The losses that they suffered at the polls in November, as well as Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s chronically low approval ratings, have made it painfully clear to Democrats that it ain’t 2020 anymore: Americans have COVID fatigue, i.e. exhaustion over the tireless restrictions that Democrats, more so than anyone else, zealously imposed upon the residents of their states and, at the federal level, beyond.
A memo—an actual memo—recently issued from a Democratic Party polling firm verifies, in spades, what some of us have been arguing from the beginning of this unconscionable period in our history. It verifies that the COVID craze is and has always been about politics—and most emphatically not about science.
The two-page list of bullet points is well-worth the read, but the takeaway from it is that Democrats are encouraged to essentially “declare” that the “crisis phase” of the Virus is “over” and “push for feeling and acting more normal.” After all, “people are ‘worn out’ and feeling real harm from the years-long restrictions,” so it’s crucial that Democrats “take their side” (underline original).
The final bullet point says it all. It’s worth quoting at length:
“Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead. If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate us through this. When 99% of Americans can get vaccinated, we cause more harm than we prevent with voters going into our third year talking about restrictions. And, if Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November” (boldface original).
Let’s unpack this.
Stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead. That Anthony Fauci has suddenly disappeared from the media means, undoubtedly, that the Democrats have indeed received this memo loudly and clearly, for, as these last two long years have made evident, Fauci exists for no other reason than to legitimize burdensome restrictions and intimate apocalyptic scenarios that could materialize lest people abide by those restrictions.
If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate us through this.
But wait, if things really are “still…that bad,” and if they really “could get” “much worse,” then shouldn’t Democrats put their political prospects aside for the sake of truth and public health? Shouldn’t they resist the impulse to forgo these goods, even if it means being perceived as “failures [who are] unable to navigate us through this?”
If the restrictions of the past two years were warranted by “how bad things still are and how much worse they could get,” then, if things are really still this bad and things really could get that much worse, aren’t the same restrictions still warranted?
The question is rhetorical and the memo elaborates on the answer: “…we cause more harm than we prevent with voters going into our third year talking about restrictions.” The harm that Democrats want to avoid is, of course, harm to themselves at the polls, a point made sufficiently clear by the fact that it is “voters,” and not citizens or people, with whom the memo is concerned. The concluding lines leave no doubt:
“And, if Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November” (italics mine).
So, as this analysis of this memo decisively establishes, Democrat politicians are motivated first and foremost by political considerations—not considerations of science or public health. By implication, so too are their fellow partisans in Big Media driven by politics, which accounts for why all of that ominous coverage of COVID with which Americans have been ceaselessly bombarded for two years has abruptly been superseded by equally scary coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. As if right on time.
However, to some of us, none of this is even remotely surprising. Some of us have always known that science and public health never had a damn thing to do with any of the fear-drumming over “The Virus.” It has only and ever been about the advancement of political interests.
Yet for as bad, for as shameless, as are Democrat politicians and their apologists throughout the media—and, as readers of this column know, there is no limit to the horrible adjectives with which we could describe them—Republican politicians and their boosters throughout the Big Conservative media aren’t much better. COVID has been the defining moment of our times. Their moment of truth arrived, the War of all wars, but the agents of the Big Con not only didn’t rise to the occasion and prevent the infliction of immeasurable pain, of every type, that millions of Americans, and billions the world over, were made to endure in the name of prevailing over The Virus; they were accomplices to these crimes.
From start to last, the government-media contrived COVID Narrative, in all of its dimensions, has been shown to have been, to put it generously, misinformation. Ignorance, incompetence, and deception are the staples that hold it together. The point is that Republican politicians and Big Conservative media influencers have never transgressed the boundaries of the Narrative. Whether it is something as fundamental as the alleged isolation, purification, and extraction of a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, or a demonstration that it is the cause of an alleged disease called, “COVID-19”; whether the topic is the efficacy or not of masks, their psychological and social costs, and their indiscriminate, mandated usage; whether it is the indefinite suspension of Constitutional liberties and the interning (“quarantining”) of whole societies, or the wrecking of whole economies, or, through the disruption of global supply chains caused by the ruination of said economies, the driving into poverty of billions of human beings around the planet; whether it is the legitimacy of the “case” numbers, as well as the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths attributed to COVID; whether it is the adverse effects, including death, that have been reported to the CDC’s own VAERS system following the administration of experimental drugs that have been marketed as “COVID vaccines,” or the fact that these drugs have a waning efficacy and an impotence against new variants of The Virus—from beginning to end Republicans and conservative influencers have never questioned the essentials of COVID orthodoxy.
Despite this, they’ve continued styling themselves as an oppositional force. We’ll look more thoroughly at all of this in the future. For now, though, suffice it to say that it shouldn’t surprise us that they’d rather spend every moment talking about what the Democrats, as the realization dawns upon them that COVID is no longer good politics, would prefer for them to talk about. Which, at the present moment, is the Russian-Ukrainian conflict thousands of miles away.
Republicans and Big Conservative media personalities would prefer not spending the time to take apart this latest memo to Democrats. They’d prefer to let them quietly allow COVID to go away. They’d prefer to virtue-signal about “standing” with Ukrainian citizens, even as they bailed on American citizens as the latter were made, by their own government and its media forces, to suffer for the last two years.
Justice will not be served until the truth about COVID is rendered glaring to all with eyes to see and those who perpetrated these crimes against humanity are made to pay the penalty that they’ve earned. If Republicans and conservatives who, shamefully, scandalously, dropped the ball, want any kind of shot at redeeming themselves, they had better start talking about nothing but the injustices, the war, that has been waged against Americans and the peoples of the world in the name of COVID.
If they want victory in November, they had better guarantee voters exactly what they will do, and how they will accomplish it—to make sure that justice is served and that nothing like the systematic dehumanization that has been the “new normal” since March of 2020 happens again.
Until and unless this happens, no Republican deserves a single vote.
I won’t hold my breath.
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