I owe great thanks to many remarkable mentors, friends, colleagues and subjects whose work, guidance and examples led me to write this book. Jeffrey A. Tucker supported my research by inviting me to be a Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He, Dr. Edward Stringham, then-President of AIER, and my other colleagues at the Institute demonstrated daily commitment to the highest levels of intellectual achievement devoted to the service of liberty in a darkening time. Mr. Tucker is a beacon of leadership in the liberty movement in general and his example of adhering relentlessly to the defense of civilized norms was a source of inspiration. Phillip Magness shared insights about economics and liberty that helped me to evolve my own perspectives on these issues. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff gave me interviews with valuable public health information that changed my thinking, as did Dr. Paul Alexander, Dr. Harvey Risch, Dr. Howard Tenenbaum and Dr. Peter McCullough.

Steven K. Bannon exemplified what should be American ideals for civic life, for investigative reporting and for open debate, by regularly welcoming me to bring these arguments and findings to his podcast platform WarRoom. I am grateful too for the millions of patriotic listeners in “the WarRoom Posse” who supported and engaged with my updates about the current crisis. Other conservative or libertarian interlocutors, including my former Yale classmate Eric Metaxas, and Scott Morefield, gave amplification to my warnings about losses of rights. Dr. Drew Pinsky and Sharon Pinsky, Dinesh D’Souza, Jamie Glazov and the Independent Institute all hosted conversations that helped me to develop and communicate the themes in this book.

My colleagues at DailyClout.io, especially CSO Craig Klein, made our advocacy work protecting our rights possible, and lessons from this work also informed my analysis. Russ Stratton edited skillfully the video interviews I did with heroes of our era; he and Johanna Baldwin sustained me with friendship and sound advice.

I thank Jenin Younes for many important conversations at AIER as we both faced the painful fact that the contemporary Left had institutionally abandoned its historic role as defender of human rights and personal freedoms. She is a fierce advocate for liberty, and I learned a great deal about the legal aspects of “lockdown” harms and medical discrimination, from watching her work at NCRA. Lori Roman of ACRU tirelessly helped me field emails and contacts from people facing medical discrimination and modelled the way people should be able to form productive friendships and intellectual alliances across ideological divides.

Tucker Carlson invited me on his show to share information about harms to women’s health and harms to personal freedoms, when my usual media contacts and platforms were refusing to look at these issues. Leslie Manookian of HFDF kept me informed about her groundbreaking legal work, which helped me develop an intellectual framework the harms of “lockdowns” and mandates within the law. State Rep. Melissa Blasek (R-NH) educated me about emergency law, and State Rep. Heidi Sampson (R-ME) brought me to the Maine Capitol to address her fellow legislators, informed me about harms to small businesses from “lockdowns,” and broke a major news story about money flows to schools to enforce abusive policies.

Activist and producer Jennifer Sey, and Tiffany Justice of Moms 4 Liberty, both influenced my thinking about how children are harmed by the policy about which I write here. Wendy Ractliffe is a stellar activist for health freedom, whose work on pharmaceutical companies’ influence was vital to my understanding of the corporate forces in play. I could not have done without her friendship, strategic guidance, and encouragement. Steve Berger frequently helped me understand issues at hand via sending important research links, shared impactful analyses of his own, and read the manuscript. Charlotte Walker was also a valued expert reader. Stephanie Locricchio, Aimee Villella, Mary Holland and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., informed me continually in their roles as courageous advocates and commentators on the front lines of medical tyranny.

Jane Dystel, Miriam Goderich and the team at Dystel and Goderich are the kind of agents that a writer is fortunate to have. I appreciate their sterling support. Elaine Lafferty made thoughtful connections and shared with me responses that helped me bring the book to readers. I am very grateful for the energies, dedication and skills of the team at All Seasons Press, my publisher, who brought this work across the finish line.

My best reader and most reliable champion is, as always, my mother Dr. Deborah Wolf. I thank also my wonderful children Rosa and Joe Shipley, as well as my wonderful stepchildren Ayla O’Shea and Alex O’Shea, for their love, support, wit and patience. No writer/mom/stepmom could be more fortunate in being inspired by four extraordinary young people, whose generations’ future is the subject of this book.

Above all I thank my husband, Brian O’Shea. Daily he wrestled with these issues along with me; for two years he fought this battle practically, alongside me; and in the process he taught me a great deal about how to fight for freedom. I am grateful to him as an expert reader, as a rigorous interlocutor, as an ally, and as a partner in arms.

Naomi Rebekah Wolf (born November 12, 1962) is an American feminist author and journalist.

Following her first book The Beauty Myth (1991), she became a leading spokeswoman of what has been described as the third wave of the feminist movement. Feminists including Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised her work. Others, including Camille Paglia, criticized it. In the 1990s, she was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Wolf's later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and Vagina: A New Biography. Critics have challenged the quality and accuracy of the scholarship in her books; her serious misreading of court records for Outrages (2019) led to its US publication being cancelled. Wolf's career in journalism has included topics such as abortion and the Occupy Wall Street movement in articles for media outlets such as The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.

Since around 2014, Wolf has been described, by journalists and media outlets, as a conspiracy theorist.[a] She has received criticism for promoting misinformation on topics such as beheadings carried out by ISIS, the Western African Ebola virus epidemic and Edward Snowden.

She has objected to COVID-19 lockdowns and has criticized COVID-19 vaccines. In June 2021, her Twitter account was suspended for posting anti-vaccine misinformation.

NAOMI WOLF

Bestselling author of The End of America and Give Me Liberty

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Naomi Wolf

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Front Cover image: 1218154152/uchar/istock.com. Stock photo. Posed by model.
Cover copyright © 2022 by All Seasons Press

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On March 8, 2020, I was sitting backstage at the Southbank Centre in London. I’d been invited there as a speaker in connection with the celebration of International Women’s Day.²⁹ I was excited to join many other female writers, speakers, and activists. I was seeing old friends, as I’d appeared there before, and I was enjoying the bustle and excitement of the typical festival crowds.

Parents and children, single people, babies in strollers, visitors from every background — wealthy and low-income and middle class; streams of retired folks: all this rich, peaceful array of humanity thronged the facility.

For decades, the Centre had been a dynamic, beloved destination on the banks of the Thames. It was a delectable smorgasbord, and a pride of London: with plays, lectures, films, dance troupes, comedians, debates, cafés, restaurants, a library, even an outdoor food court with food from all kinds of cuisines, the Southbank Centre represented the finest Western cultural and civic delights. It gathered people who wanted to learn and absorb culture at little or no cost to them. It supported people in the making of culture. It sustained a peaceful, complex, advanced community in which people from all different viewpoints and backgrounds moved freely, associated freely, and shared their thoughts and stories and ideas freely.

This jewel adorned what had been for over two thousand years a great city on a mighty river, where the crush of people who for centuries had been seeking — and at critical points attaining — always more inclusive and institutionalized levels of freedom of association and movement and expression. This civilization had brought about many of the glories of liberty, including Magna Carta;³⁰ the principle of habeas corpus, which ensured that people could not be locked up in prison forever without trial; John Milton’s paean to free speech, the Aeropagitica; parliamentary processes and traditions that were admired and emulated worldwide; increasingly humane innovations in incarceration; free primary education for children of all backgrounds; the work of the Enlightenment-era advocate for women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft; the marches of the Suffragists and the securing of the vote for women; and the Human Rights Act of 1998.

Unsurprisingly, this tradition of ever-developing laws and institutions was centered on the Western ideals of liberty and democracy and led to cultural glories that were also admired worldwide, inspiring readers in less free nations with a vision of nearly complete liberty and, over the centuries, a movement toward a relatively robust democracy and an accountable rule of law. Britain gave us cultural glories from Shakespeare to Milton, Jane Austen to Blake to the Brontës, Dickens to Auden, Thomas Paine to John Stuart Mill, and riches in music, theater, fiction, and philosophy too extensive to name.

At the Southbank Centre I was seated on a low platform next to a young Italian intern. We were chatting as we waited for the post-lecture wine and snacks backstage.

She was preoccupied, though, and explained that she was worried because she could not reach her mother in Milan. She said the region had been “put under lockdown.”³¹

I remember the sense of vertigo I felt when she said that. What? That could not happen in Italy — in a free, modern nation. I understood that “lockdown,” the holding of citizens against their wishes in one area, the restrictions of their liberty to assemble freely — only happened under totalitarian systems. I remember a kind of shudder going through me as I tried not to let the young women see how concerned her words had made me feel.

I knew what it meant. The flower of Europe was being struck at the root.

All around us continued the bustle and conversations and laughter. The excited crowds were lining up for the next events and chatting about the themes of the evening; attendees were making new friends in line or adding dimension to their existing friendships.

Our own event began and ended. It was a success.

As the crowds streamed out, you could hear the buzz of human culture being generated: this was human politics organically evolving. You could feel the power and potential of the living crowd, the energetic froth of a new set of ideas rippling through the audiences, new conversations to be explored at scale. People were talking, talking, talking.

As a writer who had spoken to many audiences, I’d seen and felt time and again the hard-to-describe power of this creature — the wave of energy that is new, like a wave in an ocean that can encircle the world in a moment, when hundreds of people assemble in person to hear ideas as a community and to discuss them with one another freely. Crowds even walk differently after such events, as I’d seen before. Heads that had been bowed were held higher. People approach each other more confidently. Strangers, even shy strangers, could be beautiful warriors-in-arms once they had convened like this.

There must have been six hundred women in the crowd that night. They streamed out of the theater, seeming euphoric.

The sense of possibility and, yes — empowerment — among them, acted on their moods like champagne. A massive crowd had entered a vast shared space tentative and hopeful and left it more optimistic, with barriers ripped away in their minds.

The women streamed out of the auditorium with old or new friends, heading toward drinks or a nighttime walk, or to the Tube together, in the endlessly exciting, inviting city.

I still have a picture from that last day of the old world.

Eight or ten of us, the activists and writers who had just addressed this audience, grouped ourselves together for a photo in the comfortable greenroom backstage. We were together in a line, women of all ages and backgrounds facing the camera, arms around one another. You could sense the proud new friendships, sparked in our brief discussions before and after the event, and the new possibilities for alliance: the exciting new possibilities that human gathering always brings to free people.

That is, until that very moment.

I can’t forget that feeling of those women in that picture right before the world came crashing down.

Back at the hotel, I called my husband, Brian. I told him about Italy having closed down.

Other countries were also “closing down” or “locking down,” whatever that meant. I had planned to head north to visit a mentor at a university.

“Come home,” he said. “They are going to close down flights.”

I made it home to New York just before flights shut down from Europe.

The city I left behind was effectively destroyed in many ways. London has never been the same again.

__________

In New York State, where we lived, Governor Andrew Cuomo declared emergency law on March 7, 2020 — before anyone really knew the extent of what would become the pandemic — and on June 23, 2021, he promised to end it by the next day.³⁴

I knew about emergency laws from studying the decline of democracies, and I knew by the middle of March of 2020 that something catastrophic had happened.

Nearly two years later, we were still under emergency law in New York State.

By Governor Cuomo’s initial March 2020 regulation (A mandate? An edict? We didn’t even have legal language for declarations under emergency law, since the emergency-law declaration supersedes actual law) Main Street stores and restaurants would close, but “essential businesses” could stay open. This executive order was just that — an “order.” It did not go through the legislature. This would be among the first of many “edicts” and “mandates” and “orders,” acts whose very linguistic structure seemed designed to habituate citizens of a representative democracy to top-down, unquestioned “order-following.”

The “executive order” put everyone in the state “on pause,” for everyone’s “safety.”³⁵

To many, this sounded like leadership for an emergency — like the “war footing” language with which George W. Bush launched the “Global War on Terror.” Many people in the safe, affluent nations of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, who were not used to crises, were cowed by this language. Also, who could object to a “pause”?

But my husband and I were not reassured by the Nurse Ratched–type comforting language, and we were astonished at Governor Cuomo’s dicta. Since we had both lived in war zones and conflict areas, we knew that commerce was never closed, even in the worst crises. People needed to keep making their livings in order to survive the crisis, and the economy needed to be sustained in order for the community to survive the crisis. We both knew from the history of warfare that when populations are forbidden to buy and sell, they can’t fight back. It is the death of their economy that kills them off or leads to their eventual enslavement or occupation.

Even in 1997, when there were sequential terrorist attacks on Mahane Yehuda, the open-air market in Jerusalem, in which sixteen people were killed and 178 injured, a national point of pride was that the market stayed open.³⁶ The same was the case in 2002, when six people were killed and eighty-four were injured.³⁷ People who are huddled in refugee camps around the world still buy and sell, and even when there is a war or terrorist attacks, children still try to go to school.

But for us in America in 2020? With a serious respiratory illness underway? “100% Closure of Non-Essential Businesses Statewide, Effective 8pm Sunday — Exceptions Made for Essential Services Such as Groceries and Healthcare.”³⁸

Governor Cuomo provided a series of directives that were bizarre and new at the time, phrased in CCP-style prose with a CCP-style concept: “Uniform Safety for Everyone.” This CCP-style language and concept took the place of what had been our American assumption that individuals are sovereign and cannot be “put on pause” by a ruler, and that it was citizens’ own responsibilities to deal with their own decisions about personal risk. But now:

• 10-Point Policy that Assures Uniform Safety for Everyone
• 100% Closure of Non-Essential Businesses Statewide, Effective 8pm Sunday — Exceptions Made for Essential Services Such as Groceries and Healthcare
• “Matilda’s Law” Will Provide New Protections for Most Vulnerable Populations — New Yorkers Age 70 and Older, People with Compromised Immune Systems and Those With Underlying Illnesses
• Directs 90-Day Moratorium on Any Residential or Commercial Evictions
• Asks PPE Product Providers to Sell Non-Essential Products to the State and Encourages Companies to Begin Manufacturing PPE Products
• Confirms 2,950 Additional Coronavirus Cases in New York State — Bringing Statewide Total to 7,102; New Cases in 23 Counties³⁹

What were the essential businesses, according to Governor Cuomo? Who had to be “on pause”?

The Walmart in nearby Hudson was open. The McDonald’s was open. Target was open.

But the Millerton library — that haven for kids from abusive homes, or from homes with no books — was closed.⁴⁰ The Roeliff Jansen Community Library up on Route 22 was also closed. Indeed, many of New York’s libraries were forced to close.⁴¹

But Amazon stayed open. Not only that, when its workers were getting sick from COVID-19, the behemoth told them, against California law, that they could not take paid sick leave to stay home. Workers said that this drove them to come to work while ill.⁴² Their illnesses were unsurprising: these were big box stores or factories with no windows, in which hundreds congregated at once, forced into even greater proximity by the closure of all smaller competition.

The beloved Hudson, New York, independent bookstore, The Spotted Dog, had to close when a worker tested positive for COVID-19.

(Indeed, New York State was not alone in this; independent bookstores across the country were forced to close.)⁴³

Forced to close in New York State: Broadway plays, off-Broadway plays, local theaters; movie theaters; concert halls; houses of worship. Thus: no galas or symphonies, no concerts, no weddings or baptisms, bar mitzvahs or funerals.

Small restaurants were forced to close. Dad’s Copake Diner, not far from us up on Route 22, a beloved ’50s style diner that was built and run by a local family, was forced to close, and four waitresses lost their incomes, along with two cooks. All the small businesses that supplied the diner — their income dried up, too. One waitress, an upbeat, energetic single mother who had been working three or four jobs, had a son in college. Her income was suppressed too, through no actions of her own. Her son was compelled to come home for the duration.

Somehow corporate chain restaurants were “essential” and by logic germ-free, but owner-operated restaurants were cesspits of disease to be forcibly shuttered.

Open: tech companies. Open: telecoms. Open: chain drugstores such as CVS. Open: liquor stores.⁴⁴

Pot stores stayed open in many states.⁴⁵ These were deemed to be “essential” services.

In England the news was even stranger. At first, they had an “essential services” list similar to ours.⁴⁶ But then there were ostentatious displays that just seemed cruel — in which shoppers could go to big box stores or stores on the “High Street” (main street) and buy food and alcohol, but could only gaze sadly at the retail products that they wanted to buy for their kids — retail products that could have kept small businesses alive. These would-be shoppers saw displays of model trains, dolls that could drink from bottles, Legos. These physical toys were all visible to the customers but roped off. The only items for sale were groceries and medicine.

In Britain you could see a product in the odd roped-off display then go home and order it from Amazon.

__________

Schools in state after state were suddenly, systematically, forced to close. Overnight, to my astonishment, “distance-learning” platforms appeared in school districts and were launched into use. I knew that these products took months or years to develop and took a year in advance at least to contract to school districts. But quickly they were ubiquitous and all ready to go, at all levels, for all subjects: a monumental and actually chronologically hard-to-fathom feat of curriculum development, engineering, and contracting.

And suddenly no one but parents and kids were alarmed at the prospect of millions of children directed onto screens, alone, as a replacement for “school.” Teachers were not alarmed, or if they were, their voices went unheard. Unions and school districts were definitely not alarmed. Teachers’ spokespeople vocally spread the message, using canned talking points, that teachers were living in mortal fear of children and saw them as little death bombs, and that it was they who refused to come to school to teach.

This bizarre situation overall immediately became “the new normal” — that buzzy phrase popping up in news articles about our state of suspended animation — with nowhere to debate it. Of course you couldn’t debate it: you too were forcibly “on pause.” All of this was happening whether you liked it or not, and no matter how much your child suffered and fell behind.

College students were sent home. Colleges were shuttered.

__________

Playgrounds were roped off with tape like the tape at a crime scene. In California, hiking trails, state parks, and beaches were closed off, with a “regional stay-at-home order” that would not lift until January 2021; for millions, the miles of open, windswept beaches were inaccessible.⁴⁷

As in a communist regime, people were told what they could and could not buy, and where they could and could not go, and indeed how close they were permitted to be to one another. Scared and confused, they complied.

It was not as if we could easily escape all these bizarre “emergency measures.” In Massachusetts, right across the border from us upstate, on March 10, 2020, Governor Baker had also declared emergency law.⁴⁸

In a sweep, Governor Cuomo replaced a vibrant, free, capitalist system with, in essence, an oligarchical economic system. By using the Stalinist taxonomy of “essential” and “non-essential,” he selected those businesses that would die and those businesses that would not only survive but thrive, eating up the market share that others less fortunate had been forced to abandon.

Advanced capitalism had taken five hundred years to develop in the West. Modern capitalism had built up delicate norms and regulations to allow reasonably fair competition. Banks had developed sensitive metrics to choose businesses likely to succeed over businesses with flaws. A relatively level playing field in North America and Western Europe, and easy access to capital, had led to a seventy-year stretch of innovation and growth and prosperity. With all its flaws, advanced Western capitalism was the fairest system, and the one most likely to support human development, that the world had yet seen.

Advanced Western capitalism shuddered, and came to an almost complete stop at the gesture of state governors wielding emergency powers, and, globally, at the pronouncements of prime ministers seizing emergency powers; in the blink of an eye, massive economies, businesses, and business owners were forced to freeze in time like the inhabitants of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

__________

What happened in New York State happened in similar language across the nation and throughout the formerly free nations of the world.

Legislation was passed federally in the United States “to address the crisis.” Emergency measures were passed in most states. A welter of regulations descended on schools, restaurants, shops, warehouses. Boards of health are not elected, so these were creating a situation that bypassed the will of the people. Millions of businesses were forcibly closed.

Massive bills were passed with little debate — everyone was at home, after all, including legislators. These bills carried names that suggested that they were about a medical crisis: in the United Kingdom it was “The Coronavirus Act.”⁴⁹ I read that bill in April of 2020 and was astounded. I could not understand from where it had emerged or why it took the shape it did. At that point, we had no idea if this “pause” was for a week or two and when all would return to the way it had been. But the UK “Coronavirus Act” was dozens of pages long, and in the version I read it suspended elections until 2021 in the UK. Why? What did these people know that the rest of us did not yet know? Why could the people of the UK not vote in 2020?

In the United States it was “The CARES Act,”⁵⁰ “The HEROES Act.”⁵¹ Later came “The American Rescue Plan,” doling out millions of dollars to states for individual schools.⁵² But there were strings attached — the Treasury threatened to claw back funds from Arizona, for instance, if it continued awarding grants to school districts that didn’t support the government line on masking, distancing and vaccines.⁵³ In Canada, according to Jay Cameron of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the health agencies were similarly empowered by emergency regulations to impose “edicts” and “mandates” on the population while bypassing and essentially emasculating the Canadian Parliament and its processes.⁵⁴ In democracy after democracy, the COVID-19 “emergency” was used to create an emergency governance structure that hyper-empowered health ministers and agencies, simultaneously draining decision-making powers from congresses and parliaments. It was the softest, sneakiest coup in history.

As the CEO of a website devoted to legislation, I followed the laws closely. I had never before seen bills that were structured to facilitate the wholesale bribery and thus the corruption of so many individuals and civil institutions.

In just two years, five hundred years of ever-developing capitalism — which since the Glass-Steagall Act gave opportunity to millions of middle class and working class investors and entrepreneurs and landlords — was replaced with a bleak, coercive, Marxist-style crony oligarchy. And when the dust settled, billions of dollars in value were seen to have been essentially stolen from one group, the middle and working class people of the West, and handed to another, the globalist oligarchs.

So in 2020–22 a blueprint was put into action to crush Western people, crush Western economies, and steal the assets of the working and middle classes. Added to this was the strategy of utilizing mass vaccination of an incompletely tested substance, as a pretext for imposing a digital identity system that could create a CCP-style surveillance society and generate untold riches in data harvesting for a very few.

The minds of many will likely reel at such an assertion. A crime of this scale is too massive for most of us to grasp as fact or even to entertain as a hypothetical.

How can one imagine such criminals?

You probably would not commit any serious crime, let alone one of an immensity and scale of destruction that it would rightly be seen as an act of absolute evil. But that’s because you probably empathize with other people, believe in basic human rights, and believe that human society, for all its flaws and the shortcomings of this or that human leader, is essentially organized for the well-being of human beings. So you cannot conceive that a movement directed against humanity, a veritable “hack of humanity,” would be conceived or executed by others. Surely you would have to be a demon or a sociopath to execute such a monumental crime.

But to understand what has happened to us, I must ask you to suspend for a while a thought process that investigators call “mirror imaging.” This is when we assume others think as we do. Because most of us are decent people, and not sociopaths or psychopaths, we tend to assume that others are also driven by basic human motivations such as empathy, altruism, and kindness — or even just by the basic notion that other human beings are also deserving of life, self-determination, and dignity.

This “mirror imaging,” though, is more than simply a flaw in analysis — it is a fatal error that leads us to miss important conclusions. For others do not always think as we do.

To understand such an immense crime, it is essential to grasp the thought processes of many political elites, of financial oligarchs, and of tech elites.

This understanding is fundamental to how otherwise nice people — and indeed Western people who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — can be committing evil now with whole hearts. There are lessons from history that we have to learn, or re-learn, quickly.

To understand this moment, in which a brutal tyranny is being enacted upon us in lockstep globally by many otherwise familiar and formerly benign-seeming Western leaders and philanthropists and investors, we have to begin to “think like a tyrant.”

I am not talking about anything arcane or occult. I am not talking about a QAnon fantasy of a few elites running the world.

I am talking here, rather, about the global elites whom I know and among whom I have lived for forty years.

I am describing what the German-Jewish philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”

To understand what is happening in the current global lockstep of tyranny, we must understand that certain subcultures, certain leaders, and certain ideologies simply don’t have our core values at heart; and we must face the fact that these monsters are not just Nazis long dead or members of the CCP far away. Some monsters are very near to us. Some monsters wear lovely suits and chat away about their kids at dinner parties. And some kinds of monstrosity and sociopathy are actively cultivated by the norms and within networks that are all around us, albeit half-hidden at elite levels and systematized and accepted at very high levels.

One source of the kind of global cruelty we see in medical fascism today derives from a post-war stratum of power.

Paradoxically, meta-national organizations founded after the carnage of the Second World War, such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and global corporate and investment communities have served to create a global elite of policymakers, nonprofit leaders, and bureaucrats, who are able to engage in cruel and oppressive policymaking precisely because they are no longer part of the communities whose lives are affected by what they impose on others.

All these meta-national organizations purport to foster a more peaceful, cooperative world — one that would blunt enmity between historical adversaries (such as France and Germany). They make the case that this meta-national organizational structure will far more greatly benefit ordinary men and women in the street than did the poor, battered, dysfunctional nation-state, with its rotten history and its bloody impulses.

The first half of the twentieth century, with its two catastrophic world wars, seemed indeed to reveal conclusively to the world the dark side of nationalism and the tragic limits of the nation-state; the period seemed like a textbook lesson in how decision-making at the level of nation-states seemingly leads inexorably to bloodshed and to racist, cruel jingoism.

The problem, though, as it turned out, is that you can’t have accountability to citizens or a real democracy if you do not have a democratic nation-state. In fact, the alternative, a world of transnational entities, spawns a class of distant, unaccountable deciders.

As faulty and limited as the post-1848 secular, parliamentary nation-state doubtless is, it is the most perfect form of government yet created, owing to its accountability to a set group of people — that is, to the citizenry of a constitutional democracy bounded by clear national borders.

Meta-national organizations, by contrast, rapidly created superstructures that made decisions above the heads of citizens of nation-states. Quickly, the unelected decisionmakers of the EU became more important and powerful in many ways than were the parliamentary leaders at the national level in Greece or Portugal or Spain. Quickly, in turn, citizens of various European countries began losing the skills to understand how their local and national levers of power worked, as citizens were encouraged to leave it all to the bureaucrats at a level high above that of national parliaments.

But nationalism within a bounded nation-state, excessive or perverted to the dark side though it can surely be, also has constructive and protective aspects. Positive nationalism, within an accountable, constitutional nation-state, allows people to care about and act on their own futures. It allows them to be motivated by allegiance to their own families, their own communities, their own landscapes, their own histories, and their own cultures. And its leaders have to face their citizenry.

But a discourse was propagated — by global elites, who benefited from this discourse — that shamed well-intended people, especially in the West, for being in the least bit proud of or loyal to their own nation-state or national culture. It was a discourse that scolded and belittled any member of any nation-state in the West for worrying about what might happen if there were any limits at all on national borders.

Yet seeing the positive aspects of a nation-state is not by definition negative. If one is French, it is not by definition racist to celebrate what is brightest about French culture and history. If the terms “French” or “Dutch” or “Moroccan” or “American” are defined as by citizenship rather than by race, then cultures expand and welcome the new, and what is “French” or “Dutch” or “Moroccan” or “American” simply evolves.

But just as you cannot have a constitutional democracy unless you have a discrete citizenry, of whatever background, race or faith, consisting of people initiated into that nation’s culture, language, history, rights, and responsibilities, so you cannot have a functioning, accountable representative democracy if you have open borders and voting by non-citizens. You have something nebulous, but it is no longer a representative democracy within a nation-state, and it dissolves the ever-more-distant leaders’ accountability to the people.

The recent handing-over of voting rights to nearly a million non-citizens in New York City⁵⁵ may sound to most readers of The New York Times like a right-on blow for “equity” and anti-racism, but it is actually a tyrant’s dream, as are the fully open borders presided over by President Biden in 2021–22.⁵⁶ The effect, and the intention, is to dilute the power of citizens within the formerly discrete boundaries of a specific nation-state.

The democratic nation-state is by necessity accountable to its people in a way that meta-national organizations simply are not. The people in a nation-state can vote out corrupt leaders. They can change course when it comes to bad policies. Indeed, they can put corrupt leaders on trial and in prison, or in the case of the United States, can execute those who have been found guilty of espionage, or of having committed treason.

The leaders of such citizens must, whether they wish to or not, deal with their people and worry about their reactions. There are natural limits to the cruelty and oppression with which an elected leader in a constitutional nation-state can get away.

Not so with leaders in the post-war world of meta-national organizations, global nonprofits, and increasingly porous borders. Once these leaders go bad, nothing need constrain their cruelty. The same is true for economic global elites, once national allegiances and national accountability have been left behind.

What happened in the almost eighty years since the end of the Second World War is the development of an elite international class of technocrats, EU bureaucrats, global nonprofit leaders and international investors for whom the nation-state — even one’s own nation-state of origin — is an artifact, a secondary concern, a sentimental add-on. What really matters are other global elites in one’s social circle and business network and the valuable relationships one can create with them. One’s “ordinary” countrymen and women recede and become theoretical. And the constant message one receives from one’s peers and from the elite meta-national culture is that those “ordinary” men and women simply are not as smart or well-educated, and so it would be a disaster to let them make their own decisions. Indeed, deciding for them saves them from their own fecklessness, ignorance, and shortsightedness.

What does this have to do with the escalating global cruelty of 2020–22 and “The Great Reset”?

Experiments done by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University not only affirmed the lamentable truth that ordinary humans are capable of great cruelty, but showed that the greater the remove from the victim — and the more authoritative the directive insisting on the harm — the more readily “normal” people become monsters and abusers.⁵⁷

Dr. Milgram found that sixty-five percent of participants were willing to shock their purported subjects (“learners”) to the highest voltage level possible on the insistence of an authority figure. “Participants demonstrated a range of negative emotions about continuing,” he noted. “Some participants thought they had killed the learner. Nevertheless, participants continued to obey, discharging the full shock to learners. One man who wanted to abandon the experiment was told the experiment must continue. Instead of challenging the decision of the experimenter, he proceeded, repeating to himself, ‘It’s got to go on, it’s got to go on.’”⁵⁸

In a sense, this experiment was replicated on a mass scale over the two years of the pandemic. A great many people instinctively felt something was terribly wrong; that what they were being told did not accord with their own experience. But at the same time, they were being subjected to a massive propaganda campaign invoking authority and superior understanding; a campaign, aligned with unthinkably lucrative direct incentives in some cases, led by a network of global elites, who, lovely as they might be one on one, and as nice as most doubtless were to their own kids, unhesitatingly executed vast cruelties and inflicted untold damage.

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How do I know about the value assigned to the holy grail of gaming the system, and the potential for cruelty, shared by certain global elites? I have seen them up close.

I will never forget being in a company car in 2015, heading to the BBC’s flagship political show. It was driven by the BBC’s longtime driver. As a reporter, I always talk to drivers in these circumstances, because the elite men and women often do not “see” drivers, waitstaff, cleaners, and other mere mortals. So drivers and waitstaff and cleaners tend to hear everything and know everything.

It was an important week, in which the people of Greece, distraught at having had policies of “austerity” forced upon them by the European Union, were about to engage in a referendum. The papers were full of elderly Greek men and women weeping and in despair because the proposed policies would wipe away their retirement savings. As is common, the European newspapers were portraying the people of Greece, in opposing austerity, as spendthrifts, as ignorant, as having brought their economic disaster upon themselves, and as needing to be rescued by the policies of those wiser heads above the level of their national leaders’ decision-making.

I couldn’t help thinking that maybe it will be the case that rejecting “austerity” policies will turn out to be an economic mistake for the people of Greece. But I knew about referenda: and if there is a majority vote in a referendum, it is by law the will of the people. In a democracy, their decision must be enacted. So you can have your opinion about whether austerity would be smart or not in this context, but since the people have a real nation-state, their referendum would determine what happened in their country. And if the people’s decision turned out to be a mistake, well, it was their mistake to make, with their own country, in their own parliament.

“Oh no,” explained the driver. “EU officials were in this car before you. The referendum is purely cosmetic. It will be ignored. Whatever happens, they are going ahead with austerity.”

I was dumbfounded.

But as it turned out, the BBC driver was exactly right. The people of Greece voted against austerity. But they were not to get their chosen outcome.⁵⁹

Later that week, back in New York City, I was at a dinner party. It was hosted by a major hedge fund manager. His clients were Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and other international investment funds. At the party were his colleagues: British, Swedish, Chinese, French, and Belgian hedge fund managers and investors.

My host, an otherwise lovely guy, trained of course in the Ivy League, was apoplectic — furious — at the rank-and-file men and women of Greece. He did not yet know what the EU officials knew. He knew that the people of Greece had rejected austerity in their referendum.⁶⁰ But he had positioned in the opposite direction. Now he was enraged at those grandmas and grandpas, and at their resistant, stubborn sons and daughters, for having temporarily messed up his bet on austerity. He was literally pale with rage. His fists clenched as he spoke about the Greek referendum. How dare they, was his attitude. The fools.

The mansion where we were gathered that night had been built by a robber baron at the end of the nineteenth century. The dining room was staffed by beautiful actors/waiters and actresses/waitresses in black pants and spotless white shirts. They charmingly served us a gorgeous plaice velouté dinner, with sides of grilled asparagus and heirloom beets. The ceilings were twenty feet high and wreathed in shadows. The walls were adorned with a mélange of works of art: Italian Renaissance princelings, luscious still lifes from the sixteenth-century Netherlands, and portraits of late-nineteenth-century American society doyennes.

The conversation was sprightly. To my right, a Norwegian investor spoke about the latest avant-garde theatrical sensation on Broadway. To my left, an artist friend of the host and hostess described escalations in the New York City art market. Everyone was educated, pleasant, and cultured. The money guys were all agreeing with the host about the perfidy and “bad behavior” of the stubborn people of Greece. The wine flowed, red and white; it was beyond excellent. No one at that table was visibly evil. There were no secret signs or shadowy conversations. If this were a movie, you could not identify a villain. No one was part of a cabal.

But the point was that these people did not need to gather in the shadows or to be part of a cabal. Why would this group need a secret sign or a secret meeting? They simply owned the global stratum in which they operated, and they were accountable only to one another.

Neither did anyone there, expressing his or her views about the events of the weeks, think for an instant there was anything wrong with ignoring and overriding the democratically expressed will of an entire nation of citizens who had articulated their wishes lawfully. No one there had to say aloud to anyone else, “Let’s be sure to suppress the eruptions of popular sentiments in nation-states, going forward” to know what kind of unmanageable future events were bad for business.

Thus, the whole nation, all the people of Greece, were being treated with extraordinary cruelty and contempt by these distant non-Greek men and women. This cruelty was possible in part because these men and women would never see them or have to face them or ever answer to them.

At the end of the evening, I was introduced to a brilliant young woman, a protégée of my host’s. She was from a small, poor, fairly recent democracy in the global South, and educated as well in the Ivy League. My host showed off the young lady’s knowledge and acumen about financial markets in the context of a discussion about the “reckless” behavior of the Greeks, and their nonsensical referendum.

Did she think her own fellow countrymen and women should have a say in outcomes about their economic futures? I asked her gently. I truly wondered what her views would be.

“No; the ordinary people of any given country don’t have the skills to make the right economic decisions for themselves or their nations. We should be deciding for them,” she calmly explained, with all the confidence and certainty of a now-privileged twentysomething.

“That’s right,” my host confirmed proudly.

So the Greeks never got their referendum outcome. There was a famous U-turn, and austerity was imposed against their wishes.⁶¹ Many elderly Greek men and women were driven into abject poverty in their retirement. Many small and medium-sized businesses were lost.

Not much later, I was at another dinner hosted by the same man and mostly attended by the same group of people. But among the guests now was someone new: a former Greek politician who until very recently had been at the center, first, of the fight to reject austerity, and then of the abrupt U-turn.

He looked flushed, proud and ashamed at once, and he was being introduced around like a captured prize.

Who knows what promises had been made, what arrangements attended this outcome, this new alliance? But that former leader must have seen a level of influence and wealth far above what mere allegiance to his fellow citizens, mere decency, could have gotten him.

And my host, well, he and his colleagues got, in the end, the outcome on which they had placed such a big, big bet.

That night the wine continued to flow — and a new constellation was part of the social mix.

Too bad about the hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” Greeks, many of them elderly, now ruined for the rest of their lives. Too bad about the wreckage of the small businesses.

But of course this is just one example of how great evil — evil at a national level, and now evil at the coordinated global level of “The Great Reset” — is achieved: by distance and by condescension and by the creation of a meta-national community who see and hear and are answerable only to each other; but who do not see, or in any way respect, the rights of nations; or of self-determination of elders, of voters, of property; of you or of me.

To understand 2020–22, it is essential to grasp that great evil need not arrive in the guise of a goose-stepping soldier, or an official knocking at your door wearing jackboots. To understand how COVID-19 policy can be so coordinated and so cruel and so neo-fascistic, we need to understand that evil can come in the form of a well-dressed man or woman far removed from any traditional human or national loyalties or decencies but pleasantly passing the sherry.

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A final factor to understand when we look at who committed the great crimes of 2020–22, and how these crimes were executed, has to do with understanding the extent of Communist China’s infiltration of the institutions of the United States and Western Europe. Sinologists such as Michael P. Senger, Peter Schweizer, and the longtime presidential China advisor Michael Pillsbury understand that China does not use military might as the primary weapon in its fight against its targeted nations and especially against us, the other superpower. Rather, its strategy is to use “a set of asymmetric weapons that allow an inferior power to defeat a seemingly superior adversary by striking at an enemy’s weakest point.” Pillsbury, like other sinologists raising the alarm, sees “a 100-year-long effort to overtake the US as the world’s superpower” with deception as the essential tactic. By China’s encouraging the United States to view it as weak and in need of Western guidance, he writes: “For decades … the US government has freely handed over sensitive information, technology, military know-how, intelligence and expert advice to the Chinese … and what we haven’t given the Chinese, they’ve stolen.” He and other sinologists believe that the CCP is intent on a plan in place since the time of Mao Zedong to become the world’s hegemon by 2049, the Communist revolution’s hundredth anniversary. He and others warn that thousands of CCP-aligned academics, foreign students who are bound by CCP law to report intel back to the CCP, and businesspeople, are embedded in strategic institutions in US and Western culture, economics, and politics. And these sinologists warn, too, that while for years China’s scholars have denied the goal of “a Chinese-led world order,” the tone from the CCP has recently changed. Since 2020, CCP spokespeople have used insulting and confrontational language to their US counterparts, and the goal of being the world’s hegemon is now stated overtly by the CCP. “The hard truth,” warns Pillsbury, “is that China’s leaders see America as an enemy in the global struggle they plan on winning.”⁶²

Among those tasked with our national security, these fears have long been prevalent. As far back as 2009, a US Senate hearing was titled: “China’s Propaganda and Influence Operations, Its Intelligence Activities that Target the United States, and the Resulting Impacts on US National Security.”⁶³

Eight years later, in May 2017, Sarah Cook, a Senior Research Analyst for East Asia, Freedom House, gave testimony at the Senate’s “US-China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing on China’s Information Controls, Global Media Influence, and Cyber Warfare Strategy.” Her report was titled “Chinese Government Influence on the US Media Landscape.”⁶⁴ That report was updated in January 2020 under the title: “Chinese Communist Party’s Media Influence Expands Worldwide: Report Finds Global Rise in Propaganda, Censorship, and Control of Content-Delivery Systems.”⁶⁵ These reports found widespread influence operations aimed by the CCP at affecting staff, content and messaging in Western media and social media.

Almost redundantly, a global influence campaign aimed at the world’s media was uncovered in 2020 by the International Federation of Journalists. They called their report “The China Story: Reshaping the World’s Media.”⁶⁶

What does all the well-established CCP influence on Western media and social media — and Western academics and sports stars and influencers — have to do specifically with the great crime of 2020–22?

Most obviously, it long kept under wraps the fundamental fact of the pandemic’s origins, ensuring that the Wuhan lab-leak premise would be everywhere derided as “conspiracy theory.” In this regard the CCP even now continues to get away with murder.

More, Communist China’s vast influence over global media benefits it immeasurably in suppressing Western heroes, Western history, Western ideals such as freedoms of speech and assembly, and Western instincts of spontaneity and individualism. Indeed, even as China daily works to undermine Western values and fan discord among the warring elements of traditionally democratic societies, its interests (including in becoming the main global force in biotech and in DNA databases) align neatly with the goals of the WEF and the bottom-line drivers of Big Tech; they readily work toward allied goals, if not in coordination. All favor like policies, aiming to intimidate citizens and break communities and to surveil citizens in a lucrative and controlling digital grid. These policies especially target freedom of speech, and aim to cripple the mastery by Western children — whom we could call the 2049 generation — of free thought and expression.

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By June, a meme appeared on social media: “Humans are the virus.”

Were we?

“Mask” very soon debuted as a positive verb. It had been, in English, until that very moment, a negative verb — facts were “masked,” true intentions were “masked.”

But now everywhere in media and social media were instructions to don masks. Any masks! “Mask up!” became a catch phrase, like “Wheels up!” or “Bottoms up!” The phrase seemed focus-grouped in the way that it was made to sound almost jolly; there was nothing in the language to indicate that “Mask up!” might connote “suffocate” or “inhibit speech and breathing.”

Newspapers showed you how to make masks out of any random fabric. They even offered patterns to cut out. I thought that sounded pretty old-school and unscientific.

But The New York Times showed dramatic schematics about why you must “mask up.”⁶⁸ They penned front-page stories about aerosol-transmission studies that concluded that virtually no situation in which other humans were breathing, indoors or out, was not potentially fatal.⁶⁹ They represented the “virus” embedded in human breath as a ghostly-white cloud of particulates in diagrams that showed the lurid clouds raining death and disease on a hapless recipient who thereby became a victim of that fatal viral stream.

I was puzzled by this emerging narrative about “masks” and “distancing,” about staying home indoors and not venturing outside.

Mostly I was puzzled because, even as a layperson, I was aware of long-held understandings regarding airborne respiratory pathogens. As a student of English literature and British history, I’d read the famous novels and knew of the great operas whose protagonists suffered from a dangerous, potentially fatal, airborne, respiratory disease, that, as yet, had no cure. The heroines Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata, Antonia in Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and Mimi in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème all suffered from tuberculosis. Hans Castorp, in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, suffered from tuberculosis.

The New Zealand novelist and short-story writer Katherine Mansfield had herself suffered from tuberculosis. The British novelists D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell had suffered from tuberculosis.

So I knew that, though this predicament in which we found ourselves was being relentlessly messaged as “novel” and unprecedented, the conducting of human civilization while dealing with an untreatable serious, potentially fatal, respiratory illness was hardly novel for human beings.

“Masking” and “distancing” would be iconic human experiences. Victims of tuberculosis were of course isolated in ways when they were ill. Yet I could not recall in any of these writers’ memoirs, or in any of their biographies, or in any of these composers’ cultural productions even a passing mention of the general healthy public’s use of masking — let alone “health” directives that called for the “distancing” of healthy people and that compelled them to stay indoors for months at a time.

Indeed, The Magic Mountain is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium; there are many scenes of inhabitants taking strenuous outdoor hikes, devouring healthful meals, and being made to lie bundled up in fur sleeping bags on sleeping porches outdoors, to benefit from fresh air and sunshine. But “masks,” “distancing,” and being kept forcibly indoors together were not at all part of the regime.⁷⁰

Tubercular people in the past were at times quarantined or sent to sanatoria, but never before in this history of dealing with serious airborne illness had the human race “distanced” the healthy from one another in order to deal with the risk of this kind of pathogen. If “distancing” and “masking” had “worked” with regard to serious airborne respiratory illnesses, why was this presumably tremendously important discovery now news only coincidentally with the onset of a brand-new illness in 2020?

The question naturally arises: how did we deal with similar medical crises in the past?

The answer: for all the devastation these crises wrought, civilization and commerce were not brought to a standstill.

In fact, America has lived through waves of infectious diseases ranging from yellow fever in Boston in 1693,⁷¹ to smallpox from 1775–82,⁷² to cholera outbreaks the mid-nineteenth century,⁷³ to waves of tuberculosis from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.⁷⁴ But we remained America — and free, after 1776, with a constitution and rule of law — in spite of these waves of disease and indeed in spite of two world wars.

Even in the worst instances of waves of serious or fatal diseases, schools sought to reopen as soon and as safely as possible. In Jane Eyre, the heroine’s boarding school Lowood is closed after an epidemic of typhus fever kills students. But after an investigation into the causes of the spread of the disease, wealthy benefactors improve the building and its location, the diet, clothing, housing conditions and treatment of the children, and “[t]he school, thus improved, became in time a truly useful and noble institution.”⁷⁵

The terrible Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–19, with which COVID-19 has been so often compared — but which, in fact, cut a much more harrowing swath through society (not only taking many millions more worldwide, but particularly targeting young adults) — did not bring to a permanent stop commerce, arts, worship or assembly worldwide. Europe likewise had long sustained waves of infectious disease, including cholera and typhus in the nineteenth century that killed tens of thousands.

But none of it dissolved North American or European culture or community. Indeed, the periods of disease in North America and Europe coincided with periods of great human achievement. People suffered in medical terms, of course; people died and were mourned. The tragedies of infectious diseases unfolded on grand scales. But culture and history, innovation and capital markets did not stop.

Western children lived through such difficult times and survived, even thrived, because they had each other. They had parents. They could speak and hug and play. And they had around them the organic local culture. The American Psychological Association notes that kids can survive many crises, even wartime, with mental health intact if they have loving and expressive home situations.⁷⁶

Indeed, people in the West sustained communal achievements during crises and bad times generation after generation. It was during the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s⁷⁷ that Philadelphia saw the creation of some of its most beautiful architectural structures.⁷⁸

During the typhus and cholera epidemics in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, Charles Dickens produced The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby, Robert Browning wrote Sordello, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first book. Charlotte Brontë brought out Jane Eyre. The examples of productivity during hellish medical crises past are endless. In each case the writer was surrounded by, and reflected, the dynamism of life in the great capital and regional metropoles; he or she was absorbed by the social and economic life of the community and went freely to church, to baptisms, and to funerals and traveled to transact business and to meet friends.

It’s not as if people were indifferent, or that no precautions were taken. In the years before antibiotics and modern treatments, infectious diseases, including airborne respiratory illnesses, were of course greatly-feared and addressed, if imperfectly, by sunlight, nutrition, exercise, fresh air and better sanitation. Everyone who reads Western novels and knows Western history is well-aware of this.

In Crimea, in 1854–56, the British nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale famously lowered rates of airborne illness in wartime hospitals by insisting on bringing into dark, unventilated conditions sunlight, nutrition, and ventilation: “hygiene, sanitation, fresh air … a good diet.”⁷⁹ Her results were measurable, and they changed public health practices. Building on this knowledge base, America’s settlement movement in the Progressive Era sought to ease crowded, stuffy, multifamily households, where infectious diseases flourished, by changing building codes so that airshafts and courtyards allowed for air circulation in the home. The Tenement House Law of 1901 ensured flush toilets and airshafts to limit disease and set minimum requirements in building codes for light and ventilation.⁸⁰

This understanding of the health impacts of sunlight and ventilation even led to the building codes that required stepped-back skyscrapers in New York City, to allow sun and air circulation to reach crowded urban streets.⁸¹ Settlement reformers got cod liver oil, with its high levels of Vitamin D, to the children of the poor⁸² and lobbied successfully for public parks and playgrounds.⁸³ The reason? They understood that sunlight, Vitamin D, nutrition, exercise, and fresh air were potent enemies of then-otherwise-untreatable airborne infectious diseases.

Everyone knew this.

Yet now, weirdly, in state after state, policies and media messages were promoting precisely the opposite. The message was not “Go to the park, go to the beach! Exercise! Open the windows! Get sun! Take Vitamin D!” but rather, “Stay Home! Bring the adult children home into crowded multigenerational households! Stay indoors, continually stressed with fear! Put a piece of fabric on your face!”

It was hard to fathom how we had so quickly lost our collective cultural memory.

The ready access of enclosed and depressed people to marijuana and alcohol under the directive not to leave home further degraded the likelihood of healthful outcomes.⁸⁴

The masking, the enclosure, the isolation, the lack of community, fresh air and exercise, the fear, the cabin fever, the generations piled on top of one another, the alienation engendered by computer screens — they all took their toll. People grew pale, fearful, obsessive, phobic, and sad. And unsurprisingly, many got sick and many died.

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The everywhere-promoted “masking” quickly became a fetish. In all cultures and at all times, masks have represented de-individuation and dehumanization. Thieves wear masks. Executioners wear black masks so their victims cannot see them. Torturers are masked. On Halloween, masked children assume the avatars of ghosts, monsters, and devils; at Carnival in New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro, masks endow their wearers with a scarier or more powerful persona.

On the other side of the equation, masks allow for people to be more easily punished and victimized. In Pentonville prison, where the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for “gross indecency,” prisoners were masked as a way to reinforce their isolation:

[T]he guiding principle of this system was to keep prisoners completely apart, as a form of punishment … When prisoners left their cells, only for exercise and to attend chapel, they had to wear a “Scottish cap,” which was a type of baseball cap with a large peak forming a mask so that they could only see through narrow slits. Even in the chapel the prisoners had to sit in cubicles, rather than in open pews. Wilde would have already experienced this at Pentonville. There were 250 cells in Reading Prison, on three landings — all single occupancy.⁸⁵

So isolation, masking, and “distancing” were part of the regime of punishment and psychological torture in a Victorian prison.

And yet in 2020–21 these were reintroduced to the West as an optimum lifestyle.

Culturally, masks are always what the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud called the “unheimlich” — the uncanny, a symbol that triggers unconscious feelings of unease, of being “not at home,” which provides a sensation that is creepy or weird. How many characters in horror films, from Ghostface to Jason in Friday the 13th, are masked?

It is not surprising that masks are so destabilizing to see, so unnerving. We see from expressions if we are among friendly people or people who are dangerous to us. Human beings need to see faces in order to feel safe.

I recall around June of 2020 seeing an adult stranger, a woman, approach a five-year-old who was beside her mother. The older lady just wanted to say “Hi” and to chat, as she had with children for decades, as we all used to do before 2020. It was second nature to her, and of course such casual interactions are basic to children’s socialization. But this child, unable to tell if the masked stranger approaching her was smiling or not, began to cower in fear, and to cling desperately to his mother.

Early in the “masking” regime, there were victims of sexual assault describing online how triggering it was for them not to be able to see faces and assess expressions. “Everyone in a mask seems like a predator,” as one survivor put it.

“Social distancing” — “mask up” — “we stand together by staying apart”: these proto-Marxist idioms and Newspeak linguistic aberrations in the culture were like hideous toadstools in what had been a familiar, fresh, green forest of Western languages.

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At the same time as the living classroom was killed off, so was the living office. “Remote working” or “working remotely” became terms in the new lexicon — as opposed to the more organic “not showing up for work” or “being absent from the office.” Suddenly, after two hundred and fifty years of an Industrial Revolution in which many Western people went to work, the importance of the office, that workplace outside of the home, simply vanished.

Abruptly, vast messaging surrounded almost every white-collar worker, communicating that one could stay home — stay home! And work “remotely,” on a platform such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Indeed Zoom — which was a platform that a tiny minority had navigated before April 2020 — was suddenly everywhere.

As with “remote learning,” Zoom rolled out everywhere as a cultural expectation without question or variation. It wasn’t as if some businesses met or polled their workers or created a hybrid model — no, the social norm was established almost overnight. Everyone suddenly knew how to navigate it, and a whole Zoom culture appeared at once.

At first it seemed impossible — this staying at home with working parents and kids tethered to screens could never be a widespread or enduring solution. Women have been asking to “work remotely” for decades, and business interests have always had reasons not to allow it.

But suddenly this massive shift in human activity every day, this shift of not going to work, was not just tolerated, it was promoted everywhere. In the blink of an eye it was “the new normal” — another phrase that appeared out of nowhere in the early spring of 2020. (Zoom’s stock, by the way, peaked in October 2020).⁸⁷

Lifestyle articles talked about “Zoomers” (cute!). “Coronavirus and Zoom have marked a generation,” we read in 2020.⁸⁸

Fashion pages discussed what it meant to wear sweatpants all day down below and a well-put-together look on top. Adorable, slightly sassy features tsk-tsked at how men working at home would hog the good surfaces and wives would have to find a corner in a bedroom. But few really seemed to question this massive shift in the expectation of how human beings should spend their days. And after “mandates” were passed to force us to stay home, resistance was futile anyway.

Still, it seemed extraordinary: kids were expected to be on a computer for multiple hours a day in one room, while a working mom, or a homemaking mom, was also nearby, and a dad might also be in the next room working on a computer. If there were siblings, they were expected to be on computers.

I knew from decades of being on panels about working mothers and “balance” — and also from having been a working mom with small children myself — that this expectation was impossible.

Whoever had issued this bizarre sudden edict seemed not to have dealt with something that had bedeviled feminism and employers for forty years: who would watch the children? No, that question was completely done away with and over the course of some weeks. A new expectation was now prevalent all over America, and indeed the West. Strange and head-spinning as it seemed at first: no one was watching the kids.

The time-honored American, Canadian, Australian, and European social outlet of physical shopping also had largely vanished overnight. News articles appeared stating that you could get sick from touching surfaces: “What’s the Risk of Catching Coronavirus from a Surface? Touching Contaminated Objects and then Infecting Ourselves with the Germs is Not Typically How the Virus Spreads. But it Can Happen.”⁸⁹ UC Davis Health would later note that “[t]ests have found traces of COVID-19 on surfaces, but no research has established that the virus is viable in those places.”⁹⁰ What a gift for e-commerce!

Menus vanished, as they presumably carried fatal diseases (except that they didn’t), to be replaced with QR codes that could geolocate you.⁹¹ “Contactless” offerings appeared everywhere: “Curbside Pickup,” Grubhub, Seamless.

Almost as suddenly, to solve the problem, at least for the affluent, of being discouraged from physically shopping for groceries whose surfaces could kill you (except that they couldn’t), meal kits appeared — they would be delivered to your doorstep! So many, many meal kits were suddenly advertised everywhere: Home Chef, Marley Spoon, Green Chef.

Figure 1

HelloFresh was one such meal kit company. It had not made money for years after its founding. It was supported by the startup studio Rocket Internet; Insight Venture Partners led a $50 million round in 2014.⁹² By 2017, HelloFresh was still unprofitable. But Rocket Internet’s stake in HelloFresh was worth almost $980 million.⁹³

What a benefit, though, the “stay at home” orders were to this formerly money-losing meal-kit company and its internet-industry investors: HelloFresh’s revenue more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, then nearly doubled yet again in 2021 (Figure 1).⁹⁴

The meal kits appeared, like magic, for every taste, at least for the upper-middle class, and pacified them. The working class people who could not afford them or who could not afford to get to Walmart or Costco, or who had no car, were suddenly trying to stay healthy in food deserts even more deserted than the food deserts that had bedeviled their lower-income neighborhoods before March 2020.

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In the digital world, almost every major website or platform suddenly had a “COVID-19” warning.

That has been the case now for two years. That is hard to accomplish. Google showed you where testing sites were, when you were just looking for directions to a nearby gas station. Our phones suddenly showed a scary, spiked, mucus-green “COVID virus” emoji when we typed the word “virus.”

Other tech moguls funded evidence for “lockdowns.” The Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford built a “COVID-19 Government Response Tracker,” which purported to show how school closures, “lockdown” policies and other restrictive measures affected health and economic outcomes in 180 countries.⁹⁵ In the middle of the “lockdown,” the Blavatnik School’s “COVID-19 Stringency Index” was widely cited in the US news media alongside case counts to show that “locked-down” states purportedly did better than open states.⁹⁶ Subsequent studies did not, however, confirm this claimed difference in outcomes.⁹⁷

The Blavatnik School, which is a public policy institution and not a medical one, was funded by Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire with both US and UK citizenship. He is a major donor to both US political parties and has ties to Russian oligarchs. Blavatnik’s portfolio includes Access Technology Ventures, “a portfolio of foundational companies that touch millions of customers across the consumer and enterprise technology ecosystems.”⁹⁸ This portfolio shows how mega-elites profit from both the CCP and the West, thus blurring the objectives of traditional nation-state adversaries and reveals how many have a vested interest in a “locked-down,” post-humane world.

The group invested more than $2 billion in tech and related companies worldwide.⁹⁹ Its holdings? Companies boosted directly by “lockdowns” and a “contactless” world.

Blavatnik’s portfolio has included Alibaba Group (a major online retailer, similar to Amazon and one of its chief competitors), Tencent Music, and ANT Financial (all Chinese companies), Zhihu Inc, “an iconic online content community” and one of the top five online content communities in China,¹⁰⁰ Facebook, Snapchat, Spotify, Square (the digital payment processor), Amazon, and Rocket Internet — the HelloFresh investor.¹⁰¹ All these platforms are boosted by a post-humane world, in which we do not meet, party, make music, or transact in person.

The Blavatnik School also offered the “Pathways for Prosperity Commission on Technology and Inclusive Development.” One of the program’s three co-chairs? Melinda Gates. The program was “founded and managed by the Blavatnik School of Government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”¹⁰²

Before anyone really processed what was happening, before we could catch our collective breath, this somber catastrophe, or what was alleged to be a somber catastrophe — one that in times past we might have dealt with in 330 million individual ways, as Americans had always dealt with catastrophe — morphed into a uniform, top-down, almost cozy “lifestyle” that was, as a form of house arrest, well, tolerable.

That is, if you were affluent.

What we did not know was that the “academic” studies, the media messaging, and the tools for the cozy lifestyle all derived from, and then benefited, the same small group.

So it took much longer than it should have for anyone but a handful to understand that the pandemic had created a pretext for 360-degree social control. This is because we’re a trusting and good-hearted people, and many citizens had little understanding of how policy is crafted in an emergency/opportunity context.

Most people naturally assume emergency-related policies are made as a direct response to the needs of citizens. But they could not be more mistaken.

Former President Clinton’s operative Rahm Emanuel famously told a Wall Street Journal forum how some political operatives actually regard horrific situations: “[Y]ou never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”¹¹⁷

Having been around global decision-makers in media, politics, and tech gives me insight into what can happen in the rooms where responses to crisis are crafted. While at a national or even a state level it is a given that the policy response to a crisis will always be presented to the citizenry as addressing their own needs, in actuality, no matter how awful the emergency may be, one of the first thing insiders need to know about an emergency is also whether it offers an opportunity to promote their interests.

This is why a lot of emergency policy can seem illogical to citizens on the receiving end.

Behind the scenes, in conversations that media do not cover, dozens of lobbyists and assorted billionaires oftentimes have a say in what that “emergency” legislation or health mandates look like.

The hidden special interests can range from Big Pharma executives to real estate investors, to telecom and tech companies to insurers. These days lobbyists can, and do, include foreign nations — even foreign nations that, far from being our immediate allies, are our sworn adversaries.

Of course, when the policy or the health-department directive is announced, those dozens of hands and scores of fingerprints belonging to the lobbyists for the mega-corporations and billionaires that shaped it are invisible. The policy is rolled out as being driven solely by medical necessity and peer-reviewed research.

This is often a lie.

Yet it is received as truth by citizens, and never more so than in the panic of the crisis, not only because they have no way to see “how the sausage is made,” but also because they are afraid.

Indeed, the outcomes sought by the elites can’t be accomplished nearly as readily in ordinary times, times where lobbyists certainly play a part, but find their roles constrained by the normal legislative process. But in a COVID-closed or COVID-managed society, there is none of the scrutiny that routinely accompanies the making of legislation; normal debate is suspended; reporters can’t — or, even more than ordinarily, won’t — ask hard questions. Policy to comprehensively control people’s behavior and movements at scale is crafted in darkness,

Emergencies create unbelievably lucrative opportunities for the ramping-up of corruption.

__________

I am often called a “conspiracy theorist.” The reason is simple. Unlike all but a very few other journalists or nonfiction writers, I’ve been a political consultant to a presidential campaign and advisor to a vice president. And as a result of those experiences, I know how the powerful react in a crisis — especially when their self-interest is involved.

A quick story. It is August 1998 and my then-husband was a White House speechwriter. We’d left Washington on vacation and were journeying through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco with our three-year-old toddler. Over crackling radios, we heard about a breaking scandal; we could barely make out disclosures coming closer and closer to an alleged sex act in the White House.

Our guide, who spoke little English, explained only: “Clinton. Dress. Scandal.” Monica Lewinsky was about to testify to a grand jury about her relationship to the President of the United States.

A few nights later, an emergency unfolded in the United States.¹¹⁸

“Changing the subject” during a scandal or a run of bad press is political-insider shorthand for “making people forget.” It is the goal of every political consultant or chief of staff under duress.

A factory in Sudan had been bombed “on the direct orders” of the president.¹¹⁹ The factory, alleged to have been involved in the making of threatening substances, was “pulverized,” reduced to “broken concrete and iron bars.”¹²⁰ The “subject was changed.” Abruptly, in the news media, the focus turned to the great threat this factory had posed to our safety in the United States, and to our very way of life. The media showed images of the post-bombardment wreckage. Triumphalist coverage attended this show of our force.

Soon enough the dust settled. When it was reported that in actuality the target had been a medicine factory, White House spokespeople countered that it was in fact a “disguised chemical weapons factory” and that soil samples showed a substance connected to the manufacture of nerve gas.

By the time the news cycle had moved on, and Sudan was once again relegated to its usual status as a US foreign policy backwater, a few brief news stories conceded that in reality the bombed building had never been a chemical-weapons factory. It had been a pharmaceuticals factory. It was one of three factories in the Sudan that made medicines, including anti-TB and anti-malarial medications. Jonathan Belke, in The Boston Globe, pointed out that the loss of domestically produced medicines would lead to thousands of avoidable deaths in Sudan.¹²¹ It hadn’t worked out as President Clinton’s staff may have hoped — the press quickly returned to the salacious allegations of the president’s infidelity, with news outlets once again getting to say “oral sex” and “blue dress” and eventually even “cigar.” The scandal was simply too irresistible a gift to the media to ignore.

But I never forgot that an entirely innocent night watchman died in the attack.¹²²

The truly powerful go to enormous lengths to control the narrative, and in general achieve great success.

What the most powerful people always want is certainty. Randomness and risk are their sworn enemies. What they never want is any possibility for chance to affect events and outcomes. Chance might allow the other side to win, and then all the billions will flow to the other side and their cronies. Chance allows that stock on which your friends have bet to tank. Chance allows populist movements to emerge that upend your best-laid plans.

When I am attacked as being a conspiracy theorist, it is when I make predictions based on having witnessed the behavior of those at the center of power and observing how it was directed 24/7 at getting rid of organic historical or market processes, and thus doing away with much-dreaded chance.

Why would powerful men and women not want to control all the outcomes in the world? In many cases, it is the fiduciary responsibilities of these men and women to control all possible risk in outcomes. “Conspiracy theorist” is a handy term of abuse, thrown around (and never more than in 2020–22) by bought media and bought social media influencers to deride those who know better how power really operates in private. The smear also serves to deter citizens from recognizing the fundamental but dispiriting truth that powerful people always seek to control history and markets and limit their risk in a systematic way — and the corollary that they themselves are often powerless.

Powerful people seek to bring about historical outcomes without leaving written evidence, using nonprofits, cutouts, relatives, lawyers, or friends of friends. They don’t issue press releases. Everyone who works at the highest levels of government understands the need for deniability; the job is to get the implied wishes of the principal accomplished, without direct instruction, let alone written memos.

This high-level aversion to risk and this aim at “no fingerprints” and no paper trail is not conspiracy theory, it is reality. It is simply the way that global elites operate, assisted by the highest-compensated lawyers and lobbyists in DC, paid for advancing world-historical outcomes without public disclosure, or a messy set of documents vulnerable to exposure in the event of a subpoena.

Indeed, though the bombing prompted perhaps by President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky redirected media attention briefly from a damaging topic, no fingerprints were left behind. Why? Because inside the White House, in 1998, it is close to certain the president never actually said, “We need to bomb an ambiguously-understood factory in Sudan to get the press focus off of me and my young former girlfriend.” It is very unlikely that any chief of staff or White House operative ever spoke any words connecting the pressure of the sex scandal to the appeal of making a dramatic strike.

But as I saw relationships unfold in the White House and in the Naval Observatory, everyone would have understood the unspoken need to simply change the subject: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?

Was that a “conspiracy”? Maybe not technically. But did large impersonal forces chillingly align to bring about a world-historical outcome, with no fingerprints? We know the answer.

And so an innocent man died, and maybe ultimately thousands more, as collateral damage.

In the same way, but on a vastly larger scale, crimes were committed in 2020–22. They were committed against the entire human race, by small powerful groups of people to bring about outcomes which they saw as well worth of the sacrifice — that is to say, the sacrifice of us.

__________

The global onslaught against human assembly, commerce, and community, managed and driven largely by tech companies, was undergirded by a new digital product: the suddenly-ubiquitous “COVID-19 maps,” also known as “COVID-19 dashboards.” X/Y axis graphs, they showed the incredibly alarming numbers of deaths and infections in sensationally-depicted detail.

The dashboards employed colors with particular creative flair. In The New York Times’s dashboard, the often nearly vertical right hand slope recording “Weekly Cases” was in lurid magenta-red — the vermilion color that seemed to be the “brand” color of the disease-related fear campaign; in contrast, the welcome rising vaccination rates would be tracked in a cool and soothing medicinal green.¹³³

We quickly became familiar with the dashboards, believing as we did that the data they revealed was behind official statements, politics and policies. We watched the graph peaks and valleys with horror or (rare) relief, certain they represented “the science” and “the numbers” in purest form. When Dr. Anthony Fauci pronounced, in his trademark Brooklyn accent, his favorite phrase, “When you look at the data —” the media reacted by referencing these X/Y charts.¹³⁴

But I began to notice that while Dr. Fauci of the NIAID and Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the CDC continually invoked the phrases “follow the data” or “follow the science,” they almost never provided the raw data or peer-reviewed publications. Instead we were left to rely on these ubiquitous non-government, third-party-produced COVID dashboards and on press release-type news stories describing studies exactly as officials had summarized the studies’ findings, but without actually linking to them.

Thus, the conclusions drawn by the media, citing these platforms especially, were impossible to confirm. Why? Because many of the most-referenced dashboards were based on flawed methodologies and unverifiable datasets. They were phantoms.

__________

As it happens, I was familiar with dashboard technology because my tech company, DailyClout.io, builds dashboards based on exactly the same process and using exactly the same technology as do the COVID maps. We also, purportedly like the COVID maps, use government data. It is in some ways a simple and, in the world of digital data, fully understood process. In other words, there is no magic to the process of creating a dashboard out of government data. Building these kinds of maps and databases is a standard feat of coding.

So I knew that the third-party dashboards that were showing the world “COVID cases” or “COVID deaths” must be based on an API. In order to be real and verifiable, the dashboards there would have to be based upon state health department data derived from real death certificates and real, working clinical tests being fed continually into an API.

What is an API?

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is like a firehose of data. It allows one software application to talk to another to send or receive information. If the data retrieved through an API are messy (usually the case), programmers have to make sense of the data, and develop ways to deal with any unexpected results they could receive from an API “call.”

To make the data useful for a dashboard, programmers also have to clean, combine and format the data into workable datasets. These datasets can then be fed “into the backend” of the dashboard — that is, the part that developers and webmasters can see, but users themselves cannot.

Developers can then take the nicely formatted data and create ways to show that data visually to users, building code to turn the data into what users see “on the front end” or the “UX” (for user experience). The way readers navigate the website “on the front end” is called the “UI” or “user interface.”

This “front end” is what readers of the digital New York Times saw when they looked at the COVID map that was featured every single day on the paper’s digital front page, or what those who went to the Johns Hopkins University Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center site (a dashboard that has had various names throughout the pandemic) saw when they went there in search of updates on COVID cases and deaths.¹³⁵

The story of “cases” and “deaths” was told by multiple media outlets using the various third-party dashboards as their terrifying illustration, their “proof.”

Yet few reporters clicked through to try to locate the raw datasets to verify for readers that what the dashboards showed them “on the front end” was really the full story. And few checked to see if there were really indeed verifiable state health department data being aggregated, or some other nonsense altogether.

For the first month, perhaps, this ignorance could be excused as part of a learning curve around digital data. But when a year passed and two years passed, and reporters were still citing digital dashboards uncritically, without understanding or, it seems, showing even any curiosity about what they were looking at, the excuse vanished. As noted, an API is a simple technology that can be explained in ten minutes to any lay person.

What reporters would not understand is: a digital dashboard is not in fact a medical product.

It is not a scientific product.

A digital dashboard is not necessarily even generated from anything at all that corresponds to physical or biological reality.

“Cases” tabulated on a digital dashboard are not necessarily generated from actual tests that are generated from real human biological samples. “Deaths” tabulated on a digital dashboard do not necessarily derive from any actual dead bodies recorded by real coroners in real hospital morgues or from funeral directors retrieving bodies from homes.

A digital dashboard is simply a product of code that counts data inputs in a certain way. It counts what the developer told it to count.

This data on a COVID dashboard that calls itself “cases” can be based on a real positive nasal swab, from a real human nose, translated into an accurate positive real test done at the correct cycle threshold, which result is then translated accurately into a snippet of code.

Or the data calling itself “cases” can be just — a snippet of code.

The data on a digital dashboard that calls itself “deaths,” implying deaths “from COVID,” are only as good as the forms filled out to claim a cause of death or the way the deaths are counted “as COVID.”

Anything at all can be counted as a “case.” And any death can be mis-identified as a “death.”

__________

If the reports of “cases” were from flawed tests, such as the now-infamous PCR tests that counted both real and not-real nasal swab material as “positive” depending on the PCR test cycle thresholds, then the dashboard would count all that data as “cases.”¹³⁶ As data scientists like to say: “garbage in, garbage out”.

Whatever the backend was told by the developer to count as a “case” was counted by the dashboard as a “case”; the “front end” — the part that you saw as a reader, the part that was the graphic display reproduced in a million news outlets and newspaper front pages — represented this aggregation to readers in a jagged line on an X and Y axis. A jagged line that day after day, scared people to death.

When it came to COVID fatalities, the counting was likewise subjective and dependent on whatever the developer told the operative code to count. If “deaths” were defined as “PIC” deaths — “pneumonia, influenza and COVID-19,” a category that the CDC came up with months into the pandemic — then that was the number that the “front end” of the dashboard presented to the world as “COVID deaths.” The correct definition was lost somewhere in the fine print.

If “deaths” were counted by the developer as “deaths with COVID-19” — and if the data retrieved by the API included anyone who’d died 28 days after a positive PCR test, even if, as documented cases have shown, that person actually died of a car crash or cancer — then the code likewise counted those deaths as “COVID deaths,” and showed them on the front end as “deaths” in a graph that usually had a clever way of not saying directly “DEATHS FROM COVID-19.”

Often the graph would say “Total Deaths” under the headline “COVID-19 DEATHS” or “Deaths to Date,” but it would have a legalistic wording to not claim that all those deaths were “from COVID-19.”

So again: accessing the raw data is what all those supposedly most invested in the facts behind the most monumental story of the era should have done on a regular basis.

News reporters should have, and scientists should have, and epidemiologists should have, and politicians should have. And citizens who considered themselves informed should have done so as well.

By linking the raw datasets, any honest, conscientious reporter would have been able to see and verify real deaths, in real contexts, or else ask hard questions about datasets that were anomalously compiled, or about missing information. But there were no raw datasets linked.

Mainstream media reporting took the “conclusions” of the dashboards at face value. So credulous and ignorant was the reporting, so lacking in basic skepticism, that to so much as raise questions about their veracity was seen as attacking science itself. For reporters the dashboards’ mere existence represented irrefutable fact.

__________

There were other problems in addition to the absence of complete linked raw datasets.

A serious one involved methodology: how the data were counted and what was actually being counted. As noted, a COVID “death” might have been based on a real dead body; or the “deaths” data might have been amplified artificially by setting the API to count death certificates that had already been changed to heighten the likelihood that document would record a “COVID death.” This happened at scale, as Dr. Henry Ealy of Portland, Oregon and his team reported, when the CDC moved the reporting of “COVID” as a comorbidity to Part I of the death certificate. As Dr. Ealy explained, since this section was the one counted by the health departments, this meant that if someone with a positive COVID test died of cancer or suicide, the death would still be counted as a “COVID death.”¹³⁷ Dr. Ealy, along with two Oregon state senators, Sen. Kim Thatcher and Sen. Dennis Linthicum, went so far as to call for a grand jury investigation charging the CDC with “willful misconduct” in this form and other forms of mishandling and misrepresenting COVID-19 data.¹³⁸ (Their filing was docketed by a federal court on March 4, 2022.)¹³⁹

A dashboard can thus count a “bad” category, such as deaths “with COVID.” If the dashboard reports “deaths,” as many do, but without adding the words “from COVID,” then the final tally displayed is not necessarily one of “deaths from COVID” at all.

Another problem had to do with chain of custody of the data, as Dr. Ealy’s research team points out.

A verifiable dashboard is one that does not have an intermediary handling the data after the time it leaves the state health departments or, in the UK, the NHS.

But there is growing evidence that third parties were invited into the handling of the data related to the pandemic, in ways that degraded its integrity and that, intentionally or not, inflated numbers in various ways.

Indeed, the basis for the grand jury investigation filing presented by Dr. Ealy and his colleagues was that government data must be handled according to certain regulations, and it is a violation of these regulations for data management and access to be outsourced to third parties.¹⁴⁰

But according to a grand jury petition filing in which Dr. Rochelle Walensky is a defendant, that is exactly what the CDC did. Dr. Ealy and his colleagues detail these alleged violations of regulations in a paper titled “COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective,” featured in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.¹⁴¹ They argue:

On April 14th, the CDC adopted a position paper authored by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), a 501c (6) non-profit organization, with the assistance of 4 CDC-employed subject matter experts (Dr. Susan Gerber, Dr. Aron J. Hall, Sandra Roush, & Dr. Tom Shimabukuro). This document was sanctioned by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, Director of the CDC.

Not only does this appear to be a potential conflict of interest, it also bypasses the OMB oversight for the IQA & PRA, as directed by Congress and is rife with ex parte communications. Ex parte communications in general violate ethical standards.

By employing a non-governmental organization (CSTE), free from the oversight of the OMB and the laws detailed by Congress via the IQA & PRA, the CDC bypassed the oversight of the OMB Director’s Information Resources Management policies, plans, rules, regulations, procedures, and guidelines for public comment. We allege this is a violation of 44 US Code 3517(a), which requires an agency to provide interested persons an “early and meaningful opportunity to comment.”

This violation has inevitably resulted in COVID-19 data for cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities being artificially elevated, and definitively compromises prudent decision making at federal and state executive levels. This includes policy enforcement for a public health crisis that may not have existed had the CDC abided by the laws that ensure the accuracy of data collection.

For example: The CSTE position paper in Section VII established rules for COVID-19 data classification and collection that allowed for probable diagnoses unconfirmed by lab testing, a test-based strategy for lab testing, and set the stage for people with no medical licensure to contact trace and illegally diagnose American citizens they have never seen.

In short, according to Dr. Ealy and his colleagues, the CDC partnered with a third-party nonprofit to allow “probable” cases to replace lab testing in terms of data collected.

It is interesting to note that shortly after the grand jury investigation petition was filed by Dr. Ealy, Oregon State Senator Dennis Linthicum and Oregon State Senator Kim Thatcher, the CDC made a statement to Reuters that its algorithm was “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”¹⁴² 72,277 COVID deaths were removed from its website. And The Guardian also reported that the CDC correction in children’s deaths came after that newspaper had reported on that issue: “The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect.”¹⁴³ Dr. Ealy and his colleagues had raised concerns about overcounting a year and a half previously — the CDC now blamed it on a bug via the machines.

The CDC’s statement that the overcount resulted from a “coding logic error” seemed to be counting on ignorance from the American public about the fact that it is the job of the CDC leadership to tell the developers to design the code to count what should be counted, and that it is their responsibility to review the website for accuracy. The CDC’s claim that a coding bug had lasted for months seems to rely on the public not to realize that bugs are supposed to be worked out in “QA” in advance of a launch — if they aren’t, they are to be fixed within 24 hours.

But follow-up questions by the press about this major overstatement of both the general public’s, and of children’s, alleged COVID deaths went largely unasked.¹⁴⁴

__________

By the fall of 2020 and into 2021, my disappointment in my fellow journalists had become acute. To their shame, reporters had become naïve. Reporters continued to take it on faith that the dashboards were transparent mirrors of solid, verifiable government data, updated in real time by the magic of what they presumed to be accountable engineers.

In the United States, most of the news about COVID in 2020–21 was being drawn from two sources: Johns Hopkins University’s COVID chart and The New York Times’s COVID chart.

But when I checked on the datasets, what I found was head-splitting. The Johns Hopkins University COVID database, The COVID Tracking Project, Worldometers.info, The New York Times, and in Britain, the NHS and UK.gov and ONS dashboards — all seemed deeply flawed.¹⁴⁵

A contractor who had been hired by Johns Hopkins to create visualizations sent me the actual datasets in a Github account. A Github account is where developers often keep raw datasets or computer codes.

I was surprised to receive these, but they were not sent to me off the record.

Looking at the Github of what were described as being leaked datasets, I saw at the time only six US states were reporting actual COVID cases and deaths to the Johns Hopkins database. If there were other datasets, they weren’t in that Github.

The COVID Tracking Project was another of the most frequently cited platforms for the first six months of the pandemic. It was identified as being “At The Atlantic,” whatever that meant. But, for 2020 and 2021, it was staffed by “volunteers.” Consequently, the data uploaded at that crucial period was presumably uploaded by these “volunteers.” Who could be anyone.¹⁴⁶

When I looked on that platform at COVID data for the Bronx — where I had recently been living — the source data for The COVID Tracking Project showed five “cases” uploaded for the Bronx in one week. But by whom? No way to know. Were these duplicates? No way to know. How was a “case” defined? No way to know. Who was uploading the “cases”? Could be public health experts. But … it could equally well be political operatives. Or bored housewives. Or an unemployed video gamer in his mom’s basement. Or it could be The COVID Tracking Project’s staff themselves. No way to know. The data were thus meaningless because there was no verifiable methodology.

Had there been honest, independent journalists reporting on those five deaths, they would have made sure they had been uploaded to the platform in real contexts, with identifying codes (not names). Then they would have called the hospitals in the South Bronx and gotten confirmation that each was a real death. But no one anywhere was doing any such reporting.

__________

An example of the human cost of this bad set of methodologies was dramatized in my visit to my mother in Corvallis, Oregon, in November of 2020.

New York, with all of its controlling policies, had been relaxed compared to Oregon. I arrived to a state in a condition of hysteria. Terror of a virus “surge” saturated the local press.

The Oregonian called November 2020 “Officially Oregon’s Deadliest Month.”¹⁴⁷ Governor Kate Brown “ordered” a two week “freeze,” restricting businesses and worship, and limiting social get-togethers to no more than six people.

“In terms of individuals, I am not asking you” she declared. “I am ordering you.”

News reports warned that violating her “orders” was a Class C Misdemeanor.¹⁴⁸

What was causing this statewide freak-out?

In November 2020, there had been 224 “fatalities” in Oregon.¹⁴⁹ The press would shriek that “cases” or “deaths” were “up 30 percent,” but when you looked at the actual numbers, in both absolute terms and relative to the state’s population, they didn’t support the panic.

There were over 4.2 million people in Oregon in 2020.¹⁵⁰ So my mom’s chance of being a “fatality” related to COVID in November 2020 was one in 18,916.¹⁵¹ For comparison, the average American has a 1 in 9,094 chance of dying in a car crash over the course of a year.

The Oregon press, as news outlets everywhere did, avoided stating “fatalities from COVID-19” but gave the impression that COVID-19 was the direct cause of these deaths.¹⁵²

In my mother’s county, Benton County, heading into the third year after the start of the pandemic, there have now been sixty-four cumulative deaths since the start of the pandemic. So, thirty-two a year on average.¹⁵³ In contrast there were 131 deaths from heart disease in 2020 alone — over double the two-year tally of Benton County’s COVID-related deaths.¹⁵⁴

For over two horrible years, my mom was terrified every single day of something that was just one quarter as likely, in her county, to happen to her, as her dying from heart disease.

Due to the ceaseless fear drumbeat in the Oregon press, and from Governor Brown’s office, my mom could barely summon the courage to hug me even after I had stayed for five days in a hotel room for the germs from the plane ride to wear off, and after I had received the negative results of a PCR test.

She endured this terror in her daily life, and this breach in human contact and comfort, at a time when deaths from COVID-19 in Oregon came in at number seven on the cause of deaths scale, below the rates of deaths from strokes and Alzheimer’s disease, numbers four and five. Below cancer, heart disease and unintended injuries.¹⁵⁵

A whole state’s worth of elderly people, instead of enjoying their mature years, socializing, and seeing family, were instructed by misreported numbers to cower indoors alone, and they did so.

__________

The Atlantic, where The COVID Tracking Project was “at,” was a grantee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — receiving $500,222 in 2019 alone.¹⁵⁶ For what? The unidentifiable topic, “Postsecondary Education, Public Awareness and Analysis.” Duration of the grant? 24 months. So: into 2020 and 2021.

Who owns a majority stake in The Atlantic? Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.¹⁵⁷ Her group “The Emerson Collective” is an activist investment entity that seeks social outcomes, including education reform.¹⁵⁸ A scary, unverifiable pandemic chart leads, among other outcomes, to a rationale for school closures, which presents booming “EdTech” opportunities for the parent company’s owner and her investing friends.

Ms. Jobs was hardly alone. Before the pandemic, other tech heirs and heiresses and moguls were buying up other legacy media outlets that would play so key a role in “informing” the public. “Most auspiciously, in 2013 the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the ailing Washington Post, quickly investing, with significant success, in its journalism and in its digital reach.”¹⁵⁹

The Washington Post, too, would play a leading role in fanning COVID hysteria.

In short, those managing the dashboards’ data and promoting the results were often the very same tech companies that stood to most benefit from skewing the numbers upward. Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer founded USAFacts.org.¹⁶⁰ Bloomberg Philanthropies funded the JHS dashboard.¹⁶¹

Johns Hopkins’s Center for Health Security “in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” was also the site of “Event 201,” which I thought until I looked at it was surely apocryphal. It was a real “high-level” pandemic exercise simulation, held on October 18, 2019. Per the scenario description, “Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person leading to a severe pandemic.”¹⁶² This simulated outbreak would require “reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.”¹⁶³

Other tech moguls created the COVID toolkit. Microsoft, along with Salesforce (whose co-founder Marc Benioff sits on the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees),¹⁶⁴ built a digital vaccine passport prototype, anticipating that “governments, airlines and other firms will soon start asking people for proof that they have been inoculated.”¹⁶⁵ Imagine the data these Big Tech giants could collect — and where it could end up.

Google, well-versed in the business of consumer data, was directly involved in COVID testing. Google owns Project Baseline¹⁶⁶ (“Together, we can invent the future of data-powered healthcare”), a key partner of Rite Aid in their administration of COVID tests.¹⁶⁷ As part of the pre-test authorizations individuals had to sign, Google and Project Baseline collected data from thousands of people who got tested for COVID at Rite Aid.¹⁶⁸

Of course, “testing” now became compulsory in many contexts, as when you were forced to test just to work or fly or see family. In 2019, Google’s revenue was $160.40 billion.¹⁶⁹ Two years later, with PCR testing everywhere compulsory, its revenue was $257.64 billion.¹⁷⁰

The fact remains jaw-droppingly incredible, but it bears repeating over and over again: the same Big Tech companies profiting by the billions from the “lockdown” and oppressive pandemic policies were tasked with presenting the data that drove and justified and sustained the “lockdown” and oppressive pandemic policies in the first place!

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The invitation was to fear, and to fear endlessly. This fear was followed by escalating “restrictions.” Restrictions in movement, assembly, and commerce. That rollout in turn permitted the massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few — the brazen mass theft of 2020–22.

Nominally directed at public health, the behavioral checks on citizens of the formerly free West, its restrictions multiplying dizzyingly, left people flailing, tossed about by strange unknowable currents. Like the afflictions streaming from Pandora’s box, they bore great ill and endless new harms.

Each time there came a new “restriction,” we, the reasonable people of the West, engaged with it at face value, at least at first. Must I stand six feet away from others? OK. Must I leave my loved one alone in the hospital, in spite of decades of hospital policies allowing loved ones to be with one another? OK. Must I accept that my unvaccinated nine-year-old can’t enter a building in Manhattan? OK. Now must I accept that my unvaccinated five-year-old cannot enter a building in Manhattan? Well … I guess … OK …

So what were these “restrictions” really for? Why were they proliferating and shape shifting day by day and week by week?

Gradually, it became clear. The true reason had nothing to do with medicine.

The true reason is that, in the elites’ war against Western humanism, “restrictions” had become the weapon of choice. Why? Because historically “restrictions” disempower the restricted and leave them open to the theft of their lands and assets.

“Restrictions” endow the ruling class with unlimited power and reduce ordinary people’s power to that of medieval vassals.

Presented as “public health necessity,” the menu of “restrictions” was deployed largely without resistance, at least initially. But their imposition succeeded also because the peoples of hitherto free nations — in North America and Europe, Australia and New Zealand — for a long time did not recognize what they were losing, or why. Born and raised in free nations to presume the best of others, propagandized into panic and fear, they confronted a situation as unfamiliar as it was deeply disorienting.

Why unfamiliar?

We in the West grew up in a very unusual and blessed time. We came of age, as did our parents, in the sacred space and dimension of liberty. It is not a coincidence that such affluence and cultural growth accompanied this post-war period of liberty in the West. Material and cultural wealth are a constant byproduct of freedom.

In fact, 1945–2020 was a beautiful and aberrant pause in the often horrific timeline of human history. Yet those of us born in that period came to take it as much for granted as the air we breathe. In this time of seemingly endless promise, widespread prosperity, relative harmony, and the establishment and growth of equal rights for all, we became complacent. It became easy to forget that in the great timeline of human history, all of it had to have been won, and at great cost.

Easy, especially, for Americans. The peoples of Europe have a longer history, and more to forget.

In France, for instance, from the bloody Revolution of 1789, through Paris Commune of 1871, from the depth of bigotry exposed by the Dreyfus Affair through to the Vichy government’s unapologetic collaboration with Nazism fifty years later, it was codified in the national DNA, or it should have been, that rights were precious things, and always subject to loss.¹⁷³

Indeed, in much of Europe the rule of law as a universal principle, and the modern Western liberal idea of universal human rights, blossomed only after the Second World War with the unprecedented expansion of civil society liberties — understandably, the world having just concluded a bloody war against a totalitarian regime of unprecedented evil.

The developing world, too, made historic advances during this period in seeking and often adopting human-rights-based law.

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, encapsulating the idealism in which, in that Cold War era, even totalitarian regimes had to profess to believe.

Translated into more than five hundred languages, the UDHR paved the way for the adoption of more than seventy human-rights treaties, affirming, among other things, the right of everyone everywhere to be free of discrimination; to be treated equally; to enjoy freedom of movement inside their own countries; to leave their countries; to not be arbitrarily deprived of their property; to be secure in their persons; to not endure “arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.”¹⁷⁴

From March 2020 to 2022 and even afterward, these rights, so laboriously won through so much blood and treasure — these rights that formed the matrix of what it meant to be Western — were suspended, dissolved, ignored, trampled.

And most people — including the French, who had staged a bloody revolution that terrified the crowned heads of Europe, and the British, who within living memory had shown the definition of courage under fascist bombardment during the Second World War — accepted, or rather meekly submitted.

In less than two years, the rights enumerated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights were suspended in the West, as the American Constitution was effectively suspended in many states. By February of 2021, I was astonished to hear State Rep. Melissa Blasek of New Hampshire tell me something that should have been one of the biggest news stories of the century: forty-seven states were under emergency law.

It happened without any conventional army rolling into any European or North American street, and without a shot being fired.

It was accomplished by stealth.

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I became more and more horrified that the global imprisonment in which we found ourselves was being mislabeled a “quarantine.”

In fact, the emergency orders imposed restricting assembly and commerce bore no relationship to quarantines in the past, which were limited geographically and in time, and separated only the sick or newly arrived travelers from the rest of society.

What was happening now was completely different.

Yes, of course, versions of this “lockdown” — mislabeled “quarantine” — had happened before on this planet. Totalitarian and fascist societies have long used mass restrictions of movement, curfews, and other ways of restricting free association and free movement to keep their citizens in check. North Korea and China have cordoned off entire regions and put them under no-movement rules. Long before the COVID pandemic, China under the CCP was among the few modern societies to restrict citizens’ physical movements nationally and regionally.¹⁷⁵ As dissident escapees from North Korea report, North Korean nationals have also long been unable to move freely around the country without proper documentation, even for family visits¹⁷⁶

Nor was Europe immune to “lockdowns” in the past — but that was in countries that suffered from fascist leadership. In 1935–36, the passports of Jews in Germany were restricted, and thereafter laws imposing increasingly severe restrictions on the movements of Jews put members of the Jewish community into effective “lockdown” as citizens within the larger German society.¹⁷⁷ Tragically, restrictions on leaving the country would finally keep Jewish Germans from escaping altogether.¹⁷⁸

But medical quarantine, as the term is properly understood, has a different history. Webster’s has defined “quarantine” as:

Specifically, the term, originally of forty days, during which a ship arriving in port, and suspected of being infected a malignant contagious disease, is obliged to forbear all intercourse with the shore; hence, such restraint or inhibition of intercourse; also, the place where infected or prohibited vessels are stationed. Quarantine is now applied also to any forced stoppage of travel or communication on account of malignant contagious disease, on land as well as by sea.¹⁷⁹

This isolation of the infected members of a community is of ancient origin. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, ill people are isolated. It was understood that within the camp of the Israelites, people infected with contagious diseases could “defile” the rest of the community. Leviticus prescribes how to handle the dreaded fear of contagion of leprosy from a member of the community: “His clothes shall be rent, his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover over his upper lip; and he shall call out, “Unclean, Unclean!”¹⁸⁰ P. J. Grisar, writing in The Forward, adds the example of Moses telling the Israelites to place outside the camp, “anyone with an eruption or a discharge.”¹⁸¹ Some analysts of ancient Jewish practices such as these, with their emphases on cleanliness and strict attention to what is “fit” and “unfit” to touch or eat, argue that some rules may have had to do with upholding sanitary practices in a time when infections swept through communities with devastating impunity.

Some historians of science refer to quarantine as a primitive “technology”: A. A. Conti, in “Quarantine Through History,” notes that quarantine “is overall one of the oldest and most disseminated and, despite its limits, most effective health measures elaborated by mankind.”¹⁸² And in the centuries before germ theory was understood, and before vaccines, quarantine — physical isolation of the infected — was indeed among the few methodologies societies had to manage terrifying outbreaks of suffering and of death.

So, yes, in the absence of modern medical interventions, such measures were long used, and often proved at least somewhat effective.

But “quarantine” has virtually always meant the restriction of movement for those who are ill or possibly infected.

With COVID, and a society-wide shutdown, including the closing down of all economic activity, all that changed. Illness was messaged from the top down as a public health matter, with the state assuming a central role, and limitless authority, in managing our own bodies and the bodies of others. From our temperatures being taken in front of strangers, to announcements of the infections of public figures on social media, COVID’s lethality was used to explain away any expectation of individual privacy or autonomy.

With COVID, we in the modern West were all re-positioned as being hypothetically ill. As PPE specialist Megan Mansell would later explain, we were all re-identified as if we were all immunocompromised.

Political leaders rolled out messaging around restrictions of movement, as labeling this form of citizen immobilization a “quarantine” to lend it the legitimacy of precedent. In fact, for Western democracies it was a new social experiment on this scale.

What can “restrictions” of this kind ultimately do? They prepare the way for wholesale theft or transfer of assets.

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What prepared the groundwork for such an easy victory against Western liberties was the quiescence born of seductive comfort — that, and a growing ignorance on the part of the citizenry of the structures of democracy that were being systematically dismantled.

Westerners had come to believe things would always be as they were. They would always have access to museums and cultural events, lovely train trips that went seamlessly across borders like a knife’s edge drawn smoothly across the surface of a bowl of cream, lovely human-rights guarantees, lovely assembly, lovely property rights, lovely mobility.

For seventy-five years, Westerners had become accustomed to this unprecedented level of freedom and acceptance of human rights. They had become accustomed to protesting en masse when a policy upset them; indeed, for two generations, nothing less had been their readily exercised right. They gathered in public in great crowds — for festivals, for outdoor rock concerts, for religious processions. They traveled freely and joyfully throughout their own countries, exploring landscapes and heritages. The delights of free movement were very democratic; it did not cost much to explore one’s beautiful country. It was affordable, usually, to buy a bus pass, and it cost little to bike or hike.

Westerners went camping, they explored antique shows and motorcycle rallies, they went to tennis matches, they gathered for wine tours, they walked to Compostela on religious pilgrimages. Europeans of all backgrounds and economic levels took long-distance trains in August to the coasts in France or to little hostels in the Alps for fresh air and relaxation. They crossed borders to visit relatives and friends; they went to conferences. In cities, they wandered and drifted and assembled, freely as birds flying solo, or as flocks of birds. They convened in bars and cafés and at popups and film festivals, and in dance halls and bistros, and at dinner parties and pot lucks, at conventions and stamp-collector meetings, and on walkways by rivers where local politicians screened films on summer nights. They wandered past the booksellers on the Seine, at their own pace. They drifted into museums to see the latest Corot exhibition at the Louvre or to revisit their favorite stele in the Assyrian collection at the British Museum. They tried the latest restaurant tucked into little alleyways. They caught up with their friends with a café crème at the corner tabac in Paris, or started the day with an ouzo in the little local café in Mykonos or in Athens.

Certainly there were quarrels — about nationalism, or immigration, or environmentalism. But on the great scale of free versus unfree human conditions, these quarrels were at the margins.

Masses in open parks listened to music. Masses explored ancient cities in privacy. People enjoyed private consultations with physicians. Parents made private medical decisions about their children. No one demanded papers.

We thought this was it, and this would last forever.

When others clamored to immigrate into our countries it was understood that it was not just the economic opportunities that beckoned, but the freedom.

People basked in those freedoms and certainly appreciated them. But did we understand them? Did we grasp how easily the substructures of our rights could be dismantled, what a fragile edifice they were?

Not really, at least none but the most aware.

In Europe, especially, under the European Union, people seemed blissfully unaware of what was at risk. Because of the horrors they’d endured during the cataclysmic wars of the twentieth century, the European Union seemed a political Godsend; a modern idealistic invention to knit European countries so closely together there could never again be large-scale war on the Continent.

And at least on its public face, the European Union did deliver widely popular policies on matters ranging from workers’ and tenants’ laws to education and the environment. Barriers to travel were erased, a common currency established. The peoples of Europe, for so many centuries at daggers drawn, went happily into the new and now easily accessible sociopolitical landscape. Croatian businessmen had lunch meetings in Munich. Swedish arts festivals invited Spanish dance troupes to visit. Students amassed languages and friends and trips and documented it all on Instagram, ebulliently.

It was so humane, so civilized.

Yet it came at a huge cost: the surrender of individual nations’ sovereignty to Brussels.

Indeed, behind European Union’s public messaging, buried in legal briefs and incomprehensible documents not readily available to the public, the people’s hands were being removed quietly from the actual machinery of both national and EU-level governance. And governance itself receded from actual transparency.

This dismantling of access to the structures of national democracy in Europe was cloaked in jargon. When I started reporting on this issue in 2016–18, in the wake of Brexit, I was shocked to realize that very few continental Europeans, including journalists, actually understood how EU governance worked. Most Europeans believed that the European Union was like a federal system, similar to that in the United States, uniting disparate entities but leaving each with a significant degree of independence. Many educated, influential Europeans and Britons with whom I spoke believed, mistakenly, that even if they could not describe it in detail, the European Union was an accountable, if complex, meta-democracy.

This was not surprising, given the degree that the European Union’s true governance was cloaked in obfuscation. Its webpages provided only incomprehensible graphics with seating charts and arrows that contradicted each other and could not be followed. Even as someone who ran a website devoted to explaining the founding documents and democratic governance to American audiences, I was consistently baffled; I kept poking around on EU websites and tweeting, annoyingly no doubt, to the EU press office: Where are the EU’s complete set of founding documents? I asked. What laws undergirded the European Union’s powers of governance? How could citizens lobby? We could organize as citizens to change our Constitution. By what method could European citizens organize to change the existing EU foundational agreements?

Where was the upcoming proposed legislation?

I then had the unnerving experience of EU spokespeople pointing me in this or that direction, but never to the foundational laws demonstrating the governance of the European Union and showing how citizens could affect or alter it. They pointed me to a “legislative feed.” But that showed only bills after the European Parliament had voted them into law.

It was during this process of trying to find these answers that I was invited to Madeira, Portugal, to speak about my book The End of America. Madeira is a beautiful archipelago, an autonomous region of Portugal, in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Madeira is lush with small green forests, mists clinging to the sides of valleys, heaped with curvaceous little mountains covered with grass that slope down to the curling waves of the Atlantic, and with a rich history as a contact point between traders and sailors. It has winding main streets with nineteenth century cottages trimmed with carpenter’s gingerbread from its time as a destination for foreign invalids who sought out the gentle climate.¹⁸³

I was on a panel with a Portuguese civil servant who spent much of his time dealing with the EU. Since I had been speaking about civic action, people were asking us about how to engage politically. One issue that came up repeatedly was that there was poor flight service to Europe from Madeira — generally you had to fly one and a half hours to Lisbon. Business owner after business owner made the case that the local economy could not grow without a decent airport able to handle more direct flights.

It seemed simple enough. “Can’t you lobby your elected officials?” I naively asked.

Impossible, explained the civil servant unhappily; aviation was managed from Brussels.

That astounded me. But surely they could lobby their own Portuguese representative in the EU?

No. It did not matter. If the European Union did not want a better airport in Madeira, the merchants of Madeira were powerless, he said. Portugal herself was powerless.

Later, we convened for a meal. The setting was a beautiful teahouse halfway up one of these dreamy green mountains.

The civil servant and my host explained the European Union to me in terms I could not mistake. Their tone was directive, as if they were handing me a task. They could not do anything about it. But they wanted people to know.

My host explained: the European Union is not a governance entity. It is an economic alliance, and Germany is by far the major influence.

The civil servant explained: “People don’t understand the structure of lawmaking in the EU. The unelected diplomats usually propose new laws. And,” he added, “Brussels has the second highest number of lobbyists after Washington, DC.”

I was astonished—this was legerdemain on a high scale. Western Europeans thought of the European Union as a state above states, a democracy above democracies. But it simply wasn’t. It was something else. It was not just “a bureaucracy” that was “complex” — too complex for ordinary citizens to understand, though this was the common messaging point in the news.

Rather, it was “too complex,” for a reason. It was democracy theater. The real power was in unaccountable hands.

Having read the history of totalitarianism, I knew what that meant. And that was why this Portuguese politician, who loved his country, took the time to disclose this insider view to me.

I knew that no matter how great things looked in Europe on the surface — the beautiful mobility, the thrilling cultural events, the busy commerce, the admirable language of human rights, and the semblance of freedoms — the powers of the European nation-state had been drained.

European nation-states had been made vulnerable, and people would be left unable to defend themselves in any real way if, heaven forbid, the now-benign, now-smiling, now-well-messaged European Union turned hostile or abusive or — tyrannical.

What I saw all around me that looked so lovely was no longer built on a structure belonging to or owned by the people.

As they would learn in 2020–22, the puppeteer’s hand could sweep the entire action away in a moment. The edifice of the beautiful drama of “European democracy” and human rights could come crashing down at any time.

In fact, having for so long lived under EU governance left continental Europeans especially easy prey for the COVID tyrants. Many of these formerly free peoples, most of whom had been born too late to experience totalitarianism firsthand, were quick to follow governmental directives, as in their lifetimes most governmental directives had been benign or at least not malevolent. And even when disoriented by these “restrictions,” most of these people failed to recognize them early for what they were, let alone mount effective resistance.

We were vulnerable, too, in the United States, and largely for the same reasons.

Our legacy of freedom was still more accessible to us than was that of continental Europeans. But day after day, “in the midst of the pandemic,” our grasp of democracy grew fainter.

We also had too readily forgotten our history, part of which, had we been paying attention, is understanding that restrictions drain human capital and blunt human civilization.

Indeed, we had seen that understanding play out in practice in our own past, for we have seen groups in America subjected to precisely such restrictions.

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