How to Terrorize a Nation: Covid & the Politics of Fear

By Dr. Kevin Barrett

Just how bad is the Covid-19 pandemic? Bad enough—likely worse than any flu season since 1919. But as bad as Covid is, it isn’t nearly as terrible as most people think. The proof: A global public opinion survey by Kekst CNC published July 27 shows that, overall, people think the novel coronavirus is about 100 times worse than it actually is.

The survey, based on a sample of 6,000 adults in the UK, United States, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan, asked “How many people in your country have had coronavirus?” and “How many have died?” Average Americans think that about 20% have been infected with Covid-19 (20 times the actual number of confirmed cases) and that 9%, roughly 30 million people, have died. In reality, according to official figures, about 0.04% of the population, meaning a little over 150,000 people, have died of Covid. So, according to the survey, the average American thinks there have been more than 200 times as many Covid deaths as have actually occurred. Citizens of other countries typically hold only slightly less exaggerated views.

Why do so many people think Covid-19 is so much worse than it really is? The answer, in two words: media fearmongering. Since last March, the mainstream media has been running with alarmist Covid headlines 24/7/365. In April, there was a surge of deaths, concentrated in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, as well as several major cities, and that was played up by the media.

Since then, though a great many new cases have been discovered across the nation, the death rate has declined drastically. Yet the media hype the new cases while barely even mentioning the much lower death rate. Traumatized by lockdowns, economic catastrophe, and now mandatory masking, and subjected to media hysteria on a daily basis, Americans now view reality through the distorting prism of fear.

Contributing to the media hysteria is political polarization. Democrats, alongside some independents and never-Trump Republicans, are desperately seeking to drive Donald Trump out of the White House. The worse the Covid disaster looks, the easier it is to score political points against Trump. That may be why the Democrats and the media are constantly attacking “Covid deniers,” “Covid minimizers” and “Covid conspiracy theorists,” as if the problem were that people underestimate the dangers of the disease.

Today’s Democrats are doing exactly what Republicans did after 9/11: spreading grossly exaggerated fears in order to incite mass hysteria for political purposes. George Bush’s approval ratings before 9/11 were around 50%; they shot up to over 90% after the false-flag attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush and Cheney stampeded the nation into paroxysms of fear-crazed blood-lust, reaping handsome political and financial profits. The compliant media captured record numbers of eyeballs and advertising dollars by parroting the administration’s gross exaggeration of the threat posed by terrorists in general and Islamic radicals in particular. Dissidents were censored, suppressed, or worse: Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney was forced out of Congress; anti-Patriot Act Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were sent ultra-weaponized U.S. government anthrax in the mail; 9/11 skeptic Sen. Mark Dayton was forced to evacuate his Washington office and give up his job due to “terrorist threats”; Rep. Dennis Kucinich dropped his plan to launch a congressional investigation of the 9/11 “put options” after his close family members started dropping dead; and Sen. Paul Wellstone and his wife and daughter and top campaign leaders were murdered in a rigged plane crash.

Such extreme terror tactics have not been deployed against Covid-minimizing Republicans—at least not yet. Nonetheless, a sort of political coup is clearly underway. The orchestrated George Floyd protests and riots, and the subsequent orgy of statue-smashing and race hysteria, has built on Covid terror in service to the regime-change project.

But what many people don’t understand is that both teams, the Democrats and Republicans, work for the same owners: the international banking cartel that creates most of our planet’s currency out of nothing by lending it into existence at compound interest. The criminal banking syndicate can literally create as much money as it wants, for any purpose, any time it chooses.

Since 9/11, the bankster-run international Deep State has changed its primary means of social control. Throughout the 20th century, it promised ordinary people a better life. It relied on the politics of hope. The 21st century, in stark contrast, has been dominated by the politics of fear.

We used to obey our rulers because we thought the system worked for us: Our lives would get better, and our children and grandchildren would be better off than we were. Since 9/11, we obey out of fear—fear of terrorists, fear of Covid, or fear of whatever orchestrated and/or exaggerated threat comes next.

Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.

America’s Comorbidity Crisis

By Tilton Adler

When it comes to Covid-19, there are more questions than answers. Debates surrounding transmissibility, the controversial efficacy of face coverings, and whether the long-term sociological and economic impacts will be deadlier than the disease are yet to be answered. But from this fog of mainstream misinformation, one thing has become clear: If you are obese and/or diabetic you have an exponentially higher risk of developing life-threatening complications once you contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And sadly, for nearly three-quarters of Americans, these “comorbidities” are red flags we cannot afford to ignore. A comorbidity is the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient, according to Webster’s.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 and above in adult women and men. It is estimated that 71.6% of Americans 20 years and older are classified as overweight or obese. According to a clinical research paper in the International Journal of Obesity, 504 Covid-19-positive patients in New York City were observed between March 10 and April 13, 2020. Of those 504 patients, 27% fell in the normal weight range, 30% were classified as overweight and 43% as obese. Patients in the overweight and obese category required intubation more frequently and subsequently died from complications of the virus. Additionally, obese males were more likely than females to die from the same complications.

Another analysis of 4,103 patients in the New York City healthcare system showed a BMI greater than 40 as the second strongest predictor of hospitalization for severe acute infection, after age. Similar findings have been documented in France and Germany. Authors of such studies have hypothesized that because

obese individuals experience reduced volume of oxygen in the lungs, resistance in their airways, and increased stress on their heart they are at higher risk of developing severe pneumonia and respiratory dysfunction, in turn leading to increased chance of death as a result of this novel coronavirus.

While obesity has been found to contribute to a more severe expression of SARS-CoV-2, there is another risk factor consistently showing up on patient charts. The CDC estimates that 34.2 million Americans are diagnosed diabetics, with an additional 88 million being prediabetic. Let that sink in. Over one-third of our nation’s population is at an increased risk of death from this virus. The United States leads the world in the prevalence of diabetes, and, unfortunately, also in Covid-19 deaths. Many scientists are questioning whether this is coincidence or causation. According to a recent article in The Lancet, “The reason for worse prognosis in people with diabetes is likely to be multifactorial. . . . Age, sex, ethnicity, comorbidities such as hypertension and cardiovascular disease, obesity, and a pro-inflammatory and pro-coagulative state all probably contribute to the risk of worse outcomes.” A close eye will be kept on diabetic patients who recover from this rampant virus. Inevitably, more will become known about which, if any, prevention methods may work to keep these individuals’ risk of contagion low. As it stands, following CDC guidelines for masking when showing flulike symptoms, personal hygiene, social distancing, increased exercise, maintaining proper weight, and improving the quality of one’s food choices are the most advisable prevention methods, according to Karl Nadolsky D.O. and the people at “Endocrineweb.com.”

It is important to point out that while obesity and diabetes have been linked to an increase in severe complications and death in Covid-19 patients, there is thus far no scientific data showing these pre-existing conditions make one more susceptible to becoming infected in the first place. An obese or diabetic individual is not inherently more likely to contract the virus than their health-nut neighbor.

As Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus said, “Prevention is better than cure.” As we continue to navigate the unknowns of this novel coronavirus, perhaps it is time to reevaluate the underlying health in the majority of our citizens, if for no other reason than to reduce the morbidity from the next global pandemic because, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s only a matter of time.