The New Yorker just ran its second big negative piece on Ron DeSantis in a week, proof of how much the woke media fears the governor of Florida. (Yes, I read the New Yorker so you don’t have to.)
The article is nominally about DeSantis’s support for age-appropriate teaching of gender and sexuality in public schools. Or, as the Democrats like to call it, “Don’t Say Gay.” The wokesters have not figured out that label is not quite the devastating comeback they think.
Plenty of parents of six-year-olds are fine with not having teachers say “gay” - they think that even if they support same-sex marriage (as I do), they and not outsiders should decide what their first- or second-graders hear about sex and family structures. Then again, these are the people who thought “defund the police” was an electoral winner, so their political instincts may not be the best.
But I digress, briefly. As you would expect, the article treats DeSantis as a political opportunist. But, unlike most woke media reporters these days, the author actually took the time both to talk to conservatives who support DeSantis’s views and to try to understand why those views are gaining so much ground right now. (As opposed to just repeating Fox News misinformation racism misogyny America is the worst endlessly.)
The result was something close to the truth - and the best explanation I have seen for the way Covid continues to drive our politics, even if no one is talking about it anymore. I urge you to read these three paragraphs - especially the sentence I have bolded - closely:
When I asked Republican activists and operatives about the rise of the school issues, they told a very similar story, one that began with the pandemic, during which many parents came to believe that their interests (in keeping their kids in school) diverged with those of the teachers and administrators. As Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, put it to me, parents who were in many cases apolitical “became concerned about these overwrought lockdowns, and then when they asked question after question, there was no transparency about them, which led them to pay more attention when their kids were on Zoom. They overheard things being taught. They asked questions about curricula. They were just stonewalled every step of the way.” The battles regarding the covid lockdowns, Roberts told me, opened the way for everything that came after. “This is the key thing,” he said. “It started with questions about masking and other aspects of the lockdowns.”
Both parties right now are trying to answer the question of how fundamentally covid has changed politics. “From 2008 to 2020, elections were decided on the question of fairness—Obama ’08, Obama ’12, and Trump ’16 were all premised on the idea that someone else was getting too much, and you were getting too little, and it was unfair,” Danny Franklin, a partner at the Democratic strategy firm Bully Pulpit Interactive and a pollster for both Obama campaigns, told me. But the pandemic and the crises that followed (war, inflation, energy pressures) were not really about fairness but an amorphous sense of chaos. “People are looking for some control over their lives—in focus groups, in polls, once you start looking for that you see it everywhere,” Franklin said.
Both parties had shifted, in his view. Biden had sought to reassure Americans that the government, guided by experts, could reassert its control over events, from the pandemic to the crisis in energy supply. Republicans, meanwhile, had focussed on assuring voters that they would deliver control over a personal sphere of influence: schools that would teach what you wanted them to teach, a government that would make it easier, not harder, to get your hands on a gun. A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic, but it served a very current political need. Franklin said, “It’s a way for Republicans to tell people that they can have back control of their lives.”
The problem - for Biden, for AOC, for the New York Times, for all the people in Park Slope who went to the right schools and believe in the current thing and know paradise is just around the corner if only we raise our taxes a little more - is that “the government, guided by experts” hasn’t had a great couple of years.
To say the least.
The profound failure of lockdowns and now vaccines have woken many average folks to the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, expert overconfidence, and authoritarianism in the name of safety.
They took our rights. The media and public health authorities would like you to forget the closed playgrounds and shuttered malls and mask mandates of 2020. And the vaccine mandates of last fall. They want you to forget that for a while, the federal government tried to take the right to work from tens of millions of unvaccinated people. State and local governments went even further; and countries like Canada and Australia further still. UNTIL 10 DAYS AGO, CANADA DID NOT ALLOW UNVACCINATED PEOPLE ON PLANES - effectively curtailing their right to travel in a country that stretches more than 4,000 miles from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
And they took our rights FOR NOTHING.
You and I and they know everything they did failed.
The proof sits in super-cold freezers where millions of vials of mRNA shots, the greatest medical breakthrough since fentanyl, sit slowly decaying. The proof is in the hospitals and pharmacies that are not offering those jabs to kids under 5, because demand is near-zero… and maybe because some of the physician-administrators who make millions of dollars a year running those hospitals know in their hearts that the risk-benefit analysis for mRNA shots for kids is all risk/no benefit and actually want to do the right thing for once. Not enough to say anything publicly, let’s not get crazy, but enough to make the shots a little harder to get.
And Dr. Anthony Fauci - double-boosted Anthony Fauci - gave us some more proof today.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer megalomaniac. (This is your excuse to retire, Tony! You got yerself the long Covid!)
So, no, I don’t plan to let Covid and the vaccines go anytime soon. Those of us on Team Reality can’t let the Faucis of the world run from their failure, we can’t pretend it didn’t happen. No mulligans here. Especially because the mRNA shots may have long-run risks we are still just beginning to see.
So the New Yorker frames the proposition the two parties are offering exactly right. The Democrats offer expertise, Ivy League brilliance, the smartest folks in the room; the Republicans personal control.
But why wouldn’t people trust their own judgment over that of “experts” after the disaster of the last couple of years? What the left cannot seem to understand is that I’m not the problem - which is why kicking me off Twitter didn’t save the mRNA shots or the mandates. Ron DeSantis is not the problem either.
Reality is the problem for the left. Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast.
The FDA and CDC should be immediately dissolved, and everyone involved put in handcuffs. Here is how evil this covid agenda really is:
The FDA recently approved the pfizer injection for 0-4 year olds knowing full well how extremely deadly the poison is. During the public comment section of the approval panel debate, Sam Dodson called in and ripped the panelists a new asshole--citing a number of sinister health risks:
The trials the FDA based the 0-4 approval on were a ludicrously fraudulent atrocity. In the end only 3 children were used to determine the injection's safety and efficacy:
Once approved, CDC director Walensky put out a video smirking, smiling, and overtly jubilant that the injection had been approved for babies and toddlers. Here she is gleaming into the camera and encouraging parents to get the poison into their children knowing full well it will kill and maim them in enormous numbers:
As an investor over many decades, I learned that trusting the "financial experts" was a very good way to lose your money. Now I am learning that trusting the "government experts" is a very good way to lose your individual rights. Good piece, Alex.
Sorry to the nonbelievers out there, but this is what happens when you get rid of God. Millions of tiny gods creating their own realities at the expense of actual, created, big R Reality. The end result being we end up living in our glorious leaders' Wishful Thinking Land. What could possibly go wrong?
Re flights for the uninjected in Canada -- we may be allowed to fly on planes now -- all masked up of course -- but when we return from a foreign trip we're required to quarantine for FOURTEEN DAYS. People who had the injections, whether voluntarily or by coercion, do not have to quarantine. No uninjected person I know is planning to fly anywhere until that illogical and unfair requirement is lifted. It's clear that the government is punishing us for not submitting to their vax mandates.
I moved to FL from IL and couldn't be happier or feel safer. The lefties just can't stand the fact that DiSantis was correct in EVERYTHING! I feel for my nieces and nephews who can't leave IL because of their jobs. Additionally the airlines, and Delta for sure , won't hire anyone who hasn't gotten the jab....wonder why there is an employee shortage in the airline industry? That's your answer. I still find it incredible that the airline industry, which is essential, was decimated by the total lack of common sense and totalitarian edicts that came from Faucci's mouth....
There has never been a wider chasm between reality and perception. The "experts" simply don't realize that they are blithering idiots. Having gotten high on 6 decades of phony money printing largess, the "leaders" in government, military, public health, big media and big business have devolved into nothing more than goulish parasites who create little of value and could not survive for a week if left to their own wits. Note to the idiocracy: we don't want you running our lives or subverting & polluting all of the various parts of our lives that are none of your business. We wish to be free of your madness and will not back down an inch until we've burned your rotten empire of lies to the ground. These clowns fear Desantis because he is consistent on the one thing most decent people care about: their desire to be free from intrusive degenerates.
And meanwhile in Vaccanada the MSM today has run stories on reimposing masks and in Quebec the problem of people having the power to make their own health choices. If the vaxxines worked, then why haven’t they worked? If masks worked, then why haven’t they worked? If lockdowns worked, then why haven’t they worked? We are no longer in the domain of science, we are in the domain of hubris.
Covid poked sleeping conservative bear. My town leans red but school boards & council members lean liberal. Parents fought school boards, got rid of masks & challenged incumbents in last school board election. All incumbents lost & city council races are headed same direction. Scenario copy/paste-able around US.
100%. I'm with you. I have zero interest in letting up on Covid and the vaccines. Leaders and so-called experts need to be called to account. Looking forward to upcoming elections when Team Reality, aka Team Humanity, shows these facistic tyrants the door.
Thank you for this thought provoking piece! "Reality is the problem for the left. Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast."
The dems will try everything in their power to get rid of "reality" and make you forget...so...
I hope voters REMEMBER what happened to the unvaccinated around the world.
I hope they REMEMBER how many friends and family suffered injury from covid shots.
I hope they REMEMBER that the shots neither protect you from catching covid nor spreading it so the tyranny was useless.
I hope they REMEMBER that if you didn't take the poison in many blue areas (in the United States) you couldn't go into stores, movie theaters, and couldn't keep your job or stay in college.
I hope they REMEMBER that Fauci has been wrong at everything.
I hope they REMEMBER that kids were being yelled at and discriminated against because a mask was slightly below their nose.
I hope they REMEMBER that fully masked kids at track meets were collapsing.
I hope they REMEMBER all the young adult athletes that are having heart attacks and dying in their sleep (SADS) right now.
I hope they REMEMBER the tyranny, coercion, bullying, bribing, and force used to control you and coerce you to take a shot of poison (even if you've already had covid).
I, for one, will never ever forget--EVER and for the rest of my life I suspect I will vote accordingly.
The legacy media has a primal hatred for De Santis because he challenges their role as the cheerleaders for the woke left, which DeSantis fearlessly battles on all fronts without Trump's tweets
The left are terrified of desantis even more than trump for one reason. Trump is a battering ram, you can hear and see him coming a mile away. Desantis is a silent battering ram, you won't know he is there until he is right next to you. Silent and deadly. I would take either one for president.
These shots are fucking evil. How do you explain a pregnant woman, who in order to keep working just HAD to be vaccinated, going through a full term and delivering a stillborn baby. When I found out about it last night, I was positively sick over it.
This is no mere "moral panic" by "anachronistic conservatives." Teaching kids in school that their sex was assigned, that they may have been born into the wrong body, that they choose their gender identities and pronouns and their own parents dare not question them, etc. This literal brainwashing of children leads to confusion and in many cases, hormones and surgeries. And it is becoming more and more common with each passing year. It is this issue that opened my eyes to the anti-science compelled speech insanity that has taken over my former party and I will gladly vote for DeSantis and donate to his campaign should he choose to run in 2024. His standing up to corporate transactivism sealed the deal for me.
The hit piece by the New Yorker demonstrates how much the Left fears DeSantis. I’d vote for him if I was a US citizen and I would have voted for Bernie Sanders last time! Just one thing: a US researcher - I think he’s some kind of behavioural psychologist but can’t remember his name - said that people think that voters vote their interests - but they don’t, they vote their values. While I think that is not always true for everyone in all circumstances, I think it is often true and especially so this time around. That’s why many people who were locked up and had every aspect of their lives controlled by the government for 2 years years now value personal freedom and the right to live their lives and raise their children the way they want to above everything else, so they are switching their party allegiance to the party and the individuals who represent those values.
Do you really think ‘they’ are going to allow the election to happen? If so, dream on.
Yesterday the CDC formed a new Monkeypox emergency response team. Look for riots in August, Covid surge in September, food shortages, Monkeypox overlaid on top of everything, leading to lockdowns, masks, all mail in voting or a cancelled election. Those in power are not going to give it up. It will take more than a vote to make that happen.
Republicans: Grant me the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other.
"the government, guided by experts” hasn’t had a great couple of years."
I had to laugh at this. You mean have not had a great half century.
With their Ivy League Brilliance they have got us involved in unnecessary wars, racked up massive debt, destroyed the immigration system, made a mess out of the school system, destroyed working-class opportunity while importing other country's poverty. They caused the Great Recession... and the root causes of that mess still exist today.
The are not just Democrats, although they are mostly Democrats, they are the American political establishment. Aka The Swamp.
I really do hope that people are waking up to this reality. I worry that it is too late.... that too much power has been conceded to these incompetent boobs..
They are armed to the teeth with woke rhetorical weapons... and their primary warrior is the campus-trained female with a built-in passive aggressive victim shield. How do you fight it in the corporation when the entire HR department and much of the C-suite are either them, or weak idiots that think virtue signaling compliance with the cult is a better path toward their personal wealth accumulation?
It isn't all women of course, but the stats are clear... the enemy of the Great Experiment where individual rights and freedoms supersede those of the collective, is the cohort of educated females surrounded by weak ass men. Fauci is one of them. Biden is one of them. Mich McConnell is one of them.
From my perspective I think we are going to need a convention of the states and do some work on the Constitution and the first thing we will need to add is term limits for national politicians in the legislature.
We also need to get the damn outside money out of politics.
Lastly, we need to strengthen laws on libel, slander, anti-trust and monopoly... break up the consolidated ownership of industries... reinvigorate the small business economy and give back political control to the local level.
We need to just start deleting who departments of the federal government. Slash the federal register. Eliminate the regulatory bloat that gives these charlatans the over-sized power they don't deserve.
School choice needs to be encouraged with federal money.
Section 230 needs to be stripped from the tech companies.
Biden and Garland need to be impeached. Garland possibly prosecuted for crimes. Harris needs to be put in an asylum with Pelosi. We need to complete a complete RINO cleaning of the Senate.
But I don't think any of this will happen because as much as the pandemic did open up the eyes of voters, too many of them seem resigned to media-programmed fear and outrage... willing to give up all of their freedoms if only someone in charge will help them feel better.
The problem seems to be due to the concept of the modern phenomenon of the expert class. Previously you could have experts in many fields and disagreements could occur across the boundaries of those fields. Now that there is an expert class, for one expert to disparage or disagree with another expert within that class is verboten. To do so would then make the whole modern concept of expert be cast into doubt and the facade of superiority crumbles. An expert can't be seen to be only human!
In the modern world of experts there can only be consensus. Evidence to the contrary be damned.
"No man's life, liberty or property are safe as long as the legislature is in session" -- M. Twain
One of my favorite quotes. But Alex, as Americans, historically speaking --we always seemed to find a hero, someone to help out - just in time. Or maybe that was what I thought growing up. These government people - guided by experts - have wholly missed the mark.
What we really have is the government actually practicing medicine. Restricting the use of certain drugs, approving others - without real solid evidence in some cases. And that's what's wrong with government healthcare. You see the government cannot practice medicine. When they do its an absolute disaster.
Mr.Berenson is 100% correct about the once much vaunted New Yorker-the two articles are hack jobs instead of exploring why DeSantis is seen not just as a governor with presidential ambitions , but as an excellent governor who challenges the woke agenda on all fronts
"A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic" !!!
So is this the party line now?? et tu, New Yorker??
Let me get this straight: all the education schools in the country, plus a large chunk of colleges and public schools (esp in cities) decide that the scientifically dubious, extreme form of social constructionism known as Gender Identity needs to be taught to even the smallest children, no questions asked.
This holy dogma includes the idea that biology is irrelevant but feelings are etched in stone, that we are all "Assigned Sex at Birth" and could change at any moment to "identifying as the opposite sex" (whatever this means), that we all have a special Gender Identity that no one can question and may lead to a lifetime of hormones and surgery, which is wonderful because it means you get to be your True Self™. (This is a very warped form of egalitarianism operating under the idea that since 1 or 2 kids might be sexually confused, fairness demands that they all be sexually confused.)
And on top of this, if any parents ask questions or push back, they are stonewalled, denounced as bigots, or worst of all, your child's teacher could guide your chid thru their gender change behind your back, and the entire institution will hide it from you and call the cops if you object.
This is a "moral panic"??!??! They expect to just force this through without any objection--why, because Judith Butler said so??
Liberals and their outlets have become dishonest condescending propagandists, and though they don't see it, they have become the monster they claim to be fighting.
100% behind you on this Alex. They must NOT get to say. 'Oops. Sowee!" and walk away. NOPE. It's good to have guys like you, Pit Bull Kirsch and others on this. Never let go until we see some kind of justice.
As for Canada, they may be letting the unvaccinated on planes again but they must still quarantine if they travel abroad upon their return - for 14 days. 14 days hasn't been necessary since at least early 2021. So that's this little tyrannical POS's way of being a vindictive jerk-off. Oh, how I loath the Liberal/NDP/Bloc Quebecois that have upheld these senseless mandates possibly fracturing the civil order permanently. And our 'experts' continue to support mandates. The other day my brother-in-law told me a story of a triple-vaccinated friend who came back from Europe. The person tested positive at the airport but no quarantine and off she went. But a healthy, unvaccinated person (some of whom have natural immunity) faces a quarantine if they go for a couple of days to Vermont. Make totes sense. To Ralph Ralph on coke maybe.
And yes, they do check and bust your balls. It's an outrageous invasion of personal and medical privacy. You have to have virtual testing with some clown from the government on Day 1 and 8.
This is what's become of Clown Canada.
On the good side, apparently according to an Angus-Reid poll (a big one here) only 8% of Canadians 'fully support' Poptart Lasagne.
Then you see the turd Governor of California, Gruesome Newsom, running ads that are paid for with his campaign dollars in, get this, Florida. Yes, the governor of CA is running ads in Florida. The left is scared of DeSantis and his popularity in a fashion never seen before. Is it possible they fear DeSantis more than 45 himself?
Don’t NY or California my Texas or Florida. Keep your stupidity where you live! If you want to wear a mask 24/7 stay where you’re at. If you want to force “vaccines” on people, stay where you’re at. If you believe there’s more than two genders, stay where you’re at.
The Democrat Mob will not go away even after a November trouncing. They need to be confronted with force to end this. Cops should never be retreating---ever. Until we see this--chaos will continue.
You're absolutely right. We cannot let this go. The fact they took our rights away is not even the worst part of this entire fiasco. People have died because of this. Suicides, domestic violence, civil unrest...to say nothing of the mounting deaths and injuries from this so-called miracle 'vaccine'.
Even worse, in my opinion, is what this did to us as a society. It turned us against each other in a way I never imagined. In Canada, there were people having very open and frank conversations about 'what to do about the unvaccinated', which included everything from denying them the right to purchase basic necessities, to arbitrarily arresting them and putting them in camps, right up to even killing them. This was actually cruelly encouraged by our own head of state, Justin Trudeau (a complete idiot and sadistic man child, but a head of state nonetheless).
This tore apart professional relationships, friendships, and even families - this, too, was also for NOTHING.
To me, these things cannot ever be fully reconciled. I understand that's on me and I'll bear that cross. But I think it will take several generations to heal these scars, if it can even be done. Keep in mind that this is not over yet, either.
Exceptional Alex! This is exactly on point. Every neighbor I speak to now(all highly Liberal) has figured out that none of the elite's mandates worked and now they are wondering what to do about their "vertigo" or "heart palpitations" or "stroke symptoms"
Covid proselytism disappeared from the media like a magician disappearing a rabbit...poof. Gone. But what is taking shape on another stage is the global pandemic treaty. The WHO is preparing the treaty to give itself unmitigated power to implement policy responses to "pandemics." This disappearing act of Covid concern might be the calm before the storm (of new lethal variants). How nice it will be for treaty-signatories to absolve themselves of having to push hard and be accountable for detested-by-many mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports and all the other indefensible policies that might be coming. One can just imagine Biden and Trudeau et al. playing up the magnificent and inspiring cooperation of nations in instituting a supranational bureaucracy to deal with the global threat of pandemics. The presidents and prime ministers can then say, "It's not up to us what measures to take. It is up to the settled-science experts and so we support and will abide by all WHO edicts to protect the citizens of our country and the world from this health crisis." The power to govern by elected officials of sovereign nations (however perturbing and alarming their records) will be victim to another sleight of hand in the chicanery leading toward world governance. What then can outliers like DeSantis do in the face of the in-liars who demand obedience to the WHO crazy-making, fertility-diminishing, immune system-destroying policies?
The people I met there were very much the "Excellent Sheep" Professor Deresiewicz describes at Yale.
My classmates were excellent at being perfectly what the professors wanted them to be. They were all used to being, essentially, perfect in the eyes of their teachers. There was no risk taking, no rebellion, no desire to stand out unless by standing out you meant being the best at fitting in.
Everyone was bound for law school or medical school or Wall Street or the top consulting firms or DC and did everything to protect that narrow track.
Everything I've seen these past 2 years out of government/academia/media is exactly what I'd expect from the people I knew -- total group think dressed up with technocratic Kabbalah.
Democrats always wanting more control remains ingrained in their Plantation Slave-owner DNA. That will never change — not even the mRNA vaccines can accomplish that miracle.
Though Covid lockdowns may have crystallized the public mood, government incompetence and deceit had become more obvious, in a variety of ways, in recent years. One could say it began with “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” Benghazi debacle, interminable war in Afghanistan, NSA domestic spying, Russia hoax, etc. That Trump was able to right the economic ship in ways not imagined, to be followed by the current turmoil only highlighted the prior and current incompetences.
The issue for me is how many businesses were destroyed and folks put out of work over policies that did nothing. It was a VIRUS ! As our friend Alex says it's gonna virus. However it was no challenge to the Spanish Flu that killed 50mm people. Think about that. This all boils down to power and control. Folks had best wakeup and stop electing idiots to office
Alex, I'm GLAD you and many of us won't let the vaccine issue go - because to do so would be to turn a blind eye on all of the government/'expert' abuse you point out and that many of us suffered under the last 2+ years. If we do not pursue answers, accountability and justice then we open the door to letting this happen again and again. As tired of hearing about covid/vaccines as we all are, we must continue to pursue the truth and open the eyes of all complacent and ignorant Americans - or at least as many as possible.
I certainly won't forget anytime soon. BOTH of my young adult kids (the most vulnerable category for myocarditis/least vulnerable to covid) could have lost good jobs if the 'experts' had had their way. These were jobs they worked their a**** off to get. Screw these people and the horse they rode in on. They have showed us who they are and now we have to believe them.
Wokeism...another huge pile of liberal crappola to completely ignore. Other than protecting your children from the horrors and terrors of the left and democrats who seem to love the destruction of everything they don't like.
If the repubs fail to come up with some solid answers for leftism, apart from basically its one man army, DeSantis, they will be bigger failures than The Dummy and his ruling cabal of terrorists. It's concerning to see so few repubs supporting DeSantis or at least some of his ideas and initiatives. More politicians of a different stripe are not the answer. Leadership is especially when it goes beyond the nonsense of politics.
On Covid, schools, and the death of the liberal expert class
The FDA and CDC should be immediately dissolved, and everyone involved put in handcuffs. Here is how evil this covid agenda really is:
The FDA recently approved the pfizer injection for 0-4 year olds knowing full well how extremely deadly the poison is. During the public comment section of the approval panel debate, Sam Dodson called in and ripped the panelists a new asshole--citing a number of sinister health risks:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/CDPaS98LipNP/
The trials the FDA based the 0-4 approval on were a ludicrously fraudulent atrocity. In the end only 3 children were used to determine the injection's safety and efficacy:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/pLqCvTlyifMS/
Once approved, CDC director Walensky put out a video smirking, smiling, and overtly jubilant that the injection had been approved for babies and toddlers. Here she is gleaming into the camera and encouraging parents to get the poison into their children knowing full well it will kill and maim them in enormous numbers:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/DARrVJoP2aL9/
As an investor over many decades, I learned that trusting the "financial experts" was a very good way to lose your money. Now I am learning that trusting the "government experts" is a very good way to lose your individual rights. Good piece, Alex.
As I live in FL, I am very thankful for Gov. DeSantis and his commonsense approach to everything. He does not suffer fools gladly.
Sorry to the nonbelievers out there, but this is what happens when you get rid of God. Millions of tiny gods creating their own realities at the expense of actual, created, big R Reality. The end result being we end up living in our glorious leaders' Wishful Thinking Land. What could possibly go wrong?
“The greatest medical breakthrough since fentanyl…” lol. That’s good
Re flights for the uninjected in Canada -- we may be allowed to fly on planes now -- all masked up of course -- but when we return from a foreign trip we're required to quarantine for FOURTEEN DAYS. People who had the injections, whether voluntarily or by coercion, do not have to quarantine. No uninjected person I know is planning to fly anywhere until that illogical and unfair requirement is lifted. It's clear that the government is punishing us for not submitting to their vax mandates.
I moved to FL from IL and couldn't be happier or feel safer. The lefties just can't stand the fact that DiSantis was correct in EVERYTHING! I feel for my nieces and nephews who can't leave IL because of their jobs. Additionally the airlines, and Delta for sure , won't hire anyone who hasn't gotten the jab....wonder why there is an employee shortage in the airline industry? That's your answer. I still find it incredible that the airline industry, which is essential, was decimated by the total lack of common sense and totalitarian edicts that came from Faucci's mouth....
There has never been a wider chasm between reality and perception. The "experts" simply don't realize that they are blithering idiots. Having gotten high on 6 decades of phony money printing largess, the "leaders" in government, military, public health, big media and big business have devolved into nothing more than goulish parasites who create little of value and could not survive for a week if left to their own wits. Note to the idiocracy: we don't want you running our lives or subverting & polluting all of the various parts of our lives that are none of your business. We wish to be free of your madness and will not back down an inch until we've burned your rotten empire of lies to the ground. These clowns fear Desantis because he is consistent on the one thing most decent people care about: their desire to be free from intrusive degenerates.
And meanwhile in Vaccanada the MSM today has run stories on reimposing masks and in Quebec the problem of people having the power to make their own health choices. If the vaxxines worked, then why haven’t they worked? If masks worked, then why haven’t they worked? If lockdowns worked, then why haven’t they worked? We are no longer in the domain of science, we are in the domain of hubris.
This is correct. Whatever “they” are telling us - i now do the opposite.
Covid poked sleeping conservative bear. My town leans red but school boards & council members lean liberal. Parents fought school boards, got rid of masks & challenged incumbents in last school board election. All incumbents lost & city council races are headed same direction. Scenario copy/paste-able around US.
100%. I'm with you. I have zero interest in letting up on Covid and the vaccines. Leaders and so-called experts need to be called to account. Looking forward to upcoming elections when Team Reality, aka Team Humanity, shows these facistic tyrants the door.
Thank you for this thought provoking piece! "Reality is the problem for the left. Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast."
The dems will try everything in their power to get rid of "reality" and make you forget...so...
I hope voters REMEMBER what happened to the unvaccinated around the world.
I hope they REMEMBER how many friends and family suffered injury from covid shots.
I hope they REMEMBER that the shots neither protect you from catching covid nor spreading it so the tyranny was useless.
I hope they REMEMBER that if you didn't take the poison in many blue areas (in the United States) you couldn't go into stores, movie theaters, and couldn't keep your job or stay in college.
I hope they REMEMBER that Fauci has been wrong at everything.
I hope they REMEMBER that kids were being yelled at and discriminated against because a mask was slightly below their nose.
I hope they REMEMBER that fully masked kids at track meets were collapsing.
I hope they REMEMBER all the young adult athletes that are having heart attacks and dying in their sleep (SADS) right now.
I hope they REMEMBER the tyranny, coercion, bullying, bribing, and force used to control you and coerce you to take a shot of poison (even if you've already had covid).
I, for one, will never ever forget--EVER and for the rest of my life I suspect I will vote accordingly.
The legacy media has a primal hatred for De Santis because he challenges their role as the cheerleaders for the woke left, which DeSantis fearlessly battles on all fronts without Trump's tweets
The left are terrified of desantis even more than trump for one reason. Trump is a battering ram, you can hear and see him coming a mile away. Desantis is a silent battering ram, you won't know he is there until he is right next to you. Silent and deadly. I would take either one for president.
These shots are fucking evil. How do you explain a pregnant woman, who in order to keep working just HAD to be vaccinated, going through a full term and delivering a stillborn baby. When I found out about it last night, I was positively sick over it.
RE: "A moral panic about gender identity"
This is no mere "moral panic" by "anachronistic conservatives." Teaching kids in school that their sex was assigned, that they may have been born into the wrong body, that they choose their gender identities and pronouns and their own parents dare not question them, etc. This literal brainwashing of children leads to confusion and in many cases, hormones and surgeries. And it is becoming more and more common with each passing year. It is this issue that opened my eyes to the anti-science compelled speech insanity that has taken over my former party and I will gladly vote for DeSantis and donate to his campaign should he choose to run in 2024. His standing up to corporate transactivism sealed the deal for me.
The hit piece by the New Yorker demonstrates how much the Left fears DeSantis. I’d vote for him if I was a US citizen and I would have voted for Bernie Sanders last time! Just one thing: a US researcher - I think he’s some kind of behavioural psychologist but can’t remember his name - said that people think that voters vote their interests - but they don’t, they vote their values. While I think that is not always true for everyone in all circumstances, I think it is often true and especially so this time around. That’s why many people who were locked up and had every aspect of their lives controlled by the government for 2 years years now value personal freedom and the right to live their lives and raise their children the way they want to above everything else, so they are switching their party allegiance to the party and the individuals who represent those values.
Fauci's Paxlovid rebound after 4 shots is giving me serious schadenfreude.
The American "elites" are neither intellectual nor practical.
Do you really think ‘they’ are going to allow the election to happen? If so, dream on.
Yesterday the CDC formed a new Monkeypox emergency response team. Look for riots in August, Covid surge in September, food shortages, Monkeypox overlaid on top of everything, leading to lockdowns, masks, all mail in voting or a cancelled election. Those in power are not going to give it up. It will take more than a vote to make that happen.
Republicans: Grant me the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other.
Democrats: I WILL CONTROL EVERYTHING!
The entire Democratic platform is basically, "spank me harder, daddy". No thank you.
This is genocide. I have no other way to describe these known deadly effects of these vaccines.
The Empire has been insolvent since 2008-- QUICK look over there a ....!!!
Great piece Alex. More of this please.
"the government, guided by experts” hasn’t had a great couple of years."
I had to laugh at this. You mean have not had a great half century.
With their Ivy League Brilliance they have got us involved in unnecessary wars, racked up massive debt, destroyed the immigration system, made a mess out of the school system, destroyed working-class opportunity while importing other country's poverty. They caused the Great Recession... and the root causes of that mess still exist today.
The are not just Democrats, although they are mostly Democrats, they are the American political establishment. Aka The Swamp.
I really do hope that people are waking up to this reality. I worry that it is too late.... that too much power has been conceded to these incompetent boobs..
They are armed to the teeth with woke rhetorical weapons... and their primary warrior is the campus-trained female with a built-in passive aggressive victim shield. How do you fight it in the corporation when the entire HR department and much of the C-suite are either them, or weak idiots that think virtue signaling compliance with the cult is a better path toward their personal wealth accumulation?
It isn't all women of course, but the stats are clear... the enemy of the Great Experiment where individual rights and freedoms supersede those of the collective, is the cohort of educated females surrounded by weak ass men. Fauci is one of them. Biden is one of them. Mich McConnell is one of them.
From my perspective I think we are going to need a convention of the states and do some work on the Constitution and the first thing we will need to add is term limits for national politicians in the legislature.
We also need to get the damn outside money out of politics.
Lastly, we need to strengthen laws on libel, slander, anti-trust and monopoly... break up the consolidated ownership of industries... reinvigorate the small business economy and give back political control to the local level.
We need to just start deleting who departments of the federal government. Slash the federal register. Eliminate the regulatory bloat that gives these charlatans the over-sized power they don't deserve.
School choice needs to be encouraged with federal money.
Section 230 needs to be stripped from the tech companies.
Biden and Garland need to be impeached. Garland possibly prosecuted for crimes. Harris needs to be put in an asylum with Pelosi. We need to complete a complete RINO cleaning of the Senate.
But I don't think any of this will happen because as much as the pandemic did open up the eyes of voters, too many of them seem resigned to media-programmed fear and outrage... willing to give up all of their freedoms if only someone in charge will help them feel better.
The New Yorker tries to figure this out, 2 years after it became obvious to anyone paying attention.
The problem seems to be due to the concept of the modern phenomenon of the expert class. Previously you could have experts in many fields and disagreements could occur across the boundaries of those fields. Now that there is an expert class, for one expert to disparage or disagree with another expert within that class is verboten. To do so would then make the whole modern concept of expert be cast into doubt and the facade of superiority crumbles. An expert can't be seen to be only human!
In the modern world of experts there can only be consensus. Evidence to the contrary be damned.
"No man's life, liberty or property are safe as long as the legislature is in session" -- M. Twain
One of my favorite quotes. But Alex, as Americans, historically speaking --we always seemed to find a hero, someone to help out - just in time. Or maybe that was what I thought growing up. These government people - guided by experts - have wholly missed the mark.
What we really have is the government actually practicing medicine. Restricting the use of certain drugs, approving others - without real solid evidence in some cases. And that's what's wrong with government healthcare. You see the government cannot practice medicine. When they do its an absolute disaster.
Republicans want an armed guard at every school.
Democrats want a drag queen at every school.
That would be a devastatingly effective ad. Hence while we will never see it.
This is an excellent piece Alex! Killer work my man. Have a great Fourth of July weekend!
desantis: immediately becoming the best governor in history seems incredible, but you can kind of cheat by just doing the opposite of joe biden
Mr.Berenson is 100% correct about the once much vaunted New Yorker-the two articles are hack jobs instead of exploring why DeSantis is seen not just as a governor with presidential ambitions , but as an excellent governor who challenges the woke agenda on all fronts
"A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic" !!!
So is this the party line now?? et tu, New Yorker??
Let me get this straight: all the education schools in the country, plus a large chunk of colleges and public schools (esp in cities) decide that the scientifically dubious, extreme form of social constructionism known as Gender Identity needs to be taught to even the smallest children, no questions asked.
This holy dogma includes the idea that biology is irrelevant but feelings are etched in stone, that we are all "Assigned Sex at Birth" and could change at any moment to "identifying as the opposite sex" (whatever this means), that we all have a special Gender Identity that no one can question and may lead to a lifetime of hormones and surgery, which is wonderful because it means you get to be your True Self™. (This is a very warped form of egalitarianism operating under the idea that since 1 or 2 kids might be sexually confused, fairness demands that they all be sexually confused.)
And on top of this, if any parents ask questions or push back, they are stonewalled, denounced as bigots, or worst of all, your child's teacher could guide your chid thru their gender change behind your back, and the entire institution will hide it from you and call the cops if you object.
This is a "moral panic"??!??! They expect to just force this through without any objection--why, because Judith Butler said so??
Liberals and their outlets have become dishonest condescending propagandists, and though they don't see it, they have become the monster they claim to be fighting.
“Reality wants a course correction, and in four months voters are set to deliver that message to the Democratic Party with a foghorn blast.”
Please, dear God, let it be so.
100% behind you on this Alex. They must NOT get to say. 'Oops. Sowee!" and walk away. NOPE. It's good to have guys like you, Pit Bull Kirsch and others on this. Never let go until we see some kind of justice.
As for Canada, they may be letting the unvaccinated on planes again but they must still quarantine if they travel abroad upon their return - for 14 days. 14 days hasn't been necessary since at least early 2021. So that's this little tyrannical POS's way of being a vindictive jerk-off. Oh, how I loath the Liberal/NDP/Bloc Quebecois that have upheld these senseless mandates possibly fracturing the civil order permanently. And our 'experts' continue to support mandates. The other day my brother-in-law told me a story of a triple-vaccinated friend who came back from Europe. The person tested positive at the airport but no quarantine and off she went. But a healthy, unvaccinated person (some of whom have natural immunity) faces a quarantine if they go for a couple of days to Vermont. Make totes sense. To Ralph Ralph on coke maybe.
And yes, they do check and bust your balls. It's an outrageous invasion of personal and medical privacy. You have to have virtual testing with some clown from the government on Day 1 and 8.
This is what's become of Clown Canada.
On the good side, apparently according to an Angus-Reid poll (a big one here) only 8% of Canadians 'fully support' Poptart Lasagne.
Then you see the turd Governor of California, Gruesome Newsom, running ads that are paid for with his campaign dollars in, get this, Florida. Yes, the governor of CA is running ads in Florida. The left is scared of DeSantis and his popularity in a fashion never seen before. Is it possible they fear DeSantis more than 45 himself?
Don’t NY or California my Texas or Florida. Keep your stupidity where you live! If you want to wear a mask 24/7 stay where you’re at. If you want to force “vaccines” on people, stay where you’re at. If you believe there’s more than two genders, stay where you’re at.
Great Article. I think you nailed it. And remember the new mental illness labeled by Gingrich a few days ago, "Biden's Reality Rejection Syndrome".
The Democrat Mob will not go away even after a November trouncing. They need to be confronted with force to end this. Cops should never be retreating---ever. Until we see this--chaos will continue.
Unvaccinated Canadian here.
You're absolutely right. We cannot let this go. The fact they took our rights away is not even the worst part of this entire fiasco. People have died because of this. Suicides, domestic violence, civil unrest...to say nothing of the mounting deaths and injuries from this so-called miracle 'vaccine'.
Even worse, in my opinion, is what this did to us as a society. It turned us against each other in a way I never imagined. In Canada, there were people having very open and frank conversations about 'what to do about the unvaccinated', which included everything from denying them the right to purchase basic necessities, to arbitrarily arresting them and putting them in camps, right up to even killing them. This was actually cruelly encouraged by our own head of state, Justin Trudeau (a complete idiot and sadistic man child, but a head of state nonetheless).
This tore apart professional relationships, friendships, and even families - this, too, was also for NOTHING.
To me, these things cannot ever be fully reconciled. I understand that's on me and I'll bear that cross. But I think it will take several generations to heal these scars, if it can even be done. Keep in mind that this is not over yet, either.
Exceptional Alex! This is exactly on point. Every neighbor I speak to now(all highly Liberal) has figured out that none of the elite's mandates worked and now they are wondering what to do about their "vertigo" or "heart palpitations" or "stroke symptoms"
Covid proselytism disappeared from the media like a magician disappearing a rabbit...poof. Gone. But what is taking shape on another stage is the global pandemic treaty. The WHO is preparing the treaty to give itself unmitigated power to implement policy responses to "pandemics." This disappearing act of Covid concern might be the calm before the storm (of new lethal variants). How nice it will be for treaty-signatories to absolve themselves of having to push hard and be accountable for detested-by-many mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports and all the other indefensible policies that might be coming. One can just imagine Biden and Trudeau et al. playing up the magnificent and inspiring cooperation of nations in instituting a supranational bureaucracy to deal with the global threat of pandemics. The presidents and prime ministers can then say, "It's not up to us what measures to take. It is up to the settled-science experts and so we support and will abide by all WHO edicts to protect the citizens of our country and the world from this health crisis." The power to govern by elected officials of sovereign nations (however perturbing and alarming their records) will be victim to another sleight of hand in the chicanery leading toward world governance. What then can outliers like DeSantis do in the face of the in-liars who demand obedience to the WHO crazy-making, fertility-diminishing, immune system-destroying policies?
I graduated from an Ivy League school in the 90s.
The people I met there were very much the "Excellent Sheep" Professor Deresiewicz describes at Yale.
My classmates were excellent at being perfectly what the professors wanted them to be. They were all used to being, essentially, perfect in the eyes of their teachers. There was no risk taking, no rebellion, no desire to stand out unless by standing out you meant being the best at fitting in.
Everyone was bound for law school or medical school or Wall Street or the top consulting firms or DC and did everything to protect that narrow track.
Everything I've seen these past 2 years out of government/academia/media is exactly what I'd expect from the people I knew -- total group think dressed up with technocratic Kabbalah.
Democrats always wanting more control remains ingrained in their Plantation Slave-owner DNA. That will never change — not even the mRNA vaccines can accomplish that miracle.
Though Covid lockdowns may have crystallized the public mood, government incompetence and deceit had become more obvious, in a variety of ways, in recent years. One could say it began with “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” Benghazi debacle, interminable war in Afghanistan, NSA domestic spying, Russia hoax, etc. That Trump was able to right the economic ship in ways not imagined, to be followed by the current turmoil only highlighted the prior and current incompetences.
The issue for me is how many businesses were destroyed and folks put out of work over policies that did nothing. It was a VIRUS ! As our friend Alex says it's gonna virus. However it was no challenge to the Spanish Flu that killed 50mm people. Think about that. This all boils down to power and control. Folks had best wakeup and stop electing idiots to office
Alex, I'm GLAD you and many of us won't let the vaccine issue go - because to do so would be to turn a blind eye on all of the government/'expert' abuse you point out and that many of us suffered under the last 2+ years. If we do not pursue answers, accountability and justice then we open the door to letting this happen again and again. As tired of hearing about covid/vaccines as we all are, we must continue to pursue the truth and open the eyes of all complacent and ignorant Americans - or at least as many as possible.
I certainly won't forget anytime soon. BOTH of my young adult kids (the most vulnerable category for myocarditis/least vulnerable to covid) could have lost good jobs if the 'experts' had had their way. These were jobs they worked their a**** off to get. Screw these people and the horse they rode in on. They have showed us who they are and now we have to believe them.
Wokeism...another huge pile of liberal crappola to completely ignore. Other than protecting your children from the horrors and terrors of the left and democrats who seem to love the destruction of everything they don't like.
If the repubs fail to come up with some solid answers for leftism, apart from basically its one man army, DeSantis, they will be bigger failures than The Dummy and his ruling cabal of terrorists. It's concerning to see so few repubs supporting DeSantis or at least some of his ideas and initiatives. More politicians of a different stripe are not the answer. Leadership is especially when it goes beyond the nonsense of politics.