I thought Joe would alienate Latinos

https://mobile.twitter.com/CherokeeOwl/status/1265797305095073793

Mandatory Masks Aren’t About Safety, They’re About Social Control

To those looking to benefit politically from emergencies, COVID presents an opportunity to advance plans targeted to transform American freedom and the American way of life.

By Molly McCann

On May 26, Virginia’s Gov. Ralph Northam announced that wearing masks outside one’s home will be mandatory effective May 29. He first hinted he might issue a masking order a week ago, likely to test the water.

A new refrain in public discourse is growing in volume by the day: “Things will never be the same.” The certainty with which we are assured of this pre-determined future is perplexing. Whether or not “things” will ever be the same is not at all clear, but that some people hope things will never be the same is certain.

A new refrain in public discourse is growing in volume by the day: “Things will never be the same.”

To those looking to benefit politically from emergencies, COVID presents an opportunity to advance plans targeted to transform American freedom and the American way of life. Mandatory-masking policies provide a valuable foundation to weaponize the virus against American liberty—now and in the future.

Demanding Freedoms Helps Ensure Them

Much of our freedom is maintained by the collective resistance of the American mood. When the Minnesota governor excluded churches from his Phase I reopening plan, Catholic and Lutheran leadership announced, through counsel, that their churches would reopen with or without the state’s blessing.

The governor’s resulting about-face was probably not due to a legal epiphany. Rather, he understood he’d pushed the envelope too far. Minnesotans wouldn’t put up with any further abuse of their religious freedoms.

Would Virginians, outside of the blue D.C. suburbs, be willing to accept a masking order? To take our freedom from us, people with anti-American agendas have to mobilize some initial quorum of consent from the population.

Masking Is Meant to Build an Opinion Cascade

Mandatory masking seeks to build that consent. In addition to extending the fiction that we are in an emergency sufficient to trigger the extra-constitutional authority of local and state executives, mandatory masking acts as a peer pressure-fueled signal that encourages conformity to our coming “new normal.”

An April 18 article in the Washington Post underscores the strategy, presenting the mask controversy as a left versus right debate. People resisting mandatory mask policies are, per usual, painted as unreasonable, headstrong, and backward—displaying ignorant American bravado while rejecting science and good sense. (That caricature is itself a tool to mock, marginalize, and silence dissent.)

The most telling passage of the article is this one:

For Trump’s supporters, declining to wear a mask is a visible way to demonstrate “that ‘I’m a Republican,’ or ‘I want businesses to start up again,’ or ‘I support the president,’ ” said Robert Kahn, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis who has studied Americans’ attitudes toward masks. ‘Masks will quickly become the new normal in blue states, but if social distancing continues through 2022, the mentality among Republicans could well change, too: If I can go to work and the cost of marginal improvement in my life is wearing a mask, maybe Americans of both parties do accommodate ourselves to it.’

And that’s the key. If we want to marginally improve our lives, we will submit. The masks aren’t the endgame. The point of the masks is to teach the American people that if we want to get some sense of normal, we have to accept abnormality.

If everyone is wearing a mask, it telegraphs a society-wide acceptance that the status quo has changed, and with that consensus other changes can come, too. Society will be primed to accept measures that most normal Americans would reject in any other time. Our new normal will include a permanent expansion of the bureaucracy and alarming new COVID-related regulations.

Masks Are of Limited Benefit

The truth is you aren’t irrational or obdurate if you are skeptical about masks. The “experts” have admitted that masks’ efficacy is usually negligible. Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, in a “60 Minutes” interview early in this pandemic, dismissed masks as essentially useless.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/27/mandatory-masks-arent-about-safety-theyre-about-social-control/

Tom Hanks Admits He Firmly Believes A Debunked Conspiracy Theory

How much longer do we have to endure actors like Tom Hanks promoting the repeatedly debunked Malthusian overpopulation scare?

By Robert Tracinski

Will the Population Bomb never die? I ask because actor Tom Hanks brought it up while doing publicity for his latest movie based on a Dan Brown novel—yes, unfortunately, another one—in which the overpopulation scare figures prominently.

I’ll venture a guess, because Dan Brown novels are pretty predictable: the villain will turn out to be a guy who is using nefarious means in an attempt to stop overpopulation. The good guys will try to stop him, but will view him as someone who used the misguided methods to achieve an “idealistic” goal.

Oh, look: nailed it.

I don’t think it’s any great secret that Brown uses his Robert Langdon novels as a passive-aggressive way of working out his issues with Christianity, and in this case he’s clearly targeting Catholicism’s opposition to contraception. But in doing so—spoiler warning, in case you care—he ends up basically condoning forced mass sterilization as a reasonable solution to overpopulation, which pretty much captures the terrifying totalitarian implications of the overpopulation hysteria.

But the new movie gives this awful idea a wholesome front man in the person of lovable everyman Tom Hanks. Here’s what he had to say about overpopulation, or as he calls it, “Malthusian theory.”

You know, when I graduated—when I was at junior college, Chabot Junior College—we finished a history course, and the professor wrote up—you need to learn this word—he wrote up the word ‘triage’—which represented, I was told, the concept that eventually, the world will have too many people in it in order to subsist on its own. And that stuck with me for a long time. And that’s what ‘Inferno’ is about, the quantum physics of overpopulation. In an instant, there could be too many people on the planet. And actually, the math does add up.

Yes, I know. This is coming from an actor in a puffball interview with puffball morning show hosts—who, ahem, also moderate presidential forums. Whoops. Actors aren’t scientists and don’t really know what “Malthusian theory” is. They certainly don’t know what the heck “quantum physics” is.

But this is how the overpopulation scare ends up being propagated forever, even though the math most definitely does not add up. Hanks says he learned about this from a history teacher. If so, then he should also have learned that Malthusian theory is history, not just in the literal sense of having been around since it was first described by Thomas Malthus in 1798, but also in the sense of having been debunked repeatedly.

I didn’t know until very recently that one of the people who debunked it was Friedrich Engels. In what may be the only correct thing he or Karl Marx ever wrote about economics, he provided this rebuttal.

Malthus establishes a formula on which he bases his entire system: population is said to increase in a geometrical progression—1+2+4+8+16+32, etc.; the productive power of the land in an arithmetical progression—1+2+3+4+5+6. The difference is obvious, is terrifying; but is it correct? Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in an arithmetical progression? The extent of land is limited. All right! The labor-power to be employed on this land-surface increases with population. Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labor does not always rise in proportion to the labor, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist—science—whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

So a super-scientific Communist utopia will be able to solve the problem of feeding a growing population, thanks to the breakthroughs of Comrade Lysenko.

https://thefederalist.com/2016/10/27/tom-hanks-admits-firmly-believes-debunked-conspiracy-theory/