The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

I have had a couple of conversations this year that had me scratching my head and biting back my usual retort when confronted by abject stupidity and ignorance: "You can't possibly be that f*cking stupid!"

The first was a long (too long... it was on a long flight) conversation with an ER physician with a second job as a medical editor. She was absolutely convinced of the efficacy of the Covid 19 vaccines, and was even more adamant that masking was very effective in preventing transmission of the Covid 19 virus. No amount of data in the form of peer-reviewed studies debunking the masking myth dissuaded her.

As for the vaccination? She carefully ignored the public...official...government and Big Pharma statements claiming the vaccine as essentially the savior of civilization, and accepted only the most narrow claims about its efficacy that were made well after the coercive push for its universal acceptance.

The second was with the vaccine tech at CVS who gave me a flu vaccine. She denied that there were ever any grandiose claims about the effectiveness of the Covid 19 vaccine, and claimed that the only statements were that the vaccine would decrease hospitalizations! No memory of the bald-faced lies of federal, state, and local government functionaries. No recollection of the huge push by Big Pharma, no understanding of why Americans are now looking twice at ALL vaccines, other than the smug, formulaic; "they don't understand."

This is, in microcosm, the typical mushy-headed liberal voter. They cheerfully accept carefully cherry-picked facts, conveniently provided by their handlers in the media and the higher reaches of the Democrat/Progressive political hierarchy. They are curiously unwilling to entertain even the remote possibility that the orthodoxy is incorrect, or even incomplete.

They are sheep...nothing more. They behave that way in all respects, and it is a quality that is used to great effect by the real thinkers in the Democrat/Progressive system. They dispatch their sheep onto the streets to riot, into the vote counting rooms to cheat, into the union meetings to lie, onto the school boards to push a deeply destructive view of America and its founding, and most of all to vote early and often for the candidates who will bring down the society that has provided the wealth and freedom that allows their behavior.

There are many flaws in the conservative movement, but the discomfort with a herd mentality is not one of them. Think back to the last significant political conversation you had with a conservative. Yes, there were many points of agreement, but more often than not those conversations expose differences. And that is how it should be. The concept of American Federalism allows for 50 incubators of political philosophy. It is a testament to the tremendous respect that our founders had for the individual, and the Democrat/Progressive hatred of it is testament to their fundamental disagreement with the notion of the individual being the building block of a free society.

Yet that herd mentality has provided the power that the left wields today, and the great question is whether a conservative movement can organize to take back that power while still respecting the innate superiority of the individual.

It's going to be an interesting ride!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter]

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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