On Deliberately Misreading the Facts
We now learn that members of the White House staff and the secret service, and even one of Donald Trump’s personal valets, have tested positive for the coronavirus. This is announced by the breathless propaganda wing of American totalitarian progressivism — that is, the mass media — as shocking news, terrifying news, hysteria-inducing news.
The New York Times, America’s leading purveyor of reality filtered through the lens of mass manipulation, offers its interpretation of the White House infections in the form of the following headline: “Two White House Coronavirus Cases Raise Question of if Anyone is Really Safe.”
Leaving aside the usual public school illiteracy issuing from America’s “newspaper of record” — there wasn’t a single copy editor on the NYT payroll with the basic English skills to gag on “the Question of if”? — I ask you to observe the cockamamie affirmative bias in that headline. The news that even members of the White House staff have contracted this virus absolutely does not suggest the NYT’s implicit conclusion: We’re all doomed!
On the contrary, what it suggests, to those still living in some approximation of the real world, is that the totalitarian fantasy that this universal lockdown age is of any value to anything or anyone is nonsensical. This virus, like any bad flu bug, is everywhere, affecting huge numbers of people. No one who hasn’t been tested today — absolutely no one — can be sure he hasn’t been exposed to it a hundred times over, or that he himself hasn’t already had it, without symptoms, as is common with the majority of those infected with any flu virus, and as is certainly the case with this one.
Here is how the NYT pitches this garbage story to match its garbage headline:
If it is so hard to maintain a healthy environment at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the most famous office address in the world, where staff members are tested regularly, some as often as every day, then how can businesses across the country without anywhere near as much access to the same resources establish a safe space for their workers?
What standard are they using to determine what constitutes “a healthy environment”? Needless to say, they are operating on the fallacious assumption, typical of this mass hysteria outbreak, that a positive coronavirus test equals “an unhealthy environment,” and certainly not a place that can be judged “a safe space for workers.” After all, someone might get sick! We can’t allow businesses to open, people to socialize, or citizens to assemble in public, if there is a chance that some of them might contract a virus without even knowing it, or, nightmare of nightmares, that one or more of those people might actually become ill!
Since when did the possibility of someone suffering flu symptoms in a given location become the standard of determining whether natural rights and economic liberty ought to be respected or cancelled for the occupants or proprietors of that location? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. We all know the answer, since we have watched the shift occur over a mere matter of weeks.
Every one of these “Oh my god!” stories, if read after stripping away the propaganda filter, is actually evidence against the alarmist interpretation. It is evidence against the “expert” junk science about the supposedly terrifying mortality rate of this flu. It is evidence against panicking, against shutting everything down, against police-enforced “social distancing,” against stay-at-home orders, against the whole tyrannical power play.
Alternative headline, produced without a newspaper’s team of professional copy editors (but by a former copy editor’s son): “Two White House Coronavirus Cases Raise Question of Whether It Makes Sense to Lock Down Whole Nations When Virus May Already Have Affected Most Households While Producing More or Less Predictable Flu-Like Outcomes.”
Today, the sheep around America are reading that NYT headline and saying, “That’s right! We’re not safe yet. Don’t let my neighbors go out yet! We need more lockdowns, more social distancing, more economic collapse, more tyranny, more, more, more! Oh, save us, Mother Government! Please save us!”
