A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
A protester runs past burning cars and buildings on Chicago Avenue, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Ross Douthat, no admirer of Donald Trump, has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that is a clear warning to left/progressives to watch out (see below). If they soft pedal the violence, they may face a similar backlash as in 1968 when Nixon won a close election on a wave of the “silent majority”. Then, in my view, Douthat goes off the rails when he predicts Biden is better positioned than Trump to win in 2020.
Ross Douthat
Anyway, the crime spike in Obama’s last years in office, the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the current conflagrations in our cities, and the screeches coming out of a much more radical Democratic Party should be dire warnings to any Democrat of longstanding.
Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
Sure, as others have noticed, Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. He grates against the sensibilities of the vast middle of the electorate. His rhetorical mannerisms can frequently upset an otherwise judicious message. Thus, he makes his reelection tougher by the day.
But, no matter Trump’s faults, they don’t take place in a vacuum. The center of today’s Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962. It’s a radical party that is morphing into a revolutionary one.
A little backgrounder is necessary. For those who’ve either forgotten or were never taught, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a direct descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. Here’s the genealogy: Intercollegiate Socialist Society > League for Industrial Democracy > Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) > Students for a Democratic Society.
The SDS national council meeting, 1963; Tom Hayden at far left. (Photograph: C Clark Kissinger)
No red-baiting here. People who would be comfortable in the SDS – Bernie and his bros, and the dominating activist base in deep blue states – are in the driver’s seat of the party. The Port Huron Statement – the constitution of the 60’s radical left – could very well be the party’s 2020 platform, with concessions to the lunacy of identity politics. How repellent would that be to middle class voters just wanting to get back to work and their kids in school? Do I have to answer?
Biden can’t run from that. Biden can be made into a comforting figure for the general election but he can’t run from the party who chose him. The duty of the Republican Party in the fall campaign would be to make Biden and the Democrats more indefensible than Trump’s tweets. The radical and preening Squad is one thing, but burning cities threatening to spread to the suburbs, and the spawning of a crime wave from no-bail and non-prosecution policies may do to the Dem Party what happened to them from 1968 onward. When a party cements a reputation as a threat to civil order, they’re in trouble … big trouble.
California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton leads a “F***k Donald Trump” chant at the California Democratic Party Convention in May of 2017.
Trump’s greatest ally is his opponents. Douthat underestimates the moral corruption of the Democrat side of the political equation.
Protesters run away when police move forward near the White House during a protest over the death of George Floyd in Washington D.C., the United States, on May 30, 2020. Demonstrations and riots have spread to cities across the United States after a video went viral of George Floyd being suffocated to death by a white police officer in the midwest U.S. state of Minnesota on May 25. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
Right now, riots and General Flynn are competing with the epidemic for headline news space. All of them can only be reasonably processed by taking a breath and waiting for pertinent facts to arise and a cooling-off period to assess the situation in an adult fashion. Understanding the George Floyd case will take more serious and steady minds than those possessed by Democrat firebrands and a crowd of urbanites-turned-street-thugs. We’re quickly coming to realize for the umpteenth time that it doesn’t take much for chaotic home lives to become chaotic streets.
On the Flynn front, the suave Obama may turn out to be what he was all along: a smooth-talking community organizer who made the upper echelons of the federal government an arm of his Democratic Party. Bad news for General Flynn and the 2016 victor over Obama’s anointed successor. It’s only beginning to tumble out. Frequently, first impressions are wrong in love and headlines.
Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn departs U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., December 1, 2017. (REUTERS/Jonathan ErnsC)
It’s no less true about the virus shipped to us from China. The reaction of our “better” people was lackadaisical at first and then immediately went to Nigel Tufnel’s (Spinal Tap) “11”. I have long suspected that big decisions were made on very little evidence, and much of that false.
A good deal of the reaction depends on where you sit, as I’ve said before. Our media central nervous system centers in New York City and runs up and down the Bos-Wash spinal cord, the most densely packed region in the country. .2% of New York’s population was killed by the bug. The inhibitions to a surrender of the mind to raw emotions was dramatically lowered by simply looking out the window (or, more properly, the “window” of our many connected devices). Can you really say that the view wouldn’t overwhelm a person’s rational calculus?
Sure, the same can be said of someone living in a lightly affected region, like my Montana. Both perspectives are probably wrong, but can we ignore the reality that more facts have emerged and more alternative voices have had a chance to weigh in? The virus is contagious and not nearly as lethal as Oxford’s crystal ball gazing that gave us 2.2 million deaths. The disease has trended downward from the Black Death apocalypse to something just above flu season.
The common cold.
I can’t help but wonder that the huge numbers of infected are at least partially a result of the massive total war approach for dealing with this particular candidate for mayhem. We know more about the reach of this virus than probably any of the more recent varietals of flu, including the strange strains of fall 2019. We have always been swimming around in a sea of pathogens. That won’t change when this culprit fades. By concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, we exaggerate its relative magnitude. Great and highly focused efforts inherently distort perspective.
The 100,000 deaths figure demands reexamination. Not that the number is wrong (even though it can be contested from a number of angles) but we have no reliable comparison with other infectious diseases because they were never accorded this level of rectal examination.
The trigger for this piece was the discovery on the CDC website of a “case fatality rate” (CFR) of 0.26% for corona (thanks Robert Verbruggen). That contrasts with the run-of-the-mill CFR ranging from 0.5 to 1.0. What’s up with that? Another example of the downward progression of the disease’s lethality.
Are we about to experience another round of disappointment for those panting for the next “Moral Equivalent of War” so as to stampede us into the Green New Deal or a woke utopia? Ignoring the ski slope fall in the actuality of a cataclysm, some still act as if the mirage of the March state-of-play has magically become as true today as it was false back then. They are as stuck in the past as Bernie Sanders and AOC are wallowing in their long-dead Scandinavian socialism. AOC’s “Scandinavia” has the same totemic value for her as the use of “selfish” and “reckless” by today’s wannabe authoritarians.
Was it all worth it? You now, the shutdowns, shelter-in-place, masks, social distancing; the loss of 10-25% of small businesses; the movement of millions of workers from the workplace to unemployment; the rise in depression, suicides, domestic violence, and substance abuse; the release of “nonviolent” inmates to “nonviolently” prey on their neighbors; and the damage to the health care of anyone not suffering from a fever and pneumonia. And let’s not forget the destruction of social life by the loss of grandma’s hugs, big-family dinners, the social bonding of the handshake, antiseptic romance through a mask, and human interaction reduced to a digital image on a screen. We may as well go all-in for sex-bots and any motorized version of a person in grey hair.
She’s a model … James with Harmony in The Sex Robots Are Coming. James is among the protagonists of The Sex Robots Are Coming, an investigation into the development of animatronic, AI-enabled silicone sexbots, and part of Rise of the Robots season on British tv.
More of the same is likely to come. These geniuses have yet to distinguish this contagion from any prior, contemporaneous, or future one. If the strangulation of society is justified for this rapidly declining threat, buckle up for the next fall/winter. As some addicts have said, taking the first hit of coke makes it easier to snort the next line, and the next, and the next, and ….
I am not sure if we are careening toward Orwell’s Oceania or Huxley’s World State. Either way, I’d hate to see the books moved from fiction to nonfiction on the Amazon website.
Patients wearing face masks and personal protective equipment wait on line for COVID-19 testing outside Elmhurst Hospital Center, Friday, March 27, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
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The Basic Limiting Principle: “There are certain limiting principles which we unhesitatingly take for granted as the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined. Some of these seem to be self-evident. Others are so overwhelmingly supported by all the empirical facts which fall within the range of ordinary experience and the scientific elaborations of it (including under this heading orthodox psychology) that it hardly enters our heads to question them. Let us call these Basic Limiting Principles.” *C.D. Broad in his scholarly piece, “The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy”, 1949, in the journal Philosophy.
C.D. Broad
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While listening to a recent National Review podcast of “The Editors”, the discussion among the editors turned to the issue of masks, as a prophylactic in government guidance or commands regarding the epidemic. I recall that the general consensus of the 3 editors was supportive. The more their view settled in my head, the more disturbed I became. Broad’s limiting principle came to mind, as did the possibility of severe social and psychological disfigurement from this “new normal”. My conclusion: this has to end sooner rather than later.
One editor, Charles C.W. Cooke, true to his libertarian bias, equated the mask to the right to bear arms. The comparison is foolish, but I get it. The Second Amendment is integral to our understanding of ourselves as a self-governing people in a citizen republic. How does mask-wearing fit into that constitutional construct? It doesn’t, unless disguising one’s appearance in public is the “new normal”. Conceal-carry doesn’t undermine fundamental social interaction like conducting public life from behind a mask.
Charles C.W. Cooke
For the podcast participants, a great emphasis was placed on its usefulness in an epidemic, citing Asians in 1 million+ urban centers who are accustomed to wearing them in their pollution-addled air. Granted, but the excuse of an epidemic had better be carefully defined with much more than boundaries of geography and longevity. However, the treatment of this contagion is morphing into a never-ending crusade. We are about to confront the limits adumbrated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in his law of unintended consequences as we continue to treat the issue as the 14th-century’s Black Death. A simple plank (masks) in the program to fight the disease may result in something more than “flattening the curve”. It will flatten our psyche and our social connectivity. The emotional, social, and economic negative spinoffs will be profound.
The practice of hiding much of our face in public, and a good portion of everything else, is indicative of near-totalitarian social and political regimes. Does Sharia and the burka remind you of anything? Do the Guidance Squads of the Islamic Republic of Iran remind you of anything? No need to worry about the niqab’s impracticality for ID photos. Women are not supposed to drive … and vote, be educated, be business leaders, or stray too much outside the home in many of these places. The rule applies to only women, but it conveys an alarming assumption about the person. Hiding the face – or a good portion of it – is incompatible in a free society of free individuals.
How do we freely interact if the person is a stranger and if the contact isn’t carefully staged beforehand? Identification from the bridge of the nose up is nearly impossible; the voice is muffled as in the electronic distortion to protect a Mafioso turncoat; the initial attraction of people to each other is marred by the absence of two-thirds of the face. Identifying criminal suspects becomes impossible since the photo on the ID is difficult to match with the hidden face, unless the thing is removed thereby defeating its purpose. Plus, how do you distinguish the bank robbers from the crowd of seeming bank robbers on the street? The whole thing is ludicrous for finding a mate and protecting people’s savings accounts.
It’s beyond ludicrous. It’s creepy. Have you noticed the mangling of the social space under a regime of masks and social distancing? Yes, I’ll add social distancing since it is the policy cousin to the masks; its purpose being the same: reducing the risk of picking up and transmitting the bug. A restaurant resembles Madam Tussauds wax museum with mannequins seated at tables to give the patrons a phony sense of bustle in an atmosphere of lockdown. I’m reminded of the makeshift suburbia in nuclear tests. Others have invented ghoulish alterations to eat and drink through the things. Does the “new normal” look like this? Huxley or Orwell couldn’t have surpassed what we are proposing to do to ourselves.
Mannequins in The Inn at Little Washington, a Michelin three-star restaurant, reopening shortly in Washington, Va., May 20, 2020A “typical American family” of mannequins who were subject to an atomic bomb test at “Doom Town” in Yucca Flat, Nevada. (Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images)
And then there’s the plastic experience of simulating a touch, handshake, or hug through a broadband image on a monitor. Now we are one step closer to the digitized world of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” (acted by Tom Cruise in the movie). Masks, mannequins, and Thanksgiving dinners limited to the immediate household and TV images of grandma and grandpa promises to be our “new normal” if some of our overlords get their way. What happens to a society with much less personal contact? We become a people awfully resembling solipsistic automatons, a shadow of our former selves.
The “new normal” verbiage, and what it advocates, with its masks and ersatz social life, should be dispensed with immediately, except in targeted locations with flare-ups and serious rates of infection. Charles C.W. Cooke, this isn’t the same as a coal mine. Masks are limited to miners, not as a public ethos for everyone. Apples and oranges, buddy.
Once breached, the standard of masks imposition comes easier the next time. If it was good for the coronavirus, why wouldn’t they be good every flu season … or permanently? After all, human beings are walking founts of pathogens, at all times. Forget about that passionate French kiss. Forget about foreplay. Expect an intensification of the birth dearth. I wonder what romance looks like behind masks and a restaurant of mannequins. My guess: it’ll be as rare as the births.
Too bad the Wampanoags in the 17th century didn’t have their own blue-state governors. They wouldn’t need the warrior face paint to appear fearsome since they’d be frightening enough in a N95 mask. They’d also be around today in greater numbers given their complete lack of herd immunity to the Europeans’ influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhus. But then again, knowing the probable negative effect of masks on romance, they’d still experience empty maternity wards. They’d still end up with the same declining numbers.
Herd immunity (the possession of the antibody in enough people to dampen a contagion’s spread) is the key. Here’s how it worked in Harris County, Tx., regarding a measles outbreak.
Being as isolated as they were – and as we are trying to be with sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and masks – the Wampanoags were virologically innocent children waiting for death. Since Wampanoag medicine didn’t include vaccines, they either faced death or salvation from a European retreat from the continent. Given the acquisitive nature of human beings, the latter didn’t happen. For us, we can simulate herd immunity with vaccines, but the things are partially successful and difficult to create. Holding out for one in the meantime could result in some of us ending up like many of the Wampanoags or experiencing a Kafkaesque mangling of life and society, or both.
Depiction of 17th-century Native American smallpox victims.
My choice is to aggressively clamp down in hotspots at the onset to limit the devastation, then loosen ASAP. We must be mindful that after a while the social and economic costs come to be insurmountable. Lockdowns should be narrowly construed and then dropped like a hot potato. 2 months is too long in the absence of flare-ups, and even then only applied locally.
Herd immunity or no, vaccine or no, we must recognize that the risk of contagion is always present. Paraphrasing Matthew 26:11: you will always have pathogens among you. It’s a truism that should restrain us from doing the same thing again. No nation can endure the constant and ugly prospect of an on/off life overhanging us every fall and winter. The lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, shelter-in-place, and masks came with no real sunset provisions. If you live in the disease’s epicenter in the Northeast, you might look upon the smothering and mauling of social and economy life differently. Anywhere else, it’s grotesque in the extreme.
Down with masks and the rest of it. As per C.D. Broad, we have to acknowledge the explicit and inherent limits.
Lately I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlog of National Review issues, like the ones of April 6 and April 20. There’s much for me to agree with in the magazine … and some points of disagreement. I’ve noticed something else, however, during this pandemic. The magazine is headquartered in New York City. Its contributors may be scattered all over the country – with many residing in the City or its environs – but they come to focus on the city, which requires many trips to reacquaint and remind them of the City’s circumstances. I can’t help but think that they have an East Coast or Northeast orientation. Does the pandemic experience in the City overwhelm their perspective on everything relating to COVID-19?
What do they see when they tune in their devices or look outside the window? New York City and neighboring New Jersey are the epicenter of disease in the US. Accordingly, the overall tenor of the magazine in the April issues is dark, one of doom. My perception of the publication’s treatment – yes, I admit to being overly subjective – centers on the dire condition of death and crippling illness in the region where they live, work, and may have been raised. Understandable.
Heaven knows, the virus is highly contagious and deadly to certain groups, regardless of national geography. Yet, a quarter of deaths to the virus comes from one state: New York, and the overwhelmingly majority of those concentrate in New York City. The Overton Window (the range of “acceptable” discourse and views) for the magazine’s staff and all media centered in the city must have been influenced by the experience.
A body wrapped in plastic that was unloaded from a refrigerated truck is handled by medical workers wearing personal protective equipment due to COVID-19 concerns, Tuesday, March 31, 2020, at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn borough of New York. The body was moved to a hearse to be removed to a mortuary. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
You might say that my Overton Window is similarly constricted by my residence in sparsely populated northwest Montana. There’s no registered cases or deaths of COVID-19 in Sanders County (a county without a traffic light), with Montana being lightly touched by the disease. Geographical bias is a problem. One advantage, though, of living outside the urban infection and death centers is to better appreciate the bad consequences of instilling an induced coma to the social and economic parts of an entire nation.
Similarly, a mother will refuse to see her lovely little darling as a juvenile delinquent in spite of the evidence. Our experiences and emotional attachments color our view of the matters before our eyes. Welcome to National Review headquarters, most of big media, and Sanders County, Mt.
Some of the magazine’s editors and contributors are strong supporters of federalism, to their credit. Some writers have taken a slightly different tack in supporting the shutdown, or are at least defensive of it. Some states never fully shut down; others went all in, and continue to do so. Federalism at work … to a point – to the applause of many of the magazine’s contributors.
Overhanging it all is an overlay of federal policies – also generally supported by the magazine’s staff – that induced that national coma. As in a coma, many bodily systems atrophy after prolonged hibernation. Are we truly prepared for Great Depression, Part II? Is there a full appreciation of what it will entail? I doubt it, especially after much personal exposure to MSNBC (much in New York City), the networks (much in New York City), and even CNN which is headquartered in Atlanta. Most of CNN’s programming emanates from New York City and Washington, DC. The publishing industry also crowds into the city. What happens in New York City seldom stays in New York City.
And a dangerous virus crowds into the city as well. The crowding of people presents an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of dangerous microbes, always has. Public sanitation campaigns and systems can only take you so far. People are still piled on top of one another and spend much time cheek-by-jowl in subways and hives of the hospitality industry. Add to this the fact that the range of personal hygiene in any population extends from obsessive/compulsive to bachelor/couch potato. As the virus parties through a densely packed population, a lockdown seems appropriate to the denizens of the City – many of them in the media – but maybe not so in places where an existence in “flats” is much less a fact of life.
New York City subway pre-corona.
Charles Murray writing for the American Enterprise Institute makes a similar point. The gravity of the disease has a population density dimension. The observation makes an excellent case for the salutary effects of sprawl, and the therapeutic benefits of many and expansive suburban parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and bike paths that exist in exurbia. A spread-out population might be a healthier one.
American urban sprawl, or just a healthier low-horizon city?
The thought will be heartily condemned by your run-of-the-mill central-planning greenie trying to replicate Hong Kong everywhere in the country. To them, sprawl is of the devil. If their design leaves the country open to pandemics, well, so what?! As per AOC and her Squad fan club, they’d love a planet with far fewer people anyway. AOC has already announced her support for infertility. Speaking metaphorically, it’s no skin off her back … or ovaries.
For those of us in the empire of sprawl, our incidences of infection and death are much below de Blasio’s mecca. Thus, why the national shutdown, or more accurately, the broad imposition of the creepy-mask look, the shuttered businesses, and enforced unemployment due to China’s city-loving incubus? The empty streets of Missoula, Mt., weren’t much different from the thoroughfares of New York City.
North Higgins Ave. in Missoula was mostly empty on the morning of April 3, 2020. (photo: WILLIAM MARCUS / MONTANA PUBLIC RADIO)
Again, why? Don’t answer by saying that it could be the same in the Helena. “Could” is a nasty word for the rational governance of one’s life. We “could” be invaded by a superpower like the Grand Duchy of Fenwick as in the “The Mouse That Roared” (It’s a hoot so take a look.).
The “science” – the thing that lefties ubiquitously proclaim but seldom understand – of the virus is mostly well known, not so with cures or therapies, or the accuracy of the stats to brutalize the population into cultural and economic suicide. A country as vast and diverse as ours should not be cowed into broadly shutting down or coming close to it by ending much of our social and economic life.
Target, target, target is the sensible response. Target with quarantines the ravaged areas. Target public and private moneys on cures and therapies. For the rest of us, leave us alone. A hurt economy is far better than a wrecked one.
The principle of holes is very relevant to our current situation. A v-shaped recovery is impossible if our hole has become a miles-deep shaft. The bounce will come up short if the lighted hole of the surface is a small dot as we look up. The window that dominates our media empires might makes us less cognizant of this reality. NYC-centrism may unnecessarily end up crippling us for quite some time.
Hugh Hewitt, normally one of the sane people in the media storm in the age of Trump, has joined the ranks of militant busybodies that were unleashed by the current sickness hysteria. A couple of days ago he was agreeing with a caller (a medical doctor, so someone with medical street cred) on the need to continue the mitigations: social distancing, masks, business closures, etc. The day after, he was ranting from his WaPo op-ed about running into groups of joggers and bicyclists on paths who were not practicing his meddlesome measures. He crafted his complaint as one of selfishness and foolishness of the non-compliant. I was incensed … not at the bicyclists but at him.
He would say, and has said, that the numbers and science are on his side. What drivel. Yes, policy making during a pandemic demands the use of statistics and science. But these are some of the ingredients in the recipe for making good policy, not the only ones. Think about it: science has produced many ways to safely abort a baby, but is abortion even acceptable? On such matters, science and numbers can only take you so far in the determination of what ought to be done.
The limitations on science and numbers go beyond the moral issues. They extend to all decision making, and especially to ones that have great impact on the country. It should begin with a presumption on the boundaries for action. In other words, what is acceptable? In combating terrorism in Baghdad, is it appropriate to nuke the city? (Oh, by the way, don’t think that it didn’t come up in many a ribald beerhall conversation around the time of The Surge.) For me, the thought was beyond the pale. The same consideration should be at work in response to a communicable disease. Options like the mass execution of the infected are too horrible to contemplate … and so should the euthanization of the social and economic life of a continental country of 330 million people. Going back to Dirty Harry: “Man must know his limits.”
Who would have thought it was possible? LA freeway without traffic jams during the current California lockdown.
And that’s what we have done with the American lockdown. We’ve decided to nuke Baghdad, so to speak.
There are so many holes in Hewitt’s logic – and others like him – that if it was a ship, it’d sink. Forcing a population of 330 million to take on the appearance of bank robbers is foolishness in the extreme. An argument in support of the nonsense relies on the highly contagious nature of the virus. Wait a minute. All viruses, as well as bacteria, are contagious and dangerous to certain classes of persons. Yes, Hugh, no surprise, the things are small enough to swim in aerosols (suspended fine droplets of moisture). Always have.
But there’s a fallback position for the would-be authoritarians. Wait for it: they proclaim that this one is particularly deadly. Well, to be honest, it’s lethal only to vulnerable groups, but these people are vulnerable to any malevolent bug, and there are many, many of those without the coronavirus in the mix. Hewitt’s stance is actually a demand that many of us will come to know only a third of a person’s face from here on out. Apparently, for him, it’s the new normal.
I guess that the discovery of masks on a couple of dimwits who just held up the local Wells Fargo can no longer satisfy the new post-pandemic standard for “probable cause” when so many of us have a few in the glove box, thanks to Hewitt, others like him, and that band of “experts” straying way outside their lane.
Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist at a bank in Odessa, Tx., January 2020.Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist in a bank in Lower Gwynedd, Penn., September 2019.
Furthermore, why bother putting anyone in a police lineup with half the face gone? Criminal investigations will be farcical in Hewitt’s brave new world. The only parallel that comes to mind is the demand by some Muslims for their women to be photographed in the burqa for government-issued ID’s. A crowded DMV under the current protocols would logically require a photo of everyone in a full burka or at a minimum in Jesse James mode. Of course, what good are the pics with two-thirds of the face veiled?
Voter ID laws are similarly made useless since the picture is undecipherable. The electorate instantly becomes whoever happens to be breathing – or not breathing in the case of Chicago – on US soil at the time of the election, a fervently sought end state of the Pelosi Democratic Party. It’s an interesting way to repeal protections of the ballot from fraud.
Exceptions? Come on, what Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and every other power-hungry politico in high office isn’t salivating at the opportunity to embrace full burka getups and the N95 bank-robber look in state-issued id’s and driver’s licenses if need be? But how will cops identify a pulled-over driver with everyone disguised in their mask? It certainly will be easier for under-aged teens to buy beer as they approach the counter with the same mask that appears on their older brother’s driver’s license. Clerks will have to learn the science of forensic facial recognition absent two-thirds of the face … or, more likely, the booze age limits will become passé.
See, the scheme is so unworkable in the long term. It’s a short-term response that some meatheads want to make the “new normal”. Amazing!
There is no limiting principle in the logic of the shutdowns, every-man-is-an-island mode of social interaction, ending gatherings and the First Amendment’s right of association, the mask-wearing nonsense, and government squashing the livelihoods of millions as businesses are forcibly shuttered. You simply can’t take a meat axe to the social and economic parts of life and still have anything resembling a life.
Some have proposed that the epidemic should be treated as a war, like Trump and ironically his “progressive” foes who are constantly on the lookout for the next “moral equivalent of war”. What they’re after, more accurately, is total war. Total war is the complete involvement of the community from kids collecting scrap metal in the neighborhood, to bond drives, the militarization of the work force, to all kinds of conservation and rationing schemes. But here’s the kicker: all war plans presume the existence of an economy. No economy, no war material, and no war. They want total war without the “total”.
The advocates of William James’s “moral equivalent of war” in response to the virus have killed off much of the economy. And given their rationale, they would inflict the prescription on us anytime the same, mutated, or cousin of the bug makes an encore. Can you imagine our economy and social life sitting on pins and needles every flu season? Stress on the people goes through the roof, uncertainty for all investment is the “new normal”, business and commerce becomes unsteady as they constantly look over their shoulders at the latest moves by some commissar, and workers and everybody else can’t plan ahead. Get used to that word “depression”. That will be our new normal.
We can’t do this, this shutting down of life. We can’t continue with social distancing, universal sheltering-in-place, the masks, and an end to work life – or its constriction. And what’s with this planned obsolescence of the neighborhood school, with its lifetime memories of friendships, teachers, band, cheerleaders, games? We can’t do this, and never should have done it. Instead, we need to do something more sensible: limit restrictions to the infected and vulnerable, pump private and public moneys into therapies and cures, and leave the rest of us to conduct our lives in accordance with our conscience and our God.
We should be admonished to proclaim “never again”. “Never again” applies to genocides, and it could also refer to the horror wreaked on our social, religious, and work lives. Never again. Please, never again.
New York mayor Bill De Blasio at one of his press conference.
Hugh Hewitt on his morning radio news show recently recounted from his Washington Post column his anger at bicyclists on a bike path in unapproved groups not wearing masks. He reacted as if they were morally irresponsible. I was floored by his over-the-top reaction, disturbingly aware that many others probably share his troubling opinion. I most emphatically don’t.
Family biking on Long Island, NY, April 28, 2020.
Our responses to this virus should ignite a debate about what is permissible for government to do. Events frequently expose deeper issues at stake. Here, during this epidemic, are we to have a government that can end the very and most basic act of living, suspending the behaviors that make up a life, any life? Do we realize that we have quietly condoned a Leviathan suffering from an obesity of power? The lockdown, both national and by the states, raises these overarching questions.
While in Costco last week, the store mandated masks to be worn and passed them out at the entrance. I overheard a conversation among two customers in the store with one person extolling the virtues of the mask. The other was in general agreement and not disposed to push back. They answered the question in one way. But the view cries out for pushback. Have sovereign citizens all of a sudden become field hands under the control of political overseers, no one being allowed to dispute their overseers’ dictats?
The masks are a signifier of this deeper problem. There is official and peer pressure to wear them. We are told that they prevent us from spreading the virus to other people. Do they? Maybe in some instances but not in others. The virus like other viruses will spread from touching products on the shelves in the same Costco that requires us to wear masks. Masks reduce the flight of the bug but it will still land on something touched by someone reaching under the thing to scratch or remove bodily fluid, and from there to the hands, eyes, and every place under the mask of another patron.
Plus, can you imagine a cardio-vascular exercise routine as we partially reintroduce carbon dioxide back into our lungs while sweat pours underneath the things? The experience makes for one more excuse for a couch potato to not shed the spare tire. Gyms – corporate or personal – might go the way of Sears or JC Penneys.
And how long must we put up with it? Hewitt says through the summer. But that’s the problem: these measures are so open-ended. There’s a never-ending array of reasons to continue to corset our noses and mouths with the things: a second surge (or a third, fourth, ….), the bug is still lurking somewhere, etc. And, let’s not forget, that greatest of all fear trump cards: kids will die if we don’t get them used to noticing people from the eyes up.
To make the encumbrances more attractive, businesses have even popped up to sell us more stylish versions, like a Riyadh bizarre selling burkas with bling. Pardon me, the thought is appalling.
In the end, should all facets of a person’s existence be surrendered to the fear of catching a virus? At a certain point we must accept the risks of a traffic accident as we drive to work, getting salmonella from our dinner salad, a slip and fall as we shuffle between our work desk and the boss’s office, carpal tunnel syndrome from pounding on our computer keyboard, and catching a germ from a friend in a prayer circle. Risks must be accepted to live the life that God gave us.
Mandates for masks, sheltering-in-place, social distancing, massive business closures, and an end to all gatherings in “large” groups is more than an expression of prudent health measures. It’s an expression of totalitarian control. Freedom carries with it dangers, always has. And so does ensconcing near-omnipotent power in the hands of a select group of “experts”.
Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist, of Imperial College in London, and the author of the projection of 2.2 million deaths in the U.S from the coronavirus.
Lenin was surrounded by “experts” in revolution. If experience is an indicator, they were good at it … bringing about revolution, that is. They just weren’t much good at anything else, as the assorted misery, shortages, and bloodshed in the ensuing decades would attest. I’m not wiling to turn over my life to the dictates of narrow-minded “experts”.
“Experts”, as I’ve said before, are specialists. By definition, they only know one thing well. The decisions of a community will always require much more than that, such as impacts on livelihoods, our religious life, and that thing called the Constitution. A broad-reaching decision should never be the sole province of a compressed group of “experts”.
Please watch this 54-minute session of the Hillsdale College symposium, “The Coronavirus and the Constitution”.
“Waco”, the miniseries currently airing on Netflix.
I was surprised and disappointed that Clint Eastwood’s “Jewell” didn’t do better at the box office. The poor showing wasn’t due to a lack of cinematic craftsmanship. It was well-made and acted with a riveting script. I have only speculation, but it sure seems like today’s public is squeamish about such offerings. Could it be a byproduct of a broad revulsion of our incendiary politics? Escapism might be more appealing because the quality of our public discourse is so appalling. That’s my guess. I hope that Netflix’s “Waco” doesn’t experience the same fate. It cries out to be seen.
Eastwood’s story is riveting, as is “Waco”. Richard Jewell was tarnished by nothing more than a FBI profile (of the “lone bomber” and the “hero syndrome” psyche hypotheses) – profiling being an investigative technique to narrow the range of suspects, not to ignore evidence and hound a person. An institutional psychosis grips and propels agents toward a particular suspect or set of actions to the exclusion of any other possibilities. All of it is based on nothing more than an abstraction that straitjackets the minds of government agents.
The potential for tunnel vision, fueled by this institutional psychosis, intensifies as the responsible agency is administratively removed from local circumstances. The FBI in 1996 was obsessed with Richard Jewell in Atlanta, and the ATF/FBI in 1993 was consumed with Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, outside Waco, Texas, as the US Marshals Service and FBI were with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Caricatures were formed and plans made from afar, and then imposed on a locality. The fallout included Jewell’s unjustifiably tarred reputation, 79 dead in the inferno at Waco, and the killing of Weaver’s wife, Vicky, and son, Sammy (age 14), at Ruby Ridge. We might as well include the yang of the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168, to the yin of Waco. Innocents all; lives cut short. It’s not a matter of saints and sinners. It’s a matter of a grotesque abuse of power that is broadly ignored as such. Easy to do when decision making is centralized and distant.
Randy Weaver and family. Federal authorities would kill his wife, Vicky (next to Randy) and son, Sammy (seated at his mother’s feet).Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, southwest of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.
By the way, what was with the 1990’s? Now that’s a question awaiting serious consideration.
Far more troubling for us today is the public’s apparent assent to this state of affairs. Are we becoming the type of people who are increasingly willing to turn over our right to govern ourselves to a narrow class of specialized “experts” employed in government service? Are we becoming sheep? One has to wonder.
Interestingly, the character of Janet Reno had a brief appearance in Netflix’s “Waco”. She approved the final assault on the Branch Dividian compound when informed of unproven accusations of child abuse at the Mt. Carmel estate. Janet Reno cut her teeth on successfully prosecuting child abuse cases in the 1980’s as chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, and rode her success to fame and the office of Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton.
Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. (photo: Barry Thumma/AP)
Oh, one important fact about Janet Reno: she devised a prosecutorial recipe – the infamous “Miami method” – for carrying out a mammoth miscarriage of justice by railroading many innocent people into long prison terms and setting off a daycare child-abuse hysteria that gripped the country in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Almost all of the convictions have been overturned and ample payouts awarded for false prosecution by states and localities who followed the Pied Piper of Dade County. The story is vividly portrayed in PBS’s “The Child Terror” and in the work of journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz in publications like the Wall Street Journal. From her perch in Washington, DC, Reno was inflicted on the Branch Davidians.
A page from the PBS website for “The Child Terror”.
Part of the problem in our thinking is the nomenclature for the government headquartered in DC. You know, the one surrounding The Mall. We try to avoid calling it what it is: a “central” government. “Central” is unsettling to a nation who sees itself as geographically and culturally diverse with the accompanying and long-established regional loyalties, and a governmental structure to reflect it. If you doubt the belief’s persistence, attend a pro or college football game. Regionalism is rampant.
The word “federal” in reference to the one headquartered in DC is the odd duck in the field. “Federal” pertains to a system of state and national sovereignties, not just the central one. The word is an awkward fit when applied to those manning our national bureaucracies. More accurately, they are “national” or “central” government authorities.
The fuzzy wording hides the reality that the DC government has been centralizing since Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office in 1913 (or maybe it was TR in 1901). The zenith of concentration is a very high plateau of power for our DC authorities running from the New Deal of the 1930’s through the Great Society of the 1960’s to our current Great American Shutdown. The decentralizing efforts of the Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich triumvirate were just hiccups along the way.
Let’s count the ways of DC’s consolidation of power. How do we, the general public, view our national chief executive? George Will’s use of “caesaropapism” for the popular conception of the presidency is apt. DC has been a hot real estate market since FDR’s alphabet soup of “federal” agencies. The commerce clause of the Constitution has been exploited to impose a national floor on wages, the amount of allowable particulate matter in a locality, our car’s fuel economy, whether to cut down a tree, bans on guns that look mean, and nearly everything between … including light bulbs. Huge swaths of our population are dependent on a national bureaucracy’s paycheck or handout. The Supreme Court through its edicts has turned the states into handmaidens of DC. With its ATF, Marshals Service, and FBI, DC has extensive and expansive police forces with a very long reach. Many of them in personnel and behavior mirror the other armed branch of the central government, the military.
The DC government is primed and ready to be at war with its citizens. I have warmed to the complaint about the militarization of law enforcement. Long a talking point of the left, it nonetheless has resonance in light of the increasing recruitment of ex-military into law enforcement, the formation of law enforcement special forces in the form of SWAT teams, and tactics and equipment more appropriate for storming Baghdad. David Koresh looked out the window of his Mt. Carmel compound and saw something familiar to Wehrmacht and Russian officers as they viewed the soon-to-be battlefield of Kursk in 1943.
Tanks in the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound.
Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge might have thought that he was beset by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars like Lt. Colonel Hal Moore’s battalion in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 (captured in Randall Wallace’s and Mel Gibson’s film, “We Were Soldiers”). “Enemy” patrols and snipers surrounded his family cabin, but he didn’t have Moore’s advantage of airpower and artillery. More aptly, he was Custer at the Little Big Horn.
The thread of concentration runs right through the past and onward to the Great American Shutdown of 2020. The potentates in DC without reservation, in essence, commanded us to stop living. It was a nationwide cease-and-desist order to end the actions that define living. Many governors – mostly blue state ones – see themselves as mini-Woodrow Wilsons, or caesaropapists, and began arresting dads playing with their children in parks or surfers 30 yards offshore. When a local government stood in his way, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom steamrolled Newport Beach. Many of them announced the extended euthanization of their states well into June, maybe beyond. Do you doubt any of them, if they won the presidency, would hesitate in making the act of going to work a crime or using their immense law enforcement powers to assault any group not culturally and politically correct? The real viral threat is this massive abuse of power, not a bug from China.
SAN RAFAEL, CA – MARCH 22: McNears Beach County Park in San Rafael, Calif. was among the parks to close in Marin County on Sunday, March 22, 2020. (Sherry LaVars/Marin Independent Journal)
The stage is set for an edict to kill society at the start of every flu season. Is that even possible? Yes, it’s possible, but not sustainable. It’s no more sustainable than to allow more law enforcement power to accrue in the DC headquarters of the FBI, ATF, and other branches of centralized police forces.
We need to be constantly reminded of the dangers. See Netflix’s “Waco” for a refresher course.
Modesty, humility, and courage are ancient virtues. They are also universal and timeless ones. The supreme mitigating factor in all that we do is the law of unintended consequences. In other words, crap happens. Humility and modesty should restrain blustery confidence. Courage is a necessity to counter an inane conventional wisdom. Trying times, like the present pandemic, put all of us to the test. Inanity surrounds.
Inane conventional wisdom #1 is the blind acceptance of saving lives at any cost – literally, any cost. Sure, save lives, but you can’t throw caution and limits to the wind as you do it. The law of unintended consequences kicks in. Take for example economic ruination and all that it portends. If past is prologue, the well-trodden path of hyper-inflation is littered with well-intentioned public policy. Shelter-in-place is destroying associations of every kind, up to and including businesses. We must gird ourselves for the very real possibility of inflation-run-amok. Price inflation from product shortages will be accelerated by monetary inflation from our political chiefs’ insistence on a national shutdown. Get ready for a double whammy, and all that comes with a wrecking of the national wealth.
Inane conventional wisdom #2 is a mindless worship of anything “data-driven”. What data? Have you ever questioned those numbers? How are they arrived at? Throwing numbers at a problem goes hand-in-glove with throwing paper money at it.
Cases and deaths flow into graphs and charts to stampede the public into accepting what are the equivalent of imperial decrees. I’m reminded of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: numbers are playthings to create new “realities”. In the hands of today’s Democratic Party and the Squad, the “new reality” is a universe of socialism.
At root are pressures to assign a digit to the most politically useful category. Cause of death is too easily accredited to the favorite of the moment, COVID-19. During a normal flu season, the low-hanging fruit for a disease are people suffering from multiple and chronic health threats. Did they die of the flu or was it their preexistent weakened bodies? In the hospital, the coin flip for cause of death will always come up tails, tails being the flu. Ditto for COVID-19.
The “cases” number is also playdough. Here, the choice of the COVID-19 category for a patient is on firmer ground with tests to identify the presence of the bug. As I’ve written before, though, the total is an ever-moving goalpost. Power-hungry politicos shout in blood-curdling tones of a death rate of 7% and millions in the morgue. The omnibus total, however, is a product of an incomplete denominator because of the lack of sufficient antibody testing and an unacknowledged ignorance of when the bug entered the US. However, today, everywhere you look, the number of cases is swelling. People had it, didn’t know they had it, recovered, and went on with their lives. Thus, early and many later prognostications were a sham. But shams can be politically useful.
John Hurt as Winston Smith, in the Ministry of Truth, from the movie “1984”.
Do we really know what we are doing? I’m beginning to doubt it. We over-confidently proclaim our omniscience, scorn unintended consequences, and blindly march into catastrophe. We are proving that science and fact are as easily manipulated as Winston Smith discovered in Orwell’s 1984.
President Xi Jinping of Red China and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. What do they have in common? Answer: authoritarian power. Xi’s power naturally comes to him because he’s a communist. Whitmer’s comes from her habit – the same one belonging to all progressives – of never letting a crisis go to waste.
Progressives are always on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war”. It’s in their philosophical DNA. They can’t help themselves. The reason is simple. They need to invent or manipulate a crisis to shock the public into accepting a transfer of immense power to them to remake society according to their lights. It’s not Constitutional; it’s dangerously extra-constitutional.
The coronavirus presents the perfect opportunity for them to seize the golden apple of power. I suspect that the belief is at the root of the early and grossly misleading casualty prognostications and Pelosi and Schumer’s obstructionism. The Great American Shutdown is really another example of the Great American Hijack of a crisis — or a recurring primer on how to expand the power of the state to control and direct the population.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi during the impeachment-palooza.
At nearly every opportunity, the progressives’ drive to expand state power shows in their budget proposals, their choice of interest group allies – totalitarian environmentalists, public sector unions, college faculties, the plaintiff’s bar, the misnamed civil rights lobby, etc. – and in their nonstop endeavors to obstruct Trump and Republicans. The progressives’ earlier grand design for our life, before they had the coronavirus, was the Green New Deal. Now they have a pandemic to play with.
William James in 1906 coined the phrase “moral equivalent of war” as a rallying cry for progressives to use to gain power. Ocasio-Cortez is the latest progressive/socialist political barker to embrace the tactic.Ocasio-Cortez drumming up support for her Green New Deal version of the “moral equivalent of war”.
The scheme is becoming clearer now that we have more information about the disease and its spread. Gloom and doom were leveraged for a power grab. The seizure of power to kill an economy was publicly justified because of predictions of 2 million deaths in the US. Others in the field of epidemiology blew the whistle. Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford brought to light the key flaw in the Cassandras’ cries (Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Washington Examiner). The exaggerated estimates were a product of good algebra and BAD numbers. Known deaths were compared to the number of known cases. But we don’t know the ACTUAL number of cases. We can’t know because we don’t even know when the virus entered the US and haven’t performed enough antibody tests to give us a clue.
The first known case of COVID-19 in the US has been pushed back to Feb. 6 as based on recent antibody tests in Santa Clara County, which probably means that the virus was circulating in California as early as January given the virus’s 2-week gestation rate (LA Times). That is the state of play now. Who knows how much earlier as more antibody tests are conducted? The trajectory is earlier, not later.
Point: Known cases of infection is an ever-expanding number as we uncover more subjects with the antibody, which profoundly alters the morbidity rate downward. So, 4% becomes .5% and then becomes ..?.. The progressives’ dream of a shock-and-awe campaign to drive the public into their utopia is disintegrating as the morbidity rate plummets.
So, what of the validity of the Great American Shutdown? I can’t blame any public official for acting on the information at hand. Still, more caution should have been evident till a better picture takes shape, especially if rendering unconscious a nation’s economy is contemplated. Many of us will come out of the Shutdown only to face foreclosure, bankruptcy, and unemployment. Broad despair at Great Depression levels is hardly justified to curb a health threat that nobody could honestly describe … except those who are eager to be dishonest in order to socially engineer their vision of the better world.
Chinese experts fighting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at the front line meet the press via a video press conference, introducing treatment of the COVID-19, in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, March 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
Not long ago, I learned of a person who was recently berated by an older acquaintance for his parents not practicing the dictats of shelter-in-place and the wearing of masks. The story is believable in the context of citations and/or arrests of a dad teaching his daughter to throw a baseball in a “closed” park or a surfer trying to catch a wave off a “closed” public beach. The pundit Kevin D. Williamson says that this is “ratfink” America at work. Today, America seems to be experiencing a major rat infestation. Why so many rats? The problem can be laid at the feet of the cult of the “expert”. Let me explain.
I’ve written of this before. America has acceded to the rule of “experts”, and the defenestration of popular sovereignty. Cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are united in the person of a civil service employee or political appointee wrapped in protection from popular accountability. We as citizens are increasingly out of the picture. We are left to the election of the participants in an increasingly meaningless debating society called Congress. We are habituated to the situation by the unceasing pounding of all things progressive in public schools’ curriculums and teacher training. The same weltanschauung permeates the popular culture.
A flow chart of the Progressive administrative state.
The “expert” is at the root of the scheme. The “expert” is degreed, preferably with a PhD. How did the master climb the mountain of high status? First, he or she jumped through the hoops of college general ed courses heavily burdened with victimology. Speaking of a pathogen, the matriculant was inculcated with the ideology by exposure to entire academic departments that are infected with it. Some owe their existence to the ideology: the Rainbow Coalition departments (Women’s Studies, etc.). They aren’t “studies” as much as they are ideology platforms. The Humanities and Social Sciences are particularly fetid. Remember this the next time you are treated by a doctor (MD that is) younger than you.
For instance, History – a subject I am most familiar – is often treated as a Progressivism apology tour. Nothing good happened till Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the beatification of environmentalism in the sixties.
There you have it for the typical college student before they devote the rest of their university sojourn – the majority of it – to their area of expertise, now that the corrupted general ed stuff is out of the way. That other stuff (general ed) is in the rear view mirror as they motor to their graduation and post-graduate destinations. The degree will certify their place in the pantheon of “experts”.
The word “expert” is an interesting one in today’s world. Really, in essence, an “expert” is a specialist. They have to be; the human mind is capable of absorbing only so much. For example, the explosion of knowledge in Biology has led to sub-categories, with sub-sub-categories, broken into sub-sub-sub-categories. Ditto for Computer Science and every other department in the college catalogue. The longer one stays in college to get that souped-up graduate degree, the more specialized the subject gets.
The intelligent design folks – much despised by died-in-the-wool Darwinists – have popularized the concept of irreducible complexity: a cell retains its complexity as we go deeper into its structure, thus drawing into question the necessary small adaptions for traditional Darwinian evolution to function. But the subject’s complexity also leads to a profusion of specialties. More true today than ever, experts are specialists!
Dr. Michael Behe of intelligent design and irreducible complexity fame vs. Darwin.
Soon we get the denizen of the administrative state whose forte is commonly limited to a very narrow slice of life. Yet, they have exaggerated importance in policy making that effects all aspects of a people’s existence. During this period of pandemic, naturally, experts whose bias is oriented toward epidemiology and medicine – and some things ideological as well – dictate policy that can destroy the economic and social parts of life. That’s the danger posed by specialists.
Ergo, the Great American Shutdown. For the expert, it’s an essential response. For everyone else facing their dictats, it’s a ravaged existence. A degreed, salaried, high-income person with substantial financial assets can afford to ride out the storm. It isn’t true for anyone whose kids, mortgage, and car payment requires a regular paycheck. These folks are ruined.
The specialized expert defines the parameters of risk when a situation falls within their wheelhouse. As one would expect, their explication of risk conforms to the sole regard of medical health. Their definition is much less considerate of different levels of risk due to circumstance. People who ride bikes run a higher risk of getting mauled by a 2-ton car than an aged pedestrian on his evening constitutional. An independent plumber comes into contact with more pathogens than a Google coder. Some are more willing to accept risk because their livelihoods require it. But the plumber doesn’t have the ear of Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, or Schumer as much as Anthony Fouci and the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Understandable? Yes, but the stew of policy demands other ingredients. Without the other additives, you might get poison.
What does the exalted role of expert get us? We all too often get a dose of scientific fact with a large smattering of personal bias. The hyper-charged politics of crafting policy brings out the worst in everybody, including our “experts”. Confirmation bias runs wild among media mavens who are on the lookout for experts to help them wield their ideological axes. So, if you are a writer with homeschoolers in his or her crosshairs, there’s no shortage of ed and psyche types with PhD’s attached to their names who are nothing but activists masquerading as experts.
If you are looking for an egregious example of same, look no further than Harvard Magazine, May-June 2020, “The Risks of Homeschooling”, by Erin O’Donnell (thanks Kevin D. Williamson for the heads up). The whole thing is a tome for ripping children from their parents and home and placing their upbringing in the hands of the government’s employees and schools. Stalin, Mao, and the rest of the 20th-century’s walk of shame would be proud.
Fact: Human beings with PhD’s after their names are still human beings. Plus, their specialties come with blinders. An epidemic should place public health experts at the head of the table. Just make sure that the other seats are filled with people of more well-rounded perspectives. If done right, we might come to conclude that the Great American Shutdown was a huge mistake.
