It is difficult to believe that Public HealthTM is trying to force America to mask up again, but here we are. The question is, why?
(Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute)
The dirty secret is this: Masks don’t work by controlling the virus. Masks work by controlling the people.
If we’re talking about stopping the spread of the virus, masks simply don’t work.
But if we’re talking about stoking fear, instilling blind obedience to state authorities, sowing discord between citizens, and publicly “outing” skeptics and dissidents – in other words, creating an authoritarian, even totalitarian system of public health – then masks work very well indeed.
MASKS DON’T WORK AT CONTROLLING THE VIRUS
By this late date, it has been established beyond honest scientific doubt that masking is ineffective at stopping the contraction and spread of COVID-19. This is true both at the microscopic level and at the population level.
The early mask mandates regarding COVID-19 were largely “justified” on the assertion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not prone to airborne spread. However, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has since been proven to be an airborne virus (like influenza), meaning it can remain circulating in room air for extended periods of time, and spreads in this manner. SARS-CoV-2 viruses have also been proven to be much smaller in size than the holes in cloth and surgical masks.
Therefore, at a microscopic level, Harvey Risch is correct: trying to block the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a surgical mask is quite literally like trying to keep mosquitos out of your yard by erecting a chain-link fence.
At a population level, the latest Cochrane meta-analysis of the available randomized, controlled trials surrounding masking and respiratory viruses concluded that “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks.”
(It should be noted that as the mask debate has been resurrected, Cochrane has been under intense pressure by pro-mask entities to addend and modify their comments about this study, to which the organization has capitulated.)
Furthermore, this study is only one in addition to the hundreds of other studies that clearly outline the epidemiologic ineffectiveness and real harms of masks, many of which have been known since at least 2021.
To summarize: at the microscopic level, masks do not stop the exit or entry of the virus into human bodies, and at the population level, mask use has not been shown to provide any benefit, and has been shown to have numerous harms.
MASKS DO WORK AT CONTROLLING PEOPLE
The entire Public HealthTM enterprise in the West has a strong political and authoritarian impulse built into it from its very conception. While a detailed review of this is beyond the scope of this article, it harkens back at least to the figure of Rudolf Virchow, the preeminent 19th century German physician, opponent of Semmelweis and Darwin, and founder of so-called “social medicine,” who famously wrote that “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.”
The attitude that Public HealthTM should possess the power to dictate national and local political policy for the “public good” (as they, the “experts,” unilaterally determine it to be) has increased over the past century, especially in the United States. Around it there have grown vast, lucrative industries, from which (since at least the Bayh-Dole Act), Public HealthTM officials often profit handsomely. The vaccine industry is only the most obvious of these.
During the COVID era, the authoritarianism of Public HealthTM morphed into totalitarian mode, with the unprecedented lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, vaccine mandates, etc. that we all endured. The most visible and most easily enforceable symbol of this power grab were masks.
Masks, even the comically useless ones made of old handkerchiefs, or the filthy, week-old paper surgical ones seen on countless chins, signaled compliance and submission. For the very real Public HealthTM purpose of unquestioning obedience, masks work very well indeed.
Masks are effective at instilling fear in people. Fearful people more readily submit to authority, particularly when that authority promises a solution to the cause of their fear.
Masks are effective as virtue signals of compliance, bolstering the submissive person’s ego. Masks also impose a very strong peer-pressure effect, which pushes uncertain persons toward following the crowd.
Masks are effective at humiliating people. They are uncomfortable, ugly, dirty, and unnatural. They truly are “face diapers.” In a word, masks are degrading. If the ways of the old Eastern bloc taught us anything, it is that the systematic degradation of individuals, especially for patently stupid reasons, is highly effective at promoting totalitarian ends.
Masks are also extremely effective in exposing dissidents. Who dares to stand up against the state? There’s one, right over there. Shame on them. Shun them. Arrest them.
That’s how masks really “work”, and that’s why the Public HealthTM types love them.
That’s why they’re trying to bring them back.
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About the Author
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Another Red Cross program… yeah ok good idea . Like the Red Cross and Good Will they want FREE INVENTORY . They don’t want to pay for what they resell … F*** k You . I won’t give you a drop like I wound give the Red Cross any either .