The Wall Street Journal has conducted a poll with the most interesting results. From 1998 to the present, the percentage of Americans who say that patriotism is an important value has crashed from 70 percent to 38 percent. The bulk of the fall has happened since 2019. More results will be discussed in a bit but let’s first focus on this issue of patriotism.
The poll doesn’t define for the respondents what patriotism is but reflect on the word. It can mean love of country and homeland. It’s perhaps true that this has fallen. That’s believable since the US in three years ceased to place freedom as a first principle.
Indeed, there is a growing cultural movement, extending from academia to the mainstream, that encourages loathing of American history and its achievements. No "founding father" is safe from being called the worst-possible names. Hatred of this country has risen to be an expected norm. But the problem goes deeper even.
When you are locked in your home, your business is closed, your church is shut, your neighbors are screaming at you to mask up, then the doctors come at you with shots you don’t want, and you are further prevented from leaving the country to anywhere but Mexico, and the president calls the unvaccinated enemies of the people, sure, one can imagine that affections for the homeland decline.
But there is another important pillar of patriotism. It is about trust in the civic institutions of the country. These include schools, courts, politics, and all the institutions of government at all levels. Civic trust in these are surely at rock bottom. The courts did not protect us. The schools shut, particularly the public ones which are supposed to be the crowning achievement of Progressive ideology. Our doctors turned on us.
And let’s say that we consider the media to be part of civic culture. It has been that way since at least FDR’s Fireside Chats. It’s always been the mouthpiece for what we are supposed to be thinking about as a people. The media too turned on regular people for three years, calling our parties super-spreader events, jeering pastors who held worship services, demonizing live concerts, and screaming at everyone to stay home and stay glued to the tube.
Yes, such evil antics tend to lessen public respect for all the institutions involved, especially when objections to these policies were censored by all the institutions we were supposed to trust with our data and friend networks. They turned out to be wholly owned too.
All the while, public support for patriotism was abused to deny fundamental rights and liberties. Patriotism was supposed to mean staying home and staying safe, masking up, social distancing, complying with every random edict no matter how ridiculous, and finally getting jabbed once, twice, three times, and more forever, despite the lack of medical vulnerability for vast swaths of the public.
The Constitution became a dead letter for a time. It still is, as visitors from other countries cannot even enter our borders lest they too submit to the shots made and distributed by companies that provide half the budget of the agencies requiring everyone to comply.
And this was all supposed to be necessary because of what was obviously a seasonal respiratory infection, a fact we knew at least a month before the lockdowns began. We could read about it in all mainstream venues. Don’t panic, they said, just trust your doctor. But with lockdowns, they also took away from the doctor the liberty of treating patients with therapeutics known to be effective against exactly this sort of virus.
Instead, we were expected to put all of normal life on hold and wait for the magic antidote that was supposedly on the way. When it didn’t arrive until after the hated president was unseated, it turned out not to be an antidote at all. At best it was a temporary palliative against severe outcomes. It certainly did not stop infection or spread. All that happened anyway, which makes the point that the huge sacrifices made in the name of patriotism were all for naught.
We should in no way be surprised that the public these days is not feeling very patriotic. And yes, this is very sad in many ways. But it is also what happens when patriotism is hijacked by the state and industry to shatter our hopes and dreams. We tend to learn from our errors. So when the pollsters come around and ask if we are feeling patriotic, it’s hardly unusual that people would respond: not really.
And we could say the same about the other poll result: the importance of religion has fallen from 62 percent in 1998 to 39 percent in 2022. Again the bulk of the crash happened after 2019. No question that the nation was already trending secular. But what are we to think when two successive seasons of Easter and Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate) were canceled by the civic elites with full cooperation from the mainstream of religious leaders?
The whole point of religion is to reach outside the mundane world of civic culture into the realm of the transcendent in order to see and live by truth. But when transcendent concerns are replaced by fear and secular compliance, the religion loses credibility. If you want to find people who still believe, you can in groups that are truly serious about faith: the Hasidim, Amish, traditionalist Catholics, and Mormons. But in mainline denominations, not so much. Like media, tech, and government, they turned out to be captured too.
In the final results of the poll, the importance of having children went from 59 percent to 39 percent and the importance of community involvement peaked at 62 at the height of lockdowns to fall to an astounding 27 percent.
Again, the culprit here seems pretty obvious: it was the pandemic response. All the policies were structured to shatter human relationships. People are nothing but disease vectors. Stay away from everyone. Don’t become a super-spreader by daring to hang around others. Be alone. Be lonely. That’s the only proper way.
Finally, among the only things that are rising concern the importance of money. That’s probably because real income has been declining for the better part of two years and inflation is gutting our standards of living. Once again, pandemic policies are the culprit. They spent trillions and the money printers matched that spending nearly dollar for dollar, watering down the value of a previously reliable currency.
The trouble with the survey is not the numbers but the interpretation. This is being seen as some weird fog of nihilism and greed that has mysteriously slipped over the population, as if it were an entirely organic trend over which no one has any control. That’s wrong. There is a definite cause and it all traces to the same egregious policies without precedent. We still do not have honesty about what happened. And until we get it, we cannot repair the grave damage to the culture or the national soul.
We are living in crisis times but that crisis has an identifiable cause and hence solution. Until we can speak frankly about it, the situation can only get worse.
CONTROLLED OPPOSITION: The FBI had more people in the Proud Boys than the Proud Boys. “The trial of chapter leader Zach Rehl was preparing to call a witness this week, but ran into a problem. Their ‘witness’ turned out to be a confidential informant for the FBI who had been spying on the defense team. That brought the trial to a screeching halt ‘until these issues have been considered and resolved.’ That’s putting it mildly, to say the least.”
“Pharmaceutical marketers have noticed the power of patient persuasion and begun to leverage ‘patient influencers’ in brand campaigns,” says a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado, alongside the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. With the wider influencer-marketing industry expected to be worth up to $21.1 billion in 2023, the study published in The Journal of Medical Internet Research provides early insights into this growing new area, including its darker side. “The bottom line here is that patient influencers act as a form of interactive direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, sharing their knowledge and experiences on pharmaceutical drugs with communities of
Academic journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International published an article titled "Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT."
President Joe Biden this weekend proved the truth to the old adage that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Biden is again arguing that the wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes. However, on Saturday, he made this whopper of a claim: “You know the average tax billionaires pay? Three percent. No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or a firefighter.” There is no indication where that figure came from, but prior low figures have been based on a highly dubious method of counting unrealized gains as income — a highly controversial proposal for a new massive tax increase.
With the start of the election season, we will now again hear the mantra that the wealthy do not pay their fair share in the United States. Many have challenged that popular claim. More than 40% of households pay no federal taxes at all. The top 1% pay forty percent of tax revenues. The top 25% of earners paid roughly 89% of all income taxes in 2020.
On the other side, some will acknowledge this is “technically true,” but they insist that this does not include such things as sales taxes and ignores the huge disparity in the proportion of income earned.
We can have that debate in good faith in the coming election. However, President Biden’s latest statistic is truly beyond the pale even for politics. Previously, the White House released an 8% claim, which was also dubious. This is the first time many of us have seen the three precent claim.
However, the earlier claim did show how it was created and how the President conceals the rather creative measures used to mislead the public.
Last month, the White House issued a fact sheet called “The Biden Economic Plan Is Working,” which used unrealized gains – a potential profit on an unsold asset – as income to lower the estimate on how much billionaires pay. It then declared to the shock of many that “in a typical year, billionaires pay an average tax rate of just 8%.”
Now this may come as a surprise but I am no billionaire. I have no expectation to be a billionaire. Some of my best friends are NOT billionaires. However, if the President is going to push for higher taxes, he owes a modicum of honesty to the voters in making his case.
The current estimate of some tax experts is that the highest income earners pay an average in the mid 20s. Ironically, if true, that is where Biden says it should be.
While that figure can be debated, the inclusion of unearned income is more than creative, it is downright dishonest. Some of us have raised legal and practical objections to the proposal to include unrealized gains in tax bills.
Income tax focuses on actual income or gains acquired by citizens in any given year. That includes “capital gains” when you sell an asset for more than its original purchase price. It is “realized” when you sell it.
Democrats now are seeking to tax “unrealized gains,” even though an asset has not been sold and could go down in value. It is a more sophisticated version of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, but it is arguably unconstitutional.
The Biden White House insists this is merely “a prepayment of tax obligations these households will owe when they later realize their gains. This approach means that the very wealthiest Americans pay taxes as they go, just like everyone else, and eliminates the inefficient sheltering of income for decades or generations.” Framing the tax of assets as a pre-payment still leaves it a tax on current wealth rather than income.
There is also the daunting logistical task of valuation and why some assets may be counted over other assets.
The same is true about a home. A family house likely will grow in value, and that value can be captured as a property tax by states. Yet the federal government cannot also take that value as a “prepayment of tax obligations” on an asset that might go down in value or not be sold for decades.
The targeting of billionaires is a brilliant way to get the public to accept a new type of tax. Once allowed, though, it can then be used on any asset and against any tax bracket to tax “unrealized gains.” If history shows anything, it is that the government tends to operate like a gas in a closed space: Expand the space, and the gas will fill it evenly.
The three percent claim of President Biden is only the latest statistical sleight of hand on tax politics. However, if he is going to use the statistic, he will have to more than double it and then acknowledge that he is using a measure for taxable wealth that is not recognized under the United States tax code.
The claim seems to suggest that Biden’s flubbed line in 2019 may actually now be an official policy: “We choose truth over facts.”
The federal government issued new guidelines Monday for Americans on how to combat the coronavirus pandemic, titled “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The 15 days are seen as a trial period for the new recommendations and add to previous guidance about practicing good hygiene, staying home if sick and following state and local authorities.
Fauci and Birx’s glee during the announcement is something to behold:
Remember when everybody had to stop going to school and start living inside their houses? Newscasters started broadcasting from home and everything? All that weird stuff?
And, oh yeah, they broke the economy like snapping a dry twig over their knee.
I recently wrote how public educators and unions were methodically killing public education. The best example this week comes from New York where a school board committee has solved the dismal math and reading scores for children in the system . . . they lowered the standards. This is not the first system to gut its standards rather than improve its quality of education. As teachers and unions object to school choice, they continue to make the case for private education. Parents are increasingly voting with their feet. The board is simply calling the lack of proficiency “the new normal” and changing the standards. Done.
New York will permanently lower the math and reading proficiency standards after embarrassing results in state testing. It is akin to shortening the 100 yards dash to 50 yards to stay competitive on speed.
The media reported that
“A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight. Some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
This may seem insane to anyone with a proficiency in logic, but it is being shrugged off by many in New York. There is now an acceptance that the public schools cannot actually educate students to proficiency levels needed to succeed in the modern world. In the meantime, some districts are moving to a four-day work week for teachers to reduce stress.
We previously discussed the elimination of gifted and talented programs to achieve equity by artificially lowering everyone to the same level.
Other schools have eliminated the “F” to guarantee 100 percent passage rates.
Still others have suspended proficiency standards to simply graduate students who cannot reach required levels in writing, math, and English.
In a prior column, I was particularly moved by the frustration of a mother in Baltimore recently who complained that her son was in the top half of his class despite failing all but three of his classes. Graduating students without proficiency in English or Math is the worst possible path for these students, schools and society.
It is the dumbing down of America but administrators, boards, and unions insist that it is better for these students, who face dismal prospects for future employment. In the meantime, we are pouring billions into schools that cannot produce a single proficient student in basic subjects. If this were a business, there would be criminal fraud charges across the nation.
Walking near Temple University, I noticed a flyer advocating for “socialism in our lifetime.” The message from an outside group reads in full, “Socialist Revolution: Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime.” Having grown up in Soviet-era Ukraine and now a tenured professor at Temple, I feel strongly that most college-age Americans do not understand what they are saying when they advocate for socialism.
Today, many American college students do not understand that they are advocating for a system that goes beyond what even the Soviets promoted. There is a real distinction that students do not appreciate between the romanticized idea of state socialism in Scandinavia and the reality of socialism – what I experienced as a student in the Soviet Union.
Most student activists tout equity and many undergraduates champion socialism as a means to achieve equity – a process to engineer outcomes. Where I grew up, this would mean giving everyone the same grade, so it was never a factor in Soviet higher education.
The Lancet is pushing the dangerous theory that people are worth no more than rats – and it's an idea being woven in the WHO pandemic treaties, warns Dr. David Bell.
Below is my column in Fox.com on the recent controversies at Stanford University and University of California at Davis where students sought to prevent others from hearing conservative speakers. These are only the latest manifestations of a growing anti-free speech movement across our campuses.
Here is the column:
When Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez left her class this week, she faced a chilling scene. Hundreds of black-clad students wearing masks over their faces stood menacing around her chanting “counter-speech is free speech.”
The students were outraged that Martinez apologized to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan after he was prevented from speaking to students and faculty last week. These law students believe that conservative viewpoints are “harmful” and thus should not be allowed to be heard on campus. In a twisted concept pushed by many faculty members, they believe that silencing others is an act of free speech.
The same views were evident on Tuesday night at the University of California at Davis, though with a more violent element. Another large group of black-clad protesters wearing masks attacked a venue that was to host a speech from conservative speaker Charlie Kirk.
Police and students attending the event were assaulted, leaving at least one officer injured. The protesters smashed windows, hurled eggs, and used pepper spray to attack the University Credit Union Center and those who wanted to hear Kirk.
It is the face of a rising generation of censors and speech phobics that has been carefully cultivated by many in academia. Our institutions of higher education have become academic echo chambers where opposing views are no longer tolerated and preventing free speech is claimed to be acts of free speech.
A chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech. Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.
They are getting these values from faculty members. Many schools have largely purged their ranks of conservative and libertarian faculty. This trend is supported by anti-free speech websites like Above the Law where Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” and argued that hiring a conservative professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach. He also mocked surveys showing that conservative students are fearful of speaking freely in class, dismissing these students as “just… conservatives being sad that everyone else makes fun of them.”
What is notable is that Martinez did not even pledge to hold students accountable for stopping the speech by Judge Duncan. Yet, that is still more than other law deans. When Professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech” at CUNY law school, CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself after using a controversial term in a meeting and resigned).
At the University of California, Santa Barbara, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.
These students have been raised from elementary schools to law school in a speech phobic environment where free speech is treated as harmful. That was evident in the disgraceful Stanford event.
Stanford DEI Dean Tirien Steinbach shocked many by condemning Judge Duncan at the event. It was not surprising to many of us who have watched free speech protections plummet on campuses for decades. When Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to step in to allow him to speak, Steinbach stepped forward and, after voicing support for free speech, joined the mob in denouncing Duncan for trying to speak despite those who opposed his views. She asked “‘even in this time. And again I still ask: Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Judge Duncan responded “What does that mean? I don’t understand…”
Judge Duncan’s confusion is understandable …. unless he has been on a college campus in the last decade. He was still harboring the outdated notion that higher education is based on a diversity of opinions and viewpoints, not orthodoxy.
The argument that stopping free speech is free speech is nothing more than a twisted rationalization. Protesting outside of an event is an act of free speech. Entering an event to shout down or “deplatform” speakers is the denial of free speech. It is also the death knell for higher education in the United States.
The presence of Antifa at the Kirk event was another predictable element.
I testified in the Senate on Antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in the United States. I specifically disagreed with the statement of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler that Antifa (and its involvement in violent protests) is a “myth.”
It is at its base a movement at war with free speech, defining the right itself as a tool of oppression. It is laid out in Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” in which he emphasizes the struggle of the movement against free speech: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase that says, ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’”
Bray quotes one Antifa member as summing up their approach to free speech as a “nonargument . . . you have the right to speak but you also have the right to be shut up.”
However, the most chilling statement may have come from arrested Antifa member Jason Charter after an attack on historic statues in Washington, D.C. After his arrest, Charter declared “The Movement is winning.” As the hundreds of black-clad Stanford Law and violent Davis protesters can attest, he is right.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): Stanford University employee charged with lying about campus rapes. “A Stanford University employee who claimed that she was raped twice on campus was charged with lying about the alleged sexual assaults, prosecutors said. Authorities unearthed alleged evidence showing that Jennifer Ann Gries made up the bogus accusations about a co-worker whom she also falsely claimed to be dating.”
Stanford is looking to be a cesspit of craziness. “In January of this year, Gries admitted to investigators that she lied about being raped because she was angry at her co-worker. Greis said she felt that her co-worker gave her ‘false intention’ and turned her friends against her, according to prosecutors.”
He should sue:
The saga “scarred” him and the false accusations took a toll on him, especially during a time when he was caring for his gravely ill mother who later died.
The man, a victim in the ordeal, was able to also provide evidence that corroborated his whereabouts, authorities said.
He told investigators, “This is disgusting. I don’t feel human. I don’t feel human at all.”
Gries was charged on Monday with two felony counts of perjury and two misdemeanor counts of inducing false evidence.
There are enduring mysteries surrounding the White House decision to issue a lockdown edict on March 16, 2020. The edict has no precedent in the history of governance: “indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.” The Bill of Rights was out the window, on the order of one man, and for a virus.
We have a number of sources now, from journalistic ones informed by people who were there the weekend of March 14-15, and also first-hand accounts as well.
Each one valorizes the decision to lock down, an opinion increasingly deprecated. Indeed, it is hard to find public intellectuals or health officials today who defend it at all, especially in light of the catastrophic consequences and no obvious advantage. For sure, there are those who still have every intention to do it all over again, such as the WHO. The absence of apologies is conspicuous. Still, it’s hard to find a fan of lockdowns these days willing to stick their necks out.
Donald Trump, of course, spent two years defending the decision. These days, he seems to be backing off the old line. More and more, he and those behind him are claiming that he “left it to the states.” That claim is a legal truism in the sense that under the American system, the states are in a position to reject edicts from the White House.
South Dakota did, a fact which proves that it was possible to defy the White House.
At the same time, the White House did everything possible to make sure that everyone complied, from phone calls to outright threats and bribes. To lock down was the easy decision for both blue and red states. Fear was in the air and people and media were clamoring for it.
To what extent is Trump personally culpable? Can we really say that he was an innocent victim of bad advice?
We know for sure that Trump praised China’s response to the virus as early as January 24, 2020, so he was already primed for the decision.
Only three days later, he shut down travel from Europe, UK, and Australia. The next day, national security took over as policy lead. By the following Monday, he issued the nationwide shutdown order. It was a dramatic turnabout in week's time.
He was very proud of his actions and bragged about them constantly.
Trump further insisted that it is not up to the states to decide when to open. He insisted that it was up to him alone. And he said this not two weeks after lockdown but a full month later.
We know for sure that the decision to lockdown took place March 14-15, 2020, on a weekend, inside the White House. Present with Trump were Birx, Kushner, Anthony Fauci, Pence, Scott Gottlieb (Pfizer) on the phone, plus two of Kushner’s friends from the information-tech industry, Nat Turner and Adam Boehler.
So far as we know, that’s it. Those were the people who, on their own (but probably not), decided to conduct history’s most ambitious science experiment.
The story as we know it goes like this. There was a virus circulating around and the main goal in public health was to minimize cases. In retrospect, this was the disastrous presumption because this was not AIDS and not Ebola but a respiratory virus that everyone on the planet earth would get several times. It was destined to become part of the world of pathogens we inhabit along with trillions of others. Our immune systems would need an upgrade as they always have.
That goal of minimization of even elimination was the unquestioned presumption going into this weekend three years ago. The little junta of fools gathered around Trump explained that the reduction of cases was the desiderata on which he should be focused. Xi Jinping locked down and defeated the bug. Trump was at least as good and wonderful as the head of China so he should do the same, or so he believed or so he was convinced..
Trump, known to be a germaphobe and believing strongly in his own prowess, agreed and bought the idea that he could shut down society for two weeks and then turn it on again. His advisers convinced him that this was the right and brave decision to make. After which, he would be celebrated as a great hero.
There is every evidence that he believed this. “If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now,” Trump said at his March 16 presser, “we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus and we’re going to have a big celebration together.”
That perfectly positioned his advisors to come back in two weeks with good news and bad news. The good news is that we are making progress. The bad news is that if he opens now, cases will go up and that will make him a liar. That’s why we need another 30 days, they told him. He approved that. And so on it went until the vaccine was made available. In the meantime, Trump himself lost control and was eventually booted from office.
In this scenario, Trump is the dupe, a man convinced to destroy the America that he promised to make great. Instead, he wrecked it. The fault lies entirely with the bad advisors Fauci, Birx, Kushner, Pence, and Gottlieb. And that is a compelling version of events. Trump was tricked!
That version of events – essentially confirmed by all accounts we have – offers an out for Trump. Maybe. After all, if he really is that gullible, does he not bear at least some responsibility for the decision?
I must say that this is the version of events I’ve long accepted. But actually, as I think about it, this story is self-aggrandizing for the tellers. To say “I convinced the president to shut down the economy” is quite the commentary on their own awesomeness and persuasive power.
What if the real story is slightly different? What if Trump himself was as gung-ho for lockdowns as anyone else in the room? What if he didn’t really need convincing but rather was happy to let others take the “credit” for having convinced him? He is nothing if not a great salesman.
How do we know for sure that Trump was not selling his advisors rather than the reverse? We do not actually know that. The most plausible scenario is that everyone in that hot house of Oval Office power pretension was equally enthusiastic for the most catastrophic public-health decision in modern history.
If this alternative scenario is true, we have another layer of problems on our hands. If the whole thing was accomplished by Trump himself – and honest people have to admit that this is possible – the scenario in the Oval Office in those fateful days changes rather dramatically. It remains a possibility that Trump himself – not Fauci, Birx, Kushner, Pence, or Gottlieb – deserves the main blame for what happened to American rights and liberties. And this blame is deserved not because he was duped but because he was in on it, having changed his mind at some point between March 9 and March 12.
I’m sad to say that there seems to be no evidence to contradict this alternative scenario. And while it is true that the decision doomed his presidency, that does not necessarily mean that he didn’t share enthusiasm for it at the time. And if that is true, we have a completely different scenario on our hands.
If we had some serious journalists with access to him, this is the question they would ask: who got to you to cause from you dismissing the virus on March 9 to just one week later issuing the most extreme edict in American history that disregarded all rights and liberties? Surely he knows the answer.
If I wanted to promote poor health I'd promote the WHO and FDA dietary recommendations. Salt matters if you're diabetic. If not, it shouldn't be much of a worry. The RDA is quite a bit lower than optimal. Probably to the point of harming health. https://www.marksdailyapple.com/salt-what-is-it-good-for/
The World Health Organization warned that millions of people all over the world are dying from too much salt and that governments must implement "mandatory sodium reduction."
One of the things that the plague chronicle aims to do, is draw back the curtain on the institutional or cultural roots of particular malignancies, which seem at first to be contingent on specific bad actors. While I understand that some of you find this irritating, it’s not my purpose to let anybody off the hook. It’s rather to point out that the very real villains we’re all concerned about are mere expressions of much deeper forces, and that fixing things will involve a lot more than rounding up all the Anthony Faucis of the world and trying them for crimes against humanity.
One vein of Corona analysis sees the entire pandemic as the plot of globalist conspirators who are interested in reducing the world population. There are many variations on this theory, but the most basic would hold that lockdowns and the rest were a means of driving us to accept harmful vaccination, which will cause a massive die-off among the vaccinated in the coming years and prepare the way for whatever netzero sustainable future Klaus Schwab has planned for the survivors.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle is a reader-supported publication. maybe you subscribe?
My readers often send me links to podcasts, videos and other media providing proofs of this Global Depopulation Agenda. Clip compilations like this one constitute an important genre in this area. They generally feature globalist goons – in this case, Bill Gates – saying ominous things about the overabundance of humans at different interviews and panel discussions.
I have a look at almost everything you send me, and by now I’ve seen enough to note that the internet case against Gates rests heavily on the same dozen or so video statements. Some of these items, for example the third one in that link (where Gates is talking about reducing childhood mortality), are deliberately deceptive, and it’s an important question, why this area is so awash in clearly manipulated media. The rest of the clips are more or less accurate representations of Gates’s arguments, the only problem being that they’re presented too narrowly.
The fourth at that link, for example, is from a TED talk, where Gates opines that
The world today … is headed up to about nine billion [people]. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.
The fifth is very similar. Here, Gates pleads:
The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where the people are the least able to deal with it, so it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. And so their ability to feed, educate, provide jobs, stability, protect the environment, in those locations means they’re facing an almost impossible problem.
If you read these statements carefully, you’ll see they don’t actually support the idea that Gates wants to reduce the world population by vaccinating people to death. First, he could hardly be expected to air such plots in a public forum; and second, Gates almost always pairs his remarks about population with other concerns about healthcare, food and education. These are strange scruples for a homicidal maniac bent on killing billions.
These statements only begin to make sense, when you realise that they’re rooted in the sociological theory of demographic transition. This theory observes that, as societies advance technologically and economically, they shift from an order of high birth rates and high death rates, to an order of low birth rates and low death rates. Gates, who like all globalist elites is worried about environmental impacts from there being too many humans, believes that he can reduce the total peak population in places like Africa by introducing medical interventions to lower mortality and thereby guide populations to a low-birthrate, post-transition demographic pattern. Whether this theory is right, or whether this makes Gates’s interventions morally defensible, are separate questions. What is beyond dispute, is that this is what Gates is arguing and what everybody in his audience understands him to be arguing.
The banal truth is that Gates is an unoriginal flabby Western liberal. He’s worried about the environment, about population and about disadvantaged brown people, and he thinks he can solve all these problems by improving healthcare. This isn’t a defence of him. I happen to think he’s a malign influence and that if we can’t rein in the Gates’s of the world we’re finished, but that’s not because he’s bent on using mRNA vaccines to decimate humanity.
Those concerned about the Global Depopulation Agenda will not be appeased by these clarifications, of course. They’ll point to anti-natalist messaging and policy in Western nations, and also to organisations like the Club of Rome and establishment intellectuals like Paul Ehrlich, who have openly railed against the spectre of overpopulation. They’ll argue – rightly – that our entire political culture is in thrall to a green movement which opposes any technology that might further human flourishing via reliable energy, regardless of its carbon impact. They’ll say I myself have frequently complained that countries like Germany are doing permanent damage to their economies by pursuing an energy transition which will make no difference in the longer term, because future carbon emissions are almost entirely a function of increasing prosperity and population growth in the developing South and East.
If there isn’t a Global Depopulation Agenda, what’s going on, and how are all these ominous developments to be explained?
The answer is very important, and it lies in the peculiarities of postwar political ideology and the moral instincts which this ideology expresses.
Among other things, the authors asked study participants identifying as “conservatives” and “liberals” (in the American sense) to indicate their spheres of primary moral concern. “Conservatives” tended to emphasise those spheres nearest to themselves – their immediate family, their more extended relatives, their friends – as bearing the greatest moral weight. “Liberals,” meanwhile, expressed the greatest moral interest in those spheres furthest from themselves – “all people on all continents,” for example, or “all mammals.”
Plotted as heat-maps on 16 concentric circles, where the first circle is “immediate family” and the sixteenth is “all things in existence”, the comparative results look like this:
Because the future survival of humanity is at stake here, we should drop the dumb “conservative” and “liberal” labels.
The heatmap on the left is not “conservative.” It reflects the ordinary, unremarkable moral orientation of almost all human beings who have ever lived, and almost all currently living humans across the entire world. Without a moral orientation that somehow prioritises your progeny and your relatives (however widely understood), your genes will get nowhere.
The heatmap on the right, meanwhile, represents the anomalous exogenous moral orientation (EMO) of politicial and cultural elites in the developed West, which “liberal” cannot even begin to describe, and which applies primary moral emphasis to circles 13 and 14. These are “all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms” and “all living things in the universe including plants and trees.” Substantial moral value is also attached to things in the twelfth circle, “all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae,” and in the fifteenth circle, “all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.” These are people who, strictly speaking, claim to feel morally bound to family, friends and relatives primarily to the extent that these fall within the “living things” or “things in existence” categories.
While we aren’t exactly governed by shape-shifting lizards, we are governed by completely insane ideologues who would do the bidding of shape-shifting lizards – if necessary at our dire expense – were these ever to be discovered.
Now, it’s not quite as bad as it seems. Remember above all that these are moral aspirations and ideals; they are how study respondents claim to feel. Revealed preferences show that most of these people, in their personal lives, still attach substantial moral weight to their immediate friends, family and community. They probably feel qualms about this, however, and when the context is not so immediate – when, for example, they’re making policy decisions for millions of citizens – they’ll compensate by caving to their idealised EMO wherever possible. Put another way: Bill Gates likes the convenience of his private jet, even as he hopes to discourage people from flying.
Remember also that it is the dose which makes the poison. Some degree of EMO isn’t bad. It’s one reason that we look down on littering, for example. An important expression of growing Western EMO would be the European interest in other peoples and cultures, including much-maligned colonialism and the less-maligned British campaign to abolish the slave trade after the later eighteenth century. Particularly since 1900, however, the EMO of Western governing elites has grown ever more extreme, to the point that it has begun to constitute an existential threat for human civilisation.
How this radical and historically unprecedented EMO came to be so ingrained is a complex question. Putting it down to the media or to propaganda is not fully satisfying, because we’d have to ask where the media and the propagandists got these ideas in the first place.
A prerequisite is technology and our growing alienation from nature. Anyone who has spent a rough week or two on the face of a mountain will come away from the experience personally enriched, but perhaps also doubtful that unmanaged unmitigated nature is every bit as friendly, good and deserving of moral concern as his immediate family. Tropes which locate wisdom in distant indigenous peoples and on foreign continents likewise betray a naivete about the realities of hunter-gatherer existence and a lack of experience with life beyond the prosperous West.
A more important, immediate causal factor, is the upset in established social orders since the Industrial Revolution, which has coincided with the rise of liberal democracy, and the replacement of the traditional aristocracy with new managerial elites. The latter have frequently pursued tactical alliances with outsiders or the lower classes to displace prior establishments – including, as the quiet revolution continues, prior managerial establishments. This is the primary function of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives in America today, and it obviously encourages and depends upon both orchestraters and beneficiaries to engage in radical EMO rituals.
As the problem seems to be growing worse over time, self-reinforcing selection effects probably also play an important part. The more pronounced EMO is favoured by the governing elite, the more all politicians and persons of prominence in the West are specifically selected for this trait, or at least for their willingness to pantomime it. While people with these moral tendencies have always existed, they’ve never been so heavily concentrated in positions of influence before, and the more concentrated they become, the more aggressively they filter for like-minded radicals like themselves, even in the absence (and in excess) of any specific objective.
Once you have seen this simple dynamic at work, you cannot unsee it.
It explains the increasing prominence of animal (and even alien) protagonists in entertainment media, the overt preference for fringe sexual minorities, the predilection for supranational global political bodies and non-governmental organisations which transcend borders and national institutions.
It explains, in particular, why governing elites are so open to insane unprecedented policies like mass immigration. They no longer have particular national moral categories at all, and so they reluctantly embrace all of humanity, and preferentially all living things everywhere. Similarly, it explains why mainstream liberal policies happily enlarge the carbon footprints of millions of third-world immigrants by welcoming them into the industrialised West, while simultaneously waging war on all aspects industrial society for their supposed negative impacts on nature.
Less obviously, the radical EMO of our leaders and their supporters explains the increasing willingness of elites to tolerate suboptimal and actively harmful policies at home. The moral world of the people who run our countries has grown enormously in size, leaving the spheres of their direct jurisdiction almost microscopic in comparison. Why not shut down all of society in an effort to kill (a likely man-made) virus? Why not inject poorly tested mRNA novelty vaccines in billions and suppress all evidence of negative population-wide effects? That elites increasingly treat their populations like cattle is a direct expression of their expanded moral universe. They have so many other things to care about.
It took a while for these moral sentiments to find their proper ideological articulation. In the early 1970s, people with radical EMO signalled, for a brief time, about the dangers of human overpopulation, and there ensued a moment of moral hysteria in which people like Paul Ehrlich wrote books like The Population Bomb. The years since have seen the emergence of a more differentiated ideological system, which extends lesser but still privileged consideration to third-world populations. Thus antinatalist systems are confined mostly to the West, where the most zealous environmental policies are also implemented. That Europe could disappear tomorrow with minimal effects on long-term global population projections or the future composition of the atmosphere is irrelevant. It is the fact that this is the circle of least moral concern, which is determinative.
In the nineteenth century, somebody like Bill Gates would be far more likely to run domestic charities, but in our present hyper-EMO world, he spends every waking moment thinking about Africa, and how he can help Africans, and in the process also save nature by hastening the African transition towards lower birthrates and bringing the netzero ideal closer to reality. All the policy documents and aspirational statements produced by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and other bodies are animated by a similar spirit.
A globalist cabal plotting the depopulation of the world would be a grave problem, but one with a clear enough solution. We’re facing, instead, an entire moral and ideological system, with very deep roots in prosperous Western culture. This isn’t a universe where everybody wakes up tomorrow, elects to put Bill Gates on trial for his crimes against humanity, and returns thereafter to sensible public health policy. It’s a world where millions of people share the ideological anxieties of eccentric children like Greta Thunberg, manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries, and dream of a future earth devoid of humans like themselves. Because the driving forces operate at the level of moral instinct and emotion, no amount of evidence or appeals to reason that can stop this. Probably the best hope lies in its naivete and idealism. Worsening conditions will ultimately deprive these ideologies of their cultural appeal; how bad things have to get before this happens, is the terrifying question.
UPDATE: A lot of comments are querying Gates’s sincerity, suggesting ulterior motives, and so forth. I have no direct insight into the man, but I suggest that his interior state is a peripheral matter here. The problem is to understand under what moral orientation he is claiming to operate, and why that moral orientation resonates so broadly with elite Western culture.
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President Joe Biden this weekend proved the truth to the old adage that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Biden is again arguing that the wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes. However, on Saturday, he made this whopper of a claim: “You know the average tax billionaires pay? Three percent. No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or a firefighter.” There is no indication where that figure came from, but prior low figures have been based on a highly dubious method of counting unrealized gains as income — a highly controversial proposal for a new massive tax increase.
I recently wrote how public educators and unions were methodically killing public education. The best example this week comes from New York where a school board committee has solved the dismal math and reading scores for children in the system . . . they lowered the standards. This is not the first system to gut its standards rather than improve its quality of education. As teachers and unions object to school choice, they continue to make the case for private education. Parents are increasingly voting with their feet. The board is simply calling the lack of proficiency “the new normal” and changing the standards. Done.
Below is my column in Fox.com on the recent controversies at Stanford University and University of California at Davis where students sought to prevent others from hearing conservative speakers. These are only the latest manifestations of a growing anti-free speech movement across our campuses.
