Thomas S. Harrington - 12/16

IPAK-EDU Director's Science Webinar '24

Note: This will be the final session for 2024

IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar

Monday 12/16 @ 7:00pm Eastern
with/ Thomas S. Harrington

“Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class”

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From the Introduction to the book:

The Treason of the Experts

While the propaganda blitz after September 11th was impressive in its force and scope, those directing it were from a small fairly readily identifiable cadre of intellectual agitators, housed in well-known think-tanks, in transparently ideological publications and in key, captured nodes of the corporate media. True, there was also a degree of spontaneous support for the aggressive American response to the attacks in a few other sectors of America’s college-educated cohort. But in general, the “expert” class, by which I mean those in the liberal professions possessing post-graduate degrees, were generally cautious when not outright hostile to the Bush administration’s wars of choice. And in this sense, they remained true to the function they had assumed as a group in the wake of the protests against the Vietnam war.

But this time around, these privileged people, whose educational background putatively provided them with greater critical thinking skills than most, and hence an enhanced ability to see through the barrage of propaganda, fell immediately and massively into line.

Indeed, not only did we see them overwhelmingly accept the government’s repressive, unproven and often patently unscientific measures to contain the Covid virus, but watched many of them emerge online and in other public forums as semi-official enforcers of repressive Government policies and Big Pharma marketing pitches.

We watched as they mocked and ignored world-class doctors and scientists, and for that matter, anyone else who expressed ideas that were at variance with official government policies. They told us, ridiculously, that science was not a continuous process of trial and error, but a fixed canon of immutable laws, while promoting, on that same absurd basis, the establishment and enforcement of medical apartheid within families and communities.

We saw how, in the name of keeping their children safe from a virus that could do them virtually no harm, they greatly impeded their long-term social, physical and intellectual development through useless mask- wearing, social distancing and screen-based learning.

And in the name of protecting the elderly, they promulgated medically useless rules that forced many older people to suffer and die alone, deprived of the comfort of their loved ones.

And they topped all this off by rabidly backing the idea that every citizen of the Republic, including those same functionally immune children, be injected—under the patently illegal and immoral threat of losing their job and their fundamental rights to bodily autonomy and freedom of movement—with an experimental drug that was known to be incapable of doing the first thing a vaccine should be able to do: stop the transmission of the supposedly ultra-mortal virus.

But perhaps most frightening and striking of all was, and still is, the way so many of these people, who by dint of their educational backgrounds should have found it more easy than most to go to the primary sources of scientific information on the virus and the measures taken to lessen its impact, chose in large numbers—with doctors being very prominent among them—to instead “educate” themselves on these important matters with curt summaries derived from the mainstream press, social media or Pharma- captured agencies like the CDC and the FDA. This, paradoxically, while millions of intrepid and less credentialed people with a greater desire to know the truth, often became quite knowledgeable about the actual state of ‘the science.”

This devastating case of class abdication—which essentially turned the old adage about “To whom much is given, much is expected” on its head— is a central focus of this book.

Viewed more broadly, this is one man’s chronicle, at times indignant and at others reflective, of an extraordinary moment in the history of the world, a moment of crisis whose eventual resolution will have far-reaching consequences for our children and their children.

Will we renew our trust in the dignity, moral autonomy and inherent miraculousness of each individual human being? Or will we, in our absent- minded drift away from the only true sources of life and spiritual renewal— things like love, friendship, wonder and beauty—resign ourselves to the idea of living a new version of medieval serfdom, wherein our bodies and our minds are seen as, and used by, our self-appointed masters as a renewable resource for the execution of their megalomaniacal dreams?

This is the choice before us. I know which reality I prefer. What about you?

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You can also read Jeffrey Tucker’s Foreword to the book here:

https://brownstone.org/articles/treason-of-the-experts-foreword/

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