Big-name conservative journalists, pundits, and academics who have been silent about the vax-harm debate, and conservative politicians who have behaved similarly, I have some news for you:
--it is getting rather late in the day.
The CDC is “admitting” that something has been amiss within its house, there are clearer-than-ever signs with respect to all-cause mortality excesses emerging, there’s a recent study from Thailand that is delivering horrible news on the myocarditis front, guys like Steve Kirsch keep finding disturbing “mere anecdote” after “mere anecdote” that suggest the real numbers are huge, and even the jittery, GOPe-friendly, and bribe-accepting Fox News took the plunge of inviting Kirsch on for a segment. He didn’t play by their script, so it’s not clear if they’ll have him back, but the “wall into the mainstream” has been pierced.
Recently, I noticed this comment by the prominent vax-harm substacker Igor Chudov (this one posted to an excellent Midwestern Doctor piece):
The "CDC and FDA workers" soon will come out in droves, feigning indignation, hoping that coming forward will keep them from being investigated or improve their career. But in the darkest hour, NONE of them blew the whistle.
I agree with Chudov’s moral judgment, but the key thing for this post is his hunch about a decisive shift happening soon. That hunch could be wrong, of course. Most of us who have been following the vax-harm story are astounded at how long and how effectively it has so far been suppressed, and a cynical type, still calculating about when he should first mention it, might ask, “We-ell, how soon is soon?”
But I believe we can say the house of cards is trembling now. And while it’s too late, oh Professional Conservative, for you to fully vindicate yourself for you decision to stay mum on this over the last six months, this September might be your last chance to do some re-positioning work, and make some amends for your part in discouraging discussion of this issue.
I suspect some of you believe your mode on this is the “smart” and “strategic” one—i.e., I think your reasoning is something like, Only non-player conservatives taint themselves with this-- Wait until after the midterms-- Leave it to the likes of Bannon. But has it been such a smart play, even in the narrowest and lowest sense of the term? As I was pointing out back in March, there are only so many likely scenarios for the tabulation of the vax-harms. Even then it was clear that a scenario that kept us below 50,000 deaths was extremely unlikely (it’s near-impossible now.) And even if we arrive by the end of 2025 at one of the lower scenarios, believing that only a couple-hundred thousand have been killed in the U.S., your refusal to look into the issue over the last half-year, to encourage open debate about it, when the element of time for prompting needing medical action was perhaps at its most valuable, is not going to wear well.
And has it been the right thing to do? You could see this was an implicit censorship scheme, and one demanded by the same progressivist/technocrat actors who had run against the grain of liberal democracy with lockdowns, who had betrayed its core principles with mandates, and who were reinforcing and encouraging the most disturbing trends in social-media “disinformation control.” Why did you in a sense cooperate with them on this?
Yes, Michael Anton, I am talking about you. Yes, American Mind, Claremont-folk and sundry Strauss-influenced public intellectuals generally. Yes, Law & Liberty. Yes, Yuval Levin, and National Affairs. Yes, Public Discourse, Modern Age and American Affairs. Yes, The New Atlantis, especially you.1
Yes, any conservative pundit and politician who is constantly talking Biden Biden Biden FBI Cheney Russiagate Hunter Woke Woke Woke, and once in a while piping in with a “mandates were sooo bad!” or “Fauci was sooo arrogant!” Yes, I am talking about big-talking you.
Some of those other issues really are super-important, but in 2022, certain silences speak volumes, don’t they?
So, Professional Conservative, hear me. You know the game of “in elite credentialed circles, there are topics we do not talk about,” and you tacitly accepted that the vax-harm topic should get subjected to that treatment.
Maybe you kept thinking it was someone else’s job to protest against it being shoved into that box. Additionally, I’d guess some of you didn’t want to distract from your issues by turning here and there to something not in your main wheelhouse, or well-fitted to your areas of expertise. I guess you thought doing that would be a too-costly expense of your energies, and would present barriers to your trying to get through to the “persuadable ones” on your top topics. Besides, your uncertainty about the science itself was real.
All that would have been understandable had this been a standard “important issue among others,” and not one that you knew a corrupt establishment was demanding silence about. And not one that would, if the claims of the mRNA experimental medicine opponents were even a third or a fourth of the way true, inevitably become The Biggest Issue of Our Time. The one destined to draw attention to the deeper one, the one summarized by Bret Weinstein as “wrong at every level, captured across the board, no functional institutions.”2
Here’s a comment I wrote in response to the latest Victor Davis Hanson column, “The Worst and the Stupidest” (itself quite spot-on, apart from the omission I’m complaining about) at American Greatness. I’ve tightened or expanded a few phrases of it for this post:
VDH, sir, it is late August of 2022, and you still won't say a thing about the existence of, or the need to have open debates about the possibility of, widespread vax harms. Obviously, if they are even as half as widespread as prominent vax-harm voices like Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Margaret Anna Alice, and Steve Kirsch say they are, they are the most egregious elite-class failure of all. But your silence about them increasingly smacks of controlled opposition. Get smart about your future reputation, and get passionate already about the urgency of needed national (or state-initiated) action to save those who can be, from those of the vax-harms which seem to be developing slowly but surely, such as the "Richard Hirschman clots." I cannot believe professional conservatives like yourself are still silencing the desperately needed dialogue on this. It is quite possible that many tens-of-thousands will die unnecessarily due to the cowardice and donor-pleasing of pro conservatives like yourself squandering valuable time.
I cannot read Hanson’s mind, so I don’t know why he is staying so silent. And as for donor-pleasing calculations, in his case I think they are quite unlikely to be a factor. American Greatness, his main platform now, in fact has been one of the only professional conservative outlets to pay serious attention to the vax-harms.3
Speculating in more general terms, I do not know what is going on behind the scenes with professional conservatives. Maybe honchos at Koch or some other big donor organization, or from the Trump camp, have issued instructions: don’t go there. (The figure most noticeably silent about the harms is after all Trump, “Mr. Warp Speed” himself.)
Such speculations might be way off, but notice, we haven’t even seen professional conservatives seeking to sponsor debate about this! They won’t even do their own “fact-checks” on the claims being made by the likes of Kirsch. They surely know he has held out major money for anyone who will debate him in public in good faith. If they really believe it is just irresponsible to discuss this issue the way people like Kirsch and co. are, that doing so verges on dangerous-to-the-public disinformation, why won’t they send some conservative medical experts over to debate him?
But no, they’ve been taking refuge in silence games. “Pretending.”
I’m calling you out, guys and gals—you’ve got to put-up if you want to justify your present shut-up.
I am not seeking to benefit at your expense. PostModernConservative has a half-thousand regular readers, and I am the last person who would know how to carve-out a new media niche or platform position designed to supplant y’all. I am at the end of the day rooting for most of you, especially the great Anton, but am growing worried for you and conservatism on this.
Why is it, BTW, that so many of the best vax-harm commentators are either liberals or former ones? Such as Steve Kirsch, Naomi Wolf, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sage Hana (I think), and Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying? Or leftists, apparently, like C.J. Johnson? Have any of you professional conservatives read the piece the German vax-harm writer Eugyppius once highlighted, about the essential uselessness of European conservatives in the face of Covid-era despotism generally? Are third parties going to emerge and take the lead, and in ways that explicitly reject the conservative label and much of its political philosophy, on the basis of its recent failures?
This should be our moment!
There are millions of dazed old-school liberals, repentant progressivists, stunned socialists, all of them appalled by the last two years, who are there for the picking, if conservatives would just show some leadership!
One of the key intellectual maladies, scientism, that academic conservatives have long lamented and dissected, has never been so on the ropes as it is at this very hour, due to the vax-harms!
But where are the big-name punches?
Whatever the rationale was back in April or whenever for not talking about this, it is falling apart. Whoever is telling you, assuming someone is, to stay “strategically mum” on this is grossly mistaken about the situation. You have to defy them.
Did you notice that Tucker Carlson has broken with the implicit ban? Dan Bongino sure noticed, as this moving testimony about his own fears for himself (Bongino vaxxed) illustrates. (Not presently to be found on youtube, presumably for the usual Traitor to the First Amendment reasons.)
This is not, I stress, simply a matter of squandering a key opportunity for coalitional shifts. You are not thinking clearly about how costly being on the wrong side of the issue is going to be.
People are dying. In the hundreds of thousands, at a minimum. No, most people don’t know this or accept this yet.
But by what plausible scenario will the vast center of public opinion be kept from this knowledge and acceptance of its reality? And assuming it cannot, leaders will be dealing with a crowd many of whose members will be convinced that they can point to a loved-one of theirs killed or harmed by the vaxxes.
Who will they blame? You think they will limit it to CDC personnel? To the Dems?
Is it not the case that you have already played a part, perhaps somewhat unwittingly, but surely also due to calculations designed to protect your organization, in suppressing this? That some of you could have set investigations into motion by means of your organizations’ own resources? Or if not yourselves, imagine if an AEI or a Heritage, or a Wall Street Journal, had directed a number of its investigators to look into this.
What facts do we not know, circa August of 2022, that if more slow-developing vax-caused deaths are coming, perhaps could have been facts used to prevent some of those deaths, assuming they had been uncovered earlier?
Or what tests could people be taking now to have a chance at protecting themselves and loved ones?
Do you think someone who loses a loved one in, say, early 2024 to a “Richard Hirschman clot” that was growing in the victim for years is going to listen to any excuses you make in retrospect about how it would have been “bad political timing” for you to have talked about the vax-harms in May of 2022 as opposed to, say, December of 2022? The only timing issue she is going to care about then is the one about when tests and countermeasures could have been developed if only more scientists had been permitted and encouraged to look into them earlier.
She will have a plausible case that your silence contributed to that delay of action, won’t she? And if she gravitates also to the idea that, well, conservatism demonstrated circa 2021-2023 that it cared very little about ordinary people, that will be a plausible case too.
If you need guidance as what to do next, scroll down in our posts and start spending time with the vax-harm substacks I recommend in a post titled “What Are Your Favorite Substacks.” And if you’re still feeling adversarial towards the key claims, then please, do the work of debate! Those on the vax-harm side would love to finally have serious interlocutors, hard-core Devil’s Advocates. Sink investigative resources into double-checking some of the vax-harm writers’ most important claims, or any of their claims you suspect are too-widely believed. Take up one of Kirsch’s debate challenges, or use any institutional clout you have to get some other major figure to do so. Force Trump to talk about it. Force McConnell-types to. Force state legislatures in Red States to mandate the kinds of tests and investigative projects that would help us shed some daylight on the extent of these harms.
BUT STOP BEING SILENT!
Please, final thing, watch this next video. It is Peter McCullough expanding upon the Thailand study. If the results hold-up, and if we can extrapolate from the relatively small group out to the broader population around the world, it means that 1 out of 100 of young persons (13-18) who took the vax have subclinical myocarditis right now! Subclinical means they do not know. That likely means all persons in that category who vaxxed should get the tests described in the study, because if they are one of the unlucky one-in-a-hundred (another unlucky set of one-in-a-hundred suffer heart damage, but it’s not subclinical, so they know about it), strenuous exercise could kill them at any time. They need to know that.
And notice especially what McCullough says about this study (which is methodologically gold-standard): there is no reason it could not have been conducted in a Western nation, likely better funded and with a larger sample, in ’21, or in earlier ’22. We could have sent the alarm many months ago, and saved hundreds of lives, thousands, who knows? Given MSM corruption, including that of Fox, we are unable to properly broadcast the warning even now. So those young men dying on athletic fields really is a result of the kind of silences I am denouncing. And there are at least four or five other major vax-harms where the present neglect of research poses similar threats!
If all this is hard for you to hear, repellent in some way, maybe due to my passion, to what I truly believe is a righteous anger, I urge you: do not turn away. If your temptation to dismiss my call is related to fear that you are in some degree complicit in these societal sins—maybe you invested in Pfizer or counselled many of your friends to take the jab or killed a key story--, then set a good example and publicly repent. It really does murder hope in Americans now, when they see nearly no leaders at any level coming forward and saying, “I was wrong about X,” or “I was complicit in Y,” and then taking steps of restitution and penance. And if your freedom to say what you think on this issue really has been threatened by donors or politicians, come out and expose that—demand repentance of them. The public will remember that, and with a gratitude likely sufficient to protect you.
The crusade to uncover the vax-harms needs your smarts, your connections, your skepticism! You can still do a powerful amount of good. But at some point, and I believe it’s coming soon, your help will arrive too late to do much of anything for society, and incidentally, for yourself.
I am sorry to report that, looking over recent New Atlantis issues for signs of their stance on this debate, they have essentially published one piece (Alex Stern) broadly critical of scientistic/technocratic backing of lockdown-style policies, a lesser one broadly critical of “alarmism,” and another which in the course of putting forth its “we should have done it this way” theory of Covid-19 policy, praised some aspects of what did happen. I was struck by this sentence: “Within weeks of recognizing the existence of a novel coronavirus, scientists mapped its genome and developed and produced vaccines faster than ever before.” Within weeks! Scientists! That is, to put it bluntly, pre-2020-usage that the emerging awareness of the vax-harms is making contemptibly laughable. (Did the authors never read a post by Igor Chudov? How about this one?) The piece I’m criticizing is “The Case for a Pandemic Moonshot” co-authored by Tom Ridge, the former PA governor and present co-chair of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, and by Asha M. George, the Commission’s executive director. Maybe the BCB is a good organization—I notice they’ve been funded at times by the Hudson Institute—but in coming years, no-one is going to wanting to be hearing scientistic rah-rah about “faster, please” “moonshots” and “warp-speed.” And people are going to be quite resistant to and skeptical about BCB’s recommendation to “develop a vaccine candidate for a pathogen in each of the twenty-six virus families that infect humans.” It is not going to be a plus when they read Ridge and Asha pushing for the funding of better-mask design, and saying things like “We were able to develop the Covid-19 vaccines more quickly because of the work that had previously been put into trying to develop vaccines for related SARS and MERS viruses. And now that we have actually developed vaccines for Covid‑19, we will be that much further ahead in developing vaccines for other variants of the virus as they emerge, or for other novel coronaviruses. If we do the same for other virus families, we could have approved, safe, and effective vaccines within a hundred days of recognizing a new viral threat.” Overall, if The New Atlantis wants to avoid the slander-tag of “captured!,” they’d better change course quick, and provide a much wider range of debate on the vax-harm issue.
Darkhorse Podcast “Keeping Sane: Bret Speaks with Neil Oliver.” It is the deeper issue because it reveals that we are not in a “Rots from the Head” situation, where the evil of Biden and his masters is the key thing. Or the evil of guys like Fauci. No. The entire body is riddled with corruption.
Can’t list all the good ones! The American Conservative has been good of late. And as for the most important non-professional conservatives on this topic, pride of place goes to Kane who puts together Citizen Free Press, the outlet that first led me to substackers like Kirsch.
jeff tucker at brownstone has been on top of this.
ditto em robinson, sharyl attkisson.
most of the best on stack seem to lean right: katherine watt
https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/
sage hana (who defies category but is pure team humanity) sagehana.substack.com
gato https://boriquagato.substack.com/
jeff childers https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/
paul alexander (ex-trump covid cabinet) https://palexander.substack.com/
2nd smartest https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/
Keep fighting. God bless you.