Jeffrey D. Sachs: What Ails America – and How to Fix It

Jeffrey D. Sachs: What Ails America – and How to Fix It

By Jeffrey D. Sachs / Common Dreams

America is a country of undoubted vast strengths—technological, economic, and cultural—yet its government is profoundly failing its own citizens and the world. Trump’s victory is very easy to understand. It was a vote against the status quo. Whether Trump will fix—or even attempt to fix—what really ails America remains to be seen.

The rejection of the status quo by the American electorate is overwhelming. According to Gallup in October 2024, 52% of Americans said they and their families were worse off than four years ago, while only 39% said they were better off and 9% said they were about the same. An NBC national news poll in September 2024 found that 65% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track, while only 25% said that it is on the right track. In March 2024, according to Gallup, only 33% of Americans approved of Joe Biden’s handling of foreign affairs.

At the core of the American crisis is a political system that fails to represent the true interests of the average American voter. The political system was hacked by big money decades ago, especially when the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions. Since then, American politics has become a plaything of super-rich donors and narrow-interest lobbies, who fund election campaigns in return for policies that favor vested interests rather than the common good.

Two groups own the Congress and White House: super-rich individuals and single-issue lobbies.

The world watched agape as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person (and yes, a brilliant entrepreneur and inventor), played a unique role in backing Trump’s election victory, both through his vast media influence and funding. Countless other billionaires chipped into Trump’s victory.

Many (though not all) of the super-rich donors seeks special favors from the political system for their companies or investments, and most of those desired favors will be duly delivered by the Congress, the White House, and the regulatory agencies staffed by the new administration. Many of these donors also push one overall deliverable: further tax cuts on corporate income and capital gains.

Many business donors, I would quickly add, are forthrightly on the side of peace and cooperation with China, as very sensible for business as well as for humanity. Business leaders generally want peace and incomes, while crazed ideologues want hegemony through war.

There would have been precious little difference in all of this with a Harris victory. The Democrats have their own long list of the super-rich who financed the party’s presidential and Congressional campaigns. Many of those donors too would have demanded and received special favors.

Tax breaks on capital income have been duly delivered by Congress for decades no matter their impact on the ballooning federal deficit, which now stands at nearly 7 percent of GDP, and no matter that the U.S. pre-tax national income in recent decades has shifted powerfully towards capital income and away from labor income. As measured by one basic indicator, the share of labor income in GDP has declined by around 7 percentage points since the end of World War II. As income has shifted from labor to capital, the stock market (and super-wealth) has soared, with the overall stock market valuation rising from 55% of GDP in 1985 to 200% of GDP today!

The second group with its hold on Washingtons is single-issue lobbies. These powerful lobbies include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, Big Oil, the gun industry, big pharma, big Ag, and the Israel Lobby. American politics is well organized to cater to these special interests. Each lobby buys the support of specific committees in Congress and selected national leaders to win control over public policy.

The economic returns to special-interest lobbying are often huge: a hundred million dollars of campaign funding by a lobby group can win a hundred billion of federal outlays and/or tax breaks. This is the lesson, for example, of the Israel lobby, which spends a few hundred million dollars on campaign contributions, and harvests tens of billions of dollars in military and economic support for Israel.

These special-interest lobbies do not depend on, nor care much about, public opinion. Opinion surveys show regularly that the public wants gun control, lower drug prices, an end of Wall Street bailouts, renewable energy, and peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. Instead, the lobbyists ensure that Congress and the White House deliver continued easy access to handguns and assault weapons, sky-high drug prices, coddling of Wall Street, more oil and gas drilling, weapons for Ukraine, and wars on behalf of Israel.

These powerful lobbies are money-fueled conspiracies against the common good. Remember Adam Smith’s famous dictum in the Wealth of Nations (1776): “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The two most dangerous lobbies are the military-industrial complex (as Eisenhower famously warned us in 1961) and the Israel lobby (as detailed in a scintillating new book by historian Ilan Pappé). Their special danger is that they continue to lead us to war and closer to nuclear Armageddon. Biden’s reckless recent decision to allow U.S. missile strikes deep inside Russia, long advocated by the military-industrial complex, is case in point.

The military-industrial complex aims for U.S. “full-spectrum dominance.” It’s purported solutions to world problems are wars and more wars, together with covert regime-change operations, U.S. economic sanctions, U.S. info-wars, color revolutions (led by the National Endowment for Democracy), and foreign policy bullying. These of course have been no solutions at all. These actions, in flagrant violation of international law, have dramatically increased U.S. insecurity.

The military-industrial complex (MIC) dragged Ukraine into a hopeless war with Russia by promising Ukraine membership in NATO in the face of Russia’s fervent opposition, and by conspiring to overthrow Ukraine’s government in February 2014 because it sought neutrality rather than NATO membership.

The military-industrial complex is currently—unbelievably—promoting a coming war with China. This will of course involve a huge and lucrative arms buildup, the aim of the MIC. Yet it will also threaten World War III or a cataclysmic U.S. defeat in another Asian war.

While the Military-Industrial Complex has stoked NATO enlargement and conflicts with Russia and China, the Israel Lobby has stoked America’s serial wars in the Middle East. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, more than any U.S. president, has been the lead promoter of America’s backing of disastrous wars in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.

Netanyahu’s aim is to keep the land that Israel conquered in the 1967 war, creating what is called Greater Israel, and to prevent a Palestinian State. This expansionist policy, in contravention of international law, has given rise to militant pro-Palestinian groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Netanyahu’s long-standing policy is for the U.S. to topple or help to topple the governments that support these resistance groups.

Incredibly, the Washington neocons and the Israel Lobby actually joined forces to carry out Netanyahu’s disastrous plan for wars across the Middle East. Netanyahu was a lead backer of the War in Iraq. Former Marine Commander Dennis Fritz has recently described in detail the Israel Lobby’s large role in that war. Ilan Pappé has done the same. In fact, the Israel Lobby has supported U.S.-led or U.S.-backed wars across the Middle East, leaving the targeted countries in ruins and the U.S. budget deep in debt.

In the meantime, the wars and tax cuts for the rich, have offered no solutions for the hardships working-class Americans. As in other high-income countries, employment in U.S. manufacturing fell sharply from the 1980s onward as assembly-line workers were increasingly replaced by robots and “smart systems.” The decline in the labor share of value in the U.S. has been significant, and once again has been a phenomenon shared with other high-countries.

Yet American workers have been hit especially hard. In addition to the underlying global technological trends hitting jobs and wages, American workers have been battered by decades of anti-union policies, soaring tuition and healthcare costs, and other anti-worker measures. In high-income countries of northern Europe, “social consumption” (publicly funded healthcare, tuition, housing, and other publicly provided services) and high levels of unionization have sustained decent living standards for workers. Not so in the United States.

Yet this was not the end of it. Soaring costs of health care, driven by the private health insurers, and the absence of sufficient public financing for higher education and low-cost online options, created a pincer movement, squeezing the working class between falling or stagnant wages on the one side and rising education and healthcare costs on the other side. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans did much of anything to help the workers.

Trump’s voter base is the working class, but his donor base is the super-rich and the lobbies. So, what will happen next? More of the same—wars and tax cuts—or something new and real for the voters?

Trump’s purported answer is a trade war with China and the deportation of illegal foreign workers, combined with more tax cuts for the rich. In other words, rather than face the structural challenges of ensuring decent living standards for all, and face forthrightly the staggering budget deficit, Trump’s answers on the campaign trail and in his first term were to blame China and migrants for low working-class wages and wasteful spending for the deficits.

This has played well electorally in 2016 and 2024, but will not deliver the promised results for workers in the long run. Manufacturing jobs will not return in large numbers from China since they never went in large numbers to China. Nor will deportations do much to raise living standards of average Americans.

This is not to say that real solutions are lacking. They are hiding in plain view—if Trump chooses to take them, over the special interest groups and class interests of Trump’s backers. If Trump chooses real solutions, he would achieve a strikingly positive political legacy for decades to come.

The first is to face down the military-industrial complex. Trump can end the war in Ukraine by telling President Putin and the world that NATO will never expand to Ukraine. He can end the risk of war with China by making crystal clear that the U.S. abides by the One China Policy, and as such, will not interfere in China’s internal affairs by sending armaments to Taiwan over Beijing’s objections, and would not support any attempt by Taiwan to secede.

The second is to face down the Israel lobby by telling Netanyahu that the U.S. will no longer fight Israel’s wars and that Israel must accept a State of Palestine living in peace next to Israel, as called for by the entire world community. This indeed is the only possible path to peace for Israel and Palestine, and indeed for the Middle East.

The third is to close the budget deficit, partly by cutting wasteful spending—notably on wars, hundreds of useless overseas military bases, and sky-high prices the government pays for drugs and healthcare—and partly by raising government revenues. Simply enforcing taxes on the books by cracking down on illegal tax evasion would have raised $625 billion in 2021, around 2.6% of GDP. More should be raised by taxation of soaring capital incomes.

The fourth is an innovation policy (aka industrial policy) that serves the common good. Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley friends have succeeded in innovation beyond the wildest expectations. All kudos to Silicon Valley for bringing us the digital age. America’s innovation capacity is vast and robust and an envy of the world.

The challenge now is innovation for what? Musk has his eye on Mars and beyond. Captivating, yet there are billions of people on Earth that can and should be helped by the digital revolution in the here and now. A core goal of Trump’s industrial policy should be to ensure that innovation serves the common good, including the poor, the working class, and the natural environment. Our nation’s goals need to go beyond wealth and weapons systems.

As Musk and his colleagues know better than anybody, the new AI and digital technologies can usher in an era of low-cost, zero-carbon energy; low-cost healthcare; low-cost higher education; low-cost electricity-powered mobility; and other AI-enabled efficiencies that can raise real living standards of all workers. In the process, innovation should foster high-quality, unionized jobs—not the gig employment that has sent living standards plummeting and worker insecurity soaring.

Trump and the Republicans have resisted these technologies in the past. In his first term, Trump let China take the lead in these technologies pretty much across the board. Our goal is not to stop China’s innovations, but to spur our own. Indeed, as Silicon Valley understands while Washington does not, China has long been and should remain America’s partner in the innovation ecosystem. China’s highly efficient and low-cost manufacturing facilities, such as Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, put Silicon Valley’s innovations into worldwide use … when America tries.

All four of these steps are within Trump’s reach, and would justify his electoral triumph and secure his legacy for decades to come. I’m not holding my breath for Washington to adopt these straightforward steps. American politics has been rotten for too long for real optimism in that regard, yet these four steps are all achievable, and would greatly benefit not only the tech and finance leaders who backed Trump’s campaign but the generation of disaffected workers and households whose votes put Trump back into the White House.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Author SIte

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/25/jeffrey-sachs-what-ails-america-and-how-to-fix-it/

Justice Is Served: Jay Bhattacharya Chosen to Be NIH Director

Justice Is Served: Jay Bhattacharya Chosen to Be NIH Director

Steve Templeton   November 28, 2024   Government, Policy, Public Health  

(photo: David Zweig, me, Jay Bhattacharya, November 2021)

Many years ago, I was at the wedding of a good friend, a guy who everyone seemed to like. He was/is humble, considerate, kind, and down to earth. I remember telling his mother while at the wedding that I would tell anyone that, “If you don’t like him, then the problem is you.”

I also feel that way about Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya. Jay’s nomination by President-elect Trump to be Director of the National Institutes of Health has been a long time coming and is a hopeful signal that national health research policy is headed in the right direction.

Jay was right about all the big things during the Covid pandemic and was an important counter to the destructive hubris of lockdown and mandate-promoting public health leaders and scientists in the US. Along with Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, Jay took enormous personal and professional risks in drafting the Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020. In response to the highly age-stratified mortality of Covid-19 and with the threat of serious collateral damage of continuing lockdowns, school closures, and mandates, the GBD instead promoted the policy of focused protection for vulnerable elderly and infirm people while allowing young and healthy people to live their lives.

The virus was going to infect everyone eventually and establish herd immunity, and there was no evidence that a vaccine (none approved at the time) would stop that natural process. The big question was how to deal with a natural disaster without making the situation much worse. Thus, the debate was focused protection versus unfocused protection—sheltering everyone regardless of their risk of mortality or serious disease until the entire population could be vaccinated with a vaccine of unknown efficacy and net benefit.

At least that’s the debate that should’ve happened. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Jay and his GBD coauthors were attacked, threatened, and slandered. When Jay’s research group published a study showing that the seroprevalence of Covid-19 in Santa Clara County in California was much higher than previously believed, it destroyed the delusion that the virus could be eliminated, that containment was at all possible. Many people didn’t want to hear that, and Jay was subjected to numerous attacks in the media, including a defamatory article in BuzzFeed claiming he was funded by dark money and implied he used questionable methods because he was biased toward the study’s outcome.

The fact that he shortly thereafter authored a paper showing very low seroprevalence in Major League Baseball franchises wasn’t enough to prove his objectivity. The message put forth by the public health establishment would simply not allow any dissent or debate. The policy needed to drive The Science™, and lower-case science could not be allowed to drive the policy.

I signed the Great Barrington Declaration the day it was published on October 4th, 2020. I had seen, and was greatly impressed by, interviews of Jay by Peter Robinson in March and April of 2020 and was heartened by Jay’s calm display of knowledge and humility. Jay described in one of these interviews the uncertainty surrounding the number of people infected and the claims being made by experts like Anthony Fauci regarding the infection fatality rate:

They don’t know it and I don’t know it. We should be honest about that. And we should be honest about that with people who make these policy decisions when making them. In a sense, people plug the worst case into their models, they project two to four million deaths, the newspapers pick up the two to four million deaths, the politicians have to respond, and the scientific basis for that projection…there’s no study underlying that scientific projection.

When asked about the potential for collateral damage to lockdowns, “It’s not dollars versus lives, it’s lives versus lives.” An understanding of the responsibility to avoid collateral harm of lockdowns was essential yet was in extremely short supply. Jay was attacked for this nuanced message. He got emails from colleagues and administrators telling him that questioning the high infection fatality rate was irresponsible. Yet, someone had to do it. However, the interviews went viral, because Jay gave millions of people something they didn’t have and desperately needed. He gave them hope.

As the year went on, Jay became the face of the opposition to unfocused protection, appearing in countless interviews and writing countless articles. He became an advisor to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who vowed to not lock down the people of Florida again after an initial wave of closures. When waves of Covid inevitably hit Florida, Stanford students papered the campus with pictures of Jay next to Florida death rates, implying Jay’s nuanced message was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. When the age-adjusted mortality rate of Florida ended up being rather average compared to other states, including lockdown and mandate-happy California, no one apologized.

YouTube censored a public forum with Jay and Martin Kulldorff and Governor DeSantis, where they made claims about the hazards of continuous lockdowns, school closures, and mandates that months before wouldn’t have been at all controversial. After the GBD was published, Jay and Martin were invited to the White House by Covid advisor Scott Atlas to discuss the idea of focused protection with President Trump. Despite that meeting, the political battle continued to be an uphill fight.

The response of federal officials was shameful. Fauci and White House Covid Advisor Deborah Birx boycotted the meeting. Then NIH Director Francis Collins called for a “swift and devastating takedown” of the GBD’s premise and called the authors “fringe epidemiologists.” There simply was no appetite at the highest levels for a nuanced message or any debate whatsoever. Media coverage of Jay and other Covid response critics continued to be toxic.

Yet Jay’s appearances and message continued to inspire millions of people and give them hope. I began writing in support of focused protection and against the constant doom-saying that was harming everyone, especially children. I met Jay in the fall of 2021 because of my writing, at a conference organized by Brownstone Institute. “I think we are making a difference,” he said after shaking my hand. Like many other people he had inspired to take a stance against Covid hysteria, I needed to hear that. 

The next day, Jay was preparing to give his speech in front of a small crowd in the ballroom, and I sat next to him while he reviewed his notes during the previous speaker’s talk. Although he was dressed in a suit and tie, when glancing down, I noticed Jay had a hole in his dress shoe. This truly wasn’t about money or even status. He was simply doing what he believed was morally right.

Later on, Jay helped spearhead a couple of Covid-related projects I was also involved in (I was there largely due to his influence). First was the Norfolk Group, which produced a resource document for the US Congress titled “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission” and the second was Florida’s Public Health Integrity Committee formed by Governor DeSantis and led by Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo. Both groups attempted to bring accountability for the US public health response, and I believe they were successful in spotlighting just how wrong and harmful lockdowns and mandates were for the very public they were supposed to help.

During the initial Norfolk Group meeting, Jay often talked about the moment of no return, “crossing the Rubicon,” as he put it, the moment that each one of us made a conscientious decision to stand up against the mob. He later recalled in an interview with Jordan Peterson: “At some point in summer of 2020, I decided—what is my career for? If it’s just to have another CV line or a stamp, I’ve wasted my life—that I would speak no matter what the consequences were.”

The world has benefitted from Jay’s crossing of the Rubicon. His nomination, after years in the wilderness and on the “fringe” of public health and health policy, restores a sense that there is in fact justice in the world. Now he moves on to the significant task of reforming health research policy. We should be cheering him on all the way.

And if you don’t like Jay, then the problem is you.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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  Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine - Terre Haute. His research focuses on immune responses to opportunistic fungal pathogens. He has also served on Gov. Ron DeSantis's Public Health Integrity Committee and was a co-author of "Questions for a COVID-19 commission," a document provided to members of a pandemic response-focused congressional committee.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/justice-is-served-jay-bhattacharya-chosen-to-be-nih-director/

Congress’s Jan. 6 Investigation Looks Less and Less Credible

Congress’s Jan. 6 Investigation Looks Less and Less Credible

by Jonathan Turley | Nov 25, 2024

Below is my column in The Hill on new evidence released by the House related to the January 6th riot. The J6 Committee fueled doubts about the official accounts by using only Democratically-appointed members and skewing the evidence. The new information further undermines the narrative pushed by both members and the media.

Here is the column:

On Jan. 6, 2021, the nation was rocked by the disruption of the certification of Joe Biden as our next president. With Donald Trump set to return to the White House in 2025, it is astonishing how much of that day remains a matter of intense debate.

Those divisions are likely only to deepen after a slew of recent reports that have challenged the selective release of information from the House January 6 Committee.

January 6 remains as much a political litmus test as it is a historical event. Whether you refer to that day as a riot or an insurrection puts you on one side or the other of a giant political chasm. I viewed the attack on that day as a desecration of our constitutional process, but I did not view it as an insurrection. I still don’t.

It was a protest that became a riot when a woefully insufficient security plan collapsed. And that is a view shared by most Americans. One year after the riot, a CBS poll showed that 76 percent viewed it as a “protest gone too far.”

A Harvard study also found that those arrested on that day were motivated by loyalty to Trump rather than support for an insurrection.

A recent poll found that almost half of the public (43 percent) felt that “too much is being made” of the riot and that it is “time to move on.” Of course, that still leaves a little over half who view the day as “an attack on democracy.”

The continued distrust of the official accounts of Jan. 6 reflects a failure of the House Democrats, and specifically former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to guarantee a credible and comprehensive investigation.

The House Select Committee to investigate January 6 was comprised of Democrat-selected members who offered only one possible view: that January 6 was an attempt to overthrow our democracy by Trump and his supporters. The committee hired a former ABC News producer to create a slick, made-for-television production that barred opposing views and countervailing evidence. The members, including Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney, played edited videotapes of Trump’s speech that removed the portion where Trump called on his supporters to protest “peacefully.”

The committee fostered false accounts, including the claim that there was a violent episode with Trump trying to wrestle control of the presidential limousine. The Committee knew that the key Secret Service driver directly contradicted that account offered by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

While the Democrats insisted that Trump’s speech constituted criminal incitement, he was never charged with that crime — not even by the motivated prosecutors who pledged to pursue such charges. The reason is that Trump’s speech was entirely protected under the First Amendment. Such a charge of criminal incitement would have quickly collapsed in court.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post, NPR, other media and the committee members called Jan. 6 an “insurrection” engineered by Trump. Figures such as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) insisted the committee had evidence that Trump organized a “coup” on Jan. 6, 2021. That evidence never materialized.

The lack of adequate security measures that day has long puzzled many of us. After all, there had been a violent riot at the White House before January 6, in which more officers were injured and Trump had to be moved to a secure location. The National Guard had to be called out to protect the White House, but those same measures (including a fence) were not ordered at the Capitol.

Two of the recent reports offered new details related to those questions.

One report confirmed that Trump did, in fact, offer the deployment of the National Guard in anticipation of the protest. The Jan. 6 Committee repeatedly dismissed this claim. After all, it would be a rather curious attempt at an insurrection if Trump was suggesting the use of thousands of troops to prevent any breach of Congress. The committee specifically found “no evidence” that the Trump administration called for 10,000 National Guard members to be sent to Washington, D.C., to protect the Capitol. The Washington Post even supposedly “debunked” Trump’s comments with an award of “Four Pinocchios.”

Yet evidence now shows that Trump personally suggested the deployment of 10,000 National Guard troops to prevent violence. For example, a transcript includes the testimony of former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato in January 2022 with Liz Cheney present. Ornato states that he clearly recalled Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops.

Videotapes have also emerged showing Pelosi privately admitting that she and Democratic leadership were responsible for the security failure on Jan. 6.

Another new report from Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chairs the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, shows that it was the Defense Department that delayed the eventual deployment of National Guard in the critical hours of the riot.

The evidence shows that, at 3:18 p.m., Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “tells sheltering Members of Congress that he is not blocking the deployment of the National Guard and, while referencing the D.C. National Guard, shares that ‘We have the green light. We are moving.’” However, the secretary of the Army’s own timeline indicates that the DCNG did not physically leave the Armory until 5 pm.

That was the critical period for the riot. Around 2:10 p.m., people surged up the Capitol steps. Just an hour later, McCarthy said troops were on their way. At 4:17 p.m., Trump made his public statement asking rioters to stop — roughly an hour and a half later. Yet it was not until 5 pm that the troops actually left for the Capitol.

The House is also under greater scrutiny this week for new information on the shooting of the only person to die on Jan. 6. While Democrats have referred to many deaths on that day, the only person who died in the riot itself was Ashli Babbitt, a protester shot by Capitol Police.

I have long disagreed with the findings of investigations by the Capitol Police and the Justice Department in clearing Captain Michael Byrd for this shooting. The media lionized Byrd and, in sharp contrast to other police shootings during that period, blamed the deceased. Again, an unjustified shooting of a protester would not fit the media narrative.

The concerns over the shooting were heightened by the Justice Department’s bizarre review and report, which notably did not state that the shooting was justified. Instead, it declared that it could not prove “a bad purpose to disregard the law” and that “evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent.”

Babbitt, 35, was an Air Force veteran who was clearly committing criminal acts of trespass, property damage and other offenses at the time she was shot. However, Babbitt was unarmed when she tried to climb through a broken window.

Byrd stated “I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are.” In other words, Byrd admitted he did not see a weapon. He took Babbitt’s effort to crawl through the window as sufficient justification to kill her. It was not. And it is worth noting that Byrd could just as well have hit the officers standing just behind Babbitt.

The new report confirms that Byrd had prior disciplinary and training issues, including “a failed shotgun qualification test, a failed FBI background check for a weapon’s purchase, a 33-day suspension for a lost weapon and referral to Maryland state prosecutors for firing his gun at a stolen car fleeing his neighborhood.” In one incident, detailed in a letter from Loudermilk, Byrd was suspected of lying about the circumstances under which he shot at the fleeing car.

None of this means that Trump or even Babbitt are without fault in this matter. Trump’s speech was clearly “reckless and wrong,” and Babbitt herself was involved in that riot. However, these reports only further highlight what we still do not know about that day.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

Author

• Professor Jonathan Turley is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. He has written over three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and other schools.

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https://ronpaulinstitute.org/congresss-jan-6-investigation-looks-less-and-less-credible/

Our Last Innocent Moment Is Our First Step Forward

Our Last Innocent Moment Is Our First Step Forward

Julie Ponesse   November 21, 2024   History, Philosophy, Society   

This lecture takes us back into history for two reasons. First, it reminds us of a Canadian who was looking at the Canada of his time and felt that things weren’t right. Two years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was officially adopted by the UN, and in response to seeing Canadians treated as second-class citizens merely because of their names and racial origin, John Diefenbaker began drafting a document in which he wrote:

“I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right,…”

It’s hard to read these words tonight, 64 years after Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights was enacted by our parliament, without wondering: 

Are we free today? 

Free to speak without fear? 

Free to stand for what we think is right? 

We can only hope that by continuing to speak even when our words fall on deaf ears, and even when we face incredible opposition, we will enjoy these freedoms again one day soon.

Second, this is a night of remembrance and the act of remembering takes us into history. It makes us confront where we’ve come from, who we are indebted to, what we have done, both good and bad. And Remembrance Day celebrates heroes, in particular. But celebrating heroes today is not only countercultural; it is often seen as an act of ignorance or even rebellion. We have undergone a shift in perspective in which victims came to eclipse heroes as the subject of history and, because of that, our history has become a history of shame. It has become an account of what the world has done to people instead of what people have done to, for, the world.

I happen to be one of those radical thinkers who believes that history is important; nuanced and complex, yes, but also fixed and unrevisable. And that remembering the past — with all its triumphs and mistakes, victims and heroes — gives us a necessary starting point for our future by making us see how we are all connected and indebted.

What I’d like to do tonight is to tell you a story. A story that takes us to the heights of human ingenuity and the depths of civilizational collapse. It’s a story that takes us through history, literature, social psychology, philosophy, and even some theology. It’s a story that starts from the idea that we need to understand the past, not through the lens of what has been done to us, but as the first step towards our future, we can make and not be forced into, a step toward our humanity rather than a turning away from it. It’s a story that starts with the following question:

Do you remember where you were when it happened? Who you were with?

That moment when you first felt the ground shift beneath you. 

When your friends seemed a little less familiar, family a little more distant.

When your trust in our highest institutions — government, medicine, law, journalism —started to unravel. 

The last time your naive optimism allowed you to believe that the world is, generally, as it seems.

Our last innocent moment.

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If you are reading this, then there is a good chance you have your own last moment of innocence, even if the details of it are a little hazy. Sometime in 2020, there was a fundamental shift in how many of us view the world. The delicate network of core beliefs about what makes it possible to navigate life with some measure of stability and reliability — that medicine is a patient-focused institution, that journalists pursue truth, that the courts track justice, that our friends would behave in certain predictable ways — started to unravel. 

There was a paradigm shift in how we live and relate to each other. A shift in attitude. A shift in trust. A shift away from a world we can never revisit, an innocence we can never recover. The before times and the after times. And, though we didn’t know it then, there would be certain unrecoverable changes to life from which we are still reeling.

That is from the first pages of my most recent book, Our Last Innocent Moment. 

I started writing that book almost three years to the day after the World Health Organization declared Covid an emergency. Three years of watching our medical, legal, political institutions crumble, or at least reveal the slow devolution they had been undergoing for decades. Three years of seeing how 2020 was (to, somewhat regrettably, borrowing Joe Biden’s term) an “inflection point,” one of those plastic moments in history where we experience a change of course so significant that it is hard even to remember what came before.

Now, we are flailing across all dimensions of life. We face unprecedented levels of national and personal debt (which are nearly double what they were in 2007), chronic illness and mental health epidemics, skyrocketing violent crime, and the realization that we are, at every moment, just one missile strike away from nuclear war. Our food and health care systems are quite literally killing us and our children are being mutilated by identity-altering transgender procedures and by a pantheon of corruptive ideologies that are hard to see as anything other than “public ritualistic sacrifice.”

Not to mention the unfathomable paradigm shifts and potential harms made possible by AI and brain-computer interfaces, “editable humans,” mRNA self-replicating vaccines, deep fakes in the metaverse, and pervasive digital surveillance.

But far more destabilizing than any of this is that, as a people, we have become untethered from the basic commitments that once grounded us. We set ourselves adrift from life framed by core Western liberal values — liberty, equality, autonomy — the values our Bill of Rights takes for granted. All of this leaves us standing at a precipice where we can no longer take some very basic ideas for granted: the idea of democracy, the idea of reasonableness, and the idea of the value of individuals. In many respects, we are the frog in the simmering water wondering if now is the right time to jump out of the pot.

Our position is so perilous that some are starting to ask, is our civilization on the verge of collapse? In 2022, the journalist Trish Wood wrote “We Are Living the Fall of Rome (though it’s being pushed on us as a virtue).” Civilization collapse was the subject of geographer Jared Diamond’s 2011 bestseller Collapse and it’s a prominent subject on the World Economic Forum website (though it’s part of their climate change and epidemic preparedness propaganda). 

Whether our civilization will collapse or not, I think it’s reasonable to ask, if we survive this moment in history, what will life look like 100 years from now? How healthy will we be? How free? Will life be recognizable? Or will we go the way of the doomed Viking colony in Greenland, the Aztecs, Anasazi, the Qin Dynasty of China, or the collapsed iconic Roman Empire?

When scholars talk about “civilizational collapse,” they typically refer to stresses that overcome a society’s coping mechanisms. Stanford classics professor Ian Morris, for example, identifies what he calls “the 5 horsemen of the apocalypse,” the five factors that show up in nearly every major collapse: climate change, famine, state failure, migration, and major disease.

Will we be wiped out by climate change or an epidemic? Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s not my area of expertise nor am I that interested in the fall of civilization as an extinction event. My interest tonight is in the decline of the aspects of our civilization that make us human: civility, civil discourse, and how we value the components of a civilization — its people. My interest is in whether there is something within our civilization that is creating our current catastrophe and what might be able to bring us out of it. And that’s what I’d like to focus on tonight.

After the initial shock of the events of 2020 started to wane, while everyone seemed to be focused on who to blame, how the global elites came to control “Big Pharma” and nearly every major world government and media outlet, and how our own Prime Minister was connected, and all quite rightly, the questions that began to consume my thoughts were more local and personal: Why did we give in so easily? Why were we so vulnerable…so quick to turn on each other? Why did we forget, and even revise, history so easily? 

I started thinking about other historical moments where we seemed to fail in the same ways and that, unfortunately, took me to some of the worst of them: the human rights atrocities of WWII, of course, but also the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Destruction of the Roman Empire, moments where we seem to have taken ourselves to the edge of human ingenuity, and then fell not by external invasion but by our own errors and misplaced ambitions. And then I started thinking about the biblical story of Babel and how much the events of our time echo it.

Just over 5,000 years ago, somewhere in the middle of the desert in the land of Shinar (south of what is now Baghdad, Iraq), a group of migrants decided to stop and build a city. One among them suggested that they build a tower so tall it will reach to the heavens.” Other than the fact that we know they used the new technology of making artificial stones (i.e. bricks) from mud, we don’t know much about what the tower looked like, how high it reached, or how long it took to build. What we do know is that God came down and, so displeased with what they were up to, confused their language and scattered them over the face of the earth.

In 2020, I think we experienced another ‘Babel moment,’ a system failure on a global scale. We had been building something, innovating, expanding, and then it all went terribly wrong. It’s a story of the natural consequences of human ingenuity running ahead of wisdom. It’s a story about misguided unification projects. It’s a story echoed in so many of the fractures we see today: between the left and right, liberals and conservatives, Israelis and Palestinians, truth and lies. It’s a story about what’s breaking between us and within each of us.  

I wondered, do all these ‘Babel moments’ have something in common? And is there something in us that keeps bringing us to them? 

One thing we can learn from examples of civilizational collapse is that they are not always due to a calamitous, external event like Bedouin charging in from the desert. More often than not the cause of their destruction is complex and internal. If you are a student of classical literature (the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, in particular), you might recognize something familiar in them.

In each of these stories, you find tragic characters with the thing that all tragic characters have in common: a hamartia or fatal flaw, that leads the character to create his own destruction, e.g. Oedipus’ blindness led him to bring disaster to his city and family, Macbeth’s vaulting (“blind”) ambition set off a chain of events that culminated in his own demise. And for a more contemporary example, it seemed to be excessive pride that led the science-geek schoolteacher Walter White in Breaking Bad to destroy his own family. 

So I wondered, is there a tragic flaw that runs through history and humanity, that led to the crisis we face now, something that, every so often, rears its ugly head and takes us perilously close to our own destruction? 

One thing that characterized the Covid years, the Covid narrative in particular, is the language of safety, purity, immunity, and perfection. To offer a couple of examples, in 2021, NPR cited studies describing “superhuman or “bulletproof immunity” to Covid, and an article in the British Medical Journal the following year claimed that the virus could simply be “eradicated.” The shots, the masking, the distancing, the words; it was all designed to give the impression that, by our own efforts, we could control nature absolutely. 

The evolutionary biologist, Heather Heying, when diagnosing the failure of the Covid shots, located the problem not so much in our attempt to control a virus; the problem, she said, is that we had the audacity to think that our attempts to do so would be infallible. She wrote:

“Humans have been trying to control nature since we have been human; in many cases we have even met with moderate success. But our arrogance always seems to get in the way…The attempt to control SARS-CoV2 may well have been an honest one, but the inventors of the shots ran into serious problems when they imagined themselves infallible. The solution was deeply flawed, and the rest of us weren’t allowed to notice.”

The problem, Heying said during a longer conversation, was the nature of the idea. It’s an idea that allowed for no caution, no questioning, and certainly no dissension because it was an idea that was already perfect. Or so we thought.

There is a lot of the Babel story in this. Babel is a cautionary tale of what happens when we get intellectually too ‘big for our britches.’ The Babylonians wanted to build a tower that extended beyond their capabilities, to transcend this world, to make themselves superhuman. They thought they could dissolve the distinction between heaven and earth, the mundane and the transcendent. To borrow the term made popular by U.S. Congressman Steward McKinney, they thought their idea was “too big to fail.” 

But more than this, the WOW factor hit Babel. They became obsessed with their new invention. They thought, “We’ll make a name for ourselves!” Not to provide housing, not to promote peace and harmony. But to become famous. To paraphrase Rabbi Moshe Isserles, fame is the aspiration of those who see no purpose in life. For all we know, the builders of Babel saw no purpose in their project. They wanted to build something big in order to feel big. But when you use technology without purpose, you are no longer its master; you become its slave. The Babylonians had invented a new technology, and that technology, as it so often does, reinvented humankind.

Babel wasn’t just a tower but an idea. And it wasn’t just an idea of innovation and improvement; it was an idea of perfection and transcendence. It was an idea so lofty that it had to fail because it was no longer human. 

Leading up to 2020, we were similarly audacious. We were arrogant. We bought into the idea that every aspect of our lives could be made immune: by an ever-expanding and fine-tuned set of laws and policies designed to keep us safe, by vaccine technology, by hacks aimed to make life easier, more efficient…The “We can, so we will” attitude barrelled us forward without the “Should we?” question to guide us. 

If perfectionism is the tragic flaw that got us to this place, if it’s responsible for our blindness and our innocence, what can we do now? How do tragic characters typically manage their flaws? And what can we do about ours?

One thing that makes a hero tragic is that he undergoes a “catharsis,” a process of intense suffering and purging through which he is forced to confront who he really is and what it is about him that led to his downfall. Specifically, tragic characters undergo an anagnorisis, from the Greek word for “to make known,” that moment when the hero makes a critical discovery about the reality of the situation and his part in it, undergoing a shift from ignorance to knowledge.

I think it would be fair to say that we are in the midst of our own catharsis, as we start to see where we are and what got us here. It’s a “painful adjustment.” Like Gatsby, we’ve had our years of indulgence and gluttony. We’ve had our projects of reckless pride. We’ve overspent and underthought, we’ve outsourced responsibility for every facet of our lives — health care, finances, education, information. We built the tower, and then it crumbled all around us. And something significant needs to adjust for that.

How do we convert our innocence into the kind of awareness and accountability that will get us back on track? How do we become human again?

One thing that’s interesting about the doomed civilizations I mentioned earlier is that some had all five traits of imminent collapse but they bounced back. What made the difference?

If you take Rome, for example, in the 3rd c. AD, 200 years before the empire actually fell: Emperor Aurelian made a concerted effort to place the good of the people above his own personal ambition. He secured the borders and defeated breakaway empires, reuniting the empire. Similarly, in the early 7th c. AD, Emperors Gaozu and Taizong of the Tang dynasty of China not only made brilliant political and military maneuvers, but they seemed to understand the limits of absolute power. 

One lesson from these two simple examples is that really good leadership matters. And, fortunately, I think we are entering an era where really good leadership is possible.

But what rescues civilizations is often much more cultural and, in a way, simpler than this.

Do we have any Irish here tonight? Well, your ancestors just might have saved our civilization once upon a time. Has anyone heard of Skellig Michael? 

It’s a remote, rocky island 7 miles off the west coast of Ireland, rising 700 feet out of the rough sea. It is, for its obvious otherworldly qualities, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the location of a number of the more recent Star Wars movies. For most of its history, it was a third-world country with a Stone Age culture, but it had one moment of unblemished glory.

As Europe was collapsing into chaos in the 5th century, and barbarians were descending on the Roman cities, looting and burning books and anything associated with the classical world, a small group of Irish monks, in a monastery on Skellig Michael, took up the painstaking task of copying every bit of classical literature they could get their hands on, making them conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the newly settling tribes of Europe. 

While the Romans were unable to salvage their once grand civilization, with this simple act, the Irish saints rescued it and brought it into the future. 

Without the monks of Skellig Michael, the world that came after (the world of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution) would have been entirely different. It would, at least, have been a world without classical books, and a world without the history, the ideas, the humanity they contain.

And by the time we get to the Renaissance, several centuries later, humanity was able to continue to rescue and reinvent itself after nearly a millennium of social regression, cultural stagnation, and rampant violence, after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Renaissance was, in many ways, a reset: a reset of our literacy, art, and architecture, a reset of our presumptions about the value of questioning and curiosity, of individualism and humanism. We desperately need a similar reset today. Don’t worry, not the kind Klaus Schwab has in mind. But we do need a reset as an antidote to our hubris, arrogance. We need to remind ourselves that living well is not necessarily a matter of living bigger or faster or across more dimensions, or that we become successful by sacrificing ourselves for the collective.

We need three things in particular:

First, we need a return to humility: One of the great lessons of Babel is what happens when pride gets out of hand. It “goeth before destruction,” Proverbs tells us, and it is the original and deadliest of the ‘seven deadly sins.’ It is, as the Ancient Greeks knew, a foolish way of investing energy in the humanly impossible. 

The opposite — humility — as C.S. Lewis wrote, is “…not thinking less of ourselves, but thinking of ourselves less.” Pride gives us the false impression that we can build towers to reach heaven; and the cure is to realize and embrace our own unique natures and see our place in something greater than ourselves. 

Second, we need to realize that human nature can’t be transformed instantly: In the fall of 1993, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech at the dedication of a memorial to the thousands of Frenchmen who perished during the Vendée genocide in western France. During his speech, he warned against the illusion that human nature can be transformed in an instant. He said, “We must be able to improve, patiently, that which we have in any given ‘today.’”

We need patience today. Our tragic flaw, if it is as I have described it, took a long while to fester and grow and deceive us into this place. And we need to give ourselves time to go through the awakening, the painful adjustment needed to cure ourselves of it. But we don’t just need patience; we need active patience, to speak when we are able, to keep a soft heart when it would be easier to harden it, and to water the seeds of humanity we find when it would probably be simpler to plough them under. 

Finally, we ABSOLUTELY must not give up on meaning: In Goethe’s Faust, the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, the fundamental motivation of the devilish Mephistopheles is to make us so disenchanted with our humanity that we give up on the project of living. And isn’t that the ultimate way to destroy us? To convince us that all the little choices we make every day are futile, that meaning and purpose are a fool’s errand, and that humanity, itself, is an unwise investment? 

In the face of this, we must simply decide that we aren’t going to let meaning be stripped from our lives, that there is no amount of money or fame or promises of safety that can replace the feeling of living with purpose. Our lives mean something and they mean just as much as they did before we were told that they mean nothing. But meaning isn’t passive or spontaneous. We need to give meaning to things, see meaning in things. And we need to keep doing it even when the world refuses to validate our efforts.

Back to the Babylonians for a minute. They got something fundamentally wrong by aiming for something outside themselves. They tried for transcendence and destroyed themselves in the process. Human meaning isn’t to be found in trying to perfect ourselves, in trying to rise above our fragility but, rather, in sinking into it, and making ourselves ever more human by doing so. 

At this moment, we are not so unlike Europe of the 4th and 5th centuries, standing at a precipice of barbarism and illiteracy. Nearly half of Canadians today are unable to pass a high school level literacy test and 1 out of every 6 adults is unable to complete the most basic literacy tasks, such as filling out a job application. And those of us who are technically literate spend more time reading emails, text messages, and social media posts than in sustained engagement with lengthier, more demanding texts. 

We desperately need a resurgence of literacy, if for no other reason than because being broadly literate frees us from narrowmindedness and the myopia of thinking that our times, our values, and our struggles are unique. It also makes us understand that things are rarely black and white, but usually some mixture of the greys in between. It might not be a coincidence that Abraham Lincoln, who paved the way to end slavery, was known to have read everything from Aesop’s Fables and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to Plutarch’s Lives and Mary Chandler’s Elements of Character. Literacy is not elitist and it is certainly not gratuitous; it is essential to our civility if only because it makes us part of the “great human conversation” that cuts across time and space.

Sometimes I allow myself to make a wish list for the future. If I could change the world with a snap of my fingers, with a rub of the genie’s bottle, what would I wish for?

Some things are pretty clear. We need government to release itself from the control of deep state elitists, we need our scientists to cling fearlessly to curiosity and free thought. We need our physicians to rise above their obsessive compliance and protect their patients whatever the costs. We need journalists to report facts and not transmit ideas. And, we need humility to triumph over hubris, individualism over collectivism, and as controversial as it may be to say, nationalism over globalism.

Over the last three years, we’ve seen humanity move quickly and disloyally from one heroic figure to another: Tam and Fauci to Gates, and then Zuckerberg and, even in the freedom camp, from Danielle Smith to Elon Musk or some other Olympian figure who will “bring fire to the people.” We’ve become conditioned to outsource our thinking to the current saviour of the moment, however worthy that person might be. But the truth is, there is no politician who will save us, no billionaire who will cure what’s really broken in us.

Yes, we were lied to, yes we were betrayed and manipulated. Yes, we need to regain control of our captured institutions. And there will be a long and well-deserving list of people to bring to account for that. But, at the end of the day, what we need to focus on first and foremost is regaining control of ourselves. We need to read better, think better, remember better, vote better. We need to learn how to speak out when it would be easier to remain silent and when we face great opposition. We need to learn how to hold tightly to the mast even as the torrent blows around us.

Some very positive things are happening in the world. Within days of being elected, Donald Trump announced his plan to deport illegal migrants en masse and revoke Joe Biden’s policies on gender-affirming care, and he appointed regenerative farmer Joel Salatin to the USDA. What we saw in America last week was not just a shift to a new political regime but a powerful mandate from a people who said “Enough is enough.”

At some point, the intricately woven, but ultimately thin, woke narratives all started to fray. Americans are done being ignored, they are done being told they are racist, sexist, fascist; they are done being fed a legion of well-orchestrated lies, being told their common sense is unsophisticated and dangerous; they are done being a pawn in someone else’s game. What that election did is it created a shift where we are no longer in the minority. We aren’t crazy or fringe. We are just simply human. 

But, as promising as all these developments are, the greatest things happening today are not political. Civilization is being awakened. We are a hungry people. We are not hungry for safety and security and perfection; we are hungry, desperately hungry, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, whether we know it or not. 

We want to live a life that, however small, we can be proud of and that will form a meaningful chapter in our descendent’s memories. In big and little ways, our civilization is being saved every day by the saints of our time: by unrelenting, truth-seeking citizen journalists, podcasters, and Substackers, by freedom lawyers and physicians, by ex-urbanites learning to grow their own food, by parents who are taking their children’s education into their own hands, and by an uprising of Canadians who are simply no longer willing to accept the lie that we don’t matter. There are well-known, well-highlighted heroes leading the charge but let’s also remember the heroes walking among us we may never know but who are saving our civilization in little steps every day. 

We are in the middle of a war. Not just a political war, a health war, an information war; it’s a spiritual war, an existential war, a war about who we are and why we matter.

What got us into trouble in 2020 is that, like the Babylonians, we tried to become something we aren’t; we tried to become gods and, ironically, by doing so, we turned ourselves into savages. If we are to redeem ourselves, we need to remember that, more important even than perfection, is refusing to give up on the sacred concept that is at the core of the dignity of every human life: reason, passion, curiosity, respect for each other, and humanity. And if we remember those things, we will have gone a long way to reclaiming them. 

Our job as humans is not to become perfect. Our job is to figure out what our function is, what are our unique talents and abilities (as individuals), and then do the best we can to offer that to the world, without excuse, without blame or resentment, even when things aren’t perfect, and especially when they aren’t perfect.

When the history of our time is written, this period will be a case study for students of global corruption, classical tragedies, and mass psychosis, and we’ll be used as an example of what humans must never do again. I thought we had learned that lesson on the plains of Shinar 5,000 years ago and in that courtroom in Nuremberg in 1946. But it seems that we needed to learn it again in 2020.

We’re lost. Sure. We’ve made mistakes. We set our sights too high and in doing so we forgot our humanity. But we can work through our tragic flaw and…remake our future.

Our last innocent moment could be the sign of our collapse…

Or it could be our first step forward.

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Author

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  Dr. Julie Ponesse, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate. She presented at the The Faith and Democracy Series on 22, 2021. Dr. Ponesse has now taken on a new role with The Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity aimed at advancing civil liberties, where she serves as the pandemic ethics scholar.

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Source

https://brownstone.org/articles/our-last-innocent-moment-is-our-first-step-forward/