This Silence Is Not Golden

"It’s dangerous. It is even treacherous."

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Brownstone Institute

At least the UK held public hearings, even if they were gamed from the start. There is a smidgeon of honesty that they held them at all. After all, the Covid era of public policy, in the US and all over the world, was the worst deployment of compulsory public policy in our lifetimes. It affected the whole of life in ways that were unthinkable even a year before. 

It was not an act of nature. It was designed and deployed by men in power. 

A chronicle of what’s been shattered yields a litany of horribles: educational losses, ruined businesses, rampant mental illness, medical injury, homelessness, job upheaval and loss, depleted arts, wrecked families and communities, inflation, ruined national accounts, a generation of students traumatized, bitter political divisions, and a widespread lack of hope in the future. 

That list is only a fraction of the cost. And the words above are anodyne to the real experiences of people. Whenever the subject comes up in private conversation, the result is a jaw-dropping accounting of personal despair and tragedy, often followed by tears under some circumstances. Constitutional government was shot and most of what we believed was and was not possible in public life was torched by the sheer ferocity of tyranny pushed by mostly unelected bureaucrats. 

None of what you just read is overtly disputed by anyone. Hardly anyone can be found today who defends what happened, except perhaps in the most sheepish terms, and nearly always with the obviously false proviso that “We just didn’t know then what we know now.” That seems like a shabby excuse for what’s resulted. These days – again, mostly in private conversations – hardly any apocalyptic prediction seems beyond the realm of plausibility. 

The public silence over this entire subject is beyond bizarre. There are political conventions happening all over the country. They are attended by thousands. Everyone is rallying about and for something. But the Covid response hardly comes up. When it does, it is quick and perfunctory conversation and quickly dropped. The only two candidates who dwell on the topic at all – Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – are systematically marginalized and silenced, with large and active juntas of opposition working around the clock. 

Recall that all the mainstream media outlets cooperated at the time – together with all large tech platforms – in cheering on the Covid response from the lockdowns to the masks to the shot mandates, while actively silencing dissent. We have all the receipts we need to prove that they all acted at the behest of government actors. Given this history, perhaps it should not surprise us that they are silent today. No one wants to admit what they did to us. 

As a result, hardly any revelations about Big Tech censorship, excess deaths, contaminated shots, misused funds, or corruption of public officials and academics get media attention at all. To many of us, what is happening and what is revealed daily amounts to a parade of scandals, except that the national media doesn’t care in the slightest. 

Both political parties were involved. So keeping silent on this whole topic is the one thing for sure that both Biden and Trump forces agree on. They don’t even have to discuss it. They just know not to go there. Once voices sign up for one side or the other, they fall silent on this and act like nothing really happened. Biden is never asked about it, but then he is not asked about anything. Trump has only been asked a couple of times, and responds as if it was long ago, he did the right thing, and otherwise offers zero in the way of specifics, even though his administration’s response arguably wrecked his presidency. 

The Trump partisans have the strongest reason for silence, and enforcing that on everyone else. Trump greenlighted the lockdowns in March 2020. By the time he lost interest in the Covid response, the bureaucrats took over, and he was reduced to tweeting objections. 

Even in September 2020 – after Scott Atlas had convinced him that it had all been a huge error – the CDC imposed an eviction moratorium that wrecked the property rights of millions of landlords, and kept that rule through the year. Did Trump approve them or was he powerless to stop them? In effect, after lockdowns, he was president in name only – a rather humiliating reality for a man who promised to use his awesome power to make America great again. 

Huge corporate retailers gained massive advantages over their smaller and locally owned competition, driving many out of business. Not one of them has publicly spoken out about what turned out to be the luckiest break in their histories. Nor have they been questioned about a possible role in pushing for lockdowns and their prolongation, not even Amazon even though their founder is also owner of the Washington Post which pushed the Covid response for years and still does. 

As for academia, most colleges and universities in the country shut down, locked kids in dorm rooms or banned them from campus, and then forced their students and faculty to get shots they did not need. Objecting to this led to major purges and cancellation, so most people stayed quiet. Hence the “best and brightest” have no reason to investigate or pursue justice. 

Thus does complicity in all these crimes against liberty, property, and personal autonomy disable what would otherwise be serious examinations of culpability. The result is the universal muttering: “It was long ago and never happened anyway.”

All this kind of socio-political analysis might explain the whole of the silence. Still, some of us cannot shake the sense that there is something else going on, something to do with the national-security state and the bioweapons program. Who said what to whom and how and why? We know for sure that whatever happened occurred between February 26 and March 13, 2020. Some people know for sure: Trump for one, but Tucker Carlson and Fauci and Farrar and many others besides. They know but they do not say. Why is this? What terrible secret is being whispered among the elites?

Where is the curiosity to know what it is? After the Great War, there were years of hearings and resulting books and public debate. After the onset of the Great Depression, it was the same: many years of official investigations. It was the same after World War Two, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the S&L crisis of the 1980s, the Iran-Contra Affair, 9-11, and the 2008 financial crisis. 

Looking carefully at a big episode and finding out what went wrong is a national ritual – or was. Why is this not happening now?

The silence is not golden. It’s dangerous. It is even treacherous. The Covid response ruined everything the world identified with America: freedom, rights, decentralism, commerce, individual liberty, and bravery in the face of trial. Governments together with all the commanding heights betrayed all those values. We need to know why. We need to know how. We need to know who. The silence could mean there is more to come. Which is to say that silence equals death. 

About the Author

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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