One Weird Trick To Use On Vax True Believers

And A Bonus Quote

Today Alex Berenson tackles the ultimate in tough questions: 

The god that failed

How to open the eyes of anyone who still thinks Covid vaccines are working as promised?

He starts out with a big precondition. Don’t try this on your average injection true believer—he’s talking about reasonable people. People who don’t think “the only problem with Australia’s interment camps is that they don’t go far enough.” In other words, don’t try it on Jim Cramer, for starters.

With that assumption under his belt Berenson moves on to two Don’ts. The first is especially intriguing, because I’ve been trying to puzzle through it—with no real success—and Berenson promises enlightenment in the near future:

First, don’t talk about all-cause mortality. We don’t know yet what’s driving that (though I have some upsetting charts to drop soon), and it’s just too weird and scary for most people to consider.

Second, don’t overwhelm them with detail. Marek’s disease, antibody-dependent-enhancement risk, healthy vaccine user bias, age stratification, clinical trial design manipulation, unadjusted confounders, declining titers, B-cell maturation, booster schedules, anti-idiotype antibodies, spike protein migration, vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia - don’t go there.

So what’s that one weird trick? It’s this question:

If the vaccines work, what’s going on?

And if they don’t [work], why on earth would anyone not at very high risk from Covid agree to participate in further rounds of this failed experiment? Much less allow their kids to be vaccinated?

The instant rejoinder offered by a commenter was:

Most will, with perfect earnest, blame the continuation of the pandemic on the unvaccinated.

Which is probably a correct prediction. Still, maybe Berenson is right—it’s foot in the door, so to speak. The beginning of a conversation, and many more questions. Sow the seeds of doubt.

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And now for something totally different. A reader took the recent post Did Germany Just Declare Victory In Its Long War? very much to heart. He sent me a quote from Leo Strauss’s Walgreen lectures at the U. of Chicago, dating all the way back to 1949. Those six lectures became Strauss’s book Natural Right and History, in the same way that Eric Voegelin’s Walgreen lectures became The New Science of Politics. In these lectures Strauss takes on the usual relativistic arguments that Libertarians and others like to trot out in favor of moral relativism: History, they say, shows that different cultures disagree on moral norms so that must mean that there are no moral norms. It’s all relative so stop talking about it and lets all just do what we want provided what we want doesn’t interfere too much with other people’s wants. Or some such twaddle.

It’s too shallow to waste time on, but I did like the quote from the beginning of the lectures. What Strauss is saying, back in 1949, was that “American social science” had rejected the Declaration’s enunciation of God-given rights based on an intelligible knowledge of human nature, and had gone over to the Enlightenment view, espoused in England, France, and—above all—in Germany. The Enlightenment view, once the view of an elite minority, is now the default view in America as throughout most of the West. Human rights are not based on human nature as created by God, but are instead based on whatever legislatures and courts say they are. This is the view in which our young students are now indoctrinated, and Strauss viewed that prospect with trepidation.

Of course, the American elite’s infatuation with German thought has deep roots in the Progressive Era. It’s also true that these ideas of German thought resonated with the skeptical and relativist English thinkers like David Hume. The bottom line is the unknowability of anything called human nature and the reliance on the Will to create the beings that we want to be. This is what’s behind our current Woke fad:

I think it is proper ... that I should open this series of lectures by quoting to you a sentence from the Declaration of Independence. ... “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

... Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does this nation still hold “these” truths to be self-evident?

About a generation ago, an American diplomat could still say that “the natural and the divine foundation of the rights of man ... is self-evident to all Americans. At about the same time a German scholar could still describe the difference between German thought and that of Western Europe and the United States by saying that the West still attached decisive importance to natural right, whereas in Germany, the very terms “natural right” and “humanity” “have now become almost incomprehensible ... and have lost altogether their original life and color.” “While abandoning the idea of natural right, and through abandoning it,” he continued, “abandoning the idea of humanity, German thought created the historical sense,” and thus was led eventually to unqualified relativism.

What was a tolerably accurate description of German thought twenty-seven years ago would now appear to be true of Western thought in general. It would not be the first time that a nation defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conqueror of the most sublime fruit of victory, by imposing on him the yoke of its own thought. Whatever might be true of the thought of the American people, American social science at any rate has adopted the very attitude toward natural right which a generation ago could still be described with some plausibility as characteristically German.

The majority among the learned who still cherish the principles of the Declaration of Independence interpret these principles not as formulations of natural right, but as an ideal, if not an ideology or a myth. Present-day American social science, as practically all non-Catholic present-day social science, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are endowed by the evolutionary process, or by a mysterious fate, with all kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no unalienable rights.

To reject natural right is tantamount to saying that all right is positive right, and this means primarily that what is right is defined exclusively by the legislatures and the courts of the various countries.