Tyrants And Their Enablers

 Daniel Greenfield at  Sultan Knish has a post that explains the Chinese lockdown and mask model failed, now its proponents need scapegoats:

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.

The problem for both the medical "experts" and the politicians that followed their prescriptions is that neither can admit that they made a mistake. They fear that admitting a mistake affect their credibility, causing people to question every pronouncement coming from their lips. But, of course, if these politicians trusted the people, rather than viewing them as rubes to be ruled, they might not have made this mistake in the first place.

Had Governor Cooper gathered businessmen, pastors, rabbis, restaurant owners and others, he ight have avoided, or at least mitigated the devastating effects of the lockdowns.  Life is, afterall, a risky business.  Safety is important, but it is not the MOST important.  

Here in North Carolina, the mini-Cuomo, Governor Cooper has weekly press conferences in which he continues to admonish people to acidulously wear masks and social distance, without real evidence.  And yet, when I go out all over the state, most people are not wearing masks except where forced to do so.  Businesses, of course, enforce Coppers pronouncements because he can pull their business license.  Otherwise, he would have no way to enforce a mask mandate.  

Yet, no one can admit that they might have been wrong:

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.

And there it is; the "A" word. Authoritarian. And authoritarians are incipient tyrants, imposing their interior beliefs on everyone. Governor Cuomo is blaming Hasidic Jews for the spread of the virus.  They are not, and he shouldn't be oppressing this group.  Governor Newson should not be blaming Christians either.

Look, it is fine if you want to wear a mask. If it makes you feel safer, go for it. The problem is when you insist that I have to wear a mask to make you feel safer. That makes you a petty tyrant.  Moreover, when authorities do it, the become true tyrants.  There is no other word for it.