by Tom Fitton
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INTRODUCTION Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste
As this book goes to print, our nation’s cities are being burned by radical, violent leftists seeking to overthrow our republic. This follows unprecedented restrictions on our constitutional freedoms, our ability to work and other God-given rights by mostly left-wing governors and local officials under the guise of controlling the coronavirus. Many leftist governors and mayors were quick to suspend constitutional rights and destroy businesses of the law-abiding but slow to protect citizens from rioters.
In one way or another, for good, and sometimes unfortunately, for bad, a crisis always reveals who we are as individuals and as a people. Always.
During the late winter and spring of 2020, the multiple individual, governmental, health-care, and private sector responses to the Wuhan COVID-19 crisis serve as a timely case study—one that should and will be examined in great detail over the course of the coming months and years.
A crisis, of course, should and does bring out the very best in a majority of us. We have seen that time and again in the past, and time and again at the height of the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic. Neighbors helping neighbors; major-league sports teams and professionals paying laid-off employees or providing other financial support; a grocery store chain donating at least 6 million meals to those hit hardest by the crisis; grocery store employees going way above and beyond the call of duty to stock shelves, ring up our orders, and keep their stores open; America’s truck drivers working endless hours and driving past the point of exhaustion to fill those stores and pharmacies with the supplies and medications our nation so desperately needed; and most important of all, our doctors, nurses, and their support staff who heroically manned the front lines of that pandemic to help and save as many infected as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, a crisis can also quickly or instantly reveal some troubling proclivities of those hoping to use it as a means to an end. Even, quite alarmingly and tragically, the Wuhan COVID-19 crisis.
There are a number of ways our republic can be—and is—under assault. One of the most unsettling, and truly vile, would be to attempt to weaken its freedoms, its laws, its borders, and the accountability of its government by exploiting a global pandemic for partisan or personal gain.
And yet, as we now know, there was a great deal of evidence that points exactly to that tactic. It was as if some politicians and activists were using the confusion, the trillions of dollars, and tragedy surrounding the Wuhan COVID-19 crisis to achieve political objectives, such as imposing long-sought changes to election integrity measures—such as ending voter ID, while pushing massive vote-by-mail schemes and ballot harvesting. Judicial Watch called for a rollback of the calling to “Liberate America” from the draconian dictates of the “cure.”
This pandemic “cure” was destroying millions of American jobs, the very economy of our nation, and our freedoms in the process.
There is no doubt that the Wuhan COVID-19 virus was quite serious and especially dangerous to the elderly and other susceptible populations.
The doubts and the questions surfaced over, first, how best to treat the virus without destroying our nation and the economic, mental, and physical well-being of tens of millions of Americans in the process. And second was the real concern regarding the World Health Organization’s (WHO) seemingly corrupt relationship with the People’s Republic of China and its leadership, and how that corrupt relationship might negatively impact the American people. For instance, based on rather obvious China lies, the WHO minimized the threat of coronavirus by suggesting the risk of human-to-human transmissibility was low. President Trump was so livid about WHO’s coddling of China that he withdrew the United States from the international organization.
Be it in our nation, or around the world, too many on the left and their allies in the mainstream media had no intention of letting the paralyzing fear and uncertainty over the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic go to waste.
It was the intention of the Left to exploit the crisis from day one.
As reported in March 2020 during a conference call held between House Democrats, House Majority Whip James Clyburn—third in line among House Democratic leadership and a strong ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi—spelled out their selfish, biased, and truly anti-American strategy with one sentence.
Said Clyburn: “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
Clearly meaning to use the panic and fear over the virus as a means to advance their leftist policy agenda.
President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—who, after leaving the White House, went on to become mayor of Chicago—must have been quite proud of Clyburn. For it was Emanuel who, as White House chief of staff, infamously said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
That you “could not do before.” A better and more accurate translation of that being what you were not allowed to do before.
Such as using the pandemic crisis as an excuse to strip the American people of their Second Amendment rights. This was a tactic multiple liberals and their handmaidens in the media immediately tried as they loudly advocated for the outright ban on the sale of guns and ammunition during the early days of the pandemic. They did so because they noticed the immediate uptick in gun and ammunition sales—an uptick caused by Americans nervous about the draconian measures being hinted at or outright advocated by many on the left.
Or when—as mentioned in Issues & Insights—a number of liberal politicians and operatives—the Los Angeles City Council, made up of 14 Democrats and 1 independent, for example—made it clear they should have been given the power to completely take over private businesses under the guise of “Saving the people.”
Operatives from the Far Left seeking to take complete control of a business built from the ground up from the blood, sweat, and tears of hardworking, law-abiding American citizens is a scheme we have seem time and again. This is the tactic of totalitarian or dictatorial regimes.
Another tactic is rigging or stealing elections. When better to try than in the confusion of a national and international crisis?
As was noted in numerous news accounts, precisely because of the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic, many leftists instantly pushed a vote-by-mail “free for all” scheme that would give fraudsters a much easier chance to rig or steal the 2020 elections—and elections in the future. Naturally, with no voter ID needed or wanted.
As Judicial Watch has long pointed out, voter fraud is a key civil rights issue. This issue demands increased attention and, more important, action. Much of that action being to not only stop fraudulent vote-by-mail efforts, but also to oppose any cleanup of the existing voter rolls, which are littered with quite possibly millions of suspect names. Millions.
Calling back to Rahm Emanuel’s point, they sought to use the pandemic as an opportunity to aggressively push “what they could not do before.” Again, what would never be allowed under “normal” circumstances.
As liberal politicians worked as one to exploit the crisis for their own partisan agenda at the direct expense of the welfare of the American people, the liberal mainstream media continually sought to silence the voice o
f President Donald J. Trump during the crisis by not only smearing him every chance they got, but by ignoring and not broadcasting his then live updates to the nation regarding the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic.
While suppressing Trump, too many in the media were happy to defend the People’s Republic of China.
Shills for the communist leadership of the nation that, unintentionally or not, unleashed the virus upon the world.
Shills who, while still making millions of dollars, were also involved in a truly heinous cover-up.
For instance, the Washington Post has a long and ongoing business relationship with China Watch, which is a branch of China Daily, a newspaper and media outlet directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military.
For over thirty years, both the Washington Post and the New York Times have featured advertorial inserts from China Watch at a reported price of over $100,000 per page. The basic math on that spells out millions of dollars of Chinese government money going into the corporate bank accounts of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
It is little wonder then that during the weeks and months before the Wuhan COVID-19 was proven dangerous and highly contagious, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and a number of other media outlets benefiting financially from business relationships with and in the People’s Republic of China continually raised doubts about how serious the pandemic truly was while simultaneously smearing anyone—most especially President Trump—who dared to suggest that not only did COVID-19 originate in China, but that the Chinese government was actively trying to cover up that fact.
Over the coming months and years, good and decent people in and outside of various governments and organizations will try to ascertain approximately how many lives could have been saved had the world caught the Chinese Communist Party earlier in its vicious lies and deceptions regarding the Wuhan COVID-19.
Lies and deceptions aided and abetted by certain U.S. media outlets.
* * *
While we will long examine and debate which was the correct strategy to follow to save our nation and the world in a time of highly flawed pandemic computer models, there is no debating the initial motivations of much of the mainstream media in creating panic and hysteria over the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic.
Knowing that, it is critically important to examine and contrast the conduct of that same media—and even certain infectious disease experts who advised President Trump—with the coverage and advice surrounding the swine flu pandemic that hit our nation and the world in 2009 and 2010.
While most of the media and a few of those “experts” would prefer that we forget, when that swine flu pandemic finally ran its course in 2010, it infected 1.5 billion people on earth and killed upward of 700,000.
Here in the United States, the swine flu pandemic infected 61 million Americans, hospitalized over 300,000, and killed upward of 18,000. Many of them were children and young people.
And yet, in the media of that time, there was no hysteria. They created no panic. They did not weaponize it. All the opposite, in fact. They played it down.
Be it CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the major television networks, all either completely ignored the swine flu pandemic at first, or pushed it deep within their papers, relegated it to a sidebar story on their sites, or a minute or two on the nightly news.
Not by coincidence, as the swine flu pandemic and its real threat to the safety and lives of American citizens was swept under the rug by the media, the nation remained “totally open for business.”
No lockdowns. No “social distancing.” Were the medical experts wrong not to do so then? Did they overreact in the late winter and spring of 2020?
Also, and as we know, there were no threats of a massive fine, or arrest, or prison time for violating the edicts of those in power.
To further understand and explain some of that conduct of the time, let’s cast our minds back to 2009 and 2010 and try to remember who the president of the United States was at the time.
Oh, right: it was Barack Obama.
Next, it becomes mandatory to examine the actual mainstream media coverage of President Obama as it pertained to the “Crisis” that was… barely covered.
What a difference ten years, another pandemic, and a different president make. One who is totally despised by most of the mainstream media, Hollywood, and academia.
More than anything else, certain behavior within the media, academia, and now even medicine and science is driven by an unhinged and incurable hatred of President Trump, a condition some have named Trump Derangement Syndrome.
To underscore that, we need only go back to the last two major pandemics before the swine flu of 2009–10. Those would be the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968–69.
The Asian flu hit during the last administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. By the standards we use today, it was an incredibly dangerous pandemic, one that, by the time it ran its course, had infected tens of millions of Americans, hospitalized hundreds of thousands, and killed approximately 116,000 Americans out of a then population of about 175 million.
And yet, no lockdowns, no social distancing, no destruction of the American economy.
In 1968, during the last year of the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, came the Hong Kong flu pandemic. Again, by today’s Covid-19 standards, truly quite dangerous. A virus that in many ways was a mirror image to COVID-19 in that it was highly infectious and could be primarily lethal to those over sixty-five years of age with preexisting conditions. By the time that pandemic ran its course in 1969, it had infected tens of millions of Americans, hospitalized hundreds of thousands, and killed approximately 100,000 out of a population of about 200 million. Worldwide, it killed upward of 4 million people.
But again, the media that existed during the last year of President Johnson’s term and the first year of President Richard Nixon’s term remained calm and induced no panic whatsoever into the population.
Consequently, once again, no lockdowns, no social distancing, no destruction of the American economy or way of life.
Knowing that historical context, it then becomes fair to ask two questions. The first: Did some on the left in the media, academia, medicine, and science react differently because Trump was president? And second, because of that bias, were they holding President Trump to a much different and much higher standard than say, Presidents Obama, Nixon, and Eisenhower?
Or did they simply—and tragically—paint our entire nation into a corner with their panic and draconian measures and then were too cowardly to admit to their mistakes and refuse to choose the actual best course of action to fight the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic?
While the answers to those questions seem clear to most of us, many on the left—because of hate and ideology—still choose blanket denials as the way to go.
What can’t be denied by anyone who was paying attention in the late winter and spring of 2020 is that the emergence of the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic led to the deliberate and dangerous abuse of that crisis by some of the usual suspects, which led to the emergence of a new tyranny at the state and local level.
It is instructive that left politico-media concerns about the “spread” and being on lockdown “together” went out the window as soon as radical leftists needed to riot, burn, and loot after the death in police custody of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
So how did this new tyranny emerge?
Certain—and instant—responses to the Wuhan COVID-19 by some of our “leaders” gave us all a crystal-clear look at that truly disturbing process.
Close on the heels and soon coupled with the deliberately fear-induced media panic came the “End of the World” COVID-19 computer model projections. Projections that exponentially accelerated the panic and lockdowns.
A number of those projected and highly flawed computer models emanating from either far-left universities and university professors, or from far-left organization
s that stood to benefit from the billions of dollars of stimulus money forked over involuntarily by U.S. taxpayers as well as other hardworking taxpayers around the world.
The most notable and infamous of these “End of the World” computer models was produced by a professor by the name of Neil Ferguson and his team from Imperial College in London. As an aside, in May 2020 Ferguson had to resign his position after it was alleged that he violated his own “safe distance” and “lockdown” orders to spend the night with the wife of another man.
With regard to the lack of accuracy or even danger associated with computer models, back in the glory days of NASA during the 1960s, when the United States was racing the then Soviet Union to the Moon, our truly courageous astronauts offered up an incredibly accurate description of such models, a description that has most certainly stood the test of time.
Observed those astronauts who were risking their very lives on the whims of calculations and predictions: “Garbage in, Garbage out.”
With that truism in mind, in March 2020 as the Wuhan COVID-19 began to spread, the team at Imperial College fed “garbage assumptions” based upon what little real on-the-ground evidence they had at the time into their computer and came out with a computer model stating that approximately 500,000 would die from the virus in the United Kingdom and approximately 2,200,000 in the United States.
These numbers, uncritically pushed by media, panicked political leaders.
Never mind that the general rule with computer models such as that—or those predicting landfall for a hurricane in Florida or say, Hillary Clinton crushing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election—is that they are almost always wrong for the simple reason that either their sample size is way too small, or they were fed incorrect or biased information from the start.
Specifically with regard to the Imperial College computer model, National Review correctly stated: “Models like this will always turn out to be wrong in some way or other because they rely on very strong assumptions about aspects of the disease we haven’t thoroughly studied yet. If nothing else, the original Imperial model will be obsolete soon.”