KUSI Wants You Dead Because Property Rights Are More Important Than Human Life
Atlas will forever be the face of this phase of the pandemic response, the embodiment of the president’s rationalizing not taking significant steps to encourage containment efforts. --Washington Post
Our local conservative-leaning TV news operation has consistently fostered doubt about the seriousness of the pandemic, featuring a steady stream of what I’ll politely call non-mainstream voices, like radiologist Scott Atlas (pictured above) masquerading as authoritative.
KUSI has been particularly aggressive in reporting on businesses --particularly restaurants-- flaunting restrictions designed to limit the spread of COVID-19. And, of course, portraying those businesses as victims of government overreach.
Here’s one example:
The pressure is high for Gov. Gavin Newsom to allow indoor dining as the Recall Newsom campaign reaches 1.8 million signatures.
Over 700 businesses have stayed open in peaceful protest represented by Attorney Michael Curran.
California’s Alcoholic Beverage Control agency has responded to these restaurateurs waving their middle finger in the air via granting interviews with KUSI’s news team. ABC has issued letters to those operations calling for a hearing to consider revoking or suspending their liquor licenses.
“It’s not legal,” said Attorney Michael Curran, who claims to represent more than 700 restaurants...
I’m not a judge, so I’ll leave that up to the courts, which have generally ruled in the government’s favor.
But it isn’t right.
And endangering the public shouldn’t be considered a “peaceful” protest, as KUSI and coronavirus enablers claim. The last I heard, death wasn’t considered a peaceful outcome.
This isn’t about providing “both sides” coverage; it’s about promoting an agenda holding that the government is always bad, science shouldn’t be trusted, and those resisting public health measures are somehow victims.
Ultimately, the dividing line in how the pandemic response is viewed comes down to whether one thinks private property is more important than human lives.
Hiding behind the claim that they are supporting businesses and jobs, this sort of media coverage has actually slowed reopenings by encouraging people to not follow safe practices.
Furthermore, a solid majority of Americans think the idea of willy-nilly lifting of restrictions is a non-starter. According to recent polling, 70% of the nation, and 44% of Republicans favor Biden’s pandemic response, including the president’s advocacy for mask-wearing and all of the other mitigation measures that Republican governors are rapidly seeking to terminate.
From David Lurie at the Daily Beast:
Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and indeed commencing with the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party has embraced the idea that the federal government is incompetent, if not evil. With no small success, the GOP has contended that FDR’s use of federal government resources to save the nation from the Depression was an anomaly (if not a fraud) and that it is futile to look to the government to solve big problems.
If the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress actually succeed where Trump’s absentee management of the pandemic catastrophically failed, and manage to oversee a relatively rapid end to the greatest health crisis of the last 100 years, together with an accompanying economic recovery, then the entire premise of the GOP’s decades-long war on government will be called into question
Rather than making this an “individual versus the government” issue, responsible business people should have insisted on the government protecting individuals, including shopkeepers.
I can pretty much guarantee that there would not have been zero GOP votes on the most recent rescue plan in Congress if this were the case. In fact, I’d bet that the Congress would have taken substantial action last fall.
From a turn of the year recap in the New York Times:
America now makes up 4 percent of the world’s population but accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths. While Australia, Japan and South Korea showed it was possible to keep deaths low, the United States — armed with wealth, scientific prowess and global power — became the world leader: it now has one of the highest concentrations of deaths, with nearly twice as many reported fatalities as any other country.
There is solid evidence that viral transmission often takes place through the air, that physical distancing may not be sufficient to halt the spread in some settings, and that masks at least partly block airborne particles.
C.D.C. researchers have found that coronavirus infections and death rates rose in U.S. counties permitting in-person dining or not requiring masks.
Since the World Health Organization officially deemed the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, at least 526,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, 22 million jobs have been lost, and the United States ranks near the bottom of the world’s nations in responding to the public health crisis.
The U.S. death rate increased by 15% last year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, making it the deadliest year in our recorded history.
A recently released report says U.S. life expectancy dropped by a full year as a result of Covid-19 from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.8 years. The report said that during that time period, life expectancy decreased 0.8 years for non-Hispanic white people, 1.9 years for Hispanic individuals and 2.7 years for non-Hispanic Black people.
One in three Americans know somebody who died from COVID-19.
For the Trump administration, the pandemic was an inconvenience standing in the way of implementing an agenda.
Science was sidelined at every level of government. More than 100 state and local health officials have been fired or have resigned since the beginning of the pandemic. In Florida, leading scientists offered their expertise to the governor’s office but were marginalized, while Gov. Ron DeSantis turned to Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a Trump adviser, and others whose views were embraced in conservative circles but rejected by scores of scientists.
Now that Joe Biden is president, things have gotten to the point where one can infer that Republicans are actually rooting for things to get worse. Their actions certainly indicate that to be the case.
https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1370099619787603971?s=20
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