China has already installed locked gates in some city neighborhoods where you can only leave if you keep your score up (anyone who has heard of 15-minute cities knows organizations like the World Economic Forum has plans to implement this globally).
You can opt-out of this system by cutting off the flow of information that you allow them to collect about you.
Instead, services from Proton Mail, for example, allow you to use email aliases so none of your accounts have your real contact information. This is one way to “compartmentalize” so that your Netflix, bank accounts, government accounts, credit card accounts, and social media aren’t all linked back to the same nexus.
We’ve all been talking about a product, place, or celebrity, only to see eerily similar ads pop up on our phones and computer screens.
Is big tech listening through your phone’s microphone or other smart devices? That’s possible, and a legitimate concern.
But perhaps even creepier is that with data mining, big tech might know what you’re thinking about without even having to listen.
If you don’t take steps to browse privately, purchase anonymously, or shield your communications from prying eyes, you are providing big tech and governments a detailed web of your life.
Log onto your friend’s Wifi network, and they may assume you share some similar interests.
Have your location logged near the coast, and you might have seafood or visiting an aquarium on the mind.
During Covid lockdowns, I swore I spontaneously decided to start making homemade sourdough bread… only to realize I was part of a huge trend. I was being served content based on the homesteading and survivalist videos I watched.
This is bad enough when it is mostly used by marketers. But what happens when the government starts using it against you?
I’m sure you’ve heard of China’s social credit system. It’s like a credit score, but for everything you do. Bought too much red meat at the store? Points off. Consumed Communist Party propaganda? Points on.
It’s all tracked, crunched, and spat out as a score that can seriously affect your life. Good score? Life’s a breeze. Bad score? Say goodbye to traveling on planes or trains, fast internet, and even decent jobs.
China has already installed locked gates in some city neighborhoods where you can only leave if you keep your score up (anyone who has heard of 15-minute cities knows organizations like the World Economic Forum has plans to implement this globally).
People who can’t see that the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror were really just stupid scams are totally on board with new scams, the wars on the virus and climate change. They’re the same people making the same phony do-gooder arguments.
International Man: The COVID lockdowns established a terrible precedent.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued what they call a “dire warning.” They say there will be a 5% increase in carbon emissions as global economies reopen after the COVID shutdowns and that it will be “anything but sustainable” for the environment. This implies that the shutdowns have been good for the environment and that returning to normal is bad.
There has also been a flood of articles in the mainstream media advocating for the use of lockdowns to address so-called climate change.
Do you think that the COVID lockdowns could become climate change lockdowns?
Doug Casey: Without exception, almost everything they say in these articles is either an overt and intentional lie or just factually incorrect. Things that are controversial at best are presented as incontrovertible facts.
Let me first reiterate a few facts about COVID.
It’s hard to be sure because everything about it has become highly politicized, but COVID itself seems no more serious than the Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Bird Flu, or Swine Flu that have come and gone in recent decades and is not even remotely comparable to the Spanish Flu of 1918.
The numbers show that COVID is a risk for people over 70, the obese, and the sick—but a medical non-problem for everyone else. That’s why the average age of decedents is 80, even though it appears that everyone who dies with the virus in their system is reported as a statistic—even if they die of an auto accident or a heart attack. People with zero symptoms are, nonetheless, listed as “cases” if they fail the overly sensitive and very expensive PCR test.
We might ask: “What’s behind this insane flu hysteria—which is radically restructuring the world’s political and economic landscapes? And why now?” It seems very oddly coincidental with a few other phenomena.
One is that the world is on the cusp of a fantastically devastating depression due to the insane creation of currency units all over the world by central banks. Is the phony COVID hysteria—and, yes, I believe it’s 80% phony—being used as an excuse for the coming collapse, a way to recuse those responsible for the insane economic policies causing the depression? In other words, is the COVID hysteria an artificially constructed force majeure used to distract from the real cause of the Greater Depression?
By mid 2020, it was already becoming clear that the United States was experiencing a spike in crime. Indeed, by midyear, numerous media outlets were already reporting remarkably large increases in homicide in a number of cities. It was clear that if then current trends continued, homicide rates in the United States would reach levels not seen in over a decade.
With full-year data for 2020 now available on the FBI’s Crime in the United States report, we can see that those predictions were right. According to the report, the homicide rate in the United States rose to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2020, which is the highest rate reported since 1997—a twenty-four-year high.
Moreover the increase from 2019 to 2020 was one of the largest increases the US has experienced in ninety years. For similar increases in a similarly short period of time, we must go back to the 1960s—or even the 1940s. In other words, this is not normal. If the current trend continues, the US could find itself back experiencing homicide growth not experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It remains to be seen, however, if this is a temporary spike or part of a longer trend. If it is a spike, we can expect homicide rates to fall back to around 5 per 100,000, as had become a common experience over the past decade. If it is just a spike, then we can blame the surge in homicide on short-term events such as the covid lockdowns or the Black Lives Matter riots. If the surge is part of a larger trend, however, we’ll need to look to more broad and permanent causes for a satisfactory explanation.
But finding the causes of larger trends in homicide rates is no simple matter, and ideological groups tend to use movements in homicide rates as “proof” of the correctness of their preferred political hobby horses.
There is compelling evidence, however, that trends in crime are driven largely by how the public views the legitimacy of the regime and its institutions. In short, the theory rests on the idea that crime increases when a jurisdiction’s residents do not respect government institutions and do not believe that government institutions can provide safety or administer justice in a fairly reliable way.
If the United States is indeed at the beginning of an upward trend in homicide, it might be more evidence of what many already suspect is happening: trust in American political institutions is falling, and consequently fear of private crime and social disorder is rising.
Homicides: Some Historical Perspective
In order to get some perspective on these trends, however, we have to look at historical movements in homicide rates.
There is significant disagreement over the measurement of homicide rates in the early twentieth century, and data is especially spotty before the FBI established the Uniform Crime Report system in 1930. There is much more consensus, however, that homicide rates were high by today’s standards during the early 1930s. These rates began to decline rapidly after 1934, and this began a long downward trend in homicide that lasted until the late 1950s. This trend bottomed out at 4 per 100,000 in 1957. By 1965, homicide rates had begun a rapid ascent, climbing from 4.6 per 100,000 in 1963 and peaking at 9.8 per 100,000 in 1980. Homicide rates remained at elevated levels throughout the 1980s, but went into steep decline after 1993, reaching 4.4 per 100,000—a fifty-one-year low—in 2014.
For example, in a recent cabinet meeting of Israeli ministers, health minister Nitzan Horowitz was caught on tape (prior to the meeting) explaining to his fellow ministers that although certain public movement restrictions lacked any good epidemiological or public health basis, they would nonetheless assist in incentivizing people to get vaccinated in order to alleviate public restrictions
Public commentator Amanda Marcotte is “incandescent with rage”—her words—with those who refuse to be vaccinated against covid-19.1 She wants to get back to her spin class, and the unvaccinated are ruining it for her. Lockdowns and other restrictions on gymnasiums have either closed them or required masking during training sessions, and the result is that Marcotte is unable to enjoy her spin class at the gym, so she has had to cancel and exercise at home. In attributing where the blame for this predicament lies, she is unequivocal: “[B]y refusing to do the right thing, the unvaccinated are stripping freedom and choice from every other American who got vaccinated. We stand by helplessly watching restrictions pile back on and our freedoms dissipate, all to protect those who won’t protect themselves.”
This statement is indicative of a relatively new phenomenon in public commentary, which is a general support for the rise of what I call “public policy by ransom.” Public policy by ransom occurs when a government imposes a behavioral requirement on individuals and enforces this by punishing the general public in aggregate until a stipulated level of compliance is attained. The method relies on members of the public and public commentators—like Marcotte—who will attribute blame for these negative consequences to recalcitrant citizens who fail to adopt the preferred behaviors of the governing class. In the weltanschauung that underpins this type of governance, government reactions to public behaviors are “metaphysically given” and are treated as a mere epiphenomenon of the actions of individual members of the public who dare to behave in ways disliked by public authorities.
It is important to note that the phenomenon of public policy by ransom should not be confused with the mere occurrence of bona fide conditional public actions undertaken by government. There is nothing inherently wrong with governments forming their policies conditional on the behavior of the public, and changing policies when public behavior changes. Indeed, public policies on pandemics and vaccination clearly should be informed by public behavior relating to those issues—governments must make choices about proposed pandemic restrictions and these choices should be informed by relevant factors.2 While there is scope for legitimate argument over reactive restrictions on the unvaccinated or maskless, what has emerged as an ominous mode of thinking in this atmosphere is the reflexiveattribution of blame to recalcitrant members of the public for any subsequent negative consequences imposed on the public by government policies. If the government chooses to impose a negative consequence on the public—even conditionally on the behavior of the public—that consequence is a chosen policy of the government and must be viewed as a policy choice.
There are two main diagnostic signs that indicate when the mode of governance has gone beyond legitimate conditional policy formulation and has entered the domain of public policy by ransom. The first sign is when there is evidence that policy formulation is motivated by a desire to punish noncompliance with behavioral prescriptions for its own sake, rather than optimizing the response to the problem at issue. For example, in a recent cabinet meeting of Israeli ministers, health minister Nitzan Horowitz was caught on tape (prior to the meeting) explaining to his fellow ministers that although certain public movement restrictions lacked any good epidemiological or public health basis, they would nonetheless assist in incentivizing people to get vaccinated in order to alleviate public restrictions.3 The second sign is when governments (and related public commentators) encourage the public to view their own policy responses to behaviors as immutable, and to therefore view individual members of the public as causally responsible for negative impacts from government policies. Such ominous thinking is on display among many public commentators, who view restrictions imposed by governments as an unavoidable consequence of public behavior. Journalist Celia Wexler claims that covid vaccine sceptics are “ruining the return to normal,” and her emotional reaction is somewhat similar to that of Marcotte. She says that “[e]xperts recommend using soft skills of listening and empathizing to persuade holdouts to get vaccinated. But instead our hearts are hardening. Every day, more of us are supporting mandates and penalties.”4 (Observe here the attitude of some commentators who present themselves as models of tolerance: to such people, listening and empathizing are desirable, but only as a means to manipulate behavior; similarly, mandates and penalties are undesirable, but must be the ultimate result if people do not conform to desired behavior by choice—thus do people self-indulge as models of tolerance and charity even while advocating odium and mandates against those they seek to coerce.)
Of course, some readers may take the view that, while it sounds a bit nasty, a little bit of public policy by ransom is a necessary expedient to deal with a major public health problem, even if it means trampling on some of the norms and niceties of governance under ideal conditions. If one accepts public policy by ransom under this expedient view, then it is worth observing that if this general method of governance is accepted, in principle, it allows governments to impose any behavioral mandate they desire on the public and attribute any negative consequence to noncompliant members of the public. Since governments control the imposed consequence of noncompliance, they have unlimited capacity to soften or strengthen negative consequences imposed on the general public. For such reasons, this mode of governance can be viewed as an ideal way to begin installing a government-mandated “social credit system.” A number of articles have highlighted the use of the covid-19 pandemic response to strengthen the existing social credit system in China,5 but others have also noted that such a system is rapidly emerging in the Western world.6
One interesting political and juridical aspect of public policy by ransom is that it degenerates the rule-of-law and bypasses the ordinary legal requirement to mandate or prohibit public behaviors explicitly by legislation or regulation (with the various attendant safeguards of this process). Under the approach of public policy by ransom, to impose their preferred mandates governments need only use (existing) broad regulatory powers to open or shut parts of society on an ad hoc basis, according to their own assessment of behavioral compliance; irate public commentators and social media demagogues then do the rest, and a form of de facto mandatory public behavior is born. Under this mode of governance, the press briefing becomes the new legislature, the words of ministers and their public relations spokesmen become the new laws of the land, and the Twittersphere and media join the police as adjuncts of the new constabulary.
A secondary aspect of public policy by ransom that is noteworthy is that it has remarkable parallels to certain well-known modes of justification for domestic violence. “See what you made me do!” becomes the explanatory approach of public officials quizzed on public policy choices, as citizens are left cowering in the corner with bruises. Perhaps the most striking similarity between these two phenomena is that they both involve the attribution of causal responsibility to initial behavior that causes those in power to respond with coercion, and so blame for negative outcomes lies not with those who impose those outcomes, but those who caused them to do so. “If you don’t have dinner on the table when I come home, I’ll go crazy on you and the kids, and it’ll be your fault!”
Critics of this analysis will presumably respond that the parallels I am highlighting here are not analogous to present circumstances, since the negative consequences imposed by lockdowns, mask mandates, etc., are all genuine epidemiological and public health requirements to deal with the consequences of public behavior. But of course, that is precisely the question at issue, and it is precisely here that one identifies clear examples of public policy by ransom. As discussed above, in Israel, the health minister has more or less admitted to his colleagues that various aspects of the government’s imposed “green card” system are not justifiable on epidemiological grounds, but are useful as a means of social control and “incentivization” of the unvaccinated. This is the nature of public policy by ransom—the imposition of negative outcomes on society for its own sake, as a means of social control.
All of these aspects of public policy by ransom are ominous developments in the thinking of the commentariat. It is likely that some have not fully thought out the implications of this mode of governance, and the unlimited power of coercion it entails to advance any behavioral agenda preferred by the government of the day. As a thought experiment, it is instructive to consider how some of these public commentators might react to the following circumstance. Suppose that a religious conservative government, lamenting the loss of nationalist and religious cultural norms in their country, decided to impose their behavioral preference that all students and workers in the country should start their day by saluting the flag (of whatever country they are in) and swearing homage to God at their morning meeting/assembly. To encourage this behavioral push, they simultaneously impose a policy to ban the functioning of public restaurants, bars, and theatres, until they can verify 80 percent compliance with their behavioral preference. One can easily imagine the kind of fig leaf of political justification that would attend this policy connection—e.g., that the continued operation of public social spaces represents a danger to society unless citizens hold good public morals for strengthening the nation. How might our high-minded public commentators react in such a case? Would they lament that their “hearts are hardening” for those who refuse to comply? Would they be “incandescent with rage” at those who are “refusing to do the right thing”? Would they complain of those unruly ne’er-do-wells who refuse to make the required nationalist/religious invocations and thereby ruin society for the rest of us? Of course, to ask these questions is to answer them—they wouldn’t, because theirs is a purely mercenary approach, and they don’t share the behavioral goals in this hypothetical case.
Like pandemics before it, one hopes that the covid-19 pandemic will subside, whether this be through vaccination, natural herd immunity, or some exogenous good fortune. What will our society look like when that happens? Will we be “back to normal”? Will our public and commentariat preserve any residual instinct for respecting the autonomy of the individual? Will our mode of governance have degenerated so far that it has become acceptable for public authorities to hold the public to ransom? Only time—and the actions of individuals who respect personal liberties—will tell.
2. Libertarian arguments on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of compulsory vaccination (for whatever little influence these arguments have in public policy formulation) hinge on an assessment of whether the absence of vaccination causes such an “unacceptable risk of harm” that fraternization with others by nonvaccinated people can properly be regarded as a rights violation (see J. Bernstein, “The Case against Libertarian Arguments for Compulsory Vaccination,” Journal of Medical Ethics 43, no. 11 (2017): 792–96). This assessment hinges in turn on an assessment of the risk of harm from the disease, the efficacy of the proposed vaccination, and the risk of any attendant side effects. While this leaves open the possibility of compulsory vaccination in extreme cases, suffice to say libertarians place a high bar on such an assessment, and they are cognizant of the ease with which arguments for an “unacceptable risk” can be made in the heat of an emergency, a fortiori when there is a strong incentive for emotional or politically motivated decision-making affected by social-desirability bias.
the populace is more concerned about how to save their collective health, sanity and jobs. That’s no easy task when the police give a hard time even to people who are found to be walking their dogs without a face mask on. These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under.
These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under, Robert Bridge writes.
The land Down Under appears to be reverting back to its original status as a penal colony as government officials, looking more like prison wardens than any servants of the people, clamp down on demonstrators weary of more Covid lockdowns.
A heavy police presence in the major Australian cities on the weekend didn’t stopped thousands of protesters from taking to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch effort to protect their severely threatened liberties and freedoms.
The protests came after New South Wales announced its second extended lockdown, which puts Sydney’s 5 million residents under strict curfew conditions until mid-September. The wait will seem all the more excruciating, however, as rumors are flying that the shelter in place orders may be extended all the way until January.
I’m really depressed. I see no end to this nightmarish tyranny.
I just want to leave Australia and never come back.
Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city behind Sydney, citizens face similar restrictions, which mean that – aside from going shopping within a designated radius from their homes, exercising for an hour a day outdoors, and going to work so long as they are engaged in “essential employment” – have essentially become prisoners inside of their own homes.
At this point in Australia’s history, the only thing that remains certain is the uncertainty, which makes the lockdowns all the more unbearable.
Images from Australia’s two major cities on Saturday showed powder keg conditions as demonstrators squared off against police, who responded with batons, pepper spray and mass arrests (It will interesting to see if Big Media describes the police actions against the lockdown protesters in the same compassionate way it described the actions taken against Australia’s very own Black Lives Matter protests around the same time last year. As the Guardian sympathetically reported: “At least 20,000 attended the Sydney [BLM] march which passed off peacefully, except for ugly scenes when police officers used pepper spray on protesters who had flowed into Central station after the rally finished.” It will be advisable not to hold your breath). In live footage obtained by Facebook user ‘Real Rukshan,’ large groups of police are seen confronting individual citizens, seemingly guilty of nothing else aside from just being there.
In one scene (at the 2:10 marker), an elderly man who appears to be leaving a Starbuck’s coffee shop is surrounded by no less than five police officers, who proceed to handcuff the man and, presumably, take him to prison. In another scene (at the 0:30 mark), two men are seen standing in front of the Bank of Melbourne confronted by six officers. In front of them on the street are four mounted officers astride anxious horses. The feeling conjured up in these incidences is the same: authoritarian police-state overkill.
Given the massive police presence amid the steady deterioration of basic human rights a person might get the impression that Australia is really dealing with an existential crisis. While that may be true with regards to obesity, drug abuse and homelessness, it seems to be a real exaggeration when it comes to Covid-19. After all, while evidence of the above mentioned scourges is visible everywhere in the country, the only place the coronavirus seems to exist in Australia is on the nightly news channels (which, by the way, have done a very poor job of keeping their audiences up to date on latest developments. Sources in New Zealand, for example, have informed that the media there has largely ignored the story of anti-lockdown protests happening just across the Tasman Sea).
For example, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, in an effort to portray the pandemic as enemy number one, expressed from the boob tube her “deepest, deepest sympathies” to the families of three people who died overnight from/with the coronavirus. Who were these fatalities? The public was not informed of their identities, but Berejiklian described them as “a man in his 80s, and a man in his 90s, and a female in her 90s.”
It’s just a hunch, but could the comorbidity in each of those “tragic” cases have been that silent killer popularly known as ripe old age? Yes, every life is precious and worth saving, but is Australian officialdom secretly shooting for absolute immortality among the population and not just prevention? That would certainly be the height of irony if true considering that the effort is killing just about everyone. In fact, it seems that the real pandemic attacking the Australian people is government-sponsored fear.
Meanwhile, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews added insult to injury when he commanded from his bully pulpit that citizens, now deprived of their favorite drinking holes to while away the jobless hours, were forbidden from removing their masks to drink alcohol in the great outdoors. As to whether the consumption of a non-alcoholic beverage outdoors would also fall within the tight confines of the mask regime, dear leader did not say. However, the answer seems pretty clear since the state is actually using police helicopters to shoo away sunbathers from the nation’s many famous beaches.
People are letting off flares now on Lonsdale Street in the CBD for the anti-lockdown protest, choppers are overhead. @theagepic.twitter.com/xbkNbeuPIS
All of this insanity has befallen the people Down Under after the continent has witnessed the barest uptick of Covid cases. In the state of New South Wales, for example, where Sydney is located, there were just 825 acquired infections reported on Saturday, an increase from the 644 the day prior. In the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, the situation appears even less worrying, with just 61 cases reported as of Saturday. These low infection rates, taken together with a high level of public skepticism with regards to the safety of the Covid vaccines, translates into just 29 percent of the population opting to be jabbed to date.
.@ScottMorrisonMP has presided over the biggest Big State government that Australia has ever seen.
And don’t try to tell me #covid19 is an extraordinary circumstance.
We’ve had two World Wars, Spanish Flu and the Great Depression and NEVER has the government behaved this badly.
So as the petty tyrants Down Under seem more concerned with getting every single Australian citizen the Big Pharma jab – together with the lifetime of booster shots and lockdowns that will certainly follow – the populace is more concerned about how to save their collective health, sanity and jobs. That’s no easy task when the police give a hard time even to people who are found to be walking their dogs without a face mask on. These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under.
A new study on Covid lockdowns in Germany shows that destroying the freedom and livelihood of civilians to fight a virus by locking the country down was pointless. Any “credit” claimed for the lockdowns was actually due to the cases already falling before implemented. Will justice be served? Also today, TX Gov. Abbott partly redeems himself by signing new vaccine passport prohibition.
When it comes to climate change, these countries laugh at Westerners for their naivete, stupidity, and self-destructive tendencies. They don’t take it seriously. It’s another reason why the next century belongs to China.
The same is true of Russia, which, for all of its faults, is basically an anti-woke country. It’s been said—correctly—that there are more communists in American universities than there are in all of Russia.
International Man: It’s been over a year since the COVID lockdowns started, and they have established a terrible precedent.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued what they call a “dire warning.” They say there will be a 5% increase in carbon emissions as global economies reopen after the COVID shutdowns this year and that it will be “anything but sustainable” for the environment. This implies that the shutdowns have been good for the environment and that returning to normal is bad.
There has also been a flood of articles in the mainstream media advocating for the use of lockdowns to address so-called climate change.
Do you think that the COVID lockdowns could become climate change lockdowns?
Doug Casey: Without exception, almost everything they say in the above article is either an overt and intentional lie or just factually incorrect. Things that are controversial at best are presented as incontrovertible facts.
Let me first reiterate a few facts about COVID.
It’s hard to be sure because everything about it has become highly politicized, but COVID itself seems no more serious than the Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Bird Flu, or Swine Flu that have come and gone in recent decades and is not even remotely comparable to the Spanish Flu of 1918.
The numbers show that COVID is a risk for people over 70, the obese, and the sick—but a medical non-problem for everyone else. That’s why the average age of decedents is 80, even though it appears that everyone who dies with the virus in their system is reported as a statistic—even if they die of an auto accident or a heart attack. People with zero symptoms are, nonetheless, listed as “cases” if they fail the overly sensitive and very expensive PCR test.
We might ask: “What’s behind this insane flu hysteria—which is radically restructuring the world’s political and economic landscapes? And why now?” It seems very oddly coincidental with a few other phenomena.
One is that the world is on the cusp of a fantastically devastating depression due to the insane creation of currency units all over the world by central banks. Is the phony COVID hysteria—and, yes, I believe it’s 80% phony—being used as an excuse for the coming collapse, a way to recuse those responsible for the insane economic policies causing the depression? In other words, is the COVID hysteria an artificially constructed force majeure used to distract from the real cause of the Greater Depression?
Another phenomenon is that the COVID hysteria has proved an excellent way to scare the hell out of the public everywhere. Terrified people demand “strong” leaders and strict controls. It’s a godsend for the kind of people who go into government, anxious for any excuse to self-aggrandize and take more power. “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” has been an operating principle of powermongers since Day One. And war is the most serious kind of crisis. Don’t forget what Randolf Bourne said in 1914: “War is the health of the State.” But a real war with a real enemy is always risky and may not always be feasible. So powermongers create phony wars. In order to fight a war—any kind of war—you need a State to organize and legitimize it.
The first major phony war in living memory was Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty—the poor lost. Then came Richard Nixon’s war on drugs. Then, Baby Bush declared war on terror. They’re all still ongoing, but it seems time for a two-front war. A war on global warming combined with a war on COVID will be ultra-effective for breeding fear in Boobus americanus. They say global warming can destroy the planet and COVID can kill everyone. A sure-fire combination. They’re certain to get widespread support from the usual suspects.
As a bonus, there’s a very high correlation between those who support the COVID hysteria and those supporting the climate change agenda. And both of them claim to have a new ally, “the science,” to sell the wars to scared chimpanzees. Not just in the US, but everywhere in the world. These two new wars will bring out the worst in everyone, everywhere.
Once you wash away their social veneer, the patina of civilization, you find that humans are tribal. Put them in groups and they revert to the lowest common denominator—they act like our anthropoid ancestors and relatives. Get people excited, hooting and panting like chimps, and they’re anxious to wage war on one thing after another. Imagine them as the anthropoids contesting the watering hole in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Conflict gives them a sense of solidarity and gives their lives meaning.
That’s especially true of humans with collectivist views, which is to say, Leftists and busybodies. In today’s world, they include the “woke,” social justice warriors, progressives, BLM supporters, Antifa, and, of course, socialists, communists, Marxists, and all their fellow travelers. They’re all Puritans motivated to control other humans. The Left has always been that way, although it occasionally disguises itself as pro-freedom to seduce the naive.
For instance, during the ’60s, the Left was pro-drugs. But that’s not because they were for personal freedom or because they believed you have the right to do what you want with your own body. They were pro-drugs because widespread and irresponsible drug use can destroy civilization.
Even when the Left seems to have good intentions, it’s not the case. For instance, the Left was against the Vietnam War. It wasn’t because they were anti-war, but because the war was against their fellow communists. It was clever, in both cases showing up the Republicans as dim-witted, unethical, and hypocritical.
Today the Left, in its various incarnations, is all for the COVID lockdowns. Those will mutate into climate change lockdowns. Both will act to compromise human freedom—even more than previous phony wars. It’s ironic that the word “lockdown” used to be used mainly in prisons—it’s rather indicative of where the world in general and the US, in particular, are headed.
International Man: What are the chances climate lockdowns will work if and when governments try them?
Doug Casey: Climate change lockdowns will work. Why shouldn’t they? COVID lockdowns worked wonderfully.
The news comes following the revelation last week that Fauci and his deputies were directly coordinating with the Chinese government over COVID-19 messaging during the early outbreak in Wuhan, China. The transparency watchdog organization Judicial Watch has released new government emails acquired via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which show U.S. government health institutions signed off on COVID-19 related non disclosure agreements requested by Chinese Communist Party officials.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?
This past week, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared a platform with a Chinese Communist Party “health expert,” and it went largely unreported by any Western media outlets. Chinese state media, on the other hand, could not get enough of it, because Fauci delivered a propaganda coup for the communist regime in Beijing. Countless state media outlets and CCP official praised the co-panelists for endorsing the endless amounts of anti-American propaganda shared during the event, which included demanding more devastating draconian restrictions in order to “combat” COVID-19.
Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a top “expert” in China’s National Health Commission who has been described as “China’s Fauci,” shared a panel with the NIAID chief over Zoom last week. The two discussed COVID-19 policy in a webinar organized by the University of Edinburgh, which also featured “experts” from the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization.
In his comments, Zhong hammered the Trump Administration and America in general, but praised the Biden Administration for rejoining the WHO. The Chinese official shared provably false information about China’s COVID-19 response and statistics, and claimed China’s brutal lockdown of Wuhan resulted in China winning its battle against COVID-19.
A loyal CCP member, Zhong spewed endless streams of false information, as lockdowns have not worked anywhere they have been tried, and they have been tried in almost every country in the world, with no demonstrable positive results.
Zhong continued, showing a slide presenting the U.S. as having the world’s worse COVID-19 response, with China demonstrating the world’s best response, which again, he attributes to the lockdown in Wuhan.
Zhong ended his presentation urging other countries not to open their economies just yet, and to perhaps wait until the entire world is vaccinated, which will take a few years. He also made the baseless claim that vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity, which he falsely described as “less-scientific.” Meanwhile, China’s economy and society, which includes a largely unvaccinated population, has been open since March of 2020.
Fauci endorsed Zhong’s comments, saying he “would underscore everything that Professor Zhong said.” The so-called public health expert added that he wants “a multi year decades commitment, and that is to make and strive for essentially access to quality healthcare for everyone in the world, so that health is really a human right in many respects.”
Fauci embraced the Chinese propaganda, emphasizing the importance of Wuhan-style lockdowns to “suppress” the virus.
“To emphasize something that both of us said; if we do not completely suppress this, we will continue to be challenged by variants which have a way of coming back to bite us,” Fauci said.
“We have been successful in the past by global cooperation with smallpox, with polio, with measles. There’s no reason in the world why we cannot do the same thing with COVID-19 by a combination of cooperative public health measures and the application of science,” he added.
Fauci’s appearance was praised endlessly by Chinese state run media outlets and Chinese Communist Party officials. Here’s a small sample size of the Chinese state apparatchik responses to the Fauci-Zhong panel.
Prof. Zhong Nanshan, the leading #Chinese respiratory disease expert, & Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top #US infectious disease expert, met via video link to exchange views on #COVID19 control ystd(2/3) evening. A right way for the two countries to work together in defeating the virus. pic.twitter.com/LxJppoGYQ1— Ambassador Deng Xijun (@China2ASEAN) March 3, 2021
Leading Chinese respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan, top U.S. infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci call for more efforts to enhance global solidarity and cooperation to beat the deadly #coronavirushttps://t.co/TA52T239D2pic.twitter.com/F79DG9AAf7— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) March 4, 2021
What are the lessons we can learn from the pandemic? Dr. Fauci and Dr. Zhong Nanshan speak about the need for international cooperation, strategy, and honesty from leaders in public health emergencies. pic.twitter.com/aR1KiDRwPM— CGTN America (@cgtnamerica) March 3, 2021
The news comes following the revelation last week that Fauci and his deputies were directly coordinating with the Chinese government over COVID-19 messaging during the early outbreak in Wuhan, China. The transparency watchdog organization Judicial Watch has released new government emails acquired via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which show U.S. government health institutions signed off on COVID-19 related non disclosure agreements requested by Chinese Communist Party officials.
It’s important to recall that the United States and over 100 countries initiated lockdowns exclusively because of the “data” that was being transmitted out of Wuhan. It was faulty, unchallenged Chinese data, repeated by authoritative figures like Fauci and his colleagues, that convinced the world to undergo lockdowns and embrace early, aggressive ventilation of COVID-19 patients, among other botched, unscientific treatment and mitigation measures.
Stanford University Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is featured in Newsweek Magazine condemning the lockdowns across the United States to fight the virus, calling them the biggest mistake ever made by public health authorities. A new study released by none other than the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ironically appears to bolster Dr. Bhattacharya’s claim. Is the truth starting to seep out from the Berlin Wall of lies? CDC report cited in this episode: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/w…
Perhaps more importantly, he argues that extreme caution can backfire and produce outcomes that have the opposite of their desired effect. He uses the AIDS crisis as an example, pointing out that demonizing sexual intercourse and trying to frighten people away from it had the unintended consequence of increasing unsafe sex.
A similar phenomenon appears to be at work today.
“Telling Americans to wear masks when they’re unnecessary undermines efforts to persuade more people to wear masks where they are vital,” Leonhardt writes.
The New York Times published an article on Friday under a simple headline: “Covid Absolutism.”
The article opens by noting that during public health emergencies, absolutism—the idea that people should cease any and all behavior that creates additional risk—is a tempting response. Times writer David Leonhardt gives various examples of this “absolutism” on display in America today.
“People continue to scream at joggers, walkers and cyclists who are not wearing masks. The University of California, Berkeley, this week banned outdoor exercise, masked or not, saying, ‘The risk is real,’” he writes. “The University of Massachusetts Amherst has banned outdoor walks. It encouraged students to get exercise by ‘accessing food and participating in twice-weekly Covid testing.'”
Examples like these are virtually endless. They invite two key questions, Leonhardt notes: How effective are these behaviors in reducing the spread of the virus? And is there a downside?
The Rise of ‘Hygiene Theater’
As Leonhardt notes, many of these actions are essentially a kind of “hygiene theater,” the subject of a recent article in the Atlantic written by Derek Thompson.
The phrase basically speaks for itself. According to Leonhardt, these actions are not rooted in science, and are primarily a form of theatrical presentation that will have little or no actual impact.
Taking every possible precaution is unrealistic. Human beings are social creatures who crave connection and pleasure and who cannot minimize danger at all times.
“Prohibiting outdoor activity is unlikely to reduce the spread of the virus, nor is urging people always to wear a mask outdoors,” he writes. “Worldwide, scientists have not documented any instances of outdoor transmission unless people were in close conversation, Dr. Muge Cevik, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told me.”
Have there been any documented instances of transmission among unmasked people who are outdoors and *not* in close conversation with each other?
So the answer to Leonhardt’s first question—How effective are they at reducing the spread of the virus?— is not difficult to answer: they’re not effective.
The second question, and its answer, is more interesting.
Unintended Consequences of ‘Hygiene Theater’
One might be tempted to argue that these theatrics still produce positive outcomes, since they are likely to make people more conscious of the pandemic and slow the spread of the virus.
Taking extreme precautions is simply “playing it safe.” What’s the harm in that?
The answer is, “plenty.” First, Leonhardt argues it’s not part of human nature to live in a perpetual state of extreme caution.
“Taking every possible precaution is unrealistic,” he writes. “Human beings are social creatures who crave connection and pleasure and who cannot minimize danger at all times.”
Perhaps more importantly, he argues that extreme caution can backfire and produce outcomes that have the opposite of their desired effect. He uses the AIDS crisis as an example, pointing out that demonizing sexual intercourse and trying to frighten people away from it had the unintended consequence of increasing unsafe sex.
A similar phenomenon appears to be at work today.
“Telling Americans to wear masks when they’re unnecessary undermines efforts to persuade more people to wear masks where they are vital,” Leonhardt writes.
For many, this statement probably doesn’t sound particularly noteworthy. It basically has the ring of common sense, a variation of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, one of Aesop’s famous parables, which taught that false alarms can harm humans by inhibiting their ability to detect actual danger.
The Timeless Lesson of Unintended Consequences
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a case study in “unintended consequences,” a term popularized by American sociologist Robert K. Merton in the twentieth century. Basically, it’s the idea that virtually every action comes with outcomes that are not foreseen or intended.
“In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects,” Bastiat wrote.
The problem, he noted, is that humans rarely pay attention to the unseen or unintended effects of a given action or policy. Ignoring these outcomes is one of the great mistakes in public policy, the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once observed.
Unfortunately, ignoring unintended consequences and focusing on intentions is precisely what we saw in 2020, and nobody has been more guilty of this than the Times.
No one is served by ignoring unintended consequences. And the adverse unintended consequences of lockdowns are legion.
If you search for articles discussing the unintended consequences of COVID-19 policies, which are boundless, you’ll find virtually nothing on their site. I was able to find two articles using the phrase “unintended consequences” of COVID lockdowns.
One article, published in September, is a profile of Dr. Bonnie Henry, a Canadian physician and British Columbia’s top doctor who spoke of minimizing the unintended consequences of government interventions. The other is an article in May that discussed how lockdowns could result in a surge of mental illness.
This dearth of coverage is unfortunate. The Times is one of the most influential papers in the world. It has immense reach and a news staff of 1,300 people. And yet—our tiny writing team at FEE has produced more articles on the unintended consequences of lockdowns than the Grey Lady.
No one is served by ignoring unintended consequences. (Well, maybe politicians.) If we’re to understand the damage wrought in 2020 and prevent it in the future, lockdowns must be judged by their actual consequences, not what they were designed to achieve.
And the adverse unintended consequences of lockdowns are legion.
The fact that even the New York Times is finally beginning to discuss the unintended consequences of COVID-19-inspired actions is a sign that we may be, however belatedly, moving in the right direction.
MCViewPoint 