April 21, 753 BC, is the traditional date on which Romulus founded Rome.
April 21, AD 1789, John Adams was sworn in as first Vice President of the United States nine days before George Washington was sworn in as President.
In 1962 on this date, the Seattle World’s Fair opened — the first World’s Fair in the United States since World War II. Three years later, to the day, the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair opened for its second and final season.
On Friday, the White House relaunched its COVID-19 information website, unveiling a sleek new landing page dedicated to the “true origins” of the pandemic.
COVID.gov, previously ballyhooing the testing, treatment and vaccination against the coronavirus, now redirects to this website.
Criticizing both the Biden administration and former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic, the website indicates that the Trump administration now embraces the theory that COVID-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, China. One section reads as follows:
PROXIMAL ORIGIN PUBLICATION:
“The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.
GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH:
A lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is the most likely the origin of COVID-19. Current government mechanisms for overseeing this dangerous gain-of-function research are incomplete, severely convoluted, and lack global applicability.
ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE INC. (ECOHEALTH):
EcoHealth — under the leadership of Dr. Peter Daszak — used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. After the Select Subcommittee released evidence of EcoHealth violating the terms of its National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commenced official debarment proceedings and suspended all funding to EcoHealth.
New evidence also shows that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has opened an investigation into EcoHealth’s pandemic-era activities.
NIH FAILURES:
NIH’s procedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security. Further, NIH fostered an environment that promoted evading federal record keeping laws — as seen through the actions of Dr. David Morens and “FOIA Lady” Marge Moore.
And that’s not the half of it; there’s a lot more.
At the bottom of the page it says that the page’s content was “sourced from the House Oversight Committee website, a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Readers of Paul Jacob’s weekday commentary on this website (thisiscommonsense.org) will be surprised by none of this — except, perhaps, that the administration of the president who awarded Dr. Fauci a “Medal of Freedom” admits to so much of the anti-freedom nature of the pandemic response.
Some excusing, though, of Trump’s role in the pandemic debacle can be seen in this passage: “Prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens. Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life.”
Just “prolonged” lockdowns? No mention of the president’s early support of them?
Finally, one aspect is catching some attention: a short section on President Joe Biden’s pardon of Dr. Fauci. Tim Pool speculates that this indicates that the Trump administration is readying itself — or at least sending out “feelers” — for an arrest and indictment of Fauci.
As to be expected, Dr. John Campbell has expressed, with candor, his approval of the White House’s newfound candor.
We are sorely deficient in talking with each other and listening to each other. We lack mobility, criticism and self-criticism. We incline to doctrinism. What makes it worse is that so many people do not really want to think. They want only slogans and obedience. They ask no questions and they give no answers, except by repeating drilled-in phrases. They can only assert and obey, neither probe nor apprehend. Thus they cannot be convinced, either.
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (1947), E.B. Ashton, translator.
On April 20, 1657, freedom of religion was granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam, which was later renamed New York City.
“We have weaponry that nobody has any idea of what it is. And it is the most powerful weapons [sic] in the world that we have, more power than anybody even . . . not even close,” President Donald John Trump informed journalists, in his usual informal manner.
While it may seem that the president just dropped a memetic “bomb” of huge importance, it’s mostly being taken with a grain of salt, as a curiosity. As just one of the things Trump says.
But he said it in a context. It was his response to a question about rising concerns about an escalation of conflict resulting from Trump’s increase in duties on goods from China. Trump appeared unruffled.
“President Xi,” he said, referring to China’s head man, is “a very smart guy” and is “one of the very smartest people of the world, and I don’t think he’d allow that to happen.”
The president had made a similar statement back in his first term, in September 2020, referring to awesome weapons of destruction that had best remain secret.
President Trump made these statements on April 9, 2025. A few days later, on April 14, Michael Kratsios, Trump’s new Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, stated that “Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space.”
Uh, what?
It is no wonder, then, that the ufology community has taken notice. But all this has played out in science fiction in the past — both as “super science” and psy-op.
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16.
On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began when the “shot heard around the world” was fired between the 700 British troops and the 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the Lexington town green.
The British troops were on a mission to capture Patriot leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock and to seize a Patriot arsenal.
The Battle of Lexington ended with eight Americans killed and ten wounded, along with one wounded British soldier.
In Concord, a couple of hours later, British troops were encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. The British commander ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans, but on the 16-mile journey they were constantly attacked by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. By the time the British reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties.
On April 19, 1782, John Adams secured the Dutch Republic’s recognition of the United States as an independent government.
Tears have been shed, garments rent: $5.3 million would have been used to retrofit a building to make it more green; $1.5 million would have funded research on the practicality of “electric vehicle carshare programs” and the “resilience” and “equity” of U.S. business models.
These initiatives are just the tip of the spear. RMI is also a good buddy of the Chinese government. RMI even has an office in Beijing.
As James Roth puts it over at our sister publication StoptheCCP.org, “Yes, RMI works with the communist government and proudly. It’s all over their website. It’s their specialty.”
Hold on, Roth. We must all try to understand that this is the kind of thing we must do if we wish to pretend to effectuate real global change in order to pretend to finetune world climate. If we let reality infect our thinking, what happens to mankind’s noble dream of instituting a globe-girdling weather-control machine while fatuously enabling the policies, conduct, and lies of tyrants? It would evaporate in the morning sun.
We’d be stuck with facts.
We’d be stuck treating RMI as responsible for its actions, as U.S. Senator Ted Cruz did in a letter to the institute’s CEO in 2023, asking “whether RMI has ever received any funding from any entity or individual associated with the Chinese government. Please answer with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. . . .”
There’s at least one such funder. RMI has gotten money from Energy Foundation China, which has CCP ties and is “run by former Chinese Communist Party officials.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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What though Reason forged your scheme?
Herman Melville, the complete epigram titled “A Reasonable Constitution” in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Howard P. Vincent Ed. (Chicago 1947).
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.
On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of the Mueller Report was released to the United States Congress and the public. President Donald Trump claimed that it exonerated him. “It was called, ‘No collusion. No obstruction.’ I’m having a good day. There never was [collusion], by the way, and there never will be. . . . This should never happen to another president again, this hoax.”