Controlling the Archives

There is news that Jay Bhattacharya may be appointed to run NIH. Bhattacharya has a history with that agency:

“Bhattacharya teaches medicine, economics, and health policy at Stanford University; he became a national voice in 2020 as one of the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The open letter- signed by thousands of health professionals- called for an end to mass lockdowns and focused efforts on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the rest of society get back to living. The statement was met with harsh criticism from leading health officials at the time, including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who privately described the authors as “fringe” and was urging a quick rebuke of their message, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.”

The suppression of Bhattacharya went even further with revelations that the Biden Administration coordinated with social media to censor him.

There have been times when, upon the fall of a regime, there is a scramble to control that regime’s archives. After all, while a regime may lie to you, it won’t lie to itself regarding certain things. In 1944 Parisians knew their liberation was on hand when they saw the Gestapo burning its papers.

Not only does the opening of archives reveal corruption, it also leads to a reconsideration of history. Journalism (especially these days) is often merely the reporting of what other people have said or is pure conjecture, while historians who later go through primary source material have a much better grip on what went on. The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s led to a re-evaluation of many parts of Soviet history as well as past US-Soviet relations. Next time you want to evaluate a historian’s work, take a look at their bibliography and see if they did any original research, or if they are merely replicating the methodology of journalists by quoting other historians or engaging in conjecture.

The determined and coordinated campaign among the DC establishment, media, and social media to censor Bhattacharya was only exposed when another regime fell and its archives were opened, the pre-Elon Musk Twitter. Upon his gaining control of Twitter, Musk authorized a group of maverick journalists (Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Barri Weiss) to go through the company archives. The group then revealed that there had been a coordinated campaign of censorship.

While we have a system of legislative oversight and a Freedom of Information Act, their effect is limited. Requesting documents and directing questions is like using a searchlight to illuminate a darkened landscape: incredibly bright but with a limited scope. After all, you can only request what you can see, the known unknowns, with little knowledge of the wider world beyond the scope of your request. Furthermore, government bureaucracies have proved adept at fighting such requests through delay and classification; as the saying goes, you may have the clocks, but paid bureaucrats have the time to bog down even the most aggressive information requests.

A good example of this was Senator Rand Paul’s experience in tracking down the origin of COVID. As he documented in his book, Deception:

“For more than two years now, I’d been fighting obstructionism from Democrats and over-classification from the intel community. I had sent literally dozens of requests to the alphabet soup of agencies either doing bioweapons research or ostensibly doing research to protect us against bioweapons.

“And yet, consider this disturbing fact. As a sitting U.S. senator who spent two years trying to investigate the origins of the pandemic, I only learned about the request for DARPA to fund the insertion of a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus from a leak to the media.”

One of the lessons of both Paul’s and Musk’s experience is that if you want to know what’s in the archives, you have to actually control them. A Bhattacharya-run NIH is the equivalent of circa-1944 Parisians grabbing hold of the Gestapo archives intact.

That’s the promise of a second Trump administration: the selection of determined enemies of the previous regime to run bureaucracies from the Pentagon to Justice in order to not only reduce their scope and size, but to grab hold of the archives and release the secrets of the previous regime.