[1000 words]
Will the guilty ever have to answer for the damage they did by pushing the Corona-Panic and disastrous policy responses, including the “Big V” [i.e., Covid-Vaccine]?
This week Matthew J. Peterson weighed in with dark visions of a future of CoronaPanic-politics worth some attention and consideration. Peterson is a U.S. right-wing intellectual, writer, editor, and publisher of some influence.
He hints at a coming backlash, reckoning, or other unsavory follow-on effects amounting to a kind of political insurgency to come at some time in the next two years, against the accumulated and ongoing damage from the Corona-Panic.
Peterson has, I believe, in the same commentary also signaled, indirectly, that he will support Ron DeSantis in 2024 over Trump. Read his own words (in full, below) to see if you agree with that interpretation.
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I quote Matthew Peterson, who posted the following on June 18, 2022 (lightly edited for formatting):
“Virus response is Trump’s biggest weakness and DeSantis’s greatest strength.
If Trump wants to run [in 2024,] he should make clear he wasn’t for mandates, etc., because what all the cool kids know is that when the terrible truth about the vax starts spilling over the dam, the Left will blame Trump. DeSantis knows this. And is best positioned to win as the single greatest reasoned opponent of Fauci in America.
I also think it’s unclear what kind of psychic break this development will cause in the next two years for many who have enthusiastically gone along over the last two years. It’s so difficult that it may be everyone just ignores the data and lives in denial. But if it does out—and the current numbers are bloody bad—the political and cultural consequences will be wild and unpredictable. I’m talking extremely wild, extremely unpredictable in ways I can’t state publicly without attracting federal attention.
I support both Trump and DeSantis. It was a complicated situation for everyone. But Trump will need to get ahead of this issue and address it in the next few months if he wants to position himself in the primary.” [End]
Now, understand that this statement is not a case of one private person spouting off an opinion. Matthew Peterson is the editor of The American Mind, one of the publications associated with the Claremont Institute, and holds a high position within Claremont itself (as “vice president of education”). Claremont is a right-wing think tank, and an important nexus of one kind of intellectual and respectable, more-or-less “in-system” right-wing activity and thought since the 1980s…
As a public personality and leading figure within the Claremont Institute, Peterson himself counts as a political actor in his own right, punching far above his “weight” (if you incline to measure “weight” by a crass social-media-follower-count metric). In terms of possible influence on people like DeSantis and Blumpf, Peterson and other key figures of the Claremont School are a big deal, even if the typical politically active person has not heard of them. They have close ties to both DeSantis and Trump, and there are plenty of pictures and video to prove it. DeSantis gave a keynote speech at their annual gala in late 2021.
The moral courage shown by Ron DeSantis, to openly oppose the might and fury of the Corona-Panic Monster at the height of its social-cultural-political mighty and fury, may itself ensure that Ron DeSantis is the next U.S. president—as well it should.
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UPDATE: The following is from a June 15, 2022, discussion with Matt Peterson, published by The American Mind and the Claremont Institute:
Spencer Klavan: It’s incredibly offensive to me…that the things we are being told constantly to get emotionally invested in and assert our virtue over, that they are distorted parodies of things that are actually “life and death,” that actually do matter. When you step back and think about the fact that all of these ideas–like “our democracy”–that they’re constantly evoking are actually real things, it becomes even more infuriating that they’re being paraded like “shadows on the cave wall” by these midwits.
Matt Peterson: Yes, and in the meantime the government intercepts all information, and Democratic law firms sift through it to exploit it for political gain. While we’re supposed to be amused by the “shadows.”
In the meantime, the gun law stuff is is real. The arrests are real. Even the mainstream media is reporting on Gascon in Los Angeles, and about how regular Democrats are just dumbfounded. This really is a guy who wants to disarm the good guys and let the bad guys run rampant over a city and commit crime.
They’ve taken real sacred things, important things, and…they’ve denigrated them. They’ve reduced it to rubble, rhetorically, and make these things meaningless. They’re in this kind of cycle of rhetorical destruction. And given as all the real things happening, it’s dangerous. We’re burning out cultural capital for any kind of normalcy. We expect, now, to see nothing but “fake news,” all the way down, all the time. That lack of trust is a real thing.
I do think there’ll be a reckoning. You don’t get away with this, for long, without real division. Civil disobedience and violence. I don’t really see an ability to pacify everyone.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot with the with the virus. To say something ‘spicy’: It really looks like there’s a real problem with the Vaccine. It’s not a joke. It doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to keep that under wraps. When they do [talk about it], they’ll probably blame Trump for it.
What kind of psychic break is going to happen if it does turn out–and I think it already has happened–that we’re causing a lot of of death through something that everyone was already so religious about [i.e., vaccines]. Forget about partisan politics. I think that’s going to look really nasty…
[end quote from Matt Peterson]
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On the Claremont School and its opposition to the Corona-Panic
Peterson’s visions of a backlash or “reckoning” are not quite typical of Claremont Institute’s normal discourse. Many people reading this I am sure are asking, “What is Claremont.” It is a late-20th-century right-wing intellectual tradition not easily describable especially because it is so academic.
Any discussion of the “Claremont School” of intellectual conservatism, or neoconservatism, and what it is now or was ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, can get complicated quickly. But important is this: the new generation of leading men are not repackaged old-line Neoconservatives. They are something more like intellectual nationalist-leaning populists. Granted, the Neocons’ tentacles are always probing for openings and the interpersonal ties and non-Christian ethno-cultural-political affiliations of some of them will have their impact, but it’s probably not worth making too much of that.
Suffice it to say, for present purposes, the Claremont School people became Trump backers, and remained so in 2020. They also became vocal and consistent and radical critics of the Corona-Panic in essentially all its forms, or in the terms I have used, they joined the Anti-Panic side.
In late 2021, I published a commentary on a political cartoon out of Claremont purporting to depict America’s Ruling Class as of the early 2020s, one feature of which was a mad-scientist shoving enormous needles at people, raining them down on faceless and disorganized people down below.
(Those interested in what the Claremont School looks like in practice in recent years, should consult writings by Michael Anton, one of the leading commentators of the Claremont School in recent years, who was a diehard Trump partisan until the end after many of the rest of us wavered or gave up on the man. Anton is criticized by paleoconservatives and right-wing libertarians for the usual reasons the Claremont School is criticized, its vision of what America is, or originally was. // Another Claremont name of note is the right-wing legal scholar John Eastman. This man is lately in the news due to his memo, in capacity as special advisor to the White House, in December 2020, that the vice president could and should legally delay the counting of electoral votes because several state legislatures were petitioning for time, to allow states to investigate the hundreds of thousands or more of tainted ballots and mystery ballots in the key states, and other irregularities and questionable practices involving top-down rule changes, which had illegally nullified the power to regulate elections which always belongs the state legislatures—all in the name of a Flu Virus Emergency, of course.)
My reading of Matthew Peterson’s statement, in light of his position as a Claremont figure, is this:
(1) “Corona-Politics” is not over, as a Reckoning is yet coming. That is to say, just because the masks are gone and it’s out of the news, it doesn’t mean the damage is gone, or forgotten, or even over;
(2) Peterson’s statement is tantamount to an outright endorsement of Ron DeSantis for president;
(3) Peterson’s statement is a guarded criticism of Dernald J. Blompf, specifically hiss failure to forcefully enough resist the Corona-Panic in 2020, his failure to emerge as a consistent opponent of the ongoing Corona-Panic Monster in 2021, his continuing silence even now and his never admitting error or failure, all of which disqualifies Trump from any political future. Peterson inserts a tactful denial, at the end, that this anti-Trump line is what he means.
When Peterson says he supports Trump, I interpret that to mean he supports the symbol of Trump. As I say, he has to be more circumspect in his position than a more polemic writer. We are entitled to interpret his meanings in this light.
Another reason Peterson is not openly critical of Trump is that Peterson knows his voice could influence Trump and may want to influence Trump to reform and use his (Trump’s) demagogic talents and bully-pulpit to oppose the remnants and the evils of the Corona-Panic and its ugly and unsavory legacy. So far, Trump has failed to do this, and it seemed to me Trump was “over” when he began getting booed by his own supporters who had specifically come out to see him, when he started bragging about the miracle vaccines. I detect some of the framing Peterson gives as an appeal to Trump’s vanity and addiction to drama (the prediction that the Left will concertedly blame Trump for the vaccines when it is revealed how many died of side-effects).
But the more interesting contribution to the discussion from Matthew Peterson is that a backlash could be coming. How bad will the Democrats lose in the legislative election in November 2022? If the Republicans take some huge number, like 260+ seats in the House of Representatives and 56 Senate seats, which would mean winning virtually every competitive race, the opponents of the Corona-Panic would probably be empowered enough to push the matter. But it sounds like the dark visions Matthew Peterson has will manifest not from “above” as from in a Congressional hearing but from “below.”
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Hail To You 
Hello, Mr. Hail. I’m glad to see you have more to say.
I went to the link for Matthew Peterson’s writing, after having read your post, and I’m disappointed that this was a series of tweets. That’s not anything on you, and, in fact, I’m glad you organized them with that light editing into something cohesive. If you find an article, paper, of what have you, please link us to that too. I HATE tweets, honestly.
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Anyway, Donald Trump had not much control of the vaccine aspect of the PanicFest, other than exhorting the drug companies to hurry and bragging about that and the timetable. So, he missed out on the credit for it, which was I’m sure due to the left’s shenanigans. (Steve Sailer’s important story – it’s been in only a handful of his posts – on the Pfizer delays even when the testing should have been considered completed in Oct. ’20 hasn’t gotten out. Maybe this Peterson has read about it, but won’t have himself associated with a White Suprem-OK Whatever.)
Now, Trump can still go on bragging about his push for the vaccine, and get rightly booed by his followers, because he doesn’t know squat all about the effects(?) He has to now disavow himself from the vaccine – pretty tricky, IMO – or be seen as part of the Kung Flu PanicFest problem. As you note, if he does bring up the deaths and health damage from it, he will be criticized by the left, which has no problem with blatant hypocrisy, for pushing the killer vaccine out too quickly. (I don’t want it at all!)
I like the guy, and I had high hopes in voting for him in ’16* for the two issues of the immigration invasion and the American Warfare State. He let us down due to his incompetence (lots of this was in his hiring practices). However, the man has no principles – I knew this coming in, but see my previous sentence. He did not stand for anything, such as fighting the Panic Totalitarianism, just wishy-washily going along with whatever his favorite expert of the month said.
There is no contest between Trump and DeSantis. DeSantis is smarter, more organized, and most importantly, a Man of Principle.
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* In ’20 I voted for him simply because he was the pro-American non-Communist, that’s all.
This was Matthew Peterson’s point, and I see PeterIke agrees in a comment below. It seems hard to imagine they could be that cynical, but we are in a new world now.
I’ve added another excerpt to the main post from a recent Matt Peterson interview in which he makes similar points. Search for: “Update” or “They’re in this kind of cycle…”.
I know for sure the answer to that is “Yes, he does read Steve Sailer,” because he and others of the new leadership at the Claremont Institute often reference Steve Sailer, and I expect many of them have been occasional readers for many years. They reference him openly and sometimes even use Sailerisms. But when Sailer embraced the Panic in 2020, they did not follow him to the dismal side of the Panic divide.
The reverse is also true, in that Steve Sailer has some interest in Claremont, in that Sailer has had posts and discussions on the “Straussians,” specifically the “West Coast Straussians,” of which Claremont is the central force (see, for example, a 2017 Steve Sailer post, “West Coast Straussianism explained,” at 4200 words plus comments. The whole thing is classic “inside baseball,” difficult for even knowledgeable outsiders to penetrate without making a major study of it.
But in answer to your question, Peterson definitely likes Sailer. Given that they both live in Southern California, I wonder if they have met?
Thanks for your info as usual. One sign you’re so good is that until recently evil Youtube fascism immediately deleted any of my posts that mentioned you rightly, in #12, describing Covid as a religious cult. Still, though all this is well and good, I must ask and warn if we’re taking it all for granted that we’ll not have the 2022 & 2024 elections stolen like the 2020-2021 elections were (the GA Senate race was obviously rigged to prevent a GOP majority), for anyone with a brain knows Trump actually won in 2020 in a landslide before the vile Deep State went into action with incredibly massive, felony fraud in the middle of the night both by millions of illegal ballots and gigantic cyber attacking. See electionfraud20.org. And I’ve not seen significant changes that would prevent a repeat in 2022 & 2024.
As a Christian, not a “conservative” (whatever that means anymore, blindly pretending we can save America without God, certain to be fatal, as our greater Founders warned), it seems to me that God made it impossible for Trump to lose in 2016, giving us 4 years to decide either for him or politicians and when we chose the latter he made it impossible for Trump to “win” (announced vs actual results) because God won’t tolerate idols, something our vastly more educated and wiser Founders knew and sternly warned us about, seemingly in vain. Only God can save us, and this we must decide to embrace if we don’t want more of the evil Biden cabal pulling the mindless puppet’s strings.
Russedav, Thank you for the comment and your efforts to leave links to Hail To You at Youtube.
This website has been “graylisted” by Big Tech, including Google, for years now. I see new examples of it all the time. BY “graylisted” I mean that while I have not been banned, many of the posts are not findable on Google. I was surprised to find that DuckDuckGo doesn’t list this site at all!
In August or September 2017, views coming in from searches dropped abruptly, and by late 2017 baseline views (largely from web searches) were down by 50-75% by the end of 2017, versus the long-running average from about late 2012 when the site was well-established and mid-2017. From the timingof this drop-off (starting about Sept. 2017), I have to assume that Hail To You was targeted specifically, and probably manually rather than “just” algorithmically, after Charlottesville protests of August 2017.
Another big change was in about mid-2020. Despite hundreds, thousands, of new viewers coming in from links during the height of the Corona-Panic, there is indication in the back-end data I see that web-search-based hits again show an unexplained drop-off, and view-counts go down. This second one is obviously another Big Tech strategy to give the Panic a helping hand.
This has been discouraging. I don’t have much of a way to counter it.
One post that has apparently slipped through their censorship-trap is the Ron DeSantis’ Ancestry post, which is now regularly getting lots of views per day, but then again perhaps it would get several times more on a pre-2017 ‘algorithmic’ playing field…
I don’t think there will ever be a “Corona reckoning.” It only happens if the media lets it happen, and they won’t since Big Pharma is their biggest advertiser. Every day it seems another semi-prominent 20-something drops dead of “unknown causes,” and yet there is no groundswell about it. It just gets reported with “his family and friends said he was a great guy blah blah” and that’s it. Forgotten the next day.
As for Trump, continuing to promote the vaccines is a very stupid move. He may be just as fooled by the media as so many others, or he’s too locked in by his ego to back down. But he has a simple way to backtrack: the Pfizer and Moderna data. All he has to do is say, “look, I trusted these drug companies, but they lied to everyone and hid data. Turns out the vaccines aren’t very effective and are very dangerous. If I’m elected, I will seek to overturn all laws that protect Big Pharma…” and so on. It’s not a difficult path to take because he has a clear scapegoat, and it’s actually a guilty scapegoat.
Now if we do get a reckoning, it will be specifically done to get at Trump. “Oh look, Trump must have known the vaccines were so dangerous but he forced them on the American people! It’s genocide!” All of which will be hypocritical lies, and the media will totally forget all the Blue State Dem governments that did most of the “forcing.” But the sheeple will lap it up, like they always do.
So the media, Big Pharma and the Dems will win whichever way this thing turns.
And I’ll second what Russedav15 says about the elections. Yes, I suspect Republicans will make gains, since it’s actually harder to steal elections the smaller they are, so winning Congressional seats will happen. But Senate seats are much easier to steal (you only need corruption in one district in a state to flip the vote) so I’m guessing we’ll see a lot of “surprise” victories for Democrats, possibly letting them keep the Senate. Of course, some Republicans will boo-hoo about elections being stolen, and then they will do what they always do about it, which is absolutely nothing.
PeterIke, thank you for the excellent comment.
Everything we know about Trump suggests that’s likely true.
Trump fell into the Trap of the Demagogue, becoming too invested or believing his own demagoguery, like a drug dealer who ends up addicted to his own product to an extent it harms him and those around him, making the entry into the business a net loss despite some early profit. This (becoming hostage to one’s own demagoguery) happened to a lot of people during the Corona-Panic.
Things that have happened in the 2020s so far go beyond the normal confines of what we expect is possible.
I still marvel at how successful and seemingly “out of nowhere” the Canadian Freedom Convoy was. It had no media support, and active media hostility, and eventually direct state hostility as harsh or harsher than the kinds of repression practiced by most late communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe.
We may also recall the building-up phase towards a critical mass against the Vaccines and vaccine mandates / digital health “passports.” I believe happened the critical-mass oppositional energy and mobilization was reached some time in Winter 2021-22, enough to have created a major domestic political headache for government(s), had government(s) not rapidly retreated, in early 2022, from the Vaccine Tyranny phase of the Corona-Panic.
What happened to the Anti-Vaccine, Anti-Mandate movement after the governments gave up on the vaxx-pass systems? It seems the above-quoted Matt Peterson, at least, thinks that for a whole lot of people, it’s not over, politically speaking.
I don’t always discuss things here (and on my blog) at the same level, though I did read Mr. Peterson’s paper*. However, anecdotes from my world can still illustrate the state of things. I can extrapolate.
Your mention of the “passports” triggered this recent memory. We may take a trip overseas sometime in the medium future. We have not been Kung Flu vaccinated and never will be. The country in question is one I could ask someone whose friends had recently been there about. I can read things on-line, but you’ll see that wouldn’t have helped, so lucky for us here. I asked her whether one needed to be vaccinated to enter that country. “Well, they want people to show those vax passports, but …” “So, would a photoshop job be fine? They aren’t looking anything up, right?” “Nah, I think that’s what my friends did. I don’t know if they were vaccinated either. I can get them to send you a copy….” She mentioned White-Out, I kid you not. That was a helpful, but also uplifting, conversation.
That’s funny to me, as how would this pretty young person think of White-Out for one thing, in this computer age (much more easy even with MS-Paint), but more importantly NOBODY that I run into is taking this BS seriously anymore. That includes lots of young people who (in general) were down with this stuff a year back.
I think, along the lines of your comments and posts about Jan ’22, this is why the Globalist elites have dropped the CoronaPanic narrative for other, greener pastures, such as UKRAINE/RUSSIA! and a lame-ass try with the MonkeyPox.
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* I’ll mention it and your post here on my next post that involves the Kung Flu PanicFest. Lucky for us all, it’s not been at a level I’ve felt the need to write about lately. (Yeah, you can take that 2 ways, haha!)
Update: I have added, to the main post here, an excerpt from an interview-discussion with Matt Peterson (ca. June 15, 2022), of more on the same subject of this possible Corona-Reckoning.
Matthew Peterson has published one of his first political essays in a long time, I have learned, released the very same day as this post (June 21, 2022):
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-way-forward/
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(quote)
THE WAY FORWARD
by Matthew J. Peterson
America is locked into an escalating cycle of political and cultural turmoil. Our cold civil war is heating up and has spilled over into nearly every aspect of life. A momentous commercial-cultural shift is now underway that will force us to reexamine our fundamental assumptions.
This shift will soon become the most significant change in America in living memory. The geographic, digital, and financial movement of millions of people and billions of dollars out from under the control of woke states, woke digital technology, and woke corporations and capital has begun.
And it is now the duty of all those who wish to stop the decline of our nation to join it.
Bulldozed
The American cultural and political landscape has been bulldozed and fundamentally reshaped over the last half century. A one-party oligarchy tied to the radical ideology of identity politics controls our major institutions as populist resistance rises. Digital technology continues to reshape human behavior and institutions, causing an escalating war over its control. [……] (essay continues)
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The essay is excellent, in the best tradition of this kind of writing. (For those keeping score, he borrows John Derbyshire’s phrase “cold civil war” twice early in the essay.)
Thx. for explaining the Claremont Institute Mr. Hail and for their links to Steve Sailer.
The Straussians are not so much one block anymore. I think that John Mearsheimer hints in this direction with his June speech in Venice. And one could take the shift the NYT has made – and Henry Kissinger’s “status quo ante” remarks about Ukraine at Davos… – – as additional hints that this is so.
See Prof. Mearsheimer esp. at 1hr 38 min in:
The contrasting picture: How refreshingly simple the Amish Covid experience was: “2020 has been our best year ever”, I remember an Amish spokesman say in the TV documentary that is so charming and hopeful:
One of the great miracles of our times is that there seem to be no young scientists, who rush to the example of the real world Covid-experiment the Amish so bravely took on their shoulders and try to understand the Amish experience with scientific methods.
Thank you so much, Dieter, for this video! This will have to appear next week, with plenty of commentary, on Peak Stupidity.
I couldn’t have written this until about last summer due to, cough, cough, a certain member of the family, cough (no, NOT the Kung Flu – put the freaking wipes away, people!), but WE ARE ALL AMISH NOW.
The lady reporter at the end asked “Is this the magic formula…?” Goodness gracious, if you could bottle it up and put it in vials, you’d dub it the “Anti-Hysteria Vaccine”. Unfortunately, common sense cannot be put into a bottle.
This guy was great. Anti-government? Check. Anti-government education? Check. Anti-goverment-healthcare system? Check.
I will have to correct that to NEXT week for the commentary on the Amish video. We had too much already this week.
Thanks for the mention and links, Mr. Hail.
The pace of posting at Peak Stupidity is always “swift,” but this week became “dizzying”!
Yeah, that was a little much. I’ve so many posts built up, but I’ll have to get back to the norm of about 5-7 /week again. Happy Independence Day.
Agreed with Peak Stupidity. the Amish video is good,
Shouldn’t we all be a little more amish?
Response below.
Medical Doctors
1) Overestimate Drug Benefits
2) Understimate Drug Harms
3) Overestimate Harm Caused by Diseases
Dr. Sebastian Rushworth Sums Up Eye-Opening Studies Quite Nicely – Now Take a Deep Breath & Think of Covid.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2022/06/14/should-the-patient-really-get-the-drug/
Dr. S Rushworth is a deserved new star. starting 2020 when he attacked lockdowns, COVID monomania..
New Study by Michael Levitt, Francesco Zonta, John Ioannidis: “In 2020/2021 eight of 33 high income countries had no Covid excess deaths at all; there was a death deficit in children.” Michael Levitt: We Are Living in Year One After Covid.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122010817?via%3Dihub
The key thing your summary neglects is that Sweden is one of those with two-year “no excess deaths” in the study’s “Two-Year Excess Death per Levitt Age-Adjusted” measure.
This should have unraveled the whole Corona-Panic Monster. Many of the active, data-oriented Anti-Panickers were reaching the conclusion by mid-2020, and making the bold-seeming claim that there was likely not going to be a significant impact in no-lockdown, non-masked Sweden. It was a”bold” claim in 2020 (and even 2021, when final data was pointing more and more towards it) given the top-down, feminized-“safetyist” global hysteria that saturated everything.
The ‘call,’ which this latest study corroborates, was possible to make as early as April 2020. I would even say any level-headed epidemiologist could have made the tentative call by April or at latest May 2020 that “this appears on current data to be a global false alarm.” After the winter season of 2020-21 passed, it was nearly certain there would be no major surge of two-year mortality in Sweden. I published as much here at Hail To You and demonstrated their 2020 spike was consistent with many other severe flu waves of the past eighty years, which had all been ignored and caused no economic or social damage.
RE: Dieter Kief, writing above
On the Ukraine war of 2022, the Claremont people have been all over the map. Some of their anti-anti-Russia output contradicts the previous theoretical positions associated with this school-of-thought. In 2019, they published an essay in the prestigious Claremont Review of Books criticizing Mearsheimer by name, and criticizing “realists and nationalists” specifically in the context of Russia-baiting. (“Flirting with Isolation,” by Henry R. Nau [b.1941] (he is a longtime professor and U.S. foreign-policy elite; I believe he is of Christian origin).
In March 2022, influential Claremont Institute figure Mark Helprin [b.1947] (a U.S.-born Jewish neoconservative and dual-citizen who served in the IDF) published an article on the Ukraine war, although trying to be cautious he ultimately could not avoid the anti-Russia and confrontationalist lines. He urges major and indefinite military aid to Ukraine, and a rapid rise in U.S. military spending. He suggests around +67% U.S. military spending as soon as possible. This was the lead article in the latest edition of Claremont Review of Books, indicating they are committed to it. It is classic neoconservative foreign policy, the kind that became so influential in the 1990s and 2000s. (“A Tragedy of Errors,” by Mark Helprin.)
Meanwhile you have The American Mind, one of the leaner and more polemical (less academic) publications from Claremont (which began in late 2018), has been much more along the anti-anti-Russia line, while also unable to be too strong with it because they are aware of the “party-line” from people like Mark Helprin.
The American Mind is of interest in this case because it editorially directed by Matthew Peterson [born ca.1979] (the Claremont figure who is the main subject of this post) from its start until recently.
There is no way The American Mind could have published some of their anti-intervention and NATO-critical articles in 2022 in the Ukraine-Russia war context, if chief editor Matthew Peterson were a war-supporter. Matthew Peterson is the Corona Anti-Panicker who predicts the “wild” reaction still to come against the effects of the Panic. In Matthew Peterson and probably some of the others of his circle, we have more opportunity to fill in with more data-points the venn diagram on Ukraine-Panic vs. Corona-Panic…
Reblogged this on Calculus of Decay .
NO Myocarditis and NO Pericarditis in Unvaccinated Covid Patients – But Quite Some Such Cases Amongst the Vaccinated, Major Study in Israel finds
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219
Thank you for the link; technically the finding (as I read it) is that Unvaccinated Covid patients had no different rate of these conditions than Unvaccinated non-Covid patients.
The implication is that high rates of these conditions for the Vaccinated MUST HAVE A CAUSE OTHER THAN “Covid” infection itself. I can think of no other hypothesis than the Vaccines caused the conditions. The study authors, of course, are careful to not mention this implication…!
Mr. Hail wrote:
I can think of no other hypothesis than the Vaccines caused the conditions. The study authors, of course, are careful to not mention this implication…!
Michael Levitt saw this graph below and asked the question, how this could be? Are the vaccines indeed this dangerous, he asked – and got 700 answers to his question.
He concluded then this:
(Age adjustment is crucial in many cases related to Covid. Swedish (and Swiss too!) excess deaths looked a tad grim (way worse than those of the Swedish neighbors Denmark, Norway, Finland), – as long as they were not age-standardised. After the age standardisation, it turned out that Sweden did indeed very well too – see the graph in my comment from July the 13th about Sweden; btw.: for Covid-data about Switzerland – scroll down the twitter thread rpezer1, my graph stems from. – Or look up Medicine Inside / Professor Pietro Vernazza, Sankt Gallen.
PS
For reasons I don’t quite get, Pietro Vernazza, a retired virologist, is the only one who looked into this age-standardization problem with regard to the Swiss data, as far as I can see.
A special driver of the Swiss statistical error-margin is the fact, that the number of old people in Switzerland grew quite a bit over the last five years…So – technically, the problem seems to be twofold: – First you have to age-standardise, plus you have to take the dynamic into account, that the total number of old people has been increasing in recent years. If you don’t do both things, you ascribe the growing number of old people dying to the wrong reason(s).I liked to know why the otherwise quite good Swiss Policy Research site did not refer to Vernazzas findings the last time I looked. Neither did the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which covers Covid by and large, not too bad…But the young women who do the reporting mainly – look down on Pietro Vernazza a bit. They mention him, but they don’t risk a decent look at his arguments, he is just mentioned as a maverick…).
Wow! If only this kind of nuanced view had been the “rule”—and not the marginalized, villified “exception”—in 2020!
A more complete reply, and rehosting of the graph in question, is below in a fresh thread.
Why?
New data confirms what Swedish chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell repeatedly said: That the benefit of the Swedish strategy would show over time.
I’m a bit astonished even, how clear this new data below is in favor of the liberal Swedish way – even though Tegnell also admitted, that the Swedes had made mistakes
1) with regard to the protection of the elderly – and
2) that the Swedish system of care homes is not as good as especially the Norwegian one – and
3) that Sweden did in the very beginning of the pandemic suffer suffer from a higher rate of severe infections for a very profane reason: Swedish winter-holidays (=ski-holidays) were a few weeks earlier and therefore, the Swedes ran into the big wave in the Austrian ski-resorts especially and came back with a high viral load – thus .w.a.r.n.i.n.g. their Scandinavian neighbors, not to go there… Keep all that in mind while looking at the following graph, comparing excess deaths in Scandinavia:
Well made study in the Netherlands finds no evidence for Long Covid.
Covid behaves exactly like any other infectious disease of the lower respiratory tract.
Click to access 2022.06.07.22276108v1.full.pdf
This is the graph Dieter Kief posted above in a threaded comment:
Originally from Dr. Julie Ponesse.
Allow me to critically say that the graph is not well made, in that after a long time looking at as a stand-alone piece of data, I can’t tell exactly what it’s talking about. Academics needs to learn to label things properly and clearly. All that’s clear for sure is there are some low bars labeled “No dose” and some high bars labeled “4 doses.”
The link to the “interactive report” is here:
https://bit.ly/3ujYTQG
There is a tab marked “Summary,” which has this:
This is not written with proper precision, and I frankly still am not totally sure what the writer is talking about, what is being measured. I thought it was “adverse events” to the vaccine? (But how can the Unvaccinated have adverse events from a vaccine they didn’t take?) If so, what is this about Covid hospitalization?
For social media purposes, the colorful bars look good, because most people only look at things for about, what, 7 seconds (+/- 5 seconds).
There are two other tabs for age groups which purport to show (I think) that Unvaccinated have lower “event” rates than Vaccinated of the same age groups.
Mr. Hail wrote: “Allow me to critically say that the graph is not well made”
The graph by Dr. Julie Ponesse, Michael Levitt refers to, is rather straightforward. It claims to show that being vaccinated is dangerous – the more one is vaccinated, the more so. –
Something that can’t be said with good reason, Michael Levitt then answers. – With the support of his 700 responders to his original question: As long as you don’t look into the data and find out who is vaccinated and who is not, your findings about vaccine-damage are just not that trutworthy – that’s Micheal Levitt’s conclusion.
If you don’t look properly into this kind of data, vaccines tend to look quite bad quite often. But if you do look properly, you have to age-standardise and then the vaccines don’t look as dangerous as they do otherwise. No wonder vaccinated die more often if those vaccinated are the very ill, who indeed die more often, but not because they are vaccinated, but because being old (=higher risk of being ill) – results in a higher risk of dying.
The mistake, not to look into the vaccination data properly – – – reappears time and time again (I’ve written this here before). It was also made by German site’s Achgut anonymous experts (Dr. Zimmermann/ Dr. Ziegler) and by the German site “science files”, but also by blogger El Gato Malo and by the Canadian researcher Denis Rancourt – amongst many others.
What Swiss infectiologist Pietro Vernazza is concerned, – he now concedes, that he might have been too sharp in insisting that there were no excess deaths in 2020 in Switzerland. The case is a bit mudddy though – not least because of the dry tinder phenomenon. The statisticians replied to him and said that they made no mistakes with regard to age standardization. I’m not 100% convinced by their arguments against him, but – be that for the moment as it may… Professor Vernazza could have formulated a bit less offensive in 2020 and succeeded even more…
Over the course of the years 2020 to 2022, Switzerland has done very well indeed – and in this regard, the anti-panicker Pietro Vernazzas overall stance is perfectly well confirmed now by the data.
See this graph here by the balkanian top-twitterer rpezer1 (his ockhamian motto: less is more – – – – so true that… prezer1 is together with orwell2024 one of my top European scientific sources by now)
In this graph (from Schöley et al, June 2022), via R. Pezer:
The pattern: Those countries already doing well (pre-Corona) on socioeconomic metrics and/or in demographic momentum have minimal or no loss in (calculated) “life expectancy.” Those countries NOT doing well on socioeconomic metrics show big calculated “life expectancy” losses. All cases are different but the general pattern holds well.
Tiers of countries according to how their year-end 2021 calculated life expectancies compare to year-end 2019 (rounded to create these tiers, but the data fit them well):
Four year lower
– Bulgaria
Three years lower
– Slovakia
Two years lower
– Poland
– Lithuania
– USA
– Hungary
– Estonia
– Czechia
– Chile
– Croatia
One year lower
– Greece
– UK
Minimal loss (1 to 9 months lower)
– Austria
– Netherlands
– Portugal
– Slovenia
– Spain
– Italy
– Germany
Zero loss or slight gain
– Iceland
– Belgium
– France
– Denmark
– Finland
– Sweden
– Switzerland
– Norway
This is a mix of several points that Anti-Panickers were making in 2020.
One is that whatever the losses to the flu wave of 2020-21, we had a good idea it was a culling effect, simply bringing some terminal (end-of-life) patients deaths somewhat sooner but not outside the same expected window (say, a two-year window).
Second, regardless of type of Corona-regime, there would not be major differences, except the damage caused by the lockdowns themselves.
As with every other statistic, we see the Scandinavian countries performing similarly and near the top; we see some ex Soviet-bloc countries, with long-term problems of many kinds, doing less well.
Maybe the most interesting lesson is, the USA now groups with these “second tier” countries. Demographics is destiny. There remains some excellent human capital in the USA (basically the Northwest-European element, and other European-Christian elements that assimilated to it without overwhelming it), but the number of migrants is now too great to continue to perform well on, nation-wide general metrics. The signs of this are everywhere and have been a theme of my writings here and elsewhere for many years. But it is nice to see it expressed so beautifully in graph form.
To counter my own point, we see France and Germany and Belgium all performing well on this calculated metric despite major migrant problems of their own. Maybe they haven’t reached the same tipping point, yet, that their cousins in the USA have reached. But I can confidently say, it wasn’t masks or lockdowns (or vaccines) that allowed them perform so apparently well.
1) Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Luxembourg have taken in even more migrants per capita 2015 ff. than Germany. I too think that this graph is quite telling.
With regard to Denis Rancourts Covid-findings about the US, a major difference between the US and the EU is a methodical treatment error of huge impact (not giving antibiotics to Covid patients in the final stage, when the lung is affected and antibiotics are most dearly needed – according to established Covid-treatment-rpotocols (That seems to be all well documented).
But of course. The European social state does provide better health care for the lower classes – and the nutritional situation and fatness of the US (working) poor (Barbara Ehrenreich) is worse than in Europe too. Just to mention it again: Denis Rancourt found three big factors being crucial for bad Covid-outcomes in the US: 1) Being poor and living in the (hot!) South, 2) being neglected the eproper antibiotics treatment and 3) being – terminally fat, so to speak (excuse me for being rough).
combined caused the excess Covid deaths in the US – in the interview below from minutes 15 to ca. 44
https://rumble.com/v11b31c-the-denis-rancourt-report.html?mref=mtyhn&mc=6a48v
Rancourt’s antibiotics thesis seems pretty well founded by data. That said: It is one of the big factors in the US that nobody outside a rather small internet-community seems to be willing to look into. (It might be no coincidence that Denis Rancourt is Canadian.)
I think the reason for that is twofold: No. 1: Lots of black (and poor white people) in the south have been treated this way and suffered and – died even from this maltratment. – Who would want to publish this crude fact? And b) the doctors who made these mistakes did so with the best intentions… – who would want to expose them now to a possible rage? (note: note: my remark here is explanatory (as opposed to being justifying).
2) A remark on the public sphere (the communicative aspect) in the case of this graph: You have to look quite patiently to find it. Nobody in the mainstream touches on it and – nobody on the hard anti-Covid side either, because it contradicts their superpanic-attitude not least towards the vaccines).
And one more in the communicative field: Orwell2024 and rpeter1 now do quote one another on twitter. That is good, because Michael Levitt does quote and retweet Orwell2024 (Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic insight: Over time, the good recognise one another…).
The culling- or dry tinder-effect is an aspect that most people find abhorrent – and they – instinctively, I have the impression, don’t want it to be discussed. – A once prominent German Green party politician, mayor of Tübingen and mathematician Boris Palmer, son of a prominent lifelong local rebel, btw. (google: Remstal-Rebell Helmut Palmer****)… – Boris Palmer***** risked to touch on this subject and that – together with some PC-issues, broke his neck in the Green party and made him a complete outsider on the very brink of being thrown out finally. (His (once very good looking career in the Green party (and in Germany…) is finished through Corona panic .a.n.d. other emanations of the woke zeitgeist).
**** here is the Palmer-house in Geradstetten/ Swabia
***** note his Russian first name – the only prominent German poltician with this first name… – the only other prominent German Boris is former Wimbledon winner Boris Becker now being in an English prison for treason…
On Helmut Palmer, Boris Palmer, and “perennial candidates”
(I re-hosted and replaced the image of the house of Helmut Palmer [1930-2004], as the original was not displaying properly.)
An English wiki editor has called Helmut Palmer the most-recognizable “perennial candidate” of the Bundesrepublik; the German wiki calls him the more dignified(-sounding to me) “Einzelkandidat,” unattached candidate; Is there no term in German for the derogatory concept of “perennial candidate,” beyond this polite-sounding Einzelkandidat?
With the concept “perennial candidate,” I am reminded of Lyndon LaRouche [1922-2019], who had an impressive organization when I first observed it in the 2000s.
I mention this because the LaRouche people somehow had their biggest following not in the USA but in Germany, and up to several-tenths of one percent of politically active Germans seem to have been affiliated at the LaRouche peak. The funny thing about Lyndon LaRouche is despite listening to his material out of interest in the 2000s, I never could tell what his real political-program was.
Before we make pronouncements based on the “lost life-expectancy-years” metric at all, we should ask if this metric is meaningful, and what it is.
Strictly interpreted, it is supposed to mean this: a median b.2019 baby in Bulgaria will die four years earlier than the median b.2021 baby, sometime around the turn of the next century.
What good luck to be a baby born in 2019!
This sounds absurd of course, almost drifting into astrology. So what is this measure (“lost life-expectancy-years”) measuring, exactly?
A (provocatively labeled) adaptation of the work of R. Pezer:
My observations and comments:
(1) the “Covid wave” of Sweden is hardly noticeable in the long run (this not a new point); this means the hysteria against Sweden in 2020 deserves remembering and reflection.
(2) for the three-year period Jan. 2020 to Dec. 2022, all four of these countries look likely to have similar “excess” death totals, measured by “deaths above their own trend-lines.” The bumps in Norway, Denmark, and Finland were just delayed, mostly not mysterious but expected (or, expected and predicted by thinking and reasonable Anti-Panic people by spring/summer 2020 and ever since.)
(3) the 2021-2022 bumps in Denmark, Norway, and Finland seem higher in magnitude than Sweden’s of 2020-21. To me this is suggestive of a number unexplained deaths, possibly caused by vaccine side-effects. Sweden’s total deaths also having not returned to trend-line despite now having zero “Covid” deaths, which suggests the same, some number of unexplained deaths.
The possible “vaccine effect” looks to possibly be around 50 per 100,000. (This is not rigorous evidence. It is just what this data looks like to me at a glance.) If true, in practical terms it means if you know a Covid-vaccinated person who died in 2021 or 2022, there may be as high as a 10% chance the cause of death was “vaccine side-effect,” and that the person would otherwise have lived years more at least. (Calculation based on [mysterious extra deaths per 100k] / [percent of population that died]*[% of population that got multiple Covid-vaccine injections per 100k], 50/(1000*.5) (Disclaimer: This is semi-speculative and not rigorous.)
This graph from R. Pezer reminds me of my own work on Sweden in 2020. I concluded firmely that Sweden’s flu wave of 2020 (and by extension into 2021) equaled flu waves in Sweden that occur about one to two times per decade (“You’ve lived through these, unaware, may times,” Nov. 2020).
My data (2020) and R. Pezer’s data (2022), and both the trendlines we calculated (= the “expected” number of deaths for Sweden in 2020), are nearly identical. The conclusions I took from my study and R. Pezer’s (and others’) more recently, all point to the same conclusion.
Another good essay by Jeffrey Tucker:
“The 1968-69 “Hong Kong Flu” Pandemic Revisited” (Brownstone Institute, July 19, 2022).
It seems inspired by the high-times of summer, ahead of the 53rd anniversary of the culturally iconic Woodstock music festival.
Anti-Panickers have been pointing out since spring 2020 that “Woodstock” was right in the middle of the 1968-69 global flu pandemic. No one noticed; no one cared; none of the then-young (b.1940s/b.1950s) remember there being a “pandemic” at the time, as there were no disruptions or panic, nor did it get a scary new name (as with this “Covid” name in English). The 1968-69 flu was even, adjusted for age and condition, worse than Wuhan-Corona.
This is why I like to refer to what happen as “the Corona-Panic,” capitalized, a proper name for a unique event, an event with its own special characteristics independent of all virological or epidemiological factors, a social and even cultural phenomenon.
To quote Jeffrey Tucker:
Matt Peterson – “…with the virus …”
To die means to die most likely from respiratory viruses – this pre-Corona study shows!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6038767/
The study finds that during a flu season, around half of people who died from any cause tested positive for at least one respiratory virus.
These viruses are always in circulation, in most case are quite harmless in an immediate sense, but are a positive-good in a long-term sense because they help the immune system. Always circulating, always coming in “contact” with the body, in most cases so mild as to be unnoticeable, and only rarely do one of these viruses actually make one truly sick. It’s normal. We don’t think about it, and we shouldn’t.
The above is a general point I recall being first made within the active Corona-Panic vs. Anti-Panic battles by Dr Wodarg, That was in the first half of March 2020. He was, it seemed, expecting a CoronaPanic-like event. He had been waiting for it ever since he saw, close up, the inner-workings of the (brief and shallow) panic related to another flu virus in 2009. He was right, it turns out.
Few of us paid much attention in 2009. Then most forgot about it entirely. In a sense, Dr Wodarg had been “immunized” against a Flu-Panic. But most were, to use the technical term, “immunologically naive” to a Flu-Panic.
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