“Fact Lives Matter” – Moving Beyond Science And Tribalization (MCM OP/ED)

Publisher’s Note: Thanks to NYU’s Mark Crispin Miller for this analysis of the strange relationship contrasting the MSM US “news” analysis of citizen pushback against CoronAuthoritarianism versus BLM. Head scratchingly odd, that the MSM “news” media calls out US citizens peacefully protesting the COVID “Lockdown,”, while simultaneously lauding as heroes US citizens peacefully protesting “Institutionalized Racism” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Miller ends on a hopeful note, courtesy of California’s Venice Beach. The bottom line: as free and sovereign individuals, we must all be asking questions, conducting research, and engaging in vigorous discussion about our own history and the events of this COVID addled moment – fact lives DO matter, be it science or anything else. Meanwhile, our summer 2020 “beach reading” includes White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism and Chaos: Charles Mason, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, two very different but weirdly complementary books. We’ve sprinkled in some video analysis reflecting on both books here. Happy high summer from the 2nd Vermont Republic! Here’s Miller and videos…

Mass protests in the US since the start of the coronavirus crisis have been held to the highest (in the narcotic sense) of double standards. Those protesting the lockdowns were cast throughout the media as Trumpist white supremacists whose reckless gatherings were “putting everyone at risk,” while those who’ve turned out since, to protest the murder of George Floyd, and white racism in general, have been loudly hailed throughout the media, and also by such eminent humanitarians as Jeff Bezos, Mitt Romney, Jamie Dimon and Melinda Gates (who’s proven her belief that “black lives matter” by testing a new COVID-19 vaccine on South Africans, and by pledging to see to it that black people in America get their shots early on, right after the elderly get theirs).The maintenance of this double standard has required some fancy footwork to explain why the BLM protests have not resulted in the same coronavirus “spike”that was alleged to have been brought on by the fascist goons who protested the lockdowns (as in, for example, “U.S. lockdown protests may have spread virus widely, cell phone data suggests,” published by the Guardian on May 18.

That explanation was provided on June 23, by a crack (in the narcotic sense) team of researchers at the University of Colorado, Denver, who found not only that there was “no correlation” between the later protests and any “COVID-19 case increase in [the] general population,” but that those protests had brought on some “positive change—an increase in social distancing.”The authors found that any direct decrease in social distancing among the population participating in the protests was more than offset by increasing social distancing behavior among others who may have chosen to shelter-at-home and circumvent public places while the protests are [sic] underway. How cool is that?

Apparently so many people fled the streets throughout the George Floyd protests that social-distancing increased, (presumably) lowering infection rates. This means that there were even fewer people venturing outdoors than when the lockdowns were in place, prompting all those Nazisto protest them. It also means, amazingly, that no one who protested George Floyd’s murder had the virus; or—no less amazingly—that, if any of them did, they didn’t bring it home and give it to their families and/or roommates who were staying in, to “circumvent public places while the protests [were] underway.” So those righteous gatherings weren’t just innocuous, coronavirus-wise, but downright beneficial, quite unlike those lynch mobs that turned out against the lockdowns—and, apparently, unlike all those Americans who, if they could, would happily turn out to celebrate the Fourth tonight, as usual, now that the Great Fear has been revived, to make it seem as if we’re suffering through a “second wave” of COVID-19. (Since BLM activists are either naturally immune to COVID-19, or somehow aren’t infectious, they should certainly choose not to get injected with that rushed-out Gates vaccine.)

All this goes to reconfirm that much of what’s promoted nowadays as “science”—social science, in this case, but medical science, too—is, in the basest sense, political, and not truly scientific in the least. In short, it’s all a lot of hooey; and not everybody’s falling for it, as this news from Venice Beach re: their “Independence Day Autonomous Zone” suggests.