Watch the full episode HERE
Good evening. It's Monday, June 3.
Tonight: The COVID pandemic was unquestionably one of the most significant events of our lifetime. Entire populations, countries and communities were forcibly shut down for almost two years. Children, including very young ones, were forcibly masked, vaccinated with an experimental medication, and were prevented from attending schools for months at a time. People were trained to acquiesce to a level of control previously unthinkable, from being arrested for certain kinds of political protests, though not other kinds; told they must stand six feet apart in public and subject to curfews and lockdowns. Questioning many of the pronouncements and policy decisions of health care and other political officials was banned through online censorship for at least a year into the pandemic.
In any situation of this magnitude, there will be serious mistakes and highly dubious decisions made by those in power to decide these things for the globe. That is true, even if those in power, in theory, are as benevolent and well-intentioned as possible. But perfect motives never drive human institutions, and the more unquestioned and centralized they are given over other people's lives, as was done in COVID, the less likely that is to be true.
On top of the well-intentioned error, one will almost certainly find in the decisions and decrees of key policymakers a wide range of corruption and self-interested motives, abuse of power, attempts to hide what they are doing to shield themselves from critique, and oftentimes outright lies that are knowing and deliberate for a wide range of reasons. All of that is present in the two-plus year management by centralized states and health care organizations in the COVID pandemic. Yet for a variety of reasons, there has been not only no accountability for those wrong acts but exceedingly little transparency or institutional interest in finding out what happened. In part, that is because COVID turned into a partisan culture war issue, where a defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization became a virtually religious duty, as it was with Robert Mueller and Jack Smith and all kinds of other officials like that before him. And yet, at the same time, any criticisms or even questioning of Fauci's decisions and judgments were decreed off limits, deemed as right-wing attacks on science. Thus far, liberal elites and most Democratic Party members and followers basically insist that Dr. Fauci is nothing more or less than a hero, that any inquiry should begin and end there, and that all of the other questions, debates and controversies should be left alone, unresolved and ignored, either as unfair critiques or even anti-scientific conspiracies.
We should really be thankful that at least some members of Congress and some members of the media, especially the independent media, have been refusing to allow such a momentous moment in history to go unexamined and unquestioned. Over the last year, there has finally been some reporting that makes undeniably clear that many of the statements made and actions taken by top health policy elites were highly dubious, if not outright and deliberately false. But establishment sectors have implicitly decided that there's no benefit in reexamining any of what happened during that period, almost all of which they vigorously endorse, which is why they don't want it examined. And they believe many dangers from looking into all of this.
I have many criticisms of the current House Republicans, particularly with respect to their unifying almost entirely with the Biden administration's foreign policy in Ukraine, Israel and most other places. But one of the places where they have done a commendable job is in taking their oversight responsibility seriously with respect to the executive branch. As part of that, today, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, something I guarantee would not even exist if the Democrats were in control of the House, held a hearing at which Dr. Fauci testified, while one Democratic member of that committee after the next expressed outrage that Dr. Fauci was even being questioned at all, and instead used their time to heap unfettered and obsequious hero praise on him, much like they do when officials from the U.S. security state appear before Congress, almost demanding that they not even be questioned. Fauci was grilled by Republican members on a wide range of issues, including his statements and decisions regarding the origins of COVID, mask mandates, vaccine efficacy, school shutdowns and far more. Many of these exchanges were quite revealing either of Dr. Fauci's borderline pathological willingness, after decades of Washington, to simply lie about what he said and what he did, or about the substantive issues themselves. We will report on some of the key highlights and exchanges from today's hearing.
Then disturbing scenes of Ukrainian men violently resisting efforts to force them to the front lines in the war against Russia – men who have decided that they will not serve as cannon fodder for this futile NATO war against Russia – have become increasingly common. One video after the next emerges seemingly every day. In general, they know what everyone whose name is not Zelenskyy or Lindsey Graham knows. Namely, there is no way NATO can achieve victories in this war in the ways that they originally and still do define victory, namely, the expulsion of the Russian army from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea.
Ivan Katchanovski has been one of the most reliable sources of news and analysis since the start of the war. A scholar in Russian studies and in that region, Professor Katchanovski, now teaches at the School of Political Studies and Conflict Studies and Human Rights at the University of Ottawa and has been a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. I've been informed about this war by him as much as anyone, and we are thrilled to welcome him tonight for his debut appearance on System Update to discuss the latest defeats and problems for Ukraine and the West in his war; the serious and growing challenges of Ukrainian recruitment and the causes that led to this conflict in the first place.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
