Deconstruction

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A New Zealander’s 9 ‘Starter Steps’ to Save America From Socialism | The Epoch Times

By Trevor Loudon

Though I’m a New Zealander, I know America and its people well. I’ve traveled to every state in the Lower 48 and have addressed more than 500 audiences across this amazing nation. My message has always been the same: The United States is heading toward a brutally tyrannical socialist revolution—and if America goes down, every free country follows.

Well, now it’s here, people, unfolding before our very eyes.

So, what can be done? Can the Republic be saved? Honestly, I don’t know.

However, I can suggest some steps that would at least give this country a fighting chance.

1. Face Reality

Millions of Americans are still in complete denial. Many think the military is secretly in control—that it’s only a matter of time until justice is done and President Donald Trump is restored. There’s a “secret plan”—just “have faith.” The truth is that Trump was outmaneuvered by an alliance of communists, globalists, and even traitors in his own party. The “deep state” is now almost fully in control.

Trump isn’t coming back into office any time before 2024—if we still have meaningful elections by then.

To make sure they can never be voted out of office, the Democrats plan to enfranchise 22 million illegal immigrants, abolish the Electoral College, gain at least four more far-left senators through Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood, and flood the country with tens of millions more refugees and illegal immigrants. They also plan to nationally introduce voting “reforms,” i.e., mass mail-in balloting, abolition of ID requirements, etc., that will guarantee eternal Democratic Party control.

If the Democrats can abolish the Senate filibuster and place at least four more leftist “justices” on the Supreme Court, there’ll be virtually no way to stop any of this if we rely on traditional political methods.

We’re undergoing a Marxist-Leninist revolution driven by China—right now, in real time.

The military can’t save us, nor can Trump. On the contrary, it’s up to patriots to protect Trump and the Armed Services from unrelenting Democrat/communist attacks.

When enough Americans face the unpleasant truth, then, and only then, can we talk about hope.

2. Stop All Violent Rhetoric

Violence will not save America. The harsh reality is that President Barack Obama had eight years to replace patriotic generals with left-leaning political appointees. He did a great job. If violence breaks out (God forbid), the military will stand with the government, not the insurgents.

Does anyone think Russia and China and Cuba and North Korea and Iran would stand idly by while their Democratic friends are being defeated by a patriotic uprising? They would undoubtedly use the opportunity to finish off their “main enemy” once and for all.

Beware of anyone inciting violence online, at a public gathering, or in a private meeting. Distance yourself fast. They will be at best hopelessly naive, at worst government provocateurs.

The left is praying for “right-wing” violence. It will give them an excuse for a massive crackdown on patriotic Americans. This country will be saved peacefully or not at all. If significant violence breaks out, it’s over.

Having said that, the Second Amendment must be preserved at all costs. An armed populace is at least some check on tyranny, even if useless in the face of biological warfare or nuclear attack. Americans should keep their guns and work every day to ensure they never have to use them against their own people.

3. Restore Election Integrity in All Red States

If voter trust isn’t restored within months, the Republican Party is doomed. Democrats will continue to vote. Large numbers of Republican voters will stay home. They won’t trust the elections and will refuse to participate. We’ve already seen this play out in the Georgia Senate elections.

Thirty states are currently led by Republican legislatures. Some are already holding inquiries into fixing deficient electoral procedures. Most will be whitewashes unless the public gets heavily involved. If the resulting recommendations don’t include the elimination of electronic voting machines and heavy penalties for organized voter fraud, it’s likely to be a window-dressing exercise. Be alert.

Patriots must work to restore voting integrity first in the red states, then the red counties of the blue states—then after 2022, the whole nation.

Get involved in this process. It’s a top priority.

4. Close the Republican Primaries Immediately

This should be a no-brainer, but no one is talking about it. Only five U.S. states have truly closed Republican primaries. This means that in most states Democrats and independents (even communists) can vote in Republican primaries—and they do. All over the country, the GOP’s enemies vote in Republican primaries to pick the weakest, most wimpy candidate they can.

That’s why the Republican base is super patriotic but most of their elected representatives in most states vote like “progressive” Democrats.

Close the primaries, Republican patriots. It will transform your party.

5. Organize a Compact of Free States

MAGA folk need to build a “nation within a nation.” This doesn’t mean secession—Russia and China would be quick to exploit such division. What’s needed is a reaffirmation of 10th Amendment rights as already outlined in the U.S. Constitution. The already out-of-control federal government is about to go on a rampage against every form of independence left in the country. Every red state with the courage to do so must immediately begin working toward a formal compact to collectively oppose all forms of federal overreach.

Such a formal alliance should start with Florida and Texas, then grow by inviting Oklahoma, the Plains states, most of the Southern states, New Hampshire, the free Midwestern states, and the Republican-led Northern and Western states.

Such an alliance, stretching from the Florida Keys and the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the Great Lakes and the Canadian border and even Alaska, would bisect the entire country.

Adding the red counties of the blue states such as Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and California, would create a voting and economic bloc that Washington would find exceedingly difficult to challenge.

When the Biden administration recently suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis close all restaurants in his state to slow the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, the governor politely refused—citingthe ineffectiveness and horrendous economic consequences of mass lockdowns.

Biden then reportedly hinted at an unconstitutional ban on air and road travel to and from Florida. This threat might work against Florida alone. It wouldn’t work against Florida plus Texas and Oklahoma and 10 to 25 other states.

The United States is technically a federation of free and independent states. It’s time to fully realize that ideal.

Southern states will soon be reeling under a massive new wave of illegal immigration. The federal government will do nothing to prevent it. Texas, Florida, Arizona, and the free counties of New Mexico and California need to be preparing to defend their borders now. This isn’t an immigration issue that is the constitutional preserve of the federal government—this is a state public welfare issue.

Of course, the Biden-Harris administration plans to pack the Supreme Court with more left-wing justices to make virtually anything they want “constitutional.” But this shouldn’t even need to go to the courts. State governments already have the power under the 10th Amendment to nullify federal overreach; they simply have to band together to put Washington back into its constitutionally tiny box.

The Republic will be saved through the courageous application of the First Amendment (free speech) and the 10th Amendment (state sovereignty).

6. Republic Review

Every free state should immediately embark on the adoption of the “Republic Review” process. There’s a small but growing movement in some Western and Northern states to review their engagement with the federal government to eliminate or nullify all unconstitutional relationships.

Under the Constitution, the states are technically superior to the federal government. They’re sovereign under the “equal footing” doctrine and have the legal power to refuse to engage in unconstitutional programs.

For instance, most states only get about 10 percent of their education budget from the feds—but are almost completely subservient to Department of Education dictates. Why not forgo the measly 10 percent in exchange for a return to local control over all public education? America is losing its youths in public schools. Every patriotic parent knows that.

This would give parents more control over their children’s education and restore citizens’ control over their own government. Is this worth 10 percent of your state’s education budget?

If the free states are willing to stand against federal overreach, they must also be prepared to forgo unconstitutional federal money.

A thorough Republic Review audit would soon return power to the state legislatures—where it belongs.

7. Form a Multi-State ‘America First’ Popular Alliance

The left has “Our Revolution,” a nationwide alliance of 600 groups operating both inside and outside of the Democratic Party. Operated by Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party USA, Our Revolution works in the Democratic primaries to elect far-left candidates such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) into office. Our Revolution isn’t subject to Democratic Party discipline, but it does get to choose Democratic candidates.

We need an “America First” umbrella group to operate both outside and inside the Republican Party—even possibly within the Democratic Party in some areas.

This organization should be all about pushing the MAGA/America First agenda at every level of government, in every state of the union.

Such a movement could harness the energy of 70 million to 80 million Trump voters without being under Republican Party control.

America First could unite the Tea Party and MAGA movements, grassroots Republicans, patriotic Democrats, and independents to mobilize tens of millions of voters to transform the GOP into the truly populist, patriotic MAGA party it should always have been.

Take that, Mitch McConnell!

Trump is already vetting candidates to stand against Republican House members and senators who betrayed their own base after the 2020 election.

America Firsters should register Republicans by the millions to primary out dozens of Republican sell-outs in 2022. The America First/MAGA movement could “own” every level of the GOP by 2024. The GOP needs the MAGA movement way more than the MAGA movement needs the Republican brand.

Meanwhile, there are almost 70 far-left Democratic members of Congress in red states. Just restoring voter integrity alone could defeat several of them in 2022.

Running MAGA candidates backed by Trump in every one of those races could flip many more. It would be more than feasible to take back the House in 2022 to make Biden a “lame duck” president.

8. Boycott/Buycott Bigtime

Patriots should be abandoning Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. for more honest platforms. They should also enthusiastically support efforts by DeSantis to heavily fine Big Tech operators who “cancel” patriots. If 25 or 30 free states did the same, Big Tech would soon be little tech.

Patriots need to organize nationwide boycotts of unpatriotic companies and buycotts for loyal American companies like My Pillow and Goya Foods.

Already, local groups are drawing up lists of “unfriendly” local companies and friendly alternatives so patriots can stop supporting their opponents and spend more with their fellow MAGA supporters.

It would also be smart to sequentially target vulnerable unpatriotic companies.

Imagine if 80 million MAGA patriots resolved to begin a nationwide boycott of one such company, starting now. The boycott would go on indefinitely until the target company was broke, or it apologized for “canceling” patriots. If applicable, every MAGA family could simultaneously commit to buying at least one of the canceled person’s products this year.

On April 1, another disloyal company could be targeted, then another on May 1, another on June 1, etc.

After two or three companies had collapsed or apologized, we would soon see large companies start to back away from the “Cancel Culture.”

Patriots have spending power in this country, people. We need to starve our enemies and feed our friends.

Again, patriots need to build a nation within a nation.

It should be also a given that every U.S. patriot boycotts all communist Chinese goods wherever possible. Check those labels! Buying Chinese communist products in 2021 is like buying Nazi products in 1939. It’s immoral and it’s suicidal.

The Chinese Communist Party just crippled the U.S. economy with the CCP virus. Then, pro-China communists instigated mass Black Lives Matter rioting. Then, the same people worked to influence the 2020 election.

It’s about time Americans stop funding their No. 1 enemy—the CCP.

9. Remove Malign Foreign Influence at State Level

DeSantis has announced legislation to massively curtail communist Chinese activity in Florida. The legislation also targets several other enemy states, including Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela—all of which interfere in this country’s internal affairs.

In December 2020, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe revealed that the Chinese Communist Party was conducting a “massive influence campaign” focused on dozens of members of Congress and their aides, including through attempted blackmail and bribery.

Currently, thousands of foreign companies from hostile regimes are buying up land, food production facilities, technical companies, educational facilities, and infrastructure. Tens of thousands of foreign agents are co-opting unpatriotic businessmen, unethical politicians, and sympathetic journalists in the interests of China and other malevolent states.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, nothing will be done to stop these activities at a federal level—but much can still be done by the free states. If every free state cracked down on foreign bribery, corruption, espionage, and subversion, this country would be transformed.

If hundreds of corrupt academics, journalists, businessmen, and politicians (from both parties) were exposed and punished, this country would soon be well on the way to moral, economic, and political recovery.

What Do You Think?

These steps alone won’t save America—but I believe they would be a huge step in the right direction. I will be following up with further suggestions and plans. But for now, I’d love to see your comments, suggestions, and criticisms in the comments section.

Thank you for reading. From a grateful Kiwi, God bless America.

Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics. He is best known for his book “Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress” and his similarly themed documentary film “Enemies Within.” His recently published book is “White House Reds: Communists, Socialists & Security Risks Running for U.S. President, 2020.”

Source: The Epoch Times

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Progressive “Riotocracy” and the Great Liberal Death Wish | The Epoch Times

Suspect In Custody After Driving Into Protest And Shooting One In SeattleBy Harley Price

Across Canada and the United States, the disappointingly small groups of peaceful protesters who have supplicated the authorities to be allowed to return to work have been mocked by their political nannies as reckless and selfish yahoos endangering the lives of the rest of us.

Even immediate family members—some of whom have been known to sleep in the same bed—have been officially shamed and fined for violating the protocols of social distancing while walking in the park or kneeling in the pews.

But that was—as our woke millennials are wont to put it—so yesterday. Today, these corona-villains might consider joining the rioters the next time they feel the need for a little physical or spiritual recreation.

Apparently, marching shoulder to shoulder with your revolutionary comrades, bloodying the faces of Asian, Latino, and black shopkeepers trying to defend their livelihood, or clutching looted big-screen TVs to your bosom—all without wearing nitrile gloves or first dousing the teeming, pathogenic surfaces of stolen merchandise or victims of your violence in disinfectant—is virologically riskless when it’s for the sake of equality and justice.

Did I miss the announcement from doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx that massing in violent mobs has now been determined to foster the herd immunity that their unconstitutional lockdown forestalled? And does this mean that ordinary Canadians and Americans have finally been granted permission to leave their domestic prisons, resurrect their moribund businesses, and resume their foundational civil rights of freedom of assembly and worship?

Of course not. In fact, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was careful to stipulate that the recent rise in COVID-19 cases likely has nothing to do with the massive nationwide demonstrations (after warning solemnly that back-to-work protests in Republican flyover country were socially irresponsible). Is anyone still sufficiently credulous as to believe that holy science is politically disinterested?

Proudly Flying the Double Standard

The tacit approval by politicians and medical “experts” of the rioters’ flouting of the urgent social-distancing edicts tells you something more generally about our rulers’—to be generous, let’s call it—philosophy of governance. It’s an open secret that for decades the perennially enraged left has been formally exempt from the cinching restrictions that apply only to bourgeois, law-abiding deplorables, and the authorities have always been petrified to acknowledge, let alone repeal, this reeking double standard.

So long as you affirm that you’re “for the poor and downtrodden” you have legal immunity to trash and burn the neighborhoods of the poor and downtrodden. Little old ladies who recite their rosaries in menacing proximity to an abortion clinic are sentenced to lengthy prison terms, but Indigenous and environmental pipeline protesters have official license to occupy and blockade public rail lines and bring national transportation networks to a halt for months. The double standard is the patriotic banner, flown with pride, of the progressive army, which preaches diversity and inclusion while everywhere denouncing and censoring non-conformist opinion and speech, and blighting the careers of the insufficiently zealous.

Naturally, progressives oppose “fascism” (about which they are too young and badly educated to know anything); and to show how much they hate it, they use the violent tactics of the SS.

The torching and demolition of America’s “racist” cities—almost every one presided over by Democratic governors, mayors, municipal councils, and police chiefs (many of whom are black, to compound the irony)—by the oxymoronically named Antifa, Black Lives Matter, believe-the-women-(unless-they-accuse-Democrats) feminists, gay and trans activists, queers for open borders, Indigenous national militants, evangelists of abortion, daughters of Gaea, Trump resisters, and all of the assorted victim groups of the intersectional left, reminds us that “racial injustice” is one of an interchangeable and ever-proliferating set of pretexts under which progressives can parade their moral superiority, while enjoying the smashing and pillaging that never seem to tarnish their lustrous reputations for compassion and probity with the beau monde.

The killing of George Floyd was immediately and universally denounced, his tormentors summarily fired from the police force and charged with second-degree murder or aiding and abetting second-degree murder, and political leaders at every level have agreed to enact police reforms.

Since their demands were preemptively met, there was no plausible reason for the “protesters” to have gone on burning and looting for another three weeks, besides the sheer nihilistic joy of it. Anyone not yet impressed by the exuberant illogic and morally indiscriminate devastation wrought by the rioters need only book an iconoclast’s tour of the hundreds of historical monuments they have defaced across the globe, including the effigy of Gandhi, the statue of Winston Churchill, and the Lincoln Memorial: the original anti-colonialists, anti-fascists, and anti-racists, or so it may seem to the un-woke.

But progressive crusaders have never required a credible casus belli. Since the sixties, the left has marched, demonstrated, occupied, blockaded, rioted, burned, and looted with the noxious predictability of black flies in June, all the while anticipating and responding to the next provocation with Pavlovian reflexivity. At least when the Goths and Vandals broke and pilfered stuff in Rome, they desisted once they’d reached satiety, and they didn’t pretend it was for a higher cause.

Protesting ‘Peacefully’

As of last weekend (the numbers increase daily and have probably doubled by now), thousands of businesses across the United States, most of them minority owned, have been destroyed—many of which, already on life-support from the coronavirus lockdown, will never be resuscitated—undoing the decades of hard work, obliterating the life-savings, and beggaring the future existences of their owners (whose black lives apparently don’t matter in the least).

During the past three weeks, in every American city in which significant “protests” occurred, the number of burglaries, shootings, and homicides has increased by between 150 and 500 percent. In the riots themselves, more than 700 police officers have been injured by projectiles (rocks, bricks, cinder blocks, bottles, or Molotov cocktails, often strategically placed by “peaceful” protesters), deliberately run over by vehicular assassins, slashed with machetes, or felled by gunfire, many of whom will be maimed for life.  In St. Louis, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot and killed by looters—another immaterial black life—while responding to an alarm at a pawn shop. The same day four other officers were shot by a “protester” aspiring to dispatch an entire police line to the other side of time.

So far, at least two dozen people have died in the riots. Ten of the dead were either innocent bystanders caught in the cross-fire, business owners vainly attempting to protect their livelihoods, onlookers deemed insufficiently enthusiastic, or local residents guilty of “privilege” and “systemic racism” because they owned property or had white skin, all executed—10 times, that is, the number of unarmed victims to die in the custody of Derek Chauvin, not a single one of whose lives will be eulogized in a nationally-televised state funeral, or whose unjust deaths will mobilize worldwide demonstrations, or soul-searching conversations about systemic leftist hate and depredation.

Predictably, at CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream media, the canonical euphemism to describe the riots was “peaceful,” while the “rare” and “incidental” violence was attributed to a few nefarious “outside” groups who tried to “hijack” the movement. (Here the words “outside” and “hijack” can be understood in the sense that crime families from out of state sometimes hijacked Al Capone’s getaway car.)

Some officials have blamed the violence on “white supremacists,” of whose presence not even the race-baiting Southern Poverty Law Center could find evidence. According to historian Stuart Wexler, writing in Haaretz, white supremacists typically infiltrate movements such as Black Lives Matter in order to foment a race war in which they hope to “purify” America through “ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, social media, and all the usual established media echo-chambers, falsely claimed to be in possession of a photograph of Chauvin wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” cap at a Trump rally.

It is, of course, a dogma of racialist orthodoxy that resurgent ghosts from the Jim Crow era maraud daily throughout the streets of contemporary America, whereby white supremacist phantoms continue to haunt the imaginations of the likes of Al Sharpton, Jussie Smollett, and the other Masters of the Racial Revels, though they are almost never seen in the flesh. (Oh, and we mustn’t forget “the Russians,” who, according to Susan Rice, were the main instigators of the arson and vandalism. Rice later admitted that she had no evidence for her preposterous claim, but on this theme, when has evidence ever mattered?)

A few observers remained un-woke enough to accept that the trashing, burning, and looting that were taking place before their eyes had indeed been perpetrated by the protesters. But to say so is impious, and so, as the Yemeni owner of a demolished convenience store reasoned, the violence was “okay” and “understandable” in the context of black grievance. Innumerable small and large business owners have agreed that their pauperization was all worth it, leading one to wonder whether they should now restock their empty shelves so that looters can mount a second campaign of theft for racial equality.

By now, every major corporation, from Nike and Google to Walmart, has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, in direct donation and advertising, on the corporately responsible principle, one supposes, that if you trash our stores and steal our merchandise, we’ll pay you. All of this seems somewhat beyond mere masochism. What we are witnessing are the psychopathologies of a civilization that has been taught to despise itself, and is entreating its progressive masters for euthanasia.

The New American Riotocratic Republic

And how have the brutal agents of oppression responded? As has so often been the case, the arson and looting by the mob has taken place in plain sight of the police, who assumed the posture of either neutral observers or comrades in arms.

Whenever the constabulary deigned to make arrests, the looters and vandals were ceremonially processed and released within minutes, so as not to be overly inconvenienced in their righteous struggle—policing on the sport fishing model, and a perfect reification of the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” hobo utopia, in which “the jails are made of tin,” so “you can walk right out again as soon as you are in.” In cities that imposed curfews, the violators were allowed to continue with their virtuous burning and looting until they were satisfied, as though to interrupt them were to interrupt a celebrant in mid-consecration of the mass (a sacrilege that the COVID-19 social-distancing police never shrank from).

The ritual “taking of the knee” by police chiefs, rank and file officers, and political leaders across the world is the perfect visual emblem of our rulers’ willing capitulation to extortion and mob rule, and more broadly, of our society’s suicidal complicity with the progressive thugs whose ideological imperative is to annihilate it. The only possible excuse for the congenitally tumescent, parasitical, self-serving, and duplicitous institution of government and its monopoly of force is to preserve the social order without which life is indeed nasty, brutish, and short, and guarantee the equal application of the law, without which might is right, and we may as well all emigrate to Mogadishu.

Like the police, America’s civilian rulers have also surrendered with unbidden zeal. In recognition of the justice of their cause, the mayor of Minneapolis peremptorily abandoned the police precinct to the rioters. Not to be outdone in demonstrations of piety, Mayor de Blasio ordered that streets in every one of the five boroughs be renamed after Black Lives Matter, just four days after Washington D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed Lafayette Park “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” marked by the words BLACK LIVES MATTER in 35-foot yellow capital letters (that color being a nice touch if you regard supine cowardice as a virtue).

It’s remarkable that in the blink of an eye Black Lives Matter has been exalted to the rank of sacrosanctity, as though it were the American chapter of Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity. Anyone who criticizes BLM (or its message of black persecution) is immediately censored, shunned, or fired.

Naturally, Black Lives Matters supports the entire panoply of progressive causes: unrestricted abortion, non-binary self-identified gender, transgenderism, “dismantl[ing] patriarchal practice,” the “disrupt[ion of] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” the establishment of “a queer‐affirming network … with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle[ing] cisgender privilege,” and opposing “trans-antagonistic violence.” (After all, even today’s Vandals have been to college.) BLM’S official website is a pretty comprehensive manifesto for the overthrow all the moral norms and institutions of Western Civilization; but I guess we’re all revolutionaries now.

The most instructive symbol of the great surrender, however, is Seattle, one of the perennial spiritual capitals of the Big Rock Candy Mountain hobo utopia. Across from another abandoned police station, six city blocks in Seattle’s municipal center have been ceded by the mayor and governor to the rioters as a fully autonomous state: CHOP, as its rulers now call it, the world’s newest sovereign nation. Around the perimeter of the Republic of CHOP, its “government” has posted armed guards to prevent foreigners from getting in (will border walls be next?).

Pre-CHOP residents who don’t share the revolutionary ideals of their new overlords have had no say over the proceedings. CHOP, or what might be called the Protestor Occupied Territories (POT), is thus a land that has been seized from the original indigenous inhabitants and colonized by its occupiers, but one doubts that the left will denounce it as an apartheid state, demand full democratic rights for the occupied peoples, or the right of return.

CHOP also seems to have revived the great Stalinist tradition of propaganda art. Spray-painted on every available surface are inspiring revolutionary messages including “End America” and “Shoplift Your Future Back.” (When the owner of an auto repair shop and his son detained a CHOP citizen shoplifting his future back and trying to burn down the building, he was confronted by a mob of a hundred shoplifting causists who demanded they let the Good Thief go.)

In this “police-free” land of equality and justice, in what Seattle’s mayor has described as a “block party,” violence, break ins, and robberies have become commonplace. If well-intentioned liberal “idealists” are wondering what the New Progressive Order will look like once it’s been established, they ought to schedule their next holiday in CHOP, assuming its overlords will let them in.

And the Great Liberal Death Wish

All of this leaves the remnant of the sane with the insoluble question: Which is more nauseating? The images of protesters beating up septuagenarian female shop-owners, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent bystanders, torching or trashing whole city blocks, and demonstrating their grinding poverty/anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist bona fides by prioritizing top-of-the-line Nike runners and Gucci handbags on their cleptomaniacal wish lists? Or the contrite acquiescence of the soi-disant “power structure” to their rank criminality and lunatic demands?

The morally preening orgies of contrition and expressions of solidarity by our political, cultural, and corporate leaders, exacted to ensure ideological conformity with the same effectiveness as under Mao, have been rather too numerous and fulsome for optimistic conservatives to any longer discount as merely pandering, self-preservationist, or otherwise insincere.

For 50-odd years, nothing has been done to stop leftist “protesters;” the inescapable conclusion is that the ruling class doesn’t in fact want to stop them. The recent riots should at least have made it clear that the angry left’s heroic struggle against a “repressive authority” amounts to pushing against an open door. In genuinely repressive societies (China under Mao, China under Xi, the former Soviet Union) protesters get shot or dispatched smartly to re-education camps. In post-modernist America, the protesters re-educate their oppressors in the ever-more exquisite points of progressive dogma.

After almost every violent leftist “protest” of late, our political leaders have withdrawn to their own self-sentenced struggle sessions, and emerged from them wearing the nimbus of penitence and progressive enlightenment. The current legislative initiatives to defund the police and re-purpose their budgets to the same welfare programs that have, since the sixties, enslaved blacks a second time to their white Democrat masters, originated from the sober counsel of a screaming, criminal mob.

Many previous progressive desiderata have similarly silted up from the fever swamps of angry demonstrations and were thereafter ratified into law by political leaders, both Democrat and Republican. That’s not “anarchy,” as many on the right have soothingly called it, if anarchy still means unfettered license in the absence of central authority. On the contrary, its progressive theocracy, rule by the same heresy-hunters as have given us campus and media thought police, trigger warnings, censorship of conservative opinion by the Big Tech oligarchy, deplatforming, Maoist shamings and denunciations, and all the other coercive measures by which they punish the slightest deviation from orthodoxy, and in the process repeal the fustian individual liberties and rule of law upon which post-Enlightenment Western democracies were founded.

I said that the recidivist riots of the intersectional left have never required a coherent raison d’etre. But that’s not quite true. Their proudly proclaimed purpose is the shopworn utopian dream of abolishing the corrupt pre-revolutionary moral norms and institutions of the patriarchally oppressed, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Christian-bigoted, and white-privileged Eurocentric civilization they despise, and replacing it with—well, they’ve never deigned to tell us precisely what.

That the feral violence and criminality of the protesting armies never seem to impugn the righteousness of their cause in the media or the ruling class makes it plain that, as a society, we’ve not only accepted the old revolutionary lie that the benignant end justifies the malignant means, but have become oblivious to the fact that not all ends are desirable just because a braying mob says so.

The violence of the George Floyd protesters can hardly be incidental; it’s merely the objective correlative of their core beliefs and aspirations.

Harley Price has taught courses in religion, philosophy, literature, and history at the University of Toronto, U of T’s School of Continuing Studies, and Tyndale University College. He blogs at Priceton.org.

Source: The Epoch Times

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The Origin of Wuhan Coronavirus | The Epoch Times & NTD | Film [click image]

OriginVirus_PageTheme-1

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is a fine documentary with the utmost detail about how COVID-19 was created in a Wuhan bioweapons laboratory and debunks the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) version of reality which insists that it originated in the Huanan Seafood Market. Click here on on the above graphic to watch the film.

By Joshua Phillips, Investigative Reporter

As the world is gripped by the ongoing pandemic, many questions remain about the origin of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus—commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

Join Epoch Times senior investigative reporter Joshua Philipp as he explores the known facts surrounding the CCP virus and the global pandemic it caused.

In his investigation, Philipp explores the scientific data, and interviews top scientists and national security experts. And while the mystery surrounding the virus’s origin remains, much is learned about the CCP’s cover-up that led to the pandemic and the threat it poses to the world.

From the start of the virus outbreak in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not been forthcoming with information about the virus. In the early days of the outbreak, medical professionals who sounded the alarm were reprimanded by police for spreading “rumors.”

Initially, the CCP said the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Market, even though it knew patient zero had no connection with the market. Fearing that it might be held accountable for the worldwide pandemic, the CCP shifted its narrative to suggest that the virus originated in the United States and was brought to China by the U.S. military.

As a leading voice in covering China for the past 20 years, we understand very well the CCP’s deceptive nature and its history of cover-ups. With this outbreak, we saw a case of history repeating itself—in 2003, we exposed the CCP’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in China, far ahead of other media.

In this documentary, we present viewers with the known scientific data and facts surrounding the origin of the virus along with experts’ opinions. We don’t draw conclusions, but we point out that serious questions remain about the origins of the virus as well as the CCP’s handling of the outbreak.

Some of our viewers felt the documentary was taking a position on the origin of the virus, which was not our intent. The documentary has been slightly updated as of April 14 to better reflect our position, which is not to provide a definitive answer, but rather to present the known facts.

Source: The Epoch Times & NTD Films

by

Some Thoughts on Thinking Critically in Times of Uncertainty and the Trap of Lopsided Skepticism | Denise Minger

twitter_these_daysBy Denise Minger

Long time no blog, fam!

So, I had this hope that the next thing I posted here would be a grand explanation about my extended absence, all the weird stuff that’s happened over the past few years, my loss of faith in nutrition as a front-line approach to healing, and various other sundries I’ve been storing up in my brain-attic.

But then COVID-19 happened, and if that isn’t the biggest cosmic plan-changer that ever did plan-change, then I don’t know what is. So we’re gonna roll with it. And at the risk of writing something that’ll already be outdated by the time I hit publish (such is the nature of current events), I’m hoping this post will stay evergreen (or at least ever-chartreuse) by sheer virtue of its universal core theme: navigating conflicting, emotionally charged narratives in which objectivity behooves us but doesn’t come easy.

So LET US BEGIN.

In case you didn’t notice, the cyber-world (and its 3D counterpart, I assume, but we’re not allowed to venture there anymore) is currently a hot mess of Who and what do we believe? This is zero percent surprising. Official agencies have handled COVID-19 with the all grace of a three-legged elephant—waffling between the virus being under control/not under control/OMG millions dead/wait no 60,000/let’s pack the churches on Easter!/naw, lockdown-til-August/face masks do nothing/face masks do something, but healthcare workers need them more/FACE MASKS FOR EVERY FACE RIGHT NOW PLEASE AND THANK YOU/oh no a tiger got the ‘rona!; on and on. It’s dizzying. Maddening. The opposite of confidence-instilling. And as a very predictable result, guerrilla journalism has grown to fill the void left by those who’ve failed to tell us, with any believability, what’s going on.

Exercising our investigative rights is usually a good thing. You guys know me. I’m all about questioning established narratives and digging into the forces that crafted them. It’s literally my life. Good things happen when we flex our thinking muscle, and nothing we’re told should be immune to scrutiny.

But there’s a shadow side here, too—what I’ll henceforth refer to as “lopsided skepticism.” This is what happens when we question established narratives… but not the non-established ones. More specifically, when we go so hog wild ripping apart The Official Story that we somehow have no skepticism left over for all the new stuff we’re replacing it with.

And that, my friends, is exactly what’s happening right now.

I’ve been watching homegrown theories about COVID-19 spiral through various social platforms, born from a mix of data (sometimes) and theory (usually) and anecdote (always). They’re generally a pushback against the mainstream narrative about the coronavirus’s timeline, severity, concern-worthiness, fatality rate, treatment, infection breadth, classification guidelines, origin… round and round we go. Some theories are reasonable (“Has the virus been here longer than we think?”), some are untenable (“The ‘virus’ is actually radiation poisoning from 5G towers!”), and many more lie somewhere between.

Most importantly, they all have one thing in common: a tendency to embrace any and all supportive data without, well, making sure it’s true. 

Y’all know what I’m talking about. Evidence we’d never give the time of day if it didn’t work in our favor. The “I remember reading somewhere…”, the “I have a friend who knows someone who…”, YouTube interviews that are impossible to fact-check (but please just trust this person’s top-secret info from an organization they can’t name without the Feds beating down their door), crowdsourced anecdotes, retracted papers, retweeted screenshots of Facebook comments from people whose names and profile pictures are blacked out, the whole shebang.

This stuff. Is. EVERYWHERE.

Unfortunately, throwing a bunch of really bad evidence together can create the illusion of a well-supported theory. And this is what’s happening, my dudes. This is what it’s come to. In our rabid quest to undermine the Powers That Be and figure out what’s really going on, we’ve thrown quality control out the window and become that which we loathe: loyalists to narrative over data.

resurcher

Case in point, let’s look at what might be the most popular COVID-19 theory circulating right now: that mortality stats are getting padded by assigning deaths to COVID-19 that are really from other causes—thereby making this whole thing seem worse than it actually is. Depending on the sub-theory, this might be due to financial incentives for hospitals (more COVID-19 patients = more $$$); a coordinated government hoax to trick people into relinquishing their sovereignty; a way to butter us up for mass ID microchipping; something something lizard people; and so on.

And from what I’ve seen—and by all means correct me if I’m missing something—this theory draws on the following claims:

  1. The CDC has literally issued guidelines telling doctors and medical examiners to classify deaths as COVID-19 if they “presume” the patient has it—no test results needed.
  2. CDC data shows a precipitous drop in pneumonia deaths right around the same time COVID-19 became a thing—suggesting pneumonia deaths have been getting reclassified as COVID-19 deaths, and creating the illusion of a pandemic.
  3. People who die with coronavirus, but not from coronavirus, are getting counted as COVID-19 deaths—again inflating the body count.
  4. Despite COVID-19 mortality skyrocketing, total mortality is staying the same (or even dropping)—suggesting a “cause of death” shuffle, if you will, and betraying the idea that we’re seeing additional deaths from a new disease. (Alternatively: “Only people with preexisting medical conditions are dying and they were gonna keel over any minute anyhow.”)

This theory would be pretty awful if it’s true. We’d have been got. Duped. Manipulated AF. But how solid is the evidence? Have we actually peeled this thing apart piece by piece before getting all ragey about the injustice of it all?

Oh, we haven’t? Well GUESS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO NOW?

Let the unpeeling commence.

Claim #1

1. First, the whole “CDC is telling people to report COVID-19 deaths without testing!” ordeal. The damning bits come from the CDC’s COVID-19 reporting guide (PDF), which gives permission to use COVID-19 on a death certificate if it’s “suspected or likely” and “‘probable’ or ‘presumed’”:

cdc_covid_reporting_guide

And also says it’s okay to report COVID-19 without testing confirmation:

okay_no_test

And the WHO’s “Emergency use ICD codes for COVID-19 disease outbreak” gives a whole death code for COVID-19 cases that aren’t confirmed via test:

who_emergency_coding

And finally, this National Vital Statistics System document says COVID-19 can be put on a death certificate when it’s “assumed” to have caused death:

nvss_alert

The point of contention here, which has sparked something of an outrage in important places such as Twitter, is that these guidelines allow a level of guesswork that could mess things up real bad. Especially if there’s already some sort of incentive to bend data in the direction of more coronavirus deaths. What if people assign COVID-19 willy nilly to anyone who has a cough or fever? Or who had a poorly-timed bout of allergies? Where does the line get drawn? For sure, “probable,” “presumed,” “suspected,” and “likely” aren’t very reassuring words when it comes to a disease we’ve shut down the whole globe to contain.

But is this actually conspiracy worthy? And, in a clinical setting, with actual doctors doing doctor things rather than us internet-dwelling oafs imagining how it all might go, would these guidelines really lead to a significant over-reporting of COVID-19 deaths?

For starters, let’s look more closely at that CDC reporting guide. Although it does say COVID-19 deaths can be assigned without a positive test result, it also emphasizes the importance of drawing from all available evidence in order to make an informed judgment:

cause_of_death_reporting_covid-19

And it turns out, this is really no sketchier than the CDC’s guidelines for certifying pretty much any cause of death. Seriously. According to the agency’s Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting (PDF), it’s okay to use personal “judgment” when there’s uncertainty:

medical_examiners_handbook_1

And yes, medical examiners and coroners are invited to give their “opinion”:

medical_examiners_handbook_3

So are physicians, according to the CDC’s Physician’s Handbook on Medical Certification of Death—note also the use of “probable”:

physicians_medical_opinion

And medical examiners are broadly allowed to list “causes that are suspected,” and to “use words such as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed’”—again, for any death-cause:

probable_presumed_any_death

And here we see the CDC’s Instructions for Completing the Cause-of-Death Section of the Death Certificate telling us again that a condition can be listed as “probable” even if there isn’t a definitive diagnosis (and also the words YOUR and OPINION written in CAPS because the CDC successfully learned how to yell on the internet; good job, CDC):

probable_shmobbable

*I know it’s tiny; click for bigger

Are you sick of this yet? Guess what? Alzheimer’s deaths can get the same code whether the disease is confirmed or “probable”:

alzheimers

Oh hey, remember 83 seconds ago when we were so mad that COVID-19 deaths could be listed as “probable” or “presumed”? Because it seemed like some unique-to-coronavirus word twist intended to help pad the death stats? REMEMBER?

probable_presumed_covid_omg

No. Just no. This same language is consistent through all the cause of death guidelines, no matter the killer in question. It’s been that way for years. And COVID-19 is even lucky enough to get separate codes for “probable” versus “confirmed” cases, which is more than we can say for some other diseases. (And to boot, some places were already seeing COVID-19 mortality explode before reporting the “probable” deaths at all.) Heck, the guidelines for coronavirus deaths are far more straightforward than the maze-like estimation formula the CDC takes for flu mortality.

In short—and please make me eat my words if I’ve overlooked something important here—this really isn’t outrage-worthy. Certifying any form of death is an imperfect, partly subjective process, and concessions for that reality are baked into all sorts of official guidelines. If overzealous COVIDing is happening (and you’re welcome to investigate any theory-offshoots that it is), it’s not because the CDC told death certifiers to cook the books.

Claim #2

2. As for pneumonia deaths getting classified as COVID-19 deaths? This graph of CDC data has been making the rounds as evidence that something very shady, very shady indeed, is going on. As you can see, around week 10 of this year (starting March 2nd), pneumonia mortality told its wife it loved her and then jumped off a cliff:

pneumonia_drop

If we’re already primed to think the COVID-19 numbers are being doctored, we might take this graph at face value and add it to our stash of outrage fodder. But that would not be smart, friends. Face value is where critical thinking goes to die. And so, in the spirit of questioning literally everything, we must ask: could anything else explain what we’re seeing?

As a matter of fact, yes! So much yes! We only have to venture as far as the CDC’s Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) page to see what’s up. Go take a look. Especially the “Delays in reporting” section. Thar be some gold.

Basically, the CDC’s death-certificate-processing system is a slow, laborious beast that ensures any recent mortality data is always incomplete. They give a decent rundown of how death certificates get handled from start to finish:

Provisional counts of deaths are underestimated relative to final counts. This is due to the many steps involved in reporting death certificate data. When a death occurs, a certifier (e.g. physician, medical examiner or coroner) will complete the death certificate with the underlying cause of death and any contributing causes of death. In some cases, laboratory tests or autopsy results may be required to determine the cause of death. Completed death certificate are sent to the state vital records office and then to NCHS for cause of death coding.

And here we have a special shoutout to our favorite infectious diseases, noting that pneumonia, flu, and COVID-19 certificates take extra long to trickle into the data pool due to manual coding (emphases mine):

At NCHS, about 80% of deaths are automatically processed and coded within seconds, but 20% of deaths need to manually coded, or coded by a person. Deaths involving certain conditions such as influenza and pneumonia are more likely to require manual codingthan other causes of death. Furthermore, all deaths with COVID-19 are manually coded. Death certificates are typically manually coded within 7 days of receipt, although the coding delay can grow if there is a large increase in the number of deaths. As a result, underestimation of the number of deaths may be greater for certain causes of death than others.

Zooming in even further, the CDC gives some stats conveying just how incomplete their recent data is, and boy howdy is it a sorry sight. At any given moment, data from two weeks ago is likely to be barely over a quarter complete, while data from eight weeks ago is still less than three-quarters complete:

Previous analyses of provisional data completeness from 2015 suggested that mortality data is approximately 27% complete within 2 weeks, 54% complete within 4 weeks, and at least 75% complete within 8 weeks of when the death occurred. Pneumonia deaths are 26% complete within 2 weeks, 52% complete within 4 weeks, and 72% complete within 8 weeks (unpublished). Data timeliness has improved in recent years, and current timeliness is likely higher than published rates.

The CDC even slaps this little disclaimer after each table of COVID-19, pneumonia, and flu death counts:

cdc_lag_time_8_weeks

Once again, with feeling: CDC mortality figures are initially very incomplete, low-balled-as-all-get-out, and retroactively fill in over time. Which means a weird pneumonia death-drop will show up any time we check the most recent data, COVID or No-vid.

To illustrate, Joseph Dunn graphed the CDC’s pneumonia data as it appeared on the same mid-March week of each year since 2013. Behold:

pneumonia_week_12_all_years

Look at all them swan dives!

And data scientist Tyler Morgan even went to the trouble of graphing the data from every weekly CDC pneumonia report published in the last decade, to show how the lines shift as data gets back-filled. Click here or on the image below for the really cool animation (it’s weirdly beautiful and absolutely worth the 30 seconds of your life):

tyler_morgan_animated_graph

In other words, there’s nothing anomalous at all about 2020’s pneumonia trends. Nothing. The popular graph up top is a meaningless piece of hooey and it’s sad that it went viral.

Note: there’s an issue here I’m cognizant of, but intentionally not touching on yet, which is that some people believe the CDC (and any other government organization) literally makes up data from thin air, thus rendering all of the above irrelevant. This level of conspiracy is beyond the scope of this post, but I may try to address it at some point later on. Not from a data angle, but from a psychological one.

Claim #3

3. Here we have the wildly popular claim that people are dying with COVID-19, not really from COVID-19. At least, not in the numbers we’re being told. It’s basically a steroided-up version of Claim #1—just with more trickery and plot-thickness and finger-tenting.

candace_owens_tweet

The evidence for this one is a lot harder to fact-check, because there are actually no facts to check. Its trueness rests on us believing that doctors and death-certifiers are being marionetted by evil forces and/or just plumb don’t know what they’re doing.

The closest thing we’ve got to “evidence” are citationless social media statements like the above, which we’re expected to trust because LOOK AT ALL THOSE RETWEETS!, a few well-publicized examples of allegedly mis-assigned COVID-19 deaths, and Youtube interviews with people who are pretty sure they know what’s going on. Like this one, featuring Dr. Annie Bukacek, with nearly 750,000 views at the time of writing.

Apparently, she knows her stuff. And the stuff she knows is that the coronavirus figures are being manipulated!

distinguished_and_cherished_physician

Hmmm…

highly_distinguished_omg

Hmmmmmm…

annie_google_reviews

annie_yelp_review

annie_healthgrade_reviews

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Serious question: how many of us bothered to look Dr. Bukacek up before thrusting her atop a pedestal of trustworthiness? And sharing her video far across the lands? And assuming she’s an impartial commentator on the whole situation (her praiseful introducer was literally her pastor)? Should we really put faith in someone we didn’t even know existed ten seconds ago just because 1) they’re telling us what we want to hear and 2) an internet headline made them sound prestigious?

By the way, to state the obvious, this is me intentionally and very shamelessly cherry-picking to make a point. Not all of her reviews are bad. Nor do the existing ones necessarily prove she isn’t credible. And if we wanted to be truly fair, we could prod deeper and ask whether she might be getting bad-review-bombed due to her vocal pro-life activism or religious affiliation or anti-vaccine stance (she’s definitely got some haterz). There’s a lot of sticky tricky gray-zone business in evaluating reputation, which is why—whenever possible—we should investigate a person’s claims rather than their character.

But the issue here is that with Dr. Bukacek, we can’t “investigate her claims” without installing cameras into every death certifier’s brain and watching what unfolds within their basal ganglias. So we’re left with only her word. And one person’s word is not useful data. Even if it’s the best of persons and the best of words.

Now, to play devil’s advocate with my own arguments here, there’s another popular video—this one featuring Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx—that seems more genuinely suspect. I saved this one for last because it might actually have some merit. In it, Dr. Birx talks about the USA’s “very liberal approach to mortality” and outright states that people who die with COVID-19 are counted as COVID-19 deaths:

Transcript: There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now we’re still recording it and we’ll—I mean the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection, the intent is right now that those—if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that [as a COVID-19 death].

It’s not surprising this clip went gangbusters! It seems like a deal-clinching A-ha for anyone who suspected COVID-19 was getting slapped onto every death possible.

However, here and always, context matters. After all, this segment was carefully cropped from a much longer coronavirus briefing from April 7th. And if we listen to the full segment—the audience question that came before this clip, and the follow-up question that came after it, and the follow-up answer Dr. Birx gave, and the addendum answer Dr. Anthony Fauci gave—we can better orient ourselves in the conversation that was happening.

Go have a listen. The relevant stuff starts at the 1:39:07 mark:

Could it be that Dr. Birx thought the question-asker was wondering if lack of testing might cause under-reporting, and tried to reassure her by explaining that the current COVID hotspots are flush with tests? And that people with “heart or kidney problems” wouldn’t be reported as dying from those things if they’d ended up in the ICU from coronavirus? (Especially given that COVID-19 itself can cause cardiac injury and kidney damage?)

It sounds to me like the thrust of the asker’s question—which was more along the lines of “Are we sure we’re not over-counting deaths?!”—went over the heads of the task force, and they addressed a different issue than the one she was trying to get at.

But I can’t read minds. And I can’t prove that it’s not all just political doublespeak and of course they understood the question. And I think there’s far too little information in this video alone to assess it from a “scam vs. not-scam” angle. And most importantly, in the absence of actual mortality data that could clue us in to potential over-reporting, I doubt analyzing this thing to smithereens can bring us any closer to the truth.

But, you be the judge. And speaking of mortality data…

Claim #4

4. Lastly and not leastly: the claim that COVID-19 isn’t actually causing excess mortality; we’re just reshuffling death causes to stack up higher for COVID-19 and lower for everything else. Boom, insta-pandemic!

First, a note. This is a Very Important claim. It’s the supreme ruler of all the claims that came before it and perhaps all those incipient ones that will come after. It has executive power and a VIP card for entry into the most highly guarded chambers of our brains. This is because, unlike causes of death, actual body counts can’t be fudged. This is the one true test. If COVID-19 really is taking lives en masse above and beyond what we’d expect from normal death trends, total mortality is where it’ll show up. If it’s not, then our game of death-code musical chairs will be revealed for the con that it is.

Again: Very Important claim. This is the crux of it, my dear readers.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to test this claim: looking at total mortality trends in areas that COVID-19 has purportedly ravaged, and comparing that to historical mortality in the same location. An absence of anomalous death spikes—taking into account, of course, delays in processing death certificates and the lag time between infection and dying—would suggest we’re over-reporting COVID-19. And if excess mortality does appear, then we either have to concede that COVID-19 isn’t a nothingburger after all, or propose that some other ghastly, unnamed entity is stealing lives very coincidentally at the same time we have a made-up pandemic.

*Keep in mind, too, that our current near-global quarantine should slash deaths from accidents and certain crimes and infectious disease—and thus “normal” mortality rates for right now would likely be lower than for previous years.

So let’s dig into this. The “COVID-19 is overblown” theory asserts that total mortality isn’t doing anything unusual. At least not significantly so. No more than a bad flu year, let’s say. And depending on the source, we may be furnished with graphs that seem to demonstrate this truth to our hungry, data-seeking eyes, such as the following for England and Wales:

no_excess_england_wales

old_mortality_england_wales

There’s one very big problem here. Check the dates.

Almost universally, the “See, it’s nothing!” graphs use data from mid to late March, when COVID-19 was just starting to pick up steam in the areas it’s most recently terrorized. And in March, there really weren’t massive mortality spikes, except perhaps for Italy. Nothing to see here, folks was true. And no one in the infectious disease world was claiming otherwise. In March, the rumblings of upcoming mortality explosions was what people were getting worried about, not the numbers as they then stood. The whole deal with “exponential growth” is that it’s—wait for it—exponential. This is how we went from 0 reported COVID-19 deaths in the USA on February 15th, 65 deaths one month later, and 30,000 deaths yet another month later.

So let’s see what happens when we look, instead, at more recent data from countries with known COVID-19 outbreaks. (This site is a great starting resource for raw mortality data and some visuals.)

First, here’s what’s up with England and Wales now (source):

excess_mortality_england_wales

And another depiction suggesting COVID-19 deaths may be under-reported (data source and image source):

excess_mortality_england_wales_2

London, OMG (source):

REPORT THIS AD

excess_mortality_london

Excess mortality in Spain as a whole, from December 2019 to April 15 of this year (source):

excess_mortality_spain

Madrid, in particular, got clobbered:

excess_mortality_madrid

And Bergamo, Italy, in which March deaths far surpassed anything seen locally within the past decade (source):

bergamo_italy_mortality

Heck, northern Italy as a whole (source):

excess_mortality_northern_italy

Switzerland looking pretty wonky for the 65-and-olders (source):

excess_mortality_switzerland

Total mortality in the Netherlands (source):

excess_mortality_netherlands

A big chunk o’ Europe getting excess-mortalitied (source):

euromomo_map_2020-14

New York City, graphed by the New York Times (article here; viewable with free subscription) (NOTE: this data is almost two weeks outdated and the the April deaths are now many magnitudes higher):

NYC_death_spike_april_4

We could do this all day, but you get the point.

Here’s the deal, folks. People. Are. Dying. The mortality trends for COVID-19-affected areas look like what happens when you’re trying to draw a straight line and then sneeze. This is not normal. This is not how things “should” look. We can argue all we want about how accurate the COVID-19-specific data is—and indeed, there’s plenty to argue about— but total mortality doesn’t lie. This is real.

Final Thoughts

By all means, the above peel-apart is far from complete. I’m sure there are more viral videos we could assess, more statistics to double-check, more anomalies to ponder. The point isn’t to reach a final conclusion here—just to demonstrate the process. The level of detail that must go into investigating a theory before we let ourselves fully entertain it. And if that process seems exhausting, excessive, excruciatingly nit-picky, too time consuming—well, it’s the price of admission for calling ourselves “informed.” Anything less and we’re operating on faith. Which is okay, if that’s our goal. But we must call it what it is.

Now maybe you’re thinking, “Okay, the ‘COVID-19 deaths are getting padded’ theory didn’t really hold up. But what about G5 radiation causing virus symptoms? What about mandatory vaccine agendas getting pushed on the world? What about COVID-19 being a bioweapon? What about what about what about?”

To which I say, Yes! Great! What about them indeed! Put on your best-tailored thinking cap and go find out. Marinate in all the data you can find. Watch out for claims that seem sciencey but trace back to a 4chan post. Be mindful of the universal human tendency to filter out things we disagree with and embrace any evidence that we like. Dig in, first and foremost, with the goal of proving yourself wrong. If you can’t, then perhaps there’s something there.

Of course, I realize the type of deep-dive we did in this post isn’t always possible, and not everyone can sit at home all day opening so many browser tabs that their MacBook freezes with a “System Has Run Run Out of Application Memory” error (anyone else? No? Just me?). Sometimes we need shortcuts. So for anyone who really wants to do the work, to prioritize truth-seeking over ideology, to stay oriented in reality, to let go of false narratives, but who doesn’t have infinite time to do so: here are some questions to ask whenever a new or alternative theory presents itself. Especially a theory we find ourselves enamored with. None of these questions can substitute for ruthlessly investigating, but they can help us stay grounded in situations where our minds easily lead us astray.

  • Am I claiming to see through the media’s fear-mongering, but falling prey to conspiracy fear-mongering instead?
  • Am I being pressured to accept this theory in order to be “woke” or “not sheeple”?
  • Have I read the full context of this quote, clip, or screenshot before assuming I know what it means?
  • Does the group promoting this theory invite questions and critiques? Or does it flippantly dismiss those things and/or attack its doubters?
  • If this same form of evidence (Youtube interview, social media comment, etc.) was used to support the “other side” instead of mine, would I still consider it trustworthy?
  • Am I taking time to research counter-arguments to these ideas, even when I want them to be true?
  • Am I looking for good vs. evil narratives as a distraction from my immediate reality? Is getting worked up about hypothetical injustice easier than being present with what is?
  • Am I embracing this theory as a way to feel like I have control—by naming an enemy in a situation where I’m otherwise helpless?
  • Does seeing myself as a “good guy” on the side of “truth” or “justice” make me feel validated, empowered, and important?

It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking we’re being Good Skeptics when we’ve really only lifted one veil of many. There’s nothing “woke” about rejecting the official story while gullibly swallowing its alternatives.

Rather, waking up means waking up to ourselves. It’s recognizing that the battle of good and evil we project onto the world is playing out daily within ourselves. It’s committing to seeing “what is,” instead of stories about “what is.” It’s spreading our skepticism evenly across the info-scape instead of saving it for the things we already distrust.

So here it is, you guys. This is me groveling at the collective feet of the internet, with one thing to say: to anyone—everyone—listening, we need to reflect on how we’re processing the claims we hear. If we’re going to question official narratives, we need to question alternative narratives with the same degree of rigor. There’s no use retiring our sheeplehood from the mainstream only to rejoin the herd on a different pasture.

Source: Denise Minger

by

Impeachment Professors: Welcome to My World | American Crossroads

Editor’s Note: Take special note of the fourth academic Professor Jonathan Turley who cared to differ with his colleagues regarding impeachment and the grounds thereof. As a result he may suffer the consequences of stepping “out of line” from the other hard core socialist academia who testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

Commentary by Mary Grabar

Welcome to my world all you people appalled by the testimony of professors presenting Constitutional grounds for impeaching President Donald Trump.

Are you disgusted by the display of feminist rage, graduate student earnestness, and droning about the “framers” by tenured elites who have built careers presenting the Constitution as a “living document”?

Ha! Welcome to my world where I spent 20 years until 2013 studying and teaching college English.

I would still be in that world, having to listen to morning-after faculty lounge debates about the relative merits of these three scholars, were it not for the fact that a department chair, and then a college president, did not like op-eds I wrote, because the First Amendment applied only to people with their views. Then the privately funded program under which I was teaching at Emory University ended.

It’s not that I could get beyond the low-paying year-to-year contracts. My thesis and dissertation focused on dead white male cis-gendered (with no “homosexual,” or even “homo-social” tendencies) Christian writers. So I never had a chance.

During my years of struggle, I would try to convey what it was like to those on the outside—family members, friends, and people I met. I described the witchy cackling at meetings, screams about oppression from lecterns, inquisitorial stares from colleagues passing by in hallways, and examples of “scholarship”—like the poster with the giant phallus (and more that I can’t describe in this forum) adorning the office door of the head of “Sexuality Studies,” which was within the English department at Emory. Every day I trudged past that looming phallus, above the poster of Shakespeare in drag advertising a “Shakesqueer” conference.

Oh, that’s just those crazy English professors, said people in the business world and in the sciences. They looked at me slant-eyed after I stammered, “but, but … the giant phallus, and …”

Today, the standards of academe have infiltrated the business world. My former skeptics on the political right no longer post political comments on Facebook. Techies such as James Damore and CEOs are fired for their words and actions that have nothing to do with their job performance. Math and science professors are required to sign statements pledging allegiance to diversity, which means admitting less-qualified women and minorities. They’re required to believe their magical diverse powers will ensure that bridges do not collapse and patients, with their skulls cut open on the operating table, do not die. They must embrace Afrocentric math, “women’s ways of knowing” anatomy, and the path-breaking theory of Lysenkoism.

My world was the faculty lounge (the office with broken-down furniture where several instructors at one time held “office hours”). It’s a world where even such poorly paid hacks thought they were better, smarter, and holier than the majority of Americans and 100 percent of Republicans.

These people need not even look at evidence or consider scholarly shoddiness because they know that if it comes from the wrong source, it is wrong, as an Amazon review respondent who agreed with commentator “Prof. JayG” that I had not cited “any evidence” in my book “Debunking Howard Zinn,” affirmed. My book is simply “right-wing trash.” No doubt, philosophy professor David Detmer still believes I suffer from “Zinnophobia.”

Such “profs” do not need to read entire books and review footnotes because of their superior abilities to “deconstruct” texts. The deconstructionist theorists I had to read in graduate school saw the real meaning of an author’s words. While mere mortals may attach the signifier (the word) to the signified (the thing or concept), the deconstructionists could see beyond. They used this ability to also discern the motives of outsiders: white people, heterosexuals, men, Republicans—and those inside and outside these groups (excluding Republicans) who did not adhere to their ever-evolving standards of what today is called “wokeness.”

These people, unlike mortals, do not need facts. This was true about Donald Trump’s election. They knew there was cause to impeach him immediately after the election, and they said so to their students. I saw this here in Clinton, New York. Mere days after the election, professors chaperoned students from Hamilton College on the “hill” to the village square, where they marched and yelled “Impeach!” before they got on the luxury buses for the mile-and-a-half ride back to campus.

This ability to see beyond evidence has been honed for a long time. Back when a few middle-class Americans dared to form a “tea party” movement to protest with speeches, bunting, and prayer against the newly elected “global citizen” President Barack Obama’s agenda of “transforming” this country, the Ph.D.s and other super-intellects discerned that this was not really the desire of law-abiding, hard-working Americans to prevent their country from turning into Cuba. They knew, just knew, that this was racism.

So were the questions about Obama’s longtime “god-damning America” pastor, Weatherman friend Bill Ayers, brobuddy Hugo Chavez, and Communist Party USA mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Obama’s fundraising party comments about “bitter” Bible- and gun-toting Americans were simple truth. His declaration of being able to rule with his pen and phone was not any threat to the Constitutional separation of powers at all. The Obama Youth Brigade Formation’s chants of “because of Obama I’m inspired to be the next” architect, engineer, lawyer, etc., repeating points of Obama’s platform, and shouts of “Yes, we can!” were signs of rejuvenated youthful optimism.

Whereas professors had proudly sported bumper stickers proclaiming “Somewhere in Texas a village has lost its idiot” during the George W. Bush administration, they recognized Obama’s words as poetic genius.

Michelle Obama, a broad-shouldered statuesque woman was treated like the most beautiful and fashionable woman in the world—even when she dressed up like a giant banana. But a supermodel married to a Republican can have no fashion sense. Melania Trump’s white coat in a Christmas video among white-themed Christmas decorations, “exude[d] cold, dismissive aloofness”—so unlike the Santa Clausy Mao Christmas tree decorations in the Obama White House!

The fact that such reactionary outlets such as Fox News reported this as if there was something wrong with having the author of the famous Little Red Book on the tree alongside a drag queen and Obama etched into Mount Rushmore proves how close-minded they are. They’re incapable of seeing the brilliance of a theory developed by the natural genius Karl Marx whose social justice work was supported by the wealthy industrialist Friedrich Engels. (And isn’t it nice that George Soros and other billionaires support similar scholarship these days?)

Marx understood history so well because he had deconstructed it and could see the patterns. Therefore, he was able to predict the future. And he could tell what would usher in a paradise.

When everyday people, like peasants, or reporters doing reporting instead of going to the Kremlin’s fancy parties, presented counter-evidence (in the case of peasants by dropping dead from starvation), the professors shot back. They accused the few reporters jotting down the numbers of beggars and dead bodies (like William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons) of being reactionaries. They accused the peasants of bringing on their own starvation by not working enthusiastically enough on the collective farms the government had so generously provided them.

Even after Kruschev had denounced Stalin for errors, the professors did not lose faith. They knew socialism could work—if only the “right” people were in charge.

The professors in the 1960s kept teaching about the superiority of socialism, hoping as Bill Ayers and company did, that through the reeducation of their charges they would usher in and rule over a socialistic utopia. And even though the Vietnamese fled North Vietnam, the people there really wanted a communist government. These thinkers knew that Ho Chi Minh was more of a democrat than the slave-owning writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

So, when I recently watched the testimony by the Constitutional scholars Pamela Karlan (Stanford), Noah Feldman (Harvard), and Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina), I thought, welcome to my world.

Welcome to my world where someone like Karlan, who at a 2017conference claimed she had to cross the street from Donald Trump’s hotel (the building apparently shoots cootie rays onto the sidewalk) and to know that Trump did not “believe in” democracy, “the rule of law,” or a “free press.” The legal scholar had denounced “voter suppression” (no, no, not about New Black Panthers outside the Philadelphia polling station in 2008; those were civil rights activists) and claimed that Trump’s sexual assault record was higher than “99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally.” (Let us hope the FBI takes note of this inside information.)

In addition to being an ace legal mind, she was able to go beyond Freud and diagnosed Trump as not being able to tell the difference between truth and falsity. She claimed that he was trying to “destabilize the courts” and predicted that he would blame a Muslim on a future terroristic attack like the one in Oklahoma City in 1995.

At the hearing, she explained that “one of the most important provisions of our original Constitution is the guarantee of periodic elections for the presidency.” Therefore, this president needed to be removed. There are so many reasons—like the president’s reference to “Russia, if you’re listening,” i.e., to get on it about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. All smart people know that this is not a joke, for Republicans are incapable of making jokes.

But those with Ph.D.s learn all the clever inside jokes at conferences. It was too bad that the rubes didn’t understand Karlan’s witty reference to the president’s 13-year-old son. She told Americans that “Trump is not a king” and that he could “name his son Barron” but could not “make him a baron.” But they just didn’t get it. So she magnanimously gave a “qualified apology,” pointing out that Trump had much to apologize for himself—like being born. And like all those feminists attacking phallologocentrism in “Paradise Lost” and “Huckleberry Finn,” she was applauded for “schooling” a “Trump crony,” Congressman Doug Collins (R-Ga.).

In my world, earnest graduate students presented comparison/contrast papers at conferences knowing, just knowing, that someone would recognize their genius. Noah Feldman may have known that his “insights” had been discussed thousands of times before at such insider events, but for the benefit of the folks he spelled it out, explaining that the “framers provided for the impeachment of the president because they feared the president might abuse his power of his office.”

“Let me begin now,” he continued, “of why the framers provided for impeachment in the first place. The framers borrowed the concept of impeachment from England, but with one enormous difference. The House of Commons and the House of Lords could use impeachment in order to limit the ministers of the king, but they could not impeach the king. And in that sense, the king was above the law.”

He then asked his enthralled audience, “I would like you to think now about a specific date in the Constitutional Convention, July 20, 1787. It was the middle of a long hot summer. …”

Feldman had been cogitating on impeachment for a while. Back in 2017, Feldman and Jacob Weisberg compared and contrasted “the collusion of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia” to Watergate, likening “Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and warnings to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller” to “President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.”

Feldman also contributed to a collection edited by Cass Sunstein, who served in the Obama White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Titled quite originally “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America,” the book delved, naturally, into Trump’s authoritarianism. (Sunstein’s earlier book, “Nudge,” spelled out how the government could “nudge” citizens to do what it knew was good for them.) Sunstein, in his introduction, took some creative Sinclair Lewis-like liberties, presenting a future as Lewis did in his novel, even though it was fiction and did not come true then—even under a president who tried to pack the Supreme Court so he could fully take over the economy and who let in British spies to encourage war fervor.

Gerhardt (who has evolved on the Constitution since the Obama presidency) also lectured about the difference between the British system under monarchy and “in our constitution” where “no one, not even the president is above the law” and where there is “a separation of powers.” He concluded “from the public evidence” that the president had attacked the Constitution’s “safeguards against establishing a monarchy in this country.”

With all this talk of kings and monarchy I was reminded of the June 18, 2018, issue of Time Magazine, which on the cover presented Trump looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection with a crown and a king’s regalia—not that I’m doubting that the three professors came to their opinions after a careful review of the evidence—even over a pre-cooked mail-order turkey on Thanksgiving.

Then there was Jonathan Turley, an independent who has always voted Democrat, but who just didn’t get it. He blasphemed in stating that he didn’t believe that there was enough credible evidence to impeach and that Democrats were offering “passion” instead of “proof.” He dared to write about it, along with describing receiving “threatening messages and demands” that he be “fired from George Washington University”—even before he had finished his testimony. I fear that he may fall victim to the kind of purge to which others have succumbed, like Trotsky, and like the more recent one attempted on feminist professor Laura Kipnis.

Over 500 legal scholars after the testimony affixed their names to an open letter to Congress, stating their agreement with Karlan, Feldman, and Gerhardt. Turley had better see the light—that the king must be impeached—soon!

Whoever let him teach at George Washington Law School anyway?

The American people do not appreciate the wisdom of their betters, but President Bernie Sanders will be sure to remind them of how lucky they are to live in a country where the government provides all the food they need and where all they need do is stand in line for it, and not even worry their little brains about what to eat because the Director of the Department of Nutritional Guidance, Provision, and Distribution, Michelle Obama, will see to it that every American gets as much as he, she, they, or it truly needs. Now let’s move! Hop on that tractor! You have a quota to fill.

Mary Grabar holds a doctorate in English from the University of Georgia and is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Grabar is the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America,” recently published by Regnery History.

Source: American Crossroads