To the left, history is fiction they can rewrite at will

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the war on statues about? It’s a case of “venting,” of course, in the emotional sense. But it’s much much more than that. The pulling down and/or defacing of statues is not some emotional spur-of-the-moment impulse, although I suppose it functions that way for some hangers-on. However, it is just one of many tactics in an overall strategy that has been coldly and methodically executed over many decades by the left, and has been reaping great rewards: to destroy actual history and create a narrative more desirable to them.

This is not about Confederate statues, in case anyone ever thought it was. That much is clear. It’s not about slave owners, either. Those were just the beginning tactics, the opening moves to lull people into a false sense about what going on.

Now it is decreed by the leftists that a statue of Lincoln next to a kneeling slave in the act of rising and with his chains finally broken, about to stand in freedom, must be destroyed. A statue paid for by actual, real life freed slaves, who gave their money to commission it. The left says it can’t be allowed anymore because the slave is kneeling, you see, and Lincoln is a white man liberator who had a few racist ideas typical of the “woke” of his time. We can’t place him in history, celebrate his accomplishments and his sacrifice, and the fact that slaves were freed, and be done with it.

No, that’s not the story the left wants told, and what the left wants it gets or you’re a racist, too. The same goes for statues of Robert Gould Shaw and all the abolitionists. Wipe em out, and obliterate the memory of their sacrifices and deny their help with the struggle for freedom, because the new story that must be heard throughout the land is that the slaves freed themselves.

There’s no question that black people were part of the process and were instrumental in it as well, particularly black freemen and freewomen. Robert Gould Shaw led the first black regiment that fought for the Union in the Civil War, and Shaw died in that endeavor. History consists of all of the above, not either/or.

But the left says that we can’t have that.

Today Scott Johnson of Powerline has published the speech of Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the statue in 1876. I’m going to except just the beginning, although the whole thing is worth reading [emphasis mine]:

I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.

Frederick Douglass was a brilliant man who had been born in slavery and escaped prior to the Civil War, fleeing north. He lived through the events that today’s leftists only read about in their carefully constructed politically correct histories. I doubt he ever imagined what would be happening a hundred and fifty years later in the name of anti-racism. He assumed the continuity of the “wise and thoughtful.” Little did he know.

Note also that Douglass keeps saying “man,” even to the point of adding “manly pride.” And yet, even back then, some abolitionists were women. I suppose that, as a woman, I could get angry at Douglass himself for that viewpoint. But you know what? I could not care less. We all are people of our times, and Douglass and Lincoln were visionaries and great great men who saw further than most of their contemporaries. I salute them both and don’t demand that they conform to some later standard of speech and thought dictated by the woke, who are most definitely not men – or women – who are “wise and thoughtful.”

If you ever looked at the 1619 Project pushed by The New York Times to rewrite American history as motivated by love and promotion of slavery, you may have wondered why the Times has persisted in pushing the tale despite widespread and bipartisan criticism of it from historians. Well, wonder no more. The Times could not care less what historians say, because the editors are not at all interested in telling accurate history. They are interested in pushing the story they wish had happened, and even more importantly, the story they want all Americans and their children to believe and to pass on to their children some day.

I fear they are succeeding – and in fact may have already succeeded. I see the evidence all around me.

[NOTE: The woman in charge of the 1619 Project, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has now been outed as being not just an anti-white racist, but one who has long subscribed to some extremely bizarre rewrites of history, such as the idea that black people discovered America first, befriended the natives, and that the pyramids in Mexico are somehow evidence of this and monuments to this early friendship. You an read the whole letter here.

This is the person heading the 1619 Project, a “history” that will be taught in many schools across the land.]

The sleep of reason: leftist Furies turning on their own, who don’t know what hit them

The New Neo Posted on by

In September of 2018 I wrote a post that began like this:

It’s no accident that the Furies were women:

“According to Hesiod’s Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes [Furies] (along with the Giants and the Meliae) emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the earth (Gaia), while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an even more primordial level—from Nyx (‘Night’), or from a union between air and mother earth.”

And then there were the Maenads:

“In Greek mythology, maenads…were the female followers of Dionysus and the most significant members of the Thiasus, the god’s retinue. Their name literally translates as ‘raving ones’…

“In Euripides’ play The Bacchae, maenads of Thebes murder King Pentheus after he bans the worship of Dionysus. Dionysus, Pentheus’ cousin, himself lures Pentheus to the woods, where the maenads tear him apart. His corpse is mutilated by his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head, believing it to be that of a lion. A group of maenads also kill Orpheus.”

I am reminded of the Furies on reading this piece by Jonathan Chait, who seems to have recently swallowed just a few tiny molecules of a red pill. Chait’s piece is entitled “An Elite Progressive LISTSERV Melts Down Over a Bogus Racism Charge,” and it’s worth reading because it offers a window into how our current Furies and maenads of the left set out to destroy anyone who doesn’t meet their standards of extreme wokism.

Here’s the setup:

On May 28, progressive election data analyst David Shor tweeted about a new paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow, showing that peaceful civil-rights protests moved public opinion toward protesters while violent protests had the opposite effect. The tweet violated a taboo in some left-wing quarters against criticizing violent protest and led within days to his firing.

What happened after that was even more bizarre. On June 11, I wrote an article briefly describing Shor’s tweet and firing. Four days later, “Progressphiles,” a LISTSERV for left-of-center data analysts, kicked Shor off. In a message to the group, the moderators described his tweet as “racist” and further accused him of having “encouraged harassment” of another member of the list…

Got that? There is a taboo against criticizing violent protest. That taboo extends to research – just as Larry Summers, for example, got booted for even suggesting research on the forbidden topic of why women aren’t more often in the ranks of the most elite scientists.

The rest of Chait’s article consists mostly of the messages in this listserv around the issue, full of typical jargon and black/white memes and unreason. In fact, “reason” is a dirty, dirty word – and remember, these are supposedly data analysts. One can assume that “left-of-center” manages to trump (pardon the expression) “data analyst” every time.

An example:

For those of you who don’t realize what makes the tweet problematic, try not to overanalyze the statistical validity of the research paper and think about the broader impact it will have if people perceive it to be true. Democrats will wave this tweet urging people to protest their oppression peacefully, which will conveniently ignore how the majority of the most visible of these actions have occurred in areas where we have Democrats running the city council. Shor had initially defended his tweet by saying “Helping Trump get re-elected is not going to lead to better behavior by cops,” and I’m certain many people here would be inclined to agree. But it is this sort of binary thinking that we have that can be so oppressive as well. Helping Trump get un-elected (in itself) is not going to lead to better behavior by cops, when the goal of abolitionist work isn’t to have better-trained/nicer/POC cops but to systematically dismantle the very institution of policing to begin with.

Or take this one:

…[I]n our spaces, racism isn’t always loud. It isn’t always brash or demanding, spewing racial slurs with a foaming tongue. Sometimes it’s quiet; steeped in seemingly innocuous data and facts. Racism can wrap itself in the trappings of credible logic and I swear it can make sense. But when you see how data can and has been used to oppress, undermine and devalue movements, it’s impossible not to offer a critical eye. The context to anything is everything. Just because it was written by a “type of person,” or has a decimal point means nothing.

Here’s the initial statement by the moderators, which is more general (my comments are in brackets):

David Shor, a member of this community, knowingly harassed and bullied another member of this space. In response to a well-deserved call in over a racist tweet [the racist tweet being the link to research that shows that riots depress Democratic votes, research that apparently was done by a black person), he encouraged harassment that led to death threats instead of choosing to learn and grow from his mistake [like Winston Smith did]. We as the Progressphiles Moderators, professionals in this industry, and as people, absolutely condemn this behavior. It is unacceptable to make people on this list and in this community feel unsafe for calling out wrongdoings [Shor is responsible for the response to his tweet, and no one – except Shor, the accused, and his ilk – may ever be criticized, because criticism makes them feel “unsafe” and by gum, we cannot ever feel unsafe]. We cannot begin to decolonize our minds if we do not create safety for those fighting against white supremacy [that is a rather complex sentence, packed full of so much jargon that I’ll leave the task of deciphering it to you]. It is on all of us to do this work, but especially to show up [your support will be required] for those already doing it and make sure they are safe. By not acting, we are perpetuating the racism and sexism we know exists on this list [“will these hands ne’er be clean?”] and in our community at large. As such, we have removed David Shor from Progressphiles.

Chait adds:

The “racist tweet” was of course a straightforward summary of a respected professor’s work. The moderators have not publicly substantiated the accusation that Shor encouraged harassment, nor have they responded to my request for comment on the charge.

Why would he think the Furies would deign to answer him? They have other work to do, and he is a passe member of the Old Guard, although he’s only in his late 40s. That’s not old in my book, but I bet it’s ancient to the newer generation of Woke Furies.

Why am I even writing about this? It’s another warning of the extreme irrationality and vindictiveness of those who are now gaining more and more power. They feel very bold right now. The fury of this particular listserv is engaged in purging and purifying its own ranks, but they are also trying to move the Overton Window and they have been going out into the larger world and engaging in their mission of destroying western civilization and the values on which our country was founded.

Make no mistake about it; they mean business, and they are getting stronger than ever.

In a lighter vein, just to relieve a little tension, here’s one of my favorite clips on the subject:

One element of the joke in that clip is the tiny size of the groups. Well, they’re not so tiny anymore.

On supremacies and equality: the Reverend Martin Luther King, 1960

The New Neo Posted on by

From a speech Reverend Martin Luther King delivered at DePauw University in September of 1960:

Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers, and all men will respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.

It’s enough to make you weep, if you think of the fact that such a statement would now be highly controversial and unlikely to find a home on any college campus.

It would probably be problematic on three fronts at least. The first is its use of the phrase “black supremacy” as similar to “white supremacy,” when we all know that according to the Gospel of Marx they are totally different in every way because of the power differentials. The second is the idea that white lives matter too, and that we are one human race who are brothers (actually, come to think of it, MLK’s use of the term “brothers” and “men” to mean “humanity” would probably be a huge no-no as well). The third is his assertion that God is a large part of the reason that all people are one and all need to be respected.

You know what I mean: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Note, also, that the words say “the pursuit of happiness” – that is, the opportunity to seek it, not the right to have it. All people are not going to be happy, and they are not going to be equal in their life conditions. But they are created equal, and given liberty to, among other things, pursue happiness.

It is no accident that King was a minister. The black community has long been an especially religious one (statistics for 2014 can be found here; I’m not sure what’s been happening in the ensuing years). Also, the underpinnings and strength of the idea of equality has inherent religious dimensions. Without religion, it’s certainly possible to believe the same thing – or at least pay lip service to it. But for many people, leftism has become their religion and leftism says that people must be regarded as different and judged by different standards, according to a hierarchy of victimhood, class, race, and gender that the left sets up.

Also, some religions have been taken over by leftism. One only has to look at Barack Obama’s own church in Chicago, which was headed by another Reverend, Jeremiah Wright, to see what I mean.

Speaking of Obama, remember this sort of thing? It’s a fascinating segment of a speech, because Obama is stating the application of the Declaration to all in inhabitants of the US and quoting the document, but cites the doctrine of equality while leaving out the Creator as the one doing the “endowing.” It’s a significant omission, I believe, and no accident:

Certainly, a person can believe in these truths without believing in God. Also, there are churches and other religious groups that have embraced leftism and its racial blaming and hierarchies. But Martin Luther King’s vision loses much of its potency when its religious underpinnings are weakened. I believe that is at least part of what has happened to it in the last few decades.

Why was King addressing “black supremacy” back in 1960, when there was still not just de facto discrimination in the US but also de jure discrimination? It’s because there has long been a tension and an argument even in the black community and the civil rights community (including white people) between inclusiveness and separatism, love and rage. It’s not new. In the late 60s, not too long after that speech of King’s, it reached a fever pitch. Now the temperature of the fever is even higher.

Some alternatives to Twitter

The New Neo Posted on by

We certainly need them.

Perhaps there are too many choices for one to have really caught on, because forums like Twitter need to reach a critical mass to work well. Twitter was the first to come up with the format, and now it’s a behemoth that’s interested in stifling conservative thought as opposed to leftist thought.

I don’t tweet. I look at Twitter now and then when someone calls my attention to something interesting that’s happening there. But if you like the idea of Twitter but you hate Twitter itself, here’s a post about an alternative called Parler.

In the comments, several people have mentioned that Gab is getting popular, too.

You might want to give one or both of them a whirl.

Another abolitionist’s statue bites the dust…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in Madison, Wisconsin. And no one seems to have the will to stop it:

In Madison, statues of Wisconsin’s motto “Forward” and of Col. Hans Christian Heg were dragged away from their spots guarding the statehouse. Heg was an anti-slavery activist who fought and died for the Union during the U.S. Civil War. His nearly 100-year-old sculpture was decapitated and thrown into a Madison lake by protesters.

More details can be found here, including the fact that a Democratic state senator was assaulted and beaten by the crowd:

“I don’t know what happened … all I did was stop and take a picture … and the next thing I’m getting five-six punches, getting kicked in the head,” Carpenter told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel following the attack.

I doubt the crowd had a clue that this was a state senator. Not that they would have cared. And it’s interesting that his offense was taking pictures.

Statues, photos – representations of the past and of the present.

Did the crowd realize who Heg was? Perhaps not. Perhaps the urge was merely to destroy a statue of a white guy who looked heroic. Off with his head!

But perhaps they did know his identity, at least some of them. I have a theory (unproven) that part of this statue-wrecking impulse is to destroy all record that in the struggle for black freedom there were many white people who fought and died for that cause.

Obama and Biden engineered the war against General Flynn

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise at all.

What is at least somewhat surprising is that a terse note actually has surfaced from our good friend Peter Strzok describing the event, which apparently occurred (also not a surprise) a couple of weeks before Trump’s inauguration.

If this is “by the book” (as per Susan Rice), I think I know what book it is and the author’s name is Machiavelli:

Late this morning, Twitter lawyer “Techno Fog” posted a copy of [Strzok’s] notes…They reveal former President Obama, Sally Yates, James Comey, Susan Rice, and Joe Biden discussing the transcripts of Gen. Flynn’s phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and how to proceed against him. Obama made it clear that “the right people” must be assigned to the case.

According to the notes, then-FBI Director James Comey said that Gen. Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak “appear legit.”

The notes also show that it was Biden who brought up the Logan Act…

The video in the tweet below shows Biden denying any part in the Flynn investigation in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in May. He says, “I was never a part or had any knowledge of any criminal investigation into Flynn while I was in office, period. Not one single time.”

To watch the video, go here.

I doubt anyone not already on the right gives a hoot about that lie by Biden, as well as the magnitude of the offense that occurred here.

And of course, Biden can always say he was telling the truth because he doesn’t remember the January 2017 meeting in which he suggested employing the never-successfully-used Logan Act against someone who is obviously entitled as a high-rank member of the transition team to have a talk with Kislyak.

How very badly they wanted to get Flynn! He was a twofer. They wanted to get him for revenge and self-preservation, and they also wanted to try to force him to turn on Trump. I think that Flynn was their “insurance policy.” Turns out he has exposed their own plottings.

Is General Flynn’s long nightmare over?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps. At least, he’s certainly gotten closer to that goal:

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grand the government’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Michael Flynn.

You can read the decision here.

Shipwreckedcrew at Red State points out something that has concerned me for quite a while, which is that the Appeals Court may end up hearing the case en banc – that is, the full court rather than the 3-judge panel. The composition of the court is heavily Democrat-appointed.

Since judges now seem to be almost utterly political in their rulings – particularly on the liberal side – it is possible that if the case somehow goes to the full court, this could continue to be strung out and the ruling could go for Sullivan. There certainly are strong political motives on the left for doing so, and I retain no illusions about the ability of such judges to find a reason for doing whatever it takes to get to the desired result.

Predictably, the “legal experts” on the left are up in arms, and clamoring for an en banc hearing. Their partisan “reasoning” is astounding; they ignore the fact that what Sullivan has tried to do is not only exceedingly partisan (somethihg of which they almost undoubtedly approve) but would up-end our entire criminal justice system as well as the balance of powers. No biggee, I guess, in order to get the nefarious Flynn.

By the way, these “experts” all profess to be “stunned” by the ruling against Sullivan, because they all made the error (a common one, I might add) of putting too much stock in the judge’s questions during the hearing. The fact that such questions and comments are often misleading is one reason I tend not to make predictions based on such information.

One of these lawyers states the method by which the case could be heard en banc, and since I have no reason to think it’s incorrect, I’ll assume it would be this way: it only takes one judge to request a vote on whether to hear it, and then six judges must vote “yes” in order to actually have such a hearing. The basis for the hearing en banc would be the legal importance of the case.

I believe it would not be difficult to get six judges to vote “yes,” considering the predominance of liberals on the full court. And then, all bets would be off.

But for the moment, today’s ruling is a cause for celebration.

As they say in “The Mikado,” modified rapture.

Trained Marxists

The New Neo Posted on by

Most people who have watched this video of one of the founders of BLM focus on the fact that she says that she and one of the other three founders of BLM are Marxists. And although that’s certainly of interest, what interests me more is her use of the word “trained” to modify “Marxists.” It’s an interesting word to use for yourself, isn’t it? She doesn’t say who “trained” her, but it would be instructive to learn the answer.

I don’t think most of the people supporting the movement BLM are aware of the Marxist “training” and aims of its leaders. It has been pitched as a grass roots organization opposing police brutality against black people. Almost everyone opposes that, as well. As such, it has gained tremendous goodwill and support, and the peaceful demonstrators are just following in an old and protected tradition which most Americans think is fine. But unfortunately, the organization itself and in particular its leaders have a much broader – and extremely radical leftist – agenda.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a summary of some of the demands of the less-well-known organization “Movement for Black Lives,” which is an umbrella organization of which BLM is a member. It is obviously a radical far-left movement. Here’s the M4BL website.]

Black Lives Matter and Jonestown

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was talking on the phone to a friend on the right (I have one or two). I mentioned something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, which is that the current BLM/Antifa movement brings to mind many aspects of the Peoples Temple, the cult that culminated in Jonestown (I’ve previously written at some length about Jonestown, here).

You may or many not recall that Jonestown was a leftist operation through and through. It grew in strength once it based itself in San Francisco. Its founder and leader Jim Jones was actually not especially religious, but used religion as a way to found an allegedly Utopian multi-racial community that tuned into a nightmare. He appealed to struggling low-to mid-income black people who wanted a better life, and to the guilty feelings of white people, some of whom were more well-to-do. They were requested to donate their money to the organization on joining, and many did just that.

Jonestown turned into a nightmare, but it was aided and abetted by a combination of the leftist Democratic Party in charge of San Francisco and a pack of even more leftist activists such as Angela Davis. Most people remember the horrific suicides – which in my post I explain were less suicides and more like a massacre – and consider the episode to have been the result of a religious cult. But what is often forgotten is the leftist origins of the entire operation, and the totalitarian mind control and Stasi-like tactics of Jim Jones and his inner circle.

And most people don’t remember that this was done with the help and approval of the Democratic Party. And notice how many of these people are still powerful, or only retired from politics fairly recently (the linked article was written in 2018):

Willie Brown, later speaker of the California assembly and mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Dianne Feinstein joined the rest of the San Francisco board of supervisors in honoring Jones “in recognition of his guidance and inspiration” in furthering “humanitarian programs.”

Jerry Brown, California governor…actually spoke at Peoples Temple. George Moscone, who owed his position as mayor of San Francisco to Jones, appointed Jones to San Francisco’s Housing Authority Commission, where he quickly became chairman…

Before Jim Jones’s victims drank the lethal Flavor Aid in South America, the powerful in San Francisco had already drunk the Kool Aid themselves. In fact, the latter facilitated the former.

I interviewed a number of Temple survivors as part of researching my new book, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. They reflected that Jones’s associations with the mighty both legitimized him and struck fear into them. Without powerful politicians, in the U.S. and Guyana, running interference for him, Jones could never have been so bold with the murders he committed. And the politicians cozied up to Jones because Jones provided rent-a-rallies for free. He flooded campaign headquarters with “volunteers.” He spoke forcefully for fashionable causes.

He preached the gospel according to Karl Marx. “I call capitalism the devil,” Jones said from the pulpit, “and socialism is God.” The Symbionese Liberation Army, Jones maintained, “moved us a little closer to change.”

And now we’re a lot closer to change, are we not?

I’m apparently not the only one seeing a Jonestown comparison. Today I was alerted to this article by Daniel Greenfield saying much the same thing:

The mad mob scenes in Oakland and across California with the power of the Democrat establishment behind them, the viral videos of white millennials kneeling and confessing their privilege, are the People’s Temple writ large on a nation. Jones, the son of a Klansman, who was inspired by a Communist-allied cult to build a following as a Marxist preacher of interracial brotherhood, joining the California Democrat establishment before going down in flames, has once again become the future.

Jones ran a leftist cult of white leaders who called themselves black and exploited their mostly black congregation, endorsing the Black Panthers and other black nationalist terror groups, while serving as a core political organization for California Democrats, including former Governor Jerry Brown.

The stain of Jim Jones is still all over California. A generation of California Democrat leaders either allied with Jones or were mentored by Jones’ political allies like Willie Brown. That includes both Senator Kamala Harris and Governor Newsom. That’s why, decades later, California is still stuck in Jonestown.

Jim Jones is “what you should see every day when you look in the mirror”, Governor Jerry Brown gushed. It’s not what we see. But it’s what Brown saw. And what so many Democrats see…

The Jonestown model is also the model for the Democrat Party which, like Jones, lures in upscale whites by playing on their idealism and guilt, humiliating them to keep them from seeing that the whole thing is a scam, and using the black people it lured in with promises of a social safety net to claim moral superiority. Add in a streak of terror and thuggery to keep everyone in line, along with a dash of sexual sadism to compromise and destroy the moral integrity of core cult members, and you have utopia…

The ultimate victims of Jonestown were largely black. That’s also true of the Democrat Party.

And it is, unfortunately, already true of Black Lives Matter – not the bona fide protestors, but the violent wing that unites with Antifa to cause major destruction.

Yes, COVID cases have risen

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had several conversations about this topic recently. A friend mentions worriedly that COVID is on the rise, and I point out that such a statistic has no real meaning. I mention that it was expected, that it’s partly a function of increased testing, that the numbers in most states are down rather than up, and that even in states where cases have risen the death toll doesn’t seem to have risen.

My listeners seem somewhat skeptical, but in general they haven’t been able to counter what I’m saying. Their worry doesn’t surprise me, though, given the obvious efforts of the MSM to keep stoking the panic.

I get the impression, also, that COVID has either gotten somewhat less likely to cause serious illness and death because of some change in the virus itself, and/or because we are getting better at treating it.

All of this makes sense, and is as expected. It could change, of course. But so far these trends have held.

Here’s an article that says much the same thing:

A dozen states have seen record highs in new coronavirus cases, blares the news media, accompanied by dire warnings of a “second wave” of the disease because those awful Republican states reopened too soon. Once again, however, the mainstream press is needlessly scaring the public by hiding the relevant context…

Even if there is a “second wave,” it doesn’t mean anything in and of itself…

For one thing the Centers for Disease Control has long predicted that coronavirus cases would increase as the country reopened, for the simple reason that the lockdowns were never intended to stop the spread of the disease, only to slow it down. Remember? Flatten the curve?…

What’s more, the increase in coronavirus cases matters only if they are going up faster than expected, and whether this is resulting in a second wave of deaths.

Neither of those appears to be true…

So far this month, in fact, the number of new cases on June 21 was 16% higher than on June 1, but the daily number of deaths was 63% lower.

Still, won’t the current spike in cases lead to a subsequent spike in deaths?

That’s unlikely. As Michael Fumento has repeatedly pointed out in these pages and elsewhere, death rates are higher at the start of an outbreak for the simple reason that the disease claims the low-hanging fruit first. This, he says, is known as Farr’s Law.

That there was always a good possibility that COVID would end up resembling a bad flu year, and this was obvious to many people quite early on, although hardly a certainty. But too many institutions – the Democratic Party, most of the health officials in charge of making predictions, and the MSM – were heavily invested in worst-case scenarios. The reasons? Anti-Trump fervor, the lust for greater power, and the desire for clicks.