The Return of the Commie Crud

by

I see that the media handmaidens of the Democrat Party are gearing up, preparing to scare the ever-loving snot out of the general public again with a new Covid variant. I swear, I can almost hear them in the newsrooms, dancing about, shaking rattles and wailing “Oooga-booga! Run for your lives, it’s a new Covid variant! It’s gonna kill granny, an’ everyone! Strap on the masks, get the vax, universal mandate! Social distancing! close down all the things! Mass insanity! Cats and dogs living together!” Or something like it. I suppose the readily boggled will fall … again … for that old panic magic, but will the rest of us?

I can’t think that those who paid attention will buy into the panic again. Too many of us on the ground have concluded that those disposable paper or cloth masks were essentially useless, and possibly even harmful for trapping crud against your face, that Covid was hardly any worse for most healthy and young people than the yearly flu, that lockdowns across the board of social activities and businesses did real harm to the economy as well as mental health, that small children had their social development stunted and the slightly older lost educationally, that there was a concerted effort to quash treatment with readily available OTC remedies, and that the much-vaunted vax-and-boosters generally did more harm than good. We know that Sweden refused any concessions to the panic – and weathered the Covidiocy just fine.

We know also that there were no mass graves across cities and towns as there had been in the 1918 flu epidemic, that the emergency hospital wards set up to accommodate a flood of patients eventually were dismantled and put back into storage – that the whole contrived panic did nothing more than to sell page views, cover the theft of a national election, give nosy neighborhood Karens another reason to complain, and for local political office holders to get in touch with their inner authoritarian. So, are we all going to rush back into the same hell of masks, lockdowns and fearmongering that we finally got shed of, barely a year and a half ago?

I’m not. I’m not going to wear that stupid mask. And if local places of business start mandating masks again, they will have lost my business. (Governor Abbott is a fairly astute politician, so I don’t think he will be easily bulldozed into authorizing masks and lockdowns across Texas – he lifted the mask requirement early on, comparatively.) I will also refuse any Covid or flu vaccination, although I expect that the vax bullies will try their best … again.

Discuss – what are the chances that the powers that be will succeed in bulldozing the public again, over Covid and its infinite variations, or is epidemic panic a spent force?

26 thoughts on “The Return of the Commie Crud”

  2. It was obvious from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan (early 2020) that Covid was essentially equivalent to flu — just another one of those Influenza-Like Illnesses which the CDC has been tracking for years. The people at risk are the rather small minority who are very old and have pre-existing medical conditions — people who should be getting special treatment anyway. For the healthy, the young, the working age — that infection was just a nuisance. But fortunately most of those exposed to the virus did not catch the sickness — as shown by the passengers & crew on the Diamond Princess.

    All of that information was freely available back in early 2020. The frightening earlier photos of well-dressed working-age Chinese men collapsed on the street were anomalies — or set-ups. And yet most people (and most businesses) went along with the scam.

    There is no reason to expect that people who willingly went along with the CovidScam (i.e. the majority of the population) will behave any differently when Son of CovidScam is officially released.

  3. I also will not get their shots. Unless the CDC Sturmtruppen get the drop on me and capture me alive. Nor will I probably get the flu shot. I have been thinking about getting the shingles shot [like most kids my age, I had the chicen pox and indeed was deliberately infected with it] but I am now more than passing dubious. The reason is that under the current governmental paradigm, we have been lied to repeatedly and blatantly by the government bodies who are supposedly supposed to be on our side. I have seen health care systems in Britain and Canada where removing the inconvenient people and/or letting them die or helping them die gets practitioners extra brownie points. No one can believe the contents of any new medication recommended the government. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. I think we are getting close to at least a dozen official blatant lies that have made it worse.

    I trust my own GP and his Physician Extenders. I trust the cardiac surgeon who literally brought me back to life a few years ago. I assume until proven otherwise that any Federal health official, and health official here in Colorado where the Left runs everything; is deliberately lying to me with ill intent.

    Subotai Bahadur

  4. I should qualify as elderly and not in good shape at 85 but my wife and I have refused boosters in spite of my undoubted Democrat internist. The masks were ridiculous although they still serve to identify Democrats in Whole Foods. Trump made a mistake accepting the Fauci brigade and its political campaign but he was under enormous pressure from the Media. There are video clips of him saying the mortality rate from the virus was less than 1%. He was hectored on TV hundreds of times. He wanted to open the economy Memorial Day 2020. Remember ? His re-election campaign was being run by Kushner and a couple of high priced GOP “consultants” whose chief talent was spending money. Scott Atlas’ book makes all that pretty clear.

    The Teachers’ Union, which now runs Chicago and LA, will try very hard for another shutdown.

  6. I doubt they will go there. Public opinion is too much against it. However, talk about Covid distracts people from Democratic scandals.

  7. I don’t think this is going to amount to much outside of the blue zones where you’;; see some local jurisdictions or institutions (like colleges) reimpose mask mandates and maybe even vaccination requirements. The COVID/Pandemic/New Variant scare is a soent force

    That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t come out, make our voices heard, and kick the tar out of some corporation who does decide to support those mandates. The whole Bud Light scenario is a revelation and it’s great to see us coming together and acting collectively like that to keep the skeer on them.

    Let’s use this opportunity to not to just “Bud Light” somebody but to get ourselves in shape for the big manipulative emergencies and scares which will be coming next Spring, not to mention next November

  8. Just in time for this comment thread, I saw Glenn Ellmers had an article over at the Claremont Review of Books “Pandemic Pandemonium” (https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/) which covers many of the same issues that we have raised here but tries to root the crisis in both historical terms and within the larger transhumanist project. It gets a little little philosophically wonky, but is worth the read. If you are not familiar with Ellmers, he is not only a nature rights philosopher, but a unique one in that he has taken the time to read and analyze the post-modern Left, you will see his references to Foucault in the article. He has also just released a book “The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy” which I haven’t had the chance to read yet.

    A few takeaways…

    Ellmers draws out the distinction between Plato’s and Marx;s conceptions of Truth as it applies to COVID; with Plato you argue within a larger truth defined by common precepts and facts, with Marx truth is whatever you claim it be. That raises a fundamental problem in developing COVID policies because a particular sub-group can claim a certain truth, “their truth”, and demand that it be accommodated despite the fact that it flies against all reason. Think about having discussions with people regarding the efficacy of masks and vaccines or keeping open schools.

    Something Ellmers touched on but didn’t go into depth are the policy implications of people holding “their truth.” One of the things I have noticed about “Woke” in the context of democratic politics is that the Left treats these groups as a given and then bases public policy decisions to accommodate them even if they infringe on other’s rights. Take the issue of transgender children in schools or the claim of the Ibram Kendi crowd that match and science curriculum needs to be deracialized or in this case society and individual liberties must be subordinated to dealing with COVID. If “Truth” in the eye of the holder, how does the State decide among competing interests? Not by judging their claims, but rather based on the political nature of the groups making the claim.

    So it helps the Left to take all of those who make claims that run against the soft totalitarian state and sweep them up into a big pile called “MAGA” or “Far Right” so those terms encompass all that is deemed “undesirable” and therefore can be ignored. You see the implications of that policy right now in the media,. A few weeks ago I mentioned an article published by Leonard Downie and Andrew Heyward, former editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News respectively, arguing just that in regard to how the media should treat “objectivity” in terms of competing claims regarding say climate change. https://cronkite.asu.edu/news/2023/can-a-journalist-be-trustworthy-without-being-objective/

    Long and short of it? The Left isn’t, at this point, going to mind if we resist the unlikely occurrence of new COVID lockdowns. In fact they welcome it because you and I have already been designated as MAGA, as undesirables and therefore by definition can be ignored. As I said in an earlier comment it’s good to act strongly against any new COVID lockdowns if only for internal reasons. But I think we need to know what those limitations are and where the big battle is coming.

    Ellmers mentions someone I would recommend to follow, Mattias Desmet, regarding mass psychology and COVID There is an excellent interview of Demet by Tucker on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZltdPfal5x) Desmet deals with group psychology and what he calls “mass formation” which is what we here have seen in the use of fear and other techniques to manipulate society.

    Read Ellmers, watch Desmet and some of his other videos and ask yourself what will be the COVID for 2024? Knowing what we (and they) now know from 2020 and 2022 about what works what will the play be? Another epidemic action? Maybe but that won’t have the same juice as 2020. Climate? More likely but the problem is that hysteria and proposed lockdowns are too slow-moving to be politically effective in the short term. I’m going to take the Democrats at their word and go with MAGA who they have already called the biggest threat to America. That will be the COVID/George Floyd of 2024. A Jacksonville-type racial shooting or a few mass shooting like we had in 2022, some false flag operations, run some stories about election officials getting death threats… all to be blamed on people like you and me who don’t think Trump (who by then will have already been convicted at least once) is the devil and that the correct number of guns for a given household is at least 4.

  9. Not complying with vaccine mandates or wearing a mask. That will be problematic as I work for a NASA contractor onsite at Johnson Space Center.

    Should be interesting – Randall Garrett’s definition of interesting in his faux-Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times,”

  10. Mike, thanks for that essay and the links. I don’t think I have seen that summer issue of Claremont Review. Maybe my subscription ran out without me noticing. I did read Scott Atlas’ book and he is right about Trump focussing too much on the election. I think that was more Kushner who was running the campaign. Trump was so isolated that he gave too much power to his family.

    Here is another excellent Tucker interview. He asks Orban how the Ukraine fiasco can be resolved. “Bring back Trump” is the answer.

    I will look for that Tucker interview with Desmet. I give a lot of credit for these interviews to his producers and, of course, they were also fired by Fox.

  14. The mantra of “follow the science” will not carry much weight when, after an inconceivable amount of money and effort, Science is still shrugging its collective white coated shoulders on many key questions. Lab leak origins? To what degree are people protected from (death/serious illness/mild inconvenience) after infection at various points in time and by immunizations at various points in time? I probably got it quite early, did the three shots and said “meh, that’s enough”. At least the impact of all this outside the “grandma gonna die” side of things is now acknowledged. The collateral damage to society generally and to education specifically has been profound.

  15. I think these latest lockdown/masking rumors are just a distraction from the more likely scenarios the swamp is working on to affect the 2024 election: 1. The Ukraine was going nuclear and 2. The political assassination of a leading candidate. This latter bothers me more than Covid.

  16. I saw the Tucker-Desmet interview linked in a comment at Althouse (was that one of y’all?), a watched it yesterday afternoon. It was utterly fascinating,
    Totally applies to the last decade (+/-) of U.S., and indeed, global mob politics.
    Interesting, too, how Desmet’s theories fit nicely with Hoffer’s “True Believer,” in describing the “mass” population segment as disaffected, detached, and alienated from mainstream society, and how easily they are manipulated by the elites.

  17. I work in Hollywood. +50% of our niche business is in Live Events. Needless to say, any mask mandate would completely shut out business down, immediately.

    Lockdowns were not even required last time, in an industry full of crazed hypochndriacs. Friday, March 13, 2020, our boss came out to the shop to tell us that all four jobs we were working on (SXSW, a major movie premiere, etc….) had cancelled, in the last 2 hours. Then he made sure we were paid through noon that day, closed the shop and went to the gun store.

    Remember that the Government will never close or go out of business as a result of this insanity. So to them there is no downside. In fact, it increases their power. And they get overtime and hazard pay.

    But the possibility that somebody who is unemployed again and back to living in his truck with no near hope of life getting better, somebody like that is going to lash out violently, somewhere, probably, against the mask people who brought him ruin. Probably.

    BR

  18. I saw the Tucker-Desmet interview linked in a comment at Althouse (was that one of y’all?), a watched it yesterday afternoon. It was utterly fascinating,

    Yup. That was me and I thank Mike above for the link. Althouse has lots of crazies in her comments so it helps to post a few links to reality.

  19. I’m in Minnesota, close to Minneapolis. We are infested with progressive white-guilt wine-moms.

    I still see them wearing masks in stores and in their cars and walking outside.

    I have no doubt that many, many Minneapolitans will welcome a return to mask requirements. It makes them feel . . . I don’t know, worthy, or superior, or . . . something. It encourages their inner scolds to run free. They see me without a mask, and they just KNOW they are the better people.

    The State Bird of Minnesota, coincidentally, is the loon.

  20. Less than a year ago, the “Mask up! Lock down! Get jabbed!” advocates were begging for an amnesty. Don’t forget this. Don’t let others forget this.

  23. Once upon a time I looked up on the CDC website the deaths attributed (important qualifier – see below) to the Wuhan China virus in the age group 0-18. For the years 2020 and 21 in the entire US the number was 770. The number of people in that age group was approximately 75 million. I’ll leave the reader to reach for a calculator to figure out the risk.

    Yet people were terrified their children were all going to die. Including idiot Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor.

    It’s tragic when young people become ill and die. But an unfortunate fact of life is that they sometimes do. The years 20 and 21 770 deaths in the 0-18 age group “attributed” to the Wuhan China virus is a small enough number that an interested health official could have investigated each death. But they were disinterested. Anyone want to take odds that many of those 770 were already gravely ill and died from a preexisting condition?

  24. @Loco

    A woman named Mary Pat Campbell is an actuary, and her substack has complete breakdowns of all the fatality numbers, from the CDC but presented clearly and without misleading bias. You know, the way an insurance company, whose entire business was founded on accurate evaluation of risks, might need.

    For young people, she had to include a big note that the number of CoVID deaths was not ZERO, but standard actuarial practice, and her settings in Excel, rounded numbers like 0.0006%, to 0%

    Her tone throughout is infuriatingly calm and reasonable. I would compare it to an accountant or trustee explaing to a reckless gambler that, no, you are broke. No, you have $8.34 to your name, you can’t bet your way out of this hole.

    If she has any righteous or political anger, it is about the huge increase in suicides, overdoses, and car crashes after decades of improvement. (Especially the vast disparity between mortality for men, vs women.) And the papering over, and even naked political misuse, of those numbers.

    She’s great. I kind of love her.

    https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/

  25. Re the WuFlu shot, just no. I recieve that suggestion in the same way I would one for an extended warranty for my truck. (And BTW, I already have one. Got it when I bought the truck.)
    As per the shingles vaccine, well, I’ve had a burst of shingles. Ain’t no fun. But the way the PTB have lied and screwed up the covid thing, I’m reluctant to take any shot they offer.
    (Firinstance, how is the shingles vax derived? Ingredients? “Don’t use this vax if you’re allergic to any of it’s ingredients”… but they won’t tell you the ingredients.)
    Trust is too precious a thing to squander, but they’ve done it. At this point I don’t believe a single thing they tell me.

  26. Well, I’d comply with employer mandates or mandates to wear a mask in places like malls or stores. The employer should have latitude to require measures beyond that required in open public squares, particularly when as trivial as masks. The only issue would be the cost of masks and will they provide them at company expense… Though they’d provide the cheap ones and I prefer nice soft cloth. Plus you can get the latter in stylish black. For the stores and malls, I would take a similar whatever attitude, insofar as the property owner sees fit to make this requirement to enter their property, whether or not because of a government mandate. If they oppose the mandate, they should fight it. Since they wont, and thus require it of their customers, I comply with the requirement as if it is their own or I do not enter their property.

    No harm comes from wearing the mask unless it makes one cocky and inclined to walk through a cloud of exhalations from the massively ill. It won’t help there, and no one said it would. Little benefit comes from it, sure, but no harm. If the mask makes it hard for you to breathe, you have serious respiratory problems already. Or some sort of nasal structural problem. I turned 50 during COVID, was and remain fat and out of shape, and could still take 37 outdoor steps at a sprint wearing a mask. Mainly because taking it on and off was tiresome when just going door to door.

    Wearing a mask outside is more of an issue. That’s a direct government imposition on the citizen not involving access to a closed government facility or private property. I would not have worn one outside, will not unless we have much more serious airborne disease in future, or worse pollution, and was fortunately never asked by any level of government here [Ottawa] to wear one outdoors. The cops made it clear they would not enforce such a rule. While I disapprove of the implied mutiny in that, I salute their pragmatism. Same with lockdowns- we were never forbidden to go outside here, and I would not take that seriously in future unless conditions were very different.

    Vaccines are far more intrusive than masks and unlike masks come with at least some harm potential.

    Though I’ve had 4 COVID shots [the first couple were employer requirements though that was later relaxed; the latter two were habit, just like every other vaccine I have had or would consider] I’ve experienced no side effects. That puts me among the overwhelming worldwide majority. But they were new vaccines and some people have had harmful side effects. The shots have also failed in some cases to prevent COVID. To be sure, ALL vaccines have always had the potential to generate side effects and still do [I was among the last generation of Canadians to get the smallpox jab in the 70s, and it made me sick, as my mother lately confirmed]. That is not news. Similarly, ALL vaccines have always had the potential to fail to prevent all cases of the disease they are against, and still do. This is not news either. Too much discussion assumes that these things ARE news. They are not. Any vaccine can have side effects. And any can fail to do its job. These are not shocking assertions. And they are not in themselves arguments against vaccination in general or any specific vaccine. These arguments are nonsense. What are not nonsense are questions about how many and how severe the side effects were in how many cases, and how many failures and how severe were they, and how did all that compare to normal expectations for vaccination, and how much these discrepancies can be justified by speed of development and urgency.

    These issues are more politically controversial than they should be and I doubt they will get the study they warrant any time soon. Unless serious people already are doing it and media just don’t care to report, of course.

    For my part, I do not consider, as above, side effects or prevention failures to be decisive arguments as such. Certain levels of these things can be decisive arguments. That’s the discussion.

    Similarly, and in keeping with the reality that not so long ago public authority was given wide latitude by conservatives in security and safety issues, and indeed “public safety”, “Public order”, and “security” arguments tended to come more from the right and radical personal autonomy more from the left [and on many issues this is still how it works], I am not convinced that radical personal autonomy is proper here. Mandatory quarantines and movement protocols in times of plague go back a long way and I doubt the American founders would fail to recognize them or, for most of them, would consider them inherently illegitimate. indeed, they knew about really dangerous diseases that we have forgotten. They knew what could be at stake in them. The America of 1919 also knew such measures and how to make them work.

    Mandatory vaccines are not unheard of. I don’t know about the US, but Ontario in the 70s required that kids have their shots if they wanted to enter public school. No exceptions unless for documented medical reasons. This was sound policy. When relaxed thanks to campaigns from the freaky left, we got stupid outbreaks of unnecessary childhood diseases in schools over and over again.

    It is probably the case that the pace of science being what it is, development of future vaccines will be faster than in the past. There may be more risks. That may not matter in a true emergency. We have duties as well as rights. But even vaccines tested over years are rarely without some risk.

    The valid questions include:
    What is the REAL severity of the alleged emergency?
    Are the measures well considered or mere panic?
    Have other measures been applied first and found wanting [border rather than interior movement controls, for example]?
    Have the measures been imposed by normal procedures or not?
    If by emergency procedures, are those procedures envisioned by the constitution [executives are not necessarily powerless] or by legislation that has been passed in the past in preparation, and had time to be debated and perhaps even tested in courts]?
    Do we regard the authorities as legitimate? If not, why not? This is no trivial pair of questions, and should probably go beyond partisanship. Though recent decades make that very hard for any side.
    Are the risks well understood for more intrusive measures [vaccination] as opposed to less intrusive and not themselves physically harmful but also debatable ones [movement protocols, masks]? Even if only partly understood, are these questions discussed openly?
    If people are to be compelled, which is not outside the scope even of free government, or never was before at any rate, then the above need to be reiterated more than once and the answers satisfactory.

    I doubt any of that would find complete rejection among the American founders, not even Jefferson, though he might ultimately stand against some of it. In their day, movement protocols were a lot easier anyway, few moved by modern standards, and if necessary plague control could mean seizing and burning property and disposing of the dead without much ceremony.

    For me, the first question is the most important. If there’s a Spanish flu equivalent, first closing international borders and stopping outside travel, and in extremity even stranding nationals abroad once a fair warning period has elapsed, is step one. That, done well and with a bit of luck, makes internal management a lot easier and reduces the need to debate harder domestic measures.

    People’s vacations are not life necessities, and I was very annoyed by the number of Canadians who didn’t take warnings seriously and eventually expected state-funded or [hah!] military flights to rescue them. That was taxpayer money to bring you back from Aruba or Egypt. Rich people problems. But I digress.

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