The Deep State Goes Viral: Introduction
The Deep State Goes Viral: Introduction
by Debbie Lerman at Brownstone Institute
The following is the introduction to Debbie Lerman’s new book, The Deep State Goes Viral: Pandemic Planning and the Covid Coup.
For most of my adult life, I believed pretty much everything I read in the New York Times and heard on NPR. I thought there was a huge difference between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, conservative and liberal. And I was a proud, even self-righteous, liberal leftist Democrat.
Since March 2020, however, with the onset of the Covid lockdowns, all of those comfortable beliefs, and my former sense of belonging to a meaningful political and social movement, have evaporated. I find myself on the outside of the mainstream, attempting to construct a new worldview and find new people and institutions I can trust. One such newfound haven of sanity is Brownstone Institute – publisher of this book, and the website where most of the articles included here first appeared.
I’m lucky to be a pretty panic-proof type of person, so back at the beginning of 2020 I was not afraid. I did not think the virus posed a mortal threat to myself or my family. I knew it affected mostly elderly people with serious ailments. I also knew that there was never a pathogen in recorded history that was so transmissible and so deadly that it required locking down the entire world. And I found no evidence that the Wuhan virus, as it was called at the time, was such a pathogen.
Yet everyone else around me seemed to have completely lost their minds, first and foremost the media and public health experts. Instead of calming the public down and advocating common sense measures, they started screaming about “flattening the curve,” masking, social distancing, and the necessity of depriving children of education and socialization to “protect grandma.” Then they started bulldozing all of society into supporting not just untested and unregulated gene-based vaccines, but also coercive mandates of those vaccines.
It was utter madness.
Yet almost nobody else I knew saw things the way I did. Even when it became eminently clear that the virus posed little to no threat to children, they insisted that kids had to stay inside (the absolute worst thing I could imagine for a child) and wear masks. Then, when vaccine mandates were rolled out, even when it became indisputable that the vaccines did not stop infection or transmission, people turned vicious. “The unvaccinated” became a category of undesirable outcasts not allowed to participate in society. I found the irrational cruelty of people who considered themselves moral and compassionate to be downright terrifying.
The main cause of that irrational reaction was equally spine-chilling: a massive, global censorship and propaganda campaign undertaken by the entire online and traditional media apparatus. It was so gigantic that most people could not – and still do not – believe it could happen.
Due to that unprecedented narrative-control campaign, barely anyone was investigating what actually happened.
So I decided to do just that, and what I discovered was astonishing.
I discovered that the US Covid pandemic response was not a public health response run by the HHS, CDC or any other public health body. Instead, it was a biodefense/counter-terrorism response, run by the Pentagon, National Security Council, and Department of Homeland Security.
When I continued to dig, I found that the same pattern was followed in many countries around the world. The pandemic response, according to all available evidence, was implemented according to globally planned and directed protocols.
None of this has been reported in the corporate media, and even in independent media spaces, very few have investigated or reported on these topics.
Why does it matter? You might ask. So what if the pandemic response was run by national security agencies according to a biodefense/counterterrorism playbook, rather than by public health agencies according to public health guidelines? And why is it surprising that most countries responded in similar ways?
Put simply, if it had been a regular public health response, Covid would not have differed from any of the viral epidemics or pandemics of the last century: The public would have been told to remain calm, wash hands frequently, and stay home if sick. Public health agencies would have tracked clusters of severe disease and treated them accordingly. This would have happened at different times, in different locations. Most people would barely have been aware that there was a novel virus circulating among them.
Instead, the response to Covid was the exact opposite: The media and public health agencies whipped the population into levels of panic massively disproportionate to the threat actually posed by the virus. Everyone was convinced that the only way to “beat the virus” was to lock down the whole world and wait for a never-before-tested or manufactured vaccine.
This book presents my attempt to understand why and how that switch happened: from a rational, medically, and ethically sound pandemic response to a global military-style lockdown-until-vaccine nightmare.
As you read the book, you will follow my understanding of what happened in reverse order: the first chapter is my analysis of the historical, economic, and political forces that converged to make the Covid pandemic response happen. Subsequent chapters delve into the details of the research that led to these conclusions.
What is “the deep state”?
Just a few words about what I mean by The Deep State in this book’s title.
As explained by a generally unknown civil-servant-turned-author named Michael Lofgren who, according to an NPR report, popularized the term “Deep State” in his 2014 “Anatomy of the Deep State, the Deep State can be understood as “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state,” which constitutes a “government within the government” that “operates according to no Constitutional rules or any constraint by the governed.”
According to Lofgren’s definition, which I adopt in this book, “the military-industrial complex, Wall Street – they’re both about money, sucking as much money out of the country as they can, and control: corporate control and political control.” Plus, I would add, this is now happening not just on a national, but on a global, level.
My hope for this book
I hope the research and analysis presented in these chapters will wake more people up to the crucial understanding that Covid was not a public health event. Rather, it was a demonstration of the crushing power exerted by an ever-expanding global deep state – in this case, the biodefense global public-private partnership – on us, the people of the world. And, hopefully, with fuller awareness and understanding, more people will resist the efforts continually exerted by these entities to agglomerate control over all of the world’s wealth and resources.
For those who are skeptical, or who might consider such topics to be too conspiratorial, I hope this book can provide a new and interesting perspective.
The Deep State Goes Viral: Introduction
by Debbie Lerman at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society