In recent months, it’s been obvious on so many occasions that politicians and media aren’t telling us the truth, it’s sometimes hard not to burst out laughing.
But for a long time, the retailing of untruth at least came with earnest pretense and attempts made to hide a little of the mendacity. Perhaps the Big Lie wasn’t exposed by its own crafter’s hand right out of the gate. Some effort was made to extend tokens of bona fides.
Some things, of course, aren’t necessarily about lies. They could be about mistakes or lack of foresight. We can’t always see everything coming. I think that’s the explanation for at least some of the surreal, near-daily about-facing on COVID-19.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
But it clearly doesn’t explain the two-faced sham that is concern about social-distancing. Social-distancing, we are to understand, is so vital that we can’t hold church in our cars in a parking lot with the windows rolled up. We can’t open small businesses, unless they sell liquor or marijuana, and we can’t sit in baseball parks or have outdoor concerts, much less have indoor gatherings, or assume a stationary position on the beach.
But there is no concern about social-distancing when it comes to holding protests with thousands of people crammed in closer together than in a ballpark, or holding riots and looting Target stores and burning down factories, attacking police, shooting security guards dead, and destroying the life’s work of small business owners.
People were already starting to get wise to that two-faced sham. We had, after all, the spectacle of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York perfectly happy to allow a mass protest in Brooklyn while on the next day, in Brooklyn, having the gate of a local park welded shut to keep – literally – a dozen or so Jewish mothers and children at a time from using it for a couple of hours during the day, masked and carefully distanced.
Hey Deblasio (sorry, I meant Kaiser Warren Wilhem), how do you explain the mass gathering outside the Brooklyn Museum the other day? Oh right, I forgot, cause it's only the Jews that you want to go after. pic.twitter.com/P9fuBmRLjq
— sol l (@szlava97) June 15, 2020
Yes. This is actually happening now!
Bill de Blasio is Welding the gates at the biggest park in the Jewish community, (Borough Park, Brooklyn) So your child shouldn't try to break in. While Hundreds of thousands of people gathered yesterday at Brooklyn Museum.#deBlasioMustGo pic.twitter.com/Q02ew5O5nZ
— Joel Fischer (@JFNYC1) June 15, 2020
People can’t avoid recognizing that this is blatantly unequal treatment by the government authorities, and there’s no way to enforce the lie that it’s not – or to enforce the lie that there is any principled concern about transmission of a virus at work here.
Notice that I am not making claims about the virus one way or another. This isn’t about the coronavirus being a “hoax.” This is about government authorities imposing the outright evil of systematically unequal treatment on the people.
Now we learn that in New York City, as it launches its “contact tracing” teams to question those who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 about their recent contacts with others, the teams will not ask if a positive-testing person has participated in a protest.
Think about that for half a second. That’s all it takes to realize that contact tracing therefore has no hope of being useful.
It won’t mean anything. Even if some people volunteer the information that they’ve participated in a protest, the fact that everyone didn’t have to respond to a question on that point will invalidate the findings for any purposes of analysis or conclusion.
We don’t even have to take it any further than that, although there are numerous other comments we could make. Have at it, alert readers.
We already have enough to know that contact tracing doesn’t mean squat. It’s being misused from the very start by the authorities: robbed of any value it might have.
There is no reason whatsoever to cooperate with it. It won’t help you, it won’t help your neighbor – there is no moral obligation to give answers for it, true or otherwise. Everyone who chooses has the superior moral justification to ignore contact tracing teams and decline to give answers to them.
The answers are only going to be misused and manipulated anyway. The pretense otherwise can’t be sustained at this point. Failing to ask about participation in large-scale protests is manipulation. No decisions about public health, and certainly not about compulsory compliance measures, can legitimately be made on such a basis.
This is not government of, by, and for the people. This is government completely severing faith with the people. The implications are appalling – but they are not implications for the people. The implications are for government, which in too many places can no longer claim to have anything approaching justice or care for the public welfare on its side.
We conclude with the cartoon situation of the day, highlighted earlier by Howard Portnoy, featuring the media hilariously indifferent to social-proximating for protests in a time of pandemic, but grievously, lugubriously anxious over the Trump rally scheduled for Tulsa on 20 June.
