"...we are living through a coup d’état." The COVID scam.

In the American Mind, Angelo Codevilla writes about the COVID Coup.

...But the ruling class’s attachment to its assumptions/pretenses/convictions overrode the obvious truth that the elderly and infirm should have special isolation from contact with persons possibly infected with the virus and that the rest of the population should go about its business.

The U.S. authorities, the “experts,” the ruling class, chose to do precisely the opposite. They “locked down” a general population that is at virtually no risk, thereby delaying the virus’s spread to people it could not harm and whose infection would build herd immunity. Keeping millions of people indoors also worsened their health. Keeping people from interacting and working normally wrecked economic and social life.

Worst of all, these authorities, these experts, transferred elderly persons known to be infected with the virus into nursing homes. In Michigan, the authorities even assigned to a nursing home an aide known to be infected with the virus. As a result, the as-yet fully uncounted deaths in these facilities, which house about 1.3 million people (about 0.39% of the population) come to about half of the total U.S. death toll. That is what happened, and it is perverse. It deserves punishment.

...Others, e.g. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent 4,500 COVID-infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes and blew off his responsibility for over 5,000 deaths with the words “people die,” later deflected responsibility onto what legitimately may be deemed to be national policy. He cited guidance from the Centers for Disease Control: “’Nursing homes should admit any individuals from hospitals where COVID is present.” Both the lockdown for ordinary people and the transfer of COVID carriers to nursing homes, said Cuomo, followed CDC recommendations. Cuomo did not resist the recommendation. He was occupied trying to score political points on Donald Trump.

...The COVID event has also made the face mask into a physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the sub-constituencies. Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and deploring the deplorables.

...In sum, the lockdowns have been perpetuated and prolonged by people who care more about your compliance than your health.

They are about increasing the Democratic Party’s chances in the 2020 election.

...Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.

...Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.

...Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by. Yet all Democrat governors celebrated and some joined masses of “protests”—forget about masks and social distancing. They did this not for anybody’s health but to to secure another few percentage points of the black vote for their party and to leverage their seizure of power over police forces.

...In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.

...Declaring emergencies to excuse taking “full powers” is the oldest of ploys. Does anybody remember the Reichstag fire? The prospect of similar things happening in America had been rising along with the ruling class and the administrative state. The authorities’ seizure of arbitrary power in the name of expertise is the deadliest strike at our way of life. Suspending law and rights, issuing arbitrary rules of behavior, has been mostly the doing of Democrat-controlled state and local government. But the lead came from the Democrat-controlled Federal bureaucracy, empowered by a president elected as a Republican, and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a majority of Republican politicians.

...Trump was giving the de facto alliance between the Democratic Party, Fauci et al., the press, and a host of profiteers public credit even as they discredited him in every way possible. They had him where they wanted him. As the lockdowns throttled America, they used the political leverage to raise demands. They aimed at his political demise as well as at economic, social, and political transformation.

The guidelines for “Opening Up America Again” that Trump unveiled on April 17 resulted from that imbalance of political credit and leverage. Far from returning the country to what it had been, the “data-driven” process they outlined, written by Fauci’s CDC, would make sure that state and local officials so inclined now have top-level, pseudo-legal cover for keeping or reimposing whatever arbitrary restrictions on opponents they think they can get away with, with whatever data they can manipulate to that purpose.

The Guidelines “advise” (that means “mandate” for officials who so choose) opening only to a percentage of capacity, and with restrictions—e.g. no singing in church,—that counter their reason for being. But churches and small business cannot survive at less than at full capacity. Schools set up other than for maximum concentration on the stuff to be learned are counterproductive. In short, the guidelines give federal sanction to choking America’s “main street” sector.

...the COVID scam being based on lies and misrepresentations by countless important persons, rigorous public testimony under oath can expose them and those who spread them.

Read more here.