Early in the pandemic, decisions were made that were very puzzling to those of us with public health experience. A few bad choices are expected, but the volume of them was far beyond what could have been from simple chance. It really felt like some of the decisions were intentional.
It didn’t make sense at the time to really talk about that publicly. It would have been viewed as conspiracy theory and would have interfered with my credibility while trying to convince people to take precautions to protect themselves.
However, I had this discussion with a number of people who agreed with my assessment. The big question that has been plaguing me for all of this time though had to do with trying to understand the motive.
Before getting into that, it might be worth looking at what the Republican party has been designing for Americans. It’s pretty clear that they are driving for a population that is dumb, destitute, dismembered, diseased, and dead. The reasons for these objectives have become quite clear.
Dumb
The Department of Education began in 1867. Concerns over federalism led to it to be absorbed into the Interior Department until 1979. During that early era, it was involved in the development of land grant colleges, the GI Bill, and other initiatives. Until this administration it had been focused on equal access to education for all, through grants and civil rights actions. This administration wants to dismantle it, claiming that it “indoctrinates America’s youth.”
However, the department doesn’t choose what is taught. That is primarily up to states, completely negating this claim.
Destitute
The Trump administration has claimed that they are lowering prices. This is not true. They have remained flat since the worst of the pandemic.
The need for food assistance has continued to climb under this administration.
Dismembered
OSHA’s mission is to assure America’s workers have safe and healthful working conditions free from unlawful retaliation by setting and enforcing standards, and by providing training, outreach, education, and assistance. OSHA’s mission is to prevent workplace injuries, illnesses, and fatalities by establishing rules for safety and health and by ensuring employers comply with these rules.
Representative Andy Biggs (R) introduced a bill to abolish OSHA in January 2025.
Diseased
Those put in charge of various federal health programs and decisions (Kennedy, Makary, Prasad, and others) are making a concerted effort to destroy health, such as the recent changes to the ACIP recommendations related to the use of hepatitis B vaccine in newborns. That is likely the tip of the iceberg.
Even during the pandemic, the antivaccine and antimask sentiments of those crowds were widely adopted by Republicans, leading to much higher rates of infection and death than would have been expected.
Dead
The mismanagement of the pandemic was put into place from the outset. That presented a problem for the Biden administration in that minimizing the impacts had been normalized, making it hard to change course. That certainly doesn’t dismiss the mistakes that were made by that administration, but the ball was already rolling. Taking a more aggressive stance to prevention infection and death would have been political suicide.
The real impact of COVID still looms in the future as both chronic and infectious disease rates rise, leading to early deaths among the population.
Discovery
This has been the biggest puzzle I’ve been trying to understand for the past five years. What is the objective? Why decimate a population through these kinds of policies?
The answer became clear to me last evening in a passage from They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent by Sarah Kenzidor.
She writes “A depopulated, partitioned United States is easier to exploit and control, particularly in a chaotic era of climate change, which they anticipated decades ago. To them, the state is just something to sell. They do not care if the buyers are foreign or domestic. The United States of America is merely a landmass to split into oligarch fiefdoms. It inspires no sentimentality and requires no veneration. Its laws are irrelevant, its rights ephemeral, its population disposable. Its history can be rewritten.
This is exactly what the Trump administration is up to. They are making the American public pawns to divvy up the wealth of the country to line their own pockets.
This is similar how the kleptocracy developed in Russia after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. The Inauguration gave a pretty clear image of who the technokleptocrats are in the US.
The Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8) prevents federal officials, including the President, from accepting gifts, payments, or offices (emoluments) from foreign countries or their rulers without Congress’s approval, ensuring officials serve the U.S. without foreign influence, with “emolument” meaning any profit or benefit from an office or service. Yet this administration is more than happy to take a 747 from Qatar and side with Israel to destroy Palestine in what likely will become a resort land grab.
The biggest disease in the US is the entire MAGA machinery. It needs to be excised and incinerated for this country to survive.
