A Tyrannical Social Disease
There is a lot of bad stuff to keep an eye out for here in Joe Biden’s America. As the nightmare in Afghanistan began unfolding about a week and a half ago (seems like years), I referred to it as “a firehose of awful.”
It can all be rather exhausting.
One thing I keep worrying about is that the petty tyrant governors and mayors who have been turning COVID mandates and protocols into a sexual fetish for the last 18 months are going to use Biden’s monumental disaster in Afghanistan as cover to overreach in reacting to the Delta variant. Let’s face it: They were leaning that way already and might be very emboldened now while their beloved and alleged president is getting all of the bad press.
I wrote on Tuesday afternoon that Oregon Little Dictator Kate Brown almost gleefully brought back the outdoor mask mandate for her beleaguered citizens.
She won’t be the last of the elected Dems to do that.
Writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, John Tierney lays out the problem perfectly in just three paragraphs:
Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.
So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.
But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.
I’ve been saying and writing much of the same for a while now, but it’s always nice to have backup. Tierney does mention something that I should be writing about more, however: explaining “to the public that the virus will never disappear.”
As far as I am aware, none of the chattering overlords has gone so far as to say that we can eradicate this virus. They’re aware that we can’t, but there is no level or amount of prevarication from the panic pimps that would surprise me anymore. They also haven’t gone out of their way to explain that we won’t. If you monitor the social media hordes who are still swallowing the government proclamations hook, line, and sinker, it’s obvious that most of them feel that there is an endgame here that involves bidding the virus a permanent adieu.
I can’t help but feel that’s by design.
That this Aghanistan meltdown is happening as American school kids are finally getting back into classrooms could prove disastrous. I’ve been telling all of my friends whose children are back in school not to get used to it. Leftists love using kids as pawns for, well, everything.
More from Tierney:
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.
“I’m an anesthesiologist,” he tweeted last weekend. “And a dad. And I can assure you in both capacities that your child will be far more comfortable if they’re in a face mask, than on a ventilator. If you’re making a choice on behalf of a child, please choose based on their comfort, vs yours.” He offered no new evidence that children are at heightened risk from the virus, much less any evidence that a mask would make any difference, but he did make sure to include a gruesome photograph of a child on a ventilator.
It was a new low in public-health demagoguery, but unfortunately not so different from the fearmongering of other officials, the press, and social-media platforms.
He highlights another problem there. The public health officials and talking heads rarely, if ever, back up anything they say with evidence. They don’t have to because the mainstream media has been devoid of journalistic curiosity for decades and half the American public has lost its ability to question or be critical of the government.
None of this will get better once the Delta variant calms down. They have no vested interest in running out of variants, and I think we all know why:
Fauci should stop naming COVID variants after the Greek alphabet and name them after elections – now we’re in the California Recall variant, next it will be the Midterm Variant, then the Keep the White House Democrat Variant forget delta, lambda, gamma, etc
— Richard Viguerie (@RichardViguerie) August 24, 2021
It would be nice to think that the worst of 2020 is in the rearview mirror. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in positions of power who are trying to keep it in front of us to block the road back to freedom.
