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Brownstone Institute

Conservatives Cancel the Cancellers

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21 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

By REBEKAH BARNETT 

The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish to protect free speech in principle or just the speech they agree with.

Calls for deportation of a comedy band over a failed joke and efforts to get ordinary working-class people sacked for saying terrible things out loud…

These are the kinds of actions one might expect from a progressive woke cancel culture mob, but in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, it’s conservatives who have led the charge to cancel their political enemies over speech.

The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish to protect free speech in principle or just the speech they agree with.

Assassination Joke Misfire

In Australia, a storm in teacup developed this week after a tasteless joke seeded clouds of discontent within conservative ‘freedom’ circles.

If you haven’t heard, Kyle Gass, of comedy band Tenacious D, quipped “Don’t miss Trump next time” as a 64th birthday wish while on stage in Sydney on Sunday night. It was in very poor taste, though the audience hooted and laughed.

Being that the duo is famous for taking irreverent silliness all the way to 11 on the dial, with antics like running on the beach in boxers and unitard in their cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game,’ and their peak silly song ‘Tribute’, you might expect a collective eye roll in response to Gass’s misstep.

But these are woke cancel culture times, defined by the dogged, humourless commitment to interpreting jokes as serious statements of intent, and the hysterical belief that words are tantamount to violence.

Gass’s bandmate Jack Black issued a formal apology and announced the cancellation of the band’s Australian tour. Gass soon apologised himself and has reportedly been dropped by his agency.

But that was not enough for upset Trump supporters Down Under, who enthusiastically called for Tenacious D’s deportation from the country.

“Tenacious D should be immediately removed from the country after wishing for the assassination of Donald Trump at their Sydney concert,” said Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party in a statement, viewed over four million times on X.

“This was not a joke, he was deadly serious when he wished for the death of the President…Anything less than deportation is an endorsement of the shooting and attempted assassination of Donald J Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th President of the United States,” he said.

Senator Babet reasoned that as Australia had wrongly deported Novak Djokovic in 2022 over his anti-Covid vaccination views, we should now also deport Tenacious D.

“Australia wrongly locked up Novak Djokovic and deported him because he allegedly undermined public trust in vaccination. Allowing Tenacious D to remain in Australia after calling for the death of a President is unthinkable, and it affirms the weakness of our current Prime Minister,” Senator Babet said.

Commenters praised Senator Babet for his “leadership.”

Left-wing news site Crikey was quick to point out the apparent double standard:

This is the same senator who in April refused to take down graphic footage of the attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel from his X account because: “Without free speech our nation will fall.” Late last year the senator sent Communications Minister Michelle Rowland 152 “postcard-style” submissions regarding the draft Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill “on behalf of members of the public”, like the following:

Simon Collins of the West Australian similarly called out the hypocrisy of “blowhards” calling for Tenacious D’s cancellation and deportation, people who at the same time “proclaim to be advocates for free speech.” That said, Collins failed to mention the central role he allegedly played in getting Perth comedian Corey White’s run of shows cancelled at the 2021 Fringe Festival over an offensive joke.

Raising the hypocrisy stakes even higher, conservative influencer Chaya Raichick used her ‘Libs of TikTok’ platform (with over 3.2 million followers on X) to doxx minimum-wage workers and get them fired for wishing the Trump shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had aimed better.

Raichick boasted on her Substack,

In fact, because of Libs of TikTok, TEN DERANGED LEFTISTS have already been FIRED from their jobs because we showed the world that they support murdering President Trump.

It is uncertain how many of these ten were public figures, but at least some of those fired are reported to be ordinary working-class Americans, including Home Depot worker Darcy Waldron Pinckney, who ill-advisedly posted to Facebook, “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!”

This effort has been enthusiastically supported by Riachick’s followers. “We got another one!” posted one commenter under a post doxxing a New Jersey Education Association employee for expressing her disappointment on social media that the shooter missed.

Yet, Raichick and her supporters previously complained loudly when Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, with Raichick calling Lorenz’s actions “abhorrent.”

Protected Speech Vs. Incitement to Violence

In the US and Australia, as in most Western liberal democracies, free speech is protected. The US has robust speech protections under the First Amendment, while Australia has the less robust implied freedom of political communication.

However, where speech causes, or is likely to cause harm, governments put legal limitations on speech rights. While the proliferation of hate speech and online harm bills is a testament to the ballooning definition of harm in Western academia and policymaking, incitement of physical violence is a foundational interpretation of the limit to free speech.

In both Australia and the US, speech that incites someone to commit a crime of violence is against the law, and in the US it is a felony to threaten the life of a president.

But not all statements expressing a wish for harm are a ‘true threat.’ In a 1971 interview with Flash Magazine, Groucho Marx quipped, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination,” but he was not arrested.

In contrast, David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party was charged in 1969 – and then acquitted in 1971 – for stating publicly before a crowd that President Nixon was “responsible for all the attacks on the Black Panther Party nationally,” adding “We will kill Richard Nixon.”

Asked to explain the different treatment of the two cases despite the similar rhetoric used by Marx and Hilliard, US Attorney James L. Browning, Jr. responded,

It is one thing to say that “I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon” when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx’s words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a “true” threat.

In other words, context matters.

Bad jokes or incitement?

Conservatives going after people wishing that the Trump assassination attempt had been successful, whether joking or otherwise, claim that their comments are “call[s] to political violence,” to use Senator Babet’s phrase.

But jokes like Gass’s birthday wish wouldn’t meet the legal threshold for incitement to violence, says James Allan, Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.

“A reasonable person would have to understand it as actually trying to incite violence,” Professor Allan told me. “I think he was just being a virtue-signalling leftie. I don’t think he actually intended to counsel violence, and I suspect most people wouldn’t take it that way.”

Dr Reuben Kirkham of the Free Speech Union of Australia (FSU) agrees that Gass’s joke would not qualify as incitement under the law in New South Wales, where Gass said the bad thing.

“Outside of incitement provisions focussed on specific protected characteristics, the person must intend that the offence be committed. A joke at a comedy event is unlikely to meet this standard, let alone to the ‘reasonable doubt’ standard,” Dr Kirkham said, echoing Professor Allan. “It might be in poor taste, but taste is thankfully not something that the law polices,” he added.

But Tony Nikolic, Director of Sydney law firm Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates told me he believes that Gass’s comment was “clear-cut incitement and should be called out.”

“Free expression is a cornerstone of democracy. However, rhetoric that crosses into inciting violence or hatred can have dangerous consequences,” Nikolic said. “We have laws to address that in Australia and they should have been used to indict the offender.”

Conservative Game Theory

Professor Allan said that while he doesn’t think prosecution or deportation is appropriate in Gass’s case, there are social consequences for saying “idiotic things” from a public platform.

“I definitely wouldn’t support [Gass]. His agent has dropped him. People don’t have to associate with people who say idiotic things. If he came out with a grovelling apology…I’d be inclined to say, OK, fine.”

Nevertheless, he warned that cancel culture writ large is not a good strategy for anyone who truly values protecting free speech.

“The problem is you go down the cancel culture route and you become as bad as the other side,” Professor Allan said. “I understand that there’s a certain sort of game theory element, that if they do it to us, we need to do it back to them, and in some areas I agree with that.

“But with speech, it is better not to play the cancel game. The other side reveals how they actually think. We want to know that. We should fight against our views being cancelled and fight hard, but not make the error of cancelling theirs. The more they talk, the more people can see the insipid, doctrinaire foundations to their views.”

Others disagree.

In an article called ‘In Defense of Cancel Culture’ in the American Spectator this week, Nate Hochman argued that the right should adopt a new, much more aggressive strategy in dealing with its political opponents: mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Hochman’s thesis is essentially that the left has debased the political discourse to such a degree that playing nice and principled is a losing game. Instead, he counsels “a short-term escalation to force a long-term de-escalation.”

This means punishing progressives for their bad behaviour in the same way that they have done to conservatives until they understand, “at a visceral level, the penalties for the system that they themselves constructed.” He reminds readers that roughly half of Democrats wanted to fine and imprison unvaccinated Americans in 2022 (in the US, Covid vaccination is a highly partisan issue).

Once progressives feel that the negatives of the cancel culture they’ve fostered outweigh the positives, said Hochman, “then, and only then, will the incentives truly change.”

Commentators in the blogosphere and on social media have offered similarly revanchist takes.

“No one wants to live a world characterized by (metaphorical) nuclear exchanges, but nuclear exchanges, once they become part of the universe of discourse, and [sic] held off only by deterrence, not decency,” wrote author Devon Erikson on X.

Pseudonymous Substacker John Carter catalogued a selection of such nuclear exchanges, including this “short list of how “Turn the other cheek” absolutely didn’t moderate the Left.”

“The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity,” he inveighed, suggesting that so long as conservatives are surgical in their use of political violence to achieve their goal – “ending leftist violence” – all will be well. “We can be magnanimous after victory.”

Source: Substack

Doxxing Ordinary People Puts Harm in ‘Digital Granite’

Free speech purists will find the MAD strategy a hard pill to swallow – especially those who have paid a price to take a principled stand against cancel culture.

Former corporate journalist Alison Bevege is one of these people.

In 2020, during the first year of the Covid pandemic, Bevege was asked to work on an article on ‘Bunnings Karen,’ after footage circulated online of an unmasked woman arguing with Bunnings staff over her refusal to wear a mask inside.

But then, “it wasn’t enough just to kind of shame Bunnings Karen – they wanted me to find out her name, to try to find her on social media. And I didn’t want to do that,” Bevege told me, explaining that there should be a distinction between how we dole out social consequences to public figures and how we deal with private citizens. She left the Daily Mail soon after.

“You know, cancel culture has two components. One component is the shaming of the act, where you might share the video of some stupid thing that someone did, and everyone can laugh at it. I don’t really have a problem with that. That’s part of how we reinforce social norms,” said Bevege.

“But it’s the second part of cancel culture that I don’t like. And that is when you try to make that person really suffer by, for example, trying to get them to lose their job or trying to make it stick to them forever in a permanent way, like trying to damage someone with it.”

Bevege, who now publishes on her own Substack, Letters From Australia, and drives buses, gave the example of a prospective employer googling the name of a person who’s been shamed online.

“When you have a member of the public, you don’t know if that person’s had a bad day, if they’re mentally ill, if they’ve just lost their parents, if they’re drunk or on drugs. But when you name someone online it’s in digital granite. It’s there forever, and can really affect their lives.”

This is where Bevege draws the line. In MAD game theory though, this is the acceptable cost of “ending leftist violence,” if the victim is a Home Depot worker wishing for a successful presidential assassination.

Deportation Should Not Be Used for Censorship of Debate

In the case of public figures like Gass doing dumb things on stage, Bevege said people should by all means “rip the shit out of him…and don’t go to a show,” but that deportation would be “ridiculous.”

“I like Senator Babet because he’s really stood up for the vaccine injured. But we’ve got to stop deporting and banning people for speech,” said Bevege, recalling the time polarising UK personality Katie Hopkins was deported from Australia for joking online about planning to breach Covid quarantine rules and for describing the lockdown as a “hoax.”

Nikolic and Dr Kirkham also raised concerns over migration laws being used as a tool for censorship. Nikolic has been a vocal critic of the conservative Australian Government’s deportation of star tennis player Novak Djokovic in January 2022 for his anti-Covid vaccination views. And, Dr Kirkham pointed to the delay of Irish women’s rights and gender critical activist Graham Linehan’s visa application earlier this year while Australian authorities conducted a “character assessment,” despite Linehan having no criminal record.

“Freedom of speech exists for the views that you don’t like, and you have to tolerate those views,” said Bevege.

Unfortunately, an increasing number of conservatives seem to be running short of tolerance.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Rebekah Barnett is a Brownstone Institute fellow, independent journalist and advocate for Australians injured by the Covid vaccines. She holds a BA in Communications from the University of Western Australia, and writes for her Substack, Dystopian Down Under.

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After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Brownstone Institute

The Most Devastating Report So Far

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya 

The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.

The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

Author

Jay Bhattacharya

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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Brownstone Institute

The Revolution of 2024: A Rare Victory for Anti-Establishment Fury

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker 

The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.

People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?

More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns  Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.

The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.

Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.

Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.

The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.

Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.

What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.

As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.

There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.

After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.

The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.

The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.

Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.

It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.

The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?

For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.

In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.

The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.

No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.

Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.

In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.

And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.

The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.

Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.

It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?

The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.

Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.

That was nuts but it happened.

If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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