That’s a lot to consider so let’s unpack this a bit.

Consider history. In October 1929, the stock market crashed. Many people on Wall Street suffered but Main Street was largely unaffected. The Hoover Administration got busy with some efforts to loosen credit but without success as credit markets slowly dried up. Throughout 1931, public sentiment toggled between pessimism and denial. Many people thought it was a temporary blip that would go away.

No one called it the Great Depression. That came much later.

By the election of 1932, enough people were concerned about the economic situation but the campaigns did not really focus entirely on that. The big issue was Prohibition. Hoover did not have a strong opinion but Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke out loudly for repeal. His fiscal policy pushed frugality and balanced budgets, and he decried Hoover as a big spender.

FDR won of course. But before the inauguration, the economic environment became dramatically worse. A banking crisis developed, and FDR used emergency powers to impose a bank holiday and repeal the gold standard. As part of this, he imposed a ban on private gold ownership. It was enforced with fines and jail terms.

Central planning then ensued with massive fiscal stimulus, crazed agricultural policies that required digging up crops to create artificial shortages, and price and wage controls.

All of this unfolded over the course of four years, the first three of which were not at the time thought to be much of a crisis generally speaking. Today it is obvious that 1929 marked the beginning but that was not apparent at the time.

It is not discernible in our time that we are already in recession but that is due to some brittle statistical measures. If you extend the inflation numbers to include housing and interest, plus extra fees and shrinkflation, minus hedonic adjustments, and then adjust the output numbers by the result, you end up in a recession now.

Do you remember the two successive quarters of declining GDP in 2022? At the time, it was said that this was not a recession, even though every definition of recession was two declining quarters of GDP. It was said at the time that the data was not enough to declare it because labor markets were strong.

Trouble was that this too was an illusion. Most of the job gains were in fact in part-time jobs and multiple job holders, and those gains went to foreign-born workers and not natives. Overall, jobs held by native-born workers that are full-time are down relative to four years ago. No one in the mainstream press admitted this.

The jobs report that came out last week was the first glimpse of truth because it was brazenly awful, underperforming every prediction. It also chronicled major job losses in manufacturing and professional services. Those are hard-core recession signs that are likely going to worsen.

All this data will start to be revised next year as the conventional wisdom will change. It will be widely admitted that the economy is weaker than we previously supposed. This will happen regardless of who wins. For one winner, it will serve as an attack and for another winner, it will serve as pretext for extreme intervention like the promised price controls on rents and groceries.

Meanwhile, we will be revisiting the inflation problem. The Fed has already added $1.1 trillion to the money stock over the last 12 months plus lowered interest rates. The effect of this easing has not affected mortgage rates because investors are expecting higher rates in the future. The Fed can control overnight lending but the shape of the yield curve is determined on the bond market.

If major changes are proposed in terms of spending cuts, the bond market will freak out and the United States could repeat the experience of the UK just a few years ago. New prime minister Liz Truss was quickly hounded out of office on grounds that her spending cuts had spooked the bond markets.

U.S. creditworthiness is already on a hair trigger as the debt pileup has reached astronomical levels. The entire purpose of this wild spending has been to balloon the GDP as much as possible to prevent a recession from being declared already. The debt-to-GDP level is now higher than it was in the Second World War, and getting worse by the day.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

The easy solution is dramatic spending cuts but that won’t happen if the bond market starts panicking with quality downgrades. There are only two private institutions that grade U.S. bonds and both are subject to being muscled by political concerns. Such an event could easily overwhelm a new administration. The political people will go into overdrive and demand that the Fed accommodate the bond market, fueling more inflation.

I truly wish that none of this would happen but the truth is that economic forces are always and everywhere more powerful than political ones. There are structural problems alive in U.S. economic life today that are not easily solved by policies of any sort.

But in U.S. political culture, whatever takes place under one president’s watch is blamed on the officeholder regardless. That the circumstances have been created by the previous administration or have nothing to do with existing policy has no relevance in the political culture. That alone makes it nearly impossible for a sitting president to plead with the public for patience.

In 1981, Reagan did make a plea for patience, and lost a great deal of Congressional support in the midterm elections of 1982. He was fortunate that the economic recovery came in time for the 1984 election that granted him a second term. But that was a very close call, and that was also under conditions that were not as structurally dire as conditions today.

As a result, the new administration will encounter pressure to achieve the impossible: immediately improve American living standards without imposing any pain at all. Such a demand is impossible to grant. As a result, whatever happens in this election will likely be reversed in the midterms of 2026, meaning that we cannot count on any kind of policy consistency for many years to come.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so. But from what I’m looking at, I don’t see how a frank acknowledgement of current conditions can be put off for another year.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The previous rule was designed to unclog the courts from endless litigation over legislative interpretations that was making life difficult for business. The unintended consequence of the shift in 1984 was to increase interventions but not from Congress or judges but from agencies, which blew up in size and authority over the course of 40 years. This was ripe for a hard challenge, and the Supreme Court certainly stepped up.

The new rule (from Loper Bright v. Secretary of Commerce) is that agencies cannot interpret laws as they wish but rather are restrained by the words of legislation from the people’s representatives.

The implications are profound. Above all else, it means transferring responsibility back to the people and their representatives. It is part of a new form of populism that has come about in response to obvious calamities.

Think back to four years ago when agency deference was riding high, imposing an astonishing number of instant laws about medical matters, social distancing, business closures, masking, and even mail-in voting. It was all pushed through by agency authority having nothing to do with Congressional mandate.

Americans suddenly found themselves ruled by a system of government they did not know they had. Consider the declaration that essential workers could work but nonessential workers would need to stay home. Was that a law? Not really. It was more like an edict. No one knew who would enforce it or what the penalties were for noncompliance.

We know now that the declaration came from the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, a division within the Department of Homeland Security created in 2018. Its declaration was even more powerful and decisive over national life than the Department of Labor, which was never even consulted.

Again, this was not law and not legislation. It was edict and no one really knew how it came to be that this agency, about which no one knew anything, possessed this kind of power. The offending legal basis was precisely this Chevron deference, which tempted every agency just to go rogue and test out its powers whenever it wanted to.

In those months and years, we came to be ruled by credentialed experts, not all and not even most but those experts who had close access to powerful agencies. They overrode scientific consensus, popular will, and even settled law. It all happened so suddenly. The goal of crushing the virus through force was never plausible and neither was the notion that we could vaccinate our way out of a fast-moving respiratory infection.

For those still suffering from those days, and that includes nearly everyone, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper (reversing Chevron) should provide some sense of relief. It will take time for the court decision to have a practical impact but the reality is that if the new rule had been in force four years ago, the nation would have been spared the pain of lockdowns and closures, and probably even the forced vaccination campaign.

The new rule is also consistent with a new governing ethos that is sweeping the world today, against arbitrary rule by powerful elites and toward more democratic accountability. That one idea is now unsettling political systems in the United States, UK, and EU, and beyond. It provides no light to describe this movement as “far-right,” as the New York Times says daily. It is something different.

We might call the ethos the new populism. It is neither left nor right, but it borrows themes from both in the past. From the so-called “right,” it derives the confidence that people in their own lives and communities have a better capacity for wise decision-making than trusting the authorities at the top. From the old left, the new populism takes the demand for free speech, fundamental rights, and deep suspicion of corporate and government power.

The theme of being skeptical of empowered and entrenched elites is the salient point. This applies across the board. It is not only about politics. It hits media, medicine, courts, academia, and every other high-end sector. And this is in every country.

This really does amount to a paradigmatic shift. It seems not temporary but substantial and likely lasting. What happened over four years unleashed this mass wave of incredulity that had been building for decades before. The final straw was the coercive pandemic response in which governments in the world issued stay-at-home orders, closed small businesses, restricted travel, forced masks on the population, and then mandated shots of an experimental technology.

All of this was generally celebrated by most large media outlets, endorsed by academia, and cheered by all respectable opinion. But this was not actually “common-sense public health.” It was radical and far-reaching, and there never was a clear statement of the end goal. Many jurisdictions locked us down until vaccination became available, and then made an effort to inoculate most everyone in the population.

That’s a big plan and it all turned on one key assumption, namely that the shot would work to end the pandemic. It did not work particularly well. It stopped neither infection nor transmission. Nor did the experts anticipate the levels of injury that would result from repeated uses of the same shot, even though the existing literature warned against that exact strategy.

Here’s the problem with blaming all experts for this fiasco. Many people with high credentials were warning against this approach the entire time. They were shouted down and censored. Many others believed that this was the wrong approach but they were prevented for career reasons from telling the truth.

This is the reason why the new populism is strongly committed to free speech. Without the opportunity to discuss and consider the evidence, we miss important truths and find ourselves blindly following the opinions of the most powerful.

To be sure, the word populism has something of a sordid history in the 20th century, mostly due to the political upheavals in the interwar period that profoundly affected industrialized economies. FDR spoke like a populist but so did emergent leaders in fascist Europe. This form of populism was very different from that in our own time. It rallied around the ability of experts to plan the economy and manage the culture.

For example, FDR’s first inaugural address struck populist notes by denouncing “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” and “the unscrupulous money changers” who “stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” In practice, he drew on credentialed expertise and agency power to remake many features of the U.S. economy, imposing price controls, industrial subsidies, tight rules on all commercial transactions, all with the goal of lifting prices under the mistaken belief that low prices were causing the depression.

The grand theory that drove the response to the Great Depression was rooted in the emergent thoughts of John Maynard Keynes, who flipped many features of classical economics on their head. In essence, his theory was that government itself should be empowered to manage the whole through careful manipulation of aggregate supply and demand, a dream that was never realizable or desirable.

In many ways, the New Deal ended up not as a populist effort but one that empowered an elite class of social and economic managers. The pattern grew worse and worse through the decades. The Chevron decision of 1984 codified it into law. But we saw the same patterns in the UK and in European countries. The movements were called populist but they all drew on scientistic schemes for improved economic and social management by imposition from the top.

We’ve been told to “trust the science” for the better part of a century. The push back against that paradigm had to wait until the apotheosis of central planning with the pandemic lockdowns, which were followed very quickly by efforts to use government power to control the climate. Together with that, and all over the world, the mass migration crisis unfolded as governments shifted from their core duties to aspirations of virus and climate control.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift, a new populism that rejects the idea that a powerful elite knows what is better for societies than the people themselves. In this view, the new populism is not a return to the interwar variety but something much earlier.

What comes to mind in the American context is the movement by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. He stood against the National Bank, fought for the rights of the states against the federal government (except on the tariff), and generally sided with the people over elites. In other words, he embraced the original idea of democracy. If you want to understand what’s happening in the world today in light of American history, that’s a great place to begin.

A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.

Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.

This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?

Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.

Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.

That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.

In 1919, H.G. Wells, inspired by the League, became so excited about the idea that he wrote a sweeping reinterpretation of world history that extended from the ninth century B.C. until that present moment. It was called “The Outline of History.”

The goal of the book was to turn on its head the popular Whig theory from the previous century, which saw history as the story of ever more freedom for individuals and away from powerful states. Wells told a story of tribes turning to nations and then to regions, with ever less power to the people and ever more to dictators and planners. His purpose was to chronicle and defend exactly this.

It was a huge bestseller at a time when the appetite for books was voracious because they were becoming affordable and there was a burning passion in the population for universal education. The thesis of his book, however valuable in some historical respects, was genuinely bizarre. He imagined a future world state ruled by a tiny elite of the smartest people who would plan all economies, information flows, migration patterns, and governance systems while crushing national ambitions, free enterprise, traditions, and constitutions.

It was crazy stuff and didn’t really happen. But the efforts never stopped among a certain class of intellectuals. Following World War II, we saw similar efforts, the U.N. being only one. In the agreement hammered out at Bretton Woods in 1944, we had forged the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were seen as the basis of a global planning apparatus, together with a new world monetary system.

None of this worked out either. The IMF and World Bank ended up being well-funded sinecures for elite academics but not really the financial basis of a world state. The U.N. turned into a disappointment for many. The efforts at global management of trade finally came to fruition with the World Trade Organization, but that machinery has proven mostly toothless and unable to stop the sweeping turning back on free trade that has taken place over the past five years. Today, no nation really fears that entity.

The drive to unite Europe was advertised as a liberal move to inspire cooperation on trade and travel and to make economic cooperation possible. But that was just the pitch. The reality of the European Union was the creation of a mean bureaucracy in Brussels that would override the sovereignty of nations and force deference to a new central state in Europe that actually had no historical precedent. It was an experiment in region-wide government planning.

Britain was always a reluctant member, but when its worst fears were realized, the people voted to leave the whole thing. The result was Brexit, a political movement that panicked elites all over the world. They saw the plans of decades going up in smoke. Boris Johnson became prime minister with the task of making Brexit happen, but his rule was confounded at every step. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic came along to upend his entire tenure.

One way to understand the COVID-19 pandemic response is as a further experiment in world government, a way for the elites to broadcast to the entire planet that they can achieve global cooperation when they want to.

In most every nation, the response was the same in terms of timing and protocol. Social distancing was everywhere, and masks, too. The breakup of gatherings including worship, along with idiotic schemes such as one-way grocery aisles, were imposed everywhere. The slogans (“We are all in this together”) and signage (wash hands, keep distance, mask up) were also the same.

It was creepy in the extreme, especially when you consider the way it all happened at once, even though we knew for sure that there are huge hemispheric differences in the way respiratory pathogens spread. Something can be a problem in New York but not in Sydney. Why did this happen all at once? The message seemed to be: This is just what we do in a global pandemic.

What they did not tell anyone is that none of this constituted “common sense public health measures” but rather amounted to an experiment without any precedent in the history of humanity. Nowhere had all this cockamamie stuff ever been implemented. Only crazy people had recommended them in the past, but the crazies somehow carried the day. There was a message behind the entire effort: We are the government, and we rule the world, populists’ resentment be damned.

In the aftermath, the World Health Organization (WHO) has picked up the mantle to goad the nations of the world to give up their sovereignty and agree to implement the same protocols anytime that the WHO demands it. They have this treaty or agreement that they have been shopping around the planet for signers. At first, it seemed to be in the bag. But with the calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic response in the rearview mirror, it turned out to not be so easy.

The group REPPARE started looking carefully at this agreement and the amendments and saw that the entire thing rested on faulty premises, twisted thinking, and fiscal profligacy. Governments around the world are now flat-out rejecting the offer to give up their control over nations. It appears now that the World Health Organization’s agreement is in trouble. We are even starting to see movements in the direction of leaving the WHO completely, just as President Donald Trump attempted to do back in 2017.

No question that a nascent world government is in operation today. It is hugely influential over media, technology, and the operation of the internet. It is managing global money flows and asset prices. It aims to reduce national sovereignty to mere brand names of the same thing and make it impossible for the will of the voters to prevail in any policy outcomes. It consists of large and well-funded elites that swim between the public and private sectors and operate through foundations and nongovernmental organizations. It is utterly detached from democratic processes.

“Nothing more disastrous could happen in the field of international economic relations than the realization of such plans,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1944. “It would divide the nations into two groups—the exploiting and the exploited; those restricting output and charging monopoly prices, and those forced to pay monopoly prices. It would engender insoluble conflicts of interests and inevitably result in new wars.”

In other words, like all government actions, the results of a world government would end in the opposite of the promise: not peace but war, not prosperity but poverty, not health but sickness, not a better environment but a worse one. It would be a prison for the world and utterly unworkable. People of the world need to be on the lookout for what is happening and reject it whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so.

For this reason, we should cheer anytime global government impositions such as censorship experience a setback. Government in one country causes enough trouble. A unitary government ruling all countries would doom what’s left of civilization.

How would this be possible? Knowledge is power while secret knowledge is full control. Even fake knowledge means power and control, such as we found out in the phony Russiagate investigation early in Trump’s term. They hounded the new administration for years under a completely fake scenario in which Russia somehow got Donald Trump elected.

Yes, that was an intelligence operation all along, one directly designed to overthrow an election, a “color revolution” on our own soil.

How dare an agency not elected by the people, and evading oversight and public accountability, put itself ahead of the Constitution and the rule of law? It’s been going on for many decades as the agencies have gained ever more power, even to the point of forcing a full lockdown of America and even the world under false pretense.

None of this is verifiable precisely because of the secrecy involved. It’s not as if the intelligence community is going to send out a press release: “Democracy in America is an illusion. We know because we control nearly everything, plus we aspire to control even more.”

The incredulous among us will shoot back: look at what you are saying! Your conspiracy theory is non-falsifiable. The less evidence you have for it, the more you believe it. How in the world can we argue with you? Your position is not really plausible but there is nothing we can do to convince you otherwise.

Let’s grant the point. Still, let’s not dismiss the theory completely. Based on a New York Times (NYT) piece that appeared last week, it contains more than a grain of truth. The article is titled: “Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on a Collision Course.”

Quote: “Even as president, Donald J. Trump flaunted his animosity for intelligence officials, portraying them as part of a politicized ‘deep state’ out to get him. And since he left office, that distrust has grown into outright hostility, with potentially serious implications for national security should he be elected again.”

Ok, let’s be clear. If the intelligence community led by the CIA is not the “deep state,” what is?

Further, it is proven many times over that the Deep State is in fact out to get him. This is not even controversial. Indeed, there is no reason for these journalists to write the above as if Donald Trump is somehow consumed by some kind of baseless paranoia.

Let’s keep going here: “Trump is now on a possible collision course with the intelligence community …. The result is a complicated and possibly destabilizing situation the United States has never seen before: deep-seated suspicion and disdain on the part of a former and perhaps future president toward the very people he would be relying on for the most sensitive information he would need to perform his role if elected again.”

Wait just a moment. You are telling us that all previous presidents have had a happy relationship with the CIA? That’s rather interesting to know. And deeply troubling too, since the CIA has been managing regime change the world over for a very long time, and is now directly involved in U.S. politics at the most intimate level.

Any president worth his salt should absolutely have a hostile relationship with such an agency, if only to establish clear civilian control over the government, without which it’s not possible to say that we live in a Constitutional republic.

And now, according to the NYT, we have one seeking the Presidency who does not defer to the agency and that this is destabilizing and deeply problematic. Who does that suggest really rules this country?

Is the NYT itself guilty of the most extreme conspiracy theory imaginable, or is it just stating facts as we know them? I’m going to guess that it is the latter. In this case, every single American should be deeply alarmed.

Crazy huh? As for the phrase “never seen before,” we have to push back. What about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Calvin Coolidge? They were all previous presidents, according to the history books that people once read.

There was no CIA back then. If you doubt this, I’m pretty sure that your favorite AI engine will confirm it.

One must suppose that when the NYT says “never seen before,” it means in the post-war period. And that very well might be true. John F. Kennedy defied them. We know that for certain. The mysteries surrounding his murder won’t be solved fully until we get the documents. But the consensus is growing that this murder was really a coup by the CIA, a message sent as a lesson to every successor in that office.

Think of that: we live in a country today where most people readily admit that the CIA probably killed the president. Amazing.

It’s intriguing to know at this late date that the Watergate “scandal” was not what it appeared to be, namely an intrepid media holding government to account. Even astute observers at the time believed the mainstream narrative. Now we have plenty of evidence that this too was nothing but a deep state attack on a president who had lost patience with it and provoked another coup.

All credit to my brilliant father who speculated along these lines at the time. I was very young with only the vaguest clue about what was happening. But I recall very well that he was convinced that Richard Nixon was set up in a trap and unfairly hounded out of office not for the bad things he was doing but for standing up to the Deep State.

If my own father, not a particularly political person, knew this for certain at the time, this must have been a strong perception even then.

You hear the rap that these agencies—the CIA is one but there are many adjacent others—are not allowed by law to intervene in domestic politics. At this point and after so much experience, this comes across to me like something of a joke. We know from vast evidence and personal testimony that the CIA has been manipulating political figures, narratives, and outcomes for a very long time.

How involved is the CIA in journalism today? Well, as a traditionally liberal paper, you might suppose that the NYT itself would be highly skeptical of the CIA. But these days, they have published a long string of aggressively defensive articles with titles like “It Turns Out that the Deep State Is Awesome” and “Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe.” We can add this last piece to the list.

So let’s just say it: the NYT is CIA. So too is Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Slate, Salon, and many other mainstream publications, including major tech companies like Google and Microsoft. The tentacles are everywhere and ever more obvious. Operation Mockingbird was just the beginning. The network is everywhere and the practice of manipulating the news is wholly normalized.

Once you start developing the ability to see the markings, you simply cannot unsee them, which is why people who think and write about this can come across as crackpot crazy after a while.

Have you considered that maybe the crackpots are exactly right? If so, shouldn’t we, at bare minimum, seek to support a Presidential candidate with a hostile relationship to the intelligence community?

Indeed, that ought to be a bare minimum standard of qualification. There is simply no way we can restore civilian control of government and constitutional government until this agency can be thoroughly reigned in or abolished completely.

I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.

The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.

There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.

Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.

New literature is emerging to document it all.

The new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony. The revolt is not racial and not geographically determined. It’s not even about left and right, categories that are mostly a distraction. it’s class-based in large part but more precisely about the rulers vs. the ruled.

With more precision, new voices are emerging among people who detect a “vibe change” in the population. One is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “Strongholds Falling; Populists Seize the Culture.” She argues, quoting Bret Weinstein, that “The lessons of [C]ovid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed…The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable.”

A second article is “Vibe Shift” by Santiago Pliego:

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.

We truly want to believe this is true. And this much is certainly correct: the battle lines are incredibly clear these days. The media that uncritically echo the deep-state line are known: Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, New Republic, New Yorker, and so on, to say nothing of the New York Times. What used to be politically partisan venues with certain predictable biases are now more readily described as ruling-class mouthpieces, forever instructing you precisely how to think while demonizing disagreement.

After all, all of these venues, in addition to the obvious case of the science journals, are still defending the lockdowns and everything that followed. Rather than express regret for their bad models and immoral means of control, they have continued to insist that they did the right thing, regardless of the civilization-wide carnage everywhere in evidence, while ignoring the relationship between the policies they championed and the terrible results.

Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to the powerful.

The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct. This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone who makes a basic demand for normal freedom – to speak or choose one’s own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask – can reliably anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely no sense.

The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. As for the pandemic protocols themselves, there have been no apologies but only more insistence that they were imposed with the best of intentions and mostly correct. The World Health Organization wants more power, and so does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the evidence of the failure of pharma pours in daily, major media venues pretend that all is well, and thereby out themselves as mouthpieces for the ruling regime.

The issue is that major and unbearably obvious failures have never been admitted. Institutions and individuals who only double down on preposterous lies that everyone knows are lies only end up discrediting themselves.

That’s a pretty good summary of where we are today, with vast swaths of elite culture facing an unprecedented loss of trust. Elites have chosen the lie over truth and cover-up over transparency.

This is becoming operationalized in declining traffic for legacy media, which is shedding costly staff as fast as possible. The social media venues that cooperated closely with government during the lockdowns are losing cultural sway while uncensored ones like Elon Musk’s X are gaining attention. Disney is reeling from its partisanship, while states are passing new laws against WHO policies and interventions.

Sometimes this whole revolt can be quite entertaining. When the CDC or WHO posts an update on X, when they allow comments, it is followed by thousands of reader comments of denunciation and poking fun, with flurries of comments to the effect of “I will not comply.”

DEI is being systematically defunded by major corporations while financial institutions are turning on it. Indeed, the culture in general has come to regard DEI as a sure indication of incompetence. Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the “great reset” such as the hope that EVs would replace internal combustion have come to naught as the EV market has collapsed, along with consumer demand for fake meat to say nothing of bug eating.

As for politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a possible unfriendly president in the form of Trump or RFK, Jr.

So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.

What does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly likely pathway for long-term social change? These are legitimate questions.

For hundreds of years, our best political philosophers have opined that no system can function in a sustainable way in which a huge majority is coercively governed by a tiny elite with a class interest in serving themselves at public expense.

That seems correct. In the days of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 15 years ago, the street protesters spoke of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. They were speaking of those with the money inside the traders’ buildings as opposed to the people on the streets and everywhere else.

Even if that movement misidentified the full nature of the problem, the intuition into which it tapped spoke to a truth. Such a disproportionate distribution of power and wealth is dangerously unsustainable. Revolution of some sort threatens. The mystery right now is what form this takes. It’s unknown because we’ve never been here before.

There is no real historical record of a highly developed society ostensibly living under a civilized code of law that experiences an upheaval of the type that would be required to unseat the rulers of all the commanding heights. We’ve seen political reform movements that take place from the top down but not really anything that approximates a genuine bottom-up revolution of the sort that is shaping up right now.

We know, or think we know, how it all transpires in a tinpot dictatorship or a socialist society of the old Soviet bloc. The government loses all legitimacy, the military flips loyalties, there is a popular revolt that boils over, and the leaders of the government flee. Or they simply lose their jobs and take up new positions in civilian life. These revolutions can be violent or peaceful but the end result is the same. One regime replaces another.

It’s hard to know how this translates to a society that is heavily modernized and seen as non-totalitarian and even existing under the rule of law, more or less. How does revolution occur in this case? How does the regime come around to adapting itself to a public revolt against governance as we know it in the US, UK, and Europe?

Yes, there is the vote, if we can trust that. But even here, there are the candidates, which are that for a reason. They specialize in politics, which does not necessarily mean doing the right thing or reflecting the aspirations of the voters behind them. They are responsive to their donors first, as we have long discovered. Public opinion can matter but there is no mechanism that guarantees a smoothly responsive pathway from popular attitudes to political outcomes.

There is also the pathway of industrial change, a migration of resources out of legacy venues to new ones. Indeed, in the marketplace of ideas, the amplifiers of regime propaganda are failing but we also observe the response: widened censorship. What’s happening in Brazil with the full criminalization of free speech can easily happen in the US.

In social media, were it not for Elon’s takeover of Twitter, it’s hard to know where we would be. We have no large platform in which to influence the culture more broadly. And yet the attacks on that platform and other enterprises owned by Musk are growing. This is emblematic of a much more robust upheaval taking place, one that suggests change is on the way.

But how long does such a paradigm shift take? Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a bracing account of how one orthodoxy migrates to another not by the ebb and flow of proof and evidence but through dramatic paradigm shifts. An abundance of anomalies can wholly discredit a current praxis but that doesn’t make it go away. Ego and institutional inertia perpetuate the problem until its most prominent exponents retire and die and a new elite replaces them with different ideas.

In this model, we can expect that a failed innovation in science, politics, or technology could last as long as 70 years before finally being displaced, which is roughly how long the Soviet experiment lasted. That’s a depressing thought. If this is true, we still have another 60 plus years of rule by the management professionals who enacted lockdowns, closures, shot mandates, population propaganda, and censorship.

And yet, people say that history is moving faster now than in the past. If a future of freedom is ours just lying in wait, we need that future here sooner rather than later, before it is too late to do anything about it.

The slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There is no other path. The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.

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Consider the big-picture thinking. Nearly every nation in the world attempted the eradication of a respiratory pathogen that is spread through aerosols and has an animal reservoir – an ambition that any competent medical professional could have told you was insane. And they sought to achieve this great goal through maximum control of the human population. And toward this end, they exercised total control for several years.

A devastating feature of total wars in history is the loss of cultural continuity from prewar to postwar. What came before fades into memory, replaced by trauma, and then the desperate desire to forget that it ever happened and then create something new.

The development of society and its growth – technological, informational, political, cultural – is supposed to be organic. War changes that, deprecating some features and elevating others, usually to the detriment of human flourishing.

We saw this after the Great War. The difference between 1910 and 1920 was more than a decade. It was a different age. The fashions, music, literature, painting, and architecture all changed and dramatically so. The Belle Epoque and its manners, customs, and ideals receded far into the past, and were replaced by something else entirely.

Monarchies and old multinational states were blown away completely, and nationality came to mean any and every external sign of group solidarity, each struggling for recognition. Most cultural signs were suddenly darker, embedding a new awareness of the grim realities of life and death on earth. The old writers were forgotten, as were old habits, professions, and ways of being. The old idealism was gone too.

This was especially obvious in high-end art culture, which turned against all forms of the past. It was precisely in this period when what we call “modern” art took hold. In the lower rungs of society, the trauma was palpable in broken homes, displaced workers, permanent consciousness of mass death, public distrust, and a turn toward substance abuse and ill-health. The only fortunes were depleted and divested and a cultural anomie gained ascendence throughout the West.

Only a few decades later, the same upheaval took place during and after the Second World War. Following that war, once again, the music shifted as did the architecture, painting, literature, demographics, and the ideas we held about the future. Optimism in general experienced its second massive blow in a century, replaced by an advancing nihilism that could not be contained until it exploded two decades later.

One again, the distance between 1940 and 1950 was far more than a decade. There was a multinational reset with the formation of “neo-liberal” world political institutions like the IMF and World Bank, plus GATT, which were supposed to guarantee global peace. And only a few years later, the Cold War wrecked those plans with the creation of walled trading blocs.

The writers of the interwar period seemed to vanish, dismissed as old-fashioned and out of touch. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nock, Mencken, Wharton, Garrett, Flynn – these were all household names in the 20s and 30s but gradually evaporated from the 1950s and onward. Magazines changed and industry too, with the old wiped away and the new granted a subsidized prominence.

This is a consequence of the perception of new times and the irrelevance of everything that came before. This was coupled with a Freudian-style unwillingness to speak about the horrors of the war.

Though never announced and rarely acknowledged by corporate media, we’ve lived through our own form of trauma with the policy response to Covid. It took a form without precedent. Without a shooting war and without a declared peace, all the signs of war surrounded us from March 2020 onward.

It was characterized by an explosive shattering of how life was supposed to work. Holidays were canceled. We faced global and domestic travel restrictions. We obeyed sudden and untested protocols from anti-social distancing to masking to closures of everything, together with the turn-key socialism of multiple trillions in stimulus spending (and money printing).

The conscription came later, as millions were pumped full of an experimental medicine called mRNA delivered through a novel system with an injection. Most had no choice. Whole cities were closed down to the refuseniks. Even the students and kids were drafted into the great push for what was called vaccination – a moniker playing off past successes – but had no sterilizing effects and made no serious contribution to ending the pandemic.

The more we learn about what provoked this horrifying experiment in virus control, the more we are discovering the central role of the military in shaping the policy response, dictating rules to public health, and shepherding the vaccine into being. From long before the American people had a clue what was coming, the military was already treating the virus as a bioweapon leak in need of countermeasures.

It was more like war than is usually admitted. Certainly most countries imposed a form of what felt like martial law. It felt that way because it was that way.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s book The Wuhan Coverup explains the larger context. The military had long worked with labs around the world in undertaking gain-of-function research in its bioweapons program of anticipating both the pathogen and the antidote – mad scientist stuff from the movies.

When the lab leak from China became obvious – sometime in the fall of 2019 – the preparations began, without consultation of elected leaders or even career civilian bureaucrats. By the time the response was implemented, it must have seemed like the only viable path, which is probably why Trump agreed to the preposterous plan of shutting down society.

The US Constitution nowhere authorizes such emergency-based abolition of liberties and rights. Justice Neil Gorsuch was correct in calling this “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” And notice the qualification: in peacetime. But can anyone think of any wartime measures that included canceling holidays, mass quarantines of the healthy, closed business and schools, and universal censorship of dissidents?

Both the Great War and the Second World War authorized universal censorship and surveillance but the targeting was specific to high-profile objectors and hardly touched the average person. And no time during these wars did government dare to issue countrywide edicts that everyone had to stand 6 feet apart from each other at all times or cover their faces just to shop. This did not happen in wartime.

We can safely edit Gorsuch’s comment to simply say the greatest intrusions on civil liberties, period.

And so what cultural trends can we track as marking the difference in pre-lockdown and post-lockdown times? We can note five terrible trends in particular.

1. The entrenchment of new trading blocs that began to form with renewed protectionism but now foreshadow the end of dollar supremacy and close ties between Russia and China. Events of this past week – in which the whole world was invited to compare the relative erudition of the Russian and US presidents – suggest the end of the American empire.
2. Dramatic declines in fertility. We are seeing this in every country but especially those countries that locked down the hardest like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, and Spain. Counties in Africa that did the least to enforce lockdowns have the highest rates of fertility. As part of this, gender dysphoria has taken hold. Yes the trans trend pre-exists Covid but the isolation, the digital addiction, the loss of purpose of the young, and the pause button on relationships cultivated a strange movement toward confusing men and women, and creating the illusion that biological sex is infinitely malleable.
3. The ruination of literacy. Surveys are showing the lowest rates of book reading on record in addition to the lowest rates of even the ability of young people to read anywhere close to grade level. Those trends might be related, as is the rise of digital addiction.
4. The deprecation of work. You can no doubt confirm this trend: work and the work ethic are deeply unfashionable, as an entire generation experienced what it was like to lounge all day in PJs and still get flooded with income courtesy of government. Labor dropouts in the UK, US, and EU remain very high.
5. Up with dependency. The US and other nations show a greater number of people than ever living off government welfare, including disability benefits but more besides. The bureaucracy has taken full charge.

Add it all together and you get less individualism, initiative, and even desire to grow in prosperity. In other words, no surprise, the dramatic collectivized response has led to a greater degree of collectivism than we have heretofore experienced. With that comes inevitable spiritual despair.

As for changes in art and music, it is too early to say but here we can detect something unusual as wartime goes, not a forward-thinking effort to create the new but a clawing back of the old forms, probably because there is nowhere else to go.

And this introduces the other side of the coin, which is that the dramatic loss of trust in media, government, academia, corporate power, and science has led to:

1. A new search for what is true, using every tool. This pertains not only to science and health but also to religion and a general philosophy of life. When the elites fail, it falls to everyone else to figure things out.
2. A new emphasis on homeschooling. This practice lived under a legal cloud for decades until suddenly it became mandatory and the schools closed for as much as a year or two. Still education has to go on, so millions of parents have taken it upon themselves.
3. A turn against college is part of this. They demand all the students get jabbed up, again and again, despite firm evidence that the shot was necessary, safe, or effective. Is this why people are paying six figures in tuition?
4. Millions have realized that government can be trusted to take care of people and so there is a dramatic turn toward financial independence and new forms of independent living.
5. New institutions are being founded. So many nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and houses of worship utterly failed to show courage throughout the lockdown and mandate period. Hence new institutions are being founded by the day that have paid close attention and are preparing a culture for new times.

Brownstone Institute is certainly part of this but there are many more besides, in addition to alternative media which is growing so fast that it is swamping the legacy media.

This is only a sketch and it is too early to see precisely what kinds of changes have been initiated in our country and world due to the wartime tactics of the Covid response. The closest analogy we can name is the Great War more than a century ago, which closed one chapter in history and opened a new one.

To make sure that what comes next is better than the corruption we left behind will take all our efforts. It is precisely for this reason that there is so much mandatory forgetting that is being urged upon us. You can see daily in the corporate news, which wants to forget about the whole ugly chapter for fear that the peasants will get too restless. Anthony Fauci in his depositions and Congressional testimony sums up the theme of all official institutions today: “I cannot recall.”

We dare not comply with this mandatory forgetting. We must remember, and take full account of the deception and destruction the ruling class has caused for no other reason than profits and power. Only then we can learn the right lessons and rebuild on a better foundation for the future.

About the Author

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

That’s a conventional version of what happened.

And yet, we keep hearing of early voices of dissent at the time that didn’t get a hearing.

The problem of figuring out whether and to what extent people acquiesced to tyranny is an important one. It is complicated by accumulating evidence that the government worked with tech and media, and therefore with the main way people get their news, to actively suppress contrary voices, even when they came from recognized experts of great credibility.

Did you see the movie The Big Short? It is based on a book by Michael Lewis. Both celebrate short-selling contrarian Michael Burry of Scion Capital. Back in 2006, he began to see strange features of the housing bubble. These financial products called mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) packed highly-rated mortgage bonds with terribly-rated ones. The more he looked, the more he was convinced that a massive housing bust was on the way.

He shorted the market, even going to the point of pushing various financial firms to create funds that did just that even when they didn’t previously exist. Very few believed there was a bubble in housing because all the experts, including the head of the central bank, said otherwise. The whole system was propping up a fake market.

Burry, who is a trained physician, believed it was going to fail. He had looked at the details instead of trusting the experts. And he turned out to be correct, perhaps early but correct eventually. The movie and book present him as a hero for being willing to go against the crowd and the experts both.

The lesson: we should all be more like Burry. Even since the telling of this story, he has been valorized as a person of great wisdom. Never trust the experts, the system, the conventional wisdom, the madness of crowds. Do your own research like Burry did!

When the lockdowns began in March 2020, it turns out that Dr. Burry joined Twitter solely for the purpose of denouncing what was going on. He sent emails too, to Bloomberg. Burry wrote them right away:

Stay-at-home policies need not be universal. COVID-19 is a disease that is somewhat lethal for the obese, the very old, the already-sick. Public policies have no nuance because they want to maximize fear to enforce compliance. But universal stay-at-home policies devastate small and medium sized business and indirectly beat up women and children, kill and create drug addicts, engender suicides, and in general create tremendous misery and mental anguish. These secondary and tertiary effects are getting no play in the prevailing narratives.

Among his statements on Twitter:

Americans must not abide. Government restrictions are doing orders of magnitude more damage to the lives of Americans than COVID could ever have done on its own.

Roughly 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The worst estimates for COVID would add less than 10% to that total. Consider this as the media implies Americans are dying at multiples of normal rates. Compassion is not incompatible with facts.

Unconscionable. Let’s put today’s horrific jobless claims in perspective. This is not the virus. This is the response to the virus killing the US and global economy, with all accompanying human tragedy. I present America’s initial jobless claims over the decades.

15 million mortgage defaults? An unemployment rate exceeding 10%? Social unrest can be expected as it passes 20%. Unthinkable in America. Just two months ago the economy was great. A virus shows up that kills less than 0.2%, and the government does THIS?

COVID like all coronaviruses will not easily engender durable herd immunity, and vaccines will prove elusive. We must learn to live with it – which means universal treatment with available drugs and no hysteria, i.e. NO LOCKDOWN!

He later took down the tweets and deleted his accounts, maybe out of despair of making any difference. We don’t know. Nor do we know how many retweets or likes he received or what the comments were, simply because they are no longer there. (If anyone can figure out how to find this, please let me know; I’ve checked every outlet.)

Given Burry’s status as a genuine contrarian expert, in the midst of a grotesque policy without precedent, you might have thought that the media would be all over him. He would be on all the talk shows. Experts would address his claims, refuting them or backing them.

What happened instead was: nothing.

In those days, I was desperate to find voices of disagreement. I really could not find any. I felt very alone. So too, as it turns out, did many others. There were many of us, as it turns out. We just couldn’t find each other. Or maybe certain algorithms were in place that prevented us from finding each other.

There seemed to be this strange trend alive at the time. The recognized experts of the past were all swept away. Many had their accounts deleted. They were replaced by new experts about whom we knew almost nothing or who had severely compromised reputations, like Anthony Fauci.

An example is Devi Sridhar, who advised the Scottish government. More than anyone else, she was granted astonishing amounts of airtime throughout the UK. She was a proponent of the idea of “Zero Covid” through lockdowns and, later, vaccines. She now admits that this was an error, that we do indeed need to live with the virus. But her book from that period she still promotes on all her social media accounts.

Did they have any track records we could check? How do we know these people are real experts? These were questions hardly anyone asked.

How is it that Sridhar was the go-to expert whereas other experts were throttled, blocked, denounced, canceled, and deleted? Perhaps because she worked for the Gates Foundation? It’s impossible not to become a conspiracy theorist to some extent as you look at this situation.

There is no reason to go all the way to October with the experts who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. They faced extreme attacks. But really the attempts to curate the public mind and engineer a consensus began as soon as the lockdowns took effect.

The same agency that meddled so heavily in information curation was also the agency that broke up the workforce between essential and nonessential, and later on dismissed the risks of absentee ballots even though their internal memos reveal vast awareness. That would be the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. Created in 2018 and practically invisible to most Americans, this small agency exercised enormous power over what we knew and what we heard.

Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing about many dissidents who were trying to speak out early on and could not get a hearing, many of whom now write for Brownstone.

Think how different 2008 would have been with the same level of speech control. Markets would not have corrected toward reality so quickly. It’s one thing for a truth to be unpopular or unconventional; it’s something else to be actively suppressed.

Looking back, one really does wonder what the reality was in those early days after lockdown. No question that mass formation played a huge role. No question that people gave in and complied far more than they should have. But what if government had not been collaborating with tech and media and just allowed the free flow of information? Might the lockdowns have ended much sooner simply because people could have heard a different point of view?

We’ll never know. This does serve as a cautionary note against a wholesale condemnation of the world for failing to stand up to tyranny. Maybe many people did stand up, in whatever limited way they could, but simply faced a system that prevented them from getting a hearing.

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Yes, these stickers are still everywhere. I recall when they first went up, sometime in April 2020. They seemed oddly uniform and appeared even permanent. At the time I thought, oh, this is a huge error because within a few weeks, the error of the whole of this idiocy is going to be known by all. Sadly, my worst fears came true: it was designed to be a permanent feature of our lives.

Same with the strange arrows on the ground telling us which way to walk. They are still everywhere, stuck on the floor, an integral part of the linoleum. If you walk this way, you will infect people, which is why you have to walk that way, which is safe. As for masks, the mandates keep popping up in strange places and strange ways. My inbox fills with pleas for how people can fight this stuff.

The essential message of all these edicts: you are pathogenic, a carrier, poisonous, dangerous, and so is everyone else. Every human person is a disease vector. While it’s fine you are out and about, you must always create a little isolation zone around you such that you have no contact with other human beings.

It’s so odd that no dystopian book or novel ever imagined a plot centered on such a stupid and evil concept. Not even in 1984 or The Hunger Games, or The Matrix or Equilibrium, or Brave New World or Anthem, was it ever imagined that a government would institute a rule that all people in public spaces must stand six feet away in all directions from any other person.

That some government would insist on this was too crazy for even the darkest imaginings of the most pessimistic prognosticator. That 200 governments in the world, at roughly the same time, would go there was unimaginable.

And yet here we are, years after the supposed emergency, and while governments are not enforcing it, for the most part, many are still pushing the practice as the ideal form of human engagement.

Except that we are not doing it. In this train station, no one paid any attention to any of the signage. The exhortations were entirely ignored, even by those who are still masked up (and, one presumes, boosted seven times).

When the moment arrived for people to get into the elevator, a crowd began to pour in, quickly beyond four, then eight, then 12. I stood there shoulder to shoulder with fully 25 other people in one elevator with a sign that demanded only four people get in at any one time.

I sort of wanted to ask the crowd if they saw the sign and what did they think. But that would have been absurd, because, actually, no one even cares. In any case, one guy asking a crowded elevator such a question would have raised suspicions that I was deep state or something.

It was never clear in any case who was enforcing this. Who issued the rule? What are the penalties for not complying? No one ever said. Sure, there was in the past usually some flunky bureaucrat or Karen who yelled at people and said do this and don’t do that. But those people seem long ago to have given up.

It’s not even a thing anymore. And yet the signs still exist. Probably they will stay forever.

There is an enormous disjunction that still persists between what we are told to do and what we actually do. It’s as if incredulity toward official diktat is now baked into our daily lives. My first thought is that it doesn’t make much sense at all, even from the point of view of those who aspire to control our lives, to issue commands to which no one listens or obeys. On the other hand, there might be some meta-rationale for this, as if to say, “We are nuts, you know we are nuts, we know you know we are nuts, but we are in charge and can continue to do this anyway.”

In other words, edicts to which no one complies serve a certain purpose. They are a visual reminder of who is in charge, what those people believe, and the presence of a Sword of Damocles hanging above the whole population: at any point, anyone can be snatched away from normal life, made a criminal, and be forced to pay a price.

The nuttier the edicts, the more effective the message.

Thus do we live in insane times. There seems to be a huge and widening gulf separating the rulers from the ruled, and this gulf pertains to values, aims, methods, and even vision for the future. Whereas most of the population aspires to live a better life, we cannot shake the sense that someone out there who has more power than the rest of us aspires for us to be poorer, more miserable, more afraid, more dependent, and more compliant.

After all, we are just barely shaking off the most grandiose experiment in universal human control in the historical record, the attempt to micromanage the whole of everyone belonging to the human race in the name of gaining control over the microbial kingdom. The effort petered out over time but how in the heck does anyone with ruling-class power expect to maintain any credibility after such a destructive experiment?

And yet there is a reason we have heard precious few concessions that it was all bogus and unworkable, and why there is still a dripping sound of papers telling us that the whole scheme worked pretty well and that people who say otherwise are disseminators of disinformation. There are still publishing opportunities out there to trash repurposed generics and praise the shots and boosters. The power is still with the crazy people, not with those who question them.

And the people who threw themselves into Covid controls as the greatest years of their lives are still at it. Hardly a day goes by when there is not a freshly written hit piece on the resistance and efforts to trash those with enough sagacity to see through all the baloney. Far from being rewarded, those who protested and opposed are still living under a cloud that comes with being an enemy of the state.

We all know that it is not just about these dumb stickers and these virus controls. There is more going on. Coincident with the pandemic restrictions came the triumph of woke ideology, the intense push for EVs, and wild ramp-up in weather paranoia with the discovery that climates change, a rampant gender dysphoria and denial of chromosomal reality, an unprecedented refugee flood that no one in power is willing to mitigate, a continued attack on gas including even stoves, and a host of other inane things that are driving rational people to the brink of despair.

We long ago gave up the hope that all of this is random and coincidental, any more than it so happened that nearly every government in the world decided to plaster social distancing signs everywhere at the same time. Something is going on, something malevolent. The battle of the future really is between them and us but who or what “them” is remains opaque and too many of “us” are still confused about what the alternative is to what is happening all around us.

Noncompliance is an essential start regardless. That crowded elevator, assembling spontaneously in open defiance to the blasting signage, is a sign that something in the human longing to be free to make our own decisions, still survives. There are cracks in the great edifice of control.

About the Author

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

You are not alone. It’s a problem all over the world. Three years ago, our social, economic, political, and cultural institutions were shattered by a central decree. The key edict came from the World Health Organization (WHO). The date was Jan. 30, 2020. The WHO was thrilled how China was responding to the virus by shattering the lives of its citizens. It told the entire world of the CCP’s miracle cure!

The WHO, said an official communique, “believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk.”

The entire world, wrote the WHO, should embrace a “spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the front lines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.” Cheers to China, said the WHO, because it is “setting a new standard.”

And so the CCP welded doors of apartments shut and an entire city was turned into a prison in the name of virus control. Suicides and despair followed, along with population-wide terror. A month later, the government proclaimed that it had beat the virus.

The WHO was thrilled, and so it set up a special junket for health officials from the United States, Europe, and the UK. This took place Feb. 16–24, 2020. The chartered flight to see the glories of the CCP miracle included Anthony Fauci’s deputy assistant. The report came in with nothing but rave reviews.

“At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures — whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home’ advisories or prohibitions on travel.”

This one report should have been enough to discredit the WHO forever, and prompt its instant abolition. Instead, the report issued on Feb. 24, 2020, became an instruction manual for the entire world, including the United States. Three days later, the New York Times was calling for nationwide lockdowns. Two weeks later, the Trump administration ordered that “public and private venues where people gather should be closed.”

We know the rest of the tragedy. Businesses, schools, churches, families, and communities were wrecked, and not just for two weeks but for a year or two or more. Looking back the goal was always to buy time to get the entire population pumped with mRNA shots delivered through lipid nanoparticles. Governments around the world used all their power to make it so.

And the effect? I’m sure you have your own stories. The sadness, demoralization, ill-health, mental illness, learning loss, and psychological sense of damage are everywhere in evidence.

Every report reveals this. It proves impossible to exaggerate the carnage. You think kids lost one year of education? Maybe two? It is getting worse. How bad is it overall and when has it been this way? The figures on reading and math show that the U.S. is set back at least two decades in progress on educational outcomes.

It’s impossible to name the worst of it since it is all awful. But loneliness certainly ranks high. Friend groups were wrecked. Not being allowed to meet for many months dissolved them. When they tried to reconstitute, they split over masking. When they tried again, they broke up over vaccines. Top health officials were urging people to exclude family members from gatherings if they were unvaccinated.

Daily I hear from people with deeply tragic stories. I spent yesterday in the beautiful and mysterious town of Tepoztlán, Mexico, meeting with a group of people who found refuge here from lockdowns. Mexico was open in those days. Even this town had its own lockdowns but they were brief. The many thousands of people who moved here include people from all over Europe, the UK, Israel, and the United States. Each has an amazing story of tragedy and triumph, and everyone is working to rebuild a life.

It’s true in your town too, as you well know. Everyone of all ages is trying to find a new path.

It’s with this backdrop that I just learned of a new initiative from the World Health Organization. And this one you simply will not believe. It is seeking new powers, new funding, and a new mandate to cure your loneliness. It’s just not possible to make this stuff up.

The headline is “WHO launches commission to foster social connection.” The commission will “address loneliness as a pressing health threat, promote social connection as a priority and accelerate the scaling up of solutions in countries of all incomes.”

What great experts are on this commission?

• Vivek Murthy (co-chair), Surgeon General, United States
• Chido Mpemba (co-chair), Youth Envoy, African Union Commission
• Ayuko Kato, Minister in charge of measures for Loneliness and Isolation, Japan
• Khalid Ait Taleb, Minister of Health and Social Protection, Morocco
• Jakob Forssmed, Minister for Health and Social Affairs, Sweden
• Ximena Aguilera Sanhueza, Minister of Health, Chile
• Cleopa Mailu, Permanent Representative to the U.N., Kenya
• Ralph Regenvanu, Minister of Climate Change, Vanuatu
• Haben Girma, Deaf Blind Advocate and Activist, United States
• Hina Jilani, Elder and Human Rights Lawyer, Pakistan
• Karen Desalvo, Chief Health Officer, Google, United States

Wait, don’t tell me that you have doubts that Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change will be able to assist in mitigating your loneliness? Surely not! Well, whatever limits he may encounter can surely be addressed by the Chief Health Officer of Google. Right?

It is intriguing that only one member of the commission is associated with a privately owned business, and that business happens to be Google. Google has been carrying water for the WHO now for at least four years. Its own YouTube platform has specifically said that it will delete any video that offers health policy commentary which contradicts the WHO. That’s essentially an announcement that the company has fully integrated itself with global government.

It’s so brazen now that they don’t think they need to hide it anymore.

So what will the WHO do about our loneliness? The press release says: “The Commission on Social Connection, supported by a Secretariat based at WHO, will hold its first leadership-level meeting from 6 to 8 December 2023. The first major output will be a flagship report released by the mid-point of the three-year initiative.”

Wonderful! So they will meet in a few weeks. It will surely be a wonderful occasion socially lubricated by chartered flights, champagne, caviar, and plenty of extremely charming small talk. Then in a year and a half, and after many emails and Zoom follow-ups, they will issue their first report.

Their final report is due in 2026 wherein they will make some recommendations.

If you are lonely, rest assured that in three years, the World Health Organization will issue a report. The experts will have spoken! The very people who wrecked the world will be charged with fixing the problem.

The absurdity of this entire cartoon-like scenario is so preposterous that not even the promoters and participants can really take it seriously. They are just trolling us now, underscoring to anyone paying attention that they have no regrets and only intend more of the same. The lockdowns will continue until morale improves.