Briefly Noted: Reasons For Hope 9/8/21

I say “Briefly Noted”, meaning that each item will be somewhat brief, but it all adds up.

This morning my wife and I went shopping at Trader Joe’s. Since TJ’s has, in our experience, been pretty much ground zero for Covid Neuroticism, today was a good chance to see what the state of Covid Countermeasures are in the face of the surging Dread Delta. The answer, in brief: surprisingly relaxed.

Yes, we’re all supposed to have something somewhere on our faces—a bow to the Mask Mandate. But there was quite a variety of ways in which people chose to evade the full cover-up. Social distancing? Eh, not so much. Whereas previously you’d see lots of people arriving in cars masked up, and traversing the parking lot in mufti, now there’s lots of last minute take the thing out and put it on stuff going on. Oh, no plexi-glass sneeze guard, baggers and checkers made no effort to distance and their masking was as relaxed as that of the customers in many cases.

I call that a hopeful sign, because it indicates to me that facts are slowly filtering out to the Great Unwashed. They’re catching on to the Covid Panic, as was inevitable. There’s no big uptick in vaxxing, probably because 1) What was the point, now that the vaxxed are known to be spreaders; 2) people are catching on about side effects; 3) Fauci lies, and everyone knows it; 4) the craziness is revealing to everyone that this just isn’t about science or medicine and probably never was.

Did I mention craziness? Fauci’s lies are pretty crazy and in your face. People just aren’t buying into his natural origins shtick any more. And now the Left is ripping their own masks off, so to speak, and revealing the very ugly truth about themselves … as they’re falling all over each other to demand that the unvaxxed be barred from medical treatment. That’s supposed to persuade the unvaxxed to turn vaxxed? It’s bizarre, but also very ugly—people know ugly, especially the moral variety, when they see it. They also know that those Lefties are living in some sort of fantasy world, where gene therapy experiments will somehow eradicate a respiratory virus and where these vaccines, like, really work.

People are learning. They’ve heard about the situation in Israel and elsewhere, so when they hear—as my wife heard Chicago’s top public health officer say yesterday—that breakthroughs are “one in ten thousand”, they know they’re being lied to. In the course of a pithy post today, The Lie Of 'All Unvaccinated, Karl Denninger included this tweet—bearing in mind that in order to receive this treatment you’re supposed to be “infected, symptomatic, and at risk of severe outcomes”:

Jim Jackson @Jim__Jackson

OK so I did a study looking at our last 50 monoclonal antibody infusions we did that had COVID vaccination status documented on the chart. 23 were vaccinated 27 were unvaccinated It isn't just unvaccinated people receiving these infusions, not by a long shot.

People are picking up on this—on the internet, by word of mouth.

People are also picking up on what’s happening in Australia—even liberals, as we discussed recently, are appalled. God only knows what they think the Covid Regime is all about, but even they don’t want to live in that sort of dystopia. And, of course, all of this—and much more—is coming together where it hits home for parents: the government schools. All forms of liberal madness are coalescing in a large, unpalatable package: union lockdowns, mask mandates for not at risk kids, talk of injection mandates, firing of unvaxxed personnel—but also CRT and gender madness and liberal cancel culture. The Covid Regime’s sheer wackiness and anti-science madness and mean spiritedness is helping people make the connection between what might otherwise appear to be unrelated phenomena.

And of course it’s not just parents who are seeing this. Essential healthcare and public safety personnel are on the liberal chopping block, and they’re increasingly pushing back against the mad mandates. With police departments across the country suffering staffing problems due to liberal anti-police madness, with cities attempting to hire replacements for all the cops they’ve lost and will lose in various ways, liberals now want to fire any—and there are many—who resist experimental injections. Most recently the police and firefighters in LA have joined forces to fight these mandates, in the name of all public employees. Liberal polling outfits suggest that this madness will not end well for the vax enthusiasts—Whopping 70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job if vaccines are mandated:

Story at a glance

A Washington Post-ABC News poll asked unvaccinated workers whose employers have yet to impose a vaccine mandate what they were likely to do if being vaccinated was required.

The poll found 16 percent of unvaccinated workers would get the shot, 35 percent would ask for a medical or religious exemption and 42 percent would quit.

Without an exemption, 18 percent said they would comply and 72 percent said they would quit.

As perhaps another indication that people are wising up, the latest Gallup survey shows opinion among Americans as to whether the CDC has an actual plan turning sharply negative for the first time since February:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More Americans now disagree (41%) than agree (32%) that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has communicated a clear plan of action in response to the COVID-19 situation. This is the first Gallup reading since the CDC in late July changed its guidance on the need for face masks for unvaccinated people in areas of high coronavirus transmission.

All of this is happening at a time when liberals are increasingly running in sand, with political headwinds blowing against them. Thomas Lifson reviews the political landscape, in the continuing aftermath of the Afghan withdrawal disaster, and suggests that For Democrats, September may be the cruelest month.

In another piece at American Thinker, Monica Showalter covers an interesting development in detail: Pelosi's bishop calls for ex-communication of pols now pushing for abortion. Perhaps liberals thought bringing up abortion would be a win for them, especially in drawing attention away from all their other problems. It may not turn out that way, especially if Sal Cordileone (ArchB of SF) follows through.

A huge proportion of Americans try to keep politics and religion at arms length—not because they don’t care but because they’re leery of where the mix may lead. Nevertheless, over the years polling from all sources, liberal and conservative, have tended to show a heavy majority of Americans are fundamentally pro-life. Political beatdowns on religion are not popular. Pelosi reminding Americans of Dem extremism may well turn out to be a very bad idea.

Finally, Issues and Insights focuses today on what could broadly be termed cultural matters that have a strong bearing on politics: Two Unexpected Signs Of A Coming Conservative Ascendency.

OK, I’m not holding my breath for that Conservative Ascendancy—I’ll settle for leveling the playing field. Nevertheless the point is worth considering. The editorial focuses on two things: The rise of black conservatives in politics and the rise of conservative late night TV.

We’re familiar now with Trump’s achievement in helping to bring black conservative voices more into the national political debate. The editors make the point that, win or lose, Larry Elder’s candidacy in the CA recall has clearly panicked Dems—what other word than “panic” can describe calling for Kama Sutra to campaign for you? Elder’s campaign may well mark a turning point that could be culturally transformative:

There have already been non-white governors who have achieved sustained popularity with successful free-market policies, most notably the eight years of Indian-American Bobby Jindal in Louisiana. But both Elder and Owens, in the spirit of Donald Trump, are far more rhetorically hard-edged in arguing their conservative views, and in attacking politicians of the left. They, Scott and other black leaders who fundamentally oppose the radical agenda of the Al Sharptons and the Joy Reids have it in their power to neutralize the Democratic Party’s poisonous exploitation of race, and bring to fruition a 21st-century Emancipation Proclamation from liberal social policies that have kept black Americans in chains of poverty for decades. A few examples of success under black conservative governance and the left’s “race traitor” taunts will wear thin.

I’m not a late night TV watcher, so it was news to me that Greg Gutfeld is now The King of that forum:

Greg Gutfeld, the hip, irreverent Fox News personality, has in a matter of several months in his weeknight 11 p.m. slot succeeded in overtaking “The Tonight Show” and the other big network late-night programs, whose hosts fill the shoes of the likes of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Jay Leno.

Again, this is about changing the culture:

One thing Elder, Owens, and Gutfeld and his late-night companions on Fox have in common is that they know how to shoot down the specifics of the actual policies of Democrats with clarity and humor. Far too often in the past, conservative solutions have been presented in the form of policy briefs that the average American has little patience to pore into.

Watching chaotic, unfettered immigration and other long-term causes of demographic changes favoring the left often leaves conservatives in a state of despair for the future. The rise of black conservative political leadership and possible dominance of the culturally powerful late-night TV slot may make for a game-changing counter-trend.

Reasons to hope.