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My wife and I entered the Black Hills from the south. It was a perfect time to be there, because all the snow and cold wouldn’t arrive for another day, and the curves of US-16A were clear and empty approaching Mount Rushmore. At night, the white figures of the four presidents are shocking and haunting from a distance. They are much more impressive than seeing them up close, either like seeing them in an innocuous snowglobe or like minatory titans guarding your reentrance to the Midwest.
My bride and I had chosen South Dakota as a honeymoon spot because we knew it was a free state. We had contemplated going to Utah, but the thought of, say, ice-skating in a muzzle was abhorrent to us. Even Wyoming has swallowed the poison; driving through Laramie and Torrington, we saw pro-muzzle billboards with the assurance of “Now, not forever.” But who could believe this? The problem isn’t how long our governments will force us to muzzle, it is that they have usurped the plenary power in the first place.
You see the bookstore owner and baristas in Cheyenne, and you get the sense that these freedom-loving people are under occupation, though they don’t understand exactly by whom. You will find plenty of people there wearing masks, but the spirit is different. A rodeo was in town when we were there and maybe ten percent of the people on the streets of Rapid City were wearing cowboy hats—you have to hope any cowboy wearing a muzzle would’ve at least had his hat knocked off.
We chose one Italian restaurant in Rapid City. Its website made some claims about doing temperature checks before entry. In fact, on its door was written very kindly “If you want your server to wear a mask, let us know.” Absolutely no one was wearing a mask. I saw my waiter’s face the first time in almost a year. After our meal, one of the servers broached my wife at the table, thinking she was an old friend he hadn’t seen in ten years. She wasn’t, and he was soon disabused of his mistake when my wife turned her lovely face up to meet him. He blushed—the first time I had seen a stranger blush in I don’t know how long.
While staying in South Dakota, the woman and I found a copy of Hillaire Belloc’s essay “The Free Press” (it made for good reading on the way to Wall Drug). The essay finds Belloc at his most pugnacious. In broad strokes: The capitalist powers have taken over the organs of the press; their hired lackeys the newspaper editors then control the reins of government by narrowing the bounds of polite conversation and crushing any figure trying to work outside them. The argument is similar to Chomsky’s in “Manufacturing Consent,” though Belloc, writing in 1915, had direct experience of witnessing the creation of large newspapers, a creature of the telegraph and the conglomerate corporation and the genesis of journalists taking their seat as unworthy arbiters of power.
Belloc bemoaned the state of the national press: The main newspapers were all owned by corporations; those newspapers’ editors were the most vulgar and low kind of strivers who nonetheless gained the power to make or break political careers. Those newspapers’ readers were dumbed down and their opinions tamed so that the hard power the editors asserted over politicians would be prodded by a homogeneous mass. The use of the “political scandal” became essential. In that age just before Trump-tweets upended the mechanism of pearl-clutching, this environment was clearly recognizable. Why exactly were John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer, two of the least odious Democrat pols, dismissed from polite society and, say, the Clintons were not?
Though a century old, the essay is still instructive and insightful, though bittersweet as well. Belloc, in 1915, saw reason to believe the power of the mainstream press was cracking. Ideas and words from smaller papers were finding their way into mainstream discourse, and the large papers were suffering such a crisis of legitimacy that no one could really take them seriously. But Belloc did not anticipate the changing media environment. The newspapers may have undergone a comeuppance in Belloc’s time, but big corporations were able to seize radio, newsreels, and all-consuming television in a similar way.
The advent of a professional journalist class, solidified by the totem of “journalistic ethics.” The Brahmins who ascended to the heights of the press during the 20th Century were just as unscrupulous as their Yellow Journalism forebears, but their lack of scruples was hidden under an “afflict the comfortable” ethos, notwithstanding the fact that in the proportion of their talent to their influence, they were the most comfortable people in the world. The Watergate coup could not have been completed without “journalistic ethics” covering for all the immoral and downright illegal actions of the Washington Post, all of which served the purposes of the Deep State against the people’s president, much of which would have been illegal if conducted by the Deep State itself. At least mafiosi have Omerta to keep from bragging about their crimes.
The newspaper, as a medium, is still the centerpiece of mainstream press legitimacy, not because it is a superior medium or even because anyone reads them, but because the modern press apparatus has its roots in them. Even when television was at its height, news anchors took their leads from the big papers. Now that television has been surpassed, legacy papers are still the highest merit as to who deserves the otherwise arbitrary Bluecheck designation. This is a travesty with regards to anything recalling an actually free press. Indeed, anonymous poasters on Twitter and bloggers are much more in line with what the Founding Fathers thought of as the “free press” than the disgusting corporate behemoths which actually control the flow of news.
The Coronadoom has only made things worse. I can’t make a gas or cigarette run without catching the blaring headlines of the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Today’s death count, today’s scapegoating of the Trump administration, tomorrow’s hope for a miracle vaccine. After decades of decay, it is almost as if newspapers are taking themselves serious again.
In the Old Regime, men were ruled by Church and State, the first of which could excommunicate him, the latter of which could kill him. The modern regime is more of a triangle between government, corporations, and the press, the first of which can bankrupt him, the second of which can starve him, the third of which can unperson him by public humiliation or simply by taking out of the basic intercourse, homogeneous and spanning every medium.
If the past year has been good for nothing else, we have been able to see these sides more clearly, and how dependent each is upon the other. The government sets out the baseline rules. The corporations lend them legitimacy, for certainly these private entities would not acquiesce so easily to fiat without good cause. The press smooths the edges of skepticism. Without the mainstream press pushing Coronadoom, there would be room for independent inquiry and discourse with respect to the disease; in turn, people would not so readily accept humiliating regulations imposed by government and corporations. Every side of the triangle is necessary to keep the facade in place.
South Dakota is what it looks like when one of these sides won’t pull its weight. Coronadoom is the next level of totalitarianism. It brings in a mindset that cannot be reconciled with free men, free inquiry, or diversity of thought. You’ll still find folks in Rapid City who wear the muzzles walking the street or serving you coffee, and there are some businesses that put up signs as obnoxious as anything you’d see in Minneapolis (though a lot of these were closed). But Coronadoom is not all-consuming. It is a nuisance and not a way of life. Corporations still try to encourage mask-wearing, but they are friendly recommendations, not the NO MASK NO SERVICE signs those petty tyrants erect wherever the government lets them. There is something wonderful in seeing a Starbucks groveling with its patrons to “Please Wear A Mask,” then seeing no one doing it.
The press is just as aggressive in South Dakota. The corporations are largely the same. But Governor Noem is a friend of her people. Without asinine legislation at their backs, corporations tremble at the thought of discriminating against the feeble, elderly, and strong-willed. I’ve heard some defend, for example, United Airlines tossing toddlers off their packed planes because they are a private corporation.
The history of late-20th Century is the curtailment of private property rights, most pertinently the right to exclude. The global megacorp did not much oppose this because (as Belloc would have noted) corporations do not respect private property. Big corporations are certainly not acting as a reactionary force now. They are rather usurping the role of governments (which at least provide exceptions to mandates) rather than reestablishing ancient rights of property. A conservative reliance on property rights that no longer exist is allowing oppression that the government would be too scared to wield.
It is heartening to see other states opening up. What is still unique about South Dakota is how little the Corona state of mind has infected the people there. Even in North Dakota, which imposed government mask mandates, the atmosphere is different. The Corona state of mind set in only briefly, but it is like moderately going insane. The process of gaining back sense takes time. Baseline sanity has never been lost in South Dakota, as in other places, and this makes all the difference. And it is all the effect of government. Nothwithstanding old Reaganisms, government is now the institution least adverse to right-wing thinking. This may not be determinative, ultimately, in whether based opinions can prevail. But for the time being it can at least provide you a pleasant honeymoon.
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I´d die to spend some days in an uncontaminated place, in an area where the world, in all its complexity, still has any value.
Thanks very much, Mr. Briggs, for the article. I needed it, since a friend just told me that a group of scientists have solved the old “Zero Covid madness vs. Convivence with an endemic Covid” duality, with an unexpected (not!) plot twist, that is, equalizing both: the virus will be endemic, but the measures too…
This is the first time scientists taste real power and recognition, and they are embracing every single vice others had in the past. “Dissapointment” is an understatement. Right now they are the enemy, as much as any social engineering elite.
Recent study from researches at Stanford University, found that there was “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
“We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures,” the study says.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
Yes, Wyoming leaders and virtue-signaling businesses put that sign up. Masks are not mandatory except in federal buildings, hospitals and doctors, and some businesses, most of which are owned by out-of-state liberal idiots anyway. Our health czar is a dictator who literally ran any competition out of town so he owns the town. Plus, Wyoming is a LIBERAL state, no matter what anyone believes. Cheyenne, Laramie and Jackson are the very worst. No freedom loving people live in those liberal nightmare “cities”. I will let the tourist department know that their infectious disease darling is doing damage just like Biden shutting down oil. Not that they care. Our governor hates coal and oil anyway…..(No, NONE of us REAL Wyomingites believe the lying sign. We know what dreadful dictators we live under. South Dakota has always been far more free and American than most states. Good choice.)
Journalistic ethics=Marxist propaganda all the way.
Most South Dakota governors have been individuals that are not easily swayed by the rest of the country. I always loved that about South Dakota.
Hopefully, United Airlines will be a bankrupt business soon. And they do have that right. It is 100% defensible. Had we stuck by it, there would have been no rules against discrimination, no quotas, none of the things that make life miserable now. People would simply have stopped doing business where they were not wanted or did not like the practices of. Now they are forced to do so. I fully back United Airlines right to go bankrupt.
It’s interesting how Wyoming is perceived by the author as having a Covid state of mind, yet only the news and the government live that way. Most people just find the whole thing extremely annoying. Few think it’s a Biblical plague or the end of the world. Wonder why, except for a sign on the interstate and stopping in one of three liberal cities, the author saw the state that way. It’s interesting. What makes one state “free” and other not?
I live in a communist state New York so we all muzzle up or else (insert eye roll here). It is downright pathetic to even think that this is somehow doing anything to impact the numbers at all. I know plenty of True Believers here that carry hand sanitizer everywhere and even wear their muzzle when driving their car or walking down the street nowhere near anyone else. I just cannot live my life in fear of this or anything else. I suffer from multiple allergies that could kill me every day of my life that I cannot truly avoid because their could be enough trace amounts in foods I eat that could kill me. I have come very close on 3 occasions actually but survived the experiences. I do not wish it on anyone but living in fear of it or anything else would lead to a miserable life.
Mark Twain once said; “If you don’t read the papers you are uninformed; if yo do read them you are misinformed.”
In an essay on the funny things kids say in school, he relates how one student was asked to define a Republican, who, obviously confused,answered: “A sinner mentioned in the Bible”. Twain added: also in Democratic newspapers.
Things haven’t changed in over 100 years.
Thank you Mr. Greenhorn, you little essay was like like a warm cinnamon roll enjoyed with good coffee.
I’m curious as to why South Dakota resisted the KOVID Krazy. Was it only because of that chick governor? Or is there a more solid and extensive foundation for the admirable moral courage displayed? A brief internet search turns up no answer, but lots of vicious lunatics hoping South Dakotans drop dead. Florida and Texas are also encouraging. But 47 states did the Idiot Chicken Panic Dance. Not so encouraging.
Interesting about Belloc and the press. I recall Lincoln had disparaging things to say about the press, and no doubt the Founders, as well. Clearly a “free press” is highly over-rated, if not outright detrimental to a society. The fact that our “free press” has become a monolithic Ministry of Propaganda for an evil revolutionary cabal proves the dangers of a “free press”.
And Big Business has proven to be a danger, as well. Free enterprise was supposedly a bedrock for a free people. Nope. It’s funny to think of Ayn Rand’s heroic, dollar-worshipping business titans leading the resistance to tyranny. No, Miss Rand, in the end it was dollar-worshipping business titans leading the damned tyranny.
Le Cornu Verde writes:
“The Corona state of mind set in only briefly, but it is like moderately going insane. The process of gaining back sense takes time. Baseline sanity has never been lost in South Dakota, as in other places, and this makes all the difference.”
Right. And not just from the Doom but how does a society regain its sanity after being long-steeped in the corrosive flatulence of Revolution? Think of the disaster of Russia. Likely, we have not hit bottom yet. The Terror-archs will have to find ways of crushing those Floridas and Texases and South Dakotas that dare defy them. We will not have Utopia until everyone is as crazy, sick, and evil as the Terror-archs. Fun times ahead.
As an aside: although Noem was the ONE governor who stood firm, beginning to end, municipalities shut down regardless. Granted, they seemed to reopen earlier than the nation as a whole. And no doubt that the Governor’s pluck trickled down, to the populace, much in the same way that Swedes were the least troubled people in the world, mirroring their government’s approach.
“Baseline sanity has never been lost in South Dakota, as in other places, and this makes all the difference.”
Yes, even in places like KY, where it’s never been as bad as stories I hear from NY, CA, etc. (though stores and restaurants have been a no-go for 7 months now, no one around here jumps theatrically out of the way if you pass within a few feet or so on a sidewalk or park path without a mask, or yells at you for not doing so – though I did see some idiot in the park yesterday who had a mask on her son who appeared to be about 5, pure child abuse to project her irrational fear and hypochondria on that child walking in the park on a sunny day!), a great deal of sanity has been lost, and who knows how long it will take to get it back, if ever, even once restrictions are lifted (as they must be sooner or later, though our brain-dead governor has not woken up yet. I’ve seen some states easing limits on restaurant & theatre capacity, and other limits or shutdown businesses, etc., nbut still keeping mask mandates – not enough and unacceptable. Burn the masks, or nothing!).
I’ll have to check out that Belloc article. Sounds like it could have been written yesterday with a only a few slight adjustments needed to apply to current situation. I saw some noxious mainstream press Bluecheka the other day going off on Substack as a threat to the press’ self-appointed “Fourth Estate” (ridiculous term – there is no such “estate” – media, using the old pre-1789 taxonomy, is just “third estate,” like any other members of the bourgeois or working-classes) role as “guardians of democracy” (well actually Ms. Cheka, that’s supposed to be the voters’ role) sifters of “disinformation” (i.e. info the govt and press owners don’t like), etc. The more people like her protest, though, the more clear it is that the edifice is crumbling; she and her ilk are just attempting to shore up ruins, and will ultimately be swept away in the dust.
Dean Ericson: You say “fun times ahead”. Things look so bad for the so called First World as a whole, that I am starting to learn French and Arabic, both of which will give more chances in Asia/Africa. That´s how bad it looks…
I still fight everyday, but I know I will lose, with my conscience intact, but lose anyway. If I had any hope left, I lost it last Saturday, when I was walking alone in the city ( I mean, ALONE, since we are under a curfew in the whole country), two o clock in the morning, and I was stopped by an unmarked police car (!) who entered a pedestrian street and fined me for being in the street and for not wearing a mask…in the middle of nowhere. On top of that, another car, this one an official police car stopped by, just in case I could, cough? Mind you: in the area of Spain where I live there is no excess death whatsoever during Covid times…
I am so tired…
South Dakota may be a hero in this Covid mess, but it appears they have rewritten the history of the Wounded Knee 1973 take over and they are trying to recind medals from the original Wounded Knee battle. So much for “you can’t change the past”. You certainly can and the government does it daily. Welcome to the land of fake history and woke legislators. It seems the current governor may be the last of a rapidly dying breed that actually fights to save America. I look to the dynamiting of Rushmore any day now. (No matter how great it looks at night–these were evil Americans and they must be erased.)
There were no masks, but there is a definate WOKE take over. Check it out.
Sheri-
Sad to hear WY is so overrun with Marxists.
Darren-
I am also in NY. I may have the chance to make a break to a free state in a few weeks.
Dale-
Pretty sure the mayor of Sioux Falls, SD is a RINO that covets the governorship, so of course he would shut down. The local papers have been as nasty to Noem as the national media which is sad to see, yet unsurprising in these times.
Rogelio-
I learned French and have been working on Arabic for my job. I’ve added on Spanish since I figure it opens up opportunities in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Philippines.
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So the main news sources have not changed ….. And thank you for the re-introduction to Hillaire Belloc and The Free Press, plus his book The Great Heresies of which chapter 3 on Islam is at:
https://oldthunderbelloc.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-great-heresies-chapter-iii.html
Plus with Darren’s mention of “communist”, I was teminded that recently someone here recommended I Led Three Lives by Herbert Philbrick, which book I quickly bought for eight dollars on the auction place and vegan reading. Am half of the way through and have learned lots about Communism … sounds just like the provokings of today: push racism, progressivism, give young people an ideal to live for as in socialism and not capitalism, and much more.
God bless, C-Marie
Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network (1976). Sidney Lumet, the director, said that of all the speeches in Network, this one, this “woe to us” speech was his message: The take over of TV News by mega-corporations, “those are the nations of the world today.”
\\ Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems and he died at eleven o’clock this morning of a heart condition! And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble! So, a rich little man with white hair died. What does that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damn force in the whole godless world. And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people. And that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died.
Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. There’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the 20th floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome, god-damn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what s–t will be peddled for truth on this network. //
1976. 45 years ago! What vision!
Steohen Rasey: That movie, “Network”, is totally relevant, and a little, visionary master piece .
What is puzzling me is that how come the youngest digital natives, who totally ignore radio, TV, newspapers, are all looking at the same areas of the internet where they collect the same crap info and reasoning that the conventional media provides? It is like one of those huge beaches with miles of sea at the bathers´ disposal, but all of them are fighting to swim in the same 100 feet. How is it possible that the natural curiosity and rebellion tendencies that everybody has at a young age has been completely dissapeared in this generation?
I am going to send this question to all of you: I know there is an inherited quality in the american spirit, one of individuality and of valuing personal freedom and initiative, which I totally share, and which I think is grossly misunderstood by a good part of us, europeans. And I very soon knew that Europe was lost when this Coronadoom started, since, given our growing, collective in the best case, bovine in the worst, attitude, we all would act as one. But I was surprised to see that the USA somehow fell as rapidly as us into the Covid twister. I am talking about global politics.
But how is the real day to day situation? Is this compliance an urban phenomenon only? What is going on in the mostly republican states? What is going on in the rural areas? It is hard to believe that that spirit only stays in Florida, South Dakota and Texas. There must be people who totally dispise the Covid measures and craziness all around the country. Is there any resistence or they just gave up like most have done in Europe? I´d appreciate any take on this.
Rogelio: As mentioned, Cheyenne, Laramie and Jackson are communist hellholes and went along with the hateful shutdowns. The remainder of the state only had a short mask mandate. Virtue-signaling IDIOTS like Menards, Target, Macy’s, etc all had mask mandate and some enforced them. One grocery store DID NOT enforce the mask mandate and I shop there. Other stores already had pickup policies in place before Covid. I would guess their in-person shopping decreased. Wyomingites tend to be NOT at all like the pioneers. They are weepy, soft fools that listen to the drivel on our left-wing radio stations and elect evil Democrats pretending to be Republicans like that *** Liz Cheney. Honestly, at least half are flaming idiots and desperate wannabes (they are like the girls never picked as cheerleader–they will sleep with the whole football team in an attempt to be part of the group. If a mask will help, the idiots wear them.) Celebrities buying and moving into Wyoming only makes it more evil and horrible. Sorry, the West is dead/100% fake.
I only a wear a mask to my doctor. Everyone else who demands a mask is an idiot and should not be shopped at or done business with. I was internet shopping for the last five to ten years because I so hate Wyoming and their garbage businesses.
Thanks, Sheri, for your description. It looks like “global” madness means exactly that…
Watching your rage, which is OUR rage, I suppose it is a matter of time that a global colaboration happens, and hundreds of millions of absolutely angry men and women will find a way to blackmail big companies and politicians, who can´t afford to have that huge portion of their “clients” against them. Unfortunately I think this might be the only way.
Good luck.
Rogelio, maybe think on the following.
That is one way of looking at all that is going on, and the other way is from God’s point of view which He heartily explains in both the Old Testament … see Deuteronomy … and the New Testament via the teachings, life, and sufferings, and Resurrection by His Son, Jesus Christ, Who only said and taught and did as the Father gave Him to do, during His life here on earth and by His Resurrection.
See this. God creates us and says that we are to obey Him in every way as He has given us life and what we need to meet our necessities. And many obey Him, and He sees them through the hardships of life, for He did not say of difficulties that there would be none.
Many others refuse to obey Him and they live their lives in great disobedience to Him:
by murdering their unborn and just born children by way of abortion;
by denying His creation of marriage by legalizing a legal marriage ceremony for same sex persons;
by denying His creation of human sexuality and gender and expressing this via transgenderism;
by worshipping other gods as the human body;
by seeking and accomplishing altered states of consciousness via alcohol and drugs;
by thievery in so many ways covered by legalisms and not covered;
by adultery;
by pornography especially abhorrent when of babies, children, young persons;
by worshipping in false religions;
by embracing atheism;
by enploying witchcraft;
by participating in seances;
by purposely refusing education, housing, and jobs to those one sees as beneath one;
by all sorts of political and news schemes to purposely misinform people;
by pharmaceutical malpractice;
by the medical malpractice of euthanasia;
by the medical malpractice of removing organs and more before a person is dead;
by inseminating human eggs in labs for fetal parts for research;
by making the way for same sex couples to have and or adopt children and therefore causing those children to not experience a mother and father’s love and family as God created family to be.
And more besides, I expect.
And of course, the solution being, in the United States and worldwide, to repent, each of us, including me, and to obey God in and through His Son, Jesus Christ, be led of and by His Holy Spirit in what and how He would have us do, whether that is how one has known God our Father, before or not.
Humankind’s understanding of God, without Christ, veers from the truth, and continues on, leaving the truth, eventually, and completely.
God bless, C-Marie
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Thank you for your comment, Marie.
Every debate has different viewpoints, relative and absolute. Probably my spirituality differs from yours, but I see your point, and I myself am torn between a surface approach and an elevated one. The first, the purely human, is, at this point, tragic. From the mystical viewpoint, nothing has ever happened that is of enough importance to make me lose my inner anchor.
I read about such liberated states and think, “Oh, sweet freedom!” Cultural maskism has taken root like garlic mustard here in Maine, where only about 300 Covid-labeled deaths have occurred outside nursing homes. The worst is that militant maskism has planted into the two public spaces I used to be most at home– the great outdoors and the Church.
While I am loath to wear them myself, I have grown to have an even stronger aversion to seeing other muzzled people.. Research on the psychosocial and cultural detriments of maskism has barely seen the light of day. I was brought to tears one day at the sight of muzzled children on a playground. And, on a trail at the end of the earth, fellow hikers actually turned their backs to us, when we, the unclean, passed them on a trail.
My greatest sadness is in our Church. For eight months we have been permitted to attend, churches were limited to 50 persons, pre-registration was required for contact tracing, checkpoints with “bouncers” were established at limited entrances, restrooms and church offices were closed, the magical pew tape is law, and woe to the young child who dares to doff his mask! The state health department was reported to have placed agents outside the entrance of one church, and one priest received a phone call from the police when a parishioner reported a pastor for not donning the mask. One college student walked 60 feet across the church to inform another that he was not sitting in the approved pews. Our state provides an online portal for reporting one’s neighbor, but this peer-policing in our churches didn’t even need the state to bring them there.
Our annual preborn homicides in Maine have outnumbered COVID deaths three to one. Would that our Church had given a fraction of this effort to saving the preborn!
Until we have faces . . .
I hear ya Maureen. Went for a walk yesterday just around the neighborhood. On one street no one else was in view for the entire couple hundred yard stretch, except as I walked down the sidewalk on one side, I saw a woman across the street on the opposite sidewalk with her dog and wearing a mask! I just want to shout at these people, “Who on earth do you think you’re protecting! What do you think you’re actually accomplishing!” Same with seeing young kids at a playground in the park masked-up by hteir parents. Kids who have a .0002% risk of dying from Sars-Cov2 exposure (I’m sure their odds of being in a car crash on the way to and from the park are far greater, yet no one proposes we ban driving with kids in cars!).
It really is a mind-numbed cult. These people are so brainwashed, they really are scared to go outside any more, even with no one around, without a muzzle.