Covid Policy Was a National Security Operation

New evidence puts everything in a different light.

Thank you for tolerating an unusual second email for the week, but this one is about all our remarkable content this week, which includes some tremendously important material. 

As a reminder: It’s time to sign up for our monthly supper club in West Hartford, Connecticut,  on Wednesday, Nov. 16. Also, as you saw, great Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Surgeon General of Florida, will be our dinner speaker for “The Great Restoration: Conference and Gala,” Saturday, December 3, 20220, Miami, Florida. You won’t want to miss this! 

If. you missed the news of our new Fellows program, have a look! If you would like to support it, please do!

Here is some content from this week. 

The Confinement of the Healthy By AARON KHERIATY. It’s hard to overstate the novelty and folly of what happened worldwide in March of 2020. What descended upon us was not just a novel virus but a novel mode of social organization and control—the beginnings of a new biomedical security state that I describe in my book, The New Abnormal.

Using the Disabled as Political Tools By LAURA ROSEN COHEN. Some leftists loathe the disabled. I learned that the hard way during the COVID lockdowns. But when it is politically expedient, they will happily and shamelessly pretend otherwise. This cynical and disgraceful anti-human machination of the Left was exposed to sunlight in the Fetterman-Oz debate.

Maybe the Fed Too Was Trolled By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. There will be no going back to 2019 prices in any sector. Powell knows this. He hates it but he is determined not to be blamed for it. For his part, he believes the blame lies elsewhere: with the apocalyptics, the conspirators, a profligate Congress, a confused President, and the shadowy bunch in the national security state. With them, and under this scenario, he is not likely on speaking terms.

The School of Friendship By THOMAS HARRINGTON. What passes today for ideological convictions, in our supposedly terminally divided country, are nothing of the sort, but rather labels to which many quickly and lightly affix themselves precisely because they haven’t really thought deeply about what they believe and why, but don’t want to be seen as being out of step, or of not having really done their homework.

More Questions about Spring 2020 Covid in New York City Hospitals  By JESSICA HOCKETT. I recently requested and obtained more files from the city’s health department to analyze alongside already-public data.Here are five observations, with supporting graphs or tables.

Censorship and Defamation: Weapons of Control By ROBERT MALONE. So you ask, “why didn’t more physicians stand up and object?”Because the entire profession has been subjected to the most aggressive and coordinated propaganda, censorship, and defamation campaign the modern western world has ever seen.

What We Knew In the Early Days By BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. We approach the third year and people have forgotten that all the harms of lockdowns were strongly warned about by many voices in many venues. In addition, the virus was much better understood back then and openly discussed. We knew for certain that the panic and fear were being wildly overblown.

Brownstone Fellows for 2023 Named By BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. Fellowships are awarded for the calendar year and provide financial support as well as moral support and community recognition. The program has begun immediately on a small scale but will grow over time as resources permit.

Global Health and the Art of Really Big Lies  By DAVID BELL. The principle of Really Big Lies is based on their being so divorced from reality that the listener will assume their own perception must be flawed, rather than the claims of the person speaking to them. Only an insane or ridiculous person would make such outlandish claims, and a credible institution would not employ such a person.

Government’s National Security Arm Took Charge During the Covid Response By DEBBIE LERMAN. HHS – the agency designated by statute and experience to handle public health crises – was removed, and FEMA – the agency designated by statute and experience to “help people before, during and after disasters” like earthquakes and fires – was put in charge. But the pandemic planning document was not updated to reflect that change or how that change would affect the Covid response.

What Happened to the Idea of Progress? By THOMAS HARRINGTON. Like people, paradigms get tired, mostly because the humans that work within them, as Kuhn suggested, increasingly lose touch with the problems that originally elicited in them the intense and sacrifice-laden drive to create urgently desired new things. But humans aren’t always very good at recognizing when they have begun going through the motions. This is especially so with those in the thrall of a purely linear vision of time in which the perennial reality of intellectual and spiritual regression is afforded no legitimate space.

We Must Have Accountability By JUSTIN HART. The current crop of failed fear mongering virus prophets coupled with the low-uptake of boosters is stark and terrible reminder that the institutions that prided themselves on public health damaged the public trust more than anything else. Your trust should be in the bedrock of our Constitution, not in some self-endowed title of “science.”  Public trust in our institutions is sinking and it will require a public trial of our policy decisions to right the ship.

Declare a Real Pandemic Inquiry Instead of Amnesty By MICHAEL SENGER. Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and canceling those who weren’t as ignorant.

The Selfish Collective By HALEY KYNEFIN. A truly prosocial approach would not shut out all other goals and insist on one way forward. It would take into account the different priorities and viewpoints of various factions or individuals, approach them with respect, and ask how to best facilitate some sort of harmony among their needs. Instead of prescribing behavior onto others it would advocate for dialogue and open debate, and it would celebrate differences of opinion.

Osterism Won’t Prevent the Next Lockdown By JESSICA HOCKETT. Oster’s implicit claim that next-to-nothing was known about SARS-CoV-2 – and therefore all the pointless, unethical, and illegal things people were forced to do are understandable – isn’t the pathway to healing, because it’s dishonest. Inexplicably, she denies that, from the get-go, we knew Covid’s stratified risks and the harms of coerced interventions.

It Was a Short Time Ago and Never Happened Anyway By RICHARD KELLY. There are other good reasons to think the onslaught is not over, that we are at the moment in a ‘phony war’ while enemy forces regroup. Inflation, energy, food, surveillance are all active fronts in the broader battle. It hardly matters which one will flare up next.

The Book We Need and Only Justin Hart Could Write By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Hart is one of the few intellectuals who was correct about the whole hullabaloo from the very beginning. Therefore he doesn’t need to embark among some silly dance in which restrictions were fine in the beginning but later became too much. Nope: he kept his wits about him the whole time. Thus does he have the credibility to write without apologies.

The War on Humanity Continues By MICHAEL LESHER. As I walked around an unadorned neighborhood that should have been full of Halloween symbols in that late October season, I began to rage inwardly at the realization that so many parents genuinely believed they were protecting their children when they deprived them of a public celebration, however innocuous.

Science Misconceived: How the Covid Epoch Wrecked Understanding By THOMAS MILOVAC. The pandemic along with the slogan, “Trust the science” has altered the desired perspective from one of healthy skepticism to blind acceptance. Such non-critical acceptance of any data, let alone research occurring at “the speed of science,” should give pause. Science moves forward when objections are made and hypotheses are fine-tuned, not when agreement ensues simply because an authority has decreed it so.

The Early Estimates of the Fatality Rate Were Very Wrong By CARL HENEGHAN, TOM JEFFERSON. The consequences of overestimating the IFR are profound. It overpredicts the number of deaths and influences political decision-making without considering the long-term harm and well-being effects. 

Bravo, Elon! By DAVID STOCKMAN. Twitter’s phony “content moderation” operation was not unique, but symptomatic of a much broader perversion of corporate management throughout Silicon Valley and much of corporate America, too. In a word, the stock market was so fantastically over-valued owing to the Fed’s egregious money-printing that executives were given leave to pursue their political and ideological hobby horses on a whim, rather than keep their noses on the grindstone of profit and loss.

The Duplicitous Dr. Fauci and His Backpedaling By LORI WEINTZ. Fauci denies that he had anything to do with school closures, but the record is clear that he advocated against schools opening in areas where the coronavirus was spreading (which was everywhere), and if they did open, there needed to be face masks, and social distancing, and test-to-stay, and quarantining of healthy people who sat too close to someone who tested positive, and onerous sanitizing, and on and on. The Covid measures for children in school, and college students, were expensive, miserable, and unnecessary, as their age groups are at almost zero risk for serious Covid infection.