The American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that had defined our way of life. Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury. Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of medical care is sure to impose needless suffering and death….
Intersectionality…
Every one of the ruling class’s constituencies…has adopted as its own the demand that voting in American elections must henceforth be “from home,” with ballots collected or “harvested” by third parties. That would shift electoral power from those who vote to those who process and count the votes—i.e. to themselves. Hence it would set the entire ruling class free from the voters….
The COVID event has also made the face mask into a physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the sub-constituencies. Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and deploring the deplorables. North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper said that “A face covering signifies strength and compassion for others” and “wearing one shows that you care about other people’s health.” On the same day, New York’s Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Wearing a mask is now cool, I believe it’s cool….Wearing a mask is officially cool.”
Anthony Fauci, who in March [2020] had told 60 minutes “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” in May gave his scientific judgment that masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing,” while admitting that they are “not 100% effective.” He could hardly have done otherwise since New England Journal of Medicine had said: “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers [the wearer] little, if any, protection from infection,” and is irrelevant to others in casual contact. Such a symbol of intersectional identity has it become that, as rioters were burning Minneapolis, its Democrat mayor urged the rioters whom he let burn parts of his city to make sure they wore masks while doing so.
In sum, the lockdowns have been perpetuated and prolonged by people who care more about your compliance than your health….
Regime of Fear…
No sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole [330 million person] nation’s entire medical care except for one disease [Covid]. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July [2020] hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government [Trump] was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it-for our own good, they claim….
The experts who made this happen stigmatized, tried to silence, and effectively criminalized dissent as dangerous to health and, of course, as racist.But
there is zero evidence that all or any of the above measures increased
anybody’s life expectancy, and plenty to the contrary. They wronged
America. But why? and cui bono?
Power…
Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The
teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for
reopening schools. Among them, restrictions on or elimination of charter
schools.
And as independent businesses were throttled,
big ones grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner. The news
media, unrestricted and at the service of the powerful, themselves
exercised unprecedented power. The social media platforms seconded the coup by censoring dissent from the “line” of their own most aggressive bureaucrats and officials. Try getting figures for COVID deaths and how they are counted from Google. YouTube
deleted a video gone viral of two medical doctors who pointed out the
truth about the COVID-19’s true lethality as dangerous disinformation….
Prohibitions such
as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to
train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by….
We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, [2020] 1200 “health experts” signed a letter approving the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.
Declaring emergencies to excuse taking “full powers” is the oldest of ploys. Does anybody remember the Reichstag fire? The prospect of similar things happening in America had been rising along with the ruling class and the administrative state. The authorities’ seizure of arbitrary power in the name of expertise is the deadliest strike at our way of life. Suspending law and rights, issuing arbitrary rules of behavior, has been mostly the doing of Democrat-controlled state and local government. But the lead came from the Democrat-controlled Federal bureaucracy, empowered by a president [Trump] elected as a Republican, and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a majority of Republican politicians.
The ruling class’s gains…have depended on suppressing truth.
An egregious example of forcible official lying is the ruling class’s political campaign against the drug Hydroxychloroquine.
President Trump had pointed to the truth that this standard treatment
for malaria for more than a half century is effective against the early
and mid-stages of the COVID disease. This fact had been discovered
accidentally and confirmed by studies and practices in France, Spain,
India, and South Korea. In April, U.S. doctors started prescribing it
widely, reported good results, and took it themselves prophylactically. The ruling class found this intolerable because it contradicted its narrative that nothing could prevent the sky from falling….Hence it set about canceling truth about drugs from public consciousness and substituting its own narrative….
On May 22, [2020] the Lancet, arguably the most authoritative medical journal, published what it called an analysis of the world’s biggest medical data base showing, definitively it claimed, that Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective, counterproductive, and dangerous. The Yale School of Medicine officially concluded that the drug is bad stuff, despite a study to the contrary by its own professor of epidemiology, Harvey Risch….Anthony Fauci who, when pressed hard, had said that he would take the drug were he to be sick of the COVID, then backed the political narrative by quipping that, as of now there is no treatment for COVID illness. The U.S. food and Drug Administration stopped clinical trials, pharmacy boards refused orders from physicians and retailers, and hospitals around the country required their physicians to stop treating their patients with it.
It turns out, however, that the Lancet study’s database was part of a fly-by-night,
strictly political operation, and that its details are literally
incredible—e.g., the number of reported Hydroxy deaths for one
Australian hospital exceeded the number of total deaths for the entire
country. In short, the report was another professionally unsustainable
hit job. The New York Times reported that
“More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the
authenticity” of the database as well as the study’s integrity. The Lancet withdrew it in shame….
For the media and for headline-readers, the case was closed. The lie stood. Then, on July 1, Michigan’s Henry Ford health system published a peer-reviewed study that shows Hydroxychloroquine significantly cut death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases.
Again, the ruling class machine ignored the truth….
Nor has the COVID affair to do with any emergency…The stream of public service TV advertising have left no doubt that the ruling class’s objective is to establish “a new normal” by extending into the indefinite future the powers by which bureaucracies have eclipsed America’s laws and way of life."...
[2020 Democratic Party Platform says they'll keep Covid "emergency measures" in place for both alleged medical and economic reasons. First they require "end of pandemic," but we've already been told pandemic will never "end" because booster shots will required in perpetuity. Second requirement is unspecified employment numbers, ie, until "unemployment falls significantly." Third requirement is general wellbeing of the economy, ie. "automatic" resumption of measures in case of "severe economic downturn in the future:"
page 9, "PROTECTING AMERICANS AND RECOVERING FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC"...
"We will keep these emergency measures in place until the
pandemic
ends
and
unemployment falls significantly.
And should the United States find itself in another pandemic
or
severe economic downturn in the future,
these protections will be made automatically available, so Americans are never again left to fend for themselves in times of crisis."...
What about GOP? GOP agrees with Democrats on main issues, occasional sputtering to the contrary is just to fool the rubes. GOP in fact would likely go further, mandating that all Republican voters be locked down permanently but all Democrat voters must never be locked down for any reason. So what did 2020 Republican Party Platform say on this topic? Nothing, because GOP failed to publish a 2020 platform, citing Covid, which didn't stop enthusiastic Democrats. GOP says 2024 will be its next one:
"RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention."]
(continuing): "Default and Consequences
Fairness requires noting that, regardless of
whatever America’s ruling Left has done, whatever its hopes, plans, or
coordination, what actually happened to the United States of America consequent to COVID could not have happened had President Donald Trump, much of the Republican Party, and America’s religious establishment not concurred in its happening…..
On March 15, Trump asked the country to shut down for fifteen days to slow the spread of the disease—to flatten the curve. Then, on March 31 the New York Times crowed victoriously that the previous week, President Trump had been stampeded to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.” ...Said the Times:
he was told that “voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment
measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.” Trump let himself be scared….
Trump believed that Fauci would cooperate in a plan for reopening,
and counted on the Democratic Party sharing credit for providing near a
trillion dollars in relief to the people who the lockdowns were
depriving of livelihood.
But, once Trump let go of the truth, he ceded control and entered a political blind alley. Trump was giving the de facto alliance between the Democratic Party, Fauci et al., the press, and a host of profiteers public credit even as they discredited him in every way possible. They had him where they wanted him. As the lockdowns throttled America, they used the political leverage to raise demands. They aimed at his political demise as well as at economic, social, and political transformation….
Far from returning the country to what it had been, the “data-driven” process they outlined, written by Fauci’s CDC, would make sure that
state and local officials so inclined now have top-level, pseudo-legal
cover for keeping or reimposing whatever arbitrary restrictions on opponents they think they can get away with, with whatever data they can manipulate to that purpose….
In short, the guidelines give federal sanction to choking America’s “main street” sector.
The guidelines’ arguably most dangerous legacy may be their recommendation/requirement that governments certify persons’ safe status for work and public interaction by tracking and isolating persons infected with the virus—or said to be. This involves hiring hundreds of thousands of persons to enforce compliance with
decreed regulations on personal behavior…empowered at the very least to
declare anyone the equivalent of “medically untouchable.”
The governors of Michigan and California (there is no dissent among Democratic Party officials) have already defined “racism” as a major health hazard.…Thus, without law or trial,
anyone could be separated peremptorily from job, business, or family,
pending redress in the courts–which most people cannot afford.
Were this practice adopted nationally, it really would be the centerpiece of a “new normal.”
By May [2020], New York’s mayor [DeBlasio] had already deputized
hundreds of (arguably former) gang members and criminals, paying them to
circulate among the general population to “encourage”–dare we
say, intimidate?—citizens to follow the Mayor’s orders….Not incidentally
the World health Organization—an extension of China’s government,
formally recommended that nations “observe active surveillance and tracing of their populations.”…
All of this, one must keep in mind, is so because President Trump’s complaisance with the ruling class’s falsehoods about the virus precluded high-level affirmation of the truths that negate the COVID Coup lies and pretenses….When pressed, Trump stuck by the falsehoods, as he did on April 22,
after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who had opposed the
lockdowns, announced that he was lifting them in his state. Trump chastised him publicly in the strongest terms, prompting the media into an orgy of accusations that Kemp was turning Georgia into a death camp….
Truth Commission…
Americans ask by what right governors and mayors essentially put people under house arrest without due process, and had them arrested for such activities as playing in the park or
paddling in the sea; by what right they shut down religious services,
etc. What else may government do in violation of the Bill of Rights?…
Perspective
It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health.
Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as
well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by
governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and
economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world.
Through the previous decade, the various failures and inadequacies of these governments and elites, of “Davos Man,” had become the prime subject of public discourse. At the very least, the COVID campaign changed the subject to physical safety and economic survival.
Davos Man tightened control by using the state’s coercive power more forcefully than in wartime, covering its class by claiming to speak for “science” in a manner that precludes counterargument….
The governments, their bureaucracies, the major legacy political parties, the celebrities and the media, Davos Man, were on one side. On the other were middle class people…Davos Man strove to make as many restrictions as possible part of a “new normal.”
In Europe as in America, the COVID affair was but the latest round in which the very same protagonists had faced off. There as here, the language and attitudes with which Davos Man denigrated its supposed inferiors in the COVID affair fit
seamlessly into previous patterns of the larger, long-term struggle.
Had there been any doubt that the COVID-19 virus was more an occasion
than a cause, it vanished at the end of May as, on both sides of the Atlantic, Davos Man switched to berating ordinary people and their civilization and ginned up yet another campaign to beat back challenges to its power.”
Among comments to this article at Lucianne, July 17, 2020:
……………
