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Brownstone Institute

The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response

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30 minute read

This article originally published by the Brownstone Institute

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER

On April 15, 2020, a full month after the President’s fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for “15 Days to Flatten the Curve,” Donald Trump had a revealing White House conversation with Anthony Fauci, the head of the National institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease who had already become the public face of the Covid response.

“I’m not going to preside over the funeral of the greatest country in the world,” Trump wisely said, as reported in Jared Kushner’s book Breaking History. Two weeks of lockdown was over and the promised Easter opening blew right by too, Trump was done. He also suspected that he had been misled and was no longer speaking to coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx.

“I understand,” Fauci responded meekly. “I just do medical advice. I don’t think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts. I’m just an infectious diseases doctor. Your job as president is to take everything else into consideration.”

That conversation both reflected and entrenched the tone of the debate over the lockdowns and vaccine mandates and eventually the national crisis that they precipitated. In these debates in the early days, and even today, the idea of “the economy” – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives.

You choose one or the other. You cannot have both. Or so they said.

Pandemic Practice

Also in those days, it was widely believed, stemming from a strange ideology hatched 16 years earlier, that the best approach to pandemics was to institute massive human coercion like we have never before experienced. The theory was that if you make humans behave like non-player characters in computer models, you can keep them from infecting each other until a vaccine arrives which will eventually wipe out the pathogen.

The new lockdown theory stood in contrast to a century of pandemic advice and practice from public-health wisdom. Only a few cities tried coercion and quarantine to deal with the 1918 pandemic, mostly San Francisco (also the home of the first Anti-Mask League) whereas most just treated disease person by person. The quarantines of that period failed and so landed in disrepute. They were not tried again in the disease scares (some real, some exaggerated) of 1929, 1940-44, 1957-58, 1967-68, 2003, 2005, or 2009. In those days, even the national media urged calm and therapeutics during each infectious-disease scare.

Somehow and for reasons that should be discussed – it could be intellectual error, political priorities, or some combination – 2020 became the year of an experiment without precedent, not only in the US but all over the world with the exception of perhaps five nations among which we can include the state of South Dakota. The sick and the well were quarantined, along with stay-at-home orders, domestic capacity limits, and business, school, and church shutdowns,

Nothing turned out according to plan. The economy can be turned off using coercion but the resulting trauma is so great that turning it on again is not so easy. Instead, thirty months later, we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we have these numbers, and a dangerous level of political division.

And what happened to Covid? It came anyway, just as many epidemiologists predicted it would. The stratified impact of medically significant outcomes was also predictable based on what we knew from February: the at-risk population was largely the elderly and infirmed. To be sure, most everyone would eventually met the pathogen with varying degrees of severity: some people shook it off in a couple of days, others suffered for weeks, and others perished. Even now, there is grave uncertainty about the data and causality due to the probability of misattribution due to both faulty PCR testing and financial incentives given out to hospitals.

Tradeoffs

Even if lockdowns had saved lives over the long term– the literature on this overwhelming suggests that the answer is no – the proper question to have asked was: at what cost? The economic question was: what are the tradeoffs? But because economics as such was shelved for the emergency, the question was not raised by policy makers. Thus did the White House on March 16, 2020, send out the most dreaded sentence pertaining to economics that one can imagine: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

The results are legion. The lockdowns kicked off a whole range of other policy disastrous decisions, among which an epic bout of government spending. What we are left with is a national debt that is 121% of GDP. This compares to 35% of GDP in 1981 when Ronald Reagan correctly declared it a crisis. Government spending in the Covid response amounted to at least $6 trillion above normal operations, creating debt that the Federal Reserve purchased with newly created money nearly dollar for dollar.

Money Printing

From February May 2020, M2 increased by an average of $814.3 billion per month. On May 18, 2020, M2 was rising 22% year over year, compared with only 6.7% from March that year. It was not yet the peak. That came after the new year, when on February 22, 2021, the M2 annual rate of increase reached a staggering 27.5%.

At the very same time, the velocity of money behaved as one would expect in a crisis of this sort. It plummeted an incredible 23.4% in the second quarter. A crashing rate at which money is being spent puts deflationary pressure on prices regardless of what happens with money supply. In this case, the falling velocity was a temporary salvation. It pushed the bad effects of this quantitative easing – to invoke a euphemism from 2008 – off into the future.

That future is now. The eventual result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating, at least according to the October 12, 2022 Producer Price Index, which is hotter than it has been in months. It is running ahead of the Consumer Price Index, which is a reversal from earlier in the lockdown period. This new pressure on producers heavily impacted the business environment and created recessionary conditions.

A Global Problem

Moreover, this was not just a US problem. Most nations in the world followed the same lockdown strategy while attempting to substitute spending and printing for real economic activity. The cause-and-effect relationship holds the world over. Central banks coordinated and their societies all suffered.

The Fed is being called up daily to step up its lending to foreign central banks through the discount window for emergency loans. It is now at the highest level since Spring 2020 lockdowns. The Fed lent $6.5 billion to two foreign central banks in one week in October 2022. The numbers are truly scary and foreshadow a possible international financial crisis.

The Great Head Fake

But back in the spring and summer of 2020, we seemed to experience a miracle. Governments around the country had crushed social functioning and free enterprise and yet real income went soaring. Between February 2020 and March 2021, real personal income during a time with low inflation was up by $4.2 trillion. It felt like magic: a lockdown economy but riches were pouring in.

And what did people do with their new-found riches? There was Amazon. There was Netflix. There was the need for all sorts of new equipment to feed our new existence as digital everything. All these companies benefited enormously while others suffered. Even so we paid off credit card debt. And much of the stimulus was socked away as savings. The first stimulus went straight to the bank: the personal savings rate went from 9.6% to 33% in the course of just one month.

After the summer, people started to get the hang of getting free money from government dropped into their bank accounts. The savings rate started to fall: by November 2020, it was back down to 13.3%. Once Joseph Biden came to power and unleashed another round of stimulus, the savings rate went back up to 26.3%. And just fast forward to the present and we find people saving 3.5% of income, which is half the historical norm dating back to 1960 and about where it was in 2005 when low interest rates fed the housing boom that went bust in 2008. Meanwhile credit card debt is now soaring, even though interest rates are 17% and higher.

In other words, we experienced the wildest swing from shocking riches to rags in a very short period of time. The curves all inverted once the inflation came along to eat out the value of the stimulus. All that free money turned out not to be free at all but rather very expensive. The dollar of January 2020 is now worth only $0.87, which is to say that the stimulus spending covered by Federal Reserve printing stole $0.13 of every dollar in the course of only 2.5 years.

It was one of the biggest head fakes in the history of modern economics. The pandemic planners created paper prosperity to cover up for the grim reality all around. But it did not and could not last.

Right on schedule, the value of the currency began to tumble. Between January 2021 and September 2022, prices increased 13.5% across the board, while costing the average American family $728 in September alone. Even if inflation stops today, the inflation already in the bag will cost the American family $8,739 over the next 12 months, leaving less money to pay off soaring credit card debt.

Let’s return to the salad days before the inflation hit and when the Zoom class experienced delight at their new riches and their work-from-home luxuries. On Main Street, matters looked very different. I visited two medium-sized towns in New Hampshire and Texas over the course of the summer of 2020. I found nearly all businesses on Main Street boarded up, malls empty but for a few masked maintenance men, and churches silent and abandoned. There was no life at all, only despair.

The look of most of America in those days – not even Florida was yet open – was post-apocalyptic, with vast numbers of people huddled at home either alone or with immediate families, fully convinced that a universally deadly virus was lurking outdoors and waiting to snatch the life of anyone foolish enough to seek exercise, sunshine, or, heaven forbid, fun with friends, much less visiting the elderly in nursing homes, which was verboten. Meanwhile, the CDC was recommending that any “essential business” install walls of plexiglass and paste social distancing stickers everywhere where people would walk. All in the name of science.

I am very aware that all of this sounds utterly ridiculous now, but I assure you that it was serious at the time. Several times, I was personally screamed at for walking only a few feet into a grocery aisle that had been designated by stickers to be one way in the other direction. Also in those days, at least in the Northeast, enforcers among the citizenry would fly drones around the city and countryside looking for house parties, weddings, or funerals, and snap images to send to the local media, which would dutifully report the supposed scandal.

These were times when people insisted on riding elevators alone, and only one person at a time was permitted to walk through narrow corridors. Parents masked up their kids even though the kids were at near zero risk, which we knew from data but not from public health authorities. Incredibly, nearly all schools were closed, thus forcing parents out of the office back home. Homeschooling, which has long existed under a legal fog, suddenly became mandatory.

Just to illustrate how crazy it all became, a friend of mine arrived home from a visit out of town and his mother demanded that he leave his Covid-infested bags on the porch for three days. I’m sure you have your own stories of absurdity, among which was the masking of everyone, the enforcement of which went from stern to ferocious as time passed.

But these were the days when people believed the virus was outdoors and so we should stay in. Oddly, this changed over time when people decided that the virus was indoors and so we should be outdoors. When New York City cautiously permitted dining in commercial establishments, the mayor’s office insisted that it could only be outdoors, so many restaurants built an outdoors version of indoors, complete with plastic walls and heating units at a very high expense.

In those days, I had some time to kill waiting for a train in Hudson, New York, and went to a wine bar. I ordered a glass at the counter and the masked clerk handed it to me and pointed for me to go outside. I said I would like to drink it inside since it was freezing and miserable outside. I pointed out that there was a full dining room right there. She said I could not because of Covid.

Is this a law, I asked? She said no it is just good practice to keep people safe.

“Do you really think there is Covid in that room?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said in all seriousness.

At this point, I realized we had fully moved from government-mandated mania to a real popular delusion for the ages.

The commercial carnage for small business has yet to be thoroughly documented. At least 100,000 restaurants and stores in Manhattan alone closed, commercial real estate prices crashed, and big business moved in to scoop up bargains. Policies were decidedly disadvantageous to small businesses. If there were commercial capacity restrictions, they would kill a coffee shop but a large franchise all-you-eat buffet that holds 300 would probably be fine.

So too with industries in general: big tech including Zoom and Amazon thrived, but hotels, bars, restaurants, malls, cruise ships, theaters, and anyone without home delivery suffered terribly. The arts were devastated. In the deadly Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, we had Woodstock but this time we had nothing but YouTube, unless you opposed Covid restrictions in which case your song was deleted and your account blasted into oblivion.

Health Care Industry

To talk about the healthcare industry, let’s return to the early days of the frenzy of the Spring of 2020. An edict had gone out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to all public health officials in the country that strongly urged the closing of all hospitals to everyone but non-elective surgeries and Covid patients, which turned out to exclude nearly everyone who would routinely show up for diagnostics or other normal treatments.

As a result, hospital parking lots emptied out from sea to shining sea, a most bizarre sight to see given that there was supposed to be a pandemic raging. We can see this in the data. The healthcare sector employed 16.4 million people in early 2020. By April, the entire sector lost 1.6 million employees, which is an astonishing exodus by any historical standard. Nurses in hundreds of hospitals were furloughed. Again, this happened during a pandemic.

In another strange twist that future historians will have a hard time trying to figure out, health care spending itself fell off a cliff. From March to May 2020, health care spending actually collapsed by $500 billion or 16.5%.

This created an enormous financial problem for hospitals in general, which, after all, are economic institutions too. They were bleeding money so fast that when the federal government offered subsidies of 20 percent above other respiratory ailments if the patient could be declared Covid positive, hospitals jumped at the chance and found cases galore, which the CDC was happy to accept at face value. Compliance with guidelines became the only path toward restoring profitability.

The throttling of non-Covid services included the near abolition of dentistry that went on for months from Spring through Summer. In the midst of this, I worried that I needed a root canal. I simply could not find a dentist in Massachusetts who would see me. They said every patient first needs a cleaning and thorough examination and all those have been canceled. I had the bright idea of traveling to Texas to get it done but the dentist there said they were restricted by law to make sure all patients from out of state quarantine in Texas for two weeks, time I could not afford. I thought about suggesting to my mother, who was making the appointment, that she simply lie about the date of my arrival but thought better of it given her scruples.

It was a time of great public insanity, not stopped and even fomented by public health bureaucrats. The abolition of dentistry for a time seemed to comply completely with the injunction of the New York Times on February 28, 2020. “To Take on the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It,” the headline read. We did, even to the point of abolishing dentistry, publicly shaming the diseased on grounds that getting Covid was surely a sign of noncompliance and civic sin, and instituting a feudal system of dividing workers by essential and nonessential.

Labor Markets

Exactly how it came to be that the entire workforce came to be divided this way remains a mystery to me but the guardians of the public mind seemed not to care a whit about it. Most of the delineated lists at the time said that you could keep operating if you qualified as a media center. Thus for two years did the New York Times instruct its readers to stay home and have their groceries delivered. By whom, they did not say, nor did they care because such people are not apparently among their reader base. Essentially, the working classes were used as fodder to obtain herd immunity, and then later subjected to vaccine mandates despite superior natural immunity.

Many, as in millions, were later fired for not complying with mandates. We are told that unemployment today is very low and that many new jobs are being filled. Yes, and most of those are existing workers getting second and third jobs. Moonlighting and side gigging are now a way of life, not because it is a blast but because the bills have to be paid.

The full truth about labor markets requires that we look at the labor participation rate and the worker-population ratio. Millions have gone missing. These are working women who still cannot find child care because that industry never recovered, and so participation is back at 1988 levels. They are early retirements. They are 20 somethings who moved home and went on unemployment benefits. There are many more who have just lost the will to achieve and build a future.

The supply chain breakages need their own discussion. The March 12, 2020, evening announcement by President Trump that he would block all travel from Europe, UK, and Australia beginning in five days from then started a mad scramble to get back to the US. He also misread the teleprompter and said that the ban would also apply to goods. The White House had to correct the statement the next day but the damage was already done. Shipping came to a complete standstill.

Supply Chains and Shortages

Most economic activity stopped. By the time the fall relaxation came and manufacturers started reordering parts, they found that many factories overseas had already retooled for other kinds of demand. This particularly affected the semiconductor industry for automotive manufacturing. Overseas chip makers had already turned their attention to personal computers, cellphones, and other devices. This was the beginning of the car shortage that sent prices through the roof. This created a political demand for US-based chip production which has in turn resulted in another round of export and import controls.

These sorts of problems have affected every industry without exception. Why the paper shortage today? Because so many of the paper factories which shifted to plywood after that had gone sky-high in price to feed the housing demand created by generous stimulus checks.

We could write books listing all the economic calamities directly caused by the disastrous pandemic response. They will be with us for years, and yet even today, not many people fully grasp the relationship between our current economic hardships, and even the growing international tensions and breakdown of trade and travel, and the brutality of the pandemic response. It is all directly related.

Anthony Fauci said at the outset: “I don’t think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts.” And Melinda Gates said the same in a December 4, 2020 interview with the New York Times: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.”

The wall of separation posited between “economics” and public health did not hold in theory or practice. A healthy economy is indispensable for healthy people. Shutting down economic life was a singularly bad idea for taking on a pandemic.

Conclusion

Economics is about people in their choices and institutions that enable them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two surely ranks among the most catastrophic public-policy decisions of our lifetimes. Health and economics both require the nonnegotiable called freedom. May we never again experiment with its near abolition in the name of disease mitigation.

This is based on a presentation at Hillsdale College, October 20, 2022, to appear in a shortened version in IMPRIMUS

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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

Published on

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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