State Dept Fact Sheet: Wuhan Institute of Virology

Update: Video has emerged where scientists were bitten by bats and had disregard to proper safety protocols.Scientists at the the Wuhan Institute of Virology 'admitted to being attacked by bats' Go here for the summary and video. 

U.S. State Department

China lied about origin of coronavirus, leaked ...

For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.

The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.

Mystery virus found in Wuhan resembles bat viruses but not ...

Related reading: SHANGHAIA new coronavirus identified by Chinese scientists is the putative cause of an outbreak of unusual pneumonia in the central city of Wuhan, according to Chinese news reports yesterday. In an interview today with Science, Xu Jianguo, head of an evaluation committee advising the Chinese government, confirmed that scientists have a complete sequence of the novel virus’s genome.
The World Health Organization on 9 January requested sequence data, a spokesperson in Geneva says, and many scientists urge the country to make the sequence public quickly, but the decision is up to the top leadership of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, says Xu, who is director of the Beijing-based State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, part of China CDC. (The center’s head, George Gao, did not respond to emails from Science seeking comment.)
Xu says the investigation is being led by China CDC but numerous groups in other government agencies are involved. “Plenty of people are working on the outbreak,” he says. The role of the evaluation committee Xu leads is to review all the findings and make recommendations to the National Health Commission. Xu also said the novel coronavirus resembles known bat viruses, but not the coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

The CCP’s deadly obsession with secrecy and control comes at the expense of public health in China and around the world. The previously undisclosed information in this fact sheet, combined with open-source reporting, highlights three elements about COVID-19’s origin that deserve greater scrutiny:

1. Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):

The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.
The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.

2. Research at the WIV:

Starting in at least 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak – WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar). The WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins.
The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.
WHO investigators must have access to the records of the WIV’s work on bat and other coronaviruses before the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of a thorough inquiry, they must have a full accounting of why the WIV altered and then removed online records of its work with RaTG13 and other viruses.

3. Secret military activity at the WIV:

Secrecy and non-disclosure are standard practice for Beijing. For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.
Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.
The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.

Today’s revelations just scratch the surface of what is still hidden about COVID-19’s origin in China. Any credible investigation into the origin of COVID-19 demands complete, transparent access to the research labs in Wuhan, including their facilities, samples, personnel, and records.

As the world continues to battle this pandemic – and as WHO investigators begin their work, after more than a year of delays – the virus’s origin remains uncertain. The United States will continue to do everything it can to support a credible and thorough investigation, including by continuing to demand transparency on the part of Chinese authorities.

Trump Announces the National Garden of Heroes

From that moment Trump proposes Billy Graham, Scalia statues in heroes ... to today, this moment….

January 18, 2021

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Background. In Executive Order 13934 of July 3, 2020 (Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes), I made it the policy of the United States to establish a statuary park named the National Garden of American Heroes (National Garden). To begin the process of building this new monument to our country’s greatness, I established the Interagency Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes (Task Force) and directed its members to plan for construction of the National Garden. The Task Force has advised me it has completed the first phase of its work and is prepared to move forward. This order revises Executive Order 13934 and provides additional direction for the Task Force.

Sec. 2. Purpose. The chronicles of our history show that America is a land of heroes. As I announced during my address at Mount Rushmore, the gates of a beautiful new garden will soon open to the public where the legends of America’s past will be remembered.

The National Garden will be built to reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism. It will be a place where citizens, young and old, can renew their vision of greatness and take up the challenge that I gave every American in my first address to Congress, to “[b]elieve in yourselves, believe in your future, and believe, once more, in America.”

Across this Nation, belief in the greatness and goodness of America has come under attack in recent months and years by a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity. The heroes of 1776 have been desecrated, with statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin vandalized and toppled. The dead who gave their lives to end slavery and save the Union during the Civil War have been dishonored, with monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Heg, and the courageous 54th Regiment left damaged and disfigured. The brave warriors who saved freedom from Nazi fascism have been disgraced with a memorial to World War II veterans defaced with the hammer and sickle of Soviet communism.

Another part is: In short, each individual has been chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love. Astounding the world by the sheer power of their example, each one of them has contributed indispensably to America’s noble history, the best chapters of which are still to come.

(b) Section 3(c)(i) of Executive Order 13934 is amended to read as follows: “The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of Ansel Adams, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Muhammad Ali, Luis Walter Alvarez, Susan B. Anthony, Hannah Arendt, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Crispus Attucks, John James Audubon, Lauren Bacall, Clara Barton, Todd Beamer, Alexander Graham Bell, Roy Benavidez, Ingrid Bergman, Irving Berlin, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Norman Borlaug, William Bradford, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, William F. Buckley, Jr., Sitting Bull, Frank Capra, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Carroll, John Carroll, George Washington Carver, Johnny Cash, Joshua Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Gordon Chung-Hoon, William Clark, Henry Clay, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Roberto Clemente, Grover Cleveland, Red Cloud, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Nat King Cole, Samuel Colt, Christopher Columbus, Calvin Coolidge, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Miles Davis, Dorothy Day, Joseph H. De Castro, Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Desmond Doss, Frederick Douglass, Herbert Henry Dow, Katharine Drexel, Peter Drucker, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Jonathan Edwards, Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duke Ellington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Medgar Evers, David Farragut, the Marquis de La Fayette, Mary Fields, Henry Ford, George Fox, Aretha Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Milton Friedman, Robert Frost, Gabby Gabreski, Bernardo de Gálvez, Lou Gehrig, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Cass Gilbert, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Glenn, Barry Goldwater, Samuel Gompers, Alexander Goode, Carl Gorman, Billy Graham, Ulysses S. Grant, Nellie Gray, Nathanael Greene, Woody Guthrie, Nathan Hale, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr., Alexander Hamilton, Ira Hayes, Hans Christian Heg, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Henry, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Bob Hope, Johns Hopkins, Grace Hopper, Sam Houston, Whitney Houston, Julia Ward Howe, Edwin Hubble, Daniel Inouye, Andrew Jackson, Robert H. Jackson, Mary Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Katherine Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Chief Joseph, Elia Kazan, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Francis Scott Key, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., Russell Kirk, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Harper Lee, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Meriwether Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Vince Lombardi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clare Boothe Luce, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, George Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, William Mayo, Christa McAuliffe, William McKinley, Louise McManus, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, George P. Mitchell, Maria Mitchell, William “Billy” Mitchell, Samuel Morse, Lucretia Mott, John Muir, Audie Murphy, Edward Murrow, John Neumann, Annie Oakley, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, George S. Patton, Jr., Charles Willson Peale, William Penn, Oliver Hazard Perry, John J. Pershing, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Poling, John Russell Pope, Elvis Presley, Jeannette Rankin, Ronald Reagan, Walter Reed, William Rehnquist, Paul Revere, Henry Hobson Richardson, Hyman Rickover, Sally Ride, Matthew Ridgway, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Caesar Rodney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Betsy Ross, Babe Ruth, Sacagawea, Jonas Salk, John Singer Sargent, Antonin Scalia, Norman Schwarzkopf, Junípero Serra, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Robert Gould Shaw, Fulton Sheen, Alan Shepard, Frank Sinatra, Margaret Chase Smith, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jimmy Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilbert Stuart, Anne Sullivan, William Howard Taft, Maria Tallchief, Maxwell Taylor, Tecumseh, Kateri Tekakwitha, Shirley Temple, Nikola Tesla, Jefferson Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Thorpe, Augustus Tolton, Alex Trebek, Harry S. Truman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Vaughan, C. T. Vivian, John von Neumann, Thomas Ustick Walter, Sam Walton, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, John Washington, John Wayne, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Roger Williams, John Winthrop, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, Alvin C. York, Cy Young, and Lorenzo de Zavala.”

Sec. 5. Funding. (a) The Secretary of the Interior shall provide funding, as appropriate and consistent with available appropriations and applicable law, for the establishment and maintenance of the National Garden.

(b) The Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in consultation with the National Council on the Arts and the National Council on the Humanities, respectively, and the Task Force, should target spending one-twelfth of the discretionary funds available to their agencies on commissioning statues of individuals set forth in section 3(c)(i) of Executive Order 13934, as amended by section 3(b) of this order, for placement in the National Garden, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.

 

1776 Project Just Released by White House

Gotta wonder if the Biden administration or media will attempt to cancel that.

The 45 page presentation is found here. It is beautiful.

We cannot forget that President Trump created the 1776 Commission, a presidential advisory group made of 18 political and thought leaders. This commission is to teach America’s youth about America’s founding. Promise made, promise kept.

Trump Announces 1776 Commission to Create 'Patriotic ...

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776, and, through this, form a more perfect Union, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Purpose.  The American founding envisioned a political order in harmony with the design of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” seeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in and sanctioned by natural law and its traditions.

The formation of a republic around these principles marked a clear departure from previous forms of government, securing rights through a form of government that derives its legitimate power from the consent of the governed.  Throughout its national life, our Republic’s exploration of the full meaning of these principles has led it through the ratification of a Constitution, civil war, the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and a series of domestic crises and world conflicts.  Those events establish a clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding.

Full executive order found here.

Quite frankly, this project should go way beyond America’s youth, there are adults across the nation that should subscribe as well and especially the media.

Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, because if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world. Daniel Webster

Appendix III of the document includes in part the following:

Appendix III

Created Equal or Identity Politics? Americans are deeply committed to the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and equally endowed with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This creed, as Abraham Lincoln once noted, is “the electric cord” that “links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving” people everywhere, no matter their race or country of origin. The task of American civic education is to transmit this creed from one generation of Americans to the next.In recent times, however, a new creed has arisen challenging the original one enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

This new creed, loosely defined as identity politics, has three key features. First, the creed of identity politics defines and divides Americans in terms of collective social identities. According to this new creed, our racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as individuals equally endowed with fundamental rights. Second, the creed of identity politics ranks these different racial and social groups in terms of privilege and power, with disproportionate moral worth allotted to each.

It divides Americans into two groups: oppressors and victims. The more a group is considered oppressed, the more its members have a moral claim upon the rest of society. As for their supposed oppressors, they must atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those of their ancestors. Third, the creed of identity politics teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression. America’s “electric cord” is not the creed of liberty and equality that connects citizens today to each other and to every generation of Americans past, present, and future.

Rather, America’s “electric cord” is a heritage of oppression that the majority racial group inflicts upon minority groups, and identity politics is about assigning and absolving guilt for that oppression. According to this new creed, Americans are not a people defined by their dedication to human equality, but a people defined by their perpetuation of racial and sexual oppression.

Click here for the full 1776 Commission presentation.

Progressive’s Comprehensive Manipulation of Human Behavior

This is a rather long article but for your benefit and that of our nation.

For decades, slicing away at human rights and the protections of the Bill of Rights have been not only been happening but in recent years it has moved into a faster forward gear. The right to self protection is often bundled in the 2nd Amendment but consider self protection is also protected in the 1st Amendment and that means protecting ourselves with speech, rallies and peaceful protests.

Big media and big tech are grouping people that are for law and order, that are conservatives and are loyal Trump supporters because of his doctrine are under assault which is beyond dispute. Big media and big tech are on overt missions to terminate Fox News, NewsMax, OANN and even social media platforms such as Parler. Just turn on CNN and MSNBC for an hour if you can stand it and the proof is there.

All for the greater good….yeah sure….

Understand that the template for a national lock-down during the beginning of the pandemic, we behaved. We stayed home, we detached ourselves from society, we could not go to church, we could not go to doctor appointments, we could not go to the gym to maintain physical fitness. Dr. Fauci was the expert and we were told to trust the science of the virus. That science changed countless times. Since then, many mayors and governors have mandated closures and sequestration applying slippery facts and slanted science.

Empty street is seen on Times Square | in-cyprus.com an empty Time Square

We continue to suffer from fear across the nation for various reasons that altering our behavior and thought. We don’t want to be cancelled, but we are getting cancelled nonetheless. We are in a tidal wave of censorship meant to silence foes and settle old scores.

Thought, conversation and dissent is a human right, a civil right. Free movement is as well, a long look back at unalienable rights is your duty. This report from the U.S. State Department summarizes it well.

It goes beyond MSNBC.

On Wednesday night, a member of the Democratic National Committee ranted that everyone who voted for President Trump should be “deprogrammed.”

David Atkins, who wrote in his campaign for the DNC, “I currently serve as the Region 10 Director for the California Democratic Party,” tweeted on Wednesday a message reminiscent of the repressive Communist states around the world: “No seriously…how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.” Read more here from the DailyWire.

But there is yet another nefarious global policy that is taking hold and you must beware. It is called The Great Reset. It is applying the same template that was used in 2020-21. Your behavior has already been altered, so it stands to reason the global elites and the Biden administration will push that action on all of America.

Now is the time for a 'great reset' of capitalism | World ...

Biden’s Build back better is a World Economic Forum plan to “reinvent capitalism” so that companies are more focused on the greater good, not profits, according to the WEF‘s own statements. How to accomplish that? By the “great reset.” Again, that’s according to the WEF‘s own words. source

Here is a summary for your use by Stacey Rubin, a lawyer and former litigator: (I interviewed her on my radio show)

At any anti-lockdown protest, you will see signs that say “Stop the Great Reset.” The New York Times calls this phrase “a baseless conspiracy theory.” Here is the problem. None of this is secret. There are books you can read about it and detailed websites describing it. Time Magazine even did a cover story. It’s the title of World Economic Forum head Klaus Schwab’s book on the lockdowns and the future. It was published July 9, 2020, and now has nearly 900 reviews on Amazon.

Proponents of “The Great Reset” argue that the pandemic proves our former society “doesn’t work,” so we need a tech-focused, “sustainable” future to reduce emissions and thereby “save the planet.” The Great Reset is a rebranded, tightened-up version of the UN’s decades-old “Sustainable Development” agenda (“Agenda 21”). The same policies and ideas are contained in “The Green New Deal,” which was defeated in 2019 in the US Congress.

It bears repeating: six months before “SARS-CoV-2” was discovered by China, the UN and the WEF signed a “Strategic Partnership” specifically to advance the “Sustainable Development” agenda, now known as “The Great Reset.” You can read all about this partnership online.

Schwab has been openly “fighting” (to use his own word) against Milton Friedman-style economics for decades, ever since Friedman published his famous 1970 essay: “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Schwab now predicts that the “COVID19 pandemic” — which he says will last at least until 2022 — will mark the final death-knell of “neo-liberalism,” which he defines as “a corpus of ideas and policies . . . favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and economic growth over social welfare.”

Others would describe neoliberalism as “decentralized power and smaller government,” and Schwab’s preferred system as “China under Xi Jinping.”

How long has Schwab known that a pandemic could be used to advance his ideals? A while, if his publications and planning exercises are any indication. His book, COVID-19: The Great Reset contains lengthy discourse on how pandemics are known agents for major societal shifts. He asks, “Why should COVID-19 be any different?”

Then there is the fact that Schwab’s organization practiced a “high-level pandemic exercise” in October 2019, less than five months before “Covid-19″ came along. The WEF’s co-sponsors for this event were The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, both of which have actively promoted 2020’s unprecedented pandemic response —as Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson recently explained, lockdowns were not recommended by any government until Xi Jinping “changed what was possible” by proclaiming “this worked for us in China.”

This extraordinarily fortuitously-timed pandemic planning exercise makes Schwab look like something of an oracle. Indeed, he openly brags about his foresight:

“For years, international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), institutions like the World Economic Forum and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI — launched at the Annual Meeting 2017 in Davos), and individuals like Bill Gates have been warning us about the next pandemic risk, even specifying that it: 1) would emerge in a highly populated place where economic development forces people and wildlife together; 2) would spread quickly and silently by exploiting networks of human travel and trade; and 3) would reach multiple countries by thwarting containment.”

In 2017, Anthony Fauci made a similar prediction, declaring that “there is no doubt” that Donald J. Trump “will be confronted with a pandemic” before the end of his term. Like Schwab, Fauci actively promotes lockdowns. Like Schwab, he declares that we can never again return to normal — if we do, we should expect diseases to constantly jump from animals to humans (because pandemics never happened until 2020, when the world grew “too industrialized”). To save ourselves, we must redesign society “in harmony with nature.”

Both Fauci and Schwab’s prose are littered with terms like “sustainability,” “inclusiveness,” “green,” “nature,” and “harmony.” Terms that are hard to disagree with, although the behaviors supposedly promoting them are a harder sell. Schwab reveals in his “Great Reset” book that our new germ-avoidant behaviors are seen as optimal to “the environment:”

During lockdowns, many consumers previously reluctant to rely too heavily on digital applications and services were forced to change their habits almost overnight . . . many of the tech behaviors that we were forced to adopt during confinement will through familiarity become more natural. If health [read: fear of germs] considerations become paramount, we may decide, for example, that a cycling class in front of a screen at home . . . is safer (and cheaper!).

The same reasoning applies to many different domains like flying to a meeting (Zoom is safer, cheaper, greener and much more convenient), driving to a distant family gathering for the weekend (the WhatsApp family group is not as fun but, again, safer, cheaper and greener) or even attending an academic course (not as fulfilling, but cheaper and more convenient).

Spelling this out for those too stunned to take it in: this is an open admission that it benefits Schwab and Fauci’s political agenda to continue lockdowns as long as possible. The same people who sell interminable lockdowns — by ignoring great science on pre-existing immunity, lack of asymptomatic spread, and flawed PCR tests — believe the lockdowns are the perfect agent to usher in the changes they desire. Will they succeed? Is their behavior remotely justified? Does the pandemic really prove our society is fatally flawed? Why can’t they use the political system to gain majority votes if their agenda is so good?

Covid-19 is the first major pandemic in six decades. Worse pandemics occurred in 1918, 1957, and 1968, when the population was exponentially smaller (1.8 billion; 2.8 billion; and 3.6 billion, respectively) and carbon emissions were not even on anyone’s radar. Because pandemics have always occurred, there is no logical basis — not even a flimsy one — to infer that “population growth,” “climate change” or “industrialization” caused this one.

People may or may not agree with Schwab that Zoom meetings are preferable to in-person work, that sitting in the same house every day of the week is preferable to commuting to an office, that local entertainment is better than international travel, that exercise classes are just as good over the computer screen as they are in a studio. But there is one thing most people agree with: being told that “germs” threaten your existence when they really do not is abusive.

Scaring people into their homes, making them fear their own family and friends, preying on their vulnerabilities, shattering their social existences— especially when you knowingly do this in hopes of making it permanent — is just about as bad as human behavior gets.

Just as bad, Schwab et al. know the lockdowns are “taking out” certain industries while sparing others: in a nutshell, the powerful survive. Anyone who has both this knowledge and the ability to influence lockdown duration has an unthinkable level of power and an unlimited ability to amass more of it by manipulating pretty much the entire global financial system. All of this is eminently predictable by the people encouraging, supporting, and imposing the restrictive orders.

“The [restaurant] sector of activity has been hit by the pandemic [lockdown] to such a dramatic extent that it . . . may never come back. In France and the U.K., several industry voices estimate that up to 75% of independent restaurants might not survive the lockdowns and subsequent social distancing measures. The large chains and fast-food giants will. This in turn suggests that big business will get bigger while the smallest shrink or disappear. A large restaurant chain, for example, has a better chance of staying operational as it benefits from more resources and, ultimately, less competition in the wake of bankruptcies among smaller outfits.”

Knowingly taking out small businesses — one of the last bastions of free speech and independence, distinguishable from the tightly-controlled corporate world — is evil. It is hard to believe anyone would do it, if they could avoid it. However, it is equally hard to ignore the fact that Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, Texas and Sweden (among many others) have fully open economies and average mortality to show for it.

Both public health ethics and the Siracusa Principles dictate that the “least restrictive means” must be used when “public health” is given as a justification for restricting basic human rights, such as the right to earn a living. Yet Schwab and Fauci both ignore Sweden and Florida, and claim that Covid-19 lockdown restrictions must continue until 2022 (or longer). How on earth do they justify it?

They seem to be telling themselves — and may even truly believe — that they are “saving the planet,” so the ends justify the means. In his book, Schwab poses the rhetorical question, “Is it okay to lie to the public for some greater good?” “Well,” I would respond, “who should we trust to decide what is the greater good?” There will never be unified agreement on which system achieves this end. Some will vote Milton Friedman, some Klaus Schwab. Most everyone, however, would agree that tricks like exploiting pandemics should not be used, even by “one’s own” side.

Reasonable people may well believe in the merit of Schwab’s “stakeholder economy.” But they undoubtedly expect to be persuaded of its merit, not to have the system foisted on them by ruse. The democratic process exists so ideas can be openly hashed out, debated, and settled by the public, each person allotted one vote. Schwab quite openly admits that he would like to dispense with this process — it is not producing the result he desires. Far from it: recent populist movements in the US (“Make America Great Again”) and UK (“Brexit”) have specifically rejected his collectivist ideals:

“Without greater collaboration, we will be unable to address the global challenges that we collectively face. Put in the simplest possible terms: if, as human beings, we do not collaborate to confront our existential challenges (the environment and the global governance free fall, among others), we are doomed.”

In his “Great Reset” marketing book, Schwab threatens that this rising tide of nationalism will prove “incompatible” with the United States dollar’s “status as global reserve currency.” He suggests that an alternative currency will be needed, that a global digital currency is eventually going to arrive, and that China is “years ahead of the rest of the world” in developing one.

Although he doesn’t say so directly, Schwab et al. undoubtedly dislike what Trump has been doing to defend the dollar. Schwab quotes Barry Eichengreen and European Central Bank representatives as follows: “The security premium enjoyed by the U.S. dollar could diminish” because “the U.S. is disengaging from global geopolitics in favor of more stand-alone, inward-looking policies.”

Predictably, Schwab makes the argument that these same nationalist policies proved disastrous during “the pandemic.” Echoing the WHO’s praise of China’s collectivist action in Wuhan — which Xi Jinping proudly declares “eradicated the virus” from the entire nation of China — Schwab writes that countries fared better during the pandemic when they share “a real sense of solidarity, favoring the common good over individual aspirations and needs.”

“Favorable societal characteristics [include] core values of inclusivity, solidarity and trust [which] are strong determining elements and important contributors to success in containing an epidemic.”

Support for these concepts is not a new feeling for Schwab. This did not spring organically out of the pandemic for him, like an epiphany. Rather, this is his long-held vision of utopia and his life’s work. He’s been talking about it for decades:

Earlier this year, Schwab told the Financial Times that his aim has been to beat back Friedman. “What was for me always disturbing was that Milton Friedman gave a moral reasoning to shareholder capitalism — [he argued] the role of business was to make business earn as much as possible and then the money would flow back from the company to the government in the form of taxes. I had to fight against the wave.”

In short, Schwab et al. are on a mission. The mission is to change society. They admire China’s and New Zealand’s governance. They practiced for a pandemic. Science has been thrown to the wind for months, censorship is rampant, Sweden and Florida are ignored, the rule of law is suspended, and certain governors seem determined never to release us from their declared “state of emergency.”

These circumstances are favorable to Schwab and his powerful allies, including technology companies, billionaires, the media, China, the UN, and others. They are detrimental to billions of less powerful, less organized people and small businesses. There is a lot we don’t know, because we aren’t being told.

Schwab and his ideologically-aligned allies think they are saving the world. It is not conspiracy theory to read their own books and listen to their own words, which target fundamental liberties and rights that the West has long taken for granted. At some point, it’s not unreasonable to observe that this is no longer about public health. It’s about a new political vision, one hatched by a private few in order to rule over the many. It is unlikely to be shared by most people, thus setting up what is likely to be an epic battle in 2021.