The conspiracy of silence is obvious. Both political parties like it. The media likes it too because it was a main participant. Academia is compromised as much as the social media companies. Government bureaucrats want the entire fiasco to be a thing of the past, except to the extent it can serve as a template for the future. That leaves only independent voices to raise ever louder questions of the entire establishment.
We are of course speaking about the calamity commonly called COVID that robbed us all of liberty and rights, and kicked off this national and global crisis. All the major national problems the US faces today—inflation, learning loss, ill-health, cultural confusion, demographic disruption, professional instability, tech censorship, widespread substance abuse, and the loss of all trust in the commanding heights including the whole of government and every connected institution—trace to the lockdowns that began that fateful day of March 16, 2020 (oddly, the day following the Ides of March, when Caesar was killed).
It was a decision for the ages. Shouldn’t we know more about what led to it and why all of this happened? The person who wants all questions to go away the most is the person who hopes to reinhabit the White House, namely Donald Trump. Whether or not you support his return to power, the reality is that he presided over the largest and fastest loss of liberty in the history of this country.
No other president can compare, not Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, or Obama. His administration, particularly in the last year, embarked on a new age of censorship, administrative state control over all our lives, astonishing levels of spending and redistribution, and massive invasion of our communities and homes. It attacked small business on a scale we’ve never seen, and seriously compromised even our basic rights to associate. The Biden administration was more of the same with new mandates.
We have a small window in which to get answers during the primary season. Perhaps there will be a breakout at some point. There simply must be. Until there is some honesty and truth about what happened and why, we risk perpetrating all the crises of our times. And let’s be clear: there is not one credible study from anywhere in the world that demonstrates that lockdowns, and everything associated with them, were worth the astronomical cost. Indeed, every bit of evidence shows that the entire COVID response was a disaster. It will be repeated if there is no accountability and radical reform.
Whatever changed his mind likely happened on March 10, 2020. What was that? To whom did he speak and what did they say? By chance, was he told that this was indeed a bioweapon from China and yet the pharmaceutical companies were working on the antidote and all he needed to do was lock down until it arrived and then he could be the hero? Was that his thinking?
Did Trump know what was happening around him? Did anyone come to him and tell him of this large document, which, to this day, is the only blueprint we have for what government was trying to do with its COVID response? Had he ever seen this before publishing? If so, did it not strike him as odd that the National Security Council would be given primacy over the public health agencies themselves?
How much did Gottlieb’s opinion matter to Trump and did Trump ever consider perhaps that Gottlieb, as the voice of Pfizer, might have had a conflict of interest? What else does Trump remember about this weekend?
All of this really matters because on Monday, March 16, Trump held a national press conference together with Fauci and Birx. At this event, they handed out a PDF to the press which in turn was issued to every public health agency in the country. It read in part: “Bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”
That sounds like a federal edict to close churches, schools, and essentially put the entire country under house arrest. Indeed, the restrictions on human association also pertained to houses, which in many states were restricted in the number of people who could gather inside them. Only one state, South Dakota, refused to go along.
Did Trump even know about the edict that was being issued that day, that he was effectively using his power as president to close churches and impose universal quarantine on the population? If so, how was this consistent with his promise to make America great again?
The next day, the Trump team got busy on hospital protocols, which amounted to the mass production and distribution of ventilators plus giving out the deadly drug Remdesivir. Who was it that told Trump that intubating people was the best way to deal with this virus? Why did they believe that, given that people who are intubated are very likely to die either from the procedure or the secondary bacterial infection that likely followed?
Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force companies to make more ventilators, which they did. Today these are mostly scrap metal, of course, and most hospitals and doctors abandoned the practice once it became clear that it was killing thousands. Why did Trump seize on this whole idea to begin with? Who was advising him and why did it not occur to him to call any one of thousands of people with hands-on specializations in respiratory viruses for a second opinion?
If Fauci and Birx tricked him into wrecking his presidency and the country, why not just admit that? If he swears that he was right to greenlight lockdowns, why should voters trust that he would not do it again? What does he believe the limits to government power are?
Moving to the fall, Trump wisely allowed himself to be schooled in medical realities by Scott Atlas, who arrived at the White House to talk some sense into the crazy people who were running the show. Trump seems to have been convinced. But meanwhile, the whole country was in ruins with millions of businesses closed, the kids not in school, and the whole population in a state of trauma at the loss of liberty.
There were two months remaining before the November 2020 election. During his campaign stops, he dropped the lockdowns, called for openings, but largely left the subject off the stump speech entirely, as if nothing had ever happened. Going into the election, Covid was largely off the agenda but for the media and Democrats who urged further lockdowns, which they implemented once in power.
Trump should explain what was going through his head during these months. Did he know what was actually going on in the country, how many businesses had been boarded up, how many kids denied in-person education, how many churches were closed, how many families had been broken up with travel restrictions? Further, did he worry that his spending and money-printing policies, plus trillions in stimulus payments, would fuel inflation after he left office?
We still cannot get a fix on how it came to be that the shots were widely mandated on people who never needed them. Nor is there an honest discussion of the resulting job losses, injuries, and deaths that resulted. Did these mandates come about simply because too many Americans thought better than allowing a stranger to inject them with a mystery potion ginned up in a lab and deployed ten times faster than any vaccine in history? Was there an industrial interest in forcing compliance? If so, that’s next-level corruption.
As for masking that all science knew for certain would be ineffective for stopping the spread of a respiratory pathogen, were they merely symbols imposed to scare the public? This is truly dystopian.
Some independent journalists with access to the candidates, and this includes even Biden but certainly also every Republican who expects to earn votes, must get up to speed on the details of this calamity. It is simply unthinkable that this country, born of the ideal of freedom, would have undergone a quiet coup against liberty and the Constitution, and yet there be no serious discussion of what happened, much less reform efforts to restore what we lost.
All of this is more important than January 6, election doubting, or tribal partisan bickering. As curious as these topics are, they are distractions from that which should interest us all: the status of freedom in America and the enforcement of the Bill of Rights. Every day, the censorship continues and every day the plots against the common good are ongoing. The kids are suffering as never before. The economic crisis still surrounds us and can get much worse. All the agencies that did this enjoy more funding than ever before.
We are supposed to live in an age of information. It takes herculean efforts to bring about silence on the most important questions of our time. But thus far, all the major institutions are managing to pull it off. This cannot be allowed to continue.