1) The Lockdown Riots
Some 40 million Americans have lost their jobs. Thousands of businesses are bankrupt. It’s hot. The pools are closed. The parks are closed. The schools are closed. Churches are closed. Playing basketball can get you arrested. Hundreds of millions of Americans have been on home confinement with its attendant social and emotional isolation for months. Stress levels are at unimaginably high levels — a nation pushed to the breaking point by draconian lockdown policies and their economic consequences.
We have been predicting for weeks that this was a prescription for social chaos and we would see rioting in the streets of our major cities if this persisted.
The murder of a black man in Minnesota lit the fuse, and far-left Antifa agitators brought logistical support — but these are fundamentally the lockdown riots. A tragic but predictable consequence of throwing out everything we know about infectious disease and adopting an unprecedented policy of indefinite quarantine of the low-risk, healthy population – especially young and angry males.
Lockdowns have destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth, tens of millions of jobs, millions of businesses, and now the very social fabric of our country, with rioting and looting spreading in American cities. Businesses that only just recently opened — or were still preparing to open — after suffering forced closure have had bricks thrown through their windows and their facilities looted.
The media and the left intelligentisia stoked the panic and demanded lockdowns yet now take no responsibility for what they wrought — or blame Trump.
2) Whatever Happened to Social Distancing?
In recent weeks the media has seethed with contempt over anti-lockdown protesters on the right who dared to ignore stay-at-home orders and shamefully risked endangered the health of themselves and others. Some even suggested the police should prohibit these Americans from exercising their right of peaceful assembly in the era of Covid-19. One Washington Post columnist sneered that because the freedom protesters’ were not social distancing, their motto should be: “Give me liberty AND give me death.”
Now three weeks later the streets of dozens of blue cities almost all still under the very strict lockdown orders imposed by Democratic mayors and governors – orders that the left has fully praised and that we have strongly argued against – are crammed with leftist protesters and rioters. Let’s just say that social distancing is the furthest thing on these agitators’ minds.
Has anyone heard even ONE media commentator or Democratic elected official object that these protesters are endangering the health of themselves and their community?
Meanwhile, business owners have been put in jail for daring to open their businesses, but looters who steal from these businesses are getting away scot-free. Churchgoers are prohibited in Washington, DC and New York from gathering for a Sunday service, but the rioters are free to gather to spray paint vile and sacrilegious graffiti with impunity.
As the saying goes: if it weren’t for double standards, the left wouldn’t have any standards at all.
3) Small Business Openings Pass the Halfway Mark
Small businesses are opening up again, with a majority of them in the latest Goldman Sachs survey reporting that they have fully reopened. That’s up from just 39 percent a month ago. We still have a long way to go but this is an important milestone.
And the number one small business ask of Congress? Liability protection. With 91% of small businesses urging Congress to enact a liability shield against potential COVID lawsuits.
4) Wall Street Journal Agrees: It is Safe to Reopen Schools
Regular readers of the Hotline know that we have been complaining for many weeks that school closures made no sense. The Wall Street Journal now agrees with us:
“A number of countries that have reopened schools in the past two months have reported no resulting increase in coronavirus infection rates, an encouraging sign for authorities around the world that are contemplating how and when to safely bring children back to the classroom.
“Researchers and European authorities said the absence of any notable clusters of infection in reopened elementary schools so far suggested that children aren’t significant spreaders of the new coronavirus in society.
“They acknowledged that their findings might change with the onset of winter and cold weather, and a recent outbreak at a Jerusalem high school affecting students and staff was a reminder of the higher risk to teenagers and adults.
“But Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries that have reopened classrooms haven’t had outbreaks in schools or day-care centers.”
5) Top Italian Doctor Says COVID is Over in Italy
“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion.
“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television.
6) Norway’s Leader: “I probably took many of the decisions out of fear.”
In his dystopian 1947 novel “The Plague,” the French author Albert Camus wrote “The only means to fight the plague is honesty.”
So full points for belated honesty to Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. Last Wednesday, she went on national TV to admit that her country’s harsh lockdown went too far. “I probably took many of the decisions out of fear,” she admitted. She also said it may have been a mistake to close the schools, while the Norwegian Institute of Public Health goes further and suggests that school closures may have even increased the virus’s spread.
7) US Ends Support For China-WHO Alliance
Last Friday, the White House announced that the U.S. is cutting ties with the World Health Organization because it had caved to pressure from China to “mislead the world” about the origins and severity of the coronavirus.
Other nations have reached similar conclusions about WHO. Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso has dubbed the WHO the “Chinese Health Organization.”
We spoke with a top Department of Homeland Security official who is convinced that no independent review of the interactions between China and the WHO will ever be allowed. He pointed out that WHO published a report in 2019 specifically recommending that entire populations shouldn’t be subjected to indiscriminate quarantining during a future pandemic.
“But then only a few months later they praise China’s quarantine, which closed businesses and schools and ordered people to remain indoors,” the official told us. “That praise in late February set the stage for other countries to embrace nationwide, one-size-fits-all lockdowns.” He concludes the virus may have spread around the world on its own, but it was the WHO who spread the wrong message on how to combat it.
8) Anti-Hero Of The Day
Maine Governor Janet Mills is a one-person wrecking ball aimed at her state’s vital summer tourist economy.
First, she imposed a 14-day quarantine on any visitors from other states. Ken Mason, who runs the Seaside Inn in Kennebunk Beach, says the rule has shut down local tourism. Last year, he only had nine out-of-state guests. Even if out-of-state visitors stay with friends they won’t be able to shop or go out for curbside dining.
Restaurants were supposed to reopen on June 1st and had restocked their supplies and rehired staff. But now Governor Mills has postponed dine-in dates for counties covering nearly half the state’s population.
As the American Thinker notes: “Restaurants already on thin ice financially now have wasted money in anticipation of reopening. Some restauranteurs, no doubt, will be driven to extinction by this capricious change.”
9) Nobel Laureate: “An Error That Has Cost The World Many, Many Trillions Of Dollars”
“Epidemiologists – and I’m not talking about you guys – don’t think anything wrong about being a factor of 10 too high but are dead scared to be a factor of 10 percent too low.
“The number of deaths caused by lockdown is way higher than anything that will be caused by Covid, unless you assume exponential growth, forever. So, therefore this is a price that the world is paying for this asymmetry….
“Sweden is not locked down. You guys are going to have a very hard time when Sweden plateaus at 6,000 deaths, which is 0.6 per 100,000, and you can say well they social distance, they’re Scandinavians, they’re cold, there’s high population density. But, you know, the fact remains that the plateau rate of population reached by England, New York City, Lombardy, France is basically around one month of natural death. (Imperial College of London’s Neil) Ferguson said a year of natural death. That is horrible. That is an error that has cost the world many, many trillions of dollars.”
–Michael Levitt, Stanford professor and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in an on-line discussion with South American epidemiologists.
10) A Tale of Two ProtestsOurs:
Theirs:
11) Quote of the day
“You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out”
Revolution, The Beatles
Photo by Parlophone Music Sweden – CC 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74044840
