A shock to the job market as massive and as sustained as the coronavirus will leave lasting change — and damage — in its wake.
The big picture: We jumped from the best labor market in 60 years, before the coronavirus, to the worst, in April. As the country comes back, millions of jobs lost during the pandemic will never come back, and there will be massive reallocations of jobs from some parts of the economy to others.
“This is the biggest thing since the Great Depression. It’s absolutely enormous and incredibly fast,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford.
What’s happening: Even as states start opening up, new job postings in the U.S. are still down nearly 30% compared with February, according to an analysis by research firm Gartner.
But a closerlook at which sectors of the economy are hiring tells us more about how the pandemic might alter the job market.
There’s been a surge in postings for grocery and delivery workers. Amazon, Walmart and Instacart alone have hired around 700,000 people since the pandemic began.
Look for similar surges in cleaning, sanitation and construction in the coming weeks and months, Bloom says. Public spaces will need to hire cleaning crews and construction companies to keep spaces sanitized and add barriers or other distance-enforcing features.
We could also see increased hiring in high tech because jobs in that sector can often be done remotely, he says.
There is also data on the sectors that have suffered most and that will have the toughest recoveries.
Jobs like Uber driver, flight attendant, server and chef are among those that have seen the steepest hiring slumps.
Gartner notes that hiring in some of the hardest-hit areas of the economy — like hospitality and retail — is starting to climb back up. But millions of jobs will be gone for good as many stores and restaurants permanently shutter and people remain nervous about traveling.
And there’s another longer-term — and seldom discussed — potential impact of the pandemic: So far, much of the pain has hit low-skill and low-wage jobs, but white-collar jobs will also be in jeopardy as the crisis grinds on, Bloom says.
Consider this: The bulk of job creation during the pandemic has been in low-wage jobs, like grocery and delivery, while other sectors freeze hiring altogether. If a graphic designer or a middle manager at a software company loses their job now, it’ll be very difficult to find a comparable job out there.
The deteriorating labor market could also push discouraged, laid-off older workers — who are also at greater risk of becoming seriously ill if they contract the coronavirus — into early retirement.
“There will be a number of people for whom this will be the last job they have,” says Bloom. “And waves of early retirement are really bad for the U.S. labor market.”
The wife of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants citizens to personally “physically intervene” to stop violent crimes, nine months after she convinced her husband to get aboard the “defund the police” movement by redirecting money from police to “youth initiatives and social services.”
Shootings in New York City doubled in 2020 and were up 75 percent last month compared to a year prior. Burglaries have also increased, and violent, unprovoked crimes against Asians have become endemic.
“As attacks on Asian American communities continue, we’re asking New Yorkers to show up for their neighbors and intervene when witnessing hateful violence or harassment. I know that can be frightening when you aren’t sure what to do or say, but you can learn,” New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray wrote on Twitter March 6. “Fear is a normal feeling when stepping into a confrontation, but being prepared can help.”
She suggested that witnesses step into the middle of a “hate crime or incident” and engage directly with the person who is being targeted by asking a question like, “What time is it?”
She also advised that witnesses “respond directly to the aggressor or physically intervene and only after assessing the situation. Be confident, assertive, calm. This is risky, but sometimes all we can do is speak up.”
They could also “support a person in crisis by recording on your phone” and “check in with the survivor after the incident. This shows them that they are valued.”
Her remarks came about a week after Yong Zheng was killed in Brooklyn intervening in just such a situation, attempting to help a stranger, who was also Asian, whom he saw being robbed.
McCray, a major figure in city government in her own right, has frequently decried anti-black racism and has a fractured relationship with the city’s police. In April de Blasio named his wife, who is black, as co-chair of the city’s Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity.
In June, de Blasio put her in charge of a “Commission on Racial Justice and Reconciliation” that will examine whether monuments and buildings honoring founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should be removed or renamed because of their association with slavery, the New York Post reported.
That came after she overrode residents’ vote to erect a statue honoring Mother Frances Cabrini, an Italian-American nun. The statue would have been just one of seven, three of whom were black. McCray said that though the nun “set an example of compassion and leadership that resonates powerfully today… it will take many more years to correct centuries of neglect and the glaring gender and ethnic imbalance in our public spaces.”
NYPD statistics list 20 arrests for alleged anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020. Most of the suspects were black.
On February 25, 2021, 23-year old Salman Mufihi allegedly stabbed a 36-year old Asian man and said, “If he dies, he dies. I don’t give a f***,” CNN reported. De Blasio called it a “horrible act of violence against an Asian American man out of nowhere, just pure hatred” and said “we have to stop hate.” Mufihi was not charged with a hate crime.
In 2015, NYPD officers turned their backs to de Blasio outside the funeral of officer Wenjian Liu, who was killed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who was angry about perceived injustice against blacks and abuses by police. “The man who killed my husband believed the lie told by the politicians and the radicals that police are evil,” his widow said.
Activists who have frequently protested police abuse and black oppression have appropriated assaults on Asians to promote their causes, with one group blaming “white supremacy” for an alleged black-on-Asian crime. As Intercept reporter Lee Fang noted, New York activists on February 20 held a rally titled, “End the violence towards Asians: Let’s united against white nationalism” in Washington Square Park to attain “Justice for Vicha Ratanapakdee.”
Ratanapakdee, an 84-year old man from Thailand, was killed January 28 as he walked in his San Francisco neighborhood at 8:30am. Antoine Watson, a 19-year old black man, was charged with murder.
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Over a dozen leaders and scholars affiliated with the Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden initiative have expressed disappointment with the Biden administration’s support of a measure to remove a legal statute limiting taxpayer funding of abortion.
The Biden administration recently declared support for a COVID-19 relief bill that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion in most instances.
In a statement posted on the Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden website, the evangelical leaders and scholars argued that they “feel used and betrayed.” But, they “have no intention of simply watching these kinds of efforts happen from the sidelines.”
“Many evangelicals and Catholics took risks to support Biden publicly. President Biden and Democrats need to honor their courage,” the statement reads.
“We call on President Biden to honor his commitment to us and immediately demand that the House of Representatives apply the Hyde language to the American Relief Package.”
Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden went on to declare that this “is no time for radical change to longstanding abortion policy” and called on certain Democrats in Congress by name to “demand the Hyde Amendment be included.” They warned that if “this is not done, it will raise the question of whether or not we are still welcome in the Democratic Party.”
“As pro-life leaders in the evangelical community, we publicly supported President Biden’s candidacy with the understanding that there would be engagement [with] us on the issue of abortion and particularly the Hyde Amendment,” the statement explains. “The Biden team wanted to talk to us during the campaign to gain our support, and we gave it on the condition there would be active dialogue and common ground solutions on the issue of abortion. There has been no dialogue since the campaign.”
Signatories to the letter include Fuller Seminary President Emeritus Richard Mouw, Evangelicals for Social Action President Emeritus Ronald Sider, and Billy Graham’s granddaughter Jerushah Duford.
Others include John Perkins, the founder of the Christian Community Development Association; Eastern University President Emeritus David Black; Florida megachurch pastor and community organizer Joel C. Hunter; Bishop Claude Alexander of The Park Church in North Carolina; and Dennis P. Hollinger, president emeritus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.
In October of last year, the group released a statement urging pro-life evangelicals to vote for Biden despite the Democratic Party’s views on abortion.
Sider, a longtime evangelical figure and an advocate for biblical solutions to social and economic injustices, also edited a book released last year called The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump in which 30 evangelical Christians talked about why they opposed the former president.
Tony Perkins, president of the Christian conservative advocacy organization Family Research Council and Trump supporter, responded to the Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden statement by contending that the group “can’t say they weren’t warned.”
“Everyone in America knew where Joe Biden stood on abortion — because he told them. In 13 debates, multiple campaign ads, and a Planned Parenthood townhall,” Perkins wrote in a statement on Monday.
“If Evangelicals for Biden want to say they never saw this COVID bill and its abortion funding coming, then they were the only ones.”
Perkins quoted Biden, who had said on the campaign trail that while he had supported the Hyde Amendment for years while in Congress, he could no longer do so.
“Once they ate of the fruit the Biden campaign was offering the damage was done. The Biden team got what they wanted in 2020: cover for their unbiblical, anti-faith position on abortion,” continued Perkins.
“… the people who argued that evangelicals needed to either back away from Donald Trump, sit out the election, or vote for Joe Biden own this — and all of the other ungodly, evil policies flowing from Capitol Hill.”
Weeks before the presidential election, Sider and Mouw wrote an opinion column published by The Christian Post touting the pro-life evangelical coalition’s statement of support for Biden.
A key point of their argument was that while Biden was pro-choice, his positions on other issues such as racial reconciliation, healthcare reform and immigration made his platform more consistent with biblical values.
“… we believe that on balance, Joe Biden’s policies are more consistent with the biblically shaped ethic of life than those of Donald Trump,” declared the statement in part.
“Therefore, even as we continue to urge different policies on abortion, we urge evangelicals to elect Joe Biden as president.”
(The Epoch Times) The Biden administration is planning to drastically expand the nation’s welfare statethrough increased child allowance grants quietly added into the latest stimulus, which some experts say is a move toward universal basic income.
As part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the annual child tax credit was increased to $3,000 per child from ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for children under 6. It will be made fully refundable, and payable in monthly installments of $300.
Before this, the maximum annual credit was $2,000 for every child under 17.
Notably, the program removed existing work requirements that would increase credit earned based on a person’s income from work. Now, all taxpayers earning under $200,000 with children aged 17 or under living with them at least half the year can claim the full credit. Tax experts have called the increase a “vast undertaking.”
Some experts describe the plan, if enacted permanently, as “the second-largest expansion of means-tested welfare entitlements in U.S. history,” one Feb. 10 Heritage report noted. The same report states that “in constant dollars, its annual cost would dwarf the initial costs of the Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs.”
Advocates of the credit increase say the expanded child tax credits will help reduce poverty for many Americans. One report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, claims it would lift9.9 million children out of poverty. But experts say this is based on faulty data, and on a false notion that the U.S. welfare system isn’t properly funded.
Robert Rector, senior research fellow of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and a leading authority on poverty and welfare programs, said the child credit program would cost the country about $80 billion a year in cash outlays and about another $40 billion in tax reduction.
The problem is that “it’s unnecessary, and it’s counterproductive,” he said.
“It’s $80 billion on top of a half a trillion dollars that the United States currently spends on cash, food, housing, and medical care for low-income Americans,” he told The Epoch Times. “And that half a trillion dollars is roughly six or seven times the amount needed to completely abolish child poverty in the United States.”
Most estimates say the cost of these expanded child tax credits will cost the country more than $100 billion, with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget identifying the cost at $143 billion annually. Although the current stimulus package notes this credit is only temporary and lasts for a year, experts say it paves the way to enacting a full-fledged, permanent policy.
‘Permanent Expansion’
During the 1990s, the U.S. welfare system was overhauled, shifting the focus away from giving cash unconditionally to one that focused on a work-oriented system. Rector noted that change slashed the poverty rate among children roughly in half while reducing dependence and increasing employment.
He says that what Biden is doing now is returning to a policy of unconditional aid that is “extremely expensive but also very harmful to the poor themselves, because when you do that you’re pushing them toward the social margin.”
Rector notes how experiments in these types of programs indicated that for roughly every $1,000 given, there is a loss of $660 in earnings. He said the child tax credit is “clearly intended” to move in the direction of enacting a universal basic income.
“They’re presenting this as if it’s a one-year change in response to the COVID crisis,” he told The Epoch Times. “But it’s clearly intended to be a permanent expansion.”
There is no possible sustainability in the child tax program, especially “when you factor in all the other social programs Democrats want to enact or are already enacted,” according to Nicholas Giordano, a professor of political science at Suffolk Community College in New York.
“Assuming that we don’t levy an increased tax burden, this program would cost nearly $1 trillion, and that’s if the program is only offered to those in poverty,” Giordano told The Epoch Times, referring to a universal basic income program. “Second, sooner or later, we are going to have to confront our enormous national debt that is growing exponentially.”
“With interest rates likely to increase due to inflation, servicing the debt will become a lot more expensive. This growing debt is unsustainable over the long term,” he added. “Thirdly, there is no fathomable way of implementing a program like this along with universal health care and education programs.”
In Finland and Canada, attempted pilot programs for universal basic income were terminated early due to the massive costs and the little benefit they provided, Giordano said.
Measuring Poverty
One issue related to the debate over welfare is how the United States measures poverty levels. The government, when it counts income, doesn’t count money taken from the half-trillion dollars in welfare as income, according to Rector.
“Our poverty statistics are kind of meaningless,” he said. “When these organizations run a calculation and say, ‘Look at how much this credit reduces poverty,’ the credit calculations are based on these ridiculous databases that exclude all of the current spending, or nearly all of it.”
“Now, they’re saying if we’re spending new money, we’re going to say that it’s income, but if it was money created in the previous welfare programs and so forth, that doesn’t exist.”
It’s important for a variety of reasons to have a working adult in a household, according to Rector, who notes that it initiates social contacts, creates role models for the children, and improves the psychological well-being of the individuals.
“It’s a huge cultural trap that you’re creating, by creating this artificial environment where the poorest people are kind of set aside and told, ‘You’re not expected to work or do anything,’” he said. “And in here, we’re going to give you a lot of money and they’re there. It’s not just this program, there are still a lot of old programs that already do this.”
(The Daily Wire) In an interview with Inside Edition, Samantha Markle, 56, half-sister to Meghan Markle by way of their father, blasted some of the claims Meghan made in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, asserting, “The truth was totally ignored and omitted.”
In the interview, Oprah asked, “Samantha Markle, your half-sister on your father’s side, has written a supposedly ‘tell-all’ book about you. What is your relationship with her?”
“I think it would be very hard to ‘tell all’ when you don’t know me,” Markle replied. “I grew up as an only child.”
“I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child,” Samantha responded. “We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?”
In the Winfrey interview, Meghan claimed, “The last time I saw her must have been at least 18, 19 years ago, and before that, ten years before that.”
But Inside Edition showed a picture of the two women at Samantha’s college graduation, saying, “But here they are at Samantha’s college graduation in 2008, 13 years ago.”
Meghan claimed her half-sister only changed her name back to Markle after Meghan’s relationship with Harry became public, saying, “She changed her last name back to Markle — I think she was in her early 50s at that time — only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough.”
But Samantha countered, “I was a Markle before she was. I thought that was kind of weird that she would say I only changed my name back when she met Harry. Markle has always been my name.”
“Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle,” The Daily Mail noted.
Town and Country Magazine reported in 2018, “Samantha, who is also known by the name Samantha Grant, is 17 years Meghan’s senior,” then quoted Samantha Markle saying, “Life is about cashing in. You take opportunities as they arise and hopefully you enjoy the ride and make it as positive as you can. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Commenting on Meghan’s claim that she had contemplated suicide, Samantha, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008 and uses a wheelchair, stated, “Depression is not an excuse for treating people like dishrags and disposing of them.”
The Daily Mail offered some examples of some questionable claims Meghan Markle made: Meghan claimed that she never researched Harry or the Royal Family before the relationship started, yet the couple’s biography, “Finding Freedom,” stated that prior to Meghan’s first date with Harry in 2016, “Naturally both participants in this blind date did their homework with a thorough Google search. Harry, who scoped out Meghan on social media, was interested.”
‘Every single influencer person on the planet can come there’
(New York Post) MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell said that he’s been developing a social media application that would restore free speech to those who were banned by the mainstream tech platforms.
My Pillow founder Mike Lindell has made the grand claim that he is launching his own social media site — after he was booted from Twitter for spreading baseless claims about election fraud.
The pillow pusher said on conservative radio host Charlie Kirk’s podcast Friday that his Big Tech rival could even be live within a month, Business Insider reported.
“Every single influencer person on the planet can come there. You’re going to have a platform to speak out,” Lindell announced, adding that he has been working on the site for four years.
“It’s not just like a little Twitter platform,” said the businessman, who has claimed that he lost $65 million in revenue this year because of mass boycotts over his ongoing claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
“They’re suppressing our voices,” Lindell railed on the show Friday.
“We’re launching this big platform so all the voices of our country can come back and start telling it like it is again,” he declared.
“You will not need YouTube. You won’t need these places … it will be where everything can be told, because we’ve got to get our voices back. People will be able to talk and not walk on eggshells.”
Lindell then discussed “cancel culture” and claimed his Wikipedia page had been “changed into something I’m not,” without elaborating.
“Google canceled me on some things, I can tell you,” he said in the podcast, explaining that he bought ads on the search engine giant so more people would see “evidence” of the alleged election fraud.
But he said Google took “tens of thousands of dollars” in ad revenue from him before shutting him down.
Lindell also complained that “even the bad stations” wouldn’t have him on their shows to talk about election fraud, the COVID-19 vaccine and Dominion Voting Systems, which recently filed a lawsuit accusing him of defamation.
The voting machine company is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages on allegations that Lindell falsely accused it of “stealing millions of votes” in the federal election.
The My Pillow CEO said the site would launch in “four or five weeks,” but also that it could launch in “10 days,” adding that he couldn’t announce the platform’s name yet. No further details about the platform, including what it would look like or how it would function, were offered.
Private Facebook group cites optics of taking vacations during shutdown
The Los Angeles teachers’ union has voted against returning for in-person learning until its demands are met, but there’s nothing to stop instructors from partying over spring break, which could be a problem.
A private Facebook page for Unified Teachers of Los Angeles members warned its followers against posting vacation photos, citing the optics of traveling for fun while refusing to travel to the classroom, as shown on a screenshot obtained by FOX 11 in Los Angeles.
“Friendly reminder: If you are planning any trips for Spring Break, please keep that off of Social Media,” said the post on “UTLA FB GROUP – Members Only.” “It is hard to argue that it is unsafe for in-person instruction, if parents and the public see vacation photos and international travel.”
The warning on the Facebook page, which has 5,600 followers, came days after the union announced that 91% of its ballot-casting members voted March 1-5 against returning for in-person instruction over novel coronavirus concerns.
The vote came in favor of resisting a “premature and unsafe physical return to school sites” until “safety conditions are in place,” including daily cleaning and improved ventilation; staff are fully vaccinated or have access to full vaccinations, and Los Angeles County “is out of the purple tier,” the most restrictive level.
“This vote signals that in these most trying times, our members will not accept a rushed return that would endanger the safety of educators, students, and families,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz said in a Friday statement.
The union responded that it was not responsible for Facebook posts by teachers or private groups.
“We have a diverse membership and they are able to post their views on personal Facebook pages and in this Facebook group – however UTLA does not monitor nor is responsible for the content,” the UTLA told Fox 11. “We do not want to discourage a robust dialogue for members in the public square of opinion.”
The Chicago Teachers Union came under fire in January after Sarah Chambers, an executive board member, posted a photo Dec. 31 showing her lounging poolside in Puerto Rico with the caption “pool life” as the union fought reopenings.
NEW: In a leaked post from a private Facebook group for UTLA union members only, teachers are warned not to post on social media if they go on spring break vacations because the optics would be bad for them while UTLA is refusing to return to "unsafe" in-person schooling @FOXLApic.twitter.com/KxQc7k450T
The Biden administration insists there is no crisis
The Department of Homeland Security is asking staff to volunteer to help manage the “overwhelming” number of migrants causing a crisis at the U.S. border, according to a new report.
Fox News reported Tuesday that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sent an email to DHS staff requesting volunteers to help with “managing property, preparing meals, doing supply runs, prescription medicine runs, housekeeping, and assisting in control rooms.
“Today, I activated the Volunteer Force to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they face a surge in migration along the Southwest Border,” Mayorkas reportedly said.
“You have likely seen the news about the overwhelming numbers of migrants seeking access to this country along the Southwest Border,” he continued. “President Biden and I are committed to ensuring our Nation has a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system while continuing to balance all of the other critical DHS missions.”
This volunteer force, which was previously activated in 2019 during the border crisis in the spring and summer, will act in a non-law enforcement capacity to provide humanitarian relief.
“In 2019, over 900 volunteers deployed to support their CBP colleagues during a similar migration surge,” Mayorkas said. “Please consider joining the Volunteer Force to again provide needed humanitarian support along the Southwest Border and relief for our CBP colleagues.”
Thousands of migrant children are overwhelming detention facilities at the U.S. border even as the Biden administration refuses to acknowledge there is a crisis on its hands.
According to the New York Times, the number of migrant children detained at the border has tripled in the past two weeks, swelling to more than 3,250. Federal law requires that children detained by Customs and Border Protection be turned over to shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, but COVID-19 safety protocols have limited the space available to house these children. Last week, the CDC had to issue guidelines permitting the administration to operate shelters at 100% capacity to fit all these kids, acknowledging these facilities “should plan for and expect to have COVID-19 cases.”
But it’s not just children. Border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January, double the number of encounters from the same time one year ago and the highest rate of any January in a decade.
“Immigration authorities are expected to announce this week that there were close to 100,000 apprehensions, including encounters at port entries, in February,” the Times reports. “An additional 19,000 migrants, including adults and children, have been caught by border agents since March 1.”
The current border surge is drawing comparisons to the 2019 crisis when there were as many as 140,000 border apprehensions in a month at its height.
There are several “push” and “pull” factors that are driving migrants to attempt to come to the U.S.
Natural disasters in Central America, poverty, hunger, and gang violence are among the push factors motivating people in South and Central America to flee their homeland for the United States. Hurricanes have left thousands of people homeless in Honduras. There is famine in Latin America caused by the storms destroying crop yields and exacerbated by the pandemic. And gang violence and widespread government corruption are convincing many, many people to leave in search of a better life in America.
Then there are the pull factors. The Biden administration has reversed several of President Donald Trump’s policies: Ending Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Remain in Mexico” policy which had migrants wait for their hearings outside the U.S.; halting construction of the border wall; and reinstating “catch and release;” and imposing a moratorium on deportations for most classes of illegal immigrants. Also, Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the new administration has developed a policy that will permit noncitizens to contest their deportation.
The softer tone Biden has set on immigration — and his promise to support legislation granting amnesty and citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants — are encouraging people to travel to the U.S. in the hopes of finding a warm welcome from the United States government.
Biden’s “humanitarian” immigration policy has consequences. In addition to migrant housing facilities now being overwhelmed, violence and criminal activity is rising on the border as drug cartels, smugglers, human traffickers, and gangs are taking advantage of the situation.
The details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.
The budget-busting legislation, sold as emergency COVID response and “stimulus,” passed the Senate over the weekend. But even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19.
“Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.”
Of the bill’s nearly $2 trillion in spending, PolitiFact reports that just $14 to $20 billion goes to vaccine distribution and vaccine-related efforts. This is a tiny fraction, a mere 1-2 percent. Overall, the spending that actually goes to health-related matters pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions doled out for partisan priorities.
For example, at least $350 billion goes to bailing out state and local governments—despite most not actually experiencing predicted COVID-19 tax revenue shortfalls. That means Biden’s bill spends more than twice as much lining the pockets of bankrupt blue states than it does actually addressing public health.
State and local budgets are not in crisis.—Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that state and local tax revenues are rising nationwide, not falling. There is no need for more federal aid to the states. https://t.co/NNiUUDzpC2#CatoEcon#CatoCOVIDpic.twitter.com/zEG5nAHvR4
Legislators also included a completely unrelated $86 billion bailout for union pension plans. And the bill pours $128 billion into public education. Despite what advocates claim, it’s not actually money to “reopen schools.” A whopping 95 percent of the money will be spent after 2021.
These are just a few of the big-ticket spending items that are unrelated to COVID-19. But slipped into the bill’s 600+ pages are literally countless smaller allocations of millions in taxpayer money. Many of these carve-outs are for waste like billions for racial justice programs for farmers or politician’s pet projects like $1.5 million for a bridge in New York that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants built.
It’s not surprising that Republican elected officials are blasting the package as wasteful and bloated.
$45 billion expansion of Obamacare, including new subsidies for people with six figure incomes.
$270 million to the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities.
This isn’t about COVID relief. It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left wing wishlist. pic.twitter.com/6bgmkymuvo
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the inclusion of “All kinds of liberal wish list items that would do nothing to help American families put COVID behind them” in Biden’s bill.
“This isn’t about COVID relief,” Republican Senator Pat Toomey, a long-time fiscal conservative, said. “It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left wing wishlist.”
Indeed, the details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.
In a 1958 television interview, Aldous Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial-intelligence algorithms to control the information we see.
Story at-a-glance:
Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World,” a nightmarish vision of a future society known as the “World State,” ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
When Huxley wrote the book, optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technology is taken to its extreme.
Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to push certain kinds of information in front of us.
Huxley’s ideas appear to have influenced the technocracy’s planning. The World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda includes the strangely ominous dictum that “you will own nothing and be happy.”
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization.
The video above features a 1958 interview of Aldous Huxley with Mike Wallace. It really is a great glimpse from the past. Wallace was smoking on the set, but that was natural back then, and Rod Serling, who produced the “Twilight Zone,” did the same. Interestingly, they both developed lung cancer.
You might recall that Huxley wrote the classic novel “Brave New World,” in which he presents a dystopian vision of a future society known as the “World State,” a society ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
Children are cloned and bred in “hatcheries,” where they are conditioned for their role in society from an early age. There are no mothers and fathers as natural procreation is outlawed. There are no family units.
Embryos are sorted and given hormonal treatments based on their destined societal classification, which from highest to lowest are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. The Alphas are bred and conditioned to be leaders while the Epsilons are designed for menial labor, free of higher intellectual capacities.
At the time Huxley wrote the book in 1931 (it was published the year after), optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technocracy is taken to its extreme.
Huxley believed his world of horror was right around the corner and, today, just shy of 60 years later, we’re starting to see Huxley’s “World State” closing in around us in the form of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s transhumanist agenda and the Great Reset, designed to trap us inside a net of constant surveillance and external control.
Enemies of freedom
Huxley also penned a series of essays called “Enemies of Freedom,” which he discusses in the featured interview. The series outlines “impersonal forces” that are “pushing in the direction of progressively less freedom,” and “technological devices” that can be used to accelerate the process by imposing ever greater control of the population.
Huxley points out that as technology becomes more complex and complicated, it becomes increasingly necessary to form more elaborate hierarchical organizations to manage it all.
Technology also allows for more effective propaganda machines that can be managed through those same control hierarchies.
Huxley cites the success of Hitler, noting that aside from Hitler’s effective use of terror and brute force, “he also used a very efficient form of propaganda. He had the radio, which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people.”
With the advent of television, Huxley foresaw how an authoritarian leadership could become a source of “a one-pointed drumming” of a single idea, effectively brainwashing the public.
Beyond that, Huxley predicted the technological capability to “bypass the rational side of man” and manipulate behavior by influencing people on a subconscious level. This is precisely what we’re faced with today.
Google, but also to a large extent Facebook, has been collecting data on you for nearly two decades. They have created massive server farms that are capable of analyzing this data with deep learning and artificial intelligence software to mine information and generate incredibly precise details on just what type of propaganda and narrative is required to surreptitiously manipulate you into the behavior they are seeking.
Huxley also points out the dangers inherent in advertising, especially as it pertains to marketing of political ideas and ideologies:
“Democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance but …
“There are particular purposes for selling goods, and [what] the dictatorial propagandists are doing is to try to bypass the rational side of men and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surface so that you are in a way making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice or on rational ground …
“Children are quite clearly much more suggestible than the average grownup and, again, suppose that for one reason or another all the propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies, you would have an extraordinarily powerful force playing on these children who are going to grow up and be adults …
“You can read in the trade journal the most critical accounts of how necessary it is to get hold of the children, because then they will be loyal brand buyers later on. Translate this into political terms, the dictator says they will be loyal ideology buyers when they’re grown up.”
Decentralization protects freedom. Centralization robs it.
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization. It’s surprising that even 60 years ago Huxley was wise enough to understand this profoundly important principle.
I believe that it is the decentralization of the internet that is required to prevent censorship and manipulation in the future. This means that websites and platforms are not stored in one central place that can easily be controlled and manipulated but, rather, widely distributed to thousands, if not millions, of computers all over the world. It would work because if there is no central storage it can’t be removed.
Decentralized platforms allow the majority of power to reside with the individual. Technologies that can be easily misused to control the public narrative must also remain largely decentralized, so that no one person or agency ends up with too much power to manipulate and influence the public. Our modern-day social media monopolies are a perfect example of what Huxley warned us about.
The same goes for economic institutions too. Today, we can see how the role of the central bank (in the U.S. known as the Federal Reserve) — a privately-owned entity with the power to break entire countries apart for profit — is forcing us toward a new global economic system that will impoverish and quite literally enslave everyone, with the exception of the technocratic social bankers themselves and their globalist allies.
Our Orwellian present
A contemporary and student of Huxley was George Orwell (real name Eric Blair), who wrote another dystopian classic — “1984” — published in 1949. The two books — “1984” and “Brave New World” — share the commonality that they both depict a future devoid of the very things that we associate with having a healthy, free, creative, purposeful and enjoyable life.
In “1984,” the context is a society where an all-knowing, all-seeing “Big Brother” rules with an iron fist. Citizens are under constant watch. Privacy is nonexistent, and language is twisted to justify and glorify oppression.
Some of the spectacles of 2020 could have easily been ripped straight out of the pages of “1984,” as riots were described by cheery news anchors as “mostly peaceful protests,” even as city blocks were engulfed in flames behind them and people were bleeding to death in the streets. For those familiar with the book, such scenes were difficult to watch without being reminded of 1984s “double-think.”
Orwell versus Huxley
There are differences between the two works, however. While Orwell foresees people being forcefully enslaved by an external agency, and kept in that state by the same, Huxley’s vision is one in which people have been so thoroughly conditioned that they come to love their servitude. At that point, no external authoritarian ruler is actually required.
If you think about it, I’m sure you will agree that this is clearly the most efficient strategy to take control of the population. Moore’s law and the exponential improvement in computer processing capacity has exponentially accelerated the global elites’ ability to precisely identify how to implement peaceful control that will have the majority virtually begging for tyranny.
In Huxley’s “Brave New World,” people have fallen in love with the very technologies that prevent them from thinking and acting of their free will, so the enslaved maintain their own control structure.
As noted by Neil Postman in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” in which he compares and contrasts the futures presented by Huxley and Orwell:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
“As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’
“In ‘1984,’ Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In ‘Brave New World,’ they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
The promise of the Great Reset
One can argue about who predicted the future best, Orwell or Huxley, but in the final analysis, I think we’re looking at a mixture of both, although it seems obvious to me that Huxley was more prescient and he was actually Orwell’s mentor. Huxley’s concerns are far more serious as the programming is essentially silent, and it is patently evident that the technocrats have been highly successful in implementing this strategy in the past year.
That said, we’re facing both the threat of externally imposed authoritarianism and control predicted by Orwell, and the subversive, subliminal programming through mindless entertainment and the lure of convenience proposed by Huxley.
Undoubtedly, the combination is a powerful one, and likely far more effective than either control strategy by itself. I’ve already touched on how Orwell’s work is playing out in the real world through the “double-think” mental gymnastics we get from the controlled, tightly centralized mainstream media these days.
For an example of how Huxley’s ideas have influenced the technocracy’s planning, look no further than the globalists’ call to “build back better” and the World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda (below), which includes the strangely ominous dictum that you will own nothing and be happy.
The unstated implication is that the world’s resources will be owned and controlled by the technocratic elite, and you’ll have to pay for the temporary use of absolutely everything. Nothing will actually belong to you. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class.
Just how will this imposed serfdom make you happy? Again, the unstated implication is that lack of ownership is a marvelous convenience. Rent a pot and then return it. You don’t need storage space! Imagine the freedom! They even promise the convenience of automatic drone delivery straight to your door.
Artificial intelligence — which is siphoning your data about every aspect of your existence through nearly every piece of technology and appliance you own — will run your life, predicting your every mood and desire, catering to your every whim. Ah, the luxury of not having to make any decisions!
This is the mindset they’re trying to program into you, and for most, it appears to be working. For others who can see the propaganda for what it is, these promises look and feel like proverbial mouse traps. Once you bite the cheese, you’ll be stuck, robbed of your freedom forevermore. And, as Huxley told Wallace, individual freedom is really a prerequisite for a genuinely productive society:
“Life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom. Initiative and creativity — all these things that we value, and I think value properly, are impossible without a large measure of freedom.”
When Wallace challenges Huxley on this by pointing out that the Soviet Union was successfully developing both militarily and artistically, despite being a tightly controlled regime, Huxley counters by saying that those doing that creative work, especially scientists, were also granted far greater personal freedom and prosperity than everyone else.
As long as they kept their noses out of politics, they were brought into the upper echelon and given a great deal of freedom, and without this freedom, they would not have been able to be as creative and inventive, Huxley says.
The threat of the new normal
This anti-human “new normal” that world leaders are now urging us to accept and embrace is the trap of all traps. Unless your most cherished dream is to lie in bed for the rest of your life, your body atrophying away, with a pair of VR goggles permanently strapped to your face, you must resist and oppose the “new normal” every day going forward.
As noted by Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill in his Feb. 5, 2021, article, while the first lockdown was marked by a sense of camaraderie and the promise of it being a temporary measure that we can get through if we just address the problem together, by the third round, all forms of social connection have vanished, as has the anticipation of a return to normality.
“In the first lockdown, the dream of normality was what kept people going; it was actively encouraged by some politicians and even some in the doom-laden media. This time, dreams of normality are treated as ‘dysfunction’, as a species of ‘denial,’” O’Neill writes.
Make no mistake. The media’s rebuke of a return to normalcy as a nonsensical pipedream is dangerous propaganda territory. The reality is we could easily open everything back up and go back to business as usual, and nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of sickness and death, would occur.
People die every year. It’s an inevitable reality of life and, up until the last two weeks of 2020, there actually were no greater number of deaths recorded than the year prior, and the year prior to that, and the one before that.
What’s more, we now have effective prophylactics and treatments that ensure the loss of life due to COVID-19 can be radically minimized. Yet, our leaders don’t want you to think in those terms. They want you to remain fearful because they have a deep appreciation of the value of fear in catalyzing the precise type of capitulation and surrender they need in order to implement the Great Reset.
Tragically, many citizens have so embraced the fear culture, they don’t even need an authoritarian figure to tell them to comply with rules that have no medical benefit anymore. They’ll happily act as the designated COVID police, making sure everyone around them complies.
Hell hath no fury like one caught in the unsound belief that they will die if you don’t wear a mask. This is no way to live. It’s not sane and it’s not healthy, and the prophetic works of Huxley and Orwell illustrate where it will all end if we don’t push back.
Never surrender to the new normal
In closing, I’d like you to ponder some portions from O’Neill’s article, in which he warns us about the threat posed by the culture of fear itself, which is just as dangerous and damaging as any virus:
“[Spiked] argued that COVID-19 … would be refracted through the culture of fear, potentially harming our ability to understand and deal with this novel danger. This has come to pass. The shift from paying lip service to social solidarity to encouraging the populace to think of itself as diseased represents a victory for the degraded view of humanity gifted to us by the culture of fear.
“The government’s early move from encouraging people to take responsibility for limiting their social interactions to using older methods of terror to ensure compliance with lockdown measures confirmed the culture of fear’s reduction of people from citizens to be engaged with problems to be managed.
“The failure to sustain the education of the next generation spoke to the exhaustion of bourgeois confidence, of the state itself, that underpins the culture of fear.
“And the current threat of a New Normal — of a forever post-pandemic dystopia of distanced, masked pseudo-interaction — demonstrates that our future will be shaped at least in part by the ideologies and forces of the culture of fear …
“Yes, the New Normal being talked up by the political and cultural elites will partially be informed by the experience of Covid-19 and the necessity of being prepared for a future virus. But it will also be shaped by … the culture of fear and its attendant anti-human, anti-progress ideologies …
“Soon the practical task of minimizing and managing the impact of Covid-19 will have been largely completed, leaving us with the far larger humanist task of combating this culture and making the case for a freer, more dynamic, dazzling future of growth, knowledge and engagement.
“Those who underestimate the culture of fear will be ill-prepared for these future battles. They will have a tendency to surrender to the New Normal. The rest of us should stand firm, even in the face of smears and willful misrepresentations, and continue to recognize and confront the real and debilitating consequences that fear has on everyday life and on humanity’s future.”
