All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
nothing.
--- Edmund Burke
Now
that the first push for the COVID security state is in “pause” mode, there has
been a good bit of commentary, at least among cranks like me, about varying
reactions to the---what shall I call it?
The Covidian takeover? The Great
Reset? It would be nice if there were a
neutral term I could find that would describe the attempt to impose an
authoritarian supra-national government regime by the globo-capitalists at the
World Economic Forum and their friends in governments and businesses around the
world.
The
most accurate term would be something like “The World Fascist Movement,” but
the problem is that no one remembers the economic and political system that was
fascism a hundred years ago. Today
“fascism” just means “something I don’t like.”
Ask one person, and Trump is fascism.
Ask another person and Obama is fascism.
Ask Amber Heard and she’ll tell you Johnny Depp is fascism. The word has been drained of all meaning, and
that’s unfortunate because the real fascists of the1920’s would recognize the
WEF and Klaus Schwab and President Xi and Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and Big
Pharma instantly. This would be a
healthier world if we remembered and recognized the fascism of that
era. Rule by “experts?” Check.
Obsession with identity politics?
Check. Melding of government and
business (a.k.a. corporatism)? Oh yeah. A rapidly expanding nanny state? Yup.
But use the term “fascism” today and a lot of people think it’s when you
call Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce.”
Sorry. I guess I wandered off there. There really is no neutral term for the
nightmarish political battle of the last two years. There’s no nice way to describe the efforts
to terrify the world with a virus, undermine human rights, destroy national
sovereignty, forcefully medicate the population with experimental vaccines,
elevate unelected bureaucrats to positions of absolute authority, and
redistribute wealth from the middle classes to the richest individuals and
companies on the planet. So let’s just
call it the COVIDIAN security state. And
the question is: who is doing it, who is
helping them, and who is fighting them?
Others
have divided the players into a dozen or more categories, but the techniques by
which totalitarian regimes come to power and maintain control over their
subjects have been studied and written about for centuries, and there are
basically five groups that appear time after time, in whatever communist or
fascist or monarchic or theocratic takeover is sought. The countries are different, and the
languages, and the culture, and the history, and the specific lies that are
told, but the evil is the same, and the people who impose it do so for the same
reasons.
My groups,
and the percentages of the population they represent, are similar to those that
appear in historical analyses of other totalitarian takeovers.
1) People Who Believe Tupoc is Alive. (My guess: about 9% of the population)
My
guess is 9% because this percentage never changes. There are always 9% of the people who think
Tupoc is alive, or Elvis is alive, or that Donald Trump will be restored to the
presidency on some random date next week.
The clueless 9% are, for our purposes, and most purposes, irrelevant.
2) The
Architects. (My guess: less than 1%
of the population)
There
is a small group of people and organizations that want different things but
which all stand to benefit from the establishment of a COVID security
state. At the heart of this movement are
the UN and the World Economic Forum, which was established in 1971 and is led
by billionaire Klaus Schwab. These two
groups and countless NGOs are united in support of The Great Reset, an agenda
of environmental, social and economic plans to reshape the world and place it
under the control of benevolent experts like Schwab, Bill Gates, and others
like them. Fossil fuels and chemical
fertilizers will be abolished. The world
population will be cut to a “sustainable” number. Traditional money and property ownership will
disappear. “We have to redefine the
social contract,” Schwab said recently. A
recent article described the WEF philosophy as follows: “Welcome to 2030: I Own
Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Happier.” The organization is not secretive about its
goals, or its efforts.
(The
WEF’s most recent accomplishment is the implosion of Sri Lanka’s economy. After
President Rajapaksa banned chemical fertilizers and severely restricted the use
of fossil fuels in 2021, the country’s agricultural sector collapsed and the
country went from being an exporter of rice to an importer of rice in a few
months. After Rajapaksa fled to
Singapore, he was replaced by new President Wickremesinghe who, like Rajapaksa,
is also a member of the WEF. The country
is experiencing a severe food crisis, which is something it had never seen
before. In addition, gasoline stations
now have armed guards.)
Other
groups and individuals have slightly different motives but also see advantages
in the COVID security state. In America,
leftists instantly perceived that the pandemic could be used to crash Trump’s
booming economy and ultimately defeat him in November 2020. (It does not appear that Trump himself ever
figured this out.) As early as March
2020, it was obvious that red states and blue states were going in different
directions in their COVID responses, with blue states eagerly locking people
down and shutting down schools and businesses
Pharma? Well, duh.
Vaccine makers had no objections to a public health regimen that allowed
them to make hundreds of billions of dollars while being legally shielded from
liability to anyone they might kill or injure.
Similarly, the pandemic was a means for people in the public health or
medical-services bureaucracies to achieve previously unimagined power over
their society.
Climate
change activists, eugenicists, and zero-population-growth Malthusians---all
these activists were obvious allies for the COVIDians. OF COURSE there are too many people. OF COURSE, we have to eliminate the inferior
ones. OF COURSE, the new, better,
smaller world must be sustainable. And
the only way to accomplish these goals is through a top-down international rule
by experts---Gates, Schwab, Fauci, Kerry, Gore, and other extremely smart
people.
3) The
Believers. (My guess: 30%)
What
shocked me in mid-March of 2020 was the overwhelming public acceptance of
lockdowns and mask mandates, and the cancellation of large public events. The NCAA basketball Tournament, the NBA
season, the opening of Major League Baseball, the closing of movies and
theaters and resorts and theme parks---it all seemed to happen instantly, with
no resistance and no public discussion. Bars
and restaurants shut their doors. Shops
closed. You couldn’t get a haircut. The edicts came down from above and were
obeyed. Legislatures and other elected
officials rarely objected, or even asked “Why?”
Because
of the lack of public discussion, the edicts in state after state and country
after country could not be viewed as a considered, rational response to a
health crisis. With no debate in the
media or in our elected bodies, the only fair description of what occurred was
a coup d’état, an authoritarian putsch that enveloped virtually all of
civilized society. Suddenly, the
“experts” were running our world, though nobody had elected them. There were
opposing voices, we later learned, but they were silenced through conventional
methods of censorship or through the sort of intimidation that has long been
practiced on academic dissenters to the climate change orthodoxy. With COVID, as with climate change, if you
question the revealed truth, you don’t get funding, you don’t get tenure, you
can never be published, and you eventually lose your job. With all that at stake, most will go along
with the program.
But we
learned about all that later. At the
time, what I could not understand was the widespread acceptance of the instant
police state, the unquestioning belief that what was being done was correct. In America, I believed, people spoke up. They read things. They talk to their friends. They have a voice. That was how the nation was supposed to
work. It had always worked that
way. Yes, it could be messy and raucous,
and yes, some people are idiots, but the cacophony is what had always gotten the
job done in the past.
I did
not foresee this phenomenon. I was
surrounded by people who instantly accepted the way the government had been
taken over. I knew them personally. They were my friends and relations. At the time, I described it as being caught
in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
It seemed that most of those I knew had been replaced by pod people.
Some
even embraced the isolation. I am the
same age as a lot of old people I know, and many of them are winding down their
careers or are completely retired, and they have a few bucks in the bank. They were perfectly content to stay at home,
have everything delivered, and stream the latest Netflix shows. They discovered during COVID that they
preferred to live their lives that way.
And
they still do. They know the danger of
COVID is vastly reduced, but as long as it is still “out there,” they would
rather stay home and have most of their supplies delivered. They wear a mask
when they emerge from their cells, and they wear it properly, over the
nose. If they are honest, they admit
they wish everyone wore a mask when out in public. (“It’s such a little thing to ask!”) They want children to be masked in school.
Also,
they have had all their vaccines and boosters and they are annoyed that others
have not. Though the knowledge is now
widespread that the shots do not prevent catching the disease, or transmitting
it to others, the true believers still view the unvaccinated as stupid and
unclean because that has been the unrelenting message of the government, news
media, and the COVID architects. In
fashioning an authoritarian system, there must always be an external enemy (in
this case, the virus itself), but there must also be an internal group against
which the rage of the believers can be directed. The demonization of the unvaxxed is necessary
for political reasons, though they pose no danger to anyone. But that is always the case. The Jews did not really poison all those wells in Europe, but it was necessary to
persuade people they did. When things go wrong, or government lies are
revealed, or the “science” turns out to be hooey, there must be a
scapegoat. That’s why the governments of
many states and nations, including this one, are still trying to enforce
vaccine mandates though no one even attempts to offer a justification for them.
4) The Order-Followers. (My guess: 35%)
Historians have reported that Hitler himself
never personally killed anybody. He
never pulled the trigger, he never slashed a throat, and he never switched on
the gas.
In our
COVIDIAN world, when I wonder who is the more dangerous---the true believers or
the order-followers, I always seem to return to this. Hitler didn’t kill anybody; it was the ‘Good
Germans” who spilled all the blood. The
true believers did some of the killing, of course, but their primary victims
were themselves. And so it is with the
COVIDIAN security state. The true
believers lock themselves away from the world and isolate themselves. When they go out, which is not often, no one
sees their faces. However, in my
experience at least, they don’t try to persuade me to join them in their
miserable existence.
I work
with both categories. The true believers
are not numerous. They have jobs, after
all, so they can’t isolate themselves at home full time. At work, as believers, they wear their masks
eight hours a day. You have to be
committed to do that voluntarily.
The
order-followers are much more common.
It’s an easier path, for one thing.
Most of them will wear the mask pulled down below the nose so that, even if they believe masks work, they
know what they are doing is pointless.
When even that becomes tiresome, they will pull the mask below their
mouths. Still, they won’t remove
it. By keeping it on in some fashion,
they signal their obedience to the COVID regime.
I have
talked to some of them and urged them, gently, to lose the mask, but with no
success. And their explanations for it,
six months removed from a city mask mandate, are thin. “You know Jeannette, the cashier? She gave me the mask and said I should wear
it.” “My sister said with all the people
I work with, I should wear one.” “Over
in Home Decor, I saw somebody coughing yesterday.”
I never
accost the customers about it, but they too are easily distinguishable. The believers always wear the mask over the
nose and mouth, and it usually looks new or laundered. Also, they wear whatever mask is currently in
vogue. For a while it was the basic N-95s;
now the cool variety seems to be a new N-95 with the elongated dog-snout.
Maybe
in the long run, there is no difference in the level of danger we face from the
true believers or the order-followers, but the latter are more frightening to
me. The believers have at least been persuaded of something (though it was
through terror, repetition, and other propaganda techniques, and not through
reason). Perhaps they can be persuaded of the truth. Perhaps they can be reached. Perhaps there is a conscience somewhere in
their souls that will someday make them pause.
But the
ones who take the path of least resistance, the order-followers, the Good
Germans? They don’t seem to care about
the virus or the politics or the COVIDIAN state that is being built. They follow one mandate: they keep their
heads down. They are content to be the
ones who are enslaved or killed last.
And we
have seen their work in the past. These
are the firemen who slow-walk their duties when the synagogue is being burned
down. These are the prison guards who
must discipline the political captives.
These are the men in the East German Stasi who quietly interrogate your
neighbors in order to assess your loyalty to the regime. They were just following orders, and that is
invariably their first defense when the communists or fascists fall and they
are confronted with their deeds. “I was
just following orders.”
And we
have seen it with the COVIDIANs. Police
and military have been used all over the globe, even in nominally free
countries like this one, to shut down churches and religious gatherings that
violate whatever “emergency powers” are being invoked. Occasionally, there would be a news story
about a sheriff in some rural county who refused to enforce whatever edict was
coming down from whatever bureaucrat, but those stories were rare, and they
never involved a big-city police force.
You may
recall the near-riot that ensued when the NYPD broke up a Jewish funeral in the
Williamsburg section of NYC. Mayor de
Blasio and the Police Commissioner even defended the use of force against a
thousand grieving Jews. What was
shocking (aside from the video of uniformed cops attacking orthodox Jews in the
streets of NYC), was that the police followed their orders without
complaint. Not a single officer refused
to “do his duty” by crushing an (outdoor) religious observance. Similar order-following occurred across
America whenever a rebel pastor would attempt to hold a religious service
contrary to the current decrees and mandates, but in accordance with the “free
exercise of religion” we are all guaranteed by the First Amendment.
But
among the order-followers, no one is more frightening than the doctors who, on
orders from their superiors and government bureaucrats, refused to treat
patients who had just tested positive for COVID. “Don’t come in to my office,” they told their
patients. “There is no treatment. Stay home and if it gets worse, go to the
hospital.” Tens of thousands of people
were told this by their trusted family docs, and they did stay home, and they
did get worse, and then they went to the hospital and died.
There were
always possible treatments for early COVID cases, and many of them helped. But there were only a few hundred doctors in
the U.S. who defied the authorities and lived up to their oaths. The rest?
Well, the rest were just following orders.
5) The
Dissenters (my guess: 25%)
This is
me, along with many virologists and epidemiologists and medical clinicians who
are far more qualified than I am to condemn the COVIDIAN madness.
When
the virus hit the U.S. in mid-March of 2020, there was never a time when the
public health measures seemed even remotely justified, partly because no one
ever tried to justify them. They were
simply orders that came down from above, and it was often never exactly clear
who issued them. So when public life
ended, and all manner of human gatherings, I knew it made no sense. This is not how we do things, at least in
America. We have elected
representatives, and they debate things, and there are loud, sometimes
intelligent, people on both sides of major issues. Pundits trumpet their opinions on TV and
radio. None of that happened.
All we
really knew at that point was that the Chinese were running some sort of
disease-related operation, but the videos we got were the ridiculous ones of
people keeling over dead in the streets (but somehow braking their falls with
their hands at the last instant), before they were instantly whisked away by a
squad of medical techs in hazmat suits who just happened to be there at that
moment. The bogeyman stuff out of China
was weird enough to make you curious, but no rational person could actually be concerned without further data that made
sense.
That
data never appeared. But then, suddenly,
you couldn’t get a Guinness on St. Patty’s Day.
Also,
it was apparent from the beginning that public health orders being issued would
make matters worse, and it was so
obvious this was the case that it also became obvious these orders could not
have been motivated by medical considerations.
We have known for decades that throwing people out of work has terrible
and predictable consequences---increased addiction, sickness, bankruptcy, divorce,
child abuse, and suicide---yet there was no attempt made to weigh these known
horrors against the then-uncertain dangers of COVID. Similarly, the weight of pre-pandemic
evidence on the usefulness of masking to prevent the spread of respiratory infections
was that masking made transmission more
likely. But then suddenly, on April 3,
2020, Fauci et al. said we should all slap diapers on our faces. (The destructive nature of masking has been
confirmed repeatedly over the past 2 ½ years.)
Lockdowns,
masking, and other measures were all part of the campaign to, “slow the spread,”
and that was the central problem since the goal of slowing the spread defied
any sort of epidemiological logic. From
the beginning, we knew 1) the elderly were particularly vulnerable, 2) the
young were in almost no danger, and 3) only about 15% of the population were susceptible
to catching COVID at all (this would later change). This meant that attempting to “slow the
spread” in the general population would only make the virus more deadly to old people since they
would be exposed to it for a longer period of time.
The
only sensible strategy would have been to slow the spread among the threatened
older people while letting the virus run and mutate through the general
population, where it was almost entirely non-lethal. Instead we did the opposite. With lockdowns and distancing, we allowed the
virus to overhang our entire society for two years but allowed it to race
through nursing homes and other elderly communities. In fact, some politicians (Governors Cuomo in
New York, Murphy in New Jersey, and Wolf in Pennsylvania), actually put
recovering COVID patients back into nursing homes and thus multiplied the
slaughter.
And
what did I do about it? I ranted in this
blog about the COVIDIAN security state and the authoritarians behind it. I tried to tell some people about longer-term
goals of the WEF and the UN to reduce world population, eliminate cash, and
institute a Chinese-style social credit system everywhere. I tried to spread the word about the dangers
of the mRNA vaccines and the terrible injuries and deaths they have caused. Also, I defiantly walked into a few stores
without a mask on when there was a mask mandate in Philadelphia. In other words, I did nothing. And I doubt I convinced anyone about the
danger, though I did learn there were people I know who agreed with me but who were
keeping their heads down.
But at
work, when I was required to wear a mask, I wore a mask. And if I had ever been required to get a
vaccination, I might have done it to keep my job. Many Americans have lost their jobs because
they refused the shot, and what good has it really done them? Would I have had the courage to stand up to
the authoritarians? For what? That’s the question you ask. Would it do any good? Or would I simply lose my income, my home and
my semi-comfortable life-style, yet have no effect on the relentless march of
the COVIDIAN security state?
As a
dissenter, you ask yourself these questions.
And even my quiet and polite rebellion has had a significant
downside. I do not corner people in bars
and lecture them on the latest vaccine injuries reported in the CDC’s VAERS
database. All I do is write articles,
and if asked, I tell people I have not been vaccinated. But I have friends and neighbors who have
dropped me, and avoid me on the street.
There are people Sandy and I used to dine with, at our home or in
restaurants, who now will have nothing to do with me. My family of nieces and nephews and cousins
has ostracized me; I never see them or talk to them, and they never invite me
to family events. A doctor and a dentist
have dropped me as a patient because I am unvaxxed. I was kicked out of a weekly chess club I
very much enjoyed, again because I never took the shot.
Faced
with evil, most people do nothing. What
good would it do? And why should I put
my neck on the line? These are the questions
that nag at me. When I think about the
COVIDIAN security state, my primary emotion is not anger, or helplessness. It is guilt.
I see what is happening and I have done little more than bitch about
it. I don’t know exactly what I could do, but my failure to do more
marks me in my own heart as a coward.
In “They
Thought They Were Free,” Milton Mayer in 1955 wrote about a year he spent in
Kronenberg with ten men who had been Nazis from 1933 to 1945, and basically still
were. Some had joined the party and some
had not, but all were solid lower- and middle-class German burghers who had
lived under Hitler, supported him, and had few regrets about their actions. Mayer didn’t just interview them. He befriended them and their families. He came to know them.
Most of
us look back on Germany of the 1930’s and 40’s and find it easy to condemn the
ordinary Germans who failed to rise up against the monstrous evils of the Nazi
regime. How could they not see what was
happening? How could they let it
happen? But you cannot read “They Thought
They Were Free” without developing a troubling suspicion that these German
people were no different from us, and probably not much different from anyone
anywhere.
At one
point in the book, Mayer is discussing the American internment of Japanese in
WWII with Hans Simon, a bill-collector:
He asked me whether I
had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said “No,” he asked me what I had done
about it. When I said “Nothing,” he said
triumphantly, “There. You
learned all about these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of
us---in our case, not even knowledge.
You knew about things you thought were wrong---you did think it was
wrong, didn’t you, Herr Professor?” “Yes.” “So.
You did nothing. We heard, or
guessed, and we did nothing. So it is
everywhere.” When I protested that the
Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, “And
if they had been? What then? Do you not see that the idea of doing
something or doing nothing is in either case the same?”
Yes, I am a
dissenter and there are many others like me.
The assembling of the COVID security state grieves all of us, but I don’t
know whether there are enough of us, with enough courage, to put a stop to it
and restore freedom in America or anywhere else.
* * * * *
Because of the mutations in the virus, and the lowered
danger, the disease itself is not as powerful a driver of the security state as
it was even a few months ago. But the virus
was always just a means to an end for the architects of this coup. That is why there are still vaccine mandates
though they cannot be justified on public health grounds, and never could
be. Once these pieces of the
authoritarian state are put into place, they will only be removed if the
authoritarians are overthrown. They
haven’t been, and there is no sign they will be overthrown anytime soon.
Masks are still required in healthcare settings (talk about
irony!), and many schools. Unvaccinated
children cannot attend public school this fall in Washington D.C. Unvaccinated people cannot enter the U.S.,
which is why Novak Djokovic, who may be the world’s best tennis player, cannot compete
in the US Open this year. And all the “emergency
powers” are still in place. They await a
new COVID variant, or a twist in the monkeypox story, or maybe some new climate
change terror campaign.
Elsewhere, the situation is far worse. In Germany, there has been no pause at all in
the construction of the New Order. Three
days ago, the German Bundestag reauthorized the “Infection Protection Act,”
featuring mandatory masking, the continued discrimination against the
unvaccinated, and the banning of protests against any of the COVID rules.
In America, there is an election in ten weeks, and while
there are very few candidates urging a return to the worst COVID restrictions,
there seems to be little pushback on what has already happened. Where is the candidate who says, “I will
NEVER authorize another mask mandate” or “I will ban the persecution of
unvaxxed persons” or “I will prosecute Fauci for funding the Wuhan virus lab
and repeatedly lying to Congress and the American people”?
Still, there is hope.
Recently, with the news that there are large numbers of excess
(non-COVID) deaths, Democrats who had claimed credit for vaccinating America
and protecting us all have started trying to shift the responsibility for COVID
restrictions to Trump. As more evidence appears
on vaccine injuries and deaths, and the horrible consequences of the COVID madness,
we may reach a point where further public health measures become political
poison and where no one will want to
be linked to the COVID security state.
As for a prediction on the ultimate outcome, I don’t have
one. Often the totalitarians succeed,
but sometimes they don’t. The architects
of the coup will not stop trying, the believers are unlikely to stop believing,
and the clueless will never get a clue.
But there are two factors that, historically, tip the balance: 1) the militancy
of the dissenters, and 2) the willingness of the “good Germans” to be dissuaded
from blindly following orders.
Copyright2022MichaelKubacki