For years in the “before times,” I traveled the world with the happy message of an increasingly free and prosperous world, born of new technologies and declining power of governments. Not all at once, I said, we are seeing the rebirth of freedom in our times. Our job is to gain a deeper appreciation of the dynamics at work, understand our good fortune, and put the finishing touches on the beautiful revolution by supporting freedom and working to dismantle what remains of the reactionary forces all around us.
People loved that message. I believed it was true, and passionately so. Yes, I also spoke about the problems that remained with the regulatory state, the healthcare services disaster of Obamacare and before, the distortions to labor markets, and more. I wasn’t entirely naive, but generally I had an optimistic frame of mind and message. People liked it. We need hope and I was a bringer of it.
This changed dramatically for me with lockdowns, which shocked me to no end. It was the reversal of all the trends I had come (implicitly) to believe were inevitable. Out of seemingly nowhere, our churches and businesses were closed, the corporate sector was cartelized, big government became a gargantuan government, and fundamental rights and liberties were trampled as never before.
As a result, we’ve seen an incredible unfolding of one crisis after another, all as an outgrowth of that pandemic response. The inflation, the health care collapse, the substance abuse, the educational losses, the demoralization of the population, the debt, the falling prosperity, the loss of all civic trust, and the rise of violence of all types and all levels in all nations—all of it can be traced to the catastrophic turn of 2020.
Since then we’ve discovered another layer of control of which we had not been previously aware. Our social media is censored. Deep state actors are everywhere in the media. Tech companies went along with the lockdowns and the censorship. Our regulatory agencies, even for essentials like pharmaceuticals, are captured by industry. The intellectual services have more power than we ever previously imagined. Our elected leaders are largely spineless.
Knowing what I know now, there is no going back to the kind of speech I gave only a few years ago. The crisis is too real and time is too short. After thinking through all this, and adjusting to a completely new state of mind, I got my bearings and started writing with new confidence but with a different kind of drive. Instead of celebrating beautiful victories, I’m more often than not today sounding grave warnings of decline.
Very graciously, I was invited to give a talk to a medium-sized group of very serious business people and attorneys and others in Los Angeles. It was a private meetup, not some large public meeting, so I won’t provide any more detail. No, it was not recorded.
Before standing up—this is the most important venue at which I’ve spoken in probably a year or more—I was not entirely sure what I was going to say. This is because what’s in my mind or what I see as truth is different from what I know would be best to say to a group that might be looking for real inspiration and hope.
My worry was that my message this time would be too tough to hear, too dreadful to contemplate, too alarming to mentally process. As a result, I had several messages I could deliver and I was not sure which would come out.
I reached the microphone. It was clear that everyone was all ears. I began with some stories of good signs of change in the country: the failure of woke ideology, the dialing back of some corporate policies, the evidence of revolt among many aspects of the electorate, the rise of homeschooling, the dying out of aggressive stands for far-left cultural reconstruction, and more. There are indeed good signs out there, and I enumerated them.
But only a few minutes into my talk, I bucked up and realized that these nice people needed a fuller picture of the challenges we face. We’ve been lied to for too long. Our news has been too filtered and biased. We’ve been treated like children by the elites.
In fact, people need to know the scale of the issue, the range of the problem, and the depth of the crisis. So I took a deep breath and just started to lay it all out. The famous phrase from the movie “A Few Good Men” kept coming to mind: “You can’t handle the truth!” I decided to take it on faith that these people can handle the truth. And even if they cannot, they need to hear it anyway.
From there I backed up to the trends in 2006, when lockdowns were first contemplated in the U.S. political context. We walked through the rise and funding of the movement that was determined to try an experiment on the nation and the world. Bill Gates got involved and the group of people in the bioweapon industry, as well as the infectious disease industry, were thrilled for the infusion of cash. Some imagined the possibility of creating both viruses and antidotes as a method of war, while plotting how to manage the civilian population in the event of such a thing.
The pandemic planning industry grew and grew, with regularly scheduled “germ games” and drills, which were running even as news of a new virus in Wuhan, China, reached public health officials and then the new media. China chose to deploy lockdowns first. It was at this point that Anthony Fauci got involved. He was made aware that the National Institutes of Health had funded gain-of-function research in the very lab from which this virus might have leaked.
That’s when the great cover-up plot began. This was around Feb. 1, 2020, and they took the rest of the month to map out exactly what would happen. There were many players and my speech named many of them. I spelled out the trajectory of events, sometimes by the day and even by the hour, insofar as we know them. From there came the edicts from the World Health Organization that the world needed to lock down just like China had. Fauci and his minions prevailed on the White House to join in.
And then it all happened: the full scraping of the Constitution and the unleashing of the deep state on the American people. But not just here: it happened over the course of weeks all over the world. Life fundamentally changed. State/corporate power exploded like we’ve never seen before, and we were suddenly ruled by experts. It became even worse in the new Biden administration because the president had campaigned on deferring to “the science,” which was by now wholly corrupt.
I spoke on and on in great detail, while trying to add some lighter asides along the way, but knowing full well that these nice people had never heard anything like this before. It’s not on the news. Unless you are a regular reader of the handful of venues that cover this topic, a person might never have heard any of this before.
As I wrapped up, I addressed the problem of violence in the country and in the world. The pandemic response deployed covert and overt forms of violence in a vain attempt to conquer the microbial kingdom. We were left only with a huge change in public morality. The longing for peace, freedom, and rights gave way to the deployment of despotism, coercion, and the demonization of dissent. Meanwhile, civic trust collapsed.
Is it too late? No, but there needs to be a dramatic turn away from power, compulsion, surveillance, insecurity, wanton acts of imposition, force as a tool of public life, and a massive and dramatic return to first principles and ideals. This is the only way forward.
The question and answer session was interesting. The topic of public demoralization and the rise of crime and thievery all over the country came up. I said it was all part of the breakdown of the old ethical codes and high standards of civic life.
We wrapped it up. Certainly it was not my most uplifting talk, but it might have been my most essential. I have no regrets. We have to tell the truth as we see it. These times require it. This is the moment. None of us want to live in such times but the course of history imposes obligations on us according to time and place. None of us can stand aside. We must throw ourselves into the battle for truth.
Traveling home from the speech, the news came out about the demonic attacks on Israel. The world today is a radically different place than it was five years ago, an uglier, more brutal, and yes bloodier world dominated by the use of power over freedom and rights. Everyone now wants in on the act.
The violence deployed by most of the world’s governments during lockdowns and the vaccine campaign—the grave temptation to remake the world by force—has become the dominant praxis by public and private forces the world over. The moral limits, the difference between right and wrong, settled laws, and even respect for persons evaporated. Whether that means raiding the CVS in the city center, storming borders, or raining down bombs on Israel, hell has been unleashed.
“Go Medieval on the virus,” said the New York Times on Feb. 28, 2020. And governments of the world tried it out. Then medieval became the new normal.
Can we find our way back to peace, freedom, and prosperity? Let us pray that we can. And let us all seek out the truth as our guiding light.
