Brownstone Institute
The Great Game of Let’s Pretend
From the Brownstone Institute
Two nights ago was supposed to be a night of reckoning and truth. The intrepid and independent journalist Tucker Carlson was to grill Donald Trump, who skipped the GOP debates because he is already the hands-down frontrunner and doesn’t want anything to do with conventional politics.
Tucker had spent the last three years on Fox correctly denouncing lockdowns, censorship, vaccine mandates, and medical segregation, plus the attacks on American liberty. He certainly knows what’s what. One might have supposed that the issues that tanked the Trump presidency and nearly the whole of American society and liberty would be front and center. Now was the time!
Oddly, none of it came up in his interview with Trump. The interview answered none of our questions about why Trump did what he did, which not only wrecked the American economy but arguably lost him the election. Even if you think the election was stolen, it was only through the mail-in ballots that the Covid controls unleashed. Tucker drilled down into none of this. It was as if 2020 did not happen at all.
The simultaneous GOP debate was even worse. Ron DeSantis started with a bang and spoke about lockdowns but the topic fizzled quickly. Following a flurry of pharma ads – indeed the entire event was funded by FDA-approved drug sales – the moderators briefly asked former vice president Mike Pence if he thought his administration bore any responsibility for learning loss because the Trump administration urged school closures.
Pence – who spent 2020 running cover for Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx – wholly ignored the question and said something else. The topic was never revisited again.
There was not one word said about tech censorship, the millions displaced and harmed by vaccine mandates, the dictatorial reach of the administrative state, the vast flurry of litigation against everything and everybody, the mass loss of trust in government and media, the foundational attack on the Bill of Rights, or the very real threat that it could happen again.
On the same day as the debate, we already saw mask mandates being reimposed. But no one spoke about it.
You surely see what’s going on here. The biggest issues in American life, which everyone experienced with vast tragedy and death all around, and about which everyone knows, are suddenly too sensitive to bring up. It’s something of which multitudes are aware but because all official institutions were involved, all official institutions are quiet about it. As a result, the great reckoning we need for renewal is farther off than ever.
Meanwhile, we’ve got Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., out there on countless public interviews, as a presidential candidate, saying remarkable things like 1) the CIA in 1963 killed his uncle who was president, 2) the intelligence community works with Big Pharma on gain-of-function research to create and cure new killer viruses, 3) they germ-gamed the lockdowns since 2001, 4) the lockdowns of March 2020 was a coup d’etat against representative democracy, 5) right now we have industry-captured Deep-State agencies that are ruling America who have no regard whatsoever for the US Constitution or the idea of freedom.
He says all of this without any shyness and with a great deal with knowledge and detail. He provides the receipts. Indeed, he has written several books on these themes. People listen and think “Oh that’s very interesting” and go hear him speak, without any presumption that he stands any chance to be President despite his wild popularity because, essentially, the fix is in.
Biden has already been selected to get the nomination, which rather demonstrates RFK’s point. Meanwhile, I’ve never once heard any reporter or read any article that challenges him on any of the facts. It’s as if everyone knows that what he is saying is true but we cannot do anything about it anyway. So he is tolerated as a wayward eccentric from a noble lineage but best ignored if we know what’s good for us.
It’s a very strange time in American political history, no doubt. We have one line of thinking sweeping through the population – which is based on mass incredulity and fury – and then another which is a veneer of normalcy that is slathered on top of our anger by all official institutions, which work hard to keep all these topics out of respectable conversations. Meanwhile, the whole of academic, mainstream social media, major mainstream media, and all of government seems to agree that all these obvious topics are too incendiary to be raised in polite company.
So everyone in the top layer of this manufactured consent is glad to play along with this great game of pretend. Meanwhile, people are fully aware now that the intelligence community is deeply involved in areas of life we previously thought were independent. And we suspect this is true even of organizations and publications we once thought were more-or-less trustworthy. How else to explain their silence and/or lies on all the crucial issues of our time?
As regards all the institutions that locked down the population just a few years ago, nothing has changed. Sure, there are a few court decisions extant that said they went too far but those are all being challenged and await appeals to the Supreme Court. But while these grueling processes play themselves out, Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the rest of our formerly free social-media platforms are more brutally censorial than ever. YouTube even announced that it will tolerate no content that contradicts the World Health Organization, which only three years ago recommended to the entire world the lockdowns pioneered by the CCP in Wuhan.
In the last few days, my own phone has blown up with people terrified of a new lockdown. They worry about leaving the country for fear of new travel restrictions. They worry about new vaccine mandates for their kids in school. They are thinking of moving to Florida and away from the big cities on the coasts where crime worsens by the day and skyscrapers are still mostly empty because workers won’t come back. And the #1 song in the world wails about the cruelty of this new world and how it is sending people to an early death.
Who would have imagined that a collapse on this level would happen in plain sight and everyone would see it and yet the entirety of the culture planners would in effect impose a fatwa on anyone who speaks about it?
Certainly I never imagined this scenario. Our whole lives we’ve sung about the “land of the free and the home of the brave” but here we are unfree and not brave. Because of facial-recognition technology, we cannot even hit the streets anymore. That was the real point of the post-January 6 crackdown: to serve as a lesson that if we resist in person, we will be recognized and dealt with severely.
The silence about the truth is utterly deafening. It’s not just that we aren’t getting answers to our questions; we aren’t even getting questions outside a handful of venues including this one.
Meanwhile, the highest hopes for saving the country from ruin are being placed in the hands of the very chief executive under whom all this began. And why? Because people believe that he was tricked and betrayed into greenlighting this wreckage even though he has never actually said anything like this. It’s the only hope people have. It’s a thin hope indeed.
When I first read Orwell’s 1984, it seemed like a dark and implausible fantasy and warning. I never imagined that it was really a reductio ad absurdum of a reality that he saw unfolding before him in the rising totalitarianism of his time. It turns out that he was a prophet of just how corrupt a highly politicized society with overweening bureaucracy can be in practice when careerism trumps courage and the cash nexus spreads the coercive mindset throughout all the commanding heights of the social order.
We are finding out now. The soundtrack of the end times is not Mahler or Wagner. It is gaming music with dance numbers on TikTok, with darkly distant echoes of a simple country singer in Virginia decrying the rich men north of Richmond.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
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