A Brief History of the 21st Century: Part IV
Given recency of events in this essay, I'm reluctant to conclude the series I started last Fall. But to what'll doubtless be my retrospective regret, I decided to finish butchering this bull.
Atlanta, GA
April 2, 2026
[NB: Previous installments in this series are here, here, and here]
When fear is fomented, the first thing most people do is panic. At least they did it in the right order.
Possibly excepting the Great Depression, the official response to covid was the biggest peacetime cataclysm in American history. It was certainly the largest “Public Health” calamity.
The scale and scope of the damage was unmatched. Like the Depression, covid was a government-induced disaster that permanently upended the world we’d known. No one was unaffected, and implications will reverberate far into the future.
It likely launched the Fourth Turning, the chaotic “winter” phase of historic cycles Strauss and Howe described three decades ago. This is a period of convulsion and upheaval, when war, riots, and economic collapse wipe away institutions that rose from the previous trough. As in earlier exigencies during the 1940s, 1860s, and 1770s, it’s characterized by persistent “emergencies” and perpetual crisis.
Roberta Modugno observed that since the sixteenth century, “exceptions to law and morality during a state of emergency seem to have become the ordinary practice of governments.” From 9/11… to the Financial Crisis… to covid… to the latest idiocy in the Middle East, that’s been the theme of the 21st Century.
This decade it’s been amplified, with the tone set from the moment it opened.
Burst Sewer Main
The Constitution doesn’t permit presidents (or any person or body in the U.S. government) to declare a “state of Emergency” to do whatever they want. “Public health” hacks have no authority to issue edicts regulating where people can go, what they must inject, or whether fabrics must cover their face.
Yet, like wastewater from a burst sewer main, authoritarian “guidelines”, restrictions, mandates, and directives poured forth to combat a bug, and did indelible damage without doing a damn bit of good.
Lives were ruined, yet deaths continued... often from causes misattributed to “covid”. Like the Times Square “Debt Clock”, they were relentlessly reported. Daily counts crawled morbidly beneath solemn anchors on the evening news.
But behind the headlines, the collateral carnage piled up (and continues to mount)…without benefit of televised tallies. At least a year of most people’s lives was ripped away, regardless their viral vulnerability or risk tolerance.
Loneliness spread, depression soared, unemployment flourished, opportunities vanished, careers stalled, and suicides spiked. Cancers went unscreened and heart disease undetected. Loved ones were told to stay apart. Elderly relatives died alone.
How many early deaths resulted, or will be caused in coming years? Who knows? But few will be attributed to covid policy, or receive a moment of silence… except from perpetrators who’d prefer we forget.
And for what? Countless charts documented covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among and within most every state, county, country, and town. Within or across regions, rates rose or fell almost simultaneously or in tandem, regardless the prescribed policy. None of “mitigation measures” seemed to mitigate anything, except the normal pleasures of daily life.
Lockdowns were always counter-productive, cruel, and lethal. They precipitated loneliness, inflation, high anxiety, deep depression, and a proliferation of drugs, shootings, suicides, and unattributed diseases that weren’t detected or diagnosed.
“Mitigation measures” hit societies like a sledgehammer. Relative vulnerability was routinely ignored. The young and the healthy were treated as if they were old and infirm. In a perverse inversion, children were forced to sacrifice for their elders. Schools closed when nursing homes were sealed. It was like giving everyone chemo to protect a few from cancer.
In most states, these top-down, one-size fits all approaches were applied to a virus that was unusually transparent about who it afflicted. But data was irrelevant and science didn’t matter. Healthy people were redefined as “asymptomatic”, implying everyone was ill and all were lethal.
How Science Works
The worst realization of the covid era was how acquiescent the American people were in surrendering their rights. I wouldn’t have thought it could be so easy.
For perceived “safety”, Americans quickly yielded or diluted even what we’d think matters most. Church, school, travel, family gatherings, friendly dinners, irreplaceable moments in a child’s life, and the last ones in an adult’s.
To the extent these activities remained, many were diluted by “distancing”, carved by plexiglass, or relegated to “virtual events”. The sterility of Zoom replaced the vitality of life.
Neighbor turned against neighbor. Families divided. Friendships were lost. As people were trained to treat their fellow men as disease vectors, suspicion rose, trust eroded, and the fabric of society frayed.
Social gatherings, even employment, became contingent on whether we’d consumed an experimental drug. Dissenters were precluded from work, banned from businesses, excluded from school, or prohibited from entering most establishments.
Millions applauded this apartheid, shunning skeptics as anti-science, grandma-killing vermin. After all, “The Science” said so.
But that’s not how science works. As with any diagnosis or scientific evaluation, the role of “expert” is to assess the situation, provide perspective, and offer suggestions.
Yet determining what to do is an individual philosophical decision, not a collective medical one. It’s not the role of “public health” bureaucrats to require remedies for millions of “patients” they’ve never met.
Yet most Americans went along. They wore masks, took their medicine, kept six feet apart, followed floor arrows on grocery store aisles… and tattled on neighbors who defied the farce.
It was as if we were trapped a giant Kafka novel, with scenes choreographed by Heironymus Bosch. It seemed like it would go on forever. And it might have, had Vladimir Putin not cured covid by changing the subject.
Balalaika from Borscht
When Russian tanks rolled west, the propaganda did a pirouette. A Wall Street expression has it that if everyone is thinking the same thing, no one is thinking at all. This phenomenon is obvious in recent years, when unanimous brains idled in mindless unison.
Moral indignation shifted from demonizing covid dissidents to renouncing Russia. Ukraine flag emojis replaced syringe images. Several hundred replicas of this foreign flag fluttered in Congress!
Among bystanders who couldn’t distinguish a balalaika from borscht, bursts of blue and yellow became the new face masks, implying that anyone not displaying them must be indifferent or ignorant.
But about multi-faceted conflicts in distant lands between people we’ll never meet, it’s OK to be ambivalent. In fact, it’s probably smart. After all, if incessant meddlers minded their own business, most foreign fiascos wouldn’t arise. Had the US government stayed on its side of the ocean, this one wouldn’t have.
Hunk of Meat
Albeit to a lesser degree than many countries that were completely made up, the Ukraine is an amorphous construct. Even its modern Slavonic name means “on the edge”, what Americans might call a “frontier”.
As with Poland or the Punjab, it’s historically been a hunk of meat buzzed by hungry flies, and regularly contested by rival dogs. Over the centuries, Russians, Ottomans, and Mongols tugged it east, whereas Poles, Austrians, and Americans pulled it west.
On occasion, the hounds drop the slab, show their teeth, and turn on each other. Which is why canines from distant neighborhoods should stay on their leash.
The Ukraine is not merely a breadbasket of Europe. It’s its cradle. It’s the land through which the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. It’s also the fertile crib of Mother Russia.
In a mirror image of Cuba sixty years ago, the Russians consider the Ukraine to be within their sphere of influence. For some reason, the Americans insist it’s part of their own.
It’s possible neither are right. But the Americans are certainly wrong. The US has no business being anywhere near the Ukraine.
Poking the Bear
Almost twenty percent of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, and forty percent are culturally Russian. When the Soviet Union was founded, the heavily Russian Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk were appended to eastern Ukraine. A few decades later, Khrushchev added another one when he gifted Crimea.
At the time, these decisions seemed relatively inconsequential since these were all Soviet territory, and no Soviet leader thought the empire would collapse. But when the USSR dissolved, the Ukraine went free. When it did, the US assured the Russians that NATO would move no further east.
Murray Rothbard said we can’t be sure a government did something until it’s been officially denied. The same can’t be said of government promises. We know those are lies the minute they’re uttered.
Within the decade, Poland, the Czechs, and Hungary had joined NATO. Five years later, Baltic states were accepted. Despite American assurances, an Atlantic alliance that lost its reason to exist had made its way to Russia’s door.
For eight years the US kept pumping illegal weapons to its Ukrainian puppets, who used them to wage war on Russians in the east. The West spent a decade poking the bear. In February of 2022, it finally woke up.
In response, the Biden Administration funneled billions to its satrap, weaponized the dollar, and attacked Germany by destroying the Russian pipeline that supplied its gas.
By sanctioning Russia, stealing its assets, and evicting it from SWIFT, the U.S. government sent a signal that the dollar system wasn’t safe. Countries took notice, backed away from the buck, traded directly, and bought more gold. Too few Americans followed their lead.
“Mostly Peaceful” Violence
While the US government caused its usual carnage overseas, the home-front was rife with rent-a-riots stoking racial grievance. After a deranged criminal overdosed in Minneapolis (and while most Americans were kept home to avoid a virus), dozens of cities simultaneously erupted in “mostly peaceful” violence.
Although a black man died in a northern state, Confederate monuments were toppled across the South. Predictably, the Jacobins soon targeted the founding fathers. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from New York City Hall. By definition, anyplace that doesn’t welcome Thomas Jefferson isn’t America.
While the culture was being erased, its people were being ripped off. Covid spending and war welfare accelerated price increases to rates unseen since the 1970s. Government debt increased six-fold this century. It’s doubled again this decade.
Such Orwellian monstrosities as the “Inflation Reduction Act”, “American Rescue Act”, and “Big Beautiful Bill” were “paid for” by counterfeiting the currency, which slowly impoverishes Americans by siphoning purchasing power.
Hundreds of billions were laundered thru the Ukraine. But that’s chicken feed. During the first year of covid, almost $7T (!) were fabricated to enrich connected corporations and convince the masses to stay cooped-up.
Yet the exterior gates were flung wide open. For decades, U.S. meddling wreaked havoc across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, sending hordes streaming toward the turnstiles that once served as Western borders. The US and Europe were overrun.
In the midst of the “pandemic”, millions of invaders were welcomed in. Many were chaperoned by state-sponsored NGOs that distributed human contraband around the country.
Attempts to oust them are met with outcries. Even requiring citizenship to vote or be included in the census is too much to ask. Since the start of this century, many states are demographically unrecognizable. The chaos and division by which we’re fraught was the inevitable (and perhaps intended) result.
Succored Snake
Mayhem isn’t limited to the US “homeland”. Like the Japanese incursion to Manchuria, the Ukraine war looks like the overture to a tragic opera with many acts. Another opened the next year in the Levant.
There’s a misperception that rancor between Muslim and Jew goes back centuries. But before the 20th century, they got along relatively well. Jews were a small minority in the region, but mostly lived as they pleased.
Antagonism built after construction of the Suez Canal, when European Zionists started infiltrating Palestine. Over decades, Arab property owners were ousted. After the Second World War the state of Israel was established.
For eighty years, fighting continued as Israel kept cleansing. Wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 strengthened Israel’s grasp on Palestinian land. As Russia was provoked to respond in the Ukraine, Palestinians were incited to fight back.
Through years of Intifada and resistance, they did. Having once held all the territory Israel now claims, they were resigned to begging for their own state. The Likud Party resisted, and surreptitiously funded unsavory organizations to discredit potential negotiating partners.
After years propping Hamas, Israel was bit by the snake it succored. The attack of October 7, 2023 was horrific, the deadliest day in Israel’s history. Almost 1,200 were killed and 250 held hostage.
The barbarity became a convenient (perhaps too convenient?) excuse to annihilate the Gaza Strip. The obliteration has continued since, with civilians targeted, most buildings demolished, and perhaps a hundred thousand killed. This atrocity has all the earmarks of a genocide. And anyone who objected was automatically “antisemitic”.
The Last Country
Israel sometimes refers to 10/7 as its 9/11. In a way it was. Both tragedies became handy reasons to launch wars Zionists long wanted.
About twenty years ago, General Wesley Clark revealed that after 9/11 the Department of Defense had a plan to “take out” seven countries in five years. On the list were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan… all of which have since been destroyed.
But the seventh country was the one Israel most wanted removed. Five weeks ago, at Israel’s behest, the Trump Administration attacked Iran. This war will one day warrant it’s own retrospective. But it seems safe to say it was lost the moment it was launched, particularly because of the reason it was.
Allegiance to “allies” is the flawed rationale that produced the First World War, the most consequential cataclysm in human history. Let’s hope that when this latest fiasco is finished, it still will be.
JD