Jeffrey A Tucker
Jeffrey A Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also senior economics columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy and culture.
The US House and Senate have voted by a supermajority for an early end to the National Emergency that Donald Trump issued on March 13, 2020. He issued this the same day that the Department of Health and Human Services declared in a classified document that the National Security Council would henceforth head the Covid response.
This day marked the beginning of a largely lawless regime – at all levels of government – ruling with its own discretion rather than according to the Constitution, established court precedent or any principles at all. It was government by the whim of experts and their rule impacted every aspect of our lives.
The Covid emergency has been formally ended but the egregious habits of government that were unleashed that day continue even now, ensnaring even the former president himself, who was just indicted by a New York State attorney general for reasons we still do not know. For all the world, it looks purely political.
Just as this indictment is a first ever of a former president Trump’s executive order was the first ever to be issued for an infectious disease. Its powers were uncertain in the midst of such an unfamiliar cover for the invocation of total power.
The edict applicable to the whole country issued on March 16, 2020, said: “indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate should be closed”. So no more Bill of Rights, including the freedom of assembly and worship? Not even one reporter questioned this at the March 16th press conference, perhaps because they were too confused. It’s hard to know.
And for how long? It was pure psyops: 15 days. For starters. Then it went on for three years in various iterations. Even now, unjabbed travelers cannot enter our shores unless they are given diplomatic clearance. One rule for the ruling elites, another for everyone else. So it has been all this time.
But was this enforceable? Did the president even possess this power? He certainly believed he did. But it was never clear. The courts did nothing to stay such astonishing executive overreach. Instead, all states but South Dakota went along, some with enthusiasm, some out of trust and some out of sheer fear of what could happen under what felt like a situation of quasi-martial law. And how did South Dakota get away with this defiance? Was it only because it is not among the states that makes the news?
The precise powers that are possible under such a declaration are still uncertain. All anyone knew is that some very powerful people at the very top were demanding actions that seemed very much in contradiction to the Bill of Rights.
Who or what could stop such an overreach was unclear. And did the people have to obey? Certainly the mass media was all in, whipping up a populist compliance movement that would, over the course of two years, denounce anyone who dared disagree as selfish in their desire to exercise their “freedumb.” Plenty of people went to jail merely for exercising their civil rights.
Meanwhile the social fabric was torn asunder again and again until it was in tatters on the floor. Over time, the whole of the public sector gradually step away from the insanity once it became clear that 1) the mitigation efforts were achieving nothing remotely close to the promise, 2) the vaccine had no public-health benefit, 3) everyone got sick of Covid mania, 4) the courts finally started closing in on the whole racket and 5) the anger of regular people toward their lawmakers finally boiled to the surface.
It is finally over, three years later. Or is it?
Robert Malone explains:
A national emergency declaration was issued by former President Donald Trump March 13, 2020, pursuant to Section 201 of the National Emergencies Act. A national emergency declaration is in effect unless terminated by the president, or through a joint resolution of Congress or if the president does not issue a continuation notice annually. Such a notice was issued by President Trump to continue the emergency beyond March 1, 2021, and by President Biden to continue beyond March 1, 2022. As announced by the Biden Administration on Jan 30, 2023, the administration plans to extend the national emergency to May 11, 2023, then end it on that date.
The Biden administration opposed the legislative action. National Review explains:
With a supermajority of senators voting in the affirmative, the upper chamber of Congress ratified a February House vote that will put an end to the Covid-19 emergency orders implemented by Donald Trump in 2020. The White House insists that it is opposed to such legislation. It argues that Congress would get what it wants on May 11, when the 11th extension of the Covid public-health emergency is set to expire. Nevertheless, when the bill reaches Biden’s desk, administration officials have said the president will sign it.
The action by Congress speeds up the timeline but what this changes precisely is unclear. It likely will not affect the Emergency Use Authorization for the vaccines or tests, because Congress very cleverly moved the authorizations of those to a different piece of legislation.
Still, it represents the formalization of a perceptual undertow of populist revolt, one that is truly bipartisan at this point. You can bet that every lawmaker is faced with constituents screaming about the school closures, the masking, the shut businesses and mask mandates, not to mention the forced jabs. The constituent base of these people was brutalized for three years. Plenty of political donors are asking questions. Lawmakers are just tired of the whole thing.
That all of this was based on fake science and terrible misapprehension of the true threat of the virus is very obvious, not perhaps from the mainstream press but not that far away with a few mouse clicks. Anyone who has bumped into evening news running on Fox would have heard Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham interviewing various Brownstone writers and scholars on this topic.
It only takes a few search terms to introduce one to a new information universe in which one discovers that the whole of civilized life was shattered for no good reason based on the posturing of a handful of government-funded bureaucrats who believed that they had more power than all the laws of the United States and the rights of people everywhere. In so doing, they worked hand-in-glove with Big Tech and Big Media to create the appearance of unity.
It’s a scandal for the ages but all major power centers (media, academia, social media and corporate America) tried everything in their power to keep it all under wraps for the better part of three years. Congress did not have to act. They chose to act – to wash this disaster out of their hair – because they faced pressure from below.
Even then, their actions were opposed by the Washington Post, of course. The vote was “largely symbolic”, the paper has written but then adds: “Several members of the White House Covid response team, including its Covid-19 response coordinator, Ashish Jha, are expected to leave the administration, according to sources.”
Yes of course they will leave the administration, all in an effort to make accountability impossible. The people who did this to us at most levels of society have gradually vanished from public life, or were pushed out.
The journalists who championed the lockdowns have gone on to other things. The academics are busy deleting posts. The pundits are deleting their pro-lockdown tweets. The think tanks that were either complicit or silent (and therefore also complicit) have moved on to pretend nothing happened. The politicians just want to change the subject. There are have precious few apologies and no admissions of wrong doing.
It’s as if the whole of the ruling class wants everyone to forget the horror of the last three years. Meanwhile, the pandemic response of brutal suppression of human liberty is now in the process of being codified as normal in the annals of the World Health Organization, even as Bill Gates argues for a new international bureaucracy to do it all over again. It was too gainful, too delightful, too thrilling, for all those who benefitted from this to pass up a chance to deploy it again.
Remarkably, even after all these years, it is not clear precisely what it is they were trying to achieve beyond the largest and fastest redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in history. They paid attention to no particulars of the virus itself, much less treatments, but instead focused entirely on some elusive goal having to do with forever flattening curves and imposing a new way of life with full anticipation that the pharmaceutical companies would save the day, which they very clearly did not.
If we want true accountability, rather than a global ruling-class effort to sweep it all under the rug, it has to come from somewhere, starting with a continued deep dive into all the players, motivations, delusions and corruptions. Then we need clear restrictions, not on people but on states, among which to curb these “national emergencies” that signal to the population that they are nothing but serfs and the power holders their masters backed by the best science.
The lawless government that went into overdrive three years ago, even if its roots extend far back in time, has finally ensnared the president who was manipulated into pulling the trigger. So yes, the lockdowns and this apparently political Trump indictment are connected. They are all signs of a loss of government restraint, taking us back before the days of the Magna Carta.
The New York Times said we should go medieval on the virus. They used the virus as the excuse but we find ourselves in a situation that does indeed feel pre-modern, like the year 1000 except ruled by a cartel of global elites.
Trust is gone. And our liberties and rights, not to mention the American system of government and the reliability of rules, are in dramatic decline. Given this, we have to do much more than pretend like nothing happened.
What happened with the Covid regime was an imposed reversal of 1,000 years of progress in human rights. This cannot be allowed to stand much less be forgotten. Declaration or not, the real emergency is far from over. It is still with us and cries out for an end that can only come from truth telling, some modicum of justice and a dramatic turn toward Enlightenment values. Barring that, there is darkness ahead.
