Is there any monster too evil for Gov. Newsom and the Dem pro-crime complex to free?


	Here are some past<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/gov-newsom-allows-release-monster-who-tortured-and-daniel-greenfield/"> greatest hits</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Gov. Gavin Newsom will not block the release of a killer who served four decades in prison for the murder of a developmentally disabled Clovis man he buried alive, officials said Monday.

	
		Newsom took no action last Friday on the state parole board’s latest decision to grant parole to David Weidert, meaning that the 58-year-old is now eligible for release.

	
		Weidert&nbsp;and a 16-year-old accomplice then lured&nbsp;Morganti&nbsp;into a car and took him to an isolated place and forced him to dig his own grave. They beat him with a baseball bat and a shovel, stabbed him with a knife and choked him with a telephone wire.

	
		Morganti&nbsp;eventually suffocated after he was buried alive.
</blockquote>


	All good with Newsom, who did draw the line at freeing Sirhan Sirhan, only because he knew the boomer Dem backlash would be too great. This though<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/us/frederick-woods-chowchilla-kidnapping-parole/index.html"> is fine</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Frederick Woods was 24 years old in 1976 when he and two other men&nbsp;kidnapped a bus full of children&nbsp;in northern California in what would become the largest mass kidnapping in US history.

	
		Now 70, Woods is set to become a free man after he was granted parole Tuesday, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

	
		Woods was originally&nbsp;found suitable for parole&nbsp;in March, but Gov. Gavin Newsom referred the decision for review by the full parole board, said CDCR Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton. During the review Tuesday, the board affirmed the hearing panel’s decision to grant parole, Thornton said.

	
		Woods and brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld pleaded guilty to kidnapping 26 children and their bus driver in Chowchilla, California, more than 45 years ago.

	
		The children, ages 5 to 14, and their bus driver were driven about 100 miles to a remote quarry near Livermore, California, where the kidnappers ordered their victims into a moving van buried six feet underground.

	
		The kidnappers demanded&nbsp;$5 million ransom&nbsp;as their victims were held in deplorable conditions, with the stench of vomit and filth intensified by the searing California heat.

	
		After 16 hours underground, the driver and children dug themselves out and escaped as the kidnappers were asleep.

	
		Woods and the two brothers were each given 27 sentences of seven years to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
</blockquote>


	What CNN isn't telling you is that Woods is extremely rich. These were mostly rich kids. And that there's a Newsom <a href="https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/he-kidnapped-and-buried-26-schoolchildren-in-the-70s-now-hes-up-for-parole/2849815/">family connection</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		The governor’s late father, state Judge William Newsom, was on an appellate panel in 1980 that reduced the men’s life sentences to give them a chance at parole. Once retired, he advocated for their release in 2011, noting that no one was seriously physically injured during the kidnapping.
</blockquote>


	Newsom's father even appeared at rallies. It's doubtful he was doing this for nothing.


	This is in some ways <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chowchilla-bus-kidnapping-frederick-woods-ran-a-gold-mine-and-christmas-tree-farm-from-prison/">another Jeffrey Epstein case</a> which shows how much power and privilege, with the right political connections, can buy you.

<blockquote>
	
		New reporting shows the one kidnapper still in prison, Fred Woods, has been making money and running businesses while incarcerated. &nbsp;A prison investigation determined he even launched a lawsuit from behind bars — suing an employee for $1.5 million.

	
		Woods has found ways to ease his long prison term. &nbsp;He's had four wives, three of whom married him in prison. &nbsp;With his trust fund, Woods bought an ocean view mansion in Nipomo, which sits mostly vacant some 30 minutes down the road from the prison. It is appraised at $1.5 million. At the beginning of this year he sold another property his family owned on Martha's Vineyard for $550,000.&nbsp;&nbsp;

	
		Woods is a descendant of two prominent California families — the Newhalls and the Woods —and the heir to a family fortune. &nbsp;He has a trust fund from his parents, which he shares only with a sister who is institutionalized with Down syndrome. &nbsp;In one court filing, the trust fund he inherited was described as "over $100 million," a number his lawyer Dominique Banos of Los Angeles dismissed as "nothing anywhere near that."

	
		Nevertheless, Woods has continued to make money. &nbsp;His gold mine hasn't panned out but his car business is thriving. He sold an old Rolls Royce for $100,000.&nbsp;

	
		Two of the vehicles in Woods' car inventory are the twin vans in which the kidnapped children were transported from Chowchilla to their underground prison in the quarry, according to Michael Bianchi. &nbsp;He says Woods has kept the old vans with the expectation that the notoriety of Chowchilla will make the vehicles worth a lot of money.

	
		After he retired, Judge Newsom became an outspoken advocate for the Chowchilla kidnappers, saying that the notorious crime was just a youthful "stunt" that had "no vicious aspect to it."

	
		Judge Newsom lived long enough to see his son, Gavin, elected California's 40th governor. &nbsp;Now Governor Newsom will have the final say on whether Fred Woods is ever successful in his bid for parole.&nbsp;&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Under Newsom, evil wins again.

Newsom-Connected $100M Monster Who Kidnapped and Buried School Bus of Children Gets Parole

Is there any monster too evil for Gov. Newsom and the Dem pro-crime complex to free?


	Here are some past greatest hits.


	
		Gov. Gavin Newsom will

Newsom-Connected $100M  Monster Who Kidnapped and Buried School Bus of Children Gets Parole

When you're pushing the narrative, you've gotta bury the lede. Bury it far out back <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/treasury-department-rejects-gop-claims-irs-hire-87000/story?id=88495613">after midnight</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		The Internal Revenue Service does not plan to use the nearly $80 billion it's set to receive in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to hire 87,000 new agents in order to target middle class Americans, a Treasury Department official told ABC News, rejecting a claim widely circulated by Republican lawmakers and right-wing media personalities.
</blockquote>


	The thing about lawyerly denials is that they very specifically deny a very specific thing.


	Like the statement that the DOJ was not holding Trump's passports which was true, only insofar as they had seized and then returned them.&nbsp;


	A clear denial would have been that the IRS is not going to step up targeting of the middle class. That denial never actually comes.&nbsp;


	Instead of quoting the spokeswoman, ABC News fills paragraphs with its own rendering of her words. That's another dead giveaway. Here are&nbsp;her actual words.

<blockquote>
	
		"New staff will be hired to improve taxpayer services and experienced auditors who can take on corporate and high-end tax evaders, without increasing audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year," she said.
</blockquote>


	Which words jump out at you there?


	"Historical norms."


	What are those historical norms, are they inflation adjusted, how far back will the IRS reach back to assert those norms? Who knows. What that means is that the denial is meaningless.&nbsp;


	The spokeswoman could have simply said that the IRS won't increase audits of the middle class. Instead, she provided plenty of elbow room for increasing audits.


	Let's look at audit declines in the short term based on<a href="https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104960"> this GAO report</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		From tax years 2010 to 2019, audit rates of individual tax returns decreased for all income levels, as shown in figure 1.15 On average, individual tax returns were audited over three times more often for tax year 2010 (about 0.9 percent) than for tax year 2019 (0.25 percent). IRS officials attributed the overall decline in audit rates to decreased funding, and therefore reduced staffing to conduct audits&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Which they will now have.


	The GAO report&nbsp;notes a 92% decrease in audits of people earning $200K to $500K and a 76% decrease in audits of those earning $25K to $200K&nbsp;


	There's your "historical norms".


	Dig a little more and the historical norms get <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-audit-rate-lowest-in-at-least-a-decade/">much worse</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Even a decade ago, the audit rate was sharply lower than in the 1970s, when the agency audited about&nbsp;2.5%&nbsp;of individual returns.
</blockquote>


	From the IRS, here's how things have changed and where Democrats would like to turn the clock back to.

<blockquote>
	
		&nbsp;In the early 1960’s, the percentage of individual tax returns that were audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was about 6 percent, and this percentage fell to 2.5 percent by the mid-1970’s.&nbsp; Over the next decade, the audit rate fell further to roughly 1 percent.&nbsp; According to the Inspector General for Tax Analysis (2002), taxpayer audit rates have fallen another 56 percent between 1997 and 2001. As a result, at present, less than 1 percent of all individual tax returns are audited.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	6%. Those are "historical norms".


	The media will use Yellen's letter and Treasury Department denials like these to 'fact check' Republicans pointing out the truth to death. What the media won't do is ask for the actual target audit percentage rate.&nbsp;


	That would expose the big lie.


	Let's close this out by remembering that the Inflation Increase Act nightmare didn't have to happen if Republicans, from the top down, hadn't thrown away the Senate&nbsp;through a combination of incompetence, terrible messaging, inflation and poor preparation. This is the cost of losing the Senate. And there are signs of history repeating itself in 2024.


	Among a lot of conservative activists, there's well-earned contempt for RINOs. And as destructive as the likes of Romney or Collins are, a Democrat majority is far worse.&nbsp;


	Manchin and Sinema, two Dems who were embraced by Republicans and had better approval ratings than RINOs, made this happen.&nbsp;


	The results are no longer hypothetical. The weaponized IRS, targeting conservatives and the middle class, is the result.


	There are lessons to learn here, but I'm not optimistic that they will be learned.


	&nbsp;

FACT CHECK: IRS Could Increase Middle Class Audits 92%

When you're pushing the narrative, you've gotta bury the lede. Bury it far out back after midnight.


	
		The Internal Revenue Service does not plan to use

FACT CHECK: IRS Could Increase Middle Class Audits 92%

Should Texas Go 'Sanctuary State" and Block Border Patrol Operations?

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

	Depressing, but all too real.


	The people in the Border Patrol are good, but like all LEOs, they're following

Should Texas Go 'Sanctuary State" and Block Border Patrol Operations?

The authorities are still searching for the Lebanese Shiite Muslim's motive in stabbing author Salman Rushdie. I hope they figure it out soon. The stabber is <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/08/17/alleged-salman-rushdie-attacker-didnt-think-author-would-survive/">happy to help</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		The New Jersey man who allegedly&nbsp;stabbed Salman Rushdie&nbsp;in Western New York last week praised Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Post on Wednesday — and admitted he didn’t think the author would survive the attack.
</blockquote>


	Jewish doctors beat&nbsp;Allah once again.

<blockquote>
	
		The 24-year-old&nbsp;was mum on whether he was inspired&nbsp;by the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989 over the author’s book “The Satanic Verses,” citing a warning by his defense attorney.

	
		“I respect the ayatollah. I think he’s a great person. That’s as far as I will say about that,” Matar said, noting he only “read like two pages” of Rushdie’s controversial novel.
</blockquote>


	Who needs to read when you've got the Koran and a fistful of fatwas?

<blockquote>
	
		“I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person,” he said about Rushdie. “I don’t like him. I don’t like him very much.

	
		“He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.”
</blockquote>


	No Motive Established Yet in Salman Rushdie Attack - WSJ

<blockquote>
	
		Matar said little else about Rushdie specifically but complained about conditions in the jail, where he is being held without bail. “A lot of the food they have given me is not allowed in my religion to eat,” he said
</blockquote>


	Hopefully,&nbsp;CAIR and Kirsten Clarke at DOJ&nbsp;are&nbsp;on this. Muslim terrorists must get their Halal food.

Rushdie Stabber Says He Did It For Islam, Complains About Lack of Halal Food

The authorities are still searching for the Lebanese Shiite Muslim's motive in stabbing author Salman Rushdie. I hope they figure it out soon. The stabber is

Rushdie Stabber Says He Did It For Islam, Complains About Lack of Halal Food

In<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/sex-men-not-skin-contact-fueling-monkeypox-new-research-suggests-rcna43484"> news everyone knew</a>, but no one seemed to dare say out loud.

<blockquote>
	
		Since the outset of the global monkeypox outbreak in May, public health and infectious disease experts have told the public that the virus is largely transmitting through skin-to-skin contact, in particular during sex between men.&nbsp;

	
		Now, however, an expanding cadre of experts has come to believe that sex between men itself — both anal as well as oral intercourse — is likely the main driver of global monkeypox transmission. The skin contact that comes with sex, these experts say, is probably much less of a risk factor.
</blockquote>


	You don't say.


	This comes after a month of debate over sensitivities about the spread of monkeypox, that was entirely absent from the fascist COVID zero strategy which gleefully shut down everything, except Black Lives Matter riots and mosque prayers, with zero regard for&nbsp;anyone's sensitivities.&nbsp;


	All the sensitivity, much like the HIV sensitivity, has hurt the people most at risk, gay men.&nbsp;

<blockquote>
	
		In recent weeks, a growing body of scientific evidence —&nbsp;including&nbsp;a trio&nbsp;of studies&nbsp;published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as&nbsp;reports from&nbsp;national,&nbsp;regional&nbsp;and global health authorities&nbsp;— has suggested that experts may have framed monkeypox’s typical transmission route precisely backward.&nbsp;&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	The framing wasn't a mistake.&nbsp;

<blockquote>
	
		Consequently, scientists told NBC News that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health authorities should update their&nbsp;monkeypox&nbsp;communication strategies&nbsp;to more strongly emphasize the centrality of intercourse among gay and bisexual men, who comprise nearly all U.S. cases, to the virus’ spread.
</blockquote>


	Democrats and allied LGBTQAPMQRZ activists have already made clear that's a form of oppression and will go nowhere.

<blockquote>
	
		On Aug. 14, Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease physician at the University of Southern California, and Dr. Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz, a resident physician in global health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, published an essay on&nbsp;Medium&nbsp;in which they reviewed the science supporting the argument that during the current outbreak, monkeypox is largely transmitting through anal and oral intercourse between men.

	
		“It looks very clear to us that this is an infection that is transmitting sexually the vast majority of the time,” Allan-Blitz said.

	
		This debate, however, is far from settled.

	
		Dr. Rosamund Lewis, technical lead for monkeypox at the World Health Organization, told NBC News it was “unfortunate but true” that “we don’t know yet” whether the virus is predominantly transmitted through intercourse.
</blockquote>


	Unfortunate, but true.&nbsp;


	The WHO is still as vital as a sixth toe.

Despite Media Claims, Research Shows Gay Sex, Not Skin Contact, Spreads Monkeypox

In news everyone knew, but no one seemed to dare say out loud.


	
		Since the outset of the global monkeypox outbreak in May, public health and infectious

Despite Media Claims, Research Shows Gay Sex, Not Skin Contact, Spreads Monkeypox

[Order David Horowitz's DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/DARK-AGENDA-Destroy-Christian-America/dp/163006114X">HERE</a>.]


	That the Christian Church in the Western world closed in March of 2020 due to fears over the contraction of a corona cold virus was a bridge too far for many of us who had spent our lives attending it.


	For the first time in two millennia, and per Caesar’s orders, the Church, on the eve of the Easter season, shut and locked its doors to the faithful. Yet when Caesar murderously persecuted the first generation of Christians, they continued to congregate to celebrate their Risen Lord. Their modern counterparts, in glaring contrast, treated one another like lepers while celebrating Mass remotely—all because of a fear of a cold virus with a survival rate of 99.5-99.9%.


	The COVID Scare revealed, in a way that nothing else quite has, the crisis within the midst of which the Church in America and throughout the West finds itself at the present moment.


	Yet in addition to their forefathers from antiquity, the Western Church’s congregants can as well turn to their contemporaries in other parts of the world for inspiration. There they will find glaring examples of courage, faith, hope, and, yes, love.


	<a href="https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/">Open Doors</a>, an organization dedicated to serving persecuted Christians around the globe, regularly features accounts of Christians in distant lands who shoulder immeasurable costs—including the cost of forgoing their very lives—for the sake of their faith in Jesus.


	Take, as one example, <a href="https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/stories/mob-attack-of-600-results-in-stronger-church/">a Sri Lankan pastor</a> by the name of “Indunil.” On March 6, after his congregants had returned to their homes following a church service, a mob of approximately 600 or so people led by Buddhist monks descended upon Indunil’s church, threatening him and his family with death threats as they beat on the church’s gates and smashed its windows. The pastor’s congregants, hearing about the attack, returned to protect him. They did not, however, retaliate with violence, as Indunil, citing Christ’s injunction to “never repay evil with evil,” implored them to remain peaceful.


	And they did in fact remain peaceful—even as several were beaten to the point of being hospitalized.


	The police eventually arrived to disperse the mob—though several officers sided with it.


	A local government subsequently ordered Indunil to suspend church services.


	Indunil and the members of his church knew in advance of this attack that they could be subjected to violence, for the environment is inhospitable to Christians. As one anonymous Christian leader in Sri Lanka put it:

<blockquote>
	
		Right now, Christians in the area are so afraid[.] However, they are still gathering to worship. They say, ‘It’s difficult, but we know we will have to face these things, and we need to be ready for this. This is God’s work and we will not deny Him.
</blockquote>


	Even after the government ordered the suspension of his church’s services, Pastor Indunil and his congregants continue to gather—in their homes, and not via remotely, as their Western brothers and sisters had done when Dr. Fauci insisted that they do so in March of 2020. So much more glaring is this contrast between the Christians of Sri Lanka and those of the West when it is considered that Sri Lankan Christians like Pastor Indunil regularly contend with real, violent threats to their lives.


	Yet it isn’t just in Sri Lanka that Christians brave grave dangers, real dangers, to profess their faith. In the West African nation of Burkina Faso, for example, the followers of Jesus are given an ultimatum. As Open Doors frames it: “Leave your home, your crops, your church—everything you know—or live every day knowing you could be targeted and killed because you follow Jesus.”


	On April 28, 2019, <a href="https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/stories/they-refused-to-denounce-jesus-pastor-5-others-shot-after-church-service-in-burkina-faso/">Pastor Pierre Oult</a> was talking in the parking lot of his church with several congregants shortly after he had concluded that Sunday’s service. This was a weekly practice for the 80 year-old cleric. This day would be different, though, as a dozen or so guys on motorbikes converged on the scene and demanded of the Christians that they convert to Islam or die. Pastor Oult and the others refused. In response, the Muslim men gathered them under a tree, where they proceeded to rob them of their cell phones and Bibles.


	Then, one at a time, the Muslims directed the Christians to the rear of the church building—where, one at a time, they shot them to death.


	A total of six people, including Pierre Oult’s son and a primary school teacher, were killed. A seventh person was “seriously injured” and taken to a nearby hospital.


	Their assailants weren’t finished, as they torched the church and stole a sheep and bag of rice from the murdered pastor’s home.


	Tragically, this attack is of a piece of a pattern of brutal violence to which Christian communities throughout Burkina Faso are routinely subjected.


	And, tragically, the kind of persecution with which Christians in Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka have to regularly live is of a piece with comparable persecution that Christians in dozens and dozens of countries around the world have to daily endure.


	Yet—and this is the point—they continue to gather, to brave the hardships, for the sake of their faith.


	They should be an example to their brethren in the West who, when confronted with nothing even remotely comparable in March of 2020, and per the State’s decree, shut their churches’ doors and treated their fellow believers as untouchables.

Learning from Non-Western Christians in the Age of Covid

[Order David Horowitz's DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America: HERE.]


	That the Christian Church in the Western world closed in March of 2020

It never ceases to astonish me that there remain people, apparently millions upon millions of people, who believe that the salvation of the country can be had if American citizens simply vote Republicans into office.


	Frankly, it’s astonishing that, at this date, traditional Republican voters are still willing to vote Republican at all.


	That the Democratic Party and its apologists in the media, academia, the entertainment industry, and beyond are beneath contempt is not in question. But we know all of this. The GOP and the Big Conservative media that advances the interests of the former at every turn are quite possibly more dangerous in that they’ve succeeded in deluding their tens of millions of constituents into thinking that they exist to counter the dominant narrative when, in reality, they facilitate it.


	If the COVID era didn’t underscore this point in spades, nothing else will.


	Democrats, recognizing that the oppression to which they’ve subjected legions of human beings in the name of combatting “The Virus” is no longer good politics for them, would prefer to pretend as if the last two years didn’t happen. Nor should we be surprised that Republicans and their conservative media boosters appear all too ready to do the same, for Big Conservatism facilitated this oppression.


	In future articles, we will consider the various respects in which Republican politicians and Big Conservative influencers permitted COVID lies to pass as truths. For now, though, we need only consider that no self-described conservative with a significant platform, whether that person be a politician or a media personality, has, thus far, two years into COVID, exhibited a fraction of the righteous indignation, of the courage, that is currently being shown by others with far less influence and resources.


	Take, for example, Professor Emud Qimron, of Tel Aviv University. Qimron is the head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and among the leading immunologists in Israel. Professor Qimron not long ago wrote <a href="https://brownstone.org/articles/ehud-qimrons-powerful-letter-to-the-israeli-ministry-of-health/">a letter</a> to the Israeli Ministry of Health. He pulls no punches. &nbsp;


	“Two years late,” Qimron writes, “you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail.”


	This is the bottom line. Yet, none of the “the experts who led the management of the pandemic” will “admit” this “because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years”—even though “you have failed miserably in all of your actions [.]”


	The Experts “refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge.” Every “decline of a wave” they “insisted on attributing…solely to” what they imposed upon the public. The Ministry of Health, by way of “false propaganda,” manipulated the masses through the lie that it “defeated the plague.” Repeatedly, the Experts “defeated it, and again and again and again.”


	Qimron continues, identifying the variety of ways in which the government’s “mitigation measures,” as they’re euphemistically referred to by those who impose them, failed—predictably failed.


	First: “You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so.”


	Second, the Ministry of Health also “refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine”—even though there existed plenty of “previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people” (emphasis added).


	Third, there is no acknowledgment that “the vaccinated” are indeed “contagious”—although there is a plethora of “observations” that substantiate this truth. Because of this refusal to come to terms with reality, “you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination—and you failed in that as well.”


	Qimron notes that the Experts “insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults than for young people who are not in risk groups—despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.”


	They “refused to adopt the ‘Barrington Declaration,’ signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals” who argued on behalf of limiting protection to only those groups whose members were most susceptible to succumbing to sickness while allowing normalcy for all others. Instead, those in the Ministry of Health “chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit” those tens of thousands of scientists who dared to challenge the Government-Media line on COVID.


	The Experts have not only failed to “set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines,” but “reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page.” And doctors “avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did…some of their colleagues.”


	Rather than disclose “data that allows for objective and proper research,” the Experts “chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.”


	For as unabashed as he is, Professor Qimron becomes bolder yet.


	Because of their “hubris,” Health officials have “burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail—for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life for the last two years.” Consequently, public trust in the Experts has reached “an unprecedented low” and their “status as a source of authority” has “eroded.”


	The “education of our children and their future” Health officials “have destroyed.” “You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest,” Qimron charges.


	Yet it isn’t just children who the COVID managers harmed. “You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.”


	The charges get more specific and egregious.


	“You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse.


	“You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease.


	“You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice.” This selection, Professor Qimron doesn’t hesitate to assert, “lacks any epidemiological justification.”


	Qimron directly addresses Israel’s public health officials. But he indirectly addresses the health officials everywhere who imposed the same kinds of life-denying measures comparable to those imposed by Israel’s government.


	“When you compare the destructive policies [that] you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries—you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed—they are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.”


	At the present moment, no medical emergency exists. Yet there is an emergency. “The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and psychological engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.” It is a “lust for power, budgets and control” that has prolonged the “condition [of] two years now” that the Experts “have been cultivating[.]”


	Imagine what America (and, by extension, the world) could have looked like since early 2020 had Republicans and Big Conservative media voices summoned the fortitude and used their resources to articulate, resoundingly and repeatedly, the perfect clarity and moral certainty expressed by Professor Emud Qimron. The dystopia into which the planet had been transformed and the gratuitous suffering that billions were made to endure could have well been averted.


	The purveyors of the COVID response are merchants of evil, for the incalculable pain, of every conceivable sort, that this response visited upon the Earth was all avoidable. Those who could’ve spoken out but refused to do so are accomplices to these crimes. Republicans and their apologists in the Big Conservative media subscribed to COVID Orthodoxy.


	Will they redeem themselves now? After all, the verdict is in. The last two years have been an unmitigated disaster, both in reality and, critically, relative to the tenets of COVID Orthodoxy itself. The “two weeks” that the Experts told us they would need to “flatten the curve” and “save lives” has turned into two years—despite “social distancing,” mask mandates, the interning of society, and a mass vaccination campaign the likes of which the world had never known.


	On their own terms, Anthony Fauci and his fellow partisans everywhere have proven themselves to be colossal failures. Whether through incompetence or dishonesty (doubtless a combination of both), they failed.


	Unless and until Republicans and Big Conservative media actors spare not a moment to hammer this point home, they deserve the trust of their constituents about as much as the public health officials of places like Israel and America deserve the trust of the public.

The Death of Outrage over COVID

It never ceases to astonish me that there remain people, apparently millions upon millions of people, who believe that the salvation of the country can be had

The losses that they suffered at the polls in November, as well as Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s chronically low approval ratings, have made it painfully clear to Democrats that it ain’t 2020 anymore: Americans have COVID fatigue, i.e. exhaustion over the tireless restrictions that Democrats, more so than anyone else, zealously imposed upon the residents of their states and, at the federal level, beyond.


	A <a href="https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/IMPACT-COVID-positioning-strategy-memo.pdf">memo</a>—an actual memo—recently issued from a Democratic Party polling firm verifies, in spades, what some of us have been arguing from the beginning of this unconscionable period in our history. It verifies that the COVID craze is and has always been about politics—and most emphatically not about science.


	The two-page list of bullet points is well-worth the read, but the takeaway from it is that Democrats are encouraged to essentially “declare” that the “crisis phase” of the Virus is “over” and “push for feeling and acting more normal.” After all, “people are ‘worn out’ and feeling real harm from the years-long restrictions,” so it’s crucial that Democrats “take their side” (underline original).


	The final bullet point says it all. It’s worth quoting at length:


	“Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead. If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate us through this. When 99% of Americans can get vaccinated, we cause more harm than we prevent with voters going into our third year talking about restrictions. And, if Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November” (boldface original).


	Let’s unpack this.


	Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead. That Anthony Fauci has suddenly disappeared from the media means, undoubtedly, that the Democrats have indeed received this memo loudly and clearly, for, as these last two long years have made evident, Fauci exists for no other reason than to legitimize burdensome restrictions and intimate apocalyptic scenarios that could materialize lest people abide by those restrictions. &nbsp;


	If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate us through this.


	But wait, if things really are “still…that bad,” and if they really “could get” “much worse,” then shouldn’t Democrats put their political prospects aside for the sake of truth and public health? Shouldn’t they resist the impulse to forgo these goods, even if it means being perceived as “failures [who are] unable to navigate us through this?”


	If the restrictions of the past two years were warranted by “how bad things still are and how much worse they could get,” then, if things are really still this bad and things really could get that much worse, aren’t the same restrictions still warranted?


	The question is rhetorical and the memo elaborates on the answer: “…we cause more harm than we prevent with voters going into our third year talking about restrictions.” The harm that Democrats want to avoid is, of course, harm to themselves at the polls, a point made sufficiently clear by the fact that it is “voters,” and not citizens or people, with whom the memo is concerned. The concluding lines leave no doubt:


	“And, if Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November” (italics mine). &nbsp;&nbsp;


	So, as this analysis of this memo decisively establishes, Democrat politicians are motivated first and foremost by political considerations—not considerations of science or public health. By implication, so too are their fellow partisans in Big Media driven by politics, which accounts for why all of that ominous coverage of COVID with which Americans have been ceaselessly bombarded for two years has abruptly been superseded by equally scary coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. As if right on time.


	However, to some of us, none of this is even remotely surprising. Some of us have always known that science and public health never had a damn thing to do with any of the fear-drumming over “The Virus.” It has only and ever been about the advancement of political interests.


	Yet for as bad, for as shameless, as are Democrat politicians and their apologists throughout the media—and, as readers of this column know, there is no limit to the horrible adjectives with which we could describe them—Republican politicians and their boosters throughout the Big Conservative media aren’t much better. COVID has been the defining moment of our times. Their moment of truth arrived, the War of all wars, but the agents of the Big Con not only didn’t rise to the occasion and prevent the infliction of immeasurable pain, of every type, that millions of Americans, and billions the world over, were made to endure in the name of prevailing over The Virus; they were accomplices to these crimes.


	From start to last, the government-media contrived COVID Narrative, in all of its dimensions, has been shown to have been, to put it generously, misinformation. Ignorance, incompetence, and deception are the staples that hold it together. The point is that Republican politicians and Big Conservative media influencers have never transgressed the boundaries of the Narrative. Whether it is something as fundamental as the alleged isolation, purification, and extraction of a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, or a demonstration that it is the cause of an alleged disease called, “COVID-19”; whether the topic is the efficacy or not of masks, their psychological and social costs, and their indiscriminate, mandated usage; whether it is the indefinite suspension of Constitutional liberties and the interning (“quarantining”) of whole societies, or the wrecking of whole economies, or, through the disruption of global supply chains caused by the ruination of said economies, the driving into poverty of billions of human beings around the planet; whether it is the legitimacy of the “case” numbers, as well as the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths attributed to COVID; whether it is the adverse effects, including death, that have been reported to the CDC’s own VAERS system following the administration of experimental drugs that have been marketed as “COVID vaccines,” or the fact that these drugs have a waning efficacy and an impotence against new variants of The Virus—from beginning to end Republicans and conservative influencers have never questioned the essentials of COVID orthodoxy. &nbsp;


	Despite this, they’ve continued styling themselves as an oppositional force. We’ll look more thoroughly at all of this in the future. For now, though, suffice it to say that it shouldn’t surprise us that they’d rather spend every moment talking about what the Democrats, as the realization dawns upon them that COVID is no longer good politics, would prefer for them to talk about. Which, at the present moment, is the Russian-Ukrainian conflict thousands of miles away.


	Republicans and Big Conservative media personalities would prefer not spending the time to take apart this latest memo to Democrats. They’d prefer to let them quietly allow COVID to go away. They’d prefer to virtue-signal about “standing” with Ukrainian citizens, even as they bailed on American citizens as the latter were made, by their own government and its media forces, to suffer for the last two years.


	Justice will not be served until the truth about COVID is rendered glaring to all with eyes to see and those who perpetrated these crimes against humanity are made to pay the penalty that they’ve earned. If Republicans and conservatives who, shamefully, scandalously, dropped the ball, want any kind of shot at redeeming themselves, they had better start talking about nothing but the injustices, the war, that has been waged against Americans and the peoples of the world in the name of COVID.


	If they want victory in November, they had better guarantee voters exactly what they will do, and how they will accomplish it—to make sure that justice is served and that nothing like the systematic dehumanization that has been the “new normal” since March of 2020 happens again.


	Until and unless this happens, no Republican deserves a single vote.


	I won’t hold my breath. &nbsp;


	&nbsp;

The ‘Memo’ to Democrats: Take Credit for Defeating COVID and Move On

The losses that they suffered at the polls in November, as well as Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s chronically low approval ratings, have made it painfully

As we saw in a <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-part-iv-jack-kerwick/">recent article</a>, Thomas Kuhn, among the most influential contemporary philosophers of science, maintained that neither the logical positivists, who assumed that science is distinguished on account of its ability to verify the truth of its theories, nor their most resolute critic, Karl Popper, who contended that it is its falsifiability that makes a theory genuinely scientific, were correct. Both approaches presupposed that it was possible to compare and contrast scientific theories in accordance with some absolute standard of evidence. But there is no such thing, Kuhn asserted, for all standards of rational evaluation are paradigm-dependent.


	The empiricism, or “radical empiricism,” of the positivists, as well as the “critical rationalism” of Popper, have no relevance to how science in fact develops.&nbsp; Kuhn was correct about this.


	Or so thought Paul Feyerabend.


	Feyerabend, who was quite the prominent 20th century philosopher of science himself, didn’t think that Kuhn went far enough. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	In Against Method, Feyerabend argued that there is no such thing as “the scientific method.” The latter implies that science is a single, unified enterprise. It’s nothing of the sort. Rather, “science” is a kind of short-hand for a plurality of phenomena, not a system, but a collage—and a collage, some of whose members are the products of myth, religion, politics, social and cultural convention, i.e. ideas that spring from non-scientific traditions.


	“It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naïve a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity,’ ‘truth,’ it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development.”


	And this principle is the principle that “anything goes.”


	Feyerabend self-described epistemologically (not politically) as an “anarchist.” A study of the history of science, Feyerabend maintained, readily reveals that science “is essentially an anarchic enterprise.” Moreover, he insists that his brand of anarchism is actually “more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives,” for the “world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination” such that only “a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds.” But this, Feyerabend declares, “is a blessing, not a drawback.”


	Thus, the “separation of science from non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge,” for if “we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them.”


	In a kind of mocking of those of his colleagues in the profession who advocated on behalf of what was known as “the unity of science,” Feyerabend referred instead to “the disunity of science,” and he contended that there is no justification to privilege Western science over and above other modes of cognition. Quite the contrary: Science “should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.”


	In fact, a so-called “scientific worldview” is to be found only “in the minds of metaphysicians, school masters, and scientists blinded by the achievements of their own particular niche [.]”


	Science, to put it bluntly, does not occur in anything at all like the manner in which the average lay person has been led to believe it does. Not only do scientists, including such world-renown scientists like Galileo, employ rhetoric, propaganda, and other sorts of intellectual shenanigans or epistemological tricks in order to advance their theories; these sorts of moves are at once necessary and desirable vis-à-vis the advancement of science, for there are no universal scientific methodologies, and neither the “critical rationalist” nor the empiricist approaches to science can move the ball.


	Feyerabend is emphatic: “Given any rule, however fundamental or necessary for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite” (emphasis added).


	The heroic ideal of the scientist as one who, upon impartially, dispassionately, and objectively substantiating his theory through rigorous testing, adds his discovery to the body of knowledge that previous generations have progressively developed by way of following this same uncompromising process is pure fantasy. The reality is something else entirely.


	“Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converge toward an ideal view: It is, rather, an ever-increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.”


	“Science,” Feyerabend says, “is only ‘one’ of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own.”&nbsp;


	It’s not just that science is but one source of insight and truth among many others. Even within science itself, it’s the case that no “single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain.”


	In itself, and at best, science is “much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best” at that.”


	Science most definitely is “conspicuous, noisy, and impudent [.]” Yet it is “inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favor of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits” (emphasis added).


	Science, or “rationality,” is “not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.” Actually, it is “neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is….” For this reason, in a “democracy,” science “should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.” Feyerabend even refers to science as “that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.”


	Contemporary sciences “are business enterprises run on business principles.” This explains why the research in “large institutes is not guided by Truth and Reason but by the most rewarding fashion” and why “the great minds of today increasingly turn to where the money is [.]”


	In light of the philosophies of science propounded by the likes of Feyerabend and, before him, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Root-Bernstein’s commentary is particularly thought-provoking.


	A professor of physiology, Root-Bernstein writes that the vast majority of “eminent scientists agree that nonverbal forms of thought are much more important in their work than verbal ones.” This motivated Root-Bernstein to assert that “most influential scientists have always nonverbally imagined a simple, new reality before they have proven its existence through complex logic or produced evidence through complicated experiments.”


	The reason for this is “simple” enough: While experiment “can confirm or disconfirm the tentative reality that imagination invents, and experiment can suggest the need for the invention of a new reality to account for anomalies to the existing one,” the “experiment cannot, in and of itself, produce conceptual breakthroughs or be used to explain data.” 


	“Logic,” Root-Bernstein continues, “is similarly limited.” Logic is critical, but a scientist “must be able to imagine that which is to be tested and how to test it before one can even begin to employ logical, experimental, and verbal forms of thought.”


	He concludes thus:


	“…I suggest that this ability to imagine new realities is correlated with what are traditionally thought to be nonscientific skills—skills such as playing, modeling, abstracting, idealizing, harmonizing, analogizing, pattern forming, approximating, extrapolating, and imagining the as yet unseen—in short, skills usually associated with the arts, music, and literature.”&nbsp; 


	The objective of this series on the history and philosophy of science is not intended to establish the superiority of any one theory to any others. Rather, it is meant to show that, contrary to what political partisans would have us think, science is not the self-explanatory, infallible phenomenon that it is made out to be. To do science is, at some level or other, to presuppose a philosophy of science, an epistemology and, yes, a metaphysic.


	So, no one who knows a thing about science can, say, claim that, “The science is settled.” Much less can anyone, least of all a scientist, purport to be <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/06/09/fauci-on-gop-criticism-attacks-on-me-quite-frankly-are-attacks-on-science/?sh=1e16119c4542">the incarnation of “Science”</a> itself—even if his name is Anthony Fauci.

Philosophy and the History of Science in the Age of COVID: Part V

As we saw in a recent article, Thomas Kuhn, among the most influential contemporary philosophers of science, maintained that neither the logical positivists,

In the <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-part-iii-jack-kerwick/">last installment</a> of this series, we reviewed the position of one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers of science, Karl Popper. The latter took issue with logical positivism, the prevailing philosophy of science during his intellectually formative years, a philosophy which maintained that scientific statements were statements whose truth could be verified through experience. Truth couldn’t be proven, Popper insisted. Rather, scientists strive to refute their own theories. So, what makes a theory scientific is that it can be falsified. 


	Thomas Kuhn, a physicist by training, became every bit as prominent the philosopher as science as Popper. In fact, inasmuch as his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become one of the most widely cited academic books of all time (and the most widely cited book in the social sciences) since its publication in 1962, it’s a safe bet to say that Kuhn is even more influential than the Austrian thinker whose work he critiqued.


	Kuhn contended that analysis of the history of science disclosed that neither Popper’s nor the logical positivists’ conception of science aligns with what scientists actually do. Science does not consist of a progressively growing body of objective truths to which each new generation adds, as the positivist’s more traditional account would have us think. Yet neither do scientists regard the first anomalous occurrence of which they become aware as a decisive refutation of their theories, as Popper argued.


	Rather, scientists operate within a “disciplinary matrix,” or a “paradigm.”


	A paradigm is the conceptual lens through which the members of a scientific community view their work. It consists, fundamentally, of “the operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory [.]” These, in other words, “are not ‘the given’ of experience [.]” They are “concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions” that, as such, are noticed by the scientist, if at all, only after “his research is well advanced and his attention focused.”


	Laboratory operations and measurements, then, are, significantly, “paradigm-determined.” They are favored because “they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm.”


	Moreover, the “immediate experience” of the subscribers to a particular paradigm, i.e. what they see, is, at least partially, “determined” by that paradigm.


	Since, then, science “does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations,” this means that “scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations” (emphases added).


	Paradigms, Kuhn further claims, are “incommensurable.” There’s been much written on this notion of incommensurability. What Kuhn seems to be saying is that the terms of one paradigm aren’t readily translatable into those of another. This being the case, no one paradigm can ever be judged to be superior or inferior to another, at least not with respect to any paradigm-neutral or objective standards of evaluation, for there are none.


	The implications of this are clear: Scientific progress is not and never has been the linear phenomenon that it is made out to be. Rather, it consists of “paradigm shifts.” Kuhn delineates four stages of scientific development:


	First, there’s “pre-science,” or the pre-paradigm phase. Not a whole lot is happening here, for the paradigm has not yet taken hold.


	Second, once the paradigm solidifies—once there is consensus among the members of the scientific community as to the assumptions, the central theories, values, instruments, and, yes, metaphysical commitment(s) that constitute the paradigm—then “normal science” occurs. When scientists practice normal science, they draw upon the conceptual resources of the paradigm to both identify and resolve problems or “puzzles.” &nbsp;


	Third, anomalies—problems or outcomes for which the paradigm appears to be unable to account—occur even during normal science, but as long as they aren’t disruptive or regarded as terribly significant, the paradigm remains settled and normal science continues. However, when a particularly burdensome problem or set of problems arise, the paradigm suffers “crisis.”


	The crisis owes to the fact that the paradigm, as is, has proven itself incapable of resolving these anomalies.


	Fourth, crisis leads to “revolution.” The paradigm is dramatically revised so as to resolve the problems that gave rise to the crisis.


	And if the crisis is sufficiently grave, it could eventuate in the abandonment of the paradigm itself and a “shift” to another.


	Kuhn explains that crisis is a stage consisting of “a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals.”


	Scientists, in other words, operate within intellectual frameworks or traditions that determine what they perceive and how they perceive it. Aristotle, for example, is among those whose analyzes Kuhn extols as exemplary instances of good science (Ptolemy, Newton, Lavoisier, and Maxwell are some others). By contemporary standards—the standards of the paradigm(s) that we endorse—Aristotle can’t sound more inaccurate. Yet this is precisely the point: We are judging him in light of the standards of a paradigm that is incommensurable with the one that he advanced. Kuhn writes:


	“The question I hoped to answer was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all [.]”


	This bothered Kuhn, for “Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.”


	While recounting his initial impression of Aristotle, Kuhn then recalled the place and time when it dawned upon him that he had been mistaken and that Aristotle had indeed “made sense” after all. Aristotle, he realized, labored within a paradigm that wasn’t inferior to, but merely different from, that upon which Newton’s inquiries depended. While Newton and modern peoples generally think of “motion” exclusively in terms of locomotion, of a change in location, Aristotle treated the term synonymously with any and all change. Given his understanding of motion, then, the conclusions that he drew from it were intelligible and his science coherent.


	So, to be clear, for all of their differences, both the logical positivists’ and Popper’s conceptions of science are mistaken. Whether we insist, as the positivists insisted, that science is distinguished on account of its ability to verify the truth of its theories, or whether we concur with Popper that it is its falsifiability that differentiates science from other modes of cognition, both views presuppose that there is an absolute standard of evidence by which theories live or die. All observations and evidence, though, are paradigm-based.


	It should be noted that the ghost of Kant, at whose epistemology we looked at an earlier installment of this series, is resurrected in Kuhn—but with a twist! Kant, remember, thought that the human mind is itself a paradigm, a set of “categories” and “pure intuitions” that it imposes upon the raw inputs of the senses. The only world that the mind ever knows, then, is the mind that it constructs via the conceptual lens of the human mind.


	Yet Kant believed that this paradigm was one and the same for all humans. Kuhn, as we now know, thought that there are many paradigms and that they are all historically and culturally-specifically.


	The point, though, is that scientists never see the world as it is. The world, or the aspects of it that scientists select for study, is a world that is filtered through whatever paradigm it is to which its adherents agree.


	Given Kuhn’s reading of the matter, it becomes clear that the history of science, of how science is actually done, has much more to do with politics and peer pressure than the popular, traditional, “heroic” conception of science would have us believe. Scientists are initiated, more or less subconsciously, into communities of other scientists. They subconsciously sign onto the consensus, the paradigm, that already exists and within which normal science is being practiced.&nbsp; There can’t be any scientific inquiry independently of the paradigm.


	Kuhn is clear that science and philosophy of science are inextricable from one another. All science embodies some philosophy of science. This conviction on his part is especially provocative in light of the COVID era. Kuhn died in 1996, but the remark that he made during an <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/">interview</a> with Scientific American regarding HIV/AIDS has implications for the prevailing narrative on SARS CoV-2/COVID 19. The interviewer, John Horgan, asserted that “the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus is either right or wrong,” and that “metaphysics and language,” i.e. philosophy, are “beside the point.” Years later, he recounted Kuhn’s response: “Whenever you get two people interpreting the same data in different ways, that’s metaphysics.”


	Kuhn’s analysis generated no small supply of commentary, both favorable and critical. In the next essay, we’ll look at Paul Feyerabend whose philosophy of science was far more radical than that of Kuhn’s.

Philosophy and the History of Science in the Age of COVID: Part IV

In the last installment of this series, we reviewed the position of one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers of science, Karl Popper. The latter took

[Read Part I <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-jack-kerwick/">Here</a> and Part II <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-part-ii-jack-kerwick/">Here</a>.]


	As I’ve been at pains to show in recent essays, not only is “the science” on any given issue never “settled,” as partisans of a particular political persuasion are forever assuring us. It remains an open question as to what science itself even is.


	From the first quarter to approximately the middle of the 20th century, an assortment of scientist-philosophers and scientifically-trained philosophers and mathematicians known as the “logical positivists” or “logical empiricists,” inspired as they were by David Hume’s contention that there were two and only two types of statements that were meaningful—those that were tautologically true and those that could be confirmed through observation—insisted that, essentially, the only genuinely meaningful propositions other than those that are true by definition are scientific in nature.


	A genuinely scientific proposition, then, is one whose truth could be verified through experience.&nbsp;


	Karl Popper, a contemporary of the positivists who would become one of the century’s most renown philosophers of science, was having none of this. For as influenced as they were by Hume, the positivists shared none of the Scottish empiricist’s skepticism with respect to the principle of induction, the principle that the future will resemble the past. It’s on the basis of this principle that scientists make the predictions that they make. Popper, however, agreed with Hume that this principle cannot be logically justified. Rather, it is due to habit that we assume that, say, because the sun has risen every day in the past that it will do so tomorrow. But we can’t ever be certain about this. We can’t prove or justify it.


	Against this dominant empiricist-inductivist conception of science, Popper argued for a philosophy of science that was deductive and to which he gave the name of “critical rationalism.” He selected the latter term in order to contrast it with the classical empiricism of his rivals. Whereas the classical empiricists maintained that “basic statements” or “observation statements” were infallible, Popper contended that there were fundamentally three problems with this claim.


	First, all observations are invariably theory-dependent. All observations presuppose a conceptual framework of one sort or other. As Michael Oakeshott once put it, what we see depends upon how we look.


	Second, scientific theories are abstract. The terms of a theory and the relations expressed between them in the propositions of that theory are abstractions that, as such, are not found in experience. They can be put to the test only obliquely, by observing their consequences.


	Third, the hypothetical character of all knowledge—including, clearly, scientific knowledge—is ineliminable. Science is as much the fruit of creative imagination as is any other human artifact, and science is born of the desire to discover solutions to problems that are themselves invariably the product of historically and culturally-specific circumstances.


	For Popper, what demarcates a scientific theory from a non-scientific one is not that it can be established as true. No theory can ever be shown to be true because the principle of induction, being a presupposition born of habit, can never be justified. Even if one observed countless numbers of swans, and every swan ever observed was white, this still could not prove that all swans are white. Rather, what makes a theory a genuinely scientific one is that it can be falsified. The theory that all swans are white, then, is scientific inasmuch as it can be falsified by the observation of at least one swan that is not white. &nbsp;


	To be certain, Popper is not arguing that a theory is scientific only if it is proven to be false. What he’s arguing is that a theory is scientific as long as we can conceive of hypothetical conditions under which it could be falsified. So, for example, the theory that the sun will rise tomorrow is obviously falsifiable in that we can conceive of the possibility that tomorrow it will not rise. Or, as Alan Chalmers noted, the fact that we can imagine a brick falling upward when released from a person’s hand distinguishes Newton’s theory of gravitation as a scientific theory, for the mere conceivability of this scenario decisively demonstrates its falsifiability. &nbsp;


	Yet until and unless these conditions materialize in reality, we have good reason to accept that the sun will rise tomorrow and that Newton’s theory of gravitation are both true (even though we cannot prove their truth).


	Einstein’s theory of relativity Popper thought emblematized a truly scientific account of reality. While Popper accepted it as true, this is not why he thought it was scientific. Einstein’s theory was “risky,” Popper said, in that it had implications that contradicted the claims of the dominant Newtonian model. For instance, gravity, Einstein held, deflects light. The truth of this proposition was confirmed in 1919 by Arthur Stanley Edington and Frank Watson Dyson via “the Edington experiment.” What made Einstein’s theory scientific for Popper, however, is that if the consequences that it forecasted were false, this could have been demonstrated.


	Popper’s philosophy of science, we can see, is deductive in that a theory can be logically, decisively refuted through a single counter-example to its predictions.


	In glaring contrast, and contrary to the pretensions of their proponents, Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism are emphatically not scientific. And they’re not scientific because they are not falsifiable: They’re elasticity is such as to allow them to accommodate all possible states of affairs—however mutually irreconcilable these states may be.


	Scientific progress occurs along lines similar to the evolutionary process, as Charles Darwin conceived it (the problems with Darwin’s theory we can leave aside for our purposes here). According to Darwinian theory, “natural selection” favors those genetic variations that are “fit.” It simultaneously eliminates those that are not. Analogously, Popper argued that scientific progress is a matter of eliminating those “tentative theories” that fail to withstand the rigorous testing to which they are subjected while favoring those that do and that, as such, reveal themselves to be, not truer, or even necessarily true at all, but, rather, more fit:


	There’s a “problem-situation.” In response to it, rival “tentative theories” are formulated. Each theory is besieged by as many attempts to falsify it as are necessary to either achieve this task or prove its fitness, its pertinence to the problem in question. This is the process known as “error elimination.” Deficient theories are exposed for what they are as the theories that survive the selection process make room for the emergence of ever-more complex problems. And so on, and so on.


	Critically, the fitness of any theory with respect to a particular problem-situation most certainly does not mean that it won’t be shown to be false in the future. The point is that a certain type of scientific progress can be said to have been made by way of the process of sorting out fit theories from unfit ones.


	Popper was not without his critics. In a future essay, we will see that another giant in the philosophy of science, the physicist-turned-historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, had a take on all of this at odds with that of Popper.

Philosophy and the History of Science in the Age of COVID: Part III

[Read Part I Here and Part II Here.]


	As I’ve been at pains to show in recent essays, not only is “the science” on any given issue never “settled,” as

“In this house, we believe in…science.”&nbsp;


	“The science is settled.”&nbsp;


	“Science says….”&nbsp;


	As I began demonstrating in <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-jack-kerwick/">a previous essay</a>,&nbsp;anyone who espouses such&nbsp;clichés is&nbsp;scientifically illiterate. Science is not some ahistorical abstraction embodying the proverbial God’s eye view of the cosmos. It&nbsp;has&nbsp;a particularly colorful past extending back centuries, a history replete with all of the nit and grit, all of the contingencies and relativities,&nbsp;characteristic of all&nbsp;cultural phenomena. And the history of science includes, of course, rival&nbsp;philosophies&nbsp;of science.&nbsp;


	It was also mentioned that&nbsp;the 18th&nbsp;century philosopher Immanuel Kant revolutionized Western philosophy when he argued that it is not, as had always been assumed, the mind that passively and impartially mirrors the world. Rather, it is the world that is made to comport with the mind. The only world that human beings can meaningfully speak of is the world that has been constructed in terms of the mind’s own internal structures. These structures are comprised of the “pure intuitions” of space and time and a dozen “categories,” including the categories of “causality” and&nbsp;what philosophers have traditionally called&nbsp;“substance.”&nbsp;


	Space, time, universal causation, and the existence of entities that endure over time are not necessarily objective features of the universe to be discovered by scientific inquiry but, quite the contrary, the very pre-conditions of all inquiry. They are features of the human mind supplied in advance of all experience and in the&nbsp;absence of which we can experience&nbsp;nothing.&nbsp;


	Kant was provoked to&nbsp;develop&nbsp;his “Copernican revolution”&nbsp;after he was awakened by his “dogmatic slumbers”&nbsp;by&nbsp;his predecessor, David Hume. To Kant’s&nbsp;legacy we will return. Not everyone, it is critical to note here, was persuaded by him to abandon Hume.&nbsp;


	Hume contended that there were two and only two types of knowledge propositions: propositions expressing “relations of ideas” and those expressing “matters of fact.”&nbsp;The former are “analytic” or “tautological”: They are true by definition. The latter are “synthetic”&nbsp;in that their&nbsp;truth can be confirmed or disconfirmed only through observation.&nbsp;


	“All bachelors are unmarried men,” “Green things are colored things,” and “Squares are four-sided figures” are all illustrations of statements expressing relations of ideas.&nbsp;They are universally and necessarily true, i.e. they cannot be false. Their truth is&nbsp;a priori,&nbsp;known prior to experience.


	“Jack is writing a paragraph on the philosophy of David Hume,” “The car is red,” and “The Earth revolves around the sun” are all examples&nbsp;of statements embodying “matters of fact.” This means that, if true, they are&nbsp;not&nbsp;necessarily&nbsp;true but, rather,&nbsp;contingently&nbsp;true: They happen to be true, but they could’ve been otherwise.&nbsp;To know that they are true or not, we have to see for ourselves, so to speak.


	Statements expressing relations of ideas pertain only to concepts. They don’t necessarily tell us anything about the real world. Thus, “Green Martians are colored beings” is necessarily true. As far as we can determine, there are no Martians, let alone green Martians. Yet this is irrelevant, for all that matters here is the relation between the&nbsp;ideas&nbsp;or&nbsp;concepts&nbsp;of green and colored. Statements expressing matters of fact, on the other hand, purport to inform us of the actual features of the world.&nbsp;


	This distinction that Hume drew between these types of knowledge claims would eventually become known as “Hume’s fork.”&nbsp;Regarding&nbsp;a&nbsp;work&nbsp;that contained claims&nbsp;that were neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable,&nbsp;Hume’s verdict was clear and decisive:&nbsp;“Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”


	In the 20th&nbsp;century, a group of philosophers known as the “logical positivists” or “logical empiricists” heeded Hume’s&nbsp;command. Only those statements that were true by definition and those that could be verified or confirmed through observation were deemed meaningful. In stark contrast,&nbsp;religious, metaphysical, aesthetic, and even ethical claims, though not always (but sometimes) dismissed as being meaningless, were regarded as being nothing more than subjective&nbsp;and figurative&nbsp;expressions of preference or emotion.&nbsp;


	The logical positivists, despite the disagreements that occurred among them, were unanimous in endorsing some version or other of the principle of “verifiability,” i.e. the principle that cognitively meaningful statements that were not analytic in nature&nbsp;must be capable&nbsp;of being verified&nbsp;via experience.&nbsp;


	And it is this conviction of theirs that led to another: The belief in “the unity of science.”&nbsp;


	The&nbsp;Vienna Circle comprised a diverse array of philosopher-scientists and scientist-philosophers who were committed to establishing the unity of all of the sciences. The German philosopher&nbsp;Moritz&nbsp;Schlick, who was also a physicist, is credited with&nbsp;spearheading the group in 1924. From that time until 1936,&nbsp;members included&nbsp;fellow physicist Phillip Frank and such mathematicians as Hans Hahn, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Theodor&nbsp;Radacovic, and Gustav Bergmann. Otto&nbsp;Neurath, a social scientist and the husband of Olga Hahn-Neurath&nbsp;was a member, as was, notably, the philosopher and logician, Rudolph&nbsp;Carnap. The Vienna Circle would persist beyond the 1930s, with new members and associates coming and going.


	Such thinkers as&nbsp;Gottlob&nbsp;Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead labored diligently to show that mathematical propositions were ultimately&nbsp;nothing more and nothing less than&nbsp;logical&nbsp;propositions which, being true by definition, told us only about the meanings of&nbsp;linguistic&nbsp;terms and nothing at all about the nature of the world. The impetus for this programmatic “logicism” was unmistakably positivist: If mathematical propositions are simply statements of logic, then it is to&nbsp;experience&nbsp;alone that we must turn if we wish to acquire knowledge of the universe.


	Pythagoras and Plato are representative of a Western philosophical&nbsp;tradition encompassing&nbsp;centuries and millennia that largely maintained that numbers are&nbsp;real.&nbsp;However, positivists like Russell could have none of this,&nbsp;for if numbers were something other than the words (numerals) that figure in language, this would mean that&nbsp;immaterial&nbsp;entities are real. Yet immaterial entities like numbers, God, objective moral truths, and so forth, being unobservable, undercut the radical empiricism to which the logical positivists were committed.&nbsp;


	Other 20th&nbsp;century thinkers would show in time that Russell and his ilk endeavored to fulfill&nbsp;an impossible task as&nbsp;numbers, being infinite,&nbsp;could never be reduced to the finite set of the axioms and principles of logic. And, by the late 1960s, logical positivism, as well as the unity of science movement, would be all but dead—or, in the words of&nbsp;the Australian philosopher&nbsp;John&nbsp;Passmore, “as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes.”&nbsp;


	In the next installment of this series, we will see the specific challenges that were made to the positivist conception of science, beginning with who is perhaps that most prominent of all 20thcentury philosophers of science, Karl Popper. &nbsp;

Philosophy and History of Science in the Age of COVID - Part II

“In this house, we believe in…science.”&nbsp;


	“The science is settled.”&nbsp;


	“Science says….”&nbsp;


	As I began demonstrating in a previous

“The science is settled.”


	To be sure, those who say such a thing are either illiterate when it comes to science and/or shameless partisan opportunists who are trying to score political points. If they accuse those who challenge their account of “science says” with “denialism” of one sort or another, or if they demand <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10324873/Emails-reveal-Fauci-head-NIH-colluded-try-smear-experts-called-end-lockdowns.html">“a quick and devastating take down”</a> of scientists with competing theories and express satisfaction that the demand has been met by such prestigious scientific journals as The Nation and Wired, you can take it to the bank that it is their political agenda that they prize above all.


	Just the slightest familiarity with the history of science readily reveals that the science is never settled. Quite the contrary, it is emphatically unsettled as “the science” proves itself to be no less susceptible to flux than the world that it purports to disclose.


	In the popular Western consciousness, science is the pinnacle of human cognition. Yet the average person, and, particularly, those who spare no occasion to adorn their property with signs revealing their “belief in science” and portraits of Anthony Fauci, have a profoundly impoverished view of science. Science, for them, begins and ends with the declarations of only those scientists who have received the stamp of approval by the government and the media. And these declarations are treated as dogma.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	Scientists are impartial conduits of objective reality, always and only just calling things for what they are. Thus, anyone who so much as remotely questions the assertions of (government-media approved) scientists are guilty of trying to discredit science itself (as Fauci recently <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/06/09/fauci-on-gop-criticism-attacks-on-me-quite-frankly-are-attacks-on-science/?sh=4e3b6f0a4542">said</a> not so long ago when he charged his critics for challenging, not himself, but science). &nbsp;


	The truth of the matter, though, is that there is no science without a philosophy of science, and science is not an activity that springs from the ether, an abstraction devoid of all cultural and temporal contingencies, but a concrete enterprise with a history. This history reveals that what we now call “science” was, until as recently as the 19th century, known as “natural philosophy.”


	The history of science also shows beyond a doubt that the popular notion of science is a fiction, a mythology. As no less a scientist than Einstein said: “Science without epistemology [the philosophy of knowledge] is—so far as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled.”


	In what follows, we will look at some prominent, representative views in the history and philosophy of science (developed, often, by scientists, or at least those who have been educated in the sciences but who are also philosophers). The objective is not necessarily to determine which, if any of these views, is correct. The purpose is to recognize that “science” is not what most of us have been led to think it is. Not by a long shot. We will see that for all of their disagreements, those who make it their business to think about these matters are in emphatic agreement that not only are the conclusions of scientific inquiry never settled; the jury is still out regarding the very nature of science itself.


	Inductivism


	The classical view of science is what is known as “inductivism.” Scientists, from this vantage, observe patterns in individual things and, on the basis of these patterns, determine universal laws. Francis Bacon is widely regarded as a prominent representative of this position, a position that he advanced in the first quarter of the 17th century as an alternative to the deductive reasoning characteristic of the scholasticism of the medieval age. The scientific method, as Bacon saw it, “gathers information” “by slow and faithful toil…from things and brings it into understanding.”


	In his Nova Organum, Bacon writes that “the true way” of “searching into and discovering truth” “derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all.”


	In the 18th century, though, David Hume, while ultimately accepting it, challenged the principle of induction. Hume subscribed to empiricism, the same epistemology that Bacon endorsed. Empiricism is the philosophy of knowledge according to which knowledge is gotten primarily from experience, i.e. via the senses, observation. Yet on Hume’s reading of it, empiricism leads to skepticism (the theory that we can actually know relatively little).


	For example, while his predecessors (as well as several of his successors) supposed that causality consisted in an inescapable relationship between cause and effect, Hume argued that experience discloses no such relationship. The most that experience reveals is that, in the past, whenever an event of one sort has occurred, it has been immediately followed by an event of another type. Because of the “constant conjunction” of these two type of events, we assume that there is a “necessary connection” between them. This assumption, however, is the product of habit or custom.


	So, because every time in the past whenever we’ve had a perception of one billiard ball striking another it has been constantly conjoined with an immediate, subsequent perception of the second billiard ball moving, we assume that whenever we have any perceptions of billiard balls colliding with other billiard balls, these perceptions will necessarily be followed by perceptions of other billiard balls moving. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Based on experience alone, however, we have no grounds for our certitude that the one event will cause the second.


	Rather, our causal reasoning, the reasoning of science (as Bacon and Hume himself understood science), is rooted in the principle of induction, the principle that the future will be continuous with the past. But here’s the rub: Experience—which, again, is the fundamental source of knowledge for empiricists like Bacon and Hume—can never prove the truth of this principle. The only argument, if we can even call it that, on behalf of the principle of induction is glaringly circular: The future will resemble the past because in the past the future resembled the past. Obviously, this is question-begging, for it still assumes precisely that which needs to be proven, the proposition that the future will indeed always resemble the past.


	Hume’s point: The very foundations of science aren’t nearly as certain—or as “settled”—as has been thought.


	In the 18th century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant admitted to having been awaken from his “dogmatic slumbers” by Hume’s radical skepticism. In order to secure the possibility of knowledge, Kant achieved his own “Copernican revolution” as he proposed that his predecessors had it entirely backwards: Knowledge does not consist in the mind’s conforming to the world but, rather, the world conforming to the mind!


	In other words, the mind is not some passive instrument that objectively gauges happenings in the world. Quite the contrary: It is active, perpetually filtering and organizing the raw inputs of the senses in terms of its own intrinsic structures, i.e. its “pure intuitions” (of space and time) and such “categories” as causality, substance, and several others. The only world that the mind knows is the world that it constructs. As Kant said, we never know the thing-in-itself, but only ever the thing as it appears to us.&nbsp;


	If humans were born with purple lensed glasses embedded into their faces, everything that they ever perceived would appear in shades of purple. This, of course, wouldn’t mean that things actually were purple. We just couldn’t know one way or the other. As far as we were concerned, though, the only world that we could ever ascertain would be a world that appears and, given the character of our perceptual apparatus, could only appear purple.


	In making the move that he made, Kant did indeed seem to secure the possibility of knowledge against Hume’s critique. Knowledge—absolute and certain knowledge—is attainable after all! Kant contended that while Hume was in fact correct that experience and observation could never ground those ideas, like universal and necessary causation, toward which Hume expressed skepticism, this is only because such notions are not the substantive conclusions of scientific inquiry but, rather, the formal conditions, the presuppositions, for the very possibility of knowledge.&nbsp; They are a priori, supplied by the mind in advance of all experience. They are what make experience intelligible at all.


	Kant’s thought marks a significant turning point in the history and philosophy of science inasmuch as he dramatically underscored the role that the human mind plays in the construction of knowledge. Others, as we will see, seized hold of this chain of reasoning in the 20th century and pursued it far beyond anything that Kant could’ve envisioned.

Philosophy and History of Science in the Age of COVID

“The science is settled.”


	To be sure, those who say such a thing are either illiterate when it comes to science and/or shameless partisan opportunists

In the name of combating a corona cold virus, power-wielding elitists have upended not just our own society, but the operations of the world.


	And yet, 21 months later, not only do millions and millions of American citizens remain scandalously ignorant of the facts regarding all things COVID; they continue to facilitate the ever-morphing narrative that its crafters have been laboriously purveying since March of 2020.


	But there are indeed certain facts that, particularly at this stage in the game, everyone has an obligation, a moral obligation, to know. We will identify them in the next article. Now, though, it’s imperative that a comment or two be made concerning the ignorance of the countless numbers of people who have bought in full every syllable about COVID that springs from the lips of the (government-media) authorized Experts.


	Their pretensions of moral superiority vis-à-vis the heterodox only render more glaring their own weaknesses of character. While the guardians of COVID orthodoxy dehumanize their fellow human beings as “anti-maskers” or, what’s more in vogue these days, “anti-vaxxers,” those who are essentially being likened to murderers or attempted murderers should remind themselves that their accusers have zero moral capital to level charges of any sort against anyone. The reason for this is straightforward:


	If everyone thought as the “anti-maskers” and “anti-vaxxers” thought, not a single person of the tens of millions of Americans (to say nothing about the millions of others in other countries) who lost their jobs would have become unemployed.


	The one million or so American business owners who were forced to permanently shutter their doors would still be able to enjoy the fruits of the passion, the blood, the sweat, and the tears that they spent years investing in making their dreams a reality.


	The 40%-50% of black small business-owners who were coerced into shutting down their operations forever would still be enjoying their livelihoods.


	There wouldn’t have been a single instance of depression, anxiety, domestic abuse, substance abuse, or suicide over “the pandemic.”


	Not. One.


	Not a single school would’ve closed.


	Children would not have been deprived of a normal childhood, of the milestone events that mark the latter, and they would not have had fear of their peers (and everyone else) instilled in them at every turn by the sights of masks and plastic dividers.


	Not a single house of worship would’ve closed, and people would’ve continued to have their existential needs met by way of being in the company—the real, as opposed to the virtual, company—of the fellow members of their faith community.


	The infirm and elderly would not have been denied visits from loved ones, visits that are integral to their well-being. They would not have died broken-hearted, lonely.


	Legions of people who died prematurely from other causes because the procedures they needed had either been postponed in anticipation of a surge of COVID patients or because they themselves feared going to the hospital and learning that they had COVID may have lived.


	Families, friendships, romantic relationships, and other types of communities that ruptured would have (all things being equal) remained intact.


	There would be fewer political divisions within our society, a society that is already rife with such divisions.


	And the two billion or so human beings from around the globe who fell into poverty last year because of the disruption in supply chains due to the devastation visited upon economies courtesy of “quarantines” would not have become impoverished.


	Quarantines kill. They kill the body, yes, but even if the flesh survives, the psyche is ruined.&nbsp;


	To be clear: It is not “the pandemic” that brought immeasurable economic, physical, spiritual, and psychological suffering and death to billions around the world. It is the response of human beings to their fear of a pandemic that is the culprit.


	To borrow terms that figure centrally in discussions over what theologians and philosophers of religion refer to as “the Problem of Evil,” we can say that the destruction of the COVID era is not an illustration of “natural evil” but, rather, of “moral evil.” It is, as they used to say, a “man-made” disaster.


	For the orthodox and their leaders to exempt themselves of all responsibility for the suffering that ensued because of their choices by blaming it on some impersonal “pandemic” further underscores their character deficiencies. This is bad faith. It is cowardice. &nbsp;


	While those who the COVID orthodox contemptuously refer to as “anti-maskers” and “anti-vaxxers” would’ve spared the world this disaster, the converse is equally true: The orthodox own the astronomical number of casualties claimed by it.


	Of course, it’s correct that the culpability of the masses is not remotely as great as that of the power-brokers and influencers who exploited their ignorance and their susceptibility to fear. The fear-mongers in the government, the media, the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical industry are guilty for crimes against humanity, and their guilt is incalculable. The guilt of those who they manipulated and who have convinced themselves of the truth of the lies propagated by their leaders is not categorical. Still, given both the literacy and the information available to Americans in the 21st century, there are no exculpatory considerations that can relieve the orthodox of all responsibility for the readiness with which they continue to unquestioningly treat as dogma every new decree—however blatantly it contradicts other decrees—that issues forth from the guardians of the COVID narrative.


	The bottom line is that the COVID orthodox don’t have the moral high-ground. They squandered it a long time ago, and continue to prove that they have no claim to it. It is those who they demonized and continue to demonize, those who held fast, who refused to indulge the Spirit of Fear, who affirmed their own moral agency and did what was in their power to prevent or stop the suffering to which others were being subjected that have the moral capital.


	Both positions, both responses to COVID, are moral responses. The decision to wear a mask or not, to “socially distance” or not, to favor vaccine and mask mandates or not—these are moral decisions. As such, they reveal the character of the person making them.


	All of this must be borne in mind the next time a politician, a career bureaucrat, a media figure, an entertainer, or a relative tries to shame you for challenging, say, the word of Dr. Fauci.


	It is they who must live with the shame for the harm for which they are responsible.

COVID and the Moral High Ground

In the name of combating a corona cold virus, power-wielding elitists have upended not just our own society, but the operations of the world.


	And yet, 21

COVID: The Surreal World of 'Cases' and Fear-Porn

Since early on in 2020, particularly since March, the world has been incessantly besieged by politicians, career-bureaucrats, and media personalities who

In what can only be described as a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0r10OWrBqg">devastating takedown</a>, Jim Jordan recently exposed Anthony Fauci for who and what he really is.


	And that is what the late Karry Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Science and inventor of the very PCR test that is now regarded (erroneously) as “the gold standard” of COVID testing, once also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTWN_PJ8t2o">called Fauci out</a> for being: a fraud.


	Jordan noted that those states with relaxed COVID restrictions, those that essentially told Fauci, Biden, and all architects of OPERATION FEAR to go pound sand, had dramatically lower COVID case numbers than those with mask mandates and other rigorous “Social Distancing” requirements.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Shockingly—though not surprisingly—Fauci at first acted as if he was unaware of this reality. This in and of itself should be all of the proof in the world that Mullis’s estimation of America’s favorite celebrity doctor couldn’t have been more on point. Yet then Fauci further revealed his true agenda by hypothesizing, incredulously, that the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon to which Jordan alluded could be resolved by noting the distinction between the theoretical and the practical: 


	In Fauci's fantasy world: While the deep blue states—those that have adopted Faucism as their modus operandi—are officially lockdown states, unofficially they are nothing of the kind, for their residents have refused to observe restrictions. In contrast, while the red states have officially been anti-Faucist, in practice their residents have studiously taken it upon themselves to wear masks and subscribe to all “Social Distancing” rules of etiquette.


	Translation of Fauci's fantasy world: 


	It is really New Yorkers, New Jerseyans, Pennsylvanians, Californians, and so forth who never took this COVID thing seriously; it is they who have conducted themselves “recklessly” and who are responsible for having prolonged “the Pandemic.”&nbsp; 


	Conversely, it is the residents of Texas, Florida, South Dakota, and all of those Trump-friendly states—you know, those whom Faucists have been calling “COVID Deniers” since March of 2020—who have slowed the spread by bunkering down in their homes, wearing their masks, and remaining six feet apart from one another.&nbsp; 


	Indeed: If only all of those Democrats in the Faucist states followed the lead of the anti-Faucists in the Republican states, we would have been out of this whole Pandemic thing in no time!


	Blatantly contradicting, as it does, the Narrative that the Faucists have been perpetuating for the last year, Fauci’s attempt to recover from Jordan’s strike is laughable on its face. And Jordan deserves much credit for drawing Fauci’s and the nation’s attention to the indisputable facts.


	Unlike Jordan, however, most Republicans have done little to undercut Faucism. Many, in fact, have facilitated the Lie. In so doing, they are no less responsible for the immeasurable harm of every kind that has befallen the citizens of this country, as well as those citizens of other countries who have suffered because America was made to suffer.


	The facts that I have revealed in my numerous essays on COVID are available to all. They need only be sought out. It is to the eternal shame of many Republican politicians and conservative commentators that they haven’t been blasting these facts to the world at every turn. Instead, in order to appear as if they are a genuine opposition party, they simply blame China for having unleashed “the Virus” upon the planet, or something to this effect.


	Bad move. And not an especially brave one either.&nbsp;


	The only thing that this line accomplishes is that it furthers the Lie, the apocalyptic fiction that, as President Trump used to say, SARS-CoV-2 is “the Plague.” This would be just plain silly if it didn’t feed into a tale that has had catastrophic effects for possibly billions of men, women, and children the world over.


	Many Republicans and conservatives stand convicted for their failure to fight when their moment of truth arrived. The damage that has ensued as a result is done. Still, now they can at least try to redeem themselves by standing up. They can, they must, talk, and talk incessantly, about the following:


	(1) SARS-CoV-2 appears <a href="https://andrewkaufmanmd.com/sovi">never</a> to have been isolated, purified, and extracted according to precisely that scientific method for isolating, purifying, and extracting bacteriophages and other “giant viruses” that has been established for decades (and <a href="https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/04/21/isolation-of-sars-cov-2-refuted-in-step-by-step-analysis-of-claim/">here</a>);


	(2) SARS-CoV-2 has never been scientifically demonstrated to be the cause of what has been known as “COVID-19;”


	(3) It was only in 2020 that the CDC, for the first time ever, decided to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/">radically redefine</a> a “case” to mean, not someone with a virus or disease that gets sick and is actually in need of medical attention, but, rather, anyone who either tests positive or is <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf">presumed</a> to be positive (see also <a href="https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/case-definition/2020/08/05/">here</a>). This switch, itself suspicious, obviously has the effect of inflating “case numbers” exponentially;


	(4) That deaths in all other categories from which people die each year are dramatically down just in proportion to the rise in COVID deaths, and that there is no appreciable number of overall excess deaths relative to preceding years reveal that deaths from influenza, pneumonia, heart disease, and other respiratory illnesses have been <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tnb1a8TXHj_jJCM2BDfGSriUgdn-2gec/view">reclassified</a> as COVID deaths;


	(5) The so-called PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) “test” is not really a test at all but, rather, a procedure or technique that its own inventor (and vehement <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chRVZ1V7Y1s">anti-Faucist</a>), Karry Mullis, himself denied was <a href="https://uncoverdc.com/2020/04/07/was-the-covid-19-test-meant-to-detect-a-virus/">meant to test for viral infection</a>.&nbsp; The PCR instead is a manufacturing technique meant to replicate and amplify DNA sequences; it is not a diagnostic tool;


	(5) As such prestigious Faucist organs as the New York Times itself <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html">concedes</a>—and as even <a href="https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/newly-surfaced-video-july-fauci-tests-dead-virus">Fauci himself</a> concedes!—the sensitivity and the manner in which, per the CDC and the FDA, the PCR is routinely administered guarantees that it will produce, as it has in fact produced, an astronomical rate of false-positives.&nbsp; It wouldn’t hurt for Republicans to as well note another <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/health/22whoop.html">New York Times</a> article—from the pre-COVID era, naturally—detailing how reliance on the PCR can and has led to pseudo-epidemics (A prominent French researcher shows the worthlessness of the PCR <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491/5912603">here</a>);


	(6) Study after study that has depended upon not just one, but multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs)—which, given the RCT’s power to curb the confirmation bias of researchers, is the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6235704/">gold standard</a> of scientific research—have repeatedly demonstrated the ineffectiveness of masks when it comes to stopping the spread of both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 (see <a href="https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article">here</a>, <a href="https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817">here</a>, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0240287">here</a>, <a href="https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/covid-19-face-masks-community-first-update.pdf">here</a>, <a href="https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/">here</a>, <a href="https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses">here</a>, <a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data">here</a>, <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372">here</a>, <a href="https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577">here</a>,&nbsp; <a href="https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.1055/a-1174-6591">here</a>, and most recently, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7680614/">this paper</a> that as well underscores the deleterious physiological and psychological ramifications of masks);


	We could continue. The bottom line is that most Republican politicians and conservative commentators have dropped the ball. Bigly.


	It is now time for them to go into overdrive exposing the truths obscured by what is one of the biggest and most destructive of Big Lies of our lifetime.&nbsp;

How Conservatives Have Failed to Expose Faucism

In what can only be described as a devastating takedown, Jim Jordan recently exposed Anthony Fauci for who and what he really is.


	And that is what the

In previous essays, I argued for three theses against the prevailing COVID Orthodoxy:


	(1) SARS-CoV-2 has <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/scientific-method-and-covid-19-jack-kerwick/">never been</a> isolated, purified, and extracted in accordance with the scientific method that has long been in place for isolating, purifying, and extracting other viruses (like bacteriophages and “giant viruses”), and neither has the scientific method been observed with respect to establishing whether this virus is in fact the cause of a disease called “COVID-19.”


	(2) The explosion of COVID “cases” is <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/covid-testing-how-reliable-pcr-test-jack-kerwick/">an illusion</a> generated by a combination of two things: (a) the redefining of a “case” from meaning “infection in need of medical attention”—which is how it was defined in the pre-COVID era—to meaning “anyone who is presumed to have, or to have had, COVID and/or anyone who tests positive for COVID” plus (b) an intrinsically limited PCR test that is deliberately run at a number of cycles guaranteed to produce a tsunami of false-positives.


	The official case numbers, in other words, are meaningless.


	(3) People are getting sick and dying from all manner of things from which people get sick and die each and every year.&nbsp; Only throughout this past year, these causes of sickness and death have been <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/all-those-covid-deaths-jack-kerwick/">repackaged as COVID</a> sickness and death.


	In this essay, we will revisit the topic of masks.&nbsp; I’ve already written about the psychological, moral, and social costs of mask-wearing.&nbsp; Here, I will focus specifically on the science—or lack of science—behind it.


	Scientists recognize that the RCT—Randomized Control Trial—is the “gold standard” as far as “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6235704/">effectiveness research</a>” is concerned.&nbsp; Drs. Eduardo Hariton and Joseph J. Locasio explain that randomization “reduces bias” while providing “a rigorous tool” by which “to examine cause-effect relationships between an intervention and outcome.”&nbsp; RCTs eliminate the risk of confirmation bias, something that is “not possible with any other study design” (emphases added).


	This is critical for our purposes, for the largest study of the effectiveness of mask-wearing by the general public to thwart the transmission of COVID utilized not one, not two, not three, but a staggering 14 randomized control trials.&nbsp;


	The study was performed at the University of Hong Kong.&nbsp; What Dr. Jingyi Xiao and her team of researchers there concluded will doubtless be written off as the stuff of “conspiracy theorists” by <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/mask-nation-and-experts-jack-kerwick/">Mask Nation</a>.&nbsp; So be it.&nbsp; But those on the editorial board of <a href="https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article">Emerging Infectious Diseases</a>, the widely esteemed journal of none other than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), determined that the findings were worth publishing.


	The verdict: Masks are ineffective.


	“We found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks.&nbsp; There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure.”


	To reiterate:


	“Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory confirmed influenza.”


	A Danish randomized control trial of <a href="https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817">6,000 participants</a> arrived at the same conclusion: “The recommendation to wear surgical masks…did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers [.]” &nbsp;


	An even larger RTC of <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0240287">8,000 participants</a> found that “facemask use did not seem to be effective against laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections nor against clinical respiratory infection [.]”


	Just a month ago as of this writing, the European Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) <a href="https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/covid-19-face-masks-community-first-update.pdf">acknowledged</a> precisely the point on which the findings of these other studies converge: Masks, particularly as worn by the general public, have no statistically significant effect upon the transmission of virus and disease.&nbsp; It is worth looking carefully at its remarks.


	First, the ECDC affirms that the role of face masks vis-à-vis slowing the spread of COVID “remains an issue of debate.”&nbsp; This is noteworthy, for even though all of the best, the real, the non-politicized science points inexorably to the uselessness of face masks, at least the folks at the ECDC, who do in fact know a bit more about science than the self-styled guardians of the Narrative among the vulgar who are forever swearing that “the science is settled,” concede that the science is anything but what Mask Nation insists it is.


	Second, the ECDC also acknowledges that up until the COVID era, all studies assessing the effectiveness of face mask use by the public “came from studies on influenza,” and all such studies turned up “little evidence to support their use.”&nbsp;


	Before proceeding, we should think about this for a moment.&nbsp; Presumably, scientists know that there is no scientific evidence that face mask use helped to slow, much less arrest, the transmission of influenza.&nbsp; If, though, we are now expected to believe that face mask use will arrest the transmission of COVID, wouldn’t this be a tacit admission that the flu is a larger threat to public health than COVID?&nbsp; And if this is correct, then what science could possibly justify responding to COVID as if it is the Apocalypse while living life each and every year in the face of a more formidable flu?


	But let’s move on, for the ECDC, albeit coyly, admits that neither is there evidence that face mask use helps stop the spread of COVID.&nbsp;&nbsp; While stating that the “evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect,” this remark is immediately qualified by its admission that “there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect.”&nbsp;


	Moreover: “Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty” (emphases added).


	Translation: There is no real or substantial evidence that masks are of any effect.


	The authors of a review of studies on face masks published last year by the <a href="https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/">Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine</a> determined that there is no evidence indicating the effectiveness of cloth masks when it comes to COVID.&nbsp; They lament how the “abandonment of the scientific modus operandi and lack of foresight has left the field [of science] wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence.”


	The authors, one an epidemiologist, the other a professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, do note that all randomized control trials that have been conducted over the last decade or so have demonstrated that “masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI [Influenza-Like-Illness] or influenza” in neither “the general population…nor in healthcare workers” (emphases added).


	We could continue in this same repetitive vein.&nbsp; Readers who are interested in pursuing this topic further can check out this <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/mask-madness-jack-kerwick/">piece</a> of mine from October of last year. I review still other studies there, including remarks from such media-adored “Experts” as Anthony Fauci that dovetail seamlessly with these findings on the essential uselessness of masks with respect to COVID.&nbsp;&nbsp; More research confirming these findings are <a href="https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses">here</a>, <a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data">here</a>, <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372">here</a>, <a href="https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577">here</a>, and <a href="https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.1055/a-1174-6591">here</a>.&nbsp; Neither have we yet touched upon the numerous studies showing that countries and states with mask mandates did no better and, in some instances, <a href="https://sentinelksmo.org/more-deception-kdhe-hid-data-to-justify-mask-mandate/">worse</a> than those places that had no such mandates.&nbsp; Nor have we looked at those studies demonstrating that those who faithfully wore masks were not less likely to contract COVID than those who did not wear masks, with some of these—like this <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6936a5-H.pdf#page=4">one</a> from the CDC—showing that most people who became infected with COVID wore a mask “always” or “often.” &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The science, it should now be obvious, does not support Mask dogma.


	&nbsp;

Masks and Stopping COVID

In previous essays, I argued for three theses against the prevailing COVID Orthodoxy:


	(1) SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, and extracted in

In this series of articles on The Virus, I’ve been exposing the gaping holes in various aspects of the Narrative.&nbsp;


	If SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, and extracted according to the scientific procedures that have long been in place for isolating, purifying, and extracting bacteriophages and other “giant viruses,” then two questions need to be asked and answered:


	(1) What accounts for the endless stream of COVID cases upon which Big Media has been breathlessly reporting for the last year?


	(2) From what are all of these people getting sick and dying?


	In my last essay, I answered (1). Here, I address (2).


	COVID Sickness and Death?


	As I showed in my last piece,<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/covid-testing-how-reliable-pcr-test-jack-kerwick/"> the PCR test</a>, as its inventor, Karry Mullis conceded, was never intended to quantify viral loads. “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron,” he said. So, the PCR test—the only test, beyond the bare presumption of doctors examining patients, used to identify COVID cases—is intrinsically and significantly limited. But as it has been implemented in practice, per the recommendation of the CDC, it is worthless.


	Labs typically run the test at 40 cycles—which is guaranteed to produce false-positives.&nbsp;


	So, doctors’ guesses that patients have COVID (a guess that promises to return more money to hospitals than they would have received had these physicians not diagnosed their patients with COVID), plus a geyser of false-positive test results equals…an explosion of COVID cases.


	There’s more, though, and it is not difficult to figure out.


	Given this formula, and, importantly, given the loose, glaringly non-unique and non-specific symptoms that are assigned to COVID-19, it is the easiest thing for “Experts” to bundle together illnesses with these symptoms from which people have been getting sick and/or dying since forever and repackage them under a single label: COVID-19.


	Think about it: a cough, running nose, sore throat, chills, chest congestion, fever, loss of taste and smell—these are all symptoms of a plethora of things, from the common cold to seasonal influenza and a whole lot else. Particularly since the vast majority of COVID cases are “mild,” it’s with the greatest of ease that any single one of these symptoms or any number of combinations of them can be used as a pretext by which to establish a “COVID case.”


	This is not necessarily to say that the symptoms in question are not signs of COVID or the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is claimed to be its cause. It’s only to note that in the absence of scientifically confirming definitively that (a) there is a unique strain of a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, (b) that it is the cause of something called COVID-19, and that, (3) given the scandalously unreliable PCR test, people do in fact have COVID, symptoms that are associated with the latter are more economically, more plausibly explained by way of reference to illnesses that have long been with us.


	The Principle of Parsimony—better known since the 14th century as “Ockham’s Razor”—applies: When confronted with two or more explanatory hypotheses, all things being equal, reason dictates that we opt for the one that is simplest. 


	Since many of the symptoms now being associated with COVID until recently were explained in terms of, say, the flu, and, given the foregoing facts regarding the science—or lack of science—behind the COVID&nbsp;Narrative, it makes better sense to continue explaining those symptoms in terms of the flu.


	Indeed, there is no doubt that a great shell game has been transpiring for a year now as cases of various illnesses have been re-labeled as COVID cases.


	And sometimes we have to thank the most unwitting actors for revealing these unpopular truths.


	For example, over at John Hopkins University, Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s program, <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tnb1a8TXHj_jJCM2BDfGSriUgdn-2gec/view">used data</a> from the CDC to analyze the effect of COVID-19 deaths in America on all other deaths. Reasonably enough, she had expected to witness a substantial number of excess deaths in 2020, i.e. deaths by all other causes plus the orgy of COVID deaths with which politicians and those in the media had been singularly preoccupied.


	She was mistaken. Sorely mistaken.


	Yanni Gu, a writer for the university’s student newspaper, reports: “Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19.”


	This was surprising because COVID (not unlike virtually everything else) overwhelmingly affects elderly people. Thus, “experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data.” Furthermore, “the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same” (emphases added).


	Whoa. Briand would soon discover that the plot was just beginning to thicken. What the “data analyzes suggest,” Gu writes, is “that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States” (emphases added).


	Wait—what?! But how is this possible? Are the faculty, staff, and students at John Hopkins University a bunch of “conspiracy nuts”??


	Nope. There is a perfectly rational, and simple, explanation to account for the unbridgeable chasm between the media-concocted perception of COVID and the reality that Briand discovered:


	Deaths from all other causes were being re-classified—misclassified—as death from COVID.


	And how did Briand determine this? For the first time ever, deaths from all other causes—heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza, and pneumonia—decreased.&nbsp; 


	Especially shocking was the realization that heart disease, which has always been the number one killer in America, appeared to have suddenly lost that distinction with the onset of COVID.


	Moreover, deaths from all other causes decreased just in proportion to the extent to which COVID deaths increased. “This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly…the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19.”&nbsp;


	Briand concludes that “deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be recategorized as being due to COVID-19,” Gu informs us.


	In response to being asked whether she thought that other diseases were being relabeled as COVID, Briand replied that unless this was the case, “what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers” (emphases added).


	She reiterated her findings: “But a decreased number of heart attacks and all other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification.”


	Within 24 or so hours of the publication of the article relaying Genevieve Briand’s discoveries, the student paper at John Hopkins University retracted it. They never, however, denied the truth of a single syllable of either Briand’s analysis nor its summary of it.&nbsp; That it was political pressure, and not shoddy scholarship that informed its decision is clear, for the school paper saved its article in a PDF file (to which I link above) for all of the world to read.


	This essay and the last two should suffice to convince readers that, at the very least, the conventional COVID Narrative is flawed from first to last. A brief summary:


	(1) No isolation, purification, and extraction of a unique virus, and no scientific confirmation that it is the cause of a unique disease.


	(2) Take presumption, an intrinsically unreliable test guaranteed to pump out false positives like they’re going out of style, and the redefinition of “cases” to mean anyone who tests positive via this unreliable test and together they yield…an explosion of virus “cases.”


	(3) Take an exceedingly and ever expanding loose definition of COVID combined with the re-labeling of deaths from other diseases as COVID and we get a “pandemic” of Virus deaths.


	The evidence is ubiquitous. We need only look. &nbsp;

All of those COVID Deaths

In this series of articles on The Virus, I’ve been exposing the gaping holes in various aspects of the Narrative.&nbsp;


	If SARS-CoV-2 has never been

In a recent essay, I argued that neither SARS-CoV-2, “the Coronavirus,” nor its causal connection to the disease known as COVID-19 have been established according to the scientific protocols that have long been in place to demonstrate these sorts of things.


	Skeptics will ask two questions:


	(1)How do you explain all of these people testing positive for COVID?


	(2) From what are all of these people getting sick and dying?


	Good questions.&nbsp; In this essay, we’ll answer the first.&nbsp; The second will be addressed in a future essay.&nbsp;


	TESTING POSITIVE for COVID


	For starters, some people, particularly in the first few months of this lamentable chapter in our country’s history, were not tested at all.&nbsp; Doctors were instructed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to identify COVID patients on <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf">the presumption</a> that they had the virus.&nbsp; Hospitals that had prepared for an onslaught of COVID patients by suspending the operations and procedures that would’ve otherwise been performed for patients with other life-threatening illnesses prepared for a flood of patients that never materialized.&nbsp;


	Thus, with emergency rooms across the country devoid of the usual flow of traffic, administrators had that much more of <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/">a financial incentive</a> to follow the CDC’s guideline, for they received $13,000 for each COVID patient and $39,000 for each COVID patient that they placed on a ventilator.


	Let’s, however, put all of this aside and consider the test, the PCR test that is used to determine COVID cases.


	Right from the jump, it’s crucial to take note of the fact that for the first time ever, beginning just last year, “cases” was radically redefined in such a way that would have been unthinkable in just February of 2020 (one month before The Virus Apocalypse engulfed the universe).&nbsp;


	For starters, as indicated above, many of these “cases,” per the CDC, included those patients who were labeled as “<a href="https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/case-definition/2020/08/05/">probable</a>” carriers of the virus.&nbsp; This means that they were diagnosed as “cases” in the absence of any “confirmatory laboratory testing.”&nbsp; And yet they were identified as COVID “cases.” &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Moreover, even when testing is figured into it, with respect to no other virus or disease has the CDC ever counted as a “case” a merely positive test.&nbsp; A positive test, in other words, has never been regarded by the medical establishment as sufficient grounds upon which to determine a “case.” Rather, in order for something to count as a “case,” a person had to have been sick and in need of medical attention like, say, hospitalization.


	In the COVID era, however, the CDC began accumulating positive PCR test results (about more of which will be said below) from people the vast majority of whom are “asymptomatic,” meaning they feel just fine, and combining them with positive antibodies tests from people who also feel just fine: The final sum, this compound, comprises all “cases.”&nbsp;


	Even The Atlantic, in its piece, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/">“How Could the CDC make that Mistake?”</a> had to concede (in so many words) that this, at the very least, was anything but a scientific way of counting “cases.”


	What The Atlantic did not acknowledge, though, is that the CDC’s manner of counting COVID cases is as rational as any other numbers cooking scheme. Furthermore, it did indeed prove wildly successful in conveying the impression to a scientifically illiterate public that case numbers were exploding.&nbsp;


	Now, as for those PCR tests: There are two problems.


	First, as Karry Mullis bluntly remarked: “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.”&nbsp; Who was Karry Mullis?&nbsp; He was the inventor of the PCR test.&nbsp; And he won a Nobel Prize in Science for this achievement.&nbsp; What did the late Dr. Mullis—who, interestingly (but unsurprisingly), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqQIY7J0fQ">contemptuously</a> characterized Anthony Fauci as an incompetent, a fraud, and a liar “who doesn’t know anything about anything, and I’d say that to his face!”—mean by his characterization of his own invention?&nbsp;


	In 1996 Mullis was among those to be interviewed by <a href="http://www.virusmyth.org/aids/hiv/jlprotease.htm">John Lauritsen</a> (an Emmy award-winning reporter who <a href="http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/">self-describes</a> himself as having been, during the course of his life, an “anti-war activist, a gay liberationist, an AIDS dissident, a publisher, and an all-around free thinker.”


	Obviously, the discussion was not about SARS-CoV-2 and whether it is the cause of COVID-19.&nbsp; Rather, it was about HIV and whether it caused AIDS.&nbsp; Mullis, like Lauritsen and the other scientists covered in Lauritsen’s essay, staunchly rejected the dominant thesis.&nbsp; Lauritsen explains why Mullis denied that his own test could detect HIV.&nbsp; The reasons for its failure to detect HIV are one and the same reasons for its failure to detect SARS-CoV-2.&nbsp; It’s worth quoting him at length:


	“PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers [of viruses].&nbsp; Although there is a common misimpression that the viral load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV.&nbsp; The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves” (emphases added).


	Lauitsen explains further:


	“What PCR does is to select a genetic sequence and then amplify it enormously.&nbsp; It can accomplish the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack; it can amplify that needle into a haystack. Like an electronically amplified antenna, PCR greatly amplified the signal, but it also greatly amplifies the noise” (emphases added).


	What this implies is that given that “the amplification is exponential, the slightest error in measurement, the slightest contamination, can result in errors of many orders of magnitude.”


	Lauristsen makes an analogy.&nbsp; “[Using] the viral load tests to gauge viral activity would be like finding a few fingernail clippings; amplifying the fingernail clippings into a small mountain of fingernail clippings mixed in with other junk; and then having an ‘expert’ come along and interpret the pile as representing a platoon of soldiers, fully armed and ready for battle.”


	He concludes: “In short, the viral load tests are a scam.”


	To be clear, this is the position of Lauritsen, yes, but as well of Karry Mullis, inventor of the PCR test that is now being treated as the gold standard of COVID testing.


	There is still another problem with the PCR test as it is currently being used that guarantees its utter worthlessness.&nbsp; More exactly, that guarantees that the “case” numbers built upon it are wholly inaccurate and, hence, meaningless.


	This past fall, none other than the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html">noted</a> that possibly as high as 90% of all positive test results are false. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Per the CDC and FDA guidelines, the vast majority of PCR tests are run at a threshold of 40 cycles.&nbsp; Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist from Harvard who is quoted in the Times piece, notes that when PCR tests are run at 35 or more cycles, they “may detect not just live virus but also live fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risks—akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.” &nbsp;


	Julia Morrison, a virologist at the University of California who is also featured in this expose of the inadequacies of present PCR testing, is blunt:


	“I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive.”


	Dr. Morrison insists that 30 to 35 would be a “more reasonable cutoff [.]” Dr. Mina said that he “would set the figure at 30, or even less.”


	Most people aren’t aware of this, but the lowering of the threshold of cycles from 40 to a figure comparable to that which Drs. Morrison and Mina prescribe translates into an enormous difference.


	“Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive-result—or at least one worth acting on” (emphasis added). &nbsp;&nbsp;


	To what should be a surprise to no one, the Times piece informs us that Drs. Mina and Morrison “and other researchers are questioning the use of PCR tests as a frontline diagnostic tool.”


	The French researcher Didier Raoult has <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491/5912603">shown</a> that when the PCR test is run at 25 cycles, about 70% of samples were genuinely positive—meaning infectious.&nbsp; However, when the test is run at a threshold of 30 cycles, only 20% of samples were infectious.&nbsp; At 35 cycles, but three percent of samples were infectious.


	And when the test was run above 35 cycles?


	Zero samples were infectious.


	Even Anthony Fauci, back in July and while on the science podcast of Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello, <a href="https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/newly-surfaced-video-july-fauci-tests-dead-virus">admitted</a> that the prevailing standard supplies bogus results. Fauci stated:


	“What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard” is that “if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more…the chances of it being replication-confident [a true, as opposed to a false, positive] are miniscule.”


	Fauci adds that it’s “very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians” when a test is run at a cycle threshold of, like, “37,” for “you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle.”&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;


	Fauci concludes: “So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it’s just dead nucleotides, period” (emphases added).


	Translation: False positive.


	And, thus, meaningless.


	Yet if the COVID case numbers mean nothing, if they are all cooked, inflated by orders of magnitude, then of what are all of these people getting sick and dying?&nbsp;


	This is the question to which we will turn in the next article.

The Peculiar PCR Test

In a recent essay, I argued that neither SARS-CoV-2, “the Coronavirus,” nor its causal connection to the disease known as COVID-19 have been established

Recently, I had a conversation with someone who endorses the conventional wisdom on COVID. The woman was friendly and intelligent. However, as readers of this column know, I have been at pains over the last year to expose, by way of at least a couple of dozen essays, the flagrant contradictions, misconceptions, unsubstantiated claims, and outright lies that constitute the Official Narrative. &nbsp;


	So, the friendly and intelligent women and I disagreed.


	Upon questioning whether I was among those who denied the very existence of COVID, I replied that while I wasn’t necessarily prepared to explicitly deny it, neither am I willing to resolutely affirm it. Is SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is said to be the cause of COVID-19, a real thing? To know for certain that it exists, one must follow the science.&nbsp;


	Has the existence of “the Virus” been established according to a universally acknowledged set of scientific procedures that must be observed to establish the existence of any and all other viruses?&nbsp;


	From the sounds of it, the answer is a resounding no.


	Dr. Tom Cowan, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and Sally Fallon Morell, are among those who have <a href="https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/02/26/covid-the-virus-was-never-proven-to-exist-a-statement/">noted</a> in a paper published last year that in demonstrating the existence of a new virus, samples must, firstly, be taken from the blood, phlegm, or other secretions of hundreds of people exhibiting symptoms that are “unique and specific enough to characterize an illness.”


	Then, “without mixing these samples with ANY tissue or products that also contain genetic material, the virologist macerates, filters, and ultracentrifuges, i.e. purifies the specimen.” This, the authors explain, is a “common virology technique, done for decades to isolate bacteriophages [viruses that infect bacteria and reproduce within them] and so-called giant viruses [a virus larger than typical bacteria].”&nbsp;


	Thirdly, once virologists perform this procedure, they are then able to “demonstrate with electron microscopy thousands of identically sized and shaped particles.”&nbsp; The latter are “the isolated and purified virus.”&nbsp;


	Fourthly, upon determining the purity of these particles, virologists are able to examine their “structure, morphology, and chemical composition [.]”


	Fifthly, “the genetic makeup” of the particles [the virus] “is characterized by extracting the genetic material directly from” them and “using genetic-sequencing techniques” that have long been in existence.


	Finally, an analysis must be conducted to prove that “these uniform particles are exogenous (outside) in origin” as viruses are held to be and not just “the normal breakdown of products of dead and dying tissues.”


	The authors conclude: “If we have come this far then we have fully isolated, characterized, genetically-sequenced an exogenous virus particle” (all emphases in the foregoing quotations added).


	They add that nowhere in the literature does it show that any of these steps have been taken with respect to SARS-CoV-2.


	Neither—and this is crucial—have the scientific steps for determining that SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of a disease, COVID-19, been taken.&nbsp; What are these steps? There really isn’t much to it:


	A group of healthy subjects, typically animals, is first exposed to “this isolated, purified virus in the manner in which the disease is thought to be transmitted.”


	Subsequently, virologists will wait to determine whether these subjects fall ill with “the same disease, as confirmed by clinical and autopsy findings [.]”&nbsp; If so, “one has now shown that the virus actually causes a disease.”&nbsp; In other words, the “infectivity and transmission of an infectious agent” will have been demonstrated.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Again, according to the authors, nothing like this has been performed to show that there is a virus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes what has become known as COVID-19.


	An ever growing number of <a href="https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/fois-reveal-that-health-science-institutions-around-the-world-have-no-record-of-sars-cov-2-isolation-purification/">citizen journalists</a> in over ten different countries from around the world have, via the Freedom of Information Acts of their respective homes, requested from scores of health agencies an account of the process by which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated (i.e. separated out from all other stuff). To date, <a href="https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/fois-reveal-that-health-science-institutions-around-the-world-have-no-record-of-sars-cov-2-isolation-purification/">no account has been provided</a>.


	To repeat, I’m not willing to say that there is no SARS-CoV-2 and that it is not the cause of COVID-19. Just because something hasn’t been proven doesn’t mean that it has been proven not to exist. It is, however, worth noting, particularly for those who are fond of advertising their self-styled commitment to Science, that the scientific method that exists for determining the existence of viruses and their causal connection to diseases has apparently not been observed here. There are lots of assumptions, perhaps even some reasonable assumptions.&nbsp;


	Yet the Science to which the guardians and promoters of the Official COVID Narrative are forever appealing they would have the rest of us think is an infallible set of stone-cold objective truths—not assumptions.


	But if all of this is true, some may be inclined to ask, then how is it that the PCR test has determined so many cases, and what is it from which so many people have gotten sick and died?&nbsp; In future articles, both of these questions will be answered. &nbsp;

The Scientific Method and Covid-19

Recently, I had a conversation with someone who endorses the conventional wisdom on COVID. The woman was friendly and intelligent. However, as readers of this

As Christians the world over prepare during this Lenten season to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, the Victory of Eternal Life over Death, they will be reflecting on how this miraculous event, more than any other, is the foundation upon which their faith -- their very worldview -- is grounded.


	Christians have, of course, celebrated Easter in many times of crisis in the past. They have been doing as much from the very inception of Christianity.&nbsp; The difference today, though, is that in the past, the disciples of Jesus had just cause to fear for their lives. Their fears, that is, were legitimate and reasonable.&nbsp;


	Matters are dramatically otherwise for the overwhelming majority of human beings in the era of COVID.


	In other words, it is one thing to worship with fellow believers in the catacombs from fear that doing so publicly will get you murdered by the enemies of your faith. It’s another thing entirely for Christianity's leaders to close the doors to their Church because they fear contracting what is claimed to be a cold virus from which, even according to the official narrative, 99.5-99.9% of those diagnosed recover.


	Of course, it isn’t just COVID, but an endless plethora of all kinds of irrationalities and lies that the world promulgates and against which Christians must always remain vigilant. These days leading to Easter can be an occasion for Christians to remind themselves of something:


	As the evangelist memorably informs us in the prologue to the fourth gospel, Jesus is the Logos of God.&nbsp;


	In the English-speaking world, readers of the Bible are accustomed to reading in place of “Logos” the term “Word.”&nbsp; “Logos,” it’s important to note, is a Greek term that was employed by pre-Christian Hellenic philosophers, and it was used to refer to what they took to be the rational, orderly structure of the cosmos.


	Christians meant to say essentially the same thing, only for Christians, it is not some abstract, impersonal principle or force that gives shape, purpose, and meaning to the world, but a person. More specifically, it is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ, who holds this distinction.


	The cosmos is rational, possessing an infinitely complex order, because it was issued by and continues to issue forth courtesy of the Logos of God, the Word of God Himself: Christ. This has implications that are all too frequently lost upon Christians no less than upon anyone else. These implications are at once ontological or metaphysical (they express the nature of ultimate reality, of what is) and ethical (they are normative, prescribing for humans how they ought to live).


	To embrace Christ is to embrace Reason. It is to embrace Truth.


	We need to reflect upon this for a moment. If atheists are correct and there is no God, then the world—being, at bottom, a contingent complex of matter in motion—is value-neutral.&nbsp; Values, such as truth, justice, goodness, beauty, and all of their variants, are the function of consciousness, of mind, of spirit, of…persons.&nbsp;


	Now, no one denies that human beings are persons, embodiments of consciousness (despite the fact that atheistic philosophers continue to agonize over how to account for the phenomenon of consciousness in a materialistic universe). Yet in the atheist’s scheme, what this must mean is that values are inventions that humans project onto their surroundings. Sure, we talk as if truth, courage, compassion and all of that nice-sounding stuff were part of the furniture of the world. The reality, though, is that they are no more features of the cosmos than are deliciousness, say, or any fictional character.


	Yet every time anyone, including the atheist who insists that his position is the correct one, references truth (to say nothing of other values), that person rejects atheism and the purely materialistic, naturalistic conception of the world that atheism entails.


	Every time a person references truth, he affirms Truth. To put it another way, if there are truths—finite, qualified, imperfect instances of truth—there ultimately must be infinite, absolute, perfect Truth upon which they depend and against the standard of which they are judged as true.&nbsp; 


	To say that a statement or theory or state of affairs is true is not to say, as some atheist-leaning theorists of knowledge (epistemologists) have insisted, that it is practical, utilitarian, coherent, or efficient. Lies can be practical, utilitarian, coherent, and efficient.


	To say that something is true is to say that it is what it is, irrespectively of whether it is popular, practical, utilitarian, coherent, or efficient. Now, it may be all of these things, but, if so, these are not essential to its being true.


	If there are truths, even if there is but a single finite truth in the whole world, it must ultimately be contingent upon infinite Truth, because whatever is contingent points, in the last analysis, beyond itself to that which is not contingent, to that which is necessary, infinite, absolute.


	And since truth is a value, and values are recognized, expressed, embodied, and assigned by persons, Truth is personal.&nbsp; Truth, that is, is a Person.


	Truth is real and it is not, then, the abstract, impersonal “Substance” or “Being” of monistic and pantheistic philosophers.&nbsp; Truth is intensely, thoroughly personal. It is a Person.It must be.


	No infinite, absolute, necessarily existing being? Then no finite, qualified, contingent beings. No infinite, absolute, necessary Truth? Then no finite, qualified, contingent truths.


	God is Truth. God is a Person. For the Christian, God, Truth, is Christ.


	From the Christian’s perspective, then, chaos is the only other alternative to Christ.


	Chaos, i.e. irrationality, lies, disorder—this is the choice, the only choice, for those who at least implicitly reject the Logos (Explicit disavowals of Christ, and even of God, as we see with atheist philosophers, scientists, and others, don’t necessarily mean that, at a subconscious level, Christ has been altogether denied; Truth, in the long run, can’t be rejected—even if it is ignored).


	Thus, as disciples of the Logos, we strive to know Truth in every fiber of our being, to embody it in heart, mind, body, and soul.&nbsp;


	And this in turn requires us to not only exercise critical intelligence and grow wise, but to be strong and brave, and in all dimensions of our lives: mentally, morally, and, yes, physically.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	This Lenten Season, perhaps more so than any in recent memory, let us, for God’s sake, for Truth’s sake, for our sake, recall that Christ is the Logos of God.

A Lenten Season Like No Other

As Christians the world over prepare during this Lenten season to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, the Victory of Eternal Life over Death, they will be

The 21st century inhabitants of the West treat the life that they enjoy as a given.&nbsp; This is especially true of Americas.


	What they fail to grasp is that as far as the history of the human race is concerned, and even relative to how much of the world continues to live, their civilization is an anomaly.&nbsp; This is both a blessing and a curse: While their achievements have been nothing short of miraculous, it is precisely because of the incalculable benefits that they’ve reaped from having constructed this envy of the world that they have become spectacularly forgetful of the realities of the human condition.


	The Western world is the planet’s version of Disney World.&nbsp; And the thinking that informs the former’s residents is no less wishful and fantastical than that which overcomes visitors to the latter. &nbsp;


	Even today, though, most human beings on the Earth haven’t the luxury of fabricating such ideologically-useful fantasies as “micro-aggressions” and the like over which to be aggrieved.&nbsp; They can’t afford to deny the self-evident tenuousness of the social order in which they find themselves and the ubiquity of the inhumanity with which all too many people treat others.&nbsp; The pseudo-sophistication that permits affluent Westerners to dismiss Good and Evil as the imaginary preoccupations of the superstitious and uneducated most of the rest of the planet, if they thought about it at all, would recognize as both demonstrably stupid and a fast track to certain death.


	Oppressed peoples—genuinely, truly oppressed peoples—are particularly astute when it comes to these matters.


	And, regardless of how politically inconvenient, from a contemporary Western perspective, it is to acknowledge this, the truth of the matter is that, globally speaking, there is no group of people more oppressed at the present moment than Christians. &nbsp;


	In <a href="https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/stories/13-days-of-darkness-with-islamic-terrorists/">Egypt</a>, back in August of last year, 68 year-old Bakhit Azis Georgi and his 35 year-old nephew, Youseff Samaan Girgis, were at Georgi’s place of business when several Islamic men kidnapped them at gunpoint.&nbsp;&nbsp; Upon forcing uncle and nephew into their truck, their Muslim abductors threatened to murder their Christian captives if they communicated at all with one another.


	Once darkness arrived, Georgi and Girgis were blindfolded.&nbsp; The truck continued moving along upon uneven terrain for the next two hours as their abductors called them “infidels” and accused them of having “defiled” themselves and their land.


	Georgi’s and Girgis’ family, you see, is the only Christian family in their town.&nbsp; And this is not the first time that their family has been targeted, for Osama, one of Georgi’s sons, had been kidnapped four years earlier.&nbsp; He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.


	Girgis spent the next 13 days in captivity blindfolded and bound.&nbsp; The only time at which the ropes around his wrists were loosened is when he was fed, once a day, a varying diet of bread, cheese, some water, and lentils. &nbsp;He slept on the ground.&nbsp;


	Given that he had no way to differentiate the day from the night, Girgis lost track of all time.&nbsp; His first night he spent crying and praying for deliverance.&nbsp; That Girgis is among millions, billions of human beings for whom evil is something that only one accustomed to the quality of life characteristic of Western societies could question is evident by the prayer that first sprung from his lips:&nbsp; &nbsp;


	“Oh God, be with me and my uncle, strengthen us, protect us, and rescue us from the hands of these wicked people.&nbsp; You are our protection.” &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Girgis’ faith sustained him as he was relentlessly mocked and insulted.&nbsp; “Every day was a nightmare.&nbsp; I couldn’t distinguish the day from the night.&nbsp; They insulted me continuously and treated me very badly. Plus, I was far from my family, I missed my children so much.”


	When Girgis asked if he could contact his children, “they refused and insulted me.”


	After 13 days, though, his prayers were answered.&nbsp; Girgis was driven to a desert not from his village and released.&nbsp; His uncle would be released 113 days after that.


	They and their family are convinced that they are targeted by Islamic militants because they are Christian.&nbsp; They are just as convinced that their attackers had no reservations about targeting them for the same reason that they have no reservations about attacking any of the Christians that they’ve targeted: This never a price that Muslims must pay for mistreating Christians.


	After all, as was already noted, Osama, one of Georgi’s sons and Girgis’ cousin, was kidnapped four years earlier.&nbsp; The police never did a thing.&nbsp;


	Moreover, throughout Egypt, Christians are subjected to the most brutal persecution.&nbsp; Within recent months, an Egyptian Christian woman named Jihan was besieged by no fewer than four men, her Muslim neighbors.&nbsp; The low lives were captured on video as they dragged her through the streets while pummeling her.&nbsp; All of the while, they hurled epithets at Jihan and threatened her with rape.


	Evidently, Jihan had been tormented prior to this.&nbsp; The local police urged her to install surveillance cameras at her home in order to deter any future attacks.&nbsp; This plan obviously backfired, for it was when her neighbors learned of it they became enraged and unleashed on her.


	The point is that they were about as deterred from treating Christians as non-persons as were the attackers of Georgi, his son, and his nephew.


	Evil is real.&nbsp; While it comes in a variety of forms, many of which are sufficiently subtle to legitimize debate over they are present in any given set of circumstances, for those on the receiving end of its most blatant manifestations—like Christians, the most oppressed group in the world today—it makes as much sense to debate its existence as it does to debate whether the moon is made of green cheese.

Egypt - Another Terrifying Case of Anti-Christian Persecution

The 21st century inhabitants of the West treat the life that they enjoy as a given.&nbsp; This is especially true of Americas.


	What they fail to grasp is

Since the COVID Scare began in March of 2020, I have been at pains to show how, from start to finish, The Narrative defies the facts, the science regarding the nature of the virus, the quality of the standard mode of testing for it, and the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of masks and all other “social distancing” protocols.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Here, though, I focus instead upon the profound, incalculable psychological damage that has been visited upon untold numbers of people in the name of combatting, not “the Plague,” as President Trump and, ironically, his enemies alike would have us think it is, but a corona cold virus with (at a minimum) a 99.5% survival rate.&nbsp;


	Even if, as I hope to demonstrate, the survival rate was appreciably lower; even if it was a death sentence for all who contracted it, the cost that millions were willing to pay to keep themselves safe from it was, as the economists would say, “prohibitive.”&nbsp;


	This is putting it mildly.


	Anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, loneliness, alienation, ostracism, rage—these are the dominant emotional states of the Age of the Great UnReason, the Age of COVID.&nbsp; They are pervasive, stemming, as they do, from the decimation of numerous jobs and businesses, the closing of schools, and the isolation mandated by all “Social Distancing” protocols.&nbsp; Families, friendships, romantic relationships, communities, and whole countries—all ruptured, quite possibly forever, courtesy of “restrictions” that have been implemented for the better part of a whole year now and on which far too many were all too eager to sign off.


	First, we need to be clear that for as common as it is to blame the pain and devastation of every sort that has been visited upon hundreds of millions of human beings around the planet upon “the Pandemic” or “the Virus,” these allusions to impersonal referents, however comforting, ultimately serve to acquit people of any and all responsibility for inflicting this damage upon themselves and one another:


	It is, to be certain, not some abstract or impersonal entity that accounts for the state of the world as we find it today (It is not that, as someone I know recently said to me, “the World has changed”); it is people, countless numbers of breathing, flesh and blood human beings, who, through their choices, produced the current situation with all of its pain for legions of men, women, and children.


	Second, we need to spell out precisely what has happened.&nbsp; It’s simple, really:


	Some people (unfortunately, millions) have chosen to “distance” themselves from friends, relatives, neighbors, and their fellow citizens generally simply and solely because of their fear of the possibility that they will be infected with a virus.&nbsp;


	Although they have no reason to think that those with whom they would ordinarily interact are sick or infected, they nevertheless believe that so long as just the possibility of contracting a virus exists, it is better not to have any physical contact with anyone whatsoever.


	Considering that human beings are mortal and that there exists an infinite number of things, including gazillions of viral and bacterial infections, that can kill us at any time, the all-consuming fear elicited by this single object must strike all who are willing to think about it for more than a split second as wildly irrational.


	Third, those, like some of our friends and relatives, who have “socially distanced” themselves from the people in their lives have assigned categorical importance to their own survival over and above all other considerations.&nbsp; Namely, they have decided that their fear of the possibility of them getting sick always overrides the mental and emotional well-being of those whose lives they could’ve enriched or otherwise made better had they not reduced the live, full-blooded relationships they once enjoyed to a two-dimensional virtual reality.


	Human beings need real communion with one another. They need to be in the presence, the physical presence, of other people.&nbsp; Humans, perhaps owing to that marvelous and all-too frequently underappreciated sense that we call “touch,” need to be able to be close enough with others to make physical contact.&nbsp; They needn’t necessarily make contact every time, or even any time, they meet. &nbsp;When together they needn’t even speak.&nbsp; Just being within close proximity of one another, though, affirms the community of persons and serves as a reminder that “no man is an island” in a way that even the liveliest of Zoom meetings never could.


	Not that the very experience of being human shouldn’t suffice to make this point, but, for those who still need it, there exists myriad of scientific studies that substantiate in spades the immeasurable physical and mental benefits of touch.&nbsp;


	Dr. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, <a href="https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hands_on_research">summarizes</a> its significance.&nbsp; He remarks that “the science of touch convincingly suggests that we’re wired to—we need to—connect with other people on a basic physical level.&nbsp; To deny that is to deprive ourselves of some of life’s greatest joys and deepest comforts.”


	Keltner is more specific:


	“A pat on the back, a caress of the arm—these are everyday, incidental gestures that we usually take for granted, thanks to our amazingly dexterous hands.


	“But after years spent immersed in the science of touch, I can tell you that they are far more profound than we usually realize: They are our primary language of compassion, and a primary means of spreading compassion” (emphasis added). &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Fourth, everyone has their share of irrational fears.&nbsp; Yet those who have been hyper-fearful of COVID have endorsed “the New Normal,” i.e. the systematization of their fear.&nbsp; They have, in effect, compelled others to live with their fear or face legal and social sanctions for failing to do so.&nbsp; Had they resisted the mandates of governors, the universalization of the very fear that these same politicians and their media apologists stoked in the first place, the Old Normal would still be with us and legions of people would’ve been spared much anguish.&nbsp;


	Ironically, most (but certainly not all) of those who insist upon masks and “Social Distancing” also style themselves the most unabashed champions of “inclusion,” “tolerance,” “togetherness,” and “acceptance.” &nbsp;Yet the systemic and systematic changes that they have demanded, or at least endorsed, have done nothing more or less than institutionalized exclusion, intolerance, separateness, and alienation. &nbsp;


	The same people who loudly, indignantly declared that we mustn’t build “walls,” but “bridges,” have favored the erection of millions of walls, from facial coverings to plastic visors and signs requiring people to maintain no less than six feet of distance between one another.


	The so-called New Normal has given rise to what we may call, “structural” or “institutional Othering.” &nbsp;This is a system under which everyone, given the concealment of just those features—facial features—that, more than any others, individuate a person as a unique personality, renders each person foreign to and an object of dread to others.


	We are all, in a quite literal sense, Untouchables now.


	The fear that led to this state of affairs is unquestionably genuine. Those in our families, among our friends, and within our communities who chose their own safety at all costs, including the cost of being there (in person) for us when doing so could’ve helped us, never meant to harm us.&nbsp; Odds are, because they have been consumed with this fear, and because this fear has been normalized throughout the country—because it’s become the thing—they most surely aren’t even aware that they could’ve hurt us.&nbsp;


	This, however, does not mean that they can escape responsibility for how they have chosen to act on that fear.&nbsp; Respect for both individual autonomy and the fact of human interconnectivity demands that people assume responsibility for their actions.&nbsp; Unless this is the case, there is no human dignity.


	I end this essay with a question that I recently posed to a friend of mine who, while opposing institutional Othering, nevertheless has her fair share of fear of contracting COVID:


	Suppose, I said, that you and I were out and about and a handful of human predators set upon us.&nbsp; I avail myself of an opportunity to run, leaving you behind to the tender mercies of the thugs. They do all manner of evil to you.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	If you survived, would you still have the same degree of respect and appreciation for me if I simply, and sincerely, explained to you that it was from fear for my own life that I had to “distance” myself from you when I did?&nbsp;


	Suppose, instead, that you were killed.&nbsp; Do you think that your loved ones would be perfectly understanding of my decision to distance from you in your moment of need on the basis of my desire to survive?&nbsp;


	At least my fear, under these circumstances, would be quite rational, for a person in a situation of that kind could very well be injured or killed.&nbsp; Furthermore, the odds of my meeting this fate are far greater than the odds of your average person meeting it courtesy of COVID, and even greater than the odds of your average person getting sick and dying after having contracted COVID from those whom one has no reason to believe are anything but in good health. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Or would you and/or your family members hold me in higher esteem had I stood by your side to fight off our attackers, even at the cost of both of us dying?


	My friend admitted that my analogy is apt and that she most definitely would not accept my explanation as a legitimate one.&nbsp; Nor, do I suspect, would anyone else. &nbsp;


	The point?&nbsp; Life is not an unqualified good and one’s safety from potential harm does not trump all other considerations. &nbsp;


	Anyone who conducts him or herself as if these things were true survives—but at the cost of flourishing.&nbsp; Such a person lives, but is never fully alive.&nbsp; From fear, he or she is wasteful of, rather than grateful for, the limited time, but bountiful opportunities, allotted to human beings on this Earth for their self-actualization and the advancement of the betterment of the world.


	Someone with whom I was once close, and who had chosen to “distance” herself from me last March, had recently informed me that she hadn’t been in touch as frequently because she had grown depressed, given her loss of a social life and her inability to travel, as she always enjoyed doing.&nbsp; She added, though, that she knows that these are “First World problems,” considering that she still has work, food, a home, etc.


	I got her meaning.&nbsp; Her pain, though, is warranted.&nbsp; And the sources of her pain are only superficially “First World problems,” for the desire that is being frustrated on her part is the most fundamental of all human desires: The desire for community with other human beings.&nbsp; This desire, in turn, is born of recognition of the truth of what I’ve been saying here: A good life, a life well-lived, as opposed to existence at all costs, consists in, well, enjoying as enriched an existence as possible, of taking advantage while you can of as many opportunities as interest you.


	Of course, this person is one of millions of co-authors of the system of Othering that now constrains her. &nbsp;She and those of like mind have indefinitely forestalled the good life that they could and presumably want to live—all of the while appearing to be oblivious to the fact that they could die this minute.


	Do or die—the old saying now assumes new meaning in light of all of this: Those who have stopped “doing” for fear of dying are, in a human, spiritual, moral sense, dying. This is, to be certain, tragic.


	It is unjust, however, that the systemic Othering that they have made possible has harmed so many others that never consented to it.

COVID and Systemizing Fear

Since the COVID Scare began in March of 2020, I have been at pains to show how, from start to finish, The Narrative defies the facts, the science regarding the

Some of us who smelled a rat from the outset of “the Pandemic”—a catchall term that has been used by the power- and ratings-obsessed to justify all manner of illegality and immorality—find ourselves struggling over how, &nbsp;assuming that there ever will be a restoration of some semblance of pre-COVID normalcy, we can, or even should, resume relationships with those of our friends, relatives, and members of our local communities who chose months ago to sever real, live contact with us for fear of contracting “The Virus” which, judging from their actions, is as uniquely contagious as it is deadly.


	As the COVID Internment approaches its 10th month, the deep sadness that I once felt over the radical subversion of my beloved country—as well as that of much of the rest of the world—gives way to outrage no less profound. So too do I still experience moments of incredulity as I witness the astonishing success had by political, bureaucratic, and media elites in driving terror into the hearts of untold millions, a dread of a cold virus that these same elites have exploited for the sake of assuming control of whole populations in ways that would have been unthinkable as recently as the beginning of March.


	The True Believers are indeed genuinely fearful. For this reason, I have labored indefatigably to exercise patience and compassion. Yet as we witness the truly incalculable damage of every conceivable sort that millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of more men, women, and children around the planet have been made to endure because the fearful have not only indulged their fears, but have required others to do the same, I begin to question whether these virtues remain appropriate. &nbsp;


	And they become all but impossible to exercise in the face of the moral and cognitive superiority that the Faucians presume whenever anyone tries to disabuse them of their fears. Tellingly—strangely—they become hyper-defensive, angry, even while denying that they are fearful for themselves; rather, to hear them tell it, it is from fear of inadvertently spreading The Virus to others that they wear their (demonstrably useless) face coverings. &nbsp;


	So, righteous indignation seems to be a not altogether unreasonable or immoral response to the Faucians’ dereliction of personal responsibility, their refusal to cultivate those intellectual and moral excellencies required of the members of a self-governing citizenry. Their actions have deleteriously undercut the well-being of their fellow human beings, not just here at home but around the globe.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	And yet, to repeat, the True Believers are genuinely fearful.&nbsp;


	Now, fear is universal, necessary, and&nbsp;when rational, it is desirable. As far as irrational fear is concerned, everyone has their share of it. However, as every other generation before our own has recognized, the difference between a strong person and a weak one is not that the strong one has rid himself entirely of all irrational fears while the latter indulges them. The difference is that the strong person confronts, repeatedly&nbsp;if need be, his irrational fears, calling them out, through word and deed, for what they are. The weaker person refuses to do this, choosing instead to succumb to them—irrespectively of the cost that doing so imposes upon his life and/or the lives of others.


	The irrationally fearful will doubtless object that there is nothing at all irrational about their fear of contracting COVID-19.&nbsp;


	To be clear, there is nothing irrational about a person’s fear of getting sick, whether from COVID or from any number of other viruses and bacterial infections. Who the hell wants to get sick?! Yet it isn’t the fear per se that is irrational here, but the extent to which the True Believers have permitted it to dictate their world. No one, and certainly no reasonably healthy person, should be giving scarcely any consideration at all to contracting COVID, to say nothing of obsessing over it as the True Believers have. That the irrationally fearful are indeed irrationally fearful can be proven readily enough:


	(a) Most fundamentally, the Boogeyman that haunts their imaginations day and night has never even been proven to definitively exist. This is to say that The Virus has never been properly isolated, meaning purified and extracted, as must be done to determine for certain that a distinct virus actually, really exists.


	Of course, the Experts and their sock puppet apologists in the propaganda media will say that the Virus has been “isolated,” but this is Newspeak. What they mean to say is that a variety of cells from humans and animals, a variety of toxic drugs and chemicals, and other genetic material co-exists in a biochemical soup, and because some of the cells that are components of this concoction have died, this must mean that it is The Virus that is somewhere within that concoction that has killed them. That the drugs may have killed the cells, or that the starvation of the cells may explain their demise, are apparently considerations not worth entertaining.


	The Virus, you see, is assumed to exist within the mix. In order, though, to know for certain that it actually exists within it, it needs to be separated out from the other guck in the mess—something that has not been done, as activist-citizens from various countries are now discovering while dozens of governmental health agencies that they have contacted via Freedom of Information laws have proven themselves incapable of supplying records of the process whereby The Virus has allegedly been isolated, i.e. separated from everything else.


	(b) The PCR test, the “gold standard” of COVID tests, was never designed to measure infections, much less sickness. Karry Mullis, the test’s inventor, made the point unequivocally when he bluntly stated: “Quantitative PCR testing is an oxymoron.”


	Moreover, the PCR tests, not for a virus, but for RNA that is assumed to be in The Virus that is assumed to exist.


	Yet even here, given subscription to the CDC recommendation that the PCR test be run at anywhere between 35-45 cycles, the test is that much more useless, for as all scientists, including none other than Dr. Fauci himself, concede, this high of a threshold of cycles is all but guaranteed to return a false-positive result. The scientists interviewed by The New York Times place the false-positive rate as high as 90%, while still others have said that it could be as high as 97% and, beyond a certain limit, possibly as high as 100% false-positive.


	(c) You can always get peeks at the truth more from what State propagandists in Big Media do not say than by what they do say.&nbsp; Even as the Fake Newsies breathlessly wax hysterical over the alleged explosion of “cases,” and even as the hand-picked government lackey doctors who they showcase violate their Hippocratic Oath by contributing to the anxiety, panic, and depression of Americans by going on about possible shortages of medical supplies, etc., notice that none of these Chicken Littles ever talk about the lethality and survival rates of COVID.


	This is because even according to their own official numbers (which are wildly inflated), COVID has a mortality rate of anywhere between one-tenth and five-tenths of one percent. This in turn means that anywhere between 99.5-99.9% of the people who are said to have contracted COVID get over it.


	To underscore: The country has lost its collective mind while ruining countless numbers of lives over a cold virus that hasn’t been proven to exist, but which even according to the official Government-Media Narrative has a mortality rate approximating that of the official mortality rate of the seasonal flu, and “case” numbers determined by a test that is all but worthless even on its own terms.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The fear that pervades a large portion of the American citizenry is real. It is also, as I showed here, irrational. And it has proven to be dangerous to all people in the United States and throughout the world.&nbsp;


	The governing class never could’ve accomplished in 2020 what it in fact accomplished if not for the compliance of the untold millions of Americans that it was able to so easily manipulate.


	So, the conflict within me between pity for the genuinely, but irrationally, fearful and outrage over their actions, continues.

Fear of the Believers

Some of us who smelled a rat from the outset of “the Pandemic”—a catchall term that has been used by the power- and ratings-obsessed to justify all manner of

The so-called “Fact-Checker” is a persona that 2020 appears to have brought into its own. Everywhere we turn now, it is impossible to avoid tripping over some self-styled “fact-checker” or other.&nbsp;


	It’s not difficult to notice that all self-proclaimed “fact-checkers” are invariably left-leaning partisans whose only interest is in “fact-checking” the claims of those who challenge the agenda of the Democratic Party.


	Of course, the reality is that the moniker of “fact-checker” is of a piece of the fiction that journalists are objective, disinterested, impartial observers and “reporters” of current events who are invested in nothing other than disseminating “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Or some such patent nonsense as this.


	In what follows, I will make my first go as a fact-checker, only a fact-checker with a twist: I will begin fact-checking the fact-checkers, both their claims and those of their fellow partisan ideologues.


	Here, I will focus only upon the biggest claims of 2020, namely, the claims regarding…“The Virus.”


	The Claim:


	COVID-19 is a novel virus that scientists have isolated.


	Rating: FALSE!


	In order to determine whether a virus exists, it must be isolated, purified, and extracted from the bio-chemical concoction of stuff in which it is alleged to have been located.&nbsp;


	This has never been done with COVID. 


	(1) <a href="https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/18/sars-cov-2-has-not-been-proven-to-exist/">Jon Rappoport</a>, an investigative journalist who has been writing about epidemics and pandemics for the better part of four decades (and whose work has never been debunked), has shown that while there are indeed those who insist that the virus has been isolated, they use “isolated” in a sense that is nearly the opposite of what it actually means:


	“Isolation is absurdly taken to mean: ‘We have the virus in a soup in a dish in the lab.&nbsp; It is not separated (isolated) from the soup.&nbsp; The soup contains various cells—human, monkey—and an array of (toxic) chemicals and drugs.&nbsp; We know the virus is there, because it is infecting and killing some of the cells.’”


	Rappoport elaborates:


	“A reasonably bright junior high school student would immediately realize this not a description of isolation.


	“A reasonably bright junior high school student would point out that there is no proof the virus is infecting and killing cells, because the toxic chemicals and drugs in the soup are sufficient to do the cell-killing.&nbsp; He might also mention the cells in the soup are being starved of nutrients, and this alone could cause their death.”


	He concludes:


	“Therefore, there is no evidence that ‘the virus’ is actually in the soup.”


	(2) David Rowe <a href="https://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf">writes</a>:


	“If the virus exists, then it should be possible to purify viral particles.&nbsp; From these particles RNA can be extracted and should match the RNA used in this test.&nbsp; Until this is done it is possible that the RNA comes from another source, which could be the cells of the patient, bacteria, fungi, etc. There might be an association with elevated levels of this RNA and illness, but that is not proof that the RNA is from a virus. Without purification and characterization of virus particles, it cannot be accepted that an RNA test is proof that a virus is present.”


	(3) The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has <a href="https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download">admitted</a> that it has no specimens of the virus available.&nbsp; That among the most powerful, most resourceful government health agencies on the planet wouldn’t have had the virus at its disposal from day one, to say nothing of possessing it nine months into the ubiquitous imposition of “Social Distancing” mandates that have deleteriously affected the lives of as many as one billion men, women, and children throughout the Earth can only mean that COVID-19 has never been isolated, purified, extracted—as viruses are supposed to be.


	(4) Citizens ranging <a href="https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/freedom-of-information-reveals-public-health-agency-of-canada-has-no-record-of-sars-cov-2-isolation-performed-by-anyone-anywhere-ever/">from Canada</a> to <a href="https://thevirushoax.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VIRUS/pages/44630017/University+of+Otago+s+Fake+Isolation+Process">New Zealand</a>, through the Freedom of Information Act, have requested from approximately 40 health agencies around the world records documenting the process by which COVID-19 has been isolated.


	These activist-citizens are intent to preclude from the outset any slippery bureaucrat-speak. Ms. Christine Massey, for example, informs the bureaucrats whom she addresses that she is “using ‘isolation’ in the every-day sense of the word: the act of separating a thing(s) from everything else” (emphasis original).


	Massey elaborates to underscore that by “isolation” she most certainly does not mean, “the culturing of something, or the performance of an amplification test (i.e. a PCR test), or the sequencing of something.”


	In other words, Ms. Massey, along with an ever-growing number of concerned citizens, is in search of records “describing the isolation of a SARS-COV-2 virus, directly from a sample taken from a diseased patient, where the sample was not first combined with any other source of genetic material (i.e. monkey kidney cells aka vero cells; liver cancer cells).”


	Massey waited six months before she received her response, a letter that dodged her request while trying to conceal the fact that the authorities dodged her request. The requested records were nowhere supplied.


	This has been the same response with which all such requests have been met.


	The Claim:


	The COVID-19 Pandemic has been raging as cases have been exploding once again.


	Rating: FALSE!


	The operative term here is “cases.”


	(1) For starters, and for all the traction in political power and ratings gained by politicians and media corporations, respectively, in sensationalizing the ever-burgeoning numbers of COVID cases, “cases” is an utterly useless benchmark for gauging a public health crisis. To know of a “case” of someone “having” the virus is not the same as knowing whether a person is presently infected, much less whether he is sick or going to become sick.&nbsp; 


	And it most certainly hasn’t anything at all to do with death.


	“Case” may only imply that a person is presumed to have, or to have had, the virus, or that a person tested positive in the sense of having, or having had, material that was found that was concluded to have been the virus.&nbsp; It could even mean that the person tested has antibodies, suggesting that at one time in the past, and perhaps unbeknownst to this person, he had either COVID or perhaps some other coronavirus.


	(2) The PCR test, according to none other than its inventor, Karry Mullis, was never designed to determine whether anyone is sick, or will become sick, from any virus. Only if a virus can be located and measured can it be determined whether a person is sick, or will become sick. But, as Mullis bluntly said:


	“Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.”


	Furthermore, the PCR test, in accordance with CDC prescriptions, is run throughout the United States anywhere between 35 and 45 cycles—a number that, as everyone from scientists interviewed by The New York Times to Anthony Fauci have attested, is guaranteed to deliver false-positives at a rate north of 90%.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The PCR test amplifies material at millions and millions of times its original size. The more cycles at which the test is run, the more amplified is the material. &nbsp;This means that the lower the virus concentration, the more cycles are needed to get a positive result.&nbsp; The problem, though, is that beyond a certain point, almost anything becomes discernible.&nbsp; But whether it is a dead virus, other genetic material, or debris is anyone’s guess.


	The French researcher Didier Raoult provides perspective. Raoult <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491/5912603">has demonstrated</a> that when the PCR test is run at 25 cycles, about 70% of samples were genuinely positive, i.e. infectious. When, however, the test is run at a threshold of 30 cycles, only 20% of samples were infectious. At 35 cycles, a mere three percent of samples were infectious.


	And when the number of cycles was above 35, zero samples were infectious.


	What all of this means is that, according to this study, when, as in most European and American labs, the PCR test is run at 35 cycles or more, there is at least a 97 percent false-positive rate!


	It is precisely because the PCR test, particularly given the astronomical threshold of cycles at which it is currently being administered, is likely to insure a false-positive result that the illusion of an exploding pandemic has been engendered as more people have been tested.


	Being the good fact-checker that I now am, I urge that all sources responsible for promoting misleading information regarding a “pandemic” that warrants the indefinite, mandatory “quarantining” of the entire country be flagged as fake or false news and censored.&nbsp;

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