Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

Why Is CDC Trying To Put A Mask On Your Face Again?
by Jeffrey Tucker

https://brownstone.org/articles/why-is-cdc-trying-to-put-a-mask-on-your-face-again/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
https://brownstone.org/articles/excerpts-from-the-5th-circuit-court-judgement-against-osha/
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-mask-of-your-enslavement-the-image-history-and-meaning-of-escrava-anastacia/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-issues-statement-ruling-health-freedom-defense-fund-inc-et-al-v-biden-et
https://healthfreedomdefense.org/hfdf-statement-on-doj-appeal/
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0420-masks-public-transportation.html
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
https://twitter.com/kasie/status/1517248989535649794
https://twitter.com/NBCNightlyNews/status/1517473308173901825

We know the wicked truth about Chairman Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers
Bloom.” He said this in 1957 while inviting anyone to criticize the
Communist Party. There were cheers all around and the criticisms were
unleashed. This lasted six weeks, after which many of the biggest
critics were shot. It was a bait and switch.

It’s a brilliant tactic for evil regimes. Ferret out the enemy and
then make them go away.

That’s not exactly what happened this week but the analogy works. A
judge in Florida this week struck down the Biden administration’s
transportation mask mandate. The opinion was highly technical and
turned entirely on issues of administrative law. The judge ruled that
the Public Health Service Act of 1944, the first ever to give the
quarantine power to the federal government, did not authorize the
imposition of universal mandates on what is really an article of
clothing in the name of “sanitation.”

Instead, what appeared to happen here was entirely arbitrary. The
Biden administration wanted masks and the CDC imposed them, including
with criminal penalties. For a full year, travelers have been hectored
and threatened at every turn.

After the court decision, a hundred flowers bloomed in the form of
air-born celebrations from coast to coast.

Will it last? Not if our rulers in DC get their way.

But let’s be clear about something. It’s about masks but more. The
mask is a metaphor for all the controls, restrictions, impositions,
mandates, closures, and resulting wreckage of the past two years.
People hate them because they are so personal. More precisely, they
are depersonalizing, which is precisely how the lockdown period of
American history has felt the entire time.

We are our faces, to others and ourselves. Take that away and what are
we? We are tools. We are pawns. We are lab rats for their experiments.
Masks are dehumanizing because they are supposed to be. The mask has a
very long history as a tool of subjection and enslavement. We all know
this intuitively.

Therefore, the opportunity to throw it off was glorious. One evening
an entire nation of travelers celebrated. Celebrating even more were
the airline staff, flight attendants, and pilots. They have lived two
years in these ridiculous things, which have nowhere been proven to
work to crush a virus. Emancipation from them was a welcome relief. So
too for workers around the country, whose interests have been
consistently disregarded.

We found ourselves in the position of caste-like scenes in restaurants
around the country: customers dining happily while being served by
masked workers. This is inconsistent with the democratic and
commercial ethos.

All the airlines as well as Amtrak announced it quickly, perhaps as a
way of making it impossible for the Biden administration to roll it
back. Even Biden himself said that the new rule is that everyone
should do what they want. I guess he didn’t get the memo.

Hold one just one minute, said someone in the administration. We need
to find out what the Department of Justice says. Then the Justice
Department immediately kicked it to the CDC: they are in charge of
“The Science” and so we’ll wait.

    “The Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) disagree with the district court’s decision and will
appeal, subject to CDC’s conclusion that the order remains necessary
for public health. The Department continues to believe that the order
requiring masking in the transportation corridor is a valid exercise
of the authority Congress has given CDC to protect the public health.
That is an important authority the Department will continue to work to
preserve….

If CDC concludes that a mandatory order remains necessary for the
public’s health after that assessment, the Department of Justice will
appeal the district court’s decision.”

What’s this about? The plaintiff Health Freedom Defense Fund issued a
sharp statement:

    “DoJ’s statement is perplexing to say the least and sounds like it
comes from health policy advocates not government lawyers. The ruling
by the US District Court is a matter of law, not CDC preference or an
assessment of “current health conditions.”

In the early days of the Biden administration, the PR decision at the
top was that it would always “follow the science,” a statement that
the new president said many times. This was supposed to be different
from the Trump administration, at least after the summer of 2020 when
the CDC lost control over the political side of the executive state.

On one hand, following The Science sounds good. However, if the
“science” really means the bureaucracies and hence this slogan is just
another way of passing the buck, there is a problem. The bureaucracies
are unaccountable, and typically default to the safest and changeless
route to preserve their power over the population.

Even so, following the DOJ’s announcement, there must have been
moments of panic at the CDC. They had the hot potato and didn’t know
what to do with it. Finally they settled on the usual strategy: they
threw it to an anonymous committee. Then the committee came out with a
statement unsigned by anyone in particular.

Instead of citing The Science, or claiming that they knew for sure
that masks were great for people, the statement started with the
following sentence: “To protect CDC’s public health authority….”
Notice that this doesn’t say to protect public health. It says public
health AUTHORITY. Those are certainly different things.

In any case, the decision was made. The CDC “has asked DOJ to proceed
with an appeal.” Ah, there we go: throw that potato back at a
different agency. The CDC has merely asked! So now the DOJ will
appeal, as forced by the sloganeering of the Biden administration and
the deference to the CDC. The results will certainly be terrible for
the administration because the next court will agree with the previous
court that there was never any legal basis for the mandate in the
first place.

They could also issue a stay. That would be catastrophic for the Biden
administration. Public anger would be out of control. Mao got away
with this because he had total power. Biden does not. In fact, his
poll numbers are awful. I’ve personally never seen an example of a
sadistic government that is simultaneously politically masochistic. In
other words, these people not only do not understand what’s good for
the country; they don’t even know what’s good for themselves!

The words of the CDC statement are the chilling part. They care about
their authority first and foremost, even only. This seems to be the
view pervasive in Washington today, as a Cold Civil War heats up
between the states and with Washington. Every day grows more intense.
Every day, the conflict becomes more raw and brutal. There seems to be
no end in sight because there will be no rollbacks, no apologies, no
regrets, no admission that their “authority” was an overreach all
along.

Will governments have learned their lessons? Look around! We live in a
world burdened by extremely arrogant and immovable public agencies
that have lost public trust. The administrative state is right now as
angry as the public is at them. There is a peaceful solution here but
it doesn’t seem to be on the table.

If I’ve learned anything new over the last two years, it’s about the
strange way in which the ruling class is impervious not only to actual
research but also to the will of the people, even when it shows up in
devastating polls.

They seem not to regard the celebrations after the judge’s decision
not as a corrective but a challenge to overcome.

    WATCH: Dr. Fauci tells me on #TheSourceKasie🕵🏻‍♀️ "This is a CDC
issue, it should not have been a court issue." @CNN
pic.twitter.com/rZZyHnFqJ5
    — Kasie Hunt (@kasie) April 21, 2022

    In an interview with @LesterHoltNBC from last night's broadcast,
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator,
addressed a judge’s decision striking down the CDC’s travel mask
mandate. pic.twitter.com/7t31y9BSEX
    — NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) April 22, 2022

It’s all about…authority. Not public health but public-health
authority. Who is in charge? That’s what’s really at issue. They say
them and we say us.