I created the above figure, and it stirred some interest. In this post I want to explain why this is happening.

Bureaucracy expands endlessly because of affluence + organization size + depoliticization and the lack of any force that can really discipline institutions.

Poor, small, and fragile: “If we don’t build, we die.” Big downside to not building.

Rich, big, and stable: “If we screw up, we could lose what we have.” Big downside to instability and risk.

So big institutions are punished more for mistakes than for stagnation. Big institutions can’t really die, but the managers can get punished. So managers optimize for not getting punished, not for dynamism.

They add rules, committees, safeguards, etc. to prevent mistakes that they can be punished for—which is to say, anything that looks risky or uncomfortable, involves open conflict, etc.

Over time you need whole classes of people whose job is to prevent mistakes—that is, to smooth discomfort, reduce risk, and manage conflict. Think ever-expanding HR, DEI, compliance, endless new offices to reduce risk, and regulatory frameworks at a national or global scale.

AI, nuclear bombs, nuclear energy, environmental damage, fossil fuels, pandemics, chemicals in food and water, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and so on are all framed as problems to be fixed by adding more bureaucratic layers, more programs, more officials, more offices, etc.

That’s not to say these problems aren’t real. Many are. But big institutions address them according to their own survival logic, not a coherent emancipatory project. The core aim is always to reduce risk and discomfort inside big rich organizations, and the tool is always more rules, more procedures, more bureaucracy.

And once you add bureaucracy, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it. “Don’t you care about children/women/health/people dying/people being poisoned/fairness/etc.?”

You also end up with institutions that cannot adapt quickly or respond effectively to crisis or large-scale change, since they have selected that capability out. Remember that dynamism is dangerous for managers: large downside, low personal upside. So institutions lose adaptive capacity over time and harden in more procedure and departments, narrowing know-how, and leadership cohorts that are trained in risk aversion rather than transformation.

Large rich institutions thus move very slowly and reactively self-protect. And since they all share the same underlying logic and training, when they finally move, they often move all at once, together. Being an outlier increases risk, so you had better move when everyone else does.

After inaction, this in turn can lead to dramatic overreach. This tendency ends up shredding credibility in both directions—for not doing enough when it was required and for doing too much when it was not required.

Increasing censorship and control of media and social media to prevent a legitimacy crisis becomes tempting. Criticism is called misinformation. Often it really is misinformation; it’s false. But it reflects real frustration, and both true and false criticism thus become subject to censorship. Almost perfected in China, growing rapidly in Europe, at a standoff in America, this becomes one of the self-protective shells of ever-expanding big rich org modern regimes.

Without some countervailing discipline, the bureaucracies keep growing, consuming larger and larger chunks of the economy. But it’s not just the economy. Over time, big rich org logic colonizes culture, politics, and science. Big change is scary in big rich societies for the same reason it is in big rich institutions: too much downside.

So, political, cultural, and scientific contestation becomes forbidden or taboo on many key questions. Don’t cause risk or discomfort. Remember that big rich org logic is to reduce risk and discomfort. Therefore increasing risk and discomfort goes against this dominant logic. Forms of political, cultural, and scientific contestation (“free speech”) that do this are heavily disincentivized.

Experts who exemplify the institutional logic reduce politics and science to “The Science”. The Science is really just big rich org risk-averse logic that has colonized every scientific, scholarly, and political field. The Science thus essentially fuses science and politics into a hybrid that borrows legitimate parts from both but is, in a strict sense, neither.

Journalism, publishing, media, etc. all undergo the same transformation and are reshaped by the same big rich org logic.

Modern progress is conceived as more fairness, more safety, more comfort, less risk, for larger numbers of groups, as implemented by the ever-expanding bureaucracy.

Every political arrangement has an ideology that legitimizes it, and in the modern, post-scarcity, large-institution West, that’s progressivism. Classical liberalism is the legitimizing ideology of the pre-managerial, small-scale capitalist order (which ended in the 1930s–60s); remnants of classical liberalism dominate among small entrepreneurs, tech bros, etc. Evangelicalism and right-wing populism are dominant among those who work outside the big institutions and oppose them. And so on.

Progressivism—the mainstream institutional left—is thus big institution + affluence ideology—the ideology of big, rich, risk-averse institutions. It’s not really Marcuse or Marx or any particular philosopher, religion, or ethnic group; it simply is the worldview of people who live inside large, comfortable organizations. It is not “ideological capture”. It is “ideological essence” of the underlying economic-organizational form.

As institutional capacity declines and dysfunction increases, the ideology of the institutions—progressivism—radicalizes. The pie is stagnant or shrinking, criticism rises, the American dream is seen as having a big rich org job, and so the masses go to college to chase it, and competition inside big rich orgs intensifies as everyone fights over a limited number of comfortable big org jobs.

Policies—more bureaucracy—are set up to adjudicate this intensifying internal competition. That’s where affirmative action, DEI, etc. come from.

These policies are not purely top-down. Big rich societies mass-produce people whose job is to work with words, rules, and feelings rather than to build. Schools, media, universities, nonprofits, etc. all communicate that meaning and status come from “impact” and “justice”. But when people enter these institutions, there is no real frontier or growth story. One of the cheapest paths to career movement therefore is grievance and moral accusation, or facilitating it.

Pressure builds from below. It began with mass enrollment in universities in the 1960s and has only intensified since.

In big, rich, risk-averse institutions under current conditions, DEI is destiny. Its name may change, but it cannot be excised while keeping everything else the same. In practice, the existing order never fundamentally changes its own incentives or myths on purpose. That takes crisis or rival institutions built on a different logic.

We can test this easily through a cross-country comparison. In East Asia the big rich org keywords are “harmony” and “social stability” instead of “DEI” and “safety”. But this is the same reflex: suppress conflict, minimize risk, and justify a growing bureaucracy as the guardian of social and institutional order.

In America, the form of conflict to be minimized is framed along racial lines. In East Asia, the framework is more traditionally Confucian: hierarchy, seniority, “wa” (harmony), not embarrassing the group. The locally determined background ideology matters. But, same form, different flavor.

Look at a large Japanese firm or ministry: endless consensus meetings, documents that need thirty stamps, whole “compliance” and “power harassment” offices that exist to manage workplace friction and protect the institution’s image. They don’t talk about “equity and inclusion,” but the function is identical to an American DEI/HR office suite: turn every conflict into a process, absorb it in paperwork, and make sure no one ever has to take clear personal responsibility.

To purge identity politics from the American institutions would really mean to purge identity politics from the basic political grammar of American life and replace it with something else. This cannot be done by fiat by the executive. And even if it could, the same big-org risk-averse logic would simply metamorphose into a new moral language. DEI is just the American accent of a global bureaucratic language whose grammar is risk-avoidance and conflict-suppression.

Everyone is afraid to steer this leviathan because steering is seen as risky and destabilizing; indeed, it violates big rich org logic of minimizing disruption and risk. It’s a soft taboo. A kind of secular evil. Everyone is terrified of both action and inaction. Debt climbs, crisis builds, it becomes next to impossible to do really big projects, and almost nobody wants to take real responsibility for steering.

You are here. The only way out is to design institutions that reward responsibility and risk-taking, not manage decline.

After FDR, this model became unintelligible and taboo. American discourse began treating charismatic leadership as suspect, invoking the specter of totalitarianism. Even FDR was retroactively reframed as a risk.

You can see this shift if you compare how people talk about FDR’s “bold experiments” to how we now talk about “norms and institutions.”

But that’s the textbook version of what happened. It is also probably wrong.

Post-New Deal governance produced a powerful administrative state that became the de facto political regime in America—what people now refer to when they say “deep state.” It also generated a professional-managerial ideology that soon set the terms of Western political culture. In practice, it:

• elevated bureaucratic autonomy over political leadership

• treated visible elite cohesion as inherently dangerous

• in political science, quietly sidelined classical elite theory—the one framework that could have explained both the old pattern and what replaced it

• trained media to treat “neutral experts” and their agencies as the “legitimate” voices, even though that neutrality rarely existed in practice

The result is a decaying administrative state paired with a political culture that lacks the language required for legitimate renewal—and a culture that, over time, has become suspicious of the one mechanism that historically achieved it: strong leadership.

This arrangement has suited the administrative states that shaped contemporary Western political discourse: it has consistently reinforced their claim to political legitimacy. It has been far less kind to the countries they preside over.

Our political vocabulary no longer contains the concepts needed to describe what Washington, Lincoln, FDR—or many non-American leaders—actually did, or how democratic leadership is supposed to respond to crisis, present or future.

Any serious talk of coordinated leadership, even in democratic terms, is now reflexively labeled “fascism.” Every strong leader is treated as “potentially another fascist.” In most cases, such leaders bear no resemblance to fascists—or to the political cultures that produced fascism. Post-WW2 political culture has, in effect, lost the ability to distinguish between authoritarianism and strong democratic leadership.

If administrative-state ideology led us here, the irony is piercing: the system protecting itself is the system destabilizing itself.

America’s universities are collapsing under bureaucracy, politicization, and loss of purpose. The world’s most productive research system once emerged from a similar crisis: 19th-century Germany. We can do it again.

At its scientific peak in the late 19th century, despite being 3% of the world’s population, Germany produced 50% of its scientific papers, 1/3 of Nobel Prizes, and founded every major modern scientific field and institution type used in modern science.

The seminar, the research laboratory, the Ph.D., tenure, and most foundational modern scientific methodological approaches were developed in the 19th century under the German system.

A proposal: an autonomous experimental neo-Humboldtian research university

My growing conviction is that, to address the crisis of legitimacy and dysfunction in America’s universities, America should prototype experimental universities along the same NEO-HUMBOLDTIAN lines.

I believe it is not enough to reform the universities.

Decades of corruption, sclerosis, and bureaucracy make turning the ship around quickly almost impossible. We don’t have time, and the administrators will not cooperate even if we did.

It will take decades to reform America’s universities, and the student quality from our best institutions is at an all-time low.

We need something new now.

In other words, the strategy: reform the existing universities from the top--as Trump is doing--while also producing pressure from the bottom through radical innovation rooted in the past--which is what this proposal would do.

Revive the spirit and principles; keep only the innovations that work; discard the rest

Currently, American research universities have greatly degenerated to precisely the opposite of the original Humboldtian model. They are universities in the Humboldtian image without its soul--stuck mimicking a system that is a century outdated in a large number of ways.

Just look at medical education--founded, correctly, on the Humboldtian model imported through Hopkins and then through the Flexner report, but now a century outdated.

Thus, the point is not to rehash the innovations or systems of the Humboldtian system, but to revive its spirit of innovation itself in a prototype form.

This is, by the way, exactly how the original Humboldtian system was founded--as a prototype in 1910 in Berlin, that then because of its successes spread like wildfire through Prussia then throughout the world.

AI engineering meets education in the 21st century

To do this, we should be tech-forward: update existing institutional models not by layering new technologies over them, but by reimagining all of education from the ground up in a tight-knit, small-scale, closed university run entirely by the scholars and scientists--and a cadre of cutting edge AI and engineering faculty.

Constitutional carve-out and scientific funding reform

To do replicate the Humboldtian model in 21st century America, a constitutional statutory carve-out for an autonomous experimental university would need to be made by Congress. This is the only way such an experimental university might be possible, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.

There are many more details.

To take just one example, scientific funding requires radical reform to eliminate the problem of the research precariat--which severely degrades scientific quality--with hard money and funding passed as a block to the institution, with allocations happening not at the federal but by the institute director at the institute level. (This was also how the Humboldtian system worked, as well as many of the other famously productive corporate and state research systems.)

And much more, including safeguards and guardrails that are of especial importance for maintaining autonomy in a modern American democracy in the age of the Internet.

Ten principles

A full discussion of this will come later--here, on my website, and in my book. So consider this an introduction.

For now, here are ten ways that American universities fall short of Humboldtian principles--and ways that a proposed experimental, autonomous university based on Humboldtian principles would be radically different.

I. Purpose of the University

Modern American university: The university exists for credentialing, revenue, and compliance. Learning is justified by “career outcomes,” “diversity metrics,” or “return on investment.” The idea of truth is replaced by “impact,” “relevance,” and “equity.”

Humboldtian Principle: The university exists for truth-seeking and human formation (Bildung). Knowledge is pursued for its own sake because truth ennobles both the individual and the nation. Credentials are not sought for their own sake, but the world’s most elite professionals and civil servants will nonetheless be produced as a byproduct.

II. Relation Between Teaching and Research

Modern American university: Teaching and research are administratively separated. Teaching is outsourced to adjuncts and graduate students; research is bureaucratized into grant cycles, metrics, and compliance regimes. Discovery and education now live in different silos.

Humboldtian Principle: Teaching is research. Professors think with students in real time. Inquiry and instruction are one continuous act. Knowledge is not closed, but open. Answers are not sought, but questions.

III. Freedom

Modern American university: Freedom is replaced by governance. Professors operate under HR policy, DEI review, and risk management. Students follow mandated curricula. The ideal of liberty yields to “safe learning environments.”

Humboldtian Principle:
Two freedoms define the university’s soul:
Lehrfreiheit: freedom of professors to teach and investigate without constraint.
Lernfreiheit: freedom of students to choose teachers and shape their intellectual path.

IV. Structure of Authority

Modern American university: Universities are ruled by administrative bureaucracies: compliance officers, diversity deans, general counsels, and communications staff. The ratio of administrators to faculty exceeds 1:1 at many institutions.

Humboldtian Principle: Scholars govern themselves through peer review and intellectual merit. Quality is guaranteed by direct oversight by the faculty. Standards for graduation and promotion are exacting, intense, exclusive. The state provides funds, not directives.

V. Epistemology: What Counts as Knowledge

Modern American university: Knowledge is increasingly subordinated to politics, marketability, or identity. “Research excellence” is measured by citation indices, funding levels, or social alignment, not intellectual rigor.

Humboldtian Principle: Wissenschaft: disciplined inquiry in any field, whether natural or human. All truth-seeking bound by method, not ideology.

VI. The Scholar’s Vocation

Modern American university: Academia is a career industry. Scholars are entrepreneurs of reputation, navigating metrics, branding, and institutional politics. The vocation becomes performative rather than contemplative.

Humboldtian Principle: Scholarship is a moral calling: a life of disciplined inquiry, patience, and devotion to truth.

VII. The Student’s Role

Modern American university: The student is a customer. Learning is an entitlement; intellectual discomfort is a customer service failure. Education is consumption.

Humboldtian Principle: The student is an apprentice investigator, learning the methods of truth, shaping mind and soul, morally and intellectually.

VIII. The State’s Role

Modern American university: The state funds higher education as workforce training and social management. Universities are instruments of policy, regulation, and cultural messaging.

Humboldtian Principle: The state guarantees independence. It funds scholarship to secure truth, not ideology. Paradoxically, through its independence, its fruits strengthen American national power.

IX. Institutional Ethos

Modern American university: Rule proliferation, low trust, and procedural control. The university is a compliance apparatus built atop a hedge fund, spiraling morale up by public relations professionals, with classrooms attached.

Humboldtian Principle: Few rules, high trust, and personal accountability. The university is a community of free minds.

X. Outcome

Modern American university: A self-replicating engine of an endlessly expanding administration: compliance units, risk offices, DEI bureaucracies, Title IX departments. It produces managers of optics and virtue signals rather than discoverers of truth.

Humboldtian System: A self-replicating engine of discovery: the laboratory, the seminar, the Ph.D., the scientific institute. It gave the world the modern research university. It’s time to revive it—and give it a 21st century upgrade.

Wrapping up

In the coming posts on this topic, I’ll outline the full story of the origins of the Humboldtian model, how it achieved such extraordinary successes the core features it shares in common with other famously productive models, how 21st-century American neo-Humboldtian prototype could actually be built, and how the prototype, and, if successful, its daughter institutions, could coexist with other research university institutions in the United States and how these and K-12 institutions could be reformed to complement it.

If consciousness ends, meaning ends with it.
The end of the world would not just destroy life—it would erase the fact that anything ever mattered.

Pascal’s Wager: if Christianity is true and you reject faith, you face damnation; therefore it is rational to believe.

Atheist reply: if you believe and Christianity is false, you risk delusion on top of annihilation; better honest oblivion than comfortable delusion.

Pascal’s counter: if oblivion awaits either way, why not prefer the “delusion” that yields a meaningful life now--and, if you bet right, salvation.

My move: invert the wager and follow the logic the other way--toward the world.

I’m not a Christian, though Christianity seems to be all I can think about these days. And I’m speaking plainly about what I’ve been thinking. I want one thing: for my life to mean something. And if Christianity is not true, then all the faith in the world can’t help.

Let’s assume, without intervention, 100% certain individual, collective, and universal obliteration: individual obliteration with each death, collective obliteration with the death of the species, and universal obliteration with the death of the universe. Call this Obliteration.

Standard cosmology points that way (heat death), even if details are disputed.

Obliteration hollows talk of values, morality, ethics. If nothing endures--no persons, no peoples, no memory--then words like truth, justice, integrity are just neurochemistry. Molecules. Meat. Virtue may feel better (or it may not), but without witness or continuation it has no standing beyond the moment. Obliteration is emptiness, not just in the future, but today. If no one remains to answer for truth, justice, or responsibility, these virtues flatten. They become mere moods.

Classical Christianity fully answers Obliteration by promising new creation; it did not need to answer the immanent, physical obliteration now visible to us. The modern world has opened that horizon--civilizational death, species death, solar death, and cosmic heat death--in a way the Fathers could have never comprehended.

Enter Christianity’s answer--and the modern wrinkle.

For more than a thousand years, classical Christian theology from Augustine through Luther has said that God’s providence works through His instruments: us. Per Aquinas: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. In plain terms: grace reject nature or civic life, as some seem to imply today; it elevates it. Human work is the vessel of providence.

Let’s ask why Obliteration matters to us. We fear death, yes, but we can tolerate the idea of dying. What we truly fear is that our lives might not matter--that everything was in vain. Our hopes, our dreams, our loves and our suffering: we do not want these to have been for nothing. The threat of Obliteration makes them less than nothing: an illusion.

Christianity answers that fear by grounding meaning in a transcendent, eternal reality--each person bears cosmic significance in relation to God--and by commanding forms of life that, when practiced, increase human flourishing.

Back to Obliteration. Hell is terrible; Obliteration is universal. If we are headed for it, everyone goes. Pascal feared an eternal loss; Obliteration is that, and more.

Under Obliteration, the old quarrel--”honest oblivion” vs. “comforting delusion”--is nonsensical. If the end is absolute erasure, the question is not whether we flatter ourselves, but whether anything we care about--including honesty or avoiding delusions--matters.

What feels true now doesn’t matter if those feelings will be obliterated, all trace wiped away, without consequence.

What remains from Pascal’s Wager: if Christianity is true, you should believe, because only then can you avoid both Hell and annihilation.

The Second Wager says: act as if Obliteration can be conquered--by building a world that outlast us.

Now, Christianity asks a lot: creation, revelation, miracle, resurrection, judgment, a love that outlives death. I don’t hold those beliefs; I do understand why, if they’re true, meaning is permanently secured. If they are true, that settles the question.

Obliteration poses two basic problems: can humanity be saved, and can the universe be saved?

We are not bargaining for personal immortality; we are asking whether our shared life can bear significance beyond our lifespans--and, if possible, across epochs.

We are asking a similar question as Christians do: can some future life help safeguard the meaning of our own?

So, can we save humanity? Yes: make humans interplanetary--then interstellar.

The universe is harder: whether heat death is inescapable is unsettled, and whether any finite civilization could alter cosmic boundary conditions is unknown. That uncertainty is a reason to fund the long‑shot physics that could lengthen the window of meaning.

If Christianity is true and we work, we gain salvation and steward creation. If it is true and we refuse to work, souls may be saved but history is wasted. If Christianity is false and we work, we still preserve meaning for as long as the cosmos allows. If it is false and we refuse to work, Obliteration erases everything. In every case, working is the rational bet.

This does not contradict Pascal’s Wager; it completes it. Pascal’s Wager asks for our transcendent salvation. The Second Wager asks for our commitment to history.

A merely therapeutic half‑Christianity misses the point: if everything is erased, “helpful” is just a way to manage our moods.

Pascal’s wager still holds: avoiding Hell is a decisive reason to believe if Christianity is true.

So follow the logic into the world.

In short, the Second Wager: act as if Obliteration can be resisted--not to usurp heaven, but to preserve the field on which souls are born, love, and choose. The first wager refuses Hell by faith; the second refuses Nothing by work. They are not the same, but they are not enemies.

The danger is Babel. Building against death without faith is a revolt. Building with it is stewardship. The Bible asks this of us, too.

If we accept Pascal’s Wager, coherence pushes us to accept its worldly corollary: bet--not on securing salvation, which lies beyond us--but on resisting Obliteration by building.

Objection: you can’t hedge both. Reply: they run on different axes--faith orders ultimate ends; work orders proximate means. They are complementary. In fact, they may be essentially linked.

If Obliteration is true and Christianity false, either we vanish or we prolong meaning by rescuing ourselves; if Christianity is true, the first wager decides eternity and the second governs what we do with history.

So what should a sane civilization do on Monday morning? A practical program toward preserved meaning: build civilizational redundancy (interplanetary habitats and hardened Earth systems); strengthen innovation capacity (real meritocracy; strong scientific institutions); reduce tail risks (biosecurity, nuclear safety, planetary defense); expand energy abundance (fission now; serious fusion research); pursue long‑horizon physics/engineering (reversible computation; extreme‑astrophysics energy capture); and found institutions mandated to think on century‑to‑millennium horizons, with memory and governance designed to outlast leaders.

The Second Wager asks for less metaphysical assent than faith--and far more action.

“Belief in progress” means specific commitments to preserve civilization and consciousness in time.

Does this go beyond what Christianity asks? Christianity asks for faith; the Second Wager asks for work.

We do not know if we can achieve any of this; prudence says try.

Obliteration is, in one crucial respect, worse than Hell: it erases even the memory of the good. If Wagers are rational against a lesser bad (Hell), they are at least as rational against the greater bad (absolute erasure).

So if the First Wager supports faith in Christ, the Second Wager supports civilizational investment in the scientific and institutional capacities that might defy Obliteration.

Christianity promises to ground meaning in a transcendent reality and to save humanity from obliteration by a life that does not perish.

A technological worldview cannot guarantee eternity, but it can extend the time horizon of human meaning--across planets, stars, eons--and deepen understanding of the created order.

This is not transhumanism. Exceeding biological or earthly limits will not cancel sin. Resources will remain scarce; desire always outruns supply; sin can never be engineered away. Stewardship is not utopian.

I believe in technological progress ordered to the worldly preservation of humanity--not a guarantee of eternity, but a disciplined attempt to expand time for the good if Christianity is false.

If the good deserves to endure, then either God secures it by eternity or we must buy time for it in history. I don’t possess the first assurance; I accept the second responsibility.

Classical Christian theology says that even if humans fail to act as instruments of divine providence, God will still find a way to fulfill His promises.

Pray toward eternity; build against Obliteration. If God makes all things new, our labor is gathered up; if not, let the labor itself carry the good--beacon to beacon, age to age. Lights fail; the line endures. We refuse Obliteration.

In 2020, it wore a lab coat.

You felt it. You obeyed. Sometimes you had no choice. Sometimes you didn’t know.

Maybe it was during COVID that you first grasped its power. Maybe before. Maybe only after.

Science slid melodiously from its forked tongue. Hidden behind: power.

Why? It was—and is—a secular faith.

This is the autopsy. What the trials said before 2020, what officials said then, and how the scientists knew one thing and said the opposite.

In this post:
1. Pre-2020 clinical trials
2. The sudden flip in Spring 2020
3. How “mechanistic plausibility” replaced evidence-based standards like GRADE
4. The incentives that made certainty profitable.

Let’s start with the core, uncomfortable fact.

During Covid, the CDC recommended masking for toddlers despite having no high-quality evidence that masks benefited young children — and substantial reasons to believe the policy risked developmental harm.

They went ahead anyway.

Why?

Power.

I will explain how this happened.

This is going to be a long series. It will explain everything about masks during Covid--both the science and political reasons why our institutions systematically misrepresented the evidence.

Definitions:
• Masking = community use of (a) cloth, (b) surgical, or (c) fit‑tested N95/respirators; either source‑control (protect others) or wearer protection (protect self).
• “Works” = reduces lab‑confirmed infection (or pre-specified hard clinical endpoint) by a meaningful effect size in real‑world use, not just in a mannequin experiment or epidemiological study.
• Pseudoscience = policy justified by selective evidence, post‑hoc endpoint changes, or departures from rigorous standards like GRADE while claiming “science.”

Prior to the pandemic, there were many clinical trials showing that masks do not prevent respiratory viral infections. The evidence indicated that they simply did not provide convincing real-world benefit on lab-confirmed infection in the best pre-COVID trials.

Take this study published in 2019 by the World Health Organization. In it, WHO analyzed ten of the best available trials on whether masks prevented influenza. They found no evidence masks worked.

Or take this study, conducted by CDC scientists. Masking was becoming an increasingly debated issue. So, the scientists wanted to find out in 2020 if mandates might work. They analyzed 14 of the best studies and found no evidence.

This created an awkward problem for public health messaging.

Public health knew all of this for a long time. Listen to our beloved Fauci. In 2019, when asked whether people should wear masks to avoid illness, Fauci laughed, calling it “paranoia”. The advice mirrored, almost exactly, what vaccine-skeptical critics would later claim.

When the pandemic struck, the public health establishment stuck to its old messaging. Here’s the Surgeon General in March 2020:

Masks don’t work, he says. Even worse, really. He warns: Whatever you do, don’t mask! You might kill someone.

And here’s Fauci on March 8th, 2020. The same message as the Surgeon General.

“There are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Naturally, the next move was to mandate what had just been dismissed as ineffective and potentially harmful.

There was just one problem. There weren’t enough masks. Why not? Well, we had offshored the American economy to China. That’s why.

So we came up with a solution: Cloth masks. Yes, we can avoid the supply chain problems. All we need is cloth, not an economy.

Ah, but there was another problem. Just a teeny tiny one. The tiniest. But a problem nonetheless.

The one clinical trial published on cloth masks in 2015 showed a 13-fold increase in infections among those who used cloth masks.

Figures from the paper for your perusal, dear reader.

Oof.

We can therefore summarize what occurred in several profoundly scientific steps:

1. Masks don’t work.

2. Masks don’t work, and nobody should wear them, because they might be harmful.

3. Everyone should wear masks.

4. Everyone must wear masks, or else.

5. But there aren’t enough masks. OK, cloth masks then.

6. Wait. Cloth masks actually increase the rate of infection. But everyone must wear cloth masks anyway. Or else.

7. The trial was rarely cited in subsequent guidance, despite being easy to find in the literature.

It gets worse.

A few months in, Norway’s public health agency published a paper. It estimated 200,000 people would need to wear a mask to prevent one infection per week.

That’s with a 40% reduction, a figure nobody serious believe or believes.

Then the Swedes enter the fray. Anders Tegnell, Chief Epidemiologist of Sweden, who organized the acclaimed pandemic response of that country, was asked to weigh in. Looking at the mask dubiously, as if at an alleged magic potion, he told the truth:

Masks have no benefit.

The Swedes were subjected to relentless international media pressure, yet they prevailed, as we will discuss soon. Meanwhile, American institutions went in the opposite direction, rewriting science by decree.

Why was this happening? The surface-level explanation is that people were afraid. But only surface-level, as we shall see in a moment.

It was April 2020. Stay-at-home orders were ending. People were scared. The science didn’t matter.

And fear was big. When mask mandates ended much later, hundreds of popular articles advised about how to cope with the anxiety of not masking. It’s not an exaggeration. Hundreds.

Many scientific articles showed that people who masked are more prone to neuroticism—that is, negative emotions.

Mask mandates increasingly became less about virology and more about psychology. Whatever their initial rationale, they functioned at least as much as a tool for managing public fear as they did as a conventional public health intervention.

Into this atmosphere stepped a handful of highly visible public health leaders. Figures like Fauci and Walensky came to function socially not only as scientists, but as high priests of a modern, institutional orthodoxy.

Their statements were often received less as provisional hypotheses, open to revision and debate, and more as sanctioned doctrine. And once a doctrine was declared, it proved almost impossible to reverse, no matter what the data said.

In the medieval world, priests offered charms, relics, and blessings to ward off the plague. Public trust in these talismans had less to do with their intrinsic efficacy than with the authority of the figures who blessed them.

In the twenty-first century, we have watched a secular analogue emerge. The mask sometimes operated not only as a physical intervention but also as a symbolic object—a visible marker of fidelity to the prevailing institutional narrative, meant to ward off biological contagion as much as the prevailing social one.

If this sounds more like religious practice than dispassionate science, that is not an accident. When institutions demand obedience, offer protection, and punish dissent, they start to behave less like scientific bodies and more like churches. The obvious question then becomes: what, exactly, is the creed? I will come back to that. For now, we follow the chain of events that made people so afraid in the first place.

First, though, we will chase this story down, following each and every link in the chain. Why were people afraid to begin with? Again, the simple answer: the media had been relentlessly terrifying the public for months. Remember the freezer trucks? The Chinese people dying in the streets, surrounded by men in Hazmat suits, insta-fragged by the virus?

Then came the World Health Organization. In early March, it publicized an estimated case fatality rate of 3.4%—a number that, presented without context, amplified the public’s fear out of proportion to the objective facts.

Just a week before WHO published this 3.4% figure, Fauci and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield published in NEJM that the death rate could be a fraction of 1%.

Even Time Magazine fact-checked the World Health Organization’s figure. And getting fact-checked by Time Magazine is like getting beaten in basketball by a retard in a wheelchair. Humiliating.

(*CFR is widely understood as an often dramatically inflated measure of mortality, due to what is known as ascertainment bias. It is often used to create sensational headlines and misrepresent infectious disease risk. This is epidemiology 101. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General at WHO, knew this. He also knew that by promoting inflated figures without nuance, he would intensify the global panic. Science Media Centre did an excellent job covering the scientific aspect of this at the time.)

Then, along came Orange Man, who repeated Fauci and Redfield’s numbers. Uh oh.

The media went berserk. Now, but Trump was right, you might say. It didn’t matter. Come on, why should it matter? It’s Trump! And so once Trump said it, Everyone-Who-Is-A-Good-Person knew where the Lines Of The Unsayable were drawn. You could only use the 10x exaggerated numbers. Trump had made that official.

And if you didn’t? Maybe you like the Orange Man, a cancelable offense. Maybe, like him, you were a Nazi. Or a white supremacist. Or a eugenicist. Or a fascist.

And maybe you want people to die. On purpose. You know, those people who want people to get infected and die on purpose. Maybe you’re one of those people. (There’s an entire book, podcast, and blog dedicated to this claim. And the guy behind it is frequently—still—quoted by the mainstream media.) So, yes, maybe if you’re honest about the science, you actually just really love death.

Now, the agenda to spread fear came from the top. In his book about his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott Atlas describes his horror when Fauci repeatedly claimed during a meeting that more needed to be done to make Americans fearful.

Yet when polled, Americans reported that they believed they had a 25% chance of dying from COVID-19. For Americans under 60, that’s 100-1000x higher than reality. Americans were brainwashed with media hysteria. Fauci wanted them even more brainwashed.

And it wasn’t just Fauci. It was everyone who was making decisions. According to a Congressional report, HHS spent a billion dollars on ads and other messaging to provide manipulative messaging like this.

This was big money. It was an industry. The money had to be spent. People had to be paid. They had to spread fear.

So so that’s why mask mandates happened, despite the evidence going in the other direction. Fear. Fear that had been relentlessly pushed. But why was HHS trying to spread fear? We’re about to arrive at the complete explanation. But still, I apologize, I must give a simple answer for now.

Our first and most foundational layer: power.

Fauci and friends spread fear because they wanted power.

I know it sounds cynical. I resisted this explanation for an extremely long time. Before I became a heretic—I mean, a traitor—I was someone who was on the “other side”. I was on the side of masks, lockdowns, etc. And I knew that my intentions were pure. They were so very pure. How could power be the reason for this all, when my motivations were so pure?

What if we considered for a moment that it might be precisely these pure intentions that are the perfect vehicle for power? What if we considered that something truly powerful could only ever use the very purest intentions? What if we considered that, in fact, that’s exactly how extraordinary power always works.

Before we explore that—what are these pure intentions exactly? how do they work? why?—I shall push forward and cover more ground. A bold statement:

Power entirely explains the dysfunction of the pandemic response. And everything grotesquely dysfunctional in the political and scientific scene happening today.

But only a very specific kind of power, a very specific shape of it, configured in a very specific kind of way. Preliminarily, let’s sketch out a simplified theory of what we might call public health power. Could we that this public health power represents something like what Foucault calls biopower? Not quite. The public health power that I have in mind has countless useless, demonic appendages. And these crush and tear. They are senseless. They speak in the name of the Almighty (Science) but bear little relation to what we might anticipate its effects should be.

What Foucault called biopower is related, well, to Foucault’s very real perversion. We could speak of Foucault’s time in Algeria. The well-known accounts of his behavior. But we ain’t gonna go there. With public health power, we mean something nonsensical. We do not mean the something sensible that Foucault fled from in terror and that justly pursued him…

Those in the institutions want power. They want to increase their power. They want to expand. They want more funding, more employees, a growing fiefdom. Fauci promoted the power of the institutions. And in turn, he was given power. Thus, Fauci was the most powerful public health official. You see, the more you promote the power of an institution, the more powerful you become within that institution. And this, my friends, leads to everyone running public health institutions promoting the power of these institutions. And, here’s the thing: in institutions that have been for decades unaccountable, they will do that by saying whatever they can get away with. Which are, granted, very specific sorts of things.

Don’t believe me?

I said this would be an long series. This is not the end of that series. We are only just getting started. But let us make an observation based on what we have seen so far.

Fauci played a pivotal role in both:

a) exaggerating the threat that led to demand for the mask mandates, and
b) promoting the pseudoscience that justified imposing them.

He generated both the fear and the solution to the fear. This is remarkable, isn’t it? To say nothing of the creation of the virus itself. Oh boy. We ain’t even going there in this series. We cannot cover everything. Soon we will. But not here.

So let us continue examining the facts about masks. Let us excavate them and carefully observe their configuration. You will recall from earlier that Fauci had downplayed masking for COVID-19 on March 8th, 2020, even stating, as the Surgeon General had, that masking could cause “unintended consequences”.

Take note, my friends.

For this is quite remarkable. Because after this, Fauci was asked by one reporter from The Street on June 12th, 2020 why he changed his advice. He claimed that he had been lying to save masks for healthcare workers.

That he could so casually admit that he was lying is itself disturbing. But if he lied masking science for instrumental reasons, what else was he lying about? None of this seemed to bother him. Or his interviewer, who nodded along.

But it gets so much worse. Let us examine the next piece of evidence. On June 1st, 2021, a year after The Street interview, a FOIA’d email by Fauci was published. It caused an uproar.

On February 5th, 2020, former HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell had asked Fauci whether she should wear a mask. Fauci responded that masking would not help.

This email means that Fauci was forcing masks on hundreds of millions of people when, privately, he did not believe the recommendation was scientific. Fauci had all along privately believed masks did not work and was lying when he promoted them, and then lied again about saving PPE to hide the first lie.

Just think about that. Fauci lied to cover up a lie. This email also implies that he didn’t believe that PPE for healthcare workers really worked either, and was lying to them too. This is head-spinning. Why would Fauci feel the need to do that?

Ohhhh, my friends, my friends. We shall get there. We are in fact converging.

But first, to punctuate these points, let us observe the following:

Isn’t that curious?

Now, it is also notable that only in private correspondence with Sylvia Burwell (a former HHS Secretary) does Fauci tell the truth. To go back to our theory, it does not expand public health’s power to lie to Sylvia Burwell, and could hurt his standing with her, so he tells her the truth.

But what happened then? Well, after the release of the Burwell email, Fauci became subjected to vicious, high-profile attacks. A few days later, he becomes visibly angry during an interview.

He turns the volume up to 11. He is in survival mode. He’s been caught. And so he lays down the gauntlet:

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

By equating himself with science, it is obvious what he is doing. He is creating a shield of legitimacy, and he is doing it to survive. This helps him to maintain his position, fending off his attackers. “To call me into question is to call science into question. Are you really sure you want to do that?”

Alternatively, we might say that it makes him feel better, which, as someone who has his entire life maintained and accumulated power, is the same thing. Threat -> defense.

There is of course a problem here. Although Fauci buttressed his position with the in-group, if Fauci is constantly speaking contextually with an objective to expand the power of public health, as I have said, and not with the objective of transparently communicating scientific fact, and if the real underlying reasons for his “flip-flops” lie outside of science, as I have maintained, then although he might shore up his personal position temporarily, he actually discredits science in the long term by invalidating the legitimate scientific concerns of critics.

This is not an accident. It’s exactly how an unaccountable, constantly expanding bureaucracy like public health should function. Because there is no accountability, all that matters for its main power brokers are perception and power, and that’s exactly why Fauci was selected, through an organic process, to be the leader of the unaccountable institution of public health.

Man, and we’ve only discussed masks. And we’ve only just gotten started.

But how is science being done by Fauci anyway? Actually, in a certain literal sense, he’s right. Attacks on him are attacks on science: under Fauci science is about expansionary power, but that *is* the science that Fauci knows.

That is also the science his colleagues know.

If we put on our They Live glasses, we will hear the following words by Fauci:

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on power.”

That is, an attack on the interests of the public health bureaucracy, which are not the same as those of the American people.

But what if there is some science somewhere, some argument that I am ignoring or missing?

Let us therefore now go through all of the evidence and arguments that were available at the time.

Every single nook and cranny. Every single argument and counterargument. Every single pivotal piece or body of evidence. Will cover, dissect, and assemble it all—into a system.

You will be shocked.