Artificial intelligence may make books even more important, because they preserve a footnoted historical record that an AI-powered internet edits, erases, and obscures in real time. This is why I dedicate hard-earned family funds to buying physical books worth keeping, such as Sen. Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up.
Although a part of me wants to join many Americans in pretending lockdowns are all in a misty, distant past, I can’t do that, because to forget would dishonor the suffering. It would deliberately discard what we learned at so great a price. I want to see and preserve evidence of the evils our political class and Democrat voters continue to inflict. Remembering may be the only way to help prevent or dilute repeated mass psychoses.
This is why I read An Abundance of Caution, a book out in April by the left-leaning journalist David Zweig, who has bylines in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. Zweig meticulously inspects a linchpin of the surreal U.S. lockdowns, extended school closures, against good evidence available not just weeks after they began but well before.
The End of Credential Credibility
Abundance of Caution documents how America’s disaster response disqualified the vast majority of America’s credentialed class. For example, three out of the four most accurate groups of people modeling Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were outside of the public health field. Several were “random” stats guys.
“A team from a management consulting firm, along with — to be frank, two random guys — McConnell and Karlen, outperformed teams of researchers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, Columbia, the University of Michigan, the famed IHME, and the US Department of Energy’s elite Los Alamos National Laboratory, among others.” Zweig writes. “It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of public health ‘experts’ than this outcome.”
As a longtime fact-checker for major publications and a father of two children shut out of school, Zweig also had internal motivations to question his political tribe’s hysteria during a presidential election year.
“[S]chool policies emerge as a window into the larger conversation around COVID-19 and, broader still, a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis,” Zweig writes in his introduction. “Ultimately, this is not a book about COVID. It’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”
Bad Science, Worse Motivations
Zweig shows his work in methodically debunking numerous Covid narratives psychotically flacked by corporate media. The U.S. Covid overreaction was not based on “the science.” It was based on bad science, and even worse motivations.
Zweig goes carefully through issues such as disease modeling, ventilation, Plexiglas barriers, six-foot distancing, Covid risks to children, and more to demonstrate that good studies in fact did not support lockdown policies that appealed to the authority of “science.” But corporate media smeared anyone who told the truth (like Scott Atlas), Zweig says, shutting up a great many people who knew the ruling class was lying.
“Many days my phone would ping constantly with texts coming in from sources — most of whom were highly placed experts at esteemed institutions — complaining about the latest guidance or announcement from Cuomo, Newsom, Fauci, or New York Times article that they felt represented risks to children or incorrectly summarized a recent study,” Zweig writes. But very few had the courage to speak publicly because agreeing with Trump was career and social suicide.
“The more fear, the more ‘seriously’ you took COVID, the more virtuous you were and the more you raised your status among other progressives or Democrats,” Zweig notes. So millions of American children had to suffer. Millions of poor children and children with disabilities had to wear masks, be left alone, and miss years of school.
Now there’s a school absenteeism crisis reaching record levels. American young people today possess the lowest average level of knowledge and skills in U.S. history. That’s a serious national problem amid record debt that our mentally and economically handicapped rising generations are expected to pay off.
No Hysteria Without a Hysterical Media
Zweig — who is clearly not a Trump voter — gives two big reasons the U.S. ruling class sabotaged their own serfs with lockdowns: China envy and Trump derangement syndrome.
“Dr. Monica Gandhi … who has extensive contacts throughout the CDC and other governmental health agencies, told me that US officials sought to emulate the strict lockdowns they witnessed in China,” Zweig writes. “The Chinese model directly influenced federal decision makers.”
Incredibly, the United States took cues from a totalitarian nation that runs concentration camps and that appears to be the source of the virus used to damage the United States. When faced with any evidence or common sense contradicting their brutal policies, America’s ruling class doubled down on totalitarianism by defining dissent as terrorism.
Never forget: It was only a few months ago that these policies were still in effect, and we’re only one election away from them potentially returning.
Europe Versus the United States
While Americans were scaremongered over everything under the sun that could be connected to Covid in Beautiful Mind fashion, Europe quickly realized school lockdowns were a mistake.
“Most dramatically, on May 17 [2020], education ministers from the European Union gathered on a conference call to discuss the reopening of schools,” Zweig writes. “Children, in different grades depending on the location, had been back in class for three to four weeks in twenty-two European countries, and it was announced that there was no evidence of a significant increase in COVID infections or a negative impact from reopening schools [italics original].”
Despite this and plenty of other information to support lifting lockdowns, American children remained locked out of school for the rest of the 2019-20 school year, and most endured some form of disrupted schooling for at least the 2020-2021 school year. Many even experienced disrupted schooling the school year after that.
Zweig believes the difference between the United States’ and Europe’s school lockdowns can largely be attributed to anti-Trump hysteria. Rather than accept that the Americans who voted for Trump had some good reasons for that, many anti-Trumpers on the right and left instinctively knew Covid policies could get the bad orange man out of office. They turned out to be right.
Again, Zweig provides a volume of evidence that only a book can document so thoroughly. He notes studies on tens of thousands of news articles and TV segments that found U.S. media gave 90 percent negative coverage to the idea of school reopening, and this negativity was “unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases.” He documents numerous examples of propagandistic misinformation spread by censorship-protected media such as The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Sample headlines from Zweig: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” from The Atlantic, about relaxing lockdowns in April 2020. “Trump Cares More About the Stock Market Than Humans,” from The Washington Post in March 2020. And “Complacency, Not Panic, Is the Real Danger,” from The New York Times in March 2020.
“[M]any progressives, professedly representing the party of science, completely disregarded overwhelming evidence about the safety of schools around the world, in significant part, as a reaction to Trump and Trumpism,” Zweig says.
Corporate Media Delenda Est
Unlike propaganda media, The Federalist accurately forecasted the evil consequences of lockdowns immediately, and we were slammed with censorship for it. I lived through the undesired fulfillment of my lockdown warnings as a pregnant, working mother of four schoolchildren plus a toddler with a school headmaster husband.
While my husband and I protected our children from isolation, we watched many others suffer, even to this day, from being banned from school, church, and social gatherings. I suffered a healthy pregnancy needlessly terrorized by (thankfully unfulfilled) threats that I labor alone in a mask. I blame the hysterical atmosphere imposed on us for that child not sleeping more than 15 minutes at a time for his first six months breathing air, and waking up with night terrors most nights for the next four years.
Like everyone else, we also lost relationships to mass media misinformation. No amount of “stimulus” hush money can ever repay these kinds of damages.
All this suffering that every American endured in one way or another and that continues to this day was completely unnecessary, and the evidence was available before it all began. Our government and media coordinated to lie to us about reality and thereby light millions of lives on fire. Given this very recent history, can we imagine there’s anything these people wouldn’t do to get what they want?
Abundance of Caution preserves for posterity just some of the shocking, enraging, multitudinous evidence that propaganda media must be defeated if the United States is to avoid further rounds of Chinese socialism with American characteristics.
