With the Bureau of Land Management frenzy fading, it's back to lying about Kung Flu

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What happened to shelter in place? It’s back.just in time for Trump rallies. Earlier this week the (very) Liberal Glen Greenwald wrote about the shift:

REMEMBER THE CORONAVIRUS? That was the pandemic which we were told by public health experts since February was so grave — the worst public health threat since the 1918 Spanish Flu — that we could not go outside for any reason, even if it meant a collapse in the global economy, tens or hundreds of millions of people suffering from unemployment, the permanent shuttering of small businesses, sustained mental health damage, and the separation of people from their loved onesand communities, including barring them from visiting dying spouses and parents and children in the hospital or even attending an outdoor burial.

So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it — by, for instance, arguing that the harms of the virus had to be weighed against the suffering from an economic shutdown and a global depression — was deemed immoral. Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments (sometimes they were that, but often they were not).

People who left their homes for any reason other than officially approved “essential” functions were — no matter how careful they were — publicly shamed if not fined and arrested. A lawyer became famous and celebrated for dressing up as the Grim Reaper to shame people for being at even deserted beaches in the sun with ample social distancing. One particularly creepy video from a police department in the United Kingdom used drone footage to castigate and denounce people who did things like walk on nature trails or go for family drives:

….What has changed — dramatically, radically and abruptly — is the messaging from public health experts and even public officials about the virus. Beginning roughly two weeks ago, we all watched as mass stay-at-home orders and self-isolation gave way to massive street protests, where tens or hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in the U.S. and around the world, often one on top of the other, chanting, yelling and singing: a virtual laboratory for what we had spent four months hearing was exactly what one must not do in the middle of this pandemic.

Read the entire essay; Greenwald is one pissed-off, betrayed liberal.

For an example of how the liberal camp reverted to its original line at the end of this week compare Nicholas Kristof’s exultant tribute to his 88-year-old mother, one of the most vulnerable to Covid, breaking quarantine to join the infected on June 4th, and Stephen Miller and Jeremy Wallace renewed scolding of the masses on June 10th.

And with that shift, the lying and hysteria-inducing posts have resumed. Wallace, for instance, shrieks about a record number of new hospitalizations for the past three days in Texas, but doesn’t say what those numbers are. in Texas’s case, 106, 72 and 98 on June 9, 10, and 11, respectively. The population of Texas in 2020 is 28,966,000. A two-second search produced those numbers, and Wallace could have easily, but didn’t, include those numbers to give perspective. That’s not in the game plan.

If anything good has come out of this virus it’s the stripping away of the last shreds of credibility once accorded the press and public health authorities. Time and again they’ve been exposed as know-nothings posing as knowledgeable experts, partisan hacks vs objective observers. Many conservatives have known this truth for decades, which may account for the blue/red divide in how the population has reacted to this panic, but now the rest of the country is beginning to discern it. I don’t see how that faith will ever be restored. Or at least I hope it won’t be.