From LifeSiteNews

Editor’s note: The following text is taken from a speech delivered by radiologist and political commentator Scott Atlas to the Independent Medical Alliance conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 5, 2025. Transcription provided by Dr. Robert Malone.

ATLANTA (Robert Malone) — First, thank you to the organizers, and to my many friends and supporters here. It’s great to be here – surrounded by people who believe in personal freedom!

At the recent international Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) forum in London, I was invited to address the question, “Can Institutions be Reformed?” Begun with Jordan Peterson, ARC joins voices from all over the world to discuss how to refresh the institutions and best values of Western heritage, values that provided the world with history’s most successful societies, particularly the commitment to freedom.

I asked that audience to first consider:

Why, at this moment in history, are we finally focusing on how institutions should be reformed, or if institutions can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing – editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and agenda-driven schools and universities increasingly unbalanced toward the left, with many conservative faculty and students often self-censoring, afraid to offer unpopular views.

The answer? It is COVID, the pandemic mismanagement specifically – the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.

COVID fully exposed the massive, across-the-board, institutional failure – including the shocking reality of overt censorship in our country, the loss of freedoms and the frank violation of human rights – in this country, one explicitly founded on a commitment to freedom.

Yet, oddly, the pandemic remained invisible at the ARC conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers addressing freedom. It was the elephant in the room – just as explaining the truth about lockdowns, the pseudoscience mandates on masks and social distancing, closing churches and businesses, prohibiting visits to elderly parents in nursing homes while they die – all are missing from post-election discussions today in the United States, including, notably, any of the very public statements and proclamations from the new administration about health care today.

Today, in the wake of COVID, we are left with an undeniable crisis in health. Trust in health guidance has plummeted more rapidly since 2019 than any other government institution, with almost two-thirds now rating the FDA and the CDC as “only fair or poor.”

Half of America no longer has much confidence in science itself. Trust in our doctors and hospitals dropped from 71 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2024. The loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those who held power, who were relied upon to use critical thinking and an ethical compass on behalf of the public, who were handed the precious gift of automatic credibility and almost blind trust.

To understand how to move forward to restore trust, it’s important to first acknowledge basic facts about the pandemic, and keep repeating them, because truth serves as the starting point of all rational discussion. And we must live in a society where facts are acknowledged.

Remember – lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns.

Indeed, lockdowns were widely instituted, they failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread – that’s the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024; Atlas, 2024.

Lockdowners ignored Henderson’s classic review 15 years earlier showing lockdowns were both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection, first recommended on national media in March 2020 independently by Ioannidis, by Katz, and by me (Atlas) – and then repeatedly for months – based on data already known back then, in spring of 2020. It was not learned 7 months later in 2020, when the Great Barrington Declaration reiterated it, or in 2021, or 2022, or more recently.

And the Birx-Fauci lockdowns directly inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed millions, especially, sinfully, the poor. “The U.S. alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths (through July 2023) if it had the performance of Sweden,” according to a review of 34 countries.  Bianchi calculates that over the next 15-20 years, the unemployment alone will cause another million additional American deaths – from the economic shutdown, not the virus.

Beyond a reckless disregard for foreseeable death from their policies, America’s leaders imposed sinful harms and long-lasting damage on our children, the totality of which may not be realized for decades. Mandatory school closings, forced isolation of teens and college students, and required injections of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting to shield adults will be a permanent black mark on America.

It is also worth remembering that this was a health policy problem.

While credentials are not the sole determinant of expertise, I was the only health policy scholar on the White House Task Force and advising the president. Virology is not health policy; epidemiology is not health policy. And while physicians are important in contributing, they are not inherently expert in health policy. Those are only pieces of a larger, more complex puzzle. The stunning fact is – I was the only medical expert there focused on stopping both the death and destruction from the virus and the death and destruction from the policy itself.

As Hannah Arendt observed in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”:

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality.

More than massive incompetence, more than a fundamental lack of critical thinking, we saw the disappearance of society’s moral compass, so pervasive that we have rightfully lost trust in our institutions, leaders, and fellow citizens, trust that is essential to the function of any free and diverse society.

Why did free people accept these draconian, unprecedented, and illogical lockdowns?

This is the question. And the answer reveals the reason for today’s silence on the pandemic.

Clearly, censorship and propaganda are key parts of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two fallacies – that a consensus of experts on lockdowns existed, and dissenters to that false consensus were highly dangerous.

Censorship first was done by the media companies themselves – when it counted most:

• In 2020, before the Biden administration, when school closures and lockdowns were being implemented;
• May 2020, YouTube bragged about its “aggressive policies against misinformation”;
• August 2020, Facebook shamelessly admitted to the Washington Post it had already taken down 7 million posts on the pandemic;
• My interviews as advisor to the president were pulled down by YouTube on September 11, 2020, by Twitter blocking me on October 18, 2020.

You might think the public – in a free society – should know what the advisor to the president was saying?

And what was the response to truth at America’s universities, our centers for the free exchange of ideas, including Stanford, my employer?

Censorship: character assassination, intimidation, and to me, formal censure.

Why is censorship used? To shut someone up, yes; but more importantly, to deceive the public – to stop others from hearing, to convince a naïve public there is a “consensus on truth.”

Truth is not a team sport.

Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles. It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others.

I am proud to be an outlier – happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong – but Cancel Culture is effective because it stops others from speaking. I received hundreds of emails from doctors and scientists all over the country, including from Stanford, from other professors, and from inside the NIH, saying, “Keep talking, Scott, you’re 100 percent right, but we’re afraid for our families and our jobs.”

And indeed, no one at Stanford Medical School – not a single faculty member there – spoke publicly against their attack on me. Only Martin Kulldorff, then a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote in and publicly challenged the 98 signatories at Stanford to debate on whether I was correct or not (none accepted that challenge!).

But that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is not simply “issue fatigue.”

It is also that so many smart people, including many claiming to support the new “disruptors,” bought into the irrational measures when it counted most, when our kids and particularly the poor were being destroyed in 2020, uncomfortable to discuss and admit, but far more fundamental than the Sars2 origin, or Fauci, or the vaccine. That acquiescence, that silence, that cowardice, and that failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that no one wants to admit.

Today, disruption is sorely needed, and many are basking in the resounding victory of history’s most disruptive politician, President Donald J. Trump.

As promised, his new administration is moving quickly, disrupting on several fronts: national security, energy, trade, justice, immigration, and perhaps most importantly with Elon Musk’s effort to eliminate government waste and fraud, and protect our money. After all, the government has no money – it’s all our money, taxpayers’ money!

In health care, important changes in the status quo have also begun, first with Elon Musk’s much needed DOGE, streamlining tens of thousands of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats while exposing massive fraud and waste in programs like Medicaid.

And Secretary of HHS Bobby Kennedy has also provoked an important, new national dialogue with his “Make America Healthy Again” mantra focused on wholesome foods to achieve the goal everyone readily supports – good health for themselves and their children. And no doubt, ensuring safety of all drugs and eliminating corruption in pharma and the food industry are also crucial to health. I am a strong supporter of those ideas.

We also have two excellent appointments in health – my friends and colleagues, Marty Makary to FDA and Jay Bhattacharya to NIH. Both Marty and Jay are highly knowledgeable, have top training and expertise, and are committed to critical thinking, to legitimate science, and most importantly to free scientific debate.

But I am concerned that most are simultaneously eager to “turn the page” on the human rights violations, the censorship, the true “constitutional crisis” – no setting the record straight, no official recognition of facts, no accountability? The ultimate disruptor won, and his disruptor appointees will now be in charge – so all is well?

Silently turning the page on modern history’s most egregious societal failure would be extraordinarily harmful. Failure to issue official statements of truth by the new government health agency leaders about the pandemic management would prevent closure for the millions who lost loved ones and whose children suffered such harms. And it would completely eliminate all accountability. Remember, only public accountability will prevent recurrence, and accountability is necessary to restore trust in institutions, leadership, and among fellow citizens.

My second concern: the era of trusting experts based solely on credentials must be over. But will that backlash against the failed “expert class” usher in a different wave of false belief? We cannot forget that legitimate expertise is still legitimate; that known, solid medical science is still valid; that unfounded theories based on simple correlations are not scientifically sound.

And we do not want to inadvertently replicate the cancel culture that harmed so many, with another wave of demonizing anyone who doesn’t 100 percent support the new narratives. It’s already begun – that if you disagree with any of the incoming opinions, then you must be “bought by pharma!” Blind support is just as bad as blind opposition; critical thinking must prevail.

What reforms are needed now?

• The first step to restore trust is formal, official statements of truth on the COVID lockdowns, masks, and other pseudoscience mandates from new HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, CMS leaders.
• We need to forbid – by law – all shutdowns and reset that the CDC and other health agencies are (only) advisory. They recommend; they give information – they don’t set laws. They don’t have the power to set mandates. And if our guaranteed freedoms are not always valid, especially during crises, then they are not guaranteed at all.
• We need to add term limits (5 years?) to all mid- and top-level health agency positions. We cannot continue the perverse incentives of career bureaucrats accruing personal power, like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx with their 30-plus years in government.
• All new heads of HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC, and CMS should be prohibited from post-government company board positions in health sectors they regulate for ~5 years. It’s unethical, an overt conflict-of-interest. Why hasn’t that been announced?
• We need to forbid drug royalty sharing by employees of the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC. $325 million of royalties were shared with pharma by those people over the 10 years prior to the pandemic. That’s a shocking conflict of interest.
• We should forbid all mandates forcing people to take drugs. First, the essence of all ethical medical practice is informed consent. And what kind of a “free country” requires you to inject a drug into your child or yourself? No – that’s antithetical to freedom. In public health, you give the information… you shouldn’t need to force anything legitimate, but you do need to prove the case.
• We need to require the immediate posting of discussions in all FDA, CDC, and NIH meetings. They work for us. What are they saying? We should know in real-time.
• We need accountability for all government funding. We have 15+ universities getting >$500M/year from NIH alone. The essence of research is free debate. If they’re thwarting that with intimidation, like faculty censures, why would they be entitled to U.S. taxpayers’ money?

More broadly, I and others are working on policies to ensure the free exchange of ideas – the essence of all legitimate science, the basis for the mission of education.

Ideological gatekeeping in public discourse has no place in free societies, especially in science and health.

Here’s the point – the solution to misinformation is more information. No one should be trusted to be the arbiter of truth.

Ultimately, most solutions come from individuals, and ultimately, it is individuals, not institutions, who will save freedom.

I fear we still have a disastrous void in courage in our society today.

To quote CS Lewis, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

We cannot have a peaceful, free society if it’s filled with people who lack the courage to speak and act with certainty on Hannah Arendt’s “elementary questions of morality.”

Finally, to the young people here, never forget what GK Chesterton said:

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.

Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

While globalists screech that Trump has descended into ‘madness,’ his ‘Liberation Day’ tariff plan that has shocked global markets is actually rooted in the combination of two economic theories that argue for ‘balanced’ trade over ‘free’ trade.

We are used to seeing the effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the blue-haired, red-faced hysterics who call the President “Orange Hitler.” Yet the introduction of tariffs on “Liberation Day” has seen the constituency of the differently-saned explode in a fit of rage at this “tariff madness.” 

As global markets “plunge,” Trump replied to critics that “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

“We have been treated so badly by other countries – because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen. They took our businesses, they took our money, they took our jobs,” he says, saying American wealth has been effectively “moved” abroad. Trump promised that this “will eventually be straightened out – and our country will be solid and strong again”. 

Taking Trump’s medicine

Is his remedy worse than the disease? MSNBC said the crash in global stock markets was the “cascading effect of stupid” tariffs imposed by Trump on U.S. imports. Britain’s Sky News came out swinging too, saying they were “the biggest assault on global trade since World War Two.”

Stocks in the USA, London, Europe, China and across Asia have “plummeted,” as the BBC and others have reported. The U.K.’s Financial Times said “political pressure” resulting from the painful “medicine” will mean “Trump’s tariffs won’t last long.” Yet the liberal bastion of The Guardian dared to suggest there may be a “masterplan” in “shaking up the global economy.” 

Looking beyond the hysterical headlines, one writer on SubStack – Tree of Woe – has read the book on “scaled tariffs” which explains the method in Trump’s so-called madness.

1. Trump delivers

Tree of Woe, who recommends the medicine of “muscular Christianity” to combat the sickness of our times, introduces his readers to the fact that Trump campaigned on: “…plac[ing] tariffs that would raise revenue, protect American manufacturing, and restore balanced trade to our global economy.” 

This was followed up on April 2 with the imposition of scaled tariffs – called “Liberation Day for American Trade” by Trump: 

As Tree of Woe notes, the reaction from the globalist media was exceptional – even for them: 

Soon after the unveiling of Trump’s executive order, the forces of neoliberal globalism orchestrated a counterattack of such rhetorical fierceness and economic malignity that it is virtually unparalleled in the history of fiercely malign economic rhetoric.

Anything seen as a threat to the liberal globalist forced consensus is branded as stupid, extremist or destructive. And so it was with the tariffs, whose aim is to replace imbalance and deepening debt with fair trade – and sustainable prosperity.

2. Theoretical basis for tariffs

Woe then shows how a book on economics provides the “theoretical basis for the Liberation Day tariffs.” 

The book is called “Balanced Trade: Ending the Unbearable Cost of America’s Trade Deficits.” It was published in 2014 by three brothers – Jesse, Howard and the late Raymond Richman. 

Jesse Richman had first published on “The Scaled Tariff” as a method of “producing balanced trade” in 2011.  

As Tree of Woe explains, “…the book challenges the orthodox theory that free trade is always beneficial and argues for an alternate policy they call balanced trade.” He quotes the Richman brothers’ own explanation: 

For the last several decades, the United States has generally played a cooperative strategy on trade with China and other[s]… U.S. markets have been open to Chinese goods…American leaders selected free trade on the basis of the (false) hope that China would reciprocate by opening its markets to American firms.

‘Free trade’ = American debt 

Did China “liberalize” along with the rest of the global system – as Clinton prophesied in the 1990s? 

The answer is no. Is this market balanced? The Richmans say, “In return for Chinese products, Americans go ever deeper into debt.” 

Debt is a major problem here. The U.S. must refinance a quarter of its national debt – 9 trillion dollars – in 2025 and must do the same for a total of 28 trillion dollars in debt over the next four years. How can Americans reverse this decline?  

The aptly named Richmans proposed one solution: “The scaled tariff.”

Extraordinary nonsense?

Does this add up to an answer? U.S. author James Surowiecki is billed as “the man who cracked the math” on Trump’s tariffs. He said the tariffs were “absurd,” and “based on imaginary numbers” – leading to a “woefully simplistic” view of world trade whose aim of balancing it was “an impossible, and not even desirable, goal.”

4. Doing the math on tariffs

Yet it seems it is Mr Surowiecki’s sums which do not add up. As Tree of Woe explains:  

Now, let’s compare the Richmans’ approach to the Liberation Day tariff formula that Surowiecki called ‘extraordinary nonsense.’

The Liberation Day tariff formula takes the U.S. trade deficit with that country and dividing it by the value of the country’s exports to the United States, then divides that value in half. For instance, if China had a trade deficit with the US of $298 billion, and exports of $427 billion, then 0.5 x $298 billion / $427 billion) ~ 35%. 

Do you see? Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs are calculated with the exact same formula as the Richmans’ scaled tariffs.

Tree of Woe explains:  

In fact, if you read Trump’s executive order, it reads as if it was written by the Richmans. 

Rarely in the history of presidential policy has a scholars policy formulation been so precisely followed.

He then supplies a little more detail:  

The only difference is that Trump has also included a national strategic tariff of 10% as a baseline.

Where does this come from? Again, Tree of Woe shows it is inspired by another economist. 

Trump trade policy is simply Ian Fletcher’s Free Trade Doesn’t Work combined with the Richmans’ Balanced Trade! 

Why are these two models used by Trump?   

The difference between the two is fundamentally a difference in priorities.

Fletcher prioritizes protection of key industry, while the Richmans emphasize reciprocity in trade flows.

5. The goal is balanced trade

So what does this mean in practice? 

The Trump Administration has hedged its position – it’s adopted the scaled tariff in full, but with a low 10% national strategic tariff (Fletcher recommended 25%).  

What is the overall goal? “Balanced trade,” as Tree of Woe puts it, combined with mutual or reciprocal trade agreements. 

Both the Richmans’ book and the Trump Administration’s executive order offer the same answer here. Since the goal is not to achieve ‘free trade,’ it is to achieve balanced trade, therefore the method by which this is achieved is not “reciprocity of tariffs” but reciprocity of trade flows.

Conclusion: Balancing power

The wider foreign policy of the Trump administration is heavily influenced by realists like Dr. Sumantra Maitra, whose central point is that “power begs to be balanced.” These are tariffs which correct imbalance in trade and will reduce or even vanish where a balance is reached.  

They punish “unfair” trade:  

When trade is balanced, tariffs go to zero (or to 10%, in the Trump version). It’s clean, it’s efficient, and it’s effective.  

Thus, Trump’s tariffs are reciprocal tariffs – but what they reciprocate against is unfair trade practice in generally, evidenced by an imbalance of trade, and not tariffs specifically. 

Rebalancing of strategic power in trade as in diplomacy is the principle here. This is not only a method to a madness but now resembles a recipe for sanity and prosperity. 

So there you have it. Far from being ‘extraordinary nonsense,’ Trump’s trade policy is in fact a careful implementation of trade policies that have been developed and detailed at book-length. 

One of the cheerleaders of the chorus of disapproval – James Surowiecki writes for the globalist magazine The Atlantic.  

He is the author of a 2005 book called “The Wisdom of Crowds.” In it, he spoke of the wisdom of the many versus that of the few. If balanced trade restores the American dream, why does he stand against the cause of the majority of American people? 

Is this a wise crowd he leads? It is certainly shouting the loudest. Yet the numbers behind the tariffs are not imaginary, and it seems strange wisdom indeed to call balanced trade and the reduction of national debt an “insane goal.”

Tree of Woe was asked for comment. This is what he said: “America has not pursued a policy of balanced trade in almost a century. The pressure on the White House to revert back to our ordinary course of business is enormous. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will be able to sustain his tariff policy in the face of opposition from the economic elite. One thing is certain: America will never be great again if we don’t re-industrialize.”  

You can read The Tree of Woe’s full report here.