When Mobs Dictate Who Can Speak, They Dictate How We Will Live

I woke up this morning to news that Twitter had locked the account of Dr. Scott Atlas, the president's top advisor on C-19. Why? Because Dr. Atlas presented data that challenged the usefulness of masks, and an outrage mob demanded that he be silenced.

This is where we are now. As I mentioned in my last post, Facebook, Twitter, and Google will silence you if you point out anything that questions their C-19 narrative — even if the information you present comes straight from the CDC, the WHO, or practicing physicians. Doesn't matter if it's pointing out the (very high) survival rates, the fact that masks don't stop viral spread, or the success doctors have had in treating patients with a decades-old generic drug: You will be silenced for presenting “misleading and potentially harmful information.”

Yeah, potentially harmful to the media's panic narrative and Big Pharma's bottom line.

Blogger Jordan Schachtel explains that Dr. Atlas linked to, among other resources, an article from the American Institute for Economic Research, which breaks down in detail the reasons that masks are ineffective against viral spread. Schachtel also points to ongoing work from Rational Ground, in this case using graphs to show how mask mandates have made no difference in the spread of the virus. Here are just a few of Rational Ground's illustrations:

Notice here the difference between Sweden, which never locked down its population, and Israel, which is on its second lockdown:

“Sweden was right,” Elon Musk said recently — and I believe he will be proved correct.

No study has ever shown masks to be effective in stopping viruses. That's why Dr. Fauci and the surgeon general himself were telling people at the height of the outbreak, at the very peak of the curve, not to mask. Nothing has changed between then and now except for the propaganda narrative. Accordingly, Dr. Atlas was attempting to illustrate the overall uselessness of mask mandates — in addition to the ongoing lockdowns.

Here's how people — people who should know better, mind you — reacted to this data that shows nothing but statistical fact:

First, you have to laugh at someone who engages in political propaganda while calling actual scientific data just that — political propaganda. George Orwell would shake his head and said he told us so.

Second, scientific data is “dangerous BS” that “will get people killed.”

Dr. Angie's last statement there really cuts to the heart of what this is all about. There appears to be a significant portion of the population — including, inexplicably, some medical practitioners — who sincerely believe that C-19 is the black plague and catching it is a death sentence. For these people, masks are something like magical talismans. Despite their porosity, despite their air gaps, masks will miraculously save you from the dreaded corona-plague. If these people had lived 500 years ago, they would have mandated that people carry crucifixes to ward off vampire attacks.

This is why maskholes act the way they do when they assault those without masks, scream in the faces of those who don't comply, or snitch on those who don't obey. They really do think you're some kind of selfish murderer, even when the virus has well over a 99% survival rate for anyone under 70, and even when there is zero evidence that masks work.

So a few people screeched on Twitter and got a medical doctor — an advisor to the president of the United States — censored. These are the people who repeatedly claim that science is on their side. So stop screeching and show the science. If you can't, all you're doing is weaponizing the word "science" against your political opponents. Kind of like when someone claims that a man can become a woman just by saying so, and then they accuse their opposition of being “anti-science” for simply pointing out the biological fact that humans have immutable XX and XY chromosomes.

The result of basing what can be said on a public platform on whoever screams the loudest will have an inevitable effect on public policy. If people are allowed to discuss only one option, that option will face little resistance when policymakers enact or perpetuate it. Consequently, mask mandates will continue despite a complete lack of evidence that they work, lockdowns will continue even though they're causing immense economic and health damage and appear to have done nothing to stop the spread of the virus, and we'll continue to quarantine healthy people rather than work toward herd immunity, which is the only way we'll ever get over this virus.

Fortunately, we have a tireless group of medical practitioners speaking up on our behalf. America's Frontline Doctors held a second White Coat Summit today in hopes of bringing some much-needed sanity to the utterly insane reaction our world has had to this virus. U.S. social media quickly banned access to the video of their first summit, and I'm sure censorship of this one will come just as swiftly. (I'm not even bothering to link to the YouTube version.) I just hope that their efforts have an effect and help to wake some people up.

I'm so tired of seeing appeals to emotion and fact-free propaganda being used to divert people from having actual discussions like rational grown-ups should. One of the tweets that Schachtel included on his blog detailing the Dr. Atlas flap really drove the point home. It came from Martin Kulldorf, a professor at Harvard Medical School:

“After 300 years, the Age of Enlightenment has ended.”

It really does feel that way, when politicized propaganda has replaced scientific discovery, when emotion outweighs reason, and when mobs with the zeal of religious fanatics can silence facts that they find inconvenient. We're moving backward, to a time when superstitious, irrational tribalism ruled human behavior. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing left of the Enlightenment values that are the bedrock of Western civilization — only ever-increasing cries to burn the witches who dare speak the truth.

Tech Censorship and the Future of Free Speech

For the better part of 2020, I've devoted myself to kicking the tires at social-media platforms outside of Silicon Valley — which basically means anything not named Facebook, Twitter, or Google. I've always been distrustful of massive concentrations of power, whether in government, the corporate world, or anywhere else. And when a handful of companies with monopoly power can essentially control what the public sees or can talk about, I believe it becomes incumbent on people who care about the free dissemination of ideas to seek out alternatives and shun those that would use their power to silence ideas.

My blog is still stuck on Google's Blogger, and unfortunately it may have to stay here until I get kicked out. Moving eight years of posts is a more time-consuming task than I can deal with right now. But I can control my other social-media preferences, and that's how I ended up at VK. It wasn't the first alternative platform I tried out, but I picked it for a number of reasons. Those reasons are different from why I've also chosen to hang around at Minds. I've also set up accounts at MeWe, Gab, Wimkin, Parler, Orbys, ColdCast, USA.life, and probably some others I've forgotten about. Some of them I find interesting and useful. Others I don't visit anymore. But I think they're all worth at least trying out.

I had high hopes that some of my Facebook friends would follow me in my migration. So far, I think one person from my friends list has set up an account on one other platform. My friends' overall lack of interest in leaving Facebook put me in a bind, because I like seeing what my Facebook friends have to say. If they weren't going to come with me, then I had to figure something else out.

So I set up a Facebook group where those who enjoyed seeing my takes on current events could gather. And predictably, Facebook “fact-checked” the very first thing I posted. There was nothing factually incorrect about the article. To the contrary, the finding that 85% of those who caught C-19 wore masks was extracted from the CDC's own data. Even worse, Facebook's overlay said there's no evidence that wearing masks contributes to an increased risk of catching the virus — which had absolutely nothing to do with what the article said. Facebook's “fact-checks” have always been about narrative control; now they're actually making up irrelevant claims to suppress stories they don't want you to see.

This wasn't the first time Facebook had “fact-checked” something I posted related to the hysteria surrounding the virus. It did the same when I shared the finding that only 6% of U.S. COVID deaths were attributable to the virus alone. Facebook's “fact-check” had something to do with telling people they didn't understand what comorbidities are — which of course missed the entire point that C-19 death numbers have been inflated by medical providers, who have a financial incentive to do so, while the establishment media benefits from keeping the public fearful and compliant as it runs cover for its Big Pharma sponsors.

Political bias laid bare

Facebook's phony “fact-check” on the masking story made me leery of wading into politics on Facebook again. I knew where this road led. It always leads to the same place.
This just happened to be the same day the New York Post's Hunter Biden story broke. And you know how that turned out. Twitter throttled the story by cooking up a lame excuse about not promoting hacked materials or revealing information that comes from unauthorized sources.

Of course, the job of a journalist has always been to get at the truth, even if it means releasing information that bad actors want to keep hidden. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, using Twitter's standards for what can be published would mean that everything from Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks' and Edward Snowden's document drops would never have seen the light of day. And, not surprisingly, Twitter held itself to no such standard when users shared stories about Donald Trump's tax returns, which The New York Times admitted were obtained “without authorization,” or the Atlantic hit piece filled with “anonymous sources” that claimed Trump slandered war veterans, or, of course, nearly four years of claims about Russian collusion with Trump, which has all been debunked as an attempt to divert attention away from Hillary Clinton's malfeasance (which I called right from the start).

Facebook's role in this coordinated attack on the Post involved shadow-banning the story until it could be vetted. It's no coincidence that the person who made the announcement of Facebook's stance, policy communications director Andy Stone, has a long history of involvement with high-level Democratic politics.

While this was all unfolding, I also learned that Facebook had taken down a liberty-oriented group I belonged to called People's Rights, along with the personal accounts of all the group's admins and moderators. Mind you, this was a political activist group that did nothing more than share articles, hold discussions about the topics of the day, and organize gatherings and campaigns. All perfectly legal First Amendment activity. Never once did it promote violence or engage in any type of aggressive behavior. Ammon Bundy's personal account was nuked, too, suggesting that Facebook was in the midst of yet another of its systematic purges of conservative people and pages.

But the throttling of the Post story is as blatant as Twitter and Facebook have ever been about engaging in the kind of partisan censorship that they always claim they refrain from. Twitter went so far as to lock the accounts of the White House press secretary and the Trump re-election page for sharing the Post article before someone in D.C. finally took action and subpoenaed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Now Dorsey has to explain himself for his electioneering just a few weeks before Election Day.

The point is, I tried to find a way to stay on Facebook for my friends' sake on the same day Facebook hit me with another fake fact-check and all hell broke loose with the Post article. Between that and the takedown of People's Rights, it was like being given a sign from the heavens that I was right to have left the platform in the first place.

Problems and solutions

But it shouldn't have to be like this. In the early days of the internet, people could speak freely about what was on their minds. Then a few small companies rose to such prominence that they essentially became the gatekeepers of internet communication, replacing the early visions of the internet as a place of unlimited resources and information with one where a tiny cabal of monopolists, in cahoots with governments around the world, control what you could say and see. In the same way that six corporations control 90% of broadcast and print media, so Facebook and Google alone control about 60% of all internet traffic — a number that will only rise. Moreover, Google, Facebook, and Twitter make up five of the world's 10 most visited websites, when you include Facebook-owned Instagram and Google-owned YouTube. Throw in Amazon for good measure, and you essentially have 10 CEOs controlling the content of all public media. We've never seen such a small concentration of control over discourse and the free dissemination of ideas in all of human history.

Antitrust law exists for situations exactly like these. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gave companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google protections against what users say on their platforms — and those three companies have taken that tremendous gift and abused it to their own ideological ends. Instead of acting in good faith like a neutral platform, akin to the UPS box that your package comes in, Big Tech has taken the protections granted to it and selectively suppressed free speech on its platforms anyway.

These companies are obligated to act in the public interest. They're failing to do that, and as such, they need to be regulated. Imagine if your phone company turned off your service for saying something the company didn't like on a phone call. Facebook, Twitter, and Google need to be held to exactly the same standard.

If these companies had not grown so powerful as to function as the equivalent of the town square, their selective censorship wouldn't be a concern. But when being silenced on Facebook or Twitter amounts to being deprived of a public voice — or, for those who make their living online, being deprived of a livelihood — then their censorship becomes an issue of importance to everyone who values free expression and the free exchange of thoughts and ideas.

All those who say “private companies can do whatever they want” or “go start your own platform if you don't like it” are promoting a disingenuous argument. First of all, no company can do whatever it wants. Whether it's ADA compliance, treating your customers without race- or sex-based discrimination, or the health department's insistence that you get the bugs out of the kitchen, every company has rules to follow.

Second, telling people to start their own social-media platform would be all well and good if a level playing field existed. But we all know that it doesn't. That's the whole problem: Monopolies distort the free market. Sure, I can start my own online book company if I don't like Amazon's policies, but Amazon, with its virtually unlimited money and power, would squash me like a bug, either by undercutting me on price or buying up my assets and putting me out of business.

Similarly, while it's great to have alternative social-media platforms like Minds that are built on the defense of free speech, telling someone on Facebook who doesn't like the censorship to set up their own company is like telling them to leave the town square and set up shop on a street corner in a remote part of town. Some of the people who agree with you will follow you there, but most of the normies will stick with the censorious town square, giving the censors even more power while dooming most free-speech startups to being niche echo chambers that will never have any real influence.

The obvious solution is to rewrite Section 230 to compel social-media companies to allow all legal speech on their sites. This is what companies like Minds and Gab already do by default. Let people see multiple points of view. Let them debate about which points of view have merit and which don't. This is how a healthy society based on free expression and the free exchange of ideas should operate. That it doesn't speaks volumes about where we are, and about the size of the threat to free speech.

The consequences we face

Make no mistake: This won't end whether Trump wins or loses — though it's sure to get far worse if he loses and the Woke Left has free rein to cancel anyone with an opposing point of view. Bear in mind that many on the Left, including academics and prominent Democratic politicians, already want to rewrite Section 230 to give social media companies more, not less, power to censor content.

But it gets far worse. Just this week, Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who's one of the most tireless proponents of online censorship, chaired a congressional discussion of not just how to shut down free speech on mainstream platforms, but also how to hunt down those who migrate to alternative sites and assure their censorship there as well. And that could easily be done by exerting Woke pressure on domain registrars, banks, payment processors, and credit card companies. It's already happening — just ask VDare and Gab. The fact that a member of the United States Congress is leading a discussion that would normalize this kind of behavior should terrify anyone who values our constitutional liberties.

People like Schiff are one of the reasons I chose VK as a platform. As a Russia-based company, VK is protected from whatever outrageous attacks on free speech that far-left U.S. politicians cook up in their never-ending lust for control over everybody's lives. In short, VK is, one hopes, beyond the reach of the Woke. Not that VK and Russia don't have their own problems. But if nothing else, VK is one of the 20 most visited websites in the world — so while a lot of free-speech social-media upstarts may or may not survive, at least there's the comfort of knowing that VK isn't going anywhere, and chances are you aren't going to get censored.

Understand that this stuff has real-life consequences. When Facebook, Google, and Twitter started to organize purges of voices on the fringes, like Alex Jones, few people took notice. But the problem with censorship, as always, is that once you justify silencing one group of people, you can then justify casting the net wider and wider. You may not care that Facebook has the power to silence every QAnon and three-percenter group on its platform, but you'll care when they start coming for groups that aren't even controversial, like People's Rights, or for you personally. Then you won't be saying “just go find another platform if you don't like it” anymore.

Then there's the fear-based C-19 agenda. We've never had a study showing that masks have any significant effect against viral transmission. But try to show data that 85% of C-19 patients wore masks before they got sick, and Facebook “fact-checks” you. Point to the Barrington Declaration, written by three epidemiologists and signed by nearly 40,000 scientists and medical practitioners as of this writing, that calls for the lockdowns to end and to adopt a strategy similar to the Swedish model that let the healthy population build herd immunity — and Google shadow-bans it in its search. Same for the WHO's recommendation that lockdowns be used only as a desperation last resort because of the damage they do both to economic well-being and to physical and mental health, or to any data showing that lockdowns haven't worked.

If you're a doctor, don't mention your success with hydroxychloroquine in treating the virus. That's “dangerous and misleading information.” Because what do you know? You're only a doctor, and the establishment has to demonize any information on a decades-old generic in favor of protecting Big Pharma.

And don't even bother trying to point out that rising case numbers don't matter if the survival rate for anyone under 70 is well over 99%. This is the black plague, catching the virus is a death sentence, herd immunity is a dangerous strategy, and the lockdowns and mask mandates have to continue until either there's a vaccine or our overlords say so.

Thus, because social media allows only one narrative on C-19, the economy will continue to worsen, domestic abuse will continue to rise, substance abuse will continue to grow, suicides will continue to increase, and our individual liberties will continue to erode as penalties ramp up for noncompliance with useless diktats against a virus that for the overwhelming majority of the general population is a bad cold.

Granted, none of this is new. Those in power have always suppressed truths that are inconvenient to the establishment narrative. That's why Edward Snowden is in exile and Julian Assange rots in prison. And thanks to the manipulation of technology and the consolidation of power, the people in charge have arguably more power than ever before to control the narrative and silence their opponents. What's at stake is no less than the free flow of information, which is simply not possible when a small handful of megacorps with billions of dollars get to decide what you can read.

Critics say that the First Amendment applies only to government censorship, which is true enough. But when you live in a world where massive corporations have more money than the GDP of some small nations and collude with governments both to spy on their own citizens and to shape what can and can't be said on their platforms, whether the censorship comes from Congress or Facebook makes little difference. The result to the shadow-banned or banished end user is the same. And the consequences for free speech are dire either way.

This is the threat we face. It absolutely must be dealt with, before we lose our grip on free expression for good.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Are the Fearmongers Themselves

Must I fear what others fear?
What nonsense!

~Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, about 2,500 years ago
(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

Over the past four years, Donald Trump has been his own worst enemy. When he could have made an uplifting comment about the nation or its people, he all too often chose to go low, engaging in blustery insults and self-congratulatory hyperbole. He's a bully, he's fairly inarticulate, and he's just not an easy man to warm up to.

Maybe that's why two little sentences in one of his recent tweets were so utterly refreshing.

After being released from the hospital following his C-19 diagnosis, Trump had this to say:

Don't be afraid of COVID. Don't let it dominate your life.

Those two sentences may be the most presidential words he has uttered throughout his entire term. In a time when the world is gripped with fear, and when that fear is leading to increasingly more draconian actions by our governments, along comes our president to remind us that there is no need to act like this. We have allowed our logical, rational minds to be overtaken by our fears — fears fanned by those in power who have a vested interest in keeping the public terrified.

Predictably, the establishment media and the usual alarmist voices on the left melted down, essentially telling the president, “How dare you tell people not to be afraid!” Yet their scolding reveals far more about them than it does about the president. Because the plain truth is that we've never overreacted like this to a virus. Precautions may have been sensible early on, when we didn't have a full picture of what we were dealing with. But now that we know the survival rate is over 99% for anyone under age 70 (and even a solid 94.6% for Trump's age bracket), and that the virus is little more than a bad cold for the vast majority of those who contract it, Trump's perspective is timely, much needed, and very welcome.

The usual Trump Derangement Syndrome surely accounts for some of the reaction to his words. But much of it also points to the establishment's anxiety that it will lose its fear- and propaganda-laden grip on the public. Because if we treated the virus in a more rational and measured way, the foundation for every state of emergency, every lockdown, every mask mandate would wither away. All the talk of forced vaccines, health passports, and 24/7 contact-tracing surveillance would end. Businesses wouldn't be dying. Kids, the lowest-risk group of all, wouldn't be sent to school all day in oxygen-depriving masks. The COVID police states around the world would be no more.

There would be no “new normal.” There would only be normal.

But we can't do that, because too many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the current narrative afloat. That's why, after we flattened the curve, the media switched from talking incessantly about number of deaths to talking incessantly about number of cases — and why, now that we're heading into cooler weather, it's focusing on an alleged “second wave” that so far doesn't exist.

It's also why social media will censor anyone — even doctors — who report success in treating patients with hyrdoxychloroquine. The media dutifully characterized that drug as “dangerous” and “untested,” for no other apparent reason than that finding a potential cure from a decades-old generic would mean that big pharmaceutical companies couldn't make massive profits off a new vaccine. And if you doubt whether Big Pharma plays a role in what treatments we can find acceptable, turn on your TV and see how many pharma commercials you see. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

And this is also why the media has censored those who point out that only 6% of U.S. C-19 deaths have been from C-19 alone, the rest of the victims having had other underlying illnesses. It's why you won't hear about the financial incentive hospitals have for declaring C-19 as the cause of death, conflating those who died with C-19 with those who died of C-19.

It's why you won't hear about case numbers being inflated, how masks have never been shown to be effective against viral transmission, how the lockdowns didn't really help, or how data is suppressed if it shows the infection numbers aren't as bad as power-tripping bureaucrats want them to be.

If you heard those things from the media, instead of the constant drumbeat of fear, you might just see that the lockdown emperors have no clothes.

That's why Trump's statement freaked them out.

It's also why Twitter felt the need yesterday to cover another Trump statement with a warning about “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.” What was the dangerous information that Twitter didn't want you to see? The fact that the virus is not lethal to most people, and that just as with every other pathogen, we're learning to learn live with it.

There's not a single word in his tweet that's untrue or irresponsible. He's right: We have no choice but to live with C-19. Like the flu, it's never going to go completely away. Either we find a way out of our fear and start living our lives again, or else we all live in antiseptic bubbles for the rest of our days, distanced from friends and family, and told what to wear and where we can go. That's no kind of life. It may be safer, but it erases everything of what it means to be human, and it subordinates quality of life to a paralyzing fear of death.

It shows you how far we've fallen when it was a leftist icon, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once told us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Those were wise words that resonate across the ages. FDR wouldn't recognize the fear that animates the people on his side of the aisle today.

Those of us who never lost our minds over this virus understand that life is about risk. We can put the virus in perspective. We know that we live among pathogens and other dangers every day of our lives. And we understand that C-19 is not the black plague and never was.

We saw how Sweden took a sensible approach, protecting the vulnerable but letting the rest of the population go on with their lives. We know that that is how you build herd immunity and make a virus essentially burn itself out — not by quarantining healthy people or putting a mask on your face, but by letting your immune system do what it was designed to do.

We understand that there's plenty in this world to worry about. We also understand when people in power manufacture fear to control the masses. The hysteria over the virus, sadly, has been the latter.

As with any illness making the rounds, we all ought to take sensible precautions. But we also should be able to weigh the data and see that none of the restrictions that have been placed on our lives are in the least bit justified.

In short: We shouldn't be afraid of COVID. We shouldn't let it dominate our lives.

I'm not always on Trump's side. But on this, he's 100% right.

All Humans Are Equal, but Some Humans Are More Equal Than Others

More than half of San Francisco's stores have closed thanks to the lockdowns. But hey, at least San Fran's city government has enough money left to throw more than $2 million at pregnant black and Pacific Islander women. Because woke racism is more important than saving your city.

If you're one of the government-favored ethnicities, you can get $1,000 a month for 15 months. On what basis? Well, according to a proponent of the program, “Black and Pacific Islander folks are small populations in San Francisco that are overrepresented in terms of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth, and we know that these birth outcomes are linked to stress, but also structural racism and the legacy of decades of discrimination.”

So here. Since your “adverse birth problems” are somehow caused by racism, here's $15,000 to relieve your “stress.” And you can spend it any way you want. So you don't have to actually use your free money to help alleviate the “adverse birth problems” we're giving you the money for in the first place.

A race-based giveaway is obviously wildly unconstitutional, but that's exactly how the Woke Left wants it. They don't believe in equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. They want to drag us back to a pre-Civil Rights era where people were treated unfairly based on the color of their skin, only with the roles reversed.

If you find that hard to believe, consider that the California legislature overwhelmingly voted in favor of removing the anti-discrimination language from the state constitution. The matter will go before voters next month as a ballot proposal. If it passes, this language will be removed from the state constitution:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.

Again, to be perfectly clear, that language would be removed from the state constitution. And this is not being pushed by right-wing racists, but by woke leftists, so they can openly discriminate in favor of minority groups.

There you have it. Discrimination is equality. George Orwell was a prophet.

The woke don't even try to hide the fact that reverse discrimination is their goal. Take this example from a California bike shop, which is proud to announce “Black Reparations Pricing” that will give you a 45% discount based on the color of your skin:

Slavery and Jim Crow laws were legal. Gerrymandering still rages on. No squawks of "reverse discrimination!" That's exactly the point, but a better term is positive discrimination. Positive because it doesn't hurt anybody, the way classical discrimination did and still does.

I've been saying for years that these people aren't interested in equality. They're bent on revenge. They want to undermine all the efforts society has made toward abolishing discrimination, only to restore discrimination and aim it at the people they blame for having discriminated in the past. In their minds, two wrongs somehow make a right.

That's the impulse driving California to push for legalized discrimination. It's the same impulse that has California now mandating racial quotas for corporate boards, legally enshrining the importance of physical appearance over merit. It's what has California now moving toward reparations — taking money from people who were never slaveholders and giving it to people who were never slaves. And it's what led the Motion Picture Academy — based in California — to declare that if a movie wants to win Best Picture, it will now have to meet diversity quotas in the people it hires to make a movie.

To top it all off, counties in California can't even hope to open back up from the C-19 lockdowns unless they show an adequate decrease in infection rates amongminority groups. Yes, we really now have COVID race quotas.

Of course, this madness isn't limited to California. The basement-dwellers who set up the CHAZ area in Seattle segregated off a section of their downtown-Seattle utopia for blacks only — and guarded it with white people. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan recently created separate “cafes” — one for whites and one for “people of color.”

It's like bringing back the whites-only lunch counters from the deep South — only now it's “woke,” so it's OK.

It's this same mindset that led the Associated Press to declare that “Black” should be capitalized but “white” shouldn't. One little change like that reveals it all. Wokeness isn't about equal treatment but about favoritism toward “marginalized” groups.

Let me ask you something. Have you heard of horseshoe theory? It's an idea that the extreme fringes of the political spectrum share ideological impulses, even if their goals are different. Once you move past the ideological center, the fringes start bending toward each other and end up moving in a parallel direction — like a horseshoe. And when the Woke Left reveals itself to be as favorable toward race-based discrimination as the far right is, you start to realize that horseshoe theory may be more than just a theory.

Take Ibram X. Kendi, one of the leading voices of the Woke Left. When President Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee, Kendi proclaimed that Barrett had adopted her two black Haitian children as a shield from charges of racism — since, in Kendi's mind, all white people are racist. (A racist statement in itself, but never mind that.)

And guess who agreed with him when he went on a Twitter rant about it? None other than white nationalist Richard Spencer:

Kendi is not an outlier, either. Ashleigh Shackleford leads discussions on how all white people are racist and always will be. Whites are devils, demons, inhuman. All her words. And apparently she actually gets paid to go around telling these things to white people.

Meanwhile, the co-founder of Toronto's Black Lives Matter chapter, Yusra Khogali, says white people are subhuman “recessive genetic defects.”

Please, someone tell me how the garbage these people spew is any different, in any way whatsoever, from white supremacists who claim that nonwhites are inferior subhuman animals.

This is exactly where “positive discrimination” leads. It can lead nowhere else. And yet mainstream culture praises it all to the heavens — while those of us who, like Dr. King, continue to treat people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin are derided as far-right racists.

You can't make this stuff up.

It's often said when someone raises examples like this, and it always holds true: Imagine the outrage if the tables were turned. Imagine if we openly celebrated “positive discrimination” in favor of white people. Imagine if we made laws and set up quotas to that effect. The mainstream media would melt down. Yet we have the exact same kinds of discriminations being advanced and promoted by the Woke, and the establishment treats it as a great act of enlightenment for humanity.

When I see this insanity all around me, I get why white supremacists think the way they do. I really do. Sometimes it's actually tempting to throw in one's lot with them. After all, if you're going to be called racist anyway, simply for being white, then you might as well play the part.

But I could never do that in good conscience, because I don't hate people based on what they look like. I despise identity politics, and white supremacists are just as much about idpol as the Woke Left is. To ally with them would make me just as bad as the Woke Left.

Besides, it seems to be mostly white elitists pushing this Woke nonsense, and white middle- to upper-middle-class people leading the street protests and the campus indoctrinations. The stupidity of this ideology clearly knows no racial bounds. Whites aren't immune to it and are actively pushing it — see Robin DiAngelo as Exhibit A — so why would I side exclusively with white people when they're part of the damn problem?

Unlike the extremes at the opposite ends of the horseshoe, I truly don't give a damn what you look like. Whether you're white or black, man or woman, gay or straight tells me absolutely nothing about what's in your heart.

And what's in your heart is what matters to me.

America's Wannabe Dictators, and Their Enablers

Generalissimo Andrew Cuomo is disappointed with your lack of compliance.

The governor, by supreme decree, will shut down any school not doing C-19 testing (even though kids are the lowest-risk group of all), and he will enact “aggressive enforcement” against any business in a “hotspot” that doesn't do what it's told. Then comes the threat, in the form of a reminder: “[W]hen the state initiated enforcement actions, compliance greatly increased.” Which is another way of saying “The last time I sent out my jackboots to threaten people with fines and arrests, they did as they were commanded.”

And if you, upstanding citizen, see any business not conforming, snitch to us and we'll make sure they get shut down.

These are the words of a bully. A dictator. A tyrant. Americans fought a war to rid themselves of people like this.

So, what is it that has Cuomo throwing a fit? I don't know. You tell me. Because this is what the case numbers look like in New York state as of Oct. 5.

And here are the number of deaths.

Let's face it: All rational thought is gone at this point with people like Cuomo. Because if Cuomo was thinking rationally, he'd see that the curve was flattened a long time ago, which is what the lockdowns were supposed to be all about, and he would open his state back up. Instead, he's bringing the full force of the state down on anyone who dares disobey him.

If he won't back off now, when will he? What is it going to take?

Are we going to see New York following in the path of the U.K. and Victoria, Australia, with their heavy-handed police-state tactics crushing any and all dissent and disobedience? Don't be surprised.

All this over a virus with a 99.7% survival rate.

Over in my home state of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer isn't any different. She recently threw a fit when the state Supreme Court smacked her down, informing her that her state of emergency could hold for only 28 days without legislative approval.

Her response? I still have three weeks to impose my will on the people, and I'm going to do everything I can to find ways around the ruling — because you peasants are staying locked down whether you like it or not.

I especially love the part about how she's helped small businesses so much. How? By threatening to arrest the owners when they try to reopen their doors?

And oh, yes, the “more deaths than the war of the day.” CNN pulled that one out of its bag of propaganda tricks recently, when it let us know in an emotionally charged report that 200,000 C-19 deaths in the United States represented more deaths than in five wars combined. What CNN didn't tell you was that over 808,000 Americans have died this year from cancer and heart disease. That's more than all the combat-related deaths in every U.S. war ever.

But that wouldn't tug at the heartstrings the same way, would it?

If you ever wondered whether the media was using this virus to peddle an agenda to keep the public fearful and controlled, you don't need any more evidence than this.

So, what do Andrew Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer have in common with other lockdown-happy state governors, like Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf, California's Gavin Newsom, and Washington's Jay Inslee?

They're all Democrats.

Not to let Texas' Greg Abbott off the hook. For a Republican, he's been pretty awful when it comes to defending individual liberty and common sense in the face of this scamdemic. But over and over again, it's been the Democratic governors and mayors who have enacted and prolonged the most draconian crackdowns on their people. They're killing businesses in their states and cities, creating a cure that's far, far worse than the disease.

Why, though? What is it about the left that makes them act like this?

They would tell you that it's because they care so much about you. But we all know that's not it.

Is it risk aversion? Well, that seems more like a conservative trait.

What it really boils down to is that the left seems to love power. They love ruling over people. They love imposing their will on you and micromanaging your life. And that's because they don't trust most Americans to make wise decisions for themselves. They think they know best. They see themselves as parents ruling over helpless children, barking out orders and demanding your complete, unquestioning obedience and submission. And they'll even tell you scary stories to keep you fearful and compliant — like C-19 is the bogeyman, and if you dare disobey, you could die or even kill someone else. So wear your mask, stay home until we say you can leave, and don't you dare question us. Disobey, and you will be punished.

Of course, looking at the responses to Cuomo and Whitmer's tweets suggests that maybe Americans really are as stupid as the Democrats think.

Please, I'm begging you, force the people around me to comply.

Smash that boot into their face even harder!

Why can't we have a tyrannical dictator for president? Maybe if Biden wins, we can have our own Australian-style police state right here!

Look at me hiding behind my mask. I'm so sacred. Please take away all my freedoms, and the freedoms of all my friends and neighbors, too.

I will do whatever you say. The virus kills 0.3% of those it infects and has little to no effect on the overwhelming majority of the general population, and masks don't work, but I believe in science. I have a rational mind, which is why I think Republicans kill people with the virus.

Why is a court of law putting the law above my fear?

I love my Dear Leader for putting safety before freedom! Who's Benjamin Franklin?

Well, we agree on that last sentence.

This is why we're doomed. It would be easy enough to stand up to a few tyrants in power and push back. After all, we vastly outnumber them. But when they have so many obedient sheep letting them get away with the endless enforcement of unjustified restrictions on all our lives, this will never end.

Cuomo, Whitmer, and all their ilk are drunk on power. They're going to take all they can get, and trust me, they don't intend to ever give it back.