The Cabal That Cried Wolf and Undermined a Republic

Jussie Smollett, Crystal Magnum and Susan Smith are three names that at various times over the last 25 years have riveted America’s attention.  Smollett is a black man who lied about being attacked by two Trump supporting white racists in 2019.  Magnum is a black woman who lied about being raped by three white Duke Lacrosse players in 2006.  Smith is a white woman who killed her two boys in 1994 and blamed it on a fictional black carjacker.

While race was central to the first and incidental to the last two, as is with much news in America, the media focused on it extensively.  But race was not the issue that makes these three cases so despicable.  What makes them so heinous is that they sought to play upon the sympathies of the American public.  In the end they failed and all three ended up disgraced and Magnum and Smith ended up in jail.    

From Al Sharpton & Tawana Brawley 30 years ago to countless hate crime hoaxes across the country today, the consequence of these hoaxes is that when exposed to enough of them, people become inured to the issue such that when real crimes take place, the victim’s stories are often given little credence or are outright rejected.   

As despicable as these hoaxes are, they are simply individuals seeking to evade responsibility for their actions or attract attention, and largely don’t impact significant numbers of people beyond those targeted or involved. 

What is a much larger problem however is when such hoaxes are perpetrated by government.  And we’ve had a great deal of that.  Manmade environmental hoaxes have evolved from the Coming Ice Age to Acid Rain to Global Warming to Climate Change, with each one being manipulated to scare citizens and implement government policies and programs that never die, despite the fact that posited catastrophes never actually emerge.  Think about the “Peak oil” fears of the 70s and the ethanol programs we’re still stuck with today, despite the extraordinary increases in oil production and reserves.

Democrats have been manipulating Americans fears and goodwill for decades and today we are watching the culmination of that treachery.  It’s called Covid and it’s easily the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. 

In reality, Covid is nothing more than a really bad case of the common cold.  Bad, certainly, but but basically the common cold nonetheless. From an epidemiology perspective that may not be completely accurate, but from a societal one it most certainly is. 

Like the flu – which kills about 36,000 people annually, Covid is largely transmitted from one person to another via airborne particles.  Over the last 18 months 42 million Americans have gotten Covid and 682,000 Americans have died from it.  The former number is likely much higher – possibly over 100 million – and the latter number is likely much lower, with many of those reported as dying of Covid in reality dying with Covid.  Keep in mind of course that that’s 682,000 people in a country of 350 million, and 95% of the dead had on average 3 or more co-morbidities and the average age was almost 75.

A little more perspective:  Heart disease annually kills 650,000 Americans while cancer kills 600,000.  We spend $350 billion a year on heart disease and $158 billion on cancer.  That works out to be $538,000 spent per person who died of heart disease and $263,000 per person who died of cancer.  Covid is a bit different.  Through March of this year the US spent $13 trillion on Covid and will likely reach $20 trillion by the end of the year.  By the end of the year the death total “from” Covid will likely hit 800,000.  That works out to be approximately $25 million per death.

Now these numbers are not exactly apples to apples in that much of the heart disease and cancer money went to research that would not benefit the people who died, while ostensibly Covid dollars went to ameliorating the virus and its associated impact on the nation.  Then of course there’s the fact that heart disease and cancer aren’t contagious while Covid is. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the survival rate from Covid is 99% or higher for men below 57 and women below 62 while the average 5 year survival rate from cancer is below 50%. 

The point here is simply that while Covid is certainly a cause of concern, it’s nothing close to an existential threat to the nation. But one wouldn’t know that from listening to the Democrats, traditional media, big tech and the healthcare industry.  For purely political and control purposes, they have conspired against the American people to hide facts about potential treatments, lied at almost every turn and sought to harness the police power of government to control virtually every aspect of American life over the last 18 months. The results have been catastrophic, from a fraudulent election to millions of failed businesses to an array of restrictions and mandates that don’t even pretend to be Constitutional.

As bad as all the obvious negative outcomes from this unprecedented destruction of freedom and staggering amount of debt will bring about, possibly the worst part of the last 18 months (besides the deaths, obviously) is that the cabal has basically wrecked what little confidence Americans had in their government.  After being manipulated, persecuted, prosecuted and insulted for the better part of 18 months, how much confidence does the average American have in their government today?  Practically none. Actually, now that a Democrat is back in the White House Democrats have embraced their inner statists and their trust has ticked up while Republicans have the lowest trust level in Government since Barack Obama’s first term – and that was back in May, which seems a lifetime ago.

And that undermining of government could very well come back to bite Americans of all stripes.  What happens when we get a real existential threat from something as deadly as Ebola and as easily transmitted as the Delta variant?  Will Americans believe that their government has suddenly become honest and responsible?  Probably not, and their skepticism grows as they see more hypocrisy and are saddled with a growing array of mandates that are demonstrably ineffective or worse, dangerous. 

The odds of a real virus borne existential threat are likely pretty low, but a visceral distrust in government is very much an existential threat to freedom and the Republic. Once before Americans were similarly distrustful of government and skeptical about its intentions and thirst for power.  The result was the Declaration of Independence.  I wonder what similar distrust in 2021 will engender... 

30 Million Dead Americans? The Coronavirus Is Not A Hoax, But The Hysteria Surrounding It Very Much Is...

On June 6th 1944 over 250,000 American and allied personnel left from England and headed to the Normandy to face the Nazis who were entrenched along in giant fortified bunkers all along the French coast. The Nazis had control of virtually all of Europe and Operation Overlord was the Allied attempt to gain a beachhead in northern France from which they could open another front against Germany.

Once the smoke cleared on D-Day, the Allies had suffered approximately 10,000 casualties, 4,400 of which were fatalities. Those numbers are of course staggering for one day, but the truth is, relative to the anticipated casualties, those number are quite low. Prior to the invasion General Eisenhower and his staff estimated 13% of the invasion troops might die and 25% of those who landed on the beaches would end up casualties. Together those calculations suggested that during the first 24 hour period nearly 30,000 Allied soldiers and sailors would end up dead and another 24,000 would be wounded.

That’s not what happened… but it could have. And that’s the point. Despite the potential for over 50,000 dead and wounded in one day and for a failure which could have allowed Germany to make its hold on the continent permanent, Ike decided to launch Operation Overlord nonetheless… because it needed to be done. Life with a Europe ruled by Nazis was simply not feasible for the United States and her allies. And so D-Day was launched. And the rest is history.

Today while there it’s not a Nazi storm taking over Europe or America – although BLM and Antifa certainly demonstrate very similar tactics – it’s the neutron bomb of Covid 19 is. Neutron bombs of course are generally intended to leave structures standing while killing people via radiation poisoning. That is exactly what Covid 19 is doing to the American economy. Not the virus itself or course, but rather the shutdowns, quarantines, lockdowns and other government interventions.

Not that the virus is not killing people. It is. Thus far about 165,000 people in the United States. That is not a small number by any stretch, but in a country of 330 million people in which 2.5 million people die annually, it is far from a catastrophe, although for the victims and their families, it is no doubt catastrophic. On Friday the government announced that 1.8 new jobs had been created in July and that unemployment dropped to a 10.2% down from almost 14.7% in April – and up from a record low of 3.5% in December. This good news comes despite the fact that the media pillories Republican governors for opening their states while venerating Democrats who seek to keep the country locked up tighter than a drum. Despite what seems to be an economy on the mend however, the reality is, the only reason the nation is still standing is that the federal government and the FED have pumped close to $10 billion into the economy since March… much of it ending up in the stock and debt markets.

Everywhere you look, hotels, restaurants, gyms, karate classes, airlines, sports teams, convention centers, the number things that are closed or working at threadbare capacity are extraordinary. But these are only the faces we see. Behind all of these public facing businesses are millions of small businesses that provide services like, pool maintenance, janitorial services, furniture repair, painting as well as goods like bread, eggs, chairs, exercise equipment, foam fingers, bobbleheads and thousands of other things businesses use and need to survive. Those businesses employ millions of people who are today not working.

Sure, companies like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Campbell’s Soup, Netflix, Amazon and Clorox are doing fine, but they are a small fraction of the American economy. And there’s the rub. America can’t survive just buying Great Value tomato sauce and Behr paints or cleaning the kitchen with Windex when not arguing on Facebook or watching Netflix and eating Orville Redenbacher Popcorn. Small and medium sized businesses drive the American economy, representing a majority of the job creation and sustaining tens of millions of employees. The true cost of this disaster – the government shutdowns rather than the virus itself – have yet to be felt, and are likely to be felt for years to come.

The Democrat’s and media’s willingness to use this virus to keep the country closed for the purpose of harming Donald Trump is simply despicable. Unlike the Nazis in 1944, Covid 19 is not an existential threat to the country, or the world. Below is a chart from the CDC. It tracks the one week average death total in the United States going back to July 2018. The funny thing about this chart is that it shows that the number of excess deaths relative to the number of expected deaths is quite small, averaging 14.4% more deaths each week than was expected. Since February 15th the number of excess weekly deaths has averaged 8,000 above the 63,000 average expected.

For a nation with a population of 330 million people, the 165,000 people who have died represent .00005% of the population. To give you an idea of how good a job of misleading the public on the dangers of Covid 19 the media and the Democrats have done, according to a July 15 poll by Publicis Groupe (page 24), Americans on average think 9% of the population has died from Covid 19… that’s 30 million people! That’s 180 times more than the actual number who have died!

So we’ve shut the country down for a virus that Americans think has killed 30 million people when in reality it’s killed 165,000. We’ve added $10 trillion to our national debt, we’ve seen tens of thousands of businesses declare bankruptcy, we’ve watched as tens of millions of people have gone on unemployment, we’ve seen depression and suicide leap, we’ve stopped people from going to church, school and in many cases, work. And all in an attempt to keep Donald Trump from being reelected in November.

To come full circle, the United States lost 400,000 troops during WW II when the population was 140 million. That’s .002% of the population lost – mostly young men of working age – in the pursuit of fighting a real, existential threat to the country and the world. Today, America has essentially eviscerated her economy and much of her community in reaction to a virus that has killed .00005% of her population, 80% of whom were 65 and older, most with underlying health problems. The Coronavirus may be many things, but it’s far from an existential threat to the United States. Heart disease kills 4 times as many people each year and we don’t shut the country down for it. Cancer kills 3 times as many people each year and we don’t shut the country down for it. Sure, they’re not contagious, but the Flu is and it kills 1/3 to ½ as many people each year and we don’t shut the country down for it either.

The bottom line is, while the Coronavirus is not a hoax, the shutdowns, the lockdowns and the hysteria surrounding it very much are and it was perpetrated on the American people by the Democrats and their media sycophants in their willingness to sacrifice the nation for their “Orange Man Bad” psychosis.

In November voters will have the opportunity to demonstrate to these anti-American misanthropes that most Americans are not snowflakes… That most Americans understand that life involves risks, but that is the cost of building a better life for their families and their communities and yes, building a better country. Ben Franklin said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” That quote, like many of Franklin’s seems to have a particular resonance in America 265 years after he uttered it. In the face of real threats Americans have demonstrated a real willingness to sacrifice for the common good. Covid 19 is not that, despite what the media and the Democrats want us to believe. Americans have had enough of this hoax of a national threat and the pernicious statists who have foisted it on the country. Hopefully they will demonstrate their displeasure in November…