Taken for a Ride

 

As the title suggests, America (and the rest of the world for that matter) has been taken for a ride three years running, at least by my count. Some of the subjects I’m going to cover were on the radar prior to the pandemic but didn’t make any significant advances, due to societal, political, or economic headwinds until the “summer of love” in 2020.

During the lockdowns that ensued while trying to “stop the spread” of COVID19, we were told by the public health establishment that public gatherings, especially those that were meant to protest the lockdowns and other draconian forms of control that certain state and local governments were imposing on their citizenry, had the potential to become super spreaders of COVID. We were told to mask up since they reduced the transmission of the virus amongst the populace. What we weren’t expecting was an abrupt about face from those same public health experts when they claimed that attending protests and marches decrying the inherent racism in our society in the wake of the George Floyd killing, was an acceptable undertaking. We watched again and again, as stories of our governing class made the news headlines showing that they could not be bothered following the same rules and restrictions that they had laid out for the rest of us. We were told that life would return to normal once the vaccines that were being developed were deployed to a significant degree that herd immunity could be reached.

Those of us who questioned the narrative coming from leadership at the various levels of government were labeled as science deniers or conspiracy theorists. The mere mention of anything that went against the establishment narrative could get you suspended or banned from social media platforms, have your livelihood threatened, your liberties curtailed, or even have personal and professional relationships destroyed. Those who did stay the course were vindicated, especially in the aftermath of FOIA requests and civil suits being filed against government agencies that had been sitting on data that proved just the opposite of what we had been told. The icing on the cake though, was billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The releases that came to be known as the Twitter Files were proof positive that contrarian views on a range of subjects had been throttled or just flat out canceled by the platform at the behest of government and corporate entities. This is no small thing, mind you, since the courts have frowned on any attempt by the state to use proxies to do what it can’t because of legal or constitutional restrictions.

Speaking of proxies, it blows my mind how a joke tangentially involving the vaccines, that came at the end of a six-and-a-half-minute monologue by guest host Woody Harrelson on Saturday Night Live (SNL), could have garnered so much vitriol from the legacy media. Especially since the punchline was an attempt at a little self-deprecation. It’s quite telling how much control over the information we receive is being exercised by these outlets and the fact that they will brook no deviation from the script, especially by one of their own. The joke itself is about 30 seconds long and comes at about the 5:54 mark in the embedded video that accompanies this link to the story.

While we’re on the subject of the jab, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what can only be called another flip-flop by the former director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci. Apparently, the good doctor was the co-author of an article in the medical publication Cell Host and Microbe. In it, he cast doubt on the ability of vaccines to provide long term treatment for respiratory viruses. This was something that has been known in the scientific and medical communities for some time, but given the position he occupied, no one who wanted to remain in his good graces dared speak of this, even though he and other like-minded individuals continued to push a vaccine that would not keep you from catching COVID or transmitting it to others. One is left to wonder why this was allowed to happen, until an inconvenient little fact rears its ugly head. The federal government plays a very important role in the development of drugs in the United States. In fact, it takes in a fair amount of royalties from the sales of the drugs it helps pharmaceutical companies develop. The researchers and scientists involved are also awarded stipends from those royalties for their work. So, is it any wonder that they and the drug companies would want to cover up the shortcomings of these vaccines (not to mention any potentially dangerous side effects) given how much money there was to be made? Imagine the mess that would ensue if the government actually enforced its own truth in advertising laws on itself!

Despite the need to come clean in the face if these continuing revelations, it appears that the only thing the government is willing to do is double down on its decisions. A prime example of this insanity would be the Cochrane meta-review, considered the gold standard of clinical studies. The recent study on masks proved once and for all that they do not work. But what did the CDC do with this info pray tell? They ignored it in favor of a couple of other studies conducted with some very slipshod and questionable methods. You can read the story here. Not to be left out, we have Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda gates foundation, and the second largest donor to the World health Organization (WHO) after the United States Government. That’s right, the second largest donor to the WHO is not a country, but a non-governmental organization (NGO) run by one of the world’s richest men. For some time now he’s been on this anti-meat kick since he thinks that livestock, or more precisely, the gaseous emissions from said livestock are endangering the planet. Get rid of cow farts and we save the world from climate change, what a concept. To this end, he has invested heavily in synthetic meat production. The only problem is that some of the organic components necessary to pull this off may not be quite ready for primetime. Here’s why this is a bad idea until more is known about this material.

We’re going to linger on the medical side for a bit longer. Why? Because there’s an epidemic of another kind that has taken root in this country. This one deals with the mutilation of our young people at the hands of a group of individuals who are driven by ideology or the promise of turning an easy buck. Under the last administration, this movement was kept under heel for fear that too much exposure would have generated the sort of attention that would have kept it from flourishing. With the Biden administration taking the reins of power though, all caution could now be thrown to the wind since there was a new sheriff in town and America was open for business. That business of course would be the transgender movement and the “conversion” of young people, and by young, I mean minors. Those who questioned the imperative to go after America’s children were labeled as transphobes, bigoted, or worse. But we now know that the folks perpetrating this evil even tried to turn parents into villains by claiming that they were keeping these kids from realizing their true selves. In some states they have gone as far as putting policies into effect in local school districts and proposing laws that would cut parents out of the loop concerning their children’s welfare. Even more concerning is the revelation that these conversions are looked at as a vehicle for profit as indicated by an email exchange involving Dr. Rachel Levine, the current Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, while she was Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health.

Speaking of bigoted, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, Scott Adams, has come under fire for comments he made during a recent episode of his podcast. What exactly did he say that got him into such hot water? Well, it had to do with the fact that just 53 percent of black Americans trust white Americans and that the attacks on their white counterparts had everything to do with their race. He decided that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with blacks given their hatred of whites. Of course, just about every paper in the country pulled Dilbert from their pages over his comments, but Elon Musk inconveniently pointed out the hypocrisy of those same outlets for stoking racial animus on their own pages. What makes this story a great cautionary tale about why we all need to get along is that most of us have no real knowledge of our ancestral history and who may have wound up in our familial woodpile. Marxist Professor and former Black Panther Angela Davis sat in stunned disbelief when she found out that she had two white ancestors, one who was a slaveholder and another who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower. This piece of insightful news came courtesy of Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the PBS series Finding Your Roots.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has decided that Diversity is now a strategic imperative. Forget about warfighting and keeping our shores safe, the number one priority for DoD is to ensure equitable outcomes for its personnel. So, rather than figuring out how to counter the likes of China, Iran, Russia and other bad actors, the focus should now be on inculcating the tenets of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) into America’s warfighting ethos. After all, a diverse and inclusive military is a more harmonious one. I can see it now, dictators Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and Kim Jong Un of North Korea doubled over with laughter after having read this latest press release. It’s not looking particularly good for the home team when you let a bunch of charlatans walk into your organization and take it over with a bunch of nonsensical ideas.

Nonsensical ideas, what an interesting topic. But since we’re here dwelling on it, let’s discuss the latest assault on the English language by the wokesters from the academic think tanks. Apparently there are certain aspects of our language that are either too violent or just aren’t inclusive enough and need to be done away with. Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have put it that way, it kind of sounds violent and has a ring of finality to it. When former talk radio personality Michael Savage used the term “borders, language, and culture” to describe those attributes that helped to define a country, he was roundly lambasted and ridiculed for what he said. Yet we have been witnesses to the dismantling of those same attributes over the course of the last couple of decades, with the past three years seeing a concerted effort to accelerate that process.

Last, but not least, no discussion on being taken for a ride would be complete without delving into the antics of disgraced DNC financier Sam Bankman Fried (SBF). If anyone could put all of the above into its proper perspective, it would be SBF. Here you had a billionaire wunderkind who was espousing the very things that progressive Dems believed in and was willing to donate princely sums to their campaign coffers in the runup to the 2022 midterm elections. He was a rock star, not only in the halls of Congress, but on cable news shows on CNN, MSNBC, and more importantly CNBC, the business channel of NBC Universal. If you needed creds, then this was a good place to get it. The only problem with all of this was that it was a house of cards built on a lie. The money he and his management team were donating wasn’t theirs. It belonged to his clients. His operation was nothing more than a political influence op funded by a giant Ponzi scheme that would have made the Late Bernard Madoff blush. We know that he didn’t believe in any of the woke nonsense he was spouting because he said so himself on at least one occasion, but if that’s what granted him entry into the hallowed halls of power in D.C., then so be it.

Just like SBF’s current predicament, all the fairy tales that we were told have begun to unravel. Those who pushed these stories either unwittingly or as knowing accomplices are going to find out what little cover that may be left won’t be enough to save them from the much-deserved scrutiny that is sure to follow. Buckle up folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride from here on out.