Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #45 Written by Stephen Moore
1) School’s Out Forever (Alice Cooper)
The CDC’s totally unworkable guidelines — which fly in the face of all of the science we have about how SARS-CoV2 is transmitted — appear to be written more to keep schools closed than to open them.
Our friends at Tea Party Patriots have done a real public service revealing this idiocy.
The CDC would require social distancing on a playground or in gym class. Do they HAVE kids? Try telling a nine-year-old he can’t climb on the horizontal ladders, or a five-year-old she can’t use the slide. Good luck with that.
The CDC’s guidelines stipulate reconfiguring classrooms so each child faces forward, eliminating most face-to-face contact. Dr. Jane Hughes in San Antonio, Texas, believes the CDC recommendations create a “dystopian environment for our children” — far more devastating than the staggering low risk (much lower than the flu) posed by COVID-19 to young people.
Further, the CDC recommends: “Teach and reinforce use of cloth face coverings. … Face coverings should be worn by staff and students (particularly older students) as feasible…”
The New England Journal of Medicine on May 21st reports that masks provide “little, if any, protection from infection.” So, why the insistence on masks? The article provides this explanation: “In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.”
So, the point of forcing children to cover their faces for up to eight hours a day is to virtue signal?
We worry, as does TPP, that the CDC’s unrealistic guidelines will have the effect of keeping schools shut this fall — despite overwhelming evidence from dozens of countries including the U.S. that children are not at risk and play no significant role in transmission.
That would be yet another tragedy inflicted on society by the CDC.
2) The “Woke” New York Times Now Rules The Paper
New York Times writer Bari Weiss tweeted yesterday:
That war raged all day Thursday after the Times published an op-ed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton calling for a military response to escalating riots, a position supported by 58 percent of Americans and 48 percent of Democrats in a recent Morning Consult poll.
“Send in the Troops,” sparked fury among reporters in the newsroom who said it made them feel unsafe.
At first, the Times stood firm. Cotton even commended them for having “stood by it in the face of a woke mob in their own newsroom and are refusing the demands for firing or censoring.”
That didn’t last long.
Late Thursday, the paper apologetically and abruptly announced that Cotton’s op-ed was the result of a “rushed editorial process” and “did not meet our standards” – which, less face it, is an awfully low bar to hurdle.
This, after all is a newspaper that has published op-eds from the leader of the murderous Taliban and autocratic Turkish President Tayypip Erdogan, and ran an op-ed titled “Pedophilia: A Disorder not a Crime.” Pedophiles the NYT can tolerate – but not Trump supporters.
3) Amazon Blocks Conservative Book on Coronavirus.. Then Reverses
Alex Berenson is the contrarian former New York Times pharmaceutical industry reporter who has done sterling work debunking the COVID-19 lockdowns and the shoddy science backing them up.
He’s collected enough gems to want to self-publish a book called “Unpublished Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns.” You can read a 1,000 word excerpt below and see if you agree with us it’s a real contribution to the debate.
But Amazon told Berenson his work didn’t meet its unspecified “guidelines” and wouldn’t be sold.
Berenson blew the whistle and within hours Elon Musk, noted liberal writer Andrew Sullivan and writers for this Hotline – among many others – had rallied against Amazon’s rejection of his work.
It didn’t take long for Amazon to capitulate and offer a mealy-mouthed sentence of regret to Berenson for the “inconvenience” the company had caused him.
All well and good, but what would have happened if Berenson hadn’t had the huge Twitter following he has and the support of powerful figures in fighting back? Too many in corporate America buckle under to pressure from the left, and exclude other viewpoints.
4) Follow The Science Scandals
Two widely reported COVID-19 studies in two influential medical journals were retracted this week. One in the British Lancet called into question the safety and efficacy of the malaria pill hydroxychloroquine in treating people with coronavirus. The WHO stopped testing the drug based on the findings.
In the case of the Lancet study, the authors admitted that “Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article.”
There seems to be a pattern here, one that began with the infamous Imperial College of London model that spooked the British and U.S. governments into lockdowns last March. The original code used to construct that model was never released and only a revised version is available to those wanting to replicate the results.
We spoke to one scholar who told us “the best outcome of these scandals would be if U.S. environmental, medical, and other regulatory agencies adopted a policy of never basing any decision or rule, and never funding any research, if the researchers refuse upfront to make their underlying data open to public inspection.”
5) LA Mayor Begins Defunding His Own Police
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has bowed to the demands of the “woke” left and proposed cuts of between $100 million and $150 million in his city’s police budget. He said the money would be reallocated “so we can invest in jobs, in education and healing.”
Garcetti’s retreat isn’t about to satisfy the radicals behind many of the protests. Black Lives Matter is pushing the idea of defunding all police departments, and the idea was endorsed on Thursday by Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 press secretary, and Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tiaib of Michigan.
We are all for big cities like Los Angelese slashing their bloated budgets. And they are going to have to do exactly that to balance their budgets this year given their support for lockdowns of their taxpaying businesses and the exodus from the cities that the mayors won’t keep safe. But cutting police services at a time when the city is under siege from highly-trained criminal thugs, arsonists, and thieves is likely to only further terrorize residents and accelerate the outflow of law abiding citizens.
Soon Los Angeles will replicate the 1996 Kurt Russell dystopia film of the City of Angeles ruled over by the criminal elements. Except someone needs to remind Garcetti that in real life there is no silver screen superhero to save the city from the carnage.
6) Anti-Hero Of the Day – NJ Governor Murphy – Again
We’ve given New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy an F minus for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis – and we only wish we could further lower his grade to a “G” for “God Awful.”
Give Murphy his due, he is blatantly open about this hypocrisy in cracking down on anyone opening their business while also embracing protests that have thousands of of people marching – often without masks or any social distancing.
“It’s one thing to protest what day nail salons are opening and it’s another to come out and peaceful protest about somebody who was murdered right before our eyes,” Murphy said this week.
Restaurants in New Jersey must remain closed to even outdoor dining until June 15. Those salons and barbershops that haven’t gone out of business completely will be shuttered until June 22. Meanwhile, the protests in New Jersey continue with state officials almost dropping even the pretense of calling on participants to socially distance.
7) Quote of the Day
“I’m trying my hardest on this online teaching thing. But I literally have less than 10% of kids that are actually doing their work. Another 30 to 40% are cheating their way through it. And the others are MIA. Discouraging.”
“Yes, we would say so, and another invisible cost of the insane lockdowns of the left which keeps wanting to throw money at the schools they have closed.”
–California teacher named Heather (we will withhold her last name to protect her job)
