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By Jeffrey A. Tucker
“Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning to Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending assassination on March 15, 44 B.C.
The death of American liberty happened around the same time four years ago, when orders went out from all levels of government to close all indoor and outdoor venues where people gather.
It was not quite a law and it was never voted on by anyone. Seemingly out of nowhere, people whom the public had largely ignored, the public health bureaucrats, all united to tell the executives in charge — mayors, governors and the president — that the only way to deal with a respiratory virus was to scrap freedom and the Bill of Rights.
And they did, not only in the U.S. but all over the world.
The forced closures in the U.S. began on March 6, 2020, when the mayor of Austin, Texas, announced the shutdown of the technology and arts festival South by Southwest.
Hundreds of thousands of contracts, of attendees and vendors, were instantly scrapped. The mayor said he was acting on the advice of his health experts and they in turn pointed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which in turn pointed to the World Health Organization (WHO), which in turn pointed to member states and so on.
There was no record of COVID-19 in Austin, Texas, that day but they were sure they were doing their part to stop the spread. It was the first deployment of the “Zero Covid” strategy that became, for a time, official U.S. policy, just as in China.
It was never clear precisely who to blame or who would take responsibility, legal or otherwise.
This Friday evening press conference in Austin was just the beginning. By the next Thursday evening, March 12, 2020, the lockdown mania reached a full crescendo.
President Donald Trump went on nationwide television to announce that everything was under control but that he was stopping all travel in and out of U.S. borders, from Europe, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. American citizens would need to return by Monday or be stuck.
Americans abroad panicked while spending on tickets home and crowded into international airports with waits of up to eight hours standing shoulder to shoulder. It was the first clear sign: that there would be no consistency in the deployment of these edicts.
There is no historical record of any American president ever issuing global travel restrictions like this without a declaration of war. Until then, and since the age of travel began, every American had taken it for granted that he could buy a ticket and board a plane.
That was no longer possible. Very quickly it became even more difficult to travel from state to state, as most states eventually implemented a two-week quarantine rule.
The next day, Friday, March 13, 2020, Broadway closed and New York City began to empty out as any residents who could go to summer homes or out of state.
On that day, the Trump administration declared a national emergency by invoking the Stafford Act, which triggered new powers and resources to the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a classified document, only to be released to the public months later. The document initiated the lockdowns. It still does not exist on any government website.
“The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force, led by the Vice President, will coordinate a whole-of-government approach, including governors, state and local officials, and members of Congress, to develop the best options for the safety, well-being, and health of the American people.
“The HHS is the LFA [Lead Federal Agency] for coordinating the federal response to COVID-19.”
Closures were guaranteed:
“Recommend significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures.
“Issue widespread ‘stay at home’ directives for public and private organizations, with nearly 100% telework for some, although critical public services and infrastructure may need to retain skeleton crews.
“Law enforcement could shift to focus more on crime prevention, as routine monitoring of storefronts could be important.”
In this vision of turnkey totalitarian control of society, the vaccine was pre-approved: “Partner with pharmaceutical industry to produce anti-virals and vaccine.”
The U.S. National Security Council was put in charge of policymaking. The CDC was just a marketing operation. That’s why it felt like martial law. Without using those words, that’s what was being declared. It even urged information management, with censorship strongly implied.
The timing here is fascinating. This document came out on a Friday. But according to every autobiographical account — from Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Scott Gottlieb to Deborah Birx and Jared Kushner — the gathered team did not meet with Trump himself until the weekend of March 14-15, 2020, Saturday and Sunday.
According to their account, this was his first real encounter with the urge to lock down the whole country. He reluctantly agreed to 15 days to flatten the curve.
He announced this on Monday, March 16, 2020, with the famous line: “All public and private venues where people gather should be closed.”
This makes no sense. The decision had already been made and all enabling documents were already in circulation.
There are only two possibilities.
One: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued this March 13, 2020, HHS document without Trump’s knowledge or authority. That seems unlikely.
Two: Kushner, Birx, Pence and Gottlieb are lying. They decided on a story and they are sticking to it.
Trump himself has never explained the timeline or precisely when he decided to greenlight the lockdowns. To this day, he avoids the issue beyond his constant claim that he doesn’t get enough credit for his handling of the pandemic.
With President Richard Nixon, the famous question was always what did he know and when did he know it? When it comes to Trump and insofar as concerns COVID-19 lockdowns — unlike the fake allegations of collusion with Russia — we have no investigations.
To this day, no one in the corporate media seems even slightly interested in why, how, or when human rights got abolished by bureaucratic edict.
As part of the lockdowns, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which was and is part of the DHS, as set up in 2018, broke the entire American labor force into essential and nonessential.
They also set up and enforced censorship protocols, which is why it seemed like so few objected. In addition, CISA was tasked with overseeing mail-in ballots.
Only eight days into the 15, Trump announced that he wanted to open the country by Easter on April 12, 2020.
His announcement on March 24, 2020, was treated as outrageous and irresponsible by the national press but keep in mind that Easter would already take us beyond the initial two-week lockdown. What seemed to be an opening was an extension of closing.
This announcement by Trump encouraged Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci to ask for an additional 30 days of lockdown, which Trump granted.
Even on April 23, 2020, Trump told Georgia and Florida, which had made noises about reopening, that “It’s too soon.” He publicly fought with the governor of Georgia, who was the first to open his state.
Before the 15 days were over, Congress passed and the president signed the 880-page CARES Act, which authorized the distribution of $2 trillion to states, businesses and individuals, thus guaranteeing that lockdowns would continue for the duration.
There was never a stated exit plan beyond Birx’s public statements that she wanted zero cases of COVID-19 in the country. That was never going to happen. Likely, the virus had already been circulating in the U.S. and Canada since October 2019.
A famous seroprevalence study by Jay Bhattacharya M.D., Ph.D., came out in May 2020 discerning that infections and immunity were already widespread in the California county they examined.
What that implied was two crucial points: there was zero hope for the “Zero Covid” mission and this pandemic would end as they all did, through endemicity via exposure, not from a vaccine as such.
That was certainly not the message that was being broadcast from Washington, D.C. The growing sense at the time was that we all had to sit tight and just wait for the inoculation on which pharmaceutical companies were working.
By the summer of 2020, you recall what happened. A restless generation of kids fed up with this stay-at-home nonsense seized on the opportunity to protest racial injustice in the killing of George Floyd.
Public health officials approved of these gatherings — unlike protests against lockdowns — on grounds that racism was a virus even more serious than COVID-19.
Some of these protests got out of hand and became violent and destructive.
Meanwhile, substance abuse rage — the liquor and weed stores never closed — and immune systems were being degraded by lack of normal exposure, exactly as the Bakersfield doctors had predicted. Millions of small businesses had closed.
The learning losses from school closures were mounting, as it turned out that Zoom school was nearly worthless.
It was about this time that Trump seemed to figure out — thanks to the wise council of Dr. Scott Atlas — that he had been played and started urging states to reopen.
But it was strange: he seemed to be less in the position of being a president in charge and more of a public pundit, tweeting out his wishes until his account was banned. He was unable to put the worms back in the can that he had approved opening.
By that time, and by all accounts, Trump was convinced that the whole effort was a mistake, that he had been trolled into wrecking the country he promised to make great. It was too late.
Mail-in ballots had been widely approved, the country was in shambles, the media and public health bureaucrats were ruling the airwaves and his final months of the campaign failed even to come to grips with the reality on the ground.
At the time, many people had predicted that once Biden took office and the vaccine was released, COVID-19 would be declared to have been beaten. But that didn’t happen and mainly for one reason: resistance to the vaccine was more intense than anyone had predicted.
The Biden administration attempted to impose mandates on the entire U.S. workforce. Thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, that effort was thwarted but not before human resource departments around the country had already implemented them.
As the months rolled on — and four major cities closed all public accommodations to the unvaccinated, who were being demonized for prolonging the pandemic — it became clear that the vaccine could not and would not stop infection or transmission, which means that this shot could not be classified as a public health benefit.
Even as a private benefit, the evidence was mixed. Any protection it provided was short-lived and reports of vaccine injury began to mount. Even now, we cannot gain full clarity on the scale of the problem because essential data and documentation remain classified.
After four years, we find ourselves in a strange position. We still do not know precisely what unfolded in mid-March 2020: who made what decisions, when and why. There has been no serious attempt at any high level to provide a clear accounting much less assign blame.
Not even Tucker Carlson, who reportedly played a crucial role in getting Trump to panic over the virus, will tell us the source of his own information or what his source told him.
There have been a series of valuable hearings in the House and Senate but they have received little to no press attention, and none have focused on the lockdown orders themselves.
The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured.
Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome.
The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.
In the early days of lockdown, Henry Kissinger warned that if the mitigation plan does not go well, the world will find itself set “on fire.” He died in 2023. Meanwhile, the world is indeed on fire.
The essential struggle in every country on Earth today concerns the battle between the authority and power of the permanent administration apparatus of the state — the very one that took total control in lockdowns — and the enlightenment ideal of a government that is responsible for the will of the people and the moral demand for freedom and rights.
How this struggle turns out is the essential story of our times.
Originally published by Brownstone Institute.
Jeffrey Tucker is the founder, author and president of Brownstone Institute.
