Covid Mandates Were Never Meant for Those Who Made Them. By Daniel Greenfield.
Hardly a week goes by without another Democrat mayor, San Fran’s Breed or D.C.’s Bowser, another Democrat member of Congress like Tlaib or Pelosi, or even Joe Biden, flouting their own mask mandates in public. There’s also no great reason to believe that they’re abiding by their own vaccine mandates. Not after it was revealed that Governor Newsom, fresh from his French Laundry scandal, hadn’t vaccinated his daughter despite mandating vaccines for children her age. But the more rules there are, the fewer of them apply to the rulers. …
San Francisco Mayor London Nicole Breed
The only consistent thing about the pandemic lifestyle is that everyone, at some point, violates some of the written and unwritten rules. Some reject the rules altogether while others believe that, like Breed, they’re generally responsible people who should be able to have some fun.
And the rules were never meant for them. …
Worse still many COVID rules were not regulating their actual targets. Beaches were not shut down because there was any danger in lying in the sand, but to discourage people from leaving the house. Banning the unvaccinated from restaurants is less about the risk of contagion than a method of coercion and about treating people who are unvaccinated as inherently irresponsible.
Less about public health, more about political tribalism:
Much like masks became a tribal marker of those who could and those who couldn’t be trusted, vaccination cards are being used to define who has elite privileges and who does not. This caste system has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with defining those who are like us, whom we trust more, and those who are unlike us, whom we are prone to distrust.
It’s no different than African tribal warfare but with cultural and ideological markers. Masks and vaccine cards either signify a friendly member of the tribe or a disgusting enemy to be repelled.
The COVID regulatory state is about punishing a perceived untrustworthy class for the benefit of a trustworthy class, of enforcing compliance on one group while letting elites do what they like. The rules were never meant to apply to those who made them and when the elites violate the rules, it’s not an oversight, but goes to the heart of what’s wrong with the COVID regulations.
The mandates were not scientifically derived regulations meant to keep us all safe, but an expression of social mistrust between social and economic classes, between regions, races, and between elites and the public that reflected the deep tribal fractures that were already there.
Failed states are the way that they are because much of the population suspects, often rightly, that the authorities are running the system for their own benefit, for those of their family members, clans, tribes, and groups. Critical race theory dresses up this ancient tribalism in modern garb by using buzzwords like “systemic racism” which it promises to remedy with its own “systemic racism”. When the state is unable to command enough of the dominant tribe to purge the other tribes, it lingers as a dysfunctional anarchic tyranny where nothing gets done.
All efforts at reform devolve into tribal accusations of “systemic tribalism” with all of the viable alternatives consisting of the same corrupt system being misused to reward different tribes.
That’s the failed state future toward which the national elites of the Left are driving us.
Coronavirus tribalism and the flouting of pandemic regulations by those who make them is not an unforeseen tragedy, but a direct outcome of how the country is being run these days. Tribal systems can’t handle a pandemic or any other national problem except by dividing people into tribes and then running the system for the benefit of the favored tribe and especially its rulers.
Mistrust is the currency of authoritarian and tribal systems which all come with an innate social credit system. The leaders trust themselves the most, then they trust those who are most like them, and they trust everyone who is different than them to the degree of their difference. …
Every society has a choice between trusting authority or trusting each other. The wider our circles of trust, the less government we need. When we trust governments more than each other, the abuses of government become the price we pay for a refusal to live with each other.
Too much government.
Too many people depend on government for their cushy jobs, including many who work for private companies paid by government. Those jobs are paid from taxes — compulsory payments extorted by force.
The people in those cushy jobs secretly fear they could not earn half as much out in the private market, where income is earned from people voluntarily exchanging money for goods and services. So they will fight tooth and nail for their privileges, their jobs, their income, and that of their class and friends. Lying, cheating, and other immoral postmodern behavior then seems to come so naturally.
