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The Great Reset, Part 2: A Camp With No Outside

The Great Reset, Part 2: A Camp With No Outside

Authored by Simon Elmer via Off-Guardian.org,

‘Today, it is not the city but rather the…

Published

4 months ago

on

The Great Reset, Part 2: A Camp With No Outside

Authored by Simon Elmer via Off-Guardian.org,

‘Today, it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.’

- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995

In Part 1 of this article, I identified the apparatuses of biopower by which our freedoms and our democracies are threatened in the West today, and which I described as the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’.

As I devote a chapter of my new book, The Great Reset, to each of the last three of these apparatuses of biopower - the UN’s Agenda 2030, the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty and Central Bank Digital Currency - I’m only going to discuss the first of them here, although it comes up throughout my book, because a system of Digital Identity is the gateway to the digital camp in which the other three will imprison us.

They all rely on it being in place for their own enforcement, and in this respect it is the most important and the one that has to be most resisted and defeated. Some form of Digital Identity has been talked about for some time, and although everyone appears to know what it is, there doesn’t seem to be much opposition to its implementation in the UK, which I’d suggest indicates that in reality we don’t understand it at all.

THE GATEWAY OF DIGITAL IDENTITY

During the lockdown of the UK, Digital Identity was discussed in relation to the China Health Pass, which is now fully operative and linked to the Chinese system of Social Credit, and which like a traffic light has three signals of access to different aspects of the public realm and services: green for freedom of access; amber for limited access or only on condition of further proofs or acts of compliance (like taking a PCR test); and red for prohibition on everything from receiving a bank loan, accessing your bank account, using public transport, passing between zones of a city to being permitted to leave your home itself. In Europe, a lot of the member states of the European Union universally or partially imposed — for instance, on members of certain industries, like health, education, police and other public services — the use of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, which was collectively known as the ‘Green Pass’. The technology for this was subsequently taken up by the World Health Organization, which in June 2023, in tandem with the European Commission, announced the WHO’s Global Digital Health Certification Network, which it invited all member states — which includes the UK — to adopt and participate in developing.

In the UK itself, we had the NHS COVID Pass, which was never enforced as a requirement of employment except for care workers, but which private businesses were permitted and encouraged to enforce as a condition of employment, access to their premises and use of their services. In April 2022, as coronavirus-justified regulations were lifted in the UK, the Department for Health and Social Care awarded the £18 million contract to develop the NHS COVID Pass to the Danish IT firm, Netcompany Ltd. The specification for the project stated:

The government may introduce a mandatory COVID Pass to access high-risk venues if the data suggests further measures are necessary to protect the NHS. In preparation for this eventuality, we have built the changes to support two levels of domestic passes. The functionality will be toggled off until required. This enables a quick response if/when the Government invokes mandate. If a citizen is fully vaccinated, medically exempt or has been in a clinical trial, they will be eligible for an ‘all venues’ (mandatory) pass. If a citizen only has natural immunity or negative test results, they will only be eligible for a ‘limited venues’ (voluntary) pass.

In anticipation of this mandate and the functionality of Digital Identity being ‘toggled on’, in the first three months of 2023 the UK Government conducted a consultation on draft legislation for what it called — presumably in an attempt to distance it from the widely opposed ‘vaccine passport’ — ‘identity verification’.

The consultation closed on 1 March, 2023; but the legal framework for a system of Digital Identity was first put in place by the Digital Economy Act 2017, which removed the legal barriers to data sharing in the UK. It was initially anticipated that the Statutory Instrument implementing a system of Digital Identity in the UK would be made in July 2023, but we are still waiting for the Government mandate.

What will this system do?

At present, the UK Government is promoting Digital Identity in terms of ease of access, greater convenience and increased safety. So, under the Online Safety Act 2023, Digital Identity will be a requirement of access to the internet, not in order to censor what we can see, read and write but to protect children from pornography and grooming gangs.

Under the Elections Act 2022, it will be a requirement of voting, not in order to further discourage public participation in the electoral process but to stop illegal voting. It will be a requirement of receiving Universal Credit or, in the future, Universal Basic Income, not in order to force the immiserated and unemployed into obligatory retraining and work but to stop fraudulent benefit claims. It will be a requirement of gaining access to public transport, medical care, education and employment, not in order to control us whenever the World Health Organization declares a new pandemic but to protect the population from future health crises. It will be a requirement of travel and movement between nation states and within the UK, not in order to enforce the restrictions on our freedoms imposed by Agenda 2030 but to stop illegal immigration into the UK and save the planet from ‘global boiling’. It will be a requirement of opening a bank account, not to force us into opening a Digital Pound account but to stop financial crime.

And just as it is in China, the system of Social Credit that relies on Digital Identity for its enforcement will not be restricted to individuals, but will apply to both privately-owned companies and publicly-funded institutions. US asset managers like BlackRock, for example, have made it clear that adherence to the behaviours written into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Environmental, Social and corporate Governance criteria by which they are enforced are now a condition of employment, bank loans, investment and other aspects of business formerly determined by the employment and trading laws of a sovereign state; and the monitoring and enforcement of compliance with these new norms will be increased exponentially with the development and expansion of systems of Digital Identity across the globe.

This enforcement of the biopolitical requirements of citizenship outside of the juridical frameworks of nation states or international law is consistent with the way the NHS COVID Pass was employed in the UK during the two years of lockdown. The decision to require this pass was made by the UK Government, but it wasn’t mandated through legislation, even in the daily coronavirus-justified regulations being made into law. Rather, the responsibility for the enforcement of the COVID Pass was passed onto the private sector. Ultimately, although we have been promised a Statutory Instrument making its requirement into law, I believe the UK’s system of Digital Identity will be handed over to the UK’s businesses, in both the public and private sectors, where it will be enforced as a condition of employment and custom by both employers and those who trade with and make loans to their businesses.

As I will discuss in far greater depth in this book, once the requirements of citizenship are taken out of a juridical framework and become, as Foucault wrote, ‘distributions around the norm’, the more difficult those norms are to challenge. This is the goal of biopower.

The first question any public consultation on Digital Identity should be asking the British public is not — as it did — whether and to what extent it meets this or that objective required by the Digital Economy Act 2017, but rather whether the British public wishes for such a system. The Government has no mandate for its imposition in its election manifesto, and its failure to inform the British public about the system of surveillance and control of which Digital Identity is the key constitutes a dereliction of the duty of any elected executive body to receive informed consent before interfering with the rights and freedoms of those it has been elected to govern. The Government’s sham consultation, to which I responded, provided none of the contexts necessary for the public to make such informed consent. Worse, it assumed the imposition of a system of Digital Identity as a fait accompli. Indeed, by couching its consultation in terms of undisclosed ‘benefits’ to the public and undefined and ideological terms like ‘well-being’, the consultation deliberately concealed the real import, reach and purpose of Digital Identity.

Contrary to what the Government has told us, a system of ‘identity verification’ does not benefit individuals of households or improve public services. We saw this with the UK Health Security Agency’s proposals for the NHS COVID Pass that were nearly introduced in the UK on the justification of tracking and limiting the movements of UK citizens under lockdown. What is more accurately called a system of Digital Identity only benefits those who wish to use such a system to monitor, regulate, correct and, when necessary, to punish those who do not comply with whatever new codes of behaviour, including our speech, the Government and the unelected international technocracies formulating those codes impose upon us.

The ‘Green Pass’ introduced across Europe demonstrated that these will be imposed through prohibitions on our movements, sanctions on our consumptions, extra-legal fixed penalty notices and the removal of our human rights and civil liberties, all of which the Governments of the West have demonstrated they are willing to enforce with extraordinary and in many countries unprecedented levels of police brutality.

Once it is imposed, however, the intervention of the police and the juridical framework within which they loosely act will become less and less necessary, as we move into the biopolitics of stakeholder capitalism. As the UK Government well knows, Digital Identity is not being implemented in isolation from, but in conjunction with, other technologies and programmes for the surveillance and control of the UK population, including the Bank of England’s Digital Pound, 15-Minute Cities, the London Mayor’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone, the requirements of Agenda 2030 and the enforceable obligations of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. Currently being implemented as mere upgrades to the infrastructure of the UK state, these will fundamentally — and, as I have said, perhaps irreversibly — change the ability of the British people to scrutinise, influence or hold our rulers to account. And yet, few members of the British public are even aware of these programmes, let alone how they will be used. We certainly haven’t voted for them. Nor, as the Government’s sham consultation on ‘identity verification’ demonstrates, will we be asked to do so. Digital Identity is the gateway to this collective system of surveillance and control that truly deserves the description ‘totalitarian’.

So little has been divulged about how it will function that it is difficult to say what it will contain; but as part of system of Social Credit, Digital Identity will certainly hold our credit history. It will almost undoubtedly hold our online browsing history. And as the World Health Organization’s Global Digital Health Certification Network indicates, it will definitely hold our biometric data. It will equally certainly hold a record of our social compliance, and what we can learn from China is that social compliance will not only be with the regulations of biosecurity set by a juridical framework but also with the new norms of behaviour we have already so readily accepted and normalised since March 2020. These now include censorship of speech and opinions contrary to those espoused by our Government; increased conditions imposed on our previously inalienable rights and freedoms; and adherence to the dictates of technocracies over whose membership and decisions we have no influence. It will be used to monitor, limit and control our movement through and out of not just our countries but also the 15-Minute Cities currently being imposed on the justification of reducing everything from air pollution to global warming. To this spurious end, it will record and restrict our consumption of energy, heat, food and water.

In practice, it will monitor and record our behaviour, opinions and compliance with the new orthodoxies of woke ideology. And in doing so, it will condition our access to everything from the internet, banking and employment to healthcare, welfare and education. One day, if the Bank of England has its way, it will be the condition of accessing the only kind of currency still in existence, over which it will have complete control.

A CAMP WITH NO OUTSIDE

Why, then, is the British public showing so little interest in, presenting so little opposition to, and demonstrating such passive acceptance of our enclosure in the biosecurity camp to which Digital Identity is the gateway? It’s in order to try and answer this question that, in addition to writing about these new apparatuses of biopower, the second part of my book looks at what are not, properly speaking, technologies of biopower but, rather, the ideologies indoctrinating us for its implementation as the dominant paradigm of governance in the West.

The first of these, of course, is the US proxy war in the Ukraine, which although started in February 2014 with the overthrow of the democratically elected Government, in the minds of most Westerners began in February 2022, as we were emerging from two years of lockdown restrictions. The transition, therefore, from the so-called ‘war on COVID’ to the war on Russia was an almost seamless one, and those obedient to the terms of the former have proven the loudest advocates of the lies of the latter, most obviously about when and why it began.

In certain respects this is a new form of warfare, insofar as the US asset managers that have been driving US foreign policy for some time now are not using the lives of young US soldiers to enforce their interests, as they have in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, but are now using the lives of the citizens of foreign countries — in this instance hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian victims — to force the public assets, natural resources and even the economy of the Ukraine into their hands. It’s a matter of indifference to them that, in doing so, they have reduced parts of the country to ruins, its people to poverty and its institutions to political impotence, except insofar as the carnage justifies them calling on even more US taxpayers’ money to ‘rebuild’ what they have demolished.

Ukraine is a bloody example and warning to the world of what can be done to a formerly sovereign state when the bodies and lives of its people are subject to a war whose goal is biopolitical control over an entire people. Indeed, Ukraine is the testing ground for the digital transformation of the infrastructure of an entire state, including online education and health services, Central Bank Digital Currency, so-called e-governance, including a civil service replaced by smartphone apps, COVID certification on the same, and a judiciary and military run by artificial intelligence. As an image of its dystopian future drawn direct from Hollywood cinema — Ukraine’s 32-year-old Deputy Prime Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has dubbed it ‘Judge Dredd’ — the country has already piloted an AI system that produces pre-trial and pre-sentencing reports that assess the risk of a suspect offending.

It’s to the same end, although employing different means, that the orthodoxies of transgenderism have attained their now unquestionable status as part of the official ideology of stakeholder capitalism in the West in a period of time barely longer than it took to impose the equally official orthodoxies of the war in the Ukraine. Few appear to have considered why, in the middle of the vast upheavals we have undergone since March 2020, governments, corporations and public institutions otherwise struggling to save humankind from any number of manufactured ‘crises’ should suddenly devote so much time and effort and money to writing the orthodoxies of ‘trans’ into our laws, implementing them in our policies, promoting them in our media, indoctrinating them through our institutions of education and normalising them in our culture industries.

It is my belief, for which a chapter of this book provides the argument and evidence, that the orthodoxies of trans are not incidental to the revolution in Western capitalism we are undergoing but, rather, instrumental to the new biopolitical paradigm of citizenship to which we will be expected to adhere — and compelled to obey by the technologies of biopower — in the Global Biosecurity State under construction.

Over the last few years I’ve written many times about the ideology of woke, which has now taken its place as the official ideology of stakeholder capitalism, having infiltrated the Cabinets of Western governments along with Klaus Schwab’s Young Global Leaders, and with just as much brazenness and indeed pride.

In my penultimate chapter, I look at how the discourse of White racism developed by woke is being used not only to silence opposition to the regulations, programmes and technologies of the Great Reset of the UK, but also to force through the changes in attitudes, beliefs and behaviours they require for our acceptance and compliance with such blatant attacks on our freedoms.

As with the apparatuses of biopower, therefore, my aim in the second part of my book is to show how the orthodoxies of woke — which now include dehumanisation of the Russian people and the Lysenkoism of transgenderism — are instrumental to the incorporation of the judicial institution, through which the limits of citizenship have until now been made in law, into a biopolitical paradigm, in which the requirements of citizenship in the Global Biosecurity State are normalised by technologies of power, as Foucault wrote, ‘centred on life’.

Finally, the body of my book is topped and tailed by two short texts. The first introduces the book with the argument that one of the conclusions we can draw from the last three-and-a-half years is that the already questionable division of our parliamentary politics into Left and Right no longer has any descriptive or practical purchase on the paradigm of governance by which we are now ruled, and should be abandoned by anyone serious about forming opposition to it. The second text, in the absence of the comforting dreams with which the UK Left has rocked itself to sleep over the past forty years of neoliberalism, concludes my book by proposing one of the ways in which we can resist — initially at least — the construction of the digital camp being built not only around and between but also within us by the technologies of biopower.

In the UK, as across most of the Western World, we lived through an extreme two-year period of lockdown in which almost all our human rights and civil liberties were removed by wave after wave of legislation on the justification of combatting a respiratory virus which anyone who troubled to look at the statistics and the criteria by which they were produced knew had the infection fatality rate of seasonal influenza. Even that’s not quite accurate since, unlike influenza, coronavirus has no effect on the young, who despite being masked for two years, deprived of their education and injected with experimental gene therapies, are as statistically immune to COVID-19 as they are statistically vulnerable to the myocarditis, pericarditis and other damages to their health and immune systems caused by the messenger RNA sequencing the UK state injected into their arms as a vaccine.

Now, however, the West has entered into a more generalised crisis carousel whose names change, week by week, from global boiling to Russian aggression to the cost-of-living to the resurrection of the threat of Islamic terrorism and, as I write, another made-to-order viral strain. But whatever their ostensible cause, the ultimate goal of the technologies of biopower whose imposition these crises justify is to make permanent what were the temporary restrictions on our rights and freedoms under lockdown.

Indeed, the best way to understand these crises is to ask how these new agendas, these new treaties, these new programmes and these new technologies make the State of Emergency under which we lived for two years permanent. Unfortunately, very few people are asking that question, of themselves or others. Under lockdown, thousands of people were forced into quarantine camps, most famously in China; but the digital camp into which we’re being corralled now, and which is enclosing and dividing us even as we return to bickering about Brexit and immigration, is co-extensive with the space of the state itself.

How is it being built? As I’ve said, Digital Identity is the gateway to this camp, over which is written not Arbeit Macht Frei — for there is no escape from a space without an outside — but rather ‘Freedom is Slavery’. And if we imagine this camp and try to visualise its structure, the Internet of Things, which includes the digital panopticon of quick response codes, facial recognition technology and now ULEZ cameras, and the Internet of Bodies to which it connects us, which as I argue in my conclusion includes smartphones, is the camp’s system of surveillance.

15-Minute Cities, which despite being proposed by the World Economic Forum — a corporate think-tank with no legislative authority over the populations of nation states — are being imposed on UK citizens by our local councils and metropolitan authorities, are the barracks into which the different areas of the camp are divided. Despite their vociferous denials to the contrary, as soon as a municipal authority or legislative body decides when, how, where, how often and in what its citizens can move about in their own country, you are on the road to fascism. 15-Minute Cities are the beginning of the transformation of the space of the state itself into a permanent spatialisation of the State of Emergency, which is why they are both justified as a means to ‘save the planet’ and denied as a ‘conspiracy theory’.

And in case we’re naïve enough — which the UK public has demonstrated itself to be beyond the dreams of even the most cynical globalist — to believe that the limits on our freedom of movement will only apply to cars, and are therefore a good thing, Transport for London has already proposed what it calls, with the ubiquity of one of the most powerful information technology companies in the world, ‘smart transport’. Employing not just facial recognition cameras but the AI technology within them, the purpose of smart transport is not merely to monitor our actions but also to learn from our behaviour, turning public transport into a vast training camp for the digital guards of our future.

Finally, Central Bank Digital Currency, in this spatial visualisation of a digital structure, is the perimeter fence of the camp, which it renders impossible to escape; for once this fence is constructed there will no longer be a space outside its extent and reach, or at least, no space inhabitable by a human society larger than a small commune, and most likely nowhere in the West.

Although the Internet of Bodies is ready and waiting to insert its system of monitoring inside us, with the proto-cyborgs for the future already implanting computer chips under their skin and ingesting them into their bodies, these technologies of biopower are, for the present, being implemented through the nation’s smartphones. This includes, of course, a system of Digital Identity; but, initially at least, Central Bank Digital Currency wallets will also go through a smartphone software application.

In anticipation of which, in March of this year the Government launched its Emergency Alert System, which was then tested the following month on the 82 million smartphones in the UK. It has not been made public how many of their owners responded; but what the UK public needs to understand, and soon, is that when the technologies of biopower constituting the digital camp are in place, this alert will not be used to inform us of whatever crisis the Government has invented to terrorise us with next, but rather to instruct us in the operational status of mechanisms of compliance it will be impossible to disobey except at the cost of our liberty.

I say it again, once the legal framework for citizenship is incorporated into a biopolitical paradigm of governance administered by a continuum of regulatory apparatuses, then legislative, legal and political means of contestation will no longer exist except as spectacles of a democracy long since dismantled. In reality, Western democracy, for some time now, has only existed in the fantasies of an endlessly deceived electorate. But it’s a measure of how far we have come since March 2020, how far we have declined as a citizenry worthy of the name, and how ready we are for the totalitarianism of biopower, that there was no protest and little outrage in response to this trial of our abject obedience. On the contrary, the same mouths and faces were wheeled out by the media to repeat the mantra of the unfailing obedient: ‘Well, if it saves lives . . .’ This is the essence of biopower to which the politics of the West is being reset by stakeholder capitalism. And, somehow, the people of the West have to stop it, if we don’t want to live in a camp with no outside.

Tyler Durden Sun, 11/05/2023 - 23:50

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Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

"Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare…

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March 12, 2024

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Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

"Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending assassination on March 15. The death of American liberty happened around the same time four years ago, when the orders went out from all levels of government to close all indoor and outdoor venues where people gather. 

It was not quite a law and it was never voted on by anyone. Seemingly out of nowhere, people who the public had largely ignored, the public health bureaucrats, all united to tell the executives in charge – mayors, governors, and the president – that the only way to deal with a respiratory virus was to scrap freedom and the Bill of Rights. 

And they did, not only in the US but all over the world. 

The forced closures in the US began on March 6 when the mayor of Austin, Texas, announced the shutdown of the technology and arts festival South by Southwest. Hundreds of thousands of contracts, of attendees and vendors, were instantly scrapped. The mayor said he was acting on the advice of his health experts and they in turn pointed to the CDC, which in turn pointed to the World Health Organization, which in turn pointed to member states and so on. 

There was no record of Covid in Austin, Texas, that day but they were sure they were doing their part to stop the spread. It was the first deployment of the “Zero Covid” strategy that became, for a time, official US policy, just as in China. 

It was never clear precisely who to blame or who would take responsibility, legal or otherwise. 

This Friday evening press conference in Austin was just the beginning. By the next Thursday evening, the lockdown mania reached a full crescendo. Donald Trump went on nationwide television to announce that everything was under control but that he was stopping all travel in and out of US borders, from Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. American citizens would need to return by Monday or be stuck. 

Americans abroad panicked while spending on tickets home and crowded into international airports with waits up to 8 hours standing shoulder to shoulder. It was the first clear sign: there would be no consistency in the deployment of these edicts. 

There is no historical record of any American president ever issuing global travel restrictions like this without a declaration of war. Until then, and since the age of travel began, every American had taken it for granted that he could buy a ticket and board a plane. That was no longer possible. Very quickly it became even difficult to travel state to state, as most states eventually implemented a two-week quarantine rule. 

The next day, Friday March 13, Broadway closed and New York City began to empty out as any residents who could went to summer homes or out of state. 

On that day, the Trump administration declared the national emergency by invoking the Stafford Act which triggers new powers and resources to the Federal Emergency Management Administration. 

In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document, only to be released to the public months later. The document initiated the lockdowns. It still does not exist on any government website.

The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force, led by the Vice President, will coordinate a whole-of-government approach, including governors, state and local officials, and members of Congress, to develop the best options for the safety, well-being, and health of the American people. HHS is the LFA [Lead Federal Agency] for coordinating the federal response to COVID-19.

Closures were guaranteed:

Recommend significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Issue widespread ‘stay at home’ directives for public and private organizations, with nearly 100% telework for some, although critical public services and infrastructure may need to retain skeleton crews. Law enforcement could shift to focus more on crime prevention, as routine monitoring of storefronts could be important.

In this vision of turnkey totalitarian control of society, the vaccine was pre-approved: “Partner with pharmaceutical industry to produce anti-virals and vaccine.”

The National Security Council was put in charge of policy making. The CDC was just the marketing operation. That’s why it felt like martial law. Without using those words, that’s what was being declared. It even urged information management, with censorship strongly implied.

The timing here is fascinating. This document came out on a Friday. But according to every autobiographical account – from Mike Pence and Scott Gottlieb to Deborah Birx and Jared Kushner – the gathered team did not meet with Trump himself until the weekend of the 14th and 15th, Saturday and Sunday. 

According to their account, this was his first real encounter with the urge that he lock down the whole country. He reluctantly agreed to 15 days to flatten the curve. He announced this on Monday the 16th with the famous line: “All public and private venues where people gather should be closed.”

This makes no sense. The decision had already been made and all enabling documents were already in circulation. 

There are only two possibilities. 

One: the Department of Homeland Security issued this March 13 HHS document without Trump’s knowledge or authority. That seems unlikely. 

Two: Kushner, Birx, Pence, and Gottlieb are lying. They decided on a story and they are sticking to it. 

Trump himself has never explained the timeline or precisely when he decided to greenlight the lockdowns. To this day, he avoids the issue beyond his constant claim that he doesn’t get enough credit for his handling of the pandemic.

With Nixon, the famous question was always what did he know and when did he know it? When it comes to Trump and insofar as concerns Covid lockdowns – unlike the fake allegations of collusion with Russia – we have no investigations. To this day, no one in the corporate media seems even slightly interested in why, how, or when human rights got abolished by bureaucratic edict. 

As part of the lockdowns, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as set up in 2018, broke the entire American labor force into essential and nonessential.

They also set up and enforced censorship protocols, which is why it seemed like so few objected. In addition, CISA was tasked with overseeing mail-in ballots. 

Only 8 days into the 15, Trump announced that he wanted to open the country by Easter, which was on April 12. His announcement on March 24 was treated as outrageous and irresponsible by the national press but keep in mind: Easter would already take us beyond the initial two-week lockdown. What seemed to be an opening was an extension of closing. 

This announcement by Trump encouraged Birx and Fauci to ask for an additional 30 days of lockdown, which Trump granted. Even on April 23, Trump told Georgia and Florida, which had made noises about reopening, that “It’s too soon.” He publicly fought with the governor of Georgia, who was first to open his state. 

Before the 15 days was over, Congress passed and the president signed the 880-page CARES Act, which authorized the distribution of $2 trillion to states, businesses, and individuals, thus guaranteeing that lockdowns would continue for the duration. 

There was never a stated exit plan beyond Birx’s public statements that she wanted zero cases of Covid in the country. That was never going to happen. It is very likely that the virus had already been circulating in the US and Canada from October 2019. A famous seroprevalence study by Jay Bhattacharya came out in May 2020 discerning that infections and immunity were already widespread in the California county they examined. 

What that implied was two crucial points: there was zero hope for the Zero Covid mission and this pandemic would end as they all did, through endemicity via exposure, not from a vaccine as such. That was certainly not the message that was being broadcast from Washington. The growing sense at the time was that we all had to sit tight and just wait for the inoculation on which pharmaceutical companies were working. 

By summer 2020, you recall what happened. A restless generation of kids fed up with this stay-at-home nonsense seized on the opportunity to protest racial injustice in the killing of George Floyd. Public health officials approved of these gatherings – unlike protests against lockdowns – on grounds that racism was a virus even more serious than Covid. Some of these protests got out of hand and became violent and destructive. 

Meanwhile, substance abuse rage – the liquor and weed stores never closed – and immune systems were being degraded by lack of normal exposure, exactly as the Bakersfield doctors had predicted. Millions of small businesses had closed. The learning losses from school closures were mounting, as it turned out that Zoom school was near worthless. 

It was about this time that Trump seemed to figure out – thanks to the wise council of Dr. Scott Atlas – that he had been played and started urging states to reopen. But it was strange: he seemed to be less in the position of being a president in charge and more of a public pundit, Tweeting out his wishes until his account was banned. He was unable to put the worms back in the can that he had approved opening. 

By that time, and by all accounts, Trump was convinced that the whole effort was a mistake, that he had been trolled into wrecking the country he promised to make great. It was too late. Mail-in ballots had been widely approved, the country was in shambles, the media and public health bureaucrats were ruling the airwaves, and his final months of the campaign failed even to come to grips with the reality on the ground. 

At the time, many people had predicted that once Biden took office and the vaccine was released, Covid would be declared to have been beaten. But that didn’t happen and mainly for one reason: resistance to the vaccine was more intense than anyone had predicted. The Biden administration attempted to impose mandates on the entire US workforce. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, that effort was thwarted but not before HR departments around the country had already implemented them. 

As the months rolled on – and four major cities closed all public accommodations to the unvaccinated, who were being demonized for prolonging the pandemic – it became clear that the vaccine could not and would not stop infection or transmission, which means that this shot could not be classified as a public health benefit. Even as a private benefit, the evidence was mixed. Any protection it provided was short-lived and reports of vaccine injury began to mount. Even now, we cannot gain full clarity on the scale of the problem because essential data and documentation remains classified. 

After four years, we find ourselves in a strange position. We still do not know precisely what unfolded in mid-March 2020: who made what decisions, when, and why. There has been no serious attempt at any high level to provide a clear accounting much less assign blame. 

Not even Tucker Carlson, who reportedly played a crucial role in getting Trump to panic over the virus, will tell us the source of his own information or what his source told him. There have been a series of valuable hearings in the House and Senate but they have received little to no press attention, and none have focus on the lockdown orders themselves. 

The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore. 

In the early days of lockdown, Henry Kissinger warned that if the mitigation plan does not go well, the world will find itself set “on fire.” He died in 2023. Meanwhile, the world is indeed on fire. The essential struggle in every country on earth today concerns the battle between the authority and power of permanent administration apparatus of the state – the very one that took total control in lockdowns – and the enlightenment ideal of a government that is responsible to the will of the people and the moral demand for freedom and rights. 

How this struggle turns out is the essential story of our times. 

CODA: I’m embedding a copy of PanCAP Adapted, as annotated by Debbie Lerman. You might need to download the whole thing to see the annotations. If you can help with research, please do.

*  *  *

Jeffrey Tucker is the author of the excellent new book 'Life After Lock-Down'

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 23:40

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Fauci Deputy Warned Him Against Vaccine Mandates: Email

Fauci Deputy Warned Him Against Vaccine Mandates: Email

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Mandating COVID-19…

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March 11, 2024

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Fauci Deputy Warned Him Against Vaccine Mandates: Email

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Mandating COVID-19 vaccination was a mistake due to ethical and other concerns, a top government doctor warned Dr. Anthony Fauci after Dr. Fauci promoted mass vaccination.

“Coercing or forcing people to take a vaccine can have negative consequences from a biological, sociological, psychological, economical, and ethical standpoint and is not worth the cost even if the vaccine is 100% safe,” Dr. Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases clinical studies unit at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Dr. Fauci in an email.

“A more prudent approach that considers these issues would be to focus our efforts on those at high risk of severe disease and death, such as the elderly and obese, and do not push vaccination on the young and healthy any further.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, ex-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID. in Washington on Jan. 8, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Employing that strategy would help prevent loss of public trust and political capital, Dr. Memoli said.

The email was sent on July 30, 2021, after Dr. Fauci, director of the NIAID, claimed that communities would be safer if more people received one of the COVID-19 vaccines and that mass vaccination would lead to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re on a really good track now to really crush this outbreak, and the more people we get vaccinated, the more assuredness that we’re going to have that we’re going to be able to do that,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN the month prior.

Dr. Memoli, who has studied influenza vaccination for years, disagreed, telling Dr. Fauci that research in the field has indicated yearly shots sometimes drive the evolution of influenza.

Vaccinating people who have not been infected with COVID-19, he said, could potentially impact the evolution of the virus that causes COVID-19 in unexpected ways.

“At best what we are doing with mandated mass vaccination does nothing and the variants emerge evading immunity anyway as they would have without the vaccine,” Dr. Memoli wrote. “At worst it drives evolution of the virus in a way that is different from nature and possibly detrimental, prolonging the pandemic or causing more morbidity and mortality than it should.”

The vaccination strategy was flawed because it relied on a single antigen, introducing immunity that only lasted for a certain period of time, Dr. Memoli said. When the immunity weakened, the virus was given an opportunity to evolve.

Some other experts, including virologist Geert Vanden Bossche, have offered similar views. Others in the scientific community, such as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists, say vaccination prevents virus evolution, though the agency has acknowledged it doesn’t have records supporting its position.

Other Messages

Dr. Memoli sent the email to Dr. Fauci and two other top NIAID officials, Drs. Hugh Auchincloss and Clifford Lane. The message was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, though the publication did not publish the message. The Epoch Times obtained the email and 199 other pages of Dr. Memoli’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. There were no indications that Dr. Fauci ever responded to Dr. Memoli.

Later in 2021, the NIAID’s parent agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and all other federal government agencies began requiring COVID-19 vaccination, under direction from President Joe Biden.

In other messages, Dr. Memoli said the mandates were unethical and that he was hopeful legal cases brought against the mandates would ultimately let people “make their own healthcare decisions.”

“I am certainly doing everything in my power to influence that,” he wrote on Nov. 2, 2021, to an unknown recipient. Dr. Memoli also disclosed that both he and his wife had applied for exemptions from the mandates imposed by the NIH and his wife’s employer. While her request had been granted, his had not as of yet, Dr. Memoli said. It’s not clear if it ever was.

According to Dr. Memoli, officials had not gone over the bioethics of the mandates. He wrote to the NIH’s Department of Bioethics, pointing out that the protection from the vaccines waned over time, that the shots can cause serious health issues such as myocarditis, or heart inflammation, and that vaccinated people were just as likely to spread COVID-19 as unvaccinated people.

He cited multiple studies in his emails, including one that found a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in a California health care system despite a high rate of vaccination and another that showed transmission rates were similar among the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Dr. Memoli said he was “particularly interested in the bioethics of a mandate when the vaccine doesn’t have the ability to stop spread of the disease, which is the purpose of the mandate.”

The message led to Dr. Memoli speaking during an NIH event in December 2021, several weeks after he went public with his concerns about mandating vaccines.

“Vaccine mandates should be rare and considered only with a strong justification,” Dr. Memoli said in the debate. He suggested that the justification was not there for COVID-19 vaccines, given their fleeting effectiveness.

Julie Ledgerwood, another NIAID official who also spoke at the event, said that the vaccines were highly effective and that the side effects that had been detected were not significant. She did acknowledge that vaccinated people needed boosters after a period of time.

The NIH, and many other government agencies, removed their mandates in 2023 with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

A request for comment from Dr. Fauci was not returned. Dr. Memoli told The Epoch Times in an email he was “happy to answer any questions you have” but that he needed clearance from the NIAID’s media office. That office then refused to give clearance.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, said that Dr. Memoli showed bravery when he warned Dr. Fauci against mandates.

“Those mandates have done more to demolish public trust in public health than any single action by public health officials in my professional career, including diminishing public trust in all vaccines.” Dr. Bhattacharya, a frequent critic of the U.S. response to COVID-19, told The Epoch Times via email. “It was risky for Dr. Memoli to speak publicly since he works at the NIH, and the culture of the NIH punishes those who cross powerful scientific bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci or his former boss, Dr. Francis Collins.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 17:40

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Trump “Clearly Hasn’t Learned From His COVID-Era Mistakes”, RFK Jr. Says

Trump "Clearly Hasn’t Learned From His COVID-Era Mistakes", RFK Jr. Says

Authored by Jeff Louderback via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President…

Published

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March 11, 2024

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Trump "Clearly Hasn't Learned From His COVID-Era Mistakes", RFK Jr. Says

Authored by Jeff Louderback via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Joe Biden claimed that COVID vaccines are now helping cancer patients during his State of the Union address on March 7, but it was a response on Truth Social from former President Donald Trump that drew the ire of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. holds a voter rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Feb. 10, 2024. (Mitch Ranger for The Epoch Times)

During the address, President Biden said: “The pandemic no longer controls our lives. The vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat cancer, turning setback into comeback. That’s what America does.”

President Trump wrote: “The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The VACCINES that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat cancer—turning setback into comeback. YOU’RE WELCOME JOE. NINE-MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU.”

An outspoken critic of President Trump’s COVID response, and the Operation Warp Speed program that escalated the availability of COVID vaccines, Mr. Kennedy said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his COVID-era mistakes.”

“He fails to recognize how ineffective his warp speed vaccine is as the ninth shot is being recommended to seniors. Even more troubling is the documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis, and brain inflammation,” Mr. Kennedy remarked.

“This has been confirmed by a CDC-funded study of 99 million people. Instead of bragging about its speedy approval, we should be honestly and transparently debating the abundant evidence that this vaccine may have caused more harm than good.

“I look forward to debating both Trump and Biden on Sept. 16 in San Marcos, Texas.”

Mr. Kennedy announced in April 2023 that he would challenge President Biden for the 2024 Democratic Party presidential nomination before declaring his run as an independent last October, claiming that the Democrat National Committee was “rigging the primary.”

Since the early stages of his campaign, Mr. Kennedy has generated more support than pundits expected from conservatives, moderates, and independents resulting in speculation that he could take votes away from President Trump.

Many Republicans continue to seek a reckoning over the government-imposed pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

President Trump’s defense of Operation Warp Speed, the program he rolled out in May 2020 to spur the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines amid the pandemic, remains a sticking point for some of his supporters.

Vice President Mike Pence (L) and President Donald Trump deliver an update on Operation Warp Speed in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Nov. 13, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Operation Warp Speed featured a partnership between the government, the military, and the private sector, with the government paying for millions of vaccine doses to be produced.

President Trump released a statement in March 2021 saying: “I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!”

President Trump said about the COVID-19 vaccine in an interview on Fox News in March 2021: “It works incredibly well. Ninety-five percent, maybe even more than that. I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly.

“But again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that and I agree with that also. But it’s a great vaccine, it’s a safe vaccine, and it’s something that works.”

On many occasions, President Trump has said that he is not in favor of vaccine mandates.

An environmental attorney, Mr. Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that aims to end childhood health epidemics by promoting vaccine safeguards, among other initiatives.

Last year, Mr. Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan that ivermectin was suppressed by the FDA so that the COVID-19 vaccines could be granted emergency use authorization.

He has criticized Big Pharma, vaccine safety, and government mandates for years.

Since launching his presidential campaign, Mr. Kennedy has made his stances on the COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccines in general, a frequent talking point.

“I would argue that the science is very clear right now that they [vaccines] caused a lot more problems than they averted,” Mr. Kennedy said on Piers Morgan Uncensored last April.

“And if you look at the countries that did not vaccinate, they had the lowest death rates, they had the lowest COVID and infection rates.”

Additional data show a “direct correlation” between excess deaths and high vaccination rates in developed countries, he said.

President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have similar views on topics like protecting the U.S.-Mexico border and ending the Russia-Ukraine war.

COVID-19 is the topic where Mr. Kennedy and President Trump seem to differ the most.

Former President Donald Trump intended to “drain the swamp” when he took office in 2017, but he was “intimidated by bureaucrats” at federal agencies and did not accomplish that objective, Mr. Kennedy said on Feb. 5.

Speaking at a voter rally in Tucson, where he collected signatures to get on the Arizona ballot, the independent presidential candidate said President Trump was “earnest” when he vowed to “drain the swamp,” but it was “business as usual” during his term.

John Bolton, who President Trump appointed as a national security adviser, is “the template for a swamp creature,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Scott Gottlieb, who President Trump named to run the FDA, “was Pfizer’s business partner” and eventually returned to Pfizer, Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy said that President Trump had more lobbyists running federal agencies than any president in U.S. history.

“You can’t reform them when you’ve got the swamp creatures running them, and I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do something different,” Mr. Kennedy said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump “did not ask the questions that he should have,” he believes.

President Trump “knew that lockdowns were wrong” and then “agreed to lockdowns,” Mr. Kennedy said.

He also “knew that hydroxychloroquine worked, he said it,” Mr. Kennedy explained, adding that he was eventually “rolled over” by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his advisers.

President Donald Trump greets the crowd before he leaves at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit in Washington on Dec. 8, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

MaryJo Perry, a longtime advocate for vaccine choice and a Trump supporter, thinks votes will be at a premium come Election Day, particularly because the independent and third-party field is becoming more competitive.

Ms. Perry, president of Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights, believes advocates for medical freedom could determine who is ultimately president.

She believes that Mr. Kennedy is “pulling votes from Trump” because of the former president’s stance on the vaccines.

“People care about medical freedom. It’s an important issue here in Mississippi, and across the country,” Ms. Perry told The Epoch Times.

“Trump should admit he was wrong about Operation Warp Speed and that COVID vaccines have been dangerous. That would make a difference among people he has offended.”

President Trump won’t lose enough votes to Mr. Kennedy about Operation Warp Speed and COVID vaccines to have a significant impact on the election, Ohio Republican strategist Wes Farno told The Epoch Times.

President Trump won in Ohio by eight percentage points in both 2016 and 2020. The Ohio Republican Party endorsed President Trump for the nomination in 2024.

“The positives of a Trump presidency far outweigh the negatives,” Mr. Farno said. “People are more concerned about their wallet and the economy.

“They are asking themselves if they were better off during President Trump’s term compared to since President Biden took office. The answer to that question is obvious because many Americans are struggling to afford groceries, gas, mortgages, and rent payments.

“America needs President Trump.”

Multiple national polls back Mr. Farno’s view.

As of March 6, the RealClearPolitics average of polls indicates that President Trump has 41.8 percent support in a five-way race that includes President Biden (38.4 percent), Mr. Kennedy (12.7 percent), independent Cornel West (2.6 percent), and Green Party nominee Jill Stein (1.7 percent).

A Pew Research Center study conducted among 10,133 U.S. adults from Feb. 7 to Feb. 11 showed that Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents (42 percent) are more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (15 percent) to say they have received an updated COVID vaccine.

The poll also reported that just 28 percent of adults say they have received the updated COVID inoculation.

The peer-reviewed multinational study of more than 99 million vaccinated people that Mr. Kennedy referenced in his X post on March 7 was published in the Vaccine journal on Feb. 12.

It aimed to evaluate the risk of 13 adverse events of special interest (AESI) following COVID-19 vaccination. The AESIs spanned three categories—neurological, hematologic (blood), and cardiovascular.

The study reviewed data collected from more than 99 million vaccinated people from eight nations—Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, New Zealand, and Scotland—looking at risks up to 42 days after getting the shots.

Three vaccines—Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines as well as AstraZeneca’s viral vector jab—were examined in the study.

Researchers found higher-than-expected cases that they deemed met the threshold to be potential safety signals for multiple AESIs, including for Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), myocarditis, and pericarditis.

A safety signal refers to information that could suggest a potential risk or harm that may be associated with a medical product.

The study identified higher incidences of neurological, cardiovascular, and blood disorder complications than what the researchers expected.

President Trump’s role in Operation Warp Speed, and his continued praise of the COVID vaccine, remains a concern for some voters, including those who still support him.

Krista Cobb is a 40-year-old mother in western Ohio. She voted for President Trump in 2020 and said she would cast her vote for him this November, but she was stunned when she saw his response to President Biden about the COVID-19 vaccine during the State of the Union address.

“I love President Trump and support his policies, but at this point, he has to know they [advisers and health officials] lied about the shot,” Ms. Cobb told The Epoch Times.

“If he continues to promote it, especially after all of the hearings they’ve had about it in Congress, the side effects, and cover-ups on Capitol Hill, at what point does he become the same as the people who have lied?” Ms. Cobb added.

“I think he should distance himself from talk about Operation Warp Speed and even admit that he was wrong—that the vaccines have not had the impact he was told they would have. If he did that, people would respect him even more.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 17:00

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