Answer the following question honestly and take your time with it because it will color the way you read the rest of this.
If definitive proof emerged at some point in the near future that either A. Ivermectin is a highly effective and safe prophylactic against COVID-19 and has been all along or B. The vaccines are significantly more dangerous than we were led to believe, what would the fallout from that look like?
Would it be the kind of fallout that leads to a few department heads being forced to resign? Would it drastically change the outcome of the next Congressional or Presidential elections? Would there be nationwide protests?
I would argue that the fallout from a revelation of that sort would surpass any of that. I believe that there would be riots, not protests. I believe that many of our leading politicians would be forced to resign by an angry mob. I believe that many of our leaders would need 24/7 security for the rest of their lives. I believe that there would be an ugly and perhaps violent backlash against the entire public health community and anyone in big pharma. I believe that there would be a sudden mass turning away from science. And I believe that this fallout would last not months but years and would change America forever.
I would also argue that many in our civilian and military leadership in Washington, D.C. have had similar thoughts about what the fallout might be in that scenario. It’s very possible that they have already determined it would be too great a fallout to allow any proof of that sort, should it ever exist, to come to light. And they may have a point.
Last week on the Rebel Wisdom podcast, Eric Weinstein discussed the ongoing pandemic and his disappointment in not only our institutions but our professional skeptics in their handling of COVID-related issues from lockdowns to origin theories and alternative treatments. He said all that with one enormous caveat — that we need to reflexively trust our institutions to an extent. “I believe there is a lot of residual wisdom in corrupt institutions.”
This thinking stems I believe from Weinstein’s experience with his mentor Isadore Singer. Weinstein and Singer had a falling out when Weinstein confronted him about the National Academy of Science’s manipulation of data to imply a shortage of scientists in order to justify changes to immigration law. Singer responded poorly (most people would) because that particular institution might as well have been his child. It’s likely that Singer couldn’t live with the idea that his work of the past however many decades might be tainted by a correct allegation of institutional corruption, particularly if he had no part in in the corruption.
I think what Weinstein is really trying to say is that we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and that there are people in these institutions like Singer who truly do have our best interests at heart. Their numbers may be dwindling, and they may not even represent a majority anymore, but they do exist and they are valuable so we can’t entirely blame them for the very human response of somewhat blind loyalty to the institutions in which they’ve made their names. That also means we can’t be reflexively contrarian about every data point that comes out of these institutions and we can’t paint with so broad a brush that the good guys still working within those walls turn on us in an effort of self preservation.
I think it’s time we all recognize how corrupt institutions win out by dividing our best skeptics — arguably the only true check remaining in the American system — into two camps, either of which by the very nature of their positions is required to despise the other. Consider that on every complex issue which seems to produce exactly two conclusions, one or the other of which 99% of observers find themselves holding, that there might be a third option that is infinitely closer to the truth. Not a triangulation of the two wrong positions or a watered down version of one or the other positions, but an entirely separate doorway to the truth hiding in plain sight.
The continued corruption and capture of our institutions depends on our inability to see that third option.
On Ivermectin, perhaps there is something amiss about the study from Argentina and perhaps it is disconcerting that we so seldom hear from the people on the ground who are conducting these studies. Can we actually hear from Héctor Carvallo or other authors of that astonishingly hopeful study?
Could someone who is actually on the ground in Uttar Pradesh, India jump on a Zoom call for an interview with a qualified journalist? What is happening there? Can he explain to us how it is that Ivermectin is so safe and effective and yet the highest levels of government in India don’t seem all that interested, even though its discovery would be a geopolitical coup for their country?
At the same time, responding to Yuri Deigin, Claire Lehmann et al: perhaps it is true that cheap repurposed drugs are being suppressed because they’re not as profitable. I won’t speak for the rest of the world but here in America it’s not as if we’ve never heard of our government or some corporations manipulating or hiding data or disappearing certain people in the pursuit of profits or power or ass covering.
Perhaps it is true, given the fallout that would follow, that the leaders of our institutions have decided that any new information adversely affecting the safety profile of the vaccines has to be suppressed. Again, if you can imagine how grave that fallout could be, you can imagine a big enough motive to keep that information secret.
The capability of someone to see this third option seems to be extraordinarily rare even in highly intelligent people like Sam Harris, and no one bats a hundred at it. But if we want to survive this civilizational decline the Western world finds itself in, we have to find people who are capable of identifying a false choice more often than not. Once found, they need to be hired by us with lifetime appointments and put inside some Greek columned building to begin examining everything that divides us and make some sense of it.
The American founders did their best to create an institutional arrangement that would give America the same advantages of Great Britain with its separation of powers bolstered by a single monarch who could never be bribed or bullied into betraying his/her country. Constructing the American system in such a way without the monarch could be described as the most daring experiment in the history of government. Alexander Hamilton himself in Federalist 9 described it as a new “science of politics”.
Now, in the midst of a pandemic and division not seen since the Civil War, we should be humble enough to reacquaint ourselves with the advantages of a monarch at a time like this and ask ourselves what might be missing from our own system? With some notable exceptions, the men who wrote our founding documents maintained a reverence for the British system even as they broke away from it. I believe their hope was that future Americans would develop institutions that would resemble the coalescing effects of a respected monarch not unlike Queen Elizabeth today. Perhaps it is time we finally begin building an institution of that sort.
Finally, to those who have engaged in heated rhetoric to denounce some of our best critics who raise questions about the mRNA vaccines or the potential of effective alternatives, a question: Presented with compelling new information, would you have the courage to walk back everything you’ve said about certain people with whom you disagree? I think the honest answer is probably not, and the repercussions of that reality are profound.
