[TW note: I don't have debate commentary for you, because last night I was out seeing a play with my 10-year-old daughter.]
It isn't just Covid.
"Public health" in general is an intellectual train wreck, a wholly politicized branch of so-called medicine that involves a seemingly endless series of false claims and ideological gobbledygook.
We should have denounced it and written books about it sooner, but I think before Covid we just didn't pay as much attention to it as we should have. And its overreach wasn't nearly as bad as it ultimately became.
I mean, remember "racism is a public health issue" as a justification for why we could break the sacred lockdowns in order to go demonstrate about George Floyd? No self-respecting discipline speaks or thinks that way.
Well, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has really outdone himself this time.
He just said: "Today, for the first time in the history of our office, I am issuing a Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence. Firearm violence is a public health crisis in America that poses a serious threat to the health and well-being of our country."
After making this announcement earlier this week, Murthy proceeded to lay out every dumb, debunked claim about gun violence ever uttered.
So yet again, "public health" is being used as a pretext for demonizing some aspect of standard American freedoms.
You will recall how unhappy Anthony Fauci was when a federal judge overturned the mask mandate on planes. He insisted that this was a matter for public health to decide, and not properly a matter for the judiciary. Well, sorry, Tony, but nobody consented to a dictatorship by -- I shudder even to think about it -- "public health" eggheads whose 24/7 barrage of false claims survives because no mainstream media source bothers to question it.
Hence at a conference later this year loosely inspired by Albert Jay Nock's book Our Enemy, the State, my presentation will be called "Our Enemy, Public Health."
Meanwhile, I've just finished the next issue of the 16-page monthly Tom Woods Elite Letter, the print newsletter I send to U.S.-based supporters.
Among other things, this one covers items like:
* The evil Southern Poverty Law Center has to downsize
* The time I startled the Tea Party by saying: stop doing THIS
* My book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, 20 years later: a Rorschach test for libertarians and conservatives
* Drunk conference speaker shouts slur at female student; Woods is there to tell the tale
* Pat Buchanan and I on Brown v. Board of Education
* Snopes finally concedes a lie about Trump -- seven years too late
The monthly Elite Letter is but one item in a bundle of goodies supporters receive, including transcripts of all my interviews for the Tom Woods Show, free entry into my murder mystery dinner parties around the country, membership in my no-censorship discussion group (The Tom Woods Show Elite), and a laundry list of other goodies intended to be the best package of thank-you gifts in the universe.
Hop on board before the next issue gets mailed out, and enjoy the pleasure of looking away from a godforsaken screen for a change as you absorb my old-school print newsletter: