Today the Wall Street Journal has a story on how the debt-ridden households of America are coming to the end of their ropes. But its MSM narrative for the default calamity now gathering a ferocious head of steam could not be more ass-backwards:

Lenders are declining to defer payments for some borrowers who were behind on their payments before the coronavirus laid waste to the U.S. economy.

Baloney!

Or as Dennis Prager tartly observed:

The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem ‘essential’ has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe.

The blindingly obvious truth is that the coronavirus didn’t do it. The Donald’s doctors did.

That is, Fauci, Redfield and Birx. They are Swamp Creatures all, respectively Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Director of the CDC and the global AIDS factotum from the State Department.

And we do mean Swamp Creatures. Between them they have been on the public teat for 132 years as either direct payrollers or harvesters of government grants.

It goes without saying, therefore, that they have no clue how the real world economy works; and that never having met a payroll, raised capital, faced fierce competitors, wrestled with business strategies or struggled to make cash inflows and outflows balance out, they are apparently under the delusion that the blooming, buzzing, throbbing mass of dynamic enterprises that comprise America’s $22 trillion GDP has an on and off switch.

Even then, our real beef is that all three have made so many hideous mistakes during their long years on the government teat, and especially during the last three months of the Covid Hysteria, that they would have been fired long ago in the real world of business.

Indeed, they might have even been fired in the fake world of business called the “Apprentice”, back when the Donald was actually running a real Reality TV Show.

Thus, when the Red Suzerains of Beijing went into the brutal martial law lockdown of Wuhan and the first US case was publicized on January 21, Fauci was asked on Newmax TV whether we “need to worry about this one”.

Said St. Anthony:

Well, you know, obviously, you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But this is not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.

Let’s see.

Having allegedly spent 52 years investigating viruses and pandemics at the NIAID including 38 years running the joint, you’d think that in the face of something as sinister as the brutal martial law lockdown in Wuhan—a city where Fauci’s own NIAID money and minions were operatives at the Wuhan virology laboratory—the good doctor might have been less cavalier about the dangers; and might have also noted that approximately 20,000 Chinese and Americans travel back and forth by air between China and the US each and every day, creating a clear risk of transmission.

But five days latter on January 26 Fauci gave a a further reassuring interview to John Catsimatidis, a syndicated radio host in New York, who asked: “Should they (Americans) be scared?”

‘I don’t think so,’ Fauci said. ‘The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States, but it’s something we, as public health officials, need to take very seriously.’

At a press conference on January 28th at which a bevy of Trump’s doctors including the Secretary of HSS said “Americans should not worry about their own safety,” Fauci also addressed concerns about whether the virus could be easily spread by asymptomatic carriers.

‘The driver of respiratory outbreaks is symptomatic people, not asymptomatic carriers,’ said Fauci.

Within less than 40 days, of course, Fauci authored the notorious guidelines that essentially put millions of actual and potential asymptomatic citizens under house arrest. But as of February 12 Fauci was still pretty relaxed, saying during another news interview:

It’s still an evolving situation. We don’t know exactly where it’s going to go, what the pattern is.

But by February 16 as US cases started to increase, he was talking out of both sides of his mouth on “Face the Nation”. When the host asked him whether he agreed with Trump’s statement that the virus could “tick down in the warmer months ahead”, he was seeing it both ways:

This virus, we don’t know. But it is not unreasonable to say that influenza, for example, which peaks in the winter, you would certainly expect it by March, April and May to taper down, as well as typical common cold coronaviruses. That’s not an unreasonable statement. However, we do not know what this particular virus is gonna do so. So we would think it would be a stretch to assume that it’s going to disappear with the warm weather.

By the end of the month on February 29 he was tacking even more when he said on on NBC’s “Today” show that,

…..the risk of disease at the time was ‘still low’ but stressed that the situation ‘could change’ once cases of community spread were reported in the US.

So it was only in mid-March, when the now utterly discredited Imperial College model appeared with its 2.2 million US death projection, that Fauci and the Donald’s other doctors sprung into full on Covid Hysteria mode.

That, in turn, resulted in the Donald’s panicked reversal on March 13 when he precipitously declared a national emergency late Friday afternoon so as to not further spook the stock market, or so he thought.

But what green-horn Trump clearly didn’t think about was that the declaration of a national emergency was a screaming invitation to all of his political enemies—and especially the Trump-hating CNN/MSM—to got into full-throated fear-mongering about the Covid-19 now that it had reached the level of a Trump-endorsed national crisis.

In a flash, in fact, the political door was thrown wide-open for the Dem mayors and governors to unleash what quickly became the stay-at-home and lockdown mayhem. That’s because they now had full political cover to attack their own economies, and were being green-lighted to fall back on Uncle Sam for tens of billion of Federal booty to replace what would otherwise have been an instantaneous drain on their own treasuries.

Needless to say, upon pivoting on a dime from “it’s no problem” to “I’m now a War President” doing battle with a deathly pandemic, the Donald simply made himself hostage to his camarilla of doctors, who were now free to step up their fear game and thereby bask in the adulation of the national press corps that was fresh out of antiTrump bullets.

That is, RussiaGate had been interred at the hand of Mueller himself; UkraineGate came a cropper as fast as it was stood up by the House Dems; and and the Impeachment Assault ended with the proverbial whimper, not a bang.

Indeed, the Donald’s utterly misbegotten and destructive daily Coronavirus Task Force briefing, which commenced at the time, allowed these three obscure career Swamp Dwellers to become overnight TV stars.

So even as Deborah Birx was rechristening herself as the Scarf Lady from Foggy Bottom, the Donald gave her and the others all the rope they needed to hang him out to dry as the promulgator and sponsor of Lockdown Nation:

‘To unleash the full power of the federal government I am officially declaring a national emergency,’ President Trump announced Friday (March 13) during a press conference. ‘Two very big words.’ This declaration will ‘open up access’ to federal funds — some $50 billion — to fight COVID-19, he said.

Why, yes, those were two very big words indeed. What they did was essentially unleash the Donald’s trio of doctors to turn what was a nasty seasonal flu epidemic into the second coming of the Bubonic Plague, and with it, the most devastating governmental assault on capitalist prosperity in modern history.

In today’s on-line world, there is probably no better real time measure of the pulse of business activity in the social congregation precincts of the American economy than Open Table reservation activity.

Not since midnight on January 17, 1920, when the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) became effective, has business activity in a major sector of the economy (bars and saloons) crashed with such cliff-diving intensity.

Within days, reservations were down by, well, 100 percent!

Here’s the thing. When did the Donald’s doctors ever explain why they changed their mind on a dime?

When did they conclude that the new coronavirus (SARS-C0V-2), which had been already gene-sequenced by late January, constituted an utterly new, death star pathogen that differed from all other seasonal viruses and coronaviruses in terms of its:

The answer, of course, is they never did. The Donald’s doctors were too busy being TV stars basking in the power and fame that came from being the Czars of Lockdown Nation.

Yet the one and only faintly plausible basis for the brutal Lockdown Nation regime that has been foisted on the American people is that all five of the above propositions were true and could have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt at the time the Open Table index plunged straight down in the chart above.

Actually, none of them could have been validated in mid-March when the horrible deed of Lockdown Nation was launched and none of them can be remotely supported now, as we will further elaborate in Part 4.

But suffice it here to start with the easy ones. We now know, and it had been fairly evident all along, that the SARS-COV-2 virus travels through the population at the same or even slower speed than the annual influenza viruses. And among children, it is decidedly less contagious and moves far slower than is the case for common influenza.

Likewise, it has been evident for weeks and weeks that the Covid is not an random sample Grim Reaper, but a vicious assailant against the old, frail, and already afflicted with life-threatening medical conditions.

The chart below is just based on age cohorts and tells you all you need to know about the folly of universal quarantines.

And, of course, if you were to further over-lay morbidity conditions on this age-based segmentation, the picture would be even far more dramatic. That is, it would actually constitute prima facie evidence that the doctors’ plot to extinguish the virus after it had been roaming freely among the US population for at least 50 days was the very definition of gross malpractice.

Still, Dr. Fauci can’t seem to cope with the blithering truths embedded above or restrain himself when it comes to keeping the public on the knife’s edge of fear. That much was evident when Tennessee Senator Alexander asked him about colleges re-opening this fall:

Senator Alexander: ‘What would you say to the chancellor of the University of Tennessee Knoxville or the principal of the public school about how to persuade parents and students how to return to school in August?’

Dr. Fauci: ‘I would be very realistic with the chancellor and tell her that in this case, that the idea of having treatments available, or a vaccine, to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something of a bit of a bridge too far. 

‘If this were a situation where you had a vaccine, that would really be the end of the issue in a positive way. But as I mentioned in my opening remarks, even at the top speed we’re going, we don’t see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals to get back to school this term.’

Huh?

As is evident in the data above, the WITH Covid death rate for the college age population cohort (15-24 years) is slightly less than one per million!

No one, but no one, who is certifiably sane would shutdown America’s 24 million strong higher education institutions owing to the risk of death at 1 per million…..unless there was some other angle to the scheme.

And, of course, there is. Dr. Fauci and the Donald’s other doctors apparently fear that college students may go home during Thanksgiving break for Turkey Dinner with grams and gramps.

But for crying out loud. That’s not medical advice, nor is it rooted in epidemiology or any other science.

It’s an out and out social control maneuver, and reflects a policy designed to thwart, rather than enhance, the only thing which ever kills off a virus—the corona variety or any other.

Namely, herd immunity.

We have a lot more on that topic on Part 4, but its opposite of universal quarantine is surely medically dubious and an absolute economy killer.

That is, the doctors plot since mid-March has been essentially to put the entire US population under house arrest in order to protect the 2-5 percent of the population which is old, frail, medically afflicted and therefore uniquely vulnerable to a virus that otherwise has mild impacts on nearly everyone else it infects.

Yesterday, we noted that the data for Illinois demonstrates this truth in spades. With fully half of the state’s reported WITH Covid fatalities having occurred in nursing home, the especially brutal form of Lockdown Nation being imposed by Governor Pritzker is flat-out irrational.

But it also amounts to taking the vast bulk of Illinois’ 12.5 million population hostage in order to protect people who are essentially institutionalized and therefore outside of the ebb and flow of daily commerce and economic life in the state.

But for want of doubt, this table on WITH Covid deaths among Illinois 100 counties amounts to a withering indictment of the doctors’ universal quarantine policy.

Millions of lives and tens of thousands of businesses have been uprooted, especially in the out-state areas of Illinois. And yet in fully half of the state’s counties there has not been a single WITH Covid death!

Needless to say, this is not the first time Dr. Fauci has left a trail of Hysteria in the wake of his malpractice. Way back in 1983 when he was trying to make himself famous and move up the ladder at NIAID, he famously claimed that hugging your family members could result in the transmission of AIDS!

That’s right. One scientist and doctor was the sole author of a paper published in the prestigious medical journal JAMA, which stated that AIDS might be transmissible through “routine close contact, as within a family household.”

That turned out not to be even remotely true, of course, but in the meantime the media had widely propagated the myth, naturally setting off a wave of hysteria.

Nevertheless, within months the author was promoted to chief of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a position Dr. Fauci, regrettably, still holds.

Reprinted with permission form David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

Wisconsin’s supreme court has ruled that the governor’s ordered lockdown of the state is unconstitutional. Bars and restaurants threw their doors open to willing customers and the celebration was like the end of prohibition. The lockdown crowd warns of “chaos” if people are allowed to go about their business of their own free will. Also today: tyrannical Michigan governor strips 77 year old barber of his license. Watch today’s Liberty Report:

Ironically, as coronavirus deaths continue to decline in the US and as more states are “opening up,” there appears to be an increase in mask wearing. Are the face masks going to prevent the spread of the virus? Will they protect people from the virus? Or may they actually cause harm to some people? Or…even: are they a new form of “virtue signaling,” a show of submission to the “authorities”? Plenty of prominent MDs – including Fauci not long ago – have condemned the mass masking of America. Are they right? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

When the history of this coronavirus scare is written, it should note how wildly inaccurate were the projections of the “experts” and what a draconian response was put in place based on bad data. When the deaths did not add up to projections, the authorities started massively cooking the books, counting every “probable” covid death as a covid death. While the US accused China and Iran of misreporting the numbers, the US is doing the same thing on a much larger scale. Meanwhile new scare stories are released in the compliant media every day warning of dire consequences if we dare to re-open any part of the economy. How much of this is enough? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

From Maine to California, Americans are defying government officials and reclaiming their First Amendment rights to assemble and protest. They are opening their businesses up in open defiance of the authoritarian political leaders. The resistance is building and thankfully remains (mostly) peaceful. How long until the dam breaks and the lockdown regime comes crashing down? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

Food industry leaders are warning that a huge food crisis is coming, with slaughterhouses closing across the country and the food supply chain badly damaged. Politicians will blame this coming crisis on the coronavirus, but their unprecedented “lockdown” policies have disrupted every aspect of the economy. Plus – now the World Health Organization is holding Sweden up as a model on how to handle the coronavirus? Flip flop? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

According to the CDC’s long established mortality models, 687,000 Americans were supposed to die during the 12 weeks between February 1 and April 18. 

But only 666,000 actually complied. So the Grim Reaper was deprived of his seasonally adjusted mortality quota, even as 21,000 families were spared, at least temporarily, of the loss and grief which accompanies the passing of a loved one.

 Either way, how in the hell does that square with Lockdown Nation—an unprecedented government ordered economic heart attack purportedly designed to prevent a Black Plague of illness and death?

 To be sure, a better than garden variety recession was already due after a record 129- month long business expansion. But it was the sudden, virulent eruption of the Covid Death Hysteria in the halls of government that turned a scheduled business cycle contraction into a monumental catastrophe. 

Indeed, the unfolding collapse now underway shouldn’t be called either a recession or a depression. These terms denote the macroeconomic contraction triggered by bursting credit or other financial bubbles and they usually take many months to reach full intensity. 

But this one literally arrived at warp speed and with orders of magnitude greater contractionary force than normal business cycle downturns. It is therefore sui generis; it stemmed from panicked officialdom who ordered households and businesses alike to abruptly “cease and desist” from their daily economic activity upon penalty of fine, jail and public opprobrium. 

The good folks at Moody’s Analytics captured the breathtaking speed of the resulting plunge in the chart below in which they tracked the number of U.S. counties falling under lockdown orders (blue bars) with an estimate of the cumulative loss in daily GDP (ascending red line). 

Whether this is accurate to the percentage point is immaterial and will be adjudicated after several years of jobs and GDP data revisions. But what can’t be gainsaid is that in the short span between March 16 and April 6th depicted in the graphic—something like one-third of US GDP ceased to happen. 

When in the modern day world of nearly unfathomably complex economic linkages, incredibly long supply chains and interactive feed-back loops you have one-third of economic activity go dark in just 21 days, the damage is likely to be enormous, even if the interruption is comparatively short-lived. 

But in the present instance the US economy was so fragile and deeply impaired owing to 30-years of debt, speculation and malinvestment-fueled false prosperity that it resembled an economic hemophiliac stumbling into a knife fight. The bleeding will be profuse and long-lasting because the American body economic had no defenses. 

We shall lay out chapter and verse on the cash flow vulnerability of the preponderant share of US households and businesses in subsequent installments. But sometimes a picture is truly worth a thousand words and this– cars lined-up at a San Diego food bank—is one of them. 

Ordinary urban poor folk don’t line up at the soup kitchen in their late vintage autos and SUVs. This is the hand-to-mouth economy lined up for food in cars that will soon be nabbed by the repo man. 

So the question recurs. Why did Lockdown Nation strike the everyday American economy out of the blue and who is responsible? 

That is to say, Lockdown Nation itself is the product of a contagion of public policy Hysteria, so who is Patient Zero? 

We think there is little doubt that it is the Donald himself, as we chronicle below. It is only his overweening, pugnacious, polarizing political persona that could have transformed a moderate public health threat into a politicized death struggle that is literally suffocating the American economy and the social life which depends upon it. 

But for want of doubt let us remind that there was never any case for Lockdown Nation — not on March 16 when the Trump White House issued its stay-at-home guidelines nor subsequently — based on the pubic health impact of the coronavirus. 

That’s because Covid-19 would be considered a despicable bully if it were an animate being. It overwhelmingly brings serious illness and death upon the old, frail and already disease-ridden, not the general population. 

Even many of the rare deaths among younger people appear to be attributable to an unusual genetic condition which causes the number one killer of the coronavirus—the human immune system—to launch an unhinged counterattack called a “cytokine storm” that ends up maiming or killing the patient, not the virus (fortunately, there are immune system suppressants that can treat these if caught early enough). 

Thus, as of April 25 when the CDC had scored 40,072 “confirmed or presumed” Covid19 deaths, the breakdown by age was unassailably dispositive: 

So the average mortality rate for the entire US population as of April 25, which was 12.2 deaths per 100,000, is completely meaningless from the perspective of remedial public health policy. It is a reminder of the old adage that you can drown in a river with an average depth of 3 feet if you end up in a deep, vicious eddy pool. 

Likewise, you don’t rationally shut down schools when the mortality rate for kids is a rounding error; and keeping the kids out of school does nothing for their grandparents and great-grandparents if they are self-isolated anyway, as the should be, when their mortality risk is 22,800 times higher! 

Indeed, among the cohorts of the working age population age 35-64, there is absolutely no basis in the mortality rates for shutting down places of work. The normal, total mortality rate for this 126 million-strong core of the work force, in fact, is nearly 500 per 100,000 annually. 

So the Covid death count to date amounts to just 1.3% of the normal mortality rate. What posse of fools advised the Donald, therefore, to monkey-hammer the working economy on account of that? 

Moreover, our eddy pool analogy could not be more spot on. A new analysis of elderly New York hospital patients who died WITH Covid-19 showed that 94% suffered from at least one life-threatening morbidity such as hypertension or respiratory illnesses, and 88% had at least two. 

That is to say, based one age alone, the Covid is a perfect case of the Pareto 20/80 rule. In this case, the 65 years and older population (52.4 million) accounts for 16% of the US total population (327.2 million) but 79% of the WITH Covid-19 deaths. 

But when you overlay, the comorbidity incidence among those 16%, the real highly vulnerable population turns out to be 5% or less. 

So the fact that we got to Lockdown Nation with lightening speed given these facts is surely a case of President Truman’s famous sign on his Oval Office desk that read, “the buck stops here”. 

The truth is, the Donald is lazy, weak, indecisive, notoriously ill-informed and an atrocious chooser of advisors, and it is exactly those attributes that lead to the March 16 stay-at-home guidelines from the Oval Office. 

Had the Donald not foolishly embraced the misbegotten project of the Infectious Disease Lobby to stop the spread of the coronavirus through the US population cold, which is self-evidently impossible with a ultra-contagious airborne virus, the Dem mayors and governors would not have had the political hall pass to instantly pile on the lockdown wagon. 

Ironically, the Dems were desperately searching for a way to discredit the Donald’s phony Greatest Economy Ever boast, and the Donald handed them what amounts to an economic bunker buster bomb on a platter. 

Indeed, choosing bad advisors and listening to them is the Donald signature failing. After all, if the gravamen of your foreign policy is America First and you appoint as your top national security advisor the most unhinged apostle of Empire First on the entire planet, John Bolton, you are either stupid as hell or semi-comatose. 

So the Donald is, in fact, the Patient Zero who spread the virus of Lockdown Nation because he was either too lazy or too dumb ask the obvious question, as we will amplify in Part 2. 

But in the meanwhile, WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins got it right: 

We started off sensibly. ‘This is not something [American families] generally need to worry about,’ said CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier in mid-January. ‘It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,’ said Dr. Anthony Fauci a week later. 

Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York, urged residents to go about their business normally as recently as March 11. 

But then on March 16, the Donald entered the White House briefing room and announced a sweeping plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus. 

And it was based on the extremely bad advice of Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady (Deborah Birx), both lifetime government bureaucrats who had absolutely no concept of the economic Mayhem that Lockdown Nation would instantly foster. 

So Patient Zero thereafter droned on night after night during this reality TV show in the stupid belief that the US economy was so strong that it could handle a 15-day Spring Vacation. 

Never was a US President more misguided: 

Stay home for 15 days, he told Americans. Avoid groups of more than 10 people. ‘If everyone makes this change, or these critical changes, and sacrifices now, we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus,’ he said. 

On Sunday, the night before Day 15, Trump told the country to stick with the plan for another month, until April 30. 

‘The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end,’ Trump said. 

‘We’re getting rid of the virus,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re doing. That’s the best thing we can do. By the way, for the markets. For everything. It’s very simple. It’s a very simple solution. We want to get rid of it.’ 

Indeed, the Donald got so bamboozled in part because of his own massively exaggerated view of his role. He came to view the absolutely catastrophic stay-at-home guidelines as merely another case of closing things down which aren’t his to close–like the border with Mexico. 

Trump described the decision to issue the guidelines as ‘one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made’ and said he was skeptical when his medical experts came to him with the plan. 

‘I wasn’t happy about it,’ he said on Fox News last week. ‘They came in — experts — and they said, “We are going to have to close the country.” I said, “We have never closed the country before. This has never happened before.” I said, “Are you serious about this?” 

But without hardly a further moment of reflection, he promptly declared himself a War President, and we were off the races to Lockdown Nation. 

But on this matter, the great Randolph Bourne was more than clairvoyant fully one century ago: 

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. 

They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. 

The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

You won’t want to miss this very special Liberty Report! Former University of Ottawa physics professor Denis Rancourt joins today’s program to examine the science behind government and media claims about the coronavirus outbreak. Does a national lockdown make any sense? Why did the scientists that governments listen to seem to get the numbers all wrong? And why have other scientists who challenged the accepted wisdom been silenced and ignored? What are the numbers? Today on the Liberty Report:

From New York to Texas and beyond, small business owners are pushing back against local and state governments who have deemed their livelihoods to be “non-essential.” Can the authorities stop this growing revolt? Plus, only government could bankrupt the medical system during a “pandemic” – US hospitals going broke. Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

How will the United States manage opening up its economy after the coronavirus shutdown? Ron Paul Institute Director Daniel McAdams is interviewed on SkyNews Australia on how incredibly wrong the “experts” have been on the “pandemic” of 2020. Americans are furious at the mistakes of their government and are out in the streets demanding their rights to go back to work:

They say we must “follow the science” and not resist the near-total lockdown of the economy and our way of life. But is “the science” tainted by politics and ideology? Also in today’s program: Houston Police push back against Harris County “mandatory mask” orders, the potential danger of ventilators, and a look at Bill Gates’ dreams for 2020. Don’t miss today’s Liberty Report:

Bill Gates doesn’t need the money, that is for sure. So what motivates him to spend billions of dollars on organizations that seek to destroy our privacy and run our lives? It is a big ego trip…or worse? Plus – shameful arrest of a mother in Idaho and Texas Governor Abbott’s pitifully weak “recovery” plan. All in today’s Liberty Report: