“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” – yet again (go figure!)

 

Rahm Emanuel famously said, during the 2008 financial crisis:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste … This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

His lesson has clearly not been lost on the progressive left in California, who are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse, a lever, an opportunity, to impose more social conditioning on the society that they increasingly rule with an iron hand.

Public health authorities in California have unveiled a “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” that requires counties to meet new “health equity metrics” in order to emerge from the current Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s a broad experiment in social justice. Under the plan, counties must reduce “disparities in levels of transmission” in “low-income, Black, Latino, [and] Pacific Islander” communities before they can move forward with reopening. In effect, local businesses must remain closed until local bureaucrats are satisfied that ill-defined racial quotas have been met.

The underlying assumption of the blueprint is that race-based coronavirus disparities are the result of “systemic racism,” despite zero evidence that the state’s coronavirus policies have been discriminatory. The plan ignores potential differences in culture, behavior, and underlying health, resting instead on the premise that racism is the driving force behind every disparate outcome. The blueprint also subverts the democratic process. Unelected public health officials are restricting essential freedoms, including mobility, worship, and economic activity, without deliberation by the state legislature or the possibility of review or appeal.

Unfortunately, the California blueprint is just part of a broader pattern of state governments using public health as a rationale for seizing power … Science becomes the highest authority; citizens must obey.

Yet progressive leaders have been willing immediately to jettison science when it conflicts with their pre-existing political priorities … In short, they created a policy of “science for thee, but not for me.”

The disproportionate victims of any attempt to race-code the criteria for reopening in California will be the poor, the marginalized, and the nonwhite—the very people whom the equity policies are supposed to help.

. . .

Citizens with a basic respect for freedom should resist this new encroachment. It degrades science, language, and democracy all at once, and acknowledges no natural limit to its power. Tyranny in a lab coat would still be tyranny.

There’s more at the link.

The same drive to control at all costs is visible in the reaction of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to being overruled by that state’s Supreme Court when she tried to unconstitutionally impose her will by decree, rather than by lawful means.  She immediately tried to reimpose her regulations using other laws and methods, while simultaneously appealing to the Court to allow her decrees to continue until the end of October, despite their unconstitutionality.  The Court rejected her appeal, which produced more anger on her part.  She appears to be blind to legal and constitutional reality, regarding them as no more than a minor inconvenience to be bulldozed out of the way of her opinions and decrees.

I’m sure most of my readers are familiar with similar “my way or the highway” approaches by the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, in that state’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.  His ruthless order that recovering patients from nursing homes should be returned to and confined in those same nursing homes ensured that the virus would spread to other occupants, killing thousands of them – but he has never acknowledged responsibility for that, and continues to defend his misguided directive.

Need I go on?  Far too many left-wing and progressive authorities, elected and/or appointed, have demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic that they view such tragedies as opportunities to impose their agenda on society, rather than crises needing solutions.  When their agenda backfires or produces negative results, they defend it blindly, refusing to acknowledge that any alternative is possible.  They can’t be trusted with power, because they so consistently misuse and abuse it.

If people with attitudes like that take control of our national government in November, Lord help us . . . because we’re going to need divine intervention to survive it.

Peter