RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/15/the-moral-busybodies-strike-again/

There’s a weird cognitive dissonance happening right now that is as revealing as it is alarming.

Just as we learn more details about all the ways Barack Obama and his henchmen weaponized powerful federal agencies to punish Donald Trump, Americans, oddly, are surrendering their own power to the same type of god-like government authorities under the guise of the common good.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” C.S. Lewis wrote. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

The effort to stop coronavirus, much like the attempt to stop Donald Trump, has been presented by ardent defenders as their call to duty, a selfless act undertaken not to gratify their lust for power but to protect the public’s best interest.

There is no discernible difference between the high-minded hectoring of former FBI Director James Comey and that of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer—their decisions are above scrutiny because, as they often scold their lesser subjects, these decisions are made for your own good. (“Everything I’m doing is trying to save your life,” Whitmer just said in an interview.)

Lies, Lies, and More Lies

Let’s begin with what now is appropriately called Obamagate.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/the_coronavirus_fifth_column.html

As left-wing Democrat-controlled states continue to keep people in lockdown, it is becoming apparent that they are using the pandemic as a means to gain ultimate control of people’s lives.

In fact, leftists the world over are exploiting the pandemic in order to create their alleged utopias.  Vanessa Vallejo, a Colombian activist and columnist explains that

Whenever they come to power, communists work hard to create a clientele network that will vote for them and support them in the future. So instead of looking for real solutions to lift people out of poverty altogether, they offer them subsidies or useless jobs where citizens are dependent on politicians. At the same time, they make life difficult for entrepreneurs, resulting in more and more unemployed people who can be hooked into their clientele network. Many of them will not be able to get subsidies, but plunging them into poverty will make them easy prey to convince so long as the government offers them aid and blames right-wing entrepreneurs and politicians for their misery.

Sound familiar?  This is happening all across the United States.  The governors of states like Michigan, New York, New Jersey, California, and Pennsylvania continue to hold people hostage to their dictatorial impulses.

After all, “[c]ompanies have been forced to close, people cannot leave their homes so they can not ‘seek’ income on their own, many are sick or have sick relatives, and in this crisis, they have no way to pay the expenses raised by the calamity. In just a few weeks, government spending and the people who need help have both increased dramatically because people have lost their jobs.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lockdown-skeptic-they-couldnt-silence-11589566245?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Mr. Ginn was disturbed that Western governments were relying on questionable Chinese data on infections and fatalities to develop their epidemiological models and reflexively copying its response to the virus. He saw no evidence that the lockdowns suppressed the virus’s spread or reduced fatalities. China has reported new cases since lifting its Wuhan lockdown late last month, Mr. Ginn notes, though its data are still unreliable.

“There was actually lots of good evidence that we knew about the virus that we were ignoring, that I included in my original Medium piece as things that we should consider, in terms of moderation,” he says. Nobody challenged his data, he says, only his interpretation of it.

“I believe in the free expression of ideas,” he says. “I had a more positive view of the data than the broader norms were, but its removal was not justified.” He acknowledges that some of his inferences may prove wrong—but notes that’s equally true of his critics. “Science is the process of understanding the data and testing hypotheses and making sure that our underlying biases are being controlled for as much as possible.”

Mr. Ginn spends his days sifting through coronavirus studies, news stories and data, which he compiles in exhaustive daily news feeds that he sends to policy makers, including White House officials as well as state and city lawmakers. His goal is to balance the media’s prevailing pro-lockdown bias by amplifying the voices of skeptical experts.

One of his priorities is reopening schools. “When it comes to children, the data coming out of Europe is very, very strong,” he says. “You have, I would say, near-unanimous consensus among European scientists, public-health officials—including in Australia, South Korea and Japan—that children, for some reason, while they do get infected, they are not very infectious.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/emmet-sullivan-vs-the-d-c-circuit-11589583144?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

“Who wrote that opinion? None other than Sri Srinivasan, a Barack Obama appointee and now chief judge of the D.C. Circuit. He was joined by conservative giants Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle. The court didn’t dismiss Judge Leon from the case, but it did overrule his objections to the deal and remanded the case back to him with those instructions.”

Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has refused to accept the prosecution and defense agreement to drop the charges against Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, despite a mountain of law saying he doesn’t have the authority. We wrote Friday about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent ruling that cuts against his decision to solicit outside briefs. And now we’re reminded of another precedent that is even more on point about the judge’s wayward logic.