The Great Deception: How Health Elites Blame the Public For Their Failures

We were walking through the picturesque downtown of Stuart, Florida, on a warm spring night. Coming in the other direction was a family of five. All three children looked to be under the age of 12. And, as is the habit today, all three were wearing masks.

Pretty, colourful masks, but masks all the same. We could make an argument about the efficacy of masks on children under 12, at a safe distance in an outdoor venue, but that’s for another day.

What struck us was the permanence of the tableau. The benign family portrait that, just 12 months earlier, was unthinkable. The acquiescence to a new norm in a highly educated and prosperous society. One brought on by monolithic Health® bureaucracies backed by police. 

The parents had made a conscious decision to accept every invasion of privacy, every lockdown, double mask, public shaming, church/ synagogue closing, border detention mandated by people they couldn’t have identified a year ago. It’s their right to protect their children how they see fit, of course. 

What intrigued us was, what do the children make of all this? Most, having been withdrawn from the social intercourse of school, have spent the year isolated and fearful of the next “wave”. (What happened to Hillary Clinton’s cloying “It takes a village to raise a child”, a concept now limited to undocumented children at the Mexican border?) 

What will the youngest generation make of this health paranoia in a year, ten years? Have their parents and their society, in confirming the myriad health risks that always surround us in an open society, convinced their children that they should permanently wear a mask, keep a distance, surrender their privacy and rights to faceless bureaucrats?

In short, have we created a nation of Howie Mandels, germaphobes who cannot touch others, who eschew public venues and shared spaces at all costs? Having roused the fear of sickness in these children will we ever be able to put the toothpaste back in the healthcare tube?

Will they see the hypocrisy in their parents being asked to surrender all their civil liberties while BLM/ Antifa protesters and rioters are given a hall pass to demonstrate in large numbers, packed close together? Or while “we, not thou” politicians dine like Nero in Michelin-starred eateries?

Their disillusion will be the— pardon the word— existential question that shapes how the West proceeds from here.

What is certain is how the ruling elites have squandered the immense goodwill of the public on a series of high-handed diktats and failed policies. A society raised to revere its experts and scientists has been abused and misled by the wavering opinions of the Dr. Faucis and politicians who cowered in fear of their Health® advisors.

Ontario premier Doug Ford is not the only person elected to high office who doesn't consider himself really in charge until after the pandemic is deemed over. From Donald Trump to Gavin Newsom and everyone in between, leadership on the issue has been farmed out to people who were on no ballot, sought no office and, tellingly, kept their jobs in this Covid-19 cock-up.

This week’s sudden re-evaluation of the security distance from six feet to three feet (a distance the WHO thought acceptable last spring) is typical of the shambolic deception perpetrated on a gullible population. Don’t get us started on how masks went from useless against a virus to the Shroud of Turin. 

It reminds many historians of the World War I generals who thought the best way to end trench warfare was more trench warfare. Attrition. Build fear. If there’s any doubt, consult Rule No. 1. More trench warfare. Anything but admit that their whole callous, murderous strategy has been a colossal mistake.

In WW I, the most loyal generation ever produced in the British Empire willingly let itself be fed to a killing field in the service of its corrupt leadership class. The brutal result for the Empire (a million deaths, two million wounded) disillusioned the survivors. This collapse in public confidence created the descent of Russia into communism, the destruction of Europe’s governing order and the rise of Hitler.

No wonder Lord Salisbury later reflected, “You should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is healthy. If you believe theologians, nothing is innocent. If you believe soldiers, nothing is safe:”

The most entitled, educated Western generation ever, the Boomers and their progeny, have willingly walked into trenches recommended by their expert class. They put on the gas masks, ignored the bullets whizzing over their heads, went “over the top” when the generals ten miles back said “Go”. 

Their reward has been a leadership blaming them for the failure to make it across No Man’s Land. “Super Spreaders!” they shriek. This cabal refuses to acknowledge that, whatever the virus inflection points are now, the greater threat to society is the punishing regimen of lockdowns and isolation— best typified by the Hell Hotels employed by a feckless PM to punish Canadians returning to the nation.

Their Media Party, likewise, remains riveted on the virus, ignoring the thousands who die of ODs, suicides, domestic assault and untreated diseases left over from Flattening The Curve last April. If their Covid-obsessed patrons in government care that they’ve spawned a worse societal crisis, there’s no indication reading the press or sycophantic social media.

There’s a WW I analogy here, too. At the end of the war most people thought the crisis facing them was the German militarism. That’s what Lloyd George told them. Had they been truthful, their leaders would have told them the real threat was Russian communism. A century later, 100 million dead from state socialism, we know they were cruelly misled. 

Will the kids in the masks on a soft Florida spring night reach the same conclusion when the true losses from Covid mismanagement are tallied?

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx