Brownstone Institute
The Book We Need and Only Justin Hart Could Write
This article originally published by the Brownstone Institute
Sometimes, even now, even after writing a book and probably a thousand or more articles on the topic, and following it every step of the way, it still feels like I dreamed the whole thing. Not a good dream but a nightmare of exceptionally dark attacks on freedom. It got so bad that online memes started deliberately misspelling the word: “freedumb.”
They really did cancel two years of public worship services, segregate the large cities, abolish in-person education, foist masks on all the kids, destroy millions of businesses, censor all media so that we could barely discover facts, forget everything that humanity only recently knew about immunity, end concerts, impose limits on house parties, scrap weddings and funerals, lock the elderly into their homes so that kids couldn’t visit, end dentistry, impose travel restrictions across state borders, and….
Yes, I could go on but there remains a sense of unreality about the whole thing. It all happened right here in the land of the free. The Prohibition years (1920-1932) were grim and ridiculous enough and proof that freedom is nowhere entirely and always safe. But the Covid epoch makes Prohibition seem very mild by comparison. The ostensible reason for the sudden imposition of totalitarian rule was to control a virus with an infection fatality rate of 0.035% for people under the age of 70.
None of these wildly destructive efforts stopped the virus. It went ahead patiently and infected the whole population that was made woefully unhealthy due to the egregiously coercive response to the virus, and then our immune systems adapted. It was all utter madness, so much so that masses of people just want to forget the whole thing, especially because so many people and both political parties participated.
We are all left with a kind of PTSD. I don’t know what the right cure for that condition is but surely coming to terms with the grim reality of what happened is essential. My worry all along is that the concerted efforts to pretend like none of this occurred, or that it was no big deal, or that it was necessary and needs to happen again, and that governments and experts did their best given the paucity of information, and so on, would actually succeed.
It would be a tragedy if we do not learn from our recent egregious experiences. Reports from the campaign trail of 2022 indicate that the Covid response is a huge issue among voters.
“Among deeply conservative and often Trump-backed congressional and gubernatorial candidates,” writes StatNews, “calls to investigate or even jail Anthony Fauci have become regular campaign rallying cries. Ads lambasting Democrats for school shutdowns, business closures and mask mandates are running in heated races including in Georgia and Florida, where Democratic candidates trail their opponents in the polls.”
My worry is that the Covid response would not become a campaign issue at all simply because both parties are so heavily implicated in the pandemic response. After all, it was Trump who was gaslighted into green-lighting the lockdowns in the first place. But even party silence has not been able to stop the waves of outrage. Everyone’s lives were shattered by it all, from the school closures to the deliberate destruction of businesses to the preposterous kabuki dance scripted by the CDC to forever avoid the virus that ended up infecting everyone.
In any case, I’ve waited for the book that could tell the story of all the horrors in a readable form and also back it all by the research we knew was there from the beginning. There are not that many people around who could write such a book simply because there weren’t many people who had a bead on this disaster from the beginning.
One of them is political consultant and businessman Justin Hart, who watched the unfolding of this mess from its first days. He founded the site Rational Ground to document it all, and provide a clearer perspective. He ended up becoming a major source for people who had an intuition that something was very wrong but needed data to back it all up. Like me, he has ended up dedicating nearly three years of his life countering the mania.
Fortunately for all of us – and fortunately for historians of the future who will be utterly perplexed by this period of history – he just has written a brilliant book. It is Gone Viral: How Covid Drove the World Insane. I highly recommend this to everyone who has been astonished by the unfolding of events and equally shocked at how little in the way of reckoning has really taken place. Hart is the perfect one for the job here: matching rigor with humor, argument with anecdote, and somehow managing to tell a nearly comprehensive story without ever getting bogged down. The voice is clear, confident, and compelling.
He covers it all: school, church, and business closures, travel restrictions, forced jabs, populist disease panic, media censorship and complicity in lies, and the massive corruption of science.
I especially appreciate his detailed work on masking. He proves their ineffectiveness but also utterly skewers the propaganda to push them anyway. I’m particularly bitter about this subject because it was obvious to me from the beginning how preposterous the whole thing was.
On May 2, 2020, I tweeted that after lockdowns “the face mask will be rightly regarded as a symbol of obsequious obedience and grotesque compliance with arbitrary and ignorant authority.” I’ve never been so much attacked for a single thought in my life, including whole treatises in large-circulation publications, as if I had committed a thought crime. I was trolled for months, even by one-time friends.
That’s how crazy the world had become. Hart’s book chronicles it all, including the stickers on the floor, the one-way grocery aisles, the closing of hospitals and day cares, the insane rules on dining, the supply-chain breakages and so much more.
Everything here is written with a special confidence that is tremendously admirable, and this is because Hart is one of the few intellectuals who was correct about the whole hullabaloo from the very beginning. Therefore he doesn’t need to embark among some silly dance in which restrictions were fine in the beginning but later became too much. Nope: he kept his wits about him the whole time. Thus does he have the credibility to write without apologies.
He also writes extremely well. We’ve been stuffed to the gills in data, studies, and in scientific claims and counterclaims deploying language that had been unfamiliar to most people until 2020. What we’ve lacked is clear thinking, plain English, and blunt truth in an organized package, turning chaos to order. This is what Hart provides.
No book can cover it all so he is careful to stay away from the purely medical aspects of the controversies about early treatment, for example. However, Peter McCullough covers this ably in The Courage to Face Covid-19. Other aspects of this disaster have been covered in Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others, Fritjers/Foster/Baker The Great Covid Panic, Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, Alex Berenson’s Pandemia, and perhaps the forthcoming book by Paul Alexander entitled Presidential Takedown for the very weird early history of the pandemic response.
Still, for regular people who seek to come to terms with the madness that befell the world, I would rank Justin Hart’s book among those that should be considered a staple reading on the whole topic. It’s as much a medical and political history as it is a psychological study in mass hysteria. Reading it is a form of therapy in the old Freudian sense: unearthing that trauma we so desperately want to forget and bringing it to the surface so that we can be honest about the sufferings we’ve endured and move on.
A mischievous idea: send a copy to every journalist at every major venue that assisted in drumming up the panic that wrecked our rights, liberties, property, and families. They need to face the truth about what they have done. This book is a great tool of truth and, hopefully, justice.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
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
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