COVID---The Players

 

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  

MLB Embraces the Security State

 

          On March 16, 2020, Canada closed its border to international travelers, with very few exceptions, and even those who were permitted to enter had to undergo a 14-day quarantine. Throughout the 2020 and most of the 2021 baseball seasons, the Toronto Blue Jays played their home games in Dunedin, Florida or Buffalo, New York  because it was impossible for visiting teams to enter Canada.  On July 30, 2021, some of the restrictions had been lifted and the Blue Jays were finally permitted to host games at the Rogers Center in Toronto.

 

          This year, Major League Baseball is allowing the Blue Jays to play home games in Toronto though there are still border restrictions imposed by the Canadian government. In particular, unvaccinated people may not enter the country.  This means that when the Boston Red Sox went to Toronto, their leadoff hitter and closer had to stay home.  Recently the KC Royals had TEN players denied entry.  When the Phillies played a two-game series in Toronto, Alec Bohm and J.T. Realmuto could not make the trip, and the Phillies had to juggle their pitching rotation as well.  The Phils lost both games.

 

          MLB’s decision to allow Toronto to play home games in Canada grants them an enormous competitive advantage over every other team in baseball since the Jays face short-handed teams in almost all of their 81 home games.  And there is no reason for baseball to allow this.  The Jays’ AAA team has a perfectly serviceable ballpark in Buffalo that the Jays have been using for most of the last two years.  Playing there would provide a level playing field for everyone.

 

          The unfairness of MLB’s position will only get worse the deeper we get into the 2022 season.  Toronto currently is on the bubble for the last playoff spot in the American League.  If they make it, beating out a rival by a game or two in the final standings, their presence in the playoffs will be regarded by vast numbers of fans as grossly unfair.  And then what happens when the Jays have home playoff games where their opponent cannot field a full squad?  The position of MLB on Toronto and its home games really cannot be defended logically.  It jeopardizes the integrity and the fairness of the sport.

 

          And yet….  Though the competitive imbalance MLB has created is the biggest story of this baseball season, you have not really seen it discussed anywhere, by sportswriters or broadcasters.  That is because they view this solely as an opportunity to display their own virtue in having been vaccinated, and to create resentment against a few athletes they call “selfish” who, for whatever reason, have decided not to take the shot.

 

          There is no other reason for the gleeful reporting that J.T. Realmuto would be docked $260,000 in salary for missing the two games in Toronto.  The amount of money a player makes per game is rarely reported because it’s not really relevant to anything, but here it can be used to create hatred against Realmuto in those who don’t make $260,000 in a year, or two years, or five.  And it works.  The reaction to Realmuto on line, and in letters to the Inquirer, has been scathing.  Ah, resentment!  Ah, envy!  Such noble sentiments.

 

          And this is also the calculus behind MLB’s otherwise inexplicable decision to allow Toronto to play home games in Toronto.  Since the League cannot force players to be vaccinated, they are doing this solely to publicly identify unvaxxed players and invite scorn and abuse upon them.  MLB hopes that the outrage directed at some players will get them to roll up their sleeves.

 

          Of course, there is a different way of looking at the decisions of players across baseball who are losing salary because the Canadian government bars them entry.  They have examined their personal situation and have made a decision they believe is best for themselves and best for their families.  And if it costs them money, well, that’s a price they are willing to pay.  They are standing on a principle.  And in spite of enormous pressure from teams, from governments, and from public scolds who write articles in newspapers, they are not backing down.

 

          There was a time when standing up for one’s principles was regarded as noble.  We used to respect the person who bucked the crowd, or “marched to the beat of a different drummer.”  Maybe we even thought he was wrong, but we respected him anyway for his courage.

 

          But no more.  Instead, we get this strange “be a good-German” argument from the press.  Why won’t you knuckle under and go with the mob?  Why must you question the wisdom of your betters?  You can see what this is costing you and yet you insist on thinking your own thoughts and making your own decisions.  Really, Mrs. Parks, why can’t you go to the back of the bus with the other Negroes?  What the hell is wrong with you???

 

          Apparently, one aspect of our strange new COVID security state is that actual laws need not be enforced, but the pronouncements of unelected public health bureaucrats or mayors exercising previously-unknown “emergency powers” must be obeyed without question.  Otherwise, one is silenced, vilified in the press and called an “idiot” on sports radio.  Forget your silly principles.  Go along with the crowd or we will crush you.

 

          Well, I’m not buying it.  Do what you want, J.T.  Believe it or not, there are still some people who admire you for living your own life and doing what you think is best.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki        

 

SUPREME DISAPPOINTMENT

 

          The failure or refusal of the US Supreme Court to identify and punish the leaker of the Dobbs opinion on abortion makes it appear the SCOTUS is just another government institution that prefers to cover up its own scandals rather than do its duty by allowing some sunlight into its darker corners.

 

          Is the Supreme Court just another DOJ, another FBI, another CDC, another Secret Service, another FDA?  I hope not.  In the deep shade of the federal swamp, where no leftist law-breaker ever goes to jail or even loses his job, I had assumed the Supreme Court was different, but maybe I was wrong.

 

          The U.S. Supreme Court is a small, insular group of justices and clerks and administrators who all know each other.  Everyone at the Court knew who did this on May 2, the day the leak occurred.  A certain delay would be expected for the purpose of gathering evidence against the leaker, but after two and a half months, the honesty of the Court is now in question.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki   

THE END OF ROE v. WADE

           On May 2, a draft opinion by Justice Alito was leaked to the world by the news outlet known as POLITICO.  In the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the draft would overturn the 49-year-old opinion in Roe v. Wade and return control of abortion law to the individual state governments.  It was subsequently announced that the draft, though not final, was authentic, and that five justices (a majority), appeared ready to release it.  A leak like this, of a draft opinion in a major case, had never happened before in the history of the Supreme Court.

 

          In the two weeks since the leak occurred, there have been pro- and anti-abortion demonstrations, including at the homes of Supreme Court justices, and calls for prosecution of the person who leaked the draft opinion.  The political analysis about the meaning of the end of Roe v. Wade has been largely fevered and hysterical, with little basis in reality.  Contraception will be banned!  Gay kids will not be allowed in public school!  Gay marriage will end!

 

          I offer a few observations about the leak, the end of Roe v. Wade, and the future.

 

          Over the past 200 years or so, there have been a number of idiotic Supreme Court decisions.  Buck v. Bell (forced sterilization of “idiots” is fine, said Oliver Wendell Holmes), Korematsu  (internment of Japanese Americans totally kosher), Kelo,  Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson.  Eventually, they get reversed, or at least ignored (sometimes it’s too embarrassing to admit they were ever written in the first place, so modern justices just pretend they never happened).

 

          Roe v. Wade has always been in this category.  It was not based in the law or the Constitution, and the only “authority” supporting it was some pop sociology that seemed really smart at the time to Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote it.  Lawyers who read it, if they were honest, knew it would eventually be reversed.  The people who are now “shocked” that the Supreme Court would do this are either completely ignorant of Roe v. Wade and what it says or they are pretending to be shocked for political reasons.  Once it becomes widely understood that overturning Roe will simply return the issue to the voters and their elected representatives, the hysteria will end.

 

          As for the whodunit, the identity of the leaker should not be difficult to discover.  A Justice of the Court would not do this because, while they may have wildly different judicial philosophies and political views, they share a deep respect for the integrity of the Court and its processes.  That means the leaker is almost certainly one of the 36 judicial clerks (4 per justice) that are hired every year from the top ranks of the most-prestigious law schools in the country.

 

          Almost all of these clerks share the views of the justices they serve, at least in terms of upholding and protecting the Court’s procedures, including respect for the secrecy of unpublished draft opinions.  Among the clerks for the conservative justices, there would never be an individual who would care enough about abortion (or any other issue), to compromise the Court’s security.  The leaker therefore can only be a radical leftist from a radical leftwing law school (e.g., Yale).  Only such a person could believe that a political issue like abortion could be worth trashing the Court’s 220-year tradition of trust and collegiality.  Supporting this theory is the fact that the leak itself has been roundly condemned by conservatives but has met with almost no criticism from the Left.  A leak like this also fits with the Left’s recent attempts to undermine the Court and its traditions through court-packing, mounting smear campaigns against conservative justices, and the like.  Similarly, the politicized DOJ has shown zero interest in an investigation into the leak. 

 

          When (or if) the leaker is identified, it will be a leftwing clerk who works for Sotomayor, Kagan, Roberts, or Breyer (who does not officially retire until this summer).

 

          The field of suspects here is exceedingly small---two or three at the most.  And since the Supreme Court clerks and justices eat together, drink together, socialize with each other, and work out together, EVERYONE who works in the building knows who the suspects are.  In fact, they probably know who the leaker is, but currently lack the proof they feel is required to name the individual.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki         

THINGS I DON’T WANT TO FORGET ABOUT COVID

 

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

― George Orwell, 1984

 

          We have now seen two years of madness and lies, and virtually everyone who had anything to do with COVID policy, at any level of government, has something to be ashamed of.  And so begins the revisionist history.  None of our rulers, or their “scientists,” want us to remember the foolish and lethal things they said and did, so we are now being told a vastly different version of what happened only a year or two ago.

 

          At the moment, the most glaring example is the sudden forgetfulness about what we were told about the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines.  They would stop transmission, we were told.  Get the shots and you’re safe forever, we were told.  The path of the virus just stops, they said.  Biden said it.  Fauci said it.  Numerous talking heads in the state-run media said it.  But now that our betters wish to inject all of us with new vaccines and boosters, seemingly forever, we are told they never said those things.

 

          In September, 2021, the CDC definition of “vaccination” was changed from:

 “The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease”

 To

 “The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.”

 

          I believe they called it a “clarification.”

 

          There are many other examples of COVID history that is now being erased, massaged, and disappeared in order to protect the reputations, the jobs, and the liberty of those who led us down this path and now wish to escape any responsibility for the deaths and destruction they have wrought.  Here is my partial list of things I am writing down so I don’t forget them.

 

**********

 

April 3, 2020---the Mask Flip    

 

          As the initial reports of COVID were unfolding, in January, February and March of 2020, we were told repeatedly by all the important public health authorities that wearing masks in public would not protect us from the transmission of a respiratory virus like this emerging coronavirus.  Fauci said this.  Jerome Adams, the US Surgeon General, said it too (and cited some medical research papers to support his position).  Both the CDC and the WHO maintained an official position that masking was inadvisable and might even increase transmission and worsen the situation.  One reason these authorities were asked about masking was that those of us in the West were seeing pictures from Asia with ordinary people wearing paper and cloth masks as they went about their business.  We had actually been seeing pictures like this for years because many Asians believe masks protected them during winter flu season, so some Americans decided they should wear masks too.

 

          There is a racism angle to all this, or perhaps it should be called anti-racism.  I was told by more than one person that they were wearing a mask because “Asians are smart” and if Japanese or Koreans wear masks to prevent infection, maybe there’s something to it.  I would point out there was no reason to think Asians were unusually intelligent, and that in many Asian countries, there were societal values that encouraged conformity rather than independent thinking, so that if you saw people wearing masks during flu season, you might wear one too just so nobody would view you as a rebel.  We remember the Tiananmen Square photo of one man confronting a tank largely because it is so uncharacteristic of the Chinese.

 

          For some reason, none of my friends took off their masks when I presented this argument.

 

          And then, on April 3, 2020, after telling us all for months NOT to wear masks, Fauci, Adams and the CDC all changed their positions.  Not only was mask-wearing an appropriate safety measure against the spread of COVID, they said, it should be made mandatory wherever a COVID outbreak occurred.  (The WHO maintained their anti-mask position until June 8, when they too reversed it.)

 

          This was truly puzzling.  None of the high-profile public health authorities cited any new study or scientific findings that might justify such a reversal.  They just all, apparently independently, and on the same day, changed their minds.

 

          At the same time, it was becoming apparent that COVID policy had a decidedly political element to it, and that red states and blue states had very different views on what should be done.  If COVID policy were being crafted based on current scientific knowledge, authorities in South Dakota and New York would presumably come to the same conclusions, but they were not doing so. The eagerness of Democratic governors to impose lockdowns and mandates suggested that COVID was being used to bring down Trump. The prevailing political analysis at the time, seven months from the 2020 presidential election, was that America’s booming economy would return Trump to the White House, and that only an economic crash could prevent his reelection.  Governments in blue states seemed much more willing to adopt policies that would bring about that crash.

 

          So on April 4, 2020, I started researching the state of medical knowledge on the subject of masks and respiratory viruses.  I assumed there would be paywalls everywhere that would limit my access to medical journals, but there were not.  The research was somewhat time-consuming, but surprisingly easy to do, and after about six hours of work, I had reviewed all the serious peer-reviewed studies on the topic that had been published over the past twenty-five years.  I read everything I could, and not just the Conclusions or the Abstract sections, because I was not trying to construct an argument or gather ammunition to support a particular point of view.  I knew nothing about the subject, but by the end of my study, I knew everything there was to know.

 

          There was nothing ambiguous about the weight of the evidence.  The answer to the question of whether public masking could prevent the spread of respiratory viruses was quite clear.  What Fauci and all the rest had been saying in February of 2020 accurately reflected the state of medical knowledge---there was no reason to think masking would stop transmission, and there was some evidence to suggest masking would make matters worse.  The reason for the April 3 about-face was a complete mystery.  No studies and no data had appeared that would cast doubt on the past 25 years of research.  Slapping masks on the general public was pointless.

 

          I’m not going to review that 25 years of research here.  (If you are curious, you can perform the same search I did, and you will come to the same conclusions.)  But I will summarize it this way: there was very little that was directly on point.  There were articles speculating on improvements in mask design and on the best materials.  There were discussions of the possible dangers in wearing masks for prolonged periods.  There were comparisons between cloth masks and N-95 masks.

 

          The one study that was on point, the only rigorous experimental effort, came from a group of regional hospitals in Vietnam, and was published in 2015.  There were three groups of people among the 4862 participants: 1) those who wore medical masks at all times for four weeks, 2) those who wore cloth masks at all times, and 3) a control group of people who wore masks in the hospital when they would normally wear masks but would take them off at other times.  Everyone was then evaluated for clinical respiratory illness, flu-like illness, or a viral respiratory infection (which would be confirmed by a PCR test).

 

          The only statistically significant result came in the comparison between the control group and the people who wore cloth masks.  Those workers who wore cloth masks at all times had more infections than those who only wore them sometimes.

 

          This was not a very welcome finding for those who want all of us to wear masks.  The CDC has attacked the study for various (silly) reasons, but it seems to be the only randomized control trial (RCT) study done on mask-wearing, and RCT is regarded as the “gold standard” in methodology.  Since COVID hit, there have been no mask studies performed with a real control group because they are now considered unethical.  Since public health “experts” believe masks protect people, it would be morally wrong (they believe), to have a control group of people who didn’t wear masks.  This means that the 2015 study in Vietnamese regional hospitals remains the best study we have on the efficacy of masks.  And it found that wearing a mask made you more likely to get a respiratory infection.

 

          Since April of 2020, there have been dozens and dozens of studies on the effectiveness of masks in lowering the incidence of respiratory infection.  I read everything that came out until about September of that year, and then I decided there was no longer any point to it.

 

          For one thing, none of them were peer-reviewed (because they were released on an “emergency basis”), most did not even attempt to identify a control group, and the vast majority were published by “Associations” I had never heard of.  In these pro-mask studies (that was almost always the conclusion), the methodology ranged from the flawed to the laughable, but there was nothing that could withstand any reasonable scrutiny.  Eventually, these articles made me angry.  People were dying.  We needed some serious scientific inquiry.  Yet all we seemed to be getting were these publications pushing a partisan conclusion that had been ordained long before the article had been written, or even imagined.

 

          There has never been a time when anyone familiar with the literature could honestly argue that masking the general public would do anything to protect anyone or reduce the transmission of COVID.  Yet now, the effectiveness of masks is settled.  It can never be questioned or discussed.  The relentless repetition of the lie has made it an accepted truth.

 

********

 

April 22, 2020---“Too Soon”

 

          Trump is largely responsible for the two years of COVID madness we have endured.  He never saw it coming, and he never figured out what was happening because he would never do his homework.  Since he doesn’t read or study, he was forced to believe what he was being told by the CDC and Fauci and the globalists  who hated him and wanted him out of office.

 

          He should have fired Fauci.  He should have replaced the leftist political staff at the CDC with real scientists.  He should have used the Justice Department to fight Democratic governors in their desire to crash his booming economy.

 

          After the lockdowns went into effect in late March of 2020 (“15 days to slow the spread”), Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was the first to dare reopen businesses in his state in April.  For this, he was crucified by the press across the country.  Trump’s comment at the time was “Too soon.”

 

          I will never forget (or forgive), Trump for refusing to fight and refusing to even try to learn what was being done to America by the radical Left.

 

********

 

Ridiculous Chinese COVID videos

 

          In January and February of 2020, Chinese propaganda videos began to appear, purporting to show people keeling over and dying on the streets in Wuhan.  (Punch “ridiculous Chinese COVID videos” into your browser for samples.)  These were displayed on the internet and on TV around the world as part of the fear campaign launched at the very beginning of the COVID madness.  Many have been taken down because they are so silly, and now expose the amateurism displayed in the initial attempts to terrorize us.

 

          As the quality of propaganda improved, less and less of it was visual.  As we become more technologically sophisticated, visual lies don’t work as well.  There are too many people familiar with video editing, photo-shopping and the like, and are eager to expose it.  Today, using words on a page or a talking head on TV to excite our own imaginations is much more effective for the spreading of fear.  That’s why we never saw the elderly people in nursing homes, dying in isolation, or the people in ICUs, on ventilators.  It would be ugly, of course, but what we conjured up in our own minds was even uglier.

 

********

 

Asymptomatic Spread

 

          On January 20, 2020, a letter from a dozen doctors in Munich was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  They reported that a woman had recently flown from Shanghai with no symptoms, met with people in Germany who later got sick, then flew back to China and only then exhibited any symptoms of COVID.  This incident was the basis for the theory of “asymptomatic spread” that was accepted worldwide.

 

          Later, researchers from the Robert Koch Institute (part of the German equivalent of the CDC), spoke to the woman.  She said she had had some possible symptoms when she got on the plane for Germany, but was afraid to admit it at the time.

 

          The effect of this panicked response to a single anecdote was to reverse centuries of public health treatment of infectious disease.  In the past, if something was “going around” and you woke up with a sniffle, you would stay home rather than risk infecting your friends or colleagues or elderly family members.  We have all done that, many times.  In the past, people were assumed to be healthy unless they exhibited signs of sickness.  Now, suddenly, every healthy person was potentially dangerous.  “Asymptomatic spread” was the justification for quarantining the healthy, for closing businesses and schools, for isolating all of us, for forced masking policies, and banning normal human interaction.

 

          “Even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in the entire history of respiratory viruses of any kind, asymptomatic transmission has never been the cause of outbreaks.  The cause of epidemic outbreaks is a person with symptoms.  Even if there is the rare case that an asymptomatic person is contagious, epidemics are not driven by those carriers.”

                   ---Fauci, January 28, 2020 Press Conference

 

          The COVID madness of the last two years has been driven by a number of myths, superstitions, and lies.  Asymptomatic transmission has been the most destructive of them all.

 

********

 

Safety Protocols, PPEs, etc.

 

          We all have our favorite bits of absurdity in this category.  When I ask people about this, there are two practices mentioned more often than any others.

 

          First is the custom that developed of masked customers entering a bar or restaurant, removing their masks for the duration of their stay, and then re-masking before walking the twenty feet to leave the place.  The practice seemed especially poignant and ridiculous when in addition, all the employees in the joint were required to remain masked at all times.  It always reminded me of those pictures you would see of Kamala and Uncle Joe and Pelosi and Gavin Newsom and thirty other big politicos sitting around a big table unmasked while the masked wait-staff stood over them dispensing another bit of foie gras or a drop of pinot noir.  (You don’t see those pictures anymore since the muckety-mucks figured out that pictures like that made them all look like Marie Antoinette.)

 

          The other protective measure that often gets mentioned is the directional arrows on the floor in supermarkets and such.  One can see the logic behind this, of course.  It costs the store almost nothing to implement and lets us all know they care about our safety.  Undoubtedly, it saved zillions of lives.

 

          My son and I discovered we had different reactions to the arrows.  He would always push his cart in the wrong direction and wait to be scolded for doing so.  I preferred to treat the place like the 24-hour GTE race at Le Mans, so I followed the arrows and graded myself on the number of carts I could pass as I wove my way through the store and zoomed past the little old ladies.

 

          My personal favorite, though, is still being practiced everywhere, and it seems clear it will continue indefinitely, regardless of virus levels, mandates, or anything else.  I speak here of the wiping down and disinfecting of surfaces.

 

          In my big-box, there are hand sanitizer stations throughout the store where customers stick a hand under an electric-eye (NO TOUCHING!) Purell dispenser and get a gob of virus-killing goo.  In addition, the janitor who cleans the bathrooms and floor spills also has the job of wiping down every handle in the store every three hours.  He has been doing this for more than two years, and continues doing it to this day.  In the food area, with all the refrigerated and frozen cases, there are 103 such handles.

 

          I don’t think there has ever been a time when this obsessive surface-cleaning made any sense.  COVID-19 is, after all, a respiratory virus, and transmission occurs when somebody launches it into the air with their nose or mouth.  Originally (two years ago), there was some speculation that it might remain on surfaces for a period of time, and this fear quickly became part of the COVID madness.  Purell made millions.  Store shelves of alcohol and bleach and rubbing alcohol and wipes were empty for weeks.

 

          We quickly learned that getting COVID from a doorknob or a shopping cart was something that just didn’t happen.  On July 3, 2020, an article in the Lancet entitled “Exaggerated Risk of Transmission of COVID-19 by Fomites” should have shut down this particular mania, but as we have seen so many times, once a bit of folklore gets embedded by fear into the public consciousness, reason and science no longer matter.

 

          Subsequent research also had no effect on the true believers.  In February 2021, Nature summarized recent findings in an editorial: “[T]he evidence is now clear.  Catching the virus from surfaces---though plausible---seems to be rare.”  A long article in the Atlantic that same month said the same thing.  Then on April 19, Vincent Hill of the CDC announced that disinfecting surfaces was not effective against COVID.  Yet a year later, it is hard to find a grocery store or big-box or airport or public building that does not offer wipes to sterilize your shopping cart or a goo dispenser for your hands.

 

          These programs are extremely expensive.  Transit systems around the country have spent hundreds of millions treating buses and subway cars and stations with antimicrobial sprays.  And in addition to the cost, there is also the lunacy of it all.  If you check recent news on SEPTA, the Philly transit authority, the last twenty articles will be reports of murders and rapes on El trains, homeless people living in the trains and stations, public defecation, garbage and litter, drug addicts injecting themselves, and the like.  The basic complaint seems to be that SEPTA is doing nothing to stop any of this.  It is, however, still disinfecting surfaces on a regular schedule.

 

********

 

Phrases that will always make me reach for my revolver

 

          “Alone together.”

 

          “My mask protects you!  Your mask protects me!”

 

          “Social distancing.”

 

          “Stay safe!”

 

          “Pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

 

          “Minor and rare.”

 

          “PPE.”

 

          “We’re all in this together.”

 

          “The new normal.”

 

          “Essential workers.”

 

          “We live in trying times.”

 

********

 

The Unforgiven

 

          The COVID madness has been characterized, in large part, by people who should have known better, should have looked a little deeper, or should have performed a minute or two of actual thought rather than blindly following the instructions they were given by those with political and other agendas.

 

          That is far from everyone.  Most people are not going to dig any deeper than a headline in the newspaper or the “top story” on Action News.  Most people are not going to read peer-reviewed studies in the Lancet.  Critical thinking skills are not taught in schools and haven’t been for decades.  Since the Left took over most of the educational system in the 1960s, children have been taught not to question authority.  Those children are now in their fifties.

 

          But I cannot forgive those who had a responsibility to the rest of us, and ignored that responsibility.

 

          I have written at length already about the medical profession’s refusal to treat COVID patients.  On instructions from politicians and public health authorities, and contrary to the oaths they took as doctors, clinicians told patients in the early stages of COVID to stay home and isolate themselves.  There was no treatment acceptable to the bureaucrats, so physicians would not even examine their patients.  A week later, many of these poor souls would be unable to breathe, so they would finally be admitted to a hospital and put on a ventilator, but many would be too far gone at that point to recover.  Tens of thousands of people died this way, because their doctors would not attempt to treat them in the early stages.

 

          Doctors were told not to treat their patients because the federal government had decided to go all-in on a mass vaccination campaign.  Since it would take years for such a vaccine to be properly studied and obtain FDA approval, the only option was to obtain a quickie Emergency Use Authorization (an “EUA”), something that had never been done before for a vaccine.  And in order to obtain an EUA, regulations provided that there must be no alternate method of treatment. That is why doctors were told not to treat COVID patients in the early stages---because if treatment worked, no EUA could be issued, and approval for a vaccine would have to go through the usual years-long process.

 

          But that only explains why doctors were told not to treat patients.  It doesn’t explain why they, in fact, didn’t.  The answer there is simple.  They were cowards, and they would not exercise any independent judgment on the matter.  To a large extent, that is what doctors do today.  They have become so accustomed to following “guidelines” from government agencies and insurers and pharmaceutical companies and public health bureaucrats and the hospitals or medical-service companies they work for, they are little more than government functionaries themselves.  Across the country, it is estimated there were no more than 200 or 300 doctors who took their professional obligations seriously and tried to treat early COVID.  And of course, those dedicated physicians saved a number of lives.

 

          It will be a long time before America’s doctors are forgiven for abandoning their responsibility as clinicians and passively accepting demands from public health officialdom that they refuse to treat their patients.

 

          But America’s doctors were not the only people who shunned their duties in the face of mass panic and government overreach.

 

          The very first clause in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution reads:

          “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

            As many have pointed out, there is no “pandemic” exception.  There’s no addendum that says, “unless the government says you can’t hold services because of a disease.”

 

          And yet….  When Cuomo or Newsom or some other governor tells churches to stop singing hymns or only allow 25% of parishioners in, or close, what do the churches do?  They obey.  Yes, there was some pushback in terms of lawsuits over the most draconian, anti-religious edicts, but for the most part, the response was obedience.  Hymn-singing stopped because, you know, singing causes COVID to appear in healthy people attending church services.  On Ash Wednesday in 2021, Catholic dioceses across America banned the symbolic rubbing of ashes on the foreheads of parishioners because, well, who the hell knows why?

 

          Some regulation of religious practices has always been permitted, but those cases have always been on the edge, at the extremes.  Occasionally, Christian Scientists will be ordered by a court to take their sick child to a medical doctor before he dies.  There has been litigation over animal sacrifices and hallucinogenic drugs.  There is a vast body of case law on employment discrimination where the question is whether an employer may fire an employee for their religious beliefs of practices.  (One of my favorites was a case from California where a school district was permitted to terminate a school bus driver because his cult espoused the religious sacrifice of children.)  But the shutting down of routine religious practices and rituals is something that has not been permitted, and which the de Blasios of America would never have attempted before.

 

          To be sure, there was some rebellion among the faithful.  When police tried to stop a thousand orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg section of New York from attending a rabbi’s funeral, the Jewish mourners refused to disperse until force was used.  Both de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea defended the use of violence to break up the funeral.

 

          A month later, as Leftists filled the streets in NYC to protest the killing of George Floyd, the city made no attempt to discourage the demonstrations until police were attacked and rioting began.

 

          All of which brings me to the next group that owes all of us an apology—the cops.

 

          Those who are given a monopoly on the legal use of violence bear a tremendous responsibility to use that power thoughtfully and within the bounds under which that power is granted.  Because the circumstances under which violence may be appropriate can arise suddenly, cannot be predicted, and may involve danger to the officers, I always give cops the benefit of every doubt.

 

          But that doesn’t mean there are no limits.  When civil authorities in cities and states across the country exceed the authority they possess and order police to stop constitutionally-protected routine religious practices like Sabbath services or funerals, it is the duty of policemen to ignore those orders.  “I was just following orders” is never a legitimate excuse for the misuse of power.

 

          I have heard the argument made that police are in no position to decide issues involving complex legal issues, but there is nothing complicated about this.  While mayors and governors may have some traditional emergency powers that might be triggered by a virus outbreak, activities related to “religion…and the free exercise thereof…” are exempt from the government’s reach.  If a rabbi says Jews should stop doing funerals for a while, fine. If an archbishop says he’s locking the church doors, so be it.  But if Andrew Cuomo or de Blasio try to shut down the practice of religion, they are violating the law, and so are any policemen who follow their commands.

 

          The frightening aspect of police behavior during the COVID madness was not that many cops chose to obey the officials who run our towns and cities, it’s that there was ZERO resistance by the police to the enforcement of orders that were clearly illegal.  One could understand the plight of law enforcers who might be unsure of their professional responsibilities, but the complete absence of any concern for the rights of citizens in this republic must make all of us wonder about their motives.  I used to view cops as the first line of defense for my basic freedoms in America.  Now I wonder whether they are actually a threat to that freedom.

 

          ********

 

Official Lies, and the End of Journalism

 

          I will not forget the lies I have been told every single day by governments, medical professionals, bureaucrats, and their lackeys in the media.  Denial of the lies is now part of the campaign to revise the history of the last two years.  “Mistakes were made.”  “We didn’t realize at the beginning that old people were more at risk.”  “For various reasons, we miscalculated the fatality rates.”  No.  They were not mistaken.  I knew the truth, and thousands of scientists around the world were trying to get the truth in the newspapers and on television, but they were silenced by the globalist Left that was pushing the COVID madness on all of us for reasons that had nothing to do with safety or public health.

 

          When forced to address the lies, the liars will sometimes claim we were lied to “for our own good.”  This infuriating explanation was offered after the April 3, 2020 mask flip by Fauci and the US government public health establishment.  Fauci himself said that we had been told not to wear masks because there was a mask shortage and the existing supply was needed for hospital workers.  Of course, there was no medical research suggesting a reason to wear masks, either before or after April 3, 2020, but let’s not spend too much time thinking about that.  Just accept that he was lying but now he’s telling the truth, and all of it was strictly for our benefit.  Get it?

 

          We all have a tendency to believe, or at least we want to believe, the people who are in positions of power and supposedly have our best interests at heart.  What happens though, after all the fibs about masks and fatality rates and the seasonality of the virus, and how COVID deaths are measured, is that now I cannot believe anything the government says.  Even if the lies were “for our own good,” (and I don’t believe that), there is now no way a rational person can believe anything he is told by official sources, the government-run news media, and the like.

 

          For example, there is a story out there in the ether that mRNA vaccines have caused AIDS.  This may be a crackpot idea.  To me, it sounds like a crackpot idea.  The problem, however, is that we know what the CDC and the WHO and CNN and NBC and Fauci and Walensky will say about it before they say it: it’s a conspiracy theory and there’s no truth to it whatsoever.  They will say it is “disinformation.”

 

          And there will never be any ambiguity or nuance to their pronouncements.  That is how you know they are lying, because there is room for ambiguity and nuance in almost any story.  There is probably some confused finding of a vaccine/AIDS link in a published study somewhere, but no one in government or the media will track it down and explain it.  Instead, they will only tell us the official position.  They will never acknowledge there may be some basis for the story, even if it is easily debunked, because they do not view it as their job to report the truth.  They will only tell us what to think.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki