The experts betrayed us — and we responded like frightened children

The Brownstone Institute and its intrepid leader, Jeffrey Tucker, have been beacons of light during the COVID-19 insanity. Now from Brownstone comes Thomas Harrington’s brilliant new book, “The Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class.”

If you have come to believe or even suspect that at the core of the pandemic madness was a betrayal by the credentialed class, if you have ever considered the possibility that what was done to the American people amounted to treason, of if you simply want to understand what we all went through so recently, then this is the book for you.

We must not turn our backs on what was done to us. If we do, it will surely be done to us again, likely even more disastrously next time.

Though a member of the credentialed class — he is a professor emeritus — Harrington lived through the COVID-driven hysterical abandonment of truth, justice, and the American way not as one of the promoters of the hysteria but as a cool observer of it. His book is a record of his thoughtful analysis of what was happening, written and published in real time.

Each section is brief and pointed. The first is dated March 22, 2020; the last is dated November 5, 2022. Here is a sampling of their titles: “The Merchants of Moral Panic”; “We’ve Let Them Get Deep Inside Our Heads and Our Communal Living”; “The Eric Adams Cure for Non-Compliance: Compliance”; “Did Health Officials Enable Big Pharma to Defraud the Government?”; “Doctors Who Live in Fear and Promote it in Others.”

Harrington’s brief, well-written, and thoughtful essays will enable you to confront how much has changed in America. He may convince you that the American people have been being conditioned for quite some time to respond as they did. He identifies those who have been doing the conditioning and how they have been doing it. The all-too familiar malefactors — Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Neil Ferguson — are given their due, but Harrington considers the political and social changes that made it possible for them to do what they did.

He examines a double revelation. Many of us were surprised to learn that America evidently does not work the way we thought it did and also surprised by the conduct of many of our fellow citizens. The elite that exercises governmental power and controls the flow of information demonstrated “the capacity and the desire to assault their own populations with well-organized and persistent campaigns of information warfare.” In 2020, Big Pharma, Big Media, and Big Government unleashed a coordinated terror campaign on the American people, and for the most part, the people responded, in Harrington’s words, like “frightened and long-abused children.”

What happened to America, to our ruling elite and to our fellow citizens, that made this possible? Harrington answers the question with questions of his own:

If the epidemics of 1918, 1957 and 1967-68 did not “change everything,” why should it be the case this time? Could it simply be that there are very large centers of power that, for reasons of their own, might want “everything to change” this time around?

Why did so many of your neighbors join in by becoming self-appointed enforcers of repressive government policies? Harrington’s examination of these questions displays a deep insight into how a ruling class can impose its will on the social order.

“The Treason of the Experts” will give you the opportunity to travel through that recent period again, this time with the benefit of a thoughtful guide and also with the benefit of what you learned from the experience.

As citizens, we have a duty to our country to take this journey. The same people who carried out and promoted the totalitarian measures that COVID provided the excuse and the opportunity for are now using the same tactics to evade accountability for what they have done. We need to recall and to understand what was done to us if there is to be any possibility of undoing the damage or any hope of preventing it from being done again.

We must not turn our backs on what was done to us. If we do, it will surely be done to us again, likely even more disastrously next time.

You may also discover, as I did, that you have a duty to make this journey for the most personal of reasons. Like victims of PTSD, we need to confront and assimilate what was done to us and to consider how well or badly we rose to the challenge. Harrington offers us a precious opportunity to learn about our country, our fellow citizens, and ourselves. Please consider taking him up on his generous offer.