Washington’s Farewell Address Remains America’s Essential Guidebook

On December 27, 2022, Kim Monson presents a special pre-recorded Christmas week broadcast featuring patriotic historian Ben Martin examining George Washington’s Farewell Address and its urgent relevance today, followed by Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker revealing the coordinated origins of COVID-19 lockdowns and Big Tech censorship.

Washington’s Farewell Address: A Document for Our Times

Start listening at 1:41 – Hour 1

Ben Martin, patriotic historian, former Army Ranger, and West Point graduate, makes the case that Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address belongs alongside the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as essential American founding documents. The 6,100-word open letter was not delivered as a speech but published in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, exactly nine years after the Constitutional Convention approved the Constitution. Martin traces Washington’s unprecedented voluntary relinquishment of power, first as Commander-in-Chief after the Revolutionary War and again as President, comparing him to the Roman statesman Cincinnatus.

Washington’s major warnings prove prescient today: the dangers of political faction and party spirit, the necessity of union as the foundation of American nationhood, and the indispensable role of religion and morality in sustaining self-government. Martin quotes Washington’s admonition that excessive partisanship “distracts the government, agitates the community, and opens a door to foreign influence and corruption.” The address was read annually on Washington’s birthday in the Senate from Lincoln’s directive in 1862 until modern times, though Martin laments that few lawmakers now attend.

“For a great leader to voluntarily give up power and return to private life is almost unprecedented in the annals of history. Like Cincinnatus, Washington understood his duty was to ensure the American people would go on after he was gone.”

Ben Martin, Patriotic Historian

COVID Lockdowns: Coordinated from the Start

Start listening at 58:29 – Hour 2

Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, reveals that the Twitter Files demonstrate censorship of COVID skeptics began in spring 2020, deliberately preventing critics from finding each other. Tucker, who started writing against lockdowns in January 2020, describes spending six months unable to connect with like-minded voices until finally assembling the team that produced the Great Barrington Declaration. He traces how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), created only in 2018, issued the March 18, 2020 directives on essential versus non-essential workers, not the CDC or NIH.

Tucker argues that bureaucracies had spent 15 years preparing for a pandemic lockdown response and needed a crisis to justify their existence. The former Twitter content curation chief, fired by Elon Musk, was immediately hired by CISA. Tucker theorizes the lockdowns served as a quasi-military exercise to test power networks while simultaneously providing a mechanism to remove Trump from office. He details how Trump was surrounded by Fauci, Birx, Pence, and vaccine executives on March 12-13, convinced he faced classified national security information about a bioweapon, and was told he could simply “turn off” the economy for two weeks.

“There was a systematic effort to keep us from finding out about each other in the interest of creating this sort of single story, the single narrative, the single line that of course you have to lock down because of this bad virus.”

Jeffrey Tucker, Founder, Brownstone Institute

FTX and the Pandemic Money Trail

Start listening at 91:33 – Hour 2

Tucker exposes FTX’s role as an apparent money laundering operation for pandemic-related political spending. Founded from Alameda Research in 2017, FTX distributed hundreds of millions to nonprofits advocating lockdowns, including $12 million to ProPublica. Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Helen Freed, ran the secretive Silicon Valley political action committee Mind the Gap, while his aunt served as Dean of Public Health at Columbia University. Tucker notes FTX funded the TOGETHER trial that concluded hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were ineffective, paid $150,000 to the head of Operation Warp Speed for an autobiography, and served as the second largest donor to the Democratic Party heading into the 2022 midterms. The exchange collapsed one week after those elections.

“Elon Musk was always a COVID skeptic from the early days because he has factories in China. When COVID came along, he would have heard about sickness and death from his own workers there, but he heard nothing. So when China locked down, he was suspicious it was all political.”

Jeffrey Tucker, Founder, Brownstone Institute