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Four Years Later- Brownstone Institute

Four Years Later

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Has the dust settled? 

Far from it. It is everywhere. We are choking on it. The storm cloud comes in many forms: inflation, learning losses, ill-health, high crime, non-functioning 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, itself was 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, Spencer Tracy asked “Why would you abolish the thing you are trying to preserve?” (Woman of the Year 1942). 

Good question. What precisely was the point of the hell we went through? Who did it 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 March 2020, the subject about which no one in polite society speaks. 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. 

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 pre-existing 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 get the completely bogus 3.4% 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 there was no form of physical intervention that 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: 

  • how they talked Trump into reversing his anti-lockdown stance on or around March 10, 2020;
  • to what extent the sudden spread of the virus was fueled by testing or even how accurate the tests were;
  • whether the sudden wave of early death was panic-based or iatrogenic or actually the virus; 
  • how it is that previously obscure agencies gained the power to manage the US workforce and censor media;
  • who precisely gave the order to lock down US hospital care and why; 
  • how it came to be that the government tried to drive conventional antivirals out of the marketplace;
  • who had pre-written 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 eight months later. Was that always the idea, in which case the “15 Days to Flatten Curve” was known to be complete gibberish? If that is actually true, 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 the reason that Anthony Fauci went after the J&J 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 page 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?

There are many theories, all with plausibility but none with 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, a 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 did Uber Eats and DoorDash and others such as Zoom.

But are we really supposed to believe that human liberties the world over were wrecked to boost 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 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. 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 CCP, which first deployed lockdowns amidst theatrically produced videos of people dying in the streets and then leaning on its power over the World Health Organization 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 the RFK, Jr. book The Wuhan Cover-Up, which explains the history of the US bioweapons program dating back to the end of World War II. There are secret labs all over the world supported by the US, 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 the enemy does not have. 

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 and also explain why so many FOIA 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 ten or more compelling theories about the whole episode. Connecting the dots is a full-time job. 

A wise man mentioned to me yesterday 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.



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Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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