The Revolt Of The Public: Trouble Seeing Things That Erupt From Below

taibbi  |  The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”

The Revolt of the Public became a cult classic in the Trump years for a variety of reasons, resonating with audiences spanning the political spectrum, from left to right to in between, everywhere except the traditional media consensus. It describes a basic problem of authority in the digital age and for that reason will continue to have relevance into the future. But its most striking feature is how completely it nailed the coming Trump era.

Published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public may be alone among the countless books about the Trump years to correctly peg its core destabilizing problem. While conventional pundits blame everyone from Russians to white nationalists to “fake news” for all that currently ails us, Gurri focused on the inherent problem of authority in the digital age. If you follow his thinking, the specific forms that recent revolts have taken — Brexit, Trump, etc. — have been far less important than what he describes as the “nihilist impulse” behind them, “the wish to smash down whatever stands.” In America, this impulse found Trump, not the other way around. It also could have (and has, in other countries) come from the left instead of the right. The relentless focus on Trump as the center of all evil on earth has mostly served to deflect from a broader narrative about distrust of institutional authority that far pre-dates Trump.

Through a series of case studies ranging from Egypt to Tunisia to Italy to the campaign of Barack Obama, Gurri lays out how snowballing disgust with the blundering arrogance of ruling parties was everywhere leading to upheavals. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party called the “Five Star” movement won 25% of the vote. Inspired by a comedian-blogger named Beppe Grillo, named after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio, the party, Gurri wrote, “lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment.”

Gurri saw such outbursts everywhere, even in the election of Barack Obama, since “the U.S. presidential elections of 2008 [were] an early instance of the public on the move against the established order.” The political scientists and pundits who puzzle over the fact that a great many people voted for both Obama and Trump, shouldn’t. Both men positioned themselves as outsiders, both were aided by a lack of a track record and a deliberately vague platform, making both effective vehicles for expressing popular discontent.

 

Andrew Cuomo A Case Study In The Loss Of Public Trust In Industrial "Democracy"

newyorker |  But why did it take two months for Boylan’s accusations to be taken seriously by reporters, lawmakers, and law-enforcement officials? Her December 13th tweet received some initial news coverage. “Bombshell Cuo Claim,” one headline in the New York Post read. But, by the end of the month, the bombshell had fizzled. In an Albany Times Union article on December 26th that recapped the Governor’s year in the “national spotlight,” Boylan merited just three sentences. Partly, this can be explained by Boylan’s decision in December not to talk to reporters, and by the fact that she was, at the time, a lone accuser, whereas now she is one of several. But there is another reason: soon after she went public, someone tried to damage Boylan’s credibility and undercut her accusations by leaking damaging information about her to the press.

Within hours of Boylan’s tweet on December 13th, several news outlets reported that they had “obtained” state-government documents relating to Boylan’s job performance in the Cuomo administration. The documents—described by the Associated Press as “personnel memos,” by the Post as “personnel documents,” and by the Times Union as “personnel records”—said that several women had complained to a state-government human-resources office that Boylan had “behaved in a way towards them that was harassing, belittling, and had yelled and been generally unprofessional.” According to the Post’s account, “three black employees went to state human resources officials accusing Boylan, who is white, of being a ‘bully’ who ‘treats them like children.’ ” According to the Associated Press, the documents said that Boylan resigned after being “counseled” about the complaints in a meeting with a top administration lawyer. Reporters who wanted to dig into Boylan’s accusations against Cuomo now had to contend with the possibility that there were people out there who might have accusations to make against Boylan. At best, the documents seemed to raise questions about Boylan’s reliability. At worst, they painted her as a racist.

In a statement, Boylan’s attorney, Jill Basinger, told me Boylan has never seen the documents that the news accounts referenced—which Basinger called a “supposed ‘personnel file.’ ” Basinger accused the Governor’s office of leaking the documents, and also said she expects that the attorney general’s investigation will look into the leak. “It is both shocking and disgusting that the governor and his staff would seek to smear victims of sexual harassment,” Basinger said. “Ms. Boylan will not be intimidated or silenced. She intends to cooperate fully with the Attorney General’s investigation.”

At a press conference last week, Cuomo said that he supported “a woman’s right to come forward,” and that he was “sorry for whatever pain I caused.” At the same time, he pleaded with New Yorkers to allow him some due process. “Wait for the facts from the attorney general’s report before forming an opinion,” he said. That’s how the Governor would like to be treated. But that’s not how he traditionally has treated others. For decades, the Governor has had a reputation for scorched-earth tactics, and for retaliating against those who corner him, threaten him, or simply displease him. As Boylan weighed whether to come forward last year, her lawyer told me, she “believed that she would be retaliated against for going public with her mistreatment.” One former senior official in the Cuomo administration whom I spoke to said it was impossible to imagine that Cuomo himself hadn’t approved the leak of the Boylan documents. “There’s no question he would know about it, and direct it,” the former official said. “That’s how he would think.”

In the nineteen-nineties, while Cuomo was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, under Bill Clinton, he fell into a long-running feud with Susan Gaffney, the agency’s inspector general. In 2000, Gaffney accused Cuomo of sexual discrimination. “Gaffney claims that Cuomo has called her at home on weekends to berate her, has started collecting information to smear her, and has leaked damaging information about her,” the Post reported, at the time. In the same story, a Cuomo spokesperson said, of Gaffney, “This is nothing more than a diversion from her misconduct regarding the downloading of pornography in her office and retaliation for our efforts to get to the bottom of it.”

In 2013, Michael Fayette, a state Department of Transportation engineer, gave a few quotes about his department’s operations during Hurricane Irene to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. His statements were innocuous—“We were up for it,” he told the paper—but they hadn’t been cleared by the higher-ups in Albany. The press found out that Fayette’s superiors were moving to terminate him, and started asking how it was possible for someone to be fired over such a harmless episode. In response, a top Cuomo aide gave a radio interview during which he read aloud misconduct allegations contained in Fayette’s personnel files, including that he’d had an improper relationship with a subordinate. “They can run over you like you’re a freaking speed bump,” Fayette, who retired before he could be fired, told me, last week.

Denmark Suspended Use Of The Astrazeneca mRNA Jabs

NYTimes |  Denmark suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine because of concerns about possible links to an increased risk of blood clots, the Danish Health Authority announced on Thursday. Iceland and Norway later also announced suspensions in administering the shots.

Danish authorities said all use of the vaccine in the country would be halted for at least 14 days after several severe cases of clots were reported among people who had received the shot, the national broadcaster DR reported.

Still, Danish health officials said they could not yet know if the clots — including a case in which a patient died — were caused by the vaccine, and that an investigation was launched to be “on the safe side.”

Within hours, the European Medicines Agency said in a statement that there is currently no indication the vaccine “has caused these conditions.” The agency, which is Europe’s main drug regulator, said the vaccine’s benefits continue to outweigh its risks, and countries can continue to administer the vaccine while the cases of blood clots are investigated.

The agency’s safety committee is already looking into all cases involving blood clots reported after AstraZeneca vaccinations.

Amid the flurry of suspensions, the Netherlands announced that it would continue to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine despite the concerns voiced by other countries.

The company did not have an immediate response to the suspensions.

Magnus Heunicke, the Danish minister of health, posted a message on Twitter confirming that the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been suspended, “following a signal of possible serious side effects in the form of fatal blood clots.”

 

Moderna Jab Ate Up Young Healthy Utah Nurse Like Hotcakes!!!

NYPost |  A 39-year-old single mom in Utah with no underlying medical conditions died four days after receiving her second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, according to a report.

Kassidi Kurill, a mother of one from Ogden, received the vaccine due to her work as a surgical tech for several plastic surgeons, KUTV reported.

“She was absolutely fine with getting it. In fact, she told all of us, ‘It’s fine, you guys should all get it,’” her father, Alfred Hawley, told the outlet.

Kurill experienced a sore arm after the first jab of Moderna, but had no other side effects.

But things took a tragic turn after she received her second dose on Feb. 1.

“She came in early and said her heart was racing and she felt like she need to get to the emergency room,” Hawley said.  

When they arrived at the ER, Kurill was throwing up. Hawley, a retired fighter pilot, told doctors his daughter had just received her second shot.

“They did a blood test and immediately came back and said she was very, very sick, and her liver was not functioning,” he told KUTV.

Kurill’s older sister Kristin, who lives in Arizona, said she knew her sister had gone to the hospital, but the

She thought her sister would get an IV and be back home in an hour, but Hawley knew they were not going home anytime soon.

“It was a total shock, and I was even afraid to tell my wife,” he told the news outlet.

Kurill was soon flown to Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, a trauma center, as her liver was failing and a transplant was believed to be her best chance at survival.

Kristin jumped on the first flight to Utah but was not allowed into the hospital because of coronavirus protocols, so she waited with her sister’s daughter Emilia, 9, as the family hoped for a miracle.

Kurill’s parents volunteered to donate a portion of their livers but never got the chance to offer the lifesaving gift when their daughter’s liver, kidneys and heart shut down.

She died 30 hours after arriving at the hospital.

speed at which she deteriorated was “so unexpected.”

Kansas Says "Get Your Ass Back In The Class - And Karen - You're On Your Own...,"

fox4kc  |  A big change is coming for students this fall in one of the metro’s largest school districts.

Shawnee Mission will not offer a remote learning option, so students will have to attend in-person or transfer elsewhere.

The news is welcomed by parents who’ve fought for full in-person learning to know remote school won’t even be on the table come fall. But no one can predict what the pandemic will be like in August, and that’s why other families are frustrated they may have to change schools to stay safe.

Remote learning are two words no one was ready for this time last year.

“It was kind of a shock, but you know I’ve got two children and have a compromised immune system so completely understood and supported that decision,” said Shawnee Mission School District parent Beth Koon.

With her family’s health concerns, Koon decided the best thing was to continue remote learning through Shawnee Mission Schools this year.

“That was just a very easy decision for us to decide to stay home with the kids and stay safe,” Koon said.

Koon said her kids are excelling in online classes. So she was stunned to see a letter from SMSD Tuesday, saying remote learning won’t be available next school year.

“To presume that the pandemic is over, there’s no spread and that adults or families like mine with immune compromised family members, who do need to make these decisions to isolate, to stay safe, to pull that rug out from under us I felt was very alarming,” Koon said.

While the district knows some kids have thrived in remote learning, others have struggled, and it wants to offer the best in-person experience possible. In a letter to parents, the district wrote, “Absent a pandemic, there is no legal way to continue providing the remote learning option.”

“We may still be in the pandemic to some degree. We won’t have kids vaccinated, but the changes that the governor had authority to put in place and that the Kansas Department of Education had authority to put in place, those will have expired and there’s no indication those will be renewed,” said David Smith, a SMSD spokesperson.

 

Politically Organized Law Enforcement Has Been Very Piggish At The Taxpayer Trough...,

NYTimes |  Ron DeLord, a fiery former Texas cop turned labor organizer, has long taught union leaders how to gain power and not let go. He has likened a police union going after an elected official to a cheetah devouring a wildebeest, and suggested that taking down just one would make others fall in line.

He helped write the playbook that police unions nationwide — seeking better pay, perks and protections from discipline — have followed for decades. Build a war chest. Support your friends. Smear your enemies. Even scare citizens with the threat of crime. One radio spot in El Paso warned residents to support their local police or face “the alternative,” as the sound of gunshots rang out.

“We took weak, underpaid organizations and built them into what everyone today says are powerful police unions,” Mr. DeLord said in a recent interview. “You may say we went too far. I say you don’t know how far you’ve gone until you’re at the edge of the envelope.”

That moment may be now.

Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of police last May set off protests nationwide, 27 states and Washington D.C. have adopted new police oversight and reform laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Officials in Boston, Los Angeles and other cities agreed to limit police spending. In November, voters overwhelmingly approved 17 ballot measures in six states to rein in police officers. 

Unions — many of which have dug in despite the protests and challenged officers’ firings in high-profile incidents — are also increasingly seen as out of step with the public. Officers in big cities can earn more than $100,000 a year, far more than citizens they are assigned to protect. That success has stoked a backlash. Many cities say they are unable, or unwilling, to pay for ever mounting police costs.

As cities from Portland, Ore., to Chicago negotiate new police contracts this year, local officials are seeking to gain back concessions made decades ago.

Union and city leaders are especially watching negotiations in San Antonio. Years ago, officers there locked in some of the most highly coveted perks and protections of any department in the country: rules that helped shield officers from discipline; fat pensions, Cadillac health insurance plans, even taxpayer-funded payments for divorce lawyers. Their success became a case study for unions nationwide.

During the last negotiations, city officials claimed the contract would bankrupt San Antonio. Now, city officials are focused on undoing some disciplinary protections. Adding pressure, a May ballot measure in the Texas city could eliminate the union’s ability to bargain — a devastating blow.

 

 

Economic And Cultural (Power) Discontents Of A Fallen Professional Class (Redux 9/30/20)

benjaminstudebaker  |  Then there are jobs that require a degree but which are less secure and less lucrative than they used to be. Attacks on teachers’ unions, for instance, are gradually eroding the benefits and security which teachers have traditionally enjoyed. As this happens, the distinction in living standard between teachers and ordinary workers becomes blurrier and blurrier. Tenured teachers still have a better situation than most workers, but fewer and fewer teachers are put in position to acquire tenure. Within teaching, then, there is a minority of secure, tenured faculty–who are part of the rump professional class. Then there are teachers who have no realistic path to tenure and have been effectively turned into casual workers. These teachers are part of the fallen professional class. The rump professional class and the fallen professional class have largely the same education, but are nonetheless treated very differently, because the system is not interested in rewarding their merit but in reducing the cost of the education system.

The fallen professionals want to be part of the rump professional class, but can no longer access it materially. They can only access it culturally, by maintaining their familiarity with the language and ideas of the rump professionals. For this reason, the fallen professionals try very hard to continue to be part of the culture of the rump professionals. This enables many rump professionals to make money off their fallen counterparts by selling an ersatz version of the experience of professional class life. This takes the form of podcasts, YouTube videos, and prestige TV shows and films. By consuming this media, the fallen professional continues to feel part of the rump professional class, even as the fallen professional is robbed of the material benefits of being a member.

Because the fallen professionals want to feel superior to the ordinary workers, the rump professionals have a financial incentive to sell ideas which flatter this superiority complex. This has led, in recent years, to the development of a woke industry which invents new terms and grounds for taking offence. By using these terms and taking offence in these ways, the fallen professionals feel they are participating in the culture of the rump professionals and they can distinguish themselves from the ordinary workers, who fail to use the language or to recognise the offensiveness.

The rump professionals justify this commercialisation of radicalism on the grounds that it is ostensibly morally committed to resisting racism, patriarchy, fascism, or even capitalism itself. But the main effect of the product is to create cultural barriers between the fallen professionals and the ordinary workers, so the fallen professionals will continue to politically identify with the rump professionals and therefore with the rich. The language is used to label the ordinary worker a deplorable bigot, and the ordinary worker responds by seeking the absolute destruction of these professionals through right nationalist politics. Mortified by the right nationalism of the workers, the rump and fallen professionals lean ever harder into denouncing them as bigots, creating a vicious cycle which pushes the workers further and further to the right.

For some time now, the left has sought to use these fallen professionals as “class traitors”. They are supposed to lead left-wing movements and organise on the ground. But the fallen professionals cannot do this, because they have contempt for the people they are trying to lead. This contempt is nurtured by the cultural content manufactured by the rump professionals.

None of this is anyone’s fault, individually. Because it’s getting harder and harder to be part of the rump professional class, would-be professionals must do everything they can to compete, and that means they have to look for money wherever they can find it. Those who make it must make money off those who do not. Those who do not were fed lies from childhood. They were told that a professional class life was achievable, and they were told it would be wonderful and fulfilling. Their desire to get the recognition and meaning they were promised is a reasonable consequence of the way they were socialised. And how can the ordinary worker react in any other way? The worker cannot have dignity without resisting a professional culture that constantly denigrates workers for lacking elite education.

Why Must These Union Big-Wigs ALWAYS Be Lying Butt-Ugly Trolls?

Newsweek |   A private Facebook group from a teachers union in Los Angeles warned members not to post images of Spring break vacations online after the union voted to remain closed for in-person instruction.

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 @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/KxQc7k450T

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) March 9, 2021

Members of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union were told to avoid sharing images of vacations in a leaked private Facebook group to avoid controversy with parents, Fox 11 Los Angeles reported Monday.

"Friendly reminder: If you are planning any trips for Spring Break, please keep that off of Social Media. 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 post said.

The private Facebook group, called "UTLA FB GROUP-Members Only" has about 5,700 members. UTLA represents teachers across Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the state with about 600,000 students, or roughly 10 percent, of California's public schoolchildren

The warning came just days after UTLA overwhelmingly voted to remain closed for in-person learning, unless the union's full list of demands are met.

Those demands include that Los Angeles County has less widespread COVID infections, staff are fully vaccinated or provided access to full vaccines, and safety conditions are in put in place, according to the union's website. Los Angeles County is currently in California's purple tier of COVID-19 restrictions, meaning that the area has "widespread" infections with more than an 8 percent positivity rate.

"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 statement.

"As much as educators long to be back to in-person instruction, it must be done safely for the sake of students, staff, and families. That has been our guiding principal from Day 1 of this pandemic," Myart-Cruz added.

200 Highly Skilled People Are Literally Transforming Human Life On Earth And Beyond

wired |  I think I felt a visceral resistance at times to the notion that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be inheritable. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who are themselves afflicted by horrible genetic problems, or who have children who are suffering from them. And when our species got slammed by a deadly virus, it made me more open to the idea that we should use whatever talents we have in order to thrive and be healthy. So I’m now even more open to gene editing done for medical purposes, whether that’s sickle cell anemia, or Huntington’s, or Tay-Sachs, or even to increase our resistance to viruses and other pathogens and to cancer.

I still have worries. One is I don’t want gene editing to be something only the rich can afford and it leads to encoding inequalities into our societies. And, secondly, I want to make sure we don’t reduce the wonderful diversity that exists within the human species.

Do you have any ideas for how to do that?

I spend the last few chapters of my book wrestling with that question. And I hope not to preach, but to allow the reader to go hand in hand with me and Jennifer Doudna and figure out on their own what their hopes and fears are about this so-called brave new world we’re all stepping into together. I once had a mentor say there are two types of people who come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. He said, “For heaven's sake, be a storyteller, because the world’s got too many preachers.”

So by telling the tale of Crispr in all its scientific triumphs and rivalries and excitement, I hope to turn people on to the science. But I also want to make them more qualified to wrestle with one of the most important questions we’re going to face as a society over the next couple of decades: When we can program molecules the way we program microchips, what is it we want to do with this fire that we’ve snatched from the gods?

---

 

We Have The Technology: Now That "No Lives Matter" Let The Eugenic Games Begin!

corbettreport |  On November 10, 2020, Joe Biden announced the members of a coronavirus task force that would advise his transition team on setting COVID-19-related policies for the Biden administration. That task force included Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

JOE BIDEN: So that’s why today I’ve named the COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board comprised of distinguished public health experts to help our transition team translate the Biden-Harris COVID-19 plan into action. A blueprint that we can put in place as soon as Kamala and I are sworn into office on January 20th, 2021.

SOURCE: President-elect Biden Delivers Remarks on Coronavirus Pandemic

ANCHOR: We’ve learned that a doctor from our area is on the president-elect’s task force. Eyewitness News reporter Howard Monroe picks up the story.

THOMAS FARLEY: I know he’s a very bright, capable guy and i think that’s a great choice to represent doctors in general in addressing this epidemic.

HOWARD MONROE: Philadelphia health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley this morning on Eyewitness News. He praised president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team for picking Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to join his coronavirus task force. He is the chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

SOURCE: UPenn Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel To Serve On President-Elect Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force

That announcement meant very little to the general public, who likely only know Emanuel as a talking head on tv panel discussions or as the brother of former Obama chief of staff and ex-mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. But for those who have followed Ezekiel Emanuel’s career as a bioethicist and his history of advocating controversial reforms of the American health care system, his appointment was an ominous sign of things to come.

He has argued that the Hippocratic Oath is obsolete and that it leads to doctors believing that they should do everything they can for their patients rather than letting them die to focus on higher priorities. He has argued that people should choose to die at age 75 to spare society the burden of looking after them in old age. As a health policy advisor to the Obama administration he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, which fellow Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted was only passed thanks to the stupidity of the American public.

JONATHAN GRUBER: OK? Just like the people—transparency—lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical to getting the thing to pass.

SOURCE: 3 Jonathan Gruber Videos: Americans “Too Stupid to Understand” Obamacare

During the course of the deliberations over Obamacare, the issue of “death panels” arose. Although the term “death panel” was immediately lampooned by government apologists in the media, the essence of the argument was one that Emanuel has long advocated: appointing a body or council to ration health care, effectively condemning those deemed unworthy of medical attention to death.

ROB MASS: When I first heard about you it was in the context of an article you wrote right around the time that the Affordable Care Act was under consideration. And the article was entitled “Principles for the Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” I don’t know how many of you remember there was a lot of talk at the time about [how] this new Obamacare was going to create death panels. And he wrote an article which I thought should have been required reading for the entire country about how rationing medical care—you think that that’s going to start with with the Affordable Care Act? Medical care is rationed all the time and it must be rationed. Explain that.

EZEKIEL EMANUEL: So there are two kinds of “rationing,” you might say. One is absolute scarcity leading to rationing and that’s when we don’t simply don’t have enough of something and you have to choose between people. We do that with organs for transplantation. We don’t have enough. Some people will get it, other people won’t and, tragically, people will die. Similarly if we ever have a flu pandemic—not if but when we have a flu pandemic—we’re not going to have enough vaccine, we’re not going to have enough respirators, we’re not going to have enough hospital beds. We’re just going to have to choose between people.

SOURCE: Dr. Zeke Emanuel: Oncologist and Bioethicist

The Panicdemic Has Scared Open The Floodgates Of Funding And Human Experimentation Opportunity

The Antibody Deception from Rosemary Frei on Vimeo.

off-guardian |  The world has been fixated for months on novel-coronavirus PCR testing, contact tracing and vaccination.

Meanwhile, another major part of the Covid biomedical complex has received far less attention: the use of antibodies for detecting, diagnosing and treating infection with the novel coronavirus.

Hundreds of antibodies have been approved for these purposes since January 2020. And hundreds more are poised to start being marketed soon.

This is part of the biomedical gold rush: by last summer already, antibodies were on track to become the most lucrative medical product, with global revenue projected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2024. Profit margins in the range of 67% aren’t uncommon.

Pharma giants such as AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are among the companies grabbing the largest chunks of the novel-coronavirus-antibody market. And some of the most muscular government agencies, including Anthony Fauci’s US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are part of the action (see, for example, the second-last section of this article, on antibodies used to treat Covid).

Virtually every study and piece of marketing material related to Covid is premised on scientists having positively and correctly identified the presence of the novel coronavirus (also known as SARS-CoV-2) in the material they’re working with.

The job of that identification is usually given to antibodies that are said to bind to the novel coronavirus. The assumption is these antibodies are able to pick out the virus and only the virus from among every other organism and substance surrounding it.

Unfortunately it turns out that the antibodies rarely (if ever) do that. This is because of, among other things, inadequate verification of the antibodies’ accuracy in targeting the virus by the companies that manufacture and sell them. And there’s even less verification by government regulators.

Let’s take a 30,000-foot tour of a couple of the main features of the antibody-industry landscape, which is awash in complexity and cash.

Public Colleges And Universities In The Heartland Are Abolishing Faculty Tenure

bleedingheartland |  With this preamble, it is not difficult to predict what will happen should Senate File 41 or House File 496 move forward and eliminate tenure from Iowa’s public universities. (Editor’s note: The House bill cleared the first “funnel” deadline and is eligible for debate in the lower chamber.) Whoever we can recruit either will be taking the position as a temporary fix until a tenure track comes along somewhere else, or is someone who has no chance of a tenure track position anywhere.

Either way, it will be impossible to develop competitive and long-term research groups. The ability to attract external funds and to sustain PhD programs will quickly crumble, and most of the accomplished tenured faculty in our institutions will leave. As Matt Chapman reported in 2019, when another tenure ban was being considered, “after similar legislation passed in 1943, three educators left the state and received a Nobel prize while tenured at other universities.”

Without tenure, our public universities will become giant teaching community colleges with no research. Upper-level courses will be taught by mostly unqualified instructors.

We will still be able to provide degrees and have fancy commencement ceremonies (if that is what you care about), but conferring degrees with very diminished value in the job market. The STEM departments as we know them will disappear. In practice, Iowa will not keep a single research university, as none of its private colleges can take up that role. The same fate will follow with the prestigious University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Our state will become a technological desert, where only companies requiring unskilled labor will have an incentive to come.

Is it conceivable to have a university system without tenure? In principle, everything is conceivable, but realistically, it is not. This system has been in place for centuries now. Everything revolves around tenure. Many funding opportunities are only available for tenure (track) positions. Changing it would require a revamping of epic proportions for the entire nation. 

google.sites |   All eyes in higher education are on Kansas, as the Board of Regents has unilaterally suspended tenure protections and long-established procedures of shared governance, transparency, and due process in order to ease the termination of faculty and staff. This extreme policy circumvents professional standards and violates our commitments as a member institution of the American Association of Universities (AAU). Procedures already exist to make decisions according to financial exigency as part of shared governance. The regents now allow administrators to bypass the established process and eliminate faculty’s structural role in it. The leadership at our fellow Regents Universities in Kansas quickly recognized that this move is at odds with our profession, and have stated that they will not implement it. Only at KU has our Chancellor not committed to shared governance and our professional integrity by refusing to exercise the policy.

 

KBOR’s policy blatantly violates two of the three core Academic Principles of the AAU– those pertaining to Shared Governance and Academic Freedom. Such actions place KU at grave risk of expulsion from this prestigious professional organization, which would inevitably impede the recruitment and retention of faculty and the securing of research funds, ultimately eroding the value of all degrees from the University of Kansas.

 

The AAU principles reflect widely held professional standards, laid out in foundational statements from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure holds that financial exigency must be “demonstrably bona fide” in order to justify termination, and must be considered by a faculty committee as well as the governing board. The AAUP standard does not provide for arbitrary administrative power over such decisions. The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities calls for “joint planning and effort” among its constituents, in which faculty are to hold primary responsibility over matters of faculty status, including dismissal. In order to have a voice in institutional planning, faculty must be fully briefed on the specific budgetary matters in play. The regents’ policy allows administrators to make dismissals without formally declaring financial exigency. This is clearly out of step with the AAUP standard that university executives work “within the concept of tenure,” and “necessarily utilize the judgments of faculty” when addressing institutional challenges.

These standards speak to the role of the faculty, but to bypass them affects the entire campus. The new policy gives a blank check to the chancellor to make sweeping changes. The regents have asked us to trust the chancellor in a time of crisis, but our financial issues predate the pandemic. This recent experience suggests that accountability is in order. To annul shared governance and transparency instead degrades the working conditions of the entire university and the learning conditions for all of our students.

Dr. Cornel West - You Know WHO And WHAT You Must Never Discuss...,

bostonreview |  Harvard hired Dr. Cornel West in 2016 without tenure? This was news to me. Five years ago I wrote what I believed was a tenure review letter for Dr. West; I even named the file “cornel_west_tenure.docx.” I received the request on April 18, 2016. Given Dr. West’s dual appointments in both the Harvard Divinity School and the Department of African and African-American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the request was signed by David Hempton, Dean of Harvard Divinity School, and Claudine Gay, Dean of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It asked me to evaluate Dr. West for a senior appointment as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy. The letter never states that this was to be a non-tenured appointment, nor is tenure explicitly mentioned. But having received literally hundreds of requests over the course of three decades, I can say it certainly read like a tenured appointment.

Besides, Dr. West had already been tenured at Harvard—and at Yale and at Princeton. Dr. West left his tenured position at Harvard in 2002 after then Harvard president Lawrence Summers questioned his scholarship, his commitment to teaching, and his political advocacy. He took a tenured position at Princeton, where he remained for more than ten years before moving to Union Theological Seminary and then back to Harvard. It never occurred to me that Harvard would bring him back as a contract laborer, especially given the criteria for tenure: the value and originality of scholarship.

It is ridiculous to have to say this, but the public attacks make it necessary: Dr. West is a formidable intellectual who works in the interstices of philosophy, theology, cultural criticism, political analysis, and social critique. He has produced a massive body of work that cuts across forms and disciplines—books, articles, published dialogues, lectures, debates, and commentary displayed across several different media platforms. No need to reproduce his curriculum vitae here. Just consider the fact that Dr. West has been the subject of several scholarly books: Mark David Wood’s Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism (2000), Rosemary Cowan’s Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption (2002), Clarence Johnson’s Cornel West and Philosophy (2003), and Keith Gilyard’s Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy (2008), to name just a few. Only a handful of Dr. West’s tenured colleagues can make such a claim. And beyond all this, he is an immensely popular teacher and a stalwart supporter of student activism.

Graduate students from across the campus swiftly petitioned the university to reconsider its decision to deny Dr. West tenure. Jonathan L. Swain, Harvard’s director of media relations, would not comment on the petition, but he did say previously that West’s reappointment committee did not have the authority to review him for tenure. To put it bluntly, either the dean, the provost, or the president blocked any possibility of turning Dr. West’s appointment into a tenured position, but no one so far is willing to take responsibility for this decision. Dr. West suspects it has to do with his politics—notably, his active support for the Bernie Sanders campaign and his consistent advocacy for Palestinian human rights. I agree. Harvard has a problem with outspoken, principled faculty who take public positions that question university policy, challenge authority, or might ruffle the feathers of big donors. And when the faculty in question are scholars of color, their odds of getting through the tenure process are slim to none.

 

Sassy Blue Checks Are 21st Century Gatekeepers And Responsible Negroes

ghionjournal |  Precisely at the time we need leadership the most, we have been left out in the cold and shepherded into the wilderness by black opinion leaders who are more interested in cashing checks and enhancing their Q ratings than they are in standing up for justice. Gone are the days of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and erstwhile moral giants who confronted racism with the courage of lions, we are now firmly entrenched in the era of hustling hyenas like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris who cozy up to the very system of repression they pretend to be fighting against.

Instead of leading with imagination, sambos in expensive suits prefer to distract us with agitprops and tropes. We went from “we shall overcome”, a mission statement of resilience, to “black lives matter” as we meekly advertise our inadequacies and beg for social acceptance. I am actually embarrassed every time I see a similarly complexioned brother or sister wearing a #BLM logo on their facemask or their chest;

As if doing damage to our psyche was not enough, some decide to add insults to self-injury by dismissing the plight of anyone who does not have melanin like ours. It is the height of absurdity to assume that someone who is “white” has privilege by virtue of their skin color. Not only is it patently untrue, it is counterproductive as it prevents likeminded and like-mired “white” people–who would otherwise be receptive to our plight–from hearing the message we are trying to convey and joining the fight for redemption.

No one likes to be marginalized and their struggles to be minimized; this is true for the truly privileged and the most disadvantaged alike. Think about it; if someone in a wheelchair downplayed your pains and pooh-poohed your anguish wrought by a broken leg, would you not take umbrage with that person no matter how crippled she was? People who have it bad don’t have a license to insult and disparage others who have it marginally better. Instead of reaching an audience that is sympathetic to our cause, all we do is close doors and preclude much needed conversations.

The only people who profit from these campaigns of grievance and woe-is-me victimhood are the very charlatans who are sitting in the lap of comfort and leading lives of true privilege. The establishment reward demagogues who incite passions and lead us in the wrong direction. There is a reason, after all, the Obamas were compensated to the tune of $60 million and why Ta-Nehisi Coates keeps landing on the New York Times bestsellers list. The fastest way to make a buck and get leg up is to sell your own people down the river in order to be invited into the whites’ house.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter have perfected the art of the shakedown in ways that puts Jessie Jackson to shame; they have made more money in our names and using our pains than any black organization since the NAACP. What do we have to show for the hundreds of millions they have collected since Ferguson? Email or DM me if you know the answer because I have been searching for that answer since Michael Brown was assassinated. Far from being freedom fighters, Black Lives Matter is a co-op of fee collectors who hear cash registers ringing each time a “black” man or woman gets killed by a cop.

Joy Reid Is A Sassy Blue-Check Establishment-Negroe Troll Licensed To Say Anything

mediaite  |   “Enter the Republican conspiracy senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow, Ron Johnson,” said Joy Reid on her 7 p.m. MSNBC show last week. By way of Moscow? I guess Johnson is a puppet of Putin, or something?

This wouldn’t be much of a story if it weren’t the third most outlandish thing Reid said in the last week. Instead, Reid is empowered to say what appears to be more hyperbolic and vitriolic comments, encouraged by her Twitter followers and, apparently, by her bosses at the NBC News-affiliated cable channel.

On Wednesday night’s Reid Out, the host was opining on the decision by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “open” the state and end the statewide mask mandate. With the chyron “Texas To End All COVID Precautions” (not true, but moving on), Reid had this to say about Texas and Mississippi: “These states, what they have in common, is they have structures which say black and brown lives matter less. All that matters is that Black and brown people get their behinds into the factory and make me my steaks. Make me my stuff. Get there and do my nails. Work. Get back to work now, and do the things that I, the comfortable, affluent, person need. Isn’t that what we’re seeing?”

There’s a lot here to unpack. Reid’s conclusion is that Texas is going to change Covid rules so “Black and brown people” can… “make me my steaks”? It’s confusing, and offensive — and spoken with such a total certainty, which makes it so much worse.

Which brings us to this tweet from Reid, also from Wednesday and also supremely confident, about what “people on the right” think:

I’ll say it again: people on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the n-word like in “the good old days.” To them, not being able to be openly racist and discriminatory without consequence is oppression. Trump is the avatar for this “freedom.” https://t.co/RlqAFYe5Zr

— Joy-Ann Pro-Democracy & Masks Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) March 4, 2021

Yes, Reid apparently believes that “people on the right” would like to “openly say the n-word,” and that “not being able to be openly racist” is “oppression” to these people. Note — this is not directed at “racists” or “white supremacists.” It’s not even couching this as “some people on the right.” It’s just a blanket, across-the-board comment, according to Reid, that all people on the right think this way. Theoretically, Joy Reid works with “people on the right” — like Nicolle Wallace. But I mean this sincerely — does Joy Reid really know a single Republican?

The Oppressed And Downtrodden...,

 

Cuomo's Finally Getting Only Exactly What He Richly Deserves...,

nymag |  The normally efficient governor’s office had been spinning out of control ever since a bombshell New York Times story broke the prior evening detailing how Cuomo had made a series of inappropriate comments to Charlotte Bennett, a young female aide, including asking her if she had ever had sex with older men and if she was monogamous in relationships.

“They are panicking,” one former adviser said. The governor’s office released a statement saying it would have no further comment on the issue, then released three more statements throughout the day, the last of which was a cringe-inducing one in which the governor said he spends all his time at work, that he considers his colleagues in the executive chamber friends, and: “At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny. I do, on occasion, tease people in what I think is a good natured way.” He continued: “To be clear I never inappropriately touched anybody and I never propositioned anybody and I never intended to make anyone feel uncomfortable.”

Cuomo announced that Barbara Jones, a former federal judge with whom he has close ties, would lead an investigation into the allegations against him. It was rejected out of hand. State Attorney General Letitia James leads such investigations, something Cuomo should know, since he led them against both Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson when he was attorney general, which contributed to both of them being run out of office. He then said that Court of Appeals Chief Judge Janet DiFiore would team up with James to pick an investigator, something James, after consulting with Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to make sure they would back her up, rejected again.

It was not lost on the three that here was the governor trying to find an older white woman to oversee the work of the first female Black attorney general.

Although it was erratic behavior from the governor’s office, it was also quintessentially Cuomo: trying to keep all inquiries in-house, trying to control the outcome, and trying to see if the other branches of state government would give ground, as they so often do.

As of this writing, there are now three five allegations of sexual harassment lodged against Cuomo: by Bennett; by Lindsey Boylan, another aide who alleged that Cuomo forcibly tried to kiss her and made inappropriate comments to her; and by a woman named Anna Ruch, who says Cuomo made inappropriate advances to her at a wedding. It is important to say “as of this writing,” because the current number of sexual-harassment claims against the governor is almost certain to rise, to say nothing of allegations of bullying, coercion, and workplace aggression that have also come out over the past several weeks.

This moment was supposed to be a triumphant one for the governor. The state is emerging from a year of COVID lockdown; vaccinations are happening; businesses are reopening. Instead, Cuomo has been holed up in Albany, waiting for more allegations to come out, as whispers grow that he will not be the governor of New York by the end of next week, if not sooner.

The biggest problem for the governor at the moment is that he is facing an open revolt in the State Senate and the Assembly. Even in the moderate suburban swing districts where Cuomo is supposed to have electoral strength, lawmakers fear that he will be a liability if he were to run for a fourth term in 2022. They are also anxious to reclaim some of the prerogatives of governing that Cuomo’s domineering style has taken away from them. And after years of abuse from Cuomo and his aides, many lawmakers are ready to exact revenge — none more so than New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who has been on a national TV tour tearing into the governor over the sexual-harassment allegations and the way he has treated his rivals in government.

“The problem he has right now,” said one Cuomo ally, “is that everybody hates him.”

Cuomo's A Dirty POS: Cuomosexuals Need To Stop Teabagging And Take The L...,

WaPo |  Two male aides who worked for Cuomo in the New York governor’s office say he routinely berated them with explicit language, making comments such as calling them “pussies” and saying, “You have no balls.”

And three women, all of whom worked in the governor’s office as young staffers in recent years, say Cuomo quizzed them about their dating lives. They say they did not view the encounters as propositions, but rather as part of an office culture they believed was degrading to young women.

The newest accounts of Cuomo’s workplace behavior by former aides in interviews with The Washington Post come after several women have publicly accused the New York governor of inappropriate personal comments or unwelcome physical contact. The allegations have engulfed one of the country’s top Democratic officials in crisis and put a sharp focus on the workplace culture he has fostered during his three decades in public office.

What Cuomo has touted as an “aggressive” style goes far beyond that behind the scenes, according to more than 20 people who have worked with him from the 1990s to the present. Many former aides and advisers described to The Post a toxic culture in which the governor unleashes searing verbal attacks on subordinates. Some said he seemed to delight in humiliating his employees, particularly in group meetings, and would mock male aides for not being tough enough.

The Post reached out to more than 150 former and current Cuomo staffers, stretching back to his time at HUD in Washington. Most did not respond. Among those who did, the majority spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they said they still fear his wrath and his power to destroy careers.

“I never knew at the time that I was making anyone feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I never, ever meant to offend anyone or hurt anyone or cause anyone pain.”

Former aides said they were infuriated by Cuomo’s attempt to minimize what they described as a pervasive effort to intimidate staff.

 

It's Not Just Fauci: Power-Sunstein An AssClown Two-Fer That Doesn't Bode Well....,

exiledonline |  So who is Cass Sunstein? Like his former “partner” Martha and like his new love Samantha, Cass has devoted his life to pleasing the guild by stuffing its vaults with the sort of forgettable Beigeist nonsense that it likes to see—because no person with a functioning gag reflex could possibly spend decades of his or her life writing endless articles about law and how to make citizens more citizen-y. Cass, however, is the kind of guy who could swallow a pepperoni stick without gagging—just look at the record:  roughly twelve gazillion articles and books on legal issues and behavioral psychology’s relationship to the law. In fact Cass Sunstein is such a prolific Middlebrow in his field that there’s even a joke among his colleagues that Cass is the Kevin Bacon of legal journals. You know, because every legal academic has either done an article with Cass, or done an article with someone who’s done and article with Cass… Seriously, in the lounges, that Kevin Bacon joke really bowls ‘em over. And please don’t mention anything to them about how they’re about three decades late with that joke. They are tenured academics, after all—show some sensitivity, please!

It’s all adding up to a bad 70s East Coast thinking-person’s divorce-drama. I mean the names themselves are earth-toned: Martha; Samantha; Cass. The campus settings; the academic must and competition. The affairs. It’s like a bad Updike book! Which is to say: The Obama Era is a bad Updike book. Rabbit’s Reduxing all over again! And we’re stuck reading it for the next 8 years!

Anyway, so after Cass dumped Martha in Chicago last year, he moved to Harvard where Samantha teaches. Now, both Cass and Samantha teach at Harvard. Which you know had to hurt, like pouring salt into Martha’s wounds, because, like, they didn’t give her tenure at Harvard. (At this moment, cue the Erik Satie soundtrack. Either that or Billie Holiday…Updike is cursing us from the grave! Burn his bones, someone!) Samantha Power is the third segment of this horrible Middlebrow Love Triangle. For Samantha, however, she had a “defining moment” in her biography. That defining moment was Bosnia—the tragedy that attracted hordes of defining-moment-tourists from the West’s top academic and struggling-journalist institutions. Every Orwell-swooning middlebrow secretly cursed under their breath that they’d never be able to duplicate his moral outrage and moral courage without a perfectly defined cause like his—so when Bosnia presented its tragedy on a bloodied platter, Samantha, along with all the David Rieffs and Peter Maas’s and you-name-‘em-if-they-read-Orwell-they-were-in-Sarajevo’s all entered the “watch me being morally outraged on behalf of humanity” competition in Bosnia, then took the “lesson” that “defined” them there, and came away with this: in the future, if America sees slaughter going on in some part of the world we don’t understand, we should bomb the bad guys and save the good guys. Now, don’t get Samantha wrong—she ain’t no George Bush. No no no, she’s totally, totally different. I mean sure, both went to Harvard and all, but really—Samantha Power is soooo smart, and George W. Bush is sooooo stupid.

How smart is she? Samantha wrote a “landmark” book, a book that really bowled over Team Obama, about genocides in the 20th century. Because genocides are really bad, she wants us to know. Not all genocides, mind you—just the genocides she chooses to focus on. She didn’t include in her book the genocides that might muddy up her Dubya-brained moralizing about genocide—anyway, it’s sexist to criticize her for omitting American-led genocides in the 20th century that led to millions of deaths in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America, and elsewhere; or Britain’s genocide-guilt in about 2/3 of the globe. Those aren’t officially “genocides” in Samantha’s classification, because that’s not playing by the rules. The rules say very clearly that these are genocides and those aren’t—so for example, when America financed and armed the genocide in East Timor, Samantha writes that America “looked away.” Well, you get the point here.

 

Declaring An "Armed Insurrection" Empowers The State To Employ Military Force Against Citizens

greenwald |  Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”

This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra:

But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications.

This -- "Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow" -- is as batshit crazy and as much conspiratorial derangement as anything from QAnon, and far more damaging since it's mainstream, but because it's on a corporate outlet, it doesn't count:pic.twitter.com/G90LfPRoHF

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 5, 2021

A pro-Trump mob didnot bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.

Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone

(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)

What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:

 (The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police Officer).

The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.

Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City courting bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.

The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.