In this essay, we will demonstrate that, by their own statements, our public health “leaders” such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, among others, have been concealing their true intentions before and during the COVID pandemic. Their beliefs and actions stemming from those beliefs are part of an ongoing cultural war that has been raging across America for over 150 years. It is the outward expression of two irreconcilable world views:
- pro-individual (life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness) versus
- anti-individualist ideologies that wish to: subjugate the rights and happiness of individuals to a centralized unelected authority.
The “utopian” vision of those wishing to subjugate our rights to a centralized unelected authority has come to be known as “The Great Reset.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic and related events such as the lockdowns, mandates, etc., it has never been more evident that this conflict must be resolved if America is going to stop the slide toward a totalitarian state.
We will examine… How and why the conflict evolved in America, and what must be done to finally resolve it so that we can regain the original foundational idea of America based on the individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
America is the first country in history to be explicitly founded on the foundation idea that the freedom of the individual to live his or her life is paramount, and the government’s primary function is to ensure that freedom. That sentiment is reflected in the words of the Declaration of Independence:
“…all men … are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness….”
From America’s earliest days through World War II, that freedom helped to transform an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse and create the most dynamic economy the world had ever seen. However, by the mid-20th century, the attitude changed greatly. This was the result of a turning away from individualism by American and European intellectuals since the mid-19th century. Herbert Croly was a leader in the Progressive movement of the late 19th to early 20th century with his view that:
“The traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.”
Croly and other intellectuals pointed to the unholy alliance between the railroad industry and Big Government after the Civil War. Although the problems of graft and corruption were real, Croly and other intellectuals failed to understand that the root of the problem was that the U.S. government subsidized the railroads to assist the Union war effort by building lines that helped win the war but, otherwise, had little economic value. Unfortunately, those subsidies continued after the war causing serious economic problems associated with the development of Big Business and Big Government in America.
Croly and other intellectuals also failed to separate the true capitalists, such as Jerome Hill, who rejected government subsidies, from other railroad tycoons who avidly pursued the subsidies. The result was increasing regulation of the industry-leading to the Interstate Commerce Act and the hardening of the belief that Big Business, such as the railroad industry, was inherently dishonest when in fact, it was the deviation from pure capitalism, via the Civil War subsidies, which caused the cascading economic problems.
And unfortunately, there were no intellectuals or industry spokesmen who could take the moral high ground against the attacks and point out that the pursuit of profit was NOT the problem. Subsidies that warped the markets and led to political influence peddling were the actual problem.
The trend of intellectuals to blame individualism and the profit motive for problems actually caused by government intervention continued unopposed into the middle of the 20th century and was reflected by this pronouncement by a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inner circle of advisers known as the “brain trust.”
“We are turning away from the entrusting of crucial decisions . . . to individuals who are motivated by private interests.” – Rex Tugwell, a key member of FDR’s “brain trust.”
During FDR’s first two terms in office, Big Government intervention in the economy became widely accepted, and many public works programs transferred resources from the private to the public sector. This was a reflection of the belief that public funding of science and public health was in the “public interest.”
It culminated with the subsidizing of the public health and physical sciences fields, and the establishment of the United Nations, an international organization primarily funded by the U.S. taxpayer.
As we will see later in this essay, these acts, alleged to be in the “public interest,” have entrenched authoritarian ideologues in public health agencies as well as publicly funded scientific institutions.
The entrenchment of these ideologues, Anthony Fauci being a prime example, has corrupted the operation of scientific inquiry and public health agencies, and has had an immensely destructive effect on the policies concerning the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change research. These policies are being used to justify a greater concentration of political power into the hands of unelected bureaucrats and are threatening to destroy the remaining freedoms of the American people.
We will now examine a couple of statements from health officials that indicate that their priorities are something other than protecting the health of people.
When speaking of the swine flu epidemic of 2009, WHO Margaret Chan showed her ideological motivation:
“Ministers of health should take advantage of the devastating impact to get out the message that ‘changes in the functioning of the global economy’ are needed to ‘distribute wealth’ on the basis of ‘values’ such as ‘community, solidarity, equity, and social justice.’”
Since when did “distributing wealth” become a matter of public health?
And then there are the VERY curious statements of Dr. Anthony Fauci:
“Congressman Jordan mentioned the people of Ohio. . . I’m looking at it from a public health perspective, and he was talking about the infringement upon our liberties. . . I certainly want to get my life back. But I also put as a higher priority, the health and the safety and the lives of the American public.”
So Fauci puts a “higher priority” on an abstraction of “the public” over that of living, breathing individual human beings. This is why egregious mistake after egregious mistake never phased Fauci. He doesn’t value individual living, breathing human beings as much as he does an invisible, nonliving abstraction.
And in fact, Fauci had in mind a re-engineering of the social order, which he revealed in a September 3, 2021, article for the journal Cell:
“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation, we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.”
As Jeffrey Tucker noted:
“This article reveals the most important point. The pandemic response was not just about this one pathogen. It was about what amounts to a political, economic, social, and cultural revolution.
“It’s not socialism or capitalism. It’s something else entirely, something very strange, like a Rousseauian technocracy, simultaneously primitive and high tech, as managed by a scientific elite.”
Where America’s Problems Began
The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are ringing affirmations of political freedom, but underneath the principles of rights is a moral foundation that is critical to its defense. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers were unaware of that foundation.
Private Rights Without an Adequate Moral Foundation: A Recipe for Disaster
The principle of the public interest was known during the founding days of the U.S. as the “general welfare” and was mentioned explicitly in the Constitution. The General Welfare principle, over time, also became known by terms such as the “common good,” “greater good,” “good of society,” and the “public interest.” It was regarded as a “mere grammatical quibble” by Thomas Jefferson, but, unfortunately, history has shown it to be anything but that.
Virtually every expansion of government power at the local, state, and federal level has been justified by reference to the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution.
These two statements essentially say that the general welfare (never defined) of society trumps the rights of the individual on an issue of fundamental importance to the Founding Fathers: personal property. This raises the obvious question:
Why did two Supreme Court justices believe the rights of the individual were subservient to society, i.e., the public interest, only seven years after the Constitution became the law of the land?
Approximately 150 years later, an American philosopher identified the full moral basis that Wilson and others were unable to do. What they needed but, unfortunately, did not have was a concise, unequivocal defense of rights based on a defense of enlightened or rational self-interest, such as:
“A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. here is only one fundamental right… a man’s right to his own life. … Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action… The concept of a “right’ pertains only to action, specifically to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion, or interference from other men.” – Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1965.
To discuss all this and provide a way forward that will increase the likelihood of returning to the nation envisioned by our Founding Fathers, we have invited Mr. Mike Gemmell to be our guest on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY on the America Out Loud Talk Radio network at 11 am and 8 pm on both Saturday, August 6 and Sunday, August 7.
Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris
Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer, and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.