"Three Months That Wrecked the World"
by Jeffrey Tucker
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
- William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"
"The most salient question of our time is: Who destroyed the world? We know the “what” of that question already. It was the lockdowns, the spending, the monetary insanity, the mandates and the overwhelming and ghastly explosion in the forces of command and control imposed all over the world. This broke everything. It is nowhere near being put back together again. In fact, it is getting worse. The main issue concerns the who. This matters if we are ever to gain a clear picture of how the happy life of 2019 turned into the hellscape of 2022.
Conspirators Like to Brag: To assist the discovery project, I’ve become a voracious and very close reader of every opportunistic autobiographical account on which I can get my hands. At issue, above all else, is that amazing period between Feb. 1 and April 1 of 2020. Three months that wrecked the world. Who were the players and why did they do it and why did they persist in their egregious errors? What were their motivations?
I have by now a complete bibliography that perhaps I will share at some point. At issue right now is the autobio of one Dr. Deborah Birx, aka the “scarf lady” who pushed so hard from those early days, all throughout the rest of the year, crucially through the November election that ended up pushing Trump out of office. She was never a fan as she makes clear, but she claims that her politics never affected her devotion to “the science.”
Yeah, we’ve heard that one before. In any case, it was she who was tasked with doing the really crucial thing of talking Donald Trump into green-lighting the lockdowns that began on March 15 and continued to their final hard-core deployment on March 16. This was the “15 Days to Flatten the Curve.”
Her book admits that it was a lie from the beginning. “We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown,” she writes. “At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done - a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it.” In other words, she wanted to go full CCP but didn’t want to say that. Crucially, she knew for sure that two weeks was not the real plan. “I left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point.”
It Was a Lie: “No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it,” she admits: "Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the 15-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task force meeting. None of this happened."
Bingo. It was a solution in search of evidence she did not have. She told Trump that the evidence was there anyway. She actually tricked him into believing that locking down hundreds of millions of people was somehow magically going to make a virus that everyone would eventually get go away. Meanwhile, the economy was wrecked all over the world, as most governments in the world followed what the U.S. did.
Trump was not and is not an idiot. She reports that by April 1, he had lost confidence in her. He might have intuited that he had been tricked. He stopped speaking to her. On the other hand, Trump had a major problem. He had made a dramatic decision. It was a disastrous one but he learned from long experience that admitting error only fed the media that wanted him dead. So he refused. He refused to admit the problem.
His solution was to pretend like it was the right thing and that it saved millions (no evidence!) but that now was the time to open the economy. It took another several weeks but finally, he went full-on with an opening agenda. He came to realize that he had destroyed the Trump economy, the ticket to his reelection, by his own hand!
Tragedy in Our Times: This is a story of Biblical proportions, at once desperately sad and tragic, a story of fallibility matched by ego, a story of enormous betrayal that played off character flaws that ended up wrecking hope and prosperity for billions of people.
Once Trump turned against her and eventually found other people to provide good advice like the tremendous Scott Atlas, Birx turned to rallying around her an inner circle (Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield and a few others) plus assembling a realm of protection outside of her.
For example, Scott Atlas tried to stop the testing madness (you remember it well) and changed the CDC guidance. “Less than a week later,” she writes, “Bob and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…” Yikes!
Et Tu, Brute? And guess who provided her protection within the White House. I will let her tell you: "Ever since Vice President Pence told me to do what I needed to do, I’d engaged in very blunt conversations with the governors. I spoke the truth that some White House senior advisors weren’t willing to acknowledge. Censoring my reports and putting up guidance that negated the known solutions was only going to perpetuate COVID-19’s vicious circle. What I couldn’t sneak past the gatekeepers in my reports, I said in person."
Did you catch that? The name is Pence. She names him out directly as her protector. Mr. Earnest, Mr. Honest, Mr. Moral and Good. He clearly teamed up with her and her gang to keep the hysteria roiling from March all the way through November. Didn’t Shakespeare teach us something about this? If you are looking for the betrayer, the slayer, the plotter, the person who fells the leader, always and everywhere look to the No. 2 in charge. There you will find the real source of the problem. Et Tu, Brute?
What followed seems inevitable in retrospect. The inflation, the broken lives, the desperation and now the growing hunger and demoralization and educational losses and cultural destruction, all of it came in the wake of these fateful days. The plotters usually admit it in the end, taking credit, like criminals who cannot resist returning to the scene of the crime. And what a crime it was."
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