✪ Anyone thinking a month ago that the country was putting the tyranny of lockdowns and mask mandates in the past was being unrealistically optimistic. The U.S. is overflowing with an army of nags, busybodies, and stuffy schoolmarms clinging bitterly to the power they’ve had over others since the pandemic began, and the Delta variant arrived for them just in time…
Check some recent headlines:
- The Pressure Campaign to Restore Pandemic Restrictions Is Succeeding – Commentary
- Mask Mania Suffocates The West Coast – The Federalist
- Americans will need masks indoors as U.S. heads for ‘dangerous fall’ with surge in delta Covid cases – CNBC
- St. Louis, St. Louis County to reinstate mask mandate, some of first in U.S. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Largest Nurses Union Calls on CDC to Reinstate Mask Recommendation – U.S. News & World Report
- With delta variant looming, could poorly vaccinated Ohio face return of lockdowns, masks? – Columbus Dispatch
- Nevada Dems Call for Statewide Public Mask Mandate — Washington Free Beacon
- School Districts Around The Country Are Opting For Mask Requirements — Kaiser Health News
- CNN’s Leana Wen says we need to go back to mask mandates because ‘the honor system does not work’ — Twitchy
Welcome to the United Lockdowns of America.
What’s that again? Our caring and kind superiors are interested only in protecting us?
Please spare us. While politicians tend to act in a risk-averse manner, avoiding to the extent they are able any blame for death, illness, and destruction, the pandemic has been a handy vehicle to control and manipulate the populace. As the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Steven D. Anderson noted in clear and plain terms, “many of these leaders are, even given all we know, unwilling to relinquish their newfound power.”
Henry Louis Mencken, who understood politicians better than most, wrote in his 1956 Minority Report that “the urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” A hardly restrained lust for power, “not the chance to serve,” is what we’re seeing among so many elected officials and public health administrators.
Consequently, much of the world is fed up with the experts and officials behind these false-faces who are subjugating them to rules that violate basic human liberties.
“People across the globe are standing up and fighting against China flu lockdowns and vaccine mandates a mere 477 days since being told we need only ‘15 days to flatten the curve,’” according to PJ Media.
In Paris, we’ve seen, well, “mostly peaceful” and clearly passionate protesters clash with authorities on the streets. Freedom fighters – our description – in Sydney have “clashed with police,” and the Irish are bitterly opposing vaccine passports.
At home, we’re protesting largely through the written word. But the frustration could easily boil over. For instance, author Michael Walsh expresses the helpless feeling of many when he recounts arriving “in Southern California a couple of weeks ago, just in time to fall victim to an indoor mask mandate jackbooted by Los Angeles County in the interests of leftist conformity, virtue signaling, and general fascist stupidity.”
“In sunny SoCal,” he said, he “got a glimpse into America’s future,” and “unless we finally put an emphatic stop to this unconstitutional and irrational madness.”
“To put it in terms that even an Antifa progressive can understand, and which conservatives need to adopt,” he continued, “we need to start resisting by any means necessary.”
At least there’s Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said his state will not return to pandemic restrictions, and has even talked about holding, says Politico, “a special legislative session to counter any potential mandates imposed by federal authorities.”
A pocket of resistance has emerged in Missouri, as well. The St. Louis County Council voted 5-2 Tuesday to rescind the county executive’s unilateral order mandating masks. The local media reported “the room erupted in cheers” after the vote was taken.
“Too many American men and women have given the last full measure of devotion for us to be cavalier with the very liberty they fought and died to provide,” said Republican Councilman Ernie Trakas. “I will not abide any measures that seek to compromise or erode our liberty and freedom.”
Even so, St. Louis County Executive Sam Page said Wednesday morning that the mask mandate put in place on Monday would remain in effect, despite the council’s vote to drop it.
But outside of a few elected officials willing to stand up for liberty, we are ruled by the worst among us. The coronavirus pandemic has proved what many of us have warned about for some time: The U.S. is devolving into a kakistocracy, meaning that our governments, from Washington down, are under the command of “the least suitable or competent citizens.”
We shouldn’t be surprised that our political class has, with a few exceptions, degenerated into a rabble of petty tyrants. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek explained decades ago why the worst get to the top.
“He argued with great insightfulness that ‘the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful’ in any society in which government is seen as the answer to most problems,” says Foundation for Economic Education President Emeritus Larry Reed. “They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation. Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”
Put another way, decent men and women don’t want to be in the position of making decisions for others. Bullies do, and that’s why so many so easily settle into politics.
Before this is even posted we hear the sneering elitists condemn our Neanderthal thinking, and ridicule our “denial” of science. We’ll be likened to members of a death cult and labeled criminals. But let’s examine data from the United Kingdom, where dominance of the Delta variant provides a strong case study and see who’s thinking like a caveman.
Since Feb. 1, the Delta variant has infected far more Britons than the Alpha variant, yet has caused far fewer hospitalizations and the death rate (see table 4), 0.2%, is not even comparable to the Alpha’s 1.1% rate. In fact, the fatality gap might even be bigger – 0.1% compared to 1.9%, according to Politifact.
“Delta,” says a doctor who practiced for three decades at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, “is not the existential threat that the media is making it out to be. … Ordering lockdowns or mask mandates for the entire population defies common sense.”
No matter what arguments we offer, our “betters” are nevertheless determined to sow fear. Their objective is to swoop in as saviors, barking out orders, and handing down mandates from on high. Again they will forbid us from gathering and trading, and they will command us to hide behind masks, a dehumanizing effect that makes us look like superstitious primitive tribesmen,
Some elected and public health officials will declare their reluctance to issue lockdown and mask orders even as they grind their boots on society’s neck. But for nearly all it will be a perverse pleasure. This is the Democrats’ America. ✪
