.
One rare exception to the general cluelessness of the right-wing intelligentsia was Angelo Codevilla, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and former professor of international relations at Boston University who died this week in a car accident, aged 78. [Per Julie Ponzi in comments, “He was in a car accident. He had had some health challenges recently, but was recovering.“]
Far from being surprised by the Trump phenomenon, he predicted its broad outlines in a 2010 essay for The American Spectator, read on air by the late Rush Limbaugh. In it, Codevilla observed that Americans could no longer maintain the pretense of being equal citizens. They were now aware of being divided into two classes, rulers and ruled—a court party clustered around universities, urban hubs and the government bureaucracy lording over an unorganized country party attached to habits and regions that history seemed to have passed by.
Codevilla’s language was startling. He insisted that understanding America required speaking of class, a challenge to the long-standing idea that America, unlike the Old World, wasn’t a class-based society. He informed voters who thought of themselves as “conservatives” that they stood on the outside of the established order. Insofar as they opposed the assembly of billionaires, mega-firms, NGOs, universities and government agencies that run the country, they were revolutionaries.
When the essay first appeared, some deemed Codevilla’s analysis too extreme. A radical by nature, he often seemed to go two steps too far. But events usually caught up with him….
Those who disliked the claim that America was divided between the rulers and the ruled had only to observe the way doctors and elected leaders cheered on Black Lives Matter protests as essential to public health while denouncing Orthodox Jewish funerals for spreading COVID.
What explained Codevilla’s farsightedness? Part of it was biography. Born in Italy, Codevilla served in the US Navy and as a foreign-service officer before becoming a staffer for the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence. On that committee, he observed up-close the workings of what would one day be called the Deep State. This experience, along with his study of Machiavelli, made it difficult to harbor illusions about those who wield power in America.
A Catholic, he was disinclined to sympathize with the internationalist, post-WASP ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency. He saw how its biases made it hostile to certain forces at home and abroad, notably conservatives and Israel. He protested the treatment of Jonathan Pollard, a US intelligence analyst who passed secrets to the Israelis. Codevilla acknowledged that Pollard had done wrong, but argued that the sentence — life in prison–was far in excess of what the crime merited. Later, he showed similar independence of mind in questioning the police killing of Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6.
Codevilla was notable above all for his intellectual courage. Unlike most thinkers on the left and the right, he was willing to go where his logic led him. He was far from the only writer to offer a radical critique of contemporary society, but he was one of the few who were willing to discuss solutions equal to the problems he claimed to see. As he pointed out, leaders of a movement opposed to the power elite must be prepared to do un-conservative things, including “fostering and leading campaigns of civil disobedience.”
Most public intellectuals outlive their influence. They die long after their insights have faded. That wasn’t Angelo Codevilla’s fate. His work, embodied not just in his famous essays, but in many learned books, has never been more relevant. Intellectually, he died in the strength of his years.”
“Matthew Schmitz is senior editor of First Things. Twitter: @MatthewSchmitz”
………………………………………
Added: Excerpts from 12 Codevilla pieces, 2010-2021
July-August 2010, “America’s Ruling Class–And the Perils of Revolution," Angelo M. Codevilla
“The Political Divide”… (first subhead)
“While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust,
the American people’s realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes.
But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008.” …(3rd parag. in subhead).
“The Faith” (3rd subhead)
“Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.”…
“The Country Class”…(9th subhead)
“Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration”—an imputation of stupidity—while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence.”…(5th parag. of subhead)
“The Classes Clash”…(final subhead)
“The ruling class’s appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong….
In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics.”…(Image of laughing Ruling Class from American Spectator)
………………………………………………
Codevilla, Oct. 2011:
10/20/2011, “The Lost Decade," [2001-2011] Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute
“Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side."…(Subhead, “Public Safety,” parag. 3)
……………………………………………….
Codevilla, Dec. 2013:
12/15/2013, “Breaking The UniParty," Angelo Codevilla, libertylawsite.org
“So long as the UniParty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does.”
……………………………………
Codevilla, June 30, 2014:
"Accurately, the Republican establishment sees...the mass of GOP and independent voters" tired of being "insulted by the ruling class as a greater threat to themselves than any Democrats could be."
June 30, 2014, “The Ruling Class Went Down to Mississippi,” Angelo Codevilla, LawLiberty.org
“The mass of GOP and independent voters, having come to see themselves as disadvantaged and insulted by the ruling class, have increasingly supported anti-establishment candidates to challenge it in Republican primaries. Accurately, the Republican establishment sees this as a greater threat to themselves than any Democrats could be.
In the Mississippi primary, Republican establishmentarians from around the country solicited votes from Democrats to defeat the insurgent challenge to Senator Thad Cochran. Their arguments were the same ones used by the bipartisan ruling class that has ruled America for a generation: The role of government is to generate benefits for its clients, and those who object are bad people. They paid many Democrat voters (nearly all black) so called “walking around money” for their votes, and have refused in many counties to let McDaniel aides examine the voter roles to see whether these voters were eligible to cast ballots.
The retail corruption is much less remarkable than the acquiescence therein of the establishment’s leadership – such as Karl Rove and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. This is very remarkable. Rove’s super-PAC, “Conservative Victory Project,” which played a leading role in recruiting Democrats for Cochran, exists explicitly to defeat insurgent Republicans everywhere. The Journal’s editorial page, whose editorials and featured columnists mobilized opinion against the Mississippi insurgency, had done the same throughout this and previous years’ primaries. Rove’s post election commentary glossed over the vote-buying as if it had not happened, while the Journal’s Jason Riley endorsed it cynically as “minority outreach.”…
The Republican Party’s very identity, the one, sole, argument it makes to persuade voters to vote Republican rather than Democrat, is that it will take the country in a direction different from the one in which it has been going.
But, in the Mississippi primary, the Republican Establishment’s campaign was by and for crony capitalism, and employed the classic themes by which the ruling class has beaten down the rest of America.
To Mississippians white and black, the establishment’s message was: All this Tea Party talk about dangerous deficits and the need to cut spending is a threat to responsible officials’ capacity to bring you the jobs and federal assistance on which your prosperity depends. Orchestrating that message was Haley Barbour, former governor of Mississippi, former national chairman of the Republican Party, and arguably Washington’s biggest lobbyist. Day to day operations were run by Stuart Stevens, formerly chief strategist in Mitt Romney’s 2012 national campaign, along with Henry and Austin Barbour, Haley’s nephews. There could be few better personifications of crony capitalism.
To the blacks, who, according to The New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight.com provided some forty thousand votes, the message was:
“Don’t be intimidated by the Tea Party….Mississippi cannot and will not return to the bygone era of intimidating black Mississippians from voting. We must rise up on Tuesday and have our voices heard on who will represent Mississippi in the U.S. Senate. VOTE THAD COCHRAN.”
The Times reported the effect: Roger Smith, a black Democrat who said he was being paid to organize for Mr. Cochran, said, ‘I don’t know too much about [Cochran’s opponent] McDaniel other than what McDaniel is saying: that he’s Tea Party, he’s against Obama, he don’t like black people.” In short, those who oppose the way things are done in America are racists. You ought to hate them as they hate you.
Why do such things? Cui bono? Clearly such behavior by the Republican establishment has nothing to do with the role it claims for itself of opposition to the direction on which America has been taken in recent decades, never mind with anything “conservative.”…
The Mississippi primary confirmed yet again that, if America is to go in a direction other than the one of which some three fourths of American disapprove, it is compelled to do so with a vehicle other than the Republican Party.”…(image above from lawliberty.org)
…………………………………………
Codevilla, Nov. 2019:
11/1/19, “The Impeachment Dog Bites Orange Man Scam,” Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness
“President Trump has appointed to positions of power in the national security agencies lots of people committed to his destruction and has been prevailed upon to fire the good ones.
For example, Trump has never stepped off the fateful path on which he set himself when he let the bureaucratic pack scare him into firing his first national security advisor, General Michael Flynn….Trump rails loudly against what is being done to him. But he does not use his absolute authority over classified information to remove the shield behind which it is being done….
The real ground of the unending attacks on Trump is the ruling class’s decision to resist the 2016 election’s outcome. It is a revolution from which the Republic is unlikely ever to recover.”…
………………………………………
Codevilla, April 7, 2020:
“Since the Ides of March [2020], President Trump has placed himself on a path that the fundamentals suggest leads to political suicide. He did this by surrendering to the ruling class—Drs. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, et al, not to mention House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—his judgment on whether and for how long, and how the country should be shut down. This is of the greatest concern to the American people in general and to his voters in particular.”…
4/7/20, “Is the President Forgetting Politics 101?” Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness
“Americans elected Donald Trump—his negatives notwithstanding—because they disliked what the ruling class had been doing to the country, because they distrusted its pretense of wisdom, and because he promised to rule by a sense that defies that of the ruling class…
The fundamental law of politics (who is on whose side?) guarantees his re-election by a bigger margin. Unless, of course, Trump himself sides or is perceived to be siding with the rulers against the ruled….
Since the Ides of March [2020], President Trump has placed himself on a path that the fundamentals suggest leads to political suicide. He did this by surrendering to the ruling class—Drs. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, et al, not to mention House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—his judgment on whether and for how long, and how the country should be shut down. This is of the greatest concern to the American people in general and to his voters in particular….
Every day, Trump (and the country) learns the ostensibly professional estimates by which Fauci, the Democrats, and the media have been flogging since mid-March are proving wrong by huge factors….
The counting of deaths from COVID-19 is being revised downward because many of these deaths result from other causes and are attributed to COVID-19 only because the person happens also to have tested positive. The smaller numerator and the enormously larger denominator means that the real lethality rate is a fraction of one percent….
Trump also knows that this establishment is hurting Americans by restricting the use of hydroxychloroquine—while physicians on the front lines, and millions of people who feel endangered, are benefiting from it or yearning for it.
Yet, in the face of criticism from the establishment, he has muted his statements of what he knows to be true about it….Trump persists in lending legitimacy to these flawed professionals….
One thing is certain: That the ruling class savors the grip on us that it has achieved during the past three weeks—above all the presumption that we must quietly accept non-legal decrees from on high. It will not give up that grip without a fight….
Fauci has warned that perhaps this virus will return with every flu season. This is more than enough for such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—who has already said that the country will never be allowed back to normal and is echoed in that by the media—to greet any suggestion to move toward normalcy with the charge that it makes one responsible for deaths. “Blood is on your hands!” will be their rallying cry.”…
Among comments:
“BioBehavioralView
In the upcoming election, President Trump may prevail. The tale is yet to be told. Thus far, he has listened to the governmental hacks. Doing so has led him into false analyses and phony promises. His credibility, never good as a person, has suffered as a politician accordingly.”…
……………………………………
Codevilla, April 24, 2020
“The ruling class…sees the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break ordinary people’s resistance to its power…to design a “a new normal," while ordinary people yearn to recover their freedoms….Trump is the person for whom they voted because they expected that he would be on their side to protect them in situations like this. Now, the casus foederis having arisen, the wolves being at the door, they are on their own. Trump is not protecting them.”…
4/24/20, “Trump Still Seems to Be Forgetting Politics 101,” Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness
“If the president does not lead soon, his people will find leadership elsewhere.”
“As Georgia Governor Brian Kemp announced plans this week to let restaurants and other businesses reopen, President Trump told a national TV audience that he “strongly disagreed,” and
as ordinary folks around the country were being vilified and arrested
for protesting mayors’ and governors’ orders to stay indoors, the president remained silent.
On April 7, I noted that Trump, by subordinating his judgment to Dr. Anthony Fauci, et al. on when and how to reopen the country, had “placed himself on a path that the fundamentals suggest leads to political suicide.”…The political side of the matter is crystal clear, shining, and flashing….
The ruling class…sees the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break ordinary people’s resistance to its power. Accordingly, they…have used their near monopoly of mass communications as well as the commanding heights of the professions, corporations, and government to frighten the people into obedience and dependency….
The ruling class is on the side of enduring and growing control of ordinary people’s lives, to design a “new normal,” while ordinary people yearn to recover their freedoms.
Hence, the basic political question is inescapable: Whose side are you on? Trump tried to escape it by striking what he thought was a good faith bargain with Fauci on a staged reopening of the country based on criteria that remained in Fauci’s power to define. Hence, he [Trump] has condemned or declined to defend people on his side….
Who are the people who are getting arrested for walking in the park, or swimming in the sea, or playing with their kids, or for protesting outside the offices and homes of autocratic officials? For whom does anyone think that these people voted in the last election [2016]? 95 percent for Trump? More like 100 percent. And why does anyone suppose they voted for him? Could it be because they
were hoping to elect someone who would protect them from having their
livelihoods and freedoms taken away by power-hungry officials?…
That is why Trump is president of the United States: because these are his people.
Regardless of what Trump or anyone around him might think, these people don’t belong to Trump. It’s the other way around. Trump is the person for whom they voted because they expected that he would be on their side to protect them in situations like this. Now, the casus foederis having arisen, the wolves being at the door, they are on their own. Trump is not protecting them. His reasoning, any reasoning, is irrelevant. Trump’s voters are where they would be were Obama in charge, or maybe even Joe Biden….
For more than a month, President Trump…has not challenged the ruling class’s incompetence, let alone its mendacity about the pandemic’s mortality, or even their most ridiculous assumptions (whoever heard of staying out of the fresh air and sunshine to counter a virus?)….
Whatever Trump’s reasoning may be, it does not supply a powerless people’s demand for leadership. If he does not lead soon, they will find leadership elsewhere.”
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Codevilla, July 10, 2020
“Sowing and maintaining confusion…about the very meaning of the word “case”—has been…the essence of this fraud…the pretense that all COVID-19 infections are “cases” requiring sequestration and quarantine, even if they involve persons to whom the virus poses no danger—i.e., nearly all Americans.”
July 10, 2020, “Fauci Is a Deep State Fraud,” Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness
“Donald Trump’s decision to accredit Dr. Anthony Fauci as the COVID-19 pandemic’s guru is largely responsible for the extent of the panic that gripped America in the spring and now summer.…Sowing and maintaining confusion...about the very meaning of the word “case”—has been the heart of that lie....The essence of this fraud is the pretense that all COVID-19 infections are “cases” requiring sequestration and quarantine, even if they involve persons to whom the virus poses no danger—i.e., nearly all Americans….So mindless of reality was this momentum that it shoved aside the only medical fact that made any difference, namely, the vulnerability of old, fragile people.”…
…………………………………………..
Codevilla, July 17, 2020:
“Suspending law and rights, issuing arbitrary rules of behavior, has been...empowered by a president elected as a Republican [Trump], and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a majority of Republican politicians.”…
7/17/20, “The Covid Coup, And how to unlock ourselves,” Angelo Codevilla, American Mind
“All of this, one must keep in mind, is so because President Trump’s complaisance with the ruling class’s falsehoods about the virus precluded high-level affirmation of the truths that negate the COVID Coup lies and pretenses….When pressed, Trump stuck by the falsehoods, as he did on April 22, after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who had opposed the lockdowns, announced that he was lifting them in his state.Trump chastised him publicly in the strongest terms, prompting the media into an orgy of accusations that Kemp was turning Georgia into a death camp….
The American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that had defined our way of life. Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury. Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of medical care is sure to impose needless suffering and death….
Intersectionality…
Every one of the ruling class’s constituencies…has adopted as its own the demand that voting in American elections must henceforth be “from home,” with ballots collected or “harvested” by third parties. That would shift electoral power from those who vote to those who process and count the votes—i.e. to themselves. Hence it would set the entire ruling class free from the voters….
The COVID event has also made the face mask into a physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the sub-constituencies. Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and deploring the deplorables. North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper said that “A face covering signifies strength and compassion for others” and “wearing one shows that you care about other people’s health.” On the same day, New York’s Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Wearing a mask is now cool, I believe it’s cool….Wearing a mask is officially cool.”
Anthony Fauci, who in March [2020] had told 60 minutes “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” in May gave his scientific judgment that masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing,” while admitting that they are “not 100% effective.” He could hardly have done otherwise since New England Journal of Medicine had said: “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers [the wearer] little, if any, protection from infection,” and is irrelevant to others in casual contact. Such a symbol of intersectional identity has it become that, as rioters were burning Minneapolis, its Democrat mayor urged the rioters whom he let burn parts of his city to make sure they wore masks while doing so.
In sum, the lockdowns have been perpetuated and prolonged by people who care more about your compliance than your health….
Regime of Fear…
No sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole [330 million person] nation’s entire medical care except for one disease [Covid]. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July [2020] hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government [Trump] was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it-for our own good, they claim….
The experts who made this happen stigmatized, tried to silence, and effectively criminalized dissent as dangerous to health and, of course, as racist.But there is zero evidence that all or any of the above measures increased anybody’s life expectancy, and plenty to the contrary. They wronged America. But why? and cui bono?
Power…
Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for reopening schools. Among them, restrictions on or elimination of charter schools.
And as independent businesses were throttled,
big ones grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner. The news
media, unrestricted and at the service of the powerful, themselves
exercised unprecedented power. The social media platforms seconded the coup by censoring dissent from the “line” of their own most aggressive bureaucrats and officials. Try getting figures for COVID deaths and how they are counted from Google. YouTube
deleted a video gone viral of two medical doctors who pointed out the
truth about the COVID-19’s true lethality as dangerous disinformation….
Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by….
We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, [2020] 1200 “health experts” signed a letter approving the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.
Declaring emergencies to excuse taking “full powers” is the oldest of ploys. Does anybody remember the Reichstag fire? The prospect of similar things happening in America had been rising along with the ruling class and the administrative state. The authorities’ seizure of arbitrary power in the name of expertise is the deadliest strike at our way of life. Suspending law and rights, issuing arbitrary rules of behavior, has been mostly the doing of Democrat-controlled state and local government. But the lead came from the Democrat-controlled Federal bureaucracy, empowered by a president [Trump] elected as a Republican, and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a majority of Republican politicians.
The ruling class’s gains…have depended on suppressing truth.
An egregious example of forcible official lying is the ruling class’s political campaign against the drug Hydroxychloroquine. President Trump had pointed to the truth that this standard treatment for malaria for more than a half century is effective against the early and mid-stages of the COVID disease. This fact had been discovered accidentally and confirmed by studies and practices in France, Spain, India, and South Korea. In April, U.S. doctors started prescribing it widely, reported good results, and took it themselves prophylactically. The ruling class found this intolerable because it contradicted its narrative that nothing could prevent the sky from falling….Hence it set about canceling truth about drugs from public consciousness and substituting its own narrative….
On May 22, [2020] the Lancet, arguably the most authoritative medical journal, published what it called an analysis of the world’s biggest medical data base showing, definitively it claimed, that Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective, counterproductive, and dangerous. The Yale School of Medicine officially concluded that the drug is bad stuff, despite a study to the contrary by its own professor of epidemiology, Harvey Risch….Anthony Fauci who, when pressed hard, had said that he would take the drug were he to be sick of the COVID, then backed the political narrative by quipping that, as of now there is no treatment for COVID illness. The U.S. food and Drug Administration stopped clinical trials, pharmacy boards refused orders from physicians and retailers, and hospitals around the country required their physicians to stop treating their patients with it.
It turns out, however, that the Lancet study’s database was part of a fly-by-night, strictly political operation, and that its details are literally incredible—e.g., the number of reported Hydroxy deaths for one Australian hospital exceeded the number of total deaths for the entire country. In short, the report was another professionally unsustainable hit job. The New York Times reported that “More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the authenticity” of the database as well as the study’s integrity. The Lancet withdrew it in shame….
For the media and for headline-readers, the case was closed. The lie stood. Then, on July 1, Michigan’s Henry Ford health system published a peer-reviewed study that shows Hydroxychloroquine significantly cut death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases.
Again, the ruling class machine ignored the truth….
Nor has the COVID affair to do with any emergency…The stream of public service TV advertising have left no doubt that the ruling class’s objective is to establish “a new normal” by extending into the indefinite future the powers by which bureaucracies have eclipsed America’s laws and way of life."...
[2020 Democratic Party Platform says they'll keep Covid "emergency measures" in place for both alleged medical and economic reasons. First they require "end of pandemic," but we've already been told pandemic will never "end" because booster shots will required in perpetuity. Second requirement is unspecified employment numbers, ie, until "unemployment falls significantly." Third requirement is general wellbeing of the economy, ie. "automatic" resumption of measures in case of "severe economic downturn in the future:"
page 9, "PROTECTING AMERICANS AND RECOVERING FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC"...
"We will keep these emergency measures in place until the
pandemic
ends
and
unemployment falls significantly.
And should the United States find itself in another pandemic
or
severe economic downturn in the future,
these protections will be made automatically available, so Americans are never again left to fend for themselves in times of crisis."...
What about GOP? GOP agrees with Democrats on main issues, occasional sputtering to the contrary is just to fool the rubes. GOP in fact would likely go further, mandating that all Republican voters be locked down permanently but all Democrat voters must never be locked down for any reason. So what did 2020 Republican Party Platform say on this topic? Nothing, because GOP failed to publish a 2020 platform, citing Covid, which didn't stop enthusiastic Democrats. GOP says 2024 will be its next one:
"RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention."]
(continuing): "Default and Consequences
Fairness requires noting that, regardless of whatever America’s ruling Left has done, whatever its hopes, plans, or coordination, what actually happened to the United States of America consequent to COVID could not have happened had President Donald Trump, much of the Republican Party, and America’s religious establishment not concurred in its happening…..
On March 15, Trump asked the country to shut down for fifteen days to slow the spread of the disease—to flatten the curve. Then, on March 31 the New York Times crowed victoriously that the previous week, President Trump had been stampeded to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.” ...Said the Times:
he was told that “voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment
measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.” Trump let himself be scared….
Trump believed that Fauci would cooperate in a plan for reopening, and counted on the Democratic Party sharing credit for providing near a trillion dollars in relief to the people who the lockdowns were depriving of livelihood.
But, once Trump let go of the truth, he ceded control and entered a political blind alley. Trump was giving the de facto alliance between the Democratic Party, Fauci et al., the press, and a host of profiteers public credit even as they discredited him in every way possible. They had him where they wanted him. As the lockdowns throttled America, they used the political leverage to raise demands. They aimed at his political demise as well as at economic, social, and political transformation….
Far from returning the country to what it had been, the “data-driven” process they outlined, written by Fauci’s CDC, would make sure that state and local officials so inclined now have top-level, pseudo-legal cover for keeping or reimposing whatever arbitrary restrictions on opponents they think they can get away with, with whatever data they can manipulate to that purpose….
In short, the guidelines give federal sanction to choking America’s “main street” sector.
The guidelines’ arguably most dangerous legacy may be their recommendation/requirement that governments certify persons’ safe status for work and public interaction by tracking and isolating persons infected with the virus—or said to be. This involves hiring hundreds of thousands of persons to enforce compliance with decreed regulations on personal behavior…empowered at the very least to declare anyone the equivalent of “medically untouchable.”
The governors of Michigan and California (there is no dissent among Democratic Party officials) have already defined “racism” as a major health hazard.…Thus, without law or trial, anyone could be separated peremptorily from job, business, or family, pending redress in the courts–which most people cannot afford.
Were this practice adopted nationally, it really would be the centerpiece of a “new normal.” By May [2020], New York’s mayor [DeBlasio] had already deputized hundreds of (arguably former) gang members and criminals, paying them to circulate among the general population to “encourage”–dare we say, intimidate?—citizens to follow the Mayor’s orders….Not incidentally the World health Organization—an extension of China’s government, formally recommended that nations “observe active surveillance and tracing of their populations.”…
All of this, one must keep in mind, is so because President Trump’s complaisance with the ruling class’s falsehoods about the virus precluded high-level affirmation of the truths that negate the COVID Coup lies and pretenses….When pressed, Trump stuck by the falsehoods, as he did on April 22,
after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who had opposed the
lockdowns, announced that he was lifting them in his state. Trump chastised him publicly in the strongest terms, prompting the media into an orgy of accusations that Kemp was turning Georgia into a death camp….
Truth Commission…
Americans ask by what right governors and mayors essentially put people under house arrest without due process, and had them arrested for such activities as playing in the park or paddling in the sea; by what right they shut down religious services, etc. What else may government do in violation of the Bill of Rights?…
Perspective
It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world.
Through the previous decade, the various failures and inadequacies of these governments and elites, of “Davos Man,” had become the prime subject of public discourse. At the very least, the COVID campaign changed the subject to physical safety and economic survival.
Davos Man tightened control by using the state’s coercive power more forcefully than in wartime, covering its class by claiming to speak for “science” in a manner that precludes counterargument….
The governments, their bureaucracies, the major legacy political parties, the celebrities and the media, Davos Man, were on one side. On the other were middle class people…Davos Man strove to make as many restrictions as possible part of a “new normal.”
In Europe as in America, the COVID affair was but the latest round in which the very same protagonists had faced off. There as here, the language and attitudes with which Davos Man denigrated its supposed inferiors in the COVID affair fit seamlessly into previous patterns of the larger, long-term struggle. Had there been any doubt that the COVID-19 virus was more an occasion than a cause, it vanished at the end of May as, on both sides of the Atlantic, Davos Man switched to berating ordinary people and their civilization and ginned up yet another campaign to beat back challenges to its power.”
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