Before the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC was too busy fighting racism to do its job. As the vaccine rolls out, the CDC decided to build the vaccine waiting list around affirmative action

Who gets to live or die? Much like in Nazi Germany, it helps to be a member of the right race.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has announced that the priorities for distributing vaccines are to prevent death, preserve society, and help those facing "disparities", and then maybe, "increase the chance for everyone to enjoy health and well-being."

Vaccine distribution is to be guided by four principles, one of which is to fight "health inequities" and another is to "promote justice". It's not the CDC's job to fight for social justice, but to fight viruses. Having failed miserably at its one job, which it chose not to do, it's instead pursuing racial equity eugenics by tackling "health inequities" for "racial and ethnic minority groups".

The CDC and NIH had turned to the National Academies to produce A Framework for Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus which falsely claimed that "COVID-19 illnesses and deaths are strongly associated with race" due to "systemic racism" and that a "vaccine allocation framework" had to reduce these "health inequities" with affirmative action.

The report noted that the "committee anticipates that the criteria will, in practice, tend to give higher priority to lower-income individuals... and Black, Hispanic or Latin, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities."

A government agency had paid for and was making use of a report which would decide who was to live or die based on race and income. And no one was willing to say a word about it.

Tennessee's Department of Health had already announced that it would be using the National Academies report and intended to dedicate 10% of the vaccines to SVI "vulnerable" areas.

The eugenics strategy of public health had been baked in long before the pandemic with the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index. SVI was supposed to help rush aid during a natural disaster to those who might need it the most, but SVI added race as a "vulnerability" to create affirmative action disaster relief. During a hurricane, your odds of getting help increased if you were in a minority area. And it decreased if you ranked higher on the SVI because you had more income.

This was bad enough. But now vaccine distribution will be driven by the SVI’s numbers.

At least 26 states are going to be using SVI for the vaccine rollout. Not all of them are planning to use it to decide who gets the vaccine based on their race. Some intend to use it, as originally intended, to spread awareness, but other states are going all in on racial equity eugenics.

Ohio’s vaccination plan indicates that state health authorities will focus on "equity" and will use federal guidance to "ensure equity in distribution" and address "racial and ethnic disparities".

In Tennessee, "priority will be given to areas in the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index".

Minnesota's vaccine distribution guidelines put promoting justice in second place and warned that vaccine doses will be allowed based on the needs of health care personnel, nursing home residents, and SVI areas. The Minnesota guidelines define “other attributes to be considered in prioritization” as including, “people from certain racial and ethnic minority groups who are

disproportionately affected by COVID-19”: treating minority status as a medical vulnerability.

That’s how ‘health equity’ medicalizes minority status and turns it into a medical disability.

States that don’t use the SVI may actually be using even more outrageously racist guidelines. California’s Community Vaccine Advisory Committee began with proposals to have groups that were the victims of "historical injustices" be first in line for the vaccine. The committee consists of medical groups, as well as radical leftist groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, several unions, and assorted minority activist groups. CVAC put “equity” second on its priority list.

Vaccine equity eugenics hit the public eye when a New York Times article quoted Harald Schmidt, a German academic who had worked for Germany’s Ministry of Health and the European Parliament, and acts as an adviser to UNESCO and the World Bank's Population and Reproductive Health Unit, suggesting that minorities should go ahead of older people.

“Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt was quoted as saying. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”.

"Dr. Schmidt" has an MA in Philosophy from the University of Munster, the academic home of one of the most notorious Nazi eugenicists who worked under Mengele, and also boasts a PhD in Health Policy from the London School of Economics.

Like Jill Biden, he’s not a doctor, but that didn’t stop the Journal of the American Medical Association from publishing a paper co-authored by Schmidt titled, “Is It Lawful and Ethical to Prioritize Racial Minorities for COVID-19 Vaccines?” which gamed potential affirmative action eugenic court cases by focusing on factors like "geography, socioeconomic status, and housing density that would favor racial minorities de facto, but not explicitly include race."

While Schmidt has gotten the bulk of the attention, the paper was also authored by Michelle A. Williams, the dean of Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Larry Gostin who heads the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Schmidt, as well as his co-authors, took part in the Vaccine Allocation and Social Justice event, along with Philadelphia's Deputy Health Commissioner, a strategic adviser to the Davos-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives, along with top state health officers from Tennessee, California, and Illinois.

And Nancy McClung: a former nurse who serves on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ Ethical Principles for Allocating Initial Supplies of COVID-19 Vaccine.

The research materials included a paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obamacare architect and a prominent proponent of triage, who had already co-authored another paper, which had warned that while directly prioritizing race "would likely be ruled unconstitutional", the better approach would be "considering vulnerabilities that, while possible for people of all races, are commonly produced by racism".

Finally, Emanuel noted that, "disparities could be further reduced by avoiding prioritization strategies, such as age-based preference, that risk widening racial and socioeconomic disparities."

The paper co-authored by the man who wrote Why I Hope to Die at 75 was saying the same thing Schmidt had said, but coded in the ambiguous language of public policy. The elderly should not get access to the vaccine earlier because they are on average more likely to be white and wealthy and saving their lives first would widen “racial and socioeconomic disparities”.

A decade after Obamacare opponents were ridiculed for warning about death panels,national and local governments are following triage measures that decide who lives or dies by race.

The CDC evolved and deployed this policy while Republicans were at the helm, and did nothing.

It’s not too late to stop it.

President Trump can clean house at the CDC and take as many of the decisions about vaccine policy out of its hands as possible. Republican governors and legislatures should stop letting the same experts who have botched the pandemic every step of the way use SVI for the vaccine.

Whatever happens this time around, using tools like SVI creates a horrifying legal and medical precedent in which medical treatment gets allocated based on minority status. As socialized medicine digs deeper into medical decision making, this will become the norm.

Beyond the pandemic, waiting for a kidney transplant, hip replacement surgery, or a scarce medication will be determined by medicalizing privilege and treating minority status as an illness in greater need of care and ‘whiteness’ as a sign of health privilege that requires less care.

Affirmative action is merging with death panels to transform equity into triage. If we don’t stop it, it will kill us. Reverting to the worst abuses of segregation will kill our souls and then our bodies.

When the NHS, Britain's socialized medicine system, debuted its contact tracing app, six million eagerly rushed to download it. After a few days, 10 million had downloaded and installed the app, and after a month, around 40% of smartphone users had put a monitoring device on their phones that would trace their social interactions and could tell them to isolate at any moment.

In October, Governor Cuomo launched a New York contact tracing app based on technology from Google and Apple, and some assistance from Bloomberg’s organization.

"It’s going to not only bring contact tracing to a new level," Cuomo boasted, while claiming that it wouldn't violate anyone's privacy.
Few New Yorkers seemed to believe him. Despite being available in Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Korean, Russian, Haitian Creole, and, even more unexpectedly, English, the app hasn’t taken off and Cuomo’s regime has refused to reveal the data that would actually show if it’s tracking positive cases. The lack of data transparency has been the second biggest story about Cuomo’s mismanagement of the pandemic, after the deaths of 11,000 nursing home residents when his administration forced nursing homes to accept infected patients. The numbers are likely higher, but the Cuomo administration, in its typical fashion, is refusing to release the data.

After a month, only 5% of New Yorkers have downloaded Cuomo’s spy app. That’s far short of the 60% that’s needed for contact tracing to work.

Even Europeans haven’t hit that 60% target. Few outside Communist China have.

Apple and Google claimed that they needed at least 15%. Only a few states in America hit that bar and they tend to have small populations that lean leftward. Most Americans have opted out.

Governor Murphy launched his state’s contact tracing app to great fanfare, urging a, “shared sense of personal responsibility to support our contact tracing efforts”. Only 4% of New Jersey residents decided to take up the former Goldman Sachs tycoon on his modest proposal.

Murphy, like Cuomo, had forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients. Some of the state’s deadliest outbreaks had also taken place in state hospitals for veterans.

Pennsylvania's Governor Wolf and Secretary of Health Richard Levine, debuted their contact tracing app in September.

“We won’t know who has downloaded the app, who has received notifications and who used symptom check,” Richard (Rachel) Levine, who had taken his mother out of a nursing home and into a hotel, while forcing nursing homes to take in infected patients, assured Pennsylvanians.

Only 4% of Pennsylavanians were convinced. Richard Levine has begun pleading with 13-year-olds to download the app. If there’s anything that’s bound to reassure state residents, it’s a strange man in a blonde wig urging their children to download an app to monitor them.

Contact tracing app adoption in America isn’t likely to get much better even with more time.

Governor Northam rolled out a contact tracing app in Virginia back in August. After half a year, the state has passed Google's 15% bar with an estimated 19% of smartphone owners having installed the app.

But few people are actually using it.

Only 553 people submitted their positive results out of 100,000 positive tests in the state.

While Democrat governors and their European counterparts have brandished download figures, many people download apps and then uninstall them. Or leave them on and then pay no further attention to them. The actual utilization of contact tracing apps is laughably miniscule.

Virginia’s 800,000 plus downloads figure still only comes out to 553 people submitting results.

That’s why Governor Cuomo in New York and the NHS in the UK refuse to release their impact numbers. Considering the performance of contact tracing apps in Europe, it’s not hard to guess what they’re hiding.

Italy's Immuni app was downloaded by 14% of the population, but only had 155 positive results submitted in three months. In France, after 2.3 million downloads, only 72 risk contacts were flagged.

A lot of people can be badgered into passively downloading an app, but when it comes time to upload their results and have the system notify everyone they’ve been around, they just as passively choose not to do it and the system fails.

After a year of touting contact tracing as the answer, the assault on privacy has stalled.

Contact tracing apps have failed miserably in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. California only got around to launching its contact tracing app now. The numbers are worse in much of the rest of the country with only 8 million Americans actually using contact tracing apps.

Trust is the biggest factor in the adoption of contact tracing apps. And very few Americans trust Big Tech, the government and its public health experts with tracking their lives and the lives of those around them. The NHS app intends to start asking users about their personal lives to "score" their lifestyles for coronavirus risk. It's easy enough to see this sort of thing as not only a privacy violation, but as an echo of China's public surveillance and social credit system.

In a socialized medicine system where people are already penalized for their risk factors by being denied access to medical care, leaving them with few options except emigration or death where age or obesity can mean a denial of medical care, and where babies can be killed because saving them is not deemed to be the best use of resources, a “score” isn’t just a score.

Few people want to be denied medical treatment because they failed the social credit system.

Conservatives are the most likely to see the downside of such calculations and the more conservative parts of the United States have the lowest utilization rates of contract tracing apps.

Nevada's contact tracing app was only downloaded 70,000 times, as of last month, and zero exposures were registered in September. In Wyoming, its app only managed 5,000 downloads.

South Carolina’s legislature banned the use of contact tracing apps by government agencies.

But all of that may be about to change if the Democrats succeed in their plan to place Biden in the White House. Biden's team is filled with Big Tech lobbyists and strongly favors a national contact tracing app infrastructure. While the Trump administration allowed states to define their own policy, the Democrat plan has been to nationalize the crisis and control the response.

Key to their plans is the creation of a national server that would store information across state lines, and allow national authorities to monitor everyone’s movements even if they leave a state.

Ten states have already moved their codes to Microsoft’s National Key Server maintained for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. Another five are following suit. As of now, virtually every state and area, such as D.C., with a contact tracing app, is on the National Key Server. That includes heavily populated states such as California, New York, and Michigan.

The hodgepodge of apps and approaches will be replaced by one system to rule them all.

Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, has also been touting Biden’s plans for app contact tracing. A national server will make a national contact tracing app much easier to implement. Google, which is also involved in the national server using its own cloud system, has, along with Apple, rebranded “contact tracing” as “exposure notification”.

Big Tech decided that people were leery of “contact tracing” so they gave it a new name.

Meanwhile, Biden’s people have been coordinating with the Rockefeller Foundation on testing plans.

"Policy makers," the Rockefeller Foundation had urged, must "allow the infection status of most Americans to be accessed and validated in a few required settings and many voluntary ones."

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently warned that the "pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty".

Despite that, under President Trump, Americans have still enjoyed an oasis of human rights compared to the brutal restrictions and measures in the rest of the world. Red states were able to choose less restrictive and abusive routes for tackling the pandemic, even while blue states relentlessly violated civil rights under the guise of a public health emergency.

All of that may be coming to an end.

The near future may be a mandatory national app based either on the existing Apple or Google architecture embedded into virtually every smartphone, or, worse, GPS tracking like Norway’s app which was withdrawn after being panned by Amnesty International, linked to the National Key Server, which will serve as a key element of a national pandemic social credit system.

Americans rejected contact tracing, but a Biden administration won’t take no for an answer.

Governor Newsom's latest shutdown order closes down small businesses and warns residents to stay at home if their area's number of available beds in intensive care units drops below 15%.

“By invoking a Stay at Home Order for regions where ICU capacity falls below 15 percent, we can flatten the curve as we’ve done before and reduce stress on our health care system," Governor Newsom, fresh from partying at the French Laundry, declared.

Spring had given way to summer and then to autumn and winter, and California Democrats are still using the pretext of preserving “ICU capacity” and “flattening the curve”. The rationale of shutting down an entire state, not so much for the sake of stopping the virus, but for keeping enough beds open in intensive care units, never made much sense even back then.

It’s insane now.

What did Governor Newsom and California Democrats do to increase ICU capacity?

In April, California had 7,345 ICU beds. Now, in December, it has 7,881.

In under eight months, the wealthiest state only managed to add 536 ICU beds. Or 7%.

In April, Newsom was bragging that California was so prepared that it began donating hundreds of ventilators to other states.

“Let me just make this clear, we are preparing for a scenario where we need 50,000 beds," he boasted.

Fast forward to December and the entire state has to be shut down (except for certain privileged industries, like Hollywood) because Newsom only managed to increase ICU capacity by 7%.

In June, the Democrat State Senate proposed a $200 billion budget. By the summer, California had received $71 billion from the federal government. So much federal money poured into the corrupt Democrat machine that the state’s auditor warned it was at high risk for fraud and waste.

In March, Newsom had announced that $500 million would be spent to do everything from increasing bed capacity to buying medical equipment to protecting nursing home residents.

And, of course, the top priority in California, care for the homeless.

Later, $600 million in federal funding would be spent on yet more housing for the homeless.

By the spring, California hospitals were claiming $14 billion in losses because they had to clear out the hospitals and postpone elective surgeries to maintain enough beds. Some of those elective surgeries were actually urgent and the death toll from postponing them is unknown.

That same policy led to Governor Newsom signing an order, which was described by nursing home advocates as a “death sentence”, forcing skilled nursing facilities to accept infected patients. So far, 6,709 coronavirus deaths have taken place at California nursing homes.

Nursing home patients have accounted for 34% of coronavirus deaths in California.

And, after all that, Governor Newsom has done next to nothing to increase ICU bed capacity while imposing another series of lockdowns, businesses going out of business, and people who can’t feed their families, while Newsom lectures them like children about washing their hands.

Democrats keep claiming that the shutdowns are happening because people don’t follow the rules. But their own metric, ICU capacity, makes it abundantly clear that they failed miserably.

Governor Newsom and the Democrats based everything around ICU capacity, and gifted with incomprehensible amounts of money and the better part of a year, they only raised it by 7%.

It’s almost as if they wanted a pretext for another shutdown. Or they’re corrupt and incompetent.

This is after all the same Democrat government that was spending $746,000 per unit on housing for the homeless after raking in billions to solve the problem of housing the homeless. It’s also the same government that does nothing to increase water capacity, but regularly declares a drought, reduces power capacity to save the planet, and then lets the blackouts roll.

But, unlike California’s refusal to do anything about the water and power situation, there’s no environmental pretext for doing so little to increase ICU capacity. Not a public one anyway.

Nor has the media found the time to actually cover that obscenely absurd 7% number.

But it has plenty of time to cover every single viral video of a person walking into a store without a mask, and every sanctimonious politician’s speech about the importance of masks.

When Governor Newsom and local Democrats claim that businesses have to shut down and children can’t play on playgrounds because of ICU capacity, no one in the media asks why, after all those billions of dollars, the state only added an average of 67 ICU beds a month.

Every California government agency tells the public to wear a mask more times a day than that.

The same Democrat politicians who kept warning that California would have to shut down if it hit ICU capacity did little to actually boost that capacity. It’s almost as if they wanted the shutdown.

California Democrats would rather pay out billions in unemployment than actually have thriving small businesses employing workers. That’s not a conspiracy theory: it’s a policy choice.

Just like letting Hollywood film crews eat outdoors while shutting down local restaurants, or keeping playgrounds closed and tennis courts open, or closing churches and synagogues while keeping pot dispensaries open, and keeping schools closed while BLM riots get a pass.

And these are policy choices that they should be held accountable for.

Once California Democrats made ICU capacity into the metric for a shutdown, they had the responsibility to increase that capacity. Instead they spent eight months shaking their fingers in the faces of the public, while partying at the French Laundry behind their backs.

Meanwhile they blew through the equivalent of Turkey’s national budget with little to show for it.

Californians, like people living under blue state rule around the country, were told that they had to flatten the curve to be free. Thousands of nursing home residents became human sacrifices to free up hospital beds for infected patients and maintain the metrics of ICU capacity.

But it wasn’t the public that failed to protect ICU capacity: it was Newsom and the Democrats.

Governor Newsom and Democrats keep trying to blame the lockdowns on the “irresponsible behavior” of the public. They were the ones who had month after month to prepare for a surge that they knew was coming, and all they have to show for it is a 7% increase in ICU beds.

Now they’re shutting down the state because it’s not meeting an artificial metric that they put into place and then did next to nothing to address while blowing through billions in cash.

It’s the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Except the grasshopper is bankrupting the ant.

The ICU capacity metric was built to fail. Just like California’s water and power, the ruling Democrats create disasters, and respond with rationing and misery, while blaming the public.

When there is a dry winter, as this one is likely to be, they don’t take the blame for failing to build dams, instead they blame the public for using too much water. When blackouts take down power across entire neighborhoods, they don’t take the blame for reducing reliable power sources and replacing them with worthless solar and wind boondoggles, instead they blame the public for not caring about the planet by running air conditioners in 110 degree weather.

Now, after almost a year of this circus, the same gang of corrupt clowns who did next to nothing to increase ICU capacity are blaming the shutdown on Californians not wearing enough masks.

California Democrats have stolen and squandered the natural wealth of an incredible state, and whenever a disaster happens, they scold the public for not being willing enough to live in misery.

The latest lockdowns may be flattening another curve: tolerance for these corrupt lying scolds.

Before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles imposed a curfew and, in a shocking oversight, asked Hollywood to follow it. While the entertainment industry isn't as big a part of the local economy as it would like you to think, its producers, directors, and stars provide a disproportionate share of the capital that the Democrats politicians who run the place use to get elected to higher office.

After ordering Hollywood to restrict filming to the same curfew as other businesses, a few hours later the order was withdrawn followed by a final plea to film shoots to “to voluntarily limit and/or avoid activities likely to invite a negative community response" which could "jeopardize community confidence in our ability to operate safely."

As if allowing movie studios to shoot around the clock while shutting down small businesses might "invite a negative community response" or raise questions about the corrupt system.

The film permit office now claims that “the State of California has viewed workers supporting the film, television and commercial production industry… as essential for the state’s critical infrastructure.”

What role does shooting movies play in the “critical infrastructure” of California? Money.

Not for the economy. In that regard, the entertainment industry is much less crucial than many of the industries that had been shut down by the lockdowns. With unemployment claims topping 8 million and California Democrat leaders fighting to eliminate freelance workers, that’s a drop in the bucket. If the crews in question were working in restaurants, they wouldn’t matter.

But the critical infrastructure that Hollywood funds is the political ambitions of the Democrats.

During the gubernatorial race, Hollywood poured millions into Newsom’s campaign, and celebrity fundraising helped put Garcetti into the mayor’s office. The Democrat with the biggest haul of industry cash usually wins. Your local pizza shop isn’t going to compete with that.

If only there were some sort of industry dedicated to exposing social injustice using art.

While restaurants spent a fortune prepping to meet the new regulations, only to be shut down anyway, the entertainment industry goes into a new lockdown with nothing to worry about.

All of this is happening under the watch of Muntu Davis, LA’s top health officer who was picked in the wake of the Black Lives Matter race riots to implement “equity”. Equity is now the top value at LA County's Department of Public Health which declares that it seeks to "ensure just systems, policies and practices". That means giving Disney a pass, but shutting down cafes.

This is what social justice lockdowns look like. Not just in LA, but across the country.

"New York City's economy is in a downturn, but film production has been a bright spot," a New York Times article chirps. Even while Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio targeted Chassidic Jews, ranting about weddings and synagogues, the entertainment industry and its allied media were exempted, and the accompanying rules were bent and broken.

Even while Democrat leaders were lecturing about the dangers of church and synagogue services, the Video Music Awards went on and celebrities were allowed to dodge curfew.

Since no election could go forward without Saturday Night Live, the high school talent show staffed by unfunny social justice activists, with occasional celebrity cameos, went forward, along with a live studio audience. Cuomo and De Blasio, not to mention the media, decided not to notice that SNL was flouting the rules by paying audience members so they counted as crew.

Having a live audience of Manhattanites to laugh when you howl insults at President Trump is an essential activity in New York. Unlike irresponsible, non-essential stuff like religious services.

As the New York Times notes, "The major studios... all report that they are full." 559 permits have been granted and 35 series are already filming in the city even though, as one studio boss notes, “one person every week or two test positive somewhere on the lot.” Unlike churches or synagogues, or weddings, these shoots are never described as superspreader events.

In a truly surreal scene, New Amsterdam, a TV drama, was caught filming outside Bellevue Hospital, blocking the path of real doctors and nurses, a population prone to infections. Even while Democrat leaders complain that there aren’t enough hospital beds, the NBC medical drama takes up space in and around hospitals while getting a free pass from the authorities.

The Times story noted that, “the large crew found it impossible to perfectly socially distance” and leaves it at that, while photos show no actual social distancing by the crews.

But the New York Times has its own Hollywood studio deals involving the 1619 Project.

Governor Cuomo is so dependent on entertainment industry cash that he flew out to California for fundraisers, including one organized in Beverly Hills by the MPAA featuring major studio heads with tickets going for as much as $50,000. This year, Cuomo held a fundraiser for his birthday featuring movie stars who praised him for protecting Hollywood's tax credits.

Those $420 million in tax credits are a net loss for the state, but a gain for Cuomo. That tops California’s film tax credit total of $330 million.

Cuomo had been insisting that the “state has no money”, and was threatening to cut first responders. He even tried to tax volunteers who came to help during the pandemic.

"We're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now," Cuomo falsely claimed. Then he called for maintaining the same insane level of Hollywood subsidies, and went further by making sure that only the big studios who fund his corrupt ambitions cash in on the $420 million.

After claiming that there would be no money to pay police, no money for anything, New York State kept the $420 million in subsidies but limited it to studios spending over $1 million.

The “state has no money” for cops and firefighters, but has $420 million for Hollywood.

Just to bring the corruption up to Chicago levels, Cuomo's proposal made sure that Saturday Night Live, but no new productions, would get access to the $420 million subsidy. If only there were some talented political satirists with a weekend show who could mock this crookedness.

Back in California, Disney's Captain Marvel got $20 million in tax credits in California. Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, which has been blamed for encouraging teenage suicide, vacuumed up over $40 million. You can’t expect one of the wealthiest companies in America to set off a spike in teenage suicides and promote pedophilia without some serious taxpayer subsidies.

When California and New York dole out $750 million in tax breaks to some of the wealthiest donors in a powerful industry who fund the political ambitions of top Democrats like Newsom and Cuomo, there’s no reason to expect their projects to be subjected to everyone else’s rules.

That’s why the order to limit film shoots to the 7 AM to 10 PM curfew was quickly pulled in LA. The county may be banning public gatherings, and destroying the last surviving small businesses who were on their last legs, but film shoots are back at half of pre-pandemic levels.

And that’s not just in America.

The UK has some of the most onerous lockdowns around, and its order shut down clothing stores, mobile phone shops, cafes, hotels, museums and “places of worship”, but left open "professional film and TV filming". Religion is non-essential, but television must go on.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the harm caused by the lockdowns to the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, but there’s been little discussion about who has been exempted from lockdown restrictions and their corrupt political and economic rationales.

The best leverage against lockdown self-righteousness is the exposure of the hypocritical and discriminatory treatment that closes small businesses while leaving giants like Amazon and Target, Disney and Netflix, wealthier than ever because of the lockdowns that benefit them.

The LA Film Office warned productions about a “negative community response”. It’s about time.

After failing to deal with months of violent riots in Portland, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced that she instead wants the police to go after families celebrating Thanksgiving.

When asked whether Oregonians should call the police on their neighbors if they have more than 6 people in their homes for Thanksgiving, she replied, “This is no different than what happens if there's a party down the street... they call law enforcement."

Except law enforcement has no interest in replying.

The Marion County Sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes the state capital, declined, stating, "We cannot arrest or enforce our way out of the pandemic."

When Governor Cuomo of New York, whose order forcing nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients may have killed as many as 11,000 senior citizens, tried to enlist law enforcement in his crackdown on Thanksgiving, the sheriffs of New York also wouldn’t do it.

The Steuben County Sheriff's Office assured that "the men and women of the Steuben County Sheriff’s Office will not be peeking in your window or attempting to enter your property to count the number of persons at your table on Thanksgiving."

"I can't see how devoting our resources to counting cars in our citizens' driveways or investigating how much turkey or dressing they've purchased is for the public good,” the Saratoga County Sheriff's Office objected.

“This national holiday has created longstanding family traditions that are at the heart of America, and these traditions should not be stopped or interrupted by Governor Cuomo’s mandates,” the Erie County Sheriff's Office declared.

"With regard to the Thanksgiving Executive Order, the Fulton County Sheriff's Office will NOT be enforcing it," another office stated, "So don't feel a need to hide cars, cover with leaves or walk 3 blocks so your house doesn't become a target of the Governors EO."

Democrats and their media have blamed this rebellion on Republican sheriffs in conservative areas, but Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr is a black Democrat and his office still opted out of the "enforcement of Thanksgiving gatherings".

While Governor Cuomo fumed that this Irish Democracy was, "frightening to democracy", a Buffalo print shop began selling stickers of Cuomo's giant head peering into windows.

Next door in New Jersey, Governor Murphy threatened to be, “as all over it as we can be."

Then he was caught on a viral video dining out with his family. Meanwhile, the Howell Township police chief stated, “I wasn’t going to have my police officers going knocking on doors and ruining somebody’s holiday just to check how many people are inside their house.”

The law enforcement rebellion wasn’t new in California. It had been going on for some time.

After Governor Newsom issued his latest curfew, the sheriffs of Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, Sacramento County, Tulare County, Fresno County, El Dorado County, and others announced that they would not be enforcing it with either tickets or arrests.

And no one would be tampering with Thanksgiving.

"The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office will not be determining—including entering any home or business—compliance with, or enforcing compliance of, any health or emergency orders related to curfews, staying at home, Thanksgiving or other social gatherings," the Sacramento County Sheriff stated. “We will not dispatch officers for these purposes."

“From the very beginning, we have not enforced these orders. We are not going to make criminals out of normally law-abiding citizens," Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said.

.In Ohio, some sheriffs were willing to be the Thanksgiving police, while others weren’t.

"It's not knocking on people's doors on Thanksgiving and saying, 'You've had more than eight or 10 people,' and it's not to make criminals out of everyday working people," Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said.

The law enforcement uprisings in New York, California, Oregon, and Ohio are part of a larger trend with local police departments indicating that they don’t want to be the mask police.

A study in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Online found that only 10% of police departments surveyed were acting as the mask police while 70% encouraged following the rules. This attitude by law enforcement forced some of the biggest cities in the country to bypass the police and utilize other means of enforcing their lockdowns and arbitrary decrees.

In Los Angeles, violators were threatened with having their water and power shut off. In New York City, a legion of city inspectors were pulled away from other duties to swarm Orthodox Jewish areas in Brooklyn after Governor Cuomo announced a crackdown on religious Jews.

The use of inspectors rather than police has become a widespread and illegal tactic for targeting small businesses, but has reached its limit as most businesses can’t survive if they close down.

The early months in the pandemic saw a boom in surveillance technologies, including drone flybys and infrared remote scans, but most police departments didn’t want anything to do with them.

A small number of police departments adopted the drones and made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Not only did most people hate them, but they also proved to be useless. Police departments that tried using the drones to break up large gatherings found that people wouldn’t listen. And the surveillance capabilities of the drones had been vastly overhyped.

As the Black Lives Matter riots broke out, police departments shifted away from coronavirus enforcement to cope with the violence and avoid being caught up in viral videos. It was around this time that the increased crime rate brought on by the riots and the mass jailbreak of prison inmates to protect them from the virus tied up the resources of underfunded departments.

Coronavirus enforcement, something most departments and officers didn’t want to do anyway, was the first casualty of the new dangerous environment brought on by the BLM riots.

Law enforcement had only been able to commit the spare resources to coronavirus enforcement because of a drop in crime rates early in the lockdowns, but once crime rates soared and cities and counties hit highs that hadn’t been seen in decades or generations, all of that ended. The budget cuts brought on by the collapse of small businesses and police defunding also left local law enforcement without enough resources to even answer calls, let alone play mask police.

And most law enforcement personnel are resentful of having been hung out to dry, robbed of resources and political support by Democrat governors and mayors, and then told to enforce widely unpopular shutdowns and mask fines by those same politicians.

Democrat politicians can’t defund the police and expect them to shut down Thanksgiving.

“It’s ironic on the heel of these cries to 'defund the police' and limit their response to what some perceive as non-emergency calls that the police department is now being asked to police family gatherings during the holiday season,” the president of Akron’s police union objected.

Not all law enforcement personnel have opted out of coronavirus enforcement. Elected sheriffs have the easiest time shrugging crackdowns away. Urban police chiefs appointed by mayors can’t put out dismissive press releases as easily, but they have made it a very low priority.

The struggle to enforce coronavirus lockdowns and codes without much support from police departments is a sign of just how challenging the post-police vision of the Democrats will be.

Democrats have turned to inspectors to fine small businesses and pull their licenses, but the inspectors are running into angry small business owners and patriotic crowds.

The Anne Arundel County Health Department was forced to cancel evening enforcement and daytime enforcement in rowdier bars. It also had to stop sending female inspectors. After Democrat Milwaukee health inspectors faced a backlash for harassing a pro-Trump rally, they no longer go anywhere without a police escort. That defeats the purpose of police defunding.

The bigger purpose of police defunding is to fundamentally shift enforcement priorities from fighting crime to pursuing social agendas, and while police departments dutifully rack up hate crime citations and participate in community policing events, their mission hasn’t changed.

The coronavirus lockdowns succeeded in dividing the country and destroying small businesses on an unprecedented scale, but they failed to turn America into East Germany. Instead the fault lines of the pandemic revealed that much of the country would not go along with the crackdown.

And the men and women of law enforcement, for the most part, did the right thing.

Even in difficult times, that ought to give us hope for the future of our country. And this Thanksgiving, it is another thing about this great nation to be thankful for.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

A week before issuing a statewide mask mandate and a few weeks after trying to ban Thanksgiving, Governor Newsom attended a dinner party, maskless, for a lobbyist.

The size of the party, a dozen people, contravened, Newsom’s own Thanksgiving crackdown limiting gathering sizes and urging members of different households not to mingle. The photos also contravened Newsom’s 93 to wear a mask at dinner between bites.

"COVID-19 has NOT gone away. Take the new case rates seriously. We cannot let our guard down," Newsom had urged on Twitter. "Wear a mask, limit mixing with those you don't live with, and physically distance."

Photos of the dinner party showed no social distancing, no mask wearing, and no precautions.

Those attending the party included not only Newsom, but top California Medical Association officials. The CMA had lobbied to suspend “non-urgent” and “non-essential” procedures. It had also cheered Newsom’s mask mandate warning that “anti-science extremists” were “putting public health at risk” in an ad campaign released earlier this summer by the association.

The anti-science extremists apparently include the CEO of the California Medical Association.

Newsom’s dinner party comes after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser violated her own quarantine, traveling to Delaware for Biden’s election party, one of the “high-risk” states, while partying with Democrat political operatives, before returning home and then refusing to quarantine.

Bowser claimed that she didn’t have to follow her own rules because it was “official business”.

The coronavirus is presumably obliging enough not to infect politicians who are traveling on official business to party with fellow Democrats, but knows to infect people at Trump rallies.

In Chicago, Mayor Lightfoot told residents to “cancel traditional Thanksgiving plans”, after joining a massive crowd celebrating Biden’s claim to have won the 2020 presidentia election.

“There are times when we actually do need to have relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times. That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not,” Lightfoot argued.

Of course all of this isn’t really news.

Governor Whitmer’s husband was already caught demanding his boat, Governor Pritzker’s family was caught traveling around the country, Governor Murphy was caught dining indoors, Governor Cuomo didn’t bother social distancing or wearing a mask at a Sharpton event, Mayor Lightfoot was caught getting a haircut, and Speaker Pelosi was caught at a hair salon.

Senator Dianne Feinstein was caught repeatedly not using a mask, and Senator Kamala Harris had no problem piling into an elevator with her entire staff. All this is just business as usual.

Even without listing the numerous Black Lives Matter marches and Biden victory parties, or the Women’s March in D.C., it’s all too obvious that Democrat leaders don’t follow the rules.

And that leads to one of two inevitable conclusions.

Either Democrat leaders are suicidal or the mask and lockdown regimen doesn’t work.

But what absolutely cannot be true is the media narrative that Democrats are following science and should be trusted to lead us through the pandemic using a regime of lockdowns and masks.

The same Democrat leadership lecturing us that masks save lives goes maskless whenever it can. And that might be forgivable if they weren’t constantly pretending that the only people not wearing masks are Republican scofflaws who are endangering all of us with their selfishness.

The only thing more unforgivable than corruption is hypocrisy.

But the fundamental question is why Governor Newsom, Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bowser, Mayor Lightfoot, and so many others are casually violating their own restrictions and guidelines.

If Governor Newsom truly believed, as he tweeted, “Wear your mask. Physically distance. Do not let your guard down. Your actions could literally save lives”, would he have joined a crowded party at the French Laundry for a lobbyist and adviser, without doing any of these things?

The only two rational conclusions are that Governor Newsom has no regard for his own life (we already know that he, like most Democrat governors on this list, has no regard for human life when he ordered skilled nursing facilities to accept coronavirus patients in a cruel act that one geriatric doctor compared to, “premeditated murder”) or he doesn’t believe his own guidance.

Are Democrat leaders particularly suicidal? That seems unlikely.

Newsom, Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer, and Pritzker, not to mention Pelosi, Feinstein, Bowser, and Lightfoot, can be accused of many things, but a wilful disregard for their lives isn’t one of them.

That leaves us with the cold hard reality that they don’t believe the things that they’re telling us.

Some of the violations of guidance meant to stop the spread of the virus can be dismissed as selfishness that doesn’t directly put Whitmer or Pritzker at risk. But when Newsom and Cuomo, among others, casually hang out in close proximity without masks, there’s only one conclusion.

They don’t practice this stuff because they don’t think it works.

What do they know that we don’t? Mostly, that nothing they’re doing will really make a difference, but that they need to be seen to be doing something. This is a common problem in politics. President Trump suffered from poor ratings on the coronavirus because, while his administration did practical things behind the scenes, it didn’t impose abusive mandates.

Like the kind that Biden ran on.

People expect medicine that really works to taste bitter and any real approach to a crisis to cause pain. That’s why we have to take off our shoes and belts when we fly even though the TSA has not stopped a single terrorist attack after all these years of airport shoelessness.

But the TSA was never meant to stop terrorism. It was there to show that the government was taking the problem seriously. And the more miserable flying became, the tighter the security.

There’s a term for that sort of thing: security theater. And there’s a term for what we’re doing now: medical theater. All of these are subsidiaries of political theater in which governments and politicians pretend to be doing things even though they know none of it really matters.

Congress spends a lot of its time holding entirely useless hearings that only exist so that its members can tweet about how seriously they’re taking the thing that the hearing is about.

Governor Cuomo mismanaged the coronavirus in the worst way possible, lying to the public, sending thousands of infected patients into nursing homes, imposing lockdowns and bragging his way through innumerable press conferences, before illegally scapegoating Orthodox Jews for the virus ahead of the second wave, but never missed a press opportunity or book deal.

That’s why his coronavirus leadership book hit the bestseller lists ahead of the morgues.

Democrat politicians know exactly how to navigate the pandemic, not to save lives, but to maximize their approval ratings, book sales, and potential presidential runs down the road. It doesn’t matter how many people die. Arguably more people dying in your state is better.

Just ask Cuomo who still holds down a nationwide championship in coronavirus corpses.

What is really important in any crisis is to be seen taking it very seriously by holding constant press conferences and imposing pain, lockdowns, restrictions, mandates, on the public. The more people suffer, the more a politician must get credit for doing everything to fight the virus.

The governors know that what they’re doing isn’t working and they don’t know what does. Their strategy isn’t to protect the people in their states, but to protect their political careers.

To find out what people really believe, don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.

Governor Newsom knew, before imposing his statewide mask mandate, that masks don’t work. If he thought they did, he would have been wearing one while hanging out with his pals. But to a lot of people, masks provide a sense of control and so politicians happily mandate masks.

Newsom, Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, and the rest of the gubernatorial gang don’t have a plan to deal with the virus. Their only plan is to wait it out and come out looking good. That’s why they wear masks in front of the camera and then take them off the first chance they get.

They’re not leaders, they’re politicians, with no clue what to do in a real crisis. Except lie.

As winter is upon us, there are only two possible explanations why so many governors repeatedly violate the rules that they tell us mean the difference between life and death.

Either they’re suicidal or they’re lying to us.

Since none of them have yet grasped a noose, put shotguns in their ears, or plunged needles filled with uncut heroin in their veins, they’re not suicidal. They are corrupt and incompetent. And while they destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions, they go on partying behind closed doors.

“If we just wore these masks,” Joe Biden said, at the final presidential debate, holding up a mask like a totem, “we can save 100,000 lives.”

The Democrat nominee’s plan for fighting the coronavirus was all about wearing masks. And indeed the only notable element of Biden’s plan has been a national mask mandate.

But would that actually work? Would it even save one life, never mind 100,000?

Few European countries have been more mask-obsessed than France.

In July, France issued a national mask mandate compelling everyone to wear masks indoors in public spaces. Anyone caught not wearing a mask would face a fine of around $150. In August, Paris and a number of other regions imposed mask rules for anyone leaving the house.

Forget the stereotype of the Parisian nonchalantly dangling a gauloise between two yellowing fingers. "You're not allowed to smoke on the street without a mask; you can't take it off, so you must find another way," Deputy Mayor Anne Souyris snapped.

How were Parisians to smoke without taking off their masks, cutting holes in them, or setting them on fire?

In a nod to another French obsession, cyclists were temporarily exempted, but AI was deployed on the metro to automatically detect which passengers weren’t covering their faces.

Some cynics suspected that this had something to do with France’s mask surplus. After buying a billion masks from China, the worldwide hub of the fashion industry ramped up its own mask production, but the demand wasn’t there leaving manufacturers with a 40 million mask surplus.

The initial drive to produce 5 million masks a day had left a lot of masks, many of them fashionable fabric masks, useless but pretty, sitting in warehouses with nowhere to go.

As the summer heat wore on, inspectors marched through French workplaces to check that everyone was masked. In a nod to class privileges, bosses were allowed to unmask in their private offices, but workers were forced to keep masks on unless they had 13 feet of space.

Still, 78% of French people polled claimed that they studiously wore their masks.

How well did that work out?

France recently passed 1.1 million confirmed cases and hit a record of over 52,000 cases in one day. While the media has been warning that the numbers are spinning out of control in the United States after this country passed 80,000 cases in a day, France’s numbers are far worse.

America, after all, has a much larger population than France.

Despite its strenuous mask regime, France became the country with the fifth largest number of cases, falling behind larger countries like America and Russia.

And it’s not alone.

In Spain, where 86% of people wear masks, the government has declared a six month state of emergency with nightly curfews and gatherings limited to 6 people. The only legal reason to leave your house after 11 PM or before 6 AM is to go to work or deal with an emergency.

Spain hit the 1 million mark even before France did.

And that's despite a nationwide mask mandate back in May, along with a ban on public smoking, making it one of the first European countries to go all in on masks.

Even though masks became more widespread in Spain than most of the rest of the continent, and the country whose totalitarian past lies close to the surface, has unleashed some of the toughest lockdown measures, this is now Spain's third coronavirus resurgence.

Italy, where 81% wear masks, responded to yet another spike with a fourth set of lockdown restrictions, shutting down gyms and theaters, while forcing restaurants and bars to close by 6 PM. No one is allowed to watch soccer games in person or go to wedding receptions.

Despite all the masks, Italy still holds the record for the second-highest death toll in Europe.

Meanwhile in Sweden, only 5% wear masks. The authorities have never recommended them believing that they are a waste of time. Sweden has used a soft lockdown that avoided fines and mandates. And the media in lockdown countries has spent the months lambasting Sweden and warning the rest of the world not to use it as a model.

But Sweden isn’t alone. In Denmark hardly anyone wears masks. And in Norway, less than a sixth do.

In the UK, where less than a third of Britons wear masks, the death rate is only a little higher than Italy, and it still hasn’t hit the 1 million mark despite a larger population.

In Europe, as in America, masks are a cultural, not medical, practice. The people likeliest and unlikeliest to wear them have cultural similarities. And they wear them for the same reason that the Biden campaign embraced wearing masks, not as a plan, but as a cultural symbol.

Wearing masks is not a plan to stop the virus, but it is a fetish of conformity. That is why so many politicians use the language of “respect” rather than medicine to encourage the practice.

Medical practices don’t need to be respected. Cultural beliefs, especially irrational ones, do.

The discomfort of wearing masks, especially in the hot southern countries like France, Spain, and Italy, perversely seem to affirm their effectiveness in the same way that some mouthwash manufacturers make their brands taste astringent to seem more medicinal.

People are trained to think that what is medically effective is also physically uncomfortable.

When the Black Death arrived, medieval Europeans resorted to a variety of practices and cures, some useful and many useless, some that had roots in a legitimate concept of illness, others that were little more than voodoo, to deal with a pandemic that had no easy answers.

The obsession with masks, an actual useful medical tool transformed into a cargo cult fetish, has echoes of the medieval misuse of legitimate medical practices during the Black Death.

In some medical environments masks may offer potential benefits, but mandating that entire populations wear them accomplishes nothing except keeping the French textile industry employed. That and the assorted unhealthy consequences of constantly wearing a mask.

But whether it’s using a severed snake to try and draw out the Black Death or wearing a mask, people in an outbreak feel the need to grasp at some means of controlling the threat. And they become angry at anyone who doesn’t appear to respect their chosen control mechanism.

Wearing a mask is meant to prevent the spread of the virus, not to protect the wearer. A CDC study showed that 88% of those infected wore masks. But the medieval logic of masks falsely assumes that wearing a mask protects you from the virus and that the virus only spreads due to those who don’t wear masks. And that creates natural scapegoats for the pandemic.

The Biden campaign and the Democrats are cynically cashing in on these pandemic fears.

"We’re in a circumstance where the president thus far and still has no plan, no comprehensive plan," Biden ranted at the debate. "What I would do is make sure we have everyone encouraged to wear a mask all the time."

France, Italy, and Spain tried that. It didn’t work.

The European countries most obsessed with masks are doing the worst. Nearly universal mask wearing in those countries has done little to prevent a surge. Democrats have a weakness for wanting to be like the Europeans. But the only thing the Biden mask mandate would do is turn us into France. The French wore masks through the summer heat only to have three times the cases per capita and per day as the Americans who never adopted a mask mandate.

Maybe, instead of Americans adopting the Biden mask mandate and becoming more like France, it’s time the French tried a little bit of freedom and being more like Americans.

The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it.

Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them.

China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model.

We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the People’s Republic of China, but it failed in every free country that tried it. Lockdowns eventually gave way to reopenings and new waves of infection. This was always going to happen because not even the more socialist European countries have the police state or the compliant populations of a Communist dictatorship.

Desperate, the public health experts adopted China’s compulsive mask wearing, a cultural practice that predates the virus, as if wearing a few flimsy scraps of fiber would fix everything.

It hadn’t and it didn’t.

But by then the public health experts and the media that had touted them were moving fully into the scapegoat portion of the crisis. The China Model had failed, all that was left was shifting the blame to more conservative and traditional populations, and away from the cultural elites.

In New York City that meant falsely blaming Chassidic Jews for the second wave. From Maine to San Francisco, Democrat leaders and their media blamed conservative Christian gatherings. Their national counterparts loudly blamed President Trump for not wearing a mask all the time.

A New York Times headline captured the cynical broad spectrum cultural scapegoating with, "N.Y.C. Threatens Orthodox Jewish Areas on Virus, but Trump’s Impact Is Seen."

The uncomfortable truth was that the lockdowns had failed economically, socially, and medically.

Even blue states and cities were no longer able to carry the impossible economic burden much longer. The Black Lives Matter riots and the onset of summer broke the #StayHome taboos, and medically, the lockdowns had been useless efforts to meet a fake crisis of hospital overflows.

America, like too many other countries, put the experts in charge and they failed. Miserably.

Democrats claimed that they were superior because they were “listening to the science”. They weren’t listening to the science, which is not an oracle and does not give interviews. Instead, they were obeying a class of officials, some of them whom weren’t even medical professionals, who impressed elected officials and the public with statistical sleight of hand. And little else.

The entire lockdown to testing to reopening pipeline that we adopted wholesale was a typical bureaucratic and corporate exercise, complete with the illusion of metrics and goals, that suffered from all the typical problems of bureaucracy, academia, and corporate culture.

The system that determines reopenings and closings is an echo chamber that measures its own functioning while having little to do with the real world. Testing has become a cargo cult exercise that confuses the map with the world, and the virus with the spreadsheet. It gamifies fighting the pandemic while dragging entire countries into an imaginary world based on its invented rules.

When the media reports a rise or decrease in positive tests, it’s treated as if it’s an assessment of the virus, rather than an incomplete data point that measures its own measurements.

The daily coronavirus reports have become the equivalent of Soviet harvest reports. They sound impressive, mean absolutely nothing, and are the pet obsession of a bureaucracy that not only has no understanding of the problem, but its grip on power has made it the problem.

The smarter medical professionals understand that the theories have failed, while the administrators who put the theories into practice confused their system with science. The politicians listen to the administrators and when they tell us to trust the science, they mean the bureaucracy. The medical professionals can’t and won’t backtrack now. It’s too late.

The best and brightest spent the worst part of a year shuffling rationales like a gambler’s trick deck, wrecked the economy, and sent tens of thousands of infected patients into nursing homes to infect the residents, accounting for at least a third of the national coronavirus death toll.

Like most national leadership disasters, it was a combination of misjudgement, understandable mistakes, tragic errors, and acts of incomprehensible stupidity or unmitigated evil.

A lot of people are dead, a lot more are out of work, and the problem is far from solved. Someone will have to be blamed and they certainly don’t want it to be themselves.

The lockdown and the rule of the public health experts has become too big to fail.

Mistakes were made, as the saying goes. Projections were built based on bad and incomplete data. Everyone followed the path of least resistance by doing what China had done. And everyone in the system, from the experts to the administrators to the politicians to the media, is complicit. That makes the massive error the world has been living under too big to fail.

There are only two choices left. Admit the magnitude of the mistake or find someone to blame.

The establishment that touted the experts is blaming its political and cultural enemies, the people it has been priming the public to see as strange, selfish, irrational, and dangerous. And also the very people who have been the loudest opponents of lockdown culture.

Given a choice between admitting the system was wrong or blaming the system’s failure on its critics, the establishment has followed the same pattern as every authoritarian leftist regime.

The lockdowns didn’t fail, they were failed by conservative Christians and Jews, by President Trump, by people who were too selfish to give up their lives, businesses, and religion for the greater good. And if only they had, the coronavirus would be gone and everything would be fine.

The China Model promised something that its proponents quickly knew it couldn’t deliver. Everything since then has been a scam to cover up the original quackery and hackery. The louder they blame critics and dissenters for the failure, the more obvious the coverup becomes.

Lockdown culture needs patsies to take the fall for why it didn’t work. Like every leftist social and economic experiment, its defenders are left to argue that it was never properly tried. If only it weren’t for Trump, and for the dissenters, for the Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn, for Christian weddings in San Francisco and Maine, for gyms, bars, and beaches, it would have worked.

Yet the simple truth is that the China Model hasn’t worked in any country that isn’t China.

It doesn’t matter who the leader or the ruling party are, whether the public wore or didn’t wear masks, the resurgence is not a political phenomenon, science doesn’t speak, and the virus doesn’t listen. But of all the countries in the world, America was especially ill-fitted to adopt an authoritarian public health model. The sheer size, openness, and diversity of the country makes us unique and should have made it abundantly obvious that no such system would work.

Anyone but an expert or administrator would have understood that these plans were doomed.

But what the system failed to accomplish in battling the virus, it made up for by providing the leadership that had enacted it with a wonderful opportunity to settle its political scores.

The lockdowns don’t exist anymore as a prophylactic policy, but as a political vendetta. The more people die, the more businesses are ruined, the more everyone suffers, the more vicious the vendetta grows as it hunts for scapegoats, political and religious, for the great error of terror.

Leftist regimes turn to political terror as their policies fail. When the idealism dies, and the theories fall apart, the organizers pursue misery for the sake of misery, using fear, deprivation, and hate to maintain their grip on power while crushing the political threats to their rule.

The rule of the experts isn’t fighting the virus. It has become the virus.

Every year, Shiite Muslims in Flushing, Queens conduct the Arbaeen, a procession in honor of Mohammed's grandson whose death at the hands of a Sunni caliph marked the pivotal break between Shiites and Sunnis, slapping their faces and chests for their beheaded Imam Hussein.

Queens now has a large Muslim population, and regular fall processions of wailing crowds.

“I have to say to the Orthodox community tomorrow, ‘If you’re not willing to live with these rules, then I’m going to close the synagogues.’” Governor Andrew Cuomo told religious Jews.

His basis for the decree was a photo of mourners who weren’t practicing social distancing at a funeral. But the photo of a crowd of Orthodox Jews on Cuomo’s slide was from 2006.

It was a very different message than Cuomo’s condemnation of bigotry when he had insisted, “There is zero evidence that people of Asian descent bear any additional responsibility for the transmission of the coronavirus." The new message is, don’t blame the Asians, blame the Jews.

They did go to a funeral in 2006.