear answer to the profound question: Why and how did this happen to us?

Connecting the Dots

There are many theories, all with plausibility, but none have the capacity to explain the whole.

We might say that pharma was behind the whole thing. That seems credible. The goal of testing mRNA on the global population explains a lot, especially given the trumped-up emergency situation. But the very notion that hundreds of governments around the world became surreptitiously captured stretches plausibility.

We might observe that digital tech manipulated policy to give itself a boost. The first big and viral article on the whole lockdown idea was by Thomas “Hammer-and-Dance” Pueyo, CEO of an online learning hub that became a huge winner. Streaming platforms benefited, and so did Amazon as a grocery and goods source, as well as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and others such as Zoom.

But are we really supposed to believe that human liberties the world over were wrecked to boost the profits of this one industry? Again, that’s a stretch. And the same could be said of the theory that media was the driving force. Yes, they won big time, deploying censorship as an industrial tactic against new media startups. But how in the world would they have gained so much power the world over?

Then there is the view that the whole monstrous scheme was concocted to drive President Trump out of office by creating chaos and greenlighting mail-in ballots that are difficult if not impossible to check for validity. That seems to check many empirical boxes. There’s no question that there was some major effort to confuse the public as if the presence of the virus was a metaphor for the Trump administration itself that needed to be strangled.

There is surely truth here, but how does that account for the hundreds of other governments around the world following the same path? That the response was not just national but global raises real questions.

In that context, we might draw attention to the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which first deployed lockdowns amidst theatrically produced videos of people dying in the streets and then leaned on its power over the WHO to recommend lockdowns to the whole planet.

There’s truth in that theory, too.

In the deeper realms, we are wise to visit the depths of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” which explains the history of the U.S. bioweapons program dating back to the end of World War II. There are secret labs all over the world supported by the United States, including in Wuhan. Their activities and funding are covered by classified restrictions from public access.

The purpose of gain-of-function research is not to discover solutions to emerging new pathogens, but to create new pathogens with antidotes that we have and that the enemy does not.

Was the release of this one pathogen part of this program? If so, that would explain why the intelligence and security bureaucracies became involved very deeply early on, why so many Freedom of Information Act requests about every aspect of this come back heavily redacted, and why we are having such a hard time getting information in general.

Any time a policy matter touches the realm of national security and intelligence, it is covered by an impenetrable veil of secrecy that no law or court seems to be able to control. This site has often explored this path of inquiry, too, with a great deal of evidence supporting it. In this case, we are really talking about a next-level theory, that of a digital-age coup by deep state masters against civilian society and democracy itself.

You can probably generate another 10 or more compelling theories about the whole episode. Connecting the dots is a full-time job.

A wise man mentioned to me recently the astounding fact that we still do not have a full explanation of why and how the Great War came to be. That war ended old-world civilization as we knew it. In some ways, now looking back, it was the beginning of the end of what we might call high civilization and the prospects for peace. It unleashed the Bolshevik Revolution, caused Western-style freedoms to be mitigated by administrative state actors, introduced the idea of total war, recruited whole populations to become soldiers, and otherwise shredded near-global expectations for ever-rising prosperity and peace.

And yet, we still don’t know fully why or how it happened. Error piled on error and malice on malice. Once that kind of sadistic chaos tempts a ruling class, many other institutions sign up to join the party of pillage and plunder and society finds itself picked apart by interest groups that care nothing for the good of all, much less human rights.

That’s a pretty solid description of what happened to us four years ago. They broke the world.

We may never get the truth, but we can get closer to the truth. There will be no stopping the efforts.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.