When Moments Mattered, The New York Times Was Just 3 Years Behind
Why I’m Already Tired of Hearing About the “Groundbreaking” Cochrane Face Mask Study
When moments mattered, The New York Times was just 3 years behind. At such moments, it is worth noting that the word retardation comes from the Latin for slow, as in “too slow.” Timing is important. If you will forgive me for broaching the use of a politically incorrect term, taking three years to state the obvious makes one retarded. It is not a cause for celebration.
In the winter of 2019-2020, we were told a very serious illness had emerged from Wuhan, China that threatened to upend life as we knew it.
On March 17, 2020, the readers of LewRockwell.com got a very important message that you could not read, then, in any mainstream publication and which you still cannot: Covid-19, no matter how minor nor how severe, is going to be used to grab power if you turn to government for the answers.
That message was written by Ron Paul, a medical doctor, in a piece called “The Coronavirus Hoax.” That message was timely. That message was necessary. That message was as absent in our national and international debate as it was vital for those seeking truth.
There Was Little Mention Of That Basic, Fundamental, Wise Concept In The Controlled Mainstream
Those reading the mainstream had no access to that message. Those relying on mainstream doctors, hospitals, or pharmaceutical companies had no access to that message. Those relying on popular opinion had no access to that message.
Those who read LewRockwell.com had access to that message and access to some of the greatest minds of our day thinking through the most pressing problems.
Ron Paul, has repeatedly and reliably turned to a truth long understood in these pages: if you let government do so, it will always and everywhere upend life as you know it.
While he was saying that, on that very dame day, on March 17, 2020, the first two-week lockdowns were going into effect in America. Some so-called emergency orders still remain in place as I write this, nearly three years later. On April 3, 2020, the CDC’s first face mask guidelines went into effect. Still, almost three years later, some face mask policies remain in place, as I write this, even in some of the allegedly freest states and obeyed by allegedly free people.
Have you yet comprehended how vital it is that you not put up with their lies by wearing a mask? If you haven’t, are you really free?
The Reliable Role of Bret Stephens
And now, on February 21, 2023, thirty-five months into the nonsense, court conservative Bret Stephens writing for The New York Times is coming in playing a reliable role in a piece titled “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?”
That reliable role is this: the one who says too little, and says it too late, thereby providing no service to anyone but the establishment. For years that has been the reliable role of Bret Stephens in The New York Times, in The Wall Street Journal, in the Sunday morning news shows, as editor at The Jerusalem Post, even in his Pulitzer Prize entry, this World Economic Forum Young Global Leader seems to be forever ready to point out too little too late while calling it groundbreaking.
He’s basically paid to be retarded, while convincing you he’s timely.
Brilliance Stated Tardy Lacks A Luster
In the article, Stephens writes something that plenty of people are treating as vital revelation: the science is finally in, the masks don’t work. The following is from his February 21, 2023 article:
“The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
‘There is just no evidence that they’ — masks — ‘make any difference,’ he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. ‘Full stop.’”
You damn idiot. We now have some 78 randomized control trials that say that. Last month’s “most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses,” was only slightly more rigorous than the May 2020 rigorous study on the topic, and of minor additional value.
May 2020 was when the scientists at the CDC told the world that the political hacks at the CDC were wrong and that mask mandates were nonsense. That was information LewRockwell.com readers knew. Those honest CDC researchers put together 14 of the highest quality randomized control trials and were able to demonstrate in May 2020 that masks would not help and would likely cause harm. That was published in the CDC’s own peer reviewed journal of epidemiology. That was established science, long understood at that time, yet widely ignored by establishment voices, like Bret Stephens — the paid retard.
Discerning Trumpistas call them the fake news media. It is true. That truth offends some journalists. The less politically correct truth is that they are a class of paid retards.
BASED ON THE SCIENCE, IN MAY 2020 SCIENTISTS AT THE CDC SAID WEARING A FACE MASK WAS RIDICULOUS AND THAT THE PRONOUNCEMENTS OF THE POLITICAL HACKS AT THE CDC SHOULD NOT BE FOLLOWED. BASED ON THE SCIENCE, SCIENTISTS FOR DECADES HAVE BEEN SAYING WEARING A FACE MASK WAS RIDICULOUS.
Don’t celebrate the people who finally work up the gumption to say that loudly and clearly three years too late. And definitely don’t celebrate those of them who still deceitfully don masks to make others feel comfy rather than facing off with the lie that they gave nestled themselves in.
Calling For An Inept Response With Passion & Vitriol Does Not Make The Response Any Less Inept
You see, telling too little truth too late is a way the establishment covers itself and pretends that it is able to self-correct, self-police, and administer justice within its ranks. It is really just another form of lying intended to secure a continued hold on power.
There is a word in the English language for people of average or above average intelligence who act retarded for pay. They are liars. Feigned ineptitude is deceit.
To that point, fake conservative, fake libertarian, fake edgy writer Bret Stevens makes the non-bold call to have one of the most openly out-of-touch power hungry federal bureaucrats GASP!!! . . . resign.
From the same New York Times article, this is what false outrage looks like as it calls for nothing more than inept behavior:
“Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.”
Yes, to call for the resignation of Rochelle Walensky in February 2023 is inept behavior.
A Collection Of Better Responses For Ensuring Accountability & Liberty
Had one been reading the pages of LewRockwell.com or the Mises Institute in the spring of 2020, he would get a very different perspective — such as seeing calls for the (judicial and legal) execution of tyrants, an approach that has long been appropriate, and a reasonable approach for anyone with a modicum of foresight.
The glorified-mosquito-abatement-project-cum-global-real-estate-regulator called the CDC should not have a resignation or two, should not conduct an audit or two, should not be reformed or downsized, none of those. In a free country such an institution is redundant, obsolete, costly, and harmful.
The CDC must be scrapped and replaced with nothing. Any executive branch entity dealing with medicine must be scrapped and replaced with nothing. Health is the responsibility of the individual. In a free country, every such government institution that deals with health is redundant, obsolete, costly, and harmful.
If you are not considering the broadest of possibilities in handling trusted officials who have run amok, you are denying yourself the use of effective tools for maintaining liberty.
Public Health Has Its Root Growing In A Disastrous Place, Much Like A Cancer
Which points directly at the entire field of public health (an industry almost entirely funded by taxes, fees, levies, settlements, and other government imposed financing).
The field of public health claims from its inception that health is not the duty of an individual but the duty of a collective, and that their allegedly incontrovertibly beneficial health measures will be had collectively by force if not granted voluntarily.
At its root such a field is toxic to individual freedom and, as easily shown from the Ides of March 2020 forward — toxic to human health as well.
You Do Not Want Communal “Ownership” Of Health
Must we all re-read The Tragedy of the Commons to remind ourselves why you do not want to make your own health (or anyone else’s health) a common responsibility? The book explains how a pasture “owned by all” is a pasture that becomes degraded. Your health, “owned by all” is health that becomes degraded.
Predictably, on March 17, 2020, Dr. Ron Paul, said that if you let government do so, it will always and everywhere upend life as you know it. So you don’t let it do that.
How Can You Get Better At Making The Right Decisions?
As Lew Rockwell wrote in the recent “Why Ron Paul is Right” — this perspective is a source of wisdom open to us all as we read the work of Ron Paul in pages like these, and we read the work of cogent thinkers that influenced him, especially Murray Rothbard — work that the Mises Institute places online free of charge and in handsome compact editions and which the Mises Institute exists to promote. That wisdom is not inaccessible and unobtainable.
If you let government do so, it will always and everywhere upend life as you know it. So you don’t let it do that.
Readers of LewRockwell.com knew that. Readers of the “conservative” Wall Street Journal or of The New York Times or of Bret Stephens still don’t seem to know that. Rochelle Wolenksy needs to go. She needs to be investigated and to see a long trial ahead of her.
But it must not stop there. It is all collectivism around one’s health that needs to go. Though I think there are even more victories to be had, if that is the intellectual shift that we can secure, the evil of the last three years will have been worth it.
Why?
Because those deaths will not have been in vain. Like any battle, those tragic deaths will have been the outcome of a society run amok that allowed itself to be governed by a government run amok.
If you let government do so, it will always and everywhere upend life as you know it. So you don’t let it do that.
Allan Stevo is a bestselling author on the topic of face masks. Read daily messages of inspiration from Allan by signing up at RealStevo.com, and get a free research report that is perfect for those who still use the awful, heavily censored Duck Duck Go — a research report entitled “11 Search Engines That Suck and 2 That Don’t.”
So true.
Their sudden discoveries are long known to anyone paying attention.