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.

Trump and the Plandemic

Now that Donald Trump has caught Cooties-19, I imagine we're going to see even more militancy in the ridiculously overblown narrative around this virus.

Predictably, we're already seeing his opponents using his illness as a way to scold both him and everyone else who doesn't blindly obey all the lockdowns and mandates. His White House gathering to announce his Supreme Court nominee, for example, was characterized as a "super-spreader" event -- but somehow, riots and shoulder-to-shoulder street protests never are. It's a woke virus!

We'll surely also see even more of a push for useless masks, whether from Trump, his handlers, Joe Biden, or the mainstream propaganda-pushers who started the whole mask narrative in earnest after the curve was already flattened. Now we're supposed to wear them because, what, cases are up? Well, so what? Cases aren't deaths. So long as hospitalizations and deaths aren't soaring, and they aren't, then there's no problem. (To the contrary, we need herd immunity.) And yet the media shifted the entire narrative from deaths to cases once we flattened the curve, evidently for no other reason than to keep the fear ramped up and the public obedient. And thus did the lockdowns stay in place and the mask hysteria begin.

Funny, though, how the "experts" were telling us not to mask at the height of the outbreak, but ever since then, the message has been "wear a mask or else." (Unless you're Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, or Dianne Feinstein — all of them mask Nazis caught unmasked in public — or a Pennsylvania Democrat caught on a hot mic admitting that masks are political theater.)

Most of the the mask-pushers genuinely seem to think that C-19 is the black plague and everyone will die without a mask -- even though masks have never been shown to be efficient against viral spread, and even though the masks most people wear are so porous and have so many air gaps that they'll never do anything to stop the spread. Just look at the states that have had mandates the longest -- they're no better off than anyone else.

But to the maskholes, masks are magical devices, like lucky rabbit's feet. They'll keep the bad virus from killing you. And if you don't comply, they'll punch you, scream at you, throw drinks in your face, you name it. But they're the calm, rational ones who "believe in science," don't forget.

Anyway, if Trump comes through all this unscathed, his enemies will of course say he had a mild case. That would only prove the point that C-19 isn't lethal to the overwhelming majority of the population. But those pushing the narrative won't see it that way. They'll just continue to mock Trump and double down on their insistence on mask mandates.

In the unlikely event Trump dies, well, they'll all just cheer, like the sick vultures they are. And then they'll say "See? You need to take this more seriously. Put on your mask.”

Although if Trump does die, it'll probably be from the experimental drugs being injected into his body than from anything else. (Not surprisingly, the White House appears to have ignored Russia's offer of treating Trump with its own developed vaccine, Sputnik V — just as all of mainstream American culture has either ignored or fearmongered against it so far.)

Trump himself was of course treated with a hyrdoxychloroquine cocktail, which numerous doctors have reported success with in treating C-19 patients. But just as those doctors have been silenced on social media and in the mainstream press, so the naysayers will use his illness as evidence that HCQ doesn't work. Never mind that Trump took it as a preventative measure long before he was ill. And of course, never mind the medical evidence that you'll never hear — all because of a combination of Trump Derangement Syndrome and the mainstream media's collusion with Big Pharma to vilify a cheap generic that no one could profit from.

There are rumors that someone in the Biden camp deliberately infected Trump at the presidential debate. Considering how hard Biden's backers were pushing to keep him from debating at all — given his obvious cognitive decline, which would explain why Biden's people refused an earpiece check before the debate — this wouldn't surprise me. Not only will Trump's illness surely lead to canceled debates, but it also takes Trump off the campaign trail right before the election. How convenient, no?

And if Biden wins the election… well, get ready for a tyrannical police state in America to rival that of the UK's second lockdown, where cops are beating protestors and students are essentially being held prisoner in their dorm rooms amid a nonexistent “second wave,” and Victoria, Australia, where police barge into homes to arrest people for protesting the lockdowns on social media, rip people out of their cars, and forcefully mask handcuffed citizens in public.

And make no mistake — it's already starting in America, with people worshiping outdoors being arrested for not obeying local mandates, and a woman stun-gunned, arrested, and dragged off for not masking at a football game.

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

If All You Can Do Is Shout Into the Wind, Shout Anyway

If you want to cut to the chase, look for me at VK: https://vk.com/eggshells.

I was a junior in high school when I discovered I had a knack for writing and editing. I was the bookkeeper for the school yearbook staff, and although I no longer recall the details of how it happened, our advisor asked me to step in as the editor midway through the year. I enjoyed the work, and I did it well enough that the advisor asked me to take over permanently as editor my senior year. I accepted with a mix of excitement and fear -- and thus began my formal relationship with the written word.

I went on to serve as the editor of the newspaper at my junior college, where I got a chance to cut my teeth on some political writing. I cringe when I think back to those early articles, but I had a budding interest in politics, and you have to start somewhere. Politics was always a hot topic in my family, so perhaps it was inevitable that I'd want to mix my love of writing with my growing interest in all things political. I thought more outside the box than my traditionally conservative parents did, and that was just all the more reason for me to want to express what I felt were my unique viewpoints.

By the time I got to the university, I knew I wanted to major in English and minor in political science. I still wasn't sure how I could make a living combining my two interests, so I decided to double-minor by adding journalism to the mix. I figured it would be easy enough to get my foot in the door as a freelance reporter and try to move up from there. 

And that's just how things played out -- but they didn't lead in the direction I'd expected. Turns out I was a better editor than I was a writer, as one of my journalism teachers later said of me in a letter of recommendation that I was the single best copy editor among any of the students he'd had over the years. His recommendation put me in touch with a newsroom editor at the local paper, which led to a reporting gig, which in turn led to a position on another newspaper's copy desk. 

I've been editing for a living ever since. Although I kept freelancing as a reporter for a few more years, my daily writing role decreased as my editorial duties increased. I still got to write some copy at my next job, but as one of two editors in a university publications department, I was primarily tasked with editing and laying out copy, in addition to mentoring the department's other editor. My boss, echoing my old journalism teacher, said I was the best editor his department had ever had. 

I'd still be at that job, had it not been eliminated in a departmental reorganization. My wife-to-be and I bounced around the country afterward as I pursued other editing gigs. Now middle-aged with a kid, we're settled down -- I hope for good -- in the Inland Northwest, and I'm fortunate to have a full-time gig as an independent editing contractor. 

But I never lost my itch to write. That's the main reason I started this blog some eight years ago. If I had to edit other people's copy to pay the bills, at least I could write on my own time and get the thoughts out of my head that just wouldn't go away until I pushed them out through my fingers. 

So this blog has been a catharsis of sorts. But my greatest disappointment has been the consistent lack of an audience. In all these years, I've never been able to build one. Most of my posts get anywhere from two or three to a few dozen views, and I almost never get any comments. 

I suppose that's how it is for most people. DIY musicians who put out albums and cobble together tours around their day jobs know the feeling. So does my wife. She loves writing fiction. But she's only ever sold a handful of her books, and earlier this year she felt like quitting -- especially after what turned out to be a vanity press eagerly took her money and promised her the moon, only to have nothing to show for her investment. 

It's depressing to have a passion for something, only to be left feeling that no one cares about the hard work you put into bringing your creation to life. For me, it's not so much that I need heaps of praise for what I do, nor do I feel the need to have my work validated. But even a small following would be nice. Just having some other folks care enough about what you do to offer their feedback and support would make the effort worthwhile. 

But maybe that's too much to ask. Or maybe my priorities are wrong. Maybe writing should be its own reward, and writing for myself should be enough. 

Writing is good mental exercise. It gives shape to my thoughts, and I feel a sense of accomplishment when I've completed what I think is a good article. In that sense, writing will always be worth the effort I put into it. But when much of your writing involves political critiques, as mine often does, I suppose that makes finding an audience even harder -- especially when your views don't fit neatly within any particular political tribe. I've always been an outsider and probably always will be, so I never expected mass appeal to be in the cards for me and my writing aspirations.

Still, I had high hopes for my self-imposed deadline of Oct. 1. That was the date I expected to launch a new presence on a new social-media site. I've been on Facebook for over a decade, and if Facebook's practice of invading your privacy to serve your personal data up to advertisers wasn't disgusting enough, its ever-increasing censorship was simply not something I could tolerate any longer. So when Facebook announced that its terms of service would be changing on Oct. 1, essentially giving itself carte blanche to remove anything from its platform for any reason it wanted, I knew it was time to leave. Facebook has consistently abused its moderation policies to target alternative narratives and political views, and it's just going to get worse under the new TOS -- especially with the U.S. presidential election so near at hand.

So I spent most of September kicking the tires at several social-media platforms, many of them fairly new ones that arose in direct response to Facebook and Google's privacy invasions and political purges. My favorite ended up being Minds, a service I'd already been using. It still has some bugs, and the features for groups and blogs aren't anywhere near what some other platforms are offering. But I love the CEO's commitment to free speech. Like me, he believes that we should be free to say whatever we want so long as it's not illegal, and he argues that silencing the worst elements on social media only makes them fester and radicalize out of sight. Nobody is obligated to listen to a neo-Nazi, for example, but if you let the Klan march through your town and nobody shows up, that perhaps sends a stronger message than banning them from marching in the first place. The latter leads to self-righteous anger and plans for vengeance, while the former lets them vent their ugliness while showing them that no one cares. Bans and other forms of confrontation feed their hate. Letting them shout into empty air effectively emasculates them. 

More importantly, Minds is heading up a program called Change Minds, which aims to de-radicalize those on the fringes. Obviously far more productive than just kicking people off your platform.

So in addition to its dedication to free speech and user privacy, Minds is actively working to make the world a better place. This approach also comes through in the way Minds essentially rewards people for interacting on the platform. You can use cryptocurrency to boost your own content, while you can receive crypto from those who interact with your posts. In theory, this system rewards quality content and therefore good behavior. And in the event that something is banned for crossing a line, a jury system consisting of Minds users can overrule the decision. In short, everyone who uses Minds has a hand in making it a better social-media platform.

But there are two problems. The first is that, as I quickly found out, none of your Facebook friends will follow you to any of these new platforms. The second relates to the first: Without enough users, these start-ups will fold. And who wants to go to the trouble of setting up a new social-media presence if the platform you're on has no guarantee of survival? 

Sure, you might make a few new virtual friends. But one post in particular, from another Minds user, has stuck with me ever since I read it. He made a crucial point about how those of us who think we're making a difference in the world really aren't, as borne out by the lack of change we see in the world away from our keyboards and monitors:

And it forces me to ask the inevitable question: What's the point of any of this? 

Why do I knock myself out making impassioned posts on Facebook and detailed blogs on here if none of it is ever going to make the slightest bit of difference? I mean, sure, the writing process itself is a good outlet for me, but I could just as easily spend the time I take writing these blogs and posts to do something actually constructive. 

And the best answer I can come up with is that it does make a difference for me, and maybe there's the tiniest chance that what I say might prompt someone else to look at a situation from a new point of view. 

But why this compulsion to speak out in the first place? Where does it come from? What drives it? I don't really know. I guess we're all passionate about something. Maybe it's my feeble attempt to try to make the world a slightly better place, or to sound an alarm over giving away away things that we'll never get back, or to hope for a better world for my daughter. 

Or maybe it's my way of exercising some kind of control over a world that's falling apart before our eyes. We have violent reverse-racist neo-Marxists wanting to bring about an anti-Enlightenment revolution that would make Lenin and Mao proud. We're losing our freedom to move about, work, or go to church or school without being fined or arrested, thanks to a massive overreaction to a virus that no one will back down from. In short: Say BLM and put on your mask. 

I don't want my kid to grow up in a world like this. Hell, I don't want to live in a world like this. And so I keep sounding the alarm the only way I know how, like the guy on the street corner holding his "Repent! The End Is Near!" sign while the world goes by, either not noticing or snickering at the paranoid weirdo.

So what to do? Well, I'm not giving Silicon Valley's woke censors any more of my time, and that includes this Google-owned blog. Problem is, it's impossible to know which of the many upstarts are viable, and I'm not all that interested in investing my time in something that's just going to fail. 

I think decentralized social media has a fighting chance, since it's mostly run by volunteers and doesn't depend on the survival of one big company's bank of servers in a single location. Decentralization also solves the problem of relying on corporate advertising that inevitably compromises what can or can't be said on a platform. Moderation is up to the moderators and no one else, and if you find a moderator who values free speech, you're good to go. 

The downside is that you're talking to almost no one. I've tried Diaspora and Friendica, two decentralized Facebook-like services, and they're ghost towns. I've also tried Mastodon, but a 500-character limit per post doesn't do much for someone who prefers to write at length.

Minds is a decent middle ground. It's not really decentralized from the user's perspective, but the company is trying to move more in that direction. However, a post I recently saw there, from someone who must have been a company insider, made me realize that there's a good chance that Minds, even with all its good intentions, will fail. I don't want to call the person out, so I won't share the post here. But the gist of it was that Minds has enough money to keep going for about a year, and then the company will have to go out soliciting funds, which could mean compromising Minds' values and mission statement. 

I'd be happy to contribute in what small way I can to help keep the platform viable, but I get the feeling that I can't do enough. See, this person was promoting Minds' "Pro" feature, which appears to be aiming for content creators to come to Minds by offering them the tools they need to build a professional website. The Pro feature costs $40 a month, and this person said it would take a little over 3,000 Pro accounts for Minds to stay at breakeven. 

Meanwhile, Minds has a "Plus" upgrade feature that costs just $5 a month. I'd happily pay that much if I knew it would help. But if the company is pushing a $40-per-month plan and saying it needs over 3,000 Pro accounts just to break even, then there's nothing my tiny contribution could possibly do to help. And I'm afraid that if Minds needs 3,000 $40-a-month subscriptions to stay afloat, then the future doesn't look very bright -- especially not when content creators can go to a place like WordPress and get a professional website presence for $20 to $30 a month. Why gamble $480 a year on a startup when you can pay less through an established presence?

Of course, this all circles back to why most people won't leave Facebook. Even if the alternatives are better, and most of them are, you just won't convince most people that switching to an unknown quantity is worth the effort. 

I've been fighting this battle for years when it comes to trying to persuade people to vote third party when they claim to hate the Democrats and Republicans so much. Even when they know the two major parties are terrible, they won't switch, usually using the inherently circular argument that third parties have no chance. Of course they don't have a chance if you won't support them.

With that in mind, I should practice what I preach when it comes to third-party politics and give Minds a try. But I just don't have the time to invest in, nor the energy to muster toward, something that has a decent chance of not surviving. So for now, the Eggshells blog is moving to VK, a big centralized service that has no connection whatsoever to Silicon Valley. It's essentially Russia's Facebook. You can set up groups there, and you can compose blog-like articles, either from your personal profile or from within your groups. VK is one of the world's 20 most visited websites, so it's in no danger of vanishing like some of these startups. Most importantly, censorship doesn't appear to be an issue there. You can get shut down for spamming or otherwise abusing the system, but suffice it to say that there are comments and discussions on VK that wouldn't last for 10 seconds on Facebook before getting zapped. As a bonus, English-speakers seem to fly under VK's radar, giving an extra layer of protection.

It'll be interesting to see if I get any more engagement there. I doubt that I will. But the point is to continue to engage in the catharsis of writing, and to hope it all makes some kind of difference in the end. I may never accomplish any more than just shouting into the wind, but at least I'll have done what I can.

The Inevitable Collapse

I'm tired. 

I've been railing for years about the direction our culture is heading in. Looking around at how quickly every undesirable trend has accelerated this year, I think it's too late to stop a complete collapse. 

Consider...

At a time when we should be having an open and vibrant discussion about managing a virus, we instead have monopolistic social-media companies silencing members of the medical community for not promoting the "correct" agenda. Whether it's a doctor being canceled because he advised the president, a Chinese scientist discussing the potential origin of the virus, or a group of physicians chronicling their success with a decades-old generic, if it doesn't fit the narrative, it'll be attacked as somehow endangering the public. (And if you wonder why a cheap generic drug would be vilified, just count how many big-pharma ads you see on your TV every day.) 

You, too, will be fact-checked or canceled if you question how the numbers have been juiced to keep the fear ramped up -- whether it's the fact that hospitals have labeled the cause of death as C-19 even when other conditions were present, or how positive test numbers have been inflated, or how the CDC admitted that only 6% of U.S. C-19 deaths have actually been from C-19 alone, with all other patients having co-morbidities. Did you know that over 90% of all C-19 deaths happen to those who were over 55 and/or already ill? Did you know that the survival rate is around 99.7%? Probably not, because that would let the fear narrative slip away and people could get back to a normal life. 

Or consider that the city of Nashville just recently got caught suppressing the numbers of cases attributable to bars and restaurants -- precisely because the numbers were so low. Never mind that small businesses are dying and the economy has crashed. Never mind that your life is still locked down. Psychopathic control freaks drunk on power have to keep you afraid and controlled, even if there's no justification for it whatsoever.

This is where we are. Science and medicine have thus been politicized and weaponized, with the aid of social media and mainstream TV, to condition you to accept one narrative and reject all others. 

Think, too, about how after we "flattened the curve," the media moved the goalposts. Instead of the incessant drumbeat on the number of deaths, the message shifted overnight to the number of cases, as if cases were the same thing as deaths. 

Apparently the media thought no one would notice. And apparently they were right. Within a month, a fearful public was conditioned to believe that masks work, even though the medical talking heads told us at the height of the pandemic that we didn't need them and they really weren't effective. 

And now we've gone from "you don't need a mask" to mask mandates, with the threat of fines and arrests for noncompliance. From there we went to stores refusing you entry for not masking even if you have a medical exemption, violating the spirit of the ADA and treating their customers like lepers. And from there we've gone to Australian police forcibly masking handcuffed violators in the streets. 

The slippery slope has never moved quite this quickly before. The UK, emulating Communist China, is now forcing its citizens to use QR-based tracking apps and submit their personal information just to enter retail establishments. 

Not to be outdone, Australia -- after already flying spy drones to make sure people were masked and not leaving the assigned perimeter from their homes, after sending the military into private homes to ensure compliance, and after arresting a pregnant woman in front of her family and using a battering ram to break down another man's door, both for merely expressing anti-lockdown opinions on social media -- is now considering a bill to arrest people who might be likely, based on their online activity, to dare to protest the government's draconian measures, creating a real-life Minority Report. 

If you don't think those measures won't come to the USA, just think about how many people were conditioned in such a short amount of time to accept a shutdown of our economy, and then to accept universal masking, and now to being encouraged to use Stasi-style snitch lines that let you report mask violations. 

Some people will accept any encroachments on their freedoms, and the freedoms of others, if they're kept fearful enough. 

Again, think about how absurd and heavy-handed the TSA's airport security measures felt after 9/11. Yet the public, fully conditioned by media fearmongering, came to accept the absurd and abnormal as the "new normal." 

Nearly 20 years later, the absurd is now routine, and any alternative seems unthinkable. Twenty years from now, will we be considering how unthinkable it once was to ever go unmasked in public, to not have universal tracking of people's movements, to not have vaccine passports? Because those are the things we're setting up to become the next "new normal" -- all over a virus with a 99.7% survival rate. 

Children are being masked in school even though they're the lowest-risk group of all. College kids are being kicked out of school if they leave a delineated perimeter around campus, turning colleges into the equivalent of minimum-security prisons. 

Do you really think this is ever going to end? Do you think any of this really has anything to do with a virus anymore? Or is it simply about power and control over the masses? 

Colleges are where another fight emerges, as institutions that were once centers of free inquiry increasingly fire teachers and expel students for refusing to bow to a rigid and divisive agenda of political extremism. 

Top schools are dropping admissions tests because arbitrary immutable characteristics matter more than academic excellence, while curriculums shift their focus from imparting knowledge and skills to indoctrinating students with "critical race theory."  

That same agenda has fanned the flames of destruction across the land, as the movement exploits a tragic case of police brutality to attempt to guilt the entire nation into rejecting the very Enlightenment values it was founded on. 

And rather than shun it for the violent extremism it is, companies, organizations, and communities bend over backwards to show their support and endorse the destruction of our very way of life. 

We're not just dealing with upset activists demanding positive change. We're dealing with extreme radicals who oppose the nuclear family, who want to abolish the police that help keep our streets safe, and who believe the United States is irredeemably racist and want to tear down everything it stands for. 

This isn't about reform. It's an open revolt against the very foundations of Western civilization. 

The postmodern radicalism of this movement first told you that biological sex doesn't exist and would cancel you if you disagreed. Now they want to tell you that your pigmentation inherently makes you a racist, all while its advocates openly work to dismantle civil-rights and equal-protection laws. 

Now it's woke to have segregated spaces for minority groups -- the "coloreds only" lunch counters of half a century ago were bad, but a "persons-of-color only" cafe at the University of Michigan is enlightened and progressive. 

Meanwhile, in California, lawmakers cheered the creation of a ballot proposal to remove the anti-discrimination clause from the state constitution -- so that institutions can openly discriminate in favor of minorities. 

All this does is move us backwards to a pre-civil rights era where the old discriminations are stood on their head and hailed as justice and progress. 

A new supremacy is emerging to take the place of all our work toward equality. Think about how Black is now capitalized and white still isn't: That's the best summation I can think of for where we are right now. The goal is revenge, not equality. 

But question any of it and of course you're a racist. Question the ongoing unrest in the nation and you'll be told it's mostly peaceful protests. Question the double standard of communities that praise shoulder-to-shoulder race protests while anti-lockdown protests are met with media shaming and even further political crackdowns, and you're a dangerous right-wing white supremacist. 

Want to go to church? Try it and we'll shut down your church. Want to reopen your business so you can feed your family? Try it and we'll strip your business license. Want to burn down churches and businesses? No problem. And it's all Trump's fault anyway. 

Businesses not allowed to reopen are being reduced to ashes, while statues of the Founding Fathers topple. The mainstream media actually, literally, defends looting, while radical DAs press charges against armed citizens protecting their homes against roving mobs. 

And the establishment cheers it all on. 

They also cheer on the gutter filth that passes as entertainment, while calling you an uptight backwards hick for opposing its cultural normalization. Netflix releases a movie about the exploitation of young girls by exploiting young girls -- a movie so explicit that it's recommended for adults only. Think about that. A movie starring children is not suitable for children. Little wonder, when it goes so far as to feature underage nudity. A regular person in possession of the same material could be arrested. But Netflix releases it, and the critics gush with praise. 

And have you heard of the new hit song called "WAP"? I won't dignify the song by quoting any of the lyrics, because it's nothing but a long narcissistic string of the basest pornography you can imagine. And yet once again, the critics heap on the praise, calling it a powerful statement of "sex-positive" female "empowerment." If reducing a woman to her genitals and what she does with them in explicit, crude detail is female empowerment, then we're definitely moving backwards as a society. There's nothing the least bit clever, symbolic, or thought-provoking about the lyrics -- nothing that could even begin to attempt to elevate them to some kind of artistic statement. 

The worst part, though, isn't even the song itself, but the fact that it's been No. 1 on the Billboard chart for three weeks. That means people are actually giving this sewage an audience. And that's a deeply distressing sign of just how rotten the foundation of our society has become. This foundation can't hold for much longer before everything comes crashing down.  

And let's be perfectly clear about one thing. 

The people praising porn as entertainment... 

The people justifying riots and calling you a racist... 

The people who want to cancel you for having the wrong opinion... 

The people who fact-check out of existence every narrative the corporate establishment disapproves of... 

The people who call riots peaceful protests while threatening to arrest you for so much as complaining about the lockdowns and mandates... 

The people who continue the lockdowns long after the curve was flattened, destroying the economy over a virus that the overwhelming majority will completely recover from... 

The people who order you to wear a useless mask, with no end in sight... 

The people threatening more violence if Trump wins... 

They're all the same people. 

They're a puritanical cult of political inquisitors, dividing us with the poison of identity politics and demanding complete ideological conformity, from you and from everyone else. 

The masks that they insist you wear couldn't be a more fitting political symbol: They want you to shut up, obey, and conform. 

And the worst part is, it's probably too damn late to stop them. We've let them take control of virtually everything in our culture, from the media and entertainment to science and medicine to just about every major corporate boardroom and academic institution. These woke Marxist psychopaths, direct descendants of Mao's Red Guard, will not rest until they've imposed their insane ideology on every one of us. 

Brace yourself, because it's going to get even uglier. 

Things are never going back to the way they were.

Social-Media Alternatives to the Silicon Valley Censors

If you use Facebook, you've probably seen the addendum to its terms of service, set to take effect Oct. 1.

There's been plenty of speculation about why Facebook is telling everyone that their content, and even their accounts, could be throttled for pretty much any reason whatsoever. The part at the end about mitigating "adverse legal or regulatory impacts" makes it sound suspiciously as if Facebook expects to be stripped of its Section 230 protections.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields Facebook and other similar services from legal liability for what their users say and do on their platforms. In short, if I go on Facebook and say I'm going to kill someone, and then I go out and do it, Facebook isn't legally liable for having given me a platform to say what I said. 

The catch is that to be protected under Section 230, Facebook and its peers are supposed to act more or less like neutral platforms, not like publishers who curate content. And as Facebook and others have ramped up the censorship of their users, the Trump administration has fired back and essentially demanded a review of Section 230, since Facebook and others increasingly appear to be violating the good-faith agreement not to behave like publishers. That's exactly what they're doing if, as it looks, they're deliberately targeting people for their political opinions.

AT&T is going before the FCC this week to argue for a reworking of Section 230 that would lessen social media's legal protections. So my guess is that Facebook is covering its behind should Section 230 change. 

Of course, Facebook could just avoid the legal drama altogether if it would simply stop censoring its users over things that are perfectly legal and acceptable to say. But just like the rest of the Woke Universe, Facebook and its allies hate free speech and will shut up anyone it disagrees with.  

Or this could be a more sinister move to ramp up the censorship of conservative voices heading into the election. What, you think Facebook wouldn't engage in the same kind of election meddling it accused Russian bogeymen of doing in 2016?

Ben Garrison

De-Zuck your life

The best thing you can do to fight the inevitable upcoming escalation in censorship is to simply stop using Facebook and its censorious brethren in Silicon Valley. Hit them in their pocketbook. Money and power are the only things organizations like this understand.

I get it, though. Getting Silicon Valley out of your life is a pain. Most of us are deeply dependent on the tech monopolies like Facebook and Google. And that might not be so bad if Facebook and Google were benevolent titans. But Google cooperates with authoritarian regimes around the world. It regularly shuts down YouTube channels based on its own ever-widening definitions of "hate speech" and "misinformation." And it spies on you.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been kicking people off its platform for ever more flimsy reasons. Having come under pressure from a score of woke corporations that demanded Facebook censor more speech on its platform, Mark Zuckerberg and his leftist cronies have shut down anti-mask and anti-lockdown pages, "militia" (read: armed constitutional patriot) pages, QAnon conspiracy pages, and many more, typically under the guise of the pages' having somehow broken the terms of service or engaging in whatever Facebook's definition of "hate speech" is.

Most recently, Facebook has actually been "fact-checking" the CDC's revelation that only 6% of U.S. C-19 fatalities had only C-19 as the sole cause of death; all the rest had underlying conditions. To say this on Facebook -- to share the CDC's own information -- is to spread "misinformation that could cause public harm." Of course, controlling the C-19 narrative isn't new -- we know that all of Silicon Valley has banned any information related to hydroxychloroquine as a potential C-19 treatment, even when actual practicing medical doctors present the information.

And Kyle Rittenhouse? Facebook has un-personed him, while GoFundMe shut down his legal-defense fundraiser. Facebook doesn't want to glorify violence, you see -- even though they let BLM, Antifa, and other assorted far-left mobs celebrate violence all the time with no repercussions.

On top of all that, don't forget: Since they're both free services, you're Google's and Facebook's product.

The usual argument from those defending Google and Facebook is that, as private companies, they can do whatever they want. But we all know that's a bogus comeback, because no company can do whatever it wants. Every company has to follow labor laws, anti-discrimination laws, and so on. Another thing they're not supposed to be able to do is engage in monopolistic practices.

But as we've seen, over and over again, no one in Washington appears to have the guts to invoke antitrust law against these companies. Because let's face it -- when a company has grown so large that it essentially controls the public narrative, it's time for that company to be broken up. No one should have so much power over public discourse to be able to change and control it through algorithms and selective censorship.

So what do you do?

Well, I can tell you what I've done.

Getting started

So far, I've taken care of the easy stuff -- shifting from Chrome and Google search to a privacy-based browser and search engine in Brave and DuckDuckGo. There are plenty of others to pick from, and I may migrate to other services once I get more comfortable with them. But for now, Brave and DDG are "good enough" solutions.

Meanwhile, I've just about moved all my email contacts away from Gmail. That's taken a while. If you've had a Gmail account for any amount of time, you'll find that as soon as you think you've updated your email address to everything you want to keep track of, something else you forgot about pops up one day. Now, my everyday stuff -- subscription emails, company offers, Amazon, eBay, and all the rest -- goes to Yandex. ProtonMail, based in Switzerland, is for personal stuff in my inner circle.

(I'll address a few inevitable questions at this point. Yes, Yandex is a free service like Google. But Yandex is based in Russia, so I don't really care if Yandex tries to market me, as it'll never affect my daily life the way Google does. Heck, I don't even care if Yandex wants to send my emails to the FSB. Russian intel doesn't easily cooperate with American intel, and that suits me just fine. As for ProtonMail, well, the Swiss are of course noted for their privacy protections.)

The things that remain to be done are to get Android off my phone, replacing it with an open-source operating system. And then there's this blog. Moving eight years of posts to another site is going to be a monumental chore. But once I get those two things done, I'll have de-Googled myself as much as possible.

Next steps

Now let's address social-media replacements. After the last round of Facebook censorship, I've seen a lot of people in groups I belong to wondering where they should go. They know it's just a matter of time before they too get fitted with the Silicon Valley woke muzzle.

Well, there are scores of other social-media services out there. But since Facebook is such a massive monopoly, everyone is there -- which means everything is happening there, which means it's very difficult to get people to move to a new platform. How you do that, I don't know. Maybe it'll take another wave of mass Facebook censorship to get its reluctant users to finally wake up and migrate someplace else. Right now, most of the alternative platforms are comparative wastelands -- because people aren't moving to them. It's a lot like getting people to vote for third parties. They argue that it's a wasted vote and the candidate will never win -- but that just becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy when no one will make the leap and cast a vote in the first place.

If you want to keep your Facebook account open, or you need to wean yourself off, my advice would be to use Facebook for completely innocuous stuff, like pictures of your cats, or posts complaining about your neighbors, and move the activism -- or anything even remotely controversial and thus subject to Silicon Valley censorship -- to an alternative site.

So let's make this as easy as possible. I could go through dozens of alternative platforms, but I'm going to focus on the few that I think are the most viable.

Twitter replacement: Parler.

Parler.

Parler (not "Parlor" -- the site's name is the French word for "to speak") works a lot like Twitter. It's built around sharing short blurbs. But Parler won't censor or fact-check you. If you're not doing something illegal, chances are no one is going to bother you.

I have a Parler account. I never liked Twitter, so I don't care so much for Parler. Aside from the fact that Twitter is a censorious cesspool, it's just not the type of social media that appeals to me. And as of now, it feels like an echo chamber for conservative ideas. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's most assuredly a result of all the censorship of conservative voices on other platforms. But I enjoy the push and pull of debate. If you want a Twitter-like experience where you don't have to worry about being silenced by a bunch of woke nannies, Parler might be the place for you.

YouTube replacements: Bitchute and banned.video.

Neither one is nearly as big as YouTube, and they can both feel a little bit clunky to use. But this is where all the video producers go after YouTube silences them. Bitchute is a combination of banned creators and folks just using an alternative to YouTube, while banned.video is exactly what it says it is. Twitter won't even allow you to link to Bitchute -- which of course only proves the need for services like Bitchute and banned.video. David Icke, for one, is there. Stefan Molyneux is at Bitchute. Alex Jones' InfoWars outfit is at both.

Reddit replacements: Ruqqus, Quora (sort of), idw.community (ditto), Voat (with huge caveats).

If you like discussion-based communities but don't want to deal with Reddit's woke censorship, you have options. Following Reddit's mass "hate speech" purge at the end of June, droves of users headed to Ruqqus, which is pretty much as close to a Reddit clone as you're going to find -- with the added bonus that you won't get banned.

Quora is a little bit different from Reddit. It's more of a Q&A-style site, with thoughtful and well-sourced answers getting upvotes and poorer responses being collapsed.

idw.community (also accessible through slug.com) is more focused on big-idea political debates. The "IDW" stands for "intellectual dark web," the group of thoughtful pundits and intellectuals that includes such names as Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Dave Rubin. It's about as anti-woke of a site as you're going to find.

(Not gonna lie -- Quora and idw.community are two of my favorite social-media sites.)

Voat is like Ruqqus in most ways, except that it seems to have turned into a haven for racists and fringe conspiracy theorists. Approach at your own risk.

And finally...

Facebook replacements: Minds, MeWe, Gab, VK. 

Minds.

MeWe.

MeWe and Minds are very similar to Facebook in how they work. You have a news feed, and you can join and create groups. The major difference between then is that MeWe's focus is on privacy -- MeWe won't sell your information or bombard you with targeted ads, nor does it use algorithms to manipulate what you see -- while Minds' mission is anti-censorship. If it's not illegal, you can say it at Minds, and no one will shut you up.

I have accounts at both MeWe and Minds. If I had to pick one over the other, I'd go with Minds. That's in part because of its commitment to free speech. But it also lets you create a blog, which I'm thinking about doing as a short-term solution to getting off Blogger for good. And I think it's also easier to make connections on Minds. Because others can pay to promote their feeds on Minds, you won't have to create your world from scratch -- you'll have something you can build on. At MeWe, it's pretty much all on you to build a network of contacts and groups.

Gab.

Gab is a very interesting place. It's a little like Facebook, with groups and a news feed, but it also feels a little bit like Twitter -- maybe because there's so much strident political discussion. Like Parler, though, the discussion feels like an echo chamber, since so many people displaced from the Silicon Valley giants have ended up here. And you will find your share of racists and fringe crazies here, though they haven't taken over the place like at Voat. Gab's founder is a hardcore free-speech absolutist, so if you come here, you're going to have to deal with the folks at the extremes.

As you can see off to the right, Gab has a merch store. It also has its own Dissenter privacy-based browser -- and a merch store for Dissenter, too. But I'm not going to knock Gab for any of the merchandising. Like many of these alternative social-media sites, Gab is user-funded. And since Visa and PayPal have both blacklisted Gab, you pretty much have to use cryptocurrency or send a check in the mail. Free speech sometimes comes at a cost -- literally.

VK.

And here's the big wild card: VK. That's short for VKontakte. VK is basically Russia's Facebook. And it holds tremendous untapped potential for folks in the West.

Why? Because VK's format will be very familiar to those who use Facebook, right down to the blue color scheme. It has a messaging function, you can share images, you can create public events, you can join and create groups -- it's all there. It even has a marketplace and its own e-payment system.

And this is no fringe website that's going away anytime soon. It's among the top 20 most visited sites in the world, with over 500 million members, and it's the single most popular website in Russia.

So why have you never heard of it? Well, probably because the Western media doesn't want you to know about it. And, partially for that reason, most of its users speak Russian.

However, there are English-speaking folks there. Most of the ones I've found are from the UK and tend to be hardcore English nationalists and Brexit supporters. In contrast, I think I've connected with a grand total of two Americans so far.

But there's nothing stopping Americans from networking and building their own groups there. Best of all, since you'd be flying under the radar, no one is going to bother you, which means you get added protection against Western cancel culture.

VK doesn't easily censor people, either. You can find a lot of articles online that will tell you how VK, like a lot of other social-media alternatives, has become a haven for those on the fringes after they've been kicked out of mainstream sites. And I won't sugar-coat it: There are some serious racists on VK, posting things that wouldn't last for 10 seconds on Facebook. But as with Gab, free speech means you take the good with the bad. Other people get to say things you may not like. But basically, as long as you don't bash Vladimir Putin, you're going to be just fine on VK. Look me up if you're interested in trying it out. I haven't used it much yet. I'm waiting for others to come so I can get to know them and network with them.

The future of free speech

I don't have any faith that Google won't pull down this post. I can only hope that the people who need to see it actually do -- and that you might be able to find a new social-media home where you can start building new communities with friends and like-minded people, free of the censorship-happy Silicon Valley giants. See you there!

The Slippery Slope of Mask Mandates and the Madness of Mobs

Your mask is a lot of things. 

A security blanket. A lucky charm. A virtue-signaling device.

But that's about it.

Remember back during the first Gulf War, when everyone was wearing those little yellow "Support the Troops" lapel ribbons to show how much they cared about our soldiers? 

Well, your mask is the 2020 version of the yellow ribbon -- your way of advertising your selfless dedication to Not Killing Grandma. And it's just about as effective as the ribbons were, which is to say they're a terrific way of advertising your moral superiority over other people  -- but not much else.

And that's because...

• N95 masks are designed for breathing out, which means you're not protecting the people around you at all. 

• Surgical masks are designed for doctors to keep stuff in, but they're intended for short-term use in sterile medical environments, not for wearing on your face all day in non-sterile environments. Doing that just turns your face into a walking petri dish.

• Cloth masks are so porous that they keep almost nothing out, though they are great for keeping moisture in, creating a welcoming environment for mold and mildew to grow and actually increasing the risk of respiratory infections -- this according to a 2015 study, long before anyone had ever heard of COVID. That study showed a 97% penetration rate with cloth masks. And that's not to mention the inevitable air gaps, or the fact that the virus is far, far smaller than the gaps between the threads, or that you can contract the virus through your eyes. (So why are the "experts" not pushing eyewear the same way they're pushing masks?)

In fact, several studies conducted before the C-19 outbreak consistently showed that masks were minimally effective at stopping respiratory aerosols and thus offered little to no protection against cold and flu viruses. It was discovered, however, that masks depleted wearers' oxygen levels and put them at higher risk for infection.

Why?

So why the sudden mask hysteria? Well, the obvious reason is that the ratings-driven media is pushing it relentlessly, and the people are buying in. Note how the media has shifted the goalposts, from talking endlessly about number of deaths to now talking just as incessantly about number of cases -- while never pointing out the obvious fact that cases are not deaths, and that more cases may simply be a result of more testing (or even some funny business with the way the cases are being counted). If case numbers rise but deaths do not follow in an appreciable manner, that's actually a potentially good sign that the virus is becoming less lethal and we're working toward building herd immunity -- despite our best efforts to thwart herd immunity so far.

Regardless, while the nonstop death counts programmed people to accept the lockdowns, now the nonstop talk of rising cases is programming people to accept masks, and even push for compulsory use.

But again, why? Why now, when at the height of the virus' deadliness, the same "experts" demanding we muzzle our faces weren't pushing masks at all? Some were saying they offered minimal effectiveness against the virus, while others were practically begging people not to wear and buy them. Let's review some of the flip-flops of the "experts" we're supposed to trust:

• "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit." -- The World Health Organization, in March
• "WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult." -- The exact same WHO, in June

• "Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around wearing masks." -- Dr. Anthony Fauci, in March
• "Some sort of mask-like facial covering, I think for the time being, can be a very regular part of helping prevent the spread of infection." -- The exact same person, in May.

• "Seriously, people. STOP BUYING MASKS! They are not effective in preventing general public from catching coronavirus." -- The U.S. Surgeon General, Feb. 29.
• "I'm pleading with your viewers. I'm begging you ... wear a face covering." -- The exact same person, July 20.

Why now, when the mortality rate has been falling since the April peak? The CDC just reported a drop in the death rate for the 12th straight week, and cases considered serious or critical have reached a record low.

Why now, when the curve has been flattened? Here's a graphical view of where daily deaths stand as of July 19.

Why the hysteria, when, by the CDC's own figures, the COVID death rate is around 0.26%?

Why, when we know that the virus poses a minimal health threat to those who under 60 and not in some way immunocompromised -- in other words, to the vast majority of the general population?

Why, when the virus now poses about the same risk of dying to the general population as does driving to work?

Why, when just a few short weeks ago, C-19 was even close to losing its status as a pandemic because the death rate had fallen so low?

Why, why, why?

The rise of the rage mobs

Well, consider that masks were originally being pushed on the premise that they might protect you from catching C-19. When that narrative fell apart, based on the data we've seen here, the mask propaganda did a sudden 180: "Wearing masks protects you from me and me from you."

The fact that the narrative shifted to justify their continued use should have been a red flag in itself, but the shift was an important one psychologically, in that it changed wearing masks from an act of self-protection to an act of selflessness. And we've seen the predictable results. In a society that loves to virtue-signal, suddenly people were falling all over themselves to push masks -- and then to insist that you wear them too.

Couple that with the continued media-driven fear that makes people think C-19 is the black plague, and you've set the stage for a mob begging for mask mandates and treating those who question those same mandates as selfish monsters, witches to be burned. Never mind the facts. Never mind the logic. It's all driven by high emotion at this point.

"It's not too much to ask," they say. Well, it's not really for you to decide what's "too much" for another person.

"It's not infringing on your freedoms," they say. Isn't it? Because you've just opened a massive Pandora's box. If you let the government decide what you have to put on your face whenever it wants, what else have you opened the door to?

"It's no different from wearing a seatbelt." Well, yes, it is. A seatbelt doesn't restrict my breathing. A seatbelt isn't mandated for something that poses little to no threat. And, perhaps most importantly, there's no end to seatbelt laws. No one pushing for masks is even bothering to ask when the mandates will end. When can you take the masks off again? What will be the criteria? Will it be a month from now? Six months? A year? Will you have to put them on again for an indefinite amount of time if some statistical point is breached, or the media sufficiently ramps up public fear again?

Incidentally, the current climate raises a good argument that seatbelts shouldn't be mandatory in the first place -- precisely because liberty entails the right to take risks over your own body, and because things like mandatory seatbelt laws created the slippery slope that make people think today that just one little more bit of control over your body isn't such a big deal. Until tomorrow it's "just" mandatory temperature checks, or "just" a mandatory vaccine, or "just" a mandatory chip implant, or "just" a burqa.

The bottom line is, the government needs to have an extremely compelling reason to force me to muzzle my face, and it doesn't have one. As a free people, we should always demand that any infringements on our liberties of any kind meet a very high bar. Instead, a fearful people are literally begging for mask mandates that will solve nothing in the long run but allow the state more control over our lives and our personal choices.

If masks worked so well, they would have been mandated at the deadliest height of the virus, not after the mortality rate has been falling for three months.

If masks worked so well, it shouldn't matter to a masked person whether I wear one or not.

And if COVID were so deadly to the general population, there would also be mandates to dispose of your mask in a biohazard bin. Instead, the virtue-signalers just toss them in the trash or on the ground, after they've finished lecturing you about what a horrible person you are for thinking for yourself.

The doctor in the following video makes a good point about how we should be handling COVID prevention by using the example of a patient with cancer. The doctor doesn't go around the woman's community telling all her neighbors to wear masks. Instead, he tells the patient to take precautions to keep herself safe. It's worth a watch -- he also makes some good points about how the average case age has fallen to 31, an age at very low risk for complications, and how the supposedly rising hospitalization numbers are being skewed.

Superstition reigns

"We live in a society gripped by a quasi-religious fervor and obsessed with symbols and irrational fears," Rich Lowry recently observed. "Our society isn't progressing but falling back into a superstition that everyone must believe or pretend to believe for the supposed welfare of the community."

Mr. Lowry is referring to the current spate of woke moral panics that's causing us not just to believe in absurdities, but also to cling to them after we've been shown the facts of the matter. He cites the Bubba Wallace controversy: Even after the FBI determined that the "noose" in the NASCAR driver's garage was just a rope door pull, many still insisted that it was a noose -- "because the will to believe is so strong and, hey, better safe than sorry."

And that is precisely the same impetus that has pushed the mask conversation from "you don't really need them" to "we recommend you wear them" to "put on a mask, you selfish bastard, or I'll call the cops."

Consider again where the "experts" stood earlier this year at the height of the pandemic. (Emphases mine.)

First, Dr. Fauci, who famously called a mask a "symbol":

"When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing as mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is."

Then there's this:

"There's not much we can do, so we're all walking around feeling rather victimized by this virus. By using a mask, even if it doesn't do a lot, it moves the locus of control to you, away from the virus."

That was Vanderbilt professor of medicine Dr. William Schaffner, speaking to Time magazine in April.

A team of doctors, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine back in May, drove home this aspect of mask-wearing in an article pointing out the low likelihood of catching C-19 from fleeting public encounters:

We know that wearing a mask out side health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

In the aforementioned Time article, Lynn Bufka of the American Psychological Association further drives the point home. She "suspects that people are clinging to masks for the same reason they knock on wood or avoid walking under ladders":

"Even if experts are saying it's really not going to make a difference, a little [part of] people's brains is thinking, well, it's not going to hurt. Maybe it'll cut my risk just a little bit, so it's worth it to wear a mask," she says. In that sense, wearing a mask is a "superstitious behavior": If someone wore a mask when coronavirus or another virus was spreading and did not get sick, they may credit the mask for keeping them safe and keep wearing it.

Are you seeing where this is going now? Back to the New England Journal of Medicine article:

It is also clear that masks serve symbolic roles. Masks are not only tools; they are also talismans that may help increase health care workers' perceived sense of safety, well-being, and trust in their hospitals. Although such reactions may not be strictly logical, we are all subject to fear and anxiety, especially during times of crisis. ... Expanded masking protocols' greatest contribution may be to reduce to transmission of anxiety, over and above whatever role they may play in reducing transmission of Covid-19.

A mask is a "talisman." A magical item, employed by ancient superstitious cultures in the belief that it offered special powers and protections to the user.

There you have it. Your mask is a lucky rabbit's foot.

And yet another physician, Dr. Simone Gold, points out the irrationality and obvious danger involved in turning your rabbit's foot into a political weapon:

Of course, by knowledge or common sense observation, most Americans already know that masking everyone is superstition. But unlike privately carrying a lucky charm, mandating facial coverings requires the consent of the governed. Many cultures mandate clothing that appears totally irrational to outsiders. Never have those cultures pretended that there is a scientific basis for their clothing requirement. Their leaders rule, and their citizens accept, that their choice of clothing is due to religious or cultural preference. 

Not wearing a mask is not mere "personal choice" like deciding between a head covering or a T-shirt. It is a flashpoint for being a free human being who has consented to be governed but has not consented to be ruled. We do not consent to a masked America, because that is a fundamental change in American society, culture, norms, and rights. 

People who are apathetic toward their own liberty cannot eliminate Constitutional rights for those who are not. This is not the first (or last) time that people who believe in superstition are screaming the loudest. The Constitution exists precisely to protect all people during times of mass hysteria. 

The mask has become the most visible symbol of social conditioning to Americans determined to preserve individual freedom. 

She's absolutely right. The masks aren't about health. They're about conditioning, obedience, fear, and control. I'm not willing to compromise my liberties for any of those things. It's not about "owning the libs," or loving Trump, or anything else. It's about standing my ground, not being compelled to do something for which there's no logical justification, and not giving up my freedoms without a damn good reason.

This is no time to roll over. It's no time for being controlled by superstitious fearful groupthink. It's time to think with a clear head about what's going on, and what our current choices portend for the future. Are we going to become an authoritarian society of hysterical germophobes who are likely to set the stage for future lockdowns and health mandates of all shapes and sizes? Or are we going to acknowledge that life involves risk and people get sick, so that we can take responsible steps to protect vulnerable people while letting the rest of the population go about their lives, hopefully building herd immunity in the process?

"The woke shamans are defining and enforcing a new symbology," Mr. Lowry continues. "They insist their spiritual sense is better attuned than anyone else's and will try to excommunicate anyone who says otherwise. Their work may seem shockingly new, but it is really a throwback to ages past -- ones that no advanced society should want to revisit."

It's not a coincidence that the people trying to cancel you for not having the proper opinions are the same ones who want to order you to put a muzzle over your mouth. Their mandates rely on the suspension of your critical thought. Indeed, it's clear that their own critical thought has given way to a classic case of mob mentality, wherein groups use emotion rather than logic to compel their peers to adopt a behavior -- even if they have to shame, scream, and use violence to do it.

The pitchforks are out, and the dominoes are falling. Under pressure, states are issuing mandates one after another, and now the big corporations are lining up to do the same. And sadly, it appears increasingly likely that the enraged mask mobs will win the day.