https://brownstone.org/articles/life-after-lockdown-introduction/
Life After Lockdown: Introduction
My last published book was Liberty or Lockdown, originally printed in September 2020. It was written in a mad fury over what happened to the world in March 2020 and delved deeply into the history of infectious disease and the lockdown idea. At this point in publishing, I still believed there was a real hope of a dramatic turnaround, that vast numbers of elites the world over would realize that they had embarked on a hopeless and deeply destructive crusade. At that point in my thinking, I believed that society and politics still more or less worked, that some mechanism would kick in and the ship of civilization would be righted.
I was wrong, of course. There was never an exit strategy from lockdowns, closures, masks, and shot mandates, not even a benchmark for when it could end or a theory about what any of this would achieve, much less how to know whether and to what extent any of it worked. Lacking any of this, how did it end? It just gradually faded away due to waves of noncompliance and too many anomalies that made the whole project seem ridiculous and evil.
The whole thing fell apart like a house of cards except in slow motion depending upon geographic political allegiances. Of course the virus is still here as all viruses are here. It was never going to end any other way than through the achievement of endemicity regardless of government actions and without the injection that most everyone now regrets getting. This was the biggest fiasco in public health history and maybe in the history of governance given the size, scale, and reach of the coercion. And now? We aren’t supposed to talk about it at all. It was merely the late unpleasantness.
This book, which is a collection of some articles I wrote for Brownstone Institute, is designed to change that. We must talk about this issue. Lockdowns were the turning point in our lives, our societies, our culture, and affected everything from academia to education, to science, to media, to tech, and all the way down to demographics and our relationship to our professional and personal lives. It touched everything, turning what worked into something fundamentally broken and dysfunctional.
Substantial parts of this book are dedicated to asking the question: why? It was a mistake, yes, but there was much more going on, something terrible and nefarious. Some institutionalization of ancient vices included the will to rule, greed, malice, and much more. Precisely how it all unfolded is a fascinating issue. We are only a little bit of the way into understanding this. And this is despite having hundreds of people on the case. Much of the essential information we need to figure out the full scenario remains classified.
Maybe it will someday be revealed but, for now, we are left only to follow breadcrumbs and money trails. This book presents what we have but without the extensive apparatus one might need in a court case. I hope it is enough to get you interested, and perhaps you too will join the great effort.
I apologize in advance for the dark tone of the book, but it is necessary. Everything we love is at stake. Sadly, the lockdown experience was the most successful mechanism of expanding state power that we’ve seen in our lifetimes, or ever. Nothing is the same. The Internet has never been more controlled and censored. Doctors are scared. Academia is transformed. Dissidents are in hiding. The purge has removed many of our best minds from positions of influence.
It’s wise to steel ourselves for more of this because they will try it all again. Even if the next round is not as extreme, bad actors are now in a position to build on what they have done already to continue the march toward dystopia. A people of dignity and rights cannot allow this to happen.
Only the naive believe that a political solution alone is enough to reverse the course. What is needed and required is a fundamental cultural change, away from the nonchalant decadence and confidence that characterized the West before 2020 and toward a more ferocious culture that allows no trampling of human rights and is deeply suspicious of power and those connected with it. No longer can we take liberty for granted. It is something for which we must fight.
I further apologize in advance for repetitions herein. In nearly every article I write, I find myself saying again and again just how appalling the whole episode was, and I do this repeatedly because so few other writers are willing to do so. It seems obvious to me that many players in public life want silence on this. We cannot allow that. We must know, discuss, learn, and share, with open minds and a willingness to go where the facts lead.
Life after lockdowns is fundamentally different than it was before: more degraded, more brutal, more merciless, and more sadistic. We’ve seen what they are willing to do to us and are now more willing to do the same to each other. Freedom cannot thrive under such conditions. For this reason, change must begin with ourselves and our desire to resist. Similarly, the rebuilding begins from within too. We simply cannot allow this to fade from memory or acquiesce into the compliant and indifferent mass that is easily controlled. We must reimagine a brighter future before we can achieve it.
I would like to offer my special thanks to all the writers, fellows, staff, and scholars of Brownstone Institute for the endless bounty of insight, criticism, and collegiality. It’s an amazing team of thinkers without which this book would not have been possible. The same gratitude goes out to loved ones in my life who have stood by me through extremely hard times. This book is further dedicated to all dissidents who refuse to give in and become part of the army of compliant victims. May this effort contribute to the rise of a truly rebellious generation.
....
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-five-fubars/
The Five FUBARs
“How many of these places where polite society turns out to be provably insane do we have to see before we stop taking their judgment on anything as significant?”
The USA is a runaway train with a dead man in the engineer’s seat. The conductor goes through the cars assuring the passengers that everything is fine. . . never mind the screeching wheels on the curves. . . or the blinding strobe effect of low sunlight passing through the trees out the window at a hundred and forty mph. . . or the bump that made half the stuff in the overhead luggage rack jump out. More than half the people on-board are at tachycardia levels of fright — some are wailing — but the other less than half just remain fixed on their phones and laptop screens. They can’t be bothered to look out the window. . . .
Okay, that’s a metaphor. But if you’re a citizen of our country and care about it, these are the matters you’d better pay attention to, because they are all going off the rails:
The war in Ukraine. We started it in 2014 to mess with Russia and Russia is going to finish it. Who knows what our real motives were. A resource grab? A desperate ploy to erase our national debt by creating a global fiasco? Sheer psychopathic hatred of this Putin fellow? We can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge the failure of this ill-conceived venture. Instead, our feckless allies in Europe are foolishly rattling their sabers, apparently forgetting that you don’t bring a sword to a nuclear missile fight.
Mr. Macron in France affects to offer up his army for slaughter on the blood-soaked plains of Ukraine, just as the Ukrainians offered up a half a million of their young men so that Victoria Nuland could feel good about herself. Mr. Macron is insane, but the society he presides over is collectively insane, so perhaps he represents them well. Similarly, Olaf Scholz in Germany, whose top generals were caught on a leaked recording last week discussing their plan to blow up the Kerch Bridge that connects Crimea to Russia. Do you understand that this would be a direct attack on Russia, an act of War by NATO? And what the obvious consequence would be?
The phantom government of “Joe Biden” is too weak and mindless to join any negotiation. Ukraine and Russia are up to some kind of cross-talk down in Riyadh with Prince MBS. Even Mr. Zelensky went down for a day, though video appears to show him coked-up, sniffling and snarfling, not a good sign. If ever there was a time to end this stupid conflict, it’s now, before the Russian election. After that, terms will only be more difficult for Ukraine, up to direct custodial supervision instead of remaining a nation. It was never any of our business (though the Biden family, BlackRock, and the CIA saw fabulous opportunity to profit there).
Next is the border. You saw last year how the blob elite greeted the transfer of illegal immigrants to their happy little island of Martha’s Vineyard. (They were not amused by Governor DeSantis’s prank, and off-loaded the mutts post-haste.) But that same smug demographic doesn’t care if hundreds of thousands are distributed to the big cities, which are now fiscally destabilized by them to an extreme, probably to bankruptcy.
Of course, that is not the main thing to worry about with what altogether amounts to millions of border-jumpers flooding our land. The main reason to worry is what the blob that invited them here intends for them to do, which, you may suspect, is to unleash mayhem in the streets, malls, stadiums, and upon our infrastructure just in time to derail the election — perhaps even to make war on us right in our homeland. The US government is paying for this whole operation, you understand, funneling our tax money to international cut-out orgs who set up the transfer camps in Panama, and buy the plane tickets for the mutts to cross the ocean, and coordinate with the Mexican cartels to shuttle this horde of mystery people among us to work their juju for the Democratic Party. The pissed-off-ness of the public has passed the red line on this treasonous scam.
A third FUBAR is the lawfare campaign of the Democratic Party and its regime in power against the citizens of this land. This folder includes overt and obvious political prosecutions by DA’s and AG’s who make election promises to “go after” individuals without such niceties as probable cause. It includes the gigantic new scaffold of inter-agency censorship and propaganda. It includes the psychopathic struggle sessions mandated by “diversity and inclusion” policy. It includes election-rigging directed by the likes of Marc Elias and Norm Eisen, getting states to fiddle laws on voter ID and mail-in ballots. It includes the political protection of rogue groups ranging from looter flash-mobs to Antifa anarchists who bust up things and people and burn buildings down. It includes state officials who peremptorily kick candidates off the ballot. It includes a nakedly biased judiciary, and especially the use of the DC federal district court to punish people extralegally, unjustly, extravagantly, and cruelly. In short, lawfare is the complete perversion of law, and we-the-people are entreated by reprobate officials such as Merrick Garland and Letitia James to accept it.
A fourth item on this list is the US economy which has been overwhelmed by maladministration of an overgrown monster bureaucracy, and the gross (perhaps fatal) mismanagement of the government’s money. The people of this land are not being allowed to do business, to find a livelihood, to transact fairly. “Joe Biden’s” shadow string-pullers are messing as badly with the oil and gas producers as they have messed with Ukraine. And they are doing it in pursuit of a laughable mirage: their “green new deal.”
John Podesta, the “clean energy czar” who replaced the Haircut-in-search-of-a-brain called John Kerry, sits on a $370-billion slush fund that can be used to just dole out to anyone and everyone as a political patronage payoff, especially to janky “community” orgs and NGOs with fake agendas. This really just amounts to an asset-stripping operation that will leave the American people busted and with broken supply chains for everything. Instead of annual budgets, Congress raises the US debt ceiling by “continuing resolutions” to keep the government from shutting down. The national debt races to the $35-trillion mark. As interest rates on debt rise, our debt payments now exceed our military spending. You can be sure that our country will break down financially very soon.
The capper on today’s list is the nation’s health, the racketeering system we’ve set up to care for it, and the public health agencies of the government that enabled the Covid-19 operation to happen. The CDC continues to push vaccines that have killed millions of Americans and more millions around the world, and has probably compromised the well-being of millions more going forward. Corporate medicine — that is, your doctor, and your hospitals — is a sinking Titanic of grift and chaos. Try to get an appointment to even see a doctor for an emergency. Try to avoid being bankrupted by your treatment. Try to get out of a hospital alive. Yeah, it’s that bad.
The doctors have surrendered your trust in them with their lying and their bullshit. The current director of the CDC, Mandy Cohen and her predecessor, Rochelle Walensky, have knowingly presided over the mass killing and injuries imposed on the mRNA vaccinated. Hundreds of their deputies should be liable for prosecution, and so should many of the other prominent characters in the Covid Saga: Fauci, Birx, Collins, Baric, Bourla, Daszak, Califf, Woodcock, Hahn, and many more.
What are we going to do about any of this? Return to the metaphor. The runaway train is still picking up speed. You can’t just jump off at 150 mph. If you’re one of the passengers watching this in horror, maybe you can decouple your car, or get the conductor to do it by any means necessary. Let’s say that each car behind the engine of this train is a state of the United States. Let the engine up front with the dead man at the controls ride that runaway to its terrible conclusion. Cut loose the cars behind it to take care of themselves, to slow down, get a grip on their situation, and make plans to find a better engine to pull the train. Decouple. Cut loose. It’s the only way.
....
http://endoftheamericandream.com/there-is-a-war-on-free-speech-and-they-wont-ever-be-satisfied-until-it-is-completely-eradicated/
There Is A War On Free Speech, And They Won’t Ever Be Satisfied Until It Is Completely Eradicated
The freedom to say whatever we want is one of the most fundamental rights in a free society. If we are not free to speak up, it is is just a matter of time before all of our other rights are taken away as well. So it should deeply alarm all of us that free speech is under attack like never before. Much of the population has become convinced that “hate speech” is a special class of speech that does not deserve protection. Of course in practice “hate speech” ends up being whatever forms of expression that the leftist elite hate. That is why “hate speech” laws are always written so vaguely. That way they can be used to go after whoever the leftist elite feel like going after at the time.
It is not always easy to have a society where people are allowed to say whatever they want. People say things all the time that deeply, deeply offend me. And there are some that have said things about me that are tremendously hateful and untrue.
But if we are going to have a free society, people have got to be free to say whatever they want. So we should never support freedom of speech being taken away from anyone, because once we start going down that slippery slope it is just a matter of time before they come after our freedom to say what we want.
That is why what is happening in the state of Washington is so alarming. A new law would allow private individuals to collect up to $2,000 every time they report someone to the new “hate crimes and bias incidents hotline”…
Senate Bill 5427, after it is signed into law, would allow private individuals (note: this is not limited to American citizens) to report “bias incidents*” (see definition below) to the State Attorney General’s Office, with the possibility of receiving up to $2,000 of taxpayers money for this noncriminal incident. The bill was very clear: this is a non-crime which they will then forward to local law enforcement to investigate. What’s to investigate? No crime, no investigation.
The Progressives & Marxists who sponsored this bill say it is intended to help “victims of hate crimes” before a crime even happens. Say what? In reality, SB 5427 would create a “tattletale hotline,” undermine legitimate criminal investigations, and freeze, not just chill, speech & the press in Washington State. People will stop talking to others and writing to others except very close friends & relatives, for fear a greedy “Karen” will report them to Washington’s version of the Gestapo.
This is crazy.
Do we live in East Germany now?
It has been pointed out that those that use social media could make a fortune reporting their fellow citizens to the new “tattletale hotline”…
“Spend five minutes on Twitter on any given day and I assure someone would say something offensive under this law that we could call a ‘hate crime’ and collect $2,000 from the attorney general,” Conservative Ladies of Washington Founder and President Julie Barrett told the Senate Ways and Means Committee at a Feb. 20 public hearing. “It potentially target[s] people for actions they don’t like, but are not actually hate crimes. In collaboration with bills like HB 1333, this would create sort of a ‘tattletale hotline’ to report people one doesn’t agree with or doesn’t like.”
Governor Kathy Hochul today highlighted her groundbreaking State of the State proposal to expand the list of charges eligible to be prosecuted as hate crimes and announced grant funding to strengthen safety and security measures at nonprofit, community-based organizations at risk of hate crimes or attacks because of their ideology, beliefs, or mission.
“The rising tide of hate is abhorrent and unacceptable – and I’m committed to doing everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe,” Governor Hochul said. “Since the despicable Hamas attacks of October 7, there has been a disturbing rise in hate crimes against Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers. In recent years we’ve seen hate-fueled violence targeting Black residents of Buffalo and disturbing harassment of AAPI and LGBTQ+ individuals on the streets of New York City. We will never rest until all New Yorkers feel safe, regardless of who they are, who they love, or how they worship.”
And in Michigan, last year a bill was introduced that would have made it a felony if someone felt “terrorized, frightened, or threatened” by your words…
Last month, the Michigan House passed Bill 4474—legislation that would expand the state’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act beyond current protections for religion, ethnicity and race, to categories including sexual orientation and gender identity or expression. HB 4474 would make it a felony hate crime offense to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” with words—deliberately misgendering someone, for example—subject to a potential penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The Left has been pushing its “words are violence” premise for some time. But Michigan’s willingness to go the extra mile and criminalize gender-related speech has summoned a ghoul from some dystopian fever dream.
I certainly do not like hate speech.
Every day, people say things that are horribly offensive to me.
But I support their right to say those things, because I don’t want my freedom of speech to be taken away.
And the leftist elite will never be satisfied until they take things as far as they possibly can.
For example, a new law in Canada allows courts to put people in prison for the rest of their lives for “hate crime offenses”…
It also amends the Criminal Code to create a new standalone hate crime offence that would allow penalties up to life imprisonment to deter hateful conduct, as well as raise the maximum punishments for hate propaganda offences from five years to life imprisonment for advocating genocide.
“I’m the father of two youngsters and, like parents and grandparents around Canada, I’m terrified by the dangers that lurk on the internet for our children,” said Justice Minister Arif Virani Monday, as the Liberals unveiled the bill.
“I’m also a Muslim. The hatred that festers online is radicalizing people and that radicalization has real world impacts for my community, and for so many other communities,” added Virani.
So what constitutes a “hate crime” in Canada?
Well, over the years the rules have been written so vaguely that they could be used to go after just about anything.
As a result, many Canadians are now deeply afraid to say anything that is even remotely “offensive”.
Now this new law which is being pushed by Justin Trudeau will make things even worse. If you can believe it, this new law would actually allow authorities to take certain kinds of actions even before a hate crime has been committed…
Trudeau’s bill is called Bill C-63, and it’s a “hate crime bill” that primarily affects “social media” and essentially “criminalizes a human emotion.”
“If you have quote ‘fear of hate’ … you can get a judge to issue a kind of restraining order against your enemy before he does anything, before he says anything, and that restraining order can include house arrest, giving up any lawful firearms, limiting who he can talk to directly or indirectly, limiting the places he can go, and requiring him to to take urine and blood tests – just because you are quote ‘afraid’ he might in the future say some hate speech,” he explains, adding that the so-called perpetrator “doesn’t have to have done anything in the past” to be required to go through the process, making it “a pre-crime bill.”
What in the world has happened to Canada?
Once upon a time, it was such a nice place to visit.
The laws that seek to restrict how we express ourselves are never enforced uniformly.
Instead, we have seen example after example where conservatives are specifically targeted.
Here in the United States, the left believes in being very soft on violent criminals, but they will go after pro-life activists with all the fury they can muster.
Right now, a 59-year-old grandmother is probably going to spend the rest of her life in prison because she was attempting to convince women not to go into an abortion clinic…
In prison, every move an inmate makes is controlled. Ms. Idoni, 59, is getting used to that. She must, because she is facing more than 41 years in prison—the rest of her natural life.
Her sentence is expected to be the longest in the United States for someone charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law that prohibits interfering with anyone obtaining or providing “reproductive health services.” It was seldom used until the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed Roe v. Wade in June 2022, which returned abortion regulation to the states.
Her crime: sitting near or in front of the doors of abortion clinics to give sidewalk counselors a few moments to talk to women before their abortion appointments and potentially change their minds. Nine women out of 10 give them the middle finger and keep walking, Ms. Idoni said. But some women do change their minds, and sidewalk counselors say the life of every baby saved is worth the risk.
More than 60 million babies have been killed in the United States since 1973, but those responsible for the killing are not being held accountable.
Instead, those that are trying to do something about the relentless slaughter are being viciously targeted by authorities.
We really do live in an upside down society.
Good is being called evil, and evil is being called good.
And if you try to speak out about what is happening, you could find yourself in an enormous amount of trouble.
They intend to completely crush all dissent, and they will never stop until they have achieved their goal.
No comments:
Post a Comment