Review of Robert Malone's “Lies My government Told Me.”

The book came out in November 2022. Like this review itself, the book itself is rather rambling. It has many virtues. It was put together by an absolute expert, respected by other experts who answered the call to contribute. However, it suffers from a certain lack of organization, having chapters independently conceived and put together, and having somewhat inconsistent tone and depth. Some chapters go into a topic to great depth, especially the ones on which Malone is an expert, and others are rather lighter.

Both Malone's father and his wife's father worked for defense contractors all their careers. They knew the insides and outsides of the intelligence community and the military community.

Malone is both a doctor and researcher.  He started his career by developing the mRNA vaccines. He. This is given him intimate familiarity with the pharmaceutical industry.

Despite his familiarity with the medical, defense, and government communities, Malone was shocked by their reactions to the Covid crisis. He was surprised that the initial measures taken were in the first place so drastic and in the second so ineffective. Third, they were also in conflict with what people had long known about how respiratory viruses work. It didn't make sense to him.

As he raised his voice, he found himself being canceled, shut down, ostracized. The first part of the book is a series of stories of his own and his wife Jill's experience. Hers came first. She wrote a book about how to deal with coronavirus. It sold fairly on Kindle, but then was all of a sudden shut down and made to disappear. Meanwhile, other people who seemed to have effective approaches to Covid, or at least ones that should have been given consideration, were shut down. These included Lev Zelenko and others who promoted small molecule drugs.

Dr. Merle Nass, who has a chapter in the book, recounts her own experience being decertified by the medical Board of the state of Maine for prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin off-label, despite the fact that this is a totally standard, long-standing procedure.

Malone is a traditional American, one of the few left. One of the weaknesses of the book is that he looks to the traditional American character, the traits that made Americans great - rugged, individualistic, self supporting and independent in the early years of the Republic - to be our salvation. He would like us to revive those traits and apply them to fixing today's problems. In this I believe he's naïve.

Nowhere does he acknowledge that people like him are a vanishing breed. We have been diluted by immigrants of all sorts, including highly intelligent ones from the East Orient and Jews, who nonetheless have a different ethos, perhaps less collegial or altruistic, and immigrants from other cultures that simply do not have backgrounds of education, science, and accomplishment.

The bottom line is that he is asking us to call on strengths that we no longer possess.  Our problems can probably be attributed to the attenuation of those characteristics over the past 150 years.

One of the problems is the financialization of society. Malone often quotes Thomas Jefferson, and refers often to the divide between Jefferson, the populist, and Alexander Hamilton, the aristocrat. Jefferson believed that the common man had enough wisdom to manage the affairs of the country. Hamilton believed that the average man was rather slow witted and that the affairs of state or better left in the hands of the natural elite, possessed of intelligence, and breeding.

There were two sides to the argument even in the 18th century. Since that time, per Edward Dutton, Helmut Nyborg, Richard Lynn and many others, the stock of American of the American population has been significantly diminished by immigration and the fact that natural selection is no longer operative. The unintelligent have been able to reproduce themselves, and the intelligence strata of society have lost the will to do so.

This was recognized by eugenicists, starting with Malthus. It is certainly recognized by Bill Gates and his father Bill Gates Senior, who were active in Planned Parenthood and other eugenics movements as much as a century ago. Contempt for the ability of the average man that runs through elite thinking in America. The Covid phenomenon does not prove them wrong. The masses drank the Kool-Aid.

People gave in to mass formation and bought a propaganda being spewed by the government rather wholeheartedly. In fact, the mass thus formed turned against people such as Malone who tried to tell them the truth. It is noble of Malone to attempt to stand by those who allowed themselves to be deceived. I fear he is wrong in hoping that something will change.

Malone writes about the American banking system going back to the Bank(s) of the United States, and the fact that the world banking families have been tie in since the very beginning. He says Rothschild money was involved in starting the First Bank of the United States. He goes on to say that there are eight families that control international banking, including the Bank of International settlements in Europe, the central bank of central bankers. Most names are familiar. Rockefeller, Warburg, Lazard, Rothschild of course, Loeb, Lehman, and Goldman Sachs.

He attributes many characteristics to these families. My observation is that it is groups of like-minded people more than families.  The founding genius of aristocratic families does not breed true. Although there is such a thing as hereditary genius, which eugenicist Francis Galton wrote about in the late 19th century, in general, the progression goes downhill. Family eminence dissipates over the generations. Specifically, intelligence regresses to the mean by 40% on average. Although the banking families do have a lot of money to inherit, and they do tend to intermarry and preserve the breeding stock, not every generation is marked with genius.

Malone devotes a lot of the book to discussing the nature of modern government. The heads of agencies such as Tony Fauci and Francis Collins ultimately have little accountability. They are at the vortex of a swirl of money. Congress appropriates funding for their agencies. The source of their power is the multibillion-dollar budgets they dole out. Offices of their agencies and contractors are in every congressional district. So much of Congress is beholden to them that they suffer very little congressional oversight. Legislators come and go, but the bureaucrats survive from session to session of Congress. They have no real masters.

Since the Bayh-Dole Act has allowed bureaucrats to have patents and receive royalties, they have independent revenue streams, channeled through these agencies, that makes several quite wealthy. It's a remarkable conflict of interest. They get royalty money, and of course stock dividends and capital gains, from the very pharmaceutical companies that are supposed to oversee.

Neither the pharma companies nor their government overseers have an interest in tackling and reducing disease with off-the-shelf, out of patent medicines. There is a vast interest in finding expensive vaccines, effective or not, to address both real and imaginary problems. Trumped-up crises have involved chicken pox, seasonal flu, swine flu, human papillomavirus, AIDS and of now Covid 19. 

Malone condemns the abuse of statistics, first by the Imperial College in London, Neil Ferguson particular, for vastly inflating the prediction of expected damage from Covid 19. He condemns them doubly for failing to correct their predictions when the evidence showed that estimates were highly overstated. He does not go into other abuses of statistics such as the miscounting of actual Covid cases by the flawed PCR test and attributing all disease to Covid, to the extent that there was virtually no natural influenza recorded for the 2020-21 flu season.

He also observes that the politicians and the public alike simply are not equipped to interpret statistics. They rely on journalists and politicians to tell them what the statistics mean. However, these supposedly expert sources are also clueless. This is a general problem with society.

Malone writes about scientism, belief in science as a sort of religion. The actual process of science is one of widely accepted hypotheses that can never actually proven in any mathematical sense supplanting one another over time.  Science involves being open to new ideas and constantly challenging currently held theories.

Scientism is exactly the opposite.  It involves treating science as a religion, as received wisdom, and any departure from the accepted consensus as heresy. That is exactly what happened with regard to Covid.

People who did not accept the gravity of Covid or questioned whether the vaccines would prevent catching the and transmitting disease were treated as heretics. Anybody who suggested that there were other possible solutions, especially hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, was cancelled, deplatformed, shunned and cast into outer darkness.

The book includes a good chapter by Mattias Desmet on Mass Formation, the way that groups adopt opinions that become tenaciously held without examination of the facts. Desmet adds that people in such groups can be highly prejudiced against people who do not hold with them. This behavior is likely defensive, because people recognize that their beliefs are not supported by reasoned argument. At any rate Desmet’s chapter offers a good summary of the thesis of his book the “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

Inverted totalitarianism is that of invisible actors a few levels down in the hierarchy. They do not bear regal titles. In the US it includes people like Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci the people who head the Federal Reserve and those at NOAA promoting climate change, another huge topic.

These people who control public policy, who impose the measures such as lockdowns masks and carbon trading caps, are not visible. Policy emerges from somewhere in the deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy. The authors are not known or accountable. The decisions emerge from a body so amorphous that they cannot be challenged.

Malone includes among his suggested solutions that good people must again take control and not allow the state to make these decisions. In that I think the battle is lost. The whole world has gone in on inverted totalitarianism. The EU bureaucracy is a prime example. The exception seems to be the truly totalitarian states such as Russia, China and North Korea, which have problems of their own. If one is looking for a model of good government, we have relatively little to choose from today. The best that we might find seems to be something like Switzerland or Sweden, where one brave functionary was able to shield the country from the worst Covid abuses.

Malone assesses the impact of preventative measures such as lockdowns, social distancing, hand washing, masks and the other rigamarole.  He writes derisively about the laptop class, people who made the policies but were not affected by them. These are people who lived away from everybody else, who could work from home, who could still socialize, perhaps without masks, and who did not have to interact with the public. They had little understanding of or sympathy for the people who were affected by the harsh measures - those who could no longer work, attend church, visit sick relatives or travel.

Malone emphasizes that he reports events as he sees them. He is not a psychologist. He does not want to delve into people's motives. He can tell you what they do, not why they did it. In particular, he does not want speculate on the motives of a person such as Bill Gates. 

Malone barely touches on education, but he does write about a couple of subjects are closely related. One of them is groupthink. There is a great tendency in corporations to seek consensus. After everybody has been heard, there is an attempt to come to a group opinion of what to do.

A compromise represents all points of view.  It may not be the best course of action, or even internally consistent, but it is at least agreed.  From that point on, opposing ideas tend to be rejected by the whole group. Group projects have been quite the thing in elementary schools over the past 20 or 30 years. Kids are taught that the objective is to reach consensus, not an optimal solution.

Groupthink is one manifestation of modern thought. Another is Desmet’s mass formation, a kind of groupthink in which people do not examine the facts themselves, but go with the flow.  The fact is that people are not as smart as they used to be. They nevertheless think that more years of education makes them smarter than their elders.  This is a problem.  Critical thinking and criticism are absent from schooling. Every child gets a gold star.  Nobody's used to criticism and the system seems designed to avoid offering offense.

Malone suggests reforms that can be made at the level of the corporation or society. The problem is deeper than that. The culture is passed on through the education system, one which is structured to be impervious to change.

Malone is absolutely on the mark in his descriptions of the Covid catastrophe and the problems of modern American society.  His suggestions with regard to how to fix it appear unrealistic. We do not have the tools, the brains for the traditional American strengths of grit and integrity to save us.  This has implications. 

An individual, rather than trying to change the system for the benefit of all Americans, must see that in even recognizing the problem he is out of step.  In being willing to make sacrifices he is all the more so. It is time to jump ship.  Locate a small community of like-minded people and wait it out, preferably in a far country that lacks the will and even the ability to control your life and your children.

Bottom line - coming from a very intelligent, well educated and well connected source, this is one of the must-read books about Covid 19.