Open Tabs: First Amendment thoughts, where is the Church, Narnia, and more!

Just a bit of what I've been reading

Let’s take a tour through a few of my many, many open tabs…

You can read the diary entries of Anthony Fauci yourself here. I agree with Jeffrey Tucker that using AI to summarize them isn’t going to give you the picture. Tucker has pulled out a few beauts for mention, here: A Romp through the Fauci Diaries: Fame Turns to Shame by Jeffrey Tucker.

If you read the whole thing with one thought in mind, it all makes sense. He was trying to turn himself from villain to hero in the story of manufactured pathogens should it ever be revealed. The awards, the valorization, the flimflam over lockdowns designed to delay seroprevalence, the forced shots – all of it designed as cover.

RFK Jr. Exposed the Real COVID Scandal: They Still Believe Experts Outrank Your Rights by Jeff Childers

Dana Bash’s interview with RFK Jr. on CNN was an important confrontation.

Examples of how bad things got during the lockdown are endless. One of the frustrations is remembering things, and then remembering other things, and realizing that a reckoning of all the things will probably never come.

But scariest of all is how quickly Americans lost the right of free speech, were denied exercise of our religion, and, I cannot stress this enough, deprived of a less famous First Amendment right, the right peaceably to assemble.

One thing the lockdown made me realize is what wisdom our forefathers displayed in including this right centrally, among the five.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. ~ First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

If Congress (even by default) doesn’t allow free assembly, it is effectively nullifying one’s right to speak. If we can’t assemble peaceably, how can we worship? Of the five rights enumerated in that amendment, perhaps the one to assemble peaceably is the most important in the sense of being essential to the rest. Authorities took away this foundational right from the honest citizen, leaving us bereft of the others.

You may remember that the authorities did allow unpeaceable assembly — riots actually, acts of violence and arson — by leftist groups during that time. They inverted this right to be more like “violently to destroy property and kill.” We couldn’t get together with friends and family, but Antifa and BLM agitators could pack themselves into crowds (no social distancing there!) and set buildings on fire.

As to the rest, members of the press willingly handed over their own First Amendment Constitutional right, sadly. If an institution could be said to be suicidal, the press would be the primary example. Our right to petition was also taken from us. There was no redress against unjust regulations because they were not laws but acts of crony bureaucrats. If your local board of health decided you were in violation of some unlegislated ruling, you had no recourse (taking away your 5th and 14th Amendment rights as well).

The whole First Amendment was abrogated on one pretext: the perceived medical emergency, declared by the government — not by personal experience or observation. None of us witnessed people dropping in the streets or even what we experienced in the early 90s, when a year of flu so bad and long-lasting caused fully one-third of the student and teacher population of the local public schools, as I vividly recall, to be laid up at home for weeks. Nothing closed, no state of emergency was declared.

Dr. Fauci oversaw a manufactured state of emergency for the purpose of imposing a vaccine. He did this by suppressing covid treatments (treatments of which he is on record as acknowledging) — by silencing those urging them. We have along the way figured out that if treatments can be shown to exist, the state of emergency categorization can’t be applied; so no treatments it is. The logic is perverse but effective.

But have we quite grasped that something far worse was perpetrated: the suspension of our Constitutional rights by invoking a supposedly higher standard, the emergency?

It’s the vaccine process writ large; a regulatory coup, but as an attack on the whole society’s political immune system.

Well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets it, and he went on Dana Bash’s show to make the point, though she did her best to prove it by hardly letting him talk.

[August 2nd], an appalled Politico reported, “RFK Jr. tells CNN host that constitutional rights take priority over public health” Visible between every printed line was the implied question: how could ANYTHING take priority over ‘public health?’…

“I think we did virtually everything wrong the last time,” the Secretary explained. He said the government’s “primary obligation” in a future pandemic is “protecting our constitutional rights.” Dana was appalled. “You’re talking about rights,” she gasped, “and I’m asking about a potential public health crisis.”

Dana didn’t challenge Kennedy’s claim that we did virtually everything wrong last time. Instead, Bash acted as though even mentioning individual rights was irrelevant, or maybe even dangerous, when we have an urgent hypothetical health crisis to deal with…

The interview proved that we’ve allowed a dark passenger to be smuggled into the public debate. That dark passenger is an attack on the foundations of our Constitutional framework itself. A technocratic group of largely self-appointed experts is attempting to use “pandemic preparedness” to amend the Constitution and flip it on its head.

Stephen A Smith apologizes to Kyrie Irving for criticism for not taking vaccine

Smith is not someone I follow, as I don’t really care that much about sports, but I will hand it to him for this video. He is not well informed on the topic of vaccines, nor does he seem to understand what has been revealed about the deceptions foisted on the public, but he manages to offer a real apology and to acknowledge the courage it required for Irving to take a stand.

And most of all, Smith does not resort to making the lame and dishonest excuse that “we didn’t know” or “it was scary.” He just owns it. Are there others?

During the masking and lockdown period, I had one very passionate interlocutor who demanded I read a study that she claimed proved that nurses can wear N95 masks all day every day with no ill effects, and that therefore I was WRONG to say that wearing a paper mask is dumb, pointless, and harmful to necessary human interaction.

I duly read the study and it said… exactly the opposite of what she claimed. It definitively showed that nurses who were required to wear masks for their shifts experienced low oxygen and impaired immune systems. When I pointed this out and quoted the relevant passage to her, she doubled down and said that the study showed it’s fine. There was no arguing with those who had been infiltrated with a sort of mass hypochondria.

Did you know there is a whole profession called industrial hygiene? These people study the actual questions of PPE and what works and doesn’t work, based on long-term studies, and they have been doing so for decades.

Here is some information from an industrial hygienist. I had seen cogent testimony he gave before a state senate somewhere but now I can’t find it. He’s kind of low-key but knows his stuff — here’s an example:

Does the Society of Saint Pius X really espouse an Ecclesiology of Substitution? by John Lamont. Lengthy in his effort to get at what the Society is really saying (are they basically Protestants? or no? and should we try to hear them?), and eventually gets around to what most concerns me too, that there is a State of Necessity and saying so doesn’t mean you’re schismatic.

Lamont also makes this excellent point about Canon Law:

The concept of canon law as real law that binds everyone in the Church, including those in authority, belongs to the idea of the Church as a divinely established perfect society with real legal authority over its members, an idea that they believe to be superstitious nonsense. For them, canon law consists in administrative guidelines that they are free to override if they wish, and that can be used in any way they want to further their purposes. The announcement that the bishops, priests and faithful of the SSPX are in schism is in their minds just a useful political tool to further the Roman policy, and a way of signalling their intent to punish and exclude anyone who resists their programme.

The Roman response to the SSPX consecrations is more significant than the consecrations themselves.

The Narnia books are as perfect as books can be and that’s my stand. Some do not like the exclusion of Susan from the final adventure; I get that, because it leaves an unsettling feeling, as of a bad conscience, with the reader. But is that Lewis’s fault? Or is it his impressive insight into the human condition?

There is no "Problem" of Susan

I left this comment on Rios’ article about Susan in the Narnia books:

Good essay! I’m always trepidatious when reading people’s Narnia takes, but you came through… we must consider Susan’s case as “still open.” Lewis’ often reminded his characters and the reader that they wouldn’t necessarily know the stories of others. And he carefully constructed the Narnia narrative to confound our ideas of time.

I’ve always found it silly to accuse him of misogyny. After all, it’s Edmund who commits the worst crime of the books, treason against his own family. Everyone has his own destiny. We happen to be able to see Edmund’s in the course of the account contained in the books; we happen not to know Susan’s, not least because it happens outside of Narnia.

The main thing is that it’s essential to Lewis’ orthodox theology that the free will of his subjects be respected. Susan has free will and one reason readers get offended or hurt by her exclusion (me too) is that we’re all identifying with the characters and, well, we don’t believe in our free will as much as God believes in it.

Lewis really put all the hardest beliefs in his books. We can’t be scandalized by that.

Links from me:

On why it’s a mistake to accept the “we didn’t know, let’s move on” take. Be sure to read to the end to know why I’m not moving on from the misdeeds of Emily Oster, whose Atlantic article calls for amnesty without a reckoning. (I’m really surprised, to be honest, that her article came out in ‘22. She was already in damage-control mode; points for realizing the truth was about to come out even by then.)

On whether I think there could be such a vast conspiracy to take away our basic rights. Well, we have history to look to for examples of how people are easily silenced if made to feel the fear:

My argument about the “state of necessity.” It’s like a stool with three legs to give it structure, but not static like a stool; more like a weapon to hurt the faithful.

Hypochondria is a difficult mental illness — it undermines the one thing you need to get better, which is trust in reality. The authorities used fear to create this syndrome among a large sector of the population.

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