It was just a few short weeks ago that the American media was going nuts talking about how it was pure evil that the Chinese were arresting people for not wearing masks.
Videos were going viral, and people were claiming to be horrified that China has no freedoms.
Neoconservative outlets like VICE News were promoting an absolute mania over this in an attempt to stir up hatred against the Chinese in preparation for a war. The VICE narrative was: “we have to invade this country and free these people from their oppressive communist government that is forcing them to wear masks.”
How quickly things change.
Here we are today, and a viral video shows police in Philadelphia pulling a bus rider out of a bus for not wearing a mask.
The masks are something I’ve commented on from the beginning.
You will remember that the black Surgeon General told people that if they wore masks, they were more likely to get the virus. Then the government/media completely changed its position, saying that masks actually might help, and people can wear them if they want. Now people are getting arrested for not wearing them. This all happened in the span of eight weeks.
I don’t believe in the coronavirus hysteria. That does not make me a “coronavirus denier,” but it might make me a “coronavirus minimizer” according to the media. What I believe, as I’ve outlined in detail on this site over the past month, is that “coronavirus” is a strand of the flu. Every year, 7-15% of cases of the flu are caused by a “novel coronavirus,” and this current coronavirus that everyone is going crazy over is simply one of these strands of the virus that causes the flu. There was a chance that it could have been a pretty bad flu (like the one from the 2017-18 season), but based on the evidence we have so far, it is just a standard flu.
That having been said, I think when you say “it’s just the flu,” you could actually be minimizing the flu. The fact that an average of 30,000 to 50,000 people die from the flu every year, and millions more get terribly ill, means that the flu is indeed very serious.
In general, I think masks are a good idea for people to wear in the winter time, because the flu is a serious thing and it makes sense that people would want to protect themselves from it, with or without the coronavirus mass hysteria. However, we’ve never done this before because of the flu, so forcing people to wear masks doesn’t seem like something that should happen.
Even If You Believed the Hype…
We can go further than that: even if you thought that this coronavirus was what they said it was, this ultra-deadly new super-virus, we absolutely could have prevented everything from being shut down by simply telling people to wear masks. This is what they did in South Korea, and in China everywhere outside of Wuhan. So although I think the hysteria is completely insane, no matter what, if people believed the hysteria the natural thing would have been to mandate masks be worn everywhere in public instead of shutting everything down and completely collapsing the economy.
Forcing people to wear masks, in the way that China was chastised for doing, is an infringement on people’s rights. But it is a very minuscule infringement in comparison to what we have now, where you get arrested for going outside, and the neighbors call the police on you if you have a visitor.
Point being: this lockdown is not even treating the problem that it is allegedly supposed to be treating. Although still unnecessary, because the problem itself isn’t even real, the alleged problem could have been solved without these insane measures. So you have to ask: why were the insane measures implemented? Is it simply mass hysteria, and absolute and total incompetence, or is there another, hidden agenda?
We still don’t know the answer.