Tag: lockdowns

“It Sounds Like a Wild Conspiracy Theory”: Jeffrey Tucker Reveals the Real Reason for the Lockdowns, School Closures, and Masking

Author and Brownstone Institute founder and president Jeffrey Tucker sat down with computational biologist Dr. Jessica Rose for an hour-long conversation about some of the most shocking revelations from the COVID response.

During that discussion, Tucker shared what he says top FDA and NIH officials told him about the real purpose of the lockdowns and other restrictions.

The purpose, according to Tucker, was “to delay the onset of natural immunity… until after the shots were online.”

Tucker admits it “sounds like a wild conspiracy theory.” But he says multiple sources who were actually there, working inside the agencies and companies, have confirmed it “without a shadow of a doubt.”

The lockdowns that wiped out small businesses. The school closures that sent children’s reading scores back to 1971. The plexiglass, the masking, the stay-at-home orders. None of it was about keeping us safe. “It was exactly the opposite,” as Tucker put it.

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The COVID Lockdowns Gave America A Glimpse Of Socialism

The next time a candidate promises that greater government control will make life safer, fairer and more secure, Americans should remember 2020. They should remember the closed schools, shuttered businesses, restricted churches, isolated families, arbitrary mandates and government checks intended to compensate people for livelihoods government had interrupted.

COVID was not socialism in the strict textbook sense. Government did not nationalize most businesses or formally abolish private property. But the pandemic gave Americans a revealing glimpse of the governing instinct behind socialism: Central authorities replaced millions of individual decisions with government orders, restricted private activity in the name of the collective good and made citizens dependent on public assistance to endure the restrictions government itself imposed.

During the frightening opening weeks, temporary precautions were understandable. We faced an unfamiliar virus, hospitals feared being overwhelmed and officials had limited information. Most Americans accepted extraordinary restrictions because they were told the measures were necessary and temporary.

The problem was how quickly temporary precautions became a system of control and how slowly government surrendered that control.

Officials decided who could work and which businesses were “essential.” They determined whether children could enter their classrooms, congregations could enter their churches and families could visit elderly relatives. Restaurants, gyms, salons, theaters and neighborhood stores were closed or severely restricted. Weddings, funerals, worship services and private gatherings were regulated by executive order.

To a governor or public-health official, a restaurant or gym might have appeared nonessential. To its owner, it was income, retirement savings, personal identity and perhaps a business intended for the next generation. There was nothing nonessential about it.

Private ownership means less when government decides whether the owner may open the doors, employ workers or serve customers. The deed may remain in private hands, but practical control has shifted to the state.

The same pattern reached schools. Parents did not individually decide whether remote instruction was best for their children. Government agencies, teachers unions and school systems made that decision for them. Students and families bore the consequences through lost learning, social isolation and enormous strain on working parents.

Government also intruded on religious worship. Churches, synagogues and mosques were closed or severely restricted, sometimes while liquor stores and large retailers remained open. Americans were told when they could worship, how many could attend and even whether they could sing.

The First Amendment does not say religious liberty applies only when public officials consider it convenient. Yet during COVID, constitutional freedoms were treated as privileges that government could suspend and later restore.

Many rules imposed under the banner of science were actually emergency judgments supported by limited evidence. The six-foot distancing rule reduced business capacity and complicated school reopenings, yet Anthony Fauci later said he could not recall how that exact distance had been selected. It “sort of just appeared.”

Masking policies often showed the same lack of discrimination, treating crowded indoor settings much like solitary outdoor activity. California authorities even pursued and arrested a lone paddleboarder during a beach closure. Such episodes revealed what happens when officials become so certain of their authority that questioning a rule is treated as rejecting science.

Public-health experts were qualified to explain medical risks. They were not uniquely qualified to decide how much education, economic independence, religious liberty and personal freedom should be sacrificed. Those were political and moral decisions that belonged to elected representatives and the public.

Yet “following the science” became a way to avoid that debate. Science could help estimate the risk of infection. It could not decide whether a child should lose a year in the classroom, whether a family business should be destroyed or whether a dying person should be separated from loved ones.

Those decisions required balancing competing risks and values. Instead, one objective, reducing the spread of the virus, was often allowed to overwhelm nearly every other consideration.

The economic response reinforced the same pattern of centralized control.

Government restricted private commerce and prevented millions of people from earning income. It then stepped in with forgivable loans, enhanced unemployment benefits, stimulus checks and other assistance.

Some support was necessary. Government could not prevent people from working and then simply abandon them. But the arrangement exposed the deeper danger: Government first displaced private economic activity and then made citizens and businesses dependent on public money to survive the restrictions it had imposed.

That is the governing instinct behind socialism. Decisions move away from individuals, employers and markets and toward political officials who determine which activities may continue, who qualifies for assistance and how resources will be distributed.

The government that closed the business became the government offering to save it. The government that interrupted the paycheck became the government mailing the check. Dependence was not an accidental side effect of the restrictions. It was their predictable result.

Socialism is commonly sold as a promise of security. Government will protect people from illness, unemployment, high prices, inadequate housing and economic uncertainty. But protection requires authority. The more responsibility citizens surrender to the state, the more power the state claims to direct their choices.

COVID gave Americans a practical demonstration of that bargain. Officials promised safety and claimed the authority to regulate work, education, worship, travel, medical decisions and private gatherings. Every restriction was described as temporary, necessary and imposed for the common good.

That is how centralized control usually advances. It does not arrive by announcing that freedom is being abolished. It arrives through promises of safety, fairness, expertise and temporary necessity. Each expansion appears reasonable when viewed alone. Together, they transfer control of everyday life from citizens to the state.

This was not solely a Democratic failure. Officials in both parties expanded government power during COVID, which is precisely why the danger is larger than any one party or politician.

The lesson is especially important today because democratic socialism is gaining influence within the Democratic Party. The Democratic Socialists of America is not formally the Democratic Party, but its candidates generally seek office through Democratic primaries, and several have defeated incumbent Democrats.

The movement is candid about its objectives. Its constitution calls for “popular control of resources and production” and “economic planning.” Its national endorsement standards expect candidates to identify publicly as socialists, support the organization’s platform and view themselves as socialist organizers first and legislators second.

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Anthony Fauci’s Private Diary and Emails Show He Knew Lockdowns Failed

ometimes you learn that people are exactly who you think they are.

And that may never apply more accurately and comprehensively than it does with Anthony Fauci.

Fauci was portrayed, starting in early 2020, as an objective, brilliant, virtually infallible God-like figure.

He was the voice of opposition to President Donald Trump, a clear-eyed force of evidence-driven policy, contrasting with the evil Trump who didn’t “listen to the science.”

That’s not an exaggeration; there were Christmas tree ornaments made depicting Fauci as a Pope, there were shrines put up in people’s houses, he was on the cover of various magazines, and he was given a parade of endless, relentlessly glowing media appearances from his fawning, adoring fans. Fans like CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

For most critics it was clear almost immediately that these portrayals and friendly media appearances depicted the exact opposite of reality.

Fauci was a narcissist. Someone who enjoyed the attention, power, and influence he now unexpectedly wielded. He was unimaginably arrogant, unwilling to listen to new evidence if it contradicted what he wanted to believe, as well as someone who apparently thought himself a virtually infallible, God-like figure.

Well, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) over the weekend released a series of diary entries, emails, and inside information from Fauci himself and it turns out that the critics were more dead on than they could have ever imagined.

There are so many humiliating, embarrassing, discrediting revelations from the emails and diary entries that many are still compiling them. Combing through the list of statements that he made privately, in direct contradiction to his public pronouncements, could be a full time job. For weeks.

But let’s highlight a few, revisit what he said, and explain what it all means.

One of Fauci’s most heinous legacies was the strong push for lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates. Those three policies were and remain significant contributors to many of the negative outcomes resulting from our response to the Covid pandemic.

School closures set back an entire generation of children.

Lockdowns led to governments printing money to allow people to stay home, setting off a spiral of runaway inflation that is still not under control.

And masks permanently damaged millions of people, from schoolchildren forced to wear them, to hospital workers who are now indefinitely required to mask in healthcare settings unnecessarily, or for those who continue to mask out of irrational fear and effective propaganda.

Many of these policies can be traced directly back to Anthony Fauci. And now we have proof of just how inept and incompetent his recommendations were, and how dishonest he was, as it became clear he’d failed.

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Fauci Bragged in His Diary About Forcing California and New York to Shut Down Schools After Years of Claiming ‘I Had Nothing to Do With It’

Newly released entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal diary show that the longtime NIAID director was not only deeply involved in closing down schools across the country but was actively proud of his role in getting California and New York to send millions of children home as he dictated the nation’s disastrous COVID response.

This directly contradicts Fauci’s repeated public claims that he had “nothing to do with” school closures, a lie he peddled for years even as American kids suffered catastrophic learning loss, mental health crises, and social isolation under the policies he helped create.

The bombshell comes from the 1,141-page “Tony’s Diary” package released this week by Senator Rand Paul, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, ahead of Fauci’s sworn testimony before the panel on Wednesday.

Fauci has repeatedly insisted publicly that critics were wrong to blame him for the school closures.

“They always come back and say, Fauci was responsible for closing schools. I had nothing to do—I mean, let’s get down to the facts,” he claimed in 2022.

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The Lockdown Disaster Must Not Be Forgiven: Massive European Study Vindicates Sweden’s Common-Sense Pandemic Response

We’re now rapidly approaching the six-year anniversary of “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”

That policy has to have been one of the most disastrous in world history, created by “experts” who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity.

It was a policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, which claimed that their lockdowns effectively stamped out transmission of covid-19 within a matter of days.

It was a policy that ignored solid research – from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realised.

It must be noted forever that lockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history.

One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives.

Yet six years later, there’s unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.

Study on Swedish Approach to Covid Shows Lockdowns Didn’t Work

A study published in PubMed examined the Swedish approach to covid policy, relative to its European counterparts, primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, but instead used “voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations,” the study says.

Despite a “majority of Swedes” supporting those policies, “this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism.”

That criticism came primarily from public health figures such as, surprise, surprise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who criticised Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd.

“You’ve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences,” he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. “But compare Sweden’s death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It’s worse. So, I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us.”

“If you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble,” Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. “They are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland … They’re starting to see now that they’re having to rethink some of the things they did.”

This was, of course, not true. They did not “rethink” their strategy of light-touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbours is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, obviously never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who were anxious to see Sweden fail.

Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.

The study explains that Sweden received criticism for “not legally enforcing mask-wearing in public spaces,” as well as keeping schools open and “being too permissive” with its policies. All the things that we were told were necessary to stop covid and save lives. The researchers tested these statements using excess mortality data and stringency indices to compare Sweden across the whole of Europe, not just its neighbours.

They chose excess mortality because, unlike covid-specific measurements, it’s less subject to bias, differences in testing, and counting, and individual definitions of covid-caused outcomes. It also accounts for deaths that “could potentially be indirectly attributed to the negative effects of strict lockdown measures and the overall strain on healthcare systems, leading to reduced access to healthcare for other diseases, among other factors.”

Turns out that what they discovered was that Sweden vastly outperformed the rest of Europe from 2020-2022, with outcomes that were remarkably similar to the other Nordic countries.

“Among 42 European countries, the cumulative excess all-cause mortality from January 2020 to December 2022 ranged from 46 (Luxembourg) to 1,080 (Bulgaria) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a median of 351/100,000,” they write. “In Sweden, the excess mortality rate of 158/100,000 was among the lowest, ranked 37th among 42 countries, and not very different from other Nordic countries: Norway (129), Denmark (97), and Finland (228).”Björkman A, Gisslén M, Gullberg M, Ludvigsson J. The Swedish COVID-19 approach: a scientific dialogue on mitigation policies. Front Public Health. 2023 Jul 20;11:1206732. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1206732. PMID: 37546333; PMCID: PMC10399217.

So why did Sweden underperform in 2020 relative to its neighbours? Likely due, as the study explains, to “mortality displacement due to low all-cause mortality in 2019,” as well as “poorly organised older adult care structures.”

What does this mean? Essentially, there were significantly fewer deaths from all causes in Sweden in 2019, meaning there were more extremely elderly people alive in 2020 who were susceptible to severe outcomes from covid. This is reflected in the massive age gradient with covid-associated deaths. In Sweden, “~40% of the covid-19-associated deaths were among patients in nursing homes,” the study says, “and 67% of all covid-19 deaths were among individuals above 80 years of age, representing 10% of all deaths in that age group.”

For younger age groups, covid was mostly a non-issue. “covid-19 deaths below 50 years of age represented only 1.2% of all covid deaths, including 21 individuals below 20 years of age, mostly with underlying co-morbidities, representing 1% of all deaths in that age group.”

Effectively, covid ravaged extremely elderly people, while those under 50, despite the lack of mask mandates and lockdowns, saw very limited impact.

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The Shocking Damage Caused by Covid Policies

he Covid lockdowns may not have been remotely effective, but at least they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts that we’re still dealing with today.

That’s the conclusion of a massive new body of research into the nonsensical policies promoted by the public health “expert” class, promoted by their media partners, and enacted by incompetent, cowardly politicians.

Mask mandates had been thoroughly discouraged by decades of pre-Covid pandemic planning. There was no body of research supporting the closing of certain businesses at different hours of the day, as many jurisdictions demanded.

No studies were conducted on the reduction of infection rates resulting from placing directional arrows on the floors of grocery stores to direct people through aisles in predetermined patterns.

There were no randomized controlled trials on closing skate parks and beaches, arresting people surfing alone in the ocean, restricting capacity to random percentages based on inaccurate assumptions of community spread.

We had no idea whether closing schools would be effective or “save lives,” but we did it anyway. We didn’t know if vaccine passports would actually have a meaningful impact on community spread, yet we were encouraged to push that too.

All these “interventions” started with little-to-no evidence. That’s bad enough. What makes it much worse? That we implemented them all with zero consideration of possible side effects resulting from those policies.

Lockdowns were an unprecedented incursion on freedom and liberty. What would that do to society, the economy, mental health, and so on? It appeared that no one involved gave those considerations a second thought, and now we’re paying the price.

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Supreme Court of France Goes Full Eco-Fascist: Declares War on Working-Class Drivers to Protect Sacred Climate Lockdowns

In a move straight out of the radical environmentalist playbook, France’s so-called Constitutional Council just overturned the will of Parliament and the French people by annulling the suppression of ZFE – Zones à Faibles Émissions, or “Low Emission Zones.” These are the hated climate lockdowns on wheels that ban older, affordable cars from entering major cities, fining working-class drivers into oblivion while elites glide around in their taxpayer-subsidized EVs.

This decision, handed down on May 21, 2026, censored key parts of a law meant to simplify economic life and give French motorists a break. The “Sages” (the Wise Ones – what a joke) ruled that scrapping the ZFEs was a “legislative rider” with no direct link to the bill’s original purpose. Translation for Americans: unelected bureaucrats in robes just nullified a democratically passed reform because it didn’t fit their green agenda.

French drivers – already crushed by sky-high fuel taxes, inflation, and endless regulations – had reason to cheer when Parliament voted to axe these zones earlier this year. Polls showed massive public support for ditching the restrictions that treat regular cars like environmental crimes. But the globalist elite, the same crowd pushing net-zero suicide policies across Europe, wasn’t about to let that happen. Enter the Constitutional Council.

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George Bush’s 2005 Fowl Play

A leading columnist for the Washington Post just wrote: “Hantavirus has an incubation period of up to 8 weeks and kills 30-40% of people who show symptoms….It’s not pandemic yet and probably won’t be, but if it were, the rational action would be—lockdown.” She added: “If this thing goes pandemic, I personally will be hiding in my house.”

Yes, and let the workers and peasants deliver food and drink to you while you safely type and tell the rest of us what to do. We know how this works. 

Keep in mind that no one thought this way a quarter century ago. No one was pushing for society-wide lockdowns in the event of a pandemic. 

That changed in 2005. I wrote an article about it at the time. It was my first foray into commentary on pandemic planning. I can recall my shock that George W. Bush gave a presser in which he pushed for lockdowns. I was even more shocked that more people were not alarmed. 

I wrote the following article reprinted below. So far as I know, I was alone in raising protest against this insanity. Here we are 20-plus years later and “lockdown until vaccinate” is the presumed protocol. 

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The Elites And Their Contempt

Last week, I was unexpectedly hit with a post-lockdown trauma response. While driving to a baseball game days before the NFL Draft came to Pittsburgh, I passed a digital highway sign instructing me to avoid nonessential travel.

Suddenly, memories of empty highways with signs instructing drivers to “Stay Safe and Stay Home” came flooding back to me.

As the week developed, it began to occur to me that the parallels were deeper than my subjective emotional response. Road closures intensified, rendering my beloved city of Pittsburgh less and less functional. Even sidewalks were closed. 

Entire parking garages were emptied and abandoned. Pittsburgh’s “most visited museum,” the Kamin Science Center, has been closed to the public for weeks because it was within the footprint of the upcoming event. For the actual days of the draft, Pittsburgh Public Schools were shuttered as if a blizzard had rendered travel impossible.

The attempt by local officials to trigger hysteria in the populace worked, maybe too well. People traveling to Pittsburgh for the event heeded the instructions to use the special free public transit to make their way in. Parking operators, expecting a huge windfall, saw themselves lower their exorbitant prices midday. For example, the Rivers Casino quickly abandoned their plan to charge $250 per day, lowering their rate to $100 for the first day of the draft and then abandoning charging altogether for subsequent days.

Local businesses outside the official footprint of the event were told to prepare for heavy crowds, but instead experienced a weekend worse than anything they had seen since the Covid hysteria. Those who didn’t want to go to the draft were terrified to go anywhere near the city.

In summary, children were deprived of education, small business owners were drastically harmed, public spaces which exist for the common good were shuttered, and normal life ceased for those who actually live in the City of Pittsburgh. While all of this was happening, local politicians were patting themselves on the back for how well everything was pulled off, taking pride that this draft broke attendance records for the NFL and that their plans of getting people in and out of the city were effective. It was our own personal Operation Warp Speed.

I think there’s a lesson here that applies not merely to Pittsburgh politics but also to the wider dysfunction we see in elected officials throughout what used to be Western Civilization.

Our political leaders view their own constituents with a sort of boredom or indifference. In the leadup to the draft, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania engaged in a number of public works projects designed to improve the area in preparation for the draft. 

Suddenly, our governments remembered that potholes aren’t supposed to be allowed to exist and that crime isn’t supposed to be allowed to happen. For three days, Pittsburgh had a heavily subsidized and highly functional public transit system, something that hasn’t existed the entirety of my lifetime.

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COVID Inquiry Finds Lockdowns May Have Cost THOUSANDS OF Lives

The authoritarian COVID lockdowns and stay-at-home orders sold as life-saving measures have been unmasked once again as a deadly failure of big government overreach.

A new UK Covid-19 Inquiry report has concluded that the relentless “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” messaging likely cost thousands of lives by convincing people they could not get access to health services.

The inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett, slammed the slogan created by Cabinet Office officials without input from health leaders. It “led some people to feel they must avoid burdening the NHS” and “may have inadvertently sent the message that healthcare was closed,” contributing to a sharp decline in A&E attendances for life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks.

The report states plainly: “It is clear that, during the pandemic, worsening delays in diagnosis and treatment led to increased ill-health and suffering and, in some cases, cost lives.” Some patients waited so long their conditions became “untreatable,” with permanent loss of mobility.

Baroness Hallett stressed: “It is important that government communication campaigns do not deter those in need from accessing healthcare.” She urged future governments to consult healthcare professionals on messaging “to avoid unintended consequences.”

Office for National Statistics data backs this up, recording more than 17,000 excess deaths from non-Covid conditions at the height of the pandemic. Cancer screenings were paused, diagnoses plummeted, and non-urgent care cancellations left patients suffering. Hospital visiting bans were branded too tough, with dying people left alone and families devastated.

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