Straight to the point

The Medical Masquerade: Introduction
by Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone Institute

The following is the introduction to Clayton J. Baker’s new book, The Medical Masquerade: A Physician Exposes the Deceptions of Covid.

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Did the world change because of Covid, or did we?

As I review this volume of essays, all written since the lockdowns began in March 2020, this question keeps coming to mind.

Since Covid, the world seems different. My own attempt to understand how and why it all happened took me step by step into the labyrinth of lies, corruption, and malice that lay behind the lockdowns, the assault on civil rights, the generational suffering, and the countless deaths of the Covid era. With almost every step the way became a bit darker.

On a bad day, I see no end to the human potential for wickedness, especially in those who seek and hold power. The more one learns about the likes of Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Tedros Ghebreyesus, Klaus Schwab, and their like, the harder it is to feel otherwise.

On a bad day, I cannot comprehend the credulity and carelessness of so many people. It seems that all tyrants need to do is inject some collective fear, and the public becomes incapable of critical thought, frank speech, or resistance to the most wanton abuse. All that a great many people can muster the nerve to do under such circumstances, it seems, is to turn on the few among them who do manage to resist.

Fortunately there are good days, too.

On a good day, I conclude that a great portion of the world has come to realize, at least intuitively, that they were hoodwinked during Covid, that the whole event was a lie and an act of tyranny. I believe that enough eyes have been opened to stop it from happening again.

On a good day, I remember that because of Covid, I have gotten to know many intelligent, courageous, and truly humane people, probably none of whom I would have met otherwise. Many of these people have risked more, lost more, and accomplished more than me. Sirach teaches that when you meet the wise, your feet should wear away their doorstep. I’ve had the good fortune to communicate and even collaborate with many of them.

These good and excellent people – the ones who most actively resisted the evil that lay behind Covid – provide hope. In fact, they may be our best hope. They have been persecuted, silenced, canceled, fired, deplatformed, delicensed, demonetized, arrested, and some even imprisoned.

But they have not been destroyed.

They are still standing, still speaking out, still fighting for what is true, just, and good. They are still striving to preserve the dignity and freedom of their fellow human beings, including those who still resent them, or even hate them. They have grown in influence and public acceptance, and rightfully so.

Furthermore, as a result of the gradual exposure of the lies, gaslighting, and psyops to which ordinary citizens were subjected during Covid, the modus operandi of our governments, intelligence agencies, militaries, corporations, and so-called ‘elites’ have been exposed.

Another positive, if unforeseeable, result is that long-term dissidents, truth tellers, and whistleblowers who were marginalized and persecuted for decades are now finally receiving renewed attention.

True heroes like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Andrew Wakefield, Meryl Nass, Dane Wigington, and others, long ago recognized and began the fight against the civilizational and governmental corruption that made the Covid catastrophe possible. Many of them were doing so decades before the arrival of Covid-era dissidents like myself.

All of these people paid dearly for their prescience, courage, and stubborn effort to reveal the illegal, immoral, and even murderous nature of our governments and institutions. Some of them paid nearly everything. But now the world is beginning to see these people anew, and it is beginning to take their messages seriously.

This provides even greater hope. And hope is, after all, along with faith and love, one of the three things that abide.

Growth and progress toward the good require change. Change is usually difficult and often painful. This does not make it less necessary.

Like many people who were awakened, red-pilled, activated, or even radicalized by Covid (and I have been called all of those things), I have lost some friends. In some cases, I have been rejected. In others, I have consciously reduced the time I spend with certain people. At first this saddened me. Now I think it probably cannot be otherwise.

Once again, has the world changed, or have we?

Covid taught me that dissidents cannot simply pick and choose their colleagues. Once you become an adversary to the existing power structure, you’re on your own, pal. There may be friends for you out there, but they’re isolated just like you. You find allies one at a time.

Where do you find them? In places you never went before you became an outsider: at street corner protests, in heavily censored social media groups, and as plaintiffs to lawsuits against your own school district.

This resorting process is confusing, tiring, and distressing, but it has to happen. Every dissident must go through a process of questioning, reappraisal, and rejection. This process is a two-way street. A dissident rejects the prevailing narrative as false. In return, the conforming majority rejects the dissident as a threat to the established order. From their respective points of view, both sides are correct.

Once the mainstream-citizen-turned-dissident runs this gauntlet, where does he end up? Where he never thought he’d be: with the other malcontents and nonconformists. At a street corner protest, in a heavily censored social media group, or suing his own school district.

The outsiders start working together, and if they stay at it, they may grow in influence and effectiveness. Why?

In the case of the Covid dissidents, our effectiveness grew in large part because we exposed lies, and we refused to stop exposing lies. Maybe it’s true that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can put its pants on. Over the long term, however, the lie is going to get caught with its pants down a whole lot more often. Point out the lies, keep pointing out the lies, explain why the powers-that-be are telling the lies, and eventually more and more people see through the lies.

The virus came from the wet market, not the lab. A lie.

Two weeks to flatten the curve. A lie.

Six feet to stop the spread. A lie.

Safe and effective. A lie.

Etcetera, etcetera.

Our effectiveness grew because we sought the truth. I believe that deep down most people do hunger for the truth, even if superficially they fear it. Our audience grew because we frankly described, stubbornly investigated, and earnestly interpreted the Covid catastrophe to the best of our ability (see the essay “Covid-19 in Ten Sentences”). Over time, while the legacy media continued to pour out increasingly obvious propaganda, we peeled away at the layers of deceit to reveal just how false and malicious the operation was. Gradually, people listened.

As Covid began to recede, most people longed just to return to (relatively) normal life. However, many of us who ran the risk of taking action and speaking out – and paid a price for doing so – have not let things go. Whether the world changed because of Covid or not, it appears we have.

For me, Covid tore the veneer off almost every institution in life. As a physician, the scales especially fell from my eyes regarding modern medicine. Covid prompted me to weigh my profession on the scales, and it was found wanting.

Prior to Covid, I had taught medical humanities and bioethics for years, both at the bedside and in the classroom. I took medical ethics seriously, and I assumed my profession did too. During Covid, I was appalled at the casual manner in which the fundamental ethical tenets of medicine were cast aside. The entire management level of my profession acted as though patient autonomy was simply null and void. They behaved as though they no longer needed to even consider beneficence, non-maleficence, or justice when caring for patients.

In the essay “The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response,” I explored this failure of my profession, unsure of how far it would lead. I performed a detailed investigation to determine how many of the key tenets and specific rules of medical ethics had been broken, abused, or ignored during Covid. Almost five thousand words and dozens of references later, I had my answer: all of them. Every one. During Covid, my profession broke all its own ethical rules.

This kind of realization can make one bitter. In fact, bitterness seems to be an occupational hazard of being a dissident. But like envy, bitterness is always ignoble and should be avoided. The best antidote to bitterness is humor, and the child of the two is sarcasm.

To quote Dostoevsky again, sarcasm is the last refuge of a decent person when the privacy of their soul has been brutally invaded. Is there a better description of what happened during Covid than that the privacy of our souls was brutally invaded?

Humor generally improves writing. Humor in writing is like beauty in a woman: it’s not quite enough all by itself, but it definitely helps. And humor, even sarcastic humor, can help deliver painful news (see “The Top 10 Covid Villains of 2021”).

At one point, my editor at Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker, dropped the hint that he was looking for something a bit lighter in tone than the usually dead-serious material he was publishing. I produced an essay for him entitled “My Golden Retriever Faces the Medical Juggernaut.”

The flurry of replies I received regarding this piece, intended as a change-of-pace, came as a surprise. Clearly, identifying the similarities (and similar problems) between human and animal medicine in the wake of Covid affected many readers. People deeply love their pets. I believe this is not only because of the companionship and unconditional love that pet owners receive from their pets, but also because of the connection that even the most domesticated animal provides to an earlier, simpler, and more natural era of human existence.

The emails kept coming in about that essay. One noted the affectionate characterization of my dog, another my lampooning of Pfizer CEO and erstwhile veterinarian Albert Bourla, and a third reported that they laughed out loud. Yet another decried the article for desecrating the honor of decent, hardworking veterinarians everywhere.

It is impossible to know which essays will strike a chord with readers. The essays I think are bound to go ‘viral’ (a term I both use and dislike) typically don’t, while the ones I have no expectations about sometimes take off.

I remember a quote attributed to rock-and-roll musician Alex Chilton. At the tender age of 16, he had a number one hit record. However, after his teens, he never came close to the charts again, despite a long career and ultimate status as one of the classic underground figures of rock-and-roll. Years later, when asked why he hadn’t had a hit since he was a teenager, Chilton replied, “My songs sound like hits to me.”

Perhaps this is the best approach: write about the issues one thinks are most important, the issues one is most concerned about at present, and the issues for which one believes positive change is possible. Those sound like hits to me.

There is no shortage of material. The societal problems that need examination, elucidation, and exposure are almost endless. Beyond the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, beyond our militarized medical system (see “Medicine Has Been Fully Militarized”), Covid revealed that virtually all of our human institutions are highly susceptible to corruption, and in many cases thoroughly corrupt.

Covid revealed that the institutions that were supposed to provide counterweights to greed, corruption, and power-grabbing – the press, academia, nonprofit organizations, regulatory agencies, religious institutions, you name it – were in fact captured and complicit with the lies of those in power. We can no longer trust these institutions to be truthful, any more than we can trust Big Pharma, the central banks, or the rapacious, ultra-rich, so-called “elites” such as Bill Gates or the WEF.

Initially during Covid, the foremost task was to stop the obvious civil rights abuses of lockdowns, mandates, and so on. To do so, we had to figure out what was really being done to us, who was behind it, and why they were doing it.

Much of the who/what/where/when/why of the Covid period are now fairly well known to those who have investigated it, although the onion still has unpeeled layers. Many of the underlying mechanisms that facilitated the abuses of Covid have also been identified.

More recently, the focus has turned increasingly to bringing change and reform to these ‘mechanisms of harm,’ as Lori Weitz has called them. For those fighting for truth and transparency in government, medicine, and industry, as well as for the protection of our fundamental civil rights, we must now, as Bret Weinstein has said, ‘play offense.’

Essays in this volume that attempt to take this approach include “Crush the Flu D’état!”, “Pandemic Preparedness: Arsonists Run the Fire Department,” and “Six Simple Steps to Pharma Reform.”

We should also remember that fundamental change for the better must originate from within. We must strengthen our own resolve to never forget what was done to us during Covid, and to never allow it to be done to us again. Any complacency we once held about our existence on Earth should be set aside. We must re-examine our own views of health and medicine (“Questioning Modern Injection Norms,”) and rethink our relationship to the collective (“What is Medical Freedom, Exactly?”).

So, to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this introduction, I would say the following:

Yes, the world has changed in many ways since March 2020. But much of that apparent change is that the true nature of things has been revealed. And the world needs to change a lot more, especially our human institutions, if we are to prevent the tyranny of Covid from being repeated.

And yes, we have changed in many ways since March 2020 as well. But again, much of that apparent change is that our true nature has been revealed. Our complacency, gullibility, dependency, and cowardice, both as individuals and collectively, were mercilessly exploited during Covid. Once again, we need to change ourselves a lot more to prevent it all from being repeated.

To close, I’ll quote Dostoevsky one last time: Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take away his freedom. May we never again allow our consciences to be appeased.

The Medical Masquerade: Introduction
by Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/