My Covid story, part 2

2020 hindsight

At the end of part 1 I described how, in April 2020, our overseas military command forced my civilian firm to send home all its age 60+ contractors.

'I and hundreds of other greybeards were herded onto cramped charter jets based out of Spain. Thirty hours later, we landed on the eastern seaboard of an America in the throes of moral and mental breakdown.  And, oh yeah – there was a virus going around.'  

It was plain what had just happened:  Western health bureaucrats – egged on by Chinese communist proxies at the World Health Organization and elsewhere - had deliberately fomented a world-wide panic.  They knowingly exaggerated Covid-19's lethality by a couple orders of magnitude.  They advised elected officials to pursue a long-discredited, quite literally medieval 'mass containment' strategy - which the Chinese preposterously insisted had achieved 'zero Covid' in Wuhan - long after the ChiComs had let the virus spread all over China and the world. 

The bureaucrats urged western officials to declare emergencies and suspend civil liberties:  to close businesses, churches and schools, restrict public gatherings, and even issue house-arrest ('shelter-in-place') orders.  Elected officials, from Trump on down, dared not defy the advice, because if they did, the public-health cartel and its media and political allies would blame every death, excess or not, Covid or not, on them personally.  They'd be voted out or forced to resign.  The ‘pandemic response’ was nothing less than a coup d'etat by the permanent bureaucracy.

To this day, it’s less clear exactly why it happened. Even at the time, as I explained in part 1, it was clear Covid-19 was just a pretext for lockdowns, and a flimsy pretext at that. ‘Two weeks to flatten the curve’ was a bait and switch: Lockdown promoters were already enthusing about the New Normal. So here, finally, is my take on the rest of 2020. For the sake of continuity, I revisit and update some of my themes from part 1. I’m sorry it’s so damn long. But as I expect you recall, it was a very long year. I hope you enjoy reading it all the same. I added lots of contemporaneous memes.

Escape and evade?

Our crowded Airbus, the cramped seating designed for pre-teens with 24" inseams, descended toward Dulles airport in the wee hours of an April morning.  On the hastily chartered, poorly provisioned flight (no meals, no cocktails, no coffee), none of the passengers wore masks, though the Spanish crew did.  US travel bans didn't apply to military contractors returning Stateside.  But it wasn’t yet clear we were home free.  A fellow passenger shared a rumor:  As soon as we landed, we were going to be herded into medical tents set up outside the terminal, for temperature checks.

I had a three-hour layover, during which I had to shuttle to another airport to catch my connecting flight home.  The rumor unsettled me.  Given the prevailing hysteria, it sounded plausible.  I wondered if they would stop at temperature checks.  Why not a full set of vital signs, some screening questions, a health history and a focused physical exam?  The more things you check, the more likely you are to find something 'wrong.' Might the wrong answers or findings result in missed connections, or even forcible detention in quarantine?

I flew with only a light carry-on backpack, as always, so checked luggage wasn't a concern.  I concocted a sketchy plan:  I'd pretend to make a cell-phone call, slip away from the screening tents into the predawn dark, sprint for the nearest fence, climb over and bolt into the surrounding residential neighborhoods - or woods, if any were left.  It seems like only yesterday that Dulles was surrounded by forests and cow pastures.  But actually that was decades ago. Nowadays the area is heavily built up. Would the fence be electrified or topped with razor wire? I had never heard of such a thing outside a war zone. On the other hand, why wouldn’t it be? Who the hell climbs an airport fence, in either direction, who’s not an enemy of the state?

And what then?  The authorities would screen the manifest and identify the missing passenger. Then they'd check outbound flights from all nearby airports. They’d soon find out where I was headed. If I managed even to board my connection, I'd face an ugly reception when we landed. I'd likely be arrested, face federal charges and lose my new job.  Bolting began to look like a last resort. If I could slip away unnoticed, it’d be different.  But I could hardly count on that.  I decided to cool my jets, at least until it looked as if I might actually be detained. 

The rumor turned out to be complete fiction.  There were no tents, thermometers, or hassles; for me, no tiresome baggage claim; and best of all, no escape and evasion.  My paranoia evaporated, at least for the moment.  In no time, I was on a shuttle van to catch my connecting flight.  There was virtually nobody at either airport.  It was eerie.  There were at most a couple dozen people on my next flight.  I don’t remember anyone wearing masks.  I spent the night in a hotel near the airport.  Next day, a friend picked me up in my old Tacoma, and drove me home to my mountain town.

Months earlier, unsure how much longer America’s misguided Afghan project would last, I had arranged a back-up job as a Customs & Border Patrol contractor.  I could start anytime, they were always shorthanded.  I had my pick of Godforsaken duty stations along the southwestern border.  The irony!  The military sent me home from a fortified facility where there was no Covid - and almost no way to get Covid - because I was 'high risk.'  So I went home and took a job screening migrants from south of the border, where the virus, by all accounts, was running rampant.  As I explained in Part 1, I wasn't worried. Everybody was bound to contract the virus eventually.  If the Diamond Princess had taught us anything, it was that healthy people would do just fine. 

Zombie apocalypse

Sometime in February 2023, pandemic attitudes among the general public had coalesced abruptly along partisan lines.  After a few weeks of uncertainty, during which progressives minimized the virus  and denounced Trump as a xenophobe for overreacting, by March the Left had executed an abrupt about-face.  The Wuhan-style lockdowns for which progressives yearned for were just too enticing, so their leaders did what they always do:  Fake an emergency, exploit it to cancel individual liberties, then demonize anybody who raised practical, medical or legal questions.  The slurs, this time, were hysterical even by progressive standards: Lockdown skeptics were 'trying to kill grandma,' they shrieked.

Progressives fetishized silly theatrics.  It was the Zombie Apocalypse, but instead of lurching about howling for 'braaaaains,' the Karen undead shrieked 'stay safe, stay home.' A few weeks later, they switched from insisting masks were strictly for health-care providers to demanding that everyone ‘just wear’ them.

The shelter-in-place orders, in particular, reminded me of the London Plague:  Centuries before anyone knew that germs - not miasma or 'bad air' - caused infectious diseases, London authorities had physically sealed families of plague victims inside their homes, alongside the disease’s flea vector and rat reservoir.  We've known for at least a century that respiratory viruses spread more readily indoors than out.  Sunshine kills them, breezes disperse them and we're not at such close quarters.  That's why we get them mostly in winter:  We spend more time indoors, sheltering in place.

Right on cue, the progressive grassroots, including most of my family and many friends, did what they always do:  Grok the hive-mind, board the bandwagon, parrot the party line and sneer haughtily down upon the skeptics.  Liberal-arts majors became medical experts overnight.  My realtor aunt lectured me on epidemiology.  Her son, a grocery-store stocker, awarded himself an impromptu medical license and took to social media to promote masks, and later, to decry repurposed medications.

Jeff, a close relative, barely graduated high school.  He has never mastered a skill or held a job for more than a few weeks, because he has struggled with mental illness since childhood.  He lives on disability. A minor symptom - though it’s noticeable even on casual interaction - is Jeff's grandiose delusion  of wide-ranging specialist expertise in fields as diverse as aerospace engineering, constitutional law, politics and history ... and suddenly, in spring 2020, medicine.  When he accused me, on social media, of endangering my parents, in Michigan, by not masking up in Texas, I had to block him, if only to keep his overwrought comment screeds off my feed.  

Oddly, Jeff and I remain on speaking terms in real life, unlike many of my other ex-friends-and-family, who lack Jeff's extenuating circumstance of a formal diagnosis.  That’s probably unfair of me.  Old-school liberals, libertarians and conservatives alike, while we disagree on much, have all noted progressives' affinity for delusion and psychopathy. Maybe I shouldn't discriminate on the basis of a formal diagnosis.

It swiftly became clear, before the ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ was even over, that the governors and mayors issuing the lockdown orders, along with ‘experts’ and scientists promoting them, never actually believed they were about safety. Lockdowns were strictly ‘for thee, not me.’ Petty tyrants flouted their own orders pretty much at will, and continued to do so throughout the scamdemic.

Gone to Texas

Fortunately, birds of a feather flock together, which made the Covid harpies much easier to avoid.  I had at first planned to work in southern Arizona or New Mexico, my longtime stomping grounds, where I had lots of friends.  But from their social-media posts, it seemed quite a few of them and many of their neighbors had lost their minds as well.  So I reclaimed my ‘native Texan’ card.  I hadn’t lived in Texas since I was a little kid, but my folks (and their folks) had never let me forget where we came from.  Texas was its own country once, and might be again, I thought, if America kept flushing herself down the commode.

In Arizona, I would have worked in Tucson sector.  Once a college cow-town, Tucson remains, to a degree, a laid-back desert metropolis, dotted with palm trees and biker bars. But it’s a 'sanctuary city' - and also the most violent community in Arizona.  The mayor, Regina Romero, is a hard-core progressive who embraced lockdowns with unholy fervor.  Governor Doug Ducey was a creature of the McCain machine - a Democrat Trojan Horse operation inside the Arizona GOP - who enabled Romero's excesses.  New Mexico was even worse.  Governor Maria Lujan-Grisham, another hardline progressive - a former state public-health director with no medical background - closed gyms, restaurants and even state parks.  She went so far as to deploy state police as her personal lockdown Gestapo when rural sheriffs refused to enforce her business closures. But I’m told that didn’t go well, and she backed off.

Kurt Schlichter fantasizes that if Washington gets too big for its britches, Texas will just secede - and most of flyover country will join it.  That story line made great fiction in his People's Republic novels, which are well worth reading. But in the real world, if the country breaks up, it'll be vastly more chaotic than Schlichter ever imagined, even in Texas - especially in Texas - which has several enormous blue cities.  As I write, Biden is polling only nine points behind Trump here. There's a longstanding peaceful separatist movement - but its members (as far as I can tell, mostly disenchanted Republicans) are routinely defamed as traitors by the corrupt GOP establishment lawmakers who dominate both the state legislature and Texas' congressional delegation. And Texas courts let the slanderers off the hook.

The 'pandemic response,' if good for nothing else, proved a powerful political litmus test:  We learned whom we could trust, and the answer was 'almost nobody.' Governor Greg Abbott's sensitive political antennae mostly kept him out of trouble with the MAGA base.  But urban Democrat judges embraced lockdowns with enthusiasm, famously jailing hairdresser Shelley Luther, who defied them.  Abbott, a bit belatedly, modified his pandemic restriction orders to get the state supreme court to release her. (Luther just ran for the Texas legislature and beat incumbent Reggie Smith, an establishment Republican, in the March 5 primary.)

There would be no shortage of Karens in Texas.  The difference was, they'd mostly be confined to big urban areas.  The countryside, where I'd be, is crawling with heavily armed nonconformists.  That, I reckoned, would sharply restrict the willingness of rural sheriffs to enforce 'pandemic' restrictions.  And I was right.

My new employer insisted I ‘quarantine’ for two weeks at home before starting work.  Never complain about government stupidity that redounds to your advantage!  There’s still plenty of snow in the high country in April.  So I enjoyed a two-week vacation ski-touring with my dogs. Evenings, I sipped Russian Standard vodka or Dale's Pale Ale, and fell into a habit that, to this day, helps keep me sane:  Surfing libertarian social media, harvesting spicy memes for subsequent shitposting.

In late April, I drove across New Mexico, toward my new home and workplace in Texas.  Masks were now suddenly a thing, so I carried pepper spray.  On social media I'd seen NM lockdown cultists publicly harassing unmasked strangers outdoors, and I wasn't going to put up with that.  I stopped occasionally to check in,  with scenic mountain backdrops, so that all Facebook could see just how seriously I took ‘stay safe, stay home.’  My final snotty check-in, on my first weekend off, was from Ojinaga, just across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Texas.

West Texas' highest mountain ranges - the Guadalupes straddling the NM-TX state line near Carlsbad, the Davis Mountains southeast of Van Horn, and the Chisos down in the Big Bend - are close to or higher than 8000 feet.  The mountains extract more rain from passing storm fronts than do the surrounding plains, so vegetation up high is relatively lush.  There's lots of grass and shrubbery, juniper and blue oak, and above that, evergreen conifers.  Those mountains mark the eastern edge of the southwest borderlands’ basin-and-range country.  I felt right at home, having grown up mostly in Arizona, among the western ranges. 

I started work in a pretty little town on a mile-high plateau, amid wide cow pastures surrounded by chaparral. Juniper-covered ridges wall the plateau off to the south and west.  It drops off into low, hot greasewood desert plains to the northeast.  It’s a 'college cow town,' not unlike Tucson had once been.

The bars, gyms and restaurants had mostly reopened by early May.  The locals, as I had expected, had paid brief, cursory lip service to 'restrictions,' then pretty much went back to normal.  There was still some weirdness.  The county public-health officer had dutifully issued a 'shelter-in-place' order.  The sheriff and town police chief declined to enforce it.  But unnerved federal agents based nearby got letters from their supervisors attesting they were 'essential workers,' just to make sure they didn't get hassled.  The public-health officer turned out to have a day job as a pediatrician.  A bartender told me the doc had dismissed her toddler as a patient, because bartending was 'unsafe' and 'irresponsible' during a pandemic.

The hardware store, the grocery store and the Subway insisted on masks.  The local eateries didn't: It seems to have been a corporate thing.  I ignored the grocery store's mandate, because their employees were too timid to challenge me.  At the hardware store, part of a bigger chain, whose employees were a little more aggressive, I practiced 'malicious compliance.'  That's when you comply in such a fashion that it makes mandate supporters uncomfortable - hopefully so uncomfortable that they have second thoughts about the mandate itself.  My MO was to wrap my Afghan scarf around my face, keep my shades on and pull my camo ball cap down low over my eyes.  If you asked AI to show you an image of a redneck terrorist, it would probably produce something that looked just like me. Once inside,  I'd just pull the scarf down under my chin.  If anyone demanded I pull it up, I would - then I’d pull it down again as soon as they turned away.  

I thanked my stars I wasn’t stuck working in a hospital.  I was already hearing all kinds of horror stories about theatrical Covid protocols, mostly from patients and their families.  Most providers, judging from my social media, were very proud of their anti-Covid zeal and had no clue how crazy they sounded. 

The war on hydroxychloroquine

Those first months, the authorities seemed focused on maintaining the fiction of Covid's deadliness, in order to sell indefinite lockdowns.  But it soon became clear that the states that had locked down hardest had suffered the highest death tolls.  The real killers, of course, were the public-health bureaucrats and elected officials who sent Covid hospital patients back to nursing homes to infect others. 

It quickly became clear that Covid had come nowhere near overwhelming US hospitals, except briefly in New York, where Governor Cuomo had gone out of his way to make that happen by exposing many thousands of the most vulnerable.  It was as if Cuomo wanted New York hospitals overwhelmed. (Other Democrat governors did the same, but managed to evade accountability - possibly because because they didn’t try so hard to hide the carnage.)

I began to see articles like 'Eerie emptiness of ERs worries doctors: Where are the heart attacks and strokes?‘ ER docs aren't stupid.  They knew perfectly well that those patients - too terrorized by the public-health cartel to leave home or to call an ambulance - were still having strokes and heart attacks and dying at home.

At some point, Trump sparked a furor by mentioning off-handedly that his doctors had him taking hydroxychloroquine, a repurposed antimalarial and antirheumatic drug, as a Covid preventative.  HCQ is cheap and generic. It has been taken safely, like candy, for decades by billions of people across the Global South to prevent malaria.  Millions of rheumatoid arthritis patients in the developed world were taking it safely too.  Chinese doctors in Wuhan, and France's top Covid doc, Didier Raoult, among others, had reported significant success treating even very ill Covid patients with HCQ in the first weeks of the pandemic.  The consensus among proponents, however - shaped in America largely by the practice of Dr Vladimir ‘Zev’  Zelenko in New York - was that HCQ worked best taken as a preventative, or in very early illness, when symptoms were still mild.  It was often prescribed along with zinc, azithromycin and prednisone.

Given the drug's safety record and experienced clinicians' avowals of efficacy, I was at first taken aback by the uproar. Then I remembered how just weeks earlier - after Trump mused wistfully about the prospects for an IV antiviral medication that would kill Covid 'like bleach or Lysol' - he had been accused of advocating that Covid patients be injected with actual bleach or Lysol.  The media had ratcheted up their fake outrage to an operatic new high, and they weren't about to let up.

Pharma-sponsored corporate media swiftly began touting fraudulent 'studies' purporting to debunk HCQ's safety and efficacy.  Two were particularly outrageous.  One, from Brazil, administered patients four times the standard dose of HCQ used by experienced Covid clinicians, in order to produce an unacceptable incidence of adverse effects.  Every substance that humans consume - even water - has a therapeutic index, a dosing window above which it becomes toxic. In plain English, then, the Brazil researchers deliberately overdosed and poisoned patients in order to 'prove' that HCQ was unsafe: a stunt worthy of the Tuskegee syphilis researchers.

The other study purportedly enrolled tens of thousands of patients worldwide, showed that HCQ was ineffective for Covid, and famously appeared in The Lancet - then was retracted two weeks later, when it turned out the whole thing, including the study population, was fabricated. At the time, all I knew was that any suggestion Covid was treatable undermined the fake-deadliness narrative.  So I chalked the HCQ furor up to that.  It hadn't yet occurred to me how much money there was be made by suppressing generic remedies in favor of proprietary medications and vaccines.

Real studies cost money, so somebody has to pay for them. That somebody is generally a pharmaceuticals firm with a big stake in the outcome.  I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't until fall 2021 that a deadly experimental 'vaccine,' illegal mandates, fascist suppression of dissent and the war on ivermectin focused my mind. Only then did I realize the public-health psychopaths - from Birx and Fauci down to municipal health officers - were just shilling for Big Pharma.  The public-health quacks’ corporate overlords couldn't make money off generic medications that might have saved many lives. I'll cover how that realization belatedly dawned on me in part 3.

I was interested in repurposed medications only to the extent they might help friends and family with more risk factors than I had.  On my May visit to Ojinaga I had gone shopping for HCQ in several town pharmacies.  (Like most medications, HCQ is over-the-counter in Mexico.)  But there was a shortage, of course: South of the border, it was getting bought up as soon as it was stocked.

My lack of early focus on Big Pharma’s role was due largely to my personal outlook and circumstances.  I was resigned to catching Covid sooner rather than later (if indeed I hadn’t already), because I was screening busloads of illegal aliens five days a week.  I knew Covid was less dangerous to me than seasonal flu.  So I just laughed off the fear porn.  I was resigned to sniffles, a cold or even a week or so of 'flu-like illness.'  I wasn't even remotely interested in a Warp Speed vaccine.  

As I told a colleague in July 2020: ’ "Flatten the curve" assumed, from the get-go, that the virus can’t be contained. That has been proven, in spades. Perhaps its spread can be slowed, but even that is doubtful, and attempting it would likely do more harm than good. Absent a vaccine, 60-80% of us will get it, well over 99% will recover fully, develop some degree of individual immunity and contribute to the herd’s. I’d rather take my chances with the virus than with a brand new vaccine, because I fear Guillain-Barre more than I fear Covid-19.'

Sometime that summer, I heard about WEF’s Great Reset conference.  It sounded to me like a feeble effort to haul the climate-change hoax out of the ditch by hitching it to the Covid bulldozer for a little more traction: a sort of Eurotrash Green New Deal, updated for corona.  About the same time, somebody told me about Event 201.  I thought it was tinfoil-hattery - until I googled it and learned that yes: WEF, the Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins - all ChiCom-adjacent lockdown promoters - had hosted a pandemic war-game in October 2019, postulating the emergence of a novel coronavirus.  What astounding foresight! Of course, we skeptics already suspected that Covid had been circulating quietly around the world months before the CCP decided to publicize the Wuhan ‘outbreak.’ The Great Reset and Event 201 organizers undoubtedly knew it for a fact.

All Covid, all the time

As spring warmed into summer, red states reopened, and the grip of fear on American minds seemed to loosen a bit. Lockdown enthusiasts began frantically moving goalposts to maintain some pretext for continued 'emergency' restrictions.  But when the George Floyd riots erupted around Memorial Day,  the public-health quacks - with their trademark lack of self-awareness - exempted the rioters from 'pandemic' restrictions.  ‘Systemic racism,’ you see - though entirely fictional - is an even bigger health issue than Covid!  This inadvertent admission was the most forceful reminder imaginable that the lockdowns had nothing to do with Covid. The public-health cartel was in league with the CCP, the ‘alphabet agencies,’ Big Tech, the Democrats and their street muscle in a political project. The rhetoric suggested their goal wasn’t just to topple a president, but to overturn an entire sociopolitical order. 

In mid-June 2020, in keeping with Farr's Law, a modest summer Covid wave gathered, infecting many (especially in the Sun Belt) who had escaped the first wave.  But now, almost nobody was dying from it, because the average patient age - at least in Texas and Arizona, the states I kept closest tabs on - was in the 30s.  Few were even being hospitalized.  The wave itself was even more modest than it looked on paper, driven by false positives from obsessive-compulsive testing of people who had no symptoms.  (More on the fraudulent Covid PCR tests below.)  As the usefulness of touting the death toll waned, on cue - like a school of minnows changing course in unison to avoid an aquatic predator - the progressive hive-mind abruptly switched from promoting the fake death toll to promoting the fake case count.  The intent was to sow fear of a 'reopening spike' resulting from Sun Belt states 'prematurely' ending their lockdowns. This seems to mark the precise juncture when the public-health cartel completed their sneaky transition from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘zero Covid.’

Early on, it had come to light that Medicare and Medicaid were offering hospitals a literal bounty for Covid patients:  $13,000 per regular admission and $39,000 per ICU admission were the numbers I heard cited in Arizona.  Then, criteria for a Covid diagnosis were relaxed to the point of meaninglessness:  In mid-May, Texas public-health officials redefined 'probable Covid' to include subjective seasonal allergy symptoms absent a positive Covid test.  This led to insurance fraud on a vast scale, orchestrated by the nation's biggest insurer, the feds - Medicare and Medicaid. 

Because US health statistics are muddled, by design, and because doctors and hospitals were incentivized to attribute every death to Covid, we'll never know how many 'Covid' deaths were due to the real killers - cancer, heart disease and strokes - which obviously don't take a holiday just because there's a new cold virus going around.  My guesstimate, for what it's worth, asymptotically approaches 100%.  It's not clear that the pandemic was even associated with excess mortality in the US in 2020.  There certainly was excess mortality that year in Britain, which keeps much better records than we do - probably because they locked down harder, with all the damage that does.  It's worth keeping in mind that the average age of Covid fatality in the UK was 82 - older than British average life expectancy.

Throughout the summer and fall, hospital administrators and spokesmen in Texas and Arizona lied, brazenly and at length, about their ICUs being 'overcrowded.'  One such hospital, Arizona’s Banner Health, was actually less crowded in spring and summer 2020 than it had been a year earlier, when it had been forced to divert ICU admissions to other hospitals.  Remember, when a hospital is 'out of beds,' actual beds are never the problem. They're short of staff to tend the beds.  

What really happened was, in March 2020, health systems across the fruited plain had closed every clinic, and laid off every doc, nurse and ancillary staffer who wasn't primarily caring for Covid patients.  The idea was to maximize earnings by taking full advantage of the Covid bounties, neglecting everyone else.  Hospitals practically stopped treating anything but Covid, which was always vastly less deadly than untreated cancer and heart disease.  Profiteering administrators balked at bringing back furloughed employees to treat less lucrative maladies, then had the nerve to complain they had ‘too many patients’ and ‘no enough beds.’ It was nonsense: They weren't overwhelmed, they were deliberately understaffed.

In mid-July, after weeks of screeching about 'cases' and utter silence about increasingly rare deaths, national media suddenly began touting a ‘new record’ for Texas Covid-19 deaths.  This too was a brazen lie.  As mentioned earlier, in mid-May, Texas public-health officials had quietly redefined 'probable' Covid-19 to include any two minor, subjective symptoms - for instance, 'feeling feverish' but with a normal temperature, plus a headache - in the absence of a positive test.  This incentivized doctors deliberately to misdiagnose seasonal allergies and other humdrum complaints as Covid, and bill accordingly.  Texas was also among the states that had, at least through the end of May 2020, conflated results from acute infection testing with results of antibody testing, reporting them all as ‘new cases.’  

So we will probably never know just how many of the ‘record Covid deaths' that summer were confounded by patients never had Covid, had never even been tested for Covid, or had recovered from Covid ... then died in car wrecks or from unrelated illness, like drug overdoses, preexisting heart disease or cancer.  But the likely answer, once again, is 'almost all of them.'

In Arizona, tales of fraud were rife.  Evidence was anecdotal, but there sure were lots of anecdotes. Patients were admitted for appendectomies and broken legs and tested positive for Covid-19, without symptoms. They were added to the new case tally to enhance public-health fear-mongering.  Hospitals could also then bill insurance for a Covid-19 admission, as well as the unrelated surgery.  Arizona hospitals also routinely deemed patients to have had ‘false negative’ Covid-19 tests and added them to the count anyway.  The feds kept encouraging the fraud via reimbursement policies.

Public park - KEEP OUT!

At least the hospitals were still open.  For many public-sector employees, the scamdemic became a carte-blanche pretext for impromptu holidays of indefinite duration, on full pay.  Public schoolteachers and their disastrous Zoom classes are merely the best-known example.  We all remember the children’s outdoor playgrounds police-taped off, and the arrests of parents who refused to comply.

But I don't have kids, so the 'pandemic' follies I found personally most annoying were bizarre restrictions at state and national parks.  One weekend I drove two hours to Big Bend, planning a round-trip hike up Emory Peak.  The masked ranger manning the north entrance told me the park was closed, 'for a week or two,' because of a Covid outbreak among park staff.  The entrance kiosks were manned just to keep people out. 

I hid my exasperation, thanking the ranger politely.  I drove off, circled around and spent the rest of the weekend scouting the park's more favorable western approaches for infiltration routes.  National parks belong to me, and just because you work there doesn't give you the authority to keep me out.  

Big Bend's main attraction is the spectacular Chisos Mountains, whose forested ramparts jut a mile into the sky above the vast desert plains that surround them.  There are only two paved roads into the park.  Both park entrances are a good twenty miles from the foot of the Chisos, mostly across barren flats.  There were no dirt-road alternatives that would get me anywhere near the mountains unspotted - not in my silver Tacoma kicking up a plume of dust. In fact, rangers were actively patrolling the roads to keep people out.

I had all the necessary topographic maps.  I could park at the general store just outside the west park entrance, or recruit somebody to drop me off and pick me up there.  I could easily bypass the west entrance on foot, through the rugged desert on either side.  But I'd need to carry a lot of water, to get myself 20 miles to the Chisos, then up Emory Peak, and back.  I couldn't count on finding water, except at the trailhead visitor center, which for obvious reasons I needed to avoid.  Hmmm, I thought, this would all be a lot easier with a dirt bike.  

Fortunately, the park did reopen, in just a week, even before I bought my Kawasaki.  So I never had to sneak in.  I faced similar annoyance at Fort Davis State Park, at the foot of the Davis Mountains.  A highway splits the park:  On the south side is the office, lots of parking, a hotel (closed of course), a museum and a paved road to a hilltop overlooking the fort's adobe ruins.  North of the highway is a small dirt parking area, then miles of  desert ridges stretching to the north, looped with hiking trails.  The park was limited to half capacity 'because of Covid,' and they were 'full.'  Even though everyone was on the south side, I wasn't allowed to park, or hike, on the north side - because the south side was 'full.'  Fort Davis, however, proved much easier to jailbreak than Big Bend:  I just parked on the wide highway shoulder, out of sight of the park office, jumped a fence and went trail-running on the northern ridges anyway.

When I finally hiked Emory Peak, in mid-August, I met dozens of other hikers, mostly in their twenties.  I was practically the only one on the trail not wearing a silly cloth ear-loop mask.  Some of the less stalwart Covidians had pulled their masks below their noses; even the loose cloth masks, which don’t stop viruses at all, do make breathing uncomfortable during exertion.  More than once, as I steamed briskly up the mountainside, an approaching hiker’s eyes widened on spotting my bare face, and she hastily pulled her mask back up over her nose. It was another reminder that the real pandemic was one of mental illness.

Fake PCR tests - and the scourge of natural immunity

Back in April, researchers at Stanford had confirmed that in both the Bay Area and SoCal, for every person with a positive acute Covid test, there were  50 more people with Covid antibodies proving (1) prior exposure, (2) illness so mild as to have gone almost unnoticed and (3) some degree of immunity.  The resulting wave of ad hominem attacks on the researchers had reinforced my early view that the 'pandemic restrictions' had nothing to do with science.  The beef with the Stanford findings was that researchers had solicited antibody-test volunteers via social media, rather than recruiting a random sample; they likely enrolled people who had been sick, and thought it might have been Covid.  'So of course,' the Karens whined, 'that skewed the number of positive antibody tests higher than the true rate among the general public.'  

In fact, the opposite was true.  The ratio of people with acute cases to those with antibodies was likely 1: 100 or even lower, because the Karens' objection - and indeed the whole definition of a Covid 'case' - was based on a fake numerator: positive PCR tests for acute Covid.  Just for starters, the creator of the PCR test had never intended it for diagnosis of acute illness.  Moreover the CDC 'recommended' a cycle threshold so high that the agency plainly wanted lots of false positives, for political purposes. If half your positives are false, then the ratio of acute cases to positive antibodies drops to 1:100 rather than 1:50.  Suppose the false-positive rate was actually as high as 90 percent, as some have argued:  That makes the ratio 1:500.

There were other respiratory viruses circulating that winter, not just flu but legacy coronaviruses, likely to cause false positives on the faulty Covid PCR test.  The Karens’ complaint assumes that a significant number of people who caught cold, then volunteered for the Stanford antibody screen, must have had Covid, instead of some other virus.  It's completely non-falsifiable.

Penn State researchers who studied New York asserted that by the time NYC locked down in mid-March, the virus was already too prevalent for the lockdowns to have had any impact on slowing the virus' spread.  The Penn State study reinforced the Stanford antibody surveys, indicating that positive antibodies surpassed positive acute tests by a couple orders of magnitude.  Moreover it was clear that the rate of Covid reinfections among the 99.9+% who had recovered was, in essence, nil.  Nobody was sure how long the protection would last.  But there was reason for optimism, since a great many viral infections do confer long-term protection.  And so it came to pass that natural immunity reared its ugly head to terrorize the Covid quacks.  

Summer cooled into autumn, but urban riots and arson smoldered on. A kid in Kenosha, Wisconsin, guarding a relative’s property from a brownshirt mob with his AR-15, was attacked and pursued. When he was forced to shoot the three nearest attackers, who badly wanted his rifle, all three ‘victims’ turned out to have violent criminal records and one was a convicted pederast. The random sample yielded great insight into the nature of leftist street muscle: You couldn’t fire into a crowd of BLM/Antifa without hitting mostly felons and child molesters.

Media discussion of natural immunity grew more and more fiery, and not at all peaceful.  Whenever the topic came up, medical authorities on legacy cable news shows became irrationally agitated, like dementia patients at sundown.  In early October, Jay Bhattacharya, one of the doctors behind the Stanford antibody research, alongside two other brave physicians, issued the Great Barrington Declaration.  Big Tech and the pharma-sponsored corporate media tried ferociously to suppress it. But by then, tens of millions of Americans were getting their news elsewhere and had replaced Google with less politicized search engines.  Too many of us knew all about the GBD and enthusiastically supported Bhattacharya and his allies.  So corporate media found themselves in a no-win situation:  They had to address the GBD, if only to ‘debunk’ - thereby calling public attention to it. I remember a medical panel discussion about that time, on CNN, I think.  One participant - a moon-faced quack whose name I've forgotten - insisted, spluttering with rage, that natural immunity was the same thing as 'mass murder.'

In hindsight, his fury is understandable.  If everybody had already recovered from the exceedingly infectious, but not very lethal SARS-CoV-2, and possessed substantial immunity as a result, before CNN's Big Pharma sponsors came up with a vaccine, nobody was going to want the jab - especially since it had been rushed into production at Warp Speed.  Pharma stocks, including the CNN quack doctor’s, would languish.  Hey, if you broke my rice bowl, I'd splutter too.

Mailing it in

There was a presidential election campaign underway, or so we were told.  But only one candidate was actually campaigning.  Trump jetted all over the country (with a short break to fight off a bout of Covid), addressing rallies extemporaneously, attended by tens of thousands of people, for an hour or more at a time.  By autumn, the economy seemed to have bounced back from the initial 'pandemic' closures - though many of the small businesses targeted by lockdowns hadn't, and wouldn't.  Trump advisers boasted of a 'V-shaped recovery.'

In mid-October, the Trump campaign rolled a hand grenade into the challenger’s tent. The New York Post, America’s oldest paper, broke the news that the challenger’s son had abandoned a laptop at Delaware repair shop in 2019. After Hunter ghosted him, never paying, the shop owner had reviewed the contents and saw files that were clear national-security breaches - messages indicating Hunter was influence-peddling, on his dad’s behalf, in China and Ukraine, with a surcharge of ‘ten percent for the big guy.’ There were also lots of salacious photos of Hunter, who’d been kicked out of the navy for drug abuse, smoking crack and cavorting with prostitutes. The repairman approached the FBI in December 2019. The FBI sat on it, because - as we’ve discussed - it might have derailed the CCP/Deep State/Democrat campaign against Trump … who seems to have felt the only option left was an October Surprise.

It’s important to understand that none of this was actually a surprise. Everybody knew about the challenger’s influence peddling. Certainly FBI briefed the challenger’s campaign when they received the laptop. Years earlier, the challenger himself had bragged, to the Council on Foreign Relations, about getting a Ukrainian investigator fired. The Biden grift was the basis of an ongoing Ukrainian investigation that formed the basis of the Democrats’ second Trump impeachment effort. And some FBI officials said as much, anonymously of course, when the laptop story broke:

The US intelligence community hurled the First Amendment onto the grenade. Twitter and Facebook, the two biggest social-media platforms, under FBI orders promptly squelched the story, making it impossible to share. Twitter canceled the NY Post’s account, an unprecedented attack on free speech. A top CIA official rounded up 50 former intelligence agents to sign a letter brazenly insisting the laptop was ‘Russian disinformation,’ a talking point relentlessly echoed in corporate media. If you didn’t watch Fox, you wouldn’t have had any idea it was real. A poll taken after the election revealed that a percentage of Biden voters more than sufficient to have cost him the election would have changed their vote, had they known about the laptop.

The challenger spent his days mostly sequestered in his basement, doddering occasionally over to the mike at small, scripted, yet still 'gaffe'-plagued events.  He was never very bright:  I'm old enough to remember how his 1988 presidential campaign cracked up amid revelations that he plagiarized not just foreign politicians' speeches, but law-school assignments. Later he became famous for what the shrinks call 'confabulation,' that is, making things up.  By 2019, his mental and physical decline were on public display.  By fall 2020, credible rumor had it that his handlers were terrified he'd catch Covid and ... uh ... not recover as handily as Trump had.

It was plain throughout 2020 that the challenger's handlers simply saw no need to campaign.  Had they just given up, like McCain in 2008?  No, that wasn't it - not after two trumped-up impeachments, 'Russiagate,' (an attempted FBI/CIA coup d'etat) and the totalitarian crackdown on the laptop revelations. Not after years of scurrilous leaks, violations of the Espionage Act, by national-security officials.  Not after months of riot, murder and arson by progressive street muscle:  Antifa and BLM were too fired up, too unpredictable for the party to dare pull a McCain and just roll over.  Surrender is for conservatives, not progressives.  So you couldn't help but wonder what they had up their sleeves.

One possibility was so obvious that everyone just shrugged it off, including Trump:  The 'pandemic' had given Democrat governors a pretext to issue tens of millions of mail-in ballots - in most cases illegally, in defiance of legislative prerogative.  To this day I'm puzzled the White House didn't challenge mail-in voting more forcefully. 

The battle for SCOTUS

The left’s transformation from liberal to fascist started, near as I could tell, in the 1990s, but accelerated rapidly when Trump came on the scene. The metamorphosis was accompanied by a dramatic intensification of leftists’ tendency to project their own motivations and outlook upon anyone who disagreed. The more fascist they became, that is, the louder they accused their opponents of fascism.

In the 2010s, partisan Democrats abruptly reversed course on keynote issues: from feminism to the explicit misogyny of the bizarre ‘transgender’ cult; from anti-corporate activism to lockstep support for Big Tech and Big Pharma; from anti-militarism to jingoism; from profound distrust of US spy agencies to slavish adherence to brazen spy-ops like Russiagate. But the left has never wavered in its violent advocacy of women’s ostensible right to hire doctors to murder their children.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a stalwart supporter of abortion ‘rights,’ and the oldest justice, had refused to retire under Obama. She mistakenly believed that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016 and would appoint an even more radical replacement than Obama would have. But her pancreatic cancer, previously in remission, recurred in February 2020. By late summer, her impending death could no longer be hidden, and the left flew into collective hysterics. They argued that ‘presidents can’t nominate a SCOTUS replacement during an election year,’ because in 2016, the GOP Senate had shot down Merrick Garland’s nomination under similar circumstances. Trump ignored them, and nominated conservative Catholic Amy Coney Barrett, who was swiftly confirmed.

The Steal

After many months of lockdowns, brownshirt violence, Big Tech / Big Intel / Big Media censorhip, censorious media 'fact-checks' and other insults to our intelligence - all of it conducted by actual fascists, noisily projecting their fascism onto all who questioned them - some hadn't had their fill.  They stayed up on Election Night, watched the swing-state vote counts mysteriously halt, then saw the totals in those same states abruptly flip in the wee hours. Others, who had gone to bed earlier, processed the bizarre reversal over coffee at dawn.  As with the lockdowns, it was obvious what had just happened. The question was, what next?

Scores of whistleblowers came forward in every swing state.  Their affidavits, sworn under oath, attested how Democrat poll workers in big, blue swing-state cities like Detroit and Atlanta stonewalled observers and made sure that the authenticity of hundreds of thousands of ostensible mail-in ballots was never verified.  Swing-state courts predictably refused even to hear any of the associated cases, ostensibly due to plaintiffs’ lack of ‘standing.’  (Judges’ homes are easy to find, and judges had watched the cities burn all summer long just like everyone else.) A partial audit the following year in Arizona established that 9,000 more mail-in ballots were counted than had been mailed out. For some reason, everybody agreed to pretend that wasn't prima facie evidence of massive, systematic fraud.

The bug-eyed vehemence of corporate-media talking heads on the new crime of ‘election denial’ was a classic example of protesting too much. Their shrieks of ‘no evidence’ missed the point entirely. The point of flooding the zone with unverifiable mail-in ballots was to make any ballot’s relationship to any flesh-and-blood voter unverifiable. The burden of proof isn’t on ‘election deniers’ to prove fraud. All they have to prove is that the election was neither free nor fair. That’s a matter of record: CIA and FBI openly made sure that Big Tech, the courts and the corporate media squelched a story that would not only have destroyed the challenger’s campaign, but in an actual justice system, would have sent him to prison.

Warp Speed

The pharmaceutical consortia producing the new ‘vaccines’ conspicuously held off announcing that their product was ready for release until after the media had called the election for the challenger.  Just weeks earlier, on the campaign trail, his running mate had gone out of her way to undermine public confidence in the vaccines.  It seemed by mid-November that, in one of those whiplash turnabouts so characteristic of the Covid-era left, the new regime was now going to try to take credit for them.  

I knew next to nothing about mRNA technology, at the time, because I wasn't interested enough in getting the jab to bother reading up on it.  I thought I might already have had Covid:  I almost never catch cold, but I came down with a bad one in early November 2019 - right after spending a week ‘on-boarding’ in a Dubai hotel jammed with Chinese tourists. I hadn't gotten sick since, despite repeated exposures.  So I did some quick remedial reading on the mRNA lipid-nanoparticle technology.  I didn’t get far before it hit me: 'Wait, what?  This isn't a vaccine, it's a gene therapy.'

Until 2020, 'vaccine' had generally meant injecting the actual pathogen - dead or so weakened as to pose little threat of disease - in order to prompt antibody production.  This was very different:  Pfizer et al wanted us to inject Covid mRNA to prompt our own cells to produce the spikes, regarded as the most pathogenic viral protein.  Would it work?  Maybe, I thought.  On the other hand, they had just rushed an experimental gene therapy into production at Warp Speed, that is, under a recklessly truncated testing regimen. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ I had more specific questions, too:

How long does the mRNA stay in our tissues?  What if it finds its way into cell nuclei, where our DNA resides?  What if the peptide sequences got corrupted (haste makes for poor quality control) and our cells started making mutant proteins?  Could that cause cancer?  We were blandly assured those weren't issues.  But we had been lied to so often and so brazenly, for the preceding eight months, by the very same quacks, that it would have been madness to take their reassurances at face value. 

A dead giveaway: The vaccine promoters were reassuring us even though they couldn’t possibly have known the answers, one way or the other.  The jabs simply hadn’t been given to enough people, for long enough, to establish whether they were safe enough to market as a vaccine. 

Vaccines, like all pharmaceuticals, have adverse effects.  But developed countries force them on all children, in order (theoretically) to protect society at large by preventing infectious-disease outbreaks.  Your kids are forced to ‘take one for the team.’  So heretofore, the bioethical consensus had been that vaccines had to have a vastly lower adverse-effect rate - many orders of magnitude lower - than the meds we give you to treat you when you’re already sick.  Until 2020, vaccines, in theory, had to be so safe - the acceptable adverse-effect rate had to be so low - that a statistically significant danger signal might not appear in clinical trials involving just a few thousand, or even tens of thousands of people, over the course of mere months.  That’s the sort of trial conducted for a new blood-pressure or diabetes medication. No: To establish a vaccine’s safety, you had to give millions of doses, over years.  That’s why it used to take so long to get vaccines approved.  By mid-November 2020, as I read up on the mRNA jabs, it was clear all that had gone right out the window.  It seemed a perfect juncture for me to 'wait and see' a few months, until 50 million Covid cultists had been jabbed.  If there were problems, they’d be impossible to cover up.

Mind you, this was weeks before I heard about the shocking adverse-effect rate in Pfizer’s own puny, perfunctory clinical trials.  In November 2020, what I didn’t know was more than enough to convince me to wait.  As I had written my colleague back in July, ‘I’d rather take my chances with the virus than with a brand new vaccine, because I fear Guillain-Barre more than I fear Covid-19.'

Why, and what next?

Today there are many plausible, mostly overlapping, sometimes competing theories, all seeking to answer these questions:  How and why were unelected technocrats able to bypass republican processes, establish a precedent for overthrowing them entirely, and then institute a sort of public-health martial law?  Who was in charge of this project?  What were their immediate goals?  And what are their long-term objectives?

If you’ll recall from part 1, I concluded early on that the ‘pandemic response’ was a joint effort by the ChiComs, the Democrats, the GOP establishment and elements of the permanent bureaucracy to overthrow Trump.  At the end of 2020, that anti-Trump partnership had triumphed.  (I wasn’t yet sure what else they might have planned. For example, I was still just beginning to process the WEF and their Great Reset.)

According to my initial theory, the Chinese, the Deep State and their hired congress-critters could, and now presumably would get back to business as usual, circa 2015. But by December 2020 that idea badly needed updating.  ‘Business as usual’ was no longer on the cards.  Too many lines had been crossed, too many icons smashed – including the rule of law, though most of us kept pretending not to notice.

Plainly CIA- and FBI-directed social media censorship was here to stay, if only for institutional self-preservation.  Free discussion of lockdowns, Covid fraud, election theft, and the Security State that enabled them, might spark an explosion engulfing them all.  Tech oligarchs in league with the spooks had already shut down Parler, the free-speech alternative to Twitter.  On top of that, we were a year into an intensive psy-op, a fifth-generation counterinsurgency campaign waged by the US government against its own people.  As a consequence, a great many Americans - typically those least rational and emotionally resilient to begin with - began displaying an array of behaviors, beliefs and speech habits that looked an awful lot like acquired mental illness.  No, business as usual - like the past - was another country.

But other key matters were crystal clear.  First, lawless usurpers had seized power.  Second, the nominal president didn’t know where he was half the time, so obviously he wasn’t in charge. Third, nobody knew who was in charge, though Soros’ and Obama’s names got bandied about a lot.  We were ruled a secret junta unchained from accountability: It followed that any notion they’d govern as moderates was a delusion. Less clear was the precise relationship among the US junta, the CCP and the globalist totalitarian movement. Is our secret junta just the US agent for the latter two?

In any event, under ‘Joe Biden,’ I expected the Soros agenda of turning major cities into real-life enactments of The Purge would intensify, and start trickling down to smaller cities and towns. Key liberties had been suspended indefinitely, and much of the population still languished under ‘pandemic restrictions’ that looked more like martial law than disease mitigation.  Of course I had avoided the worst of it, for the time being, by moving to rural Texas.  But that wisecrack attributed to Stalin kept popping into my head:  ‘You may not want war, but war wants you.’ Plainly our rulers were already at war with us, though most Americans weren’t ready to face the fact.

My big takeaway from 2020 evokes one of the first things I learned in emergency medicine: ‘Don’t argue with the crazy guy.’ You’re not going to talk the psychotic patient out of his delusion. We would not be ruled by a secret junta of psychopathic usurpers if an awful lot of Americans - including many of my friends and family members - had not voted for precisely that. Were there 81 million of them? Of course not. Were there 71 million? Maybe, but that’s still way too many. Did they know what they were voting for? Maybe not. But the rest of us did, so that’s no excuse.

They include my parents, both retired federal-government lawyers. You’d think they would have been sophisticated enough to change the channel away from CNN now and then to see what other outlets were reporting. After all, their son abandoned his journalism career in the 1990s, and made it no secret that the profession was already rotten to the core. But no. It’s clear I’m not going to change their minds.

If I can’t change my parent’s minds, we’re going to have trouble winning over tens of millions of people who, thanks to US public education, can’t tell the difference between an argument and a slogan. The American political system was designed for deeply engaged, thoughtful voters with strong critical thinking skills - that is, for ‘conspiracy theorists.’

It follows, sadly, that America is pretty much over. Secession - by state or by county, with states leaving the Union, and counties joining less dysfunctional neighboring states - might be an option. But secessionists will have to fight hard and shed blood to make it stick, and I see no appetite for that. Americans are very quiescent. The Dutch and German farmers, the French Yellow Vests, the Sri Lankans and слава Богу, the Russians are all a lot more resolute than we are. I don’t see Americans rising up and toppling the usurpers. I think it’ll take some catastrophe, like the grid’s or the dollar’s collapse, and the ensuing chaos to rouse the survivors from their complacency.

The redoubt

I had started looking for property back in April, as soon as I got to Texas - as one does, when zombies have overrun most other states.  I focused on Fort Davis and environs, because my criteria were remote and defensible.  But by November I hadn't found anything suitable.  After the election I got serious, and broadened the search.  In early December I fell in love with a remote, off-grid six-acre plot, a half-day's drive away, on a small lake fed by springs bubbling out of limestone cliffs.  It's on an old ranch that got sold and subdivided a half-century ago.  Nobody remembers the creeks ever going dry, which is saying something in those parts. 

Defensible?  It's in a forested box canyon with one motorable road in.  The cliff-studded, brushy surrounding ridges soar hundreds of feet, with plenty of covered and concealed paths out. It’s a real zombie-apocalypse redoubt. 'It's under contract,'  the realtor explained.  'But I wanted you to see it, because I'm not sure it's going to stay under contract.'  He showed me several other places nearby, but none measured up.  Barely a week after I had driven home, he called.  'The buyer backed out.  Are you still interested?'  I pounced. We were under contract before Christmas, though we didn't close ‘til a couple months later.  Now, thank God, I at least had a place to run and hide, in case the 2020s continued the way they had started.