Dear Friends and Patriots,

Have you heard the many talking heads on TV telling us we have to get used to a “new normal?” It’s an interesting reference, don’t you think? So, what exactly is this “new normal” they’re talking about? You should know. Many of you have been my friends for years, and I know for certain every one of you is a patriot. You’ve all heard this “new normal” stuff before. You should already have ideas about what they’re talking about.

The “new normal” is the exact same thing President Obama referred to as “fundamental transformation,” only, to a great extent, it’s now been realized and we’ve been experiencing it. “New normal” is how certain progressives are characterizing their desire to retain many of the social constraints placed upon us recently. They want us to get used to following rule by edict instead of the rule of law. None of the changes in our lives over the past four months has been the result of any law. How could it be? Congress hasn’t done anything except pass a couple of funding bills that added almost $4T to our nation’s already huge debt. It’s the changes recommended by long-time government bureaucrats, the “guidelines” if you will, that have changed our behaviors, that and the impositions of our state governments. We now queue up at least 6 feet behind other people in lines, and then we look behind us to make sure the next person is at least 6 feet behind us. We only go out of our houses if we have to. We no longer shop at many of our favorite stores—they’re not open. We are just now being “allowed” to do things like go to church, go to the beach, eat inside a restaurant, gather in small groups, and attend some public events. The states are now allowing such things, but only if they’re done within the “re-opening guidelines” and we maintain the social distance and mask guidelines

We’ve heard certain Democrats in national office urge their constituents to accept permanent changes. They speak of a great opportunity to become a different kind of nation once we’re “allowed” our liberty again. They argue for an entirely new social structure, a “new normal.”

Here are a few things the “new normal” movement wants to institutionalize: wearing masks whenever out in public; teleworking instead of going in to the office; staggered work and school schedules in attempts to minimize peoples’ exposure to each other; more and more disposable “safety” wear like masks and gloves; sports and music events playing to vastly reduced, socially-distanced crowds; social tracking to monitor our interactions with others; re-engineered factories that are set up to allow for social distancing; more expensive products as the costs of achieving the “new normal” affect company profits; more and more consumer goods ordered on-line and delivered to the customers’ homes instead of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores; on-line business meetings utilizing conferencing technologies that are adapted to any kind of computing device, including smart phones; health assessments before entering office buildings, schools, hospitals, and other places where large numbers of people congregate. There are many more aspects of the “new normal.” This sampling should give you the essential idea, though. Do you get a flavor of fear included in all of it? Yes, one aspect of the “new normal” is the institutionalization and general acceptance of irrational fear.

At this point, it’s useful to wonder if any nation on Earth would respond to the next epidemic or pandemic in the same way. Is the idea of shutting down an entire country to be considered part of the new normal, with the attendant inconveniences, destruction to economies, and constant fear-mongering? Gee, I certainly hope not.

Did you notice in the list of “new normal” items above how much technology is factored in? Yes, it’s true. The “new normal” being promoted would take more advantage of technology and purposely push people farther apart.

I know all this is distressing to you. It’s been distressing to me, too. Not that much has changed in my life. To an amazing degree, I didn’t change my routine. At work, I was deemed “essential” and continued to report in to my office every day. But, over 80% of my organization didn’t. They supposedly teleworked and stayed home. I’m sure some of them did work, too, but others couldn’t possibly do most aspects of their normal routines because the heart of their jobs wasn’t office-based. It made as much sense to put them in telework status as it might if your sanitation company told the people that collect your trash to stay home and phone it in. Things that we consider vital to do in normal times just aren’t being done—and our leadership says that’s okay. To a disturbing extent, my own organization is already adopting the “new normal.”

You all know I use certain methodologies in my writing. When I try to delve into a complex subject, I apply principles of critical thinking. I use the Socratic Method in my analysis and ask “Why?” as many times as necessary to arrive at conclusions that are logical and seem to be the best fit for the known circumstances and objective evidence. This COVID-19 episode has required a bit more than my normal routine. I’ve had to add considerations for motives. It appears to me there may have been crimes committed. In criminal law, prosecutors do not have to prove any motive, but they often do have to provide a logical sequence of events that best matches the material evidence. They have to bring forth witnesses, explain the evidence, articulate their theory of the crime, and convince the judge or jury of the guilt of the accused. But, they aren’t required to prove motive. Such things are necessarily unprovable, so prosecutors are allowed to openly speculate on motive. Judges and juries have to pay attention to actual evidence presented, but are free to make up their minds on whether or not any prosecutor’s theory of the crime – their speculations on sequences of events and motive – has any credibility. We’re all watching the COVID-19 saga and we’re all participating in it. It affects everyone to some greater or lesser degree. My compromises are relatively few, but I have made some. Others have been affected to their limit—they’ve acquired COVID-19 and succumbed to it. We’re all in this, but we should all be asking questions. After all, there are those calls for adopting a “new normal.” Shouldn’t we understand why? Shouldn’t we wonder what motivation is behind the calls for any “new normal?” What was so wrong with our “old normal?”

There are some questions we can’t answer with any degree of fidelity. We are all certain the virus first appeared in Wuhan, China. That seems to be well-accepted, though not definitively documented. China doesn’t unequivocally admit it did, and instead hints broadly that it may not be true. If not in Wuhan, then where? If not a Chinese-sourced infection, then who else did it, and where did it really come from? We’ll only hear learned speculations on the origination. The Chinese government has every reason to want to lie, and one thing the Chinese government has excelled at for the past 70 years is the creation and propagation of lies.

We don’t actually know if the virus is natural or not. There are quite a few virologists who assert it has traits that indicate it was at least modified in a lab somewhere. Somewhere? We can ask where, but we’ll never actually know. No one will ever admit to creating the COVID-19 virus. Why would they?

We don’t know why the World Health Organization hesitated for over a month in alerting the world that a new and deadly coronavirus was loose in the world. Yes, they did that. They knew at least by December that the virus was loose and already affecting Korea, Japan, and some places in Europe. They knew the virus was being spread by people who had been in Wuhan. But they didn’t say anything. Why not? It’s easy to speculate on the appearance of a pro-Chinese tilt to their actions, but was that really it? Were they urged to stay quiet by the Chinese leadership for a reasonable purpose? Did they remain quiet according to any arrangement with the Chinese to allow them time to take some kind of proactive measures? Or, were they individually rewarded for their silence? We’ll never know. No one will tell us.

We don’t know why certain governors in the U.S. decided it was better to concentrate COVID-19-positive patients in nursing homes. We can speculate those decisions in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and at least a couple of other states were the result of dumb recommendations from the senior health officials in those states, but was that the reason? Early on the Center for Disease Control put out that the severity of infections depended somewhat on what they termed “virus load.” They noted that health care workers, regardless of age or physical condition, had a greater risk because of continuous exposure to infected patients, increasing their own personal virus load. Orders to transfer people who had tested positive at hospitals back to the nursing home where they came from and, later, to send even more infected people to those same nursing home became death sentences for the elderly residents. In state after state, it was deaths in nursing homes that accounted for the majority of victims. Was that because of some evil plan? Was it ineptitude? Was it poor infection control by poorly supervised staffs? Was it due to just plain inadequate patient care? We may never actually know, but we do know that in almost any case concentrating COVID-19-infected people into one building that’s not equipped to isolate the sick from the healthy will almost certainly guarantee the spread of the virus and result in avoidable deaths.

We don’t know if this episode in world history is largely a natural event that just got out of control or if it was purposefully done. Even if the virus was lab-engineered, will we ever know if it was purposefully released and then kept quiet by China until it was well-established in several overseas nations? That’s a common speculation, but is there any reason to believe anyone will ever admit to it? Even beyond those questions, there are others that go deeper and ask if this entire event was facilitated for some greater purpose. Was this done as part of a demonstration of the effectiveness of a deadly virus when used as a weapon? Was it done with the specific intent to kill hundreds of thousands of older, less healthy people? Was it done to just to reduce population? Was it done to wreck the economies of the developed world to the advantage of one or more nations and perhaps one or more groups of very powerful people? We can speculate, can’t we? And we can be suspicious of any story we hear regarding who did what and for what overall objective.

We can speculate on the questions of who and why, but we will never get positive confirmation. But, do we need it? I say dwelling on questions you can’t get answered only wastes your time and energy. It’s counterproductive and not a good critical thinking practice. Once you’ve posed the question and realized the answer may never be forthcoming the right thing to do is put that question on the pile with other questions with no answers and move on. Concentrate your energies on finding questions that have answers, and also spend more time trying to understand the potential motives at play that led to this event unfolding the way it did.

I’ve been trying to unravel that motive question from the beginning of February. Why is this going on? Who is set up to gain from it all? Who is set up to lose? What are the objectives? Is timing a factor?

What’s unusual about this COVID-19 episode is how complex it is. When you speculate on motive you’re already saying you don’t think anything about the event is natural. You’re already saying you believe not only the virus, but its release was manufactured; that it was all a planned and staged event. Perhaps not all that well planned, and possibly not very well staged, but whenever you’re dealing with something as hard to manage as a disease vector, how good can that be – and how good does it need to be? It’s not far-fetched to believe the Chinese government purposefully allowed the virus to spread to western nations. It’s also not far-fetched to believe they did it to create chaos in the nations affected, and possibly even with the understanding that economies would falter and governments might even topple. It’s not even far-fetched to speculate the Chinese believed in the end the whole pandemic thing would be a great benefit to their international objectives and their economy.

There is another potential motive that has to be considered. China has been exercising a lot of influence in the world through its participation and funding of various United Nations initiatives and their Belt and Road initiatives. Indeed, the Belt and Road projects are a global effort to gain influence in the world; to put many nations in their debt. So far, over 70 nations have signed on as recipients of China’s magnanimous outreach efforts, including…Italy. Italy became a hot spot for COVID-19 thanks to the assistance from Wuhan-based Chinese workers. It is estimated there were as many as 13,000 Chinese nationals working on a Belt and Road project in Tuscany, where the outbreak in Italy began. Northern Italy is also the home of almost half of the nation’s 310,000 ethnic Chinese citizens, many of whom were traveling to and from China as tourists and visitors. Could it be that China used its Belt and Road projects as conduits to ensure the positive spread of the virus to where they wanted it to go? The main question of motive in this scenario deals with the potential of China as a power player in the globalist agenda to unite the entire world under one governmental body. China’s own internal objectives include having the dominant national economy on Earth by 2050 and becoming the undisputed most powerful nation on Earth shortly after. If a pandemic could wreak havoc with most of the developed nations’ economies, it’s likely that would aid and abet China’s interests and accelerate their timeline.

There is a third motive to consider. That motive is tied to the UN’s Agenda 2030. It’s hard to understand exactly how the Chinese see their nation’s role in accomplishing the objectives of the Agenda, but it’s clear they factor themselves in there somehow. They seem to like to use the UN for whatever purposes they can steer them to and there’s some likelihood they’ve determined a path to world domination that piggybacks on whatever success Agenda 2030 achieves. One thing is fairly certain—there are many in the world today trying to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic and use the resultant chaos and fear to promote policies more in line with pushing the needs of the Agenda than needs to deal with the effects of disease. A perfect example of that is the CARES Act, passed by Congress. It was larded with old progressive agenda items that also promote aspects of Agenda 2030. The version passed by the House had acceptance of The Green New Deal embedded in it. That was stripped out by the Senate, but in the spirit of “bi-partisanship” a lot of the progressives’ wish list items were allowed to remain. From a different perspective, it’s wise to consider the response to the pandemic appears to play to the peculiar desires of the de-population and de-growth movements, both of which are substantially supportive of the globalist goals of Agenda 2030.

I’ll close by stating my own beliefs in the simplest terms. I believe the virus is lab-altered, and the release was purposeful and planned months before it occurred. I believe the epidemic is only a single operational test in a long-series of biological weapons tests to document how such pathogens spread and to determine the effectiveness of new methods used to tailor a virus to infect specific parts of target populations while largely sparing the rest. I believe creating chaos in western economies, and especially the U.S. economy was a major objective. I believe this whole episode is China’s way of expressing their outrage at President Trump’s trade policies and those of other nations who have followed the U.S. lead. I believe the Chinese were acting in partnership with globalist operatives whose interests are predominately to accelerate the rate of progress in achieving Agenda 2030 goals. I believe the progressive Democratic-socialists in Congress and in certain states have purposefully made the situation in our country much worse than it otherwise would have been. To believe otherwise is to believe they’re all just incredibly stupid ideologues. I also believe President Trump might have managed the pandemic response far differently if the political climate had allowed him to. But, he understood he was in a “no-win” box and managed things as well as any human could in similar circumstances. I believe this entire episode in history has backfired on those who cooked it up, including the globalists and especially the Chinese. I also believe we will be a very long time assessing the magnitude of damage done to our nation and other western nations, beyond the many tens of thousands of our citizens who have been lost.

One last thought. To accept any state of “new normal” is to accept diminished liberty. All the compromises our society made to assist in coping with the virus were detrimental to some aspect of our individual and collective liberties. This nation was founded upon principles that were intended to guarantee those very liberties for all eternity. Whenever you hear anyone speak of a “new normal,” rest assured they’re talking about taking something away from you, me, and that fellow behind the tree. That’s the way it works.

In Liberty,

Steve A. Stone

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