Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/status/1589245349151268864
An interview with Gates in which he says that if government rounds you
up for quarantine in a stadium, you should have no choice but to go.
And so too if government says you have to take this shot, you have no
choice. “People act as if they have a choice but they do not,” he
says.



The Deep State Is What Disables Democracy

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The idea of democracy as it emerged gradually out of the
Enlightenment, and drawing on ancient forms in Greece and Rome, is
that the people govern themselves. People serve as the main
determinants of the rules, laws, and legislation under which they
live. They even set the rules concerning what people are allowed to do
to themselves and each other using government: such is the point of a
constitution.

In a representative democracy, we elect leaders who represent our
interests in the halls of government. Crucially, the main point is not
the election or even the right of masses of people to vote. Those are
means to an end. The end is self-government, government by and for the
people, which came to be seen in republican theory as a crucial
feature of freedom itself.

Many totalitarian societies have figured out over time how to appear
to be democratic without actually being so. When I was growing up, we
used to laugh about how the Soviet people had a vote. What possibly
could that mean or why would it matter in the slightest if the vote
only ends up changing the face and name of the marionette on the
balcony reading prepared propaganda?

We as Americans sneered at such a fake democracy. It exists in name
only over there, whereas here we have the real thing!

Or so we thought. Every American must absolutely learn the lesson of
these last 31 months.

They locked us in their homes, closed our churches and schools and
businesses, restricted travel, segregated whole cities based on
whether a person had taken a medicine like some kind of dystopian
movement, wrecked the entire economy, and separated families by force.

Not one person in this entire country voted for a single one of these
things to happen. It was never on the ballot. And for the most part,
the elected leaders in this country were not the main actors in this.
They gave approval to be sure but mainly because most of them are
deeply ignorant, easily led, and deeply scared.

The main actors were people who were never elected. They were
appointed bureaucrats. Most of them cannot be fired. They have
permanent jobs with high income and benefits. They have vast power,
more power it seems than the politicians and certainly more power than
you. Indeed they have awesome power over you. And over everything, to
the point that they can say whether you can go to church or not or
whether your children can play with friends.

Not even the courts can act fast enough to control them and stop them
from exercising total power over our lives.

The Deep State has learned that it can announce or wholly fabricate a
national emergency and practically put the entire country on a wartime
footing wherever it wants. We can tolerate this no longer.

This permanent and unelected class of rules is called the
administrative state, or, more colloquially, the Deep State. It exists
at the federal level, the state level, and at the city level. In the
COVID crisis, they all worked together out of their own interests.
They showed their face and their power. We had never experienced
anything like this.

Their power is not new. It’s been growing for more than 100 years.
What was new was the ferocity of the attack and the brazenness of
imposition. They went on TV to brag about what they were doing and
shame dissidents. Media companies and Big Tech did their best to give
them cover and block voices that made rational points.

In effect, this country became a multivariate dictatorship but the
people doing the dictating were mostly not the politicians we elected,
though they went along with the whole caper. It was this permanent
class of rulers, managers, and specialists who were in charge—people
who have never faced the voters and cannot be fired by anyone no
matter what.

This is not a just system. It wrecked this country. We pay the price
every day now: rent, gas, groceries, bills, and now job loss. All of
this wreckage you see today traces to what they did. It’s why your
child is behind in language, math, and reading skills. It’s why your
grandmother died alone and no one could attend her funeral. It could
be why your friend’s husband died suddenly. It’s why your brother has
a crisis-level addiction to liquor, weed, and pills.

The administrative state waged a war on the country for longer than
two years. No politician in the country had the power to stop it. Once
Trump greenlighted this mess in March 2020, he was effectively
unseated from power and became like the marionettes in foreign
countries about whom we used to laugh: talking a good game but
ultimately powerless in the face of the real power behind the scenes.

Now let’s talk about the Red Wave. It is a means, not an end. The
question now is: what is to be done. I strongly suggest that all new
officeholders take a gander at the Federal Register and search for
agencies. What you find is a list of 434 of them. Print it out. Using
your brain and a red pen, strike out those that are nonessential—same
as these people did with millions of workers.

Let go of the idea that these agencies can be cut. They need to be
abolished. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he didn’t reduce the
hours of the employees who were just taking up space. No, he
immediately sent them packing. That day. No more email access. No more
Slack access. Gone. Now. The new Congress needs to do this to, let’s
say, half of the 434 agencies. Bring down the number to 200. That
should be the goal.

The private sector has gone through massive cutbacks and families too.
Government must do the same. And not just for financial and economic
reasons. It needs to be done to restore government by the people. Then
we need serious changes in the employment status of any federal
bureaucrat who remains. If the person is involved in any aspect of
policy-making, that person needs to be reclassified as an at-will
employee, same as exists in the private sector.

This is just the beginning. There is another layer of the Deep State
that is not employed by government. It lives in the private sector
that is well-connected. Think of a person like Scott Gottlieb. You
have seen him on TV for 30 months, pontificating about the need to
lock down and get the jab. He is a former commissioner of the FDA. He
now works for a fancy think tank in Washington, D.C. that is funded by
industry and foundations. He also sits on the Pfizer board, which must
pay pretty well, so he is, in effect, a lobbyist for Big Pharma who
only pretends to be an independent intellectual.

When Jared Kushner needed advice on how much Trump should lock down
the country, his first call was to Gottlieb. Gottlieb told him to be
more stringent than Trump wants. That was his one piece of advice:
take away as many rights and liberties as you can get away with.

How does Gottlieb or Bill Gates fit into this deep state structure?
They are essential to it. But no one elected them and they don’t even
work for government. This is an enormously complicated problem but the
solution must be to break up these networks of influence and control.
That’s what must happen if we are to restore democracy.

I just watched a clip of an interview with Gates in which he says that
if government rounds you up for quarantine in a stadium, you should
have no choice but to go. And so too if government says you have to
take this shot, you have no choice. “People act as if they have a
choice but they do not,” he says.

No system of self-government, of government by the people, can exist
with this sort of person exercising such power.

Dealing with the problem of the Deep State has to be the major
priority of the new officeholders. It is not enough just to get
elected and then celebrate. It means nothing unless there is some
agenda, some point, some purpose, some drive, some plan. I’m not
really seeing much evidence yet that there is one. We need some focus
here now. We might not have another chance.