Article written by Steve McCann in "The American Thinker":
At
the culmination of a national health or societal crisis in the United
States, it has become de rigueur for the media and innumerable pundits
ensconced within the professional class to perform a post-mortem on how
the citizenry handled the crisis and what lessons the rubes in fly-over
country should have learned. But in the current pandemic, the top levels
of professional class that populates the ruling class and runs the
media and the major institutional bureaucracies has irretrievably
unmasked itself. And the in the postmortems that will come, they will be
found deficient.
Credulous Cowards
An
immutable tenet of today’s ruling class is that if someone or an
institution within their power base is labeled as “experts,” then these
authorities are not to be questioned and their assumptions, predictions
or projections must be treated as gospel. The century that followed the
rise of the Wilsonian progressives, who idolized a powerful government
run by educated experts, saw enormous scientific, medical, and
industrial achievements the hands of experts, the products of higher
education. The professional class, usually products of higher education,
grants deference to certified experts, and the media makes celebrities
out of those experts that support important goals of the ruling class.
Experts have had a very good century.
In the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization, a darling of the American elites, claimed
China was successfully mitigating the spread and the virus was not
spread by human to human contact. Other experts, such as Dr. Anthony
Fauci, claimed the virus was not a serious threat. These proclamations were believed without question
by the ruling class as is borne out at the time by their public
statements, published articles and mocking of President Trump for taking
the threat far more seriously than any of the nation’s elites.
However, on March 16, an even higher echelon of experts, the Imperial College
in London, came out with a study projecting 2.2 million Americans would
die if no mitigation took place or 1.1 million if an unprecedented
societal shutdown were imposed. This immediately became the new mantra
and the media arm of the ruling class was dispatched to spread this
apocalyptic message far and wide and to now vilify President Trump for
not doing enough soon enough.
Within 10 days, however, the Imperial College walked back
their doomsday scenario reducing the fatality estimates by over 90%.
Nonetheless, thanks to our media class, mass hysteria was consuming
the nation, so more experts were needed to keep up the drumbeat of fear
and trepidation.
Enter the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation on March 25, predicting a meltdown
of the nation’s health care system due to an enormous shortage of
hospital and ICU beds throughout the nation, as well as up to 162,000
deaths.
The immediate necessity of a societal lockdown, regardless of
the economic or human cost, was thus cast in stone. Since that original
study, the IHME has revised their study three times reducing their
projected death toll by 60% and downgrading the need for hospital and
ICU beds by more than 80%.
During
this entire period of time, the nation’s elites never questioned or
highlighted the errors of either the experts who claimed that the virus
was under control and not a major concern or those and their projections
which were used to shut down the nation and cast untold millions into
unemployment and unbelievable distress. By mid-March, their media arm
had created such a groundswell for a national lockdown that any countervailing studies
by numerous non-preferred but eminent doctors and scientists in the
United States and around the world were ignored and their research not
permitted to see the light of day.
One
must conclude, therefore, that the ruling class is too credulous to
question any of their annointed experts and too cowardly to ever admit
their own errors in judgment.
The Ruling Class Exhibits Totalitarian Tendencies
Conservatives
have cast a jaundiced eye toward the principal political arm of the
ruling class, the Democrat Party, for many years, believing the
leadership and elected cohort to be closet totalitarians. As the
coronavirus lockdowns spread from state to state, the party, its elected
officials and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, unabashedly
emerged from that closet, along with a few Republicans.
Wannabe
autocrats surfaced in New Jersey, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania,
California and 25 other states, issuing contradictory and often illegal
orders and proclamations under the threat of jail or severe fines.
Virtually all these unilateral proclamations, without benefit of any
legislative or judicial action, drastically curtailed essential civil
rights.
The Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, was asked by Tucker Carlson
by what authority did he have to nullify the Bill of Rights in issuing
an order that resulted in 15 people being arrested for congregating in a
synagogue. His response: “I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when
we did this…we looked at all the data and science and it says people
have to stay away from each other.”
Murphy is a member in good standing
of the ruling class and their deference to preferred “experts” and not
the Constitution.
It
was not just governors and mayors on the state and local level. Others
such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the entire hierarchy of the
Democrat Party, the mainstream media and the coastal elites supported
and applauded these actions. Further, this same cabal publicly
proclaimed this crisis was the ideal opportunity to force their long
wished for socialist agenda on the nation.
The
façade of moderation the ruling elites built over the years is no
more. They have exposed themselves for who they really are:
totalitarians. If they were ever to control all the levers of power,
they would never willingly surrender them.
Americans Now Know the Ruling Class Sold the Nation Out to China
While
the American public has long been suspicious of Chinese influence in
America, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed for all to see the extent
of this nation’s reliance on a global adversary for necessities such as
medical and pharmaceutical products. And that the single-minded pursuit
of wealth and power prompted the American ruling class to proclaim over
the years that it was a great benefit for the United States to empower China.
China
owes its faster than expected rise as a world power to the transfer of
American jobs, technology, capital, and business acumen to China so that
US shareholders could receive capital gains, US executives could
receive incentive pay for producing consumer products at a much lower
labor cost, and the nation’s elites could, using riches from Chinese
investments in the US, consolidate their retention of power.
Apparently,
the American ruling class could not comprehend that if US corporations
produce the goods they market to Americans offshore, it is the offshore
countries that benefit the most from the economic activity. If that
location is an authoritarian regime bent on world domination, then they
will use their newfound wealth to build up their military, exploit and
suppress their citizenry, promote manufacturing dependence, and corrupt
the governing classes of their potential adversaries.
And
a substantial segment of the American ruling class has been corrupted
by the Chinese Communists. (Investigative reporter Lee Smith has an
excellent analysis of how this corruption evolved at TabletMag.com.) These sympathizers are presently defending China by unabashedly regurgitating Chinese propaganda
about who was responsible for the Wuhan Virus, how it was spread and by
refusing to acknowledge that the globalist philosophy of dependence on
potential foreign adversaries for manufactured goods was a mistake.
The
coronavirus crisis has revealed to an increasingly larger percentage of
the populace the extent to which they were sold out by a now
compromised ruling class.
The Ruling Class Cares Only About Itself Not the American People
From
mid-January to the present, the reaction of the nation’s elites to the
Wuhan Virus pandemic has been almost solely based their intense hatred
of President Trump. In January and February, among a number of other
steps, Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on Chinese nationals and
quarantined those Americans returning to the United States from the
Wuhan area. At the time, he was pilloried as a xenophobe who was
overreacting. Now the President is savagely maligned for not doing
enough in January and February.
During
the month of March, hyping extraordinarily flawed studies, the media by
constant fearmongering stampeded the general public into demanding
action from the administration. A partial shutdown was proposed which
gave license to the wannabe dictators in various states to impose near
martial law. In just four weeks nearly 30 million have lost their jobs,
the economy is in tatters and the national debt, due to relief and
stimulus spending, will balloon by over $6 trillion (the total national
debt in 2002: $6.2 trillion).
The
original purpose of the shutdown was to “flatten the curve” and slow
the spread. Which has been accomplished. The time has come to reopen
the economy. Except many of the denizens of the ruling class insist on
moving the goalposts and setting targets
that can never be met before the country reopens. They are insisting on
universal testing (an impossibility) and a vaccine (which will take up
to 18 months) before the nation can get back to work. In other words, a
guaranteed safe world -- there can be no more outbreaks and deaths from
the virus. They intend to hold President Trump politically responsible
for a reopening that in any way fails to meet these unattainable
metrics.
The
fate of untold millions of Americans mired in an economic and societal
depression is immaterial as long as the economy and the nation are in
shambles come November 3, 2020. The people be damned as long as Donald
Trump and his populist movement, the most serious threat the ruling
class has ever faced, are permanently defeated.
This
nation has survived wars, depression and seven global pandemics yet the
Wuhan Virus has revealed that the current American Ruling Class is most
serious long-term threat to this nation in its 244-year history.
