Evil Enough for You?

cover image from here

I’m reading The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which is a must read this year. It’s been slow going, because I keep stopping to mark things on every page. I’ll just share a chunk today from fairly early in the book. The question it brings up is, on some kind of scale that measures horrendous evil in the world, where does this rank?

The book is 480 pages, thoroughly footnoted. I’m reading it in Kindle, so my page numbers are based on 934 pages. This section I’m quoting starts on p. 79 of Kindle:

Leading doctors and scientists, including some of the nation’s most highly published and experienced physicians and front-line COVID specialists like [Peter] McCullough, [Pierre] Kory, Ryan Cole, David Brownstein, and [Harvey] Risch believe that Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatment and off-patent remedies was responsible for up to 80 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID. All five doctors independently told me the same thing. The relentless malpractice of deliberately withholding early effective COVID treatments, of forcing the use of toxic remdesivir, may have unnecessarily killed up to 500,000 Americans in hospitals.

Dr. Kory says so plainly: “Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatments will go down in history as having caused the death of a half a million Americans in the ICU.”

These things aren’t new to us here. I’ve been quoting many of these doctors since early in the pandemic. But having all the facts laid out in a book, with references, is still kind of stunning. Piecing it together myself, it was hard to believe what I was seeing. Now it’s clear I wasn’t imagining any of it.

Half a million is a lot of deaths. The vast majority were elderly—at or beyond life expectancy, when something at some point was going to take them. But it didn’t have to be a painful illness they could have been treated for but weren’t, and which they were forced to go through alone. Even the very aged with co-morbidities, when treated early, got better—usually without hospitalization at all.

We were never “killing Grandma” by going without a mask or vaccine; Fauci was killing Grandma by withholding treatments.

The book lays out why the doctors blame mainly Dr. Fauci, and it’s convincing. For instance, the efforts of the front-line doctors who developed treatment protocols got no financing or support from any government anywhere in the world. What they got was hostility, censoring, and censuring—“much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies.”

Kennedy recounts the unusual absence of treatment protocols from US universities:

The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic.

“Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.”

Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored (pp. 78-79).

What kinds of things did Dr. Fauci suppress? There was this FDA example:

FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressive IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.

Countries in the world that follow US recommendations had the same types of problems as the US. But other countries, more off the radar, used ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other remedies in early treatment plans, and had much better success. We actually had a first world-country disadvantage.

Despite the censorship, some doctors treated—successfully. Most experienced zero hospitalizations or deaths among a wide variety of patients with age and co-morbidities. Early treatment made the difference.

Dr. McCullough is quoted as saying this of Fauci and those who helped him obstruct:

“You need, in short, to do the opposite of everything they did. It’s difficult to identify anything they did that was right” (p. 69).

The doctors’ estimates that 80% of deaths could have been prevented with early treatment—rather than the standard protocol of sending the patient home with directions to wait until they got sick enough for the hospital—is probably low. Probably all but the very most fragile could have been saved with early treatment.

Dr. Ryan Cole tells an example—one of his first, his own brother. Dr. Cole had come across Dr. McCullough’s protocol early on, so he was ready—

—when his overweight brother called Dr. Cole from a neighboring state on his way to the ER with a positive PCR test, labored breathing, blood oxygen at 86, and chest discomfort that he rated nine out of ten. “He has Type 1 diabetes,” explains Dr. Cole. Dr. Cole redirected his sibling to a local pharmacy and called in an ivermectin prescription. Within six hours, my brother’s chest pain was down to two out of ten due to the interferon effect of ivermectin, and within 24 hours after taking ivermectin, his oxygen was 98, and he then fully recovered” (p. 80).

Dr. Cole adds this:

“If you are under 70 years of age and have no severe preexisting illness, you can hardly die [from SARS-CoV-2 infection]. So, there is no fatality rate that can be reduced…. And for people who are elderly and have preexisting illness,” he adds, “as we know from Dr. Peter McCullough and his colleagues’ work, there are miraculously effective medicines to treat this virus so that the fatality rates go down another 70 to 80 percent, which means there is no ground for emergency use whatsoever. That’s a huge threat to the vaccine cartel and to remdesivir” (p. 81)

Motivations for murder tend to be money and power. Fauci’s incentive might have been money—big money for a vaccine everybody in the world is supposed to take multiple times, or maybe for the new remdesivir, which was as ineffective (or worse) as it was expensive. But he is already the most highly paid bureaucrat in America, at a bit under half a million a year. Maybe that wasn’t enough to satisfy him. But it ought to be enough to keep him from resorting to mass murder. He was already 80 when the pandemic started. He could have retired years ago and spent some of the money he’d accumulated on that more-than-comfortable salary.

I’m guessing power is the greater motivator for Fauci. This is an attitude he displays when he declares, “I am the science,” while offering no data, just his say so, simultaneously threatening anyone who doesn’t fall in line. It’s an ugly attribute. But it’s ugliest in someone who uses his power to control the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and considers his personal agenda more important than the lives of 500,000+ who could still be living among us if he hadn’t prevented their treatment.

We’re supposed to avoid judgment (Matthew 7:1), or maybe better put as “judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24). I wonder exactly how God judges someone who purposely causes the unnecessary deaths of so many people. Even when you consider mercy, it doesn’t look good for an unrepentant mass murderer and self-imposed tyrant.

Fauci isn’t the only guilty person. He might be the ringleader. Or maybe he does the bidding of someone more hidden in the shadows. But the colleagues, the bureaucrats, the functionaries who followed him, blindly or openly—those who knew they were causing deaths but that didn’t matter to them, because they wanted funding, or their job, or whatever lure he used to bind them to this evil, they are guilty as well.

Half a million deaths to your toll is massive. It’s not in the same league as six million Jews plus 8 million others killed by the Nazis, or 62 million by the USSR, 76 million by Mao’s regime in China, or even 2.2 million by the Khmer Rouge. But those were all by regime-wielding tyrants. Fauci is what you would normally think of as a pencil-pushing doctor. Plus, they all had years, maybe decades, to commit that many murders. He’s had only an intense couple of years.

 

Regime	Span of years	Estimated deaths of own people (non-military deaths)
National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NAZI)	1939-1945	14.2 million:[i]                 *   6 million Jews                 *   5.7 million non-Jewish Soviets                 *   2.5 million Polish, Serbs, others
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)	1917-1987	62 million[ii]
Chinese Communists under Mao	1949-1987	76 million
Khmer Rouge (Cambodian socialists under Pol Pot, patterned on Mao)	1975-1979	2.2 million (1/3 population)[iii]

 

How he got the power to shut down an economy, silence opposition, prevent treatment, and get people to willingly enforce his edicts on one another is harder to explain.

The damage done by the vaccine is evil for another day, but we ought to mention, despite the essential end of the pandemic through Omicron, which reaches practically the whole population whether you’ve been vaccinated or not, and maybe even if you’ve already recovered from COVID-19 in some other form—despite all that, they’re recommending it for six-month-olds, who have essential zero risk of death from the illness. The more we see how wrong they have been all along, the more they double down on the lie.

There’s something Jordan Peterson says about the dilemma a person had when faced with gestapo at the door while they were hiding Jews in the attic; should you lie? Peterson points out that you wouldn’t be in that dilemma if you and a lot of other people hadn’t waited until that moment to wonder about telling the truth.

The point is, once you know vaccines do not prevent infection—or spreading to others—you don’t give in to the pressure to take it. And that helps prevent you from being pressured into risking your children’s health with it, on down to your little baby.

The people attempting to invent a vaccine that would help in the pandemic may not have done wrong. But once they had to change the very definition of vaccine to allow this shot to be called one—even though it doesn’t prevent the illness and might not even lessen severity—they became complicit. Anyone who pressured others to take it, once its failings were already known and the VAERS data showed ever higher adverse reactions including death—when it’s still under emergency use authorization that shouldn’t have been granted, since there are effective treatments—is breaking the Nuremberg Code. This code was developed to prevent the world from ever again experimenting on human beings against their will.

Medical Case prosecutor details illegal experiments,
during the Nuremberg proceedings.
screenshot from video at the Holocaust Encyclopedia

For some, the vaccines might not have harmed, and maybe even helped prevent severe illness for those with comorbidities who would not get early treatment. But wherever there is risk, there has to be choice.

We said, “Never again!” We need to add, “Not on my watch!” Because the evil doesn’t lose its power until people stand up to it. It’s already unbelievably bad when the evildoers are sanguine about killing off half a million of our friends and family. But it will get worse unless we take away evil’s power by standing strong now.

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[i] United States Holocaust Museum's online Holocaust Encyclopedia:  https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193.

[ii] Walter E. Williams, "Socialism's Death Count," August 7, 2012. He references Rudolph J. Rummel's book and website Death by Government. 

[iii] Socialism Sucks Facebook post April 2013.

Malevolence

Yesterday was another example of malevolence in our world: a school shooting in Florida. We don’t yet know all the details. But it appears there are 17 dead and another 14 injured and hospitalized.

Alaina Petty, age 14, a Mormon girl, was one of 17
killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Image from LDS Living

The 19-year-old perpetrator was previously identified as troubled. When he had been a student, he had been prevented from carrying a backpack, I’m assuming so that he couldn’t hide a weapon inside. He was expelled from the school for behavioral reasons. He was known to be threatening, and some say his social media declared his willingness, or perhaps plan, to become a school shooter. However, he had no criminal record.

The story is that he set off the fire alarm, which would cause students to pour out of their classrooms, where they were vulnerable to his onslaught.

He was apprehended alive. It may be possible to learn something in this case that we cannot learn when the perpetrator is among the dead.

But the real motive is malevolence: a delight in evil. It’s a conscious choice.

It is not a mistake to gather weapons, plan ways to do as much destruction as possible, and then take as many innocent lives as possible. That is a purposeful act, with many small actions leading to it.

In most cases, for malevolence of this depravity, we assume mental illness is involved. Because no one in their right mind would do such a thing.

A healthy mind shrinks from taking human life. There has to be an overwhelming need—such as self-preservation, preservation of loved ones, or protection of innocents—that allows a human with a healthy mind to take a life.

But there is a sort of “logic” in the malevolent mind. I quoted Jordan Peterson on this in the last post. Because you face bad experiences in this world, you could take either the immoral or the moral stance. Peterson said, “If you take the immoral stance and say, Well, the horror of the world has made me bitter, resentful, murderous, and genocidal; isn’t it no wonder?” that’s the logic of the perpetrator of great evil.

But, as he adds, the malevolent act still isn’t logical: “All that does is make everything that you’re hypothetically objecting to worse.” And, “You can’t logically conclude that you should act in the way that is certain to do nothing but multiply [the horror of the world] beyond comprehension.”

Since we all face bad things, and we all have the power within us to choose good or evil, we have to make a conscious decision to choose to be moral.

During church on Sunday, a man told a story from over 40 years ago that will remain memorable. Back in high school, his mother was on a date with a young man. Just a pleasant date, out to dinner, to get to know one another better. The couple were returning to their car, ready to drive home, when a drunken gang of four men set upon them and threatened. They ordered the young man to let them take the girl, and then they wouldn’t kill her. They planned to rape her and leave her on the road somewhere.

The young man told the girl to run, and then he took on the four thugs singlehandedly, without a weapon, long enough for her to get away. But he lost his life in the effort.

The two young people were about 17, and so innocent. It’s hard to know, until you’re faced with something really dire, how you will react. This young man was courageous. And good.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.—John 15:13.

A year or two later, the young woman met another young man, in another state she had moved to. In conversation, she mentioned where she was from. This young man knew only one person from that town, whom he’d met at a camp some years earlier. The one he knew was the young man who had given up his life for this young woman. So he was aware of the story and knew what kind of expectation she had of a good man.

These two eventually married, and raised several sons, including the man telling the story at church. He said you can be certain he and his brothers were raised to know what was expected of them. They would be expected to stand up against evil, and protect the life and virtue of women—even a young woman they only knew from a date or two.

Consider the difference, in the face of malevolence in the world, between the immoral and the moral choice.

Violence isn’t something we reduce by access to certain weapons; violence is reduced when we learn to make moral choices, even when life is unfair, ugly, or malevolent.

The policy questions surround what to do about the perpetrator, and/or what to do to prevent the next perpetrator. It’s a necessary debate. As long as we have people who choose to do heinous, immoral acts, we need ways to stop them.

If it is because of an identifiable mental illness, we may need better ways of identifying and preventing. That’s a tough question, because it requires, sometimes, physical restraint before a crime has been committed.

Depriving all of innocent society from having the means to defend themselves against a perpetrator, in the hopes of depriving the perpetrator of the means to do harm—that’s a common suggestion. But it’s not a satisfying answer. Even, hypothetically, if you could remove all weapons from all people in the world, you would still have evildoers who purposely do harm—using other tools, utensils, or muscles against people without those things.

Returning to civilization is a better answer overall. It begins with the individual. With each of us, choosing to do the right thing—as best we can discern it—each and every time we are faced with a moral choice. Then we have a world that is less unfair, ugly, and malevolent giving evildoers their rationale.

Larry Elder was talking about the horrendous event on his radio show today. During the discussion, he played the audio of the testimony of Darrell Scott, a parent whose daughter was killed in the Columbine shooting in 1999. It seems appropriate again today. I searched to see if there was video of that speech, and I’ve included that 5 minutes below. But I’d like to quote a couple of sections:

Since the dawn of creation there has been both good and evil in the hearts of men and women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other eleven children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers.

The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain's heart.

In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA—because I don't believe that they are responsible for my daughter's death. Therefore, I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel's murder, I would be their strongest opponent.

I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy; it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies.

He shared a poem he had written about the sad change in our culture. And then he offered this:

Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, mind, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact.

What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence.

And then he suggested prayer—connection to God—as one answer.

As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, he did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America, and around the world, to realize that on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain. Dare to move into the new millennium with a sacred disregard for legislation that violates your God-given right to communicate with Him.

We get better at choosing the right thing with practice. That’s why “What religion do you belong to?” isn’t as useful a question as “What religion do you practice?” And it isn’t for one religion or sect to win out over another. It is to encourage a person in the way he has found in his life journey that leads him to honor God, life, family, property, and truth.

As I heard once: If all your life you will try to be more fair and more kind to others than some of them may sometimes be to you, then you will be happy, and your life will be full and useful."*

__________________________

* From a talk by Marion D. Hanks, entitled "More Joy and Rejoicing," October 1976.

Good and Evil Are Both Real

Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. If good exists, then evil also exists wherever there is not enough good.

Late last night a man took aim from a 32^nd story window in Las Vegas, shooting into a crowd of concert goers, killing 50 or more, injuring hundreds, maybe as many as 500 (estimates are still fluctuating). The perpetrator killed himself as a SWAT team entered his hotel room. Multiple rifles were found. Video footage from people in the crowd sounds like machine-gun fire; i.e., fully automatic weaponry, which is not available for sale. Eventually information should come out about where the murderer was able to obtain such weapons.

Image from BBC News

This was an act of terrorism. It was designed to kill as many innocents as possible. While ISIS claimed credit, there is no evidence of any connection, so that seems unlikely at this time. We don’t know if we will uncover a motive for such an evil act. What we do know is that murdering innocents is evil.

Graphic from BBC News

This morning, while covering this atrocity, Ben Shapiro was talking about evil. He referred to a book:  Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence, by Roy F. Baumeister. In this book, the author talks about four types of evil, or motivations to do violence (I’m summarizing from Ben Shapiro’s explanation):

·         Instrumental: This is the idea that you have an object in mind, and you don’t care what means are used in order to gain that end. You want money; you don’t care that it’s not your money; you go to the bank and rob it, and if don’t care if you shoot somebody in the process. That is instrumental evil. Violence is just an instrument you’re willing to use to get what you want.

·         Ego-driven: Quoting Baumeister, “Violence is perpetrated by a subset of people who think well of themselves. And indeed it mainly occurs when they believe that their favorable images of self have been threatened or attacked.” This is what we’re seeing on college campuses where protesters commit actual violence because they think someone might say words they find offensive. They even call speech that disagrees with their views violence, to justify actual violence against those who disagree.

·         Ideological: This is the people who believe, for example, that communism justifies the murder of a hundred million people, because you’re creating utopia. If people would just succumb to your vision, they wouldn’t need to be wiped out of your way. It’s also what we see with Islamic terrorism, although that can also come under instrumental or ego-driven evil.

·         Sadistic: This is the idea that you enjoy violence, that you grew up from a kid who tortured puppies, and now you go out and you murder human beings.

Often we think of evil in that fourth category. Evil seems inexplicable. The Las Vegas shooting might turn out to be in that category. But this type is actually the least common.

Sadism requires a mind that has released a person from sensing guilt, allowing unfettered “enjoyment” of inflicting pain. Most of us aren’t likely to embody this type of evil. It’s rare, because most of us feel guilt when we do wrong; guilt, or conscience, stops us from committing evil. Shapiro also says it’s the only one of the four types we can profile against.

The other three are evils all of us mostly sane people are susceptible to. And the only solution to these first three types of evil--the only way to civilization--is moral education. We need to learn that the only justification for violence against human beings is self-defense.

Moral education teaches you that your desire for money, or some treasure, or some outcome must be subordinate to the safety of fellow human beings.

Moral education teaches you that your concerns about your identity, or your beliefs, are not that important. Disagreement isn’t an attack. As Shapiro says, “We have to stop feeling offended when we are disagreed with politically. We have to stop attributing evil motives to people who disagree with us, because then we’re more likely to become evil ourselves.”

Moral education teaches that your ideology isn’t worth killing people for. You want communism? Go to someplace people have already chosen that, or set up your commune on a private island somewhere. Don’t impose it by force on anyone. You want Sharia law? There are places you can live under that law; go there. You want your ideologies to win? Try expressing your reasons in a persuasive way. Imposing your ideologies on others is tyranny, and tyranny is evil.

We’re seeing evil in people’s reactions to the atrocity.

CBS legal executive Hayley Geftman-Gold tweeted that she felt no sympathy for the victims. Calling them “Repugs,” she said, “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans are often republican gun toters.” That’s evil. I don’t know whether you’d categorize it as ego-driven or ideological, or some combination. It was recognized as unacceptable, and she was fired for her comments. This person didn’t commit the atrocity, but she thinks people she judges as inferior (because country music = non-Democrat voter) are therefore worthy of being mowed down by machine gun. That way of thinking is evil. And evil thought comes before evil action.

Hillary Clinton and Tom Brokaw both claimed that the shooting was because of gun sales, which should therefore be denied to sane, law-abiding US citizens, since the shooter used guns that were ILLEGAL ALREADY. In fact, legal automatic weapons have been used in a total of three crimes since 1934. And atheist Richard Dawkins mocked, in a tweet, “Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah! / Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns.”  In other words, they used this sadistic violence to support their political ideology. While that is clearly multiple steps less evil than committing mass murder, it is using the murder—as though it is a good thing, because we should “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Not related to this incident, but while the rains were still coming down following Hurricane Harvey, a Florida sociology professor tweeted that the people of Texas deserved the death and destruction because they are evil GOP voters. (Note to the professor: Harris County, where the majority of flooding happened, went for Hillary Clinton.) He added later that Floridians who voted for Trump deserved any disaster that Hurricane Irma inflicted. That’s hate speech. It reveals that he thinks people’s lives are worthless if they do not agree with his politics. The professor did, by the way, get fired.

What do good people do when they see others going through tragic circumstances? They send love, prayers, and help—just like you saw in Houston following Hurricane Harvey. Here’s a suggestion of how to help the suffering in Las Vegas. And this:

What do evil people do when they see others going through tragic circumstances? Decide whether or not the sufferers are people they hate, and if so rejoice in their suffering. If there’s room in your heart for that much darkness/evil, you really need to fill yourself with more light/goodness.

Ben Shapiro concluded:

All I would suggest for everybody is that we focus in on how we cleanse our own hearts of the tendency to do evil things, how we look at the world. And that we think a little bit more about the fact that we’re all brothers and sisters in this fight against evil people. And we really need to focus together on how we can make our country a better place across the board without tearing each other apart over simple political disagreements.

The how-to for cleansing our hearts of the tendency to do evil would fill another entire post. But for now, let me suggest some of the goodness I filled my life with this past weekend. It was the semi-annual General Conference for my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with hours of one good, uplifting talk after another. Here are a couple that share the good:

·         Jean B. Bingham, General President of the Relief Society

·         Elder W. Craig Zwick, of the Quorum of the Seventy