The Worst Event That America Will Face
A few days ago, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Birx, Dr. Fauci’s priggish schoolmarm understudy, went out of her way to establish for all who ever doubted it that she is (a) a hyperbolic alarmist worthy of the nether regions of the Trump campaign’s legal team, (b) quite ignorant and narrowminded, and (c) a leading candidate for Upper Class Twit of the Year.
Speaking on Meet the Press, Birx declared that she sometimes sullies her precious self by deigning to meet with members of the underclass, where she hears the most appalling things.
“When I go out, I just don’t meet with health care providers and governors and mayors, but I also meet with the community,” Birx said. “And so I hear community members parroting back those situations, parroting back that masks don’t work, parroting back that we should work toward herd immunity, parroting back that gatherings don’t result in superspreading events. And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths.”
In other words, the good doctor notes that her job occasionally forces her to meet with her inferiors — rather than only with “health care providers and governors and mayors” — and those plebs (“community members”) are always “parroting back” false opinions, i.e., opinions that she knows with absolute certainty are “myths.”
To clarify that point for those of you so used to being condescended to by petty tyrants that half the meaning in their condescension just blows right past you: The little people — those who are not health providers, governors, or mayors — are not capable of developing rational, informed ideas of their own. Thus, if you espouse any view inconsistent with the official “expert” opinion of Dr. Birx and the handful of other elitists who have manifestly failed so miserably in their handling of this virus outbreak, your non-compliant view is by definition nothing but a “parroting back” of ignorant falsehoods. You are a parrot — a mindless repeater of words you do not understand — if you are not mindlessly repeating the words of Dr. Birx, as you have been ordered by your superiors to do.
It naturally follows from this, of course, that anyone whose views vary from those of the approved experts of the moment — even one who was once thought to be a member of the “expert” class himself — has also effectively reduced himself to a parrot (or at best a parrot-trainer), whose views deserve to be mocked and ridiculed, and whose professional reputation is to be smeared forever, in the name of maintaining the doctrinal purity of expertise.
A few observations on these words from the wise:
Declaring non-compliant views to be inherently irrational, unthinking, and therefore socially irresponsible and dangerous, is always the penultimate step towards directly condemning such views and banning them from the public square.
As a prominent member of the bureaucratic apparatchik class, Dr. Birx sees it as “our job” to “constantly say” that non-compliant outbursts from “community members” are myths. In other words, the role of government-approved experts is to incessantly insult, browbeat, and demean the underclass into intellectual self-doubt and moral submission. Dr. Birx, simply stated, is a pig — in the Orwellian sense, of course, the “some animals are more equal than others” sense.
If there is one thing that history proves beyond any shadow of doubt about experts, it is that they will be proved wrong about most things. This happens to experts all the time. It has probably happened to Dr. Birx herself many times already during her career. And another thing history proves about experts is that they never learn from this history. Their latest expert opinion is always, in their minds, the absolute and unassailable truth, beyond all doubt, such that anyone who dares to question the opinion can only be identified as an ignorant, myth-spewing parrot. This is one reason why self-perceived experts are the perfect appendages of totalitarian government — they have a naïve talent for making the highly dubious seem unquestionable, since they habitually do it to themselves every day. They are true believers in their own shortsighted certainties, and hence ideal spokesmen for tyrants who wish to beat populations into submission “for their own good.”
Dr. Birx, in the same interview, claimed that, “This is not just the worst public health event, this is the worst event that this country will face, not just from a public health side.” My first reaction to that hyperbole is this: During the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, when the U.S. population was barely one-third of today’s, that virus killed 195,000 Americans — in October. Not to be overlooked, as I have repeatedly noted, is the fact that a huge proportion of those 1918 deaths were among healthy men in their twenties and thirties, along with pregnant women. Dr. Birx, an expert on such matters, must know this, must she not? In other words, when Dr. Birx says that this coronavirus outbreak is not only the worst public health event in America, but the worst event period, she knows that she is lying, doesn’t she? She knows that she is lying.
Or maybe not. There is indeed a sense in which this may well turn out to be the worst event of any kind that the United States of America will face — and precisely not as a “public health event.” But I am sure that Dr. Birx didn’t mean it in that sense. I don’t believe she is that clever.
