The Crime of the Century

“The perfect criminal, should he or she exist…” ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ March 5, 2024  |  [Sign Up]( Behind the Greatest Economic Crime of the 21st Century “The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended - indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor…” – Charles Stross [Special Reminder: In case you missed our late-day announcement yesterday, [The Real October Surprise]( The Essential Investor has merged with legacy contributors to Agora Financial. The new, larger, more inclusive project is called The Grey Swan Investment Fraternity. If you’re interested in the scope and benefits of our new endeavor, please see what prompted us to merge [here](. If you’ve been a member of The Essential Investor, please keep an eye out for your new benefits.] Dear Reader, March 5, 2024 – Nothing feels particularly super about this Tuesday. Does it? Neither Trump nor Biden have any challengers to speak of. Haley’s stump speech rarely changes: “Trump’s a loser,” and “He’s been bad for every Republican election since 2018.” To the untrained ear, she sounds like a Democrat. Really, it’s not that hard to ignore politics. Still, on the national front, mainstream news outlets like NBC and Fox are doing their best to make an entertaining case for even paying attention to state-by-state results. What else are they going to do today? They have to sell Toyota Priuses and Ozempic, somehow. Maryland is not one of the states hosting a primary today. It’s a deeply blue state given its proximity to Washington, D.C. anyway. So a ho-hum primary is always to be expected. The state’s innovative use of gerrymandering makes it so. To that end, today’s guest essay is not an attempt to sway your political opinion. It’s more of an attempt to assuage my own curiosity.  Our friend Jeffrey Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, digs into a persistent enigma that future historians will be scratching their heads over. How did Donald Trump, a purported “conservative” who promised to “drain the swamp,” come to commit the greatest economic crime since Nixon slammed shut the “gold window” in 1971? Not only did Trump lock down the economy during the pandemic, but over the course of his 4-year administration, he also dug the nation’s financial hole over $6 trillion deeper trying to paper over the trauma that those lockdowns incurred. With some deft sleuthing in the Twitter (now “X”) files, Jeffrey dons his Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker hat and peers through a magnifying glass looking for fingerprints. Enjoy. – Addison CONTINUED BELOW... 2024 – The Real Election Year Surprise In 2016, the October Election Surprise was Hillary Clinton’s email scandal… In 2020, the October Election Surprise was the suppression of all the dirty material on Hunter Biden’s “forgotten” laptop… Now, in 2024, we’re forecasting an October Election Surprise that almost no one sees coming — and this time it’ll be way more devastating than anything you’ve seen before. [Click here to learn about 2024’s real October Election Surprise »]( It’s not at all what you think. CONTINUED... How They Convinced Trump to Lock Down Jeffrey Tucker, The Brownstone Institute An enduring mystery for four years is how Donald Trump came to be the president who shut down American society for what turned out to be a manageable respiratory virus, setting off an unspeakable crisis with waves of destructive fallout that continue to this day. Let’s review the timeline and offer some well-founded speculations about what happened. On March 9, 2020, Trump was still of the opinion that the virus could be handled by normal means. Two days later, he changed his tune. He was ready to use the full power of the federal government in a war on the virus. What changed? Deborah Birx reports in her book that Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion. Jared Kushner reports that he simply listened to reason. Mike Pence says he was persuaded that his staff would respect him more. No question (and based on all existing reports) that he found himself surrounded by “trusted advisors” amounting to about 5 or so people (including Mike Pence and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb). It was only a week later when Trump issued the edict to close all “indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate,” initiating the biggest regime change in U.S. history that flew in the face of all rights and liberties Americans had previously taken for granted. It was the ultimate in political triangulation: as John F. Kennedy cut taxes, Nixon opened China, and Clinton reformed welfare, Trump shut down the economy he promised to revive. This action confounded critics on all sides. A month later, Trump said his decision to have “turned off” the economy saved millions of lives, later even claiming to have saved billions. He has yet to admit error. Even as late as June 23rd of that year, Trump was demanding credit for having followed all of Fauci’s recommendations. Why do they love him and hate me, he wanted to know. Something about this story has never really added up. How could one person have been so persuaded by a handful of others such as Fauci, Birx, Pence, and Kushner and his friends? He surely had other sources of information—some other scenario or intelligence—that fed into his disastrous decision. In one version of events, his advisors simply pointed to the supposed success of Xi Jinping in enacting lockdowns in Wuhan, which the World Health Organization claimed had stopped infections and brought the virus under control. Perhaps his advisors flattered Trump with the observation that he is at least as great as the president of China so he should be bold and enact the same policies here. One problem with this scenario is timing. The Oval Office meetings that preceded his March 16, 2020, edict took place the weekend of the 14th and 15th, Friday and Saturday. It was already clear by the 11th that Trump was ready for lockdowns. This was the same day as Fauci’s deliberately misleading testimony to the House Oversight Committee in which he rattled the room with predictions of Hollywood-style carnage. On the 12th, Trump shut all travel from Europe, the UK, and Australia, causing huge human pile-ups at international airports. On the 13th, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document that transferred control of pandemic policy from the CDC to the National Security Council and eventually the Department of Homeland Security. By the time that Trump met with Fauci and Birx in that legendary weekend, the country was already under quasi-martial law. Isolating the date in the trajectory here, it is apparent that whatever happened to change Trump occurred on March 10, 2020, the day after his Tweet saying there should be no shutdowns and one day before Fauci’s testimony. That something very likely revolves around the most substantial discovery we’ve made in three years of investigations. It was Debbie Lerman who first cracked the code: Covid policy was forged not by the public-health bureaucracies but by the national-security sector of the administrative state. She has further explained that this occurred because of two critical features of the response: 1) the belief that this virus came from a lab leak, and 2) the vaccine was the biosecurity countermeasure pushed by the same people as the fix. Knowing this, we gain greater insight into 1) why Trump changed his mind, 2) why he has never explained this momentous decision and otherwise completely avoids the topic, and 3) why it has been so unbearably difficult to find out any information about these mysterious few days other than the pablum served up in books designed to earn royalties for authors like Birx, Pence, and Kushner. Based on a number of second-hand reports, all available clues we have assembled, and the context of the times, the following scenario seems most likely. On March 10, and in response to Trump’s dismissive tweet the day before, some trusted sources within and around the National Security Council (Matthew Pottinger and Michael Callahan, for example), and probably involving some from military command and others, came to Trump to let him know a highly classified secret. Imagine a scene from Get Smart with the Cone of Silence, for example. These are the events in the life of statecraft that infuse powerful people with a sense of their personal awesomeness. The fate of all of society rests on their shoulders and the decisions they make at this point. Of course they are sworn to intense secrecy following the great reveal. The revelation was that the virus was not a textbook virus but something far more threatening and terrible. It came from a research lab in Wuhan. It might, in fact, be a bioweapon. This is why Xi had to do extreme things to protect his people. The U.S. should do the same, they said, and there is a fix available too and it is being carefully guarded by the military. It seems that the virus had already been mapped in order to make a vaccine to protect the population. Thanks to 20 years of research on mRNA platforms, they told him, this vaccine can be rolled out in months, not years. That means that Trump can lock down and distribute vaccines to save everyone from the China virus, all in time for the election. Doing this would not only assure his reelection but guarantee that he would go down in history as one of the greatest US presidents of all time. This meeting might only have lasted an hour or two—and might have included a parade of people with the highest-level security clearances—but it was enough to convince Trump. After all, he had battled China for two previous years, imposing tariffs and making all sorts of threats. It was easy to believe at that point that China might have initiated biological warfare as retaliation. That’s why he made the decision to use all the power of the presidency to push a lockdown under emergency rule. To be sure, the Constitution does not allow him to override the discretion of the states but with the weight of the office complete with enough funding and persuasion, he could make it happen. And thus did he make the fateful decision that not only wrecked his presidency but the country too, imposing harms that will last a generation. It only took a few weeks for Trump to become suspicious about what happened. For weeks and months, he toggled between believing that he was tricked and believing that he did the right thing. He had already approved another 30 days of lockdowns and even inveighed against Georgia and later Florida for opening. He went so far as to claim that no state could open without his approval. He did not fully change his mind until August, when Scott Atlas revealed the whole con to him. There is another fascinating feature to this entirely plausible scenario. Even as Trump’s advisors were telling him that this could be a bioweapon leaked from the lab in China, we had Anthony Fauci and his cronies going to great lengths to deny it was a lab leak (even if they believed that it was). This created an interesting situation. The NIH and those surrounding Fauci were publicly insisting that the virus was of zoonotic origin, even as Trump’s circle was telling the president that it should be regarded as a bioweapon. Fauci belonged to both camps, which suggests that Trump very likely knew of Fauci’s deception all along: the “noble lie” to protect the public from knowing the truth. Trump had to be fine with that. Gradually following the lockdown edicts and the takeover by the Department of Homeland Security, in cooperation with a very hostile CDC, Trump lost power and influence over his own government, which is why his later Tweets urging a reopening fell on deaf ears. To top it off, the vaccine failed to arrive in time for the election. This is because Fauci himself delayed the rollout until after the election, claiming that the trials were not racially diverse enough. Thus Trump’s gambit completely failed, despite all the promises of those around him that it was a guaranteed way to win reelection. To be sure, this scenario cannot be proven because the entire event—certainly the most dramatic political move in at least a generation and one with unspeakable costs for the country—remains cloaked in secrecy. Not even Senator Rand Paul can get the information he needs because it remains classified. If anyone thinks the Biden approval of releasing documents will show what we need, that person is naive. Still, the above scenario fits all available facts and it is confirmed by second-hand reports from inside the White House. It’s enough for a great movie or a play of Shakespearean levels of tragedy. And to this day, none of the main players are speaking openly about it. [– Jeffery Tucker]( So it goes, Addison Wiggin, The Wiggin Sessions P.S. “Being accused of fear-mongering and such, like a certain political party, is an interesting dilemma,” writes reader Scott P. from Virginia, posing a philosophical question on Super Tuesday: "Fear-mongering is a cycle as old as human society. We get smart and learn to collaborate, initially for safety, then ultimately for prosperity. We invent, then empower money. Then all hell breaks loose. The cunning and ambitious get hold of money and use it to compel the masses. Power concentrates until the game finally collapses. "The entire game, however, is made up. It's a social construct. The rules of money and debt and interest and... are all just social agreements. We can change our minds and change the system. So far, however, we prefer the dramatic, violent ending. It's an exciting game. "The fear-mongering is a product of measuring play against the current rules of the game. The rules are always malleable. It just seems we aren't." “Will we break the cycle this time?” Scott asks. “We'll see.”  Mr. P doesn’t sound too hopeful but offers encouragement all the same: “Keep up the good work!” P.P.S. “I continue to enjoy your and Bill Bonner's commentaries,” adds Robert A. from Temecula CA, “without needing to agree or disagree, much less be ‘offended’ or hide in my safe space, lol.  “But never doubt for one second,” Robert continues, “that there is not an effective deep state in the USA, and most western countries that will eventually, maybe 50 years+- collapse of its own weight in a really bad way.  “Regrettably, Trump, Biden, Obama and even Paul Krugman won't live long enough to see the destruction they wrought.”   Reader Angelo S. offers encouragement of his own. “I'm a soon-to-be 70 year old dinosaur,” says Angelo, “but I love reading your stuff. Keep up the good work, and keep sending out those new ideas.” In the words of the great Cherokee chief from Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, “We will endeavor to persevere.” Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com. The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to The Wiggn Sessions delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions, feel free to [click here.]( Please read our [Privacy Statement.]( For any further comments or concerns please email us at feedback@wigginsessions.com. 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