by Jeffrey Tucker, Daily Reckoning:
Donald Trump will certainly get the Republican nomination. With that the issue of truth and honesty about what happened on March 13, 2020, and beyond will likely not be pushed by the executive branch even if Trump wins.
No one in his circles wants any talk of this subject, even if just about every bit of the current national crisis (health, economics, cultural, societal) traces to those grim days of lockdown and the ensuing disaster. We are very far from gaining anything like transparency on what precisely happened.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The situation today is quite the opposite. Again, Trump’s team long ago accepted a tacit agreement to make the issue go away. This was initially in the interest of securing the nomination (never admit error to your voters).
But it soon became an accepted doctrine in those circles. Trump’s opponent wants it this way too, of course, except perhaps to say that Trump didn’t lock down enough soon enough.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has announced every intention to use the last experience as a template for the next. The national media has no regrets pushing wild panic. The tech companies show no remorse for unrelenting censorship which still continues to this day.
Pharma has more power than ever, and so do the armies of bureaucratic enforcers at all levels of government. Academia is out too: Here administrators closed their campuses and forced pointless shots on returning students. They’re all culpable.
Let’s take a step back and ask a fundamental question: When will truth emerge to the point that your average intellectual in a public space will admit that this whole thing was catastrophic for everything we call civilization?
We Told You So
We know the answer involves time but how much time? And how much in the way of effort will it require to get the reckoning we need before the healing we require takes place?
This morning my mind drifted back to the days after 9/11, when the George Bush administration decided to use the public fury over the attacks in New York and Washington to deploy a war that the president’s father began much earlier but did not complete. The Bush administration decided on regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A small minority of people (myself among them) objected that these wars would do nothing to realize justice for 9/11. Indeed they would cause calamity at home and abroad. Americans would lose liberty and security, and many lives would be lost.
Overthrowing Saddam and the Taliban without a viable replacement for each would unleash some unpredictable chaos. Nationalizing security at home would create a bureaucratic monster at home that would be eventually turned on Americans themselves.
How well I recall the way we dissidents were shouted down, called every name. The most absurd was “coward,” as if our opinions on this grave matter were formed by nothing other than our unwillingness to type cheers as others fought and died.
Sure enough, all our predictions (which were not hard to make) came true. The U.S. wrecked what was the most liberal and secular country in the region, while the war against the Taliban ended with them taking charge again.
At some point, the U.S. even facilitated the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, for whatever reason. No one could have anticipated a massive refugee crisis in Europe that would destabilize every government and give rise to massive public anger and distrust.
Some seven years after these invasions, candidate Ron Paul was on the stage at a Republican debate and denounced the whole thing. He was booed. And then smeared. And then shouted down and hated. But that seemed to kick off a rethinking.
Eight years after that, Donald Trump said something similar and his comments elicited the same reaction. Except that he then won the nomination. That was 2016. Since then there seems to have been a gradual dying out of the warhawks who take pride in their wild adventure.
The Radical Becomes Mainstream
Just this week, writing in The New York Times, Ross Douthat tossed off the following paragraph without much of a thought, even burying it in an otherwise uneventful column:
The Iraq war and the slower, longer failure in Afghanistan didn’t just begin the unraveling of the Pax Americana. They also discredited the American establishment at home, shattering the center-right and undermining the center-left, dissolving confidence in politicians, bureaucracies and even the military itself, while the war’s social effects lingered in the opioid epidemic and the mental health crisis.
You see how he writes this as if it is nothing controversial? He’s merely relaying what everyone knows today. Somewhere between 2001 and 2024, unthinkable thoughts became conventional wisdom. There was never an announcement, never a serious commission, never an apology or some kind of big reckoning or admission of error.
What was once radical became mainstream, gradually and then all at once. It’s not even clear when this happened. Eight years ago? A year ago? It’s not clear.
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