"The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most,"
-Yeonmi Park, North Korean dissident and human rights activist, talking about Americans.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend that sent chills down my spine. He, like me, is a liberal who is skeptical about dogma, who questions everything, who believes strongly in human rights. That was until COVID came around. During that crisis, as he told me, he wore his mask dutifully and believed what his leaders and the TV scientists told him without questioning anything. He told me that he thought it was perfectly fine to mandate vaccinations for kids and to deprive kids of a college education if they decide not to be vaccinated.
“They don’t have to go to that college,” he said, justifying University of Maryland’s vaccination mandate. “They can go somewhere else.”
Wow, just like that. They can go somewhere else.
Mind you, this is a guy who rails against pro-lifers who say: A woman doesn’t have to get an abortion in Mississippi, she can go somewhere else.
Mind you, this is a guy who loathed the argument of Southern Segregationists who said: If black people want to sit together with white people, they can go somewhere else.
This is a guy who understood how fragile and precious our rights are. Now, to him, it’s perfectly fine to mandate that people do a bunch of crap that disrupts and even ruins their lives even if there is no proof that this stuff has any positive impact, mandate them to do it because the liberal media says so, and if they don’t want to do it, hell, they can go somewhere else.
It’s a slippery slope once we decide that it’s ok to abandon our rights to an all-knowing government and insist that everyone else do the same. Especially when we don’t even look into what the government and their self-anointed leaders and “scientists” blurt out, when we simply buy the whole package without any inquisitive eye toward it. Says Park: Americans have “completely lost the ability to think critically [and have] lost common sense to a degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend.”
Yes, once Anthony Fauci and the TV doctors who appear on “legitimate” media venues proclaim that they are speaking the one truth of science, my friend will believe them unquestioningly and willingly advocate the elimination of our constitutional rights because, well, they said we have to. He won’t check into the “facts” spit out by these people, even though he disputes everything people like Donald Trump perceive to be facts. He won’t talk to people who are in the middle of COVID, because, well, some genius from University of Washington appeared on Rachel Maddow and that’s enough for him. He won’t even seek to find other voices—the tens of thousands of prominent doctors and scientists who discredit the Faucist line—who utter a different message and provide actual facts. No, he trusts the CDC, trusts Fauci, and believes that doctors on MSNBC and CNN are the only ones we need to listen to. That’s enough for him.
Why? Because he believes in science, and the people on these stations claim to be the voice of science. Because they say they are liberal, and he is a liberal. Because he inherently discredits everything that conservatives say, and these guys sound like him.
In other words, in his adherence to all things liberal, he has abandoned the very precepts of liberalism: relying on facts, questioning dogma, assuring that everyone’s rights are protected.
“What’s the harm in wearing a mask?” he asked me. “I just wanted to do due diligence and help out in any way I can. They say it’s important, so I do it.”
They say it’s important. Who is they? They are the people who speak in his language, they are the ones who stoke his preconceived notions of truth and then build false tales upon the bricks of those beliefs.
In the Geriatrics Vengeance Club, Ben makes a concert tee shirt that reads: Your Mask Killed My Grandmom. Billy Twigg, the concert leader, tells him that it’s best not the make the shirt. “I agree with you, doc,” he tells Ben. “But no one will get what you’re saying.”
What my friend doesn't get is that masks aren’t due diligence, they are dangerous.
As I watched my frail patients imprisoned for over a year, as I stood by helplessly as they died in droves from a never-ending dose of isolation and fear mandated by the CDC and Dr. Fauci and the health department, all I heard day after day was that we had to keep wearing masks. We so relied on the mask myth that we failed to notice that it wasn’t working. People were still dying, mask or no mask, still catching COVID despite the proliferation of masks. So, then my friend’s prophets said two masks were necessary, masks and shields, more isolation, and none of it helped COVID, but it further isolated the frail and the sick, it deprived kids of their education and people of their joy and livelihoods, instigating a wave of suicide, poverty, and depression, all of which likely led to the slaughter of millions without helping a soul.
Because people like my friend believed in the gospel of the mask, of isolation, of the need to deprive people of their rights and lock them up—believed in all of it without even asking any questions—we as a nation could not go down a more effective and balanced road, one that many very smart and humanistic scientists (who, incidentally, were not invited on CNN or Morning Joe or the Rachel Maddow show) advocated, one that admonished mask use as a viable strategy, that advocated targeted quarantines, that focused on rapid daily testing, that understood how dangerous it was to lock up frail elders and keep kids out of school.
But we didn't do any of that because the great God Fauci told us to wear masks.
Mask-adherence was not due diligence. It was a murderous policy that should have ended as soon as we saw how ineffective it was, how dangerous it was, how much it isolated people without preventing any COVID deaths, and how it blinded us to better strategies. We knew that last summer, both from our experience in hospitals and nursing homes, and from every good study that assessed its efficacy; just read about it in my books and in this blog.
But my friend was doing due diligence because he simply swallowed what his people were telling him, and to him it was science, and he believes in science. The mask myth stoked his own biases, and thus he chose not even to consider how perfidious and deadly it might be. We in the know, we who did look into it, we who were living through it, had no power to change course because people like my friend empowered those who clung to the mask myth. As one CNN anchor said, quoting a prominent doctor from Harvard, any other path was akin to mass murder. How horribly ironic! But my friend accepted it, and he diligently wore his mask. And people died and suffered because of it.
I told so many about what masks were really doing to us as a people, doing to science, doing to those they purported to protect. But, who was I compared to an “expert” from the University of Washington, compared to Anthony Fauci? I didn’t appeal to their biases; in fact, to them, I sounded too much like Donald Trump. And so, they listened to their people, and they enabled the massacre to continue, they encouraged it, they insisted that no one should be allowed to defy the will of the scientists, that doubters should not even have a voice. They felt that the desecration of our rights as people and as Americans was good and just, and they blindly lined up behind their liberal leaders like zombies who had swallowed a magic pill. In fact, like my friend, they endorsed giving unprecedented power to the state.
If someone doesn’t want to get immunized and comply, he can go somewhere else.
Wow! And he said that even after I explained the facts about forced immunization of college students:
· The chance of dying from COVID in that age group is lower than a dozen other risks colleges accept every year, from influenza and other infections, to accidents, suicides, alcohol-related injuries, and depression. Thus, why force immunization when the benefit is so puny?
· The immunization carries short term risks and may have detrimental long-term consequences. Why not wait for it to be studied? Why force kids to take something that may harm them, especially since we know it’s not likely to help them?
· Given that immunized people are not going to be harmed by college kids who get COVID, then this forced immunization is not even a public health issue, since the people who want to be immunized have nothing to worry about if they are exposed to un-immunized kids.
It’s kind of like forcing everyone to quit smoking, everyone to eat a certain way, everyone to lose person decision making should the state declare that we must do something else.
What’s next? Should we force people to dress a certain way if the CDC says so? What if Fauci says we should always lead with our left foot and not our right; is that enough for my friend to declare that any student who wants to lead with his right foot should be banned from school? Maybe we’ll ban Jews from schools, claiming that Jews are dangerous. Hell, Hitler did that, and the German people accepted his logic, which he too clothed in the vail of science and necessity.
In fact, Hitler paid schools that banned all Jews. Just like the Biden administration is paying colleges who force kids to be immunized with an experimental vaccine for a disease less dangerous than their drive to school every day. Oh, and the schools and the drug companies and everyone else are not liable should the kids be harmed from this forced immunization.
Still, my friend was unmoved. They can just go to another school, or no school at all, if they don’t want to be immunized.
Ah, how “science” turns a liberal very quickly into an sheepish autocrat! It’s frightening!
Once we relinquish our rights so easily and insist that the government take away the rights of others without flinching, once we engage in acts reeking of potential detrimental consequence that we do not even question, and we force those acts on others lest they cannot partake in society, then we are not liberals. We are Park’s North Korean communists. We are pawns of an autocratic state.
You can see the evolution of such science-based thinking in a terrific book called Nazi Doctors. In this book, the author shows how a widely accepted scientific credo (imported from the halls of America’s Ivy League) called Eugenics enabled Hitler to couch his plans in the bedrock of science. First, Hitler justified the castration of the handicapped, something our own Eugenicists and liberal Supreme Court declared to be scientifically sound and constitutionally legal. Then he sought to eradicate the Jewish infiltration from Germany, to scientifically extract a cancer as he put it. His language was sprinkled with scientific allusions, and many of his most prominent henchmen were scientists. To Hitler and his followers this eugenically inspired treatment was necessary for Germany to survive a grievous threat.
In Daniel Goldhagen’s wonderful book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and in James Carrol’s equally provocative book, Constantine’s Sword, both authors argue that ordinary Germans accepted and even embraced the killing of Jews not because they were forced to do so, or they were afraid of Nazi reprisals, but rather because they believed that Jews were perfidious and even evil. This belief derived from religious and cultural norms to which many Germans—even doctors, scientists, and Noble Prize winners—ascribed. Thus, when the Nazi leaders and press stated that Jews were undermining Germany and had to be surgically removed, that they were communists trying to overturn the government and destroy people’s lives, that they were part of a secret internationalist conspiracy, the German people believed it and accepted the need to rid their country of this plague. Why? Because Hitler stoked their preconceived notions of truth. It seemed plausible. And it was backed by scientists and the press.
Just like Fauci and CNN and Governor Cuomo stoked the preconceived notions of people like my friend, who inherently trust anything that is wrapped in a veil of science. The Germans believed their truth enough to enable their government to slaughter its Jews. People like my friend believed in it enough to allow our government to expunge our precious rights and to feed us bogus policies that led to suffering and death. They both thought they were doing good, even as they helped false prophets of a perverted scientific dogma commit horrific atrocities.
Liberals often accept science without critically examining whether it makes sense. Obviously, in the pursuit of “science,” liberals like my friend are more than willing to desecrate the Constitution and harm innocent people, like our elderly and youth, while watching the economy crumble all round them. This, to them, is science. We seem to forget how often science has been wrong, how it has been used as justification for horrid acts in the past, how it can be manipulated by those who seek to make it dogma, how wide the spectrum of opinion is when it comes to scientific interpretation.
We liberals also accept a certain binary logic about politics: our guys (like Governor Cuomo and Newsome) are honest and have integrity, while their guys (Trump, et al) are liars who seek to hurt us. Thus, if our guys say something, then it must be true. If their guys say something, it must be false. Each side can line up scientists to support its position, but clearly our scientists are better than theirs, because according to people like my friend, the other side doesn’t believe in science. Hence, when our guys tell us that we must wear masks outside, that we must lock up the elderly, that we must deprive kids of an education, that we must force people to be vaccinated against their will, that’s all ok. I mean, our guys believe in science, and they are the good guys, so we’ll just do what they say. Right?
As Park has observed, both here and in North Korea, when we blindly follow what the state tells us to do, when we empower the state to take away our rights, when we justify oppression and ritualistic behavior by wrapping it in a thinly laid veil of “truth” that we don’t critically examine, then we are going down a dangerous road. We become Fauci’s willing executioners, blindly following a path that "our people" have laid for us, a path that jibes with our inner biases, never looking away from that path, believing in our hearts—even as the policies we deem to be necessary slaughter people and take away their rights—that we are the good guys.
Don’t think that the Germans thought otherwise! All zealots think that way. They always have.
The only question is, will some eyes start to open, and will we as a nation, and we as liberals, look back on what we did and be aghast, or will we look back and say, “Oh well, too bad it turned out like this, but what choice did we have? We were just doing due diligence.”
We always have a choice. But once we chop down the tree of liberty and claim that it’s ok this time, even if it’s not ok when segregationists and pro-lifers and even Nazi’s did (and do) the same thing and justify it the same way, then we’re making a horrid choice. There is only one way to look back on this: we Americans and liberals and human beings must be clear eyed in our assessment of our response to COVID and acknowledge that we let ourselves be yanked down a dark road because we failed to question those who pulled our leashes. We must accept our culpability in this horrific mass deception and say:
Never again.
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