RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://canadafreepress.com/article/leftist-nonsenselike-shooting-fish-in-a-barrel

Happily, an overwhelming majority of Americans have both eyes and ears. They are watching. They are listening. They are keenly aware that Democrats are not on America’s side.

After the 2016 presidential election of President Donald J. Trump, I stopped counting the numbers of Republicans and Conservatives who told me how unpleasantly life had changed for them.

Through eight years of President George W. Bush––even through the Reagan years, they said––they could still speak to their friends and relatives and agree to disagree about political issues.

But the reaction to the Trump presidency, they told me, was so extreme, the hysteria so sustained, the venom so poisonous, the rationality so nonexistent, that they couldn’t even go to a happy affair like a birthday party or wedding or dinner at a restaurant without World War III breaking out.

No surprise. While glamorous billionaire businessman and TV star Donald Trump had been lionized for decades before he became president by the very people who are vilifying him today, while office-seeking Democrats held out both hands for his generous contributions to their campaigns, and while leftists like Oprah and the fake-news media whores considered it either a privilege or a scoop to interview him, all that changed when he descended the Trump Tower escalator with his dazzling wife Melania in June of 2015 to announce his candidacy.

WHY THE CHANGE?

Indeed, why did the “tolerant” Progressives display––and exhibit to this very day––such florid and feverish intolerance?

Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns.

Defenders of coronavirus lockdown mandates keep talking about science. “We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science,” California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended an order that, among other things, banned the sale of paint and vegetable seeds but not liquor or lottery tickets. “Each action has been informed by the best science and epidemiology counsel there is,” she wrote in an op-ed.

But scientists are almost never unanimous, and many appeals to “science” are transparently political or ideological. Consider the story of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine. His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

https://spectator.org/dems-favor-open-borders-during-coronavirus/

The other day the Washington Post ran a piece entitled, “Trump’s new immigration focus could squeeze Biden into a Democratic tug of war.” The suggestion of the piece is that Biden, in order to appear reasonable during the coronavirus crisis, will have to buck the open-borders voices within his party.

“President Trump’s sudden announcement that he would bar immigrants from entering the country could present a challenging proposition for probable Democratic nominee Joe Biden, potentially thrusting him back into a tug of war between a Democratic base firmly opposed to stricter border policies and more-moderate voters willing to consider them, particularly during an economic calamity,” the Post’s Sean Sullivan writes.

Trump is calling the Democrats’ bluff, showing the American public that the party that is pretending to be oh-so-careful about risks during this crisis is utterly careless when it comes to immigration.

The problem is that no such tug of war exists within the party. Biden and every other major figure in the party all agree that it should be a de facto open borders party. They are all in favor of health care for illegal immigrants, essentially no deportations, no wall, and emasculating border security. They have gone beyond supporting sanctuary cities to proposing that America be a sanctuary country.

Trump is calling the Democrats’ bluff, showing the American public that the party that is pretending to be oh-so-careful about risks during this crisis is utterly careless when it comes to immigration. Why should anyone take seriously a party that wants the country shut down but its borders left open?