Lord of the Rings seen as link to "far right"

Last week MSNBC host Rachel Maddow tried to link Donald Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, to the "far right" by revealing that he is a fan of fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.    

Does the Left Really Want to Argue That Enjoying Lord of the Rings Is ‘Far-Right’? | National Review | Jack Butler: 

July 19, 2024 - "This week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow welcomed J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings to the fellowship of things, such as patriotic flags and ... physical fitness, that are now bad because the 'far right' likes them. Maddow reacted to Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate by noting Vance’s connections to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and finding fault in their affinity for Tolkien’s work:

Mr. Thiel ... has named his companies after things in the Lord of the Rings series of J.R.R. Tolkien books. Lord of the Rings is a sort of favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures both in Europe and the United States. Peter Thiel names all of his things after Tolkien figures, like his company Palantir, for example. Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel, who had given him all his jobs in the world, Mr. Vance also when he founded his own venture-capital firm with help from Peter Thiel named it after a Lord of the Rings thing. He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s “Aryan” but you move the “N” to the front. Apparently that word has something to do with elves and rings from the Lord of the Rings series. I don’t know.

"Maddow’s snide rant towers to such absurd heights as to resist being taken seriously. But let’s try. It is true that Thiel, like some of his professional peers, enjoys naming things after The Lord of the Rings.... But do you know who else likes The Lord of the Rings? Basically everyone. Exact figures are hard to pin down, but at least 150 million copies of the work (divided into three entries) have been sold; it has been translated into more than 40 languages.... And Peter Jackson’s two trilogies of movies based on Tolkien’s work ... have made about $6 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. That level of success is difficult to achieve with a narrowly cast partisan appeal....  

"Tolkien would also scoff at Maddow’s apparent contention that 'Narya,' the elvish ring of power after which Vance named a venture-capital firm, has some connection to Aryan racial mythology. In 1938, Tolkien entered discussions for The Hobbit to be published in German. The German publisher he was working with wondered whether he was 'Aryan.' Speaking to his English publisher, Tolkien wondered whether the country’s 'lunatic laws' required confirmation that he was, and, if so, preferred no German translation appear at all if it meant 'giving any colour to the notion' that he 'subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine'."

Read more: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/does-the-left-really-want-to-argue-that-enjoying-lord-of-the-rings-is-far-right/

Rachel Maddow's UNHINGED RANT On Lord Of The Rings Is The DUMBEST Commentary EVER | Jon Del Arroz | July 21, 2024:

Block and Futerman make case for Israel

A small excerpt from Marco den Ouden's review of The Classical Liberal Case for Israel by Walter Block and Alan Futerman. 

A New Book Makes a Solid Case for Israel and Zionism | Savvy Street | Marco den Ouden:

May 30, 2024 - "I was asked to review a new book supporting both Israel and Zionism, The Classical Liberal Case for Israel by Walter Block and Alan Futerman.... I had a review of well over 5000 words divided into a discussion of Block and Futerman’s book followed by a critique based on ... elements they chose to ignore. I opted to publish the critique as a stand-alone essay called The Battle for Israel’s Soul without mentioning the book. Now I am presenting the other side of the story: Block and Futerman’s compelling case for the moral right of Israel to exist and the moral right of the Jewish people to have a homeland, namely Zionism.... 

courtesy Amazon..com.

"The authors argue forcefully for the legitimacy of the state of Israel as a Zionist enterprise. They provide considerable documentation to support their charges.... The basic thesis of their book, they state, is that 'The Land of Israel was built up and developed by Jews who were unjustifiably expelled from their homeland thousands of years ago and are now back to reclaim their lost property and add to it by building and developing otherwise virgin land. It is really as simple as that.” (xxvi)....

"In Chapter 1 they argue that some parts of ancient Judea are demonstrably of Jewish origin.... They also contend that there are Jews alive today who can be genetically traced to these ancient Jews.... In Chapter 2 — Zionism — they argue that Zionism, the political movement promoting a Jewish homeland state, namely the country of Israel, is justified on a number of counts. They point out that emigration to Palestine took place long before the 1948 UN partition that created the state. 'It arose from the spontaneous actions of hundreds of thousands of Jews who returned to Zion in order to build their homes, and only much later their state.' (37) Cultural Zionism preceded political Zionism.... They challenge the idea that 'the Jews somehow stole the land from Arabs,' arguing that Jewish migrants to Palestine purchased land from existing owners, some of them absentee landowners. They purchased uncultivated land, and in many cases, land that had been regarded as uncultivable. And they homesteaded unowned (government-owned) land.... 

"Chapter 3 on The Palestinian Fiction Factory, the longest chapter in the book at 70 pages (excluding bibliography) argues that claims that Palestinians were expropriated and/or forced from their land are false.... Jewish land was either bought at exorbitant prices, much of it from non-resident Arab landowners, or it was homesteaded on land declared as uncultivable. Jewish entrepreneurship turned much barren land into productive farmland. As a result, there was an influx of Arabs, increasing the Arab presence in the area. They were drawn by Jewish wealth and the opportunities it presented. So, far from ethnic cleansing, Jewish settlement encouraged Arab immigration into the area.  All Jewish land was either purchased or homesteaded, they aver. None was forcibly taken.... 

"Section 4 of the chapter on The 'Expulsion' Plan discusses the immediate aftermath of the UN declaration. It argues that Israel’s Arab neighbors launched an aggressive war to destroy Israel and that Israel had the legitimate right to self-defense. The Arab aggressors warned Arabs resident in Palestine to flee for their own safety. Many did. The objective of the war was Israeli genocide, to wipe Israel off the map. Israel encouraged Arabs to stay. Arabs who opted to stay in the state of Israel now comprise twenty percent of the population.... Regarding alleged massacres of Arabs such as Deir Yassein, 'there was no policy of massacres, and Israeli authorities investigated and even condemned such incidents.' (emphasis added) (Benny Morris in Kramer et al., “Counter-Error: Separating Fact from Fiction in the Middle East,” The Washington Institute, October 27, 2016, page 95)....

"[In] Chapter 6: Critique of the Classical Liberal Case for Anti-Zionism — the authors critique Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the Israel/Palestine conflict.... Rothbard’s position is that Zionism was an offshoot of British imperialism..... But this is untrue, the authors argue. They cite Ilan Troen’s 2011 study which argues that the first forty years of Jewish migration to the area took place under the Ottomans. It had nothing to do with imperial expansion.... While they acknowledge that the Balfour Declaration supported the Zionist enterprise during the British Mandate, in fact, according to Charles Bard, the British reaction to waves of Jewish immigration in the '30s following the rise of the Nazis was to restrict such immigration to appease the Arabs.... 

"The authors argue that Rothbard is totally wrong in his analysis of events post-partition in 1948. 'Contrary to Rothbard, the Jews accepted the partition and the Arabs who already lived in Jewish areas were an integral part of the new State of Israel (and treated as such)'.... But at the time of partition, 'seven Arab armies invaded Israel after it was completed. Why should Israel be blamed for the resulting situation when it was only defending itself from outside attack?' (265) Moreover, Rothbard offers 'no explanation of why and how a new state built virtually entirely on homesteaded or purchased areas, labored on and developed by Jewish majorities, constitutes an aggression against the collective of Arabs of the entire Middle East'.... 

"As I noted earlier, I also found a lot to disagree with, points I elaborate on in my separate essay, The Battle for Israel’s Soul. But this essay looks at the positive points they make, points that should be noted and bear repeating:

1. Zionism was a cultural movement long before it became a political one. Jews started emigrating to Israel, their historic homeland, from the late 1800s on, decades before the creation of the state of Israel.
2. No land was usurped from Arabs. It was either bought, often at exorbitant prices, or homesteaded on unowned land deemed uncultivable.
3. Arab antisemitism was rife before the creation of the state of Israel. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem himself was a virulent antisemite and concluded a pact with Hitler to exterminate the Jews.
4. When the state of Israel was created, its seven Arab neighbors launched an immediate war against the new state, expecting a quick and easy victory. Israel was, from day one, a victim of aggression by its Arab neighbors.
5. Decades of peace talks and attempts at a two-state solution have been consistently rejected by Palestinian authorities, no matter how favorable the deal was for the Palestinians.
6. Israel has repeatedly been the victim of suicide bombers and rocket attacks by Palestinians.
7. The Palestinian Authority pays and incentivizes Palestinian terrorists to the tune of $300 million a year or 22% of its foreign aid budget.
8. The Palestinian Authority forbids trade with Israel and selling land to an Israeli is a capital crime.
9. Hamas uses human shields and builds missile launch sites and tunnel hideouts under and near schools and hospitals and other areas populated by civilians. It uses its citizens to create martyrs.
10. Anti-Zionism in the form of BDS is completely one-sided. Only Israel is targeted. Egregious tyrannies and dictatorships are completely ignored.
11. There are double standards in the treatment of Israel, even by its parent and creator, the United Nations. Israel has been condemned by the UN more often than every other country in the world combined. The violent, fascist, repressive, misogynistic state of Iran has been censured a mere six times by the UN compared to 68 times for Israel. Russia the invader of Ukraine, Cuba the operator of extensive repressive political prisons (See Against All Hope by Armando Valladares), and China the largest mass-murdering regime in the history of the world, have never been censured by the UN. Not once!

"These are just a few of the points that Block and Futerman make. Despite some drawbacks that I pointed out in my other essay, this book deserves a hearing."

Read more: https://www.thesavvystreet.com/a-new-book-makes-a-solid-case-for-israel-and-zionism/

Is Zionism a libertarian movement? | גלעד אלפר | October 1, 2023:

Shoddy scholarship in White Rural Rage (II)

The book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy "reeks of tell-tale signs of being written first and finding facts second," says this researcher.."Only after they settled on a salacious title, it seems, did they go out and try to find what they already agreed to see, with little to no attention paid to whether any of it was true."

New Book on Rural America Started with a False Conclusion, Then Looked for Evidence | Daily Yonder | Nicholas F. Jacobs:

March 6, 2024 - "A new book on 'white rural rage' argues that rural Americans are the most racist, xenophobic, conspiracist, anti-democratic, and violent “geodemographic” subgroup of Americans out there. The authors, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, say that their book is driven by data and that even if you don’t like their conclusions the evidence is clear. The problem with this book is not a lack of citations; they 'bring the receipts,' as they like to boast. The problem is that those receipts belong in the trash.... The book reeks of tell-tale signs of being written first and finding facts second. Only after they settled on a salacious title, it seems, did they go out and try to find what they already agreed to see, with little to no attention paid to whether any of it was true.... I offer a more comprehensive list of each survey and poll they use here, and briefly describe my concerns below. 

"The first problem is that the vast majority of data lacks any consistent definition of what they mean by the word “rural.” This hole gives the authors license to pick and choose various points from whatever surveys they want.... Consider, as just one of several examples, a method by the polling firm IPSOS, which informs work from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that Schaller and Waldman use to prove that rural folks are distinctively drawn to QAnon conspiracies. IPSOS defines rural as any resident living in a county that is not a part of any Metropolitan Statistical Area (a place with a dense urban center of 50,000 people or more). The Census, however, estimates that 54% of all rural people actually live inside those 'metropolitan' areas — areas excluded by the IPSOS definition. Consequently, this result about 'rural America” is drawn from a survey that excludes a majority of rural residents. One wonders if the authors cared to think about what this actually means for their results.... 

"Second, ... Schaller and Waldman seem to willfully neglect any concern over sample sizes. More often than not, the surveys that inform this 'data-driven' account simply do not get enough respondents who are even from rural areas, however defined. Yes, survey outlets will report out what 'rural' individuals said, but a closer look shows that those rural estimates often draw on just a few hundred people.... Consider a poll by the Institute of Politics, which Waldman and Schaller reference to show that rural Americans are the most likely to 'take up arms against the government.' That claim depends on just 220 rural residents and 290 city residents. As such, if 35% of rural residents agree, and 29% of city residents agree, probabilistically they are indistinguishable from one another. Or consider another poll by Marist University, which Schaller and Waldman say proves the point that rural residents are more likely to believe in nonexistent voter fraud. That conclusion depends on a grand total of 167 rural individuals. Not only are the margins of error too big to be meaningful, you might wonder, can you even get a representative portrayal of rural America with that many people. 

"Because most surveys are done to get a representative picture of the national population, even when they do have adequate sample sizes, seldom do the rural respondents in the poll actually represent the demographics of rural America..... In the last seven years, I’ve surveyed over 25,000 rural residents. My experience is that the first to respond and fill that 'rural' quota are older and more conservative than average. Getting young rural folks is hard, and most surveys might only have a handful.... This demographic imbalance exists even in high-quality surveys, because most surveys are designed to make claims about the national population. Surveys weights are therefore used to adjust samples to mirror national demographic patterns. In the case of the American National Election Study, for example, this means that any estimate about rural residents inflates the voices of the most elderly residents (65+), because ANES weights create an incorrect demographic snapshot of rural America, with 30% more elderly residents than what the U.S. Census says should exist. 

"Only two surveys in the entire book conform to basic standards of survey research and even attempt to try and present an accurate picture of rural America: a 2017 study from The Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (1,070 rural residents) and a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center (2,085 rural residents).... Of course, not even these are perfect. Because it focuses on rural communities, the WAPO/KFF study only includes 303 urban and 307 suburban respondents – small samples. Consider what this means when interpreting who thinks that 'immigrants today strengthen our country,' one of the questions Schaller and Waldman use to show just how xenophobic rural people allegedly are. Once you account for the margin of error (which Schaller and Waldman never report once in the book), rural residents actually believe the same thing as suburban residents; indeed, one question down (remember cherry-picking?), the survey shows that rural residents are just as likely as urban residents to say that 'most immigrants coming to the U.S. in the last 10 years are doing enough to adapt to the American way of life.' Can you find the rural rage? 

"The final problem is the worst one because it exists even if you account for problems of defining rurality and getting large, representative samples. Throughout the book, Schaller and Waldman solely rely on group comparisons – a true indication that their analysis is driven more by a desire to confirm one’s beliefs than to find real evidence.... Nowhere in this book is there any attempt to understand what motivates rural people, in particular, to think one thing or another. Are these really rural problems, or are they the product of some other demographic characteristic such as age, race, or gender? Is the 'rage' supposedly felt in rural areas really different than elsewhere? We just cannot tell from group averages alone.  

"[T]he way we would really test why certain groups behave a certain way – be it conspiracies or vaccines — is to compare individuals within and between those groups so that we can account for the multiple differences that they might have in common. Schaller and Waldman themselves never dig this deep.... But I got some of their data and did the work. Using the individual-level data provided by the 2018 Pew study, for example, I tested Schaller and Waldman’s claims that rural residents are distinctively 'xenophobic.' At a group level, 57% (+/- 1.1) of rural residents compared to 35 % (+/- 0.68) of urbanites, agree that a 'growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values.' I relied on widely used and understood tools of statistical inference (i.e., a regression model) to understand what best explains a person’s response to that question. Ruralness? Maybe. But maybe they answer that way because of age, sex, level of education, party identification, income, race, some religious beliefs, or all of the above.

"Here’s the model’s results. Bottom line: when we include those characteristics in a model that also accounts for where someone lives, geographic differences disappear. Rural residents are statistically no more likely to think 'xenophobic' beliefs on account of their rurality. Attitudes here are almost entirely attributable to partisan identity. Being rural ... is statistically meaningless, because what drives those group averages is solely a function of Republican partisan identity. That is, rural residents are thinking the same way about that issue as urban and suburban residents.... [I]f the goal of White Rural Rage is to say that the threat to American democracy is emanating from the heartland, the data just do not support that idea."

Read more: https://dailyyonder.com/commentary-white-rural-rage-which-came-first-the-title-or-the-research/2024/03/06/

The Media's New Favorite Topic: 'White Rural Rage' | Matt Walsh | March 4, 2024:

See also: Shoddy scholarship in White Rural Rage (I) 

Shoddy scholarship in White Rural Rage (I)

Two researchers whose work was cited in the book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy say that their findings were misrepresented, and accuse the book's authors of "academic malpractice". 

The Truth About 'Rural Rage' | Reason | Nicholas F. Jacobs and B. Kal Munis:

March 7, 2024 - "A new book, White Rural Rage, paints white rural Americans, a small and shrinking minority of the country, as the greatest threat to American democracy. The authors, political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman, try to buttress this argument by citing scholarly publications. We are two of the scholars whose work they cite, and we cry foul. 

"The overarching argument of White Rural Rage is that ruralness can be equated with racism, xenophobia, conspiracism, and anti-democratic beliefs. But rigorous scholarship shows that rural identity is not reducible to these beliefs, which are vastly more numerous outside rural communities than within them. To get to a conclusion so at odds with the scholarly consensus, Schaller and Waldman repeatedly commit academic malpractice....

"In several instances, the authors misinterpret what the academic research they cite says. For example, they use a report by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats to argue that 'rural Americans are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.' But the actual report concludes exactly the opposite: 'The more rural the county, the lower the county rate of sending insurrectionists' [sic] to the January 6 Capitol riot. Moreover, when a peer-reviewed article in the journal Political Behavior compared rural and non-rural beliefs on whether politically motivated violence is a valid means for pursuing political change, it revealed that rural Americans are actually less supportive of political violence.

"Another example comes when the authors rely on a report from the Public Religion Research Institute on QAnon conspiracy theories. The report has its own fundamental problems, including a suspect measure of QAnon support in the first instance, but what Schaller and Waldman do with those data is more egregious yet. 

"First, the authors do not even interpret the model output correctly, writing that the results mean that 'QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural than urban areas.' But the report presents odds ratios, which means that living in a rural area increases the likelihood by just 30 percent. 

"Inaccurate interpretation aside, if they were more statistically literate they would see this is probably not a model worth citing. On the exact same page, the model output suggests that, compared to white Americans, being black increases the likelihood of believing in QAnon by 90 percent! Weird results like this are red flags that should make us ask questions, not confirm our priors.

"Beyond issues of sparse and selective citing, the book misrepresents the findings of multiple scholars who have built careers conducting research on rural politics and identity. The authors characterize the academic concept of rural resentment (the less headline-grabbing academic term that Schaller and Waldman have apparently rebranded as 'rage') as necessarily including racial resentment as a constitutive component. But academic work on rural identity has overwhelmingly shown that these two are distinguishable. They are different concepts. 

"Indeed, as we have painstakingly demonstrated in our own work, rural resentment involves perceptions of geographic inequity. Many rural people see inequity in who politicians pay attention to, which communities get resources and which don't, and in how different types of communities are portrayed in the media. This is not racial prejudice by another name. Schaller and Waldman favorably cite our research showing that there is a modest correlation between rural resentment and racial resentment, a commonly used attitudinal measure of negative racial stereotyping. What they fail to note is the only statistically and intellectually sound conclusion that could be drawn from our data: While this slight correlation exists, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.

"In another peer-reviewed publication that Schaller and Waldman erroneously cite, we found that rural resentment strongly explains rural preferences and behavior even when one controls, statistically, for a litany of factors, including racial resentment, that Schaller, Waldman, and others conflate with it. The value of our academic work has been to elucidate the place-based dynamics of American politics — to say that there is much more than rage and rebellion in the heartland. It's distressing to see a book citing our work to support misleading arguments.

"At a time when trust in experts is on the decline throughout America, flawed analysis like the ideas in White Rural Rage may be a greater threat to American democracy than anything coming from the countryside. It is popular these days to say 'follow the science.' Well, the science shows that there is no mystery to rural rage: Years of neglect, abandonment, and scorn have driven rural America to view 'experts' like Schaller and Waldman as the enemy."

Read more: https://reason.com/2024/03/07/the-truth-about-rural-rage/

See also: Shoddy Scholarship in White Rural Rage (II)

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, Penguin Random House, 320 pages, $32

Book debunks Canadian "unmarked graves" story

A new book challenges the prevailing media and government narrative that Canada's residential schools were death camps where tens of thousands of indigenous children were abused, murdered, and secretly buried in unmarked graves. 

Grave Error: Correcting the False Narrative of Canada’s “Missing Children” | C2C Journal | Tom Flanagan:

December 7, 2023 - "The new book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) constitutes a response to the moral panic unleashed in Canada on May 27, 2021, when the Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (aka, the Kamloops Indian Band) announced that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) had located the remains of 215 'missing children' in an apple orchard on the grounds of the local residential school. Politicians and media seized on this initial announcement.... The storyline of “mass unmarked graves” and “burials of missing children” quickly ricocheted around Canada and much of the world.... Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone for the federal government’s response on May 30 when he ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the '215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school.' By this act, possible burial sites were elevated to the status of confirmed victims of foul play....

"Over time, a more fully-developed and persistent narrative has grown out of that initial announcement from Kamloops ... to create a storyline about the inherently genocidal nature of Indian Residential ools that has since been widely accepted and largely unchallenged. But regardless of how many times it is repeated by Indigenous leaders, political activists, academics and media commentators, the entire narrative is largely if not completely false....

"Slowly at first, but now with gathering confidence, substantial pushback to this narrative has appeared, driven by a small group of professionals, including judges, lawyers, professors, journalists and researchers.... Grave Error is a collection of some of the best pushback essays published by these brave researchers in response to the Kamloops mythology. They analyze and critique the false narrative of unmarked graves, missing children, forced attendance and genocidal conditions at Indian Residential Schools. The book’s title summarizes the authors’ view of the Kamloops narrative. It is wrong. And not just wrong, but egregiously wrong. Because of this, it fully deserves our sardonic title, which normally might have more in common with a tabloid newspaper headline. Our book shows in detail just why and where the narrative is wrong....

"The editors of Grave Error are C.P. Champion and myself. In addition to an introduction and conclusion, it contains 18 chapters plus a foreword by Conrad Black and cover endorsement by columnist Barbara Kay. The first contribution is 'In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found,' by Montreal historian Jacques Rouillard. This essay, originally posted on The Dorchester Review website, is now closing in on 300,000 views. It has done more than any other single publication to punch holes in the false narrative of unmarked graves and missing children. The author has updated his version in Grave Error to cover other false claims related to GPR since Kamloops. Other contributors include retired professors [Rodney] Clifton and Ian Gentles, retired judge Brian Giesbrecht, well-known author and editor Jonathan Kay and inimitable academic provocateur Frances Widdowson.... 

"Their contributions to this volume confront all the main fallacies head-on. Widdowson shows how the legend of murdered children and unmarked graves was spread by defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett before it popped up again at Kamloops. [Hymie] Rubenstein and collaborators examine the evidence proffered in support of unmarked graves, such as the results of GPR, and find there is nothing – repeat nothing – there. One author, who published anonymously because of his fear of retaliation, shows how the GPR results at Kamloops probably are radar reflections of buried tile that was part of the school’s sewage disposal system.... 

"Other contributors include Kay, who explains how the media got the story so completely wrong, generating the worst fake news in Canadian history. Gentles examines health conditions in the schools and shows that children were better off there than at home on reserves. Former Manitoba judge Giesbrecht demonstrates that attendance in residential schools was not compelled in any meaningful sense of the term. My contribution criticizes the prolific but weak body of research purporting to show that attendance at residential schools created a historical trauma that is responsible for the subsequent social pathologies to which native people are subject. And Clifton shows from personal experience how benign and positive conditions in the schools could be. In full, our book demonstrates that all the major elements of the Kamloops narrative are either false or highly exaggerated. No unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere – not one....

"Perhaps sensing the weakness of their evidence-free position, purveyors of the Indian Residential Schools-as-genocide narrative have begun to double-down on their own claims, demanding that any criticism of their ideology be made illegal.... Winnipeg NDP MP Leah Gazan ... introduced the original House of Commons resolution declaring Indian Residential Schools to be genocidal. Then federal government ministers got involved. Marc Miller, then Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, took specific offence at Rouillard’s initial, ground-breaking essay, claiming on Twitter (now X) that it is 'part of a pattern of denialism and distortion' about residential schools in Canada. David Lametti, then the Minister of Justice, followed suit with a vague threat that Ottawa might consider “outlawing” residential school denialism. Denialism is generally defined as any debate that contradicts the official narrative as outlined at the beginning of this article.

"So here we are. A false narrative about genocide in residential schools has become firmly established in the public domain without any requirement for actual proof or due diligence. Media and government have eagerly collaborated in perpetuating this falsehood. And anyone who questions any part of the story is labelled a “denialist,” and possibly threatened with criminal prosecution. To such a world, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) offers exactly what we have been missing so far – clarity, rigour and evidence."

Read more: https://c2cjournal.ca/2023/12/grave-error-correcting-the-false-narrative-of-canadas-missing-children/

This is a low point in the history of Parliament (interview with Tom Flanagan) | The Candice Malcolm Show, True North | December 6, 2023: 

Quebec author questions climate alarmism

Quebec author Joanne Marcotte has written a book questioning the "climate apocalypse" consensus – and introducing the reader to a host of thinkers who do likewise.

Quebec author challenges climate change alarmism in new book | Western Standard } Lee Harding:

December 2, 2023 - "A Quebec author is calling for realism and pragmatism in the climate change debate, saying “apocalyptic alarmism” is uncalled for. In her book Inconvenient Doubts – Climate Change Apocalypse: Really? Joanne Marcotte introduces readers to scientists, humanists and economists who defy the past thirty-plus years of 'climate change catastrophism'....

Courtesy Amazon.ca

"The book takes a fresh look at questions alarmist doctrines insist is settled: What exactly is the consensus shared by the scientific community and the state of climate science? Is it warming or not? Are man-made CO2 emissions really the sole responsible of climate change? Are extreme meteorological events really more frequent and intense? How about the IPCC's climate models and scenarios? Are they that reliable? And is Net Zero even realistic? Marcotte says a healthy democracy would allow debate on such questions.... 

"In an email ... the author said the book was the culmination of two years of reading and podcasts from those who provided a 'counterweight' to the 'apocalyptic narrative of climate change.' This included authors such as Steven E. Koonin[] (Unsettled), Michael Shellenberger (Apocalypse Never), Bjorn Lomborg (False Alarm), Judith Curry (Uncertainty and Risk) as well as Roger Pielke. 

"'I also got to know some economists such as Ross McKitrick and a whole lot of other very interesting people and sources. The more I read and listened, the more I was convinced their work must be shared in all sorts of ways,' Marcotte said....

“'I found that it was absolutely necessary to find a way to inform French-speaking people of today’s state of the climate science since, as you would guess, the coverage here is not at all balanced, [to] say the least,” she said. 'During the week of the French version launch, I am happy to have received quite a lot of interviews from Quebec City’s radio stations but still, the subject is taboo in the Montreal media outlets'.... 

"At a time when the United Nations, the IPCC and governments worldwide demand trillions of dollars for their Net Zero project, Marcotte argues that it is perfectly legitimate to press scientists and governments to provide more explanations on uncertainties and risks. She also believes the media should offer more balanced coverage surrounding the United Nations, the IPCC and COP events.

"Marcotte holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Université Laval and worked for several years in the field of computer systems architecture. She also has been commenting and analyzing political news on her personal blog and in selected media since 2009. Marcotte, who lives near Quebec City, is ... known in her province for the 2006 political documentary L’Illusion tranquille (The Quiet Illusion). Five years later, her noted essay Pour en finir avec le Gouvernemaman called for an end to the province’s nanny state."

"Inconvenient Doubts is self-published and available in English and French on Amazon.ca in paperback and ebook." 

Read more: https://www.westernstandard.news/news/quebec-author-challenges-climate-change-alarmism-in-new-book/50636

Lockdowns were a costly failure, finds IEA book

A meta-analysis published by Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs concludes that Covid-19 lockdowns were "a global policy failure of gigantic proportions." 

Lockdowns were a costly failure, finds new IEA book | Institute for Economic Affairs:

June 5, 2023 - "A new systematic review and meta-analysis published by the Institute of Economic Affairs finds that Covid lockdowns failed to significantly reduce deaths The Herby-Jonung-Hanke meta-analysis found that lockdowns, as reported in studies based on stringency indices in the spring of 2020, reduced mortality by 3.2 per cent when compared to less strict lockdown policies adopted by the likes of Sweden. This means lockdowns prevented 1,700 deaths in England and Wales, 6,000 deaths across Europe, and 4,000 deaths in the United States. 

"Lockdowns prevented relatively few deaths compared to a typical flu season – in England and Wales, 18,500–24,800 flu deaths occur, in Europe 72,000 flu deaths occur, and in the United States 38,000 flu deaths occur in a typical flu season. These results pale in comparison to the Imperial College of London’s modelling exercises (March 2020), which predicted that lockdowns would save over 400,000 lives in the United Kingdom and over 2 million lives in the United States.

"Herby, Jonung, and Hanke conclude that voluntary changes in behaviour, such as social distancing, played a significant role in mitigating the pandemic – but harsher restrictions, like stay-at-home rules and school closures, generated very high costs but produced only negligible health benefits. COVID-19 lockdowns were 'a global policy failure of gigantic proportions,' according to this peer-reviewed new academic study. The draconian policy failed to significantly reduce deaths while imposing substantial social, cultural, and economic costs.

"'This study is the first all-encompassing evaluation of the research on the effectiveness of mandatory restrictions on mortality,' according to one of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Lars Jonung, professor emeritus at the Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies at Sweden’s Lund University. 'It demonstrates that lockdowns were a failed promise. They had negligible health effects but disastrous economic, social and political costs to society. Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times.' 

The comprehensive 220-page book, published today by the London-based think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, began with a systematic review of 19,646 potentially relevant studies. For their meta-analysis, the authors’ screening resulted in the choice of 22 studies that are based on actual, measured mortality data, not on results derived from modelling exercises. A meta-analysis is considered the ‘gold-standard’ for evidence, as it combines comparable, independent studies to determine overall trends. 

"The authors, including Professor Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University, also consider a range of studies that determined the impact of individual lockdown restrictions, including stay-at-home rules ... school closures and travel restrictions. In each case, the restrictions did little to reduce COVID-19 mortality. Shelter-in-place (stay at home) orders in Europe and the United States reduced COVID mortality by between 1.4 and 4.1 per cent; Business closures reduced mortality by 7.5 per cent; Gathering limits likely increased COVID mortality by almost six per cent....

"The study compares the effect of lockdown measures against the effect of ‘doing the least,’ rather than doing nothing at all.... Voluntary measures, like social distancing and the reduction of person-to-person contact, effectively reduced COVID mortality in Sweden, a country that did not impose draconian legal restrictions. This is consistent with evidence early in the pandemic that voluntary action began reducing transmission before lockdowns. The authors also conclude that legal mandates only limited a relatively small set of potential contagious contacts, and could in some cases have backfired by encouraging people to stay indoors in less safe environments.

"If voluntary action, minor legal changes, and proactive information campaigns effectively reduced the transmission of COVID, lockdowns were unwarranted from a public health point of view. This negative conclusion is amplified by the significant economic and social costs associated with lockdowns, which include:

• stunted economic growth;
• large increases in public debt;
• rising inequality;
• damage to children’s education and health;
• reduced health-related quality of life;
• damage to mental health;
• increased crime; and
• threats to democracy and loss of freedom.

"The research concludes that, unless substantial alternative evidence emerges, lockdowns should be ‘rejected out of hand’ to control future pandemics."

Read more: https://iea.org.uk/media/lockdowns-were-a-costly-failure-finds-new-iea-book/

New book on libertarianism's founding mothers

Timothy Sandofur's new book on the founding mothers of libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand.

The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism | Reason magazine - Marcus Witcher: 

Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95

March 2023 - "With Freedom's Furies, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.

"Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio's literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis' books 'expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience and cravenness.' Each joined Lewis in rejecting conformity, but they resisted his dismissal of all bourgeois virtue—and Rand also rejected his pessimism.

"The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was 'almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets.' The furies realized they would have to produce their own.

"And so Paterson's The God of the Machine (a philosophical treatise), Lane's The Discovery of Freedom (a pop history crossed with a manifesto), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a didactic novel) were published in 1943. All three writers believed that the morality of self-sacrifice should be rejected. Rand and Paterson both argued for a form of ethical egoism, and they would long debate who influenced whom. But the two differed greatly in their style: Rand was deeply influenced by 19th-century Romanticism while Paterson was committed to naturalism. For her part, Lane argued that human energy produced human flourishing and that 'every human being, by his nature, is free.' Humanity simply needed to discover this truth; hence her book's title.

"All three authors independently developed some of the most important insights of classical liberal academics. Paterson's criticism of the New Deal, for instance, included the argument that central planning was impossible because bureaucrats 'would have to know "absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made."' These arguments capture some of the insights of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, who were not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Likewise, The God of the Machine anticipated Karl Popper's critique of 'the arrested society,' which he wrote two years later. Paterson recognized that all utopias 'are final…they are static societies'; as such, she suggested, they could not adapt, because 'creative processes do not function to order.' In short, 'To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.'

"Lane anticipated Hayek's critique of government planning in a short 1936 book titled Give Me Liberty. She argued, in Sandefur's words, that 'to truly organize an economy…government bureaucrats would, in principle, need infinite knowledge.' Lane also hit on some important insights later associated with the economics of public choice. The idea that bureaucrats could better manage the economy than individuals was, she wrote, the 'dominant fallacy' of the 1930s. Instead, Lane insisted that 'there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.'

"Sandefur also details the trio's views on religion and how those related to their defense of liberty. While all three believed that natural rights existed independently of government, they arrived at this conclusion in different ways. Lane and Paterson both argued that the existence of a deity was necessary. Rand, an atheist, disagreed; she believed that human beings could reason our way to a justification of natural rights.

"Lane irritated the other two women with her insistence that Christian ethics could be reconciled with a robust defense of individual liberty. Her argument that people have a moral sense that leads us, by nature, to care for our neighbor annoyed Rand and Paterson, who felt that man should look after his own happiness and had no moral obligation to others. Paterson took umbrage at the vagueness of Lane's 'all men are brothers' thesis and retorted, 'Stalin is no brother of mine.' This helped end Lane and Paterson's friendship. Lane's religious views and Rand's atheism likewise made any deep friendship between the two women difficult, and they met in person just once....

"Although this is an exceptional book, it is not flawless. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of attention to the ways the furies applied their individualism to minorities. Sandefur does note that 'on matters of race relations, freedom of speech, and sexual autonomy, they were decades ahead of their time in embracing views later classified as "liberal"' [but] ... it is frustrating that the book doesn't delve into that point in more detail. Sandefur mentions, for instance, that Lane was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the largest black newspapers in the country) in 1942, but he doesn't detail any of the arguments she made in her essays there.... For more than two years at the Courier, Lane applied the ideals of individual liberty and her unique conception of human energy to black Americans and their struggle....

"Still, this book's flaws are small compared to its contributions. Freedom's Furies offers hope to a new generation of classical liberals and libertarians living through the threat of authoritarianism abroad and illiberalism at home. Compared with the domestic overreach of the 1930s and '40s and the rise of fascism and communism abroad, our own troubles don't seem quite as bad.... Individual liberty and self-reliance are still the keystones, and the furies' successors will surely continue to promote liberty in the face of the darkness today.'

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/02/11/the-founding-mothers-of-libertarianism/

Timothy Sandofur on Freedom’s Furies: Three Women Who Sparked a Revolution, Goldwater Institute, March 9, 2023:

Order Freedom's Furies at Amazon.com.

Is the free market just a Big Myth?

Is the free market just a myth dreamed up and propagandized by big business and libertarian economists?

The Big Myth Is Full of Recycled Anti-Capitalist Cheap Shots | Reason - Phillip W. Magness:

February 25, 2023 - "New academic 'histories' now appear on a near-monthly basis, each blaming a variety of social ills on the conspiratorial machinations around a single idea: the free market. Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on 'market fundamentalism' or 'neoliberalism.' The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the targeted theories a 'manufactured myth' arising from the 'inventions' of 20th century business interests.... All eventually settle on a mundane conspiracy of business interests and libertarian economists, who allegedly derailed America from its progressive path by convincing people that markets work better than government at solving problems.

"At some 550 pages, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is among the most loquacious entrants into this crowded literature. Harvard University's Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology historian Erik Conway lay out their conspiracy theory with formulaic precision, but their book is atypical in one significant way. While most of the other works in the anti-neoliberalism genre manage at least to excavate some interesting archival findings about libertarian economists (before badly misinterpreting them), this book is remarkably light on original content.... A reader ... will be left wondering why this same story needed yet another repackaged recitation....

"The Big Myth is structured in sequential vignettes about various themes and figures such as Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Friedrich Hayek, Rose Wilder Lane, and Milton Friedman, all of whom are portrayed as either willing propagandists for big business or hapless dupes of the same. The authors expend almost no effort on understanding the arguments of the thinkers they set out to debunk.

"A revealing example appears in the book's treatment of Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil." Read's story is a fairly straightforward allegory for Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand," showing how complex social coordination arises from routine economic exchanges and signals in the absence of a centralized design. To Oreskes and Conway, however, the metaphor is literally the hand of God working from above to ensure the market system provides. As they put it, 'God made the marketplace and the marketplace made the pencil; ergo God made the pencil'....

"Interpretive peculiarities continue in their treatment of Ludwig von Mises' Socialism. After initially acknowledging that the book was written in German in 1922, Oreskes and Conway soon drift into anachronism by insinuating that it was intended as a critique of President Franklin Roosevelt. ("Mises's use of the term socialism was misleading," they contend, "because no credible American political leader in 1944 was advocating central planning.") They augment this ascription of prophecy with a sleight of hand, replacing the revolutionary Marxists of Mises' original commentaries with the comparatively benign Norman Thomas as their own preferred avatar of socialism. Like other texts in the anti-neoliberalism genre, The Big Myth removes 20th century free market authors from their historical context by hand-waving the Soviet Union out of existence and proceeding as if socialism means nothing more than a narrow swath of modern Scandinavian social democracies.

"Such errors are frequently paired with another recurring theme: the authors' fundamental inability to approach their opponents with anything remotely resembling intellectual charity. The book is filled with gratuitous swipes, many of them comically ahistorical. This usually means either a false accusation of racism or a disparaging attack on a target's qualifications. Mises receives both types of abuse. After dubbing him an 'absolutist who sympathized with fascism,' Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist's migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises ... struggled to find a respectable academic job until 'dark money' funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University..... Meanwhile, Mises' academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved.... 

"They casually brand Milton Friedman a 'racist extremist' and defender of segregation, but not for any actual defense of segregation. The authors simply disagree with his argument that markets were more effective tools for bringing about integration than government edicts.....

"They accuse Friedrich Hayek of eschewing 'the essence of scholarship,' which 'is to look past the immediacies of time and place,' while themselves constantly processing history through their modern partisan commitments. They accuse free market economists of venturing outside their scientific expertise while offering their own decidedly nonexpert opinions on everything from economic inequality to COVID-19.

"The authors' discussion of the latter subject, which closes the book, is unintentionally comedic. Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. 'market failure' with the alleged success of 'countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,' China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China's centralized 'zero-COVID' regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair."

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/02/25/the-big-myth-is-full-of-recycled-anti-capitalist-cheap-shots/

Hancock Diaries shed light on UK Covid politics

The truth about Matt Hancock | The Spectator - Isabel Oakeshott:

"Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common.... [I]mportantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic.... How then could I have worked with him on his book about the pandemic? Some of my lockdown confidantes suggested it was a betrayal....  Quite the reverse. I wanted to get to the truth. What better way to find out what really happened – who said what to whom; the driving force and thinking behind key policies and decisions; who (if anyone) dissented; and how they were crushed – than to align myself with the key player?.... 

"In the event, Hancock shared far more than I could ever have imagined.... Published this week, co-authored by me, Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries are the first insider account from the heart of government of the most seismic political, economic and public health crisis of our times. I am not so naive as to imagine that he told me everything. However, since he still does not believe he did anything wrong, he was surprisingly inclined to disclosure. In an indication of how far he was prepared to go, the Cabinet Office requested almost 300 deletions and amendments to our original manuscript. Under pressure from me and out of his own desire that the book should be both entertaining and revelatory, to his credit, Hancock fought hard to retain as much controversial material as he could.... Here then – based not only on what is in the Pandemic Diaries but on every-thing I saw in the process of putting the book together – are what I consider the key lessons.

"The crusade to vaccinate the entire population against a disease with a low mortality rate among all but the very elderly is one of the most extraordinary cases of mission creep in political history. On 3 January 2021, Hancock told The Spectator that once priority groups had been jabbed (13 million doses) then ‘Cry freedom’. Instead, the government proceeded to attempt to vaccinate every-one, including children, and there was no freedom for another seven months.... Why did the goalposts move so far off the pitch? I believe multiple driving forces combined almost accidentally to create a policy which was never subjected to rigorous cost-benefit analysis.... Given the unprecedented speed at which the vaccine was developed, the government might have been expected to be extra careful about recording and analysing any reported side-effects. While there was much anxiety about potential adverse reactions during clinical trials, once it passed regulatory hurdles, ministers seemed to stop worrying....

"One of the most striking themes to emerge from internal communications is the scale of concern about Scotland.... Throughout the pandemic, far-reaching policy decisions, especially international travel restrictions and the timing of lockdowns, were distorted by what Sturgeon was doing or what No. 10 feared she might do. Hancock describes her move to mandate mask-wearing in secondary schools in late August 2020 as ‘one of her most egregious attempts at one-upmanship to date’, admitting the UK government was left ‘scrabbling around to formulate a response’. The UK government’s own guidance on face coverings had specifically excluded schools. Faced with an unpleasant choice between wheeling out the chief medical or scientific officer to say that the Scots were wrong or performing a U-turn, Downing Street chose the latter. That, rather than any medical reason, is why millions of schoolchildren were forced to spend months with grubby bits of material stuck to their faces....

"As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down.... Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called [Great] Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the g eneral population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.... Anti-lockdown protests were quickly banned. When, in September 2020, the Cabinet Office tried to exempt demonstrations from the ‘rule of six’, Hancock enlisted Michael Gove to ‘kill it off’, arguing that marches would ‘undermine public confidence in social distancing’. Gove had no qualms about helping.....

"The accusation that he blithely discharged Covid-positive patients from hospitals into care homes, without thinking about how this might seed the virus among the frail elderly, or attempting to stop this happening, upsets and exasperates him. The evidence I have seen is broadly in his favour.... It later emerged that the primary source of new infection in these settings was in any case not hospital discharges, but the movement of staff between care homes.... Hancock knew he would be accused of ‘blaming’ hardworking staff if he emphasised the link (which is exactly what has now happened). He is on less solid ground in relation to the treatment of isolated care-home residents and their increasingly desperate relatives..... Behind the scenes, the then care home minister Helen Whately fought valiantly to persuade him to ease visiting restrictions to allow isolated residents some contact with their loved ones. She did not get very far. Internal communications reveal that the authorities expected to find cases of actual neglect of residents as a result of the suspension of routine care-home inspections.

"Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical face masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus. People were made to wear them anyway because Dominic Cummings was fixated with them; because Nicola Sturgeon liked them; and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency. As early as 3 February 2020 – long before anyone outside the Department of Health was taking the prospect of a pandemic seriously – ministers were told the masks make no significant difference. In April 2020, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) reiterated this advice. At the end of that month, the Sage committee said much the same thing, telling ministers that it would be unreasonable to claim a large benefit. An ‘obsessed’ Cummings was the driving force behind mandating mask-wearing in all healthcare settings – and then in retail and hospitality. On 28 June he messaged Hancock to complain that the government was being insufficiently ‘aggressive’ on the issue and demanding that they be compulsory in shops and for restaurant staff....

"There is no doubt that Hancock worked phenomenally hard to do what he felt was best, based on all the information available at the time. Day after day, he was forced to make tremendously difficult judgments, balancing sharply competing interests.... While vast sums of public money were wasted and the collateral damage from lockdowns and other Covid policies was enormous, I do not believe there was any kind of conspiracy, still less any malign intent on the part of our political leaders during the crisis. They may have been misguided; and got some things catastrophically wrong, but mistakes were made in good faith. Whether or not those errors will be forgiven by a public only just beginning to realise the full consequences is another question."

Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-truth-about-matt-hancock/

Chrystia Freeland's 2012 look at the WEF

Rupa Subramanya finds Chrystia Freeland's book The Plutocrats (published in 2012, before Freeland became a World Economic Forum [WEF] trustee) to be a great introduction to the world of the WEF, 

The best critique of the World Economic Forum came from Chrystia Freeland herself | National Post - Rupa Subramanya:

September 14, 2022 - "In a recent interview with the CBC, Adrian Monck, managing director of the World Economic Forum (WEF), said that, 'Canada should be talking about a lot of things right now. It shouldn’t really be talking about the World Economic Forum based here in Geneva'.… Monck’s dismissive, even patronizing, remarks were in response to claims that the organization has an outsized influence on government policies around the world, including in Canada. I’ve been critical of the WEF in the past for pushing a far-left, radical ideology centred around the 'great reset'; and especially critical of the fact that Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, serves on its board of trustees. This is terrible optics, as it suggests a direct line from Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s executive chairman, to the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

"Based on this fact alone, you might think that Freeland would be the last person in the world, maybe other than Schwab himself, to say anything that could be perceived as critical of the rich, powerful and glamorous people who gather high up in the Swiss Alps. That might now be true of Freeland, who’s as much of an elite insider as it gets, but, before she became a politician, she was a journalist, and her magnum opus was a book called, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, which was published in 2012. I’ve been re-reading the book and was struck by just how on the mark she was. 

"The book’s central focus is, ironically, how plutocrats — the super-elites who sit at the top of the economic, political and social pyramid — attempt, and often succeed, in turning the rules of the game in their favour, by shaping government policy and public opinion. As becomes vividly apparent in Freeland’s engaging read, Davos is the playground where the plutocrats hash out ideas with other members of the powerful elite, from prime ministers and presidents, to celebrities, bankers, academics and others who help shape public opinion and guide public policy....  In an especially telling passage in Plutocrats, she writes...

It can be fun to imagine the super-elites who went to Wall Street and their Harvard classmates who became economics professors and those who became U.S . senators participating in a grand conspiracy (hatched ideally, at the Porcellian Club) to rip off the middle class. But the impact of these networks is much less cynical, and much more subtle, though not necessarily of less consequence.

"When people spend a lot of time together in an environment where work and socializing intermingle, whether in a university fraternity, at Davos or at other venues where powerful people routinely come together, a shared mindset develops of what needs to be done, whether to combat equality, ameliorate climate change or handle the COVID-19 pandemic. That shared mindset is often pushed on and society in order to influence public opinion and, ultimately, government policy. As Freeland wrote, 'Some farsighted plutocrats try to use their money not merely to buy public office for themselves but to redirect the reigning ideology of a nation, a region or even the world.'

"There has long been a revolving door between the top echelons of government, the private sector and academia, especially in the United States, and to a lesser extent in places like Canada. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s merely a fact. The WEF facilitates this by creating a forum for the world’s political and business elite to mix and mingle. 

"Critics of the theory that wealthy individuals would want to implant the WEF’s left-wing ideology in their home countries might assume that the wealthy, by definition, would be pushing for free markets and minimal government intervention. This is a rookie error, as Freeland aptly notes:

The bigger issue of the relationship between plutocrats and the state can’t be reduced to business batting for smaller government. Often, a big, intrusive state is the plutocrat’s best friend — true of state capitalist regimes like China and Russia and of industries, like the defence business, that live on state largesse, or of companies, like the U.S. steel industry under George W. Bush, that have lobbied for and won protectionist legislation.

"None of this should be controversial. It certainly wasn’t when then-journalist Freeland published her book: the only negative consequence she received after it came out, as she herself joked, was that she got uninvited from a bunch of private parties at Davos. Her basic message was widely accepted. Fast forward to today, when basically the same message coming from voices on the right is derided as a conspiracy theory intended as disinformation and misinformation, as Monck alleges. I wonder how Monck would respond to Freeland’s critiques of his organization? Then again, I wonder how the Freeland of today, a cozy insider at Davos, would respond to the Freeland of yesterday."

Read more: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rupa-subramanya-the-best-critique-of-the-world-economic-forum-came-from-chrystia-freeland-herself

Covid and the Psychology of Totalitarianism

Never Again? Israel’s mask mob echo the Holocaust | The Conservative Woman - Donna Edmunds:

June 30, 2022 - "In January this year, a young woman went to the opera.... The woman, known only as M, has a medical mask exemption and arrived with her face uncovered. Soon after, she was violently turned upon by her fellow opera-goers. ‘There were about 400 attendees, about 100 of them were shouting at me (people physically blocking my way to my seats and not letting me through) people telling me not to stand near them and shooing me away,’ she wrote in her Telegram post. ‘A woman hit me on the head. I didn’t speak a single word to all these people, I was literally cowering in place and at no point did I speak or reply or gesture to any of them, after the initial blow up I just went straight to security.’

"Thankfully, the security staff were supportive of M, moving away the more aggressive among the crowd and threatening to evict them. Some of the staff seemed shaken by what they had witnessed. They escorted M to her seat and stood guard at the end of her row throughout the performance. This scene would be shocking enough had it taken place somewhere like Berlin, which has seen this sort of irrational out-group persecution by supposedly enlightened citizens before. It’s all the more disturbing that it actually took place in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"Israel is a country awash with Holocaust memorials.... Yet when Covid struck in March 2020, Israel was among the countries that most enthusiastically embraced the harshest of public health measures. Its citizens suffered months of lockdowns, business closures, school closures, mask mandates and the most insulting policy of all: the ‘green pass’ – a vaccine passport which segregated society into the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’. Deckchairs appeared on Tel Aviv beach labelled ‘reserved for vaccinated people only’. The parallels with our history, only eight decades behind us, were striking and alarming, yet astonishingly the majority were content to sit inside warm restaurants during the winter of 2021, watching those who were unwilling or unable to be vaccinated turned away or shivering outside under inadequate patio heaters without a murmur of dissent....

"We know that nearly 400,000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto, but how many of us know why the ghetto was created? That it was a public health policy? When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and bombed Warsaw, the city’s sewerage system was damaged and typhus quickly spread. German propaganda already blamed Jews for spreading disease, so, although typhus was found throughout the city, it was the Jewish neighbourhoods that became ‘restricted epidemic areas’. Although by the summer of 1940 typhus cases were falling, German doctors persuaded the authorities to create a ghetto to prevent further spread. The creation of the ghetto, where overcrowding and lack of food were rife, caused a spike in cases.

"Fast-forward to 2022, and not everyone was content to go along with the narrative. Some of us wondered how so many could be so blind to the history repeating in front of their eyes. What did those Tel Aviv opera-goers think they were doing when they mobbed M?

"A Belgian psychologist and academic gives us the answer. Mattias Desmet has spent the last few years studying the rise of totalitarian regimes and was already uncomfortable with the direction Western societies were headed in when Covid hit.... In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet explains that societies in which a large number of people have anxious, lonely lives lacking in meaning are ripe for totalitarianism to set in. In those conditions, people are looking for a narrative that creates purpose and a sense of shared endeavour. Many people found exactly that in the Covid era. If left unchecked, the false narrative of mass formation descends into violence and persecution. It descends into the Holocaust.

"Desmet explained what is required to avert this dismal fate. ‘It’s really crucial that the people who are not in the process of mass formation continue to speak out, because if they don’t, the mass hypnosis becomes deeper and deeper, and typically reaches the point where the masses become so fanatically convinced of the narrative they believe in, that they believe it is necessary to eliminate the people who don’t go along with it,’ he said. ‘This is because once someone is in mass formation he feels an overwhelming solidarity, and he’s convinced that people who don’t share the solidarity, who don’t go along with the masses, lack solidarity, lack citizenship. Consequently they are not human any more and have to be destroyed.’

"He added: ‘If dissident voices stop speaking out, then the process that happened in the Soviet Union around 1930 and in Germany around 1935 will typically start to happen [again]. Once the dissident voices, the opposition, stop speaking out within the public space, within a period of six months to one year, the cruelty starts.’

"When I heard about M’s experience, I knew I had to speak out. And I wasn’t the only one. Along with my partner and a few others, most notably historian Andrew Barr, we set about writing a declaration – a warning – from the Jews to the world. We have been here before. We know where division, demonisation and mass psychosis lead. We cannot let it happen again.

"Some have said that we are insulting those who died in the Holocaust by highlighting the clear parallels between Covid policies and the events leading to the Holocaust. We say the opposite: that only by learning from history and ensuring that nothing of the sort ever happens again can the memories of those who died truly be honoured.... Others have said that our declaration has been made redundant by the apparent rollback of Covid policies. Flights are taking off again, people are unmasked, the world is returning to a semblance of normality. To those people I say two things: first, in May, Joe Biden stated frankly: ‘Covid isn’t over.’ Second, our governments have had a taste of absolute power. They now know they can lock us up at the drop of a hat. If they’ve done it once, they will do it again, unless we make it abundantly clear that we won’t be so meek the next time....

" I invite you to sign the Isaiah 62 Declaration here. https://isaiah62declaration.com/"
                For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent
                For Jerusalem’s sake I will not be still
                Isaiah 62:1

Read more: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/never-again-israels-mask-mob-echo-the-holocaust/

Lockdowns were a failure based on a falsehood, says epidemiologist in new book

Britain got it wrong on Covid: long lockdown did more harm than good, says scientist | The Guardian - Robin McKie:

January 2, 2022 - "There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. 'Everyone is at risk,' he announced. And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. 

"'I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,' [Woolhouse] says. 'In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15. And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir. 

'We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt' he argues '... to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy. We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked'. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.'

"Rather than imposing blanket lockdowns across the nation, the government should have adopted measures designed to make contacts safe, Woolhouse maintains. 'You can see from the UK data that people were reducing their contacts with each other as cases rose and before lockdown was imposed. That, coupled with Covid-safe measures, such as masks and testing, would have been sufficient to control spread.' Largely voluntary behaviour change worked in Sweden and it should have been allowed to progress in the UK, argues Woolhouse. 

"Instead, we plumped for an enforced national lockdown, in part because, for the first time in history, we could. Enough business is now done online to allow large parts of society to function fairly well – through video conferences and online shopping. 'But it was a lazy solution to a novel coronavirus epidemic, as well as a hugely damaging one,' he adds.

"However, Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who backed the [Great] Barrington Declaration which proposed the Covid-19 virus be allowed to circulate until enough people had been infected to achieve herd immunity. 'This would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020,' says Woolhouse. 'It also lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.'

"Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. 'Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,' says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.

"The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of 'shielders', such as care home workers and informal carers. 'These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.' Britain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. 'By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community'....

"And Woolhouse is emphatic that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. 'Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy,' he states."

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/britain-got-it-wrong-on-covid-long-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good-says-scientist

The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir on Amazon

Ex-adviser writes book on Trump and the virus

A President Betrayed by Bureaucrats: Scott Atlas’s Masterpiece on the Covid Disaster | Brownstone Institute - Jeffrey A. Tucker:

November 27, 2021 - "I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general. 

"Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment. Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx) deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction.... 

"Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences. 

"The fake science of population-wide 'models' drove policy instead of following the known information about risk profiles. 'The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk,' writes Atlas. 'Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.'

"'Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,' he writes, 'exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.'

"In the midst of continued chaos, in August 2020, Atlas was called by Trump to help, not as a political appointee, not as a PR man for Trump, not as a DC fixer but as the only person who in nearly a year of unfolding catastrophe had a health-policy focus. He made it clear from the outset that he would only say what he believed to be true; Trump agreed that this was precisely what he wanted and needed. Trump got an earful and gradually came around to a more rational view than that which caused him to wreck the American economy and society with his own hands and against his own instincts. 

"In Task Force meetings, Atlas was the only person who showed up with studies and on-the-ground information as opposed to mere charts of infections easily downloadable from popular websites. 'A bigger surprise was that Fauci did not present scientific research on the pandemic to the group that I witnessed. Likewise, I never heard him speak about his own critical analysis of any published research studies. This was stunning to me'.... 

"When Atlas spoke up, it was almost always to contradict Fauci/Birx but he received no backing during meetings, only to have many people in attendance later congratulate him for speaking out. Still, he did, by virtue of private meetings, have a convert in Trump himself, but by then it was too late: not even Trump could prevail against the wicked machine he had permissioned into operation.... 

"When Atlas would raise doubts about Birx, Jared Kushner would repeatedly assure him that 'she is 100% MAGA.' Yet we know for certain that this is not true. We know from a different book on the subject that she only took the position with the anticipation that Trump would lose the presidency in the November election....

"[O]n March 12, 2020 ... President Trump spoke to the nation and announced that there would be no more travel from Europe.... A day later (March 13), the HHS distributed its lockdown plans for the nation. That weekend, Trump met for many hours with Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and only a few others. He came around to the idea of shutting down the American economy for two weeks. He presided over the calamitous March 16, 2020, press conference, at which Trump promised to beat the virus through general lockdowns. Of course he had no power to do that directly but he could urge it to happen, all under the completely delusional promise that doing so would solve the virus problem. Two weeks later, the same gang persuaded him to extend the lockdowns. 

"Trump went along with the advice because it was the only advice he was fed at the time. They made it appear that the only choice that Trump had – if he wanted to beat the virus – was to wage war on his own policies that were pushing for a stronger, healthier economy.... Atlas writes: 'On this highly important criterion of presidential management — taking responsibility to fully take charge of policy coming from the White House — I believe the president made a massive error in judgment. Against his own gut feeling, he delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.' The ... fact that both Republicans and Democrats do not want spoken about is that this whole calamity ... did indeed begin with Trump’s decision.....

"I was particularly struck by his chapter on testing, mainly because that whole racket mystified me throughout. From the outset, the CDC bungled the testing part of the pandemic story.... Once that was finally fixed, months too late, mass and indiscriminate PCR testing became the desiderata of success within the White House. The problem was not just with the testing method:

Fragments of dead virus hang around and can generate a positive test for many weeks or months, even though one is not generally contagious after two weeks. Moreover, PCR is extremely sensitive. It detects minute quantities of virus that do not transmit infection…. Even the New York Times wrote in August that 90 percent or more of positive PCR tests falsely implied that someone was contagious. Sadly, during my entire time at the White House, this crucial fact would never even be addressed by anyone other than me at the Task Force meetings, let alone because for any public recommendation, even after I distributed data proving this critical point.

"The other problem is the wide assumption that more testing (however inaccurate) of whomever, whenever was always better.... Early on, Fauci had clearly said that there was no reason to get tested if you had no symptoms. Later, that common-sense outlook was thrown out the window and replaced with an agenda to test as many people as possible regardless of risk and regardless of symptoms. The resulting data enabled Fauci/Birx to keep everyone in a constant state of alarm. More test positivity to them implied only one thing: more lockdowns.... That assumption became so entrenched that not even the president’s own wishes (which had changed from Spring to Summer) made any difference. 

"Atlas’s first job, then, was to challenge this whole indiscriminate testing agenda. To his mind, testing needed to be about more than accumulating endless amounts of data, much of it without meaning; instead, testing should be directed toward a public-health goal. The people who needed tests were the vulnerable populations, particularly those in nursing homes, with the goal of saving lives among those who were actually threatened with severe outcomes. This push to test, contact trace, and quarantine anyone and everyone regardless of known risk was a huge distraction, and also caused huge disruption in schooling and enterprise. 

"To fix it meant changing the CDC guidelines. Atlas’s story of attempting to do that is eye-opening. He wrestled with every manner of bureaucrat and managed to get new guidelines written, only to find that they had been mysteriously reverted to the old guidelines one week later. He caught the “error” and insisted that his version prevail. Once they were issued by the CDC, the national press was all over it, with the story that the White House was pressuring the scientists at the CDC in terrible ways. After a week-long media storm, the guidelines changed yet again. All of Atlas’s work was made null.... 

"It was this way throughout the lockdown period, a machinery in place to implement, encourage, and enforce endless restrictions but no one person in particular was there to take responsibility for the policies or the outcomes, even as the ostensible head of state (Trump) was on record both publicly and privately opposing the policies that no one could seem to stop. 

"As an example of this, Atlas tells the story of bringing some massively important scientists to the White House to speak with Trump: Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Joseph Ladapo, and Cody Meissner. People around the president thought the idea was great. But somehow the meeting kept being delayed. Again and again. When it finally went ahead, the schedulers only allowed for 5 minutes. But once they met with Trump himself, the president had other ideas and prolonged the meeting for an hour and a half, asking the scientists all kinds of questions about viruses, policy, the initial lockdowns, the risks to individuals, and so on. The president was so impressed with their views and knowledge – what a dramatic change that must have been for him – that he invited filming to be done plus pictures to be taken. He wanted to make it a big public splash. It never happened. Literally. White House press somehow got the message that this meeting never happened. The first anyone will have known about it other than White House employees is from Atlas’s book.... 

"I can’t possibly cover the wealth of material in this book, and I expect this brief review to be one of several that I write. I do have a few disagreements. First, I think the author is too uncritical toward Operation Warp Speed and doesn’t really address how the vaccines were wildly oversold, to say nothing of growing concerns about safety, which were not addressed in the trials. Second, he seems to approve of Trump’s March 12th travel restrictions, which struck me as brutal and pointless, and the real beginning of the unfolding disaster. Third, Atlas inadvertently seems to perpetuate the distortion that Trump recommended ingesting bleach during a press conference. I know that this was all over the papers. But I’ve read the transcript of that press conference several times and find nothing like this. Trump actually makes clear that he was speaking about cleaning surfaces. This might be yet another case of outright media lies. 

"All that aside, this book reveals everything about the insanity of 2020 and 2021, years in which good sense, good science, historical precedent, human rights, and concerns for human liberty were all thrown into the trash, not just in the US but all over the world....

"Atlas experienced the slings, arrows, and worse. The media and the bureaucrats tried to shut him up, shut him down, and body bag him professionally and personally. Cancelled, meaning removed from the roster of functional, dignified human beings. Even colleagues at Stanford University joined in the lynch mob, much to their disgrace. And yet this book is that of a man who has prevailed against them. 

"In that sense, this book is easily the most crucial first-person account we have so far. It is gripping, revealing, devastating for the lockdowners and their vaccine-mandating successors, and a true classic that will stand the test of time. It’s simply not possible to write the history of this disaster without a close examination of this erudite first-hand account."

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/a-president-betrayed-by-bureaucrats-scott-atlass-masterpiece-on-the-covid-disaster/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A Plague Upon Our House at Amazon.com.