Academics Reveal That Water Is Transparent

When reading In Covid’s Wake, it becomes immediately clear that its authors, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, have very little curiosity of the immense body of research produced outside the academy.

BY THOMAS HARRINGTON

View original article at Brownstone.org.

You might have heard that there’s a big new Covid book out from Princeton University Press, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us that analyzes—soberly, of course, unlike all those other previous critical takes on the Covid phenomenon undertaken by less credentialed thinkers before them—some of the mistakes committed by the government in the course of the Covid crisis.

Its critiques are apparently so soberly judicious that the Boston Globe, one of the nation’s more reliable and unrepentant peddlers of government fantasies and lies on Covid, as well as a tireless wager of campaigns of disparagement and ostracization (right down to the level of the sports pages) of anyone who wouldn’t go along with the Fauci gospel, felt the inexorable need to devote a very long review to it.

Hmm…

A few years back, it was fashionable in academic literary circles to place a great deal of emphasis on the positionality of the author and/or reader of a given work. Though the term and the critical thrust behind it were soon subsumed into the exclusionary nihilism of identity politics, its core emphasis on the need to remain circumspect regarding the cultural assumptions one brings to the acts of writing and reading is a very healthy one.

For example, as an American Hispanist, I am conversant with many if not most of the texts read by my colleagues in Spain. However, the fact that I came of age as a reader and thinker within the American educational system means that I inevitably bring certain concerns and focal emphases to this process analysis that they do not or cannot bring to it. And, of course they, as people born and raised within the Spanish cultural and educational systems, bring many, many things to the same process that I do not or cannot ever bring to it.

In an ideal world, I would help them see certain realities that their own, in-culture training, like all forms of in-culture training, tends to render invisible to the native. And they, of course, would be my guides in the enormous and never-finished task of coming to understand the nitty-gritty elements of their daily culture in ways that I, with my outsider’s gaze, do not have the cultural tools to recognize or analyze adequately.

The key to furthering the search for truth in an equation such as this would, it seems, lies in having each of the parts develop a sense of humility regarding the inherent incompleteness of their respective critical approaches.

The dynamics of culture are not, however, solely inflected by national realities as in the example above. Within each national cultural system, there are various subsystems, or repertoires, of a class, ethnic, or religious origin that effectively condition the critical parameters of those working within them.

While many academics working within the humanistic and social science disciplines seem to earnestly believe that they are working from an all-of-society purview when analyzing the dynamics of culture, it is generally quite far from the case.

In fact, when most academics sit down to write on a given topic, they generally do so thinking, most of all, about what other academics or well-canonized thinkers have said or not said on a given subject up until that point. And that’s for a simple reason. All their professional incentives are designed to have them approach things in that way.

There is nothing per se incorrect about operating in this fashion. The problem comes when the academic in question comes to believe that the academic literature, and/or the writing on the same subject done by those in so-called “prestige” media, represents the summum bonum of critical work on the chosen subject. That is, when he or she fails to understand that a) elite cultural institutions exist in increasingly large measure to exclude points of view that might call into question the strategic goals of those who finance their existence and b) that those excluded points of view might very well illuminate key aspects of the phenomenon he or she is seeking to analyze and explain.

When reading In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, it becomes immediately clear that its authors, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, have a very limited consciousness of the highly policed and thus corseted nature of the current academic discourse on Covid, and hence very little curiosity, never mind understanding, of the immense body of superb research on the phenomenon produced outside the parameters of the academy and the prestige press during the past five years.

For example, if there is anything that has become much more clear to hundreds of thousands of Americans who have devoted untold hours to fleshing out the truth hidden behind the official narrative of the Covid phenomenon, it is that small concentrations of elites can and do exercise enormous control over the daily lives of most citizens, and that conspiring behind our backs is an integral element of the effort to do so.

And yet in this text centering almost wholly on elite actions and pursuits, the authors provide us with no theoretical or historical framework for examining this hard-to-miss reality. Perhaps include a whiff or two of C. Wright Mills, William Domhoff, Michel Parenti, Pierre Bourdieu, or Itamar Even-Zohar to address the issue?

Nope. None of that will do. Rather, in keeping with the establishment view that only crazy people believe that the rich and powerful actually organize among themselves to safeguard and enhance their own privileges, or are driven by venal impulses, they present what happened—for example, the radical change in the government approach to the use of disease modeling and the advocacy of NPIs—as the result either of an unfortunate breakdown in deliberative processes or a simple matter of one group of political players being more skilled at infighting than another.

As in, oh gee, DA Henderson lost and Carter Mecher and Richard Hatchett won.

What is never put on the table is the possibility that the Deep State might have been behind the two men pushing for the abrupt changes to established pandemic planning because the alterations in protocol would greatly heighten the level of panic in the society and thus enhance the citizenry’s amenability to their pre-planned imposition of authoritarian measures.

No, in Lee and Macedo’s world, which not coincidentally has a great deal of sociological crossover with the one they are examining in this book, everyone’s motives are healthy. Things only go wrong, as mentioned above, when processes and systems go awry, as they of course always do, yeah right, in the absence of strong coercive forces being brought to bear against them from on high.

The book’s title is quite telling in this regard.

Who let us down? Real people like Mecher, Hatchett, Birx, and a long list of others? The Intelligence services and NATO which, as Debbie Lerman and Sasha Latypova have definitively shown, ran the entire Covid response in the US and in most every EU country from March 2020 onward? The “authorities” at the government health agencies who in a matter of a few short weeks simply forget everything they knew about pandemic management and adopted completely new and untested public health protocols?

The famous scientists like Fauci and Collins, who the authors explain “bent to politics” to hide the reality of the government’s gain-of-function research carried out in China, as well as the probable truth of the lab-leak thesis?

Oh no, it was that headless, volitionless ghost named “Politics” that let us down.

After all, everyone knows that if you want to continue to be taken seriously in the academic world, you can’t go around naming the names of powerful people who, through their consolidated networks of acolytes, could really screw with your careers. No, much better to keep the emphasis on those zombie-driven “processes.”

Of course, another key element of academic career preservation is assiduously steering clear of anyone whom the mandarins of establishment institutions have labeled as intellectually unkosher. And when it comes to issues surrounding Covid, there is no one more famously unkosher from an academic point of view than RFK, Jr.

But like or dislike Bobby as you might, his two books—especially the second one—on the history of government bio-warfare research and what went on in Wuhan in that regard in recent years, are absolutely essential reading.

And yet there is not one single mention of those minutely researched studies in the book by Macedo and Lee. It’s the intellectual equivalent of writing a history of the theory of evolution without a single mention of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

And then there is the way in which the authors treat the many issues related to the mRNA “vaccines,” the forced society-wide adoption of which—as anyone who has not been cloistered at Princeton and other like places during the last five years long ago figured out—was arguably the central strategic goal of the entire Covid operation.

Their discussions of the many people who were injured or died as a result of Deep State authorities wanting to carry out a real-time experiment with a potentially lucrative new technology on the entire population are especially illuminating.

Sorry, only kidding. There is no such discussion.

In typically blinkered establishment fashion, the authors affirm the highly dubious contention that the vaccines saved lives. And to ensure that everyone knows they believe in the sacred doctrine of vaccine transubstantiation, they make clear that they consider vaccine hesitancy (a term whose tendentiousness they never come close to examining) a real problem.

To their credit, they do question whether forcing the young, healthy, and previously infected to get the vaccine was the right thing to do. But at no time do they engage in a discussion of doing so in light of established canons of medical ethics. The book contains not a word about the Nuremberg principles and only a single passing mention of the doctrine of informed consent.

What they are really interested in is the relatively unimportant matter of the sharp partisan divides on the issue of vaccine adoption.

But at no time do they even begin to touch on the much bigger and more important question of how the massive government censorship and propaganda operation devoted to vaccine uptake, nor the now well-known Pharma-run, and apparently government-approved, operations to systematically bribe medical boards and group medical practices into shilling the vaccines, might have played citizen behaviors.

I could go on.

Macedo and Lee are clearly very well-trained academic animals who have internalized the idea that if information comes at them from someone without a respectable academic appointment or a PhD next to their name, or God forbid, an uncredentialed blogger, it’s best to not even think of taking it seriously, as it might lead to a decline of their cred in that metaphorical Faculty Lounge.

They know, moreover, that in order to get ahead and stay there, one must stay within the established parameters of academic thinkable thought, which includes a code of professional courtesy that assumes that while fellow credentialed elites sometimes make mistakes, or work within deliberative systems that sometimes break down for no clearly identifiable reason, they can be assumed—unlike those less noble and dirtily partisan thinkers outside the academy—to be honestly working for the truth and the common good almost all the time.

And above all, they know that if they publish a book that is mildly critical of an establishment operation, but that does not come close in any way to digging down to the roots of the deep power dynamics that set it in motion, or examining the enormous seismic social devastation it caused, ethically compromised elite outfits like the Boston Globe, looking to suavely square the circle of their own moral perfidy, might pick it up and run with it, and that that might lead, in turn, to the highest honors an academic can ever receive: a fawning interview from NPR or the full-length feature in the NYT.

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