Free Republic

It’s been a continuing mystery for three years, at least to me but many others too. In October 2020, in the midst of a genuine crisis, three scientists made a very short statement of highly public health wisdom, a summary of what everyone in the profession, apart from a few oddballs, believed only a year earlier. The astonishing frenzy of denunciation following that document’s release was on a level I’ve never seen before, reaching to the highest levels of government and flowing through the whole of media and tech. It was mind-boggling. For proof that nothing in the document was...

ust how much mental and psychological trauma exists in the country and world today cannot be quantified, and I would not trust any studies that tried. But this much is clear. We have lost our footing in knowing something that scientists long believed we could know: whether and to what extent an economy is growing and prospering or going the opposite way. Everyone seems just to be winging it these days. Ever since lockdowns utterly broke reporting, it’s been hard to tell up from down. The substantial hits taken by major financial indexes over the last two months seem to...

The possibility of U.S. lockdowns—never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics—was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. Incredibly, the United States was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How...

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on...

I have praised the Trump administration’s accomplishments many times, but there is one huge blot on Trump’s record: his administration’s response to the covid epidemic. Via InstaPundit, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute comments on Megyn Kelly’s interview of Trump. Kelly, to her credit, began the process of asking Trump the tough questions about covid: We need to know why the churches, schools, and businesses were closed at the urging of the White House. We need to know why we faced travel restrictions, why government printed and spent multiple trillions that produced crushing inflation, why the hospitals were shut to...

No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse. Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed. It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back....

The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has revealed its ambition: to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles (EVs). Incredibly, this announcement comes as we are flooded with overwhelming evidence that EVs are a market loser. Indeed, the artificial boom and then meltdown of the EV market is a modern industrial calamity. It was created by government, social media, wild disease frenzy, far-flung thinking, and the irrational chasing of utopia, followed by a rude awakening by facts and reality. CEO of Hertz Stephen Scherr has been booted out due to a vast purchase of an EV fleet...

One reporter has proven brave enough not to take the deal. The deal is: you can interview Trump provided you don’t ask perfectly obvious questions about his COVID response that shredded the Bill of Rights, wrecked his presidency, enabled mass mail-in ballots, elevated agencies to the status of dictators, and kicked off the biggest national crisis of our lifetimes from which we aren’t even close to recovering. We still do not know when or if we will get the Constitution back. Inflation still rages, education nationwide is slipping more by the day, there is a resulting crime epidemic, and the...

The announcement that came from the White House is spooky in its brevity. It was just one sentence announcing the end of the COVID emergency. The 15 Days announced on March 16, 2020, which implemented the national emergency declared a few days earlier, ended up lasting 1,135 days. What resulted? National ruin. We see it in every aspect of our lives: cultural, economic, educational, public health, familial, community, and trust in institutions. Life expectancy is in free fall, not from COVID but from the fallout of the response. Cities are wrecked. Millions have been professionally and demographically displaced. It’s not...

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence –...

Justice Scalia's Great HeartMay God rest his soul Jeffrey Tucker Saturday, February 13, 2016 Some of Justice Antonin Scalia's decisions I agreed with and some I disagreed with. But I've never once doubted the sincerity of his beliefs. Now that he is gone from this earth, I can tell a story I've held inside for many years, a scene that touched me deeply and profoundly. I cannot think of him without remembering this moment. It was a spring afternoon some years ago, and he was attending church services, sitting in a back pew, holding his prayer book in his hands....