THE LUKEWARM ELECTORAL RESPONSE TO CORONAMANIA

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November 8, 2022 was supposed to be a day of reckoning: a chance for those who opposed the Covid overreaction to settle the score with those—mostly Democrats— who closed their kids’ schools, demanded that all wear masks, mass-tested and mandated injections of an experimental substance that not only failed to stop viral spread but also harmed and killed many.

But this week wasn’t the first—or best—chance people had to use ballots to oppose the craziness and oppression. During the November, 2020 national election, people could have punished the Democrats for their harsh state and city lockdowns and persistent support of school closures. Voters missed a grand opportunity to reject the perpetrators of this Scam when it was “only” seven months old. I couldn’t, at that time, believe that people were so willing to tolerate the nonsense for that long.

Republicans made modest gains this week. Some of those were driven by residual anger about Coronamania. But appallingly, some of the worst Corona-abusing politicians: Whitmer, Hochul, Pritzker and Newsom, were reelected. Lockdowns/school closures or shots weren’t listed as the top three issues in most polls, though some their sequelae: inflation, the economy and crime, were.

Suburban moms were supposed to take out their anger on the Democrats for closing schools and mandating vaxxes. To the extent that they did so, their votes were offset by unmarried women who voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. Largely childless, these womyn have much less of a stake in the future. They care more about their cats and dogs than they do about kids.

Many of these cat/dog moms voted Democrat to protest a Supreme Court decision that returned to states the ability to legislate against abortion. It didn’t matter to the unmarried women that synthetic birth control, including over-the-counter “morning after” pill and abortion, are available across the United States, and that these likely always will be. The pro-abortion bloc also didn’t stop to think that abortion favors men more than women, because it gives men consequence-free access to women’s bodies. Many men love women’s bodies more than they love women themselves. Reproductive choice advocates also overlook the eugenic and commercial dimensions of disability- and sex-deselective abortions, IVF and other technologies. Single issue pro-abortion voters are simple-minded and misguided.

In addition to abortion, those who wished to express, via ballots, their anger at the Corona abusers and opportunists faced strong headwinds.

First, most people vote by heritage. Statistics show that people are far more likely to adopt their parents’ political affiliation than they are to embrace their parents’ religion. While people like to think they make up their own minds, the sociopolitical grousing that seven year-olds hear at the dinner table resonates for a lifetime.

Second, people vote by self-identity. People like to consider themselves to be young and cool. Young people can’t bring themselves to vote for Republicans because doing so would make them feel unhip and different from their peers. Additionally, most young people haven’t worked hard enough to think about paying high taxes.

Given the foregoing, there aren’t many persuadable voters left. And Democrats are the party of the rich. They have multi-fold more money to spend on ads and electoral tactics than do Republicans. And the media’s in the bag for the donkeys.

Still, it’s easy to be disappointed by the very short memory people showed regarding all of the destructive, oppressive government Covid-zero edicts of the past 32 months. And it’s easy to be astounded that Democrats elected, to a six-year term, a senator who can’t even process basic concepts or coherently express simple ideas. Though he may end up being a visible symbol of vaxx injury.

People need to stop thinking that governments have all of the power to determine how the world works. Yes, governments hold a lot of cards. But governments can’t function without mass compliance. There are way too many of us to control without mass-fining or imprisonment or turning automatic weapons on us. They aren’t ready for the latter two options. At least not yet. And people could easily jam the courts by challenging various forms of governmental chicanery.

Overall, people needed to, and still need to, generally say “No” in their everyday lives. Part of this can be done by simply by refusing to obey. For example, people could have stopped the employer vaxx mandates in their tracks. If 20% of workers had refused to inject, their employers, schools, hospitals, garbage collection, transportation and every other sector could have been shut down. If this had happened, the mandates would quickly have disappeared, without any litigation or regulatory carve-outs.

Active opposition could also have changed the Scamdemic’s course. Parents and others could have picketed closed schools. Those with means could have—as some did—enrolled their kids in private schools. Scofflaws could have filled police-taped parks. People could have walked maskless through stores in such large numbers that the employees couldn’t have harassed them all. People could have displayed protest signs in their dwellings’ windows and on their cars. They could have written messages in public spaces. With chalk, of course.

The central problem was that too many people foolishly believed for too long that the virus threatened everyone and that lockdowns/school closures, masks, tests and shots were good ideas or that these measures would promptly be lifted.

Too many others were happy to get free money to stay home. This is where Trump and many other Republicans messed up. They never should have opened the Coronamania door by agreeing to even a two-week shutdown. Nor, via the CARES Act, should they have printed six trillion dollars to underwrite viral theater. They shouldn’t have subsidized hospitals or undertakers to encourage the misattribution, to Covid, of deaths of old, sick people. The Republicans should have leveled with people about, and exposed people to, the true economic—and therefore, human—costs of inducing a societal coma. They shouldn’t have economically anesthetized society to render it unaware of the actual costs of locking down. Trump also shouldn’t have pushed Operation Warp Speed or boasted about the lousy shots. When smarts and conviction were needed, he was naive and weak. His political days should be done.

Electorally thumping the Democrat Corona authoritarians would have been nice. But many Republicans also underperformed during the Scamdemic, though for a significantly shorter time.

Regardless, there were—and still are—many ways beside voting to let other people and government know that you disagreed with the craziness, and still do. Overall, and throughout, people have been too passive and afraid to disagree, to defy obviously abusive governments or to make a scene.

Peoples’ slowness to see the Scam, their naive belief in the Covid interventions, and their timidity and passivity hurt us worse than did the recent election. Though those of us who spoke against, and by their actions defied, the madness had an uphill battle because we were in the minority.