NPR, NEODEMOCRATS, NEWARK, FEAR, ANIMAL HOUSE AND THE CORONAVIRUS OVERREACTION

I grew up in a working class family. My father worked in a car assembly plant. His father was a coal miner who died of black lung in his early forties. As do most people, I adopted my parents’ political affiliation, and identified with the ostensible party of the working man, i.e., the Democrats.

In college, I stumbled upon, and listened to, NPR. I liked the calm voices and the slightly longer form personal interest stories linked by chill musical vignettes. Perhaps mistakenly, I recall a working class, populist sensibility in their late 1970s material.

During college summers, and during a year as a college drop-out, I worked as a janitor, an urban youth counselor, a bottling factory worker and a roofer. After graduating, I split another year between the bottling factory and working as a milk truck driver: a blue collar apprenticeship.

Then I attended self-branded-as-liberal Rutgers Law School, in downtrodden Newark, New Jersey. During those three years, I voted for Mondale. But I began to perceive a pervasive bias in both the type and tone of the stories that NPR covered. I was seeing the beginnings of what the liberal, Thomas Frank, later chronicled in his 2016 book, Listen, Liberal: the Democrat Party had deliberately abandoned the working class as its core constituency—a post-McGovern beatdown DNC memo expressly recommended this strategy—and had thrown in with the fringe sociopolitical/culture war agenda of white collar, college-educated liberals. Economic and demographic trends forced this shift. Factories were closing and unions were losing membership. Simultaneously, the number of office workers was increasing, and white collar workers/tech entrepeneurs had more wealth to fund to political campaigns and operatives. Democrats followed the money.

Based on various life experiences before and during law school, my political views began to change. As a youth counselor, I saw the disadvantages intrinsically imposed on fatherless children. I also noticed that many liberals sent their kids to de facto segregated private high schools. And I heard the loudest, longest cheers, by far, at the Democratic Convention in favor of abortion. Raucous delegates beamed while they howled their approval. I found this celebration of killing disturbing.

Further, it seemed that my minority conservative law school classmates were, on the whole, more grounded and resilient than the liberals. And while conservatives were reviled in ivory tower academia, conservatives’ ideas made more real-life sense. Additionally, the conservative law students I met weren’t economically privileged or racists, as liberals liked to portray them. Some conservatives were even kind of fun.

In contrast, the liberal students—many of whom came from some money—were often high-strung, demographic-identity-focused dogmatists. And the political priorities of NPR Democrats were becoming increasingly dubious. While liberal classmates rallied to support gays in the military and prisoners’ rights, and consistently left Newark before dark, I tutored Newark schoolkids in the afternoons. I also often walked, albeit alertly, through nearly empty Newark at night.

Incidents occurred. Near midnight one winter Friday, three youths in hoodies pulled a ten-inch knife on me; I can still envision it gleaming in the streetlight. Around 10 PM on a subsequent spring night, I unwillingly participated in a multi-block footrace against two sizable, mobile pursuers. I was assertive and strong enough to yield nothing in the first incident, and fast enough— just barely—to survive the second. But 1980s urban life was like that. I spent hundreds of nights in the city, so a few incidents seemed almost inevitable.

The Brick City had its quirky architectural, cultural, culinary and interpersonal charms. I wanted to enjoy these, and often played basketball with the locals. I didn’t want to live in fear, based on what might rarely happen. I decided that one must evaluate risk based on what one directly observes and what normally happens, not on others’ perceptions or third-hand stories. You have to keep both eyes open, and consider how your physical characteristics and situational awareness might make you safer—or less safe—than others might be, or feel.

Along with my knowledge of Biology and awareness of basic Covid statistics, my Newark experience has informed my Coronavirus perspective.

Newark showed the strength that lies in numbers and community. Or rather, it revealed the weakness that lies in fear and physical isolation. Because so many people sheltered in place, Newark’s empty nighttime streets became more dangerous. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: fear begets fear. Unsurprisingly, urban violence has increased sharply since the lockdowns. Lack of witnesses emboldens criminals. And social disruption messes with peoples’ heads; some act out.

The reaction to the Coronavirus divides sharply along party lines. Most Republicans want to live without restrictions and gauge their own risk.

In contrast, in general, and also regarding Coronavirus, Neo/NPR Democrats rely on coercive, one-size fits all approaches implemented by top-down, centralized governments. They ignore fundamental freedoms and the wide range of human differences and capabilities. Instead of allowing individuals to assess their own risks and take responsibility for managing these risks--specifically, in the Coronavirus context, one’s age or weight—Democrat governors and mayors have subjected everyone to an irrational, ineffective and destructive set of universal mandates: lockdowns, arbitrary social distancing measures, contact tracing, masks and vaccinations. Yet, the highest death rates are in Democrat states and cities.

As they have for the past three decades, NPR Democrats have, during the Coronavirus overreaction, subordinated the interests of the majority to misinformation, demagoguery and exceptional cases. NPR Democrats have seized on greatly exaggerated “case counts” and “death tolls,” images of individuals on respirators and headlines about atypical individuals who died under 60 with Covid. Spoiler alert: in every instance of the latter situation that I’ve seen, the decedent was obese.

The Democrat-controlled media, which also encompasses CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBS, ABC, NBC, the NYT and WaPo, and Twitter, Facebook and Google, et al., have waged a propaganda campaign of fear over reason. Throughout, NPR Democrats have consistently ignored these central Coronavirus facts: 1) 99.96% of the reasonably healthy people under 70 survive infection, 2) asymptomatic or outdoor spread are rare, 3) kids are virtually invulnerable and 4) being overweight is unhealthy.

NPR Democrats characteristically de-emphasize personal responsibility. 73% of deaths with Covid are among the obese or overweight. This has been the elephant in the room for the past year and a half. Instead of blaming Trump (also overweight), or those who didn’t mask or vaxx, for Covid casualties, lockdowners would more accurately observe that Covid mortality has largely been driven by overeating and insufficient activity.

NPR Democrats pride themselves as relying on ostensible “experts” and “scientists, who are supposed to be able to analyze data and discern trends therein. But calling someone an expert doesn’t mean they provide sound analysis. The Lockdowners/maskers/vaxxers have sponsored and backed a team of fearmongering, double-talking, repeatedly wrong, often dishonest and clearly NeoDemocrat-partisan “experts,” most notably Fauci and Walensky. These experts will only appear on liberal news outlets, where their nonsense won’t be exposed by thoughtful questions.

There are numerous, better-credentialed, non-political experts who oppose the oppressive and ineffective interventions of the past 19 months: Drs. Martin Kulldorf (Harvard), Jay Bhattachraya (Stanford), Sureta Gupta (Cambridge) plus hundreds of other doctor-signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as Dr. Harvey Risch (Yale), Drs. John Ioannidis and Scott Atlas (Stanford) and Dr. Simone Gold and her colleagues/members constituting America’s Front Line Doctors, The NPR Democrats, who fancy themselves as open-minded, have opposed discourse. They have not only failed to air the doctors named above, they have actively censored them. NeoDemocrat media journalists are not objective. They operate like Eastern Bloc totalitarians, except that they’re sponsored by corporations.

While NPR Democrats pay lip service to lower income people and the middle class, the NeoDems have stridently advocated universal lockdown/social distancing policies that haven’t saved lives, but have further enriched the already-rich: the Bezoses and Gateses and Waltons of the world, as well as the legions of comparatively affluent Democrat laptop and latte lovers who have been able to “work from home” during the “pandemic.” Moreover, the value of working class savings has shrunk dramatically because trillions of dollars have been printed to pay for various forms of unwise Covid expenditures, and thus have caused record inflation. Jack Dorcey won’t be hurt by this. Blue collar workers already have been.

While NPR Democrats often complain about a wide range of injustices and the suffering of strangers, talk is cheap. The complainers typically avoid taking inconvenient measures to address injustices. (Buying Fair Trade Coffee doesn’t count). They also fail to recognize that suffering is sometimes inevitable. When NPR Democrats alarmedly bemoan US Covid death tolls, they’re effectively mourning the deaths of very old, unfamiliar people. But how many who have lamented these deaths routinely visited lonely old folks in nursing homes? Did it only become ontologically and biologically unacceptable for old people to die when Democrats could leverage these deaths for political/electoral advantage?

NPR Democrats still like to pretend that they’re the Party of the People. But they’ve stolen a year and a half of irreplaceable educational, social development and memory-building time from those under 30; low income kids have been hurt the most. Millions of depressed people have been made more depressed. More drug users have overdosed than ever. Tens of millions of the locked down have gained unhealthy weight. Hundreds of millions more people in poor nations went hungry as the world economy shrank via lockdowns. Scamdemic interventions have not only failed; they’ve caused vast, irreversible harm,

The parade scene denouement of the movie, Animal House, depicts mindless marching band members following their leader into an alley and falling on each other in a huge heap, music still thumping and blaring. NPR Democrats following Fauci, Cuomo and Newsom, et al. resemble these marchers. Instead of playing horns and beating drums, pro-lockdown, pro-mask and pro-vaxx voices continuously blare such vapid phrases as “Stay at home!”, “My mask protects you!,” “Cases are spiking!”, “Hospitals are being overrun!”, and “Universal Vaccination will end the Pandemic!” As these lies have been manifested, Team Apocalypse continues to flail and tumble.

The satirical Animal House conformist marching band meltdown was funny. The Coronavirus overreaction hasn’t been. None of the lockdowns, mask mandates, contact tracing or vaxxes have made sense, except as political theater and tactics. For the past 19 months, the irrationally fearful have supported foolish NeoDemocrat government edicts that have badly messed life up for the vast majority.