A few days back, New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz nicely summarized a few of the many examples we’ve witnessed of those most enthusiastic about inflicting COVID-19 restrictions on the rest of us showing significantly less zeal when it comes to toeing the line themselves.
[Anthony Fauci] wore a mask to throw out the first pitch at the Opening Day game at Nationals Park — while standing more than 60 feet away from the nearest person. Then he sat down in the stands with his wife and friend, and they all took turns wearing and removing their masks…
[NY Governor] Cuomo forces the rest of us to isolate and socially distance, yet he jet-sets around and was even photographed on the plane wearing his mask like a “chin guard,” something he has also warned New Yorkers not to do. In Georgia, maskless, he hugged a number of people in a crowded room.
Markowicz is by no means the first to draw attention to the habit those leading the charge against COVID-19 have of doing one thing while saying quite another.
And, like most of her predecessors, what bothers Markowicz here is that the scofflaw COVID-19 zealots are guilty of “hypocrisy.”
Others have made essentially the same point by labeling their discrepancy between words and deeds “unfair.”
One begins to understand why – from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to “War and Peace” – the frightening power social pressure has to completely blind us to what’s happened right before our eyes figures so prominently in literature; as well as to wonder whether our current epidemic of madness would have been averted had we not substituted the time-honored stories we once told to one another with toxic Hollywood garbage designed to increase our susceptibility to delusion so we’re more easy prey to buying the worthless junk that is it’s only real purpose to sell.
When Hollywood celebrities travel to global warming conferences on private jets, they’re being hypocritical.
When Congress exempts themselves from a health care scheme they’ve inflicted on the rest of us, they’re being unfair.
But when, for example, someone in charge is seen picnicking in the park after insisting that everyone else batten down the hatches and seek shelter in their basement because of an impending category 5 hurricane, he’s being neither.
He’s guilty of something far more reprehensible.
He’s perpetrating a ghastly hoax.
If Fauci really believed that a virus “10 times more lethal than the flu” was spreading like wildfire, he and his wife wouldn’t be happily enjoying a baseball game shoulder-to-shoulder with a friend, with their masks draped around their necks. If he put any credence in the garbage he’s peddled to us, he would have headed back to the shelter of his home immediately after symbolizing our fight against the supposedly deadly pathogen by throwing that opening pitch.
If Cuomo seriously thought that anyone who has a drink at a bar or goes out in public without a mask is evincing a death wish, he wouldn’t be going to conferences, chowing down with others, hugging them, and shaking hands – the jolly good time he’s having evident for all to see from the beaming smile on his unmasked face.
If Democratic politicians really believed that an unprecedented pestilence has descended on the nation that makes gathering in crowds an invitation to a brutal and agonizing death, social justice warriors who believe American cops are racist psychopaths and their own colleagues mourning the death of Rep. John Lews would be the first ones they’d insist follow the rules designed to keep it at bay. And they’d hardly, instead, be relentlessly focusing all their energy on saving the lives of the church-going Americans they despise by stopping them from worshipping as they please.
Forget the fact that the official COVID-19 death tally is more much likely to be inflated tenfold than it is to accurately represent the real number of Americans who’d still be alive but for contracting it.
Forget that, even if you take the risible accounting seriously, the virus is less deadly to someone not elderly or already seriously ill than the seasonal flu.
Ignore that if you eliminate those states in which the virus decimated elderly nursing home inhabitants because, for whatever reason, it was allowed and in some cases even seemingly encouraged to spread among those whose lives it most threatened, COVID-19 doesn’t look like it’s much more deadly than the seasonal flu regardless of age.
Pay no attention to the fact that Italy, the country that’s supposed to make us live in fear of COVID’s unparallelled deadliness, was overrun by the flu every year between 2014 and 2017. Forget that in two of those years the estimated number of flu fatalities is comparable to the number of COVID fatalities Italy is reporting using criteria that, just like the U.S., is bound to massively inflate the true number.
Forget that Sweden, which neither locked its citizens down nor forced them to wear masks, has seen a decrease in the average number of fatalities they normally experience while this supposedly killer virus was allowed to spread freely among healthy swedes.
And, most of all, ignore that Fauci himself while addressing his peers, not only told them that COVID-19 is likely to be no more dangerous than a severe seasonal flu but even explained why the alarmist take that the virus is “at least 10 times more lethal than the flu” he used to panic us into accepting lockdowns was mistaken due to selection bias.
Many lives would be saved and even more misery forestalled if people started paying attention to some of these facts. But since the media isn’t reporting them every day like they are meaningless scary-sounding factoids like how many consecutive days new cases have risen above some arbitrarily selected number, it’s unlikely very many will.
But it’s crucial that everyone at least starts paying attention to one unavoidable fact that’s daily thrust before our eyes: Those most insistent that there’s a killer virus lurking among us that we need to spend every waking hour fearing and desperately trying to keep at bay can’t possibly believe a word of the garbage they’re peddling to us themselves.
Can anyone seriously think they’d show more concern for our lives than their own?
Or that they’d be more insistent that Trump’s supporters stay safe from lethal infection than they are theirs?
The problem isn’t, as Karol Markowicz and countless others have suggested, that “the hypocrisy displayed by the likes of Cuomo and Fauci could lead to people rebelling against following” their rules.
The problem is that against all reason, it isn’t causing such a rebellion.
Everyone needs to wake up.
If Fauci, Cuomo, and the rest believed that the rules they’re insisting the rest of us follow really were necessary for our own safety, the last thing they’d be doing is risking their own lives by flagrantly violating them or suggesting that it’s okay for their cherished friends and supporters to do so while tolerating no breach from their political enemies.
They’re not being unfair or hypocritical.
They’re perpetuating the biggest and most deadly hoax in history on the American people and have already inflicted more damage than any terrorist or foreign enemy has ever managed.
If people don’t start noticing the plain fact before their eyes that the people who’ve deprived us of our most basic rights and are crushing the life out of us don’t buy a word of the horror story they’ve used to get us to accept that it’s all been “for our own good,” their reign of terror – and that’s exactly what it is – will likely never end.
